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You are a god of small things, risen from the dust in which you were born. In your little corner of divinity, you have grown deep roots and flourished. Little prayers have been answered, unremarkable things have been made miracle. Through trial and tribulation, you have climbed out of obscurity. Your name, once whispered by only a few, is now spoken by many.

You have reached a crossroads in your winding path to divinity. On the cusp between past and future, with the prospect of greater godhood before you, it is time to reflect on what brought you here - and where your next step will lead you.

Liturgy of a Lesser God is a solo journaling game about a small god, and the lesser things over which they hold sway. It is played with a six-sided die and a deck of regular playing cards with the jokers included - and something with which to document your playthrough. The game is going to be $5 for the next two weeks, after which I'm raising the price!

Get it early if you want it cheap - or subscribe on Patreon for the same amount per month to get your hands on it and every other game I've made.

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I was tagged by @angrylittlesliceofpizza & @absurdtamsin to list my top 10 comfort movies - well, tagged The Main Blog, but putting it here. Thanks for the tag! Remember that the emphasis is on comfort, here, which does not necessarily mean good, and that's okay. Alright, here we go:

A Knight's Tale

Stardust

The Princess Bride

The Sword in the Stone

Kingdom of Heaven

Howl's Moving Castle

When Marnie Was There

Prince of Persia

Finding Neverland

Brigadoon

Not tagging anyone, but going to sheepishly clutch my A Knight's Tale DVD in the corner.

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Heads Up 7 Up Tag Game

Tagged by @akiwitch​ — thank you! Here are the last 7 lines of Murder in Saint Salma Parish, a modern supernatural story in which Mary Ann learns that her estranged, eccentric Aunt Valda’s heart going missing isn’t the most shocking thing going on in the tiny parish. The pet shop is 100% trafficking mythical creatures, the raven in the cemetery might be a god, and the painting of bigfoot in Aunt Valda’s home simply cannot be trusted not to tell a devastating joke. 

“Oh for sure, it’s the end of the world if the ritual rips Mal and Saint Salma Parish apart. But you and Gilly have everything you need to make sure it’s not.” “What happens if Mal—” Mary Ann’s nightmare came back: the dark oily flakes that the world became as it was unmade, everything she touched dissolving beneath her fingers, the disintegration expanding ever outward, spilling through the gates of the Saint Salma cemetery. Mal croaked and sprang from the mausoleum’s roof, her talons a second too late in leaving the stone, and the shreds of her existence unraveling into nothing. Tombstones shattered into the silvered essence of those who once slept and graves disgorged their bones up into stumbling people again. “Without Mal, the dead return.”

Tagging @luwianskies​ — any chance of a taste of those words you wrote last night? Never any pressure, of course. :}

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Oh so ur a writer?? Prove it. Drop the last sentence of ur wip in the tags

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i dont remember the last time I saw trans representation in Indian media but this ad just made me feel so blessed

xx

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Alright, listen. This book honks. And I want to talk about why. No, I'm not getting into the book review scene, but please indulge me.

I never had any intention of reading this book. I'll be up front with that.

A new coworker is a newish fantasy reader who, upon discovering that I am a long-time fantasy reader who also writes and has some vague publishing background, asked, "Would you read this book and tell me what you think? I haven't read it yet, but I'm curious to hear your opinion."

Sure. Why not. I was only 50 pages into the book I was reading at the time, so why not put that on pause and give this a go? This became infinitely more complicated by the fact that my new coworker is acquaintances with his wife, and then add in that I've met this author, had a bad interaction, and decided I never wanted to read his books. Nevertheless, I was determined to give it a go anyway, and I wavered for a while on whether to even include that background here.

Wasn't I already predisposed to not like this book? Perhaps. But this book was an excellent learning opportunity, if not a good story, and I think it's important for us all to approach books we don't like this way: Each time I ran hard up against my own disgust, I paused to ask myself why I felt that way. What was it about the story, the writing, the character, the plot, the world that made me react this way, and how did that interact with the author's intent?

