Damn I Am Pretty Art Laboratories

#Crux post for tonight.  Sects within the Church of the Wolf-Mother.  These are the first few I decided to do writings on.  All of the faiths in Crux are intended to be broad and unaligned.  Each has room for folk of all nine alignments.  The core tenets are the same, with individual sects taking them in their own favorite directions. Wolf-Mother Sects. The many different Totems of the Wolf-Mother are her many spirit children.  Each has their own cult Like any faith, one who worships the Wolf-Mother will often pray and respect multiple totems in their daily lives.  Those dedicated to specific totems in their lives tend to be specialists of some sort, not necessarily priests.  Priests and Druids of the Wolf-Mother honor multiple totems, but very rarely dedicate themselves to a individual totem.  They honor totems and the Wolf-Mother. and sect that surrounds them.  Here are a few of the notable sects within the Church of the Wolf...

More revised for the Friday post.  Sophia finds where all those coins were going in GenMart on #BlackFriday.  This #Shortstory originally was written back in 2013.  I've decided to go back, try to pretty it up, and repost it. Black Friday, why must you serve Mammon so? Please share this story if you liked it.  Also, as always, thanks for reading! :D

Well.  Things have been getting delayed a bit this week.  As it is #Thanksgiving, it means tomorrow is #BlackFriday.  I don't like that holiday.   I associate it with Mammon.  The greedy demon?  Yeah, that one. So two years ago I wrote this short story, inspired by my low opinion of holiday shopping.  It's about a young white witch, Sophia Clas, trying to find her sister Lucy who supposed to be working Black Friday at a dark and foreboding big box store known as Gen Mart. This is a revision and a bit of a repost of the first part of the story.  If you enjoyed it, please let me know, or better yet, share it with others who might like it too.  I plan to revise the rest of the original story, at least to make satisfy me. Enjoy!  And remember, Mammon's Day but comes once a year...

Previous | Start  | Next | Index Charlie (H minus Two Days) I floated.  The ceiling of the facility felt comforting.  After the weeks of being in sand and heat, the past two weeks back home felt welcoming.  The fear of being away had gone. I just basked in it.  Things were going to get worse.  I didn't let myself fall into a dream. "I wish I could capture this."  I told the icy-glass, giant ferret Whiskey had made.  Kyra scurried from down the wall and sniffed at me.  "Yeah.  I think you know what I'm talking about." The weasel swam over to me.  It made the strange noise she always made.  I'd connected with her mind a few times.  Those had been the strangest of dreams.  Machine images, throbbing with the urges of an animal. Kyra had become kind of useful.  Although tiny compared to my size, the goetic bot still was gigantic compared to most humans.  She could squeeze into spaces we couldn't. ...

Ok.  With Desert Bus going on, and my own lead up to other things getting weird, I figured I should do a more rambly kind of blog blog.  So let's go into random thoughts after playing Pandemic Legacy. Wanderings. Pandemic Legacy have been stirring up weird ideas for me.  Pandemic Legacy has this nice effect.  It makes a favorite board game of mine (Pandemic) feel more like a RPG than anything else.  As a GM, it kind of just makes my heart go a-flutter. I realized the other day that Pandemic Legacy makes telling a narrative better than other board games I've played.  Others have tried to inject flavor into them, like Eldritch Horror.  Eldritch Horror has diminishing returns on its narrative for me.  Especially after playing Pandemic Legacy.  Some mechanics work well.  But others don't, and the story of one session doesn't carry on.  Worse, sessions can be erratic if you don't go out of your way to parse and control what cards g...

Previous | Start | Next |  Index Ghale (H minus 2 Days) Martin cleared his throat.  Despite it being a Dreamspace, he still had his avatar portray him as accurate as possible.  The gesture had meant to gather attention. He looked like a relic from a different era.  Which he was.  His generation had thought their world was going to end, like ours only recently had come to terms with.  For Martin, it had been the world humanity had poisoned.  For us, it had was our only encounter with a intelligent, extraterrestrial civilization. "Thank you for coming."  Martin began.  Press Avatars stared without blinking.  Thousands of screenshot prompts hit the dreamspace. Martin looked up from the podium to the rest.  We'd already sent out a press release.  We'd opted for using a dreamspace press conference.  I started to wonder about that choice.  It had been a security concern.  A way to reduce the chance of the jo...

The Demons. Demons are what you make of them.  Devils exist in opposition to Angels, having fallen from the heavens.  Devils have an order, and the many Hells they tend are dark abodes.  Demons are what you make of them. Devils make deals.  They will appear when Angels come to destroy or decimate, and offer refugees a chance out.  Demons don't make deals.  That isn't what they do. Demons are what you make of them.  They become whatever people fear.  They become whatever punishment the sinful imagine.  Demons are the dark mirror, trapped in images imagined by those they will never meet.  Demons are souls who've become the suffering they imagined in life.  They also become the monsters others dream of. Among Demons this means most seek out ways to share their communal suffering.  Theirs is a existential pain.  Spiritually scarred by the weight of others, each Demon is weak to a form of forgiveness. Shedim The S...

