1714

@Havenstone On the subject of sufficiently analyzed magic, I have some more questions regarding parts of the lore dump.

  1. Would it be possible to harvest aether in eyes without killing someone? This would still admittedly be grotesque but it is probably preferable to dying.

  2. What effect would blood transfusions have on the ability to perform wisardry? In other words, if a wisard gets a blood transfusion from someone else, does that increase the wisard’s ability to perform wisardry? Do Harrowers have a method for preventing blood of different blood types from clumping together? Would it even matter if that blood did clump together?

  3. If wisards can’t harness the aether in someone else’s blood without fixing the aether, is there a way to harness the aether in their eyes and brain without bothering to fix the aether? For example, would it work to touch someone else’s eye or brain and then use their aether?

  4. So I got to thinking that if normal blood does not work well as aetherial blood, does aetherial blood work as blood in the bloodstream? In other words, could we transfuse aetherial blood back into people without killing them? If so, then what effect would that have? Would it enable wisards to replenish their natural aether? Is it possible by this method to boost even temporarily their internal supply of aether beyond what is natural? Would doing so be visible under Telos Vision? Could this be a way to get aether past the Wards by transfusing it back into someone? Are the Wards also used on a much smaller scale as security for individual rooms and buildings to prevent someone smuggling in aetherial blood for use by hostile wisards on the inside?

  5. Would it be possible using Telos Vision to detect wisards who have earlier used their own blood by checking whether their internal aether is lower than would be natural?

I like the way @MahatmaDagon phrased this sort of thing:

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1715

Havie You are a saint. The fact you survive the first demo you posted that I could be personally called and pointed out to be rather toxic or bluntly sincere evwn if I was just trying to help you and the game. Now I am older and wiser so I hope being helful but being more nicer to not depress the author I want to help.
Interaction with authors are key for instance many games I was in fence of buying could have being instant buys if they had a small choice that could have expanded my enjoyment alot. Also, make a close contct with author makes reader more engaged and ready to spend money . I am dying to still helping you and i promise being nicer lol

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1716

I loved the new BSG in the beginning, but it seemed less and less space opera and more and more soap-opera as the seasons went by. About half the final season’s eps left me feeling meh due to the over the top melodrama, and I found the final finale a bit hokey, but I was glad the series got an ending unlike the original series.

I do agree that at its height BSG was amazingly good with excellent acting, great special effects, highly effective use of sound to accentuate events, and a fine balance of engaging drama and breath-stealing action.

And yes there were terrific resonances with the soft sciences even as the series kept the hard science mostly to background material with computers and drones sidelined due to fear of Cylon hacking and replaced with humans, increasing opportunities for both interaction and heroics. There were no lasers, phasers or plasma weapons, just missiles, both nukes and non-nukes, which we already have and can relate to, and slug-throwing rail guns which were already well into development at the time the show was launched (although the US has recently reduced spending on research, cancelling plans to build demonstrators and a prototype due to the current inability to attain the desired rate of fire). So the Tech was pretty low key, and didn’t steal the spotlight away from the humans & their self-created enemy which at times seemed just as or even more human.

So if you’re going to emulate BSG, please emulate the first few years instead of the final year or two. :smirk_cat:

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1717

I hate bsg with all my soul as i dont see the appeal or the logic I really think the story is made to cause a totally hatred to any human character I have to see several chapters with a friend in the college and I end snoring after two of them. However I was able to see the prequel and even if was really boring at least was coherent. The lore is really worth reading is onw of those cases where I love the lore but hate the actual storyline. A clear example is Dragon age 2 great lore bad game.

In your game I am waiting for character could evolve to be CYNICAL there is naivete but nno cynism and mara is CYNICAL as she doesnt believe in humanity is good.

1718

Spoilerdump responses:

Point 1: Yes, this would be possible. I’m struggling to see how it would end up being relevant though. If someone is wanting to harvest your aether, offering them your eyes (or marrow, notwithstanding that the gameworld still has no non-lethal technology to extract that) is going to be poor compensation for the loss of the brain, where the game-changing quantities of aether are.

