beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

This morning's dream was simples yet disconcerting: I dreamt I tried to sing A Kind of Magic, the album, but had forgotten the words. Which seems likely after the general passage of time, but, time passing goes quicker than you think, so. Dosconcerting.

Also in the dream Highlander got acquired by one of the major comic companies and integrated with their comics code approved lines, so there was a bloke in a trenchcoat who might look like Connor if you squint, and he had a katana, but as far as you could tell it only hit scenery, statues, and other swords. Nobody actually got hurt, because he's a Hero in a Comic and Heroes Don't Decapitate.

... the problem is that, even awake, I find this all too plausible. Just ignore the series and all attempts at moral quandry, and just throw a dude with a catchphrase at a number of fights. That's ... a bit too comics.

People would probably complain that he's Wolverine with fewer blades or Deadpool without the ... everything else.

Also is trenchcoat still the magic user uniform of choice? They'd complain his kind of magic wasn't whooshy boom enough. Just a bit of lightning and some water breathing.

... I was reading on tumblr about the DCification of John Constantine and apparently my dream brain reeeeeally thinks they have a point. *sigh*

I've been pondering army uniforms lately, as part of thinking about Wrath of the Righteous.
The thing with symbols is they have no meaning until they make meaning. We've all got a store of them from our particular path through our particular culture, but we won't quite match. Which is a line of thought that leads to concluding true communication is impossible, but.
Costumes are a whole set of communications. Connotations. Symbols.
And in things set in a vaguely real world, or an urban fantasy using the here now, or some heightened version thereof, you have a very rich visual language to draw on, because it includes everything from daily fashion for the last lifetime of years to haute couture by way of comic books and stage plays. The visual language is already heavily populated with meaning.
But sidestep into another world, and you defamiliarise, everything.
In theory tou have to rebuild everything from scratch.
In practice of course everyone imports their existing decoder modules with a side order of You Are Wrong.

I've read so many Pathfinder books that I have a lot of instant associations with symbols they gave meaning in the rule books, like holy and unholy symbols. I don't have most of the colors memorised though, and I have looked them up repeatedly so it's not for want of trying. I might remember some of the national flags, maybe, since I've read the world guide. But national fashions are mostly going to go right past me, except for Osirion, because they don't wear much and it's ancient egypt style.

So playing Wrath of the Righteous I recognised Iomedae's sword, but none of the other things on shields, first time through.
And the crusader army all have their colors, and I guess when you run around camp you can find out which are which sort of, but then what do they mean? Not a lot, then or later, as it turns out.

So you've got empty signifiers that take a bunch of learning, add nothing, and turn out not to be necessary anyway.
Not ideal.

So I was thinking how in fantasy stories we default to clothing styles that were worn at very roughly the same century as the armour styles they go with - very very roughly, you kind of get a five hundred year range sometimes - but, while some of that would depend on cloth technology, a lot of it was optional fashion. So it's there to give the player/viewer/reader a general impression of 'welcome to the crusades, demon edition'.

... how much about the crusades the demon edition is becomes a whole other story...

... I mean using the word to try and reclaim an emptied iut land from actual literal demons has some *layers* if you think about it...

But I was wondering, whats the cost consequence on that kind of dressing? What do we gain vs what do we lose? What else could we be doing instead?

Like modern dress productions of Shakespeare, you get a different set of layers brought to the fore, just by putting your players in a different jacket.

So I have been looking up current ish British army jackets, and thinking how practical it might be to put soldiers in them, what with the armour situation etc.
... velcro makes a lot of difference to the putting on or armour, and I'm not sure how any clothes stand up to melee combat vs swords, so do they actually want jackets? I mean, they're wearing a bunch of cloth for allegiance purposes, it's like everyone has a flag on, but wearing a jacket and lots of pockets seems like it would meet a sword and go Poorly.
But there's a lot of classes that are not planning on meeting a sword? Alchemists and spellcasters can use all the pockets they can get.

Wrath of the Righteous on the xbox differentiates between character classes by outfit, only you have to pick the right one first or you're stuck wearing the other one for the whole game. Not the most varied of character builders. But you get a situation where gender isn't the important marker, character class is. Which makes sense in terms of why would you need to treat people differently anyway.

But does mean you get a lot of clues on who to aim at first if you want to trash the healers.

So putting everyone in identical uniform jackets would change the practicalities as well as the vibe.

