[X] Rely on Trickery, but first…
-[X] …look at the stars. It is in the nature of Realms to make their own sky, and you have seen how the City folds in upon itself. This could be your only chance for a long time…and the memory of it would be a powerful motivation, among other uses.
Adhoc vote count started by That-Random-Guy on Jan 16, 2022 at 12:32 PM, finished with 23 posts and 14 votes.
[X] Rely on Trickery, but first…
-[X] …look at the stars. It is in the nature of Realms to make their own sky, and you have seen how the City folds in upon itself. This could be your only chance for a long time…and the memory of it would be a powerful motivation, among other uses.
Aaaand that's the vote! The following choice stands victorious:
[X] Rely on Trickery, but first…
- [X] …look at the stars. It is in the nature of Realms to make their own sky, and you have seen how the City folds in upon itself. This could be your only chance for a long time…and the memory of it would be a powerful motivation, among other uses.
Now, I have a public encounter table roll (3d8 drop lowest) to do, in the sense of "who shows up in the passageways who isn't guaranteed to show up?" Normally, these would stay in the background at least until this whole event resolves, but this is in some senses* the tutorial, and I feel like being a touch helpful.
Dice Results Edit:
Well, then. Effective Results: 4, 8. Mr. 4 isn't exactly a major concern (1-3 translates to 'literally noone', people aren't exactly sending their A-list for some reason), but Mr. 8, well—that'd give the game away.
Writing!
Edit 2, for those wondering: Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about this, the updates just going quite slowly for various reasons that (skimming over a fair amount of somewhat identifying details), will in large part go away soon.
I expect to update at most 24 hours after this edit.
Hello again. In apology for the delay on this update, and to at least indicate that Tabula Rasa Quest will not die like so many young Original Quests, here's a little preview. (The actual update will almost certainly come out <24 hours after this post goes up.) It's not long, admittedly, but this particular segment seems by far the best choice for a preview, and the bits before and after it distinctly less so. Besides, if there ever was an image worthy of the old 1000-word adage...
With all that done, you clamber back up the hill, pick out a you-sized indentation, and lie in it. A few seconds later, you realize what you're missing and—for the first time ever, you distantly realize—let you body just rest.
Your mind doesn't, of course. You look up at the celestial firmament, the great vault of the sky, that which exists above and beyond the closer and lesser skies of the individual Realms, and find glory beyond words.
And secondly, because the more I look at this the more I think 90ish words and someone else's image (no matter how pretty) just isn't quite enough, here's the most interesting and preview-inclined section of the Event/Miniturn mechanics that this update will introduce.
Points
Energy: 4+. That which powers the body. Much akin to stamina, at least for now. You've managed to rest yourself, a little.
Vitality: 0 (2). Bodily resilience, the ability to soak physical damage without damage to one's capacities. Wound mitigation, in other words. You are not conventionally armored or tough or physiologically redundant, but the malleability of the Tabula Rasa enables quite a few interesting tricks in the redistribution/reshuffling area—given the opportunity.
Underdog's Edge: 2. Stories don't always have laws, but their tendencies are reliable. By the nature of your predicament, quite a few of those tendencies are oriented in your favor. You are one against many, leveraging cleverness and speed to escape the swarms, and that many mostly consists of mooks. If not for the sheer suffocating influence of the inter-realm murk and the grinding weight of the many...
[Due to your current overall environment, this Point Type is only accessible when Tabula is both on the backfoot and visibly the 'underdog' of the specific clash in progress (at which point it'll be autospent for a turnaround, or at least an opportunity).]
Pathos: Y (Base Throughput 1). The mode of rhetorical persuasion based on emotion. Note that it takes two to tango—this is mainly here for the sake of completeness.
[Ethos and Logos aren't utterly unavailable, Enhanced Communication (Basic) isn't that limited, but authority and logic aren't exactly applicable primary tools here.]
Major Statuses
Desperation: "No." [0/?]
[The degree to which Tabula has thrown restraint and caution to the wind, paying dearer costs for short-term power. Correlates with mental trauma. Best kept low, barring certain edge cases.]
Having made your decision, you act on it. As tempting as it is to relax your body entirely and busy your mind with the sky, many of the stratagems you have in mind will work better the sooner you do them. You turn back towards the path you used to get up, contemplate how best to descend, and…decide to rest for a moment, anyways. You've spent most of your life running. You lower yourself to a sitting position, leaning against the smoother side of the peak, and relax…
A few moments later, you head down the mountain and walk to a door 45 degrees along the island's edge from the one you came in by. Moving with quick steps, you map out its immediate insides, confirming your suspicions: Its section of the passageway-tangle surrounding the island is sparse and dilapidated, with the most intact rooms leading directly to a passageway that, based on your position, must be the one that's entirely decayed away in the middle (and never intersects another island-to-City passageway). Needless to say, you couldn't possibly use this to bypass the next set of pursuers, and in the long run, no barricade you could hope to construct would last long. You know the concepts of 'day' and 'month' and 'decade', and intend to experience them firsthand.
That said, 'long' and 'short' depend on the context: All you need is a distraction, a false trail leading to a thin shell of impediment blockades. A few minutes extra headstart, such that (in combination with your 'melt into a murk-leak and let the main wave of pursuers pass you by' main trick) you'll disappear into the empty spaces of the City (or fail altogether) before they work out where you've actually gotten to. Hopefully. All you really need is to not have anyone on your tail until you're already breaking through whatever 'goalkeeper' units have been left at the points where the island-city passageways meet the passageway-tangle of the city itself.
(Technically, there may not be any such 'goalkeepers', but actively expecting that sort of error doesn't seem conducive to survival, to say the least. If no one's there, all the better.)
