Indulgence
Version 1.0 “Clarity”
By Savestate
You have 1 Cobalt and 5 Silver.
You Are:
The powers in this section represent unbounded developmental potential, exponential or hyper-exponential growth, expressed through their own particular lens. If you are uncertain as to what a description implies, default to higher-end interpretations.
Options here cost 1 Cobalt and 1 Silver.
=Beloved=
You have the unconditional, all-transcending love of a concept.
Not some specific embodiment or expression of this concept, but the concept itself, as written into the bones of the multiverse. There is nothing it would not do for you, but a great cosmic bureaucracy restricts what it can do for you. You may receive one Greater Boon and three Lesser Boons from your admirer, and nothing more- not without attaining such absurd power these Boons are as insignificant trinkets. You need not call upon all your Boons immediately, and indeed may benefit from preserving a few against future need.
A Boon can be used to obtain any benefit that lies within its power; as such, the examples presented below are far from all-encompassing. Boons may provide novel forms of supernatural power- a summoned Ally might take the form of a brilliant archmage- which may be transmissible.
Ally
Allies provided by your Boons will be eternally loyal, with a thorough comprehension of your self; they will walk the perfect middle ground between blind obedience and unreliability. So long as you live, no death or maiming will adhere to these allies for long.
Lesser Boon:
● Generate an ally approximately 200 times as powerful as you currently are, with limited developmental potential.
● Generate an ally as powerful as you, who will grow more powerful at a 1:1 ratio with your own progression.
Greater Boon:
● Generate an ally more than a million times as powerful as you currently are, with near-zero developmental potential.
● Generate an ally as powerful as you, who will grow more powerful with the square of your own progression.
Power
Lesser Boon:
● Amplify all basic parameters and future increases to said parameters by a factor of 20.
● Accelerate all future development by a factor of 5.
● Assume new powers whose sum total does not surpass your existing powerset.
● Amplify an existing power and future increases to said power by a factor of 50.
Greater Boon:
● Unlock a new ability with developmental potential on par with another You Are option, but significantly inferior progression.
● Develop a new, universally-applicable method of progression, well-suited for clever exploitation and explosive growth.
Comfort
Lesser Boon:
● Acquire a measure of plot armor.
● Tweak all of reality out to the limits of your perception in a largely ‘cosmetic’ sense, akin to porn physics.
● Create a private realm well-suited to provide both great luxury and opportunities for safe development.
Greater Boon:
● Generate a new infinite multiverse, rooted entirely in the single concept that so admires you, under your absolute control but regarded as Unreal by those forces that defend the cosmos itself.
Immortality
Your admirer interprets the Boons you request in the manner that best serves your interest.
Unless you do something absurdly stupid, you won’t reach an inescapable end.
Lesser Boon:
● Guarantee lossless reincarnation to cosmically distant realms upon death or worse-than-death.
● Become that which springs to life full-formed wherever its name is spoken above a whisper.
Greater Boon:
● Acquire absolute immunity to all harm.
● Become fated to never encounter that which would see you harmed.
=The Inheritor=
You inherit the absurd creative power of some far-distant fallen smith. With a few minutes’ work, you can Record upon the substrate of your power a perfect schematic for any ‘created thing’ you have the opportunity to observe. In a similar timeframe, you can create a new schematic to fulfill a specific function, plagiarizing from your recorded schematics to create as optimal a design as is theoretically possible. If you have only recorded aircraft so far, a car you design might run off a jet engine, but it will be the best possible jet engine powered car.
Given two hours of work, you can Refine a single schematic. This increases its derived performance in a specific area by a dramatic margin- doubling the speed of a computer, or doubling the durability of a truck. You cannot use this to directly decrease cost, complexity, energy or fuel usage, or so on; neither can you directly increase the sources of performance, i.e. boosting the tensile strength of a phone rather than its overall hardiness.
In a similar timeframe, you can Reinvent a single schematic. This alters the basic rules of its function by several degrees. Taking a sailboat, you might change it from a device that allows safe travel over water into a device that allows safe travel through the void of space, still driven by wind and sail.
Your research and development efforts see hourly results equivalent to a full year’s productivity. This takes into account, and compounds, all available resources. Two hours with an investment of fifty dollars and a buddy joining in for half an hour partway through sees results comparable to a project with a budget of $400k and 13,000 man-hours of development time. Such development efforts will never produce the effects of your Refinement or Reinvention, but can and do yield the fruits of actual scientific progress.
Your personal capabilities, including basic attributes, knowledge, skill, and more esoteric forms of ability, will always be minimally sufficient to eventually recreate any schematic from your records. This cannot prevent your death, but can and will preserve a portion of your faculties against even the most thorough forms of annihilation. Basic tools are obsoleted by this factor of your power: you need no fire to refine ore, nor hammer and anvil to shape it, nor wrench and pliers to assemble it. However you may come to obtain them, raw materials are no less necessary than for any other creator. Stripped of body and mind and soul, cast into a true void, you might persist in some sense, but be imprisoned nonetheless.
It is within the abilities of others to use, study, replicate, and even modify your creations, including those that function by blatant nonsense. Preventing such subversion is not difficult- a relatively minor effort of Refinement could blackbox your work effectively against the scientific efforts of whole planetary civilizations- but crucially, it is not automatic. Neither does your work inherently function in realms with strange or lacking physical laws, no matter how loosely it is rooted in any one realm’s laws. Guaranteeing reliable function even in a place of raw chaos is, again, a relatively minor effort of Reinvention, but not automatic.
=A Wound=
The aftershock of a might cosmic weapon has left a wound upon reality shaped exactly like you. It sits above thought and perception, the player behind the character, the actor behind the role, truer to yourself than any part of you trapped inside reality could ever afford to be. Your wound-aspect cannot be destroyed or diminished, for what weapon could make a wound less severe? Neither can it be remedied or healed away, as this is merely destruction with extra steps.
Initially, you have exactly one Thread. In 24 hours, it produces one point of Action Potential, equivalent to 20 minutes of conceptual ‘activity’, and it can store a maximum of 10 points of AP. As time passes, the wound-aspect of your self steadily and continuously expands. Each objective day, you develop one additional Thread, and your individual Threads increase in productivity and relative storage capacity as their numbers rise. You may accelerate this natural progression without limit by absorbing any phenomena that ‘deteriorate reality’ in some sense. Your wound-aspect provides an innate faculty for such absorption; if you managed to make contact with its event horizon, you could eat a black hole.
AP may be directly spent to fuel a kind of impossible haste, super-speed. Any amount of AP may be spent over any timeframe for proportionate results: 20 seconds spent over 1 second for a 21x multiplier, 1 minute over 10 minutes for a 1.1x boost, 20 minutes over half a second for a brief 2401x surge. Few of the natural consequences of extreme speed apply to your haste; it manifests most similarly to time dilation, and the fuzzy edges of the effect actively mediate interactions in countless ways for your convenience. As but one of these conveniences: metabolic byproducts within your body are actively regenerated into useful compounds, mitigating the expected increase in nutritional requirements from experiencing more time in a given day. Generally, expect no hidden dangers and few exploitable side-effects. An attack you make while accelerated is no more or less potent; an attack upon you while accelerated finds its impact diffused over time, but not outright reduced.
You may additionally spend AP to execute actions instantly, bypass restrictions on action, and empower actions. Executing an action instantly by spending AP sees results equivalent to spending the corresponding amount of time on it. The amount of AP required to bypass a given restriction may be derived from the amount of time required to work around it. Ignoring an hour-long cooldown would take 3 AP, while stabbing an opponent in melee from half a mile away would cost fractional AP, rounded up to the minimum increment of one. Where simply working around a restriction is impossible, the cost of bypassing it is instead a multiplier to effective AP cost. Spend twice as much AP to include another person in your instant three-hour training session, or five times as much to include the starfighter you pilot in your instant journey, etc.
Empowering actions with AP increases their effectiveness linearly with regards to AP spent over baseline cost. That is to say, investing 40 minutes worth of AP into empowering a minor spell you could cast once per minute indefinitely would be expected to amplify its results by a factor of 40. Actions with any degree of empowerment acquire a degree of conceptual ‘effectiveness’, the difference between natural healing and regeneration.
Your Wound-aspect persists past even the most thorough annihilation of your lesser self, but is at least theoretically reliant upon your capacity for action. Theoretically. By spending ten times the normal AP cost, you may take an action as if it were a preexisting contingency- made in advance by some prior iteration of yourself, held suspended since. If you are cursed to always fail, you might continue to act at full effectiveness by deciding all your actions are preparations made by your prior, uncursed self. Death of body might be recovered from by deciding you did some healing ‘in advance’. This is not, in any real sense, a retroactive effect.
=The Progenitor=
Your ‘bloodline’ is linked, through you and through an infinitesimal crack in the walls of reality, to a better realm. Each day, three droplets of dark quintessence leak inside, and become available for your use. You may imbibe this quintessence to acquire supernatural abilities and to augment those same abilities. Any ability acquired in this manner is shared amongst every member of your bloodline at full strength, undiminished should it be spread out amongst even uncountably infinite numbers of bearers.
Any creature born from or sired by a member of your bloodline becomes part of it, bound by blood. You may freely banish these bloodbound from your line, stripping from them all of its power. This may be performed automatically, and even in response to complex conditions, such as the decision to betray your goals.
You, personally, may induct any willing creature into your bloodline at no cost. This, again, may function automatically, and in complex ways: you might visit a galaxy populated by quintillions of people and immediately induct all among them who are righteous and noble. These oathbound may not then be banished from your line by any means; they will retain its power forever.
The powers obtained from quintessence may alter and improve the bearer, enhance the manner in which they act upon the world, bestow specific abilities, and generate undirected phenomena of grand scale. These categories might be usefully named Attribute, Ability, Panoply, and Domain. Using a particular category to acquire a particular advantage is more a matter of efficiency than necessity. Ten droplets invested in Attribute affords physical might twice that of a realistic peak human. Ninety invested into Ability might unlock some minor magic system, such as a kind of potion making. Sixteen in Panoply could grant the power to throw fireballs comparable to modern grenades; the same into Domain could allow full-scale hurricanes to be called down upon one’s location.
Used crudely, the power of the Progenitor offers a quadratic progression curve. Clever synergies between powers, especially the purchase of unrealized potential in addition to immediate strength, may yield something approaching exponential. Fully harnessing your bloodline, there are multiple potential routes to hyper-exponential growth of personal power.
As long as your bloodline exists, you have an easy route back into reality. At any time, you may choose to incarnate yourself within any member of your bloodline. They awaken to the fact that they were you all along, that any semblance of independence was merely a lie put up by the world. You are restored to the peak of your power, and regain the full and unblemished truth of your identity. Technically speaking, there is no strict limit to the number of incarnations that may exist simultaneously.
=The Nexus=
You are the core of a unique form of magic. This magic system is tautologically capable of generating any effect that has been generated with this magic system. This includes effects generated by indirect, incomplete, or grossly inefficient means.
The substance of your magic, its basic building block and fuel, is abstract potentials. Any thing containing some non-zero quantity of your magic’s potentials serves as an avenue for the passive, free harvest of more potentials. (This harvest does not actually deplete whatever you gather potentials from, only incidentally interfering with precognitive effects.) Rates of collection scale directly with the amount of potentials contained within the thing, allowing for exponential growth up to the limits of its magic capacity. Potentials are generally a fungible resource, but do vary in kind- energy potentials, power potentials, etc. The kinds of potentials harvested from any given thing relate to the kinds of ‘expenditure’ it could enact; basic energy potentials are thus the most common by far.
Your magic responds eagerly to your will and desires with all of its ability. (The idea it could ever be used against you is laughably absurd.) Raw potentials can naturally spend themselves to fuel compatible processes; this is an extremely effective method of expanding the magic system’s functionality. Lending a bit of energy to a gust of wind could grant aerokinesis suitable for generating flesh-stripping wind blades within minutes of acquiring Nexus. Even something as grandiose as the charms of a Solar Exalted may become replicable, if only you can convince said Solar to draw upon your essence potentials.
Your magic improves, permanently and globally, as it is used and produced. When it is harnessed to generate an effect, it becomes more efficient at producing said effect. Anything saturated with potentials becomes a better storage medium. This is in most cases not a matter of specific objects- any person full of potentials increases the capacity of all persons, and as such for any other kind of thing. The growth itself is an unbounded linear increase in output per unit of input, and can be accelerated without limit. A civilization of ten billion mages improves your magic at least a thousand times as rapidly as one of ten million.
Where your magic can replicate the behaviour of a thing with only the potentials produced by said thing- i.e., duplicating the explosive properties of gunpowder with only the magic naturally produced by that gunpowder- it can subsume those behaviours. The subsumed behaviours are no longer natural functions of the contaminated object. They are then magical effects, under your control no less absolutely than any of your magic’s other behaviours. You might tell gunpowder not to explode, or with more thorough subsumption, tell it not to exist. Someday, you might end universes as easily as one would terminate a program.
The method by which Nexus would grant you immortality should be obvious.
