Recently, I've been re-visiting and re-thinking Destiny Attributes A LOT, and the way I'm treating them is changing potentially a lot from the way I thought about them at the very start of designing the background stuff for the story.

1. First, I imagined people as having only one attribute, period.
2. Then I realised some people would be hard to categorise into just one attribute, but might fit perfectly into two, so I decided people could have more than one attribute at once, with one probably but not always overshadowing the others.
3. Then I realised that some people might "vacillate", and it turned into a kind of a sliding-scale system, but where every attribute sort of had its own "scale bar". Kind of like in a tabletop RPG. I created the "attribute radar charts" to represent this visually.
4. Recently, I began to realise that there could be different ways Directed and Undirected attributes could be "balanced" and turned those into a kind of continuum from Directed to Undirected (Directed, Gathered, Hardened, Lost, Scrambled).
5. Now, I've come up with yet another new idea: that every character can be one attribute for one specific thing and another for another specific thing, and so on, which is part of what creates the "scale bars" and hence the "attribute radar chart".
6. Finally, I've come up with the idea that Directed attributes have about 2-3 Undirected attributes typically associated with them instead of there being no real pattern and all of them being equally likely.

Okay, now let me explain the second-to-last bullet.

This new way of categorising characters I'll probably mostly just use on the random OC generator and similar things like that where it's a little bit like an RPG character sheet kind of thing, but basically: a character could look something like this, for example.

• Problem-solving strategy: Fantasy
• Social interaction: Esteem
• Self-image: Machination
• Crisis situations: Synthesis/Flight
• Overall worldview: Esteem

This character would mostly just daydream and waltz out of actually solving problems, but in a real emergency, sometimes come up with odd and unexpectedly brilliant deductions. That, or fret and cry. In a social situation they would tend to show off and try to earn other people's admiration, but might be bad at it as their expectations of what would be impressive might not match reality. Which, again, could end with either a brilliant save or a thousand humiliated apologies and this person trying to leave as soon as possible. They'd tend to think of self-improvement as a private project that they always needed to be constantly planning and strategising for in great detail, perhaps in order to achieve absurdly ambitious aims, and never let themselves stop working toward these plans. Overall, they would tend to think that they have a great purpose that MUST be achieved through lots of painstaking planning and work, but not know exactly to what purpose this work is leading them, only having a general (and possibly grand and impractical) idea.

Since this character has two Esteems and Flight is associated with it (tentative) they would either be classified as just Esteem or Esteem + Fantasy.

Well, um. This has been the State of the Destiny Attributes, thanks for reading I guess.

Ok, I have a couple of things to tell you about today.

First, I don't want to give too much away since I plan for a lot of the story to be about surprise, but I'm thinking about calling the chapters of Tyrian—instead of "Chapter X:"—"Truism X:", and having a weird little Artifex truism as their title (e.g.: "guns create people!", except I'm most likely not going to use that one specifically since I didn't come up with it myself).

And then there would probably be an intro sequence with either an Artifex trying to explain the argument in a TEDTalks-like format or just a random anecdote happening at one of the Artifex places but still involving the weird idea in the chapter title.

My idea is that I'll get started on these "truisms" some time in the not-too-distant future before I try to do the actual story, probably at random times while I'm taking breaks from working on Stablehand/Tenkai. It may mean some or all need to be redrawn if my skills improve by the time I do the actual thing, but I've discovered that it tends to make me more willing to actually get something done if I just get SOMETHING done right now, no matter how utterly crappy it is. And oddly enough, half the time when I "just draw garbage" it actually comes out okay anyway, if not exactly wonderful.

Second, I'm currently working on separating all the Tyrian pages out into their own hub kind of like the Stablehand pages. I don't know when that will be done though.

All the Tyrian music is now under the CC-BY-SA, because I realised it made absolutely no sense for it not to be. I've updated the "legal story" and music pages with this information.

As with what happened with Stablehand, I can't prevent you from using the CC-BY-NC-SA instead if you made a remix (etc.) before today (January 11, 2014), but from now on, this is the licence. If the licence for Tyrian as a whole turns out to be something better later, I may switch to that, but remember, "better" to me means more open, not more restrictive. And I'm guessing it will be at least a year before that happens anyway. Maybe two if I'm slow. :p

Anyway, enjoy your now-actually-libre tracks, I guess!