About the Mythic GM Emulator

Now the rubber meets the road. I've got a character, and a module, and it's time to apply the Mythic GM Emulator. Being me, I'll write out what I'm doing.

The core of MGE is the fate chart. It works like this...

Formulate a question: Does Ilse know who she really loves? Does Indy speak Jovito? Is Saulot in another castle?

Then assign it some odds, ranging from "impossible" through "no way", "very likely", and so on, through 50/50, to "somewhat likely", "near sure thing", and all the way to "has to be".

Now, roll 1d100 and check the chart row for the odds you selected. There's a number there, ranging from (at the outset) 5 for "impossible" up through 95 for "has to be". If you roll that number or below, the answer is yes. If your roll less than one-fifth the required number—like 10 if you're checking a 50/50 kind of question, where the target number is 50—you get an exceptional yes, and if you roll the upper fifth of the failure range, you get an exceptional no. As a gracious service to those of us who are slow on math, those fringe numbers also appear on the chart.

There's an interesting complication here. In addition to the likelihood of the question you're asking, you consider the chaos factor. This is a number from 1 to 9 reflecting the overall weirdness and unpredictability of things. The higher the chaos rank, the more likely it is that answers will be "yes" and that random stuff in general will turn up. Take 50/50 questions. At the outset of an adventure, the chaos rank is 5, and there's a 50% chance that 50/50 questions will get the answer "yes".  At chaos rank 4, the chance drops to 35%, and all the way down to 10% at rank 1; at rank 6 it's 65%, up to 95% at rank 9.  Likewise with all the other probabilities.

You adjust the chaos rank at the end of each scene, applying the sensible standard of whether things got more or less chaotic. Did the characters achieve goals and establish order? Knock the rank down. Did surprises happen and things run amok? Raise it. And so on.

There's also some neat charts for random events. Anytime you roll doubles—11, 22, 33, etc.—and the first digit is equal to or lower than the chaos factor, something random happens. A chart suggests a variety of possibilities for event focus: a remote event that has or will bear on the course of play, a new NPC comes into play, there's significant progress toward or away from one of the character's ongoing goals, and so on. Each comes with a neat discussion, and there are examples, to show ways you might apply this unexpected stimulus.

Then there's the event itself. Way back when, Lee Gold wrote up how she used a thousand-character kanji dictionary as a source of gaming input—roll d1000 twice, look up the two characters, and try to construct a connection. Voila, gaming input. I know Lee didn't invent that kind of technique, but I always associate it with her anyway. So when I say "MGE has a Lee-like pair of charts", I'm only explaining an association in my mind. This is my mind, and welcome to it. Anyway, there are two 1-100 charts, one for actions, and one for subjects. Let me break out the dice and make a few rolls...

78 for action, 25 for subject. That's "cruelty" and "friendship". A friend turns cruel? The character is cruel to a friend, intentionally or otherwise? The character befriends someone who's been cruel?

57 for action, 91 for subject. That's "create" and "weapons". Possibilities abound, particularly for a pacifist like Deepleaper.

One more. 34 for action, 83 for subject. That's "lie" and "riches". A wealthy liar? Someone lying in hopes of riches? Someone lying to a rich person, or on behalf of one?

MGE recommends some record-keeping. In particular

#1. A list of NPCs, both those who've actually appeared and those who've been mentioned. It doesn't have to be exhaustive—"a bunch of farmers" is entirely sufficient for many purposes. It's just to make sure that potential hooks are there for you to see and remember them whenever it might be handy. Major NPCs naturally get more length and detail about who they are and what they've done.

#2. A record of the chaos rank, discussed above.

#3. Threads. This is MGE's label for all the ongoing plot elements. "Get the thing" might be the opening of a thread, with successive scenes including elements like "ask X where the thing probably is" and "recruit Y to help get the thing" and finally "got the thing". You should keep track of open threads even if they haven't been acted on in a while, so that they don't get forgotten, and then note when they're closed—successfully or otherwise, brought to a definite end—so that they might provide fodder for sequels.

Now, folks with MGE experience often comment that it's not always the best tool for running preexisting plots. There are several reasons. one is the really neat bit coming up.

At the start of each scene, you have a short sense of what it's going to be about, with a starting hook. But before going on, you roll a d10, and if it's equal to or less than the chaos rank of the moment, it gets transmogrified. Depending on the particular roll, it might be an altered scene or an interrupt scene.