First of all, a disclaimer: This will have spoilers. If you intended to check this book out, perhaps don't continue further until you've read it yourself. Maybe then come back and compare your experience to mine.

> The worldbuilding is based on two-dimensional lore.

The world is comprised of what appears to be three human races split along religious lines. The three sibling gods each have their own race of followers with some individuals inheriting the magical power of their god. One is a magic associated with air and water with a father/older brother god figure; the next is a mother/middle sister associated with fire and light; the third is a little brother associated with... the hard labor of forging? It's unclear what he originally stood for, but by the time the immense lore dumps are complete, we see the little brother's transformation from a highly skilled craftsperson who takes immense pleasure in crafting gifts to his siblings into a petty, angry god bent on chaos and destruction of his siblings' domains.

What brings on this transformation? The gift of a song.

He is so enraged that his siblings gave him a song instead of a physical item like he gave them that he goes into a rage, evicts himself from the metaphorical house, and goes to live in the bowels of the world where he can forge in peace. He goes on to create all the various fantasy creature races in the world like dragons, fae, constructs, shadow demons, etc.

And his name? Keos. He's the chaos god and his name is Keos. I can forgive a poor name here an there—perhaps he never said them out loud—but add in that the sister's light/fire magic is called lumen—y'know, like what lightbulbs are measured in—and I have concerns.

Naming problems aside, the entire world's history and the racial relations all stem from a god's immensely childish reaction to a gift. I am well aware that many deity lore can be goofy or based on overblown reactions to things, but it feels so thin and flimsy that to prop the whole world and its cultures on top of it could not stand.

> Ableism is pervasive in the culture.

The story starts off with a prologue, which, as a concept, is not inherently a problem, but it was my first clue that this was not the story for me. In this world, being disfigured in any way physically marks you as an agent of the chaos god. Either these agents are killed or ostracized in order to better mitigate any mischief and evil they may commit or bring to their community. We are immediately thrust into this intensely ableist world with the birth of a child missing a hand and part of a forearm. The parents are killed and the baby taken to the woods to die.

I hate it already.

The author, being the sort of person to review their own book, states in his lengthy review: "Whatever you do, don't think for a moment that I'm blind to the tropes I've chosen to use. They serve a purpose and are conscious choices."

If this is the case—that he's aware of his tropes and they are purposeful—he must also be aware of the statement he's making by having all disabled and disfigured be labeled as evil ne'er-do-wells. Because this story takes place almost entirely within the small town of Chaenbalu where these beliefs are rampant, we're lead to believe that this is the way the whole world works. We get one glimpse of the outside world where it mentions a larger prevalence of disabled and disfigured individuals, but it's so brief and not at all explored that our understanding of the world goes mostly unchanged.

Is this part of Call's subversion of tropes? Perhaps Chaenbalu is indeed a backwards town, holding on to old traditions that the rest of the world has left behind, but the characters are so isolated they wouldn't know—and therefore we don't know whether that's the case. Bad news: It's so distasteful that I'm not interested in reading more to find out if it's just Chaenbalu that's the issue. I'm so put off by the whole concept.

> Every female character is cardboard, and they all die.

Centered in Chaenbalu is the Academy, a school with two gendered factions: the witwomen and the Master Avatars. (You'll notice that the sexism starts right off the bat with the fact that Masters get capitalized but witwoman does not.) The witwomen are trained midwives and kidnappers, sent out into the world to collect children and bring them back to the Academy as a "reap" or class of new students. The students are told that their parents submitted them to the Academy's care in a boarding-school-type thing, but that's spoiled in the prologue as being untrue.

Unfortunately, we don’t get a chance to really explore what it is the witwomen are up to, or what any of the women are like. There is only one female character with any amount of on-screen time, and even that is negligible. She acts as nothing more than a plot device, which I’ll talk about later, functioning only as an object for the main character to lust after. Anytime she is described, it is with delicate detail paid to her soft, plump, pink lips, the breasts, the hips. At every turn, she’s sexualized—and perhaps that’s due to the main character’s gaze being the narration we receive, but even in the epilogue scene when our main character is not present, the author continues to describe her this way, so perhaps it’s not a function of the main character at all. She receives no further development than who her father is, what her body is like, and how much she dislikes those marked by Keos, aka, the disabled and disfigured.

