---
# System prepended metadata

title: 'Shiptest Lore Meeting, July 2023 (Magic)'
tags: [Discussion Notes, Planning, Design]

---

## Agenda For Shiptest Lore Meeting, July 17th, 2023
[ToC]

## relevant notes (embedded below!)
[The Wizard Problem: Souls, Remembrance and Grilled Cheese](/mp8hX1wXRwqWiQyM56DMTg)
[Spungle, or: How I Learned To Stop Hard Sci-fiing and Love The Supernatural](/91WHVLP_SRq-u5pBoM2HzA)
[The Necropolis](/x52Pw-uhSHuCrpM1G3PrOA)
[Random Events](/pVQwvtyMRDuhu7DR2Tz_sw)

### Supernatural stuff in general - Y/N?

The massive pile of supernatural we have laying around!

Anomalies as ways to add inexplicable things like Constructs.

Rituals with less overt magical effects

Cult contructs reflavoured as bluespace/redspace spawned organisms

"Magic" working on fellow believers?

tmt: let it be known that i think the supernatural / "magic" should be used sparingly and always kept vague, never systematized. it should be The Supernatural. "how does blood magic work? what is UP with cults? what property does the null rod have that allows it to nullify magic?" these should not be questions with answers: it is The Supernatural

blessed: I prefer ritualism, vague supernatural forces, and so forth
small cults, corrosive influences, that kinda thing

rylie: leaning remove

apogee: Definitely yes, but toned back from what we currently have. I liked some ideas Any brought up prior to the meeting- things like folk tales, sailor's superstitions such as scrimshaw and various ideas about omens (weather, wildlife, etc as signs of a doomed or blessed voyage and so on), some ritualized aspects to maintenance and ship life that may or may not have any effect, but they certainly make the spacers feel more at ease. Supernatural stuff can still exist in this framework, but more in the framing of things like ghost stories, cryptids, tall tales, and so on- things that MIGHT have happened but nobody can confirm.


### Wizards

Gone, along with spellbooks and etc.

apogee: Fuck no.

general consensus definitely in favour of removing wizards

### Cults – Blood and Cog, Forge Frenzies, Solar Orrery weirdness, etc.

Cults as part of a larger worldview, mystic beliefs? Or as a practice rather/parallel to concrete cult movements

apogee: Yes, but substantially toned back. Keep in mysterious, explain very little of it in explicit detail, confirm none of it as Actual Magic, flavor the cults more like "some freaks in robes my cousin's best friend's sister's dog claims they saw performing a ritual at midnight behind an abandoned Denny's" than "empowered servants of an Actual Bona Fide God wielding Real Magic." In other words, make it a folklore thing or just rumors- much like the Solar Orrery weirdness, which only really hints that something supernatural may or may not have been at play and could easily just be as insanely precise as it is out of a mix of skill, devotion to craft, and blind luck.

ash: I'd like to keep cultstuff but give their background a very heavy reworks to give them actual substance as ideologies/religious movements rather than just conversion mode antags

tmt: IMO cults should still be antagonists in shiptest, like, lorewise or whatever. aka "don't feature them outside of ominous ruins and hushed whispers"

blessed: I like antagonistic cults, yes. I don't like knowledge of them being widespread
Big Cults with Obvious Dark Gods is
I don't want it here
Cult constructs
cult metal
are okay
I like them.
we'd lose a lot of rock planet content
the presence of cult ideas
like
small, unknown groups
is fine imo
I don't want active insidious groups that governments would want to blow up
also I don't like blood cult hugely because it's like.
everyone knows Generic Eldritch Blood Cult
There are real cults.
there can be spiritaulism and things that are vaguely magical.
transcendant experiences, strange whispers in their mind, odd artifacts
strange things.
I think we should avoid having cults be a directly player aspect
it should be something you pick up over time
I like the idea of the Solar Orrery being
a clockwork thing
with cultic tastes
Certainly they spread easier in the frontier


