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

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PowerLeca said:
See, this is just a challenge to the assumption that LQ has a monopoly on a hunky hermit. I am wondering if the count clans that were represented at the summit might have offers for Xuan Shi due to his connections to Xin'an and Xuan trade and status. I could see the Bao (trade, ofc) or the Diao (Imperial-okayed spirit blood, plausible deniability of interest in Xin'an) or the Meng (Moon and astrology connections, recognition of his assistance clearing their honor) trying their shot at him.

These offers, delivered to the Xuan before their offer to the Ling, would absolutely spice up any rumormilling.
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Nah , for a courtship you generally do need both parties consent or atleast approval for the courtship to go through even the talking stages . With gg he most likely accepted the courtship for political reasons and knowing it's just talking at that point .

Xuan shi isn't social enough to have made a lot of inroads with individuals that might send a letter of courtship to his family that are actually worth a damn and wouldn't get thrown out in the spam folder .

Becuase any marriage candidate would be marrying INTO the xuan . And then presumably leaving to the isles with xuan shi . Which he currently isn't interested in .

Meng Dan would be a possibility , except the meng are in hot political water and are using meng dan to shore up their burnt relationship (heh) with the cai through Renxiang . The courtship with qi would be their main focus rather than risk others going after him and interrupting that or his current mission .
 
The canonical events in the upcoming chapter (according to the rumours)
Edit: Original art by Aka Akasaka, all I did was edit the text
(original pages from Kaguya-sama: Love is War - chapter 74)

 
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Trouble with rescuing the beavers before the war is that the starlit labyrinth is related to, well, star pollution weirdness. And maybe Polar Nations giants.

We want to be able to poke that lore after clearing the site. Doesn't work for pacing reasons.
 
AbeoLogos said:
Trouble with rescuing the beavers before the war is that the starlit labyrinth is related to, well, star pollution weirdness. And maybe Polar Nations giants.

We want to be able to poke that lore after clearing the site. Doesn't work for pacing reasons.
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I dont agree it would be very interesging getting some of that lore before the war arc it might open some narrative options that we dont have right now.
 
Personally i feel like investigating the place that most likely has creepy star monsters in it, is a great leadup to going to war with the guys who are friends with the stars.
 
Investigating star nonsense absolutely works as a prelude to a war arc. The complication is that the war arc it works with is fighting the Cloud Nomads. And we're going to be fighting the ith, underground.

The right time to do the first leg of lending the beavers a hand, in retrospect, was before the summit. Then our star findings could have been worked into the relevant Nomads/observatory/White Sky plot threads and explored enough to tie off and leave for later.

Like, it's not just broad scale geopolitical stuff, we're also looking at interpersonal/character implications. Star findings lead into the Meng-sponsored observatory, which ties into Anxi, who is an astronomer, which wraps back around to geopolitical tensions between our allies. Just all kinds of stuff.

None of which there's time to get to before the war. We have around two and a half months to get a new flute, work on serious geomancy with Zhengui, sort out our active Domain, have some serious followup with Huisheng, and go on a spirit capturing camping trip with Bao Qian. And that's just our confirmed to-do list.

There's good odds of a count clan wanting our attention, us needing to check in with Xin'an (maybe dropping Hanyi off there), pre-war family scenes, getting to know Renxiang's future spouse, etc.

I like the beavers and I think the war arc is kinda dumb. I'd rather skip out on it and do domestic skullduggery or hang with the Polars, honestly. But that's not an option, and the story flow just doesn't really work for doing the beavers any time soon.
 
If we put off helping the beavers cause it doesn't pass your "writing flow" vibe check until some nebulous point in the future, then its probably never going to get done. Remember the whole 'liminal carver' thing and how long that got put off cause people wanted to wait for a super thematically appropriate moment (or whatever the exact reason was)?
 
farsuk said:
"What an uncomfortable way to put it" The bao really didnt study their intended constumer if their been this bad at selling their product. Not great look for famous merchants... they clearly arent invested into this transaction... poor qian having his already small chance being trashed by his own clan. Unfortunate but not unespected. Anyway we can focus on real candidates like xuan shi.
Now when are we gonna save the beavers. Its taking to long. We need to do this before the war arc.
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We're not dead yet, however convenient it might be for you if we were.

