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Drawing Maps - Season 6 Faction Creation Pt. 2 - Aesthetics
🕑 Added 2019-09-18 06:08:37 +0000 UTCHey everyone! Welcome to another look into my notes as I continue to prep for Season 6, which now has a name: PARTIZAN! Listen above as I dig into a major breakthrough I had w/r/t the aesthetics of this season. This is less a Beam Saber specific thing and more general insight and workflow discussion about arriving at aesthetics for the season.
Regardless, I hope you enjoy. Also, guess in the comments about which Stels you think map up to the other key terms!
- Stel Nideo
- Type: Theocracy - PRESENT.
- The Divine Principality is built around a faith that runs through both streams of Asterism: The centrality and timelessness of the state, which itself is divine (or a conduit for divinity, depending on who you ask). They govern through biopower and necropower--all about control through law, order, categorization, and culture. You don’t need secret police when you shape everyone to police themselves.
- Goal: Secure the Borders - Nideo is cleaning house and barricading the door ahead of anticipated hostilities. Survival is the fittest.
- Corruption: 4
- Aesthetic notes, Notable NPCs, Vehicle Designs, additional traits.
- The PRESENT: Faith, political education, and the culture industries (mass media and high art, both), policing, and surveillance. They also maintain the constellation satellites that orbit the moon, ensure that anyone can look up to the sky to remember their morality lessons from childhood. They Can tell you were someone or something is now. Arbiters of the aesthetic and moral good.
- Architecture is what the architectural critic Nicolai Ouroussof called “hidden medievalism.” Using a two-part technique, Nideo architecture misdirects you from the truth of their buildings and settlements: First, they deploy the sort of “invisible” design elements that make you forget you’re in a city and walking past buildings to begin with. Lots of glass, buildings mirrored, modular, and positioned so that they reflect the sky, not each other or you. Second: critical regionalism: They adopt and extend local historical customs to underscore the Asterist principle of cellular stability, to ingratiate themselves with the locals while simultaneously beating their chests about how they can do it better. If your hometown used big orange gates, they make the biggest orange gate you’ve ever seen, and they make it so it’s one of the only places your attention goes.
- One major example of this, though also one that has actually permeated across all Nidean art: Statues as fashion and vehicular accoutrement, as lifted from the Hypha.
- Normative humanoid body mech designs. Beautiful in the way “beautiful” might apply before you put on your critical thinking cap. Featuring flourishes like capes, holographic insignia projections, and asymmetrical statuettes on their frames. Also: 12 glowing eyes in a 3x4 grid.
- NPCs
- Aleel Verdicate, The Song of Paritzan
- Ranks are: Note, Chord, Melody, Passage (two roles, you're either a Chorus or a Verse), Song, Cycle.
- Oncemore Once
- Zuse Zaveleta
- Sefton East
- Vernal Leson
- Aleel Verdicate, The Song of Paritzan
- Squads
- The Divine Imminence and Elect - Tier V - Presence itself.
- Church of Received Asterism - Tier IV - On any other world, Divinity’s first faith would be the strongest force on the planet. But here, in the birthplace of Progressive Asterism, the old church isn’t even Stel Nideo’s most capable organization.
- The Plume - Tier IV - Hallows blessed by Empyrean directly, sent to ensure that the home of Progressive Asterism remembers the strength of NIdeo’s virtue..
- The Lambic House - Tier III - Between the mountains of the Pique Ridge is a town where peasants pick fruit, and where the monks of the Sovereign Immunity who look after them in place of normal Nidean leadership, turn that fruit in the moon’s most popular drink. All involved would die before letting anyone else see the recipe.
- The Partizan Palace - Tier III - Once a week, the portcullis opens, and when it does, it brings the truth. Then, as in every system throughout Divinity, the Palace gets a hold of it, and turns it into information, indexed and improved.
- House Leson - Tier II - Though blessed by a divine, and committed to their vocation of executing the faith’s justice, House Leson remains landed lay gentry. With lineage going back to a heroic elect of the Divine Clash, Nideo holds them up as proof that courage is rewarded.
- The Divine Vernacular - Tier II - Sometimes a divine wields a blade, incomparable in sharpness. Sometimes, it allows thousands to speak instantly, at distance. You decide which is more frightening.
- Sefton East - Tier I - Though only a Melody in the church, East’s emphasis on unity and peace in a time of war have found them a loyal following.
- Ardor and Adamance - Tier I - The rare Nidean hollow unit, made of those who have yet to earn the touch of the divine, yet who strive tirelessly and gallantly towards it.
- Regions
- The Pique Ridge
- A coastal chain of mountains and the valleys beneath, leading to the highly populated shore
- The Pique Ridge
- Type: Theocracy - PRESENT.
A transcription is available for this episode here.
A full list of completed transcriptions is available here. Our transcriptions are provided by a fan-organized paid transcription project. If you'd like to join, you can get more information at https://twitter.com/transcript_fatt. Thank you to all of our transcribers!!
Comments
Keita Ohara
Getting these text summaries that accompany the audio is absolutely rad and helps me process the prep better!
Josh Good
Agreed, i always meant to watch the youtube videos or listen, but these are the perfect size to take as they come.
siberianpine
I never have time to watch long YouTube streams. A tight hour of you talking stuff through is exactly what I need and is making me less nervous about not being able to follow a what's going on when s6 starts in earnest. More of these please!
Bee Elderly
im really excited about s6 but also about this style of drawing maps! i might be biased because its easier for me to listen to podcasts than watching youtube streams !
Dan Cantu
This update made me so happy! I was on the fence as to whether or not I was going stay on for Season 6 because of the difficulty I had keeping track of everything in Twilight Mirage. Austin identifies the issue perfectly in the middle section of this update and I am optimistic that his solution will make a huge, positive difference. It reminds me of similar solutions from past oral storytelling, such at the epithets used by Homer: swift-footed Achilles, clever Odysseus, gigantic Ajax, etc. I'm excited for Season 6! (and, of course, more Bluff City)
Morgan Jackson
Also, since you asked us to guess the others: Stel Apostalos: Motion, because of its more recent integration into the DP and constantly changing History Ste Columnar: Future, because they're robots Stel Orion: Space, because it's big
Morgan Jackson
Tbh if you see "MOTION" as "ENERGY" then that's not far off from a physical description of reality! Super excited for this kind of big conceptual framework to play out on a more personal and character-driven level :)
