Personally, I too prefer to live in a world where science works. :)

Its also a plot hook for a conspiracy to bring upon a mind capable of doing exactly this, a kind of an magic fueled AI.

Clavier Succor heartens its users. It gives them a form of relief from their woes and woves a story with familiar elements.

An older god selects them as their successor and they must save the world to become a a god again. The other elements of the story, the rivals, the loved ones, the others are second stringers in this quest. Its all about the ego of the user.

Unfortunately such artifacts as Clavier Succor are forbidden from common use because of their warped addictive effect. Its possible to ride the high with a second user or multiple ones though, while the original user acts as a nexus. This ends the warranty of the original rather fast thou.

Discipline would def be the harder one to envision, but it'd have to be so freaking cool probably.

Geometry & Astromancy would definitely be a classic combination (like Reagents & Alchemy). I can imagine Artistry, Belief, and Patrons fitting particularly well too. Discipline and Reagents are two that I think would be really hard to combine with Astromancy; I wonder what those sorts of Traditions would look like.

Universal Repository: The Stele of Heaven
Immortality Flaw: To kill an Astromancer, you must determine the constellation they've built their immortality upon. Once you do so you must craft a weapon within the Hour, Day, Month, and Year of that Constellation and then kill the astromancer using that weapon. (This idea came about due to the concept of the "Great Four Tiger Sword" of Korean folk practice. Said to be smithed in the appropriate time related to the Tiger, it's said to be the most Yang-aligned weapon possible and thus perfect for banishing evil spirits. Thus where the Astromancy immortality flaw derives from.)

Principles
Imbued Symbolism:The meaning of any star or constellation is determined by the land you stand on when you look to the night sky. When working magic it's better to honor these meanings and strengthen magic as a whole than to work against it, and thus weaken future magic to come.
As Above So Below:From the actions of gods in the Worlds Beyond to the smallest ants of the Basin, all are but reflections of the great motions of heaven. Look to the actions of the stars to understand the actions and events of the world.
Rise With the Sun Not Against:There is an auspicious time for all things. Better to wait for the appropriate time and succeed than to be impatient and doom your workings to failure.
Living Constellations:Every star is a wish of Aion's and we are the assembly of those wishes given form, constellations of the flesh. Thus, to know the stars which make you is to know the entirety of your life.

Manifestations

1. Planting a Curse into a star so that all born under it are immediately cursed.
2. Tattooing the Constellation of an Archetypal hero to borrow their expertise.
3. Wrapping yourself in a blanket of pure night to camouflage your flight.
4. Cloning stars to create an installation of them to aspect the local Flow in a room.
5. Releasing an energy wave of shooting stars to slam into your foe.
6. Bouncing a Farspeech message off of the moon to reach a loved one.
7. Inscribing a tablet with a star chart that you implant within an automaton's body to grant it personality.
8. Bind the perfect Flow-aspect within a bottle of ink left to soak in the light of a specific star.
9. Examine the stars of yesterday to psychometrically read the events that occurred the other day.
10. Radiate the inner light of an ominous star to cow an army.
11. Paint the beams of a house with the repeating star chart of a famous architect to Ward the building against collapse.
12. Create a grove of an eternal eclipse.

Unique Limitation: While the stars rule much they do not oversee all as the chaos of the Dream Realms lay beyond the orderly touch of their light. All Astromancers who wish to leverage power of such realms must make a choice: they can either refine their craft so they might let the stars guide their Dream Travel, or they can learn to hold the power of the stars in their mind enabling them to Dreamshape. Each Astromancy Tradition known can have a different choice.

Typical Arts: Star-work (an Expression I made up for manipulating the heavens and making certain astrological events happen as needed), Blessing, Curses, Personae, Expanded Expertise, Weather-work, Knotwork, Lagged Curses, Warding, Psychometry, Precognition, Hallucination

Typical Paths: The most common would be Artistry, Language, and Geometry. Basically, evoking the names of the stars and constellation, using artistic rendering and songs to evoke them, and using the sort of angle heavy star charts common to astrological readings (just look at one of those natal charts and tell me that doesn't look magical). The least common paths would likely be Patrons and Wild Magic. Also another common one would technically be Calendar magic.

