MadScientist

welcome to my lab

[madscientist14159]

I think Azulaang/Aangzula would be so fucking funny.

I know a lot of people play the idea for angst (aangst?) or a darker version of the story. A sort of “ooooo the Sexy but Evil and Insane Manipulator is getting her claws into the heart of the sweet naive avatar she already almost murdered! Isn’t she so Scary and Intimidating?”, and like, it’s your fanfic, but I think that misses a lot of the potential.

Remember: Azula has no goddamn rizz. At all. And she thinks she’s the funniest person alive. A belief that Aang does not share in the slightest.

You don’t have to write her as a cruel calculating seductress, when you can write her as a Really Incredibly Cringe fourteen year old girl with no clue how to get the boy she likes to like her back, so she does the traumatised child-weapon equivalent of pulling his pigtails (hunting him down across the continent and attempting to kidnap him while daydreaming about him joining the fire nation).

Azula who joins Team Avatar because she has a crush, and tries being extra egomaniacal and evil, in an attempt to impress Aang.

Azula who gets her life saved by Aang, and now she feels the need to help him out to repay her debt, and his unwillingness to use evil means to depose her father is So Frustrating and Why Won’t This Boy Just Let Her Massacre Fire Villages For Him Aaaaaargh?!

Azula who tries her Political Mastermind schtick in order to take control of Team Avatar to save them from their own incompetence, but it just Does Not Work.

Azula who tries meditation to understand Aang better, but is so incapable of having any chill that it somehow results in civilian casualties.

Azula who tries to be the Dark Intimidating Manipulator Fire-Sifu, but Aang doesn’t find her scary at all, and just wants her to try having fun with him, and she doesn’t know how to handle this.

Let the girl be a mess.

[ethereal-feline]

Zuko thinks Azula is trying to manipulate the Avatar to help their dad win the war and joins to steer Aang back into peace

The rest of the Gaang wonder how these 2 cringe siblings with no social skills and even less chill were ever Scary TM

[madscientist14159]

Azula also thinks that Azula is manipulating the avatar.

I cannot emphasise enough that watching him from across the campsite while failing to pluck up the nerve to speak to him for several minutes, while Aang is getting increasingly weirded out that she’s Staring At Him and Hasn’t Blinked the Whole Time, before suddenly blurting out something really cringe and intense with all the confidence of a serial killer wearing her previous victim’s skin as a suit, is not successful manipulation.

[madscientist14159]

Jared (19) would have been immune to Leitners

[madscientist14159]

what if after ep9, leeroy came back to the C&A office and tried the headset on again

[madscientist14159]

no wait, what if leeroy did that at the START of ep9 and full-crashout jax has to interact with the mostly-healed version

[madscientist14159]

what if after ep9, leeroy came back to the C&A office and tried the headset on again

[madscientist14159]

They should make me the doctor who showrunner. I would fix every problem with the lore while simultaneously creating about twice as many new ones.

[madscientist14159]

CALYPSO: I had no friends but the sky and sun. :(

URANUS and HELIOS: Who said we were friends?

[madscientist14159]

wow it was so crazy when pomni used her iconic unicorn horn to stab bubble to death and upload the entire circus to kinger’s steam account so they could all become league of legends streamers

[madscientist14159]

just saw tadc the last act in cinema

that digital circus sure was amazing

[madscientist14159]

mage the ascension but it’s the magnus archives, and each fear is a paradigm

[madscientist14159]

Sometimes on writing advice threads, I see someone ask "how long should a chapter be?" and inevitably get the responses "as long as it needs to be" and "how long is a piece of string?". These are not helpful answers (and frankly, I think the responders are being deliberately obtuse as to what the intent behind the question is). Here are some answers that I do consider helpful:

You want your chapters to be easily digestible chunks. Most people can handle 3-5k words without trouble. Unless your story is deeply engaging, or your target audience is very well-read, the reader might lose focus once you're getting closer to 15k words.

