So… current semi-mysterious/can’t be arsed to post regular update project is finished!  More pictures once they’ve been done, but here’s what it’s done to my poor dry pallette…

Before:

After:

Welp… there is is, on Privateer Press Titan Gladiator, now finally finished after a month-and-a-half’s hiatus.  Couldn’t be arsed to fix some of the sculting issues – this was purely a painting exercise.  Hence the occasional glimpse of green stuff

Colour breakdown;

Armour - VGC Gunmetal, washed with thinned Black + Blue Ink, then highlighted with Gunmetal/Black/Blue mix, with successive highlights made by mixing in VGC Silver.  This made a nice contrast to the skin tone.  Gold elements were then washed with sepia ink.

Skin - VGC Desert Yellow + Beastly Brown, shaded with a Sepia/Brown ink mix, highlighted with the base colour + Off-White.

Clothes/Ropes - VGC Royal Purple + Blue Ink, shaded with more Blue + Black ink added to the mix, successive highlights with Cold Grey then White.  Ropes were Off-White, then thin coat (no other kind possible) of Yellow, washed with Sepia Ink.

Bones/Tusks/etc - Off-White, with thinned Sepia Ink.

Overall, I think the colour scheme works nicely.  Occasionally a bit hit and miss, but I like the result.  Up on the shelf now… probably back to Infinity next.

A peculiar beast, lairing in pots and ramekins, only emerging to… sod it… Crumble Make!

Recipe (such that it is)

Apples (one per person?  who knows?) – preferably red, bit sharp, or whatever’s lying around in the corner of the kitchen.  Diced, then peeled, or vice-versa if you’re feeling organised.

Flour / Unsalted Butter / Caster Sugar in roughly a 10:7:4 ratio, enough to cover the apples.

More Sugar - anything you have lying around, along with more Butter - enough to make a caramel for the apples.  Maybe about 20g each per apple… who knows?

Oats, if available and uneaten.

Under no account should preperation, or, god help, shopping for this recipe be performed at any stage.

1. Forget to pre-heat the oven to 200-degrees-ish.  Centigrade, unless you’re feeling experimental.  Kelvin, whilst a bold attempt, may not turn out quite right, but will indeed produce a crispy top…
2. Rub butter into flour. Keep rubbing butter into flour.  Wonder why you have a paste, panic, add more flour.  When it looks like breadcrumbs, stop, and wonder why you don’t just use breadcrumbs.  Ponder the mysteries of life, then mix in sugar and some oats.  Enough to break up the landscape.
3. Take apples, look in fridge for lemons or lemon juice, fail, then cut up small.
4. Heat up butter and sugar in frying pan until the point it starts to turn brown, throw in apples and pray.  With luck, the pan will be re-useable.  When the apples have started to caramelise, add a bit of cinnamon until distinctly brown.
5. Put apple in buttered ramekins or containers or whatever you have.  Preferably kitchen ware, preferably oven save.
6. Put crumble on top of apple, sprinkle water.
7. Put in (hopefully warm) oven, for somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes… with luck, you’ll end up with pudding.

Serving Suggestion:

Serve.

Eat with spoon.

GLORY!

Back into history time!  (again)… for a re-hash of some of the background to the world of Broken.  I’ll try and make it quicker and somewhat less labourous this time.  I’ve decided to munge the W&W and Mechanics bits together too, didn’t seem to make much sense keeping them apart.

The Beginning

As I said yesterday (boy, that’s going to get old quick…), there were, indeed, a people for whom Urtongue was a native language.  But to find them, you have to go back a bit – to the very beginning.

The origins of the world of Broken are unknown to most of its inhabitants (usually they have more immediate problems to worry about), and there aren’t many beings around who know much of the truth (or, in some cases, remember it).  But it started not with a bang, or a let-there-be-light, but with the notion of existence.

Outside and before the world stands and stood the Abyss.  This was and is a place of formless nothing, with half-formed minds and concepts spawning and devouring each other in eternal evolution and predation.  It was one such mind-meaning that formed the world; it embodied a kind of stability that was new to the chaos around it, and formed a kind of shell around itself; the first matter and the seed of the world.

Over time, this shell grew and the energy of the creator-being was stretched and dispersed throughout the structure.  With this loss of focus came change, and the stability of the world’s earliest times was loosened, and the world allowed to change.  From this change came three primal forces, the First, or Paramount Rivers of Sun, Void and Life.  Void contained and preserved the primordial structure of the world, extending even past its shell and into the Abyss, creating the Soft Places and the Twilight where lurk things half-formed and imagined.  Sun shone upon the Void, raw creation seeding the world with new ideas, concepts and material incarnations.  And finally Life wove its way through the world, changing and adapting it.  Out of each of these three fundemental forces, a tribe was formed, the three First Tribes.

