OOC: RP Discussion/Idea thread

[sunnyside]

I'm thinking of renaming the "Celestial culture" the "Spiritual culture" as I want people to be able to quickly guess at stereotypes in play to avoid confusion and make signing up easier.

I also think I probably should include suggestions for sources of art for the same reasons.

Still accepting feedback. It's ever so tempting to write more. But I suspect one page is about the tl;dr limit and I want to leave people enough room to make their specific city state and leave freedom for how individual players fit into the world.

 

The spiritual culture, sometimes called the Celestial culture, is largely defined by their discovery of communal magic. It allows them to connect with each other, with what they call the Celestial Entity, and those of their order who die while having a strong enough connection with the Entity. This desire for eternal life shapes much of their existence. Though the Entity is…complicated. While they can connect to it and can pray to it if they like, it does not truly speak back. Instead they get something more akin to feelings. As far as they can tell, the entity wants them to be moral, peaceful, honest, giving, modest, and perhaps a bit prudish. The path is not always clear cut. For example they may feel driven to peace, but they’d also feel driving to protect each other and innocents or to keep their youth from turning away from the entity. In such situations they tend to just feel bad no matter which route they take, unless they can come up with some third option.

Other cultures suspect they've created their own self-sustaining delusion though a sort of telepathic connection, and since the dead they can contact don’t seem to be having new experiences in their “afterlife” the joke is that Celestials manage to not live twice. They also have a bit of a reputation for being crazy as they tend to first be very welcoming to the needy and concientious to any that want to leave their culture. Shanty towns increasingly full of debauchary tend to build up around their cities. Similarly other cultures often continually encroach upon their lands, with nothing but a firmly worded letter to warn them off. Tension builds until one day the negativity is too much, and what results tends to be a vicious ethnic cleansing by people who do not much fear death. They prefir to use their communal abilities to turn a small number of combatants into super soldiers or to use large gun type weapons that remove the personal element from combat.

Still, normally they’re just the sort of people you’d want to deal with and be around. Living hard working modest lives as they focus on their work. Joining together via their communal magic as they carve out massive stone cities (often Gothic in style) out of barren and hostile lands, creating stone ships, airships, and tracked vehicles powered by the magically enhanced strength of acolytes turning capstans and winches. Or tending gardens if possible or yeast/bacteria thermal vats in order to feed and clothe themselves and the needy. They also tend to have large families. The culture would be larger if not for how many children are drawn away. Though in any case they often become uncomfortable being alone, as that rarely happens within their cities.

Spiritual package (20 Points)
Cummunal Magic (20 points): Cannot be used on oneself. One can commune with another willing living person to telepathically communicate with them, heal them, ward them, or boost one of their abilities by your communal magic rating. One can commune with decesased friends and relatives to talk. Or one can “pray” to the Celestial Entity, which has very unreliable and unpredictable results.
Enhanced strength (10 points, power)
Enhanced resilience (10 points, power) (both of those for handling the hard labor of life within this culture).
Potential Art Sources: The average folk by medieval peasants or monks. More recently Abnegation might fit well. Clerics and that sort of thing; especially for healers. For there big guns maybe the Anime “Cannon Fodder” from memories or scenes from masses working in Battle Fleet Gothic.

For those that engage in the distasteful act of direct combat they tend to appear as Knights/Paladins or similar themes. Also, for those boosted by masses using communal magic, you can get ridiculously heavy weapons and armor such as you might find in sci-fi series (Daemon Hunters from 40k particularly come to mind). While this list has a western flavor, you can easily instead use the styles of different spiritual backgrounds.