But I don't know that people look at all them knights in armour and jump straight to 'mostly young people who just got drafted into a grinding ongoing war'. Or even 'mostly veterans of the grinding ongoing war, but not particularly distinctive heroes, so already the Knight Commander kicks more arse than them, after a week, because xp'.

Translating any part of that visually seems like a tough problem.


But modern uniforms aren't going to be a good fit for practicalities, I reckon.


Thing is though the outfits a PC can turn up in range from 'skins wrapped with thongs' through 'kind of highlander with more fur' up to your basic bag of robe and then on to trousers, assorted, or one picture that looks Ustalavic ie setting for Dracula ish. It's a kitchen sink setting with kitchen sink fashion and time is space because every place gets knocked flat so much (in universe) and because they don't want you to have to change planets to change genres (writers side). And yet all those fashions are rules as written equally useful and appropriate, which leaves you wondering how.

So I'm back to, how much modern army uniform can you put on your standard shining armour footman to convey or translate their place in this world?



... not that I'll get the opportunity to, but...

I relistened Lives of Captain Jack, Mighty and Despair
and it is still a powerful piece that really puts Jack through it
but it frustrates me a bit as well for what it didn't articulate.

( Read more... )

So it is a strong story, but today I am thinking about all the stories it wasn't, and it seems to me it wasn't those stories because it didnt want to talk about age, disability, or need.

Just grief, isolation, and choosing not to use their own power.


But with a really miserable ending.



I want there to be stories about Jack that aren't about horribly extended suffering and miserable endings.

I went to look up some words but ended up back on my own blog finding the last time I complained about imprecise translation of historical relationships of power, so I am no further ahead but know I've been annoued about the same thing for Long.

I started out with Pathfinder rules, where if you take a Leadership feat you get Followers and also a Cohort. In the skinnier book Cohorts and Companions it elaborates on this so you can also have Recruits, which are like slightly lower level Cohorts but you can have several of them, only one of them following you around on any given day. Companions usually means *animal* companions, which ends up being unflattering to Doctor Who. And there are a lot of very specific versions of cohorts, some of which you get through an archetype, like Instructor and Apprentice for wizards, which can only make the same type of wizard as you are but has rules for letting them go voluntarily and finding a new apprentice. Or there's Torchbearer, Light Bearer, Weapon Bearer, Page, Squire, and Groom, who are all lower level cohorts of a particular limited type. (Many of those are from Ultimate Intrigue, or look them up on Nethys.)

What interests me are the in universe social and legal relationships implied by this stuff. Like there are Adventure Party Charters mentioned in Cohorts and Companions p22, and in some jurisdictions the Party so contractually bound is a legal entity with a specific tax relationship to the state, one which works out as expensive up front but advantageous if you survive the long term. "In some regions [...] characters can pay a fee of 100gp per level for each member to register their charter with the local government, exempting them from salvage taxes on treasure and mitigating fines for collateral damage to property and buildings." [C&Cp22] Of course not every game is going to have taxes etc in the first place, which may be why the associated feat is mentioned but not actually included, anywhere, ever. But it's an interesting try at giving the Party a distinct legal status. They're a business with a difference from mercenary companies, since no one has to hire them and 'salvage' is presumed to be relevant Often. But they're different from everything else too.

Honestly requiring the armed bastards to get a licence seems like an idea with significant utility.

And a new party just setting out isnt going to have the fees handy.

And part of registering is making sure no one else is using the name, like Companies House and so forth. But who among the sixteen year olds with a single spell each or possibly One sword is going to have encyclopedic knowledge of such parties? They'd end up looking for names just like usernames on a new service.

Also it clears up the deciding who is and isnt the party. The full members paid their 100gp per level and are entitled to treatment as per the charter re treasure sharing and being brought back from the dead. "Are shares equal or is level a factor".

Also when I went looking for what a cohort calls their leader (no opinions discovered) I found many (many) discussions on where a cohorts equipment comes from, who pays for it, should the party wealth by level be adjusted for them (no), etc. The book says a new cohort is equipped as per an NPC of their level, but after that it sayeth not. So people kept arguing. Like, the people saying a cohort is over powered and they dont allow them at their table and the people saying its really difficult to keep them properly equipped from their share should maybe pay attention to each other's point? But in Cohorts and Companions it actually mentions this as something the *charter* needs to decide, "Do cohorts or hirelings get some portion of the wealth, or is their master responsible for rewarding them?"

