#glitchrpg

i've recently picked up Glitch, & i'm attempting to cobble together a game for a few friends; i was hoping you could clarify some of the stuff with the Flore toolkit. it seems to be pretty optimized for physical artifacts, like swords and cars, rather than things the player "treasures" like, say, an album they really like, or a flavor they love. would you happen to have any advice on resolving this, whether that's tying conceptual things to Treasures or adapting the rules to more intangible things?

thank you so much for writing Glitch, by the way! i've been loving it so far.

The system did shift a bit more towards concrete things between Nob3 and Glitch, mostly because you're more likely to play out the process of cultivating the power in those things as a Shepherd Arc.

I think there are four reasonable approaches.

First, you can localize the effect. It's not "a flavor" that you love enough to make a Treasure. It's "my morning coffee" or "eating really spicy food" or whatever.

This is useful because it gives you a functionally concrete target. Yes, your morning coffee is different every day, but was it not Herodotus who said you can never step into the same coffee twice? Was it not the Laser King, blessed be his name, who said that all we have is not reality but just experience?

Making a ritual/experience of it, or otherwise localizing the Treasure, plays well with subtle effects that fit that experience.

Second, you can do something like "this old cassette with the song on it" or whatever.

Third, you can do a florilegium of different examples of the thing. Let's say you treasure chocolate. Not eating chocolate. Not chocolate cake. Just, you love chocolate in all its forms, like you're the star of some zany cartoon commissioned by the Chocolate Guild of Minnesota or whatever. Then you get a chocolate bar. You want to do your magic. You want to summon the Chocolate Sheep. So you spotlight the chocolate to add it to your florilegium, I dunno, hold it up and lovingly recite the ingredients from the label or whatever, rhapsodize about chocolate and this bar to everyone around you, and then it's in your florilegium and you can glorify it to summon up that Sheep.

(baa baa black sheep, have you any wool? cocoa, sugar, abraxas, ghul, o chocolate sheep by this command cast off your seals and bless this land.)

Or whatever.

which three different characters respond to by

teleporting out of existence (with the same stat as the costume change - an easier effect using it, even!)

just actually punching it

using the fact that he's ontologically defined as "dying of betrayal" to inflict the cactus with the same, making it's own needles harm it

none of these actually help, and then they have this exchange

SG: "To be clear: I have never stated that the world is not wrong. I do not myself believe that the world is not wrong. But I question it. And I advocate for the questioning of it. Precisely because is such an easy conclusion to us."

GB: "Apologies. I didn't mean to put words in your mouth."

SG: "I don't think you did. However, I want to make my meaning clear. It is often misunderstood out of an instinctual revulsion. The truth is—of course—that if I did truly believe that the world had merit, we would not be having this conversation."

GB: "What do you mean?"

SG: "Knowledge of the wrongness of the world is intrinsic to a Strategist. To accept the world is to become something else."

GB: "Ah yes. I have read about this in the works of Ercangast and Alidag."

SG: "Much has been written on the topic, yes."

GB: "From your writings and this conversation I have gotten the feeling that you in particular don't place much value in being a Strategist. You seem rather disillusioned with it."

SG: "Mmh. We are glorious, beautiful and sacred things. But we are also defined overwhelmingly by failure, misery and self-delusion. It is a proud thing to be a Deathwright. But it is a pitiful thing, too."

GB: "By this logic, if accepting the world is to become something other than a Strategist—wouldn't that be a good thing?"

SG: "Ah, we must be careful in conflating these concepts. I am not secretive about my desire to transcend my state of unbeing as Cannamarka once did. But not every transcendence is a change for the better. We are not so wretched that we couldn't fall further. We all know this. We know what it is like to be a mere revenant."

GB: "Do you think accepting the world would cause you to fall back into revenance?"

SG: "No. In fact this is very unlikely. I have not yet met a revenant that didn't hate with the same fervour as we do. I am merely pointing out that—flawed and haunted as we are and yearning as I am to transcend—shedding our nature is not a good thing by necessity."

GB: "I see."

SG: "I cannot tell you what would happen if you opened your heart fully to the world and became truly convinced of its inherent merit. I do not know of a single Strategist who has done this. Perhaps it has happened, but there is no record of it. And so it is impossible to say."

GB: "Does that worry you?"

SG: "You are quite insightful, do you know that?"

GB: "You honour me, Illuminate."

