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So the way this game happened is basically, every now and then I want to do a diced game, but I always run into the fundamental problem that when I actually analyze how something should work, it makes more sense diceless. Like, I always wind up feeling that if I actually know what you are supposed to be doing in a situation in a game, then ... it's almost always one thing. Probably with a significant axis of player-level variation, but not, like, a list of twenty things that should each happen 5% of the time, or whatever, much less something that should only happen 30% of the time but should happen super-well 5% of the time.

This is not me mocking d20-type systems, for clarity. More than half of the games I have loved to play were diced. More than half of the games I want to play but don't have the energy or opportunity to play right now are diced. Just ...

It's the problem with trying to build towards a diced game from an environment of thought that isn't using those foundations already.

So when I found a mechanic that I liked that actually worked, that ... honestly wasn't actually specifically a diced mechanic, but which didn't get in the way of doing a diced system with it? I wrote down the whole system core really quickly and then frantically began to try to figure out what of my existing already-written setting things I could pair it with.

The best option, unfortunately, was Fortitude: the Far Roofs.

The reason I say "unfortunately" there is that I've had a basically complete Chuubo's supplement, like, 160k words? something? sitting around for years, one of my favorite Chuubo's sourcebooks really, that's what that is, waiting for me to get the Arcs book out so that the character writeups in it will make sense, and using that setting for something else ...

Well ...

I worry that I will at the very least have to do the Chuubo's version kind of low-budget and without its own kickstarter because people will have already seen a lot of the content. At the worst, I'll decide I can't release the Chuubo's version as a print book at all, but will have to just release it all here or something.

... but, but, but, they paired together really well.

So what you're going to be seeing ... soonish? Probably 2023, maybe 2Q, although that's also when Nob4 is loosely scheduled so one of them will have to move to avoid me competing hard with myself ... is this new system, plus the Fortitude rats content.

For universality, I've moved this stuff out of Town qua Town. The rats are still Fortitude rats. Town is still assumed to exist. ... but here and there on Earth, waterways and Fortitude rats have shown up, and so you can set your story in a place that doesn’t need Chuubo’s lore like I dunno Portland or Baltimore or even Twin Peaks instead.

... I mean, if you're a Chuubo's fan, you can also just set things in Town!

But there’s that.

The book's completely written, I could theoretically jump into layout, but there's resource stuff finicky enough that I feel like I have to playtest for a while before moving forward. Otherwise, you’ll hit all these mechanics and they’ll hum like a perfectly-tuned engine that isn’t in gear and takes you nowhere at all. ^_^

Anyway, the bit I wanted to share today from this is a bit about the Near Roofs, which is to say, the part of the rats' rooftop home that isn't the Far Roofs yet.

I have checked on google and I don’t seem to have ever shared this, even the parts that existed before. So here you go!

**

                The Near Roofs

This bit’s from when you’ve just reached the Near Roofs—maybe gotten over your initial shock, maybe walked around up there for a while, maybe gone from the stuff that’s more like “your own house’s roof” to something more foreign and interesting to you.

You’re still in, or at least over, your town.[1]

Eventually, this kind of place is going to be all safe and known territory to you, all old hat to you, because ultimately it is just a part of regular old dull boring wherever-you-happened-to-be-living. It’s not magic. It’s just ... Portland. Suzhou. Whatever. Seattle, Baltimore, Fortitude, or St. Paul.

... but for right now? On your first trips up there? It’s mysterious and wondrous and strange. Maybe even a little frightening. The place you’ve lived for so long is suddenly defamiliarized to you; you find places that you have a hard time accepting are actually ­there.

This is a good time to introduce any changes in the real world that are necessary to having the game work—

Like, the rats arrive places by ship, so there’s a river, lake, or oceanfront somewhere,even if your city is landlocked. Maybe it’s not visible from the ground, if you want to hew closer to the established contours of your home, and that’s probably weird and a little magical ... but that doesn’t really matter here; it’s not a magic that makes the roofs themselves any stranger.

Too, it’s useful here to have the roofs be kind of interesting and detailed. To have a lot of them that are relatively safe, relatively low. It’s possible that you’re living somewhere where you couldn’t find that. Where all the roofs are dull, or interesting but rickety and high. If you need to change that kind of thing, introduce some variety or a bit more safety, this defamiliarization process is a good time to bring in something new.

Here’s a few places to explore.

          [1] as noted, I've dropped a strict dependence on Town. The playtest game I'm running is actually splitting the difference and taking place in "Fortitude, WA."

              Eight Banners

This bit’s up north, near the burrow Little Nymh. Here rats can fly banners from the roof to mark their victories—any victory, really, although they’re grouped, more or less, by scale. There are a lot more than eight banners here, and in fact, it’s closer to two thousand; the eight banners of the name recognize five great victories:

awakening as Fortitude rats;

the Hallow’s-Eve victory, when the Mystery named Hedge the Fang took over the bodies of seven hundred cats and tried to kill the local rat population—but they drove him out and lost fewer than a thousand rats, two hundred cats, and five or six of the Big Folk (humans, that is) thereby;

the peace accords, struck between the Rat King and his rivals Neven and Kysely Vertigen, that ended the “Usurpers’ Age;”

the rats’ discovery of a magical sailing route from Fortitude, the land of their origin, to ... well, originally, the dwarf planet Eris, but let’s say here, the town where the game is set, instead; and

their defeat of the monster Typhon at Thresher’s Woods.

The remaining three of the eight major banners are currently blank; this signifies that they have not yet defeated the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy[2], conquered the world, or made an end to Death.

It’s a pretty gorgeous span of roofs; they’ve chosen good ones, with solid construction and chimneys or second stories that offer epic views of the waterfront and your town. It’s fun to walk along the Lower Banners, where rats have put up small plaques to relatively small deeds and fly the appropriate streamers—here’s one, for instance, commemorating a litter where all the kits survived their first month; here’s one for counting the teeth of the Mystery named Goblin; here’s one for five years of love and marriage; and here’s one from the valedictorian of Professor Roza’s academy!

The street of Great Banners is even cooler, but I haven’t been there; nevermind flying a banner, you’re only supposed to go there and look as a commemoration for some great occasion in your life, so I’m saving it for something special. Maybe when this book comes out! That’ll probably have happened by the time you’re reading this, though, so you could certainly go there and see.[3]

              [2] a particularly noxious Mystery.

[3] I can't believe I was wrong on this one. Just can't believe it. I was so sure!! It just made so much absolute sense!

              Heaven’s Sleeve

This bit’s not far from the water.

These are pretty ordinary roofs. They’re not really crowded together but they’re not terribly far apart either. The slopes are modest and consistent. The tiles are red, white, and gray and mostly made of slate. It’s not until you go up near the top and look down the length of them that you see anything at all special or interesting here.

If you do that, though, you might catch your breath.

The roofs are like a branching road, or river, or a waving bit of cloth. They run together in the distance—you only really see the gaps between them up close—and become this great sweep of pathway that parallels the shore, touching the harbor in several places, and has breakaway paths that lead past intriguingly colored clusters of rooftops and up into the city’s heart.

The rats call this place Heaven’s Sleeve, and the story goes like this.

Once upon a time, Cneph the Maker wandered down to Earth—to this very city, in fact! When he turned to leave again, he caught his sleeve on the nail of a house. It ripped off and grew into a hydra of great waving streamers. These lay themselves down to become the region the rats call Heaven’s Sleeve. Because of this only most of Cneph the Maker could leave the world—he had to leave a portion of himself here, as he’d left a portion of his robe.

      Kaoru’s Cross[4]

This bit’s roughly central. It’s where two major roads cross down below.

The buildings near here tend to have conjoined roofs. That means that when you’re looking down from above, the crossroads is two deep, crisscrossed trenches in the rolling hills of the roofs. Those trenches are gaily colored, with rows of trees and bits of white and red plaster visible from above to either side. Good smells drift up. You can hear people walking along the way, and occasionally the jingling of bikes. The roofs aren’t wholly contiguous—there are plenty of other little roads that break them up, and a few architectural separations—but there’s an overall sense of evenness to the terrain, like you’re on rich red ground and you’ve opened up the earth to see a marvelous miniaturized world of people walking around below.

The rats’ll tell you that Karme Kaoru fought here with the Mystery named Salamander, aka “Indiscretion;” it unleashed a terrible fire, but she caught it up, transformed it, and used it to re-fire the terracotta of the rooftop tiles. Ever since, they’ve been indestructible, like rat-gum-treated rooftops, and just a little bit warmer than you would think they’d be.

    [4] but WHY is she cross, Jenna?! Is it because you're telling everyone about her little, uh, indiscretion?

    The Red King’s Road

This bit’s starts at the waterfront and it runs northwest.

These are pretty ordinary roofs. They’re solid enough underfoot, and they’re not that high, and the gaps between them are pretty small—all in all, they’re good beginner’s roofs. They aren’t particularly mythic or impressive in themselves. To me, though, the things that happened there give them some grandeur.

The Red King’s Road is one of the remnants of the Usurper’s Age, when a whole litter of siblings and a number of cousins and even a handful of foreign powers engaged in war, actions, and rebellion against the throne of the King of Rats.[5] “The Red King” was one of those unruly siblings: he rebelled, and he lost, and he walked this road when returning to his throne and grave.

His isn’t the only story, or the only rooftop region, emerging from that time. There’s a similar history to the Corpse Duke’s Runway, the Traitor Prince’s Gallows, the Sword Princess’ Path, and to Kysely’s Edge; not to mention Konrad’s Court and Neven’s Solace, distinguished from the previous in that Konrad and Neven both reconciled with their King.

    [5] Rat generations go fast, so you may well have been alive when all this “ancient history” happened; though, if you want to say that the rats weren’t public at the place where you live yet, though, that is fine.

    The Republic of the Living

The white roofs of this place are the keep of the Living Mayor, who broke off from the Rat King’s kingdom some while after the Usurper’s Age and declared himself an independent power. There he sacrificed his mortality, with the help of the Mystery “Malambruno,” and sank his flesh and mind into his domain, animating the upper and lower roofs of his republic with his own spirit. Now he is every spinning vane, every laundry line, every roof tile and every gutter; and thus the rats of the Republic of the Living may always retreat to the high places and know safety if the Rat King invades them from below. The matter is essentially notional now, as the Republic of the Living and the Kingdom of the Rats long ago made peace and reunited; now the Republic is only the Living Mayor himself and those disaffected rats who want to make a show of political dissent by signing on.[6]

    [6] In Chuubo's there's also bonus Region Properties here,

The Living Mayor is watching;

Iconoclasts are welcome.

In case you wanted to know. ^_^

    Thresher’s Woods

This bit’s off to the northwest.

The name refers to a space of rooftops, telephone phones, and a scant few trees. It’s not a real forest, but if you sit or lay down here, if you get your eyes low enough, you’ll understand why the rats see it as one. Dark wood is a common construction feature here. Protruding attic windows cast grim shadows. Telephone poles and their wires loom. The place feels and smells like you’re in a light forest.

Thresher’s Woods is a relatively well-traveled region. You can often find a news-rat about or a place to buy a rat-sized meal. There are fire-pits scattered through the region on stone roofs: the humans below receive a tiny stipend and free fire insurance in exchange for allowing the rats their fires up above. Rats that spend so long on the roofs that they don’t feel comfortable in the burrows any longer often set up residence here in Thresher’s Woods, so you’ll see tiny laundry lines and other signs of habitation scattered here and about.

Here’s how the rats tell the story of the place.

In the old days, in the Autumn Dynasty, there was a crop of heroes like nobody’d ever seen, or has ever seen again. They were astonishing. It was an era of warriors like Chryseis Moriko, who could take on a Big Folk soldier toe-to-toe and come out the better; of thieves like Alen Aleksei, who stole his father back from Death; of geniuses like Zlatan Petrova, who invented refrigeration; and of heroes like Kristen Lukenya, who might as well have been a Mystery, save only that she died and once she’d died she did not bother to return.

