Accelerando

I just finished Charles Stross' Accelerando. It is, in my opinion, the best book of his that I have read. While it is available on the net here, I did read the paperback, as JA had snapped it up in a charity shop. After hearing some comments about its incomprehensibility from my colleagues, I was slightly apprehensive. I was hooked from chapter 1! Robotic pets, uploaded crustacean intelligences, bad mercantilist aliens, worse post-human AI capitalist scum, and an interesting approach to issues of body and soul, made for a highly enjoyable read.

Void Rose - Religion

The issue of religion in Void Rose:

I was thinking that the religious beliefs of the (Agafiya) and the Javed are similar. These would be some sort of Taoist style "Way" religion which is more an approach to the world as it is, rather than a religion in the western sense.

The Agafiya 's version of the Way is the New Age hippy version. Personal Development, Harmony with the world and all that. Adepts and Arcana reflects this. Dislike of Sorcery per Blue Rose, because it goes against the natural order of the world.

The Javed version reflects a more sinister side of the Way, reflecting a desire to master and twist the natural order of things according to one's selfish desires. It utilises sorcery, and was responsible for the cornucopia of cataclysmic events that destroyed most of the planets. Most of its adherents are evil sorcerers and undead lich-king monsters.

For the Resheph, they do have a more traditional western point of view, with a patriarchal, messianic religion based around a god represented most commonly as a living flame, but which has quite a few anthropomorphic characteristics. Possibly the living flame being appeared to save them from the disasters caused by the Javed.

I am considering a splinter-sect of the Resheph, possibly incorporating elements from the Agafiyan 'Way', possibly a more deist approach to their religion in which the nature of things is an embodiment of the living flame.

Blue Rose...In Space

I watched First Knight on BBC last night with JA, it was even worse than I remembered it. However it made me spend about half an hour reading Blue Rose while trying to wake up this morning, as both the plot, and aesthetics of the movie resonates really well with the Romantic Fantasy of the game. I have also been reading the Savage Worlds Scifi toolkits lately, so these things must have morphed together in my mind.

I started thinking about a True20 Settings called Void Rose(Working Title). Essentially, it is Blue Rose style Romantic Fantasy in Space.

I want to keep the tripartite structure of Aldis and her antagonists, Jarzon and Kern. So here are some basic ideas:


Spelljammer style crystal sphere which contains all of creation.

3 Major Powers:

The Good(Agafiya? ): Open-minded good-guy kingdom, based on social contract with both populace and surrounding world. Uses ships that are living(Plantlike possibly) and are controlled using Psychic Arcana.

The Bad(Resheph?): Not so open-minded steampunk, victorian, white man's burden religious fanatics. Uses ships that are uses living flame(or something or other) to power steampunklike vessels. Probably uses cannon and other nasty things.

The Ugly(Javed ?): The undead bastards. Evil powermad, life-hating monsters. Uses ships that are vampiric entities (possibly warped and corrupted versions of The Good ships), which uses lifeforce as their powersource.


The setting is a solar system on which most planets have been destroyed by cataclysms caused by hubris and folly and so on, and so most of the action will have to take place in space or on small moons and asteroids. My initial idea is for there to be this aethyric energy field which is created by all living things(Yes, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away), which makes life possible on these rocks.

I am thinking of having archetypical PC parties be roving bands of Agafi(?) agents, swashbuckling heroes, possibly having some of the Elizabethan Seahawk mystique, combined with that of a frontier US Marshals.

First!

This is a test. Just seeing if it actually works. It's not like I haven't made a blogpost before, but the utter need to procrastinate just got the better of me...