Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
IIRC Gifted One BTFOs the Stone, yeah.
A Simple Transaction I
- Thread starter Rihaku
- Start date
- Original
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
Which one is Gifted One? First CYOA where Skeleton Key shows up?
Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
What? I thought the Gifted One was your 'one guy gets all the MYCs that involve getting given stuff for free' build?
- Location
- Peterborough, NH, USA
No. Gifted One is-
This.
Specifically here, and here. With Wishcraft double-dipping on a Legendary effect and a general +1 ISH on Magic, I could easily cosplay a Genie, since I get Wishes, from Minor to Lesser, 729+ times more quickly than normal. Ie a little under an hour per Minor, about 12 hours per Least, etc. as the lower limit. ISH 3 is sort of the absolute minimum bar even if I show up without having had any time whatsoever to train or study anything.
Had a few builds for this lying around, this seemed to be the best place to put them.
Build #1a & #1b: Paradox
Insertion Point: Endor
Magics: Many-Colored // Witchcraft, Dominion (Black // Discordism)
Benefits: Graceful, Outward (Many-Coloured -> Chromatic Eminence {Black} // Witchcraft -> Lucid Discordism)
Drawbacks: Yetzer Hara (Lethe), Indebted, Adversary, Discord, The Witches' Due
As previously stated the Adversary might fight against or alongside the Witches; they're either beneficial or a minor irritant, given their focus on immediate power and unwillingness to take drawbacks. With the reserves and talent of a Graceful Chromatic Lord // might of Lucid Discordism and the reality-warping might of Dominion, my grasp over the Color Black // Discordism should be sufficient to fend off the Covenocracy; mere Witches have nothing on me.
Build #2: Angelgrace
Insertion Point: Genesis
Magics: Halocraft // Halocraft & Dominion: Grace
Benefits: Graceful & Malakh (Providence Dominion: Grace) // Graceful
Drawbacks: Indebted & Naraka // Indebted, Adversary, Disfavored, Naraka
The Genesis Halo you receive can be used to contact Heaven, at which point you can donate your Halo to Uriel (as even without Enochian fluency, I'm sure that enough charades could get your point across) and let him go at Hell whilst you relax and grind your Dominion. Halocraft's resource needs are easily met by Graceful, Malakh, or Dominion: you can thereby grab a nice cushy job as Heaven's Halocrafter, and maybe get strong enough to resurrect YHWH with a full Dominion.
Build #3: Boring Blandness
Insertion Point: The Human Realm
Magics: Occultum
Benefits: Graceful, Naturalisation, Favored
Drawbacks: Yetzer Hara (Lethe)
A very comfy, unambitious build: you're freakishly talented wizard and not much else.
Build #4: Demiurge
Insertion Point: The Ecumene
Magics: Dominion
Benefits: Graceful, Malakh, Outward (Dominion -> Demiurgos)
Drawbacks: Yetzer Hara (Lethe), Indebted, Dark Force, Disfavored
Demiurgos is essentially Dominion over everything: broad reality-warping which strengthens with practice, but stated by Birdsie to have much slower progression speeds in turn. Providence is focused on mitigating this, as a kind of snowballing progression booster for Demiurgos which increases quadratically as I practice it.
1Y - Create nearly arbitrary amounts of mundane non-living matter in nearly arbitrary arrangements up to the scale of a city block, even if you do not possess the requisite expertise in architecture or engineering; such as instantly making a tavern or several hundred cars. Acquire such expertise with effort. Teleport to anywhere in the same city, or with a day's effort, to another place on the same continent. Shoot energy blasts that if well-aimed can obliterate a human being or severely damage a tank (no cooldown on said blasts, no other demerits.)
10Y - Create basic animal life effortlessly, create human-tier life (several family units) with a month's focused work. With a year's work, make a zone in which all beings slowly recover from harm, or a similar project. Instantly turn to dust a single mortal man who displeases you or severely harm a battalion of such.
100Y - Craft zones of permanent alteration: an area where gravity works different, an area where zombies can spawn, etc, with a day's focused work. Immediately turn armies of mortal men into dust. Harm even Principality-tier angels with energy blasts. Teleport to anywhere in this world instantly or to other worlds with a year's effort to craft a portal.
1000Y- Create a whole continent of magicless mortals in a day, or craft a planet from whole cloth in a year's effort. Create a single malakh with an effort of will. Telekinetically move a moon instantly. Teleport to other worlds instantly: create a portal to anywhere you know of in a month's labour. Permanently alter the laws of physics for a single world over the course of a month (add or change a magic system's behaviour, globally change the properties of common elements in bizarre ways). Obliterate a principality instantly or severely wound an army of angels.
10Y - Create basic animal life effortlessly, create human-tier life (several family units) with a month's focused work. With a year's work, make a zone in which all beings slowly recover from harm, or a similar project. Instantly turn to dust a single mortal man who displeases you or severely harm a battalion of such.
100Y - Craft zones of permanent alteration: an area where gravity works different, an area where zombies can spawn, etc, with a day's focused work. Immediately turn armies of mortal men into dust. Harm even Principality-tier angels with energy blasts. Teleport to anywhere in this world instantly or to other worlds with a year's effort to craft a portal.
1000Y- Create a whole continent of magicless mortals in a day, or craft a planet from whole cloth in a year's effort. Create a single malakh with an effort of will. Telekinetically move a moon instantly. Teleport to other worlds instantly: create a portal to anywhere you know of in a month's labour. Permanently alter the laws of physics for a single world over the course of a month (add or change a magic system's behaviour, globally change the properties of common elements in bizarre ways). Obliterate a principality instantly or severely wound an army of angels.
Build #5: The Victorious World
Insertion Point: The Human Realm
Magics: Ancient Luminance
Benefits: Habakkuk
Drawbacks: Yetzer Hara (Lethe), Indebted, The Flock
The Flock themselves aren't that much of an issue: Habakkuk's knowledge suffices as a counterargument, and given their sincerity it seems somewhat doubtful it'll come to blows. Contact with them can presumably assist in getting an audience with the Morningstar in time, which is what's really necessary for the real plans.
According to Discord Samael is an avatar of Yaldabaoth, and Lucifer can exploit this connection via his Beyond Supreme Pride Dominion to use his power-copying Providence on Yaldabaoth. This provides a blueprint of Yaldabaoth's powers, which can then be rapidly filled in with Grace to become an archon.
This process is fast enough that from the Archons' viewpoint you essentially become one of them faster than they can react: with you, Lucifer, and maybe Uriel too since he can do the power copying trick but with Humility in place of Pride you've got great odds of striking them down.
This process is fast enough that from the Archons' viewpoint you essentially become one of them faster than they can react: with you, Lucifer, and maybe Uriel too since he can do the power copying trick but with Humility in place of Pride you've got great odds of striking them down.
Even without that cheat, the security offered by joining Lucifer is second to none, so it's a great benefit to your ascension either way.
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Birdsie
Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy
- Location
- Poland
A CYOA that I'd shared a while ago with friends and on Patreon.
Decided to make it public for fun now.
Prince of Vindication
One morning, you awaken and realize the cosmos isn't as it should be; a truth so poignant you cannot help but shiver. From within comes a dross of inner potential. Sometime long ago, you were a warrior or ranger on a mission to repair the world; then you died. Now you awaken again.
You are bestowed orbs numbering three (3), to represent the power inside. You must also choose somewhere to begin your crusade, from amongst a number of places that are, in one way or another, doomed. Some of these fates may be more difficult to forestall than others.
[ ] Auditorium - Once, the citizens of this somber nightmare saw only death: havoc running rampant as avenging monsters came to whittle down children in their cradle. However, all is right now, as the world stands whole and united: the collective of Auditors conducts the affairs of a cooperative universe. And it's truly a vast universe out there. The Auditorium's colonized worlds chime with crystalline Resonance like a celestial chorus. Legions of Oneirodynes explore the outer reaches and eliminate threats. Conclaves of Oneirists harvest and manifest people's hopes and dreams, to ensure prosperity and stability. No souls are lost, for in this strange aeon, even death has died.
The Auditorium settles new worlds constantly and its population is swelling vigorously. Inventions of biomedicine, xenogenetics, and Dreamcraft proliferate and deliver the citizens into the embrace of a world in which all basic and esoteric needs are fulfilled. Alien, divine, and human beings stand side by side, hand in tentacle. Tolerance of race and religion has skyrocketed over the decades since the end of the war. The Auditorium now seeks multiversal treadways and diplomacy with others beyond its own humble borders. You could enter that frontier, or settle down into its policy-making echelons. There are other threads or avenues of adventure to pursue. Military service offers captivating rewards and power, although more intrepid adventurers always search for the Echo.
[ ] Tribornia - Unlearn swiftly the even-handed probity and isonomy of Earth. On Tribornia, you'll see only a sharp divide. There are those with the necessary power to enact their hegemony and those without it, and therefore powerless to stop the empowered. Here, even nations can be slaves to individual masters, and the masses can do naught but hope to survive unmolested. More often, however, the powerful collect into coteries, colloquially named Clans. History's timeline is drenched in violence, blood, and stories of those who defied this order. In moments of crisis, even the most ardent and embittered rivals shall close ranks and come together to annihilate the arrogant masses, if they should need such a reminder.
The world's living through a revival. Following the most recent invasion of Hell, and the even more recent Sinking of Teiivan, the recently ephemeral lines in the sand have settled once more. The fellowships are now readying for yet another War of the Clans, the victors of which shall collect the artifacts, lands, and secret arts of the losers. The Pillars of the Sect scheme internal strife as their master, a man known only as Splinter, is occupied pondering the best way to conduct the wars ahead. The Immortals who've partaken of the Devouring Elixir are sharpening their fangs and seek to sate their hunger. However, unknown to most, the world's about to experience massive change as a small Clan of ambitious new players named the Brotherhood of the Sword arrive on the stage.
[ ] Thematic Earth - With the Educator's arrival came a change on every conceivable level, a reordering of the Architecture of the World. Reason's been kicked to the curb and beaten over its head with a blunt instrument, as countless Themes vie for supremacy and relevance, overwriting mundane causality as floodwaters may consume a helpless valley. The myriad Enrolled in the Educator's Academy are the celebrities and paragons that media outlets follow and tabloids expound upon, excited to see what comes next. The stability of this planetary order is upheld by Archetype, a collection of students who've assembled to counteract malicious Enrolled and help each other in times of need.
This Earth is reaching its culmination. The shocking disappearance of the brilliant yet terrifying Metaphysicist has left a number of his followers rudderless and resulted in the regular occurrence of dimensional imbrication events, which appear to steadily become worse, causing upheaval and destruction across the globe. Enrollment experts are starting to question how far the Educator may push his agenda before the Thematic well has run dry or starts to draw on iterative Themes. The world is more chaotic and uncontrollable with every year, leading some to believe it is only a matter of time before the end. They are correct, albeit for the wrong reasons: the apocalypse does loom on the horizon but with a different, unkinder face.
[ ] Yoria - You'll see few worlds more candid than Yoria, the ultimate destiny of which is writ across its constellations. This is a world without a twist: a land of simple and pure fantasy, ill-tempered wizards and honorable knights; storybook tales of drakes slain and princesses rescued, with adventurers fearlessly scaling the walls of ancient dungeons or acting as hired mercenaries for dukes. This sun's rays have caught the faces of entire generations of noble kings and dark lords. Glories and wars freckle the arrow of time; wealth and riches are yours to claim if you are brave and bold. The ruins of ancient civilizations lie scattered and unexplored, ready for claiming and awakening, along with the ancient magitech within.
There are dangers and calamities ahead, near and far. Hundreds of recorded prophecies, old and neoteric alike, speak of their inevitability. Apocalypses have occurred before, and each time the world's recovered and experienced golden ages in the interim. Most worryingly, across the centuries, the weave of magic has started to unravel and lose its potency, and few contemporary workings can reliably repair it on any scale beyond the local, and never permanently. It seems the world's marching towards a slow ruin, a decay of all that makes it so unique and fantastic, and the sages and oracles offer no succor or way out. You may fear not, however, as that day is still far beyond the horizon.
[ ] The Leviathan Isles - An archipelago of secret magics, wreathed in mists of brume, its many people schismatic and warlike. The citizens of the Isles are divided into three central paradigms: the faithful of the Benthic, the adherents of the Monolith, and the worried fence-sitters who hope not to be involved in their zealous affairs. Tarcan and their Duri fellows look with hate and unease as the Lasarian Tsardom swells to the north with new converts; the Brotherhood of the Golden Hook is rumored to wield inhuman powers beyond that usually conferred by oils. Meanwhile, the minds in Yechod and Yothestein invent new machines that run on steam, rather than sacred oils or salt, further cementing their independence.
Your hands certainly won't be idle. There is always an island to colonize, a settlement to raid, a naval battle to wage, or an adventure in forbidden ruins to be found. From the Benthic Vast to the north, eldritch monstrosities and pelagic eidolons assault the center. Meanwhile, from the alien Monolith in Pangaea's center, chiseled Slabs and other stone-made creatures take to the sky and rove over the land. Each type of creature is sacred to some faction or another, worshipped as either demigods or angels and demons; you'll find no end of heretics to either order. Around the map's corners, you'll find even stranger forces at work.
[ ] The Backroads - Abandon the restraints of a domesticated universe and embrace freewheeling adventure. Instead of a sensible world, travelers of the Backroads find only anarchic wilderness - whether as sprawling evergreens or merciless deserts - and the solitary roads that connect its flickers of civilization, like dim fireflies in a void. Although you'll always find the eponymous roads, the distance between locations is ontological, crossable via effort and time rather than spatial intervals; you'll arrive once you're meant to arrive. The roads have dangers as well, often in the form of other travelers and creatures.
Certain locations are more or less dangerous than others, and the sections of land vary in civilized sophistication and population counts. On average, however, you'll seldom be more than a day away from a settlement at least the size of a one-stoplight town. Everywhere you travel, misadventures and oddities seem to follow like a pack of mischievous brats. A trained driver or hitchhiker may find methods of expediting their travels in a particular direction, skipping past entire localities to arrive directly at a particular spot across the world, or even perform the metaphysically resonant act of driving off into the sunset; to greener pastures and new worlds.
[ ] Inner Magic (1 orb) - The Inner art specializes in channeling, refining, and manipulating spiritual energy - a multifaceted and pluripotent dross - to fulfill a variety of ends. Training is the foundation of strength, but innovation and tutoring are a more decisive factor in attaining strength: even rudimentary self-suffusion can enhance the exerted force and attenuate incoming harm, but true and impactful power comes from employing techniques.
Techniques are countless, an umbrella that covers the vast fields of one's imagination. All skills can be made supernal: mundane prediction sharpened into true precognition; a sword stroke made so brilliant it can cut an archer's string before the arrow is nocked, or if aimed lethally, to sever their neck from afar. With the self extruded into the world, one can learn to manipulate the elements, reinforce matter, or conjure spirit guardians, and more. There are many paths to follow, each replete with its own shortcuts and secret tricks. Instead of a warrior's route, one could instead aim to become the ultimate demolitionist or even a baker.
It all culminates in an Invocation, the expression of a practitioner's self - the inner made outer. These Invocations can range from direct, straightforward and impactful to more esoteric and conceptual: each Invocation is often complex enough to quibble over details. Rarely does an Invoker wield a 'simple' power such as pyromancy; instead, he may call forth a flame that feeds off the souls of the conquered and can summon them back to an unseemly form of existence as wraithly 'burning men.'
To start with, you'll possess an innate sense of your reserves - which are of an appreciable, but not titanic size - and moderate control: self-reinforcement will allow you to deform steel and outrun cars, at moderate expenditure. Your talent in developing and mastering techniques is unusual; you can even translate a master's Invocation into a technique, even if the result is merely a shadowy reflection of their shining truth. Your Invocation is assured to be top-tier once you attain it, conforming with expectations and wishes.
[ ] The Pattern (1 orb) - A human soul's development is stochastic, as vulnerable to discord's unraveling as the drifting tides are to a blowing wind's uncaring caress. Emotions are spiritual hazards, as much a venom to autarky over the self as a viper's venom to a colony of cells: enfettering an otherwise indomitable spirit to the mindless hands of chaos. The Pattern is precisely what its name implies: a Pattern that once spread from soul to soul, stabilizing the influence of chaos and forevermore dispelling its disorder.
The Paladins of the Pattern once stripped the souls of their initiates naked and bound them in circles alongside demons of fear, revealing horrors beyond comprehension, with the Pattern's stabilizing influence cauterizing cleanly the sectors that surrendered to such fear. Once an initiate was fearless, other flaws were struck from the palimpsest: temptation, irrationality, weakness, cowardice. Once an initiate was utterly faultless, they were inducted into the brotherhood as White Knights: named not so for the color of their armor, but the color of their soul, as perfect as the Pattern dictated.
You'll become a Paladin of the Pattern, a mere initiate still. With an effort of will, you're able to infuse yourself with the Pattern, assuming rightful wholeness; restoring limbs or maintaining perfect emotional equilibrium. Perennial maintenance of this Pattern with your sustained effort causes it to eventually become self-maintaining: removing or attenuating emotions you consider undesirable, and providing constant healing. This can be pushed out beyond your body's constraints as Patterned light, conferring healing onto the worthy, or smiting foes. Its constant exaltation of your self's every approved facet improves you holistically as well: physical enhancements, clarity of thought, improved magical control. This focuses on preventing degradation more than anything, ensuring the long periods between training sessions are lossless. Eventually, you'll be able to infuse others with the Pattern to spread it.
Be careful not to allow your emotional surgeries to result in excessive value drift, especially over long periods. All you consider antithetical is struck down, but what a future version of you may consider antithetical could be different from your current definition. Once you've attained an acceptable level of detachment or courage, it may be wise to cease further descent.
[ ] Inbetweener (1 orb) - The dichotomy of essence and form. The economy of the Leviathan Isles runs on the salts and oils that come fresh from the Monolith and Benthic; each worshipped as a font of endless power or ruthlessly exploited by miners and barons.
Aside from being essential resources in driving industrial advancement, bodily absorption of either salts or oils transforms the individual into a superhuman. Often, the consumption of salts bestows arcane and elemental abilities, while oils bestow organic and eldritch powers, although such stable trends can sometimes break down, especially in the case of rare samples of either substance, and the combination of both substances may yield even stranger powers.
You're one of the uncommon Inbetweeners, able to absorb both salts and oils at once, without the usual symptoms of madness, mutation, and the rejection potentially caused by incompatibility. You'll receive a bushel of salts and a gallon of oils, both of them of supernal quality, more or less equal to each other in terms of potential empowerment offered.
Here are samples of what you could achieve with those amounts:
Salt - Moderately superhuman attributes. Creation of crystallized drones under your control, capable of deploying cantrip-like magics. The ability to make oneself nigh-invulnerable for short periods or permanently with a crippling weak spot.
Oil - Moderately superhuman attributes. Humanoid shapeshifting precise and fast enough to assume the form of any observed human almost instantly, or with mild positive adaptations such as webbed feet. Mild psychic powers, mostly empathy and mind-reading.
If Leviathan Isles, you instead receive double the amount of salts and oils.
[ ] Ideogrammer (2 orbs) - This art's authors are fallen and forgotten, their statues pulled down, their obelisks abandoned. Their clenched grip over reality is banished like an illusion before a butterfly's wings. The nation is now an egalitarian endeavor and shall remain so. You can claim the spoils if you wish, or else they shall rest among the ashes forever.
An Ideogrammer crafts memes. These memes are woven into complex ideations, which can then be 'installed' into a medium. Applied to a human being, this manifests as a firm but subtle mental influence. Installing the ideation of cigarettes into a man spawns a compulsive interest, which leads to addiction after the first taste of nicotine. It can instead be made with negative valence, compelling a smoker to quit their addiction, or with any other number of subtle nuances to tweak the effects.
A novice's ideations cause minor symbolic ideograms - miniature symbols, characters, and other sigils - representative of their component memes to saturate the area or target, invisible to a non-sorcerous gaze, earning the art its name. Advanced Ideogrammers can conceal these to deter detection via magical scrutiny, or enhance the effect by stamping the symbols physically. A picture of a water bottle can instill thirst, an Aramaic phrase that means 'death' can inflict sudden cardiac arrest upon being viewed, and so on. An expert Ideogrammer can make even humans into walking Ideograms. Installed memes are transmitted upon eye contact with others; allowing a careful Ideogrammer to potentially create armies of semi-zombified servants overnight, or rewrite societies.
An Ideogrammer's naturally immune to their own created ideations, and can inoculate others, or render filters on each meme to prevent infection from occurring on undesired targets based on preprogrammed parameters; no others are left alive who can still wield this art, but in theory, you could install a strong resistance to enemy ideations in yourself if you wished.
Advancement is an incremental process; the road from novice to master is one of decades, if not whole centuries, containing both a slew of experiments and countless refinements of the ideation process. However, a master of Ideogrammation does not at all resemble a novice. His ideations are so potent as to casually overwrite reality: the concept of speed itself applied to a car makes it abnormally fast or transforms it into a supercar. An entire police department may be portrayed as villainous cowards or heroic super-cops; a portrayal which'll make itself real over time, if it weren't already at least partially. Over time, the Ideogrammer can carve out entire chunks of the collective subconscious and alter worlds, on both a mental and physical level, within days or weeks.
Be careful not to fall to the same corrupt incentives the originators of this art fell to. Tyranny and benevolence are two sides of a coin.
[ ] Enrollment (2 orbs) - The Architecture of the world casts deep shadows, as ideals are struck with infinite radiance. An enlightened soul can harness these chimeric silhouettes, and through doing so, enforce a Theme on reality that incrementally converts the world's operations away from physical mundanity and causality, and more into attunement with itself.
In common parlance, a conduit of a given Theme is called Enrolled; an individual bearing a Role that resonates with the Theme and possesses traits and aspects that reflect its namesake. The Olympian of the Superhero Theme embodies the strength and indomitability of a caped hero; the Once and Future King incorporates the mythical archetype of a perfect, virtuous king from Arthurian Legends. There are countless other examples; as many Themes as there are potential areas of stereotype and archetype, and as many Roles as one is capable of rationally demarcating out of them.
Choose a Theme, and develop a chosen Role within. Given you're the only Enrolled within your Theme to start with, attunement and benefits can be derived from having a central Role within it. Areas and existential contexts you operate and perform deeds in become saturated with your Theme, forcing the Architecture of the world to retune in accordance with the Theme's ethos. Doing this can slowly inculcate the populace with Thematic superpowers, change the environment, and even shift causality and probability.
To start with, you're a fully matured Enrolled, perhaps capable of devastating a mundane city protected by a small military garrison on your own within half an hour, if unopposed and if your Role is mostly focused on combat or destruction. Given your Theme's lack of exploration, it'll induct new Enrolled over time on its own, to a set number of about twenty equals. By proactively seeking out acceptable targets, you can induct them on your own with a bit of effort and time, earning you capable allies who'll swiftly attain your level. Your powers improve by playing your Role, as well as spreading and reinforcing your Theme; the mightiest Enrolled could shatter continents easily after only several decades of productive profusion.