There were too many of them, and the world too small. That was their curse. They did their best to live under the rule of the Rat King and devote their attention to the Mysteries, but it was too difficult. Little feuds grew large. Tempers grew hot. They called the local rats under their various banners and they waged war such as Fortitude rats have rarely seen; and one by one, they cut each other down, here, in the span of roofs called Thresher’s Woods.

It was not until the war had almost ended, not until there were scarcely seven out of seventy of the great remaining, that Typhon came to make an end to all the errant rats. It is their great triumph and their monument that her skin flutters in the wind, a golden kite of flesh, on the street of Great Banners and from the highest telephone pole peak of Thresher’s Woods.[7]

    [7] I have a gorgeous color picture of Thresher's Woods to use in the final book, though ... I'm not sure I can hit the price point I want for the book if it's in color!! It troubles me. I am thinking maybe there will be an inset frontispiece with a few color pages if I go B&W?

    Wingmaidens’ Reach

These roofs are clean and ever-so-slightly luminous. The Wingmaidens’ Reach is mostly made of the roofs of houses, but its northern edge extends to warehouses and a cannery. There is an extensive birdcote in the central portion that resembles a fantasy palace, which, in some respects, it has become.

In the central cote of Wingmaidens’ Reach live the seven ternmays, rat heroines cursed by Malambruno to adopt the skins and wings of terns. They must take on the form of a tern one day in four, from dawn to dusk, and may do so at other times as often as they like. They tried at first to undo or escape this curse but after learning that ternmays are functionally immortal, beautiful to other rats, and can fly as often as they like, they stopped trying to reverse it.

The Wingmaidens’ Reach has acquired a portion of the peril of the far rooftops; it is an innate geas of the place and all that transpires there that beauty has a price.[8]

    [8] In Chuubo's, this too is a Region Property. ^_^

    Traveling with the Rats

This bit’s about the travel customs of the rats. It tells you what kinds of things the rats will be doing when you’re out on the roofs in a traveling or exploration scene.

If you’re lucky you’ll see them at play.

They’ll have little races, from here to there or possibly around and about everything — they don’t typically need exact rules for this to have fun, not like adult humans might, as long as there’s a clear sense that the other rat is doing something related to their race. You’ll see them chasing one another around and around and around up an old chimney, skittering past an unexpected bird’s nest on the way, quite possibly exaggerating the risk of falling off for effect; and then, if one of them is losing, he or she might decide suddenly that the real aim of the race is to jump off the chimney from halfway up, scramble along a weathervane, and jump out before the weathervane turns about onto the roof of a nearby house.

They’ll play hide and seek. This is particularly common if there are enough of them that a few of them can get ahead of you while one or two stays beside. They’re mature enough not to really acknowledge that they’re playing hide and seek—instead, it’s “that goof! Where’s he got off to now?” or “good grief, she’s gotten lost again?”—but you can tell by the smugness when they do find one another or when, after not being found, they strut back to the group.

They’ll play fight, now and again. This is awesome fun for them, and they’ll usually be giggling or boggling their eyes[9] with good humor the whole time—chasing, pouncing on, and struggling to pin their opponent, with an ultimate aim softly biting or tapping the neck.[10]

Even when it’s not safe enough to play, or when they’re not in the mood, they still hardly ever go from one place to another in a straight line. They will always be exploring, looking at their world and the roof from all directions, exclaiming in soft joy, wonder, or surprise at this and that. They’ll run up a television antenna, if they can find one, or up any weather vane, or along an attic roof. They’ll go back and forth between nearby roofs, or between a roof and the branches of a nearby tree, for no real reason other than that they can. They’re most comfortable and happiest when they’ve thoroughly explored the space around them, even when they’re in places they should technically already know.

Sometimes even in the near rooftops they’ll start acting really cautious or aggressive. They’ll tell you stories of bad things that have happened nearby, or poke at the rooftops skeptically with their swords, or make plans for coping with horrible danger. Do not be concerned. They are hamming it up for you. Seriously, any time you hear a rat admitting to fear, or hinting that you should be afraid, you’re getting yourself set up to have your leg pulled—they are perfectly capable of hiding their reactions and talking out of your range of hearing, and that’s exactly what they woulddo if they were genuinely concerned. At the very least, say, “For serious?” and, if they agree, say, “Promise?”

Because I guess something scary could be going on, but if you can’t get them to promise to it, then what’s really going to happen is that you’re about to see a scary mask propped up on the roof or you’re walking somewhere where a bat might fly out at you, and they’re getting ready to laugh and laugh at you when you get scared. As for why they’d do such a mean thing, well, it’s the same reason that people scare children—it’s to make you more cautious when you wouldn’t be, and less scared when you would.

    [9] Did you know that rats’ eyes can sort of pop out and vibrate in their sockets when they’re really happy? It’s called boggling! It can definitely take you by surprise.

[10] The rats of Fortitude tend towards neoteny in their fighting — a standard fight is a children’s game persisting into adulthood, rather than the kind of fight anybody could take seriously. That’s why they’re laughing! Boasting, arguing, and tests of skill are conceptualized as extensions of these fights, so you’ll often see a rat rubbing at its neck when particularly impressed, or tapping another rat’s neck when it thinks it’s being particularly impressive. In case you’re wondering, in a serious fight, their instincts will tell them to bite the enemy’s rump. Their brains, of course, will probably be telling them either to use a weapon or to back down.

    The Near Roofs

For the GM, or anyone who is up for handling this part of things.[11]

Some things you might say when the characters are traveling the Near Roofs:

“tell me about the views of the water”

“tell me about the rats that you see moving here and there on the roofs”

“tell me about the rat habitations that you find”

“tell me about the rats you see hawking food, newspapers, treasures”

“tell me about the warden-rat you see, pensive, with the air of a guardian”

“tell me about the music of the rats”

“tell me about the banners the rats fly”

“tell me about the temple of the rats, and the music that rises from it”

“tell me about the garden of the rats”

“tell me about the roofs that kind of feel like a desert”

“tell me about the roofs that kind of feel like water”

“tell me about the roofs that kind of feel like a forest”

“tell me about the roofs that kind of feel like the sky”

“tell me about the roofs that kind of feel like the city (in miniature)”

“tell me about the roofs that kind of feel like a glade”

“tell me about the roofs where the rats have their advanced industrial project”

“tell me about the roofs that kind of feel like the hills”

“tell me about the roofs that kind of feel like an alley”

“tell me about the roofs that kind of feel like a port”

“tell me about the roofs that kind of feel like an island”

“tell me about the roofs that kind of feel like your home”

“tell me about how you pass through the Lower Banners, up north, with its flags and kites and its waterfront view”

“tell me about the banners you read there, and the accomplishments of the rats”

“tell me how you look up at the street of Great Banners; will you visit it when you have an accomplishment that’s worthy?”

“tell me how you pass through Heaven’s Sleeve, down by the water—do you go up high to see how the roofs flow together to form a great branching road?”

“tell me, do you know the story of Heaven’s Sleeve? (pg. XX)

    o Do you think a rat here might tell you?”

    o Want to share with a friend?

“tell me how you pass through Kaoru’s Cross, near the heart of the city, with a crossroads like two deep, crisscrossed trenches in the rolling hills of the roofs”

“tell me what you hear from the people who walk there; from the jingling of bikes”

“tell me how it feels to walk on the rich red roofs of Kaoru’s Cross, solid as the ground?”

“tell me, do you know the story of Kaoru’s Cross? (pg. XX)

    o Do you think a rat here might tell you?

    o Want to share with a friend?”

“tell me how you walk the Red King’s Road, from the waterfront off northwest—good beginner’s roofs, I’m told, with solid tiles and fairly short gaps for when you’re jumping”

“tell me, do you know the story of the Red King’s Road? (pg. XX)

    o Do you think a rat here might tell you?

    o Want to share with a friend?”

“tell me how you pass through the Republic of the Living, where every spinning vane, every white-topped tile, every laundry-line and every gutter is inhabited by the spirit of the ‘Living Mayor’ of the rats?”

“tell me of the rats who live here, officially forsaking the governance of their King?”

“tell me, can you feel the presence of the Living Mayor on these roofs?”

“tell me, do you speak to him—the Living Mayor—through some chimney-flue or gutter-wind?”

“tell me how you pass through the northwest Thresher’s Woods, where the roofs feel like a forest, and there are tiny fire-pits and laundry lines scattered here and there around the outside of rats’ homes?”

“tell me, do you know the story of the Thresher’s Woods? (pg. XX)

    o Do you think a rat here might tell you?

    o Want to share with a friend?”

“tell me how you pass through Wingmaidens’ Reach, where beauty has its price?”

“tell me of the fairy-tale birdcote at its heart?”

“tell me how you see the ternmays passing overhead?”

“tell me, do you know the story of the Wingmaidens’ Reach? (pg. XX)

    o Do you think a rat here might tell you?

    o Want to share it with a friend?”

“tell me how you walk

    o the Corpse Duke’s Runway, and what the roofs are like there;

    o the Traitor Prince’s Gallows, and what the roofs are like there;

    o the Sword Princess’ Path, and what the roofs are like there;

    o Kysely’s Edge, and what the roofs are like there;

    o Konrad’s Court, and what the roofs are like there;

    o Neven’s Solace, and what the roofs are like there

“tell me of the roofs you walk—what do they feel like, here? do you know their name?”

“tell me, do you know the story of this place?

    o Do you think a rat here might tell you?

    o Want to share with a friend?”

“speak to me of the rats racing and chasing one another on the roofs?”

“speak to me of the rats at their games of hide and seek—and their excuses, not to admit that they’re at play?”

“speak to me of how the rats explore the space around you as you go?”

“speak to me of the play-fights of the rats—their eyes boggling, their voices giggling, chasing and pouncing or with play-swords dueling until one is softly bitten or tapped upon the neck?”

“speak to me of how the rats pretended that there was trouble coming ... only to have it be a prank?”

“speak to me of something the rats ran up, or found?”

          Some History

The original system is pretty good, but it wasn’t put together with any particular application in mind.

Later on, I did some work on Microbloggers of the Lost Island.

This is a game I honestly ought to do more with sometime, but when I left off, it was with the realization that I’d have to do a large annoying task that I am not particularly motivated about in order to make the game work (lots and lots of tables), and I’ve never felt driven to do so when I have other projects around!

So, anyway, Microbloggers.

Microbloggers adapted the basic diced system to focus on NVC; the idea was, I think, that among other things the system would serve as a teaching tool for non-violent communication. It wound up with a bunch more special actions to roll, as well as the trait set Physical Action, Self-Care, Introspection, Awareness, and Communication.

At the time I was in part tackling NVC as a kind of challenge (could I turn the game into a tool for working with this?) and in part I was kind of personally pleased with it having had some very minor success in navigating some particularly tricky conversations using its tools.

... lately I’m less certain how I stand on it as a concept, but that is neither here nor there.

When I started on a new diced project, anyway, accordingly, since I had it sitting around, I used Microbloggers as the basis. To a great degree, when things were finished, I’d cycled back a fair ways towards the original action set, but---well. Twice-refined is better than none! Plus, there’s now the MotLI set of traits.

(Even outside the NVC context, I found myself liking that set of traits, because it felt like it was mildly socially good to highlight things like Self-Care as useful even if the PCs themselves are likely to be bad at them? Plus they are nice and defined and simple and interesting and not too far off of what I’d specifically need for Dreaming Waters if I ever wound up going back to that, so they stuck around!)

Anyway, I thought I’d share with you where that left things, today!

         Basics

So, first, I’m going to keep the old dice mechanic here, because I like it. Some of the details like how Obstacles and Skills and Will and such might vary in later books, but then again, they might not, that’s not important:

What is important is that we’re still rolling 5d6 and checking for matches, with matchless rolls being a critical failure and triples being a critical success, and thus a high fixed chance ... I think, like, ~10%? and ~20%? of these things happening each roll. You still want a double less than your trait to succeed, and a failure is still what happens when the only doubles are over your trait.

               Special Actions

So I cut and cut and fiercely cut down on the special actions and got them down to 8 from the MotLI 18 or whatever, which was great until I looked at the original set today and realized I’d started with only 9.

But!

8 is smaller than 9, and I did get them down to 8, at least, at least for an Immersive-focused kind of game.

