Showing posts with label magic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label magic. Show all posts

Thursday, 31 January 2019

Mistborn



mistborn by brandon sanderson. 

I read ch1.
I put it down for a busy week. 
I started over and could not put it down.
Back to back in a blur of days.

I thought, often; this is amazing.
I thought, often; this is inspiration for JadePunk 
(Tales of Kausao city) by ryan danks.

Two days after finishing it I was craving, withdrawal symptoms, 
reminiscent of FireFly after the first time you binge-watch it. 
Lucky lucky lucky there’s a sequal! 
Currently in the snailmail ...
 actually theres two sequals and then four more ‘next era’ novels. 

Its the very best fantasy book I have read in a long, long time,
Since mervyn peake’s Gormengast trilogy.
My number one in the genre. 



Sunday, 14 January 2018

Proxy Kill

Proxy Kill


"I will not hurt any student, and I will protect all learners from harm. I will remember that there is art to learning as well as science, and that caring, empathy, social, emotional and physical development are as critical as intellectual achievement. I will apply, for the benefit of each student, all available instructional supports and resources, in the knowledge and conviction that we each learn differently, and that everyone can learn." socratic-oath-for-educators



Socrates, the "father of western thinking" was forced by controlling society to drink poison for their perceived crime of corrupting youth.



0. pre-med
In the first decade of the 20th century, Snake Apple Tree wrote a serial of short stories entitled The Murder Chronicles (aka New Murder Fiction). 

It was published incomplete to www.snakeappletree.co.uk

This has nothing at all to do with;  Liang Yaosheng's works of same title or R. Barri Flowers works of same title or the-line-up's interactive fictions of same title or anybody else using the same title which quite clearly is collectively a shareware title under no formal copyright property. 

Snake Apple Tree's serial as a complete includes both the final (unpublished) chapter(s) and also other short stories not included in the published core. They were not published due to their personal nature. The serial is billed as being semi-fictionalized accounts of true stories. They are tales from the underground; official records always show very different versions of events. This is because the official versions are cover-ups by a corrupt society.


The following are chapters of the final novella (Proxy Kill) of the serial. 

IN MEMORANDUM. 




1. basis

Manufacturing a collective operational base which holds a paradigm and enforces it upon target. 
The paradigm enforces depression upon the target of such severe intensity that the target commits suicide.

Everybody says "its a shame" and enjoys their suffering of the loss of the target from the collective. 

In animal species we observe this behavior. Example, a murder of crows (collective noun for a flock of crows in English language is 'murder') will peck to death the weaker members of the flock, increasing the amount of available food scraps to scavenge for the stronger members. This maintains the health of the flock while being a bitch for the target. 


2. control

Trying to control the target. 
Enforcing a false paradigm, establishing it in the mind of zombi's as the officially endorsed collaborative agreement, the dominant narrative.
Instead of respecting nature, intuition, spirit. 
Aboriginal map of reality has three circles: the world of nature, the world of Spirits, the world of Humans. The world out of balance is the world which accepts only Humans as valid and Nature to be exploited, and dismisses the world of Spirit as make-belief.
Shaman integrate it as Truth. 

The excuse to protect 'vulnerables' from those who can and want to help.
The result is: 
Without help, the vulnerable kills him/her self.


3. Luci

Luci was 14. 
I was 28. 

I saved up and bought a Japanese fretless blue electric bass guitar. 
Luci saved up and bought a red electric fender guitar. 

The first time we met was in the street, both in the glow of yielding our tools which were finally in our possession, on that first day of ownership. 

Bang! 

There is magick in instruments. 
There is even more magick in music.
There is magick in the universe to have put this coincidence together. 

We are but cogs in an intergalactic, multi-dimensional machine the mechanics of which are far, far beyond our understanding. The very best we can hope for is to recognize some small glimpse of this, through the divine worshipful connection of, when we trust our intuition, when we let music flow through us without mind getting in the way, when we have sex. These are the three principles of divine worship.

Luci was dark and worshipped dark gods with blood and sex magic.
She had a shrine to black metal and goth. 
She had candles and spoke a language I have not heard in several incarnations. 
A young witch coming of age, wise far beyond her years and obsessed with Jungian Shadow. 

