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Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

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storryeater said:
I hope the fact that I am answering most quotes doesn't come off as rude. It depends on the site culture, as far as I know, some consider it thoughtful, some salty. If it seems rude, please inform me.

I agree with your first point, its why the absence of rubberbanding is a deal-breaker.

However, your second point is not really an obstacle. You don't only have 1 spirit with that strategy, you have several different spirits that fulfill different roles and that works like a well-oiled machine. Essentially, you are paying to outsource the equivalent of 2 arts, getting greater efficiency to those arts due to action economy and ability to cast them more times. As long as you spend less than 50% of your total Qi, thats a net profit compared to even getting 1 more ducal art, considering how much your art activations cost in actions and Qi. All you need to do is have a balanced party, but its less of a headache than having a balanced art loadout because you can train spirits.



Thanks a lot for answering me. Narrative reasons are fair enough for me to not push for more spirits, although it still seems to me that benefit > cost for peer level ones. Cheers for the best Xianxia out there.
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The biggest issue for a beastmaster build is that Spirits above the early reaches of Third Realm or so rapidly become more obscure, and often have connections that make getting them a tricky thing because you risk pissing off their friends if you do it indelicately, and to do it delicately would require some pretty major considerations if you didn't want to give offense.

Lower realm cultivators have the problem that they don't have the Qi to support many spirits (Barring shenanigans like Renshu's infinite worm spam), higher realm Cultivators have the issue of there being too few spirits that could qualify as peers to them.

Like, a Fourth Realm Spirit is the overlord of a local biome, a Fifth Realm spirit could reliably rule over a small earthly country--these are proud and mighty creatures, and if you're strong enough to just bludgeon them into compliance, they're too weak to be worth the trouble.
 
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Alectai said:
The biggest issue for a beastmaster build is that Spirits above the early reaches of Third Realm or so rapidly become more obscure, and often have connections that make getting them a tricky thing because you risk pissing off their friends if you do it indelicately, and to do it delicately would require some pretty major considerations if you didn't want to give offense.

Lower realm cultivators have the problem that they don't have the Qi to support many spirits (Barring shenanigans like Renshu's infinite worm spam), higher realm Cultivators have the issue of there being too few spirits that could qualify as peers to them.

Like, a Fourth Realm Spirit is the overlord of a local biome, a Fifth Realm spirit could reliably rule over a small earthly country--these are proud and mighty creatures, and if you're strong enough to just bludgeon them into compliance, they're too weak to be worth the trouble.
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Thus me admitting that the absence of rubberbanding destroys the actual viability of that build.
 
storryeater said:
I hope the fact that I am answering most quotes doesn't come off as rude. It depends on the site culture, as far as I know, some consider it thoughtful, some salty. If it seems rude, please inform me.
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You're fine, discussion is appreciated so long as it doesn't either get too off topic or abrasive
Just refrain from personal insult, inflammatory language and the like

Various threads may have their own little rules depending on the subject matter and hosts, but the general rule that ought to serve you well is don't act like a dick

As an aside, welcome aboard
 
Incidentally, this is why Zhengui is a big deal. A xuanwu is one of the few types with spirits with a hope of "keeping pace" with a human cultivator partner up onto the upper realms, even if he's probably doomed to eventually fall behind just due to Ling Qi's cultivation speed. But in theory, Zhengui could grow to the top realms of cultivation someday.
 
CrimsonOddball said:
You're fine, discussion is appreciated so long as it doesn't either get too off topic or abrasive
Just refrain from personal insult, inflammatory language and the like

Various threads may have their own little rules depending on the subject matter and hosts, but the general rule that ought to serve you well is don't act like a dick

As an aside, welcome aboard
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Good to know, thanks a lot. I strive to not act like a dick and to not be one as a matter of policy, but that's for others, not me, to judge, so best I can do is ask when in doubt.
 
Also keeping in mind that Ling Qi's absurdly lucky with her spirits.
The typical high quality non-ducal spirit is something like Linhuo, who provides utility reinforcing her cultivator's strengths, and requires specific knowledge or crazy luck to get, or Lanhua/Sixiang quality, which was obtained through the patronage of a Great Spirit.

Compounding that, you need to win their loyalty, binding a spirit doesn't get you anything in itself, and spirits have a lot of quirks which you need to take into account.
The somewhat easy way is to get a young/incomplete/undeveloped spirit, which is what Ling Qi did, which meant that as they developed under her care, their traits grew in a way which was mostly compatible with her personality, and thus need less maintenance, but the problem with that is that you had to deal with the expense and difficulty of a spirit which spends a long time mostly useless AND is resource hungry.

