And now we're back.  Obviously, when I said magic was next, I really meant Spirits were next.  You got that, right?  No, seriously, since I write these things off the cuff, I sometimes change my mind midway through.  Spirits are so fundamental to how everything in this setting works that I decided I needed to handle them, first. 

I’m breaking this down into sections, since otherwise it would be pretty long.  (Also, this way I get several days worth of content instead of just one)

Spirits

Man and beast share their world with Spirits, born in the echoes of creation long ago.  Spirits ruled the world before the rise of Men, and some say they will rule it again when the last Man dies.  Sometimes allies, sometimes enemies, Spirits are at least as variable as humans, and wield fantastic powers.

Powers of Spirits

The ways of Spirits are not the ways of Men.  Men are bound by flesh.  Spirits are part of the eternal Land or the boundless Air.  They are creatures of Will, rather than of Flesh.  But they are also constrained in ways that men are not, enmeshed in their roles or lacking in substance.

Each Spirit is bound, to some degree, by its nature.  A Hunting Beast must hunt.  A spirit of flame must burn.  A spirit of a lake cannot journey out to other lands.  But within its purview, a spirit can be very powerful.

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Gamespeak:  My thoughts are that this needs to be a freeform system.  A spirit will be defined by attributes that tell you how powerful it is, and what areas it can influence.  Then there's a system for calculating how powerful a spirit needs to be to generate a given effect.  On a scale of 1 to 5, a fire spirit with a 1 might just be able to light a candle, while a 5 STR fire spirit might be able to set a whole city afire.  A Spirit's stat block would have whatever basic statistics are needed, plus its power level (possibly different for each of its areas of influence).  Then some common/well-known specific effects would be a good idea, so you don't have to calculate them on the fly every time you need them.

The Buffy Magic system is a pretty good guideline, with its definitions of effect, duration, number of people, and so on.  I'll probably end up with something like that.

The goal is to produce a system where the GM always knows what a given spirit can do, and the players can make informed guesses, but there's still room for surprises.
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Spirits of the Land

The Spirits of the Land are manifestations of the Land's will and character.  A land with no spirits withers and dies, becoming a blasted wasteland where nothing grows and nothing can survive for long.  Far from the places of Man, the Spirits of the Land are vast and powerful.  Primitive men in this primordial wild often worship them as fearsome and terrible gods.  Wild Spirits of the Land generally have the form of great beasts.  In places where the rule of Man dominates, the Spirits are diminished, but no less vital.  They are shaped by men's wills into forms closer to human.

Wild Spirits

The Spirits that dwell in the wild are often savage and terrible, but also often hold ancient secrets and awesome powers.  Only the bravest, or most foolish of men can face them.  The risks are great, as are the rewards.

The Black Woods of Gothe are ruled by a black bear taller than a house, with burning embers for eyes, and with claws that can sunder tree trunks.  Anyone who brings iron into the forest raises the black bear's rage.  In his presence, fires will not burn, and shadows become visions of men's darkest fears.  By day, the bear is never seen.  Only the sharpest arrows will pierce the dark bear's hide, and any hurts he takes one night will be healed by the next.

Stories say that a warrior who kills the dark bear will gain his power - skin that turns blows, and strength beyond mortal ken; shadows that answer his call, and power over flame.  No one has done so yet.  Kenning Men say that one can, on the first new moon of spring, approach the bear carrying neither weapons nor flame, and the bear will judge the man's worthiness.  For a worthy man, the bear will answer any one question, and give the man one of his teeth, which may be made into a spear tip or a dagger sharper than steel.  But if the man is judged unworthy, the bear will kill him and devour him, such that no one remembers his name.  Still other stories say that if the man is found worthy, the bear will still kill him, and he will rise three nights hence as a bear himself.

Each land has one totemic spirit, a Genius Locus.  To defeat or treat with that spirit is to become a Lord.  Thereafter, the Land recognizes its Lord and rewards him when he is strong.  The Land makes demands of its Lords, though, and these demands must be met, else great doom befall the Lord.