With that in mind, you set to work. Thanks to the small number of routes and general decay, it doesn't take much doing to turn most routes to the broken island-city passageway into single-file chokepoints, where any group would have to take turns carefully edging around some gaping leak of essence-sludge: All you have to is spot a weak point, hammer on it with the rock you picked up, and trust in the pressures of the inter-realm murk. (Plus the passage of time. You decided to do this bit before sky-gazing for a reason.) With that done, you head down the final chokepoint room between the island-surrounding passageways and the broken passageway to the City and set about the finicky task of blocking the inward-opening door from opening while making sure to be on the outside when it fully closes. (In short, you push a chest of doors such that leaves a sliver of space for you to slip through, then pull it the rest of the way as best as you can.) Finally, you do inconvenient things with the furniture on your wait back to the island, jamming chairs under doorknobs such as to make the unbarred path fairly circuitous, a bit of a maze.
All in all, that takes enough time that your misdirection efforts on the island consist of leaving a more obviously false trail to another of the doors, on the far side from the door you originally entered by. (The difference being that you make sure to step in your own footsteps coming back from the door to your big distraction, and don't do that on your way back to the far-side door.) With luck, this extra trick will make them think…you discard that line of thought, and focus on climbing back up the hill instead of standing around worrying. What's done is done, and what really matters is that your pursuers not turn round too quickly upon reaching the island.
With all that done, you clamber back up the hill, pick out a you-sized indentation, and lie in it. A few seconds later, you realize what you're missing and—for the first time ever, you distantly realize—let your body just rest.
Your mind doesn't, of course. You look up at the celestial firmament, the great vault of the sky, that which exists above and beyond the closer and lesser skies of the individual Realms, and find glory beyond words.
For a fleeting moment, you wonder why you're only seeing this now (as opposed to when you first climbed this hill), and are very concerned indeed. Then you realize that earlier, you were looking viewing the sky at an angle, with your focus on the ground. The inter-realm murk exists mostly as a sort of ocean in which Realms (and this island, of course) are like islands, but nontrivial amounts of the stuff drift above its surface. It is only here, atop a hill, looking directly upward, and outside the Realms that even you can see this with clarity.
That, you distantly think, is a great pity. The first layer of this cosmic spectacle is great in and of itself, starlight and rainbow nebula, but your eyes see so much more. The sight before your eyes is merely (and that word feels deeply unfair to apply for all that you know it to be true) an outside view of the current permutation of a vast and world-spanning megastructure of astral Essence; alloyed, intermixed, and hybridized with all manner of ethereal beauty and elemental majesty. If this is even somewhat representative of the general sky-above-sky in general, then it surely contains—.
A mental clock ticks its last.
"No. No!" But your protests mean little, compared to the ceaseless march of time. The sky is not that complex, at the finish, but it is far and large and constantly ever-so-slightly changing. Your mind can only do so much, especially with an objective of joy and appreciation. Time has burned: Today is not the day where your grasp of the sky-above-sky's present will progress far enough to, for example, interrogate the traces of thunderstorm it holds, leftover from a different age. But. Your examination took a different course, not a lesser one: If you ever forget this you will have ceased, in some important way, to be you.
[Foundation Memory Gained: Sky-Above-Sky (Night, Brief, Glorious). This memory can be contemplated for assorted mood effects (mostly positive); utilized in compatible works of magic, Essence, and narrative; analyzed for further knowledge; and upgraded by a better look at the sky-above-sky.]
That aside, your body has spent this time in a state of total rest, and the joy of these past few minutes seems to have done you some good all by itself. You must attend to your survival.
Resources
QM's Note
If you're having difficulty with time, spoons(/mental energy), or just grokking my verbiage, don't worry: The vote for this update doesn't call for deep understanding (or really any understanding, for that matter) of this system. All that really matters at this juncture is that Tabula has enough power to break past a decent amount of resistance, this is after all a bit of a tutorial, but not enough to make minimizing that resistance anything other than a major priority (and the vote text, of course).
Seeing as this is the tutorial, here's an explanation of how each category works. Points are a catch-all for the various forms of abstract or immaterial resource, such as the room Tabula has to leverage their 'underdog' position for a Narrative-based edge, or their reserves of plain old 'hold long can I run before exhaustion' physical energy. Items, meanwhile, are what you'd expect them to be, the useful objects Tabula physically has on them. In the event that Tabula picks up a Wound, it'll be tucked into Major Statuses, which currently only contains Desperation—see its entry for information on it. Finally, once we move into more normal turns we'll gradually start seeing Assets.
Since Points are very much the main type of resource for this sort of thing, they bear further elaboration. The first thing is that they don't work purely in round numbers: A plus or a minus after the number represents that the 'top' point, the first one to be drawn upon by costs and such, is a bit over- or under-strength. Generally, 'plussed' Points will give slightly more effective—or at least energetic—options, and 'minused' Points will result in imperfect success or a chance of failure. Options to avoid these issues or decline the more-energetic option will appear as appropriate. On a related note, not all Point Types are born equal, so to speak. They're very much apples and oranges to one another, but even so, a Mastermind Point is a bigger deal than an Energy point by orders of magnitude—if it can be fully brought to bear.
Finally, this is an evolving system that'll be modeling pretty different situations as we move from one set of mini-turns to the next, to say nothing of the entirely different temporal scope of the Main turns. Barring a metaphorical 'glitch in the Matrix', it'll be stable over the course of any one Event or Battle or Heist, but when extrapolating over the long term I recommend focusing on stated in-universe capabilities and traits—Tabula knows themself, or at least will know themself once certain skilltree-opening Main Turn actions have been taken, and Acute Truesight is Acute Truesight.
Points
Energy: 4+. That which powers the body. Much akin to stamina, at least for now. You've managed to rest yourself, a little.
