#tarb rambles

i was watching noah caldwell-gervais' neverwinter nights retrospective, and it's a sentiment i saw in one of @ampleappleamble's posts about missing the small prose descriptions, where he talked about the isometric perspective already relying much more on the players' imaginations thus making the 2d isometric games far better at building an immersive and detailed game world. so it's a bit ironic how, to a point, the more information your brain has to fill in itself the more believable a fictional world is.

and to be clear, i think avowed nearly flawlessly translated the look of eora from isometric to first person. this is just inherent to adapting from one genre into another. if i had to hazard a guess, it's this reason why any random pillars fan who bounces off avowed feels that way (differences in rpg systems and story notwithstanding).

personally, and this is true for pretty much any fantasy universe, i find myself assuming magic is going to be the source of the most powerful abilities, because, y'know, it's magic. but that's what i like about eora. even if the magic has the potential for ridiculous power, it's grounded enough to where i can see martial characters standing their ground.

in my headcanon, idunn is by far a better warrior than wulfrun is, but she has not had nearly the breadth of experience of wulfrun. wulfrun by the time of avowed has such a deep connection to both the in-between and the beyond because of her watcher abilities that it absolutely makes sense she and her friends are able to take down archmagi.

for instance georg cantor. his story is tragic for mundane and deeply human reasons in regard to his mental health, but the fact that he was a pioneer in how mathematics deals with infinities makes it tempting to turn his struggle with mental illness into a cautionary tale about possible eldritch horrors that ground our reality.

so instead i like to imagine a hypothetical physicist who has the big breakthrough that finally harmonizes quantum mechanics and general relativity. physics is solved! except that opens the door to even deeper and more unintuitive answers about the fundamental laws of physics. and every answer spirals out in a fractal of new and ever more bizarre questions. and follow those questions long enough and you go insane.