Gradually_Adjusting

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

Quality

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Here’s one that I’m exceptionally pleased with. I managed to steal from Star Trek, Robocop, and The Matrix all with one obscure paper magic spell: The Inkbound Phantome. This spell is merely one part of the process to forever entrap a spirit in the pages of a book, even allowing you to intrude on the charade.

Within the pages of a phantome a timeless hell unfurls. The boundaries of storytelling and magic blur to create a false dream that ensnares spirits, demons, and lost souls. Bound within the book’s enchantment, they become unwitting actors in a theatre of the mind, playing out the drama every time the book is read anew. The ink itself dances and shifts with every reading. The actual story and the physical circumstances of the entrapped entities are determined by the creator of the phantome. It is easiest to create a fictional tale, but it can also be an attempt to recreate true events. However, inkbound prisoners are only able to respond naturally to circumstances as dictated by their jailors.

These books are more than just a dark diversion, however. They can be read like a normal book, but Spice Rangers have also discovered that reading a phantome in conjunction with tincture of nilmahal and rabt-ke-patta, which together create vivid and spiritual dreams, one enters a dream realm that mimics the story. This can be thrilling and profound. They can bend the story and shape it around themselves, but if they break character the prisoners can awaken and perhaps escape into the reader’s mind. This can be especially dire when the prisoner is Demonic…

Phantomes contain a world of endless possibilities, where readers become both witnesses and participants in a tale that transcends time. The ink flows, the imprisoned spirits awaken again for a time, and the readers, with each turn of the page, indulge in an enchanted realm of words.

Process

First, Create Ink of Binding. Then, the magician must use it to write a book that defines the circumstances at play in the story, the character(s) that the imprisoned spirits will inhabit, detailing their personalities, memories, abilities, habits, and preferences, and the major events of the story. The number pages that are incorporated determines how many prisoners it can contain. To the imprisoned, a lengthier and more detailed manuscript will create a more credible illusion. Too few pages, and the characters will see through their charade and find it ridiculous. An overly simple or badly written manuscript will lead prisoners to rebel or go mad. Third, the bindings of the book must be obtained. Bones from a Vvurm are preferred, but the remains of any magical beast will suffice in creating the hard cover and spine. The pages of the manuscript are bound within this vessel, and then the phantome is ready to receive its inmates. A spirit, demon, or human soul must be captured and bound to the object. This spell does not do that, it merely creates the vessel.

Notes

It seems very likely that books such as these would be the perfect device for creating a daemonhost. All one needs to do is imprison the demon in the phantome along with the soul of the target host (with the vivid reading tincture), casting each in a story where the human willingly becomes a shadow, forsaking the light of Karna - and offering their body to the Demonic spirit in exchange for its allegiance to the author of the book. The trick is to end the dream at the correct moment, so that the agreement concludes in the vivid realization of what has been done. Daemonhosts in this setting always preserve the human soul within the host’s shadow, and a bit like Peter Pan’s shadow the human soul remains aware and able to move freely. They often try to interfere with the daemonhost, but the evil spirit who inhabits their body is able to physically interact with the shadow.

Also it is difficult to learn magic in the lands of Karnum, where the truth has no path. One of the ways to learn sorcery is to create a phantome with a nature spirit, or a demon, and place them in a story that would plausibly give them a reason to teach magic. A common storytelling device is to cast them as a lonely sorcerer or witch who falls in love with a wanderer, and offers to teach them magic in order to woo them. The reader must first read the book so that they can play the part convincingly, and then dream with the demon in hopes of receiving the true lessons. It is possible that the cambion Maerlyn D’Ambrosio was conceived in this way.

There are also judicial applications of the phantome. Imagine being sentenced to have your soul imprisoned in a phantome alongside scores of other condemned, and the story is an attempted prison break - only to have the prisoners discover the horrible truth at the end, again and again. Imagine again that you have been drugged with the dreaming tincture, and sentenced to read such a book. Some phantomes are used in the judicial process - severe punishment involves being sacrificed and turned into an inkbound along with hundreds of others. Each month your book, which is a tale of torment, is reread. You relive the suffering anew, and then a page is torn out which makes the illusion slightly less believable upon the next reading. This continues until the story collapses and you get to watch it all happen from a remove. Each retelling gradually makes the suffering more of a farce. Eventually the story ceases to make sense, and you lose your mind, and then your soul is released. One of the lighter punishments is being forced to read the book. A harsher punishment involves using the tincture and experiencing the torture along with the souls.

