I dunno, we're already doing genderless primary beings with gender fluid aspects. Plus... y'know, the entire duality we're working with.

I was thinking we'd have a male and female for each color, split between two gods.

Otaria would weep.
Y'know, if it wasn't a salt blasted lifeless hunk of rock.


I kind of hate to admit it, but I was considering what the colors we could play around with them was, and that went to making me think of red, to play on the second color we have. Running platinum white to strawberry blonde to full on flaming red.
And then I realized I'd suggested freckles and realized I'd unintentionally turned them GINGER.
So... do we want them to run from Albino to Ginger?

The freckles, btw, came about because of the idea that they'd resemble a scattering of stars on their skin to kind of drive home that connection.

Incidentally, as difficult as this is, we're also going to have to deal with making our GOBLINS distinct too... which is going to be hoof-ah...

The hair ribbons seem... less immediately grokkable. I mean, I had to relate them to dreadlocks before it clicked. Not shutting them down, just saying we should think about them.

*opens mouth... slowly closes it while squinting at you*
Too easy.
Going on the Soltari though, I think we might be trying to hammer them into place, which... maybe we should come back after doing some other work and see if they'd gel at that point.

I found it an elegant solution when I was developing him. Oh... and when I said beard, I meant with a mustache as well. Full facial hair.


Catfolk, Satyrs, and Elves are all possibilities in my books. I think Cats might be edging a bit too differently human, but I wouldn't shut them down if we could do something interesting with them.
Elves would probably have the greatest ease going with our resemblance, but there again, we're already using goblins and they ARE the two overused bits.
I still like my idea of Satyrs, but if they don't match with what you guys want to do, then I'm fine stepping away from them.

I was doing some thinking and managed to come up with something.
So, we essentially have two pairs of the gods:
Time and Fate
World and Heavens

Now, what those two pairs have in common is thus:
Time
Space

Which we can actually use Eternity as a bridge between the two. So long as we can relate hir to one of the two sides, we essentially have a 1-1-1-1-1 relationship. That being 4 pairs. If we can figure out how to close out the loop, it WOULD be interestingly cyclical.

In other news, I worked up a little description for the Moonfolk's home continent:


Just a fairly sketchy idea of where they come from. Thoughts and/or expansions?

Well, I think when we talk about a world with (and from) gods, people are going to make an immediate mental connection to Theros. So I wonder if having Satyrs would work towards our advantage and play into expectation, or if it will seem too similar. From a Greek/Roman mythology standpoint, having Satyrs would be good, because that sort of creature is historically close to the gods. And we would likely diverge from the Theros Satyrs by making our mono-green and divorce them from the more prevailing theme they had there.

On another topic, I've been thinking of ways to fill out the world with some of the larger creatures. I don't think this will necessarily work, but what if we have our larger, mid-range creatures, 3/3 or so, be enemy-colored creatures who straddle the color philosophies in the opposite direction of the gods? For example, Motion (R) matches with Stillness (U) at the god level, but for this level of creature, we would match it with One, the other concept. This would be a challenge, and not everything would line up, but it would give us a way to fill out a more rare creature. (Incidently, I sort of want Cyclops in here, which I would put in for this purpose.)

Barinellos, as to your description of the Moonfolk lands, I like it in general, although I sort of got alarm bells at "observatories." What kind of tech level are we looking at with this world? Personally, I've been thinking of it as pretty undeveloped by comparison with many of the planes. That just feels more right to me, for some reason. What are other people thinking?

Well, mostly I'm looking at a situation where we spread our creatures types out across things. We already have Moonfolk which also have some association with the Kami, and Goblins which feel generic enough that we don't have to worry about the fact they appeared in Kamigawa as well.
Now, if we went elves, we run into the problem that if they are sitting next to goblins, we're going to lose some of our potential to do unique things. Satyrs, were used with Theros, but by the same merit, we're going in some pretty weird directions to distinguish ourselves from Theros.

