That it is, and the Friday before a long weekend, at that.
Ontolos-Na sounds intriguing.
A question: if you can draw on the power of your descendents, what does that imply about predetermination and free will?
Actually, whose descendents? Does this work only in the maternal line, or could a whole cartel of houses suddenly find they're bound by unremarked paternal ancestry?
How long do women live? How long are they fertile? If there are multigenerational families (and possibly quite strung-out childbearing) what impact does that have on their domestic architecture? (Okay, so I have this thing about social structures and the spaces we make to accommodate them.)
Who are an adult's closest companions? Who raises children? Provides food? Makes clothing? Builds shelter? Who will a person eat with? Sleep with? Work with? Do they have leisure time, and what sorts of things do they do with it?
What's a successful life? A satisfactory life? A failure? Do people take liberation on faith, or can they tell when someone's been liberated? Does the average person know anyone who's been liberated? (I'm assuming that liberation manifests primarily as disappearance from the world.)
And why is it so tempting to create a society and then place characters outside it? Is this just the role-playing dilemma of getting players started in a world where they don't know the social rules?
> I have a basic Ontosnan model of herodom based on mastering emotional
> qualities, where growth to a new level entails being obsessed and even
> possessed by a shadow quality. So the creator must struggle with the inner
> destructor in order to grow, the sage the fool, the warrior the coward etc.
I realise you said gaming in the world was some time off, but do you have an idea of how to play this sort of psychodrama?
(Okay, so my very first impression of your summary was "the Discworld's Small Gods meet Anglo-Saxon sweostor sunu relationships and multigenerational freezer-clone family corporations in a world coloured by the Bridge of Birds and some Tibetan stuff I don't know yet." Since I happen to like all those sources, this is no bad thing, although it's sent me on a search to identify a short story I read 17-ish years ago about man creating god.)
Yours,
Jennifer
-- Jennifer Geard
Powered by hypermail