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.

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.

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.

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/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. :)

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)

Are there potential bioweapons from way back then, so integrated into the users psyche that they themselves have gained the Gift? If so, whats their take on becoming autonymous?

Just some thoughts, its quite possible im way off base here.

It feels really good to have this released. I'm looking forward to seeing how it does, and trying not to put too much weight on that. :)

If you haven't been following its development, you might be wondering what the difference is besides a new coat of paint. Here are some of the things in Sorc that I couldn't do in SA:

• There's a civilization that's invading hell and winning. Yes, this is exactly as problematic as you might think.
• There's another one that literally lives in thoughts and dreams, and exfiltrates people from fascist nations.
• Some civilizations are taking a scientific approach to things. This is working great at the moment, but Sorc has a fundamentally non-scienceable universe and they're going to run into severe problems some day.
• There's a society of shapeshifters that used to be for mutual protection, but now everyone can be a shapeshifter if they want, so it's more of an artistic society for body art.
• There are things that are impossible in SA but possible in Sorc (and vice versa), so I had space to explore the ramifications of those.

There's a lot more, but I don't want to make you read a huge wall of text here. The game is pay-what-you-want, so if you just want to take a look, feel free to pay $0 and read through. You can always re-buy it later if you want to throw dollars my direction. Here's the link:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/346504/Sorcerously-Advanced

Errata for the print version of Sorcerously Advanced

Last Updated: 03 April 2021

Errata with major game effects

• None at this time.

Errata with minor game effects

• Page 46: In the second bullet point, the sample character should have Power 6 / Import 6
• Page 158: The Rage should refer to the "Hold To Your Traditions" CV.

Errata that doesn't affect game content

• Page 14: There's a layout gaffe in the top left-hand corner.
• Page 112: There is an extra period after Inheritable that shouldn't be there.

All of this has been fixed in the PDF, epub, and mobi versions. Because updating the physical books is a much more tedious and lengthy process than updating the PDF, the printed versions of Sorcerously Advanced will always be behind the PDF copies. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Please do not report:

• Anything that's already in the Official Errata Thread.
• The mini-writeups at the end of each civilization typically fit into the same rules as standard characters, but do not need to. Do not report them unless something is clearly a placeholder or typo (for instance, if they have "X" as their value for a Profession or Nature).
• Differences between Sorcerously Advanced and Sufficiently Advanced. You should assume that any differences are intentional unless stated in the Official Errata thread.

Please do report:

• Typos
• Pieces of game text that contradict one another
• References to Sufficiently Advanced that should say Sorcerously Advanced instead
• Incorrectly statted sample characters
• Layout gaffes, such as text boxes overlapping with text in the page or images whose bars overlap the rest of the layout in strange ways.
• Accessibility issues with the epub version, mobi version, or simple character sheet.
• Accessibility issues with the print version (e.g. contrast issues, red/green issues).

Thanks again!

Here's the link to the GitHub Repository.

PDF and print versions are still pending at this time (March 21st 2021). Don't worry, you'll know the moment they're released. :)

The one you're probably going to get tripped up the most by is that I've renamed the types of Expressions. It used to be Innate -> Universal -> Exclusive -> Grand Wonderwork. Now, it's Universal -> Common -> Restricted -> Grand Wonderwork. I realize that having "Universal" change levels isn't great, but it feels like a much more sensible scheme.

I've made some small tweaks to how the natives of the Worlds Beyond are handled and what their restricted volition looks like. This mostly impacts the Sovereigns and their mid-to-long-term plots. There have also been some tweaks to the Unroyal, most importantly the sidebar on page 200 (which is now named "Exfiltration" instead and removes/patches some of their previous lore).

Other changes have been fairly small - just formatting and spelling and such. I just wanted to flag those two because the first can be confusing and the second might change some of how you see those civs.

So I'm bowing out. Resigning from the project. Colin has my blessing and encouragement to remove my name from the acknowledgements.

Many thanks to the Chandra X-ray Telescope for the new corner image! https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/ast29sep99_1/

What exactly are dragons? there are implications they are sapient, with their resentment towards the gift in one area of the world, are they from elsewhere in the Kaleidoscope? outsiders? or perhaps just Gods.

What limitations to volition do outsiders without the gift have?

Can a God be given the gift? presumably it would no longer be a god.

Can you give the gift to a curse?

do mystic servitors have sovereignty (presumably, you could give it that part of the gift if they don't, but do they have it naturally?)

