Deja Vu Meanderings

I've had a bit of a weird day today.

I got up around lunchtime (fair enough, I didn't get to bed until stupid o'clock - purely by accident, but for the second night running). I got to work on putting together character traits for Smog & Mirrors. Got a fair few done.

Things get a bit foggy after that.

I do remember that Jason was downstairs when I finally went downstairs, and had been for a while (I spent some time trying to identify the voice from upstairs).

Later I realised that I didn't have enough food in the house, and that I was beginning to suffer severe deja vu as a result (largely about topics of conversation - which is confusing because conversations can get pretty cyclical in our house at the best of times). It didn't help that I was convinced that the conversation I was having with Jason and Tom, having joined it by coming downstairs, was crosswiring in such a way that I thought I was deja vuing it as being a previous conversation (which may or may not have occurred before)

Eventually I went up to Spar and spent a lot on food and snack food, to ensure that I could get something inside me to get my mental balance back in check. (It's been a while since I've had deja vu this badly. Kind of amusing, yet confusing at the same time.)

Had home-made burger, wedges and peas, courtesy of the wonderful Erfalaswen.

After Jason left, I went back upstairs and continued with the character traits. I didn't recognise any of the work in front of me as being the stuff I'd written just a few hours earlier, and spent several minutes wondering if I'd somehow opened an earlier version of the Traits and Skills document and was looking at some obsolete stuff from an earlier version of Smog & Mirrors*. No, because there was no provision for Character Traits in earlier versions of the rules.

Then I looked at the character generation rules and didn't recognise them either, which was odd because I rewrote them only a few days ago.

Even now, several hours later, I'm still convinced that I've got the Superstitious and Scientist 'opposed' traits already existent under two other names, elsewhere in the Traits section, yet I can't find them anywhere. I just deja vu them as being somewhere else in the document. (It doesn't help that it's formatted into two columns, and I'm inserting text all over the place, meaning that paragraphs are jumping around the page like buggery.)

Now I can only remember most of today as discrete snippets of conversation, rather than a progression of events. I'm not even sure some of them even happened - they may have just been imaginary contextual 'attachments' to deja vu events. The net result is a fair amount of 'lost time'. How the hell have I experienced twelve hours of daytime since I got up?

It's nothing major, just the fact that I haven't eaten properly today, and have drunk too much Coke or Pepsi (2 cans of each, way above my usual amount - I ration myself to one, normally), but it is mildly disorienting.

All in all, a weird day.


On a more mundane note, here's a list of character traits for Smog & Mirrors, so far, if anyone's interested:

Acute Sense (one for each of the five senses, valued depending on how important the sense is)
Bardic Privilege (a medieval anachronism that still exists amongst movie actors, novelists, music hall entertainers and so on)
Class (basically a modification to the social class given in your character's career, working either positively or negatively)
Contact (black marketeers, police tip offs, informers, that kind of thing)
Criminal Record (available for Minor Offences like theft, affray or public disorder, Intermediate Offences like robbery, assault or blackmail or Major Offences like murder, rape or treason)
Dependents
Desensitised
Diplomatic Immunity
Dissident (political dissidents or religious heretics)
Disturbed (not actually insane, but carrying a few Insanity points from character generation)
Duty (saving the world, looking after your family, winning the war, stamping out collectivism etc.)
Excommunicated (only applicable to followers of the Creationist Patriarchy - the world's I-Can't-Believe-They're-Not-The-Vatican religion - and comes with a tattoo or branding of an 'X' on your forehead)
Family Backing
Good Looking
Heir
Indebted
Illiterate
Lunacy (available in Minor, General or Major varieties)
Mutation (available in Invisible, Visible and Hideous varieties)
Nemesis (available in Rival and Deadly Foe varieties, with the option of a Secret Nemesis)
Outlaw (a punishment given in absentia for major crimes, or for not cooperating with the judicial system - i.e. not turning up in court or paying levied fines)
Patron
Privateer (a mercenary soldier - read 'professional adventurer' - with the right to travel and to bear arms without restriction, provided he swears temporary allegiance to the ruler of whatever territory he's in)
Runner (Good at it, I mean)
Scientist (Better at learning science stuff, but more likely to be driven insane by daemons, angels, magic and other wibbly stuff)
Strong
Superstitious (The opposite of the Scientist trait)
Thaumist (You're able to cast spells)
True Faith (Your faith can repel creatures from the Outside and their servants. You have angels and daemons as entities from the world of the setting, and then you have foul Chaos-Cthulhoid beings from beyond: the Outsiders)
Ugly As Sin
Undead - Liche (You're an undead thaumist that draws magical energy from the world around you, meaning that other undead and magical creatures in close proximity to you will suffer stat losses, and its harder for other thaumists to cast spells in your presence)
Undead - Revenant (You're a corpse that has risen from the grave due to the area's ambient magic - kind of like a zombie with a brain)
Undead - Vampire (You've risen from the dead due to your own willpower, but need to consume the thaumic energy trapped within the blood or flesh of the living in order to stay active. You're tougher than usual, but all your stats halve during daylight hours)
Union Member
Weak Stomach


They're the ones I've written so far. Ones that exist solely as names at the moment, and may get dumped before they're written up, include (in no apparent order):

Alias
Dark Secret
Crippled – various limbs, and possibly sensory stuff as well
Terminally Ill
Sterile
Disciplines of Faith
Lazy
Innumerate
Obsession – an example is Anders Festredner’s hatred of collectivists. (Festredner is this world's version of pre-chancellorship Hitler, a nationalistic fringe demagogue in the America analogue, Vinland - anyone who ploughed through the Vinland background I posted a few weeks ago will have encountered a breakdown of the Vinland Nationalist Workers' Party's political beliefs.)
Racism
Prefrontal Lobotomy (this is just a vague idea scavved from GURPS - probably not really suitable for a PC)
Calling Card – a trademark left at the scene of the crime
Cursed
Cold Blooded Killer
Cowardice
Aged
Young
Pacifist


*The World War One-era roleplaying game I'm writing, for the uninitiated.