=Ascendant=
A time traveler, however limited, can be described as one step beyond someone who merely experiences time. You are at least two full steps beyond that.
Your most basic abilities are the power to reset and rewind. When you first acquire the power of the Ascendant, the status of reality is recorded. At will, you may revert the multiverse, and every point along all its timelines, to this recorded state. Your ability to rewind is similarly straightforward and supremely effective. There is no limit to the amount of times you can reset or rewind, no price to be paid, no external threat that can escape the effect.
Ascendant, your consciousness exists partially outside of time. No effect can prevent you from taking purely mental action, and you may change your perceived timerate at will. Neither resetting nor rewinding breaks your continuity of consciousness, and your mind and memories do not decay. Even if you rewind reality to a point where you do not exist, your self will endure undiminished in the outside. Most kinds of psychological assault are ineffective against a mind like yours.
Time is no longer the primary constraint on your growth and progression. With the power to save and load, you may undergo arbitrarily great degrees of development in arbitrarily tiny amounts of realtime. Almost anything you could properly conceptualize may be recorded and reinstantiated, even across resets. Both saving and loading incur a price. ‘Timelessness’ is generated as you reset and rewind, in proportion to the magnitude of temporal variance lost to your power. The amount of Timelessness required to save or load a thing scales directly with its significance. Saves are permanent, but resetting or rewinding away something you have loaded does refund its price.
=The Player=
You gain the benefits of a modified Gamer system. Killing any creature grants you xp in accordance with its power. Gathering sufficient xp- ten times as much for each subsequent level- allows you to level up, awarding you one stat point, one skill point, and a compounding fivefold multiplier to the effectiveness of those points. Stats and skills augmented with points see a number of benefits. Beyond the obvious additive enhancement, they receive an increasing degree of supernatural effectiveness and convenience as well as boosted growth rates and developmental potential. There are no strictly defined areas you can or cannot invest stat or skill points; a stat point could be added to Strength as easily as Body or Arms, but broader subjects see their benefits outright lessened in addition to being spread thin. Skill points, in particular, can provide significant amounts of knowledge outright, or unlock abilities no amount of training should be able to provide. One skill point, used well, could grant you access to an entire magic system- or create one from whole cloth.
The system integrates and refines all lesser abilities. Your physique is translated into a number of level-boosted stats, your competencies into level-boosted skills, any training you undergo into ‘free’ stat and skill points. Various reserves of energy, mana and stamina and yet stranger, are distilled into a single pool of universally applicable Energy. Even the mundane medical benefits of bandages or caffeine are converted into direct healing or temporary stat boosts. This never diminishes what is converted, and will usually improve it by a significant margin. At level five, piloting a small mechsuit capable of lifting one ton, you could lift hundreds.
You are the Player, at least as much as you are the character. Whatever happens to your character(s), this game cannot really harm you save for in a limited emotional sense. Accessing the character panel, you may swap between, create, and delete your characters at will; your character(s) need not make any motions nor utter any command phrases for you to access your various menus. Though the multitasking required is not trivial, you can even control multiple characters at once if necessary. New characters are designed with a number of build points limited per-character, to establish backstory, appearance, and initial abilities, and are inserted into the world upon creation. ‘You Are’ and ‘You Have’ powers are part of you, the Player, rather than part of your characters.
You have access to an endless list of quests and achievements. These are constantly created in response to your current circumstances and dismissed as they become invalid. In addition to bonus xp and system-created loot, these can provide player-level benefits: extra stat, skill, or build points for all your characters, soulbound treasures, potentially even rare upgrades to the system itself. The difficulty of questing scales only imperfectly with your own level of ability. A week of the worst, most inefficient questing would see you earn at least six stat points, and it can only get faster and easier from there.
=Beastly=
You become something that logically extends from lichhood. Your body is converted into an immaculate phylactery. With a simple crafting action, you may convert the remains of almost any once-animate thing- corpse, broken robot, disenchanted intelligent sword, crashed starship, etc.- into a new phylactery, anchor and defensive shell and projector alike for your mind and spirit. So long as even one of your phylacteries remains intact, you are immune against assault upon any aspect of yourself less shallow and inessential than physical form. Every second, a pulse thrums out through all your phylacteries, restoring every one from even the most thorough annihilation.
Your phylacteries act as a source of ‘shadowflesh’, the quantity and nature of which is determined by the materials used in the specific phylactery’s construction. Shadowflesh naturally exists as formless darkness, but can take shape at your command, instantly assuming the substance and structure of anything its nature encompasses. A phylactery made from the corpse of an ordinary human soldier could produce a good kilogram of shadowflesh per second, which could shape itself into immaculate copies of the same soldier and their kit, or specific pieces of their equipment, or a skinless humanoid ghoul, etc.
When shaping your shadowflesh, you are not limited to wholesale copies of the original subject. Emaciated corpse becomes phylactery generates shadowflesh that most naturally takes the form of frail, emaciated limbs, but your freedom to arrange these constituent materials is only limited by your own mental faculties. Layering bone atop bone for a larger, denser, sturdier frame is trivial, combining multiple strains of shadowflesh into hybrid forms is simple, using flesh derived from obsolete warmachines to create bleeding-edge technological marvels is well within your reach. Brains and similar formed from shadowflesh may be used to seamlessly expand your own memory, mental speed, and multitasking ability without discomfort or constraint.
Shadowflesh is an extension of your body, under your complete control regardless of distance or seperation. It is only ‘false’ in that it is and remains component to your body, and in that it retains the power to gradually revert to unshaped shadow. Actually destroying shaped shadowflesh is fairly difficult. Once it has shape, shadowflesh requires no less fuel or sustenance than the structure it imitates. Shadowflesh’s capacity to revert to unshaped substance and assume new shape largely mitigates this problem. Depleted blood can reform into fresh and hearty ichor, discharged batteries into fully-charged cells. Unless throwing away mass for ammo or wasting energy profligately, neither fresh shadowflesh nor normal sustenance will be required.
With experience, more can be integrated into a phylactery than the physical. Mind, if its container remains somewhat intact. Spirit, if it has yet to fully depart. All these inclusions character the phylactery’s output, and may be expressed through it. Recreate the flesh of a defeated mage, and graft it into your forms to empower them with wizardry. In time, some semblance of even wholly external abilities may be preserved into your newest strains of shadowflesh.
You Have:
The benefits in this section represent tools. Not actual physical implements, but all the same: solutions aimed at specific problems.
Options here cost 1 Silver.
Wealth
When you desire a specific good, you may manifest a golden weight on a nearby unoccupied surface. This weight’s weight, in pounds, is equal to the cost, in inflation-adjusted 1999 british pounds, of having the desired good be purchased and delivered to your current location. If the weight is successfully lifted at least three feet above its original location, the desired good appears on a nearby unoccupied surface and the weight vanishes. If the weight is at any point not held stably, it immediately vanishes. The weight does not function in environments without a consistent gravity or pseudogravity of at least 0.9 g.
Understanding
Upon perceiving any manner of signal, you immediately receive knowledge of both its meaning and the intentions behin it. Not only will you know if you are being lied to, you will know if you are being manipulated by someone speaking only the truth, and to what ends. This does not require clear perception of the signal (you may use this ability to read even if you are mostly blind), and nor does it require a mind capable of processing the signal. The knowledge this ability provides will never cause you harm, even if it really should. At will, you may attach this ability to any signal you produce, allowing it to be understood in the same way by others.
Change
With a touch, you may cause a willing or helpless target to be encased within a large spherical shell. The shell is several thousand times as durable as its occupant, but if it is broken, the target is released unchanged as if no time had passed. Otherwise, the shell opens on its own after five days, the occupant altered in accordance with their wishes. This can produce almost arbitrary cosmetic and sexual changes, but only limited ‘practical’ benefits. Any bodily injury or affliction can be restored perfectly, including aging, genetic flaws, and stat loss; outright augmentation is incapable of anything beyond the equivalent of one year’s diligent physical conditioning.
Pockets
You have an inventory to which you may send any object in your grasp (or from which you may recall stored objects) with a simple mental command. Your inventory has no maximum capacity, being unbound by space, and objects held within do not experience time. Conscious beings may resist being sent to your inventory without trouble, but otherwise you may store away anything you could lift. You will never have trouble sorting through your inventory, either keeping track of the contents or locating specific items. With a minor spiritual effort, you may grant any container a sub-inventory, capable of storing a quantity of stuff proportionate to its abstract ‘usefulness as a container’.
You Can:
Complications here grant 1 Cobalt.
Travel
You discover, activate, and take command of an ancient device of unknowable origin. This device allows for safe, stealthy, and extremely far-reaching multiversal travel; it can take you from one wholly independent infinite multiverse to another, and conceal your intrusion from even the local omnipotents. Locating a specific reality is beyond it, as is making more than a handful of multiversal transitions per day.
Now active, the device is obviously flawed- either incomplete or severely damaged. Its engine contains something utterly inimical to reality, to existence; you are safe from it, but the world is not. After three cumulative years in the same cluster of worlds, the local multiverse will begin to collapse away into nothing. The first sign of collapse is the loss of growth, as populations can no longer expand, at best holding steady. Unless you leave, other concepts follow.
The machine can be repaired and/or completed, given work by someone with the right set of abilities. If you lack those abilities, and cannot find anyone else to do the job, the device will point you to suitable artifacts in any world you visit. All of its parameters may be improved; in time, its destructive influence may be contained completely.
Fight
Over time, new rooms will appear randomly in the doorways of any world you have visited. This is rare on an individual basis, but common on the whole, occuring an average of once per five years for each doorway. These additions represent more doorways, and so the total number of rooms rises exponentially without limit. New rooms are patterned off of their neighbours- an extra set of cubicles in an office building, another kitchen on the other side of your house, etc. Beyond the imperfection and gradual mutation inherent to this mindless iterative copying, every new chamber will be slightly more dangerous than its surroundings.
These rooms exist outside of normal space, each slightly ‘deeper’ than its predecessor. They branch off outwards, but never loop back on themselves, and can be cast adrift by ruining the doorways that keep them anchored. Blessedly, the deeper you move into this nullspace, the more difficult it becomes for anything like a person to be created. Even at the most shallow layer, the potential millions of direct copies of humans generated each day will utterly lack consciousness.
Generated rooms contain objects patterned off the contents of their neighbours. Thus, they can be looted. In the most mundane sense, how much could you get from selling off the contents of a spontaneously-generated second kitchen? As rooms increase in danger, there is a roughly proportionate increase in ‘potency’. The mindless copying that forms them cannot create clever traps or advanced technologies, so instead you see hazards empowered supernaturally. And an imperfect replica of a hazard may well be not only safe but useful.
Share
Seven imperfect clones of yourself appear. They possess all your memories as of their creation, but are distorted in personality. Together, they represent you at your cruelest, your kindest, your most lustful, your most gluttonous, your laziest, your proudest, and your most paranoid. Crucially, they are no more cruel, or kind, or so on than you yourself may sometimes, however briefly, become. However, they can never escape or diminish their particular ‘mood’.
Each clone has power equivalent to one third your own, growing and diminishing as you do. This is not to say they have your abilities at one third intensity. Each clone has its own distinct powerset, largely unrelated to yours, and it would take at least three working together to match you. You have no special control over your clones, but they have no special drive to hurt you. They may be killed, permanently, at least as easily as you yourself could be.
Incidentally, you may lend out portions of your power to others, diminishing yourself by equal margin. Energy, stats, abilities, etc., in whole or in infinitesimal fractions. What has been lent cannot be kept against your will, and any growth made by what you lend away is no less yours. ‘You Have’ powers are not diminished by lending; you could share Change with everyone.
Grow
You are isekaied to a xianxia world on the brink of catastrophe. A demonic cultivator has risen to the peak of power, such that no being remains in this world that could ever defeat them. They are in the process of consuming the world itself to break through to the next stage. Already, one of the elements has been subsumed: all the metal in the world is but an extension of this monster. Unless you interfere, in fifteen years time all remaining life will dissolve into silver centipedes. Ten years after that, they would break free into the wider multiverse, arriving first at your own world of origin.
This particular xianxia world is typically vast but very much finite. It is made up of dozens of layers stacked vertically, each wealthier than the last. With a habitable zone in each layer some ten thousand miles across, even the relatively primitive local civilization represents hundreds of billions of people. There are societies vast enough to get lost in, there are entire armies of mighty cultivators that you might recruit to your cause.
The cultivation system of this world is rooted in force of personality, in charisma and willpower. A cultivators basic parameters converge towards one megastat, strength and speed and intelligence and more multiplied together. A similar process magnifies upon skill as it is cultivated into dao. Your enemy- and they very much are your enemy, however you might feel about it- has refined themselves down to two aspects and one dao. They are APOCALYPSE SUN // SILVER CITY // LORD CENTIPEDES. The dao they wield is third-order, equivalent in breadth and conceptual potency to one of the five elements, and they possess raw power sufficient to liquefy mountains or crack continental plates.