Once, a mighty city stood on the mountain called Drakencrag.  The city's first king slew the dragon of the mount with a sword forged from starmetal.  As the dragon died, he granted the king and his descendants dominion over the mountain, the valley, and the fertile plains beneath, so long as the people never slew any  of the lesser dragons that lived in the mountains, and each shepherd left his first ewe of the year as an offering to the dragons when it was a year old.

For many years, the people prospered.  Their hunters brought back full sacks.  Their fields produced more than sufficient grain.  Their warriors brought back great plunder in raids against weaker neighbors.  Until there came a king who grew tired of the wyrms that sometimes stole from his herds or burned his crops.  With the sword of his fathers, he slew a wyrm.  Thereafter, the city knew no peace.  A plague of wyrms descended, burning the city and the surrounding villages, and killing those who lived there.  The king and his warriors fought back, but they were defeated, and the starmetal blade was lost.

Now the Drakencrag is once again ruled by a great and powerful dragon, and legends speak of the wondrous treasure that might be found in the ruins of the city.  The people who dwell in the valley and the fields beyond will slay such wyrms as descend from the hills to steal sheep, but they never pursue the wyrms into the mountains, for that is surely death.  To appease the Dragon, they must now sacrifice to him a virgin girl who has just begun to have her moontime each year on the longest night.

Not all Spirits of the Land are gigantic or dangerous.  Even in wild places, there are some spirits that can be helpful to men, although even these spirits are not to be crossed.

Many wild places are home to the Little People, who look like misshapen effigies of humans.  They are attracted to human activity, but seldom do more than watch from a distance.  Few travelers ever get more than a glimpse of them.  When unobserved, the little men will steal small objects, often hanging them in the tree branches nearby, or work other small mischief.  But other times, they will mark safe trails, or lead lost travelers from danger with their haunting voices, which warble like birds and click and croak like frogs and insects.

A man who touches a little man will have good luck all day, so some people think to capture one and keep it in a cage.  This is a poor idea, since the others will take great offence and work their small mischiefs on the captor and everyone around him, and even if he releases the captive, they will never stop hounding him.  Or so say the legends.

Spirits of Man

Spirits do not only dwell in the primordial wilds.  They are part of the Land, and as such are found everywhere upon it.  But in places dominated by Man, they are diminished in form and power.  This does not mean they are powerless, by any means.

In the ancient city of Illyum, after the sun has set, fortunate men (or unfortunate ones) will sometimes see a trio of women, shapely in form, but clothed head to toe in red wrappings, with red cloaks hiding their heads and silver, eyeless masks hiding their features.  These women sometimes walk, sometimes dance to inaudible music, but never speak.  Everyone knows that the Red Ladies are harbingers.  Anyone who actually hears their music will die in a fortnight.  If he can actually hear them sing, he will die that very day.

Very rarely, a Red Lady will stop and lay hands upon a person, always a woman or a child.  If she bestows her blessings upon a grown woman, that woman will conceive a child within the next year.  If she chooses a child, that child will not fall ill until his beard begins to grow (if a boy) or her moontime begins (if a girl).

Once in a great while, only two Red Ladies will appear.  They will dance through the city plaza in broad daylight, and everyone in the square will hear the haunting music.  The pair will pick out a woman in the plaza, be she young or old, pretty or ugly, and dance around her, finally taking her hand and leading her from the plaza in a frenetic, spiraling dance.  Anyone who tries to stop them will be compelled to dance as well, although not to follow.  Those stricken will dance until the next sunrise, if they do not die first.  The chosen woman will be led away and will never be seen again.  The next time the Red Ladies appear, there will be three again.

