Mzimwi

The strange preponderance of human feet amongst the jetsam of the Salish Sea Since August 20, 2007, several detached human feet have been discovered on the coasts of the Salish Seain British Columbia, Canada. and Washington, United States. The feet belonged to five men, one woman and three other people of unknown sex. Of the ten or 11 feet found, only two have been left feet. Both of those were matched with right feet. As of February 2012, only five feet of four people have been identified; it is not known to whom the rest of the feet belong. In addition, several hoax feet have been planted in the area. Decomposition may separate the foot from the body because the ankle is relatively weak, and the buoyancy caused by air either inside or trapped within a shoe would allow it to float away.[5] According to Simon Fraser University entomologist Gail Anderson, extremities such as the hands, feet, and head often detach as a body decomposes in the water, although they rarely float.[40] However, finding feet and not the rest of the bodies has been deemed unusual. Finding two feet has been given a "million to one odds" and has thus been described as "an anomaly".[5] The finding of the third foot made it the first time three such discoveries had been made so close to each other.[40] The fourth discovery caused speculation about human interference and, statistically, was called "curious".[41]

hmm - what is the difference between learning to read a language and to speak it? you can learn to read chinese and never know how to speak it. also, this is a small set of symbols, maybe a hundred and a few that can be improvised. so it shouldn't be expensive - 1 point for basic, 2 for fluent, i guess. by the way, for language nerds, you must learn a bit of haitian creole. "li pale franse" which one would think means 'he speaks french" means "he's a liar". the word 'neg' from the french word for 'black' means 'person' - 'mwen neg' = 'i'm a person' whereas 'blan' means 'foreign' without regard to skin color. in face, there's huge range of words for various hair and skin combinations. it's like ghetto french - 'se gwo, sa!'

I'm working on a different kind of rune magic, one much less power than the system in Grimoire. It's what i'm used to calling syntactic magic - the runes are words, you cast a spell by making phrase out of them. This system is used exclusively for making fairly mundane magic items. Here's the flavor text: and an example of the glyphs. more later, still noodling this.

well, i have some fluff for you - about shadow elementals/mirage djinn. setting - a group congenitally insane Savage Elves are discussing technological advances in their evilness....

you do understand that you have an obligation to the public.....gifts of mythopoeitic genus carry a burden, ndugu wangu.

Is your work on spirits online? Love to see....

What brought this on? I just started working on this project again! Thanks.

I briefly worked on a world that was centered around the endless war between Faerie and Goblins. The Fey had magic, the Goblins psionics. The third clade was hybrids (humans, chimps, ogres, cherubs) - they had magnetism, because iron poisoned fey and blocked magic, while magnetic fields scrambled psi.

I experimented with making it more mechanistic (stats are GURPS, I abandoned this before switching to HERO)

I have lots of material on how spirts are viewed in real world Africa - mostly scientific articles from JSTOR. If you nix the Bantu words, most of it is generally applicable. Here are a few samples, each from a different article:

I use something similar to this idea in my Wajabu world. Beadwork is one of the fundamental ways of enchanting an item, thus beadwork leather shirts take the place of metal armor, which was never invented and would probably cause a heatstroke in an equatorial climate.

Update: First, I'm changing the name of the setting as a whole. 'Ubantu' is still used to mean 'civilized lands' but the setting as a whole is now 'Wajabu' from 'U'=land of and '-aajabu'=miracles and wonder. 'Alice in Wonderland' is 'Elisi katika Ncha ya Ajabu'. For a while it looked like Indie Press Revolution was going to help me find a co-author and walk this through Kickstarter, but that has fallen through. Back to looking for a co-author who knows HERO well, we can Kickstart it ourselves after that. Steve Long liked it - these are his comments and those of Jason Walters (in italics). I don't think I'm revealing anything private here, I certainly don't mean to.

This is VERY sensitive to relate, but I barely escaped being raped. I'd had a fifth of vodka and some benzo and went outside to pee, Guy followed me and threw me down and very nearly got there before my friends rescued me. Years later I met him and he apologized. We talked and eventually I went home with him - hell, he was cute. I've been cavity searched, too. It's just medical - hell, when I was a kid, a doctor held me down and did a spinal tap. I don't get the personality damage part of that. The worst thing you could do to me is a lobotomy - knowing you're going to cut my brain and take part of me away. Or waiting to be executed. Lots of nightmares about that.

oxen don't run right - there aren't different gaits like with a horse, a cow just panics and bolts. pre colonial africans rode oxen a fair amount. also, i think cows spent a lot more time eating low cal foods. then again, people ride elephants. there are two pages on the GURPS forum, one mine, about domestic dinosaurs and riding birds.

Has anyone ever seriously studied if ratites would be useful as mounts, were they a bit bigger? There's more to it than size - a place to sit, a means of guiding the animal, a gait that doesn't crush your pelvis, etc. What makes a mount?

