Main reason I made this thread is I was in the process of commissioning some paper dolls for the quest but ran into a hell of a few weeks, and now I can't remember who I was talking to or when they tended to be on irc..so if you see this and know what the hell I am talking about, please say something.

Just stopping in to say I'm really enjoying this quest. I really liked how you handled the opening, giving us a protagonist with something of an alien perspective, further complicated by her age and preconceptions, making us have to work just to communicate and get useful information from her.

And even now that we've gotten things more figured out, the continuing feeling that both character and player know more and less than each other is kind of fun to play with.

Can't help say who you were talking to on irc, I'm afraid. Missed that. Did you try checking your logs?

Oh, hey, now I can talk about this thing properly! So, yeah, I recognize the setting and all, have the backer's draft of the RPG it's based on. That said, I've been taking care to keep my setting knowledge out of my suggestions because it's annoying when people constantly blab about that stuff in a quest clearly meant to be accessible to those unfamiliar with the setting and which can easily have differences from canon. That happens way too much in Lunar Quest and its discussion thread (not to mention that a lot of that knowledge turned out wrong due to the variant setting).

But, yeah, I love Town, and so I've been following this. The beginning was pretty cool, all confusing and stuff, and then I saw the familiar name and things made a little more sense.

And I just recently find out that I already knew you in another context after seeing you link to this, ahaha.

Jasper does fit in really well as a character on tgchan, doesn't she?
It is comforting to know, that should I become a multi-souled eldritch creature able to consume damn near anything and continually upgrade itself... there's a ready-made think tank online, tailored to my specific needs.

(Actually, becoming such a being IS in fact on my to-do list, on the "in case of Singularity" section...)

Also, may I say that it brightened my day considerably to see that someone found my artwork worthy of usage :)

Awesome.

So, in the thread we've been told the plan is six years of princess maker. How hard is that promise? If we do go actively seeking a way to talk to dad by finding one his shrine, or otherwise ignore secrecy, does this change things?

Hmn. Well if you stay in Town its pretty solid.
No one really worships your Dad. He has underlings but is busy.

Also Town has some beings on the level of your mother or a little less protecting it.

Now even if you go into the Outside and search for your father..there's a betweenness to the current time. Huge momentus changes just happened, things are in a state of confusion and rebuilding and time passing.

So ..I have no idea if that answers your question.

More than I expected to find out, I'm just trying to get a useful answer, or hints in that vague direction, about how much we have to worry about people identifying us and spreading the word.

> (Sorry I keep rewriting the next post. Finding a balence of sumary and direct dialogue that shows what I want to show but also lets me start chewing thrum IC time is hard.)

When in doubt start with a choice you want to give us to chew on, and work backwards maybe? Also, don't be in too much of a hurry to hurry unless there's strong hints your player base wants to as well I'd suggest: I'm snickering just imagining the possible trouble involved in someone trying to invite our mysterious heroine to the harvest dance.

Good Idea, also sorry for the weird formatting of my most recent quest post, copied it from email.

So we seem to be getting into the early part princess maker aspect here- going around and discovering things we could train in or devote time to (before the time investment and grinding really starts).

So far our possible activities include-

Visiting / participating in Jasper's mother's temple. Seems important to keep a personal / spiritual line to Jasper's past. I would think we'd want to make visiting the island something we'd want to do semi-regularly. Once a week, or so.

Resuming (sword) training. Given that we're an orphan of some kind of celestial war, that our mother saw fit to train us even at a young age, and that we saw her murdered, being prepared for future conflict is a pretty pragmatic concern. I'd think this is the kind of thing we'd want to be practicing every day- before breakfast, with the sun rise.

(There will be secondary quests and modifications involved- we have to devote time to finding/making/buying/commissioning a practice sword, and a later a real one. And eventual Jasper will have mastered what she remembers as best she was able, and we'll need to look for further instruction, and/or someone to train against).

Meditation. Mental controls are probably helpful in our situation, and will likely have some positive influence on Jasper's ability to understand and apply her own abilities (especially as she now lacks a direct teacher on how to use god-mojo). Note she changed the sunbeam- that's directly applying her power to manipulate the outside world. We'd only seen her powers act on herself, up till then. Probably something that might be good to participate in a few times a week?

(I mean, so far that's saying yes to everything, but spiritual / mental / physical are good starting cornerstones, I think).

>So ..I have no idea if that answers your question.
The question has to do with the change of discovery, and well, what risk being outed or discovered actually poses should it occur.

We've got conflicting priorities: Jasper is currently weak, but with great potential. We want to hide from those who might seek to harm or exploit her. But at the same time, we seek to tap her potential- learn, grow strong. But there's a trade off where the people in this place who might be best suited to teach her are perhaps the best suited to make her for what she is.

Which is why there's a running and repeating consideration in thread of who knows, who might know, how they might know, who can be trusted, what education is worth hanging out with who at what risk, or if we're actually succeeding at hiding at all, etc.

tl;dr: It's hard to know how much princess maker we can play when we're worried about playing hide and seek (or even if we should be hiding).

>>77635
>tl;dr: It's hard to know how much princess maker we can play when we're worried about playing hide and seek (or even if we should be hiding).

Well encapsulated. In the actual game the princess of Princess Maker 2 seemed to be indistinguishable from an ordinary teenage girl aside from that mythological people dumped her in your lap and judged how well you raised her later. (I have no direct experience with any of the others in the series.) She also had a dependable guardian with a minor-demon servant to take care of her so it's unlikely that she would have been significantly unusual in town even if she were discovered to have been delivered from heaven.
Jasper, in contrast, doesn't know if anyone knows her secret, how common not-so-mortal people are where she lives, or have anyone she knows she can trust to talk with about her background and unique challenges besides *the voices in her head she deliberately made up.* If most of her advice and conversation is coming from self-induced schizophrenia this has *implications* for her sanity and social capabilities.

(I have a bit of a cold, nothing that bad. I'm still going to work and ect. But it's enough that writing isn't fun. So going to wait until I feel better.)

Mostly irrelivant aside that you probably already know:
schizophrenia is a lot more then just hearing voices.
Hearing voices is an extreamly coMmon symptom, about as specific to mental illnesses as nausea is to physical ones.

Yeah. I am un sure how to get you the information you need in a satisfying way.
I mean I could just tell you ooc, but it is better if your IC knowledge tracks your OOC knowledge. hmm. Okay I might have some ideas actually.

>>77880
Yeah, I'm aware that the 'voices' part of the difficulties keeping imaginary and real sorted is an overplayed cliché versus the more varied and subtle facts of what can happen. Glad it's not one of my problems.

>>77894
Interesting method of shoe-dropping the notion that our heritage simply isn't a big issue as long as we don't do something obviously stupid (we wouldn't have woken up if we're this obviously inhuman and that was a problem).

I hope I am not coming off as two railroady, it's just in this sort of quest your suggestions can cause the mc to do things other then follow them.

Railroady? Nah. There's a difference between being forced into things and the fact that the character is an independent entity from the players. It's understood that while we influence them, we are not them. It's entirely appropriate for her to have an emotional response while we're more concerned with practical actions (or quibbling about the wording or a statement :p). Granted, too much independence on the part of the character can start to feel like we're just along for the ride, but I'd say we're well away from that tipping point right now.

If you're interested in the subject, Jukes has a pretty good consideration of how narration-style and the manner in which a character interacts with the suggesters can influence their level of agency, or the size of the suggester-character divide over here >>70351.

Its interesting how hostile to text quests that thread is.

Might have gone somewhere else with this if I had read that thread.

Glad I didn't though, I like this place.

The notes on pov are interesting, I think I like the choice I made.

Would people mind if I shifted back to third-person narration, first-person when adressing the suggesters? I shifted to first person for both because I thought it was inconsistent, but now that I realize what I was doing I think it kind of worked.
Sorry for this sort of change I know its jarring, but this quest running thing is very much a learNing experience for me.

Uh, yeah, there's a certain percentage of the community who comes out in almost violent opposition when the recurrent "should I settle for a text quest if I can't draw" question is raised. (That thread doesn't even have the worst examples). Granted the question is flawed, but the default response isn't much better, and I don't see why they get so worked up about something they were never going to read, anyways.

>>78461
>1st / 3rd person hybrid
Well, it can work. Off the top of my head, that's what Larro does in several (many? all?) of his quests. Protagonists talk directly to the suggesters, while action is described in 3rd person and italics. I think though, to make it not sound or read 'wrong' you do have to take that step to formally offset the two voices using some kind of formatting- keep the dialog and omniscient action unambiguously separate.

(Although I'm not sure how well that would work when the action set apart is a longer text-quest appropriate descriptions, rather than the simple almost stage directions Larro uses. Does that matter? Worth messing with, perhaps).

Story wise, that shift in narrative style would establish (or imply) that we have the ability to perceive the world beyond what Jasper chooses to tell us, though. Up till now, she's had to tell us everything. The entirety of the quest has been a blind dialog in her head (all our information coming second hand), rather than the more common dialog parallel to a setting we exist in / perceive.

That last point is true..hmm. okay I think sticking to first person is actually clearer as it keeps the ooc and ic abilities of the voices closer.

I'm someone who has done more observing/participating in quests than watching theoretical discussions of how to run a quest. If you wanted my opinion I'd say that your first challenge is getting the players enough information in interesting ways without giving them too much, and your second challenge is keeping it organized. Consistency is good, but the reason it's good is that it supports clarity which is the actual need. Using different person/voice between internal responses to suggestions and actions is a good idea if it's kept generally-consistent.
The existence of suggesters as dubiously-real personalities in the protagonist's mind could make this more difficult than a quest where suggestions are exactly that. It's often tidier to have them just be ideas in the character's head. I'm not sure what specific advice to give here beyond that, aside from developing character as a lens for interpreting suggestions (including rejecting or even mocking them if appropriate) but that's something you already seem to be doing. If you want to see the contrast in two currently-running quests I'd point at Dungeoneer quest as an example that responds to voices in the character's head, and Beyond The Stars as an example of one that treats them flatly like suggestions and doesn't engage in dialogue with them.

