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Paths of Civilization

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Adhoc vote count started by Umi-san on May 29, 2017 at 12:56 PM, finished with 43025 posts and 118 votes.
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Do dead spirits collected by the Greater Spirit of Death eventually reincarnate, under the Ymaryn belief system?
 
Swimmingly said:
I just caught up with this quest, and, AN, this is really cool. Kudos. I find it interesting the way Ashryn splintered into Axchin and Arxyn, and the way that Gwygotha managed to splinter into part of a creation story, a demon, and Crow-knows what else. I was almost cheering out loud every time the shamans got their medical on, and the establishment of the Sacred Warding was awesome. There were tears in my eyes when I read about people sacrificing themselves to experimentation in order to cure the blue plague, and when seeing how that knowledge opened diplomatic relations with the Dead Priests.

I found the way you handled the development of experimental wisdom really interesting too, with the choice between different modalities of rationality.

AND I STILL WANT TO KNOW WHETHER MAGIC IS REAL.

There's so much weak evidence that it works, up to and including stuff like those apocalyptic droughts, and even some stronger evidence, like the shaman's work curing that one senile king, but almost all of it could come down to the placebo effect/understood phenomena that the shamans stumble into and practice as magic. The way that religious figures, including some specific ones invoked in magical rituals, are specific to the cultures they're worshiped by, and warp in name and story over time, suggests that it's at the very least a very flexible system. The success of the Spirit-Talkers in the early game, and their cave in the mountains - was that down to psychological effects? Psychoactive drugs?

And, most importantly, if there is magic, is it the sort that will get refined in the future, the sort that actually functions according to comprehensible scientific principles?
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It's probably best to treat our Shamans like Tech-priests from 40k. Lots of ritual that is probably up for grabs as to whether it does anything but a lot of knowledge and useful advice contained in the ritual.

You'll note that with our traits if there really is a magic system out there we will probably be the first to find it.
What'd you think of the Iron Sudden Event that happened? Blew me away.


Academia Nut said:
On the question of what happens to the Heart Soul after death, it is believed to enter a natural cycle of rebirth with other spirits. While biased towards animating human bodies, they can spend time in animal or even plant bodies for a time, and this is the primary source of 'contamination' of the human spirit, in that sometimes a Heart Soul that was once within an animal animates a gestating human, bringing slightly mismatched spiritual energies with it. The Heart and Mind Souls also each have a sex to them, and these can be accidentally mismatched. While this can cause considerable distress for a Mind Soul, it also provides both male and female energies in abundance, allowing for the working of powerful magic once the distress has been smoothed out. Lesser mismatches or the addition of extra souls are also attributed to other distresses and strengths.

Dead bodies, with their missing Heart Soul, are seen of as places where demons can hop in, but all but the most powerful demons can't actually animate the body, and instead thrash about within the corpse, casting their curses and causing disease and decay.
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Interesting.

So we have a form of reincarnation instead of any actual afterlife outside of the courts of the spirits which sound like they are invisible to mortals but still part of the World. It is also very interesting what this mismatched gender of the Heart and Mind can do. It almost looks like we consider folks of non-hetero gender to be magically super powerful.

Do I have these mostly right?


Swimmingly said:
What's the current naming style within the Ymaryn?
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-wyn- is also a very common particle in all named Ymaryn characters we've seen.

But to give examples from within common times we had Magwyna, Yelhmyn. A while back but not to long ago, and the -wyn- particle makes it's appearance.
 
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Ghostdevil said:
We need to somehow create English, so that I can start pronouncing these names without sounding stupid or wrong :p
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I just treat the -wyn- bits as *win* and ii as *ee* like from Creed. It's served me well enough.
Adhoc vote count started by BungieONI on May 29, 2017 at 1:03 PM, finished with 43033 posts and 119 votes.
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Umi-san said:
Tbh the mirror would be better spent on Mars or one of the outer planets.
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I disagree. Earth is our home, and it is also where we get the most benefit from a sunshade/mirror. The way I see it: we ain't going to move agriculture off the planet, no matter what.

By building the sunshade/mirror, we will be able to grow food where ever and whenever we want, while providing even more useful energy to the ecosystem.