I have an old handout...SaurMounts.pdf

This is my take on the Herbalist, which is actually more of a Pharmacopeist, as they use plenty of animal parts. You might find useful the idea of a trigger ingredient - :

Oh, and just in case you're still with me, I do have the outline of a series of books for Ubantu...

Hmm - interesting. Here a link to my fiction about the first days of Ubantu posted on the Alternate History forum. I'm not throwing that up at you, I just thought it was funny that that is exactly what I was trying and where I was trying it. OTOH, if Diamond Spear's (great name, BTW) world has magic, it's not alternate history - or, at least as the AH folks say, it's alien space bats. Still, I get the point - he wants something more Earth like. About me and fiction. See, when I first dropped out of grad school, I decided to try my hand at fiction. Being that my favorite book is Naked Lunch and that I know from experience that I'm a much better writer while under the influence of opiates (Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment. ) I decided very purposefully to become addicted to morphine. I found my sister's old dealer, bought a huge amount of pills and got him to teach me to shoot up. I even bought an Interzone t-shirt, then began writing first book of my psychedelic fantasy series, "Welcome to the Occupation, Lotus Position Book One" . And it was brilliant. I can't explain how the prose just flows as fast as I can type, from by dreaming mind to the page, guided by Morpheus, my muse. Too bad I'm an insulin dependent diabetic and *really* bad at shooting up - after three months I had cellulitus so bad I couldn't move my arm, much less type and was having seriously dangerous blood sugar spikes. I quit. I wish I could go that way, but I can't. And without it, infotainment writing is all I'm really good for. And maybe my fiction wasn't that great - if you're not a fan of China Mievilla and the New Weird, it'll probably be unreadable. Hell, you be the judge - here's a sample chapter..."The Meeting of the Bored". Perhaps playtest isn't the right word - I'd like his, or anyone's input. Just a review. Though I know I'm lucky in getting the HERO himself Mr Long to look it over, and I'm desperately trying to live up to his critiques and advice. I've put SO MUCH work into this, and I have no idea whether or not I've written myself into corner....it's a scary. I did have a bit of a brain bloom thinking about pirates and swashbucklers, that aspect of Ubantu is not well done. Thanks, though. Right now I'm reading about Bantu jurisprudence, so I'm going to give you a praise name, "Induna Mngariza" or "Sharpeyed Mediator".

Cool, but then please, by the Ancestors, HELP ME PLAY TEST IT. Tell me what you want to see, and I'll fix it...

Huh? I've been working on Refugium and Ubantu for over a decade - it's 150pgs of PDF and a hundred more of notes. I taught myself to read Swahili with Alice in Wonderland/Elisi katika Nchi ya Ajabu. I honestly have no idea what you're asking. Am I giving him permission to work with my ideas? I invited him to join me, hell, I'd LOVE for him to work with me - but for some reason I seem to have offended him, even though I can't make heads or tails of his objections. As for your other point about detail - yes, fine. Some people like that. I once tried to play a Savage Worlds game about SF priests fighting zombies - but the GM couldn't tell me what the Church believed in. I couldn't play it. I *love* reading good source material. Tekumel is recreational, and I'm a long term GURPS fan. BUT I've also gone out of my way to make it easy for people who don't like that, by including some fairly familiar roles and simple essays like "Being Mbantu". You can play an Ogre Thug, if you like. OTOH, Ubantu has another purpose - I'm trying to pump life into a rapidly disappearing mythohistory. Kids in East Africa know more about Harry Potter than the legends of their own cultures. I'm trying to put those together and make them *vivid* - a bright, shining powerful Africa, what Africa should have been. I can't just siphon off another people's history and turn it into a Tarzan movie. Refugium is about more than a weird place to kill weird things and take their weird stuff - it's a dream, a world of mind. And if it kills me, I'm going to see it distributed in Africa. Just sayin'.