Many peoples know of household spirits, like the Brown Men as small as mice, always dressed in clothes made from scraps of cloth and decorated with bits of stone and metal.  The Brown Men live in the shadows beneath cupboards, in the gaps between stones, and in the void between roof and rafters.  They prefer rough, somewhat shabby dwellings over the fine houses of the rich.  Wise people will leave out a bit of food for them, and make sure the odd scrap of good fabric falls to the corner, because Brown Men will protect the house they live in.  They chase away vermin, and do not foul what bits of food they steal for their own use as rats would do.  Sometimes, they might also deign to do small chores like patching a leaking thatch roof or mending a small broken thing left laying out.

If they are well-treated, they will also protect the inhabitants from hostile magics.  Whenever a malevolent entity or evil spell targets a member of the household or a guest, a Brown Man can choose to sacrifice his life in the stead of the original target.  The next day, the lady of the house will find his corpse, blackened to a cinder, on the hearthstone.  When this happens, it is important that the inhabitants of the house honor the little cinder with a proper funeral, scaled down to its size.  Otherwise, the remaining Brown Men might give offence and leave the house.

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Gamespeak: Spirits of the Land will have fairly esoteric power purviews like "Healing" or "Hearth" or "Hunting" (although they won't all have to begin with the letter "H.")  I'll try to avoid the more elemental ones like "Fire" or "Storms" because those should be the realm of Spirits of the Lower Air.  But fire or storms might be part of a Spirit of the Land's repertoire.  A spirit of fear might only appear during storms.  The Genius Locus of a volcano could well have a body made of burning lava.  I'll have to think about how those work.

Next up, Spirits of the Lower Air.

Today's Found Writing is on a post-it note.  That doesn't really carry to a scan, but I want you to know it was a pain to bring home because it stuck to stuff in my wallet.

Incidentally, I find it amusing that evidentally a lot of people get to my blog via google image search for some variant of "Tattoo Writing" (and even more will, now).  I wonder if someone out there somewhere has a grocery list tattooed on his arm.

This looks a lot like one of my grocery lists - short, and fairly random.  I bet the person who owned this post-it note lives close to the store.

Unlike me, he or she is probably in a relationship, since the list originally held two kinds of shampoo.  (But then again, it's crossed off.  Maybe they broke up.  I wonder which one got to keep the cat)

Seems like people would get bored of these.

Seems like I should finish the other world I started designing before I start designing a new one.

Life is full of things that seem really obvious, but aren't. :)

"Kickin' it Old School" has kind of fallen by the wayside because I decided I wasn't really all that interested in sky pirates.  I didn't feel like I had anything really cool to do, and I couldn't work up much enthusiasm.  Since this blog is purely voluntary, I'm letting that project languish in the back corners of my mind and the non-updated corners of my blog.

But all is not lost.  Another old idea of mine has bubbled to the surface, and I think I'll use my blog to hash it out for a while.  For now, I'm just concentrating on the setting, without thinking about rules or game systems.  (Well, I say that, but really I'm thinking about rules and game systems, just not writing down the specifics.)  My goal is to build the world and figure out how stuff in it is supposed to work, then figure out how to represent it mechanically.

So, let's get started.

Origins
This world came to me from several sources.

•   Princess Mononoke, with a modernizing world pressing up against an ancient, magical world.  I love the talking animals and the god of the forest.  I love how magic isn't something intrinsic to any of the human characters.  People with magical knowledge use it the same way that people in the real world use practical knowledge.
•   The Arthurian mythos (also seen in other places) with the King's ties to the Land.  The King is the Land, and the Land is the King.  While Arthur was strong and true, his power extended across the world.  When he was laid low by sloth, treachery, and falsehood, the very land weakened, and eventually Camelot fell.
•   A desire of mine for a world where "Magician" doesn't mean "Superhero in robes."  (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)  I like the idea that "Magic" is the manipulation of forces external to man.  What this means in comparison to, say, a D&D Wizard or a Mage: the Awakening Mage is pretty subtle.  On the surface of matters, there's not much difference between casting a fireball spell and summoning a fire spirit to tell it to burn someone, but there's a big difference in what the magician thinks about it, and a lot of little differences in how it all plays out.
•   A little bit of Hermetic lore I picked up in various places (including RPG.net, where all the cool kids hang out): One of the laws of Hermetic Magic (of which I'm ignoring many more) is that human magic can't affect anything beyond the Lower Air - which is to say the moon's orbit.  Shadowrun had the same rule, as I recall.  I wonder if the guys at FASA were inspired the same way I was.  Another bit is "As above, so below," which points to a symmetrical world.

