TimEd
Meteor maker
Basically Ice Age and its retreat probably. Or at least a version of Ice Age, since I doubt Ice could cover the entire planet due to all the other Powers who probably wont welcome Ice in their backyard.
Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)
- Thread starter yrsillar
- Start date
- Original Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Xainxia slivers would be the perfect source of materials for a support cultivator's talismans.
- Location
- somewhere over there.
- Pronouns
- They/It
They'd be super annoying for most people, though. A whole bunch of low-quality beasts with item drops that aren't even close to worth the effort of killing them once they group up.
It's a Hive. The Swarm would be a Sunflower like entity.
- Location
- Brazil
Can the Xuan Wu's of the Xuan sail through that storm?
Now to spot the most prime real estate on the globe, best weather and far from any other nation or ongoing "natural" disasters.
.....Maybe smack dab in the middle of the ocean but a floating island.
.....Maybe smack dab in the middle of the ocean but a floating island.
Maybe not!Brazil has less "natural" disasters.
- Location
- Colorado
Even if there's nothing visible from above the oceans are probably full of ancient beasts that could eat Cthulhu like a potato chip. Being far away from civilization is a very bad thing in this world.
No, but Xuan Shi did mention there was a Xuan Wu variant that can.
- Location
- out of this world
EternalObserver
eYe Gaze baCk
- Location
- The Void
Do you see the big giant whirlpool swirling in the map? That's the dubbed Hellstorm/Maelstorm. It was first mentioned by Xuan Shi during turn 9 arc 1.
It was also referred jokingly as Not!Australia
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
It's been referred to by Xuan Shi as the Maelstrom:
yrsillar said this on Discord about what's beyond it:
For reasons that are unclear to me, it is Maelstrom.
So a couple of things. First, I'm thinking about Gan Guangli and how miserable he must feel when he hears about Renxiang going out on missions like this and him unable to be there fighting to support her. Just the worst! Once he makes it into the inner sect, vibe is going to be so much different in the "Cai Group".
Second, a completely unrelated topic.
It honestly surprises me how little emphasis is put on gathering information about your opponents, or even your allies. Or at least, how little emphasis we've seen on it from Ling Qi's POV. So much of these Cultivator fights isn't just power vs. power, but more a kind of counter and counter-counter where knowing what to expect from your enemies (and for that matter from allies) would be a crucial aid to victory. Knowing exactly what your enemy's arts are and how they are likely to attack you and defend against attacks has got to be worth multiple stages of difference in a hypothetical "you know everything about them and they know nothing about you" fight.
Now of course it's going to be tough to know exactly what sort of powers an enemy people like the Shishigui or the Cloud Nomads are going to bring to the table, but one can imagine briefings that go into stuff like, "Common abilities are X, Y, and Z; whereas A and B are things we've never seen from them. Cloud Nomads with N mount type frequently seem aligned with P type abilities." Etc. An on the other side, while I certainly understand why Young Masters will want to keep their secrets, understanding the abilities of your allies and what they are weak against and what they are strong against would sure be a huge help on a battlefield where split second decisions have to be made.
You can even imagine an entire character concept built around it, the woman who has memorized the details of every art ever observed and recorded and can make a pretty good guess on at least the broad strokes of an enemy's techniques just from seeing a single ability in action. Seems like it could be a big deal!
Of course, maybe circumstances just haven't been right to see that sort of thing in Ling Qi's perception. Still, it would kind of cool if for example, someday we had to join to go after a Cyan foe with a bunch of other Greens and it was proceeded by an extended discussion of everything known about their abilities and specific assignments made as to who is going to try to what to hinder and confuse them and where their likely vulnerabilities are. Just go deep tactical at least once. (I know *players* have sometimes done that for certain duels, most notably the Princess in the Tournament, but it hasn't been as big a part of the narrative.)
Second, a completely unrelated topic.
It honestly surprises me how little emphasis is put on gathering information about your opponents, or even your allies. Or at least, how little emphasis we've seen on it from Ling Qi's POV. So much of these Cultivator fights isn't just power vs. power, but more a kind of counter and counter-counter where knowing what to expect from your enemies (and for that matter from allies) would be a crucial aid to victory. Knowing exactly what your enemy's arts are and how they are likely to attack you and defend against attacks has got to be worth multiple stages of difference in a hypothetical "you know everything about them and they know nothing about you" fight.
