I ran a session where the
PCs traveled to Hades to toss a malicious artifact into the River Lethe so it would be erased from all memory. Feel free to steal liberally.
Warning! These next thoughts were spun off of Pbartender's latest post in my
Cyberpunk thread as well as me playing Space Marine and rekindling thoughts of 40K. They're not so much places as weird-ass ramblings, but it is about the shape of the NeverNever and how it can be used so I felt here was an appropriate place.
First off is this insane idea of blending augmented reality, the NeverNever, personality uploads, spirits, and AI. The more I think about it the more I see this analogy between the virtual and the spirit. I don't know, I know it's not coherent, but:
- Fae courts as AIs, or vice versa. Entities that are unspeakably powerful on their home turf and bound to their word/code, slaves to their nature without free will.
- Spirit travel: You open a rift/connection to the NeverNeverWeb, leave your dumbshell body, do your business in the spiritWWW, and download into the same shell or maybe you travel through from nnn.chicago to nnn.london and download into a new body to meet with your troll contacts in meatspace.
It's got a lot of Shadowrun to it, and it's not canon or probably even usable in any existing game, but I'm seeing this weird Blade Runner technomagic future. Maybe it's after some magical apocalypse/singularity, maybe it's all just a simulation. Whether it's magic or tech or not doesn't matter anymore, it's just all boiled down to "abilities that are greater than what we can do ourselves". I see it as a sleek, warm, but ultimately uncaring place. Jaded in the face of miracles.
If you're still with me, this next barrage of musings should be a little more coherent. It might have even already been espoused in some long-dark thread buried aeons ago, but here goes. All this kind of came together in my head when I was playing Space Marine and a boss critter walks out of the Warp with a host of demons like Cowl and his überghouls.
- I've always scoffed at Mab, etc. whenever they talk themselves up as these forces of nature, etc. Yes, they are plot devices and such, but Earth is a tiny, tiny fish in a very large sea. What we think of as the NeverNever is only like our "local" space. I think some of this came from an old thread about someone having a player unfamiliar with the Dresden Files wanting to play an honest-to-goodness alien. Humanity brings its own conceits and perceptions wherever it treads, and if we, say, went to Mars and crossed into the NeverNever there, it would necessarily be somewhat tinged by what we think of the red planet. But before human robots ever touched down on Martian soil, perhaps its spirit world was quite different than what we can imagine. Perhaps Queen Mab is a lot of talk, and there are other indescribable things out there. Depending on how you want to look at it, maybe Outsiders are simply from these extraterrestrial NeverNevers. Or not. They work just as well existing outside the typical physical/spirit world structure.
- So the NeverNever is the Warp from Warhammer 40K. Even taken locally, there are so many good analogies:
- Travel through both can be quicker than any physical travel, but it is fraught with danger even if you know where you're going. Knowledge of the Ways is like having a Navigator; Harry's
like having the Astronomican.
- There are things that tempt and corrupt humanity's minds; Chaos powers map nicely to Denarians.
- 40K is science fantasy anyways, so a lot of the setting shares common roots with elves and orcs and wizards/psykers and all that. But imagine if you will, traveling farther into the NeverNever than ever before. My mind goes to crazy science fantasy/pulp sci-fi much more readily than straight fantasy, so I think of Flash Gordon and eldritch rocketships flying through purple skies. Swords and SMGs against alien dinosaurs inside hollow spheres. I also think of Event Horizon and deadly black hellgates.
I just had to spew this stuff into words somewhere before it got jumbled beyond all comprehension.
