Wildermyth Wiki - User contributions [en]

Loops

2020-09-15T02:26:41Z

Daustin:

I discovered loops inside of loops inside of loops. I lost my way, and regained it, and lost it again. Except, but I’m skipping ahead, aren’t I?

I apologize. I’ve ceased to think of time the same way others do. I know you don’t know me, but I’m actually a nice person. I’m a trapeze artist.

You see, I always wanted to get to the Yondering. In school, I had daydreams. At night I read books that brought my heart there. It felt there. Like if I only found a way to reach beyond the edge of my imagining, I could grasp it.

Um. I found it. A way, I mean. It wasn’t even very hard.

I learned to trapeze because I liked the idea of flying, but not with device. With art. I mean. What do I mean? I liked my body, and the way I could shape it like an instrument, sending power through my muscles as you'd send air through a horn to cause noise. What came out of me was music, too. Kinetic music that to others sang as an image. I flew.

I lit a candle in my bedroom when I was seventeen. In the middle of a night. I was alone in the house because Mom and Aunt Kim were in San Diego for the weekend, and I was old enough. I was a trapeze artist. People would trust me with anything.

Shadows shattered themselves against the candle flame. Everything looked weird. The light that showed on my ceiling was. Well, it hovered in halos there, and I remembered looking up at the light from where I lay on my bed, and thinking. It’s circles and circles in circles, isn’t it? It’s rings of a tree, it’s light, it's.

No, and I won’t be discredited by letting you think I was more talented, or more vision-blessed than you. I just worked harder to think most differently. I think that’s part of being a trapeze artist. You uncertain yourself of the facts others build their homes on. Like gravity. You have no still home, as a trapeze artist. Yours is not of here but of there, ''just'' there. The edge of the air you can’t reach unless. Unless you somehow.

Yes. Right. Can swing through space, catching timely bars you're too spinning to see.

When you do that, you’ll reach the Yondering. Your home can be there because that is the frontier of motion. Venturing thought.

But I don’t want to fill your head with ideas like swinging through the stars on bars of light. That's too me-not-you. What I'm trying to say is that the potential is. And I mean it really and always is. There’s a knowledge you don’t unknow. You don’t teach it, you don’t learn it. It’s in you, born wild. It's the idea someone once called wildermyth.

It’s a story you heard and were never told. It’s a time you danced perfectly to music that didn’t play. Or you started drawing a symbol that meant everything to you, and had no meaning.

Should I keep explaining.

I want to say I slipped from my bedroom that night, through a hole in the light. I also feel that’s dishonest. It’s leaving something out, but I don’t know how better to say it.

I realized the nature of not being here at all, and it was brilliant, it was pin-small, and I. Could fit any gap my mind couldn't see.

There, in the Yondering, the trees and the hills, and the mountains, and the lakes. There, these things hold such a surplus of color, they sometimes lend it to the sky. I lived there. I built a cabin where no one was, and I passed between worlds by lighting a candle, and gazing in the rings until I fell all the way through.

It's hard to keep your hygiene in the Yondering. And that really does suck for all my reasons, private and not. But anyway, I ended up staying.

Sometimes I would visit the bounded world still. To, actually, I don’t know what it was to do, because I never ended up doing anything. In that small troubled plane of people all trapped and turbid and thinkless, and sinking, and silly and.

Oh, and I don’t mean to say it was magic.

It was the loops. Loops inside of loops, they pass into infinity, which is the same as saying. I mean. You know when, if you keep drawing circles on a piece of paper, one inside of another, inside of another?

Yes I’m saying it looks like a tunnel. I’m saying that’s almost enough of a reason to use it as one.

The loops aren’t just on ceilings. They’re not only described in light, or what is seeable. See, that’s what I didn’t understand, at first, but I got to getting.

Think about. No, or just. If you want, you can imagine a cell. Remember a cell? Or.

Here, here’s what I want to say: everything is the same thing.

That means you are a trapeze artist. In order to change what is, or where is, or when, you’ve got to be muscular with the truth. You have to move it through the loops of being until it gets lost among them. There’s a point of leverage where all of your force can arc through nothing, to put existence how it wasn’t. This can take moments and last eternity. It can take an eternity and last moments.

The time of it is its most illusory and unimportant aspect.

The Maylen explained it like this: You must believe something along until it builds up the inertia to be.

Uvanna claimed in this way it was like bearing a child.

Ulstryx roamed through Yonderings uncounted, and far into the grays, and didn’t know what we meant. Hated that we said it. Ulstryx never knows why everything has changed, and everything becomes noisy and loud with motion, he steps into it, and hates.

The dragon-children found the way through yolks, as I had through a candleflame. They did fine. I like them.

The Ones Who Were had it all figured it out already.

What I’m saying is that I was flying behind. The whole time. Well, mostly, right? But anyway. What did I tell you about time?

I’m sorry, I’m lost again. The trouble with going in loops all the time is you get. Dizzy. The next thing for me to do is to be born, and I’d better not forget.

But. Oh, right, at least I invented people. So that’s something you can’t take away from me.

Stat

2020-06-02T19:18:05Z

Daustin: /* Personality Stats */

Characters ([[Hero]]es, [[Monster]]s) have Stats! Most of the Stats are stable properties of the character, but some are used to mark temporary conditions, such as injury. Not all stats operate on the same scale.

=How Stats Work=
Most stats you care about - Combat Stats, etc., Use whole numbers. Bonus Damage. Armor. That sort of thing. Lots of gear and some story outcomes, leveling up, history lines etc., will give you **fractional** stat boosts. So your character might not have a whole number there, they might have 4.5 speed, or something like that. We always round these numbers down.

Most stats are stable, set by the character's [[Aspects]] (which are often driven by their [[History]]) Some stats are specifically used to track temporary states, like Injury, Actions, Shield, Shred. You can expect these to be changed directly by events in game.

=Combat Relevant Stats=
==Health==
[[Health]] (aka hit points) reflects how much injury you can sustain before you die or must make a [[mortal choice]].

==Speed==
How many squares you can move in one action.

Humans start with a base speed, modified +1.7 by each of their natural legs they still have. It is also modified by age and by various [[Gear#Augments|augments]] and [[theme]]s.

==Armor==
[[Armor]] reduces incoming physical damage.

==Warding==
[[Warding]] represents damage reduction for magic and elemental attacks.

==Melee Accuracy==
Aim with melee weapons this is used to calculate your [[hit chance]], depending on several other factors like the enemy's evasion stats, and your weapon's [[wield]].
==Range Accuracy==
Aim with ranged weapons this is used to calculate your [[hit chance]], depending on several other factors like the enemy's evasion stats, cover, and your weapon's [[wield]].
==Stunt Chance==
Base chance for you attack to [[stunt]], which is an additional positive effect (something like crit in other games, but often a status effect instead of damage).
==Physical Damage Bonus==
Bonus damage for physical attacks, such as weapon attacks with melee or ranged weapons.
==Potency==
Used to calculate damage for Magic attacks. Because magic attacks are often AOE, this is not always added directly on, it depends on context.
==Dodge==

Used to evade attacks by moving out of the way. Great against slow heavy (low [[wield]]) attacks such as greatswords or two-handed maces, but worse against fast light (high [[wield]]) attacks like daggers.

==Block==

Used to physically deflect attacks. Works uniformly against all attacks.

==Perception==
How many squares you can see. Usually 10, until you get really old maybe.
==Obscured==
Some things might be hard to see unless you're right up close? Unclear if this is used at all.

=Campaign Relevant Stats=
==Recovery Rate==
How quickly your injuries heal. Younger and more hearty characters heal faster, old characters heal very slowly.
==Retirement Age==

When are you going to hang up your boots, roughly?

Retirement age starts at 45 for a human and can be affected by:
* Upbringing (up to +30)
* Either reaching level 4 or being a legendary hero (+5)
* Being a Mystic (+20)
* Being a Hunter (+10)
* Certain story events (up to +1000)

=Personality Stats=
Stats for Story Roles and Their Relationships: When one of these stats is called out as a role, it means that hero has the highest number for that stat in the present or affected party. If that stat is called out negatively (e.g. “Not Leader”) that character has the lowest number for the correlating stat.

The hook describes a facet of a character’s personality and especially as pertains to that character’s place in stories. Affects what characters might say, and what language is associated with them, as well as relationships with other characters.

It should be possible to call out Roles for party, or for the whole company in an event, if necessary.

======Bookish======
"I've read about this"
Nose in a book, this character is involved with stories and science, and shuns needless action.

======Coward======
"I don't know, sounds dangerous..."
This character often quails when confronted with true horror, but will come through at unexpected times.

======Goofball======
"Whoa, that reminds me of a funny story!"
This character tends to joke and make a fool of herself, especially when tensions are high.

======Greedy======
"I'll just take that. And that. And that."
I want to keep this explanation all to myself. It's mine, all mine.

======Healer======
"That looks like it hurts. Can I help you with that?"
This character is naturally gifted and nursing and nurturing others, and tends to have an intuitive sense for people’s pain.

======Hothead======
"Enough talk. Let's attack!"
This character is quick to anger, quick to action, and will often be impatient when asked to wait.

======Leader======
"All right everyone, let's stick to the plan."
This character tends to take the lead, either explicitly or implicitly, in situations that require a firm or decisive statement.

======Loner======
"I'd rather to do it myself."
This character is unafraid of loneliness, even embraces it. Often pulls in the direction of solitary action and survival.

======Poet======
"I see that! And taste it, hear it, feel it. Wonderful!"
This character sees things in a different way, alive to the sensory pleasures of the world and able to express her aliveness with some fluency.

======Romantic======
"Love is what makes life worth living."
This character is a Casanova, or at least wishes he were, and will speak up in romantic matters and be influenced often by his attractions.

======Snark======
"I am so excited. That was sarcasm, by the way."
This character is witty and sarcastic, and often negative, but may be shockingly hopeful and romantic when it comes right down to it.
----

=Story Relevant Stats=
These are intended to range roughly from 1-100, and are to be used for event rolls in stories, things like that.
==Charisma==
A measure of how favored this character is, by other people, or even just fate. Starts out higher in youth and declines with age.
==Tenacity==
A measure of how mentally tough, patient, prepared, and determined this character is. Goes up with age.

