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NorseQuest (A Norse Xianxia)

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[X] Look for people willing to buy and sell cargo
[X] Listen to the local Skalds, learn what news there is in Denmark
[X] Go to the Jarl's hall and greet him

I like these. I have no real preference which first.

I definitely like Kare and want to recruit him. He seems interesting. I have no idea how he winds up with a wolf's head, but it's interesting.

As for Steel...fuck. I dunno what we do about that. Innovation, maybe?

The Lone badger said:
Hopefully Blackhand isn't going to come back while we're away and wander around the farmstead looking for us.
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He'd probably overhear where we are. Or just wait there for us.
 
[ ] Look for people willing to buy and sell cargo
[ ] Listen to the local Skalds, learn what news there is in Denmark
[ ] Go to the Jarl's hall and greet him

These three seem the best options, although we should probably start with meeting the Jarl?
 
Good god, it's even worse than I thought.

The Law of Steel means that the Same Things will happen again and again. The trappings will change, but History just... Doesn't happen. The same stories happen with different actors, again and again and again.
 
Steel is horrible in a way few things is, I'm reminded of Cosmere magic which works off Concepts, one of which is called Preservation. It's normally considered a good force but take to it's extremes it's basically freezing creation so nothing changes which is pretty similar to Steel. I feel like embracing Steel basically makes a person an undead in a way, eternal but unliving.
 
Alectai said:
Good god, it's even worse than I thought.

The Law of Steel means that the Same Things will happen again and again. The trappings will change, but History just... Doesn't happen. The same stories happen with different actors, again and again and again.
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Well, Steel isn't everywhere so it's not absolute, but I definitely think it's the main reason for the 10x time scale...things advance only 10% of the speed they should.
 
Imperial Fister said:
"You wanna know what the the Price of Steel is?" He whispers, time seeming to stutter to a halt as your heartrate picks up to an ear-splitting pitch. "It's you," he pokes you in the chest. "It's me," he drives a thumb into himself, his eyes never leaving yours for even a moment. "It's all of our children," he waves a hand across the ship, gesturing at each and every thing he speaks of, "It's the very ground beneath our feet. It's the air we breathe. It's every damn blade of grass growing in every damn field! The Price of Steel, the price to lock the present in place," he drives a finger towards the heavens as hundreds of headless fish bob in the churning waves, "is the future!"
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Alectai said:
Good god, it's even worse than I thought.

The Law of Steel means that the Same Things will happen again and again. The trappings will change, but History just... Doesn't happen. The same stories happen with different actors, again and again and again.
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The Norse can't grow or learn as a result, which completely fits with the Enemy's malice and their shacking of Norse cultivation. And it tells us exactly what kind of people the Steelfathers are to make such a deal. They lock the present down so they can maintain power.
 
The Enemy can't even be defeated as long as the Law of Steel says that the Future Can Never Come. Because overcoming the Enemy would be a milestone in history, and the Law of Steel won't allow that.

But he can wipe us out, because the Rise and Fall of empires and cultures is something the Law of Steel permits.
 
[X] Look for people willing to buy and sell cargo
[X] Listen to the local Skalds, learn what news there is in Denmark
[X] Go to the Jarl's hall and greet him

These seem good to me.

Imperial Fister said:
The sky darkens as the sun fails to rise. Shadows drape themselves off Sten's body as he looms like a specter in the night, suddenly towering over you like the mountains in the distance.

"You wanna know what the the Price of Steel is?" He whispers, time seeming to stutter to a halt as your heartrate picks up to an ear-splitting pitch. "It's you," he pokes you in the chest. "It's me," he drives a thumb into himself, his eyes never leaving yours for even a moment. "It's all of our children," he waves a hand across the ship, gesturing at each and every thing he speaks of, "It's the very ground beneath our feet. It's the air we breathe. It's every damn blade of grass growing in every damn field! The Price of Steel, the price to lock the present in place," he drives a finger towards the heavens as hundreds of headless fish bob in the churning waves, "is the future!"

Sten breathes heavily as the skies clear up over head.

"How," you whisper, voice full of frozen horror, "how do you defeat it?"

"I," Sten collapses in on himself, face contorted in agony, "I don't know. My teacher died before he could tell me."

"Fuck," you whisper, wishing very much that Blackhand were here with you.

"Fuck is right," Sten whispers in response, eyes locked to the blood-slick seas.
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Okay, but hear me out here...

...what if we punched it really hard?
 
MrRageQuit said:
The Norse can't grow or learn as a result, which completely fits with the Enemy's malice and their shacking of Norse cultivation.
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Steel is a worldwide problem, the Norse may have a worse issue with it than most, but it's not exclusive to them.

