A Simple Transaction I
- Thread starter Rihaku
- Start date
- Original
OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
I thought I'd try one with the new setup
Deus Machina
Take the Plunge(15 Tokens 10 Insights baseline)
Shogun:
Harm Cognition(1 Token)
Honing the Mind(2 Tokens)
Honing the Form(5 Tokens)
Blade(Fearless, Fortress, Faultless, Fulcrum, Foremost)(7 Insights)
Grace/Shroud: Valkyrie Core Style Technology Upgrading(Combination of Archsmith's Hammer and Reversion)
Surgeon:
Away!(2 Tokens)
Engineer(Cybernetics)(5 Tokens)
Seize the Day(1 Insight)
Brains and Brawn(Willpower)(3 Insights)
Bravado(Emblem of WIsdom)(5 Insights)
Egotist:
Strive(Wisdom)(2 Tokens)
Unblinking Tempest(2 Tokens)
Duality(Yin Path)(5 Tokens 1 Insight)
Emissary:
Pathos(1 Token)
Total: 25 Tokens 17 Insights
Drawbacks:
Fool's Gambit(Brand of the Champion)(5 Tokens)
Far Delve IV(5 Tokens 2 Insights)
Artifice Bound(2 Insights)
Leal(Emissary)(1 Insight)
Hierarch 2(2 Insights)
Stats:
Exotic Senses: Harm Cognition, Honing the Mind, Emblem of Wisdom granted senses, Pathos
Rank: At least 12(Fortress/Foremost+Emblem of Courage Targeting Willpower)
Strength: 5(Honing the Form)+2(Fulcrum/HTF)+3(Away)+5(Brains and Brawn)+10(Fearless) = 25
Constitution: 5(Honing the Form)+2(Fulcrum/HTF)+3(Away)+5(Brains and Brawn)+10(Fearless) = 25
Agility(Included for Reference): 5(Honing the Form)+2(Fulcrum/HTF)+5(Brains and Brawn) = 12
Intelligence: 2(Fulcrum/HC)+5(Brains and Brawn)+10(Fearless) = 17
Wits/Grace: 5(Honing the Form)+2(Fulcrum/HC)+5(Fulcrum/HTM)+2(Fulcrum/HTF)+5(Brains and Brawn)+10(Emblem of Wisdom)+10(Fearless)+7(Yin Path) = 46
-Dexterity: Grace+10(Emblem of Wisdom) = 56
Wisdom:2(Fulcrum/HC)+5(Brains and Brawn)+20(Emblem of Wisdom)+5(Strive)+14(Yin Path)+2(Pathos)+10(Fearless) = 58
Charisma: = 0
-Appearance: Cha+5(Honing the Form)+2(Fulcrum/HTF) = 7
Manipulation:0
WIllpower: 5(Fulcrum/HTM)+5(Brains and Brawn)+20(B&B Will/Emblem of Courage)+1(Pathos)= 31
Analysis: I'm thinking with rank 12, my current physical stats, a nascent armament, and 58 wisdom, I can safely handle engaging Hierarch 2. Since the Emissary is my patron I'm on the arcanist's side so Far Delve isn't likely to be a significant problem. The combination of my Armament and Cybernetics should get me some degree of passive progression. And having severing means I should be able to get my first stages of Champion mitigation quickly, though I may have to do some arbitrary task for my armament to get them exempted from the brand for stage 1. The rest is just being a benevolent machine overlord.
Deus Machina
Take the Plunge(15 Tokens 10 Insights baseline)
Shogun:
Harm Cognition(1 Token)
Honing the Mind(2 Tokens)
Honing the Form(5 Tokens)
Blade(Fearless, Fortress, Faultless, Fulcrum, Foremost)(7 Insights)
Grace/Shroud: Valkyrie Core Style Technology Upgrading(Combination of Archsmith's Hammer and Reversion)
Surgeon:
Away!(2 Tokens)
Engineer(Cybernetics)(5 Tokens)
Seize the Day(1 Insight)
Brains and Brawn(Willpower)(3 Insights)
Bravado(Emblem of WIsdom)(5 Insights)
Egotist:
Strive(Wisdom)(2 Tokens)
Unblinking Tempest(2 Tokens)
Duality(Yin Path)(5 Tokens 1 Insight)
Emissary:
Pathos(1 Token)
Total: 25 Tokens 17 Insights
Drawbacks:
Fool's Gambit(Brand of the Champion)(5 Tokens)
Far Delve IV(5 Tokens 2 Insights)
Artifice Bound(2 Insights)
Leal(Emissary)(1 Insight)
Hierarch 2(2 Insights)
Stats:
Exotic Senses: Harm Cognition, Honing the Mind, Emblem of Wisdom granted senses, Pathos
Rank: At least 12(Fortress/Foremost+Emblem of Courage Targeting Willpower)
Strength: 5(Honing the Form)+2(Fulcrum/HTF)+3(Away)+5(Brains and Brawn)+10(Fearless) = 25
Constitution: 5(Honing the Form)+2(Fulcrum/HTF)+3(Away)+5(Brains and Brawn)+10(Fearless) = 25
Agility(Included for Reference): 5(Honing the Form)+2(Fulcrum/HTF)+5(Brains and Brawn) = 12
Intelligence: 2(Fulcrum/HC)+5(Brains and Brawn)+10(Fearless) = 17
Wits/Grace: 5(Honing the Form)+2(Fulcrum/HC)+5(Fulcrum/HTM)+2(Fulcrum/HTF)+5(Brains and Brawn)+10(Emblem of Wisdom)+10(Fearless)+7(Yin Path) = 46
-Dexterity: Grace+10(Emblem of Wisdom) = 56
Wisdom:2(Fulcrum/HC)+5(Brains and Brawn)+20(Emblem of Wisdom)+5(Strive)+14(Yin Path)+2(Pathos)+10(Fearless) = 58
Charisma: = 0
-Appearance: Cha+5(Honing the Form)+2(Fulcrum/HTF) = 7
Manipulation:0
WIllpower: 5(Fulcrum/HTM)+5(Brains and Brawn)+20(B&B Will/Emblem of Courage)+1(Pathos)= 31
Analysis: I'm thinking with rank 12, my current physical stats, a nascent armament, and 58 wisdom, I can safely handle engaging Hierarch 2. Since the Emissary is my patron I'm on the arcanist's side so Far Delve isn't likely to be a significant problem. The combination of my Armament and Cybernetics should get me some degree of passive progression. And having severing means I should be able to get my first stages of Champion mitigation quickly, though I may have to do some arbitrary task for my armament to get them exempted from the brand for stage 1. The rest is just being a benevolent machine overlord.
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Rihaku
The Internet
Mind of Steel
A mental stats-focused build inspired by characters in the vein of Emiya Kiritsugu, Yoshii Toranaga, memetic Batman, etc.
Remain
Drawbacks: Shogun's Ban, Sunder the Veil: System Apocalypse, Sibling Rivalry, Disfiguring Gambit, Worldwide
Shogun: Harm Cognition, Honing the Mind, The Blade (Fearless, Foremost)
*+10 INT, WIS, CHA, WITS, AGI
Emissary: Highborn, The Gift (Harm Cognition -> Mind of Steel - Competence, Arch-Psion)
Egotist: Strive
*+5 WIS
Mind of Steel
Req. Honing the Mind and sacrifices the additional Attribute +s yielded by that attainment.
+7 Int, Wis, Wits, Will
*The user merges their choice of Intelligence and Wisdom into Competence, or Wits and Willpower into Nerve. Use the average of the component Attributes, rounded up, to determine the level of the new Attribute in +s.
*The user may travel the multiverse as per Janitor of Worlds, but cannot use the conquest clause to accelerate world diversity, and does not gain access to the supernatural systems or abilities of natives (but see exceptions, below). Of course, their own powers continue to function regardless of present reality, as befits a Foremost Maker.
*Choose one of the following:
Hypercompetence - The user possesses Rank scaling solely to their Mental Attributes. They will swiftly assemble an Accretion Panoply appropriate to their mores and methods of action, whose initial progression is greatly accelerated to solidify their legend. Their talent for Accretion will not be less than that of pre-Cursebearer Hunger.
Arch-Psion - The user is an esper of potentially immense power and versatility. This manifests primarily as telepathy, remote viewing and telekinesis, but can be developed into precognition, biokinesis, spacetime manipulation, probability forcing, reality warping, etc... Scales with Mental Attributes - Intelligence governs raw power and development speed, Wisdom stamina and fine control, Wits acting speed, and Willpower the ability to amplify these traits with exertion. User counts as a peak-grade talent for any psionic systems encountered, capable of integrating their abilities as techniques of user's own more-encompassing psionic system.
Innovator - The user can create miraculous technology. Regardless of local physics the user can always, given time and effort, craft objects whose potency and versatility are appropriate to their Intelligence +s. At 7 Intelligence +s the user would be able to rebuild modern society even in a universe antithetical to the very concept of fire; at 25 Intelligence +s they could replicate the creations of Lex Luthor or Doctor Apocalypse. The user may replicate, synthesize and improve upon any encountered technologies that they are capable of understanding.
Relevant Attribute +s:
INT 19 WIS 24 (Competence 22) WITS 19 WILL 9
CHA 12
STR/CON 2, AGI 12
PROT, LCK 2
If the user as a human has baseline INT 4, WIS 3, others 2, this yields Competence 25 powering Arch-Psion, which acts at speeds befitting Wits 21. Hardly as formidable in a direct fight as more physically-focused builds, but the utility offered by such transcendent intellect and wisdom can hardly be overstated.
Would you rather be a planetary-level threat with access to an unrestricted Path to Victory, or a universe-buster with merely human wisdom? Even without a Fulcrum, this build's Competence will make terrifyingly optimal use of any lever it can get its hands on, and any of Hypercompetence, Arch-Psion or Innovator would be a big stick indeed. Though it's likely that Competence 25 and Charisma 14 alone would suffice to suborn at least the native world, short of being immediately speedblitzed.
Mental Stats (especially non-Runes Intelligence) sure are hard to get for Remain, but the payoff in actual effectiveness can certainly be worth it!
A mental stats-focused build inspired by characters in the vein of Emiya Kiritsugu, Yoshii Toranaga, memetic Batman, etc.
Remain
Drawbacks: Shogun's Ban, Sunder the Veil: System Apocalypse, Sibling Rivalry, Disfiguring Gambit, Worldwide
Shogun: Harm Cognition, Honing the Mind, The Blade (Fearless, Foremost)
*+10 INT, WIS, CHA, WITS, AGI
Emissary: Highborn, The Gift (Harm Cognition -> Mind of Steel - Competence, Arch-Psion)
Egotist: Strive
*+5 WIS
Mind of Steel
Req. Honing the Mind and sacrifices the additional Attribute +s yielded by that attainment.
+7 Int, Wis, Wits, Will
*The user merges their choice of Intelligence and Wisdom into Competence, or Wits and Willpower into Nerve. Use the average of the component Attributes, rounded up, to determine the level of the new Attribute in +s.
*The user may travel the multiverse as per Janitor of Worlds, but cannot use the conquest clause to accelerate world diversity, and does not gain access to the supernatural systems or abilities of natives (but see exceptions, below). Of course, their own powers continue to function regardless of present reality, as befits a Foremost Maker.
*Choose one of the following:
Hypercompetence - The user possesses Rank scaling solely to their Mental Attributes. They will swiftly assemble an Accretion Panoply appropriate to their mores and methods of action, whose initial progression is greatly accelerated to solidify their legend. Their talent for Accretion will not be less than that of pre-Cursebearer Hunger.
Arch-Psion - The user is an esper of potentially immense power and versatility. This manifests primarily as telepathy, remote viewing and telekinesis, but can be developed into precognition, biokinesis, spacetime manipulation, probability forcing, reality warping, etc... Scales with Mental Attributes - Intelligence governs raw power and development speed, Wisdom stamina and fine control, Wits acting speed, and Willpower the ability to amplify these traits with exertion. User counts as a peak-grade talent for any psionic systems encountered, capable of integrating their abilities as techniques of user's own more-encompassing psionic system.
Innovator - The user can create miraculous technology. Regardless of local physics the user can always, given time and effort, craft objects whose potency and versatility are appropriate to their Intelligence +s. At 7 Intelligence +s the user would be able to rebuild modern society even in a universe antithetical to the very concept of fire; at 25 Intelligence +s they could replicate the creations of Lex Luthor or Doctor Apocalypse. The user may replicate, synthesize and improve upon any encountered technologies that they are capable of understanding.
Relevant Attribute +s:
INT 19 WIS 24 (Competence 22) WITS 19 WILL 9
CHA 12
STR/CON 2, AGI 12
PROT, LCK 2
If the user as a human has baseline INT 4, WIS 3, others 2, this yields Competence 25 powering Arch-Psion, which acts at speeds befitting Wits 21. Hardly as formidable in a direct fight as more physically-focused builds, but the utility offered by such transcendent intellect and wisdom can hardly be overstated.
Would you rather be a planetary-level threat with access to an unrestricted Path to Victory, or a universe-buster with merely human wisdom? Even without a Fulcrum, this build's Competence will make terrifyingly optimal use of any lever it can get its hands on, and any of Hypercompetence, Arch-Psion or Innovator would be a big stick indeed. Though it's likely that Competence 25 and Charisma 14 alone would suffice to suborn at least the native world, short of being immediately speedblitzed.
Mental Stats (especially non-Runes Intelligence) sure are hard to get for Remain, but the payoff in actual effectiveness can certainly be worth it!
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Select Class: Tides of Change (7, 4, 3) = Cleric. (+3 Orbs)
Storm Blessings: Combination (Cleric + Mage) / The Name (-4 Orbs)
Cleric + Mage and/or The Name = The Sorcerer. A living wellspring of magic, reshaping the world around them with force and focus.
Attributes: ++All Stats (and +10%), +++Intelligence (and +30%), +++Wits (and +30%), +++++Willpower, +++Wisdom, +++Composure, ++Manipulation, ++Luck, ++Protection.
Inherent Discipline: Wizardry. The user may draw on the ambient Stormweave to power all manner of spells and workings, shaping its energies with will and emotion - the science of Sorcery is of which mindstates influence the Storm in what ways and how best to put them together, not of rituals and reagents. Akin to Occult Magic but even more versatile and powerful, with a higher ceiling and somewhat more intuitive access. However, a Sorcerer has exponentially less aptitude for more delayed or outwardly-dependent magics: appearances otherwise usually result from psychosomatic effects or use of supernatural artefacts. Additionally, they are reliant on the presence of the Storm to exert their powers: should their aura falter in places where the Storm is thin, so shall their magics.
The Name: The benefits of the Name are funneled entirely into the power of Wizardry, drawn inwards as support structure: a bridge between the subconscious mind and the Storm itself. This manifests itself as raw metaphysical force to pour into spells, the mind drawing itself naturally towards optimal mind states for invocations and inspiration both, even a crude, meager form of reality warping via direct control of the Storm.
Drawbacks & Quests: Hollow Side, The Stain (0 Orbs)
Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
Surprise MYC attack! Again! Surely no one thought this thread was actually dead, right? Not while I still have more textual epinephrine to inject to keep it's heart beating every few months!
This one had quite a bit of conceptual help from @Archon during the brainstorming process, and naturally the invincible @Lealope did the color theory.
