Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
What's so unappealing about the option to you that you want it to lose as opposed to having your option win?
A Simple Transaction I
- Thread starter Rihaku
- Start date
- Original
- Location
- Pindorama
Normally Luna Conqueror would be my second option, but I'm willing to sacrifice it for a chance at Twice-born.
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
What happens if Twice-Great gets eliminated? You're facing off not just an Accretion/Seven Seals contest here, but an even harder Gisena/Catherine contest.
- Location
- Pindorama
You quoted my offer, didn't you read it?
It is in the interests of people who want Seals in particular to consolidate behind one option. I am willing to pay for that option to be Twice-great. It is simple as that.
It is in the interests of people who want Seals in particular to consolidate behind one option. I am willing to pay for that option to be Twice-great. It is simple as that.
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
I'd point out that those voters could simply wait for Twice-Great to be eliminated, before Seals-preferring voters move on to King of Sorcerers. Eliminating King of Sorcerers in fact is harmful to the Seals cause, as Gisena voters would have to select Luna Conquerer.
From a tactical voting perspective anyway.
No, that would be Ceathlynn. It's too soon for us to pretend to be the reincarnation of a legendary historical figure for political advantage.
- Location
- USA
I think most people who want Seals would care about that more than the companion, especially because Rihaku stated he thinks the thread as a whole would regret not picking Catherine. I myself supported Gisena and Accretion until the change in builds and primary remittance convinced me to change.
Seals did poll as more popular in the last round I think.
You could go round and round though. If Twice-Great gets eliminated then Hunger voters will have to go Luna Conqueror!
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- Location
- Planet Earth
- Location
- Pindorama
That's why it's a compromise. There are in fact people who would vote for Luna rather than King. Eliminating Twice-born doesn't guarantee victory, and I can't speak for peoples emotional attraction for Gisena, her winning personality doesn't seem to factor into why people are picking her.
Omakes complicate this discussion as well. If people just want Gisena they should vote for Luna, they have no reason not to. If they just want Seals, however, they have to gamble on Omake power not being enough. To ease this, I offered to vote for King even if lost; so that a gamble wouldn't go punished.
The pact is sealed; you may call my sword in the future.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I think there's a good chance Rihaku goes straight to a victor without further consolidating for us; gotta keep momentum up after all!
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- Location
- Brazil
Thanks for the heads-up!
[X] Cut Off The Head
[X] Twice-Great
OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
On a somewhat tangential note, I saw a video about the ridiculousness of Serious Sam 4 and considering there may be 100,000 on one fights I'm beginning to think Serious Sam's physical capabilities are entering Xianxia/Rihaku Protagonist level territory. That or it's a giant case of a Battle Mastery analog in action.
- Location
- US
[X] Cut Off The Head
[X] Luna Conquerer
King of Sorcerers doesn't appear to have any omake power behind it, so I'll content myself with the next best thing.
[X] Luna Conquerer
King of Sorcerers doesn't appear to have any omake power behind it, so I'll content myself with the next best thing.
[X] Cut Off The Head
[X] Luna Conquerer
I think pattern in Rihaku quest is if you have enough power then social is not a problem.
Like in Nameless case,We don't need to interact with people under reality forming.
The job to run the empire is for minion.
The job of leader is the empire source of power.
[X] Luna Conquerer
I think pattern in Rihaku quest is if you have enough power then social is not a problem.
Like in Nameless case,We don't need to interact with people under reality forming.
The job to run the empire is for minion.
The job of leader is the empire source of power.
OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
Given the Existence of the Apocrypha Curse then barring sufficient mitigation you may well find yourself mistaken as a demogogue scaled to our power turns the people against us.
Talace
It must be raining somewhere else!
What I think this ignores is that social is also a relevant source of power-- remember when Nameless got to reduce the penalties for taking A Throne of Stars? Beyond that, we're no longer working within the confines of a single universe easily outscaled-- now that we are a Cursebearer, we will at minimum be encountering creatures far beyond our wildest dreams and will need non-conflict oriented ways of dealing with them
That was only relevant because Baen realized Nameless had a big enough stick to be worth his while though. Our build here gives us a heavy positive multiplier on getting the bigger gun, and a heavy negative modifier on convincing people we should each put down our guns, or even just each point them at a mutual enemy. Trying to fight the tide rather than work with it seems much more likely to just get us killed when Tyrant triggers and brings about a confrontation we couldn't handle.
