Vox Maxima Story Spotlight 3 — The Million Eyes
What follows here is a discussion of what, if I had the means and writer tools to make my Custom Magic set have proper story spotlight material, it’d look like this, it’d be built out of this. This is basically about story mechanics underlying a game system, and I want to present it to you so you can have a handle on what it looks like when I’m trying to explain game narratives for the presentation of conventional narratives.
This third section indicates the midpoint of the story and the collapse of a lot of hopeful ideas; this is where the party meets with the Jatku Outcasts in their jungle fortress, and learns the horrible truths about the Necrocalypse, the Emperor, and the truth of the dead woman Jatku, mother to one of the Princesses.
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. It’s composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →Vox Maxima Gallery 3: The Iacon Colleges
The Iacon Colleges represent the coalition of the finest magewrights, researchers and technician in the Kraivh Empire. The Empire is a place of faith and trust, but it is to the colleges they turn when they want to make their vaulted cathedrals and also sick sky skimmers. The Iacon Colleges represent a drive to understand the world that the Emperor is keeping safe, and the Iacon Colleges do so through rigorous study, abandonment of the unnecessary, and a kind of focus that could drive a mushroom through a solid concrete slab.
It is the Iacon College who first spoke of the coming disaster, it is the Iacon College that can find murky shards of lost history, it is the Iacon College whose great towering spires, near to the heart of the Empire, most closely align with the needs of the empire. Where a billion are lost, many of them are lost in the Colleges, and all they have left behind are parts and notes. The Iacon Colleges seek to remake their history, even if they have to time travel to do it.
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. It’s composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →Vox Maxima Story Spotlight 2 — College Days
What follows here is a discussion of what, if I had the means and writer tools to make my Custom Magic set have proper story spotlight material, it’d look like this, it’d be built out of this. This is basically about story mechanics underlying a game system, and I want to present it to you so you can have a handle on what it looks like when I’m trying to explain game narratives for the presentation of conventional narratives.
This second section is about the characters travelling through the Kraivh highways to the city that holds the Iacon College
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. It’s composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →Vox Maxima Gallery 2: The Kraivh Empire
The world is broken; wounded, and one in seven in the entire empire expunged. A billion are missing and amongst them were workers, guards, scholars — and those missing people have left a wound across the entire world. Thankfully, the strong leadership, the head of the Kraivh Assembly, have been able to hold the institutions of the world strong in this great, yawning disappearance.
The armies of the Kraivh defend the borders. The Osteotheruges pick through the graves and memorials, trying to find the truth that has been lost. And even Emperor Kraivh, The Eternal Undying himself has assigned his closest blood to the quest of solving the great question, beginning the quest meant to solve that mystery, and in the process, bring back a satisfactory answer to be spoken in in the Vox Maxima.
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. It’s composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →Vox Maxima Story Spotlight 1 — All The Emperor’s Daughters
What follows here is a discussion of what, if I had the means and writer tools to make my Custom Magic set have proper story spotlight material, it’d look like this, it’d be built out of this. This is basically about story mechanics underlying a game system, and I want to present it to you so you can have a handle on what it looks like when I’m trying to explain game narratives for the presentation of conventional narratives.
This first section is going to be the establishing shot; it discusses the characters that are going to be introduced, the goals of this story section, and then the beats of the story that the writer can then take as their subsequent storytelling. This helps inform character dynamics for flavour text and the later appearances of characters on cards.
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. It’s composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →Vox Maxima Gallery 1: The Emperor’s World
Ten years, ten long years of life, disappeared from the collective memory of all citizens of the world. People blink and wake up, seeing about themselves a world defined by new factions, new ideas, and new technologies, many of which they may have even had their hand in inventing.
Where am I? What’s going on? This isn’t the body I remembered, people don’t call me the name I remember – what has happened to us.
This is the new world of the Vox Maxima – waking up the moment after, all the anxieties of before confronting a new world, and a new life. What is this world, and what is present here? What is strange and what is it that your damaged memory can manage as being somehow normal?
Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. It’s composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.
WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!
Continue Reading →MTG: Introducing — Vox Maxima
It is 917. You are anxious about the news. You knew things were going to go badly, but you didn’t know they’d be this bad. You run through the streets of the city, trying to get the feelings out of your heart, feeling your fingertips numb, the swell in your throat and the agony of knowing, of knowing this.
The world is going to end. Sometime in the next few years. Sometime soon.
It’s called the Necrocalypse. The actual specifics are confusing – there’s a confluence of so many magical factors, and it seems to be directly tied to activities of spellcasters. The same people who made the world you live in, with the towering, safe, well-cared for and healthy hallmarks of the life you lived were all at the expense of something… coming. Something eventual. Something inevitable.
You take in a deep, helpless breath.
You close your eyes.
You open your eyes. It is 927.
You stand in the bazaar, surrounded by the noise and sound of the clink of coins and the lowing of the camels and the other animals here for trade. Everyone around you hesitates too – you can see it, the moment that happened to everyone else. You know where you are – a Kraivh Cremains Bazaar, here to trade with the bone dust that drives the heart of the Kraivh Assembly’s great industrial and military engine…
… but you have no idea what you did yesterday.
Or the day before that.
Ten years of your life, disappeared, and ten years of everyone’s life.
Ten years missing.
What happened?
A DECADE LOST
You blinked, and ten years disappeared. The world is changed, with five factions grappling to contend with this new reality and its new crusades, rebuilding the missing time and what it means, in the great empire of the Kraivh Assembly.
A BILLION DEAD
One person in nine is gone. A whole Empire, spread across what were a host of countries, holds the world together, handling the tragedy. But as instantly as the Empire appeared, so to do its enemies – beset from without and within by threats to its tenuous stability. The machinery of war has been set in motion as everyone contends with the sudden, widespread loss of their time.
Planeswalkers are stranded, unable to Planeswalk away. The Emperor holds the Assembly together with both hands, turning to his daughters to quest to save the Empire. They travel the land, meeting its people, and trying to understand the words that destroyed a decade. They seek to express the Vox Maxima – the greatest voice.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
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