Dangerous Right Wing Extremist... Nerds? (Leaflit Deep Lore)

Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with Leaflit Mitsuha (slime-girl VTuber, guild receptionist, and master worldbuilder) for a deep dive into her massive collaborative TTRPG universe in the Lyrian Chronicles / Angel’s Sword RPG.

From 10+ years of running campaigns born out of depression, to building a live-service West Marches-style canon campaign with 140+ players, to magic systems, corrupted zones, divine power through belief, player-driven politics, fiend drama, and how AI is supercharging communal storytelling — this is one of the nerdiest, most optimistic conversations we’ve ever had.

We explore how online communities are prototyping the future of entertainment, why “cringe but free” vitalism beats shame culture, the power of shared worlds vs. solo gaming, and why asynchronous friendships and player agency matter more than ever.

If you love worldbuilding, anime-inspired lore, tabletop RPGs, VTubers, AI creativity, or just watching smart people geek out — this one’s for you.

The game can be found at:

https://rpg.angelssword.com/

If you’re interested in joining the Mirane Campaign you can find it on the Patreon for the game (This is how they fund development, since it’s free to play):

https://www.patreon.com/c/angelsswordrpg/home

Episode Transcript

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Prefer it?

Malcolm Collins: No, actually this is what, so I was just saying that Leaflet is like one of my top three sources of news, and Simone was like, this is the way news should be. And like if you had told me as a young man, well when you grow up, you see it turns out the New York Times, nobody trusted anymore. You know, you, you go to, uh, wall Street Journal, nobody trusted anymore Uhhuh.

But you see there’s like these anime characters online and um, a lot of people really trust them. Not, not only that. And it’s like, oh, what, what’s their credentials? Like, how does everybody know that they, you know, are they like work correspondence or something? And it’s like, no, it’s just like everybody starts lying.

And so like the five people who aren’t like everybody takes super seriously.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Basically. And

Malcolm Collins: they’re just like, that sounds. Insane. And it is like, no, no, no, it’s weirder. You see, it turns out that like the type of music you listen to is going to regularly feature these random anime characters. [00:01:00]

Leaflit: Oh, God.

Oh. Like the whole, like sky, like,

Malcolm Collins: oh, it’s so funny. Leaf flip. We had, uh, one of our kids, uh, who’s watching Sky, because I, I play Sky Browns all the time while I’m working or whatever. I, I like his songs. Yeah, I think they’re pretty good. Mm-hmm. Um, and, uh, you know, and so our daughter likes to identify with every female character she sees.

Yeah. So she goes, oh, that’s me. And usually I’m like, okay, yeah, sure, yeah, that’s you. Um, and this, I was like, oh no, actually, uh, that’s one of my friends and one of our older kids was like, wait, one of your friends that’s like an an, that’s like a, an animated character. She goes, those aren’t real. And I’m like, well, okay.

So this is a, this is gonna take a little bit of time to explain, uh, but sometimes. They’re real. Uh, Simone, what’s his, uh, sign on the screen? Is this something we can get rid of? Uh,

Leaflit: the live,

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: live view. Why? Why does it think we’re live?

Leaflit: I don’t know.

Simone Collins: [00:02:00] I don’t know. But we’re not there. It’s gone. I’ve made it disappear.

Everything’s going to be okay now.

Malcolm Collins: I invented a new dish today, which is actually pretty good. Um, oh, what’s that? So mac and cheese is extra pepper, like black pepper,

Leaflit: uhhuh.

Malcolm Collins: It actually works really well.

Simone Collins: I think it’s done a lot at restaurants as it is.

Malcolm Collins: What made me realize this is a lot of like Asian dishes that you’ve been making recently.

Just use obscene amounts of black pepper. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, like pepper chicken and stuff like that. I was like, why, why, why don’t I do this with everything?

Simone Collins: Why not?

Malcolm Collins: It’s

Simone Collins: doable. Okay.

Leaflit: Good flavor when it’s freshly cracked and stuff.

Malcolm Collins: But the reason I’m so excited to talk with Leaflet today, ‘cause the first time we talked with her, apparently it was like your first time talking to somebody else.

Sorry for you. I should, uh, give some context. So Leaflet is, um, quickly growing in influence. I think she’ll soon be, I mean, just based on my viewing it, I think she’ll soon be one of the sort of [00:03:00] dominant right-wing streamers, um, oh geez. In terms of like interesting ideas. Um, and we brought her on ages ago.

Um, and, uh, since then she’s gone on all the channels. She’s always on the, uh, the, the side scrollers.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: side scrollers and stuff like that. Um, and she’s always on ev every Sky Brow video, every one of the Sky Brow videos. It’s like three F-ing leaflet appearances. If I could have as much mental space as somebody’s ring.

