Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom: Retooling magic

A while ago, when I was converting WotMK over to Exalted's system, I decided to use Terrestrial Circle Sorcery for the various groups of creepy sorcerers because that way I didn't have to write a ton of spells. However, I gave every group of sorcerers ten spells, I've written up fifteen groups so far, I didn't want any overlap between the groups, and there's only so many Terrestrial Circle spells that people have written, even with weeks of scouring the internet for them a while back. When I was writing up the latest sorcerous order, I could only find five spells that fit the concept and weren't already taken by other groups. When I found myself writing up several new spells, I realized that I had hit the limits of the parameters I'd set for myself, and if I wanted to be able to write more sorcerous groups--and I do, since there are several countries in the gazetteers that don't have any at all--I needed a full custom spell list for each group.

So I'm going back to my previous approach. You can see an earlier version of that here, from when I was still using Novus, and a modern version below the cut:
( The Pyromancers of the Kappa Wastes )

So far, I've done that to thirteen of the fifteen original sorcerous orders I had--sixteen now, counting the one that triggered this whole thing in the first place--and it hasn't been nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. I did all that in about three weeks, and it leaves plenty of space for expanding into places that the list of Terrestrial Circle spells I have doesn't go.

For example, originally the Servants of Yarikh from B'rabt were just a place for all the Biblically-themed spells in Exalted to go, like Plague of Bronze Snakes, River of Blood, Water from Stone, Food from the Aerial Table, and so on to go, drawing on B'rabt's combo Egypt/Israel thematics (it's based on Birabuto, but I wanted something different than WotMK!Egypt), but now that I'm writing my own spells I can go back to the association of Yarikh as a moon god and write moon-themed spells for them. And keep the serpent imagery as well, because what is sword and sorcery if you don't have sinister priests with serpent-topped staves walking around?

A new Japanese challenge

We've mostly been discussing news articles, but last class my tutor had a different suggestion--reading a novel.

Not the 源氏物語 or anything like that. She said that when she was last in Japan, her roommate gave her a book called 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ (my translation: "I Shouted Out Love at the Heart of the World"), which google tells me has the English title of Socrates in Love. Google also says that was supposed to be the original title, and it does sound better in English. Anyway, my tutor mentioned that she never read it because it sounded like a bunch of sappy mush, but that it might make a good discussion topic.

I'm a bit apprehensive. Partially because while readying the NHK Easy Japanese articles isn't very hard for me, I've never tried to read a novel before. That and going to the Amazon page for the book, the reviews are...mixed. The one that shows up at the top for me starts with, "この本が、日本で一番売れた書籍、になってしまったことが何だかな," which means "Somehow this book has become the top-selling book in Japan..." Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Especially when it goes on to say, "最後は読むのがつらくなってきてナナメ読み," which could mean either that the book became heartbreaking at the end or that it was painful to read because of the mood it was trying to evoke. Judging by the one-star review, I'm going to assume the latter.

Well, maybe I can practice complaining in Japanese!