Project Rundown

I need to write more. This is a given. I want to be able to add more things to my portfolio, specifically more creative things than just modeling (which I also need to do more of). There are so many good and bad ideas that I've forgotten, though, and I'm going to try to remember as many of these as possible and write them down here.

I'm going to try something similar to Stephen King's method. I'm going to just write something each day and hope it sticks. I expect a lot of crap, but hey, Stephen King has also written 66 books and over 100 short stories, as well as a book on writing (called On Writing, naturally), most of which have been best sellers and gone on to become movies or miniseries. Hopefully something will come of it, since it's by this method that he wrote Carrie. Of course, in his own words, most of it is crap.

Without further ado, the rundown.

Vindae, and Einher/Sephirot: the single largest project here. It encompasses not only a story, but an entire fictional world. The story side of things is intended to be my take on fantasy stories. It mixes magic with science fiction, but stays closer to the Final Fantasy games than it does to the 'sword and planet' genre of scifi presented in books like Edgar Rice Borough'sJohn Carter of Mars series.

The Science Fantasy feel of this picture is what I want Vindae to be like.

Also, for those of you slow on the uptake, that's Pokemon as a fantasy setting.

The story concerns a boy named Aiden, and the young girl who falls from the sky with no memory. The girl is a homonculus, an artifical human, created by the group Sefirot in an attempt to unlock the gates of Heaven and use the power that resides in the Tree of Life to erase Creation and start over. The story follows Aiden and Riza, the girl, as they uncover her past (and the fact that being a homonculus, she doesn't have one, as she only woke when Aiden found her), and avoid being killed by the Sefirot.
The villains in the story each have a personality based on one of the seven sins, though except for one of them none of them are truly evil. Their leader, Kether, only wants to 'destroy' the world so that he can remake it without strife and hatred. He's actually something like Adrien Viedt. He knows that what he's doing is wrong, but that his goal is ultimately Good. He plans to punish himself when the ordeal is over, banishing his own soul to the Abyss, a place characterized by an eternity of conscious non-existence.
Kether's backup plan is that the entire world will raise up against him as one, proving that he does not need to destroy the world to make it a better place. In the journey to uphold the promise to protect Riza, Aiden ends up gathering together a multiethnic party and defeating Kether. In this way the story is intended to be like Final Fantasy as well. The story is written with the conscious feel of an RPG in mind.

The story is also meant to be written as if it was translated from a fictional language, with footnotes explaining nonexistent translations, idioms, and other things.

The volume of information I have on the story as well as the setting is enough to fill it's own Note, or even Notes, and covers religion, magical items, holidays, countries and races, and even the different types of magic.


Ashcroft is the second of my large projects, and though I've already written notes about it, I'm going to put it here anyway.

Silent Hill is one of the things that inspired Ashcroft, and the main character originally wore a white vest, green skirt, and boots in homage to Heather.

The story is intended to be a game, and has always been written as something between Silent Hill and a point and click adventure game. The first draft even made mention of the protagonist's inventory.
Ashcroft follows the journey of Ashleigh Harker, who wakes up after crashing her car on the outskirts of a haunted town with no memory. In dealing with the town's demons, she learns what part she had in the town's current state, and why she's been brought to the town after four years.
Ashleigh faces the minor demons of the town, as well as the seven people who turned the town into Hell by destroying the life of a young girl, a young girl created in a laboratory as a psychic weapon. The malevolence of the town itself also plays a part in it, an entity that wants to take the girl's power for itself.

This twisted abomination is likely to end up an enemy in Ashcroft.

With that, I leave the more defined projects, and go into ones that exist as nothing more than a vague concept and maybe a few notes.

The Celestial War: In the beginning, the Creator made Creation, and with it, Eden. When Creation was formed, the Creator faded away. In the Creator's place where left the Celestials. For a while, there was peace. After a great earthquake, Eden was split. The Celestials in the West became known as Demons, and the Celestials in the East became known as Angels. For a time, things were still peaceful. There was trade and travel between the two nations.
As the years grew longer, distance created dissent, and the Angels and Demons went to war with each other. No one knows how it started, who first attacked or why.

The Celestial War is nothing like this, but I like giving everything a picture.

Lead by the brothers, Michael and Lucifer, the two armies battled for years. Eventually the Demons were defeated, and Lucifer and the demons were taken to Mount Purgatory and cast down into Hell. In that empty world, Lucifer and his celestials set to work rebuilding. Meanwhile, Michael declared himself God, ruler of all Creation.
In Hell, in the golden fields of Elysium, the city of Pandeamonium was built. For a time, things were good. Despite being exiled from their home as punishment for losing, the demons lived content in Hell, far from their enemies in Heaven. After the city was completed, Lucifer was declared God, and ruled his new nation.