Um, and, uh, if you guys were

Leaflit: on too.

Malcolm Collins: He did. He did one with us. One with us, yeah. Um,

Leaflit: was it the Creamy Majaro one?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Creamy Majaro.

Leaflit: That was the best one. That was my favorite one.

Malcolm Collins: Oh. I really like the Amelia one.

Leaflit: I like that one too. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Um, but what I wanted to do is this video, so for all our friends who are coming here to learn something about the world, because I was like, how was it weird that, uh, you’re one of my major sources new?

No, no, no. I don’t wanna do that in this video. I wanna focus on like nerd stuff specifically.

Leaflit: Sure.

Malcolm Collins: So I want to focus on, [00:04:00] because when I first heard that like you had built a world

Leaflit: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I asked you about it last time. I think you were a little, like, you didn’t, you, you probably were like, somebody doesn’t actually want all the lore.

And I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Simone Collins: You were still working on it though. I don’t think it had gone live yet.

Leaflit: Yeah. It’s, it’s out now and it’s grown a lot since then. Like we have over like. 140 players now.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh.

Leaflit: But like, that’s not like players who are playing in, you know, with their friends and whatever.

This is like one campaign. You imagine like one tabletop,

Malcolm Collins: one camp. Explain campaign how this works. One, sorry. Okay, so I need to zoom back for the audience here. Okay. So, um, there, it’s like tabletop gaming, um. Mm-hmm. And, uh, tabletop gaming happens in like, d and d is the most famous example. You got pathfinders, all that.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Um, and sometimes people will create their own, uh, lore in worlds. Um, and that is what she has done. But it [00:05:00] appears that somehow you created like an MMO version of tabletop gaming. So explain.

Leaflit: Sure. I can. So it, you know, it started off, uh, I was running this campaign for like, such a long time. Like I, I looked and I was like.

I had like, what, 14,000 hours or something and like, roll 20. Yeah. I, I’m like crazy. So like, no, it’s a good kind of crazy this, I went through some really, really bad times in my life and I was like super depressed. I didn’t like do anything. And all I did was tabletop. I was like, I’m just gonna play tabletop, go sleep, wake up, play, play tabletop.

So all of that stuff, and like translated into the YouTuber stuff and the company and all the stuff that we do is like, based on that. So like, that campaign has been running for that long, like over 10 years. Yeah. It’s so

Simone Collins: cool. I mean, it’s not cool that you were like in a dark place. Oh no, it’s fine. It sounds like, it sounds like a, a show’s plot.

Like, you know, girl gets depressed and then like literally falls into an alternate universe and it’s a little zaki and like that is, and [00:06:00] then like becomes like an internet celebrity and then it’s straight out of like a show plot. And then I didn’t

Leaflit: like expect any of this. Like if, if you told me like.

Years ago that I would be doing this, I’d be like, you’re crazy.

Malcolm Collins: That is. Okay. So I wanna dig into how this came to be this world, but I also wanna get into like, because I watch, so for Boo who don’t know, like the content that I’m familiar with from her is from YouTube and it’s a fan of hers who clips it and she sort of shares it 50 50 with the fan, um, and, uh, puts together her YouTube.

But what that means is I don’t get all of the lore and backstories to your characters mm-hmm. To your world. Like, okay. Brief question just to start.

Leaflit: Sure.

Malcolm Collins: What’s the difference between the Goo Girl character and the character you are Nower and are they actually the same character? Character? Is it sort of like a same Okay, so it’s a slime.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Reincarnated slime is, is one of my favorite is Kai. So, um, oh,

Leaflit: me too. Me too. [00:07:00]

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Okay. Okay. I’m

Leaflit: a slime girl. Right. So like, the, the, the story is that. My character is half slime. So my character’s dad is a slime and my character’s mom is a fay. And there’s like an entire, like this all came up because like years ago when I was running this campaign for so long, right?

Mm-hmm.

One of the players was like, but what if I wanna have a kid in games? Like what happens if like, I’m a cat folk and my wife is a slime. And so like, I was like, damnit. So like now I had to like write all of this lore bin and it ended up being used for this to like make my character. So my character is technically, her race is kymera, which is like magically mutated biological thing.

So like for instance, a cat folk would be a kymera, but they would be of the cat folk, like. Type, like subspecies type, right? And even with them that there’s even two different like phenotypes. There’s like the lyth [00:08:00] and the Zo lith, which is like, so the difference would be like if you had a, a rat girl versus like a caven,

Malcolm Collins: sorry.

First of all, one of my favorite things about this conversation, if there was a huge population on the internet who sees both of us as right-wing extremists, and this is a conversation that to the internet right wing extremists, they having, it’s like, well, you’ve got the chimera of the cat girl. Um, no.