Of course, you might be thinking about a “conscientious” harvester who wants aether without killing people…but I’m afraid I can’t imagine successfully basing an even-slightly-more-humane alternative to the blood economy on eyeball harvesting. Even if you cut back severely on your country’s blood consumption, you’d still be adding thousands upon thousands of blind helots (or alternative target group) to the population every year. Not sure anyone would know what to do with that. I suspect that as the first thousand or so began to die prematurely, the pressure to blind fewer people and just slaughter people outright instead would be irresistible.

I guess if you’re not talking about a systemic issue, but a one-off situation where you need more aether than you can burn out of your own blood, but not so much that you need a brain, and you’ve got someone you’re willing to blind, and the time and equipment to keep the aether in the eyeballs from subliming…this could be relevant. But tbh I don’t think I’ll be writing that scenario any time soon.

Point 2. Blood transfusion technology doesn’t exist in the gameworld. The idea, “maybe it would work differently if I found some way of sticking it into my own veins,” hasn’t occurred to anyone, in part because it’s such a well-known truth that you can’t use someone else’s blood. Blood types weren’t known in our world until 1901, and aren’t currently understood in the gameworld.

Point 3. You can’t access the aether in eyes, brains, or marrow just by touching it. Refinement from the other elements is required, along of course with fixing it so it doesn’t sublime away as you refine it.

Point 4. Again, no transfusions. Sorry! And Wards are never used on a small scale, for reasons I leave you to speculate about.

Point 5. It’s possible that an extremely experienced and specialized Theurge could use Telos Vision for this purpose, but we’re probaby talking Ennearch level. The difference would be subtle and very hard to spot without much practice.

The Ch 2 tax collector raid is definitely also wider than it may appear. :slight_smile: And yes, it widens Ch 2 a lot more than many people realize.

@P_Tigras, I agree that the wheels came off BSG more and more as the series went on. I thought its most important problem was that it kept trying to be a mystery-box show, which was what Moore & Co were TERRIBLE at writing. “They have a plan,” except they don’t, they really, really don’t. Is God somehow at work in any of this? Beats me. Who are the final five? Arbitrary, nonsensical, undoing lots of what came before. Why is there a freaking Bob Dylan song in the BSG-verse? I don’t even care any more…

When they ran out of steam on the first couple of big mysteries, they also lost a lot of the tension that had been driving the plot, and (like many writers in a similar bind) fell back on relationship melodrama. The great early dilemmas, the tensions between military and civilian leadership in extremis, the politics of responding to malevolent infiltrators in your midst…almost all of that got lost and replaced with less interesting problems too. I did think they still found some interesting family drama in the Adama-Roslin-Lee-Starbuck dynamics, but with diminishing returns.

Anyway, I promise I already know the answers to the mysteries of the Rebels-verse. :slight_smile: And I’ll do my best not to lapse into soap opera.

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1719

Havie is there a way to killer switch all teurges brain and make them burn It could be awesome some kind of DEATH RAY OF GOD and fry all heretics also a great way to deal with over population just Hegemony dead grab all their food and distribute during the famine period… I just want kill the mages and their tools in a justice bonfire

1720

Sadly, there is no Awesome Death Ray of God in the XoRverse.

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1721

It really depends on when you came into the series. Their first two and a half seasons were the best. Then it was a slow downhill ride from there. I probably wouldn’t have watched more than one or two eps either if I had started in seasons four through six with some of the bad eps. I kept watching only because I was already heavily invested in the series, but I was gritting my teeth more and more as time went by.

You understand! My feelings exactly bro!

Yepyep!

The first three despite excellent acting seemed very tired by the time the series ended, and as for the fourth, I was quite frankly sick of how the best pilot/best sharpshooter/best out of box thinker would be so amazing if she weren’t feeling so empty inside and thus turning to alcohol and philandering to self-medicate herself. I mean I get it, but I just didn’t care any more.