=Transient Stats=
==Age==
how old
==Injury==
Subtracted from Health to give current health. Injury heals over time in the Overland Map, according to Recovery Rate.
==Shred==

How much of your armor has been temporarily negated. It is repaired at the end of the [[mission]].

==Shield==
Temporary health that is added to your health bar, and used up first, before accruing injury
==Actions==
How many actions you have remaining this turn. Reset every turn.
==Experience==

Used to track [[promote|promotions]]. Normal stuff. Note that the three hero classes have different experience curves.`

[[Category:Character]]

Morthagi lore

2019-11-16T16:36:09Z

Daustin: /* Ecology */

The Clockwork Undead

=Art of the Mortificers=
'''Morthagi''' (mor-THAW-ghee: singular and plural noun) is an old term, as old as the practice that first created them. Morthagi can be any of a wide variety of constructed entities that combine once-living tissue with mechanical components, mystical elements, and clockwork, in order to achieve a profane, though admittedly impressive, semblance of life. The most remarkable of them show true intuition, analytical capabilities, and situational cunning. Indeed, the limits of the Morthagi's potential for thought are beyond knowing.

'''Mortificer''' is the term for those who invented and built the Morthagi, in antiquity. You read their stories, and if you're lucky stumble upon some of their original texts, scrawled in archaic scripts. Most academics are helplessly taken with their achievements, and we certainly see the value of Mortificial components and mechanisms in such fields as medicine and masonry. The art of Mortificing is sadly lost to our world, and though many have sought to revive it, all have failed. The children of the Mortificers, their constructs, 'live' on, self-propagating, preserving the legacy of their creators.

=Ecology=
They may be destroyed by willful violence or exceptional accident, of course, but otherwise Mortificial devices and the Morthagi in particular tend to remain operational indefinitely. They appear almost universally capable of interfacing with each other, performing mutual repair and maintenance to sustain each other over infinite generations of people. To most scholars, this suggests there's an elegance to the schematics of the Mortificers that we are simply not comprehending, a simple repetitive principle that allows them all to exist, iterate, and interlock. Myself, I've analyzed their stunning capability to form links where none would've seemed conceivable, and I've attempted to observe the nature of their complex and holistic maintenance, and after doing so can only hypothesize that it's based on critical thinking more than original design: they study and solve problems with their 'minds', applying thought-skills that are perhaps owed to the lost magics interwoven with their joints and gears at their inception, back when such things may have been possible. Indeed, I see not the consistent reliable markings of manufacture, but truly the inspired and creative asymmetry of art.

That is not to say that the Morthagi are not essentially tools, or that there is no pattern to their form and function. Many an explorer has written of finding machines in deep tombs and forgotten caves. Often they're discovered employed in some mundanity, working at whatever it is they were directed to do, all those ages ago. Such constructs are often reported to have unique designs, and some are suspected to be exaggerated or wholly fabricated by those giving the account... but certain designs seem to be timeless, repeated by every practitioner of the artform. And few of them are defenseless.

Some of the simpler Morthagi must be powered by an external mystical or mechanical means, and can fall dormant in the absence of such a power source. Others, though, must have been designed to harvest their own power supply from their surroundings, giving outstanding credence to the notion that these Morthagi, for purposes that remain delightfully and tantalizingly opaque, were intended to outlast the civilizations and genius minds that birthed them. What they harvest and use appears opportunistically selected, ranging from naturally occurring resources and oil deposits, to living matter refined for whatever essential fuel such matter can produce. Regardless, it is never safe to assume that a given Morthagi is dormant, or, indeed, that one exhibiting harmless behavior might not suddenly turn aggressive.

There is so much about the Morthagi 'Ecosystem' we do not yet know. The hunt for knowledge rides by day and night! It never rests!

[[Category:Monster]]
[[Category:Morthagi]]

Deepist Lore

2019-11-16T16:21:37Z

Daustin: /* A Deepist Poem */

[[File:Cultist_minotaur.png|200px|thumb|right|Deepist Minotaur]]
== On Deepism ==

What can you really say is true about Deepism? The most we know comes from those who don't complete their initiations, who give their word and then grow scared in the warrens beneath the earth where they're shepherded, and are able to engineer some kind of escape. Those accounts hold meager weight with me, for who can really credit the words of oathbreakers? Regardless these dubious tales do give us a glimpse at the structure of the Deepist cult.

It is a cult: hierarchical, shrouded in secrets, virulent how it spreads to infect the minds of the disenfranchised and alone. You know those who belong to it by their garb and grunting mouths, slack faces and leeched-looking skin. Mostly they stay out of sight.

Deepism is almost entirely counter intuitive to a philosopher of gods and orders, such as myself. In fact, it's almost too neatly opposed, suggesting to me an ulterior ideology beneath the fabrication we observe, and others participate in. While the holy orders I've studied have emphasized light, ascension, and visibility, Deepism holds sacred the opposites. Darkness is truth to a Deepist. To descend is to grow in circumstance and majesty. The thing most obscured is what a Deepist must count most consequential.

As for the symbolism of the bull, the gravitation towards the monstrous and fungal... It follows that one must ascribe meaning to one's immediates. People anywhere must tell stories about the trees, the birds, the sun, moon, and stars. Such is what they encounter and are fascinated with. It is only logical that the horrors that grow below, grow among the Deepists in their caverns and holes, would figure greatly in their mythologies. From all appearances, they are an ancient, dogged order of devotees, and whatever it is they have given themselves to, they seem to feel rewarded in their service to it.

I will always be curious to ascertain more, though I very much doubt anything of substance will volunteer itself. Thus, I move on to more productive studies.

The Deepists are like the wolves or the Thrixl: they are there, and to wonder why is only the game of spurious soap-loving scholars and other limp-limbed idlers.

== A Deepist Poem ==
"When There Came Our Bull-Headed God"

In dagger-jagged depths, spiral-delved and full of drumbeats,

We banged our braggy drums. Blasted voices in old blessing-songs

Of softbodied gods who supped with us on sweetshrooms

And molds and cavedust, on dropwater and on nothing.

Hoofed and horn-laden he came out of halls buried

In looping heavy notes he laid his challenge-poem across our lakes

And calms and caverns. “Here,” he sang “is cairn and cure for your old

Listlessness: horn your heads and abandon them for glory.

Story your starless cavesky, I say, with the bloods and deeds of

Foes you feared when those old gods flaunted and flustered your faith.

I am unbeatable in darkness I am unquenchable by cool or by wet.

I am your founder

Now. I make, as flamefall feathers new the farmfield,

You my grass, all gathered terror- gripped who witness my greatness

And hope for no gory end, you the wheat into the consuming fire. You

The barkless into the bounteous proud and boast-belting brazens

I call brothers. Be unbound by peacetraders and take bellowing

what is not well-guarded from you: it is yours by law, if by you it is won.”

And his great legs danced on the rock and dashed themselves on dunderheads.

While his song split the stones and unsteadied stabled hearts,

We wild ones heard and wailed our long-locked warliness,

And took from timorous hands the morsels and the troves

And the surpluses we were owed and stamping and clapping and stomping,

Charging, we cantered after him down dauntless into the wells and chambercaves

Of a hundred underpeoples. We ended them. And until then had not been us, thundering and thunderous.

Writer's Guide

2019-11-16T16:16:18Z

Daustin: /* Monsters! */

All about writing for Wildermyth!

=Lore=
==The Yondering Lands==

[[File:YonderingLands.jpg|600px]]

The world goes through [[loops|cycles]]. Civilizations rise and fall, and threats to humanity wax and wane. Building ruins, powerful artifacts, the memories of great deeds all fade into myth or are lost to memory and are rediscovered time and again. The history of the lands are repeated patterns that are still never quite the same.

[[The Yondering Lands]] are sortof vaguely American. Or at least, if you have a choice between American and European, lean American. This applies mainly to flora and fauna, but also to little things like, we don't talk a lot about nobility, kings and queens, and we don't use a lot of the strongly-flavored medieval-fantasy words. No British accents or isms, unless it's a particularly foreign character. (People have been known to fall into the lands from time to time from other places, so.) But then also, we don't quite do banjos and cowboy hats. Guitars are maybe right on the edge. Fiddles are probably cool, right? I don't know.

==Monsters!==

[[File:MonsterBanner_deepist.jpg|600px]]

[[Deepist]]s are a minotaur-worshiping cult who live in cave systems. They put stone and fungi to creative use, and our heroes aren't sure whether their power comes from their own passion, or from something more sinister... Read some in-fiction lore [[Deepist Lore|here]].

[[File:MonsterBanner_drauven.jpg|600px]]

[[Drauven]] are grouchy lizard-folk who primarily live in the trees of forests and swamps, or in trees within swamps, but are happy to descend to the ground to go raid a village and maybe snack on a villager. They decorate themselves and their environment with bird and dragon-like motifs. Read some in-ficiton lore [[Drauven Lore|here]].

[[File:MonsterBanner_gorgon.jpg|600px]]

[[Gorgon]]s have been corrupting the local wildlife and turn them into raging tentacular monsters. They seem to be doing this experimentally, in pursuit of some deeper truth, but to call them "scientists" would tarnish the word. In the meantime, they continue to create the beasts as quickly as we can slaughter them. Read some in-fiction lore [[Gorgon Lore|here]].

[[File:MonsterBanner_morthagi.jpg|600px]]

[[Morthagi]] are clockwork undead, created from bone and metal long ago to serve some dark master. Their creator may be long gone, but the Morthagi themselves have persisted, clanking and hissing in the dusty, forgotten corners of the world. Read some in-fiction lore [[Morthagi lore|here]].

[[File:MonsterBanner_thrixl.jpg|600px]]

[[Thrixl]] are dreamlike insect-dragons. Their powers are more subtle than those of a Drauv, but more frightening. They prefer to attack minds and souls directly. Read some in-fiction lore [[Thrixl lore|here]].

All monsters are indeed monstrous. There may be shades of gray, but in aggregate monstrous life is incompatible with human life. Humans fight monsters to survive.

There are no demi-humanish creatures in the Yondering Lands: no elves, dwarves, orcs, or their kin. But I mean, we COULD have some badger-people or some other weird stuff. I mean, Drauven are kindof on the line, aren't they? But certainly none of the "stock fantasy races."

==Magic!==
Human magic is performed by [[mystic]]s who [[interfuse]] with objects to manipulate them.

But also, some [[monster]]s can perform magic and/or ARE magic.

