The Arx Secrets Thread
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I came on staff well after a bunch of people had got that one and it was fairly normal, but my impression was it was one of those things where it was useful to keep track of who had hit a certain milestone of knowledge, but was otherwise just a neat thing to freak PCs out.
The way revelations work is that clues are assigned to them, and they’re given a target number, at which point the revelation is triggered. The target number is based off a clue’s rating, so if your target number is 60, and you’ve got two clues with a rating of 30, the revelation pops. You can do more with it, like require certain clues to be known before a player gets the revelation even if they’ve passed the target number, etc, and there are a number of revelations that were never meant to be obtained by PCs that have a number impossible to reach with the clues assigned, that were used largely to organize GM notes/information.
So the Fable revelation has a massive number of various clues assigned to it, particularly ones about magic, and PCs could hit the target number with any combination of those. Staff can also look at a revelation and see who actually knows it, so if we wanted to send a vision out to everyone that had got a certain revelation, it was pretty easily done.
RE: Tehom, one thing I think might not have been entirely clear to players is that Aion and Tehom aren’t really entities in the same way the gods are, they’re more like the two basic forces of reality. Aion isn’t just the Dreamer, but the Dream (aka, the physical world) and Tehom is the Nightmare (aka, the abyss, the physical world’s dark reflection). This is why Aion didn’t have a seraph or Tehom a herald…they don’t need agents to enact their will or be their representatives, because they basically are everything, or at least contain everything.
Edit: for the curious, unless I’ve missed some, there were 60 clues attached to Fable Knows Your Name:
Primum in the blood
Blood magic frauds
The Castle of Count Corso
Curious Case of Countess Cosette
Copper’s notes on magical sleep
Inquisitor Dalere’s report
Unnatural coincidences
Red Warden Memo
Laughing at a Leer
Sanguis Primus, a fragment
Let the sleeper awaken
Aldwin’s Memories
Mad Murderer Of the Boroughs of 993 AR
The Ring of Duchess Vedette
I Must Forget
Writs, An old journal
Thus came the Despite
Breaking Mirrorborn
The First Conclave
Francesca on Galling Brass Censers
So, You’ve Joined the Forces of Evil
The Triarch Demanded It
A Fractal Forgiven
Haunted Mementos
The Thinnest Point
Obsidian, Onyx, and Jet
Hard To Read With No Light
The Unwritten Word
Lianne’s Analysis of Ravings
A shadowy, smiling monopoly
On Demon Binding
A Treatise on Prophecy
Navarre Strongoak Don’t Live Here No More
Teatime with Onyx
Interrogation Log of Prisoner #7835
The Madman of the Panopticon
Death and Oblivion: A Cautionary Tale
Demonic Tissue Sampling
Lord Barton’s Ravings
Weaving - the style of Pure Magic
Casting - Shav Nonsense
Demon Worship and Black Stone
Alrec’s Evil Twin
Dying Old Gods
Mostly Normal Bringer Head
House of Questions, the living taint
Petrichor’s Prayer of Stewardship
Palladium’s Recollections on the War
The Twin Sister of Lydia Nightgold
The Blighted Land Soil Conditions
Lovely Groves in the Oathlands
Missing Headstones
Percephon’s mirror at the blight
Perrach and the Bringer
Sugan’s Mirror
A Puzzling Genealogy
A Dream of Pyrite
Claw for Claw
Say My Name
Fractal of the AbyssThey’re all mostly from season one, I think.
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Some people already know some of this…
Enyo was a Cardian agent, loyal originally to Ostrumadin, spying on Malar and his goons. Started out low, eventually climbed her way up in the ranks. But…
Enyo was also Katya.
…and Dagny. Then Katya.
Then Enyo again.
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@watno said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@kalakh said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
Say My Name
How many people had this one?
Three.
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@dvoraen Ray - who got that revelation in the Murder of Crows while discussing Lowers secrets and specifically the things that had happened to people who said the wrong thing in the Murder of Crows - hid in his secret subterranean lair for a week.
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Martino’s initial secret was that he served Malvici, directly Calypso and Eirene, as the House Spymaster. Did a few actions around building up a base of this, and mostly drawing in more-and-more clues. This worked great for allowing some good RP with others about clues, information and trading that sort of thing - but always skirting around the edges of the metaplot. Was one of those secrets where you are fiercely loyal to people, but we went through a little revolving door of Calypso.
