Chamomile Has A Blog

Reddit was a mistake. Not my specific decision to have a Reddit account. There’s lots of people on Reddit and if this blog is ever going to amount to anything, it’s probably going to be posted there at some point. Nor am I saying that Reddit as a community is terrible, although for the most part it is (Redditors will probably take offense to this, even though the identical statement “subreddits go down in quality as they get larger” is uncontroversial – how would you expect subreddits to become worse as they get bigger if the average Redditor didn’t make communities worse?). I’m also not talking about Reddit’s admins being dicks, although they are.

What I’m talking about is how Reddit’s design as a piece of software systematically encourages certain poor behaviors. If you want to build a community and you make it a subreddit instead of a forum or a Facebook group or whatever, it will be prone to certain problems because it is a subreddit, regardless of whether or not you end up catching the attention of some of the festering cesspools you’ll have as neighbors by virtue of being on Reddit (/r/funny, /r/politics, /r/atheism, if you’re remotely familiar with Reddit you can probably think of at least a few more). Even with the exact same users, the community will be worse by virtue of the fact that the features intended to improve the Reddit experience have backfired.
Continue reading “Reddit Was A Mistake” →

More stuff dredged up from that one setting I worked on that one time.

Continue reading “The Order of the Magi” →

The Miracose Order here was originally designed for the same setting that I made that magic system for. Unlike that magic system, the Miracose Order as an organization could be dropped into just about any setting with only minor alterations. They’re a vicious, power-mongering order of spies, assassins, and sorcerers steeped in shadow magic who can serve as anything from the villain of a minor side quest to the main antagonists of an entire campaign. They have sort of a vaguely Red Wizards of Thay-esque vibe to them.

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Synthetic Energies

Energies created by combining ether with another esper type are called synthetic energies. Celestial esper (also called sacred esper) is spontaneously generated by the heavens and infernal esper (also called profane esper) is spontaneously generated by the hells. Theological upheaval has been caused by recent experiments in an astral demesne which have shown that the vast ambient ether of the Astral Sea can be used to “spontaneously” generate any synthetic esper in any of the astral demesnes. This synthetic esper will then slowly crowd out the natural philia resulting in a demesne that behaves very similarly to the heavens or hells (except, in this case, with lycan esper). Since the heavens and hells are, geographically speaking, not much different from other demesne clusters, many have now adopted the belief that rather than some fundamentally different sort of demesne, they’re just the result of some ancient wizardry. There is not yet any significant evidence as to whether the angels and demons were an intentional part of these ancient wizards’ plans or an accidental side effect.

Continue reading “A Magic System: Synthetic and Fundamental Energies” →

Essential Energies

“Essence” is a complicated word in magical studies. It can mean “the type of esper associated with a certain emotion,” like the “essence of ambition” being choleric esper. It can also refer to the essence of a soul, which means any kind of esper that a human can naturally channel. Of course, since other souls can channel other sorts of esper, some use “essence” to refer to esper, which is pointlessly confusing since we’ve got enough definitions being bandied about and the word esper already exists. For purposes of this section of the text, “essence” is used to refer exclusively to a set of espers found in and spontaneously generated by the human soul (among others) which have certain elements in common with one another, especially the three lumen espers.

These five espers exist on a loose spectrum from light to dark (though all are invisible to the naked eye except when hyper concentrated): Agape, eros, philia, ether, and umbra. The first three are the lumen espers and are quite similar to one another, and it is actually a matter of some debate as to whether eros or philia are brighter than one another. Eros is defined by a softly fluctuating luminescence and mercurial nature, whereas philia is a steady light, dimmer than eros at its brightest and brighter than eros at its dimmest. Agape has the decency to be both steady and extremely bright.

Continue reading “A Magic System: Essential Energies” →

A while ago I wrote out a bunch of arcanobabble for a magic system I’d designed. This is that arcanobabble. I hope you like directionless worldbuilding.

Continue reading “A Magic System: Base Energies” →

If the Ocean has spent ~15 years setting up Moana to restore the heart of Te Fiti, and if the primary obstacle to making that happen is Te Ka, a lava monster weak to water, why doesn’t the Ocean run interference on Te Ka the first time Moana encounters her? Like, do the exact same thing Maui did in the climax with the whale splashing and the cutting off of appendages with the fish hook, except the Ocean is too big to be meaningfully retaliated against and has an indefinite supply of water with which to keep Te Ka at bay.

Unrelated note, at some point WordPress started attaching the clock to my current time zone, which is why a few weeks back we stopped updating at noon for GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and started updating at noon for GMT (GLORIOUS MOUNTAIN TIME). I’m traveling this week, so expect to see the update schedule bounce around a little bit.

Wrath of the Righteous is an adventure path Paizo made back 2014 that I have just remembered exists because I needed an example of how incredibly aggravating Paizo’s plot-necessary NPCs often are, and that will always be my go-to example of that particular weakness in their writing. So long as I’ve got it on my mind, and in the interest of having an article to link to whenever anyone asks for details on why that particular encounter is so goddamn aggravating that even some of Paizo’s forum population revolted over it, let’s talk about how incredibly dissonant and frustrating Iomedae’s behavior is in Wrath of the Righteous.

Continue reading “Remember How Much Wrath of the Righteous Sucked?” →

Red Dawn is a Pathfinder adventure for characters of 9th-12th level that I read recently. In the interests of full disclosure, the reason I’ve read the adventure at all is because I’m acquainted with the guy who wrote it. That’s not the reason I’m writing about it, though. No, the reason I’m writing about it is, as it so often is, because a daily update schedule is turning out to be a lot more punishing than I was expecting and this is easy content. So let’s talk about the adventure.

Continue reading “Red Dawn” →