Exchange of Realities

Why are the undead written so similar to the living?

Their death changes nothing. They still see the same colors, feel the same walls, smell the same scents—okay, maybe the blood smells stronger, but honestly, that’s cliché. They can’t always go out in the sunlight, sure, but that’s barely a change. Hearts which no longer beat still race; blood that no longer pumps still rises for a blush.

This sort of death and return will not fly. They are not dead. They are not alive. By necessity, they should be different. Why are they not?

Undeath is liminality, sitting on the brink between two worlds. It’s a perpetual meeting, standing between two groups and never fitting into either. And yet the ghosts talk like everyone else, and the vampires—so different, so unreal—still manage to attract everyone to their beds. Why are they all so mundane? Why not make of undeath something new?

Why does the ghost, intangible, have the same senses as her human counterpart? What would come in place of touch? Might they not see opacity as hue, solidity as shade, differentiate between light mist and the wax-paper skin of one living past his time as we would between teal and navy blue? Why not blur feeling and sensation, so that the ghost trades sunlight and cold wind on her skin for the feeling of irritation from the commuters on a Monday morning, or the exultation of children at recess? When watching that old woman in the choir, eighty-something going on immortal, can your ghost warm herself with the woman’s ageless zeal? Does she brush up near the edges of a crowd, everyone familiar, everyone belonging, and find that sense of togetherness as solid as they find the doors to the room?

How does the vampire feel his weaknesses? When confronted with a pile of millet seed on the ground, is the urge to count the grains in his head? His hands? Does he even realize he’s doing it before he’s finished? When they place a sprig of wild rose on the coffin (yes, Stoker said so), is what keeps him from rising from it a weight on the lid, or on his limbs; a smell dulling his wits or just preventing him from waking?

What is it like to have died? Is it like rising from a weight? Burning away? Is there light, darkness, warmth, cold, something nobody’s mentioned yet? Do they see themselves? Were there calls to go farther into something new? Have they, as Garth Nix would imply, pulled themselves to their feet in an endless gray current and trudged against it back to the world they belong in? Or awoken in a forest and taken the left hand path at every crossroads?

We are fantasists. Death is what we choose to make of it. If we’re going to use it as a transition and not an ending, let’s make it worth taking the time to come out on the other side.

“So there I am—visible, mind you—and up comes Kaz. And he walks right through me! Like I’m not even there! So I turn around to give him a piece of my mind, and he just laughs it off—and you know he knows better, he’d never do that to Nita—and says he’d been thinking about inviting me to a feast, and—well, I’d had it. Yeah, that’s why I didn’t use the door. I needed to get out of there. I’m sorry, okay?”

When you’ve got ghosts on the same footing as the people around them—so to speak, anyway—little issues are going to crop up. Issues like the fact that ghosts don’t need to, or in some cases can’t, eat. Or like the fact that they pass right through everything that isn’t incorporeal like them. Like with the bloodsucking earlier this week, social convention is likely to end up cropping up. For instance:

Walking through ghosts. Granted, most people wouldn’t want to—it’s cold and clammy at best, and downright disturbing at worst. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, though. I don’t imagine it to be much more comfortable for the ghost. So there’ll probably be agreements that pretty much boil down to “I don’t walk through you, you don’t walk through me.” This, of course, only works if it’s known that the living creature can in some way sense the ghost—calling foul on someone who couldn’t have known is just unfair.

Food. Would you invite a recovering alcoholic to a wine-tasting? Or a lactose intolerant to an ice cream social? Didn’t think so. For someone who can’t eat, but does have all her senses, being invited to an event that’s all about the food is probably going to be about equivalent to any of the above examples. Worse when people start rubbing it in (even if it’s an innocent “You gotta try this stuff!”). Particularly if they’re the only one of their kind at the party and don’t have anyone to commiserate with. So odds are social convention is going to declare this insensitive at best and downright nasty at worst.

This doesn’t mean that it’s just humans watching out for the ghosts’ feelings; the ghosts have to adapt as well. Take the ghostly ability to walk through walls. Just because one can doesn’t mean one should, and not just because of the risk of being walked in on while changing. I imagine the conventions regarding walls and doors for ghosts being similar to the conventions for fences and gates among humans. Sure, you can climb over the short chain-link fence or the wooden one around the front yard/pasture, or slip through that crack in the taller board fence, but unless you live there or are very good friends with the owner (and are young enough that it’s still acceptable), it’s not going to get you a very good reaction. Taking the gate, on the other hand, lets them see you coming, shows that you’re following the rules, and in general keeps the system going. By the same token, social convention will probably pressure the ghost to stick to doors and either open them before walking through or announce its passage through in some way before doing so.

