The OOC Tavern

[Pulpatoon]

I'm game! Parallel sounds fine.

And welcome, Kanye!

[mb.]

Whatever works for you, boss. I like the idea, but I'm not sure it needs an entire story.

Yeah, I'm not thinking Story with a big S, just some short flashbacks, which'll flesh out everyone's backstory.

[mb.]

If Bedwyr's also down with it, I'll get it started.

[mb.]

Guys, a quick heads up: I'm flying from Florida back to Denmark this afternoon, so from now until sometime Friday I'll probably be offline. Just so you don't miss me too much. Seeya soon!

[Kanye Westeros]

So, I've been reading the world thread stuff and noticed something odd about the Urbem write up:

Urbem is a large, crowded, and in parts thriving metropolis. The city is a study in contrasts: Vicus Solis, or The Quarter of the Sun, is an elevated and walled area, almost a city unto itself, where the nobility lives, relatively oblivious to the rest of the city and world. Basetown, in the shadow of what the commoners call Shinetown, is dark and generally filthy. The Basetown constabulary is corrupt, leaving the nights dangerous enough to require a curfew, which does little to control the gangs and tickermen that plague the streets. Vetus, home to the Scholae Universitas, is the oldest quarter of the city. It is a place of faded gardens and dusty streets, largely ignored by much of Urbem.

Other districts are described, but Shinetown isn't. Is that by design, or something you wanted someone else to build up. Because I have an idea.

Shinetown: Bordering the slums of Basetown, and many safer (slightly higher class) common districts, Shinetown is a haven for creativity, the buildings are shabby and old, but brightly painted and covered in murals, the people are poor, and often sport among them great artists and madmen. Emptores (buyers/collectors) from across the city, and sometimes from across the Empire come to Shinetown to peruse, purchase, and patronize the best artists and craftsmen the 'Shining district' has to offer. Imagine the kind of neighborhood that Leonardo DaVinci, Michaelangelo, or Beethoven would have lived in.

Aziza lives in a tiny apartment above a small tavern on the Via Imperia (Empire street). The apartment is right in the middle of Shinetown,and the exuberance and color of the place spurs her to spend hefty sums of her money to live there.

[mb.]

Nice write up. But the text I wrote is obviously not clear enough: Shinetown is just Basetown slang for The Quarter of the Sun. But maybe I can work in your description somewhere later.

[Kanye Westeros]

No worries, we can just change the name and boom, another district is born!

[Pulpatoon]

I propose the new district is called Grogneck. A hundred years ago, it was a dangerous slum that even the lowest Basetowners would avoid. When a body of refugees entered the city, they were pressed into Grogneck, where they established themselves and began to practice their traditional crafts. Money and more artists began to trickle in, and a generation later, the slum had been gentrified. It became de rigueur for nobles to patronize a Grogneck artist. Ten year later, the refugee population found themselves priced out of the neighborhood they had built.

Grogneck is a little passé among the most elite nobles, now, but there is still plenty of money changing hands there, and it is lousy with artists, soothsayers, and charismatic madmen.

[Kanye Westeros]

I love it!

Also, Oelle, what sort of Rite of the Land have I shown you? Maybe it was something that formed the basis for one of your spells?

[Spartakos]

If Bedwyr's also down with it, I'll get it started.

I'm down with it.

[Kanye Westeros]

If Bedwyr's also down with it, I'll get it started.

I'm down with it.

AWESOME!

[Pulpatoon]

I love it!

Also, Oelle, what sort of Rite of the Land have I shown you? Maybe it was something that formed the basis for one of your spells?

Oelle has a spell, "Aetheric Consultation," which he derived from observing Aziza in communion with her people's spirits. He pestered her to repeat this act several times, well past her usual limits of patience (but Oelle brews the only reliable hangover cure) while doing things like measuring her nostrils with calipers and taking samples of her exhalations in little glass jars. Asking her to pee in one of the jars was beyond the outermost limits of halfling patience, however, and he had to continue his studies without his subject.

Oelle spent months calculating the results of his measurements, filling books with tiny scribbles and elaborate diagrams with names like "Psychoresonances of astral flux registered via ambient humidity." It took a long time, but he eventually had a working spell that provided reliable contact with spirits. Not as complete or elegant as Aziza's communion, but it worked.

He presented a paper on the subject, which led to the grant that enabled him to begin his forays into the forest for more research.

Kanye, why did Oelle see Aziza communing with spirits in the first place?

[Kanye Westeros]

Kanye, why did Oelle see Aziza communing with spirits in the first place?

This is actually the story of how we met.
One of your colleagues, Dr. Corvo, came back from an expedition into the Lignum with several varieties of plant specimens, one of those specimens was the home of a Dryad, a real angry one. She was raising hob all up and down your college.

Druids being a rarity in the Big City, as you can imagine, it would probably have been several days or weeks before a foreign spirit-caller could arrive. Luckily, Aziza had newly arrived in Urbem only that day. She was actually under arrest for having run up a bar bill, and then tried shapeshift under the influence and fly away...

