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Knight of Wessex (A Written World Quest)

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Priests constantly take communion because of their direct participation in the church structure, they should have easier access to awards in the form of Zeal.
Thanks to all this, their Zeal gain should be much higher than an ordinary knight. It is clear that they are not focused on the fight and therefore will lose to the knights.
But the question remains, where do they spend this huge pile of Zeal? How big miracles can they do if they try and how much influence do they have on society?
I mean, for example, if they can massively bless crops for fertility and treat people for diseases, then this plays incredibly strongly on the dynamics of medieval society. For example, by reducing child mortality and making hunger a much less likely event.
 
I also think a limb-maiming attack would fit well in our repertoire - could mix things up with Clever Deflection perhaps, or use it to further set up a GKB. And as Kiera says it falls under Hard-Fall Style's purview so gets bonuses accordingly.
 
H2F2 said:
Priests constantly take communion because of their direct participation in the church structure, they should have easier access to awards in the form of Zeal.
Thanks to all this, their Zeal gain should be much higher than an ordinary knight.
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Um...I think you are underestimating how often Knighte take Communion here. Also, perhaps I should clarify some of how this works. Specifically, there is a scaling factor where each point of Grace from Communion requires taking Communion more times than the previous.

Priests do generally average more Grace from Communion than Knights of the same Hama (or whatever spiritual stat they have), but we're talking, like, a couple of points, not an order of magnitude difference or something.

H2F2 said:
But the question remains, where do they spend this huge pile of Zeal? How big miracles can they do if they try and how much influence do they have on society?
I mean, for example, if they can massively bless crops for fertility and treat people for diseases, then this plays incredibly strongly on the dynamics of medieval society. For example, by reducing child mortality and making hunger a much less likely event.
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Prayers can certainly do a lot of impressive things, yes. Bear in mind, however, that this is a cultivation world. Mundane diseases may not claim the lives of as many children, but monsters do eat children pretty regularly as the monsters are at cultivator power level and the children are not, and there are magical diseases as well.

Infant mortality is honestly probably still lower, but bear in mind that not only the Priests providing care, but also the things they must protect their flock from, are super-powered.
 
Could the lightning produced by Hard-Fall Style possibly lead to a Lightning Revelation? Or are Revelations obtained in a different manner?
 
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
Priests do generally average more Grace from Communion than Knights of the same Hama (or whatever spiritual stat they have), but we're talking, like, a couple of points, not an order of magnitude difference or something.
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What about receiving a reward in the form of Zeal for priests?
Is it something that is difficult but possible to get as part of the church structure, or is it rather an exception to the rules that you should not count on?
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
Prayers can certainly do a lot of impressive things, yes. Bear in mind, however, that this is a cultivation world. Mundane diseases may not claim the lives of as many children, but monsters do eat children pretty regularly as the monsters are at cultivator power level and the children are not, and there are magical diseases as well.
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I completely forgot about this reverse side of cultivation. Probably the same problem with the harvest, the priests bless it, but there are many evil forces that want to spoil it.
Speaking of magical creatures, who are there in our region besides trolls?
 
H2F2 said:
What about receiving a reward in the form of Zeal for priests?
Is it something that is difficult but possible to get as part of the church structure, or is it rather an exception to the rules that you should not count on?
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It's possible if you do favors for the Church, sure. Or do them for a specific Priest, for that matter. Any cultivator who has Zeal can gift it, they just need to be more motivated to reward you than spend it themselves.

H2F2 said:
I completely forgot about this reverse side of cultivation. Probably the same problem with the harvest, the priests bless it, but there are many evil forces that want to spoil it.
Speaking of magical creatures, who are there in our region besides trolls?
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Elves and Ettins leap immediately to mind. Various Norse monsters come across the border from the Danelaw decently regularly as well, and various more animalistic creatures. There's lots of other stuff, but most of it isn't wildly common. Even 'normal' animals often have elemental powers and similar things.
 