That’s just the easy ones. Got anything else to suggest?

So yesterday, we were talking about blood and social ritual from the perspective of the vampire and the willing blood donor. It’s not the only way these things can go, of course.

For one thing, not everything that drinks blood has fangs. Most of them, sure, but every so often there are counterexamples: the ghosts in Exalted’s Underworld come to mind. For these, the standard bite may not be entirely appropriate; their teeth just aren’t made for it. So one might just go for a slash-and-slurp sort of method instead. Or—particularly in the case of the aforementioned ghosts—a volunteer could bleed into any of a number of possible vessels and offer those instead. This allows for an additional ritual element, making it a more appropriate method than direct sipping for ceremonies and similar formal occasions. It also allows more sheer variety of possible situations than a simple bite might. Can you imagine the blood donation equivalent of a Japanese tea ceremony? (Or, for that matter, a British high tea?)

Then there’s the flip side of there being a social code for drinking blood from willing victims. The communication element is probably going to work its way back into unwilling blood removal at some point, as the drinker decides that feeding isn’t enough and that he may as well leave a message while he’s at it. (Or, for that matter, that he wants to leave a message and he may as well get a bit to eat in the process.) Most normal blood-drinking assailants will go for the throat, for the convenience reasons discussed yesterday. That doesn’t say anything. Except maybe “I was hungry.”

But biting somewhere else does. Going for the thigh, due to its associations with intimacy of several varieties, would tend to give a number of potentially nasty overtones to the situation. (Add the fact that it’s going to take longer to access than the other locations, a way of dragging out the experience.) Wrist-draining an unwilling target, on the other hand, would give a considerably different image—a sort of mockery of respect, perhaps, particularly if it’s not the drinker’s usual modus operandi. It might also cast doubts on how actively the victim was resisting, as conventional wisdom would state that it’s easier to remove someone’s fangs from your wrist than from your throat. And then there’s going for the inside of the knee, if you’re keeping the submissive aspects mentioned yesterday—I’m thinking creepy hero-worshiping stalker, but ironic turning of the tables on someone who was in a position of power could work just as well. If nothing else, it’s one kinky way to go. Either way, the deliberate choice signals premeditation and purpose—and that in itself might be more unnerving than another near-death, or yet another bloodless corpse in an alley.

Blood ritual itself can go in a number of different directions, ones that don’t necessarily require the participants to be undead. The most logical, of course, is offering it to something hungry, like blood sacrifices to appease gods or summon demons. But that’s easy; why stop there? What about demonstrating fealty to a blood-drinking noble by offering him one’s throat? How about if you’ve got a race or a group that can learn about someone by tasting their blood; might that not give a whole new meaning to offering one of them your hand at the beginning of a social event? Imagine the turns of phrase that could come of this, as evening parties with large numbers of unfamiliar people rapidly become a leading cause of anemia.

Can you think of anything else?

Consider the vampire. More importantly, consider the vampire’s diet. Vamps just gotta drink blood.

I’ve seen a lot of substitutions and workarounds been used—medical blood, animal blood, stuff-that-isn’t-necessarily-blood-but-carries-life-energy. That’s one way to go about it.

But if it must be fresh, and must be human, at some point it’s probably going to get to the point where there are a number of social rules involving blood drinking. (For some reason, a lot of the time it just gets equated to sex, to some degree or other. Some writers are more enthusiastic about this than others.) But there’s more detail that can go into that; one thing that interests me is what society says about what where the drinkee is bitten means.

For purposes of this riff, I’m going to be looking at five possible sites: the throat, inside of elbow, wrist, thigh, and back of knee. They’ve got good veins, and it’s possible to get a decent amount of meaning out of each.

The thigh’s probably not going to show up much in social drinking, at least not among members of polite society outside of closed doors. It shouldn’t take that much imagination to see why: for one thing, it’s an awkward point to get at, and for another, any lower garment longer than a pair of Daisy Dukes is going to get in the way. As a result, the thigh is likely to acquire rather intimate connotations.

