A girl needs a knife!

I ran four whole errands this afternoon. Surely no one has ever been as busy and sweaty as I!

Read (manga): Rainbows After Storms vol 5 (Luka Kobachi): Oh no, now the other one’s past is returning, but in a longer-term way that could lead to actual conflict!

Read (novel): Demon on Deck (Deborah Wilde): Further adventures of the Jewish half-demon magic cop and magic crimes and her super-vampire ex who has some kind of master plan he’s not telling her about. The more she learns, the more likely it seems that her mom, head of Vancouver magic police, is going to be the master villain.

Read (short): “My Evil Mother” (Margaret Atwood): The tribulations of a woman raised by a witch(?) in the 1950s. Is it magical realism? Is it suburban fantasy? It’s a mystery! Or not.

Written (game design): 489:

More things PCs might do in combat:
– make an opening for a ally to exploit
– charge!
– break the environment
– reshape the battlefield
– disarm them
– throw sand in their eyes
– make a fighting retreat
– push them off a cliff
– turn undead
– kiss them
– swipe something from them
– attack without regard for your own safety
– forgo attacking for better defense
– drive them back
– wrassle
– throw them
– fling them away
– too cute to kill
– take a prisoner
– get an ally back in the fight

I’m assuming any attack magic will be treated similarly to shooting
guns/bows and throwing bombs, although I still don’t know whether we
even want direct attack magic. Nothing says “fantasy adventure” like a
bolt of lightning to the face, but can we do better? Maybe we can’t,
because D&D has taken over the entire genre, but what about magic that
only transforms things, or only enchants items, or only summons
spirits? This is one of the major places where we can establish setting,
so of course I must die of indecision rather than doing anything useful.

Actually, what I should do is decide what unnatural things monsters can
do. Magic PCs have access to doesn’t have to be the same, but should be
in the same genre. We already established people can turn into monsters,
or be turned into monsters, and perhaps becoming able to spend Harmony
is just the first step on that path. That’s probably not the only source
of monsters, though. There should definitely be entities from the higher
realms, animated things (corpses, plants, golems), interdimensional
incursions, ghosts, what else? But we reject the D&D mindset of
pigeonholing everything, which throws us back onto vibes. Which is fine,
actually. We just need to establish the vibes. And maybe some kind of
cosmology? Are there gods? Is that just a mortal attempt to put a face
on impersonal workings of the universe? Is there an afterlife? If so, it
definitely shouldn’t be Heaven and Hell. In fact, if there even is a
difference between “angels” and “demons”, it shouldn’t be perceptible to
mortals.

If we keep my earlier idea of spells as astral implements, which you can
get from monsters and other mages (one way or another) then PC magic is
even more strongly tied to monster powers, although it doesn’t have to
be absolute. Some powers are too large or strange to be stolen and used.

Based on how I come up with lists of actions, possibly I should run down
the list of generic monsters (dragon, werewolf, vampire, manticore,
etc), but I want to avoid the standard movie monsters. There may be
things that sometimes look like humans and sometimes like wolves, but we
don’t need the rest of the Hollywood baggage. But that leaves things
still wide open.