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The Arx Secrets Thread
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@Evilgrayson I seriously considered trying to do the Paladin bit for Bhandn at one point (doing it on his own, to specific god(s)), but I could never quite justify it to myself, and I second-guessed the idea constantly as to whether it was even thematic if not heretical.
But I did want to do something involving Vellichor, but the reasons why now escape me.
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Volcica’s secret is that she is gasp a Deathspeaker! But she’s also a shaman, and that combo is v rare. Turns out she’s descended from the first Deathspeakers, way back in the Dance of Skulls. I never got around to looking into past lives, but she did end up as a Voice of Death and got to form a soulbond with Bat, the primordia, sooo. All in all? Pretty rad!
Auda was a half-Rex’alfar. Her parents dumped her at the Tragedy instead of killing her like they were ordered. Her mother was a knight of Solace and a White Steward, so that’s cool! Sapphire-as-Ruby saw her half-blood, and writ her into the Triarchy, and the rest is history! She also managed to become the Black Rose, and also the head of the Apothecary college, and also high up in the Shadow Court, all as ways to honor Ruby/Sapphire/Veil and Emerald/Blight. Her death was also pretty Knave, so that’s cool.
I dabbled on a few rosters when I took a few breaks from those OCs, but nothing really stuck other than Mailys for a while, pre-‘all of corsetina is smiling shadows’ era.
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@dvoraen said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@Evilgrayson I seriously considered trying to do the Paladin bit for Bhandn at one point (doing it on his own, to specific god(s)), but I could never quite justify it to myself, and I second-guessed the idea constantly as to whether it was even thematic if not heretical.
But I did want to do something involving Vellichor, but the reasons why now escape me.
Was it heretical? Absolutely. But Ray didn’t care, and Death wasn’t like most of the other gods.
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Saya’s secret was that she was an escapee from HG. A spellspinger (never specified), freed her and some others. Most of her memories weren’t her own, and a part of her desperately wanted to go back to Legion because having to make her own choices was TOO HARD and all these noble ladies wanted slippers with every single dress!
Ainsley had visions from Gloria from the first moment he picked up a sword. And his past life was a champion of Gloria who was exiled by Primeria.
Clover was a red warden and had saved a phoenix that some cultists were trying to sacrifice for primum.
Lys’ secret was that when she lied she got faster, stronger , and tougher. Which evolved as she tried to find her parents who were two Veil-touched people who accidentally scammed each other and then left her in the Lowers at an orphanage. Recently she found out that she had been Veil touched in her past life where Jade made her immune to writs and Plantium had her killed, which broke Nash and he refused to wield Birthright the first ever heirloom sword again. He peacebound it with the ribbon she wore in her hair.
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Okaaaaay. Hi, player of Apollo here!
Apollo’s original secret was that he stole stuff without intending to and absolutely hated it. Good lil Oathlander boy picking pockets? Lawd, the shame.
I spent the first couple years spinning wheels on this without a lot of traction, but late 2021 or early 2022, he had a vision as his hands got away from him: darkness, terrible pain in his hand, and someone talking about imprinting something on the soul. So he did what any determined lil shit would do and asked his wife to cut open his hand and look see if there was something there. WILD: there was. Not just on his soul, but on flesh and bone under his skin without any scar. Some kinda Avarice-lookin thing. A well-timed crit on a Mana roll during the exploratory surgery and he had a vivid memory of what happened:
In a past life, he stole something from Mortorius the Arisen, a lich who had somehow defeated death. Mortorius responded to the theft by removing all his flesh while he was still alive, taking his face, and presumably the mark he left was in there, too, unless that was a different past life. (Who knows.) I had a real moment of wtf, is splatterpunk!Arx a thing? but whatever. He had a dream afterward about what happened after he died: the ghosts were like shit son, you’re fucked up because you’re not supposed to carry your wounds and your agony into the afterlife but guess what. So like. He’d be in search of some Solutions for Healing the Soul, now that the bigger fish are fried, if anybody feels like a little RP or chat to let me know what that entails.
