Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 23

The Vote Fears Fire.

I've got some possibilities for where to go next.  Actually, I think I am a little more than halfway done, so let's see what I've got left.

Daemons - Last, and possibly greatest of the Underworldly denizens, spirit and flesh and chaotic evilness.  Since my Monday night group decided on a runs-on-buffyverse principles game, I will probably be getting to these soon.  So far, all I've got for them is the newt-looking thing that stings you and draws you to the Underworld.

Walking Dead - Got a notion for these as well, though most of the entries will be manifestations that sometimes happen when someone gets the old animated-corpse mill turning.  A corpse-animating mill, huh?

Spiders - Dear boyfriend, we can make your girlfriend scream louder than you can.  Sincerely, the spiders.  My favorite part about burning wheel is that they have things for playing wolves and giant spiders, so *steal*

Those from the Mountain Tops - For a long time, there was nothing going on in the central mountain region, but something has changed, something is returning or waking up.  Trolls are coming down, girls are going up, people are starting to talk about how water is Father and Father is Chaos and terrible again. 

Remnants of a Younger War - In the southeast, before the land fell and the water rose, there was a tower, and from the tower, something evil commanded hordes of servants, thorned and corpse-eating servants.  The queen is gone, but the ugly birds still flock around the island down there.

Aspects of the Forest - In the northeast, along the border with Murren, sits the last great, dark forest, a bloodthirsty god in its own right with many strange aspects and manifestations.

Denizens of the Other - Lobstermen, memetic fox demons, explosive teal crystals and shit that makes no sense; below the Underworld or on the far side of something else.  Mermaids that swim in oceans inside the walls and drown you under the plaster.  Weird shit. 

Sea Creatures - Also marsh creatures of the southwest.  River tigers and fish men. 

Dragons - Because I have to sometime, right?  I need to figure out how to make them, too, but I have an idea. 

Night Things - Demigods of the different regions, a knight who might be a spirit of death, an old king who takes evil way over the top, a maiden who creates problems and then solves them with lots of blood...

So, again, and while I am away, what should I do next?
View Poll: #1890525

CLOCKWORK PHOENIX: official table of contents

Originally posted by time_shark at <b>CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 4</b>: official table of contents

(NOTE: This is culled from a recently posted update on the Clockwork Phoenix 4 Kickstarter. If you’re a backer, and you haven’t read the full update yet, I recommend that you do. It’s chock full of things you need to know, much of it time sensitive.)

I’m thrilled to be able to share the official table of contents of Clockwork Phoenix 4.

Yves Meynard, “Our Lady of the Thylacines”
Ian McHugh, “The Canal Barge Magician’s Number Nine Daughter”
Nicole Kornher-Stace, “On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse”
Richard Parks, “Beach Bum and the Drowned Girl”
Gemma Files, “Trap-Weed”
Yukimi Ogawa, “Icicle”
A.C. Wise, “Lesser Creek: A Love Story, A Ghost Story”
Marie Brennan, “What Still Abides”
Alisa Alering, “The Wanderer King”
Tanith Lee, “A Little of the Night”
Cat Rambo, “I Come from the Dark Universe”
Shira Lipkin, “Happy Hour at the Tooth and Claw”
Corinne Duyvis, “Lilo Is”
Kenneth Schneyer, “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer”
Camille Alexa, “Three Times”
Benjanun Sriduangkaew, “The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly”
Patricia Russo, “The Old Woman with No Teeth”
Barbara Krasnoff, “The History of Soul 2065″

This is a truly international anthology – with contributors hailing from seven countries – that encompasses off-beat takes on sf, fantasy, horror, or combinations of two or more, as well as interstitial works that just can’t be easily classified.

We received more than 1,400 story submissions during our reading window, and we whittled them down to sixteen short stories and two novelettes that all together total 87,000 words, making this the largest volume in the series by far. All of the writers have received their contracts and I’ve begun sending them their payments. This crucial stage is what the Kickstarter was all about; I wouldn’t be able to pay the writers at all, much less offer them a worthy pay rate per word for their work, without the generosity and support of all our backers, and of those who helped us out in other ways.

I’ll be publishing Clockwork Phoenix 4 simultaneously in trade paperback and e-book formats. I’m aiming for a June release, and then an official reading and launch party at ReaderCon in Boston in July, the same convention where I officially launched the Kickstarter last summer, and where I’ve launched all three of the previous volumes.

Originally published at DESCENT INTO LIGHT. You can comment here or there.

