al103
Grumpy Russian Bear (SV edition)
- Location
- Russia, Krasnoyarsk
As far as I know, no, it's not Wuxia or Xianxia. It's Murim story. Same pond, but yet another fish - of Korean variety.
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Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)
- Thread starter yrsillar
- Start date
- Original Fantasy
Arkeus
Crazy cat guy
- Location
- France
It has some trapping of Murim, but it has mostly Wuxia themes... and is in a Xianxia universe.
Basically, it doesn't try to adhere to a genre specifically.
al103
Grumpy Russian Bear (SV edition)
- Location
- Russia, Krasnoyarsk
Well, it's a big pond. Existing for long enough time. Fishes had all the time to crossbreed.
At the risk of chiming in from the sides and derailing things some more, personally what I liked about ZTJ is that its characterizations are consistent, which includes their character flaws and foibles, and that the absurd and continuous escalation of infinite treadmill things is avoided with an engaging world and cast.
Rather than introducing a new batch of previously unmentioned antagonists whenever the current antagonists are outleveled with the only real connection between them being that their relation means the new ones hate the protagonist for killing the old ones, all the relevant powers exist in this world from the very beginning and act to achieve their respective goals throughout the whole story.
There are increasing stakes over the course of the story of course, but that's driven by the fact that the protagonists start as unwilling bit players and pawns in the schemes of those much more powerful than them and, not wanting to settle for that, struggle to achieve personal agency and make decisions of their own.
Hence the title and all that.
Thinking about it, that might be why its beginning is so unusual and it takes a long time to pick up speed.
While I enjoyed the characters early on, it spends a while just getting things set up with the first main conflict being kicked off after like 50 chapters and then takes another 100 chapters or so to conclude that and is pretty consistent in terms of what it offers afterwards.
Whether it's worth to keep going for 200 chapters just to see if you'd enjoy it after all is a whole other story though.
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I tried getting into Ze Tian Ji a while ago, but didn't get past the intro, which I thought was purple, overwritten, and boring. But then again, I failed to get past the intro of Forge if Destiny a few times as well.
I think I'll give it another shot. What would you say is the best/most complete translation and where can I find it?
Aramis
An unwilling witness
- Location
- Who cares?
How do you distinguish between Wuxia and Xianxia then? All I know is that Xianxia tends to have a higher ceiling and that most stories are powerwanks while Wuxia is better grounded and can develop more themes.
- Location
- earth
So I just binged the story - can probably find my comment a few pages back asking if it was worth it.
I really enjoyed it, have a few questions though.
Can someone explain the domain aspects better? I had difficulty following the mechanics and benefits of it.
Will the inner sect sequel be handled in a separate thread?
Thanks.
I really enjoyed it, have a few questions though.
Can someone explain the domain aspects better? I had difficulty following the mechanics and benefits of it.
Will the inner sect sequel be handled in a separate thread?
Thanks.
- Location
- Illinois
Oh, I do know of one other Western author who writes Xianxia pretty well. Will Wight's Cradle series is far more solid than most, has a core group of characters who are likable, interesting and don't get outleveled, and the main character actually has morals, always a plus in this genre. You do have to buy it from Amazon unless there's a sale, but otherwise I'd recommend it pretty highly.
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Gravity Tales has the whole thing translated. They went back and retranslated the earlier chapters others did before as well at some point, so you at least have consistency in regards to terminology, etc.
As far as I understand it, as you reach the higher realms of Cultivation, you also choose/define your "Way" which is more or less tied to your identity.
Aside from metaphysically solidifying who you are as a person (which makes making fundamental changes more and more difficult), it also gives you some powers tying into the thematics you choose.
Right now direct effects aren't hugely pronounced yet and Ways aren't set in stone either, but Ling Qi's initial theme is some vaguely "Home" related thing, both a desire to have one and to offer one to those close to her.
Direct mechanic benefits of the domain itself so far are restricted to some minor buffs to those with close enough relationships to Ling Qi.
The Domain stat is however also used to determine how much potency you get out of your "Domain Weapon" which typically means a Flying Sword, but can be basically anything and ultimately just means a potent magical tool that can act semi-independently of its user (it basically gets its own "turns" in the combat system but needs its user around to actually wield it) and can have whatever special abilities its creator managed to forge into it.
Grinding up the domain stat is done through various means and conveys various mechanical benefits, which probably aren't too relevant now because of the answer to your other question.
Namely, that, yes, it will be its separate thread and the whole underlying quest mechanics will get an overhaul.
Aside from a few things, we don't know what will stay, what will go or what will be replaced with what, so don't worry too much over decyphering the mechanical details of this thread.
In particular mechanical resolution of combat will be gone completely. Yrs will instead take the abilities everyone fighting has into account, go through the strategies employed by the parties involved and determine things narratively from there.
Might be that he'll throw a die or two for purely luck reliant things, but might also not be.
Any more specific questions you wanna ask though?
deadcrystal
Slaaneshi Cultist
- Location
- The Warp
Only just found this quest, and it's very very good and I'm very much looking forward to book 2.
I do have questions for the thread, as I've only read the threadmarked posts so I don't know what the playerbase's plans are.
What's the plan for progression once in the inner sect? I believe that most of Ling Qi's arts are either mastered, or at a soft cap until her base spiritual/physical cultivation ranks up?
More Eight-Phase Ceremony before progressing anything else? Base cultivation level then back to ranking arts? More meridians so everything can be equipped at once again?
What's the consensus regarding the Argent arts? I'd guess that we plan on picking up that last missing one (Argent Pulse? I think?) and completing the set for whatever the bonus is for having all the base Argent arts mastered. I don't know whether the thread agrees with that though, on the whole.
What's the plan with Ling Qi's mother? I get the impression that with low base talent and her age we're not expecting for her to progress much with cultivation beyond initial awakening. If she were to learn only a single art I'd say Argent Mirror would be a good choice, but I think we're not actually allowed to teach the Argent arts to those who aren't part of the Sect?
She seems at a bit of a loss for something to do with herself, so encourage her to look into mundane skills for clan management? Bureaucracy/Trade? As preparation for whatever bit of landKiryuin Satsuki Cai Renxiang grants to Ling Qi as her fief? Ling Qingge defs needs something to do, and it's the best idea I've come up with.
I do have questions for the thread, as I've only read the threadmarked posts so I don't know what the playerbase's plans are.
What's the plan for progression once in the inner sect? I believe that most of Ling Qi's arts are either mastered, or at a soft cap until her base spiritual/physical cultivation ranks up?
More Eight-Phase Ceremony before progressing anything else? Base cultivation level then back to ranking arts? More meridians so everything can be equipped at once again?
What's the consensus regarding the Argent arts? I'd guess that we plan on picking up that last missing one (Argent Pulse? I think?) and completing the set for whatever the bonus is for having all the base Argent arts mastered. I don't know whether the thread agrees with that though, on the whole.
What's the plan with Ling Qi's mother? I get the impression that with low base talent and her age we're not expecting for her to progress much with cultivation beyond initial awakening. If she were to learn only a single art I'd say Argent Mirror would be a good choice, but I think we're not actually allowed to teach the Argent arts to those who aren't part of the Sect?
She seems at a bit of a loss for something to do with herself, so encourage her to look into mundane skills for clan management? Bureaucracy/Trade? As preparation for whatever bit of land
Hm, am I in the xianxia rec thread?
Must have taken a wrong turn at that crossing...
Must have taken a wrong turn at that crossing...
- Location
- earth
That was fairly comprehensive, thank you. I'm happy to hear that mechanical resolution will be gone - I prefer quests that follow a narrative structure with voting on character choices/strategy and such. I've seen quests get too bogged down in the numbers, although I'm glad that this one didn't.
Not too many - we're never gonna get Argent Pulse, are we? The gamer in me wants the completion bonus so bad but it's awful for our build path.
Hopefully this thread will get an update saying to move to the new thread then. I've missed sequels because of that.
Hm, am I in the xianxia rec thread?
Must have taken a wrong turn at that crossing...
Can you send me a link for that rec thread?
Simplest check is: is anyone actually flinging energy blasts around and are they common?
Wuxia is generally speaking, overblown martial feats, improbable weapons, poisons, or even psychological warfare. People might, if very powerful, shatter walls and buildings, Jump Good, cut with bladewind or shockwaves. Wuxia does have witches and sorcerors show up, but they're usually hard to distinguish from charlatans or trickery. Wuxia ages usually don't exceed a hundred for humans, though sometimes theres whatever gribbly or sage claiming to be a few centuries old.
Xianxia by contrast is generally focused on esoterica, if someone is talking about conceptual supremacy, using elemental blasts, ascending to immortality or the like...its probably Xianxia.
Theres nothing actually keeping Xianxia from being as richly developed as Wuxia, but as with writing fantasy its very very easy to forget the plot and just go with biggatons.