Symph
When it comes to the Grow world, how does you average person start out when it comes to stats and abilities? What does your average cultivator start out with? How do you transition from a mundane mortal( if there are any) and into a cultivator?
admin
Average mortals are like average humans from our Earth. A first-stage cultivator can use their charisma in place of their basic physical attributes, giving them a mild statistical advantage and immunity to many kinds of harm. You could burn out most of a first-stage cultivator’s nervous system and they’d be fine. Becoming a cultivator is as simple as absorbing Qi into your body.
Anonymous
When it comes to aspects, is your refinement or subordination of stats to other aspects just something that requires a breakthrough to another level of cultivation. Or is the refinement of stats into aspects and skills into dao just something you can do as a cultivator, and you just might not be powerful enough to do certain things yet.
admin
Dao is just something you do as a cultivator. Creating aspects is a Stage 10+ thing, each step in that process an entire stage.
Symph
Does refining a stat into an aspect require a breakthrough in cultivation, or is it just a facet of this system of cultivation that all cultivators can just do whenever they have the proper understanding to do it?
Is there just one process, like you have to bind a stat to a special magical artifact of enough power, or could you potentially develop anything into an aspect?
admin
Stages past 9 are fairly personalized, but Stage 10 is normally ‘Aspect Establishment’, literally the creation of your first aspect.
Aspects could potentially be just about anything.
Nox
1 Cobalt and 5 Silver
You Are:
Beloved-1c -1s(convenience)(Lesser boon: The effects of Understanding)(Lesser boon: The effects of Pockets)(Lesser boon: Constant knowledge on all clones from share)(Greater Boon: Knowledge and knowhow on how to fix the travel device)
A wound-1c -1s
Nexus-1c -1s
Player-1c -1s
You Have:
Wealth-1s
You Can:
Travel+1c
Share+1c(All start in the Growth world as that is where I will be)
Growth+1c
Forgot 1 my bad for the double post.
Nox
I feel like I kinda lowballed on Beloved a bit as it’s hard to gage it’s limits.
Fight also seems way too punishing to ever pick, any reality you go to pretty much gets the backrooms treatment for all the doors in that reality, having spawning dungeons I could understand but every door if 5 years go by seems too much to me.
Nox
Revised Build:
1 Cobalt and 5 Silver
You Are:
Inheritor-1c -1s
Wound-1c -1s
Nexus-1c -1s
Ascendant-1c -1s
Player-1c -1s
You Have:
None
You Can:
Travel+1c
Fight+1c
Share+1c(All start in the Growth world as that is where I will be)
Growth+1c
Plan:
Abuse Ascendant+Wound in the cultivation world to defeat my clones and lord of centipedes.
Attempt to use inheritor on the travel device to make a schematic for it, then use the wound to consume its effect destroying it then proceed to make a new one(If this fails reset with Ascendant).
Don’t leave the cultivation would until I can find a way to counter fight with nexus by making some strange law instantly removing the doors or translocating them someplace as they generate.
Or if possible intermingle the effects of nexus and fight(as both originate from you)to gain some tangible control over the effect and how it generates.
Would this work?
(Kinda realized the, you have options are kinda a trap as they can be replicated with nexus alone.)
(Would replace my old build with this but I can’t)
Gdjitxdjl
->Clones are a major hassle to deal with since they not only scale in power as you do but are also as equally hard to kill. When three of them working together can equal you while six of them is double your own power it makes it easier to just ignore them in the long run imo.
->Nexus is essentially an auto-win against LORD CENTIPEDE since he doesn’t know any better.
->The You Have options aren’t terrible if you don’t intend on going all in on You Are options. They each have a function which they do well with no investment on your own part after all.
Nox
Q1 Would the clones even grow in power level if you looped with Ascendant?
Q2 what’s stopping you from isolating the clones from each other, as they won’t have the abilities or synergies you have?
Q3 the clones don’t have Ascendant but know you do meaning they know that they can’t win, would they not just surrender and try and mediate coexistence?
You have multiple powers that compound and multiply on each other, meaning the clones are not much of a treat when you take the time to think about it. I also just hate the idea of there being clones of me and they would know as much so dealing with them in some capacity is inevitable.
admin
Yes. They grow and diminish as you do.
The clones themselves. They know what you are like, and one of them is extremely paranoid.
Depends. Their personalities are derived from your own.
Nox
So even if you come back in time they still have 1/3 of your strength, but still have no memories or experience of the loop?
Assuming you still keep your wound Ap built up could you not just dump it all into dealing with them instantly, unless they get some form of auto-reality warping, gain copies of all your powers or plot armour, you can eventually just deal with them within a few breaths.
I can’t see how having Ascendant+Wound would not just give you inevitable victory, wound alone gives you a way to multiply your power that they have no way to counter or benefit from, am I wrong in thinking this?
admin
Yep.
‘Ability to punch above your weight class’ is at least partially factored into power levels, but yeah, storing up resources for one big effort is a valid way to handle the clones.
Gdjitxdjl
Yeah, you defintely really lowballed Beloved. None of the stuff you spent your Boons on is really worth imo. The thing is you just wouldn’t get all these instantly as you’d need to work for them.
->Understanding: It’s not hard to replicate it via Wound, I think. Just need to spend AP to bypass any restrictions on communication and so on. Or, via Gamer with skill point investment to unlock a similar ability.
->Pockets: You’d be able to get something similar by investing skill points into acquiring an ability like it though it could be a potential system upgrade too. Or, just use Nexus to fake it by creating and then destroying whatever it at will or in making your own pocket dimension.
->Clone Knowledge: Invest stat points from Gamer into Multitasking to achieve the same effect. Or, maybe mimic it with Wound?
->Travel Fix: Not necessary since the device itself will point you towards what you need to fix it if you don’t have the ability to fix it on your own. Not really an issue with Gamer, Wound, or Nexus though since you’d have multiple avenues of fixing it ranging from investing stat points into the right skills to obtain super-science, spending AP to just bypass restrictions on fixing it, or simply subsuming it entirely into your system of magic.
Eh, it’s rough early on for certain builds but becomes less an issue later on as time progresses. For example Gamer can simply create a character focused around taking control of Fight with a proper investment of stat and skill points while Nexus would be able to subsume any rooms created instantly after a certain point allowing you to destroy them on a whim which could even be automated if you want. I’d say that Ascendant+Nexus is best at it though Ascendant+Gamer would work pretty well too.
Nox
I realized that hence I remade the build, and the problem with fight just thinking of the socioeconomic damage it would cause.
House/building prices would skyrocket as they become a way to potentially infinite resources, banks and landlords would mass evict people from their houses, hoarding mass amounts of needed resources in warehouses would be a common problem, governments would somehow try and limit the public from building doors as they have the potential to crash the economy.
You might be mistaken in thinking this could be used to reach post-scarcity, but in all likely hood would lead to massive power grabs from governments to organizations attempting to monopolize this new endless resource supply, and civil unrest would be through the roof, I might be wrong but this kinda just seems like human nature would tear it’s self apart(In this day and age at least ).
Gdjitxdjl
Q1 {Ascendant}: If I Saved an individual’s skill in some particular field and then Loaded it onto another different individual what would happen? Would I be able to selectively decide how it applies?
Q2 {Wound+Change} Is Wound able to bypass the restriction of “limited ‘practical’ benefits” on Change? Also, can Wound empower the action of using Change?
Q3 {Wound+Understanding} It seems like Wound would be able to relatively easily replicate the capabilities of Understanding?
Q4 {Wound / Inheritor} It seems like it’d be relatively simple to replicate most of the capabilities of a Solar Exalted via Wound? Specifically, I refer to Wound’s ability to empower actions along with being able to bypass restrictions. It doesn’t seem like it’d be too difficult to pull off with Inheritor either especially in conjunction with Wound.
admin
They’d get the skill, and maybe some personality contamination/new memories. You’d be able to work this out into something you control completely.
No.
Yeah, but it’d be a bit expensive early on.
Yeah. Especially with Inheritor too. Inheritor alone would struggle a bit.
Gdjitxdjl
Q1 {Gamer / Beastly} Is being a ‘character’ an inheritable trait such as it potentially being passed on to any offspring or created entities? Also, what about in regards to Beastly if I have a character use their shadowflesh to split off a separate creature?
Q2 {Beastly} Is shadowflesh itself able to convert other things into more of itself? Basically, if I have a shadowflesh beast eat a bunch of meat or rocks or whatever would it be able to convert that into more shadowflesh.
Note {Beastly}: Honestly, given that shadowflesh can exist independent of a phylactery it seems like the best use of the latter is as a shadowflesh generator.
You Are {Wound / Gamer / Ascendant}
You Have {Wealth / Pockets}
You Can {Travel / Grow}
I’m pretty torn between picking up one of Beloved / Inheritor / Nexus / Beastly as well since they each have very promising interactions with my current selection. Oh, I should probably jot down my concept for Beloved as well:
Greater Boon {Power}
The residual energy of some passing cosmic weapon has warped your nature granting you a measure of it’s own supernal excellence and cataclysmic power. Initially, you begin with a single mote of Glory the generation of which will increase at exponential rate over time. (Basically, it’d be a Solar Exalted with the serial number filed off. There’d be a few tweaks though like the ability to create pseudo-exaltations and so on. I’d say it’d do well as a strong, versatile power that can empower not only yourself but others as well. It just has a bit of trouble with more ‘exotic effects’ on its own outside of the conceptual supernal excellence.)
admin
Player, no. (Unless it’s some sort of dedicated multi-form effect). Beastly, yes. Biomass split off of a character is as permanent as biomass split off of anyone else.
Yep.
Gdjitxdjl
Multi-form effect… Hmm, something like the Tyranid Hivemind from 40k or Slivers from MtG then would apply?
Where does Beastly fit in on the exponential growth tier list compared to the others? It seems…inferior. But, I guess with Wealth it’d probably have the best starting growth.
Also, which You Are powers do you think have the best synergy with Beastly? I’d probably say Inheritor myself since all the forms you create would count as ‘created things’ for the purposes of schematics.
How does Beastly interact with Cultivation? Would you be able to cultivate multiple Dao’s and Aspects with each different body and swap them around at will?
For Inheritor+Beastly can you dedicate multiple different bodies on creating schematics, refining them, and reinventing them? So like 10,000 bodies each tasked with using Inheritor to churn out new schematics.
admin
You need to be dividing, rather than spawning, to preserve the character-state. Like, you could set up a skill that lets you split into two bodies with halved physical attributes, then have each body absorb shadowflesh to recover from the loss.
In a resource rich environment, you have a doubling time of 5-15 minutes. With zero outside resources and Beastly as your only source of supernatural phenomena, you can potentially double in as little as four hours. It can get much faster once you start piling on the magic.
Wound, if you’re looking to harvest most of your powerups from existing creatures.
By default, you’d just be one cultivator with a weird body. With sufficient development, Beastly can produce flesh that contains both mind and spirit in forms suitable for cultivation.
No. Becoming more capable isn’t enough to speed up Inheritor.
Gdjitxdjl
>No. Becoming more capable isn’t enough to speed up Inheritor.
It seems that Wound does have the best synergy with Inheritance then. I’d thought the trick of creating multiple individual minds from my shadowflesh each tasked with using Inheritor would have worked though.
Can Inheritor be used on the shadowflesh and phylacteries themselves?
admin
On the shadowflesh, yes.
E
alright time to finally post my build
You Are: Beloved, The Inheritor, A Wound, The Player
You Have: Understanding
You Can: Travel, Fight, Grow
so 1st things 1st is Beloved. I pick ‘Growth’ for the concept, I use 2 Lesser Boons on plot armor and having my Beloved as an Ally/waifu that has 1:1 of my growth, I use the Greater Boon on accelerating all my future development by the power of 2, I save up the remaining Lesser Boon
I Record the Travel machine and then absorb it for Wound, I now get at least 120,001^2 Threads per day, on the 2nd day I would have (120,001^2) + 1 Threads and because of that day 3 would net me ((120,001^2) +1)^2 AP or around 207 quintillion AP that I could spend on whatever I want
I invest 200 quintillion AP into Inheritor, instantly creating, Refining, and Reinventing schematics many many times. a huge percent of the invested AP would go into the invention of a reality destroying device that I could make cheaply and quickly craft that I could then feed into Wound
Player is there just because, and I guess I’ll also spend 1 quintillion AP on completing quests/achievements
so basically my build is all about pay-to-win
Questions:
1 does x^2 development also work for the times of Inheritor? meaning schematic creation, Refinement, and Reinvention would only need to be √x instead of x where x = few minutes/2 hours
2 how does the x^2 development affect the R&D boost of Inheritor?
3 say, about the x^2 development, what if i used planck time for x? wikipedia says planck time is about 10^-44 seconds or conversely 10^44 planck time is 1 second, if i could use planck time as the reference for development then with x^2 development 1 second would of development would only need 10^-22 seconds of development. this is even more absurd if we talk about years and longer, 1 year could be written as 3.1536 × 10^51 planck time, x^2 planck time development makes it so that 10^51 would only neeed to be 10^25 or so
4 how much Threads per day would my supposed reality destroyer net me, at least the same as the Travel machine?
admin
1. It effects the results of those, not the times.
2. It doesn’t. Mundane R&D efforts don’t equate to your own growth.
3. It doesn’t work like that. It increases growth. If you increase your power by 1.5x, it is instead increased by 1.5^2 or 2.25x.