The Beast Fears Fire - Korrids

Fair warning, this is probably going to be the last BFF entry before Arisia. Tomorrow, I have to start assembling my notes for the panels I am on, and see what I've got. I might pick up again once those are done, if I can get them together tomorrow and Wednesday, but I am not the most confident person I can be.

Korrids [Want 2]
Impulse - To Bring Forth Wood.
Get it out of your system. I'll Wait.
Wood gets a weird place among the elements in the old stories. It consistently comes in second place to the other elements in contests, second or third. It's never the bottom of the pack and it never wins, exactly. It's an undeniably important element for human life (triply so, since Wood manages all the animals and fungi of the world as well as all the plants), it is the most common calling (and arguably, the one of most typical utility) of witchcraft in the Savelish traditions, but it doesn't hold a lot of spiritual significance in Crickton, except, maybe in the southeast, where the forest runs things.

Wood's custodial spirits, the korrids, have a funny relationship with humans that reflects the themes of the old stories. Korrids don't seem, when interacting with humans, to show much in the way of identity, constantly inhabiting different plants and animals, manifesting, discorporating, always changing it's manifested form. When they do manifest outside of a creature they inhabit, they take a form similar to the last thing they inhabited, though often with very marked cosmetic differences. Occasionally, they appear as buoyant clouds of plant detritus, pollen and seeds. Their voices are clipped and rapid, and they cycle through a lot of different tones and sounds in their voice, never content to stick with one.

Their approach toward humans is very erratic, ranging from solicitous to sullen, with the occasional burst of enthusiasm or temper. People accustomed to dealing with the spirits describe them as operating under a massive inferiority complex.

Harm - 1/Peril [Poisoned] When a korrid gets riled, any form it assumes or creature it inhabits has the sting of bees, spiders, stinging trees, poison ivy, any irritant, allergen or venom you can name, it can deliver. Korrids tend to fly into short little rages without any sort of warning, and can jump from plant to animal to plant so quickly, that it's hard to fight them at first.

You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry
When you're in the sights of an angry korrid, face Want
On a Hit, you can talk it down a little, enough that you can face it however you choose.
On a Hard Hit, you placate the spirit, leaving it very apologetic and willing to perform a favor on your behalf. No, really, it insists.
On a Miss, you can't get it calm enough to know where it is and what it's doing, not before it gets you. Suffer Harm as stated.

I will not change one sinew. I will not change for you. I will not change for I HATE YOU.
If you can convince a korrid to work with you, it can enhance wooden items you make and create Bitterthrone Wood, which, while remaining as light as the kind of wood it was beforehand, takes on the tensile strength, flexibility and hardness of of really good steel (better, actually, than you can get domestically in Crickton); it retains the malleability and ductility of wood. This requires the cooperation of a korrid (not necessarily the same korrid) at three different stages in creation.

You can pretty much guarantee that any tree that gives esoteric wood is a long term, habitual host to a korrid. Possibly one more powerful than detailed here.

Great wolves aren't hosts for korrids, despite being wolves. Their sapience puts them in the human category (a formulation that would annoy them), and host to elves, instead.

The Beast Fears Fire - Silf

Silf [Violence 2]
Impulse - To Bring Forth Wind

Wind gets the distinction of being the element least interested in humanity in the old stories. Least interested or least able to concentrate long enough to act upon any of its interests. It's wind, after all, say the storytellers, changes quickly, comes up strong and sudden and dies away just as fast. There are some parts of the world where people consider wind an enemy of humanity; not Crickton, where no part of the country, however remote or difficult to travel is more than a week's walk from the shore, but the notion persists. Wind witches are the least common calling in the Savelish tradition and their magic, best suited for confrontational, if not violent purposes, makes them unpopular on their best days. Wind has, even in maritime Crickton, kind of a bad repuatation.

Silf don't help matters much. Of all the custodial spirits, Silf are the most likely to interact with people out of sheer pique, and not necessarily pique that had anything to provoke it. It's rare that this happens, but it happens, especially in the high places like the northwest and central regions of Crickton.

Silf look like varying-sized balls of something that looks halfway between smoke and fog, billowing and curling from a central silvery knot. At times, silf will arrange to mimic facial features out of their mass to talk. Their voices sound like someone screaming from very far away.

Harm 1/Peril [Chill] Silf are the most straightforward of the custodial spirits in terms of fighting. They will try to batter their opponents, and are cohesive enough to strike as though they were solid. When silf move aggressively, they become bitterly cold, capable of causing frostbite with a brush against exposed skin.