==Equipment!==
There's lots of [[equipment]] in the game. Generally procedurally generated, but its history grows over time. Every piece of equipment has a description, some narrative insight that follows some [[Equipment Descriptions|general rules]].

TODO - The equipment design is in pretty heavy flux right now.

=How the Game Works=
This is a quick overview of how the game functions. It's good to have a handle on this so you know what you can do.
==Heroes==
[[Hero]]es are generated with [[History]], which drives [[Aspect]]s, which drive [[Stat]]s.

Hero History is generated as three lines, an Origin, and Anecdote, and a Motivation. These affect prime stats and personality stats, and also seed Hooks.

History lines leave behind a number of [[Hook]]s (usually 3 per hero), which are more specific character aspects and often take the form of a personality flaw or quirk. Hooks are great things to hang quests off of! They're also useful for letting a hero have a moment of badassery or weakness that's totally in theme for them. You can call out hooks when adding story roles, if you want to tell a whole story that hinges on one, or if you want to call out an optional character to provide an alternative path, that sort of thing.

[[Aspect]]s are just facts about the hero. Stuff like "human", "female", "attractedToMen", "hunter", "missingLeftArm". Aspects can carry stat modifiers and [[Effect]]s. Aspects are the workhorse of the dynamic content in the game, almost everything you need to know about a hero, site, anything really, can be accessed as an aspect (other than stat values). (History lines cannot be queried, but can apply aspects, which can be queried.) Hooks are just aspects with a special naming convention and some extra tooling around them.

[[Stat]]s are divided into Prime and Secondary, and into Gameplay and Personality. You can use any of the stats when selecting targets and determining difficulty rolls for events. Some stats have different natural ranges, which is a bit awkward, but that's where we're at right now. Personality stats are a great way to make characters come alive.

==Overland Map==
See: [[Campaign]]

The overland map is randomly generated, and fits together like board game tiles. In between tiles, mountain ranges and rivers create barriers that restrict travel. Players explore one tile at a time, scouting the tile, fighting any lurking threats, and then defending and improving the tile over time.

About half of the tiles the player explores will have an enemy lair on them. Lairs must be cleared through combat. Attacking a lair triggers an ''Arrive at Site'' story. Empty tiles may trigger a ''Wilderness Scouting'' 'story. Monsters will occasionally attack tiles that the player controls. The player will be prompted to defend.

As play progresses through the [[chapter]]s , the player will gain access to more and more area, which means additional tiles will be accessible. Control of tiles is important to the player, because it provides benefits at the end of each chapter, and Tiles are a source of stories and advancement for characters as well.

==Mission Maps==
[[Missions]] take place on randomly generated maps. The way it works is there are a set of scripts, and each script builds one type of map, with some random variation. Mission maps are designed to break the encounter into 2-4 sections, so that the player has some control over the pace of the fight.

==Legacy and Unlockables==
A player's [[Legacy]] is a collection of their favorite heroes, and these heroes can rejoin playthrough after playthrough. Similarly we track things the player has done over time as [[Unlockables]], which are also stored in the legacy. Stories should be able to query this stuff.

==Effects: Triggers, Targets and Outcomes==
Most things that happen in the game are modeled with [[Effects]]. Effects each have a trigger, a set of targets, and a set of branching outcomes. This same system is used for combat abilities and storytelling.

Stories use this system to specify when they can be told, and how they change the game world.

See Main Article: [[Story Inputs and Outputs]]

=Tools=
==Set up your work space==
If you are a developer and have version control access, you should also have access to the version control setup guide, which is not stored on this wiki since it contains some sensitive information. Do that setup first.

* How to run [[Scratchpad]],
* Some common [[Technical Difficulties]].
* Learn how to [[Testing|test]] your content.

==Exploring Existing Content==

The fastest way to find the content is by using [[Scratchpad]], but a lot of it can be found in the game as well, if you have cheats turned on. The [[Character Sheet]] is home to a lot of this, and the [[Content Editor]] can be pulled up with F12 once you're in-game.

[[Combat Lab]] is a great place to see what's currently possible in the game. From here, there a number of cheats accessible that will help you to build any character you want to try out. [[Gear]] upgrades, ability upgrades, and (some) narrative content can all be accessed here if you poke around. Particularly, check out the [[Character Sheet]].

[[Environment Lab]] will show you what mission maps we currently support.

[[Name Lab]] gives you some insight into the name generator.

[[The Content and Comics Editor]] is where the vast bulk of the content in the game is accessible.

[[Character Lab]] is currently sorta broken, but wants to be a catalog of all the heroes and monsters we can generate.

==Using The Editors==
See main article: [[Comic Editor Reference]]

=Tone, Style, Voice, Visuals=
hey what's a good story?

What's our "bar" for comic panels?

How many personality-specific lines should there be?

Let's decide all this!

=Stretching and Establishing new Content=

How far can stories range from the existing material and game assets? Spoiler: quite far!

Because we are using 2D art and no animation, certain things are incredibly cheap for us to do, which would be prohibitively expensive for other games. Here are some examples which should give you an idea. In general, we are looking for writing to stretch and grow our content range as much as possible.

Here are few but if you have a particular idea, run it past!

'''Comic Art''' is very cheap. If you need a prop or a background to tell a story properly, ask for it!

'''Special [[Gear]]''' Weapons are maybe the second-cheapest asset class in the game, specify as many as you like. Augments are also pretty cheap. Armor is fairly expensive, but we can do it if it feels really special.

'''One-Off Monsters''' if none of the existing monsters make sense, you can call for a one-off monster to appear in a story or a fight. Most stories probably won't need this, but it's relatively inexpensive, so let's do it when it makes sense.

'''Body Modifications''' are where our character rig really shines. Any limb, or the head, can be swapped out for something monstrous or more awesome. Hair styles, skin patterns, scars, tattoos, bring it! It gets a little tricky if it modifies the face, because the different facial expressions

'''Playable Characters''' might be monsters or weirdthings that you can recruit or get transformed into. Fairly cheap, and we really want these. One thing to consider is whether they will be able to use weapons or armor. The default approach is that non-humans don't use gear, but we could possibly make an exception for weapon-wielding, since that is relatively easy to rig up.

'''In-game Scenery''' is cheap, and could double as comic props?

'''Map icons''' are very cheap if you need something specific.

'''In-Game Environments''' are expensive, since they require a lot of art to work together, and a deal of programming too. But, bring your ideas. We might be able to make something work.

'''Combat Abilities''' Do you need special abilities, as rewards, for one-off enemies, playable characters, or whatever? They are pretty easy to make! Say what you want and we can talk it over.

'''Buffs/Debuffs''' are relatively cheap, particularly if they are similar to an existing effect.

'''Combat Avantages/Disadvantages''' are not totally implemented, so let us know what you want to see.

=Event Types=
There are maybe 10 or 12 different types of randomly selected events that we need. They each cover a particular situation, have different inputs and outputs, and generally impose particular constraints on the writer.

See main article: [[Event Types]].

Drauven Lore

2019-11-11T20:26:34Z

Daustin: Cut and simplified Drauven. Probably needs more eventually, or jsut a general more flavorful rewrite

[[Category:Monster]]

The Drauven tend to live out in the armpits of the wilderness, toiling at their wars and wings and drenching their idols in blood. They are known for enslaving whatever and whoever they can dominate, including humans and each other.

The Drauven, singular Drauv, got their name long ago, and perhaps gave it to themselves. The meaning of the word is unknown, and pronunciation varies in different regions and Yonderings. They walk upright and display human tendencies such as the use of tools and weapons, the construction of shelters, the coveting of treasures, and the use of an obviously complex language. Their communication is composed of sounds that are, for the most part, physically impossible for a human to reproduce. Their social structure appears clan-based.

Given to argument and gladiatorial sky-jousting, some Drauven are born for chiefhood, winning their fights with natural ability from an early age. Drauven sometimes grow crests of feathers beneath their jawlines and upon their large shoulders. There appears to be no gender bias in this development, nor indeed does gender seem to play a part in the taking of social roles. It would seem the Drauven are organized into a caste-system that distinguishes hunters and soldiers from tenders. The chief and the elders possess the most obvious preeminence.

As foes, the Drauven are organized and cunning, using stealth and intelligent tactics to achieve their battle-goals. Their weapons and armor tend to be well-made and lightweight, perfect for carrying long distances. They regularly inhabit almost any landscape, though they show a general preference for swamps and wooded areas.

A human society capable of defending itself makes an unattractive target for most Drauven clans. Still, they are never far from where we raise our own doors, and nor is the threat insignificant that they may, one day, unite.

Deepist Lore

2019-11-11T19:57:11Z

Daustin: Removed minotaur stuff, replaced with some brief descriptive text about Deepism from the perspective of some judgmental philosospher

[[File:Cultist_minotaur.png|200px|thumb|right|Deepist Minotaur]]
== On Deepism ==

What can you really say is true about Deepism? The most we know comes from those who don't complete their initiations, who give their word and then grow scared in the warrens beneath the earth where they're shepherded, and are able to engineer some kind of escape. Those accounts hold meager weight with me, for who can really credit the words of oathbreakers? Regardless these dubious tales do give us a glimpse at the structure of the Deepist cult.

It is a cult: hierarchical, shrouded in secrets, virulent how it spreads to infect the minds of the disenfranchised and alone. You know those who belong to it by their garb and grunting mouths, slack faces and leeched-looking skin. Mostly they stay out of sight.

Deepism is almost entirely counter intuitive to a philosopher of gods and orders, such as myself. In fact, it's almost too neatly opposed, suggesting to me an ulterior ideology beneath the fabrication we observe, and others participate in. While the holy orders I've studied have emphasized light, ascension, and visibility, Deepism holds sacred the opposites. Darkness is truth to a Deepist. To descend is to grow in circumstance and majesty. The thing most obscured is what a Deepist must count most consequential.

As for the symbolism of the bull, the gravitation towards the monstrous and fungal... It follows that one must ascribe meaning to one's immediates. People anywhere must tell stories about the trees, the birds, the sun, moon, and stars. Such is what they encounter and are fascinated with. It is only logical that the horrors that grow below, grow among the Deepists in their caverns and holes, would figure greatly in their mythologies. From all appearances, they are an ancient, dogged order of devotees, and whatever it is they have given themselves to, they seem to feel rewarded in their service to it.