Okay, so, so it, your character came out of an individual play session that you were playing.

Leaflit: She’s an NPC. So, okay, so, so she’s not even my oc That’s a funny thing. What? Yeah, she’s not So this cha So when I was making my V YouTuber character, I was like, well, I don’t really wanna be like the girl. I wanna be like.

Just some random villager office lady. And that’s what Leaflet is, is she’s like the guild receptionist of the Guild. So the player character, I’m DMing the game, the player characters, [00:09:00] they went through this really, really long campaign. They ended defeating the big bad. Mm-hmm. And they’re settling down.

They’re like, let’s make an adventuring guild. Right. So they found the Adventuring Guild and my character is the receptionist of the Guild. So I’m not even like a main character or anything like that.

Malcolm Collins: No. I actually really like this, um, as, as a world that was created by the Adventuring Guild receptionist.

Leaflit: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Sounds very fitting for like an anime. Um, yeah. Uh, have you, have you watched the one about the Adventure Guild receptionist?

Leaflit: I have not. Is that the one where she’s really powerful?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah.

Leaflit: Yeah. I haven’t seen it yet. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It’s actually, it’s decent. It’s decent. Um, okay. So, uh. You when you were playing this particular campaign, was this in your world or was this before your world existed?

Leaflit: All of it is the same world ever since the first one. So there’s been like different timelines, like some take place like thousands of years in the past, but it’s all one continuous world. [00:10:00]

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Leaflit: And go ahead.

Malcolm Collins: No, continue. Um, I wanna keep hearing, well you, you have multiple campaigns that you place in different times.

First I gotta hear about the logistics. How do you do this many people in one campaign?

Leaflit: Oh, you’re talking about that one? So that one is the newest one. So that’s the 10th campaign. I think it’s the 10th one. And so what happened is we, we, we developed this, this RPG, right? The tabletop RPG. And we released, we released it like the system’s out like an alpha, like anyone can play it for free.

It, it’s kind of like imagine Dungeons and Dragons. But the difference is the rules are online, so anybody can play it. There’s no fee. And then. It updates every two weeks, two to three weeks. So we have like patches. So it is, I hate to use the term, but it’s like a live service tabletop, RRP G kind of.

Malcolm Collins: That’s actually really interesting. Okay. So if I understand this correctly, people play individual campaigns with small groups.

Leaflit: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: But what’s politically happening in the world Change, like politically GI don’t know what you call it, but like that’s changing as they’re playing.

Leaflit: Okay. So, so [00:11:00] it goes like this.

So, you know, we have, we have, we have the game, we have the live service thing, right? And what happened was is as we were playing this, we were like, we don’t have enough people testing the game. And mm-hmm. Somebody was like, well, have you heard of West Marshes? You know what West Marches is?

Malcolm Collins: No.

Leaflit: Okay. So like, have you heard of West Marshes?

And what West Marches is, it’s a format of tabletop RPGs where you have all of these individual parties. And, and they can do whatever they want in this world, but then like what they do like actually affects things that other parties see. So like what happened was we were like, what if we do that like a canon campaign where players can feel like they’re actually a part of like the leaflet world and the leaflet lore, and then they can affect the world.

So like, we’re like, okay, so let me sit down and like make a setting for it. And what we invented was a setting separated from the main continents. Like where a leaflet lives right now is like a different, that’s like the main area. Okay. And then we separated off. So there’s this, there’s this concept in the story.

Um, there’s a place called the Astro Line, and it’s basically like. [00:12:00] Imagine like the equator, but it’s just giant, like irradiated zone. It’s like magic is messed up there. Yeah. And it corrupts stuff, right? So these adventures are basically, and normally you have to be a really high level adventure to go there ‘cause they don’t want people going there.

Mm-hmm. But this person set up like this kind of bootleg village where they’re like, okay, anybody that wants to go in, like, you know, you could come here and then like, there’s a way to get in there. Right? So the players are those people, they’re like the, the, we’re not official adventurers, but like, you know, screw it, we’re gonna go in there and uh, we’re gonna look and whatever reason.

So like some players are like,

Malcolm Collins: so what makes

Leaflit: the

Malcolm Collins: line irradiated? Like, what makes it dangerous?

Leaflit: Okay. So it’s a little bit, okay, there was an event that happened in the game in previous things and it caused an event in which this happened. I can’t really say it because it’s like, it’s a spoiler and like everybody’s trying to figure that out right now.

Malcolm Collins: Oh. Oh. All of that’s awesome. Okay. [00:13:00] Okay. Okay. I can tell you later though.

Leaflit: Off,

Malcolm Collins: off camera. In what way is it, so you, you call it a radio. I guess what I’m trying to find out is like what makes it hostile feeling? Is it like unusual numbers of monsters, mana, sapping? Like what’s the thing that makes it dangerous?

