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PostPosted: Fri Nov 20, 2015 3:00 am 
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If you want the voices to build up over time, you could have them each show up after he kills someone (of course not for everyone he kills, as that would be too many. Just people whose deaths were somehow significant). Mybe even have them be the voices of his victims. Although, that would make CHILD terribly tragic.

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PostPosted: Fri Nov 20, 2015 5:15 am 
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It might also help if I gave the non-voice characters actual names, rather than WARLORD, OFFICER, or KING.

Maybe something as 'Khanut the Warlord' for their first appearance in the scene and simply addressing them by name one their role is clear?

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PostPosted: Sat Nov 21, 2015 1:31 am 
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Great play.

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PostPosted: Sat Nov 21, 2015 2:05 am 
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Great play.

Thanks!

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PostPosted: Sat Nov 21, 2015 5:28 pm 
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Barinellos wrote:
The story itself was interesting and the use of scripting was a fairly avant garde choice to make. I do feel as though it could have benefited from an initial cast list, as many of the voices aren't immediately apparent as to which is a stage presence or not.

Yeah, obviously the concept here is that we're only getting fragments of the play. I had considered doing an initial cast list, but I figured it would be utterly massive, and a large percentage of them would never be seen. Still, maybe I'll try to put that together at some point.

Speaking purely for myself, I sort of feel like this is a feature, and not a bug. I kind feel like that moment of confusion -- when another voice appears, and you think that it's new, but you're not totally sure -- is fitting, given the subject matter.

Anyway, this was really neat, Raven. Thanks for sharing!

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PostPosted: Sat Nov 21, 2015 5:36 pm 
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Barinellos wrote:
The story itself was interesting and the use of scripting was a fairly avant garde choice to make. I do feel as though it could have benefited from an initial cast list, as many of the voices aren't immediately apparent as to which is a stage presence or not.

Yeah, obviously the concept here is that we're only getting fragments of the play. I had considered doing an initial cast list, but I figured it would be utterly massive, and a large percentage of them would never be seen. Still, maybe I'll try to put that together at some point.

Speaking purely for myself, I sort of feel like this is a feature, and not a bug. I kind feel like that moment of confusion -- when another voice appears, and you think that it's new, but you're not totally sure -- is fitting, given the subject matter.

Anyway, this was really neat, Raven. Thanks for sharing!

The problem with it is that, strictly speaking, this is before he went bonkers.

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PostPosted: Sat Nov 21, 2015 6:02 pm 
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Speaking purely for myself, I sort of feel like this is a feature, and not a bug. I kind feel like that moment of confusion -- when another voice appears, and you think that it's new, but you're not totally sure -- is fitting, given the subject matter.

Anyway, this was really neat, Raven. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!

Barinellos wrote:
Yeah, obviously the concept here is that we're only getting fragments of the play. I had considered doing an initial cast list, but I figured it would be utterly massive, and a large percentage of them would never be seen. Still, maybe I'll try to put that together at some point.

Speaking purely for myself, I sort of feel like this is a feature, and not a bug. I kind feel like that moment of confusion -- when another voice appears, and you think that it's new, but you're not totally sure -- is fitting, given the subject matter.

Anyway, this was really neat, Raven. Thanks for sharing!

The problem with it is that, strictly speaking, this is before he went bonkers.

Yeah, I took a few liberties with that, admittedly. Basically, in this version of things, he's hearing voices all along, and maybe at first, they represent various parts of his personality. The CHILD is what remains of his innocence, the SOLDIER is his indoctrinated sense of duty, the MASTER represents his training and fear of failure and so forth. But his dossier mentions that there were many brothers, not just Muinn, and so I sort of imagine that as each one dies, Huinn sort of loses it more and more, and the voices become less representative and more literal. Notice in that first scene shown, he only interacts with his voices briefly, and mostly responding to feeling like another brother was lost. In the second scene, the only voice he responds to is the FLOCK, which at that point is basically Muinn. Then the SPARK manifests as a representation and pulls him into the aether, which sort of completes the snapping of his mind. Then, in the scene with the KING, he starts to show that he's going completely bat-**** crazy.

And obviously, we're missing a lot anyway.

But yeah, if I missed the mark, I'm not entirely surprised. Huinn's hard to write for...


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PostPosted: Sat Nov 21, 2015 6:37 pm 
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So, this one is something that's a little outside of my usual bailiwick, but this story just sort of barged its way into my head today, and I figured that I'd better write it down before it could cause too much trouble.

The Reunion


With that being said...

Spoiler

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Last edited by OrcishLibrarian on Sat Nov 21, 2015 11:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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PostPosted: Sat Nov 21, 2015 7:46 pm 
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@The Reunion:


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PostPosted: Sat Nov 21, 2015 11:37 pm 
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Well, thank you for the kind words, Raven! I'm glad that you liked the story!

