• She/her

I'm that neon-haired woman with tits big enough to end your entire career no one warned you about.


(I'm tagging all of these posts with "retroquest 2" so that they can be looked at easily in order or filtered out.)

Okay, so I've talked a bit about why the Runes are important. What decisions did I make with this important thing, then?

I began with a couple of inchoate principles around wanting to do something different but primarily with recontextualization and only secondarily with changing the syntax. So I decided I wouldn't delete any Runes or move any to different categories from the text, but I felt free to add them and reword definitions for existing ones.

In the process of all of this, I decided that the elements would also have subdivisions, because that's a cool concept which leads into my decisions on what to add. One of my favorite fantasy maneuvers is when there's a system of elements which breaks with the classic four, or the four+one of fire/water/air/earth and aether. Now, this game has a six or possibly five+one set of elements- the big four, plus darkness, plus moon, (!) which is marked as a temporarily accepted element in Gloranthan terms.

Elements

So I began with those six, and I thought- okay, what if the classic four elements are "inner world" elements people know how to manipulate well and there are other elements which are "outer world" elements people don't know how to manipulate well. So I added light as a counterpart to darkness, and then I sat and thought for a bit. I wanted something that was a counterpart to moon as a truly "off-the-wall" choice, and then- well, the Womb Realm Mandala of esoteric Buddhism, a vampire game I'd been playing, and the cultural ferment of From Software's fantasy games in the vein of Demon's Souls, especially Bloodborne, came together and I wrote down "blood" as an element and drew a little droplet shape for it.

From there, I had my eight elements, which might be four earthly, two infernal, and two celestial, or four inner and four outer or other possible shapes and formations. I decided that the subdivisions would be described as instrumental and sociocultural ones instead of some metaphysical truth, mostly because I came to all this through Glorantha and the fog of subjectivity is an element of it I like, but also, secondarily, because it reduces any psychological pressure to make them meaningful- they can be silly, cringe, what have you, they're a subjective phenomenon.

So here are the elements in order of how I wrote them down, in the first and second pictures at the top.

So here are a couple of key factors in this- the four classic elements have short entries, because like all prep, these are notes for use. I know the kinds of meanings these four substances have culturally in the real world because I live there, and I don't need to remind myself of them, and leaving that space open allows for flexibility of meaning and interpretation at the table. The less common elements have longer ones, because they need a bit more clarification as to their meaning- Light and Darkness mostly to explain that they are universal elements present in the world rather than substances like the Greek aether that are absent from immediate sensory experience.

Blood has one of similar length, because the clarification is just- "blood is the physical stuff of life, everything that moves and is alive has some kind of blood to allow it to do so". Is this world going be one with a lot of vampire aesthetics? It's possible for sure, but I think that will only be possible through play- what will the group's decisions in play end up focusing on and highlighting?

Moon is the longest, both because its concept is more abstract- it's a substance of inconstancy or instability- and because the subdivision is based on a concept from linguistics around the order of differentiating color terms that human languages obey. Once again, a note that summarizes the concept and its basic order for use at the table if relevant, but also for any further prep related to the anthropological aspects, some of which (languages) is already called out explicitly in the rules text.

As for the subdivisions, the main factors here are leaving them open and using fairly subjective language, while also trying to cut down on binary oppositions- we have five of those with the power Runes already, let's make the elements points where nonbinarist existence is more baked in.

This is big and long, so I'll end it here and continue with Forms next.


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