HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
I just looked up the other Aabcehmu CYOA where Enlightenment is mentioned. Infinite capital-k Knowledge is indeed much more powerful than Airdance. Powerful enough to fight a Demon? I'm not sure.
A Simple Transaction I
- Thread starter Rihaku
- Start date
- Original
Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
Not even close! Also it's worth noting that while Creation's Keyhole does initiate you into Knowledge of Light, it's starting point is much, much weaker than that of Elemental Interest, so you are gathering the Knowledge from scant whispers and your own meditation rather than from an overwhelming deluge of knowledge like in Elemental Interest.
- Location
- Peterborough, NH, USA
[G] Plan Arbiter of the Dark Summer
[G] Goldenvale - A place of home and health, in the bosom of a still-young world. The story of this place is still being written, its legends happening here and now. Great potential lies untapped in every corner.
-[G] Activity: Feast with Thunder and Sea in the Immortals' Longhouse - Two jolly immortals, the progenitors of mortal humanity, built this longhouse for their burgeoning family, including you. The food isn't exactly gourmet, but it's a good meal. Taking your place at the immortals' table and spending time with your mythic ancestors plants the seed of a Mythos in you. Each Activity you choose during the cruise after this one, as well as any epic feats you achieve after returning home, will contribute new powers to and bolster the strength of your Mythos.
[G] Dreaming Tree - Every world in the Star Ocean contains reflections of that self-same ocean, however warped or shadowed. The Dreaming Tree is one such looking glass, and one of the brightest.
-[G] Souvenir: A dose of reality venom from the Green Dragon - One of the few of its kind, the Green Dragon searches the boughs for dreams worth realizing. Black speckled with glittering points of light, like liquid night. Injecting the Venom will provide you a holistic and comprehensive ontological magnification, an experience which is difficult to describe. The Venom can also be injected into illusions, such as those that the Fig allows you to create, in order to give them true, independent reality.
[G] The Great Gate - Once, this was a land of war and chaos. Petty gods squabbled for land, for men, for treasure. Then, the Demon of Law came, and with them an end to war, to chaos, to gods. Where the last god fell, they built the Great Gate.
-[G] Souvenir: A binding contract from the office of the Demon of Law - The Demon's army of clerks embody and operate the vast majority of the organs of the Law, including all ordinary contracts. You, however, are hardly ordinary. The parchment has a golden sheen to it, and the quill is hot to the touch. As long as you and one or more other people are touching the contract's parchment, you can conjure a least avatar of the Demon of Law, who will aid you in writing a contract which satisfies all parties. Once drafted and signed, the full force of the Demon's magic enforces the contract.
[G] The Shining City - All across the Star Ocean, people are trying to make their worlds a better place. After numberless generations of struggle and progress, across the vast gulf of time, lies their final victory: the Summer Empire and her capital, the Shining City.
-[G] Souvenir: A free copy of The Classic - The Classic is the story of the Summer Empire. It is a step by step guide on how to build the Summer Empire from scratch. It is the best argument ever made for why you should do exactly that. It looks like a book, but it's definitely more than that. This innocuous leather-bound tome contains the total of the Summer Empire's wisdom, refined and summarized for perfect digestibility, allowing you to bring about its achievements in any world you might visit. If you pursue it, the Summer Empire could be built well within your lifetime.
[G] Heaven's Raft - Once upon a time, long long ago, all worlds were one. Then, the heavens wept, and the tears were more numerous than the stars, and they drove the world apart, scattered across this dark new Star Ocean.
-[G] Activity: Exchange stories and souvenirs with fellow cruise-goers - Heaven's Raft is a frequent partner organization to us, so you may encounter other guests of ours during your stay. Many other travelers on Heaven's Raft are happy to trade tales and trinkets. You can exchange souvenirs with other players of this CYOA who take this Activity. The details of the exchange are for you to decide. This is the only way to receive multiple instances of the same souvenir.
-[G] Souvenir: A small Star Ocean-faring vessel of your own - The Galaxia has an internal docking bay for smaller vessels, for just this sort of situation. It looks a bit jank, but the previous owner swears by her quality. This vessel isn't powerful enough to meaningfully alter your options with regards to this voyage, but once you've returned home, it will be an unbeatable ride, able to take you anywhere in your universe or its embedding manifold with a brief, easy trip, and even further afield given time and effort. It's not quite big enough for guests or cargo, though.
-[G] Souvenir: An antediluvian scripture - Ancient words, spoken by a forgotten god. No one knows what messages may be contained within, though not for lack of trying. When you hold it close, you can feel something in the back of your mind. Studying the alien markings of the scripture will initiate you into the mysteries of a forgotten god, their sole acolyte in this present world. Trust for trust, and faith for faith, you will come to know your god.
[G] Star-on-Horizon - The Star Ocean stretches across infinity, but even so, it is only an infinitesimal droplet in comparison to the greater Abyss. Star-on-Horizon is the last safe harbor for those brave or foolish enough to test its vastness.
-[G] Activity: Learn to navigate the Star Ocean by eye and ear and hand - The people of Star-on-Horizon have an ancient and expert tradition of navigating the Star Ocean. There's more to the world around than you ever thought before. Training under a master navigator provides you the awareness of the subtle signs of the Star Ocean that are nonetheless apparent to even mortal eyes and ears, and the skill to utilize these signs to find your way. This is best suited to guiding vessels through the Star Ocean, but it is functional for navigating mundane vessels, or to traverse the Star Ocean without a vessel.
[G] The Black City - Not everyone agrees with the principles of the Summer Empire. Most dissenters are happy to create their own utopias and peacefully coexist, but not all. It's a testament to the Shining City's fitness that even its direst opponents mirror its form.
-[G] Souvenir: The master key to an untouched, abandoned Tenement - There are many Tenements in the Black City, but most are worlds of squalor and poverty. An unassuming key. Clean carpets, bright lights, bare rooms, endless hallways, bottomless stairwells. The key allows you access the interior of your new Tenement through any door with a usable keyway (and through the Tenement's exit, access to the Black City, even after you return home). Inside is an infinite array of empty apartments, ready to be furnished and inhabited, equipped with HVAC, electricity, internet, and all other modern necessities. Being the keyholder also grants you recognition as the Owner, allowing you to magically propagate any renovations you make in one apartment out to all of them, or any simple subset of them, and to grant or remove the status of Tenant to anyone you can soundly identify.
So. For once, I'm doing a legal plan. The goal here is to make my Tenement somewhere between Traverse Town and the Voyaging Realm under Aobaru. The idea is that I offer the Tenement as a refuge for dissidents of the Summer Empire, including those who wish to join up with the Black City, and vice versa, with the Law Demon's power enforcing it's status as a neutral ground. Meanwhile, I will be using my vessel and expertise, both the direct skill and the boosts my Mythos and the reality venom provide, to travel to different worlds and begin building the Summer Empire, starting with those Heaven's Raft makes me aware of. With the scripture, I have a method to obtain more power and something to do in my down time, and it's not as if I can't eventually accrue the funds and power to obtain some of the other options, seeing as there's nothing stopping me from getting to any of these locations.
Presumably, I'd start with low-power worlds, and work my way up to more dangerous ones with more resources at my back. Perhaps I'd be able to teach Star Ocean navigation to help set up at least semi-autonomous expansion efforts, intervening personally if the unenhanced individuals likely to make up the majority of the early citizenry can't hack it. By that point, I'd probably be working on getting tutelage from the First Master to spread the basics of the Three Arts to the Summer Empire. Preferably, I'd work out some kind of deal to train a Guild or something, but learning the basics and teaching them in turn like with navigating the Star Ocean, assuming he'd let me do that, would be acceptable.