4. Sounds appropriate.
E
1 ah i see, but then what does it actually mean for schematic creation, Refinement, and Reinvetion? for example I separately spend 60 and 600 AP on Refining a schemtic, do I get 10 and 100 Refinements or 100 and 10,000 Refinements?
1.1 how about Player? there’s already x^2 xp gain but would there also be x^2 point allocation? for example I put 1,000 stat points into strength, would strength increase by 1,000 or 1,000,000 points?
2 how come it doesn’t affect R&D? the wording is “Accelerates all future development by…” and well R&D is research and 𝘥𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 so…
2.1 on the topic of Inheritor R&D, what’s the formula for its boost anyways?
3 ohh ok, that wording makes it seem like if I don’t somehow consistently grow ≥√5x then x^2 would be not worth it
3.1 thinking about it, could I make it a Boon? something like “Decrease all time requirements by a factor of 5” for Lesser and “Decrease all time requirements by the power of ½” or “Decreases all time requirements by its square root” for Greater
4 while the 120,000 estimate for Travel’s machine and thus my reality destroyer is acceptable, I still want to know an exact number for the reality destroyer, note that my planned reality destroyer is an actual reality destroyer as in it will destroy the entirety of all of reality -excluding me of course- if it were to go off
4.1 or instead of something that complicated, would a multiverse-sized black hole net the same amount of Threads/day as Travel’s machine?
5 could I actually do the ‘spend absurd amount of AP on questing, get equally absurd amount of points’ thing? like I spend 504 quadrillion AP and I get 1 quadrillion weeks worth of questing done?
6 killing one thing but in many timelines is a valid way of getting xp right? like if I kill one thing worth 1 xp but in like 1E101 timelines I instantly become level 100?
6.1 how does the x^2 development affect simultaneous xp gain like above? do I still only get 1E101 xp or 1E202 xp?
E
so uhh, are you interested in answering my questions above? just asking considering it’s been nearly two weeks without a response
i’d be cool if you don’t answer them, it’s just the lack of response that’s been bugging me
admin
I do not intend to answer those questions.
E
woops i seem to have replied to my own post, but anyways yeah if you look at my post, i want a response from you if you wanna answer my questions or not, the lack of it has just been bugging me
Gdjitxdjl
I’m trying to figure out any synergies for Beastly & Nexus and I’m coming up with a bit of a blank? Best I’ve got is maybe using Nexus to convert stuff into shadowflesh directly. I guess that Beastly could be a good source of potentials as well.
As for Beastly… Hmm, personally I like the idea of going with an ‘altered’ version: The general idea is that now shadowflesh can infect, corrupt, and assimilate material which it can then mimic. Left to itself shadowflesh would have low passive growth rate but by condensing large quantities of shadowflesh you can create ‘umbral cores’ which function similar to phylacteries in that they generate large quantities of shadowflesh easily and are hard to destroy for good.
If the other You Are powers that you don’t pick also exist separate…. Hmm, I’d say that it’d make Ascendant an almost mandatory pick. It’s hard to beat someone who can upgrade themselves to Lv. 100 right at the start when you’re still Lv. 1 and then stomp you. They only need to beat you once for it to stick after all.
randomlurker44
On the synergies… I am not Savestate, but:
– nexus magic can do anything that has been done with nexus magic. If you can get your magic to encompass the energy of your physical actions and then go craft a phylactery, your magic can craft phylacteries directly, anywhere it is present. Also, phylacteries would then be a part of your magic, so anything they can do would be part of your magic. Your magic can now directly conjure shadowflesh, make things fully restore every second, and directly act as an anchor for your existence. Anything your shadowflesh can do becomes something your magic can do directly, etc.
In the other direction, you could probably make weird lifeforms with nexus that could make strange phylacteries.
This being said, I do personally think these two don’t synergize as well as some of the other You Are choices. Nexus should probably synergize best with choices that can do a large number of impossible things, which Nexus magic could then rapidly improve on. And Beastly isn’t great at finding new magic and stuff that it can do on its own, better at looting and combining it from other places and people. So you’re left with a lot of exponential expansion, but getting more out of context powers would be really difficult (if you didn’t have multiversal travel, anyway).
Gdjitxdjl
Ah, those are some good points you raise. I do agree that Beastly & Nexus don’t have the best synergy in comparison to some other combinations.
Gdjitxdjl
You Are {Wound, Ascendant, Beloved}
You Have {Wealth, Pockets}
You Can {Travel, Grow}
I just like using Wound as the foundational element to tie everything together? If I was limited to just a single You Are option then I’d probably have to go with Wound. Either way I’d figured that I’d list a few concepts for Beloved which appeal to me for this build:
->Beloved {Fire / Time}: Eeh, you’d essentially gain control of either Fire or Time. It’d start out fairly simple however as the depth and breadth of your ability expands then it’d become increasingly conceptual in nature. Why did I put the two of these together? Mostly since there’d be a lot of overlap at the higher end with much of it simply being a matter of aesthetics. It’d be fairly easy to thematically tie either option into Wound / Ascendant which is nice as well.
->Beloved {Not}: This would focus more on the ‘wound in reality’ aspect, I think? It’d likely center around ‘unmaking’ by casting things into your wound-aspect with it initially being limited to the merely physical before progressing to the conceptual. As nature abhors a vacuum you’d probably be able to eventually leverage your unmaking to actually create things as well. Or, I guess a different angle might be to replace what you’ve taken with bits of yourself?
I’d probably add in a Lesser Boon {Ally} for this via Beloved, I think.
You Are {Wound, Inheritor, Beloved (Alt-Beastly)}
You Have {Wealth, Pockets}
You Can {Travel, Grow, Fight}
I’d essentially be the ‘Devouring Swarm’ who’d be able to seamlessly adapt myself to counter and overcome any potential threats. Eh, I’d probably go for a techno-organic aesthetic since it seems pretty fitting? A mixture of the Tyranids, Phyrexia, and so on for inspiration. Of all the options this is likely to result in the most inhuman nature if precautions aren’t taken. In any case these three You Are options have some very, very nice synergy going on.
You Are {Wound, Ascendant, Player}
You Have {Wealth, Pockets}
You Can {Travel, Grow, Fight}
A simple, strong combination with a lot of synergy to it. At most I might reskin Player with most if not all the ‘System’ stuff taking place in the background. Eh, it varies. I figure it could be pretty interesting if rather than being merged that Player & Wound’s wound-aspect were kept seperate to create a hierarchy of self that’d go Wound-Aspect > Player > Character(s). Sorta like Wound-Aspect is Azathoth while the Player is Nyarlathotep and the Characters are the Masks.
(Multitasking isn’t really an issue when you can literally just invest stat points into it which would then be further boosted by your Lv.)
Which one would I go with if forced to pick? Eeh, I really don’t as they all have their own appeal. I’d probably narrow it down to the last two options though I guess. They seem to have the most potential.
Shifter
Do you even need Pockets with Player? Gamer already have inventory (unlimited too iirk), and even if Player don’t have it (it wasn’t directly mentioned after all), with 1 point you should be able to create it. With x5 point powers every level after some time it will have so much capacity you can throw solar systems in it and it wouldn’t even take 1% of it capacity so it would be mostly indistinguishable from Pockets.
Symph
Could you use Progenitor to connect to things outside of the bloodline? Like if you had You Can Fight, could you spend x amount of Quintessence to gain powers or abilities or whatever’s, based on Fight?
admin
You can use Progenitor to augment foreign abilities, but you don’t by default have any power over the phenomena generated by Fight. It’d be like developing power over/based on the Earth. Which is something you could definitely do, admittedly.
Gdjitxdjl
A few more questions in regards to Wound & Ascendant:
#1 {Wound}: How easy is it for an individual to change their nature and form (i.e. shapeshifting) via Wound?
#2 {Wound} Is it possible to replicate Player’s ability to create backstories even to a limited extent via Wound?
#3 {Wound} By investing 72~ AP I’d be able to empower all my actions for the entire day? Then by investing an additional 72 AP (144 AP) I’d be able to further empower my actions? Going from 2x to 3x and so on till you surpass Saitama and Superman.
#4 {Wound} Is it possible to bring the wound-aspect into reality on either a temporary or permanent basis via Wound itself?
#5 {Ascendant} It’s mentioned that memories are carried over upon resetting or rewinding therefore wouldn’t this also include knowledge and skills acquired via Wound?
#6 {Ascendant} Clarification on “almost anything”?
#7 {Ascendant} If you Load something then can you also “unload” it without resetting or rewinding?
#8 {Ascendant+Wound} Viability of a multiform effect by combining these two? Basically, I’d imagined using the wound-aspect to forge a connection between them all (sorta like a bunch of trees all sharing the same root system). Which raises the question of if I can overwrite others by Loading my mind along with connection to the wound-aspect onto them.
admin
1. Easy enough. You can bypass the normal limits of metabolism to regenerate into new forms, or execute your actions through a foreign vessel.
2. Yes.
3. Yes. Empowerment is uncapped. This would bolster your normal actions; your haste and instant actions would require additional AP to receive the same benefit. (Because 72 AP is the amount required for 24 hours of action, but you can have more than 24 hours of action in 24 hours.)
4. I don’t think this is within the capabilities of Wound.
5. Yes.
6. You probably can’t bring back a complete copy of Ascendant and share it around. This is the only example I can think of. It’s a strong almost.
7. No. With additional investment, you could load its nonexistence.
8. Completely viable.
Skorr
2b. The limitations of using Wound to create “backgrounds” in comparison to Player?
How difficult / feasible is it for an individual with Wound to permantly acquire other powers via expending AP? For reference: Chakra from Naruto, X-Gene from Marvel, Kryptonian Physiology from DC, Cursed Energy from Jujutsu Kaisen, Dragon Physiology from [?], and so on.
Is the AP from Wound a viable source of potential for Nexus?
admin
Unless you pick up some foreign power capable of such, you won’t actually be changing the past- only the present, and evidence found in the present.
You can train up your traits beyond normal limits. You can get so efficient at imitating another power with your own that it makes no difference that you technically lack it.
Yes.
Skorr
->You can train up your traits beyond normal limits. You can get so efficient at imitating another power with your own that it makes no difference that you technically lack it.
Huh, I hadn’t actually considered that. It’d be pretty useful though since you’d be able to reduce AP expenditure by simply improving your baseline capabilities rather than constantly empowering yourself. The imitating another power while technically not having it is sorta weird though.
By the way what are the general limitations of Cultivation? I know you’d mentioned previously that while exponential it’d still be inferior in terms of growth to the You Are options at least.
admin
Cultivation is capable of exponential growth.
You Are options, used properly, are capable of unbounded hyper-exponential growth.
Skorr
Ah, sorry. I meant more like what is Cultivation’s specialization? As in its strengths and weaknesses roughly in comparison to the other You Are options.
At the moment it seems like Cultivation has the most personalization at the start in the form of Aspects and Dao?
admin
High-level Dao turns into a large multiplier to your effectiveness within most possible areas of activity. High-level Xianxia Magic lets you exert your attributes through the world and other people as if they were extensions of yourself, in ways grand and subtle. Development of Aspects immunizes you against many forms of harm. At the level of Lord Centipedes, you cannot really be diminished except by attacking your Aspects specifically; a curse that conceptually denies you metabolic function would work on you, but not actually have any negative effect. You can amass very large values in basic parameters. (strength, agility, endurance, charisma, intelligence, wits, perception, willpower, wisdom, life, integrity, luck)
You spend exponentially longer periods where your power is essentially stagnant, as you prepare to reach the next stage of cultivation. You need exponentially greater resources if you want to accelerate your progression. You sacrifice some basic parameters in the construction of your Aspects; there become gaps in your ability. A perfect Dao is thought to be impossible; there will always be some small areas where yours is inapplicable unless you give up much of your potential power to maintain multiple.
The comparison that springs to my mind, laying this out, is golden-age superman.
Cultivation has only limited early personalization. At Stage 4, you can begin pursuing Dao. At Stage 10, you can begin developing Aspects. That normally takes a long time to reach.
Alfie Armstrong
Nexus is worded a bit weirdly, but here’s what I think it essentially boils down to:
You start with some amount of Potentials exceeding 0.
You can do several things with a potential, assuming you don’t just ‘hold’ it.
You place it in a thing. This causes it to passively produce / allow free harvesting of more potentials, at a rate which increases if you add more potentials to it.
The potentials harvested vary in ‘attribute’ depending on what types of ‘expenditure’ the container is capable of: these attributes seem general, i.e. lean more towards broader concepts than specialised things. Energy, not electricity from a battery, Magic, not life force, etc. This leads into the second possible application.