For the Win(d)
When you are under attack from silf, face Violence
On a Hit, you are able to defend yourself and gather your wits well enough to face the spirit any way you choose.
On a Hard Hit, you are strike at the core of the silf hard enough that it discorporates and flees.
On a Miss, you get battered around by icy winds. Suffer Harm as Stated.

On my hill I wait for wind
Scholars have tried to determine what kind of relationship there is between silf and the feared magic wind witches possess called the Black Wind. Probably nothing strong or direct, as the Black Wind is primarily psychic in nature, while silf, once manifested, are entirely physical.

Silf don't leave behind anything when they discorporate, but it is possible to trap one or more silf in a specially prepared bottle and use them to control the strength and direction of local winds. This really upsets the silf so trapped, and while some magically inclined ship's captains are willing to use the wind bottles, it's hard to find a full crew of sailors willing to step foot on such a ship.

The Beast Fears Fire - Elves

Elf [Malevolence 2]
Impulse - To Bring Forth Humanity

If you ask a Crick about elves, they will probably echo some version of the sentiment that, because Crickton is the only place on earth where the five races of man live in harmony, it stands to reason that Crickton would have more elves and more active elves than anywhere else. Don't read a lot into that statement, you can hardly get two words out of it between factual errors and bullshit. Crickton is quite diverse and pluralistic, and you could divide the different physical characteristics and cultures of people into 5 just as accurately as any other number, as a nation and a people they handle their diversity better than most, and there are a lot of elves, but yeah, a lot of problems with the way the Cricks tell it.

Elves are custodial spirits of humanity, but what that actually means is kind of hard to suss out, sometimes. They live among people, can, like other custodial spirits, inhabit people, but unlike other custodial spirits, they do not manipulate or control people. They really can't, since self-determination is one of the defining characteristics of humanity (elves are custodial spirits of Rukh as well). This puts them in something of a weird position in regards to their responsibilities. Elves are bound to try and strengthen and preserve their element, but since humans are tricky, and since humans can determine their actions for themselves, elves have to follow suit. Elves have individual opinions on how to preserve and strengthen humanity, and while they can encourage their charges toward those ends, they can't make them. For this reason, elves are self-willed and significantly cleverer than other custodial spirits, to the point that they really don't have anything in common with the others.

When they manifest, elves take on a humanoid form, proportioned similarly to a cartoonish human toddler with a broad, clever face, pointed ears, a full head of hair and skin that is usually a darker or cooler shade of gray on the back, outside of the legs and arms and head and a lighter or warmer shade of gray on the front of the torso, inner arms and legs, throat, mouth and nose. Elves have navels and suggestions of secondary sex characteristics for their chosen gender, but are apparently sexless. Their hair can be just about any color, but it usually black, white, gray, some shade of yellow or orange or dark blue. Elves have quiet voices and slightly evil sounding laughs.

Harm 1/Peril [On Fire] Elves don't hurt people if they have any choice at all in the matter, and, even if forced to defend themselves, will usually only manifest fire as a distraction to give them time to discorporate. It is against their nature to do violence to any human directly, even one that has done them great harm. That said, they, like their charges, take sides in conflict, and will happily lend their strengths to a human friend who allow them to inhabit, up to and including helping them do violence (they are generally against violence, however, and always counsel restraint.

Inhabiting People Elves can inhabit a person pretty much indefinitely; during that time they may be active, giving advice and encouragement and actively engaging with the things their host perceives, or they might be passive, seeming to slumber. Whatever the case, the host has access to the capabilities of the elf, Instincts, Natures and Abilities, which they can use in place (in the case of Nature, if the elf is stronger) or in addition to their own. Any NPC who has an elf has their Threshold raised to 2 or by 1. Any PC who is inhabited by an elf gets use of the 1,2,and 3 Harm Spots (as well as being able to roll using the elf's dice). Also, anyone inhabited by an elf is immune to possession and the powers of other custodial spirits (only room for one, and elves are designed to inhabit humans, so they get priority).

An elf must always ask, every time they wish to inhabit a person. Their host must want to be inhabited, not just meh-willing, otherwise, it doesn't happen. Elves cannot control or affect the actions of their host, beyond improving their host's capabilities, trying to persuade them, or leaving their host if they object to their host's actions.

If a human dies while inhabited by an elf, the elf dies with them. This is the only way, short of massive psychic trauma, that they can die.

It is possible to forcibly separate elf from host using magic. This is kind of frowned upon, but sometimes necessary.