The other witapprentices and witwomen appear for two scenes, and by the end of the book, they are all dead in the midst of an attack on the Academy that serves only to move the main character's story forward. Without this attack, he would never have a story worth telling in a book. Without their deaths, the attack would not have happened. And even the romantic interest is faux-killed in order to provoke a specific emotional reaction in the main character to move the character's development forward.

> The characters are shallow.

While I can't guarantee that this problem is due to the two-dimensional worldbuilding, I personally feel they're probably related. There are a couple of friend characters around and a mentor that are all lacking in development, but let me focus on the main character.

The male students train at the Academy with the goal of becoming avatars, and then later, Master Avatars. As avatars, they are expected to go out on secret missions to retrieve magical artifacts and, if the artifact is a "dark artifact,"—that is, if it's built to do harm to another person, and by lore belongs to Keos—murder its owner.

The main character is one such student, testing to become an avatar, and worse yet, if he doesn't pass his test this go-around, he'll never be able to become an avatar and he'll instead be relegated to steward status, taking care of the upkeep of the Academy. And of course, no one wants to be a steward! You'd be a servant to everyone, and where's the action-packed fun in that?

But our main character has a motivation even more powerful than the dread of being a steward: a girl. Not just any girl. The headmaster's daughter.

To be fair, this book is not advertised as a romance. Which is good, because it's not a romance. The main character has a deadly crush. He even has a promise ring forged, ready to give it to her when he passes his test and becomes an avatar. His love for this girl is so powerful for him that it's quite literally all he thinks about, but because she's the headmaster's daughter and is also a witapprentice, he hardly ever sees her, and the times we do get them in the same scene, it's plain this relationship will literally never work out.

She may not know about his missing half an arm thanks to a magical prosthetic, but it's clear she holds on to the old ableist traditions with positive glee and with the same strength as a hippo's jaw. While our main character pines after her and even eventually when they are engaged, we are telegraphed again and again that it will never last, that she is a horrible person, and that she will never accept him with his missing hand. We know this and we watch the main character acknowledge this so many times that it is a failing of the plot that there is even a chance for her to betray him.

Which she does, of course.

This goes back to the author's assertion that he's aware of his tropes and to trust him in his plan. He sets up a male lead and throws the only female character at him, establishing the possibility for a romance—a common trope—and molds that romance into the core motivation for the male lead. She is his reason for wanting to succeed, and he waxes poetical about how terrible it would be if A) someone else got her first, or B) he didn't pass the test and he couldn't be with her. They must fall in love, yes? The author also tries to convince us that she is a likeable person, a person worthy of his devotion, all the while foreshadowing with a heavy hand that she's, frankly, ableist, racist, and a terrible person who is not at all worthy of his devotion. Ah-hah, a subversion! They are not at all meant to be together!

The problem is that she repeatedly shows her hand as a garbage human in front of him an innumerable amount. We the audience dislike her so intensely that to have her as the main character’s sole motivation is laughable. Perfectly inconceivable. A true weakness in the foundation of the plot that’s so profound that if the story struggled to stand on its weak worldbuilding, it almost certainly cannot stand on this. Her betrayal is so blatantly obvious and inevitable that his surprise is outrageous, and his hurt comes not with sympathy from us but absolute incredulity.

> The author’s prejudices taint the writing, and the writing needs editing.

I won’t talk too much in depth about a scene in which the romantic interest is stunned and the main character performs a grossly sexualized search of her body, but I will point out that later, the author writes, “he relived the seconds they had shared in the shadows...” There was no sharing of moments. She was stunned. There was nothing romantic about it.

Later, the main character is sent out on an assassination mission. The author writes, “He wondered what kind of a man he was about to kill - good or evil, father or bachelor - and whether the man would struggle.” Ah yes, an unmarried man. The opposite of having children. Of course, how silly of me to consider that being unmarried precludes me from having children, or that being married means I must have children.