One winged-rat crashing into a mirror later and she's in chains, being brought to a Watch barracks near the university. My escorts stop a running clerk asking after the commotion, the clerk explains, and I start laughing. I quickly make a deal. I'll take care of the spirit, and pay my tab, if they let me go free. The guard thankfully agreed.

So there she was, being lead through the fine marbled corridors of academia, still wearing her old rawhides and furs and stinking of a couple months' travel. They lead her to the faculty emeritus back office area. Right away I can hear her, quiet girlish giggles giving way to a mad shrieking laughter and the sounds of things breaking. I follow the sounds to a lounge, there's the Dryad, coaxing new growth out of the wood paneling, the picture frames, the furniture and cackling the whole while. A total mess.
Now normally, I can just speak to the spirits of the world naturally, but when one gets so worked up and enraged, you gotta be extra polite just to get their attention so they calm down enough to listen to you.
So I reach in my pack for the materials to make a Spirit Pact, a rite any initiate can perform:

• First, the Sacrifice; I prick my finger and spill some blood on the floor.
• Second, the Offering; I crumble up a stale piece of bread I'd had in my satchel and drop the crumbs in the blood. Most any food will work, within reason, you wouldn't want to offer beef to a cow spirit, or bread to a wheat spirit.
• Third, the Introduction; Your full True Name, and any attendant titles
• Fourth, the Invocation; Command the spirit to appear before you.
• Fifth, Convocation; Make your pact, decide on terms which both sides must uphold, in the case of the Dryad I was to find her a new home, and so she jumped into my spear as a temporary home (I later found her a nice grove near a pond just outside the city walls)

Oelle was one of the crowd of onlookers, and he appeared impressed, and considering I'd never seen an outsider this interested in the ways of the Land, I saw no harm in teaching him pact-making.

[mb.]

Aziza, to me the most interesting part of that, and possibly the basis for another bond, is that Oelle knows your True Name. It's up to you both: does knowing someone's True Name give you any power over them? And if so, was Aziza just careless in sharing hers with Oelle, or did she have a reason to trust him already?

[mb.]

Also, this more or less tells the story for Aziza & Oelle. I don't really feel the need for running a roleplayed story for this, and maybe it's also enough for the bonds with Bedwyr and Boggs as well to just deal with it this way? And as I said elsewhere, feel free to come up with a fitting bond that doesn't necessarily need to be exactly what's on the character sheet.

[Kanye Westeros]

Aziza, to me the most interesting part of that, and possibly the basis for another bond, is that Oelle knows your True Name. It's up to you both: does knowing someone's True Name give you any power over them? And if so, was Aziza just careless in sharing hers with Oelle, or did she have a reason to trust him already?

Hmmm...I hadn't thought of that. Though, in the original pact with the Dryad, She would have only whispered her name since the 'shouting' doesn't start til step four. But definitely over the course of teaching Pact-making to Oelle he would have heard her Name, and she would have learned his. Her True Name is Setaerin Ranshae just in case it ever comes up. It wasn't careless so much as bravado, a sort of "if you screw me over, pray you kill me before I find you." kind of thing in the beginning. But she trusts Oelle now.

As for what a True Name is and does, it's the magical equivalent of your phone number, email address, and street address. It is used to find and reach you regardless of distance, obstacle, and in some cases, time. This is why Summoning spells are often built around the True Name of the summoned target, to make sure you're snatching the right thing. It's the same reason so many spells and curses require some hair or blood from the person being targeted. I'm not sure if you're cool with it, but mechanically I would say that knowing someone's True Name does away with needing to roll a spell on them (good or bad), you just say it and it's done.

[mb.]

Sounds feasible in theory, although it's maybe a little too powerful. In practice, if the target is aware of your casting, I'd give them a Defy Danger roll+INT or something to avoid.

[Kanye Westeros]

Sounds feasible in theory, although it's maybe a little too powerful. In practice, if the target is aware of your casting, I'd give them a Defy Danger roll+INT or something to avoid.

Oh sure, definitely. I'd just mean the practitioner wouldn't need to roll.

[Pulpatoon]

I assume that Oelle, has a city-dwelling human, doesn't consciously have a True Name, or rather, doesn't have a tradition of protecting it with an adopted public name. However, as a bastard, he might have a backdoor True Name that includes the identity of his father. Oelle Name-of-the-Mother Name-of-the-Father sort of thing. In which case, Oelle himself doesn't know his own name.

But, yeah, I'm good with a bond of knowing Aziza's True Name. And, if she bothered to do a little snooping, she might know his even though he doesn't.

[Kanye Westeros]

Well, A True Name is the essence of who you are more than where you come from. If you identify as a bastard, a perfectly good Truen Name could be Oelle Bastard-Son, Lorekeeper of the Aetheric, Illuminator of the Arcane...etc. etc. so on and so forth. You have to find your Name, it isn't ever given to you by another.

Aziza's True Name, Setaerin Ranshae, is just Ur'Kaleen for Dances faster than death on a moonless night which she uses a partial translation of as her last name.
by the way I love world building, and can literally do this forever, so if I'm going too far or getting boring or bothersome, let me know and I'll step it back.