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>>96644454
Perhaps the most fundamental pieces of writing advice is that if you want to write well, you have to read a lot. So with that in mind: what's on your bookshelf, anons?

How many books do you have? Which one's your favourite? Do you even still buy physical books or have you switched to an e-reader? And do you borrow from public libraries at all?

Personally - and I know I'm going to be called unoriginal - I think my favourite book is the copy of Lord of the Rings that I've had since I was a kid. And I'm a committed Luddite in that I still prefer physical paper over e-readers; I also borrow from public libraries fairly regularly.

>>96644491
Lord of the Rings is a wonderful book.
Last time I counted, pretty sure it was over 300 books. Could be over 400 now. There was a time when I was at flea markets occasionally, and would grab whatever I could find that looks interesting, or if it's an author I heard of, but never read. Or sometimes just books that looked old. The oldest book I currently own is from 1927. Probably a bibliophilic tendency.

>>96644825
Misjudged it, after counting them for whatever reason, I got 340 books.
Roughly, I may have lost count, occasionally…

>>96644491
Any recommendations on good fantasy to read? I have this weird inkling that I want to write a detective/noir story set in a high-magic setting.
I recently bought Sanderson's Mistborn but the size of the book daunts me.
Also a lot of the books I read are more like books on how to write, and not necessarily fantasy. So far I've really liked Goldman's Adventures in The Screen Trade, and Araki's Manga in Theory and Practice. I'm also mostly through Maass' Emotional Craft of Fiction but I'll eventually have to reread it since it's been so long and I've mostly forgotten it.

>>96645545
>I have this weird inkling that I want to write a detective/noir story set in a high-magic setting.
Honestly, I can't think of anything that fits this exactly. Terry Pratchett wrote a few detective stories set in the Discworld (part of The Watch series), but they're not really noir.

On the other hand, the Witcher series has some very noir vibes at points, but they're not really detective stories.

Ironically the only person I know who writes high fantasy noir detective fiction is me. But unfortunately for you, I never get around to finishing them.

>I recently bought Sanderson's Mistborn but the size of the book daunts me.
I don't think I've read that since around when it was originally published, but I remember it being a very quick read. Like, so quick I blasted through it, went back and got the second part of the trilogy, then bought the third part and read that too in like a couple of days. Of course I was pretty young then; I definitely get through books slower now that I'm older. But while Brandon Sanderson has his faults, stodgy prose and slow pacing are not among them.

>>96644454

It's more important to write every day than to write well.

Just write every day, write often. At the end of the year, you'll have more than 300 pieces of writing that you can polish and develop.

Just keep practicing. It's simple.

>>96644825
I definitely have far fewer books than you. I've never actually counted, but I've only got one proper bookcase and a mini one to fit them into. I really need to get a bigger bookcase.

I'm also not sure what the oldest book I have is. Probably a Bible from the 1870s.

>>96644454
Happy Birthday to 4chan. How many years in the clinker?

I have this cyberpunk story I'm working on, and in it I want to have the characters slowly uncover and (try to) fight some big conspiracy going on behind the curtain. My problem is I can't really think of anything really shocking.
My current idea is that the ultra-wealthy are building generation ships at the edge of the solar system and when they're done they're going to leave Earth to complete collapse. And while I like it the more and more I think about it the less shocking and horrifying it seems.
Any advice, ideas, or things to get inspired by?

>>96658698
Why would society collapse once the rich and wealthy leave?
This makes it sound like you are being subversive and that you want to say that society needs wealthy people, which would be amusing indeed for pro-capitalist people like myself.
But it's probably not what you are aiming for. For some reason, the collapse is set in stone and assumed. Why? Maybe this can be the shocking factor. Why is it collapsing?