Luci and I did not have sex. 
We did play music.
We did talk about psychology. 
Luci was depressed and cutting herself deeper each time. 

I had recently finished doing counseling nvq2 and frustrated that the red-tape limitations of doing it professionally for money through the state would make any real attempt at actually fixing somebody, not possible. The girl needed emotional and mental support, she needed a hug. She needed a fuck but being only 14 in a nation which kills paedophiles and where the age of consent is 16, we did not go there. We could have and it was a potential between us. Some other lucky brat would have to sort her out that way. I proved my parental responsibility. We behaved in accordance with social conformity despite occasionally facing down natural instinct together. 

Our relationship was mostly defined by music tutor and counselor. I lent her cd's and guitar effects boxes. We both used the same software, so I taught her some of the tricks I have learned with it. It helped her to focus on creativity instead of self-destruction. Her family members who got to know me and who trusted me remarked the positive influence I was having on her. She stopped cutting so often. Her scars began to heal. 

The prejudice twats did not like me sniffing around a vulnerable minor. 
They did not like the age gap. 
They beat me up in the street. 
They knew where i lived.
I stopped visiting her. 
That was my mistake. 
She nose-dived.
She cut too deep.
She dead now. 


4. Popi

After the tragedy of Luci I traveled to get over it. 
I trusted my intuition and I went in that direction, regardless. 

I found myself in the Valley. 
From the outside, the Valley is the last retreat of free people in Britain.
It does have an internet site and it is described on there as;
"Survival lifestyle"
There are no facilities.
It is entirely based on people and people skills. 
A place where free people can go to develop skills not even known about by the city slaves and their mindless polluting conformity.  

Drink water and wash from the stream. 
Import food or grow your own. 
The Valley is surrounded by forest. 
The community is organized well enough that a daily shit-bucket collection takes your toilet from your bender and deposits it in the community compost. 
Kids born there are educated locally and not by state school. 
It is hardly Canada and the reserves, but its the closest thing to it in UK. 
Everybody knows everybody. 
Everybody knows everybody's business. 

A culture in miniature highlights the issues which all cultures face.
Politics is as rife in the Valley as it is in the city. 
It is also somewhat of a tourist venue for those curious and able to find it and get there. 
Everyone lives openly, which is to say everyone has the same STDs because with a very small population of very open minded people, liberal people gonna do what liberal people gonna do. 

Popi grew up there. 
At 15 Popi had enough. 
I heard about Popi. 

Popi a Bright in the context of the 2017 movie Bright (directed by David Ayer)
Everybody loved her. 
Popi was the most free spirit the Valley had produced, of a population who uphold being a freespirit as the ultimate Human Right and Aspiration.
My intuition screamed at me that I have to connect with her.
As soon as possible. 
I asked around.
The community protect.
People do. 

"No mate, you ain't going near our Popi."
"Ye well thanks for making me feel like a wolf after a sheep but there's more to it than that." 
"We don't know you."
I looked her square in the eye.
"I am True. You don't know Truth."

I wasn't though. Had i been True i would have gone direct to her.
My mistake was a preconception that I needed to go through other people to find her.
The Valley works its mysterious charms; to take, to give, to set its own balance.

I knew that by connecting with Popi I could set her toward a path she needed to be on, and that it had to be me because nobody else could do it. Because of the primal nature of energy and how it dances, electromagnetic. I cannot explain this without sounding crazy to the crazy people. 

I had seen the girls spirit and connected with her in dream. Because brights stand out in the darkness and I have stared into that darkness so much that I can see the motions of brights, their colours which have meanings, where and how they flow, and ebb. I saw the imminence of her ebb.

The valley closed its cultural gates against me. 

I saw her ebb extinguish and I cried. 

Later, i heard that Popi had killed herself. 

Those who knew her explained, she had been trying to get away from the valley and its controlling culture. She had nowhere to go. 

I returned to my empty flat in the city which was a gate to so much of the multiverse. 

Another light gone out. 