Uh - humor much? "that ship has sailed" was a humorous reference to the "age of sail'. Your response was rather tetchy, but I'm going to assume that I accidentally offended you and apologize for that, so perhaps we can start again. The above is not at all clear as to whether you are talking about what you want to do or what I've been doing. If you're saying that Ubantu is based on the popular perception of Africa, you honestly couldn't be more wrong. That's Nyambe and Spears of Dawn, what I call "Guinea Perdu" - the bizarre romanticized notion of Africa held by many African-Americans who couldn't tell Nubia from Lesotho with both hands and a flashlight. I find that, well, offensive. Throwing together orishas and Pharaohs and Shaka Zulu all willy-nilly...As for grim reality, Ubantu features a slave race of sentient baboons that work on cotton and corn plantations, I discuss female genital mutilation and the customary practice of infanticide in the cases of twins and turn the typical Bantu oppression of witches into a eugenics pogrom aimed at the obliteration of human psychic potential. Refugium is meant to be modular. It began as an expansion for the GURPS Banestorm setting, which is a kind of alternate Europe. You should be able to add in what areas you like, to your taste. I don't really understand what you mean by "floating concept" - what exactly do you want to present? Also, again, I can't tell if you like or dislike the Vikings. Do you mean that you want a 'kitchen sink' that includes more stuff? To a degree. Suppose perhaps that I had several books done. Would you then like to add in the meta-culture of world travelling explorers? I want, at some point, to have this - perhaps and empty continent filled with riches and ruins and mystery, where everyone meets and mixes. I've seriously thought about adding zeppelins . But still - you want to write something about a type of game? I'm working on the campaigns and adventures section of my book. I just don't get it - it's an idea, but what are you going to *make*? I'm being serious, not snotty, I really don't understand what you want. ??? No, not the real world. Magic works. There are real ogres and ghosts and the Ancestors can send you mail. What on earth (or off) do you mean by a 'fictionalized version of our real, actual world' and how is that different from a setting that is 'not the real world'? Ubantu is a version of Africa. Nèf Guinée, the next book, is a version of the Caribbean and South America. They are not connected - you can use them completely separately, or if you so desire, have the intrepid waChomba sailors from Ubantu cross the ocean and call upon Nèf Guinée or Tawatinsuyu (Inca). Ubantu departs from our world a 1000 years ago, NG less than three hundred. Originally, I designed Milikyunjovu, the Empire in Ubantu, as a challenge for the pseudo-Catholic and Islamic nations in GURPS Banestorm, but to integrate the two I'd have to have elves and dwarves and I just hate all that 'halflings in the jungle' crap. Hasn't D&D butchered enough cultures? Sigh - okay - so, please, please, take a bit to explain what you're interested in. I have a feel for you're your going for, and I like it - it's a part of something I can see in the dim future of what I'm working on, but you seem to have a much better feel for the whole postmodern swashbuckler pirates bit. Talk to me.... Asante sana, ndugu

That ship has sailed...I'm finishing up the first book now, based on Bantu Africa. The meta-setting is called 'Refugium' or perhaps 'Refugia' - a world where cultures that lost out on our world get another chance, with magic and without colonialism. All of them reach the Age of Sail at the present time for the setting. I'm almost certain the first book will go on into layout this summer and be on kickstarter asap. There's a link to the current version of the PDF in my sig. If you're really interested, I'd LOVE a partner/co-author. The name problem - I started out calling it Ubantu, which is protoBantu for 'Land of the People' but that's too close to Ubuntu, the Linux distro, so I need a new name. Alternatives: Ulimwengu - Swahili for universe; Umphasi - Zulu for Earth; some contraction of 'Mdala wa Uhai' - the Cloth of Being, as the cosmos is called; Afrikajabu - a contraction of Afrika ya Ajabu, Africa of Marvels; or Ekong - Duala/Cameroonian for 'they have transported us to another world'. Any input here would be very helpful. I've got a bit done on the next one, Nèf Guinée: The other potential worlds are I'm currently thinking of skipping to Bundahishn out of sympathy for the Kurds.

Neither. I don't get the confusion. Originally, there was a discount in the cost of the magic because it was linked to a Pact, meaning that if you break the pact, you can't use the magic. This is part of the anthropology of the magic system, if you will. D&D uses literate magic - spells are written in books, *language* is the power. This is pre-literate magic, where knowledge is the power. Classically, shamans and medicine men are always paranoid. In RW, this is probably because they are mostly charlatans, but also, their magic is in the physical items and how they are manipulated to access the power. If anyone learns this, the shaman's knowledge is no longer exclusive and he loses his power. Does that make sense? Thus fetish-sorcerers, being this kind of pre-literate tradition, work on secrets. The methods of building their fetishes is 100% classified, from teacher to apprentice only. Naturally, these secrets are protected with curses, and as this is a magical world, the curses work. In Ubantu the medium (haha) for these curses is your personal guardian spirit/namesake angel. Likely a fetish sorcerer also has a tutelary spirit associated with his particular tradition - I'd translate the original GURPS need for levels of magery into ... dammit, what does HERO it?, but say that in the campaign world, this is the magical boost from your tutelary spirit, to whom you've sworn your oaths of secrecy. That give the spirit/GM discretion - say the character is spied upon while repairing his fetish, but by a child who doesn't know better. Then the fetish just doesn't work, maybe he has to talk to the kid and make up a story first to get it going. On the other hand, if he is tortured into giving out details, which are then written down, all his power is lost.

The idea, which may not be of much use in HERO, is that you could customize your spells. Say you know telekinesis stuff. You might have a fetish/staff/fly swatter that is customized for short range delicate work and another for long range basic stuff. This is the GURPS text: About the taboo: yes. The fetish sorcerer has a guardian spirit who is also a bit of a narc. If he breaks the rules, his ancestors and other allied spirits can cut him off or even curse him. Sorry, I got tied up in base material. I'm writing the Kikuyu kingdoms, done as a low magic area where they get into castles and siege engines. Thanks