(no subject)
Character Information
Name: The Weaver
Name of Canon: New Crobuzon series by China Mieville
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: Canon
Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas-Lag#Weavers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdido_Street_Station
http://baslag.wikia.com/wiki/Deities_and_powerful_beings#Weaver
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PerdidoStreetStation > mentions the Weaver a few times.
“The Weaver is a really godlike power. It's not even a blind idiot god, a sort of Lovecraft thing, it's just a purely capricious god. It's an intelligence you can't understand, so you can't trust it."
-Amazon.com interview”
― China Miéville
Canon Point: On one level, it doesn't matter. Weavers see the progression of time and movement through space as similar, and they move through dimensions with ease.
On another level, her canon point is immediately before she is called in to New Crobuzon to deal with the dreaming epidemic.
Setting: The world of Bas Lag, as illustrated by three China Mieville novels Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. It is an incredibly wide-ranging world, not quite fantasy (though it involves magic) and not science fiction (though it does base a lot on scientific principles). It involves a little bit of steampunk, the inclusion of races completely alien to human thought, some Lovecraftian awe, a great deal of political intercourse, and a hell of a lot of imagination.
In brief: Bas Lag is a (planet?) world with a huge variety of cultures and species. Humans make up a large portion of it, but there are also hundreds of others, detailed in the wikipedia article if you're curious, including scarab-headed women who build with solidified spit, huge flying vulture-like creatures with a culture based entirely on individuality, froglike water-things that can sculpt liquid so that it stays in place, and cactus-people covered in spines. It's about as easy to describe as our own world and contains more variety and deeper weirdness. The books aren't so much a narrative of Bas Lag itself as they are three vaguely interweaving story lines mostly centered on New Crobuzon, one of the foremost trading city-nations in Bas Lag.
New Crobuzon has something of America's diversity (only more, and weirder, and crammed closer together) with England's sense of cramped history, with a sense of the utter bizarre. It is a city of a brutal government and law handled by an often-disguised militia; it is a city of impossibility, where a thousand different sorts of magic are practiced. The species mentioned above all live in amicable, crowded hostility, the sort of vague low-level in-all-directions prejudice that becomes a familiar friend as history goes on. The khepri women live in sisterhoods where they treat their non-sentient males like pets; the cactaci live in a giant, glass dome; the garuda, on the top of a half-ruined building.
Convicted criminals are often punished not only by imprisonment/slavery/indentured servitude to one of New Crobuzon's colonies, but also with Remaking, a process by which mechanics and magic are combined to produce some truly grotesque combinations. A woman who accidentally killed her child was Remade so her child's arms were grafted to her forehead, eternally moving and grasping and toying with her hair but never growing. Another woman's legs were severed and replaced with a boiler with wheels that she had to constantly feed coal. It is a city of casual cruelty and eldritch fascination. New Crobuzon is chaos and strangeness, but it is home.
The Weavers are in this world but also apart from it. They live in several dimensions at once, and they see Bas Lag from a distance, as a vast web of elegance and unimaginable scope. They only step into the physical dimension to see and change things, to weave the web prettier. Basically, their world is that of childlike, weird-ass giant spiders. They chatter and they hum at each other and they work together without any actual system of hierarchy, simply in the interest of weaving a better whole.
Personality: The first and most important thing to understand about Weaver's psychology is that she is not human. Not even remotely. Human brains automatically think in certain ways: in opposites, such as yin and yang, male and female, black and white, or in hierarchies, like this one is leader, this one is follower. Humans can certainly learn to think in patterns or in webs, but it isn't an automatic setting in our brains.
Weavers think in webs. Always. Hierarchies look like little piles of stones to them and are about as interesting, and thinking in black and white is ridiculous, as true black and true white aren't real. Thinking in webs means thinking in connected concepts. When she speaks, she doesn't make statements so much as she constantly makes comparisons, between words with similar meanings to words with similar sounds but meanings that contrast in lovely ways. Her entire motivation is to construct the world so that it is a more elegant web, from how she sees it. This may involve little tweaks and little changes, or it might involve an effort to do something greater. She's as likely to paint a random house blue as she is to slice off a person's ear or spend a day turning everything she sees upside-down.
Weavers favor beauty over all else. They seem to subsist on beauty, in fact, perhaps starving to death without it. There have been Weaver wars, brutal and slow, between factions who believed that it was more beautiful to slaughter an army of a thousand men or to let it live, or those who argued over the proper time to pick a dandelion. These arguments are morally equivalent, in their world. It is a matter of aestheticism, not of right or wrong.
