Thrythlind's Fics

Three to Four classifications of magic a la Pathfinder 2e/D&D (Arcane, Divine, Primal, Occult - sometimes psychic)

Martial and Caster classes all use some sort of magic (this differentiates common guards/soldiers/bandits/etc from adventurers)

Adventuring parties/societies/companies form via a ritual that pools their magic to a degree, resulting in some passive benefits for the party. There's some general benefits for all parties based on the number of people involved.

Also some benefit when multiple of the same class of magic pool together that only starts to appear at the third or fourth member of the same classification. adventuring parties/societies/companies generally start at around 3-4 members and grow as they're more successful. so a 4-person party of one of each brand of magic has demonstrably less power than a 4-person group all of one type of magic.

So for a long while, no mixed party has lasted long enough to get a roster of enough of each type of magic for the benefits to start appearing.

Enter a bunch of people that are on the outs for one reason or another getting together because nobody else will work with them. They start ekeing out successes on deliberately working out synergies within their various systems.

Then once they hit that threshold of members they start getting the teaming benefits of the various magic types and suddenly between their worked out strategies and getting actually buffed by the society ritual, they suddenly become an absurdly effective company.

Battle Pacing (Tanks and Crowd Control)

Damage (Melee, Ranged, Magic)

Support (Healer, Buffer, Debuffer)

Utility (Stealth, Navigation, Crafting, Trap-Handling, Diplomacy)

System Possibilities:

Primal - Nature powers/magic

Divine - Drawn from the Soul/Divine Font.

Psychic - Power of the mind

Elemental - Power of the classical elements

Necromantic - Power of death and the dead

Arcane - Power related to raw magic.

Refine it:

Soul magic (Lay-Term: Necromancy)

Channeling (Lay-Term: Holy Magic)

Primal (Lay-Term: Nature Magic)

Working on an urbanfantasy set of stories inspired by a set of fanfics I'm working on (which I've been posting teasers of here now and again) and as I write the fanfic, I'm filtering ideas out... and one of these is a dynamic between two adoptive sisters (a nephilim and a human)... and a shared philosophy they have mirrored versions of...

So the basic philosophy that they both have is "If it can think it can choose."

They both agree on that statement. This is probably the one they were raised being told.

The differences they have comes in the second statement they each add on to that basic comment.

The nephilim's secondary conclusion is "If it can choose, it can choose to be good."

The human's secondary conclusion is "If it can choose, it can choose to be evil."

This isn't a difference they fight over and they likely aren't consciously aware they have this difference…

… as such, this isn't something they regularly say out loud but comes as just a natural conclusion of the first statement they were raised with.

And the impetus for this split is also similar: angels

extensive personal experience for the nephilim

secondhand reports and stories for her sister

The nephilim is essentially a war refuge. She came to the world in the wake of a war that destroyed the heaven and hell of her cosmology (the setting has multiple cosmologies). The war was multi-layered but part of it was some angels perceiving nephilim as abominations to be destroyed...

So, the nephilim for the first 11 or so years of her life was front and center in witnessing all the various ways that angels can be horrific and intensely violent creatures. They were originally created as weapons to destroy the enemies of a particular power which in story is long past....

and she is imminently aware that she is half-angel and she struggles against the element of Wrath within her which will threaten to bury everything that makes her ... her... in favor of punishing and destroying the things that anger or disturb her...

... so she focuses on the idea that "if it can choose, it can choose to be good" because from her perspective, that's what she's doing every day of her life. She chooses to be happy not just on a surface well, but seeks out genuine joy to experience.

She wants to be "what people think angels are"

By comparison, her sister grows up among humans and hearing about angels as they epitome of goodness and holiness only to encounter this girl who was her new little sister and the ways that girl talks casually about how terrible angels can be.

So, her secondary conclusion is influenced by this…

I think her parents are experts in the cosmology and were well aware that angels can be malevolent or at least dangerous, but less upfront with that to their daughter until the nephilim was adopted. So, she now heavily focuses on reminding herself that reputation is just that and to doubt it.

