Thanqol

Space Soldiers(wolfsujiyama & Thanqol)

I mean, there is style, and then there's right and wrong. There are objectively correct ways to do writing, going all the way down to spelling things correctly. It's an art form. In painting you sometimes get modern pieces that are highly abstract experimental slashes of paint or jumbles of patterns, but the people doing those generally understand the basic mechanics of how to cut paint with water, how to clean their brushes, and when to use an oil-based paint as opposed to an acryllic. It's the same with writing; some things are style, but not knowing the fundamentals isn't a style.

Like, take this:

One of the Commanders then stops Sarah and says, "Oh by the way, your room will be in the East Wing of the ship Room 100, and you'll also be the Scout Squad One Leader." Sarah started to get angry as she says, "You have got to be kidding me! Why am I in a Scout Squad, and Leader at that?" The Commander shrugs and says, "Don't know, I'm just passing on the message from the higher ups, letting those know that those who have been assigned to the Scout Unit." Sarah walks off pissed as she says, "Fine."

Literally no published author of note in the past one hundred years writes dialogue like this. The accepted format going back arguably to Shakespeare is to add a line break after each piece of dialogue. This is all one solid brick of text in the middle of a huge brick of text and it's basically impossible to unpick.

One of the Commanders then stops Sarah and says, "Oh by the way, your room will be in the East Wing of the ship Room 100, and you'll also be the Scout Squad One Leader."
Sarah started to get angry as she says, "You have got to be kidding me! Why am I in a Scout Squad, and Leader at that?"
The Commander shrugs and says, "Don't know, I'm just passing on the message from the higher ups, letting those know that those who have been assigned to the Scout Unit."
Sarah walks off pissed as she says, "Fine."

Like, this still isn't good, but it's at least readable. From there we've got the real basic problem of - Show Don't Tell is a cliche that people hear in year ten creative writing classes, and it's frequently something people have to unlearn later once they're more developed, but you really gotta know how to show and not tell. You just flatly state that she gets angry without the smallest flourish; no detail, no colour, no flavour. What does it mean for someone to go from a standing start to being angry? What does that mean for this person? Does her voice raise, or does she get cold and severe? Does she clench her fists, stomp her foot, literally anything?

More broadly, there's zero colour or life in this writing at all. You've talked about the ships without describing the interiors, you've talked about the commander without detailing anything about his look, his uniform, his vibe, his tone of voice, there's just nothing here. Like:

some of the armor looks interesting, intimidating, or just plain cool,

No colour, no shape, no detail. Nobody knows what you think is interesting; writing isn't about telling people things are interesting, it's about making people interested in something in the exact same way that you are interested in it.

It genuinely feels like you've got no passion for writing, that you're disinterested in it as an art form, especially if this is how you've been going for two decades.

E: Just as a reference point, here's how I introduced Hades in one of my games:

"Re...da...na..."

The scarlet light flickers like your heartbeat. Water runs down on your head unsteadily from ruptured pipes, just as your blood runs unsteadily from ruptured veins. You're so tired and there's so, so, so much road left to go.

And above you stands the God of the Dead. The ceiling light casts him in a dusty blue halo - red bow tie like a bloodless slit across his neck, black and white waiter's dress making it seem as natural for him to take your coat as take your life. When you look at him all you can think of is how easily he would fold up; he gives the impression of a sheet of origami paper, so loosely tethered to this world all of those angular joints might bend and crease and sweep him away on crane's wings.

Space Soldiers(wolfsujiyama & Thanqol)

I'm not quite sure how to say this, but I mean it in the nicest possible way: Your post is not very well written.

But that's okay! Writing is a technical skill. There's no moral judgement attached to that statement, it's just an observation from someone who's been doing play by posts for 25 years now. This is absolutely the sort of thing that you can, with effort, refine, improve and master. I'd be delighted to provide technical feedback and insight into how you can improve your writing abilities. We're all on this journey together and the best thing we can do is help lift each other up.

But I also get if you're not interested in that sort of feedback. Again, no judgement, place of calm serenity, we all write for our own reasons and under our own pressures. So, I put it to you - are you interested in hearing my detailed feedback?

