All of us stories

In the end, we're all stories.

If there's an afterlife, which I disbelieve, then there are precious few ways of reaching back from afterlife to life with a status update. Once breathe is gone from our lungs, and the fire out in our brains, synapses still; there is nothing left of us among our friends and family other than our stories.

Or rather their stories. Their stories of us.

And that's the only thing anyone can guarantee as an afterlife. We will be the stories told by those who choose to remember us.

I do not know my great grandfather's name. But I know he fled from his home in Finland during the first World War. Finland was under Russian occupation and Finnish boys were being conscripted to the front lines to die for glorious Mother Russia. My great grandfather borrowed a Swedish friend's passport (this was the days prior to photo ID) and fled Finland under a false name. He entered the United States through Ellis Island, and then mailed the passport back to his friend, changed his name and moved to Western Canada and started a new life. And he did this all, knowing only two words of English: 'Yes' and 'No'.

I have no idea how accurate or inaccurate this story remains. The story was told to me by my mother. She based her understanding of it on her mother's story and the other details she could unearth. My grandmother based the story upon the tales told to her by her father, my Great Grandfather.

I do not know how much of the story has changed. I do not know my Great Grandfather's name. But I know his story. And I have told it countless times to friend and family. This is his afterlife, his story continues on because I tell it.

I hope that when I die, I will have left a story- even if only one- worthy of being retold across generations.

This is the engine that drives Blood Red Dreaming.

A Quick Look at the Elders

The Old Ones and Outsiders - The Eldritch Abominations
 
The Elders are the greatest denizens of the Shadowlands, beyond everything else in the Shadowlands. The Elders have many forms, although none of them are able to fully approximate human form with any skill. They are sympathetic to humans in the Shadowlands, but think in such alien ways that they are very dangerous to deal with directly or from whom to seek aid. The Elders are the personification of concepts, and only Man of Void/Lady of Fire might ever have a connection to some actual human.

• The Three (Mystery, The Great Serpent, The Weaver)
• The Four (The Survivor, The Shepherd, The Primal, The Sleeper)
• The Fear Touched (Man of Void/Lady of Fire, The Hound, the Grey)
• The Guides of the Fallen (The Little Green Man, The Rainbow Moth)

Neurological Termite Mounds

You think you are an individual with a rational mind or at least a single consciousness in control. You are wrong. You are a termite mound, a hive being.

And the conscious part of the mind is not the driver. You are the marketing department. Your job is to justify to the rest of the mind the decisions made by the subconscious and to convince yourself that was actually why you made that decision.

You are a thrumming hive mind, a bag of accumulated instincts and automatic responses masquerading as a single mind.

First Attempt at an Inspiration Piece for Arcadia

Initial artwork for Blood Red Dreaming, the Realm of Arcadia. No utopia or idyllic land of fairy tales. Mistake it as such to your pain and surprise. The land of the Free Peoples, be wary and be strong.

An Introductory look at the Tribes

The Hungry Empire erected the City of Glass. But people refused to fall in line. Some people survived in the shadowy margins. Before that, for 666 generations the tribes lived by the Song. Before the rise of the Hungry Empire. Now they call the stories of Arcadia home. These free peoples, both in Arcadia as they were in days of old, and in the City of Glass as they struggle for survival, these people are the Tribes.

Don't Invade Russia in Winter

Every lesson applies to every circumstance. No exceptions.

Don't invade Russia in the winter means don't go into that interview unprepared, it means pay attention to the realities of the rhythms of your chronic illness.

There are no exceptions. That one you're thinking right now, your special circumstances that I don't understand. Yes that one too. Every lesson applies to every circumstance. No exceptions. You are special just like everyone else.

There is somebody who has overcome your challenges, and with more setbacks and in worse conditions. Yes. Yes they have. Get over it. Your suffering is not noble. Your suffering is a choice. And it is a choice to not live your life in favor of being the star of your own Greek tragedy

That's your choice. But it is always a choice. Everything is a lesson. And ever lesson applies to every circumstance. Yes. Even yours. Even that one.

Introduction to High Magick

High Magick is the raw essence of the Shadowlands; a weaponized essence of story. High Magick is learned through the Witches and Wizards. When High Magick is used, the caster is channeling the power of the Demons known as the Fair Folk.

Learning Magick

Magick is learned from The Witches and Wizards. Once learned, a spell must be synced to the Player's Avatar by meeting the Requirements of the Fair Folk in question. Each member of a particular court has two spells to teach: one from the relevant witch and one from the relevant wizard.

The Demon Courts

Magick in the Shadowlands is controlled by a group of Fair Folk or Demons, divided into six courts with six roles within each court.

• The Courts of the Solar Year
• The Twilight Rebellion
• The Midnight Court
• The Midday Court
• The Darkened Court
• The Courts of the Hidden Wood
• The Bone Shrine Court
• The Bone Forest Court

Spell Structure

There are 6 spells per Court. One per member of the court. Each spell has two broad focuses - Internal and External. Internal is taught by the witches and external is taught by the wizards. Each spell has three variations: Fire (critical thinking), Rose (self Sufficiency), and blade (self defense).

• Magus Spells: The Magus spells are meta spells (manipulating the rules of the world itself)
• Witch (Internal): Manipulation of the rules of the Avatar.
• Wizard (External): Manipulation of the rules of the Shadowlands. 
• Caretaker Spells: The Caretaker spells are protective spells (safeguarding what is)
• Witch (Internal): Safeguarding your own Aura and Avatar.
• Wizard (External): Safeguarding things in the outside world.
• Messenger Spells: The Messenger spells are communication spells (sending information from one party to another)
• Witch (Internal): Receiving information into the self that others are trying to send.
• Wizard (External): Sending information to others.
• Mediator Spells: The Mediator spells spells to facilitate negotiation (building connections between people)
• Witch (Internal): To build a connection between a party and yourself.
• Wizard (External): To connect to outside parties (not yourself). 
• Scholar Spells: The Scholar spells are divination spells (discovering what is unknown and hidden)
• Witch (Internal): Discover something internal to the self: remember lost information, learn things about the self that is unknown, etc..
• Wizard (External): Discover something external to the self, something about the world.
• Harbinger Spells: The Harbinger Spells are prophecy and summoning spells (bringing 'something' from elsewhere)
• Witch (Internal): Bring something external into the self (self possession/channeling). 
• Wizard (External): Bring something external into the present (prophecy of some sort).