5.Toni

Soon after that I encountered a young teenage boy crying on the back doorstep of a church at the back of my apartment. I asked him whats up? Sat next to him. Talked. He opened up to me. 

"Social services has forced me into adoption with a woman who does not feed me and hits me." 

He showed me the bruising.

"The teachers don't care. The police don't want to get involved. So I have run away. I don't know where to go." 

I could not take a vulnerable minor into my apartment alone without putting myself at risk. i do not operate that way. 

I was returning to my apartment to eat because I had not eaten for a day or two. Neither had Toni.
I suggested we buy food from the shop, which we did. Moving the body in walking is a step toward going forward, motion, holistic metabolic system regulating itself toward balance, starts the healing. He stopped crying and had a goal now, albeit temporary and small but the food would help.
He is eating my food, technically not my food but food I had bought. My energy is going into him with it. His configuration would shift and align with mine. This is how energy works. Idiots do not see it this way.
We discussed his friends and their parents being home, people who know him and can help. 
He was missing the hell out of his old friends, his old school, his old life. He had been banned form seeing any of them by his foster mother.
We visited his friend in another part of town. He was grateful that I knew the route. 
His friends parents were out and I did not want to drop him off there, it felt bad.
We visited another of his friends in another part of town. 
We borrowed the phone to call Toni's mother and she told him to fuck off.
The friend phoned his own mother and arranged Toni could stay the night there. 
She likes Toni and knows him well.
This felt good. The healing Toni needs even if only for one night.
I did not know what else to do.
Had I called the authorities, the police &/or social services, it would have betrayed Toni's trust for me and it would have caused him more problems. 
He would have run away again with nowhere to go.
He would lose trust in other people and his ability to trust others would be damaged.
Shaman are healers. We are advanced at emotional psychology and at psychology. 
We do our best to do the right thing.
I did not see Toni again but I did see a few of his friends sometime later who told me that he had gone back to his foster mother's and they hadn't heard of him since.


6. This list continues. 

Many more examples. People would rather drive their kids to suicide than allow a shaman to heal them. This is UK 21st century. I do not regard any of this to be my failing because I tried damn hard to prevent those who I could see are going to do it, from doing it. Everyone who was binding them to the path of self destruction did everything they could to get rid of me by labeling me as the danger element, as an unknown, as a potential risk. 

There is a beautiful tradition that by remembering to others the lesson of a persons life, is to honour that life.
 






©2018 Ordo Octopia

Thursday, 3 August 2017

BitchPack



"If and when you feel rage, if you would only give yourself some time, some spiritual food, if you will do that for yourself, if you will abridge your rage with that spiritual food, eventually everything will calm down and will be fine. You will be able to move ahead and that time of rage will be over. The idea of forgiveness. Womens rage often comes from their family of origin situation, sometimes it comes from adult trauma too, that is less common. For instance a woman who has had a mate who has been tremendously abusive. That is less common because usually people who have not abused as children will not stay for a minute with a mate who abuses them. So the adult trauma is less common. Regardless of where the trauma ocurs, something has to happen, to recognise, it, to bless it, to contain it and to leave it."  Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With The Wolves

Blame Shifting.
Often the ones perusading you to leave the perceived abuser (the target), are abusers who do not want to let you go (the cult, who extrapolate your energy). Often the target is a liberator who the peer group resent.

She doesn't know what to do. So she will do whatever the next person she speaks with who she trusts tells her to do. That is how she is. Manipulable. So, I told her to ignore everyone else and trust her own intuition. Everybody else in her life is giving her various versions of ignore me and avoid me. Because I am a threat to their control over her. They are all caught in energy games. As an outsider-observer I can see this clearly for what it is. Because she is coming from a culture of control-games, that is normal to her, she will entangle me in them too if she has a chance to. I prefer to keep my life clean. I trust my own intuition. It helps more than other peoples advice ever does.