>>96662255
>Why would society collapse once the rich and wealthy leave?
NTA but my first answer would be that these same people have put the global economy through some kind of pump-and-dump scheme and they intend to leave with all their gains right before the bubble pops
of course, the snag here is that this requires there to be somewhere else they can go where all this money has actual use, rather than just fucking off into the stars; it would make more sense on a national (or even continental) scale rather than a planetary one, unless humanity has already established nice places to live outside of earth

>>96662255
It's kind of like >>96662562 says. But the idea is that the world is basically ruined, even the space colonies meant to get everyone away from the pollution are breaking down because they were built so cheap and shitty. So those with the resources to do so are preparing to leave everything to it's fate and get out of dodge

>>96644454
How do you lads find the inspiration for your characters and settings? My mind is turning up blank.

>>96669576

>Pipe right there to fall on the papers

kek

I'm getting better, according to my well-read friend. Writing stuff just takes practice.

>>96674989
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2VLFmQlGjk

even if some fucks are gonna say it's basic, but I found some genuinely really good advice from this

Any good recomendations for Books and stuff with Magitech based settings? I'm trying to write a basic bitch tiny first timer D&D campaign and I want some ideas

>>96645545
>I have this weird inkling that I want to write a detective/noir story set in a high-magic setting.

This might be more difficult than it sounds.

Detective fiction is all about the reader having theoretically the same possibilities of resolving the case as the detective. I mean, yes, you're not gonna have the same brain that Sherlock Holmes has, but the writer should give you the same situation he works on/nudge you in the direction the detective inquires (think of when in a whodunnit he focuses on something that you probably didn't think of as important).
I'll add that he didn't just use his awesome chemical knowledge to bypass this.

In high magic you're presumably gonna have a shitton of magical ways to deduct things. Not even thinking of something like detect evil which probably invalidates the whole point of the genre, but the whole shebang about how the world works. If we have a thief that entered a "safe" room of a dwarven bank, how can I, the reader, even know what makes it "safe" from a magical standpoint? I would assume there are tons of magical sigils, guard golems that can be almost unseen, powders that could make a thief fly. How can i deduct shit or try to, without 100 pages of a Magical Primer for Adventurer Detectives?

I would assume it's more possible in a straight up scifi setting which does presumably have better gadgets, but runs on our science and natural laws (or at least it's not totally absurd to just add something like "oh and we discovered this and that"). Or, of course in a lower magical setting in which the new rules are fewer, if even they are relevant (suppose magical items are just something that makes you better at your natural skills and/or magic is more a thing like casting "special effects" like fireballs).

Mind you, it's an interesting idea, I'm just not sure if it's doable.

>>96645545
Dresden Files is high magic, but modern day, I have trouble thinking a of a medieval detective besides some sort of pathfinder or an inquisitor.

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Newfag DM here. Trying to do a VTM game set in 1980s miami during the drug war.
Players are going to be working loosely with the Sabbat or independent factions, but will have the option to choose a bunch of different groups to support.
Basically, here's my idea for the campaign
>Players are working with Sabbat, just arrived, or just independent in 1984 miami
>Sabbat like Miami because they can use the drug cartels to bring in bodies, guns, cars, whatever they need; this is boosted due to how close Cuba is
>Camarilla wants to get rid of the Sabbat and keep Miami for themselves; The Prince (toreador) sees the Sabbat as a plague and Miami as a bastion of different passions.
>Anarchs exist in Miami, wanting to kick out the Sabbat too to keep Miami independent, but lack leadership (more on that later)
>Camarilla moves in and establishes "Rule" which no one really acknowledges. This angers the Prince which leads to him later on contacting the coterie
>Sabbat don't own the coterie, but they can choose to work closer with them to kick out the Cammies/Anarchs
>During a mission, the coterie will be abducted/kidnapped/staked to meet a new independent leader; "The General" (WIP). His story is he's an ex Revolutionary War general for the British. My shtick with this character is he saw how fiercely the Americans fought to be free from rule, where he has second thoughts about fighting for a monarchy that is oppressing people. After he was embraced and woke up in this new world, he sees the Anarch movement as the same idea; he then decides to assist the Anarchs. My idea for his sort of character is a sort of Count Dooku "dangerous gentleman" type
>Other independent groups include a bunch of Nightclubs, one is exclusively blood brothers, one is ventrue trying to profit as much as possible from the greater Miami, one is the Tremere trying to make sure their chantry won't be harmed during the incoming conflict.
>Smaller groups (which players can assist or wipe out) will include
(1/2)