Exorcism
When you want to force a human inhabiting spirit out of its host, you need some charm, mojo or ritual, and face Malevolence.
On a Hit, you force the inhabiting spirit from the host, causing (Great Harm to the Spirit | Great Harm to the Host | No Harm to the Spirit | No Harm to the Host) - choose 1.
On a Hard Hit, choose 2.
On a Miss, the spirit remains in the host, you take Harm as stated, and cause one of the Hit conditions of Moderator choice.

More human than human
You can play an elf if you are really interested. This is a very different sort of character than most, and your Moderator might veto the choice, but if not, here is what you need to know.

- Your Nature, Strength, Instincts and Traits are all as normal.
- You have no Gear other than Fire (D8), which you cannot lose. You can pick up and use Gear that is around of provided by others when you are manifested, but carrying it is very hard to do.
- You do not get to choose your Abilities; instead, you get the following:
--Custodial Spirit
1. You can interact normally with other spirits regardless of your state.
2. When unmanifest, you cannot interact with physical things and they cannot interact with you.
3. When manifest, you can interact and be interacted with by physical things, you can manifest and unmanifest at will, but if you want to unmanifest in order to avoid danger, you must Act Under Fire.
4. You are not subject to Perils that affect living physiology (hungry, tired, suffocating, etc) unless the source of the peril is supernatural.
5. You can inhabit a willing person. When inhabiting them, they can call upon any of your Natures, Instincts, Abilities other than this one, if your capabilities are superior to theirs.
5a. You can spend Strength to help them on any Move, and both of you mark Insight any time either of you spends Strength.
5b. Your Host gains the 1,2 and 3 Harm spots.
5c. While inhabiting someone, you cannot make any Moves of your own.
6. When free of a host, you travel via levitation, which you can do in any direction about as fast as a person can run.
7. Fire does not harm you.

You can also learn the following Ability
I Touch My Elf
When you want to share some of your natural powers with your Host, face Malevolence
On a Hit, you can give your host 1 of your natural abilities (Touch Spirits | Levitation | Immunity to Some Perils | Unharmed by Fire).
On a Hard Hit, you can give them access to 2 of your abilities.
On a Miss, you and your host suffer 1 Harm and you are ejected from them. You cannot try to inhabit them for the rest of the Scene and until the Harm has been recovered.

There is a story that elves might have once been custodial spirits of fire who jumped over to humanity when they first saw humans making an using fire. Murens and Pinefolk do have (much smaller and more secretive) traditions of Fire based witchcraft, though fire witches are incredibly rare, to the tune of maybe five in Crickton, and that's a lot of fire witches for any nation.

Beast Fears Fire - Uneen

Uneen [Ignorance 2]
Impulse - To Bring Forth Water

There is a story that uneen were a lot more active, once, back in the old days, back when the elements actually craved sapient attention; in some ways, perhaps they were the most active early on, teaching the ancestors of humanity to fish and forage in the sea, and, according to some accounts, introducing the five languages of the Sea to people (Littoral, Demersal, Neretic, Demersal and Benthic. Six if you believe in Abyssal). Now there are other languages that do not have their roots in the sea, but the sea languages are extraordinarily widespread; only the most remote places lack at least one person who can speak them (well, not all of them. Crick, for instance, is a hybrid using Littoral and Pelagic, with a tiny bit of Benthic thrown in for fights - most languages on the continent are this way). What advantage this might hold or have held over pre-existing languages is subject to a lot of debate. Native speakers of the sea languages are usually quite certain that there was one, while non-speakers tend to hold that there is not or that the Uneen's purpose, whatever it was, is flawed or incomplete. Uneen don't have a lot to say on the matter.

Uneen appear in bodies of water as faintly luminescent patterns, reminiscent of an opal, and out of the water as glowy, opalescent balls of water. Uneen gurgle and babble a lot, and it's very difficult to talk to them at the best of times. When they are riled, it's hard to talk with anything.

Harm 1/Peril [Tongue Twisted] Uneen spray droplets all over the place and leap around like mad. Droplets absorb through the skin and then start messing with your mind. For people, this is a sort of mild psychic attack (okay, there is no such thing as a "mild" psychic attack) which has the secondary effect of afflicting victims with a form of oceanic aphasia. While under the effects, speakers of any language of the sea shift through usage and vocabulary in each of the languages (including ones they do not know), which scrambles the meanings and connotations of statements and making verbal communication very difficult. Non-speakers tend to find sea vocabulary randomly dropping into their speaking, with no knowledge of what they words are or mean.