Later, because Apollo really and truly tried to empathize with everything and everyone, he got a lesson in autopsies from Lianne, just to feel what it’s like to be on the other end of a scalpel. Lianne wasn’t real confident that it was gonna yield any answers, but was happy to teach him. It did yield answers, which was a little victory for Apollo: though he had not yet crossed the threshold there, it felt like a step toward magic to learn someone’s motivations from long, long ago. Mortorius wasn’t trying to create some Future Herald of Avarice or anything (which was one of my favored theories for awhile). He just wanted to see if he could implant a compulsion. Just a tinkering scientist… with a wholeass disregard for pain, suffering, human life, etc.
So Apollo’s whole secret wasn’t really about how special he was. Kinda how special he wasn’t. Mortorius’ historical victims were generally described as ‘murders and disappearances in the Lowers’. No names.
Mortorius appeared again in his Crossing, which was cool (probably a vision/hallucination of, not the real deal, but … appropriate). He tied a lot of Apollo’s successes back to that mark (sure, why not: why wouldn’t someone like that see Apollo and his change in station as avariciously ambitious). That scene was lovely, tying up a lot of the history with a bow - and he Crossed when he cut out the stitches and the mark Mortorius had left, free of his stealing compulsion for the last few weeks of the game.
And then, very late game, someone logged in who I’d been tipped off years ago might have some kinda related secret, and we got to RP meaningfully about it right up to the end. It wound up being great story.
And I’m just gonna imagine Apollo and his new buddy-in-trauma sort out how to go murder someone who’s defeated death before. Pretty sure they’d have help aplenty.
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@discoarse I am the original player of an OC that received very similar secret. I ran around the grid for quite a while trying to find anyone who might have insight or a similar experience to share and fight back together. Can’t help but wonder if it was that PC you ran into and were able to bond with over it. Don’t want to his name here since he’s not my OC anymore but thanks for sharing this, kind of tied up a loose end for me, too, in a way
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Celine’s secret: A short while after The Tragedy, she awoke to noises in Sanctum. There weren’t any guards around and she followed the noises and, direct from her secret: ‘Her mother, Princess Marianne Valardin, stood over Celine’s older sister, a sword in the older woman’s hand now embeded deeply within the gasping Audrey’s stomach. Celine remembers screaming, the torches around the kitchen roaring to life seemingly in accordance to her disbelief, and her mother looking back at her. To this day Celine swears she could see a mark on Marianne’s forehead, glowing in fire, for a moment, before Audrey, still alive, stabbed their mother in the neck.’ Audrey got blamed for the murder of their mother and lost her nobility, there’s more to this, but that’s the player of Audrey to talk about, not me. Celine realised that something evil had infested the Oathlands, and over the following years infiltrated cults and hunted demons. I think she was a fledgling fire mage as when she lost her composure or panicked, things around her got incinerated. I didn’t manage to witness anyone’s ceremony to get the clue for learning magic so she never crossed over.
Part of her secret was that her mother had an affair with a Malardin of House Lenoir and showed him the secret passages beneath Sanctum, which were then used in The Tragedy. (SORRY VALARDINS!) She never told anyone about that and carried it as a guilty secret. It was that knowledge that drove her passion for hunting down and destroying The Malardin Brotherhood which, according to her secret, she excelled at.
Elsbetta’s secret was that her previous soul, Cassia, was beloved by the dragons, and in partuclar by Talar. If I read the clue I have on her correctly he and she were lovers. Cassia was the First Duchess of Westrock Rach and she was also known as The Lady of the Lost Star. There weren’t many clues to find on her as the original player dropped her way back when and she wasn’t played until I picked her up last year. Talar was slain by ‘King Diamond’ during the Reckoning and, believing his soul lost forever, she built a lighthouse on Westrock Reach so others, if not he, would be able to find their way in this world or the next. Oh yes, the Cardians were hunting Elsbetta according to clue #3084, but I think they were hunting quite a lot of the playerbase at one time or another!