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"Get rid of stuff?" said Caster. "But what are you talking about? Look at this!" he gestured wildly at one an old lady sitting on a blanket in front of a heap of crocheted goods. "Each of those sweaters would take months of work, full time! The patterns are absurdly intricate, the colour transitions skillful - and yet, they hardly seem to be moving! And here! Look, this garden gnome!" he grips it with both hands. "Look at the cross-hatching in the eye shadows, the individual strands of hair painted, the highlighting on the patchwork jacket -"

"Oh, that piece was just for practice," said the fishman painter, who was unpacking another box of gnomes. "I've got much better ones back here."

"Practice!?" He cradles it in his arm as he whirls around.

"Oh, yeah. I mostly like the painting part of it," said the fishman.

"But that's mad! You could make a business selling these -"

"But then I wouldn't be painting them, would I? No, any that don't get picked up go to the kids who like smashing 'em with hammers."

Caster clutched the gnome to his chest like he was saving a life. "He is not serious, Fluffybiscuits. Confirm to me that he is joking."

Breathless Dead

"Oh, come now," said Aphrodite, as beautiful as the Skies. "Did you think this was for you?"

The wind pulls at his hair, touching the line where it threatened to recede. He takes a deep breath of pure, clean oxygen. He stretches in the radiant sunlight, the warmth that carries out even here at the system's edge. He feels the trace of humidity, and looks forth to the coming thunderstorm.

He needs no cigarettes here.

"I know exactly what each of you people want, and frankly, it's disgusting," said the Heartbreaker. "Your desires are the desires of the dead, and I mean that quite literally. For you see..."

He leaned across the sweeping silver railing of the Plousios, and he called to the air. "What is the purpose of life?"

And the uncountable trillions of microbacterial life in the air that stabilized the wind currents, perfumed the breeze, and transported nutrients to the larger organisms in this sky blue sea - they raised their voice in chorus to answer.

"Life is the export of entropy!"

"That is all there is to it," said Aphrodite. "All organic life, from the meanest parasite to the most complex biomantic miracle, exists to export entropy. To stabilize the center by pushing chaos to the frontier. When the first algae blooms oxygenated the ocean they pushed chaos into the atmosphere. Laudable, but they were not complex enough to understand their world's limits, and their ecosystem overloaded and collapsed. Demeter had to search long and hard to overcome that problem, deriving ever more complex ways to push chaos to the frontiers in the process. She had to invent the brain, and then invent social organization, and then invent the empire. The technology of empire was able to push entropy to its fringes long enough to build a ladder to the stars. The great work could, at last, continue, unbound by the chains of a singular atmosphere."

He smiled, like a polaroid photograph of a grandfather when he was still young and beautiful. "That is your purpose. The galaxy out there is merely the spoil heap at the edge of the ant nest; the inevitable consequence of the dig. You dare to think that this place is not beautiful? The infinite force of life that builds and maintains and expands it disagrees with you. The galaxy swims with life, and all of it is bent towards this end."

"But," he sighed. "Your desires are not those of the living. You have dead souls. Corpse souls. Broken hearts that see the beauty in the entropy that life itself slaves to expel. You are nothing of mine, you breathless dead, but I love you even still. How can I not? So come, see, the night time sky that lives as the proof of my love."

Night fell across the Skies. A macroengineering marvel beyond measure, involving eclipse and storm clouds beyond comprehension. Celestial mechanics whirled and swung to darken the blue almost to black so that the citizens of the Skies could see the stars and the galaxy beyond.

A galaxy of constellations. Stars organized into framing squares, and the pictures within drawn with stars as ink. The ancients looked for meaning and order in the sky, but the Skies built that meaning and order even if it meant moving the stars themselves. Seen from Capitas, the whole galaxy is organized. Seen from Capitas, entire sectors of uncountable trillions form a single glittering portrait in the endless whirling night.

"In the ancient days, men built pyramids," said Aphrodite. "But they told stories of the Gods immortalizing their favourites in the stars. Now the pyramid is obsolete; any man can become my favourite by immortalizing himself in the Skies of Capitas."

Thus spake Aphrodite... but you might not have the ears to hear him. After all of this, the God of Love might feel distant even from atop his own throne. Instead all this bombast might feel like buzzing, like silence, like the raving of a small man, like knowledge spoken by the choir. Instead all you might see is a night time sky where the stars are not scattered wildly, but organized into neat rows and shapes.

