Needles & Nilbogs

 I haven’t decided if I’m ever going to actually post the city spies soulmate au that’s been rattling around in my brain since (*checks draft creation date*) February of last year (technically: 2/16/22, 9:19 AM, hah), but I want the book 1 outline out of my drafts before book 4 comes out (THREE DAYS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA), so this is a proposed outline for a city spies fic that has about 1/2 of book 1 written, all of book 1 planned out, and a loose outline for books 2 and 3.  This was the original idea: It's the one where whatever you write on your body appears on theirs in the same spot, starting at age 10, and it's just the person who completes you whether it's romantic or platonic; also, fate guarantees that it's someone you will have contact with even if that comes from finding out you're soulmates, you're always going to meet in person at least a bit. Often have mannerisms in common. Rio and Brooklyn get closer platonically through their notes while fighting in...

 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 ...

This is a continuation of the series I started one two weeks ago: textile traditions in fantasy worlds  and how you build them. Part 1 was about general ideas for how cultures interact with textiles, and this part (part 2) is about specific traditions for your culture. I assume anyone reading this, fair warning, has already read part 1 and has sort of a general idea of their culture’s textile traditions and history. Or at the very least, a couple of ideas about materials and workers and tools.  This week, we’re focusing on specific textile traditions in a culture. This means things that have been handed down for at least a few generations (traditions are passed down from person to person) relating to fabric and its role in people’s lived (textiles are mostly not-everyday-clothing-things but more like rugs and blankets and special clothing) that are reasonably compact to define and easy to drop into an rpg world (specific means not going into 300 years of detailed history all ...

Shut up, it’s still Thursday. I really like historical textiles, and I like fantasy worlds, and I like world building. So let’s talk fantasy textile traditions, for your default fantasy d&d-ish world. I have a bunch of ideas, and so I’m going to present a guide to developing a complete textile tradition for a fantasy culture, using examples, and also a list of things I’ve done that anyone can steal and drop into a game, because I have a lot of those. That’ll be the end of this three part series. This first bit is mostly about researching and coming up with general ideas, next week will be about making specific traditions, and the last week will be a list of ideas that you can use to build on.  I want to note that this is going into a lot of detail, and most people aren’t going to use this level of detail. I actually often start with specific traditions rather than a general thing, but I have a lot of preexisting knowledge that I can use to develop the general ideas more quickly...

Today I have no plan for a blog entry, no sleep, and no time. So I’m just going to share an idea and a world I’ve developed — and (surprisingly for me) it’s not the Auri or their culture. It’s a setting I’ve probably mentioned before; it was intended for d&d, but it mostly ended up being used for Risus games and the infamous Elvish Flirting Law Incident. Because I started developing it in middle school and the gaming club met at lunch, that’s why. And then the past of that world showed up in my high school gaming group, set in the world during its version of a Cold War or world war.  The setting is called Neverron, because when I wrote it, I intended it to be Never Eberron, a world where the premise of Eberron was taken in other directions. However, I wrote it without any real knowledge of Eberron other than the basic “more magitech and politics, less high fantasy” concept, so it’s pretty different.  So. Neverron is a world of magitech and politics, with a lot of both prob...

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’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.

 I’m not quite sure what to write today, because I’m low on sleep and high on stress, but I’ve been thinking a lot about some lore for the world of Ensign of the Week (side note: the redesign playtest material is waiting for a time when I have enough time to actually put some thought into it. It should show up sometime soon). Specifically, I’m thinking about the multitude of species present in the setting, and about some of their history.  So I thought I’d share it. In a perfect world, where I had all the time I need, I’d write it as a set of encyclopedia entries or another in-universe perspective, but today it’s simply a pile of things I thought about.