Choosing Thematic Earth discounts Enrollment by one orb, but you're instead integrated into one of the already existing local Themes as a new Role therein.
[ ] Chosen (2 orbs) - You are a Chosen One, destined to fulfill an ancient prophecy.
Its manifestation matters not, but rather, its terrifying effect.
Coincidence multiplied by chance is your shield and sword. You're protected from all forms of misfortune to an absurd level, capable of standing in the eye of the storm unharmed, turning the tables on a villain who's captured you, or simply walking into a den of scum and walking out unharmed and unnoticed; as if divine providence itself were your cheerfully adoring fan. Your proactive luck is also a minor force acting in your favor. You'll live without a single worry about finances or health and other mundane frivolity.
In a scenario where you're otherwise equal to a foe, your true odds of winning are about six in ten or better; in a scenario where a foe has a decisive advantage against you and by all reasonable metrics you should die for the temerity of having drawn such attention, you have at least a coin flip's odds of escaping unscathed, but no better.
Furthermore, you'll wield threefold boons to complete your destiny:
Sword - An implement by which you carve your destiny out, some form of unique tool. It need not be a weapon or physical device, and can instead be a rare boon or magical art. Its forms are as myriad as the Hero with a Thousand Faces himself. Arthur's Excalibur, Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, Achilles' immortality, Odin's runes, Anakin Skywalker's connection to the Force, and more of that vein; every manner of asserting one's will is valid.
Shield - An implement by which destiny can guide you and provide aid; rarely something that is 'owned' unlike the Sword. This can manifest as a magical artifact that whispers advice, a wise bearded mentor, a familial group of companions who'll never leave your side, or even a strange instinct for simply doing what's right. This is the medium through which destiny ensures you remain on the correct path to make the most of your boons.
Trial - The reason this choice is so cheap. Ahead of you is a quest, a harrowing journey that'll take everything you have in you to complete; there'll be challenges and enemies, riddles and difficulties. You can refuse the call, if you wish, and in doing so seal away most of your fortune. However, completing your trial means a subsequent return with the elixir; a hero triumphant, the cycle complete. Power is merely a medium of making oneself known, and yours shall be incomparable afterward; the might of your Sword and Shield shall be at least doubled, elevating their worth transcendentally. However, the completion of your Trial may take a long time; even decades. It's rare for one so Chosen to be signed on for a mere dalliance of a season.
[ ] Titan (3 orbs) - A primordial maker. A Titan does not ever quibble over the details, he simply chisels bedrock truth into reality's skeleton. Woe to any who stand in opposition.
Yours is an existence of metaphysical immortality, as indestructible as the mountains are to human hands; no more capable of experiencing death than that which is already dead. Instead, when your consciousness aborts its central processes, you simply enter a torpid dream-filled slumber and slowly restore yourself; if not chipped away, you'll eventually attain wholeness once again. The most viable method of slowing you down is imprisonment, but even that is unreliable; after all, prisons decay, and you do not.
Your form, mind, and spirit are amplified to a realm of utter glory. Furthermore, you can alter them: shapeshifting into eldritch or pleasant forms and increasing your size to even that of a skyscraper, dividing and compartmentalizing your mind freely and attaining almost unmatched quantitative acceleration, and setting automatic spiritual processes to run in the background. This is shapeshifting, although capable of esoteric alterations; you can become a Titan made of raw magic or one made of stillness.
Even in your standard 'mortal' and bridled form, you have the strength to crush steel into dust without any effort, cogitation to compress days of thought into a moment, and metaphysical magnitude to drown entire nations in stunning radiance.
You're capable of asserting titanic truth over material reality. This allows for reshaping the terrain, either in general or 'in tune' with your themes and domains as a primordial being. Focused applications allow you to create special workings over time; servant creatures, domiciles that project special effects, or massive constructs to anchor reality to your will.
There are greater powers that can permanently and asymptomatically slay a Titan, denying them even sleep's repose, but they are starkly uncommon. Still, you should be cautious: eternity is ever a titan's ally, but it will eventually deliver you to meet such powers. You're not the last of your kind around, but there used to be more of you...
[ ] Auditor (3 orbs) - The Auditorium's Oneirists are tasked with one simple mission: the making of dreams into reality.
Their Dreamcraft is what allows otherwise silly-looking spaceships made of mundane steel and powered by earthly fuels to move at star-crossing velocities and for solar-spawned Resonance to generate a flux that banishes the concept of death on galactic scales.
You're an Auditor, a master of masters among Oneirists.
With Dreamcraft, the enhancement and suppression of 'absurdity' comes easiest. This murky term refers to most supernatural powers. With an Auditor's Resonance, this allows you to escalate magics or to diminish them to nullity with a moment's attention; a summoning ritual so empowered calls forth embodiments of nature in place of lowly spirits. Likewise, a deity struck with your defiance will find its powers not answering as keenly and falling between their fingertips; a god realizing mortality.
With time and experimentation, you'll realize other echoes. Auditors are no mere Oneirists, stumbling and struggling with drawing forth fundamental resonances. Your mastery of Dreamcraft suffices to generate almost arbitrary effects, if you are given time to prepare, and can draw out the correct vibes from within. Sample techniques on Auditor-level include interworld travel, metamagic based on nominative substitution, attacks that erase swathes of reality irreversibly, and fear auras that cause heart attacks in gods.
[ ] Architect (4 orbs) - The Architecture is a record of all we are, and everything we have the potential to become.
You stand as a True Architect, a purveyor and a viewer of the world's most secret diagram. From it extends all else. Understand the source and you understand where the river flows: an Architect's foremost benefit is total apprehension of the universe, which on a novice's level can be likened to localized nigh-omniscience. Their predictions come true, and with effort, they can alter what'll happen by affecting certain parts of the Architecture, causing knock-on effects; the basis of all Architectural Ritualism.
The Architecture doesn't conceal a single fact. There is no escape from its sharp clarifying light. Even the motivations of so-called deities can be splayed out on a worktable, disassembled, analyzed, and methods of changing their mind researched. As the Architect's prowess increases, so does their success rate with such actions. Sufficient iteration of predictive power is indistinguishable from an unending path to victory; constant awareness of what must be done to realize the image of one's personal success.
In practice, many are driven mad; even more refuse to take more than a few tentative steps into the truth, predicting and fearing their own downfall. You do not hold any advantages over your peers, for the truth is unsparing.
No advantages save one: if you should dare to keep looking forwards and inwards, if you should continue to step on the road of gold, if you should read its sigils and comprehend the wisdom of the ancients... then your eyes will eventually shine like diamonds.
From then on, not even the Architecture will comprehend you: after all, how can it comprehend something vaster than itself?
[ ] Excellence (1 orb) - Golden transmutation; a spark of brilliance that illuminates the corridors of a being. Your heart is an elder thing, uncompromising in the face of mediocrity.
Choose one aspect of yourself to exalt as such: if a magic is chosen, its immediate limits are shattered and your talents heightened; an Inbetweener's consumption-derived abilities evolve slowly with training and time; an Ideogrammer's memes could affect reality directly from the start. If a benefit is chosen, its variables scale higher and provide a higher advantage; the Baneful Blade is already a Sword as you receive it, or the Rainbow Shard's powers are doubled. This is stronger on cheaper options.
Instead, Excellence may encompass the totality of yourself. This'll boost relevant aptitudes: strength, agility, appearance, intellect, charisma, and offer a minor buff to natural talent and power exerted with most magics.
[ ] Maritime (1 orb, requires Leviathan Isles) - A sea cannot be sailed without a vessel, and a vessel is worthless without its captain. Fortunately, serendipity smiles upon your issue, as where you have a problem, chance sees a solution.
You'll appear in a safe port with a fresh deed of ownership for a competently built and newly christened ship, a full stock of ammunition and supplies, and a loyal crew sufficient to staff the ship and conduct whatever manner of operations you have in mind. The demographics, religious denominations, and skills of the crew, as well as the exact parameters of the ship, are yours to decide, although you cannot provide specifications on individual sailors, except the quartermaster. You'll also have sufficient money to pay everyone's wages for at least three months of sailing, allowing you to skip that particular worry.
Furthermore, you can optionally design a reputation for yourself among the Leviathan Isles, whether as a completely bloodthirsty pirate well-liked by others of his ilk, or a neutral mercenary and privateer willing to rub elbows with either worshippers of the Benthic or the Monolith as money dictates. You can ascribe yourself any set of deeds appropriate to your seeming level of competence and power that might've been reasonably accomplished over the last decade, accounting for development within that time, but cannot invent wholly wild stories unless you accept others will disbelieve them, or at least take them with a generous grain of salt.
If you are also an Inbetweener, this even further doubles your starting stock of oils and salts.
[ ] Ideal Education (1 orb, requires Thematic Earth) - You're back to school! Congratulations or condolences as appropriate. However, unlike most forms of education, this one teaches you magical superpowers. Choose a Theme and you'll be retroactively insinuated into the world's history as one of the illustrious Educator's students, a member of his Academy, starting your first day of school. If this Theme existed 'canonically,' you'll replace one of its members; otherwise, an extra Class will have been Enrolled on a random year.
This carries all of the natural advantages of Enrollment, as well as having the Educator's direct help and oversight in shaping your Role. You can also enter your Thematic World in search of artifacts, allies, and other potential benefits.
If chosen alongside Enrollment, you'll wield a Role of special prominence and influence in your Class and Theme; assured to rise to a height of unusual competency. At minimum, you'll be the strongest person in your Theme, and among the strongest Enrolled, but you stand decent odds of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of the Olympian or Metaphysician, as long as you apply yourself.
[ ] Chaos Code (1 orb) - A metal-cool tablet of navy and cobalt stone inscribed with azure runes; if tapped with a finger, it'll light up with a holographic display showing you, for a lack of a better term, job listings.
These are extremely varied in nature, as are the clients, but they are most often cosmic and conceptually abstract in scope; under rare circumstances, an overdeity or other similarly mighty entity might post a request, although this is much less common. Availability of contracts is wildly unpredictable, dependent on time, location, and metaphysical circumstances beyond mortal understanding, comprehension, or prediction; one season might see you drowning in hundreds of requests, and then for another year you might at most receive one shoddy contract a month. Moving to a neighboring universe is usually a decent way to find new work.
As an example: the idea of death might decide that to preserve existential balance, a certain individual must face the eternal silence; if the hit is carried out, it might reward you with an artifact cloak that annuls curses of instant death and is extraordinarily good at protecting its wearer from harm. The idea of love itself might be dissatisfied with the downturn of true love scenarios, and demand the successful matching of at least seven ideal partners to each other, offering payment via increased fortune in amorous endeavors.
If you have accumulated a reputation, you'll be afforded some leeway to negotiate the nature of these rewards. ("Instead of a cloak, could I have a death scythe?" "Can you just get me a girlfriend instead?") Your clients' willingness to humor these requests will often be much greater if you managed to fulfill the requests swiftly or with special attention to detail or otherwise somehow gone above and beyond in the name of your task. Minor adjustments to your rewards are easier for them to accept than full-on replacements.
Whether your mercenary activities comprise of being a hitman of death, or a cupid of love, if you completely don't like the rewards attached, you can instead ask to receive in-store credit. This credit can be spent to purchase rewards other users of Chaos Codes have rejected, most often from a varied list, but you should note the rates of exchange are extremely unfavorable; on average, you should only do this if you completely despise a reward.
There are at least seven others like you across the multiverse, although a Chaos Code doesn't have any inherent messaging or communication function, so you're unlikely to ever meet them.
[ ] The Drive (1 orb, requires Backroads) - After your arrival, a car will pick you up; its driver is a young woman with sunglasses and a cool attitude. You'll soon embark on a drive across the Backroads, its details moderately bending to suit your wishes; it can be an epic and significant mission with countless opponents whose blades will temper you, or a simple road trip with comfy diners and whacky humorous side characters concluding in a somber send-off.
You can stay on the Drive for as long as you like, or ask to be driven off into the sunset, experiencing a happy ending.
The benefits this provides are minor, and accumulated over time, but they'll always at least somewhat match your desires. You can make a stop to scavenge for technology in a wrecked UFO in the middle of the desert or discover an abandoned wizard's tower full of books in the middle of a rocky canyon, and more of that nature. There may be other passengers, either to start with, or along the way; some will eventually depart, having arrived at their destination, and others may be convinced to stay around as companions.
[ ] Clanborn (1 orb, requires Tribornia) - Undergo rebirth as a scion of a Great Clan, one of the ruling powers of Tribornia; each one a continental behemoth, dominating multiple nations. You'll accrue status, influence, wealth, and secrets; most importantly, your position shall be one of import. A highly favored Pillar of the Sect, a Lord of the Riders of the Wind, and so on: a position one step underneath the leader, but still of sufficient authority as to influence their own decisions and actions.
Naturally, you'll have access to the expected resources. Your Clan's secret techniques are yours to claim: combined with your high position, you'll wield some unparalleled abilities and may possess idiosyncratic methods of self-empowerment. You'll have natural access to and training in Inner Magic, and if you already possess it, your natural talent is bolstered slightly beyond the described norm.
Here are some of the Great Clans, as a demonstration:
*Riders of the Wind - Have control over the area geopolitically corresponding to Earth's South and Central America. Career criminals evolved into a Clan; recruit from organized thieves and lesser criminal gangs and cartels. Also poach members from other Clans. Mildly disorganized; three Lords at the top rule over their own autonomous territories under the leader, Lern. In battle, the Riders favor loose and adaptable techniques, especially aeromantic elementalism: they are magnified via concord and group use. One Rider is problematic; an entire pack can wreck cities with hurricanes.
*The Sect - Have vast influence, but do not directly control, most of the area geopolitically corresponding to Earth's South and East Asia, as well as some of Australia and the coastal areas of the Americas. The Sect was created by its master, Splinter, over two hundred years ago, and professes a mission of salvation and equality. Eight Pillars uphold the Sect, each with its own assigned 'lands' to save. This number never changes, and is a part of 'organizational feng shui' which is somehow related to Splinter's Invocation, called the Path of Inner Divinity. Each member practices a form of exceptional inner energy cultivation descending from this Invocation.
[ ] The Sheriff's Gun (1 orb) - Act with honor, and it'll serve. The Sheriff's Gun resembles a nondescript six-shooter revolver. A skilled and honorable user can force a change of shape; it can assume the form of any firearm, preferably a handgun.
Each of its bullets is a conceptual delivery mechanism for the ideal of deserved retribution. The Gun was meant to rest within the cold hand of justice at the long arm of the law. Therefore, if wielded for a righteous cause, it never requires manual reloading, has infinite ammunition, and its rounds impact with disproportionate striking power; often with enough force to penetrate a tank's armor.
The Gun possesses a discernment akin to human sapience, with a frightening intellect and insight. It rewards good behavior with supernal life advice and the occasional hint to success at whatever tasks you are pursuing, even ones unrelated to the pursuit of justice. This encompasses most benevolence, but it especially likes hunting down criminals. It does not, at all, like being used for petty ends. It understands and tolerates killing. It's a Gun after all, but one that was made to stop evil, rather than encourage it.
Over time, if you earn the Gun's approval and become worthy of it, the Gun can inculcate elements of the Sheriff's Role in you. This'll cause you to develop some of the Aspects of the Sheriff and it can happen even if you are already Enrolled.
The Sheriff's Aspects are:
*Justice - Above all, enforcement thereof. Enhanced attributes, especially speed and constitution. Immunity to corruption.
*Law - Grants boosts dependent on one's legal authority. Can deputize others to grant them minor superpowers.
*Gun - Can develop the Gun's abilities, mostly as special shooting techniques. Increases power and penetration, as well.
[ ] Oneirodyne (2 orbs) - An Oneirodyne is a machine that runs on personalized eldritch Resonance, the unrefined stuff that Dreamcraft orders into discrete reactions. Often, in cleaving to the human standard, it takes the form of a humanoid machine many stories tall, with a hull tough enough to resist concentrated tank fire. Without Resonance, an Oneirodyne loses most of its steam. Fortunately, you now output a natural brand of Resonance when in contact with your machine: sufficient to sustain its growth.
An Oneirodyne is 'alive' much as any being, but is reliant on its partner to develop meaningfully. Like most Oneirodynes, yours draws its essence from a particular elder being or source. This decides the nature of its abilities. The number of Elder Gods to proliferate essence has increased vastly since the Auditorium's early days, allowing for splicing and hybridization of strains. Below are some examples of strains, and what powers they can net an Oneirodyne in about a year of calm development, but feel free to invent:
*The Archcleric - Increased durability over most other Oneirodynes, casually weathering attacks that'd instantly destroy most of its peers. Psionic powers, chiefly consisting of macroscale telekinesis and telepathy; semi-automatically reform the environment to one's advantage and brainwash enemies. Eventually, develops psychically reactive thrusters for flight and evasion, as well as a psychic breath weapon that can dissipate most forms of non-Resonant matter on contact.
*The Shepherd - Can manifest constructs of golden cosmic energy; constructs draw from an inner reserve and cost upkeep, but are exceptionally easy to automate; can form rings of reactive shields that intercept strikes or auto-attack smart-fire orbs. Extension of conceptually sharp claws; capable of cleaving even an Archcleric-type in half with a single well-aimed strike. Precognition drawing on cosmic energy, sufficient to foresee minutes into the future if exerted to its maximum.
*The Mist - Mach 1.2 movement and attack speed, with concomitant reactions (most Oneirodynes don't exceed the sound barrier until veterancy; a decade or so into being piloted.) Innate flight at movement speed and accompanying material intangibility; can transform into a noxious white mist that acts as a mixture of neurotoxin and reactive acid, or selectively as harmless fog. Can cover entire battlefields like this within an eyeblink. A scanner array that detects living beings within a hundred kilometers. Low durability and strength, as a drawback.
On the Auditorium, the cost of this option is reduced to one orb.
[ ] Born of the End (2 orbs) - Since times immemorial, men have rightly feared the fury of ruin and the vindictive gods who dispensed death with mere offense. That cycle carries on today, as we live through yet another season in a war without end. You instead shall become an incarnation of one who's already won, the achiever of spring after that long, merciless winter. Gloria in excelsis Deo.
As Grailbound, you're axiomatically immortal and unaging, swiftly recovering from all harm. Even if you're whittled down to nothing and thoroughly shattered on the most essential protospiritual level, you'll fail to lose consciousness and recover flawlessly within at most what'd be a subjective hour, as the world itself conspires to reverse your experience of death; a world cannot exist where you are slain forever. The metaphysical wire mesh foundation of the multiverse will sooner break forever than you truly die for even a day.
This effect is intelligent and discerning; if the site of your corpse is harmful and will break you down instantly, such as finding yourself in the center of a black hole, you'll instead be restored in the closest safe space where this would make sense; continuous cycles of orchestrated suicide can allow you to somewhat force the effect into a manner of grisly teleportation and, on the extreme end, even interworld travel if you are willing to stomach such means of locomotion.
Discounted by one orb on Tribornia, although as a side effect, you'll be magically compelled in an unbreakable contract to cooperate with your fellow Grailbound in maintaining the Grail's secrecy, continued existence, and other activities willed by the Grail. On average, this shouldn't occupy more than about a fifth of your total time even when the global pressures and cooperation are intensely pointed against you; during most decades, you'll be free to do as you wish, without a bother in the world.
Taken alongside Clanborn, you are made a full-fledged member of an elusive ancient organization, nowadays rebranded to the rather simple and deceptive name of Team Apocalypse, privy to its secrets and techniques.
Cannot be taken alongside Enforcement of Ruin on Tribornia.
[ ] The Baneful Blade (2 orbs) - Declare war on reality. Take up the Ruinarch's own Blade. If you should embark on this path, cast aside the hopeless and ignorant elegance of peace, and abandon the foolish halcyon dream of rest. These are falsehoods, as you'll soon discover.
The Blade provides its bearer with all they need to enforce Ruin: motivation, rest, stamina, breath, and sustenance. It confers axiomatic defiance and durability that scales with one's capabilities and spite, a pondersome immunity that can shield a mortal man as though dressed in tenfold plate; or make a hero of the world into an indestructible bulwark, on whose skin galaxies splatter with no more significance than snowflakes in winter's dark. After all, Ruin shall not touch its scion and champion.
For every forestalled fate, an eventual Ruination.
The Blade's wicked edge is the Bane of all things. It's a cloud of botulinum neurotoxin and a nuclear reactor for a mortal man; a sacred exorcism for a demon; Kryptonite for a Kryptonian. It strikes them as much as what they are most vulnerable to. Wielded against celestial entities made of pure abstraction, it dissolves them with their antipodes; against wondrous ideas, it renders them into silent chaos. Against inanimate matter, it cuts as a sun or a supercool void made into an inviolable and micron-sharp horizon, whichever is superior. You have a level of discernment and control over this effect; it can be attenuated and suppressed, such that the Blade's mere presence doesn't wither forests or set cities ablaze. Anything that has a weakness shall face swift destruction.
The Ruination of things and meditations on the Blade can slowly unlock new capabilities or improve existing ones. Eventually, Blade may evolve into Sword: not the mere matter of Ruin made into an item, but an artful implement of Ruinous technique.
[ ] Rainbow Shard (2 orbs) - This Sevenfold Benediction is a ring, its seal a crystal flower, cracked in the middle like a shattered gemstone or a blossom dividing into petals. The seams demarcate zones of color, each petal like its own world.
Each sunrise, one of the zones fills with beautiful luminescence. This grants you access to a minor supernatural ability. These are vast in expression, ranging from the mobility-oriented such as nation-range teleportation once every hour; to rare yet costly boons such as once-a-month resurrection and complete healing of a single individual, dead for no longer than half a year through violent or unnatural means. After each section is filled in with light, the ring will begin to shift the abilities into new ones. More often than not, you'll find the ring trying to grant you abilities that are useful in resolving the dilemmas you face at the moment.
You can choose to consciously lock in a power to prevent this shift from occurring, instead, causing the petal of the ring to furl inwards and taper off to a point; if all petals are so furled, it'll come to resemble a skewer made of lambent crystal.
Thrust the Rainbow Shard so arrayed into your heart, and you'll become imbued with the stored light. The artifact itself shall lose any further power, becoming at most a decorative piece.
The abilities recorded within shall synthesize into a higher form congruent with your spirit. Each static and linear ability undergoes a dramatic evolution into a broader or more granular power. The hourly nation-range teleport develops into a stock of spatial energy that you can spend to alter your own positional coordinate within the universe, never inferior to its original. Instead of a monthly resurrection, you acquire a set of diverse bio-necromantic capabilities, sufficient to replicate that feat with few if any resources, and perhaps do it even more often if properly equipped, among other uses. These abilities, unlike the ring's static powers, are capable of development and the slow removal of limits via training, and will at least somewhat synergize with each other, if at all possible.
[ ] Blood of Saints (3 orbs) - The Saintblood, the Halo Sanguine, the Gift of Passion, the Mark of Lamentation. This makes you a scion of that most venerable and ancient of lineages, that from which every mystery originates, and whose bearers once decided the fate of the world. In most contemporary carriers, the Gift is content to slumber. However, three orbs suffice to attain its full ignition.