At present I believe our main objective is to finish and clean out the Argent Arts while we push for Green 2 like we've been putting off(since there wouldn't be time to finish the Green 2 upgrades for the tourney). Mostly because we aren't really going anywhere far while Zhengui is doing his Green breakthrough. After that...hit the Inner Sect archives.
We're almost certain to be challenging for a major rank jump once Zhengui breaks through incidentally.
Deadly Snark
Tryhard As Fuck
Yeah I guess Red Storm the Manga also counts as Xianxia too.
I just generally dont associate it with Xianxia because its as most of you know, very very good. Its like ZTJ in that there is a rich cast of characters, and the author knows how to give the MC problems that cant be solved with just biggatons. Making it very clear for all that the MC is very powerful being a leader is a whole another set of challenges.
I just generally dont associate it with Xianxia because its as most of you know, very very good. Its like ZTJ in that there is a rich cast of characters, and the author knows how to give the MC problems that cant be solved with just biggatons. Making it very clear for all that the MC is very powerful being a leader is a whole another set of challenges.
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Not sure if there's any true consensus regarding it yet.
I will say that you're very unlikely to be the only one with the completionist urge and my own thoughts are roughly as follows:
Potential benefits of completing the argent set and then bothering with Argent Pulse that I can see would be brownie points with the Sect for actually learning its arts, passive benefits the arts provide for mastery even if we don't expect much benefit from their active applications for our build, the fact that they are arts extending into Green (and that Pulse is potentially a pure Green art) which we do not have to expend additional resources to get access to, that they Argent training boosters seem relatively accessible and that mastering them might grant us bonuses for learning more advanced Argent Arts that actually work with our build.
Each of these points however comes with a bunch of caveats and potential issues.
To start with brownie points, if there are any to be gained at all, will also depend on argent arts not being a literal waste of time for us.
The fact that we got decent use out of Current during the Ji Rong fight in a public setting reflects well on the Sect which in turn reflects well on the Sect's attitude towards us, but if all we're doing is slavishly learn arts that are useless for us, that's far less likely to have any benefits.
And it bears repeating that it's not certain the Sect would care even if the Argent arts were incredibly good for us.
So it's a weak argument made weaker by however poorly the Arts suite our build in the coming system.
Which leads to the second point of passive benefits.
We don't know how those will be reflected in the future.
Might be that the thematic conflict between what the arts do and what we do is big enough that, in the new system, we won't even get the equivalent of some passive dice bonuses for having the arts leveled and equipped.
It might however also be that in a system, where we no longer use turn based mechanical combat resolution, restrictions along the lines of "It is objectively always better to spend our action this turn doing something that isn't one of the Argent Storm active abilities" become less stringent.
And things like Argent Storm having the "movement keyword" or whatever (keywords were at some point mentioned to maybe be part of the new system, I think) might make it more rather than less applicable.
Ultimately it's nothing we can make any definitive statements on, so it's something to keep in mind for when we actually learn about the new system, but no reason to precommit to actually bothering with any of the Argent Arts much further.
Next point runs into similar issues.
Sure we already have these arts, don't have many other trainable things right now and don't know how difficult it will be to get decent and effectively more useful Arts in the Inner Sect.
But whether it's preferable to train the arts we have rather than spend some actions to get others depends on how useful or useless these arts actually are, which brings us back to the previous point.
And we also don't actually know how the action economy will look like in the new system. For all we know the other things we do have left to do will let us use all our turn actions efficiently already.
Ultimately we once again don't have anything we can use to make actual decisions and instead just have a list of things we need to find out once we have the new system in order to decide.
This also applies to the remaining two points.
How much the abundance of argent boosters improves the prospect of learning Argent Arts is not yet clear until we have the new cultivation rules and a list of what the available boosters mean in those. Not to mention that the speed at which we can cultivate Argent Arts is ultimately only actually matters if Argent Arts turn out to have tangible benefits in the new system.
And the basic Argent Arts helping with learning advanced Argent arts actually useful for us, depends on their existence and availability.
So in conclusion, my opinion on finishing Argent Pulse is a big fat questionmark and a huge checklist of things I want to know before providing an actually valuable opinion.
Arkeus
Crazy cat guy
- Location
- France
I'll note here is that we do have access to the first floor of inner sect disciple archive for free. The question being how far those arts go, but they should be in quality somewhat better than the basic argent arts at least, and probably would fit our build more.
OTOH, I guess it's plausible that they don't go far in green, so we'll need to see.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
I'd say they're about on par myself, but have the upside that we can pick and choose precisely what we want, and specialty stuff that you want is usually better than generalist stuff that only coincidentally covers a hole.
