“In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits . . .” ― Robert Anton Wilson
Meredith’s aspect of the Creative Fire, like all aspects of that Fire, can’t be codified precisely in words. (And if you try to capture an artist that way, you’ll find the art squeezing away between your fingers.
Considering Visiting Or Patronizing Meredith? You Ought. Here Are A Few Of The Traits Found Among Some People Who Enjoy Her Work.
Curious. Curious George was a curious little monkey. Was he ever able to go off and sign his own book deals? Who knows? If you want to find out, you’re probably curious.
Unusual. Sure, we’re all unusual. But it does depend. You shan’t need quite as much love for the unusual enjoying those gourmet custom pizzas (which are, admittedly, not exactly ordinary themselves) as you will appreciating some of Meredith’s marvelously oogie-boogie crafts.
Slightly Woo. There is a bit of mystical element here; not as much sorcery as some, not as little bit of cantrippery as you might exect.
Excited. As with some other traits, we hope this one finds you often; but really, you have quite a lot of selection to examine. You’ll want to bring your energy!
Eclectic. Some people like everything to be exactly the same in exactly the same way. These people are not ecclectic.
Some of her Lore includes:
Bone.
Lore of bone, lore of stone, Always inside, and not alone.
Meredith’s Bonework is ethical, careful, and has a resonance you can feel. Also, it’s reaaaaaaaally pretty.
Revifification.
Necromantic practice, strange and trackless, Not always evil; darkling access.
Chaos Magick
“One cannot shape the world without being reshaped in the process. Each gain of power requires its own sacrifice.” ― Phil Hine
Wasteland. Pawprints From The Heart doesn’t merely defy description; she takes description, strangles it to death, then harvests its bones in an ethical fashion. She could be Darkling for her dolls alone, or Albion for her Steampunk terns. We placed her with the Wasteland because we wanted you to be at least reasonably prepared for her to alter your reality tunnels with her brain-bending work.
Meredith is the Wise Woman of the Wastes. Her intimate knowledge of art, craft, and Necromancy is much sought-after. (However, please be courteous, and while you are not obligated to purchase anything, please don’t let your inquiries get in the way of others purchasing from her or viewing her wares. She has quite a lot of uses for ethically-sourced bones, you know.
LORE:
Meredith’s scrolls relate to a variety of subject. Her role in the Story is variegated and exciting.
WARES:
The unexpected. Pet portraits, fiber art, acrylic paintings, primitive crafts, natural bone art and some Steampunk, as well.
Dearest friends, foes, admirers, and tenured assassins,
We are tempted to present ourselves as an enterprise so massive that when you arrive, you will see a city which would shame Atlantis, erected through the force of our imaginations and a budget sufficient to purchase one or two of the less-popular suburbs of London.
The imagination part? That we’ve got.
Would you like to help us get the space ready? Would you like to show up 2-3 days early, hang out with our crew, and help us set up? And we’re not proud…if you’ve got ideas, if you’ve got decorations, if you have other ways you want to help, we’d love to meet you and get ready with you.
We’re workaholics, so doing extra work to get ready for the show IS our idea of fun. If that doesn’t sound crazy to you, you might want to meet us.
So stay alert, trust no-one, and keep your laser handy.
(Cyberpunk postulates a far-off future, like the year 2014. Postulate a world where people wear exaggerated corporate suits and ties to imagine being powerful executives at planet-shaking megacorps; hackers lead stainless-steel-rat lives between the cracks of society, dressing like scifi punk rockers because anyone who laughs at them finds their credit card numbers posted to the gigantic billboard which replaced the state of Maine; cyberwarriors are busy, not arguing with people, but fighting very, very deadly bots to get past very real electronic defenses at the ever-present risk of electrocution…)
Granted, we’re a marketplace, so you’re not all THAT likely to need to hide a murder.
Oh, sure, sure, sure. Some people, SOME people, when you say, “This link doesn’t do anything”, the first damn thing they do is CLICK ON THAT LINK.
You conniving, untrusting so-and-sos…
Now, Wonderplace Alpha is not primarily a game, which means you don’t have to worry about ‘winning’ it. (It also means that instead of having a big reveal on Saturday night, we have an extra-big, very weird party instead. Can you live with that?)
That means the ‘Intrigue’ section is not essential to the game…sorry, did we just say it wasn’t a game? We meant, ‘event’. Intrigue isn’t essential to the event, and as people putting together a Marketplace where all manner of beings interact, we have a vested interest in our patrons, friends, and stoneholders being happy and getting along.
Most of the time.
But you will find, especially if you look for it, that there are a number of characters who do have larger stories if you want to dig. You aren’t likely to do battle with axes more than once (like most people, really)…but battles of wits happen not infrequently within our walls. So bring your wits with you; you’ll want and need them.
I wouldn’t know.
I get by on good looks, myself.
EVENT SUGGESTIONS:
DO: Participate in our BBS to discuss some of the possible intrigue between our Elements.