An example Tradition would be one I had devised for a custom Civilization, The College of Empyrean Revelation. The Tradition is, the Measure of Heaven, and is Geometry to Astromancy. A Tradition pioneered by the college as an introductory Tradition for young mages so they might best understand the nuance of Astromancy through the relationship of one star to another, the angle of their ascent beyond the horizon, and more. They often devise a star chart and then trace the connections to form sigils they might tattoo, inscribe, or what not in different tools and objects to cast their Expressions or guide magic into tools and structures. Due to its introductory nature, it's become a standard across the territory the College holds and can be seen in all manner of public works. The more nuanced forms of Astromancy are taught within specific colleges or by professors to their cherished assistants who show them the deeper mysteries behind heaven's workings.

Anyways, hope y'all dig it.

Would also make a civ that used a lot of Blessings perhaps develop towards a lot of like, initiatory lodges/mystery cults. Where they monopolize specific Blessings alongside whatever mundane professional expertise would be needed to construct the Blessing appropriately. So you could end up with lodges of midwives skilled at birth related Blessings, and Blessing as post-natal care. Or architectural lodges who know specific Blessings to put upon buildings and will only do so for certain fees. In the same way, could have the other side of that coin being a civ that has Curse knowledge be really defused throughout these same organizations. While of course there'd be families who cultivate their own Blessing and Curse techniques.

Though the downstream effects are definitely something to think of. Since it feels like the type of Blessing and scale would do a lot to effect neighbors.

And you should def be able to Bless the Land. In the same way that I think it'd be really cool if one could Curse the Land (also resisted by the appropriate Nature score for the civ).

• The text and trade dress are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
• All full-color images, including elements used in the cover design, were created by Tithi Luadthong (aka GrandFailure). These works were purchased from CanStockPhoto (which is sadly now defunct). Some images have been digitally altered. The only exception is the “star lotus” on page 7, which is constructed out of public domain components and which I also placed in the public domain.
• I made the diagrams. They are also released into the public domain.
• Icons are from Game- Icons.net, licensed under the creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

As with Sufficiently Advanced, if you're interested in making works for sale I'm almost certain to say yes.

I can imagine some serious cultural implications for powerful blessings requiring a lot of flow to create, and even bigger implications if they continue to consume or twist the flow as they function. What would a civilization that centers around blessings look like? Let's say that the ruthless upper class who demand regular blessings get overthrown before the game starts. Now people who are well-liked, either because they're kind and good people or because they're manipulative, probably become centers of local power in the civ. You could end up with a cult-of-personality effect, or with families focusing their power on one promising individual at a time. I can imagine some people being very disgruntled about who's chosen and who's not.

The effect on their downstream neighbors could be really bad. Civilizations who use up more flow than others can cause major flow shortages or poison the flow. Good fodder for Archive interventions.

Also - if you can bless people, can you also bless land? It might resist using the average Nature score of the civilization itself, since presumably the people and/or their government are already working to enhance it.

Seriously though, I think more flow for bigger blessings makes sense in terms of scale. Similar to how the flow increases work for Weather-work.

I do think that requiring resistance could make tons of sense actually. Could position it as a Blessing being a warping of someone's fate. mechanically, the stronger you are the more firm you are and your fate would be pretty interesting to play with as well. Also (if I have the rule right) in the same way that someone applying a Curse can still end up with a Complication from the casting of the curse. You can have the caster of a Blessing suffer potential consequences of the action, almost like fate is snapping back into the caster.

I really like this actually as I think about it.

I don't have a good single answer for blessings yet, so I'll give you some options to consider.

Depending on how the blessing works you might be opposing the people around the recipient, but honestly that just feels like too much work - you'd have to track the strength of the blessing and compare it multiple times per game. Plus in some ways it's an action economy problem. If you get to do something *and* the blessing gets to do something, your team should definitely all bless each other every day.

"More flow required for bigger blessings" makes some sense, especially if you're interested in having blessings be Loud.

You could simulate blessings with the Enchantment expression. The balancing factors there are time for the ritual and locking up your own flow.

You could *require* resistance from the recipient, using the appropriate Nature, under the rationale that it'll be harder to actually improve the effectiveness of someone with high Natures.

I hope that helps! This will probably keep rattling around in my brain for a while, so I'll let you know if I come up with other options. Let me know what you decide to use!