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

As a further aside, I came up with this idea because I loved the way Kitsune in Werewolf can use paper magic to create false worlds, and I wanted to make something that resonated with the feeling you get when you get lost in a book - or the haunting experience of having a character from a novel feel as if they’ve escaped into your head. I was also thinking about holodecks when I came up with the idea, but I wasn’t happy with how being in a holodeck lowers the stakes of the story artificially (and then artifically raises them again when you deactivate the safety features - that’s cheating). The stakes involved in a phantome are based in its circumstances - the actual prisoners waking up and entering your mind, or if the pages get damaged the story doesn’t have enough room to unfold properly and they start to pick at the edges of your false reality. I would love holodecks as a real technology, but as a storytelling device all the tension is undercut by the knowledge that it’s all simulated and any stakes can be negated by a toggle switch (deus ex machina). Phantomes are meant to be more along the lines of The Matrix, except in this case the protagonist is the jailor and the erstwhile baddies are the sleepwalking inmates. A demonic spirit could become like a “Neo” and try to liberate the other spirits in the book, but they would still be the baddie. It puts the good guys into a questionable moral position and a tenuous position of power at the same time, which is always a fun circumstance to investigate. I was also drawing from history in a sense, because part of what inspired me was the ancient Roman legal proceeding of a “fatal charade”, in which the condemned is forced to put on a play where their character’s death is carried out on stage in truth. Of course, for an inkbound spirit condemned in this way, the punishment can be repeated as often as anyone can be bothered to read the passage.

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

Thanks! I admit I forgot to check tvtropes when I was writing it. Turns out, the closest thing to it was an episode of Futurama. Not bad!

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PortalBook

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

Today, it seems we all are

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

Dating through an app is hard. I can’t hack it at all. Dating through mutual friends will limit your options, but genuine connections happen much more readily. I’ve found (what felt like) true love a few times, all from mutual acquaintances. I didn’t have a good job, and I’m not even that nice (or “nice”) of a guy IMO. I just made normal friends, and dated the people they knew.

You don’t need to compete with the whole world of sexy, highly eligible, rich people. You need to be a person with friends, not habitually smell bad, and be capable of genuine human vulnerability. That’s literally it.

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

Same! I moved hella far from all my old groups, and am basically starting over now. I’m not a hermit, I’m prestiging.

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

Rad

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

This is such a cool example of storytelling through item descriptions. It’s not as moody and vague as Dark Souls item descriptions, but it has a desolate, historical feel very reminiscent of the era it seems to be inspired by.

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

Dude who uses the phrase “AI GF IRL” is certain they’re too much of a galaxy brain to date humans 🎉

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

I’ve had a few months of fairly high effort cooking, so I’m taking a week off and serving fried chicken sandwiches.

Sheesh even lunch had been banh mi or sushi from scratch, I don’t know what I was thinking. The cook is on vacation!

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

That’s when you pay extra because money is yucky

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

Writing treehouses into the setting is always so irresistible, isn’t it?

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

You don’t see many ground dwelling flighted birds, so that checks out for sure. For me it’s always that desire to create highly verticalized spaces for dynamic combat and exploration. So I tend to make excuses to promote that

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

That’s a very structured process. Do you have this written out as a set in stone workflow?

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

No, I'm just that good.

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

It's such a pity. I tried the last one and it feels like the whole franchise has lost its way somewhat. Victim of their own success I guess.

Gradually_Adjusting, 10 months ago

Thanks for the chance to lend a hand around here @infinitecartographer! The main reason I threw my hat in is that this is a community that matters to me, and the migration away from reddit has taught me that passion beats passive every time. Really glad you’ve created this space for us to write together.