Chain of Isekai WoG Compilation

Chain of Isekai Word of God Compilation

Sections:
[Worldblood]
[Stellar Pacts]
[False Wizardry]
[Divine Transcendence]
[Halfmad Mechanisms]
[Prismatic Corruption]
[Unbeing]
[Misc]

Big Things:
[On Evil Gods]


[Worldblood]

Bleeding on a high-Rank item regularly is a viable method to maintain its power in low-Rank areas, due to the Worldblood in a high-Rank individual’s blood.

The ‘Survival’ perk reduces the amount of food you require to 1/4 what your Worldblood Rank and body would indicate.

Rank 0 and Rank 1 things are actually identical in behaviour and physical properties.
Rank 0 things only exist in the World where they are produced artificially; all Upwellings are Rank 1 at minimum, and all ore comes from Upwellings.

Zones are three dimensional, taking up a certain volume of space.
Zones and Upwellings are defined by the World’s environment generation algorithm, and thus anchored to absolute coordinates.
As the atmosphere of the World extends upwards infinitely without thinning, there are many high-Rank locations and even Upwellings (of the sort that only modify/convert existing material, due to the algorithm’s need for a clear sky) floating freely.

On increasing your Worldblood Rank:
Most living beings adapt through metabolic processes.
They consume substances rich in Worldblood, integrate them into their bodies, and these substances draw in ‘loose’ Worldblood released during digestion to catalyze the gradual conversion of the entire body into higher-Rank materials (which is thankfully much faster than the normal seven-year full replacement period).
Adaptation generally requires the replacement of a significant portion of the body’s substance with higher-Rank materials.
If an unliving automaton has some sort of self-repair mechanism that can take in external materials, or is fine with ship-of-theseusing themselves with higher-Rank components, they’re golden.

On consequences of eating really high-Rank food:
I will first note that really high-Rank foods can be quite difficult to digest, or even chew.
The person’s adaptation would most likely simply stall, potentially even reverting as too-potent materials are flushed from the body but not replaced.
The biology of high-Rank individuals needs more nutrition, not simply a quantity of Worldblood, and the higher-Rank portions of their body can neither directly rip Worldblood from the food they consume (reducing its nutrition) nor suck up loose Worldblood before the lower-Rank sections of their biology can draw it in (to maintain the person’s current Rank).

In theory, someone in a Worldblood-poor environment, consuming Worldblood-poor foods, might lose high-Rank materials more quickly than they can be replaced.
I believe this would take about seven years to achieve a decrease that will not be undone as soon as they get enough to eat, unless you take measures to accelerate the process (such as a Pact-power that accelerates metabolic processes).
This is not feasible without foods that have been artificially purged of Worldblood, due to the increased nutritional requirements of high-Rank individuals and the saturation of the entirety of the World withthe stuff.

With higher Rank, a person can not only move more quickly (to find more food), but can also eat more quickly, digest more quickly, and even hold more food in their stomach (due to extreme strength and durability).
A person eating twice their body weight in food and barely showing it is quite reasonable for high-Rank individuals forced to make do with lower-Rank foodstuffs.
Minding that high-Rank individuals have supernatural levels of skill as well, they could quite plausibly take an hour to snatch up a few dozen animals, cook them implausibly quickly, scarf down several tons of meat, then continue traveling, using their supernatural agility to avoid bending a single blade of grass as they run.

On dietary mutations:
If they’re absorbing something from the environment (given even the sunlight is enriched with Worldblood), they’re getting what they need from that.
If not, they’re still probably okay- the same mechanism that converts a fraction of the Infinite Sun’s output into the Worldblood that saturates and fuels the World also allows effects like False Wizardry food conjuration to come with Worldblood.
If you’re drinking in the emotions of a tree to feed yourself, you’ll be generating new Worldblood in the process.

Worldblood’s innate magnification of physical qualities is its most basic and obvious property.
However, it is also used to keep the World from collapsing into a singularity, to create new resources in Upwellings, and to manage many other functions of the World.
Worldblood artifice exploits the manner in which Worldblood interacts with physical structures to precisely manipulate Worldblood, allowing its higher functions to be accessed.

Food grown in a Zone of a certain Rank will almost always be of the same Rank as said Zone.
The environment is high-Rank because the air, sunlight, water, and soil is saturated with power that itself saturates the ecosystem.
Harvested food, which is no longer alive, will not draw in Worldblood to enrich itself if carried to higher-Rank areas.

As a slight exception to the normal mechanisms of Worldblood, the Rank children are born at is determined more by the Rank of the foods their mother ate during pregnancy than by the Rank of the mother, trending towards lower Ranks.
In a sufficiently large Rank 7 area, literally everyone could be Rank 7 from birth.

Upwellings that generate ore do not have ‘full’ states.
They produce metal at a rate appropriate to their nature, pushing lesser stone outwards or sometimes overwriting it.
Left alone long enough, the weakest of Upwellings could produce a literal mountain of native gold.
In my imagination, most Upwellings produce somewhere between a few kilograms and a ton of ore each day; the rate of production being fairly consistent and stable for each Upwelling.

On ‘Unfold’ and Worldblood techniques:
With ‘Unfold’ alone, if you work really hard at developed a specialized way of teaching a specific technique, you may eventually be able to convey it to others, most likely in a lessened form.
Other powers, including in-world things like teaching-boosting Legends and Pacts, would be helpful there.

‘Ignition’ may be a bit niche, but I believe it has some useful applications.
If you also have ‘Upwelling’, you can very rapidly regain lost Rank.
If your Rank is high enough, you can choose to burn your flesh and use the ‘Rank boosts traits that it wouldn’t normally’ effect to regenerate faster than you burn up.
You can very easily double your strength or more for a few seconds at a time, just long enough to land a mightier than normal blow.
If your focus isn’t Worldblood, you could use the trait-booster effect to amplify other power sources temporarily.


[Stellar Pacts]

On the power level of Pacts:
A Star devoted entirely to producing and manipulating fire could allow its users to compare decently to skilled firebenders.
The same amount of power given to enhancing pyrokinesis in a different way could turn someone who can already burn down planets into someone who can simultaneously burn down multiple planets.
A wizard with an appropriate Pact would most likely find their spells to be 2x – 10x stronger, depending on the side benefits provided (some degree of enhanced control over spell results, or enhanced learning rate, or an extra way of recovering Velt).
A Pact that multiplies reading speeds could plausibly reach 5x – 15x ranges, while one that only accelerates the reading of ‘simple’ or ‘routine’ information could greatly exceed that.

By default, the New Moon appears in ‘all the Heavens’.
This was explicity intended to include both your pocket sky and the natural skies of the World, and could plausibly include the skies above every planet in a scifi setting you visit.
You should be able to prevent it from appearing in, or remove it from, specific heavens, even without applying other powers.

All power sources work mostly normally in the Heavens, though some don’t have necessary prerequisites (like the presence of Primordial Beings or Worldblood).
A soul could use Unbeing to destroy every soul in their afterlife, but not breach the boundaries of their afterlife to invade others.
This partitioning is part of the Heavens’ purpose.

Nothing can pass in or out of an afterlife save Starlight and souls (which can never escape an afterlife).
No power of Starlight save those that are purely communicative may pass through the afterlife’s outer shell.
Pacts, and the temporary bonds formed by Astral Essence, form connections that latch on to the outside of an afterlife and suck out Starlight like a vacuum.
The Broken Broadcaster and Stellar Pacts starting location combined indicate the worst possible attacks an afterlife can suffer: you are bombarded with loud, screeching noise constantly (though earplugs and the like still work if you can make them), and most of your Starlight (but never all) is drained away by an excessive number of artificial Astral Essence bonds.

The powers of a Star are defined by their creator, upon the moment of their creation.

The New Moon lets you move things between stars and create as many new stars as you want, so long as you remain within the confines of the moon.
A person only provides starlight for the star they are currently inside of, but could easily take a few steps outside their purely functional star to conjure up a delicious feast in one right next door whenever they need to restock on snacks.

Afterlifes focused on comfort are able to devote their powers to producing luxuries, building comfortable environments, and chatting with other afterlifes.
These afterlifes can more safely make their powers broad and inefficient, because what they make with those powers, due to the nature of the Heavens, generally won’t decay.
Its okay if it takes a few years to construct a new room in their mansion, or a machine that spits out a chocolate bar each day, or a sexbot, because everything they make will just steadily pile up and make their eternity steadily comfier.

Stars are controlled by the collective will of their inhabitants, like a direct democracy.

Stars are potentially capable of leaving the New Moon, if the inhabitants decide to.
You are additionally capable of banishing both souls and Stars from the New Moon.

The light of the Heavens isn’t ‘real’ physical light- as such, it cannot be perceived by any thing that lacks a human soul (or Starlight-detecting artifice), and is less impeded by physical barriers.
It would take a bit more effort for someone living underground to see the Heavens, but only because a physical cavern ceiling tends to make a person feel like they shouldn’t be able to see something on the other side.

No limit on the amount of Astral Essence a person can hold, and it persists indefinitely.

You can only have one Pact-power, yes.
However, Astral Essence means literally anyone could wield the power of dozens of afterlifes at the same time, it would just be pretty expensive.
The powers provided by Ties that Bound count as Pact-powers.
That is to say, they function for perks like Combinatorial.
They do not count as Pact-powers in the sense you can only have one Pact-power; you can have any number of powers from Ties that Bind.