A Preliminary List of Denizens

The Outsiders 

The Elders

• The Three (Mystery, The Great Serpent, The Weaver)
• The Four (The Survivor, The Shepherd, The Primal, The Sleeper)
• The Fear Touched (Man of Void/Lady of Fire, The Hound, the Grey)
• The Guides of the Fallen (The Little Green Man, The Rainbow Moth)

The Fair Folk

• The Broken
• The Sheedr, The Faidr, The Gnomon
• The Sold Ones

The Spirits

• The Old Spirits (The Quiet Ones, The Sickly Ones)
• The Miscreated
• The Psychopomps (The Iron Horses, The Rust Vultures, Ghost Bears, Stone Turtles, Stellar Jays)

The Monsters

• The Abominations
• The Wendigo  (The Stillborn Army)
• The Giants (The Grigorim)
• The Chimera (The Bakumera, The Name Eater, The Story Hunter, )

The Gods

• The Dead Gods 

---

The Inhabitants

The Tribes

• The Ancient Tribes
• The Last Tribes
• The Mountain Stronghold
• The Northern Mystics
• The Peasant Warriors
• Strongiron Village
• The Displaced Horde
• People of the Abandoned Harvest

The Folk

• The Seven Clans
• The Free Folk
• The Cold Folk
• The Silent Folk
• The Wise Folk
• The Swift Folk
• The Gentle Folk
• The New Folk
• The Sea Folk
• The Old Folk
• The Constant Folk
• The Strong Folk
• The Clever Folk
• The Singing Folk
• The Dancing Folk
• The Ghost Folk

The People

• The Five Clans
• The One Leaf People
• The Two Leaf People
• The Winter Leaf People
• The Water Green People
• The Blade Green People
• The Stone Crack People
• The Village Treaty People

 

---

The Archetypes

The Locust Touched

• True Believers 
• The Locust King 
• The Officers (The Truth Speaker, The Dragon Lord, The Bone Man, The Cinnabar Lady)
• The Black and White
• The Knights of Unity
• The Knights of Purity 
• The Faithless
• The Oil Cloth Rebels 
• The Good Charlatans 
• The Crusader Bureaucrats 
• The Lost Children 

The Free Path

• The Thread Bearers
  
  • The Circle Walkers(First Mother, First Hero, The Kudavbin King, The Witch Doctor, The Dreamwalker)
  • The Witches
  • The Wizards

An Introduction to the Law

There's nothing more reassuring than realizing the world is crazier than you are.

Thor: The Dark World

The Storyteller

The Storyteller is the player who agrees to open the way into the Waking Shadowlands, so that the other players may send their Avatars through the Ring.

The Avatars and Auras

The Personal Projection of a psychonaut sent into the Waking Shadowlands to achieve victory in grand adventures and quests.

The Aura is the psychonaut's ability to maintain their Avatar in the Waking Shadowlands

Tools

Tools of the Psychonaut profession, their tricks of the trade: Magick and Artifacts and their related skill trees.

The Deck and Action Resolution

Actions are resolved first by asking if the psychonauts HAVE previously done the action in the Bonelands.

Vajra

The energy built between sessions and used during incursions.

Concerning Tools

A psychonaut brings only their vajra and their residual self image (to steal a term from the Matrix) into the Shadowlands during an incursion. But a psychonaut can leave things in the Shadowlands to collect and use on their next incursion. These are the tools of their avatar, psychic enhancements from the Shadowlands, grafted onto a psychonaut's avatar to serve their will.

An Introduction to the Denizens

The beings of the Blood Red Dreaming are all fictional, which is to say that they live inside stories. Some began life as real people, sometimes more than one real person merges to create an archetype. Some beings are ideas incarnate. They exist as personifications of concepts or seasons, times or places. These beings live in the Shadowlands, because the human mind more readily remembers stories and more readily remembers characters. And so within the human mind, within the Shadowlands, we find many strange denizens- monsters and fair folk, spirits and gods, and eldritch abominations greater and older than any god could hope to be.

The Denizens are divided into several broad categories: The Others, The Inhabitants, and the Archetypes.

The Others

The Others are also divided into several order (arranged here from most to least powerful): Elders, Spirits, Gods, Fair Folk, and Monsters.

All the denizens will assist Sorcerers in the Shadowlands, but all have a price. Elders demand stories. Spirits demand attention. Gods demand worship. Fair Folk (Demons) demand payment. Monsters demand blood.

The Inhabitants

The Ancient Tribes, the People and the Folk: the inhabitants are just that- they are the beings that inhabit the Shadowlands. Not possessed of any great supernatural powers in the universe of the story, the live and get by as they can.

The Archetypes

Arguably the strangest of the Denizens, the Archetypes are Avatars of beings from the Bonelands. But these are reusable hollow avatars and many people will step into the roles of the Archetypes and play the parts of hero and scoundrel and villain.

The Archetypes are Divided into several Groups, which can easily divided into Freepath and Locust Touched.

I am for that thing in your genome that demands it. I am for that thing which keeps you animals alive. I am, at most, a slice of monkey suspended within the stuff of universal intelligence. You are a monkey in nice clothes.

In the harsh environment you refer to as a habitable planet, group behaviors are required to survive long enough to procreate. Since you are stupid monkeys, you have no natural affinity for group altruism.

And so you have evolved a genetic pump that delivers pleasant chemicals to your monkey brains. One that is triggered by awe and fear of an anthropomorphism of your environment. Earth mothers. Sky gods. Bits of bush that catch fire. Interesting-looking rocks. An oddly-shaped branch. You’re not fussy.

When your brain does this idiot work, you stop in front of that bump or stick and consider it fiercely. Other monkeys will, like as not, stop next to you and emulate you. Your genetic pump delivers morphine for your souls. You have your fellow monkeys join in. Perhaps so they can feel it too. Perhaps because you feel it might please the stick god to have more monkeys gaze at it in narcotic awe.

The group must be defended. Because as many monkeys as possible must please the stick god, and you can continue to get your fix off praying to it.

You draw up rules to organize and protect the group. Two hundred thousand years later, you put Adolf Hitler into power. Because you are, after all, just monkeys.

I am your stash.
— Morrigan Lugus, Supergod #3

A Quick Synopsis of the Realms

The land of story, of myth and legend, or religion and politics, of fantasy and dreams. The land where everything is metaphor and analogy, where everything is symbolic.

The Realms

The Ring

The chamber at the end of universe, but is it this universe or the last one? The Ring is the permeable shell through which avatars enter the Dreaming Shadowlands and through which they must pass to use any gates to move from gate to gate. Think 'Event Horizon' or Nightcrawler's teleport ability. But it's a drug trip. This implies that drug trips dip people into the ring unprotected with their minds exposed.

The Foglands

The land of ignorance and obscurity. The first place everyone who enters the Shadowlands ends up in after they pass through (or bypass) the Ring. The Fogslands of Leng is the unformed land of the unconscious: Urizen and Eden, depending upon how the player enters and what happens. This is how people end up in the Shadowlands if untrained. This is always the first mission. This is the equivalent of the Astral Plane or the realm of dreams and many dreamers end up here.