Sun-Soaked
I had a like. Idea for blood cults actually
Are you familiar with the Numen-eaters from Qud?
I was thinking a sort of like. Fatal attraction/secondary response cult
Like less of a "we worship the dark gods!" and more like- people making their own interpretations of a less clear phenomenon
Like, there's some kind of source of strange, bloody dreams and phenomena
And the blood cults are a kind of Response to that 
The most intense like. Physical Imprintation. Is people being Twisted out of shape, like the hermits(though their deal is different)
Let's say that they believe in a kind of like 
Loss = Gain kind of identity
You bleed/experience suffering and it's ceremonially "sacrificed" to bring you spiritually higher
It could even be a kind of psuedo-transcendalist thing where it's like
"experiencing suffering allows you to shed your worldly flaws and x thing after you die"
Depending on the level of dogma. This could just be. Charms, prayer, living a slightly modified, like, not run from challenges kind of way.
Or actual mild blood stuff(but this would be a kind of. Historical throwback and not be very popular with new followers)
It's a New Spiritual Movement based on an old, slightly controversial one
I really like the idea of a previously hardline, Blood and Sacrifice group that's been slowly tempered down for popular consumption 
(and maybe lost The Kill and Blood Explosion part of the magic in the process, leaving like. This ritual will let you grow crops faster! type stuff)

bokkie: That's why they're not being adressed very seriously either, people on the colonies just see it as "space madness"

Ashtꙮri (Nyaru gAMEr) — Today at 08:34
Cult constructs would probably be too overt, one thought I had was they might be like
natural lifeforms to bluespace/redspace and don't persist in the physical world or something?
fox% — Today at 08:34
that'd be a good way to tie into the necropolis too
Frog-Frogged — Today at 08:38
We could have them be cc but also not cc in the sense of like

This shell is just made of clay and ceramic. The Bluespace Entity trapped inside is the one shooting bolts and punching people
also adds a pretext for them being like. mooks that attack players on sight

Maybe Binding them in a shell pisses them off and generally speaking they eventually find a way to break their commands and kill their creator

Ashtꙮri (Nyaru gAMEr) — Today at 08:39
Something like
Original discovery of Weird Stuff in the Frontier prompts a lot of mysticist groups into going off to try and form groups/worldviews and study it that ends horribly and scares a lot of people away from the ideas?

Frog-Frogged — Today at 08:43
@roger% I do think that like. In the sake of keeping cult ruins and o,ld constructs floating around 
We should have a connection to a previous history of a group that got power and Canned "magic"/bluespace entities from recieving instructions in dreams from Something In Bluespace

That entity suddenly left them on read, and the cults ate themselves alive over the religious schism

Eventually we got a bunch of small-scale personal blood stuff (that's mostly tamed down to personal wiccanism stuff)

Ashtꙮri (Nyaru gAMEr) — Today at 08:43
I think what might be nice to keep around is like
Mystics able to mess with each other but not with people who don't believe in it
so like
two believers out in the frontier where the weird shit happens can smite each other but this just Does Not Work on regular people or near the core systems

### Necropolis

Maybe long-term changes to be more in line with scifi?

apogee: As intrinsically bound as the Necropolis is to our current iteration of lavaland, I think we need to kill it if we're toning back magic. Thinking back on it I never really liked the "it's kind of like doom" vibes anyway.

moth% (red) — Today at 09:12
always saw tendrils as a lavaland thing
not sure why they would be across the galaxy
fox% — Today at 09:13
yeah necropolis chests can go
they suck
Frog-Frogged — Today at 09:13
I have two trains of possible thought about necropolis

-The result of someone trying to take a bluespace/redspace being into their own body. They merged and became Something TOo Terrible To Describe.
They were killed and their rotting corpse festered and become the first source of the necropolis

-Biological Weapon created by a dead empire(killed themselves with it) 
Frog-Frogged — Today at 09:14
they just suck and can die forever yes
fox% — Today at 09:14
we can reflavor the megafauna
it'd be pretty easy to
i think our fauna are fine
the megafauna and elites could use some touching
Ashtꙮri (Nyaru gAMEr) — Today at 09:16
I've been writing some of the Vox lore to try and integrate with Necropolis stuff as like, part of the aftermath of them fucking up their whole region of space, but I'm still in draft stage with it
Necropolis sounds like it's really tied into a lot of things
what are the specific kind of issues people have with it? just like
too much game-y loot?
fox% — Today at 09:16
no they aren't
I could see them being like, a xenofauna parasite.
Frog-Frogged — Today at 09:18
Biological hazard is kinda boring though. For something so. Evilly Festering

I see them as the remains of Something Terrible being killed and it's corpse making a special kind of rot
Frog-Frogged — Today at 09:30
Magical influences are generally being toneshifted down to more grounded
and being reworked to be extradimensional in nature
It could be like. Vaguepilled
Pollution from dead civilizations. 

A soup of biological, dimensional, etc. hazards. that happen to sump together over time

### Crystals

More enemy variety

Potentially a source for ghettochem esoteric stuff?