Some of these feel like questions that would be best answered in play, as part of a plot, but others, like the mystic servitor sovereignty and level of volition of outsiders seem important to establish. I might have misread something.

I've also started putting together the DriveThruRPG page for the game.

Semi-optimistic timeline:

• Proofreader is done in 2-4 weeks.
• I take 1-2 weeks to incorporate everything.
• I upload the new file to DriveThru and order a proof.
• It arrives in… (checks DriveThru again…) Oh. "Hardcover books shipping to the US and Canada are estimated to print in 30 business days", plus usually 1-2 weeks for shipping. Oof. That's a LONG turnaround for proof copies. Maybe I'll do a proof with the Interregnum Edition just to check the colors, because otherwise it's an extra 6 weeks every time I want to try a different color adjustment.

Will keep everyone updated.

The B-side is entirely songs I already knew. I actually made the B-side first, thinking it would be the whole soundtrack. I didn't realize it until I was done, but the B-side was just a warmup for the A-side.

The A-side has a mix of artists I know well and some who are completely new to me - and let me tell you, I found some fucking awesome musicians in the course of making it. While B has one of the most discordant songs I actually enjoy, the A-side has harsher music in general, along with some serious emotional gut-punches.

Both sides tell the same story.
Correction: Each side tells a story around the same events.

The A-Side
The B-Side

As many of these as possible are from the artists' own YouTube channels.

PDF version

Looks kinda fuzzy in this version for some reason, but the original is perfectly crisp.

https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/

Here's the link to the TV Tropes page for the game:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/WorldTreeRPG

Difficult Play and Safety Tools


This game revolves around themes of…

• The use and abuse of power

• Political, cultural, and academic colonialism

• What we become when we are limited by our desires and beliefs rather than our minds or bodies


Any or all of these may result in emotionally difficult play, particularly where they overlap with players’ real-world experiences, and especially for those who have had bad experiences with abuses of power in their lives. To improve the play experience for everyone, there are three rules that apply while you are playing Sorcerously Advanced:


1. The Biology Rule: Anyone can leave the play space at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all, with or without explanation, with no penalty. The GM or players can inquire if they’re concerned – “You ok?” “Did something happen?” – but no clarification is required.

2. The Good Friends Rule GMs and players gladly accept the task of adjusting their stories to avoid causing pain or disgust. All participants are mandated to respond to indications of concern or revulsion, such as: Ughhh; Um…; Ew; Oh lord; Hold on; Where is this going; Can we not? Any channel is acceptable: verbal, note passing, text messages, facial expressions, a raised hand, etc. The response should be immediate, and might include: a time-out to discuss with the group, a private conference, or simply asking what to do. Good phrases to remember include “Are we ok?” “Should I wind that back?” “Should we skip this?”

3. The Self-Determination Rule: Let others determine their own levels of comfort. If you read pain or disgust in someone’s manner, bring it up – but if they tell you they’re ok, let the matter rest. Everyone has their own reasons for playing RPGs.


These are fairly unstructured rules, are intended to work within the social norms found in many gaming groups. Our hope is that more “natural” interactions will make it easier for people to bring up when they’re uncomfortable before that turns into pain. If you’d like a set of tools with a bit more structure to them, we recommend starting with the Tabletop RPG Safety Toolkit, a free resource. You can find it at

[
https://bit.ly/ttrpgsafetytoolkit 
https://bit.ly/ttrpgsafetytoolkit]

Classic Elementals: Patrons → Elementalism
Animal & Plant Elementals: Patrons → Earthpower

Elric also relies on various drugs and herbs to remedy his physical deficiencies so the following could also be justified:

Reagents → Alchemy

On very rare occasions, Elric will summon Arioch. So:

Patrons → Glory

So what of his wannabe rival, Theleb K'aarna? Well, he has summoned elementals and beings from other worlds. And Pan Tangians seem to go in for human sacrifice so his Traditions are:

Blood Magic → Elementalism
Blood Magic → Glory

He's not the sorcerer that Elric is and after the debacle with Tanelorn he loses access to the Glory fount as the Chaos Lords turn away from such a failure.

This horde of unread, filthy, smelly peasants must be stripped of their magic so that Magick (note the capital M, note the K!) can once more be the sole preserve of the deserving, be in the hands of responsible, trained and educated wizards who have had a proper apprenticeship and everything. Well, good luck with that, Voldemort.