Vitality: 0 (2). Bodily resilience, the ability to soak physical damage without damage to one's capacities. Wound mitigation, in other words. You are not conventionally armored or tough or physiologically redundant, but the malleability of the Tabula Rasa enables quite a few interesting tricks in the redistribution/reshuffling area—given the opportunity.
Underdog's Edge: 2. Stories don't always have laws, but their tendencies are less variable. By the nature of your predicament, quite a few of those tendencies are oriented in your favor. You are one against many, leveraging cleverness and speed to escape the swarms, and that many mostly consists of mooks. If not for the sheer suffocating influence of the inter-realm murk and the grinding weight of the many...
[Due to your current overall environment, this Point Type is only accessible when Tabula is both on the backfoot and visibly the 'underdog' of the specific clash in progress (at which point it'll be autospent for a turnaround, or at least an opportunity).]
Pathos: Y (Base Throughput 1). The mode of rhetorical persuasion based on emotion. Note that it takes two to tango—this is mainly here for the sake of completeness.
[Ethos and Logos aren't utterly unavailable, Enhanced Communication (Basic) isn't that limited, but authority and logic aren't exactly applicable primary tools here.]
Major Statuses
Desperation: "No." [0/?]
[The degree to which Tabula has thrown restraint and caution to the wind, paying dearer costs for short-term power. Correlates with mental trauma. Best kept low, barring certain edge cases.]
Items
Mildly Pointy Rock: A sturdy and fist-sized rock, of the right shape to be grasped by a hand and applied sharply to someone else. Not bad, as improvised weapons go.
Pocket Gravel (Multiple): A fistful of rocks of the island's smaller rocks; too large to be called pebbles. Very distracting to throw at someone's face. (Which is a 'dirty tactic'?) Might also work to make some slip, under the right circumstances. You're not entirely sure if all of them are worth their own weight, on the margin, but this is not the time to fuss over the details.
[X] Hide near your original route here. Thanks to the recent passage of you and the 'Talent Scouts' overmind, it's both an obvious trail and the fastest path for you: The passage of the overmind and its reality-defining field cleared the murk, to an extent.
It seems likely that the frontmost of your pursuers will march straight past you, intent on tracing this trail. Once they pass, you can pop out of your hiding place and move with the greatest possible speed straight through space that, to your pursuers' knowledge, has already been traversed. From there, you just need to punch through your enemies' backlines and disappear into the City. But. But. If you were the planner for this, you might think to yourself that 'okay, the backlines will only be relevant if the search teams thoroughly screw up', and concentrate your guards right at the other end of that path. Or something. (You are very new to this, and that strange auto-knowledge mechanism has very little to say about tactics relative to the complexity and depth you suspect the subject holds.)
If you take this path, you will need to leave it at some point. You've seen that this passageway intersects or touches another passageway at a few different points, the question is which one to take.
[X] Hide where two island-to-City passageways merge, away from your original path. Due to the structure of the passages, you can be confident that once a group comes out of passage A, there will be no good reason for a second group to cover the same space. Much the same can be said of the original path, which at least will be faster to travel, but for you to appear from this angle would be especially unexpected. But, the time costs…
On one hand, this option quite entirely avoids the primary issues of retracing your original route. On the other hand, it'll take longer for your pursuers to work their way past the passageway merge (they'll have no obvious trail to follow, and reason to think you might be hiding in a corner), and your pace will be fundamentally slower. Should your false trail be unraveled…well, you'd think it'd take a while for the frontmost searcher to send word of your trickery back to management, what with the inter-realm murk and so on, and management would still have to think of your particular side-route, but…if one thing's for sure, it's that you don't have complete information.
QM's Note & OOC Vote On Visible Background Die Rolls
If you noticed, apologies for the delay: I really did mean to make this happen within 24 literal hours but…life. Specifically, it became clear that I really should draft and send two particular emails, of bureaucratic nature. That issue at the least shouldn't interfere with this Quest again. Speaking of which, future update cycles should be shorter, at least relative to the time at which non-me posts in the thread dry off—I'm getting a grip on this 'writing' thing, to make a long story short.
Oh, and I greatly appreciate questions and discussion, as ever.
Edit:
There are a few different significant die rolls going on in the background. Which would you like to see when the vote closes? To be clear, I will most definitely provide context for what each of the rolls actually represents and what its results mean, and you are not required to ignore it when discussing votes—which is one of the main reasons why this sort of thing will taper off a good deal past this event tutorial/introductory sequence, pending the day Tabula sets up IC ways of gathering knowledge from beyond the range of their senses.
[X] 'Mr. 8': The highest entry on the 'who shows up who usually wouldn't?' encounter table (which is ordered from least to most dangerous). How go his efforts? Speaking of which, what, approximately speaking, is his general deal?
[X] Inter-Faction Relations: Not everyone trying to capture Tabula is from the same organization, or even quite the same side. How have they been getting along? This option will cast some light on (rolls a 1d3) 'Mx. 4', the other out-of-the-usual person to show up here.
Yeah, it'd be good to have a vote with a bit more contextual depth, for lack of a better word. Something to discuss. Unfortunately, that's the shape of Tabula's situation, I figured that this decision was a bit too important and unclear to simply fiat myself. (That, and the update was already running a bit overlong. All things considered, I'd like Victory Against the Overmind/Reaching the Island to be an exception to the norm.)
This should be less of an issue going forward (let's just say I have some things planned), but in the meantime, y'know those 'what non-default people show up to the Tabula-catching effort' rolls I did when the vote closed? I've added an OOC vote for the set of rolls I'll do publicly when the vote closes, at the very bottom of the update.
(On a related note, events within the range of Tabula's senses will always have their rolls done publicly. Just thought I should mention it.)
