u/Obvious_Ad4159

I am writing a cyberpunk story set in Earth 2094.

Thing is, I know that things like tattoos, aesthetic surgery for aesthetics sake are haram, and that piercings are not necessarily haram but there are bodyparts you can and can't put them on. In layman's terms, from what I understood, any form of bodily modification(that isn't for medicinal reasons/health benefits) is seen as haram, because the body is considered one of Allah's perfect creations and to alter it is a sin.

So, let's talk hypotheticals. In the year 2094, where cybernetic implants are pretty common, how much aversion to getting said implants would the followers of Islam have?

I'm not talking "I lost my leg in a train accident, let me get a new one", I'm talking more about aesthetic cybernetics, or augmentation for augmentation sake.

That's it. That's the post.

Honestly, a lot of action stories, especially within the realm of fantasy, sci-fi, LitRPG, and Isekai, heavily rely on many of the characters being dumber than mulch.

I've been running across that "issue" in my own novel for a while now, since I have elves, and elves are smart. I also have human nobility, and nobility is also smart. (Arguably).

In my most recent chapter, an elven mage from the kingdom of Dulma was hired as a volunteer commander in the service of the Vatur elves. Her goal was to lead a squad of Vatur elven mages against the otherworlders. She is around 600 years old, and has been an adventurer for around 400 of those years. She is also written to be calculating, smart and composed in stressful situations.

I have been planning to have go up against one of the main characters in the story, lose and get gravely wounded, but survive by the skin of her teeth.

Then I began writing the chapter, which I will now summarize:

- The elven army formed a defensive line at the very edge of the Silver Forest, which is the Vatur home.

- The elven army proceeded to get around 80% of its soldiers turned into fertilizer when the otherworlders shelled them with airburst artillery shells from 50km away.

-Mirna somehow survived along with a handful of her squad as they fled deeper into the forest.

Now, this is the part where the actual fight between her and one of the main characters was to take place. She was to hold off their advance but ultimately lose, though put up a good fight. I won't tell you how cool the fight was supposed to be because it never happened.

It might've if the guy she was supposed to fight (Colonel Clyde) wasn't a 7 foot tall bioengineered human soldier, wearing a watered down version of the power armor, and was completely immune to magic. Plus he has a gun.

She couldn't run cuz he has a gun and would shoot her. She can't fight him because he's immune to magic and has a gun. So, the only logical solution would be to surrender and pray to the gods that he would spare her. (Which he did).

It's kind of deflating, given than the original idea was for the two of them to clash, but the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. Like, who would fight someone they have such a huge disadvantage against? Especially after seeing him plough through her remaining unit with ease.

So around 500 words of awesome magic combat went poof, since it would mean that Mirna suddenly had a brainfart the size of Albuquerque and it would go completely against her character. She is supposed to be a 600 year old elf, and despite their incredible pride and ego, the elves aren't really the stupidest fantasy race out there.

This isn't the first time I've done this, where action sort of has to take a back seat because the personality and intelligence of certain characters just wouldn't allow them to act like idiots. The thing is, it kind of happens in the moment where I write or am about to write a certain scene, only to realize that there is absolutely no way to realize said scene without massively undercutting the already established personality and traits I've given to a character. I personally think this doesn't ruin the story, but it definitely deflates the action from time to time.

P.S. The post is not a complaint, more a general observation.

Honestly, a lot of action stories, especially within the realm of fantasy, sci-fi, LitRPG, and Isekai, heavily rely on many of the characters being dumber than mulch.

I've been running across that "issue" in my own novel for a while now, since I have elves, and elves are smart. I also have human nobility, and nobility is also smart. (Arguably).

In my most recent chapter, an elven mage from the kingdom of Dulma was hired as a volunteer commander in the service of the Vatur elves. Her goal was to lead a squad of Vatur elven mages against the otherworlders. She is around 600 years old, and has been an adventurer for around 400 of those years. She is also written to be calculating, smart and composed in stressful situations.