Which actually sort of beings me to the aesthetic of the world that I've been kind of toying with. Ultimately, I keep coming back to gothic dark fantasy, so more exotic creatures like Satyrs, I think, will feel more unique for us. Of course, unlike other dark fantasy, I see things as being pretty vibrant and bright. So... gothic bright fantasy? Does that make ANY sense at all?

But once again, I'm not super attached to them, I'm just trying to maximize our diversity.


For the record, the Icons are going to have their own feature, so best not to get too far ahead of ourselves on THAT field.

Renaissance level is what I've been working with. (Like, not even Magic renaissance either. Somewhere behind Fiora.)
You see, the thing is, we're waaaaaaaay back in their histories right now... but that's not the present. We're building up from the Mythic Age, but it's been a long time since then.

Moonfolk should have a strong, cultural attachment to flags. They will have flags for their towns, for their cities, and for all the great Houses, as well as a unifying flag for Moonfolk in general.

Legend would hold that is a flag on the moon. How did it get there? No one knows, but the Moonfolk dream of discovering the answer.

That is a terrible joke but I'm actually going to second that motion because I love terrible jokes and because I actually think that would be a rather interesting visual.

I love the waterfall-drenched island aesthetic. That's cool.

And yes, gothic bright fantasy does, in fact, make sense. I mean, you've got Faerie Goth and Tribal Goth, and Deathrockers tend to use brighter colors but they're more modern and also like punk taken to a horrifying extreme so I'm not sure that's quite the look we're going for, and there's Pastel Goth but opinion in goth circles is very divided on whether Pastel Goth is even actually goth...

Here's some potentially useful visual resources:
http://gothic-culture.tumblr.com/post/4 ... ibal-goths
http://gina-xanadu.tumblr.com/post/8391 ... -antwerpen
http://neptunes-mo0n.tumblr.com/post/20085222320
http://psychara.tumblr.com/post/8318050 ... r-queen-of <---this one is pretty awesome
http://psychara.tumblr.com/post/8678923 ... by-peacock
http://psychara.tumblr.com/post/8452999 ... -icydreads
http://psychara.tumblr.com/post/8560756 ... -me-and-my
http://www.followtheblackrabbit.com/index_main.html (I don't think there's anything to really associate Stitcher with goth other than the fact that I think her work WHICH IS VERY NSFW works interestingly in juxtaposition with some of the other stuff here)
http://londonwarrior.tumblr.com/post/39 ... st-fantasy
http://thegothicalice.tumblr.com/post/4 ... ua-hair-me

Florence + the Machine isn't """strictly""" goth but her work has a lot of affinities with goth, particularly in that like a significant number of her songs are about a blissfulness that sort of wraps around and becomes a death by a thousand cuts. See:



I'd dig up some other videos but... like... goth videos are usually terrible, metal videos are usually terrible, which means that goth metal, which has the most tendency to embrace dark fantasy aesthetics, are like TERRIBLE SQUARED.

...So I'm a bit of a goth at heart secretly? >.<

Well, I'm okay with the general concept of that, but I would insist the flags be triangular. Which could have some interesting visual motifs picked up from Cosmos. Sort of like the Rakdos diamond patterns, but with triangles instead of diamonds. I've been doing a little brainstorming for visuals there.

The largest reason I'm okay with the flags is that in Tibet, you can find a ton of flags in villages and tied to markers.

I thought it would be a good source of clouds for our moonfolk to live among without ACTUALLY having clouds. I'm going to compose a list of lands that would sort of make a composite of the continent. This is partly to give us some variety in biomes too.
Yeah, I was ahead of the curve with Florence, so no need to tell me about that. A lot of my top 25 is still Florence.

Well maybe someone who isn't as hip as you will find the link useful

She's really good though. I'm excited to see what she does next.

To say nothing of the fact that you did an article that featured an examination of her video, right?

