Monday, August 31, 2020

History lesson: Sometimes you get what you need

 


By Christopher Robin Negelein  Image by peter_pyw from Pixabay    

Now we will see how one third of the superpower Trokia came to be in Solar Sails. 

A regular reader notice soon that three's are a theme in the game and that the essence that levitates void ships comes in three varieties, mineral, plant and animal. On the other hand, while Trokia is three bastions it have only has a market on two of the three types of taara. For my two cents when it comes to themes in both games and fiction, you have to remember your Ralph Waldo Emerson. ...

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. A great person does not have to think consistently from one day to the next."  - Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841.

There are times when being slavishly consistent does more harm that good. As a genre writer and a geek, I can think of a couple; 40 plus years of inherently inconsistent Star Trek canon hemming in story telling and D&D's fourth edition trying to make every class have the same number of options. I can also think of two great examples of what happens when you take inspiration from a theme as compared to repeating the formula, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Comics Elseworlds.

Paying homage to theme, rather than sticking to the exact details every time, lets your story have room to breathe and adds a bit of mythic vibe. So the next time you tackle how to keep a theme go in your story, keep your mind open to more than just finding a one-to-one for every detail. 

Regardless, dig in and enjoy! (The below excerpt is under the usual first draft disclaimer and probably has a few typos. Be gentle, but feel free feedback.)

The grand forests on the opposite side of the Nesol city-state always had a reputation for being wilds and strange the further you explored into its heart; rumors of giant beasts, dragons and even trees that were fighting to release themselves from the earth and fly into the sky. 

Few believed such tales and the fewer who tried to validate the claims were ever seen again. Then four friends, who had gotten recent fame from liberating the town of Larsa from a strange psychic vampire menace, decided to take on the infamous drake, Shimmerscale, who laired in the forests.

Their names, though, are now lost to time, there are still legends of these Four and in many of them, their names are different or even shared by the same person. Some of the stories even stretch back to pre-Shatter times. Occultist theorize there is an ancient curse at work actively erasing their names, probably as punishment for the arrogance of one, if not all, of them. 

Armed with spears and heavy duty nets, the group set out to catch this rare drake. The woodsman of the group ironically got them lost as they bumbled deeper and deeper into the dark under the forest canopy. There were also some alleged missteps when trying to avoid a nest of giant wasps that caused another hero to fear the creatures for the rest of their lives. 

It also turned out that Shimmerscale’s “burrow” was way up high in a taara tree. The fight to capture the creature  was fought on a giant swaying branch while the taara tree still barely clung to the ground with just a few root tendrils. Half the party hung on for life; their fingers gripping the deeply grooved bark as their legs flailed about

The roots finally splintered and the taara broke free to majestically drift skyward on course to reach the bastion’s protective hurricane winds where it would be shredded into mulch. But the roguish hero release Shimmerscale to salvage the net. Running to the roots, she dragged across the top of the forest canopy. Luckily, the net snagged on several tree branches below, barely keeping the taara tree’s rise in check. All the meanwhile, the other three hurled insults at the roguish hero for releasing the bounty, and if she had been a petty person, she could have cut the net loose to let them all fly into the sky. If so, Nesol’s and Trioka’s history would be very different now. 

Cooler heads prevailed as the other three released they could have been lost in the sky above (and not even aware of the horrible death awaiting above) 

All four heroes used all of their cunning and legendary abilities, to pull the tree down to the ground and then pull it back to the city to sell as an oddity to make up for the loss of Shimmerscale. 

The tree was bought by Lug Wen, the master shipwright. His vision was to create flying pleasure skiffs for the city's senatorial elite. This brought him great posterity until the city lost six senators in one night as they partied and tried to see how high the skiff would go. Only to be the first on the bastion to fatally discover the fierce cocoon winds that protect the bastion.


Go, Ganza! Go. 

 I'm open to bribes for more Cypher stuff! You can do a one-timer at  https://ko-fi.com/ganzagaming , or regularly via this Patreon. Regardless, I'm still working on Solar Sails, a fantastical world of SPELLs that's JAMMERed with all sorts of the fantastical. 

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