NorseQuest (A Norse Xianxia)
- Thread starter I.F. Ister
- Start date
- Original Fantasy Action
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- Tags
- norse mythology (mythology) original xianxia cultivation western cultivation ask sirihand did your mother tell you anything? discussion pleases yggdrasil farming gloating gets people killed granary management hubris is a coward's word you will die norsemen do not die when they are killed the qm has a bad memory the qm is bad at math viking courtroom drama (legal drama) vikings
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
I mean, it still helps, in the sense that it effectively eats the first hit or two that might actually punch through his DR. And it also lets him put Shapeshifts into things that aren't DR (Though it's hard to beat "DR on par with a giant necromantic abomination" as a combat strategy.)
It doesn't necessarily have to be armour, we could do something like a helmet with runes on it or a sword, it depends on what they've got currently. Although IIRC, didn't we get an agreement to buy iron from the dwarves at relatively cheap prices at the conclusion of our mercenary contract?
I recall that was part of Deadman's plan.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
We've got a modest drip, but making Mail for Giant-Blooded is way beyond the level of 'A Modest Drip'
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We actually have a bunch of projects we need to do for ourself as well (all our weapons other than Sagaseeker need to be updated, we need a new Wood Axe, more Training Items, which are good for everyone, would be nice...). Helmets for us and ideally Abjorn would also be on the itinerary. I suspect we're gonna be doing at least 2 crafting projects every turn for the rest of the year.
All of which is not to disagree with the idea of arming up our huskarls, though as Alectai said we're not gonna be making them mail (Too. Much. Iron.). New weapons, on the other hand, are very possible.
I actually did a breakdown of this he said was accurate. Lemme find that:
So, backup weapons for Gabriel and Abjorn (likely Saxes) are possible, as is up to two Saxes for Tryggr and a very large Axe for Trausti. We could also reforges Stigmar's Mail for him, since that doesn't require any Iron he doesn't already have.
If it's Realized we can put Runes on it. This seems like something Runes can do if we come up with the right wording.
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Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Please, please god, no, don't just spent 2 actions crafting for the next year in game, I don't mind doing one per turn, but that's just too many when we've got other things we could be doing, like refurbishing the Underhouse and following up on the Heart of the Hading Quest.
And all that dismisses setting things up for Disclosure, which should be our biggest short-term priority.
And all that dismisses setting things up for Disclosure, which should be our biggest short-term priority.
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
Disclosure should be a mid term goal, not a short term one. We know we are still sorely lacking in combat multipliers and allies to survive Disclosure.
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Of course, after we do enough Disclosures, and suffer through them, the Enemy should pretty quickly hit a point where it cannot afford to spend the forces needed to squash the Disclosure. Squashing one or two people doing Disclosure, sure. Squashing several hundred people?
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Of course, after we do enough Disclosures, and suffer through them, the Enemy should pretty quickly hit a point where it cannot afford to spend the forces needed to squash the Disclosure. Squashing one or two people doing Disclosure, sure. Squashing several hundred people?
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Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Then we should start trying to make some now.
The longer we wait, the harder Disclosure is going to be. We've already taken a step to prep a battlefield by the best engineers we have access to, and we're upgrading our gear to the highest standard available without unrealistically long investments. Steinarr's still around for now but probably isn't going to last much longer before his Fated Day, which means we've got him as a panic button if things get really spicy.
But just taking no serious steps towards it because "It's too far away" means we'll never get there, and it was ultimately Hallr's greatest folly to trust basically nobody with the Secret. Communities are one of the few things we have as hedges against the Enemy's nonsense, and he kept it all to himself. Sure he was an absolute beast, but that didn't help him when the chips were down.
Hell, maybe start inviting Folkmarr and company over, that's a connection to tug on now that the Horra thing is sorted out, and pre-Drysalt preparation is going to be good for everyone involved. If we can get that relationship up a bit more, that might be another batch of allies we can bring in.
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WhoTheHeckity
But no one ever asks HowTheHeckity
- Location
- Murica 🦅
[X] That it comes to life, but does nothing
- Location
- California
Ehehehe, whoops. At least she doesn't seem to blame us, but Aki better have got everything sorted by the time we show up or he's going to have one peeved Seeress to answer to.