Now, everything has changed. For two thousand years, the war has been over, but for Lucifer's Lieutenant, Azazel, a new home cannot fill the whole left by the loss of the old. Scarcely had Lucifer been crowned regent of that new world before Azazel began to stir dissent. Lucifer was deposed by those he had once led, and once called friends. He was exiled from the home that he built with his own hands and the sweat of his brow once again. He was banished to Earth, the world of humanity.

Now, 2000 years later, Azazel makes his move. He seeks to awaken the beast Apollyon, chained beneath Creation, ultimately leading to the end of the world, as prophecised by Metatron, the half-mad blind oracle kept chained in Eden's capital of Arcadia, who is believed to hear the voice of the creator. Yeshua, a strange urchin has appeared, taking care of Elyon, stirring her to deeper prophecy than ever before. To save the world, Lucifer must find his way back to Heaven and Hell, and convince his brother Michael that Azazel must be stopped. Unfortunately, the deposed God of Hell is nowhere to be found. The Four Riders are coming, and Apollyon stirs. The only one who can save creation is the missing Daystar.

The Rat God: A story set in Vindae before it's main story. It tells the story of Gaetta the Rat, a demigod and trickster, who sets out to defeat Bahamut, the last of the Old Gods that holds Vindae in a grip of terror.
Bahamut, along with it's brothers Ziz and Leviathan, fell to the planet Vindae a millennium ago in an event that shattered two of the three moons and left the planet with three massive craters. For ages they slept, but eventually they awakened, and resumed their eons old war. They were Ziz, God of the Skies and Father of the Wyvern, the massive bird capable of blotting out the sun with it's wings; Leviathan, the God of the Oceans, and Mother of the Wyrm, the great sea serpent with the power to cause tidal waves and flooding with a flick of it's tail; and Bahamut, Lord of the Earth and Flames, and Father of the Behemoi, who's burning grip engulfed the world the longest. Ziz and Leviathan had been sealed away, and Bahamut was left to rule the world. A great alien creature so powerful that it could defeat the Gods of Vindae.
This is where Gaetta comes along. Setting out to bind up Bahamut as Ziz and Leviathan had been, he traveled to the burning kingdom of the South, with a waitress as his companion, and used a magical necklace to defeat the Lord of Earth and Flame.

The story was originally thought of as a parable for why Behemoths, large elephant like creatures, would be afraid of mice and rats. The answer being that a rat defeated their creator.

The World's Greatest Theif Jack of Diamonds The only thing I've thought of that would actually be a series, the Jack of Diamonds is a young boy who happens to be the worlds greatest thief. Originally it was intended to be yet another story set in Vindae, though somewhat lighter. In fact, it's possible it could be a children's or young adult story. Jack's misadventures would involve him attempting to steal something impossible, all while avoiding the pursuit of a beautiful female detective, and at the same time, he would be stealing from people who were thieves themselves, exposing them as he took their riches for himself, and gave what he didn't need back to the victims. Something like Robin Hood, but in it for the challenge.

Further owing to it's possibility as a children's series, Jack of Diamonds is likely to be accompanied by a wise cracking animal sidekick.
I think I settled on either a red panda or a fruit bat.

Possible exploits include being framed for murder, escaping prison, and whatever other misadventures I could think of. Think of him as my version of Sly Raccoon, Jing: King of Bandits, Lupin III, Phantom Thief Dark, the Leverage team, and other similar thieves who aren't necessarily villains.

I don't know, I think I could write a pretty good young adult series.



Theme: One Character Gives Up Their Life for Another
1. A soldier who saves a child in a wartorn land
2. A woman goes after the man who killed her father and falls in love, thereby giving up her life of revenge for him. Or, he kills himself. Or she kills him, then herself.
3. A man and woman fall in love, and have some sort of great adventure together. They have sex, he dies saving her, and she lives on with his children having no father. I think I actually stole this one from a Trigun fansite that theorized Milly and Wolfwood made love the night before he died, and that Milly was pregnant.
4. A woman finds a man lying half dead in a river, nurses him back to health. The man gives up his life to save her. From a monster, perhaps. The idea being that whatever almost killed him is what he saves her from. Perhaps mixing this with 3, because nothing says drama like a baby with only a mama.