Most of the time, too---again, at least in something Immersive---you’ll only really need three, rolling

Being There: ... to have an experience more completely.

Losing Yourself: ... when you’re stunned, adrift, or falling into an obsessive spiral, and

Wonder: ... when you want more.

... but I had to admit to myself that even in Immersive games you’d still need an even more special-purpose action now and again, like:

Bonding: ... to seek, or recognize, a moment of meaningful communication.

Daring: ... to take bold, decisive action.

Dismay: ... for trouble, conflict, and struggles.

Delirium: ... when horrible and/or transformative things happen, or

Peace: ... when you’re doing simple, honest things.

As before, these are initially rolled using the standard five traits (Physical Action, Awareness, Introspection, Communication, and Self-Care), but later on, as your Issues rise, you may be able to roll an Issue’s rating instead.

I’ve taken the bits about getting XP on a critical success out; they’re useful, but not at the heart of what these actions are doing. If you’re using these rules for the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG, though, directly, you’ll definitely want to add that back in!

               Being There

When your character is experiencing something in the world—something funny, or horrible, or delicious, or beautiful, or just … iconic for your experience—you can roll Awareness or Something to Deal With to get a stronger sense of that experience. Alternatively, this roll can bring sensory experience or mood into play during a relatively slow or casual scene.

Here’s what happens.

A matchless “critical failure” pushes you to ignore and reject your experience of the world itself and its importance, possibly focusing strongly on what you’re doing or talking/thinking about instead. +1 to Complex.

A failure adds nothing to the experience.

A success lets the moment resonate—    o the GM/HG talks more about the purely sensory experience of the world around you, or a particular thing that you were savoring ... what you see, touch, taste, hear, smell;    o and/or, if you prefer, you can talk or emote a bit more about what it all feels like to you.

Triples work like a success; save, the experience stirs your heart. +1 to Something to Deal With.

Quadruples and quintuples give you a sense of a cosmic force moving underneath the surfaces of things—a private vision of yourself or the world that transfixes you. Discussion of the sensory experience or what you’re feeling should bridge into a description of that experience. +1 to Something to Deal With.

             Losing Yourself

You’ve lost yourself. You’re overcome. You’re stunned, adrift, agonized, obsessed, or physically lost.

In such cases, you can roll Physical Action or Complex to find your way through.

A matchless “critical failure” generally means that you feel a little horrified at yourself. Snap out of it. Reject the obsession if there is one, pull yourself together if you’re just stunned, realize that you haven’t traveled anywhere near as far as you thought if you were physically lost, and take +1 to Isolation.

An ordinary failure pushes you to freeze up or be useless for a long time, or, to go into an obsessive spiral building towards an overwrought or self-destructive action. If anyone else is present for the latter, a fog of stress and awkwardness will make it harder to process and respond to what they say.

Success means that someone interrupts you before “a long time” passes, or before your spiral reaches the point of self-destructive action. That a PC or NPC volunteer, or, if there is none, the notional/cinematic “world itself,” will step in before that point and react emotionally to your situation, giving you a chance to find your way out.[1] If you want to, as a player, you can then use this as an excuse to switch from losing yourself to doing something dramatic or cool ... or, if that doesn’t actually seem right to you, you can just continue towards a failure, interminable pause, or self-destructive action from there.

Triples don’t get that interruption. Instead, they push you past the point of obsession or confusion until you can see something deeper in your lostness. Something real. Describe it, or let the GM/HG describe it, and know that you have a chance of grasping a bit of enlightenment here ... but whether you do or not, you’re likely to crash into a metaphorical wall. Either way, +1 to Complex.

Quadruples or quintuples make that chance more concrete. Take a moment and really do your best to find what insight you pick up here; get help from the gm and the group, if you need it. It’s just ... too bad you’re still lost. +1 to Complex.

              [1] What does it mean for “the world itself” to respond to something? Classic examples include a flash of lightning and roll of thunder as approval/emphasis of a dramatic statement; or, something falling over in the distance, startling you out of a freeze response; or, the world “showing its disapproval” for your losing yourself in phone games by having your account run out of money.

               Wonder

Sometimes there’s something that your character’s bearing witness to—that they’re experiencing, or listening to, or watching, say—and you think that they can get something out of it. That there’s something in it that’s worth adding to their life’s store of experiences.

In such a case you may roll Awareness or Mystery to see if that is so.

Here’s what happens:

A matchless “critical failure” means that you feel really out of your depth here. It’s not just that you don’t spot anything of note or understand anything extra — you wind up feeling like you’re not really capable of getting anything more out of this. Frustrated and alienated. +1 to Hollow.

On failure, you may listen, you may watch, you may pay attention, but your mind slips over the substance of the thing. You don’t really know what to do with it. Optionally, you can ask the relevant player or GM/HG what the “core” of the experience is, the thing that you should be focusing on, digging into to find its richness — but if they tell you, you have to not dig into that for at least the remainder of the chapter. (For instance, someone might highlight the most important part of a story they’re telling, or the GM/HG might hint at why a magical event matters to ongoing play, but you won’t really figure that out until later on.)

On success, the relevant GM/HG or player describes what’s going on a bit more. Or, if there’s nothing more to see, they might describe the silence after the events finish, or the impression (they expect) it leaves you with, or go over it again from another perspective. If it’s mystical enough, they might read a bit of poetry or something instead.

On a triple, the same thing happens, but the emotional impact on you is stronger. +1 to Mystery.

Quadruples and quintuples point the way to an extraordinary discovery or conclusion, if such a thing is there to be discovered or if the person providing information can think of something worthy with a few moments’ thought. If not, then instead it’s this piercing, spiritual insight; you feel a strong sense of connection to this place, context, or subject, and take +1 to Mystery.

          Bonding

You’re trying to meaningfully communicate with someone. To reach out. To connect. Or, you’re noticing that that’s already happening.

In such a case, roll your Communication or your Mystery.

Here’s what happens.

A matchless “critical failure” lures you into saying something thoughtless.

On failure, you feel an impulse to share a secret or otherwise make yourself vulnerable.

On success, you can get a glimpse into their heart—you can ask them a question, and either they’ll answer honestly, or their player (for an NPC, the GM/HG) has to signal OOC before they speak that an honest answer is impossible at this time.[2] If you wish, you can reverse this right, offering them a glimpse into your heart, instead.

On triples, you get the benefits of success. In addition, the conversation is really good. It’s energizing. +1 to Mystery.

Quadruples and quintuples represent transformative, incredible experiences—you feel like this conversation is life-changing, like it’s full of rich insight. You also receive the benefits of a triple, including +1 to Mystery.

         [2] if you’re just looking to connect, and don’t have anything dramatic to ask, the recommended question is either “this is what I think I’m hearing from you: .... is that right?” or “could you let me know what you’re hearing from me?”

          Daring

You’re taking a risk. You’re stepping forward. You’re putting your trust in something — in luck or in fate; in a person; in an idea.

So decide to be Daring, and roll your Physical Action or your (in) Over your Head.

Here’s what happens:

A matchless “critical failure” blows up in your face. Sometimes that means you’ve made a bad gamble. Other times, e.g. if you’re trusting an NPC and the GM wants that NPC to be trustworthy, it means that you’ve done the gamble wrong: you’ve offended the person you were putting your trust in, or somehow they’ve gotten the exact wrong idea about what you want, or whatever.

Regular failure, though, doesn’t always mean that your bold action fails. Instead, the GM takes a moment to clear their thoughts and then decide(s), with a fresh perspective, what should happen as a result of your action. It doesn’t have to be good, but it doesn’t have to be bad!

Success counts as a success on the underlying action, and also gives you a feeling like—yeah. You’ve changed the world with your decisions. You’ve shaped fate. Maybe, if what you’re trying to do is too complicated to succeed at with just a roll, things don’t go perfectly, but you’ve done, or will do, something. You know?

Triples, in addition to being a critical success on the underlying action, give +1 to (in) Over your Head.

Quadruples and quintuples generally represent extraordinary luck, success, and impact, or at least an appropriate two of the stated three. You also receive the benefits of a triple, including +1 to (in) Over your Head.

                       Dismay

This is awful! You’ve got that squirmy feeling deep in your gut, like: I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be doing this. This situation is trouble.

At such time you may roll Introspection or Hero to see if you can find a way out.

Here’s what happens:

A matchless “critical failure” means that whatever you’ve done is worse than useless—you’ve actively made things worse! Generally, that means that there’s a horrifying cliff-hanger, and the scene ends, and you refuse to talk about what happened there and how you survived(?) for a while.

On failure, you freeze up, and something bad happens, though all is not yet lost.

On a success, the GM/HG monologues about the doom as it advances. Choose whether:    o you freeze up, but all is not yet lost;    o you retreat, but tactically, and all is not yet lost; or    o you achieve a tactical objective, like slowing the thing that’s chasing you or rescuing an unconscious person who’s also under threat, but you’re still in danger and may suffer some negative consequences—at the GM/HG’s whim, if appropriate, or your own.

Triples allow an impressive fighting retreat where you also achieve a tactical objective, or, an incredibly successful escape. +1 to Hero.

Quadruples or quintuples represent extraordinary luck, skill, and survival reflexes — in addition to the +1 to Hero, you can pull off an escape or victory that neither you or the GM/HG would have previously thought possible!

         Delirium

Something horrible is happening to you! Or at least something scarily transformative. Life is kicking you hard.

To help wrestle with and process the trauma of that, you may roll your Introspection or your Sickness. Here’s what happens.

A matchless “critical failure” means that you can laugh off what’s happening. But why? And how? +1 to Illusion.

On failure, ... whatever happens, happens.

On success, the experience of the thing itself is slowed so that the GM/HG can describe lurid, surreal, and supernatural elements of the experience—to add special effects to it like a gothic writer or a stylized movie. You may also have a brief break to process. ... then, alas, the event proceeds.

On triples, you gain the benefit of success ... but life really is messing with you hard. +1 to Sickness.

Quadruples or quintuples mean that this is just impossible to deal with as things stand. In addition to the +1 to Sickness and the other effects above, you can and usually must tie the traumatic event to one of your ongoing quests; you’ll have to deal with it, and that quest, together.

The effects of success, triples, and beyond may not seem like rewards, exactly ... but honestly, if you’re going to be kicked around by life, wouldn’t you rather the GM or HG and story at least put some time and effort into it?

                Peace

You’re doing some kind of simple, honest activity. And you want it to matter—to matter enough, specifically, to be one of your two spotlight moments for the chapter.

So you’ll declare a moment of Peace, and roll your Physical Action or Calling.

Here’s what happens:

A matchless “critical failure” means that something just plain terrible happens. You’re a little freaked out. +1 to Complex.

On failure, you work, and it’s productive, but it doesn’t get to any narratively meaningful milestones.

On success, you’ve gotten something done. You’ve cemented progress, or completion, into the fabric of the game.

On triples ... you get the feeling like that success was important. That it relates to what you’re meant to be doing, even more than you already thought. +1 to Calling.

Quadruples and quintuples generally means that you did just the right thing. In addition to the success and the +1 to Calling, there’s a sense of building connection to this place or context.

The roll here is intended to be self-justifying:

It’s not that the work you were doing was already established as important, or that you’re discovering it to be important, but rather, you decide as a player that this is one of the actions that you want to have be important enough to mark in the record of the game; and so, accordingly, it becomes important—at least on success, and to a certain extent on failure.

If you don’t explicitly want that, you can still roll Physical Action to do things ... just don’t declare them as Peace!

         What Happened to Vice?

Obsessive Action, Shock, and Wicked Action got rolled into Losing Yourself: they’re pretty different, but the core results when you’re rolling them were too similar to keep them apart.

Accordingly, Vice got rolled into Complex for simplicity.

... again, they aren’t the same, but ... it saves system space?

... and pretty much the same, for other missing Issues and actions. ^_^

         Quests

So nominally the 1-2 recommended colors for a quest flavor action just become recommended rolls in a system like this:

Blue is obviously Daring

Trouble is Dismay, but Never Say Die! is probably Losing Yourself or maybe Daring?

Green is mostly Delirium, although Wicked Action is Losing Yourself.

