A lot of luck and very loving parents.
Distant Stars. (a WH40K/Xianxia civ Quest).
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Roth963
If I become inactive with this massage, I died
I am not sure we will, we only got one such guy and hundreds of people do tribulation a turn, that state seem so rare that we are better off just healing him and being done with it, and instead investing our APs in such things as formations and divine qi.
- Location
- Italy
I'm pretty sure we gained some very devoted zealots right now.
hundreds do the first to second step tribulation. That's the one when, where they fail, they become mostly-mortal-but-a-bit-stronger after they recover. It's the physical-only tribulation.
second to third step we don't HAVE hundreds of people that can try it. and the result if they fail are the "Broken", and I imagine the half-third step is what happens with a bare-success. like, if the DC is 50 and you roll 50 exactly.
Actually, let me check just how many people have tried to reach the third step at all thus far. I remembered I quoted all recruiting results recently...
found it: Distant Stars. (a Xianxia civ Quest).
TURN 2: one second step tries and fails.
TURN 3: 16 second steps try and fail. One partway succeeds (Kekeru, half pillar)
TURN 4: none try
TURN 5: none try
TURN 6: none try
and then, from last turn,
TURN 7: a five sects elder tries and succeeds.
TURN 8: none will try, they warned us for turn 10
TURN 9: presumably nobody will try.
TURN 10: we've been warned 13 will try, and we're making arrays to help them.
So, except maybe some second steps in the sects I might have missed, thus far there have been 17 attempts at the third step, with one full success (turn 7) and one half-success (turn 3), and we'll get 13 more attempts on turn 10.
That's not enough to state the half-success is particularly rare. Right now we have 3 full third step cultivators (Shikatu the Emperor, Nekita the Daughter, the five sects elder) and ONE Half-pillar third step. and un unclear number of Broken, which from my understanding are people who tried to ascend to third step and failed BUT survived.
EDIT: also we currently have 40 second steps total. Which includes the 13 who announced their intention to attempt the tribulation in two turns, leaving 27 "lower" second steps.
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Roth963
If I become inactive with this massage, I died
We know how it works.
So to me it very much implies anyone can enter half step.
I suppose it depends on timeline, if the apocalypse is late, it may be worthwhile to study him, if it isn't, we should just heal him and let him cultivate as much as he can while we focus on getting ready ourselves.
- Location
- Italy
we're not talking about the same thing I think.
First to second step, they either succeed, fail and die, or fail and become just-a-bit-more-than-mortal.
second to third step, they either succeed, fail and die, fail and become "Broken", or get a partial success when they reach the third step but can't go any further.
What I'm saying is simply that we don't know how rare the partial success is, because right now we don't have high enough numbers to judge it.
We've had 17 attempts from quest start, of which 15 failed (and either died or became broken, unclear what the numbers of broken are), one succeeded (the sect elder last turn) and one partially succeeded (Kekeru, who can't cultivate any longer).
you talked of hundreds of people trying and us only getting one partial success. I'm just saying that the hundreds of first-to-second step tribulations you talked about don't count for this, as it seems like there's no partial success there (outside of the not-dying-but-lose-powers).
The Coinage System
So, I was thinking about this because I made an off-comment mention for this in the next part (I also mentioned it in the start of the turn) and figured I might as well post may thoughts about this. keep in mind that I'm not an economist (and especially not a historical economist) so this may have large holes in it but ehh.
So, the coinage system (because you haven't switched to paper money yet).
A small bronze coin is the lowest denominator, and they aren't worth much 5 would allow you to buy enough ingredients for a decent meal (by this time standards) so families (the average family size being 5) require 75 small copper coins for food alone.
25 small bronze coin's equal 1 large bronze coin and they represent the hourly wage for unskilled labor (construction and the like) of course this is wildly divergent but the wage is around here. This means that it only takes 3 hours of work to feed a family for a day (and then you have to pay for all the other stuff.
8 large bronze coins equal 1 small silver coin, which represents a day work (although workers rarely get paid in sliver coins) a month of food for a family would cost between 11 and 12 small silver coins, renting a decent place would cost about 10 small silver coins.
30 small silver coins equal 1 large silver coin, which represents a month work and are mostly used when a store is making a big stock buy or for high quality comforts.
12 large silver coins are 1 small gold coin and represent a full year of work, this coin is only used by wealthy merchants and land owners. If you want to buy land/ a home small gold coins are what you'll normally use, the apartment that costs 10 small silver a month to rent would cost 3 small gold coins to buy.
10 small fold coins are 1 large gold coin and represent a decade of work and is pretty much what you use in the budget and outside of large and wealthy organizations is rarely used, and if it is its mostly for large scale land sales.
Now is this useful? Not really most of this is below the abstraction level but it was fun to think about and its will help me in knowing that if i make a mention of some amount of money you will have more than just the tone of the sentence to help you place how much it was.
And now that you've read this, I want you to think about how insane it is to go bother the emperor for the theft of a few small coper coins.