The Saintblood enhances your constitution drastically, causing health and energy to abound. These superlative blessings are focused, first and foremost, on keeping you alive. As a consequence, you are incredibly difficult to kill; even without any other supernatural powers, you could survive three consecutive car crashes with, at worst, a sprained wrist. Your great longevity assures that barring incidents of sudden violence, you'll live on to become a sprightly centenarian. Furthermore, in dangerous situations, fate itself seems to guide you through straits of circumstance, granting you supernal luck for avoiding harms that'd slay you even with your body.
You're a natural Somatomancer; if you don't already have Inner Magic, it'll become attainable eventually during your lifetime. If you're already a Somatomancer, you'll instead find yourself developing with inborn talent and unlikely alacrity; a prodigy among prodigies. This is a level of sophistication one step over what Excellence could provide. Your eventual Invocation shall take twice as long to form at minimum, but once you attain it, it'll be a world-shattering thing. Past Saints, although forgotten by history, had unified the world for the duration of their lifespans; singularities of might that crushed the Clans of Tribornia under their feet and birthed order.
Furthermore, determination and suffering can empower you, as either feeling causes your acquired powers to unfurl like fractal hyperstructures: basic footwork developed into frightful artistry, a simple cut made into a behemoth-slaying stroke, a cantrip lighting villages on fire, and more. These improvements, albeit somewhat absurd, only last for as long as you can channel determination or suffering; once a particular 'event' is concluded, most of the benefits disappear... but crucially, not all of them.
As a final side effect of the Saintblood's nature, life seems slightly more enjoyable to you across the board; food tastes sweeter, friendships are more fulfilling and meaningful, and even repetitive tasks do not become boring as fast - all without the associated mental changes one may expect. You'll still be able to view all situations with the usual clarity without falling into corrupting incentives of pleasure.
[ ] Thrice Great (3 orbs) - A many-faced hero such as you deserves an equally multifaceted brilliance, to reflect the multitudes of achievements you may attain.
Like cement still not set into a stable form, a reservoir of inchoate pluripotency now slumbers within your heart. Drawn forth and channeled through a vessel, it can form into a Facet.
This Facet can be virtually anything imaginable, but is meant to represent a road not undertaken, or a vast reinterpretation of something you already have a certain capability in. Otherwise, it is not gated or constrained by metaphysical or magical law.
As an example, a Facet made through Inner Magic could be called Outer Magic; an art predisposed to channeling extradimensional energies, external to one's corpus, with advancement and casting potential dependent on the nature of available energies, rather than its caster's advancement; making investment into sanctums and allies doubly worthwhile. A Faceted Pattern may instead become a Pandemonium; the ability to dissolve ordered and explicable phenomena into a primordial murk, with a variety of side applications.
A Facet needn't be diametrically set against its original concept, only sufficiently different. A Facet and its original version can be slotted in and out at will - or, if at least somewhat coterminous in application or usage, wielded at the same time. This is usually no more tiring than using two such similar magics would be. If Facets are opposed on a conceptual level (such as a demonic and angelic magic,) they may be incompatible, rendering simultaneous usage impossible without accompanying severe self-harm.
Instead, you can choose to channel a Facet's potential through your entire being. This crystallizes an entire alternate version of yourself that you might've taken. However, not only can you not hold both Facets of yourself at once, but switching between them is a metaphysically exhausting task, requiring several hours of rest once it's completed to fully access your alternate powers, leaving you exposed to harm for that duration. This can be mitigated with practice, but never entirely.
As one Thrice-Great, you can form three Facets; the First Facet develops immediately, a Second develops in around three years, and a final Third in around thirteen years from the moment you attain your First. This otherwise automatic process can be accelerated with meditation on the shape of the future Facets your capabilities might take on, speeding up the attainment of the Second and Third Facet around tenfold if you stick to the preordained shapes.
Attaining a Facet beyond one's Third is unprecedented, even for the original sage who devised this method. However, it may not be strictly impossible for a hero of sufficient wisdom and means.
[ ] Shattered Aeon (4 orbs) - Friendship and its vaunted power are well-known to adventurers on many worlds, cited in countless memes, and extolled as a high virtue. Almost none know the true story, the face behind the mask of friendship, that very concept of fellowship and confidence in another. Once, this enticing force had a chance to reforge reality forever, to make it better, and it failed its quest miserably, shattered over the rocks by a savage betrayal, as trust in one's fellows dissolved into wicks of darkness.
Give friendship a chance again, and maybe you'll swim to a brighter world. Even if reality's shores may be wicked, even if the tides are cruel, and even if the driftwood you cling onto is headed to Hell - at least it'll all be in good company.
Through sheer circumstance or outright absurdity, you'll come face to face with an ensemble of reliable companions numbering anywhere from two to eight, most of whom shall possess a solid reason to get involved in your affairs, and the eclectic set of competencies, knowledge, magics, and eccentricities needed to meaningfully aid you and each other in your quest. Even if you have deep-seated personality issues that'd make cooperation with most people a distant dream, you'll be able to work alongside them.
Never shall your companions' aptitude or overall potential fall beneath your own, even if your capabilities already appear preposterously strong, as if some cosmic game master were doing their level best to ensure the game is as fair and interesting for each participant as possible; sometimes, your friends might even exceed you on an individual level, if often only for short periods. You'll all incessantly push each other to excel and succeed, providing motivation and constant support if the need arises.
Likewise, you'll all have a nearly preternatural, deeper-than-subconscious awareness of each other's overall needs and intentions; even if separated by light-years of distance, you'll find your actions synchronizing as if orchestrated by some celestial puppet master who wishes to see you all collectively succeed. Should one of you secretly be experiencing some abuse or issue, the others will always instinctively know how to act to provide aid, sometimes without even fully understanding why their hunch tells them so.
Above everything, this boon ensures one matter: certitude. You can always trust your friends, as even if you find some of their behaviors infuriating or vice versa, each downfall or argument is only a prelude to a more tempered, stronger bond. Even if forced into betrayal via mind control, the affected party shall only do the uttermost minimum on behalf of the controller. Even their spirit will fail, finding itself weaker than it should, when commanded to harm its allies, as if the player behind the character were only paying minor lip service to the effect, but still rooting for your inevitable aid in liberating themselves from this malign influence.
Being Usurpation's Chosen is mightier than Shattered Aeon. However, you may take a measure of cold comfort in knowing this one thing alone: your friends shall be spared the guilt, as you'll be the Judas to drive a dagger into their backs.
[ ] Unchained (+1 orb) - No chains, no limits. Harm follows every footstep.
Even if seemingly innocuous, your abilities tend towards destructive conclusions: a Chosen's fortune may chaotically reduce or modify that of others to amplify your own, a Somatomancer's Invocation may be unstable and explosive, and a Titan may overwrite the world into one uninhabitable for most beings. Even as an Architect, your insight will focus on destruction, and you'll struggle to undo calamitous fates: attempts will only multiply the amount of ruin awaiting.
True control over one's abilities acts as mitigation of this curse but is almost never attainable in the short-term. Broad Excellence may act as a partial form of mitigation but isn't reliable for the higher-order powers on display.
[ ] Usurpation's Chosen (+1 orb) - How can you ever believe in another heart, when a shadow is the truth of every being? You cannot trust. Trust will always confine and contain; trust will always weaken and betray. Enemies make war, but the wounds are clean and they will always heal. Trust alone will make you truly bleed. Trust alone can mutilate and maim - betrayal is the most brutal butcher.
As a consequence, you're doomed. Sometime in the future, you'll either betray someone else in a tremendously hurtful fashion they didn't deserve, or you shall be yourself betrayed similarly. You can choose, and you can proc this early on your own terms, but it'll always cause some form of strife at an inconvenient time; the party affected will be hurt, and this will cause some complications.
[ ] An End to Silver (+1 orb) - Your arrival on a world accelerates its apocalyptic fate; if one doesn't exist, it'll spawn a calamity to match your transgression. This acceleration cannot be prevented; the end of a given universe will arrive within seven years at most. However, through effort and ingenuity, you can overcome this calamity: slay its source, overcome entropy, or simply evacuate the people. Once this is done, the world experiences at minimum a decade of reprieve, before your presence calls down another calamity.
These fates moderately avoid harming you; if you step beneath a titan's foot, you'll be crushed, but if you do not proactively seek out death, and take at least mild precautions, you should be able to survive the apocalypse, along with whatever comes out on the other side. It'll be everyone else who is damned. With this appendix, the curse ensures its own preservation via your own.
Enhanced luck can mitigate the curse; pushing back the appointed time of the end, and offering more leeway in dealing with the threats. Eventually, it can start to weaken them altogether, but attaining even a halfway reduction is almost downright impossible. True freedom can be gained with the intervention of an Ensilvered Sorcerer, or something of a similar level of conceptual power.
[ ] Enforcement of Ruin (+2 orbs) - Wheresoever you walk, you are doomed to Death.
The closest individual or force to 'the concept of Death' in your local reality becomes aware of you within days of your arrival. Thereafter, they'll become obsessed with the idea of ending you. Given the breadth of this curse, it can manifest in a variety of ways: for Tribornia, you may draw the ire of the infamous Team Apocalypse, and on the Thematic Earth, the Rider of Death who serves the Lamb, and so on. However, aside from the information that you exist, and a strong compulsion to seek you out and destroy you, this bane does not provide any aid to your ruin's wellspring.
If a given reality doesn't have a matching individual or entity that can reasonably assume such a role, you'll instead simply have a vastly increased chance of fatal incident or death under other circumstances, which not even a Chosen's luck can reduce. In such a situation, it may be wiser to craft an embodiment to hunt you down: better face an immortal snail than a falling piano at every corner.
If you have the Ruinarch's Blade, you'll instead be the cause of your own eventual downfall. History repeats itself.
[ ] The One Principle (+2 orbs) - Get used to hatred, for it'll be one thing you shall experience in abundance wherever your feet tread.
All entities you encounter develop a dislike towards you, starting as a minor niggling at the back of their mind, and eventually developing into a tremendous hatred; over years, people will invent reasons to despise you, and civilizations might even wholesale turn into widescale witch hunts of your person, as you are branded the number one enemy of the public, a hostis humani generis.
A single look is sufficient to gestate that incipient seed of hatred, although obsessive hatred rarely develops on its own from a single impression; most often, you'll need repeat and frequent interaction to make you appear as utterly loathsome to another being. Only then can distaste bloom into abhorrent detestation the likes of which men often reserve for parasites and cockroaches.
This can sometimes cause enemies to potentially set aside their differences to pursue your destruction - at this curse's fullest development, even ardent foes, once constantly at each other's throats and willing to do anything inclusive of murder to each other, might be willing to tolerate each other as long as it contributes to annihilating you. Whether you view this as a good or a bad thing is entirely up to you; cooperation isn't necessary to make it real.
Your comrades made via Shattered Aeon are fully immune to this.
[ ] Keter Theli (+3 orbs) - As soon as you select this drawback, the fabric of the entire multiverse ripples and frays apart in rebirth, as some distant and dead cosmic eye turns in your direction. Each timeline simultaneously bends, as the eye closes itself and calmly awaits the fulfillment of its ascension.
But you'll forget about that event, or dismiss its import out of hand as some 'background thing' of no relevance to your activities; the same will be done by every other being across the multiverse, from ancient liches to overdeities, as all return back to their business.
It won't be long after that you'll find a dragon's egg, and it'll hatch within a month of your encounter. From it, shall come a child unlike any other; a perfect son or daughter, surpassing any dream or conceptions you might've ever had of such a thing. They'll be adorable or starkly serious as needed, and absorb your teachings and instructions with a keen, obedient mind; almost starved for information. He or she will be a magus so excellent they'll surpass your own abilities within only a couple of years; absorbing them won't present them with an issue, and they'll be able to combine them or make better versions swiftly. Even boons such as Born of the End or being a True Architect may be copied and even improved upon.
Make sure you raise your dragon well.
After all, you're family.
Decided to make it public for fun now.
Prince of Vindication
One morning, you awaken and realize the cosmos isn't as it should be; a truth so poignant you cannot help but shiver. From within comes a dross of inner potential. Sometime long ago, you were a warrior or ranger on a mission to repair the world; then you died. Now you awaken again.
You are bestowed orbs numbering three (3), to represent the power inside. You must also choose somewhere to begin your crusade, from amongst a number of places that are, in one way or another, doomed. Some of these fates may be more difficult to forestall than others.
Location
Choose a starting location. Depending on where you pick, leaving may present a challenge, so be careful.
Choose a starting location. Depending on where you pick, leaving may present a challenge, so be careful.
[ ] Auditorium - Once, the citizens of this somber nightmare saw only death: havoc running rampant as avenging monsters came to whittle down children in their cradle. However, all is right now, as the world stands whole and united: the collective of Auditors conducts the affairs of a cooperative universe. And it's truly a vast universe out there. The Auditorium's colonized worlds chime with crystalline Resonance like a celestial chorus. Legions of Oneirodynes explore the outer reaches and eliminate threats. Conclaves of Oneirists harvest and manifest people's hopes and dreams, to ensure prosperity and stability. No souls are lost, for in this strange aeon, even death has died.
The Auditorium settles new worlds constantly and its population is swelling vigorously. Inventions of biomedicine, xenogenetics, and Dreamcraft proliferate and deliver the citizens into the embrace of a world in which all basic and esoteric needs are fulfilled. Alien, divine, and human beings stand side by side, hand in tentacle. Tolerance of race and religion has skyrocketed over the decades since the end of the war. The Auditorium now seeks multiversal treadways and diplomacy with others beyond its own humble borders. You could enter that frontier, or settle down into its policy-making echelons. There are other threads or avenues of adventure to pursue. Military service offers captivating rewards and power, although more intrepid adventurers always search for the Echo.
[ ] Tribornia - Unlearn swiftly the even-handed probity and isonomy of Earth. On Tribornia, you'll see only a sharp divide. There are those with the necessary power to enact their hegemony and those without it, and therefore powerless to stop the empowered. Here, even nations can be slaves to individual masters, and the masses can do naught but hope to survive unmolested. More often, however, the powerful collect into coteries, colloquially named Clans. History's timeline is drenched in violence, blood, and stories of those who defied this order. In moments of crisis, even the most ardent and embittered rivals shall close ranks and come together to annihilate the arrogant masses, if they should need such a reminder.
The world's living through a revival. Following the most recent invasion of Hell, and the even more recent Sinking of Teiivan, the recently ephemeral lines in the sand have settled once more. The fellowships are now readying for yet another War of the Clans, the victors of which shall collect the artifacts, lands, and secret arts of the losers. The Pillars of the Sect scheme internal strife as their master, a man known only as Splinter, is occupied pondering the best way to conduct the wars ahead. The Immortals who've partaken of the Devouring Elixir are sharpening their fangs and seek to sate their hunger. However, unknown to most, the world's about to experience massive change as a small Clan of ambitious new players named the Brotherhood of the Sword arrive on the stage.
[ ] Thematic Earth - With the Educator's arrival came a change on every conceivable level, a reordering of the Architecture of the World. Reason's been kicked to the curb and beaten over its head with a blunt instrument, as countless Themes vie for supremacy and relevance, overwriting mundane causality as floodwaters may consume a helpless valley. The myriad Enrolled in the Educator's Academy are the celebrities and paragons that media outlets follow and tabloids expound upon, excited to see what comes next. The stability of this planetary order is upheld by Archetype, a collection of students who've assembled to counteract malicious Enrolled and help each other in times of need.
This Earth is reaching its culmination. The shocking disappearance of the brilliant yet terrifying Metaphysicist has left a number of his followers rudderless and resulted in the regular occurrence of dimensional imbrication events, which appear to steadily become worse, causing upheaval and destruction across the globe. Enrollment experts are starting to question how far the Educator may push his agenda before the Thematic well has run dry or starts to draw on iterative Themes. The world is more chaotic and uncontrollable with every year, leading some to believe it is only a matter of time before the end. They are correct, albeit for the wrong reasons: the apocalypse does loom on the horizon but with a different, unkinder face.
[ ] Yoria - You'll see few worlds more candid than Yoria, the ultimate destiny of which is writ across its constellations. This is a world without a twist: a land of simple and pure fantasy, ill-tempered wizards and honorable knights; storybook tales of drakes slain and princesses rescued, with adventurers fearlessly scaling the walls of ancient dungeons or acting as hired mercenaries for dukes. This sun's rays have caught the faces of entire generations of noble kings and dark lords. Glories and wars freckle the arrow of time; wealth and riches are yours to claim if you are brave and bold. The ruins of ancient civilizations lie scattered and unexplored, ready for claiming and awakening, along with the ancient magitech within.
There are dangers and calamities ahead, near and far. Hundreds of recorded prophecies, old and neoteric alike, speak of their inevitability. Apocalypses have occurred before, and each time the world's recovered and experienced golden ages in the interim. Most worryingly, across the centuries, the weave of magic has started to unravel and lose its potency, and few contemporary workings can reliably repair it on any scale beyond the local, and never permanently. It seems the world's marching towards a slow ruin, a decay of all that makes it so unique and fantastic, and the sages and oracles offer no succor or way out. You may fear not, however, as that day is still far beyond the horizon.
[ ] The Leviathan Isles - An archipelago of secret magics, wreathed in mists of brume, its many people schismatic and warlike. The citizens of the Isles are divided into three central paradigms: the faithful of the Benthic, the adherents of the Monolith, and the worried fence-sitters who hope not to be involved in their zealous affairs. Tarcan and their Duri fellows look with hate and unease as the Lasarian Tsardom swells to the north with new converts; the Brotherhood of the Golden Hook is rumored to wield inhuman powers beyond that usually conferred by oils. Meanwhile, the minds in Yechod and Yothestein invent new machines that run on steam, rather than sacred oils or salt, further cementing their independence.
Your hands certainly won't be idle. There is always an island to colonize, a settlement to raid, a naval battle to wage, or an adventure in forbidden ruins to be found. From the Benthic Vast to the north, eldritch monstrosities and pelagic eidolons assault the center. Meanwhile, from the alien Monolith in Pangaea's center, chiseled Slabs and other stone-made creatures take to the sky and rove over the land. Each type of creature is sacred to some faction or another, worshipped as either demigods or angels and demons; you'll find no end of heretics to either order. Around the map's corners, you'll find even stranger forces at work.
[ ] The Backroads - Abandon the restraints of a domesticated universe and embrace freewheeling adventure. Instead of a sensible world, travelers of the Backroads find only anarchic wilderness - whether as sprawling evergreens or merciless deserts - and the solitary roads that connect its flickers of civilization, like dim fireflies in a void. Although you'll always find the eponymous roads, the distance between locations is ontological, crossable via effort and time rather than spatial intervals; you'll arrive once you're meant to arrive. The roads have dangers as well, often in the form of other travelers and creatures.
Certain locations are more or less dangerous than others, and the sections of land vary in civilized sophistication and population counts. On average, however, you'll seldom be more than a day away from a settlement at least the size of a one-stoplight town. Everywhere you travel, misadventures and oddities seem to follow like a pack of mischievous brats. A trained driver or hitchhiker may find methods of expediting their travels in a particular direction, skipping past entire localities to arrive directly at a particular spot across the world, or even perform the metaphysically resonant act of driving off into the sunset; to greener pastures and new worlds.
Magic
Here are the available magical arts, ranging from common to fully dead arts, delivered back into the world via your intercession.
Here are the available magical arts, ranging from common to fully dead arts, delivered back into the world via your intercession.
[ ] Inner Magic (1 orb) - The Inner art specializes in channeling, refining, and manipulating spiritual energy - a multifaceted and pluripotent dross - to fulfill a variety of ends. Training is the foundation of strength, but innovation and tutoring are a more decisive factor in attaining strength: even rudimentary self-suffusion can enhance the exerted force and attenuate incoming harm, but true and impactful power comes from employing techniques.
Techniques are countless, an umbrella that covers the vast fields of one's imagination. All skills can be made supernal: mundane prediction sharpened into true precognition; a sword stroke made so brilliant it can cut an archer's string before the arrow is nocked, or if aimed lethally, to sever their neck from afar. With the self extruded into the world, one can learn to manipulate the elements, reinforce matter, or conjure spirit guardians, and more. There are many paths to follow, each replete with its own shortcuts and secret tricks. Instead of a warrior's route, one could instead aim to become the ultimate demolitionist or even a baker.
It all culminates in an Invocation, the expression of a practitioner's self - the inner made outer. These Invocations can range from direct, straightforward and impactful to more esoteric and conceptual: each Invocation is often complex enough to quibble over details. Rarely does an Invoker wield a 'simple' power such as pyromancy; instead, he may call forth a flame that feeds off the souls of the conquered and can summon them back to an unseemly form of existence as wraithly 'burning men.'
To start with, you'll possess an innate sense of your reserves - which are of an appreciable, but not titanic size - and moderate control: self-reinforcement will allow you to deform steel and outrun cars, at moderate expenditure. Your talent in developing and mastering techniques is unusual; you can even translate a master's Invocation into a technique, even if the result is merely a shadowy reflection of their shining truth. Your Invocation is assured to be top-tier once you attain it, conforming with expectations and wishes.
[ ] The Pattern (1 orb) - A human soul's development is stochastic, as vulnerable to discord's unraveling as the drifting tides are to a blowing wind's uncaring caress. Emotions are spiritual hazards, as much a venom to autarky over the self as a viper's venom to a colony of cells: enfettering an otherwise indomitable spirit to the mindless hands of chaos. The Pattern is precisely what its name implies: a Pattern that once spread from soul to soul, stabilizing the influence of chaos and forevermore dispelling its disorder.
The Paladins of the Pattern once stripped the souls of their initiates naked and bound them in circles alongside demons of fear, revealing horrors beyond comprehension, with the Pattern's stabilizing influence cauterizing cleanly the sectors that surrendered to such fear. Once an initiate was fearless, other flaws were struck from the palimpsest: temptation, irrationality, weakness, cowardice. Once an initiate was utterly faultless, they were inducted into the brotherhood as White Knights: named not so for the color of their armor, but the color of their soul, as perfect as the Pattern dictated.
You'll become a Paladin of the Pattern, a mere initiate still. With an effort of will, you're able to infuse yourself with the Pattern, assuming rightful wholeness; restoring limbs or maintaining perfect emotional equilibrium. Perennial maintenance of this Pattern with your sustained effort causes it to eventually become self-maintaining: removing or attenuating emotions you consider undesirable, and providing constant healing. This can be pushed out beyond your body's constraints as Patterned light, conferring healing onto the worthy, or smiting foes. Its constant exaltation of your self's every approved facet improves you holistically as well: physical enhancements, clarity of thought, improved magical control. This focuses on preventing degradation more than anything, ensuring the long periods between training sessions are lossless. Eventually, you'll be able to infuse others with the Pattern to spread it.
Be careful not to allow your emotional surgeries to result in excessive value drift, especially over long periods. All you consider antithetical is struck down, but what a future version of you may consider antithetical could be different from your current definition. Once you've attained an acceptable level of detachment or courage, it may be wise to cease further descent.