The neck, meanwhile, is the most common point of puncture in most stories. Logical; for one thing, it’s the easiest spot to reach when you’re grabbing someone from behind—or from in front—and restraining them. It also poses the most difficulty for a drinkee who wishes to declare that enough is enough. The conclusion? It takes trust to offer up someone your neck. Trust, or a lack of choice. This might give throat-biting an association with trust or intimacy, or it might make it into a sign of domination or possession. Or all of the above. Rarely are social codes simple.

Consider, on the other hand, offering the wrist. It gives you distance, and the ability to yank your hand away if the drinker’s getting greedy. In addition, there’s more variety in positional significance; depending on whether the drinker is standing or sitting, and what the drinkee is doing, it can accommodate almost any combination of ranks or comparative statuses imaginable. Perhaps chivalry is undead? (If you’re seeing parallels to older kissing codes, don’t be surprised—so am I, and I’ll give it pretty good odds that this reasoning explains those as well.) Add to this the fact that it’s easier to keep blood off of both clothing and furniture this way, and and the wrist bite could rapidly become the most common form of social drinking.

What about the inner joints? That varies. The inside of the elbow strikes me as something that would be between the throat and the wrist in terms of familiarity. The underside of the knee, on the other hand, has its own complications. It’s awkward to get to. It practically requires that the drinker position himself somewhere below the drinkee. I would see it as a way for the person whose blood is being drunk to assert dominance over the one doing the drinking: “Sure, you can have some. But you’re going to have to work for it.”

I’ll be sinking my teeth further into this topic tomorrow, so do come back. Fangs for visiting!

While brainstorming today’s post, I realized that I was approaching a rather interesting conjunction of events—I’d committed to having my birthday during Undead Week. Potentially contradictory, isn’t it? Being an opportunist when it comes to topics, I decided to run with it. Which gave me today’s question: what events do the undead, particularly ghosts, celebrate?

On first thought, birthdays were out. At least, birthdays as we know them. It seemed to me that the birthday would be bittersweet: “If I had lived, my age would be…” doesn’t exactly strike me as cheerful. And in nonmodern times, it certainly wouldn’t be a song-and-presents party like we get—can you say anachronism? But my muse reminded me that if memories of life are important to our undead, the birthday celebration may become a way to hang onto what they were.

Then there’s the logical opposite, the death-day. Which could, I suppose, be popular—it makes sense in cultures in which life is just a way of getting ready to die. And certainly, a famous warrior whose heroic end lives on in legend probably wouldn’t mind having it recognized. A ghost whose afterlife revolves around avenging her untimely death, on the other hand, will almost definitely remember the day, but I don’t think she’ll be celebrating unless her murderer is on the pointy end of several sharp knives. And one who died in a manner that lacks both a mortal cause and good memories might not want to remember the event at all, possibly even counting their years as the dead by some other calendar event, if they do so at all. (Of course, those who do celebrate their deathdays beg the question: is it the actual date of death that matters, or the day of the funeral? If the latter, that might make a proper burial more important, as someone without one is neither alive nor officially dead.)

Which brings me to the next question: What might these other events be? One possibility is holidays from the ghost’s life—possibly even ones that are no longer celebrated, or are celebrated so differently as to be unrecognizable. Imagine a ghost who still lights two candles in the window to commemorate the day the young soldiers left for the war, long past the time in which the war was one and the wait for them to return turned into a victory celebration and therefore an excuse to throw rowdy parties and get roaring drunk. (Character note: If he knows the times have changed, why doesn’t he change with them?)

If the worlds of the dead and the living are separate, there’s probably a night that brings them closer together. It could be a set date, for some reason determined by outside forces. It could be the conjunction—or the disjunction—of a solar and a lunar calendar. It could even be something simple like the day after the harvest when they burn the sugar or wheat stubble or whatever’s left over. But whatever it is, you can bet the locals are going to feel it. It might even be important enough to be the beginning of someone’s year.

Why not reverse some of our standard celebrations a little? Like having ghosts celebrate the end of one season rather than the beginning of the next? Similarly, we celebrate our parents, and similarly, the living in one world might celebrate their ancestors (living, deceased, or both); why, then, wouldn’t the ghosts celebrate their descendants, who carry on their line? And of course, in cultures with ancestor cults, days set aside for festivals commemorating said beloved ancestors may or may not be celebrated among the dead, but they’ll certainly be noticed. (Does a deceased member of such a culture still worship her ancestors? If prayer has an effect ordinarily, do her prayers still count?)