Which also is one vote for Master and Cohort. Which seems awkward to me.

But it puts that at the level of 'the party decides and agrees in advance' rather than a rule.

Honestly page 22 seems Incredibly Useful for deciding in advance the kinds of things adventure parties get Really Very Annoyed about, and having people agree in advance seems likely to lower the temperature on a Lot of arguments.

Where people could learn this kind of stuff before they run full tilt into it in universe though... seems like a Pathfinder thing? Like teh Pathfinders aren't an adventurer guild exactly, but they also are. Guild experience would accrue in many advice books, and Pathfinders publish the Chronisles full of hard earned lessons. And if you've got to charter, you could probably get some suggested charters there.

... p22 also advises thinking of a party alignment and keeping everyone within one step of that. Which probably helps answer such questions as do you actually have to help each other in combat. Team Evil's charter could be evil.

... Team Chaos having a charter at all seems counter intuitive, but that runs into the definitions thing again. Like I'm sure Robin Hood and his merry men were very clear on the division of wealth and their obligations to each other, they're just paradigmatically Chaotic Good because they weren't taking top down authority about any of it.

ANYway

I set out looking for Words
because there are a lot of specific Words for specific sorts of cohort
but fewer for the people who have cohorts.

Like, Recruits dont imply the existence of a Recruiter, let alone that they'd address their Recruiter by that word. "Be they students, retainers, new recruits to your order, or neophyte members of your faith, you have access to a small set of dedicated servants." Your recruits have so many words right there, but what do they call you? Teacher? Sir? Leader? Master?

Master is awkward for... several reasons. Because Master of the house, Master of the subject, and Master who owns slaves, are all the same words. Master Journeyman Apprentice encodes a different relationship of power to Master and Slave, as far as I know.

Also when I went looking for word sets I got annoyed, because thrall in the dictionary says it means slave, servant or bondsman, but those are different things. And nobody says what the person who can give the thrall orders is called. English seems to have fewer words for boss than for people you're the boss of. Forms of address, there should be more of them.

Also when I went looking for stacks of words in original language, older versions of English maybe, I still got frustrated at the fuzzy definition, and still didnt find anything about how you'd address the next layer up. Is it just not there or do I not know the search terms?

Wait, google is rubbish looking for things I already know are there, that's going to make it trickier.

Why I ended up back on my own journal was looking for a citation for a thing I remember reading that said English translations frequently introduce gender where no gender is stated or implied. Not just saying policeman where the original word is more like police officer, also saying Lord or Lady, or rather specifically saying Lord as a translation for a particular level of power and according to this one specific book ignoring that the gender just isnt there.

But even my own notes get frustrated because yes the one book said it, but only that one, so then what?


Like, also, I'm frustrated with the subtitles on martial arts movies, because I feel like I'm not understanding the relationships between people, since how they treat each other isnt necessarily something I'd guess from available titles in translations. But is that because English just never did that exact relationship, or because I dont know enough martial arts movies, or because the translator was doing their best, or what?



If we're inventing fantasy worlds we're inventing fantasy relationships of power, and we get to decide what those mean.

But we either go full conlang (I lack the skills)
or we're importing thousands of years of historical assumption with every word.


... actually having the characters work out a Charter *on page* would let you specify what Party and Cohort means *to them*, and then you can stress them accordingly.


But you'll still have to decide what the cohort calls their... leader master instructor knight boss.

I have been thinking about time travel
and whatever reasons characters have to 'protect' the timeline

and I think that when writers agree completely with one side of an argument
the story is worse.

Like they forget they have to explain or even make an argument, it's so water is wet to them,
so you end up with arbitrary rules based in a culturally religiously and every other ly specific mindset
that just doesnt see they've given all the good lines to the other guy.

If they have to figure something out they'll remember to explain it to the audience.

Lit class said story is thesis antithesis synthesis
like you have two positions arguing and coming to a new truth
so the truth that is obvious to the author needs to be the synthesis, not either of the starting points.

But in a multi season show they'll arrive there at the first point they believe they'll get cancelled.

Then any new characters will be making new arguments but the desired truth doesnt change.

No synthesis.



That's tricky.