Anyway, if Bao Qian really is out of the running, I think I prefer Meng Dan.
 
Therandompers said:
If we put off helping the beavers cause it doesn't pass your "writing flow" vibe check until some nebulous point in the future, then its probably never going to get done. Remember the whole 'liminal carver' thing and how long that got put off cause people wanted to wait for a super thematically appropriate moment (or whatever the exact reason was)?
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The beavers are absolutely going to get done eventually, because the fief isn't going anywhere and the project has main plot stuff locked behind it.

The thing is that I want to actually get a chance to interact with that main plot stuff once it's unlocked. That means not immediately getting distracted and running off to get hit in the head by some other, obligatory, unfolding event (which we also don't do anything serious with, because we get distracted by yet another thing).

We've had main plot stuff slowly but surely suffocate to death like that before. The Western Territory/Thousand Lakes intrigue stuff is the biggest example which immediately leaps to mind. There was a time where it was basically THE big looming plot, ut we only ever got scraps of hints of it and couldn't followup or accidentally flushed our opportunities.

So it just... died. Its shuffling corpse made the summit a few degrées more unwieldy and less coherent, but that's it. We didn't have the foundation to do anything with any of it.

Star stuff will die the same death if it doesn't have room and inertia. It just will.

Btw, we are finally getting some Liminal Carver stuff soon. It's folded into the upcoming Meng geomancy lessons. Part of the reason it took so long is that it got hooked to a narratively rotten art for dubious reasons.
 
AbeoLogos said:
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Honestly, I find this line of argument weird. Yrillar is the writer of this story, not we. If he thought some choices would lead to the death of some important plot point, then he wouldn't offer them. I find the idea of trying to preserve the narrative of the quest from the player's position strange. We don't have such power, whatever choices we make, only QM does.
 
Varder said:
Honestly, I find this line of argument weird. Yrillar is the writer of this story, not we. If he thought some choices would lead to the death of some important plot point, then he wouldn't offer them. I find the idea of trying to preserve the narrative of the quest from the player's position strange. We don't have such power, whatever choices we make, only QM does.
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I mean, that's your prerogative, but just look at how the art votes turned out during the summit. We voted so bad we lost an art cultivation slot, our FFS vote essentially got voided, and it straight up killed SNR. None of those were Yrsillar's game plan headed into the summit, or even those specific votes. Could the vote options have been curated better before we got our grubby paws on them? Sure, but QMs aren't perfect and if we can steer around narrative pitfalls among options we're given, then we should. Why wouldn't we? Quests are cooperative. Both sides of the equation should be trying to make it easy for the other. We all owe a duty of care to the story, imo.

But also, this is a bit besides the point, because we're not even getting the option of beavers pre-war arc. On yrsillar's say-so.

Double also, ironically one of the reasons beavers got delayed so long is yrs had Ling Qi promise Meizhen we'd do the other fief delve, and we were basically paralyzed by not wanting to contradict that, but he also didn't lock it in so we didn't know what to do with the situation. Stuff happens sometimes.
 
Funny things I noticed about the fief:
-If we take out all the income from the Cai clan and the Xia clan's assistance and the wealth that go to Xia Lin, Ling Qi (and the Ling clan), Gan Guangli and Cai Renxiang, the only reason the fief isn't in the red is the income from our road... I guess we make people pay a toll to go to Xin'An ? Or we sell peoples lots of fish as provision for the trip down south.

-the maximum income we can get from our silver mines is 0.45 wealth. that's barely more than half the money we can get from our sheep pasture, which could give us up to 0.8 wealth if they were fully manned. I suspect that is because simply extracting the silver without having an infrastructure to sell it or making money with it is... well, a little useless ? At least it makes the mortals happy.

-there seem to be a heavy implication that the reason we can't develop the Snowblossom temple further without formalizing boat construction is that... Well, about 2/3rd (making numbers up here :D ) of the ritual importance of the temple is invested in the boat-shrine, and we can't make a better one without boat-building infrastructure.