[ ] Inbetweener (1 orb) - The dichotomy of essence and form. The economy of the Leviathan Isles runs on the salts and oils that come fresh from the Monolith and Benthic; each worshipped as a font of endless power or ruthlessly exploited by miners and barons.
Aside from being essential resources in driving industrial advancement, bodily absorption of either salts or oils transforms the individual into a superhuman. Often, the consumption of salts bestows arcane and elemental abilities, while oils bestow organic and eldritch powers, although such stable trends can sometimes break down, especially in the case of rare samples of either substance, and the combination of both substances may yield even stranger powers.
You're one of the uncommon Inbetweeners, able to absorb both salts and oils at once, without the usual symptoms of madness, mutation, and the rejection potentially caused by incompatibility. You'll receive a bushel of salts and a gallon of oils, both of them of supernal quality, more or less equal to each other in terms of potential empowerment offered.
Here are samples of what you could achieve with those amounts:
Salt - Moderately superhuman attributes. Creation of crystallized drones under your control, capable of deploying cantrip-like magics. The ability to make oneself nigh-invulnerable for short periods or permanently with a crippling weak spot.
Oil - Moderately superhuman attributes. Humanoid shapeshifting precise and fast enough to assume the form of any observed human almost instantly, or with mild positive adaptations such as webbed feet. Mild psychic powers, mostly empathy and mind-reading.
If Leviathan Isles, you instead receive double the amount of salts and oils.
[ ] Ideogrammer (2 orbs) - This art's authors are fallen and forgotten, their statues pulled down, their obelisks abandoned. Their clenched grip over reality is banished like an illusion before a butterfly's wings. The nation is now an egalitarian endeavor and shall remain so. You can claim the spoils if you wish, or else they shall rest among the ashes forever.
An Ideogrammer crafts memes. These memes are woven into complex ideations, which can then be 'installed' into a medium. Applied to a human being, this manifests as a firm but subtle mental influence. Installing the ideation of cigarettes into a man spawns a compulsive interest, which leads to addiction after the first taste of nicotine. It can instead be made with negative valence, compelling a smoker to quit their addiction, or with any other number of subtle nuances to tweak the effects.
A novice's ideations cause minor symbolic ideograms - miniature symbols, characters, and other sigils - representative of their component memes to saturate the area or target, invisible to a non-sorcerous gaze, earning the art its name. Advanced Ideogrammers can conceal these to deter detection via magical scrutiny, or enhance the effect by stamping the symbols physically. A picture of a water bottle can instill thirst, an Aramaic phrase that means 'death' can inflict sudden cardiac arrest upon being viewed, and so on. An expert Ideogrammer can make even humans into walking Ideograms. Installed memes are transmitted upon eye contact with others; allowing a careful Ideogrammer to potentially create armies of semi-zombified servants overnight, or rewrite societies.
An Ideogrammer's naturally immune to their own created ideations, and can inoculate others, or render filters on each meme to prevent infection from occurring on undesired targets based on preprogrammed parameters; no others are left alive who can still wield this art, but in theory, you could install a strong resistance to enemy ideations in yourself if you wished.
Advancement is an incremental process; the road from novice to master is one of decades, if not whole centuries, containing both a slew of experiments and countless refinements of the ideation process. However, a master of Ideogrammation does not at all resemble a novice. His ideations are so potent as to casually overwrite reality: the concept of speed itself applied to a car makes it abnormally fast or transforms it into a supercar. An entire police department may be portrayed as villainous cowards or heroic super-cops; a portrayal which'll make itself real over time, if it weren't already at least partially. Over time, the Ideogrammer can carve out entire chunks of the collective subconscious and alter worlds, on both a mental and physical level, within days or weeks.
Be careful not to fall to the same corrupt incentives the originators of this art fell to. Tyranny and benevolence are two sides of a coin.
[ ] Enrollment (2 orbs) - The Architecture of the world casts deep shadows, as ideals are struck with infinite radiance. An enlightened soul can harness these chimeric silhouettes, and through doing so, enforce a Theme on reality that incrementally converts the world's operations away from physical mundanity and causality, and more into attunement with itself.
In common parlance, a conduit of a given Theme is called Enrolled; an individual bearing a Role that resonates with the Theme and possesses traits and aspects that reflect its namesake. The Olympian of the Superhero Theme embodies the strength and indomitability of a caped hero; the Once and Future King incorporates the mythical archetype of a perfect, virtuous king from Arthurian Legends. There are countless other examples; as many Themes as there are potential areas of stereotype and archetype, and as many Roles as one is capable of rationally demarcating out of them.
Choose a Theme, and develop a chosen Role within. Given you're the only Enrolled within your Theme to start with, attunement and benefits can be derived from having a central Role within it. Areas and existential contexts you operate and perform deeds in become saturated with your Theme, forcing the Architecture of the world to retune in accordance with the Theme's ethos. Doing this can slowly inculcate the populace with Thematic superpowers, change the environment, and even shift causality and probability.
To start with, you're a fully matured Enrolled, perhaps capable of devastating a mundane city protected by a small military garrison on your own within half an hour, if unopposed and if your Role is mostly focused on combat or destruction. Given your Theme's lack of exploration, it'll induct new Enrolled over time on its own, to a set number of about twenty equals. By proactively seeking out acceptable targets, you can induct them on your own with a bit of effort and time, earning you capable allies who'll swiftly attain your level. Your powers improve by playing your Role, as well as spreading and reinforcing your Theme; the mightiest Enrolled could shatter continents easily after only several decades of productive profusion.
Choosing Thematic Earth discounts Enrollment by one orb, but you're instead integrated into one of the already existing local Themes as a new Role therein.
[ ] Chosen (2 orbs) - You are a Chosen One, destined to fulfill an ancient prophecy.
Its manifestation matters not, but rather, its terrifying effect.
Coincidence multiplied by chance is your shield and sword. You're protected from all forms of misfortune to an absurd level, capable of standing in the eye of the storm unharmed, turning the tables on a villain who's captured you, or simply walking into a den of scum and walking out unharmed and unnoticed; as if divine providence itself were your cheerfully adoring fan. Your proactive luck is also a minor force acting in your favor. You'll live without a single worry about finances or health and other mundane frivolity.
In a scenario where you're otherwise equal to a foe, your true odds of winning are about six in ten or better; in a scenario where a foe has a decisive advantage against you and by all reasonable metrics you should die for the temerity of having drawn such attention, you have at least a coin flip's odds of escaping unscathed, but no better.
Furthermore, you'll wield threefold boons to complete your destiny:
Sword - An implement by which you carve your destiny out, some form of unique tool. It need not be a weapon or physical device, and can instead be a rare boon or magical art. Its forms are as myriad as the Hero with a Thousand Faces himself. Arthur's Excalibur, Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, Achilles' immortality, Odin's runes, Anakin Skywalker's connection to the Force, and more of that vein; every manner of asserting one's will is valid.
Shield - An implement by which destiny can guide you and provide aid; rarely something that is 'owned' unlike the Sword. This can manifest as a magical artifact that whispers advice, a wise bearded mentor, a familial group of companions who'll never leave your side, or even a strange instinct for simply doing what's right. This is the medium through which destiny ensures you remain on the correct path to make the most of your boons.
Trial - The reason this choice is so cheap. Ahead of you is a quest, a harrowing journey that'll take everything you have in you to complete; there'll be challenges and enemies, riddles and difficulties. You can refuse the call, if you wish, and in doing so seal away most of your fortune. However, completing your trial means a subsequent return with the elixir; a hero triumphant, the cycle complete. Power is merely a medium of making oneself known, and yours shall be incomparable afterward; the might of your Sword and Shield shall be at least doubled, elevating their worth transcendentally. However, the completion of your Trial may take a long time; even decades. It's rare for one so Chosen to be signed on for a mere dalliance of a season.
[ ] Titan (3 orbs) - A primordial maker. A Titan does not ever quibble over the details, he simply chisels bedrock truth into reality's skeleton. Woe to any who stand in opposition.
Yours is an existence of metaphysical immortality, as indestructible as the mountains are to human hands; no more capable of experiencing death than that which is already dead. Instead, when your consciousness aborts its central processes, you simply enter a torpid dream-filled slumber and slowly restore yourself; if not chipped away, you'll eventually attain wholeness once again. The most viable method of slowing you down is imprisonment, but even that is unreliable; after all, prisons decay, and you do not.
Your form, mind, and spirit are amplified to a realm of utter glory. Furthermore, you can alter them: shapeshifting into eldritch or pleasant forms and increasing your size to even that of a skyscraper, dividing and compartmentalizing your mind freely and attaining almost unmatched quantitative acceleration, and setting automatic spiritual processes to run in the background. This is shapeshifting, although capable of esoteric alterations; you can become a Titan made of raw magic or one made of stillness.
Even in your standard 'mortal' and bridled form, you have the strength to crush steel into dust without any effort, cogitation to compress days of thought into a moment, and metaphysical magnitude to drown entire nations in stunning radiance.
You're capable of asserting titanic truth over material reality. This allows for reshaping the terrain, either in general or 'in tune' with your themes and domains as a primordial being. Focused applications allow you to create special workings over time; servant creatures, domiciles that project special effects, or massive constructs to anchor reality to your will.
There are greater powers that can permanently and asymptomatically slay a Titan, denying them even sleep's repose, but they are starkly uncommon. Still, you should be cautious: eternity is ever a titan's ally, but it will eventually deliver you to meet such powers. You're not the last of your kind around, but there used to be more of you...
[ ] Auditor (3 orbs) - The Auditorium's Oneirists are tasked with one simple mission: the making of dreams into reality.
Their Dreamcraft is what allows otherwise silly-looking spaceships made of mundane steel and powered by earthly fuels to move at star-crossing velocities and for solar-spawned Resonance to generate a flux that banishes the concept of death on galactic scales.
You're an Auditor, a master of masters among Oneirists.
With Dreamcraft, the enhancement and suppression of 'absurdity' comes easiest. This murky term refers to most supernatural powers. With an Auditor's Resonance, this allows you to escalate magics or to diminish them to nullity with a moment's attention; a summoning ritual so empowered calls forth embodiments of nature in place of lowly spirits. Likewise, a deity struck with your defiance will find its powers not answering as keenly and falling between their fingertips; a god realizing mortality.
With time and experimentation, you'll realize other echoes. Auditors are no mere Oneirists, stumbling and struggling with drawing forth fundamental resonances. Your mastery of Dreamcraft suffices to generate almost arbitrary effects, if you are given time to prepare, and can draw out the correct vibes from within. Sample techniques on Auditor-level include interworld travel, metamagic based on nominative substitution, attacks that erase swathes of reality irreversibly, and fear auras that cause heart attacks in gods.
[ ] Architect (4 orbs) - The Architecture is a record of all we are, and everything we have the potential to become.
You stand as a True Architect, a purveyor and a viewer of the world's most secret diagram. From it extends all else. Understand the source and you understand where the river flows: an Architect's foremost benefit is total apprehension of the universe, which on a novice's level can be likened to localized nigh-omniscience. Their predictions come true, and with effort, they can alter what'll happen by affecting certain parts of the Architecture, causing knock-on effects; the basis of all Architectural Ritualism.
The Architecture doesn't conceal a single fact. There is no escape from its sharp clarifying light. Even the motivations of so-called deities can be splayed out on a worktable, disassembled, analyzed, and methods of changing their mind researched. As the Architect's prowess increases, so does their success rate with such actions. Sufficient iteration of predictive power is indistinguishable from an unending path to victory; constant awareness of what must be done to realize the image of one's personal success.
In practice, many are driven mad; even more refuse to take more than a few tentative steps into the truth, predicting and fearing their own downfall. You do not hold any advantages over your peers, for the truth is unsparing.
No advantages save one: if you should dare to keep looking forwards and inwards, if you should continue to step on the road of gold, if you should read its sigils and comprehend the wisdom of the ancients... then your eyes will eventually shine like diamonds.
From then on, not even the Architecture will comprehend you: after all, how can it comprehend something vaster than itself?
Benefits
Here is a variety of benefits. These are not arts, but vary from alterations in circumstance to useful artifacts.
Here is a variety of benefits. These are not arts, but vary from alterations in circumstance to useful artifacts.
[ ] Excellence (1 orb) - Golden transmutation; a spark of brilliance that illuminates the corridors of a being. Your heart is an elder thing, uncompromising in the face of mediocrity.
Choose one aspect of yourself to exalt as such: if a magic is chosen, its immediate limits are shattered and your talents heightened; an Inbetweener's consumption-derived abilities evolve slowly with training and time; an Ideogrammer's memes could affect reality directly from the start. If a benefit is chosen, its variables scale higher and provide a higher advantage; the Baneful Blade is already a Sword as you receive it, or the Rainbow Shard's powers are doubled. This is stronger on cheaper options.
Instead, Excellence may encompass the totality of yourself. This'll boost relevant aptitudes: strength, agility, appearance, intellect, charisma, and offer a minor buff to natural talent and power exerted with most magics.
[ ] Maritime (1 orb, requires Leviathan Isles) - A sea cannot be sailed without a vessel, and a vessel is worthless without its captain. Fortunately, serendipity smiles upon your issue, as where you have a problem, chance sees a solution.
You'll appear in a safe port with a fresh deed of ownership for a competently built and newly christened ship, a full stock of ammunition and supplies, and a loyal crew sufficient to staff the ship and conduct whatever manner of operations you have in mind. The demographics, religious denominations, and skills of the crew, as well as the exact parameters of the ship, are yours to decide, although you cannot provide specifications on individual sailors, except the quartermaster. You'll also have sufficient money to pay everyone's wages for at least three months of sailing, allowing you to skip that particular worry.
Furthermore, you can optionally design a reputation for yourself among the Leviathan Isles, whether as a completely bloodthirsty pirate well-liked by others of his ilk, or a neutral mercenary and privateer willing to rub elbows with either worshippers of the Benthic or the Monolith as money dictates. You can ascribe yourself any set of deeds appropriate to your seeming level of competence and power that might've been reasonably accomplished over the last decade, accounting for development within that time, but cannot invent wholly wild stories unless you accept others will disbelieve them, or at least take them with a generous grain of salt.
If you are also an Inbetweener, this even further doubles your starting stock of oils and salts.
[ ] Ideal Education (1 orb, requires Thematic Earth) - You're back to school! Congratulations or condolences as appropriate. However, unlike most forms of education, this one teaches you magical superpowers. Choose a Theme and you'll be retroactively insinuated into the world's history as one of the illustrious Educator's students, a member of his Academy, starting your first day of school. If this Theme existed 'canonically,' you'll replace one of its members; otherwise, an extra Class will have been Enrolled on a random year.
This carries all of the natural advantages of Enrollment, as well as having the Educator's direct help and oversight in shaping your Role. You can also enter your Thematic World in search of artifacts, allies, and other potential benefits.
If chosen alongside Enrollment, you'll wield a Role of special prominence and influence in your Class and Theme; assured to rise to a height of unusual competency. At minimum, you'll be the strongest person in your Theme, and among the strongest Enrolled, but you stand decent odds of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of the Olympian or Metaphysician, as long as you apply yourself.
[ ] Chaos Code (1 orb) - A metal-cool tablet of navy and cobalt stone inscribed with azure runes; if tapped with a finger, it'll light up with a holographic display showing you, for a lack of a better term, job listings.
These are extremely varied in nature, as are the clients, but they are most often cosmic and conceptually abstract in scope; under rare circumstances, an overdeity or other similarly mighty entity might post a request, although this is much less common. Availability of contracts is wildly unpredictable, dependent on time, location, and metaphysical circumstances beyond mortal understanding, comprehension, or prediction; one season might see you drowning in hundreds of requests, and then for another year you might at most receive one shoddy contract a month. Moving to a neighboring universe is usually a decent way to find new work.
As an example: the idea of death might decide that to preserve existential balance, a certain individual must face the eternal silence; if the hit is carried out, it might reward you with an artifact cloak that annuls curses of instant death and is extraordinarily good at protecting its wearer from harm. The idea of love itself might be dissatisfied with the downturn of true love scenarios, and demand the successful matching of at least seven ideal partners to each other, offering payment via increased fortune in amorous endeavors.
If you have accumulated a reputation, you'll be afforded some leeway to negotiate the nature of these rewards. ("Instead of a cloak, could I have a death scythe?" "Can you just get me a girlfriend instead?") Your clients' willingness to humor these requests will often be much greater if you managed to fulfill the requests swiftly or with special attention to detail or otherwise somehow gone above and beyond in the name of your task. Minor adjustments to your rewards are easier for them to accept than full-on replacements.
Whether your mercenary activities comprise of being a hitman of death, or a cupid of love, if you completely don't like the rewards attached, you can instead ask to receive in-store credit. This credit can be spent to purchase rewards other users of Chaos Codes have rejected, most often from a varied list, but you should note the rates of exchange are extremely unfavorable; on average, you should only do this if you completely despise a reward.
There are at least seven others like you across the multiverse, although a Chaos Code doesn't have any inherent messaging or communication function, so you're unlikely to ever meet them.
[ ] The Drive (1 orb, requires Backroads) - After your arrival, a car will pick you up; its driver is a young woman with sunglasses and a cool attitude. You'll soon embark on a drive across the Backroads, its details moderately bending to suit your wishes; it can be an epic and significant mission with countless opponents whose blades will temper you, or a simple road trip with comfy diners and whacky humorous side characters concluding in a somber send-off.
You can stay on the Drive for as long as you like, or ask to be driven off into the sunset, experiencing a happy ending.
The benefits this provides are minor, and accumulated over time, but they'll always at least somewhat match your desires. You can make a stop to scavenge for technology in a wrecked UFO in the middle of the desert or discover an abandoned wizard's tower full of books in the middle of a rocky canyon, and more of that nature. There may be other passengers, either to start with, or along the way; some will eventually depart, having arrived at their destination, and others may be convinced to stay around as companions.
[ ] Clanborn (1 orb, requires Tribornia) - Undergo rebirth as a scion of a Great Clan, one of the ruling powers of Tribornia; each one a continental behemoth, dominating multiple nations. You'll accrue status, influence, wealth, and secrets; most importantly, your position shall be one of import. A highly favored Pillar of the Sect, a Lord of the Riders of the Wind, and so on: a position one step underneath the leader, but still of sufficient authority as to influence their own decisions and actions.
Naturally, you'll have access to the expected resources. Your Clan's secret techniques are yours to claim: combined with your high position, you'll wield some unparalleled abilities and may possess idiosyncratic methods of self-empowerment. You'll have natural access to and training in Inner Magic, and if you already possess it, your natural talent is bolstered slightly beyond the described norm.
Here are some of the Great Clans, as a demonstration:
*Riders of the Wind - Have control over the area geopolitically corresponding to Earth's South and Central America. Career criminals evolved into a Clan; recruit from organized thieves and lesser criminal gangs and cartels. Also poach members from other Clans. Mildly disorganized; three Lords at the top rule over their own autonomous territories under the leader, Lern. In battle, the Riders favor loose and adaptable techniques, especially aeromantic elementalism: they are magnified via concord and group use. One Rider is problematic; an entire pack can wreck cities with hurricanes.
*The Sect - Have vast influence, but do not directly control, most of the area geopolitically corresponding to Earth's South and East Asia, as well as some of Australia and the coastal areas of the Americas. The Sect was created by its master, Splinter, over two hundred years ago, and professes a mission of salvation and equality. Eight Pillars uphold the Sect, each with its own assigned 'lands' to save. This number never changes, and is a part of 'organizational feng shui' which is somehow related to Splinter's Invocation, called the Path of Inner Divinity. Each member practices a form of exceptional inner energy cultivation descending from this Invocation.
[ ] The Sheriff's Gun (1 orb) - Act with honor, and it'll serve. The Sheriff's Gun resembles a nondescript six-shooter revolver. A skilled and honorable user can force a change of shape; it can assume the form of any firearm, preferably a handgun.
Each of its bullets is a conceptual delivery mechanism for the ideal of deserved retribution. The Gun was meant to rest within the cold hand of justice at the long arm of the law. Therefore, if wielded for a righteous cause, it never requires manual reloading, has infinite ammunition, and its rounds impact with disproportionate striking power; often with enough force to penetrate a tank's armor.
The Gun possesses a discernment akin to human sapience, with a frightening intellect and insight. It rewards good behavior with supernal life advice and the occasional hint to success at whatever tasks you are pursuing, even ones unrelated to the pursuit of justice. This encompasses most benevolence, but it especially likes hunting down criminals. It does not, at all, like being used for petty ends. It understands and tolerates killing. It's a Gun after all, but one that was made to stop evil, rather than encourage it.
Over time, if you earn the Gun's approval and become worthy of it, the Gun can inculcate elements of the Sheriff's Role in you. This'll cause you to develop some of the Aspects of the Sheriff and it can happen even if you are already Enrolled.
The Sheriff's Aspects are:
*Justice - Above all, enforcement thereof. Enhanced attributes, especially speed and constitution. Immunity to corruption.
*Law - Grants boosts dependent on one's legal authority. Can deputize others to grant them minor superpowers.
*Gun - Can develop the Gun's abilities, mostly as special shooting techniques. Increases power and penetration, as well.
[ ] Oneirodyne (2 orbs) - An Oneirodyne is a machine that runs on personalized eldritch Resonance, the unrefined stuff that Dreamcraft orders into discrete reactions. Often, in cleaving to the human standard, it takes the form of a humanoid machine many stories tall, with a hull tough enough to resist concentrated tank fire. Without Resonance, an Oneirodyne loses most of its steam. Fortunately, you now output a natural brand of Resonance when in contact with your machine: sufficient to sustain its growth.
An Oneirodyne is 'alive' much as any being, but is reliant on its partner to develop meaningfully. Like most Oneirodynes, yours draws its essence from a particular elder being or source. This decides the nature of its abilities. The number of Elder Gods to proliferate essence has increased vastly since the Auditorium's early days, allowing for splicing and hybridization of strains. Below are some examples of strains, and what powers they can net an Oneirodyne in about a year of calm development, but feel free to invent:
*The Archcleric - Increased durability over most other Oneirodynes, casually weathering attacks that'd instantly destroy most of its peers. Psionic powers, chiefly consisting of macroscale telekinesis and telepathy; semi-automatically reform the environment to one's advantage and brainwash enemies. Eventually, develops psychically reactive thrusters for flight and evasion, as well as a psychic breath weapon that can dissipate most forms of non-Resonant matter on contact.
*The Shepherd - Can manifest constructs of golden cosmic energy; constructs draw from an inner reserve and cost upkeep, but are exceptionally easy to automate; can form rings of reactive shields that intercept strikes or auto-attack smart-fire orbs. Extension of conceptually sharp claws; capable of cleaving even an Archcleric-type in half with a single well-aimed strike. Precognition drawing on cosmic energy, sufficient to foresee minutes into the future if exerted to its maximum.
*The Mist - Mach 1.2 movement and attack speed, with concomitant reactions (most Oneirodynes don't exceed the sound barrier until veterancy; a decade or so into being piloted.) Innate flight at movement speed and accompanying material intangibility; can transform into a noxious white mist that acts as a mixture of neurotoxin and reactive acid, or selectively as harmless fog. Can cover entire battlefields like this within an eyeblink. A scanner array that detects living beings within a hundred kilometers. Low durability and strength, as a drawback.