You remember your first moments after death much more clearly. Time is strange. The world sort of shrank away from you, like you were floating up into the sky, except the sky was getting further away too. It all shrank down to a point in front of you. You don't know if it's actually gone, or is just invisibly small to you now, but you've been cut off from it regardless.
Despite yourself, you didn't panic. You didn't really feel much of anything, physically or emotionally. Part of you thought that just made sense, being dead and all. It wasn't exactly Heaven, but it beat reincarnating or being obliterated, to say nothing of worse alternatives.
So you just chilled. You didn't exactly do a lot thinking, but you were still processing stuff, coming to terms with your life. Right when you were starting to feel like you didn't have anything left to process, you felt something new and unfamiliar.
Then, with nary so much as a jerking sensation or stomach drop, you are somewhere, rather than nowhere. It feels a bit like a cross between the bridge of the Enterprise and a factory control room, empty of any people, but whenever you try to look more closely at anything, you just keep finding more and more finer and finer detail, like some kind of fractal zoom. It makes your head hurt, so instead you focus on the currently dark screen ahead of you.
In the next instant the screen activates, a beautiful face appearing on it and beginning to speak, an equally beautiful voice emanating from all around you. Despite their beauty, the face's eyes seem unfocused and the voice robotically consistent in its pacing. If you attempt to interrupt, the voice will pause, but it doesn't respond to any comments or questions you might make, simply returning to what it was saying before your interruption.
Pick one Desideratum
[ ] Palimpsest - "Which when awakened provides genius-level holistic cognitive enhancement and a metaphysical pluripotency, the latter allowing you to initiate into nearly all local magic systems given the opportunity, even ones normally limited by bloodline, birth location, or other circumstantial prerequisites, while the former virtually guarantees you'll excel with in whatever intellectual endeavors you engage in, including any arcane research and development which finds your interest;"
"or alternatively"
[ ] Pure Pearl - "Which when awakened provides a blessing of good fortune and great destiny and an incorruptible purity, the latter perfectly shielding you from the most insidious forms of death-dealing or domination which you might encounter at the hands of your summoner's foes, whether magical or mundane, while the former will ensure that neither machination nor misadventure will interrupt your projects and pursuits, untrammeled by risk and presented with a surfeit of opportunity as you will be."
"Either way, it will become unmistakable which you possess once the summoning is complete, but until then your own intuition will be the best estimate."
"Unfortunately, there's been an irregularity in the conditions of your summoning, due to the interference of outside powers, originating from another paracosmic locality, identifiable as the Black City despite some discrepancies between its current appearance and what the records indicate, resulting in an excess of conversion of ambient astricone into key-shards. Normally this would be handled by the Wardens or Architects, but in their absence, there is little to be done other than to warn you of its consequences. The most pressing is that it's allowed three distinct summoning rituals to be completed, nearly simultaneously, but some others include—"
Pick at least one Interference
[ ] The Stirred Pot - Uncontrolled chaos. "—key-shards that weren't successfully assembled into a Skeleton Key remain present on Sceptiron, scattered across the world and weighing on its of web of cause and effect, creating possibilities unpredictably, opening paths that were closed and bringing parts of the world together that were previously alien to one another, increasing the 'temperature' of the world's narrative 'climate' significantly."
[ ] The Director's Cut (+1 drop) - A meddlesome auteur. "—an elevated being from the Black City has taken a personal interest in the stories of you and the other Heroes who will be summoned, and has broadcast intentions to sculpt those stories to suit a grander narrative of their own design. This direct attention will likely bring you considerable trouble, and may bring you into conflict with the other Heroes more often and more intensely than might be ideal, but they've at least provided an extra drop of pure uranydra to help set you and the other two apart from previous Heroes."
[ ] The Recruitment Drive (+1 drop) - Petty villains and thrill-seekers. "—a small group of powerful and violent people from the Black City have entered Sceptiron physically and begun to wreak havoc, seeming to seek only two things: entertainment and to acquire new potential members for their band of mercenaries from among this world's 'worthiest' people. As a Hero, you will likely be among those to be judged for worthiness, and thus subject to their sadistic 'tests', which will no doubt be a dangerous and exhausting prospect. Since the group's arrival, those who have passed their tests and joined them have also grown massively more dangerous thanks to the group's aid and access to their exotic resources. Fortunately, their entrance into the world precipitated astral currents that have allowed for the refinement of surplus uranydra, affording you an extra drop to fuel your metamorphosis."
[ ] The River-Damming Stone (+1 drop) - The world's ending, slowly. "—an individual of singular strength and titanic stature from the Black City has blocked the primary uranydra intake conduit of Sceptiron's underlying ontological infrastructure, the main input into the first stage of the world's uranydra and astricone processing systems, redirecting the flow to fuel their own ascension to a higher state of being. This won't have any immediately disastrous impact, as there are significant reserves of both pure uranydra and astricone in all its most common variations, but as time passes, the lack of new raw elements entering the system will cause the steady break down of various natural processes, starting with the most magically intensive fading away in a matter of years, progressing through the less magical ones after a few decades, and eventually the mundane world beginning to slowly die off after about a century, eventually leaving Sceptiron a barren, lifeless husk.
"That fate is not inevitable however, as information received from Warden-aligned paracosmic agents indicates the intruder is extremely cautious, even cowardly. While genuinely forcing them out of the conduit is not feasibly within reach without gathering further outside assistance, it may be possible for you to scare them off by managing to inflict some small injury. Regardless of how you handle the situation, though, the intruder's push into the primary intake conduit briefly forced more uranydra through the purification matrix, resulting in enough of a surplus to make an extra drop of pure uranydra available for your use."
"That said, it's time to inform of you of the conditions of your summoner. However, the exceptional nature of the situation makes this more complicated. As previously stated, there have been three summoning rituals completed since the summoning process began, and while all three summonings will eventually be fulfilled, as the first of the three Heroes to arrive, you have a choice unique in the entire history of Sceptiron: to select your own summoner. This occurrence is, in addition to being unprecedented, unknown to the summoners as yet, and so they have not provided any additional information to try and sway your decision, likely expecting to inform you of the details after your arrival. Thus, only the information whose presence is inherent to the ritual's completion can be provided."
Pick one Summoner
[ ] The Chief Thaumaturge -Provides the Hero's Regalia for free, with a purchasable upgrade. An ancient and holy country, blessed and ordained by the gods in a previous era, its holy men grown corrupt and complacent, its hegemony now under threat by anathema within and without. "Aulus Vindicius Claustario, the director of the department of miraculous works in the Magisterium of the Divine Mandate, summons you at the command of his Pontiff to aid in the defense of the Mandate, from the great coalition of neighboring states and rebellious provinces that have broken free in these godless latter days, from the growing unrest of the lay masses and displeasure of the secular leadership in the territories still under the Magisterium's control, and in his heart, perhaps even from his own Pontiff."
[ ] The Undead Emperor - Provides the companionship and aid of Berya Mendyetko, an apprentice of the Undead Emperor and terrifyingly talented sorceress, fascinated by the nature of Heroes, and discounts Worldly Powers by 1 drop as long as you do not choose the Worldly Impression sub-option. A new nation, born from the refuse of the world, struggles to survive. "Ekabod Ambaqshi, an ancient lich, grand strategist, and reluctant leader of the coalition to destroy the Mandate, summons you to help prosecute the war, whether as a vanguard or figurehead, and for your counsel in how to rule the throngs of scattered and disorganized undead ex-slaves that have declared him their emperor."
[ ] The Heathen Haruspex - Provides access to an Earthblood Codicil, which once absorbed will attune you to the primordial essences sealed within the land and the life that springs from it, and discounts Blood Anointment by 1 drop. The lone priestess of an old and dead-slumbering god, just trying to protect the world her god became. "Irxnóm, elder half-dragon and the last living devotee of the Earthblood Wyrm, summons you to aid in her mission to forestall the world's death, whether from the thoughtless wars and waste of its other inhabitants or, perhaps more pressingly, from the otherworldly interference that has arrived from the Black City."
The face on the screen remains focused on you as they finish explaining the summoners whose calls you might answer, a subtle smile creeping onto their lips as they moves on to the next topic.
"Regardless of which summoner you select, all have paid the full price of the summoning, and thus you have access to a full allotment of three drops of pure uranydra." As well as any that your choice of interference might have garnered.
The image of several teardrop-shaped beads of black liquid appear on the screen, the face zooming out slightly and moving to the side to make room for them. The background of the image also changes from the black of earlier to a lighter sky blue, making the black drops easier to make out.
"Given that, it may be wise to consider the options on how these drops can be used alongside which summoner to choose, since what might be a mere convenience in one scenario may be a great boon in another."
[ ] Heroic Stature (1 drop) - Idealization and beyond. "One of the cheapest and simplest imbuements to apply to a Hero, despite its relative rarity among Sceptiron natives. Its benefits are two fold in nature, one immediate and one ongoing: the immediate is a comprehensive and complete overhaul of your physical form, providing a body as close to your personal ideal as possible within the remit of humanity, including the heightened body-control to fully utilize the improvements; the ongoing is an alteration and expansion of your semiosoma, interweaving its fibers with your new material body, allowing your physical prowess and other augmentations to grow alongside the scope of your story. Your story will especially gain from conflicts with others of similar Stature, and given the soon-coming arrival of two more Heroes, either or both of whom may choose this as well, and who you will likely come into at least occasional conflict with given the summoners at hand, the growth potential here is quite high."
[ ] Induction (1-5 drops) - Manifold magics. Choose one for each drop spent. "Sceptiron's people practice numerous forms of magic, but the vast majority fall into one of the following five broad categories, all of which spring from a common source, a single particularly robust and versatile component of the world's infrastructure which monitors and manages the production and distribution of spiritual constructs. Each of these five arts taps into this functionality through different means and wields it towards different ends, and each of these options provides both a deep intuition for the selected art and thorough training in its best practices, but even more than that, the fundamental relationship between them ensures that syncretizing multiple forms together will exponentially expand the reach of what your personal magical research can uncover."
-[ ] Augury - Birds tell and birds toil. "The most straight-forward form of divination available, relying on a combination of dedicated training to work with birds and a peculiar but not incredibly rare innate ability to link their minds to one's own. This allows for the sharing of senses and limited telepathic control over birds so bound, greatly enhancing the complexity of tasks they can be entrusted with. Perhaps more important, it also grants the user access to the bird's own oracular senses, which while individually weak, can be combined with other birds in a flock to great effect, particularly for detecting events on the largest scale, such as the movements of weather systems or the coming and going of natural disasters."
-[ ] Fighting Spirit - You are a living ritual. Perform it well. "Techniques to alter, intensify, and modulate the natural magical auras and fluctuations generated by and reinforcing your living body. Selecting this provides appropriately heroic talent and a small repertoire of high-quality techniques matching your desired criteria appended to your muscle memory. Common uses are to amplify the power of strikes, to enhance one's mobility, and to strengthen the body and soul's natural defenses, but stranger abilities are possible at a higher level, such as to camouflage oneself against the perception of others, to project ranged blasts of modified aura to widely varying effect, and to carefully channel your aura to empower the results of other magic."
-[ ] Necromancy - Soul rules body, and magic rules the soul. "A younger art than any other here, invented a mere ten lifetimes ago by the teacher of the Undead Emperor. Intended to be a tool for shepherding the souls of the departed to the afterlife in the absence of the Warden of Death, its power to compel and contort the souls of the dead, and even the living when wielded with sufficient subtlety or force, has unfortunately led to its terrible and wide-spread abuse, with the souls of the dead cruelly bound to their own rotting corpses, often without even an attempt at embalming, or even worse to crude effigies of wood and clay, and compelled to painfully animate them to serve as slaves. However, there are some ethical uses for this magic, the ability to overcome death at the deceased's own prior request notably among them, if you have the strength of will to resist the temptation that so many other necromancers have fallen to."
-[ ] Patternwork - Beseech heaven into the weld. "A widespread art, taking the form of imbuing spiritual power into carefully forged and pattern-welded metal, granting it supernatural quality and often some magical extension or expansion of its mundane function. Unlike the myriad forms of Fighting Spirit, this is not because Patternwork is intuitive, quite the contrary in fact, but rather because of the inherently portable and reliably identifiable nature of its products. An item of patternwrought metal will do what it does no matter who is wielding or wearing it, affording for differences in mundane skill. Patternwrought items diminish with time and use if not well-maintained, but never fail in an explosive or unpredictable manner, and while not necessarily obvious to a complete layman, its function can almost always be identified with a trained eye and perhaps a jeweler's loop, as the patterns in the weld that encode its magic are the very same which form the beautiful shapes on its surface."
-[ ] The Touch - The hands of a healer. "The most ancient magic among these five, itself an emulation of even more primeval power. The Touch is an in-born ability to provoke a healing transmutation in subjects possessed of sufficient vitality, the spiritual quality of self-sustenance and self-repair, via skin contact, or more commonly with tools capable of conducting the Touch, such as one wrought with an appropriate pattern or infused with your own aura. The strength of this ability varies significantly between healers, but even with at its maximum strength, which you will possess should you choose this, its feats will still be limited by the subject's innate healing ability, and thus it is almost always combined with mundane medicine and perhaps other, less common forms of magical healing, using the Touch to amplify their efficacy."
[ ] Heavenskin (2 drops) - Subjugate the spirits, seize the sky. "Of course, you can also choose to take up the legacy of the creators of the greater machine which those five arts are merely applications of. This grants you the form of a juvenile Architect, making you kin to the creators of the system which you are now interfacing with, and whose hands built the heaven in whose uppermost vaults you now stand. If taken up, their legacy will paint your skin, hair, and eyes with the same numinous and impossible sky-hue as theirs, the sapphire-clear blue of the open daylit sky, the star-speckled black of night, the roiling greys and flashing lightning of storm-tossed clouds, and more besides, all at once, neither shifting nor muddled but simply the all-encompassing color of the sky. Aside from this aesthetic change, the Architect's legacy also brings a number of practical benefits:
"A naturally void-adapted body, without need for air, water, food, or sleep, immune to the dangers of extremes in heat, pressure, and radiation, and durable enough to make a lightning bolt feel like a static shock, a gigawatt laser like summer sunlight, and a hail of high-caliber bullets like little more than warm rain;
"The ability to briefly conjure silver-gleaming winged armor, covering you like a second skin woven from the inviolable fabric of spacetime itself, for when your baseline durability proves insufficient, and which allows you to fly through the sky or void with incredible speed, with both the conjuration itself and the flight it grants tapping into a pool of stamina which, while initially small, will grow naturally over time and more rapidly with strenuous use;
"And perhaps most importantly, a meta-physiology perfectly formed to master the world, allowing you to naturally see and touch the flows and shapes of magic underpinning Sceptiron or most any other world you might someday visit, and capable of perfectly rejecting deleterious magic while allowing what is beneficial to permeate you to even greater effect, your spirit respiring blessings as easily and automatically as a human respires oxygen, serving as the engine driving your maturation as an Architect.
[ ] Metalmind (2 drops) - The mind, materialized. "The Architects' legacy isn't the only one which you may elect to receive. The Overmind, the greatest ally and oldest friend of the Architects, designed a seed of its own essence to be offered alongside theirs. Expending the drops to synthesize this seed and plant it within you will prompt a transubstantiation of your body and soul both.