Leaflit: So like this force is called asra and it’s a type of magic. So there’s like the different types of magic. Okay. Astro’s like the least understood one. And what it does is it tends to just make weird effects, but the, the biggest effect that it has that’s bad is that it will sometimes corrupt a thing and it doesn’t have, I mean this is the thing, it doesn’t have to be a biological thing.

Like it could be like, it could be, but it could also be like a house or like, and are you familiar with SCP? It’s kind of like that.

Malcolm Collins: The SEP foundation? Yes. Like. Yeah, we, we talked about, that was the thing I talked to you about where they make up all the monsters.

Leaflit: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And

Malcolm Collins: they have the entire lo and it’s so cool.

Leaflit: Oh,

yes.

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: It’s actually most recently, I love watching SEP lore videos. Um,

Leaflit: [00:14:00] yeah. It’s similar to that. So like, things get corrupted, so like

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Leaflit: A, a house for instance, or like a, like one of the, the big dangerous ones is a mirror. Okay. And there’s like this mirror and like, it’s just a corrupted mirror and it’s the corrupted concept of a mirror.

So it’s like, rather than being like a creature that like stands up and attacks you. It. Like if you look into it, it like corrupts you basically.

Simone Collins: Our kids are gonna be, become obsessed with this as soon as they get like literate.

Malcolm Collins: I’m actually almost more interested in how, so it sounds like the way you developed your universe, if I’m if I’m wrong here, is you started, uh, just sort of building on it as you played session after session and then new things get added.

It reminds me of, um, in somebody as I described, like modern Judaism as a bit like this mm-hmm. That it’s just been around forever. And then people added new things, new things, new things. And now when you look at like Orthodox Jews, it’s like fashion trends from like two different centuries all implanted on top of each other.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Uh, not, not too, too [00:15:00] millennia, like, and we’re just gonna, uh, because when you’re like different types of magic.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. First of all, I wanna know about the different types of ma like

Leaflit: Sure.

Malcolm Collins: Let’s zoom into that. Yeah.

Leaflit: All right. Sure, sure. Of course. So like the, um, I love this by the way. Like I, I, I sometimes use this on stream.

I just, I just nerd out about Lauren. Like, like people ask because the people that play the game wanna know, and they’re like, oh, it’s time, it’s time for the leaflet lo session time to like, time to figure out stuff that she won’t tell us, right? Try time bait her into telling us stuff. But, uh, so there’s like arcane magic, and that’s like the, that’s like your typical understanding of like sort of science magic, where like they have an understanding that there’s like this energy force and then like they could take the energy force into themselves and then program it and then use that to like, use magical effects.

And the extension of that is called arteris, which is if you, you know, arteris, but basically mm-hmm. It’s taking that programming but making a circuit that goes into an item so that it can, you can put the manna into the item [00:16:00] and it like follows that exact circuit, which allows non-PE casters to cast. So like in the world, like everybody uses magic, like even like fighters.

Like they would like have a sword that has like that circuit in it and they would all use magic that way.

Malcolm Collins: So I, I, um,

Simone Collins: first off, no, I just have to say this is really annoying to me. Have you heard of Harry Potter in the methods of rationality?

Leaflit: No, I have not.

Simone Collins: Okay. It’s basically Harry Potter fan fiction. It was like, well, what if we took you, my guy?

Yeah. He’s, he’s an, he’s an AI dor now, but like, I mean, this is one of the things that made him famous and what was really fun was this premise of like, what if someone just really thoughtful took this wizard universe and was like, okay, well what if we like, apply some more like principles of basic physics to this and stuff like that.

But he doesn’t really follow through with it. Uh, and what I, well what I’m hearing here is you’re like, well, what have we like actually thought through how like this magic would work and how we could apply it to, to objects and like how in a real world non magical people would start to leverage it. And, and like,

Malcolm Collins: well, I [00:17:00] have, um, fans who don’t know this.

If you, if you have, if you’re on our like subscriber, I have a number of stories that I’ve played out with like mm-hmm. Uh, the, the site that we run reality fabricate where I try to go through like different magical universes. Um, but, okay, so now I’m immediately interested in if this can, so this system, where does magic come from and how can it be stored?

Leaflit: So there’s two ways. One, people natural, there’s like a biological magic container that people can have. Okay. And then the other form is as fuel. So like they can create like a distilled magical fuel. So these, like items I’m telling you about, they use like cartridges that, like, people put like a, like a bullet in it, but it’s like a ma it’s like just a fuel canister.

We’ll put it in. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I, I should, I should be more direct about what I’m trying to do. So what I love doing in these universes mm-hmm. Is try to figure out how their physics work to find out how I can exploit them to become extremely powerful. So what I’m asking here is, uh, if I wanted to fill up a canister of magic in your universe.