If I had a nitpick about either of my above-stated challenges it wouldn't be the consistency one though. It would be that we've been there for days and we still don't know much about this town or what we can do in it. That's fair, we haven't gone around exploring and mapping it yet, but it's a little frustrating for someone who is the kinda guy that looked up the strategy guide before he ever played Princess Maker 2. (Yeah, I've spent more time reading the spoilers for DCSS than playing it.) Balancing mystery, discovery, revelation and text-dump is hard and I bet my tastes on the subject favour explicitly-available information more than most, so take this with a full size salt-lick.

Fair enough.

I tried to fit in verbal map when Benten took Jasper to the roof but maybe I should have made an actual picture.

Tourist bureau pamphlet? Guided tour? Conversation with an innkeeper or taxi-driver? A bureaucrat that hands us a map and a guidebook?

It's hard to handle this gracefully because there's an awful lot of information to communicate (content to make) about any settlement bigger than a small village. Any method of communication that is above a certain-level of complete and accurate can bend or damage the fourth wall.
Honestly, I'm just pointing at something I'd believe is a difficulty. I don't have any particular solution I'd call 'the solution,' and the way you were handling it before with everything being more first-person and text-heavy has its advantages too: Ctrl+F is very useful in your quest.

PowderedLight 2013/12/15(Sun)09:33 No. 78508 ID: 6bc048
File 138712878117.jpg - (113.51KB , 720x1034 , 1387092806677.jpg )

I made a map but I haven't labeled it yet. .

Also Doughter is a typo.. >_<

Wow that looked better on my phone..on here its making my left eye.

Hmm.... now maybe we can tell if we really should've made a left turn at Albuquerque.

>>78514
So that stuff off the the left is to show that the big lack can lead to other places, but not necessarily predictably or consistently?

>>78515
And where's the house we're staying, on that map.

Ashleys house is right at the 'o' in Fortitude.
Your sort of suposed to live near there if your livelyhood directly depends on the sea, but you don't go down their every day. I.e. sailors that spend days/weeks/months at sea, (as opposed to the fishing fleets that mostly come to port night).
But that's more tradition / stereotype then reality, after all if a families kids all decide to work with a shrine or in Arcadia or as Fisherwomen the Town isn't so spread out as to force them to all move out of the family home.

Sorry about me forgetting to use pictures.

A map of Fortitude is coming soon.

PowderedLight 2013/12/20(Fri)12:45 No. 78592 ID: 7e7b17
File 138757230503.png - (156.37KB , 1440x800 , Fortitude.png )

Here it is.

Huh. This suggests the question of, "How dangerous is it when we're big?"
I'm thinking that we could maybe earn ourself some dosh practicing being a star under the floating island, if it's not too bad.

Less so then science would suggest for sure.

Hmm. Thinking about how I want to handle a voice's offer to teach Jasper physics. I'm not sure that role-playing it out would be that fun, but hmm. Thinking.

>>78873
I remember I once offered to give a character an entire lecture's worth of differential equations to distract this group of scholars he'd been roped into talking to. Quest died before he could act on it or reject it, though.

But yeah, including outside knowledge into characters is kind of complicated. On the one hand, we're obviously giving advice all the time, and rather frequently explaining new concepts to her. But actually giving her a working understanding, passing the knowledge to her, is tricky.

I suppose it could sort of be abstracted in? If nothing else, she has cooperative tutors and TAs when she starts going to school.

>>78873
We're avatars inside her head, how hard is it to fudge something about her accessing our knowledge directly, and what are the issues?

One way to treat that is you could say that she already knew this stuff and had to in order to make voices that themselves knew this stuff. Us understanding more about philosophy and so on would be more of a reflection of different perspectives, since she already read this stuff (or had it magically beamed into her skull by mom).

Sorry about not posting. Been sick and trying to catch up on my forum rpg games.

I suppose I did land a bit of a knot on your game, lemme know if I can do or suggest anything else to help you get through it.

Right now the pRoblem is I am really sick, like spend 20 hours a day in bed sick.
going to the doctor about it this evening.

>>79080
Sorry to hear that. Feel better, rest up, and try not to get glowing snot on anyone's clothes. Don't kill yourself worrying about updates- we'll still be here when you're feeling better.

First comes health, next comes family for most people: Don't neglect what's important on our account.

Hmm. I am starting to find writing for this quest a little overwhelming in that I want to have time pass, but you have lots of things you are doing that I want to describe, and relatively few routine acTivities using up time.

Hmm, once she gets a job and start studying that will use up time, and once you know your way around town, a lot more of her social interaction will be routine.

Yeah, we may be stabbing a little deeper into the character and world detail guts than you expected. Both myself and whoever else it is that's regularly participating seem to be rather contemplative and intellectual types. That's a different sort of challenging from people who are pursuing the maximum of violence, greed and/or porn.

This is now officially "excuses to explain philosophy and meta-physics to your protagonist, the quest". I don't know why I'm having so much fun trying to balance verbosity against clarity, but I am.

I could make a guess about why:
Artistry and inspiration is particularly found at the edge of our competence. I don't think there's very many people truly competent at discussing philosophy in a useful way (if any), so therefore talking and scripting philosophy into a quest like this probably hits a lot of those artistic buttons.
I like to propose Alexandrian solutions to knots myself, but we haven't found Jasper's literal or metaphorical sword yet I think.

Hmm. I haven't actually wOrked how the Kichi magic works w.r.t. changing the future.

I am leaning towards however it works for most people it works the opposite way for Jasper, but honestly both options feel too logical, too much a part of how the world works.

The Kichi pools are very tame magic. Domesticated even, give them another generation or two, at least if their best seers have kids (not with each other mind) and are diligent in there duties, and it might become not really magic at all, just something cool about how the world works. Like how birds can fly, and vampires be scary.

But right now it's still magic. Powered by the very stuff of confusion and erosion of expectations.

>But right now it's still magic. Powered by the very stuff of confusion and erosion of expectations.

Spoiler alert? We haven't covered what magic is in the setting yet.
I'll try to help with the question of the 'certainty' of predictions. These supporting questions may help you figure it out. Probably better to keep the answers hush-hush.

1) Is there any active, self-willed source associated with the predictions, which has an agenda?
2) Most predictions in fiction/myth tended to be rather vague, why aren't Catherine's statements so vague?
3) How much does what vision a seer gets depend on who the seer is?
4) What rituals are involved in getting a divination, and what could interfere with a divination?

Let's consider the example of how divination supposedly worked for the ancient Romans and Greeks. For them divination was reading the intentions and conflicts of the gods, in a variety of different sources that showed this information more or less as a statement of fact. Predestination was semi-certain to them because the will of the gods was much stronger and more predictable than that of mortal people (which is why you could read it in the shape of guts and the patterns of the stars); the truth of divination came from the power and predictability of the gods. The pronouncements were vague because exactly how something might happen wasn't always certain but the intent of the gods was powerful, certain, and could only be counterbalanced by other gods (or other beings capable at their level). As a rule the deities would not have anything to learn from talking to an oracle or a haruspex and particular deities were the sources of information to some diviners (like Apollo was for the Pythia, one of the oracles). In those cases the diviner was channeling the deity and the deity would speak the predictions themself through the lips of their priest(ess).
If you wanted to use this set of ideas it's worth noting that Jasper is a deity-tier being herself: Perhaps a seer could be focused/obsessed/blinded by the direct involvement of a particular deity, since they're priests interfacing with the divine in varying levels of directness.

The root philosophical question here of predestination versus free-will is what it all will ultimately boil down to in one way or another, but looking through the supporting details of how the prediction works, and how that predestination gets made, might help you figure out which is a better fit. The story intentions and themes are also very important here: Choosing your answer to suit the story is a time-honored method.
If you're still not certain after all that try flipping a coin. If the answer you get from flipping a coin feels wrong that tells you something.

Thanks that's a Huge help!

I've personally found that the best way to review what I've learned is to explain it to other people: Thanks for helping me hold on to my familiarity with classical mythology.

Mortal prophecy could also be narrative-causality-based, like in the "Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms" series.
If different Imperators are associated with different sets of tropes and story structures, then if Imperator X is associated with an event, fate might push toward a rule-of-three resolution, where the youngest child of a family succeeds where the two previous siblings failed - while if Imperator Y takes an interest, things are predisposed to end with a face-heel turn, followed by Redemption Equals Death.
A Seer might then divine which influences there are on a scenario - based on things like which Estates figure prominently - and calculate how the conflicting narrative tendencies would resolve optimally.
Basically, it would be Genre-savviness taken to the max.

>>79894
That seems to be a system-local reinterpretation of the ancient Greco-Roman concepts of predestination with details of this setting that I'm not familiar with yet. It makes sense that certain deities--or perhaps imperators--would be associated with betrayal, loyalty, violence, lust, insight and so on.

If I've correctly interpreted what our scenario is--playing Princess Maker to determine what kind of goddess Jasper is--it would follow that by disrupting her stated prophecy we have just added elements of defiance, rebellion, will and self-determination to Jasper's character. We' would also have just established an opposition or a command/precedence over whatever it is that grants insight to Kichi seers.

>>79897
Well, not necessarily. We took an impulsive action, and saw the consequences. It remains to be seen what lesson we draw from that. " You can get away with things" or "there are unintended consequences.". Depending on how we play that, we could go towards or away the traits you described. (Or even remain sort of neutral, if we tried to strike a balance).

>>79898
I agree that the fat lady hasn't sung yet on this particular experience but I was mostly commenting on the deeper meaning of what's going on. What's going on is Jasper's a goddess beginning her self-determination. Bending the traits of a goddess through guidance might call for some sort of overall plan. Should I indulge my artistic impulses and make a proposal?

>>79900
Personally, I'd think we're somewhat too early in the process to be able to sketch that out in much detail, and there plenty of things we don't yet know that could significantly impact long term plans. We don't really know what it means to be a goddess (demi-goddess?) in this world, let alone what the world has become since it was shattered.

But hey, there's certainly nothing wrong with indulging creativity and doing speculative planning. That's what dis threads are for. Worst case it just ends up being irrelevant, better case it gives us interesting ideas to consider and discuss, or that help the author.

>>79903
I specifically mentioned my creativity, not so much my planning abilities. :)

Later that week Jasper bought a hard-bound book and some pens to write down thoughts, dreams and make sketches in. A century later it was discovered and recognized as one of the most important works of her worship, although usually restricted to the initiated.