"Your new body will look much the same as it would otherwise, initially at least, the only immediately noticeable change being a subtle prismatic sheen to your hair. Internally however, the changes will be stark. It will be composed of noometal, a unique substance found nowhere else in Sceptiron, which is malleable and reactive to your mind, naturally generating a telekinetic force at the direction of your thoughts which in turn allows your body to move and feel just the same as before despite its new composition, or even to float weightlessly when dedicated entirely to fighting Sceptiron's gravity. That same malleability also allows you to freely reshape your body, taking on any form you have sufficient noometal to construct, heedless of biology and only marginally concerned for mechanical dynamics. Noometal is, however, much denser than human flesh and bone, and your new body will still only have the same mass as it would otherwise, and thus your initial human form will be a hollow shell, mere millimeters thick, though the intuitive application of your force will ensure your body doesn't collapse under its own weight.
"Your soul's evolution is just as stunning, as it becomes able to imbue psychic programs of a sort into your noometal, allowing you to automate the application of its force, following its programming even if you disconnect the programmed noometal from the rest of your body, though the more complex a program is, the more mass will be needed to store it. You can even replicate your entire mind, which occupies 12 kilograms of noometal at a minimum, allowing you to quite effectively multiply yourself, and with your soul spanning every mind you spin off, you needn't ever worry of divergence. Additionally, each mind you possess, including the first, generates a sourceless trickle of additional noometal whenever it's at rest, neither mentally overtaxed nor exerting its full telekinetic force, with a maximum growth rate of approximately 2.74 grams of noometal per day if your mind is completely empty and your force totally relaxed. Your soul can even serve to store your noometal, allowing you to stow it away or redeploy it with a thought, with even stowing noometal from one body and deploying it to another far away being possible. Noometal stowed this way still contributes to your overall force, but is erased of any programming it had, including a mind, and thus also cannot contribute to your accrual of more noometal. Notably, as your stores of noometal and the number of your minds grow, your soul's own capacities will never become overburdened, and instead grow to match, setting you down the long, long path which the Overmind has trod before you."
[ ] Blood Anointment (4 drops) - The sanction, status, and shape due to a scion of the Wyrm. "There is an even older legacy than either the Architects' or the Overmind's, in the last imbuement prepared for Heroes such as yourself. Deep beneath the earth, a dragon sleeps within the heart of the world, and with this, you may be christened with its primordial blood, bringing with it three main benefits:
"Access to the magical properties present in everything which grows up from the earth, from the humblest patch of moss to the grandest mountain, gained from the dragon's dreams emanating from deep beneath, which are normally sealed by the weight of heaven for all but those anointed with the earth's blood, or who have touched the blood through some lesser means such as the Earthblood Codicils once used by the ancient haruspices to induct new members into their order, which in turn transforms them into the basis for a mighty and versatile alchemy, as well as massively expanding the remit of any other magics which utilize them as a medium;
"A verdant aura of draconic majesty, making it impossibly clear to all that you are kin to the Wyrm, of one blood with the world itself, and thus worthy of reverence and submission. Outsiders to Sceptiron will be minimally affected, including the other Heroes, but native humans or other sophonts will be powerfully inclined to at least deeply respect you, whether as friend or foe, requiring a display of truly incredible willpower from them to do more than either follow or flee from you in the face of your aura when flared to its fullest extent, while lesser lifeforms can only bend to your will without resistance, with plants and even the earth and stone itself shifting and changing to accommodate you, and though the heavens and the magic which descends from them are not strictly bound by your aura, you can still consider yourself to have a general resistance to that magic thanks certain protocols that will soften the blow whenever they're used against you;
"And finally, a bodily tie to the slumbering Wyrm themself, providing enormously enhanced strength, agility, endurance, and perception, a body enough to make you an apex predator among any of Sceptiron's magically augmented ecosystems on its own, even without considering your aura or the power offered by earthblood alchemy, and what's more, you can rouse even greater power from the slumbering blood, temporarily transforming yourself into a true dragon, drawing in the earthblood of everything around you to catalyze the metamorphosis and coloring your draconic form with the dreaming essences hidden within the environs whose earthblood you respire, a form which in turn crumbles away into fertile black soil when the transformation runs its course and you return to your human shape.
"All of these abilities emerge within you through your connection to the dragon on whose sleeping, bleeding body Sceptiron was grown, and so they will experience commensurate improvements as the Wyrm continues to heal from the killing blow which initially put them to sleep. This process is geologically slow, such is the magnitude of the wound suffered, but there are means available to you to hasten it, as one who has been anointed by the blood. The details cannot be shared here, but if you search for them, the blood will show you the way in time, so long as you survive."
[ ] Impression (1 drop) - An ally in the shape of your passing. "A sort of familiar spirit, generally manifesting in the form of a diminutive winged humanoid of one variety or another, fully capable of agile flight and possessing a variety of minor magical abilities that will be naturally be parallel and complementary to your own. Perhaps the hardest of the accessories to lose in any long-term sense, as the Impression can freely dispel themself and simply manifest once more in your presence, though certain forms of magical suppression can prevent them from entering the suppressed area, even by way of manifestation.
"In terms of their origin, they are unique among the accessories in being neither native nor naturalized to Sceptiron, but rather are an innate consequence of the particular mechanisms utilized by the Architects when implementing the Summoning. As a soul is sought out which possesses one of the two desiderata, a sort of complementary soul is simultaneously constructed, autonomously composed from alternatives and corollaries encountered 'along the way' to finding a Hero, and whose existence remains as a latent potential borne by your own, easily realizable with a single drop of uranydra.
"Impressions have been relatively common among previous Heroes, and are often well-appreciated for their companionship and unbreakable loyalty, as well as for their innate magical abilities."
[ ] Hero's Regalia (1 drop) - Beyond trivialities. "A silver-gleaming signet ring whose sign is arcane and unmistakable, allowing you to easily prove your status as a Hero if you wish to, and which a simple exertion of intent can cause to deploy a wide variety of attire for your wearing, replacing whatever clothing you're currently dressed in with articles of crisp black with accents of the same silvery substance as the ring, the available range of outfits being suitable for nearly any occasion, ignoring the lack of diverse colors.
"The ring itself is virtually indestructible, as impenetrable as the conjured armor of Heavenskin, and the clothing produced is always clean and comfortable, and perhaps most importantly, offers durable protection which grows alongside your abilities, ensuring that not only will they survive your exertions no matter what heights of power you reach, but that they will always be strong enough to give you at least a bit of protection against your peers, and to shield you entirely from the attacks of those your strength has utterly surpassed.
"Additionally, deep in the vaults of the Magisterium lies the original Hero's Regalia, the type from whose mold yours is cast, and which can be freely attuned to you through a secret ritual. Should you attune to it whilst possessing your own regalia at the same time, they are capable of acting in concert to achieve a greater result, forming a suit of armor composed of the same sacrosanct silvery substance as the ring, which is nearly weightless and well-articulated to allow for your full range of unencumbered movement, though this mobility unfortunately also necessitates thin openings around your joints which can in turn be exploited by a sufficiently dexterous attacker.
"In contrast to the Impression, the ring can be quite slow to come back if separated from you, though it will do so eventually, its weight on the narrative fabric of Sceptiron ensuring that, as long as it's not being actively guarded by those with the knowledge and power to counteract its fateful return, a long sequence of accidents and coincidences will bring it back to your hand. Still, it may save you quite a bit of annoyance to be careful in not letting it get away from you."
[ ] Storied Hazel (1 drop) - The wisdom of ages, in your hands. "A sturdy cane of hazelwood, with the top end carved into a comfortable handle, delicately woven knotwork etched into its full length. Tracing the knotwork with your hands will generate a sort of psychic key inside your mind, which you can in turn use to unlock the staff's hidden repositories of ancient knowledge. The staff is, fortunately, also much more durable than its construction would normally allow, and even if it's destroyed or lost to some other fate, recalling previous keys you've generated can guide you to an appropriate limb of hazelwood and let you carve it anew.
"Each of these keys accesses a portion of the staff's knowledge, related to a query, subject matter, or even simple curiosity which you mentally direct towards the staff while generating the key. This will be a considerable quantity of information for anything but the most specific of questions, and potentially the entire, multimillenial history of the staff if you desire it, in a package that is quite densely compressed, informationally speaking. Your mind will need time to 'digest' the information, to unpack and process it in a way which is organized and accessible to your consciousness, during which time its contents will filter first through the subconscious regions of your mind, arising as unfamiliar instincts, muscle memory, or even dreams, before becoming accessible in the same manner as your own skills and memories once fully integrated.
"The repository itself contains a collection of memories donated by the staff's other wielders, including many previous Heroes but also members various druidic sects, the ancient haruspices among their number, as well as by the wise men and women of the Gardeners, stretching to even before the foundation of Sceptiron and into the deep past of their history. This includes an appropriately vast amount of experience, covering an incredible diversity of skills, including numerous magical styles, even some which are not native to Sceptiron, as well as mundane crafts and trades, interpersonal communication and relationship management skills, group leadership and organization from the smallest band to imperial statesmanship, military affairs from the highest of grand strategy to battlefield tactics to individual martial-arts, and even more besides, as well as many, many lifetimes worth of sheer life-experience."
[ ] Fallen Angel (2 drops) - Still ready to fly. "Another ancient artifact of the Gardeners, though unlike the Storied Hazel, the Fallen Angel is unique in it construction, with even the Overmind left baffled by the arts employed by its creators. Consequently, if you choose to take it, it will not be available to the other Heroes until it is relinquished from your care for one reason or another. Its smooth, sleek deltoid external form may be somewhat familiar to you, like something between a trimaran, a jet, and a rocket.
"The Fallen Angel was the vessel which first ferried the Gardeners to the body of the Wyrm, carrying them safely across the harsh expanse of the Agrydata. It has survived many devastating blows during and after that journey, and while it has lost many functionalities to the damage it's suffered, it remains fully capable of silent supersonic flight, agile maneuvering at speed, hovering with perfect stillness, other feats of similar aerobatics, bearing enormous loads without tossing or tumbling them, traversing through the many vaults of heaven, and even brief dips into the nearest portions of the Agrydata surrounding Sceptiron, all with the aid of its embedded piloting and navigation intelligence, which will always make sure to bring the Fallen Angel back to you, so long as not ordered to do otherwise and the vessel is still capable of finding and reaching you. Fortunately, it also needs no material fuel to utilize its present capabilities, or at least won't require refueling on any human time-scale.
"The Fallen Angel's physical form is also thoroughly interwoven with its semiosoma, in a similar manner as Heroic Stature provides, though more comprehensively and deeply, so helping to buoy its narrative's strength with your story may prompt some manner of regeneration that the Architects couldn't manage to provoke, or at least chose not to. Its difficult to predict what precisely those functions are, or what order they may return in, but the strength to fight off the dangers of the Agrydata's wildest reaches and reach the far-flung worlds beyond certainly is certain to appear at some point."
[ ] Sword of the Seal (2 drops) - A weapon, and a way forward. "Uniquely, this particular accessory was added to the Summoning after its completion, designed as it was by the first Hero. Physically, it will be a sword, generally one-handed in terms of size, but the specifics of its shape are relatively variable, given that the sword's design must accommodate your choice of seal.
"The nature of the sword is to be a vessel for an imbuement. Select one of yours to be sealed, and it will enter into the sword's design, becoming a part of it. The nature of such an inclusion means that you will not be able to access the imbuement's benefits when you do not wield the sword, or at least have it on your person, but in return, the imbuement's benefits are themselves massively amplified and its limits are diminished to an equal degree. In terms of uranydra, it is as if an additional drop were devoted to increasing the imbuement's immediate benefits, and a further drop devoted to elevating its long-term potential. The exact form of these augmentations will take has many degrees of freedom, which you may use to sculpt the result, but the nature of the blade means that it will always be bent towards battle in some shade or shape.
"The sword also grants its wielder an echo of its inventor's own prowess with blades, both as an art unto themselves and in combination with the sealed imbuement. Not the impossible world-cleaving sword-might of the first Hero's final showing before his departure from Sceptiron, but still greater than what Fighting Spirit or the Storied Hazel might offer, at least without the former itself being augmented by the sword's seal. This echo is also the sword's primary method of returning to you, as its wielders will always find themselves delivering the sword back to you eventually, their actions subtly influenced by the echo's intent."
[ ] Worldly Powers (3 drops) - A boon companion. "The Summoning, when performed properly, contains a provision to help incentivize Heroes to tie themselves to the summoner. A willing volunteer in the ritual, which may or may not be the ritual's central performer, offers themself as a vessel in which to plant a seed of your essence, drawn harmlessly from your own soul. This seed will naturally sprout within them under your care, and the flourishing of which will inspire a deep understanding of and kinship with you in them, bringing with it what loyalty such a thing always does, as well inspiring enormous growth in their skills and abilities, possibly matching or even exceeding your own depending on how dedicated you are in pursuing advancement. Naturally, as a loyal and autonomous persons in their own right, the recipient of Worldly Powers will naturally take whatever actions they deem necessary to find their way back to you if an unanticipated separation occurs.
"The particular circumstances regarding your summoning mean that, unlike normal, you have a choice of summoner, and thus a choice of Worldly Powers as well. As with the summoners, the information provided regarding the recipients was limited, but what is available will be shared with you.
"If you choose to answer the Chief Thaumaturge's summoning, then Ioachimus of Hafemuntia will be the recipient of Worldly Powers. A young man and prodigy among the Enses Mandatini, the warrior-monks who guard the physical texts of the Divine Mandate. He possesses extensive knowledge of the Mandate, its laws and history, its religion and culture, and despite his youth, is also a battle-hardened warrior, having earned his place defending the Mandate after showing exemplary skill and bravery on battlefields further afield. In terms of magic, he possesses the Touch, has excellent fighting spirit though not many techniques, and is trained in several of the Magisterium's god-given rituals, centering mostly on purification and sanctification, capable of cleansing and protecting against a wide variety of malicious magic and spiritual attacks.
"If you choose to answer the Undead Emperor's summoning, then Berya Mendyetko will be the recipient of Worldly Powers. As previously stated, she is an apprentice of the Undead Emperor, albeit primarily as a necromancer rather than an administrator, and is fascinated with Heroes, yourself naturally included. She's possessed immense magical talent from birth, the refinement of which she has pursued from a young age to the exclusion of almost everything else. Consequently, she possesses a diverse array of magical skills and techniques, including including all five magics within the remit of Induction, as well as the numerous lesser traditions which litter the lands outside the Mandate, and even a handful of stolen magisterial rituals, including the Summoning itself, which she helped reverse engineer. Even if you don't choose to invest the seed of your soul into her, Berya will be remarkably devoted to helping you, a devotion which in turn actually makes the implantation process significantly cheaper to perform.
"If you choose to answer the Heathen Haruspex's summoning, then Irxnóm herself will be the recipient of Worldly Powers. The breadth of her skills is difficult to measure, whether mundane or magical, given that she has fully absorbed and integrated the contents of the Storied Hazel, and even contributed a significant fraction of the memories it now contains. She has also been present to observe many key moments of Sceptiron's recent history, including being one of only a handful of people still alive who have personally witnessed the previous Summoning, and even before that, the final terrestrial appearance of the Wardens before their departure from Sceptiron nearly a millennium ago. As a half-dragon, she possesses enhanced physical abilities comparable to those granted by Blood Anointment, and as an elder among her kind possesses a number of permanent draconic features, lesser forms of what the draconic transformation of Blood Anointment grants, while as an experienced haruspex, she is also deeply familiar with the best practices of earthblood alchemy."
