thephantasmalmaze

[thephantasmalmaze]

A final goodbye

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MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM MIND BEAM

hi thief, hows the crash out going pookie

[thephantasmalmaze]

Wearing nothing but your perfume

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Unfamiliar world

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Pages say that faith is blind

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Explaining the 2.0 world cause I can finally fully do that now that the Ester and Bella lore drop has happened.

So first and foremost a couple things we have to establish about the lost twins, they are a perfect mesh of their parents but they do each magically take a bit more after each parent. Ester takes more after Aster, which is why she is much more effected then Bella at the shattering of Aster. Bella takes more after Ezra, she is affected by the shattering of Aster but not as much as Ester.

That space is sort of a hallucination, sort of using the forest to tap into a different timeline since it’s a weird place where space and time fold in on each other constantly. Bella being Ezra’s kid is able to easily tap into that, and while she may not fully understand why it’s the fact that she can and does that matters here. It should also be known that Bella herself can kinda connect to that timeline but not fully either (there are reasons she is partially limited no I won’t explain that), but she did not build that timeline from the ground up. She essentially anchored the group to a timeline she subconsciously choose.

So there are two major timeline changes in this timeline.

1) Aster is still shattered, but Ezra keeps the twins and is there to help with the degrading of Veleda. So the girls grow up knowing who they are, and the Ezra cycle basically halts at the third major iteration (the foggy woman)

2) Anastasia never becomes “lost” due the stabilization of Ezra.

With that let’s get into the meat of this. The twins being raised by their mother ( I’m gonna refer Ezra that way), means they are actually aware of who and what they are. Being of Ezra and Aster the twins ground him, not in like a kids having to be adults thing, but in despite when Ezra eventually cycles from fractured to fog his twins bring him back to himself extremely quickly. So the forest stays pretty well within its borders, and the twins are able to be consciously and well hidden from fate. Giving them the few centuries they need to grow into their power and titles.

Let’s talk shay first cause I’m sure you’re all wondering how that went down, shay cleric of the lost gate keeper to the woods. While the forest remains in its bounds, Ezra remains extremely power as a god of large and encompassing emotion. Young Shay being at the is more of Ezra’s way of allowing them freedom should shay choose to have it. In this time line shay doesn’t meet Sylvanus do to a bunch of small things, instead they meet a very (I hesitate to use the word maternal, but something along those lines) Ezra. Who has raised her two children and is more than willing to take another in.

But Ezra being of decent control of themself (kinda) does recognize the negative effect they have upon shay. Most creatures are not made the isolation that the purest form of being lost dictates, and so they give them the position that gives them the most potential to spread their wings and leave. Shay 2.0 has never taken that option, and I don’t think ever would, so the lost family makes sure to wander in their direction from time to time.

Okay now I’m to the thing I know y’all wanna hear about: Ester

Some of this I’m going to have to be a little vauge in portions about cause some of her stuff here directly overlaps with actual campaign. So like I can’t tell you her full fledged godly domain sorry. But ester is a good here, a relatively minor deity but a deity nonetheless.

Ester 2.0 actually looks a little different then I first described her, I just didn’t want to tip my hand quite that early especially when y’all were on high Ezra alert already. She has mostly black hair but the highlights of it are more clearly grey toned, but other than that it’s the only kinda significant difference. Anyways now that that’s outta the way let’s talk ester 2.0 and Siron cause oh boy do I have so much to say on them that I haven’t been able to before. So getting it out of the way, Siron is actually an oath of devotion paladin and his oath is to ester, but it’s an oath of love and religious devotion it’s an extremely complex dynamic but it essentially comes down to acting in her will and in faith of her path for him. Now let’s be like super clear, there is a very very clear power dynamic here but they do genuinely care for each other, I also do just think that Siron is a bit of religious zealot as well. It took me for fucking ever to figure out how I would get these two to meet, and I couldn’t separate them I’m too attached to my straighties. Eventually what I came to was Siron eventually leaving Shars order and being a bit lost with out a god or an oath to follow, eventually finds ester. Similar to how you met her, Ester isn’t the kind to reveal herself as a divine on first meeting, and the two do hit it off in that time. Through a series of shit that I never fully fleshed out Siron eventually winds up being told and taking an oath to her, which is how he becomes so important to ester and becomes pretty much her right hand man.

Now for the extra fun how ester 1.0 was able to warn you. Again like Bella she doesn’t know what she is, but she can tap into Ezra and her own power easily, and with a shattered aster she is constantly accidentally tapping into the raw magic of guidance constantly. Esters warning wasn’t quite a premonition it was more of her sensing the time line you had started down and her pulling you back to the cross road of strings. As far as ester knows she showed you a vision of the future, the reality is she unknowingly restarted your path and was able to guide you down a new one.

Anyways yeah so that’s a fun 2.0 dump :)

[thephantasmalmaze]

No better feeling then finally being able to drop the biggest lore bomb you’ve been holding on to for 3 YEARS.

[thephantasmalmaze]

I'm doing this anonymously for the fun but you're going to know exactly who this is based on the writing style and the question itself.

South Warren obviously suffers from corruption, but I'm curious about the details. How are the citizens affected by this? Is it a mafia type scenario where they're being coerced into paying fees to the crows or magpies for "protection"? Where on the scale between organized crime and government corruption do the problems lie? What are the differences in approach by the magpies and the crows? Are the two groups made up of different demographics? Please please please feed me please please please my liege I wanna know soooo bad

(guy who definitely doesn't want to make a logic model. guy who would never do that)

First things first, this obviously is a fictional place so some of this is yk highly stylized and not 100% grounded in shit from reality.

There isn’t really a fees for protection fee. Think of them less like mafia and more like monopolies. The magpies and crows started out as two rival “shipping” companies, that as they grew expanded exponentially in power. Like magpie and crow shipping are still two legitimate businesses, now that’s not to say they both don’t have a seedier underbelly but that’s where it began.

Both of them do have a component of organized crime. Especially when it comes to harming the other company, and if you know you’re going to sail along a trade route with particularly aggressive birds you might pay a safe passage fee if you don’t want to risk it, but it’s not a huge shakedown.

People who join one or the other tend to do so for two reasons.

1) birds of a feather stick together. Both companies support those inside their company, businesses that’s are associated with one tend to only get their business. Now some buissness stay out of it (ie Var) but some stores don’t, it depends on what’s better for them.

2) opportunities inside the organization (legal or not) can be tempting for the pay.

The corruption that Umberlee and Thorm were concerned with mainly lies in the higher classes of people and the government, who have ties to one or the other. Or those who use the confusion and fear the two organizations cause to slip by with even worse shit yk. And the fact these upper echelon use these companies and rope in many lower class citizens looking to survive.

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I can't believe I forgot to post this this entire time - Thief

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who pisses the highest in south warren

I'm not answering this I'm just here to shame you for this

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They're only human

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She had to get taller to yell at someone base by _biacami_ it felt so very them <3 Siron belongs to @/Zer0_Dom :3

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Honey Whiskey

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Dnd doodles from last session

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Messages from the other path

[thephantasmalmaze]

Thief forced me to draw this one