jennafans | The Mill-Maids - a liminal (high-mortal) campaign concept (Reply)

Talismanic sempstry was mentioned in the Glitch book, but not in any detail.

Suppose, if you will, that talismanic sempstry was not actually invented by the author of The Divine Tailor, but that it was the first formalized compilation of something that individual spinners, weavers, and seamstresses have been doing for as long as clothing has existed: the art of calling down miracles greater than yourself by carefully shaping thread and yarn. Under the assumed name of "A. Tayler", the author in question claimed that they had invented the entire craft, covering up the fact that many of the descriptions and techniques had been lifted wholesale from existing traditions.

(If you were to ask the Excrucians, talismanic sempstry was never really "invented" - it has always existed, in the world outside the world. I have no way of verifying this statement because of the nature of the Lands Beyond Creation.)

Even in mythology and folklore there are traces of this knowledge already having existed since time immemorial - the fairy tale of Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle collected by the Brothers Grimm tells of a girl whose godmother had taught her rites with which her spindle could chase down and locate her lover, and her shuttle could weave a carpet so lush that real plants and animals sprang from it. But this was an individual and idiosyncratic art which was easily traced and suppressed. Any mortal whose ambitions aimed too high, or who discovered a technique too powerful, was helpless against a truly miraculous being.

Still, there were families, and other groups, passing down small handfuls of techniques in secret: a pattern of knots that would call the wind for a ship, embroidery that would grant some protection from bad luck, the weaving pattern needed to create a belt that granted superhuman strength and stamina to the wearer. Some passed on knowledge of plants and dyes that could prime thread and fabric to amplify miracles applied to them. A few also carefully preserved the instructions for greater symbols that could do major magic.

The author of The Divine Tailor did not write their book because talismanic sempstry was invented in the 1870s. They wrote their book because talismanic sempstry became dangerous in the 1870s, with the rise of mass production of textiles and clothing - when it became possible for mortals to hide major works within tens of thousands of yards of fabric and thousands of replicas of the same mass-produced items. In their earliest years, the textile mills overwhelmingly employed unmarried women, and so these saboteurs were referred to as "the mill-maids". The name stuck even as the workforce for the entire industry was slowly replaced with immigrant labor.

A bit of fabric with an embroidered sigil could be activated and then stuffed into a bin of scraps and discards. A jacquard loom's punch-card instructions could be slightly altered to weave in a potent pattern, and then the card burnt and replaced with an innocent one before anyone could tell who had done it. The contents of the great dye-vats used to color fabric in the shocking shades popular in this era could be adulterated. All this had the effect of making it impossible to tell who of a factory's dozens or hundreds of workers had committed any given act.

Some of the aggrieved decided that they'd just punish an entire factory; Noble historians hold that the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, in which more than a hundred women and girls perished from being locked into their sewing-room and unable to escape from the flames, was an act of retaliation for someone attaching sigils of honesty underneath the buttons of the shirts they made. But mortal garment workers were further motivated to form unions, and within them mill-maids would exchange techniques with each other.

For a campaign with this premise, you might follow a set of mill-maids rooming at the same boarding-house, working in the same room, or involved in labor organization - each of whom has inherited the tradition of a handful of magical and miraculous patterns. The setting could be historical (I really like the Victorian era, okay), or it could be modern. Maybe they are trying to depose the Noble that owns the company they work for. Maybe they're using what leverage they have to fight a (seemingly) unrelated force in the world. You could even insert a (former?) mill-maid into a different campaign and see what happens!