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NorseQuest (A Norse Xianxia)

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Wiggy said:
The issue is that only one of our kids gets the soul inheritance that lets them get advice from their ancestors 'safely' without drawing down the Enemy for talking about cultivation openly.
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That is a thorny problem. It may be the work of a generation or more just to feel out the boundaries of Old Power-Miser's awareness and devise a workable method for getting around that problem.

Another possibility is, say, to try and build up the clan's collective strength to the point where Grandson can tell all his grandkids how to cultivate at once and then they just hold the line, even against attacks much more powerful than the one that just hit us, holding on for long enough that the great-great-grandkids all collectively become a major breakout threat that way
 
I dont know If it helps, but I asked Imperial Fister a little while ago if The Enemy™ was a part of a religion they said yes.
 
You know, teaching other people how to cultivate.

We should probably map out a few realms first. That way, when we teach others, which is basically declaring war on The Enemy, we can quickly escalate a lot of people to Stage 2/3/etc of True Norse Cultivation. Because even after the initial attack, we'll be marked for death. Permanently. So once we declare war, we need to be able to quickly grow as a sect/clan, teaching as many Norsemen as possible how to do True Norse Cultivation while dealing with increasing amounts of escalation from The Enemy.

We shouldn't see it as a preparatory step against The Enemy, but as the inciting move where we try to change Norse culture or die in the attempt.
 
Couple of extremely minor addenda to the old animal husbandry infopost:

KreenWarrior said:
Pigs: Animals bred solely to transform feed into meat. They can have up to two litters a year at 12+ piglets a litter, and famously can eat slop (though I think if you're serious about pig-keeping you pay attention to the diet like with any other animal). They can be penned or released into woodlands and rounded up later, though that can result in wild boars.
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There was also an intermediate level, where the pigs are kept in buildings on the farm but are released (under supervision) to find forage for themselves. Forage might include, for example, acorns and so on in the woods near a farmstead (which were often intentionally managed woods where possible) or roots (this is a good way to dig up all the random crap roots left behind after you clear shrubs and so on to make a field suitable for cultiva- ah, plowing, sowing, and harvesting, to avoid any ambiguity :p).

Because you're keeping an eye on the pigs and shooing them back into their pens, you don't lose control and don't get as many wild boar problems, but you get more than if (purely hypothetically) you kept them in a pen all the time and fed them slops. The catch is that unless it is very large, a farm probably won't produce enough waste edibles for many pigs to thrive, so letting the pigs forage is kind of important.

Anyway, whether your pigs are penned up or released to roam is kind of a sliding scale. There's also an angle here where farmers deliberately use livestock's eating habits to clear fields of weeds and random vegetation so they can be cultivat- ah, plowed, sown, and harvested.

Cattle: The most prestigious farm animal, many cultures (including the one Halla's in) measure wealth in part by how many cows you keep in your herd. They give lots of milk (though we're centuries before modern milk cow breeding) and have 1-2 calves each year (and you want to calve them to keep the milk going). Cows are also important in that they can pull plows and do other labor. Generally you castrate male cattle for either meat or labor animals, but not sure if that was practiced back in this time period
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It absolutely was done in real life during the Norse era, because real life farmers didn't want to deal with large numbers of angry horny rampaging bulls running around all the time. As I understand it, cattle have the same male/female ratio as most animals, around about 50/50, and "50% of all your cattle" is way more bulls than any normal cattle rancher wants to put up with.

In this setting, where the rivers of macho run fast and deep and it's quite possible that any real Norseman who even knows how to rhyme with "drengr" is all like "lol just punch the bull right between the eyes and that'll take the wind out of his sails lmao," for all I know the practice may be a bit less common, but there's probably some resemblance to real life here.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
Two possibilities occur to me:

1) The Enemy is contending with other (extremely powerful) forces, over long time scales. This is why the Enemy is likely to intervene disproportionately against someone who, say, starts teaching secrets systematically, because that's the kind of thing that spreads like a fungus whenever you turn your back for a few decades because you're busy. When you catch something like that, you have to snuff it out early or it starts making you micromanage your response, which is bad if you're already dealing with a bigger problem.