[X] Hide where two island-to-City passageways merge, away from your original path.
[X] Inter-Faction Relations: Not everyone trying to capture Tabula is from the same organization, or even quite the same side. How have they been getting along? This option will cast some light on (rolls a 1d3) 'Mx. 4', the other out-of-the-usual person to show up here.
[X] Hide where two island-to-City passageways merge, away from your original path.
[X] 'Mr. 8': The highest entry on the 'who shows up who usually wouldn't?' encounter table (which is ordered from least to most dangerous). How go his efforts? Speaking of which, what, approximately speaking, is his general deal?
[X] Inter-Faction Relations: Not everyone trying to capture Tabula is from the same organization, or even quite the same side. How have they been getting along? This option will cast some light on (rolls a 1d3) 'Mx. 4', the other out-of-the-usual person to show up here.
[X] 'Mr. 8': The highest entry on the 'who shows up who usually wouldn't?' encounter table (which is ordered from least to most dangerous). How go his efforts? Speaking of which, what, approximately speaking, is his general deal?
Not closing the vote yet, since some of the bigger posters from past updates have voted yet, university is being Pain, and in any case the OOC 'what background rolls should happen publicly' vote is currently tied.
[X] Hide where two island-to-City passageways merge, away from your original path.
[X] 'Mr. 8': The highest entry on the 'who shows up who usually wouldn't?' encounter table (which is ordered from least to most dangerous). How go his efforts? Speaking of which, what, approximately speaking, is his general deal?
[X] Hide where two island-to-City passageways merge, away from your original path.
[X] 'Mr. 8': The highest entry on the 'who shows up who usually wouldn't?' encounter table (which is ordered from least to most dangerous). How go his efforts? Speaking of which, what, approximately speaking, is his general deal?
So! New to the Quest, a couple of notes:
The "become like the Overmind " thing really appeals to me on multiple levels
1: I just really like having minions and minion control
2: Using the minions to make it really hard to actually pin down the true us seems like it would be extremely useful, especially if we can have multiple kinds of minions or similar
When we have the opportunity to do so we really need to take a deeper look at ourself.
I wonder if there's a library or something we can raid for knowledge of WTF is up with the rules of reality
Another thing I want to do is start poking at the fabric of reality again and see if we can warp it better
I wonder if we can become some kind of Genus Loci. Not sure what the benefits of it would be but it might be neat.
We probably picked the wrong starting skillset for this but I wonder if we could become some kind of ship or creature that can sail between Realms.
The "become like the Overmind " thing really appeals to me on multiple levels
1: I just really like having minions and minion control
2: Using the minions to make it really hard to actually pin down the true us seems like it would be extremely useful, especially if we can have multiple kinds of minions or similar
When we have the opportunity to do so we really need to take a deeper look at ourself.
I wonder if there's a library or something we can raid for knowledge of WTF is up with the rules of reality
Another thing I want to do is start poking at the fabric of reality again and see if we can warp it better
I wonder if we can become some kind of Genus Loci. Not sure what the benefits of it would be but it might be neat.
We probably picked the wrong starting skillset for this but I wonder if we could become some kind of ship or creature that can sail between Realms.
For the usual QMly reasons, the exact answer to many of your questions will to have to wait until Tabula can go a-lookin' ingame. However, I can say the following:
Taking a deeper look at yourself(/Tabula) is, like...suffice to say that actions to that effect will be a mainstay of the first few main turns—just gotta win through these next few miniturns of disappearing into the City.
On the subject of libraries, innocent whistling, but Acute Truesight is quite good at that sort of thing.
Better reality-warping will soon happen—Tabula was literally born earlier this morning, by in-universe time
Genius loci...not a spoiler to say that they're a thing, I think
And finally, don't worry about starting skillsets. Really. Quite possibly the biggest effect of Tabula Rasa (that be fully revealed once one of those aforementioned 'examine self' main-turn actions happens) is that Tabula has a lot of 'empty slots' to fill with traits. That first-turn choice definitely denoted a tendency towards a certain type of problem-solving, as well as some ability in that area, but it's not a determinant or option-locker in the long run.
Temporary Threadmark — Vote Closed, Rolls for 'Mr. 8'
[X] 'Mr. 8': The highest entry on the 'who shows up who usually wouldn't?' encounter table (which is ordered from least to most dangerous). How go his efforts? Speaking of which, what, approximately speaking, is his general deal?
[X] Inter-Faction Relations: Not everyone trying to capture Tabula is from the same organization, or even quite the same side. How have they been getting along? This option will cast some light on (rolls a 1d3) 'Mx. 4', the other out-of-the-usual person to show up here.
[X] Hide where two island-to-City passageways merge, away from your original path and [X] 'Mr. 8' have won! Time for the rolls.
Tabula:
None, as it turns out. This stage of the plan doesn't contain much uncertainty of the sort that's visible on their end: The next hardpoint of resistance isn't really set up to catch them by surprise. (Besides, like, Tabula's actions are predefined in ways that non-PCs aren't, and this isn't a high-roll game.)
'Mr. 8' (As per the vote on visible background rolls.):
Their first die is a 1d5 representing whether Mr. 8 goes 'wide' or 'tall' with their efforts. Since this roll is effectively a luck roll for Tabula*, this roll comes from the players, first-come-first-serve. (In other words, please give me a d5.)
The second die is a 1d75 for Mr. 8's success in whatever it is that they do. I'll be rolling for this.
Once both the rolls are up, I'll do a post recording the roll results, commenting on what they mean in practice, and generally dropping the tidbits of information I promised in the OOC vote.
* Under the circumstances, giving a small buff to almost everyone on their side (the 'wide' end of the spectrum) is rather less of a threat to Tabula then sitting down and asking oneself just how thoroughly they can 'roid up the quick response team.
