Another Cosplay Rat Doodle.

A quick doodle of... okay, it's Meenah from Homestuck, but it's, in this case, the image I'll be using for my character in an RPG who is also a fish-chick with a trident.  It's... complicated...  whatever.

And, finally, here's a Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine Doodle I did.

  An Octopus Singer, a Fortitude Rat, a few Octopus sketches, and a Horizon Ghost (the ghost I am the least happy with....).  

….And Rinley too! I should wait until this is all done… But I have no idea when I’m going to just give up, so I’m going to just spam these until I don’t anymore.

"An Unreliable Narrative" - A Prototype Welcome to Night Vale Quest Set for Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (Part 1)

Okay, so I've been thinking about Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, and I've been thinking about Welcome to Night vale, and I've been thinking about how to combine Chuubo and Night Vale together. More specifically, I've been trying to think about Chuubo Quest Sets and just how tricky they are to make.

If you don't follow Welcome to Night Vale, it's one of the most popular podcasts ever, about(and I'll use the cliche description everyone uses from the first episode) "A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep": http://commonplacebooks.com/welcome-to-night-vale/

If you don't follow Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, it's an unreleased Tabletop RPG written by Jenna Moran, designed, primarily, for playing Miyazaki-inspired games, but its same sense of normalcy among the strange definitely can fit:  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1710667762/the-chuubos-marvelous-wish-granting-engine-rpg

As a fun exercise that no one will ever get any use out of, I thought I'd mess around a bit with making a Cecil Quest Set, which I am going to tentatively call the Unreliable Narrative Quest Set.

Alright, so let's break down a Cecil Arc. In my mind, the Cecil Arcs of Welcome to Night Vale typically traverse a certain path:

Reporting: Cecil dispassionately observes and reports even momentous events, as if they are completely external to him.

Editorializing: Some crisis or issue strikes Cecil/Night Vale causing him express fear or concern OR state opinions that clash with official opinions

Becoming the Story: Cecil is, personally, drawn into events, whether it be physically, emotionally, or merely by association.

Human Interest: Cecil has some sort of personal revelation, emotional catharsis, or transformative event

A Return to Normalcy: Cecil settles back in, the revelations of the past ignored or integrated.

Now, for various reasons, I'm pegging Cecil as being on a Storyteller Arc, generally. The most obvious is the nominal relationship, but the authorship abilities of the Storyteller Arc, and the slow burn character development of its Quest set both fit the character, in my mind. As, Ms Moran said, he's almost a background character-type, not a lot of actual growth along his path for most of the story, except, perhaps, in short bursts.

Basically, the Storyteller Arc is as follows...

Doing your thing, being cool

Continuing to do your thing even as things start getting messy

Facing things outside of your expertise

Go for the gold, the biggest prize

Fall back to earth, rebuffed by your earlier overreach

It's not exactly a map, but it's not too far off. The overall shape of the Arc feels similar.

I think I should go to bed now... But I'll come back to this, i think. Maybe. 

Well, maybe not.

Three!  Spheres!  Cataclysm!

Journey to the Outside

And the angel of the sun did fall. She fell, down, down, from the sky, and into the emptiness beyond the world, beyond the things that were good and real, out where only false and nonexistent things might live.

And then they knew what it was to know darkness, to know meaninglessness, to lose all hope. The world, the whole and breadth of it, knew what it was like to be without a sun.

But at the same time...

...and, perhaps, this was most surprising of all...

At the same time and for the first time, the emptiness beyond knew what it was to have a sun.

And the whole of it changed.

--- Journey to the Outside, a fan campaign for Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine

So, I've been working, off-and-on, for a while on an idea I've had to do a Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine Epic Adventure campaign in the style of Journey to the West. I'm almost ready to get started running it, so I thought I'd share the stuff I've got so far. Instead of actually creating the mechanics for the characters, I'm giving descriptions and allowing the players to choose their Arcs on their own. I'll probably write up, at least, the starting Quests for each character, eventually, but I haven't gotten there yet. So far it's mostly just a list of characters and a bit of description for each one, and their variants.

Introduction

Jade Irinka is dead. The sun has fallen into the Outside and the world is reeling under a strange and alien sky. Each day a ball of blazing gas rises and sets, casting shadows and helping the plants to grow. But it is not the sun - and in their bones, the people of Town know it.

It is a mournful thing to live in a fallen world.

But there is hope. Or, rather, there is a chance for hope. Hope exists, but someone has to venture out into the Outside and get it. Someone has to go on a journey to save the world. And not just anybody: gods and monsters and villains… and also just some guy.

It sounds like it will be an Epic Adventure, doesn’t it?

Sidebar: Conventions

This campaign is an Epic Fantasy game featuring THREE Conventions, manifesting as level 2 Afflictions:

The stage may be small but audience is great

You are well known wherever you go

And

There’s always a place to stay when the weather gets bad

Journey to the Outside - Characters

Prepare to go on a great quest to the ends of Creation and well, well beyond. Before you know what to pack for such a quest, though, you need to figure out just who you are! So, are you...

❀ The Light Seeker, Tripp Tanaka, if you want

✶ to be the sort of person who tends to fall headfirst into trouble

✶ to make friends out of enemies

✶ to be sort of naive and embarrassing

✶ to have a mission to find a great treasure

(or are you the Rider girl variant, Susan Numidia, instead?)