On the Auditorium, the cost of this option is reduced to one orb.
[ ] Born of the End (2 orbs) - Since times immemorial, men have rightly feared the fury of ruin and the vindictive gods who dispensed death with mere offense. That cycle carries on today, as we live through yet another season in a war without end. You instead shall become an incarnation of one who's already won, the achiever of spring after that long, merciless winter. Gloria in excelsis Deo.
As Grailbound, you're axiomatically immortal and unaging, swiftly recovering from all harm. Even if you're whittled down to nothing and thoroughly shattered on the most essential protospiritual level, you'll fail to lose consciousness and recover flawlessly within at most what'd be a subjective hour, as the world itself conspires to reverse your experience of death; a world cannot exist where you are slain forever. The metaphysical wire mesh foundation of the multiverse will sooner break forever than you truly die for even a day.
This effect is intelligent and discerning; if the site of your corpse is harmful and will break you down instantly, such as finding yourself in the center of a black hole, you'll instead be restored in the closest safe space where this would make sense; continuous cycles of orchestrated suicide can allow you to somewhat force the effect into a manner of grisly teleportation and, on the extreme end, even interworld travel if you are willing to stomach such means of locomotion.
Discounted by one orb on Tribornia, although as a side effect, you'll be magically compelled in an unbreakable contract to cooperate with your fellow Grailbound in maintaining the Grail's secrecy, continued existence, and other activities willed by the Grail. On average, this shouldn't occupy more than about a fifth of your total time even when the global pressures and cooperation are intensely pointed against you; during most decades, you'll be free to do as you wish, without a bother in the world.
Taken alongside Clanborn, you are made a full-fledged member of an elusive ancient organization, nowadays rebranded to the rather simple and deceptive name of Team Apocalypse, privy to its secrets and techniques.
Cannot be taken alongside Enforcement of Ruin on Tribornia.
[ ] The Baneful Blade (2 orbs) - Declare war on reality. Take up the Ruinarch's own Blade. If you should embark on this path, cast aside the hopeless and ignorant elegance of peace, and abandon the foolish halcyon dream of rest. These are falsehoods, as you'll soon discover.
The Blade provides its bearer with all they need to enforce Ruin: motivation, rest, stamina, breath, and sustenance. It confers axiomatic defiance and durability that scales with one's capabilities and spite, a pondersome immunity that can shield a mortal man as though dressed in tenfold plate; or make a hero of the world into an indestructible bulwark, on whose skin galaxies splatter with no more significance than snowflakes in winter's dark. After all, Ruin shall not touch its scion and champion.
For every forestalled fate, an eventual Ruination.
The Blade's wicked edge is the Bane of all things. It's a cloud of botulinum neurotoxin and a nuclear reactor for a mortal man; a sacred exorcism for a demon; Kryptonite for a Kryptonian. It strikes them as much as what they are most vulnerable to. Wielded against celestial entities made of pure abstraction, it dissolves them with their antipodes; against wondrous ideas, it renders them into silent chaos. Against inanimate matter, it cuts as a sun or a supercool void made into an inviolable and micron-sharp horizon, whichever is superior. You have a level of discernment and control over this effect; it can be attenuated and suppressed, such that the Blade's mere presence doesn't wither forests or set cities ablaze. Anything that has a weakness shall face swift destruction.
The Ruination of things and meditations on the Blade can slowly unlock new capabilities or improve existing ones. Eventually, Blade may evolve into Sword: not the mere matter of Ruin made into an item, but an artful implement of Ruinous technique.
[ ] Rainbow Shard (2 orbs) - This Sevenfold Benediction is a ring, its seal a crystal flower, cracked in the middle like a shattered gemstone or a blossom dividing into petals. The seams demarcate zones of color, each petal like its own world.
Each sunrise, one of the zones fills with beautiful luminescence. This grants you access to a minor supernatural ability. These are vast in expression, ranging from the mobility-oriented such as nation-range teleportation once every hour; to rare yet costly boons such as once-a-month resurrection and complete healing of a single individual, dead for no longer than half a year through violent or unnatural means. After each section is filled in with light, the ring will begin to shift the abilities into new ones. More often than not, you'll find the ring trying to grant you abilities that are useful in resolving the dilemmas you face at the moment.
You can choose to consciously lock in a power to prevent this shift from occurring, instead, causing the petal of the ring to furl inwards and taper off to a point; if all petals are so furled, it'll come to resemble a skewer made of lambent crystal.
Thrust the Rainbow Shard so arrayed into your heart, and you'll become imbued with the stored light. The artifact itself shall lose any further power, becoming at most a decorative piece.
The abilities recorded within shall synthesize into a higher form congruent with your spirit. Each static and linear ability undergoes a dramatic evolution into a broader or more granular power. The hourly nation-range teleport develops into a stock of spatial energy that you can spend to alter your own positional coordinate within the universe, never inferior to its original. Instead of a monthly resurrection, you acquire a set of diverse bio-necromantic capabilities, sufficient to replicate that feat with few if any resources, and perhaps do it even more often if properly equipped, among other uses. These abilities, unlike the ring's static powers, are capable of development and the slow removal of limits via training, and will at least somewhat synergize with each other, if at all possible.
[ ] Blood of Saints (3 orbs) - The Saintblood, the Halo Sanguine, the Gift of Passion, the Mark of Lamentation. This makes you a scion of that most venerable and ancient of lineages, that from which every mystery originates, and whose bearers once decided the fate of the world. In most contemporary carriers, the Gift is content to slumber. However, three orbs suffice to attain its full ignition.
The Saintblood enhances your constitution drastically, causing health and energy to abound. These superlative blessings are focused, first and foremost, on keeping you alive. As a consequence, you are incredibly difficult to kill; even without any other supernatural powers, you could survive three consecutive car crashes with, at worst, a sprained wrist. Your great longevity assures that barring incidents of sudden violence, you'll live on to become a sprightly centenarian. Furthermore, in dangerous situations, fate itself seems to guide you through straits of circumstance, granting you supernal luck for avoiding harms that'd slay you even with your body.
You're a natural Somatomancer; if you don't already have Inner Magic, it'll become attainable eventually during your lifetime. If you're already a Somatomancer, you'll instead find yourself developing with inborn talent and unlikely alacrity; a prodigy among prodigies. This is a level of sophistication one step over what Excellence could provide. Your eventual Invocation shall take twice as long to form at minimum, but once you attain it, it'll be a world-shattering thing. Past Saints, although forgotten by history, had unified the world for the duration of their lifespans; singularities of might that crushed the Clans of Tribornia under their feet and birthed order.
Furthermore, determination and suffering can empower you, as either feeling causes your acquired powers to unfurl like fractal hyperstructures: basic footwork developed into frightful artistry, a simple cut made into a behemoth-slaying stroke, a cantrip lighting villages on fire, and more. These improvements, albeit somewhat absurd, only last for as long as you can channel determination or suffering; once a particular 'event' is concluded, most of the benefits disappear... but crucially, not all of them.
As a final side effect of the Saintblood's nature, life seems slightly more enjoyable to you across the board; food tastes sweeter, friendships are more fulfilling and meaningful, and even repetitive tasks do not become boring as fast - all without the associated mental changes one may expect. You'll still be able to view all situations with the usual clarity without falling into corrupting incentives of pleasure.
[ ] Thrice Great (3 orbs) - A many-faced hero such as you deserves an equally multifaceted brilliance, to reflect the multitudes of achievements you may attain.
Like cement still not set into a stable form, a reservoir of inchoate pluripotency now slumbers within your heart. Drawn forth and channeled through a vessel, it can form into a Facet.
This Facet can be virtually anything imaginable, but is meant to represent a road not undertaken, or a vast reinterpretation of something you already have a certain capability in. Otherwise, it is not gated or constrained by metaphysical or magical law.
As an example, a Facet made through Inner Magic could be called Outer Magic; an art predisposed to channeling extradimensional energies, external to one's corpus, with advancement and casting potential dependent on the nature of available energies, rather than its caster's advancement; making investment into sanctums and allies doubly worthwhile. A Faceted Pattern may instead become a Pandemonium; the ability to dissolve ordered and explicable phenomena into a primordial murk, with a variety of side applications.
A Facet needn't be diametrically set against its original concept, only sufficiently different. A Facet and its original version can be slotted in and out at will - or, if at least somewhat coterminous in application or usage, wielded at the same time. This is usually no more tiring than using two such similar magics would be. If Facets are opposed on a conceptual level (such as a demonic and angelic magic,) they may be incompatible, rendering simultaneous usage impossible without accompanying severe self-harm.
Instead, you can choose to channel a Facet's potential through your entire being. This crystallizes an entire alternate version of yourself that you might've taken. However, not only can you not hold both Facets of yourself at once, but switching between them is a metaphysically exhausting task, requiring several hours of rest once it's completed to fully access your alternate powers, leaving you exposed to harm for that duration. This can be mitigated with practice, but never entirely.
As one Thrice-Great, you can form three Facets; the First Facet develops immediately, a Second develops in around three years, and a final Third in around thirteen years from the moment you attain your First. This otherwise automatic process can be accelerated with meditation on the shape of the future Facets your capabilities might take on, speeding up the attainment of the Second and Third Facet around tenfold if you stick to the preordained shapes.
Attaining a Facet beyond one's Third is unprecedented, even for the original sage who devised this method. However, it may not be strictly impossible for a hero of sufficient wisdom and means.
[ ] Shattered Aeon (4 orbs) - Friendship and its vaunted power are well-known to adventurers on many worlds, cited in countless memes, and extolled as a high virtue. Almost none know the true story, the face behind the mask of friendship, that very concept of fellowship and confidence in another. Once, this enticing force had a chance to reforge reality forever, to make it better, and it failed its quest miserably, shattered over the rocks by a savage betrayal, as trust in one's fellows dissolved into wicks of darkness.
Give friendship a chance again, and maybe you'll swim to a brighter world. Even if reality's shores may be wicked, even if the tides are cruel, and even if the driftwood you cling onto is headed to Hell - at least it'll all be in good company.
Through sheer circumstance or outright absurdity, you'll come face to face with an ensemble of reliable companions numbering anywhere from two to eight, most of whom shall possess a solid reason to get involved in your affairs, and the eclectic set of competencies, knowledge, magics, and eccentricities needed to meaningfully aid you and each other in your quest. Even if you have deep-seated personality issues that'd make cooperation with most people a distant dream, you'll be able to work alongside them.
Never shall your companions' aptitude or overall potential fall beneath your own, even if your capabilities already appear preposterously strong, as if some cosmic game master were doing their level best to ensure the game is as fair and interesting for each participant as possible; sometimes, your friends might even exceed you on an individual level, if often only for short periods. You'll all incessantly push each other to excel and succeed, providing motivation and constant support if the need arises.
Likewise, you'll all have a nearly preternatural, deeper-than-subconscious awareness of each other's overall needs and intentions; even if separated by light-years of distance, you'll find your actions synchronizing as if orchestrated by some celestial puppet master who wishes to see you all collectively succeed. Should one of you secretly be experiencing some abuse or issue, the others will always instinctively know how to act to provide aid, sometimes without even fully understanding why their hunch tells them so.
Above everything, this boon ensures one matter: certitude. You can always trust your friends, as even if you find some of their behaviors infuriating or vice versa, each downfall or argument is only a prelude to a more tempered, stronger bond. Even if forced into betrayal via mind control, the affected party shall only do the uttermost minimum on behalf of the controller. Even their spirit will fail, finding itself weaker than it should, when commanded to harm its allies, as if the player behind the character were only paying minor lip service to the effect, but still rooting for your inevitable aid in liberating themselves from this malign influence.
Being Usurpation's Chosen is mightier than Shattered Aeon. However, you may take a measure of cold comfort in knowing this one thing alone: your friends shall be spared the guilt, as you'll be the Judas to drive a dagger into their backs.
Drawbacks
As one who opposes this world's degeneration, you may afflict yourself with burdens. Your profits from this baneful section cannot exceed five orbs.
As one who opposes this world's degeneration, you may afflict yourself with burdens. Your profits from this baneful section cannot exceed five orbs.
[ ] Unchained (+1 orb) - No chains, no limits. Harm follows every footstep.
Even if seemingly innocuous, your abilities tend towards destructive conclusions: a Chosen's fortune may chaotically reduce or modify that of others to amplify your own, a Somatomancer's Invocation may be unstable and explosive, and a Titan may overwrite the world into one uninhabitable for most beings. Even as an Architect, your insight will focus on destruction, and you'll struggle to undo calamitous fates: attempts will only multiply the amount of ruin awaiting.
True control over one's abilities acts as mitigation of this curse but is almost never attainable in the short-term. Broad Excellence may act as a partial form of mitigation but isn't reliable for the higher-order powers on display.
[ ] Usurpation's Chosen (+1 orb) - How can you ever believe in another heart, when a shadow is the truth of every being? You cannot trust. Trust will always confine and contain; trust will always weaken and betray. Enemies make war, but the wounds are clean and they will always heal. Trust alone will make you truly bleed. Trust alone can mutilate and maim - betrayal is the most brutal butcher.
As a consequence, you're doomed. Sometime in the future, you'll either betray someone else in a tremendously hurtful fashion they didn't deserve, or you shall be yourself betrayed similarly. You can choose, and you can proc this early on your own terms, but it'll always cause some form of strife at an inconvenient time; the party affected will be hurt, and this will cause some complications.
[ ] An End to Silver (+1 orb) - Your arrival on a world accelerates its apocalyptic fate; if one doesn't exist, it'll spawn a calamity to match your transgression. This acceleration cannot be prevented; the end of a given universe will arrive within seven years at most. However, through effort and ingenuity, you can overcome this calamity: slay its source, overcome entropy, or simply evacuate the people. Once this is done, the world experiences at minimum a decade of reprieve, before your presence calls down another calamity.
These fates moderately avoid harming you; if you step beneath a titan's foot, you'll be crushed, but if you do not proactively seek out death, and take at least mild precautions, you should be able to survive the apocalypse, along with whatever comes out on the other side. It'll be everyone else who is damned. With this appendix, the curse ensures its own preservation via your own.
Enhanced luck can mitigate the curse; pushing back the appointed time of the end, and offering more leeway in dealing with the threats. Eventually, it can start to weaken them altogether, but attaining even a halfway reduction is almost downright impossible. True freedom can be gained with the intervention of an Ensilvered Sorcerer, or something of a similar level of conceptual power.
[ ] Enforcement of Ruin (+2 orbs) - Wheresoever you walk, you are doomed to Death.
The closest individual or force to 'the concept of Death' in your local reality becomes aware of you within days of your arrival. Thereafter, they'll become obsessed with the idea of ending you. Given the breadth of this curse, it can manifest in a variety of ways: for Tribornia, you may draw the ire of the infamous Team Apocalypse, and on the Thematic Earth, the Rider of Death who serves the Lamb, and so on. However, aside from the information that you exist, and a strong compulsion to seek you out and destroy you, this bane does not provide any aid to your ruin's wellspring.
If a given reality doesn't have a matching individual or entity that can reasonably assume such a role, you'll instead simply have a vastly increased chance of fatal incident or death under other circumstances, which not even a Chosen's luck can reduce. In such a situation, it may be wiser to craft an embodiment to hunt you down: better face an immortal snail than a falling piano at every corner.
If you have the Ruinarch's Blade, you'll instead be the cause of your own eventual downfall. History repeats itself.
[ ] The One Principle (+2 orbs) - Get used to hatred, for it'll be one thing you shall experience in abundance wherever your feet tread.
All entities you encounter develop a dislike towards you, starting as a minor niggling at the back of their mind, and eventually developing into a tremendous hatred; over years, people will invent reasons to despise you, and civilizations might even wholesale turn into widescale witch hunts of your person, as you are branded the number one enemy of the public, a hostis humani generis.
A single look is sufficient to gestate that incipient seed of hatred, although obsessive hatred rarely develops on its own from a single impression; most often, you'll need repeat and frequent interaction to make you appear as utterly loathsome to another being. Only then can distaste bloom into abhorrent detestation the likes of which men often reserve for parasites and cockroaches.
This can sometimes cause enemies to potentially set aside their differences to pursue your destruction - at this curse's fullest development, even ardent foes, once constantly at each other's throats and willing to do anything inclusive of murder to each other, might be willing to tolerate each other as long as it contributes to annihilating you. Whether you view this as a good or a bad thing is entirely up to you; cooperation isn't necessary to make it real.
Your comrades made via Shattered Aeon are fully immune to this.
[ ] Keter Theli (+3 orbs) - As soon as you select this drawback, the fabric of the entire multiverse ripples and frays apart in rebirth, as some distant and dead cosmic eye turns in your direction. Each timeline simultaneously bends, as the eye closes itself and calmly awaits the fulfillment of its ascension.
But you'll forget about that event, or dismiss its import out of hand as some 'background thing' of no relevance to your activities; the same will be done by every other being across the multiverse, from ancient liches to overdeities, as all return back to their business.
It won't be long after that you'll find a dragon's egg, and it'll hatch within a month of your encounter. From it, shall come a child unlike any other; a perfect son or daughter, surpassing any dream or conceptions you might've ever had of such a thing. They'll be adorable or starkly serious as needed, and absorb your teachings and instructions with a keen, obedient mind; almost starved for information. He or she will be a magus so excellent they'll surpass your own abilities within only a couple of years; absorbing them won't present them with an issue, and they'll be able to combine them or make better versions swiftly. Even boons such as Born of the End or being a True Architect may be copied and even improved upon.
Make sure you raise your dragon well.
After all, you're family.
Superman Ain't Got Shit On These Respawns.
[W] Thematic Earth
[W] The Pattern (1 orb)
[W] Enrollment (2 orbs)
[W] Excellence (1 orb)
[W] Ideal Education (1 orb, requires Thematic Earth) - Superheroes.
[W] Born of the End (2 orbs)
[L] Unchained (+1 orb)
[L] Usurpation's Chosen (+1 orb)
[L] Enforcement of Ruin (+2 orbs)
[W] Thematic Earth
[W] The Pattern (1 orb)
[W] Enrollment (2 orbs)
[W] Excellence (1 orb)
[W] Ideal Education (1 orb, requires Thematic Earth) - Superheroes.
[W] Born of the End (2 orbs)
[L] Unchained (+1 orb)
[L] Usurpation's Chosen (+1 orb)
[L] Enforcement of Ruin (+2 orbs)
- Location
- Europe
Dragons on Thrones
[ ] Architect (4 orbs) -
[ ] Shattered Aeon (4 orbs) -
[ ] Enforcement of Ruin (+2 orbs) -
[ ] Keter Theli (+3 orbs) -
No mere Diamond is this, but a Dragon upon his Throne.
Thematic Earth starts around the time of the Quest, so Death is still kind of bitch made. With the help of my Architect tier friends that should be manageable, try to link up with the Educator, Meta, and the depressed Magician-to-be. Raising my Dragon in an environment of Friendship should provide a reasonably positive environment for growth. Ideally I'd stack more magics to give my new child an even better start into life, but no child wants to be a tigers son, certainly not a dragon. Architect is a perfectly respectable profession, in contrast.
100 Ordinal Credits.
5 Cerulean Obols.
0 Radiant Electrum.
—
[3] - Shards of Infinity: [+4 Cerulean Obols]
—
[ ] A Modest Realm - Modern Earth
—
[ ] Gamble -
First Gamble: Receive [+1 Radiant Electrum] in addition to the listed reward.
[ ] 2: Caress of Winter - [+1 Cerulean Obol]
[ ] 8: Maw - [+3 Cerulean Obol]
—
—
Profess / Preference
Ally / Alternate
[ ] I: Attribution Requested [5 Ordinal Coins] -
[ ] II: Ally [20 Ordinal Coins] - Lady White
[ ] II: Armada [70 Ordinal Coins] - Eschaton Sorceress
Dream / Double
[ ] I: Twice [3 Ordinal Coins] -
—
Cerulean Obols
[ ] Chosen One [4 Cerulean Obols] -
—
Radiant Electrum
[ ] Ninefold [1 Radiant Electrum] -
Debit: 50/ 6 / 1
Credit: 80 / 04 / 2
Net: 000 / 0 / 0
Strategy:
Go to earth and start a scientific revolution with Ninefold. Use Chosen One to pass on your System to others, so they might grow mighty in time. Pick some useful companions, ideally able to pass on their systems. Use the power transformation ability of lady White to remove and convert Shards.
5 Cerulean Obols.
0 Radiant Electrum.
—
[3] - Shards of Infinity: [+4 Cerulean Obols]
—
[ ] A Modest Realm - Modern Earth
—
[ ] Gamble -
First Gamble: Receive [+1 Radiant Electrum] in addition to the listed reward.
[ ] 2: Caress of Winter - [+1 Cerulean Obol]
[ ] 8: Maw - [+3 Cerulean Obol]
—
—
Profess / Preference
Ally / Alternate
[ ] I: Attribution Requested [5 Ordinal Coins] -
[ ] II: Ally [20 Ordinal Coins] - Lady White
[ ] II: Armada [70 Ordinal Coins] - Eschaton Sorceress
Dream / Double
[ ] I: Twice [3 Ordinal Coins] -
—
Cerulean Obols
[ ] Chosen One [4 Cerulean Obols] -
—
Radiant Electrum
[ ] Ninefold [1 Radiant Electrum] -
Debit: 50/ 6 / 1
Credit: 80 / 04 / 2
Net: 000 / 0 / 0
Strategy:
Go to earth and start a scientific revolution with Ninefold. Use Chosen One to pass on your System to others, so they might grow mighty in time. Pick some useful companions, ideally able to pass on their systems. Use the power transformation ability of lady White to remove and convert Shards.
Last edited:
Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
Are the DLCs still available or should I consider them non-canon, given they're not present here?
Birdsie
Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy
- Location
- Poland
You can use them. Just repost them for posterity or something.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Demon King
[ ] Thematic Earth[ ] Inner Magic (1 orb)
[ ] Enrollment
[ ] Auditor (3 orbs)
[ ] Architect (4 orbs)
[ ] Excellence (1 orb)
[ ] Ideal Education (1 orb, requires Thematic Earth) - Tarot, The Devil, Demon King
[ ] Born of the End (2 orbs)
[ ] Unchained (+1 orb)
[ ] Usurpation's Chosen (+1 orb)
[ ] An End to Silver (+1 orb)
[ ] Enforcement of Ruin (+2 orbs)
[ ] The One Principle (+2 orbs)
[ ] Keter Theli (+3 orbs)
When I saw "The One Principle", the Demon King role come to mind immediately. This is the demon kings power if your wondering.
[ ] The Devil: Demon King [10 Will, 1 Credit] - For every transgression, a reward. A Demon King arises when the rewards outweigh the consequences; the miracles rise above the screams; the wonders outscale any potential concern of the suffering caused. Apply care or embrace it, the Demon King cares not.