DO: Alternately, if you want, avoid participating in advance and just show up prepared to be a little sneaky, at least when dealing with the cast and characters.
DO: be aware that while we have our gritty bits, the many Merchants of the Marketplace prefer to keep a general Faire-Day atmosphere. No matter how unpopular the apple-seller is, nobody wants them murdered until we’ve eaten the apples and they’ve helpfully pushed their carts out of our encampment and off to whatever convenient, out-of-sight place they’re choosing for their gruesome ends. We would definitely say we’re a little more like the Pirates of Penzance, and a little less like that one-eyed guy in that one movie who kept biting people’s ears off. Messy. Messy.
DO: Avoid actually scamming people. You know. This should be obvious. If it isn’t, this is definitely not going to be an exciting game by whatever your standards are. (We might run a “Paranoia” LARP someday, if you want to sign up.)
DO: Bring a pair of dice. You never know when you might need them after all.
DO: Disguise your nature beneath innocent-seeming clothes of another element.
DO: Forget that and dress like a Pirate. Sublety is for cowards!
Beings throughout the known Universe All of us here love Renaissance Faires and other places where the ordinary, everyday World gets to be part of a larger, more imaginative World, of greater possibilities!
Now, most Renaissance Faires have modern conveniences, accepted credit cards, and don’t tend to need to have the citizens rise up and man the catapults against immanent raids of werewolf hordes, like they did int he old days. Similarly, we aren’t going to check to make sure that all of your garments have been manufactured in Nevryone and shipped to Otherwhen from Neverwas.
But we do absolutely encourage you to come in costume, garb, fancy dress, character, persona, fursona, or pretty much whatever you’d like, within reason*.
Don’t worry that it won’t be ‘enough’ of anything. You CAN get as fancy as you want, and we all respect and admire people with fantasmic and elaborate gear!
But what makes a Wonderplace are the people, not the clothes**. So don’t worry and don’t be afraid to experiment! You’ll also have a chance to see what other people are wearing via our upcoming social media.
This is the time to:
Scour your closets for interesting things you’ve not worn in a while
Check the thrift shops! They have fascinating things!
If you’ve lots of lolly, consider supporting independent creators who make clothing and costumes! Some of them are our vendors!
Alternately, you could attempt to supplicate the Dark Demons of Clothing and sacrifice a leisure suit on an alter to Bajoombah, the Vile Bane of Polyester. We don’t recommend it. But you could.
You can wear your everyday walkabout stuff! That’s all right as well!
You can get your things AT the fair from our vendors! You can even talk to our vendors in advance about things they can make and hold for you.
You could visit our sponsors. They sure wouldn’t mind.
Yes, you can totally get your gear at Spirit. Plenty of us do. If Spirit Halloween didn’t extrude itself into your reality, we’d have to invent it. Same with Hot Topic, Spencer’s, and That Store Everyone Says Is Cringe But Everyone Secretly Really Wants To Go Into
* “Reason is in the tentacle of the beholder”, as Voltaire said.
** Nearly all of our clothing merchants have lodged a formal complaint against this ridiculous and unfounded idea.
“Sleep my little baby-oh Sleep until you waken When you wake you’ll see the world If I’m not mistaken…
Kiss a lover Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure…
Face your life Its pain, Its pleasure, Leave no path untaken.” ― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
The first and simplest pleasure is just strolling the Faire. Some of the enjoyment is in participating, if you choose; you get more out of your experience the more you put into it.
We’ll have shows in the evenings and performances through the day. You’ll have the chance to meet our Cast and interact with our Story, learn our Lore, and experience the grand and peculiar Concardance which is Wonderplace Alpha.
We’ll be adding programming as the time goes by. Please stop by here to stay updated on our programming and our many escapades to enjoy.
“All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elefant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games – those which can be played in any sense “perfectly”, such as a grid, Prallian scope, ‘nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions – can be traced to civilizations lacking a realistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies.
The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attributes of the pieces, is inevitably to shackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value, As a work of the intellect, it’s just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They’re just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you’ll keep fit at the same time.” ― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games*
In most lands, arguments in Wonderplace Alpha are resolved by swordfighting to the death**. However, Earth, being backward in this as in so many things, frowns upon this practice.
Now, there aren’t a lot of arguments or ‘challenges’ that need to happen in Wonderplace Alpha. Many–most, perhaps–enjoy the entire weekend without participating in the story underneath. Like any big story shared with thousands of people, it’s really made up more of what happens when you’re in a special place engaged in magic, and less about trying to rival whatever your local bards or psychic podcasts are singing about this week.
But if you do get into a situation where you need to ask a question of someone who won’t talk, or change a piece of the story and make it your own, or any time when you want to interact in-game with other game elements and you aren’t sure if you ‘should’ win, you need:
A referee
A clear idea of what you want to ask for
Everyone who should be present (if you’re doing something involving someone else, they’re generally going to need to be there, unless it’s behind their back.
And a challenge ball. A “challenge ball” is a small, cheap object which is used to try to alter the Wonderplace reality around you. Historically, we never know how many challenge balls to provide each year. That makes things terrif–er, interesting.