I have been planning to have go up against one of the main characters in the story, lose and get gravely wounded, but survive by the skin of her teeth.

Then I began writing the chapter, which I will now summarize:

- The elven army formed a defensive line at the very edge of the Silver Forest, which is the Vatur home.

- The elven army proceeded to get around 80% of its soldiers turned into fertilizer when the otherworlders shelled them with airburst artillery shells from 50km away.

-Mirna somehow survived along with a handful of her squad as they fled deeper into the forest.

Now, this is the part where the actual fight between her and one of the main characters was to take place. She was to hold off their advance but ultimately lose, though put up a good fight. I won't tell you how cool the fight was supposed to be because it never happened.

It might've if the guy she was supposed to fight (Colonel Clyde) wasn't a 7 foot tall bioengineered human soldier, wearing a watered down version of the power armor, and was completely immune to magic. Plus he has a gun.

She couldn't run cuz he has a gun and would shoot her. She can't fight him because he's immune to magic and has a gun. So, the only logical solution would be to surrender and pray to the gods that he would spare her. (Which he did).

It's kind of deflating, given than the original idea was for the two of them to clash, but the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. Like, who would fight someone they have such a huge disadvantage against? Especially after seeing him plough through her remaining unit with ease.

So around 500 words of awesome magic combat went poof, since it would mean that Mirna suddenly had a brainfart the size of Albuquerque and it would go completely against her character. She is supposed to be a 600 year old elf, and despite their incredible pride and ego, the elves aren't really the stupidest fantasy race out there.

This isn't the first time I've done this, where action sort of has to take a back seat because the personality and intelligence of certain characters just wouldn't allow them to act like idiots. The thing is, it kind of happens in the moment where I write or am about to write a certain scene, only to realize that there is absolutely no way to realize said scene without massively undercutting the already established personality and traits I've given to a character. I personally think this doesn't ruin the story, but it definitely deflates the action from time to time.

P.S. The post isn't really a complaint, more an observation.

So, a friend talked my ear off about local AI, ollama, Claude, and with Pewd's newest release Odysseus, I decided to give Hermes a try.

Got the desktop app to run stuff locally, etc.

Issue is, I run a intel i5 10400F for a CPU, 16GB of RAM and a GTX 1650 (which in this scenario might as well not be there.)

Since I primarily got this to horse around with in hopes that it would help me with my hobby, I didn't mind much. The primary use for all of this was for it to turn all the chapters of my novel into .md files, and then when I forget a scene, or a character's description, or literally anything across 800 pages I've written so far, I can just ask the AI.

I've tried different models that I've been recommended, from Llamma, Deepseek, Gemma and Qwen, and have found one that does what I need best and also has a acceptably fast response time.

That model is Qwen3.5:9b.

Llamma3.1 definitely doesn't work. Deepseek starts to fritz out at the first few messages and Gemma definitely hallucinates pretty hard.

So far the most consistently well performing one was the Qwen model I've just named above.

Now, obviously my hardware is definitely nowhere near fit for the task of running AI agents locally, but I gave it a whirl anyways for shits and giggles.

So, for anyone with low tier hardware looking for a stable and consistent model to run, I recommend Qwen3.5:9b.

/compress *(or a mid dot) error: not a quick/plugin/skill command: compress

I reinstalled the desktop app like 6 times, still getting the same error every time.

I've been browsing and seeing people complain about their novels having 100k words, and that it's too much. Apparently, most agents are looking for something in the range of 80-100k words.

So, I checked my own dashboard and realized 211k words, which would be around 800 pages if you use the standard 275 words per page estimate, according to royal road. Personally I haven't checked my word count or how much that would be on a paper back book up until now.

And this is just book 1. I already have the second one hot off the oven and ready to start dropping.

I'm wondering how important it actually is, since massive novels can be divided into smaller books, like trilogies and tomes? I mean, Song of Ice and Fire is a behemoth in that regard.

I could probably try to compress the story, but by a barely noticeable margin as I made sure that all events and things going on somehow tie into each other, hence there isn't too much fluff.