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
It's possible if you do favors for the Church, sure. Or do them for a specific Priest, for that matter. Any cultivator who has Zeal can gift it, they just need to be more motivated to reward you than spend it themselves.
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How sacred is the Zeal transfer process?
I mean, is it possible, for example, to pay tithes to the church using your Zeal?

Are there any restrictions prohibiting excessive use of someone else's Zeal?
For example, the Pope, with his influence on the Christian world, could receive Zeal in almost unlimited quantities over the centuries, becoming the most powerful cultivator in the world.
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
Even 'normal' animals often have elemental powers and similar things.
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It looks ominous enough, especially if they get stronger over time and don't die a natural death.
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
Elves and Ettins leap immediately to mind. Various Norse monsters come across the border from the Danelaw decently regularly as well, and various more animalistic creatures.
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Turning back to the topic of cultivators of magical creatures. For example, if one of them became a Christian cultivator, would it have any fundamental effect on their essence, or would they simply add the powers of cultivators to their set of powers?
 
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
Elves and Ettins leap immediately to mind. Various Norse monsters come across the border from the Danelaw decently regularly as well, and various more animalistic creatures. There's lots of other stuff, but most of it isn't wildly common. Even 'normal' animals often have elemental powers and similar things.
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What kind of Elves are we talking about here? Fae?
 
H2F2 said:
How sacred is the Zeal transfer process?
I mean, is it possible, for example, to pay tithes to the church using your Zeal?

Are there any restrictions prohibiting excessive use of someone else's Zeal?
For example, the Pope, with his influence on the Christian world, could receive Zeal in almost unlimited quantities over the centuries, becoming the most powerful cultivator in the world.
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Transferring Zeal is like transferring any highly valuable thing and treated as such. And the Pope is the most powerful cultivator in Christendom to the same degree he is the richest, for just about the same reasons. Which, in this era, to be clear, does not mean he is either the richest or most powerful by any means (the Byzantine Emperor is likely both richer and more powerful, for instance).

You may also be overestimating average Pope lifespans in this era. Between the year 885 and 900 AD in real life there were no less than 7 Popes, many ruling for less than a year (one was only Pope for 20 days before dying) and none for more than 6 years. In the Written World, with a timeline multiplied by 10, those numbers are likewise multiplied by 10, but we're still talking 60 years at most for a comparatively long-serving Pope, not 'centuries'. And less than a year for some of the briefer tenures.

Now, both in real life and in-universe this is largely because one does not become Pope as a young man, and in this world they are powerful centuries old cultivators before ever becoming Pope, but it's still worth keeping in mind when thinking about how long a Pope can acquire power.

H2F2 said:
It looks ominous enough, especially if they get stronger over time and don't die a natural death.

Turning back to the topic of cultivators of magical creatures. For example, if one of them became a Christian cultivator, would it have any fundamental effect on their essence, or would they simply add the powers of cultivators to their set of powers?
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That's...not exactly how that works. Humans cultivate, animals do not generally do so in the strictest sense. They have powers and abilities but not cultivation per se. Companion animals, like Crowley, are a slightly different situation, and will be gone into more as things go forward, but even they don't get Zeal and Fervour and the whole Carolingian experience.

Constenanto said:
What kind of Elves are we talking about here? Fae?
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Ones from English mythology. So yeah, pretty much. Fae adjacent, anyway.
 
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An important note about the nature of Zeal, while we're discussing it:

Raising stats with Zeal alone is an abstraction, and not precisely accurate to the reality of the setting. In the reality of the world, raising most stats requires both Zeal and an equal amount of Training. That gets really fiddly though, so, as a game abstraction we only worry about the portion of your Training that is not being used to allow Zeal expenditures (this is why it is a smaller number...the real number is actually bigger than Zeal, the number you are shown is what you have on top of supporting Zeal).

But, in-universe, if Audrey were suddenly given 500 Zeal she could absolutely not spend it all immediately on stats. She would need to gradually work through it over the course of years to use the empowerment properly. If you ever hypothetically got a reward like that, we'd impose a per-turn Zeal expenditure cap on stat boosts to reflect this. This is worth bearing in mind when considering why people might not be handing out, or receiving, more than a certain amount of Zeal. Reinald's gift to Audrey of about a year's worth of Zeal was probably about as much as she could actually handle and internalize relatively quickly, and even then we're likely fudging things slightly in her favor in the name of expedience.
 
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DeadmanwalkingXI said:
You may also be overestimating average Pope lifespans in this era. Between the year 885 and 900 AD in real life there were no less than 7 Popes, many ruling for less than a year (one was only Pope for 20 days before dying) and none for more than 6 years. In the Written World, with a timeline multiplied by 10, those numbers are likewise multiplied by 10, but we're still talking 60 years at most for a comparatively long-serving Pope, not 'centuries'. And less than a year for some of the briefer tenures.

Now, both in real life and in-universe this is largely because one does not become Pope as a young man, and in this world they are powerful centuries old cultivators before ever becoming Pope, but it's still worth keeping in mind when thinking about how long a Pope can acquire power.
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But every decade prolongs life expectancy by a hundred years. Are the candidates for pope so powerful that even the influence of the pope for several decades does not give them the opportunity to accumulate so much Zeal to move into a new decade?
 
H2F2 said:
But every decade prolongs life expectancy by a hundred years. Are the candidates for pope so powerful that even the influence of the pope for several decades does not give them the opportunity to accumulate so much Zeal to move into a new decade?
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See above regarding how internalizing Zeal to do things like increase in Decade can take quite a while as you need Training as well...they often just don't have enough time.

Related to this, you may also be underestimating how expensive raising in Decades is at higher cultivation level. If you follow the progression you see on the existing Decades and extrapolate, it'd be over 100,000 Zeal to go from the 10th Decade to the 11th, and most people elected Pope are likely higher Decade than that, if I were to guess, and could even need something like 1,000,000 Zeal (going from 13th Decade to 14th Decade) to advance. Given needed Training, that takes a good long while...it's obviously not impossible, as people do it, but it's not a given by any means.

Those are ballpark numbers, mind you, but they're in the right order of magnitude, which is the important bit for understanding how this works.

And, of course, not all Popes die peacefully. The number who do is probably significantly lower in a cultivation world.
 
Do great holy relics exist or at least theoretically exist in any way?
For example, the holy grail or the crown of thorns and others like that.
It is clear that we will never see them, but what in theory could they do or give to their user?
 
H2F2 said:
Do great holy relics exist or at least theoretically exist in any way?
For example, the holy grail or the crown of thorns and others like that.
It is clear that we will never see them, but what in theory could they do or give to their user?
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Sure. Magic items in general very much exist, so do the important ones, and the important ones are very powerful indeed. And they could do most of the stuff it's said they could do mythologically.
 
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Is it possible to increase Grace through doing good deeds?
For example, especially zealous protection of mortals from monsters or donations for the benefit of the poor?
Or is Grace earned exclusively during church rituals and increasing Hama?
 
H2F2 said:
Is it possible to increase Grace through doing good deeds?
For example, especially zealous protection of mortals from monsters or donations for the benefit of the poor?
Or is Grace earned exclusively during church rituals and increasing Hama?
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That's not directly possible, I don't believe. Or at the very least vanishingly rare. That said, that kind of behavior is likely to result in rewards of various sorts...the Rosary Bead being an example of that sort of thing, drawing an angel's attention is one way to get a Revelation, Grace inclines powerful people to notice when you do that sort of thing, and so on. Lots of possibilities depending on the situation.
 
How would it work mechanically if I came up with a move that used both a Shape and a Style. Or a Revelation and something else, etc.

For example, I thought of using Ground Shape to launch into the air and then Hordebreaker to just slam our entire body into an opponent.
 
Assuming it's like NorseQuest, I imagine combining moves would be possible but you would have to use them separately, rather than getting a single combined Rote. Do in your example, we'd need a Ground Rote capable of launching someone into the air, and a Hordebreaker Rote that'd be a slam. Although I could be completely wrong, ultimately Deadman has the final say.
 
Kiera said:
How would it work mechanically if I came up with a move that used both a Shape and a Style. Or a Revelation and something else, etc.

For example, I thought of using Ground Shape to launch into the air and then Hordebreaker to just slam our entire body into an opponent.
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There are a a few ways to do this.

Firstly, and simplest, you can just combine a Feat and a Rote in combat (or two Rotes, or whatever). If you do this in one action, you'd pay the Fervour for both and likely a surcharge for combo-ing them (I'll look at details and see about what that surcharge should be...the Norse pay 50% extra on the more expensive of the two effects when they do this, I may fiddle with that for a Chivalric Cultivator, some Feats or Rotes might also be combo-able without the surcharge and will be noted as such if so, I could see that being true of a jump-booster).

So, in that example, you'd just buy a jumping Feat for Ground then combo it with Horde-Breaking Charge. This is probably all you need, and a necessary first step to doing a more permanent combo. This only works if the two effects actually work with each other coherently as one move...it'd be possible to combine a Ground-based leap with most offensive Rotes as that can easily be one continuous motion, but combo-ing Faulty Ground and GKB into one action? Not so much, those are separate things entirely.

If you have already done that (ie: have both pieces of the combo, have likely used said combo at least once), then a second option becomes available, and you could actually buy the combined effect as a single Feat or Rote, combining and possibly modifying the combined effects. Whether this would fall under a Feat or Rote and for what Shape/Style/Skill/etc. depends on the specific effect you are aiming for. That specific example would be under Horebreaker, I think.

That second option is usually only worthwhile if you're intending to use that specific combo a whole lot.

As a third option for the specific example you suggest rather than the question in general, you could just get a Meditation-equivalent Feat of Ground to enhance your jumps for a whole combat and use that with Horde-Breaking Charge, though that would likely jump a less impressive distance than an instant Feat that cost Fervour per individual jump.
 
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I believe you've had sufficient time, and I probably want to write my portion before Metaphor: ReFantazio drops tomorrow, so I think I'll lock you up.
Scheduled vote count started by Alectai on Oct 7, 2024 at 10:29 PM, finished with 43 posts and 10 votes.
  • [X] Plan Building our foundation
    -[X] [Focus Action] Bird bonding.
    -[X] [Secondary Action] Attended mass/communion.
    -[X] [Secondary Action] Spar with the other squires
    -[X] [Chancellery] Red-Black Lightning
    -[X] Training and Zeal (15 Training, 24 Zeal)
    –[X] Spend 3 Training on "Through Their Eyes" Meditation
    –[X] Spend 4 training to get perfect footing to refined.
    --[X] Spend 8 training on Clever Deflection (putting it to 14/27 to mastery).
    --[X] spend 19 zeal on getting to the 9th bead
    [X] Plan tournament prep.
    -[X] [Focus Action] Bird bonding.
    -[X] [Secondary Action] Attended mass/communion.
    -[X] [Secondary Action] spar with the other squires (specifically see if you can try for armored spars).
    -[X] [Chancellery] Red-Black Lightning
    -[X] Training and Zeal (15 Training, 24 Zeal)
    –[X] Spend 3 Training on "Through Their Eyes" Meditation
    –[X] Spend 4 training to get perfect footing to refined.
    --[X] Spend 3 training on getting an armor piercing Rote (or in not avelibe armor damaging).
    --[X]Spend 5 training on clever deflection (putting int 11/27 to mastery).
    –[X] Spend 16 Zeal on combat 5.
    --[X] spend 4 zeal on getting to the 6th dacade.
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