[Gossamer's Scrapbook] The Ethereal Canyon I

[Kovac]

Someday I will share the dream I had about Jen, me, and a bag of mice!

[Paragon]

Someday I will share the dream I had about Jen, me, and a bag of mice!

... o.O

[Sybel]

I can honestly say, learning about your underwear was highly entertaining. Now I always know color your underpants are.

[Gossamer]

. Best Quote Ever! Seriously... read it and I bet you will agree! jackanope 11:35 pm Writers. All a bunch of fucking drama queens. lol Out of the blue. Random. And totally apropos to any situation anywhere! .

[Sybel]

...You're welcome. NOTE I'm saying the illiteracy is intentional. Artistic license if you will.

[Gossamer]

. Hahah Sometimes things just never die down do they? That's so funny its not even funny. And why am I laughing so hard I'm crying? Nice pic of Kavala, btw. She'd be horrified to be used in such an inappropriate manner. .

[Gossamer]

. Focusing And Being AWOL Thanks For Your Continued Patience! Thanks to everyone who have been and continues to be patient. I've been super busy lately with the last holiday push for the year. I even worked a double this week and in a shocking move the guy I worked the double for volunteered to take my Sunday shift from me to make up some of his hours so I get a full weekend off. This is great because I want to finally get some holiday decorations up, do some baking, and get Mizahar all caught up. That leads me to the topic of this scrap. Focus. It's hard for me to focus on more than one thing at a time usually. Once I focus though, I utterly and completely obsess about it until I think its perfect. Right now that obsession has been on my kelvic rewrite which has become something monstrous and beautiful. But all you kelvics, hopefully, will be pleased when you see it because it should answer all the questions you've ever had about kelvics and more. You see, when you loose focus on Mizahar, you never really get anything done. If you have ten projects, you'll tend to flit around from one to another, adding bits and pieces here and there, but never really getting any of them completed. The secret, ultimately, to success on Mizahar is to just concentrate on one thing at a time and stick too it. The same is true for training your PC up. If you work on a ton of things at once, you'll most likely always feel like your spinning your wheels. But if you can obsess with just one thing at a time, and work on it until it is as awesome as possible - you will see results. I hate to say this, but the same is true with alts. The more alts you have the less your characters individually really grow. Its fun to have alts though. I know that first hand. I want to go around and give equal time to everyone, but you just can't. And you go through moods and phases where one alt has more appeal to you than another. Its just life. So if all you care about is the story, create tons of alts and tell stories until your heart is content. If you want stats, then focus on one stat at a time and work on it until you are satisfied. If you want a good blend, alternate. Focus on a stat, focus on the story, focus on another stat. It works wonders and keep you from being truly distracted. Personally, I like the combo. I want the stats to back up the story. But that's not everyone, and its totally understandable if its not you. .

[Gossamer]

. Viewpoints My rant on why being different is boring... seriously boring. Mizahar is a wonderful vehicle for creative and collaborative storytelling. And for the most part the website is filled with writers - lets face it anyone can be a writer - who are here because they love spinning a good yarn. To me its amazing to see the wide variety of player characters that are generated by people just reading our lore and giving themselves a little bit of time to be creative. However, therein lies the problem. Most people equate creativity with being 'vastly different' from one another. How so? Well the first and almost classic mistake is that people give their PC's physical appearance or deformity that is outside the standard race. I'm not talking about a burgundy dye job on your PC's hair. I'm talking about weird almost obscene height, extreme shortness, missing limbs, missing eyes, no noses, extra fingers and toes, etc. You'd be surprised at how many requests since 2009 we've had in the help desk for a pc to be born without eyes. I can think of four off the top of my head. Not empty eyesockets, mind you, but just no place for eyes on their face. And while blindness happens and is normal, normal blindness is never something sought after. Abnormal blindness is. If given a range of height for a race - say 5'5-6' - the vast majority will not pick somewhere in the middle - say 5'9" but rather they will pick 6' or even sneak in a 6'5" or so. It irks me to no extreme to see this. Inarta are short! Deal with it. There are no tall Inarta. They are also built of lighter frame than most humanoid races. Akalaks are jewel toned. No you cannot have an albino. And that's just the topping on the cake. Most pcs then go ahead and instead of taking a very physically and mentally average PC and making them the racial norm, they will read the racial writeups and then pick something so extreme as to not even resemble the racial writeup. My personal feeling is that by taking a 'standard' person in game and letting them find their own course is one of the best most rewarding ways to play a character. Start with the common. That's so common that its UNCOMMON to find a gentle seer Konti that wanders the world waiting for her Call. They should all start that way, really, unless their circumstances dictate otherwise. And yet half the game starts out as slaves. Why? Half the game has bandits that killed their families. No one ever comes from a normal family with 2.5 kids. Another favorite mistake writers often make is the illiterate PC that can't read or write but uses an extraordinary array of vocabulary above what a normal pc would use in that PC's dialog. That's a real faus pax in my book. Why? Because its not remotely believable. In fact it comes off as ridiculous. If your PC has no math skills, how can they count money in the market? How can they haggle? How come they don't give incorrect change? It's the little things that make a PC incredible. It's not the big features. I guess what I'm getting at with this scrap is that I wish people would pay more attention to detail when they are creating a character and stick more towards the racial norms. Making believable characters goes so far beyond knowing their vital statistics. Their height and weight and physical appearance are the easy parts. The harder parts are in the details that I've mentioned above. A close second in the mistake category is mental challenges like illnesses or habits that are outside of the standard. A great many people have Multiple Personality Disorders. I've scrapped about this before and how annoying it is, so I'll skip it - but it needed to be mentioned as part of this scrap. What's wrong with the average Joe with no particular mental hangups? Why not have any mental hangups your PC might have be acquired in game through RP? That way you have a track record of a characters development through strife. That gives you and anyone else you might want to drag along for the ride a chance to get some in-game action going. Cause lets face it... social thread after social thread is boring. And since we all can't be in big quests all the time, we have to do something to keep ourselves entertained. Why not make your new hobby looking at the same old thing in a different way and revitalizing the normal by making it extraordinary? Please just think about it! .