When Jasper commissioned the sword from the dwarf it was originally not a particularly powerful artifact. However, over the years the simple fact of her using it and practicing with it so much, so often and so intensely, it gradually transformed into one of the most powerful artifacts. The fact that it was bought quite expensively has been noted and is probably responsible for the first power: She first used it as a child in her early adolescence and continued to do so into her adulthood. Without the budget to replace it this meant she unconsciously invested it with the power to change size, shape, weight and balance to fit the wielder and their needs, varying all the way from the size of a knife to a claymore, in many varieties of curve and balance. The other powers are usually less obvious.

The weeks spent learning about intimate hygiene, makeup, clothing, clothing fitting, tailoring and alteration from the courtesan gradually wore down on Jasper's patience. She never lost her temper but her experience of the utter waste of vanity coloured her attitude forever after. This is why it is customary for her priests to shave all their body hair, wear their head hair only in simple styles, and only wear the most simple of robes or other garments. The core ideas are that grooming is strictly for hygiene, minimal presentability and protection from the elements with a calculated minimum of effort, resources and time spent.

>emptyness.jpg
Huh, interesting. First place my head was sun, actually. Especially since she mentioned Amaterasu. An ink-brush circle is totally how you'd summon the sun in Okami.

>>80028
It seems that the Kichi seers have more awareness and confidence about Jasper's status as the sun than she does. I just *POKED* that, we'll see how that goes.

>>80033
...I'm not sure really how that's not just stating the obvious? I mean, yes, Entropy knew who we were. The Kichi did do. Catherine addressed us by name, they all made references to light and fire, and the shrine maiden we're with was drawn to comment on sun gods, and how she knew Jade was real (because she knows Jasper's her daughter). Catherine saw this coming, and discussed it with people. The rest of the family also seems to have know what was coming, anyways. Even if the other seers aren't looking (or can't look?) directly at us, would have to be blind not to see the coming of the sun.

I have to confess, I can't really make out what you're suggesting asking, either. To me the tone seems kind of hostile towards someone who's trying to help us (and who we're trying to establish sympathy with, over the default aggression), and it seems unreasonable to expect her to be able to explain in detail how this god stuff works. Realistically, I don't think they can know. Look at the price Catherine is paying for getting too close to us. I don't think the other seers can look too closely at the sun.

>>80055
Jasper has expressed statements implying that she was not sure who the sun currently is. 541777 is one of the places to go looking at that, 545289 is another.

If you don't understand what that hypothetical statement is saying I'm not doing it right. This discussion is more appropriate for in-thread however since it's about a course of action.
The intent I launched us into this conversation was, "You're worried about something. Tell me about it so I can do better please," and so far we've been getting a bunch of mythology and vague cautions that told us nothing we hadn't already been told. My rather-indirect response is saying, 'You didn't tell me anything useful and now I'm worried without any idea how to avoid these problems. Are you really sure you can't tell me about the problems?'

Oh, not them knowing who we are, them believing we're the new sun. Now I see what you mean.

I'm less sure of that point, though. I mean, it's obvious Jasper has a lot of sun-like nature, maybe even that she is a sun, but that she's acting as this new smaller universe's sun? That's a lot less certain. (And might bear asking after).

And that sentiment (you sure you can't give me any specifics?) is one I'd support.

...actually, come to think of it, with the whole thrust of the complicated ownship and identity philosophy thing she was putting forth, there could be more than one sun / more than one person acting as the sun. (Heck, she literally wondered as much). Just because we're tapped into it, doesn't mean no one else is. There might be conflicting claims, as it were.

>>80070
>And that sentiment (you sure you can't give me any specifics?) is one I'd support.

It's a course of action so I took it back to the quest thread. :)

>>80078
That's a possibility I was not considering because apparently the more usual course of events when the Imperator behind a thing dies is that the thing vanishes from reality.

The sun's lesser power to keep what used to be beyond reality and the outside from mixing (resulting in less unequivocal reality) also seems to imply that the sun is weaker than it used to be. Perhaps this may a reflection of conflict over the sun instead of a reflection of the relative power differential between Jasper Irinka the little girl and her mother. Still, I suspect that an Imperator's particular authority and manifestation in reality as a phenomenon is most of what the 'estate' is. This seems to be supported by Entropy finding it worth note that Jasper inherited her mother's estate.

I have no idea how Ra and Amaterasu fit in--whether they're aliases, alternate manifestations, previous holders of the solar estate, or separate existent beings with competing claims to being the sun. Perhaps they all have not-conflicting claims to being the sun, maybe in different places? We're relying far too much on speculation as it is so I'm wary of treating that hypothetical too deeply.

If there are multiple forces involved, maybe we're not fighting over it. Maybe it's taking the combined power of everyone who could claim a scrap of sunlight to light a sufficient fire to fill the void at all, even in a limited capacity?

I'd agree this is all a lot of speculation based on little hard fact (which is why considering who might be in a position to actually teach Jasper about her nature versus the risks or their motives is gonna be important / tricky). I suspect though, if we are the sun itself, we'll eventually have that confirmed when we're contacted by heaven. You'd think a wayward sun would be something they'd be interested in, after all.

>>80087
Jasper is in Entropy's domain, officially under his protection AND the protection of one of the leading Excrusians. Further, the sun continues to shine. I suspect that between those two intimidating folks having stated interest in her and the fact that Jasper is still a vulnerable little girl 'Heaven' is too busy to reach out.

Other relevant considerations: Jasper's named protectors are an Excrusian and a demon. That may compound her already questionable social-status in Heaven--her heritage, upbringing, presence at the occasion of her mother's murder and the fact of her escape and fall from heaven may be interpreted as hostility or suspicion on her part.

Wonderful, now we get to add, "Send letters to people in heaven," to our to-do list. That wasn't full already, really.

>>80091
My idea was that if we're the only thing keeping the sun burning, and everything utterly went to hell when the previous sun being killed, we're not something big forces are going to be able to keep their hands off of, even if we're protected or under the influence of others.

I mean, think about it. Worst case, we've got one little girl who's death switch turns out the light on existence. I can't imagine an established power structure that could leave that well enough alone.

If they are keeping hands off, that suggests several possibilities:
(1) We're not the only thing keeping the sun burning
(2) We are, but they don't know it.
(3) We are, and they know it, but they don't know where we are. And/or, who we are. Jade kept her daughter a secret from the rest of heaven.
(4) They know where we are, but the forces protecting us, and/or the risk of getting to us is bad enough that they think it's less dangerous to leave us be, for now. (It's no good trying to secure the universe's self destruct button if there's a good chance you'll set it off in the process, for example).

The other thought that's starting to bug me now is we've now seen some things in our nature that are pretty clear connections to Jasper's mother. We're clearly the heir to the sun. But what did we get from her father. We may be the sun, but what else are we?

Part of the problem is all we really know about him is philosophical, and pretty broad in scope. I'm not sure we know enough about who or what he is that we'll recognize it when we see it. (Except maybe by elimination? Or a similar feeling as the "going cold" mental state).

>>80104
My intuit of the balance of power and hostility differs. There's things worth checking and considering from your more tense analysis of the potential but I'm just not seeing a major war brewing here. I also think your four hypotheses are off by overestimating Jasper's current importance. Consider the following:
1) There is much less existence than there used to be because Jasper is not (yet) a sufficient substitute for her mom.
2) There's a truce. Jasper is now known and noted to his side by her father the Warmain, and the Warmains are the Excrusian faction that is least weary of war. If there are plans to restart the war on their side it is unlikely they would include Jasper's death; her recruitment could be a goal for prosecuting the fight without nominally violating the truce.
3) If anything the Excrusians are having trouble with winning too much territory in the last round. Reference: Complaints about outside being contaminated with reality.
4) The Imperators are facing severe political and logistical challenges; Entropy is busy keeping the local area properly existent. They badly they lost in the last round of open combat, which was started by Jade's death. She previously kept the Excrusians in check. It's pretty obvious that the Excrusians won the last fight and gave the Imperators a truce because they ran out of desire to fight.
5) The last round of war seems to have subjectively started and ended recently. That means the social/economic/political pressures leading up to open hostilities have not had time to build up again yet.

My working hypothesis about Jasper's near-term risk assessment: It looks to me like nobody particularly wants war except perhaps certain younger parties eager to improve their status by claiming victories for their side (like Ms. Senko perhaps). Therefore she has more to fear from garden-variety threats and/or her sister than politically motivated threats for the near and middle term future.
However, if her power grows to the point that the Excrusians notice her pushing back on their territory everything could change right there. I quite suspect that Jasper rebuilding and reasserting the sun's power to banish the phantasms and figments of the unreal is already part of our future if we don't succumb to her sister's gambits. That might break the truce right there, but I'd still say go for it; bring on enough power to blind and blast and she won't fall to an arrow like her mother did. (Pro level: Recruit her sister to serve as Space, which protects her from threats with unfathomable distance and choking emptiness.)

What Jasper could get from her father's side of her heritage is inadequately known, and what we do know is confusing: Warmains destroy, and seem to be the foremost effective power in leading and performing assaults for their side. His eyes are the void, he wielded a bow with superlative accuracy and effectiveness. He has been known to provide 'evildoer lollipops' to his daughter, which implies bloodlust and blood-drinking--perhaps certain vampiric traits as well? Aside from this she may also have been gifted with some Excrusian-side version of sight, insight and assertion for 'fate,' guessing from Jasper's description of fatalism moods.
It's worth noting how much of that can fit with what a star is and does; stars certainly can consume, blast, illuminate and pull.

>vastly overestimating her importance
I started from the position that her continued life was the only thing keeping the sun burning and creation falling apart again, so yes, that's kind of inevitable.

You consider the problem from a war risk / benefit analysis, but in those circumstances I don't think it's so much a matter of wanting to go to war over controlling her at all- it's that they literally couldn't afford to leave her in a position where she could be harmed at all. She's a big, red, self-destruct button out in the world, waiting to be accidentally pushed.

Of course, that's not a problem if Jasper's sufficiently hard to kill, and sufficiently protected from forces capable of it at her current location. (Or if her would-be selfish protectors are sufficiently ignorant to the risk).

Although, personally, I'm doubtful she is the sun itself, anyways. I'd find those extraordinary consequences to be a pretty good argument against her being the sun. Still up in the air, though.

I'd say your analysis of the warring factions not wanting to fight over her is perfectly valid though in the case she's not the only thing keeping creation going. Then she's not an unsecured ultimate-risk, she's an unsecured potential asset not worth the cost or risk of attempting to take. (And it's possible Heaven may not be interested in claiming her anyways, for reasons we discussed a ways back).