-[ ] Worldly Impression (requires Impression) - Twin blossoms. "Alternatively, rather than investing this seed into a native of Sceptiron, you can instead infuse it into your Impression to bring it more fully into reality, with remarkable results. In addition to the Impression's basal form expanding from diminutive to a comparable size to yourself and its magical abilities growing from minor complements to yours to a full suite of powers comparable in strength to your own, you will now benefit from the boon of progression should the Impression's growth ever outpace your own, and two new further facets of your relationship to the Impression will emerge. First, in much the same way that the Impression can choose to dispel themself in order to return to irreality and can freely reappear near you while so vanished, you too can now step into irreality so long as your Impression remains in your stead, sensing the world through your bond to them, and manifesting yourself through them in turn. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, whichever desideratum which you do not have, your Impression will instead possess, and so long as the two of you both remain within reality, and in close physical proximity, both of you will benefit from both desiderata."
[ ] Skeleton Key (4 drops) - A key to open many locks. "Strictly speaking, this is not an option that is meant to be offered to new Heroes, and is in fact not usually even possible to offer at all, but the exceptional circumstances of your summoning allow for it, if only just. A Skeleton Key is a powerful tool for a staggering variety of purposes, unified by the concept of 'opening'. Its physical form can be used as an ordinary key for any equally physical lock without any additional effort, regardless of the complexity or nuance of the lock it is opening, and with progressively more convoluted ritual, more protracted and abstruse forms of 'lock' can also be opened.
"Often, Heroes wish to move on to other worlds after accomplishing their missions here on Sceptiron, sometimes even to return to their world of origin for one reason or another, and for those that do so wish but lack the means to reach their destination, the Architects left this as a final resort. The construction of a Skeleton Key, one of the greatest technological achievements they made during their occupation of Sceptiron and the crux of the Summoning as a whole, is not trivial, and as previously mentioned, requires the accumulation of the proper kinds and quantities of astricone. Sceptiron's heavens are a machine designed, in part, to automate this process, and for Heroes who wished to travel onward, once the materials to construct one were accrued, a Skeleton Key would be offered to ease the Hero's passage.
"Simply from the stockpile already available, a Skeleton Key could be constructed, and protocol allows for it to be offered even now. If you wish, it can be dispensed, albeit at great cost. The rituals of its more advanced usage will be obscure, though your summoner will be able to provide at least a modicum of guidance in its use, as will either desideratum. Perhaps most remarkably, given the circumstances, you could even direct the key to be used to perform a fourth summoning, which as a Hero yourself, you would possess some additional freedom in determining the target of, such as aiming for a specific individual from your homeworld. It would be vanishingly improbable for such a target to possess either desideratum, but they may still possess a lesser spiritual trait of some value, and even if not, they will be allotted their own full portion of pure uranydra, so long as you are able to recruit the help of your own summoner in order to perform the Summoning correctly. Unlike virtually any other use of the Skeleton Key, however, successfully completing a Summoning will consume the key entirely, its preontological substructure dispersed across the vast paracosmic gulfs between Sceptiron and the target's world."
"The budget of uranydra afforded to you so far, in accordance with the ritual and with the peculiarity of your summoning, is not the final limit on what you resources you may call upon. For various reasons, the Architects allotted six drops of pure uranydra to be held in reserve for summoned Heroes, with three provided at a baseline and the remaining three drops additionally available at the Hero's discretion, if the Architects found no reasons to prevent their expenditure. Generally, this was accompanied by the induction of one or two transformations in the Hero which on their own may seem to be drawbacks, will also bring you into closer alignment with the story of the first Hero, who the Architects found to be such a great success as to try and replicate with future summonings where possible. These transformations will now be listed and described."
Choose no more than three drops worth of Drawbacks.
[ ] First Person Perspective (+1 drop) - You are the hero, after all. "The first Hero, in personality, held none as equal to himself, and never held to counsel from others which he did not first seek out. Even his acquiescence to the interests of the Architects was a matter of convenience and circumstantial alignment, the disintegration of which lead to his raising as the first Warden and the Architects' subsequent departure from Sceptiron.
"By accepting this drawback in return for one drop of uranydra, you too will find yourself all but incapable of accepting the authority or superiority of any other over yourself, even when such takes an entirely benign or outright helpful form."
[ ] Heavenly Tears (+1 drop) - Let open the flood gates. "Upon his descent from the arrival platform where you now stand to the surface of Sceptiron, interactions between his unexpectedly expansive semiosoma, his instance of Heroic Stature, and some of the weather-generating uranydrous systems of the lower heavens produced a truly massive storm, which was also intensely and chaotically magical due to being infused with significant amounts of incompletely synthesized uranydra and astricone. The storm was self-sustaining, and actually still exists in the present, though it was later shepherded away from inhabited areas by the Wardens.
"By accepting this drawback in return for one drop of uranydra, your descent will be modified to induce a similar, albeit significantly smaller, storm over the place of your summoning. It will not resolve itself naturally, and will cause significant damage to both property and nature while it rages, but it will not be impossible to withstand for the locals, at least for the near future, nor is it an intractable problem to solve if you choose to make an attempt."
[ ] Halved (+2 drops) - It cost an arm and a leg. "A fairly simple transformation relative to the others. When the first Hero arrived, he was quite grievously wounded, missing his left eye, arm, and leg, as well as the left member of several internal organ pairs, the absences of which were anomalously resistant to healing even via the Architects and Overmind's most advanced means of reconstruction. He remained remarkably capable throughout his summoning despite this, though, and once methods of prosthetic implantation and control which evaded the healing-ban were discovered, he began a truly meteoric ascent, the results of which quite drastically altered the course of Sceptiron's history.
"By accepting this drawback in return for two drops of uranydra, your body will be subject to the same wounds as the first Hero, though yours will be sealed to limit blood loss to a manageable level and their resistance to healing will, naturally, only extend as far as the ontology of Sceptiron is able to support. Regardless, looking into quality prosthetics quickly upon your descent is recommended."
[ ] Unveiled Aura (+2 drops) - Becoming a beacon. "The previously mentioned interactions between the first Hero's semiosoma and Heroic Stature had an additional effect, which records indicate persisted through to his final departure. He possessed a unique and intensely powerful aura, which not only allowed for his position to be determined from virtually anywhere on Sceptiron by those with access to the correct methods, but also broadcasted a wide range of details regarding his characteristics and capabilities which could be interpreted through the same methods. While this didn't end up impairing him much, his actions and the actions of later Heroes has, unfortunately, prompted the formation of a long-running and well-hidden conspiracy to find, slay, and harvest the corpses of Heroes to acquire the remnants of their desiderata and uranydrous enhancements.
"By accepting this drawback in return for two drops of uranydra, your aura will be unveiled in a similar manner, an event which the aforementioned conspiracy is well-prepared to detect and well-motivated to exploit. You should expect them to cause trouble eventually regardless, but with your aura unveiled, expect it to begin very soon."
[ ] Avarice (+1-3 drops) - Why not just take it? When you think about it for a moment, and take another (brief, so as to avoid giving yourself another headache) look around, you notice that there doesn't actually seem to be anything forcing you to take any of these drawbacks along with the other three drops. You could just take three more drops' worth of imbuements and accessories, and you don't think anything would stop you. You don't know what sort of ramifications that might have afterwards, other than probably negatively influencing what this voice says about you to the other two Heroes who are on the way, but given what's on offer, and what sort of problems you'll be dealing with, the extra power may be worth it?
[ ] Red Eyes Alight (+3 drops, limit-breaking) - You have Her interest, now. Good luck. The face's expression goes from merely anxious to outright worried, and the voice sighs before speaking once more. "There are…additional drops present in the reserves. There's no record of their harvesting, nor any other indication of their origin. Despite being, to all detailed analysis, entirely identical to any other quantity of pure uranydra in your allotted portion, visual inspection finds them to be inexplicably…red. This matches discrepancies in the Black City's appearance, which combined with reports about a potential cause or contributing factor to the discrepancy, indicates that the presence of these drops may be related. It's likely that the increased chaos in the Black City, a primary instigator of their present interference, was caused by this change, and utilizing these anomalous red drops may be inviting that chaos into your story. Thus, caution is likely wise, but…they are nonetheless available, if you deem their expenditure necessary."
This one had quite a bit of conceptual help from @Archon during the brainstorming process, and naturally the invincible @Lealope did the color theory.
Herotide's Arrival
Introduction
You died. It was a while ago now, long enough you don't remember exactly how, other than that it wasn't terribly surprising.You remember your first moments after death much more clearly. Time is strange. The world sort of shrank away from you, like you were floating up into the sky, except the sky was getting further away too. It all shrank down to a point in front of you. You don't know if it's actually gone, or is just invisibly small to you now, but you've been cut off from it regardless.
Despite yourself, you didn't panic. You didn't really feel much of anything, physically or emotionally. Part of you thought that just made sense, being dead and all. It wasn't exactly Heaven, but it beat reincarnating or being obliterated, to say nothing of worse alternatives.
So you just chilled. You didn't exactly do a lot thinking, but you were still processing stuff, coming to terms with your life. Right when you were starting to feel like you didn't have anything left to process, you felt something new and unfamiliar.
Then, with nary so much as a jerking sensation or stomach drop, you are somewhere, rather than nowhere. It feels a bit like a cross between the bridge of the Enterprise and a factory control room, empty of any people, but whenever you try to look more closely at anything, you just keep finding more and more finer and finer detail, like some kind of fractal zoom. It makes your head hurt, so instead you focus on the currently dark screen ahead of you.
In the next instant the screen activates, a beautiful face appearing on it and beginning to speak, an equally beautiful voice emanating from all around you. Despite their beauty, the face's eyes seem unfocused and the voice robotically consistent in its pacing. If you attempt to interrupt, the voice will pause, but it doesn't respond to any comments or questions you might make, simply returning to what it was saying before your interruption.
Desideratum
"Welcome Hero, to the world of Sceptiron. The direst of exigencies has once again arisen, and our world's great leaders have summoned you to aid them in overcoming its challenges. Worry not if you find yourself unprepared, you will be granted the power and resources you need. The sacrifices made by your summoner have been rendered into pure uranydra, the heavenly lubrication necessary to implement your heroic metamorphosis. Instead, what guided your summoning was something deeper, a rare and valuable element which lies at the basest level of your ontological foundation, something fostered but left quiescent by your homeworld and which the summoning will properly awaken. It might be either one of:"Pick one Desideratum
[ ] Palimpsest - "Which when awakened provides genius-level holistic cognitive enhancement and a metaphysical pluripotency, the latter allowing you to initiate into nearly all local magic systems given the opportunity, even ones normally limited by bloodline, birth location, or other circumstantial prerequisites, while the former virtually guarantees you'll excel with in whatever intellectual endeavors you engage in, including any arcane research and development which finds your interest;"
"or alternatively"
[ ] Pure Pearl - "Which when awakened provides a blessing of good fortune and great destiny and an incorruptible purity, the latter perfectly shielding you from the most insidious forms of death-dealing or domination which you might encounter at the hands of your summoner's foes, whether magical or mundane, while the former will ensure that neither machination nor misadventure will interrupt your projects and pursuits, untrammeled by risk and presented with a surfeit of opportunity as you will be."
"Either way, it will become unmistakable which you possess once the summoning is complete, but until then your own intuition will be the best estimate."
Interference
The face's eyes seem to become clearer and more focused, its expression changing from placid to something between distressed and annoyed, and the voice's tone and prosody more organic as it continues to speak."Unfortunately, there's been an irregularity in the conditions of your summoning, due to the interference of outside powers, originating from another paracosmic locality, identifiable as the Black City despite some discrepancies between its current appearance and what the records indicate, resulting in an excess of conversion of ambient astricone into key-shards. Normally this would be handled by the Wardens or Architects, but in their absence, there is little to be done other than to warn you of its consequences. The most pressing is that it's allowed three distinct summoning rituals to be completed, nearly simultaneously, but some others include—"
Pick at least one Interference
[ ] The Stirred Pot - Uncontrolled chaos. "—key-shards that weren't successfully assembled into a Skeleton Key remain present on Sceptiron, scattered across the world and weighing on its of web of cause and effect, creating possibilities unpredictably, opening paths that were closed and bringing parts of the world together that were previously alien to one another, increasing the 'temperature' of the world's narrative 'climate' significantly."
[ ] The Director's Cut (+1 drop) - A meddlesome auteur. "—an elevated being from the Black City has taken a personal interest in the stories of you and the other Heroes who will be summoned, and has broadcast intentions to sculpt those stories to suit a grander narrative of their own design. This direct attention will likely bring you considerable trouble, and may bring you into conflict with the other Heroes more often and more intensely than might be ideal, but they've at least provided an extra drop of pure uranydra to help set you and the other two apart from previous Heroes."
[ ] The Recruitment Drive (+1 drop) - Petty villains and thrill-seekers. "—a small group of powerful and violent people from the Black City have entered Sceptiron physically and begun to wreak havoc, seeming to seek only two things: entertainment and to acquire new potential members for their band of mercenaries from among this world's 'worthiest' people. As a Hero, you will likely be among those to be judged for worthiness, and thus subject to their sadistic 'tests', which will no doubt be a dangerous and exhausting prospect. Since the group's arrival, those who have passed their tests and joined them have also grown massively more dangerous thanks to the group's aid and access to their exotic resources. Fortunately, their entrance into the world precipitated astral currents that have allowed for the refinement of surplus uranydra, affording you an extra drop to fuel your metamorphosis."
[ ] The River-Damming Stone (+1 drop) - The world's ending, slowly. "—an individual of singular strength and titanic stature from the Black City has blocked the primary uranydra intake conduit of Sceptiron's underlying ontological infrastructure, the main input into the first stage of the world's uranydra and astricone processing systems, redirecting the flow to fuel their own ascension to a higher state of being. This won't have any immediately disastrous impact, as there are significant reserves of both pure uranydra and astricone in all its most common variations, but as time passes, the lack of new raw elements entering the system will cause the steady break down of various natural processes, starting with the most magically intensive fading away in a matter of years, progressing through the less magical ones after a few decades, and eventually the mundane world beginning to slowly die off after about a century, eventually leaving Sceptiron a barren, lifeless husk.
"That fate is not inevitable however, as information received from Warden-aligned paracosmic agents indicates the intruder is extremely cautious, even cowardly. While genuinely forcing them out of the conduit is not feasibly within reach without gathering further outside assistance, it may be possible for you to scare them off by managing to inflict some small injury. Regardless of how you handle the situation, though, the intruder's push into the primary intake conduit briefly forced more uranydra through the purification matrix, resulting in enough of a surplus to make an extra drop of pure uranydra available for your use."
Summoner
The face on the screen's expression sharpens and focuses again, now seeming to properly register your presence in specific, tracking you as you move around the bridge-slash-control room you've been pulled into."That said, it's time to inform of you of the conditions of your summoner. However, the exceptional nature of the situation makes this more complicated. As previously stated, there have been three summoning rituals completed since the summoning process began, and while all three summonings will eventually be fulfilled, as the first of the three Heroes to arrive, you have a choice unique in the entire history of Sceptiron: to select your own summoner. This occurrence is, in addition to being unprecedented, unknown to the summoners as yet, and so they have not provided any additional information to try and sway your decision, likely expecting to inform you of the details after your arrival. Thus, only the information whose presence is inherent to the ritual's completion can be provided."
