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

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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dycouza said:
We chose Academics and Clairvoyance over Precognition and Postcognition would be a continuation of Academics, specifically Ling Qi's affinity for studying the past. Transcending that into doing it literally since she's more about experiencing things than learning about them from books. The thing with basing our perception of memories is that we can look at an object as we would a song or an art piece, as a story with personal meaning. We can look at a static object and see its past and listen to its echoes, giving us everything we would get by basing our perception on hearing but with added flavor. Flavor that actually makes sense as something Ling Qi wants rather than just something she can do.
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I fully disagree. We are not at all getting the same things with the 2 art ideas.
The music perception idea is ultimately about changing our broad visual perception and claivoyance into auditory perception and clairvoyance by using music as a medium, and since Ling Qi's music is conceptional, we dont have to worry about other loud noises disrupting what she can hear.

your idea is to change the focus of the art to reading objects and postcognition, which while a nice idea in general is still very different
Btw im not even sure that the change you describe would actually still be within the scope of a simple art modification action. Afterall Xin differentiated between clairvoyance and postcognition and changing the track might need more investment to make it happen (like, successor creation for example)


the xin quote:
"There is divination, and there is divination Ling Qi. Clairvoyance and its related disciplines are both the simplest and most reliable. Object reading and postcognition are relatively simple as well, given a reasonable proximity to the present. Future sight or even prediction is not so easy, nor so simple."
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I wonder about the loss in relationship to the sect. If we go well in the diplomat route we should be able to gain prestige for the sect making them happy.

I think it would all be dependent on how we present it and what we offer to the sect (internship opportunities for students). Getting some elders on our side would be helpful.
 
naths said:
I fully disagree. We are not at all getting the same things with the 2 art ideas.
The music perception idea is ultimately about changing our broad visual perception and claivoyance into auditory perception and clairvoyance by using music as a medium, and since Ling Qi's music is conceptional, we dont have to worry about other loud noises disrupting what she can hear.

your idea is to change the focus of the art to reading objects and postcognition, which while a nice idea in general is still very different
Btw im not even sure that the change you describe would actually still be within the scope of a simple art modification action. Afterall Xin differentiated between clairvoyance and postcognition and changing the track might need more investment to make it happen (like, successor creation for example)


the xin quote:
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We would still have Claivoyance, I'm not proposing removing it. I want to not narrow down our perception to being primarily about hearing, but instead focus our clairvoyance on echoes. Echoes are reverberations. They're sounds, they're footprints, they're the result of an action that echoes in ways one cannot easily notice but are there none the less. And they serve double duty because echoes are more tied to hearing than sight but unlike Music does not exclude sight.

Our insight Even walking alone, footfalls echo beyond your hearing. is about the unforeseen effects of actions, it suggests the infinite secrets of everything that happens. Postcognition is nothing more than deep Clairvoyance, it's about looking at something's past to understand it. It's about being an investigator searching for the echo to find the footfall, literally in some cases. Which is what Ling Qi often does, she doesn't look at things and accept what they are but asks how they came to be and uses that context for understanding.
Erebeal said:
Honestly, I'd like to kill the "academics" focus in favour of "++ secrets" which feels more LQ
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I see Academics as the necessary background for all the history, culture, songseeking Ling Qi does. We wouldn't have understood Old Tribes and Ice Witches if we hadn't studied past peoples and events. What secrets are we searching for if not these? Secrets and history aren't goals in and of themselves, it's what they reveal about the present that's important to us. If you like lore you want Ling Qi to like lore right?
 
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DragonWyrm said:
I wonder about the loss in relationship to the sect. If we go well in the diplomat route we should be able to gain prestige for the sect making them happy.

I think it would all be dependent on how we present it and what we offer to the sect (internship opportunities for students). Getting some elders on our side would be helpful.
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This all started with us basically cutting them out of the decision making process, everything that comes out of it is going to be tainted with that. And well. The empire is hella xenophobic, there's a lot of good things to come out of diplo with the white sky but prestige is going to be very muted compared to what it probably "should" be.
 
dycouza said:
We would still have Claivoyance, I'm not proposing removing it. I want to not narrow down our perception to being primarily about hearing, but instead focus our clairvoyance on echoes. Echoes are reverberations. They're sounds, they're footprints, they're the result of an action that echoes in ways one cannot easily notice but are there none the less. And they serve double duty because echoes are more tied to hearing than sight but unlike Music does not exclude sight.

Our insight Even walking alone, footfalls echo beyond your hearing. is about the unforeseen effects of actions, it suggests the infinite secrets of everything that happens. Postcognition is nothing more than deep Clairvoyance, it's about investigating something and looking at its past to understand it. It's about looking at the echo to find the footfall, literally in some cases. It's about being an investigator. Which is what Ling Qi often does, she doesn't look at things and accept what they are she asks how they came to be and learns from it.

I see Academics as the necessary background for all the history, culture, songseeking Ling Qi does. We wouldn't have understood Old Tribes and Ice Witches if we hadn't studied past peoples and events. What secrets are we searching for if not these? Secrets and history aren't goals in and of themselves, it's what they reveal about the present that's important to us.
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I dont see how the visual -> auditory shift would be considered 'narrowing down'. Ling Qi is a cultivator and this is an art, so most things she can do with visual perception, she can also do in some way with auditory perception. Like, Bai Meizhen uses taste based perception, Bao Qingling seems to use vibrations for her perception and someone like Luo might have hearing and or smell based perception. And just like Meizhen didnt turn blind by getting her taste based perception art, we wouldnt turn blind either.