SG: "You are correct. I am troubled by it. My pursuit of the ultimate transcendence has stalled for quite some time now. It is possible that this acceptance is what I am missing to take that final step. But I do not know."

GB: "I find that interesting. I'd think that acceptance of the world couldn't possibly be a part of it, given that Cannamarka had achieved this transcendence before there was a world to accept."

SG: "It is not that simple. Cannamarka's state of enlightenment is a complicated thing. She was not beholden to the dualities that we take for granted. She resided in Rainnuan and she did not. She did neither and she did both. She is in Creation's past and she is not. Both and neither. She was destroyed when Rainnuan was shattered and she was not. Is it really so impossible that she could have transcended void and world both before there was a world to transcend? Could she not have accepted the value of Creation before Cneph even conceived of it?"

GB: "It still strikes me as illogical, I must confess."

SG: "Mh. Then let us return to less murky ground. Assuming acceptance of Creation was impossible and therefore never necessary for Cannamarka, it would still trouble me."

GB: "Oh yes?"

SG: "Cannamarka achieved her transcendence in a vastly different environment and from a vastly different initial state of unbeing. Perhaps she needed not accept the world, but she also was not poisoned and degraded by it. She was never at war with it. We cannot simply walk her path and expect it to still lead to the same end. Rainnuan is no more. Ninuan is fallen. Everything we do, we do in the context of the world."

GB: "Ah. Yes, I can see the logic behind that. Given this, is achieving Cannamarka's transcendence even possible anymore?"

SG: "It is."

GB: "How can you know?"

SG: "It is my fate to achieve it. And if there is anything I do understand quite intimately, it is fate. I only hope that when I find the path, I can mark it for others to follow."

The polls are complete, it's time to analyze the results. Clearly these were fair polls and there was no bias introduced by some of them being much funnier/more interesting than others, or the fact that some like Persona/Star Quality or Vastness/Child of the Ash really need more space to explain the concepts than tumblr polls will allow. None whatsoever.

(Using the Nobilis/Glitch titles because they fit on the graph better).

As we can see, Wanderer/Called Away is by far the most popular miraculous arc among tumblr users. What's particularly interesting though is that Gardener/A Keeper of Gardens is #2! The natural conclusion from this is that tumblr users fucking love Realms.

#3 and #4, Monstrous/Indomitable and Lore/Gatekeeper deal with being a monster and befriending/binding monsters respectively, which also makes a great deal of sense to me on the monsterfucker website.

The bottom of the scale includes a lot of highly customizable arcs, the ones where you build your own powers. Persona and Vastness may have had some poll quality issues as mentioned, but I'm genuinely surprised that Eide is so low.

To absolutely no one's surprise, Tumblr is Sickly. A lot of that is down to Wanderer/Called Away, obviously. Immortal arcs tended to perform the best on average, but you just can't compete with that.

The most popular kind of arc is - once again no great surprise - Otherworldly. Bindings, Aspect and Shepherd are all about the same in second-ish place though, which is surprising! I would have thought Emptiness would do better!

At this point we can construct our tumblr splat. We could, of course, just take the top four arcs. But I think it's more interesting to compare Tumblr's results to the existing ones. I could probably have done some regressions here and been fancy about it but let's just go by raw popularity because I'm lazy.

Tumblr, collectively, is a Magister of Game! Yeah! That sounds about right!

Save your Tears for another Day~

I love how this one came out. @nichtschwertart 's player character Ildinia in Glitch, here pictured partying it up in the club with some probably very illegal stuff to unwind after a hard day of being a single Mom!

My coat will turn your jagged blades, and fires crown my feathered brow; I am the mountain-bird, unrivaled: bone of the bone-strewn oceans of the west.

This is a Strategist dying of Popularity. A proud queen whose domains lie on Ninuan's Western shores, she rules over a dizzying court of intrigue and power-plays; her vassals scheme to exalt themselves and win the chance to sit at her hand, by impressing her or discrediting their rivals. She is a Rider of the oldest sort - it is her curse that even as she demands homage and tribute from her subjects, their own demands upon her time and attention rise until she is torn apart by the need to remain the object of their gaze. It's a strange and perilous thing - her want of attention a sickness, to many Ninuanni eyes, as much a part of Creation as anything she's burned when her hosts ride into the Is that she claims to wish to sever and be freed from.

The lyricists of her court hold to a tradition that phrases her Luthe in the reverse of the common forms of wider Ninuan: