ANIMA: MOSAIC Strict Spirit Magic

What's This?

I'm fond of the free-form magic system that was included in PARIAH Volume 1 and have written multiple posts about using hit dice in a similar way to GLOG magic dice, a number of ritual magic posts (including this one) and an attempt at summarising free-form spirit-magic for the post-kickstarter crowd. 

Fond, yes, but not in love... and perhaps it's time to take some advice from Jim Parkin (via William Faulkner) and kill my darlings...

PARIAH VOLUME 2: City of Ghosts

I had planned to write a long-winded post explaining the major changes to my RPG design philosophy and other nonsense that would not be fun for me to write and possibly much less fun for you to read.

Given that a picture paints a thousand words, please take this image instead:

City of Ghosts cover image, WIP by Jef Cox

We'll be launching a kickstarter for this at some point next month.

Interview by Weird & Wonderful Worlds

I was simultaneously honoured and humbled by Maxcan7 (of Weird and Wonderful Worlds) offering to interview me last month. That interview is available NOW via the following link:

https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2022/01/alone-in-labyrinth-weird-wonderful.html

Be warned: it was conducted via instant message, so my tendency to ramble was indulged. 

Hope you enjoy it.

Check out the whole series, there's some great interviews including ScrewHead McDuff, Spwack, Semiurge and some other people whose names don't begin with "S" — including Patrick Stuart.

https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/search/label/interview

Demi-Humans & Alignment: Dwarfs

Continuing my extrapolation and twisting of original material to create a new chassis to run old school modules I'm jotting down some notes about so-called "demi"-humans. 

This was originally meant to be part of the "alignment" post. Likewise my post about elves (forthcoming) was supposed to go on the end of this one, but I started to ramble...

Previous posts in this series:

• Initial concept:
  https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/09/reverse-engineered-adventure-game.html

• Hit Points, Hit Dice, Death and Dismemberment etc.
  https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/11/generic-adventure-game-hit-protection.html

Most pertinent to this post... alignment:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/11/alignment.html

 

Image courtesy The Internet

DEMI-HUMANS 

What is a Demi-Human? 

Dungeons & Dragons has always taken a Tolkien-esque approach to "demi-humans" and "humanoids":  dwarves [sic] and elves are treated as "races" rather than the magical spirits that appear in our myths and folklore. This treatment is extended to orcs, goblins, gnomes etc. The clue is in the terminology used: they are human-like or human derived, or variations (or corruptions) of humans.

Folding that back on itself, what if they became "in world" what they are outside the fiction: projections of human ideals? These are spirits rendered flesh: they exist because of our stories and folklore, and our belief in tales of ancient kingdoms in forgotten mountains or slender gender-fluid aliens materialising in dark forests.

They do not have economies and cultures and taxonomies, they are archetypes.

Demi-Humans and Alignment

When I first started to think about alignment again, may brain did this:

• Law vs Chaos
• Clerics vs Magic-Users  
• Dwarfs vs Elves

As with other binary pairs, there are (multiple and interesting) exceptions, but I like this set up as a foundation.