We discuss that around here too, don’t worry.
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Considering that one of the main romance options in the game has the nickname Prince Nippletwister (Phaedra/os/x, who is the Dengistic heir of Kleitos), you can eliminate everything that is after the comma
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Man, that’s exactly what I’d hoped and dreamed XoR could be. 
(And yes I know my carefully placed ellipses aren’t going to stop you monsters from derailing my politico-sociological fantasy into another nippleganza, dammit)
But that’s not important right now. I just popped in to say: sorry, gang, but with the end of May staring me hard in the face it’s clear that I’m definitely not going to deliver on Mayduin. I’ve recently been knocking out 3000+ words a day and that’s still not going to get me across the finish line. 
Structurally, Irduin as I’d originally planned it was an odd chapter. I wanted it to introduce the rural Hegemony and its dynamics through a village that’s in some ways typical and in some ways unique. That involves introducing a bunch of new characters and asking the reader to care about their struggles at least a little. But when it was just going to be an interim stop on your way to the big city, I was worried that readers would find it maddening. Why are you asking me to read about all these people at the inn so I can decide who to hang out with, just for Chapter Two?
Now that I’m planning to make Irduin the back half and climax of G2, I can give those characters and their stories a little more room to breathe. I think this will ultimately make it a stronger game. But it does mean that I’ve been writing more slowly, and just, well, more, than I’d expected.
So apologies to everyone (including my editor) who’s been waiting patiently for an update…and then onward and upward. Juneduin awaits!
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That’s a compliment to the Author’s worldbuilding, if anything.
This is interesting but I think you’re making the same mistake I’m always making, which is thinking about XoR world mechanically/causally. Which makes sense, we live in a mechanical world so that’s how our brains work. But it’s been so far layed out in the text that XoR’s world is teleological. The fact that aether is the most concentrated in an infant brain doesn’t necessarily mean that it was placed there, or arrived there from anywhere, it may be there because that’s where it’s ought to be, because the telos/teloi of the infant (and it’s brain) is the widest, the least set in stone, and it’s capacity for change is the greatest.
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My wallet… it’s suffering… I can’t keep making these bets…
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My slowing down right around the time you told me about the bets is 100% coincidental. I am definitely in no way taking a cut.
(sorry!)
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Mmm. Sort of. Aether does move mechanically, as we’ve seen with both Harrowing and questions of going to the sphere of aether to grab talismans. So while an infant’s brain ought to have aether teleologically, unless conception is a metatelic function, aka Theurgy*, the process for expanding the supply of aether probably has some kind of mechanism.
*and if this is the case, then that has the implication that aether can be “created” by Theurgically altering the telos of a subject. Which has been discussed before, but still has implications that need to be explored by mad science.
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Was it hardcore confirmed that there’s a physical sphere of aether? I must’ve missed it. I always thought that “sphere of aether” was a metaphorical approximation.
Hell, I’m not even sure if it was hardcore confirmed that aether is physical (i.e. can be touched and put on scales). It being inside of aetherial blood (or brain matter) isn’t necessarily indicative of it being physical.
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I think the only immaterial thing the Hegemonic philosophy acknowledges is telos.
Given the aether seems have a definite location in space, I think it has to be physical.
It also has a tendency to go to another place beyond the lunar sphere if it is freed from a human body.
There are also greater and less quantities of it in bodies which again would point to it being physical. As would its susceptibility to manipulation by physical means.
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I agree with this part. You’re referring to the process of making aetherial blood, right?
But this is a tough knot to untangle in the world building. If the XoR reality is mechanical (cause-effect/ classical physics) and the magic is teleological (as confirmed by the Author and evidenced in the text - you don’t have to contend with the laws of physics while doing theurgy, only with the telos of the thing), where do we delineate between the two?
Magic trumps physics, this is a given. If aether is a physical substance, physically present in people’s brains and in a place in the outer space, then manipulating the fuel for magic with magic should be entirely possible. Sure, we can say that the telos of aether is impossible to grasp, but the brain’s made of mush. The telos of water inside the brain is plenty graspable. Manipulating the medium in which the aether physically resides == manipulating aether.