You fuel something else with it. Heat tea by using a potential with the ‘energy’ attribute, cast a spell with a ‘magic’ potential, make a permanent generator with a ‘power’ potential. Possible exotic or recursive applications- pour in energy and power potentials until something gains anomalous properties, pull ‘magic’ potentials from that, etc.
Note based on the ‘essence’ potential it seems that ‘magic’ seems to tend toward the energies used for one system rather than all- won’t be dark energies of pure EVIL nor represent every kind of magic there is. Magicka from Skyrim, mana from MoL, Warpstuff from WH40K, etc.
Anyway, this seems to lead into the final method of using a potential.
Replicate an effect that a potential has been involved in creating. Doesn’t to be the sole power source, just in the mix somewhere. Going by my examples in 2, you could gain thermokinesis, gain wholesale access to a magic system, or in the generator case gain electrokinesis/ abilities based on what the generator fuelled. Effects derived from this also apply: aerokinesis moves an object, that’s telekinesis. All sorts of recursive potential: practically guarantees Reality Warper status with enough creativity and experimentation.
So, here are my questions, aside from ‘have I gotten anything here wrong’ and ‘what other functions have I missed (side-eyes the ‘subsuming’ mechanic)’.
1) Can you directly use potentials on other potentials? I’m imagining a metastructure of potentials compounding on themselves to stretch the bounds of what they can do: energy potential can’t be used to directly make matter via E = mC^2? Now it can.
2) Potentials being stored in one another to cheat storing them: simply attach them to the ones you already have and watch them grow like weeds. Enhance rate of harvesting per potential for even exponentialer exponential growth.
3) The deal with ‘ten billion mages’ – does this refer to letting them harvest and use potentials for you, empowering them via gained abilities and letting them carve out new applications of you power, or what?
4) What can hold a potential. Can you store it in abstract things? Your mind or soul? The fabric of reality itself? Information?
Note that I mean these questions from the context of a ‘low-level’ Nexus; these are functionally irrelevant at higher levels because at that point you can manipulate reality freely and don’t need to wrangle more value from the base nature of potentials.
admin
Accurate enough. Subsumption isn’t super important at lower levels.
1) Potentials can be transformed, used to generate different kinds of potential. I wouldn’t call this direct interaction.
2) You could store certain types of potential within other types. Energy within power.
3) Letting them harvest and use potentials. Grinding out efficiency improvements for you.
4) Depends on the type of potential. Anything that can release energy can contain energy potentials. Information has a non-zero energy value, so it can contain some quantity of energy potentials. If the fabric of reality could be broken down to release energy, it could be used to store energy potentials.
Alfie Armstrong
Also, I know it’s unrelated but I had a unique strategy for the Chain of Isekai CYOA and wanted to know if it was viable.
Using all the False Wizardry perks, Unfold, Constellation and Throw Yourself In, could you combine all the aforementioned perks with Divine Transcendence, Stellar Pacts and (the core of the new ability) False Wizardry to create a new, superior magic system?
– The False Wizardry perks (excluding Archive Splinter) all work really well as behaviours of the new magic system. Metamanipulation is invaluable for greasing the way and overcoming stipulations.
– Constellation is useful for pulling it all together, and really shines with Metamanipulation loosening its limits.
– Throw Yourself In is there for to boost the capability of the new power- I’d be permanently sacrificing all of the abilities going into this to bolster it. Faith and Starlight would also lose their ability to pull from elsewhere- they generate only from me. Metamanipulation paves the way here.
– To make it more meaningful this change is permanent.
– Unfold is used simply because it is a meta perk which might grease the way in some areas. Synergy with Metamanipulation.
admin
Entirely possible. Even without perks or outside context powers, the individual systems can be used together to great effect.
Alfie Armstrong
By that post what I meant was leveraging Constellation, Throw Yourself In, Unfold and Metamanipulation + the other False Wizardry perks to create a new power source- New Wizardry, if you will.
This would be achieved by sacrificing all the aforementioned perks, False Wizardry, Divine Transcendence and Stellar Pacts through Throw Yourself In to create a massively boosted, Metamanipulation-assisted fusion a la Constellation- a permanent amalgamation, with False Wizardry as the core. New Wizardry
– Magical Mastery, Spellseed, Deep Magic and to a lesser extent Metamanipulation would serve as innate behaviours of the system. Some stuff from DV and SP, but mostly a more flexible, mutable version of FW.
– The four 12-CP perks are mostly there to reinforce one another and grease the way for creation- Constellation to combine them together, TYI for permanence and reinforcement, Metamanipulation to pull them all together (and enhance Constellation to let it serve that function) and grease the way, Unfold assists spell creation and development, etc.
admin
Yes. And that is entirely possible with your perks.
Alfie Armstrong
Faith and Starlight compound with Velt to create the new reserve of energy used in the Power Source, and add their functions in as well.
Heavenly Artifice and the Theurgist-style magics as well as spell development, casting styles and reservoir growth similar to Faith development of Legends, Webs / Mythos and creation of reserves to hold energy. Perhaps throw in extra perks for more functions of New Wizardry- all 4 point perks would allow granting of New Wizardry to others.
Note about Faith and Starlight: you’d sacrifice the ability to pull from outside sources in exchange for boosting New Wizardry’s powers.
Shifter
It feels like you can mimic some effects of different You Are with Player. Like, reset and rewind from Ascendant are basically just gaming Save and Load (not Ascendant save and load. And even Ascendant save and load can probably be emulated to some extend). The Inheritor is very high Crafting skill and so on.
Though I would assume you can just directly spend skill point to get the skill “Ascendant” and so on, this would be too op. Or am I wrong and you can get basic levels of other You Are with some large amount of skill points? Like 1000 and without the x5 compounding bonus.
Also question about Beloved. Are those options the only one I can choose or can I choose something else with similar power level?
admin
Some options can mimic other options. Every You Are is extremely powerful.
The options below Beloved are examples only.
Skorr
You are: Beloved, Wound, ???
You Have: Wealth, Understanding
You Can: Grow, Travel
For Beloved I’ll take Greater Boon {Power} so that I can be an Abyssal Exalted, I think. They’re probably my favorite Exalted and they also have a good thematic synergy with Wound. Then I’d probably go with Lessen Boon: {Comfort – Private Realm}, {Ally – 1:1 Growth}, and {Power – Amplification x50 (Abyssal)}. If I didn’t have Wound or was only limited to Beloved? Then I’d instead likely take Lesser Boon {Immortality} in place of Lesser Boon {Power} just for insurance.
I’m not really sure what my third You Are option for this would be. I guess I lean most towards either Nexus or Inheritor? This is mostly since I sorta feel that Gamer would overshadow the rest of it if I went with it. And, Beastly just doesn’t quite fit what I’m going for.
In any case I feel that Cultivation would have some very good synergy with being an Exalted as it’d provide the raw power that an Exaltation lacks? I also think I’ve settled on my ASPECT / DAO too: It’d be UMBRAL SUN / HEAVEN SUNDERING RAPTURE though I might swap the “Rapture” part of the latter for “Glory”, “Tyrant”, or “Venerable” instead. Another option might be STARFALL CATACLYSM / UMBRAL SUN since they sound pretty cool as well. It being so open-ended just makes it really hard to settle on one of them.
Skorr
A few more questions:
#1. If we attempt to replicate what LORD CENTIPEDES is doing in subsuming an aspect of the world are we limited to just physical phenomenon? Could we subsume a concept instead such as “Love”, “War”, “Justice” and so on instead?
#2. Is all life dissolving into silver centipedes a natural consequence of what LORD CENTIPEDES is doing or something that he deliberately set out to achieve? Therefore if he hadn’t been a demonic cultivator yet still attempted to subsume the world could he have caused a more benign effect to occur?
#3. What are your thoughts on in place of a You Are selection that we’d be able to instead take a Elemental Typo option instead? Optionally, can it be modified to begin weaker yet have the same exponential growth/potential of the You Are choices from Indulgence?
#4. Also a clarification on Divine Breath from Elemental Typo as it says we’re limited to a “single complete godhood”. Is that in total or per concept?
admin
1. Yes.
2. It is deliberate. The adversary could have allowed people to continue to exist within, or as part of, itself.
3. Do that if you want to? You can definitely leverage Beloved to get custom You Are options.
4. Your goddesses can only create miracles within the scope of their conceptual domains. No domain can be held by more than one goddess. Combined, the set of domains encompasses all possible things without overlap.
Skorr
2. Yeah, that just makes him a dick then.
3. Sorta? I mean I can’t take Beloved multiple times so I’d just have one custom You Are options. What I’m angling for is essentially [Abyssal Exaltation / Coronal Mass Injection / Divine Breath] so if I could get that for a Greater Boon and one Lesser Boon then I’d be happy with it. If needed I wouldn’t mind trimming certain parts to strengthen the remaining elements.
4. Huh, I see. So that means you can’t have multiple incomplete godhoods split among the goddesses? (For clarification I’ll refer to the individual with the complete godhood as Goddess while the others are goddess without capitalization.)
->We’re the deciding factor in determining which goddess becomes the Goddess? Or, at least have an ability to greatly influence the process?
->Can a Goddess act through the other goddesses of the same concept via narrative resonance or using them as an icon?
->What occurs when a Goddess or goddess has a child?
->The Goddess and goddesses aren’t limited to just purely human form? So if I found them attractive then monstergirls are just as viable as eldritch abominations like Shub-Niggurath.
admin
3. Yeah, viable.
4. You can, there just won’t be overlap. Like, you could have one Goddess who controls ‘all four elements’, or four goddesses who control air, water, earth, and fire respectively. The conceptual territory is infinitely divisible.
-You have a lot of control over how the godhood is split up, because you can just tell the goddesses to allocate it in a certain way.
-Yeah.
-They can get free miracles from their mother by virtue of familial relation.
-Yep.
Silor
By how much do threads improve per increase? Like from say going from 1 to 2 threads does that mean each thread now produces AP that is worth 40 minutes or 2 AP per day? Is the increase just a doubling or exponential?
admin
If you have one thread, it produces 1 AP per day.
If you have two threads, they each produce 2 AP per day.
If you have ten threads, they each produce 10 AP per day.
Symph
Can nexus get conceptual potentials? Value/currency potentials from money or works of art? It might take some work and progress with the nexus as a whole in some way, but could you get and use potentials like that to make something like the You have Wealth?
admin
With enough development, yes.
Symph
Would you be able to use something like Understanding to perceive something like the value or worth of what you are looking at, and use nexus to then get those types of potentials?
admin
That’s beyond the scope of Understanding.
Symph
Fair enough, would you be able to nexus Understanding and modify/add to it? And if you can, since I think you said information can contain potentials at least of energy could you use Understanding to transmit potentials along with it’s effect? So if you are for example doing an interpretive dance to communicate something to someone, could that transmission of understanding carry potentials of some kind, or would you require a more direct connection with the person? Without having the effect of indirect transmission of knowledge within the nexus already
admin
Yes. It’s possible.
Skorr
Greater Boon (Power)
The perfected hybridization of an Abyssal Exaltation & Cultivation? It seems like it’d have quite a bit of potential to it.
admin
Sure.
Cyrus Serapheth
Hey, I’ve got a question relating to Inheritor. You’ve indicated in the past that you could use Refinement on your own body, at least given that “your body” qualified as a “deliberately created thing.” Could you Reimagine yourself to let you use magic or psychic powers? Would you need an example in your universe, or could you go “I want to be a D&D Wizard” and then Reimagine yourself accordingly, even far beyond the D&D cosmos?
I guess the real question is that, say you only have Inheritor, how could you use it to let you branch into R&D’ing magic, particularly if you’re in a world without magic?
Additionally, can you Reimagine mundane items like clothes or jewelry to function like they’re enchanted items? Do you have to sacrifice an aspect of an item to Reimagine it, or could it conceivably gain a new function without necessarily losing the old function?
admin
Yes. The biggest delay in using Inheritor to become a wizard is the crafting process. You could rebuild a cell phone into a techno-wand day one.
Yes. Reinvention can be used to enhance without trade-offs. You’d just need to rebuild the item according to your new, superior schematic.
Symph
Would Inheritor allow you to rebuild your body from the ground up even if you “die” Since death isnt enough to stop your abilities from working.? Would you need to create a method of plugging back into the body or would your power allow you to reconnect by itself?
admin
Yes. You could slot right back in to any body designed with that in mind.
Symph
If you turn a solar panel into something that converts sunlight into magical energy instead of electrical would this magical energy exist only with your invention as the source of it or would this new type of energy be a part of the wider universe this invention is just tapping into? Or would you just need to refine the schematic so it specifically works off a broader thing that exists in the world, like a VR helmet that views dreams instead viewing the dreamscape of the collective human consciousness?
admin
Unless designed to be more universal (which you can definitely do), your magic panel wouldn’t effect the wider universe. Someone who learned about it, or gathered samples or schematics, could potentially recreate it, play with its functionality, etc. Someone lightyears away, unaware of its existence, would be without those expanded scientific options for lack of that causal link.