Tell Me Something
When you face an uneen, face Ignorance
On a Hit, you are able to communicate and be understood. You can face the uneen any way you choose.
On a Hard Hit, the uneen accidentally tells you the words that will force it to discorporate. You speak them, the uneen goes away.
On a Miss, you're not sure what the hell is going on. Your mouth doesn't obey you. Suffer Harm as stated. You are limited to making 3 word statements until you have resolved this peril. (In character, you are saying all sorts of things, but only the occasional 3 words worth of meaning comes out. You have to switch subjects any time you make a statement, but you can switch back to old topics as much as you want.)

Ocean, help me find a way
Uneen-inhabited water, if you can collect it, works really well for scrying, and most water witches will collect a little for their scrying bowls.

Uneen don't change your ability to communicate through nonverbal means.

The Beast Fears Fire - Jolm

Jolm [Hardship 2]
Impulse - To Bring Forth Earth

The Gulf of Catastophe sits on top of what used to be, within historical record, a very large area of land called the Ketteleye. The history of that region is full of accounts of earthquakes, sinkholes, rockslides, mudslides, trees falling over for no apparent reason. It was a trio of serious earthquakes, all within about 20 years of one another, which caused the land to crumble and the sea to rush in, and no one in Crickton or its neighbors knows a damned thing about plate tectonics or the actual science of how earthquakes happen, so the jolm get the blame.

Fact is, they deserve some of it. A seismic event big enough to sink the Ketteleye into the sea would do a whole hell of a lot more to the rest of the continent, let alone the region, than it did, and prior to that, there was a lot of evidence that there were fewer jolm in the region than any place else on the continent and that those who were there were both weaker and less coherent than anywhere else. No one is too certain why, and it's likely that anything that would lead to an answer to the question of what happened to the Ketteleye to make it so geologically precarious is sunk at the bottom of the Gulf of Catastrophe.

With the exception of the historical Ketteleye, jolm almost never manifest unless an earth witch is making them manifest. When they do, jolm manifest as crystalline columns with visible auras, or as glittering clouds of coherent dust rising from the ground like convection currents. Once manifest, they tend to be, in defiance of most peoples' expectations, very chatty, speaking constantly in a childlike sounding whisper.

Harm 1/Peril [Heavy] Jolm are no more physical than any other custodial spirit, and generally pretty stationary, even when manifest. They do have a power that they use to fight, when fighting is what they have to do that causes anyone or anything they choose within a certain distance of them, to become extremely heavy. When used on animals, this tends to suffocate and crush them, over time.

The Weight
When you are the target of the jolm heaviness aura, face Hardship
On a Hit, you are able to crawl out of the jolm's aura before it does any lasting harm.
On a Hard Hit, you manage to topple the crystals or disperse the glittering cloud and force the jolm to discorporate.
On a Miss, you are borne down under the aura. Suffer Harm as stated.

Are you strong enough to stand, protecting both your heart and mine?
Jolm crystalline formations are perfect little batteries of earth power, which makes them very tempting targets, as interacting with one can give you short-term versions of the powers that earth witches have. For obvious reasons, earth witches are not big fans of anyone they catch using jolmcryst. There are some people who think that a large-scale "farming" of jolmcryst was responsible for the state of the Ketteleye. It is one of the simpler and more plausible explanations.

The Terminology Fears Fire

There is a BFF done for today, but I want to wait to make sure that the word I came up with for shadow spirits is neither slang for a sex act, nor some arcane racial slur. I don't think it is either, but it's a word that sounds so deliciously unpleasant on the tongue that it feels like it must be something you wouldn't want to speak aloud...

Since I am at work and in the office, I am not looking it up until I get home.

The Beast Fears Fire - Slooch

Slooch [Disaster 2]
Impulse - To Bring Forth Shadow

Slooch have a little more interaction with people than most custodial spirits, and, maybe a better understanding of us than the spirits that take care of the elements. Shadow is where the dead chose to reside, and spirits are less concrete and discrete than physical beings. Because they reside so close to the remnants of humanity, it's likely that Slooch will sometimes pick up fragments of human memory, making them curious about the living. Generally, they satisfy this curiosity peeking in on people from their native habitat (young children are especially sensitive to their appearance, which is the usual reason why, if you have them, you are likely to be waking up three or more to the bed most mornings). That's usually the extent of interactions, but, every once in a while, a slooch will get a hold on something particularly strong or especially malevolent, and start acting on that.