At another time, a character who is well known to wear an eyepatch is described as “winking at him with his one eye.” I’m sorry, author, but that’s just blinking. I could have given him the benefit of the doubt that perhaps he’d forgotten this character is missing an eye and wears an eyepatch if not for the “with his one eye.” The author knew what he was doing.

These moments aside, many scenes dwell in the melodramatic, letting emotion set the scenes awash in a horribly garish light that fails to give the scenes their weight. The point of view was pretty tight to the main character, but with odd moments where it split away to document events that happened outside of that character’s view, even within scenes where the main character is present. It felt a bit sloppy. Passive voice is rampant, with sentences and whole scenes in dire need of better editing. “Myjun was walking in step with her father...” “His flyssa was caught by Annev’s flamberge...” It made the writing dull—hobbled by too many words that meant too little, and too specific of words amidst their plain neighbors that made it dissonant.

> The plot is overstretched.

This book is 576 pages. At page 250, something occurred that made me think that perhaps I’d just witnessed the inciting incident and that now the plot would begin. At page 330, I thought the same thing. At page 400, I thought the same thing. At page 525, I realized with a jolt that I was witnessing what this book would consider the climax, and I could put what happened at page 400 the inciting incident. Until that point, there was no clear indication of what the plot actually was, and there were at least 300 pages of unnecessary story.

I understand from a bit of research that this is intended to be the first of a four part series. Realizing that puts the entire plot of this book into perspective. This climax is the point of no return for the series, with a 500-page lead up. With a bit better editing and a cleaner line, this book could have been immensely less frustrating. Perhaps all these things that bother me are the point of the book—perhaps the next books in the series will overthrow some of these expectations as the main character ventures outside Chaenbalu and sees what the rest of the world is really like. Perhaps.

Do I trust that the author will do that? No.

Am I interested enough to continue reading this series to see if it gets better? No. Do I hope it does? Sincerely. I may not like the author, and I may not have liked this book, but there are people who do and I respect that. I hope it meets their satisfaction. It’s not for me.

Do I regret reading this over the last month instead of the book I was reading and will go back to reading? Surprisingly, no. I hated it, don’t get me wrong, but I also learned a lot about why I hate it—what made it not work—and I think there’s value there, too.

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WIP Themes - Moonwater Series

Tagged by @akiwitch—YO! Thanks! This is neat, and also fascinating, and also horrifying. I’m gonna do it for the Moonwater nonsense.

addiction | beauty | betrayal | change vs. tradition | chaos vs. order | circle of life | coming of age | communication | convention vs. rebellion | corruption | courage | crime and law | dangers of ignorance | darkness and light | death | desire to escape | dreams | displacement | empowerment | facing darkness | facing reality | faith vs. doubt | fall from grace | fame and fortune | family | fate | fear | fear of failure | free will | friendship | fulfilment | good vs. bad | government | greed | guilt and forgiveness | hard work | heroism | hierarchy | honesty | hope | identity crisis | immortality | independence | individual vs. society | inner vs. outer strength | innocence | injustice | isolation | knowledge vs. ignorance | life | loneliness | lost love | love | man vs. nature | manipulation | materialism | motherhood | nature | nature vs. nurture | oppression | optimism | peer pressure | poverty | power | power of words | prejudice | pride | progress | quest | racism | rebirth | relationships | religion | responsibility | revenge | sacrifice | secrets | self-awareness | self-preservation | self-reliance | sexuality | social class structure | survival | technology | temptation and destruction | time | totalitarianism | weakness | vanity | war | wealth | wisdom of experience | youth

I think you could probably argue for a couple others, but I think I’m going to go with these.

Tagging @luwianskies and @tithtalks in case either of you are feeling up for it — never any pressure, my dears.

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Heads Up 7 Up Tag Game

Tagged by @akiwitch — thanks!! Here’s the last 7 lines written on the redraft of Crystal Combat...

“We won't be able to bluff our way through. We're just going to have to go in and hope he doesn't notice.”