Red is mostly Wonder, but Shock is Losing Yourself, some listening is Bonding, and Sympathetic Action doesn’t map very well. (It was always just a front end for Shock anyway. ^_^)

Gold is Losing Yourself.

Purple is Peace, but some conversations are Bonding.

Silver is Being There or sometimes something else.

Black is kind of assuming that if you have Rituals or Transitions around they will be their own thing, but it’s also a mix of Wonder, Delirium, and Losing Yourself.

... of course, while the color icons were always a little indirect, always a little more like hints than absolute directives, this makes things a lot worse; it’s probably the best way to convert existing quests, but if you’re building a quest for a diced system, it can’t possibly be the thing that you’d want to do.

You’d want something that, like, points to the rolling directly!

     What Would That Look Like?

There are exactly eight actions, and if my OCD were in complete control over my actions I would map each one to a color, but it’s not, and so I won’t be doing that.

Instead, I think the right course for a quest in a diced Chuubo’s game is to just give in and choose a specific roll. That does mean that you’re narrowing in the action a lot---if you take something like Poisoned, from pg. 337 of the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG, you’ll see quest options like:

[[BLUE]] trying to understand what is happening

... which can only really be a Daring assumption about what that is, but also quest options like:

[[GREEN]] [[RED]] a dizzying vision of the enemy

... which could represent (Suffer) Corruption/Whatever, Wicked Action, Foreshadowing, or Shock in Chuubo’s terms and thus could be rolled as any of Delirium (you’re corrupted by that vision), Wonder (you get lost in the vision), or Losing Yourself (you’re dizzied by or tempted by that vision), among other possible options.

Picking just one is cutting the content in that single quest bullet down to a 1/3!

... but still, I think there isn’t really a choice. I don’t think there’s room in a quest card to give people complicated if/then tree choices. I don’t think there’s room to say: “you have a dizzying vision of the enemy. Roll Delirium if it corrupts you, Losing Yourself if it dizzies or tempts you, or Wonder if you get lost in it”---that goes beyond giving hints to the player and on to the level of “filling up the quest card with a bunch of admittedly helpful but borderline presumptuous reminders about how the system works.”

Conversely, a quest bullet like

(Delirium/Wonder/Losing Yourself) a dizzying vision of the enemy

... well, it has its points, I guess, but it’s a lot, and is really just buying a some of the benefits of the above for a dose of its flaws.

So I think what you actually have to do is to pick single, specific rolls for each bullet, which means you basically have two choices:

de-emphasize quest flavor, or

have maybe ... 10-12? standard bullets? per quest?

The option I wound up with going with in my current project is to de-emphasize quest flavor a little; rather than “these are the things that progress your quest,” they become “here are some ideas for things that progress your quest.” For strict Chuubo’s, though, you’d probably have to pick door two and just have more bullets all told.

What the final result looks like, for me, is something like

      A Burdened Path

(Gold Silver 3, Orange Green Purple 2, Red 4)

People expect a lot out of you, even though your powers aren’t really under great control right now.

         MAJOR GOALS

people want you to be more than you are

you mess up out of carelessness

you are part of a ritual

             QUEST FLAVOR / Things to Say

“what grand structure do I witness on the roofs?” Roll Wonder.

“who shows off to me, puffed up with pride?” Roll Bonding.

“what happens when my magic goes out of control?” Roll Delirium.

“who gives me new clothing, and why?” Roll Being There.

“who gives me food, drink, or crystal, and why?” Roll Being There.

“where am I when an enemy decides to be weirdly companionable?” Roll Being There.

“what weird social expectation do I accept?” Roll Daring.

       And those are some current thoughts on diced Chuubo’s-type systems!

               IOSHI Games

The IOSHI setting attempts to capture a specific and simple storyline. As with the hero’s journey, the universal pulp novel plot, or the Hollywood romance formula, the Game Master can embroider this basic plotline in any number of ways. The IOSHI storyline is compatible with stories of arbitrary complexity and depth, although — as with any other setting — the Game Master and not the setting creates these stories.

[[ This is actually open to argument, and an interesting question, but look it was 2003 and a different time and more importantly this was originally freelance work for Tri-Stat before the Tri-Stat people decided that it would work better financially to keep the money instead of paying people. Ironically, kind of in-genre!

... anyway. ]]

A standard IOSHI campaign follows the structure outlined below. Game Masters can deviate from this structure freely; when doing so, they should keep in mind that the setting is designed for use with this story outline and modify it appropriately to match their own.

               Character Design

By default, characters are savants. They have an inherent knack for one or more key occupation categories and IOSHI training in some subset thereof.

Sometime before the campaign began, the characters made the deliberate choice not to buy into two standard Tartessian assumptions. Rather than accepting the experts’ assurances as to the well’s safety, the characters installed filters. Rather than happily embracing a position as corporate resources, the characters nurtured a resentment against this fate or found some criminal means to avoid it.

             Campaign Structure

First, the system strikes at the characters for refusing it. For some reason — often because of the characters’ choice to use filters or because of their rejection of corporate entanglement — the characters appear on someone’s hit list. The characters defend against various attempts to remove them for a variable number of stories.

As the characters gain experience, they also gain progressive insight into the motivations of their enemies. Even if the characters perform no research, any IOSHI training or brain chip piracy they perform improves their mental map of the world. This allows the Game Master to reveal new truths. To survive, the characters usually depend upon their allies, creating an increasing number of social entanglements.

At some point, the characters have enough information to begin striking back. Some immediately do so. Others must have specific motivation before they abandon a habitual defensive stance. Typically, this motivation derives from the character’s social connections, who also come under threat. The characters’ offensive position also lasts a variable number of stories.

Finally, the characters find themselves in a position to take significant action against the hostile elements of the world’s power structure. This phase of the campaign can begin as soon as the characters have sufficient experience to confront the Game Master’s chosen antagonists — who may be a handful of sharks and other savants or an unstoppable force with practical dominion over all of Tartessos. The confrontation itself has one of four outcomes: the characters win a series of limited victories, win a series of victories, die bloodily, or sell out. The Game Master should not predetermine the outcome, but can eliminate some of the last three options depending on the mood of the game.

       Story Structure

Typical scenarios combine elements of the military mission, the dungeon crawl, and the superhero adventure. The antagonists threaten something the characters care about, such as their own lives. The characters must get that thing to safety or nullify the threat. At the same time, the characters often have the opportunity to kill the story’s antagonists — typically, minions of the overall campaign antagonists — and claim some of their possessions. The characters can then sell off these possessions or — in the case of IOSHI training — install them in a character’s brain.

        Escalation

The security level in Tartessos — the opposition faced by those engaging in illegal or covert action — varies greatly from region to region. As the characters become more powerful, they gain the ability to act against the system or their enemies in increasingly high-security areas. This gives characters a shorthand with which to measure their own abilities: the higher the security level they can overcome, the more practical a direct assault on the bastions of their antagonists becomes.

The standard security level consists of an armed human police force, monitors, a few automated defences, and reasonable software safeguards. The ability of characters to circumvent this security adjusts upwards or downwards based on regional concerns. A Game Master can rate regions on the quality of each important aspect of security, which affects the characters’ ability to avoid that security with standard Skill/Trait rolls. In addition, it adds “security options” to the area that the characters must overcome, invented by the Game Master or selected from the suggestions below.

           Chart Security Levels

Security Level / Circumvention Difficulty / Roll Bonus/Penalty / Additional Options

Anarchic         Easy                                        +2            0

Criminal          Somewhat Easy                      +1            0

Urban              Typical                                    0            0-1

Significant      Somewhat Difficult                -1            1-2

High                Difficult                                  -2            2

Military           Really Difficult                       -3            3

Maximum       Almost Impossible                  -4            4

END CHART

                 Automated Defence Systems

Some regions in Tartessos have automated or remotely-operated defence systems — electronic barriers, stun fields, and sharpware-targeted machine guns. The circumvention difficulty modifies rolls when the characters try to disable, evade, or endure the effects of these systems. A bank’s key computer systems might have an Automated Defence Systems (High) device that floods the machine room with anaesthetic gas when intruders enter. This imposes -2 to Endure rolls when the characters attempt to resist the incapacitating gas or interfere with its dispensation. Some Automated Defence Systems options follow.

                 Adaptive

The automated defence systems evaluate the characters’ actions in an intelligent way when activating. For example, a defence system that seals specific corridors to channel intruders is adaptive; a system that seals all corridors in order to trap them is not.

          Advanced

Normal defence systems include such things as guns, elevator overrides, and alarms. Advanced Automated Defence Systems employ high-end technology. This allows a range of unusual security effects. It also means that standard countermeasures — such as jamming guns or blinding their sensors — do not necessarily apply.

           Complex

Normally, at most one system guards any given location within the region. Each Complex option allows an additional interlocking defence system per location. For example, a region with Complex Automated Defence Systems, chosen once, can have up to two interlocking defence systems per location. Each has its own purpose and activation methods.

            Guards

In regions guarded by nameless NPCs rather than well-defined antagonists, the Game Master can build and use a standard “guard” template — e.g., a combat-focused ‡30 character. Rather than making the guards more or less competent, the Game Master can apply the security-based roll modifier to the characters’ rolls for combat and conflicts when the characters and guards face off. For example, a maximum security region might have perfectly-trained drone guards. The Game Master can implement this by applying a -4 penalty to the characters’ Action rolls when facing off against the drone horde. Some Guards options follow.

          Numerous

The region employs an atypically large security force — twice what one would expect for a building, borough, hideout, or Project of its sort. Further doublings count as one additional Guards option each.

        Guard Upgrade

The Game Master should design standard upgrades to normal guards based on the needs of the game. Each assignment of this option gives each guard either one standard ‡16 upgrade or an ‡8 upgrade specifically chosen to make the characters’ lives more interesting.

          Guard Leader

The Game Master designs one or more significant antagonists whose primary purpose is to augment the region’s security. Such antagonists may have many more character points than the other guards. The characters do not receive a roll modifier when fighting a guard leader. Guard Leader counts as one Guards option if the antagonists make intrusion more complicated, two if they make it more dangerous, and three if they make it nearly impossible.

            Monitoring

In regions under any sort of observation — whether in the form of patrols or security cameras — the Monitoring circumvention difficulty modifies rolls to evade detection. A ghetto plagued by gang warfare might have Monitoring (Anarchic) on the streets and Monitoring (Criminal) in each gang’s base. Characters would receive a +2 to their rolls when sneaking past patrols on the street, but only a +1 when sneaking through a gang headquarters. Some Monitoring options follow.

             Full Surveillance

Full Surveillance regions continuously monitor or patrol all easily traversable spaces. If the region also fully monitors airspace, ducts, sewers, and other normally inaccessible places, this counts as two Monitoring options.

              Unusual Sense

The region’s monitors employ unusual detection techniques that are difficult to circumvent, such as motion detectors, thermal observation, and particle analysis. Each pair of unusual detection techniques commonly used in the region counts as a single Monitoring option.

          Redundant Monitoring

Multiple independent sources monitor the observed portions of the region. For example, many locations may have both PIPE-manned cameras and patrols.

           Operations

When intruders alert security to their hostile intentions, it starts taking action against them. Apply the circumvention difficulty modifier to the characters’ attempts to interfere with an organized response. For example, in a region with Operations (Criminal), characters might divert guard response to the wrong location with basic electronic ventriloquism. In a region with Operations (Military), this becomes more difficult. Some Operations options follow.

                              Response Time

The local security force reacts to the characters’ actions with unusual alacrity. Guards, software, and the security head’s commands move easily through the region.

      Subtlety

The local security acts with restraint and stealth. The circumvention difficulty roll bonus/penalty applies to the characters’ attempts to discern the current locations and reaction pattern of the security force.

         Support Officers

Officers with IOSHI training bolster local security operations. Having a hunter, librarian, shaman, shark, or visionary on staff counts as an Operations option — rather than participating in combat, these security officers assist the security force in planning its reactions.

          Software

Characters invading a secure region may wind up in conflict with the software therein. As with guards, the Game Master can apply the security-based roll bonus/penalty to the characters’ rolls for combat and other conflicts when the characters and the software face off.

