A Continent of Banalities

The last character for the last day! I'm coming over all emotional. Within and between the minds of all living beings are the Dream Realms. They are invisible but ever-present. Every thought and feeling connects to them, every nightmare spawns a new one or rejoins an old one.¨ You were brought into the world by some cruel dreamer, the only native of Lost Hope, a great and looming city. In this place fragments of forgotten cities and forgotten people seemed to end up. Each was tormented by empty grief, connected to lost memories. High above its heavenly mirror image (called Nepenthe) glimmered. It was no doubt meant as a further punishment, a place too far to go, too high to reach. Instead it gave you hope. The world was surely greater than these two opposites? The city was your birthright, and you would make it your own. So you became a hovel, then a house, then a street festooned with garlands and grotesques. You shrugged off your body and exchanged it for the place that was no lo...

You lived a life on the run before the Gift. Every night the Widows descended on you. Their hands and tongues were knives, and they meant to inscribe secrets on you, write a world history in wounds on your body. Inside and out. And so they did, until the day the Gift gave your people the power to rescue yourselves. It took effort and suffering, but your people knew from suffering. The demons are your servants now, and you are kinder masters than they ever were. You chose to keep the scars. They are hidden behind your neutral mask and androgynous robes. So do your spouse and your two children. Can’t give the fiends a single foothold. You are building a new world on the back of the fiends. It requires a strong will and a keen mind to bring them to heel, and rein in their otherworldly excesses. Still, bringing the demoniac aesthetics into your work, just to see the sharp intakes of breath, the wide eyes, and the dry minds. There is a stark charm to the balustrades with the throbbing marro...

  We'll end the month with some characters for the posthuman fantasy rpg Sorcerously Advanced. In Kornhaime, where you’re from, the grindstones are bigger than castles. You worked your fingers to the bone in the immense mills, until one evening when a voice seemed to beckon you from one of the grain silos. It told you that the time of drudgery was over, if you wanted it. A great Gift had been given to the world. On that day you took your freedom, while your masters were reeling from the rush of power suffusing humanity. In those heady moments, everyone was equal. In some places the enslaved had their revenge, but in many others the cunning rulers found ways to keep their hold on power.  Kornhaime is still the breadbasket of the world, but now the stones are worked by magic. Your people wanted freedom, but not too much. They were scared to slip their chains completely. You left them with both tenderness and contempt in your heart.  Now you walk the world, entering people’s...

Ogham are the masterminds behind The Detectives. They have studied the murder mystery genre, along with every cop show, morality tale and redemption story known to humanity. They invented The Detective, and people are lining up to get a persona into an iteration of it. But someone once said that every wave is new until it breaks. How long can Ogham stay relevant with this one?  Ogham are not a single person, but a thirteen-person group-mind of dataforms (scanned human beings run in computer simulation). Centuries ago each mind was a human being who was scanned, and then gravitated towards each other, due to a shared interest in narrative and entertainment, justice and murder. They exist in a virtual world full of crime scenes, relationship maps, and set pieces. In theory each constituent individual remains a fully realized self, but in their virtual nerd cave, the observer might wonder if they weren’t simply parts of one personality playing superficial roles (the Leader, the Contin...

Faustino Jargal is here undercover on behalf of all mankind. All mankind, starting with their own sliver of it. Faustino is a spy for the space ark Darga, a Spacer ship. Spacers are the remnants of those who set out from Old Earth but never found their forever home. These surviving ships have since built dozens of new vessels, sending them off at greater speeds towards more distant worlds, or even other galaxies. Darga is one of these ships.  The Dargans are Survivalists, and believe that posthuman entities, such as the Tivoli Aggregate, are essentially alien gods. They are an overwhelming threat to humanity, unmoored from any sane limitations or beliefs.The Dargan Survivalists know (or think that they do) that any information that reaches the ‘gods’ can be sent back in time, potentially ruining thousands of years of human progress. This makes them very secretive and quite paranoid. Not being known is central to survival.  Faustino is the next step. Since birth they have been ...

Grondep is a young criminal from the League of Independent Worlds. The League began as a loose conglomeration of colonies from Old Earth, and has ended up as a very tightly knit civilization. It only recently made contact with other civilizations, but has done reasonably well on its own. The population is generally urbanized, and various shades of strong-government liberalism pervades throughout. Religion exists, but is relegated to the status of hobby.   Grondep grew up in a middle class family. Her mothers worked in banking, and she grew up with a healthy understanding of economics. Her can-do attitude and communication skills, she was a great asset for organized crime. Advanced biotechnology is a recent import to the League, and while it is not illegal, treatments that grant functional immortality are heavily regulated and expensive. The thinking is that widespread immortality will lead to overpopulation and a workforce without any upward mobility. All of this is a bit above Gro...

Once again I'm a bit behind. Today I'm starting on a new series of characters taking part in a form of serialized entertainment for a posthuman audience. In the posthuman, post-scarcity civilization called the Tivoli Aggregate, novelty is worth more than gold. Actually gold is just another transition metal, but novelty lifts the spirits to new heights. A novelty on the verge of becoming a tradition isThe Detectives, a flash mob murder procedural happening without warning. An Aggregate persona will have ‘died’, and the titular detectives arrive on the scene. Members from other civilizations are invited to be detectives, lending the event some authenticity (“encounter entities from other polities and see their genuine values and reactions in REAL TIME!”) Let us meet the current stars of the Detectives bullpen.  Owain Prosser is from the Agrarian-Socialist Family of Ysbaddaden IV. This civilization believes in the uplifting quality of manual labor, the revolution as a continuous p...

  NAME: Oceane Carbon Archetype: Inquisitive Journalist Profession: Reporter Nationality: Canadian (Quebec) From a young age Oceane was being lied to. A cynic might say as much as the next child, but perhaps it hit her differently. Father Christmas stopped coming after her dad died, and she put two and two together. The church she was forced to go to on Sundays. Seemed to be an advanced version of the same. Something you wanted to believe, paired up with something you were afraid not to believe.  Oceane began searching for the truth in everything. It was difficult, since it wasn’t as black and white as she’d believed as a kid. She told a boy she loved him when she was 15. When she turned 16 she realized it was no longer true. There were half-truths, conditional truths and consolatory fables, and organizations were in the business of keeping it all going like a rustbucket car.  Her mother often despaired of her questions and arguments, and said that she’d sacrifice the mon...

First character for Troubleshooters. Hermann Philemon Liebeskraft Archetype: Lovecraftian Protagonist Job: Food critic Nationality: Swiss  Hermann first encountered horror in his mother’s Älplermagronen. The simple and hearty dish of macaroni, cheese and potatoes became a “chiaroscuro of repulsive tubes and unguessable slime, forever congealing into fresh shapes, each unfinished but suggestive of an utterly inhuman malignancy”. That is a direct quote from his first food review, which he wrote that night. Herman had his butt whupped, but adversity only strengthens the true mystic seeker. Hermann delved deep into the darkest recesses of cuisine, reading the horrid “Hundertmal Mensch” (a cookbook of ‘long pig’) and even the long-banned “Flavours of Cockaigne”, of which we shall say no more.  Hermann attended Le Cordon Bleu in Paris for almost 24 hours, and was unceremoniously booted after he likened a crème brûlée to “an ancestral nightmare of antediluvian invertebrates” and fain...