Aesopian

the problem with swgrclan, you see, is that he is not LT manager

A hooded kharajyr laughs evilly from his fishing setup, "bwuahaha"

I thought the princess had died there. When she does, can I steal her blood? They say there is power in king's blood.

Yeah, but it should be allowed to be grown. Bloody devs. I mean, players teleport around, so what? I think it's neat.

You should be explaining the teleportation mechanic, not removing it.

Its actually (0.70^4) or around a 24% chance of failure for four Druids in one day.

These creatures should be a subtype of ent.

~| The Savage Glade |~ A druid is not pure. Our drive is not pure. I hate the City. It consumes me. I hate the cobbles and the towers, the bridges and the alleys. I hate the churches, bastards born of hubris. I hate the castles, seats for obese kings who sit atop hierarchies made of coin and social strata. In a truly natural world, there is no hatred for the City, because there are no cities. A druid can tear from her chest the family tabard, she can put the torch to her own home and belongings, she can beat her skull on the rocks until she has forgotten how to speak, but the City will still be part of her. That is what it is to be a druid, whether you are serene or hateful, you are a bringer of balance. A tree does not consciously bring balance to the world. It simply acts in accordance with its nature, and this is balance. A druid makes a great sacrifice to bring balance to the world, because so long as they are a druid, they will never be in balance themselves. To follow a code, even a druidic code, is to be unnatural. In my last missive, I asked you to travel into the forest and meditate. The ravens spoke of many that wandered into the glades throughout Axios to sit and consider. Unfortunately, they cannot read your minds, so I might only hope that in your thoughts you found enlightenment. The descendants hold a power which is far beyond anything an animal might muster -- the capacity to choose between the natural and unnatural. We can choose to pursue attunement with the world, or we can languish in our vapid mental constructions. It is the ultimate spiritual need, for all peoples, to become natural. The truest reward for a druid is to no longer be a druid. It is to release your staff, to remove your cloak, and to disappear into the forest. Every word cleansed from your mind, like bits of moss from a rocky edifice. Only you remain, instinct your guide. Never again will you accept a command, and never again will you give one. There is nail and tooth, blood and spittle. They say that the few who reach this great plateau free themselves from the curses of Iblees -- that by giving up everything they purify themselves in the flow of nature. It is the paradise I would seek we all embrace, if only it were possible. Now, I will place another task in your hands. Any of you, or all of you. Travel into the city and meditate. Think of what you hate, and what you love. Think of the trees cut down, the animals ripped apart, and the lands perverted in the name of the city. Think of the towers erected, and the colosseums constructed. To sacrifice your own personal purity is necessary to destroy the very thing which most threatens it. For now, you will serve, and you will undo the harm levied unto the world by the descendant. When the time comes, the forest will await you. Show that you are dedicated to the cause of restoring balance to this world. I ask this of you. ~ March Ash You find a message on a sheaf of bark, scrawled in animal blood. Previous Issue Dreamer Next Issue Join the author.

If civil war isn't the death of the empire, beaurocracy surely will be.

~| The Savage Glade |~ Each day we die. Our bodies die. They crumble away like dry sandcastles on a windy day. Some of us build them well, and some build them poorly, but the wind and the tides tear at them all the same. But, our minds also die. It is the self-death of the man born again. We come across ideas and mull over them for a time, and then leave them to rot in the wastes of our memory. We stand by creeds and hold them close to our hearts, until we don't. We promise our husbands and wives that we will love them until the end of our days, and in that moment it is true. Then, years down the line, we come to the realization that we do not love them any longer, because the person who did died long ago. Many of us fear death. We run from it. In the black of night, it is a long pale face. Dark, sunken eyes stare out at us. It is jagged teeth. We distance ourselves from it, but it is part of us. The cycle of life and death is indivisible, because it is one whole. In my last missive, I asked you to memorize religious texts and then burn them. The ravens complained that the smokier skies above the cities were difficult to fly in: I will take this as success. I heard even, from a small hummingbird, of a young dwarven boy hurling a tome into a pit of magma. The wisdom of children is strong. The death of a book, of a beam of light on the surface of your retina, has given birth to something that will grow to be beautiful. We have distanced ourselves far from what is right -- I'd not have to speak with you through these missives, had we not adopted the sin of language -- and those revelations will help us return to a better time. It would be a lie for me to say that for our world to be a Good world, we may have to suffer. We will have to suffer. Feudalism feeds the masses. Without it, countless will starve. Disease will become even more rampant. Many will not have shelter without the City, and will be forced to weather the elements without aid. If sin did not make us happy, if it did not feed us and nurture us, we would never pursue it. We have unsteadied the world and so must, for a time, endure the pains of our work. I wish to help you brave them, that we might survive them together. The cycle of life and death must be made to balance, either by our hand or by powers a thousand times stronger than we could ever muster. The flow of creation will one day turn against us, if we do not learn to ride its currents. Now, I will place another task in your hands. Any of you, or all of you. Travel into the forest and meditate. Think of who you are, and who you once were. Think of all the deaths of the people you have ever been. Each day a death and a new life. New reality flows into you, and builds you up. Old reality flows out of you, and tears you down. You are a single eddy in a river that spans the universe. You are distinct from it, but are simultaneously part of it. This is what it means to be you. Show that you are dedicated to the cause of restoring balance to this world. I ask this of you. ~ March Ash You find a message on a sheaf of bark, scrawled in animal blood. Previous Issue Dreamer Next Issue Join the author.