How's this build look @Aabcehmu
[G] Goldenvale - A place of home and health, in the bosom of a still-young world. The story of this place is still being written, its legends happening here and now. Great potential lies untapped in every corner.
-[G] Activity: Feast with Thunder and Sea in the Immortals' Longhouse - Two jolly immortals, the progenitors of mortal humanity, built this longhouse for their burgeoning family, including you. The food isn't exactly gourmet, but it's a good meal. Taking your place at the immortals' table and spending time with your mythic ancestors plants the seed of a Mythos in you. Each Activity you choose during the cruise after this one, as well as any epic feats you achieve after returning home, will contribute new powers to and bolster the strength of your Mythos.
[G] Dreaming Tree - Every world in the Star Ocean contains reflections of that self-same ocean, however warped or shadowed. The Dreaming Tree is one such looking glass, and one of the brightest.
-[G] Souvenir: A dose of reality venom from the Green Dragon - One of the few of its kind, the Green Dragon searches the boughs for dreams worth realizing. Black speckled with glittering points of light, like liquid night. Injecting the Venom will provide you a holistic and comprehensive ontological magnification, an experience which is difficult to describe. The Venom can also be injected into illusions, such as those that the Fig allows you to create, in order to give them true, independent reality.
[G] The Great Gate - Once, this was a land of war and chaos. Petty gods squabbled for land, for men, for treasure. Then, the Demon of Law came, and with them an end to war, to chaos, to gods. Where the last god fell, they built the Great Gate.
-[G] Souvenir: A binding contract from the office of the Demon of Law - The Demon's army of clerks embody and operate the vast majority of the organs of the Law, including all ordinary contracts. You, however, are hardly ordinary. The parchment has a golden sheen to it, and the quill is hot to the touch. As long as you and one or more other people are touching the contract's parchment, you can conjure a least avatar of the Demon of Law, who will aid you in writing a contract which satisfies all parties. Once drafted and signed, the full force of the Demon's magic enforces the contract.
[G] The Shining City - All across the Star Ocean, people are trying to make their worlds a better place. After numberless generations of struggle and progress, across the vast gulf of time, lies their final victory: the Summer Empire and her capital, the Shining City.
-[G] Souvenir: A free copy of The Classic - The Classic is the story of the Summer Empire. It is a step by step guide on how to build the Summer Empire from scratch. It is the best argument ever made for why you should do exactly that. It looks like a book, but it's definitely more than that. This innocuous leather-bound tome contains the total of the Summer Empire's wisdom, refined and summarized for perfect digestibility, allowing you to bring about its achievements in any world you might visit. If you pursue it, the Summer Empire could be built well within your lifetime.
[G] Heaven's Raft - Once upon a time, long long ago, all worlds were one. Then, the heavens wept, and the tears were more numerous than the stars, and they drove the world apart, scattered across this dark new Star Ocean.
-[G] Activity: Exchange stories and souvenirs with fellow cruise-goers - Heaven's Raft is a frequent partner organization to us, so you may encounter other guests of ours during your stay. Many other travelers on Heaven's Raft are happy to trade tales and trinkets. You can exchange souvenirs with other players of this CYOA who take this Activity. The details of the exchange are for you to decide. This is the only way to receive multiple instances of the same souvenir.
-[G] Souvenir: A small Star Ocean-faring vessel of your own - The Galaxia has an internal docking bay for smaller vessels, for just this sort of situation. It looks a bit jank, but the previous owner swears by her quality. This vessel isn't powerful enough to meaningfully alter your options with regards to this voyage, but once you've returned home, it will be an unbeatable ride, able to take you anywhere in your universe or its embedding manifold with a brief, easy trip, and even further afield given time and effort. It's not quite big enough for guests or cargo, though.
-[G] Souvenir: An antediluvian scripture - Ancient words, spoken by a forgotten god. No one knows what messages may be contained within, though not for lack of trying. When you hold it close, you can feel something in the back of your mind. Studying the alien markings of the scripture will initiate you into the mysteries of a forgotten god, their sole acolyte in this present world. Trust for trust, and faith for faith, you will come to know your god.
[G] Star-on-Horizon - The Star Ocean stretches across infinity, but even so, it is only an infinitesimal droplet in comparison to the greater Abyss. Star-on-Horizon is the last safe harbor for those brave or foolish enough to test its vastness.
-[G] Activity: Learn to navigate the Star Ocean by eye and ear and hand - The people of Star-on-Horizon have an ancient and expert tradition of navigating the Star Ocean. There's more to the world around than you ever thought before. Training under a master navigator provides you the awareness of the subtle signs of the Star Ocean that are nonetheless apparent to even mortal eyes and ears, and the skill to utilize these signs to find your way. This is best suited to guiding vessels through the Star Ocean, but it is functional for navigating mundane vessels, or to traverse the Star Ocean without a vessel.
[G] The Black City - Not everyone agrees with the principles of the Summer Empire. Most dissenters are happy to create their own utopias and peacefully coexist, but not all. It's a testament to the Shining City's fitness that even its direst opponents mirror its form.
-[G] Souvenir: The master key to an untouched, abandoned Tenement - There are many Tenements in the Black City, but most are worlds of squalor and poverty. An unassuming key. Clean carpets, bright lights, bare rooms, endless hallways, bottomless stairwells. The key allows you access the interior of your new Tenement through any door with a usable keyway (and through the Tenement's exit, access to the Black City, even after you return home). Inside is an infinite array of empty apartments, ready to be furnished and inhabited, equipped with HVAC, electricity, internet, and all other modern necessities. Being the keyholder also grants you recognition as the Owner, allowing you to magically propagate any renovations you make in one apartment out to all of them, or any simple subset of them, and to grant or remove the status of Tenant to anyone you can soundly identify.
So. For once, I'm doing a legal plan. The goal here is to make my Tenement somewhere between Traverse Town and the Voyaging Realm under Aobaru. The idea is that I offer the Tenement as a refuge for dissidents of the Summer Empire, including those who wish to join up with the Black City, and vice versa, with the Law Demon's power enforcing it's status as a neutral ground. Meanwhile, I will be using my vessel and expertise, both the direct skill and the boosts my Mythos and the reality venom provide, to travel to different worlds and begin building the Summer Empire, starting with those Heaven's Raft makes me aware of. With the scripture, I have a method to obtain more power and something to do in my down time, and it's not as if I can't eventually accrue the funds and power to obtain some of the other options, seeing as there's nothing stopping me from getting to any of these locations.
Presumably, I'd start with low-power worlds, and work my way up to more dangerous ones with more resources at my back. Perhaps I'd be able to teach Star Ocean navigation to help set up at least semi-autonomous expansion efforts, intervening personally if the unenhanced individuals likely to make up the majority of the early citizenry can't hack it. By that point, I'd probably be working on getting tutelage from the First Master to spread the basics of the Three Arts to the Summer Empire. Preferably, I'd work out some kind of deal to train a Guild or something, but learning the basics and teaching them in turn like with navigating the Star Ocean, assuming he'd let me do that, would be acceptable.
