A good story starts at a specific place and ends at an equally specific place. There might be other stories about these characters, and those of you who know my ongoing love affair with Allan Quatermain have no doubt about my approval of that if it’s done well, but each story begins and ends on its own.

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It’s June and that means it’s time for a little Gemini solidarity. Go twins! Or at least other Gemini. This is part three of three.

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In the Middle Ages, it was sometimes believed that twins could only be born if the mother had been involved with two different men. Twins were a proof of infidelity and as such were a shameful thing to befall even the most innocent family. One twin might be secreted away, sent to live in a local monastery or with a distant relative and thus forgotten.

Or, well, honestly? Sometimes people just move away from home and no one quite knows where they’ve gotten off to until it’s too late.

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It’s June and that means it’s time for a little Gemini solidarity. Go twins! Or at least other Gemini. This is part two of three.

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Psionic talents tend to run in families. There’s clearly genetic influence, though it’s equally clear that we just don’t understand the components of psionic talents well enough to map those genes yet. Current research seems to indicate a variety of other factors coming into play, ranging from environment to family structure.

But what is most intriguing is what seems to happen when otherwise identical twins are born with psionic talents.

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It’s June and that means it’s time for a little Gemini solidarity. Go twins! Or at least other Gemini. This is part one of three, which I admit is a curious number for a series on twins.

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On Earth, we sometimes see a complication in twin-pregnancies in which one twin manages to siphon off more than their fair share of the nourishment provided by the placenta. One twin is born with a redder complexion, larger, but not always healthier, while the other is born pale and tiny and frail.

On high mana worlds, this situation can be differently dangerous, as the dominant twin steals away the physical nourishment while the frailer sibling survives by feeding on a greater share of the magical energies surrounding the twins.

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A couple of months ago, I went to a martial arts seminar where we did a variety of drills I’d never seen before. The most fun, for me, was playing with a blindfold.

I literally had no idea how easy it was to hold my own against a sighted opponent while blindfolded. I’d never done it before, it wasn’t a part of my training. But not only could I readily block almost everything that came at me, I could also consistently strike for my desired targets.

But let me repeat an important part of that: I hadn’t done this before. It was not a thing I’d trained to do.
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I love the start of a new campaign. I love new characters who don’t quite know who they are yet and a new setting where everything is fresh and full of promise. I love seeing how people choose to play characters who are more and less like previous characters and how those characters interact.

What I hate? Is how campaigns start.
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There are some in the Ingressa who can foretell the future, either in large or small ways: wisefolk know how to cast coins or read runes and answer with truths only half-unexpected, fools who can watch the rise and fall of stock prices and predict from this the color of athletic shoes that will be most popular next season, or people in between who just sometimes know how things will fall out in the end. There are people who make their livings not quite cheating at games of luck with these gifts and people who sell their wisdom by the roadside and people who live with the terror that someday someone else will realize just how much they know.

But there are other people who can make fate. With words alone they can manufacture destinies.
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You can tell a lot about a person by the equipment they choose.

We all know that. We all have developed rules for how we interpret some types of equipment. I know I have opinions about men who drive fast, red cars, and that those opinions don’t always bear out when faced with reality.
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Stories are a part of how we make sense of our world. We tell them to explain how things are, we reference them to make our own intentions clear. We don’t mean to be speaking in riddles when we do this, it’s just that I tend to think everyone has read the Brothers Grimm and Lafcadio Hearn.
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A very dear friend of mine died recently. It’ll be a couple weeks before this runs, but I’m writing this as the wound is still fresh. He was a great guy: talented, funny, kind. You’d have liked him. Everyone did, even though he wasn’t really the kind of guy everyone expected to like. He was just a little different, never quite fit in perfectly with any given group, but that was why everyone could like him.
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