So, the coinage system (because you haven't switched to paper money yet).
A small bronze coin is the lowest denominator, and they aren't worth much 5 would allow you to buy enough ingredients for a decent meal (by this time standards) so families (the average family size being 5) require 75 small copper coins for food alone.
25 small bronze coin's equal 1 large bronze coin and they represent the hourly wage for unskilled labor (construction and the like) of course this is wildly divergent but the wage is around here. This means that it only takes 3 hours of work to feed a family for a day (and then you have to pay for all the other stuff.
8 large bronze coins equal 1 small silver coin, which represents a day work (although workers rarely get paid in sliver coins) a month of food for a family would cost between 11 and 12 small silver coins, renting a decent place would cost about 10 small silver coins.
30 small silver coins equal 1 large silver coin, which represents a month work and are mostly used when a store is making a big stock buy or for high quality comforts.
12 large silver coins are 1 small gold coin and represent a full year of work, this coin is only used by wealthy merchants and land owners. If you want to buy land/ a home small gold coins are what you'll normally use, the apartment that costs 10 small silver a month to rent would cost 3 small gold coins to buy.
10 small fold coins are 1 large gold coin and represent a decade of work and is pretty much what you use in the budget and outside of large and wealthy organizations is rarely used, and if it is its mostly for large scale land sales.
Now is this useful? Not really most of this is below the abstraction level but it was fun to think about and its will help me in knowing that if i make a mention of some amount of money you will have more than just the tone of the sentence to help you place how much it was.
And now that you've read this, I want you to think about how insane it is to go bother the emperor for the theft of a few small coper coins.
Roth963
If I become inactive with this massage, I died
I am mostly thinking we need guys to check people over, because how the hell didn't those guys get laughed out before they reached us.
And damm, gold is really valuable.
It's mostly due to the fact that the point of doing the audiences is that everyone can go to the emperor to solve their burdens/ills/injustices/conflict or just hear their gratitude and you mostly relay upon the fact that most people are sensible enough to not go bother the emperor for the small stuff.
And this works well its just that once in a while you get someone who clearly didn't think things through.
Will our paper options include representative certificate/backed, fiat, or both?
Basically backed and government guaranteed redeemable certificate vs fiat currency.
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Fiat vs. Representative Money: What's the Difference?
Fiat money is physical currency—paper money and coins—while representative money indicates the transfer of a sum of money stored elsewhere.
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Is it something like regrowth or progression?
- Location
- Italy
that's already better than most wages nowadays, really.
possibly the most un-xianxia like thing in this whole quest is that two random guys were allowed to go to the emperor for a problem regarding 5 small copper coins, basically less than 5 to 10 dollars at most, and were not punished at all for it.
Now just to wait until spirit stones become a thing...
and considering that the emperor was a big factor in the current laws being what they are, there's not even much of a risk of him establishing bad precedents.
Will our paper options include representative certificate/backed, fiat, or both?
Basically backed and government guaranteed redeemable certificate vs fiat currency.
Fiat vs. Representative Money: What's the Difference?
Fiat money is physical currency—paper money and coins—while representative money indicates the transfer of a sum of money stored elsewhere.www.investopedia.com
All in all it doesn't really matter that much, does it? the imperial economy is heavily abstracted and simplified from our point of view. The fact that we'd have a universal currency without having to worry about exchange rates, fiscal paradises, differing monetary and fiscal policies, differing work regulations (and laws in general) will make things immensely easier and better to manage on the whole.
Though on a side note... could we maybe get (in the empire state page) something like a population counter? An Idea of what level of population we're dealing with might be worth knowing.
...you know, if we survive that long it will be fun if/when the emperor get something like a facebook/twitter account and people just start to send petitions and requests/prayers there.
It would even be pretty efficient, actually. As of right now the Emperor is limited in his reading speed by basically having to be careful not to tear book pages while turning them over too quickly. With a computer screen he could quite literally read multiple pages per second on a giant screen, so he could easily read tens of thousands of pages worth of information per second (once he gets a big screen with good enough refresh rate that can operate that quickly AND is good enough to read/think that quickly, which I'd expect high step 4 COULD be)
Probably fiat as the government is incredibly stable although I might put it to a vote when the time comes (with the reasoning being that it might create a cresses during/just after the apocalypse as order is taking a very, very big hit).
When I first set up to write this I wanted to avoid various tropes in xinxia that I didn't like, you know things like everyone's an asshole and no one of the lower realms matters and so on and so on.
This influence both the cultivation system I crafted and the character I introduced.
I probably should, at quest start there were approximately 23 million Keku and at the end of this turn were looking at about 48m which averages out for like 1% yearly growth in population (although this did increase last turn).
- Location
- Italy
yeah, but this goes beyond being un-xianxia.
If you tried to go to a police station in most countries arguing about a theft of 5-10 dollars, you'd be laughed out of it usually. If you tried to do so to a mayor, you'd likely be "politely" escorted out.