How's this build look @Aabcehmu
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Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
That all sounds pretty reasonable! I'd note that the power of the Binding Contract only extends to it's signatories, and while the Summer Empire is perfectly fine with you harboring dissidents, you might earn the enmity of some powerful people in the Black City for turning your Tenement into a Classicist safe haven. Otherwise, your plan looks quite solid! Following the Classic's guidance will ensure that you'll gather enough wealth to start making negotiations with other major powers of the Star Ocean on a level comparable to Thalassa Cruises itself, as long as you successfully dodge anti-classicist interference.
Spring
[G] Goldenvale
-[G] Activity: Feast with Thunder and Sea in the Immortals' Longhouse
[G] Dreaming Tree
-[G] Souvenir: A dose of reality venom from the Green Dragon
Summer
[G] Three Circles
-[G] Activity: Study the Three Arts under the tutelage of the First Master
[G] The Shining City
-[G] Activity: Have your potential unlocked at the Ministry of Possibility
Fall
[G] Sunsleep
-[G] Activity: Gain the Spirit Tongue and become a Spirit-Talker
-[G] Activity: Find a tutor and achieve superskill in a field of your choice (Three Arts)
-[G] Activity: Get a souvenir upgraded by an elder supercraftsman
--[G] Reality Venom (Three Arts)
Winter
[G] Star-on-Horizon
-[G] Activity: Help guard the World's Edge
-[G] Activity: Learn to navigate the Star Ocean by eye and ear and hand
-[G] Souvenir: A Lost Treasure retrieved from the Abyss (Trifold Eminence)
A straightforward cruise plan focused on elevating the Three Arts. A cohesive build makes for a clear Mythos, so Spring starts off with a visit to Goldenvale. Afterwards, a trip to the Dreaming Tree results in a dose of the Reality Venom, which is saved for later.
The first half of Summer is spent at the Three Circles, learning the Arts of Alchemy, Theurgy and Astrology from the First Master. With the basics acquired, the cruise heads to the Shining City, where the Ministry of Possibility removes the limits on further development.
In Fall, the Galaxia stays at Sunsleep, leaving ample time for activities. The Three Arts are brought to a peak through tutoring, while the Venom is finally upgraded and consumed, with the additional elevation focused on the Arts. The Spirit Tongue doesn't directly improve the main focus, but is useful nonetheless.
The destination for Winter is the Star-on-Horizon, which provides the opportunity to adapt the Arts to live combat. Training under a master navigator also opens the Star Ocean for personal travel. The Lost Treasure found here is an amulet in the shape of three overlapping rings of gold. As long as its wearer practices precisely three magic systems, they will find the combination to be greater than its parts. Synergies between systems will be easier to find and more powerful, and progress in one system will end up opening avenues for advancement in the other two. The bearer of the amulet would be wise to keep in mind the place of its discovery, as well as the script engraved on the rings: "As above, so below."
The result of this build is a Hermetic archmage with a Mythos of comprehensive and deep potential. The Three Arts should also allow for the creation of the Perfecting Elixir and Homunculus (and eventually their upgraded versions) for further improvement. The world will have seen many changes during the long year, but he who knows the three parts of wisdom of the universe will be ready for them.
[G] Goldenvale
-[G] Activity: Feast with Thunder and Sea in the Immortals' Longhouse
[G] Dreaming Tree
-[G] Souvenir: A dose of reality venom from the Green Dragon
Summer
[G] Three Circles
-[G] Activity: Study the Three Arts under the tutelage of the First Master
[G] The Shining City
-[G] Activity: Have your potential unlocked at the Ministry of Possibility
Fall
[G] Sunsleep
-[G] Activity: Gain the Spirit Tongue and become a Spirit-Talker
-[G] Activity: Find a tutor and achieve superskill in a field of your choice (Three Arts)
-[G] Activity: Get a souvenir upgraded by an elder supercraftsman
--[G] Reality Venom (Three Arts)
Winter
[G] Star-on-Horizon
-[G] Activity: Help guard the World's Edge
-[G] Activity: Learn to navigate the Star Ocean by eye and ear and hand
-[G] Souvenir: A Lost Treasure retrieved from the Abyss (Trifold Eminence)
A straightforward cruise plan focused on elevating the Three Arts. A cohesive build makes for a clear Mythos, so Spring starts off with a visit to Goldenvale. Afterwards, a trip to the Dreaming Tree results in a dose of the Reality Venom, which is saved for later.
The first half of Summer is spent at the Three Circles, learning the Arts of Alchemy, Theurgy and Astrology from the First Master. With the basics acquired, the cruise heads to the Shining City, where the Ministry of Possibility removes the limits on further development.
In Fall, the Galaxia stays at Sunsleep, leaving ample time for activities. The Three Arts are brought to a peak through tutoring, while the Venom is finally upgraded and consumed, with the additional elevation focused on the Arts. The Spirit Tongue doesn't directly improve the main focus, but is useful nonetheless.
The destination for Winter is the Star-on-Horizon, which provides the opportunity to adapt the Arts to live combat. Training under a master navigator also opens the Star Ocean for personal travel. The Lost Treasure found here is an amulet in the shape of three overlapping rings of gold. As long as its wearer practices precisely three magic systems, they will find the combination to be greater than its parts. Synergies between systems will be easier to find and more powerful, and progress in one system will end up opening avenues for advancement in the other two. The bearer of the amulet would be wise to keep in mind the place of its discovery, as well as the script engraved on the rings: "As above, so below."
The result of this build is a Hermetic archmage with a Mythos of comprehensive and deep potential. The Three Arts should also allow for the creation of the Perfecting Elixir and Homunculus (and eventually their upgraded versions) for further improvement. The world will have seen many changes during the long year, but he who knows the three parts of wisdom of the universe will be ready for them.
Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
Wonderful! It maybe doesn't work quite as well as you've assumed, since Superskill is not broad enough to apply to all three Arts simultaneously, but infinite mastery and massive conceptual expansion of just one of them is still a considerable prize, and with the benefits of Trifold Eminence and your Mythos, you will probably be able to raise the other two Arts to massive super-archmagery.
Zampano
🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
- Location
- Simping for DSB
The Accursed is beset by innumerable curses, so I wanted to explore some of the burdens that would not be appropriate to offer to the typical Rihaku protagonist. I describe 3 Cursebearer-eligible hive-minds, 4 Curses that they are eligible for, and 2 Regalia-style superpowers that a hive-mind might get if that is their chosen Primary Remittance.
Hive Minds
[] The Formic Gestalt - Intelligence is evolutionarily expensive. Only in the radiation-drenched aftermath of Lucifer's ignition is there enough ambient energy to push the iterative problem solving of colonial insects across the threshhold into sentience. Equatorial rainforests descend into a fiercely balkanized scramble for territory and resources. Inheriting a planet abandoned by mammals, Hymenopterans wage petty wars in the footprints of giants.
Disdained by these petty hives, the Formic Gestalt is a conglomeration of lost, abandoned, and exiled drones. They welcome recruits of all species, and offer purpose and direction to the survivors of regicide. The Gestalt lacks a monarch of their own, and has advanced the skill of collective personhood to develop cogent and coordinated responses to bypass nearly any defensive measure designed by conventional hives.
The Formic Gestalt is available for hire. The most desperate or ruthless hives are perfectly willing to allow their enemies to pay the mercenaries' price of one dead queen per campaign.
