Mysterious electromagnetic-field generating knife-footed tube creature, from the random alien tables from Silent Legions. What a good set of tables. (1762)

Elves, dwarves, gaunts and sometimes Children of Nursiir hold themselves to be the elder races of Geos. This is not necessarily true, but who's going to argue with them? Does the wide extent of the ancient Dwarrowdrask give modern dwarven nations the mineral rights of first refusal on, well, basically everything on three continents? Are the Deep Roads for the dwarves alone? Is the eternal memory of the Dead Caste of the Sunless Isles proof that they know more than you, mortality-bound mammal? That they're wiser and greater than you can fathom, and you should trust the opinion of a bunch of long-mummified gaunts? Are modern elves the true inheritors of the wonders of the Crystal Age, of the Silver Elves themselves? The Sea Elven nation of Yldron-Oversea certainly maintains that position, citing their taming of the Sunken Archipelago's Worldscar as proof. (The note here in the 'Nursiian' section is a note that says 'gonna go come up with some smug stuff, BRB'. What do I even pay that guy for?) (1583-6)

The K'katekh, the Orithir and the [unpronounceable, often called 'stalagmites' by humans]. Some quick sketches. (1365)

These strange creatures are, once again, generated using tables from Silent Legions, and while they have lived in the solar system for billions of years, they yet hunger for Earth's untapped arcane potential. (1364)

Rolling up another Random Mythos Alien from the Silent Legions book, I got this fun beastie − its species live among humanity through shapeshifting and also psionic control... (1363)

A creature from the Outer Dark, an alien beast that has come to our realm to cause mischief. Silent Legions also has a table to build random mythos aliens! How fun. (1362)

In ancient days, dread powers stirred. Even now, the knowing can use their rituals. (I'm using the vast array of extremely fun random tables in the Silent Legions book to craft myself a pantheon of the Black Dream) (1361)

From the travel diaries of Hykariath-kin-Uelvi, natural philosopher and anthropologist, on the unnamed village and customs of the Sidereal Elves on the island of Forn.

(1172)

Types and Varieties Of Elf.

Dangit.

Now I said every element has two whole Higher Expressions, that means there are now officially TWENTY FOUR whole elements, in this lovely ring of connectedness and opposition.

I mean, come on K2, twenty four races wasn't enough for you? Add fiends and elementals?

Add different styles of language? Different ways to apply magic? A whole damn programming language?

I MAY BE OVERTHINKING THIS.

It's Wednesday.

I'm a very busy person at the moment, so Chiasmata may have a much slower updating schedule over the next week or so.

But, as I said, it is Wednesday! Worldbuilding Wednesday!

Ask me questions about any of my worlds, any of my characters and any of my stories! They all help immensely and provide me with sustenance.

What a piece of work.

The first of the character select things for the upcoming Geosian adventure. There's a character for each of the nine zodiac signs, and I'm drawing a reference for all of them, then making a silhouette and putting the silhouette here.

These nine are only the main characters, by the way.

How alembians work.

That picture is how their physical appearance works. It mentions not the Leaders, the Gifts/Powers, the society or anything really else. And this caption isn't going to either. I mean, apart from just then.

I may talk about society later. In another post. Too many spoilers, you know?

Realisations

Things I've just thought about, with regards to Reposesnagged.

Dancestors.

I have been thinking about the dancestor-type pre-scratch alembians, the alkians.

I will demonstrate this by gibbering a bit.

Their original story was that the Knight of Doom killed them all after they failed with a tumor-esque bomb and then they were ghosts, the end. The Knight of Doom therefore has dubious morality and blah blah blah.

But that's basically, letter-for-letter, what the Beforan trolls did. And I may be many things, but I am not that unimaginative (feel free to disagree).

I toyed with the idea of them riding out on a meteor, propelled by the Knight's formidable telekinetic power. The Knight would of course die from overexertion, followed by the rest of them as their meteor spins uselessly through the Furthest Ring. Especially since there would be two Leaders on that particular asteroid, automatically trying to vie for dominance and kill everything. Maybe the alembians would eventually encounter an asteroid full of rotting corpses. Who knows?

But that's pretty close to what happened to the post-scratch trolls. They were flung off by a blind telekinetic who died in the process and who had a golden theme to their powers. The only difference is that the trolls murdered each other first, rather than out in the Ring.

