Remove ads

Last Light of a Dark Age (Warhammer 29K/Disco Elysium)

Voting is open
Reader mode
LuciDreamer said:
I've had a day to think about this.

Does this imply that Harmony's entire "memory," up to this point, was constructed? While there were some constants (The War, the Ice, and the Mother figure), was every interpretation of Harmony's axiomatic chamber simultaneously valid at the same time? Is she creating memories out of whole-cloth, or is she reframing them under new/old axioms and ideas?

By choosing to be a hyperempathic murderblender, did she make that true, did she choose the option that was already true (retroactively), or is she taking on a particular persona out of dozens of personas that would have been valid for the dreamshape to mold her from?

...or am I, perhaps, just thinking too much about this? :p
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

No. Everytime Harmony is making a choice she is simply feeding the Dreamshape data about her preferences and personality. When Harmony makes a choice in the vote, that is a confirmation of her personality. It helps give the Dreamshape information about who you are.

You weren't literally going to overwrite your memory if you picked Titanagalbat - instead, by picking the Progeny, you gave the Dreamshape affirmative data about who you were. Every choice you picked is retroactively true as soon as you pick it and helps teach the Dreamshape more about you.

The problem tended to be is there were many cycles where one of your attributes would achieve a random critical success, and the Dreamshape was less aggressive with autofails through Gen, and then the memory would interrupt as you started screaming about the fact you're under attack, or that you need to wake up now, or something else equally disruptive. And this would ruin the refining process, for reasons you don't fully understand, and cause a need to reset. So it would wipe your memory, and send you back to the start of the loop. You get a little bit of a picture of some of these from the dreamshape's note on each attribute - Incandescence and Interlace were just a general pain in the ass, while other attributes utterly derailed an entire cycle out of nowhere.
 
Last edited:
Cetashwayo said:
The problem tended to be is there were many cycles where one of your attributes would achieve a random critical success, and the Dreamshape was less aggressive with autofails through Gen, and then the memory would interrupt as you started screaming about the fact you're under attack, or that you need to wake up now, or something else equally disruptive. And this would ruin the refining process, for reasons you don't fully understand, and cause a need to reset. So it would wipe your memory, and send you back to the start of the loop. You get a little bit of a picture of some of these from the dreamshape's note on each attribute - Incandescence and Interlace were just a general pain in the ass, while other attributes utterly derailed an entire cycle out of nowhere.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Wait, does that mean that the loop has never gotten to the end of our memories yet?
 
That offers up a few options.

What information is the dreamscape even looking for?
A few options :

1) It is simply interested in the contents of the memories, which it can not read directly, but must read through Harmony as an intermediary.
A simple answer, but it doesn't explain why the questions exist. It wouldn't need to ask the question if it can just see what happened by looking at the memory.

2) It is extracting information via a side channel. By forcing Harmony to make the choice all over again, it doesn't just capture the facts of the memory, it recreates the emotional state.
This explains why the questions are asked and answered, but it kinda bypasses the nature of the question.

3) My preferred theory.

We know that Despair is the chink in Harmony's armor that it has created. We know that the dreamshape operates through gen, through the memory eater. I propose that these aren't mere coincidences. I propose that we have 3 versions of Harmony going on here, not 2. You got Miss Normal, obviously, and the original Harmony. But you also have our current version, who is a lot like Harmony, but not exactly the same. Let's call her Harmony-2. The dreamshape is forcing her through the cycles of memories (with redactions, and autofails, and modifications of implants) because it requires a version of Harmony sufficiently similar to the original. To that end, it is asking the questions. If the questions don't match the memories, it knows it fucked up, knows it has gone off track somewhere. By steering the questions, altering the options, interfering in the options, it can make Harmony-2 grow in it's desired direction.

And the crucial difference between this Harmony-2 and the original, between the not-quite-there and the successful infection of the dreamshape, is that it wants this version to despair and die. That's why it's isolating Harmony from her supportive system.

The thing that's being refined is Harmony-2 herself. The great danger, and great trouble, is that Harmony-2 has to go through this process to wake up, but without being altered into the very kind of person that would become a dreamshape.
 