Pick one Summoner
[ ] The Chief Thaumaturge -Provides the Hero's Regalia for free, with a purchasable upgrade. An ancient and holy country, blessed and ordained by the gods in a previous era, its holy men grown corrupt and complacent, its hegemony now under threat by anathema within and without. "Aulus Vindicius Claustario, the director of the department of miraculous works in the Magisterium of the Divine Mandate, summons you at the command of his Pontiff to aid in the defense of the Mandate, from the great coalition of neighboring states and rebellious provinces that have broken free in these godless latter days, from the growing unrest of the lay masses and displeasure of the secular leadership in the territories still under the Magisterium's control, and in his heart, perhaps even from his own Pontiff."
[ ] The Undead Emperor - Provides the companionship and aid of Berya Mendyetko, an apprentice of the Undead Emperor and terrifyingly talented sorceress, fascinated by the nature of Heroes, and discounts Worldly Powers by 1 drop as long as you do not choose the Worldly Impression sub-option. A new nation, born from the refuse of the world, struggles to survive. "Ekabod Ambaqshi, an ancient lich, grand strategist, and reluctant leader of the coalition to destroy the Mandate, summons you to help prosecute the war, whether as a vanguard or figurehead, and for your counsel in how to rule the throngs of scattered and disorganized undead ex-slaves that have declared him their emperor."
[ ] The Heathen Haruspex - Provides access to an Earthblood Codicil, which once absorbed will attune you to the primordial essences sealed within the land and the life that springs from it, and discounts Blood Anointment by 1 drop. The lone priestess of an old and dead-slumbering god, just trying to protect the world her god became. "Irxnóm, elder half-dragon and the last living devotee of the Earthblood Wyrm, summons you to aid in her mission to forestall the world's death, whether from the thoughtless wars and waste of its other inhabitants or, perhaps more pressingly, from the otherworldly interference that has arrived from the Black City."
The face on the screen remains focused on you as they finish explaining the summoners whose calls you might answer, a subtle smile creeping onto their lips as they moves on to the next topic.
"Regardless of which summoner you select, all have paid the full price of the summoning, and thus you have access to a full allotment of three drops of pure uranydra." As well as any that your choice of interference might have garnered.
The image of several teardrop-shaped beads of black liquid appear on the screen, the face zooming out slightly and moving to the side to make room for them. The background of the image also changes from the black of earlier to a lighter sky blue, making the black drops easier to make out.
"Given that, it may be wise to consider the options on how these drops can be used alongside which summoner to choose, since what might be a mere convenience in one scenario may be a great boon in another."
Imbuements
"There are two potential ways these drops of pure uranydra may be utilized: imbuements, which manifest as direct alterations to your body and soul; and accessories, which manifest external to and independent of your person, and which are generally much more vulnerable to being separated from you than imbuements. Given their relative fixity, the available imbuements will be described first."[ ] Heroic Stature (1 drop) - Idealization and beyond. "One of the cheapest and simplest imbuements to apply to a Hero, despite its relative rarity among Sceptiron natives. Its benefits are two fold in nature, one immediate and one ongoing: the immediate is a comprehensive and complete overhaul of your physical form, providing a body as close to your personal ideal as possible within the remit of humanity, including the heightened body-control to fully utilize the improvements; the ongoing is an alteration and expansion of your semiosoma, interweaving its fibers with your new material body, allowing your physical prowess and other augmentations to grow alongside the scope of your story. Your story will especially gain from conflicts with others of similar Stature, and given the soon-coming arrival of two more Heroes, either or both of whom may choose this as well, and who you will likely come into at least occasional conflict with given the summoners at hand, the growth potential here is quite high."
[ ] Induction (1-5 drops) - Manifold magics. Choose one for each drop spent. "Sceptiron's people practice numerous forms of magic, but the vast majority fall into one of the following five broad categories, all of which spring from a common source, a single particularly robust and versatile component of the world's infrastructure which monitors and manages the production and distribution of spiritual constructs. Each of these five arts taps into this functionality through different means and wields it towards different ends, and each of these options provides both a deep intuition for the selected art and thorough training in its best practices, but even more than that, the fundamental relationship between them ensures that syncretizing multiple forms together will exponentially expand the reach of what your personal magical research can uncover."
-[ ] Augury - Birds tell and birds toil. "The most straight-forward form of divination available, relying on a combination of dedicated training to work with birds and a peculiar but not incredibly rare innate ability to link their minds to one's own. This allows for the sharing of senses and limited telepathic control over birds so bound, greatly enhancing the complexity of tasks they can be entrusted with. Perhaps more important, it also grants the user access to the bird's own oracular senses, which while individually weak, can be combined with other birds in a flock to great effect, particularly for detecting events on the largest scale, such as the movements of weather systems or the coming and going of natural disasters."
-[ ] Fighting Spirit - You are a living ritual. Perform it well. "Techniques to alter, intensify, and modulate the natural magical auras and fluctuations generated by and reinforcing your living body. Selecting this provides appropriately heroic talent and a small repertoire of high-quality techniques matching your desired criteria appended to your muscle memory. Common uses are to amplify the power of strikes, to enhance one's mobility, and to strengthen the body and soul's natural defenses, but stranger abilities are possible at a higher level, such as to camouflage oneself against the perception of others, to project ranged blasts of modified aura to widely varying effect, and to carefully channel your aura to empower the results of other magic."
-[ ] Necromancy - Soul rules body, and magic rules the soul. "A younger art than any other here, invented a mere ten lifetimes ago by the teacher of the Undead Emperor. Intended to be a tool for shepherding the souls of the departed to the afterlife in the absence of the Warden of Death, its power to compel and contort the souls of the dead, and even the living when wielded with sufficient subtlety or force, has unfortunately led to its terrible and wide-spread abuse, with the souls of the dead cruelly bound to their own rotting corpses, often without even an attempt at embalming, or even worse to crude effigies of wood and clay, and compelled to painfully animate them to serve as slaves. However, there are some ethical uses for this magic, the ability to overcome death at the deceased's own prior request notably among them, if you have the strength of will to resist the temptation that so many other necromancers have fallen to."
-[ ] Patternwork - Beseech heaven into the weld. "A widespread art, taking the form of imbuing spiritual power into carefully forged and pattern-welded metal, granting it supernatural quality and often some magical extension or expansion of its mundane function. Unlike the myriad forms of Fighting Spirit, this is not because Patternwork is intuitive, quite the contrary in fact, but rather because of the inherently portable and reliably identifiable nature of its products. An item of patternwrought metal will do what it does no matter who is wielding or wearing it, affording for differences in mundane skill. Patternwrought items diminish with time and use if not well-maintained, but never fail in an explosive or unpredictable manner, and while not necessarily obvious to a complete layman, its function can almost always be identified with a trained eye and perhaps a jeweler's loop, as the patterns in the weld that encode its magic are the very same which form the beautiful shapes on its surface."
-[ ] The Touch - The hands of a healer. "The most ancient magic among these five, itself an emulation of even more primeval power. The Touch is an in-born ability to provoke a healing transmutation in subjects possessed of sufficient vitality, the spiritual quality of self-sustenance and self-repair, via skin contact, or more commonly with tools capable of conducting the Touch, such as one wrought with an appropriate pattern or infused with your own aura. The strength of this ability varies significantly between healers, but even with at its maximum strength, which you will possess should you choose this, its feats will still be limited by the subject's innate healing ability, and thus it is almost always combined with mundane medicine and perhaps other, less common forms of magical healing, using the Touch to amplify their efficacy."
[ ] Heavenskin (2 drops) - Subjugate the spirits, seize the sky. "Of course, you can also choose to take up the legacy of the creators of the greater machine which those five arts are merely applications of. This grants you the form of a juvenile Architect, making you kin to the creators of the system which you are now interfacing with, and whose hands built the heaven in whose uppermost vaults you now stand. If taken up, their legacy will paint your skin, hair, and eyes with the same numinous and impossible sky-hue as theirs, the sapphire-clear blue of the open daylit sky, the star-speckled black of night, the roiling greys and flashing lightning of storm-tossed clouds, and more besides, all at once, neither shifting nor muddled but simply the all-encompassing color of the sky. Aside from this aesthetic change, the Architect's legacy also brings a number of practical benefits:
"A naturally void-adapted body, without need for air, water, food, or sleep, immune to the dangers of extremes in heat, pressure, and radiation, and durable enough to make a lightning bolt feel like a static shock, a gigawatt laser like summer sunlight, and a hail of high-caliber bullets like little more than warm rain;
"The ability to briefly conjure silver-gleaming winged armor, covering you like a second skin woven from the inviolable fabric of spacetime itself, for when your baseline durability proves insufficient, and which allows you to fly through the sky or void with incredible speed, with both the conjuration itself and the flight it grants tapping into a pool of stamina which, while initially small, will grow naturally over time and more rapidly with strenuous use;
"And perhaps most importantly, a meta-physiology perfectly formed to master the world, allowing you to naturally see and touch the flows and shapes of magic underpinning Sceptiron or most any other world you might someday visit, and capable of perfectly rejecting deleterious magic while allowing what is beneficial to permeate you to even greater effect, your spirit respiring blessings as easily and automatically as a human respires oxygen, serving as the engine driving your maturation as an Architect.
[ ] Metalmind (2 drops) - The mind, materialized. "The Architects' legacy isn't the only one which you may elect to receive. The Overmind, the greatest ally and oldest friend of the Architects, designed a seed of its own essence to be offered alongside theirs. Expending the drops to synthesize this seed and plant it within you will prompt a transubstantiation of your body and soul both.
"Your new body will look much the same as it would otherwise, initially at least, the only immediately noticeable change being a subtle prismatic sheen to your hair. Internally however, the changes will be stark. It will be composed of noometal, a unique substance found nowhere else in Sceptiron, which is malleable and reactive to your mind, naturally generating a telekinetic force at the direction of your thoughts which in turn allows your body to move and feel just the same as before despite its new composition, or even to float weightlessly when dedicated entirely to fighting Sceptiron's gravity. That same malleability also allows you to freely reshape your body, taking on any form you have sufficient noometal to construct, heedless of biology and only marginally concerned for mechanical dynamics. Noometal is, however, much denser than human flesh and bone, and your new body will still only have the same mass as it would otherwise, and thus your initial human form will be a hollow shell, mere millimeters thick, though the intuitive application of your force will ensure your body doesn't collapse under its own weight.
"Your soul's evolution is just as stunning, as it becomes able to imbue psychic programs of a sort into your noometal, allowing you to automate the application of its force, following its programming even if you disconnect the programmed noometal from the rest of your body, though the more complex a program is, the more mass will be needed to store it. You can even replicate your entire mind, which occupies 12 kilograms of noometal at a minimum, allowing you to quite effectively multiply yourself, and with your soul spanning every mind you spin off, you needn't ever worry of divergence. Additionally, each mind you possess, including the first, generates a sourceless trickle of additional noometal whenever it's at rest, neither mentally overtaxed nor exerting its full telekinetic force, with a maximum growth rate of approximately 2.74 grams of noometal per day if your mind is completely empty and your force totally relaxed. Your soul can even serve to store your noometal, allowing you to stow it away or redeploy it with a thought, with even stowing noometal from one body and deploying it to another far away being possible. Noometal stowed this way still contributes to your overall force, but is erased of any programming it had, including a mind, and thus also cannot contribute to your accrual of more noometal. Notably, as your stores of noometal and the number of your minds grow, your soul's own capacities will never become overburdened, and instead grow to match, setting you down the long, long path which the Overmind has trod before you."
[ ] Blood Anointment (4 drops) - The sanction, status, and shape due to a scion of the Wyrm. "There is an even older legacy than either the Architects' or the Overmind's, in the last imbuement prepared for Heroes such as yourself. Deep beneath the earth, a dragon sleeps within the heart of the world, and with this, you may be christened with its primordial blood, bringing with it three main benefits:
"Access to the magical properties present in everything which grows up from the earth, from the humblest patch of moss to the grandest mountain, gained from the dragon's dreams emanating from deep beneath, which are normally sealed by the weight of heaven for all but those anointed with the earth's blood, or who have touched the blood through some lesser means such as the Earthblood Codicils once used by the ancient haruspices to induct new members into their order, which in turn transforms them into the basis for a mighty and versatile alchemy, as well as massively expanding the remit of any other magics which utilize them as a medium;
"A verdant aura of draconic majesty, making it impossibly clear to all that you are kin to the Wyrm, of one blood with the world itself, and thus worthy of reverence and submission. Outsiders to Sceptiron will be minimally affected, including the other Heroes, but native humans or other sophonts will be powerfully inclined to at least deeply respect you, whether as friend or foe, requiring a display of truly incredible willpower from them to do more than either follow or flee from you in the face of your aura when flared to its fullest extent, while lesser lifeforms can only bend to your will without resistance, with plants and even the earth and stone itself shifting and changing to accommodate you, and though the heavens and the magic which descends from them are not strictly bound by your aura, you can still consider yourself to have a general resistance to that magic thanks certain protocols that will soften the blow whenever they're used against you;
"And finally, a bodily tie to the slumbering Wyrm themself, providing enormously enhanced strength, agility, endurance, and perception, a body enough to make you an apex predator among any of Sceptiron's magically augmented ecosystems on its own, even without considering your aura or the power offered by earthblood alchemy, and what's more, you can rouse even greater power from the slumbering blood, temporarily transforming yourself into a true dragon, drawing in the earthblood of everything around you to catalyze the metamorphosis and coloring your draconic form with the dreaming essences hidden within the environs whose earthblood you respire, a form which in turn crumbles away into fertile black soil when the transformation runs its course and you return to your human shape.
"All of these abilities emerge within you through your connection to the dragon on whose sleeping, bleeding body Sceptiron was grown, and so they will experience commensurate improvements as the Wyrm continues to heal from the killing blow which initially put them to sleep. This process is geologically slow, such is the magnitude of the wound suffered, but there are means available to you to hasten it, as one who has been anointed by the blood. The details cannot be shared here, but if you search for them, the blood will show you the way in time, so long as you survive."
Accessories
"Now, the accessories available to you will be described. As stated previously, these accessories are less deeply intertwined with your person, and to varying degrees are more liable to become unavailable, whether through misfortune or malfeasance. However, should it become separated from you, each accessory has its own method of finding its way back to you in time."[ ] Impression (1 drop) - An ally in the shape of your passing. "A sort of familiar spirit, generally manifesting in the form of a diminutive winged humanoid of one variety or another, fully capable of agile flight and possessing a variety of minor magical abilities that will be naturally be parallel and complementary to your own. Perhaps the hardest of the accessories to lose in any long-term sense, as the Impression can freely dispel themself and simply manifest once more in your presence, though certain forms of magical suppression can prevent them from entering the suppressed area, even by way of manifestation.
"In terms of their origin, they are unique among the accessories in being neither native nor naturalized to Sceptiron, but rather are an innate consequence of the particular mechanisms utilized by the Architects when implementing the Summoning. As a soul is sought out which possesses one of the two desiderata, a sort of complementary soul is simultaneously constructed, autonomously composed from alternatives and corollaries encountered 'along the way' to finding a Hero, and whose existence remains as a latent potential borne by your own, easily realizable with a single drop of uranydra.
"Impressions have been relatively common among previous Heroes, and are often well-appreciated for their companionship and unbreakable loyalty, as well as for their innate magical abilities."