(Most of the time you’re interacting with any game or immersive elements, you’ll be near a staff member who can referee, sometimes in your encounter with them.)
All you need to do is explain your intention to the referee, and hand them your challenge ball. They’ll take the challenge ball whether or not you win, and listen to your explanation. If they’re refereeing, they’ll make the decision between two players.
So an encounter might be of this variety.
YOU: I say that, on the night of the murder, I was actually nowhere near the city where she was brutally slain ten years ago.
REFEREE: Well, in real life, none of us were here ten years ago. But if that was true, it would change the whole story we just heard about this place. What’s your better story?”
Not everyone likes to do storytelling in the middle of their weekends. And if we want to have a story you can actually mold, that does mean it’s not going to be a “start, problem, solution, end” story, as if you were trapped inside it. It’s a “This happened, then we did this, then we did that, then this happened and all these things happened”. That’s not a story with a specific start and end for the weekend; but it’s a story you can take home afterwards.
* Or possibly ‘to the pain’.
** Have you read “The Player Of Games”? Whether or not you know the rest of Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” series, ‘Games’ is an intense tractor-beam of slow-building obsession. I don’t know what I would do if I were a slightly superhuman games expert, playing a game so large an entire species built itself around that game. I don’t think I have the courage to try to write it. But Mr. Banks did.
“There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven’t even started wondering about yet.“ ― Roald Dahl, “James and the Giant Peach“
Some of what we are is quite simple. We’re located in your lovely city of Lake George, New York, at a very pretty and rather capacious venue. We’re not floating in some fairyland in your dreams; that costs extra. Our areas are big, outdoor spaces full of vendors and interesting people. You’ll need to do a bit of walking to get around. (There are some golf carts available for rental.)
Some of what we are is rather more complicated. You never know who, or what, you’ll encounter at Wonderplace Alpha…and honestly, neither do we.
We hope that’s comforting.
You’ll be able to go back and forth between our various places, and will probably want to explore our whole grounds. (Although if you just want to spend the whole time hanging around the Pub or the Barnyard Market, who are we to stop you?) They are functional spaces and decoration is variegated but the inhabitants are…colorful, to say the least. (Would you like to assist us? If you want to volunteer to be part of the heroic team of pioneers who’ll be helping us decorate in the days before the event, do get in touch.)
In each area, you’ll see many people wearing the garments and gear of their assorted persona and stations.
You’ll also see people wearing normal everyday clothes, because all are welcome at Wonderplace Alpha.
But thing might get a little weird.
Albion is our Steampunk, Mad Science, and Eccentric Weirdness area. Do say hello to one or more of the Mad Hatters, would you?
In this area, you can expect to see things that are medium-tech. But there’s a lot an Artificer can do with 19th-century tools. Given that engineering insanity is involved, it can be hard to predict what you’ll see here.
Dress has rather a whiff of 19th century Great Britain, at least as viewed through the eyes of Young Dr. Frankenstein. It’s a quirky blend of technology and hand-labor here. Some clothing is quite elaborate, with suits and dresses (though dresses are terribly impractical for our terrain, but they’re just grand for tea) and some clothing is very simple.
A number of our attendees from Plain Boring Regular Earth tend, by choice or through the difficulty of acquiring good anti-phlogiston goggles in the average Home Depot, to wear basically everyday clothing with a few accessories. And that’s more than fine, as well.
Your vendors are particularly likely to have offbeat, ‘punk, alternative, and other strange gear.
Dress is likely to be anything ranging from the human Middle Ages and Renaissance, to Fae fashion. It’s where you’d be most likely to see nonhuman folks. It’s where you’re most likely to BE nonhuman folks. Titania has a secret for you.
You know, we do sometimes encounter Faeries. And it’s very difficult to predict what they’ll wear or or do. Some are very traditional, some are very punk rock.
When the going gets weird…
The Barnyard is our general marketplace, gathering area, and communal hall.
It’s the friendly gathering area of our outpost.
The Wasteland is our post-apocalyptic, scifi, future, and Gods-only-know-what.
We’re not saying that everyone here is a misfit, a punk, a loner, or a trickster. Some of them are also a little weird.
Darkling is a haven for souls who celebrate the night, and its oddities.
Dress is generally (but not invariantly) with an eye towards that which is darkish, Halloween, Samhain, midnight, Gothic. They’re not necessarily evil, any more than anyone else; just the Winter Court.
Darkling has no leaders and no special missions.
Honest.
While Darklings, like the Goths of other places and times (both the Peter Murphy kind, and the sacking-Rome kind) often wear black, black and also, for variety, black… like all Elements, they do value individual freedom, and you can wear what you want. Those who want to keep in theme often tend toward looks like those found in Villains, the Undead, the Zombie Zoo, and pretty much how we tend to dress from about August first to about November 23rd.
The Wasteland, as seen by Mr. William Broad (you might know him as Billy Idol.):