Cetashwayo said:
LEGACY FLESH
BIONIC MOTHERBOARD
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
There's no chance of us tapping either of these guys for help right?
Cetashwayo said:
[] GLAMOUR. The texture of your truest self. Survive with inhuman grace.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Also 'inhuman grace' and what we learned from Glamour's pass has me wondering if this option has us try to pull an Uno reverse card and wear it like clothing. COLD FUSION appears to be all about combining a hylic's status with a dreamform after all, which has surprising similarities to the symbiosis Sympathy was trying and might well have something to do with why we keep getting hints of her personality and thoughts shining through in our memories.
 
Da Boyz said:
There's no chance of us tapping either of these guys for help right?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

They are unconscious fragments of a greater whole. You can no more reach out to them than you can reach out to instinct, to subconscious emotion. They are within you at all times and boast no special power or ability.
 
Last edited:
In a way, Harmony is in the process of being reborn. Again.
Cetashwayo said:
You weren't literally going to overwrite your memory if you picked Titanagalbat - instead, by picking the Progeny, you gave the Dreamshape affirmative data about who you were. Every choice you picked is retroactively true as soon as you pick it and helps teach the Dreamshape more about you.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The Dreamshape's demeanor and method of "learning" reminds me eerily of one of the endings of Prey (2017). It is learning more about Harmony, so that it can... become her? Subvert her? Take her Inverse Soul as its own? Obtain some of her traits, as an Illuminatan and a Kora-self? Because clearly it doesn't "just" want to wear her skin and take her bodily functions, else it wouldn't care so much about her memories and her trauma.

It seems to have an internal voice, a personality, and executive agency. So it probably doesn't need Harmony (or indeed, any Illuminatan) to give it that (unless, in a way, it's already been compromised by its exposure to Harmony, just as Gen was, but in a more subtle, insidious way). Maybe it needs something else... like a form? A host? An energy source? A resource well?

It's casual dismissal of things like the Black Noise and the Nail would seem to imply that it sees those things as unwanted externalities, like how a human would treat sewerage. An obstacle that needs to be overcome or shielded away from decent society through infrastructure and moulding, or made "useful" through refinement. How strange, that something so totally esoteric to us is treated as a mere resource to it, a dreamshape.
 
Da Boyz said:
There's no chance of us tapping either of these guys for help right?

Also 'inhuman grace' and what we learned from Glamour's pass has me wondering if this option has us try to pull an Uno reverse card and wear it like clothing. COLD FUSION appears to be all about combining a hylic's status with a dreamform after all, which has surprising similarities to the symbiosis Sympathy was trying and might well have something to do with why we keep getting hints of her personality and thoughts shining through in our memories.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That would mesh quite well with the origin of a lot of this tech. Petriform is based off Void Crystals which are made by the Still Coast who wrote the forbidden book that our knowledge from Sympathy seems to at least partially revolve around. Considering that while, in the story, the first choice is false we know that we could've walked down those paths and been Pandora or Roxana. Which means that if we look at the commonalities between them we can see that they all have a close association with a strong psyker while being hylics. Pandora is sisters with Eleusia and Roxana is married to Koshkin.

Maybe the nail is only a dead end of you're a heartless polygon? And maybe no one's figured that out because the pneumatic vs hylic divide is too culturally ingrained and people with that level of power haven't ever associated this closely with a hylic (who may or may not be special being born on the same day and all) before?
 
LuciDreamer said:
The Dreamshape's demeanor and method of "learning" reminds me eerily of one of the endings of Prey (2017). It is learning more about Harmony, so that it can... become her? Subvert her? Take her Inverse Soul as its own? Obtain some of her traits, as an Illuminatan and a Kora-self? Because clearly it doesn't "just" want to wear her skin and take her bodily functions, else it wouldn't care so much about her memories and her trauma.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

We do have this bit of information.

Cetashwayo said:
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: Remaining and serious resistance to refinement, especially from external legacy augmentations. Stray observation: A problematic failure, though resolvable in flaying phase. Essential to retain as much combat data intact for the waking phase of Cold Fusion, considering potential necessity for evasive measures if detected early. Though primary yolk's own social isolation has ensured few interpersonal risk-factors. Certainly must resolve issues prior to descent into planetary negation well designation 'Dis', layer two Fraud.