One could manipulate the water telos in aetherial blood and make it flow out of the vials of enemy theurges b-e supercooled helium style.
There’s tons of really inconvenient things we could infer if we assume that aether is a physical substance in a physical world.
Edit:
Then again the presence of aether in a substance can temporarily suspend/modify it’s teloi. When water in the blood or glass of a vial comes into contact with aether, it’s telos/teloi could become ungraspable. It kind of makes sense.
What happens if you drink aetherial blood? Does your body’s total aether content increase? And if so - permanently or temporarily?
Damn it works real well with the chaos from greek mythology though. But even then aether being in this Leibnizian weird state between classically physical as we know it and fuzzily metaphysical works best when I think of it. You know what I’m talking about, the apparent incoherence of monadology that’s only seeming incoherent due to our preconceptions working strongly against it, like a non-divisible entity being made up of multiple (equally non-divisible btw) entities.
We’ll probably never get to explore how the change is wrought on a microscopic level, how exactly is theurgy modifying physical reality in complete ignorance of physical laws (and reasonably so, I don’t think even Author can make atomic/subatomic physics casual reader friendly). And the most I expect from Aether sphere lore dump is the mythos of it, not practical applications.
Sorry for rambling. I think getting a straight answer whether aether is physical or not (or more interestingly - neither/both) would pose more further questions than it’d answer current ones. Oh, the magnificent perils of intricate worldbuilding.
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Is there a true line at all? It could be that it doesn’t fit neatly into a taxonomy of purely mechanical or solely teleological, but…well, it acts like aether, with properties that will need to be discovered and analyzed by theurges once the idea of a scientific revolution (and sharing information with each other) gets off the ground.
I mean, it’s entirely possible that these are all true. That doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to be known, or efficient to do in battle. Quickly affecting teloi in a human appears to be pretty difficult due to the complexity of the human’s teloi. Also, of course, it’s unlikely that most of this is really known in-setting. Again, there hasn’t been a real scientific revolution, and the number of people who really know what aether is is very limited (I recall Havenstone saying that they don’t actually explain how aetherial blood works until you’re ready for the Second Kyklos). So they’re spitballing and doing academic debates at the Lykeion, but they probably don’t know anything more for certain than we do and probably less.
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That’s kind of what we’re doing 
. I hereby baptize general XoR forums “the Lykeion”.
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I think the initial challenge to this line of reasoning is that the aether expense required for this kind of experiment far outweighs the perceived potential benefit. I am sure theurges have invented all kinds of inefficient uses for aether through experiments, but have discarded the techniques as impractical.
It is definitely a physical substance because of the meteorite talismans wielded by the senior members of the Hegemony’s elite. I would submit that it is possible and maybe even likely that it is more physical than it seems and the Aristotelian understanding of its interactions with the physical world are a misunderstanding/flawed observation. We practiced medicine for centuries irl based on balancing humors for example. Sometimes inadvertently it worked.
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One doesn’t necessarily imply the other.
A hundred dollar banknote may be wielded by a senior member of Democracy elite. It may have measurable effects on physical reality. Is money physical?
A holy symbol may be wielded by a senior member of religious elite. Is religion or faith physical?
I know it’s not an analogy. It could be somewhat argued that money and religion are social constructions (are they?) and aether in the XoRiverse isn’t. Let’s use a more direct analogy then.
A homegrown amateur of physics may wield a sceptrelike object with a rapidly rotating circular head weighing way more than he could normally pick up. Is centrifugal force physical?
To a lesser extent - is universal spin conservation physical? (Well, yeah, ok - it is. But you know what I mean.)
Are mathematical concepts physical? I have 1kg bag if sugar. How much sugar do I have? 1kg. Ok, but if I’m on Jupiter or in zero g. How much? 0.8ish litre? Sounds reasonable, I have 0.8ish litre of sugar. But what if I’m running really fast, like close to light speed and Lorenz transformation occurs. How much sugar do I have?
You can reduce it to number of grains but then we can replace a bag of sugar with liquid or a gas. So a number of molecules? Yeah, fine, you got me there Dr. Smartypants.