I will always be curious to ascertain more, though I very much doubt anything of substance will volunteer itself. Thus, I move on to more productive studies.

The Deepists are like the wolves or the Thrixl: they are there, and to wonder why is only the game of spurious soap-loving scholars and other limp-limbed idlers.

== A Deepist Poem ==
"When There Came Our Bull-Headed God"

In dagger-jagged depths, spiral-delved and full of drumbeats,

We banged our braggy drums. Blasted voices in old blessing-songs

Of softbodied gods who supped with us on sweetshrooms

And molds and cavedust, on dropwater and on nothing.

Hoofed and horn-laden he came out of halls buried

In looping heavy notes he laid his challenge-poem across our lakes

And calms and caverns. “Here,” he sang “is cairn and cure for your old

Listlessness: horn your heads and abandon them for glory.

Story your starless cavesky, I say, with the bloods and deeds of

Foes you feared when those old gods flaunted and flustered your faith.

I am unbeatable in darkness I am unquenchable by cool or by wet.

I am your founder

Now. I make, as flamefall feathers new the farmfield,

You my grass, all gathered terror- gripped who witness my greatness

And hope for no gory end, you the wheat into the consuming fire. You

The boastless into the bounteous proud and boast-belting brazens

I call brothers. Be unbound by peacetraders and take bellowing

what is not well-guarded from you: it is yours by law, if by you it is won.”

And his great legs danced on the rock and dashed themselves on dunderheads.

While his song split the stones and unsteadied the stabled hearts,

We wild ones heard and wailed our long-locked warliness,

And took from timorous hands the morsels and the troves

And the surpluses we were owed and stamping and clapping and stomping,

Charging, we cantered after him down dauntless into the wells and chambercaves

Of a hundred underpeoples. We ended them. And until then had not been us, thundering and thunderous.

Deepist Lore

2019-11-11T18:48:14Z

Daustin: Removing Deepist Vignette

Deepist Lore

2019-11-11T18:47:35Z

Daustin: /* A Deepist Poem */

[[File:Cultist_minotaur.png|200px|thumb|right|Deepist Minotaur]]
== A description of minotaurs ==
We are calling these beasts Minotaurs, a name that will no doubt sound familiar out of legend. There is no question in our minds that these incredible masses of muscle, horn, and hate, are the very monsters that inspired those eldritch tales. Still, biceps like these simply don’t translate to the page.

What we now know is that Minotaurs share key skeletal and muscular similarities with [[Drauven | Drauvs]], making it highly likely that the two starkly different monsters are somehow related. The obvious differences are possibly indicative of a split early in the dawn of history, and we have heard tell of ancient sorcerers whose canvas was the world, whose paints were living beings and the forces of primal energies... These are merely myths, and myriad reasons exist why such a split might have occurred (sorcerers, though).

Minotaurs are shaped like massive men, with the heads of bulls encasing shockingly human-like brains. They stand a good foot or two taller than the tallest man, and are half again as strong as our best warriors, on average. Their powerful bodies are covered with fine hair, and they commonly weave jewelry of bone, and whatever other materials are at hand, into their hides. Like Drauvs, they show disturbing social tendencies, but are much more solitary, appearing more high-strung and unlikely to cooperate than even their famously violent relatives.

The behavior patterns we see are mostly nocturnal, and they show a preference for dark places such as caves and dense forests, away from the sun. Minotaurs, it would seem, have a deep affinity for music. Often, when the noises in the dark feel rhythmic, or hauntingly tuneful, it is the strange soft music of one of these bull-creatures, a tune to give pace to the solitude, or possibly, to calm the nerves in the midst of the hunt. Almost strictly carnivorous, these creatures prey upon other cave-dwellers, no matter how ferocious. A Minotaur seems startlingly incapable of calculating survival-risk, and they will start fights with creatures or bands more than capable of destroying them. A deep rage appears to suffuse their thought-processes, in the moments when a human would normally be weighing the risks and rewards of fight or flight.

Possessed of undeniably deep emotions, Minotaurs are generally proud in bearing, belying their monstrous appearance with sensitive ideas of respect and honor. What little language they use seems borrowed, as if it were merely a convenience they thought to implement, not at all a necessity they would care to develop. They seem to favor elegant, extravagantly powerful weaponry, and rarely possess armor, or even clothing. Normally found alone, Minotaurs show little regard for prioritizing or strategic combat. Some breeds, however, appear to be learning to hunt in threes, favoring simultaneous, multi-directional pincer-movements. One of our mystics has remarked: “That’s just bully.” Take a wild guess who said that…

Do Minotaurs mate? Do they live forever? Both seem unlikely. Perhaps they just congeal out of darkness or cave-mold. Perhaps their propagation is a mystery we should make further attempts to investigate...

--These Informed Opinions submitted by the Order of Kralar on <Date>

== A Deepist Poem ==
"When There Came Our Bull-Headed God"

In dagger-jagged depths, spiral-delved and full of drumbeats,

We banged our braggy drums. Blasted voices in old blessing-songs

Of softbodied gods who supped with us on sweetshrooms

And molds and cavedust, on dropwater and on nothing.

Hoofed and horn-laden he came out of halls buried

In looping heavy notes he laid his challenge-poem across our lakes

And calms and caverns. “Here,” he sang “is cairn and cure for your old

Listlessness: horn your heads and abandon them for glory.

Story your starless cavesky, I say, with the bloods and deeds of

Foes you feared when those old gods flaunted and flustered your faith.

I am unbeatable in darkness I am unquenchable by cool or by wet.

I am your founder

Now. I make, as flamefall feathers new the farmfield,

You my grass, all gathered terror- gripped who witness my greatness

And hope for no gory end, you the wheat into the consuming fire. You

The boastless into the bounteous proud and boast-belting brazens

I call brothers. Be unbound by peacetraders and take bellowing

what is not well-guarded from you: it is yours by law, if by you it is won.”

And his great legs danced on the rock and dashed themselves on dunderheads.

While his song split the stones and unsteadied the stabled hearts,

We wild ones heard and wailed our long-locked warliness,

And took from timorous hands the morsels and the troves

And the surpluses we were owed and stamping and clapping and stomping,

Charging, we cantered after him down dauntless into the wells and chambercaves

Of a hundred underpeoples. We ended them. And until then had not been us, thundering and thunderous.

== A Deepist Vignette ==
The Call of the Horn

Amber flames toiled in the dark, digging away at the in-buckling blacknesses of twenty-one generations gone. Eeland sat on a pewter pew and her fingers twined stray fibers of her bleached burlap robe into twists.

She sat waiting for the horned prophet.

Checking the silk cord around her waist, then the plaits of her three asymmetrical braids. She counted them.

“The small braid is for friendships,” she intoned to herself. “They’ve sharded you, they’ve clung, they’ve pulled.” Kah’s face melded out of the crimson places inside her, and she made it crumble, brick by brick. “The middle braid is for family. They’ve cut you, melted you, poured your soul in their miscast molds.” Don’t think about Andlewick, don’t smell the pine-dust of the mill, or listen to the song of summer’s whitejay… by the north willow where you and your sister… don’t.

She gripped the middle braid hard like she would uproot it. Her sleeve fell to her elbow, the etchings on her flesh catching candlelight and roiling like burning silver serpents. Comforted her.

“The… the third braid.” Her hand wobbled to grip it, and her fingers almost couldn’t circle it. “The third braid is heaviest. It’s—″

Something so vast shouldn’t be so quiet.

The prophet sat by her. Was sitting by her. Had been sitting by her. His huge fingers stroked the back of her hand.

“Ee!” she cried. And fought back instant shame. “Lord—Lord Ilog! Who Art Strangest and Truest and Most Mysterious. The Knower of Labyrinths, the Founder of Course, the Walker through Fog. Lord Ilog.”

The prophet’s great legs were bigger around than her body. The skin was damp felt. It buzzed along the side of her knee. He smelled like old rock, old sweat, ancient leather, and… maybe she was imagining the scent of wild freesia.

The prophet put both hands in his own lap, a massive elbow on each thigh. She felt his head dip beside her, and knew she was being asked to look in his eyes.

Did herself proud, Eeland. Without blinking she met him gaze for gaze. Eyes little more than two wet large orbs in the dark, pricked with light. The head, which belonged to a bull, was indeed ducked low so that she could see it without tilting back overmuch.
Lord Ilog seemed to be waiting too.

“Lor…ah—ah! The third…” she thought she perceived a nod of his chin, and went on: “The third braid is heaviest. It’s for the self, insisting on selfness. All it grips it endlessly holds.”

The breath from his great nostrils struck her face cool.

“Truss them up and hang them off you. Be in the falling world a mighty pillar. Be in the darkness a solid flame. As the great bull, be fast and solid and constant in your course. Be unflagging, ferocious, hearty. The change is not in you: the change is in that which trembles before your charge, perceives you anew in your uncloudedness, your righteous steamless light.”

For moments throbbing and hypnotic, they sat and the little amber candleflames burned lower. It seemed her words echoed without decay in the black chapel.

What would he do? There was muscular heat.

Then she felt him shift, and they stood together.

Eeland, who had been born in Andlewick, second daughter to a basketweaver, who had grown up a regular girl, who had learned her letters from the kind schoolmaster and only once stolen a plum when she was too young to respect the difference between good and bad… Eeland, that girl others had called the peacemaker, the sweetheart, the brightsoul, destined for happiness and goodness and a joyful life… Eeland followed the atrocious prophet past the candles’ glow down a tunnel that seemed to yawn open just for them.

The air in it was moldy and sweet. Broad and high enough for Lord Ilog, she was a small boat in a night sea, drawn along into a strait by her mooring to this invisible whale, whose size was sensed but never seen. As she went, her steps grew heavier, and the heart in her colder and more craven.

Go back, her sister whispered to her.

Go back said her mother, and even her addled father mumbled something to that effect.

Go back went the whitejay, and Kah too, who told her he would love her again, if she would only come back to him, to Andlewick, to life…

Go forward, said her training. Said the distant light. Said the morbid aroma of the prophet who now halted, and stepped aside before her, and ahead of them was a hallway, and an arch too small for the prophet to pass through, and beyond it the red of a hearthbound fire. Go forward, where even he cannot go…

She swallowed her thoughts away, and shook the distractions from her eyes. Her braids whipped her cheeks but she didn’t feel them.