Try to make your chapters roughly consistent lengths. Error bars of a couple-thousand words, let's say. It's jarring to suddenly get an 11k word megachapter or 0.8k word microchapter in the middle of a book where most chapters are around 4k.

Pace yourself. If you start to lose track of things once you get to 9k words, then in most situations, your chapters shouldn't be 9k words or longer.

[madscientist14159]

Archivist Behaviour

[madscientist14159]

Spiral avatar who can turn things into plastic toy versions of themselves. Oh, you’re halfway through a meal at a restaurant and you’re raising your fork to your mouth to take another bite? Yeah… sorry… the thing on your fork is one of those plastic toy food objects you get in children's play sets. Yeah… sorry… so is everything else on your plate when you look down in shock. Yeah… sorry… your fork is actually also a plastic toy, and you’re sitting at a plastic kid’s-sized table on a plastic kid’s-sized chair. Enjoy drinking from your no-spills sippy-cup, though.

(the wine in it was replaced with a plastic toy bunch of grapes)

You fetch the manager to— complain? Ask what the fuck is happening? Have a humiliating breakdown in front of? —and when you get back to the table, everything is normal. Dude, you’re fucking crazy. Eat your food.

So you leave the restaurant, only to discover this in your parking space:

[madscientist14159]

Beating Zagreus in Elysium should have had him give Mel a Zagreus-boon. Like. Blood-related stuff. Show Zag growing in divine power since the events of the first game.

[madscientist14159]

TMA game where the entities are disco elysium skills. Raise a skill high enough and you can get avatar powers, but you also impulsively do fear monster stuff.

Can’t tell if this character is more or less of a human disaster than Harry Dubois…

CORRUPTION (trivial: success) — You see that mould on the wall? Go lick it.

SLAUGHTER (medium: success) — Don’t do that. Punch the wall instead. Fucking wall. Thinks it’s better than you.

SPIRAL (challenging: failure) — I could’ve sworn there was supposed to be a door there…

SLAUGHTER — You could make a door. By punching the wall down.

[madscientist14159]

TMA RPG Tips

Change things.

Fear is derived from the unknown, and like Newall and Sims pointed out, now that your players have heard the story, that mystery is dead. So if you want to keep the horror alive, you need to make a new mystery. Their solution for Protocol was to make an entirely new fear-based magic system inspired by alchemy. You can do that too.

I made a setting where nightmares are psychic diseases that start manifesting in the waking world as they become recurring dreams that slowly infect the host’s brain. Eventually, the host hits a point where they either get killed by a dangerous manifestation, or they reach symbiosis with the nightmare, becoming a “boogeyman” (avatar). Other people exposed to nightmare manifestations can then also become infected due to the frightening experiences causing nightmares about the things that happened to them, spreading the psychic disease further.

But maybe you don’t want to come up with a new fear system. Instead try creating new entities. Smirke didn’t get everything. Maybe another eccentric victorian heard of his list of fourteen and got so petty about disagreeing that they made a different list of fears that splits them up differently (causing academic infighting between cultists to this day). Maybe the fourteen are Major Fears, but there are also several Minor Fears with their own monsters and artefacts. Maybe the fourteen are umbrella categories, and contain multiple sub-entities that sometimes work at cross-purposes.

I created some example entities here:

The Famine: fear of starvation, poverty, and deprivation. Manifests as rat-monsters and emaciated figures.

The Whisper: fear of being misunderstood, lied about, bullied, or excluded. Manifests as lawyers, reporters, social media callout posts.

The Mirror: fear of being someone you don’t want to be. Manifests as doppelgängers, echoes, vengeful figures from your past.

The Coil: fear of snakes, poison, plots and conspiracies, and not noticing danger until it’s too late. Manifests as snake-monsters.