In mindset, the Weaver is somewhat childlike. Calm and delighted, most of the time, pleased even when she's busy killing evil dream-moths. Her emotions are recognizable by humans and identifiable, though her morality and her reasons for her emotions are often obscure. If something displeases her, she's more likely to simply eliminate it from the environment than throw a tantrum -- like a painter who sees a cotton ball or a feather or some dust fall on their painting and just picks it up or brushes it off and throws it away. Everything must be neat and tidy and perfect.
In my personal interpretation, given constant exposure to humans and creatures with human-like attitudes and motivations, the Weaver will grow to empathize with them more. As things stand, sentient creatures are figures of the web -- little things, that make webs in their own right, but clumsily and stupidly and often in need of correction. She does not fully acknowledge them as thinking beings.
This particular Weaver has a fondness for human beings and beautiful chaos. She has lived underneath New Crobuzon for several centuries because she likes when they try to ask her for things. She also likes the way they make scissors. The room they use to contact her is made almost entirely of scissors in various configurations, and she adores the sound of it -- something about the chaos that these simple, incompetent webweavers hold in their hands, their ability to sever the links that are woven.
Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions: Let's talk playability! I know most of this app now has you going "wow, but, in a roleplaying game?", and now I will assuage some of those concerns.
1 - godmode powers. The Weaver is essentially a god, with the foresight and power that entails. She is nigh immortal, able to regenerate and phase in and out of reality. She's a league of creature far above humanity. To this end, I suggest that her powers to phase between dimensions be limited; perhaps she can step in and out of the fourth dimension, but she can't move beyond the edges of the station, and she still needs to use the transporters to go long distances. So, pretty much taking away all of her godlike abilities, which would be fine with me.
Also, she is so capricious as a character that it's easy to nudge her into taking actions that are not godmody. Without mun permission to take a certain action, I could easily have her take another. Like: she wants to slice off someone's ear. The player of someone isn't okay with that. Instead, I have her scratch the picture of an ear into the dirt and rub it out.
2 - Seeing webs. I would like her to keep her semi-foresight, leaving her the ability to see the shadows of webs that others weave. For example, she would be able to see that an ordinary human creates consequences on an ordinary human level, but would look at a creature like Gabriel (spn) or Loki (mcu) and see that they are a higher class of being. This would not include automatically knowing what their powers are, only seeing them as a kind of fellow weaver, though a limited and tiny one.
This would be done only with mun permission. It's easy to say she caught a bad angle on this one, or she didn't look closely enough, or that she was distracted by a shiny pair of scissors and the snip that they make and didn't look.
3 - Giant spider. She's a giant fucking spider. She makes literal webs and is huge and durable and hard to kill. I propose she pretty much keeps all of this. She's certainly not the type to use it to do anything game-disruptive.
Inventory: None.
Appearance: Giant spider, taller than human, awe-inspiring. Has little, agile hands on two of her forelegs, and bone-scythes on another two. She balances on the remaining four, moving one leg at a time like a tarantula. Deeply scary.
Age: …kind of n/a, kind of on the order of several hundred years.
Samples
Log Sample: Her web is the best it has ever been.
At the outside edge, long stretches of desert weave into long stretches of salt-ocean, devoid of water; sand here and wave there and them both tied together and anchored to pillars of stone deep beneath the earth.
On the inside, it is more varied.
She chatters as she weaves the center over again, twisting the shine of light off of a wall of windows into a long, sticky rope, and anchoring it to the fold of darkness behind a woman's chest of drawers. "Draw a maw a drawer awe flawless sleepless knowless law," and splashes a spurt of blood from a cold-blooded murder across the rope for color.
She hears a snick, suddenly. The slice of scissors. She perks, her little hands frozen mid-weave. And she scurries
and slips
And then she has fallen in a bag of rocks, a jumble-thing of chaos and nothing and everything. She shrieks, shrilly, and then takes a moment to look around. A woman's shoe turned over in her hands and she sets it down, reverently, and picks up a piece of smooth rock and gently bashes in the toe, making it snubbed and curved. Her hand grips the shoe and tosses it back, letting it clatter and land among the junk behind her.
She trills, pleased, and rummages through. She can't move in very many directions, but she does not mind; there is plenty to see.
Network Sample: [ when the device turns on, she sees a sparkle-web of a thousand ends. watches it change as she turns to voice --
-- and the listeners hear an excited chitter of: ]
I TRIPPED I FELL IT SEEMS A SHELL TO A PRETTY SIGHT TO AN ISLAND AN EMPTY SEE VACUUM BREATHE OUTSIDE INSIDE A STATION SEETHE
[ -- to video, as a giant spider's terrifying mandibles thoughtfully click over the camera. ]
FLESHSCAPE MINE OR NOT YOU CRINKLE YOU WEAVE AND SCATTER SHIVER HANDS OF CLUMSY SWING.