Bwomp!

So, I feel like I've laid a little groundwork for the Moonfolk culture, talked a little about their homeland, and explored their visuals... How are we feeling about them in general?

As an aside, I went through about 5 variations of the Iconic origins but I continually got frustrated because they kept seeming to step on the Avatars too much.

I'm feeling pretty good about moonfolk... and I'm feeling better about centaurs too if we're going with sort of a light-dark gothic fantasy aesthetic. I think there's fun to be had there. Fiddling with their aesthetic shouldn't be too hard I think. The goblins'll probably give us some trouble but we can ponder that over...

That leaves white and black.

Hooboy.

Centaurs?
Or did you mean Satyrs? I mean, we talked about having Centaurs in red for midrange, but... just wanted to be clear.

And yeah... hoooooooboy.

I pictured satyrs, I imagined them in my head, I went to type their name, and I typed centaur instead because ???

Time to go to bed.

But one last thought before bed: could we get away with Labyrinth style Brian Frood influenced goblin designs here? How well would that work?

Also, Raven, do you have any thoughts on dark/light gothic fantasy as the overarching aesthetic?

Yeah, I'm good with the moonfolk.

Looking through Gatherer (have I mentioned how much I hate the new Gatherer?) our options for pre-existing creature types are pretty limited. I did a search for non-humans, non-beasts, non-gorgons and non-zombies. Most of what I got were demonic (demons and imps) or dead (Shades, spectres and wraiths). There are Ogres and Ratfolk, which are both out because they are pretty far from human and were also featured heavily in Kamigawa, which I think we want to avoid if we're doing Moonfolk. There are a few Giants, but I'd rather avoid them for reasons related to Elysium. I did see a number of hounds, so we could possibly do a hound-folk type creature, possibly styled after Anubis, if we wanted to go that route.

There were also Gargoyles, which might be an interesting way to go, but again, that's pretty non-human. Hags also exist in black, and so it's conceivable we could do a witch/warlock sort of thing. Similarly, we have vampires as an option, but I'd personally rather avoid them because, well, they're not a race.

The other option we have, of course, is to color-shift a race from somewhere else. Lorwyn gave us precedence for elves, but I think pushing them into mono-black would be too far away from expectation. I think Orcs are an option, and play into fantasy tropes, and Dwarves, I think, could do well in . I still think Aven in black are an option, but again, pretty non-human. Non-Viashino Lizard folk might work, and again, centaurs are a potential solution.

So, did any of that set off ideas for anyone?


Not really. I'm always pretty much down with gothic stuff. My instinct tells me a world based so heavily on gods and their works would be better served in a bronze age setting, although I suppose that's essentially what Theros was, so gothic is a good option.

Jackalfolk would certainly be very potentially interesting, I do have to say that.
The one thing I would worry about there is essentially having the same issue as ratfolk, but I can dig a houndfolk if we want to go that route.

Right now, unless we go simple and use Human, I think it might be our strongest option. It does play pretty well with Death and Void though, particularly death. Although, some vaguely Egyptian mysticism could possibly help use with Void.

I don't think houndfolk have quite the same inhuman silhouette as ratfolk would--you can imagine them standing more upright, whereas ratfolk are pretty... crouchy.

There's still Dauthi if we want to go a bit further out into the realms of weird... but there aren't a lot of great alternatives.

What about orcs? I like orcs in black. But they might be too big.

Anyway, I'd be cool with hounds/jackals

I don't think they're too big, but I do think they're maybe a little too similar to Goblins.

And yeah, wizards is a little too comfortable with where they are in black with characteristics. It's really sort of frustrating. With white, we can at least understand that they've not been able to nail it down, but with black, they just... sort of stopped trying.

Yeah, I mean you can see that with Lorwyn--everything got just sorta color shifted into black to fill the void.

Although that DOES remind me of one other possible choice: faeries.

Thoughts on that?