Phantom Brave actually did inspire Shadow Wars a bit. The spirits in that game are called Phantoms, and they need to be bound to a material object before they can interact with the world.

And that's all I can find at the moment. I think I have some other journals lying around with other ideas in them.
This is what I have, though. I don't think it even touches the tip of the iceberg, though.

In addition, there's still the game related ideas.

Odyssean, the game about powerful mages in modern society who are cursed to never be able to settle down at the cost of the gift of magic.
and
Shadow War, which features magicians teaming up with spirits to fight hungry ghosts.

Phantoms | Freewriting inspired by Geist

A long time ago, I was going to try to make a game based on a concept that was somewhat cobbled together from a bunch of sources. Some of it was Fate/Stay Night's and Negima's concept of a team of two people fighting together to amplify each other's strengths (in both series, one of the team is a mage and the other is a warrior. In Fate the Servants begin as warriors, while in Negima, the Minister Magi becomes a warrior by dint of the Pactio).
Some of it was Bleach and what little I knew about Geist at the time, the idea of fighting against ghosts with swords and magic. Some of it was other things from the World of Darkness games, like how Werewolves deal with Spirits, and Spirits in general. Each Spirit is something conceptual. Not exactly a ghost, but in a way just like one. It's a totemic thing.
There might be a Wolf Spirit, but it isn't the spirit of a particular wolf so much as it is a spirit of the concept of Wolves. It embodies the real aspects of wolves, but also the concepts that humanity associates with them.
There was also a little bit of Phantom Brave in the original idea. Each mage had a Phantom that they would be bound to, and to give that Phantom a physical body, they needed to bind their soul to some object. Whatever the object was, the Phantom would have abilities related to that. Some kind of memento might allow it deeper insight into emotions, or a rock would make it sturdy and immovable. A Phantom materialized with a book would have knowledge of that book, and a greater affinity for books and knowledge in general.
The concept of Phantoms in the game is that they weren't necessarily dead people, they were those same kinds of totemic spirits like in Werewolf and WoD. They wouldn't necessarily have been spirits of objects, but special spirits of the concept of Phantoms.
The enemies of this Phantom game would have been Hungry Ghosts. This is one of the concepts I took from Bleach, though it of course took if from Buddhism. In a way, the Hungry Ghosts are spirits (whether totemic or human) that have been stained with death. Maybe there was a church were someone was mugged and beaten to death, and now the spiritual essence of that church is stained with the violence of the attack, and the suffering of the victim and the fear of their death. With the spirit stained, instead of sending out the feeling of the impressive gothic architecture and the comfort of God, it instead sends out negative vibes, and another murder happens there. Eventually the spirit can't cope. It gives off a resonance comparable to what it feeds on, but as that resonance grows darker, it starts to break at the spirit.
Eventually, unable to passively endure the trauma, it takes on a semiphysical form, one that eventually becomes capable of crossing over the barrier and reeking havoc on the living.
When one of the Hungry Ghosts kills a human, then that human's resonance is stained when they die, and they're more likely to come back as a Hungry Ghost as well.
What's capable of stopping them, then, is the bond between a Mage and a Phantom. They join together as two sides of the same coin and they become able to operate on the same wavelength as the Hungry Ghost, and beat it into submission. The way spirits work, killing a Hungry Ghost is a release, and allows it to be reborn.

Well, after reading the new World of Darkness book, Geist: The Sin-Eaters, I got some more ideas. The new game is basically about Sin-Eaters, people who have died and come back thanks to creatures called Geist (pl. Geister). Geister are basically a cross between ghosts and World of Darkness's Spirits. They're ghosts that are closer to spirits. Instead of just being dead humans, they've transcended that into being dead Spirits. One example is a Discarded Man, made of newspapers and beerbottles. Another is the Drowned Gardener, bloated and wet and covered in chains.


