Exchange of Realities

Earlier this week, I talked about fun with playing a group the GM hasn’t fleshed out yet. While I’m rather prone to doing this (one of my favorite characters was from a line of spies, and pulling examples of the Fifty Rules of Spywork out of my ear was good fun until I started running out of numbers), what set me off this week wasn’t that game, but one I just started in, with a character I’ve been in the mind of for all of three weeks.

This one was designed for Trollsmyth’s Labyrinth Lord game, taking his rules on gnomes for a spin. I consider the information he gave me to be perfect for my kind of fleshing out a society: we had a purpose (fixing the world), the natural stats, and a language family (Dubious Greek, to be exact). The rest, it appeared, was up to me.

So I got started on it. My first step was to quibble with this whole concept of a ’spellbook’ as such; while I couldn’t arrange for the innately magical creatures to have, you know, completely innate magic (and it wouldn’t have been too fair, so it’s just as well), I did manage to bargain myself a slightly different flavor of magic recording—instead of pen and ink notation, my take on the gnomes used various sorts of threads and knotwork. Even without actually having access to magic yet, mine’s working on her patterns and trying to learn from whatever she sees.

And it continued. My gnome’s community fixed areas tainted by magic gone wrong through the arrangement of the surrounding plants into magically stabilizing patterns. Because of the string-oriented nature of their magic-keeping, they tended towards a universal interest in textiles, or at least in stitching (the other two ladies in the group cared about how the clothing looked, Lycoris just wanted to see how it was put together).

The communication with animals ended up taking up a lot of room in my mind. A gnome’s likely to be trailing a menagerie of pets; I’ve only had Lyca for a couple weeks, and she’s already tamed herself a snake and had her eye on a member of a large, bird-eating bat species. And that means having to get said menagerie to cooperate with each other. From this, I find that they’re likely to favor negotiation as a way of getting what they want, and to be good at mediation.

This is about half of what I picked up on during the session; for some reason, this is a character who won’t let me remember things unless I’m in her world. More later, perhaps.