Now of course it's going to be tough to know exactly what sort of powers an enemy people like the Shishigui or the Cloud Nomads are going to bring to the table, but one can imagine briefings that go into stuff like, "Common abilities are X, Y, and Z; whereas A and B are things we've never seen from them. Cloud Nomads with N mount type frequently seem aligned with P type abilities." Etc. An on the other side, while I certainly understand why Young Masters will want to keep their secrets, understanding the abilities of your allies and what they are weak against and what they are strong against would sure be a huge help on a battlefield where split second decisions have to be made.
You can even imagine an entire character concept built around it, the woman who has memorized the details of every art ever observed and recorded and can make a pretty good guess on at least the broad strokes of an enemy's techniques just from seeing a single ability in action. Seems like it could be a big deal!
Of course, maybe circumstances just haven't been right to see that sort of thing in Ling Qi's perception. Still, it would kind of cool if for example, someday we had to join to go after a Cyan foe with a bunch of other Greens and it was proceeded by an extended discussion of everything known about their abilities and specific assignments made as to who is going to try to what to hinder and confuse them and where their likely vulnerabilities are. Just go deep tactical at least once. (I know *players* have sometimes done that for certain duels, most notably the Princess in the Tournament, but it hasn't been as big a part of the narrative.)
- Location
- The Void
It might be a little dated now that the war has put a stop to them, but the monthly duels we had against our Inner Sect peers was exactly that though ?
Every month or so we had Ling automatically doing some recon and search off-screen and giving three names of cultivators with their spirit beasts, their cultivation level, some of their ability rank, what type of elements they use, how do they fight and even a little summary about them.
Hell, if I remember well, we even met Yu Nuan that way : people wanted a music fight against a nominal pair and so voted for her after reading the files LQ gathered on her.
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Jensaarai
Sing Victory Everlasting
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I don't think the near-infinite paths of Cultivation really engender themselves to easy or effective classification, beyond the most basic and vague. IIRC that's kinda why all we really got as a debriefing for the Southern Tribes' tactics was that they did hit-and-run with high mobility, and mass-group buff chains. Informative, assuredly, but it didn't really tell us anything about abilities or what moves they're likely to do.
- Location
- Castle
The actual reason is that it causes more work, note keeping and narrative space demands
And the reward for work well done is yet more work
And the reward for work well done is yet more work
If we look at it from the Y'lith'kai perspective, I would expect them to know that the Argent Sect has:
1. A lightning duelist with some unknown super move that is presumably charged up over the fight
2. A field creation controller that has two (or more? Need to investigate) spirit allies. Lots of cold effects.
3. A radiance disruptor/commander. Her techniques seem really familiar yet are diametrically opposed.
3a. What the Stars is up with her super form? She goes from mid-Third Realm to Fifth Realm and switches up her entire powerset?
4. A weird shelled snake spirit blood? Extremely strong defense, is able to intercept your attacks and counterattack.
4a. Seems to be distantly related to one of 2's spirit allies. Is there a personal connection?
5. Some information about the Cyans, though I personally don't know much about them.
6. In general they appear to rely mostly on high powered specialists instead of groups of lesser cultivators supporting each other.
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- Location
- CA
I keep going back and forth on whether or not this would be effective. Surprisingly, for all my love of that specific counter it feels like my conclusion is that it'd be misguided in this case.
My first immediate thought was that, in terms of how effective it'd be, this hits a pretty hard ceiling at late Green: that's when people can't take in outside Arts any more, they have to create them all themselves. Even if someone's an Coldstar Blade user from a long line of Coldstar Blade users, they're still going to create their own unique spin on it. You can be pretty sure ice, fire, swords, and duality will be involved, but that conceptual space is only going to get wider and more complicated as they go up the chain, and specific counters will grow less useful.
But then again, once people are past that point, they're in more conceptual territory: they move further from typical human mindsets and into a territory more governed by adherence to specific rules and ideas. So knowing their concepts gives you an idea of where to shiv them in the philosophical and/or literal back.
