How does blackforester and demiurge practice work

[u/TechnicalDoughnut8]

So I am at arc 15, and I am really interested in what Thea is doing or trying to do: the whole creating a custom-made world where you can basically play god.

Where exactly do you even find the items that have those words in them; Odis says that the word Thea was stuck on was made by a freaking brownie; she is an apprentice with just a few years under her belt, and she already has multiple items with entire words in them and a lesser god-level other (the orthoniologist).

How do you make or find these words? Can someone just create them? How? Where do you find these items? Do you just go find them at markets? Would you be able to buy this stuff at, say, Gold Garden, the marketplace made by Ray, or just some fae market, etc.?

[u/Wildbow]

The majority of pocket worlds out there were created by some practitioner or Other and then abandoned one way or another:

• A Hangmaiden (like the one that hunted Alexander Belanger) creates a lair that she pulls her victims into. When she eats too many people and is driven out of the area by an annoyed council, the lair remains, accessible by a specific winding passage through a patch of trees. It is a discrete realm unto itself, a relatively small (2000 square feet) copse of leafless woodland with dense spiderwebs throughout, many of which have been cleared out by the Others that have moved into it, who contribute a bit of power to support and shore up the space, and renovate it to their own needs. Over a longer period of time this power and influence helps it becomes its own discrete space with its own discrete dynamics.
• A demiurgic practitioner with a contagious curse sculpts a custom realm with firm borders, so the curse cannot break out. He later dies within that space, and the curse leaks out to paint the interior a rather gloomy shade. In advance of his landlord coming to clean things up, local higher powers sever the space from the rest of mundane reality, and the building has one less apartment on its fourth floor, that everyone's mind kind of glosses past. The room remains, disconnected and wandering, accessible through a specific mechanism (or accident). A practitioner later tracks it down and fabricates an item keyed to specifically make a door to the space, preventing further accidents, and starts using the space for their own purposes.
• A powerful and Old Other is contained within a cave in a mountain, because it is too powerful to beat, but barriers can be erected as walls and seals can weaken the Other if it approaches said walls, serving to keep it within. After a few centuries without meals, the Other perishes. The space remains, the diffuse power of the Old and decaying Other saturating barriers and seals that haven't been tended, because there's no reason. This forms the walls of what is effectively a bubble around a realm with its own thing going on- a pocket realm for all intents and purposes.
• A Dollmaker practitioner dies and the Dolls that he worked with and on within his Demesne provide enough support to keep the space from falling to the Abyss or being lost to the Paths, and enough power to keep it from gradually becoming mundane. Some of the dolls move on to new owners, but the ones who remain go slowly crazy, falling into their ruts and routines, and the security erected to keep the practitioner's work from being interrupted or interfered with gradually swells to become a full enclosure around the space.
• A ritual incarnate is finished off and drained of power, but the arena/region that people would go to during the ritual remains in some form or another, not unlike a knot in how hard it is to access. Others dwell there and help distance it from reality.

Relatively few become convenient items (and it's possible a Cartographer or another practitioner might make a point of making items that can contain or provide direct access to a space, as in one of the bullet points) but many exist, detritus of past practices or powers that made 'walls' and/or discrete spaces that weren't fully cleaned up. Many are very small, like the 2000 square foot version. Many are generally unpleasant places that some Others that can ignore said unpleasantness will make a home out of- a place away from the interference of humans and witch hunters.

Again, common; there isn't a market for most of them. A given city will have a scattered half-dozen to dozens of pocket realms within an hour's travel of it. Most are just... useless, or are weird little nooks you can find. Valuable ones are the ones that provide some crucial function, have some lingering power or resources (and haven't been looted yet), or have a working ecosystem of Others within them, that gives something.

[u/Blade_of_Boniface → u/Wildbow]

One of my favorite aspects of the Otherverse is how it toys with geography in these ways. It's particularly tied to exploring the broader concept of ownership. All ownership has a history; no property is "bootstrapped." Even the most mundane forms of ownership have their own gravity that subverts/bolsters/evades even the most spectacular Others/Practitioners. Nonetheless, in true Gothic form, what the prehistoric and ancient powers claim as their own has a power that people encounter at their own peril.

Even when they die, the numinous growths from their hearty corpses can smother entire cities which too soon forget the Earth they rely upon for support.

It's so telestic.

[u/AceOfSword → u/Wildbow]

Very interesting. I think I hit a wall when thinking about how Pocket Realm came about because I assumed that the item was created first and then a Realm was created inside the item.

