Rebuilding for the 5th Edition: Kya'Rei L'Di'Shinabon

Going to try to rebuild some of my older characters for the 5th edition rules.  Starting with a flirty drow priestess.

Why we need fantasy.

There is a reason why we must have magic and fantasy in our stories. It has nothing to do with the sort of stories that can be told in fantasy. Rather, it is that desire for the fantastical that we must keep hold of. Whether or not you believe in faeries or magic or psychic powers or the like is pretty immaterial. But the desire for these things should not go away. And fantasy, whether it is dark and grim or childish and whimsical, drives and awakens that desire for the fantastical. The desire for the impossible.

What is Divine Blood?

Divine Blood is an urban fantasy setting set in an alternate history Earth.

The Academy by Zachary Rawlins

Stories written around the idea of a bunch of teenagers at a school for the supernaturally gifted have been around a long time. From the original X-Men to the Jedi Academy and onward toward Harry Potter, it has been a repeated theme and that is even discounting the number of times that the idea has been used in anime. Since Harry Potter, we've seen a large number of these come out, some with unique twists on the scenario and others being somewhat formulaic.

This certainly falls into the former category. It is clear that Mr. Rawlins takes a number of queues from anime and manga in his story telling, but the setting itself is a very dark work filled with grim, frightening people (many of the most frightening being the "good guys") and punctuated by occasional relaxing rays of normality.

The first novel takes you through two simultaneously developing and closely related storylines, focusing the majority of the time on the life of one Alex Warner while the subplot storyline occasionally gives peeks at the more brutal world surrounding where he finds himself.

The metaphysics and mythos of the piece are intriguing and seem well thought out. Definitely an engaging read.

http://www.amazon.com/Academy-Central-Book-1-ebook/dp/B005LIBM30

The Batman Issue

So, having recently watched the Batman vs Spiderman Death Battle and seeing the number of people complaining about how Spiderman shouldn't be able to beat Batman, a few thoughts came to mind.

Book Review: Faerie Tales: Revelations Trilogy

Faerie Tales is a fun piece of reading for anybody who finds Urban Fantasy an appealing subject. There are werecreatures, vampires, witches and, of course, the Fae.

Insane Mages and other Crazy Characters

This is something of a trope with my gaming group.  It started with one specific member and has sort of spread out from there.  The basic idea is that the character is so far outside of what is a normal experience that while everything they do works and make legitimate, if somewhat "other", sense, that they just seem bizarre and, well, crazy to outsiders.  At some point recently, one of us made the comment that my character, the insane mage of the game in question, seemed to be getting crazier.  To which the person who more commonly plays the type responded that all her characters seemed to get crazier as they went along.  This has led me to thinking about this seeming trend toward apparent flanderization.

Trained Psychics versus Talents

Talents are people born with specific psychic abilities.  Some people have more than one Talent, others have rather broad Talents and others have limited Talents.  These abilities work through a combination of biology and instinct encoded on a genetic level.  For most, they do not have to learn how to perform the action so much as they have to learn how control it. 

Stuff about Japan

I have lived in Japan for a little over two years now and I’ve been meaning to get to this discussion for a while now. There are a number of things about Japan that some Americans might be surprised about. Granted, some of this stuff is stuff that applies to much of the world, but still, given the fact that most people grow up in the general area, or at least country, where they were raised, it would still be a bit of a surprise.

What's Wrong with DC fans?

I am not a fan of DC comics. I am not a fan of Marvel comics. Both of them lost me sometime around the turn of the century.

I find them boring, predictable and absolutely unwilling to disrupt the status quo. The storylines are so full of conflicting nonsense that it's hard to get interested in the parts that attracted me in the first place.

Transhumanism

Does anybody else get tired of the trend for most movies smacking of transhumanism to be some sort of horror-fest where transhumanism turns out to be the big threat of the movie. The concept of the digital uploaded mind is under attack in the upcoming Johnny Depp movie. Admittedly, it's not my favorite branch of transhumanism, because I'd want us to know more about the way the human mind works and have much better computers first. Ideally, I'd like a true AI to occur before we even think about trying it.

That and I'm fond of my flesh.