Damn I Am Pretty Art Laboratories

Simha's belly growled.  She tried to ignore that.  She focused on her walking.  Simha counted each step through the golden grass.   She exhaled in a steady pace.  The ridge crunched under her feet.  Simha knew this village had to be close.   Simha could hear their thoughts in her mind.  The dozen or so teeth piercing her dark skin kept her storm rumbling.  The magic came through those teeth.  She'd spent the better part of the last three winters purifying the fetishes. They took time.  Oaths.  Promises made to the spirits bound to them. In exchange, they let her open the Storm.  Her mind.  Her thoughts and dreams turned into thunder.  On her chest, the infant stirred a bit. Simha soothed her baby son.  In the hot sun, Simha wore him in a sling across her chest.  Along with the fetishes piercing her skin, bits of a lion skin dragged behind her. The walk to the village went how she thought i...

Here's a in-world document from #Crux, the City of Curses .  An article on Technology and a bit on Androids.  Androids tap into a few different themes in the setting, but mainly they exist as part of a question on the nature of humanity.  Are Androids human?  Or are they just toys very good at the act?  Maralda provides a bit of a biased view on them below. Androids, Steam and Chains. This article was first published in the 1784 Newrose issue of the Ariaist Times, a magazine known for its radical and Ariaist leanings. A century ago, no one could imagine the wonders we now have.   Technology that does things that once only the most expensive arcane magic could create.  Photography can let anyone hold a portrait.  Factories have mass-produced goods that would've surprised our forebears.  A century ago they have paid high bit of coins for same.  Steam engines, too.  They have begun to enable fast travel that once only held to c...

#InTransitMonsters  is a  #firstdraft   #novel  about Technology as Messiah.  Humanity is about to fall, and is forced to create monsters to save itself.  Can these giant monsters succeed, or will humanity's old ambitions damn the species to extinction?   Previous | Start | Index  | Next Ghale (H plus 16 days) Martin left the hospital.  Losing contact with Charlie hadn't just hit me emotionally.  It moved the UN security council to shut down the Pygmalion Program.  Morgan hadn't talked to me at all in the last week.  All the while, still no signal from Mars at all.  Satellite imagery hadn't picked up anything of them.  Nothing other than a devastated image of the City of Fontana. Either the monsters had died or they'd gone rogue. No one knew. But they had dismissed me.  I didn't think I'd ever get to know what had happened to Charlie.  My tears took over at some point. I hadn't left my home after...

Classes.   Essay By Maralda Inculti Tyranus, Bard.   Dated Newrose 12th,  1784 AO Classes are weird.  Class itself is a strange term.  I've never been able to find who first coined it.  Ursyklon has the word Klon they use for it.  I'm going to try to explain this, even if it is something everyone I know takes for granted.  Here we go. Even as a Bard, a story collecting member of that class, I can't quite fully explain it.  Anyone can learn a Class.  Well, technically not everyone.  Classes are weird.  Some require a certain aptitude, something in the student that some can't match.  Some can be wizards, but others can never learn a single cantrip, no matter how hard they work at it. Ok.  I'm going to try to explain this.  As a young girl, no one could ever explain it to my satisfaction.  Almost everyone learns a Class at some point in their lives.  Children don't have Classes.  I didn't kn...

On Ith.   Essay By Maralda Inculti Tyranus. Ith.  My home.  The Sorcerous Republic. My father told me how Ith rebelled against the theocratic rule of Othebea.  The core of the revolution had been the right of arcane magic to practice certain rituals.  If you ask me, a core set of principled spellcasters set the stage.  Othebea had been long changing its view of Witches and the like. I grew up after the revolution.  Ith still is growing.  I don't know if that means it can survive.  There has always been a key struggle.  The Unsorcerous.  They have no rights. My father is a Vampyre, and my skill as a Bard makes me Sorcerous.  I have more rights than a lot of people.  A lot. It's a class thing that I can't stand.  Rangers or Fighters I've met, I could kill them in the street and face no criminal action for it.  Even though my father's clan doesn't slay innocents for sustenance, many other vampyre c...

#InTransitMonsters  is a  #firstdraft   #novel  about Technology as Messiah.  Humanity is about to fall, and is forced to create monsters to save itself.  Can these giant monsters succeed, or will humanity's old ambitions damn the species to extinction?  A bit of a shorter entry, but better than none I guess. Previous | Start  | Next | Index Charlie (H plus 7 Days; Operation Sewer Management) Twenty minds connected to me.  A single waking dream.  All the Monsters.  A part of me always had feared that nickname Nasr had given us.  Not this time.  Not when we fought together in our first, real battle against the Enemy. But in my head, with everyone connected to my Oneiros, my feelings didn't matter anymore.  Maybe heroes or gods weren't needed here.  Maybe Earth needed Monsters.  I exalted in that. "We are Monsters.  I'm a creature of nightmares conducting a symphony of witchcraft on a planet ...

Avoid the urge to play a character that does the right thing for the right reasons.  Don't avoid doing things that hurt the character.  Make the character's life a struggle.   Don't have the character be some orphan.  Play the child of a evil queen.  Play the scion of a noble house that is throwing it all away.  STRUGGLE.  It's worth it in the end to play a struggle. I'm not saying, "play a asshat."  Or play a jerk.  Nor am I advocating for that dreary, high school emo moan fest.  But look for a struggle for your character.  Have them fail to overcome them.  Explore that.  I think once it has been explored, then it's ok to get in a win. This isn't a GM thing.  It's a player thing.  Struggle to overcome something internal in your character.  Avoid the gut urge to have a character be perfect here and there and everywhere.  Further, when bad things happen to your character, it behooves one to step ba...

It happened.  Something that excited me so much I jumped up and down and giggled over it.  Well, jumping is too much work.  But it did excite me.  The land of dreams, dark Gentry and dealing with world of darkness, all came back to me.  Yays! Some recent open playtest doc dropped for Changeling the Lost 2nd Edition from Onyx Path.   Changeling the Lost is my favorite entry for the nWoD   Chronicles of Darkness .  One of the best campaigns I've ever won was a Changeling game- City of Thorns . Instead of gushing over the new rules, I want to talk about why I like it.  Most of my current players have little to no experience with it.   Crux itself borrows a few ideas from how I ran City of Thorns .  So, I'm going to do a list.  A list about what I love about Beautiful Madness. Becoming Lost... ...is part of what makes CtL for me.  The sobriquet is apt.  They've all lost something.  As always, characters s...