March 3, 2024

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!

Goals

  • The Iacon College is a place for information. They care about information in an entirely cold way. Fundamentally, they think that everything that exists is anchored in reality by information and therefore, all information that’s available to access in the world can be catalogued. Here, then is an opportunity to express a lot of technical information.
  • Express the Iacon character:
    • Demonstrate multiple attitudes towards information that all value information
    • Demonstrate a lack of emotional depth in exchange for informational proof
    • Demonstrate the heavy reliance on modularity – Iacon agents have servos integrated into themselves, pulling them out to do minor tasks while they leave them as they are
    • Demonstrate the problem they have with the Missing Decade: They started transhumanist projects to escape the Necrocalypse, but do not know if that event has been averted or not.
    • Demonstrate that the Iacon are willing to do something drastic in order to protect the entire empire from the Necrocalypse, and refer to the Great Distribution.
  • Give the Main Cast an opportunity to meet Inx and hear his story about something he discovered digging through junk. This should probably be something he tells one of them, separately, and reflect any later theme. Suggestion is that the person who hears the story is Primrose, because she’s socially inquisitive and less engaged with the more challenging mystery the rest are engaging with.
  • Guide the characters on to the next section of the story, where they’re going to push through Kraivh Territory to investigate the Jatku hives on the periphery of the Empire.
  • Highlight the main cast of the Iacon crew, notably Yndelle and Inx
  • Show that Cazas has met the Iacon Council and brought an official seal from them, suggesting the way the Emperor has kept the Iacon Council resurrected.
"Chronx, Time Dripper WUB Legendary Artifact Creature — Construct Chronx, Time Dripper can’t be sacrificed. At the beginning of your end step, draw a card for each charge counter on Chronx, then put a charge counter on it. If you own Chronx, you may exile it. If you don’t, the next player in turn order gains control of it. “The meeting will commence when we have a quorum. Entering wait mode.” 2/2"
"Yndelle, Acting Council 1WUB Legendary Artifact Creature — Artificer Yndelle has fabricate X, where X is the amount of mana spent to cast it. 2, sacrifice a token: Draw a card. While the Council deliberates eternally, Yndelle exhorts the Iacon to simply proceed with research. 0/1"
"Inx, Reconstructor 1B Legendary Artifact Creature — Artificer T: You may cast target creature card in a graveyard this turn. Each creature you cast this way is an artifact and enters the battlefield as an artifact. (It’s not a creature.) 1/3 ---Other Side--- The Timeless Silence WWUU Enchantment — Saga I, I - Destroy all creatures. End the turn. (Exile all spells and abilities from the stack. The player whose turn it is discards down to their maximum hand size. Damage wears off and ""this turn"" and ""until end of turn"" effects end.)"
"Ravite, Dragoncrafted WWUU Legendary Artifact Creature — Knight Eminence — As long as Ravite is in the command zone or on the battlefield and it’s your turn, each creature you control assigns combat damage equal to its toughness rather than its power. Bit by bit, she shed the weight of all but her convictions. 1/4"
"Great Distribution 2WB Sorcery Exile all creatures. Then, each player creates X 1/1 colorless Servo artifact creature tokens, where X is the number of creatures controlled by the player who controlled the most creatures exiled this way. Material can be used for the remanufacture, and the immaterial attached when convenient."

Characters

In the Iacon college, characters are mostly interested in staying in one spot and remaining working on their research. Characters in this section are best considered as setting up information or laying plans or themes for later pieces. Since most of the Iacon characters have mechanised and distributed their intelligence, they can do things like give communication drones or something like that to other characters.

  • The Iacon Council, a character in absentia. This is a body of administrative researchers whose magical runes keep the College isolated from the Kraivh assembly. At some point in the Lost Decade, these characters left the college and haven’t returned. They still send edicts to the college, but it turns out their orders to do things like repeal the separation of the college from the empire are just being ‘lost’ in the paperwork.
  • Yndelle, the interim rector of the College is the woman whose focus on her research has her pursuing the ends of the Great Distribution, but also keep the Iacon Council’s wishes for integrating into the empire from coming to pass. She’s driven and thoughtful but also extremely dispassionate: her greatest weakness is an inability to embrace sentimentality. Even in the context of the college, she feels no traditional import to the Council, because they are not present to argue their case.
  • Inx, a scrapper who hangs around the perimeter of the college, explores the desert ruins and finds magical junk to bring back to the college and sell it. He has all the hallmarks of a typical Kraivh cremains scrapper – it’s the discovery of the history of the pre-Iacon superweapons that mess with time that shake him up and push him away from the emotional indulgence of the emperor.
  • Ravite, a lonely cyborg guard who helps them travel from the Iacon perimeter to the ruins of a city destroyed by the Jatku Outcasts. She moves slowly and patiently, and seems to have a damaged perception of the current date – she lists years that haven’t happened yet, like they’re in the past. Despite this, though, Ravite is extremely reliable and very good at making enemies that attack the group crumple under their own weight. Think magical akido, but like, actually does something.
  • Carmine, an arrogant, self-impressed woman from the colleges who loves to deliver speeches and lectures, but who also, upon interrogation, reveals she’s a Planeswalker – she’s not from the Kraivh Empire. But when pressed, she refuses to explain more about what that means – beyond hinting she can’t leave. She does however, have a glow about her that Primrose mentions.

Scene

  • The Scooby Gang arrives in the Iacon college, after a long description of travel throughout the empire. Describe the Cremains Bazaars – which are places trading the remains of the billion dead, clean bones and other remnants from the lost decade.
  • When they arrive in the college, they experience its literal induction – servos and robots that try to guide them through the induction into the college, meeting different authority figures as they give their lectures and times.
  • During this time, they eventually meet with Yndelle who takes them down to the research stacks to find the servos that have been recording through the Lost Decade.
  • This gives them opportunity to see the legendary characters that aren’t quite people – like the quorum drone Chronx, that’s always trying to assemble a quorum for the Iacon Council. This is a hint that the Iacon Council cannot be assembled, because they’re dead.
  • Jatku II and Cura have an exchange in consideration of Ravite – they watch her defending the college from threats in the desert, and talk about why they’re driven to fight for protecting their friends.
  • This also leads to the group learning about the next possible hint for organic memory storage – the insect cult, the Jatku Outcasts, which are at the edges of the forest across the desert. This also shows a second use of the name Jatku, and gives Yndelle an opportunity to explain who Jatku was and how important she was to research, all without realising she’s talking to Jatku II.
  • This introduction inspires curiosity in Kraivh IV, who asks if she knows anything about Ynvei, her mother. Yndelle explains the strange and complex theory of Ynvei, the idea of the Grand Design as a sort of omniconspiracy that could be self-sustained by sheer complexity itself.
  • At some point here, Inx discloses his story about time-warping WMD spells, and Cazas learns about the Great Distribution. These two ideas influence the group to have different views of the empire’s enemies – Cazas sees them as just as bad as what they say the Empire might be, but whoever learns about the time-bombs considers that people can want to restore damage that’s been done.
  • The group, realising they can only get partial information from the Iacon, prepare to leave, with Ravite’s help.