Needles & Nilbogs

 Continuing on from the past two posts, this is the final part of a 3 part series dealing with textiles and traditions in fantasy worlds.  Today, I’m going to give a few examples of textiles in RPG worlds that I’ve built, but first I want to briefly talk about working these into a game. Working worldbuilding into an rpg plot is a complex subject and requires a lot more effort than I can give right now to cover comprehensively, but specifically for textiles, one thing I do is to describe what clothes people are wearing. This is especially useful if clothes denote something special in society, but even if they don’t, “light brown linen robes” and “neon yellow polyester raincoat” come from two very different cultures and textile traditions, and imply two very different levels of technology. Beyond clothing, consider dropping in household items — a “woven rug with geometric patterns” can give a good setting to a scene and reinforce bits of culture, or a tablecloth could be made ...

Last week I talked about the various classes and scheduling at the Auraic Academy, and I’m continuing that today, with some excerpts from the course catalogue at the academy.  I’m basing this on course catalogues that I’ve seen, so it doesn’t list the teachers but it lists the title and level of the class, a brief description, whether it’s a semester long or a year long (1 credit for semester long, 2 for year long), and any prerequisites. A note: honors classes boost GPA (so an A is 5 points, a B is 4, and a C is 3, rather than 4, 3, and 2 points respectively). I’m not doing this for every class, mostly just non-core classes (but not even all of those), divided by subject area. I have omitted several classes (especially at higher levels) where I’ve given some description of lower level classes and see no point in repeating things.

 I’m picking up where I left off last week, on the Auraic Academy . Today, I thought I’d cover classes, which are a very important part of, you know, being a school.  The academy has a handful of ways to determine what classes students take. Every student has certain classes they must take every year or almost every year; those are core classes. There are also non-core classes, which are further divided into graduation requirements (you have to take the class for a given number of semesters, usually but not always in a given year/years) and electives (you don’t have to take any specific ones but you do have to cover a certain number of credits). 

 So one thing I’m working on, in my nonexistent spare time, is the Auraic education system. Mostly because I recently spent our road trip listening to the first Harry Potter audiobook and realized how messed up Hogwarts is. What happened to math classes and science and writing classes and discussing literature and actual nonmagical history? What happened to all the things you need to know to function as a being in society? Does anyone at Hogwarts ever take a civics class? So I started thinking about the Auraic Academy for Aspiring Mages. In universe, most of the Auri call it simply the academy. Sometimes they even drop the first syllable; it’s in the neighborhood of Academy Commons, and most folks call that area ‘Cad’my Comm’ns to save a few syllables.  It’s the center of middle and high school education for the city of Valus Dae, and thus for about 60 to 75 percent of all Auri. Valus Dae is not a particularly small city, but as the Auri mature at about the same rate as humans...

 I’m kinda tired. We got back from our road trip on Saturday, then we unpacked, then it was my birthday just a couple days ago, and I’m exhausted from everything.  So I’m just going to dump a bunch of random photos here from our trip, roughly in chronological order, and see if there’s anything I want to say about them. Featured within: the Regal Cardigan I started and finished (link to the Ravelry project page) during the trip (and the Olympic Games, so it qualified for the Ravellenic games too!); random scenery things; and a handful of random drawings I did, including a bunch of characters from the Murderbot Diaries books.  Blogger does weird things on pictures from a computer for some reason, so these may be rotated in random directions. No idea how to fix that, though, so my apologies if it’s hard to read. Also, this is image heavy, obviously. 

 I’ve had a few ideas of what I wanted to write this week, and I’ve begun drafting a few patterns, but I think I feel like I should share this thing. It has sort of a long story behind it, and it’s really detailed, so I’m not sure how much I should explain, but I think I can give the gist of it easily enough. I just really want to show off some of the lore I’ve been thinking about lately. This might be a bit long and rambly, and I definitely got it out later than usual. I’ve been busy.