Sythyry placement and displacement
Jul. 17th, 2010 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sythyrySythyry is not quite canonical World Tree! Canonical World Tree is defined by the RPG sourcebook. I've generally been trying to keep quite close to canonical. But I have drifted away from it in a few respects. Here's what I can think of just now:
- Transaffection is far more despised in Sythyry's version of World Tree than in the canonical one.
- Vae is far more dangerous and brainwarped than the baseline nendrai in the rulebook, though that is explained in-story.
- Sythyry is using some as-yet-unpublished rules to enchant things fast.
- Sythyry is not perfectly reliable on some topics, like how well Cani read emotions -- they read them far better than a human (or Zi Ri) does, but not the near-mindreading that Sythyry sometimes seems to think.
- Oh, and not many people but Sythyry, Kantele, and Inconnu actually agreed with Sythyry's previously-held, now-abandoned theory of transaffection.
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Date: 2010-07-18 02:39 am (UTC)I also really don't know enough about world tree (despite reading the Rule Book about a dozen times) to know what is and isn't canon.
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Date: 2010-07-18 03:03 am (UTC)1) I don't like people much (or the subset of people I know who are 15 at anyrate), and this is very good so why would I want to give them something so thoroughly enjoyable?
2) Most of that subset wouldn't be terribly enthused about it because of how little it involves (explicit) sex. This is neither pornography (detailed and graphic) or erotica (vague, imaginative, romatic) and so would not appeal to that part of a 15 year old.
3) Most of that subset wouldn't be terribly enthused about it because of how little it would be (publicly) liked. After all, all things furry are evil and whatnot, at least in the eyes of the vocal masses (so very few people actually, but they are loud ones).
Those also double as some of the many reasons I love Sythyry's Vacation.
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Date: 2010-07-18 03:53 am (UTC)I'd happily hand it to folks of various ages, regardless of whether they liked to read, or liked furry. For one, there's a long history of animal-people in literature, from Winnie-the-Pooh through Animal Farm to Redwall (among other current books). Various people will also find animal-people accessible in a way that 'Real Literature' is pushed away, due to seriousness and other potential distaste-relics from schooling.
But then, I'm weird like that, having been in the science-fiction-&-fantasy fandom community for not quite 30 years, and having raised two kids.
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Date: 2010-07-18 04:24 am (UTC)Departures from canon
Date: 2010-07-18 04:16 am (UTC)argueshare their viewpoint with me if they like. >:)* The sourcebook states that "tolerant villages" treat both-females as co-lovers, and intolerant ones kill them at birth. (p. 24) Sythyry's Journal had them treated as female if not killed.
* Raven's Beak: we talked about this once and IIRC you said it was appropriate under the rules, but I don't think it makes sense within canon. 1) Durudor spells are usually more complex than the non-Durudor equivalent; a 5-cplx Durudor defensive spell is definitely not canonical, no matter how weak. 2) The Useless Spell (p 234 cplx 10 Cr * Ma *) is clearly intended to serve the min-maxing purpose of Raven's Beak, but it's cplx 10, does nothing at all, and potentially irks the gods. Granted, it has the potential to hit all 7 verbs and Raven's Beak only hits 2, but Raven's Beak is clearly a far better min-maxing spell. However, the specific reason I disallowed it is less for these reasons than because many players like to differentiate their characters from one another based on their skills, and Raven's Beak basically means that not only the PCs, but all other adventurers in the world, will tend to have symmetrical and uniform development across all Nouns. My players do not all agree with me as to whether or not Raven's Beak should be canon -- Lut pretends to be bitter that Delight gets it when his PC didn't. >:)
* IIRC (I can't find the page reference), the sourcebook treats homosexual and transpecies romance as pretty much the same -- they're both kind of quirky and unsuitable for marriage, but not particularly stigmatized. Sythyry's treatment of homosexual marriage as ordinary and pedestrian is likewise as non-canonical as the stigma against transpecies.
* Ketheria is bigger: the sourcebook says that "Central Ketheria" is the area within 200-300 miles of the trunk (p 82), and Vheshrame isn't that close to the trunk, per Sythyry's suggested distance from Vheshrame to Oorah Thrassen. Possibly Vheshrame isn't in central Ketheria? But that doesn't feel right.
* As Terrycloth noted, city walls in Sythyry seem more potent and versatile than in the sourcebook. The sourcebook also portrays city walls as often making life within the city uncomfortable in various ways, and says that they "kill a few Prime children a year". (p. 77) City walls in Sythyry's World Tree don't seem to have any of these drawbacks.
Those're the ones that came to my mind.
Re: Departures from canon
Date: 2010-07-18 07:38 am (UTC)Total agreement on the both-female thing, tho.
-Alexandra
Re: Departures from canon
Date: 2010-07-18 01:54 pm (UTC)Anyway. The write-up for The Useless Spell doesn't specifically say that, but it's a sound notion. It could be complex because of the variability inherent in the spell(there is no cantrip that can use completely arbitrary arts, or even arbitrary nouns OR verbs, that I can find), but with it being Magiador and touching those arbitrary arts only most tenuously, it could indeed be because the gods don't like it.
The main worry is botching. If your Useless Spell involves, say, Locador as an art and it botches... you can expect yourself to be subject to "Here"'s tender mercies.
As a GM, I would probably assign at least two extra botch dice to any invocation of Useless Spell and perhaps double penalties(from being hurt and from Trouble, chiefly), to reflect how little the gods like it, and to give the possibility for the resulting botch to be suitably terrifying. The spell requires delicacy to keep the relevant gods from being offended. If you throw a Useless Spell while you're entangled and itching and who-knows-what, and that power die rolls a 1... well, your cley would probably have been better spent on something else. Anything else.
