[Gossamer's Scrapbook] The Ethereal Canyon I

[Gossamer]

That's lovely. Thank you Seven. Can I hang it above my bed?

[Pash'nar]

The hot pink lipstick is missing, but otherwise, it's totally above-the-bed-worthy, I'd say.

[Gossamer]

. Human - You Are So Small! Its always fun having four-footed friends who have heads larger than your husbands torso. .

[Paragon]

Haha, n'awww -- I saw it on Facebook, but what an awesome pic! Does Matt always make sidelong glares like that?

[Gossamer]

I think that was a 'You are really going to capture me cuddling a horse in the pitch black at 1 am and have it turn out?' Okay hon. And yes, my darling hubby, I did, and yes it did... even if it was only on my phone. If you notice it looks a lot better ran through photoshop though to lighten it up.

[Gossamer]

. Pet Peeves Yea this is probably going to be a rant but its been coming for a while. I have three major pet peeves that are rearing their ugly heads today. I am not pointing fingers at anyone. If I was, I'd be doing it to your face. But I want everyone to understand a few things about me if you care enough about me to read this blog. The first two are personal and the third is more game related. I want to know just why the hell its okay to not get back to me about something for days and days and not expect me to get upset or worry. However its perfectly acceptable for you to get upset when I don't get back to you right away about something YOU think is important? I don't get upset when I don't hear from you. I just frankly assume you don't care enough to respond or there's something busy in your life that's keeping you from it. Both are more than reasonable assumptions. We all have different priorities, and if your studying for an exam, then you need your head screwed on right if you drop everything to get back to someone right away on an internet game. If I get too worried about it, I'll send a nudge and ask you whats up and hope you respond. If you don't, I'll generally chock it up to real life eating you alive like it does to me at times. So, if you don't bother answering me for a while, and I don't bother answering you for a while - assume its because I think its not that important to you or that you need time to think about it and I'm giving you that time. Don't get upset and think its about more . It's not personal. And I'm not 'holding your PC up' just because you picked this time and this place to create a PC when i don't reply to a HD ticket same day. I usually do because I try to be courteous. But if I don't, its not because I hate you or don't like the concept or don't want you to succeed here. Stop taking everything so personally. And don't expect my response time to be instantaneous while yours is not so much. I'm great at mirroring to folks. I give back what I get from them. Now, my second pet peeve is a big one. I'm not here to be your friend. I make friends with people that are here, but I could care less whether you like me or not and you should care less whether I like you or not. I'm very slow to warm up to people, but once I do (and the feeling is mutual) we usually have a great relationship - be it love or hate. If I don't care for something you do, I'll tell you straight out. That doesn't mean I don't like you. Everyone has a bad day. I just don't like what you did or are constantly doing. If I don't like you, I don't throw you off the site like a little kid would or not let you play with my toys. I just keep you at arms length. And I can tell you right now the number one reason I don't like others, or at least the actions of others, is when they are the 'mememememememe' type people more worried about how others see them than how they add to the game or what they can contribute. I like people who join. I like people who volunteer. I don't want grandstanders or attention hogs to contribute just to get more attention. Its a vast difference. You can really tell who writes because they love to write. It shines through every time. Every time. But if you lurk in chat, socialize constantly, and simply hog the spotlight its annoying. My third pet peeve is the player demands. Just because a player demands something doesn't mean you give them to it. Resources and knowledge is RARE. There are no truly rich or posh cities unless they were designed that way. I'm going to be fighting tooth and nail to preserve city identity and theme as Mizahar gets more popular and populated. If you want to know metal and how its used, you go straight to Sultros. If you want to truly know magecraft and magic, you need to go to Sahova. If you want to study medicine in the traditional sense, you need to go straight to the Opal Order. If you want thick and heavy posh politics and court intrigue, head straight to Ahnatep. If you want fierce matriarchal society issues, head to Falyndar. If you want desperate almost extinct males obsessed with unarmed combat, head to Riverfall. Wind Reach rocks the glassworld. Don't forget it! Can you get these things other places? Sure, sometimes, but they won't ever be in the quality and quantity that they will be in the places that are known for them. If something is unclaimed... feel free to claim it. But don't overlap. There are things that are universal - growing/hunting/procuring food. No one claims it, but each place - each domain - can claim a slightly different way of doing it and should. Deep religious faith? It can be universal. You can't hold the corner of the market on beliefs like you can on say jewelcrafting like Nyka does. But remember, Nyka needs her gems from somewhere because no one place produces everything. And if you want fine olive oil, you go where the olive trees grow. You don't create a huge grove of oil trees in your back yard. I'm the eraser roaming around erasing blurred lines. I have to be. Otherwise we'll have a mess. A huge mess, which is what happens to sites that are unattended by any sort of leadership. Domains' don't have autonomy. Everyone answers to someone here. Mizahar has to work that way or else it will fall apart and not be the special place it is now. So please don't take it personally. Its not PERSONAL. If you do something as a storyteller because players demand it, then your a TOOL. Think about it. If a player demands something of you, look around instead, tell them where to go to get it, and send them on their way. If no one has really dealt with it before, then feel free to put it in. If you want a dusty little spiritism or divination shop in the corner of your city, that's fine. But remember, the real expects on spiritism are in Black Rock and the real divination is in Mura. Keep it that way. Its about RESPECT. .