She has this adoptive sister she cares about so much... and this person she cares about spent the first part of her life being hunted or tormented by beings her culture at least told her were purely good. So, in a way, she is actively choosing cynicism and suspicion. She deliberately doubts.

So, both are decent people who are capable of accepting non-human entities. (Their aunt is a former demon, for instance) But when it comes down to risk…

The nephilim will risk her life on the chance the thing she's fighting can be better.

The human will lean toward killing an enemy rather than give it the chance to hurt her or others again.

I haven't heavily explored this in the fanfic version of these characters yet. This is sort of an outgrowth of how fanfic comes with what I've been calling scaffolding that you don't have when you're writing purely original concepts (including "inspired by" concepts).

When you're writing fanfic a lot of characterization and worldbuilding comes assumed and there's less work that needs to be done to sell it.

The three fics of this AU focus on:

Wednesday (Wenclair)

Supergirl (Supercorp)

K-Pop Demon Hunters (Polytrix)

Here we go:

Werewolf Zoey has found that her sensory issues have been mostly solved by having an enhanced sensory suite... except vacuums. Those are terrible.

150 year old Vampire Mira is more in tune with tech and pop culture than 18 year old Wednesday Addams.

Vampire Mira met Imp Rumi because she thought she was going to Nephilim Kara's graduation and hadn't realized that was two years prior.

Wednesday showers Enid in atonally macabre declarations of love and devotion in Spanish.

Enid flirts with Wednesday by putting a werewolf growl into her voice with all it's supernatural impact on people's survival instincts.

Ghost Agnes prefers the sign on her door to be askew.

Rumi and Kara helped learn being human from board game nights.

Enid wants to know how Zoey does the ears and tails in human form.

Zoey wants to know how to get rid of the ears and tails when she's human.

Lena is very smooth. The first Lena/Kara kiss happened at the end of chapter 2 in the fic.

Agnes occasionally steals things and brings them back to her room.

Rumi's marks represent positive relationships with people in the world around her. The more connections she makes, the more connected to the world she is. Marks include partners Mira & Zoey, employees Bobby, Enid, and Wednesday, mothers Celine & Mi-Young, cousins Kara & Alex, and probably a few others.

Kara physically can't lie and hasn't figured that out in her 25 years of life. When she tries, the words just refuse to completely form in her head.

Wednesday doesn't want her parents being told about her problems because the collateral damage when they solved things would be significant.

Zoey has a job for a cleaning company that works at a few schools and office buildings around town. Including LCorp.

Mira was a civilian triage nurse in the Korean War. She learned from her human partner of the time.

If Mira met vampires of the same kind as her they'd know she helped kill her sire by her red-hair. If they learned who her sire was they'd say "Oh, that asshole. Justified."

Romance was a descendant of Mira's siblings.

Enid has started wearing shades of black and white lipstick so she doesn't provoke an allergic reaction when kissing Wednesday.

Sad bits of my Seoul Shadows AU

Wednesday has had prior partners including Tyler, a goth girl from Jericho, and Xavier. The partners between Tyler and Enid were murdered by Tyler.

Enid did not make it to Nevermore, she was homeschooled after being hospitalized in the wake of her first year at Lycanthropy Camp.

Enid came to Korea thinking she'd be there long enough to miss certain family reunions and not embarrass her mother by existing. Then she learned she had been given a one-way ticket while the plane was landing.

Rumi and Mira were in a polycule with Jinu. he poisoned them in order to force Rumi to tell him how to contact Gwi-Ma.

The mark on Rumi's body representing Jinu is dead and scarred. Newer scars are starting to replace it.

The mark on Rumi's body representing Mi-Yeong is faded post her death, but still distinct and part of the overall pattern.

Kara is a refugee of a war-torn Garden of Enid where at least two of the warring factions would have killed her on sight.