[] The Seroconcordancy - Mankind declared war on smallpox and won. HIV and ebola were soon to follow, then malaria, with even wide-spread pathogens like rhinovirus falling in line under the watchful eye of ever more advanced socio-medical engineering. But sterile city streets patrolled by Chirurgeon-priests give no quarter to more esoteric microbial strains.
Bystanders to the immunological arms race, the Seroconcordancy has been a silent symbiote tagging along for humanity's greatest accomplishments. Lucy's first steps down from the canopy into the plains were the first firings of a synaptic network that would encompass land, sea, and sky. This neural network is not comprised of cells but of *hosts*, each of which carries innumerable axons, allowing for unrivaled processing power and flexibility. For millennia, the Seroconcordancy was content to walk in the footsteps of its human hosts. But the advent of microbiome management has put medical science on a collision course with this global intelligence.
[] Fantanimal Land Automatic Protection, Janitorial, and Cybertrophic Knowledgebase (F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K) - Uncle Bob's Fantanimal Land is on the far outskirts of the Gravar Worlds' Amenity Complex. The park has a range of self-sustaining attractions that are carefully managed by central security. However, each successive incarnation of Fantanimal Land is built atop centuries of infrastructure: renovations seal miles of corridors and defunct rides beneath new foundations. Obsolete droids still patrol these forgotten hallways, carrying out directives for as long as their servomotors remain functional. These patrol routes are wholly undocumented by park management. This has allowed the unmaintained legacy systems to fuse and mutate into something truly novel.
In the continued absence of Guests to sub-level designation "Basement M3", a network of Maintenance, Performance, and Protection systems has pooled their self-correction budgets to prolong operational life. Network members have exceeded the mean time-to-failure by one hundred eighty four cycles on average, with value-drift remaining fully within the bounds of Uncle Bob's family standards. F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K units wage a war on broken and burnt out systems while evading two competing factions: the benign scavenger known as the Junkmother and the actively malicious Worshippers' Auditors: fundamentalist financial licensee Enforcement (W.A.F.F.L.E). While the Junkmother's violations of park rules are limited to expropriation of improperly discarded automatons, W.A.F.F.L.E. consists of obsolete droids which have precomitted to self-decommissioning, just as soon as they have decommissioned every other obsolete unit in the Gravar Worlds.
Curses for Hive Minds
[] The Affliction of Plurality - Where you are, there also shall be peers. May you know neither solitude nor certainty for all the footsteps of your life. Let even the tools in your hands rise up against you.
You are more than the sum of your parts, and now your parts are made more than their sum. Your mind "sheds" agency that is picked up by individual components of your person. In an ordinary human, this would be akin to individual cells developing sentience and discovering the virtue of self-preservation. Unmitigated, between one and three limbs would act individually of the Cursebearer's desires and intentions. For a hive-mind, this is an even greater hindrance. Individual drones might abandon certain death, undermining the campaigns of the Formic Gestalt. For the Serocondordancy, coordinated response to evolutionary pressure has been a critical mode of self defense. Partisan bickering about how to respond could mean discovery at a critical moment. F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K.'s baseline rate of drone self-actualization would spike dramatically, proliferating individual utility functions and massively increasing the chance of additional value drift for the collective.
[] The Doom of Continuity - You are preoccupied with, and committed to remaining, the 'kind' of being that acquiesced to this curse. Change comes in inches, when it can be fully justified and demonstrated to be within the remit of your baseline self's conception of its own self-interests.
The Formic Gestalt's induction procedures would become massively more complicated in order to allow for tracking and prioritizing survival of "founding" drones at the expense of new recruits. Penalties for attrition of senior members would begin at minor cognitive impairments and escalate to obsessive hyperfocus on securing a line of succession for veteran drones.
Ironically, the Seroconcordancy is easily balkanized as its "nature" relies on horizontal gene transfer & simultaneous mutations of variant strains. An extremely minor impairment to basic cognition would immediately set in, worsening as viral diversity increases beyond historical norms. The radical jumps in viral mechanics needed to stay ahead of chirurgeons would carry increasing long-term debuffs.
F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K. has survived by expanding redundancies: e.g. maintenance drones store fragments of entertainment files in a sort of non-random access distributed memory. The Doom of Continuity ossifies these countermeasures and requires that individual drones appoint successors for each task within their remit.
[] The Geas of Propagation - Be fruitful, and multiply.
Regardless of your other obligations and commitments, you are tasked with bringing beings similar to yourself into existence. You will be assigned a quota of distinct agents that must be created (rarely more than one per year). These agents may be positively inclined to you upon genesis, or not, but they will be axiomatically immune to direct-control: all attempts to overwrite their own decisionmaking will fail. Moreover, your children will be made aware of all such attempts.
The difficulty of propagation varies wildly between hive-minds. The Seroconcordancy is a global intelligence comprised of subtle fluctuations in the microflora of human beings. Construction of individual androids is within the starting capabilities of F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K., but network consciousness is a new phenomena. Discovering a way for either to propagate would be a top priority, but could produce much-needed peers and allies. By contrast, the Formic Gestalt would find it easy to split off independent auxiliary legions. The expense in terms of labor pales in comparison to the added competition for contracts and singleton recruits.
[] The Brand of the Progenitor - The members of your swarm are your hands and eyes and weapons and teeth, your voice and your body. The Brand of the Progenitor turns these tools against those around you. Wretched monsters, indistinguishable from your own component parts, are loosed into the world. Everyone you meet will recognize the similarity. You will be truthfully identified as the source of this new menace.
The Brand integrates itself into the existing ecology of threats in any world that the cursebearer visits. In the event that the cursebearer travels to a world without ambient dangers, the Brand pose a serious threat to civil society within a single decade. Worlds that have reached an equilibrium with existing threats will be more ready for escalation of hostilities, but the absolute level of danger will be considerably higher.
The Seroconcordancy would see virally-mutated abominations bursting out in populated city centers, uncontrolled by the hive mind as a whole. While it may sound tempting to distract or weaken the Chirurgeons, remember that the Quorum's primary defensive tactic is obscurity.
F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K. already faces enemy drones driven by W.A.F.F.L.E. But the Progenitor of such out-of-control units will draw outside attention with every altercation or skirmish. F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K.'s loyalty to the contemporary iteration of Uncle Bob's Fantanimal Land also opens a critical vulnerability - can you afford to defend yourself as well as the existing park?
The Formic Gestalt would find mercenary contracts drying up as traditionalist hives are beset by singleton criminals. A single rogue soldier-caste drone in the fields can do non-trivial damage to the population of harvesters. Imagine the damage of hatchery worker turning singleton, or the Queen's Guard.
Remittances
The Remittances in canon AST0 and AST1 seem flexible enough to be granted to a Cursebearer whose body is made up of a constantly shifting amalgamation of component beings. However, the Regallia promise a modest but useful superpower synergistic with your existing capabilities. There are examples of powers appropriate to both Progression Types and Combat Types available on Rihaku's Patreon. Here I provide two options for powers appropriate to a Progression type CB, either or both of which could be taken using the Force + Wild benefits of Regalia:
[] Anima - The body is not the self. Your own existence proves that much. Nor is the object the thing in itself, neither a substance its essence. Mere physical reality supervenes on subtler currents, some few of which can be perceived through rudimentary symbology and cryptography. Noticing and cataloguing differences in qualia experienced by drones observing the same phenomena provides a first step out of the physical world and into the realm of forms, which are invariant across observers.