Consider me completely reassured. :smiley_cat:

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1722

I think that all mystery-box shows are destined to start sucking after 1.5 seasons, because when you don’t have a plan and rely on constant suspense to keep people engaged, eventually they figure out the show is on a rocket to nowhere and can’t care anymore.

As someone who started off loving BSG, and then hated it after season 2 for all of these reasons, I just want to say thank you.

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1723

And ppoison? Could a poison effect only teurges. I am just want a effect system trick to show my divinity without fighting Imagine mara charisma reforced with teurges screming in agony and tear down their own flesh Even if is not practical at great scale it is important as publicity value to reinforce the idea of they are heretics. That and I have to find a not direct violent way of killing them with no direct violence. If soldiers seem their mages as heretics they could joining me.

Still My first goal is kill that horrible demon called Breden I have imagine a perfect way and a ritual only for her… As she will became the public Judas in Mara tradition canon.

1724

Babylon 5 managed to keep the mystery-box relevant for five seasons. But then, JMS made sure to ration out the amount of time he spent on the Vorlons and Shadows in the early seasons so that there’d be plenty of time to ask the big questions later.

Here’s a trick: Show a theurge a roll of duct tape. If they’re using theurge-vision, the sheer number of teloi they saw would blind them.

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1725

I need something spectacular and bloody to charm commoners in believe Mara religion Something luke them turning Lemmings or they turning march hares in public or they killing each other or running naked or making pigs fly… Something that show they are mad and Mara as a god send…Havie could I do lsd in water to make Teurges high and use that as divine power?

1726

The planlessness is terrible, and it still feels to me like something we shouldn’t have to take for granted.

I remember when it first dawned on my college crowd that the overarching alien mystery in the X-Files wasn’t going anywhere satisfying, because Chris Carter & co. had started without a “plot Bible,” never wrote one, and just kept making stuff up. Heroes had a terrific mystery arc for its first few episodes, ending with “save the cheerleader,” and then lurched clumsily into the unknown, with Tim Kring barely managing to arrange a halfway satisfying ending to Season One before it all collapsed entirely in subsequent seasons.

JJ Abrams is of course also particularly notorious for his mystery abuse, especially since his TED Talk on the subject. It includes the following insight:

“In the creation of Lost, Damon Lindelof and I were basically tasked with creating this series that we had very little time to do. We had 11 and a half weeks to write it, cast it, crew it, shoot it, cut it, post it, turn in a two-hour pilot. So it was not a lot of time. And that sense of possibility – what could this thing be? There was no time to develop it.”

From what little I know of it, it sure seems like the economics of network TV make it hard to work out a satisfying seasons-long set of mysteries. To make a show for network broadcast, you start with a pilot and (if you’re lucky) a few episodes, usually with a short deadline. You probably won’t have written too much of the rest, because it’s all so contingent on how the show is received. You’ll probably not have thought too much about subsequent seasons. And the rush to keep up means you’ll probably keep making things up pretty close to deadline, rather than properly thinking ahead.

But that might be changing in the new streaming era, with Netflix, Amazon & co. throwing money to develop whole seasons. Sure, they’re mainly doing it one season at a time; but at least those seasons are pretty coherent, and there’s less preventing the showrunners from thinking ahead. Let’s see if Stranger Things can stick the landing in Season Three, but I think it’s unpacked its mysteries pretty well so far.

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1727

@Havenstone Hmmm. It is difficult to improve on things without actually understanding them and sadly it seems the cost of seeking such knowledge is going to be bloody, but the cost of ignorance will be higher so seeking knowledge it is.

I guess that is part of being a skeptic. My MC does not consider widely-held beliefs to necessarily be true. My MC would dismiss many of those beliefs outright as Hegemony self-serving lies/propaganda, and would consider many of the remainder to be the best understanding possible at the time but still not necessarily actually true.