Eeland’s paces began small and faint, but as she continued down the hallway—the walls were painted, she thought, images only dimly visible in the light that grew from the far arch, hunting scenes, maybe—as she continued, surety in her blossomed. Shuffle turned to walk turned to stride. Fear turned to caution turned to pride. And the light swelled before her, the promise, the revelation.

And the paintings began to grow clear.

Not hunting scenes. Not exactly. More like battle scenes. Heroic figures, at war with monsters: the iron-toothed Drauv, the mechanized Morthage, the twisted and leering Gorgon… Overcoming them all, this group of characters. A man in robes, a woman in armor, two sisters with bows and a strange-eyed fellow with horns emerging from his head. There they all were, appearing in scene after scene, winning, and winning, and casting down evil, growing more powerful, growing older…

All at once they stopped. And she realized she was at the arch. The smell of bread hit her homesick nose and made her sob once, before she clapped hands to her mouth. Took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and stepped inside.

It wasn’t quite what she expected. Here was no grandiose temple, no raised altar, no monolithic statue of a bull-god, astride the universe. Here were humble bookshelves and there was a bright flame-flowering hearth, there was an oven and sacks of grain, foodstuffs. There were two long tables, and racks of armor, weapons. The ceiling was vaulted, raftered with beams of oak, but dripping with stalactites. At one of the tables sat a solitary woman. She looked positively ancient. She noticed Eeland staring at her and bowed her head, solemn eyes bidding the girl come near.

Eeland approached, unsure what she should be feeling. Trying to insist that sucking vacancy inside wasn’t the shock of her disappointment.

“Oh,” was the first thing she said. “Hi.”

The woman’s face folded itself into unlikely formations. “Yep, yep,” the woman said.

“I’m Eeland?”

“You seem to think so,” she said.

Eeland tested each braid, counting the plaits. She rolled up her sleeves to look at the holy signs etched over her skin. “Well.”

“Sit,” the woman said. “There’s bread on a plate somewhere.”

Eeland rubbed her face with both hands. “Ah…”

“Sit.”

Eeland drew out a chair. It roared on the stone floor. She sat down. There was no bread anywhere. “Or…” Eeland said. “I’m wondering.”

The woman’s eyes were hard and strong.

The two of them sat together, just as she had sat with the prophet. Long, and wordless. Only there wasn’t that same… what do you call that? There wasn’t that eldritch hum, that elicit excitement, that sense of gleeful perversion of the soul.

“I studied faithfully,” Eeland decided to say.

“A noble thing.”

“I really believed.”

“You’re not unique in this.” The woman knocked her knuckles together, and then stood up. Eeland was surprised to see an old sword hanging off a belt around the woman’s waist. Bent-backed, she couldn’t stand straight. Could the woman even hold that sword anymore? Even draw it? She walked to a little desk by the hearth, and took a piece of paper off the top of a stack. An ordinary piece of paper. She hobbled back to the table, and groaned as she sat down.

“Do you need help?” Asking a bit late, aren’t I? She struck her own thigh with a fist. “What I mean…”

The woman didn’t look up. She produced a pen from somewhere, and began writing. She took time with each character, paused for moments of stillness, like someone counting the beats of a rest in a great symphony that must be taking place elsewhere…

Finally she tapped the back of the pen twice on the tabletop, and sniffed. She wiped her nose. Then the woman slid the paper over to Eeland, and suspended her pen like a hogspit between the skeletal index finger of each hand. It had several simple sentences on it in dark bold letters, precisely spaced. “Read this to me,” the woman said.

Eeland looked from the paper to the woman, to the paper again. She stared into the flames, and wondered why she felt so empty.

“No heroes.”

Nod.

“No monsters.”

Nod, nod.

“Only you and me, and our imaginations.”

Grizzly dry lips curved up.

Eeland let her shoulders droop.

“Do you want to learn how we did it?” The woman’s phlegm-webbed voice wrapped Eeland’s ear with this last vague promise.

Is there still a secret to be had?

“Do you want to know how we conquered death?”

What does a girl from Andlewick—after she’s abandoned everything she’s ever known in order to join a Bull-cult, only to find out it’s all some kind of fraud inspired by the inelegant words of a decrepit hag eating bread alone in a firelit cave—what does a girl like that—and assuredly there must have been others who got this far, better studiers, more faithful, brighter, stronger?—what does—or do you have to be as dull and desperate as Eeland was to swallow all this drivel?—what can one such as her even say?

“Tell me,” Eeland sighed.

[[Category:Monster]]
[[Category:Deepist]]

Deepist Lore

2019-11-11T18:42:12Z

Daustin: /* A Deepist Poem */

[[File:Cultist_minotaur.png|200px|thumb|right|Deepist Minotaur]]
== A description of minotaurs ==
We are calling these beasts Minotaurs, a name that will no doubt sound familiar out of legend. There is no question in our minds that these incredible masses of muscle, horn, and hate, are the very monsters that inspired those eldritch tales. Still, biceps like these simply don’t translate to the page.

What we now know is that Minotaurs share key skeletal and muscular similarities with [[Drauven | Drauvs]], making it highly likely that the two starkly different monsters are somehow related. The obvious differences are possibly indicative of a split early in the dawn of history, and we have heard tell of ancient sorcerers whose canvas was the world, whose paints were living beings and the forces of primal energies... These are merely myths, and myriad reasons exist why such a split might have occurred (sorcerers, though).

Minotaurs are shaped like massive men, with the heads of bulls encasing shockingly human-like brains. They stand a good foot or two taller than the tallest man, and are half again as strong as our best warriors, on average. Their powerful bodies are covered with fine hair, and they commonly weave jewelry of bone, and whatever other materials are at hand, into their hides. Like Drauvs, they show disturbing social tendencies, but are much more solitary, appearing more high-strung and unlikely to cooperate than even their famously violent relatives.

The behavior patterns we see are mostly nocturnal, and they show a preference for dark places such as caves and dense forests, away from the sun. Minotaurs, it would seem, have a deep affinity for music. Often, when the noises in the dark feel rhythmic, or hauntingly tuneful, it is the strange soft music of one of these bull-creatures, a tune to give pace to the solitude, or possibly, to calm the nerves in the midst of the hunt. Almost strictly carnivorous, these creatures prey upon other cave-dwellers, no matter how ferocious. A Minotaur seems startlingly incapable of calculating survival-risk, and they will start fights with creatures or bands more than capable of destroying them. A deep rage appears to suffuse their thought-processes, in the moments when a human would normally be weighing the risks and rewards of fight or flight.

Possessed of undeniably deep emotions, Minotaurs are generally proud in bearing, belying their monstrous appearance with sensitive ideas of respect and honor. What little language they use seems borrowed, as if it were merely a convenience they thought to implement, not at all a necessity they would care to develop. They seem to favor elegant, extravagantly powerful weaponry, and rarely possess armor, or even clothing. Normally found alone, Minotaurs show little regard for prioritizing or strategic combat. Some breeds, however, appear to be learning to hunt in threes, favoring simultaneous, multi-directional pincer-movements. One of our mystics has remarked: “That’s just bully.” Take a wild guess who said that…

Do Minotaurs mate? Do they live forever? Both seem unlikely. Perhaps they just congeal out of darkness or cave-mold. Perhaps their propagation is a mystery we should make further attempts to investigate...

--These Informed Opinions submitted by the Order of Kralar on <Date>

== A Deepist Poem ==
"When There Came Our Bull-Headed God"

In dagger-jagged depths, spiral-delved and full of drumbeats,

We banged our braggy drums. Blasted voices in old blessing-songs

Of softbodied gods who supped with us on sweetshrooms

And molds and cavedust, on dropwater and on nothing.

Hoofed and horn-laden he came out of halls buried

In looping heavy notes he laid his challenge-poem across our lakes

And calms and caverns. “Here,” he sang “is cairn and cure for your old

Listlessness: horn your heads and abandon them for glory.

Story your starless cavesky, I say, with the bloods and deeds of

Foes you feared when those old gods flaunted and flustered your faith.

I am unbeatable in darkness I am unquenchable by cool or by wet.

I am your founder

Now. I make, as flamefall feathers new the farmfield,

You my grass, all gathered terror- gripped who witness my greatness

And hope for no gory end, you the wheat into the consuming fire. You

The boastless into the bounteous proud and boast-belting brazens

I call brothers. Be unbound by peacetraders and take bellowing

what is not well-guarded from you: it is yours by law, if by you it is won.”

And his great legs danced on the rock and dashed themselves on dunderheads.

While his song split the stones and unsteadied the stabled hearts,

We wild ones heard and wailed our long-locked warliness,

And took from timorous hands the the morsels and the troves

And the surpluses we were owed and stamping and clapping and stomping,

Charging, we cantered after him down dauntless into the wells and chambercaves

Of a hundred underpeoples. We ended them. And until then had not been us, thundering and thunderous.

== A Deepist Vignette ==
The Call of the Horn

Amber flames toiled in the dark, digging away at the in-buckling blacknesses of twenty-one generations gone. Eeland sat on a pewter pew and her fingers twined stray fibers of her bleached burlap robe into twists.

She sat waiting for the horned prophet.

Checking the silk cord around her waist, then the plaits of her three asymmetrical braids. She counted them.

“The small braid is for friendships,” she intoned to herself. “They’ve sharded you, they’ve clung, they’ve pulled.” Kah’s face melded out of the crimson places inside her, and she made it crumble, brick by brick. “The middle braid is for family. They’ve cut you, melted you, poured your soul in their miscast molds.” Don’t think about Andlewick, don’t smell the pine-dust of the mill, or listen to the song of summer’s whitejay… by the north willow where you and your sister… don’t.

She gripped the middle braid hard like she would uproot it. Her sleeve fell to her elbow, the etchings on her flesh catching candlelight and roiling like burning silver serpents. Comforted her.

“The… the third braid.” Her hand wobbled to grip it, and her fingers almost couldn’t circle it. “The third braid is heaviest. It’s—″

Something so vast shouldn’t be so quiet.

The prophet sat by her. Was sitting by her. Had been sitting by her. His huge fingers stroked the back of her hand.

“Ee!” she cried. And fought back instant shame. “Lord—Lord Ilog! Who Art Strangest and Truest and Most Mysterious. The Knower of Labyrinths, the Founder of Course, the Walker through Fog. Lord Ilog.”