Skorr
So does that mean you’d be able to ‘custom build’ magic systems and the like whose access can either be made universal, limited to certain individuals, or so on? Still not sure if I prefer Inheritor or Nexus though as there is a certain degree of overlap between them along with both of them being just really cool.
admin
Yeah.
Symph
If you used the Nexus on information you entered into the computer, would uploading that information allow you to cause your nexus to propagate potentials through the internet and essentially archive and save every bit and byte of information into the nexus?
admin
Yeah.
Carina
You Are –
Beloved (Creativity)
The Inheritor
A Wound
The Progenitor
The Player
You Have –
Nothing
You Can –
Travel
Fight
Share
Grow
Major Boon – Your mind is constantly filled with new and inventive ways to use your powers and resources. This remains true even when it shouldn’t otherwise be possible; new ways to combine powers being created wholesale if somehow you should exhaust literally every possible permutation of your abilities. The effectiveness of these means of using your powers scales geometrically with increased complexity. This of course includes the usage of the remaining minor boons.
The first thing I’ll do is reinvent my cell phone a couple of times to make the internet functions work even without internet, then convert Google maps into a service that gives effective routes to increased power rather than specific destinations.
All player stats get split into wisdom, intelligence and brain. Similar for progenitor.
Wound accelerates all the above.
Basically, I’m too small brain to come up with ways to get exponential growth, so I’ll make my powers figure it out for me.
Symph
If you could use nexus to completely subsume the Metal element concept of the Grow world would you be able to change how others interact with that entire elemental phase, like Dao and Aspect?
If you then pressed delete on the subsumed element would that be enough to breakdown the world or would you need to ride the whole phase cycle in either direction to knock them all down in order to break apart the world in an energy expending way?
admin
You would.
I think the world could endure as a shadow of itself. Collapse would happen gradually, as the earth becomes holey and crumbles from the inside out, the many vertical layers of the world losing the strength to keep themselves apart. Elemental forces losing strength or running wild without this missing component, all eventually draining away. But a world can die without ceasing to exist.
Symph
Would the structuring effects of player be able to mix in with Inheritor and allow you to use the node structure of Inheritor of the Impossible forge with its tech tree system to add structure and build upon different schematics and tech trees?
admin
Sure.
Symph
Do I have the grow world Milestones correc so far or am I missing some?
Stage 1 is becoming a cultivaor by absorbing enough qi. This restructures your stats so some of them collect under your charmisma and you can begin to use it for more things.
Stage 2 is the restructuring of the rest of your stats under the willpower
Stage 4+ is when you can begin to pursue Dao
Stage 9 Can attempt to form an Aspect but that’s usally stage 10
and Stages 10+ are more personal depending on your aspects and dao I imagine. Did I mess any up and are there any I am missing?
admin
Stage 1: Body Refinement Impetus. You fill your body with Qi, which you manipulate by sheer force of personality to manipulate your body in turn. For physical stats, use Charisma.
Stage 2: Body Refinement Harmony. You establish basic Qi structures to achieve a greater unity. For physical stats, use Charisma + Stat.
Stage 3: Body Refinement Resonance. You establish a number of Qi structures, layered atop each other. Their resonances empower each other without diminishing any individual component. For physical stats, use Charisma + Strength + Charisma + Endurance + Charisma + Agility.
Stage 4: Mind Blossom Impetus. The resonance produces a finer grade of Qi, which you pour into your mind. By sheer willpower, force out the products of consciousness. For mental stats, use Willpower.
Stage 5: Mind Blossom Harmony. For mental stats, use Willpower + Stat.
Stage 6: Mind Blossom Resonance. For mental stats, use Willpower + Intelligence + Willpower + Wits + Willpower + Perception.
Stage 7: Spirit Evolution Impetus. The resonance within your mind produces a yet finer grade of Qi, which you pour into your spirit. For spiritual stats, use Luck.
Stage 8: Spirit Evolution Harmony. For spiritual stats, use Luck + Stat.
Stage 9: Spirit Evolution Resonance. For spiritual stats, use Luck + Wisdom + Luck + Integrity + Luck + Lifespan.
Stage 10: Construct a new stat, placing it above Charisma, Willpower, or Luck.
Stage 1 enables the pursuit of techniques because it immunizes you against the otherwise-crippling physical consequences.
Stage 4 enables the pursuit of Dao because it immunizes you against the otherwise-crippling psychological consequences.
Stage 7 enables the pursuit of sorcery because it immunizes you against the otherwise-crippling spiritual consequences.
You cross over from Stage 9 to Stage 10 when you forge your first aspect.
Symph
This Esteemed one is Grateful Learned Senior!
Skorr
You Are: Wound, Ascendant, Player, Nexus, Beloved
You Have: N/A
You Can: Grow, Travel, Fight, Share
While not having Wealth is unfortunate this is probably my favorite combination of options, I think. As for Beloved:
->I’ll spend two Lesser Boons to destroy my clones since I very much dislike the thought of having them around. Is it a waste? Eh, probably though one I’m willing to make.
->I’ll spend one Lesser Boon to acquire a private realm of my own. Specifically, I’d want it so that each individual character would have their own sub-realm within the private realm though in some cases I wouldn’t mind them being shared. In addition I’d like for it have the ability to seamlessly merge with outside realities on a partial basis. Why? For RP reasons pretty much as not all characters would have reason to have their own private dimension. That martial arts master willing to train you? Or, that enchanted sword you stumbled across? Extrusions of the private realm.
->For the Greater Boon… Exaltation Cultivation, I suppose? By which I mean a merging of Exalted and Cultivation to create something greater than the sum off its parts. In practice given that I have Player it’d probably be something similar to Exigents. The cultivation? I dunno. Maybe a unique charm tree or something.
It’d probably end up looking like this in what I need to manage:
Global Pools [AP] [Potential] [Timelessness]
Character-specific [Health] [Energy] [Essence]
Well, unless I can fold [Essence] into [Energy] which would be a really big boost in power.
Question: How badly would I piss off the other concepts if I used Ascendant to rewind time to keep on picking new Lesser and Greater Boons which I then Save and Load? Would they do anything to me?
—
Oh, and since it amuses me:
You Are: Wound, Ascendant, Beloved {Time}
You Have: Wealth
You Can: Grow, Travel
Basically, I’m a wound in reality and time. Which Time being a kinky bitch loves me for it. In this case I’d probably go with a more in depth ability to manipulate time which expands to the conceptual as well for the Greater Boon? I’d want the ability to create ‘time monsters’ too though. Stuff like being able to do my own version of the Hounds of Tindalos or the Shrike.
Lesser Boons… One of a private realm, one on boosting the Greater boon by a factor a 50, and the last on getting a 1:1 ally. Perhaps something similar to The Divine Breathe from You’re an Elemental Typo only mixed in with it being a corruptive force that also corrupts time. Lots of potential there.
admin
All they’d see is that you have more Boons then you are supposed to have. They’d try to remove them.
Skorr
Huh, so Ascendant is a valid way of swapping Boons from Beloved then? Probably has a weird effect if paired with Wounds to create a preplanned contingency of having already swapped out one Boon for another. But, Wound doesn’t make retroactive changes however Ascendant would so what happens when you use them together?
Honestly time fuckery makes my head hurt when I try to wrap my head around it.
Subrosian_Smithy
A few clarifying questions about Inheritor. (Given the vibe of the CYOA, I vaguely assume the answer to most of these will be “yes”, but I digress.)
You can invent new schematics based on those you’ve already recorded. Does this apply to refined and reinvented schematics, as well as to their normal counterparts?
Refining a schematic seems to boost it holistically – you can make a phone hardier, but not directly bolster its subsidiary material properties. Can you still do things like directly Refining the schematic for an alloy?
When Refining or Reinventing something, do you still retain old access to your old schematics? Like if you want to build an ordinary sailboat instead of a spacefaring aetherjammer. And can you control the results of your Reinvention?
How “basic” are the tools that you can substitute for with this power? Are you only limited to e.g. mechanical/thermal/chemical devices? (Actually, for that matter, if you can use Inheritor to rebuild yourself after death, then do you know how the original Impossible Forgesmith died?)
You can use Refinement or Reinvention to secure one of your creations against the effects of reverse-engineering and alien physics. Could you also approach the problem directly, and build e.g. a Fidelius Vault which seals away as many trade secrets as you like, or a Reality Anchor which projects a bubble of stable physics?
admin
Yep.
Yeah.
Indeed. You have full control.
It’s relative to the task; you have the minimum requirements for effective work. You could decide to write a new program on an alien supercomputer you found and substitue for a ‘basic’ hacking suite and optical-processor-infiltration-tool.
The power changes between holders. The original did not possess this immortality.
Sure.
(Huh, not a single “yes”! :D)
Carina
In regards to stage 10 cultivation where you create a new stat, can you add directly to this new Stat with Player? If so, is this more or less efficient than adding to one of the subordinate stats? And I guess the same question for Dao and skill points.
How much cultivation process could be ignored/obsoleted with Beloved[Cultivation] boons? Is there a limit to how far you can cultivate?
admin
Yes. Definitely more efficient. Skill points can be added directly to a Dao, but this isn’t any more or less efficient.
You could get a peak Stage 9 cultivation base for two Lesser Boons. You could immediately become millions of times more powerful than a normal peak Stage 9 cultivator with all three, though you’d still need to develop your Daos/etc. There’s no hard limit on this cultivation system.
Wissende
For beastly, what happens to the once animate thing when you turn it into a phylactery? Like if I turned a corpse into one, is it still a corpse that just now moves at my will? Or does it return to how it was when animated? Or does it just stay inanimate and its like a treasure that I have to store somewhere where it produces shadowflesh for me.
And is there any reason the once animate thing can’t be made out of shadowflesh?
admin
I failed to explain this in the document. It will be reduced down to, transmuted into, a tiny little artifact. Like, a silver-banded crystal the size of three fingers.
Your shaowflesh remains a viable part of yourself even when a structure it composes is ruined.
Symph
Would the effect of fight Spread to the Grow world, would this potentially cause mass duplication of supposed to be unique artifacts and treasures, or would the world have some method of stopping this, like certain things just can’t be duplicated because of their profoundness or something similar?
Would you be able to cultivate some kind of technique based on or directed towards the phenomenon or would it require dao or maybe sorcery?
Could you still do sorcery, or things like divination without being at the luck stage? Like bad luck curses or divination, it would just be limited to terms of scope based on how high your luck stat is? And without being able to use your luck to negate bad effects like a miss cast or reflected misfortune curse couldn’t be blocked and could come right back onto you
admin
Yes. This could duplicate unique treasures.
Techniques are too physical/bodily to influence the phenomenon, but they could make use of it. Turn the body’s internal environment into a set of rooms to benefit from the duplication, say.
Sorcery is possible even without cultivation, but becoming something that can wield sorcery involves massive spiritual trauma.
Symph
Could you use stat points to create or upgrade aspects or do those really have any kind of numerical value to begin with?
Could you use Player to add another stat and then suborn your 3 mega stats to it with their suborned stats?
Would nexus be detectable by cultivators if you weren’t using specifically QI potentials? I more mean an flow of energies and powers, since throwing a ball of fire is pretty detectable itself.
Im just wondering if you would get found out by someone that would be able to tell you were doing super natural stuff without being a cultivator, would people just assume it was some weird innate talent or a treasure?
If there is such a thing as fate or destiny, or even just some forms of divination would you be an out of context issue if you used non cultivation supernatural methods to do things?
admin
Yes.
Sure.
No.
If they realized you really weren’t a cultivator, they’d be pretty freaked out, but hiding your Qi isn’t uncommon. Especially once they develop Daos, people can do a lot without any obvious Qi use.
You would not.
Skorr
If a Greater Boon from Beloved was used for Cultivation then what kind of unique qualities and traits could be derived from such a choice? I assume that that a Greater Boon would be far more powerful given you can acquire peak Stage 9 cultivation base for just two Lesser Boons.
admin
Using a Greater Boon pretty straightforwardly (and inefficiently) you could cause yourself to cultivate automatically, at a rate that doubles every 24 hours.
Alternatively, you could unlimit the body>mind>spirit progression, allowing you to climb through an endless series of increasingly profound realms, mastering methods beyond Dao and sorcery. Body>Mind>Spirit>Ideal>???
Skorr
True, while automatic cultivation at a rate that doubles every 24 hours is pretty nifty it does seem rather inefficient compared to other options a Greater Boon could be used for. A few ways to improve upon it do come to mind such as being able to easily bestow portions of your cultivation upon others to empower them and so on.
I see, I see… That does seem like a better use of a Greater Boon especially in the long run. I assume that how exactly it’s expressed would be flavored by the Concept which you’re Beloved by? Also, if I wanted the ability to influence the cultivation of others would it be viable to simply fold it into the Greater Boon or would instead taking it as a separate Lesser Boon be more appropriate?
admin
Sure. Yeah.
Skorr
Unlimiting the Mind/Body/Spirit progression of Cultivation would be the best use for a Greater Boon, I think. While it lacks the automatic doubling progression of the other in exchange you can reach even further heights. So it’d essentially be a trade of short-term power in exchange for long-term potential.
