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The Arx Secrets Thread
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@Snackness I think in a story setting, not a RP game with players, it would have been different. But we were trying to balance with the fact that these were PC things! Mostly just trying to have a niche where thematically someone should be keeping an eye on things, and it used to be Malrico always knowing where they were, and then he was dead, so.
Good for everyone’s survival to make sure they at least weren’t being collected by cultists or whatever.
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@Quibbler said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
I had a Megalomanic goal to get the Oracle’s crown. Gianna had some link to the sirens I think, which I am very curious about (@clue 2227). Mostly when I brought it up the response was NOPE you’re gonna DIE so I eventually stopped pursuing it. I always wondered, though.
There was also the thirteenth crow dream (3033), which made Gianna decide she wasn’t going to tie herself to team good guy or team bad guy but instead try to… bridge between them.
As previously mentioned I’m definitely not the expert on Oracle (or Copper), but I think the ‘crown’ was metaphorical, like it wasn’t an actual object or anything, think of it like the way people use someone having the mantle of something. Oracle taught/bestowed Copper the ability to use time magic, which was otherwise unique among mortals (and now immortals). I remember someone sending Watcher a messenger asking after the crown, and her response was that she had no idea what that was really referring to, but that any power over time vanished from the Dream when Copper did.
Watcher did not know this firsthand, but she wholeheartedly trusted the person who told her both in that she would definitely know, and that she had no reason to lie about it.
So blah blah blah it isn’t possible for anyone else to learn time magic, at least in Arx 1’s setting.
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@Roz said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@Rinel said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@Roz said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@Rinel said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@Roz said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@kalakh said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
Re: Prism: Prism had a bit of her own thing going apart from Skald, but when Skald stepped down from godhood he granted a share of the power he retained to her, so she’s still got power, but yeah afaik she’s no longer a Seraph.
Prism actually decided not to accept that power. She and Skald are instead living as a comparatively normal, undivine couple instead. It’s very sweet.
I assume she still has magical ability, because she had also been a mage, but she’s no longer divine.
When did Skald step down, and who/what, if anything, filled the role?
In the finale months, after Orichalcum was killed and writs were removed from the Dream, Azazel was real PECKISH and went and ate Legion (and Fable and Ruin). That meant that Skald either needed to kind of mash together with Vellichor in some fashion, or give up his divinity and power to Vellichor. He chose the latter, because Skald likes being himself and being embodied in the Prime because it’s more fun. But he did save a bit of power for Aleksei and Prism (although Prism, as mentioned earlier, declined hers).
Azazel ate Fable? Huh. I thought… Huh. I am either misremembering or never knew correctly. I thought the Devourer worked for Fable. Was he his own agent the whole time?
He was Fable’s Herald, yes.
And then he ate it.
lmao get rekt
Thanks for all the explanations! It’s neat to see the secrets unveiled.
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Oh, also, Legion, Fable, and Ruin were the big three that Azazel consumed, but he actually ate a fuckload of lesser-but-still-powerful horrors up north, which I suppose is good news for when the Arvani start pushing back up that way.
Afaik, that didn’t include the Maw of the Blizzard though.
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Was Azazel always capable of Devouring things as powerful as gods and their reflections, or did he get supercharged by it?
I’m assuming the reason he didn’t go after any of the gods originally was because it would negatively affect their reflections.
You mentioned Skald needing to merge with Vellichor as a result of Fable being consumed; were any of the other gods affected by Azazel’s unholy buffet?
Finally, were Death and Skald unusually anthropomorphic for gods, or was it just that we (I?) saw more of a human side to them due to their relatively outsized influence in the founding of Arx?
bird's still the word
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@Rinel said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
Was Azazel always capable of Devouring things as powerful as gods and their reflections, or did he get supercharged by it?
I’m assuming the reason he didn’t go after any of the gods originally was because it would negatively affect their reflections.
You mentioned Skald needing to merge with Vellichor as a result of Fable being consumed; were any of the other gods affected by Azazel’s unholy buffet?
He got supercharged but I’m definitely not the person to explain what happened there. Legion and Fable were the only Reflections that got et, so it was mostly Skald handing Vellichor a bunch of new responsibilities and going lmao bye.
If the final battle had gone worse though, the follow up last chance scene would have basically been Azazel doing a god/archfiend chomping speedrun while the PCs tried to stop him.
Finally, were Death and Skald unusually anthropomorphic for gods, or was it just that we (I?) saw more of a human side to them due to their relatively outsized influence in the founding of Arx?
Definitely more anthropomorphic than the other gods, for several reasons. Skald in particular took a pretty active hand in doing shit, then ended up stuck in the physical world because he used a bunch of his power to bind Legion, and leaving would have released it again.
Also he apparently thinks Elysia is lame in comparison now.
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@Rinel said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
Was Azazel always capable of Devouring things as powerful as gods and their reflections, or did he get supercharged by it?
No, he started very smol. He got bigger by eating so many secrets over so many years, until he was big enough to start eating really powerful beings. And the more he ate, the more powerful he became.
I’m assuming the reason he didn’t go after any of the gods originally was because it would negatively affect their reflections.
He needed to get through the Thinnest Point to get in nom range of the gods, I think. He was going for the Thinnest Point to eat the Wheel.
You mentioned Skald needing to merge with Vellichor as a result of Fable being consumed; were any of the other gods affected by Azazel’s unholy buffet?
Skald was impacted because his Reflection was Eaten. The only other archfiend Azazel ate was Fable, who he just replaced.
Finally, were Death and Skald unusually anthropomorphic for gods, or was it just that we (I?) saw more of a human side to them due to their relatively outsized influence in the founding of Arx?
