Mimesis

Jul. 13th, 2025 08:40 am
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[personal profile] heya_baru

Author's note: This story is presented in two parts, Ascent and Descent. Although the form of the written word requires that one section follow another, they can be read in any order.

Ascent

Emil arrived on Venus under a storm of human misfortune. The looming threat of famine sent prayers crashing out the windows; consternation grew so thick in the air that the rats not felled by starvation could have swam at eye level through Kansai's tunnels.

Seven days of chemically induced somnolence bled out of Emil's mind while she sat in her cockpit. Her body pulled her consciousness from the mire of a nightmare, wrapped under the delicate kudzu of IV lines, data cables, defibrillators, and fiber optics; if she dared weave herself any further into the cloister of the ship's control system, Athena might have struck her atop the head with a shuttle. Her ears popped as the cabin altitude equalized with Kansai's fetid ambient air.

When he was still alive, Cultri told Emil to always note her nightmares, for terror is a second pair of eyes. The needling dread of that nightmare remained in her extremities while she reached a finger behind her head and unlatched the network connector in her skull, inner ear jostled by the grinding of metal on bone. The wetware status system on her laptop chirped unhappily.

The Kaghan's wife cornered Emil before she even left the airport. The ease of Marta's youth sloughed from her skin like leprosy, leaving behind a landscape of rib bones and desperation. Rationing had its hands around their throats until they had started to suffer like ascetic monks for want of a meal, she explained, they had nothing to eat but the dust of the planet, she could feel her stomach growling in her teeth; if their prayers were too quiet for Aphrodite or Ištar it was due to the hunger pangs stealing the air from their lungs. Marta had to grab fistfuls of her silk dress in her hands and hike up the hem while she led Emil to the datacenter. The engineering teams were striking over the rations, and with no one to battle the ferocious appetite of Venus's rust, a dozen rotting pipes across the settlement had started to belch their contents onto the concrete floors. Men shuffled beside them in the narrow halls, the wet linen of their expressions stretched thin over battered cheekbones. Stinking water sloshed at their feet.

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Demon Core: End

Jul. 12th, 2025 07:38 am
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[personal profile] heya_baru

Part 1

Bruit

Hero laid Leander out on the floor in his bedroom and rested her head on his chest.

“You’re stoned out of your mind.”

He nodded. “Can you blame me?”

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Demon Core: Part 16

Jul. 12th, 2025 07:34 am
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[personal profile] heya_baru

Part 1

Dirges of Silence

The week before I turned ten, my grandmother sold her mortuary in the suburbs of Albuquerque and placed me under her wing following the death of my parents. Before the mortuary’s closure, she stole slivers of youth from her untimely dead and ate them with her tea, an act that curried no favors with the divine who saw the youthfulness of the dead as their birthright. To thumb the scales of sin, she would lay awake on cloudless nights as to let the moon confess its sins to her before forwarding its contrition to god. With the rising of every sun, angels would tally her sins while she washed her hair, and even the most captious among the heavens would count the sum as zero.

On long and unwelcome winter nights when the stars carried my weeping from my own lips to her ears, she would come into my room and tell me a tale, one she swore on the name of her mother to be as real as my tears:

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Demon Core: Part 15

Jul. 12th, 2025 07:03 am
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[personal profile] heya_baru

Part 1

Bleeding Hands Veil Our Eyes From The Cosmos

She had to get out of the house, out of the block, out of Los Lunas; there was too much of Sestos; his guns and drugs and stacks of half-read books propped up against the wall, crowding everything, haunting her, waiting to bury her, a final dignity they denied him.

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Scavenger Character Creation Example

Jul. 11th, 2025 11:04 am
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[personal profile] zarpaulus

I thought it would help to include an example of character creation in Scavenger: Caches and Prizes. Since Horizon's story takes place in the same time period as the game's default setting I used her.

 

A player decides they want a raccoon pilot named Tanya Loter. For characteristics they roll a 9, 5, 7, 6, 3, and 7, they decide to assign the 9 to Intelligence, since flying a spacecraft would presumably require a lot of smarts, giving her a +1 DM to INT throws, 5 to STR, 7 to DEX and END, 6 to EDU, and 3 for SOC, her player’s not that concerned with social standing (577963). The campaign takes place in the Tiere system (Ch. 14), so taking a look at the planets in the system the player decides that the Orbital Alliance of Jord sounds like a good origin point for Tanya. As a Pallene culture she can choose between Aircraft-1, Computer-1, or Streetwise-1 for an upbringing skill, the player decides on Aircraft.

 

Next, it’s time to design her phenotype. Jord is a temperate Terra-sized world but Tanya spent much of her early life on space stations orbiting the planet. So while her favored atmosphere and temperature are Terran and Temperate, her player chooses a Light gravity to represent the limited access to spin gravity on such post-Federation stations. There is a list of common Procyon traits and Tanya’s player consults it to pick the Climb, Iron Stomach, and Notable (DEX) traits, increasing her DEX to 9 (597963); and picks the Increased Metabolism adaptation in order to compensate for the third trait.

