worldsforanyoccasion

[worldsforanyoccasion]

I saw them again, wheeling over the lake. They lazed there, as if frozen. Perhaps they are. The water is choppy and white flecked during the day and black glass at night. And still they are above the light. Out of the trees, I see the eyes of their kin, ghostly pale, unblinking.

There was a fox in the yard today, all sleek white angles, like living snow. And in its jaws, a small dark thing limp and flecked with black.

The wind has changed again and it’s all out of sorts. The vast bulk of clouds roll unending from the North, a ceaseless wave that pins us here, caught between the endless plains and the cruel gray sky. It’s colder now, colder still than it was and with more cold to come.

I’ve had to stop the Work. The lines and angles no longer seem to connect but seem to hover, as if a distance separated them where they cross, the lines almost trying to escape the page. Maybe they are. Or maybe the Work is getting to me again.

In the afternoon, I heard it, the bright, clear cry of the hawk, but I did not see what made that cry. The shapes over the lake scattered then, diving for the trees, fading the closer they came to the frosted branches.

[worldsforanyoccasion]

Boardgame Blues

Worldbuilding is still a thing in my life much in the same way as breathing, but other things are moving in, vying for my time that is not already devoted to labor: Boardgames.

I have long loved Dominion and many of its expansions. For Christmas years ago I received Ticket to Ride and Bang!, the latter I traded for a copy of Love Letter. After a particularly great game night, I add Kemet to my slowly growing collection. And slow did it grow, until recently. For the first time in a long time, I have a degree of disposable income. And through some process I am still coming to terms with, late night bouts of internet browsing have transformed money into games.

I picked up Arkham Horror, the Card Game. Then Gloomhaven. And last night, Mystic Vale and yet another copy of Love Letter.

Many of these are good. My brother and I finished the second part of Arkham Horror last night. My rpg group has completed two scenarios of Gloomhaven. And it goes on.

Where then, does the Blues come into this? It goes back to the whole reason I can afford the games in the first place; full-time employment. Specifically working from three to midnight. My friends are not really available before I go to work, busy as they are will school, and post-midnight gaming is likewise discouraged.

And so my collection grows as the amount of time I have to play with it declines.

[worldsforanyoccasion]

Maze of the Blue Medusa and Dungeon Design

Dungeons make up half of the name of the long time leader in table top roleplaying games, but I have rarely been excited about them. "Why not?" some may ask. The answer is dungeons just are not that intersting most of the time, hence the usual term of dungeon-crawling. Sure there might be a larger theme than just dank-hole full of monsters, but there are still other issues. Dungeons are classicaly populated by all manner of wondering monsters with a big, powerful monster crowning the deepest level. And wondering monsters often leave everything to be desired. Sure they are offten fitting to theme, but so often it boils down to entries like 2d4 kobolds or a pair of stone golems. There are other issues as well, mostly in terms of supplies and logistics when it comes to spending days or weeks in an enclosed location, but those are likely beyond the scope of this post. Why then is the Maze of the Blue Medusa different? I don't entierly know. While many other dungeons have elaborate backgrounds and histories, something about the Maze's feels different. Or pehaps the fact that each of the inhabitants has an agenda, and more importantly, personality. I have seen several locations where the inhabitants have various degrees of personality and back ground, but in almost all circumstances those will be swiftly discarded as their posseser rushes into combat as their first, and often only action when confronted by interlopers. The inhabitants of the Maze, however, all have reasons to be there. Some seek the Medusa's death, others to free or kill other inhabitants of the Maze and some are just there to repair the place they beleive to be the afterlife. And all these motives are fleshed out and, better yet, acted upon first, meaning that when adventurers encounter sentient sculptures with low self-esteam, the are met with something that acts, behaves, and offers a gljmpse into why it is there and what it is doing. And then it kills them for assualting its world-view.

[worldsforanyoccasion]

If you have not heard of it yet, take a look at Vornheim, the Complete City Kit. Lots of neat things in there. Also Maze of the Blue Medusa as well as A Red and Pleasant Land. Those last two are beautiful and full of all kinds of interesting thoughts, some of which are difficult to dislodge. And speaking of difficult things, I need to build a bunch (14+) full NPCs for Vampire the Masquerade. @intothesilverdarc, wish you could and/or would play in this one.