If we consider RME, the most used technique of that art is the 2nd one: the wisps that give her a bigger field of vision. the second most prominent seems to be the scrying to me, and we might have used the 1st tech: the silver gleam in the eyes before. we never used the 3rd tech: the one that would have developed into precognition for CDP. I want to keep the wisp ability and the scrying, just paired with a different sense. I'd be fine with replacing the 1st and 3rd tech with something else though, be it some secret sense or something else.



Postcognition is explicitly not just deep clairvoyance. Clairvoyance is supposed to be the easier divination discipline, while those disciplines that mess with time get harder. Xin mentioned in the quote above that postcognition only stays simple if you stay close to the present. and consider this: our current scrying range is 12 km. it is almost faster to just fly the distance to talk to the other person, so even with this simple and reliable divination we are still at the beginner steps. I am confident that any attempt at postcognition will also be heavily restricted as it is.
 
I don't know about hearing-based, but we're definitely better served by some music-themed perception skill/art than the current projection-sight based RME. As such, the AP plan is fine:
[X] Plan: take Pills like Water

For skills, my previous estimates were wildly optimistic and we have access to neither woodwind+ nor an advanced perception skill, and with most of our social/misc skills softcapped, at the moment we can only diligently work on our attributes in the meantime.

As a bit of hedging toward future options I'm going with moving up manip S over presence A (or something else), it served us well so far if nothing else. The skills are largely from available opportunities (last time we're training RME).

[X] Turn 12 plan: Why are all my skills capped
-[X] Dexterity 4**, Resolve 4**, Manip 4**, Composure 4** (32/40)
-[X] Academics 3**, Formations 4**, Survival 1 (40/40)


Odds (for what it's worth):
• Academics has a 74% of hitting softcap, (84, 91, 95, 98 with 1~4 omake points)
• Formations at 90% (95, 97, 99, 100 with 1~4 omake)
• survival at 50% (we can probably find a turn with an odd die later if it fails, but 67, 83, 100 with 1~3 points)
 
Do we have any sense of when the old families vs Empire conflict (which, IIRC, the Cai are looking likely to join on the side of the old families) is likely to heat up? That's a plot line that's been running in the background for a while now, and it seems pretty relevant to how much effort we put into relationships with the Sect and the other parts of the Empire.
 
naths said:
I dont see how the visual -> auditory shift would be considered 'narrowing down'. Ling Qi is a cultivator and this is an art, so most things she can do with visual perception, she can also do in some way with auditory perception. Like, Bai Meizhen uses taste based perception, Bao Qingling seems to use vibrations for her perception and someone like Luo might have hearing and or smell based perception. And just like Meizhen didnt turn blind by getting her taste based perception art, we wouldnt turn blind either.

If we consider RME, the most used technique of that art is the 2nd one: the wisps that give her a bigger field of vision. the second most prominent seems to be the scrying to me, and we might have used the 1st tech: the silver gleam in the eyes before. we never used the 3rd tech: the one that would have developed into precognition for CDP. I want to keep the wisp ability and the scrying, just paired with a different sense. I'd be fine with replacing the 1st and 3rd tech with something else though, be it some secret sense or something else.



Postcognition is explicitly not just deep clairvoyance. Clairvoyance is supposed to be the easier divination discipline, while those disciplines that mess with time get harder. Xin mentioned in the quote above that postcognition only stays simple if you stay close to the present. and consider this: our current scrying range is 12 km. it is almost faster to just fly the distance to talk to the other person, so even with this simple and reliable divination we are still at the beginner steps. I am confident that any attempt at postcognition will also be heavily restricted as it is.
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We do use the 1st tech all the time, we use it whenever we notice something we didn't. It's the secret sense. A Shishigui assassin, the near imperceptible sound of drumbeats, anything that's hard to notice. That's what makes it so good, because it doesn't demand we actually use sight, we can use it with sight or hearing or anything and if it was twice as good as one of those things at the cost of the other it'd be less for it. I'm okay with hearing taking precedent over sight but we need something thematically specialized but mechanically general, and hearing is the opposite of that. It's a cool quirk with no depth behind it.

The perception types as Xin described then aren't abstract concepts, Clairvoyance is perceiving things, Postcognition is inspecting things for clues to their history and Precognition is taking understanding of things around you and just predicting how they'll act in the future. We can do all these things as mortals in the order of difficulty Xin described, Ling Qi can just become supernaturally good at it. Postcognition as I understand it means looking at the Qi of an object and realizing some of that Qi is perceptibly more recent than others, fading like memories do, and divining that the concepts of Qi reads like a poem of its history.
 
[X] Plan: take Pills like Water
[X] Turn 12 plan: Why are all my skills capped

I'm all in for enhancing our Hidden Moon connections, come the way they come, what matters to me is that we do it.
 
I've seen people voting for the "Turn 12 plan: Why are all my skills capped" plan for the next turn and I was wondering where that was written out? Someone copied the in the "take pills like water plan" which looks good, but what's this second one?
 
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