And also, the Knight wouldn't survive to do some more morally-dubious things. It'd be a shame if that didn't happen.

But they still need to be firmly outside the bounds of their session by the time their Scratch is set off. There are few self-propelled ways of doing this. I mean, you could set off in a battleship or something, but that's what the iritids will be doing. Maybe.

They could go through one of the Skaian defence portals. That might work, but what would they do on a dead Alkis to get themselves all killed?

This is all very confusing, and I haven't even started on the mite dancestors. Their story is mostly going to be a comedy of errors. A tragic one of stupidity, miscommunication and dramatic irony that leaves a bunch of developmentally-stunted twerps languishing in dream bubbles. Of course, where the dream bubbles come from is a mystery, and their presence attracts the attention of some things that really should have faded away trillions of years ago.

I have yet to pin down precisely how many inheritors there were as well. It's definitely more than two, but do I want it really to be twelve? Again, these are the sorts of things I think about when I have better things to do.

So in conclusion, I need to think of a suitably cruel way to kill all the alkians. And the mite ancestors (and iritid ancestors) need sad backstories. I'll get right on that.

Geosian Playing Cards

A follow-up to this, this and this. This is an in-character explanation of something I felt needed explaining.

Why hello there, ladies and gentlemen! My name is not important, but what is more important to know is that I am a fortune teller! And, as a soothsayer, I am a veritable beacon of knowledge on the subject of the cards! And while I do not necessarily use them as the makers intended, I do know how they work and what the little pictures on them mean.

There are nine suits, each named after one of the nine season constellations. They are therefore named after each one of the star signs one can have been born or hatched under. This means that the cards have hella symbolism, which makes my job as a cartomancer much easier!

I mean, I do other divination of various forms, but cartomancy is easier and simpler and gives more discrete answers. Throwing lots is more ambiguous and runs on basically the same principles, extispicy (or haruspicy) is gross and a bit cruel, tea leaves are weird and vague, necromancy (in the talking-to-the-dead kind of way) is mildly illegal and palm reading varies so much between the races that I might as well not bother.

The suits each have nine cards, each of which has a number, or a thematic number-name thing (Primes, Twins and Quads are the only ones anyone remembers, though). That makes eighty-one cards overall, far more than your puny human packs of cards. But enough cultural posturing! On to the divination!

Now, I'm not going to explain the myriad of card games to you, suffice to say that Snap still exists in this universe. I am instead going to explain the cartomancy that I use to explain the future to people! It is how I earn my keep, after all! It'd be a shame if I were to not know how to fleece people of their hard-earned coin with my chosen arts of divination.

So first you find a willing victim mark customer, wanting to know their fortune for whatever reason. You lead them gently to a table or a flat surface you can place your cards on, depending on where you are. If all else fails, you can keep them hovering in the air, which has the bonus of looking damn impressive and the downside of being fiddly and tiring. Seriously, I barely have the attention span to lift more than about twelve cards at a time, let alone keep them still. That's for professionals, not to suggest that I'm an amateur.

Once you're all sat down or stood up or whatever, the game can start!

Reaching deep into the light and darkness of the future, you open your magesight or other wizarding senses and gaze at the world afresh. You can either shuffle and move the cards by guided hands, or can reach out with your mind and turn your thoughts into movement. It takes seconds, and then three, six or nine (any multiple of three, really) cards are lying face down between you and your client, and these however many cards hold all the information that you're ever likely to need.

Pardon my poetry, it's a rather involved process and I'm missing a few big details out because they're hard to explain without cursing the limits of language. Most magic is like that to some extent, divination more so.

Then, the cards are interpreted! Now, cartomancy is a bit vague and everyone does it differently, but the general symbolism is the same between the practitioners and it's not as if I've got an Uractic Board to spell the answers out explicitly. (They're really rare and occasionally dangerous - so plain old cards for me, thanks. I'm a traditionalist.)

For my particular thing, the cards I lay out are all pertinent to the situation and the number on the cards is usually the magnitude of the "effect" of the constellations on the person and their question's answer. The relative locations of the cards also help to understand what's going on.

For the "higher number equals importance" thing, the only exception is the Prime of a suit, which could go either way circumstantially, from a lack to a pivotal importance. It's  all based on context, so any explanation I can give you will involve me waving my hands around and saying "you know, things and stuff", so not particularly easy to understand.