Well, they gave me some ideas, and I just started freewriting.
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Sometimes, the dead aren't restful. They die alone, lonely, sad and pathetically. Sometimes they die by diseases that aren't content to leave the soul untouched, and consume it as readily as the body. Sometimes it's violence and hatred that takes them out, leaving a harsh stain on their echoes. Sometimes it's not how they left the world that matters, but how they existed in it. A young girl teased and tormented by her classmates because she's quiet and dresses all in black, her long hair covering her face. A middle aged man who put up with abuse from his mother now goes out and enacts revenge on women who look like her, raping them and leaving them in the woods for the coyotes. Another man runs with a crew of three, each one as bad as the next, they hit every bank in town and shoot the place up before anyone can get there. A woman knows her client's guilt, and how he'll kill again if he's not locked up and treated, but still she smiles when the verdict comes, because the money helps her sleep at night.
Dying cold and alone, wasting away in a hospital bed, murder most foul. A life of quiet pain and depression, or one of violence and hatred, one driven by avarice and pride. These are the things that cause a death to go bad. In these circumstances, the dead aren't restful. They scream, and they shout, and they rage against any they encounter.
A death stained with sadness creates an echo that takes others into that sadness, making them weep until they die, laying in a bathtub drawn with hot water, they lean back and let the blackness embrace them as the blood drains from their wrists. Misery loves company.
A brutal murderer and rapist escapes prosecution only to meet his death at the hands of the survivor. His anger and hatred fuel his echo, and he returns to continue his bloody 'work'.
A man does nothing more than stumble into the wrong place at the wrong time. His car broke down in front of an old mansion. If he was able to look back now with cognizance, he would laugh at something so cliche. He stumbled in from the rain and looked around for the owner only to find just that, the owner. The only one who's truly ever owned the estate, and killed anyone who would claim otherwise. Now he's among the number, just one more echo in the cacophony of anguish that haunts the site.
I've met them. The echoes. Some are quiet, and some are restful.
Others aren't. They're cold, and cruel, their corpus twisted and altered from years or decades of self inflicted pain that most of them can't even see. The dangers to themselves that comes from indulging those malicious desires. The desire to write a wrong or save a loved one, a desire that mutates and manifests as something wholly unlike what it might have been.

When echoes become obsessed with a concept, they grow Hungry, feeding off of mortals and creating more of their kind.

Those echoes that become something unhuman, something almost primordial, they torment the living and destroy reality with their existence, passively fraying the ends of everything and chewing and digesting it just by being there.
The worst of it is that they consume souls. They do it to sustain their blasphemous unlife, or perhaps to fill some hollow part of themselves, to fill up the empty shell that they know are. The Buddhists have a name for them. They call them Preta, the Hungry Ghosts. They have "mouths as small as needles, and stomaches the size of mountains." Colourful imagery. That's what they do, though, they eat and feed, trying to fill that mountain with needle sized bites of humanity. The Japanese call them the gaki or Jikininki, and they were greedy, jealous people in life. They come back with an insatiable hunger, be it for corpses or shit. In the Book of Enoch, something similar is described. Great beings with unrivaled hunger, completely devoid of a mouth to sate it.
Whatever their origins, people who die deaths with a great stain might become one. What's worse, one of these hungry echoes will often leave more of it's own kind birthed by it's voracious wake.
They're hard to stop, the echoes of people who died terrible deaths--and even those who had their echoes stained before they even died. They come back when you kill them, because they're already dead. They can be banished back to whatever Hell they came from, but that's a stopgap. The dead come back, until you can kill them once and for all. Sometimes it's as simple as offering something to them. A simple meal. Sometimes you'll have to find a corpse, dig it up, salt it and burn it.
If only it was always that simple.
Sometimes you have to take an exceptionally old and well made sword, blessed by some religious figure, and cut the echo until it dies once and for all and never plagues the living with it's Hunger.
Sometimes even that, a fight to the death with steel and will, is too simple. Sometimes you have to reenact the death. An act that can be painful even if the echo in question is terrorizing innocents with it's Hunger. How much conviction does a hunter need to find the soul of a little girl causing young women to take their own lives in depression and berate her and torment her until she takes her own life again, this time with a definite finality. Or what of dragging an innocent man unaware of what his Hunger is doing along the same road he was murdered on, scaring him to death as he's pulled from a car by chains soaked in holy water.
That's what it's like to see the dead.
It means seeing the innocents who are lost, and doomed to repeat their actions, echoes of hurt who can't move on. It means helping them, whether by destroying what ties them to the world, or resolving their issues.
It unfortunately also means dealing with the restless dead, the merciless demons that a person can become when they don't get help, when they're hung up on it all and can't move on to the Beyond. They become predators, their Hunger withering and killing lives both metaphorically and literally.
It means dealing with the things that are wrong in society, and sometimes it means doing things that shouldn't be done, things that leave a bad taste in your mouth. You'd damned well better swallow it down and chase it with something less bitter. Sometimes you have to fight off the echo of a lonely girl who met her end in an alleyway at the tip of a knife. Sometimes the innocents go bad. It isn't their fault. What happened to them would scare anyone shitless. They don't even know what's going on half of the time. They just exist, like animals. Fear drives them. The fear of a death they've already faced but refuse to face. Refuse to accept and acknowledge. They lash out, frightened and alone.
When they become like that, when an echo's Hunger starts to take them over, starts to become all they are, they change. Usually it's the face that changes the most. Their eyes and mouths become... less. Less than human, mostly, but sometimes they become smaller. They may even vanish. Their clothing becomes less clothing, and more symbolic. The old image of Jacob Marley in chains, his earthly greed tethering him to the mortal world, denying him entry into heaven. This is how the Hunger starts for an echo. They think they're missing something. Something that ties them to the world, something that they can get from others, but they're too simple, too animalistic, to do anything more than Hunger for that thing.
That's when they try to take it. That's when they start to become defined by their Hunger and feed off of the resonance left behind by whatever it is they think they lack. Even the kindest soul can become Hungry after death, no one knows what causes it, other than a thick and ponderous stain on their echo. Even the innocent can become monsters after death, their echoes feeding on friends and family.
Their essence shifts and twists until they become nothing more than a living symbol of their Hunger, a demonic and tortured soul that can do nothing more than attempt to ease that torture by spreading it on to others and consuming what's left in the wake, all while hoping that they can obtain whatever ephemeral quality it is that they're missing.
Feeding their Hunger just makes them Hungrier. With every bite, their stomachs grow emptier, and their souls become hollow.