Altered scenes are just what they sound like. You go to meet with your client, but he's been kidnapped, and you might be able to catch up with the abductors if you hurry. You climb over the final pass to the meadow you seek, only to find that the river from the glacier above is in flood, and your way is blocked. You start laying out the surprise party for your friend, but she comes home unexpectedly early. Your goal is still there, but there's something surprising in the way between you and it.

Interrupt scenes revolve around complications out of left field. The random event charts described above provide an intrusion that has nothing to do with the character's goals but have to be dealt with anyway. Strangers who must be dealt with, disasters, orders from the authorities, all kinds of things can take the character away from existing goals and to another matter, for a little while or a long time.

Once you know the general framework of what's going on, then you resolve things with the rest of this system and whatever other rules you're using. (I haven't looked in any detail of the rest of the Mythic system because I know I want to use HeroQuest right now, but on skimming it looks very narrative-friendly and I may try it out later.) At the end of it, you have a short set of notes to yourself about what happened, who was involved, what the chaos rank is now, and like that.

There's more in the book, including compact, excellent advice on things to consider in building worlds and adventures, and a really wonderful extended example of play that includes both continuity and chaos as ongoing elements, demonstrating the kinds of surprises the system can generate and ways that the human element of the game can take them and surprise right back.

I suspect it wouldn't be a lot of work to adapt this whole thing to HeroQuest, shifting from percentages to difficulties and masteries and all, but I don't feel up to that when I have, you know, paying work needing my attention. I'll use it as is for now in combination with HQ and see how it goes.

Oh, yes, to answer the three questions early on...

Exceptional no: No, Ilse doesn't know who she really loves, and both yearns and fears to let herself ask the question and find out for sure. Her ambivalence and shifting internal allegiances will be a major driver of character in Casablanca.

No: Dr. Jones doesn't know Jovito, and therefore Belloq can get away with his heisting of what Indy's snatched from a tomb at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Exceptional yes: Not only is Saulot in another castle—the Vienna chantry—but he's in Tremere. Boy is the clan in for surprises, come the Final Nights.

The Descent: The Mission

"Alone?" I asked, unsure if I'd genuinely understood.

"Alone," confirmed Greatmother Zurian. The current at the mouth of Lower Reed Cave let her keep the perfect poise I'd admired so much while growing up, and so failed to ever master myself.

"Of course," I said. "As Undine wills and the tribe needs," I added the formality to make it clear that I was thinking as well as feeling, even if thinking hastily.

The Descent: The Descender

Wikipedia tells me that D&D's D series of modules—Descent Into the Depths of the Earth, The Shrine of the Kuo-Ta, and Vault of the Drow—were published in 1978. That makes me think that my memories aren't deceiving me, because what I remember is already having played D&D for some months before learning about them and really wanting to run or play them. I tried, too, but it didn't work out, for the usual unsurprising reasons, and I never did get another opportunity.

I've decided that it's been long enough, and that I'm by golly owed a foray through this trilogy. So I'm going to see if I can make it happen, with the help of HeroQuest, Cerulean Seas, my own psionics hackery, and the Mythic GM Emulator. First up, the protagonist.

Deepleaper

100 words:

Deepleaper is more analytical than most viridian naiads, and an especially talented shapeshifter. Deepleaper comes from a lineage of kahunas, and has a special devotion to the dolphin spirit, with its gifts of cooperative power. Also, Deepleaper has great personal expertise in the psychic arts of true seeing and true thinking. Shortly before the rites of adulthood, Deepleaper took an oath of pacifism, and keeps it. The name "Deepleaper" comes from a lifelong habit of plunging into interesting-seeming caves and ravines, just to see what lies further down. A wide variety of fishy companions travels with Deepleaper wherever conditions allow.

Markup time:

Deepleaper is more analytical than most viridian naiads, and an especially talented shapeshifter. Deepleaper comes from a lineage of kahunas, and has a special devotion to the dolphin spirit, with its gifts of cooperative power. Also, Deepleaper has great personal expertise in the psychic arts of true seeing and true thinking. Shortly before the rites of adulthood, Deepleaper took an oath of pacifism, and keeps it. The name "Deepleaper" comes from a lifelong habit of plunging into interesting-seeming caves and ravines, just to see what lies further down. A wide variety of fish companions travels with Deepleaper wherever conditions allow.

