Where Faeries Come From

Faeries come from the dreams of children. Each faerie is dreamed into life by a particular child, or the way that old, wise faeries tell it, they dreamed themselves to life.

Each faerie inherits a few traits from their dreaming child: language, regional knowledge, favorite foods, nursery rhymes, etc.

And because they come from children's dreams, faeries are wildly varied and inherently chaotic. The capriciousness of faeries is the capriciousness of children. The whimsy of faeries is the whimsy of children. The cruelty of faeries is the cruelty of children.

That's why faeries kidnap children. They take them away and put them to sleep. (They put them in diabetic comas by feeding them candy.)

Faeries prefer to approach children (and childish adults). Though they give kisses, they have no concept of sex. And although they kill, they do not understand death.

Faerieland is filled with sleeping children. Great mounds of them. Orphanages where they are stacked like firewood.

Some children are trapped in nightmares, and terrible things come out of their heads. But that's okay. Faeries can't even spell 'consequences'.

And if one of those children is woken up, somewhere a faerie dies forever. They don't disappear; they suffocate. Eyes rolled back, gasping, as nightmares curl around their heads.

All Your Questions Will Be Answered

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge

Troll and Flame did it: http://trollandflame.blogspot.com/2014/01/d-40th-anniversary-blog-hop-challenge.html

So did Swords and Dorkery: http://mikemonaco.wordpress.com/2014/02/01/dds-40th-blog-hop/

And Dyson: http://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/2014/02/01/dungeons-dragons-dyso-28-questions-answers/

NOW I WILL DO IT.

I've never done one of these before, but I'll do my best.  Let me know if I go off topic or ramble or something.  

1. First person who introduced you to D&D. Which edition? Your first character?

I want to run a game where I put stats on everything.  HP, AC, attacks.  Like, at the most fundamental level, this would mean that the barbarian could dispel an enchantment by hitting it with his axe.  But it would also apply to other things.  Kill a fire by shooting it with wooden arrows?  Fine.  Destroy a child's sense of wonder?  Okay.  Attack the darkness?  YES.  Killing someone's civil liberties?  Check.

Basically, it's a one-button video game, and you can solve any problem by (a) identifying what you need to kill, and (b) killing it.

Faith, Biology, and Gaia

Religion Aboard the Axis Mundi

The human brain evolved for an environment that is very far from the one that it finds itself in.  In some ways, faith is a response to that stress.

Humans aboard the Axis Mundi live in a world without a learnable history, or a constant geography.  In some ways, faith is a response to that ambiguity.

Not everyone thinks that the AIs are greek gods.  Many people believe that they are both gods and AIs, because in their minds, these are almost identical concepts.

No one has any idea of how computers work.  The concepts involved (quantum computing, positronics) are so far beyond anything they (or we) are familiar with, that it would take a lifetime to comprehend.  Computers make computers, and computers make electronics.  They don't even use human-readable languages anymore.  There's no HTML or C++ inside computers anymore, or anything that your eyeballs could parse.  There's just math.

Every tribe has a guardian spirit (small, helpful AI) and an assembler (sort of a 3D printer on steroids).  Tribes that lack either don't last long.  Want to know why the oxygen recycler is broken?  Ask the guardian spirit.  Want to know what parts you need to scavenge to repair the old one?  Ask the assembler.

There are a lot of itinerant preachers.  They are remnants, all of them, and most are loathe to kill the last of a god's faithful.  It invites disaster.

Scenes From the Axis Mundi

This is part three of my Axis Mundi posts.  If you haven't read them, this post isn't going to make a lot of sense.

part 1

part 2

Basically, the Axis Mundi is an 8000 year old colony ship carrying the last of humanity on a voyage that will probably never end, because the AIs and the humans that run the place are all damaged/insane/amnesiac.  Huge expansions of culture, technology, and especially religion.  The AIs style themselves as roman gods (according to their names).  The foremost of these AIs is Apollo, who has invented matter-cloning technology during the voyage and has been cloning generations of cryo-sleeped dudes, who wake and serve, never suspecting that anything is wrong.

This is what the Axis Mundi sounds like.

Don't click on those other fucking youtube videos.  I don't even know why I wrote them down.  This is the one you are looking for.

Map of Centerra

I like maps.  Not everyone does, and that's cool.  Have you ever looked at all the different types of projections there are?  Doesn't Cahill's butterfly map look sweet?  Have you ever seen anything as beautiful as the Mississippi's meander maps?  Or the reductionist perfection of a good subway map?

Here's the 15th version of my map of Centerra (one of my settings).  Every place on the map has at least a couple paragraphs for it (even if they're not technically written down) and many places have a couple of pages.  I also have about a half-dozen detail maps at 3x or 4x magnification of all the little interesting bits and bobs that look more interesting up close.

It's just a functional map.  Something I can edit easily, and without any adornments.  It's tough to see on small monitors, but if you're curious enough to zoom in, there's a lot of stuff down there.