Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop

This isn't a setting I expect to primarily focus on, but wanted to throw together some notes about it before forgetting.  The idea as been partly kicking around in my mind for awhile now, but was brought to the forefront by the 💿🐎 on Twitter recently regarding the ethics of looting bodies.   Possibly something like this already exists, but I can't recall this exact view of it being brought up before. The idea of a vast necropolis isn't that bizarre, a few of my favorites are: Charn from The Magician's Nephew  by C.S. Lewis.  Charn is a dead world after Queen Jadis spoke The Deplorable Word . Necropolis: Brutal Edition - A fairly simplistic brawl and explore game taking place in a seemingly vast necropolis. Abarrach from the Fire Sea  book of the Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.  A world where the choking fumes and heat of an underground lava sea have killed off everyone who is not a powerful magician.  The remaining m...

In the Owl Light setting the "Elf" body type seems to have been some sort of standard template used by the gods and powers in ancient times to create lithe, skilled beings.  Elves from other worlds in many cases appear to have arisen over the course of aeons as part of natural evolution in those places, sometimes as precursors to humans or co-sentients on their worlds. But the crop of Elves (the Eld) currently predominant on Hypethra mostly originate from the Netherworld.  In this realm the dreams and thoughts of all sentient creatures accumulate, peopling the realm with every imaginable permutation of archetype and narrative, and sweeping the landscape with gradual but ceaseless changes as the whims of psychic currents dictate. Prodigal Eld The Prodigal Eld are those creatures fresh sprung from this tumult, still given over to the Netherworld's bizarre currents.  Free will is a novel concept to most Prodigal Eld, but their convictions are backed by the strength of worlds...

This is a supplement meant to refine and flesh out the idea of languages in an RPG a bit and expand the concept of cants (as inspired by D&D's Thieves' Cant ).  Most of this has been wrapped into the still nascent KROP game (a homebrew based on GLOG), but it should be relatively easy to adapt to other similar types of fantasy games. Supplement here. You can find more related info here: Earlier Stuff  - This supplement is an expansion of some of the ideas discussed in earlier posts: Languages: Cants (Thieves' and other) Languages: Monastic Linguistics & Unusual Tongues Thieves' Cant Thieves' Cant - Defined Thieves' Cant - Lexicon Other things of interest  - None of these were directly adopted into this work, though they were things partly in mind at the time: Back Slang  & Rhyming Slang 1337 - Hacker obfuscation jargon. Hobo Signs Polari - Cant used by a number of professions historically and notably mentioned in recent years due to it's use in...

Anne (of  DIY & dragons  and  Bones of Contention ) has recently been running a weird post-human setting for for us using  Mausritter . Today she was reflecting how she realized the recent dungeon delve we were involved in lacked any real ability to socially interact with the occupants or phenomena it contains. But, while this might limit things in some ways, I don't think that's necessarily bad.  There can be a variety of different, valid ways to set up a scenario, and not all of them necessarily have to involve social interaction. Leaving aside for now specific physical challenges and dangers, or interactions with more recent denizens of an area; I like having locations set up based on an event or events that happened there in the past, with the nature of things in the area dictated largely by the consequences of those events.  There are several ways I think revelations about past events can play out, either in any given sub-location (room), or in the...

I'd been meaning to watch The Endless for awhile since it came on Netflix and finally got around to it last night.  As it kind of came across in the teaser, this was a middling, somewhat light, cosmic horror movie. The premise starting out put me in mind of the 2007 math-cult film Believers .  But as The Endless progresses, the cultish nature of the group in Camp Arcadia becomes less of an issue compared to the otherworldly nature of the place itself and the looming supernatural threat. In the end it reminded me a little of the premise of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy books (though I haven't seen the movie Annihlation , based on the books, so I'm not sure how closely that parallels the premise). For my tastes, the premise and situation were fairly interesting, and the special effects were appropriately understated in some spots and adequately dramatic in other bits.  But the film was not without flaws: After the first couple scenes there was a definite air...

I thought I'd posted this earlier, but apparently I wrote this review back on G+, so here it is now from an archived copy: ------ I originally looked into The Day Star by Mark Geston simply based on the awesomeness of it's cover (depicted) but it took quite awhile before I finally got around to reading it recently. I probably should have managed to fit it in a long time ago though, since it is such a short work. The book might fit, if awkwardly, into the dying earth genre of fiction (certainly it's world weary enough to make the cut). And while reading I kept seeing elements and flashes of other better known books, though I get the sense there's no direct influence involved. The cosmology bears some similarity to King's Dark Tower setting: a multi-world universe shaped by powerful human technology of old which tried to bend the world to human will and is now in disrepair. Although not a perfect correlation, the weakening of the universe's boundary which occurred...