Was later when he was sent a black diamond ring that previously belonged to someone that he became more hooked in with the metaplot. Wearing it and carrying the curse of inflicting acts of cruelty upon people. Wore it every day since November 2nd 2021 and had 3 people OOCly chat about it after seeing it. Only 1 ICly. Would emote about rings tapping glasses, wearing gloves indoors and removing them to reveal a set of rings.
Eventually after performing one cruel act after another, started poking it somewhat more and freed his mirrorborn who killed some Archivists. Damn staff. Never giving him the journals and clues he was looking for. Met said mirrorborn again later and came to an agreement that in offer for the mirrorborn’s magic, his direct descendants would work to free Diamond.
Sorry kids. Dad wanted power at any cost.
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@Duke-Whisky That mirrorborn was actually 1/13 of Diamond. Each ring represented a facet (haha) of Diamond, so this one was Diamond’s Callous Indifference To All Other Life. Sorry Templars.
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So what was the full story about Diamond? I understand he was split up, but I was never really clear how he became immortal (the trip to the Abyss?) and what his general angle was, alongside Primeria. That whole era was highly interesting to me as a player, but ICly I knew zero about it so I never got the opportunity to pursue the subject of the events leading to the Dance of Skulls.
If it’s answered in clues, does anyone want to spill the beans to me with clue shares? >.>
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@dvoraen He did some mad Oblivion magic so he can’t die. Technically a bunch of the fractals can’t die. So as a rule, don’t waste time mourning them!
As far as angle. Primeria turned to the Abyss for help against the war with the dragons because the gods didn’t want to act and empower their reflections. Their reflections didn’t care so much otoh. She got corrupted and died (got murdered). Diamond was mostly just an abyssal mage ruler until an assassination attempt drove him mad and he decided to start chumming up with Obsidian (who was just insane) and went all rar rar Abyss. Did intense Oblivion magic so he could never die.
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@Duke-Whisky Did Martino mention researching/interest in Fable and working with others on it to Gianna once? I remember thinking, oh, Oswyn would be better for that, I wonder why Martino hasn’t mentioned it to him. And then I thought on it some, like why someone might not want to contact Captain Good Boy Book Nerd about it. And then I was not wholly surprised when the thing with the Mirrorborn and the Archives happened.
Then I was torn between NO ONE GO INTO THE ARCHIVES being IC but not wanting to stomp on plot OOC.
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RE: events leading to the Dance of Skulls, Primeria walking into the Abyss, followed by the other original Fractals, gave the elves enough power to fight off the dragons, at the expense of occasionally unleashing demons and the experience slowly (or, in the case of Obsidian, not so slowly) driving a number of them mad. Not all of the elves were particularly thrilled with this, such as Calithex, Platinum, Silver, Symonesse, etc. but for a while being an abyssal mage was just kind of a thing, and there were more fractals created. Best of intentions, etc.
Eventually Primeria decided it would be extremely cool if elves could be immortal like the First Children; you can extend your lifespan with magic, but dragons, etc, will just live forever unless they’re killed, and she also thought it would be pretty cool if Death just got cut out of the affair completely. Death’s priests did not, in fact, think this was cool, and extra didn’t think it was cool to sacrifice an insane amount of human souls to Oblivion to manage it. Calithex was/is Death’s Herald, so he was at the forefront of what turned into a rebellion/civil war against his older siblings. Primeria decided to put the rebellion down by sacrificing an absolutely unfathomable number of human souls to Oblivion in order to poof them all out of existence, but Diamond convinced her to lower that to a slightly less unfathomable number of human souls to permanently curse the sun against them instead. The rebels became the Nox’alfar, unable to survive in sunlight, and Death lost her absolute shit at so many souls getting Oblivion’d, kicking off the Dance of Skulls, aka Good Job, Primeria, Enjoy Your Zombie Apocalypse.
Lots of stuff happens, such as a bunch of First Children taking one look at that shit and deciding to fuck off to found the primasens of Nefer’khat with various mortals they cared about, elves splitting off to become the Sylv’alfar, etc. Eventually Calithex and the first human king, Harren Harrow, found Death’s City, aka Arx, in an attempt to appease her, which…kinda works, except Primeria won’t back down, which means Death won’t calm down, which leads to Sapphire doing the needful and sticking a knife in Primeria, becoming the First Assassin. Dance of Skulls over, Diamond becomes King of Caer’alfar.