[Verilian]

I have to agree with Jen on pretty much everything she said here. Normal is the way to go, but don't let that fool you. Normal is not boring.. not in Miz, anyway. A "normal" akalak is a blue-skinned awesome warrior. How is that boring? A normal Inarta is a hot-headed, red-headed, potential giant eagle rider. That's not boring. A normal kelvic is an animal, with a mindset that is completely different from anything you are used to! How is that boring? I think all of my PCs are pretty "normal." Sira is the least normal, I suppose, but even she still fits within the confines of what she is. Raised among Inarta, she has their attitude, mixed with the wind eagle wisdom, and a little Sira flair thrown in. She isn't normal for a kelvic, perhaps, because her animal form is capable of human intelligence and emotion, but Sira is exactly what she should be given her living situation and animal form. Marcus, my Black Sun character, is also pretty "normal." He was born in Ravok, loves Rhysol, his parents weren't super wealthy but neither were they poor, and his parents and even a grandfather are all still alive. Massacre, my Zith.. well, perhaps he is a little abnormal, in that he doesn't have a tribe currently. But he is a wild, hot headed, temperamental creature that loves to strike fear in his prey and occasionally tries to eat people. And he always longs for a tribe, the only reason he hasn't found one is I am hoping to one day form a PC tribe. L'orlei is pretty much your basic Konti. She isn't crazy, she's a healer. What makes her unique is her business, I suppose. Instead of being a konti who works as a healer for the Opal Order or something, she has her own little business that sells herbal remedies, and offers free healing when needed. She doesn't know her father, but that's not all that unusual, and her mother is gone on her Call. L'orlei doesn't know whether she is dead or alive, but neither has it broken her mentally. I have a fifth, but I left him out of this because I'm still fleshing out the details on him. He is a little different in that he is a spiritist, but he does follow all the traditions of his people, and have a similar personality. I like to think all of my characters are pretty interesting, and I enjoy all of them. While they are not abnormal, I do believe all of them are unique. There is only one Sira, even the other wind eagle kelvic out there is nothing like her. There is only one Marcus, one Massacre.. you get my point. So... um.. yeah, that's all I have to say about that. The End.

[Johanne]

I really like to think that Johanne is somewhat normal. Sure, she's a little tall, but she's lanky and proportionate. She's a bit pretty, but not beautiful, and she's not godawful either. She's thoughtful but to a fault sometimes. She's creative but afraid of her own capabilities. She has a drive and ambition but is scared to tap into that because she's afraid of failure. She's a human. She's nothing special: she's not magical, she's not amazing at combat. She writes okay and tattoos a little bit better.

But I wanted to give her something that would make her soul different, even if her write-up and race was not. That's where her scars come in. The beauty of being human is that they can be whatever they like, really. Johanne is definitely a human, in that she has ambition, a great willingness to learn, and lives a little bit of a quiet, nondescriptive life: like the Lore says. But her scars are beautiful and strange and there's a backstory to them, and that is what makes her MINDSET different: not her physical appearance, not her skills, not her abilities. Johanne is 'different' because she has heart and is not afraid to show it, not even on her skin.

I think, to all players reading this, maybe think of it like this: don't make your character extraordinary in skills, capabilities, differences. Make your player extraordinary by being just you. Just ordinary.