Raven Swallows the Sun

Moving Shop

2006-03-11T03:01:00.000-05:00

Ben and Thomas seduced me into this; after spending some time musing about WordPress, I've migrated Raven Swallows the Sun to a new address, http://njyar.thesmerf.com/blog/. See you there.

....design flash

2006-03-09T02:05:00.000-05:00

What happens if I take that wuxia thing and stir it up with Snow From Korea?

Conversations with Jonathan have cleared up my understanding of low-impact design and gotten some wheels turning in both our heads, I think. This is a good day to be a designer.

Introspection ~ Epiphany

2006-03-08T15:11:00.000-05:00

So, there are a lot of playstyles that I find incomprehensible. There was a time when I considered them pathological, but I think I'm over that now. I think I figured out my mental block! But they still make me nervous.

See, the way I see it, roleplaying games consist of three important components, in a strict hierarchy. There is a game system which induces roleplay, which consists of tiny stories which describe imaginary experiences. Importantly, each layer controls and constrains the layer inside it; the system shapes the stories shape the imaginary situation.

I strongly feel that the best play, for me, is play where this structure is acknowledged, understood, and used. That means that all play begins and ends at system; if I primarily want to play with an interesting system, then the stories and imagined events take a backseat. If I want to tell stories of a particular form, then I obtain a system that induces that form. If I want to imagine particular experiences, then I get a system that induces stories that evoke those experiences.

Styles of play where upper layers get thrown out of balance severely disorient me. Jonathan's recent discussions of low system-impact play and the related discussions of immersion set me floundering, because this is play that, by its very nature, cannot adhere to the hierarchy as I have set it out; as I understand it, these playstyles ultimately seek to discard overt system, in favor of either stories or experiences (which, I might add, are doubly disorienting because they are fictional and it appears to be a related goal of immersion to ignore this).

Because of the design potential of highly covert system, I still find design for these styles intriguing; I can steal from them to serve my own ends.

But that's not going to make me less nervous around them.

Self-Serving Cupcakes

2006-03-06T00:58:00.000-05:00

When I was younger, chocolate cake was my festival food of choice. There were some weirdos I knew who liked yellow cake or shudder carrot cake, but for me it was always chocolate. Those other things, they weren't cakes; they were barely acceptable vehicles for icing. (If I wanted a carrot sweet, then I could have gajar ka halwa, which is about a billion times better than carrot cake.) I still feel this way about angel food—it seems like a rubbery, spongy thing that you might use as a structural element in one of those layered pudding-and-fruit affairs, but not serve as a dessert in its own right.

When I discovered custard and cannoli, I forgot cake for a time. For years, delicate almond-flour confections held my heart.

But, like a forgotten tulip patch, it comes back. I made chocolate cupcakes today.

These are from Nigella Lawson's recipe for chocolate birthday cake, in How to Eat; the chocolate flavor is not as intense as I would have liked, and so next time I do this I will make chibi-brownies.

But the texture is not bad at all, and the deep, bitter coffee ganache (I cheated, Nigella does not specify this) balances the slightly excessive sweetness of the cake; it saves me from thinking I am eating kiddie food.

And it feels good, baking cake for no reason whatever.

The Wonders of Modern Technology

2006-03-03T04:59:00.000-05:00

"I am not sure about these thing," says Birds-of-Trinity.

"Then perhaps you should consider this model! It is powered by the uncertain nature of things." The salesman smiles, but his eyes are full of fear.

Birds-of-Trinity examines the fingernail laser katanas critically. "Well, these are certainly adequately sharp." There is a noise, like a knife being drawn across a whetstone. Backward. "Hm. Well, it appears that they are acceptably long." There is a sound, like a snail retreating into its shell. "Mister Gingerbread, this does not appear to be well-suited to my disposition."

"No," he replies, shaking his head. "It is a weapon for the tentative."

"Birds-of-Trinity is not tentative! Show me the other ones again, the ones powered by nameless dread."

Some time later...

"What impertinence is this?!" Birds-of-Trinity's fingers flare with violet light. It slashes the reciept she is holding into four ribbons. The light brightens. "They didn't tell me about the installation fee for the irritation module!" The light turns blue. "And now I can't return them!" Green-gold. She checks herself, about to make a fist. She slaps her palm on the table. There is a smell of smoke and a clattering, and she falls.

Far away, a salesman chuckles. They all seem to think the irritation module is such a good idea.

So I Wanted Madeleines...

2006-03-01T20:23:00.000-05:00

...or like financiers or mignardises or something. There is nothing like the creamy, moist texture of almond cakes. The contrast of the firm crown of the cakes and the melting pedestal holding them up is irresistible.

It's a good thing Clotilde knows how to make those, and I had mini baking cups, because otherwise I'd have had to go to the bakery.

1c sugar
1 1/4c almond meal
zest of 1 lemon
4 eggs
2/3c butter
1/4c flour

So, I didn't have almond meal. Who has time to go to the gourmet market in the middle of the week? Well, yes, I do. I didn't, though. Just blanched some almonds and ground them up in the processor. I think I could have gotten a more elegantly delicate texture from professionally ground almonds, which I will try next time. As it was, they had tiny, rustic but not unpleasant, toothy fragments of almond floating about inside. The real kicker was the smell: a heavenly, floral fragrance, like perfume from many years ago.

Stir together the sugar, almonds, and zest; break up lumps with a fork. Add the eggs, and the butter, melted. I beat this all together with one of those stick blenders, which probably incorporated some air into the batter as well. Last, add the flour and stir in well.

Pour into your moulds of choice—ideally, financier pans, but you can get adorable tiny cupcake foils at the supermarket—and bake in a preheated 400°F oven for ten to twenty minutes, depending on the size of your mould. Take them out immediately when they start to take on visible colour. They're done. They'll still be sticky on top until they have had some time to cool, and the centres should remain moist and spongy.

Contemplate a single rose while peeling these one-by-one and devouring them all in one piece, or more daintily, in bites, spreading a marmalade with a proper bitter streak.

It Began at the Water

2006-02-26T23:34:00.000-05:00

It danced there, on the sand, on the water. The wind howled and sang a melody for it, and it kept time by naming the beats of the two-headed drum: dhinak dhinak dhin dhin dha, dhinak dhin...Was it a woman? Was it a man? Now yes, now no, now, perhaps. It was white. It flickered.

It was a god.

They could tell by the way it moved, or didn't move: the way its scarves hung stiff as paper in the thrashing sea airs until it turned its eyes to them; the way it would strike a pose and then suddenly be uncoiling from a different one; they saw it in the pale flash of its eyes and the lazy extension of its limbs. It flickered. They stood behind the dunes and the trees and watched.

Most of all, they could tell it because it was more a performance than a performer; a painting of a dancer. It flickered, and it smudged.

The hush of admiration for a god's unleashed beauty became a hush of impatient preparation, as the god ascended to heaven on the crest of a silver hill. They had noticed, at last, that as its feet touched the sand as it danced, as it threw shells from its hands, all these things were glazed with a layer of whiteness. Everything the god touched was turning into pearls.

Árichesja Raven-Swallows-the-Sun later said of the theophany, "That was when the war began."

Refining UCS

2006-02-16T20:19:00.000-05:00

Some refinements and clarifications from the RPGnet thread:

Damage:

A simple damage success generates a -1 dot wound.
A difficult success generates a -2 dot wound.
A legendary success causes a -3 dot wound.

You may perform a "called shot" at a difficulty of the defender's Essence. A simple success causes a -1 dot wound; a difficult success causes a -1 dot wound to the Accuracy or Defence Attribute.

This makes it a little easier for high-end Exalted to wear down their inferiors to helplessness.

No, I Die!

When you suffer the consequences of defeat, you may choose to die. Describe the way you do so. Your consequences of victory occur, if this is possible (as when your goal is something like save Yuanyin's life or obtain the Green Destiny, and they do so in the most permanent fashion reasonable; if you obtained an item by dying, then twists of fate will keep that item in obscurity until your spark's next incarnation remembers your epic death and seeks it out.

Extras:

For each damage success against an extra group, defeat one extra. This is just a cinematic thing; I think extras are a little too annoying to deal with in the default.

Ox-Body Technique & Healing

Radical changes ahoy! Since I don't have HLs, I can't use OBT to add those; instead, they'll have to be repaired some other way. Haven't figured out the details of this.

Anytime you would regain Willpower outside a conflict, you may recover your Essence in Ability dots, or one Attribute dot. I award stunts a lot, so this will probably work for me.

Stakes

Clarification: An effect you obtain by stake-setting and winning a conflict can only be negated by defeating you in another conflict.

Other comments and questions are of course welcome.

Indian-Style Chicken Satay

2006-01-30T19:56:00.000-05:00

This won't turn into a food blog permanently, promise.

So, everyone has enjoyed satay, those beautiful skewers of rippling grilled meat, bright gold from their marinade, at a Malay or Thai restaurant. What makes them so delicious?

They are impossible to make, I say, and the sheer unfamiliarity makes them fascinating. Or, rather, the seasonings that go into satay marinade are hard to come by in an American kitchen—galangal, lemongrass, tamarind, fresh turmeric—and some are strange to American tastes; one source calls for a small amout of belacan, Malay fermented shrimp paste.

Being that I live in an Indian kitchen, though, I thought I could approximate. Looking around, I found that the marinade's built around a foundation of equal parts cumin and coriander. That's easy enough. Turmeric on top of that, for the yellow colour; easy. Sugar. Garlic. After this the ingredient lists start to diverge. Lemongrass! one cries. Fish sauce, lemon juice! another declaims.

It seems like these are establishing the sour and salty aspects of the marinade. I went for salt and Worcestershire sauce (I have fish sauce, but I'm serving people who don't like it) for salty, and tamarind for sourness; as I recall, it's also a fair tenderiser for meats, which will be nice. I find lemon toughens things, and lemongrass imparts a lot of fragrance but not much taste. One recipe calls for anise, which I thought intriguing, and another for chili powder—neither seems particularly authentic but they are welcome.

The recipe I ended up using looked something like this:

1 teaspoon each: Cumin, coriander, red chile powder*, sugar, turmeric
1 clove: Garlic
1 pod: Star anise
A splash: Tamarind concentrate, Worcestershire sauce (I didn't really measure these; start with a half teaspoon of each and adjust up.)
1 Tablespoon: Vegetable oil
As needed: Salt & pepper, water

Grind the star anise and spices (except the turmeric, it'll stain your spice grinder) together to make a find powder; mince the garlic or pound it to a paste. Add to the sugar, tamarind, turmeric, Worcestershire sauce, and oil. Mix well, adding water to make a smooth thin paste. Adjust seasoning if needed. Marinate 1 pound of meat overnight in this marinade.

The anise is very intense here; though it seems like cooking it subdues the almost overpowering smell of the marinade, it is a little stronger than I liked. I'd use half a pod (four lobes) next time. I'd also increase the amount of chile powder; the spiciness didn't come through the other flavors at all. Nonetheless, it looked exactly right, and the flavor came reasonably close to restaurant-style satay, so I think it'll be even better with the changes I described. Possibly also add salt.

It was nice on ciabatta with peanut sauce and mâche, but the greens were a little too tender for the sandwich overall. Some wilted spinach might have done the job more gracefully, if less beautifully.

*: This refers to the powder of dried red chiles, not the chile-based spice mixture.

Xin Chao and the Legend of Buildings

2006-01-30T16:59:00.000-05:00

The saga of Vakhriyya Dawndrinker does not begin on the dawn of that chilly day when she sailed across the Sea of Years in her grey driftwood ship.

Nor does it begin some millennia before her birth, when Rustam on his ship of flowers landed here, when he and Allevih the witch and Durat the swordsmith became two kings and a queen, and ruled with great honesty and craftiness and glory.

Nor does it begin some hundreds of years later, when those three sailed away on the counsel of dreams, leaving their empire to collapse.

The saga of Vakhriyya Dawndrinker begins long before that, in a forgotten place in forgotten years, when Xin Chao tended his goats among the long grasses. They grazed day and night, uncaring, because Xin Chao's heart was like the sun.

Then the winds came to the hills of Xin, and with them the dust and the black kites that beat at Xin Chao with their wings and tore his flesh with their claws. Then Xin Chao's blood came out onto the red earth.

Then the rains came to the hills of Xin, soaking the goats and washing Xin Chao's blood into the red rivers and red streams.

Then the darkness came to the hills of Xin, the clicking darkness of velvet spiders and ebony wasps and onyx scorpions with stingers held high, and when Xin Chao gasped in fright he breathed them in and drowned in them.

Yet Xin Chao was undaunted, because his heart was like the sun.

So he took his sword and he crushed the spiders and he beat back the rain and he cut the wind's wings so that it could no longer fly, and he said to his long-suffering goats, "My heart is like the sun, but yours are not, and so I will build you a...a building! A building that will shelter you from outside as my heart shelters me from inside.

So he took his sword and he cut trees and reeds and blocks of earth and he built a...a building. He put his goats inside.

Then when the winds and rains and darkness came, they washed up against the...the building's walls, and were beaten back, and Xin Chao sat on the top of a hill and laughed, and they slunk away, muttering bitter, bitter oaths.

Thousands of years later, Vakhriyya Dawndrinker awoke to hear curses on the wind.

Torchbearer Playtest Materials

2006-01-30T00:29:00.000-05:00

I've finished assembling playtest materials for Torchbearer. Now I am looking for playtesters! If you're looking for a new game to play, let me know and I'll tell you about TB; the address is arichesja (a symbol goes here) gmail (punctuation) com.

The Other Side

2006-01-12T23:30:00.000-05:00

So, Mridangam is basically out of my hands.

Feels good.

So, I'd been wondering about why I haven't had anything to write about Feneng lately, and then I figured it out: I accidentally gave her a place in the world.

skype

2006-01-11T04:37:00.000-05:00

blackbirdlantern. Yeah, I guess I'll try this out.

Mo on Push and Pull

2006-01-10T13:06:00.000-05:00

Mo says things that I have been trying to verbalise about Mridangam.

Caesar Salad with Stuff

2006-01-09T16:32:00.000-05:00

So, I've been craving some odd things lately: Caesar salad, corn, feta, mushrooms...