The idea of using techniques to take advantage of Fight is an interesting concept as well. After all what constitutes a “Room”? Merely an space enclosed by walls, floor, and ceiling along with having at least a single door. Therefore it seems entirely possible that one could become a world unto themselves via this method. While outwardly an individual could retain human form while inside they’ve become an infinite labyrinth of of rooms which entire civilizations could be lost within. I refer to the Immortal Aperture from Reverend Insanity as one potential route while the house on Ash Tree Lane from House of Leaves.
Question: For the Lesser Boon of Comfort where reality is tweaked in a largely ‘cosmetic’ fashion out to the limits of your perception. You’d mentioned that it could be considered akin to ‘porn physics’ therefore would ‘porn logic’ also be applied? Also, are you able to adjust how reality is tweaked such as for example going from ‘gothic horror’ to ‘action adventure’?
Question: For a Lesser Boon {Ally} would it be possible to acquire something roughly equivalent to The Divine Breath from Elemental Typo? To clarify: I don’t mean a separate entity but rather more the power itself as a sapient phenomenon which originates from myself similar to Nexus.
admin
To some degree, yes. It’s the sort of broad change in behavioral patterns that still has a lot of outliers. If you pick your boon right, yeah.
Sure.
Skorr
Actually wouldn’t you be able to achieve the same effect of “unlimiting Body/Mind/ Spirit” in Cultivation through Wound’s ability to spend AP to bypass restrictions on your actions?
admin
You could develop your Body/Mind/Spirit endlessly, but extrapolating the cycle over endless greater forms? I don’t think so.
Skorr
Question: For Lesser Boon {Power} when you acquire a new power whose sum total does not surpass your existing powerset then is it already at maximum strength and mastery or would you need to train it to acquire mastery? Also, by using Wound’s ability to create preexisting contingency plans in conjunction with Ascendant would you then be able to ‘fake’ the growth of that power by simply having it so that you chose it when the sum total of your power was higher? I’m going to assume it wouldn’t cause any retroactive changes to the timeline either since that’d make things…messy.
Question: How effective is the plot armor from Lesser Boon {Comfort}?
admin
You get the new power at 100%, where 100% refers to your current strength. It can then be trained up even further.
Possible.
You won’t suffer critical failures. You won’t make the worst possible decision, unless you actively try to. Your enemies won’t make that one in a million shot.
Symph
Would understanding allow you to bypass any requirments for wisdom when it came to being able to comprehend complex techniques? As long as you could percive it, like if you have a cultivation method that required a high level of wisdom to even attempt to comprehend, would understanding allow you to succeed and retain all of the knowledge about it?
Would understanding include comprehension as well as intention? Or would personal comprehension require active study of the information you now Understand? You read a poem that actually describes and transmits certain concepts related to a cultivation method but only people who can alright comprehend the ideas behind it can fully comprehend what the message of the poem is? It might translate the poem from a dead language as well as let you know that this poem isnt just a poem and actually encodes the comprehension of some profound thing. But would you also gain that profound comprehension, or would you need some level of that profound comprehension to count as being able to percive down that deep?
admin
Partially. Understanding lets you look at a crazy complex mathematical formula and understand what it means, but it doesn’t teach you math in the process, or explain why it means what it means. A lot of the time, just knowing the answer will be sufficient.
Skorr
Aha! I think I found a relatively simple way to negate the threat of the clones from Share. It requires: Wound, Ascendant, and Beloved.
Solution: Use Lesser Boon {Ally} to generate an ally that is approximately 200 times as powerful as you currently are. There limited developmental potential can be worked around by using Wound+Ascendant to create a preexisting contingency involving rewinding time which is used to update when you selected the boon to the current point in time. Or, I guess you could use the 1:1 and then use the Wound+Ascendant to swap them to the 200:1 version as needed. Therefore the Ally should be massively more powerful than clones even when they’re working together.
Would this be viable?
admin
Yeah.
Symph
How does fight actually manifest? Is it like, the doorway to the kitchen is suddenly cut off from the “Real Space” kitchen and now leads seamlessly to the fight space? Is it that way from both sides?
In terms of a room with just one door would this mean you could enter a real space room and turn around and suddenly be fully cut off from the real world if the doorway changed into a fight space?
admin
Yes. Yes.
Yes.
Symph
If you wanted to make a nexus effect global would you need to cover the whole world in some kind of spread of potentials or is range just something that improves with use? Like subsuming doorways into being magical effects, making the nexus auto covert any “doorway”
admin
Either spread your power normally over the entirety of the area you want to affect, or infect the ultimate source of the phenomenon, or develop means of scrying targets and transfering potential with global reach. Range isn’t difficult to improve, but it’s not automatic, you need to find/choose a way to improve it.
Skorr
You Are: Wound, Ascendant, Beloved, [???]
You Have: Wealth
You Can: Fight, Travel, Grow, Share
I’ll use Beloved for unlimiting Body/Mind/Spirit Progression of Cultivation along with acquiring an Ally that grows in 1:1 rate with myself and a private realm well-suited for both luxury and safe development. In regards to the last Lesser Boon, I might as well save it for later since nothing is exactly coming to mind for it yet. I suppose that by using [Wound (Preexisting Contingency) + Ascendant (Rewind)] that I could take advantage of it as an ‘open slot’ to generate phenomena as needed? It seems potentially viable at least.
As for [???]… Eh, I can’t decide between Player and Nexus for my final choice since both are really fun. I lean slightly more towards Player though, I think.
RE: Cultivation
Wealth+ Private Realm + Fight neatly solves the problem of resources for Cultivation while Wound + Ascendant mostly gets rid of the issue with escalating time.
RE: Clones
Not really an issue since they scale with my own growth so I can swap out my 1:1 Ally for one with 200x my power via [Wound (Preexisting Contingency) + Ascendant (Rewind)] as needed. Honestly, with the aforementioned ‘open slot’ idea I may even be able to kill them off permanently.
RE: Ally
Hmm, I like the idea of them being a mix of Nexus and The Divine Breathe though with more a cultivation aesthetic. Sorta like Heaven’s Will from Reverend Insanity though with more of an ability to directly intervene such as creating ‘Divinities’.
RE: Travel + Fight
Huh, now that I think about it this could be an easy way to power boost Wound. Just use Fight to keep on creating copies of the device allowing me to use Wound to ‘farm’ the reality deterioration effect of each device. I’m sure there is absolutely no way this could go wrong, lol.
Skorr
Actually, upon consideration I feel that that [Wound / Ascendant / Beloved / Inheritor] would be best especially in regards to helping with Cultivation progression and techniques.
Symph
When it comes to creating rules and such for nexus how granular could you be? Is it just a matter of development as long as it’s something you could demonstrate or communicate to the nexus?
How would player help in that regard?
What kind of stuff would energy potentials from the Player system be able to do?
admin
Control is as granular as your resources allow. You don’t need to be able to communicate or express what you want for the Nexus to be able to work towards it. Player gives you even more resources to throw at your goals.
Player-Energy potentials could be used for anything that requires a finite, fungible resource.
Symph
Could you use Player-Power potentials to create and design Systems for people? While I have no doubt that Player could allow you to unlock a “multiplayer” feature of some kind, I Imagine you would have to earn/buy more specificity into the specific system, or unlock it somehow with further progression to get more specific detail.
admin
Sure.
Skorr
Questions regarding Nexus:
Would Timelessness from Ascendant be considered a viable abstract potential for Nexus to extract? If so what would Nexus be able to use it for?
Would it be possible to set up ‘automatic cultivation’ via Nexus where it does the majority of the work? Also, assuming you’ve ‘unlimited your Body/Mind/Soul Progression for Cultivation’ then could you use Nexus to allow others to follow in your footsteps?
Questions regarding Beloved:
Is ‘The Not’ a viable option for the concept which loves you? It does seem rather paradoxical as ‘The Not’ would be everything that doesn’t exist in reality after all.
RE: Cultivation & Wound
If one has ‘unlimited their Body/Mind/Soul Progression for Cultivation’ via a Greater Boon from Beloved then do you think this would eventually allow them to interact with the Wound-Aspect of Wound directly such as manifesting it into reality and so on?
admin
No.
Yes, and yes.
Sure.
Sure.
Symph
I think I remember you saying that beastly could scale up to handle the task of fight, is this just doorway disruption or would beastly be able to develop methods to more directly control it? How would beastly reach global scale to handle it?
admin
Actually controlling it would be a struggle. Maybe create some living doorways, wait for them to spawn new rooms, and harvest them for phylacteries?
Beastly can just grow. Global scale isn’t a challenge. Kill one rat, and within two hours you can have a hundred rat-weight in bioforms hunting prey and crafting phylacteries.
Symph
It’s would be pretty HR Giger, but an endless labrynrinth of shadowflesh and bioforms sounds pretty fun. Would new rooms and items be created from “your” Shadowflesh if you made the room and doorway out of shadowflesh? If not I imagine you could just go through the increasingly deeper rooms converting it as you go and turn your phylacteries into mini pocket worlds.
If you did somehow create a body cultivation method that turned your insides into “rooms”, would semi or totally-spiritual things like meridians or a golden core also be “yours” or is there the potential for rouge creations to appear that need to be subdued or dispersed?
What is the lowest level sort of thing that can be converted into a phylactery? Or as you get increasingly more varied strains of shadowflesh does that level get lower in things you can consider “animate”
admin
Yes.
There is some potential for deviant elements forming.
An ordinary virus probably wouldn’t qualify. A bacterium might.
Skorr
Besides having Beloved is there another relatively easy way to achieve ‘unlimiting the Body/Mind/Soul Progression of Cultivation’? Such as some combination of You Are options like Inheritor + Nexus or so on.
admin
If you want to duplicate that exact effect, Inheritor, Progenitor, or Player could work given varying levels of continued investment.
Skorr
Huh, that makes it a more difficult decision then since both Inheritor and Player are really tempting. I’m pretty loathe to give up Ascendant to gain both however with how broken unrestricted time reversal is especially with the Save / Load function included.
Symph
For Beloved, If the concept was Games or maybe challenge would you need to use the Greater boon to be able to play Sburb/Sgrub and it’s variants from Homestuck?
Would you need to use a lesser boon to make the universe or your powers “Real” In terms of being able to leave to the wider multiverse and not get thrown into reality jail?
admin
Depends on how much you can get out of said games, and how quickly.
Symph
You can get alot out but you have to master a game that is hyper contexualized to challenge you and the other players and the time taken could be months to years, you still have to actually use your powers and still climb the God Tiers to get better with your fancy conceptual powers.
Would it make more sense to go with Power as the concept you are beloved by for this?
admin
I mean, I’ve read Homestuck. The point was one of- The more powerful you are when you use them, the more lenient boons become. You could try to produce any possible interpretation or variation of Sburb. You can definitely make something that fits within your budget.
A basic game of Sburb that runs ‘correctly’, that grants you access to grand conceptual power and a new (real) universe and conditional immortality through godhood? Comfortably fits within two lesser boons.
Symph
Wow really? Boons are worth more than I was giving them credit for and needing to only use 2 means that the others can be stashed till later
Would player naturally have the ability to let a character do something like new game plus?
Would the endless growth potential of that require something like a resource or token you earn so there is some bottle neck or would that kind of potential growth require something more?
admin
That’d be something to unlock with an achievement/quest.
Depends on the growth curve. Faster escalation requires more effort/resources.
Symph
When you disrupt the doorway to a fight room and the room is cast adrift does the room still exist somewhere or is it just dissolved into nothingness when it isn’t tethered anymore?
If it does continue to exist somewhere is it just a kind of void space they all connect too or are the different rooms their own self contained dimension?
admin
It still exists, cut off from the world. Theoretically, it exists in the same extra-dimensional space as all other rooms. In practice, there’s no way for someone who couldn’t already travel between dimensions to reasonably navigate this space.
Symph
Would you need to be able to fully subsume a human to resurrect them if they are connected to the nexus, or do they just need to contain enough potentials to remake the body?
How long does the average subsumption take for something?
Is it different for everything and it depends on the complexity and the thing targeted?
admin
Depends on how thoroughly they’re dead. If you have some sort of record of the mind, it can be as easy as rebuilding the body.
It depends on the potency of what you’re trying to subsume. Of course, baseline magic capacity tends to also scale with that, so it balances out. Definitely less than a month, if you work towards subsumption as a goal.
Symph
Would yeast count as something viable for crafting into phylacrities? When it comes to the examples of tech based things that would be viable for crafting, how low on the tech tree can you go for that? What would be considered animation? Is it self motivity? The crashed star ship requires direction but moves under its own power.
With the example of the soldiers kit, how far does this extend? If I tie a bunch of stuff that isnt animate to a viable target and craft it, will the “bunch-of-stuff” also come along?
admin
Sure, but you’d be working with individual yeast cells and subcellular phylacteries there. The most basic tech you could get away with is a steam train. Self-motivity is a good low bar.