Other than that, the scene saying goodbye to him was lovely. Aki was always one of my favorite characters, and I'm already looking forward to the trip to see him.
Also, under no circumstances should we have the straw puppet restart it's mission. It's mission is to hunt down the seeds and kill whoever stole them.
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
We can cheese the Disclosure Scaling Difficulty by having Aki do the disclosure if he's figured out the Riddle, can't he? We can also cheese it via Ginnunagagap, and there's probably other methods too. Hallr did trust other people with The Secret, multiple times even.
On my part Disclosure should be something we do after tons of preparations anyway. Preparations that definitely makes it a mid-term goal just in term of timeframe if we want to actually succeed.
- Location
- California
We're already a good way through the prep for disclosure anyway, with the promise of Dwarf aid to set up the battlefield. However I don't think we're ever going to be able to make it anything close to safe or a sure thing. The Enemy might not be allowed to make it impossible to survive, but they can make it improbable to do so.
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
[X] That it comes to life, but does nothing
Well, my point is that even tons of preparations would put even a successful Disclosure quite a few years away. Enough that you can't and shouldn't call it a 'short term goal'.
It's 250oz of mail for a regular sized person, and 500oz for a giant-blooded person, right? (Or 400oz if we went for short mail.)
...How much Food does one unit of Gold or Silver buy, and how many units of surplus Food do we produce a year?
I think training items are probably likely to hit diminishing returns pretty quickly once we go past the stat-boosting ones, and also it feels a bit munchkiny to me. Don't disagree with updating our weapons, helmets for everyone sound good. Another thing I wondered is if for certain kinds of items, we could use one action slot to make a batch of the same thing at once.
I don't really disagree with this, although if there's such a sense of urgency here, it feels weird to me that there wasn't more opposition to Aki leaving, or anyone advocating getting him to disclose to the others before he left, given that whole thing where we told him the secret of True Cultivation. Or any effort to make plans where Halla takes people to Ginnungagap/Niflheim and tells them there, which we already know is a hole in the Enemy's information security scheme so wide you can sail a boat through it. (Hint hint.)
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
The issue is that Ginnungagap isn't free, that particular part of it is, and it's not exactly a safe place to go to either. We were allowed there because we had fair business, but I imagine she'd be oathbound to give us a hard time if we were just trying to take advantage.
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
The Enemy isn't 'forbidden' to like send enough forces to kill us from my understanding. It is, however, limited by the number of actual forces it has available to kill us. So it will pragmatically allocate what it believes should be 'enough' to guarantee success in killing everyone*, drawing down from it's reserves and other fronts as needed.
Which means that once enough Norsepeople do Disclosures, The Enemy will be forced to give up on squashing them, because there's now just too many hotspots for it to now shut down.
*This probably also part of the scaling**, since if you managed the first kill attempt, then it needs to recalibrate you upward.
**Unclear what determines the scaling though, since logically it should only scale by what it can detect.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Remember we get one free social per turn on top of our three actions. So we can be doing that, one other action, and two crafting actions every single turn. I'm not sure what you have in mind that's more action intensive than that? Like, the Underhouse is one action to clear it out and then one to furnish it at most (more likely, the latter is Work Dice or Research Dice), and the Hading is likewise a single action.
So, to be clear here, what actions do you want to do to set up Disclosure? I'm not against starting to prep, but I'm not sure what actions you actually want us to take in pursuit of this that preclude spending a fair amount of time crafting? I mean, we have the Dwarf agreement to help set up a place, we have a collection of people we hope can survive it, how is getting those people geared up not prepping for it, and for anything else that may ensue?
We're also definitely not doing it before the Vestfold trip, so...we're talking at least 9-10 turns from now. I don't think crafting is getting in the way of the needed number of actions given the time frame.
I think there's definitely a place for a few more, though certainly not an unlimited number by any means. Like, 3 more at most, to be clear, but Training Items for, like Weapocraft, Chop, and Worplay would be very nice to have. Or maybe replace the Chop Item with one for Glima and/or Fang if we can (Style items aren't impossible from what IF said, one for Stoker State is just not viable). They're a lot less urgent, though, it's true, except for maybe the Glima/Fang one if we can figure that out.