Diamond was fine enough for a long, long while. At some point Obsidian got kicked out of Caer’alfar because he was an insufferable psycho fanatic, but he slipped back in and started whispering in Diamond’s ear. Like Smile said, there was an assassination attempt that was a very near miss, it sent Diamond into a spiral, Obsidian was like “hey, did you know Tyranny is really cool? Also what if we kicked off another apocalypse and maybe Primeria had a point about that whole undying thing after all” etc etc the Reckoning Baalphrigor is a kaiju and wrecked Caer’alfar with demons, and Diamond managed to completely sever himself from the Wheel, so it’s literally impossible to kill him.
The solution was Amber smashing him to bits with a special hammer, so the lesson here is that 1. messing about with Death leads to various apocalypses, and 2. the royal house of Caer’alfar needed some serious therapy, because King Calithex Ael’noctis somehow ended up being the most level headed sibling.
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@kalakh Awesome read, thank you.
One query to make sure I’m completely clear. When we’re talking about oblivion magic, we mean magic deriving from Oblivion, and that “oblivion magic” is not a catch-all term for magic derived from the Abyss, correct?
In other words, oblivion magic is typically meant to be interpreted as the counterpart to magic deriving from Death, usually used for anti-Wheel shenanigans as Diamond did?
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@dvoraen Correct.
Oblivion magic does fun things like completely obliterate souls, which makes Death zombie apocalypse levels of angry.
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@sao said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
Relevant on the question of Driskell Stillwater, from the AMA Apostate did (https://play.arxgame.org/dom/cal/detail/7532/)
Apostate says, “Bless Driskell, but one should take everything they said, tie it up into a tastefully decorated package, and then yeet it into the sea. By happenstance they might have said something accurate somewhere in there but I have not yet seen it.”
Huh. I thought they had staff sanction for what they did.
Well, that explains a bit of my perpetual theological confusion, then.
Still called it on that rat bastard 13th tho
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@Rinel said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@sao said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
Relevant on the question of Driskell Stillwater, from the AMA Apostate did (https://play.arxgame.org/dom/cal/detail/7532/)
Apostate says, “Bless Driskell, but one should take everything they said, tie it up into a tastefully decorated package, and then yeet it into the sea. By happenstance they might have said something accurate somewhere in there but I have not yet seen it.”
Huh. I thought they had staff sanction for what they did.
And that’s why that PC type was so shitty and disruptive to the game. It constantly put other players in the position of having to clean up misconceptions and reinforce theme on overdrive, while people angrily insisted that the person was right. So it basically only served to cause confusion and hostility. Same thing happened with Elisha.
Plus, as staff has also mentioned, that character type inevitably also wanted staff to MAKE their weird ideas be secretly correct.
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@Roz said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
Same thing happened with Elisha.
I often wonder whether I took the right path with Elisha–trying to OOC project that the ideas were wrong while ICly treating him with compassion–but I think in the end I come down on “you shouldn’t have had to make that choice.”
I do regret that my misunderstandings of lore frequently caused problems, though I don’t really assign blame to myself or anyone else for miscommunications happening. It’s hard to tear yourself out of misconceptions you’ve managed to fall into.
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The people spreading IC disinformation that people thought was real were also always, always players with way more energy than me, lol.
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@sao said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
The people spreading IC disinformation that people thought was real were also always, always players with way more energy than me, lol.
i’m sorryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
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@Rinel I’m not blaming you for THAT. I do think it was a contributing factor to how widespread the issue became because anything that I could do to combat the problem would always be diminished by the fact that some people could rp 12 times while I was rping once or twice a week. Not that I was the only player trying to do the needful there, just. A thing. That happened.
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I do understand. And over the years I’ve come down on an attitude of “well, I’d do things differently if I did it all again, but that is in the past now.”
Honestly, the big OOC thing I learned from Arx was that sometimes you just need to ping staff and say “look, obviously I as a player confused about some stuff, so can you tell me what I’m doing wrong here?”
ETA: The second big thing was that I learned it’s a benefit for everyone involved to just tell some people you would prefer not to RP with them