But my thought after that was that if you put a big emphasis on always attacking people at their weak points, then they tend to fix them, and finding flaws and fixing them is how you advance in all forms of cultivation. So it feels like implementing that on a large scale--"okay, Red+Yellow Army, these are the Cloud Barbarians, they are weak in these very specific ways"--would, failing genocide, result in enemies that are militarily and philosophically stronger, because the two are highly intertwined. And given that people are disproportionately stronger at higher levels of cultivation, it strikes me that putting your enemy's army through the crucible makes things worse for you in the long term, not better. It might be useful as something you do very rarely, for very short periods of time, but how much restraint do large organizations typically show with the Tragedy of the Commons?
My thought after that was that it'd be possible to make an individual Way of it, because if you were sufficiently good then you'd be able to win fights the first or second time so that they didn't have time to temper themselves... But defining yourself by other people in an adversarial sense feels like it'd be a pretty dead-end Way. (Unless you ID the protagonist and you're willing to play Vegeta all your life.) I'm not sure how you'd focus that sort of Way in on yourself instead of others, unless it was tied to some conviction related to breaking the rules of nature and the universe through edge cases, which seems like it'd get you someone from the Ministry of Integrity smiling and asking pointed questions.
Isn't the vast majority of any army the Qin or their neighbors are going to field going to consist of Greens and lower? "This doesn't work once you get to Cyan" isn't much of a problem because that mostly doesn't come up and, when it does, you will be interacting with them as individuals rather than as part of a larger whole.
And they by and large don't get to fix these weak points because they die on the battlefield when they are revealed. Low Barons have a huge attrition rate and this battle suggests the same for our neighbors. The survivors grow stronger instead of break but they are very much the exceptions that go on to populate the higher ranks.
Given the constant low-intensity warfare there is going to be an established framework for how things go. Barring some significant technological advance to shake up the strategies (impurity cultivation and Suyin's work) or allow for them to take the fight to a previously neutral country (the Y'lith'kai) it seems like everything should quickly settle into a mostly stable status quo.
And they by and large don't get to fix these weak points because they die on the battlefield when they are revealed. Low Barons have a huge attrition rate and this battle suggests the same for our neighbors. The survivors grow stronger instead of break but they are very much the exceptions that go on to populate the higher ranks.
Given the constant low-intensity warfare there is going to be an established framework for how things go. Barring some significant technological advance to shake up the strategies (impurity cultivation and Suyin's work) or allow for them to take the fight to a previously neutral country (the Y'lith'kai) it seems like everything should quickly settle into a mostly stable status quo.
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Oh, I don't think you'd have to be quite that specialized to be useful. You could probably fit "figuring out my opponent's Way" under a general "I am the Great Detective who sees the Truth all try to hide" sort of Way. And of course there's the much more mundane approach of interviews, spying, and baiting your opponent into fighting lesser opponents while you watch from the shadows sort of thing. More much villain than hero work, but there's room for all kinds.
Cecylene
Eternal Idea Engine
- Location
- Massachusetts
- Pronouns
- He/They
Yrs had a comment about military composition a while back...
And we know there are thousands of Cyan in the Emerald Seas alone as there are "many thousands" who stall out in Cyan.
- Location
- At the end of the world
I believe you're incorrect.
LQ is G4, wich makes fight even more impressive, considering Team Ling was holding against nominal peers and superiors and still managed to down some. Also, I believe, second danser is still (yet) alive.
If we're going for semi-realistic geography does that mean that White Cloud are from Siberia? It would feat geographically.
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Fundamental problems with that:
-The higher your cultivation the harder it is to comprehend what others are doing anymore, especially if their path is strongly divergent. Some concepts become increasingly unthinkable.
-The more specific your counter the harder you get fucked if it doesn't work, because preparing counters costs cultivation time and resouces, and if someone successfully misrepresents their style you get about as screwed as people attacking Ling Qi in the tournament assuming that just because she's evasive she must be squishy.
Most people wouldn't do so because its better to build yourself up than to tear enemies down.
Somebody who can actually pull this off is not a soldier. They'd be someone cultivating specifically to be an assassin, using a Hidden Moon or other related focus. They'd be Jiao.
- Location
- The United States
- Pronouns
- He/They
So looking at Xeph's beautiful new map just made me viscerally realize how much the Empire's relative positions with it's neighbors was damaged by the "loss" of the Golden Fields.