The Stellar Pacts Location is vaguely cyberpunk.
Stationary rigs on the ground are used to generate Astral Essence, and mass proliferation of these has allowed almost every drop of Starlight the dead can produce to be extracted and used.
Extremely high demand has relegated most of the population to using heavenly artifice significantly cheaper/worse than what the wealthy can get.


[False Wizardry]

On exotic materials constructed by precise sequences of many spells:
Materials that do not interact with the Worldblood-based phenomenon of gravity, or interact with it in a different manner definitely exist.
Another example may be a fluid that is capable of absorbing heat but can not releasing it into other materials; it would appear to be a permanently-freezing coolant that glows steadily brighter as it is used, shining a brilliant white shortly before it breaks down into its constituent elements and releases its stored heat.
Additionally, a sufficiently well-engineered material could itself convert heat into orderly forces.
So, a device might use the random molecular motion of heat to accelerate some electrons and make electricity.
Applications of this concept may include the conversion of light into directed kinetic energy, or the creation of materials with effects somewhat resembling magnets, which exert a constant pushing or pulling effect on all substances within a certain range.

A scarred spell continues to produce and store Velt, and you retain the ability to access its reservoir to store or remove energy.
It may be difficult to prevent energy stored in the spell from leaking out to fuel its effect under normal circumstances.

With a spell that conjures Velt, some means of magnifing the potency of said spell, it could yield more power than it consumes.
So, you could engineer spells that, when scarred appropriately, significantly increase your rate of Velt recovery as a passive effect.
Even if you are somehow unable to breach 100% efficiency, stored spells of a ‘Conjure Velt’ effect can easily act as mana potions (especially as stored spells can take on liquid forms).

Writing a spell onto something may enhance its resistance to damage to some degree.
A spell’s informational resilience makes it harder to erase the information of the spell, which has limited carryover to the durability of the medium it exists upon.

On scarring a spell of fireball or teleportation:
You’d mostly likely end up with a continuous but heavily lessened fire/teleportation effect.
A stored spell could be scarred to produce a sword that burns for some duration instead of a sword that shoots off a fireball a few times.

A significant portion of the spellscarring process is altering the wizard’s mind, which is much more easily changed, to adjust how it interacts with the spell pattern.
Spells that hold a scarred spell as a prerequisite don’t care if their prerequisite works properly; they can reach under the scar tissue to anchor properly.

False Wizardry’s teleportation is very physical, and difficult to aim at precise locations on the fly.
I believe that the physically weaker of two objects teleported to intersect would be either violently smashed out of the way or split open/crushed down to make a suitable gap (depending on size and weight differences).
This means it’s safe to teleport into open air, and even bodies of water, and that intersecting another person on landing is liable to just fling the two of you apart and break some bones, but most people teleporting inside a cliff face will be crushed down into unidentifiable viscera such that the pressures involved are equalized.

Given access to both Spellseed and Deep Magic, you can conjure Faith, Velt, Astral Essence, and Worldblood directly, though the usefulness of their raw forms varies.
Faith can’t really exist without being either ‘X’s Faith’ or ‘Faith in X’.
Astral Essence must be tied to a specific Star to exist.
It should be possible to create examples of these resources that have particular natures, or to transform the natures of samples of these resources in arbitrary ways.
Velt is a psychic energy without physical form, and disappears very rapidly outside of a mind or spell.
Somewhat similarly, Worldblood is almost closer to a quality of an object than a physical thing- you can store it, and transfer it between things, but attempts to conjure it will either just increase the Worldblood present in something that already exists or conjure something rich in Worldblood.
It should not be difficult to create spells that can conjure these resources ‘into’ a particular target.

Archive Splinter and a capacity for telepathy would not permit directly, instantly imprinting spells on the minds of others.
It bypasses some of the innate limitations of False Wizardry too trivially.
Archive Splinter is already a significant benefit just by allowing you to trivially duplicate spellbooks that are normally very expensive to produce.

The intelligent spells of Spellseed can function even if engraved onto bone or tattooed into skin, and Archive Splinter can allow this to be done instantly.

Scarring a spell does not allow you to learn it a second time, to enhance your Velt supply.
The scarred version counts as a full copy.
It remains possible to unscar scarred spells.

Consciousnesses produced by ‘Spellseed’ cannot know any spells when created.
They may learn spells normally, as all minds can.

Spells of False Wizardry have their own symbology and rules, a combination of diagrams and structures vaguely resembling mathematical equations.
Learning spells is its only skillset, though the basics aren’t difficult to pick up even without any instruction but the spell pattern itself.
Learning a spell requires understanding how its component symbols logically fit together.

False Wizardry is great at creating matter from nothing.
There are four spells just to conjure various kinds of cheese.

Spellseed allows the engineering of spells that make greater use of variables than the original spell list.
Deep Wizardry makes this easier, especially in the area of creating spells that interact with each other.
An example of a spell from the original list is a Recall spell that attempts to bring the caster to the location they inhabited 83,452 seconds ago. With Spellseed, a spell that creates a specific mystical structure (such as a teleport anchor) and another spell that targets the closest or most recent such structure created by the caster is entirely possible.

Spells from the original list do not return information directly.
A spell to detect treasure might make all gold and silver in range temporarily glow with a light that passes through most materials.
With Spellseed alone, spells that add information to brains of a precise kind are possible.
With the addition of Deep Magic, spells that add information to any manner of mind are possible.

The Velt a spell produces/stores/costs directly corresponds to the time it takes to learn it.
Fire 1 takes ~3 hours to learn (discounting variance in skill and mental ability), and produces/stores/costs 3 Velt.
Fire 10 takes ~50 hours to learn, and produces/stores/costs 50 Velt.

Fire 1000, the end of its spell line, produces a fireball half a kilometer across, burning at temperatures many times greater than required to boil tungsten and persisting for well over an hour.

I imagined the simplest spells as taking about half a day to learn for someone with a below-highschool-level education, taking into account the need to read them multiple times.
That’s somewhere around 10k words, I think?
A spell at that level should be approximately as dangerous as stabbing someone with a large knife from a dozen meters away, or as useful as conjuring a bread roll.

‘Deep Magic’ specifically applies to ‘your spells’.
This includes all spells you create- otherwise, a spell that relied on Deep Magic to, say, conjure Worldblood, could not be taught to others.

With ‘Deep Magic’ and ‘Spellseed’, you should be able to develop a line or lines of spells that temporarily or permanently alter how someone’s magic functions.
At the simplest, a series of ‘Mage’s Invocation’ spells that provide hours-long boosts to the effectiveness of all other spells.

The False Wizardry Location is not a technological setting.
Imagine a combination of a university and a hive city.
Basically, the average wizard can conjure food and drink, produce magical lights, and just make a bedroom for themselves in the wall somewhere if they feel like it.
Now extrapolate that to something larger than a mountain, built up over many centuries, with minimal central government.


[Divine Transcendence]

An ‘average’ user of Divine Transcendence will produce 5-10 ‘X units’ of Faith from self-confidence.
Someone who can turn themselves into a living god will generally exceed 20, as self-confidence is also talent here.
A ‘casual’ worshipper is liable to generate 1 – 3 units of Faith, while a sufficiently devoted fanatic can produce 10+ units, the only problem being converting all of it into a useful format.

Myth only binds your behaviour when you use Domain powers or Act as Mythos.
If you aren’t actively, consciously wielding it, you are no more bound than you were at Stage 4- aka, not at all.

Faith corrupted by Unbeing could be weaponized against gods.
With the right system you could convert the Faith of others towards this purpose (creating a cult whose worship slowly turns a noble god into an abomination), or allow your corrupted Faith to infect other Faith within the target’s reserves.

Faith is a thing specifically produced by humans.
Not human-like minds (Light Within specifically allowing you to grant Faith-producing capabilities to sufficiently human minds), but humans.
Generally, a sufficiently human intelligence created by a being with access to Faith should be capable of producing Faith.

The range at which Faith can be collected without a Sculpted Mythos is normally in the area of 10-100 miles.

To support a Legend Chrysalis, a trait needs to be metaphysically big enough and distinct enough.
A sufficiently powerful spell of False Wizardry may work, though insufficiently dissimilar spells may be treated as part of the same ‘trait’ for the purpose of supporting legends.
The perks bought in the CYOA certainly have more than enough metaphysical power, but their sheer potency is such that a legend probably couldn’t directly increase their effectiveness.
You’d probably get side benefits that make the perk more convenient or useful, like a boost to the rate at which you learn spells to go with Archive Splinter, or an extra pool of power that can be used to fuel Metamanipulation.

Legends can be attached to basically any skill or attribute, even those related to other power source.
A Legend could let you read faster, let you learn spells of False Wizardry (and only those) significantly faster, strengthen your spells (possibly only certain kinds of spells, or only in certain situations), enhance your supply of Velt to fuel spellcasting, or let you defy some of the normal limits of False Wizardry.
An archmage with appropriate Legends, facing one without, might detect the spell their opponent is casting and cast an opposite spell to nullify it before it is completed.
Instead of turning to point at an enemy sneaking up from behind, she might will a bolt of lightning to fire in that direction.
She might detect the weighty patterns of spells from great distances, sniffing out books of magic long forgotten, and destroy the physical tomes to instantly learn the spells they contained.

