Alicornutopia

███ Ezra's settings, characters, and threads.

Main Characters
Enthusiastic Seeker of Novelty: A giant, intelligent, friendly talking spider. Also telepathic and venomous. Very enthusiastic about all things new or edible.

Jeffy (measuretwice): A young artist from a world where humans usually have two bodies. Having only one, his society considers him to be severely disabled.

Other Characters
TBA

Settings
Twice World: Humans typically have two bodies, telepathically linked by one mind. Having only one living body is a major disability. Earthlike, but with a few other minor differences.

Gnat: A large network of caves underneath a surface world. The human empire on the surface is systematically exiling various nonhumans and undesirables to the caves, where they run into denizens such as telepathic spiders. Magic is based around rituals to produce unique artifacts, some more useful than others.

9gend: People here have a much greater variation in primary and secondary sexual characteristics than on Earth. Our culture of primary concern groups this variation into nine major genders and a few different subtypes, culture and gender politics ensue. Originally designed around the prompt of "Omegaverse, but trans-positive and way less rapey."

Epiphyte: Two species of plant people live in symbiosis with four-gendered humanity. Magical body paint enhances the strength or flexibility of some body part, literally or metaphorically.

Virtues: The magic recognizes several virtuous codes of behavior, such as Honesty and Charity. When you keep to a virtue for seven years, you get a corresponding superpower.

Obduction: Some effect is stealing people from various times on various planets, mostly right before they would have died. Cultural contact ensues. Based on a video game but: mostly prefer to run it with original planets rather than the canonical ones.

The Sharing Federation: Humans on Star Trek ships, exploring the galaxy with their bestest friends the Yeerks. Content warning for domestication of people.

Forgetful magic: If you can forget it, you can change it.

Skytopia: Commerce and talking animals, in airplanes on floating islands.

Archaeotechnology: taking weird artifacts like "manacles that heat up when they hear lies" and making useful things out of them like "a steam engine powered by spoken falsehoods".

Threads
Constellation page

Starting this thread off with a fairly bare skeleton, for me to fill in as it occurs to me. Questions welcome.

Traditional question: What are your characters hogwarts sortings?

How about sortinghatchats? (It's different)
How about this system? (Unless it's already there and I missed it?)
What are all their daemons and how do your characters interact with them?
What are their (Quinn) birth blessings?

I think if Novelty got magic in Kappa's system there, she'd be Air. No comment on the other characters.

I'm not familiar with sortinghatchats.

I have no intuitive sense for assigning daemons or birth blessings.

Gnat
Novelty's homeworld. (She heard that you can name your world after something you like.) So far, we're mainly concerned with the goings-on in a relatively small part of a huge underground cave system.

Aranea are exceedingly large spiders, perhaps the size of a large housecat. They are also intelligent, telepathic, and venomous. All aranea proper are female; the males are neither telepathic nor venomous, and intelligent is an open question.

The aranea in these parts live in tribes, each with a queen; they trade with each other, but also skirmish for hunting territory, and conduct raids to steal other tribes' males.

Novelty's tribe, the Bold Explorers, specialize in living and hunting near the Cave of Big Things. The creatures that live in that cave are many times larger than usual. Aranea don't venture into it much, for fear of giant predators; but the Bold Explorers prey on some of the smaller Big Things that wander out of the cave, like eight-foot-long cave lizards.

Stories also tell of a Cave of Little Things.

Some other tribes specialise in enchanting artifacts. By drawing certain diagrams, placing a mundane object in the center, and performing certain songs or dances over them, the objects can be imbued with magical power. What power, exactly, doesn't seem to be predictable or consistent; you might try the same ritual several times before getting an artifact that you like.

Possible next topics: example artifacts, other species.

Let's share a few of my setting fragments that haven't been threaded. Their names are temporary designators showing their primary inspiration.

"Parsimonious Time Lords": A variant on Doctor Who's alien Time Lords intended to reduce the number of Who-ish coincidences. Unlike the Who version, they don't naturally look the same as humans.

Instead, when they die, they can regenerate their body to be patterned after the species of a nearby being. Our characters of note have probably mostly gone to the trouble of getting human bodies because they're hanging around humans, but there may also be Huan analogues that just like being dogs, or some individuals who manage to hang on to alien bodies by not dying.

I currently think that their internal biology doesn't change to match as much, it just rearranges to fit inside the form. So they have two hearts in case a form needs the extra pumping, but in human form both hearts just hang out in the chest. These time lords also have a more cosmopolitan digestive system than humans, to cope with whatever might be appropriate food for a form. I'm not committed to this, though; they could just match entirely.

Parsimonious Time Lords might speak "Parsimonious Draconic", which would be a variant on Elcenian Draconic that tries for a similar efficiency of components. This pan-language doesn't coin its own words. Instead, its speakers take advantage of universal translation to just use the most precise word that exists in any language for their meaning.

Virtue magic
This world's magic system recognizes and rewards virtue. There are probably around twenty-something Virtues, and if you consistently act according to a virtue, you get to use that virtue's corresponding magical power.

For a virtuous person, the trouble comes in when virtues conflict. If somebody asks your opinion of something you don't like, do you say something kind or something honest? Some virtues are almost impossible to keep together - how can you be consistently both Courageous and Cautious? So you have to pick your favorite Virtues, and consistently choose to embody them.

Healing comes from the virtue of Generosity. And if somebody asks you to heal them, you'd better do it; turning them down wouldn't be very Generous.

Courage gives you invulnerability. But you'd better not do anything so meek as to quietly go along with a dinner plan you hate.

If you mess up on one of your virtues, you can't use that virtue's magic any more. You can try again after seven years of keeping it with no mistakes.

Ooh do you have more of them?