The Mirrored City

The land of the Locust King and his Hungry Empire, his false utopia that hovers- a castle city in the sky. Without secret knowledge of the Free Peoples, wanderers in the Shadowlands will be hard pressed to move deeper, beyond the grip of the False King and his Hungry Empire.

Arcadia

This is not utopian or idyllic, but many mistake it as such to their pain and surprise. This is the land of the Free Peoples, and it is wild and independent, so be wary and be strong.

The Painted Labyrinth

The Painted Labyrinth is the place of trials, the deepest part of the Shadowlands, a realm of initiation and the keeper of ancient mysteries. All who seek to become warriors must journey here, but have a care- the labyrinth devours the unwary.

The Hollow Heart

The Secret Heart of the Shadowlands and the counterpoint to the Ring. The Hollow Heart is the bottom or the 'root' of the Shadowlands. A dimension of darkness. This is the source code of the Shadowlands and the cheat code of the realms.

The Bonelands

The so-called real world, the world of flesh and bone, the world of fact and science- the alien world so far beyond the capacity of the human mind that we created the Shadowlands again and again to escape it.

The human mind is a small thing, and fragile. The universe on the other hand is vast. Indeed, the universe is vast beyond human imagining. To say that the universe is beyond human comprehension is to undersell the scope of things quite spectacularly. The human skull runs over trying to hold the seemingly impossible scope of the universe. The concept of zero drove men mad. The idea of an infinity universe terrified the wise. The Catholic Church was so threatened that it declared heretical idea of earth as a tiny speck in a small galaxy in an insignificant corner of a universe so vast that light could only trek across it slowly.

What is the Shadowlands?

We don't live in the real world. We live in a fantasy world constructed by our mind.

How can this be?

Because we can't access the real world. Our senses are ridiculously limited in their perceptions. Sight is limited to the so call visible spectrum, unable to see infrared or ultraviolet, radio waves or x-rays. We see thirty  frames per second, making the very fast and the very slow virtually invisible to our senses. Our hearing is likewise limited, and our sense of smell fails to notice all kinds of deadly vapors. We can't perceive radiation, except when it sickens or kills us.

In addition, the idea that our sense will function properly is something frequently disproven, near-sightedness, far-sightedness, blindness, deafness, colorblindness, hallucinations and much more reduce our already limited knowledge of the real world.

And what of our assumptions? Humans don't come hardwired with the knowledge that an adult possesses, and no two adults accumulate the same body of knowledge, the same cultural baggage, the same heuristics and contexts, stories and biases and on and on.

The Refugee Crisis (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

The refugee crises borne from the arab spring seems to me to be an obvious continuation of civilization's inability to sustain the growth rate needed to sustain it. As the Roman empire began to falter once it could more longer new lands, our empire seems to have began to crack and cannibalize itself.

But what would I know?

The experts keep saying that continuous growth in a closed system is only a paradox if we are talking about other things. Human civilization is a special case the experts say.

I might point out the fall of Rome, of Babylon, of Persia, of multiple caliphates and moguls and daimyos. I might point out that empire after empire now lies like bones in our museums.

But what would I know?

You Die in the Bonelands

Underlying all magic is an attempt at remaking the world to match our assumptions, our biases, our own taboos and fears. Underlying all magic is the idea that the world would be better if it conformed to our story.

The Bonelands don't care about our story. And this is why we die there.

Introduction to the Ring

The Ring is the place where everyone begins their quest into the Shadowlands. People wander through the Shadowlands in a haze before awakening and beginning their lucid dreaming endeavors into the Shadowlands. The Ring appears innocuous to most travelers, who remain ignorant of where they truly reside when they step into the ring. The Ring is the refuge of a dying universe in the Dark Era. It may be a shadowlands future for our universe. It may be the universe preceding our own, the universe from which the Man of Void and Lady of Fire sent their message, which guaranteed their rebirth in the new universe- through message, through story.

Design work for Character sheets to be used during play

Early design work for the character play sheets for gaming. The idea here is to make gameplay quick and intuitive, to not require massive reference books to take each action.

Welcome to the City of Glass

Concept Art for the Painted Labyrinth

The Painted Labyrinth is the deepest Realm of the Shadowlands that is 'easily' accessible. The most dangerous and abstract realm of the Shadowlands. As all Realms of the Shadowlands represent cultural memory of history, encoded as stories. The Painted Labyrinth is the long term storage of ancient stories and histories, where history has been encoded as myth and legend. The Painted Labyrinth is a land of archetypes and monsters, the land of trials, the taste of death, a path where heroes go to learn whether or not they are in fact heroes after all... or fail forever.

I'm not 100% happy with this art piece for the Painted Labyrinth, but I want to provide content at a decent place. I want to enable people to play Blood Red Dreaming without myself present to walk people through the process. So here is an image. It is an imperfect attempt, and I will probably try again, but for now it is enough.

Copyright Canot Ever Make Sense (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

Copyright is an attack on the processes of learning and innovation. It is an assault the survival prospects of our species it is innately elitist and authoritarian.

The copyright industry likes to claim its necessary to protect artists. Which is almost exactly like a loan shark describing his hired leg breakers as lender protection agents.

Copyright is an attempt to control what can be said by whom.

Unsorted Thoughts, Number 2

Stop hiding what you want behind what you think is reasonable to ask for.

You don't have to take from others. You can build what you need and take others with you.

You may very well be hurting people by depriving them of fruits of your creation.

A quick collection of photos of the first draft of the Book of the Crescent Sun

 The Book of the Crescent Sun is the record book used to keep track of activities used between games to generate Vajra for use in gaming session and the Incursions into the Shadowlands.

Unsorted Thoughts (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought 

as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

After all 

what is technology 

but the imposition 

of our fantasies 

upon the real world?

Welcome to the Ring

Here, as promised is the inspiration piece for the Ring. It's obviously more symbolic than the piece I did for the Foglands. For the moment, that feels right. I may go back and make a more representational image later down the road, but right now, this feels like the right place.

Unsorted Thoughts, Number 4

What is to give light, must endure burning.
Viktor Frankl

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him

Welcome to the Foglands

A concept piece for the Foglands. I am working on art pieces to help establish the mood and feeling for the various Realms of the Shadowlands.

The next piece to look out for will by the Ring. Which, in all honestly, probably should have gone up first.

School and Prison (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

Why school is different from work? School like prison is designed to hold people for a period of time. School like prison pretends it has an ulterior motive in order to justify holding people as it does.

What Gods Need

There have been thousands of gods through the years that have received the worship and devotion of humankind. And thousands of gods thus stand dead or forgotten. Their laws are now ignored or transgressed unless some new upstart deity has adopted their codes. The chances of the god into whose worship you were born or introduced is in some way special amidst the divine mob is minuscule. Therefore, if you are going to interact with and make deals with the divines, you should do so with a healthy sense of what they are.