Turns out they taste pretty good together; I pan-fried the corn to get some colour on it, and threw in leftover fajita-style chicken and grilled portabella mushrooms, warmed it all up, and poured over Romaine with Caesar dressing and chunks of peppercorn feta.

In fact, this was delicious. Unfortunately the feta in the photo looks a little unappetizing.... The sweetness of the chicken and corn were a nice balance for the salty feta and unnameable meaty flavour of the mushroom—is that what they call umami? The slightly bitter greens and tangy dressing satisfied my other taste cravings excellently. One thing I'd change is to cube the feta smaller and maybe find a way to warm it up; it's just this side of overwhelming. I still have a little box of corn in the fridge, and I'm thinking of ways to use it up.

That thing on the right is whipped cream, a little too stiff, floating on Turkish coffee; ideally you get a little bit of fluffy cream and a bit of coffee in each sip, but the cream turned out to be too dense and I ended up thinning it out with skimmed milk and ice. It didn't really go with the salad even remotely, but I needed the caffeine.

So, here's to, hopefully, the end of this Raven hiatus. I'm gonna allow myself to blog on more stuff than just fiction and games from now on; it helps to keep my mind moving.

The System-Allergic Player

2005-12-26T13:40:00.000-05:00

He talks about his character all the time. He draws portraits and tells little stories about the things that happened offscreen. He's always early to the game and has the grace to bring snacks. He loves the game.

Yet, somehow, it's been two months and he still has to borrow a book to look up Magic Missile every time. He asks, "How far can I move this turn?" The same distance as every turn, Sam. "Can I cast Spell X?" No, Sam, you ran out of spells today. Remember? You said it yourself ten minutes ago.

You know this player. I know this player. It's System-Allergic Sam, who somehow cannot wrap his head around the rules of the game. He spends combat rounds in D&D paging through books. In Polaris, he needs to carry a conflict cheat sheet - that's conspicuously blank of notes and not really of any help to him. In Exalted, he forgets how to calculate his dice pools and Charms are hopelessly intimidating.

How can we help Sam? Can we? Should we play with him?

Birds-of-Trinity: An Exaltation Story

2005-12-23T23:22:00.000-05:00

The fourth book of the Epic of the Second Dawn of the Deliberative is separated into two volumes, white and black. The white volume has covers of mirror-polished steel, and a soft jacket woven out of ibis feathers. It is a bestiary of birds, and each bird is a tale from the life of the hero who named herself Birds-of-Trinity.

Each day, I drink.

Each day, I drowse.

Each day, I write a hundred beautiful words and set them to the music of the zildar. I invent new sweets and offer them up to the mouths of kings and lovers.

Each day, I beat my wings against the cage.

Give me a little bit more.

So begins the epic of Birds-of-Trinity, who was once Núiyal Kól, the scream of the crane, in the country of Chaya, where the butterflies nest in spring.

The first entry in the bestiary is entitled "The Riddle-Wisdom of the Hawk," and it tells this story:

So it was that one day, Núiyal Kól sat in her garden and watched the ducks swim in the pond. "Quack," one would say to another, and the second would reply affirmatively, "Quack." This is how things were at that time. Today, though, things were different. "Quack," said a familiar duck, and in reply, a shriek from the sky: "Kriiiiiiiii!" It was a hawk with white discs marking its wings. The hawk landed beside Núiyal Kól, tilted its head as if to ask, "You, friend, what adventure finds you here?" and flew off without a look back.

Núiyal Kól went to her chambers and gathered those things without which, she could not remain herself: A book of songs, a pen, and two knives, one for art and one for battle. She untied her hair and took off her sandals, and tied the long sleeves of her robe behind her. She painted a white spot on each hand. Thus unencumbered, she left her chambers, and did not even turn to shut the door.

The book describes the solar hawk of the east, whose feathers are red and whose beak is golden, whose eyes are all-seeing, who has white spots marking its wings. It is the legend in some forgotten country that this hawk will lead a child home who has lost his way, for inevitably he has seen him on every step of his path.

So it was that when the sun had risen and set five times, Núiyal Kól was in a new country, one of which she had only heard rumor before. It was said that the people of this land worshipped talking faces that they carved into the trees, and once a year, a maiden would smear her sex with sacred pollen, and in due time bear a green-eyed son who could speak to things that could not be seen. She met such a man on the road.

"Hero! What trouble do you bring to my people?"

"There are no heroes here," Núiyal Kól replied, with bitterness. "There is only a poet and a dramatic man."

The man took his staff and wrote upon the earth. Story-cutting-man.

"It is the character for hero, yes: a man cut apart by stories."

He wrote the characters again, a little differently. Man-cutting-story. "You see, the poet is the same, only seen from the back."

Núiyal Kól gave the man a courtesan's smile, beautiful and false. But there was a flaw in it, and a little bit of happiness showed through. She laughed for the first time in a season. "But you are looking at my face, shaman, and I am a poet. Your prophesy is backward."

The shaman shrugged and walked away.

In paintings, the hawk is always depicted with a sparrow's skull in its left talon, and three white narcissi in its right. It is both executioner and mourner.

So it was that when the moon had turned in her phases five times, Núiyal Kól was beset by a cadre of the king's Peacock Guard. "Núiyal Kól, will you return to us?" the captain implored. "The king sits, starving, in the banquet hall; he will not rise from his seat until you bring him your famous thousand-leaves pastry."

"I have made it a thousand times," Núiyal Kól replied, "and so it cannot be made again. That would require the secret of the thousand-times-thousand-leaves pastry, which I have not perfected."

"His sword-arm grows soft, Núiyal Kól, for he will cross swords with no one but you."

"He is no longer my equal in swordsmanship; I have travelled far and learned much from these undiscovered countries. The king must fence with his equal."

"His ears are stoppered with wax, Núiyal Kól, and he will not drain them until he hears the Tale of Ten Dynasties from your tongue. Each day his language grows more disordered and his body more deprived."

"Then the Ten Dynasties will end with him, who cannot live without a bird that has flown from the nest, and I will return to give my respects to the Eleventh."

"Your heart is hard."

"You are mistaken; it is your heart that is hard. Mine is merely become difficult to persuade."

Crackle, flutter, snap. The Peacock Guard had fanned their fans and lowered their spears. Then there was a bright light and a darkness like sudden nightfall.

The olar hawk famously preys on other birds. The peacock, pheasant, and bird-of-paradise are counted among its mortal enemies, for only they, among all the prey birds, are able to fight back; they entangle the hawk in their twisting plumes.

So it was that Núiyal Kól meditated on these three ordeals while composing verses with which to festoon the treetops. As a result of these meditations, she took up the name Birds-of-Trinity and set out in the search of new stories to tell.

Turkey Day

2005-11-24T02:20:00.000-05:00

We are eating with vegetarians. :/ Happy Thanksgiving, all you Americans out there, and to everyone else, I hope that your year is closing pleasantly, and you have reaped a great bounty of good experiences and fortunes from it.

Weapons of the Gods: Secret Arts

2005-11-24T02:02:00.000-05:00

One of the things I've noticed about the reaction to this game is that it draws in people who are interested in its high-flying wuxia action, but that's not what keeps them there.

Rather, what I'm seeing is that people read through it, leaping first to the kung fu and saying, "This is pretty okay." Then they start to browse through the book, finding interesting things. The kung fu really doesn't tap the depths of the combat system, for instance (More, lots more, on this later). The motion of the River is fascinating. (I'm a bit of a gearhead; I love these things.) Then they find the Loresheets. "Whoa, it says I can be the descendant of Qin Shihuangdi! There's a world-changing thing that his ancestors can do! Wow! I can force the GM to tell me a story about Tiger Soul!" Empowerment!

And people flip out over this, for some reason.

Then they hit the Secret Arts, which are, at their root, a way to improvise and control systematic reward and punishment systems to make the other players do what you want them to do. Among people who profess to understand the systems involved, the reaction is unanimous: Awesome.

We've been doing this stuff for years, people, and yet when I hear that chorus of excitement for PTA's fanmail, or for narrator dice in The Pool, it's from designers, not regular people who play just regular games, not the people that flip out over Secret Arts...what's missing? What's wrong?

Off-Schedule Post: Rainwater Jaguar

2005-11-15T14:57:00.000-05:00

It cast a shadow laced with restless white veins. The breeze became cold and sharp where it had touched its flank. It growled with the sound of thunder on the horizon. The treetops swayed at its throat like tasseled wheat.

It was Rainwater Jaguar, the hungry, merciless bringer of moisture, the changer of blood into bounty.

The rites had been interrupted by the idol priests, the worshippers of Darab-of-Floating-Whiteness, Blue-Eggshell-Ferzeen, Afshan-in-Heat-and-Coolness, and countless others, the priests of the soft and silent gods who did not appear to their men except as flashes of light on the edge of the sun, or a breath of mountain jasmine on the desert wind, or as a heartbeat of compassion in a flinty shopkeeper's eye. The implements of sacrifice had been scattered, and the offerings taken, given bread and wine, hidden from the prelate of iron, the prelate of obsidian, the prelate of bone...

Without offerings, Rainwater Jaguar was growing thin. His watery hide clung to his bones of ice, making deep ripples on His divine ribs. His eyes were darkening with dust, his clarity clouded by the sand in the airs.

Without offerings, Rainwater Jaguar was growing angry, coming to Earth and worrying at things, batting sheep between His paws, looking for a companion to play with. He is but a kitten yet, and for that we are fortunate, for He has not yet learnt the way to hunt.

He must be fed, so that He will go to the sky and bury His droppings there; boiled against that azure dome by the sun, they will become clouds and the rains of spring.

Here I am, Jaguar! Look, I have bared my throat to you! Look, I cut it, the blood comes out! Devour me, Jaguar! Turn me into rain!

His Teeth are so cold.

Being a part of the Web

2005-11-08T13:59:00.000-05:00

Are there web sites around that I should look at, link to? Let me know. For the purposes of Raven's sidebar, I like to have a real name to go with personal pages.

There are a lot of places I like that I don't link to here, 'cause they're ot overly relevant; http://www.beaverandsteve.com is one of those.

I'm posting slow 'cause of NaNo, if you hadn't guessed; it's hitting the Bad Week! I'm still excited.

Feneng 10: The River

2005-11-03T14:39:00.000-05:00

"Feneng," Blackbird Lantern coughed, "the years have not been kind to you."

She chuckled. "Stand up, you rascal. What have you been doing?"

"Convalescing."

"Well, no wonder you're still sick. Come, here, we'll dance the fever out." So he rose, and pulled her to his chest, and hand-in-hand they danced. Out the sickroom, into the hall, through the garden gate; the sun rose. Into the woods and across the hills; the moon set. To the River. Blackbird Lantern hesitated; his face burned as Feneng whispered, "I trust you."

They skidded out across the waves and eddies; they scorned the rocks. They paced the dance with the sound of their feet on the water. Days and nights blurred together until they had forgotten all but the beat and the motion of hands, the streamers of steam and the song neither of them was singing.

Finally they stopped and Feneng, unthinking, lifted water from the river and drank. Blackbird Lantern took her by the hand and they rested in the shade of a plane tree. "You are very beautiful today, Feneng."

She shook her head. "I have never been beautiful."

The dance master ignored her modesty. "The River has changed you." So it had: features which were once merely strong and proud had gained balance and poise; the cloudy colour of her eyes, now the rich darkness of a pond, with jade and emerald flickering in their depths. Grief flickered there, too, and monsters. Feneng's lips and cheeks were painted with excitement.

She reached out and ruffled his hair. "Enough staring. Now I know what it's like," she said, "to be you." A yawn. "So, what do we do, now that you are healthy and I an immortal?"

The dancer's eyes flickered left and right, as if to see if anyone was watching, and then he grinned. "What else do immortals do, my dear? We misbehave."

I Dreamed This

2005-11-03T12:24:00.000-05:00

So, Monday night (really Tuesday, the first of November), I started The Rosemary Idol, my novel for NaNoWriMo. Just wanted to say.

I dreamed of a game last night, a modular Tarot game where each of the symbols the Tarot uses was a mechanical ability, and you got to construct your character card by pulling symbols off other cards. I assume that these newly denuded cards then became part of the environmental mechanics.

Feneng 9: Abalone

2005-10-31T14:23:00.000-05:00

Feneng lay scattered in the doorway of her chambers, watching the lacquer on her fingernails dry. Today there was to be a mighty feast, and all the heirs of the house must attend, charm, overawe. She snarled at the nails in disgust and gestured at a handmaiden. This was no night for halfway measures.

"You said that it was the fashion in the city, Nightfall-without-Warning?" The other only nodded, and tossed a teasing glance at her mistress. "Please don't give me the silent treatment tonight, not tonight. Father will have all our heads if we are less fine than our guests. Show me the gauntlets."

Nightfall laughed. "Father loves you best of all, Feneng. He would hardly take your head unless you took his first."

"So they said about you," Feneng observed, "elder sister, before you went to the priests and came back wise and cold."

The older woman looked away, stung. She lifted a delicate filigree from a silk-lined box. The gauntlets were rare green liutmenéé, the metal of hours, set with abalone in a peacock feather pattern, with emerald claws at the fingertips. "It is how he lets us go."

"They are very beautiful."

"Put them on!"

Feneng did so, and flexed her fingers experimentally. The gloves were so fine they looked like a brilliant tattoo; the cunningly fashioned claws did as dancers' nails would, lashed out to an arm's length when her fingers and arm were extended, and obligingly ebbed back when relaxed. "Look at these feathers, Father never could bear to see us grow up."

"They have monsters in their eyes! How exquisite." Nighfall's eyes flitted to the wardrobe. "Remember what he did when Nílazem dressed like a man and took up spear in his army? The black gown with moss pearls, dear."

"It is so very dark, what do you think of the blue and alexandrite? He was so furious! Was that when he made the army learn maces, hoping that she would storm off at the prospect of fighting with such an uncouth weapon?" Feneng rifled through her jewel cabinet. "And the blackbird-and-phoenix crown."

They both laughed and reminisced until they were both desperately late for the feast, but once they arrived, there was no one present as beautiful as the princesses in green and blue and black.

liutmenéé: liu<t>m(e)-néé day<EARTH>-set in motion; the metal used by clockworkers, when tempered properly it can be bent and twisted extremely and still return to its original shape when the pressure is released.
Nílazem: ní-lá-ZEM golden-bird of prey-PREDATOR; the sunhawk.