We haven't been given any 'batch' options as of yet, and I suspect that might require a Trick, and whether it does or not it seems almost certain to reduce the quality of the items in question.
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Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Yeah, the Enemy hates Disclosure because it gives it more moles to squash. Hence how he punishes it severely--but he still isn't willing to just retroactively magic a kill squad in place for anything short of an existential threat. (Presumably, the Nornir extract a hell of a price from him whenever he gets caught doing this shit, and it's not something he's willing to do for anything other than being in a headlock)
Which is what fucked Hallr. Presumably, he wasn't aware that the Enemy could do that, this is also why victory in one lifetime is straight up impossible--because if it looks like you're about to Win, the Enemy will cheat. You can only beat him by him not having the resources anymore to Cheat hard enough to stop you. One of the ways of doing that is to steadily raise the base of knowledge though individual steps that aren't enough to trigger an insurmountable response, but in aggregate are more than he can handle.
This is actually why BOOK is important. Because presumably, the Enemy can't double tap a single source of Disclosure. He's taking advantage of the Oral Tradition because information passed down that way is always a new Disclosure, and therefore he gets to act with extreme force each time. Once a Book is written, presumably he can only attack during the course of committing your knowledge to paper, and can't just attack again anytime someone reads it. Especially if the knowledge isn't gifted freely and you have to work your way through it independently.
The Enemy didn't get to take a swipe at Halla immediately after she figured out Cultivation. He just threw a couple Foemen at her to see if she was secretly some absolute beast who had been hiding her strength all this time, and he launched an Attack of Opportunity by enabling the Troll-Man attack to happen at the same time. But as we've also seen, we're not getting attacked by armies of Foemen every turn. He's aware of Cultivators, and can apparently intuit your level of Orthstirr by looking at how much Odr you can cultivate (And thus, he knew to launch his prepared probing attack when our Odr cultivation dropped down from fucking up with the Pockets), but he doesn't have access to your character sheet automatically, and his attention is finite, even if his awareness is not, so he's not going to know Literally Everything about you because he's got more important things to be paying attention to as long as his Attention hasn't been invoked. Ironjaw undoubtedly is very much taking up the lion's share of his current Attention right this second, especially after he ganked a Steelfather using a piece of the Weapon.
We're more an afterthought than anything else. He'll take a swipe at us if it's cheap and easy, and he'll react appropriately if we show signs of no longer being a small problem (By breaking through to Realm 2 or by starting Disclosure), but he's not constantly scrutinizing our every action just yet.
Which is what fucked Hallr. Presumably, he wasn't aware that the Enemy could do that, this is also why victory in one lifetime is straight up impossible--because if it looks like you're about to Win, the Enemy will cheat. You can only beat him by him not having the resources anymore to Cheat hard enough to stop you. One of the ways of doing that is to steadily raise the base of knowledge though individual steps that aren't enough to trigger an insurmountable response, but in aggregate are more than he can handle.
This is actually why BOOK is important. Because presumably, the Enemy can't double tap a single source of Disclosure. He's taking advantage of the Oral Tradition because information passed down that way is always a new Disclosure, and therefore he gets to act with extreme force each time. Once a Book is written, presumably he can only attack during the course of committing your knowledge to paper, and can't just attack again anytime someone reads it. Especially if the knowledge isn't gifted freely and you have to work your way through it independently.
The Enemy didn't get to take a swipe at Halla immediately after she figured out Cultivation. He just threw a couple Foemen at her to see if she was secretly some absolute beast who had been hiding her strength all this time, and he launched an Attack of Opportunity by enabling the Troll-Man attack to happen at the same time. But as we've also seen, we're not getting attacked by armies of Foemen every turn. He's aware of Cultivators, and can apparently intuit your level of Orthstirr by looking at how much Odr you can cultivate (And thus, he knew to launch his prepared probing attack when our Odr cultivation dropped down from fucking up with the Pockets), but he doesn't have access to your character sheet automatically, and his attention is finite, even if his awareness is not, so he's not going to know Literally Everything about you because he's got more important things to be paying attention to as long as his Attention hasn't been invoked. Ironjaw undoubtedly is very much taking up the lion's share of his current Attention right this second, especially after he ganked a Steelfather using a piece of the Weapon.