Shades of Grey: Mages

Mages are ordinary, mundane muggles who've had their eyes opened to the rest of the world. Often times it happens because they almost die--or actually die--and Awaken to the abilities they have. While most people see their lives flash before their eyes, Mages experience a sort of spiritual journey where they look deep into themselves and find the ability to do what they need to do.

In addition to not dying when killed, Mages are gifted with magic. They can call forth spirits and summon up fire and all that jazz. When they awaken they are usually (and often quickly) found by the Mages' Association and they are either learned in the ways of magic (generally made to understand the rules of magic and then dumped on an apprenticeship). Some find that their modest or miniscule talents aren't worth it, and they don't bother practicing the Ars Arcana. They see it as too difficult to become skilled, too dangerous. Others do, and are the ones who go on to become Mages.

Their greatest task is to make a Pact with a Phantom and protect society at large.

I'll deal with the laws of magic later. For now, the Mage's relationship with Phantoms.

Mages are human beings who can tap into spiritual energy, the same energy that powers and makes up spirits. They can use their willpower and emotions to manipulate that energy, allowing them to perform magic. Now, there are many different forms of magic, from tracking to just plain old shooting fireballs, but one of the most important things that mages do is making a Pact with a Phantom.

The Pact isn't really so much an agreement as a binding process. The Mage enables themselves to channel mana into their Phantom, allowing the Phantom to use more power. They also embody the Phantom. Embodiment will be covered later as well, but the short version is that they give the Phantom a physical form.

Together, the mage and the phantom form a fighting team. Of course, it's perfectly possible for them to talk out any differences that they have. Possible, but not likely. The life of a mage is never a simple one, and there's a reason most of them live in seclusion.

While the Minister and Magister are likely in their partnership to take on any number of supernatural baddies to keep the place safe, the original Pacts were formed to deal with Shades. More on those later as well. The short story: Evil spirits.

That's about it for now. Later I'll get into how magic works, why bad magic is bad, and of course Phantoms and Shades.

Shades of Grey

Shades of Grey is a sort of setting/game that I've been working on with the help of my gaming group. The basic premise is taken from the Fate/Stay Night canon: Magical powered Masters working with exceptionally powerful Spirits. There isn't a Grail War or anything to pit the characters against each other, and there are no (as of yet) 'Classes' like Rider and Saber and Berserker. There's also a bit of Negima, in the form of "Pact Partners", and because of the unwanted connotations of Master and Servant, I've decided to take the terms Magister/Magistra Magi and Minister/Ministra Magi from Negima (which mean Master Magi and Servant Magi, but details details). Surprising to me, there's also quite a bit of Bleach. It was unintended, but it really is a surprisingly good feel for the game. People going around in the dead of night slaying giant, out of control ghosts.

Each player plays one half of the Pact Partners, either the Magister or the Minister, the Magister being a Mage and the Minister being a Phantom. The two groups need each other, and have a symbiotic relationship, working together to fight against Shades (corrupted spirits), and other nasties out there. Since each player is playing either a Mage or a Phantom, the idea is that there will be two player teams working together. That would generally mean two or three such Pact groups, depending on the amount of players.


The next few posts will deal with a bit of the fluff involved in the game.