I don't care about Pure Wyld. I mean, I like that it exists, it's a neat bit of setting concept. Telling people that if you wander far enough from the world all order and reason is lost, that's cool. It also doesn't matter. It is literally designed to be unplayable, because you actually need something to have causality and rules to play them in a game.
Same, actually. I... think either I misread something, or you did, or we both did, or...?
What I'm concerned about is the edges of Creation, the playable place. This is where the shaped raksha hang out - because they have taken form and too much Chaos is actually hostile to them now, and because there are bigger and stranger things than them in the more chaotic parts that threaten them. So, nobility in exile. This isn't because they are a community that has universally decided to advance on Creation as one group - it's because they are the raksha, the Wyld is the Wyld, and so it pushes them towards Creation unless they want to be eaten by monsters.
Actually still on board, more or less. See, I actually like the idea of animal-analogue Wyld entities, intermediate creatures that are more than just Wyld robots but not as developed and conceptually adept as the average raksha; mostly, because it gives me more room to fiddle around with the entire conceit of what raksha are, metaphysically.
There's a couple different directions you could go with that. First off, the idea of them being less competent at weaving coherent tales to hide behind, so their facades are metaphorically misspelled and missing crucial lines of text. As a result, their behavior and appearance tend to be just plain off from what they wanted, almost like an in-universe version of a glitched-out NPC.
Instead of a vicious hunting wolf that feasts on the blood of men, the Wyld Beast forms as a shuddering, vaguely hound-shaped mass of black fur and sulfurous mist, tearing down stone structures and somehow "drinking" them through squirming tendrils of its own vomited-up intestines - because not only are its perceptions of Creation's rules incorrect, it then bungled the attempt to create a story to sustain itself with, so now
both are riddled with mistakes and logic errors.
Another Wyld Beast, attempting to hide behind the mask of a dashing traveler and his horse, emerges through the gate more or less like what it was aiming for... except that its saddlebags don't open, they're just canvas-textured masses of flesh on either side of the horse body, and the "gloves" its rider body "wears" are just its own overly leathery-looking hands, complete with fingernails if you look close. When the rider body speaks, its voice comes from the horse body, and the horse body's neighs emerge from the rider body.
Alternatively, they aim low, try to pass themselves off as "a traveler" or "a deer", or something similarly innocuous. Maybe they're trying to make it easier to ambush prey, maybe they're actually just clever enough to realize that more complex stories just don't work out right, but whatever the reason, the results are equally flawed.
On the one hand, Wyld Beasts deliberately choosing a bland, uninteresting self can be devilishly hard to pin down; their fabricated existence is so banal that it simply slides off of mortal minds without making an imprint, like trying to remember a single blade of grass in a field. Essentially, they crudely replicate the Arcane Fate of Sidereals, albeit through radically different methods and with less potency.
The downside is that proper raksha avoid such forms for a reason - that same boring quality that lets the Wyld Beast use it like an invisibility cloak also rasps painfully at their inner self like a straitjacket, constricting unpleasantly whenever they try to act against the humdrum story they've woven around themselves.
Likewise, 'boring' and 'powerful' don't often go hand in hand, making this second category of Wyld Beast almost painfully reliant on ambush and a quick kill, because they don't have the raw strength or skill to overwhelm an aware opponent, and every hostile move they make pushes them closer to being crippled by their own fraudulent self-identity.
Your opinion?