2) The Enemy's power is huge, but has been gathered slowly over a very long period of time. Hundreds, thousands of years. The Enemy is smart about knowing that sometimes it has to expend power to gain power, or to prevent a threat from arising, but it also doesn't want to waste anything, because a little waste would go a long way towards tipping it over into a downward spiral. So the Enemy is an old power-miser* and acts at all times as if the bulk of its resources are to be kept out of play unless there's a clear, immediate need, as if its attention were elsewhere.

Either is possible. There are probably other explanations too.
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*(Hmm, is there a kenning there, maybe? Because it does fit the whole 'suppressing true cultivation' thing)
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One thing we actually know is that there are Gods out there, and that at least a few of them don't like the Enemy, and are able to push in its stuff to a degree when it makes itself too obvious. So it may be that its responses are limited in some cases not by available resources but by how loud it's willing to go.
 
Sirrocco said:
One thing we actually know is that there are Gods out there, and that at least a few of them don't like the Enemy, and are able to push in its stuff to a degree when it makes itself too obvious. So it may be that its responses are limited in some cases not by available resources but by how loud it's willing to go.
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Or by having already gone loud enough that it's effectively locked in a wrestling match with one or more of the gods, looping back to my case (1).
 
Alectai said:
It's just irritating, you know? Who the fuck was dumbass enough to pay a price so great that it gave the Enemy near perfect knowledge of Cultivation and anyone who dips their toes into it?
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Keep in mind, for all that the Norse gods kick ass and play at being tricksters, the do not, nay, they HATE paying their due when a bargain is struck.
Shard said:
You know, teaching other people how to cultivate.

We should probably map out a few realms first. That way, when we teach others, which is basically declaring war on The Enemy, we can quickly escalate a lot of people to Stage 2/3/etc of True Norse Cultivation. Because even after the initial attack, we'll be marked for death. Permanently. So once we declare war, we need to be able to quickly grow as a sect/clan, teaching as many Norsemen as possible how to do True Norse Cultivation while dealing with increasing amounts of escalation from The Enemy.

We shouldn't see it as a preparatory step against The Enemy, but as the inciting move where we try to change Norse culture or die in the attempt.
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i mean... there is a stupid big move we can do for that.... It would need Norseman to have a normal writing system, not the "too real so its magic" runic system we currently have though. And it needs to be spread around widely.

Get fucking big boulders, or a small mountain even, and make pillars out of it/them. Big enough norsemen need to fly or jump high to read the top.
Write on it the instructions, preferably coded in some way (not with runes though) and put them in our fyjgla.
Go around in the bigger towns and drop them in the night, then leave for the next
Enjoy the chaos and mayhem in our wake. :V

As much as it pains me, Great Teacher Halla is probably not the best endgame for Halla, currently.
She is kind of the second founder of her family. She needs to take care and cut lose ends from Steinar's time, accumulate a starting capital for her kids and prep the next heir for Charred soul as best she can....

Our next PC? They probably need to get around the North, collect info and make bonds. Networking, basically.

Now, i know thats just my opinion, but as long as long them plans go? i think thats a decent first draft.

On another note though, i think we should follow the tried and true method of serial reincarnators: Master a new field of knowledge each life.
Sure, all of them need to be able to fight and farm, but stuff like Seidr? Shapecrafting or forging? they are all fields that will make great impacts on the next heir, because the price is already paid and the teacher is always with them.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Or by having already gone loud enough that it's effectively locked in a wrestling match with one or more of the gods, looping back to my case (1).
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Well, it clearly is locked into a fight with the Gods (we've seen both Thor and Odin take steps to thwart its designs). After re-reading it, though... I get the impression that the Gods are actually weaker. Like, they're basically Ancient Cultivator status, and they do what they can to thwart its designs, often in little ways, but they can't attack it directly, or even resist it in a matter of force-against-force. Thor wiped out some foemen who were coming after us in a probing attack because he happened to be in the area. Odin cloaked Halla from its sight for a time, but could no longer do so once she advanced too far. I'm starting to get the impression that they're all playing the game of "being very careful about making big moves" too.

So... we start to see a cadence to the thing, then. The idea is to build up as far as you can, to reinforce your defenses, and to only offer provocation when you've already advanced well past the provocation that you offer.

Another thought... it's possible (it even feels probable) that the Enemy is not rational. It's not necessarily taking the game theory optimal move each time. Instead, it is full of hate and low cunning - it corrupts where it can, because Corruption Is Good, and it lashes out when offended. It's possible that it's not seeking to destroy threats so much as punish temerity... it's just that there are so many bloody humans out there that it can't really even pay attention to them all, or necessarily remember them.
 
Sirrocco said:
Well, it clearly is locked into a fight with the Gods (we've seen both Thor and Odin take steps to thwart its designs). After re-reading it, though... I get the impression that the Gods are actually weaker. Like, they're basically Ancient Cultivator status, and they do what they can to thwart its designs, often in little ways, but they can't attack it directly, or even resist it in a matter of force-against-force. Thor wiped out some foemen who were coming after us in a probing attack because he happened to be in the area. Odin cloaked Halla from its sight for a time, but could no longer do so once she advanced too far. I'm starting to get the impression that they're all playing the game of "being very careful about making big moves" too.
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Then again, Thor and Odin may also be busy dealing with other problems and having to play it cagey and not exert their maximum strength all the time or risk overextending themselves. Because they, too, have rivals and enemies. Such as the Jotun, potentially such as Loki and Hel, potentially such as the Christians, and who knows who-all else?

It's certainly common in cultivation settings to see a situation where multiple factions are stalemated despite having plenty of prodigiously powerful superbeings as their respective leaders, because the leaders have to operate under logistical constraints and avoid making themselves vulnerable to peer competitors. Which, I perceive, can create an environment where entire mortal lifespans may pass without the front lines moving very much, and where the actions of low-level cultivators are relevant at least on the scale their power permits them to act on. Because the demigods who could theoretically blow everything away with a wave of the hand are busy or their hands are, in effect, tied.
 
Sirrocco said:
Well, it clearly is locked into a fight with the Gods (we've seen both Thor and Odin take steps to thwart its designs). After re-reading it, though... I get the impression that the Gods are actually weaker. Like, they're basically Ancient Cultivator status, and they do what they can to thwart its designs, often in little ways, but they can't attack it directly, or even resist it in a matter of force-against-force. Thor wiped out some foemen who were coming after us in a probing attack because he happened to be in the area. Odin cloaked Halla from its sight for a time, but could no longer do so once she advanced too far. I'm starting to get the impression that they're all playing the game of "being very careful about making big moves" too.
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I interpreted it as 'the God's can't attack the Enemy' not because they're too weak but rather the Enemy refuses to engage with them. Which, well, doesn't change anything. But I didn't get any indication that the God's were weaker than the Enemy or necessarily stronger. Like, the Gods clearly can't deal with the Enemy, but at the same time the Enemy doesn't seem able to deal with the Gods. I'd say that we don't know enough about True Cultivation to really say that Odin's inability to help us comes from a place of weakness or something else.

Overall, I think the Enemy is stronger than the Gods at some things, but weaker than them in some other aspects. Something like the Enemy has something that prevents the Gods from dealing with them, but perhaps the Gods have too much individual power for the Enemy to actually do anything about them. Like, Thor is a scary fucking guy. But as far as I can tell, his strength is a very literal one - rather than fuck you through messing with fate/causality, he'd just come over and whack you with Mjolnir.

Although a point in your favour is the fact that Enemy somehow managed to entrench itself in Norse lands even more than the Norse Gods themselves. Unless the Enemy is Norse in origin, like Ymir or something.
 