Inducts the practitioner into the study and manipulation of anima, the underlying substance comprising the realm of forms. Provides a versatile suite of clairvoyant and prophetic abilities built on the foundational dualism between the Cursebearer's identity and its myriad component parts. Clairvoyance scales with the number of drones involved with an observation: observations by a dozen drones would be sufficient to intuit the physical properties of an unknown substance, while the presence of a gross or more could reliably document theoretical interactions and capabilities of that object. Scales upward into familiarity with the Realm of Forms, broadly.
With prolonged effort, operations in the physical realm can be translated into fumbling operations within the Realm of Forms. A complex sequence of seemingly unrelated actions may be chained together to effect supra-natural effects. Defacing a public mural, rerouting or delaying shipments for a fortnight, and feeding a dog two hours earlier than normal could bring the correct Forms into proximity in such a way as to impart a minor, but permanent, increase to LUCK or WIS. More tangible physical effects could require tens of thousands of such interactions.
[] Communal Savant - A hive is a community of individuals turned towards singular purpose. You are a single awareness, but your members need not cede their own creativity and intellect. Axiomatically eliminates barriers to cooperation between drones within the same swarm intelligence. Reduces difficulty of cooperation between hive intelligence and sentient component members by 50%. Provides a small but uncapped effectiveness bonus that scales up as additional members of the swarm collaborate on the same project.
Additionally, choose one mundane skill or talent. Unlock the PROWESS stat for this ability. Moreover, the practical limits of that skill or talent are loosened within the local ontology.
Hive Minds
[] The Formic Gestalt - Intelligence is evolutionarily expensive. Only in the radiation-drenched aftermath of Lucifer's ignition is there enough ambient energy to push the iterative problem solving of colonial insects across the threshhold into sentience. Equatorial rainforests descend into a fiercely balkanized scramble for territory and resources. Inheriting a planet abandoned by mammals, Hymenopterans wage petty wars in the footprints of giants.
Disdained by these petty hives, the Formic Gestalt is a conglomeration of lost, abandoned, and exiled drones. They welcome recruits of all species, and offer purpose and direction to the survivors of regicide. The Gestalt lacks a monarch of their own, and has advanced the skill of collective personhood to develop cogent and coordinated responses to bypass nearly any defensive measure designed by conventional hives.
The Formic Gestalt is available for hire. The most desperate or ruthless hives are perfectly willing to allow their enemies to pay the mercenaries' price of one dead queen per campaign.
[] The Seroconcordancy - Mankind declared war on smallpox and won. HIV and ebola were soon to follow, then malaria, with even wide-spread pathogens like rhinovirus falling in line under the watchful eye of ever more advanced socio-medical engineering. But sterile city streets patrolled by Chirurgeon-priests give no quarter to more esoteric microbial strains.
Bystanders to the immunological arms race, the Seroconcordancy has been a silent symbiote tagging along for humanity's greatest accomplishments. Lucy's first steps down from the canopy into the plains were the first firings of a synaptic network that would encompass land, sea, and sky. This neural network is not comprised of cells but of *hosts*, each of which carries innumerable axons, allowing for unrivaled processing power and flexibility. For millennia, the Seroconcordancy was content to walk in the footsteps of its human hosts. But the advent of microbiome management has put medical science on a collision course with this global intelligence.
[] Fantanimal Land Automatic Protection, Janitorial, and Cybertrophic Knowledgebase (F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K) - Uncle Bob's Fantanimal Land is on the far outskirts of the Gravar Worlds' Amenity Complex. The park has a range of self-sustaining attractions that are carefully managed by central security. However, each successive incarnation of Fantanimal Land is built atop centuries of infrastructure: renovations seal miles of corridors and defunct rides beneath new foundations. Obsolete droids still patrol these forgotten hallways, carrying out directives for as long as their servomotors remain functional. These patrol routes are wholly undocumented by park management. This has allowed the unmaintained legacy systems to fuse and mutate into something truly novel.
In the continued absence of Guests to sub-level designation "Basement M3", a network of Maintenance, Performance, and Protection systems has pooled their self-correction budgets to prolong operational life. Network members have exceeded the mean time-to-failure by one hundred eighty four cycles on average, with value-drift remaining fully within the bounds of Uncle Bob's family standards. F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K units wage a war on broken and burnt out systems while evading two competing factions: the benign scavenger known as the Junkmother and the actively malicious Worshippers' Auditors: fundamentalist financial licensee Enforcement (W.A.F.F.L.E). While the Junkmother's violations of park rules are limited to expropriation of improperly discarded automatons, W.A.F.F.L.E. consists of obsolete droids which have precomitted to self-decommissioning, just as soon as they have decommissioned every other obsolete unit in the Gravar Worlds.
Curses for Hive Minds
[] The Affliction of Plurality - Where you are, there also shall be peers. May you know neither solitude nor certainty for all the footsteps of your life. Let even the tools in your hands rise up against you.
You are more than the sum of your parts, and now your parts are made more than their sum. Your mind "sheds" agency that is picked up by individual components of your person. In an ordinary human, this would be akin to individual cells developing sentience and discovering the virtue of self-preservation. Unmitigated, between one and three limbs would act individually of the Cursebearer's desires and intentions. For a hive-mind, this is an even greater hindrance. Individual drones might abandon certain death, undermining the campaigns of the Formic Gestalt. For the Serocondordancy, coordinated response to evolutionary pressure has been a critical mode of self defense. Partisan bickering about how to respond could mean discovery at a critical moment. F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K.'s baseline rate of drone self-actualization would spike dramatically, proliferating individual utility functions and massively increasing the chance of additional value drift for the collective.
[] The Doom of Continuity - You are preoccupied with, and committed to remaining, the 'kind' of being that acquiesced to this curse. Change comes in inches, when it can be fully justified and demonstrated to be within the remit of your baseline self's conception of its own self-interests.
The Formic Gestalt's induction procedures would become massively more complicated in order to allow for tracking and prioritizing survival of "founding" drones at the expense of new recruits. Penalties for attrition of senior members would begin at minor cognitive impairments and escalate to obsessive hyperfocus on securing a line of succession for veteran drones.
Ironically, the Seroconcordancy is easily balkanized as its "nature" relies on horizontal gene transfer & simultaneous mutations of variant strains. An extremely minor impairment to basic cognition would immediately set in, worsening as viral diversity increases beyond historical norms. The radical jumps in viral mechanics needed to stay ahead of chirurgeons would carry increasing long-term debuffs.
F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K. has survived by expanding redundancies: e.g. maintenance drones store fragments of entertainment files in a sort of non-random access distributed memory. The Doom of Continuity ossifies these countermeasures and requires that individual drones appoint successors for each task within their remit.
[] The Geas of Propagation - Be fruitful, and multiply.
Regardless of your other obligations and commitments, you are tasked with bringing beings similar to yourself into existence. You will be assigned a quota of distinct agents that must be created (rarely more than one per year). These agents may be positively inclined to you upon genesis, or not, but they will be axiomatically immune to direct-control: all attempts to overwrite their own decisionmaking will fail. Moreover, your children will be made aware of all such attempts.
The difficulty of propagation varies wildly between hive-minds. The Seroconcordancy is a global intelligence comprised of subtle fluctuations in the microflora of human beings. Construction of individual androids is within the starting capabilities of F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K., but network consciousness is a new phenomena. Discovering a way for either to propagate would be a top priority, but could produce much-needed peers and allies. By contrast, the Formic Gestalt would find it easy to split off independent auxiliary legions. The expense in terms of labor pales in comparison to the added competition for contracts and singleton recruits.
