I finally got around to reading this over the last couple of days and only after finishing it all on AO3 do I discover, to my mixed glee and horror, that there's commentary for everything over here I could have been reading as I went
I do have a question - somewhere in one of the early logs, Testolagh says he doesn't miss sleeping (shortly after they first meet in the North). This is fairly clearly him being Malfean and having Nightmare Fugure Vigilance, but in Secrets Revealed Ch4 he mentions having a sleep cycle? Caught my eye.
But moving on to more general reactions, I have consistently been
super impressed by you guys' mastery of characterisation. Keris' grappling with her budding compassion and her loyalty to the Reclamation, her need to be loved, the dynamics of her relationship with Sasi re: they genuinely do love and support each other but are also kind of a little bit
really unhealthy (and that was
before I got to Fear and Excess, which I'll return to in a minute), becoming a mother and trying to parent a bunch of deva lords with fundamentally not-entirely-human psychology, the whole fallout of the Big Reveal About Keris' Past - I've already skipped a bunch that could be in the middle of that list and I could still go on, but you get the picture. You do a consistently fantastic job of making not just Keris, not just her souls and supporting cast, but Creation as a whole feel like a living place.
This is a big part of what makes the "being an at least nominally loyal Infernal" thing work for me (also, Lilunu, who is fantastic and ES should be proud). Keris is a better person than she used to be, but she's still not exactly a
good person. But she's engaging and compelling because she struggles with it, because she grows and develops not just as numbers on a character sheet but as a
person. I usually drop a work as soon as mind control comes into things if it's any more than a section/chapter or two I can skim through, let alone a monster series like A&T, but here I am, even after all the UMI social Charms and genuinely freak-me-out shit I have to not think too hard about like Self-Seed Infestation and whatever the secondary-personality-watchdog spell was called. Yeuch.
Speaking of yeuch, it's time to talk about Fear and Excess, which is as impressively well-written as everything else you've published, entirely in-character and believable, builds on hints from previous instalments re: Sasi being Not Okay, and yet even setting aside... I probably can't get specific on SV but some of Sasi's particular kinks... I hate it. This is hardly any slight against you; the fact that your characterisation is so consistently fantastic and you're so good at writing complex characters means I do genuinely
like Keris and Sasi despite myself, and I am a sap, so seeing them be viciously, fundamentally Not Okay is just unfun. Hopefully things will resolve in a way that means they can eventually be at least Slightly More Okay.
Moving swiftly onward, I've tinkered with the Kerisgame Hacks a bit and come to the conclusion that I actually really like them for the most part, though I think I've settled on a hybrid Essence/Enlightenment system that offers more room for the power/control dynamic, 'conceptual weight' vs understanding and harmonisation with the power of your soul and the cosmos. "I can bounce fuckoff giant hammers with my abs by declaring I AM" versus "I can stop a giant fuckoff hammer with a touch by sublime understanding of momentum and inertia". Really must get around to finishing the Municipals draft, now I think about homebrew
I'm most impressed - typically of me - with the Charms, both in terms of the outright homebrew (snek Keris is fantastic, for one, and I love everything about Pantheon Charms) and in the quality-of-life adjustments to other Infernal stuff, but that being said I also think the Styles system is super cool and am currently in the process of stealing it for the endless characters I make in my eternal inability to find an actual game to play in or players to run one for.
Anyway, in conclusion, this is overall one of my very favourite series - not just in RPG terms but as a story - and you guys should be super proud of what you've created here as authors and homebrewers, even aside from the fact that you've been playing this game for
ELEVEN YEARS WHAT THE FUCK.
You know, it occurs to me that once this whole crisis is firmly in the past and everyone can reflect on things for a bit, Keris is going to feel super smug about the fact that po!Sasi fixated on her while barely mentioning Testolagh
Honestly I feel pretty sorry for the guy. Having your girlfriend come back one day and tell you "so I know we agreed I could sleep around for the sake of the mission/as long as my heart was still yours but surprise I have a girlfriend now" is already a super rough deal (and puts me in the amusing position of being less forgiving than a
Malfeas-primary Infernal); even acknowledging that the 'different needs' thing Sasi uses as her rationale for having two romantic partners could reasonably mean that she loves Testolagh primarily for hun-reasons...
