User talk:Marasmusine/Mad Girty

The Book: Is it pre-war? Does it give access to pre-war knowledge? Also, from a DM perspective, if someone else read it, would the same thing happen to them?

Hero points: Always round down.

Sethxiz: Please tell me a bit about him. I need to know enough to understand how he interacts with other far-realm beings and elder gods- or at least how they might interact with him. What is his attitude toward her faith? --Kydo (talk) 23:21, 23 January 2017 (MST)

I only have a rough idea of these things, I will try and develop them as I know more about the game world.

Six Complex Discords appears to be a newly bound codex, modern handwritten common text on clean vellum. The font is angular and spindly with thick nodes, resembling musical notation, and indeed sometimes gives way to pitch lines that wave and merge across the page.

The book is a physical "shadow" of Sehtxiz's intrusion into the material world. It is happenstance that it reached out and found the bookshelf, it merely mimicked the form of the surrounding books.

Stop me if this encroaches on your cosmology too much, or if its cliche or just dumb, but I'm trying to think "terrible secrets" and "great old one".

It contains knowledge about the substrate between the different planes of existence, a sort of flow that Sehtxiz describes in terms of multidimensional pitch (such that they are "complex", having component pitches at angles to one another), strands of interleaving tone that form chords that weave through the planes. These sounds cannot be heard by living creatures, except rarely as a vague impression, a silhouette. The book explains that, since the invention of music (by whatever deity that might be) and its propagation by mortal creatures, this substrate has been disturbed. There are six discords in "simple" pitch that have resonance in complex pitch, and can weaken or strengthen the substrate's ties to the planes. To date, these discords have not been hit upon frequently enough for any significant effect. But the ramification is that, in the most extreme, there could be an instrument or orchestra of a magnitude enough to cause a resonance cascade. If the right sequence of discords are played, new planes of existence can be connected to the multiverse, drawn from whatever lies outside of the substrate, in the Far Realm. Similarly, a plane could be caused to disconnect, and it would fall away into the great beyond.

Will write more later. Marasmusine (talk) 03:21, 24 January 2017 (MST)

I worry that the description above might encroach too much on your cosmology, so it can be toned down in some way. In any case, the book alone isn't enough to do any damage, it would still be a monumental task to do anything in practice. The book might also describe far realm creatures made out of sound, or the unknown consequences of certain songs. Bards would be aghast at its contents.

Sehtxiz uses the discords from the far realm to channel its power into a servant. It wants to investigate the possibility of transmuting material objects and creatures into complex sound, as a way of preserving them through some cataclysm it prophesies. This has already shaken Girty somewhat, and as Sehtxiz drip-feeds her more information, it could test her sanity. Its voice is like anti-music, which only becomes apparent in her mind when she can hear pleasant or melodic sounds, such as bird song.

It is alien even by Old One standards, something akin to The Colour Out Of Space, existing as reverberations in a poly-chronic fluid that fills its realm. It has little interaction with anything else, with the exception of its reach into Azathoth's realm as the "monotonous whine" of flutes. Marasmusine (talk) 09:43, 24 January 2017 (MST)

0_0 Yeah... Girty should be extremely cautious about who she shares this information with. Just so you know, there really IS an impending global disaster, and there is significant reason for the Council of Wyrms to suppress any knowledge or understanding of interplanar relationships. I'm totally cool with this addition to the setting. It sounds like this concept is fully compatible with "the weave" flavor text in the PHB, so I think I might actually incorporate that concept into play. As for overstepping your bounds? Nah! The only way to overstep is to:

1. Write up statistical properties for game content, including treasure value. (Unless you spend a plot point to do it)
2. Make important decisions for non-allied NPCs or any PC. (Unless the player gives you permission, or you're the caller deciding travel direction)
3. Determine the results of an uncertain event. (If the result is certain, I won't complain. I'm not going to force you to make checks to cross a gentle stream.)

Have you seen Fantasy vs. Fiction? Watching that is what inspired me to get off my butt and start this thing, because it gave me a good idea of how to approach play. What I'm doing is a sort of hybrid between those two approaches to narrative construction. I'm giving you guys the power to contribute significantly to the campaign setting's content so that the setting and narrative fundamentally revolve around your characters- somewhat like what you'd see in Matt Mercer's game. However, once created, game content lands in my lap and takes on a life of its own, apart from the players, in an overall setting which will be carrying out its own cold, unfeeling machanations. Your characters have the freedom to do as they please, and the setting revolves around them, but the fact that it centers on them is an effect generated by the players, not the DM. --Kydo (talk) 11:33, 24 January 2017 (MST)

To answer an earlier question, Sehtxiz doesn't care who Girty prays to. Marasmusine (talk) 12:08, 24 January 2017 (MST)