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MUSIC | VISUALS | ABILITIES
WORLDBUILD | ZODIAC | STORY

PERSONALITY
Spinner has a breezy and simple personality. He is a spy, he has great ease at blending in without much friction. He is a seemingly friendly and irresponsible man with a sharp shadow. Spinner does not offer his own opinions much, preferring to watch and listen and allow others to unfold before him. Underneath his nondescript facade, Spinner is a man of principles who would sacrifice anything to protect those he loves. He is passionate and artistic, but also quietly haunted from his youth and the powers of the Crying Spider. Spinner is a man who inspires others to accept themselves and brings out their best traits.

IDEALS
Self-contentment. Beauty. The Crying Spider is patron of art and intuition. A High Master of the Crying Spider sees into the mysteries of the world with far more clarity than any others. This feeds their intuition and their instability. They focus deeply in the beauty of the moment, as well as with an eye for artwork to leave behind for posterity. Life may be eternal, but so is death and rebirth; it is all as fleeting as it is everlasting. And dying means nothing in the face of truly experiencing their lives and resonating with their place in the universe.

ABILITIES

CRYING SPIDER
Disciples of the Crying Spider have more raw, innate talents than any other sect. They are powerful but without their training can be exceedingly volatile in that power. They are energy manipulators who are limited only by their own creativity.

DIVINATION
Spinner can do small acts of divination on the spot by throwing the bones for magic eight-ball style responses.

PROPHETIC DREAMS
He has a low chance of receiving omens and visions in his dreams, they are infrequent but always intense in their clarity.

SPY
Spinner is an intelligence gatherer. He is a social engineer, liar, lock pick, thief, and his stealth skills are to be admired.

Dark fantasy setting. There is not a total lack of science, but it is generally seen as a physical extension of magic. At this current timeline in the world, they are pre-industrial and lacking in complex machinery. What's there is niche and steampunk.

The society has a medieval power structure of Warlord Emperor and High Priest. They are in coalition, in theory, but often in political opposition in practice. People reside in small towns or large trade cities, frequently run by corrupt officials. Various supernatural threats and bandit gangs lurk in the wilderness.

Ghosts and spirits are a big problem in day to day life. To learn more details, see the Kingdom of Five Beasts.

The world has a bespoke zodiac system based around 5 celestial beasts:

THE GHOST DOG
Loyal but independent, intelligent, prone to loneliness. Patron of the afterlife.
THE RAT PRINCE
Shrewd, practical, prone to greed and scheming. Patron of money and earthly goods.
THE NAKED SWAN
Beautiful and charming, prone to vanity and pettiness. Patron of diplomacy.
THE CRYING SPIDER
Delicate and artistic, prone to tragedy. Patron of the arts.
THE DYING CROCODILE
Assertive and grounded, but with hearts prone to rage. Patron of war.

To learn more details, see Five Celestial Beasts.

15 year cycles, 3 years per zodiac, wherein the influence of said zodiac waxes and then wanes. Those born in the high year of their zodiac are expected to be most closely aligned with its tenets, while those in the waxing or waning years may have more personality traits from their neighboring animal.

Each beast has a series of temples where their disciplines are taught. Some monks have supernatural powers and may go on to become High Masters in their orders. The temples are always on the lookout for initiates in the arts and they squabble over their acquisition. Aspiring monks can join a temple outside their own zodiac, especially if one was born in a waning year, but those born in the high star year are generally expected to keep with their own.

Born to an average hunting village, Creeping Dust and Little Brother live out their early years in an idyllic peace. They expect nothing of note in their lives, to follow in the footsteps of their father as a hunter, to perhaps take a wife and start a family. Their simplistic lives are disrupted by the arrival of the recruiters in their village. The emperor's high priest, Sentinel In Darkness, has orchestrated a grand temple building project which requires many able-bodied workers. It is grueling work akin to slavery, and those who are taken for the work will never return to their families again.

To spare Creeping Dust, Little Brother sneaks off in the night to fulfill their family's quota of conscripts. His brother is emotionally gutted when this sacrifice is discovered. Heart broken, Creeping Dust also leaves the village. He banishes himself to a subterranean academy known as Mountain Twilight, where he intends to spend the rest of his days in study as penitence for failing to protect his younger brother.

Little Brother is 15 years old when he takes his brother's place among the temple builders. He and the rest of the caravan are marched out to the Badlands where their work awaits them. They are each initiated with a magical brand around their wrists. The magic forces them to work regardless of their own inclinations, wellness, or ability. The days are monotonous, food and water are scarce. The weakest among them die early and are cleared away like so much debris. The rest deteriorate more slowly, growing skeletal and eerie as they continue to stack bricks and carve icons. They are given wide berth by society. Even the hungry ghosts, which threaten the days and nights of their world, see so little energy in the slaves that they are of no interest.