It wants to take you down into the City of Dis. Your null field would let it go deeper than most. But what is it searching for? You dare not ask.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The shape has a destination which likely requires the null field to be active. But also, we know that the dreamshape can not survive the nullfield itself. I suspect that our dreamshape is doing something similar like it did with gen.
Tool on the outside, dreamshape on the inside.

It needs to create a version of Harmony which willingly does what it wants it to do, but it can't control that version directly, because else it would destroy itself through the nullfield.
 
Last edited:
Can finally post.

Had thought that Dreamshape would be somehow be involved in our predicament. Too many things would otherwise not line up, though I suspect that a reread with this update in mind would be pretty illuminating.

Now on the vote:

[X] RHYTHMS. The tempo, in the planet's noise. Harmony with artifice.

One of Harmony's great strengths was always Interlace and her ability to connect to others, fat good that it did her on the conclave's naughty list.
Thus I like the idea of her using the ability to connect to Illuminata's "biosphere" to stand to smug platonic, archimedean or catalan solids.
 
Last edited:
Cetashwayo said:
INFOWAR [AUTOFAIL]: Boss, I'm issuing a CODE BLACK. That is a speaking machine. Bona-fide. You cannot answer it in any way whatsoever. Do not even acknowledge it exists. In fact, pretend what I just told you did not get told to you. And forget the forgetting.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Cetashwayo said:
COGITATION [AUTOFAIL]: They cannot say anything. They are a recording.

RHYTHMS [Trivial - Success]: You know that is not true. The recording is a reactive intelligence, capable of simple responses. There is no answer, because there is none that will satisfy.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Worth noting that in retrospect D5h was desperate to prevent us from acknowledging Rhythms and the mere presence of Rhythms was enough to trivially undo a deception that they later tried, one which resulted in the Chandlers and which apparently caused some pretty severe headaches during that coil for it.
Cetashwayo said:
RHYTHMS [Challenging - Success]: A scene appears. The time is last night. The setting is a musty, wrecked hotel room, in a town of the blind. The sight is a horror. Strings and circuits quivering in the meat of a stone doll. Muscles of a synthetic jaw held ajar in a silent scream. It is a woman's scream. A familiar scream. Your scream. She sobs in halting, choking gasps, the suffocated death rattles of a living, breathing being, turning to stone.

RHYTHMS: She is everything they asked of her - a credit to her hylic clade, a credit to her kora-face, best missionary and best monk in her entire monadic cell. She is an idol, an icon, and to one man, a goddess - everything but herself. Her true self is sealed inside an airtight bell jar. She chokes alone inside this stained glass sarcophagus she has spent a lifetime constructing. The only person she ever trusted enough to break her free instead fell in love with her coffin.

RHYTHMS: She remembers no childhood. She has no parents. She has no family. She has no past. She has no present. She has no future. No one will ever know her. When she is gone, it will be as if the human behind the mask 'Miss Normal' never existed. As if she never existed.

RHYTHMS: She collapses at the foot of the bed, tear-ducts drained, too weak and exhausted even to reach for the half-emptied bottle of uranium absinthe. She closes her eyes for the final time, despairs, and dies.

[GEN]: i only wanted to help

That - that must have been a glimpse of the present you. Miss Normal, the Miss Normal that Gen knows, not Sympathy, or you. The Miss Normal that you…were, when this process began ten loops ago, and before you were run through the twelve coils of marrow memory.

And this process began because, after all this time - after eighteen years - the dream was ready to hatch.

And you were ready to die.

Again.

GEN《AUTOFAIL》: Modem remains unrefined. A frustrating, if expected, result. Stray observation: Leaving aside the serial malfunctions of GIFTHORSE, residual elements of S.O.P.H.I.A. remain stubbornly rooted within the deepest sections of the Noise. Attempts to outright disable the noise have failed on in multiple cycles. 'Serenade of the Chandlers' particularly pernicious interruption in Coil 2-3. Any connective router is compromised. Unlikely to achieve refinement before the flaying phase. Given the role in near premature objection in cycle 1 and cycle 7, this remains a running concern worth making error log for.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Our modem is arguably one of the few pieces of ourself still uncorrupted and managing to effect the outside world, most pertinently GEN/GIFTHORSE. While on the one hand D5h is on guard comparatively towards it they also are confident they'll be able to take care of it during the flaying and probably be more focused on some external signal being received (such as S.O.P.H.I.A helping out) rather than a broadcast being made using the modem after they cast Power Word: Sink on us. We likely have one good sucker punch in us if we go with Rhythms, but we also know that its going to be useful given how comparatively cautious D5h is with it compared to all the other unrefined elements.
Cetashwayo said:
NOOSPHERE [AUTOFAIL]: A search of my repository brings up no results for the word 'petriform'. Did you mean petrified, a synonym for fear? Are you afraid?