The prophet’s great legs were bigger around than her body. The skin was damp felt. It buzzed along the side of her knee. He smelled like old rock, old sweat, ancient leather, and… maybe she was imagining the scent of wild freesia.

The prophet put both hands in his own lap, a massive elbow on each thigh. She felt his head dip beside her, and knew she was being asked to look in his eyes.

Did herself proud, Eeland. Without blinking she met him gaze for gaze. Eyes little more than two wet large orbs in the dark, pricked with light. The head, which belonged to a bull, was indeed ducked low so that she could see it without tilting back overmuch.
Lord Ilog seemed to be waiting too.

“Lor…ah—ah! The third…” she thought she perceived a nod of his chin, and went on: “The third braid is heaviest. It’s for the self, insisting on selfness. All it grips it endlessly holds.”

The breath from his great nostrils struck her face cool.

“Truss them up and hang them off you. Be in the falling world a mighty pillar. Be in the darkness a solid flame. As the great bull, be fast and solid and constant in your course. Be unflagging, ferocious, hearty. The change is not in you: the change is in that which trembles before your charge, perceives you anew in your uncloudedness, your righteous steamless light.”

For moments throbbing and hypnotic, they sat and the little amber candleflames burned lower. It seemed her words echoed without decay in the black chapel.

What would he do? There was muscular heat.

Then she felt him shift, and they stood together.

Eeland, who had been born in Andlewick, second daughter to a basketweaver, who had grown up a regular girl, who had learned her letters from the kind schoolmaster and only once stolen a plum when she was too young to respect the difference between good and bad… Eeland, that girl others had called the peacemaker, the sweetheart, the brightsoul, destined for happiness and goodness and a joyful life… Eeland followed the atrocious prophet past the candles’ glow down a tunnel that seemed to yawn open just for them.

The air in it was moldy and sweet. Broad and high enough for Lord Ilog, she was a small boat in a night sea, drawn along into a strait by her mooring to this invisible whale, whose size was sensed but never seen. As she went, her steps grew heavier, and the heart in her colder and more craven.

Go back, her sister whispered to her.

Go back said her mother, and even her addled father mumbled something to that effect.

Go back went the whitejay, and Kah too, who told her he would love her again, if she would only come back to him, to Andlewick, to life…

Go forward, said her training. Said the distant light. Said the morbid aroma of the prophet who now halted, and stepped aside before her, and ahead of them was a hallway, and an arch too small for the prophet to pass through, and beyond it the red of a hearthbound fire. Go forward, where even he cannot go…

She swallowed her thoughts away, and shook the distractions from her eyes. Her braids whipped her cheeks but she didn’t feel them.

Eeland’s paces began small and faint, but as she continued down the hallway—the walls were painted, she thought, images only dimly visible in the light that grew from the far arch, hunting scenes, maybe—as she continued, surety in her blossomed. Shuffle turned to walk turned to stride. Fear turned to caution turned to pride. And the light swelled before her, the promise, the revelation.

And the paintings began to grow clear.

Not hunting scenes. Not exactly. More like battle scenes. Heroic figures, at war with monsters: the iron-toothed Drauv, the mechanized Morthage, the twisted and leering Gorgon… Overcoming them all, this group of characters. A man in robes, a woman in armor, two sisters with bows and a strange-eyed fellow with horns emerging from his head. There they all were, appearing in scene after scene, winning, and winning, and casting down evil, growing more powerful, growing older…

All at once they stopped. And she realized she was at the arch. The smell of bread hit her homesick nose and made her sob once, before she clapped hands to her mouth. Took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and stepped inside.

It wasn’t quite what she expected. Here was no grandiose temple, no raised altar, no monolithic statue of a bull-god, astride the universe. Here were humble bookshelves and there was a bright flame-flowering hearth, there was an oven and sacks of grain, foodstuffs. There were two long tables, and racks of armor, weapons. The ceiling was vaulted, raftered with beams of oak, but dripping with stalactites. At one of the tables sat a solitary woman. She looked positively ancient. She noticed Eeland staring at her and bowed her head, solemn eyes bidding the girl come near.

Eeland approached, unsure what she should be feeling. Trying to insist that sucking vacancy inside wasn’t the shock of her disappointment.

“Oh,” was the first thing she said. “Hi.”

The woman’s face folded itself into unlikely formations. “Yep, yep,” the woman said.

“I’m Eeland?”

“You seem to think so,” she said.

Eeland tested each braid, counting the plaits. She rolled up her sleeves to look at the holy signs etched over her skin. “Well.”

“Sit,” the woman said. “There’s bread on a plate somewhere.”

Eeland rubbed her face with both hands. “Ah…”

“Sit.”

Eeland drew out a chair. It roared on the stone floor. She sat down. There was no bread anywhere. “Or…” Eeland said. “I’m wondering.”

The woman’s eyes were hard and strong.

The two of them sat together, just as she had sat with the prophet. Long, and wordless. Only there wasn’t that same… what do you call that? There wasn’t that eldritch hum, that elicit excitement, that sense of gleeful perversion of the soul.

“I studied faithfully,” Eeland decided to say.

“A noble thing.”

“I really believed.”

“You’re not unique in this.” The woman knocked her knuckles together, and then stood up. Eeland was surprised to see an old sword hanging off a belt around the woman’s waist. Bent-backed, she couldn’t stand straight. Could the woman even hold that sword anymore? Even draw it? She walked to a little desk by the hearth, and took a piece of paper off the top of a stack. An ordinary piece of paper. She hobbled back to the table, and groaned as she sat down.

“Do you need help?” Asking a bit late, aren’t I? She struck her own thigh with a fist. “What I mean…”

The woman didn’t look up. She produced a pen from somewhere, and began writing. She took time with each character, paused for moments of stillness, like someone counting the beats of a rest in a great symphony that must be taking place elsewhere…

Finally she tapped the back of the pen twice on the tabletop, and sniffed. She wiped her nose. Then the woman slid the paper over to Eeland, and suspended her pen like a hogspit between the skeletal index finger of each hand. It had several simple sentences on it in dark bold letters, precisely spaced. “Read this to me,” the woman said.

Eeland looked from the paper to the woman, to the paper again. She stared into the flames, and wondered why she felt so empty.

“No heroes.”

Nod.

“No monsters.”

Nod, nod.

“Only you and me, and our imaginations.”

Grizzly dry lips curved up.

Eeland let her shoulders droop.

“Do you want to learn how we did it?” The woman’s phlegm-webbed voice wrapped Eeland’s ear with this last vague promise.

Is there still a secret to be had?

“Do you want to know how we conquered death?”

What does a girl from Andlewick—after she’s abandoned everything she’s ever known in order to join a Bull-cult, only to find out it’s all some kind of fraud inspired by the inelegant words of a decrepit hag eating bread alone in a firelit cave—what does a girl like that—and assuredly there must have been others who got this far, better studiers, more faithful, brighter, stronger?—what does—or do you have to be as dull and desperate as Eeland was to swallow all this drivel?—what can one such as her even say?

“Tell me,” Eeland sighed.

[[Category:Monster]]
[[Category:Deepist]]

Deepist Lore

2019-11-11T18:41:58Z

Daustin: /* A Deepist poem */

[[File:Cultist_minotaur.png|200px|thumb|right|Deepist Minotaur]]
== A description of minotaurs ==
We are calling these beasts Minotaurs, a name that will no doubt sound familiar out of legend. There is no question in our minds that these incredible masses of muscle, horn, and hate, are the very monsters that inspired those eldritch tales. Still, biceps like these simply don’t translate to the page.

What we now know is that Minotaurs share key skeletal and muscular similarities with [[Drauven | Drauvs]], making it highly likely that the two starkly different monsters are somehow related. The obvious differences are possibly indicative of a split early in the dawn of history, and we have heard tell of ancient sorcerers whose canvas was the world, whose paints were living beings and the forces of primal energies... These are merely myths, and myriad reasons exist why such a split might have occurred (sorcerers, though).

Minotaurs are shaped like massive men, with the heads of bulls encasing shockingly human-like brains. They stand a good foot or two taller than the tallest man, and are half again as strong as our best warriors, on average. Their powerful bodies are covered with fine hair, and they commonly weave jewelry of bone, and whatever other materials are at hand, into their hides. Like Drauvs, they show disturbing social tendencies, but are much more solitary, appearing more high-strung and unlikely to cooperate than even their famously violent relatives.

The behavior patterns we see are mostly nocturnal, and they show a preference for dark places such as caves and dense forests, away from the sun. Minotaurs, it would seem, have a deep affinity for music. Often, when the noises in the dark feel rhythmic, or hauntingly tuneful, it is the strange soft music of one of these bull-creatures, a tune to give pace to the solitude, or possibly, to calm the nerves in the midst of the hunt. Almost strictly carnivorous, these creatures prey upon other cave-dwellers, no matter how ferocious. A Minotaur seems startlingly incapable of calculating survival-risk, and they will start fights with creatures or bands more than capable of destroying them. A deep rage appears to suffuse their thought-processes, in the moments when a human would normally be weighing the risks and rewards of fight or flight.

Possessed of undeniably deep emotions, Minotaurs are generally proud in bearing, belying their monstrous appearance with sensitive ideas of respect and honor. What little language they use seems borrowed, as if it were merely a convenience they thought to implement, not at all a necessity they would care to develop. They seem to favor elegant, extravagantly powerful weaponry, and rarely possess armor, or even clothing. Normally found alone, Minotaurs show little regard for prioritizing or strategic combat. Some breeds, however, appear to be learning to hunt in threes, favoring simultaneous, multi-directional pincer-movements. One of our mystics has remarked: “That’s just bully.” Take a wild guess who said that…

Do Minotaurs mate? Do they live forever? Both seem unlikely. Perhaps they just congeal out of darkness or cave-mold. Perhaps their propagation is a mystery we should make further attempts to investigate...

--These Informed Opinions submitted by the Order of Kralar on <Date>

== A Deepist Poem ==
""When There Came Our Bull-Headed God""

In dagger-jagged depths, spiral-delved and full of drumbeats,

We banged our braggy drums. Blasted voices in old blessing-songs

Of softbodied gods who supped with us on sweetshrooms

And molds and cavedust, on dropwater and on nothing.