>>96676673
(2/2)
>Nosferatu who assist the old folk in retirement homes, exchanging ghouling for information they get from visitors. Looking to just survive the incoming violence
>Gangrel pirates who initially assist the Sabbat, they are unique in which the all have protean 3, and all required to turn into sharks as their animal. They assist the Sabbat by attacking US Naval boats and providing recon. They're essentially pawns but they just don't know it yet.
>Cajun Tzimisce fleshcrafters, all in the swamps outside Miami; they keep their land protected by fleshcrafted gators who patrol the area constantly for intruders. Being split between the Sabbat and new growing Anarch movement, there's internal conflict between the newer and older kindred on which side to support.
That's it in a nutshell. The incoming "conflict" is something I need to work on, but my idea is that eventually the Prince will say enough is enough, and start getting blood hunts started for key members of anyone who doesn't bend the knee to his rule. This doesn't go over well with any faction, and every side starts to gear up more and more for war; all this while the US Government is trying to end the drugtrade once and for all.
What I want to do is introduce each player to each of the groups, and let them decide who to back.
Any advise or recommendations would be appreciated; this is my first time running VTM

>>96675606

Literally Umberto Eco

>>96644454
What happened to the blue girl?
>>96644491
I loathe my glacial reading pace, does anyone have tips for increasing speed while also maintaining comprehension? I find when I turn off the internal narration in my brain I'm not actually reading.

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>>96688538
Savor. Just keep reading. Look up words when you don't know them.
You will get more developed in your ability to comprehend as you go. Don't rely on speed reading techniques.

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>>96644491
I visited the library often this year while unemployed. but I'm about to be shackled again so that gets harder to do.
I have three bookshelves I share, latest find is Welcome to the Monkey House. I'm currently reading All Quiet on the Western Front, The Crystal Shard, and last book I bought for full price was Monalisa Overdrive since it's impossible to borrow, looking forward to starting that next once one or both of the current ones are done. I have a hard time chewing on only one story at a time.

>>96688538
>does anyone have tips for increasing speed while also maintaining comprehension?
Well, if anyone ever invents time travel you could go back a couple of decades and make yourself read more as a small child. That's definitely crucial. Although I suppose if time travel existed you would already have done that and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Honestly, like so many skills the key is just repetition. Don't overthink it, don't confuse things with fancy techniques. Just find things you enjoy reading and let yourself pick it up naturally by just immersing yourself in it.

That said, if you have undiagnosed dyslexia or something like that, there are specialised fonts that can help. It also sometimes helps to get your eyes tested; if your vision is a little off it might be forcing your brain to do a bit of extra processing to work out what the words say. It's quite easy to have vision that's good enough to get by in day to day life but could still be improved with glasses. (likewise, if you already have glasses your proscription might be a little off). I mean, it's probably not that, but it's worth checking.

>>96689346
All Quiet On The Western Front is one of those books I've always meant to read but never got around to. Is it any good?

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Posting a small excerpt from a /tg/ novel I'm writing, looking for general feedback. I posted it to /lit/ a while back, but it might be nice to hear a fa/tg/uy's opinion.

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>>96695420
>Is it good?
It has wonderful prose, and the subject is very frankly explained in a very heartening way.
You are there in the trench and we just said goodbye to our buddy with death on his face talking about what you will do to collect his nice boots before the orderlies steal them.
It is in a memoir style, perfect past, poetic flow. All the things I love for war stories

>>96695886
I have notes for you but let me sleep on it. Consider researching different topics related to your scenes to improve the authenticity of your world.

>>96697864
I can understand that. It's part of my first draft (finished) so now I get to go through and add a bunch of those bits to it. Thank you for the feedback.

>>96695886
There are red, squiggly underlines. It's eggregious to have misspellings in your screenshot.

Avoid flourish.

"found travel effortless"
"every possible inconvenience"
"directed off the road"
"all these events"
"a strange mixture"
"summarily direct them to prepare"
"despite the day being"
"has ruled here, uninterrupted"

Don't add piles of words that say nothing and "sound nice." You're tickled by the sound of your voice. No one else is. Convey meaning.