Mm-hmm. [00:18:00] Right? Yeah. Um, where, like, what’s the process for that?

Leaflit: Um, basically, so right now the main way to get it is to mine like, it’s like a fossil fuel is people will mine like a fossil fuel of magic.

Malcolm Collins: Clever way to not make it easily breakable. So it’s not something I could take from captives. It’s not something I can take from an environment.

I need to literally mine it.

Leaflit: So the funny thing is, is there was a way to do this. Um, so one system that we have is this thing called Divine Arms. Have you watched a Comic A Kill?

Malcolm Collins: Uh, which one is that? I, I I,

Leaflit: the one with assassins and like, they wanna take down the government and then they have these, these weapons that like nobody understands how they were made.

Malcolm Collins: Um, is, you’re not talking about Cleta, right? So No, no, I haven’t watched that one.

Leaflit: So basically there’s these ancient weapons that nobody knows how they’re made or what they’re made out of, [00:19:00] and the methods of their creation aren’t understood. And there was one that did this, that basically converted people’s lives into like bullets.

So they would like shoot all their countries with them like an artillery. But it got blown up recently, but someone’s trying to rebuild it. But that’s a little, that’s a, that’s another story.

Malcolm Collins: Wait, oh, hold on. So, okay. So is, is there any understanding in the universe of why this thing that they’re mining has this power?

Leaflit: Um, it’s basically like, like fossil fuels. It’s like as things die and they have like magic in them that like, kind of distills into like rocks and like different things that they can, they can mine up. And then like, liquefy

Malcolm Collins: clever. I like

Simone Collins: biological being, can produce magic that maybe like there’s something in them that when die, they die.

Like, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leaflit: All of the types of magic Yeah. That, that exists.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, that’s pretty, uh, you know, if I was making this universe, uh, the twist I would [00:20:00] use is that it turns out that this is actually their souls that people are burning through. Like, it’s

Leaflit: like, that’s a different magic.

Malcolm Collins: That is, okay, go over this

Leaflit: kind of, so like, that’s how divine magic works in a setting.

So divine magic is the idea that if you believe in something, a piece of you goes to that. So like, oh, fun. Oh, so like very

Simone Collins: like Neil Gaman American Gods.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Kind of like that. It doesn’t really matter what it is too, right? Like if it’s a concept you believe in, it would like send like some of that energy of your soul to that, whether that’s a god or even a hero, right?

Then that’s how like, heroes are so powerful. It’s like so many people like love them.

Malcolm Collins: Does it burn your life force to use this form of magic?

Leaflit: Um, it’s kind of like a finite amount, so it doesn’t like kill you. At least in the normal sense, like the typical sense.

Malcolm Collins: Did you ever see, I I, I don’t know. I know this is a deep, I think [00:21:00] it’s called Krono Trigger or something, the anime where the character like loses their life lifespan every time they use magic.

Leaflit: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I kept expecting the entire thing. I was like, they’re not actually gonna have her die young. Like there’s gonna be some reversal before the end of the anime.

Leaflit: Wasn’t that ending amazing? It was like the

Malcolm Collins: best No. That ending was like what? The, you had her die as like a child. Like, what? I did not, there’s, there’s, there’s not consequences to this type of magic in most.

Leaflit: I loved it. I loved, I loved how they actually stuck that ending. ‘cause like most people with chickened out.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, absolutely. Bring back

Leaflit: consequences.

Malcolm Collins: 100% believed they were going to chicken out. I didn’t have the slightest. There was no part of my brain that throughout the entire anime thought that she was just going to die after the big bad, like being held by her best friend.

Right. Like, I was like, what? You had set them up as like lovers and they’re still children.

Leaflit: This is the way it happened was so good too. Like, just [00:22:00] like the, the final scene of it, like, man, it was, it was good. It was a good one. Yeah. Oh, one thing you might like about the magic, like in like relation to the world is, so ad adventuring is like, think of a, the wor word.

Adventuring when they think of an adventure or someone who like, you know, the concept of like adventuring guild and you get like ranks and stuff like that. Yeah. The, the original concept of that was. Um, is a fighting style called that was built around that. Okay. And it’s people that are able to use their internal magic to like augment their muscles.

And that’s like the basics of that. Okay. And this is why like everyone in the setting, like e like even like the level one characters can like jump like three stories and they can like instantly teleport behind you and stuff like that using like their magic, right? And the original story, so this is like actually canon in the lore, is that there was a character who was a girl and she [00:23:00] had a dad who was like this expedition.