[ ] Hero's Regalia (1 drop) - Beyond trivialities. "A silver-gleaming signet ring whose sign is arcane and unmistakable, allowing you to easily prove your status as a Hero if you wish to, and which a simple exertion of intent can cause to deploy a wide variety of attire for your wearing, replacing whatever clothing you're currently dressed in with articles of crisp black with accents of the same silvery substance as the ring, the available range of outfits being suitable for nearly any occasion, ignoring the lack of diverse colors.
"The ring itself is virtually indestructible, as impenetrable as the conjured armor of Heavenskin, and the clothing produced is always clean and comfortable, and perhaps most importantly, offers durable protection which grows alongside your abilities, ensuring that not only will they survive your exertions no matter what heights of power you reach, but that they will always be strong enough to give you at least a bit of protection against your peers, and to shield you entirely from the attacks of those your strength has utterly surpassed.
"Additionally, deep in the vaults of the Magisterium lies the original Hero's Regalia, the type from whose mold yours is cast, and which can be freely attuned to you through a secret ritual. Should you attune to it whilst possessing your own regalia at the same time, they are capable of acting in concert to achieve a greater result, forming a suit of armor composed of the same sacrosanct silvery substance as the ring, which is nearly weightless and well-articulated to allow for your full range of unencumbered movement, though this mobility unfortunately also necessitates thin openings around your joints which can in turn be exploited by a sufficiently dexterous attacker.
"In contrast to the Impression, the ring can be quite slow to come back if separated from you, though it will do so eventually, its weight on the narrative fabric of Sceptiron ensuring that, as long as it's not being actively guarded by those with the knowledge and power to counteract its fateful return, a long sequence of accidents and coincidences will bring it back to your hand. Still, it may save you quite a bit of annoyance to be careful in not letting it get away from you."
[ ] Storied Hazel (1 drop) - The wisdom of ages, in your hands. "A sturdy cane of hazelwood, with the top end carved into a comfortable handle, delicately woven knotwork etched into its full length. Tracing the knotwork with your hands will generate a sort of psychic key inside your mind, which you can in turn use to unlock the staff's hidden repositories of ancient knowledge. The staff is, fortunately, also much more durable than its construction would normally allow, and even if it's destroyed or lost to some other fate, recalling previous keys you've generated can guide you to an appropriate limb of hazelwood and let you carve it anew.
"Each of these keys accesses a portion of the staff's knowledge, related to a query, subject matter, or even simple curiosity which you mentally direct towards the staff while generating the key. This will be a considerable quantity of information for anything but the most specific of questions, and potentially the entire, multimillenial history of the staff if you desire it, in a package that is quite densely compressed, informationally speaking. Your mind will need time to 'digest' the information, to unpack and process it in a way which is organized and accessible to your consciousness, during which time its contents will filter first through the subconscious regions of your mind, arising as unfamiliar instincts, muscle memory, or even dreams, before becoming accessible in the same manner as your own skills and memories once fully integrated.
"The repository itself contains a collection of memories donated by the staff's other wielders, including many previous Heroes but also members various druidic sects, the ancient haruspices among their number, as well as by the wise men and women of the Gardeners, stretching to even before the foundation of Sceptiron and into the deep past of their history. This includes an appropriately vast amount of experience, covering an incredible diversity of skills, including numerous magical styles, even some which are not native to Sceptiron, as well as mundane crafts and trades, interpersonal communication and relationship management skills, group leadership and organization from the smallest band to imperial statesmanship, military affairs from the highest of grand strategy to battlefield tactics to individual martial-arts, and even more besides, as well as many, many lifetimes worth of sheer life-experience."
[ ] Fallen Angel (2 drops) - Still ready to fly. "Another ancient artifact of the Gardeners, though unlike the Storied Hazel, the Fallen Angel is unique in it construction, with even the Overmind left baffled by the arts employed by its creators. Consequently, if you choose to take it, it will not be available to the other Heroes until it is relinquished from your care for one reason or another. Its smooth, sleek deltoid external form may be somewhat familiar to you, like something between a trimaran, a jet, and a rocket.
"The Fallen Angel was the vessel which first ferried the Gardeners to the body of the Wyrm, carrying them safely across the harsh expanse of the Agrydata. It has survived many devastating blows during and after that journey, and while it has lost many functionalities to the damage it's suffered, it remains fully capable of silent supersonic flight, agile maneuvering at speed, hovering with perfect stillness, other feats of similar aerobatics, bearing enormous loads without tossing or tumbling them, traversing through the many vaults of heaven, and even brief dips into the nearest portions of the Agrydata surrounding Sceptiron, all with the aid of its embedded piloting and navigation intelligence, which will always make sure to bring the Fallen Angel back to you, so long as not ordered to do otherwise and the vessel is still capable of finding and reaching you. Fortunately, it also needs no material fuel to utilize its present capabilities, or at least won't require refueling on any human time-scale.
"The Fallen Angel's physical form is also thoroughly interwoven with its semiosoma, in a similar manner as Heroic Stature provides, though more comprehensively and deeply, so helping to buoy its narrative's strength with your story may prompt some manner of regeneration that the Architects couldn't manage to provoke, or at least chose not to. Its difficult to predict what precisely those functions are, or what order they may return in, but the strength to fight off the dangers of the Agrydata's wildest reaches and reach the far-flung worlds beyond certainly is certain to appear at some point."
[ ] Sword of the Seal (2 drops) - A weapon, and a way forward. "Uniquely, this particular accessory was added to the Summoning after its completion, designed as it was by the first Hero. Physically, it will be a sword, generally one-handed in terms of size, but the specifics of its shape are relatively variable, given that the sword's design must accommodate your choice of seal.
"The nature of the sword is to be a vessel for an imbuement. Select one of yours to be sealed, and it will enter into the sword's design, becoming a part of it. The nature of such an inclusion means that you will not be able to access the imbuement's benefits when you do not wield the sword, or at least have it on your person, but in return, the imbuement's benefits are themselves massively amplified and its limits are diminished to an equal degree. In terms of uranydra, it is as if an additional drop were devoted to increasing the imbuement's immediate benefits, and a further drop devoted to elevating its long-term potential. The exact form of these augmentations will take has many degrees of freedom, which you may use to sculpt the result, but the nature of the blade means that it will always be bent towards battle in some shade or shape.
"The sword also grants its wielder an echo of its inventor's own prowess with blades, both as an art unto themselves and in combination with the sealed imbuement. Not the impossible world-cleaving sword-might of the first Hero's final showing before his departure from Sceptiron, but still greater than what Fighting Spirit or the Storied Hazel might offer, at least without the former itself being augmented by the sword's seal. This echo is also the sword's primary method of returning to you, as its wielders will always find themselves delivering the sword back to you eventually, their actions subtly influenced by the echo's intent."
[ ] Worldly Powers (3 drops) - A boon companion. "The Summoning, when performed properly, contains a provision to help incentivize Heroes to tie themselves to the summoner. A willing volunteer in the ritual, which may or may not be the ritual's central performer, offers themself as a vessel in which to plant a seed of your essence, drawn harmlessly from your own soul. This seed will naturally sprout within them under your care, and the flourishing of which will inspire a deep understanding of and kinship with you in them, bringing with it what loyalty such a thing always does, as well inspiring enormous growth in their skills and abilities, possibly matching or even exceeding your own depending on how dedicated you are in pursuing advancement. Naturally, as a loyal and autonomous persons in their own right, the recipient of Worldly Powers will naturally take whatever actions they deem necessary to find their way back to you if an unanticipated separation occurs.
"The particular circumstances regarding your summoning mean that, unlike normal, you have a choice of summoner, and thus a choice of Worldly Powers as well. As with the summoners, the information provided regarding the recipients was limited, but what is available will be shared with you.
"If you choose to answer the Chief Thaumaturge's summoning, then Ioachimus of Hafemuntia will be the recipient of Worldly Powers. A young man and prodigy among the Enses Mandatini, the warrior-monks who guard the physical texts of the Divine Mandate. He possesses extensive knowledge of the Mandate, its laws and history, its religion and culture, and despite his youth, is also a battle-hardened warrior, having earned his place defending the Mandate after showing exemplary skill and bravery on battlefields further afield. In terms of magic, he possesses the Touch, has excellent fighting spirit though not many techniques, and is trained in several of the Magisterium's god-given rituals, centering mostly on purification and sanctification, capable of cleansing and protecting against a wide variety of malicious magic and spiritual attacks.
"If you choose to answer the Undead Emperor's summoning, then Berya Mendyetko will be the recipient of Worldly Powers. As previously stated, she is an apprentice of the Undead Emperor, albeit primarily as a necromancer rather than an administrator, and is fascinated with Heroes, yourself naturally included. She's possessed immense magical talent from birth, the refinement of which she has pursued from a young age to the exclusion of almost everything else. Consequently, she possesses a diverse array of magical skills and techniques, including including all five magics within the remit of Induction, as well as the numerous lesser traditions which litter the lands outside the Mandate, and even a handful of stolen magisterial rituals, including the Summoning itself, which she helped reverse engineer. Even if you don't choose to invest the seed of your soul into her, Berya will be remarkably devoted to helping you, a devotion which in turn actually makes the implantation process significantly cheaper to perform.
"If you choose to answer the Heathen Haruspex's summoning, then Irxnóm herself will be the recipient of Worldly Powers. The breadth of her skills is difficult to measure, whether mundane or magical, given that she has fully absorbed and integrated the contents of the Storied Hazel, and even contributed a significant fraction of the memories it now contains. She has also been present to observe many key moments of Sceptiron's recent history, including being one of only a handful of people still alive who have personally witnessed the previous Summoning, and even before that, the final terrestrial appearance of the Wardens before their departure from Sceptiron nearly a millennium ago. As a half-dragon, she possesses enhanced physical abilities comparable to those granted by Blood Anointment, and as an elder among her kind possesses a number of permanent draconic features, lesser forms of what the draconic transformation of Blood Anointment grants, while as an experienced haruspex, she is also deeply familiar with the best practices of earthblood alchemy."
-[ ] Worldly Impression (requires Impression) - Twin blossoms. "Alternatively, rather than investing this seed into a native of Sceptiron, you can instead infuse it into your Impression to bring it more fully into reality, with remarkable results. In addition to the Impression's basal form expanding from diminutive to a comparable size to yourself and its magical abilities growing from minor complements to yours to a full suite of powers comparable in strength to your own, you will now benefit from the boon of progression should the Impression's growth ever outpace your own, and two new further facets of your relationship to the Impression will emerge. First, in much the same way that the Impression can choose to dispel themself in order to return to irreality and can freely reappear near you while so vanished, you too can now step into irreality so long as your Impression remains in your stead, sensing the world through your bond to them, and manifesting yourself through them in turn. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, whichever desideratum which you do not have, your Impression will instead possess, and so long as the two of you both remain within reality, and in close physical proximity, both of you will benefit from both desiderata."
[ ] Skeleton Key (4 drops) - A key to open many locks. "Strictly speaking, this is not an option that is meant to be offered to new Heroes, and is in fact not usually even possible to offer at all, but the exceptional circumstances of your summoning allow for it, if only just. A Skeleton Key is a powerful tool for a staggering variety of purposes, unified by the concept of 'opening'. Its physical form can be used as an ordinary key for any equally physical lock without any additional effort, regardless of the complexity or nuance of the lock it is opening, and with progressively more convoluted ritual, more protracted and abstruse forms of 'lock' can also be opened.
"Often, Heroes wish to move on to other worlds after accomplishing their missions here on Sceptiron, sometimes even to return to their world of origin for one reason or another, and for those that do so wish but lack the means to reach their destination, the Architects left this as a final resort. The construction of a Skeleton Key, one of the greatest technological achievements they made during their occupation of Sceptiron and the crux of the Summoning as a whole, is not trivial, and as previously mentioned, requires the accumulation of the proper kinds and quantities of astricone. Sceptiron's heavens are a machine designed, in part, to automate this process, and for Heroes who wished to travel onward, once the materials to construct one were accrued, a Skeleton Key would be offered to ease the Hero's passage.
"Simply from the stockpile already available, a Skeleton Key could be constructed, and protocol allows for it to be offered even now. If you wish, it can be dispensed, albeit at great cost. The rituals of its more advanced usage will be obscure, though your summoner will be able to provide at least a modicum of guidance in its use, as will either desideratum. Perhaps most remarkably, given the circumstances, you could even direct the key to be used to perform a fourth summoning, which as a Hero yourself, you would possess some additional freedom in determining the target of, such as aiming for a specific individual from your homeworld. It would be vanishingly improbable for such a target to possess either desideratum, but they may still possess a lesser spiritual trait of some value, and even if not, they will be allotted their own full portion of pure uranydra, so long as you are able to recruit the help of your own summoner in order to perform the Summoning correctly. Unlike virtually any other use of the Skeleton Key, however, successfully completing a Summoning will consume the key entirely, its preontological substructure dispersed across the vast paracosmic gulfs between Sceptiron and the target's world."
Drawbacks
The face's expression and voice's tone have been evolving slowly as it's described the imbuements and accessories on offer. The smile and relative cheer drain away now, replaced with what might be anxiety, with their brow furrowed and words reticent, as if they wish they could avoid saying what they say next."The budget of uranydra afforded to you so far, in accordance with the ritual and with the peculiarity of your summoning, is not the final limit on what you resources you may call upon. For various reasons, the Architects allotted six drops of pure uranydra to be held in reserve for summoned Heroes, with three provided at a baseline and the remaining three drops additionally available at the Hero's discretion, if the Architects found no reasons to prevent their expenditure. Generally, this was accompanied by the induction of one or two transformations in the Hero which on their own may seem to be drawbacks, will also bring you into closer alignment with the story of the first Hero, who the Architects found to be such a great success as to try and replicate with future summonings where possible. These transformations will now be listed and described."
Choose no more than three drops worth of Drawbacks.
[ ] First Person Perspective (+1 drop) - You are the hero, after all. "The first Hero, in personality, held none as equal to himself, and never held to counsel from others which he did not first seek out. Even his acquiescence to the interests of the Architects was a matter of convenience and circumstantial alignment, the disintegration of which lead to his raising as the first Warden and the Architects' subsequent departure from Sceptiron.
"By accepting this drawback in return for one drop of uranydra, you too will find yourself all but incapable of accepting the authority or superiority of any other over yourself, even when such takes an entirely benign or outright helpful form."
[ ] Heavenly Tears (+1 drop) - Let open the flood gates. "Upon his descent from the arrival platform where you now stand to the surface of Sceptiron, interactions between his unexpectedly expansive semiosoma, his instance of Heroic Stature, and some of the weather-generating uranydrous systems of the lower heavens produced a truly massive storm, which was also intensely and chaotically magical due to being infused with significant amounts of incompletely synthesized uranydra and astricone. The storm was self-sustaining, and actually still exists in the present, though it was later shepherded away from inhabited areas by the Wardens.
"By accepting this drawback in return for one drop of uranydra, your descent will be modified to induce a similar, albeit significantly smaller, storm over the place of your summoning. It will not resolve itself naturally, and will cause significant damage to both property and nature while it rages, but it will not be impossible to withstand for the locals, at least for the near future, nor is it an intractable problem to solve if you choose to make an attempt."
[ ] Halved (+2 drops) - It cost an arm and a leg. "A fairly simple transformation relative to the others. When the first Hero arrived, he was quite grievously wounded, missing his left eye, arm, and leg, as well as the left member of several internal organ pairs, the absences of which were anomalously resistant to healing even via the Architects and Overmind's most advanced means of reconstruction. He remained remarkably capable throughout his summoning despite this, though, and once methods of prosthetic implantation and control which evaded the healing-ban were discovered, he began a truly meteoric ascent, the results of which quite drastically altered the course of Sceptiron's history.