We're more an afterthought than anything else. He'll take a swipe at us if it's cheap and easy, and he'll react appropriately if we show signs of no longer being a small problem (By breaking through to Realm 2 or by starting Disclosure), but he's not constantly scrutinizing our every action just yet.
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I just went back to look at the update where we asked about that, and that's not my reading of the answer? It seems like anywhere on the Gjoll and near Niflheim would work. Which is... potentially a lot of places, it's a big river. It's dangerous, sure, but apparently not dangerous enough that Halla was not able to sail up and down it completely alone and return unscathed. And it's not as if regular Disclosure isn't insanely dangerous as well.
But also my primary point was that... there was no discussion of this at all apart from me joking about it at the time. People weren't coming up with hare-brained schemes or inventive plans to take advantage of it. (For example, just do the entire thing on a boat, without setting foot on the bridge.) There's been more plans proposed for how to mess around with forging things than there have for taking advantage of this massive gap in the Enemy's ability to do Disclosure.
So it's hard to see any real sense of urgency from the playerbase on this topic - the same as with everything related to Odr Cultivation in general.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Halla was dropped in pretty much right where she needed to go, and had an Einherjiar escorting her while she was fishing Aki out. She did her homework, skipped the dangerous Instant Death portions, and had high level overwatch because she was willing to be polite.
I really don't want to assume that just because a relatively curated area was safe as long as we were polite means the entirety of that section of the place is safe.
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
I mostly see Ginnunagagap as a 'proof of concept' thing. Modgudr did say the reason it's fine is because The Enemy can't hear or see you there, so it has no information available to react to you with. Which implies that other methods of 'just don't be heard' should also be viable.
One idea I had was..
High Seidr:
1) Realize an object. This could even be The Book.
2) Develop High Seidr spell where you invite the spirit of a Realized Object into your soulscape.
3) Tell Book everything inside your Soulscape.
4) Teach High Seidr spell to whoever wants to learn.
5) Whoever wants to learn uses High Seidr spell to get Book Spirit into their soul.
6) Book Spirit does Disclosure inside their soul, where The Enemy can't hear or see them.
One idea I had was..
High Seidr:
1) Realize an object. This could even be The Book.
2) Develop High Seidr spell where you invite the spirit of a Realized Object into your soulscape.
3) Tell Book everything inside your Soulscape.
4) Teach High Seidr spell to whoever wants to learn.
5) Whoever wants to learn uses High Seidr spell to get Book Spirit into their soul.
6) Book Spirit does Disclosure inside their soul, where The Enemy can't hear or see them.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
I don't think High Seidr can be taught without being Initiated, so I doubt that'll work. Low Seidr works because it's ultimately an Orthstirr weaving that generates the trace amounts of Odr needed to fuel it, High Seidr directly involves using Odr to bribe biddable Spirits that you've beckoned to you through one method or another.
Also, the Enemy isn't an idiot, if multiple people start suddenly achieving Breakthroughs in the same place, he's going to be able to figure it out given time. If you tie your thing to something that can be directly attacked from the Black Forest, chances are that he'll have them killed or subverted.
The trick, it seems, is taking the reins of Initiation out of his hands. That seems to be how you introduce something new to the greater canon of Norse Cultivation. BOOK is a good way of doing that because he can't actually take a swipe at anyone who just reads it, and if we make it some kind of trial of wits to understand the secrets, he loses the ability to just assert himself as the one who imposes the Trial instead.
Also, the Enemy isn't an idiot, if multiple people start suddenly achieving Breakthroughs in the same place, he's going to be able to figure it out given time. If you tie your thing to something that can be directly attacked from the Black Forest, chances are that he'll have them killed or subverted.
The trick, it seems, is taking the reins of Initiation out of his hands. That seems to be how you introduce something new to the greater canon of Norse Cultivation. BOOK is a good way of doing that because he can't actually take a swipe at anyone who just reads it, and if we make it some kind of trial of wits to understand the secrets, he loses the ability to just assert himself as the one who imposes the Trial instead.
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