It is one of my favorite punctuation marks, although I like most of them.
What’s not my favorite is knowing I have to get up special in the morning, instead of according to routine, so I wake up early and lie there wondering if my alarm didn’t go off and I messed everything up and have to go live in a cardboard box under the freeway overpass.
Read (manga): Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon vol 4 (Shio Usui): They finally admit their feelings for each other (with some encouragement from others), the end! Yay ace representation and all, but them both being ace makes it feel like the author was trying to distance themself from the idea of women having sex. Still very cute, and the little sister is definitely going to take over the world.
Read (novel): Heretical Fishing vol 4 (Haylock Jobson): More OP cultivator fishing adventures, this time with a boat, and then also some plot monsters introduced in the last like third of the book. I know what happened to the world has been hinted at for a long time, but I’m not sure it’s as interesting as Corporal Claws gaining nigh-infinite power.
Written (game design): 222:
(We have to pretend that the 13th Age module Eyes of the Stone Thief
didn’t finish the idea of living dungeons and put a bow on it. Maybe we
can find a better name.)
Of course after writing that, I read Kickstarter updates for a
far-future science-fantasy game, and now I want ancient wonders and
cities built around still-functioning services from before and
everything. This is because I have no actual thoughts of my own, I just
read the Internet and remix it like an LLM.
Thinking about cities built around ancient wonders reminds me to wonder
how mythic this should be, and then what I mean by “mythic” except “like
Glorantha”. I think it means the supernatural being personified: if a
wizard casts a spell to make a wind blow, that’s whatever, but if they
chain the North Wind in their basement, that’s mythic. This definitely
includes direct works of named gods (eg, the Forge of Hephaestus). I had
been leaning away from that, though, with gods as nameplates hung on the
impersonal natural flow of the universe, people turned into monsters by
their own fates and not by snotty deities, etc. D&D, despite having
multiple lists of gods in the back of the book, is also like this,
possibly because all divine quirkiness has to be flattened out to fit
into the power-by-level curve. Also, having a specific god that
does/has specific things is a non-generic setting element.
Another way to look at it is that in a mythic world, you can negotiate
with every natural phenomenon, or that everything is a phemonenon with a
person behind it you can bargain with. The moon is Selena’s most
precious jewel, not a place you can go or even a gravity rock. This is
definitely a great basis for a game, but it’s not at all the way I
normally lean, at least for worldbuilding, so let’s not do that. This
time.
An exception might be the afterlife. I want to avoid the D&D thing
of souls getting sorted into planes according to alignment (which
doesn’t even exist in our game) and then staying there. Reuse!
Recycle! Upcycle! Reduce? I mean, just because it’s fantasy doesn’t
mean there has to be an immortal soul. Minds are plenty good enough.
On the other hand, this is fantasy, and surviving beyond death is
a very popular dream. But if there’s recycling, there should be
processing. Grinding. Melting. Reforging. And, naturally, some
sort of celestial apparatus (probably not the mechnical kind) to
do it all. An imperfect apparatus, which is why sometimes memories
of past lives seep through. Maybe it’s decayed, maybe it’s become
corrupt (villainous eunuchs of heaven?), maybe humans just don’t
understand what it’s actually doing; in any case it’s another source
of trouble. Bonus trouble if there are multiple factions of soul
processors who want different things and get the brilliant idea to
manipulate society in different ways.
This has implications for resurrection, namely that you have to get the
soul before it enters the hopper, but that’s fine. If somebody claims to
have come back from the dead after a thousand years, that should
definitely be sus.
Do only people who can spend Harmony have souls? Nah, that seems rude.
Being able to spend Harmony might be something desirable in a soul,
though.
Still need a good short in-world name for that. “Touched”? I think most
people who speak US English understand that it’s both “touched by the
divine” and “crazy”. Actually, we need multiple terms.