"By accepting this drawback in return for two drops of uranydra, your body will be subject to the same wounds as the first Hero, though yours will be sealed to limit blood loss to a manageable level and their resistance to healing will, naturally, only extend as far as the ontology of Sceptiron is able to support. Regardless, looking into quality prosthetics quickly upon your descent is recommended."
[ ] Unveiled Aura (+2 drops) - Becoming a beacon. "The previously mentioned interactions between the first Hero's semiosoma and Heroic Stature had an additional effect, which records indicate persisted through to his final departure. He possessed a unique and intensely powerful aura, which not only allowed for his position to be determined from virtually anywhere on Sceptiron by those with access to the correct methods, but also broadcasted a wide range of details regarding his characteristics and capabilities which could be interpreted through the same methods. While this didn't end up impairing him much, his actions and the actions of later Heroes has, unfortunately, prompted the formation of a long-running and well-hidden conspiracy to find, slay, and harvest the corpses of Heroes to acquire the remnants of their desiderata and uranydrous enhancements.
"By accepting this drawback in return for two drops of uranydra, your aura will be unveiled in a similar manner, an event which the aforementioned conspiracy is well-prepared to detect and well-motivated to exploit. You should expect them to cause trouble eventually regardless, but with your aura unveiled, expect it to begin very soon."
[ ] Avarice (+1-3 drops) - Why not just take it? When you think about it for a moment, and take another (brief, so as to avoid giving yourself another headache) look around, you notice that there doesn't actually seem to be anything forcing you to take any of these drawbacks along with the other three drops. You could just take three more drops' worth of imbuements and accessories, and you don't think anything would stop you. You don't know what sort of ramifications that might have afterwards, other than probably negatively influencing what this voice says about you to the other two Heroes who are on the way, but given what's on offer, and what sort of problems you'll be dealing with, the extra power may be worth it?
[ ] Red Eyes Alight (+3 drops, limit-breaking) - You have Her interest, now. Good luck. The face's expression goes from merely anxious to outright worried, and the voice sighs before speaking once more. "There are…additional drops present in the reserves. There's no record of their harvesting, nor any other indication of their origin. Despite being, to all detailed analysis, entirely identical to any other quantity of pure uranydra in your allotted portion, visual inspection finds them to be inexplicably…red. This matches discrepancies in the Black City's appearance, which combined with reports about a potential cause or contributing factor to the discrepancy, indicates that the presence of these drops may be related. It's likely that the increased chaos in the Black City, a primary instigator of their present interference, was caused by this change, and utilizing these anomalous red drops may be inviting that chaos into your story. Thus, caution is likely wise, but…they are nonetheless available, if you deem their expenditure necessary."
- Location
- washington
I mean I didn't think the thread was dead dead rihaku seems likely to finish the quest someday. Even if it might not be a year or two its only like a single update from finishing.
OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
Here's my first go at buildcrafting here
Plan Misdirection(7 Drop Build)
Desideratum: Pure Pearl
Summoner: The Undead Emperor
Interferences(2 Drops): The Recruitment Drive, The Directors Cut
Heroic Stature(1 Drop)
Induction: Patternwork(1 Drop)
Metalmind(2 Drops)
Worldly Powers(2 Drops)
Storied Hazel(1 Drop)
Drawbacks: Unveiled Aura(+2 Drops)
Pure Pearl is a mitigation measure against Unveiled Aura, as are Worldly Powers/Storied Hazel to turn Berya into an ally of considerable power who isn't subject to Unveiled Aura(Presumably storied hazel can be shared). Heroic Stature is because well... it's a progression methodology. I'm wondering if it's possible to use Patternwork on yourself if you take Metalmind. Also programming chunks of yourself is a good way to circumvent deficiencies in things like willpower.
Plan Misdirection(7 Drop Build)
Desideratum: Pure Pearl
Summoner: The Undead Emperor
Interferences(2 Drops): The Recruitment Drive, The Directors Cut
Heroic Stature(1 Drop)
Induction: Patternwork(1 Drop)
Metalmind(2 Drops)
Worldly Powers(2 Drops)
Storied Hazel(1 Drop)
Drawbacks: Unveiled Aura(+2 Drops)
Pure Pearl is a mitigation measure against Unveiled Aura, as are Worldly Powers/Storied Hazel to turn Berya into an ally of considerable power who isn't subject to Unveiled Aura(Presumably storied hazel can be shared). Heroic Stature is because well... it's a progression methodology. I'm wondering if it's possible to use Patternwork on yourself if you take Metalmind. Also programming chunks of yourself is a good way to circumvent deficiencies in things like willpower.
Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
The Storied Hazel can be shared. Berya could even go and carve her own copy of it once she's gotten her first key.
It is definitely possible (though a little tricky, not instantly intuitive) to use patternwork on vitalized noometal.
Plan: Wake Your Bitch Ass Up Dragon, You're Solving It.
[X] Pure Pearl
[X] The Recruitment Drive
[X] The Heathen Haruspex
[X] Heroic Stature
[X] Induction
-[X] The Touch
[X] Blood Anointment
[X] Heavenly Tears
[X] Pure Pearl
[X] The Recruitment Drive
[X] The Heathen Haruspex
[X] Heroic Stature
[X] Induction
-[X] The Touch
[X] Blood Anointment
[X] Heavenly Tears
Rihaku
The Internet
I will assume that you know the contents of the advancements alluded to in Summoner selection, despite that being chronologically later in the narrative - else you would be blind to the mechanical benefits and synergies inherent. Hero's Regalia sounds a lot more impressive than it is, for example.
SORD GUD
[H] Palimpsest
[H] River-Damming Stone
[H] Heathen
[H] Heroic Stature
[H] Blood Anointment
[H] Sword of the Seal: Blood Anointment
[H] Heavenly Tears
[H] Avarice I
The plan is simple: use Palimpsest hypercompetence + full system access combined with my giga-boosted Blood Anointment to get really good at harming things really fast, then hit the River-Damming Stone as hard as I can. Alternatively, if it would be faster, figure out a way to manifest a Skeleton Key and use it to unlock the Dam. Since I don't have any crippling flaws like First-Person Perspective or Unveiled Aura, I'll likely be able to convince the other heroes to cooperate with me in saving the world from the Dam - a bad first impression inflicted by Avarice means little in the face of hypercompetence.
Would I had access to one more point without taking Red Eyes - eight would just barely suffice to get everything in this build plus Heavenskin, and being an Angel Dragon would likely be a significant additional advantage. But given my mission the Sword is a much more directly relevant booster to Blood Anointment.
Cut through, even if it cannot be cut.
SORD GUD
[H] Palimpsest
[H] River-Damming Stone
[H] Heathen
[H] Heroic Stature
[H] Blood Anointment
[H] Sword of the Seal: Blood Anointment
[H] Heavenly Tears
[H] Avarice I
The plan is simple: use Palimpsest hypercompetence + full system access combined with my giga-boosted Blood Anointment to get really good at harming things really fast, then hit the River-Damming Stone as hard as I can. Alternatively, if it would be faster, figure out a way to manifest a Skeleton Key and use it to unlock the Dam. Since I don't have any crippling flaws like First-Person Perspective or Unveiled Aura, I'll likely be able to convince the other heroes to cooperate with me in saving the world from the Dam - a bad first impression inflicted by Avarice means little in the face of hypercompetence.
Would I had access to one more point without taking Red Eyes - eight would just barely suffice to get everything in this build plus Heavenskin, and being an Angel Dragon would likely be a significant additional advantage. But given my mission the Sword is a much more directly relevant booster to Blood Anointment.
Cut through, even if it cannot be cut.
- Location
- Europe
Just Fuck Me Up Fam
[ ] Pure Pearl -
[ ] The Stirred Pot -
[ ] The Director's Cut (+1 drop) -
[ ] The Recruitment Drive (+1 drop) -
[ ] The River-Damming Stone (+1 drop) -
[ ] The Heathen Haruspex -
[ ] Heroic Stature (1 drop) -
[ ] Heavenskin (2 drops) -
[ ] Metalmind (2 drops) -
[ ] Blood Anointment (4 drops) -
[ ] Impression (1 drop) -
[ ] Sword of the Seal (2 drops) -
[ ] Heavenly Tears (+1 drop) -
[ ] Avarice (+2 drops) -
[ ] Red Eyes Alight (+3 drops, limit-breaking) -
Credit: 12
Debit: 12
Net: 00
Objectively you can just skip Red Eyes Alight, take out Impressions and the Sword, and still have a pretty solid build. There's some greater risk due to multiple scenarios, but it might be a worthwhile one. However, the premise of this build is just taking it all, so Red Eyes Alight gets slapped on top.
I don't need magical spirit fuckery to work with someone whose interests already align with my own and who was already willing to accept spiritual interference for my aid. They either are flexible enough to work with, desperate, or already have a defence. So Worldly Power is avoided.
The Storied oak is moderately less useful when the Haruspex is chosen, since she can probably duplicate her own iteration given some time.
That leaves you a Heroic Metal Heaven Dragon with an Impression who can further empower one of your imbuements with the Sword if needed, or give it to the Haruspex (or maybe the Dragon itself?!?).
You're very fortunate, 'pure', compatible with the mechanisms of this world, and can become pseudo dragon god hive mind. Presumably She eventually fucks you up, but that's the premise of the build.
[ ] Non-Existent. [2 Informative Opinions]
[ ] Brightest White. [1 Inherent Memory]
[ ] Fake. [8 Inherent Memory] TSH + Legendary + Self-sourced Battle Magic
Credit: 81 10 5
Debit: 80 18 9
The plan: Use your absurd battle magic to steadily work your way back into being real. White and Non-Existent are there to keep you functional despite Legendary.
[ ] Brightest White. [1 Inherent Memory]
[ ] Fake. [8 Inherent Memory] TSH + Legendary + Self-sourced Battle Magic
Credit: 81 10 5
Debit: 80 18 9
The plan: Use your absurd battle magic to steadily work your way back into being real. White and Non-Existent are there to keep you functional despite Legendary.
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Zampano
🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
- Location
- Simping for DSB
Interference:
+Director's Cut
+Recruitment Drive
Drawbacks:
+Heaven's Tears
+Halved
Budget: 8 Drops
Desideratum: Pure Pearl
Summoner: The Chief Thaumaturge
Imbuements:
+Heroic Stature
+Metalmind
+Impression
+Worldly Powers [Impression]
+Hero's Regalia [Attuned]
This build is about stacking the Desiderata. Because of who I am as a person, I'm going to get the Pure Pearl option even though I want to get Palimpsest. Worldly Powers + Impression closes that gap. As long as I hang out with my (equally powerful) friend, I'll get a genius level intellect boost. That boost is important because I'll be turning myself into a sphere of computronium with Metalmind in order to escape the most inconvenient effects of the Halved drawback. Even after being halved, an average sized human would have enough mass to generate 3-4 minds, which will generate a new brain worth of material in ~4 years.
In the mean time, the attuned Hero's Regalia can generate inviolable spacetime armor that does not need to leave any vulnerable joints or weak spots because I'll just be a floating sphere surrounded by invincible armor. I'll simply become the Pure Pearl advancement. The Impression will then be able to go adventuring with their own 3 (8?) drops of juice buoyed by having both Desiderata while I tag along.
Update: Aab said on discord that the Impression has your # of drops minus 4, because that's the cost of Impression + Worldly Potential which is required to give you both Dessiderata (collectively). So it'd be a 4-drop simulacrum, above and beyond the effect of having both Luck + Genius + teleportation.
+Director's Cut
+Recruitment Drive
Drawbacks:
+Heaven's Tears
+Halved
Budget: 8 Drops
Desideratum: Pure Pearl
Summoner: The Chief Thaumaturge
Imbuements:
+Heroic Stature
+Metalmind
+Impression
+Worldly Powers [Impression]
+Hero's Regalia [Attuned]
This build is about stacking the Desiderata. Because of who I am as a person, I'm going to get the Pure Pearl option even though I want to get Palimpsest. Worldly Powers + Impression closes that gap. As long as I hang out with my (equally powerful) friend, I'll get a genius level intellect boost. That boost is important because I'll be turning myself into a sphere of computronium with Metalmind in order to escape the most inconvenient effects of the Halved drawback. Even after being halved, an average sized human would have enough mass to generate 3-4 minds, which will generate a new brain worth of material in ~4 years.
In the mean time, the attuned Hero's Regalia can generate inviolable spacetime armor that does not need to leave any vulnerable joints or weak spots because I'll just be a floating sphere surrounded by invincible armor. I'll simply become the Pure Pearl advancement. The Impression will then be able to go adventuring with their own 3 (8?) drops of juice buoyed by having both Desiderata while I tag along.
Update: Aab said on discord that the Impression has your # of drops minus 4, because that's the cost of Impression + Worldly Potential which is required to give you both Dessiderata (collectively). So it'd be a 4-drop simulacrum, above and beyond the effect of having both Luck + Genius + teleportation.
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Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
It is remarkable that you have basically turned yourself into a Magical Orb accessory for your Impression.
Zampano
🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
- Location
- Simping for DSB
Wrote this on the subway so I might be missing the opportunity to grab for additional juice by writing you a blurb, but here's what I got:
[] Lucky Orb - [Required]. Set droplet allowance to 4, which may not be increased via drawbacks or interference.
Your tour guide to the Mandate, The Lucky Orb provides the benefits of a Pure Pearl, tripartite spellcasting, and an aura of unquestionable heroism that can be toggled on and off at will. The Lucky Orb can translocate to you (or vice versa) and it may provide additional Progression as its semiosomatic distortion grows. The orb is inviolable to conventional spacetime effects and may offer insight or commentary into magical effects commensurate with a spellcaster that spends at least twice your waking hours contemplating the orb.
Cannot be taken with Hero's Regalia, Worldly Power, Impression.
Edit: Without writing all new blurbs to complement Metalmind, the default Impression build is probably just full-price dragonblood. Maybe Heavenskin + Fallen Angel could cook, but I think that build gets sniped by Recruitment drive.
[] Lucky Orb - [Required]. Set droplet allowance to 4, which may not be increased via drawbacks or interference.
Your tour guide to the Mandate, The Lucky Orb provides the benefits of a Pure Pearl, tripartite spellcasting, and an aura of unquestionable heroism that can be toggled on and off at will. The Lucky Orb can translocate to you (or vice versa) and it may provide additional Progression as its semiosomatic distortion grows. The orb is inviolable to conventional spacetime effects and may offer insight or commentary into magical effects commensurate with a spellcaster that spends at least twice your waking hours contemplating the orb.
Cannot be taken with Hero's Regalia, Worldly Power, Impression.
Edit: Without writing all new blurbs to complement Metalmind, the default Impression build is probably just full-price dragonblood. Maybe Heavenskin + Fallen Angel could cook, but I think that build gets sniped by Recruitment drive.
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No clue how to fix the mess of drawbacks I've selected. Gonna need an expert.