And of course, there’s always crashing the parties of the living. Particularly (as in the above) if the party’s for you.

Being dead doesn’t have to mean an empty calendar. Why not give the ghostly year some life?

Welcome to Undead Week at the Exchange of Realities!

Since my posting week (not counting Impractical Applications) ends with Halloween, I figured I’d celebrate. And what better way to hit up the spookiest time of the year than by taking a closer look at the undead?

Undeath is an interesting sort of state. Originally, it was viewed as an abomination and a curse, and the undead were mindless, damned, or otherwise not the kind of people you’d invite to a nice party. Veinglory had an interesting riff on this just a few days ago. Long story short, she summarizes how the vampire has gone from being a horror-movie enemy to being worthy of being protagonists. Similarly, ghosts have gone from something you sic a priest on and throw holy water at to as often allies and friends.

But now that these things are protagonist fare, they can be reasoned with, and hold exchanges of culture. And that being possible means that there needs to be culture to exchange.

For instance, I haven’t read too many vampire novels, but most of the ones I’ve had have shared a number of similar things. There have been references to the weaknesses Stoker mentions—staking, garlic, silver, sunlight, and so on, in just about all of them. Of course, there’s been the blood-drinking, but that tends to be more a nuisance than an impediment. …and then there’s the people whose thoughts as far as blood-drinking have been pretty much automatically “Find ways to make it like sex.” There’s way more that can be done with that; the sheer number of interesting social customs, rituals and similar features that can be drawn from that sort of feeding—or from any sort of blood-based subsistence—are staggering. (Needless to say, this is one of the topics I plan on covering this week.)

Or think about ghosts. There are a lot of things that can be done with ghosts; what sorts of events do they consider to be noteworthy? What’s their opinion of walls, and are there conventions by which they might choose to respect them or not? How do they interact with those who came after them? Are there things you just don’t talk about around them? How much of an insult is it to walk through one?

What about their effects on people? If an undead ruler of a place has some sort of weakness, what kinds of prohibitions might that result in for the people under him? If a certain sort of undead is particularly likely to prey on townsfolk, how might the burial practices be affected? What about their impact on the language?

Undead show up in a lot of places. Most RPG worlds have some place or another where you can’t kick a rock without hitting one. Vampires are practically a genre in and of themselves, as are zombies. And who here hasn’t at some point told or heard a ghost story? As a result, they’re a common plot device, and knowing how to use them with style can make your undead stand out.

So stick around. Ask questions. Make suggestions, particularly with regards to topic. Most importantly, don’t let the suspense kill you!

This week I discussed making the implausible feasible through various techniques. This, of course, was not without inspiration from my charming players, who seem to ask the impossible before breakfast and justify it by the end of dinner.

This situation, though, is a doozy, even for them. Big Things are going down, things that even they realize are a bit too big for them. So they ask for help. Of course, with them being Big Epic Heroes, “asking for help” is more like “requesting mobilization of an army commanded by the biggest god they can find”.

And just my luck, they arrange it in such a way that they’re doing it at a distance, so I can’t turn to the dice so much to try to determine whether this plan of theirs should be successful or not.

What’s a GM to do?

I stewed about it for a while—I still haven’t quite decided, actually. But that’s when one of my players stepped in and started talking to me about why a yes answer is more probable than I might have thought. It wasn’t those reasons that got me more favorable, or at least not too much. Instead, what got me was one of my players joking about the idea of a couple other gods taking bets on it. Which gives me a mental image based on the idea of what sort of chaos could result from it. What’s not to like? A long-shot bet between a few gods, leading to a number of possible events I haven’t quite figured out yet, some of which are just hilarious and fun color and some of which might be actively plot-complicating in the future in ways that almost balance out the irritation that would come with having to have to take into account all the variables that everyone’s expecting to come into play if the request is granted.

It might be worth it. I’m still figuring it out. But I enjoyed the suggestion, and that’s made a great deal of difference to me.

So there you are, meeting with your advisers. There’s a plan that’s just been executed, one proposed by one of your lieutenants and signed off on by the five-year-old child after a few hours of explaining the words with more than three syllables. There’s no chance of it going wrong according to the data you’ve been given, and everyone’s getting ready to break out the Blood Orange Sunrises.

And then you get word that the plan’s a bust, and that you’ve been set back farther than the plan would’ve set you forward.