It’s pretty lenient, but doesn’t encompass stuff that is completely superfluous. You just need to be able to argue that the stuff is ‘supposed’ to be there. Maybe because they’ve been there for a while, maybe because they are physically built into the structure (not just loosely tied to it), maybe because there is some plan they fulfill.
Skorr
For Inheritor:
->Is it possible to Record a schematic from your own mind without needing a physical object? For example if I already know how to build a fridge but don’t currently have one on hand. (Or, cheating via Wound / Ascendant perhaps)
->How does Recording work in regards to more abstract creations such as religion, philosophy, or a style of swordsmanship for example?
admin
Not for creations that are supposed to be physical objects. You can use knowledge from non-Recorded sources in the creation of schematics. You could create sufficiently high quality simulation systems, such that an imagined design becomes well enough realized you can Record it.
You need to observe an existant example of it. A high quality description of an idea, a skill in use, a participant in a social structure or belief system.
Symph
Could you use quintessence to make different bloodline characteristics that allowed you to gain more quintessence or are you limited to the amount and frequency that comes from The better realm?
Can you develop separate bloodlines? I imagine You would just have to bake in how it works I imagine when you spend the quintessence.
Does quintessence have any intrinsic properties of its own besides its ability to be used to empower your bloodline?
What would quintessence potentials do if you nexus quintessence itself?
admin
Yeah.
You could develop bloodline abilities that only function under somewhat specific conditions, at some cost in efficiency.
In its unspent form, it has some minor effect on probability.
They would be useable for any task where there would be an expenditure of quintessence.
Skorr
Are the You Are options intrinsically immune to being retroactively undone? Such as them being fixed points in time. For example if you have Wound then you wouldn’t have to worry about an entity going back in time to prevent the creation of cosmic weapon that made Wound.
admin
Yeah, normal time travel can’t touch you.
Skorr
That’s nice to hear. It’s making me reconsider the combination of Wound+Player+Ascendant for Wound+Player+Nexus instead since Nexus would have better synergy with it being able to replicate both AP and the Player’s system.
Skorr
For Player how much investment {Levels / Build Points / Etc.} would it take to equal a Lesser Boon or a Greater Boon from Beloved?
admin
Boons scale with you, so… several times as many points as you have.
Cyrus Serapheth
Questions regarding “The Player”: It’s one of my favorites. I might actually write something with it, albeit a nerfed version of it. (Your Level is the multiplier, rather than benefitting from an exponentially-compounding fivefold increase per Level.)
1) How much does a stat/skill point count for, roughly? In the previous version, I think it was 10 stat points in strength roughly being equivalent to adding “peak human strength” onto your own (by default), and 1 skill point was a month of training. What’s the scale going on here, 100 is “the conventional human maximum in [attribute]”? 10? 1000? The value of a point changes quite a bit depending on the answer here.
2) If a character dies, can you just respawn them akin to the old version of The Player, or do you have to create a new character with a background that may-or-may-not be identical to yours? Because I’d honestly prefer just respawning myself than needing to rebuild my life or something similar.
3) Do backgrounds influence your skills and attributes? I think I remember seeing a note that, with enough background points, you could create a character who is basically “The 21st Primarch Who Averted The Horus Heresy”. Can you create a character who is a savant in an ability you don’t have, and thus you now have that ability? Or a character who is much smarter than you are, and now you’re at least that smart?
4) “Stats and skills augmented with points see a number of benefits. Beyond the obvious additive enhancement, they receive an increasing degree of supernatural effectiveness and convenience as well as boosted growth rates and developmental potential.” This is different from just having a statistic for those akin to a “fresh” character, yes? You don’t automatically get those benefits without at least putting a point into them directly.
4.5) For the “supernatural effectiveness and convenience”, can that equate to having game interface elements appear where appropriate (like with enough points in stealth and you suddenly have a Stealth Meter that reveals how detectable you are) and sudden game elements applying in “real life” (despite lacking magic or invisibility effects, a high enough Sneak score means you can crouch naked in front of someone and they just won’t notice you, akin to High Sneak Skyrim characters).
5) If you’re running multiple characters and one dies, do you lose all the skills you invested into that character? Like if you had a wizard in one continent, and a craftsman in the other, but the wizard died, do you suddenly forget all of your magic? Or do you keep the raw values, but lose the benefits from having invested points into them (so no enhanced development rate or improved convenience, but you don’t lose what you’ve learned thus far)?
6) Do skills carried by one character transfer to others? (I mean, they’re all YOU, and you’re the one who gets the knowledge, generally, so I imagine it would depend on whether it’s a mental ability to a physical one, and you keep them to varying extents.) If I make one character specialize in “Acting/Deception” so that I can easily pretend to truly be someone else — so that I can role-play — would those skills allow me to role-play while playing my other characters?
6.5) As a corollary to the above, I presume that even if you can leverage the skills of other characters, you don’t actually gain the development acceleration, convenience, supernatural effectiveness, etc., derived from investing points… those only apply to the character that invested points. Is that correct?
7) I know that your mental attributes, at least, can be shared between characters… or rather, you can always be as smart as your smartest character. If you lose your smartest character, do you then become dumber, only as smart as your current smartest character?
7.5) I guess the real question is do you have “base stats” that apply to you, The Player, and can apply to all of you, The Characters?
As an aside, I imagine one of the more “efficient” means to grind background points would be a repeatable quest/achievement where you have to “role-play” your character… or at least, not be “caught” breaking character by using skills/attributes you don’t have on “their character sheet”. Sounds like a fun idea to me.
admin
1) Stat points are about that level, skill points roughly correspond to a year of training. They grow more powerful, per point, the more you invest, because of how points enhance your developmental potential.
2) No free respawn, you’d need a skill or system upgrade.
3) They can, yes. You can use this to gain new abilities.
4) Because of how your existing qualities are systemized, you can get some of those benefits even without investing points.
4.5) Sure!
5) You lose anything that’s not purely a component of your mind.
6) Skills are imperfectly transferable.
6.5) Yes.
7) No, you’ll never lose any intelligence.
7.5) Yes. Your basic mental attributes.
Carina
In regards to Player stats, it seems like basically anything can be a stat as long as it isn’t already covered better by a skill. What happens with weirder stat choices? I’m talking about things like:
1) Metaphysical weight
2) Does ‘all’ as a stat actually do anything?
3) ‘bodies’ as distinct from ‘body’
4) Adding points to a cultivation mega stat you haven’t cultivated into creating yet
4.5) Adding points into another cultivators mega stat, could I instantly give myself Apocalypse Sun/Silver City?
5) ‘Essence’ a la the old version of wound
6) stats specifically relevant to other You Have powers. Things like ‘schematics’, ‘threads’ or ‘shadowflesh/phylactery’
6.5) ‘beloved’ and/or ‘concept’
admin
Weird stuff works. Metaphysical weight… depends on what sort of metaphysics you’re considering. ‘All’ is so broad its benefits become negligible. Bodies could give you an inefficient multi-form. Adding to a cultivation mega stat… it would take a good bit of investment to build it up properly, but you could. You could grab copies of other cultivators’ custom stats. Essence would probably just turn into Energy. Stats can definitely boost other You Have powers. Concept would probably be too broad to be useful; Beloved might give the concept that loves you extra access- you’re offering them some power they can use to help you.
Fafner
First, thanks for creating and sharing this creative CYOA.
I do have a few questions though, mainly about Nexus because I love the idea of such a versatile magic system.
1: It mentions mages, but how would you go about creating other mages, could i just throw potentials around and those exposed become mages?
1.1: if so, can I prevent randoms from become mages every time I use magic? Or make it so that only certain types of people, say based on personality traits, can become mages?
1.2: You mention that Nexus magic could even recreated Exalted charms if I could convince an Exalted to use it to bolster their own powers. So could I just ‘shoot’ potentials into an Exalted and they would automatically be able to ‘feel’ these potentials and know how to use them?
2: If I wanted to make magic users start popping up all over the world, I guess I could just randomly blast potentials into the air right? How long would this take to spread across the globe?
3: Subsuming an object, once something is filled with potentials, I can tell it stop existing, but I have a question about how quick this process is. Starting out, could I will away a gun that’s been drawn on me before it fires?
3.1: How long would it take to subsume a person?
3.2: Does subsuming something count as Recording it for Inheritor?
4: Could I recreate something thats been subsumed by my magic?
4.1: If so, how perfect is this recreation? Could I subsume then recreate a person, soul, memories etc?
—
I’ve been absolutely loving this CYOA, thank you for creating and sharing it.
Questions regarding “Nexus”: It’s such an interesting take on a magic system.
1: It mentions a ‘civilisation of ten billion mages’, but how do others become mages?
2: Say I wanted to spread magic across the entire Earth, do I just throw abstract potentials around? How long would it take to cover the whole planet? If so, could I limit who becomes a mage, maybe based on personality type or something?
3: Subsumtion: I can tell something subsumed by my magic to ‘not exist’, starting out, how quicky can this process occur? If I’m focussing and throwing all the potentials I can at my target, could I subsume a gun someone has pulled on me before they shoot? What about a living person?
4: Once I’ve subsumed something, could I then recreate it out of raw magic, even if I don’t have any other ‘conjuration’ or similar type of magic yet? Could I subsume a person, then recreate them, soul and all?
Thank you again for creating this amazing CYOA. It’s really helped me stretch my creative muscles as I try to think or more and more broken ways each of the options could be exploited.
admin
Comments from new people have to be approved manually. I’ve merged your comments.
1. Anyone who gets some of your potentials and has your permission to use them can become a mage. You have a lot of control over how this works. Basic uses, like drawing on potentials as an extra energy source, are very simple.
2. Basically. You just need to make the magic available. Basic passive spread could take as little as 18 days, active spread being many times faster.
3. Starting out, you probably won’t be able to fit enough magic into something to subsume it. As soon as it’s possible at all, the process can become extremely fast. You can use this to meet Record’s observation requirement.
4. Yes, definitely. Subsuming something means you can already replicate all of its behaviours from your magic.
Silor
So in Ascendant because Saving itself cost timelessness doesn’t this mean you can’t Save anything properly in your first timeloop? Or can you still Save anything from a timeline you have experienced despite it being non-existent now?
admin
Yea.
Silor
Yea to the every loop Save yay or yea to the fuck you loop uno :’)?
admin
The latter.
MrCogs
I really enjoyed this CYOA, having fun thinking of combinations and expressions of the different abilities. Though I did have a couple of questions, if its not a bother.
1. For Beastly, the first line says your body becomes an “immaculate phylactery”. Based on the later explanation of shadowflesh and its ability to become any material that is part of the makeup of its progenitor phylactery, would this mean that as soon as you gain Beastly, you can generate shadowflesh that becomes copies of your original living human body (assuming you’re both alive and human), individual organs and bones, etc?
2. I don’t think I quite understand what it means to “leverage your bloodline” from Progenitor, i.e. the text saying that depending on how well you do so, Progenitor’s power increase can go from quadratic to exponential to hyper-exponential. Would it just involve siring/bearing/creating a large number of children and then choosing to incarnate/possess all of them? Even then, it seems like by description, improvements from Progenitor are equally distributed, so your bloodline isn’t thinned by having a million descendants, but neither would it be “concentrated” if you incarnated as all of them.
3. A lot of comments have mentioned synergies for multiple You Are powers held by a single individual. I assume that there would be lesser but still very useful synergies if two allies (friends, lovers, etc.) each gained a You Are power? I was imagining something like an Inheritor creating exotic machines which a Beastly person could damage and then turn into phylacteries, or a Gamer getting access to a novel form of ability or progression that a Beloved gained via the freeform Greater Boon of Power option.
admin
1. Yes.
2. It’s a matter of what powers you choose to pick up, and how you use them. You can just straightforwardly increase your stats, or create a power that lets you refine your body to lastingly increase your strength, create methods by which groups of people can convey even greater power to an individual. It’s saying “you need to be cleverer than usual to get hyper-exponential growth of your personal ability out of this option”.
3. Yeah, definitely.
MrCogs
Ah okay. So for instance, I could spend hundreds of drops of quintessence to create a new class of Ability where me and everyone in my bloodline gains a minimal sensitivity to the Force (or something equivalent like “the Pulse” that was in your Chain of Isekai extra notes), but has the potential to reach Jedi Master/Sith Lord levels of strength and foresight if they spend time in training, meditation, and self-reflection.
admin
Basically.
MrCogs
Sorry, had another question on The Player. Are things like equipment and vehicles factored in by the Player’s system when calculating XP for beings killed? In nonmagical or low-magic settings, the most deadly things on the battlefield are likely going to be artillery, attack aircraft etc rather than individual soldiers, but the 4-6 guys crewing the artillery piece are not inherently more powerful or higher in stats than others.
Second, if the Player uses a Beloved Boon to get an area facilitating training, would it be more likely be a virtual arena or “white room” that just spawns enemies, or is the Boon enough to create a world thats realized and complex to enable quests?
admin
Modifiers like equipment aren’t accounted for until you get the right system upgrade.
Depends on what you ask for, but a Lesser Boon can provide for some amount of questing.