Live, public roleplaying on a forum. Person A and Person B collaboratively create a story by taking turns writing posts, and if you’re really lucky, more letters will join in at some point. Person A and Person B each play a set of characters. For example, Eliezer plays Keltham, the god Asmodeus and the world-saving slave Broom, among many other characters, while Lintamande gets the other half of the cast, including Carissa.
A sample of the most recently updated glowfics. Notice most have two or three main authors, and the word continuity. “Planecrash” at the bottom is the Mad Investor Chaos continuity
This form of roleplaying lets you use facecasts, which you can think of as the sprites of a visual novel, but most of the time they’re random stills from Hollywood/TV actors. They will show up as the post’s avatar and are chosen based on the current character’s emotions. This almost always means one forum post per line of dialogue, however.
The facecasts for Keltham, including those classic scenes where he turns into an elephant
Glowfics tend to focus on unique viewpoint characters and often unique settings and crossovers, avoiding the general roleplaying tendency to self-insert as popular characters. Thanks to network effects I’m not going to get into here, many of the themes are aligned to those seen in rational fiction. Think of the archetypical glowfic as a really smart and serious girl having a bunch of conversations with Lord of the Rings characters and trying to figure out how the setting’s magic works in practice, only to then exploit it.
I need to stress how important conversations are. By virtue of the format involved, virtually all the exposition needs to be requested and received on-screen in “real time” by the protagonists. This makes every glowfic a talky affair, action rare, and romance common. Glowfic readers will say that’s the point.
Some dialogue from Mad Investor Chaos. Most glowfic looks like this, posts on a forum
Nearly every main character and world is reused later in other glowfics, maybe best showcased by the Effulgence continuity. Even if the characters are not the same, character archetypes from previous stories sometimes show up, like they’re reincarnated across settings.
They have a loose association to Alicorn’s Luminosity (yes, this is where the name comes from, Luminosity being a Twilight fanfic and the first glowfics themselves being fanfics of Luminosity) and the novel’s main character Bella Swan. Alicorn is the inventor and most prolific glowfic writer, but I feel this background fact explains approximately nothing while also being the most well-known factoid for some reason. It’s exactly like the deal with Terminator and the field of AI Safety.
Maybe the most important fact of all, I haven’t actually ever managed to finish a single one. Glowfics are long. I’ve only gotten far into two of them, both co-written by Eliezer. I think he’s got a flair for the dramatic that synergizes with both roleplaying and narrative, or maybe I just really miss HPMOR. Most of the others I’ve tried are either opaquely weird, repetitive, too horny, or blatantly more interesting for the roleplayers than the audience, which is fair, and dare I say it, valid.
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Keltham dies in a plane crash and gets sent to this Pathfinder world, Golarion. Specifically, he lands in Cheliax, which is a small part of that whole Avistan continent you can see above. None of this matters. What does matter is that Cheliax is a Lawful Evil country, a ruthless religious dictatorship at the service of the god Asmodeus, who loves contracts as a minor part of his domain of pain and suffering.
The entire story will revolve around hiding those simple facts from Keltham. In fact, at its core, Mad Investor Chaos is a farce, a work where Satan himself is trying to tempt a rationalist into becoming evil while being unable to directly hurt him or reveal itself.
Asmodeus and Carissa (who he meets right after arriving)’s strategy to corrupt Keltham from Good-poisoned Lawful Neutral into Evil is to take advantage of his repressed dominant urges, and, eventually, have him mistreat Carissa enough to qualify for hell. To Keltham, “Good” means manipulation, emotionless utilitarianism and the bad parts of “the greater good”, while “Evil” means good business sense and libertarian everyone-for-themselves societies. This is not at all how it works in Golarion, Pathfinder, Dungeons and Dragons, or anywhere, in fact, but it’s a misunderstanding the Asmodeans are only too happy to confirm.
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