Name: The Weaver
Name of Canon: New Crobuzon series by China Mieville
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: Canon
Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas-Lag#Weavers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdido_Street_Station
http://baslag.wikia.com/wiki/Deities_and_powerful_beings#Weaver
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PerdidoStreetStation > mentions the Weaver a few times.
“The Weaver is a really godlike power. It's not even a blind idiot god, a sort of Lovecraft thing, it's just a purely capricious god. It's an intelligence you can't understand, so you can't trust it."
-Amazon.com interview”
― China Miéville
Canon Point: On one level, it doesn't matter. Weavers see the progression of time and movement through space as similar, and they move through dimensions with ease.
On another level, her canon point is immediately before she is called in to New Crobuzon to deal with the dreaming epidemic.
Setting: The world of Bas Lag, as illustrated by three China Mieville novels Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. It is an incredibly wide-ranging world, not quite fantasy (though it involves magic) and not science fiction (though it does base a lot on scientific principles). It involves a little bit of steampunk, the inclusion of races completely alien to human thought, some Lovecraftian awe, a great deal of political intercourse, and a hell of a lot of imagination.
In brief: Bas Lag is a (planet?) world with a huge variety of cultures and species. Humans make up a large portion of it, but there are also hundreds of others, detailed in the wikipedia article if you're curious, including scarab-headed women who build with solidified spit, huge flying vulture-like creatures with a culture based entirely on individuality, froglike water-things that can sculpt liquid so that it stays in place, and cactus-people covered in spines. It's about as easy to describe as our own world and contains more variety and deeper weirdness. The books aren't so much a narrative of Bas Lag itself as they are three vaguely interweaving story lines mostly centered on New Crobuzon, one of the foremost trading city-nations in Bas Lag.
New Crobuzon has something of America's diversity (only more, and weirder, and crammed closer together) with England's sense of cramped history, with a sense of the utter bizarre. It is a city of a brutal government and law handled by an often-disguised militia; it is a city of impossibility, where a thousand different sorts of magic are practiced. The species mentioned above all live in amicable, crowded hostility, the sort of vague low-level in-all-directions prejudice that becomes a familiar friend as history goes on. The khepri women live in sisterhoods where they treat their non-sentient males like pets; the cactaci live in a giant, glass dome; the garuda, on the top of a half-ruined building.
Convicted criminals are often punished not only by imprisonment/slavery/indentured servitude to one of New Crobuzon's colonies, but also with Remaking, a process by which mechanics and magic are combined to produce some truly grotesque combinations. A woman who accidentally killed her child was Remade so her child's arms were grafted to her forehead, eternally moving and grasping and toying with her hair but never growing. Another woman's legs were severed and replaced with a boiler with wheels that she had to constantly feed coal. It is a city of casual cruelty and eldritch fascination. New Crobuzon is chaos and strangeness, but it is home.
The Weavers are in this world but also apart from it. They live in several dimensions at once, and they see Bas Lag from a distance, as a vast web of elegance and unimaginable scope. They only step into the physical dimension to see and change things, to weave the web prettier. Basically, their world is that of childlike, weird-ass giant spiders. They chatter and they hum at each other and they work together without any actual system of hierarchy, simply in the interest of weaving a better whole.
Personality: The first and most important thing to understand about Weaver's psychology is that she is not human. Not even remotely. Human brains automatically think in certain ways: in opposites, such as yin and yang, male and female, black and white, or in hierarchies, like this one is leader, this one is follower. Humans can certainly learn to think in patterns or in webs, but it isn't an automatic setting in our brains.
Weavers think in webs. Always. Hierarchies look like little piles of stones to them and are about as interesting, and thinking in black and white is ridiculous, as true black and true white aren't real. Thinking in webs means thinking in connected concepts. When she speaks, she doesn't make statements so much as she constantly makes comparisons, between words with similar meanings to words with similar sounds but meanings that contrast in lovely ways. Her entire motivation is to construct the world so that it is a more elegant web, from how she sees it. This may involve little tweaks and little changes, or it might involve an effort to do something greater. She's as likely to paint a random house blue as she is to slice off a person's ear or spend a day turning everything she sees upside-down.
Weavers favor beauty over all else. They seem to subsist on beauty, in fact, perhaps starving to death without it. There have been Weaver wars, brutal and slow, between factions who believed that it was more beautiful to slaughter an army of a thousand men or to let it live, or those who argued over the proper time to pick a dandelion. These arguments are morally equivalent, in their world. It is a matter of aestheticism, not of right or wrong.