"What does god need with a starship?"
Captain James T Kirk

Slavery (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

When people tell you not to bow to peer pressure, they are often doing so out of response to cultural mythology, collective peer pressure.

The belief in the noble rebel is essential in an empire. We need that illusion to tolerate our slavery

Allegory of the Whisperer

Why We Need Open Source (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

I have said before that the most important qualification for considering oneself free is the ability to walk away. if one cannot choose not to participate then one is a slave.

With the rise of the Internet, digitization on information, and the rise of the 3d printer, we can see at the copyright industry has lost all natural sources of leverage. Information can be shared freely without restriction and without border. This destroys the leverage which the middle men who run the copyright industry once had and makes them very very scared. As such the copyright industry has gone into the surveillance business. they have lobbied and bribed and bought politicians and they have been behind a large part of the rise of surveillance culture in the modern era in an attempt to enforce copyright. The concern regarding governmental surveillance culture is obvious but what surveillance culture and copyright monopoly does in the modern digital age is less immediately obvious. In essence licensing agreements and digital ownership with always online connections transforms the world into a rental culture. Everything can be taken away at the whim of the copyright holder. We are living borrowed lives.

Purchases can be rescinded. Access withdrawn. Nothing you own is truly yours. Copyright itself must be attacked to be sure. But that is likely to be a long and hard battle.

Better to outflank. Make them irrelevant. Open source culture provides a means of outflanking them. Open Office as an example, provides a way to step around Microsoft's stranglehold on word processing with Microsoft Word.

We need more things like this more things released into the public domain and copied for things shared more free alternatives that cannot be taken away because no one owns them.

As technology makes it possible to obtain more goods for free, the vultures of commerce will attempts to bar the gates.

Our slavery has been invisible in the first world for more than one hundred years. Now that technology makes freedom a viable possibility, our chains will become a lot more obvious.

A Quote from the book Gaia's Garden, "Each need not satisfied by another component of the design becomes work for the gardener; each product not used becomes pollution. "

Concept Idea: The Heroic Quest for the Perfect Angel CINDY-CT8

A post-apocalyptic black comedy model modelled on the story of the Ramayana.

Raymond is a spoiled survivalist child in a powerful prepper camp. A bandit raid on the camp results in the theft of a number of important pieces of gear, several people, an armored vehicle and Raymond's collectible figure of his favorite animated heroine: Cindy-ct8 (still on the package!)

Raymond is uninterested in until he learns of theft of his figurine, and then he is roused to an epic quest to retrieve Cindy.

Ideas: Ray is an idiot hero and a comedic sociopath. He is not incompetent, rather he is disinterested in anything outside his narrow range of interests. He is the butt monkey as karma smacks him around for his selfish attitude nearly constantly. However everyone mistakes his antics for heroism, except for Ann Nguyen (Hanumann) who views Raymond as a kind of charming brain damaged child that needs protecting.

The constant efforts by Anne to keep Ray out of trouble are a major source of the humor.

Another key source of humor is the fact that the audience knows that Raymond is questing for an action figure, but the rest of the characters believe Cindy to be his girlfriend and interpret Ray's actions through the filter of a heroic badass quest.

The humor in the story will also derive from the contrast Ann Nguyen's the constantly applicable practical prepper skill set versus Ray's occasionally game breaking but otherwise limited skill set (computers and violence). A final source of humor stems from the conflict between the melodramatic mock heroic inner monologue of ray and the actual situation. A visual narrative contrast.

Ray's reliance on violence appeals to his father, despite is other children being more capable in the running of the camp. Most of the villains should be portrayed sympathetically. And the story will gradually reveal - although the core cast will not notice- that ray's camp is hated as a violent bully by the other camps.

Ray has three older sisters: Linsday, Brenda and Chandra. All of whom are more capable than him but neglected due to gender. Linsday is ray's fraternal twin and better at him in everything including combat but doesn't enjoy killing. Brenda and Chandra are highly skilled leaders with strong organizational and strategic minds, but neither is bloodthirsty or cruel. Their father considers this weakness. Although examples of how viciousness and cruelty immediately biting him and camp in the ass are frequent and legendary. Other camps call them Camp Scorpion.

God's Fruit (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

Eating is a holy act.
What you put into your body is an offering.
Put only your best offering before your altar.

Ask yourself: "If I were a god would I honor or smite the mortal who gave me this offering?"

Your body will do the same to you

What Religion Is

Religions are collections of useful lies constructed to latch onto the human imagination and burrow into our collective cultural memory. You can say this is good or this is bad. I will simply say that it is.

The Problem with Living for the Weekend (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

Do you like your job? I hope so. But statistically you are unlikely to like your job.

If you are lucky, like me, you do not hate your job and it provides you with a good wage good hours and good benefits.

But so what?

My job is essential to the functioning of modern civilization. Like many boring but essential jobs, my job keeps the wheels of civilization turning. And I know co workers for whom this is their justification for going to work everyday.

But so what?

Let's ask horrible question shall we. What is the value of retaining civilization?

The great advantage of civilization, is it enables massive population growth, and specialization of labor.

The cost of civilization is that it requires massive outlays of resources. but because it is not sustainable it must grow more with each new generation and it did the last.

As a result of the population, and labor specialization. civilizations tend to produce massive technological and social innovation.

But so what?

because of what they require massive consumption of resources and ever increasing growth numbers, the price is
... everything.

And on top of that, if destruction of ecosystem isn't a large enough for you, there is of course the cost to each and everyone of us for our participation in civilization.

Industrial scale total war, hierarchically enforced poverty... and that is before we start examining your work week. The overcrowding of urban centers squeeze more people into one place than a human mind is wired to process. The pace of work and the stress of intangible enemies we can't see or strike with a spear drives 70% of us quietly insane at some point.

We work longer hours with less rest for worse results than our hunter gatherer ancestors and mental illness is our reward from our pointy haired bosses.

But so what?

Isn't that just how the world is? Were making ourselves sick, and in the process we're killing life on earth. But that's just how things are. Right?

7 billion of us toiling at job we mostly don't like so we can medicate with media and chemicals on the weekend?

So what's the alternative? The deck is stacked against us and if we step out of line we risk our livelihoods and security.

But so what?

Spending Vajra

Aether

• Can absorb Aura Damage at the time or damage on a 1 to 1 basis
• Can be used to bolster other player attempts on a 1 to 1 basis
• Can buy new cards. 2 vajra to buys 1 card

Air

• Used for Critical thinking actions on a 1 to 1 basis
• Can dispel or resist magick. Action Attempt as normal, Vajra spent on a 1 to 1 basis
• Can expose new weak points. Action Attempt as normal, Vajra spent on a 1 to 1 basis

Water

• Used for Self sufficiency style Actions on a 1 to 1 basis
• Can repair Aura damage after the fact. 2 vajra repairs 1 Aura level.