Timezones being a thing, and my own being really incompatible to staff GM’d events, I wasn’t able to join in metaplot events and missed out entirely on the final crazy wind-up weeks. I’ve lived the last few weeks vicariously on the sidelines reading all the logs, and shedding a few tears for a couple of characters. Shout out to Mabelle and her bees.
Thanks for the great times, those I’ve played with.
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@Rowan said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
I didn’t manage to witness anyone’s ceremony to get the clue for learning magic so she never crossed over.
FWIW, I think you’re referring to the Primum cleansing rite that got passed around, and that wasn’t actually related to anyone becoming a mage; it was to cleanse the poisoned primum in Arvum so that people could, in general, become mages later on, but someone doing the rite was unrelated to whether or not they could learn magic later on. (And PCs did not start actually becoming mages until the finale months.)
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@Roz That’s the one, yes. I was told, perhaps incorrectly, that you had to have your primum cleansed and receive the clue in order to be able to learn magic when magic was possible. If that changed towards the end when people could learn magic regardless of whether or not they had their primum cleansed, I missed that info entirely.
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@Rowan I think it’s more likely that you got bad info. Cleansing the primum was about cleansing the primum in Arvum, not in individuals. It may have made people’s primum feel a little better as an additional effect, but it wasn’t related to making individuals prepared to do magic; it was about healing the land.
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@Roz Not sure if there was another kind of cleansing, but for what Rowan might be thinking, if it was bad info, it was certainly going around. I definitely remember a cleansing thing being said to be necessary to do magic and only happened to a person by another person who had it done to them. Which seems to be pretty distinct from just a general cleansing of the land.
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So there was a point when we had planned for it to be one of the steps on the way to learning magic. I know it wasn’t Apostate’s initial plan but when people got into the cleansing rituals, I think it was added to the steps to crossing the threshold thing since it did help PCs define what was important to their character. Technically ‘designing an anima ritual’ was also supposed to be a step before crossing the threshold. Toward the end, though we sort of fast-tracked everything.
ETA: Tehom had added a step by step process to the admin interface but I don’t think that’s going to be implemented exactly to Arx 2.
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I forget the exact terminology, but Ari Corsetina was secretly the human pawn of some great old one. He was saved from the pirates who attacked the ship he served on, and threw him overboard, by a tentacle monster who saved him and then fought on his behalf to give him command of the ship.
The way I interpreted this, and played it, was to say look, Ari’s just a regular guy. He’s a man with a young family, who has to spend long periods away from them to provide for them. He’s a good, loyal guy who sacrifices of himself for others.
He’s not some dashing action hero. I’d say he’s comparable with a guy like Finn in Star Wars. He doesn’t have the special powers, but he’s dragged into all of this, and it tests him.
He eventually gets an inkling that Mirari Corsetina, his daughter, is mixed in with this, that Belladonna Pravus is mixed in with all of this. That everyone he works for, and fights for, and loves and respects, is benefiting from these deep dark powers.
And that power also wants him, and he can feel is watching him with its possibly-malevolent desires, every time he goes out to sea.
What do you do if you’re Ari in this spot? Your wife is dead. Your daughter is all you have left of your old life, and she’s somehow come through everything to a position of influence, comfort, and success. Are you really going to do anything that could possibly take that from her? Of course not.
Or Belladonna. The Pravus family was reaching new heights, and they’ve been very good to you. Are you going to betray them, or undermine them? No!
So what do you do if you’re Ari? You gratefully accept the Knighthood you are given. You quietly watch proudly your daughter do her thing. You serve your lords and ladies.
And when the burden of being watches, and courted, and groomed for some inhuman purpose is too much, you drink.
Mirari’s adopted sister kept stores of wine for trade. Ari frequently broke into those, because it was all he could do.
