Weird & Wonderful Worlds

Have I defined Weird and Wonderful before? I talk a lot about Weird, but why Wonderful?

Weird is what is juxtaposed against the known and normal. It is a feeling, unsettling, or like the appeal of poking a stinging blister. It is something for which you lack frame of reference, or is beyond frame of reference. It can also be an anachronism, an uncanny valley. It's a kind of spiritual openness. Weird has been explained elsewhere better, but this is where I'm coming from.

Wonder is when the known and normal are exceeded and redefined. It is eureka and understanding and doing. It is the scientific method and systems and information theory, coding, math, linguistics. It's like the Dunning Kreuger Effect; the more you know, the more you realize there is to be known.

"Weird & Wonderful" is a common enough phrase, but actually, they are often placed at odds. Spiritualism vs. Materialism, Ancient vs. Modern; these limiting false binaries.

Statistics and probabilities, germs, genetics, atoms, control systems, are all really Weird. They are not necessarily intuitive, and for all the Wonder that comes from understanding them, it reveals more Weird unknowns that never quite reconcile with our sensory-perception of the world.

The majesty of nature, the interconnectedness of collaborative spiritualism, the introspection that can come from ritual, are all Wonderful; they reveal hidden aspects of the self and the world, without diminishing what else can be.

Wonder in the absence of Weird is like an addiction, an unsustainable compulsion to squeeze more out of the finite. It's wanting answers in the absence of questions, wanting not for Wonder but just to get back to baseline.

Weird in the absence of Wonder is meandering and circular. A kiddie pool can be mistaken for the infinite expanse of ocean if you refuse to measure its bounds.

Wonder creates the space for a far more vast and rich Weird, and Weird asks the questions and demands the slow contemplation to keep Wonder from spiraling out unsustainably.

Termina: Animist Necromancy, Gestört, Radiation of the Nihilist Supra-Organism, a Waste Product of Capitalism, The Sleeping, and other things

In Animist beliefs, life and death are non-binary; Ancestor Spirits carry a presence as nodes in the Superorganism network, the spirit in all things. Communing with the dead is a natural and spiritual practice.

Termina is not that.

Termina is to Anima as Undead is to the Living.

It is the Null-Spirit, the Gestört, the Nihilist Supra-Organism. A collection of things without parsimony, collectively less than the sum of its parts.

A radiation, a waste product of rampant expansion towards meaningless ends. An inefficiency, the churn of capitalistic profiteering.

A linear extrapolation of a spirit at its end. Ambulating without change or purpose, an Undead Cancer.

An Anti-Mutation, a hungry abomination monopolizing future potentialities.

The miracle of Anima, the self-organization of a universe in a low-entropy state, is its improbability. Termina are the creeping tendrils of entropy— eldritch enzymes unraveling proteins, molecules, and ideas, leaving behind a high-probability, undifferentiated state where everything equals nothing.

Broad Categories of Termina

1. The imagined idea of another person, and parasocial relationships.
2. Inert bureaucracies.
3. "Content" generated solely to be consumed.
4. "Solutions" in search of a problem.
5. Advertisement per se.
6. Generative AI as weaponized by capitalists or consumed by those who neither understand nor care to learn ML.
7. Christianity as weaponized by colonizers to genocide peoples and ideas, or the shibboleths of religion.
8. Unconscientious artifice.
9. Measures in violation of Goodhart's law.
10. Weapons of warfare and state violence.

Termina is also not this, but it'll look good in the thumbnail.

The Sleeping

Necromancers of Termina, in contrast to The Dreaming.

Their power comes from striving for power; auto-catalytic; the shrewdness of a single-minded predator; weaponized ignorance self-replicating.

The Relationships between The Sleeping and Termina are of a transactional nature, thoughtless, coercive, and isolating.

Example Termina

1. Forged painting.
2. Smartphone with designed obsolescence.
3. Snake oil.
4. Homeopathic water.
5. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.
6. NFT Bored Ape.
7. E-Meter.
8. Reproduction of the original Colt Revolver.
9. Property deed of stolen lands.
10. Private Equity LLC.

One day I'll actually properly write up this setting, but for now it'll just keep coming out piecemeal...

Against the Grey Play Report 3: Butt-Busty Baboon Rube Goldberg Machines, or Inception but with a Mutant Squirrel Eyeball Monster

Between the previous session and this one the group did a Reach of the Roach God side adventure set in the same campaign universe, but I was not present for that game and at least so far it has not directly impacted this campaign afaik, but with Huffa's permission I might share that PR down the line as well if it becomes relevant.

Reminder that I don't write these, it's (almost*) all Huffa :), which explains why they're better than my usual PRs lol.

* I believe this PR was not written until a little after the fact so it was lighter on details, so I've tried to fill in a bit more myself. As a result Jabronsky's actions are overrepresented here.

The game continues to get better and better with each session, for real.

I will return to writing my own posts sooner or later, I've just had a very busy summer...

Previous PRs:

1. Against the Grey Play Report 1: We Did an Akira and now the Eye Panopticon is Onto Us
2. Against the Grey Play Report 2: BOB!BAAAAAAHB!BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHB! (Translation: Please Kill Me!)

Characters

Jabronski (Me)

A rock.

Vacillates between slightly agitated and at peace with the universe.

Gastrolithic neurotoxic "frog" companion.

Can sporecast from within the companion.

Hark (Gibran)

Human fighter/barbarian-type who is a gung-ho stoner. Gets up to shenanigans, but also often comes up with clever plans.

Maude the Badger (Onya)

(She/her) Gun lovin, bomb throwin, grumpy old lady. 

Onya: "Loosely based on my grandma, and an old weird anarchist I met as a kid. Both were kinda scary and problematic."

Play Report

We began last session with you all drifting down in the balloon into the portion of the river where the Grey were extracting their spirit distillate - which appears extremely and dangerously polluted.

Somehow you managed to divert the balloon away from the river, but were spotted by Greys at their camp (which had been largely destroyed the session before).

The balloon crashed into a big tree in the forest north of the camp. There you encountered a squirrely that had been dosed with the distillate, and gave it psychedelic therapy*

* Max Note: This is actually really underselling it lol, it was a classic Max psychonautical thing involving the Mycelium Matrix and incepting the squirrel eyeball monster (which incidentally Huffa described really well at the time, it was much creepy) to overcome its childhood traumas.

Some of the Greys that had been sent after you landed on top of the tree and Jabronsky used invoked one of his Freaky Fractals* to keep them at bay.

* Max Note: Butt-busty baboons! It involved a Rube Goldbergian chain of events of agitated butt-busty baboons cascading cacophony of chaos and violence.

You got down the tree and began heading northward toward the Sacred Cave where you know mercenaries hired by the Greys were planning a raid on the hoard the Watchers had collected there to sacrifice to the spirits of the Forest.

You all made your way to the cave. The mercs had already attempted an infiltration when you arrived and you intervened. Here my memory gets very murky. As I recall you saw some of them sneaking in and one/some of you snuck in to warn the guards inside, while others of you approached the mercs still at the camp outside?

Huffa: addendum!

just remembered this bit

You left Chord to setup shop and make bombs and repair the balloon in the tree.