And that's all folks!

Geosian Race thumbnails.

A followup to this here. And then this here too.

Ignore the rubbish traditional art and my stupid handwriting.

Celestial Races.

Lyrisk are from somewhere slightly north and across a sea or two. A good deal of these weird race names don't change upon plural. They are the main inhabitants of the port town of Dronis on the north coast of the part of the continent on which the story takes place. A future Geos adventure would have one of these as a protagonist, a researcher of areas of high background magic. Those areas are cool. They have quantum adaptive plants that are blurry unless they're attacked.

Sauric come from the actual main body of the northern Geos continent. They like magic, and their design has changed a bit from the previous iteration of Geos. They have a fairly weakly maintained body temperature and do much better in the warm. There is a line of very powerful archmages called the Irantai who have their mildly super-supernatural abilities passed down through a long, unbroken line from who-knows when. Or maybe it's just a very powerful family line. Who knows. Their main population base is in the city of Lathia, founded by an entity or being known as Lathis a good while ago. Also, they have tails.

These guys live in wet places, and despite my frankly weird model, tend to be sane and sensible. Tend to be. They live in a place called Kreak in a swamp and in numerous other places where it's nice and wet, like marshes and such. Despite the really high humidity, they keep vast libraries in their cities as carefully as they can. The Great Archives are in Kreak are a mildly definitive collection of most of the useful literature from this part of the world. This guy in particular is a bit of a weirdo, a fortune-teller who seems to always know what you're thinking. He travels with a saner friend whose job is theoretically to look for interesting items to purchase for the Kreak archives. These guys are cold-blooded and cool-skinned and can breathe underwater for a while.

Terrestrial Races.

We seem to have some form of image error, but The Ninth People are weird and reclusive, so that makes sense. They live in the Ninth City and a number of surrounding minor settlements and farms. Since the Ninth City impacted, they have been involved in a number of wars, because they use technology that is scary to the other Geos races and the other Geos races use magic that is scary to them. They are basically gently nudging into a minor industrial revolution, whereas the rest of Geos is the sort of vaguely fantasy medieval to renaissance sort of thing that fantasy worlds tend to indefinitely occupy.

Walkers are nearly extinct in this part of the known world, with a likely estimate of about twelve remaining and an almost completely forgotten language. What precisely their abilities were is mostly forgotten, but popular mythology holds that they could walk through shadows and become invisible, along with some more not entirely untrue powers. They were mostly wiped out by an insane necromancer about a generation before the geosian story would begin.

About 5000 Earth years ago, a magitek civilisation spanned a good portion of the globe. Legend tells of the gods growing angry at their arrogance, as is the way with ancient civilisations of great might and power, and smote them for their arrogance. Whether or not this is true, the civilisation fell and in the middle of the barren lands the trakki live in there is an ancient, ruined city. The remnants of the race that built the city live in a number of wandering tribes in the barren lands. While they can occasionally be seen in cities, they tend to be the ones thrown out of the tribes for misdemeanours.

Infernal Races.

In the Bathyscape lagoon, there is an underwater city called the Bathyscape. The ynthos live there, and in a number of other underwater cities in a chain under the northern sea. They have a fantastically xenophobic system of government, although their dealings with some of the land cities are frostily cordial. They make weapons out of glass and hunt underwater monsters. They can live on land, but they need to be kept perpetually humid and tend to like it in the shade better.

Gaunts live mostly in the Shaded Lands, a large area of land to the south which is perpetually covered in shade and darkened clouds. Within the shaded lands, they mostly live in a city built into the sides of an extinct volcano. They do lots of necromancy and used to be separated into warrior and mage castes, but the warrior caste dwindled and eventually merged with the mage caste. They were in a bunch of wars with some of the celestial races, but a nice uneasy peace has descended for now.

The drikar live in big underground cities, all linked by tunnels. They see very little reason to visit the surface, so they don't usually. Their relationship with the other infernal races is reasonable, and they seem to get along with the terrestrial and celestial races better than any other of the infernal races, probably because they're so useful for building underground (and occasionally overground) structures.

And that's it for now! These are sort of what all the different kinds of people look like, so now I'll be more pressured to do some different stuff about Geos, like the zodiac and suchlike.