-between the text of our contract with snowblossom and the implications of what's necessary to collect clearwater mist, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up having a very interesting archetype of water/lake/dream cultivator-priests spring out of the pseudo-sacrificial proto-cultivation methods we will develop here, and even if they're bound to be low-ish cultivators (Snowblossom herself is a Cyan spirit, so a cultivation method based on her probably can't help much more), they would be very interesting.(Citing the relevant part of the contract as a reminder, emphasis mine)

yrsillar said:
"First and most greatly, we beg the blessing of Qi, to water the guardians of this place, to grow their strength, to ensure that no strife comes upon the shores of Shenglu. For these we offer our own in return, on three festival nights shall the chosen go out upon your waters and offer the the fruit of their experience, the sharing of memory and triumph and a return of a tithe

Qi grew and multiplied in cultivation, though it would take careful management, it would be possible to ensure that the offering, more complex than her spoken words implies, rippling and buzzing through the waters with values and amounts promised. The rites and proto-cultivation art exercises through which qi would be expelled and returned ritualistically.
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- Rereading that contract, it seems to also imply that should strife reach Snowblossom's shores, it would be a violation on our part... Which means we're unlikely to see Snowblossom fight unless we really mess up, and she might decide to hold us accountable for that.
 
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Varder said:
Honestly, I find this line of argument weird. Yrillar is the writer of this story, not we. If he thought some choices would lead to the death of some important plot point, then he wouldn't offer them.
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Well I mean. There have/has been at least one instance where an important plot was entirely derailed to the bafflement of YRS before. And actually a lot of early Threads could be described as the thread's choices mostly running against the path plotted out for the inner sect. It's a major reason the path we're currently on has led out of the inner sect so early as well as why the war sparked off so much earlier in the timeline than YRS originally planned.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Most of the time the attitude towards this Quest specifically is one of collaborative fiction. Individually we're not any sort of story author, but collectively we're shaping the storyboard by making important (and sometimes just flavorful) plotting choices with regularity.

The specific argument that "if we don't do X now we'll never do it" was brought up for SNR during the summit and that vote killed SNR dead while taking air from thematically resonant arts and opportunities.

I was incredibly surprised with how well that portion of the Summit went despite that, and I'm happy with the way SNR was killed off (not because SNR was killed off, but the way it was killed was good). Still, it did take up space that could've been used for something more relevant.

As for Liminal Carver that's unfortunately just not had space to come up yet. Part of the costs of crunching the Inner Sect plots/narratives and heading to a war and fief immediately is that we just don't have time for training up new capabilities if we're not sure they'll see immediate use. It's a reason that Music has been largely mute (heh).

Unfortunate, but I think Music and Liminal Carver both have hooks to get back into the center of things. I see the creation, maintenance and repair of long term Formations/Talismans being important for multiple Fief and Fief-adjacent-adventures. Music will, of course, have a Flute at the center of things.

As for Beavers, well, I hope they'll be sitting in ~writer's stasis~ till we have time to poke them as a portion of Cloud Tribe War stuff. As part of the fief's lands there's an even lower opportunity that it fades than the trade road in the shadow of the old Li county seat. You wanna talk about fading I mean yeesh
 
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The problem with the Beaver Glacier was both mechanical and narrative. It also extended to the Cathedral of Winds, actually.

I don't remember the details, but when the fief locations were first introuced there was a kind of Exploration Completion bar. That bar was filled by investing actions on a turn in it, and then rolling for it.
Not only that, but boosts could be applied to that roll, and we even got bonuses for exceeding 100%. Or something similar.

So that, naturally, led the thread to try and mix-max those explorations, to get the most out of it. The most clear example was the Cathedral exploration paired with Suyin's investigation.
But Suyin's investigation also occupied a narrative slot, which we only got a finite number each month. Since other narrative avenues took precedence, the Cathedral exploration kept being pushed back, because it wasn't optimal.
It was also further muddled by making it an "adventure with Meizhen after so long".

The Glacier was even more so, because its bar was like 200% or something like that, with different prize tiers at 100, 150 and 200 (inaccurate numbers). As it tends to happens in this kind of situations, and not only on this thread, the search for the most optimal and efficient plan; to spend as few actions out of our limited pool on it, led to it not being advanced at all.
Then the story kept moving forward, and the Summit was upon us.

There was an attempt to advance it by turning it in a Xuan Shi Adventure, but we chose the Liminal travel to the South (which was awesome) because of Summit reasons.

Shu Yue also said that the Glacier could last like a decade without anything major happening, and that leads us to now.

