Azure Skies and Shadow Crossers
1) A Japanese company, Frontier Works, is in the process of organizing what arguably could be called the most elaborate tabletop RPG ever made, conducted entirely online, called 蒼空のフロンティア or Azure Sky Frontier. For a fee, users submit character profiles, plotlines, descriptions, etc. to Frontier Works. Frontier Works then has professional writers, artists and even voice actors and actresses bring the users' characters to life and flesh out their storylines within the context of the greater Azure Sky Frontier mythos and the stories being produced by other users. Frontier Works then acts as a sort of game master by providing new plot twists and challenges to the player and their characters, forcing them to submit new profiles, plotlines, descriptions etc. in order to overcome those obstacles and continue the plot. Frontier Works takes all of those and gives them to their professionals, and the cycle repeats. It is very much an experiment and could run into serious problems as Frontier Works tries to integrate the thousands of stories being submitted to them into a conherent whole while at the same time attempting to respect the users' creative visions. It sounds like a colossal and expensive task, so I am very curious as to what sort of pricing model Frontier Works will decide on. There will no doubt be heavy restrictions on user-submitted content as well, in order to both maintain plot continuity and avoid the whole enterprise collapsing into bad fanfic porn. Still, Frontier Works should be commended for what looks to be a bold attempt at something no one has ever tried before, and if the kinks can be worked out, the final product could be nothing short of spectacular. I might even be convinced to drop a few characters of my own into the Frontier, hehe.
The Azure Sky Frontier Homepage, which includes some preliminary art as well as a movie introducing the world of the game, can be found here:
http://souku.jp/
Additional art and more detailed information can be found at this article by Famitsu covering the game:
http://www.famitsu.com/pcent/news/1224202_1341.html
2) I had some bizarre but amazing dreams last night, though unfortunately many of them were incoherent to the point of making it impossible to relate them here. One, however, was very coherent if not particularly logical, so I thought I'd describe it here. The setting was a prestigious private school adorned in Gothic spires and towers and faded colors, predominantly grey and beige. Students dash back and forth through dusty, ancient hallways carrying books and homework. One girl, however, furtively ducks down a side hallway and ends up in a secluded room that opens up to the ashen sky. After making sure she wasn't being watched, she put her hand on one of the walls and whispered some sort of incantation. Raised characters emerged from the wall for a brief second, and then the whole wall disappeared. In its place appeared a maze of corridors, which the girl entered. She grabbed a strange white hooded cloak from a hangar near the entrance and, flinging it over her head and laughing, disappeared into the maze. In the open room she had left, the wall had reappeared and there was no evidence anyone had ever been there. Outside, a group of students wearing dark uniforms were playing with a strange obsidian tablet in the courtyard when suddenly a flash of light erupted above them. Only several of the students seemed to notice it, and smiled knowingly when the image of a jet black tower with spikes on its sides materialized over the school buildings. Within seconds it vanished again, and the students who saw it returned to the conversation.
Then the scene jumped. Once again, grey and beige Gothic buildings under an ashen sky. Indeed, this was the same scene as before, with two differences: the students were nowhere to be found, and the once again black tower soared in the sky, this time very real and very much a part of the landscape. Entering the buildings, it became very clear that this was no longer a school. Instead, gaunt inmates at a medieval version of a maximum security prison scuttled slowly about the halls. The floor, in particular, was notable for a complicated series of tracks running in various directions. Each inmate was chained to a ball within the track, such that they could only follow their particular tracks within the buildings. No more than two inmates could be on a track at a given time, and the tracks were designed such that no inmate could pass each other on a track. In the event two inmates were going opposite directions on the same track, one would have to retreat to a track junction a few meters away and let the first pass before proceeding on his on his or her way. This ensured that the inmates would be unable to gather in large numbers and plot a prison riot, and actually encouraged fights to break out among them due to the inevitable "traffic jams" and "road rage" that would occur as they moved along the tracks.
Suddenly, however, it was clear that something strange was going on at the prison. Inmates told of "poltergeists" who would whisper secrets from the walls, purposely jam the tracks of the inmates so they could not proceed to places like the mess hall, or even the toilet, and leave "presents" in the form of boxes with small bits of food and medicine as well as letters promising more in return for various favors, usually involving the torture or murder of one of the other inmates. Several inmates had gone insane claiming to hear rattling from the walls, while others had developed strange cults and rituals in an attempt to appease the poltergeists and to curry their favor. Sometimes the rituals seemed to work, with the strange entities leaving them large amounts of food or other necessities, but just as often they would find their track completely jammed, leaving them stranded in a deserted hallway without food or water, hopefully to be discovered and freed within a day or so. Sometimes nobody ever found them. Half the prison lived in terror of the "ghosts," while the other half slowly grew more and more desperate to find and destroy whatever it was that was tormenting them.
This is getting long so I'll cut to the chase: The prison and the school exist in two parallel universes, and some of the students at the school discovered a means to pass between the two at will, using the white cloaks they found along the way to safely navigate the maze that separates the two. The students, of course, found the prison and its inmates to be an endlessly fascinating diversion, and using their abilities to pass through walls as well as to shrink to the size of mice and scurry through floors, they entertained themselves by torturing and indirectly killing the inmates one by one in a twisted, psychotic game that could only be conceived of by amoral children. My dream didn't get this far, but it was clear that the inmates would eventually discover the truth about the children, and then use the passageway between the worlds to both take revenge upon them and escape their detention.
