If the lack of new content in the past few weeks wasn't an obvious indicator, I've been stuck in a bit of a rut with the game/novel/story/whatever this project is.
Long story short:
I have tons of offers to play test things, but nobody who feels like sitting down to pen a story. But the brings me to my topic for today: how to pen a story.
I am thinking that the final form of my story is actually that of a "lego set for drama." A Role-Playing board game, with a card-based minigame for the interactions. An interactive miniseries in a box.
But what constitutes the building blocks for a story? The best explanation I've heard in the last 20 minutes is from Natya Shastra, a Sanskrit text on the performing arts. Not being much of a scholar of Sanskrit, I'm basically going by the wikipedia entry and a few blog posts.
But the summary of the summary of the summary is that there are 8 basic Rasas or "flavors" in the arts:
शृङ्गारः | Śṛṅgāraḥ | Vishnu | Romance, Love, attractiveness |
हास्यं | Hāsyam | Shiva | Laughter, mirth, comedy |
रौद्रं | Raudram | Shiva | Fury |
कारुण्यं | Kāruṇyam | Yama | Compassion, mercy |
बीभत्सं | Bībhatsam | Shiva | Disgust, aversion |
भयानकं | Bhayānakam | Yama | Horror, terror |
वीरं | Veeram | Indra | Heroism |
अद्भुतं | Adbhutam | Brahma | Wonder, amazement |
Now at the risk of sounding like a broken record, what if take this concept and look at it in my 3 colors combining metaphor:
In my Tegic (short for Technical Magic) source books I was developing a concept of Quintessence. The idea that our world was made up of the interactions of energies from 3 outside realms:
Which gives rise to my schools of Tegic:
And each of those schools roughly match with 8 schools of magic in Dungeons and Dragons.
The difference between white and black is if you are combining colors as light or as ink:
Up until now I was toying with the idea that a side effect of each school of magic would be a particular emotion. But now I am realizing emotion is the very process of magic. Emotion is a read of how the mind is being changed.
What I have discovered is the building blocks of storytelling. Each of my magical quintessences are, in a sense, a Rasa. And better, this concept is as old as storytelling itself.