He was like going on grand adventures, right? And the daughter really wanted to go with him, but it got to a point where like her dad was like, okay, like. You stay at home, you, you can’t do any of this. Right. Yeah. And then like, he would take her brothers and she got so upset by this, that like, and her mom was like a maid.

So her mom would teach her like, oh, like, here’s like magic for like how to heat up water. Here’s magic, how to do this stuff. Right? And eventually she was the first person who founded the ability to like, augment your muscles, the magic. And that’s the explanation of why female player characters can actually fight men.

Malcolm Collins: I, that’s needed, that’s being needed in a setting. I’m, I’m actually sorry. I love this is, this is why first, I, I just can’t help but thinking in so many people’s minds, these are two like far right comments that are talking, you learning out about like old anime, but then two, it’s like you come up with explanations for stuff mm-hmm.

That the mainstream creators are not coming up with. You have like a d and d campaign or [00:24:00] whatever, and a female’s just as strong as a male and a female isn’t as strong as a male. I mean, it’s, it’s

Leaflit: not, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Right. And so you’re like, no, we have an explanation of that. Yeah. But the other thing, um, so I wanna go deeper because I wanna find out how this system can be broken.

Okay. Explain to me the different types of magic.

Leaflit: Okay. So there’s like the divine magic, which is the one I talked about.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That’d be harder to explore. You could try to create a culture something. Mm-hmm. It wouldn’t really be, which they

Leaflit: have done, people have done that

Malcolm Collins: actually. Can you use divine magic to manipulate people’s minds?

Leaflit: To manipulate people’s minds? I mean, I guess you could use any magic to do that.

Malcolm Collins: Well, if you can use divine magic to do that, you can create a cascade, right? Mm-hmm. So if you can, uh, like use the divine magic that you have to get people to worship a certain concept and then draw power from the concept, you’re having them worship, you could create a cascade.

But, uh, that, that [00:25:00] seems hard. Like the mining one. What I, what I’m impressed about, about your world is I can’t think of many ways to exploit the magic. So I hear about,

Leaflit: well, because you have to work on it, because Yeah, like, as I was DMing this stuff, right? So like all of this, it wasn’t something I planned out.

I was like, I wrote, I, I sat down and I was like, okay, I’m gonna do this, this, this, this, this, this. And this is like how this system works. It was like me playing with players, right? And again, like this goes back to like a time when I was like really, really depressed. Yeah. So you have to imagine I would like run 18 hours.

I would sleep, eat, run 18 hours. That was like my schedule. Right. And, and so I didn’t even have time to prep for the games. Right. So a lot of it was reactive based on like, players trying to do some b******t and then like would have to like, okay, well how do I, how do I, how do I write myself out of this?

Right.

Malcolm Collins: I know what’s so funny is George RR Martin has been working on the last book for like, for however many years, and you’re forced to like, write new volumes every time you go in. Okay.

Leaflit: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So I, I wanna understand the, uh, [00:26:00] body manipulation magic. What is the source of that magic?

Leaflit: The body mini, you mean like

Malcolm Collins: the stuff that’s used to make people physically more powerful?

Like, is that the same with the artifice or magic, or is that something different?

Leaflit: It’s the regular arcane magic. So it’s like the, the ambient like force, I guess it’s like magic just exists in the world. It’s like ambient.

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Leaflit: Of different levels. Not like the same level everywhere. Yeah. And people have a thing called a soul core, which stores all their magic.

Malcolm Collins: So you can store magic from the ambient magic level.

Leaflit: Yeah, but it’s, it’s, it’s capped as to like your, there’s like a search in like maximum. Okay. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: You can’t, can, you can’t, can you store it in any external object?

Leaflit: Mm. Some people can, but it’s still reliant on magic to activate. It’s like the, the biggest loophole here would be like, probably umo.

Geez. Like they have, like, they can Yeah. Imbue their [00:27:00] magic into ink and then write like talismans that like have a spell effect. It’s like, but then they also have to use their magic to activate it still. So it’s not really that big Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Of a well set up world. I’m gonna be honest. Well set now. I’m, I’m impressed, uh, that it’s hard.

Yeah. Because what I would normally do, if you could do something like that, then what you need to do, like if you’re a Lord or something like that, is use any of this type of character you have captured or mm-hmm. Essentially industrially farm them to create magical scrolls, but if it’s their own magic that’s needed to activate the scroll mm-hmm.

Then you can’t use it in any sort of industrial capacity.

Leaflit: Mm-hmm. One thing it might be, what, what might be interesting, like if, if you wanna know this about divine magic, is that like, if it’s a God, like the concept of a God, that is, there’s a container for it, so you can actually kill the God and like take their container.