But it's like saying you get the characters to be who you want them to be at the first cancel point so no character development after first season. You just have to have an assortment of ways to have your protagonists wander off model for the course of a season. Big ticket ones like fear and the seven deadlies are a good start. Then they gradually conquer those tendencies in themselves whilst also circling back to the writer's idea of true. They have to present an argument to themselves, to get back on course.

Man vs man, man vs self, thesis antithesis synthesis edition.




This annoyance brought to you by
the timeline is sacred
and other defences of the status quo that never articulate why it is the only thing worth defending.

The bad guys so often have a point because the bad guys are the ones trying to change things
since the good guys circle back to their most iconic state so often.

... mind you that includes Gotham being Gotham, so iconic and desireable arent the same
but lets face it, in any other city Bruce Wayne would have fixed it by now, inventing enough problems a billionaire can't fix them without punching is a whole argument about the nature of people in itself...


So writers need to include
why are we defending this exact this
and
why aren't our tools working yet
and
how are these tools going to work
and
why is this guy opposing it

and then
move everyone along a bit
to a better everything.

... usually they remember to level up the tool kit, I guess...

Today I dreamed about saving Lindsey McDonald again.
Just pulling him out of hell again and back into life.
Sure he'd need supervision of some sort to double check this wasn't a cunning plan by team evil, but dream me was entirely willing to follow him around for life.

... the character died in 2004 and I still get these dreams.

I dont get how stories treat 'bad guys'. Like there's such a thing. Like we're supposed to celebrate the killing.

I mean I just read a summary of Lindsey in season 5 and as far as I can see it's one giant Citation Required. I can spin what I saw to be verrrrrry different to what they just wrote.

But I dont just mean 'maybe this bad guy secretly didnt do bad things', though I... do that a lot.

I mean, they give characters motives, set them up in dilemmas, have them work through them to the tiny chance of survival and freedom... and then act like there was some more perfect version they 'should' have figured out, so it's just time to kill them now.

Why is that the story? Like, I get that tv does the cathartic violence so we don't have to, but it seems like most stories get the cat up the tree, decide it was a bad cat all along, then set the tree on fire. Instead of actually saving the cat. Ever. At all.

And the characters that do manage to 'change sides' and impress the 'good' guys?

Dead. Just a lot. They get the redemptive sacrifice story arc, which is not something I can agree with at all.


And then there's Spike, who was kind of an accident, but a very excellent one. He rewrote himself.

Everyone should get that chance. Enlightenment.

You can never say someone will never be a good guy, because there are no good guys and bad guys, just people, doing their best.



So here I am, nineteen years on, dreaming about second chances for someone the story had real clear opinions on.

Reading a bunch of Immortal!Ianto fic and just
wondering what these writers see in Jack Harkness?

Because to me, Jack loving many people easily and often is a lot of the point of him, plus his struggles to keep doing that when grief hits him over and over. He loves and it hurts because some day it will all be over, but he still loves.

It seems to me that a bunch of the fics that make Ianto immortal seem to think he... fixes him? Makes him eternally monogamous by the power of his beautiful Welsh vowels? Something.

The time travel ones where Ianto meets past and future Jacks seem to be spending time teaching Ianto how to not be hurt by non monogamy, and how to understand he is still special enough to remember in a thousand years, even when Jack is highly unlikely to have been single for much of that.

But the immortality ones are like... look at this soul mate! The one! OTP 5eva!

... it's been bugging me and now it has clicked why I might have to avoid the immortality ones
even though some of them are in fact about threesomes.

Like, don't get me wrong, Ianto living long and long is very much what I want out of fic, especially lately.

But there's different attitudes to what that would optimally mean for him, or Jack, or him and Jack, and I don't like the ones where Jack loves fewer and fewer.

I just read a fixit that felt the need to get rid of Alonso Frame in Jack's life, and while it is likely they haven't listened to Big Finish, because fewer people have, I can guarantee that I started that audio thinking 'but Ianto' and ended it thinking 'Just! Let! Them! Kiss!'
(which was some good writing)
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/One_Enchanted_Evening_(audio_story)

But like, Jack is a 51st century guy, he can dance with so many people.

Some writers actually do not like that.

It's puzzling, and I doubt it would occur to them to tag it, so I'm just going to run into it at random.




Canon Ianto does get a bit upset about Jack's tendency to flirt with sushi, if Big Finish counts as canon even more so.

But part of giving Ianto more time would, to me, be giving him time to get more comfortable, shake off some of the attitudes that had him hiding himself, maybe understand Jack better, be more confident where he stood with him.