[Phoenix]

Jen,

It's never easy being the person that has to do all the stuff no one else wants to. That's not a slam at anyone, either. No one wants to be the Manager that makes the employee works; they're the ones that get all the shit for making sure things get done.

That being said, things get personal when guilt lingers on ones conscious and is ignored or treated with ignorance. It's really hard to admit when you're wrong, especially when it gets called out into the open and you have yet to even admit it to yourself. It's easier said than done to ignore the resulting hurt feelings. Others feelings are something no one can ever really control.

[Gossamer]

. Magic Just how well do you understand? I feel like a lot of players don’t put enough thought into magic sometimes, especially how dangerous it is. And in neglecting to do this, they consider magic something like a skill you already know about, can go out and learn anywhere, and utilize. That's so not true. Mages are a tight lipped group. If you could do something incredibly special and incredibly powerful, would you just teach it to anyone who had the coin to buy your time and effort? Would you put a grenade in the hands of someone you didn’t know anything about? I personally wouldn’t. I’d be careful even giving someone an idea that grenades exist before I knew them well enough to know they wouldn’t abuse one if they could somehow lay their hands on one. Pre-Valterrian the Suvan Empire and the Alahean Empire were at war. Alahea was loosing badly even though they had the vast majority of mages and what I'll call magic technology on their side. Practically all of their citizens were educated and aware of the existence of magic. The problem was the great mages of old didn’t share their information and knowledge with just anyone. Sure they were day to day present in the lives of the people, but they only had a few apprentices here and there whom studied with them for years before they passed on the knowledge. I don’t’ ever see the Alahean Empire having huge mage schools ala Harry Potter or a culture that did anything but put these mages on pedestals and treated them just shy of godly. I think the Alahean Empire might have fell partially because it relied too much and too heavily on good old fashioned magic and didn’t combine it with straight technology and military strategy like the Suvan Empire did. The Suvan Empire on the other hand was more practical about things. They valued military might over anything and made sure every citizen was a part of the military whether they liked it or not. This meant they could field bodies. They could weaponize huge numbers of people, so that when mages could knock down huge numbers of people with say Reimancy, the Suvan Empire still had even more in reserve to throw at them when that mage was left twitching on the ground bleeding from their orifaces from overgiving. People did ten years of duty to even be able to own property in The Suvan Empire. And everything they had after that duty depended on the quality and level of their work while they were in. They had great thinkers and scientists, men who played with magic and technology like they were interchangeable. I love that line from Thor, the movie, where Thor is explaining the rainbow bridge to the young scientist and states something like…. “You come from a world of science. Other worlds have magic and that drives things. My world is one where magic and science work hand in hand. “ I might be paraphrasing there, but it was a great moment and one that I thought long and hard and decided this was a fitting way to describe Mizahar too. It only makes sense. Look at Marcus Kelvic. He was an officer in the Suvan Empire, one that was hurt in the line of duty and retired to an estate his grandmother Morwen had given him and his twin sister. His sister, not injured, was a world explorer for the Suvan Empire and would travel the known worlds looking for new technologies and magics to bring home to Mizahar and the Suva. She was lost towards the tail end of the war when Alahea shut down some of these major gates in military operations. Marcus didn’t know where to look for his twin and because of his wounds could not physically go after her. He used the awesome power of technology and magic combined to create the kelvics, who were utterly loyal to him and somewhat disposable to search the other worlds being his eyes and ears when he could not go. It’s an epic story of sibling love and family loyalty. He made them from a creature type he found off world, a parasite, that could totally simulate humanity and utterly posses lesser animals. Someday I will post the whole novel up here since I wrote it for my 2009 NaNoWriMo. But I digress. In writing the Marcus Kelvic story, it gave me a great insight into just how magic and technology worked on Mizahar. I want to share that with you so that you can understand as well. Magic is intimate, personal, and wholly something that hits us on the soul level. You shouldnt' just be able to go fork over twenty gold and have someone initiate you into Reimancy in a 'class'. Oh My God No! I did a thread with Samu'al with my PC Kavala where Sam initiated Kavala into Reimancy and it changed her. It linked Sam to Kavala in a way that as a even a Founder I can't begin to describe. His blood is her blood and his work sculpted her work. They are linked and tied, and it was so hugely personal and so incredibly beautiful that you just can't teach that formally or set up a system where someone could. Sam had to trust Kavala when he gave her that ability. They had reasons for passing on that knowledge and it was a privilege that Kavala had to earn from him. And now she owes him the kind of debt a child owes a parent for their existence. Samu'al molded Kavala into the PC she is now because of that incredible ritual. She shouldn't, truthfully, even known about reimancy until she had to hire an architech to work on her place and he showed her some of it. Did he teach her? Hell no. She was his bread and butter paying him to do some work on the cliffs below Sanctuary. If he taught her he took away his livelihood and potentially created another mage in Riverfall that might just be better than himself one day. That's not good for business. Just because you know a magic is the most popular one on the game doesn't' mean your PC automatically knows about it. I get so frustrated that PC's know all about the geography of Mizahar and where other cities are and who's there etc when the odds of someone in Syliras say knowing about Lhavit is pretty much slim to none. The world is huge. HUGE. It took well over a year for the most famous Zeltivan of all to circumnavigate it (in sailing time not waiting time), and that was only possible because they had to sit and wait out ice and weather and seasons. Sailing from the eastern sea to the internal Suvan takes just as long. You don't do it in a season. And if your from Riverfall you probably don't know about Avanthal unless you run into someone who's from there and say is dead and needs to get his family safe. Yup. That's how my PC found out Avanthal exists. And she's still somewhat dubious that a culture could arise in the land of ice and snow. So.. Magic. Just because you know doesn't mean your PC knows. Just because its common 'in game' doesn't mean its common all over. And just because you know its perfectly safe to use, doesn't mean the population as a whole doesn't get really nervous to the point of wanting to make people disappear when they see a simple man able to turn a building into a towering inferno just by concentrating a little. Give it some thought. Seriously. .