❀ The Peerless Spirit, Sonya Hou, if you want

✶ to be an impossibly skilled nature god

✶ to be a reluctant hero and a bit of a jerk

✶ to climb a ladder to heaven and face what doth dwell therein

(or are you the cyborg variant, SWk-2456, instead?)

❀ The Vice Magus, Roderick Titov, if you want

✶ to be something of a comic relief

✶ to use weird and scary magic to get what you want

✶ to decide the fate of whole worlds despite being wildly unqualified

(or are you the girl variant, Zoey Titova, instead? Or maybe you're Colbrand, the False Light?)

❀ The Granite Knight, Oboliu Waite, if you want

✶ to be steadfast even in the face of terrible things

✶ to labor under a terrible enchantment

✶ to get things done when your companions are always faffing about

✶ to be asked to sacrifice your life to remove a great darkness from the world

(or are you the boy variant, Dace Lillimut, instead?)

❀ The Servant Prince, Julian Lungren, if you want

✶ to change into a bunch of shapes but especially an enormous dragon!

✶ to quest to regain your honor and impress your family

✶ to put someone else's needs before your own

✶ I did mention becoming a dragon, right?

(or are you the girl variant, Yurian Lopez, instead?)

Or come and be . . .

❀ The HG, or "Hollyhock God," if you want

✶ to focus on describing the world rather than being attached to any particular character

✶ to play the game, and nobody else is being the HG, so you had better!

✶ to be able to just say that things happen and they do, and

✶ to help pull together a story from the things characters do,

I guess this is the first nonsense I’ve ever reblogged.

I want to know how big the Tumblr Chuubo’s and Nobilis fandom is!

If you like Nobilis or Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, like this post. If you generate content for them, reblog this post.

(Re what counts as “generate content”: posting an occasional character sheet every so often is plenty. There isn’t a “you must post this frequently to count” bar.)

"An Unreliable Narrative" - A Prototype Welcome to Night Vale Quest Set for Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (Part 2)

Alright, so.  I should talk about what this Quest Set is “About” before I start making it, I think.

Since it’s the Cecil Quest Set, it’s going to be, primarily, about Strange Happenings and Emotional Reactions.  It’ll be about mildly dealing with the strange and terrible, being filled with apprehension or worry or passion, about facing off against the dark monsters around you, and about finding a new boyfriend, or finding out about your own weird past or finding that maybe, just maybe, you were wrong about someone… who was still a total jerk.  

Who else, other than Cecil might be on “An Unreliable Narrative” Arc?  Fox Mulder is probably on either the Bindings or Otherworldly version of this Arc.  Of the other characters of Night Vale, only Old Woman Josie seems to be on the the Cecil Arc*… probably a Shepherd or Mystic version of it.  I’m not sure who else off the top of my head.  

Anyways, quest by quest for the Cecil version of the set.

Storyteller 1:

This Quest is about simply dealing with strange happenstance.  Weird stuff is going on, but that doesn’t mean you need to get all bent out of shape about it!  Do what you’re doing.  Talk about the weird stuff.  You’ve got a job to do and you can’t let strange stuff get in the way.  Sounds like a Work-and-Study Quest to me.  Perhaps something like…

Stoic Witness

20 or 25 XP Quest

You’ve got a job to do.

The news won’t report itself.  The bagels won’t bake themselves.  There are strange things going on and you take note.  You watch them.  You talk about them.  But you don’t let them side track you.

After all.  People are counting on you.

✿ Stoic Witness (25 XP)

Major Goals

The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:

You maintain your composure even as something world-changing and terrifying is happening just off screen.

You give up an opportunity for wealth, power, or happiness, because you have other duties to attend to.

You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 10 XP.

Quest Flavor

1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:

✿ go about your work day as usual

✿ take pride in a job well done

✿ spend time admiring something simple (a flower, a cup of coffee, a stray cat)

✿ describe something strange you witnessed to another person

✿✿ give a monologue of seemingly nonsensical gibberish, ostensibly about the nature of reality, but with deep metaphorical relations to current events

✿✿ give a monologue of seemingly nonsensical gibberish, ostensibly about the nature of reality, but apropos of nothing

✿ pretend that what you’re doing is more important than it is

Or, the shorter version....

✿ Stoic Witness(Simplified) (20 XP)

Major Goals

The HG can award you 5 XP towards this quest when:

You maintain your composure even as something world-changing and terrifying is happening just off screen.

You narrate the events of a phantasmagoric dream state as they occur.

You can earn each bonus once, for a total of up to 10 XP.

Quest Flavor

1/chapter, you can earn a bonus XP towards this quest when you:

✿ talk about what’s going on around you

✿✿ talk about what’s going on with your everyday life

✿ spend time admiring something simple (a flower, a cup of coffee, a stray cat)

✿ describe something strange you witnessed to another person

✿ find yourself surrounded by water, snow, or strange mute children

✿✿ talk about things you cannot possibly know

✿ worry that you might be missing out on something because of work

Annoyingly, I didn't realize Tumblr wouldn't keep my coloring.  Anyway....

One Quest down.  I’m going to take another break…  this was the first thing I did when I woke up!

* I thought, with its themes, some of the other Night Vale characters might fit… but really, Carlos is on a Scientific Adventure.  The Apache Tracker was on a Heartwarming, Heart-rending Coming-of-Age Story Arc.  Tamika Flynn is on a Secret History, and The Man in the Tan Jacket and The Faceless Old Woman Who Lives in Your House seem to be on Numinous Gardens Arcs.  Intern Dana is probably on a Heartwarming, Heart-rending Coming-of-Age Story, too.