Feneng 8: Ochre

2005-10-27T23:11:00.000-04:00

In her bower garden, Feneng brushed her hair and counted the leaves on the trees. The frost had come to burn wilt onto their edges; the radiance of yesterday had faded to a subdued impression of ochres. A black rainbow flitted across the pool, a starling, and she made jealous eyes at its coat. Oh, to be young again! To have tresses black as ink, to have eyes that dart and flash!

A snapping twig intruded on her thoughts. "Magnificence, Desolate Vessel wishes to speak with you."

Feneng smiled. "It has been years since I have seen her. Bring her here, and send cakes and wine."

The acolyte bowed, and shortly afterward, Desolate Vessel turned up at the side of the pool, carrying a basket. "Have you seen this garden? It's fascinating. I think there is a mountain behind that tree, but I can't quite reach the other side..."

"You have to climb the tree."

"Oh, of course. I'll get right on that," announced Vessel, as she took the brush from Feneng and inspected her handiwork critically. "You should speak to your handmaidens, Refuge. They have been doing awful things to your hair. Look, there is a spider in it!" She tossed a pinecone into her friend's hands, and soon they were chasing each other between the trees, tossing fruit and handfuls of leaves like they had in the old days, when they still wore the blue and tied flowers in their sleeves to brighten Red Cliff's austere halls.

Some days had passed before Desolate Vessel mentioned what brought her to Beast-Among-the-Mountains. "Blackbird Lantern has been asking after you," she mentioned over dinner. "He poisoned himself with River water, and wonders whether it will defer to you, and see fit to stop blackening his tongue and teeth."

"That man is impossible," muttered Feneng, pushing back her chair. "and if he would just learn when to shut up, I wouldn't have to do this. Put on your shoes. We run."

Weapons of a More Civilised Age: P'an Ku

2005-10-24T22:45:00.000-04:00

P'an Ku

...The lighter components, such as clouds and wind and azure, rose to become the sky. The heavier components, such as iron and weight and deep places, fell to form the world.

P'an Ku Cuts the World

This new form of the Void was more helpless than any it had taken thus far. "I will not permit this decrepitude!" suggested P'an Ku. With blows of First Conception, he cut the world into ten times a thousand parts, which moved apart in eight directions, until only the dark web of Existence-Hating Radiance remained. Eager to destroy all the things that are, it pursued! Doing so, its hollow components, such as blackness and silence and radiance, spread between the ten thousand things to make space. "A hero like me has no equal!" P'an Ku declared. Immediately, he set to constructing a mansion to house his glory.

Two aeons passed, and P'an Ku looked out; he saw the winds and the clouds. "Whence comes this vapour?" said he.

Five aeons passed, and he felt a coolness in his lips. "So!" he observed, "the world is cold."

Nine aeons passed, and he heard the dragons breathing. He entered his mansion and shut the door, because now he understood that the Void had found him, had caught him, had settled in his mouth and leached the energy from his breath.

P'an Ku Sleeps

"I could tend to the parasite," P'an Ku commented, "but then who will complete my home?" He spun his axe...

The King in Exile

2005-10-20T23:36:00.000-04:00

Today he walks along the shores of the Sea of Years, gathering driftwood; he is helping Radhivanee Dawndrinker build a ship. He has learned why the ships of the Zuqùndoth are grey.

But no sand clings to his feet; no salt sparkles in his hair. His trailing sleeves are stained with red clay, it is wedged up under his fingernails and darkens the soles of his sandals, because he is the exilic king of Tarag Thán and the land is a part of him.

In this way are the great families of the Tháni known; they cannot be separated from the places that gave them birth. The Emerald Emperor who now sits on the throne of the holy city is said to have appeared in the throne room, a young warrior unknown to all men, and overthrown the king before him, turned the amethyst of the royal chair to deep leafy green with a touch. He has never left there. The exulant priesthood of Láyammúra'mu cannot escape the flowers of their temples; they sprout up at their feet and lead them back home.

The exiled king has been building things as long as he remembers, which is a long time, though in that time he cannot remember if once he had a name. "Foreigner," shouts Radhivanee, "where is your haul? Where is the lumber? I see you have brought a pretty bundle of branches to grace our vases in this place with no flowers." Everyone calls him Foreigner now; he has the bearing of a man separated from his home. Every so often, I call out to him too, and I catch him smiling.

Smiling, because he has done what no other of his countrymen has dared: He has chosen his place in the world.

Awakening

2005-10-17T12:40:00.000-04:00

In the darkness, there is a rustle of wings. There is a stir of whispers.

"Do you see it?"

"Do you hear it?"

"They are singing your name."

"They are reading your prayers."

In the darkness, there is an opening of eyes, and the darkness is replaced by uncounted lights.

"The storms are awakening."

"And the heralds have returned to nest."

One voice speaks out, louder than the rest. "Perhaps..."

"...perhaps?"

"Perhaps it is time that we returned."

"They have not seen us in some time."

"But they remember us. They miss us. They crave the warmth of our glory."

There is a hum of assent. Then, one light becomes a darkness, wraps itself in shape. "I will be the first."

Somewhere in the brilliance, the gods shed a collective tear, in farewell for the brightest of their company.

Torchbearer Playtest Raises Questions

2005-10-13T18:02:00.000-04:00

So, my IRC playtest group has been fascinating, raising all kinds of useful rules questions. I thought I'd bring them over here and think about those questions for a while.

Who can get Fuel for referencing a Trait? When and how?

Well, as-written, you much be narrating for a character when you get Fuel, but it isn't clear what "narrating for a character" means, so here it is: You're eligible to get Fuel for a character Trait when you do one of the following things:

Narrate a character action that expresses the Trait.
Create an Ordeal that transparently involves a Trait, for instance by obviously requiring the character to exercise it.
Set Trial stakes that express a Trait.
Narrate a Trial result in which a Trait is expressed.

You only get Fuel once per Trait in a scene, though; you can't have someone call a character's name three times to get 3 Fuel.

When can you introduce a new Ordeal?

You can introduce a new Ordeal any time in a scene before the Trial is rolled. You absolutely cannot introduce new Ordeals after that; there is no mechanical input permitted post-Trial. You may embed an Ordeal in the stakes of a Conflict, such that the Ordeal takes place only in the case of victory, or only in the case of failure. In this case, you only have to pay for the Ordeal if it's actually inflicted.

Shipwrecks

2005-10-10T14:46:00.000-04:00

Blanked on something to write today, so here is an old piece.

‘This one’s neat.’ She held up a piece of bottle-green seaglass shaped like a ring. It was glossy from the wet.

‘Yeah. Look here, I found a blue piece.’

‘Wow, blue. Do you think there’s more?’

‘We haven’t looked over there yet.’ He pointed down the beach. In that direction, the sand slowly gave way to smooth gravel and outcroppings of increasingly large and slippery stones.

‘Yeah. Maybe later. Do you want to play picnic?’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay, I’ll be the picnic and you be the ants. You have to try and take all the food – that’s the glass – before I eat it.’

Soon picnic lost its novelty and the children walked back to the boardwalk, where their parents were playing bridge. ‘We’re hungry.’

‘We just had a snack, dear. Why don’t you two have some juice,’ she reached into a bag and pulled out two boxes, ‘and build a nice sand castle? When you’re done, you can show us all what you’ve made and help us build one for ourselves, and then we can all go and have pizza for dinner.’

‘Pizza! Can we eat now?’

‘I like pizza.’

‘No, dear, the pizza place you like isn’t open yet. Here, look at my watch. What time does it say?’

He ran his fingers through his hair as he examined the watch. ‘Twelve-twenty?’

‘No, honey, the small hand is the hour.’

‘Four o’clock?’

‘Very good! The pizza place opens at five-thirty, so we can go eat then. Okay?’

‘That sounds like a long way away.’

‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll bet that if you go out there and start building castles, you’ll be out there until long after five-thirty unless someone tells you what time it is.’

‘What’ll you bet?’

‘If I’m right, I’ll take you out for ice cream after the pizza.’

‘Ice cream!’

‘Cool! Let’s go!’ They carried their pail back toward the surf to gather decorations for their castle.

‘Hey, what’s that?’ Behind the fence of a dune, something dark and lumpy was curled up in the grass. The children pressed their noses to the slats to examine it. ‘Ew, it smells icky. Let’s go play over there.’ She stepped back and rubbed her wrinkled nose. The boy, ignoring her, looked around for a stick.

‘Well, I want to know what it is. You can go back and finish building the guest wing.’ He found a stick and poked the mound timidly. It didn’t react, so he gave it a firmer prod. It snored and rolled over – it was a very dirty man in an equally dirty coat. ‘Oh!’ He dropped the stick and took several steps back, to where his friend was standing.

‘What was it?’

‘Um... some dirty guy.’

‘I thought people weren’t ‘posed to go back there.’

‘Maybe we should go,’ he paused, ‘back to the castle.’ They did, and started to pile sand against a blank wall to make the next extension of it. Soon afterward, the boy put down his pail. ‘Let’s dig a moat.’

‘For what?’

‘We can put a fish in it and pretend it’s a moat monster.’

‘A what?’

‘Moat monsters eat people when they try to cross the moat.’

‘That doesn’t sound friendly.’

‘Our moat monster can be friendly. Like Jumbles.’

‘Okay. But why do you want to build a moat?’

‘Castles have moats.’

‘Cinderella’s castle didn’t have a moat.’

‘Yes it did.’

‘Did not.’

‘It did too. Remember when the prince had to swim across the moat to find Cinderella?’ He had completely forgotten the castle, and was now standing in the crumbling rotunda that was once its handsome entryway.

‘You’re just making that up. I’m telling.’ She stumbled to her feet, folded her arms, and walked off. He sat among the cupolas, making faces at birds. Soon afterward, she came running back. ‘The parents say that it’s time for dinner!’ They were halfway back before either remembered the pail of painstakingly gathered seaglass.

Blackbird Lantern: Excerpted from a diary

2005-10-08T15:25:00.000-04:00

Dear Diary...

Why does Feneng keep looking at me like that? Do I have a snot-thingy? Did one of the larks crap in hair? Should have noticed that. Guess will take bath now.

Dear Diary...

Is still doing it. Maybe poor girl has some kind of vision problem that no one saw fit to inform me of. Thanks, ladies! Just leave good ol' Blackbird Lantern in the dark, right. He doesn't ever need to know anything.

And stupid Hospitable Spear is doing it too! Maybe something in water that makes these Red Cliffers nearsighted. V. disconcerting.

Have just been informed I have new quarters. Will comment on once moved.

Dear Diary...

New quarters are in communal dormitory area. Have cell with three walls, great ocean window, chest for things, windows to adjoining cells. Have remembered intoxicating effect of godmark.

And this, the mark, it brings me to a quandary.

(Ed.: Here the text breaks into Nrittandih of the poetic mode. It is rendered as prose by this translator.) I am Blackbird Lantern, of Veamándhi-of-the-Marshes, of the Ninth-night county, son of Sparrow Brand, son of Effulgent Nightingale before him, son of (Ed. The litany of lineage crumbles into an illegible scrawl, as signatures are wont to do.) I am not some soft-chinned inheritor, but an eater of gods! I have the golden blood because I danced with the fire until she bared her throat and begged I drink! I feel like I am on display.

Ed.: Text changes back to conversational Seinundjé. I'm not sure whether I want to remain on display. It's a disservice to the good women of Red Cliff; I should explain the situation as I did at my home, or I'll spend all my time here surrounded by fascinated moths who have other tasks they should attend to.

But I do enjoy the looks. And the visits.

Torchbearer: Stakes for Trials

2005-10-06T14:01:00.000-04:00

A funny thing happened in Torchbearer last night: Without any textual suggestion, the players started to set completely explicit stakes for each Trial, like, "If I win this, then I make the demon in Shulin's body manifest," or, "If I lose, then I'm blown off course by the blizzard."

This is totally awesome, I said to myself as I watched them play things out. What a neat and natural place to embed complications!

This might lead somewhere interesting soon. I'll post a fiction this evening, too; I don't feel like this qualified as a real post.

Mountain 2: Tthayet

2005-10-03T21:39:00.000-04:00

The great city of the Zuqùndhoth, Tthayet-in-my-dreams, is older than anyone remembers. It sprawls across a chain of islands, some great, some small, all cobwebbed with canals and crowned with flowering terraces. There is no ground in Tthayet, only road and bridge and cultivated roof.

Long ago the celestial sculptor, Satàrah, danced across the oceans with her lover Raztat.

Tonight, Blackbird Lantern dances across the blue-tiled roofs of Red Cliff, telling stories to the storms. Signalling banners are in his hands and his ankles are heavy with bells. In the shelter of a darkened pavilion, musicians play: a violin, a beating drum, and a voice raised in song set the rhythm for the dancer to follow.

Dust fell from Satàrah's feet and made the clouds; Raztat's spear cut the waters and made wave and tide. Men watched them from the shores, and so they learned an art of battle.

The Lantern's banners tell the sky how Red Cliff was raised, brick by brick, against the edge of the sea. He tells it of the temple's age, of its beauty, how it was here that the language of stone defeated the language of man, with its scale and dignity and excellence. His torches are the only source of light; every window of the great temple is dark.

The dancer's fingers gripping empty air made the sun turn away his face in shame while dragon and phoenix watched her eyes in embarrassed fascination, for so subtle and expressive was Satàrah's abhinaya that it laid her desire naked for all to see. Women watched them from the ships, and so they learned the art of cutting stone.

The drummer's rhythm falters in the darkness, and the violin misses a note; the sun is rising and the musicians are exhausted. Blackbird Lantern still moves across the roofs like a dry leaf carried on the wind, because the clouds have not cleared, and the air is still thick with the smell of meat.

Fingers on his throat buckled Raztat's knees. Meeting her eyes made him drop the beat. They could dance no longer; other things were on their minds. So it was that the sculptor and the warrior sank to the water and the heat of their passion boiled the sea, leaving cracked hills of salt and sand, the foundations of Tthayet-in-my-dreams.

Thousands of years later, in the first theophany in recorded history, Vakhriyya Dawndrinker took up Satàrah's dusty white mantle, and danced on those white salt hills; at every spot she placed her foot, a flat-topped tower sprang up, and when she waved her hands, bridges twined through them like vines or hungry snakes, looking for vermin on which to feed.