But the point stands that there are things you can point to and observe, that can have an effect on the world that aren’t strictly physical.
The thing that makes me particularly inclined to believe that aether isn’t physical (or completely physical) is mainly the fact that it enables the breaking of the laws of physics and as such enables reductio ad absurdum. But moreso even than that it’s the fact that there’s already observable metaphysics in the XoRiverse (telos isn’t as real as a bag of oranges in the real world) and that Greekomorphic mythos is exactly where such concepts thrive.
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Aether as a physical element
For aether to not exist physically, we’d need to assume that any claim of its detection as a physical element in human bodies and meteors — already a secret reserved for the ruling elite of the Hegemony — has been wrong; that the accounts of “ancient alchemists [who] first made their study of metallic aether”, and their observations that “if anything loosens the matrix of other elements fixing it in place, the aether sublimes in an instant” are at best misunderstandings, at worse entirely false.
What may not be physical is the mechanism for blood magic, and it’s the grand Karagond trick to make it unthinkable that this is anything but “aether”.
“Yes, yes, the Theurges speak of elements. We know.” The lithe Guardian sounds slightly bored. “As if mere matter could ever change the teloi of things, simply because it comes from on high. We must ensure that you do not absorb this confusion. The Theurges are lost to themselves, unable to recognize their own spirits in the mirror of their blood-element.”
Two very different magical cultures; two incompatible interpretations as to the origin of blood magic. Perhaps aether is necessary, but it’s far harder to prove it’s sufficient.
As for my opinion:
I’ve posited before that the world of ΧOR is structured as layers, or “masks” that hide further and further causes and mechanisms until we reach the source of all things (the nature of which is disputed). To “see the world without its masks”: nature behind nature. Those deeper abstractions would be immaterial in the sense that they define the material world through their motion. In this framework, aether would be a material catalyst for altering those immaterial abstractions.
On aether in children
This is why I think a sharp delineation between the “mechanical” and the “teleological” is imprecise for describing ΧOR’s blood magic. This isn’t a deity creating a universe, it’s an author writing a story, and it’s natural for the magic system to be designed with the demands of the story in mind. That design can still be described mechanically, with internal self-consistency (with no demand for consistency with physics) and select inferences emerging organically to become part of the story.
Anyway, we can ask Cerlota how aether ended up in humans in the first place. Her response?
“By the Will according to which we were made.” Cerlota shrugs. "Or, if you are a skeptically-minded Nyr, by some ancient and fortunate accident in which our brute ancestors grazed on metallic aether, thereby taking it into their bodies and their heirs’. But I know of no truly satisfactory explanation."
My interpretation is that...
…humans naturally produce aether as a biological function rather than absorbing it as a nutrient from some aetheric realm; the rate and quantity of production merely changes with age. Given the alchemical language surrounding aether, we can call it transmutation that breaks conservation. Sure, there’s aesthetic power in envisioning some common reservoir of pure possibility that links all humanity — enough that if I were to ever write a fantasy world, I’d be tempted to include it — but I’ve not seen enough to convince me that such a reservoir exists in the world of ΧOR. That said, if it were to exist, and there was a personal ‘backdoor’ within each person, well… One would naturally attribute that to “Angels” of creation residing in a realm of aether, wouldn’t we?
Food for thought for the Inner Voices.
On aether in space
For what it’s worth, I don’t think we’re ever going to know whether aether can be viably harvested from ‘the heavens’. It’s reaching for the stars as the world below collapses: it seeks a technological solution to a social problem. It’d be thematically dissonant.
Now, for individual comments:
And even then, Cerlota mentions that “Other Theurges claim that teloi are themselves actual structures wrought from aether, and that rather than a forge metaphor in which one element affects the properties of another distinct one, we should envision the process more alchemically, as a dissolving, accreting, or rebuilding within the self-same element…”
We can ask Cerlota whether the telos of aether itself can be changed (I take some credit for this question), to which she responds that every Theurge has tried and failed. A key piece of ambiguity comes from Theurgy first needing to understand telos before altering it: Cerlota personally fell at that very first step: “To contemplate the telos of aether for too long is like staring at the sun; I tried once with a Talisman, and it felt as though it was burning a hole in my inner eye.” It was physically possible for her to try to use magic to study fuel for magic: whether her failure is representative of humanity’s limitations or the universe’s limitations is unclear, and is unconvincing evidence for or against the physicality of aether.