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And what

Leaflit: [00:28:00] could you do with it? Nobody knows about, but I I, I they’ll find out now, but it’s whatever.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, that’s amazing. You’re dropping law here. No. Um, so there is, um, one of my favorite things about the war hammer universe. Are you, do you, do you like follow the war of like war hammer 40 K and stuff?

Leaflit: A little bit. Like, I’m not like super deep in it, but I, I know like a little bit of it

Malcolm Collins: is they took the concept, um, and this, this is why I like it. So they took the, I I, I actually have never read a single war hammer book in my entire life. I have only watched lore videos. Um, but they took the concept of.

Well, if you worship something similar to your universe, like if you worship a, a God or a concept or have a feeling mm-hmm. Um, that, that creates a divine entity of that type. Yes. And what what is funny is a lot of like hippies beliefs, this, they’re like, well, all gods and all religions are true in so far as like people believe in them, right?

Leaflit: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And then it takes this, and it’s like, and [00:29:00] if that was the case, it would actually be really horrible because what would happen is the most basal concepts like a fear of death would get feedback loops where like, the God that was manifested by that fear would want to create more of that fear to manifest himself further.

Uh, you get like the God of eroticism, the fear of death, like all of the most basic things. Um, but it doesn’t sound like that’s a problem in your universe because it sounds like these are not like active thinking entities that are, that would want to like empower themselves further.

Leaflit: Yes. Well, one thing I will say is that.

That ties in, that whole thing being bad ties, ties into what I told you about is like what caused the big irradiated zone.

Oh

yeah. So if you think about it, right, like I’m sure you can piece together.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Okay. Okay. So what are the major political events in, in the world right now that like players are thinking about, that are changing, that are exciting people?

Leaflit: So, there’s, [00:30:00] there’s two right now. There’s the, there’s the novel, the Light Novel, which is a civil war in like one of the countries. But the big political one right now is Moran, like the, the campaign has all the people playing in it.

Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.

Leaflit: So there are a bunch of people that live in like this. This town called Mera.

Okay. And it is like a base that was set up kind of out in the middle of nowhere. And typically people can’t go there ‘cause there’s a big tundra before you get there. So it’s really hard to get there. Most people, like, there’s also, the other thing too is we had to, so there’s airships in the setting, but airships, they, they only really, they float on like magic lay lines.

So like, if there’s no lay line, you can’t put, you can’t just like put a ship there. It would be really, really hard to like fly a ship there. Yeah. So because of that, this tundra has no lay line. So like you can’t just fly it over it. So you’re talking like really, really hard caravans that are going through like, brutal conditions with [00:31:00] like no food or anything like that.

So

Malcolm Collins: yeah. So why, why do people go there? Like what’s the adva, is there some resource at this location?

Leaflit: It’s to explore the as line, because there’s all sorts of crazy stuff there. Like, there’s new, new resources, new materials, uh, items called, um, Astro Relics, which are like, if you’ve watched Made In Abyss, it’s kind of like similar to that.

Or you can find like these crazy, like items that do stuff and it’s like, how is this work? How does this work? And like there’s even a system where like people will will gather these things and submit them for research to like the big like, like academies, like magic academies.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Leaflit: And, uh, different monsters, like different parts, new things like that.

Um, they’re all looking for that. But the, the fun thing about is there’s a lot of drama because people have different reasons. Like some people wanna be like researchers, they wanna like understand what Astra is. Mm-hmm. Some people are like, I just want fame and fortune and like, I’m here to like, make tons of money.

And some people are like, well, I’m here for my country because I wanna find technology that’ll help my country. So they have all these like [00:32:00] different reasons. And because of that, the players clash a lot. They end up fighting, they end up making their own little factions. And there’s a character who’s like the expedition director.

And this character is like a kind of mysterious force. Like nobody knows who they are. No one’s ever seen them. And they actually, there was like a bunch of people thinking that the director was like, evil because the director doesn’t help them. So like they, they’d have like a case in which like there’d be this giant monster just walking around like killing people.

And it’s like the newbies would go out and get slaughtered by this monster. And so they have to set up like parties, like, oh, let’s go hunt this thing down. But they’re like, wait a minute. If the director ha is, is this powerful? Why are they not doing anything about it? They must be evil. Right?

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

And it’s like

Leaflit: from my point of, it’s like you just don’t understand like your idea of like the future and your idea of, of what is important. The, the director’s thinking about things on a completely different scale than like you even could [00:33:00] possibly imagine, because from the director’s point of view, if the director helps you all, then you’ll never grow and you’ll suck.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: So it’s like, it’s, it’s kind of fun like to have

Malcolm Collins: that. No, no, that’s also fun. Okay. Has this been established that they are wrong about the director in Universe yet? Or is this like being

Leaflit: a, the, there’s a song sang by the director. So like, okay, so here’s like a whole nother thing. So there was a fan song made.