Mountain 1

2005-09-29T22:30:00.000-04:00

Obligatory Game Design Stuff: Torchbearer's beginning playtest. I'll post more on it when I have something substantial to say. Until then, fiction.

The scent of foxgloves hung in the air, and beside them, Blackbird Lantern wondered about what had just happened. Feneng had run by with a bird on her shoulder—a scarlet lark, maybe—and commanded him, "Send me Desolate Vessel and Creator-of-All-Things"; she was out of earshot before had composed a response.

Something has ignited the golden blood in her, he thought.

Run was the first thing she said to them when they came to her at the temple gate. She was already several yards downhill, chasing that red bird.

So they ran.

Soon after, they could no longer see the temple, and they did not stop. The forests fell away and plains rolled up at their feet like a yellow sea. They did not stop. The sun streaked across the sky many times, and before long Desolate Vessel and Creator-of-All-Things were aware of nothing else but the ground passing beneath them and the slow beat of eight wings. Still they did not stop.

When a white-bearded mountain reared up before them and filled the sky, they stopped.

They landed at its feet.

Vessel croaked.

Feneng laughed. "Go, drink water and when you return here we will pray." They hadn't noticed they had changed, so they would not be able to change back on their own.

The acolytes flew off, and, some time later, three priestesses stood up after their meditations and began to build a fire. It was cold under the mountain's shadow. "Feneng, what are we doing here?" Creator asked.

"The lark wishes us to move this mountain. It blocks the route to his home, he says." Feneng sipped her tea complacently. "We will carry out the task in the morning." Desolate Vessel and Creator-of-All-Things exchanged a look. Neither could tell whether it was a look of amusement or alarm.

Shut the windows. Close the doors. Turn the keys. Where are the horses? Blackbird Lantern was battening down the monastery.

A storm was brewing. He could smell its pain.

Blackbird Lantern, for the first time in many years, was afraid.

It did not take long to move the mountain. Underneath it was a beautiful valley full of trees. Never having touched the sun, all their leaves were white.

Creator-of-All-Things: Áyak-Rélusén-Móloh
Desolate Vessel: Nanjyar Móe

Feneng 7: Magnificence

2005-09-26T07:17:00.000-04:00

"You honour us with your presence."

Blackbird Lantern shrugged. "Not at all, Magnificence."

"Not yet," Feneng corrected.

"You wear the Serpent's Crown."

"What does that mean?"

He caught her eyes with his own, and for a while she was lost in them. It was like gazing into a banked fire; they were so blue, so black, and filled with tawny sparks. He slowly turned his head and she watched the sunlight play across the angles of his face. What was he? Shadows skated down his arm and pooled in the palm of his hand. Feneng realised then that he had stood up. His jaw was clenched, his eyes downcast. "I wish I knew what happened to you there, in the forest."

Feneng shook her head violently, to clear her mind of cobwebs. Blackbird Lantern's presence was simply too distracting, hypnotic. "What does it matter to you? I'm just some damaged heiress; you are perhaps the most precious thing the church of Veamándhi has ever encoutered."

Somehow, she was now holding a pendant, its fine gold chain looped round the dancer's neck. There was a hazy recollection of someone's hand reaching under his jacket to retrieve it, but now Feneng could not remember whose. The pendant was a thin disc of amber. Trapped inside was a tiny butterfly, made black by resin and the passing of years. One of its wings was missing.

Blackbird Lantern touched Feneng's hair. Her crown coiled happily into his fingers, and he held it for her to see. Beneath one beaten-gold leaf was a little sphere of amber, another three-winged butterfly. "This is why, cousin. I am not so much a stranger as you think." He replaced the crown. He smelled like fire, too, like smoke and heat and pine.

Feneng fled.

A long time later, Hospitable Sword refilled his friend's wine cup.

"It would be easier," the dance master murmured, "if only she were less beautiful." They finished more bottles before the kohl stopped running down his face in angry carmine streaks.

Designing for the Inter Nets

2005-09-22T15:18:00.000-04:00

It's not something I consciously do, but it's something I do: I design games that are deeply rooted in the physical world. People find it bizarre to play Mridangam without being able to sling gestures; Refreshing RAIN has a go board and mahjongg tiles, Torchbearer is nonsensical without physical Torch objects. Limitless is probably most efficient with, like, mancala cups for your Method dice.

These are all data-storage techniques that turn abstract information into physical things that can be rapidly and easily manipulated. How do you do this digitally, under the constraints of, for instance, IRC?

I realise that there are like ten people, tops, reading this thing. I don't do cool theorising like my colleagues at anyway. and This Is My Blog, or have a game coming down the print pipeline soon enough that you should be saving for it. Nevertheles, I encourage you to think at me.

Torchbearer Has Rules

2005-09-19T23:19:00.000-04:00

...and they are right here. I'm working on writing Examples of Play for each of the major process sections, and then it's to prettifying and clarifying the language of the rules, with the Scarlet Lark Encyclopedia and stories serving as breaks in between.

Webspace provided graciously by the excellent Thomas Robertson.

Brothersword and Sisterbow

2005-09-15T14:00:00.000-04:00

The Rgye Vô Shchang have a strange custom. Sometimes, when a woman is in an interesting position, she goes into the bush and finds a fine stave of myrrh, or sandalwood, or the horn of a hkh'on antelope, and she fashions a bow from it. Meanwhile, her husband makes a sword of watered silver, or Eastern damask bronze, or perhaps of jade or tiger bone. They only have nine months to do so, for the blade must be quenched for the last time and the bow strung for the first time on the day of the baby's birth.

The three are named together: the child, his brother the sword, and his sister the bow. The three grow up together and learn to know one another inside and out; with the passing of years the swordgod and bowgoddess become more alert and awake, and before his nineteenth year, the child has become a warrior and shaman, experienced in combat and skilled at taming gods.

These children become dangerous. They have lives of leisure and ease; there is little that can thwart the will of such a trinity. By the same token, they do not become heroes.

But sometimes the brothersword breaks.

Sometimes the sisterbow snaps.

Sometimes someone kills them.

This invariably drives the child insane. A bond forms between the child and his battle gods, and when this is cut, the child's mind shatters like a dropped egg. These are the heroes of the Shchang: men and women who have had pieces of their heart formed into instruments of war and then cracked. Some of them are thirsty for vengeance. Others are hungry for completion. Still others lust after their own deaths. It makes no difference. A leg of the tripod has come out, and thus, it collapses, and crushes whatever ends up beneath it.

Tentative Torchbearer Table (of Contents)

2005-09-12T00:15:00.000-04:00

So, I am struggling with a small puzzle here with Torchbearer; how to organise the book? Here is one possibility, but I welcome discussion of it; I am not totally certain in it.

Story: From Water Does All Life Begin. A story of the Scarlet Lark setting. This sets the mood of languid, lush, watery excess of the setting. Subsections of the rules-chapters are separated by SL vignettes no longer than a page, as well, even when the chapter-introductory fiction is non-SL in nature. Approximately half of the vignettes should feature Feneng or Blackbird Lantern; the rest are excerpts from fictional literature of the setting, in the manner of Nobilis.
Step-by-step How To Play; this presents the game rules in a condensed, but not simplified, fashion, suited to just grab the book and learn as you go. Probably does not contain any interspersed vignettes, for ease-of-use.
Story: ??? Not something of the Scarlet Lark setting. Lighthearted, impression of dryness and scarcity, for strength of contrast.
The rules of the game in long form, including some designer's notes and discussion of emergent properties.
Story: Red Saffron. A story of the Scarlet Lark setting, featuring Feneng.
Scarlet Lark resources, including:
1. Sample characters, of varying extremeness. Naturally the recurring characters of the fiction are represented, either here or in the next subsection.
2. Sample Torches, at least one of which was once a character.
3. Bites of setting material, in encyclopedic rather than narrative form. These should give an impression of interconnection but confusion; they contain repeating motifs but also contain contradictions and outright impossible situations.
4. A note about the special properties of the setting materials and their use in play.
Story: ??? Not something of the Scarlet Lark setting. Dark, impression of savagery and ill-temper, for contrast.
Designer bling, including a list of inspirations and Other Cool Games, acknowledgements and dedication.
Story: ??? Something with Blackbird Lantern; should make reference to the water temple in FWDALB and Feneng of RS. A story of the Scarlet Lark setting.
Appendices: copyable materials and a "cheat sheet" rules summary which has page references to the two larger rules sections.

Feneng 6

2005-09-08T16:18:00.000-04:00

Today at Red Cliff, it is very quiet and the halls thrum with excitement, because with his old books, Blackbird Lantern brought sweet-bitter news: the famous grave play Rûnâ Srighaxindvaroùn, Songs of the Serpent Archivist, is to be performed on the night of the harvest moon at Floating Cove.

The grave play, you may recall, is a custom adopted from the worshippers of Láyammúra'mu, who wrote in the Book of Emperors, "Sing songs upon me and the joy I have built for you, for only one thing pleases me better: the tears in eyes and the cracking of hearts that are the regalia of grief." They hold that performance and grieving are the most exalted forms of worship, and so, one famous priest, whose name is lost to us, devised a new thing: a play that was performed only once each generation, and then not again until all those that witnessed it have passed away, so that each time it was shown, it would be as though it were the last time, and each line would be like a mourner's wail, singing for the dead.

It is somewhat a dark custom.

So, he says, it has finally happened that the last of the audience of the previous performance, a Tarag Tháni prince by the name Careless Sword, died on military campaign, eighty-eight years after the play was last performed, and it will be shown to commemorate the first anniversary of his demise. This particular play is a legend told by a snake spirit of ancient times, who recounts the tale of Rustam the hero with a boat of living trees, and Rustam's quest to slay the selfsame demon, aided and impeded by the romantically fickle circle of allies he has gathered.

It is a beautiful tale, which I have heard retold many times and in many versions, but the grave play is said to be the best version of it by leaps and bounds, and I look forward to seeing it.

To turn death into gleeful anticipation! Such was the art of this nameless priest.

Rûnâ Srighaxindvaroùn:: Songs of the Serpent Archivist; rûnâ srighaxi-n(d)-varo-ùn play (serpent-archivist spirit)-song-NOM.p Like all Murammite grave plays, written and performed in Nrittandih, the sorceror's language.
Floating Cove:: Lethre-rayri Lúsyewem flying-(swamped by water) water-landing
Láyammúra'mu:: Star Garland; láya-múmu-rá star-neck-enclosure, refers to a myth which concerns the lighting of the sky; the deity (no gender is given) is said to pluck the jewels from its necklace and place them in the firmament as the stars and planets.
Careless Sword:: Tháfyarar Rómo care-(lack abnormally)-3.s sword

Torchbearer: The Story of a Hero

2005-09-05T23:07:00.000-04:00

Torchbearer tells the story of a mythology being born; people tell stories, and some of the stories fade into obscurity, but other stories are remembered and retold and stolen from, and they become laws unto themselves, describing the inner workings of the world.

That is to say that a sufficiently strong story doesn't just end when its protagonist resolves his defining Conflict; instead, that story becomes a Torch, and in the next layer of the mythology, it becomes an element that the newer stories can resonate with. Oh yeah.

There are four possible closures for a character when his Conflict resolves:

If his story was weak,: he fades into obscurity.
If his story was ordinary,: he becomes an element of a Torch's symbology.
If his story was strong,: he becomes a Torch in his own right.
If his story was mighty to the point that it defines his people,: he merges with an existing Torch to extend its symbology and influence.

How do you determine this? In the simplest manner possible! A character who relies on Torch contributions, which is to say a character who's moving in lines already tread by older mythology, will have fewer Traits than one who is more self-reliant. Therefore, a character with fewer Traits than the number of Torches in play fades into obscurity; if he has at least as much Fuel as he has Traits, he's absorbed into the Symbology of a Torch he possesses. If he possesses no Torches or has insufficient Fuel, he fades completely, and doesn't have further impact on the mythology.

A character with at least as many Traits as the number of Torches in play entrenches himself into the mythology. If he has at least as much Fuel as he has Traits, then he may merge with a Torch he possesses. This means that the Torch acquires a new physical representation, and the character's Traits are added to its Symbology.

If he does not possess a Torch or his Fuel is insufficient, then he becomes a Torch in his own right, acquiring a physical representation, and converting his Traits into Symbology.

Feneng 5

2005-09-02T02:24:00.000-04:00

It was neither the third day of the third week nor the evening of the deepest tide, and so it could not be time for a festival prayer; nor was it a day sacred to any significant saint, nor a time when a dignitary was expected.

Yet the assembly bells were ringing, and so I followed the archivists out of the scriptorium and down the long stair that led to the greater assembly hall. It seemed we were the last to arrive; the banners of the other callings were already looming among the seats. An acolyte stood at the foot of the stage and lifted a hand for silence. This was all very unusual. “The dance master Blackbird Lantern comes to Red Cliff with books from Veamándhi-of-the-Marshes, but the ride has fatigued him. He wishes to dance to shake the stiffness from his bones.” I noticed that some of the elder monks seemed very excited at this announcement, and very soon I was to discover why.

Even from the back of the hall, I could see that Blackbird Lantern, who had stepped out of the shadows as the acolyte scrambled to her seat, was very thin, and his eyes were lined with bright red kohl. His riding coat had one long sleeve.

Without ceremony, the drums began to play, and a trumpet sounded the first notes of “Choking Crane,” which happens to be an aria from my favorite opera, and though I did not know it then, I have seen it a great many times.

Blackbird Lantern's performance was unplanned and unrehearsed, and I have never seen one to equal it. When the bells rang to show the springing of the trap, he planted his right foot on the floor and from that point onward, did not move it from that spot; when the crane, exhausted, fell to the ground, his legs bent at seemingly unnatural angles and I swore that I could hear the bones in his knee grinding and cracking against each other. His sleeve trailed on the ground in front of his open mouth, like a pool of blood. It was a long moment after that final gesture before anyone dared move or breathe. Then the hall broke out in applause.

Afterward, the scriptorium was abuzz with rumours....

Blackbird Lantern: Méemlam Lái (light.v-TOOL blackbird)
Veamándhi-of-the-Marshes:: Payussen Veamándhi (payuh-sen; swamp-GEN.pl)
Veamándhi-of-the-Marshes is not a temple of any great fame or distinction; sitting as it does on the borders of the Fever Waste makes it more concerned about the health and hygiene of the surrounding people than the sorcery, warfare, and liturgical wonders of the great temples.