On Faith use and production:
In the Unconscious Excellence stage, most people will wield Excellence infrequently enough that their capacity to store Faith is the primary limiting factor.
Those that use it more frequently naturally grow more efficient at retaining the Faith they produce.
A Reservoir can theoretically be constructed at any size; a fully-effective Reservoir could be built from less than 100 ‘Y units’ of Faith, but would store very little Faith.
The capacity of a Reservoir scales linearly with the amount of Faith invested into it, modified by the quality of its construction- a ‘perfect’ Reservoir could store 1 unit of Faith for every 3 units of Faith bound into its construction, but very crude Reservoirs can quite possibly reach ratios of 100:1 or greater.
Someone with sufficient renown and a high-quality Reservoir could collect and purify 10 or more units of Faith each day, and someone with more talent could surpass even that.
A Legend Chrysalis requires several thousand units of Faith, meaning people who have sufficiently large followings can produce them at a rate of almost one per year and people who are all alone would be lucky to make half a dozen in the span of a lifetime.
Depending on the degree of fire resistance, I would expect blessing a house to take somewhere around a few hundred units of Faith.
The cost to bless a city would naturally depend on its size.

‘The World Your Stage’ enhances Sculpted Mythos, to a degree dependent on the meaningfulness, truth, and beauty of your stories.

If someone isn’t conscious, they aren’t producing Faith.

Faith is a consumable resource, and a raw material.
Abilities such as what Legends provide do not consume Faith in the same way waving your arm doesn’t consume Faith; it is an inherent capability.

‘Many Faces’ can cause areas devoid of worshippers to generate a steady supply of new Faith for whatever needs you have.
Where I say Faith never decreases from its historical peak, this is meant to indicate Faith production.

At lower levels, Divine Transcendence can be considered to simply increase the power and breadth of your existing capabilities.
This becomes somewhat less true at higher levels of power.
At Stage 4, the intersection of your Faith-boosted abilities produces totally new powers- someone who focused a lot on blacksmithing might acquire outright pyrokinesis.
A Stage 5 individual’s Domain can stretch quite far from its original source (a god renowned as an incredible swordsman causing the blades of an enemy army to turn on their wielders).

On how a person grows:
First, you wield transcendent excellence with active effort.
As you hone yourself, it grows less straining to wield it so.
You are a blacksmith who can forge a mastwork sword in half a day, if you really push yourself.
Second, you begin to express transcendent ability without any conscious effort or exertion.
You no longer need apron, gloves, or tongs, and your routine pace is the completion of a masterwork every day.
You don’t need to quench what you forge.
Thirdly, your abilities grow more powerful and blatant- though still outgrowths of your honed skill and ability.
You find yourself able to control flames and can shape metal by touch alone.
Fourthly, your abilities swell to match the faith others have in you.
Your own skill and ability doesn’t matter as much.
You bless every forge in the nation, and swallow up an invading army in a roaring inferno.

Also on how a person grows:
Stage 1: You have what is effectively a Solar Excellency.
Stage 2: You can expend your resource pool as much as you want, given sufficient time and energy.
Stage 3: You can make new passives, most of them either boosting a stat/ability directly (while making it count as supernatural), letting you break some of the rules that normally limit a trait (like needing to be in a place that has food to successfully forage for food), or providing a niche advantage (like heightened resistance to fires you started).
Stage 4: You are a demigod, in the PJO vein.
Your passives grow stronger the more of them you have, and you can adjust them to take advantage of that (‘really good at taking a hit’ might become ‘your skin is armor’).
You gain a bunch of boosts, also scaling with the number of passives you have and shaped by the concept you picked.
You might get one or more special abilities, like pyrokinesis, that run off the same resource as your Excellency and have no real limit if your resource pool has enough in it.
Stage 5: You are a god, that now requires worship to use your godly abilities.
You can use worship even if it’s thousands of miles away, and target basically any location that has people who worship you nearby.
You get a Domain, making those ‘scale infinitely with enough energy’ powers increasingly versatile as it grows.
You get a potentially dangerous way to power-up in the form of Act as Mythos.


[Halfmad Mechanisms]

Inventions are limited to physical things.
However, you certainly could design lungs or rebreathers with healing effects, or devices that radiate time-distorting light, or element-manipulation organs.

In the case of normal item-crafting, Throw Yourself In would only improve a single specific item.
In the case of Halfmad Mechanisms, where you create an Invention by amassing a whole bunch of effort, then draw on its non-physical presence to create artifice otherwise impossible, the design itself can be improved for potentially incredible result.
You sacrifice pyromancy, designing a machine that can wield supernatural pyromancy.
You sacrifice your Mythos, designing an artificial god.
You sacrifice your ability to use a freeform magic system from a different setting, designing an artificial mage core.

Throw Yourself In, by default, does not prevent you from reaquiring what you sacrifice.
However, if you sacrifice something and your potential to ever get it back, that is a much more powerful sacrifice.


[Prismatic Corruption]

Gemergence:
-‘Immediate awareness’ includes a basic understanding of their nature and abilities, but not a full breakdown of which parts of them are most useful or exacty how they achieve their abilities.
The population cap of Gemergence functions by ceasing to spawn new Primordial Beings of that type when they reach the cap.
It does not interfere with the natural reproduction of their breed.
-‘Accumulation’ means you can store as many crystal spheres as you want.
No passive production unless you hook up a thermodynamics-defying generator to the well.
-Exactly what you put into the pit doesn’t matter except for how much progress it provides to the next crystal sphere.
It’s a gacha system.

There exist Primordial Beings that simply act as food crops or domesticated animals; even those that seem to farm themselves, and need to be eaten to propogate.

It is not rare to find Primordial Beings that are willing to ’empower’ a person without recompense, but is very rare to find Primordial Beings whose empowerments (mutations, mostly) do not come with innate drawbacks.

There are Primordial Beings that resemble fungi, just as there are Primordial Beings that resemble plants, animals, minerals, fluids, colors, and so on.

There exist Primordial Beings that can mutate humans, animals, plants, and minerals.
These do not always overlap, nor do the mutations that can be applied to a given type of thing.
There exists mutated cave-wheat that feeds by giving off light instead of absorbing sunlight, and veins of mutated living ore that has taken to rooting into and expanding through the muck of the deep underground.

Some particularly similar kinds of Primordial Beings may be able to crossbreed.
Primordial Beings that operate off of very divergent physical laws are unlikely to be compatible, but the results of successful hybridization can be as interesting as primordial artifice.

Someone who has been mutated can still benefit from Worldblood.
This can compound upon the benefits of mutations, such as multiplying the durability of stoneskin instead of weaker fleshskin.
Some mutations may receive lesser, or no, benefits from Worldblood, depending on how ‘non-physical’ they are.
A mutation that lets you taste emotions would improve as your senses sharpen, but the power to heal others, drawn from an oath that bars you from telling lies, would not benefit.

Removing mutations is very difficult and expensive, but possible even without anything bought in the CYOA.

The World does not allow Primordial Beings to inhabit it that would break the setting.
Mind that the setting is infinitely large, and one of the simplest power sources (Worldblood) scales to arbitrarily high power levels, so that’s a bit of a high bar.

Potions created with Prismatic Corruption can get weirder than the abilities of Primordial Beings, due to the odd interactions between conflicting metaphysics.
If a Primordial Being has a breath weapon, you can combine the organ that produced it with parts from other Primordial Beings to create a superior weapon.
It remains difficult to create a potion or item to produce a specific effect without some kind of starting point- most body modification potions include ingredients with some body modification effects, which are altered by the other ingredients used.
Without such a starting point, you could end up mixing ingredients randomly hoping for a useful interaction.
Invisibility cloaks are relatively simple (if you are lucky, you could just skin an invisible Primordial Being), and if you had the right parts, you could definitely create a tool by which new, loyal Primordial Beings could be sung into existence.


[Unbeing]

Unbeing isn’t a pit you summon monsters from.
It’s a pit you throw pieces of your victims into as you turn them into monsters.

The simplest applications of Unbeing (turning yourself into a monster) can be performed by anyone with a basic understanding that Unbeing exists and a few of its metaphors.
Any training beyond that just makes it safer and more controlled.

Stabilizing things of Unbeing is very difficult and expensive, but possible even without anything bought in the CYOA.

Someone turning you into a thing of Unbeing would need to be strong enough, or otherwise have a great enough advantage, to just kill you normally.

Anything that makes it easier to kill and/or eat a target will make it easier to use Unbeing to destabilize/distort/consume the target.
If you can extend tendrils of fungal dreams through a target’s mind, eating away at their hopes and fondest memories to fuel the growth of your roots, it will be significantly easier to turn the minds of others into things of Unbeing, and from there, the rest of their existence.

It is entirely possible to use Unbeing, and convert other things into Unbeing, without becoming of Unbeing yourself.
Turning a piece of yourself into a thing of Unbeing simply provides a tool that makes the process of turning other things into Unbeing much easier.
You could just do it the hard way, or acquire a tool of Unbeing that isn’t a part of yourself to shape Unbeing with.