 

Now for her career. Tanya’s player thinks Navy would help build her piloting skills so they throw INT to qualify, they roll a 7, modified to 8 with the DM, which is enough to succeed. They’re using the basic training variant rule so Tanya gets all the Service skills at rank 0 and then throws 1D on the Specialist table, getting Piloting at rank 1. Advancement is next and a failure, but not that big a deal. Next she throws survival, and comes up snake eyes, fortunately they’re not doing hardcore mode so she just roll on the Mishaps table. With a 4 Tanya is dishonorably discharged from the Navy. Her player isn’t quite ready to start yet, so they try for Belter this time. Qualification is easy enough, for skills they get Piloting again on the Service table, bringing her rank in that skill up to 2. This time they’re successful on advancement, gaining the skill Zero-G-1 and making another skill throw, gaining Engineering from the Specialist table. Survival is close, with a roll of 6 they wouldn’t have made it without the Notable DEX trait.

 

At this point Tanya’s player is ready to go adventuring. They lost their Mustering Out Benefit throw for the Navy term but they still get one for Belter. The dice come up 6, meaning Tanya starts out with a 40-year old Prospector.


Songs for the Dusk: Downtime 1 Recap

Jul. 10th, 2025 10:36 am
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[personal profile] dismallyoriented
Realized only just now I typo'd the title of my last recap post. Boo. At the time of writing this draft, I was trying to make sure I got this one out before we finished Mission 2. I did not finish this before we finished Mission 2 lmao. [Wife's note: HE SO PROFOUNDLY DID NOT DO THAT] Anyway, delays aside, it's time for Downtime!

For those of you who don't play Forged in the Dark games (FitD), games that use that system have a codified Downtime phase that occurs between missions. It's time for PCs to rest and recover from whatever stress & harm they've racked up, work on long term projects for themselves, and deal with any other complications and random events that the GM rolls up. It's also a fantastic time for character interactions between party members and NPCs. Each player has two actions to spend working on those aforementioned things.

All FitD games (as far as I'm aware) have a Complication that occurs during downtime. The GM rolls for a random occurrence off a table, based on certain in-game conditions like "how much trouble have you caused with your missions." Crews that have accrued more heat and bad attention will have more troublesome random events, some of which will involve factions that they've pissed off coming to. Resolve their problems, let's say. For example, we've taken -1 rep with Children of the Fault, the group that Isaiah belongs to, because even if you have really good reasons to scrub a mission it's still not a good look to take on a job and then say "Actually, never mind." Despite that we're still within the most basic heat level, so we would've been fine - had our GM not rolled the "reroll on a higher danger table" option and landed on "Quintessent Life - troublesome spirits and magical creatures".[1] Which, to be fair. We did bring home a wholeass dragon wisp, so.

Because Songs for the Dusk is so community focused, it adds another feature to its downtime phase called "Threads". At the start of the downtime, you pick a broad theme or concept about your community that you can build your downtime scenes around. For this downtime, we chose, "How does gossip work in this town?" and began filling in the different avenues of how news spreads in our community, and how people talk to each other.

ExpandA side note on Love Letters )

ExpandDowntime 1 )

Sentimental well wishes

Jul. 5th, 2025 09:59 pm
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[personal profile] dismallyoriented
Sometimes there are influential old people in your life, or even just old people who were around as a passing fixture of your life because they were fellow members of your community. A good several of mine were teachers - the old Chinese man who taught me violin since 5th grade and hosted student recitals in his backyard, the Russian woman who taught me piano and did her damndest to teach expressive body language when I didn't understand why it mattered or how to feel it in my performance, the other old Chinese man who ran an art class at my local Chinese school and gave me unexpected gender and life goals. They're important parts of your life but only for as long as you're doing the thing that keeps you in contact. And then you quit, or get a different teacher, or graduate and move away, and you leave each other's orbits. You look at the calendar year and remember how long ago it was when you knew them, and you don't know exactly how old they were when you were last together but you can sure do the math on the odds of life expectancy.

I have no way of knowing if these people are still alive, or how their lives are going. For some of them, I'm not sure I deserve that information, in the sense that we were only tangentially connected and a next door neighbor who you never really talked to Isn't the kind of relationship you get intimate life details for. But the fondness is still there, the well wishes are still there. Even if I don't know that anyone is there to receive them anymore.

One Page Ziiiiines

Jul. 2nd, 2025 01:27 am
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[personal profile] beepbird
After finally making sense of how to fold them, I've been a little obsessed with making one page zines for the last few days:
Expect more. I'm having fun. :P

Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
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[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

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