The only other times you are likely to see a slooch, its because a shadow witch sent one, a shadow witch screwed up and is getting backlash in the form of one, or some other magical force has stirred up the shadows and caused a problem.

When slooch manifest, they usually do as spherical clouds of semi-distinct darkness, often (and ironically) shedding an indigo or violet luminescence. Alternately, they will take on the shape and form of a shadow, sometimes a copy of your shadow, sometimes other shadows in a place - shadows which clearly move around of their own.

Harm - 1/Peril [Shadowed] Whatever form they take, a slooch that wants to hurt you can only do so by fusing with your shadow and, through it, your body. Someone who is shadowed becomes a darkened, grayscale version of themselves, agitated, but somewhat morose. A slooch can, over time, draw a shadowed human completely into shadow, converting their body over. What happens to the person after that is up for debate, but it's a choice between death and possible conversion into a slooch, thus, kind of academic.

Count the Shadows
If you are being marauded by a slooch, face Disaster
On a Hit, you are able to avoid the shadowy grasp and escape or find safety in the Scene.
On a Hard Hit, you manage to trap the slooch in light or darkness that prevents it from manifesting, and the slooch leaves the Scene.
On a Miss, you get got. Take Harm as stated.

I can understand your disbelief as you tried to turn away
Shadow witches who get a slooch as a result of backlash find their usual powers of facing Malevolence in place of Disaster ineffective against the spirit that comes after them, though their other powers still work fine on the spirit.

It's possible to "milk" shadow stuff out of a slooch, generally using shadow magic, but some formulae allow folks who aren't shadow witches to extract the stuff. Pure liquid darkness has a lot of uses, and you can get a fair amount in trade for it, but those who make a career out of extracting the stuff figure out how to go easy or they don't stay in the career for long.

Arisia

Here is mah schedule:

Speculative Poetry Reading Sat 8:30 PM
In which awesome poetry gets read. Come see us!

Morally Ambiguous Characters at 10:00 PM (I'm modding this one!)
What genre characters, either YA or adult, break out of being able to be labeled "good" and "evil"? What characters are labeled good or evil, but are actually more ambiguous in spite of their label? How do we respond to them as readers, and what challenges do they provide for writers?

How to Be a Fan of Problematic Things Sun 11:30 AM
*Lord of the Rings*. *A Song of Ice & Fire*. *Scott Pilgrim vs. the World*. Many of us like things that are deeply problematic! Liking these works doesn’t (necessarily) make you a jerk. How can we like problematic things and not only be decent people, but good, social justice activists? How does one's background matter? How does one address the problems? This panel will discuss how to own up to the problematic things in the media you like, particularly when you feel strongly about them.
Inspired by this blog post: http://www.socialjusticeleague.net/2011/09/how-to-be-a-fan-of-problematic-things/

Reading: Amundsen, Lipkin, Rios Sun 1:00 PM
Authors Erik Amundsen, Shira Lipkin, and Julia Rios will be reading selections from their works.
COME TO THIS. YOU WILL. COME. TO. THIS.

Future Fantasy Sun 4:00 PM
Epic fantasy is mostly set in the past. Urban fantasy is mostly set in the present. Why are there so few works that use magic and are set in the future? What might a futuristic fantasy world look like, and is it really indistinguishable from a sufficiently advanced technology?

Speculative Poetry is Awesome Sun 8:30 PM (I'm Modding This One, Too!)
Over the past decade, speculative poetry has increasingly turned toward the mythic, personal, and powerful in subject matter, with venues such as Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Stone Telling, Cabinet des Fées, and Jabberwocky showcasing a new generation of poets who’ve redefined what this type of writing can do. Come discuss what's new and wonderful in the world of speculative poetry!


Short Fiction: Why Is It So Awesome? Mon 10:00 AM
Short fiction is thriving in the age of the internet, and for good reason. It often takes more risks than novels do, and is free to explore ideas that don't need the length of a trilogy of novels. Come discuss your favorite short work and where to find it!

The Horror of Our Youth Mon 1:00 PM (Modding This One.)
Stories around the campfire, *Goosebumps,* *Fear Street,* *Coraline,* *The Graveyard Book,* and Edward Gorey… There's a whole lot of wonderfully spooky and downright scary stuff out there for children and young adults! What makes a good scary book for younger readers? What are some things to remember when writing horror for younger audiences? And where can you find more horror for your kids? Feel free to bring your own flashlight and blanket-tent. Shh! Don’t wake any parents!

8 Panels, 3 I'm modding, 1 social justice with two people who really know their shit. Wow.