Earth

• Self defence can boost conflict resolution on a 1 to 1 basis
• Can shift Inner Eye Value. 2 vajra shifts Inner Eye 1 degree.
• Can be used to 'overcharge' Aura. 2 vajra adds 1 Aura level.

Pragmatism

The hoarding instinct. It might be useful later. This tendency holds back and hampers the modern first world naked ape. But one upon a time resources were valuable and hoarding and repurposing existing resources kept people alive.

Why should magic be any less pragmatic?

Grimdark (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

Is the popularity of grim and gritty reboots of children's programs driven by a desire for continuity? Once Upon a Time kids played at being adults. They played house. They played college. They played cops and robbers. Cowboys and Indians. War. Not all are positive and uplifting of course. But all share something in common. The child is playing at being an adult. They are practicing the future.

As Children's Entertainment has become more fantastical, has it become more difficult for kids to make that connection? It's hard to pretend playing Batman or Voltron or My Little Pony friendship is Magic are in any way a practise for adulthood.

Is the act of rendering these children's programs into grim and gritty formats attempt to balance this unequal equation?

Regaining/Losing Vajra

Vajra cannot be regained while players are engaged in a session. But if the Players achieve their Mythic Goal, they will recover the Vajra they invested at the start of the session, regardless of how much they have burned in said session.

If a player's Avatar survives the adventure but does not achieve a Mythic Goal, they retain only that amount of their invested Vajra that was not spent during the story Session.

If a player's Avatar is Shattered, the player will lose all Vajra at the end of the Session. They can still spend their Vajra after being ejecting from the Shadowlands, but only on passive effects.

Four Things to Fear (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

I am afraid of many things. Nuclear waste disposal. Copyright wars setting civil rights back for decades. Surveillance culture in the government. Expert culture leaving us deliberately infantilized. But four tightly inter-related things top my list: species extinction, over population, peak oil, and climate change.

Everything starts with overpopulation. There are 7 billion of us on a planet which can maybe support 2 billion of us. This is a problem.

We are defying that natural limit by using fossil fuels to synthesize fertilizer and pesticides, transport crops vast distances, mechanized agriculture to an industrial scale and venerate a car culture that makes possible staggering urbanization.

The problem with fossil fuels is that the earth is not making more and we have no viable alternatives that work on the scale needed to replace them at the moment. Plenty of contradictory evidence is swirling around right now, but a decent body of evidence suggests that we have used more than half of our favorite fossil fuel, and the others won't be far behind. This is a problem.

The turn of knife here is that although we are running out of fossil fuels, we have more than enough to turn climate change from the problem that it is now into a permanent nightmare on earth.

Climate change has already rendered the Northwest Passage ice-free in the summertime. Something that has never happened previously in recorded history. Climate change is already resulting in melting of the permafrost to begin releasing methane trapped within it. This is a problem.

These are the effects of climate change. But both also contribute to climate change themselves. At a certain point even if we stop contributing to climate change the damage will be done and climate change will accelerate on its own. This is a problem.

And as a result of over population and the effects of climate change the rate of species extinction has increased 1000 fold in the last ten thousand years as a direct result of our civilization. An estimated 200 species are going extinct every single day because of how we choose to live. This is a problem

We now have the choice of maintaining our lifestyle temporarily at the cost sacrificing our life support system permanently, or dramatically reassessing how we live and accepting inevitable heavy sacrifices. We want to ignore these things it seems and continue living in a fantasy land. And this really is a problem.

Lost in the Map

Magick, language, symbols, the whole of the Shadowlands are a hologram, a map of what they represent. We navigate using the map. We shouldn't walk on the map.

If you get lost in the map, you will never reach your destination.

Accumulating Vajra

Vajra is accumulated, as indicated, is accumulated by doing things in the real world.

There are four sub-types of Vajra: Aether Vajra, Air Vajra, Water Vajra, and Earth Vajra. Aether Vajra is earned by doing 'self-care' activities, such as exercise and meditation and journalling and planning. Air Vajra is earned by doing 'Critical Thinking' Activities, such as asking the three questions or attempting to disprove assumptions. Water Vajra is earned by doing "Self Sufficiency' Activities like gardening or survival skill practice. Earth Vajra is earned by doing 'Self Defence' Activities such as strategic games and martial arts training.

A Complete list of activities and how to earn the Vajra is provided in The Book of the Crescent Sun. In the Quick Start Guide, we don't cover this in detail, because the first adventure is where the players earn the ability to invest any Vajra beyond Aether Vajra. A PDF file of the Book of the Crescent Sun is available free on our website. Attached to the Quick Start Quick is an abridged checklist for accumulating Aether Vajra for the initial adventure session.

Hebrews and Glue

According to the Hebrew god, he made the world in six days and rested on the seventh sometime after the Sumerians invented glue. According to the Norse Eddas, Midgard -that's Earth- sits upon the Yggdrasil World Tree which is somehow not visible from space. Why do the Yama Kings' control over hell cease at the borders of the middle kingdom? Why don't Incan and Egyptian mummification rituals follow the same mystic and Ecclesiastic rules? Why does the rainbow serpent stay in Australia? Why did Thor never travel to Punjab to honor the warriors there? Why did Ganesha never inspire a Pagan European Shaman?

We have catalogued fossils and other geological and anthropological evidence tracing the origin of the modern human back to roughly two hundred thousand years ago. And yet; the oldest gods and spirits of which we can find evidence- recorded in stories and rock art from Australia- are a mere forty thousands years young. Gods are so much younger than humanity that our general belief in their immortality is astonishing. And if we cease to limit our musings to modern humans and include all human species then the timeline jumps to around two million years depending on current evidence. And then I wonder: do apes have gods? Do birds follow spirit guides on migration? Do whales sing in religious devotion?

And this is why Chaos Magicians eschew traditions. If our gods are younger than us, then we have the hierarchy reversed. This is why Grant Morrison summoned John Lennon in deity form with the same willingness as he did when communing with scorpion gods and Hellenistic goddesses alike.

To assume that our gods exist outside us is to ignore the weight of history. Any power or magick our gods possess they obtained from us. And thus, we can use or modify, create or banish them as we need. They serve us and we are their creators. It is only power hungry priests and would be god kings who have labored to convince us that the reverse is true.

Defining Vajra

Vajra is the fuel on which the player's Avatars function. Vajra is the mystical energy of the human will and story. And it is literally this in the case of Blood Red Dreaming. Vajra is earned by doing valuable things in the real world, and recording those actions in a book (Called the Book of the Crescent Sun- because we are preposterously pretentious). Players are literally mythologizing their daily actions and routines.

