Wednesday, August 19, 2009

World Building: Wizard Swears

Ack! Its been a long time since I posted! But I have the perfect topic for it:

Unique swear words, insults, and exclamations!


Belgium!

Gorram!

Merlin's beard!

By the egg!

Cotton-headed ninny-muggins!



A good way to add detail to a world is to give it its own swears, insults and exclamations! Good terms include slang and silly words, as well as religious, historical, and cultural references.

Some examples include:
[person of significance]'s [something belonging to person, usually of note]
God's Thumbs!

[any silly sounding word]
Holy Shnikies!

[a curse word in another language]
Ilka-tuk-tak!

[something considered disgusting or uncouth]
Dragon droppings!

[something of some importance, religious, cultural, etc.]
Sacrebleu!



The sky is the limit.

Of course, the best purpose of making up swear words is to be have your characters swear without offending anyone, a good trick for a writer.

What do you think of this idea? Post a comment!

Friday, August 7, 2009

Dreamplane conjuration and mutability

My first experience with dreamplanes was a movie, that I don't remember the name of, where a guy with psychic abilities gets recruited into a program where they use a machine to allow psychics into other people's dreams. At first they this is done to help people with problem dreams, then he develops the ability to enter dreams without the machine and has to save the president from one of his coworkers.

Besides the plot, the interesting thing about the movie was that while in a person's dreamplane, they had the ability to create any item they needed and they were even able to change their form.


This seems like a good adventure or side adventure concept, where they can get anything they need, but there is quite a good chance that anything could turn on them, becoming a nightmare. A character that they believed to be another visitor to the dreamplane could turn out to be a part of the dream, and upon leaving they find that this person that they have bonded with is nothing but a dream.


Or maybe...

The person you took out of the dream with you is still a dream-being but by releasing it into world you unleash the chaos of dreams. Which then reminds me of an anime movie called paprika, where people use technology to view and record a person's dream. Eventually it releases a crazy person's dream and an evil person's dream into the world. Long story short, it took a giant naked ghost lady with multiple personalities to fix things.

...

where was I?

Oh, right! While in the dreamplane, you can conjure any item you need and even manipulate the surrounding area. Maybe to add to the mess, you have to worry about your sanity if you go into a crazy person's dream, or maybe nightmares have some sort of corrupting effect on people.

I may just write a campaign based on the ideas here... except that the people I play with are readers... >.<

Well, maybe they will forget...

Anyway, does this rant inspire you? Does it make sense? Does it seem pointless to you? Comment!

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Psychoplanes, Dreamplanes, and Getting Back Into my Posting Schedule

Well, I have not been keeping up with my posting schedule as well as I would have hoped, and lets hope that I get back into it easily. More APSC soon, really.


But for now, I want to bring up a topic that has interested me for some time.

Planes.

Its always a wonderful concept when you can leave your universe and travel to a completely different world, but what if instead of going away from your world, you went deeper into it. Into another world, the world of the mind of another person?


I admit, this is by no means an original concept, but it has so much potential for a RPG.

Perhaps there is some mental instability with your friend and the only way to resolve the problem is to hook your brain up to a machine that can project your consciousness into the world that is his mind.

What wonders would you see? How much would these worlds differentiate? Are they infinite or finite? Does a person's intelligence determine how large the psychoplane is? Are psychoplanes limited to sentient beings? How would an animal's psychoplane differ?

I could really go on all day.


And don't even get me started on Dreamplanes.

Now I want to do several posts on this topic. I probably will.