Friday, February 12, 2021

Big Bundle Of Setting Questions & Such

Firstly, the 13 Items World but for my setting I do not have a name for yet...
  1. Blue-grey moonsilk parasol.
  2. Boltlock rifle, chipped and scratched, tied with prayer scarves and charms, the gun-spirit is old and grumpy, hates the black powder & paper cartridges that foul itself.
  3. Oily rainbow rock of ancient compressed plastics.
  4. Duelling sabre in an eel-leather scabbard. 
  5. A gilded sub-machine gun, the nearly scratched out makers mark places it as once belonging to the Serpent King's Secret Police. It's gun-spirit is young, spoiled, and energetic.
  6. A Samovar, made of brass, accompanied by bricks of tea and bags of coffee.
  7. Several stick grenades.
  8. Bio-mantic organ sacks, squishy and highly valuable.
  9. A penny-pamphlet adventure novel set among the "exotic" Boatlords of the Zum Delta.
  10. Helmet & splatter mask with a mail veil, decorated with apotropaic eyes.
  11. Bathhouse token tied to a dues letter from the Courtesans Union.
  12. Perfumes & lip-paint in little tins.
  13. A pyramidal prism, containing an insightful machine-spirit, taken off a sorcerer's corpse.
Next, answering Locheil's setting questions for the same yet-to-be-named setting...

1. Which specific NPC do I want to piss of the least?
        The Lady of the Blue Spire who controls the Hierophant and its great machine-spirit. Tangling with her and her vast network of bureaucrat-sorcerers is not recommended.

2. Which god should I want to piss off the most?
        Perhaps the Orbital War Gods? It does take some effort to make them properly angry. But if you manage you might be able to trick them into blowing up a mountain range or city you don't like.

3. What's the worst thing I could meet at a crossroads?
        Probably a devil's incarnation offering you tantalizing contracts, for an arguable definition of 'worst'.

4. What's the nearest thing that can utterly destroy me to your starting town? Or starting town equivalent?
        Oh there is a lot of stuff. Ancient Auto-Machine Basilisks, thunderheads full of Lightning Wyrms, raiding party of Lunar Fae, pack of gun toting Baboons. The list goes on.

5. Is apotheosis open to my character? If not, why not?
        Oh heck yes and in so many ways. Plug yourself into oldtech machinery, make a deal with an alien godling, abscond off into trans-dimensional space. So many options.

6. Do people in your world have souls? Why?
        Sort of? It's complicated and there's much debate on the subject. Suffice to say people have got something that can be hijacked, stolen, used as legal tender with some para-dimensional beings, and bound to artificial bodies to achieve immortality. 

7. Does jazz exist in your setting yet? Can I invent it and not be stoned to death?
        Yes it does (of a sort) but only in the big Industrial Cities where they can afford to make the instruments. 

8. What's the weirdest country/polity/region/area on your map?
        Most places are pretty dang weird, but the giant space elevator is pretty weird even by the local's standards. There's also the Glass Desert which as the name suggests is all glassy sand and half-melted cities haunted by immortals kept alive with arcano-tech machinery.

9. Do guns exist yet? If they do, is there anything making them weird/different?
        They most certainly exist! Gun-spirits mainly are what distinguishes them. That and a tendency towards ornamentation.

10. Is there a divide between mundane/magical animals?
        Not really, some animals just do weird stuff. Others don't. Sometimes animals that don't do, do do weird stuff for reasons.

Gael Bertrand

3 comments:

  1. God I love how evocative this all is

    With the gun spirits though, does it mean they're sentient? I can't help but imagine (if that is the case) a gun scolding you for using it improperly.

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    1. Depends on the gun but yes mostly, the more mass manufactured a gun is the more 'deadens' its spirit becomes (however new spirits can move into such guns and with sufficient time a deadens spirit can get awakened) As well, most guns if you want to talk to the spirit you have to do a little ritual and it has to actually like you (for example a gun-spirit might refuse to talk to someone who hasn't been properly cleaning the firearm) but the spirit is always there.

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  2. This setting is fuckin' brilliant :)

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