When he died, he died sacrificing himself at sea, in battle, for family and lords. The beings watching him lashed out when he died, but it was too late. He was at peace, having served those he cared for with all he had.
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Could someone please go through Lucita’s truesong’s The Final Verse and tell me what “Cloak, crystal, sorrowed, shadow’s glee
And old gray fox makes two sides three” and down means! -
@Rhamnious Looks like the Accords from here. Red Wardens, Prismatic Order, Triarchy, Smiling Shadows, and True Lyceum. Two ‘good’ orgs, two ‘bad’ orgs, and one ‘neutral’.
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Alaric’s big secret was already pretty well known by the time I began playing him (he and Brianna had a certain kid named Alarion and the whole reason Carlotta and Sherrod went on the Night’s Grove trip with him was to figure out what to do about it in relative privacy) and if that wasn’t enough, it actually got aired out at the Assembly of Peers by Marcus the one time. (Marcus getting banned from the next AoP for a made-up procedural violation was 100% Alaric retailiating for that, lol.) That said, he did know straight from the drop that neither Alarion nor Alaric III were dead because they didn’t show up in the Shining Lands to yell at him while he was under the Exsilium Noctis, though the latter also wasn’t a secret for too too much longer (lotta other people got visions about that). His other other secret was also not really much of a secret in that he needed soul healing not to go cuckoo for cocoa puffs again, so no offing the NPC Queen since she was the only one around who could do it! (This was also instituted so as not to a) not let the alliance with the Nox backslide since the plot had turned out going this way and b) not touch off the mother of all IC/OOC catfights by having a single PC King in play. I was 100% on board with this.) In a lot of ways Alaric’s real big secret was that the admin staff never expected anyone to get him fixed in the first place, hee.
Ferrando’s secret was that he was a Red Warden from the get go but started play on the outs with Wolbrand (the Red Warden version of the secretly evil NPC placeholder org leader, though Wolbrand wasn’t really capital-E evil just so much as a big jerk who wasn’t very concerned about keeping his operatives alive IIRC) due to a mission gone bad. Said mission involved Ferrando using a one-time-use magic healing widget to save the life of a conwoman captured by the Smiling Shadows after killing the Shadows, instead of leaving her to die and tailing the Shadows back to their hideout like Wolbrand wanted. Said healed conwoman took up a new identity as Selene after recovering, ergo Ferrando got himself hired at the Whisper House to keep an eye on her if the Smiling Shadows went after her again. This plot hook never actually went anywhere since there was never an active Selene before I got Alaric, and after that if I had a scene with Selene it was as Alaric because he kind of took over all my playtime. According to Apos’ AMA this was all tied into the death-of-Genevieve plotline.
I only ever made one OC, Vayne, but I didn’t really find a groove playing him and gave him up to the roster after two months. He was fairly successful as far as donated-roster characters go (he got promoted to Legate!), which was neat to see. Anyhoo his secret was that his reflection in a mirror would occasionally serve as an informant or otherwise give him advice when he was alone.
Strictly speaking I was also the first Jan Kennex but other than getting her initial starting skills set up I barely got out of her @rs period because a few days after I took her up the Alaric apps opened up. Whatever her secret was, later players would have had to set it up.
I also picked up Fairen for the last month (sort of hilarously the only character I ever @org/disafavored as Alaric because of complaints about that one player who could not have a civil IC disagreement with aaaaaanybody to save his friggin life), whose nominal secret was that he was haunted by the ghost of his older sister Hianora, who maintained her control-freaky advice tendencies after death. Though Fairen’s real secret was basically that ex-Metallic Adept and current Seal-keeping-Baalphrigor-snoozing Nickel was hiding out in his basement (which strictly speaking was an extensive network of caverns) back home under the Leaholdt, since House Leary was basically founded primarily to give the surviving remnants of the Nickel Guard the political authority to raise an army and use it to keep Obsidian cultists out of the territory surrounding the caverns and such.