The Four Winds Among the Church's greatest servants, you will find golemlords, coatl, and at least one vampire saint. You will also find the Winds. The North Wind It is the warmest and the smallest of the winds. It is also the most human of the winds. It is known as the Killing Wind. It was imprisoned by the storm giants inside an iceberg for a while, but its release was eventually secured at great cost (a truce). The North Wind was altered by its imprisonment. Rumor claims that upon its release, the North Wind begged Zulin to be made human, and was refused. Unique among the Winds, the North Wind takes wives. (Men and women: all can become windwives.) One of the paladin orders, The Seraglio of the Blue Feather, is composed entirely of their number. (I'll do a post on them, eventually.) The North Wind is martial. It is often sent on missions of assassination by the Church. It kills through suffocation. It is capable of creating a near-perfect vacuum. The West Wind The West Wind is the noblest and most attentive of the winds. It is known as the Castle Wind. It is responsible for carving out the Holy Castle of Concrayda in the Immortal Mountains. The hands of the wind are both strong, nimble, and sadly limited. They are strong enough to hurl trees, dexterous enough to thread a needle while bearing it aloft, and yet they cannot set down an egg without breaking it. (They must always be moving quickly.) The hands of the wind are well-suited to sculpture, which it performs by throwing grains of sand. It took the West Wind over a century to complete its construction. You can see it atop Mount Crayda, rising from the peak like the flutes of a pipe organ. It is the Church's most private retreat, where they conduct international business, when the situation demands a neutral ground away from the Holy City of Coramont. The Castle was originally designed to be only accessible via flight, preferably by the West Wind personally carrying all guests up to the Castle. This practice was quickly discontinued (partially because of the Wind's aforementioned difficulty in setting things down gently) and a hasty staircase was carved. Concrayda is partially built for humans, but large portions of its interior are meant to host the West Wind itself, as well as the lesser winds that consort with it. It lives in the Holy Castle, and can sometimes be heard playing the castle like a musical instrument, which it is. Intruders are scoured to polished bones by the sand that carpets all of the rooms and hallways. The East Wind The East Wind is the smartest and swiftest of the winds. It is known as the Whispering Wind. It travels quickly. It brings news, carries messages. The recipients only notice a swiftly-building gale, followed by about six seconds of harsh winds, while a sibilant voice whispers swiftly into your ear, clearly audible above the din. The East Wind is the most popular of the Winds. Many smaller winds are obedient to it, or at least friendly, and they cooperate in gathering information for the East Wind. (Because of this, enemies of the Church always speak guardedly when a wind is blowing.) The East Wind loves to travel. It blows the Pope's private galleon wherever the Pope travels, and accompanies the Pope on all of his sea voyages. The Popes private galleon was designed for this: it lacks a keel and a rudder. In fact, the galleon more closely resembles a wooden tower with a skirt of sails along its midsection and a weighted bottom. It's a bit like a buoy. (And yes, buoys rock. The crew remains near the waterline when the ship is in motion, and the Wind stabilizes it when it is at rest. It is also stabilized by several enormous anchors arranged radially, like guy lines on a radio tower.) The South Wind The South Wind has never been tamed. It is difficult to capture a Wind by launching