Basically, if you want to assemble a group of inter-reinforcing unique spirits you run up against the practical limits of managing a group of peers, who are say...an elemental maneater, a phantasm of madness and delirium, and an all consuming inferno.
 
Yeah most cultivators don't get to just stumble across powerful and/or useful spirits and bind them @storryeater
(Though being a bunch of cultivation gremlins there is some debate on exactly how powerful or useful our spirits currently are)

Most cultivators, who don't have centuries old powerful and wealthy clans at their back, have to settle for whatever they can most conveniently manage to entreat and bind
Li Suyin and Su Ling took while and spent a good deal of effort to make it happen if you recall, and most outer sect disciples actually couldn't manage to bind a spirit at all
People like Bai Meizhen get their spirits handed to them by merit of coming from families with the infrastructure and resources to easily provide a source of high quality spirits,
CRX literally gets them made for her by her mother but that's something of a special case

Or you can be like Ling Qi and Ji Rong and just trip over a Xuan Wu and a Heavenly Dragon
 
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Bear in mind that even baby spirits need to eat.

If I remember correctly, one of the perks that Ling Qi got for signing up with the Cai is that CRX agreed to subsidize Zhengui's upkeep costs. We don't know exactly how much she's paying every month, but it's implied that keeping Zhengui fed is fairly pricy.
 
CrimsonOddball said:
Yeah most cultivators don't get to just stumble across powerful and/or useful spirits and bind them @storryeater
(Though being a bunch of cultivation gremlins there is some debate on exactly how powerful or useful our spirits currently are)

Most cultivators, who don't have centuries old powerful and wealthy clans at their back, have to settle for whatever they can most conveniently manage to entreat and bind
Li Suyin and Su Ling took while and spent a good deal of effort to make it happen if you recall, and most outer sect disciples actually couldn't manage to bind a spirit at all
People like Bai Meizhen get their spirits handed to them by merit of coming from families with the infrastructure and resources to easily provide a source of high quality spirits,
CRX literally gets them made for her by her mother but that's something of a special case

Or you can be like Ling Qi and Ji Rong and just trip over a Xuan Wu and a Heavenly Dragon
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Also yes, note that Suyin took a quest to specifically get a suitable spirit beast. Its a pink spider, who, after a year is still pretty cuddly in size and with average potency(Zhenli's heritage suggests a plateau in upper Green, with options to make Cyan if she's sufficiently exceptional), and mostly a lab assistant more than anything else.

THAT is above average. Thats a special spirit beast you took pains to research, took pains to get a young, impressionable one, and passed a trial which cost a bomb to buy all the booze and then stay standing trying to outdrink a Poison elemental.

The average is you go hunting for one, find a suitably potent spirit, beat it up, bind it by force and then break it to your will over time. Noting that such a spirit is usually already at its plateau, most spirits prefer to only bind to a cultivator when they already hit a bottleneck on their natural growth, which means that for the cultivator this spirit is not going to get stronger anytime soon.
Alectai said:
Actually, we know it, Zhengui's food budget is about 2 GSS a month I think.
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And he's eating more and more as he grows. He's hardly slowed down much.
 
Also FYI, the Sects(both Great and minor) are where the mad scientists who want to do weird things instead of gathering temporal power go. They get funded because you need SOME innovation to keep up, its risky in terms of reputation for noble families, and hey, these weird nerds are volunteering to take the risks AND not want personal political power unlike the noble families.
 
The thing with spirit beast is that barring a clan of people who specialises in using many spirit beasts, with arts to match, Ling Qi is probably as close to 'beastmaster' as there is.

We have seen that going for 'quantity' rather than 'quality' is usually not a winning proposition (see: the current stampede), so it means you want to actually spend time to help your spirit beasts train, and you want time to train yourself, and you want your build to work with your spirit beast's. So yeah, there are going to be specific clans that are "We have many spirit beasts at once we train and our arts are designed to help them"... but it's very hard to help a lot of spirit beasts when you don't know much about them from the get go, so those would be very specialised clans.