In general the thing that's interesting and elegant about Curses is how they easily slot into the Conflict system to create Complications. With the curses made getting to in-setting replicate more insidious or clever ways of harm/getting what one might want. However, when imagining what the inverse would be (what I'll be referring to as Bless) I'm kind of running short. As an expression it would ideally serve to create Advantages in the same way that Curses create Complications. Yet when taking that forward it would mean situations where players would likely want to just accept the Blessing. At which point, how do you then adjudicate the level of Advantage that could be generated? Would it just become a matter of the expression requiring more Flow contingent on the size of Advantage seeking to be generated? I just have so many questions, so any insights people have is definitely appreciated. Mainly cause once this is past I feel like it'd be easier to continue working on the actual expression I want to make.

The answer is basically a combination to those. You have a physical form, so you can still participate in physical conflicts, but because that form has no biology, a fair amount of biotech won't work on you. Someone who tries to infect you is just plain out of luck.

I just got my forum notifications figured out, so my apologies on the delayed replies for, like, everything up until this week.

I haven't done any additional work on SA recently. Most of my time was spent on Monster Ambulance, and now that that's out, I'm alternating between The Unconquered Land, The Legend of Bigfoot's Ghost, and the Fantasy Fantasy Games blog.

The published version of Into the Impossible is on DriveThruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/391471/Into-the-Impossible

I hope you enjoy it!

Wonder how Colin is doing?

Hello again.

Things have changed a little bit. A lot, actually. So, like, turns out "I" am actually "we". As in a system. Which is to say multiple people in one body. I'm not sharing the presence or absence of any diagnosis, but it's most often associated with dissociative identity disorder. Do you remember Pneumonica mentioning several times ideas that "just came to them" spontaneously and almost fully formed?

Yeah. It wasn't really their work. No shade, it's not like they knew.

So anyway, now we all have open expression. I was just browsing about on DTRPG and noticed Sorcerously Advanced. And I had no clue why something was just tugging at me. Then I saw the newer ed of Sufficiently Advanced, and it really tugged at me. I had no idea what was capturing me. Then I heard a voice in back shout, "HOLY CRUD, COLIN'S STILL AT IT!" Apparently I was getting brain leaks. lol

Anyways, wanted to forward an old friend's remembrance, and say hi to all y'all. We might linger around here a bit, who knows?

Boogiepop
The Weaver's System

https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/714009328310484992/okay-so-a-thing-about-tolkiens-middle-earth-is

Among those wonderful images is one of the Carina Nebula (17MB JPG). Those of you with long memories or particularly good eyes might recognize the Carina as one of the elements on the cover of SA2. It doesn't cover exactly the same area - I think SA2's image is just off to the left of the one in Webb's new image - but if it did cover the same area I'd be sorely tempted to replace the cover image. :)

I'm considering converting my current game into SA2, or maybe Sorc, since I tend to prefer fantasy over scifi… But SA2 seems the better fit. Still, it seems like I will need to shift the settings a little bit, and I don't know how much I can shift it before I have to break certain assumptions of the setting. So, I thought I'd check here, if this was possible.

My current setting:
The players have been kidnapped from modern earth and brought to a world where they are given powers by "gods" and are forced to go through "dungeons" and to fight others, all for the entertainment of said gods. The players are aware that the powers they get are the result of the gods enslavement of some type of other beings, that seem almost spiritual in nature. There are hints that the other inhabitants of the world, including the denizens that stock the dungeons, are from other worlds and were kidnapped, also.

In my behind the scenes notes, I know that the PCs were not literally kidnapped but were, rather, copied. The "gods" are highly advanced, highly immoral beings who are doing all this for sport.

I want the PCs to be able to escape and maybe even to seek revenge against the gods or to free the others that have been kidnapped/copied. I was thinking SA2 or Sorc might be the way to do it.

Now, I know the easiest way would be to make the world they're on simply a digital reality, a simulation. I'd like to avoid that, if possible. I was thinking, if I used SA2, the "modern earth" that the PCs are all from would turn out to be a world that had forgotten the Diaspora, that had been engineered to be as much like Old Earth as possible. The planet the PCs currently inhabit is far outside any civilization's influence. The "gods" are descended from amoral transhumanists. As far as the dungeons and their denizens being from other cultures… Perhaps the gods could have a whole society focused on engineering these elaborate sets and creatures to inhabit them, then wormhole-ing them into position when ready?

Most of the powers the PCs have displayed, so far, would be easy to duplicate using Nanotech and Stringtech- flight, fireballs, etc. Some of them would be more difficult for me to explain- personal Teleportation, phasing immaterial like a ghost.

My thoughts are that some Stardwellers can come upon them and seek to rescue them. But, with the Powder Keg universe being so busy with other stuff, no major civilization wants to waste time rescuing a few hundred primitives.

Would the kinds of things these gods are capable of doing be in the realm of 5s and 6s in capabilities? Or have I stretched things too far?

I feel like Sorcerously Advanced could do this by using various other worlds, though I don't know what the lasting implications would be to the setting. And, also, I feel like the system is a little bit more complicated to explain than SA2, though not enough that that would be a deciding factor.

This may be the last time I touch the Advanced books for a while. I love them and will no doubt come back at some point, but I have a bunch of other fun projects in the works, including Monster Ambulance - which is very close to ready too! It's a busy time here.

The first release candidate for Into the Impossible can be downloaded below. I'm sure there are still typos in this release - please do report them if you find them - but the content is all set to go.

This book adds more Expressions, adds more detailed Infrastructure-level Expressions, gives some examples of old busted magic, and talks more about how magic effects various civilizations in unique and different ways. It also has a quickref section at the back for things like Loud and Silent magic.

Here are the downloads:

PDF format (19 MB)
epub format (400 kB)
mobi format (200kB)

Work on physical copies will be started after I feel like enough typos have been spotted. Because of the current… (indicates the entire world)… and the resulting shipping and printing issues, the turnaround for proof copies will probably be longer than usual, so… yeah, who the hell knows, pandemic 4 lyfe apparently.

I've got my first Sorc campaign having its first session in a few weeks, and I'm getting pretty hyped, rereading a lot of the rules to make sure I'll be able to be on top of things. One of the big changes between Sorc and its predecessors is that Twists are tracked by Nature, and invoking them on an Approach must draw from the associated or 'adjacent' Nature. This is really the only change to the system that I feel a little iffy on; functionally, it adds six new 'adjustable in-play meters' per character. By my count, that's 7 (including Reserve), as opposed to the previous 2. That's a marked increase in bookkeeping, and it adds some issues for me in particular, as I like to hand out tangible fiddly bits to represent player resources like that. What I don't think I understand is what nuance to the play experience the change is adding.

I know the game is very generous on running it your own way, and provides a generous amount of support for that, so just using the Sufficiently Advanced system would probably be fine. That said, I tend to be really anal about wanting to run things 'by the book'. I'd love to know what people feel the Twist bank mechanics in Sorc bring to the experience, as I'd really like to feel more comfortable with it as written. :)

So the civs in SA are definitely post-need but their metrics for what constitutes a basic need certainly differ. An average citizen of the Tao Of History has Metatech 5 which is basically mind control powers. Such a citizen could wreak havoc in a habitat belonging to the Disciples Of The Void. Their civilisational Metatech has a maximum of 2. How do the Disciples protect themselves from being subverted by a malicious Taoist or missionary Unionist?

Also, how do these Civs with these different attitudes to what are basic tech police themselves within their own societies and without?

EDIT: Looks like I misunderstood the term post-scarcity. Looks like it means post energy and resource scarcity.

http://www.itcamefromthebookshelf.com/2021/07/sorcerously-advanced.html

Again, a very positive review. There are some comments he made that gave me some ideas to add to Into The Impossible.

http://www.itcamefromthebookshelf.com/2021/07/sufficiently-advanced-second-edition.html

This is from the It Came From The Bookshelf! blog, which started as one guy reading every book in his collection and has expanded a little from there. As mentioned, the review is very positive, which always makes me feel good. :)

In general, the Gift cannot be suppressed or returned. You've got it whether you want it or not. Returner cults can't actually stop their children from doing magic unless they move into a Null Zone.

Even if you did manage to get rid of the Gift, any changes that have happened to you via Becoming would still be in effect. They're not connected to the Gift, and they're not impacted by disconnection unless there's a direct overlap between what Becoming gave you and what you disconnect from.¹ Does that answer your question?

As for the bioweapons: If you can have a conversation with said weapon, it can be given the Gift. Heck, it probably already has the Sovereignty part.

Here's the beta version of Into the Impossible if anyone is interested. New Expressions, new infrastructure-level theurgy, old broken tech, and a few miscellaneous references.

PDF version (16.5 MB)
epub version (378 kB)