Except for Little Brother, whose innate power as a Crying Spider draws the ghosts in over and over again. This brings unwanted attention on him... The symptoms of a latent spider are well known, and news of his existence reaches a nearby noble. Lord Burnished Copper demands to take possession of him. So, he is packed up into a wagon in bondage and sent away. He has no questions about being treated well by his new master. He will be treated like property, like a weapon to be polished. But it can be tolerated until he finds some means of escape. There is at least food at the new manor house.

The Lord Burnished Copper was born under the Rat Prince's sign and he falls in line with their league. The temples of the Rat Prince are manufacturing a coup, and any powerful Spiders they keep under their control will be of value in the war to come. Little Brother hears quite a bit about it, isolated there in the manor. He, of course, must be shown off to the other Lords who have not yet procured such a treasure.

Little Brother is turned over to his teachers then; mercenary practitioners of the celestial arts. None with the discipline nor character required by the temples, but all of them vicious in their craft. Little Brother spends his days being beaten and harassed for any failure, perceived or otherwise. The standards set before him are seemingly insurmountable. However, weary and aching, he begins to grasp at the basics of the energy manipulation that is considered so dangerous.

As he begins to remember the feeling and patterns of the threads of the universe, he also begins to have the first of his dream visions. He sees the unhappy world the Rat Princes will bring about with their despotic leanings. He sees the much greater threat of the Spectral Realm; the unparalleled beauty of the Celestial. Sometimes he even sees his older brother, holed up in the dark and the dank in the depths of Mountain Twilight. He sees the ghosts closing in.

His dreams over the years steel his resolve to escape.

Their prized Spider disappears from the manor one night, leaving not a trace of himself. He escapes into the countryside with the meager supplies he was able to gather. Away from the wards of the manor, however, he is hunted across the terrain by ghosts.

He is saved from their starving pursuit by a High Master of the Dying Crocodile. A jovial and bawdy old man named Thrashing Shell. Little Brother camps with him a few nights until they hit a small town where he can stock up on provisions and the wards needed to protect himself from the specters. Then he sets out on his own again. This is far from the first good-natured adventurer he will use as a stepping stone along his way. No one can be trusted. No one can know where he has been.

He heads for the capital to warn the Emperor. The trek to the capital is trial enough, but he must also find a way inside the imperial court without being announced. The Rats in the court will be watching for him, he knows. As much as Lord Copper might like to think he died in the countryside, food for ghosts, they will always be paranoid.

He arrives in the capital and makes pains to blend in, to make himself any other Little Brother of any other family, working for their living in the big city. But he is watching. He is watching the secret meetings, the shifts of the guards, the unexpected ways to climb up a rampart in the night.

It takes him months to feel confident in his plan, but that does not trouble him. It took him years to escape the manor house. But he is older now, wiser, and splintered with the harsh lessons he has had to learn along the way. He sneaks up into the tower where the Spymaster works late into the night.

High Master of the Crying Spider, Golden Seams, is amused by his efforts and recognizes one of his own. The worst has come to pass: the boy has been heard, and the boy has been believed. He is taken in by the spymaster's guild and kept hidden, while plans are surreptitiously devised with the Emperor for how to respond. In the intervening years of political chess... Little Brother is sent to a monastery of the Crying Spider to hone his skills and achieve the rank of High Master. It is the first time since he was 15 years old that he has not been treated as a piece of property.

He returns to the capital after five years with his new rank and an elevated family name: Artful Spinner.

As the spymaster's guild gathers intelligence, the true weapon of the coup comes to light. The temples, once thought as gestures of faith as commanded by the High Priest, are instead conduits of spectral magic which engorge the hungry spirits within their radius. Spirits empowered and emboldened will gather together into one terrible entity, to be set loose against the innocents of the country as the Rat Prince retinue carves its way to the capital.

After the capture of a particular informant close to the center of the conspiracy, it is also revealed that Mountain Twilight is to become the surest of their monstrosities. With this in mind, Spinner volunteers himself to head for the subterranean academy to investigate its goings-on. But he is already much too late, the spell has already begun, and the cavern is inaccessible. Spinner and his men search the surrounding mountainsides for another way inside, and upon finding one, they soon after find the survivors from the academy. A handful of scraggly scholars, a few more mutilated temple builders, and... his brother. His dreams of the ghosts closing in around Creeping Dust have come true, and Spinner is there to pull him back out from the dark.

They return to the capital and make their report to the Emperor. Spinner is promoted to Spymaster as Golden Seams steps down to allow a man with more vigor to lead during these trying times. Creeping Dust and one of the temple builders, Savage Hawk, are taken in as generals and advisors. The pair are sent to their respective temples to hone their skills, and upon their return they are to take vengeance upon the treacherous High Priest.

Spinner is not driven to vengeance in the same way as his brother, but does not try to deter his path. All he tries to do is figure out how to bridge the twenty years they have suffered apart so that they might once more be brothers. For now, he performs his duties: providing intelligence and instruction to his brother who strides out onto the battlefield to make the traitors suffer.