"Oh good. Good plan. The non-plan. My favorite. Let's go."

Poor Sheytana and Keetan, trying their best but eternally in over their heads.

Tagging @luwianskies, but only if you’re interested, my dear. No pressure at all.

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how have you been?

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We know how this ends. Others have traveled this way before you, and you may one day come this way again - but those are other times. This is now. And you have many miles to go.

Dust of the Traveled Road is a collaborative storytelling game for 2-4 players about venturing into the unknown, discovering new things, and letting your experiences change you. It is also a game about a small group of travelers on the Road to stranger places, and the bonds you forge along the way. You will take on one of three roles - Knight, Adept or Magus - and set out from the Dreaming City , a bizarre metropolis that has been your home for some time, to see the world beyond it together with your traveling companions. You will visit strange places, meet peculiar people, and gather the Dust of this world until you reach Journey’s End. Your journey will change you - and in turn, you might change the world. To play, you will need a copy of the rules and character sheets, and a copy of the world map included with the game. It was written for the Journey Jam on itchio! If you like storytelling games like Fall of Magic or Our Queen Crumbles, you might enjoy Dust of the Traveled Road as well!

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Last Line Tag Game

Tagged by @akiwitch — thank you!! Given NaNo, I actually have fresh writing to contribute this time....

Sheytana wiggled the knife free and tossed it back hilt-first toward them, calling, “We said we don’t want a fight, but you’d be wise to figure out a better enterprise than looting the crypts for corpses.”

Throwing a tag out to @luwianskies since I know you’ve been writing some! :}

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This year’s NaNo? A mess! And mostly rewrites. I’m using NaNo 2020 to finish off the last 10-20% of Book Five, then going back to Book One to write the scenes I didn’t know I needed back then and rewrite the bits that are in desperate need of pulling into line. I feel very much like this year will be floundering for me rather than the purposeful NaNo I’m used to doing. I haven’t had a lot of time this year to prep and my focus has taken a huge hit, so we’ll just have to see how it goes.

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Haven't been able to run a game in a long time due to Reasons(TM), but bringing this back because one of my players told me she really misses it and she had a dream about it the other night. Guess I really need to re-prioritize writing sessions.

Visions: The Knitting of Holes

A small snippet of a dream (?) one of my players will receive at our next session that I felt like sharing. The party left the character behind with the sheep and the party dog while they went to investigate a town. Enjoy a little “the world is falling apart and not even the great weaver can knit it back together.”

Keep reading

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been thinking about appearances and stuff

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Last Line Tag Game

@akiwitch has tagged me twice during this whole pandemic thing to do this, so I feel like I owe a bit of writing. Here’s some stodgy ol’ Gran for you from Gran and Gwyn. A bit more than one line, but oh well, too bad! Thanks for continuing to tag me, Aki — I know I’m slow to respond sometimes, but I appreciate it.

Gran growled, biting back a retort and assessing the assorted portraits. "Which one is she?" His silent nervousness drew her glare again. "When were they made then, if you don’t know who’s who? Surely there's a date on them, or an artist’s signature."

Mayor Bronlowe shuffled away, flinching from her imminent wrath. "None, my dear—"

"Don't you Dear Woman me, Bronlowe. You're telling me they disappeared twenty years ago and nobody remembers what she or her mother or sister look like?" Gran grumbled, a sound not unlike the thunder of a summer storm brewing. "Nonsense," she muttered, trying to bring the women's faces to mind herself. All she conjured was the painting in the stairway of the Silver House. The green eyes and red hair of the unknown woman looked back at her from all the paintings; the same tilt of the corners of the eyes here; the exact shade of green there; the slight curl of the hair from there; the line of the lips from everywhere.

The woman was here, in every one of these others, a long lineage of proud, distinguished creatures not quite native to the town but close enough that no one could remember their history, not even the records. Gran pursed her lips as though her annoyance alone would bring the past into clarity. It did not, of course, and with a grand huff, Gran grabbed the curtain that kept the fading light from the paintings and dragged it shut.

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Let’s talk about the fabulous aromantics out there