In mindset, the Weaver is somewhat childlike. Calm and delighted, most of the time, pleased even when she's busy killing evil dream-moths. Her emotions are recognizable by humans and identifiable, though her morality and her reasons for her emotions are often obscure. If something displeases her, she's more likely to simply eliminate it from the environment than throw a tantrum -- like a painter who sees a cotton ball or a feather or some dust fall on their painting and just picks it up or brushes it off and throws it away. Everything must be neat and tidy and perfect.
In my personal interpretation, given constant exposure to humans and creatures with human-like attitudes and motivations, the Weaver will grow to empathize with them more. As things stand, sentient creatures are figures of the web -- little things, that make webs in their own right, but clumsily and stupidly and often in need of correction. She does not fully acknowledge them as thinking beings.
This particular Weaver has a fondness for human beings and beautiful chaos. She has lived underneath New Crobuzon for several centuries because she likes when they try to ask her for things. She also likes the way they make scissors. The room they use to contact her is made almost entirely of scissors in various configurations, and she adores the sound of it -- something about the chaos that these simple, incompetent webweavers hold in their hands, their ability to sever the links that are woven.
Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions: Let's talk playability! I know most of this app now has you going "wow, but, in a roleplaying game?", and now I will assuage some of those concerns.
1 - godmode powers. The Weaver is essentially a god, with the foresight and power that entails. She is nigh immortal, able to regenerate and phase in and out of reality. She's a league of creature far above humanity. To this end, I suggest that her powers to phase between dimensions be limited; perhaps she can step in and out of the fourth dimension, but she can't move beyond the edges of the station, and she still needs to use the transporters to go long distances. So, pretty much taking away all of her godlike abilities, which would be fine with me.
Also, she is so capricious as a character that it's easy to nudge her into taking actions that are not godmody. Without mun permission to take a certain action, I could easily have her take another. Like: she wants to slice off someone's ear. The player of someone isn't okay with that. Instead, I have her scratch the picture of an ear into the dirt and rub it out.
2 - Seeing webs. I would like her to keep her semi-foresight, leaving her the ability to see the shadows of webs that others weave. For example, she would be able to see that an ordinary human creates consequences on an ordinary human level, but would look at a creature like Gabriel (spn) or Loki (mcu) and see that they are a higher class of being. This would not include automatically knowing what their powers are, only seeing them as a kind of fellow weaver, though a limited and tiny one.
This would be done only with mun permission. It's easy to say she caught a bad angle on this one, or she didn't look closely enough, or that she was distracted by a shiny pair of scissors and the snip that they make and didn't look.
3 - Giant spider. She's a giant fucking spider. She makes literal webs and is huge and durable and hard to kill. I propose she pretty much keeps all of this. She's certainly not the type to use it to do anything game-disruptive.
Inventory: None.
Appearance: Giant spider, taller than human, awe-inspiring. Has little, agile hands on two of her forelegs, and bone-scythes on another two. She balances on the remaining four, moving one leg at a time like a tarantula. Deeply scary.
Age: …kind of n/a, kind of on the order of several hundred years.
Samples
Log Sample: Her web is the best it has ever been.
At the outside edge, long stretches of desert weave into long stretches of salt-ocean, devoid of water; sand here and wave there and them both tied together and anchored to pillars of stone deep beneath the earth.
On the inside, it is more varied.
She chatters as she weaves the center over again, twisting the shine of light off of a wall of windows into a long, sticky rope, and anchoring it to the fold of darkness behind a woman's chest of drawers. "Draw a maw a drawer awe flawless sleepless knowless law," and splashes a spurt of blood from a cold-blooded murder across the rope for color.
She hears a snick, suddenly. The slice of scissors. She perks, her little hands frozen mid-weave. And she scurries
and slips
And then she has fallen in a bag of rocks, a jumble-thing of chaos and nothing and everything. She shrieks, shrilly, and then takes a moment to look around. A woman's shoe turned over in her hands and she sets it down, reverently, and picks up a piece of smooth rock and gently bashes in the toe, making it snubbed and curved. Her hand grips the shoe and tosses it back, letting it clatter and land among the junk behind her.
She trills, pleased, and rummages through. She can't move in very many directions, but she does not mind; there is plenty to see.
Network Sample: [ when the device turns on, she sees a sparkle-web of a thousand ends. watches it change as she turns to voice --
-- and the listeners hear an excited chitter of: ]
I TRIPPED I FELL IT SEEMS A SHELL TO A PRETTY SIGHT TO AN ISLAND AN EMPTY SEE VACUUM BREATHE OUTSIDE INSIDE A STATION SEETHE
[ -- to video, as a giant spider's terrifying mandibles thoughtfully click over the camera. ]
FLESHSCAPE MINE OR NOT YOU CRINKLE YOU WEAVE AND SCATTER SHIVER HANDS OF CLUMSY SWING.