The last post I made pointed out that I needed a creation story for the world of Claws of the Chimera. Here it is!
“Come close, Aldo, and I will tell you a tale.”
The boy stood and walked over to where his mother sat. He nestled in the lap of her long embroidered dress, against the smoothness of her pregnant belly, and looked up into eyes that sparkled in the firelight. “What sort of tale?”
Her lips bent into a small smile. “The first tale, my sweet. How the world was made.”
Aldo closed his eyes, fingers wrapped around a lock of her dark hair, twining it over and over around his fingers, as she began.
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I have snow to thank for the fact that I’m aspiring to be a writer at all. In my second year of teaching, we lived opposite a Starbucks that was never very busy at the best of times. It was a great place to go and write; quiet conversation, background music, first-name-terms with the manager and the benefits of having a ‘regular’ drink. (Venti hazelnut latte, extra shot – not my favourite any more, sadly!)
Read MoreI've been quite enjoying writing the CYAO but it's starting to sprawl - by design. I'm starting to see why Mass Effect couldn't have been totally open-ended!
Here's a sample of the decision tree for my CYAO:
Read MoreIt's ok as long as you kept your thumb in the page, right?
I remember whiling away the hours reading through the Ian Livingstone/Steve JacksonFighting Fantasy books. They had green borders, wonderful cover illustrations, and the ending was almost always at paragraph 300. But I don't remember ever actually 'playing' one of them. Just reading through and assuming I'd won the fights, because it was fun to seek out all of the terrible deaths.
Koru, one of the five countries that make up the continent of Ehrian. Although, that said, one that I'm thinking of changing the name of, mainly because that makes the spoken language 'Koruan', which is little too close to 'Korean'. Maybe 'Korun' works, or 'Kor'. 'Caw, listen to me speak my language'. Bleh. In the D&D campaign we've gone with Koruan.
Anyway! A bit of dunking in the politics of Koru.
This is the last of the Paragon Path tales that I wrote for my Dungeons and Dragons group. Enjoy!
The journey back to Fjornik was a quiet one, everyone wrapped up in their own thoughts. Only the rhythmic beat of the horses’ hooves disturbed the silence, a silence which had been hard won.
Faces flashed before her eyes. Maran. Ena. Doe. Even Vile, she thought with a snort. He was a bastard, but he didn’t deserve to die like that. The last weeks weighed heavily on her, and she knew the others were feeling it too.
“We won, didn’t we? We’re heroes.” she said aloud, more to herself than anything else.
Toofi looked round. “It doesn’t feel like it, though,” she said quietly.
Read MoreThis is one of the Paragon Path tales I wrote for my Dungeons and Dragons group. As a bit of back story to this one, we left Ostardva's story hanging at the point when Tiamat, the evil dragon goddess, had offered him a place as her paladin. We kept the suspense up until the very end of Heroic Tier about whether his Paragon path would be as an evil paladin or as a righteous one, or turning his back on the path of a paladin altogether. Enjoy!
“No.”
The word echoed around the cavernous chamber. Ostardva, stood on one of Tiamat’s long, sinuous necks, stared defiantly at the five immense dragon heads, arrayed in front of him.
The central one, the red one, started backwards a little, as if surprised.
“No? Just like that? You disappoint me, child of Arkhosia.” The five heads spoke as one, a woman’s voice but with a hint of growling bass in it. The sound was like a hammer-blow, every word a storm to be weathered.
Read MoreThis is one of the Paragon Path tales I wrote for my Dungeons and Dragons group. Enjoy!
Futch frowned as he walked away from the others. No-one seemed in a particularly celebratory mood; they had won the war, beaten the Lich, but at a high cost. Hundreds had died, thousands perhaps. Ostardva, Gieve, the others on the airship.
Maran.
He gritted his teeth and clenched his fist, fighting the surge of frustration that threatened to boil over. To have been so far away, and not able to do anything, or even know about it... It wasn’t fair. He wandered through the streets, barely aware of the direction his feet were taking him, lost in thought.
Finally he stood in front of the southern gate, looking out over the plains. The gently sloping path that lead to Varikause and beyond lay in front of him and, with one backwards glance at Fjornik, he shifted.
Read MoreThis is one of the Paragon Path stories I wrote for my Dungeons and Dragons group. Enjoy!
Kali stood in the confusion of the city. In a way, ruined as it was, it felt more comfortable to her; instead of stone formed into buildings and walls, it was more like the hillsides of her childhood, rough and unformed.
She rubbed her shoulders at that thought, feeling the roughness of her own skin. It was still odd to her; she’d grown used to the small slices and nicks, the little pieces of skin that grew back harder than scars should, but the final battle against the Lich had been devastating in more ways than one. Hundreds had died, an entire city fallen into a pit, friends and travelling companions blasted into nothingness. In the darkness and heat of the cavern under Ortmund, revealed at last, they had battled the Lich and emerged victorious. She flexed her hands, remembering the freezing cold and biting pain that had stung them as she had grabbed at whatever was inside its armour, holding it in place so that Toofi could deliver the death blow. The backlash of energy had flayed her torso open, revealing a rougher layer beneath the skin that ached still.
Read MoreThis is one of the Paragon Path stories I wrote for my Dungeons and Dragons group. Enjoy!
The bar was loud, uncomfortably so, but Toofi had found a quiet corner in which to sip her mug of ale. Fjornik was coming back to life, more so now that the threat of the undead horde was gone, and it was good to not have to watch her back all the time.
The events of the last few weeks were still large in her mind, though. Memories rose unbidden; fabulous journeys into other realms, the weird feeling of controlling a body much larger than hers, and a grinning face pressed up against crystal.
Read MoreEve and Tic return! I'm still trying to nail down exactly what she's like, and what her role is. Ideally I'd like to use her to explain things that we take for granted. This one touches briefly on plant biology, but not in any way that would teach things. The trouble is, I think it would take quite a lot of exposition to explore some ideas.
Anyway; in my head, the setting for this is a town in Avatar: The Last Airbender, in a valley, where Zuko and Iroh end up fighting Azula, and Aang gets involved as well. According to Google, it's called Tu Zin.
Another 100 themes story. I don't exactly know where the influences for this come from, but at the beginning it was loosely based around Jack and the Beanstalk. We had to teach this a couple of years ago and it's always seemed like a really unfair story to me. I mean, Jack is a thief and a murderer. He breaks into the Giant's castle; he hears threats made about men, but doesn't have any evidence; he steals from him three times, and then when the Giant follows him to retrieve his stolen goods, Jack kills him. What about the Giant's wife, who hides Jack? What happens to her after her husband is dead?
Very unfair :(
Anyway, here's an almost entirely-unrelated story about giants.
Another Eve and Tic story. This one developed the idea that Eve lives in a post-human world, a place where we, as the Antecedents, left some of our technology and our iconography, and that's about it. I really like this idea; I've read a couple of things set in this kind of post-human world and they're always fascinating. I love new, fantasy-inspired, looks at current technology. It's also handy to clear another of the 100 themes off the list. This project's hanging around like nothing else.
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