fearne: do you want to come into my bed.... 😏 cuddle for warmth 😘 i wont hurt you i promise 😉
fearne, having succeeded: okay now that you're in my bed.... we can get down to business.... 😉😉😉
fearne: you know that sword we traded u for passage. i kind of want it back :( or can i at least say bye to it :(((
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i also love how Bor'Dor is, like, just A Guy with a hair-trigger startle response so his go-to is blindly firing high-level spells and screaming before apologising profusely
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Oh man, it was so good to see them all again!! I'm going to have to rewatch at some point, but Caleb is definitely in a weird, emotional in-between place.
Like, you're in your early 30s, all of your friends have careers, and Significant Others, and even families, and there’s just you. Who had a traumatic childhood that delayed your start on adulthood and maybe means you're "behind the curve." The only time you've ever lived on your own you were starving on the streets, homeless and penniless and sunk so deep into a depression you didn't feel human. Now you have a house, and a Tower, all your own, but it is so. Empty. Your friends visit, and you're just a Sending or a Teleport away, but . . . They have their own lives. And that depression maybe starts to sink back in. And you finally have some closure on the biggest quest of your life since it became your own, but all that means is you're kind of directionless. What now? What next? What if I choose wrong?
And yes, on top of that you're falling more and more in love with your Kryn Friend who visits you, but always on his terms. And that's okay, he has his own problems and his own priorities, and you can't imagine you would be worth more risk than he is already taking. You have the life you deserve . . . The life you earned . . . So why does it not feel like enough?
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Okay here's the thing though. Actual play is not like other narrative forms, because the amount of chance involved in the game play means that the ending, in most scenarios, is not already written, and even when it is, as in EXU: Calamity, how you get there is not yet set in stone.
But notably, what is set in stone, the past, only goes back so far. In theory, character backstory is pre-written, but anyone who has played TTRPGs with an emphasis on story and character will recognize that backstory is a lot more fluid than we might imagine, and certainly more fluid than the history of a real person. As you really begin to play the character, you find the ways the backstory doesn't quite mesh, what needs to be cut or fleshed out, and you can make those edits over time so long as they haven't yet been brought out explicitly in game.
But the farther along you get, the more you have to make explicit, and the less leeway you have (at least without significant, usually clunky, retconning) to change that past to suit the future that you're developing.
At the same time, though, the backstory that does get set into stone over the course of the game is still in many ways virtual, in that it is often, if not exclusively, filtered through the point of view of the character's memory. Even in the flashback sequences of this chapter of Candela Obscura, the emphasis tends to be on how the characters remember it, and what they choose to remember—Sean doesn't know, will never truly know, if the children he killed were monsters or not; Nathaniel doesn't focus in his memory on the fact that he tried to save his brother, he only remembers having failed.
In this sense, there is generally an element of unreliability to backstory. Because it exists in memory (even for the players, who usually have not played out every one of those moments as if they were living it, only having remembered it), it is subject to the fallibility that memory always involves.
This kind of restricted timescale, the entire world contained concretely only within the context of game play, is a mechanical reality and limitation of TTRPGs in general, and much like the laws of physics, it's not really malleable. One could play out certain pieces of backstory, but cannot ever live the entirety of a character's experience, and even then, the larger context of that experience will always exist outside of the world until it is made concrete in the course of the game.
This is the brilliance of Marion's breaking of time. The manipulation takes advantage of the fact that this memory is only a memory, because even as played out between him and Jean in "Flesh and Blood," it is still filtered through how the Marion of the game remembers it, and not a concrete experience.
That ability of the Medium, to manipulate reality and change oneself in the process, as though it had always been this way, is a mechanical acknowledgement of the already slippery flow of time in game play. It is a beautiful mechanical form of retcon that doesn't feel like a cheat or a copout, and it's simultaneously a very clever way of managing the tension between these limitations of form and the common fantasy archetype of diviners and seers.
Using it to then literally rewrite the past, because the details of the past are still fluid until they are explicitly written, is nothing short of poetic.
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