Read your dialogue aloud as your characters. You've done a decent job, here, of breaking up your descriptions with dialogue. But the dialogue is wooden. It's not bad, but it's not good, yet.

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>>96698854
I can understand most of the feedback, though I'd just like to add the context this is a sort of modern man sent to Arthurian-esque land, so the "wooden dialogue" was more an attempt to differentiate between those who come from our world and those who exist in a sort of storybook land. Do you have any advice on a better way to handle that? I wanted to stay away from the "thee, thou, ye" vocabulary.
Also, can you explain a bit more about the direction-based words you specified? Wouldn't that be a concise way of expressing "meaning", or is it more that there should be some further explanation/description ("barked an order", "directed with a silent glare", etc.)?
I don't really have anyone irl to offer advice on this, so I appreciate your feedback.

>>96699998
>I'd just like to add the context this is a sort of modern man sent to Arthurian-esque land,
I picked up on that just fine, actually, so good job providing the context clues to do so.

You want to use your words well. Use as few words as possible to say as much as possible. Want more words? Have more to say.

Let's take one sentence and break it out. I'm gonna pick this one, 'cuz it's a doozy:
>Every possible inconvenience was cleared from their path; children snatched out of the way, wagons directed off the road, their wheels often gouging deep ruts into the mud, peasants scattering at their approach, but one thing connected all these events were the deep bows given by each person along the road.

Let's go clause by clause:
>Every possible inconvenience was cleared from their path
"Every possible inconvenience" means the same thing as "Inconveniences." "Every possible" just slows down the sentence. When you slow down a sentence, you make it more difficult to understand because minds wander. "was cleared from their path" is passive past tense. The real reason you're told to avoid passive tense is because, again: it causes peoples' minds to wander. That's unnecessarily wordy. It's just blah-blah for the sake of blah-blah. This is what I mean by "tickled by the sound of your own voice." You've written more than was necessary and you didn't do it on behalf of the reader. This first clause could be "Inconveniences cleared." Same info conveyed.

If you really want to: "Inconveniences cleared their path." However, since you're about to describe a buncha street scenes, pick a more-exact word like "road" or "street." "Inconveniences cleared the street/road." Same info, no passive tense, no extraneous qualifiers. It's a better sentence.

>>96700146
The next clause follows a semi-colon. A semi-colon connects independent clauses. And you can use one there, although you run into trouble later in the sentence for doing so. But what you're about to convey is a list. So use a colon, not a semi-colon. Especially because you've got parentheticals within your list, so you're going to need semi-colons in just a second. And the bigger truth?

If you can end a sentence? Do.

"Inconveniences cleared the street." Boom--done.

Want to describe the street scene? Perfectly legit for stage-setting and explaining what's going on as the characters progress. Even conveys a sense of motion, which is a good choice.

But you chose to speak in hypotheticals. Don't. Be particular. Immerse me.
>children snatched out of the way,
Don't tell me about the kinds of things that happened. Tell me what happened. Show not tell. Children aren't snatched out of the way. A particular child is snatched out of the way. Wagons aren't directed off the road--a leek-farmer's wagon bounced into a rut. Peasants aren't scattering in general--three dudes in black smocks scrambled outa the way.

Your other problem with the semi-colon is that you've got the following;
>, wagons directed off the road, their wheels often gouging deep ruts into the mud,
"Their wheels" is a parenthetical to the wagons. But you've written yourself into a corner by using a semi-colon instead of a colon. Separating what happens to the wheels from the wagon with a comma is fine, but if you're in a list following a colon, you can then seperate your items with semi-colons and still use commas for parentheticals. Because you used a semi-colon, you're locked into commas to segregate your list items so the parentheticals within your list need to be denoted with parentheses or dashes.

>>96700146
>>96700201
Thank you for this, I'll try to keep it in mind as I revise my first draft. It's 137k words but it sounds like I might be able to give it a healthy trim.

>>96675046
Good anon

>>96675606
There's a long-running Japanese show (I can't think of the name) where the hatamoto to the shogun retires, wanders the country as a cart peddler, and solves murder mysteries along the way.