Edit: ...well then! Don't panic—well, don't panic too hard—but it'd be quite unfortunate to roll a 1 on that d5.
uhhhhhhhhhhh
look on the plus side at least Mr. 8 didn't roll a 75 and crit
Now, uh, time for me to think over what to write in the roll summary post. Don't worry I do in fact know what to do and did not assemble the roll tables in such a way as to allow a game over by luck alone so early in the game
but uh
I did not expect the dice to so suddenly and enthusiastically decide to
to this
'Mr. 8' Efficacy: 74 on a d75 Tall or Wide: 1 on a d5.
Well. This has happened. Your opponent's closest thing to a no-caveat hero unit rolled just short of a crit, and he decided to focus heavily on, in essence, the enemy unit meant to handle situations like 'somehow our target slipped the search net'. Y'know, the exact thing Tabula's going to do next. This isn't realistically going to Bad End you, what with Tabula's advantages and your choice to hide away from your original path, but it does remove a lot of your margin for error with regards to getting a flawless victory.
Now, I did say I'd talk about 'Mr. 8's deal, and give actual context as to what the rolls mean in practice, not just vague comments regarding your odds of a Bad End and remaining margin for error. So!
Mr. 8 has some skill and much experience in the many arts of Essence-Work: The manipulation and transformation of the stuff that, at the base level, makes up this world. Considered from the most abstract of perspectives, Essence-Work is simply the mid-point between Magic, the use of (to put it reductively) the subtypes of Essence which inherently do things, embody some change in the world, and—.
—and the other end of the spectrum, in which one reframes current events and misdirects the gaze of logic, and, in short, manipulates the Narrative. We'll call that other end of the spectrum Narrative Manipulation: On an in-universe basis, trying to pin down that sort of thing into a single term limits one's own abilities and enables opponents to No-True-Scotsman their way into all manner of definitional advantage, but we on the far side of the screen suffer no such limit. (Technically more 'little' than 'no' because creativity can be hard and communication is hard, buuuuuut I'm getting sidetracked.)
For the sake of comparison, let's define those extremes in a little more depth. Magic, for starters, is about what you'd expect. Grab hold of mana or thaums or [element] magic or whatever from inside or outside the body, apply will to it in some manner, and it becomes a spell, which does [THING]. To be clear, that application of will needn't be first-hand, feeding magic through runes or paper talismans and having the intent and force encoded into those symbols do the shaping for you. (Similarly, a direct dump of fire-aspect mana onto a battlefield can be expected to, you know, go flamey flamey burn burn.) All in all, Magic encompasses wide realms of different techniques and power-sources and manipulation-methods, to say nothing of infrastructures.
The power of the Mage is Power Itself: If one wishes to grasp great powers and have them do your bidding (usefully), there's nothing to it but to get good at power-grasping, power-directing(-to-do-what-you-actually-want), and not fucking up your bodily integrity or mental hinged-ness because you go up close and personal with the wrong subaspect of energy.
Speaking of aspects and subaspects: What separates matter-Essence from magic-Essence from the stuff of Sky-Above-Sky from the godawful sea/cloud/I-quit-this-job of murk between Realms is what that Essence has been defined as being. The relevance of that sort of thing to Magic is pretty obvious, or so I hope, fire essence ( Essence that's been 'labeled' as "Pure Undiluted Flame") is good for fire spells and an important question to ask upon finding a good wellspring is whether it's output is tainted with elemental poison or something. Of course, that's not the end of the story: To give a related example, where do the rules of magic come from, the subtleties of metaphysics? Whence the elements of the element magics? What of the physical world, the thousand nested complexities of life, the fine detail of artifice, the mind itself?
The province of the Essence-Worker is the manipulation of what Essence is. One sub-skill of magic is the use of will buttressed by pressing logic and emotional force to make mana act as a different interpretation of itself, and the trick of Essence-Work is that if you make that effect recurse on itself, stacking modifiers on modifiers until the set of viable targets extends far beyond mana, whole vistas of possibility open up: It's all well and good to magic a puppet into moving as you command but in the long run it's infinitely more mana-efficient* to simply make it so, to say nothing to certain situational benefits w.r.t hiding from mana-use detectors. The flipside, however, is that any given Essence-Work transformation or addition or subtraction needs to be individually bootstrapped into, for lack of a better word, trueness: The state in which that particular change is regarded by reality as an extant rule of what happens when so-and-so objects/persons act upon so-and-so target. Factors increasing price include more general objects/persons, more general targets, less sense-making changes, you get the idea. Note that the term sense-making is covering a lot of ground: Many Essence-Work processes have unusual resource costs because when they were first formulated, their user resorted to 'fuck this, time to bridge this last gap with a dead body' just to make it work in the first place, then as their methods advanced they couldn't talk their way back out of sacrificing some sort of stereotypically energetic animal to give their puppet the 'spark of movement'. (On the flipside, established Essence-Workers are very dangerous given even a little prep time and a specific enemy with a known weakness even vaguely vulnerable to their bailiwick, and bailiwick expansion is by definition one of the main things an Essence-Worker thinks about.)
For obvious reasons, all these overlapping rigmaroles get in the way of being a good Mage, with all the biggatons of power that that involves. (Speaking of which, there are many operations within the fields of normal magic that do Essence-Work type things with the formulation of new mana types or the invention of runes or the simply causing some new spell to be a thing. The difference is that Essence-Work moves beyond the requirement of mana AKA Essence-that-does, and can thereby access much more esoteric effects.)
To try and draw this together, the power of the Essence-Worker is the novel angle, the outside-genre-problem or -solution: If it worked by the normal rules, it'd be Magic, or the laws of nature.