*Essentially, through the absorption of negative emotions such as fear, discord, hate, or shame, you gain power. This is a background feature, a process that occurs without any need for guidance or activation: simply by staying in the catchbasins of human emotion, you can accumulate endless might and magic. Negativity directed towards you, however, is especially potent: by styling yourself as an adversary and giving humanity reasons to despise you, you might become truly undefeatable, a patrician of godhood to rival even the likes of the Olympian or Once and Future King, and possibly even stronger than them.
*Even annoyance is sufficient to coax out some trickle of power; a hundred especially irritating pranks on a susceptible individual may equal weeks of training, and unlock minor supernatural capabilities, such as arm-range telekinesis, color alteration within your field of view, or facial shapeshifting. Often, the powers developed are related to the emotions you incited and the associations you created with them. Naturally, the strength swells in tune with the strength of the emotions.
*For all its stellar potential, the cost is truncated, as this synergizes extremely with your own desires and is therefore easier to argue for: a method of advancement that requires almost no activity from you, but potentially allows for sudden scaling in a case of dire exigence. Others do not see the use of this as easily as you do.
*Essentially, through the absorption of negative emotions such as fear, discord, hate, or shame, you gain power. This is a background feature, a process that occurs without any need for guidance or activation: simply by staying in the catchbasins of human emotion, you can accumulate endless might and magic. Negativity directed towards you, however, is especially potent: by styling yourself as an adversary and giving humanity reasons to despise you, you might become truly undefeatable, a patrician of godhood to rival even the likes of the Olympian or Once and Future King, and possibly even stronger than them.
*Even annoyance is sufficient to coax out some trickle of power; a hundred especially irritating pranks on a susceptible individual may equal weeks of training, and unlock minor supernatural capabilities, such as arm-range telekinesis, color alteration within your field of view, or facial shapeshifting. Often, the powers developed are related to the emotions you incited and the associations you created with them. Naturally, the strength swells in tune with the strength of the emotions.
*For all its stellar potential, the cost is truncated, as this synergizes extremely with your own desires and is therefore easier to argue for: a method of advancement that requires almost no activity from you, but potentially allows for sudden scaling in a case of dire exigence. Others do not see the use of this as easily as you do.
All the drawbacks will cause so much hatred towards the PC that they'll become insanely strong. Add the immortality from Born of the End, Excellence to boost the power of Demon King even more, the BS you can pull of with the Architect, and make you powers even more absurd with Auditor while also reducing your enemies. Though with all this power and drawbacks, there's a solid chance the Thematic World just straight up gets destroyed.
Just taught of a fun reverse of the previous build.
The Hero
[ ] Thematic Earth[ ] Ideogrammer (2 orbs)
[ ] Enrollment
[ ] Chosen (2 orbs)
[ ] Excellence (1 orb)
[ ] Ideal Education (1 orb, requires Thematic Earth) - Tarot, The Devil, Demon King
[ ] Thrice Great (3 orbs)
[ ] Usurpation's Chosen (+1 orb)
[ ] An End to Silver (+1 orb)
[ ] Enforcement of Ruin (+2 orbs)
[ ] Keter Theli (+3 orbs)
Basically use Thrice Great to create a facet that's the opposite of The Devil, Demon King. So instead of gaining power from negative emotions you get power from positive emotions. Then use Ideogrammer to then propagate goodwill towards the PC and the Chosen helps with survival and also helps generate goodwill.
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Very neat CYOA. If I recall, Yoria is the loosely Zelda-inspired fantasy world from Defeating the Darkness. Thematic Earth is obviously from The God Diversion. The other couple of places I don't recognize.
Since the Ensilvered Sorcerer is mentioned, are all these worlds considered to be part of the Silververse aka the Diamond?
OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
Auditorium is postcanon A Mask of My Own Face
Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
Unleashing my reserve of builds from when I was working on the preview:
And, here's my DLC:
And my DLC Build:
This one's a pretty simple Somatomaxxing build. The Bluebloods are a clan I made up whose techniques emphasize leadership, charisma, buffing their minions, and deriving power from their minions.My Kingdom Come said:
This one replaces that nasty shitstain who was the canon Hero for the Fantasy class, with a guy who is significantly nicer but nonetheless kind of awful to be around.The Hero of Our Tale said:
Not a super strong ethos for this one, I wanted to make a build that gives Titan time to grow and the Grail seems good for that.Infinity's Abider said:
Odd Jobs on the High Seas said:
These two are both Keter Theli builds, though they take pretty different tacks. Odd Jobs is more about creating a convivial atmosphere for the Dragon to grow up in, while Pater Peractionis is more about manually tinkering with the inside of the Dragon's head to make sure they grow up into someone good.Pater Peractionis said:
And, here's my DLC:
DLC for Aabcehmu said:
And my DLC Build:
Vaguely similar to The Hero of Our Tale, though without the enrollment reinforce my heroism with narrative force and instead relying on my DLC. I initially didin't like that my DLC was a one-off single-use ability, so I made this to let me stretch it out.All My Second Chances said:
Aabcehmu
Confusion as a Natural State of Being
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Pronouns
- Any/All
Rihaku
The Internet
Two builds, derived from the tags of this thread:
If only the drawbacks weren't capped at +5 orbs...
Hubris is a Coward's Word
Tribornia
-Titan
-Saintblood
-Baneful Blade
Drawbacks: Unchained, Usurpation's Chosen, An End To Silver, The One Principle
The Baneful Blade grants defenses scaling to one's immediate power; a mere world-shaking hero under such aegis can shrug off galactic-scale impacts, so how much greater a Titan? Ruin armor plus Saintblood plot armor plus titanic invulnerability make me a virtually unstoppable juggernaut as I lay waste to this grotesque realm, while Saintblood inner magic refines my command of the Blade to truly outrageous levels. And if in the course of my rampage I encounter truly precipitous adversity... then all the suffering inflicted upon my corpus, and the ensuing Titanic determination in response, will only fuel the engine of my Saintblood to higher peaks. It's almost like I'm some kind of... echo of the Forebear of Dynasties himself! All shall love me, hate me, and despair.
First, the Grail. Then, all reality.
Absolute Peak Degeneracy
Thematic Earth
-Enrollment: The Xianxia Protagonist
-Auditor
-Shattered Aeon
Drawbacks: An End to Silver, Enforcement of Ruin, The One Principle
I am a xianxia protagonist, so no wonder everyone hates me... But with my Auditor-backed plot armor and plucky crew - including numerous Fatties, Jade Beauties andthe mighty Lord Fifth, this nameless hero shall defy the scorn of the everyman to rise above and save this world from certain annihilation (or at least enable Suizhen the Martial Heroine to do so after I craft the Nebula Battlesuit buff her from afar). My companions are all 4-orb powers in their own right, conveniently just potent enough for one or two to be budding True Architects - and their grasp of the Architecture, enhanced to 'absurd' heights by Auditor, may be just what this reality needs in order to stave off armageddon.
If only the drawbacks weren't capped at +5 orbs...
Hubris is a Coward's Word
Tribornia
-Titan
-Saintblood
-Baneful Blade
Drawbacks: Unchained, Usurpation's Chosen, An End To Silver, The One Principle
The Baneful Blade grants defenses scaling to one's immediate power; a mere world-shaking hero under such aegis can shrug off galactic-scale impacts, so how much greater a Titan? Ruin armor plus Saintblood plot armor plus titanic invulnerability make me a virtually unstoppable juggernaut as I lay waste to this grotesque realm, while Saintblood inner magic refines my command of the Blade to truly outrageous levels. And if in the course of my rampage I encounter truly precipitous adversity... then all the suffering inflicted upon my corpus, and the ensuing Titanic determination in response, will only fuel the engine of my Saintblood to higher peaks. It's almost like I'm some kind of... echo of the Forebear of Dynasties himself! All shall love me, hate me, and despair.
First, the Grail. Then, all reality.
Absolute Peak Degeneracy
Thematic Earth
-Enrollment: The Xianxia Protagonist
-Auditor
-Shattered Aeon
Drawbacks: An End to Silver, Enforcement of Ruin, The One Principle
I am a xianxia protagonist, so no wonder everyone hates me... But with my Auditor-backed plot armor and plucky crew - including numerous Fatties, Jade Beauties and
Lealope
Not yet invincible
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Some statements on the CYOA.
R' — Today at 7:32 PM
Birdsie in the cyoa, to what extent can other picks accelerate or improve architectural ability?
Birdsie — Today at 7:33 PM
Very mildly; Excellence is most likely your best bet.
R' — Today at 7:34 PM
what about the drive
Birdsie — Today at 7:34 PM
It straightforwardly lets you go on without sanity loss.
Hmm, Drive?
R' — Today at 7:34 PM
also, is a titan more or less tanky than born of the end
Birdsie — Today at 7:36 PM
Less. Consider that Titan is a 3-orb option spread out among several improvable benefits, whereas Born of the End is a 2-orb spent almost entirely and purely on being unkillable.
That said a Titan is 'tankier' in the sense their physical form likely handles damage better. BotE has better conceptual scaling, it can bring you back potentially even from something like true death attacks from an insufficiently developed Baneful Sword.
R' — Today at 7:36 PM
finally, is the first paragraph of usurpations chosen flavor txt or does it actually make you a sociopath
Birdsie — Today at 7:36 PM
Flavor text mostly.
Although it could make you one if there were literally no other way to fulfill it.
The effect is absolute even for an Architect or Shattered Aeon.
Caveat emptor.
R' — Today at 7:37 PM
so you can intentionally choose to betray to trigger itn
Birdsie — Today at 7:37 PM
Yes, as long as it follows the outlined parameters.
you'll either betray someone else in a tremendously hurtful fashion they didn't deserve [...] it'll always cause some form of strife at an inconvenient time; the party affected will be hurt, and this will cause some complications.
There's no avoiding this, you can simply at best decide: "Yeah, right now I can afford to do this. Sorry for what I'm about to do, [victim]."
Depending on the form of betrayal and victim, chances of reconciliation also differ.
R' — Today at 7:39 PM
so yeah, if i pick drive and architecture with two of the lesser drawbacks and align my drive towards architecture
am i the diamond eyed
bc that seems pretty comfy and good
Birdsie — Today at 7:41 PM
Diamond Eyes are pretty much assured to develop as long as you don't die or go insane, so yeah. You get to have pseudo-Weird American adventures with forms of precog that, properly controlled, won't diminish any of the fun or comfiness.
Properly exerted and controlled Architecturalism is nice like that.
R' — Today at 7:43 PM
is keter thelis downside merely being totally eclipsed or is the dragon secretly evil
Birdsie — Today at 7:45 PM
A bit of column A, a bit of column B, although 'secretly evil' is a misnomer.
It'd be more accurate to say the dragon has a potential to great evil if poorly raised, and poorly raised here is a somewhat dangerous category; it requires wisdom and foresight. Unconditional love is a decent start but only a start. A young dragon's psychology is an intricate and inhuman puzzle.
Birdsie — Today at 7:46 PM
You could raise Elyon on a diet of love and pride in his own accomplishments but untempered by some humility it'll result in a being with something resembling the Doom of the Tyrant; convinced its opinion is correct and no other, etc.
R' — Today at 7:46 PM
could the educator succcesfully raise a good Dragon
Birdsie — Today at 7:46 PM
Hmm. If forewarned, almost definitely yes.
But Elyon can initiate even into Architecturalism.
R' — Today at 7:46 PM
hm. but the drawback prevents foreknowledgr
Birdsie — Today at 7:46 PM
Hmm. If forewarned, almost definitely yes.
But Elyon can initiate even into Architecturalism.
Birdsie — Today at 7:47 PM
It's a drawback of pure stepping on stones.
If you fail miserably then you've raised a hyperscaling threat you have basically not a shadow of hope of overcoming, better than you in every way. Even a 'partial success' in parenting might simply result in a yandere son/daughter who'd kill billions without a care to preserve the life of those they care about for simple minutes.
Draconic psychology tends towards extremes, sin, and flawed outcomes.
It's a very fine balancing act to raise Keter Theli into a fully mentally stable individual.
It's somewhat easier to simply control the shape of madness, although - again, not ideal.
That said, raising them into mental stability is very much possible.
R' — Today at 7:50 PM
how about Thematic - Wise Mentor, Excellence - Thematic, True Architect, The Drive?
Birdsie — Today at 7:50 PM
That is a pretty sweet and balanced mixture with good odds, yeah.
And if you manage to raise Elyon successfully then it's a pretty good force multiplier.
He/she will explicitly be better than you; it's all but impossible to outdo their scaling in the long-term.
R' — Today at 7:51 PM
does one really need force multipliers if one has diamond eyes tho…
diamond eyes is pretty much enough gun for virtually any goal
Birdsie — Today at 7:52 PM
A sane Elyon would attain Diamond Eyes and then you could collaborate together on remaking the Seals!
In the long-term making systems of magic equivalently varied and strong as Enrollment.
Above everything though you get a pretty cool kid.
The Backroads (with Drive especially) also surprisingly aren't that bad a place to raise a child. There are some more positively-attuned Ideogrammatic remnants that can have a potentially stabilizing effect if you can find them, and with Drive and Architect you'd have good odds of it.
Aabcehmu (Fib) — Today at 7:56 PM
Birdsie, any thoughts on Pater Peractionis's odds of success, either with or without my out-of-context knowledge about the risks of raising dragons?
Or Odd Jobs, for that matter
Hmm
Man what a dangerous idea
Messing with fire there.
But Chosen luckily protects from really bad situations, so maybe it's not all fucked?
Practically speaking assuming you act early enough this is a very good way of ensuring the kid grows up on the straight and narrow.
Just install the correct mental Ideograms of desired traits and then Pattern them into self-maintaining permanence.
Odd Jobs is somewhat more positive and comfy.
Although I'll note it relies greatly on your party members having good parenting skills.
Not a bad thing to rely on, mind you, but still a bit of an uncertainty.
R' — Today at 8:49 PM
can saintblood + inner remotely compete with the other 4 orb potential option (true architect)?
Birdsie — Today at 8:51 PM
You'll at minimum have a top-tier Invocation - some of those are ridiculous. It'd need time and extra effort to rival the current strongest Invocation but it holds that potential, especially since as a Saint you can attain greater heights via suffering and determination empowering you.
It's a different kind of power, but yes, it can be rather absurdly potent.
For a benchmark, the strongest Invocation is Reduce to Zero, which allows its user to do exactly what it says on the tin: reduce any value, real or imaginary, to zero.
It can even alter parameters fully abstract or unknown to him.
"Amount of threats to me: zero."
Birdsie — Today at 8:59 PM
Other Invocations that aren't the above Reduce to Zero but are generally considered top-tier include:
-- Reactive blasts of energy akin to Pain's Shinra Tensei capable of flattening half a city the size of New York in one unconstrained use, instantly slaying everyone within the affected zone (including other master-tier Inner Mages.)
-- Extremely fine-tuned and powerful subatomic telekinesis capable of almost instantly transmuting any matter in range to any other kind of matter, although only with a range of thirty feet.
-- The ability to burn off pieces of one's soul to manifest the Final Light, an antipode of the Big Bang representing the ultimate fate of the universe in which the last star winks out. Can forge items made of the Final Light among other techniques.
-- Enacting 'miracles.' Broad and versatile, themed around delivering salvation in a manner that earns the faith of others / the masses. Can heal the masses, create and maintain a zone where death doesn't happen, resurrect the dead, and shatter the souls of lesser Innerists.
As a Saint you'd minimum attain something on par with one of these.
R' — Today at 9:12 PM
hm. some of those are impressive but reduce to 0 seems like the only one that could even have a chance at contending with diamond eyes
Birdsie — Today at 9:14 PM
Yeah, a lot of the utility from the Inner + Saint combo is also having other techniques to draw on + the subsidiary aspects of Saintblood. It's a different kind of strength than Architect; less incisive but with arguably greater breadth.
Magical_Duck — Today at 8:52 PM
I forget, if you take Shattered Aeon, can Keter Theli be counted as a companion thus sparing them from the effects of The One Principle?
Birdsie — Today at 8:53 PM
Nope.
R' — Today at 9:12 PM
can excellence be controlled? for example, excellence on Chosen One dedicated solely to mitigating the Trial
Birdsie — Today at 9:13 PM
Of course.
R' — Today at 9:13 PM
to what degree would that actually mitigate the trial
Birdsie — Today at 9:15 PM
Noticeably but it still wouldn't be a dalliance of a season; you're in for something like a quest of a decade at minimum, depending, but at least now it likely won't be a literal mortal lifetime before you're done.
R' — Today at 9:15 PM
im more concerned w difficulty rather than duration
Birdsie — Today at 9:16 PM
Hmmm. That one's a bit trickier. By its very nature the Trial must offer you some difficulty to overcome, but you could at least use Excellence to steer yourself into the sort of adversity you'd find more satisfying to overcome.
Instead of being the one to end a war without an end in sight, maybe you must collect ten thousand flowers from every realm and bring them back? Think along those lines, not necessarily what I literally said.
R' — Today at 9:13 PM
also, does Chosen One let you pick the Sword and Shield yourself
Birdsie — Today at 9:14 PM
Yeah.
R' — Today at 9:19 PM
does shattered aeon only provide friends? if it provides other relationships, can you define them yourself or is it based on your needs
Birdsie — Today at 9:21 PM
It provides an eclectic mixture of what you want, what you truly need, and a small bit of random factor. You start off as friends, but you can definitely start romances with compatible companions, or instead become a family, etc. All sorts of social relationships are covered. True friendship doesn't preclude also, say, dating each other; if anything, it paves the way.
R' — Today at 9:22 PM
hm. not optimal for foisting my dragon parenting needs off on the crew
Birdsie — Today at 9:22 PM
On average, it'll be better than solo parenting, but yes.
R' — Today at 9:22 PM
what would Excellence + Shattered Aeon do
Birdsie — Today at 9:24 PM
One of:
Even better control and acuity over that friendship protoinstinct; metaconceptual assurances you won't be mind-controlled against each other, etc.
Have even more companions (+3 or 4), and all your friends are even stronger and even better at spurring you to get stronger yourself.
Get to define what your companions are like with much stricter detail and control.
Or something similar.
R' — Today at 9:25 PM
does Thrice Great bascially let you define custom superpowers? for example, if im a Titan can i get a facet that is just a grab bag of powers i want that sum to 'about as good as being a titan' in value?
Birdsie — Today at 9:29 PM
Nah, it needs to be some kind of reflecting or opposing facet. Think of it as an AU version of the option in question. Instead of Titanhood, you could get Divinity; far inferior in terms of raw power and immortal renewal but with much greater versatility and access to godly domains, such as what Hunger's Ring does or equivalent. Other Facets of a Titan might be existence as an Archdevil/Demon King, a world-changing Archmage, or similar.
Birdsie — Today at 9:30 PM
But as long as that condition is fulfilled, yeah, you can define it with good leeway and liberty.
R' — Today at 9:30 PM
but I can define what the facet is within those parameters?
Birdsie — Today at 9:30 PM
Yeah.
R' — Today at 9:31 PM
and you get to embody all these facets at the same time as long as they aren't directly incompatible?
Birdsie — Today at 9:32 PM
Yeah.
You couldn't wield the Baneful Sword and its antipode (the Creative Sword?) at the same time, most likely, but you could maybe do with the Static Sword.
R' — Today at 9:30 PM
To what extent can Thrice-Great bypass the immediate power vs potential dynamic? for example, Facet of True Architect devoted to immediate power - how good can that be
(assuming true architect is a 0% power, 100% potential option)
Birdsie — Today at 9:32 PM
It could offer you access to an unconstrained (albeit not fully realized) Aleph Seal? Basically embody numerous mythical figures and archetypes (or Roles, in the Enrollment/Thematic sense) simultaneously and synthesize their abilities together.
R' — Today at 9:33 PM
is this about TItan-level or well below?
Birdsie — Today at 9:33 PM
Starts well below, scales over it swiftly.
R' — Today at 9:33 PM
Titan is a pretty high bar to clear given it grants massively superhuman levels in every attribute
Birdsie — Today at 9:33 PM
Imagine being [insert ten random mythical figures] at the same time.
With all their abilities synergizing neatly.
The simultaneous powersets and equipment of Ares, Athena, Odin, Thor, Arthur Pendragon, etc.
R' — Today at 9:36 PM
is there any way to use thrice-great or anything else to adjust drawbacks such that they are just as punitive but with different actual effects
R' — Today at 9:37 PM
for example, giving myself the doom of the tyrant instead of the brando f the wretched
Birdsie — Today at 9:37 PM
I actually haven't considered that angle but it sounds viable.
R' — Today at 9:41 PM
does skill at swordplay actually affect the efficacy of the Blade?
Birdsie — Today at 9:42 PM
The Blade, no; once you've evolved it into the Sword, yes.
R' — Today at 9:41 PM
for example, would a saintblood inner magic user specialized in the sword have more synergy with the ruinblade than just a titan who can wield it with insane speed and force
Birdsie — Today at 9:42 PM
Most likely yes.
R' — Today at 9:43 PM
once you have the Sword is it basically a Praxis ripoff or is it more limited than that
Birdsie — Today at 9:44 PM
It can realize most effects within the purview of ruin and destruction. It's difficult albeit not impossible to twist it towards other ends: cutting wounds out of reality to heal, negating nothingness to create matter, and so on, but its offensive capabilities will always outstrip all others. While doing the aforementioned things you'd already most likely be able to fire out Bane blasts that erase continents wholesale from existence.
Meditate on the Sword and it'll provide solutions to problems proactively.
But naturally said solutions usually involve, y'know, epic fucking entropic death.
Birdsie — Today at 9:47 PM
Oh, notably a fully realized Sword is one of the very few things that can reliably destroy a Grailbound, although it'd still be easier in all cases to target the Grail itself directly.
R' — Today at 9:47 PM
huh, so if the grail is destroyed then all the dudes with born of the end lose their immortality?
and the grail is just an artifact in one world
Birdsie — Today at 9:47 PM
Yes, hence why they protect it.
R' — Today at 9:48 PM
what a crippling weakness
Birdsie — Today at 9:48 PM
That said it cannot be destroyed - a fact which is guaranteed - as long as there exists at least one individual with Saintblood.
As long as a Saint exists, they are the only one with the 'authority' to do so.
So Team Apocalypse has carefully curated their bloodline and winnowed it down from a family tree to more of a family line. And between having Tribornia's strongest fighters, influence from a past Architecturalist on their side, and some other boons... odds of it ever being destroyed are basically null.
R' — Today at 9:47 PM
and the grail is just an artifact in one world
Birdsie — Today at 9:51 PM
It's a semi-sapient entity with its own powers and uses the Grailbound as its servants / pawns although it is mostly content to do nothing but sit around and observe the world, generally.
It can forge contracts with mortal beings. Mostly offers its assured immortality in return for oaths of fealty.
But it could theoretically offer other things like temporal power.
R' — Today at 9:47 PM
do you have to choose a theme as a Titan
Birdsie — Today at 9:47 PM
Not really. By default your theme simply adheres to your environs.
R' — Today at 9:51 PM
so the Ruin armor scales with your personal power, and a world-shaking hero can tank galaxy-busting attacks trivially
how much can a Titan with Ruin armor tank?