Mere Sapnon Ki Rani: Conflict System

2005-08-30T04:15:00.000-04:00

See the original MSkR post for the introduction to this game. This system remains incomplete; another option for the failed klesha transfers is to have them act as simple success, but generate collateral suffering as well. I have strong doubts about the klesha transfers that reduce total threat weight.

Conflicts

Insert conflict trigger and outside-SIS resolution here

To begin you need to define each character's goals. Characters may continue participating in a conflict as long as they are able; prior to being disabled, they may surrender. The last character remaining in a conflict achieves his goal.

A conflict consists of a series of successive turns. In each turn, the character of highest-ranking Caste acts first; among characters of the same Caste, compare their talent score in that Caste, and proceed in order of decreasing talent.

What You Can Do

During a turn, you may take one of the following actions:

Attack

You use one of your skills to injure another character. Roll a number of dice equal to the relevant skill (with some dice mechanic that rewards high talent); said dice mechanic generates three outcomes: failure (infrequent), injury (frequent) and severe injury (frequent).

Injury inflicts a one-die penalty on the victim's use of the skill you attacked with. Severe injury has two possible effects on the victim; it can either reveal a Vel, one of the overhanging dooms that threatens a character engaging in confrontation, or it may increase the klesha of that Vel. See The Elephants of Four Quarters for more details on the Vel.

Failure sets you off-balance. When none of your Vels are visible, this isn't actually an issue; you just didn't get to do something interesting this turn. However, if the appropriate Vel is visible, then it becomes exposed. See See The Elephants of Four Quarters for more details on what exposure means.

Lament

You tell a sympathetic listener of your troubles. Your family will always listen to your troubles; you may also invite player characters to listen, but they may decline. For each listener, you transform one die of injury into a sympathy die; all the injuries you transform in this manner must be against skills associated with a single Caste. You choose a character to accuse, and then give each listener one of the newly created sympathy dice. The possessor of a sympathy die may spend it to roll an extra die in in an attack against the accused.

The possessor of a sympathy die may also spend it when the accused makes an attack; for each sympathy die spent, reduce the accused's attack pool by one.

The Elephants of Four Quarters

Each character exposes himself to four dooms when he engages in conflict; these are the Vels. When Vels begin to appear, you are able to perform several new actions during your turn in a conflict.

There are four Vels, each corresponding to a Caste. A Vel is first revealed when a character takes a severe injury to a skill in a Caste; further severe injuries in that Caste increment that Vel, while injuries to other Castes concern themselves with their corresponding Vels. When a Vel is revealed, the character inflicting the injury specifies the doom that will visit itself upon the victim, should that Vel fall. Its initial klesha is 1.

Klesha, weight, describes how threatening a Vel is. A Vel with low klesha is one that is light; it isn't putting a great deal of stress on the strings of destiny, and it's not likely to fall. As klesha increases, so does the danger of the Vel's falling. (Some inversion of the dice mechanic makes it such that any attack tempts the Vel at the same time.)

Exposure of a Vel indicates that a character's enemies have observed a temporary gap in his defences. When a Vel is exposed, it makes it drastically easier insert dice mechanic here to inflict simple and severe injuries on the character, within that Caste's field of influence.

??

A ?? is a tactical adjustment you may make when your opponent is under two or more Vels; the object is to lure him into shifting position. Roll an Air-skill (any Brahmana skill, Archery, Smithy, or Horse); on success, transfer klesha equal to your appropriate Talent (relative to the skill rolled) from one Vel to another of that opponent's Vels. On failure, you suffer one points' worth of the same adjustment; on severe success, the target's klesha increases by the appropriate amount, but the source's reduces by half that amount.

??

A ?? is a tactical adjustment you may make with your own threats when you are under three or four Vels. The object is to move closer or farther from a particular threat. Roll a Fire-skill (any Kshatriya skill, Prayer, Ornament, or Speech); on success, you may do one of two things. Either transfer one point from a source Vel to all your other Vels, or transfer one point from all your other Vels to a target Vel. On failure, either the target increases by the appropriate amount, but only one other Vel is decreased; or else all the other Vels are incremented, but the source is only decremented by one. On severe success, increment the target by one but reduce all the others, or else decrease the source by the appropriate amount but only increase one other.

??

A ?? is a tactical adjustment you may make when you are under two or more Vels; the object is to move into a more advantageous position yourself. Roll a Water-skill (any Shudra skill, Scripture, Battle, or Mystery); on success, transfer (some number of klesha) from one Vel to another of your Vels. On failure, you suffer one points' worth of the opposite adjustment; on severe success, the target's klesha increases by the appropriate amount, but the source's reduces by half that amount.

??

A ?? is a tactical adjustment you may make when two of your opponents are under Vels; the object is to shift the position of two characters relative to yourself. Roll an Earth-skill (any Vaishya skill, Celebration, Kingship, or Theft); results are as (Air adjustment) but with transfer magnitudes for successes reduced by half.

Vel: Tamil, spear. Klesha: Skt., weight.

The Scarlet Lark: Linguistic Appendix

2005-08-27T18:55:00.000-04:00

The following are detailed parses and translations for all the prior Scarlet Lark posts; further translations will be provided as footnotes to new posts.

Feneng 1

Feneng

fene<n>g

rest comfortably<INE>

place where one rests comfortably; refuge

She Who Runs
Mudjavíniak	ya	Rí
mudjw-rV-híniak	ya	rí
run away, flee-3s-PRS.PROG	REL	she[NOM.s]
she that flees; she that runs away

Finds-Comfort-in-Law
Sílire	Yinyísj-mí	Háthaíyen
síli-rV	yinyí-sj=mí	háthaí-én
find-3.s	law-ESS.s=in	comfort-ACC.s

Feneng 2

Takes-Refuge-in-Beauty
Fénegwe	Duthueísj-mí
féneg-rV	duthueí-sj=mí
rest comfortably-3.s	beauty-ESS.s=in

Feneng 3

Immeasurable-Dagger-of-Brotherhood
Tefúnwettzja	Róm'z	Kothás
tefa-ún-wédj-rV	rózb-n	kothás
measure-NEG-able to undergo-3.s	brotherhood-GEN.s	dagger[NOM.s]

Tarag Thán
tarag	thán
embrace	flame
Lit. "embrace flame"; archaic. Traditionally read as "Embraced by Flame" or "The Embracing Fire". Alludes to the fire curse of Ulmemr Yár, which surrounds the central islands of the city.

Kévezem Pillar-of-Sky
Kévezem	Táyn'an	Povu
kéve-sem	táyan-n	povu
sharp-eye[NOM.s]	sky-GEN.s	pillar
Keen-Eye Pillar-of-Sky

Red Cliff
Sáya	Tháya
red	shoulder; cliff

The People of the Dragon

Léhes Lizb Lit. "Flesh mountain."

Feneng 4

Hararo Páisí
hararo	páisí
harar-o	pái-sí
opinion-VOC.s	flower-DAT.p
flowers have an opinion; opinion becomes flowers

Flowing Serpent
Ulmemr	Yár
ulmem-r	yár
flow-PROG	serpent[NOM.s]
Flowing Serpent; archaic. Modern form, kédeniakwe yár.

Hospitable Spear
Thénde	Péle
hospitable	spear

Tangled Root of Heroism
Hujhul Kún'dh-mí Harástechhó
hujhul	kúdh-n=mí	haráste-s-chó
tangled	root-GEN.s=in	hero-ABSTRACT-INS.s
Lit. "Tangled by/among the heroism of root"; archaic or poetic. Root is likely an allusion to ancestors.

pái chweng
pái	chweng
flower	black
"Black flower", refers to the black petals of holy saffron. Chweng is a foreign borrowing from the language of sorcerors. The borrowing is also the source of the non-standard word order.

The Temples of Palau-of-the-Iron-Hand

Yetyem Lédh
ye<t>yem	lédh
hand<EARTH>	black; dark
Lit. "Black Hand"; the EARTH infix indicates that the hand is not fleshly, but made of some unliving material; a roundabout way of saying "iron hand".

Míkhi Nén'dh
míkhi	nédh-n
spindle	mist;vapour-GEN.s
Lit. "Vapour Spindle".

Phalai Pí
falai	pí
floor; platform; earth	tide; flowing water
Lit. "Tide Floor".

O mists, that you would clear!
Nédhhiul,	methne	kirikkíssne	lésesen!
nédh-siul	methe-ne	kirig-hís-sne	lé-se-sen
cloud-VOC.p	wish-1s	clear-IRR-2p	you-NOM.p-ACC.p
Overdeclination rules! Lit. "O clouds, I wish it were that you were clear!"

She-Rips-Error-to-Pieces

Resmeváracje

resm(e)-várath-rV

mistake-rip to pieces-3.s

The way of cutting fingers

káaládh

káa-ládh

move violently-finger

Lit. "fingers moving violently". Often misinterpreted as "stiff fingers" from káá-ládh.

MSKR: Invulnerability and दुःख

2005-08-25T00:53:00.000-04:00

Note: The conflict mechanic for MSKR strongly resembles EUCS.

Skills have different levels of vulnerability. The standard skill is mortal; it recieves injury normally. Heroic and divine skills are unusual: a heroic skill downgrades severe injuries to standard injuries, and a divine skill never suffers standard injuries. This doesn't actually make life easier for them; heroism deflects the reduced damage to the hero's family, while gods deflect their injuries onto the world. This is known as dukkha, suffering.

Invulnerability is the strongest defence; an invulnerable skill never suffers damage, but instead, the invulnerable character's player chooses another of the character's skills to deflect each injury to. It does not cause others to suffer dukkha.

The Temples of Palau-of-the-Iron-Hand

2005-08-22T12:32:00.000-04:00

It's my birthday (Ed.: This was originally posted Aug.24), so I get an aside. I think it's really dumb to dislike game rules. I don't care who you are; if you don't like games because they have rules, and they're good rules, you're a dumbass, and I cannot take you seriously.

Yetyem Lédh once stole the sword of Rakaui. It did not go well for him. It was hardly a century, or what passed for one in the time before the gods had won their Names, before the sword in its indignation sliced off his hand. He thought to repay the weapon for its insolence by melting it down and forging of it an iron hand, for which he has become named, but the weapon's soul fled before he could complete his revenge.

Yetyem Lédh, frustrated, began to build temples, each one a studied insult against another god, a spell to subvert and poison the other's power. Of these, the most famously beautiful are Míkhi Nén'dh, the Vapour Spindle at the mouth of the sacred River, and Phalai Pí, Tide Floor, the moving temple that was said to be hung from the ankles of the moon.

Míkhi Nén'dh

She murmured, nédhhiul, methne kirikkíssne lésesen, O mists, that you would clear! Obediently, the plumes of cloud folded themselves, closed their wings, and when finally settled, the black-beaked crane dipped its head in greeting.

Feneng was not prepared for this. After some time, she recovered her composure with some embarrassment and bent to stroke the bird's strong, cold back. She had been shocked; Míkhi Nén'dh's reputation did not do the temple much justice. At the top of its single tower, more mistcranes wheeled around a dance floor, each carrying a lantern that shone with strangely steady purple light. Eight bridges reached out to the land on either side of the River's gorge. Below the bridges, the temple narrowed to a point, like the root of a tree. The uttermost base of the temple, where it leaned on the stone River-shores, was no thicker than a man's femur. It ended in a tiny fist. It was much more imposing than Red Cliff, whose golden stucco walls were beginning to feel like home.

"This is the great monstrosity that so offends the principalities of ocean and sky?" Feneng asked the crane this, not expecting a response.

This contributed to Feneng's surprise when the bird gestured at some obscure architectural detail with a foot, and turned its head to the side, to get a better look. She took this to be an answer, as the bird's legs were not, as one would normally expect, the legs of a bird, but rather appeared to be scaled, webbed, plated imitations designed by some overeager crab. Seen in full face, the bird's eyes were iridescent but unintelligent, unmoving, glassy, and ultimately fishlike. When it opened its beak to cry, Feneng caught a glimpse of gill slits, and recoiled in horror and disgust at its branching, feathery tongue.

Phalai Pí

I went to Phalai Pí once, said Resmeváracje, when the rains had not favoured my family's lands I still had the hope that Our Lord The Maimed could corrupt the natural course of things to serve us better.

It is the tallest thing I have yet seen, so tall that its peak is wrapped in clouds even though the lower levels are flooded at high tide. It's woven of fish bones and silver wire, so from a distance it is as though a geyser or a great wave struck the shore and instantly froze. She paused. Things eat it. Everywhere you go, you can hear them, crunching at its foundations. You can see them moving, though the gaps in the latticed floors. Their great hall's sacred icons are all gnawed at the edges.

She shut her eyes and shook her head as though to clear it of the unpleasant memory, and went on...

Their priest demanded that I defeat an acolyte in single combat efore they would hear my plea. I was young, not yet having taken up the scarlet, and so I did not have káaládh, the way of cutting fingers. They gave us each a white dagger, made of milky glass or perhaps fish ivory. It was hard to tell because no sooner was the dagger in my hand than the acolyte flung himself at me.

He was not a good fighter. I gutted him before his hood could fall, which turned out to be for the best because if it had, I could not have killed him. He was my eldest sister's eldest son.

She-Rips-Error-to-Pieces is my name. Phalai Pí does not belong on these shores; by this name I have sworn to remove it.

That Infernal Clicking

2005-08-18T23:18:00.000-04:00

A Horrific Addon for Many Games

What You Need

A soundtrack with insect noises
Mood music
A sound-mixer such that you can play both at once and adjust their volume independently
A game system

Your Choice of Game System Should...

Have a frequently-used mechanic that generates random numbers, preferably one that doesn't get used with drastically increased frequency in some identifiable circumstance
Facilitate the use of many distinct characters for each player
Only permit a single player to frame scenes ever (this is a strong version of old-skool GM responsibilities)
Give players Something Useful To Do when their characters are not immediately present.

Setting Up TIC

This game is, like, the opposite of what I usually do when I design; it relies very heavily on information-hiding. You need one player who Knows It All; in like D&D you should assign this role to the DM.