Umi-san said:
The tunnel network might work for connecting through the Atlantic, but going the other way would probably be too far, and the creation and maintenance process of both tunnels would be an unbelievable amount of effort for a somewhat bottlenecked result. Zeppelins would be easier.
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I doubt a Zeppelin would be any better than plain old ships.

Meanwhile, as cities sprawled out into mega-city and metropolis, the more expensive it is to build above ground infrastructure, because of all the massive disruption caused to the surface.

So what you do? You go down, below the infrastructures and build a new layer. At least that's the idea.

In reality, this will only be viable once we improve tunnel boring technology and that above ground infrastructure disruption costs too much. Elon Musk claims he can make it orders of magnitude faster.
 
Fashism is when you get too much nationalism.
You need a minimum nationalism so your people stand up for your land. But there is a too much, where it stops to be something benign. The point is where your people stop considering other people to be human.
Thats why it's called national socialism. Translated its along the lines of, 'Only ours are real people.'. Treating only 'your people' socially. It doesn't have anything to do with socialism, except adding the word to itself.
Easy to understand, when you get down to the definitions of the terms.
 
Da Boyz said:
Blood for the Crow God!
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Feeding our chief deity with the blood of our enemies?

Further evidence that the Demon-God* Crow and the Thunderbird's Cronies are of the same type!

*I would like to petition that everytime we bring up Crow, we preface it with this. Because that is possibly the most metal title any of our pantheon will ever get.
 
Academia Nut said:
On the question of what happens to the Heart Soul after death, it is believed to enter a natural cycle of rebirth with other spirits. While biased towards animating human bodies, they can spend time in animal or even plant bodies for a time, and this is the primary source of 'contamination' of the human spirit, in that sometimes a Heart Soul that was once within an animal animates a gestating human, bringing slightly mismatched spiritual energies with it. The Heart and Mind Souls also each have a sex to them, and these can be accidentally mismatched. While this can cause considerable distress for a Mind Soul, it also provides both male and female energies in abundance, allowing for the working of powerful magic once the distress has been smoothed out. Lesser mismatches or the addition of extra souls are also attributed to other distresses and strengths.

Dead bodies, with their missing Heart Soul, are seen of as places where demons can hop in, but all but the most powerful demons can't actually animate the body, and instead thrash about within the corpse, casting their curses and causing disease and decay.
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So an Empty Man wouldn't quite be 'empty' as such, just animated by an especially clever and mighty demon, probably accused of having died during birthing or in early childhood, or the parents accused of making a deal to reanimate the child?

That's actually pretty straight on, considering the things a psycho would do to 'feel alive' would generally be stuff you'd accuse someone of having a demon on their shoulder for doing.
 
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Academia Nut said:
I both implied and then came out and said a while back that the People think that queer people are magic.
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Which logically means that if an Ymaryn wrote Naruto, NarutoXSasuke would be canon.

That is the only possible conclusion and I refuse to entertain other ideas.

Powerofmind said:
So an Empty Man wouldn't quite be 'empty' as such, just animated by an especially clever and mighty demon, probably accused of having died during birthing or in early childhood, or the parents accused of making a deal to reanimate the child?
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Actually, if Crow is closest to a Demon, wouldn't he then also be capable of doing stuff like inhabiting empty corpses and parading them around to spread wisdom.

Oh, won't that be fun if it ever happens. Or if we just think it does, that has the same effect.
 
Powerofmind said:
So an Empty Man wouldn't quite be 'empty' as such, just animated by an especially clever and mighty demon, probably accused of having died during birthing or in early childhood, or the parents accused of making a deal to reanimate the child?
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It would be cooler and a bigger deal if they were actually empty. They'd be true abominations - not things from within the world like spirits or souls, not things from beyond the world like demons or Crow. There's just nothing in them, and would thus be intrinsically anti-everything.
 
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Academia Nut said:
Every person is considered to have at least two souls, an upper soul which dwells in the head and is responsible for complex thought and a lower soul which dwells in the heart which is responsible for physical animation. An excess of souls or outside spirits can be associated with both great power and mental dysfunction.
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So...having a third soul may make you powerful, but does not guarantee wisdom? Is this a nod to the Exalted or was this part of the Exalted nod to some mythology?
 
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