Birdsie — Today at 9:53 PM
A Titan with the Baneful Blade's essentially indestructible unless somehow disarmed. You'd at minimum need a universe-busting attack from a truly elevated entity to deal any kind of significant damage, but even that'd simply be the sort of damage that a Titan heals from normally. It'd take advanced use of Blue Entropy, an Ensilvered Sorcerer's edict, or something else utterly dumb like that.
Birdsie — Today at 9:54 PM
Still a case of, "more threats than I can count on my fingers," but if they are all spread out across the multiverse? Wherever you're at, you're probably safe.
R' — Today at 9:54 PM
the Ruinblade can be disarmed?
Birdsie — Today at 9:54 PM
Mhm. Once you've advanced to Sword form, that becomes less of a concern as you can simply invent a technique to prevent that. Even faster if you have Inner Magic or something.
Birdsie — Today at 9:55 PM
But naturally it is worth keeping in mind anyone trying to disarm you would have to contend with the Blade's Baneful wrath.
R' — Today at 9:55 PM
hm... what's the most synergistic tanking effect that stacks with Titan and Ruinblade... Saintblood?
R' — Today at 9:55 PM
it grants plot armor without the trial requirement
Saintblood Titan Ruinblade is 8, that's barely within budget...
Birdsie — Today at 9:55 PM
Hmmm. Saintblood definitely isn't bad. Or Born of the End.
R' — Today at 9:55 PM
can't take Born of the End, I'm trying to destroy the grail
would a thrice great facet be better than saintblood for initial power
Birdsie — Today at 9:56 PM
Rainbow Shard focused on pure durability, healing, and shielding powers would be extremely applicable, too.
R' — Today at 9:56 PM
that doesn't grant immediate power, I have to wait at minimum 7 days
Birdsie — Today at 9:56 PM
Oh you want immediate?
Then yeah, probably Saintblood is better.
The Pattern isn't bad if you want a bit cheaper.
R' — Today at 9:57 PM
though it's hard to beat architect + drive or architect + born of the end
can a saintblood titan wielding the ruinblade kill a diamond eyes architect even if they're seen coming
Birdsie — Today at 9:59 PM
Depends on the local ontology / situation, such as avenues for escape. To contend you directly and physically would be laughable at best so the Architect would have to run or call on allies who can fight you but the availability of those varies.
R' — Today at 9:57 PM
btw, one principle doesn't stop you from being loved and hated at the same time right
like, their hate won't crowd out other emotions they feel about me
Birdsie — Today at 10:00 PM
If you are sufficiently loveable, yes. Intense cognitive dissonance is somewhat likely.
R' — Today at 10:00 PM
its okay, it'll make perfet sense since i'm a tyrant
R' — Today at 10:00 PM
the vibe i'm going for is Forebear of Dynasties, so completely inevitable and unstoppable no matter your preparations or how far away you see him coming
Birdsie — Today at 10:03 PM
A Diamond-Eyed Architect cannot be spoofed but sufficient Swordwork can let you obscure the sight of True Architects below that level, at least to a degree. Cutting away or corroding sections of Architecture where they escape is theoretically possible if you are an Architect as well as the Sword's wielder, but maybe if you are truly and extremely goated you could attain that without being an Architect?
R' — Today at 10:04 PM
it's okay if they can delay the end, so long as there is truly no stopping it eventually
R' — Today at 10:02 PM
is enforcement of ruin meant to be a synergy or antisynergy
like, is it supposed to be good that i'm my own downfall, or is it mean to bypass the Ruin Armor's insane durability
that would render most threats irrelevant
Birdsie — Today at 10:04 PM
Depends on how you define 'good.'
R' — Today at 10:05 PM
it caps your lifespan basically, yeah
in which case I can't take it for my forebear build
Birdsie — Today at 10:05 PM
The original Ruinarch waged a brutal war on reality and became a multiverse-transcending terror, an entity so mighty the Horror King would've been simply yet another abomination put to the sword, eliciting no more reaction than a raised eyebrow and meriting no more attention than one face among countless crowds.
But his campaign inevitably led him to remove significant good from reality as well.
So at the end of his long crusade he essentially committed suicide with the Sword and shattered its core in a manner that Ruined most of his campaign retroactively. The worst of the worst he slew remained so, but other concepts were returned.
R' — Today at 10:07 PM
so ruinarch was well above ensilvered sorceror huh
since HK was > ensilvered sorceror
interesting
Birdsie — Today at 10:07 PM
He was pretty much on the verge of winning this kalpa.
Birdsie — Today at 10:07 PM
But then decided this kind of victory falls shy of what he'd set out to achieve.
Birdsie — Today at 10:07 PM
And so decided it'd be better to start over.
R' — Today at 10:07 PM
so he was a forebear ripoff...
Birdsie — Today at 10:10 PM
He was built somewhat divergently. Ventured into worlds not meant for him in pursuit of a target, which drew the ire of the Dark Ones. He parried their attempts to splinter him sequentially, captured and eliminated the target, and then left pretty much unperturbed.
Birdsie — Today at 10:10 PM
That's more or less how you know he was close to winning.
Birdsie — Today at 10:11 PM
Power alone wouldn't have parried a splintering.
R' — Today at 10:12 PM
so I assume Excellence applied to Thematic is more efficient than Thematic + Enrollment combo
since Excellence works better on cheaper options
Birdsie — Today at 10:14 PM
Mhm.
R' — Today at 10:14 PM
"Choosing Thematic Earth discounts Enrollment by one orb, but you're instead integrated into one of the already existing local Themes as a new Role therein." does this limit you to the canonical Themes
like, I can't choose Exalted Theme or Rihakuverse Theme
Birdsie — Today at 10:15 PM
Nah you can make your own, although they should be something vaguely comprehensible to a layman.
R' — Today at 10:16 PM
is that true even when picking the full price version? I can't choose Rihakuverse Theme regardless?
Birdsie — Today at 10:16 PM
Oh wait, you meant on Thematic Earth.
Then yeah it has to be canonical.
R' — Today at 10:16 PM
hm... I assume Eastern Fantasy was one of the canonical themes
Birdsie — Today at 10:16 PM
Other than that, mostly anything is fine so long as you could tell the name to an average person and they wouldn't balk in total incomprehension.
R' — Today at 10:16 PM
which would therefore allow for Enrolled: Xianxia Protagonist
R' — Today at 10:19 PM
so something like Contemporary Fantasy would allow for Enrolled: Time Looper?
Birdsie — Today at 10:19 PM
Yeah, totally viable.
R' — Today at 10:28 PM
would a potential-focused Thrice-Great Facet on Titan outscale Saintblood + Titan, or are they roughly comparable given the identical cost
Birdsie — Today at 10:29 PM
Hmmm. Hard to say honestly.
I'd say roughly comparable.
R' — Today at 10:30 PM
mm. I'll just take saintblood to avoid complicating it
progression-wise, is saintblood without inner magic just a normal somatomancer with an epic-grade invocation
Birdsie — Today at 10:31 PM
Yeah pretty much.
R' — Today at 10:47 PM
I assume the power-ramp offered by Auditor is pretty fucking massive? Like, 'turn a normal enrolled Olympian-level while this is active?'
Birdsie — Today at 10:50 PM
Sounds about right.
Birdsie in the cyoa, to what extent can other picks accelerate or improve architectural ability?
Birdsie — Today at 7:33 PM
Very mildly; Excellence is most likely your best bet.
R' — Today at 7:34 PM
what about the drive
Birdsie — Today at 7:34 PM
It straightforwardly lets you go on without sanity loss.
Hmm, Drive?
R' — Today at 7:34 PM
also, is a titan more or less tanky than born of the end
Birdsie — Today at 7:36 PM
Less. Consider that Titan is a 3-orb option spread out among several improvable benefits, whereas Born of the End is a 2-orb spent almost entirely and purely on being unkillable.
That said a Titan is 'tankier' in the sense their physical form likely handles damage better. BotE has better conceptual scaling, it can bring you back potentially even from something like true death attacks from an insufficiently developed Baneful Sword.
R' — Today at 7:36 PM
finally, is the first paragraph of usurpations chosen flavor txt or does it actually make you a sociopath
Birdsie — Today at 7:36 PM
Flavor text mostly.
Although it could make you one if there were literally no other way to fulfill it.
The effect is absolute even for an Architect or Shattered Aeon.
Caveat emptor.
R' — Today at 7:37 PM
so you can intentionally choose to betray to trigger itn
Birdsie — Today at 7:37 PM
Yes, as long as it follows the outlined parameters.
you'll either betray someone else in a tremendously hurtful fashion they didn't deserve [...] it'll always cause some form of strife at an inconvenient time; the party affected will be hurt, and this will cause some complications.
There's no avoiding this, you can simply at best decide: "Yeah, right now I can afford to do this. Sorry for what I'm about to do, [victim]."
Depending on the form of betrayal and victim, chances of reconciliation also differ.
R' — Today at 7:39 PM
so yeah, if i pick drive and architecture with two of the lesser drawbacks and align my drive towards architecture
am i the diamond eyed
bc that seems pretty comfy and good
Birdsie — Today at 7:41 PM
Diamond Eyes are pretty much assured to develop as long as you don't die or go insane, so yeah. You get to have pseudo-Weird American adventures with forms of precog that, properly controlled, won't diminish any of the fun or comfiness.
Properly exerted and controlled Architecturalism is nice like that.
R' — Today at 7:43 PM
is keter thelis downside merely being totally eclipsed or is the dragon secretly evil
Birdsie — Today at 7:45 PM
A bit of column A, a bit of column B, although 'secretly evil' is a misnomer.
It'd be more accurate to say the dragon has a potential to great evil if poorly raised, and poorly raised here is a somewhat dangerous category; it requires wisdom and foresight. Unconditional love is a decent start but only a start. A young dragon's psychology is an intricate and inhuman puzzle.
Birdsie — Today at 7:46 PM
You could raise Elyon on a diet of love and pride in his own accomplishments but untempered by some humility it'll result in a being with something resembling the Doom of the Tyrant; convinced its opinion is correct and no other, etc.
R' — Today at 7:46 PM
could the educator succcesfully raise a good Dragon
Birdsie — Today at 7:46 PM
Hmm. If forewarned, almost definitely yes.
But Elyon can initiate even into Architecturalism.
R' — Today at 7:46 PM
hm. but the drawback prevents foreknowledgr
Birdsie — Today at 7:46 PM
Hmm. If forewarned, almost definitely yes.
But Elyon can initiate even into Architecturalism.
Birdsie — Today at 7:47 PM
It's a drawback of pure stepping on stones.
If you fail miserably then you've raised a hyperscaling threat you have basically not a shadow of hope of overcoming, better than you in every way. Even a 'partial success' in parenting might simply result in a yandere son/daughter who'd kill billions without a care to preserve the life of those they care about for simple minutes.
Draconic psychology tends towards extremes, sin, and flawed outcomes.
It's a very fine balancing act to raise Keter Theli into a fully mentally stable individual.
It's somewhat easier to simply control the shape of madness, although - again, not ideal.
That said, raising them into mental stability is very much possible.
R' — Today at 7:50 PM
how about Thematic - Wise Mentor, Excellence - Thematic, True Architect, The Drive?
Birdsie — Today at 7:50 PM
That is a pretty sweet and balanced mixture with good odds, yeah.
And if you manage to raise Elyon successfully then it's a pretty good force multiplier.
He/she will explicitly be better than you; it's all but impossible to outdo their scaling in the long-term.
R' — Today at 7:51 PM
does one really need force multipliers if one has diamond eyes tho…
diamond eyes is pretty much enough gun for virtually any goal
Birdsie — Today at 7:52 PM
A sane Elyon would attain Diamond Eyes and then you could collaborate together on remaking the Seals!
In the long-term making systems of magic equivalently varied and strong as Enrollment.
Above everything though you get a pretty cool kid.
The Backroads (with Drive especially) also surprisingly aren't that bad a place to raise a child. There are some more positively-attuned Ideogrammatic remnants that can have a potentially stabilizing effect if you can find them, and with Drive and Architect you'd have good odds of it.
Aabcehmu (Fib) — Today at 7:56 PM
Birdsie, any thoughts on Pater Peractionis's odds of success, either with or without my out-of-context knowledge about the risks of raising dragons?
Or Odd Jobs, for that matter
Hmm
Man what a dangerous idea
Messing with fire there.
But Chosen luckily protects from really bad situations, so maybe it's not all fucked?
Practically speaking assuming you act early enough this is a very good way of ensuring the kid grows up on the straight and narrow.
Just install the correct mental Ideograms of desired traits and then Pattern them into self-maintaining permanence.
Odd Jobs is somewhat more positive and comfy.
Although I'll note it relies greatly on your party members having good parenting skills.
Not a bad thing to rely on, mind you, but still a bit of an uncertainty.
R' — Today at 8:49 PM
can saintblood + inner remotely compete with the other 4 orb potential option (true architect)?
Birdsie — Today at 8:51 PM
You'll at minimum have a top-tier Invocation - some of those are ridiculous. It'd need time and extra effort to rival the current strongest Invocation but it holds that potential, especially since as a Saint you can attain greater heights via suffering and determination empowering you.
It's a different kind of power, but yes, it can be rather absurdly potent.
For a benchmark, the strongest Invocation is Reduce to Zero, which allows its user to do exactly what it says on the tin: reduce any value, real or imaginary, to zero.
It can even alter parameters fully abstract or unknown to him.
"Amount of threats to me: zero."
Birdsie — Today at 8:59 PM
Other Invocations that aren't the above Reduce to Zero but are generally considered top-tier include:
-- Reactive blasts of energy akin to Pain's Shinra Tensei capable of flattening half a city the size of New York in one unconstrained use, instantly slaying everyone within the affected zone (including other master-tier Inner Mages.)
-- Extremely fine-tuned and powerful subatomic telekinesis capable of almost instantly transmuting any matter in range to any other kind of matter, although only with a range of thirty feet.
-- The ability to burn off pieces of one's soul to manifest the Final Light, an antipode of the Big Bang representing the ultimate fate of the universe in which the last star winks out. Can forge items made of the Final Light among other techniques.
-- Enacting 'miracles.' Broad and versatile, themed around delivering salvation in a manner that earns the faith of others / the masses. Can heal the masses, create and maintain a zone where death doesn't happen, resurrect the dead, and shatter the souls of lesser Innerists.
As a Saint you'd minimum attain something on par with one of these.
R' — Today at 9:12 PM
hm. some of those are impressive but reduce to 0 seems like the only one that could even have a chance at contending with diamond eyes
Birdsie — Today at 9:14 PM
Yeah, a lot of the utility from the Inner + Saint combo is also having other techniques to draw on + the subsidiary aspects of Saintblood. It's a different kind of strength than Architect; less incisive but with arguably greater breadth.
Magical_Duck — Today at 8:52 PM
I forget, if you take Shattered Aeon, can Keter Theli be counted as a companion thus sparing them from the effects of The One Principle?
Birdsie — Today at 8:53 PM
Nope.
R' — Today at 9:12 PM
can excellence be controlled? for example, excellence on Chosen One dedicated solely to mitigating the Trial
Birdsie — Today at 9:13 PM
Of course.
R' — Today at 9:13 PM
to what degree would that actually mitigate the trial
Birdsie — Today at 9:15 PM
Noticeably but it still wouldn't be a dalliance of a season; you're in for something like a quest of a decade at minimum, depending, but at least now it likely won't be a literal mortal lifetime before you're done.
R' — Today at 9:15 PM
im more concerned w difficulty rather than duration
Birdsie — Today at 9:16 PM
Hmmm. That one's a bit trickier. By its very nature the Trial must offer you some difficulty to overcome, but you could at least use Excellence to steer yourself into the sort of adversity you'd find more satisfying to overcome.
Instead of being the one to end a war without an end in sight, maybe you must collect ten thousand flowers from every realm and bring them back? Think along those lines, not necessarily what I literally said.
R' — Today at 9:13 PM
also, does Chosen One let you pick the Sword and Shield yourself
Birdsie — Today at 9:14 PM
Yeah.
R' — Today at 9:19 PM
does shattered aeon only provide friends? if it provides other relationships, can you define them yourself or is it based on your needs
Birdsie — Today at 9:21 PM
It provides an eclectic mixture of what you want, what you truly need, and a small bit of random factor. You start off as friends, but you can definitely start romances with compatible companions, or instead become a family, etc. All sorts of social relationships are covered. True friendship doesn't preclude also, say, dating each other; if anything, it paves the way.
R' — Today at 9:22 PM
hm. not optimal for foisting my dragon parenting needs off on the crew
Birdsie — Today at 9:22 PM
On average, it'll be better than solo parenting, but yes.
R' — Today at 9:22 PM
what would Excellence + Shattered Aeon do
Birdsie — Today at 9:24 PM
One of:
Even better control and acuity over that friendship protoinstinct; metaconceptual assurances you won't be mind-controlled against each other, etc.
Have even more companions (+3 or 4), and all your friends are even stronger and even better at spurring you to get stronger yourself.
Get to define what your companions are like with much stricter detail and control.
Or something similar.
R' — Today at 9:25 PM
does Thrice Great bascially let you define custom superpowers? for example, if im a Titan can i get a facet that is just a grab bag of powers i want that sum to 'about as good as being a titan' in value?
Birdsie — Today at 9:29 PM
Nah, it needs to be some kind of reflecting or opposing facet. Think of it as an AU version of the option in question. Instead of Titanhood, you could get Divinity; far inferior in terms of raw power and immortal renewal but with much greater versatility and access to godly domains, such as what Hunger's Ring does or equivalent. Other Facets of a Titan might be existence as an Archdevil/Demon King, a world-changing Archmage, or similar.
Birdsie — Today at 9:30 PM
But as long as that condition is fulfilled, yeah, you can define it with good leeway and liberty.
R' — Today at 9:30 PM
but I can define what the facet is within those parameters?
Birdsie — Today at 9:30 PM
Yeah.
R' — Today at 9:31 PM
and you get to embody all these facets at the same time as long as they aren't directly incompatible?
Birdsie — Today at 9:32 PM
Yeah.
You couldn't wield the Baneful Sword and its antipode (the Creative Sword?) at the same time, most likely, but you could maybe do with the Static Sword.
R' — Today at 9:30 PM
To what extent can Thrice-Great bypass the immediate power vs potential dynamic? for example, Facet of True Architect devoted to immediate power - how good can that be
(assuming true architect is a 0% power, 100% potential option)
Birdsie — Today at 9:32 PM
It could offer you access to an unconstrained (albeit not fully realized) Aleph Seal? Basically embody numerous mythical figures and archetypes (or Roles, in the Enrollment/Thematic sense) simultaneously and synthesize their abilities together.
R' — Today at 9:33 PM
is this about TItan-level or well below?
Birdsie — Today at 9:33 PM
Starts well below, scales over it swiftly.
R' — Today at 9:33 PM
Titan is a pretty high bar to clear given it grants massively superhuman levels in every attribute
Birdsie — Today at 9:33 PM
Imagine being [insert ten random mythical figures] at the same time.
With all their abilities synergizing neatly.
The simultaneous powersets and equipment of Ares, Athena, Odin, Thor, Arthur Pendragon, etc.
R' — Today at 9:36 PM
is there any way to use thrice-great or anything else to adjust drawbacks such that they are just as punitive but with different actual effects
R' — Today at 9:37 PM
for example, giving myself the doom of the tyrant instead of the brando f the wretched
Birdsie — Today at 9:37 PM
I actually haven't considered that angle but it sounds viable.
R' — Today at 9:41 PM
does skill at swordplay actually affect the efficacy of the Blade?
Birdsie — Today at 9:42 PM
The Blade, no; once you've evolved it into the Sword, yes.
R' — Today at 9:41 PM
for example, would a saintblood inner magic user specialized in the sword have more synergy with the ruinblade than just a titan who can wield it with insane speed and force
Birdsie — Today at 9:42 PM
Most likely yes.
R' — Today at 9:43 PM
once you have the Sword is it basically a Praxis ripoff or is it more limited than that
Birdsie — Today at 9:44 PM
It can realize most effects within the purview of ruin and destruction. It's difficult albeit not impossible to twist it towards other ends: cutting wounds out of reality to heal, negating nothingness to create matter, and so on, but its offensive capabilities will always outstrip all others. While doing the aforementioned things you'd already most likely be able to fire out Bane blasts that erase continents wholesale from existence.
Meditate on the Sword and it'll provide solutions to problems proactively.
But naturally said solutions usually involve, y'know, epic fucking entropic death.
Birdsie — Today at 9:47 PM
Oh, notably a fully realized Sword is one of the very few things that can reliably destroy a Grailbound, although it'd still be easier in all cases to target the Grail itself directly.
R' — Today at 9:47 PM
huh, so if the grail is destroyed then all the dudes with born of the end lose their immortality?
and the grail is just an artifact in one world
Birdsie — Today at 9:47 PM
Yes, hence why they protect it.
R' — Today at 9:48 PM
what a crippling weakness
Birdsie — Today at 9:48 PM
That said it cannot be destroyed - a fact which is guaranteed - as long as there exists at least one individual with Saintblood.
As long as a Saint exists, they are the only one with the 'authority' to do so.
So Team Apocalypse has carefully curated their bloodline and winnowed it down from a family tree to more of a family line. And between having Tribornia's strongest fighters, influence from a past Architecturalist on their side, and some other boons... odds of it ever being destroyed are basically null.
R' — Today at 9:47 PM
and the grail is just an artifact in one world
Birdsie — Today at 9:51 PM
It's a semi-sapient entity with its own powers and uses the Grailbound as its servants / pawns although it is mostly content to do nothing but sit around and observe the world, generally.
It can forge contracts with mortal beings. Mostly offers its assured immortality in return for oaths of fealty.
But it could theoretically offer other things like temporal power.
R' — Today at 9:47 PM
do you have to choose a theme as a Titan
Birdsie — Today at 9:47 PM
Not really. By default your theme simply adheres to your environs.
R' — Today at 9:51 PM
so the Ruin armor scales with your personal power, and a world-shaking hero can tank galaxy-busting attacks trivially
how much can a Titan with Ruin armor tank?
Birdsie — Today at 9:53 PM
A Titan with the Baneful Blade's essentially indestructible unless somehow disarmed. You'd at minimum need a universe-busting attack from a truly elevated entity to deal any kind of significant damage, but even that'd simply be the sort of damage that a Titan heals from normally. It'd take advanced use of Blue Entropy, an Ensilvered Sorcerer's edict, or something else utterly dumb like that.
Birdsie — Today at 9:54 PM
Still a case of, "more threats than I can count on my fingers," but if they are all spread out across the multiverse? Wherever you're at, you're probably safe.
R' — Today at 9:54 PM
the Ruinblade can be disarmed?
Birdsie — Today at 9:54 PM
Mhm. Once you've advanced to Sword form, that becomes less of a concern as you can simply invent a technique to prevent that. Even faster if you have Inner Magic or something.
Birdsie — Today at 9:55 PM
But naturally it is worth keeping in mind anyone trying to disarm you would have to contend with the Blade's Baneful wrath.