All the other players should make harems of characters, like three or four each. You want a whole ton of these. Don't get overly attached to them, but make them strongly distinct to the naked eye.

The knowitall chooses a secret number. How he chooses this secret number will vary from mechanic to mechanic, but generally you want something you can spot easily and will happen no less frequently than one roll in 10; for a d20 game of TIC, I'd use the ones digit of the die as my secret number range.

Set the volume on your mood music to like 50%, and that of your insect noises to like 5%. Then turn down your overall volume until you can just barely talk over the music comfortably without raising your voices.

The imagined locale your game is set in must be a place where earshot and line-of-sight are restricted, like in a swamp at night, or an old and poorly-maintained mansion, or whatever. Use the restrictions of sense and space to set mood.

Playing TIC

This is, like, a survival horror thing, of the kind where you never get to see the monsters.

With that in mind:

The knowitall frames every scene. It's his sole responsibility to determine when and how characters appear and depart from stage.

Whenever the dice generate the secret number, the character the roll was made for is Eaten By The Clicking. The knowitall makes a note to himself about this, and does not announce it to the players. However, from this point onward, that character does not reappear onscreen. When the scene ends, knock up the Clicking like 5%. Consider increasing it slowly over the course of several seconds so it's not sudden and perceptible.

The first roll made by anyone after someone is Eaten sets the new secret number. That second roll doesn't actually trigger Eating, if the new secret number is the same as the old.

Multiple characters can be Eaten in the same scene. Raise the Clicking once for each eaten character.

Don't Eat a player's last character.

There's one way that players may control sceneframing: They may Go Looking For a character. This is a whatever kinda roll in the system you're using. "Success" indicates that, if the target was alive, the next time the searchers appear on screen they have the target in tow. If the target was Eaten, then the searchers have attracted the Clicking's attention, and they are Eaten the next time the secret number comes up, in the place of the character that triggered it.

Variation

A rare success on Going Looking can bring an Eaten character back, but the searcher still attracts the attention of the Clicking.

You Creep

Well, yeah. The idea here is to set up an uncertain, aurally uncomfortable situation, and have a completely uncontrollable condition that puts all the characters in very real but imperceptible danger. Particularly, if you're managing your volume right, the slowly escalating background noise will force everyone to talk subtly more loudly, which should stress them out noticeably.

I don't know whether I'd actually play this.

Feneng 4

2005-08-15T02:04:00.000-04:00

The world had lost all shape and meaning. It was a seamless blur of green, and red Feneng lay crumpled at its centre. Here at the southern extreme of Kvei-tzu Mu, the pines sweated sugary resin, and the moss of the sea drank it greedily, turning the tree trunks into columns of jade. Their highest branches filigreed the sky with viridian. Evil gasses of the swamp tinted the mist of daybreak with the colour of bile.

It was here, in this country that broke painters with despair, that the monastery at Red Cliff was wont to celebrate Hararo Páisí, the Flowers Have An Opinion rite.

Feneng liked to chew on things while she was thinking; now she chewed on a branch of wild coriander as she discussed her plans with a sympathetic wisteria. "This is ridiculous. How am I to find a flower in this forsaken place? Nothing blooms here; what god is there to awaken the buds, to tend them as their petals unfurl? None with that subtlety would venture into these wilds." She glared at her favorite dagger, forged of fine Zuqùntsìn damask bronze. "Someone must have made a law." It was filmed with a mocking layer of verdigris. "Verdigris."

The wisteria rustled and dropped a wilted leaf onto Feneng's shoulder, comfortingly.

"This is ridiculous," Feneng snapped. "Here I am, talking to a vine, crazy as a second son riding South to subjugate the Shchang and cover himself in glory..." She paused. "...cover myself... in glory. I'm going to make Dagger very sorry we became friends. Wisteria, bear witness!" Then she clapped her hands and leapt to the top of the tallest tree she could see.

"VILE! ACCURSED! EXILED! SPAWN OF KVEI-TZU MU! UNFIT TO OFFEND A CAMEL!" A pause for breath. "I am Seeks-Refuge-in-Beauty, Feneng (so they tell me)! I am (if my sources are correct) the Heir Embraced by Fire! The Flowing Serpent coils on my brow and I carry the sword of Veamándhi! I DEFY YOU! I MOCK YOU! I—" A decided rustling below. Feneng took a deep, steadying breath, tightened her sash, and dropped back to ground.

There was a some deer there. That was the only reasonable way to describe it. It was not so much several deer as it was a mass of deer-ness. Liquid brown eyes stared in every direction, under a thicket of antlers. It moved almost silently on many hooves.

The some deer was not very good at acting like some deer, Feneng thought. Deer do not have so many teeth, probably, and even if they do, it's impossible that they would be so imposing. They were sufficiently long and adequately sharp.

It seemed to agree, because it rippled and changed, making a loud groan much like the sound of a butcher sawing through a particularly thick bone. It began to put Feneng in mind of the exotic deep-sea fish the naturalists were so fond of displaying, all gaping eyes and gaping jaws full of tangled, translucent teeth. It was then that she attacked it. When it began to react, it was too late; its many-jointed limbs were already entangled in trailing sleeves of crimson, and before it could bite at her its mouths began to fill with gelatinous gore, as Feneng's dagger bespattered the two with the liquor of the monster's eyes. It was a short and ugly fight. Mercifully, the monster's blood smelled of foxgloves and wine.

Feneng found long grass, and began the long process of making a trophy of the monster's teeth. When her tooth crown was complete, there were more teeth, so she made bracelets. There were more teeth, so she made anklets. There were more teeth, so she made armbands. There were more teeth, and now she swore and vowed vengeance and curses upon Red Cliff, her ancestors, the god responsible for devising the first teeth, and so on, until she had strung all the remaining teeth on a line, and this she slung over her shoulder twice as a sash.

This figure, barefoot, every limb encircled by fangs, robes stiff as armor with unholy blood, with a monster's heart in one hand and a gory dagger in the other, walked for three days and nights without pause, until she arrived at the gates of Red Cliff.

"I have arrived!" said she. "Summon Immaculate-Dagger-of-Brotherhood, Hospitable Spear, and Tangled-Root-of-Heroism." The gatekeeper was not accustomed to this rite. He fled without pausing to discover who this apparition was, and shortly the three chiefest warrior-priests appeared, hands upturned and sleeves untied as if for battle.

"Lovely Refuge, you have returned to us!" was Master Dagger's response. He ran to embrace her, stopped short, and gestured vaguely. "You look like you have been cleaning the tombs. Meet us at the water, below the Endless Stair."

Feneng nodded, although inwardly she groaned. The Tedious Stair was not known for being an enjoyable or brief walk.

As he walked down the hall, Dagger mused. Foxglove, the heart-stopping herb?

By the time she arrived, the warrior trinity had changed their battle robes for white practice robes, which minimal garments consisted of little other than kilts and long sleeves that began at the elbow. They were arrayed around the ablution font, and each held an urn. Without pausing for pleasantries, they began the purification rite which concluded all major ordeals. The youngest, Hospitable Spear, intoned, "You who are dead to the world of goodness, be revived, by degree of earth—" he brought the smallest urn to Feneng's lips and she tasted rich, dark wine—

"—and sky—" continued Immaculate-Dagger-of-Brotherhood, and Feneng tasted honey made from jasmine.

"—and sea," concluded Tangled-Root-of-Heroism, giving Feneng a drink of salt water.

"Life repays the suffering of birth!" they shouted in unison, and three sleeves lashed out. Feneng found herself sinking to the bottom of the ablution font. It was rather cold.

She thrashed back up to the surface and heaved out of the water, gasping. "Oh for Ban's sake are you going to do that every time?" She coughed and shivered.

Spear was considered to be somewhat tactless. This popular opinion was not without its roots in truth! The young priest had risen in the ranks so quickly for his martial force, not his talents in diplomacy. At the moment he was diplomatically concealing a loud snicker with his hand.

"Actually, it's supposed to be a surprise," Tangled explained, distractedly. "Next time, one of us will have to interrupt another during some earlier bit of the ritual." He had already begun climbing the stair—not the Endless Stair—that led to the temple gardens. He stopped when Dagger threw a pebble at him. "What?"

"Look… pái chweng."

Feneng looked around in confusion. "What?"

"Congratulations, little queen." Tangled acted like this kind of thing happened every day. "That is a good omen indeed; now no one can question your prowess, mettle, or vision."

"Master Tangled, please, what are you talking about?"

"Look at your crown, Feneng."

She lifted the wreath from her hair, and gasped. The needlelike teeth had grown into graceful stems; at the tip of each bloomed a little flower, with tiny black petals and long, elegant stamens. It was a wreath of red saffron, the most sacred of spices, a prophetic drug, and the finest red dye known to living man. She looked down at her hands, her sash. Every tooth had blossomed thus.

Exalted Unified Conflict System

2005-08-11T17:30:00.000-04:00

In kinda-cheatsheet form; to be expanded outside of posting schedule...

Step 1: Declare Intent

Each player declares his character's goal, and the way in which he proposes to accomplish them.

Based on these methods, the ST chooses an Ability; this is the Ability the whole conflict will use. We'll call it the Focus. He chooses three Attributes, for Accuracy, Force, and Defence. For a shorthand, you might just want to use Dex/Str/Sta, Man/Cha/App, and Wit/Int/Per, but remember that this is a shorthand and not a full accounting of options. The Attribute set will not change throughout the conflict, but the Focus may shift repeatedly.

What You Do In A Turn

Conflicts proceed in "turns"; these are abstract time units whose lengths are defined at runtime.

Each turn, roll initiative (method TBD) and proceed with the characters in initiative order.

Each turn, you have one mobility action and one standard action. A standard action is a full dice action, which may be split or delayed as per the rules in Exalted. Similarly, it may include defensive actions. Mobility actions are slightly different; using a mobility action, you may only move "one turn's movement", or reFocus. You can perform mobility tasks with a standard action as well, but, unless you have an exotic source of multiple actions, reFocusing twice in a turn is not more useful than doing it once.

Attacks

The most common action you will take is an attack. The dice pool for this is Focus+Accuracy. Add the successes of this roll to Force to determine the "raw damage" of the attack. Subtract the defender's Focus; supernatural creatures add their Defence to this. The damage can't be reduced below the attacker's Essence. Roll the resulting dice pool at a difficulty of the defender's Essence; upon success, the defender suffers an injury.

Defensive Actions

You can take a defensive action to reduce the successes of an attack roll before damage is calculated. Each Exalted Caste is associated with a defensive Ability. You defend against attacks with the defensive Ability of the same Caste of your heritage; make a roll of this ability plus Accuracy and subtract the successes from attack successes. In addition, Dodge may always be used when a Dawn Ability is the Focus or when the goal defended against involves physical harm.

Attribute-based Exalted may use Defence alone, except when Dodge is applicable. Gods under the Sustainers rules may defend with specific abilities when the Focus falls under a Sphere; then they use the other Ability as defence.

Defences for Solars & Abyssals: Melee, Resistance, Lore, Larceny, Socialise
Defences for Sidereals: Endurance, Performance, Brawl, Stealth, Athletics
Defences for Dragon-Blooded: Linguistics, Awareness, Presence, Bureaucracy, Archery

ReFocusing

As your mobility action, you may reFocus, which means that you shift the conflict's Focus to another Ability in the same Caste, based on your own heritage. Obviously, Attribute-based Exalted cannot reFocus, nor can mortals; spirits may reFocus a conflict to another Ability that shares a Sphere with the current Focus.

Damage

An injury reduces your score in the Focus by 1; when you have 0 in the Focus Ability, then you must either reFocus on your next action, or suffer the consequences of defeat.

The People of the Dragon

2005-08-08T21:40:00.000-04:00

Far to the west lies Léhes Lizb, the Mountain of Flesh. It is a dragon; perhaps he is sleeping, perhaps he is dead. For fear of waking him, we dare not speak his name.

Long ago, a hero went to the mountain and returned with a burden: a bundle of dragonmeat. He cooked it over a fire of hazel and blackwand, and served it to his people. As they carved the meat, there was a wonder, for the patterns of fat and sinew wrote the secrets of immortality therein. This is the power of the dragon: they endure. They cannot be killed by injury. They do not die of old age. Their flesh does not rot. Cut from their veins, their blood does not cool; it remains hot and golden.

Dining on the dragon changed the hero's people. They stopped aging. They stopped dying.

They began to go mad.

The eldest of the people of the dragon retreated from the world; being turned into unchanging immortals shocked them, not at all pleasantly. They took poison to fall into endless slumber, or closed the gates of their silver towers, never to be reopened; one famously tanned his flesh into leather and alloyed his bones with steel to make a quiver of spears for his heirs. His blood still flows in the fountains of his rooftop garden.

The second generation were no longer human. Their eyes were silver and violet and blue, like flowers or coins; their voices like battle drums. They became warlords, each the equal of the others, and all were thus forgotten.

The People of the Phoenix

Every phoenix is different.

A Shchang, passing through our city in pursuit of a stolen horse, once told me that the king of Kúddhim keeps a flagon of phoenix's blood, a shining alloy of honey and fire, hidden in his treasure vault. Whenever someone of the royal line dies, his heir takes the throne. Then, the late king's heart is washed with the immortal blood and planted in the royal tomb. In nine nights, a copper raven claws its way from the earth, who speaks with the king's voice and knows his dead mind. Thus they have preserved their wisdom unbroken since the dawn of the world, so they say.

The Zuqùndhoth pass down a tale of the Blue Bird of the East, who leads ships away from deadly reefs. It exacts a harsh price; the captain of every such ship becomes day-blind, only able to see when the face of the sun is hidden.

There is a legend among the Marunddhaùn of another Shchang hero, Chvie-Jen Four Winds Sing, who was first famed for her mad thirst for godblood. When she came upon white Krii, the night phoenix, she was enlightened, and became a great force of mercy; now the place where the slaying took place is covered by trailing golden jasmine, and white birds-of-paradise make their nests there; they can be found nowhere else.

Torchbearer Cheat Sheet

2005-08-05T03:46:00.000-04:00

Thursday ends when I go to bed.

Setup

Characters

You assign your character five Traits, and then choose a Conflict from among those offered to you; its Importance is 7.

Torches

Make approximately n+2 Torches. A Torch requires a meaning, symbology, and representation. Pass 'em out.