Wait,

micro, explain, explain that.

Okay. So there’s a concept. So in the game, the way, first I have to explain a little bit about the game. So in the game you have four action points, and you can use this for action points for anything. It’s not like d and d where there’s like move action, like minor major, it’s four.

Okay. And the biggest balls thing you could do is called a double heavy attack, which means I’m not doing anything but just attacking. Right? Um, I’m doing two all in attacks that have, I don’t care if it misses, if it hits, I could do big damage, right? It, so it’s like the, the big balls thing to do. [00:34:00] And so a player made a song called Double Heavy Attacks.

It’s like a, like a, like a metal song and everyone loves this song, right? And it, it, it kind of became like this huge meme in like the community. Oh my

Simone Collins: gosh.

Leaflit: So the, I, the concept of double heavy attacks now means a person who. Understands what they want and they go for it all in. That’s what it means. So yeah, we’ve taken this song,

Simone Collins: you now have slang.

This is so good.

Malcolm Collins: You said there was a, the song. Okay. So by the way, for people who are confused as to why something like this is interesting, if you’re just watching this and you’re just like, this seems like weird nerd stuff. Like why is this interesting? Uh, what I consider how media and entertainment are changing the concept of a form of entertainment, of the type that is being described here was genuinely.

Impossible, uh, I wanna say two generations ago. [00:35:00] Mm-hmm. Uh, so I, I, it might’ve been possible in the early days of the internet, but it hadn’t been developed to this extent yet. Um, and what we are seeing right now is something that whatever our kids are doing for fun is likely going to be an extrapolation of ideas like this.

Mm-hmm. The iterative, interactive elements, um, uh, I, I think are genuinely like anthropologically. Culturally, we are looking at, uh, a, a. You can ignore it and you can say, well, none of this stuff matters because, um, you know, like this is all like urban monoculture, whatever. And it’s like, no, but this is like, this is like actually the, the like internet conservatives who are into this stuff, right?

Leaflit: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Um, and uh, people can be like, well then why would, why would they be into it? And the answer I would make is it’s because all of the media [00:36:00] that’s out there, people are like, why do so many conservative influencers watch a ton of anime is because it’s not woke yet. It’s like the one form of media I can watch where like, women are feminine and men are masculine and, uh, I’m not preached to 24 7.

It’ll have its own message, but it like, um, and th this is a form of media that because people create it. Communally. And what’s even more interesting than that, it is not created by like a localized friend group. Mm-hmm. It is created by an online friend group. Yeah. And online friend groups and local friend groups have very little in common if you think about the way they actually end up structured.

Yeah. Um, local friend groups, you know, the way you look ends up mattering, uh, your, your local social standing, how much money you have, et cetera. Uh, and this can matter in an online friend group if it’s in some like, pay to win scenario or something like that. That’s obviously not what this is. Um, and it’s one of the reasons that if you look at the culture of our era today, I [00:37:00] point out that a lot of, uh, just the culture that we live in, and I’d argue all the way down to Trump originally came from Fortune.

Um, brownies came from four chan, memes came from four Chan Trump originally in the primaries. I’m not saying that he won because of four chan, but he was recognized in the primaries because of what was happening there. And that was a totally new type of community where social status was determined in a totally new way.

Um, and the way it was determined, because there wasn’t up votes or anything like that, was based on how, uh. How, how much, whatever you said could grab attention. Um, and that meant to be sort of maximally shocking and everything like that, and that defined a generation of cultural output. When you look at what Leaflet is doing now, we might see the prototype of what the next generation of cultural output is going to look like.

There are going to be. Potentially, and I’m not saying it’ll happen within [00:38:00] leaflet setting, maybe in 10 years when this is metastasized and you have different groups doing this, um, groups that are potentially so large that ideas and memes that come up within these settings end up affecting, uh, not just like what, like first of all, the four chan could create something like a Brony movement or memes was insane back in the day, but then they could elect a president That changes politics in the United States permanently.

Um, so paying attention to these ways that culture is changing and the innovators within this space is not a, like a lark. It’s not like a a, a curious aside. It’s something that anyone who is interested in where society is going is treating as one of the main courses. But to go forward, you mentioned some sort of fanfic.

So somebody, people write fanfictions about this and you incorporate them

Leaflit: a song. It’s a song. So somebody made a song’s

Malcolm Collins: a song. Song is like a fan song. Yeah. Okay.

Leaflit: Yeah. The fan song. Double Heavy Attacks. And what we did was we took that. And we started making versions of that song from [00:39:00] all the characters that embodied that idea, but from their own point of view.

Yeah. So like the director has a version of the song, but it’s so completely different than the others. ‘cause others are like, I’m gonna go all in, like, you know, for my family and, you know, this is like, I wanna like go on