Now, Vader’s Guide to Employee Relations says that in circumstances like this, the proper thing to do is to make an example of the guilty party in order to put the fear of you into the rest of your henchmen. I, however, disagree.

For one thing, consider the effect on minion morale. If we’re going to all that effort to reassure the minions that they are not expendable, do we really want to sabotage that by demonstrating that we don’t even value the people above them enough to let them learn from their mistakes? And never mind just minions—how many heroes have recruited our higher-ups with the fact that they don’t kill failures and will cheerfully protect their converts? If you’re going to use self-preservation as a motivator, remember that other people will do so as well!

For another, it’s rather pointless. Heroes interfering where they weren’t expected? Not her fault. Heroes had ally that the lieutenant could not in any reasonable way expect? Not her fault. Lieutenant has subordinate who sabotaged her in order to gain credit himself? …why are you even considering killing the lieutenant, anyway? Weather took a turn for the disadvantageous? Unless she’s a practicing weather mage, not her fault (and even then she might deserve a pass). If you can’t come up with some way in which the lieutenant herself was actually responsible for the fiasco, as opposed to just being the poor sap unfortunate enough to be supervising it, it wasn’t her fault, and if bad luck were a capital offense, how many of us wouldn’t've lived to get our powers?

Furthermore, she knows how her plan failed. She might even know better than you how her plan failed. If she’s the type to learn from it, it’ll only make her more effective. Death would, of course, interfere with this.

Now, this isn’t to say you should never kill your lieutenants. Just that that’s not a circumstance under which you want to do so.

However:

Let’s return to the example of not her fault earlier, with the lieutenant sabotaged by a member of her squad. Yes, you don’t kill the lieutenant. The saboteur, on the other hand, is fair game.

Likewise, sellouts. Definitely sellouts. Unless you have definitive proof that this is one of those “Deceive your enemy by fooling your friend” situations, and the friend is definitely you, sellouts cannot be trusted. (If they’re acting like they’re on your side, and quoting that proverb, that alone is grounds to kill them.)

Then there’s mutiny. That one’s an interesting case. If they’re turning on you because of mind control, and you can make sure that a. they really were mind controlled and b. you can prevent it in the future (and have a way to strike back at the culprit when next they try), I’d be willing to give a lieutenant a pass in that case. Particularly if my trap-riposte is vicious and satisfying enough. Similarly, I am willing to cut someone trying to take me out to ascend in rank slack under a very small set of conditions—but only because I have ways to enforce what I do do. They have to be clever, they have to be interesting, and I have to be able to maroon them in another world that could do with someone of their talents with no chance of their returning home to try again. Note: This is probably a fatal weakness that will destroy me eventually, but it’s good for the Hands as a whole, and besides, playing against the really talented ones can be quite enjoyable. The rest—just kill them. You’ll all be better off.

End result: Decreased loss of talent, more energy going to kill the protagonists and not your teammates, and higher employee morale. I’d consider that an improvement.

The other day, I riffed on the need for wonder in our worlds. There wasn’t much response to it here, but our friendly neighborhood zombie brought it up to me in conjunction with why H.P. Lovecraft is so popular, and that got me to thinking.

Lovecraft, he pointed out, got people going on Cosmic Horror, the kinds of big things that result in abrupt unconsciousness because they couldn’t comprehend them. Was that what it was all about, though? From my own forays through the Dreamlands stories, I’m inclined to doubt it; what got me hungrily rereading were the less mind-breaking but no less alien images. Bat-winged horrors and the Crawling Chaos are all very well, but what I came out of “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” most remembering was the bottle of drugged alcohol offered to Carter: “A single hollowed ruby, grotesquely carved in patterns too fabulous to be comprehended.” (Okay, that’s still a slight narrative copout, but the image I got of the patterns being in the empty space of the bottle itself, the area that holds the liquid weaving and knotting itself together like a depiction of the root system on a Tree of Life only more so, doesn’t leave the mind too easily.) “The Doom That Came To Sarnath” was about the death of a civilization, but what I got from it were the gemstone-mosaic floors made to imitate exotic flowers underfoot.

Which brings me back to wonder, since that was what it was that got me: what it is, and what it isn’t. Wonder isn’t terror, particularly not if what you’re starting with is terror and trying to evoke wonder. Particularly when what would be the Wondrous Thing is “GONNA EAT ME!”, as the equestrian claims the horse thinks, because you’re too busy trying not to be eaten to be amazed by the mythical creature trying to do the eating.