>>96675606
>I have trouble thinking a of a medieval detective besides some sort of pathfinder or an inquisitor.
Brother Cadfael

>>96697736
>the subject is very frankly explained in a very heartening way.
It's funny how the war stories written by men who actually served in them are always less dramatic than the ones written by people who didn't. Case in point: the most recent film version of All Quiet On The Western Front. It's a good film, but it's approach is very much 'OMG look at the horrors of war! Look at that guy getting lit up by a flamethrower, isn't it gruesome? Isn't war terrible?'. Whereas All Quiet On The Western Front is more matter-of-fact, and you can infer the anti-war message just from the events.

I had to do Journey's End at school, a British WW1 play. There is not a single scene with combat, it's all just men sitting in a trench waiting for the death they know is coming and can't escape.

>>96710807
If there's one thing to take from the memoirs of different conflicts I've been reading lately, it's that civilians severely overestimate just how much time in war is spent actually fighting it.
I feel like a lot of anti-war media falls flat in its delivery when it's made by people who don't have firsthand experience (and haven't read enough accounts from those who do), and while I'm still not able to explain it entirely, this is probably one of the major factors: if all they know is the violence bit then it's all they're able to represent, without the endless destitution, deprivation, and boredom that would generally take up the vast majority of a soldier's service, so the message just comes out as "omg did you know people heckin' DIE in war!?"

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>>96710807
The book and the movie are doing very different things to shortcut into sympathetic projecting, and I like both of them. They were effective at doing exactly what they should for their respective medium.
One is drawing from your emotional core telling stories you'd hear from buddies around a fire, and the other is harrowing with physiological impact that you are experiencing with the character as it happens.
The movie is shot in a specific way to control when and where the viewer feels relaxed and often disrupts it, leading you to get to this heart rending place where the young man singing in the woods feels genuinely cathartic. If you don't sink into it I don't think you'll get that same reaction as I did, but my point is only, that both forms of this story, as different as they are, do a great job for very very different reasons.
Personally though, when it comes to horrors of war stress movies there's no better than Come and See

>>96710807
>>96711538
>it's that civilians severely overestimate just how much time in war is spent actually fighting it
If you haven't already read it, check out "Storms of Steel" from Ernst Jünger. It's one of my favorite books and despite the martial name, a good chunk of it has nothing to do with the actual combat. Instead, it's a lot of waiting, passing time, getting drunk. Indeed, there is some humor to be found in this book. Some scenes in the trenches in that book are genuinely funny.
But there are also combat scenes and they are some of the most intense shit you can read
Holy fuck, that battle of the Somme at the end, the guy is magnificent

>>96718096
>"Storms of Steel" from Ernst Jünger
>It's open access on Internet Archive
Oh fuck yeah, on the list. Thanks for mentioning it.

>>96644454
I dunno, ask >>>/lit/

>>96718023
The movie missed the main point of the book, though (admittedly I say this as someone who hasn't actually read the book, but still).

The point is that Paul dies and nobody notices. There isn't some grand battle, he is not part of a heroic struggle. His death is not even a footnote in the history books. Whereas in the film, Paul's death is part of a final assault on the 11th, ordered by callous and vainglorious old men, which ends the war in apocalyptic scenes of carnage. Remarque was trying to show his reader that war is not some dramatic struggle that on might derive at least some meaning from; you just get slowly ground down until you're picked off without fanfare. The movie started off well by showing the uniforms being recycled, but it was clear that the people making it didn't really understand what Remarque was getting at.

finished a WIP I had laying about cause people tell me I don't finish my stories
https://voca.ro/1o2Mn6knEEjN
"A Kobold"

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>>96644454

I need your wisdom for the direction of my story. The medium is a crpg so I am not entirely sure I am in the right place, but I am at least in a place I respect.