Splendid. For a while.

Space Soldiers(wolfsujiyama & Thanqol)

Okay. I'll take your advice and have her be a deserter/elf species type. Hope that I've got it right by this point.

I'll hold off a bit on writing another special forces character, I want to see how the game works in action before I add one to the mix.

Return to Thellamie

"Thou seeks destruction?"

With every breath from the lips of Sayanastia the Dark Dragon the torch flickers - torn equally between extinguishing and joining the dark, and sending loose a curtain of flames to seek purchase in the deep tangled roots.

"My dreaming sister may be less storied in thy cultures, but she is no less perilous. Nor does she guard her sleep any less jealously. Her rage if awoken would rival my own."

Injimo looked up. The Dark Dragon was cast in a million shadows, shivering through the infinite twisted trees and branches of the Wildwood. She swims through it as though a part of it, everywhere outside the dim light of the torch. Her little fire and scarlet hood and beating heart seemed like small things indeed.

"I do not intend to fight the Maids," said Injimo. "I intend to join them."

"Join them?" Branches snapped; leaves tore apart, trunks went dry and brittle, and a shock of bloody autumn ripped through the twisted green. In the breaking was the sound of laughter. "The Heroine's shadow, abandoning her post?"

"I have lost fighting them twice now," said Injimo. "They know a style of warfare that I do not know how to counter. I must submit to them and study under them. One day Heron might have call to learn, and I must be able to teach her."

"Is that so?" said Sayanastia, her shape silhouetted in cascading crimson leaves like scales. "And you would leave your fellow handmaidens alone?"

"They have a quest," said Injimo steadily. "I have a duty."

From the autumn leaves came antlers of shadow, red sap dripping from razor fangs. "Even if that means defending the manor against them, when they move against it?"

"I have a duty," said Injimo. She stepped into the Dark Dragon's jaws - and in a flicker, the shadow was gone, and all the leaves fell to the ground in a crimson pathway through the woods.

"Then I," said the void cat, nestling on her shoulder, "would see where it leads you."

Space Soldiers(wolfsujiyama & Thanqol)

Okay cool, thanks for the clarification. I'll go with the Android Type, where the imprinting process resulted in the mind fracturing between the virtues and vices. Is there anything else I should know about Androids in this setting?

Speaking of, if you want to find me on Discord I've got the same username there as here.

Space Soldiers(wolfsujiyama & Thanqol)

Okay, just recapping to make sure I've got it:
- Robots and AI are barely above modern technology levels; unintelligent programmed drones and roombas.
- The experimental special forces synthetics are biomechanical androids running off uploaded organic brains
- Artificial Types are the programmed from scratch 'pure' AI, not brain uploads, but even they are using the biomechanical android bodies.

Liu Xing should be an Artificial Type in that case, given that she was coded from scratch. Have I got this right?

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Some of the food, it must be said, is great. You host a big public gathering of any kind and at least a few people are going to stay up all night cooking just to flex on everyone else - that's as human as cooking itself. But the main event is the Expiration Date Potluck. People bring in any ingredients they have that are walking close to the expiration date line and a large outdoor kitchen full of volunteers figure out what they can make with it. Anything that isn't usable goes into feed buckets for children to throw to the pigs at the petting zoo.

The potluck has a reputation for being exotic. One of the most common ways foods go bad is if someone gets something experimental, outside of their normal cooking range, and then they either can't figure out how to use it or realize too late that they don't like it. It makes its way to the back of the cupboard and then waits there, accumulating months, passing from the mind. It's not anyone's fault, people just like avoiding their problems. That's why it's important to have the potluck; it's the short-circuit that stops the feeling from resolving into shame and regret.

"The commitment to recycling," Caster murmured. His voice came as a surprise, like a ghost's. "Is this land as poor as Adam said? That you have so little that every scrap must be saved and repurposed?"

Space Soldiers(wolfsujiyama & Thanqol)

I was thinking of Liu Xing as an outright android; underneath the skin is metal, wire and circuitry. In that context, species and age aren't directly relevant. Or did you mean that synthetics were more like clones and robots aren't on the table at all?