Chariot II

So, once the book versions of We Don't Go Back, On a Thousand Walls and Cult Cinema are finished, I'm going to do a second edition of Chariot.

Funny thing about Chariot. I wrote it nearly three years ago now, I crowdfunded it, I laid it out, and I played it with my friends for a while, and then I put it away and did some other stuff. And you do, that's what you do, isn't it? You put it to one side.

And about eighteen months after I last looked at it, I looked at it again. And it's full of typos, which it would be, because no matter how good you are at proofreading, you don't proofread your own work; and some of the art I'm still happy with, in an outsider art sort of way, and some of it I'm less happy with; and some of the rules need to be explained more clearly and given better examples. I came up with a better way to do the card mechanics.

But for all that, I read this, and I thought, by God, this is good.

Expert

We define an expert as someone skilled or knowledgeable in a given field, or at least that's the simple version. I think the real definition of that is more nuanced, truly, has more to do with the perception of others than with verifiable competence.

Errata: Alternative Boons for the Lover

I should first offer an apology for not having posted for a couple of days. Life got in the way, mainly and while I knew the pace of the blog wasn't going to be one I could keep up forever, I still hope to post if not daily, at least five times a week. I still have several essays about pop Atlantises and fractured histories to write, and a bunch of game stuff.

But today, I want to fix something in Chariot. 

Helio Arcanaphus is Not Impressed

A map

Qeraf, The Seven Cities and One

The inevitable Crowdfunder update: Having sailed gently and gracefully past the £1000 mark like one of the aerial yachts of Caiphul, I'm pleased to say that I am able to pay Malcolm Sheppard money (and good, proper money, or something more approaching good proper money than the RPG industry usually offers) to write a chunk of material for the game, 10,000 words of it.

There are two days to go!  Please, even if you don't want to give us your money, share it on the usual social media, like Chariot on Facebook, follow me on Twitter and check out the Indiegogo campaign. Everyone who contributes more than a pound gets to see all the drafts.

OK, done. On to today's extract. 

I'm in an ebullient mood. So, one of the more fanciful, romantic corners of the setting today. Who doesn't love a flying island?

Chalidocean, City of the Golden Gates, Dream of Empire

XVI. The Tower

Important piece of lore today. Today's post isn't in the current draft but will be in the new version I'm uploading Friday, which you can get hold of early if you support Chariot at http://igg.me/at/ChariotRoleplay.VII.CHA.BE.CHA

Gods of Atlantis

Six of Pentacles: A Black Atlantean Ritual to Akhantuih.

The Atlantean body politic and the religious establishment are one and the same.

The Long Before

Six of Wands.

Time only began with consciousness, and memory, and in the Long Before, the forebears of humanity – mindless, formless, swam in the Astral Sea, the First Root of the Human Race. We evolved; we gave birth to elongated, weightless beings of light-bearing ether, and as the Second Root, we drifted through the ages of the seas and the time of the Greatest Beasts. We learned to dream, unbound by the shackles of time and consciousness and thought, and our dreams shaped the evolution of the world around us.

In Search of the Miraculous #2: The Lonely Death of PD Ouspensky

Where I got the title for this series from.

In Search of the Miraculous was the defining work of Peter Ouspensky. As Ouspensky goes, he was certainly a lot more principled and honest than a lot of the New Age thinkers.

Rmoahal Bodies

Ghenim

So large, and yet so ignored, so silent. The shackled giants who stand in the corners and alcoves of every Atlantean city, who toil in the fields, mines and factories, who fight in the slave battalions, who huddle in the shanty towns that the Atlanteans insist so hard do not exist.

Muvian Bodies

Page of Cups

They look like Atlanteans, the Muvians; at least at first glance.

Tlavatli Bodies

Queen of Wands

The Atlanteans are, although they would deny it openly, always somewhat afraid of the Tlavatlis. Part of that must be because of their size which, unlike the generally cowed Rmoahals, couples itself with a restless energy.

Atlantean Bodies

Knight of Wands

It can only make sense that the Atlanteans, rich, widespread and populous, display more variation in their appearance than any of the other cultures of the Twin Continents.

Your Direction to a World of Miracles

How many maps of Atlantis are there? Loads, that's how many. 

Everyone who writes about Atlantis has their own map: Lewis Spence, Ignatius Donnelly, Graham Hancock, Charles Berlitz, Otto Muck, all different (Murry Hope uses other people's). Scott-Elliot has six of them, all at different stages, each superimposed on a map of the present world. I'm drawing my own, which loosely draws on the form of Scott-Elliot's map of Atlantis at its height, the third one.

It's liberating in a way, finding places to put a mythology. Putting names for people who never really existed in a context. For a project like this, maps matter.

In a lot of ways more work has to be done setting up cultures and conflicts than in the sorts of games I'm used to writing, the modern day horror, the near-future stuff, since the world needs a sense of place. It's going to take a while, the map.

Atlanteans, the Third People

Kuiorih ka Akhantuih, Black Atlantean priest

What is there to say? The Atlanteans, for good and ill, are arbiters of all there is. They are the explorers, scientists,  philosopher, discoverers. No one is close to them in wealth and achievement.

Clean water. Healthy people who can read and write. Lights on the streets at night. Peace, for the Atlanteans at any rate.

Tlavatlis, the Second People

Svaathë, a Tlavatli.

Among the children of the Rmoahals,  some travelled north, and there they settled, and there they learned selfishness. There they learned ambition.

How little I've added

This book I nearly broke my neck as a kid trying to get hold of.

In writing the setting material for Chariot, I keep finding myself amazed by how little I have to add.

From the sketchbook

A Lemurian.

Atlantis as written by the victors

My Atlantis books, some of them. Three feet of shelf space, no lie. My favourite is Murry Hope's Atlantis: Myth or Reality? because any sensible answer to that question makes that the shortest book ever ("Duh, myth. Next, please!")

The history of a nation is, unfortunately, too easily written as the history of its dominant class.

Kwame Nkrumah, first President of Ghana.

One of my intentions with this project, on the worldbuilding side, at least, is to write a revisionist fantasy history while being true to both my boyhood additions to the mythos and the source material. My solution is to limit the voices I use.