See also:


Saturday, 5 September 2015

SorcerersOfUrTuruk





Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk - RPG Review


A lifelong love of roleplaying.
A life changing trip to Thebes.
An ongoing attempt at co-writing Herbertian Dune fan book 7 ‘Sorcerers of Dune’.
A few seasons in Al Raqis (SecondLife) helping develop the Desertborn culture.
An ongoing attempt at writing the ultimate magickal fantasy role-playing game to explore a world where ‘mind-over-matter’ type magick (manifestation of intent at quantum level) is used daily by the mainstream and how rapidly things could change in such environment.

A .pdf copy of Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk (justified as a birthday present to myself for breaking my breadline budget).

I feel qualified to write a review for this one. I glossed over the rulebook, struggling through dry heat to ignore the whispering that I should own slaves and train my party in seduction, possibly including a snake cult priest as one of my five starting characters.


People and Place

Character creation is intricate and complicated, requires study. I have seen versions of these and the system rules so many times that I will learn them more easily as a player rather than by GMing this rpg, at first. As a single-parent dad who introduced my 5 year old to dice-based Wizard and Warrior role-play only yesterday (he’s addicted), I simply do not get the time nor state-of-mind to dedicate to taking on something of such magnitude.

Having made that decision I sat back and enjoyed reading and admiring the art which reminded me of watercolour pictures I have seen made by explorers of ancient Egyptian sites during the late 19th century. There should be more art of Ur-Turuk. In creating any custom world, art which greatly enhances the atmosphere for a game, can be the most expensive and time consuming aspect to produce.


Vahnam

It seems imperative that a Vahnam (a collective of all the Wizards and their small retinue to which all players belong) should get their players heads together before they create their characters, to discuss the Vahnam, its nature and assets. This approach would strengthen the Vahnam’s holdings and potential future development due to foresight. It would also avoid glitches, for example; what if major player characters are from rival factions?

The chapter on creating the physical base for the group is succinct and well done, as this is one of the important aspects of the game. Developing the city of Ur-Turuk for home based adventures is necessary but scant, suggestive. I have a lot of questions and ideas from the summary overview.

There needs to be a lot more about home-based campaigns. The factions are easy enough to understand and improvise with. Activities which the players engage in will affect the life of the city they inhabit.


Artifacts

By contrast to the character creation process, the rules for artifacts themselves seem very basic and limited. While this might not be a bad thing, it is certainly mechanical.

How many artifacts are out there and why are they not already all acquired by sorcerers? Surely Ur-Turuk has a stockpile of such artifacts waiting to be disassembled by different Vahnam. Is there a council of all the Vahnam? A meeting site in the desert for the festival of the eclipse once every few years?

Since the core of the game is the Artifacts, why is there so little gone into this aside from some very limited random creation tables? At the stage where artifacts description is irrelevant and they become reptilian number crunching. The real excitement of role-play is outside of game mechanics, it is the story. A more elaborate backstory involving the source of the wizards power is befitting of this classic. I feel a well thought guide for GMing this rather than a few paragraphs of tables is necessary addition.* I can't wait for the expansion modules, my imagination filling with promise of eastern splendor.


Personal Experience
Create situations regarding integration of all the characters as the story develops. A simple rule that you cannot play the same character in two consecutive seasons / adventures would do this, and make for a busy Vahnam!
The big question; what did each individual character do in that time while the main ones were actively pursuing some adventure? As they are all living communally in the same Vahnam this is the secret flavour of the game. How does each character relate to the other characters in the Vahnam? Make it personal, this is the best way to squeeze the living juice out of this game. Force the magic to take a background role, albeit the ruling force of the groups lives. Game Rule; role-play a scenario of what every character is doing during each season, or at least make vague cover-notes outlining it. The Vahnam journal.

Description is everything. With this game, everything possible should have at least one adjective. This should be a game rule. Play to all the senses. 


Meditation

One question I had hoped to find out more about during reading the rulebook is:

What temperature is the desert at night? What temperature are the cities?

I was inspired by walking bare-foot on cold crazy-paving slabs, thinking about how easily converted to a heated under-floor system they could be with a shovel and a few bricks. The space should be large enough to crawl under and would make an excellent hiding place in any home or ancient temple. That's not to say I thought about burying Sorcerers in the garden.