To make a creature of Unbeing, you simply need a source of value that you can overwhelm.
You turn the value into Unbeing, combine it with other value if it is insufficient on its own, and distort it until its form and capabilities is in accordance with your desires.
This is a bit more complex than it sounds- it is easier to distort things less; turning a soul into a source of baleful unlight that casts curses down upon the world below (as a subtle alteration of the nature of stars) is easier than turning the soul into a wraith that commands pale flames, which is easier than turning a soul into a highly-physical beast with flesh of stone.
A corpse can become a zombie, but a living person has significantly more value, and doesn’t need to be distorted to regain the capacity for motion and violence.

Belief, Starlight, Velt, all can be corrupted, for they are part of you.
Making sure you only convert a portion of your current reserves, and not your capacity to produce those energies (which you cannot shed so easily), is slightly more difficult.
This corruption generally won’t make the energies more potent.

False Wizardry and Unbeing combined allows a person to expend Velt to stall their descent into Unbeing.
However, a person tends to learn and experience things, forming new skills and memories over time.
This increases the cost of stalling your descent into Unbeing, as you are metaphysically heavier.
If the Lich lives long enough without learning new spells of False Wizardry to increase its energy supply, it will need to start jettisoning excess weight to keep afloat.

Forcefully transferring negative traits from yourself to an enemy is possible, but it will almost never be significantly easier than inflicting a more mundane wound that would have similar impact.
The nature of Unbeing encourages using those who are much weaker than you as prey and receptacles of corruption.

On sacrificing negative aspects of yourself:
Unbeing is about diminishing- removing a wholly negative aspect of a thing is just about the opposite of diminishment.
That said, Unbeing is also about distortion, and can definitely remove negative aspects of mutations if you have some way to pay the price (including making other people pay for you).

On Unbeing based nuclear reactors:
Using Unbeing to destabilize a substance such that it decays into energy and a lesser substance should be possible.
Allowing that substance to use Unbeing to destabilize other substances in a similar manner, allowing your reactor to make its own fuel, should be possible.
This could involve atoms and nuclear fission, it could involve reducing earth and stone and fresh blood to lifeless ash.

On potential applications of Unbeing:
-Capture a mighty warrior, and destabilize their existence.
Push them onto a path of descent you believe will shape their mind to make them willingly obey or work with you.
Their body warps in some way, and they become a monster of unbeing, just as powerful as they were previously and now bent to serve your will.
-Use Hearts Aligned and Flow like Sand.
Sacrifice yourself and another person, use a strong emotional bond to get a sacrifice efficiency above 100%, and create a new being, a temporary fusion, stronger than the sum of its parts.
Go full Steven Universe.
-Use something renewable to slow your descent and prevent your decay.
A herd of animals, False Wizardry, etc.
Difficult, and increasingly so, but possible.
A lich can survive indefinitely so long as they keep learning new spells.
-Create a large staff, an example of Worldblood artifice that consumes its entire reservoir of Worldblood in one go to produce a powerful healing effect.
Warp it into a thing of Unbeing, removing its need for Worldblood just as transforming someone into an undead removes their need for food.
Now you can spam it without worrying about your power supply, making it much more useful than before at the cost of a finite lifespan.
-Capture a civilian, and destabilize their existence.
Push them onto a path that will allow them to destabilize others in a similar manner, and that will push them to do so.
Spread the plague of undeath, consuming a city.
Observe as some of the strength your victims lose accumulates in a small number of special infected (cough L4D).
Use triggers their path has conditioned them to follow to push the horde towards a target you need destroyed.


[Misc]

‘Literally You’ probably cannot purge the negative effects of mutations while retaining the positives, as this is in the same vein of things as increasing Worldblood rank without increasing hunger.
Additionally, you cannot sacrifice yourself to yourself with Unbeing, then reverse the damage done after 24 hours, causing yourself to grow exponentially more powerful with each passing day.
Also, it can’t give you more Chain Parts to spend, no matter what you do.
‘Literally You’ can be used to negate the costs of ‘Throw Yourself In’.

‘Trades Made Well’ functions on all power sources.

‘Gemergence’ and ‘Throw Yourself In’ are potential methods by which hostile aspects of yourself, including intelligent spells, may be safely removed.

It is theoretically possible to use out of context powers like New Moon to deny the barriers of the Heavens.

Even the ‘mundane’ aspects of this world are often not bound by ‘input = output’.
Escalating feedback loops are entirely possible.

All 4-point powers allow their relevant Power Source to be carried to other worlds.

Regarding what would be sufficient to satisfy Dreaoms of Change’:
New Moon by itself would be enough, being that it fundamentally changes how the afterlife works and allows countless scattered souls to come together for the first time in millenia.
The creation of a post-scarcity society would likely be even more significant than ending death, for a people who can reliably chat up their dead ancestors.

Soulless people produced by the Elixir of Life retain all of their memories and their full personality.
A computer can continue to work fine, even if the backup drive is removed.

The Infinite Sun is a bit of a unique situation.
The discovery of such an entity, a source of literally infinite power, was a unique opportunity.
The builders created other worlds, but without the Infinite Sun they could never have created a truly infinite universe.
The danger was subtle, as well- until the final stages of construction, when humanity was seeded, the Infinite Sun was nothing but a mindless force; its subtle shifts in output followed predictable patterns that were easily compensated for.
What happened to the builders is unknown, though they vanished shortly after humanity was seeded.
Perhaps they fled upon realizing they granted an infinitely powerful being consciousness?
By my metaphysics, fleeing is much easier than pursuit- they could have easily cleaved apart the multiverse irrevocably to seperate themselves from this looming threat.
(Or maybe they just wandered off when they completed their work.)

The veil seperating the World from the Heavens acts to curve light passing through it, creating an illusion of the sun rising and setting.
Because of the way it was set up, the sun appears to exist in the same relative position no matter where you are in the world; there is only one time zone.

The temporal discontinuities between the World and Earth were not caused by the ‘Home Free’ mechanism, but are naturally occuring.
Delaying the activation of ‘Home Free’ will not alter the amount of relative time experienced on each end.

The Prismatic Corruption Location Upgrade means you don’t have to worry about mindcontrol through the mind-body interface.
You are still capable of experiencing sensations, though you are naturally capable of pulling back from your physical form to reduce what you feel (to avoid extreme pain, mindbreaking pleasure, or infectious ideas).
It enhances your memory, as forming new memories causes the substance of your mind to expand, thus providing new space to store memories.
Unless you actively prune chunks of your mind away, you’ll always be able to recover a memory that has faded, peeling away newer layers to reveal the pristine original memory.

Even if you don’t spend any Chain Parts on a power source, you can use it.
Except for Halfmad Mechanisms, which requires being born a Halfmad.

All power sources can, in theory, be used in all sections of the world.
However, Worldblood is inherently reliant on territory and the quality of your territory, and Prismatic Corruption is inherently reliant on the species of exotic life you have access to.
It is entirely possible to encounter vast stretches of land where no Primordial Beings exist and the Worldblood concentration never exceeds the minimum Rank, where pursuing these power sources is impossible without outside resources.
The Worldblood and Prismatic Corruption startling locations are unusually rich, but not unique in being unusual.

On the starting locations:
They are very major locations, but I would not call them the most major (though the eighth is definitely special).
The first seven are examples of places very heavily focused on a single power source, which heavily utilize it and understand it well while disfavoring or not considering all others.
This purity, the ascendancy of one power source over all others, is the reason you are drawn to these locations.
Indeed, there are almost definitely locations far greater where multiple power sources are mastered and used together to incredible result.

The various ‘Dreams’ drawbacks have no time limit.
As long as you don’t die permanently, you can keep trying.

The Lonely Goddess has a whole bunch of social powers.
She is supernaturally charming and beautiful, impossibly excellent in all areas of romance and love.
Calling upon her greater mythos, she can influence the feelings and beliefs of entire nations, and reshape the relationships between people.

The Infinite Sun can control the amount of sunlight an area receives.
She could lock a continent in eternal night, or reduce a castle to a molten pit hundreds of kilometers deep.
She can treat her physical body as the sun, producing arbitrary amounts of FTL light from it.
Her control of this power is somewhat imprecise, but her offensive power is literally infinite.

The World only has seven power sources; it doesn’t even have the Hard Science of our world.
That said, the combination of multiple power sources can have very interesting and useful effects, and is sometimes considered an eighth power source in and of itself, ‘True Wizardry’.
The people that created those ancient ruins were masters of every power source, and had found ways to do some crazy things.
Staves that consume a mix of Worldblood and Starlight to cast greatly magnified spells of False Wizardry, crystals containing decaying souls trapped in temporal distortions that provide benefits similar to a Legend, infectious two-dimensional Primordial Beings that spread across the surface of a victim’s skin, reducing them to a flat image and then erasing itself to leave nothing behind.

The spiritual avatar from ‘New Moon’ and the mental thread from ‘Archive Splinter’ are all part of you.
You all know the same spells, and access the same archive.
All three aspects of yourself could simultaneously study the archive, if desired.

If you have the capacity to move a structure as large as the Forgotten Tower, it could be moved without damaging it, but it has no capacity to move itself.
That said, it is very good at manipulating its own internal volume; if you build the connections, it can take you thousands of kilometers in a single step.

The World doesn’t have relativity.
All light, as it ultimately derives from the Infinite Sun, travels infinitely quickly.
All of the World’s coordinates are absolute.
Eat it, physicists.