Maybe in the mid game we'll have the leeway to start working on this but for now intermediaries and the knowledge they can't put us down seem like the ways to conduct any diplomacy (Which we should avoid as much as possible).
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- Location
- Rivendell
[X] Luna Conquerer
Haha, wow I was thinking about how Tyrant works in practice and we're basically a sovereign citizen, one that'll actually shoot you too.
We weren't conscripted this time. We made a choice, not to forgive or forget or move on, and the consequences of that will (hopefully) echo in eternity. It's true we're compelled to battle, but only by the ragged remains our hero's own resolve. No wandering into a glade, no summoning ritual, none of the bullshit counterfactual consent that the Divinities did. Real agency.
'Before a storm' is accurate, since we're about to swan dive into some serious shit. But this is a beautiful take on the proverbial world of cardboard. To put it another way, "It is the world that has become insubstantial, relative to me." We don't have phasing powers, but there's a similar feeling here. No limits, no boundaries we can't breach in time. I wonder if Bleach Quest's Aizen would be a suitable Cursebearer? He'd kill for the power of unlimited Progression.
Between this and the quote stating that by the time the hero had avenged himself linear time wouldn't be a concern, we may have underestimated the heights our man fell from. Wielding the King's Scepter and he's still a shadow of himself... paradoxically it gives me hope, since he attained that level in only eleven years without the power of Progression.
Does the same for our hero too, who thought he'd depleted that resource long ago. Hope is a fossil fuel, hate a nuclear reactor.
And like that, my already high esteem for our protagonist rises further. This is a hero we can root for. Dedicated but not deficient in honor, vengeful without being cruel. Reaching out despite theodicy and the Brand of the Wretched, feeling gratitude and appreciating the magnitude of this gift? It's a touching feat of empathy and the Accursed deserves thanks. Sisyphus and Prometheus' burdens pale in comparison. This isn't straightforward altruism, but he likely could have found a way that didn't depend on sharing his strength. It's what he's known for, after all.
So I hope that sentiment will endure the eons of strife and he can eventually keep his promise, perhaps even joining the exalted ranks of the High Cursebearers one day. I'm curious about those fellows; are there any Combat-types among them? Notable individuals, names or titles preceded by a definite article that we should know? Or just other Cursebearers in general? I'm a sucker for tidbits of lore and still trying to wrestle the regret for passing up the Praxis into submission.
Amused by the pluck, but not dismissing the sentiment. Positive displays of emotion from him are rare as hen's teeth. That he's capable of them at all's cause for yet more hope and the hero acknowledges the humanity underlying the unfathomable power, thinking of the Accursed as something other than 'it'. All in all, a great scene.
On a meta level, though? I'm logging every word, because 'advice and/or instructions from the Accursed' are crucial for the Tyrant's Doom.
The Accursed only knows what they'll think when they find no body, or how they'll explain this to their superiors. How was the assassination carried out, anyway? He intervened right on the brink of our demise. The description's sparse, no hints of an immediate threat, nobody else in the room. Did they just leave him to bleed out? Seems negligent.
When in doubt, acquire power. And it sounds like we'll need a lot of power. Having done the isekai thing once before, he's under no illusions about this being pleasant. His backstory was tragic enough to elicit sympathy from the Accursed. I wonder how many people even qualify to bear the Apocryphal Curse?
The Geas has preferences, huh? Blue skies, a bright sun high overhead, pastoral idyll tarnished with violence. This probably doesn't match the surreal beauty of the Manifest Realm, though. Wonder if high levels of Accretion can eventually induce findross terraforming? Territories are supposedly valid targets for one's legend, which may be the secret needed to unlock Coalescence. But ultimately it's a good thing he didn't land there, can you imagine the Tyrant's Doom interacting with the Implicate Duty? Shocked pikachu faces for days.
To think he's younger than Seram, not even thirty. We'll need to increase our lifespan unless we want to rely on Indenture for immortality (we don't) to even last that length of time. It brings the scope of this shit to the fore, that his life up until this point's scarcely more than a hundredth of a percent of the time we could spend in this world. Not that he remembers more than a fraction of it. 937 octillion years is a number so vast it doesn't feel real; twenty-five hundred years takes us back to well before the birth of Christ.