These tidbits floated around in my cluttered brain until they collided, and the shape they took was of a fantasy world with a different flavor than the bog-standard High Fantasy world I'm used to.  I started thinking about how this world might fit together and what the people who lived there would act like.

So, without further ado, here's the world:

The World

In the center of creation is The Land, where men and beasts dwell.  On the Land is fresh water and every manner of plant and animal.  The Land shelters life, and is Alive.  The Land is sometimes a lover to be cherished, a teacher to be respected, or a foe to be defeated for your survival.

The Spirits of the Land live upon it and within it.  They take their shapes from the Land's nature and power.  In the deep wilds, the Spirits of the Land are huge and fearsome.  In the places of men, the Spirits of the Land are smaller and tamer, diminished and changed by the presence of Men.

The Wise might know the ways of the Spirits of the Land, but cannot compel them with words learned in the movements of the Stars.  Men must contend with, or supplicate, the Spirits of the Land, for they can be deadly enemies or powerful allies.  Every demesne within the Land is ruled by a powerful Spirit, a Genius Locus.  A Man (or Woman, the spirits don't really care) who can bind this Spirit to himself through force of arms, cunning, or sacrifice, becomes the Lord of this demesne.  Thereafter, the Land answers to the Lord, so long as he remains true to it.

Above and around the Land is the Lower Air, home to incorporeal spirits.  The Spirits of the Lower Air are reflections of the primordial world.  A Spirit of Fire is the essence of flame, and dances in every candle and sleeps in every ember.  Spirits of Storms dwell in the heart of raging maelstroms, making the wind blow, spitting lightning, and crying out with voices of thunder.  Ponderous and slow, the Spirits of Stone are hard and impenetrable when they are young, but over centuries are worn down to Spirits of Sand.  Everything has its Spirit, its archetype and first cause.  Those who follow the Wise ways can learn the language of the Stars, which allows them to speak to these spirits, and sometimes to command them.

Normally, Spirits of the Lower Air are incorporeal and only able to affect the Land in limited ways.  Spirits of Storms do not cause storms, they are born in them, and they rarely take notice of specific places to savage or to avoid.  They only interact with Men when they are called to do so, or in times and places of power.

Beyond the Lower Air is the Greater Air (or the Higher Air).  Here, dwell the Spirits of the Greater Air.  The Spirits of the Greater Air can never be summoned or compelled, only entreated.  They cannot directly affect the Land, but they can inspire Men and Spirits to do their will. 

The Spirits of the Greater Air wish to see Man ascend, but they are not united in the belief of how Man should ascend, or what ascension means.  Thus, the Spirits of the Greater Air often contend with each other.

Every Star is a Spirit.  Their movements through the heavens reveal secret knowledge to those who learn to read it.  Every person is born under a specific Star, and some people are chosen by their Stars as special agents.  Only through these Champions do the Spirits of the Greater Air directly act upon the Land.  To follow one's Star is to follow one's Destiny, often into greatness, but just as often into death.

As above, so below.  There are worlds of Spirit beneath the Land, as well as those above it.  Beneath the Land, and in every dark place, there is the Underworld.  Those human spirits that cannot ascend beyond the celestial sphere and are not dragged into the ever-darkness of the Deep dwell in the Underworld, as do fallen and corrupted Spirits of the Land and of the Lower Air.  The Underworld is not evil itself, but much evil dwells there.  It is a place of stagnation and rot, but also a place of ancient knowledge.  Some who follow the path of the Wise learn to treat with the Spirits of the Underworld.