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Anyone know Jasher’s?
I played him for a while a long time ago. If I recall right, he had the blessing of some god/dess or something but I can’t remember the details and I never fully learned the point of it all or what it really meant. Now I’m curious.
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Sabella’s first secret was agreed to be one of the worst on the game by just about anyone who ever heard about it because it didn’t make a lot of sense. It was that she knew the Black Rose Mummers were actually the thieves guild and she wanted to become one of them because she thought they were so cool and something something get them to work for Grayson? This on the surface seemed a somewhat interesting thread, if incredibly unlikey (the cons outweighed the pros like crazy), until you realized that the people running the group also hated all nobility. Like actively sought to bring it down and hated that she was trying to be an actress which made my first month there very, very difficult because it was me trying to scene with people who would inevitably just tell me how stupid I was, how awful Grayson was, how they weren’t ever going to let me into the play actions, and it was a disaster that made me dread RPing. An early thing that I think was dropped was that the Mummers would actively recruit children from the Tragedy to be their informants and get them placed as wards with noble families but if that ever went anywhere I wasn’t apart of it because again, totally stonewalled due to being a princess that was barely tolerated to be hanging around.
Add to that early on at the one Mummers meeting I was ever invited to, Sapphire tried to kill everyone and I ended up being like why would she EVER want to be associated with this group?? Like she never went into the Lowers past the park after that happened because she was traumatized by it.
So her secret was changed to that she saw the good in everyone, which was much cooler and fit the PC far better.
Korka was the reincarnation of Caithness and that was VERY fun to play. She didn’t like what the Whispers became and was always annoyed that she had Caithness at the edge of her mind. Did she become an inquisitor because she wanted to or because stupid Caithness wanted to keep defending the Compact? Delving into that with @Herja was probably the most fun I had on the game.
Gretchen was also a great character who the Leer was in love with or something. He’s send her notes and she’d provide the smiling shadows with poisons. She was a ton of fun to play though with Tessa dying nearly immediately after I picked her up, I was the only active Moore for awhile and it was very isolating. She had an alternate identity: Maggie Moins who ran the black market for rare goods in the Shadow Court and I like to think she didn’t end up dying due to the frost elves that got the other Moores but spent her days making a fortune as Maggie selling her snake oil to the public and magic items on the side, taking all those nobles that looked down on her and her family for all they were worth.
Adora was a smiling shadow. I’m sure that shocks everyone since she was such a nice carpenter. But that org was dead, dead when I was there (if you did a last 20 on the channel it took you to the start or Arx and that was two years in). No one ever talked to me or reached out and I never even knew where the hideout was. She was a ton of fun to play because it was during the age where a bunch of nobles loved being insulted by commoners and she was always game. Also she was great at making stuff so a good creative outlet for crafting. She liked to send people things unasked for and then demand a ludicrous payment. 9 times out of 10 they’d just pay and it was hilarious.
My biggest regret was not having the time for Sabella to convince the other highlords to take power away from the Crown. The assembly of peers was mostly for show where the other Houses could vote, but then Alaric basically did what he wanted regardless. I REALLY wanted to make it so the Crown was just one vote that only counted just as much as the other Houses and would’ve traded the other highlords being okay with Pravus becoming a Great House for it. I even had clues saying that they used to have that sort of power! But then Liara was made highlord and she had zero interest in pursuing that and the Pravus thing exploded. But it was some fun politicking RP while it lasted!
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Lumen had a killer demon tricked into being trapped in the body of a little bunny rabbit. He horribly devoured her enemies.
Lark’s original secret involved being targeted for assassination by the Smiling Shadows. Copper saved her, and she was inducted as a Red Warden recruit. She became a cell leader and much later, the High Warden. Her secondary secret developed through gameplay. She ended up with a talent for deciphering patterns in weaves and identifying their weak points for other Wardens to attack.
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@helvetica Lark being incisive like that is SO GOOD