The idea here is to tie your entertainment to your daily routines, in order to make doing things valuable to your success and happiness easier by gamifying those activities.

We are hacking our brains' dopamine production to help achieve our long term goals in a way that will sneak past all of our collective human failings. So yeah, ridiculously pretentious.

Going Mad (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

I want to argue that civilization is the primary cause of depression and mental illness today.

My argument stems from an assertion I'll make which claims civilization is at odds with how the human brain is hardwired.

Some background. The human species adapted itself to a hunter gatherer lifestyle over one hundred thousand years ago.

Before becoming hunters however, humans were prey. And even as hunters, humans had their own predators.

Both before and after adapting to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, the primary survival strategy of our species was social cooperation.

A good description for humans through much of our existence would be a social primate sitting in upper middle of the food chain.

This is still who we are. Evolution shaped us over two hundred thousand years as homo sapiens alone. Ten thousand years of civilization is a coffee break by comparison.

We are limited by the adaptations provided by natural selection. We are limited in our thinking by the physical realities of our brains.

Civilization is constructed to suit the needs of civilization, civilization acts like a super organism, much like a bee hive or anthill, and thinks of individual humans as resources to be used and as cells of the civilizational body.

This is not to say civilization is bad. But it does mean civilization is not designed for or interested in meeting human needs any more than a beekeeper is in meeting the needs of her bees. That is, as a secondary concern addressed only so far as necessary to keep them productive.

Civilization then obviously will only grudgingly adapt to our needs and thus we are tasked with adapting ourselves to civilization. Which poses a problem.

Civilization is an experiment in scale, growth is a literal measure of success. And yet the human mind is wired to empathize with only one to two hundred people. Anyone else is a stranger, registering in our ancestral prey mind as a possible predator.

To counter this, civilization has developed the rule of law, which is used to persuade humans that strangers are not a threat and can be ignored while you do your work growing civilization.

Religion is invoked to add a moral story driven reason to follow the rule of law. Love thy neighbor etc... This effectively hacks our minds. We are wired to think in stories after all.

But we are still prey living in midst of millions of potential predators. And we are social creatures hardwired for small scale tribal societies and the egalitarianism necessary to run such societies.

But modern civilization quickly moved from a scale of thousands to millions and the systems of a small scale egalitarian tribe simply didn't work in this scale. Hierarchies were established. Kings and presidents appeared along with chains of command and cults to experts.

These experts act in our stead. And as a result, civilization leaves us as prey in a sea potential predators dependent upon faith in the rule of law to protect us and bereft of our power to enforce any change or administer any discipline (which has been passed on to those various experts).

Is it any wonder we're drowning in mental illness?

Excalibur and Us

Since watching Star Wars, I had always dreamed of being the chosen one. drawing Excalibur from the stone, inheriting my father's lightsaber, I always hoped to be heir to some ancient lineage some destiny to carry on.

Richard Dawkins said that we are lucky because we will die. He said that most people will never die because most people will never be born. He pointed out that the number of possible humans outnumbers all the grains of sand on all the beaches on all the possible worlds. and then he said that amongst all those are poets greater than Keats and scientists created Newton, and yet here in our ordinariness are we.

And yet we are the chosen ones. We are heir to a great lineage. We are heir to 6 million generations of heroes and warriors- across two million years of human evolution. Little self programming informational algorithms running in the computers using chemical fire, wearing bodies forged in the hearts of dying stars. This is who we are. Star children. Heirs to all of human history. The chosen ones amongst near-infinite possible humans. We've already drawn Excalibur.

As Warren Ellis argues through Axel Brass in the graphic novel Planetary, that if you save the world then it will repay you a million times over. And as Morgan Freeman's character points out to Lucy in the movie by the same name. "The point to life is to pass it on."

Concept Idea: The Seventh Song (Video Game idea)

HOMELAND
Players experience a Loss of innocence when they learn the truth about their utopia.

FRONTIER
Players discover the rebels are also using the locust king's methods and are no better, simply less successful than the empire. And are forced to deal with the idea of the victims are also contributing to the problem.

RUIN
Faced with the unpleasant truth that helping either team will lead to the imminent destruction of the ecosystem and also magic and magitek and the end of civilization and the death of millions. But although releasing the sleeping beast will prevent the destruction of the eco system, it will still destroy magitek and cripple the power of magic across the world and kill fewer but still millions.

The game will include multiple wild goose chase legends about magical solutions: ancient crystals, lost gods, power from the moon, lost ancient magitek, geomancy and solarmancy etc... each includes a resolution where the solution is found to be fake or the weakness or problem of the solution is made clear.

Finishing any wild goose chase arc spends time towards the actual solution. The more wild goose chases pursued the worse the ending obtained.

AFTERMATH
Best ending has five million people survive, 1 out of every 4 (original population was about 20 million) and proper leadership is in place so that society doesn't break down in the aftermath.

Worst non-evil ending. Less than one million survive. Anarchy ensues. Mass war and flitting and killing. The old ones confirm that life will continue. But the survival of the human race is not certain.

Evil ending IMPERIAL
Similar to the naive ending. But the 'heroes' know the consequences of their actions. The ending concludes with the shattering of the magitek shield and a rush of wendigo and refugees as the sky turns blood red. but instead of saying THE END, it says THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Evil ending REBELS
if the players kill the sleeping beast after siding with the rebels the ending will show the fall of the empire and the brief rise of the frontier states before the sky turns red and the wendigo swarm across the land. but instead of saying THE END, it says THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Some of the Many Many Influences behind BRD

The vajra system is inspired by the Dark Souls Souls system. The Avatar concept is inspired by Hong Kong action Theatre and its star system. The accumulation of progress from outside the game is inspired by Pokemon go and other ARG games. The story element mechanic is inspired by the Fate core system and its aspect mechanic. The playing card resolution system is inspired by psychosis Ship of Fools and tarot card resolution system. The enemy weakness system is inspired by shadow of Colossus and Legend of Zelda boss battles.

Additional game mechanics inspiration comes from rifts, wushu, fudge, alternate and probably others we didn't notice we influencing us. Story and sitting inspiration come from a myriad sources. Including Stephen King's Dark Tower series, Dark City, The Matrix, the Invisibles, dot hack, neverwhere, the Discworld novels, in the mouth of madness, persona, bloodline and dark souls, the work of HP Lovecraft, planetary, star trek V, far cry 3, hyper light drifter, Ishmael, the holy, Shadow of the Colossus, Legend of Zelda, green grass running water, mage: the ascension and too many more to name.