So what I'm saying is that the members of the Fellowship of Truth are basically magical fanbois, purebloods to use JK Rowling's term (I'm trans and she has greatly disappointed me). They have that sense of entitlement. There's a reason that the term muggle is so often used in many fandoms to describe non-fans or newbies. Thus the behaviour of toxic fans in real life and elitist wizardly cabals in fiction can be used as approximate models for the general mindset of the Fellowship of Truth.

Akashic Brotherhood: Discipline (both) → Arete
Celestial Chorus: Belief → Glory
Cult of Ecstasy: Artistry or Reagents → Oneiromancy
Dreamspeakers: Patrons → Earthpower
Euthanatos: Blood Magic → Necromancy
Order Of Hermes: Language → Elementalism
Sons of Ether: Reagents → Alchemy
Verbena: Blood Magic → Earthpower
Virtual Adepts: Geometry → Oneiromancy

In some cases it was easy to find a good fit, in others it was a bit of a stretch.

Sorcerously Advanced: Interregnum Edition (PDF download, ~80MB)

Page xx references and some typos will still be present. Everything else is, at least in theory, just about ready for publication.

I've consolidated all the chapter documents into a single massive 250-page-plus document. This is one of the weakest points in Affinity Publisher, but we'll give it a shot because it should enable a much smaller file size. Seriously, Affinity, book docs. Seriously. You are not building a better workflow here.

My next steps are fixing the "page xx" cross-references, making yet another layout pass for all the styles that broke during the document merge, and sending it to the proofreader. I also have to (ugh) make decisions about uniform capitalization (or lack thereof) for game terms.

As part of this I'll be posting a Release Candidate version later this week.

Ahem.

So yes, more advice, nicer diagrams, some layout work, some image replacement. Today I'm writing one of the bits I've been looking forward to most: the rules for crossover games between Sorc and SA2.

Putting characters from one game into another is easy. Building hybrid characters took more consideration. Natures and Capabilities aren't really the same things, metaphysically speaking. They just sit in the same places in the game mechanics and have similar effects.

In the end I decided to go with a fairly simple approach, letting players mix-and-match the two with some adjustments to Power scores if someone builds a 12-attribute monstrosity. Power is a more general word than Tech, so it won out as the thing-that-balances-Import term for hybrid characters.

I'm still deciding what to do for characters who are built without certain groups of attributes. What do you do if someone lacks Cognitech, Mystery ,and Trickery? What if they lack both Self and Biotech? I could point people to the Disconnection rules, but SA2 handles a lack of attributes a little differently. I want to make things as easy to remember as possible so that folks don't constantly have to flip open the book they're not familiar with.

I ditched a few images that didn't fit with the way the people of the Basin are described. All of them got replaced. Still looking for more stock art that has appropriate folks in it, but I do not have high hopes.

Current page count: 256. Auspicious number.

Remaining items:

• Finish the Advice section.
• Check gender and representation balance.
• Layout tweaks

Since I've got plenty of time before the end of the month, I'm going to spend some extra time on Advice, improve the existing diagrams and make more, and really buckle down to try to find art that represents the characters who actually live in this world.

The first person I asked about proofreading said no, so I gotta check my second option (who has done great work for me in the past). I would not be the least bit surprised if that takes more time than just through the end of November, so I'll have a PDF put together sometime the week of Thanksgiving for those interested in early access.

After tons of brainstorming and some Excel, I've finalized the Power calculation at something very close to what SA2 has. Your Power is the average of your top 2 Nature scores. If all your other Nature scores are 1, subtract 1. Repeat for each Tradition.

This puts Power slightly higher than Tech overall, but I'm ok with that, especially since Sorc has the Worst Enemy Rule and Suff doesn't.

This probably means that the full-blown sample characters are up next.

I've also found a few places where the text styles were not what I expected (bullets based on the Base style instead of the Body style like they should be). I'll need to do a bunch of style checks before I can do final layout. I'm just glad I can see the difference between 12pt and 11pt text.

Still remaining:

• Examples for…
  • Plots
  • Using Twists
  • Taking Complications
  • Full-blown characters
• Finishing the Advice chapter
• Spreadsheeting
• Layout for the other chapters
• Send it to the proofreader

I've decided to handle the Page XX stuff after the proofreader returns it, so that might be after November depending on their timeline.

I saw this while writing NPCs for the Unroyal, which are the most antifa civilization I've ever created. Good omen there.