(or get to hear it said, outside House of the Dead)




... people who have not heard the audios, even the free ones on the iplayer, have a Different idea about these characters, especially the end...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012hkvt/episodes/player


There are so many audios now, I fear missing some just from not having seen the cds.

Some of them are in the books app on my iphone though, along with all the torchwood paper books.



Canon has like a central mass and then all this Also stuff. Tricky.



But I like Captain Jack Harkness in all his flirty glory, so I like when people change to keep up with him, not changing him.

I am still rereading the InCryptid books.

I think I read some of the writing is a response to Supernatural treating a particular character badly
and I have read the author was in Buffy fandom
and the stories seem very much in dialogue with that too

but that keeps meaning I keep staring into space imagining giving Giles these books to read, or telling the Initiative what they're doing wrong in small words, or, you know, taking the whole political reframing back to the source text I'm familiar with and letting it make the good guys somewhat less than shiny.

I also kind of want to rewatch Lost Girl.


The thing is BtVS and many others make monsters by making metaphor literal. Wrestling with your demons, now with bonus action sequences. And that can tell a powerful set of stories.
But it also leaves this ugly angle where it is possible to look like a person, act like a person, have been a person up until very recently, but still not count as a person any more today.

Vampires as a metaphor for sexual assault or vampirism for addiction or whatever the metaphor is today, solid story mileage.
The part where the story then just solves it with a stake... oh, so many layers of problem.
( Read more... )


I have no conclusions, just vague themes and some pondering.

I took that thought for a wander for like an hour.


But it bothers me. I don't know how to design a story that tells things the way I want to see them. I seem to have programmed me wrong, somewhere.

shall think on it.

Don't really have anything to say, have had a couple of days of mostly staring at nothing much thinking about nothing and everything.

The Flash and the way the show treats Thawne has been bothering me, but not in a write fix it fic way, because it's too pervasive. It's not a single thing that needs resolved, it's years of writing choices that make it no fun for me. I keep circling back to earlier in the show but there isn't any point it treats people the way I would. I can't fanfic or AU it from their starting premises.

The thing is I have a tendency to see hero and villain as thesis and antithesis, and the natural answer to their problems as synthesis, somewhere in the middle. But these superhero stories exist in a cyclical stasis where the hero preserves a status quo ( Read more... )

I don't know, I wouldnt write any of it this way. The genre endures because of the cyclical aspects, but it frustrates immensely for the same reasons.



So then I try to think about something entirely unrelated but it doesn't work because my brain isn't done chewing on that arrowverse stuff yet.

Which is the same reason I can't get started watching anything else.

So I guess I'm just going to do a bit of nothing for a bit.



On the plus side I got my tasks done for the week so far, including sorting things ready to throw out.
The bag 'so many cables' is going to resolve years worth of drawer mess.
Also I couldnt get the batteries out of one flashing little lamp I have that has a :-) face, and the batteries looked discolored and not right, so I was :( and thought I'd have to throw it away. But then I saw how to get the whole mechanism out, so I have the :-) guy and the light is ready to throw away.

:-)

And cleaner day happened correctly, so, things are holding steady.



I just get stuck on stories.

Well there's not much else to do.

RPG rulebooks skip over a lot of inplications in favour of making it easy to do the expected thing. So there are spells for bringing back the dead. And there's a sort of assumption that you'll use them on PCs, and use the money you earn for things other than Raise All The Dead Ever. Like, if you use it for that, you'll be severely under equipped later and probably get eated. And the adventure paths so far have mostly dealt with the potential to bring people back by just saying they're too far down the river of souls and it dont work.

But the world they write is way too unstrange for ressurection to be any degree of common, even for the aristocracy.

A lot of social institutions are way too lazily familiar even without magic. Primogeniture as the only inheritance method? Marriage without definition, meaning in practice lifelong monogamy? And the ways the social norms entirely fail to reflect the diversity of the deities! There was a priest of the goddess of travellers who set off the plot by punishing his daughter for having sex outside of marriage. For a goddess of luck and dreams and following your own light, how does that value set even make sense?

But then, add magic.

It's awkward if your ex turns up at your wedding. It is past awkward and into worlds of plot if they had been until recently deceased.

You'd get all sorts of problems that even Bujold with Cryoburn barely dipped into.