We all started out playing Dungeons and Dragons and Legend of Zelda. As such it would be hard to estimate just how much of an influence both of these things were upon the game

When Auras Break

Aura failure types

• Aura SHIMMERS
• and becomes WEAKENED
• -1 to Action Resolution Attempts.
• Aura SHUDDERS
• and becomes CRACKED
• -2 to Action Resolution Attempts.
• Character loses next action to reconstitute Aura.
• Aura SHATTERS
• .... Ouch
• The Avatar is expelled.
• Allies can rescue.
• Aura SHATTERS irreparably...
• The Avatar is expelled.
• Allies cannot rescue

Innovation (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

A strong definitions for innovation would be: to err purposefully and repeatedly in a new direction.

A Manifesto for Good Ancestors

Long ago in the future time was a wheel. The locust king conquered the world and hammered time into a flat line. The future no longer led back to the past. The locust king devoured the future to feed his empire in the present. And one day there was no future left.

Standing at the end of the line, with no future before them, the children of the present had to weave the future back to the past in order to survive. Time had to be a wheel in order to last forever.

The line will break. The circle will return.

Destroy rational reality with this one weird trick!

I'm going to show you something rather odd. Read this little article about conscoiusly shaping the culture of a group, could be a business, could be a sports team, could be a club or even a church congregation. Then read it again below.

---

Original

When you start thinking about designing your community culture there are four things to consider.

What is your group's culture now? What do you want your community culture to be? What outside influences must be addressed? And how will human nature force me to compromise?

Knowing the gap between there you are and where you wish to be is essential. This shows you the talk ahead. The amount of transition required will also give your first indication as to the difficulty of your task.

When deciding on the culture that you wish to build, be sure to think about what it needs to do. Culture is primarily a technology to influence people towards the task of building society.

What must your society accomplish? How must people act on a daily basis for society to accomplish that goal? That is what your culture must reinforce, encourage and enable.

What will break your society and prevent it from reaching its goal? This is what your culture must dissuade, penalize and render taboo.

At this point outside factors must be considered. Everything from terrain to soil composition resources rainfall and other physical factors. From the influence of other groups to conflicting cultural forces within your group. What are your challenges. Some may be adjustable. Others may be a immovable as a literal mountain. Don't ignore them.

And the big one of course, it's human nature. Technically part of the previous section, it should be addressed separately because failure to match your culture to human nature will result in absolute failure.

Human nature is driven by and limited by our neurology and physiology. These things will not negotiate with you. And you build cultures that defy them at your own risk. Human nature can be aimed and distracted and even diverted. It cannot be dismissed or discounted.

We will address human nature in its nuts and bolts in subsequent episodes. For the moment start by honestly assessing the culture of your group, how much you must shift the culture of your group and what hard physical limits will have to be addressed to do that.

---

New

When you start thinking about designing your Cult's culture there are four things to consider.

What is your cult's culture now? What do you want your cult culture to be? What outside influences must be addressed? And how will human nature force me to compromise?

Knowing the gap between there you are and where you wish to be is essential. This shows you the talk ahead. The amount of transition required will also give your first indication as to the difficulty of your task.

When deciding on the culture that you wish to build, be sure to think about what it needs to do. Culture is primarily a technology to influence people towards the task of building cult society.

What must your society accomplish? How must people act on a daily basis for society to accomplish that goal? That is what your culture must reinforce, encourage and enable.

What will break your cult's society and prevent it from reaching its goal? This is what your culture must dissuade, penalize and render taboo.

At this point outside factors must be considered. Everything from terrain to soil composition resources rainfall and other physical factors. From the influence of other cults to conflicting cultural forces within your group. What are your challenges. Some may be adjustable. Others may be a immovable as a literal mountain. Don't ignore them.

And the big one of course, it's human nature. Technically part of the previous section, it should be addressed separately because failure to match your culture to human nature will result in absolute failure.

Human nature is driven by and limited by our neurology and physiology. These things will not negotiate with you. And you build cultures that defy them at your own risk. Human nature can be aimed and distracted and even diverted. It cannot be dismissed or discounted.

We will address human nature in its nuts and bolts in subsequent episodes. For the moment start by honestly assessing the culture of your cult, how much you must shift the culture of your cult and what hard physical limits will have to be addressed to do that?

---

I trust that you see my point.

Our words shape our reality, so choose your words with care

Beginning in the Brain

You can't escape your inner fish. To bring you home was built upon the brain ancient prehistoric fish. You're ever so many great great great grandfather was a little slug like fish. It now bears the name Pikaia and it was the first chordate, that is the first creature with anything resembling the spinal column. All of our culture and our learning, all of her songs and literature, all of her science and our philosophy, all these things are built on the foundation of a little sea slug with a spine.

And with each successive generation. Each time we bred and did not die before reaching sexual maturity, each of these successes added a new layer to the tapestry that would be our culture that we would hard code into our DNA, into our brains.

Air breathing. Courtship rituals. Fight or flight response. Herd mentality. Social rituals. Rearing our Young. From reptile brain to neo cortex , our genetic history is built into our culture, built into the very fabric of our social norms. Or at least it was, until ten thousand years ago. Then the heresy, then the blasphemy, then the treason against billions of years of evolution. Then the cities. Then came the Locust King.

New Ideas, Unsorted: Geo Caching

• Incorporate geocaching into blood red dreaming. 
• Use for special weapons and new location.

Excalibur in the Rust, Mythopoetic Design

Excalibur in the rust.

The concept of a mystic artifact, and one neglected is too universal to neglect. My wife has suggested the concept of a Mystic compass. Diviner's pendulum hanging under a gyroscope compass. Maybe with sextant. I like this, traditionally this is a sword or a weapon. I love the idea of something used for navigation and exploration as a cultural artifact.

By contrast we have Mistletoe. The Scythe of the Locust King is a corrupted sickle. Forged when the false king took the mirrored mountain and transformed it into the glass tower

The Weak Bond (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

We babble away on public networks. Pseudonymous to strangers. Is it any wonder that so much bile fills these networks? We are social creatures held without consequence for our actions. Our deeds are lauded by a mob we know not who. Our misdeeds go unblamed. We lack the social cohesion of the tribe. We are then the sum of our social bonds and the current era is the age of the weak bond.

Other Book Cover Designs

Comparison of Cover Design

First design above, second design below

The Dose makes the poison

-

Tim Ferriss

Plans for Des Occultus Aranea

So NEOvirtual shamMAN is a blog of my own occult journey primarily. I hope, obviously, to present that occult journey in a way that is interesting and useful to other occultists and would be occultists.

To that end, I have been endeavoring to put together a resource for local occultists. The solution I have settled upon takes the form of a podcast consisting of interviews with local occultists of various disciplines. The idea is that these will help me progress upon my own journey, they will help local occultists bring awareness to what they do, and provide a useful general informational resource to occultists who are not actually local.

That's the plan.