Hoofed and horn-laden he came out of halls buried

In looping heavy notes he laid his challenge-poem across our lakes

And calms and caverns. “Here,” he sang “is cairn and cure for your old

Listlessness: horn your heads and abandon them for glory.

Story your starless cavesky, I say, with the bloods and deeds of

Foes you feared when those old gods flaunted and flustered your faith.

I am unbeatable in darkness I am unquenchable by cool or by wet.

I am your founder

Now. I make, as flamefall feathers new the farmfield,

You my grass, all gathered terror- gripped who witness my greatness

And hope for no gory end, you the wheat into the consuming fire. You

The boastless into the bounteous proud and boast-belting brazens

I call brothers. Be unbound by peacetraders and take bellowing

what is not well-guarded from you: it is yours by law, if by you it is won.”

And his great legs danced on the rock and dashed themselves on dunderheads.

While his song split the stones and unsteadied the stabled hearts,

We wild ones heard and wailed our long-locked warliness,

And took from timorous hands the the morsels and the troves

And the surpluses we were owed and stamping and clapping and stomping,

Charging, we cantered after him down dauntless into the wells and chambercaves

Of a hundred underpeoples. We ended them. And until then had not been us, thundering and thunderous.

== A Deepist Vignette ==
The Call of the Horn

Amber flames toiled in the dark, digging away at the in-buckling blacknesses of twenty-one generations gone. Eeland sat on a pewter pew and her fingers twined stray fibers of her bleached burlap robe into twists.

She sat waiting for the horned prophet.

Checking the silk cord around her waist, then the plaits of her three asymmetrical braids. She counted them.

“The small braid is for friendships,” she intoned to herself. “They’ve sharded you, they’ve clung, they’ve pulled.” Kah’s face melded out of the crimson places inside her, and she made it crumble, brick by brick. “The middle braid is for family. They’ve cut you, melted you, poured your soul in their miscast molds.” Don’t think about Andlewick, don’t smell the pine-dust of the mill, or listen to the song of summer’s whitejay… by the north willow where you and your sister… don’t.

She gripped the middle braid hard like she would uproot it. Her sleeve fell to her elbow, the etchings on her flesh catching candlelight and roiling like burning silver serpents. Comforted her.

“The… the third braid.” Her hand wobbled to grip it, and her fingers almost couldn’t circle it. “The third braid is heaviest. It’s—″

Something so vast shouldn’t be so quiet.

The prophet sat by her. Was sitting by her. Had been sitting by her. His huge fingers stroked the back of her hand.

“Ee!” she cried. And fought back instant shame. “Lord—Lord Ilog! Who Art Strangest and Truest and Most Mysterious. The Knower of Labyrinths, the Founder of Course, the Walker through Fog. Lord Ilog.”

The prophet’s great legs were bigger around than her body. The skin was damp felt. It buzzed along the side of her knee. He smelled like old rock, old sweat, ancient leather, and… maybe she was imagining the scent of wild freesia.

The prophet put both hands in his own lap, a massive elbow on each thigh. She felt his head dip beside her, and knew she was being asked to look in his eyes.

Did herself proud, Eeland. Without blinking she met him gaze for gaze. Eyes little more than two wet large orbs in the dark, pricked with light. The head, which belonged to a bull, was indeed ducked low so that she could see it without tilting back overmuch.
Lord Ilog seemed to be waiting too.

“Lor…ah—ah! The third…” she thought she perceived a nod of his chin, and went on: “The third braid is heaviest. It’s for the self, insisting on selfness. All it grips it endlessly holds.”

The breath from his great nostrils struck her face cool.

“Truss them up and hang them off you. Be in the falling world a mighty pillar. Be in the darkness a solid flame. As the great bull, be fast and solid and constant in your course. Be unflagging, ferocious, hearty. The change is not in you: the change is in that which trembles before your charge, perceives you anew in your uncloudedness, your righteous steamless light.”

For moments throbbing and hypnotic, they sat and the little amber candleflames burned lower. It seemed her words echoed without decay in the black chapel.

What would he do? There was muscular heat.

Then she felt him shift, and they stood together.

Eeland, who had been born in Andlewick, second daughter to a basketweaver, who had grown up a regular girl, who had learned her letters from the kind schoolmaster and only once stolen a plum when she was too young to respect the difference between good and bad… Eeland, that girl others had called the peacemaker, the sweetheart, the brightsoul, destined for happiness and goodness and a joyful life… Eeland followed the atrocious prophet past the candles’ glow down a tunnel that seemed to yawn open just for them.

The air in it was moldy and sweet. Broad and high enough for Lord Ilog, she was a small boat in a night sea, drawn along into a strait by her mooring to this invisible whale, whose size was sensed but never seen. As she went, her steps grew heavier, and the heart in her colder and more craven.

Go back, her sister whispered to her.

Go back said her mother, and even her addled father mumbled something to that effect.

Go back went the whitejay, and Kah too, who told her he would love her again, if she would only come back to him, to Andlewick, to life…

Go forward, said her training. Said the distant light. Said the morbid aroma of the prophet who now halted, and stepped aside before her, and ahead of them was a hallway, and an arch too small for the prophet to pass through, and beyond it the red of a hearthbound fire. Go forward, where even he cannot go…

She swallowed her thoughts away, and shook the distractions from her eyes. Her braids whipped her cheeks but she didn’t feel them.

Eeland’s paces began small and faint, but as she continued down the hallway—the walls were painted, she thought, images only dimly visible in the light that grew from the far arch, hunting scenes, maybe—as she continued, surety in her blossomed. Shuffle turned to walk turned to stride. Fear turned to caution turned to pride. And the light swelled before her, the promise, the revelation.

And the paintings began to grow clear.

Not hunting scenes. Not exactly. More like battle scenes. Heroic figures, at war with monsters: the iron-toothed Drauv, the mechanized Morthage, the twisted and leering Gorgon… Overcoming them all, this group of characters. A man in robes, a woman in armor, two sisters with bows and a strange-eyed fellow with horns emerging from his head. There they all were, appearing in scene after scene, winning, and winning, and casting down evil, growing more powerful, growing older…

All at once they stopped. And she realized she was at the arch. The smell of bread hit her homesick nose and made her sob once, before she clapped hands to her mouth. Took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and stepped inside.

It wasn’t quite what she expected. Here was no grandiose temple, no raised altar, no monolithic statue of a bull-god, astride the universe. Here were humble bookshelves and there was a bright flame-flowering hearth, there was an oven and sacks of grain, foodstuffs. There were two long tables, and racks of armor, weapons. The ceiling was vaulted, raftered with beams of oak, but dripping with stalactites. At one of the tables sat a solitary woman. She looked positively ancient. She noticed Eeland staring at her and bowed her head, solemn eyes bidding the girl come near.

Eeland approached, unsure what she should be feeling. Trying to insist that sucking vacancy inside wasn’t the shock of her disappointment.

“Oh,” was the first thing she said. “Hi.”

The woman’s face folded itself into unlikely formations. “Yep, yep,” the woman said.

“I’m Eeland?”

“You seem to think so,” she said.

Eeland tested each braid, counting the plaits. She rolled up her sleeves to look at the holy signs etched over her skin. “Well.”

“Sit,” the woman said. “There’s bread on a plate somewhere.”

Eeland rubbed her face with both hands. “Ah…”

“Sit.”

Eeland drew out a chair. It roared on the stone floor. She sat down. There was no bread anywhere. “Or…” Eeland said. “I’m wondering.”

The woman’s eyes were hard and strong.

The two of them sat together, just as she had sat with the prophet. Long, and wordless. Only there wasn’t that same… what do you call that? There wasn’t that eldritch hum, that elicit excitement, that sense of gleeful perversion of the soul.

“I studied faithfully,” Eeland decided to say.

“A noble thing.”

“I really believed.”

“You’re not unique in this.” The woman knocked her knuckles together, and then stood up. Eeland was surprised to see an old sword hanging off a belt around the woman’s waist. Bent-backed, she couldn’t stand straight. Could the woman even hold that sword anymore? Even draw it? She walked to a little desk by the hearth, and took a piece of paper off the top of a stack. An ordinary piece of paper. She hobbled back to the table, and groaned as she sat down.

“Do you need help?” Asking a bit late, aren’t I? She struck her own thigh with a fist. “What I mean…”

The woman didn’t look up. She produced a pen from somewhere, and began writing. She took time with each character, paused for moments of stillness, like someone counting the beats of a rest in a great symphony that must be taking place elsewhere…

Finally she tapped the back of the pen twice on the tabletop, and sniffed. She wiped her nose. Then the woman slid the paper over to Eeland, and suspended her pen like a hogspit between the skeletal index finger of each hand. It had several simple sentences on it in dark bold letters, precisely spaced. “Read this to me,” the woman said.

Eeland looked from the paper to the woman, to the paper again. She stared into the flames, and wondered why she felt so empty.

“No heroes.”

Nod.

“No monsters.”

Nod, nod.

“Only you and me, and our imaginations.”

Grizzly dry lips curved up.

Eeland let her shoulders droop.

“Do you want to learn how we did it?” The woman’s phlegm-webbed voice wrapped Eeland’s ear with this last vague promise.

Is there still a secret to be had?

“Do you want to know how we conquered death?”

What does a girl from Andlewick—after she’s abandoned everything she’s ever known in order to join a Bull-cult, only to find out it’s all some kind of fraud inspired by the inelegant words of a decrepit hag eating bread alone in a firelit cave—what does a girl like that—and assuredly there must have been others who got this far, better studiers, more faithful, brighter, stronger?—what does—or do you have to be as dull and desperate as Eeland was to swallow all this drivel?—what can one such as her even say?

“Tell me,” Eeland sighed.

[[Category:Monster]]
[[Category:Deepist]]

Morthagi lore

2019-11-11T18:31:30Z

Daustin: /* Ecology */

The Clockwork Undead

=Art of the Mortificers=
'''Morthagi''' (mor-THAW-ghee: singular and plural noun) is an old term, as old as the practice that first created them. Morthagi can be any of a wide variety of constructed entities that combine once-living tissue with mechanical components, mystical elements, and clockwork, in order to achieve a profane, though admittedly impressive, semblance of life. The most remarkable of them show true intuition, analytical capabilities, and situational cunning. Indeed, the limits of the Morthagi's potential for thought are beyond knowing.

