Darth InSidious

What marvellous humility, to identify yourself as among the profane without even the egotism of words! And what stupendous self-mortification, to do it over and over again...

Haven't finished a book in a while, but the last thing I got through was Borges' short story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Currently also reading the Rule of St Benedict and Bleak House.

I like how obyknven is slowly losing the use of the finer points of English grammar. Is he eventually going to be left with only nouns and uninflected verbs, like a kind of handbag spambot? On the topic: more techno-salvationism ITT. The next hot thing will, doubtless, be calculating the precise orbit of the human soul.

I don't really mind, provided it's not yet another version of the towers of hanoi (vel sim.) or a pointless reaction-time test. As others have said, it needs to fit in with the world and the setting. Which reminds me of another point: enough with the temples with pointless sequences of rooms. People do not, in general, build temples full of pointless rooms full of guards and treasures. They usually construct them quite carefully, with purposes in mind for separate spaces. So why do almost all RPG temples tend toward "treasure room A, guard room B, treasure room C" design? We get almost no hint of any sacred purpose to the building. You might as well scrap the word 'temple' and just call them all 'sacred banks'.

"Somewhere over the past few centuries, Latin became the "ominous" language" - orly? What about the fact that throughout the European Middle Ages, Latin was a very ominous language to the common people? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrimage_of_grace

Will it be called Dark: Shadows Rising, by any chance?

Please, please, no painfully unfunny "game humour", hilariously zany characters included. If the game needs humour it could actually be... funny.

I'm hoping for a kind of Egyptian/Mesoamerican/Mesopotamian mashup, with a good dose of Sumerian pessimism and a heavy gnostic flavour. I want gloomy, mysterious cult, full of strange sacred books that hover on the edge of comprehension, and dark, disturbing, hidden rituals.

My own idea is that the gods are mysterious, unkown, unknowable, fickle, distant and utterly unpredictable. Their behaviour, their agendas, their way of thinking, their origins are all completely unknown, and can only be grasped at by allegory and tales which point toward the truth without ever encompassing it. They are infinitely above humanity (unless they aren't), and they don't deign to explain themselves to humanity, or to interact with men except when and if it pleases them. How many there are, whether they are all different or merely aspects of one another, their meaning... these are all very good questions, and each has many, many contradictory answers - which might all be true, or all be false, for all we know.

... I am the things that are, that will be, and that have been. No one has ever laid open the garment by which I am concealed. The fruit which I brought forth was the sun.... ... I am in my name. My name is a god. I do not forget it, this my name... Must the pantheon be another watered-down take-off of over-simplifications of Greek or Norse belief? It's a bit boring, isn't it? Why should a god be 'of' anything in particular, and why shouldn't they interfere in whatever they damn well please to, or not? Why should a god manifest in any particular form? Why should the gods care? Why should the gods not be two, seemingly exclusive, things at once? Or three? Or sixty-three? Why should there be a set doctrine of the gods? Why should the gods fit our conception of deity? Why should the gods be known to the masses, and why should they manifest to anyone except their priests? There should be semantic, not formal-logical, associations at play in the religions of this world. In short, why should the system make sense from an RPG-writer's point of view? This is meant to be a religion, not a splat-book article, or a mathematical equation. Ambiguity/multivalency make a religious system (or asystem) more interesting, not less. There has to be something transcendent about a god, or at least other, to make them worth worshipping. Some suggested names, which may obliquely indicate something of the gods' natures: Gath, the Unwinding Serpent or The Lapis-Eyed One The One Who Is Not Ashar of the Great Place She Who Loves Silence or The Smiling Weaver Yuehueloti, the Veiled Mirror Wind Unhearing The Dreadful One or The Six-Fold Chrysanthemum The Jade Bottle or The Mother of Knives or Smiling Shalu The Nine Copper Lords He of the Southern City Gath-Ashar, the Weary Spider Yuehueloti-Shalu, the Angry One or The Tomorrow-Ruler Wearing-Two-Masks Kishgal the Bailiff or The Lord of the Roof or The Standing One and so on. Why not borrow Blake's pantheon?

Sure, but that doesn't mean that we're allowed to talk about male chickens around here. A coq-block?

Don't you like birds, Enoch?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon ?

The oracle of Google mentions not the wheel of time, when these statements are put to it.

Berenzen: No, it doesn't. Atrocity would need to be .XX. not .X. .

It's usually classed as a semivowel, since it can be used as either a vowel or a consonant.

Looks like it is 'eternity', then.

Seems a likely candidate since they seem to be doing pairs of words organized by the first vowel(aa, ee, ii, and so forth). After Infinity it will probably be Obesity. Neither "infinity" nor "obesity" fits the pattern.

Y is a semivowel.

Looks like I was right, then.

... And "evil religion keeping the world in a dark age" isn't generic in your view? Well, there doesn't seem to be anything to differentiate here, so my guess is that X = consonant, and . = vowel. So we'd have an eight letter word, running v-c-v-c-c-v-T-c. My guess is the final combo is one of a limited number of options - most likely H, S, or another T. Of course, that's just speculation, and not much use at this point. ETA: Assuming the code is that simple, got it.

The distinction between snakes and dragons is fairly elastic, but the point is irrelevant. It's clearly the ouroboros. Not sure what its significance is. It may simply be decorative, since the ouroboros in the ancient world could symbolise eternity; it could therefore here simply have meaning in that it surrounds the number, as a symbolic representation of '4' here referring to four days.

Enough with the manufactured 'identity' schtick already. As members of the irritable-and-reactionary-non-brylcreem-using-newspaper-ignoring-left-handed-blue-eyed community, we feel outraged/horrified/shocked/appalled/gratified that this disgraceful/shocking/outrageous/appalling/positive behaviour/speech/action/omission... Gaming is an action not an identity. If it forms such a large part of your life that it begins to look like one, it is time to turn the machine off and go outside.

Yes, yes it is. And the state is a racket designed to extort from you. I mean, what have they ever done for cont. p94

Happy Pascha, everyone. Is it possible to only like one or the other? Personally I'm no more a fan of acts of extreme self-mutilation than I am of orgiastic consumerism. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought that was the point of the Agony in the Garden.