I have the first interview in the can. Said interview is with ceremonial Hermetic Magician and Freemason: Troy the Devil Man. The audio is better than expected, but still rather rough in spots (read rubbish, you will hear my dishwasher and both of my dogs during the course of the interview).

I will be posting that interview once I have the minimal editing done that I intend to do.

In the meantime, here's a list of topics that I hope to cover as subjects of discussion on future podcasts.

• "What is Magic?" a discussion on the definition and nature of Magic.
• "Mythopoetics and Appropriation" A discussion on syncretism, mythopoetics and the politics of cultural appropriation in the occult.
• "Why do you bother?"What is the benefit that Magical practise provides to one's life? A Discussion.
• "Education in the Occult" a look at courses on the occult available in the Lower Mainland- such as Enochian.org and Scholomance.

Domesticated (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

We have been domesticated. We queue up in lines that don't exist and for our turn when there is no precedence.

The Biology of Stories (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

 (*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

Humans are alive. Humans are biology. Everything that springs from us is therefore based upon our biology. Therefore, we should be able to find a biological basis for the structure and systems of all of our stories

I want to create an equation language of stories.

Anger Management

Anger. I feel a thousand ghosts scrambling about in my wake. They tear with jagged claws against ever surface I pass. They, my inner selves, reveal my own hypocrisy. I hate this world, even as I cling to it. I know nothing else.

What am I to do? I put on a strong front for those whom I know need to believe in my strength. And I believe in my strength as well. But I need permission to have bad days. I need to rage and snarl and gnash my teeth. But my venting will scald those around me more fragile than myself. And so I bottle up my rage. I feel that this is not the wisest course. I need a better solution. No. What I need is an actual solution. What I have made do with previously has been only a bromide.

A Fictional Snapshot, Number 1

I get claustrophobic when I die. The crush of immobility; dying neurons firing desperately but increasingly without pattern, without the guidance of my consciousness. Shut a computer off and restart it, barring damage from a hard boot process, nothing is lost. Digital storage has a strong fidelity in the event of a system shutdown. The human bodies I find myself using are different. So good at the necessary parallel processing required for sustaining consciousness, human bodies have terrible information fidelity in the event of a system failure. Pattern loss and data corruption arrive with oxygen starvation and get worse from there.

By the time I manage to reboot, I've normally lost a great deal of useful working code. I generally have to retain some of the code from my now host to fill in gaps in memory and sometimes core functions. My surviving original memories tell me that I have a full digital back up at my home in the future.

I don't know when I'm from precisely or how far I'd have to travel back into the future to get there. Every reboot takes me further into past in search of a new host. I worry that I have moved too far into the past, beyond the lifespan of human body. I may never get home.

Maintaining your Aura

An Aura has three states: Stable, Weakened, and Cracked. An Aura begins each session Stable. When a player takes Aura damage, they can burn Aether Vajra to prevent the Aura from dropping states. If a player cannot absorb Aura damage, then each point of unabsorbed Aura Damage reduces the Avatar's Aura by a Single State.

Investing your Aura

When Players begin any incursion into the Shadowlands they must spend Vajra. They must spend one vajra of any type to enter the Shadowlands in the Ring or at any location in another Realm for which they have visited the Bonelands counterpart in the last lunar month. To enter any where else, at least one player must have the key to that Realm, and they must spend two vajra of any type. This vajra is not retained, being expended in the using.

After that players determine how much vajra of each type they wish to take with them into the Shadowlands. The vajra types are kept separate, but players may invest as much of their vajra as they like. Any Vajra not invested may not be used in the game.

Aura

When the players begin an adventure session, they begin by investing their Avatars with Vajra (see that Section) that they have accumulated through work done between sessions. The Aura is the Avatar's ability to remain corporeal within the Shadowlands.

If a player's Aura shatters their Avatar is expelled from the Shadowlands, and they are limited to passive assistance for the remainder of the session. A player who achieves a mythic goal in a session regains all invested Vajra. A player who survives the session, but does not achieve a mythic goal gains no Vajra back. A player whose Aura shatters loses all invested Vajra.

Update on Interview with Troy the Devil Man

I sat down with Troy the Devi Man- one of the Rain Coast's most experienced Ceremonial Magicians. We spoke at length, and even remembered to record some of it! We generated about 90 minutes of really interesting occult discussion.

I am currently reviewing the audio and adding intro and outro audio, and will be uploading the whole interview shortly.

Hand Size, Card Recovery, Drawing with an Empty Hand

The hand size is five cards. On an Amazing Success, the active player(s) only, not assisting players, may draw 3 cards up to a full five cards. On a Normal Success, players draw 2 cards or to a full hand. On a problematic Success, players draw up to one card or to a full hand.

If a player fails, they regain no cards. During Sequels, the player may spend two vajra to draw one card- up to their maximum hand size.

If a player has no cards in hand, they may always draw a single card- face down- to boost an action resolution attempt. In this a zero is applied towards the player avatar's own total value (giving no boost). Players may bolster other players attempts, but may not draw cards in such cases even if the active player succeeds.

The Deck of Void

Gameplay Resolution is done with a deck of cards rather than with dice. A Player's Avatar in the Shadowlands can do whatever the player themselves is physically capable of doing.

Anything beyond the capacity of the Player requires the expenditure of cards to accomplish. If they are unable to do the action in the real world, the Storyteller will define the Difficulty and Consequences as listed in that Section.

The player will then attempt to have their Avatar resolve the action. This can be accomplished by spending Vajra, using Story Elements in play or playing Cards from their hand.

The Deck of Void is a 72 card deck. Every card has a value between 4 and 0. Each card is assigned an Action type as well as listed in that Section: Hero, Scoundrel, Villain, Mind, Body, or Hands.

Each card has a Denizen, Realm or Season depicted on it to help provide players with mythos lore and world familiarity through play.

There are six cards with a value of four, the highest value in game and thus the rarest. There are twelve cards with a value of three, eighteen cards with a value of two, and twenty four cards with a value of one.

All the cards with a value between four and one have a denizen of the Shadowlands depicted on them. There are twelve value zero cards, divided into two groups based on what they depict. Six cards depict Realms in the Shadowlands. Six Card depict the mythic seasons.

Cards with a value between four and one can be laid to boost the chances of success. Player may play cards on any attempted action, even if it is not their attempt.

Cards with a value of zero nullify all card bonuses (and only card bonuses) played prior to the zero value card being played.

This can be used against another player, who may elect to spend more cards to counter the effect. If played against a Denizen, then the single card played by the Storyteller is negated and no more cards will be laid by the Storyteller for that action. A value zero card that is played which matches the action type (hero, scoundrel, villain, mind, body, hands) nullifies the cards already played, and halves the difficulty- provided the player can describe in story what is done to make this occur.