Usually people currently only have 1 spirit beast in the early stage of greens, with more exceptional people having a second one (Meizhen and Liling getting a second spirit for the tournament, CRX getting a second one when we attacked the BINO). Shen Hu with his two spirits when he comes from a second gen Baron background is very much exceptional, here. It's not easy to find not only good spirit beasts, but ones that fit you and that you also have time and the ressources to take care of.

Ling Qi not only has 3 spirit beasts, but she has direct, specific links with all three of them and spend a lot of them nurturing them. Getting a fourth one would demand even more good luck even if she was rich, but even then it would also demand a lot of nurturing from her, and a lot of invested time before they could become useful. That, and Qi cost.
 
I will be astonishingly pedantic and point out that LQ has only one spirit beast. Sixiang and Hanyi are not spirit beasts, they are spirits.
 
naths said:
I think you are forgetting that both of them have a baron title too. We are -at least on paper- their equals
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A lot of new baronial houses marry into or get adopted into more influential noble families.
A brand new baron without connection has a shitty lot, so combining your titles together would give you the strength of a century old baronial family.

See the big chokepoint is that most new baron titles come with one Green, and maybe a half dozen Reds and Yellows from their family being awakened. They have limited force projection, if the Baron wants to do anything they have to go themselves and that means no Green at home to respond to raids and gribblies. They can't afford risk, or they'd be set back beyond recovery, but if they don't take risks they'd find it hard to raise a second Green from scratch. If they're a facepuncher, they got no value added resources. If they're production, they'd find it hard to protect their fief if its harassed at all regularly.

If a Baron adopts two other barons and marries a third, that gives them four Greens to project force with, they gain immensely in options...at the cost of still having one manor's worth of resource generation. This is a winning strategy if you're on a border/wilderness barony, you could churn those four Greens into 1 reserve and 3 resource acquisition specialists.

Those who stand alone, die alone.
 
veekie said:
If a Baron adopts two other barons and marries a third, that gives them four Greens to project force with, they gain immensely in options...at the cost of still having one manor's worth of resource generation.
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Also worth noting how this impacts the Arts issue. An unsupported Green has only the arts they know, and whilst they might want to Awaken and develop their contemporary and successive family, they aren't going to have much of anything in the way of options. If you can't learn arts that suit you as a person individually, you aren't going to get very far at all with Cultivation. Especially given the fact that you aren't allowed to teach Argent arts except to sect members.

The small band of greens method mitigates this...somewhat. Still not great, but children will have more than a single option.

Still pales in comparison to marrying into one of the old families that have been around long enough that they've had cultivators running the gamut of talents and interests, so there's always something to suit a new cultivator.

The Bai care package that the Cai negotiated for kind of bypassed this for LQ, giving a nice base spread of low level arts, and honestly more importantly several cultivation arts to suit different people.
 
veekie said:
A lot of new baronial houses marry into or get adopted into more influential noble families.
A brand new baron without connection has a shitty lot, so combining your titles together would give you the strength of a century old baronial family.

See the big chokepoint is that most new baron titles come with one Green, and maybe a half dozen Reds and Yellows from their family being awakened. They have limited force projection, if the Baron wants to do anything they have to go themselves and that means no Green at home to respond to raids and gribblies. They can't afford risk, or they'd be set back beyond recovery, but if they don't take risks they'd find it hard to raise a second Green from scratch. If they're a facepuncher, they got no value added resources. If they're production, they'd find it hard to protect their fief if its harassed at all regularly.

If a Baron adopts two other barons and marries a third, that gives them four Greens to project force with, they gain immensely in options...at the cost of still having one manor's worth of resource generation. This is a winning strategy if you're on a border/wilderness barony, you could churn those four Greens into 1 reserve and 3 resource acquisition specialists.

Those who stand alone, die alone.
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Well, from a practical pov, we have nothing to offer them in return for becoming our retainer/vassal. We arent particularly rich, have no land to hand out and we arent really influential yet.

Also, given that we are talking specifically about Li Suyin and Su Ling:
Li Suyin has a much better option called 'staying at the sect'. Her father payed for the full tution, so she doesnt have mandatory military duty aside from that of an inner sect disciple and the sect is currently supporting her research in a way we could not (archives, secured access to materials, *probably* help with selling her products). The sect also offers her easy access to other crafters for joint projects.

Su Ling will have to serve her 8 years in the army before anything else, unless she gets a patron who can do what Cai Renxiang did for us and buys the entire dept. (Which we dont have the money for) Given her personality I could actually see her staying in the army, if she likes her squad enough for it. Otherwise, she is also a crafter, so staying at the sect is as much an option for her as for Suyin.