[Seven Xu]

It bugs me when people ask me if my PC will teach them magic he’s still novice in and has only told one person about in the year he’s had it—it bugs me even more when they propose a magic trade, as if power over the arcane is akin to baseball cards.

And the thing that irritates me the most, the very absolute most, about magic in this game, are people (players and moderators alike) that support mass guilds of mages that willingly teach the stuff and throw it around as there are no consequences at all to their actions. Of course, they’ll get sweaty and dry-mouthed from over-giving once in a while, and that makes everything totally okay. I think I’ve mentioned my annoyance with this guild before. “Hey, so, yeah, the djed storm. Wooh. Let’s disregard how terrifying THAT ordeal was and go about our business of being a totally super awesome and public group of mages!” It’s just so silly.

I don’t romanticise magic that much, though. It is what it is. It’s dangerous and most people shouldn’t use it. I feel as if Seven has his head squarely placed on his shoulders to deal with one school of simple magic: the shielding he acquired from a ghost’s possessing him to save him from being gutted. Suffice to say the ghost was pretty damn good at shielding to be able to stop a physical knife, and it is a long-standing goal for me to get Seven that far. In a year, he’s at 20. It'll be a long time before I get close to that. Chock it up to my laziness and inability to "grind" points.

I thought about morphing, but after an incident that occurred in-character, Seven is not going to ever, ever want to do that.

[Caelum]

I've had people ask me why my PCs don't have much, if any, magic. Caelum is the primary example. The only non-god related magic he has is projection to which he was forcibly initiated for various, impacting plot purposes. It was awful for him, and so he only has 6 xps in it because he never practices it. He hates it and it reminds him of a one of the darkest hours of his life. The only other PC of mine who has magic is an Eypharian whose life ambitions are aided and abetted by the use of hypnotism, and even then she has it in very low levels because she doesn't trust magic. She doesn't find it to be a reliable tool. I, personally, think it would be awesome to have at least one PC be adept at one of the magics; but none of my PCs fit that bill. At all.