Playin'

First time round, introduce each character and their Conflict.

Afterwards, rotate through characters as you please, running them until you roll a Trial. Then immediately move on.

In A Scene

Narrate freely until someone contests something you're doing, or it is an obvious component of your Ordeal. See Vincent's List entry for objection procedure, I'm too tired to look it up. When you express a Trait, earn a drop of Fuel.

When you're contested, tag somebody to narrate for your resistance; if it's an owned character then its owner narrates. Check for Allies. At this point anyone may focus the Trial, see below. Else, continue. Each other player may offer a Torch to one of you. If you accept, they outline the Torch's relevance in the conflict and the recipient narrates it formally. Roll your side's Traits + Torches against your Ordeal's. Your opponent assigns you a new Trait if you lose; you expend a Trait, losing it, and drop the Importance of the Obstacle, and the next one containing it for each 2 excess margin, by 1.

Caring About It: You can spend X Fuel before rolling a Trial to multiply dice contribution from Torches by X.

Allies: You can spend X Fuel, X = some other person's Ordeal's Importance, to nest that Ordeal into the one you're in right now; you get involved in his story for its duration, and you both add your Traits together to roll against it.

Focus: Spend X Fuel to turn a Trial into an Ordeal X. This can only occur once per scene; several players may share the cost.

Feneng 3

2005-08-01T15:40:00.000-04:00

As the martial arts lesson wound down, Immeasurable-Dagger-of-Brotherhood gestured Feneng over to his side, mopping sweat from his face. "You learn quickly. Welcome to the class."

Feneng finished tying up the sparring mat she was holding and shrugged. "Thank you. I did grow up in Tarag Thán, Master Dagger. We are warriors as well as courtiers."

Immeasurable-Dagger-of-Brotherhood nodded. "Will you join us in the baths?" Feneng looked a bit surprised. "We are priests, you recall."

"Ah, naturally. It would be unseemly to attend the evening prayer reeking of sweat."

"Just so."

Master Dagger's expression suddenly became very serious. Feneng noted that she and the instructor were the only two remaining in the steaming bath; the remainder of the students, acolytes, had scattered to perform their various household duties. "Finds-Comfort-in-Law does not want you here, Refuge."

"What, why?"

"You don't see it in her face? If your family does not take the throne, her line stands to inherit, via Prince Kévezem of Pillar-of-Sky."

Feneng nodded. "The abbess tells me that he is a wicked man." They had only recently reviewed the complex succession traditions of the holy city. "I had thought her eyes were a funny colour."

"He does not like Red Cliff; she is concerned. But he is better than many."

"You say that as though many are also better than him."

"I would not be lying if I said that, either. There are salamanders in that family." When Feneng raised an eyebrow, he yelped, "What? You obviously have a little of the golden blood yourself."

New Posting Schedule

2005-08-01T15:16:00.000-04:00

From now onwards, I'm adopting a twice-weekly posting schedule for Raven Swallows the Sun. Every Monday and Thursday, I'll post something, and once every week, I'll post some piece of game design. These weekly pieces will be on some recurring topic, and tagged as such.

Optional Saturday entries will introduce new topics.

In the event that I'm unable to post something on a mandatory posting day, as soon as the condition preventing me resolves itself, I'll post once each Saturday and twice on regular days until the backlog clears.

The current list of topics for weekly articles is as follows:

Mere Sapnon Ki Rani
Torchbearer
The Scarlet Lark setting for Torchbearer
Feneng vignettes for the Scarlet Lark
"Shreyas rants about games unproductively" will never be a weekly topic.

The Scarlet Lark

2005-07-20T18:56:00.000-04:00

By the custom of my people, my childhood has been cut from my mind. I have become a knight-priest of Veamándhi; I wear the priest's long-sleeved robe and I carry the blue jade sword Lúlyun. Now I must return home, to reclaim my family, my childhood, and my queendom.

My Dream Videogame

Visual Style

I'm thinking that this game has a really lush, surreal look about it; it uses a weird, iridescent lighting effect (I'm thinking that lights with this property vary in hue based on their intensity and reflection angle) to set off focal points and supernatural effects, like the velvety black motion trail made by Lúlyun.

The game takes place mainly outdoors; the sky should always be visible, even when Feneng is indoors; it's seen through windows and skylights, open gates, crumbling gaps in ancient walls. The world is crawling with miscellaneous wildlife – butterflies leap out of grasses as they are disturbed, there are birds and wild cats in the trees, the game's background music is punctuated with birdsong.

The architecture and costuming of the game borrows ancient Chinese and Thai visuals, but tempers them with a bolder, cleaner aesthetic; you are likelier to see a character in a green robe with a single silver phoenix embroidered on the breast and sleeve than you are to see the same character in a robe that's covered with multicoloured dragons.

I don't really think that the game will have a lot of voice-overs, for reasons that will become clear later. Instead, I'm thinking that dialogues take a graphic-novel format; exchanges are presented as a series of stills or slow-motion events (using the graphics engine) with superimposed speech bubbles. Characters tend to gesticulate in a stylized manner when they talk.

In the occasional cinematic flashback, the visuals are all sepia-toned, except for one color on the narrating character's person, which remain intact. This is their totem colour, and appears in all their accessible outfits. Naturally, Feneng's colour is red.

As an action-adventure, this is a game full of monsters. These are occasionally wild beasts of the countryside, but most of them are the inhuman and dangerous skinchangers, who are universally able to alter their shapes, within a particular theme. One might have access to arachnid shapes, for instance. Skinchangers will occasionally shift forms during battle, and they can do so while still fighting. The arachnid who changes from spider to scorpion will be able to lash at you with its new claws even as they are increasing to the appropriate size and shape. The occasional human opponent will always have a move set as broad and deep as Feneng's own.

Feneng, the star of the game, is a wuxia swordswoman in a bright, almost luminous red robe. As the game goes on, you accumulate costume options, and they all organically respond to the environment – becoming dark and clingy when wet, changing colour when dusty, and so on. The red robe is a focal-point sort of item, though, and it has long trailing sleeves that are continuously in serpentine motion. When Feneng fights, she is a hypnotic swirl of red and black. Feneng's speech is usually animated when it's voiced over; she has constantly moving eyes and tends to gesture almost violently. It should be quite striking when she doesn't.

Gameplay

The main story of this game is that of Feneng's triumphant return to her homeland, all the while relearning what it is like to be part of her world and unearthing her past. Later, an element of intrigue and espionage appears as Feneng tries to recover her ancestral privilege.

For the most part, think of the heavy exploration and puzzle-solving style of Metroid Prime. The Scarlet Lark also has some more difficult, rewarding puzzles, which are optional for completion of the game but will unlock things such as new outfits, secret areas, new swords, magical powers, and new playable characters, who are pulled from the pool of NPC opponents in the game (remember them?). These optional puzzles are like Myst-level difficulty; the clues are there in the game but they require observation and planning to solve.

The combat system in this game is of variable complexity. You can have "casual" fights, in which Feneng's combat abilities are not fully available and the battles are shorter and easier, but less rewarding, or you can use Lúlyun's magical abilities to bind yourself and some opponent(s) into a "duel", which is more difficult, but Feneng's combat abilities are deeper and the rewards are better and more interesting. You accumulate some supernatural abilities as the game goes on, like being able to toss chi balls or slow down time or what have you, which supplement Feneng's built-in Lightfoot and swordsmanship. Broadly speaking, casual combat is reminiscent of God of War, while duel combat is more complex, looking like Soul Calibur.

It's not important early in the game, but there's some kinda cool dialogue system through which you can manage how well people think of you and deduce information about their relationships. This doesn't really need to be particularly amazing, just well-crafted; the bulk of the energy in this game is going into the puzzles and action.

You can replay the game as blinged-up Feneng or any of the various unlockable characters, who generally don't have as many costume options except those that are necessary to solving puzzles in the game, but are otherwise just as deep in gameplay terms. There's also a vs. mode where several characters can fight it out in any of the game's areas.

Interface

I imagine the sky as a kind of HUD that shown non-essential information; you can kinda note what's going on there while you're playing, or get a better look when you go into the pause menu. Info is conveyed through cloud formations and constellations, that are visible both day and night.

More essential information stays on the screen in the traditional "floating widget" fashion; when a widget is unnecessary (as when the character is not fighting or a gauge is full) the widget hides itself, so you can get a really generous view of those lush environments. On rare occasions, the game conveys nonessential puzzle-related information through a system of non-obvious omens. The built-in hint system, for instance, is embodied in a scarlet lark.

Feneng 2

2005-06-23T21:39:00.000-04:00

"We found you in a rosebush," said the nun. By some secret art, she had tied her long sleeves into a complicated knot while they were walking. That explained why all the doors in this place had holds so close to the floor; the monks could slide them open with their feet. "So, we thought we would call you Takes-Refuge-In-Beauty. If you are here to be a nun, that is."

Feneng looked at the nun's robe she was wearing, the untied sash slipping out of its loops, felt her tangled hair. "I don't remember another name. Or another plan."

Finds-Comfort-In-Law did not smile. "At the dawn prayer, we watch in silence as an acolyte opens the windows of the prayer hall. Find a seat, and when it's over, meet me at the door and we'll go see the abbess." Feneng nodded. She found a seat in the rearmost row and waited. Tong. Tong. Tong. Finally, someone walked toward the front of the room. She was dressed in blue, and carried a long wand with an oil lamp hanging from the end.

The front of the prayer hall was one long bank of windows, Feneng discovered. Each was covered with a sheet of black paper, and the acolyte touched each paper with the lamp in turn. The fire slowly receded to reveal the sun hanging low over the horizon, and below it, something flat and covered with mirrors. Feneng gasped.

"It is the sea," someone whispered.

"We have been expecting you," said the abbess.

"What?"

"Yes, what?" asked Feneng, irritably.

The abbess pushed forward the thing on her desk. It was a crown, a silver laurel wreath with a glass sphere twined in it. The sphere was half-full with water, it seemed. "You remember this?" Flames spun over the surface of the water as she spoke. "All the heirs of your line come here wearing this crown."

Feneng dropped her head on the desk and shut her eyes, while the crown snaked up her arm and nestled in her hair. "No."

Future Torchbearer

2005-06-20T03:32:00.000-04:00

I have a few things that I could write for Torchbearer right now, but I am not going to list them. Instead, I ask you, the readers, what stuff is missing from the prior posts, that you want to know about?

Feneng 1

2005-06-20T03:21:00.000-04:00

Snap. Crack. The beasts were getting closer. Feneng covered her nose and mouth with a sleeve; she did not want to smell them. She ran until the moon set and the deepest darkness fell and she could run no more, and then she heard them in the distance and started to run again, waving her arms in front of her so she would not break her nose against a tree. She did not stop, and the forest closed in above her. Here in the north, the trees grew so thick on the foothills of the Jaw that night and day could not be separated but from above the trees. She ran.

"How long have I been running?" said she, at last. She did not break her desperate stride and no answer came to her. "What am I running from?" Feneng did not remember. As she continued to run, she continued to forget. She forgot her name. "I am She Who Runs," she announced.

Finally She forgot to run.

Tong. Tong. Tong. Tong. Tong. Tong. Tong.

"You're awake!" A rotund monk was filling teacups on the table beside Feneng's bed. "Hurry, take your tea! We are already late for the dawn prayer."

Feneng rubbed her eyes, stretched, and knocked over her tea with a trailing scarlet sleeve. She stopped and gazed sleepily at the mess for a bit, and then, "What am I doing here?"

"No time, no time. Don't worry about the tea; follow Finds-Comfort-In-Law."

At that instruction, a young lady glided across the room and held out a hand. "Come, after the morning prayer the abbess will be excited to see you." Without waiting for a response, she walked out the door.

Feneng shook her head. "—I'm sure that she will." She followed her down the windowless hall.

Vincent's Checklist

2005-06-13T20:41:00.000-04:00

So I'm going through this useful-looking thing, trying to figure where Torchbearer stands. I'll update this post as work on TB continues, or alternatively just comment in the new stuff.

Mechanical Rules For...

Opposition

I hope that this is made clear in the mechanics of Trials and Trait/Fuel manipulations, which set one player against one another in a sort of uncomplicated way. It'd be interesting to give them some more active roles here, as opposed to simply setting them as narrators.

The more involved opposition would probably involve some kind of Fuel bidding procedure.

The major positioning mechanism lives here in the form of Torch offerings, but these are only positional for the parties who are not in fact pivotal to the Trial. This is kind of wonky, I think. What now?

Situation

Shit, man. I am not even sure I know what situation is. I need help here.

IIEE

Gotta work on this. I think, like, there needs to be a "say yes or roll the dice" model going on here, even though I like the "yes, but at what cost?" thing that I did with Mridangam. That's probably too freewheeling for this design, though. This thing needs to be separate from Trials and the pacing/structuring function they serve.

One possibility is this: During your scene, you narrate the actions of your hero and their consequences in the world. You can't solve the problems of an Ordeal with narration alone; you must resolve those via Trials. If the owner of your current Ordeal thinks you're trying to weasel out of it via narration, he may call for a Trial. However, you may declare other effects in the world. Your ability to do this is infinite, but bounded by the approval of the other players. Any other player may interrupt your narration to state that he objects to a particular result you have described. He must specify exactly what event he is objecting to, specify an alternative result, and spend some quantity of Fuel to purchase an equal number of dice. In response, you have several options. You may simply say that it's not worth it, and accept that your result doesn't happen. Alternatively, you may narrate some string of events that expresses your character's Traits and how those Traits lead to the event you desire. For each Trait you invoke, you may spend 1 Fuel to purchase a die. When you're done narrating your efforts, roll your dice against the objector's. If you have more successes, your result occurs. If not, then the objector's alternative result does.

The major reward mechanism, Fuel, lives here in EE.

Resolution & Outcome

Pretty much handled in Trials here.

Consensus About

What Each Player Should Do Right Now

This is really clear in my head, but not on paper yet.

Consensus On Two Of These

Characters

Yeah. All over that.

Situation

Please see above!

Setting

Not gonna go there. Setting is an ugly myth.

Colour

Yeah. Torches pwn j00.

The Other Two

Yeah, so, needing to write guidelines about this. I have some clues about what it means for a Torch to be expressed in the setting, and situation is still a black box to me.