Keywords and Abilities

Kahuna of the Dolphin Spirit 19

• Peacemaker +3
• Widely Knowledgeable +2
• Natural Healer +0
• Warding Aura +0
• Rally Defenders +0
• Devotion of Unity +0

Viridian Naiad 13

• Intuitive Awareness of Natural Surroundings +4

Psychic 13

• Bodyshaping +4
• True Seeing +0
• True Thinking +0

Oathsworn Pacifist 13
Fish Companions 13

Flaw: Insatiably Curious About the Deeps 17

Commentary

Some traits are marked with +0 as a reminder to myself that they're good candidates for later improvement. They'd be part of keyword descriptions if I were to write out keyword descriptions, but I have a tendency to fall into the trap of world-building and manual-writing so much that I never get around to the actual play, and this is me jumping over that hurdle this time.

Viridian naiads are creatures of the natural world, born as seed pods and cultivated in kelp-like groves for decades until they achieve self-awareness and uproot. They're humanoid, with lean builds, webbed hands and feet, and a leaf-like dorsal fin that runs from the crown of the head to the tailbone. Deepleaper has typical coloring, with a deep emerald green body and violet highlights in the fin.

Viridian naiads can safely dive to 2500 feet without special effort; some individuals, like Deepleaper, have trained and practiced to go considerably further down. They have moderately acute senses of pressure, movement, and electricity, and short-range sonar pinging, to navigate safely in darkness. They breathe water, but can survive a few hours in air without suffering harm.

Most viridian naiads see the world simply and intensely. Their emotions are seldom complicated and almost always deeply felt: whatever makes them happy tends to make them really happy, and every disappointment becomes intense, even if short-lived, grief. They have very little grasp on duplicity (and can be exploited by others who know this and play on their innate sense of harmony and good will; "a naiad's wages" is a widespread term in the seas for working for little more than praise or flattery). Some individuals develop a more refined awareness of how others live, and the complexities that make it hard to say that something is just plain good for bad. These relatively worldly naiads often make welcome translators and mediators, since even when they appreciate the complexities, they bring a simple desire for good outcomes that can help cut through many obstacles to getting them.

A conscious commitment to peace often accompanies this extra awareness and experience, and Deepleaper feels it very strongly. Living without practicing violence oneself and without depending on the violence of others is sometimes very hard work, but peace-seekers like Deepleaper feel it's important to demonstrate the possibilities of the choice.

Like the majority of viridian naiads, Deepleaper gives most worshipful allegiance to Undine, the harmony-seeking naiad goddess, while also respecting and honoring most of the other common gods of the sea.

In game terms, the kahuna is Cerulean Seas' aquatic counterpart to the druid. Kahunas commune with, evoke, and sometimes embody various aspects of the sea as represented by spirit animals. Deepleaper's family has had a shared gift for the work for centuries, and Deepleaper took up the legacy enthusiastically. In Deepleaper's case, the spirit that speaks most welcomingly (and sometimes very persistently) is the dolphin, embodying the virtues of teamwork, shared protection, and strength through shared cooperation. Not all kahunas cultivate pets or untamed animal friends, but Deepleaper likes exploring with company, and usually has anywhere from two to half a dozen friendly free-swimming creatures nearby.

Shapeshifting is a rare but recognized and respected talent among the naiads, and often accompanies that extra appreciation of the world's moral dimensions. Deepleaper can't—at least, can't yet—imitate sentient beings, but can take on the form of almost any wild creature, and keep it up a long time. Each shift of the tides makes it harder to remain in forms other than that of the naiad, but it's not impossible, just a sometimes distracting struggle.

Since this is me indulging in a taste for sci-fantasy, psi takes the place of magic. (There are spirits and it's possible to commune with them, get favors from them, and so on, but I'm separating that out from most of what most RPGs call "magic".) In addition to shapeshifting, Deepleaper is particularly good at sensing the world beyond the limit of physical naiad senses and at recognizing and sharing with other minds directly, exchanging the complexities of multiple languages for those that come from minds seeing each other's symbols and nets of allusion.

Now to get Deepleaper into some dramatic-type trouble.

Psi in HeroQuest, take 1

I've said over the years that I didn't like the rigidly mechanistic language used by most RPG psi systems, too jargon-y even for most contemporary and future usage, let alone suitable at all for most fantasy milieus. Time to see if I can take a framework I'm pretty fond of—the D&D 3.x psi system as overhauled by Dreamscarred Press—and put it in other language as well as streamlining it for use as HeroQuest keywords.

The Disciplines

The D&D 3.x/Pathfinder names appear in {brackets}, wherever I felt like it might help others to be reminded of what I'm adapting in each specific bit. As a matter of design, I've snipped out the psychic warrior class as a distinct thing. My feeling is that in HeroQuest terms, the psychic warrior is just a person with fighting talent who draws on bodycrafting and true shaping, and maybe some of the other disciplines as well. Likewise, I ended up deciding that the wilder is just a true thinker focused on emotion, and the vitalist is someone using true thinking and true seeing with an emphasis on healing.

Bodycrafting {Psychometabolism}

You start by learning how to reshape yourself in relatively minor ways, including taking on the general form of anything about your size and weight (but not most of its properties). You can heal yourself, strengthen your physical abilities, absorb wounds from others into yourself, and physically (but not psychically) blend in with your surroundings like an increasingly competent chameleon. You cultivate an awareness of the distinctive properties of all living creatures around you, and can imitate select traits of theirs—as usual for this discipline, for one for a little while, then several, and for longer durations, until finally you can manifest many qualities not your own for as long as you care to keep them.

You then learn how to revive a body whose soul hasn't yet left for a new incarnation, and how to work more radical transformations of yourself, including ethereal intangibility and fully detailed shape-shifting, first to creatures and objects about your own size, then to ones much larger or smaller or than yourself. You can sacrifice mental reserves for vast but short-term boosts in your speed and physical prowess, and sustain long-term boosts without significant harm. You can regrow severed body body parts, first ones you've lost and then ones lost by others you wish to help, and you understand how to unweave psychic curses and lingering psychic damage and traumas.

As a master bodycrafter, you learn how to change shape to almost anything you can imagine, to split yourself like a fissioning jelly creature, and to temporarily or even permanently fuse yourself with other people and objects.

Soulfighting {Soulknife}

In the other disciplines, psychic resolve is usually an end in itself: you want something, you learn how to go about it, and then you do it. As a soulfighter, you practice arts with an intermediate step: you shape psychic force into nearly tangible forms, which you then use as weapons.

Your basic tool is the soulknife. It's by no means always a knife, but you start with simple blades and move on to more complicated weapons from there. Whatever its form, the soulknife is a faintly luminescent thing, almost like glowing fog, barely solid to your own touch and capable of passing through almost anything else material. It nonetheless harms living flesh (and, with a great deal more effort on your part, inanimate matter), acting as a focus for your sense of desirable violence and destruction in that particular moment. It's not a general-purpose tool; that's reserved for the peaceful arts, while the soulknife is always a weapon.

You can evoke your soulknife in the blink of an eye, and then it remains with you until you choose to let it go or lose your waking awareness. Once you know how to wield it in hand-to-hand fighting, you learn how to throw it and then how to project it like an arrow from an imaginary bow. At first it's limited to maneuvers you could make with a physical weapon, but then you learn how to have it strike at unseen enemies, whirl around you like a saw blade, change its form in mid-fight, cut at a foe's vitals without puncturing any skin, and many other such maneuvers.

As a master soulfighter, you can evoke your soulknife invisibly and direct it without obvious gestures, and sustain multiple soulknives at once, each doing something different. You can also instruct it in a series of maneuvers that it can keep executing even if you're knocked out or otherwise incapacitated.

True Moving {Psychokinesis}

You start by learning how to exert simple pressure at a distance: lifting and throwing small objects, and pushing with injurious intent on one or more people out of your physical reach.

You then learn how to refine your thought-effort for fine gestures, and also how to push as hard as you could if right there physically, then much harder than that. At the same time, you learn how to deflect the motion of objects in your vicinity, starting with simple reflection, then adding absorption and redirection to your arsenal of shielding possibilities. You learn to erect very powerful but fleeting shields for yourself and others, and to create longer-term barriers, finally even permanent ones around designated sanctuaries.

As a master mover, you can make bubbles several paces wide and whisk everything inside them to wherever you wish, and create powerful spreading whirlpools in both air and water. Finally, you learn how to apply the negation of all psychic movement to create bubbles in which no psychic powers can work.

True Seeing {Clairsentience}

You start by learning how to create and use momentary flashes of awareness beyond your normal senses. You can see (and hear, smell, and taste) a glimpse of somewhere else, or of the previous owner or user of an object you handle, or of an emotionally charged moment in the past of the place you now occupy. You can boost any of your natural abilities for a single effort with intuitive insights into the problem you're trying to solve. You also learn how to force this kind of fleeting glimpse onto someone else, creating a very unwelcome, unnerving moment's distraction.

You then learn how to sustain longer shifts of awareness, how to open others' perception without it being distressing, and how to weave together souls' experience so that the sharers feel each other's pain, benefit from each other's rest and healing, and so on. You learn how to mask yourself from the psychic searches others may make, and how to make yourself more prominent to psychic senses. You also learn how to make an object or place so that true movers and true travelers can reach it more easily. You learn how to combine several separate effects so that you can observe a remote location and interact with others in it, your voice a whisper in their ears, your touch the gentlest of pressures.

As a master seer, you understand the workings of causation, coincidence, and fate. You can read likely paths into the future for yourself and others, and shift the balance of luck toward allies and away from enemies. You develop a total awareness that lets you see all the major highlights of a target's past, present, and future.

True Shaping {Metacreativity}

You start by learning how to craft ectoplasm, the barely-tangible stuff produced where psychic, astral, and material forces converge: you can make temporary objects of simple shape, barriers to slow strong opponents and halt weak ones, and to animate ectoplasmic blob as "living" weapons. Then you learn how to work with more solid and real materials, both to infuse them with ectoplasm for temporary modifications and to speed and slow their natural processes under psychic guidance to alter them as if by tools and the normal effects of aging. With practice, you learn too how to reverse those changes, fixing damage and even un-carving machines back into their component plants and minerals.

You then learn how to work with the forces of crystallization, turning other things into gems and other crystals and making crystals fluid, misty, or even explosive. You also learn to work with larger quantities of materials in other ways, from the handfuls and spoonfuls that are all a novice shaper can handle up to more than you can carry.

As a master shaper, you turn away from material things to work the same kinds of transformation on other planes. You can sense them, though not as well as a true seer, and step to them, though not as briskly as a true mover, and once there you can change them in almost any way you can imagine. It's not always possible to bring any of the results back to matter with you, but only a master shaper can even try.

True Thinking {Telepathy}

You start by learning to feel emotions in others—every mind constructs the elements of what self-awareness calls a thought or feeling out of complex elements, and taken raw, the pieces of anyone else's mind are a barely comprehensible jumble. As a true thinker, you are always a translator of internal experience-language. As you come to understand what's going on the flows that lead to fully formed thoughts and feelings, you learn how to create relatively simple ones, like a desire for or aversion to a particular target. You also learn how to associate bits of thought and memory in others' minds about yourself with other elements, so as to make them think of you in a certain light, like "friend" and "trusted authority". You also learn how to issue short mental commands that make recipients want to carry out a simple order, or stop moving and even interrupt automatic actions like breathing.

You then learn how to create new internal experiences out of nothing but your own wishes, including false memories and lasting moral and emotional imperatives. You also learn how to change and suppress existing memories, and the present-moment tastes and judgments that build on them. You gradually learn parallel transformations in yourself and others, including suppressing one body's awareness of injury and shifting to another, so that one person now suffers another's wounds while the first is healed. You learn first how to lift the thoughts and feelings that go with mastery of a particular ability from someone else's mind and use them yourself, and then how to copy them without also temporarily removing them from the source. You learn the arts of psychic self-defense at a deeper level than the practitioners of the other disciplines, including how to calve off subordinate minds within your own to act as tempting targets for others' psychic incursions. You learn how to meld multiple minds harmoniously into a psychic concert {metaconcert}, in which all share in the strongest version of any ability the participants wish to call on.

As a master thinker, you learn how to suppress more and more of a target's thinking, culminating in the ability to induce immediate death. You learn how to transfer your mind with another's, first temporarily and then permanently. You also learn how to make your sense of self infectious, so that over time a target actually becomes a mental duplicate of you, complete with all your memories, desires, and destiny.

True Traveling {Psychoportation}

You start by learning how to recognize when others are using arts of true moving and true traveling nearby. You can speed yourself, and exchange places first with willing targets and then with unwilling ones. You learn how to turn any path into a way into or out of the astral realms, moving there safely yourself and guiding ever larger groups of non-psychic companions.

You then learn how to fly and swim at preternatural speeds and without hindrance from complications like gusts and floodwaters, how to instantly jump miles at a pace, how to shift around the parts of an enemy in ways that inflict tremendous pain and damage, and how to arrange a gateway or stepping-stone to open up when specified conditions come true. You also learn how to banish creatures of the non-material realms back to their homes, and how to ward your vicinity against incoming efforts at true travel.

As a master traveler, you can create permanent doorways and bridges between distant spots (or matching posts on different planes of being), and slip through knots in the fabric of time so as to loop back or forward a few seconds.

Neritia and welcome to it

Neritia is one of my current thought-toys, a setting built to throw a whole lot of things I like together in what I hope may be a coherent whole, including:

Sci-fantasy. There's no magic in Neritia, at least none in the casting-spells sense. There are powers of the mind, and there's at least some manipulation of the energy flowing between dimensions, and like that. There are no gods, but there are spirits and supernatural beings, and there are cosmic intruders, of whom more below. This is a style of imaginary world I grew up reading about, in young-adult fiction of the '60s and '70s and in adult fantasy and sf of the same vintage.

Sea and sky. The world of Neritia has no land, just ocean and atmosphere. There are reefs and shoals, yes, but various things wear them down again, and the same with volcanoes and anything else that would push land permanently up above the high-tide line. I'm thinking there'll be something like Space 1889's liftwood to support some long-term habitations in the sky, but haven't worked out just what yet.  Liftkelp, perhaps? This is a desire that runs back to my childhood fascination with nature shows: Jacques Cousteau's documentaries, other National Geographic documentaries, Wild Kingdom, and like that.

Anthros. There are no standard fantasy (or sci-fi) races on Neritia. All sentient beings native to Neritia (which is to say that they've been there long enough to have no history or memory of life elsewhere and to have societies built on the realities of life here and now) are anthropomorphic, combining humanoid (not necessarily homo sapiens) legacy with traits from a wide variety of animals. I'm deliberately keeping the biology of this fluffy and weird. I have no real sense of the society that produced the anthros, but mix in advanced technologies, probably of multiple alien races, and psi, and a bit of this and that, and you get an outcome that would make for a dull expository lump. The fact is that cross-breeding and hybridization of various sorts work, so there.

No apocalypse. There are no epic disasters in Neritian history. The founders came from somewhere, and it's at least a bit of a lost world, but civilization didn't crash: the founders had time to adapt. There are ruins of much older civilizations, but they rose, fell, and passed the ways civilizations do, and are not the legacy of planetary catastrophes. There's no lost Golden Age, no great achievements once held but now lost. The present day is a time of diverse flourishing experimentation and development and is as good as it's ever been for a whole lot of people of many different kinds.

Smart technology. Inevitably, there's not a lot of mining and such on Neritia. There's a lot of use of growing plants and their resources, and a fusion of biotechnology with psionic craftsmanship and other stuff to make ingenious use of what's available to let people lead lives that are clean, safe, and filled with comfort and beauty. A particular inspiration here is my first reading of the companion book for Connections, looking at the pictures of things like evolving water mill technology and pondering what could have been done with relatively simple means if only people had realized it, combined with the picture of the past in stories like Lest Darkness Fall and "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" that emphasized past societies as filled with people who were busy having insights and dealing well in many ways with the challenges of life as they had it.

Society. "Gender" is almost as flexible a concept as "species" on Neritia, given the various forces at work, and I want to run with that. Insofar as there's a gender-based power structure in Neritian communities, it's matriarchal, with patriarchy being as rare there as actual Amazon-type communities on Earth. But Neritia is a place where love and desire have a bunch of means at their disposal with which to trump most biological constraints, which makes "what do you actually want?" a much more significant question, precisely because there's less need to have to settle. There's still room for all kinds of power abuse—indeed, the environment and internal resources create a bunch of new ones—but they have to coexist with alternatives and responses also not available on Earth.

The threat: aberrations. I have a great fondness for the exotic menaces of D&D, the ones from the Far Realm, twisted alternate realities, ghastly futures, and primordial pasts. But then I started reading Lovecraft early, too, so what can you expect? These will be the perils confronting Neritia, thanks to a developing conjunction of influences that strengthens them and complicates resistance to them.

Yes, but why? Because I can. Because it's a thing to think about when I'm not working on Something Wicked or otherwise engaged. Because I've been really impressed by the work of others doing just what they thought would be fun, and feel like I should do some of that too. :)

This blog and welcome to it

Hello, and welcome to A Singular HeroQuest. This is going to be a blog all about side projects and personal indulgences—a place for me to write down thoughts that I want to remember and share, but without worrying if anyone else ever really cares about them or not. It's for my own writing and thinking practice.

If you enjoy it too, so much the better!