           Black ICE

Some software can initiate mind combat with any character with a net-enabled datajack. This counts as one Software option.

          Hardened

Unless the character has direct physical access, Hardened Software imposes an additional -4 penalty on rolls to defeat it in network combat.

                 Software Upgrade

The Game Master should design standard upgrades to software “character sheets” based on the needs of the game. Each assignment of this option gives the region’s important programs either one standard ‡16 upgrade or an ‡8 upgrade specifically chosen to make the characters’ lives more interesting. For this purpose, “important programs” are those whose destruction or defeat would meaningfully reduce the area’s security.

           Software Guard Leader

The Game Master designs one or more significant antagonists whose primary purpose is to augment the region’s security. This functions as with the Guard Leader option save that the antagonists exist in the net rather than in physical reality.

         What’s Left?

         Karma

https://kaaramel.tumblr.com/tagged/karma-draws-things

      So Karma’s been doing fan art for my RPGs for quite some while, and all of it has been awesome.

I was nervous here for much the same reason I was nervous about Kirsten---

That Karma’s work would be great I didn’t doubt, but would it be a stylistic match?

This was Glitch, after all.

Glitch, explicitly conceived as a successor to James Wallis’ coffee-table-book vision for Nobilis.

Glitch, designed to be all ... all high-arty and stuff, and recapture any members of the stick-out-their-pinky-when-drinking-tea-and-reading-message-boards demographic that I’d been losing with Chuubo’s and Nob3.

Glitch, you know. A deep and solemn tome.

(Why did I do a deep and solemn tome? I’m not a deep and solemn person!!) :P

... but anyway, I was reminded, I think by Rand, that I loved Karma’s work, and everyone loved Karma’s work, so how could it possibly be a bad idea?

And in fact this was correct!

          Page 74

“Erchen’in Branza, who dies by the Sandwich”

Piece Style: a “Strategist” dying of the thing ...

                     Strategist: Middle Eastern, she/her

Bane: Your choice, or “sandwiches”

Examples:

she is at a food court or school cafeteria staring at a taco with anguished uncertainty

she is on a sidewalk with mulberry trees surrounded by a ring of sinister-looking sandwiches held together by pins

she is being run off the road by a sandwich truck

two giant hands carrying pieces of bread are closing in on her

she’s clawing at her eye, trying to pull out the sandwich that’s stuck in it. Chunks of sandwich are scattered on the floor around her.

she’s staring dolefully at the “keyboard” of her computer, which has been replaced by a sandwich. As has one of the pictures on the desk, and two lights in the chandelier, and a windowpane.

she’s at a funeral, and another attendee has wrapped bread around her leg and is about to take a bite.

she has just opened her sandwich at a restaurant to reveal the wriggling nest of poisoned spined monstrous things that are within.

            Note: Please avoid unfortunate stereotypes. Heck, please avoid stereotypes at all. Unless you’re a Middle Eastern woman or clear it with a Middle Eastern sensitivity consultant first:

She is not a terrorist.

She is not a belly dancer.

She is not wearing full-on desert survival clothing unless actually in the desert.

Don’t put her in full burka or niqab.

Don’t assume she’s Muslim, although if you want to make her Muslim and use hijab or maybe chador that is OK.

           As a general rule, it is fine to set the scene in America, although that may make it harder to clearly indicate that she is Middle Eastern in a greyscale picture. That said, it’s actually fine if most readers can’t clearly identify her ethnicity as long as a hypothetical Middle Eastern woman reading the book can go, “Oh, like me!”

          Karma: I’m giving you this one because I think that your work will be good for the lighter-hearted banes. I’d still like it if you pretend that you’re in the Renaissance trying to satisfy a noble patron with how art-y your result is, to get more of that Nobilis spirit, but this one will let you keep your usual liveliness, spark, and humor in play.

                          Commentary

Three sketches!

In sketch 1, Karma pretends to be in the Renaissance and attempts to please a noble patron with how art-y these sandwiches are.

Mm, those are some arty sandwiches, indeed.

         In sketch 2, Karma plays more to their strengths:

(This is not me guessing their motives, they explained this in email ^_^):

and finally (though while also expressing certain doubts on the matter), they attempted to synthesize them:

Well, while they were uncertain about whether that synthesis was a good idea, the art slot wasn’t---and the test of putting each sketch into the art slot and seeing which one works best never lies!

...

... actually, I have no evidence of that, really, do I?

...

The test of putting each sketch into the art slot and seeing which one works best is intuitively compelling, and produced an awfully good book!!

That, I do have evidence of. ^_^

So, anyway, I went with sketch #3. ^_^

It would later develop into

        and then from there into the piece in the book!

               Page 275

“Dresdinian Granda, who is dying of Family”

Piece Style: a “Strategist” dying of the thing ...

              Strategist: Caucasian, they/them

Bane: Your choice, or “family.”

       Examples:

they are sitting at a dinner table with a mundane family looking miserable;

or with a mostly mundane family, and an exaggerated monster;

a mother and father with wings, which Dresdinian definitely doesn’t have, are pushing them out the high window of an apartment building, or off the branch of a tree (with a distortedly large nest);

they are sitting on a bench staring at a ringing phone looking sick;

they are in a prison-cell-like room with a high, barred window;

they are being dragged through an airport crowd by shackles on their wrist, pulled by an ordinary-looking but efficient person;

they are sitting with their head in their hands as their father uses their Abhorrent Weapon to pound in nails on the roof and their sister rides their out-of-control pale horse around the yard;

they are opening a door to a pair of faceless/masked monsters in tuxes and gloves doing a “ta-da we’re here!” pose with luggage behind them;

they are being squeezed hard by a python coiled around them while staring in horror at a goat snacking on what looks like mail. On the wall is a family genealogy chart including something like

[wiggling snake]             +            [goat]                                         |           ???!                           [falling stars]

                [Sensitivity Note]

               Karma: this one is a little more serious, possibly, or possibly not! I wanted to see where you went with it.

       Commentary

There was some discussion over whether a serious take on a nonbinary Strategist dying of family might hit too close to home for some readers, but Karma went in a loosely serious direction anyway because of the piece’s location in the book (amidst solemn topics) and I felt like I’d assigned enough nonbinary characters (... 8ish?) that it wouldn’t feel like it was a bigger statement than “yeah, stuff happens.”

So I expressed my support!

After plugging the piece into the page, I did suggest that the character probably needed to be facing the other direction, though, it being a right-hand page.

... I’m always wanting to flip characters or pieces horizontally and I’m honestly not sure why, is that a brain thing? Am I right about it? Is it some kind of minimalistic version of “editors/developers like to futz with things without actually changing them?”

But, well.

The character really did need to face the other way!

I’m almost certain of it!

Here’s where that piece, anyway, landed (sketch-wise):

and bam, there’s another sketch good enough that I could have slipped up and left the sketch in the book. ^_^

... well, I mean, hopefully I would have noticed the blank nameplate. ^_^

... hopefully.

                So

So, the “Literary Fiction” quest set in Glitch was originally about Filimer Sarus.

The way I figured it was, if I ever wrote a series of books about Filimer’s life, which I’m really not likely to do, but, you know, what they would look like ...

They might go like:

               Prologue

Filimer Sarus lives in a hidden realm and purveys ethical blindness. He’s one of the “Unclean Kings,” and every day he encourages Powers to abandon their own ethical judgment and the service of their Imperators and instead immerse themselves in echo chambers of scorn and outrage. Every day he encourages inattention—not acceptance, not even true apathy, but unwillingness to face—the suffering of the world.

But increasingly he faces his own blindness.

One day it’s just too much.

                Book One

He goes out to find truth. He goes out to find ... a reason why the wrongness of the world endures. To find something beyond his own revulsion.

He meets someone whom he almost idolizes. It’s a very spiritual journey, very Illusions (by Richard Bach).

He faces a flare-up of his disease that tears the world around him apart. He loses his grip on his realm. In the end, he realizes that the world is hard.

He is dying of ... presumably he is being devoured by the earth? That’s his sickness. That’s the thing he’s dying of.

The world is eating him.

It’s a hard thing, sometimes.

          Book Two

He is back in the world, living a new life. He has shed his high position and has decided to live an ordinary life as a rail inspector.

It falls apart when the world begins to swallow him again.

He becomes fascinated with the idea of binding the world together and down with railway and postal lines. With the stomping the world flat, or the maps of it at least, that people do these days.

But ultimately he doesn’t think that he has time.

What can he even do? No matter what he does, no matter how he lives, it just keeps happening.

In the end, he remembers why he decided to live—the thing in him that he found that moves even when turned to stone. The filament that he named himself Filimer for. The life.

He chases a great railway-spirit horse and ultimately tames it, finding a moment of laughing freedom before he dies.

          Book Three

He spends a while in Ninuan, only going into the world to get the coffee he likes and see his friends from afar. But a Power tracks him down and is all, look, we know you’ve turned, we want your help to get the new guy.

He goes back into his old faux-Chancel, now revised into a new, weird Filimerverse by his replacement, “the new guy,” whom he eventually confronts ...

And who turns out to be a false him.

A ... Mimic him? Should that even be possible?

He figures out eventually that it’s not, that it’s a Mimic taken from some force of malleability that’s simply been pushed into his shape, a mud-Mimic, but it’s still impossible, or at least ought to be impossible (he feels, anyway), because, like, it just rubs his nose in everything; and also, it makes him feel ... kind of responsible for it?

Like, just killing it would be somehow cruel.

Eventually, he decides that it’s a fine Filimer, an acceptable Filimer, a Filimer that can be the new Filimer now, sure, and he won’t “take it down” like the Powers wanted, but he’ll speak against it and what it’s doing. He’ll, y’know, oppose.

He steals back some of his own great artifacts, and eventually finds, in the stave of morality, the ability to make truth. He thinks ... that might be it. The tool against the new guy, but also, against the world.

He holds a grand colloquium on what the right thing ought to be.

... and ultimately, decides.

                Aside

If I actually wrote this, I’d have to make a little more sense, for clarity; like, I’m not saying that this is a model of clear plotting or writing.

It’s just the shape of his story.

He’s drafted to fight the replacement him, he goes into his old faux Chancel, finds the guy, decides to let the guy be a Filimer, steals his stave of truth, and holds a colloquium.

Making the emotions of “let the guy be” and the metaphysics of the stave work would be a thing I’d do when actually writing the book---

So if they confuse you, that’s why!

That work isn’t yet done.

                Bonus Aside

Within Attaris’ “Seal of Time,” the world divides into a thousand thousand paths. The concept is a notional one, reflective of the present and not the future; while one may explore down those branching paths to find a superfluity of mystery and wonder, in the end, only one leads to the actual Fourth Age that is to Come. The moment one steps off that specific path and explores the road not taken, one deviates from the actual story of one’s life.

— from A Tourist’s Guide to Creation, by Jasprite Sherrard

    There’s a version of this quote in Glitch, but I had to trim it down a lot, IRONICALLY, to fit. :(

        Book Four

Anyway, as of the end of book three, the world is no longer wrong, since Filimer’s declared what is right; at least, not there, in that location, it isn’t wrong any more; but it is slowing. It is congealing.

The world has become locally right, but nonfunctionally so.

Filimer decides that this is a dead end, and walks into the Seal of Time to return to another path.

He becomes fascinated with the mechanism of time and possibility—with Attaris’ thousand thousand paths—but in the end, the shifting ground unnerves him. He finds himself wanting to return.

He can’t.

He’s lost.

In the scattered timeways, he chases the riddle-beast that lives there, and ultimately finds the song-law that can chart the way to a golden world.

Will he go there?

He’ll walk ten thousand silvered paths before, instead.

Fin.

           And So

That, you see, was the story set that would eventually be boiled down into Glitch’s “Literary Fiction” quest set.

That was the story set that you ... walk in the footsteps of? as it were?

When you take those quests.

... and part of making those quests, accordingly, was thinking a lot, like, a lot a lot, about what “chases the riddle-beast that lives there” actually looks like, would look like, in a mystery/Immersive Fantasy-type game.

It couldn’t be about a bunch of exciting chase scenes. Honestly, that wouldn’t even work well in a book.