You do not automatically get Perks to go with new power sources acquired from Mechanical Purpose.
However, you may spend any CP you have reserved to acquire novel Perks.

The veil of the Heavens is absolutely impassable by purely in-setting means.
If you can prevent a soul from passing on, or decide you don’t need the original soul (the brain still records memories, after all), resurrection becomes much easier.
Every power source but Halfmad Mechanisms and False Wizardry should be able to create a new vessel/fix the old vessel, then shove the soul back in.
If the soul has not yet left, every power source should be able to reanimate a corpse, with or without soul.
Easier with purchases, but possible through wholly in-world means.


[On Evil Gods]

“Why don’t many gods mentally alter people into fanatics?
It’s certainly immoral, but that seems like there are many who wouldn’t care about the ethics due to the power.”

Firstly, a lot of ‘natural’ gods (made up entirely of Faith) would be incapable of even considering doing such a thing, because their stories include stuff like ‘mind control/enslavement is bad and harmful’.
Even human gods tend to have difficulties here, as Domain powers (required to influence lots of people in a reasonable time frame) are generally limited by the myth structure in a similar manner.

A human god might have personal-scale abilities to influence minds, which are not limited by their myth structure, but at that point, it’s probably more efficient to engage in diplomacy and politics to get entire nations to become slightly more faithful than to manually create fanatics.
Demons can be similarly not limited by your myth structure, but producing lots of them without giving them the capacity to multiply on their own is a real pain.
Plus, as you generally can’t create a demon of ‘obeys this one specific person and can also rewrite mortal minds’, demons that diverge from your own myth structure can be quite difficult to control.

So that just leaves evil gods, recognized as being willing to engage in mass enslavement, or those gods whose myth structures are so strange mind-bending people to praise you without end is considered good.
This still runs into several issues.
Permanently altering minds without side effects is much more difficult, and much rarer an ability, than turning people into fanatics who are nearly useless as anything but Faith-batteries.
Such a flawless ability is unlikely to function so well at massive scales.
So not only is this process obvious, but it takes away from the intelligent manpower at your disposal.
Additionally, if you are producing mentally-damaged fanatics, they’ll have lesser capacity to understand the complexities of larger mythos structures, reducing the quality of the Faith they produce for those purposes- potentially making their sum output worth less than that of a more intelligent but less devoted follower.
And this is not even getting into the difficulty of expanding your sculpted mythos if you’re reliant on fanatics of this kind.

Nevertheless, there certainly would exist ‘simple’ evil gods, who warp humans into maddened cultists, extracting incredible quantities of Faith and wielding a lower-versatility Domain with careless abandon.
The Demonic Cult from the supplement is perhaps the purest (and most dangerous) example of such, being fueled by Faith only barely complex enough to support demonic entities, and even capable of drawing on simpler forms of Faith (such as specific emotions) as needed.
If a normal god is a story, the structure formed by innumerable demons aligned towards the same ideal is a concept.

[color=”invisible]Blood for the blood god, and all that.[/color]


54 thoughts on “Chain of Isekai WoG Compilation


  1. taptun

    >The Velt a spell produces/stores/costs directly corresponds to the time it takes to learn it.
    >Fire 1 takes ~3 hours to learn (discounting variance in skill and mental ability), and produces/stores/costs 3 Velt.
    >Fire 10 takes ~50 hours to learn, and produces/stores/costs 50 Velt.

    How to calculate it? I tried to do this by adding a number to increase the level by, those 3 hours + 2 hours for the Fire 2, but it obviously doesn’t work that way. So the question is how to calculate it?

  2. TerrorCooper

    Would it be at all possible for a person who went through the CYOA to acquire Power Source, Location and ‘Origin’ upgrades/perks, ‘companions’, Manifestation Points and/or Mechanical Purposes after entering the World?

    • admin

      Location/’Origin’ Perks: Possible, even without CP.
      Power Source Perks: Trivial with CP. Otherwise impossible.
      Companions: Impossible. They do not exist unless chosen.
      Manifestation Points: Already earned in-world. Challenges can be activated at any time. You only stop being able to collect Manifestation Points when you collect your Mechanical Purpose or complete every challenge.
      Mechanical Purpose: Your basic stipend of Mechanical Purpose can be collected at any time after entering the World. Obtaining more is impossible.

      This does not take into account visiting further realities beyond the World.

      • TerrorCooper

        Thanks! Also, two questions have been raised in my mind, one from your ‘visiting further worlds’ comment, the other by my own thoughts;

        1. Is it possible to ‘teach’ the ‘techniques’ granted by the Power Source perks to others? [This is the one raised by my own thoughts]

        2. Does going to a new reality give you a new stipend of points to spend on the CYOA whilst keeping your previous choices, do you have to redistribute them, or do you just get plopped into the new reality?

        • admin

          1. Special spells/techniques/etc. created with the help of perks are no less teachable than their ‘normal’ counterparts. Perks themselves would require a powerful meta effect to be shared or taught.
          2. If the Chain of Isekai takes you to a new reality, you get a fresh 100 CP on top of everything you already have. It is much like running the CYOA a second time.

  3. Subrosian_Smithy

    Hum, showerthought: you’ve said that you can use Throw Yourself In on CP-granted perks as well as in-World abilities. Sacrificing Elevation to create a spell that can summon Upwellings, etc.

    There are Half-Mad perks which allow you to turn other people into Halfmad, and to copy Inventions. Could you sacrifice Binding of Progress and Copycat Principle in order to build an Invention that other people could reverse-engineer?

    • admin

      Tricky… With quite a bit of development work, you could produce an Invention that (in addition to its other features) ‘taught’ those who tried to study it, like a benevolent form of Reaper indoctrination. With sufficient investment in meta effects, you could more directly invert the ‘directionality’ of those Perks, saving you some work.

  4. Subrosian_Smithy

    You’ve mentioned on QQ that it’s possible – even without perks – to construct pseudo-souls which meet the requirements for internalizing the secret of the Gate of Heavens.

    What would that look like in practice, if you don’t mind me asking? Using Halfmad Mechanisms to run an adversarial attack on the process which creates souls for newborn children? Get together a bunch of afterlife-shaping powers with Stellar Pacts, and rig up a starlight-based personality core?

    • admin

      The problem of creating a ‘sufficiently-human soul’ can, but does not necessary have to, be approached from such a mechanistic angle. Human children spawned in Halfmad cloning vats, thinkmeats unwoven from body and grafted to a subject requiring a soul. Symbiotic Primordial Beings without true physical presence, trained and modified until their behaviours fall within the necessary bounds. But a soul can be more than a metaphysical organ, an extension of the body made up of slightly more esoteric substance. “You are a soul, you have a body.” Personhood, by itself, is sufficient qualification to understand the Gate of Heavens.

  5. Subrosian_Smithy

    Some more questions occurring to me as I keep coming back to this CYOA. Sorry if I’m a bother, I’m just thinking out loud here-

    It’s explicitly impossible to breach the Heavens without out-of-world powers. Obviously, New Moon is the easiest way to breach the boundaries of Stars, and New Moon + the Stellar Pacts location upgrade is enough to let you open a physical doorway into the Heavens.

    However, are there any other ways to breach the Heavens with OCP perks?

    Nothing Immovable allows you to treat absolute immunities as mere resistances. Perhaps that would let you carve a hole into the sky, so long as you were attacking the barrier of the Heavens itself?
    Deep Magic + Spellseed lets you invent metamagic effects. Could you invent a spell capable of breaching the boundaries of the Heavens, even temporarily?
    The infinite range powerup from the Sun might let you reach across the barrier of the Heavens. Use Literally You and perkshare Ties That Bind with all of the dead at once?
    Halfmad Mechanisms probably couldn’t create any new Heaven-breaking effects, but maybe it would let you automate it, with Throw Yourself In.

    Speaking of Spellseed and Deep Magic-
    I assume that under normal conditions, the ‘size’ of a spell is directly related to its potency? So a spell with a game-changing effect, like a permanent alteration to the function of a target’s magic, would probably be up there with Fire 1000 for endgame spells.
    I’ll also assume – tentatively- that perk-granted bonuses to the efficacy of your creations aren’t factored into that calculation. So a spell you create can be more effective than its ‘size’ should indicate. Is all of that right?

    • admin

      There are many ways to breach the Heavens.
      Nothing Immovable would work.
      Deep Magic + Spellseed would work.
      The Infinite Sun’s reach would work.
      Halfmad Mechanisms… accurate assessment.
      Other possibilities remain.

      A spell’s learning time and Velt parameters (cost/capacity/generation) scale in direct proportion to each other. Size and complexity scale with cost at a sub-linear rate. Total potency/effectiveness scales with cost at an above-linear rate. Incredibly useful spells will generally have very high cost. Perks, as out-of-context effects, can easily produce spells that are disproportionately powerful for their cost.

  6. Subrosian_Smithy

    Hum, is there any combination of CP perks or OCP abilities which would net you multiversal travel? Without Mechanical Purpose, that is.

    Deep Magic + Spellseed, probably. At first I thought I was giving that cheese combo too much credit, but you’ve said in the past that the Recall spell line (“I want to teleport back to the place I was standing XYZ seconds ago”) doesn’t have any sort of distance limitation.
    So you could at least invent a Greater Supreme Ultimate Mega Recall spell in order to go between Earth and the World? And there could be opportunities for further development, even if full-throttle planeswalking isn’t trivial.