In this particular case, I think coming up with the idea to try it is a fairly natural progression of noting that aether inside the body can pass the Wards but aether outside of the body cannot. So I do not think it is unreasonable for the MC to come up with the idea after talking to Cerlota Viore. I’ll concede the Rebellion at the time the MC crossed the Wards probably did not have the equipment to experiment with the idea and with at most four vials, aetherial blood is currently too precious a resource to risk in an experiment but that calculation can change based on supply. There is also the fact that for a test to be effective, aetherial blood would probably have to be injected into a wisard and those are in even shorter supply particularly considering the experiment might kill the person. Still this is something that in the long term probably needs to be tested. Also, the game-world is one that has for several centuries been built on use of blood so it stands to reason that blood would have been studied more in this game-world than in ours just as gunpowder was studied less in the game-world than in ours.

I do hope that our rebellions won’t necessarily be outright stopped from trying ideas just because they haven’t been tried before.

Challenge accepted! :thinking:

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1728

Thank the Angels for this feedback/decision. :slight_smile:

But yeah, I agree that forum feedback is an amazing resource, and it saddens me when authors don’t use it. It’s not like the fanbase is too large.

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1729

That’s fine, but it’s one thing to approach an existing belief with scepticism, quite another to imagine an alternative that actually triggers a paradigm shift or major new invention. When you’re basically asking, “Why can’t our rebellion come up with a technology I know about?” the answer is generally going to be, “Because however convenient it might be, people often go centuries without coming up with all the ideas that are possible at their tech level.”

You make a good point that there’s a greater incentive in the gameworld than in ours to experiment with blood transfusion. It would also be easy to say that the first few times it was tried, it made the receiving Theurge deathly ill without any notable positive effect, so it was deemed a dead end. But I’ll give it some thought.

What it certainly won’t be is a way of smuggling any meaningful quantity of already refined blood through a Ward. The concentration of aether in refined blood would keep you stuck on one side.

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1730

I could advice you to be careful in game what character knows and more importantly want to know about Theurge Mara for instance doesn’t want to know Into slightest in fact her reaction would be violent.

So you know about Theurge :tea: Is a wonderful day to die in a stake as an heretic don’t you think my friend blood mage.

Mara defends blood mage is pure evil and against Shayardene recordings and the cause of Xaos storms So any knowledge will be heretic so Mara will want react in character and violently zealous against anyone that tries to info dump her about it.

I am saying that because if games starting info dump attack me with info My character wouldn’t ask or even want in a million of years could be out of immersion.

Sorry If It sounded rude I am trying to not use the metaphor I have in mind really hard. Just be careful and let player that doesn’t play as teurge have mysteries that should uncover with a Theurge run . Just my two cents

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1731

@Havenstone Innovation happens during warfare and I get the impression that this will be a war the likes of which has not been seen in centuries. The first Thaumatarch experimented with blood from what lore we are told so following in the footsteps of such experiments could seem like a good approach in the absence of having access to the earlier results. I wasn’t asking that the approach work, I was asking that the MC think to try it. The MC would have had months to brainstorm these sorts of things and plenty of incentive to do as much brainstorming as possible.

I suppose the MC could try eventually having a wisard drink or eat small quantities of aetherial blood to see what happens. That should be well within our current tech level.

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1732

Part of my thinking is that the model that Hera’s successor made (namely the wards) is by its own nature unsustainable without constant expansion. Simply because eventually population rate will more or less stabilise. The amount of blood they need would need to be constantly filled with the vanquished and because of the aftermath of Hera’s death and the military reversals blunting their forward momentum it would eventually lead to the death spiral that the Hegemony seems to be heading towards.

Even without us, I reckon that within twenty or so years the Hegemony would have hit terminal velocity and disintegrated under the weight of the inherent flaws that were created. Because I am near certain the Wards were never supposed to be more than a temporary stop-gap for the second Thautmarch to reassess the situation, replenish his forces, and then begin his conquests again.

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1733

@Havenstone Just morbid curiosity, would we have a choice in later games to order to harvest someone’s (both) eyeballs, or harvest his/her marrow (which means paralysing the unfortunate victim), as a punishment?

Assuming all hegemonic people (nobles, yeomen, helots, etc.) are willing to give up one of their eyeballs for harvesting, would the aetherial blood be enough to replace the current helot harrowing?