It had to be ... subtler, and more lyric, than that.

... and one of the best set of scenes that I saw when imagining it out was the pauses in the conflict, like:

* [[BLUE]] [[RED]] sharing a camp or a fire with something unusual—often, a mythical creature with a stylized manner of speech

... which could be other things, other kinds of creatures, but for Filimer, was likely the very beast he chased.

I didn’t particularly want to illustrate Filimer, but that moment, that sitting at the campfire, only with a random PC-stand-in Strategist instead of Filimer?

          53LF

The last of Li Po II’s paths to power is the understanding of the self; and, to aid in this endeavor, each character in IOSHI has a set of traits representing their acceptance of each of the major subcommunity theses. One of these traits starts at 1—normally, “core culture,” but it’s up to the player; the rest, at 0.

The way this works is, when a character fails at something, when they lose a roll, they will have a chance to overcome it. A character crashes their motorcycle. Or fails a stealth check. A decker fails to get crucial data, or raises an alarm. A character tries to rescue someone, but the conversation goes poorly, and their target thinks they’re being assassinated. Whatever.

... in all these cases, if the player doesn’t like the outcome, that player will have a second chance.

Characters have a number of rerolls stocked equal to their highest subcommunity thesis—so, initially, 1.

If a character needs more, after using those up, the character will need to temporarily raise one of their theses to do so. Each thesis can only be raised once per adventure.

Notionally, when rerolling using a community thesis, a character must use the strategies that that community favors. Thus, a character who wants to reroll a failed stealth check by raising their artistic thesis has their eye drawn by beauty, and so hides somewhere differently than they otherwise would have; or remembers a stealth technique from a favorite book; or conceals themselves in a group of artists discussing something; or, if the player is desperate, uses a keenly trained artistic eye to spot hiding places callow, untrained, and philistinic guards are unlikely to notice and appreciate. A character who wants to reroll a conversation using the maenadic thesis catches the character’s opposite number in the conversation up into their flow.

After the adventure, the player rolls once for each hypothesis they raised, using its starting rating—as it was before the mission—as its value. If they fail, the temporary increase becomes permanent.

For instance, a character might end the first adventure having raised Core Culture temporarily to 2, Anthropophobic Culture to 1, and Technical/Research Culture to 1. The player rolls against a skill of 1 to see if the character’s Core Culture goes up; let’s say, rolling 1 4 4 4 5. That’s a triple, a success, so it falls back to its original value, 1. They roll to see if Anthropophobic Culture increases, rolling a skill of 0 and getting 4 4 5 5 6. That’s a failure, so it stays at 1. Finally, they roll to see if Technical/Research Culture increases, and get 1 3 3 5 6; another failure, so it stays at 1 too. The character now has Core Culture 1, Anthropophobic Culture 1, and Technical/Research Culture 1—that character is now just a little less human-identifying and a little more technocratic than they had been.

The traits below are paired, set up so that a character cannot increase both traits in a certain pair arbitrarily. This is not a perfect rule—the reader may find the opposition established here between core/artistic and floating board/maenadic culture particularly suspicious, but even the other pairs are not exact; nevertheless, it is the recommended default, lest players find themselves driving their secure and criminal culture theses upwards to the point where they see security as an intrinsic violation and yet are desperate to surround themselves with it, a hardened criminal themselves yet ever-fearful of the nebulously heinous criminal beneath every bush and hiding inside every unsecured toilet paper roll, and so forth.

And thus:

                   Core Culture

Core culture solutions involve outsourcing, mobility, proud Tartessian identification, and not identifying overly with one’s work, one’s stuff, or one’s employer. Classic core culture rerolls involve outsourcing parts of a stealth mission, heartfelt speech, or sexual encounter; abandoning things one would normally go back for; or having a rideshare deliver extra ammunition during a firefight.

          Core Culture 0 allows a disregard for the basic thesis of Tartessos. Perhaps the character doesn’t see labour as fungible, or, perhaps, as objective, measurable, or good? Do they resist default Tartessian mobility and have trouble acquiring Tartessian cred?

Core Culture 1 gives some level of Tartessian identification—a character who considers the ideals of Tartessos good.

Core Culture 2 gives at least one (1) standard unit of Tartessian identification.

Core Culture 3 pushes a character to perfect their Tartessian qualities—to feel shame when they cannot separate their person from their work (or whatever they construe as their work, for a character of atypical employment) or are unable to be detached and objective in the pursuit of the same.

Artistic culture may no longer be increased, and further increases reduce it by one point each (to a minimum of 0).

Core Culture 4 inclines a character strongly towards core culture solutions, for rolls and rerolls alike.

Core Culture 5 is beginning to push a character past willful blindness towards the delirium of the heartland Tartessian—the notion that that which earns is inherently virtuous; that if a mindless leviathan were to rise within the heartland of Tartessos, pouring all its funds into market manipulation to create ever-more wealth in an endless, ever-escalating cycle, that that fell beast would rightly be named the holy, the most blessed, the good. For if the works of the beast yield profit asymptotic, then that beast is all efficiency within the world.

Core Culture 6 drives a character to abandon their own ego to that beast; to dance the movements of the markets, to be nothing but the tendrils of their economic god. Wealth is a magic that flows through such a character, though it does not stay; their flesh dissolves into the engine of the world. If the character retains any personhood, it is a personhood of masks, a personhood adopted in the name of the so-called irregularism heresy, the idea that the bumpiness and ill-fittingness of human bodies and human minds, their inability to serve it perfectly, provides a certain friction that the grand machine requires.

               P.S. I tried to cling to the “he or she” thing that Guardians of Order forced down my throat for the original draft, for consistency and to let you share in my outrage at how unnecessarily awkward it is, but ultimately it’s rude to nonbinary people and I just can’t keep it up any more.

                      Anthropophobic Culture

Anthropophobic solutions involve alien or animalistic patterns of behavior. A classic reroll is succeeding at a decking attempt by dodging the portion of the security software that evolved from human-detecting captchas.

                    Anthropophobic Culture 0 allows a character to be pretty confident that humans are cool and being human is OK.

Anthropophobic Culture 1 makes anthropophobes seem interesting and cool, as well.

Anthropophobic Culture 2 imbues the character with a willingness to become a little bit alien themselves.

Anthropophobic Culture 3 pushes the character to reject the human form and human nature; gives them ... an active ideological drive, to leave humanity behind.

Physical idealist culture may no longer be increased, and further increases reduce it by one point each (to a minimum of 0).

Anthropophobic Culture 4 inclines a character strongly to lean in to anthropophobic culture solutions, for rolls and rerolls alike.

Anthropophobic Culture 5 is beginning to push a character into radical departures from humanity, putting even basic notions of personhood on the table.

Anthropophobic Culture 6 drives a character to become something that can no longer be even plausibly construed as human: pushing them not merely to physically modify themselves, not merely to mentally identify as something else, but to change to the point where reconstructing the original human is impossible and applying human norms is pointless.

            Artistic Culture

Artistic solutions involve aesthetics, the knowledge of art, the practice of art, and the artistic community. At low levels, the standard solution simply takes inspiration from art or from artistic experience; at high levels of community identification, the character instead relies on the monomania of an artist who can subordinate their life entirely to their craft.

               Artistic Culture 0 allows for a character with mild or negative affect towards art.

Artistic Culture 1 gives the artistic culture a certain sparkle in the character’s eyes.

Artistic Culture 2 pushes the character to practice art.

Artistic Culture 3 pushes the character further, making them ashamed to have income outside of art, life outside of art.

Core culture may no longer be increased, and further increases reduce it by one point each (to a minimum of 0).

Artistic Culture 4 inclines a character strongly to lean in to artistic culture solutions, for rolls and rerolls alike.

Artistic Culture 5 makes it actively harder for a character to keep track of the world outside their art—pushes them to detach from conventional reality, in the name of their artistic conceits. The milder end of this is the painter uninterested in the world beyond the brush; the more extreme end, the revolutionary idealist whose revolutionary zeal is turned towards achieving cubism in life.

Artistic Culture 6 increasingly erodes the character’s ability to communicate outside the context of their art—in time, they will be unable to express themselves outside of their manifesto’s terms, and perhaps even then only in movement, or in paint, or in song. If at that point they appear able to interact with citizens outside their community, it is faked; they may portray a role that is capable of doing so, but it is not them, and it may well not share their interests.

                      Corporate Communities (Floating Boards)

Floating board solutions may involve exploitation of corporate power, but are more generally things of pure abstraction—just as a core culture solution involves rejecting overt identification with one’s stuff, one’s work, or one’s employer, a floating board solution involves disidentification from ordinary human notions of purpose and strategy. A classic floating board reroll in a car crash is not to have been personally driving around in the first place, but rather to have abandoned the whole plan that involved driving not long before that in pursuit of an approach theoretically 0.002% better. A second option is to assume that if one is driving and crashing then it’s an expression of one’s destructive corporate ideology and not an accident and that one is almost certainly crashing into a corporate resource belonging to a notional ideological opponent in a fashion that will not seriously injure oneself. Pick oneself up, get out of the car afterwards or as it spins out, and keep participating in the board meeting you’re in over the phone!

                      Floating Boards 0 allows a character to anthropomorphize corporations as having motivations and purposes—as existing to do things, rather than as notional structures that distort the vibrational exertion of power.

Floating Boards 1 gives the sense that that viewing corporations as motivated or purposeful is dangerous—an irreal perspective that comes with the risk of potential personal losses. To see such illusions, in short, is to open oneself up for exploitation; this is a sense that nags at the character, even if they do give in now and then and think that, e.g., Convem’s Cow on a Stick Subdivision exists to make cows on a stick.

Floating Boards 2 pushes the character to implement their ideological agenda through floating boards on the local corporate ecosystem. It makes them want to do that, to see ways to do that, whether or not it’s a practical option at that particular time.

Floating Boards 3 makes it actively difficult for the character to conceptualize a company as “for” a thing, and puts them on intellectually and emotionally shaky ground when they attempt to implement a practical agenda through one.

Maenadic culture may no longer be increased, and further increases reduce it by one point each (to a minimum of 0).

Floating Boards 4 inclines a character strongly to lean in to floating board solutions, for rolls and rerolls alike.

Floating Boards 5 makes it actively harder for a character to grasp the idea of actions or ideas that are abstractly rather than situationally wrong—their moral compass begins to fade, along with such ideas as “permanent losses,” “absolute truth,” and “things that are dangerous to mess around with.” Their sense of social constructed reality sharpens and becomes more acute than their perceptions of reality proper; they may not yet have lost their sense that the underlying truth exists, but the constructed narratives recorded in digital evidence and interpersonal communication are taking on a truth-like valence for them.

Floating Boards 6 alienate the character from truth and morality; they become an instrument of the corporate engine, the movements of market forces as the inputs to the scientific calculator remaining of their soul.

                    Next Time

The first time I opened up the file, it was honestly pretty hard to say anything about the trait.

Like, there wasn’t much to work with in Nobilis 2nd (or, for that matter, 3e.)

And, like, it’s a bland trait, right?

So I went for

Aspect is the self—the body and the mind, empowered. It is the human being, ascended, raised up unto the level of divinity.

The Aspect attribute is the measure of an Imperator’s miraculous investment in a Power’s body and mind. It is the degree to which they are no longer substance, but essence; no longer meat and bone and tangled mind, but light, but breath, but fire.

Each level of Aspect costs 2 points and makes the miracles of body and mind less costly. With no points in Aspect, at Aspect 0, a character is fundamentally mortal, albeit a mortal with the identity of a god; to act with the inhuman grace that is characteristic of the Powers is exhausting, rare, and exhilarating. At the peak of the Attribute, at Aspect 7, the character has burned away their mortality in the crucible of what they have become:

An equivalently exhausting effort will suffice to chase down a bullet, shove past stone walls, or write an epic novel in a night.

... before diving straight into the Attribute descriptions.

         Honestly, Though

That was kind of lame, and I knew it was kind of lame; so eventually, I dragged myself back around to it and tried something more expansive, more thematic:

Aspect is freedom from the treacheries and pains and failings of the flesh and mind. It is the ability to take action, to take the kinds of actions you could already take, perfected.

