Ascala Spotlight - Everyday Arcana

Hello. C J here. I think I’ve figured out the math puzzle I was working on about social themed stories in my card game. I had an idea a while ago about a card game where the player plays story based events contained as a single deck each. Each deck has 20 numbered cards including reprints of the characters who are in the story and they can be played in order or shuffled. This sounds like the best approach to narrative social events in the game. One problem down.

Also I’ve been thinking about the mechanics for the Five Million Strong Quantum Expansion, the Quantum Expansion set in Ascala. I wanted to try to find ways of making everyday tasks and tools into cards with spells, relying on the city Ascala and its theme of industrial magic use to guide the process. Five Million Strong looks to put some of the arcane and the mystic into modern life and its normal actions.

I’ve divided these into five categories and paired them with one of the smaller nations within the continent as a whole and the nation’s gem colour. We have school and job training for Ascala itself (Sapphire), computer use and software for the corporations (Silver), food service and retail for the Interior where they grow crops (Emerald), household economics and chores for the Vantaran Empire (Quartz) and finally online social media and networking for Oiwan (Shadowed).

I thought about dividing the steps of doing retail into individual sets of phrases and ideas. I arrived at four. These are greeting, sales, payment and departure. My other thought was to make one card for the overall tempo of the job, relying on the gem colour and its association with music to put these four ideas into song metre as a spell idea. This is where I am with these but the idea should work well. There are two sets of cards between the Starter Set and there but the planning for them is mostly done and just needs typing up.

C J Mcpherson

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The Tunnels Under Haven

Hello. C J here. Walking down the streets of Haven is not always as safe as the city would like people to think. Yes, they have curbed the banditry that plagues the Southern half of the Coastal Road. The Desert Princes whose cities dot the Southern coast of the Southern Continent if anything make the problem worse for themselves with their constant rivalries and politics. So no, a traveller in Haven or in the River Lands is unlikely to meet a bandit or other criminal sort. But then there’s the walking dead to consider. Many of the basements, catacombs and landmarks of Haven have old foundations from before the city had its current name. In ages long past it was one of two competing capitols for the Desert Empire, both of which unified under the first Sand King of the Gold Dynasty, the God-Lion. It was never his place of residence and both the other capitol and the rest of the Desert Empire are long since buried under the dunes. Well, people like to assume they’re buried. People wo...

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Fantasy Plus Minecraft Server Project Update One

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