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The Arx Secrets Thread
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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.”)
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@junipersky Did you mean this for the Arx Secrets thread?
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… yes lemme… just… yeah
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@junipersky lol i got u
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I’m confused, where should I be.x.x
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@Roz said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@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.
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@RightMeow said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
Magic obviously too. What was yours? I like to hear the personal spins on rostered/non-OC characters.
Oh, and magic too, didn’t answer that.
So I’m proud of this one–this takes a sec but bear with me. Years back @Aria did an action to collect the oral traditions of the Prodigals Riven had been collecting into books. I started writing out some of these folk stories in the Whites, some of them involving an antagonist named Wildfire whose motive and characterization in every story was aggression and mass murder (and so the protagonist needs to think of something clever to either save everyone from Wildfire or to save Wildfire from whatever invincible opponent he plans on trying to 1v1). What I never told anyone outside of some Black Journals was that Wildfire was Thesarin’s nickname in his wilder days, and the story is a generally wildly fictionalized version of his pre-Compact exploits.
So fast forward years ahead and I need to make the decision about magic. I definitely settled on Adept quickly, study & control or invocation of a higher power really aren’t Thesarin’s Thing and my impression at the time was that Adepthood was tied to magic as performance-enhancer rather than more esoteric effects, which suited my concept. The Brand was simple; Thesarin has already tattooed his entire life on his skin, so he already has a forest of marks defining his identity; “they’re magic now” is a pretty direct step. When it is made clear to me that an Adept has a lot more options for magic than I’d initially thought, at first I do try to work out if I should expand things–can something else really define him? And my conclusion is “no;” he can try really hard at other parts of his life but when the question is “who is Thesarin Riven, what defines him, what is his truth” then as much as he might complain or regret it the answer is “he commits horrible violence.”
So then I’m thinking about it further, with the advice from people about how personal magic is, and I decide to tie in the Wildfire stories. So in addition to the preternatural prowess I’d already had in mind I decided to add in a fire effect when he gets going, where fire starts to pop up around him as he fights. Thesarin, the violence he commits, and the barely-directed fury and hate that drive him to do so are a metaphorical raging inferno, but because it’s magic there is also literal fire everywhere. He is the Wildfire of Greenwood and ash and death follow him.
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@insomniac Will you elucidate on the bit you wrote about adepts and “more options for magic than I’d initially thought”? I was never really clear on their details other than they turned primum inward as a kind of augmentation, iirc, and even then I might be missing the mark with that summarization.
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@dvoraen said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@insomniac Will you elucidate on the bit you wrote about adepts and “more options for magic than I’d initially thought”? I was never really clear on their details other than they turned primum inward as a kind of augmentation, iirc, and even then I might be missing the mark with that summarization.
Not insomniac ofc, but I bet I know what he means: for a lot of Arx time I think that most people, myself included, thought that adepts were limited specifically to fighty physical sorts. That is: magic used to enhance physical stats and combat ability. But adepts are just drawing primum from themselves to do magic, and the magic they do doesn’t have to be about physical enhancements. So being an adept doesn’t mean you’re just one type of magic user: it’s about where your magic is sourced from, rather than what you do with it. So more flexible than I think a lot of people thought. (Again, myself included!)
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@insomniac I also settled on adept for dreamy future times that never happened. I also wrote Lark’s soul brand, but I guess I’ll probably repurpose that bit of writing for some other use.