>main character wakes up surrounded by arcane sigils in an empty room
>talked to by a disembodied voice, telling them that his presence have freed them
>that is because the body crash-landed into the place where the spirit was bound, but that is not up to reveal yet
>the sprit tells the character that they will stay in their body and keep their blood pumping (something the body cannot do on its own apparently) if he keeps walking and gets them out of here
>Facility is a little high-tech, and very destitute. There are decaying security drowns walking about, and being hostile. (Human-shaped drones for rule of cool)
>Eventually cornered as the facility gets to full alarm and the remaining drones are closing in, but then is rescued by a some other characters
>The take him home into an 80s punk-style city, and have a doctor check up on him
>Doctor tells him that his body is breaking down, and needs an expensive enzyme to stop it

So the thing is that in a book, or a movie, this would be two nice thick plotlines to follow. Maybe even discovering the feelings and thoughts of the main character about their predicament. In a crpg though, it might be just dividing the attention, as people get interested in one, but not the other. Especially since players go around and discover what makes them curious. Instead of having the follow the motivations of a character.

So I figured one has to go, but I am not sure which one.
Getting rid of the voice would mean I don't have to write an inner voice that comments on everything for the story, and getting rid of the "you're falling apart" plot, means I don't need to worry about some timer or anything, or the lack of it as a dissonance.

What you guys think? Any advice would be appreciated.

>>96736502
Possession by a spirit clashes with a 80s punk sci-fi city. I would say it makes more sense for the protagonist to wake up in an abandoned lab with a bunch of medical devices rather than arcane sigils, escape the facility by killing the drones, find a doctor to see why he doesn't remember anything, and get told his body is breaking down. The driver of the plot then becomes to find out what the lab was doing to him, involving investigating shady corporations and mad scientists.

Or if you preferred the arcane half, ditch the doctor and the body breaking down part and the main plot becomes about getting rid of the spirit possessing him before it takes over his body entirely.

I think either could work. And to be honest, if you played it right you could pull off your original concept, if you just say that the body is breaking down because of the spirit possession. Then the player has to look for a way to remove the spirit, while finding enzymes to stabilise himself until he can accomplish this. However, it would be a lot harder to balance the clashing settings of arcane urban fantasy vs 80s sci-fi punk.

>>96739401
The enzymes are actually just a red-herring, because it is the only way a medical professional could rationalize the process of a magically created artificial body breaking down on a cellular level. Since this golem-person was unfinished.
Which now I guess I realize it might be just overcomplicating things for a twist nobody will really care for?

As for the clashing, I'm trying to follow the sort of genre casserole that fighting games all seemed to have agreed on; anything goes as long as two dudes can fistfight with it. Monsters, wizards, cyborgs, or just guys who did a lot of pushups and situps.

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>>96734308
Please give me text, thank you

>>96740737
Is that one of Berkey's pieces? It looks amazing.

>>96739401
>>96740218
I had a night to sleep about it. Thanks I think I'll go that way by removing the spirit.

Damn, once I was able to start writing around 20:00, enough time to finish a session, then watch, play something, read a book and go to bed.
This rhythm is broken, it takes me way longer to start writing, and only stopping once it's almost time for bed. Shits fucked.

>>96747130
I will start now
I will start NOW
I WILL START NOW
Okay, first, we look for some good music… then…

>>96740737
>>96734308
That image is fantastic, made me want to listen to anon's work. Unfortunately the voocaroo is ded

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>>96756357
It's not related, was for eye catch but I hope anon sees it and posts story.
>>96740997
It's an homage to Berkey, from Vampire Knight Requiem issue 7. I haven't read it yet but it def has rule of cool
Got the sauce if you're interested
>zipcomic dot com slash requiem-vampire-knight-issue-7

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>>96760891
Thanks, fampai

It's been a while since I've written anything so I thought I'd have a go at something quick.

>>96644454
A thousand thousand halls and all in silence. All filled with books, wall to wall, floor to ceiling. In places even that vast space hadn't been enough to contain them, and they had overflowed; there were tunnels like mine-workings where - seeing that there was plenty of unused area above head height - extra shelves had been added spanning the gap, creating a new ceiling which groaned under the weight of paper so that props had to be wedged under them to stop it all collapsing. In the depths of the stacks there were even passages where - with the overspan unable to bear more weight - new bookcases had been lain flat, and gantries strung over them, so that prospective borrowers had to walk over them or even crawl, where the ceiling had got low enough.

