HEY ALL! Super excited to share what I've been working on narratively for this thing. 4 new chapters and an editing pass! We clocking it at around 58k words now. Once I hit 100k, we’ll be gearing up to post on Royal Road!
First off, new art from @kohimakko!
Couple of things first (wow patch notes for a piece of fiction):
Title Change
Another title change. I wasn't really vibing with either Ultimaviolent nor Ultraviolent, so I decided to go for the name of the main characters. The Red Bodhisattva Cadre (yes, from Red Gleaming Saints).
Red = Revolution, Marxist, Maoist, etc.
Bodhisattva = Cultivation for the sake of the Masses, Collective Cultivation, and so on
It fits right in!
Subtitle Change
Our little genre marker now I feel like is going to be this one as well. New Weird Cultivation fits the most.
New Weird = A slipstream Literary genre that breaks all Fantasy conventions and mixes Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror. The most formative novel of my entire life was China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, closely followed by Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Wolf. So you can expect that even more now here!
The entire saga will go through the Three Realms with the whole crew, so we start at urban and countryside fights all the way to intergalactic combat. Like a real heaven transcending xianxia! But with a Dialectical Materialism twist of course.
Some Lore Switches
Revised some things as I nail down a bit more of the setting as I move it to its Xianxia roots.
Gleaming Saints are Bodhisattvas. Despite my past reservations, I think using the actual term, as it is an English word now as well, is going to hit what I really wanted to say. Same things goes for a lot more things. I think the strength of Words is the evocativeness of its preciseness, so I’m hoping to hit that with the setting.
Thus, Red Gleaming Saints are the Red Bodhisattvas!
Sects
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. - karl marx
SECTS STILL LIVE. The richest Sects are those that collaborated or turned into corporations. These Mega-Sects hold various smaller Sects within them (for example, Haestann Company having the Mekanician Sect, the Digitarian Sect, the Corsair Sect, and so on). The remains of the cannibalized Sects.
In Post-Calamity, Sects still live. Many of them endure by going underground, others endure by steeping halfway into Capitalism, understanding the immanent contradictions and working to intensify them. There are hundreds of Sects still alive, often with just 5 to 6 members in their coterie. But they are Sects all the same.
In Post-Calamity, the Sects have become essentially skillsets. Being part of a Sect means you are trained in that Sects martial arts and/or sorceries, secret techniques, and augmentations. These Sects not only teach their fabled secret techniques, but also a certain skillset that would help the disciple of that Sect to learn more.
The Sects at this point have even become synonymous with “Jobs” or “Professions.” If you’re of a particular Sect, people assume that you’re in a particular labor field already.
Every martial art discipline and every sorcery has been monstrously turned into an income avenue. In post-calamity, there are no pure witches or sorcerers anymore—any sorcerer or witch worth their salt has turned their skills into businesses, start-ups, onstrand personas.
When you say that you’re a professional witch, then you’re doing it to make money. Otherwise, you’re a hobbyist. Why should anyone trust you? Unless, of course, you’re an elder, or a teacher of some kind.
All that is holy is profaned.
When the world governments returned they had to make sure all martial arts were pacified as well. This meant that any martial art being practiced must be in the context of sport. Otherwise, while not strictly unlawful, it is not encouraged to be practiced in public. Old sect masters and martial hermits have turned their dojos and clubs into revenue streams. Some of them do it to support the club. others do it to keep themselves afloat. Capitalism creates businessmen out of martial artists.
Aall that is solid melts into air.
The [UNFOLDING INFINITE PETALED LOTUS MANDALA] of the Martial Underworld is a coterie of Sects that operate under the same organizational structure, less out of camaraderie and more out of necessity. There are a hundred hundred Sects out there, some only having one or two practitioners, but they are protected as a piece of revolutionary counter-hegemony and violence by the Communist Party, which continues to survive as the underground force against the rest of the world.
The Communist Party of the World is sometimes called the Earth Womb Coterie or the Knights of the World.
These Sects not only teach physical martial arts, sidhi techniques, cultivation, and so on, but also teach a particular Skillset that the individual can then use to greatly benefit their own community or integrate into the proletariat.
Sect Specialties
Each Sect has a Specialty that colors how they approach situations.
[STRIKE] Sects deal damage. they avoid damage by either being very mobile or being very far. In non-violent situations, their teachings promote forward thinking, work towards creating and/or strengthening regional vanguards, participation in electoral politics as praxis, direct action, strikes, and protests.
[DISRUPT] Sects afflict debilitations. Intercept harm. Mitigate loss. or applies battlefield manipulation or control. In non-violent situations, [DISRUPT] Sects are all about spreading agitprop, cultural counter-hegemony, engaging in dialectically materialist analysis of concrete conditions (otherwise known as the Enxonian Think-Tank, named after Fulang Enxo’s tactics of dialectical analysis) infiltration, sabotage, riling up the workers, and exploiting class antagonisms.
[SUPPORT] Sects organize, strengthen, enable, and heal. In non-violent situations, [SUPPORT] Sects mobilize the masses into protests, strikes, and peasant revolutions. They create grassroots political movements. They teach true political education and create durable power within mass communities, workplaces, and trade unions to bind the disparate struggling proletariat together.
Some Sects for the main crew:
Wanjo: Sword Dialectician
Zaji: Asuri
Kancil: Vanquisher/Eschatonian
Metteya: Immanent/Saint
To Come
That’s it for now. Here’s some plans though:
GOV BETA MANUSCRIPT 2 will release before the Royal Road Release of RBC. That one will have all the revisions to align it completely with current Lore as well as some new scenes at the end to connect it better as a Prologue to Red Bodhisattva Cultivation! Raxri/Zan Reng will return soon!
The Lore changes are coming to the 10,000 Swords Against Heaven as well. It’ll come with the 2.0 change once I get more widespread feedback in a few months. I don’t expect I’ll get a lot though because I don’t think 10k Swords really has a widespread appeal, being a super political commie game and all.
Mechanically the game’s core doesn’t change anymore. Much of the revisions will probably be on the Progression side now as I run more and more High Level games.