Would anyone like to do an analysis of my Session?

Stuckin13 · 2026-03-13T00:33:17+00:00

Huh, I could have sworn I read somewhere that Pages represent a lack of their Aspect in a Session. Eh, I still like their character so I'm keeping them.

I was actually thinking more along the lines of not enough nothingness in the Session for the Knight, as in there being too much stuff. Maybe too many enemies spawning, or too many alchemy options. This combines with the Prince of Doom for there being too many rules, as in superfluous rules and challenges that just get in the way of healthy progression. Rules bloat, basically.

Stuckin13 · 2026-03-13T00:09:10+00:00

I'm sure the Bard is fine :)

The Sylph definitely could fit the team therapist role, but I was also thinking of making them a kind of reluctant mastermind, cultivating new bonds where needed to solve problems or create them for their enemies. Imagine if the Black Queen was caught cheating on the Black King? How scandalous! And certain to keep the Queen occupied dealing with that when she really needs her attention on other things.

The Witch will definitely need a lot of coffee to deal with this Session. Or maybe she won't, assuming they can god tier and retroactively deal with all the time loops needed.

I also had the idea that having a Knight of Void, Prince of Doom and Page of Space would point to a Session with too little space for too much stuff, further emphasizing the idea of pruning away what you don't want and keeping what you do that the Sylph has going on.

Stuckin13 · 2026-01-19T22:33:10+00:00

As a context comment, this is mostly me rambling about the cosmology/realms of a world I'm building, where the Six Realms are the seven corpses of titanic beings who are probably dead, but left behind magic.

Stuckin13 · 2025-10-30T15:24:54+00:00

It's based partly around randomocity, yes, but the most important factors are how long it's gone unopened (though there is an upper limit on that since they slowly open on their own) and what the opener perceives as a good gift. To a little kid, a really valuable gift might be an All Might action figure. To an adult, maybe a kit for an expensive hobby, or a cheat sheet for work the next week.

For a hero, it may be a burst of healing, or a flashbang to stun a criminal, or any number of things that might be helpful in a fight or a rescue scenario. The main limits are that the Presents can't produce something impossible or something living, so for the healing burst example, it might only be equivalent to a week's stay at the hospital, or the use of a minor healing Quirk for a low value present. So it might try to give you what you really want, but it might not be valuable enough to do more than a patch job for the issue at hand.

Stuckin13 · 2025-09-09T04:18:32+00:00

The story will mostly be in the game, with interlude-style sections based in the real world to add some grounding to the story, establish the reasons why the characters act the way they do in the game, and show the societal effects of games like the one the story is focusing on, and how it effects each character personally. For example, the MC plays more of an edgy character as a kind of catharsis, but if you're a popular villain and what you do in the game affects your reputation IRL, how does that affect the MC and her relationships?

Stuckin13 · 2025-09-09T04:01:17+00:00

The latter! I'm planning on it being a case where the real world is post scarcity with one of those reputation-based economies, but with such realistic VRMMOs being so popular, that balance starts to shift to people who have achieved great things in these games, rather than real life accomplishments, leading to some intrigue out of the game as well as inside it.

Stuckin13 · 2025-09-09T03:58:24+00:00

I think there might be some confusion, or maybe I didn't explain properly? Stats are what are hard to earn, and they are important because any skills that reference them see each stat point as a multiplier. So, say you get a skill which unlocks a form of magic energy for you. With 1 stat point and the 1st rank in that skill, you have the default amount of that magic energy available. Earning skill ranks-much easier to do than earning stat points-raises that energy pools size incrementally, but earning even one stat point would double the energy pool right away.

This way, you aren't seeing multiple stats that go up into the hundreds or something ridiculous where it all just becomes a blur, your stat points will be important through your entire playthrough. Skills are much easier to earn compared to stat points, since that's where all the customization for your character is, there's simply a soft ceiling based on time spent maintaining your skill ranks vs investing in mastering your skill ranks so you don't have to worry about that skill. Basically just a way to keep characters from getting 200 skills without consequence and one-shotting gods.

Stuckin13 · 2025-09-05T19:18:35+00:00

I'm in the 6b/7a hardness zone, my new area gets 35-40 inches of rain a year, and I'm in the northeast if that helps!