It is a fundamental fact of Pathfinder or DnD that death is reversible. If you have enough money and enough magic, you can get anyone back. If you're on good terms with a druid you can even get them back from death of old age, possibly as another species, but with their mind basically intact.

So what does that do to every legal and financial structure and institution? How do they deal with persons who only intermittently exist? Do they swear Until Death and if so are they realistic about what that means?

What do you do about inheritance if the deceased comes back and wants their stuff?

Heck, with high enough level magic, time is almost no object: what do you do about entire royal lines if famtasy King William or Queen Elizabeth is suddenly alive and well again?

You'd have problems of identity, obviously. You'd need to confirm someone was who they said they were. But having done so... then what?

And the thing is all those different religions in the rule book would each approach this *differently*, due to the fundamentally different approaches each represents. And every one of those religions would have internal divisions too. And these disagreements would be about the most fundamental day to day stuff.

... I keep landing back on who is married to who and under what circumstances it could wear off, because how much fic could this be relevant to? Like, fantasy world Steve and Peggy and Bucky would have *layers* of complication.

... fantasy world Captain America would have to deal with being the once and future. People would call him back to life any time they thought their side needed a little mythic support. ... exhausting.



I like stories where nobody gets killed off because then questions need answers and problems need dealt with, not just ended.

But it do have some knock ons.

Thinking about the utter destruction of the multiverse
as you do
it occured to me that someone who could write that and expect readers to roll with it fundamentally doesn't think of a character as a single continuous person.

Post Crisis they can still write stories about their characters. As archetypes. ( Read more... )

I have been re reading 'Paladin of Souls' and getting distracted in both directions.
Daydreaming other stuff instead of Chalion, and then taking Chalion for a wander too.
Ista is a wonderful character and I love how everyone's choices make sense.

I was thinking about Pathfinder rules and how they lend themselves to characters who start adventuring a bit later in life. Say someone with an interest in magic who took many years to actually make it work, but can only cantrip after 35 and waits til age 53 to get a first level spell. From the ppint of view of someone with a rule book, that is a characrer whose stats only made it to 10 and 11 because age bonuses, and they're unlikely to be optimised as a spellcasting class. But in universe, that would be someone who reached and studied and tried, and finally got their reward. Power. But the rulebook knows they're not going to get level 2 spells until they increase their stats again. They probably dont. There are spells that tell you someone's INT or CHA, but most people most of the time would just be guessing. So they'd work away diligently and not know that without enhancement the best they'll ever be is casting level 6.

Maybe a lifetime of frustration, maybe someone with their priorities elsewhere.


Or: people in universe dont get to choose their stats. So someone could have stats to be an excellent wizard, but all they want in the world is divine magic. And the presumed a approval of their deity. And they wont get it, if they havent the wisdom score, even if their deity likes them very well. So they can master the arcane arts, but never really know what their deity thinks of that.

The rule books make it clear that not all priests are clerics. They can be a wizard priest. But without getting actual miracles live and direct... they'll end up wondering.

And maybe pouring improvement into Wisdom, even when it makes no game mechanical sense. And hoping age will teach them a thing or two.


And that's just Humans. If you add in half elves or haof orcs you have stories of people getting on quicker or slower than expected, and how that will feel. Half orcs grow up fast. It ought to look like being smartest, learning quickest, but orcs have a reputation as not smart at all, so there's tension in the image there.

(So much of the history and game rules doesnt match what we're told people believe about each other. Which I guess is realistic, in its way.)

Half elves grow up slow and frow old slower. But they're just as sharp as anyone, eventually. So what reputation do they get? Slow as in stupid or getting the credit for getting there eventually?


... if they are a Wizard one suspects not stupid. Wizards having many ways to answer that kind of reputation. But they'd still have spent more years than their peers just too young to start studying.


So, head full of thoughts about age and time and learning and adventure. Capacity and lack thereof. And how no one actually wants to have a dump stat.

Gets in the way.



Still, just thought doodles for now.

I shall continue reading.

I need to sit down and make words go in a row again. Any. Whatever story comes out of my head, getting written down.


For a while now I've been meaning to do like a rewrite of Star Trek but translated into fantasy. So they don't have sufficiently advanced scienxe, they have straight up magic.

Which means they have the Prime Directive episode where they cannot reveal themselves to the locals because they are Insufficiently Advanced, but they mean the locals can't even do cantrips.
( Read more... )