At this point, I'd like to suggest a metaphor of sorts of Magic vs. Essence-Work, in which I try to map the three to ways of interacting with the rules of a TTRPG: Mages min-max, Essence-Workers do a lot of talking about how so-and-so proposed rule is clearly a logical extension of the existing rules (and then back their arguments with large bribes of time and resource-energy in ways that only work because this is an imperfect metaphor), and Narrative Manipulators propose complex and convincing-sounding new descriptions of what Narrative Manipulation is that incidentally cause them to win everything.
Now that I've written an entire bloody lore post for the preamble, time for the (far shorter) promised info on 'Mr. 8' himself! As previously mentioned, he's an Essence-Worker who, while not master of the art, is pretty skilled and much more experienced. His options for the editing of the definition applied to a given chunk of Essence are oddly varied, for some reason beyond the direct scope of this answer: It remains to be seen what relation exists between his shoulder-mounted wave motion gun of Inconvenient Costuming and the impossibly mana-efficient metal/plastic golems that constitute his main contribution to this effort. Speaking of which, thanks to his high roll and low 'Tall vs. Wide' roll, he's done the following: Provided a set of newly fueled, temporarily reinforced, and very fast 4/7-legged golems to help the aforementioned Quick Reaction Force get around (then help block the exits once, and set up sympathy-effect voodoo-alarms linked to the search-area exits furthest from the main base, keyed to go off if (and I say this because it'll feature in the next update) the door starts being broken, or unlocked by someone besides the fellow tasked with allowing the search teams sent in to get in and out.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the objective here is to make sure that Tabula is through the door and racking up a head start very soon after the alarm goes off, or better yet without tripping it at all.
Finally: If I've done the worldbuilding segment/supermajority of this post even somewhat right, then many of you likely have all sorts of questions resulting from this, about exactly Magic and Essence-Work uh work and the paths of improvement Tabula could take and what is and isn't possible. By all means, askaway, metaphysics-level worldbuilding that Tabula doesn't know yet is much more available to you all than, y'know, the structural weaknesses of Mr. 8's bots. (On a related note to this and my above comment on the objective here, that 'discussion is the best thing since sliced bread' tag is there for a reason.)
what if you cast magic using the inter-realm murk? that seems, intuitively, like a powerful school of nullificatory magic, probably with a short range- since the Base structure of all magic is said to involve 'Grabbing' the power, the grabbing process is a base word of the system, present regardless (Otherwise you'd expect some systems where you cast magic by Attuning yourself to the power and letting it come to you, for instance... Well, actually those systems would exist anyway But they'd be failing to make use of the base verb Grab.) and that means it applies to the inter-realm murk without any further magical knowledge. it even has that 'because [expletive] you' part of its general function that all the best nullification/defensive magics use. theme-wise, it seems like an excellent start-point there.
Why would using more willpower lock people into... 'sacrificing an animal'? Do you get to absorb the willpower of things you kill? is that a part of the system they laid down first and used to expand it further?
What happens if an Essence-worker makes a very basic magic system ('mana can make spells'), doesn't fill it out with specific interactions to determine the spekks (somehow putting in enough willpower), and then a mage who is not an essence-worker tries to use the system? can they create new spells and 'discover' new interactions?
I suppose the logic part means essence-workers can't be crazy, but would it be correct to take the emotion part to mean that going on drugs with their logic already planned out can boost essence-workers?
I notice the 'Fire essence', which is 'Fire essence', is 'labeled' as 'pure undiluted Flame'. Does this indeed mean that the Label attached to essence can differ from and even contradict the plain facts of the subsystem and world, and gain or at least not lose power thereby- that the conceit of a magical system can notably and distinctively differ from its actual capabilities?
(Fire essence isn't a combustion reaction, it's clearly storeable and manipulable in ways that 'pure undiluted Flame' wouldn't be*, because you can do magic with it. It's Essence tagged with Flame, which doesn't make it Flame directly, and is a contradiction owing to the 'Pure undiluted' portions of the tag.).
as a specific example of a contradictory-conceit magic system, Exalted uses Essence for 'Perfect Defenses'. If it is possible to make new magic systems of equal or greater overall power relative to Exalted(or possibly a weaker one of more compressed scope), then one would be able to make an attack with sufficient potency to overcome exalteds perfect defense, making the general conceit of perfect defenses differ from the reality. As such for an Exalted-equivalent system to be extant requires a conscious seperation of conceit and fact- 'the conceit is this defense is perfect, the fact is that it works on anything which isn't stronger than its finite power, and may have flaws.' -for this sort of setting. course my main reason for noticing this kind of thing is JOIN CTG because it relates JOIN CTG to certain JOIN CTG factors of my considerations JOIN CTG on something involving JOIN CTG my game, Confront The Godmodder JOIN CTG which I run on dnd beyond forums JOIN CTG and should be joined.
*assuming the color doesn't change the word except as emphasis.
edit: oh yeah also what are the structural weaknesses of Mr 8's bots
I've had a busy few days, but I can finally finish answering this!
Edit: I'd like to note that I didn't spend several days on this, I do have a sense of time efficiency, I just finally sat down and actually applied myself and then this happened.
what if you cast magic using the inter-realm murk? that seems, intuitively, like a powerful school of nullificatory magic, probably with a short range- since the Base structure of all magic is said to involve 'Grabbing' the power, the grabbing process is a base word of the system, present regardless (Otherwise you'd expect some systems where you cast magic by Attuning yourself to the power and letting it come to you, for instance... Well, actually those systems would exist anyway But they'd be failing to make use of the base verb Grab.) and that means it applies to the inter-realm murk without any further magical knowledge. it even has that 'because [expletive] you' part of its general function that all the best nullification/defensive magics use. theme-wise, it seems like an excellent start-point there.