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TheCount said:
i mean... there is a stupid big move we can do for that.... It would need Norseman to have a normal writing system, not the "too real so its magic" runic system we currently have though. And it needs to be spread around widely.
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Et cetera censeo... We have never seriously tried to use the runes to store information.
All we do with it is using it in magic where we want to maximize the "too real so its magic" effects. (Which isn't bad, i really like those parts, but: )
We haven't tried to use the runes to hide knowledge (which seems lie it should work, with the whole "rune" etymologically relating to secret*) or use rune magic to preserve texts (imagine something like "may these runes keep the knowledge and show their secret to those who read it", just with more than 10 seconds of thought put into it, used as runemagic surrounding our speculative cultivation texts). Or heck even just writing runes without the carving and painting ritual of runemagic.

TheCount said:
Our next PC? They probably need to get around the North, collect info and make bonds. Networking, basically.
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Get around the north, maybe also get around central (HRE) and western europe. If we could get our hands on velum/parchment (paper like made from animal skins) that could be helpful. Also connect with germanic pagans in christian lands could be informative.


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Simon_Jester said:
In this setting, where the rivers of macho run fast and deep and it's quite possible that any real Norseman who even knows how to rhyme with "drengr" is all like "lol just punch the bull right between the eyes and that'll take the wind out of his sails lmao," for all I know the practice may be a bit less common, but there's probably some resemblance to real life here.
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You castrate cattle when they're small calves, no need to orthstirr up and punch out full grown bulls. :)
 
TehChron said:
You dont know much about Christianity. Do you?
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The issue is that Converting isn't a Good End.

It might defeat the Enemy in some fashion, but it does so by effectively conceding the field and just burning it to ashes. Yes, the Adversary is either defeated or hobbled to such a degree that it never troubles the world to any reasonable degree again, but it comes at the cost of losing all the potential of what the Norse could be if it was defeated.

The Norse system being as egalatarian as it is happens to be fantastic, it's just that it's being co-opted by some unknowable thing that tries to bend it against what it's best at--which is to say, cultivating and protecting the land.

Then again, I dunno if you were agreeing or disagreeing or what, I am not on a lot of sleep right now.
 
I think as a general approach to cultivation, we should be as paranoid/properly prepared as possible. Think about the multiple ways things can go wrong, or if they go right, how The Enemy will try to punish us for succeeding. Get countermeasures for possible ways things can go wrong. Experiment in ways where the failure more is 'welp, I guess I destroyed this something I liked but isn't actually important to me' rather than.. well, we've already seen some other possible failure modes.

Honestly Seidr and Shapecrafting are both very helpful for experimentation because you can experiment on like, other things. Not yourself.
 
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If the Enemy is powered by sin/blood debt or something similar, I'm not surprised that Christianity is effective at suppressing it - Christianity as a religion is obsessed with the concept of expiation of sin. Jesus dying to forgive the sins of humankind is it's whole thing. And there's confession, communion, last rites, various means of atonement, etc.

Raises questions about other cultivation systems but we'll learn more if we ever get there I'm sure.
 
Shard said:
I think as a general approach to cultivation, we should be as paranoid/properly prepared as possible. Think about the multiple ways things can go wrong, or if they go right, how The Enemy will try to punish us for succeeding. Get countermeasures for possible ways things can go wrong. Experiment in ways where the failure more is 'welp, I guess I destroyed this something I liked but isn't actually important to me' rather than.. well, we've already seen some other possible failure modes.

Honestly Seidr and Shapecrafting are both very helpful for experimentation because you can experiment on like, other things. Not yourself.
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With Seidr there is also the fact that so far our cultivation requires both Warriorpath and Seeress/Seidrpath stuff. We mostly do Warriorpath stuff with a very diminuitiv side of Seeress/Seidr/Womanspath (knowing weaving), and we have very successfully used cultivation for Warriorpath stuff.
When we get Seidr it may give us lots of new things for cultivation, and Seidr may get boosted by cultivation greatly.
 
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Alectai said:
Then again, I dunno if you were agreeing or disagreeing or what, I am not on a lot of sleep right now.
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If the issue is one of past sin or debts, then take a moment to understand what the meaning of Easter for Christianity is.

Christians arent ceding anything by that metric. They already won, thus that contest is meaningless.
 
But Christianity taking over the Norse is the neutral ending, right? So is the debt stuff wrong, not applicable here, or there's an even worser fate than the Enemy winning?
 
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