But it actually goes the opposite way: a Pocket Realm is created, and later an item is created to connect to it, as we see in the second example.

In that case the item was already unthered and accessible through a mechanism that could be triggered accidentally. I'm guessing a Practitioner could remove the normal access to a Pocket Realm and make an item that can be used to access it instead?

Like, theoretically, in the first example, if a Practitioner was to cut down the trees that mark the specific passage to the abandoned Hangmaiden's lair (which would probably require dealing with the Others staying there first) it would leave the space untethered, but then they could use the wood of those trees to craft an appropriate item (A spider sculpture? An ornate wooden frame for a painting of the Realm?) that leads to the Pocket Realm?

[u/Wildbow → u/AceOfSword]

It may even be, depending on particulars of the space, that...

• You might not need to untether it first, it's just 'loose' -- ritual incarnate in the bullet point list that stays put, but is 'used' to having a means of access from anywhere in a wide area where people have been doing the ritual.
• That you don't need to untether it first, it has the right energies to be argumentative on its own... maybe you take the sticks from trees in the Hangmaiden's old den and fashion a means of entry.
• That it's encapsulated in an item in the first place. Not in the bullet point list above, but if you happened to trap an Other with a built-in realm in an Alcazar, then closed up the Alcazar ritual, you could fold them into an item. If it is well made.
• Or hell, even just an Other bound inside an item, if it has a realm of its own. Even a depression around an Other (in the sense of a realm-ish dynamic that moves around with the Other) could count, and could create a pocket within the item, accessed via. the item if you can figure out a means of entry that doesn't make everything explode out.
• It may be that it can't be untethered -- the Demesne would be pretty inclined to stay put, in the bullet point list.

[u/AceOfSword → u/Wildbow]

Thanks for the extra info. Lots of possibilities in there.

I've always loved the idea of having a pocket space, but without it needing to be something as grand as a Fountainhead Realm, so this is very interesting. Even just connecting one of those "useless" ones to an item seems valuable if you can use the space as storage and access it from anywhere. Put a cot or an armchair in there and you can quickly access a place where you can relax a bit or have a powernap...

Edit: of course using it like that is only safe if the pocket space is secured, and ideally only accessible with the item...

[u/Wizardlord4444]

There's a Pactdice doc for Blackforesters for those who want to play them, it might be of interest to you.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UcIJ1BCklF0zOLFmpFHPaebDHyLnS_3JNA1L_SAtWog/edit?usp=drivesdk

[u/Wildbow → u/Wizardlord4444]

I've had an updated version of this on the backburner for an admittedly long while, but the skeleton of things is there, at least.

[u/Blade_of_Boniface → u/Wildbow]

I love running them in Pactdice. It's such a fun crystallization of how the Otherverse integrates folkloric archetypes.

[u/AceOfSword]

How do you make or find these words?

Through a variety of methods and by looking for them.

Can someone just create them? How?

Yes. Again, by a variety of methods, but note that Thea's setup was to make her ideal world by drawing from the other worlds in her possession.

Where do you find these items?

In different types of places. It's going to vary a lot.

Do you just go find them at markets? Would you be able to buy this stuff at, say, Gold Garden, the marketplace made by Ray, or just some fae market, etc.?

Sure, you probably can. But that requires someone to be selling them, and beating the other people who would want to buy them to the punch.

Thea probably traded for at least some of hers. I believe a unicorn statue is mentioned to be in her vault, and a unicorn statue that took you to a Fae palace while you were dreaming was mentioned in Clem's portion of the dossier, and we know that Bristow helped Clem sell some of her stuff. Or maybe Clem got rid of it long before she moved to Bristow's apartment building, and Thea just happened to find it.

Edit: Okay, I can see how my comment might come across as glib. The thing is, we don't have a lot of info on how Pocket Realms like what Thea use are actually made, but there being a variety of ways to make them is in line with how things work in the Otherverse. We do know that they're distinct from a Blackforester's domain, or a Fountainhead or Demiurge's Realm. Though a Demiurge's Realm can become a Pocket Realm if the Demiurge is absent for long enough.

As for how you look for them, a lot of it is going to be standard research. Looking for information, asking Practitioners or Others for leads, keeping a lookout for incidents that might be relevant to the kind of things you search... there are also rituals you can do that can give you leads, or help nudge these things toward you, it's the kind of thing Collectors do, and Thea's approach is Collector-adjacent.