Etchings

Some notes about otherworldly entities:

• Ghosts are, as expected, remnants of dead humans. Native to the material world and tied to Death magic.
• Spirits are beings of things, from houses and trees to emotions and events (not people themselves). Native to the Shadow and tied to Spirit magic. Have to pass through the Gauntlet to get the material world.
• Goetia are beings of thought. Native to the Astral Realms and tied to Mind magic.
• Ephemeral entities are those 3 entities: ghosts, spirits, and goetia. Naturally, they cannot interact with the material world nor are aware of beings of the other types. They can enter the material world be being summoned or they fight their way in. Twilight is a state of being for them: invisible and intangible - not manifested. Manifesting means they take physical shape in the material world; they can do this through magic or some other conditions.
• Supernal entities are different - Fae, Demons, Shades, Beasts, Angels. These beings are from their respective Supernal World. They don't go into the material world nor Twilight unless summoned (or some weird stuff happens).
• When viewing the world from the Twilight, it's like you're in a dream or through a sort of shimmering veil. Like if you maxed out bloom on your screen. Entities and things in Twilight that are of the same ephemera can "physically" interact, like ghosts with other ghosts.
• "Rank" determines ephemeral and Supernal entity strength. Over 5 is nuts.
• Ephemeral entities subsist on Essence. They must spent 1 per day to remain active in the material world, and once per hour when existing outside a suitable condition.
• Supernal entities subsist on Mana. They do not need to spend it to remain in the material world.
• Ghosts, goetia, and Supernal entities naturally refill their pools when in their home realms. Spirits do not. Ephemeral entities regain 1 point per day in the material world be being close to an appropriate condition.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Mage the Awakening 2nd Edition both have a snowballing problem. Starting small, effects can be continually layered on top of each other until the game is broken.

Let's go through the Time Arcanum in Mage the Awakening, second edition.

Let's go through the Fate Arcanum in Mage the Awakening, second edition.

Brief ratings of the complexity of the 10 different Arcanums in Mage the Awakening, Second Edition.

Now you've done it. You've attracted the attention of a nation-state powered group of hunters. Well funded, well trained, and even supported with a bit of supernatural power, they're on your trail, and they want you dead. An unprepared mage is a dead mage - after all, you're only human. A knife in the back, a bullet through the head, or a quick poison in your food would be all that it'd take to get their revenge. A prepared mage, however, is one of the strongest forces in the Chronicles of Darkness universe. A mage needs to know who, what, when, where, why, and how. A good mage finds these out. A great mage controls some of these questions.

How do you handle this, then? A Life mage could entirely change their body: height, weight, skin/eye/hair color, and birthmarks. Think bigger. They could change their fingerprints, their blood type, even their DNA. This lets you hide. How do you strike back? How do you end this fight? Find a powerful person dying of an incurable disease. Cure the disease. Now they owe you, and if you're smart, you can use that.

With Mind, you have a few paths available to you. The first is to make yourself a strategic and tactical mastermind. Despite their training and resources, you know that everything they think they know is part of the Lie. You, at least in part, are Truth: control your path by controlling them. If you're really the puppeteer type, raise up an organization against them. Most everyone in power has enemies, and even if they don't, you can make some. Find another organization, and feed them. Bring them up in the image of your army, and deploy them to battle.

If you want this over without any bloodshed, and can't be bothered to take direct action, then simply destroy the connections between them and you with Space. If the links to you fray and fall through their fingers, then memories falter, emotions fade, and written records are misplaced. Control the ties that bind, and order them to slip away, just as you do. Any organization this strong must have other things to do, other paths to follow. Control the path to you, and control your future.

There's a simple option, of course. A mage skilled in Fate can control the way that future unfolds. Ensure that the hunters never ... get ... quite ... close ... enough. They made raid the building down the street, the hideout in the next lot, or even the house next door. But no matter how hard they try, no matter how many resources they pour into their search, something always goes wrong, and you always slip away. If they are willing to give more and more to find you, let that Monkey's Paw curl inward. You are Fate; you are the future; you spin the webs, you control the players, you are the chess board itself.

There are many ways to use different Arcana to solve a problem. Need to pass a math test? Could Fate it to be successful; use Life to give yourself more raw intelligence; use Matter to make your test a clone of the smart kid's test; boost your knowledge of math with Mind; coax the Spirit of the test to pass itself; speak to the last teacher's ghost with Death; or create more Time to study. Could even use any of those to make other people test worse and shoot for the curved grading.

What about being in a car going down the road, and another car runs the red and is about to slam into you? You could use Forces to reduce the other car's velocity, or create more space between them with Space or Time. Matter or Death could force the other car off its path. Life, Mind, Fate, Spirit, Forces, or Time could give you the reflexes to react. If you're going to get hit, Life, Death, or Time could fix the damage to your body.

Need to find someone? Could simply Fate your paths to cross; find where they were last with Time; find who last saw them with Mind; or trace their steps with Matter, Death, Space, or Spirit.

I like Zig's syntax more than Nim's, but Nim is much further along.

Yeah, Zig isn't 1.0 yet, but it seems like most new (relative) languages having the tooling squared away.

Zig does cross-compiling better than Rust, probably almost as good as Go, so that's cool.

Before Go sorted out package versions, it still had go get, which worked well enough for most people.

Looks like Zig tells people to go the "./vendor/" route, cloning in your dependencies. Not awful, but without at least some tooling, kind of a bummer.

I like having a standard, official package management solution. Python has many usable package managers, all of which have their own merits. It took me years to find poetry, which is my (current) favorite.

Go had a lot as well, before they sorted everything out.

Rust? cargo. Done.

Heck, even JavaScript has npm leading the pack, with some folks on yarn or pnpm. And, npm rips off the features that the other managers introduce after a while, so there's no major reason to switch off of npm for most people.

Nim has nimble.

Elixir has mix.

Technically you could install all Python packages to your global scope, but that is a pretty sure-fire way to dork up your entire system.

Zig likes to promote that their language compiler is also a compiler for any C program, and that's dandy, but still - fragmentation. Every Zig project comes with a build file that is 22 SLOC!

Rust allows the customization of its build process via a build file, but it's rarely required!

Go has programs that can bake extra stuff into the binary. I haven't used one in a looong time, but I remember them/it being fairly simple.

Python ... doesn't compile, which will probably forever bug me.

TypeScript doesn't either, not technically. Can webpack it down to a all-in-one runnable node file and distribute that, though still requires the user to have the runtime installed. Most devs will, sure, but users? Very unlikely. Deno moves to solve that with their executable builds, but they're still sort of buggy.

Java .jars don't count if Python doesn't.

Plus like holy crap, ever unzip an enterprise jar? It's like GBs of stuff. I stopped the unzip one time after like 50 GB.

I'm joining the most realistic flight simluation network, and starting with the most difficult position: ATC.

The programs and tools I use to be productive in the terminal.