The thing about the inter-realm murk is that is that it isn't really a type of Essence in and of itself, it's, like—let's imagine several thousand different bottles full of Essence, each more-or-less having a single pure aspect, and spanning a vast variety of different aspects. This set of course includes all manner of element magics and not-element magics ("Anyone care for a glassful of pure ennui?"), but we're also talking stranger things: Essence of Pub, for instance, and I mean the type of drinking establishment. At this point, an authorial fiat-miracle teleports the contents of every bottle into the bottom of a very large basin—which, for simplicities sake, we will assume is basically indestructible.
Needless to say, doing this sort of thing translates at first into a good deal magical violence, as many of those magics respond to their newfound freedom by subliminating into crude spells of their type. However, that hurly burly soon passes, and the different Essences start to undergo more stable forms of mixing. Even in this relatively 'spherical cow' scenario, outside the influence of any Realm or conscious mind, these reactions aren't easily summarized. Sometimes two aspects meet and annihilate, contradicting each other's premises; sometimes they meld, forming (one interpretation of) the proportional midpoint between the two; sometimes they make like oil and water. (It bears noting that aspects basically are concepts which of course are generally made of other concepts, which has its own implications for the complexities of a given reaction.) In parallel with these conceptual transmutations, more physical mixings occur—those explosions from earlier certainly did their own share of mixing.
Let's fast-forward, and maybe multiply the quantities a bit. In the long run, any remaining traces of true reactiveness expend themselves, and the contents of the basin trend towards ever-greater degrees of intermixing, with any given milliliter constantly fluctuating between a thousand different mix-permutations of various interpolations of interpolations of the original aspects. The more human aspects slowly dissolve into their constituent concepts (each of which is its own concept), unable to exist under conditions so far removed from their typical context's. Soon, the more nature-derived aspects undergo the same process, followed slowly but inevitably by many of the concepts: This is no place for whole numbers, or the idea of purity. Near the edges, where this amalgam touches void or the basin, the mélange retains a certain connection to normal reality, but the aspects deeper within only become more and more self-referential, trending further and further into the far reaches of combination-space as they react and meld and disassociate.
Eventually, it reaches a sort of meta-stability, where the depths far from any part of the pool contacting non-murk grow unmoored from all that is real, and the parts of it contacting non-murk slowly turn from liquid to wisp, drift away, and then dilute into whatever is around the murk (in this case nothingness, but usually air), and anything out of place regresses to the mean. It's no place to go diving, as you can likely imagine, and the passageways need more than a bit of special reinforcement: They consist of 3 different sequences of rooms wound around each other in non-Euclidian ways—in the sense that in normal space, their positions would often overlap—as part of, this is hard to put in words, but basically to fit more shielding into the same amount of effective surface area.
(In the truly long run, the basin of this thought-experiment will empty, but in practice the actual murk between Realms receives reliable inputs and exists in a world where evaporated murk-stuff dissolves into actual nothingness a good deal slower than in a vacuum.)
So, to circle back to the original question: Casting magic by directly grabbing the inter-realm murk suffers all sorts of complications since the specific composition of any given blob is variable, complex, and unique, the deeper and more potent stuff turns into a small amount of the good stuff surrounded by a large amount of edge-murk (some of which might have used to be you) when pulled into open air, and those constituent aspects tend to lack obvious uses what with being so weird. Oh, and Realms in general are rather definitionally things which keep the murk out
None of this means the murk between worlds doesn't have its uses in the magical arena, but they're pretty situational (even ignoring that you have to be near it to use it), and messing around with the deepmurk can go very wrong in the blink of an eye, in ways only possible for a substance so disconnected from human thought and the laws of nature. Besides, like, the art of the mage is at base the use of the types of Essence which Do things, and as mentioned earlier the murk between worlds is what you get well after all the stuff-doing Essences in the mix shoot their shot. 'Expletive you' isn't an aspect of the stuff in the Essence sense, it's a net effect of it's properties. The full dynamics of the ingame not-spherical-vacuum-cow inter-Realm chaotic murk are quite complex indeed, what with the vast number of added factors and the overarching rules/tendencies of this World as a whole, and (fortunately for my keyboard) not too relevant to our current story.
P.S. What I meant by Grab is that for a spell to happen, some sort of intent or will needs to be applied to the mana involved (mana meaning Essence-that-does in general, usually Essence-with-isMagic-subaspect). Normally, that means someone thinking about or thinking at the spell they're currently casting, sometimes it's a magic item that feeds it's mana through a imprint/program describing the spell, and sometimes a vial of concentrated flame breaks and the resultant cloud self-refers to its own internal concept of fire and goes fwoosh.
((I'm pretty sure that could've been a good deal more succinct, but making it shorter would take yet more time and effort, and this is ultimately answers, not updates or formal informationals. Besides, I think some fairly interesting stuff lies within all that detail.))
Why would using more willpower lock people into... 'sacrificing an animal'? Do you get to absorb the willpower of things you kill? is that a part of the system they laid down first and used to expand it further?
Woops, editing shrapnel. It's sacrificing and animal that locks people into sacrificing a animal. Absorbing the willpower/life essence/other appropriate aspect of things killed is the basis more than a few schools of magic and essence-working logical support chains, but it's not a base mechanic. Locking in 'use lots of willpower' is another (generally regretted) thing that Essence-Workers can build into their systems, though does translate into a certain base level of efficacy and/or speed.
What happens if an Essence-worker makes a very basic magic system ('mana can make spells'), doesn't fill it out with specific interactions to determine the specs (somehow putting in enough willpower), and then a mage who is not an essence-worker tries to use the system? can they create new spells and 'discover' new interactions?