The Big Six

Violence, sex, children, money, God, or art. Nothing firm on these yet, but they would do well to be discussed as good pegs to hang Torches on.

TB: Traits

2005-06-12T22:44:00.000-04:00

So, what is a Trait, anyway?

A Trait's something that is, right now, memorable and interesting about a character. They sway the results of Trials. Traits also permit you, the player, to inject your influence into the narrative, in two opposing ways. They are a double-edged sword!

Imposing Influence

When you assign a Trait to a character, you are making a statement about him that is assumed true. Think about this for a while, you can do cool stuff with it.

Accumulating Influence

When someone observes you describing a character expressing one of his Traits, he will award you with a point of Fuel. It's okay for you to gently remind people that you're expressing a Trait, like by subtly giving key words in your narration extra emphasis. He doesn't take this from his own reserve; it just bursts into existence in your hands. This Fuel will permit you to generate Ordeals!

How To Make Me Buy Your Game

2005-06-07T14:43:00.000-04:00

This post is about my opinions on the presentation and quality of games. It is ranty.

Give It A Good Title

I am deadly serious here. There is nothing that will stop me from buying a game faster than a title that's deliberately constructed to be a boring or nonexistent word when acronymed. FATE, GURPS, CODA, S(Where is the W?)ORD, &c., all come to mind here. Why are you obscuring the game's name behind its initials? Is it that bad? Yes, I know that it is. Stop doing that.

If you want me to buy your game, its title better tell me something about it, or, better, raise a question about it. Don't be too verbose; we are young and fearless and have no time for that. Don't tie yourself up in someone else's conceptual space*.

Take great care when punctuating your title.

Woozly fantasy words with interspersed punctuation and caps don't cut it, either. HârnMaster? Secret of Zir'An? Who are we here? Okay, I'm a linguist. I like my words to be mangled systematically.

If you are extending a preëxisting property, then please come up with a new, related title for it. I am doubly likely to give something a second look if my first impression of it is pleased surprise at the depth and cleverness of your scholarship! Thus, until someone writes Quentasta Aratar of the First Age of Middle-Earth, I am not buying a Tolkien game.

Stay Away From Cheesecake

By which I mean, "I should be able to read these books around my parents." This isn't so much a self-consciousness thing as it is a subject-matter thing; if I want to look at big excited boobies I will locate an appropriate website, thank you.

State and Meet your Design Goals

Really, people. Just, like, demonstrate that you know you're a craftsman and you understand your craft in a workmanlike fashion. It's not tough.

Get Me Going

This is, like, probably the toughest bit here, because there are several ways to do this and they're all kind of interrelated.

Presence

I won't know about your game unless you tell me! Similarly, I won't look at your game favourably unless I like you. This means, like, advertise your game, be enthusiastic about it, but don't let it override your personality. Be an interesting person in your own right, or else don't have a personal presence at all! It's better to be a faceless designer than it is to be a shill.

Particularly, make a habit of taking critique with good grace. Communicate with it, learn from it.

Beauty

Okay, so I have tastes, and this is where those come out.

This becomes less useful as advice to designers who want their games purchased at all, and more useful as advice to designers who want their games purchased by me. I realise there are not that many of you out there.

Characters. Games tend to have characters! If you do, then they should not be losers, or at least not unmitigatedly so. I am not really interested in telling stories about losers. I tend to like it when characters have abilities that surprise and amaze me, but this is by no means mandatory.

Settings. I like it a lot when cosmologies are self-consistent in some manner. They don't have to be logically consistent with the world if they are not literally true in the world, but they do have to have some mythological element of making sense. Yeah, I know that's a really weird statement. I also have standards for linguistic plausibility! Fictional languages contain many pitfalls. If you're going to use them, then put some linguistically-aware thought into them. Come up with a systematic, meaningful orthography. Concern yourself with syllable structure! Most fictional languages will end up being naming languages, so you don't need to go into syntax unless you really want to. It is often a better course of action to simply sidestep the issue by using an appropriately resonant natural language.

All this talk assumes a fantastical setting. Yes! For my part, I am not overly interested in "real world" settings. There's a lot of baggage there that I'd rather do without.

Systems. This is mainly for another post. Just one tidbit: If the system goes into detail about some facet, then I, as a player, want some influence over that detail. I want the power to make decisions about it.

Appearance! Holy crap! Don't lay out your book like it is ugly. C'mon now, you know who I am looking at. HeroQuest. Dungeons & Dragons 3e. Torment my eyes! Did you seriously pay people for those readability disasters? Why? Take some notes from Engel, but don't let your layout excuse bad systems writing. d20 Engel? I am looking at you. It really pays to have a nice logotype and a clean, expressive cover graphic. See Nobilis.

*: This is the great downfall of With Great Power..., which always makes me think, ...comes great fucking Spiderman. I really don't like Spiderman. Of all the superheroes that I don't like, I like Spiderman the least.

Mere Sapnon Ki Rani

2005-06-07T01:02:00.000-04:00

The Queen of My Dreams

The palaces of ancient Bharata are shrouded in mystery and darkness, nestled between jungle hills or at the base of golden cliffs that shade them from the sun. They ring courtyards studded with mango groves and sacred wells large enough to build entire new palaces inside them; the sun doesn't reach their bottoms, and the water there is always cold and still.

The palaces are filled with priests and princes, sorceresses and queens. They are filled with liars.

To the south and west, across the narrow ocean, lies the Crescent of the Sun and the mad Solar Barbarians, ever-obessed with their religion of paper, their armies led by astrologers and geometricians rather than generals and warriors.

Who Are The Characters?

The characters are the warrior nobility and learned priesthood of Bharata. They are the select few, the people in the world who can act with resource and conviction, who have the leisure to pursue selfish and nonutilitarian aims. Sometimes they are other people, too, farmers and retainers and foreigners, those who lean on the freedom of the wealthy.

According to the sages, men can be evaluated along four axes of inborn talent, which correspond to the four social castes that Bharata divides itself into. Each talent is linked to four fields of training, which are, to an extent, independent of that talent; for workmanlike tasks, training is training, but the ability to produce works of art, perform innovation, and overcome obstacles are all things that depend on talent.

The talent of Air corresponds to the brahmana caste, who serve as scholars, scientists, and priests. In ancient times, they were the "tenders of the fire," who kept the village's hearth burning, before the miracle of flint was discovered. The skills of Air are:

Vision:
Prayer:
Celebration:
Scripture:

The talent of Fire corresponds to the kshatriya caste, the administrators of kshatar, territory. They are warriors and leaders. The skills of Fire are:

Archery:
Splendour:
Kingship:
Battle:

The talent of Earth corresponds to the vaishya caste, the craftsmen, farmers, merchants, and other skilled labourers of the country. The skills of Earth are:

Smithy:
Ornament:
Tilling:
Cattle:

The talent of Water corresponds to the shudra caste, the "outsiders." This is the caste assigned to those whose calling is unknown, which makes people misunderstand it; the role of the caste is to serve as communicators, emissaries, and traders to foreign lands, and so, people with mysterious origin are assumed to be shudra from another tribe. The skills of Water are:

Horse:
Speech:
Theft:
Mystery:

What Do They Do?

Characters fight. There are a variety of ways that they come into conflict! More on this later?

Resolving Trials

2005-06-02T15:34:00.000-04:00

Terminology evolves.

At some point you will say, "I have struggled mightily against this ordeal. I wish for my progress to be measured in the annals of myth and history." You will thus initiate a Trial.

A Trial is a small turning point within an Ordeal. The event of resolving a Trial is a small moment of revelation where the players learn the scope and impact of a character's actions.

To determine this, the protagonist's player rolls one six-sided die for each Trait his character has, and the Ordeal's creator rolls one die for each point of Importance the Ordeal has. Each player discards any die that rolled 4 or greater and adds up the pips on those that remain. Compare the results (soliciting terms for this value here); the character wins if his result is greater than the Ordeal's. Else, the character loses.

Complications

Torch Offerings

When a Trial is declared, before the dice are rolled, each other player has the opportunity to offer one Torch to either the protagonist or the antagonist. Should that player accept, then the player offering the Torch will first narrate some event that shows how the Torch's principle gives that player an advantage, and then hands him the physical representation of the Torch. This action grants him an additional die to his roll.

Layering (desperately seeking words!)

When a Trial is declared, before the dice are rolled, noninvolved parties may spend Fuel to transform the Trial into an Ordeal; the Ordeal has 1 Importance per drop of Fuel spent to transform it. If several people want to transform a Trial, then only the person who wants to spend the most Fuel does so. Once an Ordeal's Importance has been set, it cannot be further altered by Fuel.

This new Ordeal is contained inside the previous Ordeal.

Alliance

When a Trial is declared, before the dice are rolled, a noninvolved party may spend as much Fuel as the current Significance of its Ordeal. In doing so, he becomes involved in that Ordeal, and fights against it alongside the other character, though for his own purposes. From his perspective, the Ordeal is contained inside whatever Ordeal he is currently opposing. Alliance allows both characters to add their Traits together when rolling Trials.

Results of Trials

Character Victory

When a character wins a Trial, subtract the Ordeal's result from his, and divide the difference by 2. Round up. This gives you the Trial's depth; it tells you how far-reaching its impact is. The victory drills through that many layers of Ordeals nested within each other, reducing the Importance of each by 1.

Winning a Trial also resolves one of the character's Traits; he loses that Trait. The player chooses which Trait is resolved thus, and it's his responsibility to explain, in narration, how the loss of this Trait came about and how the affected Ordeals came to be influenced. The other players will be excited to offer suggestions about these events, and the player should not feel embarrassed to use them.

A character's allies do not reduce the Importance of their Ordeals, but they do lose Traits.

Obstacle Victory

When a character loses a Trial, he finds that his journey has become a little more complicated. The instigator of the Obstacle assigns him a Trait, and narrates how this Trait came about.

All the characters in an alliance gain Traits when they lose a Trial.

Torchbearer Reborn

2005-05-10T00:55:00.000-04:00

I'm not going to try and describe Torchbearer anymore. Not with any kind of a capsule summary, anyway. It's too complicated in my brain for me to put that in words just yet. Instead, I am going to try and write its text.

Setting up Torchbearer

Initial Estimations

Before you do anything mechanical, talk to the people you're going to be gaming with and get an idea of what they are interested in doing. Are they interested in a languid yarn in the style of the Arabian Nights, or maybe a rollicking, proselytising pirate crusade? Is there a particular style of speech you want to use for the game, or any particular etiquette involved? Where will the game take place? If you're playing over the long term, when are you going to do that? Where? How are you planning to handle it when players are absent? How will you handle guests? These are all things to consider, and, more importantly, discuss.

Character & Conflict

Every character in Torchbearer is defined by his essential Conflict. This is the thing that drives that character to be the centre of a story. These Conflicts may be overt or subtle; Disney's Ariel has a Conflict about wanting to join the surface world, while the Beast has a rather more abstract Conflict between love and his jaded, callous demeanour.

When you create a Torchbearer character, you will not assign him a Conflict. Simply give him five Traits. A Trait is something distinctive about that character, something that a story would take note of, like Ariel's beautiful voice or Hercules' strength or the glittering coppery blood that Chvie-Jen Four Winds Sing gained when she slew the night phoenix and drank the burning ichor in his heart. At this point, you would be well-advised to keep your earlier discussions in mind. It may not be appropriate for you to make a melancholy robotic butler for a Greek war epic. You should probably be talking about your character ideas, trading back and forth ideas for Traits, and doing all that kind of stuff while you're doing this. You want to give each Trait a name, and write two notes about it: how it might help you, and how it might hurt you. You don't even need to define all of your Traits, but don't short yourself! For each Trait you leave undefined, mark down a blank spot on your character record that you can put a Trait in later.

Once you have described the character and defined his Traits, each other player will offer you a Conflict you may involve him in. Eventually, you must accept exactly one of these. Before doing this, though, discuss the offers with the players that offer them; maybe you want to combine two ideas you like into a single Conflict instead of discarding some player's input at the cost of your and his enjoyment. Once you've arrived at a Conflict you find interesting, write it down, and record which players' ideas went into it. A Conflict has a number that indicates its persistence in the story, called its Importance. Your initial Conflict has an Importance of 7.

Characters work through their Conflicts through a series of struggles known as Episodes. Each Episode of a foundational Conflict is a miniature Conflict in its own right; those Conflicts may contain Conflicts of their own, if you are so inclined.

Torches

The next thing you will need to think about are Torches. Torches are lights that illuminate the world. The Torches in your game are the things that tie the stories of your heroes together; the reason that they are created after the characters are is so that your Torches can reflect and complement them, rather than overshadowing them and determining their properties. You need about one Torch per player, plus two or more "for the pot."

A Torch is, most importantly, a statement about the world, like The Gods Are Cruel or Beauty Is Transient; this statement is reflected in the stories told about the world. It is rare for a Torch to be unambiguously positive; those sorts of things don't really tell us much about the world, because they're not noticeable enough to be interesting and parts of stories, so be wary of Torches like Evil Is Dumb unless you're deliberately trying to reinforce that ideal ham-handedly. A Torch also shouldn't make statements about the way conflicts resolve, so Good Always Wins In The End isn't a very good Torch.

After determining what your Torches are, you should think of a few things in the world that are connected to each one. The Gods Are Cruel might, for instance, be connected to thunder, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, as well as bulls and vultures. Beauty is Transient might be linked to butterflies, flags, mirrors, and song. These things can either be things that embody the principle, or they can be implicitly redefined, as the bull is, by their association with it.

The last thing you need is, for each Torch, something that you can pass around between players that represents that Torch. You can have something as simple as an index card for each Torch, indicating its name and its associations, or you might want to do something a little more elaborate and tie an action figure to a rock for The Gods Are Cruel, recalling Prometheus, and taking a wilting flower to represent Beauty is Transient.

Once you've done all this, distribute Torches between players, as evenly as possible. You should have a few odd Torches; just hand those to people at random, or use a method you prefer.

Conflict Templates

You don't need these for characters' basic, foundational Conflicts, but you want to collect a set for elaborating their Episodes. This serves two purposes: it gives you some set of ideas to riff off of when expanding Conflicts, and it allows you to subtly flavour your stories, in a way similar to the operation of Torches; both elements create repeating motifs.