The library of the Damascene. In some parts of the world he was called a buddha (not *the* buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, but a walker on the same path), for he had been enlightened, although sources differed on whether by meditation or divine revelation. Further east still, he was referred to as a sage, although only by a tiny sect consisting of less than a hundred people whose ancestors had, at one time, been Manichaeans. How he became part of the Manichaean corpus was unknown even to him, although given that they managed to integrate Jesus Christ into Zoroastrianism and Chinese folk religion, it should hardly have been a surprise.

The Damascene may or may not have been spiritually enlightened, but there was one thing he was lacking, and that was knowledge. He just couldn't hold onto it. Maybe it was *because* he was so in touch with the spiritual realm, but every fact he learned about anything relating to... well, reality, which is to say everything to do with anything we would recognise, flowed straight out of him.

>>96768570

Which was a shame, because he was immortal, and therefore learned rather a lot. It took him a long time to decide that this was a problem, and even longer to work out a solution. How long exactly was another of those facts that had been lost to him. But eventually, after an unspecified period of time, he built his library, and he built it in such a way that when a slippery fact escaped his mind it was caught and preserved in the pages of a book in the great and strange geometries of his library.

What the Damascene was unaware of at first was that his design for his library was a little too good. It was perfect at its appointed task - that is, capturing and storing his wayward memories - but it also began to catch other things too, like a drag net sweeping up porpoises. Any free-floating bit of information was fair game and a great many things that had nothing to do with the Damascene were sucked up by the library's bibliographic vortex.

Hence the issue of space. The Damascene had learned enough in his time - knowledge he was now able to consult his library to apply - to be able to bend the laws of physics a bit. In fact the library, while technically real, was not quite as much a part of the world we all know and love as, say, the room you're sitting in right now (if you're sitting outside, go back inside immediately. The outside is no place for a reader, much less one who reads fantasy short stories. It's dangerous out there. There are *allergens*). However, you can only bend the laws of physics so far before they break, and so he'd been forced to resort to simply cramming them in any which way he could.

>>96768583

This was far from the only, or indeed the worst problem with the library. The ever-present danger of shelf collapses, book avalanches and the like was a mere trifle compared to the existential threat of actually trying to read a book. Without precautions, at least, although even with precautions you were still taking your life in your hands. More than your life, perhaps. The library hoovered up any stray piece of information, but that wasn't limited to ordinary - for want of a better word - free-floating facts.

Sure, the full stats for the 1978 Minneapolis softball league were in there, and the secret recipe for McDonalds mayo, and the admissions Lavrenti Beria had made about his blackmail of many western politicians before his execution (don't ask, but if you know who Lavrenti Beria is you can probably guess what he was blackmailing them about). But if you opened a book at random you were equally likely to get the stray thoughts of an eldritch being older than space and time, whose very name could unhinge the human mind. Or, the plans for a machine that hasn't been built yet and can't be built in our reality *unless* you bring the plans with you when you leave and then... well, then you find out why the very idea of the machine had been excised from that other reality and cast into the void. Or the echoes of your future self warning you not to open the book you're going to open later but also, somehow, carrying the shadow of the contents of that book back with it until you have to find the book just to warn your past self not to send the warning back...

Suffice to say, the Damascene does not permit casual visitors to his library. Only scholars who have proven themselves to be as dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge as he is are even considered, and of those only a handful have ever passed his rigorous safety training.

>>96768598

For the ambitious researcher there are many hidden treasures hidden amongst the stacks. The lost drafts of Shakespeare's final play, the original notes Fermat jotted down once he ran out of space in the margin, the Rosetta stone for Linear A (which is in fact a papyrus written by an Egyptian trader by way of Cyprus). And treasure in the more literal sense, like the log books for the Spanish treasure fleet lost in the great storm of 1717, or the train timetables that list the route for the train that carried the Amber Room away from Konigsberg in 1945. Not that any researcher worthy of the Damascene's exacting standards is interested in anything so crass.