I suppose that it's not *completely* impossible that the character in question could be... well, the character in question. But I'd really rather defer to the people who were more involved with crafting the Cabal that myself -- particularly Tevish, since I think this particular individual was his handiwork? And especially since he already wrote the poem, like you pointed out.

Anyway, I'm mainly hoping that people just enjoy the story, regardless of who the characters might turn out to be or not to be. A lot of times, I have a hard time grappling with oldwalkers. But, in this case, the moment that crystalized in my head was really just two people talking, and two people talking is something that I can usually get my mind around. :)

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PostPosted: Sun Nov 22, 2015 12:13 am 
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I had intended Mender & Sunder to leave the Mender's death... suspect. Like an elf dying in LotR suspect -- she's gone pretty finally in a normal sense but the author has faith in an eventual return. She passed on beyond all shores, but some spirit remains. Is that poetic license? A worshiper's Faith? Or a reflection of a deeper truth that more prosaic accounts that list her name among those slain in the final downfall have missed? Some of my early designs had her having been imprisoned rather than killed, ending up Sealed Good in a Can. As good as dead to the multiverse, until the stars are right. (Actually in The Pit on Ashkanar, but as Ashkanar's fall crystallized in talks with Barinellos that led up to Remembrances, the identity of any potential sealed resident of the Pit changed)

I do like Reunion as an interpretation of her. Like, I'd always seen the Mender as something a little like an Oldwalker Aloise. She was a person, so she had bad days and didn't always make the best decisions, but she was always pretty relentlessly good. When I was putting the Dominia Cabal together one of the rules clattering around in my head was that nobody (and certainly neither faction) was totally good or evil. Even Ellia started as a reasonable woman who absolutely did love her daughter. But the Mender? I'm sure there are stains on her record (siding with either faction in the Civil War would have been one of them; both the Mentalist and the Chamberlain were in my mind on the far darker end.) but she would always try to do the right thing. To make Dominia a better place, and not just for herself.

I feel like that's something that, to an extent, really tends to generate its own rewards. Even Zhiran (in Remembrances) seems to respect her more than he does any other member of the cabal. So part of me wonders... who'd do it in the end? Who would actually strike down The Mender? By the end, it's pretty much Ellia left fighting, of the true titans of the Cabal. She'd have it in her, I suppose. I don't think there's anything she WOULDN'T do after the events of The Planeswalker's Daughter.

Part of me feels kind of guilty about cabal members turning up in the modern day. I almost feel like I cheated with Kala since I went with what her initial bio listed as a limited number of sources reporting. But then part of me doesn't exactly want to give up on The Mender, not when an alternative that seems so beautifully in character presents itself, one that would have kept her out of Dominia for all these millennia.

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PostPosted: Sun Nov 22, 2015 12:27 am 
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I'll have to add my own comments to the various threads of topic circulating right now after dinner, but I stand with szat on this.

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PostPosted: Sun Nov 22, 2015 8:30 am 
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The Reunion is very, very good! Unfortunately I'm not up to date with the Cabal storyline, so I missed a few references; I'll catch up in a few days.

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PostPosted: Sun Nov 22, 2015 12:42 pm 
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Thanks so much, Tevish, for the very thoughtful comments, and the additional context and insight! They are very much appreciated. And, if you felt like this was in-character, then I'm really, really happy about that. :)


I had intended Mender & Sunder to leave the Mender's death... suspect. Like an elf dying in LotR suspect -- she's gone pretty finally in a normal sense but the author has faith in an eventual return. She passed on beyond all shores, but some spirit remains. Is that poetic license? A worshiper's Faith? Or a reflection of a deeper truth that more prosaic accounts that list her name among those slain in the final downfall have missed? Some of my early designs had her having been imprisoned rather than killed, ending up Sealed Good in a Can. As good as dead to the multiverse, until the stars are right. (Actually in The Pit on Ashkanar, but as Ashkanar's fall crystallized in talks with Barinellos that led up to Remembrances, the identity of any potential sealed resident of the Pit changed)

Thanks for sharing all that! Whatever her story might turn out to be, I guess I'm just glad that The Mender isn't trapped in the pit!


I do like Reunion as an interpretation of her. Like, I'd always seen the Mender as something a little like an Oldwalker Aloise. She was a person, so she had bad days and didn't always make the best decisions, but she was always pretty relentlessly good. When I was putting the Dominia Cabal together one of the rules clattering around in my head was that nobody (and certainly neither faction) was totally good or evil. Even Ellia started as a reasonable woman who absolutely did love her daughter. But the Mender? I'm sure there are stains on her record (siding with either faction in the Civil War would have been one of them; both the Mentalist and the Chamberlain were in my mind on the far darker end.) but she would always try to do the right thing. To make Dominia a better place, and not just for herself.