[ ] Pure Pearl
[ ] The Stirred Pot
[ ] The Director's Cut (+1 drop)
[ ] The Recruitment Drive (+1 drop)
[ ] The River-Damming Stone (+1 drop)
[ ] The Heathen Haruspex
[ ] Heroic Stature (1 drop)
[ ] Induction (3 drops)
-[ ] Augury
-[ ] Fighting Spirit
-[ ] The Touch
[ ] Heavenskin (2 drops)
[ ] Sword of the Seal (2 drops)
[ ] Skeleton Key (4 drops)
[ ] First Person Perspective (+1 drop)
[ ] Heavenly Tears (+1 drop)
[ ] Avarice (+1 drop)
[ ] Red Eyes Alight (+3 drops, limit-breaking)
I summon Aabcehmu, hand him a sword that turns you blue and this cool key. Then I go listen to birds and have friendly rivalries with the other heroes while the old dragon lady explains to my new smart friend how fucked we are.
Aabcehmu's Arrival
[ ] Pure Pearl
[ ] The Stirred Pot
[ ] The Director's Cut (+1 drop)
[ ] The Recruitment Drive (+1 drop)
[ ] The River-Damming Stone (+1 drop)
[ ] The Heathen Haruspex
[ ] Heroic Stature (1 drop)
[ ] Induction (3 drops)
-[ ] Augury
-[ ] Fighting Spirit
-[ ] The Touch
[ ] Heavenskin (2 drops)
[ ] Sword of the Seal (2 drops)
[ ] Skeleton Key (4 drops)
[ ] First Person Perspective (+1 drop)
[ ] Heavenly Tears (+1 drop)
[ ] Avarice (+1 drop)
[ ] Red Eyes Alight (+3 drops, limit-breaking)
I summon Aabcehmu, hand him a sword that turns you blue and this cool key. Then I go listen to birds and have friendly rivalries with the other heroes while the old dragon lady explains to my new smart friend how fucked we are.
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OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
Desideratum: Palimpsest
Summoner: The Heathen Haruspex
Interferences: The Recruitment Drive(+1 Drop)
Imbuements:
Heroic Stature(1 Drop)
Induction: Necromancy(1 Drop)
Metalmind(2 Drops)
Accessories:
Storied Hazel(1 Drop)
Fallen Angel(2 Drops)
Drawbacks:
Halved(+2 Drop)
Heavenly Tears(+1 Drop)
So here's my logic for this one.
Palimpsest should allow me to initiate into whatever restricted architect/gardener arts are in Storied Hazel that may be unavailable to Irxnom, which will help me understand Fallen Angel. Fallen Angel stumped the overmind. So being able to understand it enough to pull metalmind shenanigans with it should lead to some interesting shenanigans. Necromancy just seemed like something useful you could pull shenanigans with given access to the vaults of heaven via Fallen Angel.
Halved had the key portion "only extend as far as the ontology of Sceptiron is able to support". We've got other worlds eventually with Fallen Angel. I'm a noometal shapeshifter not subject to standard concepts of biology for forms. Irxnom knows arts from beyond Sceptiron, as does the Storied Hazel. There should be some option given those to heal halved.
I didn't take Blood Anointment because for all her power she hasn't been able to resolve the problem of the worlds injuries, and think it'll take other resources potentially synergistic with hers to properly resolve the issue.
I might consider tinkering with this with maybe an impression, or perhaps take patternwork again, or maybe fighting spirit(Potentially drop Storied Hazel or Necromancy).
There's presumably not many people at Irxnoms summoning location which should enable heavenly tears to be dealt with with minimal loss of life.
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@Magical_Duck New CYOA for the index
As for a build...
[ ] Palimpsest
[ ] The Recruitment Drive
[ ] The Chief Thaumaturge
[ ] Heroic Stature
[ ] Impression
[ ] Worldly Powers
-[ ] Worldly Impression
[ ] Heavenly Tears
There is a reason these guys are reaching across the multiverse to grab these foundational powers, so Worldly Impression seems like the most sensible grab. Heroic stature is the progression power. I'd prefer more starting power... but I'd rather have the progression boosts and other complications or drawbacks seem problematic, either compromising judgement or causing serious issues. The villains are a problem due to numbers, but far more able to be handled in small bites.
Might be worth taking unveiled aura for the chance to grab Fallen Angel... everything else can be gained with enough time and effort I suspect.
Zampano
🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
- Location
- Simping for DSB
I had my excel sheet open on the plane (but not the actual CYOA) so here's what I came up with in midair using just the shorthand notes from my first readthrough:
Desideratum: Pure Pearl
Summoner: The Heathen Haruspex
Heavenskin -2
Heroic Stature -1
Pattern Work -1
Fallen Angel -2
Sword: Pattern Work -2
Base 3
Recruitment Drive 1
Stirred Pot 1
Tyrant 1
Heavenly Tears 1
Avarice 1
"There are more things in Heaven than on Earth."
The Architects keep the weapons of war under lock and key. But every artisan has a comfortable set of tools that they use with natural grace. Archimedes answers the Heathen's call equipped not with a sword but with a mallet: an implement of creation and ornamentation, rather than destruction. The Mallet enables Pattern Work of vastly expanded complexity with very little preparation. With time, it can produce more specialized crafting tools still: an engraver's vice to arrest the motion of electrons within their orbit, a jeweler's eyepiece that peers beyond the mundane 4+3 dimensions of traditional spellcraft, a spindle drawing string from untrammeled leylines of the earth. Given time, this artisanal panoply may create Pattern Work of almost any effect that is both self-casting, self-repairing, and even self-propagating.
Leaving his workshop to answer the call was a setback with perhaps a silver lining. The Fallen Angel would never be repaired under the eyes of Heaven, but the cool dark of the Earth may offer enough privacy to implement some of the more recondite Pattern Work implied by non-destructive examination of the ancient device.
Archimedes is equipped to quickly provide local mitigation for the storm of his arrival, which should serve as an act of good faith persuading his Summoner that they share common interests despite a refusal to operate within a more productive partnership. Heavenskin alone should be able to tank an initial assault by the Recruitment Drive, assuming that they are not specially equipped for his variety of exotic prey. With sword-boosted Pattern Work, he should be able to craft enough gear to stay ahead of their escalation curve or at least escape with Fallen Angel.
There are three interconnected Progression engines here: First, Heavenskin naturally absorbs enchantments. Pattern Work can reliably generate specific effects which will be absorbed and made permanent by his unique physiology. Second, the Heathen's copy of Storied Hazel should remember at least a few unique phenomena that would provide useful grist for crafting, while Pure Pearl ensures that retrieval goes smoothly. Developing Heroic Stature through conflict with other heroes (via Director's Cut) is linked to repairing the Fallen Angel, which opens up some exciting prospects like mining an asteroid belt for exotic minerals in a unique Pattern Work creation.
Hard Mode:
River Damming Stone (+1)
Edit: this build is legal but I meant to take
Red Eyes Alight (+3)
Blood Anointment (-3)
In hard mode, Archimedes has gone full Greed and will need to scale fast enough to
I tried to write a SWORD build and it turned into a MAEG. Let me try again.
Heathen
Pure Pearl
Director's Cut + 1
Unveiled Aura +2
First Person Perspective + 1
1 Fighting Spirit
1 Heroic Stature
2 Sword: Heroic Stature
3 Blood Anointment
Fuck this I'm a dragon
Blood Anointment gives magic resist and +STATS enough for regular conflicts against local mages & threats. There is no need to compromise with the locals when they allow their "heroes" to be set upon by a shadowy conspiracy of poachers and butchers. Abd there are extradimensional forces influencing the other summoners, which makes compromise with our rivals impractical. They will receive one mote of grace: I will take up fight with Steel rather than tooth and claw. As iron sharpens iron, steel will hone steel. So armed, strength and skill are heightened beyond reason into a single inevitable truth:
"Fuck you I'm a dragon."
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Say, is there anything in particular stopping me from just joining the group? Like, I get that their tests are dangerous, but, if I were willing to go through that, could I just go with them?
WHISPER
IS VERY TRANQUIL!
That's DLC of course
Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
You could, but that's something you'll have to do after you've descended to Sceptiron's surface, not something that you get during your summoning.
Rihaku
The Internet
And, a Worldy Impression build:
Two-Headed Giant
[H] Haruspex
[H] Palimpsest
[H] River-Damming Stone [+1]
[H] Blood Anointment [-3]
[H] Impression [-1]
[H] Worldly Powers - Worldly Impression [-3]
[H] Heavenly Tears [+1]
[H] Avarice [+2]
Palimpsest and Pure Pearl together are exponentially more potent than either one alone; competence without fortune is often powerless, while fortune without competence can be frivolous. With both, strength compounds upon strength. And our immense initial strength will only grow vastly with the ability to acquire any magic system combined with abundant opportunity to develop them. It probably won't remotely approach the unsealed might of a Sword + Blood Anointment build to begin with, but if we are aggressive about it, should be able to collectively achieve a superior outcome before the Stone's first time limit restricts the highest magics.
That said, Palimpsest allows one to use magic regardless of personal or local conditions, so would the Stone actually prevent a Palimpsest Hero from accessing the uppermost reaches via its fundamental drain? @Aabcehmu
Given our dual boons of superior intellect and superior luck, combined with our vast arsenal of starting powers, a prospective goal might be simply to wake the dragon in order to handle the Stone for us.
I avoid the other three complications because pure chaos is also anathema to hypercompetence, vastly reducing the reliability of our long-term plans, while the other two are just horrible. Being toyed with by a nigh-unassailable (from our perspective) being, even one restrained to imposing narratively satisfying complications, acts as basically a cap on effectiveness if not raw power - no matter what you do, you'll have to contend with the problem of the week which, for precisely those narrative reasons, will likely scale to you. The other one does not bear considering - dealing with an extradimensional Slaughterhouse Nine that are virtually guaranteed to be (initially) more powerful than you means that if they are remotely competent, you are fucked. Pure Pearl might skate out of the way via luck shenanigans but the negative outcomes here are so bad as to render the risk balance intolerable.
Alternatively, while the River-Damming Stone is a far more formidable foe in terms of raw power, its unwillingness to actually engage us means it serves as a static predictable target which we only need to wound before it will be on its way to trouble another verse.
Two-Headed Giant
[H] Haruspex
[H] Palimpsest
[H] River-Damming Stone [+1]
[H] Blood Anointment [-3]
[H] Impression [-1]
[H] Worldly Powers - Worldly Impression [-3]
[H] Heavenly Tears [+1]
[H] Avarice [+2]
Palimpsest and Pure Pearl together are exponentially more potent than either one alone; competence without fortune is often powerless, while fortune without competence can be frivolous. With both, strength compounds upon strength. And our immense initial strength will only grow vastly with the ability to acquire any magic system combined with abundant opportunity to develop them. It probably won't remotely approach the unsealed might of a Sword + Blood Anointment build to begin with, but if we are aggressive about it, should be able to collectively achieve a superior outcome before the Stone's first time limit restricts the highest magics.
That said, Palimpsest allows one to use magic regardless of personal or local conditions, so would the Stone actually prevent a Palimpsest Hero from accessing the uppermost reaches via its fundamental drain? @Aabcehmu
Given our dual boons of superior intellect and superior luck, combined with our vast arsenal of starting powers, a prospective goal might be simply to wake the dragon in order to handle the Stone for us.
I avoid the other three complications because pure chaos is also anathema to hypercompetence, vastly reducing the reliability of our long-term plans, while the other two are just horrible. Being toyed with by a nigh-unassailable (from our perspective) being, even one restrained to imposing narratively satisfying complications, acts as basically a cap on effectiveness if not raw power - no matter what you do, you'll have to contend with the problem of the week which, for precisely those narrative reasons, will likely scale to you. The other one does not bear considering - dealing with an extradimensional Slaughterhouse Nine that are virtually guaranteed to be (initially) more powerful than you means that if they are remotely competent, you are fucked. Pure Pearl might skate out of the way via luck shenanigans but the negative outcomes here are so bad as to render the risk balance intolerable.
Alternatively, while the River-Damming Stone is a far more formidable foe in terms of raw power, its unwillingness to actually engage us means it serves as a static predictable target which we only need to wound before it will be on its way to trouble another verse.
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Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
No, you would still be able to access the uppermost reaches of the local magics for the most part, though some forms of magic that depend on truly large-scale uranydrous and astroconic infrastructure will require some active adaptation on your part, to figure out ways to supplement functions that are neither contained within your spiritual remit and thus buoyed by Palimpsest nor small-scale enough to be supported with uranydra and astricone gathered from other parts of Sceptiron or converted to run on earthblood essences.
OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
Cyber-Cultivator/Spiritmaxxing(8 Drops)
Desideratum: Palimpest
Summoner: Heathen Haruspex
Interferences:
The River Damming Stone(1 Drop)
The Recruitment Drive(1 Drop)
Imbuements:
Metalmind(2 Drops)
Induction: Necromancy(1 Drop)
Induction: Fighting Spirit(1 Drop)
Induction: Patternwork(1 Drop)
Heroic Stature(1 Drop)
Heavenskin(2 Drops)
Drawbacks:
Avarice(1 Drop)
Halved(2 Drops)
Logic: So here's what I'm thinking with this one. A Lot of my logic still holds for Halved. But it's called Cyber-Cultivator because the process of developing metalmind enhances the spirits capabilities, Fighting Spirit also can be used to enhance the spirit, Necromancy could be usable for spiritual enhancements if it can be self targeted, there might also be room there for self patternwork shenanigans.
I'll be initiated into Necromancy/FIghting Spirit/Patternwork/Earthblood Alchemy, and the induction magic systems are described as synergistic with each other. Not sure how Earthblood Alchemy might synergize if it synergizes with anything here(Does Earthblood Alchemy synergize with any of the choices?). Heavenskin acts as a force multiplier for any Necromancy/Fighting Spirit/Patternwork augmentations, along with giving me senses that make me better at them.
Desideratum: Palimpest
Summoner: Heathen Haruspex
Interferences:
The River Damming Stone(1 Drop)
The Recruitment Drive(1 Drop)
Imbuements:
Metalmind(2 Drops)
Induction: Necromancy(1 Drop)
Induction: Fighting Spirit(1 Drop)
Induction: Patternwork(1 Drop)
Heroic Stature(1 Drop)
Heavenskin(2 Drops)
Drawbacks:
Avarice(1 Drop)
Halved(2 Drops)
Logic: So here's what I'm thinking with this one. A Lot of my logic still holds for Halved. But it's called Cyber-Cultivator because the process of developing metalmind enhances the spirits capabilities, Fighting Spirit also can be used to enhance the spirit, Necromancy could be usable for spiritual enhancements if it can be self targeted, there might also be room there for self patternwork shenanigans.
I'll be initiated into Necromancy/FIghting Spirit/Patternwork/Earthblood Alchemy, and the induction magic systems are described as synergistic with each other. Not sure how Earthblood Alchemy might synergize if it synergizes with anything here(Does Earthblood Alchemy synergize with any of the choices?). Heavenskin acts as a force multiplier for any Necromancy/Fighting Spirit/Patternwork augmentations, along with giving me senses that make me better at them.
Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
Earthblood alchemy does synergize with the systems available through Induction, and with most magics in general, but synthesizing it with them will be a bit less ~automatic than the cross-over between different Inductions, which the Induction option itself helps give you a headstart on.
Also, it is definitely possible to both use necromancy on yourself, which on its own would normally mostly be a way of improving your self-awareness and self-control, but in combination with Fighting Spirit could help you refine your techniques, and in combination with patternwork would likely help you overcome the difficulties associated with attempting to forge patterns into vitalized noometal.