The Inevitable: fear of being pursued, slowly but inescapably, by something you can’t outfight (incl’ fears of mortality). Manifests as zombies, and tall bipedal inhuman things that always seem to find you again no matter how far you run.

The Gore: fear of violence, pain, and the insides ending up on the outside. Manifests as slasher villains, carnivores, and viscera/blood.

The System: fear of being dehumanised, a cog in the machine, or formulaically analysed/controlled. Manifests as killer robots, machinery, men in black.

The Boss: fear of authority being wielded against you, or being crushed by the weight of its responsibility. Manifests as police, CEOs, politicians, etc.

The Worthless: fear of failure, defeat, being wrong, incompetence. Manifests as people who are better at things than you are and usurp more and more of your life from you, or people who are bad at things and you find yourself falling to their level and getting lumped in with them.

The Glitch: fear of technological addiction, losing control over technology, or of the line between real and virtual breaking down. Manifests as computer game elements showing up in real life, getting trapped in virtual environments, having you account for real life suspended.

The Thief: fear of being robbed, losing things, or resource/energy-drains. Manifests as cat burglars, heist teams, master hackers, parasites, vampires.

The Intruder: fear of your spaces being invaded. Manifests as figures in your room at night, bug infestations, phroggers.

The Tumour: fear of bodies going wrong, disease and health issues, disfigurement, and pain. Manifests as fleshy abominations, surgeons, or disease.

The players already know what The Magnus Institute, London’s deal is. So give them new jobs. In my nightmare setting, the players work at a psychiatric hospital in the chronic nightmares ward. You could just as easily have them work in an antiques shop, for the CIA, or at a take-away restaurant with a menu system they can’t understand. Anywhere that they could plausibly encounter The Horrors on a regular basis, either by studying them, selling them, hunting them down and murdering them, or having them as customers.

Above all, change rituals. I cannot stress enough how little players will care about an apocalypse that they know isn’t going to happen. What I recommend instead is to make rituals not bring the entity fully into the world but rather do something smaller. Maybe a successful ritual gives an avatar more powers. Maybe it creates a major artefact like the coffin, or gives birth to a really strong monster. Maybe it causes a disaster (such as a corruption ritual causing an epidemic, a desolation ritual causing massive fires across a city, an eye ritual creating a new type of mass-surveillance, etc.). It should be something that the players would want to stop (if only so that a rival isn’t empowered), but that they actually believe will happen if they fail to do so. Or maybe the players are cultists, and want to pull off their own ritual.

[madscientist14159]

Tma/Tmagp crossover with digital circus where Chester and Norris are Teaholding’s circus names.

Abstraction is when you eat a computer.

[madscientist14159]

Ideas for TMA Avatars

Eye avatar that “sends you to the Eye” (alternate dimension that’s a street filled with people staring at you pointing and whispering and recording you on their phones, CCTV tracking your every movement, TVs in shop windows showing news stories about you/documentaries on embarrassing moments from your life).

Spiral avatar that can make you suddenly wake up in bed and discover that the last x amount of time was actually a dream.

End avatar that makes you rapidly age.

Vast avatar that makes you shrink so that your environment is huge in comparison.

Desolation avatar that causes floods and water damage.

Spiral avatar that causes common paranoid schizophrenic delusions (radio transmitter in your teeth, secret messages hidden in random text, government agents following you, etc.) to actually happen to you.

Stranger avatar that’s a CPR dummy, that bites your tongue off when you use it.

Buried avatar made of living superglue.

Flesh avatar that’s a genetic engineer who changes stuff about your body, or clones you and you can’t tell who’s the clone.

Dark avatar that can appear anywhere that isn’t within anyone’s field of vision.

Web avatar that makes you get really stupid ideas that seem clever at the time.

Eye avatar that can make whatever random post they want go viral, potentially cancelling the poster.

End avatar that makes you age backwards, erasing everything you changed in the world as you de-age to before you did it, eventually making it so you were never born.