The way that The Mender sort of made sense to me, in my head, is that I almost thought of her as being like the reliable, good-hearted sibling of someone with a serious problem, and that she's constantly finding herself being asked to compromise her own principles, and to do things that she isn't wholly comfortable with doing, because that's what it takes to keep this other person (or, as this particular case may be, cause) from doing even more damage to itself and to other people than it would do if she wasn't there to try to pick up the pieces, and clean up the messes, and rein-in the worst of the destructive behavior. Because I've known people like that in my life, and always find myself thinking about them, and asking: How has this person allowed herself to be pulled into this vortex, where she's basically devoting her entire life to stop this other person -- in whom it's really hard to see the redeeming qualities -- from just falling to pieces and causing a lot of collateral damage in the process? And, in some ways, it's a sort of act of supreme self-sacrifice, because it means being willing to sublimate your own wants, and needs, and beliefs at the altar of something else that you care about deeply. But there's also this aspect of conflict-avoidance to it, I think, because, no matter how hard you try, there's no happy ending for this dynamic. It can't last indefinitely. Only one of two things can happen: you either have to confront the person that's doing the damage, and get them to reconsider what they're doing (and that takes a level of courage that I, for one, don't know if I would have), or you have to be able to walk away.

And I sort of imagined that this was The Mender's dilemma for all those years. There were people that she was loyal to, and there were ideas that she believed in, even as she saw all the suffering that those people and ideals were causing. And I think she genuinely believed that her part in all this was to be present, and to do everything that she could to mend the damage that was done. But I think she also had to know that what she was doing was fighting a sort of rear-guard action against forces that were greater than her ability to control, and that, at the end of the day, she would have to make a choice: Would she make a stand, and try to change the course that things were headed? Or would she walk away, and just try to save what could be saved?

And my hope was that what you're seeing in this piece is just a little bit of that internal battle. I think that she's saying things that she probably wishes that she had said more forcefully thousands of years ago. And I think that her choice to sort of bind herself to this particular plane, to sort of sacrifice her own freedom in an effort to heal at least one of the worlds that she feels partially responsible for breaking, is her own attempt at making reparations for choices that she felt like she had to make at the time, but which she now feels were not the right choices.


Part of me feels kind of guilty about cabal members turning up in the modern day. I almost feel like I cheated with Kala since I went with what her initial bio listed as a limited number of sources reporting. But then part of me doesn't exactly want to give up on The Mender, not when an alternative that seems so beautifully in character presents itself, one that would have kept her out of Dominia for all these millennia.

Well, again, thank you for the kind words. I won't presume that it is The Mender in this story, but the fact that you feel like it *could* be her is a tremendous compliment.


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I'll have to add my own comments to the various threads of topic circulating right now after dinner, but I stand with szat on this.

I look forward to any thoughts you have!


The Reunion is very, very good! Unfortunately I'm not up to date with the Cabal storyline, so I missed a few references; I'll catch up in a few days.

Well, I mean, I'm clearly not caught-up either :blush:... but apparently that didn't stop me!

Kidding aside, thanks for reading, Huey! And for the kind words!

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PostPosted: Tue Nov 24, 2015 11:27 pm 
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Another one of these came today. :(

The Storm

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PostPosted: Tue Nov 24, 2015 11:46 pm 
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Good stuff. Is Hara an existing character?

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PostPosted: Tue Nov 24, 2015 11:55 pm 
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Good stuff. Is Hara an existing character?

No, she's new.

I found myself imagining this very agrarian world tonight, sort of in the image of the American great plains. And Hara sort of appeared in that world.

Thanks for reading, CKY!

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 25, 2015 4:23 am 
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I couldn’t find her.

This sent a shiver down my spine. It reminded me of "I don’t want to be a ghost story." from a piece everyone here should know well. (as in: never read Rest for the Wicked? Do it NOW for Small Gods' sake I don't even)
The rural theme is strong and consistent, even in the figures of speech; the religion mentioned in the story seems interesting except for the stupid bigotry of most of the clergy, mirroring accurately some episodes I heard of. Talking about religion in some forum is a faux pas, but I'll give my humble two cents anyway: the main reasons for a religion to exist should be soothing the souls of the faithful and encouraging decent behavior. When a minister of a religion denies comfort to good people... it makes me clench my teeth.

That's not to say I dislike the piece, on the contrary; it makes Hara's compassion more cathartic, and always warms up my heart to read about someone breaking away from the existing paradigm to make something good.

(maybe CKY's confusion was caused by Sri Hara being the name of an existing character)

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 25, 2015 4:29 am 
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Amusingly, the two could potentially be connected simply because Sri has had a LOT of religions founded in his wake over the millennia.

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 25, 2015 4:34 am 
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Barinellos wrote:
Amusingly, the two could potentially be connected simply because Sri has had a LOT of religions founded in his wake over the millennia.

So her choice of name would be similar to naming children after one of our saints... Sounds good.

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