a crusade against it, and so this goal has eluded the Church for some time now. There was a time when the South Wind fought his three siblings, and all three were overcome. The South Wind is larger and more powerful than his three siblings combined. Fighting a Wind Good ******* luck. Even the smallest wind, the North Wind, is capable of throwing trees at you (although it prefers the intimacy of suffocation). And the East and West Winds are strong enough to pick you up and throw you a quarter mile. If they make an attack roll, your horse will land on you, too. The South Wind isn't any stronger locally, but it is so large that it can just form a circular loop on top of you, and then just keep blasting you with hurricane-force winds. But that brings me to my next point: the Winds cannot stop moving, and they have a hard time changing macro-direction locally. Think of them as having the speed and and maneuverability of a Boeing 747 that can control all the wind directly below it. Once it flies over you, it needs to circle back for another strafing run. This takes a few minutes, so you have plenty of time to prepare between Wind attacks, also known as "holy **** where did it find all those fence posts and it just sucked up our donkey" moments. It's like standing under a tornado for six seconds at a time, every five minutes. The best way to escape it is just to go underground. Just jump in the nearest cave and start going down until you hit Centerra's huge and world-spanning Underworld. You could also jump into a large body of water. Even a mighty Wind can't do much more than whip the surface into a furious spray. (Just mind the incipient boulders.) You can't hit the wind. That's stupid. Not even with a magic sword. Not even with a fireball spell. The best way to defeat one of the Great Winds is to trap it. This is why Winds rarely follow you very far into enclosed spaces. They're afraid of getting trapped like the North Wind was, and they're very weak when they are slow (e.g. turning around in a cramped cave). The best way to kill a Great Wind is to trap it, and then crush it. Maybe, like, a steel silo that retracts into the ground. It'll be like trying to crush a bunch of tigers in a grape press, though, so make sure that you build that thing sturdy. If a Wind dies, the wind will stop blowing from that direction. At least for a moment. Then there will be crazy windstorms for a few weeks as the lesser winds fight amongst themselves to establish dominance. All ships at sea will probably be sunk. Some spells are very effective when fighting winds. Protection from arrows functions a bit like protection from evil, and makes the wind unable to contact you directly. (It can still throw cows at you, though.) Winds cannot cross a wall of wind. (They're awfully good at going around, though.) Gust of wind injures them as if were a damaging spell of a comparable level. A reskinned scorching ray, perhaps? Control winds functions as a charm spell. Control weather can seal a Wind out of an area, or trap it inside of the area. If you cast gaseous form on yourself, you have basically jumped into the Wind's lap. You poor fool. It'll be like that time Hulk Hogan wrestled that puppy. A Great Wind is a 10 HD creature that's nearly impossible to damage or kill. A lesser wind is a 3 HD creature that is very similar. The lesser winds all have names and goals. They are all devout Hesayans, and have their own churches in the upper air. None of them can form tornadoes. Tornadoes are cheesy. Tornadoes with faces and hands are even cheesier. **** your anthropic chauvinism. And tornadoes are the wind equivalent of devils anyway (see also: dust devils). You'll never see a tornado in any place where the Church has a foothold. Until your meme posts are as good as this get the **** out of these forums.