And I’ll leave the rest for tomorrow… because the post date is a damn dirty lie…

Okay, more civilized time, albeit with painting urging me along.  Yesterday, I looked at Patterns, and how they form an integral part of Broken’s cosmology; today we go a little deeper.

Urtongue

As I mentioned yesterday, in this odd cosmology of mine, the world strives for complexity and meaning.  As River-flows weave themselves into Patterns of increasing intricacy, they gain a deep, essential meaning.  This is where the Urtongue comes from; the language of the cosmos writ small in every part of it.  It’s not a language any mortal being can speak or even understand in its entirity.  Any attempt to manipulate Patterns on this micro-scale rely on the use of  derivative speech, writings or runes that bare the merest resemblence to Urtongue itself; carrying enough of the primal language that merely speaking properly constructed phrases, or carving sigils in precisely the correct way can evoke effects within the Rivers and the Void.

Because of this, languages that exist for long enough will eventually migrate towards the Urtongue; the more ancient, the closer they become to Urtongue and, inevitably, the more risky they are to use.  The way civilisations who are wise enough to recognise this drift cope with this is to construct Shadowtongues; artificial languages untouched by deeper meaning, and without risk of unintended evocation of primal forces.

There are thousands of approximations of Urtongue, evolving over years upon years, now wielded by shamans and magi to subtle, yet powerful effect.  Not all of them are language as we’d understand them; the way a river carves the pebbles it carries with it may be the writings of the river-spirits as they wage terratorial war over possession of streams and tributaries.  The three-fold language of the Ethoun, and Mar’aan oneiroglyphs are likewise reflections of Urtongue, each with their own capabilities and potencies.

Even through this great wealth of knowledge, mortal speakers of Urtongue-analogues can’t hope to attain true mastery of the deeper language; this is impossible as far as the tribes of the modern world are concerned.  The best a Namer or magus can hope for is to weave crude pseudo-Patterns, working from the ground upwards to built webs and weaves through which the energies of the Rivers flow and react.  True mastery was reserved for those for whom it was their native tongue.

And I’ll talk tomorrow about the mad Ul’Ehlt and the rest of the First People.

Whys and Wherefores

Frankly, Urtongue and Naming (the process of using it in spells and rituals) is probably the most ill-fitting bit of the cosmology.  It could be removed, if I wanted, but I kind of like it as an inevitable result of the drive to complexity inherent in these alternative physics:  this is a natural law based on semantic and art rather than thermodynamic and mechanics.  It’s through Naming that sorcerers gain control, shamans bind spirits, and craftsmen create artifacts of strange and wondrous power.  So I’m keeping it  With Urtongue, Broken is like some kind of techno-fantasy; with technology and magic blurred into one.  Without it you’d get a more shamanic feel, less scientific and constructed.  Nothing wrong with that, but I prefer the former path.

Mechanics

The influence of Urtongue is represented in the game by the skill of Naming, and its derivatives.  In the short term it’s used to reinforce and control other instances of Riverworking; it only has any great direct effect through either lengthy rituals to coerce the flow of the Rivers into doing what you want, or through access to a great external source of power.  Probably more on that later.

Sorry for the purple prose.  See you again tomorrow…

Bit late tonight, but with tea by my side and narwhals behind me (on the TV, just to clarify), I’ll try to bash something out.  Hampered somewhat today by working from home, which in theory would have given me more time for this, but in fact means I’m in front of a Eclipse window until 8pm wrestling Javascript.  Anyway, yesterday was a somewhat cursory look at the Rivers that underpin Broken’s cosmology; for today, the Patterns that they form.

Patterns

The energy that arises from the Rivers is chaotic and unformed.  It pools and gathers in certain places, often forcing its way into the Void as a primal manifestation; mountains, volcanoes, seas and storms.  However, there is one natural law above all others in this world; that over time any power seeks complexity and meaning.  Unlike our world, where entropy – the ultimate disorder of matter – is the end-point of the universe, in this other world, it is complexity, meaning and the evolution of intricate River-Patterns of woven and knotted flows of power.

From these primal Patterns the physical world forms, as energy crystallises within the influence of the Void.  The land; hills and mountains, streams, seas and the workings of the upper air are formed of great, homogenous Patterns, so loosely-bound that they cannot be examined in their entirity, and parts of the whole are easily seperated.  These macro-Patterns can further evolve; a given mountain may attain a unique identity, or the metaphysical ‘flavour’ of one part of a sea can be different to another, but it’s when the Patterns that are formed are smaller, tighter and more complex that further changes occur.