Two of Mira's vampire siblings died to her sire because the third (Abby) betrayed all of them and then used a bomb to kill the sire in the confusion.

Mira was sold to her sire as food by her family in exchange for influence and resources. She was turned because she was pretty.

Mira's first 60-70 years of undeath were not pretty. Her sire was terrible.

Zoey's version of Lycanthropy involves a second body grown within her and her soul transferring to the new body as the prior body dies. It's very painful.

Zoey was in prison for six months for stealing a car. She was a passenger and thought it belonged to the driver (Romance). This was before she was a werewolf.

Rumi's recently been faced with the damage her past existence as a demon had done. (Most of those memories were lost when she was reborn humanish)

Agnes was murdered twenty-three years ago and spent most of the time since trapped in reliving her final moments until Enid and Wednesday knocked her out of it.

Before Kara, Lena's girlfriends have been rather... bad.

Lena's stepmother tried to make her into a mindless drone.

So... I'm already thinking of ways to adapt my Seoul Shadows series into an original project and find myself hitting a stumbling block.

Part of this is because I'm not going to seriously delve into that until I finish the fanfics, so I flat haven't devoted much thoughtspace to it... just enough to know where the adaptation will stumble.

So let's start with some things I know:

I know the original story will be set in its own city rather than Seoul. I think I might take the route I took with Modern Red and avoid naming the city and just let people make assumptions as to where it is based on cultural queues, tech level, and so on. Might not go as far as I did with Modern Red though, where it becomes increasingly clear that that story is not set in Earth, even an alternate one.

The Huntrix dynamic I'm using is probably safe. Changing the characters into an imp, a vampire, and a newbie werewolf ... none of whom work in the entertainment industry (well the vampire owns a nightclub) substantially changes their personal and interpersonal dynamics so, they're already essentially fresh characters in KPDH cosplay. (So is the way with AUs)

Kara and Lena again isn't a big stretch. Switch from Kryptonian fleeing environmental disaster to Nephilim fleeing multi-factioned and often genocidal civil war in the Garden of Eden again changes the dynamic a great deal. I do plan to adjust the super-science direction a bit in Lena, but then again, applying science to Nephilim reality bending would be interesting.

I'll also be taking further steps away from the Supernatural model of Demons and Angels. I mean I already have... but more so.

Several things I gloss over will get more attention ie: the turning story I gave Mira will be drawn out and expanded on. More work will be done in characterizing group dynamics because once it is original it won't have the scaffolding of prior familiarity that comes inherent with fanfic. This will cause the story to naturally deviate or evolve even further away from where it currently stands.

More effort will be made into discussing the types of creatures out there.

Mortalis, Night, Wild, and Power circles will need some examination and probably renaming one or two. "Creature of Night" is easy enough, the others stand out as a bit more clearly the Urban Shadows identity.

Powers and natures will become more fluid as I step further away from the RPG.

The city will require more description. I can say Seoul and myself and other people who have been there get an immediate impression of the alleys and streets, the blend of ancient and modern, the clustered and cramped nature of it. All of that, but in my own city I'll need to go into more detail and that will again be a point of deviation and evolution.

No ... the problem here is Wednesday and Enid.

Wednesday is already an intrigue heavy and dark urban fantasy. As compared to KPDH which is a more personal exploration with simple sides and Supergirl which is an outright superhero story. Because of this, Wednesday and Enid have a lot the same dynamic. Both personal and interpersonal.

I know I want an oracle because the ability to see the future just feels like a great justification for the attention of the cult that complicates her mission and forces dealing with the other characters and eventually meeting the other.

The whole issue of Enid's backstory would have to change a lot of if I made the equivalent character not a werewolf. As would her interaction with the werewolf in the other story.

Some particulars like Wednesday's allergy to color would make the derivation extremely obvious which would be fine in a parody but not so much in a upfront supernatural thriller/mystery.

Spoilers, obviously, but may change.