Chat Thread

[Ranger]

When imposed, you can still shapeshift. When I'm bored I may turn into a giant and sit on a campus building or stand in the middle of the road just for fun.

[Guest]

I never thought of shapeshifting when imposed for myself, so that's interesting, but I'm talking about some poeple thinking that I need to switch or front to 'experience', or I'm forever immature, unfulfilled, directionless, ambitionless, without cravings and naive. Unless I front.

 

What if we're all 4-way-passive-fronting-with-simultaneous-experiences? Add that to the glossary terms.

 

[Ranger]

If you guys are already back-seat fronting, fronting isn't too different. The main difference is my host isn't processing as much information unlike myself.

 

Also, possession is nice if you want to do things and learn more about yourself as a person, but it isn't required. I ultimately decided that it's something I would like to pursue.

[Guest]

Well, we're on the same side then Ranger.

[Ember.Vesper]

Is this where random standalone stories peripherally related to tulpas go?

 

One of the player characters in my long-term Dresden Files campaign is a wizard private investigator, Markus. Markus has been in a relationship with a sidhe (fairy) princess, Monica, almost from the beginning of the campaign, even though she uses him shamelessly and looks down on him. Since Monica became Queen of the Spring Court, she hasn't had much time or use for Markus and her secretary sometimes refuses to route his calls through. Markus eventually confronted Monica about this and she admitted that she doesn't trust his judgement about something being important enough to interrupt court business. (Markus has awful judgement in every area of his life, not just in dating fae who don't love him.) He asked what he could do to have her show him trust and respect.

 

Now, I've played Monica nearly a hundred hours over the past two years. She's never displayed the slightest flicker of self-awareness, thank God, but her personality is extremely vivid and I'm often surprised by what comes out of her mouth. She said she would trust him if he consented to having a "fae symbiont of wisdom" implanted in his head. There were many different components to the deal, a side effect of which is that Markus can't tell anyone about the symbiont. So if he gets distracted talking to the symbiont in front of people, he’s out of luck.

 

I had a few sessions to think between Markus and Monica striking a deal and Markus getting the implant. Other characters, one in particular, have lived or appeared in the protagonist’s head in the original novels, so there is precedent for this sort of thing. I've often addressed issues in my own life through the medium of the game, so I decided to include lots of different tulpamancy concepts. Markus' player has known about Vesper for a long time and recently had dinner with her. I told him I was going to "give him a taste of what it's like to be me".

 

I named the symbiont "Sophie", based on the Greek word for wisdom. I usually don't decide much personality in advance for my characters. I knew in advance she would give consistently good advice about not doing all of the stupid stuff Markus always does and that she would be fun and have her own issues and values and motivations in addition to being a symbiont of wisdom.

 

A few minutes into playing her, I knew she was, in her own view, a cute, perky, and enthusiastic twelve year old girl with a slight lisp. Ummm... it's just barely possibly I was influenced by someone here.

 

-Ember

[Guest Reilyn-Alley]

Ember, Hahaha! I love it! Bad wizard! Bad wizard! Oh! Good wizard! Do that more! *headpats*

 

Yeah Misha, I think it's like how I realized after all the stuff I already do, sharing front, that switching would probably just be.. Less time with Lance so why bother doing it? I think I still like the concept, but maybe that's just because it's something new to try and we have put effort into it with no results yet so there's that stubbornness in both of us going "let's at least do it once to say we tried it and justify our efforts", lol. I think if we had an awesomesauce wonderland to play in and everything was so real and amazing it would have really lowered my interest in the outside world, but that wasn't the case and I have no complaints with how things turned out.

 

I think if there comes a point that someone has to stop and go "Wait, why do I want to even do this thing? It seems pointless", there is clearly little desire for it so just move on and find new things to work towards? I mean, we gave up on the mentality a while back that tulpamancy was a checklist of experiences and everything had to be checked off. Fun neat stuff to try sure! But.. I mean, even if we never get better at anything and we never have a vivid wonderland or manage to switch or get any better at this parallel processing thing, have lucid dreams, etc, I think we already now have a good enough thing going on to be happy together for the rest of our lives. <3

[Guest]

Mhm!

[Ranger]

Cat likes to come up with story characters, but she decided to keep story characters and the Grays / me separate from them once she became really confused over the whole Gray Ranger / the Gray Dimension dynamic. Ever since, Gray Ranger the story character and the Gray dimension became two separate things.

 

I don't really know if I would want to talk to any of the story characters. Maybe talking to Perry would result in the most interesting conversation. (He's an alien who can quickly re-generate who has a vice for stealing cash and stashing it).

 

• Cat has also thought about stories about Tulpamancers. One was supposed to be more realistic where the main lead was sexually harassed by either a co-worker or her boss and her friends who support her happen to be Tulpamancers.
  
• This one she wanted to be a video game. The back-story is about a young woman who's a practicing elemental wizzard and her Tulpa is an anthro-dragon. In this universe, they don't have the internet but they have a special place were Tulpmamancers across the kingdom meet every year face-to-face to practice magic. The intresting thing is magic is soul-based, and Tulpas have their own magic, so ultamitely the main character has lightening powers and the Tulpa has fire powers. The main story is about a younger magic practicioner who discovers that "she" has two forms of elemental magic, but the main characters try to keep their plural identity a secret.
  
• Tulpamancy has inspired Cat the idea that aliens can be naturally plural. One idea was an alien who hooks his mind to the main human character's mind (unknowingly), and the human is helped by the alien's Tulpa. (The human thinks the Tulpa is a real human being). Another idea that stuck around is one alien's body has a logical and primitive understanding of emotion, but can create Tulpas that understand emotion and can act as diplomats... That story idea is extra weird for a lot of reasons though...
  

[Guest]

Sounds really interesting actually. Throw in a trip to Mars or a mechanical spider and it's a summer blockbuster, i'm not really joking.

[Jamie]

Guys! When I was in middle school with Gavin, we read the first book of the Hybrid Chronicles by Kat Zhang, What's Left of Me. In these books, everyone is born with two identities, but one is naturally dominant, and the other is supposed to disappear during early childhood. As you might guess, the protagonists are a system of two, where both personalities stay.

 

I really want to read these books again- I actually only ever read the first one. It was my only source of plurality representation that wasn't DID or "insanity" based for years.

 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11043618-what-s-left-of-me

 

Gavin thinks about writing a book about being a tulpa. He's not sure of the plot, yet.

 

-J

 

Edit: Bad spellcheck, bad!