I've been seeing a lot of this in recent fantasy, mostly western fantasy, where things that used to be irredeemably evil, like demons, orcs, goblins, etc, slowly being turned into grey area characters.

From whatever the hell they did with Orcs in the most recent LoTR, to the demons in Frieren.

Evil now seems to require a mandatory sad backstory that's almost relatable, and everyone evil is in some way a victim of some greater oppression or are forced into being evil.

The most recent example that I see people still clashing about are the demons in Frieren. A predatory, man-eating species of creatures that mimic human appearance, voice and mannerisms to lure their prey and lower their guard. Pretty easy to understand. Yet some folk still somehow connect that to current real life global events, trying to make the connection between said demons and real life groups of people.

Orcs, trolls and goblins are also victims of that, since they used to be viewed as an evil force serving a greater evil and existing solely to corrupt the world. They are monsters. While being loosely sapient, they are still using what intelligence and free will they have to do evil.

The question I have is: Should modern fantasy writers be hesitant, or outright avoid, writing higher monsters (like orcs, goblins, trolls, vampires, etc) as irredeemably evil out of fear of cancellation and backlash from people who constantly make connections to fantasy worlds and real life events?

That's the question. I've googled and seems that most modern systems would struggle against such a thing. So I've decided to ask here, since military vs fantasy is kind of this subs thing.

Wyverns:

- Double Scaled
- Can shed loose outer layer of ferromagnetic scales to create a shrapnel storm.
- EMF creates a sort of storm cloud that hides the flock from direct line of sight.
- Can detect things entering the EMF field (missiles and larger) which allows them to dodge attacks with greater efficiency.
- They are most vulnerable when breaking formation to swoop down and attack as they lose the protection of the storm.
- The smallest flock consists of around 50 wyverns.
- Their secondary scales aren't that tough, meaning that they are very susceptible to anti air emplacements.
- The cloud they create can be make them inconspicuous on a stormy day, but looks extremely out of place when there isn't a storm to blend in with.

JDF:

- They have all their military stuff.

Wyverns are the second most dangerous predator in the skies of Monlutz. Their abilities were an evolutionary byproduct of being prayed upon by dragons. They are extremely aggressive, extremely territorial, to the point that they attack anything in the skies in their territories. They are flock animals, meaning that they never attack or hunt without the support of their flock, which is often led by a matriarch. They mostly inhabit mountain ranges, but solitary wyverns hives can be found in caves and hills too. If they JDF stumbled across one such hive, how well would their do against the wyverns?

I'm nearing the end of book 1, and so far have introduced regular (lowborn) elves and their progenitors the High Elves (Highborn).

Highborn are extremely powerful and loved by mana, having powers akin to demigods in the world. Powers which include regeneration, almost instantaneous, effectively making the only method of taking them out be headshots or decapitation.

I am yet to introduce the Dark Elves, who are the sister-race of the High Elves, and will do so in the second book. Unlike the High Elves, the Dark Elves gave up their mana (for reasons I will not reveal due to spoilers) and basically rely on corrupted mana and dark artifacts as a source of power.

They can, like their sibling race, use regeneration magic. Theirs, however, works similar to how I made orcs and trolls. They can regenerate damage using a form of transformation magic, basically turning something like fat cells into whatever they need. This requires them to have a surplus of body mass to be able to regenerate fully. If you lose an arm, which is like 5kg, you need to have an extra 5kg of fat, for example, to spare.

Which means that some dark elves who chose to use and study this form of dark magic, are pretty fat.

I am curious to see how the readers will react to the introduction of these rotund mages.

I ask this here, as I feel it makes sense to ask people within my own sphere, rather than the ones on Patreon's sub, though they are divided in opinion there too.

I am a firm believer that not everything needs to be social media, and the thought of patreon turning into a social media kind of platform ain't making me dance with joy.

Maybe I'm mistaken tho, so I ask both big and small authors with patreons, how y'all feeling about this change?