    Halfmad Mechanisms. You’ve said in the past it would be possible to build an interdimensional portal to Earth just with Halfmad Mechanisms perks, although I’m not sure how that would work.
    Copycat Principle on interplanar phenomena would be a good place to start. Supremacy of Ideas and Accumulative Expertise… I wouldn’t normally expect mere quality boosting effects to matter for this, but on reflection, I can imagine them pushing you through a qualitative as well as a quantitative threshold.

    Prismatic Corruption seems like it should be the most fruitful option, as the exploitation of an entire multiverse. But the Builders have obviously locked it down hard b/c the World is still sealed from the inside.
    I feel like it would either be easy mode (with some kind of meta chicanery on Gemergence or privilege escalation hack on the Forgotten Tower?) or impossible.

    Unbeing… is Nothing Immovable going to be the real MVP again?
    It’s Knife Meta levels of burning the house down, but I’m skeptical that you could usefully bring it to bear against the problem.
    Perhaps specific *mutations* could provide an angle of attack, if they modify your dimensionality or the way you interact with space.

    • admin

      The World’s construction is perfect, but it is not designed to withstand outside context elements that manage to slip past its defenses; rather, it is intended by its creators to be the most permissive possible stable infinity. Multiversal travel is impossible, but it is just barely impossible. Beyond the listed effects of perks, the presence of Chain Parts has a very subtle impact that can tip such a balance.

  7. Cyrus Serapheth

    I have some inquiries relating to certain Perks.

    Unfold:
    1) Does this apply to any specific, repeated application of Every Limb In Motion and Metamanipulation? Like learning multiple spells from Archive Splinter more easily than normal, or being able to better stretch a specific ability in a specific way.

    Constellation:
    2) How ridiculous can this get? I have some applications in mind, please let me know how (in)feasible they are.
    2.1) Combining Faith’s ability to create Reservoirs and Velt to create Velt Reservoirs to artificially expand your reserves.
    2.2) Combining a Faith Reservoir with your Faith Generation and a few Spell Imprints to passively generate a lot of Faith using False Wizardry Mechanisms.
    2.3) If you combine Strength with Spell Strength, would the Worldblood enhancements to physical strength carry over to your spells?
    2.4) Could you create artificial forms of “X”-blood that enhance other power systems or qualities? Like Velt and Worldblood to create Veltblood (which you store some of in your Supersaturation Reservoir for safekeeping), which enhances mental faculties and spells. Or Faith and Worldblood to create Faithblood. Or Astral Essence/Starlight and WB to make Starblood, which is basically the spiritual worldblood found in the New Moon.

    Spellseed:
    3) If you can alter False Wizardry, what about Worldblood and other systems? Can you create an “Optimize Rank” spell that permanently maximizes the otherwise random variable benefits received by your current Rank? How about an “Augment Rank” spell to mimic Heart’s Blood, albeit at the cost of increasing Hunger instead of mitigating it? Would such a spell be a temp boost, or could it be made permanent?
    3.1) On a related note, what stops me from creating an “Augment Spell Power” spell to double the power of my spells, and then recast it to quadruple the power, and then octuple my power, etc., exponentially? (Aside from Velt limits, though another Spell could reasonably sidestep that too, like “Conjure Velt.”)

    Spellseed + Gemergence + Throw Yourself In:
    4) Could you sacrifice a Gem with a specific flavor of Primordial Being to create a spell that permanently mutates you accordingly? A complex way to skip steps if you need to, basically, and gain your mutations “quietly.”

    Nothing Immovable:
    5) What qualifies as an attack? Does an insult, a verbal attack, qualify as a vector for NI? I imagine it wouldn’t do much, but repeated applications via a Breaking Speech could distort someone’s mind or send them spiraling into madness, I’m sure. Would Metamanipulation be required for that if it doesn’t count?
    6) Do attacks enhanced by Nothing Immovable allow you to skip the “you must use a thing of Unbeing to best inflict Unbeing onto others” bit? In other words, making all NI-backed attacks cursed and viable vectors for Unbeing corruption automatically?

    New Moon:
    7) How integrated into my greater selfhood is the Spiritual Avatar? Am I a hivemind with two bodies now, or do we just think alike? Can we communicate with each other easily, or is it more akin to being a Medium the Stellar Pacts way? Do we share Legends and Faith? What’s separate and what’s not aside from the most obvious (Perks would be shared within reason, like the Gemergence pit and maybe the Supersaturation Reservoir, and we both know the same spells)?

    • admin

      1) Yes.
      2.1) Yes.
      2.2) You could repurpose False Wizardry imprints to serve as sources of Faith instead of Velt.
      2.3) Yes.
      2.4) You could create variant forms of Rank; Worldblood itself is moreso a substance than an attribute. You could perhaps fuse other storage mechanisms to your Supersaturation perk to expand the set of energies it can contain.
      3) Not without Deep Magic. With it, yes. Even permanent boosts would be possible with sufficient research.
      3.1) Only the absurd difficulty of creating such a powerful spell.
      4) The problem here is that the Gem is not really a part of you.
      5) Anything intended to harm or diminish can qualify. A weak attack is still weak.
      6) No. Being on fire makes it easier to start fires, but this does not mean Nothing Immovable can be used as a lighter.
      7) You are one person, with one mind, merely somwhat better at multitasking. All purely mental traits are shared, while that which is more physical is held seperate. Faith can be exchanged easily, while Legends may or may not be shared simply based on what aspects of yourself they are bound to.

  8. Subrosian_Smithy

    Idly musing about how Mythoi are supposed to work to begin with.

    That is, a God’s Sculpted Mythos is powered by belief in the Mythos itself – it’s [Faith Others have In Their Mythology], as opposed to [Faith Others Have in Them], let alone [Faith That Is Theirs] or [Their Faith]. But it’s not obvious to me why that distinction matters.

    Suppose I’m a Divine Transcendence cultivator. The difference between a unifying concept in a Stage 4 Legend Web (“I am XYZ!”) and a mythology in a Stage 5 Sculpted Mythos (“I am XYZ, the god!”) seems very thin on the ground.
    Especially when it should be possible to have a unifying concept and a myth that are both identical to one another and both uncontroversial statements about the self. (At least for a Divine Transcendence cultivator who lives a sufficiently mythopoetic life.)

    Or… no, maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong.

    You’ve said that faith absorption, the process of ‘digesting’ the faith of others, is a major bottleneck in this cultivation system. Other people can believe in you, but the Faith they produce in the process is almost inaccessible to you until you learn to claim it as your own.
    Conversely, Domain powers only require a minimum level of resonance with the underlying myth before you can draw on a given source of Faith.
    Likewise, you’ve also said that any fragments of a God’s cultivation base which are torn away by the barrier of the Heavens may become natural/inhuman gods.

    So maybe instead of thinking about a Divine Transcendence cultivator as creating a mythology in Stage 5, it would be more useful to think of her as creating a god.
    When she spreads her Mythos through mortal civilizations, those stories may still point at her in the abstract – valorizing her deeds and history in the world, declaring her excellence, etc – but the way she uses that Faith is completely different.

    Instead of trying to cross the gap and draw that Faith into her own essence as a discrete entity, she allows that Faith to terminate on the level of abstraction. She doesn’t need to digest the Faith of others before using it to fuel her Domain powers, because her Sculpted Mythos exists on that level of abstraction.
    If a natural god is a living mythology, an indistinct story which draws on the belief of humans to sustain itself and act in the world without being “real”, then she’s using her Legend Web as a framework around which to develop the same metaphysiology.

    And while there is a unity between her and her exoself – as two parts of a single being – her divine exoself still isn’t so tightly tied to her human soul and sense of individuality. That being why it can be torn away or become a shackle when misused.

  9. LordElsquare

    Separation of Self says “For ALL purposes, your willpower is effectively limitless”. Magical Mastery says “Your spells are enhanced modestly by your mental abilities – WILLPOWER, intelligence, wisdom, skill and knowledge all providing unique advantages”. So if you take both, are your spells limitlessly improved in whatever area willpower corresponds to?

    I was also wondering a bit about Gate of Heavens. If you already have New Moon, does that not give you most of the advantages of this ability? The dead of any type can join your moon, and you can bring it to any night’s sky, so it follows along with you. If you want access to the dead, New Moon grants a more direct access. If you want to offer people an afterlife, same story.

    So the major difference is that Gate of Heavens lets you learn a secret that can spread and grant people the ability to produce starlight (potentially without any input from you, once you’ve told the first person). How easy/feasible would it be to make somthing similar, using other perks?

    For example, taking some sort of rumour power (legends about storytelling, or a mutation that lets you tell memetic tales that stick and spread in peoples minds, or something similar) and sacrificing it and your ability to produce several soul-related invetions with Throw Yourself In to make a soul-activating rumour? Or perhaps Spellseed + Deep Magic to create a spellmind which casts ‘Bestow Soul seed’ on people it comes across, giving them a fragmenary soul which grows in fractal patterns which encode that same spell; the seed would need to regrow that pattern many times, due to the problems with engraving patterns of False Wizardry, but eventually it would stick, and their new artificial soul (probably an invention – a soul that grows from a seed, produces starlight and has a particular engraving on the surface; likely made using Throw Yourself In) would be a fresh spellmind for ‘Bestow soul seed’. Or forge a new star inside your moon, producing starlight that grants its pact users the meta-ability to kindle souls in other people?