<No.>

NOOSPHERE [AUTOFAIL]: Why not?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Cetashwayo said:
NOOSPHERE [Impossible - Critical Success]: Rising from the tragedy of the Cyber War and its aftershocks, LETHE is at the forefront of Cybaris' Company's Global Good initiative. Under the inspired leadership of corporate instance and Morow-fork Seltzer Lacuna, LETHE is a pioneer in cognitive-medical solutions for the weight of memory. Millions of cyber veterans and survivors across Illuminata's megalopoli, Cubes, and town-complexes owe their lives, and their wellbeing, to the work of LETHE. On its Insindulingo Campus its tireless scientists and researchers work every day for the dream of tomorrow.

NOOSPHERE: Even hylics count themselves among the successful outpatients of LETHE's visionary palingenesis programs utilizing unique techniques developed during early efforts to understand and cure Petriform sarcoma. Treatments for petriform growth, spellshock, godfright, and generalized neurosynthetic malfunction offer a second chance to the bravest, and the best, of our aging heroes. With LETHE, your long night is over - and the dream begins.

NOOSPHERE: You remember the Cybaris subsidiary's corporate motto, spoken by a hologram of Seltzer Lacuna himself - "A mind is a terrible thing to waste."

[GEN]: what have they done to you

Lethe put a staple in you - but that was not the only thing they put inside your mind. They put the seed of something else.

GEN《AUTOFAIL》: Suboptimal. Unrefined and uncategorized raw data remains. In general, disastrous internal organization of semantic file-folders delays full refinement. Hypothesis: Implicit attempt to obscure aspects of internal factual archive from external access? Certainly, can defragment and fix during the flaying phase.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
On the other hand D5h is dismissive of Noosphere but earlier worked to hide any information about Petriform, probably due to its own origins/usage of it. We are terrified from our exposure to Petriform gas and are now face to face having to confront that fear in the worst possible form, possibly quite literally given its shaped by our despair. Choosing to know our enemy might give us a hint as to how exactly we can deal with Petriform, pull forth the raw knowledge that it was trying to conceal and give us the ability to puncture something which otherwise would resist our Nail. Moreover D5h is dismissive of our Noosphere either due it's low score or due to it being weak to the flaying process, and doesn't seem to have picked up on the fact that LETHE has been blown wide open.

At the end of the day the greatest defense it has is the petriform, the thing that prevents it from getting the same treatment as the lesser daemon that was in Sympathy's mask. I doubt it will be that easy, and we're going to have to confront our greatest fears in order to break through which might be a bit hard with Incandescence suborned...but there's something there.

Unless we actually have to make a roll using the attribute in question in case RIP bozo we might as well go for Living Weapon because even if we're just driving knives into our head to get the petriform out we're really good at that. Though Noosphere's crit might carry us there and make it so we don't have to pass an incredibly hard roll using a stat of 3 again. Hopefully having already passed the check to keep it unrefined we can use the stat to knife D5h in the ribs while they aren't expecting it though.
 
Last edited:
Cetashwayo said:
Do you mean that Shivers is, in DE quests?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yeah , this. Perhaps my orignal comment was poorly worded , since i meant that Shivers (or their equivalent) takes center stage in a lot of DE-inspired fiction , including quests. So this wasn't a statement about this particular quest and more of a general trend observation + preference for some attributes + was not meant to be in any way disrespectful.
 