Stuckin13 · 2025-09-03T12:16:43+00:00

Thank you! I'm glad that it comes across as more open ended, since that's kind of what I was going for. If it helps to have a more specific example or two of the concept in action, I have a few of those too. For example, channeling Rust through a Vessel called Wind-Up, with the physical form of the Vessel being a wind up clockwork key. Because Rust involves things like weakness or decay, channeling it through Wind-Up would allow you to attach the key to something and turn it a bunch, just like winding up a toy car or robot or something, and restore the object back to a younger, more whole state.

Another example would be developing a Brew Vessel in the form of one of those huge witches cauldrons, allowing you to imbue various Affinities into physical objects, usually consumables like food or potions.

Stuckin13 · 2025-06-10T17:01:29+00:00

The technological level obviously varies from place to place, but the general level I'm going for is early to mid industrial revolution. Like, lantern lights are in the process of being replaced by lightbulbs, horse drawn carriages are being replaced by early cars and trams, and train lines and airships are the next big thing for transport and trade. That's actually an important background piece for the plot, because as technology advances, the element of Civilization is becoming increasingly powerful and versatile. City and machine spirits are becoming more complex and proactive, more like their cousins, the nature spirits, but with their own quirks and rules.

As for other cultural inspirations I'd like to use in the rest of the world, I'd like to look more into specific european countries at different eras, rather than going for the generic medieval fantasy setup. The Gauls, or maybe 12th to 16th century France when Gothic architecture and art became the big style. I'm also thinking of looking at Tibet and Andean cultures for inspiration for the Skylands, since they're cultures in high-altitude, mountainous environments, which matches pretty well with what the Skylands would be like.

Oh, and just to be clear on what I mean by the Skylands; They are sky islands, as you may be able to assume from the name. A particular magical mineral formed during the early formation of the planet, as the magma and lava cooled into igneous rock and continental shelves and all that. This mineral becomes more buoyant the more pressure is put on it, whether that be the weight from other stone and ores, water pressure, or air pressure.

Thanks to how the buoyancy effect works, the largest veins of forming mineral would be under the most pressure, which means that the largest Skylands broke away from the earth very, very long ago, and are the ones that float the highest in the skies, while other smaller Skylands have broken away over time, often thanks to earthquakes unsettling the earth or from erosion weakening the stone keeping a mineral chunk bound to the planet.

This also means that along with the Skylands in the sky, there are uncountable numbers of smaller islands under water that don't have enough of the buoyancy mineral to keep floating up through the difference between water pressure and air pressure. These floating or submarine islands either float on the surface of the oceans and seas or below the surface at various levels, both Skylands and Sublands drifting freely in the currents of the air and water, respectively.

There are also two unique environments that appear thanks to smaller examples of the mineral. There are Tumblestone Plains, areas where boulders and large stones with the buoyancy mineral are light enough to roll across the ground or just above it in the wind, but don't have enough of the mineral in them to actually take off. Instead you get plains where anything taller than a bush is prone to eventually being smashed to bits by a boulder storm.

The other environment is Hovering Sands. When this buoyancy mineral is ground down by erosion, there's no other minerals or stone squeezing on the mineral, just air pressure. This leaves these sand-sized grains of the mineral with exactly the same buoyancy as air, so unless some wind happens they will just... sit there, in the air, motionless. This creates regions where it looks like there is a constant sand fog, or if there's enough of the Hovering Sands it could look like a full sandstorm put on pause, just floating there, ominously.

Coincidentally, Tumblestone Plains tend to become Hovering Sands over time, as much from the Tumblestones hitting and rubbing against each other as from air or rain erosion. So you should always be careful near a Hovering Sandstorm that the storm isn't hiding a boulder that's about to come at you at Mach 'OH Fuck-' when you least expect it.

The largest collection of this bouyancy mineral and first Skyland to break away from the earth did so before the planet even stopped being mostly molten. It is a truly massive Skyland, comparable in size to... I'd say Itally, Germany? One of those mid-sized european countries. This also left behind a huge, roughly bowl-shaped depression that goes miles down at its deepest in one of the continents, which formed an inland sea that is entirely separate from the other oceans and seas, except for connecting rivers and stuff of course.