Like Spirits of the Lower Air, Spirits of the Underworld are generally incorporeal and unable to treat with Men.  They can be called and bound, and they can touch the Land in times and places of power.

Beneath the Underworld, and beyond the Land, is the Deep. 

The Deep touches all waters.  The Sea is a barrier to the magics of the Land.  No man can rule the Sea, even if he slays 1000 Krakens.  Similarly, the magics of the Land often have difficulty passing over water.  The magics of the Lower Air are generally unaffected, but the Spirits that dwell over the Deep are not the same as those who dwell over the Land, except for those of the wind, which blows everywhere.

People of the Land are always suspicious of those who choose to live their lives over the Deep, and those who live on the waves are rarely comfortable on the Land.

In the Deep, terrible spirits dwell.  As the Spirits of the Greater Air wish to see Man ascend, the Spirits of the Deep seek to drag Men down and diminish Mankind.  Men who fall to despair or hatred, or who were born under fallen Stars sometimes hear the voices of these Spirits.  The Spirits of the Deep will offer knowledge and power and strength to those who hear them, but such power destroys the user as surely as it destroys all around him.  The Stars will not shine upon such a one.

Next up, Magic (which might be split into several parts)

I really love these things, and they're so darn easy.  Here's one more.

Funny how her face never looks the same way twice, isn't it?  Mostly that's because I'm not terribly consistent.  But also it's because I haven't quite found an image that completely "clicks" for how Li should look.

Anyway, here's a look at Li's tattoo from the back.  I'm thinking of doing another one from the front.

Here's a new one

This one will be short and sweet, since it's not a huge, vastly-thought out change.

Here's the deal: right now, Dex, particularly in Cinematic Unisystem, is the king of stats.  Far and away, Dex is worth more than any other stat (With the exception of Willpower if you're a Witch.  Then it's just far more valuable).  Dex gives you your dodge, your to-hit, your number of attacks, and adds to your damage in the form of extra Success Levels (and extra attacks).

This is somewhat emulative of Buffy (and Angel to a lesser extent) and it's a handy way to keep the Slayer from needing a 9 STR to be as cool as Buffy.  But it has some drawbacks.  When your Slayer does get that 9 STR, on top of her 7 or better DEX, she's nigh-unstoppable.  And she can get there while largely ignoring two of her physical attributes.  Also, it's really hard to build a big, strong guy who's effective without being hyper-fast.  By the time he's strong enough to make up for his lack of speed, the "glass ninja" effect really kicks in, and people start going splat and looking like wall-art.

So I suggest a minor change: make STR and DEX interchangable for Melee attacks.  Dex still wins on Initiative, number of actions, and defense, but now a big, strong, slow guy can hit by plowing through defenses with brute force.  This only works on attacks where pure strength matters.  Mostly, that'll be hand-to-hand or melee weapon attacks.  I'm not even sure I'd apply it to thrown weapons, and for sure it wouldn't apply to launched ones like bows or crossbows.

I might also suggest a new Defensive Maneuver called "Just Take it" which is Kung-fu or Getting Medieval + CON.  It works just like Dodge, but the idea is that you parry, shield your vitals with your arms, or whatever, and... well... just take it.  I'd only allow it to apply to Bashing damage unless the defender has natural armor or something - in which case he probably doesn't care as much.  I haven't thought that one out yet.  It just occured to me while I was typing this post.

That's the kind of cutting-edge, up-to-the-minute, heavily-hyphenated game design you get around here.

Inspired by RPG.net, a word done entirely in MS Paint:

It shouldn't prove too hard to guess.  I did it at lunch today.  I could have done better at home, with two monitors.  The next one (should there be a next one) will go better, as I've figured out the order of operations better.