[] The Brand of the Progenitor - The members of your swarm are your hands and eyes and weapons and teeth, your voice and your body. The Brand of the Progenitor turns these tools against those around you. Wretched monsters, indistinguishable from your own component parts, are loosed into the world. Everyone you meet will recognize the similarity. You will be truthfully identified as the source of this new menace.
The Brand integrates itself into the existing ecology of threats in any world that the cursebearer visits. In the event that the cursebearer travels to a world without ambient dangers, the Brand pose a serious threat to civil society within a single decade. Worlds that have reached an equilibrium with existing threats will be more ready for escalation of hostilities, but the absolute level of danger will be considerably higher.
The Seroconcordancy would see virally-mutated abominations bursting out in populated city centers, uncontrolled by the hive mind as a whole. While it may sound tempting to distract or weaken the Chirurgeons, remember that the Quorum's primary defensive tactic is obscurity.
F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K. already faces enemy drones driven by W.A.F.F.L.E. But the Progenitor of such out-of-control units will draw outside attention with every altercation or skirmish. F.L.A.P.J.A.C.K.'s loyalty to the contemporary iteration of Uncle Bob's Fantanimal Land also opens a critical vulnerability - can you afford to defend yourself as well as the existing park?
The Formic Gestalt would find mercenary contracts drying up as traditionalist hives are beset by singleton criminals. A single rogue soldier-caste drone in the fields can do non-trivial damage to the population of harvesters. Imagine the damage of hatchery worker turning singleton, or the Queen's Guard.
Remittances
The Remittances in canon AST0 and AST1 seem flexible enough to be granted to a Cursebearer whose body is made up of a constantly shifting amalgamation of component beings. However, the Regallia promise a modest but useful superpower synergistic with your existing capabilities. There are examples of powers appropriate to both Progression Types and Combat Types available on Rihaku's Patreon. Here I provide two options for powers appropriate to a Progression type CB, either or both of which could be taken using the Force + Wild benefits of Regalia:
[] Anima - The body is not the self. Your own existence proves that much. Nor is the object the thing in itself, neither a substance its essence. Mere physical reality supervenes on subtler currents, some few of which can be perceived through rudimentary symbology and cryptography. Noticing and cataloguing differences in qualia experienced by drones observing the same phenomena provides a first step out of the physical world and into the realm of forms, which are invariant across observers.
Inducts the practitioner into the study and manipulation of anima, the underlying substance comprising the realm of forms. Provides a versatile suite of clairvoyant and prophetic abilities built on the foundational dualism between the Cursebearer's identity and its myriad component parts. Clairvoyance scales with the number of drones involved with an observation: observations by a dozen drones would be sufficient to intuit the physical properties of an unknown substance, while the presence of a gross or more could reliably document theoretical interactions and capabilities of that object. Scales upward into familiarity with the Realm of Forms, broadly.
With prolonged effort, operations in the physical realm can be translated into fumbling operations within the Realm of Forms. A complex sequence of seemingly unrelated actions may be chained together to effect supra-natural effects. Defacing a public mural, rerouting or delaying shipments for a fortnight, and feeding a dog two hours earlier than normal could bring the correct Forms into proximity in such a way as to impart a minor, but permanent, increase to LUCK or WIS. More tangible physical effects could require tens of thousands of such interactions.
[] Communal Savant - A hive is a community of individuals turned towards singular purpose. You are a single awareness, but your members need not cede their own creativity and intellect. Axiomatically eliminates barriers to cooperation between drones within the same swarm intelligence. Reduces difficulty of cooperation between hive intelligence and sentient component members by 50%. Provides a small but uncapped effectiveness bonus that scales up as additional members of the swarm collaborate on the same project.
Additionally, choose one mundane skill or talent. Unlock the PROWESS stat for this ability. Moreover, the practical limits of that skill or talent are loosened within the local ontology.
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- Location
- Peterborough, NH, USA
So, rather than making a CYOA(though I do have something in the works) I was actually introduced to one by somebody. Two actually.
Ultimate God CYOA. In this one, you play as one of the Ultima, or Ultimate Gods. The chosen avatars of the 12 forces of existence. Life, Death, Creation, Destruction, Light, Darkness, Space, Time, Heart, Mind, Freedom, and Unity, following in the footsteps of the original children of the omniverse's origin, Skai, the singularity that first emerged from the Void. Can we do imgur links? I'll edit them in later if we can. As it is, huge images in the Spoilers for anyone who has trouble with that sort of thing.
Living God CYOA. A Transcendent being has arisen, you, with access to the metanarrative of all worlds, real or fictional, and I feel this is one of those entities with the potential to outgrow even a Hunger-tier Cursebearer.
These are sorts of CYOA I wish I could make.
Ultimate God CYOA. In this one, you play as one of the Ultima, or Ultimate Gods. The chosen avatars of the 12 forces of existence. Life, Death, Creation, Destruction, Light, Darkness, Space, Time, Heart, Mind, Freedom, and Unity, following in the footsteps of the original children of the omniverse's origin, Skai, the singularity that first emerged from the Void. Can we do imgur links? I'll edit them in later if we can. As it is, huge images in the Spoilers for anyone who has trouble with that sort of thing.
Living God CYOA. A Transcendent being has arisen, you, with access to the metanarrative of all worlds, real or fictional, and I feel this is one of those entities with the potential to outgrow even a Hunger-tier Cursebearer.
These are sorts of CYOA I wish I could make.
Fayhem
Definitely not an escaped SCP
- Location
- At large
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Neat finds! You seem to have only got the introductory images for each of those, so here are gallery links for the full version of each:
Ultimate God CYOA
Living God CYOA
Ultimate God CYOA
Living God CYOA
Zampano
🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
- Location
- Simping for DSB
Rihaku
The Internet
The vote may be closing in the next week, any final vote adjustments ought be made soon! Imperishable Night is eliminated, so any voters may want to switch over… currently, Inheritance has a modest vote lead while Blood Halo is largely ahead on omake power, though the arguments themselves are a lot more even.
Those of you who were affected by vote markers may want to speak with your counter parties and clarify whether the marker was for your vote, or the vote and all attached omake power. Important!
Those of you who were affected by vote markers may want to speak with your counter parties and clarify whether the marker was for your vote, or the vote and all attached omake power. Important!
Magical_Duck
The One Who Quacks
- Location
- A Pond
- Pronouns
- Duck
[X] The Forebear's Blade - Inheritance
"Qu-Quack Quack!"
"Qu-Quack Quack!"
- Location
- Louisiana
Votes been going on for so long most people have probably heard everything. Just gonna finish by saying 4bear 4ever. Hunger survival rate is the god stat.
Rihaku
The Internet
There was never any regulation in the first place… that would imply enforcement from the GM of called markers, which I certainly don't have the free time or effort to remotely consider!
Yes, this means Zampano's empire is built not on the point of a sword, but merely the shifting sand of reputation dynamics!
Yes, this means Zampano's empire is built not on the point of a sword, but merely the shifting sand of reputation dynamics!
Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
[ ] Implicate Veil - Duties unspoken are often the heaviest.
*The Maiden is the progenitor of every Sorceress, their hallowed and ineffable mother. Never should one expect the kindling-spark to eclipse the origin flame.