Snow Elves descend from Moon Elves, not any of these kinds of elves.

I always tell you morons to add clauses and make these systems in depth but you never do because 'it's too complicated' and you 'don't have enough aphetamines'. Add clauses. make it robust hoky shot, I did it myself, you guys are the ones who made everything over simplified. Now people will complain.

~| The Filthy Tongue |~ Ink fades. The immortality of the written word is fleeting. A single spark caught in dry roof thatching can undo a lifetime of effort. Nature is, and always will be, a force for order and chaos in equal parts. We cannot escape it, just as we cannot escape the passage of time. We will always be made to endure change. Many worldly religions espouse their texts as truth. The Church of the Canon bears scrolls. It is not my role to doubt their content. The revelations to the authors of the scrolls may very well have been from the creator. However, dictated truth is imperfect. Language is imperfect. When I say 'red', the color represented by the word in your mind may be a shade different than that in my mind. It is simple to know that the holy scrolls, or any other physical representation of moral truth, is not the ultimate source of moral truth prescribed to us by the creator. This is because the physical world is fleeting. There will come a day when every scroll has turned to dust. What will we turn to then to know how to be Good? The purest representation of any creator's will can be found in their creation. In my last missive, I asked you to break pieces of the city with your firsts. Axios was a fine land when I came across it first in my travels, long before I ever came to the prime diaspora. Now, Axios is being corrupted. The city pervades its nooks and crevices. Roads cut through once-beautiful fields. It pains me in my soul. The ravens told me of broken fences and shattered masonry all throughout Oren -- but I heard little of similar activity in Sutica, Urguan, or the other nations. I am disappointed. I will expect you to do better next time. Our message is best delivered in action. Moral truth must be self-evident in nature, because nature is the only thing that is eternal. We have an imperfect duty to find moral truth in nature outside ourselves. The hunger that gnaws in a wolf's belly. The crow's caw above a rotten kill. The trembling of a brook. They teach us, and give us strength. This duty is imperfect because moral relativism pervades reality. We all find different truths in nature, and they are all correct, but they do not supersede the truths we find in ourselves. We have a perfect duty to find moral truth in our natural selves. Our passions and our hates. Hunger. Thirst. Lust. These are the base pursuits which were given to us through our creation, and they are the purest form of the what the creator wills us to do. When we act naturally, without consorting our higher faculties, we ensure we behave in a way which is moral -- otherwise, it only might be moral. Now, I will place another task in your hands. Any of you, or all of you. Memorize a religious text, and then burn it. A poem or a prayer, a psalm or an ancient obituary. The moral truth of a text can be ratified in your mind and forgotten. The unnatural reality of a book may be destroyed. Destruction and preservation are in two halves a whole, and comprise the cycle of life and death together. Show that you are dedicated to the cause of restoring balance to this world. I ask this of you. ~ March Ash You find a message on a sheaf of bark, scrawled in animal blood. Previous Issue Dreamer Next Issue Join the author.

Memetic, so like exclusively transmitted by information. When you want to erase someone's mind, you just say a very precisely intoned phrase, or (more likely) punch them in a bunch of specific places. Obviously these are extreme examples, in reality it'd take hours to tear someone's mind down. if you've read dune, it's just a fusion of being a bene gesserit and a mentat

This magic should be purely memetic, circumventing traditional voidiness entirely. that said, it'll never happen because you guys are uncool, so this is a fine substitute

The orcs were doomed the moment the sky smiths removed their increased physical strength, says Ti'gobser.

For an orc, life is war. It is the sharpening of weapons on the bones of one's old enemies. It is the slaughter of wild beasts, to turn their hides into armor and their skulls into goblets. It is fiery sex on the eve of battle (and then again, upon return). It is an eternal, unending war. The dream of a single realm under orcish dominion is impossible, because it is not that dream the orcs ultimately want -- it is the pursuit of that dream. The moment they have their utopia is the moment they would shatter it. The struggle. The strife. That is what tells an orc he is alive. This is the Good Life for an orc, because it is a reflection of the struggle within an orc. The war without is a reflection of the war within. It is the conflict between competing feelings for duty and love, it is the lust for power and the restrictions of honor. An orc's internal conflict is as much a war as the battles he fights in the real world. A passive reality does not accurately reflect a person's internal struggles, so they can find no peace. A bureaucratic pursuit is not satisfying. A glorious war is. Chaos and order, hate and love, the conflict is beauty. When Krug battles Horen, it's not only because he feels he has been abandoned, it is because he feels Horen's pain. Krug can tell the war within Horen has turn to ash, that the life that once animated him has been snuffed to smoke by the curse of Iblees. And so, within Krug there is a battle, between his hope to release his loving brother from living hell, and his hate for Horen's abandonment. I don't think this should be resolved. When Krug carries Horen's pale-skinned body, about to bleed out, into the deserts, I think it would be good for us to be allowed to wonder. Is it hate that fueled his choice to fight Horen, or love? Or is it both, twisted as tightly as two anacondas focking, in a way you can never tease them apart? It is important to remember that humans may fear death and want to live, but that an orc may not respect this. Krug may not respect Horen's wanting to live, believing that it is the foolishness of a demented mind. Or, maybe it is Krug's hate that is telling him to ignore Horen's wishes, disguised as his hope to free Horen from the hell of old-age. Who knows. Anyway, that's my two shakes on it. Internal conflict is cool IMO. I think a fusion of this and old lores would be appropriate for maintaining server cohesiveness, then it'd seem like more story was revealed, rather than explicitly a retcon.

Aesopian 4 lyfe

remove the channel mute and just kick anyone who uses a soundboard