>Ms. Senko
From her letter, I'd consider her motives more personal than anything else. I get the impression that 'saving' her sister is more what's driving her than the advantages of winning her to the cause. That, and what seemed like a good amount of jealousy and resentment.

>>80119
>She's a big, red, self-destruct button out in the world, waiting to be accidentally pushed.
This above? That is where you overestimate her importance. She doesn't currently have much power to push back outside and this is behind why the Imperators are in crisis mode with folks like Entropy acting outside of their core competence to hold together small parts of what used to be reality. Her mom was amazingly powerful and she is not (yet). Jasper is a pre-teen girl, not some Imperator with millenia (or eons? timescales are yet another unknown) of experience and growth behind her.

We don't know enough about little sister to guess her motives. We know much more about father and we still don't understand his motives either. I don't know how much sibling rivalry or jealousy there could be without them having ever had contact before though; could go anywhere from absurdly much to little sis being very worried about her big sister being all alone and on the wrong side of the war.

...I don't see what power or age has anything to do with it. We saw, explicitly, what happens when the sun dies (the reality it supports falls apart). If one assumes Jasper is now the sun, and what it means to be the sun hasn't fundamentally changed, then the same disastrous consequences still follow.

If you want to assume that what it means to be the sun, and/or the structure of the universe is now fundamentally different, then yes, naturally the consequences or implication are different.

We're running into this weird thing now where I was trying to look at the hypothetical implications of an assumed premise, and instead you're coming after the premise. Since it's fairly obvious neither of us buy into the premise anyways, I'm just going to drop that line of thought.

Although saying "ah-ha! She's the sun" followed quickly by "but what it means to be the sun is different now" isn't a very helpful revelation. Instead of a reference to learn from, we get a circular definition. Jasper is the sun, which is the thing that Jasper is (but not what Jade was). Which, to be, fair, could be perfectly valid for one god assuming the role of another. They change what the role means.

...although personally, I'm still doubtful she assumed the role in any form at all. We'll have to see if we learn anything from Jade's temple, or from the Sunday festival that clarifies anything, later.

>We don't know enough about little sister to guess her motives.
No, we don't know enough about anyone to make any concrete guesses. This is all speculation. But if we consider what is currently the only resource we have on her, the letter comes across as highly personal.

>and cause I think I might have Mom's job now.
Haha, nevermind my doubt. Even Jasper's starting to think that now.

>>80132
Mm, okay. Working within your assumption that I've crashed twice now; unless they wanted to take the risk of finding out what happens when there are no Imperators left they still would not want to attack Jasper. Assuming that she was necessary to keep reality going her loss could be devastating for both sides. The outside being contaminated with reality is already an issue to the Excrusians, and their morale has been reported to be low. The last time the sun died was a big win that they were prepared for but they seem unprepared for further action. In contrast, the Imperators would have anywhere from very little to no territory to defend so it would be very easy for them to start performing guerrilla/asymmetrical warfare hiding in the reality-contamination of outside. Worse, if Jasper's death put their continued existence on a finite timescale they would probably be vengeful; the most violent people tend to be those with the least to lose. Against an enemy that already has morale issues that could be devastating, and this discounts possible 'game over' issues if the Imperators collapsed. Sane people on the Excrusian side would want to avoid this can of worms.
If anything they would be interested in controlling her effectiveness--boosting it right now, and perhaps later decreasing it. I can't think how Entropy's jacket is anything but a visible sign of support since it's unlikely to have a landmine in the lining. Now I'm curious about that jacket, hmm.

>We saw, explicitly, what happens when the sun dies (the reality it supports falls apart).
I suspect it was a bit more complicated than that: I think that Jasper's mom as the sun was instrumental because her rays of brilliance were good at illuminating truth and banishing the unreal through revelation. Dependant concept: The Excrusians and their outside being unreal, fantastic, false. Net effect: Area denial that kept all but the most powerful of Excrusians from daring to go near reality where her power was apparent. That would certainly put a point on the notion of Jasper growing up as her mother's heir and apprentice: A second sun in operation at the same time as the first would be scary. This could easily explain the sequence of events leading to the fatal shot: Jasper's upbringing would have been interpreted as a threat of annihilation.

As far as the circular definition goes: We're playing princess-maker with an immature deity here. I think we're guiding what kind of goddess she becomes--what her powers, values and competences are. Note my earlier creative interpretation/guessing what we're doing here (seen at >>79909 above). For now however I'm pondering some nice rainbows in the Kichi pools.

>both sides would want to avoid her death, possibly interested in controlling her
Agreed. I'm just surprised neither side is taking more overt action to make sure she stays alive. (The protection offer by the Town and/or Entropy may be greater than it appears, or there may be more to the treaty than we know about).

>sun theory stuff
Interesting, and it would fit with father's letter (angered that Jade's plan used their daughter). Although that reasoning kind of implies that he understood the effect the sun was having on creation and the outside, when his own reaction suggests that he was caught completely off guard by the consequences of Jade's death, or at least vastly underestimated / did not have a full understanding of the mechanics.

>>80141
She has been handed a totem of importance and a formal invitation to visit and stay from what may be the foremost Excrusian. That would communicate clearly, "Hands off!" to their side. I'm not sure what more the Excrusians could do without risking the truce, and Jasper, in the process.
As far as the Imperators go, someone or something brought her to Fortitude I'm guessing. Their resources also seem to be stretched thin after Jade's death, and Jasper did demonstrate effective survival instincts in running away from that fight. This might be the best they can do.
That seems weak though, we haven't even had a letter from heaven yet (that we know about). I'd say this supports my previous assessments of her importance: Her importance comes from her diplomatic and potential value instead of her direct power and influence.

I should try reading that letter again I suppose, but Jasper's father would be far from the first person to have been caught up in events beyond his control or understanding. The Imperator side collapsed after Jade's death--perhaps the Excrusians expected that the Imperators were better prepared than they were if they were willing to risk as direct a threat as a second sun. We may never know how much of this is the personal issues of Jade's love and family lives versus political-military calculation, but my starting hypothesis would be that it was political-military calculation on the Excrusian side and decisions that Jasper's mother didn't fully think through and understand on her side.
We perhaps don't want to resume talking about responsibility and foresight though. Jasper was already exasperated with it when I brought up the subject in connection to 'fate.'

Can I just say this discuscusion is real interesting. (And a bit intimidating. (I hope my future work on this lives up to the level of thought you are putting into it)

Also hmm. I feel like I should clarify why Jasper was exasperated with an anology. Consider if a pre teen was relaying their day and was talking about when she and a friend got a warning from a cop about about something and the person she was talking to sort of panicked about what personal responsibility means versus following the law.

Its not that its not a real issue...its just one that's been a background part of life for her.

Does that make any sense?

>>80145
>Does that make any sense?

Oh it does. I'd say you did a good job of characterization there: At first she tried explaining her pragmatic simplification of the moral issues I was talking about, and when I pointed out holes in it (which she probably already knew about) she gave up. I'd label that a potential future source of internal conflict that allows Jasper to realize someone can be both wrong and right at the same time, to question her ethics/axiomatics and consider the implications of the ethics and views of others.

As far as our speculation goes, the common advice (if I remember) is something like, "Make sure that the speculation in your discussion thread is wrong about at least some things."
That said, there is little shame in stealing our cooler ideas--as long as they fit with the rest--since we're basically giving them to you here. The hard part may be giving up cool ideas we came up with because they conflict too much (or kill too much potential surprise), and forgetting to steal enough ideas from other sources.

>English honorifics hard
The part you were worried about looked fine to me, although using "ma'am" as a prefix is kind of weird. It tends to be used as a substitution for a name. Which is odd, now that I think of it. I was going to say it's like sir ("yes sir", "yes ma'am") except sir can be used as a title. (Sir Namingworth). I don't think I've ever seen ma'am used that way (instead there's lady, dame, madam...). Huh.

>phone updating
Now that's commitment! Phone suggestions are enough of a pain.

http://www.tgchan.org/kusaba/quest/res/541026.html#566840
This is spoiler text.
Spoiler tags are awesome for hiding asides like talking about vocabulary issues. A list of the locally-used bbcode is here: http://www.tgchan.org/kusaba/news.php?p=faq
They require square-brackets though, so if you actually are updating from a phone I that may be impractical or impossible.

Titles in general are context-specific, and classism-centric mostly. 'Ms' would be the modern default unless she has a qualification/professional title like Doctor (or Maga/Sage/Oracle/Seer? don't know if those are just job descriptions or class identifiers here). One particularly noteworthy title that may, or may not, be applicable is that female magi tend to wear Maga as an honorific prefix because it's saying this is someone who can use magic of the degree that turns people into newts or throws lightning or other things like that (masculine is Magus). If she had a feudal/political/military/paramilitary title like Lady, Minister or Sheriff that would also apply.

>>80255
"Sir" and "Dame" are the prefix-honorifics for male and female knights, respectively but Sir also ends up being used as a non-specific term of deferential address to men taken from military usage as the proper way to address anybody of higher rank in the military.

"Mademoiselle" is the direct translation of Miss, which is not in common English usage. "Ma'am" is a version of the French "Madam." It is a rough synonym to "Mrs" which is a contraction of Mistress, the feminine of Master/Mister. Madam tends to be used without the woman's full name and Mrs with, except that this has changed since the feminist revolt at the sexist notion that a man's wife usually has more status as a wife than from her own achievements. The specifics of whether to use Miss or Madam depends on marital status, with women who have never been married being Miss and those who are or have been being Madam, and is used as a non-specific term of respectful address for women.

Mistress is also the term for a particular woman that a man has a extramarital sexual affair with. Madam also applies as slang for the female manager/proprietor of a whorehouse. This is related to the New Orleans slang question, "Qui est votre maman ou papa?" which is asking who is your pimp, and literally is asking who is your mother or father. Feel free to explain this to anybody you hear asking, "Who's your daddy?" because I'm certain they would appreciate knowing they're identifying themself as a customer of the oldest profession.


What I'm getting at with all this rambling about titles is that all of this is complicated at best. Real world honorifics are a confusing mess of respect, disrespect and conditional respect embodying structural violence and open class warfare so full of doublethink and doublespeak that they're relevant to a discussion of newspeak in George Orwell's 1984. You should feel free to make up and use other titles to fit the classism/prejudice of your world's societies since real world titles are a pile of contradictions anyhow.

Thanks. Hmm. Maybe I should use the titles from the actual languages they are speaking?

Will think.

Ended up writing pmmm crackfic pseudo erotica instead of working on this. >•<

>>80294
For a while I was mystified what the heck "pmmm erotica" could be. "Oh spank me stakeholder, I've been a naughty project lead!" is definitely hitting the crackpipe, but that didn't quite seem right.
Then I looked it up and found out that the acronym "pmmm" has another meaning outside of IT project development, among people who like Japanese cartoons.
Do I need to take a crash course in this stuff, or is it okay if I continue sleeping in my rocking chair on the porch?

Up to you really. My thing is the "3am Hitomi quest" in the NSFW section of http://questionablequesting.com/

But I am working on the next post of this, just stumbling thru writers block.

>>80389
Your search term seems to be invisible to the unregistered, at least without using Google directly.

My favourite advice to people struggling with writer's block in fiction is to consider things from a different viewpoint within the story. If that viewpoint is a character, you could write out what they know, what they care about, and then figure out what they think is going on. Another option is to use a place, an object or a non-involved party like a tree instead for an alternative viewpoint, which can be either easier or harder.
I suspect you know that plenty well enough already though, so I'm gonna have to dig deeper for useful advice.

Uhm... are you famliar with the writing developmental method of trying to balance out your amount of dinosaurs versus sodomy? Perhaps you may want to adjust the dosage of dinosaur upwards a little bit.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/11/a-likely-tale.html
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006945.html

Yeah this story could proBobly use some more action.

Hmm. Kind of oddly, by that division I think a lot of sex scenes would count as dinosaurs.

Oh, yeah. You have to register to see the nsfw forums. Registering is easy though.

>>80389
...are there ANY image quests on that site?

Not that I know of.

>>80400
Well, we do seem to have had fun with all the sodomy. I guess you must have an excellent supply of lubricant, the right gadgets, good technique and experience to keep it interesting and enjoyable as well as you have. But if you're finding that after all the sodomy that it's getting sticky and hard to keep going it may be time for some dinosaur involvement. Freshening up the sodomy with some variety is what I would start with though instead of planning to change things drastically.
Metafictionally our focus-viewpoint character (sole protagonist?) is hanging out in a place with a whole bunch of armed folks who could burst out into a fight at any moment, or even challenge her to a fight. Why are they armed? Do they have enemies? Is dueling just a day of the week that ends in 'Y' for them? If she starts talking about fighting are these people believers in, 'show, don't tell!' maybe?

I'm not sure I'm ready to register for 'nsfw pmmm' really: I was napping in the rocking chair on my porch with the shotgun, see, and the strangest thing is that the kids aren't even playing anywhere near my lawn. Apparently they're behind closed doors? I'm a little puzzled by that.

>>80400
I think we've been slowly getting more action. Or action-agency, anyways. I mean, we decided to do actual things that weren't dialog at the Kichi shrine! The story has been transitioning from us being an observer things happen to to a player who makes things happen.

Amusingly, I don't think literal dinosaurs would be entirely inappropriate in this setting. (Though they'd probably be dragon flavored).

>I think a lot of sex scenes would count as dinosaurs.
Rar! Sex! Grr.

>>80417
Problem with a fight is we're still unarmed. So if a conflict isn't one we can avoid, escape, or talk our way out of, or that we can deflect or resolve through one of our protectors, that really only leaves god powers to defend ourself with. Which depending on the circumstances either wouldn't be something we could bring to bear effectively, would be overkill to the extent of trivializing the threat, or, worst case, be actually proportional to the threat.

Unless, say, the rats decide we need testing and lend us a blade or something.

>>80419
I can't tell whether you're trolling me or lacking imagination here. There is more to conflict, combat, challenges and the unexpected than swordplay.

>>80423
Just making the observation that balancing reasonable challenges for a god is an interesting proposition, at best. Our potential for the moment is largely balanced by age, inexperience and ignorance, but having so few tools in our toolbox sort of cuts both ways. It's very easy to slide off the part of the curve where challenges are interesting and dynamic and into the parts where they're trivial or leave us powerless.

Not that it can't be done, certainly.

>>80424
Ohhhh....
"It's more important to look good than to be good." Quote is relevant since we're dealing with adventurers here. Yeah, it's a safe assumption that Jasper could burn and/or consume anything (and probably everything) there is in Horizon but can she bust a move or pull a flourish that impresses? There's more to winning than beating your opponent senseless; you have to convince everybody else involved that you won, that you would win again if it happened a second time, and that they accept the fact that you won. Then you have to make people like it, appreciate it, see artistry and talent in it, and find it interesting enough to talk about and spread your legend.

Yeah, I know, that stuff is like pissing-contest 100, 101 and 200 but it's rather important to scenario design any time there's adventurers, warlords or deities involved.

I'm starting to wonder why everybody knows who Jasper is. Local gossip? Entropy put us here and left a warning/introduction letter that was put up on the town-hall bulletin board? She's up there in the sky so people just recognize her when they see her on the ground too? She hasn't taken off her welcoming-kit nametag that says, "Hi, my name is," with a blank and actually filled it out?

I suspect that nearly everybody we've met has known and Grandma has been waiting for us to feel comfortable with telling her. But we don't know how, so I'm starting to wonder just what else we're missing.

Well, it is possible everyone knows. However, I suspect it's more that certain people are just in a position to know and/or are capable of recognizing or sensing what we are, and that certain others are well enough connected to have learned we're here from someone in the first group.

With the rats, I suspect it's the later. Courts tend to be well connected and gossipy, adventurers have dealings with powerful beings, I'd expect they'd have had plenty of opportunity to find out.

Of course there's really no way to know for sure what anyone knows or doesn't know without addressing it directly. I suppose we'll just have to see who reacts and who doesn't.

I'm not dead, just distracted and sick.

>>80742
I know this is approximately finals time for a lot of college/uniersity kids. Good luck, try not to cheat more than you have to?

Nah. Im a professional now. Didn't have good enOugh grades to go to grad school.

I have something aspergers like (as well as other issues) so always seemed to be about 4 years behind everyone socially so that's proBobly why your getting a college age vibe off me.

I actually have a post half way written, but it's not working for me. I think I might need to back up my detail scale.

Would people mind if I do a more summery-like style? Say have Jasper descRibe days to you instead of in "real time"?

>>80877
Well, it depends on how much is happening, or what the situation is. Covering a longer time per update or description gives us less chance to interact or influence the events or dialog directly, naturally. There are cases where we won't miss that much, and other times where we would be all "gah! We should have done this!". Obviously, too little reader control in the wrong situation feels like railroading. In the right situation, decreased reader control just serves to move events along.

In the case of the rats, we have kind of already sketched out a plan for how she should talk and deal with them. Baring major curve balls coming up, I don't see why we couldn't let the situation proceed along those lines.

>>80877
Actually, I was guessing based on interest in Japanese cartoons and the timing of when you stopped updating so much.

It's hard to make good recommendations about pace I find because there seems to be a mismatch between the information the players get and the stated intentions for the quest parameters/goal. I can say, "That conversation with Catherine's aunt went surprisingly slowly and we didn't learn very much from it anyway," but that's not a full and useful answer. The key part of an update as I figure it is that there should be a genuine, meaningful choice to be made in it. To make those choices you need the right information about your position, potential, and what the tradeoffs between your various choices all are. So far our decisions have been mostly to try and gather more information because we really don't have the minimum information necessary to make reasonably-informed, long term decisions.
More simply: In the actual Princess Maker game I'm familiar with you had an omnipresent, explicit-numbers character sheet and firm expectations for what the strictly-limited options available to you would do. You could reload from a previous save if you didn't like a result and replay a year you thought was misspent in hindsight, and there was a specific list of known outcomes you could easily look up in the online FAQ any time you wanted to know what was going on in that crazy game.
It's hard to make decisions based on our attempts to maximize constitution, charisma, sensitivity, art, cooking and such scores without seeing the statpage and the full list of options. Without that information we've been treating this as a dialogue, exploration and character discovery exercise we've handled with an agenda of discovering the details of Jasper and the other people and possibilities in the world. Seriously, we're stumbling around looking for answers to the questions of what's going on, what's important, what our difficult constraints are, and is there a Samus Aran bounty hunting school on Chozo we'll miss out on if we commit to a particular agenda right now without doing sufficient research into the game's world to find it? What will we be kicking ourselves over if we hit the fast-forward button on what seems like a good idea without enough knowledge to know we were making a decision we'd be regretting?
I get that this question is really hard because with 'enough' information you've basically turned it into some combination of an algebra/integration problem and a spreadsheet exercise, and without 'that much' information we've been hesitant to commit to anything more long term than finding out what our options are and trying to tentatively engage in some of the ones that seem more useful.

>>80898
The main point here is very true- we're acting very micro in our attempt to explore and discover our options. So far, these have nearly all been first meetings with people- so we have lots of questions, follow up questions, and interest in getting the details right, seeing what we can get from them, and what leads they give us to others.

I think things would be freer to get more macro once we start doing return visits, or choosing to pass time training or working with people we've already met. (For instance- our introduction to meditation and it's potential usefulness required more of our focus than Jasper actually attending lessons later).

>conversation with Catherine's aunt went surprisingly slowly
Product of two things- if you let us, we're going to ask clarifying questions about nearly every detail. And if you let us, we're going to dig into interpersonal stuff and try to explain things / make friends with people (we really like diffusing the "this problem would just go away if these idiots would just talk to each other like reasonable people" trope. Not that plot or characters always let us). Plus, ooey gooey character development.

Hmm. Princess Maker is probobly not quite the right example, because who you know is more important then what (except for a handful of skils (like Meditation, and /possibly/ Swordfighting) and..hmm..maybe Gardening/Academics/Athletics or ?Astrophisics? maybe?).

Let me put it this way, just being able to sword, or knowing your times tables is probobly not really going to matter if you get in a fight with your Sister, but having built up a web of friends and foes, or gaining a better connection
to your memories of your mother, or understanding your connection to the Sun.

And Yeah, hmm. I do feel like I am taking too long to give you info, and that your questions, and the info I have to give are sort of off from one another. Almost like your giving me java interfaces and I'm trying to hook it up to haskell code.

>>80907
Haha. Observation: the advantages you list as more useful are those less suited to your desired shift in narrative pace. We can easily automate or skim over rote education and training, but building connections and understandings generally involves players being hands on.

You're incentivizing us to do other than you want! :V

>better connection to your memories of your mother / connection to sun
Definitely bumps a second visit (and possibly making visiting a regular thing) to Jade's temple to a higher priority. And probably visiting the Vasili on a Sunday to see what happens.

>[...] but having built up a web of friends and foes, or gaining a better connection to your memories of your mother, or understanding your connection to the Sun.

I'm mildly surprised that learning astrophysics and building our worship following isn't *more* important than how to sword considering we're a divine, celestial body here. (Cue joke about how skeevy it is to be talking about the celestial body of jailbait.)

>Almost like your giving me java interfaces and I'm trying to hook it up to haskell code.

I am but a simple C developer, please do not terrify me with mention of such eldritch horrors. Even LISP frightens me.

>You're incentivizing us to do other than you want! :V

That would seem to be the obvious analysis here, but it couldn't be that simple, could it? If so the desired 'change in pace' would mean directly making Jasper more likely to lose, and I have more faith in our QM than that.

>Definitely bumps a second visit (and possibly making visiting a regular thing) to Jade's temple to a higher priority. And probably visiting the Vasili on a Sunday to see what happens.

Already on the agenda. We should write out that agenda in full though, and perhaps reorganize it or revise it. :)

Well I think it's about balancing enough detail to interest me against so much that I get overwhelmed.

If that makes any sense?

Also, um strictly speaking this is not consciously known to Jasper, but being worshiped is not a particularly useful path to cosmic power for the kind of beings Jasper and her mother are/were. (Personal priests are useful as are areas that are 'yours', but belief casual worship are actually less useful to you then they would be to a human. (Because human societies are much more democratic then Nature)

Anyway, almost done with the post. The rats are taking Jasper into Horizon to find her a practice sword.

>[...]but being worshiped is not a particularly useful path to cosmic power for the kind of beings Jasper and her mother are/were.
That makes surprisingly little difference in how useful I think a large body of lay worshipers is.

Without knowing more about the source material you're working from I'm not sure what more I can help with on balancing the detail level and pacing: I've avoided reading about 'Jasper Irinka' and what else she's a character in to avoid having too much OOC/spoiler knowledge. I think I did find the source the above pic of Jasper comes from originally though, unintentionally.

Also, if you take much longer to update I may have started a new quest before that. It's about spreadsheets, and my largest stumbling blocks are where to give up on finishing my starter spreadsheet and figuring out what to use for a top-image.

> Also, if you take much longer to update I may have started a new quest before that. It's about spreadsheets, and my largest stumbling blocks are where to give up on finishing my starter spreadsheet and figuring out what to use for a top-image.

Is this supposed to make me want to post? :P

>>81010
Heh, not so much no, nor discourage either. Mostly I'm just stuck and since you did start, and run, a quest here I was hoping you may have some insight I could use.

Umm. It's more work then it seems? The next post is coming, I keep writing one paragraph then falling asleep.

Took forever to Find a good image and I am still not that happy with it.

I guess I have a very strong internal image of what Horizon looks like.

Okay I am going to OOC introduce the concept of Regions. Regions are different areas each with their own Properties and Genre.
Together these tell you how to live in tune with the world.
Properties are things that are true. At least if you use them.
In Fortitude :
Honest work will be rewarded, in time.
There is a home here for you.
Your life will stagnate if you don't reach for your dreams.
----
(Some of the shrines have additional Properties. Like Maple Hill where cats go where they please)
These mean that Jasper can use honest work or connecting to her adoptive family to overcome obstacles, much like Earth humans can use science or social connections. Conversely a foe could try and oppose her by stagnating her life, and unless Jasper was following her dreams that would be easier for them.
In Horizon things are a little different.
In Horizon: (This is non canon for reasons.)
You have something to worry about.
Teachers must be delusional obsessive or wicked.
Monsters walk among us.
Three things must happen then time passes, experienced only in boredom.
You must be part of a clique.
---
Horizon is not a happy place exactly. Still, Jasper can plausibly pass as a monster among monsters so it's not all bad.
---
Now Genre is basically what kind of stories the Universe wants to tell there. Which will help Jasper progress on her stories and gain cosmic power. (And/Or a bicycle.)
Fortitude is Pastoral which means stories consist of doing work, talking through something, or experiencing the world and letting the mood affect you.
Horizon is Gothic which is Pastoral plus obsession, where something takes up more and more of your thoughts, escalating slowly into paranoia or obsession.

Huh. Interesting. The underlying metaphysics varies from place to place.

>Fortitude
>your life will stagnate if you don't reach for your dreams
Well, at least we've been proactive so far- working to explore our options so we can develop our goals, and Jasper's been rather committed to ideas like justice. In the short term, I don't see us stagnating.

Longer term, our 'dreams' are pretty non-specific. They're vulnerable to suppression if someone made a concentrated effort of it.

Definitely a good base of operations though, the way work and connections are rewarded. Reaffirms our current (and default) strategy of making friends and allies. Also suggests that even if we learn things elsewhere, practice is perhaps best done here (so the work pays off? Maybe that's why Jasper found the sword practice harder in Horizon. It wasn't paying off as quickly or as easily as she had grown used to).

>Horizon
>Still, Jasper can plausibly pass as a monster among monsters
Yeah, that's easy. Neither the child of the sun of void really belongs in the land of the dark, and gods have been described in monstrous terms of fear and power long before modern notions caught on.

>You must be part of a clique.
...does Jasper count as a clique of one? Because of well, us. We make up a rather literal inner circle.

>teachers, paranoia, obsession
This is the real problem, though. What risk does it pose getting an education in this place? If the teachers, by their very nature, are flawed, if the mind will inevitably twist in certain ways. Makes me wonder if accepting Entropy's offer is more dangerous than rejecting it.

A case study might be in order. The fencing club gives us an opportunity to test if we can handle it, and what happens in these conditions. And test what coping mechanisms of adaptations of thought work.

I'll just mention that region properties are a thing that exist in the tabletop RPG this is based on (though it's not necessarily wholly the same ones). It's a pretty quirky TRPG.

>>81202
That is interesting. I'm wondering about how Jasper's divinity fits into this: How much can she make, change or destroy these properties and the genre, or create other areas with different ones?

The respondent at >>81211 also asked questions I'm interested in answers to. However, I'm quite sure most of this is getting further and further into deep OOC questions--perhaps we should avoid this topic and thank PowderedLight for the basics regarding properties and genre.

Another idea that occurred to me: if Horizon itself sort of compels people into cliques- that might be what Jasper felt that set off our mind control alarms. She was unaffiliated, but interacting with the head of a clique (that she was potentially in the position to join). In that context, a desire to deserve him / the absurdity of his generous gesture towards her, might seem only natural.

>>81219
Yeah, I hardly expect all the OOC stuff to be revealed. It's as much there for us to consider as it is for him to answer. Thinking out loud.

> How much can she make, change or destroy these properties and the genre, or create other areas with different ones?
Right now she can temporarily impose her nature on a smallish area around her, which is represented mechanically by adding a region Property. (basically creating a temporary sub-region like Maple Hill).

We've already done this simi-consciously a number of times, mostly when being cold. She's been needing Inevitability more then Hope lately. Though I've not been clearly distinquishing your mechanical actions, so a number of the effects you see are the combination of multiple powers. For example when dealing with her grief she went silver eyed creating an overcast day where people worked steadily but unenthusiastic. Mechanically this was actually three different powers. Wicked Mode (turninng your eyes silver), Hopeful Mood (Wicked Mode Version) which created the region property, and Element Emote (which allowed her to express her feelings through the sky).

But IC I think that was one umph, if empowered.

THough note that adding a region property is used mechanicly to represent several differnt kinds of powers, its a nice low key but still important effect for powers that give options more then impose realities.

Now modifying region properties is not impossible, but also non trivial even for Imperators. The Entropy's have, for example, been tweaking Horizon, (often in different directions).

Sorry about shortness. Didn't realize how short it was until I wrote it.

>>81356

Short happens. I posted a response that didn't show up on the thread, I'll check back later and post again if it still isn't there.

Oh! Little Island is also an Region. Still Pastoral Genre, but the properties are a little different:

Things change when they are good and ready, not before.
You can never experience the dark.
There is blue clear sky, with a sun that shines brightly, the island is well lit.
Things show what they are.
Lies are left behind.

And in the temple is added:
* You must keep things in good order.

Big Lake is also a Region, but you haven't really spent enough time there to have even the unconscious understanding this sort of OCC knowledge represents.

Though all that would take is just studding the shore, or going on a fishing boat, but the Ferry you are using sort of acts as a bridge between Fortitude and Little Island, connecting them, and keeping the waters of Big Lake 'away'.

Gah. I hate that at a certain point of staying up too late, I completely lose the ability to suggest dialog. Wit does not exist after three. So here's musing on what I'd like to say instead.

I wanted to keep the simplicity of the original idea of introducing ourself as Jasper and answering her question of identity with the problem of our own uncertainty as to how we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to be it, but I can't quite figure out how to resolve that with coming out and saying who we are.

Switching to celestial to rattle off the full list of titles and pedigree is dramatic, and calls back to her using the tongue, and Jasper's failed first attempted to introduce herself that way way back when, but it doesn't mesh with the simple thing at all.

...I also like the idea of a bait and switch, something like, I'll tell you how to address me if you promise not to. Not sure if that exact example works- but we want to lock Mother McCormick into seeing one identity, firs. Because we want to be Jasper here, with her, not her new goddess. We need a mentor and friend and elder, not a worshiper. We want to be in the lesser position, oddly. To be able to learn, not burdened with leadership or devotion. We want to attend the temple, not lead it. (I actually find the idea of a god essentially practicing a faith kind of appropriate. Especially if that's how she learns how to be a god).

>>81420
>Lies are left behind.
That just affirms my vote, in my mind. We left the lie behind when we told Ashley the truth. We don't have to tell everyone, but we won't lie about it anymore. And Mother McCormick did ask.

Noted! Its nice to see people put effort into this.

There is a difference between each of lying, lying by omission, evading the question, openly avoiding the question, and full-disclosure.

I'd like to express my amusement at what amounts to a reversal of positions. Back before we were outed, I was solidly arguing for camp paranoia. Now that we've been made several times, I find myself arguing for disclosure- and to someone I once assumed was among the first to know.

I've signed too many NDAs in my lifetime, and seen too many examples where they either weren't used or didn't work. You can't un-say things, but you can be polite in avoiding topics when you're uncertain of your limits of discussion and choose different topics.

Need to find a picture, also surprised that the content of the quote hasn't drawn discussion.

Pff, I guess we got a little too caught up in our won different perceptions of the situation to think about that. (Be interesting to see how you / Jasper resolves that).

...I suppose if we're thinking about whether to reveal our heritage, it might not be out of place to ask after the quote. It's somewhat relevant. (Although I initially read it to be more allegorical than literal- a reference to the permanent (seeming) nature of the pantheon, and that while gods have peers, it's difficult or incorrect to think in terms of some superseding others).

> Need to find a picture, also surprised that the content of the quote hasn't drawn discussion.
Insufficient information to speculate on. Likely hypotheses are: Mom said something she shouldn't, priestess is not a normal human.
Information gathering is proceeding. Chances are I'm making a mess of it, but it was already a mess.

That's still about her knowing the quote, not about it's content. Then again, I might have already told you guys the relevant theo-biology.

Jasper knows the broad strokes, if you want to ask.

>>81483
Heh, I was certain that if it mattered we'd hear more later. We've already got our plates full with understanding who Mom and Dad were, and we're barely started on the question of what.

Well who and what are not really separate questions here..

So the next bit is being harder to write then I expected.

Man grief is heavy stuff. Not sure how good a job writing it I am doing.

The closest person to me that has died was my cousin. About 6 months ago, and honestly I didn't know her that well. More weird / scary then sad for me personally. My family though. . They had had her live with them a couple of years when I was at college. So they, they were hurt.

Sorry just rambling here. Feel free to ignore.

---

On another note, your speculation is not being ignored by Jasper. She just isn't responding right now.

Wheeeee, out wall-of-texting the quest. Bad habit.

>>81518
I think you did a good job with that bit- I was impressed how the context completely changed what I was reading in the poem. It was suddenly a story of loss, burning out, creation-through-destruction, instead of celebration, or creation. Breaking down instead of building up. (And there are suddenly more roles- I see Jade and Senko in the tiger, The creator / the father / the destroyer, and Jasper the lamb?). I hadn't even considered flipping that one that way.

...yeah okay, I'm kind of rambling there, but I'm not going to take the time to flesh out a proper literary analysis. Blake's kind of an old obsession of mine, especially that you could do a duality thing and read some of them back and forth like that (I always like to see the Clod and the Pebble more of a presentation of a paradox than an argument for either position). So yeah, this pushed my buttons.

>your speculation is not being ignored by Jasper. She just isn't responding right now.
That's appropriate. There's a reason I focused on her response first and not the speculation, anyways. In the moment, her emotions are more important than thinking about the bigger mysteries here.

Dr. Moran, the author of the rpg I got Jasper from edited a line or two of the poem to make it more outside relevant.

I suppose congratulations on having the (typos aside) most literate quest running in TGChan right now? We've got multiple references to famous poetry in the main thread.

Bengals! Dialectics untie!

Huh. ID changed again.

Okay, hoping over to dis because we have clearly crossed over from what do we do in the moment concerns to fundamental disagreements about our long term plan(s) of action. (And because I'm not really sure it's that great airing this in front of the character, anyways).

I still think, on the matter of disclosure / saying who we are, is that we should be on the middle path. We've seen that complete secrecy is impossible and pointless. But I would argue that complete disclosure has drawbacks as well. We should be open when it is appropriate, or with those who know, and just leave it otherwise. Open secret versus open declaration.

Now, since this contention is obviously not universally accepted, I'm going to try and make the case for it.

The advantage I see to the middle path is mostly social / developmental. We have a chance to develop relationships with people without pressures / responsibilities / context that would otherwise significantly color those relationships. I feel this would be healthy for the development of any young person- especially one who will have / has as much power as she does. Plus, it has the benefit of reinforcing certain social skills she might otherwise be rather inexperienced in. And as an added bonus- works well with the region-theme (honest work over time, finding allies and friends, etc).

I see two main kinds of problem with living openly. The first is that it sets us apart, as a being of power. And that will fundamentally change how we interact with many people. Not all for the worse, but I think that puts as at a disadvantage. It's easier to grow as a person when you're free to be a person, and not a title, or an avatar, or what have you (I think we've already seen some others isolated by their position / heritage, Entropy jr, for instance). People need people, and other her other statuses aside, Jasper is a young, vulnerable person who needs room to grow (in princess maker terms: I'd say it would be easier to raise her well in the village than locked up in an ivory tower). Secondly, there's the problem that being a god comes with a certain burden of responsibility. People need the sun to do things. They feel the need to worship it, to thank it, to ask certain things of it, to curse it when things go wrong. There's... an awful lot we could potentially have to deal with. Honestly, there's a reason gods are usually far away from the people who are affected directly by them. Being close- so you can be called to account, responsible for everything, is awful sticky burden. Especially for a child who's still got her own emotions and a hell of a lot of other things still to sort out. Possibly even worse, if we're too inexperienced to meaningfully influence our domain! (Ie, being responsible for what the sun does without significant control). I don't see Jasper as being ready to shoulder that burden- in fact, I see having to deal with it regularly as detrimental.

>>81566
Haha, wow. I've got no idea what to make of that.

>>81575

I'd rather not push Jasper too much further into the spotlight than she's ready for, but she *is* the spotlight for one thing. Another important point is that she's never going to get a sense of what her actual limits are from hanging around with humans because they aren't her peers. They're interesting, but fragile, aliens to her.

>Haha, wow. I've got no idea what to make of that.

I do: Hungry sun is hungry for love. Remember, Jasper can devour anything and has a bottomless appetite. I do like it when a girl is honest about what she wants... but I'm just not into vore.

There's nothing wrong with pushing limits. I would just prefer to set things up so we have an environment where we don't have to. I suspect, as time goes on, reliefs will be in shorter supply than challenges.

>what to make of that
The hardest part to follow is what she's responding to. The thing that actually seems to makes the most sense is responding to her past self's last post.

>not into vore
Don't knock it till you've... been eaten and are no longer alive to knock it.

>humans aren't her peers
>alien to her
See, I would agree with the first, but I would object to the second. Her perspective is very alien (and amounted for most of our early difficulties in communication), but her mind doesn't really seem to be so. Her emotional reactions, how she responds to things, processes grief and fear and anger and uncertainty all seem to be very human. Which suggests to me that there is value in her interacting with mortals on those terms. Human interaction is a low risk laboratory, a social playground, to learn skills that might be useful when we are faced with her peers (better understanding or control of her self, or a better ability to understand others, will come in handy facing other powers, either adversarially or cooperatively).

I mean, most of what's she's had so far has either been family, or her mother's sycophants, or encounters we've guided her though.

I wouldn't want our first real prolonged social experiment to be in Entorpy's school, in the skewed enviroment of Horizon. I'd prefer to have a grounding, prior to that. (Assuming of course, we decide to attend).

I agree with basically not bothering to mention the little "Oh, I'm a sun-god" thing for the reasons stated. Right now she's in a position where she has to deal with mortals regularly, and I think it'll be better for her not to be put on some pedestal. The people she might want to discuss her unusual status with (and a few she wouldn't) already are pretty much in a position to know anyway. So there's no need to bring it up, she can still find people to learn what she needs to know from.

*cough* it's just a list of pick up lines.

Some of them more or less terrible.

Each one to a different person.

Like the eyes one is to your stalker / prophettess.

You though can also look at it as a bit of prophesy/foreshadowing about who will eventually be in her life.

>>81604
I recognized Chuubo, Seizhi, Mirame, and Leonardo. Possibly Rinley and/or Natalia too.

>>81606
Oh, yeah, and Kid Entropy. That one took me a minute.

>>81604
Haha, okay, yeah, it makes a hell of a lot more sense if each line is directed at a different person. All piled together is kind of overwhelming.

>>81602
I never disagreed with this. Talking about divinity with mortals who have no frame of reference for it is just gonna get us myths and legends for a response most of the time: Interesting perhaps but usually not too helpful. The issue we're grappling is what about the funeral of Jade Irinka, and the knock-on effects of our choices either way.

Do you guys want a Favicon?

There's been the question raised of entropy-school versus dad school. I want to ask, is there a conflict there? I was kind of under the impression that Entropy's place was more middle school / high school, while Dad's sounded more high school / university.

>>81624
I certainly wouldn't object to one, although I haven't had an idea for one myself. A stylized sun of some kind? Maybe the sun over Foritude? (Although that would be awful tricky in 16 x 16). I suppose the source material might have symbology to draw on, too.

Anonymous 2014/05/12(Mon)06:54 No. 81637 ID: 3dd384
File 139990288945.png - (175.13KB , 547x480 , silver.png )

>>81628
>I suppose the source material might have symbology to draw on, too.

Well, if anyone can make the Silver Icon look good at 16x16...

Archivemod 2014/05/13(Tue)15:29 No. 81663 ID: e1609c
File 140002014745.png - (689B , 16x16 , symbol.png )

>>81637
I can give it a go

"Within the United States and Canada, in most cultural groups and regions, the funeral rituals can be divided into three parts: visitation, funeral, and the burial service."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funeral

If you want a reference for (American flavour) Christian burial practices, search for that section in the wiki article. It's pretty good and not very long.
The rest of the wiki article covers many different ritual practices as well, if you want to pick something else.

Thanks. Might be a few days before the next post. Going to try and answer the ITQ.

Might not be able to update until the weekend.
I'm working on other projects.

Any thoughts on the ITQ posts?

>>81780
Well, in regards to the schooling- Entropy I managed to make not attending his school sound much more dire than I previously assumed. It sounds like that decision would amount to a defiant stance and invitation of conflict we would be in no way be prepared to defend (unless we end up playing different guardians of the town against each other- stalemating entropy so he can't take direct action against us? Even if that worked though, that would really change the climate, and cut us off from some areas).