MrRageQuit said:
And it tells us exactly what kind of people the Steelfathers are to make such a deal. They lock the present down so they can maintain power.
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Not necessarily. It sounds like making yourself a Steelfather may trap you in stasis. You add a little bit to the world being in stasis as well, sure, but it's not any worse than making a steel artifact for the world, I don't think.
 
Personally, I think in an ideal world, we might have hoped was the secret of Steel's creation would contain some kind of riddle which could provide leads on destroying it. This isn't quite that, but it does tell us a lot. The antithesis of Steel is... creation, innovation and more broadly, change?

Honestly, my difficulty putting that into a plan of action is less finding an option, and more that there are quite a few. Halla has already done at least one project which qualifies here in terms of creating the book, and if we manage to create a Norse version of Knightly Armour, then we'll have created two genuine innovations. But how do we use those to destroy Steel? Do we somehow... think about them and use that to help us gain a burning will to resist stagnation that empowers us or something? That honestly might not be impossible, but I don't know what the best ways to experiment with it could be.

Alternately, you know what else is unambiguously a force for change and allowing new growth? Destruction. The fires of Ragnarök, for example, will usher in a new age and end the old. So it feels like the Blackhand answer to all problems of "Skill issue: Use hotter fire." would also apply here. Which seems diametrically opposed to using creation, but fundamentally destruction and creation are two faces of the same coin - whilst stagnation is more about not letting the coin be flipped at all.

I'm less stumped on an approach so much as trying to figure out how this narrows down the field.

(This is before getting into creative approaches to dealing with Steelfathers which don't involve directly destroying Steel, which is arguably a totally separate line of research.)
 
Skippy said:
Alternately, you know what else is unambiguously a force for change and allowing new growth? Destruction. The fires of Ragnarök, for example, will usher in a new age and end the old. So it feels like the Blackhand answer to all problems of "Skill issue: Use hotter fire." would also apply here. Which seems diametrically opposed to using creation, but fundamentally destruction and creation are two faces of the same coin - whilst stagnation is more about not letting the coin be flipped at all.
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Blackhand decided to just use the First Flame, also called Sky Forge's Fire and Ilmarinen's Fire.

It's not so much the heat, IMO, but the fact that it represents The Beginning Of All Things.
 
Alectai said:
The Enemy can't even be defeated as long as the Law of Steel says that the Future Can Never Come. Because overcoming the Enemy would be a milestone in history, and the Law of Steel won't allow that.

But he can wipe us out, because the Rise and Fall of empires and cultures is something the Law of Steel permits.
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So that adds another piece to our long-term action plan across history.
  • Complete the Enemy-proof initiation ritual with Halla, on top of her book (and spreading literacy) so that basic True Norse Cultivation can't be stomped out, and the successors will be able to reach her level much more swiftly and easily.
  • Continue developing further exploration of True Norse Cultivation, while getting through the landmines and traps the Enemy's laid out.
  • Destroy the Law of Steel, somehow.
  • ...and other objectives that crop up as we learn more about All for One the Enemy.
 
MrRageQuit said:
So that adds another piece to our long-term action plan across history.
  • Complete the Enemy-proof initiation ritual with Halla, on top of her book (and spreading literacy) so that basic True Norse Cultivation can't be stomped out, and the successors will be able to reach her level much more swiftly and easily.
  • Continue developing further exploration of True Norse Cultivation, while getting through the landmines and traps the Enemy's laid out.
  • Destroy the Law of Steel, somehow.
  • ...and other objectives that crop up as we learn more about All for One the Enemy.
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There's also, related to these, actually meaningfully changing Norse culture for the better. That's adjacent to several of these, but not quite the same thing.
 
Shard said:
Blackhand decided to just use the First Flame, also called Sky Forge's Fire and Ilmarinen's Fire.

It's not so much the heat, IMO, but the fact that it represents The Beginning Of All Things.
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Well, in that case it seems like he was attacking it more from the creation angle too, but it seems like destruction would logically work as well. Surtr's Fire, after all, is definitely a catalyst of ending one age of the world and ushering in a new beginning. Or the destructive force of Kali as one aspect of the cosmos, which both nourishes and devours new life in a cyclical process, etc..
 
I guess you can look at the Charred Soul as kinda the antithesis of Steel. Instead of one person living on forever, unchanging and themselves, it's a passing of knowledge from person to person, each innovating on each innovating on what the others did. Each growing with help from the last generation, but with their own personality and interests and findings. The nature's of the two are very opposite, a force of change, innovation, and growth that allows a whole line to eternally improve, where as one is a force of statis and eternity that allows one singular person to be Forever.
 
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