[worldsforanyoccasion]

“Only in silence the word, Only in dark the light, Only in dying life: Bright the hawk's flight On the empty sky. —The Creation of Éa”        ―    Ursula K. Le Guin

What have I been up to? Surprisingly little, but it consumes most of my time. I’m working full time now because everyone likes to watch numbers in the bank account go up steadily, or at all really.

Once again I am running Vampire: The Masquerade and have a neat political powder keg set right in the heart of that game, but such is the way of kindred.

As for work on Archipelago...nothing. I want to edit what I wrote for my NaNo, but so fay I have strayed further and further away from doing that. My most recent bout of procrastination has involved The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild. There are better review of it out there that what I have to say so all I will say is that it is good.

And that was the state of things this January until I heard of the passing of Ursula K. Le Guin. She will be missed, but at least we have her stories. 

Many of the authors I grew up reading are gone; Michael Crichton, Arthur C. Clarke, and Tolkien. And another one now. There is something ephemeral, something I can’t quite grasp about losing another author who’s work inspired me. They are gone but their ideas linger in ink, on paper. And in the minds of everyone who ever read them.

So what now? What does that hawk see in the empty sky?

[worldsforanyoccasion]

@random-animezing, thanks for the Chistmas wishes and Merry Christmas to you too.

[worldsforanyoccasion]

Personally, coming up with characters is more difficult. Once I have them, they tend to take over, do things that I don’t really expect, which is odd sice I am the one dictating what they do. In those instances, I can have thirty pages before I have any idea what they are doing. Just keep writing.

Lately, I’ve been falling into this strange rut of having characters but not knowing what to do with them. I have a basic concept of who they are starting out, but no story. This is a new problem for me, as usually the characters emerge along with the world they’re set in. 

How can I overcome this? @worldsforanyoccasion

[worldsforanyoccasion]

Rubber Duck Debugging

I spent four hours today to partially fix an error. I still am not sure why my program does not work as expected. Getting that far required a bit of consulting with a friend who as programmed some substantial things, though not in the language I am working with. The rest was as the title suggests, explaining my code, not to a rubber duck, but to a lego corn man.

On other notes, I started another foray into Vampire the Masquerade, once more as storyteller. I have my city defined and the court named with a handful of notes on each character, but there is something daunting hanging in the air this time. Most of that may be the fact that my schedule is shifting to be perhaps the most inimical to frequent gaming it has ever been. Perhaps the other part is that I have three players, that while I have gamed with them before, two of the three have never played anything but DnD and similar variants and none of them having played in this system.

Then there is the the work I have yet to do on the story draft I wrote in November. Or maybe it is the winter starting to hit and my will to do much disappearing like the sun does at four-thirty.

[worldsforanyoccasion]

worldsforanyoccasion Post NaNoWriMo

I did it! 50,141 words in thirty days. What came out of all of that? I have a hundred and fifty-four pages of incoherent and temporaly isolated scenes depicting everything from grand adventure to dull legalese pertaining to the contract work of outfitting assaying expeditions. And more. And less.

Much of what I wanted to accomplish, namely just make a bulk deposit of ideas concerning Archipelago, happened. There is a story in there, in fact there may be two or more, but the untangling and realigning of elements won’t really start for a bit after the honeymoon period wears off and I have the perspective to work out what stays, what goes, and what changes entirely.

In the meantime, I’m working on a few other things, both exciting and dull. Often they are the same thing depending on what I am doing. For a while now (a sporadic quantity of time spanning five years) I have been trying to work out a program for tracking Paizo’s Pathfinder Kingmaker Adventure path. Thus far I have two non-functioning prototypes and another iteration that is looking promising. But part of that includes the dullness and frustration of troubleshooting code that, while not spaghetti, is at least elbow-macaroni when it should really be more like manicotti or at least a well-layered lasagna.

[worldsforanyoccasion]

In my zealousness, I caged the ephemeral and posted guards to keep it there. But it turns out that Noscript, given the chance, will block just about every UI element tumblr can throw at it. This mistake, for the time being, has been corrected.