'''Mortificer''' is the term for those who invented and built the Morthagi, in antiquity. You read their stories, and if you're lucky stumble upon some of their original texts, scrawled in archaic scripts. Most academics are helplessly taken with their achievements, and we certainly see the value of Mortificial components and mechanisms in such fields as medicine and masonry. The art of Mortificing is sadly lost to our world, and though many have sought to revive it, all have failed. The children of the Mortificers, their constructs, 'live' on, self-propagating, preserving the legacy of their creators.

=Ecology=
They may be destroyed by willful violence or exceptional accident, of course, but otherwise Mortificial devices and the Morthagi in particular tend to remain operational indefinitely. They appear almost universally capable of interfacing with each other, performing mutual repair and maintenance to sustain each other over infinite generations of people. To most scholars, this suggests there's an elegance to the schematics of the Mortificers that we are simply not comprehending, a simple repetitive principle that allows them all to exist, iterate, and interlock. Myself, I see their ability to form compatible links and make complex and holistic repairs and attribute it to their already proven ability to study and solve problems, owed itself to the lost magics interwoven with their joints and gears from the beginning. Indeed, I see not the consistent reliable markings of manufacture, but truly the inspired and creative asymmetry of art.

That isn't to say that the Morthagi are not essentially tools, or that there is no pattern to their form and function. Many an explorer has written of finding machines in deep tombs and forgotten caves. Often they're discovered employed in some mundanity, working at whatever it is they were directed to do, all those ages ago. Such constructs are often reported to have unique designs, and some are suspected to be exaggerated or wholly fabricated by those giving the account... but certain designs seem to be timeless, repeated by every practitioner of the artform. And few of them are defenseless.

Some of the simpler Morthagi must be powered by an external mystical or mechanical means, and can fall dormant in the absence of such a power source. Others, though, must have been designed to harvest their own power supply from their surroundings, giving outstanding credence to the notion that these Morthagi were intended to outlast the civilizations and genius minds that birthed them. What they harvest and use appears opportunistically selected, ranging from naturally occurring resources and oil deposits, to living matter refined for whatever essential fuel such matter can produce. Regardless, it is never safe to assume that a given Morthagi is dormant. Almost all of the common designs include a storage mechanism for energy, and can reactivate when certain conditions are met.

[[Category:Monster]]
[[Category:Morthagi]]

Morthagi lore

2019-11-11T18:30:55Z

Daustin: Updating Morthagi

The Clockwork Undead

=Art of the Mortificers=
'''Morthagi''' (mor-THAW-ghee: singular and plural noun) is an old term, as old as the practice that first created them. Morthagi can be any of a wide variety of constructed entities that combine once-living tissue with mechanical components, mystical elements, and clockwork, in order to achieve a profane, though admittedly impressive, semblance of life. The most remarkable of them show true intuition, analytical capabilities, and situational cunning. Indeed, the limits of the Morthagi's potential for thought are beyond knowing.

'''Mortificer''' is the term for those who invented and built the Morthagi, in antiquity. You read their stories, and if you're lucky stumble upon some of their original texts, scrawled in archaic scripts. Most academics are helplessly taken with their achievements, and we certainly see the value of Mortificial components and mechanisms in such fields as medicine and masonry. The art of Mortificing is sadly lost to our world, and though many have sought to revive it, all have failed. The children of the Mortificers, their constructs, 'live' on, self-propagating, preserving the legacy of their creators.

=Ecology=
They may be destroyed by willful violence or exceptional accident, of course, but otherwise Mortificial devices and the Morthagi in particular tend to remain operational indefinitely. They appear almost universally capable of interfacing with each other, performing mutual repair and maintenance to sustain each other over infinite generations of people. To most scholars, this suggests there's an elegance to the schematics of the Mortificers that we are simply not comprehending, a simple repetitive principle that allows them all to exist, iterate, and interlock. Myself, I see their ability to form compatible links and make complex and holistic repairs and attribute it to their already proven ability to study and solve problems, owed itself to the lost magics interwoven with their joints and gears from the beginning. Indeed, I see not the consistent reliable markings of manufacture, but truly the inspired and creative asymmetry of art.

That isn't to say that the Morthagi are not essentially tools, or that there is no pattern to their form and function. Many an explorer has written of finding machines in deep tombs and forgotten caves. Often they're discovered employed in some mundanity, working at whatever it is they were directed to do, all those ages ago. Such constructs are often reported to have unique designs, and some are suspected to be exaggerated or wholly fabricated by those giving the account... but certain designs seem to be timeless, repeated by every practitioner of the artform. And few of them are defenseless.

Some of the simpler Morthagi must be powered by an external mystical or mechanical means, and can fall dormant in the absence of such a power source. Others, though, must have been designed to harvest their own power supply from their surroundings, giving outstanding credence to the notion that these Morthagi were intended to outlast the civilizations and genius minds that birthed them. What they harvest and use appears opportunistically selected, ranging from naturally occurring resources and oil deposits, to living matter refined for whatever essential fuel such matter can produce. Regardless, it is never safe to assume that a given Morthagi is dormant. Almost all of the common designs include a storage mechanism for energy, and can reactivate when certain conditions are met.

If a Morthagi is encountered in a dormant state, it is sometimes possible to remove its power source without destroying the body. This is an extremely dangerous operation obviously, but we have some accounts from the literature of skilled mortificers who have safely disabled dangerous constructs in the field.

[[Category:Monster]]
[[Category:Morthagi]]

Thrixl lore

2019-11-11T17:06:55Z

Daustin: Updatign Thrixl for world consistency

[[Category:Monster]]
== Origins & Myth ==

No one knows where this race of creatures was born from. There’s a legend they flew down from the sky one night in a shower of astral rock, when the world was young and flames still shot from mountaintops to spray stars on the night sky. And that they nested in the rocky places, and were covered over with ash and stardust, that they slept.

Another old story says the [[Thrixl]] were always here, that they were born in the deep heart of creation like a fear, the earth’s forbidden nightmare. That they woke only when a great meteor fell into the warm wombs of their shared dreaming.

They went on existing, of course, among and apart from all other things. When it served their purposes to be known, they made themselves known.

As civilizations of people rose, the Thrixl wove their wants and cares through the fabrics of these realms, pulling on the threads of mighty heroes and mystics to serve the plots of vast unguessable works, tapestries of existence over which the Thrixl are thought to toil. It's not known whether they hold such base feelings as greed or malice, but their disregard for other forms of life won them powerful enemies over the course of time.

Wars were fought. Great barrows were raised and overgrown, and forgotten, and ancient weapons cast to mud, cast to fire, dissolved in the rain of history. And the foes of the Thrixl are gone from the world. And only their whispers remain.

== Form and Function ==
Astronomical variance is the keyphrase when trying to frame a picture of the Thrixl. And maybe toss in one of those other useful phrases like supercosmic terror.

The most pertinent item we found, scouring our library for clues and characters, was this unfinished journal. It seems to have been written by a nerd—I mean, an enthusiast—and describes an encounter in a nameless, mapless glade. The writer meets a trio of smallish beasts, “the bastard children of dragon and spider.” Limbs and features “at home on beetles, mantises, wyrms.”

“They were weaving, it looked like, and digging patterns into the earth, turning the soil up, and marking it with pigments scraped off their own underbellies.

They noticed me. It was unavoidable. Three sets of eyes turned on me: six eyes in this face, five in this one, one eye on the largest of them, a long-limbed, bony creature with armored joints.

I looked in those eyes expecting to see nothing. The mute marble orbs of an animal, a drone. What I saw instead was coyness. Deliberation. The turbid fire of dreamers, thinkers, artists.

The skinny cyclopean nightmare hooted from its horned mouth and wrapped itself in its clear glass wings.

And later I woke, far from the spot, by a lakeside. A travelling leather merchant saw me attempting to drown myself in the water, pulled me ashore. I came out of it like a man rising from a night-terror.

And I was both relieved and inexplicably heartbroken.”

The journal goes on to describe other travels and observations, many of them unbelievable or marred by clear exaggeration, but this account, at least, seems consistent with sightings we’ve had, or thought we’d had.

Opinion ranges, but we believe the variance in Thrixl morphology can be tied to family traits. Sort of like humans. There is a relatedness that feels in part deliberate and in part organic to their natures. It must be stressed that despite the dramatic difference, we feel a latent singularity ties these beings together, as if deep in them is a composition that is identical, and changeless, uniting them even as they grow to varied size and display such contrasting traits.

Not much is known about... well the big ones. Rumor paints them similarly, both dragon-esque and arachnid, insectoid, vaguely animal. Appendages both real and spectral. The most troubling thing we’ve observed is how seamless and natural this amalgamation grows on the eye, as if each aspect belonged first and only to them, and it only takes seeing to realize it.

Kralar is said to have once walked among them. He wrote this one cryptic line, a message to his order:

“These are the askew arguments of warped gods who one day compromised and birthed to creation every inkling and inspiration their combined perversity could muster.”

A bit extreme, maybe, but the point is solid.

== Habitat and Lifeways ==
The Thrixl dwell wherever they find a reason to, but seem to favor places they can brood undisturbed and spin great webs of dreams in their heads. It is not known what they eat, but the belief is around us how fog is: that they feed on emotion, on the force of livingness, whatever you call that. Souls? The word lacks passion. Passion is something the Thrixl harbor and thirst for and need. They stoke their imaginations on it, and more than anywhere else they seem to live in their imaginations.

And they hold the power to turn the imagined into truth...

As you might surmise, the lairs of the Thrixl are afflicting strange to the human eye.

They grow like warped opera-houses somehow native with the rock, the trees, and the earth. They teem with chambers holding scenes out of someone’s thoughtscape, themes made furniture, half-assembled backdrops for dramas that will never play. Tied together with threads, the floors and walls spread with indecipherable vagrant murals. Phantom actors sometimes drip past reality, pressing their faces to the planar glass, and shouting lines off crazed scripts from the depths of whatever beyondering they inhabit.

Whether these places serve as necessary homes, or are merely the decorative diversions of creatures living in seclusion is unknown. What little we know of Thrixl mating is that it takes place in the untouchable mental troves of its participants. It’s thought that any number of Thrixl can join together in this ethereal space, and the dream they share is the life they create, and like an animated flame it crawls from its lofted perch down a wick of unreality into the stuff of being, and makes out of what matter it finds a carapace, and welds itself into the shape its fathers and mothers theorized it might... unless it doesn’t.