(I can't think of why anyone already in serious trouble would use that spell, but it should be even more clearly a bad idea to directly offend the gods in your time of need.)
Re: Departures from canon
Date: 2010-07-18 02:32 pm (UTC)There's no reason to have the spell exist if there's a cplx 5 spell that serves the same powergaming purpose with no "the gods hate it" disadvantage. (Yes, you can argue it's because The Useless Spell can potentially handle all Verbs and not just nouns, but in practice being cplx 10 makes The Useless Spell much harder to involve extra arts at all).
Like a proper literary analyst, I see no reason to assume authorial intent should dictate my reading of the text, so technically it doesn't matter if Bard agrees with me or not. >:)
From a sociological perspective, I generally prefer the "both-females should act female" take. If both-females are despised, no one's going to want to marry one, so having them act as female makes them easier to ignore entirely. It's not uncommon for females to never marry, after all.
Dustweed did get considerably more hate from the wider community for being both-female than is canonical, though. It's a -1 disadvantage in the book and says that the character will be at a -2 on social rolls from other Herethroy. The "nice" conversations that Sythyry overheard about Dustweed when they went to Across Saga were between non-Herethroy about how disgusting zie was and how they wished zie would leave and the management should not have let something like zir into the establishment.
Re: Departures from canon
Date: 2010-07-18 10:35 pm (UTC)Re: Departures from canon
Date: 2010-07-18 01:35 pm (UTC)(*: Of course, males and some co-lovers might well be officially members of another triad; this would presumably be "outside both triads").
Re: Departures from canon
Date: 2010-07-18 02:06 pm (UTC)I am sure there was a sentence in the sourcebook somewhere about this -- explicitly lumping all non-fertile unions together -- but I cannot find it anywhere now. x.x It's driving me nutes.
Re: Departures from canon
Date: 2010-07-18 02:28 pm (UTC)I think I do see your point, though. Even in the species which could be expected to care more about such things(Rassimel being the chief one involved in Sythyry's journal), that seems to be getting quietly ignored. Cani marry in large, mixed-sex units and Orren families are all over the map, so either of them being intimate with someone of the same sex is hardly of note. (Not that all Orren family partnerships are intimate, even.)
Re: Departures from canon
Date: 2010-07-18 03:08 pm (UTC)Re: Departures from canon
Date: 2010-07-19 05:05 pm (UTC)Re: Departures from canon
Date: 2010-07-20 06:58 pm (UTC)Now, my extrapolation from this and the earlier sections on the eight species was that what forms this took would indeed depend on the species; by the sound of it, because Cani are close-knit, it would not be uncommon for...ah...body-play between mates and mates-of-mates and such, but to have a marriage or mateship between a pair of same-gendered Cani (or a member of another species) would be unusual, and fit the above; some longhouses would be more or less tolerant. Similarly, I'd wager that it may not be uncommon for an Orren marriage of several partners to end and leave a same-gendered couple, or to have a same-gendered couple seeking another (likely of the opposite gender) to join their marriage, and that is all likely more social acceptable then the above Cani example. And then there are the Zi Ri...
Re: Departures from canon
Date: 2010-07-18 10:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 05:24 am (UTC)The lack of italics in the question gave me some amusing mental images.
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Date: 2010-07-18 05:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 02:21 pm (UTC)The only differences I could think of offhand that weren't noted already are tthree:
First, shifter hybrids got their adult lifespan drastically reduced. Lithia's projected adult life(that is, not counting the roughly 30-year period of infancy, childhood, and adolescence) is ten years. Compare forty as the average cited in book, with the main complications starting up some 10 years before; also, Lithia shifts more frequently and rigidly than is portrayed in the book(pretty much universally hourly, rather than "an hour or two but I can hold out for a bit longer if it's more important to stay in one shape than to avoid the pain").
Second, certain of the species have never been encountered in variant forms. While this makes sense for Gormoror(there aren't many of them to begin with, thus not many have been met, and they tend to live in bands according to breed), it's almost surprising that variant Orren haven't drifted by. This is a very mild and even nitpicky point, though - Cani and Herethroy have been properly variable, there's been some varied Rassimel(including skunk and squirrel styling), and Zi Ri, well, see the rarity thing above with Gormoror. The even-more-scarcity of Zi Ri being balanced by family ties - and even within that, there's been variance. Sleeth have been different colours, and Khtsoyis... well, Khtsoyis.
Third, there has been next to no sign of cordial dealings with nonprimes, Vae(and her doom) notwithstanding. As an example: wherriwheffle herders are alluded to as a major source of livestock - most primes don't want to live outside the city; of those that do, Herethroy deal with plants, and neither the Gormoror nor the Sleeth seem particularly inclined toward farming of any sort. In contrast, the herdsman's greatest boon is a spell that most primes wouldn't want to admit knowing(involving Mentador), is originally a wherriwheffle spell, and is a spell that they can cast for free. Sure, fewer cities might let a wherriwheffle in than, say, a mherobump or taptet or even greft, because wherriwheffle are nuisances that like to pilfer shiny(read: Durudor; read: expensive) objects - but there'd at least be some commerce, maybe with some of their more stable representatives bringing a livestock train to the city gates every week or so. In a way, those philosophers on the inistella exemplified this point - first off, most of the beings encountered were rather scary(nycathath, perdithorne, the inistella itself, and to a degree the norren); second, the position of harmony, while extreme, was much more vilified than I might expect. It shouldn't be that much of a surprise to find a similar commune on-branch involving primes and the less threatening nonprimes; if you omit the perdithorne(who have an active dislike for Cani) and the inistella(for more practical reasons), there doesn't seem to be any reason the others couldn't live a quite happy life, including the nycathath defending them.
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Date: 2010-07-18 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 07:00 pm (UTC)