5D Antipyramid said:
Yeah , this. Perhaps my orignal comment was poorly worded , since i meant that Shivers (or their equivalent) takes center stage in a lot of DE-inspired fiction , including quests. So this wasn't a statement about this particular quest and more of a general trend observation + preference for some attributes + was not meant to be in any way disrespectful.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I actually agree. Shivers is very much a "second playthrough" attribute. The inundation of prose which doesn't help you solve the case much and has a literary vibe of providing a portrait of Revachol is really cool, but it can also distract you, and especially on a first playthrough, overwhelm. In a lot of DE-fiction people take it too far, and it loses its magic because it's used so often. I think in some DE fiction people also focus on Inland Empire and the zany stuff too much - there is a contrast of naturalistic and very mundane conversation with the more high-flying stuff. That is the combo which makes Disco Elysium work.

That is part of why I have actually merged Shivers with Interface (the DE skill). Rhythms retains its mystic quality and ability to cross the normal boundaries of perspective, but it also has a utilitarian aspect as a way for you to interface with machines. If Interlace allows you to find similarities between you and whoever you're speaking with, to empathize, rhythms allows you to understand differences - it is literally a change of camera, a different tune and tempo. Roxana, for example, absolutely uses Rhythms in the mystic way, but it's also her main combat skill.

When you have twelve rather than twenty-four attributes, I have tried to make it so every single attribute has a literary/philosophical component, and a utility. You have the attribute as a tool, a skill, and the attribute as a philosophy.

In general especially after the first few updates got me into the groove I've put a lot of serious thought on how to adapt Disco Elysium to the text format. White checks don't work because you can't really redo checks the way you do in DE, the story needs to move on. DE has failing-forward but failing-forward becomes much more imperative here because you will never replay. I removed passive checks and replaced them with a combo of just an implicit passive check (your level lets you know this) and then a differentiation between critical and less serious checks. Sometimes knowing a thing is useful, sometimes you need to vote on whether you'll survive something intact.

I've also revamped the thought cabinet because it was explicitly admitted to be undercooked in the original and I wanted axioms to have a clearer bearing and influence on you. The only area I haven't totally figured out is the Task Manager, which rapidly got somewhat tedious to update (though obviously this isn't why I turned it off lmao). It was useful to help people find their way but the near constant-updating of it was what made it difficult.

I have plans on how to bring it back but explaining it would be spoilers :)
 
Last edited:
[] LIVING WEAPON. The killing instrument. Draw your sword.
[] GLAMOUR. The texture of your truest self. Survive with inhuman grace.

The Shapes dream of tomorrow... but they aren't the only ones who do. Time for the Black Star to become even more radiant than the endless white of Dreamspace.

Edit: Changed my mind... GEN's desperate love of its partner and its protection of her for ten long years is too touching... and even if it dies today, we will still remember its love when no one else does. At the end of all things, we are the girl who bonded with the Chandlers. A tomorrow based on empathy.

[X] RHYTHMS. The tempo, in the planet's noise. Harmony with artifice.
 
Last edited:
Wait people get overwhelmed by Shivers? I just played one playthrough and naturally went from an Int build to Shivers. Granted, history nerd so maybe I was just too hooked on the vibe.
 
Deadly Snark said:
Wait people get overwhelmed by Shivers? I just played one playthrough and naturally went from an Int build to Shivers. Granted, history nerd so maybe I was just too hooked on the vibe.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It is more Shivers delivers a very specific experience but is often billed as the 'must-have' skill. I think it's best experienced as a skill you upgrade further into the game while having your focus be elsewhere. It adds so much richness and flavoring when it is a secondary.

Players can sometimes get frustrated in failing crucial checks because they ploughed so many points into Shivers, misunderstanding the appeal.
 
Da Boyz said:
Unless we actually have to make a roll using the attribute in question in case RIP bozo we might as well go for Living Weapon because even if we're just driving knives into our head to get the petriform out we're really good at that. Though Noosphere's crit might carry us there and make it so we don't have to pass an incredibly hard roll using a stat of 3 again. Hopefully having already passed the check to keep it unrefined we can use the stat to knife D5h in the ribs while they aren't expecting it though.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I doubt it. If the choice we make here is just which stat does a die roll, then we'd simply pick the option with the biggest number. It wouldn't be much of a choice at all.
 
Between our impending participation in the Night Furies and the reveal of D5h's destination as the second layer of Dis, Fraud, I'm expecting the next update to be very ULTRAKILL.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Voting is open
Remove ads
Back
Top