    Thinking about various sacrifices with Throw Yourself In, actually – if you make a kick-ass invention with the aforementioned perk, and also have Accumulative Expertise, can you build on that enhanced invention as a starting point for others, without having to make the sacrifice each time? So you can pay a hefty price to unlock distant or impossible to access areas of research, but then make further developments in those areas in a more normal halfmad way? (e.g throw in various abilities relating to worldblood, all your rank, etc, to make a worldblood reactor. Then realise you have no way to move the resulting worldblood around, and invent a form of worldblood piping, building off of the material properties from your previous invention, without needing to rank up and re-sacrifice everything again)

    • admin

      I feel there is a critical distinction to be made here, between willpower as a ‘stat’ and as a ‘resource’. You have limitless willpower to ‘spend’; if you had the means to convert willpower into energy, you could power the World off of it. But the ‘quality’ of your willpower is not substantially greater for that.

      There is some redundancy, yeah. Throw Yourself In or the DeepSeed combo could fairly easily substitute in for its unique benefits.

      Yes, Accumulative Expertise synergizes quite well.

  10. Subrosian_Smithy

    No setting questions this time, just a note – I’ve been gathering up all your COI WOG (on here, reddit, QQ, etc), in a Q&A document for my own personal gratification.

    However, would you be comfortable with my sharing it with others?

  11. Subrosian_Smithy

    Idle musing, there’s quite a lot of Faith you can attach to your soul without getting bloated or lopsided or anything – you can have multiple redundant Reservoirs and such. And there’s obviously a transitional step between Stage 3 and Stage 4 where you have multiple Legends disconnected from your Legend Web.

    So like, can an established God or Demigod deliberately create Minor Legends that are out-of-theme for their divine concept, with the intention of *never* adding them to their Legend Web? Going back and racking up little bonuses across the board, as opposed to trying to further their specialization.

      • Subrosian_Smithy

        Also on Divine Transcendence, how physically inhuman can you become by cultivating it?

        It definitely changes you, but that effect seems to cap out at the demigod stage, where your physiology is suffused and sustained with Faith. An augmentation, not a transformation.

        Could you use Domain powers to to transform yourself into Myth-appropriate forms? Become a raging thousand-armed demon or an ocean-spanning sea serpent, and such.

        It might not be the right toolkit for the job, I mean. Prismatic Corruption and Unbeing would probably be the best options for turning yourself into something radically inhuman. But not everyone will have access to appropriate mutations, or be comfortable warping themself into a creature of death.

        • admin

          Divine Transcendence is capable of more extreme transformation, but you need to go out of your way to get it, actively dedicate resources to alteration of form.

          Expressing your Domain powers as something like a living creature, as vast and powerful as your own myth, would be trivial. Transforming yourself into this world-form instead of merely summoning it would be difficult. Possible with a well-designed Sculpted Mythos even if you don’t have out-of-context advantages; the primary challenge would be in avoiding diminishing yourself into something much like a natural god.

          • Subrosian_Smithy

            That makes sense. Natural Gods are obviously capable of creating avatars out of their faith – or at least of possessing avatars they create more indirectly. In fact, you’ve said that every power source save for False Wizardry and Halfmad Mechanisms can create appropriate vessels and anchor souls. And I’d be shocked if you couldn’t use a specialized-enough Domain power to warp someone else’s body.

            So I guess transforming yourself into something mythic with Divine Transcendence “just” requires you to use leverage the power of Faith in the appropriate way as you build your Sculpted Mythos, then?
            Design compelling yet flexible myths to channel the power directly, instead of indirectly fucking around with things like body-swapping?

  12. Subrosian_Smithy

    I’ve also been thinking a lot about Stellar Pacts lately, wondering how far you could twist it with Deep Spellseed or Throw Yourself In Inventions.

    Souls aren’t really immortal by default. Presumably they get some staying power on account of the fact that they’re not physical objects, and that’s only intensified by the preserving nature of the Heavens. But most of their protection comes from the Barriers that enclose them.

    Could you find a way to enclose living souls in star-shells while preserving their capacity for action and movement in the physical world? I imagine that would require significant research into the nature of the Barriers of the Heavens, but it would make souls immortal in a way that wouldn’t require them to be in bottle afterlives to enjoy.

    Of course, without further investment, I imagine it would also impact their ability to use Stellar Pacts – forcing them to rely on their own soul alone, like a person in a singleton afterlife – but that might still be a tradeoff worth making.

    Hum, actually, this seems like the kind of situation where the Stellar Pacts location upgrade, or something like it, would be a useful addition to the mix. You’d be able to use a Heaven as your own inner world, and not just as a filtration element around your soul.

    • admin

      Souls are immortal in the manner of the ageless; they do not naturally decay, but may be killed.

      Souls can already manipulate the world from behind a star-membrane via Astral Essence, which can be generated in large quantities by artifice. This is not constrained by distance; stars across the unreachable barrier of the Heavens can demonstrably use Astral Essence present in the World below without issue. Movement, then, is probably unnecessary. It might actually be better this way, keeping the souls behind the double layered protection of Heavens and star-membrane alike.

      With well-designed infrastructure on either end, something like an advanced VR setup and communications center internal to the star and some organ or implant to generate Astral Essence within the body, a soul contained within a star could replicate most of the capabilities of an unshielded soul. Self-resurrection would still be a challenge, in the event all available bodies are destroyed.

      • Subrosian_Smithy

        Oh, I always forget that Stars can use their own Astral Essence.

        Does that ever interfere with efforts to tap the strength of the dead? Or… no, I guess the Astral Essence only provides a channel. They probably fuel the powers they use within their own star and the powers they use in the World with the same flowing stream of starlight.

        The infrastructure in the aforementioned example would require a star designed to facilitate it, I imagine?

        • admin

          Astral Essence is indeed only a means of accessing power.

          Some degree of communication is possible regardless of the star’s design, but such a powerful interface would be easiest to establish with an appropriately specialized star.

  13. Subrosian_Smithy

    Also also also on Divine Transcendence, you’ve talked in the past about how a Legendary Archmage might wield their legend in conjunction with False Wizardry.

    How would Legends be useful for people wielding the other Power Sources?

    Stellar Pacts and Prismatic Corruption… feel more like a source of arbitrary powers to stick Legends on than anything else, so there’s not much to say there. Though you could probably plug Legends into your ability to sense things with starlight.

    Worldbood, that just gives you bigger traits for things your Rank governs, I bet.

    What about Halfmad Mechanisms and Unbeing? Those two I have no clue how Legends and divine power could enhance them.

    • admin

      Halfmad Mechanisms
      -The forgemaster accretes a Natural Legend around one of their designs, strengthening every instance of it across the World.
      -The forward thinker consigns themself to existence as formless divinity, this half-life and a few choice legends anchoring their full suite of designs to the World for millenia to come.
      -The dabbler stacks a load of legends that boost the effectiveness and quality of what they craft, invents things half-way, and relies on those legends to make them work anyway.

      Unbeing
      -Develop a Natural Legend to combat your own diminishment. If it grows quickly enough, for the rest of your existence, you might never face the consequences of your actions!
      -Develop a legend that makes you resolute in sticking to your beliefs, carrying your decisions through, unerringly pursuing your goals, etc., making sure it’s properly focused on ‘you’. Then slap it onto an enemy as a kind of mind control.
      -Distort a legend from something stored by an attribute into something that stores an attribute. Carry around different versions of the same stat, with different legends attached, to swap around in accordance with your needs.

  14. Polardwarf

    On QQ, you said that Upwellings created with elevation in the afterlife would create Worldblood that grew your spiritual and preserving attributes instead of physical.

    Would this count upwellings created in your pocket dimension from the Stellar Pacts location upgrade?

    Also, what spiritual attributes are increased? Would this world blood be a lot better for slowing aging, and would spiritual attributes help you learn False Wizardry by increasing mental attributes or power control?

    • admin

      The internal volume of the relevant pocket dimensions functions as the internal volume of an afterlife does.

      Worldblood with greater attunement to preservation would naturally serve as a more effective source of longevity. I would expect this substance to have some incidental benefits regarding mental function, much as normal Worldblood incidentally improves reflexes despite its strongly physical nature.

  15. Polardwarf

    So, is there any way with these power sources to get access to powers from other settings you can travel too? I was wondering if you travelled to say Harry Potter if you could use something like Unbeing to become a Wizard. I imagine if you sacrificed a dozen wizards to make yourself one, that would be diminishment by going from 12 to 1 and distortion by making you a wizard right?

    Though I will admit Unbeing is the most confusing power source. It seems like it would be possible to do with one of them at least, but I am drawing blanks on how I would go about it.

    • admin

      Unbeing would serve you well. Cast everything about a person but the powers you desire into the abyss and integrate what remains.

  16. TerrorCooper

    Was rereading the CYOA yet again, when I started wondering;
    When it comes to the superhuman metabolism and hibernating period provided by upgrading the Survival option, does the resultant slowing of your metabolism reduce your caloric requirements to 1/40th of their original amount, or a 10th of a 1/4?
    …Unless those are just two ways of saying the same thing, in which case just ignore me and my mathematical incompetence.

