Mara095

I’m working on a fantasy setting where no aspect of the culture is a taken-for-granted import from the real world, so I’ve built them a unique calendar for their years. My objective was to create a system that both feels like it developed naturally in the world, and yet is systematic enough (and has enough familiar aspects) for a reader to comfortably be able to understand and remember. I’d love to hear some thoughts on it!

The Calendar

The year is 365 days long; this is divided into six 60-day tides, plus five days at the end of the year which are not part of any tide and serve as a time of holidays and celebrations. The order of the tides in a year is Bindingtide → Meadowtide → Start

Some effects are pretty straightforward, we can all imagine the types of damage most of the attacks do and what different debuffs feel like or represent, but for example how do you picture the Darkness Orbs doing damage? What is happening to the enemy that takes that hit? Or, what does it feel like to have Doom stacked on you, y’know? Can an enemy sense it building? Is it just a sense of certain doom that builds until it breaks, does it desiccate the enemy like the animation implies, or what? Do any potions strike you as probably being especially yummy or nasty? These are the sorts of things I think about playing this game.

A few weeks ago I got a trailer on youtube for (I'm pretty sure) a movie, which I watched about half of before skipping; as I recall, it was a montage of a man anxiously working out, while his voiceover just repeated "they're gonna kill me. I'm gonna die!" in an increasingly insistent tone. It seemed to be a comedy movie (the voiceover was very funny in a way I can't get across over text, it really stuck in my head), and it didn't imply it was much of an action film, just that somebody was out to get this guy. I can't tell you who the guy was played by, because I thought it was an ad for The Roses, so I overwrote him in my memory with Benedict Cumberbatch, but I just finished watching Th

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Legate, Godspeed, and Doktor Deathbed backed away from Hippolyta, as the Sisterhood moved as one to float in a tight circle a few feet above her head. Because this fight had been so self-contained, no large-scale attacks and every cape focused solely on each other, there was still a very large crowd of civilians gathered around the parliament, watching the carnage like a public execution with an unpredictable ending. The Sisterhood began to descend, one at a time.

The first was the woman in green, her gown adorned with frilly lace similar to a tutu. She had short red hair, and was the one who went barefoot. "Sister Sylph," she introduced herself as she touched down; she tossed o

Eleven years ago, Earth fended off the first and only Apollyon-Class threat to ever grace the planet. Eleven years ago, two members of the Paragon Division were effortlessly dispatched by an alien claiming to be the antithesis of life. Eleven years ago, Deputy Director Emery Salvatore had assisted the Director in countering the threat and saving the world; she'd tacitly approved of potentially nuking New York City, and though that hadn't come to pass, she'd directly signed off on the Director letting Absence out of one of CSPEC's Darkrooms, which itself led to the deaths of over a hundred and sixty thousand civilians before she was re-apprehended, over a third of those occurring after the al

"Rise and shine, Abby, it's your lucky day," a guard said as he opened the door to Absence's cell. The girl immediately came tumbling bodily out of the cell, looking around and panting in excitement, arms straining against the straightjacket she wore during all daylight hours. Both the cell walls and the straightjacket were made from a very tough weave, similar to Kevlar, that suppressed powers with prolonged contact, and she hated it — she hated its texture for not being as smooth as it looked, she hated the jacket for how stiff the material was to wear, she hated that even the scratchy, scratchy sheets were made out of a single thin layer of the stuff.

"We're going? We're leaving? I'm

"Madam Director, ma'am, um, it's probably nothing, but..." An aide jogged alongside Director Gaprindashvili as the woman strode down the cold hallways of the headquarters of the UN's Council for Supernatural, Parahuman, and Extraterrestrial Counterintelligence.

"Out with it, Thompson," the Director snapped at the reedy young man, her long coat billowing behind her from the brisk pace. Agent Thompson adjusted his glasses, trying not to drop the unsorted, unbound papers in his arms.

"Um, well, we've detected an anomaly, ma'am — out in space, that is." He offered her a sheet of paper, which she accepted wordlessly. "It's headed for Earth. If it were a meteor, it would clock in as a seven on

Minute by minute, cultist by cultist, the line crawls forwards, towards my inexorable fate. There's no way I can possibly take part in this, there's no way I could ever willingly do this sort of thing to Lira, my body and mind both refuse to accept what I'm shifting woman by woman closer towards — but there's no way out for me, either. If I run, if I balk, if I try to free her, I'll be found out, and Lira and I will probably both be killed. It's not an option. As I slowly approach the rack she's bound to, I look for how it attaches, for the parts of her body most firmly pinned to the sharp metal edges of the cruel device, for how it operates and where it might be weak. It's the only thing I

It's almost 19:00 o'clock, so dusk is beginning to overtake the town, which makes for pretty surroundings as I approach through the forest. Golden sunlight dapples through the boughs of the colossal evergreens around me, and the pine-needle bed covering the forest floor is soft and pleasant for walking on. As I near the town, I run my litany of kills through my head, attempting to consciously pry from them any direct lessons or insights they might have left on my subconscious, anything I might have learned about fighting and killing that my time as a wrestler didn't. Only my massacre of the four girls in the dragoon's car was anything approaching a fight, given that the soldier did try to

I wake up sobbing. A heaving cry wakes me as it wrenches its way out of my chest, and I roll over as heavy coughs force their way out of me in the wake of the heave. The sheets around my head are soaked with tears, I can't breathe through my nose — how long have I been crying? I didn't even know you could cry in your sleep. I try to force myself into a seated position, but a hitched moan catches wrong inside my chest and I collapse back, burying my face in the nearest pillow I can grab. What am I crying about? It feels strange having this much emotion rattling through my bones without knowing what's forcing it to the roiling surface. I'm not going to be able to bottle this up any time soon,

The two that stewardesses I chose on a whim follow me out of the lounge car, clutching each other so tightly that it's a wonder they can manage to walk at all. We leave the body of one of their coworkers behind with the two survivors of my lust. Whether or not they'll stay survivors depends on whether this plan goes the way I want or not.

There's not a sound from my two captives but quiet whimpering as we walk through the stewardess bedrooms. There are a good handful more beds than stewards on this trip, even before you subtract the at-least-one employees who won't be needing one tonight. The occupied beds have a few personal effects strewn across them, but I don't pay mind to any of t

The steward's section of the train is up front, past all the passenger cars, the passenger lounge, and the public showers, before the captain's quarters and the engine. The last few passenger cars aren't terribly interesting, none of the passengers out of their beds, so I pass through them quickly. I don't see any notable bloodstains on my shorts and top as I look down, and the pistol is securely zipped in my bag, so I don't look much like I've killed seven people in the past two hours, I don't think.

It's still insane to me that I have a gun in my bag. It'll be a major leg up on the cult, because I'm assuming even the Family of Petals aren't rich and influential enough to smuggle some o