Your subsequent line of reasoning regarding manipulating the medium in which aether resides to me seems consistent with the world: it easily leads to the conclusion of aetherial blood. Having extracted the medium (blood, brain, eyes, etc.), the aether remains useless to us until, per Cerlota, we “unlock the aether while preventing it from ascending”.
The explanation for why we can’t just “make it flow out of the vials of enemy theurges b-e supercooled helium style” is that it’s an invalid tactic: Theurges can sense and block Changes. There’s no reason to assume that a Theurge couldn’t willingly do this with their aetherial blood phials if they wanted to.
Basically, I fail to see particularly inconvenient implications of physical aether.
While the underlying argument about mathematics being an abstract constructed system is nice, this attempted illustration is more semantic. Yes, weight changes with gravity. Mass doesn’t. At the speed of light, that mass is still that mass. The energy there is still the same. We apply the same force, the same acceleration occurs; don’t have to count molecules to see that. How much sugar do you have? You have 1 kilogram of it. There’s your cause, and it’s a physical property. How much does it weigh on Jupiter? What’s its volume? Those measurements still derive from an underlying physical cause.
The same applies to your example of centrifugal force.
You already said it, “object”: the reality of what we’re seeing is caused by the interactions between various physical bodies, and centrifugal force is illusory precisely because it’s not a result of those interactions, only appearing because we selected a rotating reference frame. It’s not the cause of any physical effect in the world. Take a stationary frame of reference and then it’s not physical, because it doesn’t exist.
The argument isn’t wrong; it just doesn’t apply to aether and Talismans in the setting. One of the most incredible traits we have is being able to point to and name concepts that are abstract or imaginary or all manner of not physically manifesting. This entire forum thread is predicated on that power. But I would not light oil on fire and suggest that it isn’t physical because I can’t affirm the color of the flame appears the same to me as it does to the person next to me.
Of note, we already have mad Theurgy in this department.
“It has of course been attempted, with all of the aetheric organs, and with both animals and humans, together and separately.” Cerlota ignores your barely-audible curse of disgust at the images this calls up. “But even the best-informed Theurgic tinkering has so far only reduced human subjects to the level of animals…including permanent dissipation of their aetherial capacity.”
But who knows? Maybe Diadoch(e) “There are parts of your body whose sole telos is pleasure… and no one else could ever do to them what I can" Phaed is secretly a test tube baby produced by this experimentation… The imagination runs wild with sufficient ambiguity and some well-placed ellipses.
And speaking of the 「 (sigh)“nippletwister” 」
It’s certainly a vote of confidence towards being able to create memorable character concepts.
(I’m mainly hyped for Tamran though)
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Aether in our world’s European alchemical tradition is related very closely to the Aristotelian concept of prime matter, which is basically matter without any form joined to it. It’s pure potency or the opposite of the Unmoved Mover/Unchanged Changer which is pure actuality. Aether may in fact have no definite telos if Aristotelian physics and metaphysics end up being an accurate concept of how the XoR cosmos works unlike ours. Form is basically what makes an entity the kind of thing it is, so maybe the answer to “what is aether” and “what is its telos” is “potentially anything and actually nothing”.
Now, it’s possible the Aristotelian view isn’t how the word actually works and is only what the Theurges think, Havenstone has said that’s intentionally undefined, but for the moment I’m treating it as accurate provisionally.
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I’ll reply to it when I have more time on my hands. Just wanted to say that I love your comments.
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Hi, I am new to the forums so I wanted to ask if this game has a guide anywhere posted and if so how to search for it?
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A general guide, no, but there are a few build guides on Steam. You can also join us on the Discord if you have more specific questions, plenty of knowledgeable players there.
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Is there like a route thats objectively better or somewhat metagamey?
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