Across The Mists, Behind the River

On one of occult spaces on the net someone posted  How Occultists Beat Physicists to the Punch: Clairvoyance, Atoms, and String Theory . Someone else posted the essay  Swedenborg and the Holographic Paradigm . The Beginning Theistic Science blog also has some stuff on Swedenborg & QM. As usual regardless of these cases being reality - my rule of thumb is never think this supernatural stuff can be used to avoid going to the doctor or taking medicine, and don't forgo logic in one's life decisions - for our game purposes it weds together ritual Psi-boosting practices identified as "Space Occultism" and scientific discovery. Were the Precursors just better at this particular kind of clairvoyance? Is that how they advanced so far beyond what Post-Cataclysm civs have managed to achieve on similar timescales (if the retrieved history archives are to be believed)? Will the civs serving as the setting's Points of Light be unable to achieve such heights without s...

Keep the Faith Shepherd Humanity Protect the Conspiracy Technology Can Save Us All Mirrors are not inversions, they aren't quite the same thing as trying to put a logical not on every descriptor of the Cyberpunk genre. So there's more than one path for such a setting to take. My attempt here is going to be partly a general brainstorm and partly a kind of "fun house mirror" to David Jarvis' essay about Cyberpunk relating to his setting book Interface Zero  and Mike Pondsmith's video  "Cyberpunk 2077 - Mike Pondsmith about Cyberpunk World" 1. Let's call it "Golden Chess Master" for now because I think it would involve the super-rich, and even corporations, being the good guys. Think Wild C.A.T.'s Halo Corp, Stark Industries, Batman Incorporated, Kord Industries, Mason in the Invisibles, that time Sunspot bought out AIM and merged it with his own corporation. Additionally you're not rebelling against a domineering society,...

Was skimming through The Blood of the Saints by Alan Chapman and saw mention of the Holy Guardian Angel as the future magical self (then Hyperion Cantos came to mind...). Got me thinking about Tommie Kelly's mention of the Simulation Hypothesis as a way of seeing the world from a particular esoteric angle.  There's also Rune Soup's Gordon White who talks about Space Shamanism and Astrognosticism. And of course all the New Age stuff that came out of Quantum Mechanics. Makes me wonder about more science fiction inspirations for occult practices. I don't mean Technology-Indistinguishable-From-Magic but rather Magic(k) inspired by science & science fiction or, to put it in a way internal to the setting, scientific advancements that could lead to particular rituals, initiatory practices, or at least metaphysical outlooks. So some very preliminary thoughts on that: Faster Than Light Travel:   If alien civs are like our own they likely held light to be a hard limit ...

Bio-tech mixed with expected metal & circuits - Having read through my Prophet trades (minus the Strike Files which are setting info I'll get too shortly) I often found myself thinking "this is what I'm going for."  There's an elegance to Prophet where it's science fiction but inclusion of Psi & Bio-tech make it have an uncanny, weird-fantasy feel. I've talked a lot about Psi but Prophet made me fully realize the value of bio-tech in providing the right tone for Space Occultism. The idea of living ships has been seen in D&D as the Spelljammer setting had living ships of varied kinds. The show Farscape which used this conceit to great effect as Moya felt like another member of the party, a character in her own right. A ship that can be infected with disease, that can be a mother, that can sense damage done to her internal cavities in which the crew resides provides a lot of adventure seeds. Another great use of the living ship idea is the ...

While Sigil might be the most obvious one D&D players from the era in which the TSR setting bonanza occurred there are other cities with multiple portals to multiple other realities. Union and the City of Brass come to mind from within D&D, but also Moorcock's Tanelorn. If we stick with WotC I'd add in Everway . You could have portals/gates leading to different planets which gives you exposure to different cultures, species, levels of technology, gender differentiation, etc. Maybe places where physics and/or magic works a bit differently if you want to go the distance. What I think gets introduced with actual fantastical realms, "planes", is that archetypes, concepts, and abstractions are made physically real. There are Planes that function as Platonic Realms of Alignment (The Outer Planes) and/or Alchemical Realms of Elemental Substances (The Inner Planes). You could also have planes representing Technology, Time, Government, Knowledge, Math, etc. And...

Two aspects of parapsychology/ paranthropology that I think would greatly influence the religious dimension of space civs is the continuation of the abduction phenomenon as an enduring mystery and the avenue of dreams as a means through which psionics acts. Abductions by Extra- vs Ultra- Terrestrials: Abduction by aliens civs of higher tech levels but still existing within the confines of this universe would, I suspect, be more rational than that of the mysterious abductions that seem to be done by fairies and other absurd entities. There are the "nuts & bolts" aliens and the ones that seem to come through planar-portals linking our universe to the Weird that is their home. (Or, arguably, have existed at "right angles" to mundane civilization which puts them in the Weird corners of the Void's expanse) There could be rational reasons for "nuts & bolts" abductions. There are a variety of Uplift Engines, Jump Gates, and similar Ancient/Pr...