We simply can't poke the space eldritch abomination nest 2 months before we're deployed to war. This isn't a problem we can just poke our head into to check it out and then leave it untouched for half a year (real life or in-story)
 
Therandompers said:
And where, pray tell, did yrsillar say that?
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Couldn't recall where I remembered confirmation from, so I did a search in the discord and found this exchange:
discord said:

Elizabeth, Prince Of Beavers — 2024-06-01 10:38 AM

Yrs when will beavers next be an option

Yrsillar — 2024-06-01 10:39 AM

most likely after the war unfortunately liz

Elizabeth, Prince Of Beavers — 2024-06-01 10:39 AM

Aah no worries

Yrsillar — 2024-06-01 10:39 AM

beaver storyline/starstuff needs room to breath

Elizabeth, Prince Of Beavers — 2024-06-01 10:39 AM

Again I'm not fussed how long it takes to get around to them as long as we pick them at the first possible opportunity
[...]

Elizabeth, Prince Of Beavers — 2024-06-01 10:40 AM

Thanks for the headsup
[...]

Yrsillar — 2024-06-01 10:40 AM

ye, need to clear up this last big narrative debt so I can have a fresh field to start sowing new plot threads
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Therandompers said:
Also, implying that we don't care about the quest is certainly an…interesting thing to say.
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Sorry, this was my bad for not communicating more considerately. "Duty of care" is a term of art which refers to an obligation to take care of something. Like the form in healthcare, daycare, etc. (which incidentally are things that carry a duty of care by the providers to the providees). It doesn't mean to care about something, like on an emotional level, and I didn't mean to imply that anyone here has anything less than genuine love for the story. Not even the wrongvoters (a group I'm not infrequently a part of, after all).

I can see how that bit of jargon could come across as a pretty nasty accusation. I wouldn't make claims about the internal thoughts or feelings of other posters; that's a pet peeve of mine too. Please be assured that wasn't the meaning or intent. Again, my bad, and I'll be more mindful about non-obvious language in the future.
 
Doramas said:
The problem with the Beaver Glacier was both mechanical and narrative. It also extended to the Cathedral of Winds, actually.

I don't remember the details, but when the fief locations were first introuced there was a kind of Exploration Completion bar. That bar was filled by investing actions on a turn in it, and then rolling for it.
Not only that, but boosts could be applied to that roll, and we even got bonuses for exceeding 100%. Or something similar.

So that, naturally, led the thread to try and mix-max those explorations, to get the most out of it. The most clear example was the Cathedral exploration paired with Suyin's investigation.
But Suyin's investigation also occupied a narrative slot, which we only got a finite number each month. Since other narrative avenues took precedence, the Cathedral exploration kept being pushed back, because it wasn't optimal.
It was also further muddled by making it an "adventure with Meizhen after so long".

The Glacier was even more so, because its bar was like 200% or something like that, with different prize tiers at 100, 150 and 200 (inaccurate numbers). As it tends to happens in this kind of situations, and not only on this thread, the search for the most optimal and efficient plan; to spend as few actions out of our limited pool on it, led to it not being advanced at all.
Then the story kept moving forward, and the Summit was upon us.

There was an attempt to advance it by turning it in a Xuan Shi Adventure, but we chose the Liminal travel to the South (which was awesome) because of Summit reasons.

Shu Yue also said that the Glacier could last like a decade without anything major happening, and that leads us to now.

We simply can't poke the space eldritch abomination nest 2 months before we're deployed to war. This isn't a problem we can just poke our head into to check it out and then leave it untouched for half a year (real life or in-story)
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The other thing that gets me about this hurried push is on that last note. Like, this thing has been implied to be pretty fuckin' scary, a notion reinforced by that generous timeframe that was given on poking the bear. This could be a sovereign-level threat, if weakened, no? Let's, uh... Let's wait for Cyan.
 
barty said:
So what I'm hearing is that you didn't rush-order it when you heard GG couldn't refuse a proposed wedding with a Jia ? press X to Doubt /s
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I actually didn't? They're just that fast. I talk a lot about Forge in my other Discords and my friend had just opened commissions for the first time and I've been pulling hella overtime so .... I threw them some cash and a 3d modeled pose I slapped together and some reference pics. Four days later.....you see the results.
 
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