What makes the Elementary Argent Arts good is that even if they're not the perfect choice for everyone, they're rarely an outright bad choice. Even AS is only not so great because SCS does the same thing and is a ducal quality Art, so the only thing it brings to the table for us is a sprint and a counterattack.
Plus, you know, between them all, we've got a solid grounding in the Imperial Eight Elements, which'll equate to "You can grab whatever you think is fitting and learn them regardless of elemental composition, unless it's something super exotic anyway."
Elements are less important than the Lessons after all, when it comes to Domain slotting.
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- Location
- earth
Speaking of that access, didn't we have permanent access to the Outer Sect archive (first floor at least) from Elder Su's class? We never really seemed to use it much. It's academic now, but wanted to ask why anyway.
@Pipeman, great analysis.
- Location
- The Temple of the Winds
There's the fact that Argent Pulse only Unlocks once we master AC and AS. So we could master those two, and stop there if Argent Pulse isn't worth the time.
edit: bronie points, imo, can also be earned through mastering your current arts instead of looking for more.
From an Elder (or any type of teacher for that matter) Point of View, whom will you favor ? the disciple that took the time to master all his previous reward arts or the one that's constantly looking for "better" ones ?
edit: bronie points, imo, can also be earned through mastering your current arts instead of looking for more.
From an Elder (or any type of teacher for that matter) Point of View, whom will you favor ? the disciple that took the time to master all his previous reward arts or the one that's constantly looking for "better" ones ?
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- Location
- United States of America
Well, we used it more than what it seems like on first glance. We just never really used it for arts.
Primarily we used it to do research on some basic formations, how to raise Zhengui, and to gain some better understanding of some basic cultivation knowledge. We didn't use it for arts because... we never really needed to.
We got Zephyr's Breath and Falling Star Art from the first level of the archives, but by the time we actually had time to get another art we were advanced enough that the first floor wouldn't have cut it for the quality we needed. Adding to that, we got pretty much all of our arts from spirits or Elder tutoring/trials (and high-quality arts at that) and so getting arts from the first floor was really never a priority.
Much appreciated.
First floor only contains baby's first red level arts, from what I remember.
Haven't much read up on the discussion from back then myself and only joined up later, but I imagine our lucky finds in Zhou's test and whatever else we picked up kept us occupied for long enough to outgrow the first level of the Outer Sect archives before we really needed to make use of it extensively that way.
It was used more frequently for general research, I think, at least when we didn't manage to get one of our friends to exposit at us instead.
That aside, I forgot Domain slotting when going through Domain basics and odds are pretty good that's gonna be retained in some form, so time to rectify that.
Basically, as you level up the Domain stat, you unlock "Domain Slots".
Precise numbers might change, so I'll not bother looking up how many you get when right now, but it's worth noting that the total number of slots we'll have will be limited and we'll likely have notably more opportunities to fill them than we have slots.
Meaning we should be at least somewhat selective.
Anyway, right now if we have an open Domain Slot and master an Art that ends in Green, we'll get the opportunity to learn a lesson related to our Path and Domain based on the teachings of the Art and "slot" that lesson into the Domain Slot.
This is at least a significant part of how we acrue Domain powers and effects and define what our Domain is about and it'd take significant effort and resources to swap out things we put into our Domain Slots, so it's best to consider the decision more or less final.
And as mentioned, details might change, but generalities should be kept on some level.
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Eh, while it's true that elemental composition isn't the be-all-end-all, what is important is depth of understanding and personal resonance. For the first, a cultivator should be able to understand an Art and its philosophy more ably if it is grounded in an element that they have a capable grounding in. For the second, if a cultivator puts something in their Domain, it should be a lesson from an Art that they've actually used to some significant degree, and elemental composition informs in what way and with what potency cultivators are capable of using their Arts, in accordance to their personal breakthroughs, insights, and affinities.
Cultivators tend to specialize in elements for real reasons, and one of those is to maintain peak clarity in the lenses through which cultivators act which are those elements. The Lesson a cultivator takes from Arts don't exist in a vacuum, and they aren't all equal.
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DeAnno
Sometimes words have two meanings
Lots of people talking about training Argent Arts as if it's a forgone conclusion. I for one would rather train SCS than AC/AS right now (since SCS is a better Art than either and one that actually fits our build), and considering we also need to train base cultivation on both sides and cultivation art, that's probably going to be a bone of contention early in the next thread. We'll probably need one action for non-cultivation things either way.