Let’s talk a bit about our hypothetical baker who accidentally wanders onto the Magical Hero Arc. Vittore Parrino has
Baking 3
Adventuring 2
Lore 2
Cooking (General) 1
And yet his player realizes that he is stuck, striving to better his baking and caught against an impassable barrier; that’s why he’s taken up Adventuring, hoping that he’ll find an insight. And more than that, the player realizes that when thinking about who Vittore Parrino is, Immortal fits better than Frantic does—
He’s not the kind of adventurer who lives by his wits. He’s an institution in the Region where he roams.
… but he doesn’t have any magic. How will this play out?
Hi! So I write a fanblog for Nobilis and Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (both diceless tabletop roleplaying games) called “A User’s Guide to the Apocalypse”. It was originally started to share pieces of a supplement I’m writing of the same name, but I’ve since branched out quite a lot! A lot of the content is perfectly usable even if you’re not playing the specific game I designed it for.
I write quest sets, extra mechanics, and flavor content for CMWGE based on Replay Value (an AU of Homestuck). And characters and fiction for Nobilis and Chuubo’s. And some other things, too. (Like snarky comments on pictures of flowers. But seriously, though, you aren’t paying for those.) My blog posts original content at least once a day.
If you like what you see on my blog, consider shoving a few dollars in my general direction. Or reblog this. It’s all good, either way.
In situations where you have to survive, at any cost – when you get kidnapped and stay there for years, when you go to war and kill people, when everyone you love dies in the apocalypse – you can survive, if you start paring parts of your soul away.
Sometimes this isn’t a big deal. If you pare away the part of yourself that gets disgusted at things, you stop caring when you have to clean the toilet. (Or you stop caring about whether the toilet is clean at all.) If you pare away the part of yourself that cares about the difference between Mozart and Rachimanoff, you can just tell people that you don’t like music.
But some parts are more critical. If you pare away the part of yourself that expects things to turn out right in the end, reality will stop letting you down. If you pare away the part of yourself that knows what it is like to be happy, you’ll stop missing the idea of being carefree. If you pare away the part of yourself that wants there to be a better tomorrow, you’ll have no aspirations to crush. There’s simply less of you to hurt, and so it hurts less. But it also makes it harder to find joy.
And when people are younger, and don’t know their souls as well, they often cut through parts of themselves that an older person would try to preserve. The ability to love. The ability to trust. The ability to feel.
Maybe you can grow them back, through years of dedication and an environment where other people have those parts intact so you can borrow from them. I know, at the very least, that it takes a very long time.
The thing about having a soul that’s been pared down to survival, though, is that you don’t care, you don’t feel. And if you grow up in the kind of world where not caring is a good thing, where taking advantage of people is just something other people do, where aspirations beyond the next few days are worse than useless – you won’t realize that good things can come from these parts of a soul, because you already cut them off and threw them away when you knew only suffering and hatred.
— Sandra Hisakawa, practicioner of the Heart-Magic
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