#graven moon

[cool-ghoul]

Hmm.

Should I pitch my game, formerly Graven Moon, now Sin Eater here again?

Actually going to Real Design School has definitely helped me tune it up.

[cool-ghoul]

As a note, in Graven, I dump my worldbuilding mostly through the power of having two Highly Educated Fantasy Leftists who love commiserating with each other.

Also Kas's unabashed love of the world.

[cool-ghoul]

So, GRAVEN MOON lore tidbit because I've got a smidge of writer's block.

the Fey are Roman-inspired in GM, and serve as the elf-analogue. They also were patronized by the now-dead Jade Demiurge, who taught 'em about genetics in the bronze age. They've been eugenicists ever since, practicing a system of caste and house called the Germline. People pair off, produce offspring, and kids are raised communally. Love has nothing to do with procreation, but they're certainly capable of feeling love, just like humans, and have something kinda like marriage

One of the Castes is Gigas, the warriors (with an Equestrian subcaste for the classy ones), who average about seven feet (~210 cm) and are built like a fucking humanoid bulldozer. So, nonzero chance you could be gently but firmly held by a seven-foot handsome grey elf in Dis.

One of your party members is a Gigas. His name's Tiberius, and he's a sad dad who has had his life ruined by his merc partner Akki, with the two making a Boke/Tsukkomi duo. They're stuck together because they both fucked up really hard trying to kill each other and now they're heterosexual life partners. Or an ambiguously gay duo, depending on how you read it.

[cool-ghoul]

So, Ghosts and Zombies, right?

While it’s a technicality, in GRAVEN MOON, you can create a ghost and a zombie from the same body.

Let’s say you’re a necromancer. In lieu of reanimating the body whole as an True Undead (like Rei, the protagonist), you can just yank the soul out and reanimate the meat to create a stupid little automata-- a Zombie or other, more specialized soulless undead. These things are legit just meat with a lil’ alchemic reactor in there that emulates the presence of a soul to direct the flesh.

As an aside: “Extracting a soul” sounds more fancy than it is, really: it’s just killing someone. The soul falls out and degrades into it’s components a few minutes after death, but you can stick it in a container to keep it fresh.

You can’t technically touch soulstuff-- it’s like trying to grab a vapor-- but it’s on the same plane we are, and you suck it up with a vacuum if you gotta, and there’s obviously abundant technologies and sorcerous techniques to move it around.

From there, you can dispose of the soul by rendering it into Numena to use as fuel for spellcasting or leave it to manifest as a Phantom (a technical term, people call em Ghosts a lot).

A Phantom’s the perpetually executing “dreams” of a soul’s memory (Phantasma). It’s the imprint the mind leaves on the soul, y’see. If you must, you can think of it like the soul’s cache: they’re usually too traumatized to interact with as a peer in this state and require extensive and careful rehabilitation if you want to actually talk to them. Even then, they are very prone to “breaking” again: trauma is as trauma does, after all.

Phantoms are typically unable to produce new memories or process new experiences as a result of the trauma of being extracted from a body, but sticking it in something (such as a haunted painting) helps the sentience crystalize and better orient itself, possibly returning to a blurry self-awareness if you’re patient and supportive.

This where it’s usually referred to as a Ghost, to distinguish it from spontaneously occurring spirits, and to indicate that it should be regarded as a person, not a feral presence, even to the laity. Depending on how a culture feels about ancestors, they’re probably due more respect than the necromancer that made them.

Is this important to you, shit ass dead dude?

Yeah, probably.

[cool-ghoul]

By the way, for GRAVEN MOON, one of the provinces, Vykkengraf, is best (cheekily) described as “if Ming China had an Australia”.

Which they kinda did, but this one’s overseas as opposed to on the border marches.

It’s an ex-penal colony, whose former owner, the Yi Dynasty, exported their political, military, and civil prisoners, shortly before closing their borders. Since this followed a period of expansion, It’s a melting pot that has a deserved reptuation of being full of rough people who both party and maraud very hard.

They learned to domesticate Wyverns from the aboriginal population (who’re still around), but the rest of the wildlife has a deserved reputation as being some of the most dangerous on Dis. Things get pretty Monster Hunter sometimes.

[cool-ghoul]

Hopefully Tiktok Empaths are only trendy for a few more weeks, because the supporting protag for GRAVEN MOON’s an actual psychic who reads via empathy.

it’s because it’s a circus fortune tellers are iconic and there’s a game mechanic attached to it please don’t take this as a political statement or shitty meme gimmick

[cool-ghoul]

Good news, we got artists for GRAVEN MOON!

Now we just need Code, Music, and Animation.

If you guys know anybody, like, heyyyyy~

[cool-ghoul]

Oh and by the way, no heroes in GRAVEN MOON are “important” to society upon recruitment; like, not even a fucking town sheriff (Sol goes in the ‘paladin’ slot if you gotta fit her in one, but she runs security at the circus and hates cops as much as you probably do. She’s a vigilante by background.)

There are three turncoats that show up later, but the agenda here is that sometimes it takes a Hobbit to get the ring to Mount Doom, dunnit? Anyone important would blow it.