For that sort of thing, there's a fairly high chance that the magic system isn't quite up to spec, or other mages can't quite use it, or...but if it does work, it tends to draw from a mixture of the internal fine detail of the mana used (if the mana specifically comes from system X, it's going to act a good deal like system X), the preconceptions of the caster, and extrapolation from what exactly was going through the Essence-Workers head as they implemented that rule. Also, each spell cast tends to be pretty unique, a product of what exactly went into it, and that lack of rules removes or weakens a lot of paths for getting more bang for one's buck. That having been said, such a system would be near arbitrarily flexible (within the constraints of not having any infrastructure to support more thought-intensive stuff), and repeating a spell over and over again would make it a genuine part of that system without any need for Essence-Worker interference—that's what it means to build a system anyone can work within!
I suppose the logic part means essence-workers can't be crazy, but would it be correct to take the emotion part to mean that going on drugs with their logic already planned out can boost essence-workers?
Yes, but there's a bit of a sliding scale between artistic methodologies where the end result can be noticeably 'made on drugs' and more mechanistic/scientific techniques that call for some mixture of a steady mental hand and plain concentration. (I'd also like to note that some variants of crazy don't (in all cases) preclude the more dream-logic ways of justifying a rule, that up to a point most inputs can substitute for most other inputs, and that the non-neurotypical tend to get along just fine in Essence-Working.)
I notice the 'Fire essence', which is 'Fire essence', is 'labeled' as 'pure undiluted Flame'. Does this indeed mean that the Label attached to essence can differ from and even contradict the plain facts of the subsystem and world, and gain or at least not lose power thereby- that the conceit of a magical system can notably and distinctively differ from its actual capabilities?
(Fire essence isn't a combustion reaction, it's clearly storeable and manipulable in ways that 'pure undiluted Flame' wouldn't be*, because you can do magic with it. It's Essence tagged with Flame, which doesn't make it Flame directly, and is a contradiction owing to the 'Pure undiluted' portions of the tag.).
as a specific example of a contradictory-conceit magic system, Exalted uses Essence for 'Perfect Defenses'. If it is possible to make new magic systems of equal or greater overall power relative to Exalted(or possibly a weaker one of more compressed scope), then one would be able to make an attack with sufficient potency to overcome exalteds perfect defense, making the general conceit of perfect defenses differ from the reality. As such for an Exalted-equivalent system to be extant requires a conscious seperation of conceit and fact- 'the conceit is this defense is perfect, the fact is that it works on anything which isn't stronger than its finite power, and may have flaws.' -for this sort of setting. course my main reason for noticing this kind of thing is JOIN CTG because it relates JOIN CTG to certain JOIN CTG factors of my considerations JOIN CTG on something involving JOIN CTG my game, Confront The Godmodder JOIN CTG which I run on dnd beyond forums JOIN CTG and should be joined.
*assuming the color doesn't change the word except as emphasis.
Hmm. Going to need to unpack this a bit. 'pure undiluted Flame' was mostly just an artistic way of saying 'Essence with a strong and pure fire magic aspect', but you've pointed at a fairly good question. To try and answer, free-floating fire mana tends to become flame, storing fire mana altogether calls for special mana-storage stuff (that handles heat well), and—I really should do a sentence break here.
As I was saying, storing up Essence-That-Is-Literally-Flame basically calls for an Essence-Worker who possesses (or can simulate) pretty high levels of "I am a Essence-Worker with tools X, Y, E, and F, who can [insert previously created meta-rules here], which is why...[full logic chain abridged]...resulting in this container that can suck up, filter out, and store pure conceptual material Essence-with-Aspect, specifically from this here combustion reaction.
Now, as for your Exalted comparison: That, uh, is technically possible, but trying to system-fight the base underpinnings of the Exalted setting
um
one who do that has long since ceased to be an essence-worker, and started to be the sort of existentially insane skill-based and/or tool-based god-Monster* that, uh doublechecks the deep lore
not only does not exist, but cannot exist not for any reason of law or metalaw, but because I do not see a chain of events that could lead to such an entity.
can't get there from here
It is not forbidden, per se, not in the way that transperfect attacks are forbidden in Exalted, but that's largely because it never seriously occurred to me. (Working around Perfect Defenses on the way towards one's goal instead of attempting to bash through the single most impenetrable barrier in existence is approximately 'yes' more practical.) At the risk of repeating myself and slipping into rambling, the summary is 'yes, if one defines an entity with sufficiently exponent-defined abilities in the right areas, but that's not going to come up in play'.)
*god pretty literally, Monster in the colloquial sense of unreasonably overpoweredness
Though if 'Essence of Pub' is an option, then I imagine 'Essence of Expletive You' is certainly something an Essence-Worker might be able to work with...
Though if 'Essence of Pub' is an option, then I imagine 'Essence of Expletive You' is certainly something an Essence-Worker might be able to work with...
For the sake of maximal clarity, I should note that genuine pure Essence of Pub was, while not totally unviable, still an example I pulled from my posterior. Make no mistake, mages and Essence-Workers and those who manipulate the world's narrative are plenty capable of doing many useful and reliable things with the composite aspect of "this is a pub" which lies across any pub worthy of the name, actual physicalized and well-contain Essence de la Publicité is a very difficult product, on account of Pub being a complex and multifaceted concept lacking in particular weight or significance.
Indeed, given a certain degree of care and haste in the channeling of the stuff—otherwise, well, the You in 'Expletive You' can be rather...fungible. On the plus side, that's true of any opponent that might try the same trick against you, except for, uh— flips through deep lore
—a...few...no-one you need to worry about
Edit: I've made some updates to the first-page informational notes, just keeping things up to date and linking my above post in the Lore Archive.