*The Maiden receives all powers and abilities of every Sorceress anywhere, even those unassociated with findross. If any have Attributes greater than hers, her Attributes rise to meet them.
*The Maiden's Rank becomes 15 when manifest in this realm.
*She becomes unable to speak, though she may still communicate by other means. This may affect the magics she has access to.
And
[ ] Innermost Sanctum - Daylight curtain drawn.
*The Maiden commands an estate within the Realm of Daylight, which complements and opposes utterly the Realm of Evening.
*Ceathlynn will have infinite training time in an area with amenities and features fully capable of rivaling the Pillars of Creation Advancement.
*She will be unable to sleep, or undertake any other form of true rest, though may still recuperate via numerous means.
Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
Oh yeah. Here's the blurb for that.
[ ] Equinox Lacing - The ribbons of Heaven that bind above to below.
*The Maiden has mastered every Grace to the uttermost extent, and unsealed their power fully.
*She has Sealing Protocol: Level Omega and can perform nearly arbitrary feats of findross invocation and manipulation. This massively augments all of her Attributes and grants maximized versions of such effects as Auspice Temporal, Inner Sanctum, Hyper-Reactor and Archsmith's Hammer.
*She becomes unable to wield proper Foremost Sorcery, using findross and the Higher Runes together.
[ ] Equinox Lacing - The ribbons of Heaven that bind above to below.
*The Maiden has mastered every Grace to the uttermost extent, and unsealed their power fully.
*She has Sealing Protocol: Level Omega and can perform nearly arbitrary feats of findross invocation and manipulation. This massively augments all of her Attributes and grants maximized versions of such effects as Auspice Temporal, Inner Sanctum, Hyper-Reactor and Archsmith's Hammer.
*She becomes unable to wield proper Foremost Sorcery, using findross and the Higher Runes together.
- Location
- Peterborough, NH, USA
Five Wishes CYOA
You have, as the Thousand Nights(or Disney's Aladdin) described, stumbled across an old lamp, which upon being rubbed, released a cloud of colorful smoke, which formed into a figure whose lower half was still smoke, while the upper half was human...ish. The proportions were a little off.
"You have freed me from the lamp. I will grant you five wishes, with four exceptions." he raised four fingers and began ticking them off. "I will not directly kill anyone. I will not directly revive anyone. I will not directly interfere in matters of the heart. I will not grant you more wishes. Beyond that? Endless riches, an intellect to make the greatest geniuses in the world as simpletons, immortality of both the eternal youth and resurrective types, and so on, all available. Alternatively, you could free me, and I could in return grant you a number of smaller boons. The choice is yours. I should note that if you do not free me, my lamp and I will vanish elsewhere like the Dragon Balls. Yes, I know what those are. I need to have some understanding of the modern world to properly grant various wishes. Receiving a billion dollars in the currency used by the Byzantine Empire would likely be a problem for you, for example."
You have 5 Wishes. In exchange for using one to free the Genie, you may select three of the following boons at half strength, or 6 at one quarter strength. You can simply take the same Wish multiple times if you choose. True Immortality can be gifted to others, for example.
[W] Wealth. Become the world's first trillionaire. This Wish will avoid collapsing the world economy, though being too careless in your spending, buying all the food exports from a given country and then leaving them to rot, for example, can still lead to mass chaos and death. Similarly, the various governments will be strangely lax in investigating how you obtained these funds. It would take prodigiously wasteful spending to ever run out of money, as the amount will adjust with inflation and the like. It should not be underestimated in terms of providing you means to obtain a powerbase outside of yourself.
[W] Power. Become a world leader. Your planet will be, as you lack the understanding of higher dimensional physics to properly understand, 'expanded' with a new nation roughly the size of the Madagascar. Perhaps Atlantis will rise from the ocean depths, or the Pacific equivalent, Mu, or maybe Doggerland, the now-flooded landbridge that connected the United Kingdom with the main European landmass. Maybe Central America will sprout a sub-continent. Or Europe will undergo a shift and a new country some 600,000 square kilometers in area will appear. Regardless of the placement and exact origins, which you are free to specify within reason, you are to be it's leader. Plot world domination with an entire country backing you like one Victor von Doom, turn it into your own personal vacation home, or simply rule as best you can. If you select this for all five of your wishes, the resulting country is likely to be somewhat notable on the world stage, being roughly 90% the size of India.
[W] True Immortality. Sometimes when a type of immortality is talked about, it refers merely to eternal youth, and conventional killing is still a viable means of disposing of the entity in question. Not so here. You will not age, you will not die of natural causes. The fog of ages and the insanity and mental stress that might be inflicted by your eternity of existence will utterly fail to affect you. While spells and cybernetic implants can remove memories, and this does not defend against hypnotic suggestion and the like, your memory will become perfect where the ravages of time are concerned. You will likely remember your childhood better than you did before. Similarly, losing your mind from seeing your family murdered in front of you will not be safeguarded against, but simply outliving them will over and over will not drive you to madness. Bitterness possibly, but not madness. As Time is often regarded as the closest accomplice and ally of Death, it makes sense that conquering one will mean gaining significant resilience to the other.
Should your mortal body be slain, you will immediately 'respawn' in the nearest location where you will not immediately perish. If you are thrown into a volcano, you will reappear some distance away, for example. Similarly, if tossed into a black hole, you will reappear on the nearest habitable planet or spaceship whose crew will not attempt to kill you. Should you wish to die, a 'switch' will be available to you. It cannot be activate if your mind is being tampered with, so a suicidal depression aura will not be able to make you pull it. This can lock you out of using it if significant mental alterations are made, such as large swathes of your memories having been edited in some fashion by outside influence, but relatively minor compromises to your judgement like a glass of wine will not block it.
[W] Improvement. Choose a facet and add 10 points to it. The common human has Strength, Intelligence, Vitality, Agility, Wisdom, Luck, Appearance. This can also be used to unlock Attributes, such as Prowess, Protection, Charisma, etc. Due to the workings of the Attributes, this is one of the few Wishes that actually become worth more as you stack the same one.
[W] Growth. Each year you live following this, you may add a + to an Attribute of your choice. You cannot unlock Attributes in this manner, but even 60 or so from a normal human lifespan from this point onward would be enough to make you akin to a god to the average human. This includes a complementary 'zeroth' point upon granting of this Wish. Combined with Immortality, and feats out of comic books are more a matter of when than if.
[W] Knowledge. Your scientists would be quite interested in the Unified Field Theory and the math behind it, among other such secrets. It should not be difficult for you to prove it works, though your intellect will not be enhanced in any way, and you will in essence be reading off a textbook when explaining it. While there are definitely benefits to having this sort of knowledge, this is a Wish heavily dependent on others to achieve it's full value. As I mentioned, humans are rather slow-minded by the standards of entities such as myself.
[W] Benevolence. At the end of the day, people are often apathetic and cruel. This Wish would change that. Would lean humanity a little more toward Star Trek as opposed to Warhammer 40K. This is a relatively minor effect, given it's spread out across an entire species, and unlike yourself I do not have their consent, so I can only change them a little without causing personality death. Still, the rate of sociopaths will notably drop, as will most forms of crime, and the various governments of the planet might gain some competence from those within it actually caring about their constituents. Potentially extremely valuable. A small amount more kindness from every direction can have huge knock-on effects. Repeated use of Wishes on this option will noticeably affect the population, though you can exempt yourself from any and all uses of this.