Living beings; plants, animals and other, stranger manifestations, occur when two circumstances intersect; the possibility of a tightly-bound Pattern, and the presence of the energy of An, River of Life.  When this happens, living creatures can be found, formed anew from the substance of the world, or inheriting a Pattern from their parents.  These living Patterns are much more resilient than those of the non-living manifestations of the Rivers, and are the key to thought, instinct and higher intellect. 

Some beings manage to take another step in terms of the evolution of their Pattern; they are Adept – those whose Patterns have changed enough from the base nature of their species that they are no longer truely part of it.  Adepts exhibit strange and potent abilities, and are forever set apart from those around them through awe and fear.  Most Adepts manifest from sapient species, such as the Thousand Tribes of Man; conscious thought and self-cultivation are the most reliable routes to Adepthood.  Other Adept-creatures may arise through chance or experimentation, although rare, and likewise possess powers beyond those of their mortal kin.

There is a step beyond these Patterns; mortal and immortal.  A deep meaning, that all that exists attempts to reach.  It is a language, a system of meaning so deeply embedded that it is a natural facet of reality.  So tomorrow, I’ll talk about Urtongue.

Whys and Wherefores

The nature of Adepthood originally began as a mechanism for PC-uniqueness, and I just decided to run with it.  The idea of Patterns as a supernatural DNA kind of followed along, especially when I decided to go all the way and try to imagine a truely alien cosmology.  They are your DNA, your soul, they very fabric of you.  To be an Adept is to tamper with your very essential nature, to harness the supernatural forces that determine the nature of your body and mind.  Forgetting the self-help tone; it’s also a way of permanently and irrevocably making yourself something very different to your fellow man.  Perfect PC-material, come to think of it

Mechanics

Once again, not too much (cos it’s late).  Pattern is a core stat, and determines how tightly bound a creature is spiritually.  Regular critters, and mortal sapients might be easily bound or undone with sorcery; powerful Adepts rather less so.

More tommorrow!

So once again, I’m sitting around watching the rush into NaNoWriMo, and once again, I’m taking on the (rather easy in comparison) challenge of it’s sister; NaBloPoMo, and trying to post once a day for this month.  And once again, it’s probably going to mostly be about Broken, ’cause it makes good blogging fodder.  And because I don’t exactly have the most interesting of lives  Although anything that comes of the painting should find itself up here too.

Anyway, on with the show.  I’m going to try and keep things a bit more consistent this time; I’m going to try to work through my world-building in a bit less of a slapdash way to last November; hopefully this will be useful for both myself, and anyone who’s interested.  I may also try to fill in some semi-mechanical details; give you an idea of how these aspects of the world would be represented in the rules.

The Rivers

The starting point for any real discussion of Broken has to be the Rivers.  They aren’t physical streams, but flows of supernatural (from our point of view, that is) energy, that exist in a place that isn’t quite in the material world, but close enough to influence it in a very fundemental way.  Of course, from the point of view of the inhabitants of Broken, this is very much the normal state of affairs.  What’s rather less well-known is that the material world itself is but another River; Khet, the great River of Void, and all things result from the ways in which the other Rivers manifest within the Void.  Stone, for example, is the manifestation of the River of Stone, and strong winds blow wherever the River of Storms grows close to the material world within the Void.

These Rivers are not just abstract flows of energy; most contain entire Otherworlds within them; smaller reflections of the world within the Void, and likewise touched by other, foreign flows.  Plants and creatures grow here too, some familiar, some totally alien; and there are many species and tribes who were once inhabitants of an Otherworld, exiled or lost and left to live within the Void itself.

As the energy of the Rivers flows into the Void and the Otherworlds, it forms patterns of woven flows, and it is from these that the physical world springs.  And so Patterns will be the focus of tomorrow’s update…

Whys and Wherefores

The Rivers were one of the first bits of Broken I really figured out; a bit of Stephen Erikson’s Warrens, a bit of the Death-as-a-river analogy from Garth Nix’s books.  From just a magic system they’ve grown to be the very fundemental science behind the setting.  Riverworking; shaping the energy of the Rivers into physical effect is as much technology as conventional magic, and the reverse holds true in Broken – my slightly stubborn attempt to get away from the Magic vs. Technology duality in a lot of fantasy settings.

Mechanics

Really, the Rivers underly the entirity of the rules.  ’Realms’ – Broken’s stat-equivalent are Rivers, and vary with the species and special characteristics of a PC or NPC (Humans having Blood, Breath and Bone).  Likewise, sorcerers can tap into raw River energy, Namers invoke and weave Patterns, Shapers tap into the macropattern of the world around, and Tuners tinker with the Pattern that makes up their own physical form.  Not much more I can go into at the moment, as it’s pretty fundemental to the setting.

Including Canary Wharf

Note the Tower of London in the foreground.