Old stuff: Make them a type 3 civilization
    Their society is built on top of the crystals
    They start experimenting with reality, creating sm crystals
    The strange crystals are actually biological
    And when they fuck with reality too hard, they unleash a supermatter cascade which makes the strange crystals malfunction and spread like a cancer
    Then skrell dead
    Anything after that I'm not sure on
    and i said this regaurding the stragne crystals
    Well, crystals are biological
    With ancient technology, they can be modified to however they like
    Be it extremely sturdy, conductive, sharp,  or flammable
    However,most survivng crystals are the sharp and sturdy ones 
    And they become corrupted with exposure to supermatters and cascades
    Think how cancer works
    Most In game ones have developed resistance to it
    Actually, nevermind that, just cascades
    the issue is tetra said having a species that came before every other species "has Effects on a setting" 

Origins for the SEC being fucked-up as they try to research it and unleash contamination

The obols have weird names like "Dreaming Obol" or "Screaming Obol" 
Touching them mindblasts you with the thoughts/dreams/sensations inside
Which could be used as part of puzzle ruins to give hints to the solution, could be used to convey lore flavour stuff too

There are Cracked Obols that can explode to release crystal contamination if disturbed

Crystals as an info storage medium

connect vox + crystals + wierd obols and old-world knowlege

Frog-Frogged — Today at 08:49
Strange Matter-type bluespace crystals 

Like, most bluespace matter is highly unstable and "falls" back into bluespace eventually(generally when crushed inhand so someone can tp out of their ship and instantly die)

But at some point (presumably our snake people) created a metastable form of bluespace in a cataclysmic event
and it turned out to be -so- stable it bitflips nearby Normal Space matter into itself

Frog-Frogged — Today at 09:05
Actually the idea that like.
Crystals can somehow interact with the process of sapience in a weird way

Is really interesting and plays into some ideas I had around the Civilization that once made crystals and other fucked up related stuff

### Trickwines

They're science

+ with a hint of the frontier weirdness?

apogee: These are cool, ambiguous on whether or not they're really magic, and play into the "resourceful frontierspeople Doing Things with the weird shit found out there" angle. Definitely keep.

### Moth Psionics

Leaving this alone for the moment while we ponder psionics in the lore. Potentially implementing as very minor effects and nothing that holds up under scientific scrutiny?

apogee: I'll be honest I don't want to egg on the moth players more. Some of them are just plain weird. Besides that, it should be more like "psionic migraines" type stuff than Goddamn Powers or Telepathy or somehting. Moths got dealt an almost comedically shitty hand when it comes to genetics (and the dealer was an Actual Person who did that on purpose for some reason), I see no reason why any weird psionics stuff would be any different. Regardless of what form it takes it should mostly be a thing that appears on the frontier anyway because of spungle reasons.

### Misc. Spungle – NoF supernatural influence? Ghosts?

Leave the NoF ambiguous, never confirm or deny anything.

apogee: The Night of Fire is fine as a mundane catastrophe. I see no reason to throw the supernatural into it. Especially if we tone the supernatural back in general.
Ghosts are cool. Hauntings are fun once in a blue moon. As long as they continue to be kind of an ambiguous thing that characters still argue about IC the same way people argue about them in real life, I see no reason to change them.

Ghosts are as real as they are IRL. People assign stuff to them and are a cultural fixture.


### Updates on wiki organization

Still a WIP!

### Updates on tagging system progress

ough

### Creation of a secret lore document

apogee: Well, we can't exactly put all this secretlore out in public, but we're absolutely at the point that we need to have this sanely documented and available for reference by the Actual Lore Team.

ash: turns out we can't actually change any of the notes in our public team to not be public. We might have to use a google doc for this because of the difficulty of adding private viewers to standalone hackmd notes

### Free space (discussion of other important lore developments, updates for ongoing projects, etc.)


# Embedded Notes
### [The Wizard Problem: Souls, Remembrance and Grilled Cheese](/mp8hX1wXRwqWiQyM56DMTg)

{%hackmd mp8hX1wXRwqWiQyM56DMTg %}


### [Spungle, or: How I Learned To Stop Hard Sci-fiing and Love The Supernatural](/91WHVLP_SRq-u5pBoM2HzA)

{%hackmd 91WHVLP_SRq-u5pBoM2HzA %}

### [The Necropolis](/x52Pw-uhSHuCrpM1G3PrOA)

{%hackmd x52Pw-uhSHuCrpM1G3PrOA %}

### [Random Events](/pVQwvtyMRDuhu7DR2Tz_sw)

{%hackmd pVQwvtyMRDuhu7DR2Tz_sw %}