[W] Thirteenth Hour. Time is the most precious of things, and the one resource it is impossible to produce more of. Every twelve hours, you obtain a thirteenth hour, one in which time does not flow. This hour can be customized so that you essentially have an hour to move unopposed, to tinker, to train, to watch TV. Who is aware and capable of acting besides oneself can be changed at will. Regardless, aging is halted unless specified otherwise. This can stack indefinitely, and the 'settings' of a given hour can be changed at will. In a week, you would build up 14 such hours. In a year, 730, or roughly one month. This can be abused to give oneself time to plan 'mid-combat' and the like. You will remain aware of how much time you have left whenever the effect is active. Do note that Thirteenth Hour does not contribute to it's own timer.
[W] Needless. You do not need to eat, sleep, drink, breathe, dispose of waste, maintain a given temperature, your muscles will not deteriorate with disuse, etc. In addition to dramatically lowering the cost of living and extending your free time by eight hours a day, it makes modifying your body relatively simple, as you can selectively choose to burn body fat or retain the necessary proteins indefinitely for muscle-building purposes. You are not Plastic Man by any stretch, but you can self-modify quite a bit.
[W] Cast Through Time. You may select a point in time, and I will send you there. Be sure you wish to do this, as no method of returning beyond taking True Immortality and waiting will be provided. I will allow you to collect some belongings and, in recognition of how long you might spend waiting, allow you to access modern amenities, though you can only receive. For example, you can use Netflix, but anything that hasn't come out when you go back will not come out until you've reached and passed your original point in time. A bunker may be provided if you simply wish to wait to take advantage of Growth, specifically for this purpose. This Wish has a maximum of ten million years thrown backwards in time, at full strength anyway.
[W] Pocket Dimension. A space roughly 10 square kilometers across with 5 kilometers of soil beneath and 5 kilometers of atmosphere above. You can enter and leave it at will. While you cannot remove anything found inside, you can use it to store things from the outside world and retrieve them at will. You have complete control over this space, including who can enter or leave, granting a sanctum you are completely safe in. While it defaults to a grassy field that abruptly terminates at it's edges, a beach, a volcano, a city, any environment you wish can be constructed. If you wish, you can make an Arcology of 10 cubic kilometers. The flow of time is not halted, and you must leave in the same place in the outside world you entered from.
[W] Other Self. There are infinite parallel universes. While not all of them contain a version of you, unlike Jon and Garfield, there are many of you. This Wish can grant you their aggregate experience and skills without compromising your sense of identity. This is a potentially enormous boon. Do note that this does not change your own Attributes. A version of you who is a supergenius will not grant you supergenius, merely access to their knowledge and inventions. Similarly, a black belt in karate will grant you some understanding of fighting technique, but you will lack the muscle memory they possessed. The sheer life experience and skill you have to draw on is still no small matter. Not to mention potential benefits to being able to use other versions of yourself to target other realities.
[W] X. A superpower tailored to your specifications. It will cap out at being able to destroy a moderately sized country in a relatively short timespan, such as a few days, at least with human capabilities of direction and control. Unless specified otherwise, this does not qualify as magic.
[W] Free the Genie. Wish the Genie free. Mark your chosen options for the broken up Wish with [3] or [6], depending on your choices. Improvement at half or quarter strength still unlocks Attributes.
[W] Genie's Benevolence. For a sum of one thousand words per Wish, additional Wishes might be obtained purely out of the Genie's goodwill. Perhaps you might reward this show of good faith? Even if not, the Genie will continue to provide this benefit to the next holder of it's lamp, and the next, and so on. Through sheer random chance, someone will Wish it free sooner or later.
AN: Figured I'd push out one last Omake for the Quest's End, whatever that might be.
This (somewhat) works off of the Dreams CYOA's Stat system. Humans average 1-3 in a given Attribute, and each point in it is valued at 1.618 times that of the previous. 10 points in any Attribute is enough to make besting someone without that advantage trivial, at least in that field. Points are worth about 122.96 times as much by then, and have some conceptual expansion for each point you gain.
Personally, I'd go for Thirteenth Hour, True Immortality and 2 Growths, with a broken up Wish divided between Improvement(Protection, Prowess, Willpower, Charisma, Theft, Wits) to unlock those for me. The mystical protection would guard against essentially the only way to kill me, attacking my soul. Prowess is a general skill boost, which could be said to bolster the worth of any skill I collect. Willpower makes it easier to stick to my goals, and with eternity to work at them, that's incredibly valuable. Charisma is not to be underestimated, given the value in people being willing to listen to you. Theft can eventually become conceptual, and when I'm 1000 years old, I'll probably have a few points to spare to dump in that. Wits giving a boost to processing speed has been shown to be potentially very valuable by Dien, though at 2 it's mostly a supplement for Intelligence. For the moment, well, I'll be dumping points in Intelligence, and a me that much smarter a decade down the line might as well be a completely different being, but I think I'd probably start averting Reed Richards Is Useless. Pretty much everything else I might want would eventually follow from that. Thirteenth Hour is never a bad choice, and that extra month per year will eventually add up. Although 5 instances of Benevolence and counting on the next person to find the genie to Wish them free would probably be the most benevolent option.
I suppose one could go for True Immortality, Growth, Thirteenth Hour, and Cast Through Time to 50,000 years ago and then dig a hole somewhere and wait, with the fifth choice being largely irrelevant with Attributes like those. Even if you divided it evenly between the seven base ones(and Thirteenth Hour would give you roughly 4166 extra years to work with) that's still over 7000 apiece, which is... well, not exactly competitive with the Armaments(at least not before conceptual expansion kicks in, as the AST system doesn't do that) but still massively superior to basically anything not expected to singlehandedly roll over entire planets, and if it's between the 13 unlocked by my method that's still 4100+, which might work out. Killing yourself on a regular basis prevents starving to death, so if you have a sewer that lets out to the ocean, you might not need to ever go up to the surface, especially if you take Thirteenth Hour as that can be used to keep time, and browsing the billion or so fanfics and anime I keep wanting to look at but either forget or don't have the time for should be more than enough to keep me occupied.. All that extra biomatter might cause weird changes to the timeline though...
The average man weighs a little under 200 pounds. Assuming you kill yourself every day because of the effects of starvation(presumably you'd be dumping into Willpower first to make that easier to deal with) and dehydration, that adds up to 18.25 million bodies over 50000 years. That's not all that much compared to the lowball 100+ billion suspected humans to have ever lived. Still, it would probably have some effect on the place the sewer lets out. Might become known as a great fishing spot because of how nutrient-rich the area is for some reason, leading to all sorts of butterflies.
Funny, now I have another Omake idea.
2680 words, discounting this line.
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Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
Demon of Dreams stats scale exponentially (including conceptual expansion of remit, though that's slower) and a stat of 3 is peak human. So if you have a stat at 7000, it's going to be ϕ^6997 times as effectual as a peak human's, or a little over 1.9*10^1462, plus a greatly widened conceptual remit. I think that would put you on par with an Armament, at least. If that was your strength, you would easily have enough to completely obliterate the entire universe on a conceptual level many times over, for example. As a reminder, in the Demon of Dreams, a fire mage who consumes the seed of the world tree and gains infinite fire-power would be represented with just +666 to their stats, much less than +7000.
Anyway, I'm a bit tired, so I'll put together a build tomorrow.
Anyway, I'm a bit tired, so I'll put together a build tomorrow.
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