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Hi everyone. I'm Echo, though depending on how you got here you may also know me as Professor Vining, Active Historian for Mission: Zodiac. I'm here on Dreamwidth for a few reasons, and I'm offering this post as an explanation of what you can expect from me.
First off, the modern internet is... not good. I was a teen in the 90s, and I think the general structure of the web in the late 90s/early 00s was much better than the walled garden corporate hellscape we have going on now. As a follow-on point, I feel like social media is a bit in the process of collapse. Facebook has been largely unusable for years due to a combination of the ad density and algorithmic timeline. Twitter has been in a sometimes-funny death spiral since Elon Musk took over. I have a lot of hope for Bluesky, but currently there's a bit of a kerfluffle over how much of a perfect techno-libertarian you can be with regards to moderation, and I'm uncertain if it's going to survive this intact. I had a lovely time on Tumblr in the mid-10s, but they made some misguided choices with regards to handling adult material, and I've lost just about everyone I used to know there; the nice people I have been able to find again don't feel quite the same. Instagram and Tik Tok are all pictures and video, and as you'll be able to tell after only a short time here, I'm all about typing words. Also, I'm kinda bad at social media. I'm not really a 'poster' or 'influencer', as it were, and I tend to spend a lot of time on there just reading my feed, sharing funny memes, and leaving weird and/or flirtations comments on my friends' posts. And every few years I think to myself, 'Gosh I miss Livejournal.' So here I am, reaching for a version of the world that doesn't really exist anymore, but I think we can try for a little while anyway.
The other thing is, as alluded to from the introductory paragraph, I'm a writer. It used to be short stories with the occasional poem, now a lot of my effort goes into tabletop roleplaying games. My main work is Professor Vining's Guide to the Mythic Age, a fantasy setting. I'm working on putting it in multiple game systems, including one of my own design called Dreams of a Mythic Age. I've been tinkering with some version of the setting and/or game system for close to 20 years now, so various parts of it are in different stages of completion. I'll discuss what I'm working on and what I'm thinking here, and I invite any comments and input into my design process that you'd like to offer. When things are (basically) done, I'll put them up on my website, http://missionzodiac.neocities.org . Because, pursuant to issues in the second paragraph, wasn't it nice when we all had our own little websites?
Been a while, but I've been back at it lately. I recently finished chapter four of the Guide, Technology in the Mythic Age. This is, effectively, the equipment chapter, and like Magic of the Mythic Age it's a little sparse without a mechanical side. I also worked up the goblin ancestry and a related culture, which have been added to Uncommon Heritage. This is an interesting one, as the goblins are expats from a campaign world my kid made called the Goblin Green. They always imagined the world as being in relation to my own Mythic Age work, and now it's got a real presence in my Guide, so that's pretty cool. The entry is a mix of ideas from both of us. As is the whim of an ADHD teenager, they've moved on from the Goblin Green to other worlds and ideas, but this bit of creation they did has a permanent mark on my setting (more than has really been revealed -- I let them make a huge effect on the cosmology with one of their ideas).
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Work on the game continues sporadically, because that's the kind of person I am. I've most lately been working on the mechanical side of things, getting some of the basic rules down for Dreams of a Mythic Age, the game system I'm building for the setting. I've also been thinking about how the world looks under Pathfinder, so I may tinker with that when I'm feeling a little stalled out on original system work. Also, I updated the look of the web site a bit, after some feedback from a couple friends.
In my thoughts on what to put into Technology in the Mythic Age, I had some thoughts about magical tattoos, and how would those work, and that got me thinking about the subject of how one goes about enchanting people and items in a more permanent fashion. It occurs to me that 'magic items' is really more of a Magic of the Mythic Age thing, so I'm gonna be headed over there for an update before resuming work on the new chapter. I'm thinking stormkisser tattooing, the rune of permanence, adjustments to one's prime element, and the phenomenon of divine endowment.
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Working on Technology in the Mythic Age, and I thought I'd share this oddity in design: the Mythic Age is post-scarcity fantasy. It all started when I was reading the excellent Spheres of Power, an alternative magic system for the Pathfinder RPG. They've got some spells that let a character conjure materials, and at higher levels there's an optional ability that lets you produce things like precious metals. They include a sidebar warning that this ability can easily unbalance, you know, 'the economy' or whatever. I thought, what if I lean into it instead? What if magic can produce anything anybody needs, and so the economy effectively disappears? What if I can do Star Trek post-scarcity in a fantasy setting? Turns out, I can, and the concept of ley line nodes in every town that anybody can use is the key.
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Hi everyone! So it turns out, I had three chapters of my Guide to the Mythic Age (and one supplemental document) done already. I've spent the last few days since my first post formatting them up for the web site and getting them uploaded. So far, People of the Mythic Age, Places of the Mythic Age, Magic of the Mythic Age, and Uncommon Heritage are up on the website, which as a reminder is http://missionzodiac.neocities.org. Now I'm ready to start work on new material, which I figure I'll talk about in this space as it goes. In terms of the Guide, I'm thinking chapter 4 is Technology in the Mythic Age, which will cover things like nonmagical clockwork, the Striding City's electrical technology, and lumentech, but also be the 'equipment chapter'. I've also gotta work on some of the mechanical concerns, so that the content of the Guide is actually playable.
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