  17. Ok47

    How long would it take to create a spell that would multiply learning speed of spells (and stack with similar pacts and spells) of False Wizardry with both Spellseed and Deep Magic?

    • admin

      You could get something basic within a few months.

      • Ok47

        So a 1.5 multiplier (or a 1.1) will take months?

        So can a Legend multiply reading speeds of False Wizardry, change what you get from Gemergence, give the ability to have a 2nd (very weak) pact, or interfere with Halfmad Mechanics (give or take many myths via Many Faces).

        Can I create fanatical followers via Goddess’s powers, kill them (or turn them back to normal) around The World and still get faith from them? If so what are the costs of faith for the Goddess to do so?

        Is it possible to create the same generators over and over? Or make slightly different versions via spellseed? If so how fast (or rather momentum) can I do this with a few dozen prerequisites for making hundreds of Bread conjuring spells assuming it takes half a day for a similar spell without the multiplier from Spell Seed.

        What if I seal spells within a stick that destabilize and releases itself when touched with a unique belt signature saving velt costs.

        Is it possible without metamanipuation to use Constellation to fuse 7 spells I’m learning so I can learn all seven at the same time? If so can I do the same with Spell Seed’s spells or can I use meta manipulation at perks?

        • admin

          Yes.
          Yes. To a degree. Yes. Yes.
          The barrier of the Heavens interdicts faith.
          Yes? I’m not completely sure what you are asking.
          You probably wouldn’t save on Velt costs.
          No. You don’t have them.

          • Ok47

            What if I use the point perk, Many Faces to still gain the fanatical worshippers divinity? Probably slow and impractical (especially in the bigger picture). If so will the Goddess be on board (or be able to help with this? If so how much faith will she use?

            Also if a area once worshipped the user of Many Faces even after death what about a traveling van of worshippers? From point A to B if there was a pilgrimage of followers who traveled, would Many Faces collect all Faith as if there was followers in Point A, B, and the travel between them? Or just B if they die there?

            As for Spells Seeds, can I add prerequisites to shorten the time to learns Spells from Spell Seeds? If so is it possible to create a slightly different spell learnt, make the prerequisite all previous spells to shorten it’s time, create a Second spell using the same process for a shorter amount of time then repeat ad-infinitum with all the resulting Velt Generators?

            Does Unlimited Reach breach the heavens? If so then by itself could I collect faith in the heavens? Or could I only do that with Meta-Manipulation?

            Using Meta Manipulation on Constellation can I somehow study 7 Spell-Seed spells, turning ability/traits to processes/studies?

            • admin

              You’d still get the regional faith production, yes. No need to kill them at that point. The Goddess would be hesitant, but she’s willing to kill for you. You’d need to jailbreak her powers if you want her to be able to do so, though- she’s a pure social build.

              If they spent some time living there and worshipping you, you’d get faith from that region. No need for death.

              Yes. No, it runs into diminishing returns.

              Hmm. Honestly, probably not. You’d need to add something more, build upon it somehow. Metamanipulation would work.

              You could use Metamanipulation to directly increase your research ability, or to repurpose forms of action towards study. Constellation could enhance this.

  18. Jaz

    Couple of questions on this wonderful setting and cyoa.
    1. How long would it take to learn all original 7 million spells of false wizardry with just Archive Splinter’s constant study? Decades? Centuries? Millenia? Eons?
    2. With Copycat principle, does claiming an invention steal it’s design from the original inventor or just copy it into your mind?
    3. Worldblood, Stellar Pacts, False Wizardry, Halfmad Mechanisms, and Prismatic Corruption all provide some way to alter materials. I’d assume if you tried to stack alterations from all five power sources to make some super-alloy you would start running into conflicts. What kind of conflicts would those be?
    4. Supersaturations’s reservoir is immune to attack and interference, does this mean you are unable to develop non chain part abilities that draw on this reservoir to function?
    5. How far apart ate the mentioned 8 locations? Could you travel from one to another in a single lifetime, provided you had a map and method of transport? Given the fact that the world is infinite, it is very possible for them to be an arbitrarily far distance apart.
    6. You mentioned that the Forgotten Tower can move you thousands of kilometers in a single step, what kind of form would this take? Mini-Towers dotted around? Doors in hillsides? Simple teleportation?
    7. Given that the world is infinite, does this mean that the world has infinite population? or if you go far out enough do you just stop encountering civilizations? If the world does have an infinite population, do the Heavens have an infinite number of stars from all the infinite people dying? I’m struggling to understand how that would work.

    • admin

      1. Millenia.
      2. It’s straight up theft.
      3. Prismatic Corruption materials can operate on weird rules. Worldblood reinforced items are resistant to False Wizardry alteration. Honestly, conflicts aren’t a massive problem.
      4. No, you can. It’s talking about hostile interference.
      5. Indeterminate. Choose for yourself.
      6. It’s capable of spatial manipulation within its area of influence.
      7. Yep. Yep. It’s wild.

  19. Giga

    Thanks for making this. I have some questions, if you don’t mind answering.

    1. Can you use Special: Literally You to gift powers to Special: Unraveled Mind if you touch their avatar? If that doesn’t count as touching “them”, what if you touch their avatar while channeling Unbeing: Nothing Immovable?
    2. Would gifting Worldblood: Supersaturation let Unraveled Mind access Worldblood for themselves?
    3. If you gift the Unraveled Mind Stellar Pacts: New Moon, would they have a spiritual avatar body? If their spiritual avatar body had access to Worldblood, could their mind utilize it elsewhere?
    4. Does the Unraveled Mind have a soul? I thought of gifting them some power to kill themselves like Halfmad Mechanics: Throw Yourself In, then resurrect them with some other ability, freeing them from their prison.
    5. Does Special: Infinite Sun’s infinite range let Unraveled Mind operate anywhere?
    6. Does knowledge gained about Power Sources from Unraveled Mind’s perk count as “a power acquired from Power Sources section” for the purpose of gifting the knowledge with Literally You, if the knowledge is relevant to powers you’ve purchased in that section?

    7. If you gift Special: Ancient Evil the Unbeing: Eternal Grasp power, would they maintain their peak power indefinitely without need for sacrifice?
    8. Does the Ancient Evil ability give a form of infinite multitasking if you create clones controlled by yourself, as all the new cells would be controlled as if guided by your intellect?
    9. Would Infinite Sun’s infinite targets let each subcomponent yield your full power at no additional cost, especially with Prismatic Corruption: Every Limb In Motion?

    10. Does Special: Lonely Goddess’ ability undo Unbeing? Creating a child using Unbeing: Hearts Aligned between Lonely Goddess, Infinite Sun, and myself could be… interesting, with the Lonely Goddess primarily providing overwhelming love and the Infinite Sun primarily providing overwhelming power and myself primarily providing multiversal travel. Maybe even combine powers like Throw Yourself In during the creation.
    11. Does Divine Transcendence: Many Faces apply retroactively, such as if gifted to Lonely Goddess?
    11b. Related: Does Stellar Pacts: Ties That Bind apply retroactively, such as if gifted to Ancient Evil?

    12. Does Infinite Sun’s infinite range reach any universe you’ve previously been to, even if you are not currently in that universe?
    12b. Would the infinite range let New Moon create a multiversal moon that can house stars from any universe you’ve visited?
    13. Can you house or combine other moons from New Moon with consent from all parties? Having a multiversal moon that universal moons nestle in sounds neat.
    14. Is the Location: Stellar Pacts Upgrade an actual afterlife that is in Heaven, or is it a pocket dimension beneath heaven that has characteristics of an afterlife?
    15. If one body with Literally You dies and their soul crosses the barrier to Heaven, can that body choose to resurrect on that side of the barrier?

    16. Does Infinite Sun’s infinite range cause Unbeing: Numerical Superiority to flag every enemy in existence?

    Thanks again.

    • admin

      1. Sure.
      2. It would help them use Worldblood for their physical avatars.
      3. Yeah. If they had some way to pump it around?
      4. Yeah, but it’s stuck pretty deeply.
      5. Anywhere you can draw a physical path from a source of connection.
      6. No, it’s just knowledge.
      7. Mhm.
      8. It can.
      9. No.
      10. It can. The most direct route to your restoration would be the unravelling of your creation, after all.
      11. Sure. Sure.
      12. Not if there isn’t a path. If there was a path, sure.
      13. Sure.
      14. A pocket dimension with afterlife characteristics.
      15. Sure.
      16. If you raise your chosen weapon against every foe in existence, sure.

      • Giga

        “10. It can. The most direct route to your restoration would be the unravelling of your creation, after all.”

        Yeah, that makes sense. Still – ouch.

        “16. If you raise your chosen weapon against every foe in existence, sure.”

        MAKING THE MOTHER OF ALL AGGROED MOB TRAINS HERE JACK, CAN’T FRET OVER EVERY EGG /meme

        Truly. the greatest challenge of Chains of Isekai is deciding which Special buddies to take. Despite an infinite world with an infinite number of people, I want these specific people.

  20. Ok47

    By having souls worship you in Gate of Heaven would you gain faith since it isn’t seperate by The Veil?

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