So yeah, it was indeed a bizarre dream, but it reminded me of an episode of the Outer Limits and was just twisted and entertaining enough to make me wish it had lasted it a little bit longer. Instead it switched to a dream where I was having an argument with my father and brother during a road trip. That one wasn't fun at all.
Today's Quote, from my supervisor Mr. Yoshikawa, who handles international exchange with our sister city Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in Russia:
"I used to get really annoyed by the fact that the people in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk never respond on time to my e-mails. After many years here, now I think it's kinda cute."
The Azure Sky Frontier Homepage, which includes some preliminary art as well as a movie introducing the world of the game, can be found here:
http://souku.jp/
Additional art and more detailed information can be found at this article by Famitsu covering the game:
http://www.famitsu.com/pcent/news/1224202_1341.html
2) I had some bizarre but amazing dreams last night, though unfortunately many of them were incoherent to the point of making it impossible to relate them here. One, however, was very coherent if not particularly logical, so I thought I'd describe it here. The setting was a prestigious private school adorned in Gothic spires and towers and faded colors, predominantly grey and beige. Students dash back and forth through dusty, ancient hallways carrying books and homework. One girl, however, furtively ducks down a side hallway and ends up in a secluded room that opens up to the ashen sky. After making sure she wasn't being watched, she put her hand on one of the walls and whispered some sort of incantation. Raised characters emerged from the wall for a brief second, and then the whole wall disappeared. In its place appeared a maze of corridors, which the girl entered. She grabbed a strange white hooded cloak from a hangar near the entrance and, flinging it over her head and laughing, disappeared into the maze. In the open room she had left, the wall had reappeared and there was no evidence anyone had ever been there. Outside, a group of students wearing dark uniforms were playing with a strange obsidian tablet in the courtyard when suddenly a flash of light erupted above them. Only several of the students seemed to notice it, and smiled knowingly when the image of a jet black tower with spikes on its sides materialized over the school buildings. Within seconds it vanished again, and the students who saw it returned to the conversation.
Then the scene jumped. Once again, grey and beige Gothic buildings under an ashen sky. Indeed, this was the same scene as before, with two differences: the students were nowhere to be found, and the once again black tower soared in the sky, this time very real and very much a part of the landscape. Entering the buildings, it became very clear that this was no longer a school. Instead, gaunt inmates at a medieval version of a maximum security prison scuttled slowly about the halls. The floor, in particular, was notable for a complicated series of tracks running in various directions. Each inmate was chained to a ball within the track, such that they could only follow their particular tracks within the buildings. No more than two inmates could be on a track at a given time, and the tracks were designed such that no inmate could pass each other on a track. In the event two inmates were going opposite directions on the same track, one would have to retreat to a track junction a few meters away and let the first pass before proceeding on his on his or her way. This ensured that the inmates would be unable to gather in large numbers and plot a prison riot, and actually encouraged fights to break out among them due to the inevitable "traffic jams" and "road rage" that would occur as they moved along the tracks.
Suddenly, however, it was clear that something strange was going on at the prison. Inmates told of "poltergeists" who would whisper secrets from the walls, purposely jam the tracks of the inmates so they could not proceed to places like the mess hall, or even the toilet, and leave "presents" in the form of boxes with small bits of food and medicine as well as letters promising more in return for various favors, usually involving the torture or murder of one of the other inmates. Several inmates had gone insane claiming to hear rattling from the walls, while others had developed strange cults and rituals in an attempt to appease the poltergeists and to curry their favor. Sometimes the rituals seemed to work, with the strange entities leaving them large amounts of food or other necessities, but just as often they would find their track completely jammed, leaving them stranded in a deserted hallway without food or water, hopefully to be discovered and freed within a day or so. Sometimes nobody ever found them. Half the prison lived in terror of the "ghosts," while the other half slowly grew more and more desperate to find and destroy whatever it was that was tormenting them.
This is getting long so I'll cut to the chase: The prison and the school exist in two parallel universes, and some of the students at the school discovered a means to pass between the two at will, using the white cloaks they found along the way to safely navigate the maze that separates the two. The students, of course, found the prison and its inmates to be an endlessly fascinating diversion, and using their abilities to pass through walls as well as to shrink to the size of mice and scurry through floors, they entertained themselves by torturing and indirectly killing the inmates one by one in a twisted, psychotic game that could only be conceived of by amoral children. My dream didn't get this far, but it was clear that the inmates would eventually discover the truth about the children, and then use the passageway between the worlds to both take revenge upon them and escape their detention.
So yeah, it was indeed a bizarre dream, but it reminded me of an episode of the Outer Limits and was just twisted and entertaining enough to make me wish it had lasted it a little bit longer. Instead it switched to a dream where I was having an argument with my father and brother during a road trip. That one wasn't fun at all.
Today's Quote, from my supervisor Mr. Yoshikawa, who handles international exchange with our sister city Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in Russia:
"I used to get really annoyed by the fact that the people in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk never respond on time to my e-mails. After many years here, now I think it's kinda cute."