Glass Bird Games

Well, things are a bit fucking bleak today, eh? Let's talk about the end times. Between current events in the US of A, my work on my archeological hearth-fantasy setting , and my revisiting of the storyline of the latest Final Fantasy XIV expansion, I've been thinking a lot about dysfunctional, decaying and all-around disastrous empires and their ends. All of Ben Robbins' West Marches posts are incredibly useful, thought-provoking, and entertaining reading, but my favorite has always been his musings on Layers of History . I'm trying to invoke this especially in the stuff I'm writing lately, and it always helps to have some jumping off points for the Big Foundational Questions of a setting - the character of the ancient people that came before, and the reason they're no longer here. So here's some sparks for the long-gone, half-forgotten kingdoms of your setting. Be forewarned that bad vibes follow. Ruine Eldena, Caspar Friedrich 1825 Roll d4 to determine th...

In Crimea, Ivan Shishkin When I was very young there was a stretch when I was absolutely obsessed with Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf . For those unfamiliar, the piece is a narrated children's story accompanied by an orchestra, with each character represented with a specific instrument and theme. I loved  it, and would listen to it over and over again until I had every bit memorized. Not so much every word, or even the specifics of the story, but every turn of the music was etched into my imagination. The characters spoke to me not through their literal actions, but through the way they were portrayed by the orchestra. Soon I was imagining entirely new stories, new configurations of characters and their interactions based on the way their themes were woven together as the narration rattled on, entirely ignored. Music has such a deep-seated emotive effect, even for kids (or adults!) with no formal musical literacy to speak of. We should be leveraging this inborn sonic empathy be...