Rebooting Crux for it's second season- despite awkward timing stuff- felt like it was a success.  At least in my goals.  Having a session where you more or less do a conversion to altered rules, advance the time and all of that, carries certain risk about them.  Luckily my group places some trust in me. I had multiple sections of what I call questions.  I asked the group questions, but the purpose of each set of questions were different.  These were key to what I thought the session had to do.  The group needed to have idea of what the game was about and what kept their group together.  We'd questioned it prior to it. So questions seemed apt. Same Page Questions The first section of questions weren't character centric.  They were game and group specific.  The urge to just leap in and crack characters without no bigger framework wouldn't help.  The questions about the game as a whole were just reconfirming things we'd already be...

Previous | Start | Index  | Next Dayvd Whyte (H minus 3 Days) I tapped my palm lightly on the Conjuring Box.  The signal activated it, calling forth the next programmed order.  My Daemon programmed that order, never with my consent. #Conjuring Beverage. My Daemon ordered a drink for me.  Grape juice.  Like I always would have.  Predictable.  As the Daemon was supposed to function. I gazed at the purple fluid in the glass. "Davyd?"  Rahm's voice shook me from the reverie. "Ah.  Yes.  The last bit of planning."  I took a sip.  My paranoia about the Daemon still held from the previous months.  Tiny things the Daemon shouldn't have gotten wrong.  Tiny slips or mispredictions. Errors.  I'd scrubbed that Daemon and had it replaced with a new one.  Reprogrammed.  New heuristics, re-tuned to me and my social media.  Then the errors appeared again. So I replaced that Daemon with anothe...

Kunan fell. That had been his intent after all, although half way down panic set in.  He'd never lept this far down before.  Kunan had aimed for the largest detritus he could see in the alley below the wall.  He hoped it could catch him. Nonetheless, he fell. The wall he had jumped from had been the main division between the Wish Quarter and the landfills of the Rag Coast.  Kunan could withstand the stench.  His father's stables had enured him against whatever could be over here.  He just hoped the fiend-blooded gangsters following him weren't.  They didn't follow, but he could see the five of them watch him fall.  They then started to run, looking for ways to follow him down. Yay. Kunan landed on the detritus.  Something cracked.  The air vacated his lungs in a burst.  He tried and failed to right himself.  His left leg didn't move.  It burned.  Lightning shot from it. Kunan felt his leg.  Bones ha...

The Rag Coast. Aspect: Ragged Waste Connected To: The Irons District (to the South), Grand Bazaar (to the Northeast, Port of Crux (to the North), Palace Hill (to the East), Wish Quarter (to the Southeast). Most Significant Icon: None Well Known For?  Filth, Crematories, Butcheries, Penny Graves, and Grotesque Swine. Stinking of filth and grime, the Rag Coast sits along a stretch of the Locke river. Sewer grates and landfills dominate the shore line.  This is a dumping ground for offal and dead animals from the Grand Bazaar and other parts of Crux.   I don't linger here, at this eyesore that springs from the city into the sea.  This is a place to dump the unwanted.  One shudders at the thought of what might have left here. History Landfills and other detritus always have clogged parts of Crux.  At first caught in nooks and crannies.  In the last few centuries it had gotten out of hand.  The founding of the Ragwalkers had led to neighbo...

The Reboot. So, I hit a snag, and a problem, in my home Crux game.  The temptation to kill the game and start with something fresh has to compete with my urge to finish it.  You see, I made a big mistake. The problem stems from the error I made in creating the game to begin with.  Crux had been a pet side project, and suddenly using it to run a game was more of an impulse decision.  I did it because I had been drinking and breathing it for two or three months beforehand.  On top of that, I had two new players- new to me, not to gaming- and I had little experience running Fate Core, not one of my slipshod hacks of nWoD or Pathfinder. I don't want to play or run Pathfinder again.  It isn't bad, I just feel exhausted with it. But Fate Core?  I still think I could learn how to do it better. Mistaken At Inception The big mistake is that I hurried didn't really forge a good story around the group the characters belongs to.  This means they h...

Crux, 1435 After Othebes Tynann Wiseowl tried not to fall over with anxiety at the sight of the angel in the air above her.   Afterall, Angels appeared so rarely.  Each other time had ended in some sort of disaster. "Um, pardon sir, or ma'am?" The Ursyklon girl stammered at the six winged, red-haired feminine being hovering above her.  As a Ursyklon, Tynann felt tiny compared to the angel's towering height.  "I don't know, if you are one or the other or... you know..." The red-haired being looked down at her.  Eyes glowing with white energy dug into Tynann's soul. "Keeper.  Take me to the Vault of the Last." "Riiight."  Tynann tried not to wince at the words as the angel spoke them.  Being a Keeper had been something she'd been hoping to have get out.  "Uh, how do you-" The angel bent over.  She placed a fist on one hip.  "The Vault.  You will take me to it." Tynann crossed her arms.  Sh...

#Crux post for today.  Another icon down, the Voice.  No one knows her birth name, just her nom de plume.  Once a found voice for a opera, she has blossomed to one of the major forces for making lives better in the city of curses. Aspect: Sing It For the World! Quote: "No.  I'm helping you because I believe in what you are.  You are the best.  I can tell.  I can't see or hear you, but I believe in you from what I have experienced so far." The Voice is most well-known celebrity of the Maru Sea.  Known for her talent at singing, composing music, theatre and more.  Her fame is only matched by her generosity.  The Voice matches the beauty of her performances with her charitable efforts. Common Knowledge The Voice first could be thought as a celebrity who most in Crux associate with Palace Hill.  But many people in Crux don't think of her first as a singer.  They don't even think of her as the highest priestess of the Si...