Still playing Shop Titans, I hope that counts!

Did some work, had an initial 1:1 with New Manager T, gave Nightvale some ‘nip so he freaked out. (I offered some to Sage but she didn’t care. Apparently food is her vice.)

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.14-15: The one with the train heist on the greenwasher, where Breanna gets to be gay, and the one with Harry’s ex-family and the alarming ending.

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 5 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): The one with the zombies and the duel. Things are getting serious.

Written (game design): 396:

I don’t want generic zombies/skeletons, or even skleltons, because
there’s not much point to any kind of generic monster, let alone one
that’s just a bandit PCs don’t have to feel bad about killing. Maybe
corporeal undead are different depending on where their body was
abandoned? Or just always different, but it’s nice to have some thematic
consistency between monsters and their environment. D&D notwithstanding,
incorporeal undead are just various forms of ghosts. I feel like ghosts
should have more memory of their life, wandering corpses can be more
ravening.

Oh, but what about vampires? Are they even undead? Seems like a clear
case of monster-that-used-to-be-person, even if they were disanimate
for a while. I think it’s fine if they are kind of alive, even. Multiple
kinds of vampires! Multiple ways to become a vampire! All of them are
terrible, none of them are cool! And not all of them drink blood, this
is the category of wandering corpses that are fresh enough to still have
their memories and personality. Instead of draining your blood to turn
you, they can drown you in a bog until you mummify or set you ablaze
with the eternal flame or whatever.

What can ghosts do? I don’t think we have levels, so no level drain, but
whatever spirits can do, which is, um, well…

What even is a spirit? I strongly believe that a witch’s familiar
is a spirit, not a Disney princess cute animal friend. You can have a
cute animal friend, it’s just not a familiar, although maybe the
familiar could be possessing it, or manifesting in its form. So there
are spirits that bring magical knowledge from… somewhere. Maybe the
same place as answers to necromancers’ questions, which is to say the
accumulated memories of everyone dead? Which doesn’t tell us what
spirits are. I don’t think I want to go the Exalted route of everything
having a spirit that can be called up and talked to: that is not the
vibe I have for this setting. I mean, maybe there are spirits, but they
aren’t people, you can’t have a conversation in words. Unless they’re
ghosts and have a personality!

So apparently spirits can manifest in the form of living creatures, and
possess living creatures. What else? I really like the image of a wizard
with a bandolier of cages containing spirits that can be set loose to do
things, but maybe those are more like elementals? Are those different?

We’ve wandered far afield from figuring out how magic works. Maybe
that’s too hard for now and we should think about what kinds of magic
there are instead, or otherwise brainstorm weirdness. (Weirdness tends
to be specific, and show-don’t-tell, so it makes the setting less open,
but that’s fine.)

Different kinds of magic are probably practiced in different areas,
since communication isn’t that great? Maybe there are printing presses,
but is there a scholarly community that likes flaunting knowledge at
each other? Probably not, since magic is immediately useful. Do we have
nation-states that hoard military knowledge? Maybe not, I’m picturing
more like ancient scrolls of martial arts techniques, except not
necessarily ancient.

Does magic actually work differently in different areas? On the one
hand, that would definitely be weird, and entertaining to watch PCs deal
with, but on the other, it would be a lot of work to come up with
multiple ways for magic to work that didn’t just randomly hose different
characters in each zone. Maybe minor differences, though? Does magic
come from living dungeons, and that’s why it’s different in different
places?

Is everything living dungeons? Is everyone a monstergirl from a living
dungeon? No, probably not. If nothing else, things like people becoming
monsters should be global, so there’s some underlying world even if
there are plenty of additions (incursions? I think Trophy Dark took that
one) piled onto it.