The Library of the Damascene would be considered one of the great wonders of the world if more than a handful of people knew it existed. But don't make the mistake of thinking it's the only arcane library. There are stranger beings than the Damascene in the endless halls of our multidimensional reality, and many of them have their own archives. The Damascene is unique only in that he occasionally allows more mortals access to his collection. And perhaps the most dangerous aspect of his library is that it has details of the others. How do you think I learned about them if their masters don't permit mortals? That's right; maybe I was a little careless, wandered a little too far through the stacks. Or maybe I wanted to find that catalogue that didn't belong even in the esoteric spaces of the Damascene's little pocket of reality.

>>96768607

Imagine what wonders the others contain. Or rather, don't. We humans have a fairly tenuous grip on sanity already, in the grand scheme of things. There are books out there...

No. Don't even think about it, not even to warn others. Because there are some libraries out there where you don't have to go looking for a book. The book will find you. No, better not even to think about it...

In trying not to think about it, I thought about what I wasn't supposed to think about. Which is a mouthful, but you get the idea. And now there's a book on the table in front of me. I didn't put it there, but a leather-bound book there is. And although I know that I should close my eyes, turn my back, and try my very best to forget that it's there, at the same time...

Knowledge has a weight to it. You think that library shelves creak and groan because of the mere mass of paper? No, knowledge has its own substance, and its own gravity. It draws you in, and the more knowledge there is the harder the pull. I can feel it already.

Maybe if I just looked at the cover. Just to see what it's about. Surely that couldn’t hurt...

>>96644454
I keep reading lorebooks for games I will never play just so scenarios I set in my head are lore friendly
What stage of autism is this?

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>>96785479
The 5th stage of astral Autism

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>>96768570
>>96768583
>>96768598
>>96768607
>>96768614
Imagine being alive because you can both offer nothing of value to it so you're never swallowed up, and lucky.
There you are, in the great akashic plane, permitted insights into the vastness of knowledge because you are too dumb to die.

>>96786905
That's a really interesting idea actually: a library only the ignorant can access because the knowledgeable will be eaten by it.

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>>96644454
What rumours do your characters have?

>>96800437
>"It had to be a dead ostrich..."

>>96800437
We don't gossip.

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>>96801282
Would that be the one some bloke named Archie Duke shot because 'e was hungry?

>>96804434
Baldrick was alright, but Tony's best work is The Worst Jobs in History

>>96804449
Maybe, but they both that and Blackadder have the problem that they were written by Boomers who don't really know anything about history.

>>96658698
>My current idea is that the ultra-wealthy are building generation ships at the edge of the solar system and when they're done they're going to leave Earth to complete collapse. And while I like it the more and more I think about it the less shocking and horrifying it seems.
"People trying to leave" is only horrifying if they take something with them we need here, can't leave without fucking something up here, or there's something greatly detestable about it that warrants emotion and reason to attempt to stop it like their ships are powered by anally raping little boys or something.

Guy went to job, was rejected, only if "be an ass at Artelier and Co" - "no, I'm not weak, I'll go to war". He went by "proved means", killed every boss ever, by 10^7 years at 10^777 planets, at instance, etc, did everything man can do. Gave Kiroshi Super Corp to nature and provided information with protection. How he handled it- he could. So, it.

>Sandbox Campaign
>Vampire Raiders to the South
>Dragonborn in the North East
>Fall of a nearby Empire, think Firefly almost
>Across the globe Super Volcano is blowing
>In the Desert a wild technocrat is building a bomb to destroy EVERYTHING
>The Gods are in a War, each with Tons of Power given to Warriors
>If none of that intrigues them, you can do little fetch quests in the starting village until they get bored.

Too much? Too little? Most is fleshed out slightly, just waiting to see what my new group bites onto.

>>96819670
>Sandbox Campaign
You're a braver man than I.

I think the best advice is: be flexible. Get too specific with the setting and you can end up railroading your characters, but do too little and it doesn't feel like a real world. I think your approach is good: flesh out each area a little and then wait to see what your players do before getting into the nitty gritty of the details.

>>96811418
wat