All this hype about world development has got me digging up some stuff I came up with a while back. I've got one solid idea and two kinda extreme ideas, so I'm gonna go hard for a bit. Here's the pitch for one of the extreme ideas:
Living ideas. A chavi that tangles itself up in another person's chavi like some kind of parasitic vine. The parasite chavi starts to interfere with the host chavi, causing strange dreams, intrusive thoughts, and false memories.
I figure they'd work as valterrics. Maybe they once belonged to people that died in a sufficiently weird way that their chavi could no longer attach to their soul? This would also raise the question of what happened to the soul - might be interesting to make something out of those.
An alternate angle would be they're wizards. A sufficiently mad and sufficiently clever wizard might see the chavena as an alternative to the traditional cycle of reincarnation, or straight-up immortality. So they do something that lets them live on as their parasitic chavi and hijack living people by somehow absorbing or supplanting the host chavi.
The craziest angle would be to call them small gods, or maybe fragment monsters. Dangerous free-floating truths in the chavena.
But yeah the general concept is: An idea - not necessarily even a true, sane, or coherent idea - that is alive and wants to spread. Once it finds a host and attaches to their chavi, its feeding appears as a growing obsession in the host. The idea will appear in their dreams, in their thoughts, in their memories - it will be a literally consuming obsession.
And then, whether we chalk it up to human nature or influence from the parasite, it starts to spread! The host's obsession drives them to shout about it in the streets waving a sign, or preach it in churches, or write a best-selling novel, or just in a casual conversation go "Oh dude bro mate friend-o I gotta tell you about this crazy dream I had last night."
If someone else starts to consider the idea, the parasite has an opportunity to take their chavi and start to feed on it too. I'm not really up on the proper language for describing the chavena - we could call it a feeding signal, or feelers/tendrils the parasite spreads out to grasp at adjacent chavi. The person considers the idea, which means the idea enters their chavi as an experience, thought, or memory. The stronger or more frequent the experience, the stronger the hold on the person's chavi until it's as attached to the parasite as the first host chavi.
The idea-obsession has now consumed two people, and they go on to spread it to others. The more chavi the idea is part of, the less likely it is that the idea will be unhooked and left to find a new host if one of its hosts forgets to eat, or gets so wrapped up in their thoughts that they walk off a cliff.
The concept has a lot of potential uses, I think! Zeltiva has that whole forbidden library - maybe some of those books are forbidden for a very good reason. Maybe some past host wrote it down somewhere, and reading about it gives the idea a foothold in your chavi. There's this whole 'forbidden knowledge' vibe going around in a few places and these could be part of it.
A growing parasite could manifest as a weird cult. It could be used to spice up a dungeon crawl with some dark, dangerous knowledge and creepy fanatics. On a larger scale, an out-of-control infection could appear as a radical social movement, or a revolution, or a plague of riots.
It opens interesting possibilities for various gnosis wielders. They might be abominations to Nysel for Dreamwalkers to destroy or avoid. If shadows have chavi, Night Walkers might risk meeting infected shadows that are too eager to share a secret that resists being kept, or the secret-keeping compulsion of the Night Walking mark could make a perfect prison for it. Followers of Eyris might resort to book-burning because these things consume knowledge and spread madness and misinformation.
Aurists might be able to detect a parasite before it can grow out of control. Perhaps most interestingly in the wizarding department, containing virulent knowledge like this would give Hypnotists something noble and non-creepy to do.
Lots of potentially cool stuff here! Also lots of potentially no-no stuff here, like involving chavi lore. What do y'all think? Does this sound interesting? Plausible?
Living ideas. A chavi that tangles itself up in another person's chavi like some kind of parasitic vine. The parasite chavi starts to interfere with the host chavi, causing strange dreams, intrusive thoughts, and false memories.
I figure they'd work as valterrics. Maybe they once belonged to people that died in a sufficiently weird way that their chavi could no longer attach to their soul? This would also raise the question of what happened to the soul - might be interesting to make something out of those.
An alternate angle would be they're wizards. A sufficiently mad and sufficiently clever wizard might see the chavena as an alternative to the traditional cycle of reincarnation, or straight-up immortality. So they do something that lets them live on as their parasitic chavi and hijack living people by somehow absorbing or supplanting the host chavi.
The craziest angle would be to call them small gods, or maybe fragment monsters. Dangerous free-floating truths in the chavena.
But yeah the general concept is: An idea - not necessarily even a true, sane, or coherent idea - that is alive and wants to spread. Once it finds a host and attaches to their chavi, its feeding appears as a growing obsession in the host. The idea will appear in their dreams, in their thoughts, in their memories - it will be a literally consuming obsession.
And then, whether we chalk it up to human nature or influence from the parasite, it starts to spread! The host's obsession drives them to shout about it in the streets waving a sign, or preach it in churches, or write a best-selling novel, or just in a casual conversation go "Oh dude bro mate friend-o I gotta tell you about this crazy dream I had last night."
If someone else starts to consider the idea, the parasite has an opportunity to take their chavi and start to feed on it too. I'm not really up on the proper language for describing the chavena - we could call it a feeding signal, or feelers/tendrils the parasite spreads out to grasp at adjacent chavi. The person considers the idea, which means the idea enters their chavi as an experience, thought, or memory. The stronger or more frequent the experience, the stronger the hold on the person's chavi until it's as attached to the parasite as the first host chavi.
The idea-obsession has now consumed two people, and they go on to spread it to others. The more chavi the idea is part of, the less likely it is that the idea will be unhooked and left to find a new host if one of its hosts forgets to eat, or gets so wrapped up in their thoughts that they walk off a cliff.
The concept has a lot of potential uses, I think! Zeltiva has that whole forbidden library - maybe some of those books are forbidden for a very good reason. Maybe some past host wrote it down somewhere, and reading about it gives the idea a foothold in your chavi. There's this whole 'forbidden knowledge' vibe going around in a few places and these could be part of it.
A growing parasite could manifest as a weird cult. It could be used to spice up a dungeon crawl with some dark, dangerous knowledge and creepy fanatics. On a larger scale, an out-of-control infection could appear as a radical social movement, or a revolution, or a plague of riots.
It opens interesting possibilities for various gnosis wielders. They might be abominations to Nysel for Dreamwalkers to destroy or avoid. If shadows have chavi, Night Walkers might risk meeting infected shadows that are too eager to share a secret that resists being kept, or the secret-keeping compulsion of the Night Walking mark could make a perfect prison for it. Followers of Eyris might resort to book-burning because these things consume knowledge and spread madness and misinformation.
Aurists might be able to detect a parasite before it can grow out of control. Perhaps most interestingly in the wizarding department, containing virulent knowledge like this would give Hypnotists something noble and non-creepy to do.
Lots of potentially cool stuff here! Also lots of potentially no-no stuff here, like involving chavi lore. What do y'all think? Does this sound interesting? Plausible?