It's one for us too, I was surprised to even get the option for Indenture again, but the conquest mission makes for a nice change of pace. Fifty contiguous years of rule with the Apocryphal Curse and Decimator ticking away is going to be challenging. The Human Sphere doesn't give us a sense of the size either. Is it a region of space? A flexible amount of territory under the influence of a magical paradigm? A dimension that isn't contiguous with other Spheres?
I'd been assuming he was American, going by the western ideals in the absence of cosmetic details. But that even he doesn't know is just painful. It's surprising he remembered enough religion to ask if the Accursed was the devil, though I guess he didn't get to finish the question. We've underestimated the toll his past took on him, which is not an error I thought possible. He lost his name? Surely someone reminded him in the wake of the tragedy? My expectations for that wretched realm are low, but... wow. We should get this guy to a mirror, maybe we can guess nationality from the appearance and give artists some details to work with.
Doom of the Martyr would've been a good fit for him. This is painful and poignant, yet more evidence of the ordeal he went through. The Slumber being dreamless by default might've been a mercy to Dread. To quote Roland, "I'm afraid to go to sleep. I'm afraid my dead friends will come to me, and that seeing them will kill me."
Vendetta's the most optimistic option. It's not that he saw Three Wishes and turned down the chance to resurrect his wife and child, it's that he wants it all. Vengeance and them all back, not just the woman who fell in the final battle. This eases some concerns about his mental state and sows the seeds for a great and tragic narrative arc.
And thus does the dream of democracy die, without a word spoken to mourn its passing. Not the greatest sacrifice he'll make.
Oh hey, our counterfactual killers in the timeline where Sword won. Does the Geas just not do initial safety? Makes sense for a Curse to be maximally inconvenient.
These beasts remind me of the wolf pack Arthur first fought, low-level creatures with advanced coordination. The strength and speed he displays here are nice, but with this build-agnostic update I can't help but wonder how he's doing this with Accretion, which doesn't provide explicit physical enhancements.
Having fun, huh? Is that... legal? You mean to say we're not bound to a grim existence of stoically trudging from conflict to conflict? This is good, though, since if we get Hunger the visceral pleasure of combat will mean he's better adapted to life as a transcendent shounen murderhobo.
Nice to see he's still got it. One
Cue speculation about what the fuck a 'Sphere' is and restrictions on travel between them. It could be that these are just drones from the jackal-dragon and I'm reading too much into things, but half the fun of reactions is overanalyzing and going on tangents. Also, I shed a tear for the Talon here. They're not edible, but they could've been! Talon + Brand of the Champion + Regalia would've been a very RPG experience. Reloads, side-quests, lots of loot. 'How does killing goblins give you coins? That shouldn't even be possible, who's minting these?' 'It's
Investing in Endurance to let him fight continuously could be good, he's unlikely to be as limited by will as Seram. Or Wits, if Seven Seals wins so he can handle more Sealing on the fly. Though it's not clear how the Progression interface will work, knowledge of vidya was probably cut in the name of expediency, one reason the aforementioned build wouldn't have been good for the hero. Looking forward to getting him a name, or at least an epithet, playing the pronoun game got exhausting with Nameless, who never made the transition into a title. Accursed willing, we won't get it from Gisena.
Is that an EVA? I anticipated giant robots, but not so soon! The tech level's a little idiosyncratic, if there aren't any roads and the city they're fighting in is stone. They're inside the walls too, so even if the 'good guy' wins we might be in for some collateral if it falls in the wrong direction. Or explodes, kaiju rarely go out cleanly.
This could be another Cursebearer, bound to the same task by the Doom of Rivalry. But I suspect not, since 'the only two of our kind' were Control's words, used to describe the bond shared by him and Seram, both summoned heroes.
1566 words, not covering the options to get this out the door.
Not really. Nameless was born grandson to a deity, Seram struggled without civilization to buttress his willpower, Dr. Apocalypse accomplished nothing for decades besides making enemies, Arthur was a footstool to Imperia, Ulyssian lived in a world where social magic made its concepts mostly superficial, and even Odyssial was a First Age Solar ('nuff said).
Our protagonists see plenty of glory in battle, but their short-term goals are less approachable. To lead starts with knowing what others want, but we tend to reject such on principle. When others find what we want, we end up snared like rabbits in a box.
Rolen von Keng
Sleeping Green Bear
- Location
- The Wilderness
[X] Twice-Great
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OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
Tally incoming
Rolen von Keng
Sleeping Green Bear
- Location
- The Wilderness