• NPC templates are complete up through Nova. 5 civs left to go.
• A bunch of graphical touch-ups that I spent a few hours on but I'm not sure I'm going to keep.
• A bunch of text style cleanup and synchronization. This is one of the things that Affinity Publisher isn't good at yet - there are no book files in this app.
• Um… I forget. Look it's been a busy few days here in the USA.
• Added a third Flow Parasite, The Ones Without Eyes. I feel like I was pretty successful in making Flow Parasites creepy as hell.
• As usual, a bunch of small things I just noticed.

Day 4 has been slow, but I think I'll have the Conflict examples complete and a little tweak to Trickery in addition.

Specifically:

• Shapeshifting now has 3 tiers, at Self 2, 3, and 4. The mid-tier is what used to be at Self 2. The one currently at Self 2 is now for incorporating small bits of your Fount into yourself for things like eagle-eyed vision, metallic skin, the speed of the angels, etc. Note that this is still shapeshifting and still comes with Chakra Occlusion.
• Knotwork moved up to require Industry 3 as a minimum.

With this change, Nature 3 is now specifically for overtly magical stuff, and 2 is more for things that one could accomplish without magic under the right circumstances or with mechanical aids. Nature 4 is for things that enhance/modify lower-powered arts.

I also touched up Manavores, which have become Flow Parasites. With this change there should be nothing that can actually kill an immortal character except for their Fount-specific Flaws of Immortality.

Hoping to do a little more later.

Edit: Did more later!

Found a few small things that needed writing; wrote them.

More importantly, all civilizations now have a set of four named-but-currently-empty character templates. I filled them in for the Returners because they're fairly easy there (I can knock off the magic part). Here's an example, a merchant who (gasp) only sells physical things! Weird! Also they're not a very good Returner because they've started learning magic so they can make a quicker buck. This will definitely end well for them and not at all in blood and tears.

Merchant of Physical Objects

CVs: Wizards are Devious 1, Walk the Paths 3, Riches for the Bold 5

Natures: C1, I1, M1, S1, T2, W1

Professions: Merchant 3, Prolocutor 2, Linguist 1

Tradition: (none) [Becoming, Mental Acuity]

Normally I wouldn't bother to include those two particular Arts, since they're part of the Universal set, but they're all this person has so far.

This year I'm going to be working to take Sorcerously Advanced out of beta and into Final Candidate stage.

Here's what I'd like to do this month:

• Finish the Advice section.
• Double-check every culture's Core Values. Some of them were underwhelming in the playtest.
• Finish all the example text. (This is the worst and will take the most mental effort.) I need examples for…
  • Plots
  • Using Twists
  • Taking Complications
  • Full-blown characters
  • Character templates (under each civ)
• Probably write some things I didn't realize I hadn't written. I found one of those today in the "Invention for GMs" section.
• Spreadsheet any he/she references in the book, or (if there are few enough) just move everyone to "they" for gender-neutrality.

Once I'm done with all that, I'd like to…

• Tweak the layout.
• Fix the page xx references
• Make a PDF
• Give it bookmarks
• Give it to my proofreader.

Today, I…

• Wrote examples for the conflict section. I have another full page of these to write.
• Finished off examples for Rituals.
• Finished off the Living Pantheon examples.
• Finished the Infrastructure rules.
• Worked through some new Core Values:
  • The Cult's became "Hold To Your Traditions" and "Know Yourself" - fairly small changes.
  • The Golden Ægis lost "Bring the Light" (which was too vague) in favor of "Raise Every Voice"
  • The Sovereigns lost "You Need Prove Nothing" in favor of "Every Soul a Fortress"
  • Those Above now have "Stand Alone" and "Seize Responsibility"
  • The Unroyals' vague "Shine Brightly" was replaced with "Lend Your Strength", and "Let None Rule You" became more widely applicable as "Let No One Reign."
  • The Worldbuilders shifted from "Be Relentless" to "Stand Again", which is clearer as to when it applies. "Plan for the Future" became the more emotional "Prize the Future".
  • In Society news, the Protean Society went from "Freedom of Form" to "Unlock Change" and the Windblown lost "Tell your Story" (though they still have an oral tradition), picking up "Caution and Order".
  • One goal for all of these was to make more reactive/defensive CVs into things that drive people to action, and thus can be used in a wider variety of conflicts.

There are two "added degree of difficulty" challenges here, one of which is my concussion (which still limits my screen time), and the other of which is the 2020 US presidential election (which may require my presence on the street with my medic bag). The former is helped substantially by an e-ink monitor, but both have the potential to really derail things.