Needles & Nilbogs

Ugh, club day. Too much being a smiley person for me, thanks. It was not helped by the fact that I was running on like no sleep. (I stayed up to make triboards for two clubs, which might have been a bit overly ambitious.) Anyways, that’s why I didn’t post yesterday. So tonight I used family movie night as an excuse to project all my complex emotions about club day onto some characters from a story I’m writing. I don’t know whether I’ve ever talked about this on the internet before, but I guess this snippet I’m really happy with is a good start.  The bare minimum context is that it’s about a bunch of high school theater kids, about half of whom are magical in some way; this includes the main character, eleventh grader and threadmage María Soledad “Solí” Armijo Riveras, and her banshee girlfriend Elia Graydaughter. Everyone involved is queer and magical and just trying to get through high school, and they have shenanigans and friendship and stuff.  (CW: mentions of transphobia, ...

 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 ...

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...

 I start a lot of blog entries with “I’ve been really busy this week”, and this is another case where that’s true. Instead of actual anything, this is a snippet of backstory for one of my D&D characters: Fia, who I’ve definitely mentioned before. This is just a moment from her backstory as a rebel in a cell of the sorcerous underground, fighting against the establishment, except this bit is her and her best friend talking. (I haven’t slept enough this week, this is not eloquent, but I’m putting this out there because otherwise there shalt not be anything here.)  Fia and JWW — — —  It had been a stressful mission, and Fia was curled up in the corner of the safehouse's broom closet in the comfortable dark. She was enjoying the quiet and playing with a bit of her hair when someone opened the door.  "Go away," she said. "I don't want to talk." "I just need a broom, don't worry," a voice with a thick British accent said. "I'll be out of...

This is the first part of a complex project I’m working on for a number of unrelated reasons (sort of a bet, sort of a dare, and then I got really intrigued…) that has to do with the real-world physics of D&D5e magic, and translating magic to physics equations. The goal is to be able to write something that looks like it could be a chapter out of a physics textbook, but for D&D magic-users. The first step, though, is to be able to come up with a way of representing magical power (in game terms, spell slots) as something that can be worked with (an equation or a constant or something).  I started with a simple method that took the number and level of spell slots for a given character level and produces a single measure of magical power. I used the table for multiclass character spell slots by level (PH 165) for all my work, because I wanted something that did not require a specific class. This method should work for providing a measure of power for any class that can cast sp...

 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...

 Every Saturday afternoon, I have a virtual RPG group. It's just four of us these days, playing D&D5e in post apocalyptic San Francisco (although there will be and are currently more apocalyptic events, so that's not quite accurate). I mention it occasionally, but I wanted to talk a little bit about some stuff that's come up in our game lately. Specifically, I want to talk about our characters' internal, unconscious biases.  

 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.