Many people conflate wonder with beauty, or vice versa. I’ve done it quite a bit myself. But there’s more to it than that. Wonder is the thing that makes you stop and go wow. Beauty is the easiest way to evoke it—I’m sure we’ve all seen or read the scenes that were made to evoke an “Oh my this is gorgeous” reaction, and certainly those were the first things I thought of when writing my riff.

It isn’t all, though. What about sheer artistry? Imagine a wall on which someone has carved a mural of a tree’s roots, all knotted and interconnected. Now imagine that along with managing to make a tree-root Celtic knot that covers an entire wall, the artist has managed to do so using only one line. I don’t know about you, but I’d stop and stare. Same with one of those “incredibly lifelike sculptures” that half the time are a tribute to their artists and half the time are a sign that a monster with a petrifying gaze is somewhere in the area.

Others might find their wonder in personal moments. Have you ever tutored? If so, have you seen that flash of insight, the moment where the student figures out something that’s been eluding him all day and just plain glows? What about those times when someone who’s ordinarily on guard against the world just relaxes?

Or it might be in natural processes, even the dangerous ones. There’s a reason why people chase storms, or why oftentimes those who aren’t afraid of lightning will make a point of clustering by the biggest window they can find to watch it. And why there is so much fascination with fire—what lies at its heart? When does it stop moving? Be honest with me—if through some astronomical improbability the sun were to go nova in ten minutes, and there was nothing you could do, wouldn’t you just watch it and marvel at it until the end? It doesn’t have to be spectacular, either; as I type this, I look out the window to the purple haze in the eastern sky that heralds the end of the sunset, and I can’t help but stare at it.

Contrast in scale can work as well. Consider the night sky in the country, and how enormous it seems, and how small the one looking at it might feel. Or the trees that one can’t quite see the top of, or the view from the top of a mountain, or the first sight of the ocean. On the other hand, have you ever seen “The Inner Life of a Cell”, and realized just how tiny all this color and motion and things non-bio-majors might not be able to put names to gets?

Wonder’s everywhere. We just need to be ready to put words to it.

So you’ve got this great idea. It’s Epic, it’s inventive, it’s glorious—and it’s a one in a million chance at best. And not only is the world against it, but there’s also the matter of suspension of disbelief; if you’re a writer, there’s a risk of the audience crying foul, and if you’re a gamer, the GM may cut you off as soon as you try to get it across. And it seems right: after all, what’s to say anyone would be even remotely successful doing things like asking a god for help or combining artifacts and magical phenomena in ways that the world does not appear to be ready for?

So how do we try to make these ideas something that our audience won’t look askance at?

Complicate it

The best way to not have an idea scream out “cakewalk” is for it not to be a cakewalk. Succeeding at this plan requires fixing the item involved. Or finding a group of people to provide support for an important political bid. Or heading out and collecting ingredients, or doing a few people a favor. Basically, this idea has phases, and the phases are interesting in and of themselves. It isn’t just a win button.

Consequence it

And what’s to say it’s over when the idea has come to fruition? One of the best ways to rationalize the plausible-but-barely is to make success more interesting than failure. Maybe it’s a direct consequence, with the plan resulting in its executor coming to someone’s attention, for good or ill. Or perhaps the connection is a bit less direct, and it just triggers a set of events that might have interesting results down the road.

Explicate it

This is actually the most important part of making sure an idea can actually fly. It needs a logical base, a straight path from A to B to C to D. You don’t need to quite make a mathematical proof out of it, but you might want to come pretty close. (For instance: “All right. We’ve established that people can create items out of existing dream-qualities in this world. And we know that using X magic, it is possible to step into another person’s dreamscape. And that it should be possible to come up with some way to bring gear when stepping into someone else’s dreamscape, and leave it behind. And we know that because of that other thing a few incidents back, this character has that particular set of skills, or can learn them. With me so far? Good. All right. Now, regarding that NPC imprisoned by a demon somewhere we can’t get to yet—would it be possible, using the above skills, to try to ensure that she doesn’t break before we find a way to get there by having this character loan her some bits of her own determination?”) The logic needs to be clear and fluid, all based on things that have been established before; any logical leaps, and the entire structure falls apart.

Steps like these turn an impossible plan into something a bit more doable. While they won’t guarantee that it will find a successful reception, they will alleviate many of the doubts that come from presenting a really audacious plan. Every tool helps, right?