Today's Challenge CN:Ascend Themes Part IV

Teeing up the Themes Roaming, Tattoo, The Last Outpost, and Theme Park.  I am going to extend this challenge one more day to do a wrap-up of the ideas generated, and maybe refine them a bit as the connections have started to form.

Roaming

·         Mechanics: Roaming benefits. Tools. Magic. Worldshaping. Cast Stones. Resistance. Success accumulation. Don't know where this leads, which is the point.

·         Roaming, Traveling without purpose, Traveling to where you are taken. By what? Riding a ripple, the physical thing. But what is the force, the pull, the reason? Fate? What drove Ronin from town to town? Too long in one place and what happens? But without intervention what happens? Roaming to leave, as opposed to finding something.

·         What else Roams? What else rides the ripples?

Tattoo

·         This one still conflates into Calligraphy for me. As in Calligraphy = Symbols = Tattoos. Difference? Tattoos are individual and permanent statements about one's self. Calligraphy is fleeting, shared, and of any subject. Diversity vs Self/One. Calligraphy as a Diversity/Thought method. Choreography as a Diversity/Action method. Tattooing as an One/Action method.

·         Tattooing as an action. Contemplation and suffering. Tattooing as story telling. History convened through action and moments of action rather then words/thoughts. Shared history through the open display, a reminder that continues but needs no thought.

·         Mechanics: Tattoos are permanent. They have an effect once the characters have moved on. Tattoos are the marks left behind by the characters, the gathering effect of their travels. They are what is built in each place. Each place has a collection of stats, and after each event, the place changes due to the actions of the characters.

·         Tattoo – Brand – branded throng: The characters are bound together, unable to divide. When a ripple calls, they must either all ride, or stay in place. Rolled Trials determine the result if the characters are in disagreement. What marks them as one?

The Last Outpost

·         Last: A once far reaching culture held sway for as far as one could travel. Nothing else but this culture was known. Hegemony. The Great Collapse ended it. It's culture was lost to the unknown, save for this last vestige. How did it survive? What lessons does it hold? What flaws remain, the cause of the Collapse, the harbinger of the next?

·         Outpost: On the edge. A lookout? Protection for travelers? Trading center? New contact with others? What was its mission? What is its reason for being now?

·         The: Solitary, alone, isolated. What is it's fate? To maintain the last vestiges of a lost culture? To learn from and teach the next? Will it disappear in time, mingling and being adsorbed by the new? Will to cling to it's ways in desperation and orthodoxy.

·         Mechanics: The Last Outpost represents a renewing cycle for the characters. A place to reground themselves from the experiences in the pond, engage in the politics of the day. A chance to reclaim who they are and what they represent, or by contrast, realize how far they have grown. New Training and a regrounding are to had, but orthodoxy and flaws are the ruts that lie here as well.

·         Opposing (somewhat off the path, here, but it was a flash) Traits, Mind and Body. A scale with that as one increase, the other diminishes. Too far down one path, a consequence of the roaming the pond, and the character becomes a Ghost or a Zombie, inhuman and unplayable. The Last Outpost provides the means to rebalance, but at what cost?

Theme Park

·         A park, place, area where ideas, beliefs, philosophies, emotions rest. A place to tromp through and explore, trying new themes out, taking them for a ride, feeling the rush of Adrenalin.

·         Sugar Mountain, to be forever young, a child experiencing each for the first time. A distracting cacophony in which to get lose one's self. Insanity.

·         The wildness of the dark, the space in between the clusters of light. Distracting, entrancing. Sensates dance there, but never for too long less they lose themselves. Jabberwockies, the everything at once, the nothing at all.

·         The Last Outpost is the last thing to catch a hold of before plummeting ever farther into the void. An oasis in the never ending Theme Park.