So even if we want to have them as retainers, we would need to make sure that we can actually offer them something that can at the very least match the benefits they can get somewhere else (in this case the sect)
 
For babby Barons, hanging out in the Sect is an attractive option because you get access to teachers, resources, and arts. You don't have a household or fief to worry about, nobles send their kids there to have babby tier slap fights and bump into each other so you can make connections and display your worth. Not to mention relatively passive spirits with which to get possible patronage of who probably won't eat you and may give you one of their spawn if you impress them.

Sect is a good gig if you can swing it.
 
naths said:
Well, from a practical pov, we have nothing to offer them in return for becoming our retainer/vassal. We arent particularly rich, have no land to hand out and we arent really influential yet.

Also, given that we are talking specifically about Li Suyin and Su Ling:
Li Suyin has a much better option called 'staying at the sect'. Her father payed for the full tution, so she doesnt have mandatory military duty aside from that of an inner sect disciple and the sect is currently supporting her research in a way we could not (archives, secured access to materials, *probably* help with selling her products). The sect also offers her easy access to other crafters for joint projects.

Su Ling will have to serve her 8 years in the army before anything else, unless she gets a patron who can do what Cai Renxiang did for us and buys the entire dept. (Which we dont have the money for) Given her personality I could actually see her staying in the army, if she likes her squad enough for it. Otherwise, she is also a crafter, so staying at the sect is as much an option for her as for Suyin.

So even if we want to have them as retainers, we would need to make sure that we can actually offer them something that can at the very least match the benefits they can get somewhere else (in this case the sect)
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We do actually have several distinct things. Whether its enough to actually go for an active recruiting attempt is another matter:
-Baronial household starter arts. The Cai Art Package contains everything you need to raise your own body of Red and Yellow armsmen which most new Barons have to either try to invent on their own, or horse trade for it when they have nothing to trade.

-Ducal direct vassal land on the border. Our fief is likely to be on the upper end of what a Baron COULD have, with the downside of needing to pacify more land than we should be able to do alone.

-Political connections. We're not exactly good at using it but our status as Renxiang's direct vassal is a position many politicos would kill for.

-Understanding liege. Most Barons signing up under another noble as vassal is taking quite the gamble on what they actually get. If Su Ling wanted to have a go at her mother for instance, she's going to need to clear that with either feudal or sect politicals, and that'd cost her.

Put all together, I expect Suyin to be out of reach(she has her own family arts, she's likely attached to her family name, she's already being courted by another Cai vassal, and her specialization is much better off near the Sect or provincial center than on the frontier), Su Ling on the other hand is more likely to be open to the idea.

The Ma Sisters MIGHT, not sure, but if they make it to Green, well, their family is artisans. Just high enough to know how big the gap is.
 
veekie said:
which most new Barons have to either try to invent on their own
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Inventing arts has the dual problems that you both have to be a decently high-level Green to do it, and that they have to be, at minimum, consistent with your own Way.

A swordmaster might be able to make new sword arts that use elements that they themselves don't make real use of (as long as the message of the art isn't antithetical to them), but they won't be making bow arts. They still have the problem of not being able to provide for a child/other family member that is drawn to a different method.

Trading for arts is, as you mentioned, very difficult for someone in that position, but the other method is trying to force family to all develop along the same way for which you have the arts, which isn't great either.

Like, the big families for sure have The Family Arts, the default orthodox route which they expect most cultivators to travel down, or at least dip into.

But they've built up libraries for those who travel down less family stereotypical routes, as well as different approaches. When Bai Facepuncher is born, she will not be left without resources, somewhere in the family vault will be arts left from their ancient ancestor Bai Meatfists the Punchenator.

So that starter clan package that LQ has is not a small thing. It's something to negate a major disadvantage new Baronial clans normally have to deal with if they don't want to be eaten by a bigger clan.

veekie said:
Su Ling on the other hand is more likely to be open to the idea.
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I mean, do remember what we've seen of Su Ling. Her big ambition is obviously to kill her mother, but we've also seen how she interacts with mortals and the stuff they have to deal with. After her 8 years of service is done I think she'd be inclined to be a wandering monster-hunter protecting mortals from threats that other immortals can't be bothered to deal with. I don't think she'd agree to any service or clan-entry that didn't respect this want.
 
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