Exchange of Realities

I don’t have game this week; apparently Halloween parties trump session. The zombies get to un-live a little longer.

This week, the application is actually in reverse: instead of applying what I was writing to my sessions, I got the idea for what I was going to write from stuff that was going on in game. Or rather, stuff that was going on in the game world offstage.

I have this NPC on a mission in the nearer portions of the Underworld. Now, leaving aside the group’s opinions of the matter, this isn’t too bad a thing; she’s decent at Underworld-work. Growing up around the dead occasionally comes in handy, wouldn’t you think? But there’s a situation she may or may not need to talk herself out of. And for that situation, I’d been playing with an idea involving laws of bloodsucking and technicalities.

So I’m talking about said idea with one of my muses, and it somehow branches onto the idea of bloodsucking codes in general. It started with an image. If someone’s had her blood drunk by one of the more powerful undead and lived to tell the tale, does that make her in some way belong to him? Would it have to happen regularly, or could just once have done it? What if he didn’t have that status when the blood was drunk, but did now?

This got me to the idea of people having their blood sipped and not being killed by it. And that, in turn, got my symbolism focus going. We make such complicated codes out of social actions with considerably less impact, after all. It began with the question of what sorts of things might change the impact of the drinking. That, in turn, got me onto how anatomy would factor into it. I’d written most of it before I thought about the back of the knee; that one was one of my favorites, due to how role-reversing the action was.

The rest came with the realization that it was almost Halloween, and that if I kept playing with undead long enough I could make it the full week.

And then I started trying to re-apply this to my game….

And there was synergy. And it was fun.