In becoming a Power, the mortal body and brain are, at least in potential, alloyed with a divine pith. The mortal architecture of a person’s being is wedded to a spiritual coprocessor, a model of their self, that flows through their bones, their nerves, their brain, their blood. When the divine will in them demands they act, that they solve a puzzle or outrace a car or whatever else they may be physically or mentally called upon to do, that miraculous presence woven through them responds:

Not by purely mortal means, but in miraculous fashion, do they respond.

The Powers speak of this as being perfected to the image of themselves—that a human Power, the most common kind on Earth, becomes an idealized human. That a Power born or reshaped into an owl would become an idealized owl, instead; a dragon, an idealized dragon; an ai or walking tree, an idealized ai or walking tree. The vain become, in some sense, more ideally vain. The passionate, more ideally passionate.

Whatever the Power was, they become more.

This is to some extent incoherent. It is impossible to become “more” oneself, as one is at 100% capacity there already. The Powers imagine that a human who can, in a burst of effort, outrun a car, while running in a generally human fashion and posture, is an idealized human; in fact, such a being is necessarily not “human” at all. In receiving a forcible infusion of the divine, a Power does not become more themselves; they become something else.

Nevertheless, it is the nature and the quality of Aspect to reinforce and enhance a given image of the character, rather than to take it in completely new directions; to make them better, along an essentially quantitative axis defined by a concept of their identity.

Whose concept?

It appears likely that it is a mélange of the Power’s self-concept and the Imperator’s concept of them in the instant of their enNoblement. That the Imperator looks upon, say, a human, and sees the shape of humanity in it, and the loose shape of their specific identity, and enhances that with the fire of divinity; and, as a reference point, a guidepost to keep from screwing the process up entirely, less confident or more scrupulous Imperators may bind a portion of this enhancement to the Power’s concept of themselves as well. In some cases, if the Imperator is liberal in drawing on the Power’s own mindset or the Power’s Aspect is low, this concept will drift naturally as the Power’s concept of self changes; in others, the core of their Aspect may only be shaped by the grooves the Power’s use of Aspect wears in it over time.

Imperators can get it wrong, and easily—they’re not good at understanding people, and not all of them have a strong grasp of exactly how not good at understanding people they are. Fortunately or unfortunately, however, if an Imperator gets it wrong enough that it’s obvious, that usually also warps and twists the Power’s mind and body to match:

If an Imperator thinks a Power can fly and bite through boulders, they’ll probably wind up with wings and a jaw they can unhinge, rather than the bizarre ability to run so fast they fly. If an Imperator gets confused and thinks that their lookalike Power is a famous chef, the Power will probably acquire an innate flair for and interest in the culinary arts even when they’re not using Aspect miracles at all. Induced dysphoria is rare and nonsense outcomes much rarer.

Even when there are no imposed changes, though, or when the Power is completely acclimated to every change the Imperator makes, there’s a subtle alienation that can accompany the recognition that one has been perfected to another being’s ideals. There’s an awkwardness to being aware that “peak human” (or “peak owl” or whatnot) is just “peak human” in a particular Imperator’s eyes.

On the other hand, Aspect’s also the most generally delightful of the Attributes the Powers possess. Assuming that one hasn’t been warped in any unfortunate fashion, it offers a lightness and competence in physical and mental action that is frankly enviable. A Power can do any task with grace and verve, can enjoy the full range of activities open to their mind and their body, can experience existence with the flexibility and resilience of a child and capability beyond any adult’s. They can wrestle tigers into submission in the morning, knock out a short story and a bit of handcrafts over lunch, get into an impromptu bassoon contest on the subway, and spend their evening talking hostage-takers down—

And that’s at the low end, assuming that they won’t need to do things like “stomping open the earth,” “writing the immortal poem of the 21st century,” or “redirecting a few bullets while they’re still in midair.”

      At That Time

The best thought I had for what the Aspect Cost was going to be was---to my substantial surprise---Burn.

        See

See, my original plan, the thing I’d been vaguely expecting I was going to do ever since I loosely conceptualized Nobilis 4th in the late-Glitch-development era, was that Aspect’s Cost would be a lost connection to your human self. That, fundamentally, it would be alienation from humanity.

It was hard to find a good catchy phrase for that, I struggled, I tried, like Rift and Gulf and Schism and Alienation (perfect, but too long) and Distance and Distortion and Fray and Char and Hollow. I’d even tried Divinity, on the theory that I could have, like, Divinity as the Aspect Cost, and maybe Rule as the Domain Cost; and the main problem with Divinity was that it was hard to sell it as a bad thing.

(Glitch’s system is forgiving enough that it might break down a little if players started thinking Costs were a good thing to have in character. They wouldn’t figure out they were wrong about that quickly enough, there’d just be a very slow-building dissonance over time!)

     Except

When I actually thought about a Power trying to, like, push their Aspect, I couldn’t figure out how they’d be doing that by losing track of their humanity. I could see how doing that would help them forget their humanity, but there was weirdness there, like, if I did it that end around then the implication would be that any Power could use any level of Aspect comfortably and freely and the only problem was that at higher levels they risked getting confused about who they were!

And that’d be ... interesting! But not right.

Like, when a Power pushes their Aspect, just like when a mortal pushes their Ability, it feels like there should be effort. It feels like there should be concentration, will, intensity.

And really that’s just Wear, but the idea of having Aspect and Ability share a Cost was broken, and the idea of Aspect’s Cost just being Ability’s Cost in a miraculous suit was broken too---

But if I combined the idea of exertion with the idea that you could damage your connection to yourself, to your humanity?

That you could be, well, burning away the complexity in yourself, the mortality, the you you used to be?

It wasn’t quite the same as Glitch’s Burn, but you could see the kinship there!

        I Wanted

There was this idea I was toying with, which was the idea that maybe Domain was connected to a duty that the character had to the nature of their Estate.

Like:

There’d been discussion on the discord about whether the Power of Hunger was obligated to go around, you know, making people not hungry so much, or making it not so unpleasant, and whether the Power of Fire should, like, stop people from getting burned, and all that; and there was this vague implicit idea that had been floating around since the beginning of Nobilis that, yeah, you do have an ethical obligation to fight suffering ... but also, maybe, that the Nobilis have a kind of duty of care to their Estate, to its nature? Too?

Which is why you can’t just assume that the Powers of Hunger and Fire etc. are jerks, on the basis of, like, hunger and fire; and, uh, why the Power of 19th Century Detroit hasn’t completely rethought 19th Century Detroit as, like, a major world religion that gives real ninja powers; and why, like, the Power of Knives doesn’t just let you shoot bullets from them or whatever even though it would indubitably make knives more useful and popular.

(Or, like, if they’re pacifists, why you can’t use knives to, I dunno, cut away bad personality traits? and why rabbits don’t have laser eyes? and so on?)

It would need to be loose enough that if the Power of Rabbits really wanted to give them laser eyes, it’d be fine; but, like, the point is: I was thinking about having a thing like that in the game.

And it seemed to me that the corresponding idea for Aspect would be a ... kind of duty of care to yourself.

This was an exciting idea to me, and it connected to the Burn thing, and the main problem was, it was a flop:

The Duty of Self-Care

Aspect is fundamentally entangled with what can be considered a Power’s duty of care towards themselves, for it is in damaging themselves that they may push past its limits. It is in sacrificing some of the complexity and independence of their existence to adhere to that divine internal mold; in forcing past their natural limits; in stoking the fire of divinity within them past the levels that its flesh can bear, or, at higher levels of Aspect, past its own natural concentration and intensity, that they may reach the higher-level miracles of this trait.

In the public ethos of the Powers—that is, in the code that they are willing to discuss openly, without ensuring that no judgmental Imperators or enemies who might report to the Locust Court are listening—a Power should always be willing to burn themselves out, utterly, in their Imperator’s service. And, publicly or privately, almost any Power will be willing to damage themselves if the alternative is losing a battle with higher stakes than damage; and most Powers are inclined to think that, as with mortal exercise, a measured amount of pushing oneself miraculously is healthier than none.

... but that said, even the strictest loyalists to the Imperators or the War generally concede that a Power has a duty to protect the Imperator’s investment in them by not recklessly destroying themselves; and on a subtler philosophical level, it is commonly if not universally agreed upon that a Power should seek to respect themselves and to flourish, even if only in the name of greater effectiveness, and that this too imposes a duty of self-care.

Nobilis will assume, even if some Powers do not, that this duty exists; that on some fundamental level a Power should have a care for their own health and being. Thus, in nourishing and honoring that health and being they may generally restore their reserves of Aspect-related strength; in failing in the duty of self-care, they may potentially damage those reserves; and the “story” of pushing themselves too far may take the form of their failing in that duty of self-care.

       So

So here was a question that occurred to me:

Why was it a flop?

I liked the abstract idea of including self-care in the game, it fit with the ideas I had going, it built on the thematic movements I had going in Glitch, but it ultimately just wound up feeling ... flat.

        Ultimately

Ultimately what I pinpointed as my mistake was at the level of writer attitude.

I needed to remember, I think, what it was to be excited about Nobilis, and why one would be excited about Nobilis.

I mean---

I think it is important for a modern Nobilis to grapple with the way Imperators dehumanize Nobilis and dispossess them from themselves, much less the problematic ways that the Nobilis must deal with the world as a whole ...

But also, and even more importantly, I needed to go back ten or twenty years in my mindspace, to when the world of magic and miracles and things realer and truer than this was amazing.

I couldn’t quite square this with the Nobilis 2nd writing style that I’d used for Glitch, because my excited writing style has evolved, but I didn’t have to fall back to 3e’s voice either;

I think, this is likely the tone I’ll want to use, in the end:

       Aspect

Unfortunately, I had at some point caught on fire; but, I was having way too much fun just then to STOP.

— from Before the Last Leaves Tumble, by Ameline Skalski

Aspect is being what you always should have been. Aspect is the Attribute that makes you magic.

Or, if you want a more formal language here: that maketh you miraculous.

The slumbering potential that lives within your flesh and brain, Aspect will allow to flourish. The fire of godhood that could arc along your nerves and bones, it will awaken. If it is possible to envision a way in which the very substance of a character can stand alongside the Imperators, the Excrucians, the entities of miracle, Aspect is the thing that gets them there.

It is alienating and it is transfiguring.

It is common, even inevitable, to lose oneself in it. It is impossible to hang on to being human, as humans are human, if one regularly lives as a beast of the divine. To live in the presence of Aspect is to throw oneself into a river of greatness, to give oneself over to a grandness of intention uncontainable within the base mortality that one had started with; it is all-consuming, all-absorbing, it leaves no room for stability or clinging to the self one held before.

The ego of a mortal that began the journey into Nobility is as a boat upon a storm-tossed river, a kayak over a waterfall, a glinting fish before the gaping maw of the leviathan: it cannot hope to steer, but only to find its reflection, its greater image, in the wild power that there roars. It can only hope that the divine image of the character is in some meaningful sense the same being as their starting self, or at least a parallel and mostly isomorphic one, before it casts itself away into the rush.

There is a deep rightness to it that makes this tempting. It is traditional to stare into the maw of Aspect and see one’s true self, one’s better self, envisioned. It is traditional to laugh with joy when one first understands what one can be, and again and again as one experiences it.

It is only that this inherently privileges a divine view and disdains the worth of the mortal self that may be concerning; only that the idea of a “true self” is, perhaps, a contradiction, when a self is only its own being. Aspect is an enhancement in that it is endlessly freeing; to activate it, or to attain it, is to cast away the weight of the world, the crippling limits that have chained one down, and be free at last to live as one has wished to live. But it is also a transformation that is well known to be shaped as much by outside forces as by the character themselves:

The model for the divine human was inherent in the world before any non-miraculous human living now was born. The model for a Noble, in the fullness of their Aspect-granted strength, is as much that, and their Imperator’s conception of what they ought to be, as it is the unshackling of something that lived within the self that was there before.

Imperial hegemony thus becomes a mediating element in the process of self-actualization; an unsettling guiding hand that shapes what one is and what one should be, although in fairness without this slightly suspect action of enablement not even one in ten thousand Powers would have become the miraculous things that they are now.