[worldsforanyoccasion]

I think there is something to be said about confidence in your writing (and not just yours @wyseink​ ). There are times where you will fill page after page, confident that what you are putting down in pure gold only to realize later that what you wrote was a load of garbage. Sometimes you might find something shiny in the mess, but confidence in your writing ability can be a double edged sword. Some people (like @intothesilverdark) are great at having hindsight and knowing instinctual what works, even if it is only after the fact. Others are sometimes aware when what they are in the act of writing is good or needs more work. This varies from person to person and even from genre to genre.

I am far more confident in my ability to put together scenes when writing literary fiction than when I write fantasy.

As for confidence in your ideas? That is something else. The page holds your voice, once it’s out there, you can’t really go back and say you meant it a different way or that what you said is being misinterpreted. I mean you can, but what people will believe about your writing is out of your hands. How do you convey your ideas so that they are understood? By being confident in your ideas. There are your ideas and if you don’t think they are very good, then why write about them in the first place? But you are writing about them, even if you don’t know where it’s going or how to get to the end, the big payoff, or the climactic scene. This is why you have to be confident in your ideas. They can be as vague as possible, but as long as you stand by them and know that you can make it work out, then you will.

[worldsforanyoccasion]

There are two types of writers…

Writer A: “I’ve fleshed this character out to the point where they’re more real then I am. I know everything about them, including their blood type, their thirty-first favorite song, what they did for their sixth birthday, and which brand of apples they prefer.”

Writer B: “This character exists as a full person in my head, but I know absolutely nothing about them. Once I forced them to talk about themselves,  and they simultaneous lied about their past and told me accurate trivia facts I don’t remember learning.”

[worldsforanyoccasion]

Time to Act for Net Neutrality

https://www.battleforthenet.com/

Imagine paying more not for more data or more bandwidth, but because of the websites you want to visit. We can stop this, but only if we all fight together.

[worldsforanyoccasion]

Here be no Dragons and Parthenogenesis

Something that occurs and reoccurs, aside from my numerous typos (more on that later) is most fantasy worlds have dragons. There are, of course, numerous dragons or dragon-like beings in our own mythologies from the Western dragon to the Lung dragon and more in between.

Why? What is our love affair with dragons and why do they show up in so many settings?

I don’t think I will attempt to provide an exhaustive answer to that question, since many of its answers may just boil down to “dragons are cool” or “because dragons mean fantasy.”

I did a lot of that too, in my older worlds. But somewhere in getting from there to here, I started questioning that. It began with Guild Wars 2.

I started playing GW2 just a scant few months before the Heart of Thorns expansion released. In that time, I played with friends, tried a few dungeons, fractals, and world vs. world. And I played the personal story. Now a bit of spoilers, but the big bad evil guy of the story is the Elder Dragon Zaithan, a massive undead dragon and elemental force of necromancy. Then HoT released, and the big bad evil guy was Moredremoth, Elder Dragon of plants and elemental force of mind. Recently, the third season of living story involved two further dragons, two dragon offspring of another dragon from GW, and a mad god bent on killing said dragons. The other gods left rather than fight the elder dragons. Dragons. There, that should be enough that semantic-satiation kicked into effect and the word dragon looks weird now.

And that is kind of how I felt about dragons in settings. But there was something else in effect, part of what lead me to create the Vayern instead of re-using another fantasy race, and that was the Charr. In GW, they were the villians, in GW2 they are a playable race. Something of a cross between a lion or tiger, a goat, and other, odder bits, the Charr are not simply re-skinned orcs, as is a common trope, nor are they one of a seemingly endless iteration on elves ala World of Warcraft style. They are their own thing.

Now there is a trope for “Our dragons are different” and one of my favorite comics, Gunnerkrigg Court has things that fall into that vein. And I started thinking, what would my dragons be like? And then I asked, do I need dragons at all?

No. I don’t. Instead of trying to make my dragons different, I decided to do something entirely different. There are no dragons in Archipelago.

No fire-breathing winged lizards, or serpents, or any of that. Why? Because it didn’t fit with what I wanted Archipelago to feel like. Any setting I crafted would be made same-y if I added dragons, so there are not any.

What things exist in their place? Ecologically, nothing since I didn’t remove them, but never included them instead. Thematically? Big baddies that hoard wealth or pose as a serious threat kind of things?

Well, there doesn’t seem to be much need to have hoarders, but as for threats... I have a few.

Some spirits are malevolent, and many beasts are dangerous, but the real terrors start showing up in the things that are tied to the void, the Shadows. Shadows (never shades oddly enough, only the capital S Shadows) are part of the void and can’t really untie themselves from it. They are agents of unknowable agendas. They can distort reality around them, but can’t create anything, only consume.

And here are the real terrors. As of yet, they have no names, but they may never have names for all I know. The are feline in appearance, though with six legs ending in seven toed claws with double opposable thumbs, even if they walk on all six (not bipedal or centaur-esque). Their eyes let them see the physical and spiritual. They act somewhat like a matriarchal society, but are conceived via parthenogenesis, meaning they reproduce from eggs without fertilization. And most importantly, they are hive mind.

What one of them knows, they all know. What one of them sees, they all see, etc. Due to this, they are never encountered individually, preferring pairs or a pack (6-36?).

What role do they serve in Archipelago? None that is known. While of the void, they don’t seem able to cross it, and so are limited to a few realms where they stalk the shallows, the places where the void encroaches on reality. They are clever and cunning and seemingly indestructible. Why? Because I want them to be. What will they become in the future? I don’t know.

As for the numerous typos, when inspiration strikes, I rarely set forth to calmly and deliberately record these things, instead trying to stick the idea down in whatever shape I can before it fades, or worse, I forget it. Often, this means numerous words out of place or horrifically misspelled. Throw in the fact that a lot of my writing involved made up words and unusual names and a bunch of red squiggly lines often looks about normal for me.

[worldsforanyoccasion]

There is something strange I’ve noticed recently when it comes to Archipelago. The first realms I created are the ones I’ve changed the least.

Fallen Temple has had things added to it, but as a hub, that makes sense. Ithos has gone through two iterations, the first being based on an unfinished drawing from over two years ago. Eos continues to vast and expansive and off limits to non-vayern. I kind of know why, but that mythos is still being hammered on, or so I tell myself. Truth is I haven’t yet began incorporating it into the over-all world lore, and as such it has been set on a back burner until I better understand the cultures of the places I build.

That is an entire enedevor in itself, since realms are something akin to if a country or state or province was stuck off by itself with only a handful of ways to connect with its neighbors, and while it links to them, the connections are limited since it doesn’t bear any real relation to geography.

And the geography of Archipelago is a mess. Some of the realms may be mapped some day, and a map of the major links between realms might surface at some point as well, but the majority will only be described with words. I think that works fine for now, since my forte is words, but there is something dreadfully final about mapping out a setting. Once things are pinned down, only major events tend to shift them about. I think I like the idea of being able to go back and refine things.

[worldsforanyoccasion]

Posts about Archipelago are likely to vanish for the month of November, and maybe longer if I forget about posting here, but this year I’m going to finaly try my hand (and sanity) at NaNoWriMo.

Why now? So many of the people who I used to share writing with seem to have fallen off the face of the Earth or unintentionally vowed never to write again.

I miss having critiques and critiquing stories and growing as a writer alongside fellow writers. I miss having dreaded deadlines and long nights filled with frantic words.

So, for November, I’m going to try. Something like 1,666 words a day if I want to stay on pace, something that means I’ll be writing about half the length of my class manuscripts every day. For a month. I can’t wait and it still terrifies me somewhat. At the beginning of the year, I set page goals per week, now I’m setting word goals per day.

What will I write? A story from the Archipelago. Adventures in the far off lands and small spaces I have been dreaming up for the last few years. If even two percent of what I write is good, I’ll have thirty pages of good work and even more full of ideas.

[worldsforanyoccasion]

Conlangs and other craziness

Something I have been wanting to do for a while is create a language. Work on Archipelago only reinforces that desire. But I run into issues immediately. Vayern, being owls, have different vocal capcities and while I have decided they can speak human languages with only some difficulty, creating a language spoken exclusively by owls is difficult since I am not an owl (though I am often nocturnal or crepuscular). I want their language to be one which was purely oral for a large part of its history before a formalized writing sytem was developed. That means I need to know what the language used to be like. The same thing happens when thinking about human languages in Archipelago. Relative isolation leads to dialects and eventually child languages, but now I need earlier languages and again I fall into this Tolkienesque trap. To know what languages are in Archipelago, I have to know what language was once luke and everything that happened in between. So for now, I invent names to call things by since names are useful things to reference, but k owing they don't fit into any specific language or cultural history bothera me.