Bestiary

There are some creatures here which changed my view of the world; riding reptiles! No mention in the rules for the simple exchange of mule packs and horses into raptor-racers and giant lizard mounts trained by an animal trainer. These should not be left to the cliche of ‘the vehicles used by the snake cult as alternative to equine mounts’.


Elephant In The Temple

I am disconcertingly saddened by the situation of facing that the wizards know magic to be a limited and dwindling force in the world. This is immediately the driving force of any wizard character I will ever play; to find out how to make magic more permeable, other than by leaving artifacts in protected storage for the future generations.

What does a Wizard do once having mastered all aspects of magic and maxed out in their ability at it? Surely by then their personal insight into magic might help to answer such questions. If it does, the GM is left entirely to his own devices as to how this might emerge. It does not have to be beyond the canon material. 

A belief that the Alulim will ever return is a religion which the wizards cannot invest energy into relying upon, and yet they must in case it should ever happen. They have to accept their lot; to choose between living a humble and forgotten life of research, a glorious and ultimately mythic life of legend or die trying, or the more altruistic approach to work hard toward the effort of making magic permeable. How else can we truly understand the study of magic than to pursue that specific goal? Learning more about the Alulim becomes imperative. The core rules limit the available knowledge of the Alulim to a few charts which do not even mention the possibility that they left decipherable texts behind; and to the GMs discretion.*


Abstraction

The players invest a lot of time and creative focus into designing their Wizard, retinue and how this integrates with the other players characters, in the formulation of their collective home address.

Personally I cannot put this amount of this type of work into a project without also becoming immersed in aspirations I have for my characters and the group as a whole; “what are the common objectives?”. Although it can be entirely left out of the game with no loss of enjoyment, to my way of thinking a lot of time must be dedicated to discussing this between the group and the GM. There is epic amount of scope to build on the foundations of this books simplicity. For that I like it.

This my sort of a game. It needs expansion packs which twenty years ago would have been integrated into the core rule book; a sign of how the rpg industry is developing.


Summary

The book is a rules system, complex to learn but easy once you know it, set in a promising world which requires a lot from the GM. It seems that the more experience and romanticism a GM has toward understanding and developing the setting is crucial in what will define memorable campaigns. It could be of the realms of 'card-quest permutations the board-game' or it could be Sinbad. It could be even better. 

A collection of proverbs which will characterize the culture begins with the famous;

“What is the world?”
"It is what we bring to the table."

Wizards of Ur-Turuk houses brilliant ideas which will benefit greatly from developing further, integration of some of the ideas; the world and its features. I cannot wait to see the expansion modules. I want to know more about the 7 Lineages. I want to work on the 2nd Edition.*

Next on my reading list is The Thousand and One Nights (again).





*
To address this; I intend to write Enchanted Dawn, a fan based book to re-create the Artifact creation table by giving Artifacts an ‘Original Purpose' which affects the progressive campaign by means of karmic continuum. It is an expanded rules series.

Artifacts are magic and they call to their owners, those who are to learn from them, ultimately unbind them and destroy them, to re-work their energies into their own. [i]But which way around does this flow?[i] Symbols of these connections are multi-sensory, worked into several levels of the storyline. Without making effort to do so, they are simply a pacman pill won at great risk.

What are the long term effects of using magic? In a world where limited artifacts exist and are regularly destroyed, their magic used up by a sorcerer but dies with that sorcerer; the game is established at a time in history when magic is still available. It will not always be so.

Finding out more about the Alulim, is this even possible? Is it possible by using magic?

A Council of the Vahnam meets to address these issues. The Council of Vahnam Library contains a lot of information regarding Artifacts and their origins. Different Vahnam also function as Factions; for and against one another.




Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk is available from The RPG Drivethru

See The Rogue DM interview with Graham Bottley of Arion Games

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ADDITIONAL: 21.9.2015
https://soundcloud.com/snakeappletree-white-lightning-gate/ur-turuk-snake-trance


Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk is ©2015 Arion Games. I make no claim of ownership to this properties. It is common sense that online role-playing games for purposes of roleplaying may be utilized as such. Any apparent or alleged copyright infringement is to be regarded as fan fiction.