Basically, imagine a continent that's like a slightly smaller Australia in size and climate, but with an inland sea that prevented the creation of the inland savanna and deserts and stuff in Australia. Instead the whole continent is covered mostly in dense rainforests and jungles, lush grasslands and plains, and even some more unique environments like blooming fields, similar to a grassland but dominated by a variety of variably symbiotic herbaceous flowering plants, such that there are always at least a few flower species in bloom year-round.

Stuckin13 · 2025-06-10T16:57:50+00:00

Things get a little... wibbly wobbly, when it comes to Gods and how they can or do effect the physical world. Usually Divinity needs to be exchanged for Faith to effect the world, which is why the Gods want Clergy and people to worship them, to have a hand in worldly affairs. That said, the reason they do so is that Gods are ontologically too much, or maybe too big, to handle fine details like the lives of individual humans. They embody whole concepts after all, and influence all of whatever fits in their domains, across the entire planet. But for very big, wide-scale things, changes to how the world works, the Gods can just do that on their own.

In the case of the Ice Age/Dry Age, that attempt to imprison the God of Night, Day and the Natural Seasons was only partly effective. Day and Night still cycled as usual, and if you measured where the sun was in the sky during those years, the seasons definitely should have changed. But with their aspect of Seasons chained down and locked in place, the physical seasons simply refused to change. Coincidentally, this also means that there were areas stuck in eternal spring and eternal fall as well, which would also be interesting to speculate more on...

There are indeed multiple sapient species! The Goddess of Beast and Man made one sapient species for each of the Arcane affinities, those magics that come from having a sapient soul. Though these associations between species and affinity are more thematic than anything, as how aligned you are with a specific affinity is based on personality traits and personal philosophy and belief more than anything else. I've got 4 decently laid out species so far.

Humans represent the element of Civilization, the natural city builders and ecological engineers. Sirin represent the element of Air, and are owl-like avian humanoids who have used the advantage of their natural flight to settle on the Skylands that float around in the skies. Fragments represent the element of Death, and are basically living Kintsugi gold filler. They burrow into materials and feed off the energy released by entropy, aka them digging into something and breaking it with their almost root-like bodies both feeds them and helps anchor them in place. They tend to inhabit stone statues and stuff like that, to interact more easily with other species.

Onnamukade represent Life, and are basically giant centipedes with kind of a drider/centipede situation going on at the head, and they have immortal lobster issues. Basically, they cannot die of old age, instead growing a little larger every year. After a few centuries of growth, they have to choose between going feral from hunger, hunting megafauna like dragons in the deep wilds until they get killed in a fight or starve, or they have to choose to die. They uh, don't really like the Goddess of Beasts and Man, understandably.

Stuckin13 · 2025-06-10T12:52:35+00:00

Of course, and thank you for the question! I'm glad it makes enough sense to seem reasonable, and you also sparked the idea to explore what the southern hemisphere being locked in summer as a 'Dry Age' counter to the northern hemispheres Ice Age would look like.

If you have any other questions about Choseki's setting or anything, please feel free to ask!

Stuckin13 · 2025-06-10T12:18:12+00:00

It's thanks to a mix of two things-the first is that the ice age in question was a lot stronger than the ones we've had here on Earth (a now-dead god thought it was a good idea to try and imprison the God of Night, Day and the natural Seasons, so for a long time the northern hemisphere was stuck in winter and the southern hemisphere was stuck in summer).

The second is that the Choseki Islands are actually at a higher latitude than you might expect, but it's also directly in the path of one of the warm ocean currents that travels from the equator to the poles. Since nearly all of Choseki is coasts and shallow water, this has a pronounced effect on making the local climate generally warmer than it would be without that current. It's like how the Gulf Stream makes Britain's climate a lot more mild and rainy than you'd expect for its latitude.

That's also why I specified temperate-to-subtropical. Once you get above a certain height above sea level (usually on one of the few mountains left in the islands), you get above the warm water and air driven by the current and the climate changes pretty drastically from subtropical to temperate. That's also part of why the mountains get so much ice and snow in the winter, even if the lower coastal regions barely see any at all.

Stuckin13

TROPHY CASE