Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

PrimalShadow said:

It is not all discarded wisdom! Some of it is probably discarded stupidity.

Imagine a magical library containing a copy of every piece of paper ever written or typed. How valuable would such a place be? Yes, it would contain all sorts of wonderful works, including ones that have been lost time. It would ALSO contain literally trillions of pages of paperwork, worksheets, scratch paper, receipts, labels, and so on. Even if you could filter things by format to e.g. only inspect works of poetry or literature or whatnot, the vast majority is still going to be drivel*. And having even the most ingenious works in your library won't save you if nobody can find them.

*anyone who has ever tried doing an archive dive on fanfiction.net can attest to this.

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Those things still have quite a bit of value though. Knowing what people bought. Knowing what people wrote in their free time. Knowing what people where sketching. All of these things let the people of tomorrow know what the people of today were really concerned about. Sure they do take up valuable space in the main section of the library so you box them up and send them into the archives. It doesn't really matter if it seems silly or stupid because that is not really the libraries call. There may be a use for it someday and so the information is stored.

Destroying information like this is almost always a political move. Sometimes the situation is so bad that you need to burn books to keep warm. However the destruction that is shown in the chapter is a tool being used to remove views no longer supported by the current rulers. It's not about cleaning up the library or removing stupidity,. (Which is also a very thorny subject. Who defines what is stupid?) That is the last thing on the mind of the people who ordered such a burning.

Also fanfiction.net is in no way a library and their lack of organization shows this. Really old libraries like the library of Alexandria had piss poor organization but even they had better methods than ffn. I am also very hopeful that libraries in FOD have a good system since they have had libraries from at least 9000 years ago as the Shang usurpation burned one down. (World History 101, Historical Timeline)

Erebeal said:

The math of talent actually underestimates the the intended effect - the difference is supposed to be even larger than that in-story. We discussed changes to the formula to represent things better at the start of Threads, but everyone got sick of arguing about math so it never got implemented.

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I think it's probably best looked at as a kind of 'luck' stat. Not exactly, but kinda. Mechanically it would simply mean using a different roll table for the spread of results for any given roll in which 'luck' is involved. Exploration, random encounters, etc.

Like, a low-talent character rolling high on a d% on a 'who shows up?' roll would get... someone willing to hire them on, or a shot at rescuing the local Baron's young son/daughter from something they can actually defeat, etc. Good, great even! ... for a talent 3, Guard-For-Life type of person. A low talent character who rolls low, on the other hand, hits a spot of bad luck. Petty thief makes off with their coin purse, or a lesser spirit messes with them for a bit.

A high talent character, on the other hand? Runs into the local embodiment of a Great Spirit*. While they're looking for something completely different, if they're even looking for anything at all, while on a low roll they find stuff that's still useful - and substantially more useful than what the low talent character would find on even a high roll - if not incredibly so, like the couple dozen yellow stones we picked up.

*: I think we're 3/3 on the final result of 90+ (after modifiers) resulting in running into an Aspect of the Moon? That 96 waaay back during Zhou's first test - where we met Xin for the first time - then the Bloody Moon year 2 month 2, then this. Granted, this event folded that roll into it, so we don't know the results of the roll just yet. I don't know if there even was a roll for the Dreaming Moon Rave we ran into... I think it was a plot hook from a job, so no roll was used or shown? Not sure.

E: Fluff wise... power attracts power, or something along those lines. Or perhaps potential attracts power? Eh, not totally sure how to phrase it.

I mean, though, here in the modern era libraries destroy books all the time. And for good reason!

There's only so much shelf space, and new books get written every year. Which means that every year, something has to go. Librarians call it "weeding". Removing old, outdated works, that have gotten damaged and soiled and are less relevant. Every year.

Sure you'd like to have some library where they keep at least one copy of every book every written so it's never lost. But... that library is not the library of some medium-sized city like Tonghou. Honestly if Dreaming Moon hadn't explicitly said the books were being destroyed for political purposes, I would have thought nothing of it. A new Imperial grant brings in a load of new books? Of course you need to weed out the old books.

Just another perspective on things, and maybe a clue why the librarian doing the burning doesn't think it's a very big deal.

[] Historical Plays, works of wit and satire, (Speech, Government,)

Somebody dissed somebody's great grandfather once, but the tables have turned and the one whose views was mocked to public acclaim is now cleaning up old shames.
Made worse in Cultivator setting, because you might mock some nobody, and three centuries later they're a Violet and no longer appropriate. Even if the mortals don't remember who it references, the guy is still around and wants to clean up old shames.

[X] Songs and poems of peoples and ways of life long gone (Spirit Ken, Beast handling)

Like the Weilu, like the many myriad tribes of the Empire past, these works of culture reference spirits and beliefs that obstruct assimilation and naturalization into the Empire. Spirits which might still be around to teach people the wrong things, if only they knew how to reach them.


[] Paintings, watercolors and tapestries depicting glories long gone (Art, War)

I reckon all those paintings of glorious civil war are now unacceptable because We Have Always Been At Peace