The Aspect attribute, then, is the measure of an Imperator’s divine investment in a Power’s body and mind. It is the degree to which they have been exalted, raised up, made no longer things of the physical world but the breath of the divine. It is the extent to which they have been recast and remade, rather than simply empowered, as beings on the order of the gods.

To be Aspect 0 is to be tangled meat and bone and mind; to be Aspect 7 is to be light, and breath, and fire.

Each level of Aspect costs 2 points and makes miracles of the body and the mind less costly. With no points in Aspect, a character is fundamentally mortal; they are disinclined to take truly miraculous action, and even enhancing their mundane selves can be exhausting. At Aspect 7, the character has burned away their mortality in the crucible of what they have become:

Their every action can be casually miraculous, and if they exhaust themselves they can chase down a bullet, shove past stone walls, or write an epic novel in a night.

A character may purchase “Gifts” that relate to Aspect. These represent personal specialties and tricks within the broader field of Aspect. Some of these Gifts appear later, along with a general system for constructing your own Gifts.

                 Cost

Currently I’m actually back to Divinity as the Cost again, or, rather, “Godhead,” but that’s relying on my ability to make things feel a little sharper and faster than they do in Glitch---

It may very well flop back to Burn, or even to Aspect Miracle Points, if need be, if that’s what I need to use to capture the twin senses of “losing yourself to divinity” and “pushing too hard.”

       Anyway!

That’s where I am! Aspect chapter almost complete, which will mark the official launch of the Nobilis 4e project, at least in my brain.

I’ll be back to the Art of Glitch tomorrow---here, I mean, anyway---

I just wanted to share what was going on in my writing right this second, a bit, first! ^_^

                      Jenn Manley Lee

https://www.dicebox.net/

        So I stumbled on Jenn’s webcomic Dicebox a long, long time ago, and then again later; not only is it smart, and increasingly smart as it goes on, but it’s just gorgeous. Plus, it’s kind of stylistically on the mark for Glitch stuff? Which is why I was really happy to meet Jenn at a large local Thanksgiving and find out that she sometimes does commissions!

(... well, OK, it was a large Thanksgiving, so I was mostly busy being paralyzed by people and sounds; but, to the extent that I was mentally present, I was happy!)

A year or two later, after Glitch was approaching ready to go, I reached out to Jenn and got her involved in the project. There was a communication mix-up, though, and I’d failed to reach her in March when assignments were initially going out; when I did manage to get ahold of her in early May, I was so relieved that I, uh, just gave her a six-piece assignment.

Starting with ...

              Page 50

“Hradegais Loden, who is dying of Sunrise”

                     ... which you’ve seen before, since it was originally assigned to ??, who dropped the project.

I wound up giving it to Jenn because it was far away from all her other pieces in the book!

Then there was

                           Page 189

“Raniba Theos, Amputation their bane”

 Piece Style: a “Strategist” dying of the thing ...

Strategist: Egyptian (modern), they/them, probably actually in Egypt.

Bane: Your choice, or “amputation”

Examples:

sticking their forearm in a little guillotine that has replaced the normal card slot at an automated train station;

sitting glumly in a room scattered with severed limbs (resembling their own?);

trying to awkwardly laugh off the fact that their arm has just come off during a handshake;

trying to pay for something with half of a $5 bill (or 100-Egyptian-pound note);

living in an apartment where everything has pieces just kind of missing, from the bookcase to the sink.

             Note: please avoid unfortunate stereotypes. Unless you’re Egyptian or clear it with an Egyptian sensitivity consultant first:

They are not dressed like King Tut.

Or Nefertiti.

Or anyone like that.

They are dressed as a modern Egyptian if in Egypt, or as an American if in America.

… probably as a modern Egyptian in Egypt.

They do not ride a camel to work.

They do not live in the desert.

They are not a Bedouin.

They do not make their living as a merchant.

They do not own a magic lamp-shaped lamp, flying carpet, or monkey.

They are not lazy or comedically foolish.

No weirdness about the lips.

              It is fine if the readers do not immediately identify them as Egyptian, particularly given that this is B&W art; all I need is for that to be what you are drawing.

Further, ... [nonbinary sensitivity stuff.]

        Commentary  

It’s always weird talking about Jenn, TBH, because I get afraid people will think it’s a typo. “Oh, that Jenna,” they’ll say. “Not only has she confused herself for one of her artists, she can’t even spell her own name!”

Anyway, Jenn is actually a different person, honest, I can’t do art like this, and for this one I got this amazing rough:

which like yeah.

Later, the finished version came in as (a higher-resolution version of):

Which is also great and, formally speaking, I accepted it as it was, but I did wind up admitting that I missed the cartooniness of the original back foot.

So she wound up updating and fixing that.

Towards the very, very end of things I also wound up asking her to brighten the piece just a hair---

But that wasn’t so much to make the piece better, as to make it a better fit for its specific place in the book?

And with that, Raniba Theos was done!

(Jenn was working on layout by then, so the nameplate went into the book as a separate deal.)

                              Page 253

Piece Style: magic realism

Strategist: Italian, they/them

Bane: inobvious

                  Description: they are being horrified by a serious kitchen fail that they have just experienced, e.g. #3, #12, #14, #15, #18, #25, #33, #34, #68, #88, #94, #97, #98, #110, #127, or #148 from here. 

Staring in horror from a nearby doorway, sitting nearby (floor or chair) with head in hands, standing struck dumb having just failed to rescue whatever, face sinking as they remove whatever from the oven … that kind of thing.

 Note: please avoid unfortunate stereotypes. Unless you’re Italian or clear it with an Italian sensitivity consultant,

They are not in the mob.

They are not oversexed.

They are not wearing enough crosses to vaporize Dracula on contact.

Don’t assume they are fashionable or eating Italian food or part of a large family, although if for some reason one of those things winds up fitting it is OK.

Separately, [nonbinary sensitivity note.]

                      Commentary

OK, so the first rough I got on this one was:

This one needed help, and it was my fault. What I wound up sending her about it was:

[this] is amazing, but I worry that it's a bit too comic and not quite enough "life, of all the things I had to live, why did it have to be life;" I think mostly I mean, when doing the details of the character's expression/pose, please try to err towards defeat/despair/whyyy or blank rather than shock/startlement.

That there's a concern here is, of course, my fault---I wasn't expecting such an active scene. (For clarity, the active scene is great.) Therefore, I thought "horrified" would be enough to convey the right mood. I should have realized a broader range of possibilities exist and been more explicit as to the mood. My apologies.

I’d probably have been fine with a relatively small update that just changed the expression/pose---I get really nervous about asking for changes when it’s my fault, or when they’re not strictly necessary, even though most artists don’t mind, and the ones who mind will generally mind even if it’s not my fault and they are strictly necessary.

... but regardless, she wound up updating the piece concept.

which you’ll recognize as the basis for the piece in the book!

The final piece was great, and needed no changes at all! Which ironically means that I won’t showpiece it here. ^_^

I did wind up enlarging it in the book by a few percent and tilting it a degree or two ... I think counterclockwise? ... to look better opposite page 286, but that wasn’t about the piece qua the piece.

      Additional Commentary

I don’t really like that this page got moved opposite the Drunkard’s Gift; it was the only piece I could find to shift to there after I had to move what I thought was going to go on page 287, but ...

Like ...

I don’t think drawing a connection between the Drunkard’s Gift and the picture would be a very strong reading of the scene. The character really doesn’t look drunk, and I’m not familiar with a relevant Italian stereotype, and that kitchen is not, to the best of my knowledge, what a drunk person’s kitchen looks like.

... but I don’t like that you might look at the heading, and then the wine glass, and then be confused because the character isn’t drunk and also isn’t doing the specific things that that Gift lets you do.

...

The thing is ...

The picture looks good, there, like, visually, paired up with the blocks of the text on the opposite page? And I spent hours and hours shuffling pieces around trying to find a better way to fix the pg 287 problem without screwing other stuff up worse and in the end, this was the best I could do.

So, there you are!

It’s a great piece, anyway, all that aside. ^_^

            Page 296

“Hatharid Gerlos, whom Tourism kills”

Piece Style: a “Strategist” dying of the thing ...

Strategist: Caucasian, she/her, middle-aged

Bane: Your choice, or “tourism.”

Examples:

a tour guide is showing her off to a gasping crowd;

she’s being attacked by the spike of the Eiffel Tower or the noseless Sphinx;

she’s in a restaurant where all the food is absurdly alien and the water is fizzling and steaming like acid;

she’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sandals and camera while a bunch of concerned guards point their weapons in the middle of a government base;

she’s picnicking in a war zone.

                   Commentary

I think this character wasn’t originally Caucasian, but by the time I actually assigned the piece I got too worried about the range of possible unpleasant implications to have her be any other ethnicity I could think of.

Here’s the rough!

I love the birds so much!!!

But, to my eternal embarrassment---

Also, I really needed new glasses at the time, and I was looking at a much smaller version---

I didn’t realize this was on a bridge.

... :/

I tried very hard to figure out what was going on in the sketch. So hard. But the best I could do was interpret her as being on a turn in a stairway.

So I correctly guessed that she was being shot at by a gondola or gondolier, but, like, why was that happening while she was on a stairway?!? Like, that felt too indirect as a thing to happen just because you were in Venice, on a stairway halfway up a building somewhere.

Really, really embarrassing!

Jenn actually had to do a second sketch here, showing Hatharid falling through a pitfall trap to hungry, waiting sharks instead:

... at which point I could actually see the bridge and realize that the first sketch was much better. *^_^*;;

I was very happy that Raniba Theos, dying of amputation, was the next sketch she sent in so I could just accept with praise immediately and not give the impression that I did this kind of thing every time. *^_^*;;

          Page 319

Piece Style: magical realism

Strategist: Native American, he/him

Bane: inobvious

              Description: a roboticist/artisan puts the last few touches on a fairly lifelike mechanical rabbit. Ideally, a few others do pet rabbit things (in an open cage? Basket? Bed? Which is itself on a shelf?) in the background. If there are others in the background, the foreground one can/should be a bit less complete.

                Note: [Native American sensitivity note, which you’ve seen before.]

Secondary Note: this image is mostly just “Strategist doing a complicated project;” other than “advanced robotics are possible in the right metaphysical environment,” there are no specifics defined in the setting and thus nothing in particular you need to adhere to in drawing the rabbits.

         Commentary

Jenn came back to me with this:

which I thought was just lovely! (And kind of Penguindrum, but I suppose there was a bit of that in the original assignment.) 

... except, of course, that he had human eyes.

Could she keep that design and make it look good with starfield eyes?

...

...

It turned out that she didn’t think she could, or at least didn’t want to. I guess the direction of his gaze was too important or something?

(Eyes are a big deal!! Probably if I’d realized I’d be illustrating whole books of these guys eventually I’d have had Excrucians have nostril starfields or kneecap starfields instead.)

So ultimately, instead of correcting the eyes, she decided to change the whole piece:

I loved the rabbit peeking over his shoulder, but I was really afraid that he’d lose the ... kindness? That the first sketch had? But Jenn reassured me that he wouldn’t.

And in fact he did not!

             Page 378

“Nikmoda Ranlin, who dies of Delight”

         You’ve seen this one before as well!

         Layout

So what was not expected when I originally contracted Jenn was that she would also wind up revising the layout!

I hadn’t actually been expecting to revise it at all. I mean, it was a complicated layout!

And already poured into the book!

... but Jenn has done professional layout stuff in the past, and, y’know. Offered to touch it up a little. Fiddle with it to taste. Give it a little polish. Maybe ... like, take the chapter headings from

to

... ?

(Just the chapter headings; ignore the mess this made of the text. ^_^)

And of course, I thought that would be great!    

          Anyway, though, once she’d done that, though, she did a little more polish ...

And a little more ...

And, like, adjusting the marginalia format is, in a book like Glitch, a big deal ...

And a bit of work with the flowers ...

And then a little more polish ...

And ...

Well, anyway, ultimately, she wound up giving me a discount on a fairly comprehensive rework of the book’s general “look.”