If you went higher than that and insisted, I could see a night in a cell.
Now, admittedly here we have an open-door policy on some specific days and the emperor doesn't have to worry about personal security (I dare any petitioner to try and assassinate him. I'm sure the viewers would have a laugh about it!), but it's still so foreign a concept that this might ever happen...
Still, I suppose it also gives people a way to bypass the bureaucracy in case of injustices, be they technically legal or not. And Shikatu might not have mind-reading powers, but he DOES have a good century of experience in reading people, and plenty of supernatural skills to help and support him...
yeah, we're still in the stage where we're mostly restricted by food availability, though as tech goes up we'll likely see a bigger population boom, especially if we try to nudge society towards a "big families" culture.
That said, 23 million is pretty low. That plague must have been truly devastating, because those are numbers lower than humanity in the -500 BC.
Now admittedly we also have a smaller planet, but even if we go 1/3 of human pops for comparison, in the 1400 (before the reinassance, as mentioned before in terms of tech/social progress pre-quest start) estimated human pop was 350 millions, and a third would be around 117 millions.
...all of this mostly to say that wow, that plague was brutal and really unprecedented in human history. It's the Black Plague on steroids and hitting the whole world instead of mostly only Europe!
This has two reasons for why it is, first Keku are mostly migratory, the ability to fly has kept such ways of life far more relevant then in human history but this did come at the cost of limiting population growth for a long time.
The second of course is the disease here are a few choice quotes about it form the first threadmark.
Then add all of the chaos during the disease and after it and Keku society has been scarred forever by it.
Which is just par for the course for supernatural disease's hitting a low-tech world.
- Location
- Italy
on that note: supernatural disease.
Do we have any idea what caused it? Qi was an unknown, there had been no cultivators, and the world was for the most part mundane.
so, where did a super-plague come from? a freak portal to hell? a virus or bacteria from a place of power? The Apocalypse forces managing to send the disease through some tiny portal to weaken their future target?
EDIT: or, as the above is something we likely have no way to know... WHAT was the disease, from our understanding? and has it ever come back, even in limited or isolated cases?
Well it was some kind of virus, highly infectious and very, very deadly and as far as you know there has never another case of it, although there have been a few viruses that are reminiscent of it but far, far weaker.
- Location
- Italy
possible, but the demon said that normally it would be MUCH harder to open a portal for them, and that the diffused energy from the tribulation helped making it easier.
The plague is from BEFORE the first cultivator, Shikatu. From before the first tribulation.
And so I have to wonder how it got here in the first place.
Either it started as a "normal" plague, and all the death from that allowed them to somehow empower it a bit, or the Places of Powers (which predate cultivators) had an effect on it, or we're missing something else.
Or it was just random chance, I suppose, but that feels unlikely. A plague that leaves no survivors, and that was explicitly mentioned to be RICH IN QI? That's not normal.
The plague is from BEFORE the first cultivator, Shikatu. From before the first tribulation.
And so I have to wonder how it got here in the first place.
Either it started as a "normal" plague, and all the death from that allowed them to somehow empower it a bit, or the Places of Powers (which predate cultivators) had an effect on it, or we're missing something else.
Or it was just random chance, I suppose, but that feels unlikely. A plague that leaves no survivors, and that was explicitly mentioned to be RICH IN QI? That's not normal.
Roth963
If I become inactive with this massage, I died
The plague might actually be what attracted the demons, I wouldn't be surprised if such a massive death caused by a bacteria that figured out demonic cultivation would attract attention, that attention led to the demon planning the invasion.
On the other hand, the demon said sending demons in was hard before heavens, but not impossible, and viruses are extremely small, such biological warfare may be easier to use than anything else.
We are going to need to seriously make countermeasures, I wouldn't be surprised if biological warfare is used in the future of such invasions.
And damm, this disease is definitely going to become mythological in the future, scarring the race, leading to the birth the emperor and so on.
Cultivator System the Keku are used?
I'm assuming you're asking about the cultivation system in use? Well there's a section on it in the character sheet but to provide a quick explanation.
The cultivation system is divided into "steps" which are the major realms like body refining and foundation establishment which are then divided to more minor steps.
The first step is about tempering the body and strengthening it, the second is about expending the dantian and Qi capacity and the third step is about building a foundation of pillars and gathering insights for them.
- Location
- Italy
and the transition to the fourth is apparently about making a "core" that includes all pillars (or as many as we can fit) into an overarching concept, which right now for us seems like it will be "cycles. the cycle of the element, the cycle of life and death, and the Keku's place in all of this".
What stages the fourth step will include and what we'll gain there we don't know, though my guess is that we'll start to gain dao fragments and Dao shards, working towards a single Dao that will then be tested in the tribulation to step 5.
What stages the fourth step will include and what we'll gain there we don't know, though my guess is that we'll start to gain dao fragments and Dao shards, working towards a single Dao that will then be tested in the tribulation to step 5.