Skald was embodied on the Prime because he was using his power to keep Legion bound. Death isn’t embodied, but she did get kicked out of Elysia by the other gods.
Skald was definitely the closest to being able to seem human because of the nature of Choice and all the practice he got wandering around and interacting with humans.
Death definitely does not act human. She’s a mad goddess.
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@kalakh wait is my pretty house on avarion’s peak okay
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@Selira said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@kalakh wait is my pretty house on avarion’s peak okay
Define “okay”
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@Selira absolutely not.
hope this helps!
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@hellfrog Is it “more” or “less” than okay? You just said “no.”
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Did… did it collapse into the volcano or is part of it overlooking that as a new, potential shardhaven because honestly that would be sick?
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@Roz said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
Death definitely does not act human. She’s a mad goddess.
Her Reflection was the picture of sanity. SOME WOULD SAY.
ETA: He’s not really though.
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@dvoraen said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@hellfrog Is it “more” or “less” than okay? You just said “no.”
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@Roz said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
Death definitely does not act human. She’s a mad goddess.
Maybe I should have just said “more obviously active in the world.” Dance of Skulls, etc.
Granted, that was one time, but it was a pretty big deal
bird's still the word
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I don’t know if this is really a place for it, but I wanted to ask for an informal vetting of how I perceived Bhandn’s magic being, as well as his would-be-PC retainer (meaning I was at one point considering deleting that retainer and CG’ing him as an OC).
Bhandn
I saw Bhandn’s magic as being relevant to color. Not like: “this glows a given color if it’s magical,” or that he does the equivalent of D&D’s color spray or prismatic ray for his use of it, but rather his magic would be something a bit more subtle.For example, if he perceived something aligned abyssal, it might seem shadowed, whereas an elysian-alignment might be perfectly clear to his eyes like he had perfect vision of it, even at a distance. If the magic was primal and maybe had to do with Fire, it might be like a reddish tint to the air or his perception of the object, similar to someone looking flushed.
My reasoning for this was that he kind of sees the world in a more direct way. “It’s a sword, it’s made of X, X should look like this.” Lines of thinking like that. Buuuut, if he ends up an adept, I don’t think it works that way since adepts’ magic, iirc, is based upon your self-perception or to that effect? Kind of why I was curious what others in the know thought of this.
Aendal
Bhandn’s retainer I imagined as a nascent mage. He mostly learned about the world through the written medium. Just like you can read a story in a book, a scholastic treatise on a subject, and so on, I saw his perception of magic as being somewhat similar to how I imagined Platinum did (I got the impression Platinum saw magic as a formulaic, perhaps mathematical study; this is partly based on a scene with Silver in the Nox’alfar embassy). So Aendal might see “arcane writing” he wouldn’t necessarily be able to read (fully understand what magic was done) until he learned more about it. Kind of like how you need to look up a word in the dictionary. You can recognize a language by its characters and style, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can read it or understand it without study. -
So Rostered Characters …
What twists/alterations/etc did you make that was not on the sheet but just became a thing for the char?
Esme was not sheeted to be a zealot, but I kind of took it and ran. It started as a joke and then it just grew from there.
Also the fact she couldn’t lie to anyone while looking at them. Her eyes were her tell. I did that because (hate it or not) I could get purple in my pose and wanted something the other person could react to in case I forgot to say something or give an indication in the pose. As her eyes always broadcast what she was thinking/feeling.
Magic obviously too. What was yours? I like to hear the personal spins on rostered/non-OC characters.
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@Rinel said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@Roz said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
Death definitely does not act human. She’s a mad goddess.
Maybe I should have just said “more obviously active in the world.” Dance of Skulls, etc.
Granted, that was one time, but it was a pretty big deal
You do one zombie apocalypse…
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@RightMeow So there were a couple big ones for Thesarin.
First off was his voice. The roster bio had him down as a man of few words, while my characters tend more toward sesquipedalian loquaciousness by default, so I found myself doing what I came to refer to “Karl Urbaning” my posts. (See, during the filming of Dredd (2012), the lead actor went through his script with a sharpie to blot out unnecessary lines because “Dredd talks less.”)
With that starting point, though, I wound up putting together what I think was a fairly unique voice for his dialogue (although I obviously had my inspirations) to make it clear that he’s not from around here without dropping in foreign words or zee fonetik aksent. Word order, dropped words, word choice that I wouldn’t generally use, so that were another character wouldn’t usually have thought something Thesarin ain’t oft had cause to reckon it. I don’t know that I always hit the balance of sounding off while being intelligible but I did try.
A bit more broadly, his whole… quasi-reluctant grizzled getting to old for this shit backstory built off of what was in his bio but was at least as drawn from other inspirations and characters as it was anything he came along with. Part of it was just being an over-40 surrounded by under-22s, part of it was just an appreciation for takes on the “old gunfighter” trope and inspirations from Bill Munny to the Bloody Nine, part of it was that his backstory had him as a super-popular barbarian war leader and I was working out what he might’ve done to get to that point. Also, I do just generally love the whole trope where the guy who generally acts as a level-headed voice of reason backslides and you get to see the person they were before they tried to work on themselves. I had been sitting on some of those “ague that walks, flood that laughs, butcher of champions and breaker of heroes, the Wildfire of Greenwood who leaves ash and death behind” lines for years and didn’t drop them until the endgame scenes.
& on the other hand, I enjoyed giving him some world-weary wisdom that he liked to drop over and over because sure he’s a barbarian warlord turned nobleman but he’s also a father of four. I always find it extremely funny hearing the stories from massive celebrities about how no amount of international acclaim or fanatically devoted fans will ever make their teenage children think they’re cool and I figure that applies just as much to fantasy heroes. (“Oh my gods dad we all know you lived in the woods a hundred years ago.”)