R' — Today at 9:55 PM
hm... what's the most synergistic tanking effect that stacks with Titan and Ruinblade... Saintblood?
R' — Today at 9:55 PM
it grants plot armor without the trial requirement
Saintblood Titan Ruinblade is 8, that's barely within budget...
Birdsie — Today at 9:55 PM
Hmmm. Saintblood definitely isn't bad. Or Born of the End.
R' — Today at 9:55 PM
can't take Born of the End, I'm trying to destroy the grail
would a thrice great facet be better than saintblood for initial power
Birdsie — Today at 9:56 PM
Rainbow Shard focused on pure durability, healing, and shielding powers would be extremely applicable, too.
R' — Today at 9:56 PM
that doesn't grant immediate power, I have to wait at minimum 7 days
Birdsie — Today at 9:56 PM
Oh you want immediate?
Then yeah, probably Saintblood is better.
The Pattern isn't bad if you want a bit cheaper.
R' — Today at 9:57 PM
though it's hard to beat architect + drive or architect + born of the end
can a saintblood titan wielding the ruinblade kill a diamond eyes architect even if they're seen coming
Birdsie — Today at 9:59 PM
Depends on the local ontology / situation, such as avenues for escape. To contend you directly and physically would be laughable at best so the Architect would have to run or call on allies who can fight you but the availability of those varies.
R' — Today at 9:57 PM
btw, one principle doesn't stop you from being loved and hated at the same time right
like, their hate won't crowd out other emotions they feel about me
Birdsie — Today at 10:00 PM
If you are sufficiently loveable, yes. Intense cognitive dissonance is somewhat likely.
R' — Today at 10:00 PM
its okay, it'll make perfet sense since i'm a tyrant
R' — Today at 10:00 PM
the vibe i'm going for is Forebear of Dynasties, so completely inevitable and unstoppable no matter your preparations or how far away you see him coming
Birdsie — Today at 10:03 PM
A Diamond-Eyed Architect cannot be spoofed but sufficient Swordwork can let you obscure the sight of True Architects below that level, at least to a degree. Cutting away or corroding sections of Architecture where they escape is theoretically possible if you are an Architect as well as the Sword's wielder, but maybe if you are truly and extremely goated you could attain that without being an Architect?
R' — Today at 10:04 PM
it's okay if they can delay the end, so long as there is truly no stopping it eventually
R' — Today at 10:02 PM
is enforcement of ruin meant to be a synergy or antisynergy
like, is it supposed to be good that i'm my own downfall, or is it mean to bypass the Ruin Armor's insane durability
that would render most threats irrelevant
Birdsie — Today at 10:04 PM
Depends on how you define 'good.'
R' — Today at 10:05 PM
it caps your lifespan basically, yeah
in which case I can't take it for my forebear build
Birdsie — Today at 10:05 PM
The original Ruinarch waged a brutal war on reality and became a multiverse-transcending terror, an entity so mighty the Horror King would've been simply yet another abomination put to the sword, eliciting no more reaction than a raised eyebrow and meriting no more attention than one face among countless crowds.
But his campaign inevitably led him to remove significant good from reality as well.
So at the end of his long crusade he essentially committed suicide with the Sword and shattered its core in a manner that Ruined most of his campaign retroactively. The worst of the worst he slew remained so, but other concepts were returned.
R' — Today at 10:07 PM
so ruinarch was well above ensilvered sorceror huh
since HK was > ensilvered sorceror
interesting
Birdsie — Today at 10:07 PM
He was pretty much on the verge of winning this kalpa.
Birdsie — Today at 10:07 PM
But then decided this kind of victory falls shy of what he'd set out to achieve.
Birdsie — Today at 10:07 PM
And so decided it'd be better to start over.
R' — Today at 10:07 PM
so he was a forebear ripoff...
Birdsie — Today at 10:10 PM
He was built somewhat divergently. Ventured into worlds not meant for him in pursuit of a target, which drew the ire of the Dark Ones. He parried their attempts to splinter him sequentially, captured and eliminated the target, and then left pretty much unperturbed.
Birdsie — Today at 10:10 PM
That's more or less how you know he was close to winning.
Birdsie — Today at 10:11 PM
Power alone wouldn't have parried a splintering.
R' — Today at 10:12 PM
so I assume Excellence applied to Thematic is more efficient than Thematic + Enrollment combo
since Excellence works better on cheaper options
Birdsie — Today at 10:14 PM
Mhm.
R' — Today at 10:14 PM
"Choosing Thematic Earth discounts Enrollment by one orb, but you're instead integrated into one of the already existing local Themes as a new Role therein." does this limit you to the canonical Themes
like, I can't choose Exalted Theme or Rihakuverse Theme
Birdsie — Today at 10:15 PM
Nah you can make your own, although they should be something vaguely comprehensible to a layman.
R' — Today at 10:16 PM
is that true even when picking the full price version? I can't choose Rihakuverse Theme regardless?
Birdsie — Today at 10:16 PM
Oh wait, you meant on Thematic Earth.
Then yeah it has to be canonical.
R' — Today at 10:16 PM
hm... I assume Eastern Fantasy was one of the canonical themes
Birdsie — Today at 10:16 PM
Other than that, mostly anything is fine so long as you could tell the name to an average person and they wouldn't balk in total incomprehension.
R' — Today at 10:16 PM
which would therefore allow for Enrolled: Xianxia Protagonist
R' — Today at 10:19 PM
so something like Contemporary Fantasy would allow for Enrolled: Time Looper?
Birdsie — Today at 10:19 PM
Yeah, totally viable.
R' — Today at 10:28 PM
would a potential-focused Thrice-Great Facet on Titan outscale Saintblood + Titan, or are they roughly comparable given the identical cost
Birdsie — Today at 10:29 PM
Hmmm. Hard to say honestly.
I'd say roughly comparable.
R' — Today at 10:30 PM
mm. I'll just take saintblood to avoid complicating it
progression-wise, is saintblood without inner magic just a normal somatomancer with an epic-grade invocation
Birdsie — Today at 10:31 PM
Yeah pretty much.
R' — Today at 10:47 PM
I assume the power-ramp offered by Auditor is pretty fucking massive? Like, 'turn a normal enrolled Olympian-level while this is active?'
Birdsie — Today at 10:50 PM
Sounds about right.
- Location
- Europe
By Will Alone
[ ] Tribornia -[ ] Inner Magic (1 orb) -
[ ] Chosen (2 orbs) - Sword: Inner Magic, Shield: Determination
[ ] Excellence (1 orb) - Inner Magic
[ ] Clanborn (1 orb, requires Tribornia) - Dunno
[ ] Blood of Saints (3 orbs) -
[ ] Usurpation's Chosen (+1 orb) -
[ ] An End to Silver (+1 orb) -
[ ] Keter Theli (+3 orbs) -
Since I've already made an Architect and Friendship build this focuses on the other magic that catches my attention. It's probably inferior in potential and ability, by a fair bit, but inner magic is quite interesting regardless.
Apple Excellence to Inner Magic, making it fully self-sufficient, reliant on nothing but ones self. Further, training alone suffices for advancement, neither requiring nor benefiting from teachers or innovation. It is the steady grind of effort that mills dross into power.
Further, we make Inner Magic out Swords, the implement by which our will affects the world, and our Determination we make our shield, spiking and shifting as appropriate. In moments of true and profound exigence our Will is adamant, unbending and unbreakable.
Blood of Saints spikes our magic even further with our Determination, techniques unfurling into monstrous workings, the world disdained before the sharp sword of Will. Our Fortune is a awesome thing, a force unto itself, that bends probability and draws forth everything but the impossible.
Yet, our Trials are greater still. Betrayal looms as a shadow, set to stain a learning dragons mind. And still the End comes, the world imperilled as if to require a hero. But that's alright, succeed or fail, all you have to do is try.
This isn't a praxis build, they're just analogous by way of convergent evolution! Similar problems demand similar solutions!
I wouldn't take this build, because Architect is too good and I'm sucker for lost/broken magics like Shattered Aeon, but assuming they weren't an option this wouldn't be too divergent a choice for me.
Kojogos
Hard Mode: [+3 Points, +1 Seals]
[K] The Optimizer [+2 Points] -
[K] 2: Void Dragon. [+1 Seal]
[K] 6: Forgotten. [+1 Seal]
[K] 9: Arcane. [+1 Seal]
[K] 10: Debt. [+1 Seal] +1
[K] Qilin [5 Points] - Elf
-[K] Hidden Dragon [{2} Seals] - Cultivator
[K] Exponential [4 Seals] III: The Logos
[K] Overlord [+0 Points, Special] -
Credit: 05P 06S
Debit: 05P 06S
Koji is well suited to the Logos, and already quite capable. In combination with a cultivating Elf and the System he is a potent, rapidly advancing threat to the Overlord.
[K] The Optimizer [+2 Points] -
[K] 2: Void Dragon. [+1 Seal]
[K] 6: Forgotten. [+1 Seal]
[K] 9: Arcane. [+1 Seal]
[K] 10: Debt. [+1 Seal] +1
[K] Qilin [5 Points] - Elf
-[K] Hidden Dragon [{2} Seals] - Cultivator
[K] Exponential [4 Seals] III: The Logos
[K] Overlord [+0 Points, Special] -
Credit: 05P 06S
Debit: 05P 06S
Koji is well suited to the Logos, and already quite capable. In combination with a cultivating Elf and the System he is a potent, rapidly advancing threat to the Overlord.
Last edited:
Any%Speedrun'DiamondEyes'
[ ] Thematic Earth
[ ] The Pattern (1 orb)
[ ] Enrollment
[ ] Architect (4 orbs)
[ ] Excellence (1 orb) - The Pattern
[ ] Ideal Education (1 orb, requires Thematic Earth) - Philosophy, The Aesthetic
[ ] Unchained (+1 orb)
[ ] Usurpation's Chosen (+1 orb)
[ ] An End to Silver (+1 orb)
[ ] Enforcement of Ruin (+2 orbs)
Not too sure how I should explain my choices so Ill go point to point.
The Pattern should be able to harden my resolve and accelerate the shaping of my Charakter in a way that is conductive for the development of my Role and control of my architectural Insight. With Exellence it should be able to hollistically improve my Beeing more over time instead of just maintaining myself and hopefully make it unnececary to cut parts of me out for further improvement seeing as Excellence has the most effect on cheaper Options
Enrollment (+All options associated with it) was chosen for the most Part because of the abundance of possible allys within and Top Grade Instructions from 1 or even up to 3 other Architects and their protection against my Drawbacks. The Role of Aesthetic seems to me as the closest possible Support Role to my Exploration and hopefully fast skill growth in Architecture wich hopefully diminishes the impact of Unchained over time.
Architecture is my cornerstone here. Pattern, Excellence and Enrollment were all chosen so that I have the most possible potential and wherewithal to Attain the Utmost of Architecture while my Allies help me stop the multiple consequences my Drawbacks inflict. With time and the tutelage of the Educator I should be able to Master Architecture enough to be able to diminish Unchained enough to make my powers more usable outside of combat without beeing a danger to those around me and later on even seek out a higher Benevolence to Stop An End to Silver.
Usurpation has to be procced by myself before I get Betrayed in my most vulnerable moment, preferably before I trust anyone to much. To make it as devastating as possible without destroying possible alliances with other high powered Enrolled like Solomon or even more Powerfull people like the Educator, I will try to contain the Betrayal and fallout to my fellow Peers of the Philosophy Class. I will have to swallow my misgivings and ingratiate myself to them until I become a cornerstone of their life maybe even fall in love and as soon as my betrayel is possible twist the Knife as hard as I can. Preferably I wont need to kill anyone but would be willing to traumatise them emotionally and or physically hopefully I dont have to betray more than one of them. After that I would try to find all to me possible options of treating them or other forms of help. I would probably never be able to be a Part of their life again but nothing speaks against trying to support them without their knowing. If at all we ever reconciliate I would still harbor doubt against their motives just to be sure.
Death wanting to kill me shouldnt be too much of a hindrance seeing as the local version isnt too powerfull for my Allies to defeat and subsequently keep imprisoned.
The next Apocalypse is already known to be the Lamb and OG Solomen was able to thwart their plan before their Initial assassination of the Educator happend about a Year into his Enrollment wich should give me and my allies enough time to further our Architecturel Insight and divine any further dangers to Thematic Earth and prepare for them.
If I overlooked something or someone noticed a flaw I didnt think of please Tell me. This has been pretty fun
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OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
Here's a basic 3 orb Oneirodyne build. Not sure what else might be appropriate/thematic aspectwise/synergistic with oneirodynes.
The Mech Pilot(3 Orb Version)
Setting: The Auditorium
Magics: Enrollment(Science Fantasy or Similar Theme: Mecha Pilot)(2 Orbs)
Benefits: Oneirodyne(Shepherd Class, 1 Orb)
Aspect ideas:
Pilots Bond: Pilot can create bonds with 1 primary vehicle and 4 secondary vehicles. Bonds are established by physical contact with vehicle.
Pilot's Fitness - Constitution/Dexterity/Wits Boosts
Pilot's Excellence - Elevates the stats/conceptual potency of a piloted vehicle
The Mech Pilot(3 Orb Version)
Setting: The Auditorium
Magics: Enrollment(Science Fantasy or Similar Theme: Mecha Pilot)(2 Orbs)
Benefits: Oneirodyne(Shepherd Class, 1 Orb)
Aspect ideas:
Pilots Bond: Pilot can create bonds with 1 primary vehicle and 4 secondary vehicles. Bonds are established by physical contact with vehicle.
- Pilot and Primary Bonded vehicle are metaphysically considered one being where advantageous.
- If the primary bond is broken, the pilot must wait one week before establishing a new one
- Secondary bonds can be instantly replaced.
- Pilot can teleport any bonded vehicle to their location with a fingersnap
- Bonded vehicles without intent/thought based controls can be piloted as though they had them
- Pilot benefits from structural analysis on any bonded vehicle in close proximity
Pilot's Fitness - Constitution/Dexterity/Wits Boosts
Pilot's Excellence - Elevates the stats/conceptual potency of a piloted vehicle
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Rihaku
The Internet
Broken Limiter
Thematic Earth
-Enrolled: The Determinator (an uncapped Batman analogue: hypercompetent, extraordinary intellect, wisdom and physique, absurd and endless reserves of willpower, not limited to 'peak human' levels). Superhero name: Odysseus
-Blood of Saints
-Auditor
Drawbacks: Usurpation's Chosen, An End to Silver, Enforcement of Ruin
Saintblood's determination-based amp is powerful enough to allow a cantrip to incinerate entire villages, or for a single sword-stroke to slay an enormous behemoth.
Auditor's amp is strong enough to turn Summon Lesser Elemental into Summon Elemental Incarnation, or for a normal Enrolled under its benediction to fight toe to toe with the Olympian. It also turns anyone who opposes you into a muggle.
What if we applied these amps to each other?
The plan is simple: Determinator allows me to constantly feel maximum levels of determination, which causes Saintblood's amp to activate, which makes Determinator stronger, which causes me to feel even more determination, which causes Saintblood's amp to activate, which makes Determinator stronger...
Meanwhile, Auditor is massively augmenting both of these abilities, while itself being augmented by Saintblood. I assume diminishing returns will kick in at some point, but will that occur before I become a hypercosmic scaling threat? After all, I am going to defect from the superheroes and join the Metaphysicist, though it's all for the greater good. Sacrifices must be made to forestall Armageddon, and at least one of the horsewomen is aware of the threat that I pose. Truly, it is imperative that I stay consistently determined to advance in power, both to preserve my own life and to save the whole world!
This is probably the build I'd take. Saintblood offers great defenses and quality of life, Auditor lets you do basically anything, Determinator is the glue that allows each to amplify the other.
Thematic Earth
-Enrolled: The Determinator (an uncapped Batman analogue: hypercompetent, extraordinary intellect, wisdom and physique, absurd and endless reserves of willpower, not limited to 'peak human' levels). Superhero name: Odysseus
-Blood of Saints
-Auditor
Drawbacks: Usurpation's Chosen, An End to Silver, Enforcement of Ruin
Saintblood's determination-based amp is powerful enough to allow a cantrip to incinerate entire villages, or for a single sword-stroke to slay an enormous behemoth.
Auditor's amp is strong enough to turn Summon Lesser Elemental into Summon Elemental Incarnation, or for a normal Enrolled under its benediction to fight toe to toe with the Olympian. It also turns anyone who opposes you into a muggle.
What if we applied these amps to each other?
The plan is simple: Determinator allows me to constantly feel maximum levels of determination, which causes Saintblood's amp to activate, which makes Determinator stronger, which causes me to feel even more determination, which causes Saintblood's amp to activate, which makes Determinator stronger...
Meanwhile, Auditor is massively augmenting both of these abilities, while itself being augmented by Saintblood. I assume diminishing returns will kick in at some point, but will that occur before I become a hypercosmic scaling threat? After all, I am going to defect from the superheroes and join the Metaphysicist, though it's all for the greater good. Sacrifices must be made to forestall Armageddon, and at least one of the horsewomen is aware of the threat that I pose. Truly, it is imperative that I stay consistently determined to advance in power, both to preserve my own life and to save the whole world!
This is probably the build I'd take. Saintblood offers great defenses and quality of life, Auditor lets you do basically anything, Determinator is the glue that allows each to amplify the other.
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OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
Now that I've done a basic role it's time for something a bit greedier.
The Mech Pilot(6 Orb Version)
Location: Thematic Earth
Enrollment(Role: The Pilot)(1 Orb, discounted from Thematic Earth)
Oneirodyne(Shepherd Class, 2 Orbs)
Excellence(Oneirodyne)(1 Orb)
Ideal Education(1 Orb)
Inner Magic(1 Orb)
Drawbacks:
Enforcement of Ruin(+2 Orbs)
An End to Silver(+1 Orb)
Pilot Role Aspects:
Pilots Bond: Pilot can create bonds with 1 primary vehicle and 4 secondary vehicles. Bonds are established by physical contact with vehicle.
Pilot's Fitness - Constitution/Dexterity/Wits Boosts.
Pilot's Excellence - Elevates the stats/conceptual potency of a piloted vehicle(this should be construed as enhancing weapons a vehicle may have attached or be wielding, along with supernatural abilities a vehicle may possess, it's basically Nasuverse Lancelot's Knight of Honor)
The Mech Pilot(6 Orb Version)
Location: Thematic Earth
Enrollment(Role: The Pilot)(1 Orb, discounted from Thematic Earth)
Oneirodyne(Shepherd Class, 2 Orbs)
Excellence(Oneirodyne)(1 Orb)
Ideal Education(1 Orb)
Inner Magic(1 Orb)
Drawbacks:
Enforcement of Ruin(+2 Orbs)
An End to Silver(+1 Orb)
Pilot Role Aspects:
Pilots Bond: Pilot can create bonds with 1 primary vehicle and 4 secondary vehicles. Bonds are established by physical contact with vehicle.
- Pilot and Primary Bonded vehicle are metaphysically considered one being where advantageous. This includes such things as the pilot being able to use inner magic to enhance their mechs actions, and the mech being able to manifest the pilots inner magic evocation.
- If the primary bond is broken, the pilot must wait one week before establishing a new one
- Secondary bonds can be instantly replaced.
- Pilot can teleport any bonded vehicle to their location with a fingersnap
- Bonded vehicles without intent/thought based controls can be piloted as though they had them
- Pilot benefits from structural analysis on any bonded vehicle in close proximity
Pilot's Fitness - Constitution/Dexterity/Wits Boosts.
- Jumping ability and ability to survive fall damage are enhanced
- Maybe Titanfall 2 Parkour
Pilot's Excellence - Elevates the stats/conceptual potency of a piloted vehicle(this should be construed as enhancing weapons a vehicle may have attached or be wielding, along with supernatural abilities a vehicle may possess, it's basically Nasuverse Lancelot's Knight of Honor)
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Rihaku
The Internet
Ruinarch Reborn
Thematic Earth
-Enrolled: The Sword Saint (As per the Determinator, but less of a polymath and more focused on supernal mastery of the sword.)
-Blood of Saints
-Inner Magic
-The Baneful Blade
Drawbacks: Usurpation's Chosen, An End to Silver, The One Principle
This build uses one half of the Broken Limiter engine, channeling the rest into pure combat strength via the Baneful Blade. It's a somewhat 'safer' line in that the Baneful Blade grants overwhelming raw power in my hands, and unlimited progression with less fear of splintering - the Ruinarch at his height was able to parry the direct intervention of the Dark Ones on at least one occasion. And, lacking both Unchained and Enforcement of Ruin, I am not doomed to his eventual fate.
It's been confirmed that The Baneful Blade at a sufficient level of mastery can be used to continuously reset The One Principle's additive hatred by destroying 'hatred towards me' on a cosmic scale (though this is less effective for peer-level beings), allowing me to live a somewhat normal life after the day is won. Like Broken Limiter, my enrollment allows me to maintain a constant state of absolute determination which keeps the Saintblood amp on basically all the time; training therefore progresses rapidly.
My plan is simple: solve all my problems via sword techniques. With sufficient Ruin, anything can be cut through. One way or another, this realm and all those connected to it shall learn this fundamental truth:
Sord gud.
Thematic Earth
-Enrolled: The Sword Saint (As per the Determinator, but less of a polymath and more focused on supernal mastery of the sword.)
-Blood of Saints
-Inner Magic
-The Baneful Blade
Drawbacks: Usurpation's Chosen, An End to Silver, The One Principle
This build uses one half of the Broken Limiter engine, channeling the rest into pure combat strength via the Baneful Blade. It's a somewhat 'safer' line in that the Baneful Blade grants overwhelming raw power in my hands, and unlimited progression with less fear of splintering - the Ruinarch at his height was able to parry the direct intervention of the Dark Ones on at least one occasion. And, lacking both Unchained and Enforcement of Ruin, I am not doomed to his eventual fate.
It's been confirmed that The Baneful Blade at a sufficient level of mastery can be used to continuously reset The One Principle's additive hatred by destroying 'hatred towards me' on a cosmic scale (though this is less effective for peer-level beings), allowing me to live a somewhat normal life after the day is won. Like Broken Limiter, my enrollment allows me to maintain a constant state of absolute determination which keeps the Saintblood amp on basically all the time; training therefore progresses rapidly.
My plan is simple: solve all my problems via sword techniques. With sufficient Ruin, anything can be cut through. One way or another, this realm and all those connected to it shall learn this fundamental truth:
Sord gud.
- Location
- 1
...I don't get the impression from the source conversation that the Baneful Blade would grant this as a general benefit. It was said:
Judging by the last two lines, I'd expect that the ability to parry splintering only comes in if you're close to winning the Games, and presumably through some paradigm other than just raw power (such as enlightenment). Like, I guess the Ruinarch's power might be fundamentally shaped in such a way that anyone using it is multi-track drifting between the paradigm of power and a second paradigm the Dark Ones are cool with letting win, but I find this unlikely; as supporting evidence for the claim that copying the powerset used by someone who was {exempted} from Splinterings does not generally confer the same {exemption}, I present this brief discussion of the Calyx, the power system used by the Archstar of a thousand orisons: