Noircana - a campaign toolkit?

Imagine a world where magic bleeds out raw, and infuses all within. Where arcane is mundane and lines between living and dead thin. A civilisation of sorcerers all the way up, from the newborn to gods that pass unseen, a landscape gone mad, and now MAD - with Mutual Assured Destruction.

Conventions, contracts and pacts abound, but out where the rules don't apply there's radicalism and exponential growth. Ever more subtle forms of power and means to exercise it. Mysteries in mysteries, but faint trails back to puppeteers for any who dare look, and know how - or can learn.

A world where wealth is redefined and anything really will be possible. If it isn't already...

This is one possible take on a project JD and I have been talking about here at his blog, The Disoriented Ranger. It's essentially a themed toolkit for tactical roleplaying*, but could also go beyond, into other game types too: imagine a wargame where units are unnecessary and battles fought with arcane power only, but orders of magnitude greater.

It started with JD's subsystem for personal magic weapons and my mind still on Read Magic. One of the major ideas we've been discussing is the near-universal magic item, formed naturally, and the concept of a magical signature unique to a particular source, and linked with that the idea of casters having a magical fingerprint and leaving it behind.

Not a noircrawl so much as a noircana to deepen a campaign, building on lesser-used spells like Detect Magic and maybe leading to whole new sets like those in Space-Age Sorcery. It plays to dark classics, but also more recent reference points like The Matrix and the so-called singularity. Hereticwerks and others already work with material like it.

The glad lightness of a far future and alterpluristemics

The recent focus on paths among universes or settings set off some thinking here. What if the journey could be planned, or the destination known, or a traveller could move back and forth? You could import/export between paradigms. Then came the next thought...

Which item from any given setting or universe could really change the nature of another?

One that came to my mind was the flower from the classic Star Trek episode "This Side of Paradise". It sprayed spores that removed resistance to empathy and freer love - see the first video below. And I thought of the grim dark of a setting like the 41st millennium.

Wouldn't work? Xenophobia between the factions is just too strong? In the second - and potentially very offensive - video, of Richard Herring's Hitler Moustache, a train of thought starts at 3:32 in which Herring jokes that while many of us embrace the existence of so many nations, anyone who sees only Them and Us is just one step from universal love.

Of course, in a war-torn far future like M41, anywhere the flowers were planted could be subject to Exterminatus or the equivalent, and probably would be once their effects were known. Conflict can be made profitable, or be the sum total of experience or a source of identity - that we know. So what mechanism could be used to spread the love around?

Well, the Orks are a major, dynamic vector. And they multiply via spore release. What if a rogue xenobiologist or bad dok raised an Ork to produce the love spore too? Orks get everywhere and could inherit the galaxy. Now they'd share it. What would that mean?

At any rate, a transpluristemic path like one of those for the Ends, especially if it could be hacked or co-opted, or a follow-up found, could give rise to a new kind of protagonist: a figure who travels the settings, maybe the genres, altering them for a given purpose...

A few bits and pieces

First, BoLS has a major update on the ongoing GW vs. Chapterhouse case - there's a little more here - and HoP flags up a clever thunderhawk.

Second, if you've been having trouble seeing The M42 Project's vision of an improved alternative to 40K, SandWyrm posted a force organisation chart and revised game introduction. 

Third, there's a discussion going on at Trey's last Warlord review, on change in people and genre, and Roger the GM sees the old school in ITV's classic show Knightmare.

Fourth, one or two of us were commenting a while back with Lovecraft's favourite words, and to expand a shrunk vocabulary I've decided to build on that. I started here and here.

Lastly, it seems no one got that movie reference from the last post, so I've put a slightly more open reference into the next entry for the Maelstrom table. This is entry no. 6 of eight unless someone else jumps in before Saturday. If you have a suggestion, go for it.

     The descent into the Maelstrom... (heading for 1D8)

     6. ... wakes the traveller - who is afloat and wired up in a sensory deprivation tank.
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New genres A-Z - from archeopunk to zombie derival

Here then are all of the entries for the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2012, 26 posts with the theme of possible new genres for fiction, maybe in gaming but also beyond it. Some are deadly serious, others may just be silly, but as so often, it depends on you - the person.

The underpinning was this debate, on themes that have been running through a lot of the posting at the Expanse, and the discussion has spun out across the months. The latest instalment could be this recent back-and-forth. Feel free to join in, anywhere and -when.

Read any good sly-fi?

More inspiration for gaming and wider fiction, like the space plasma and symbiogenesis posts, but more like those on geoengineering and warming, and maybe even comment forms teaching an AI.

This time it's about helium, a gas with a range of applications, some arguably critical.

But there's not much on Earth, and even less because the market price has collapsed thanks to a timed sell-off of stores. The good news is the moon seems to have a lot...

The fiction? What if a sell-off was designed to cause a shortage and create an economic incentive, in this case for private spaceflight? Providing transport to the moon for helium extraction could be highly lucrative, and a decade or so is good lead-time; a consulting role in exchange for support might seem a smart career move. For bonus plot strands, some of those involved might want to cut funds to projects for ideology or appropriation.

More? From the blogs, how about this suggestion of western self-deception re Chinese military development, or this challenge to a buttress of modern physics, Mr Einstein's special relativity, or this look at the failings of reason itself in contemporary culture?

I need a label for these posts, so I'll propose a possible new genre. Here's a definition:

sly-fi (n., pl. -s)  a fictional genre consisting in the interpolation of feasible secret histories from reported facts and their elaboration in other settings

That's the label I'll use from now on, so you can find all the posts, including this, here.

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Pro-apocalyptic fiction?

Here's a thought. Many fictional settings present cycles of existence, and focus on the period just before a potential collapse or just after. There's a doom to avert or world rebuild, assuming there's knowledge post-apocalypse of what went before.

How about playing with that a little, and writing a world in which the civilisation is being deconstructed, structures dismantled and materials returned to the earth? Scaffolding on the walls of a castle, or machinery scaling a habitat, isn't there to raise, but the ordered opposite, and resources are buried whole or broken down, not by disaster, by design.

The trigger could be tyrannical decree, divine intervention, a revolution whether sudden or slow-building and of course enlightened government, of AI say. Energies in the world might be largely be put into developing new technologies to separate materials, clean them and return them to nature. The goal might be a certain level of ongoing activity, or a stewardship, or that one day a final group, individual or device will turn out the last light.

Maybe concealed observers remain and the thing is an experiment in creating new life?

As a concept, it reflects current awareness and fears of environmental catastrophe, and die-off discussion, and the idea of a noble sacrifice, although it could also suggest the cruelty and horror of periods in very recent history. Maybe it resonates too much with our age to be compelling, or escapist. Maybe this kind of thing is already out there?
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Flash Fearsdelayed & taken over - Higher random

It's Friday the thirteenth, and Blogger's been down, not to mention all the usual horror. But yesterday was Thursday and that means Flash Fearsday at Lunching on Lamias.

Join in; write a terrifying tale in 140 characters. A new genre this week, gamer horror...

He rolled the die, very well. It skipped, danced. Six. 

"Four," I said. "Two," came the reply. 

We settled on one.

And thus it became serious.

How about a bit of propluristemic content to go with it? Propluristemic content is a rule for adaptation to various systems and settings, for this context any dice-using system.

Higher random

It's very simple: roll the die; decide you like another result more.
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