Meaning we should probably plan on attending, and on developing the skills needed to function in horizon, to cope with our classmates to be, and to cope with the slanted view an education system in a deranged, competitive enviroment might bring (preventative measures to try and get a good education without getting messed up by the delivery. The idea floated a while back about us tutoring her sounds a lot more reasonable to me now- she could use a basic grounding in her approach to school-learning, and in the fundamentals of the fields she'll end up studying).

Dear old Dad made the potential consequences of attending his university sound worse than I was expecting, as well. I've considered that we might end up attending simply as part of Jasper's efforts to understand what happened (how can we decide what's right or just with only half the picture, or even less?), or as a necessary step in delivering justice (if taking down Dad turns out to be the way to do that). But we may have to consider what effect that would have on our personality as much as what we might learn. More to balance. Dunno. I'd think I'd need more information before making any solid decision, there.

>>81780
Parameters of desired feedback?

Not sure Honestly. Writing critique s are always welcome. I'm a programmer so taking collaboration/critique well is important to me anyway.

Uhh. Mostly I think I just wanted to make sure you were reading them.

Oh, uh, stepping back from the story and looking at the content of the itq stuff for the moment:

I like that you've done them. Very few non-drawn quests have ever tried, and I appreciate where the responses found a different voice than the main story. Say, when Jasper responds to comments we would likely not have made in-quest (like her unusual response to the idea of having a family), or the surreal, future-pickup lines.

That said, this quest kind of falls into a place where it's tricky to pose questions, though. When the whole story exists as a dialog with the protagonist in the first place, when is it appropriate to take a question outside the narrative? I find the usual impetuses to itq are either "this wouldn't be appropriate to talk about now, at the current point in the story" or "the character I want to talk to isn't the player character or on screen right now" (ie, plot or circumstance in the way). Or: "I can get an itq response even if the quest isn't updating right now". There's also asking stuff for the express purpose of world-building / filling in the blanks, but I'm not sure how much I want to approach that at this point in the story- since the character's exploration of a world she knows little about is still so central.

Thanks that's exactly the sort of feed back that is useful.

Oh also is there any rules/guidelines about when to have a second (ic) thread? Its starting to get annoying to scroll down.

>>81836
There are no hard guidelines. When to start a new thread is entirely at your discretion. Soft limits vary by author. The closest thing to a hard limit is if you get over 2k posts in a thread, things break. (Which has only happened once so far, I think. In the Lunar Quest Dis thread, and that took years).

The thread's a reasonable size to retire, if you wish to. Just look for a reasonable break point. (Although, I suppose where we are actually might work? The soft ellipse trail off is a kind of ending, and you could use the bustling kichi event for the OP in thread 2).

Okay. This weekend when I post the dinner I'll make a new thread.

Working on post will be done today or tomorrow.

As per >>81202's section on Genre, I am consciously attempting to steer this scene towards "talking through something". Or, in the original game's lingo, a Shared Reaction. In a scene where there's a lot of unspoken issues and anxiety, it seems like the best path through the fog and into the sunlight.

Okay, a response to the quest's use of ITQ so far:
ITQ is (as a rule) about non-canon interactions between characters and the people who ask them dumb (or occasionally not-so-dumb) questions. This makes it an iffy place to go for performing world building and characterization in the quest's world. However, since we're stuck in Jasper's (apparently pre-adult) head (at least for now) our possibilities for interaction and observation are significantly limited, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps using ITQ like that works to help round out the world building and get us information and character interaction without the limits of our character perspective within the quest itself, but it's messy at best to do that: ITQ is supposed to be non-canon and totally supplemental, because otherwise many of the potential crossover (or even inside-one-quest) interactions wouldn't make sense.

ITQ is usually at its best when it's used to tell jokes or interesting anecdotes, to harass characters in ways that lead to entertaining responses, and to have crossover reactions between different characters that would be entertaining. It's worth noting that Jukashi mocked two of Lagotrope's characters from their Asteroid Quest by combining them into a single character, and then later used this character as the protagonist of a new quest (which I haven't followed any of because it's too furry for me). Jasper doesn't seem the type to be really fun to tease or to wield humour, innuendo, sarcasm and pointed language in general like that. We've gotta teach this girl the fundamentals of applied sass if you want her to be equipped for that kind of conversational fencing; she doesn't strike me as a good victim for it so she'd have to at least be an armed combatant. Perhaps Entropy would work better for it since his specialty is conflict?

>>81964
I'd be surprised if anybody had different ideas about how to deal with meeting your girlfriend's parents in this situation. I'm honestly curious what else people could even come up with and justify as a reasonable idea--I'm drawing a blank.
More seriously we should puzzle out appropriate conversation. I'm guessing that the, "So I bought the horse a prostitute," story is off the table but I'm at a loss for what should be on it.

>Jukashi mocked
Eh, it's entirely too good natured to characterize as mockery, in my opinion. I mean, it's clearly a parody of everything ridiculous about asteroid quest, turned up to eleven. But bizarrely / impossibly / contradictorily it ends up taking the insanity seriously. There's a sheer amount of loving world-building detail and effort Jukes can't seem to help throw at even what started as an april fools quest, and it comes across more as a transcendent tribute.

Some of the zanier stuff has even generated explanations that have looped back around to explain / influence things in the canonical universe. (Like neumono fighting styles / martial arts, or gender dynamics, and even some of the prehistory).

>What ITQs are supposed to be
...I'd disagree with some of that, or at least, disagree that they're rules that are always true. How canon / frivolous the information is varies (as does how much is bullshitting, boasting, arguing, or lore / background revealing), not everyone does crossover stuff (actually, it seems to me there's less of that now than there was in some of the older threads), and as for how it's best used. Well. That's really rather subjective. If there wasn't some fundamental disagreement as to how people feel about that, we wouldn't have the BTE spinoff. Personally, though I enjoy the jokes and inter-universe friction when it happens, what I really appreciate the ability to drill down into characters and settings when the authors let us. It's like conducting little interviews.

As for needing the ability to sass or anything else- ITQ is more about seeing how characters respond than equipping them to respond well. ...although it would be interesting to track how a character changes over time through their responses. I'm not sure we've ever had anyone develop at the right rate for that.

>different ideas about how to deal with meeting your girlfriend's parents
Well, at this point, I was approaching it as more meeting with people who circumstances would have made our opponents. But yeah, how to convey what we want to is tricky.

>Eh, it's entirely too good natured to characterize as mockery, in my opinion.[...]
>(which I haven't followed any of because it's too furry for me)
I wouldn't know what Jukashi did with that quest. I was making a point about how the thread tends to be used for non-canon stuff and to allow interactions with characters outside of their quests. You're right if you say that it's possible to put materials that are core-content for a quest in all sorts of places, including in threads in questdis, or offsite from tgchan.org even. I don't recommend it: If it's core content for the quest it should be in the quest somewhere. Not everyone reads ITQ or follows questdis and the harder you make it for someone looking at your quest to follow what's going on the less interest/responses you'll get.

>That's really rather subjective.
Yes and no. What people like varies, a lot, and you're right that different people can and do use ITQ in a variety of different ways. Following a quest is made harder by putting the essential content into more places than just the quest threads though, and I was cautioning about that. I mean seriously, the information about dad's school could have come in the mail as a course calendar, application forms and the rest of a preregistration package and that would've been pretty cool. Showing that off to granny Ashley and Ms. Bentenmaru could've generated an appropriately amusing WTF reaction. (If we could get one for Entropy's school that would be pretty nice too.)

As far as what to say at dinner goes, each time I think about it I remember yet another inappropriate joke or anecdote. Seriously, I'm considering writing this stuff down and checking whether I've got enough good material to start a career as a filth-mouthed stand-up.

Interesting.

I have to disagree with some of it.

But I am not saYing what yet.

Poor Catherine, if Jasper was older, or I didn't find making things tough for her funny she would have a much simpler life.

But instead she gets to live life like a sit com.

Danger of being non canon I guess.

It has been said that conflict is at the heart of all good stories, and pain is at the heart of all humour.

She was totally dressed like a NPC, she was just asking for it. Authors can't help themselves when they've got writing to do and a NPC just flaunts their plot-utility so shamelessly.

Anonymous 2014/06/03(Tue)23:10 No. 82112 ID: 3dd384
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>>82092

>>82112
Okay, I need to buy a hint. Can anyone explain this one for me?

He is a Storyteller who loves tragedy. In this quest he would be an Imperator of the Dark. Rather the anti Jasper, though his element is proBobly clocks or time, his principal is probobly something like false hope.

But the picture is in reference to what I did to Catherine.

Oh, well: Just because her girlfriend is literally too hot to touch, her family is embarrassingly petty and earthy for a bunch of seers, she's blocked from doing a vital job she's been training for a sizable fraction (the majority?) of her life by parental curfews, and her mom in particular seems to demonstrate a maturity level appropriate for Catherine's little sister that doesn't mean you're being overly harsh. Some people just get lucky like that--in fiction or in real life.

Anonymous 2014/06/05(Thu)07:49 No. 82135 ID: 3dd384
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family tree

weirdness wrt catherine's birth left out for the moment b/c we don't really know what's going on there

>>82132
I guess the bright side is that at least it's not the Titovs.

Anonymous 2014/06/05(Thu)08:09 No. 82137 ID: 3dd384
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>>82135
Updated with some drama. Maybe I'll get to the stuff from the old thread later

Man I have awesome helpers.

Yeah..the Titovs are messed up.

Nifty, can we treat this tree diagram as known information in the quest then?
Genders might be helpful, as well as an understanding why none of the three of Aegon, Abronchyus and Aegon aren't suitable as heirs: If I had to guess the lead seer is supposed to be female or they just don't have enough talent/skill with being seers.

Now I'm starting to wonder if the bickering was staged for our benefit, without Catherine being in on it, to try and ask us to manipulate fate for their benefit without actually risking asking a goddess for a favour. Thoughts?

>Catherine grumpily kicked her, and she sighs. “I am sorry. I am being a terrible host. Why don’t we get to know each other a little better. I am Yukari Kichi, mother of Catherine, and Samantha Kichi and wife of Robert.” she says pointing each of them out. “Ran is my elder sister, and Orange my younger brother, Agathe is his wife, and Abronychus, Abydos, and Aegon their sons. Hikari is my mother, and my father was Aki. I hear you are living with Grandmother Ashley?” she says pointing at little shrine with a black-framed black and white photo of an dour looking man.

Samantha wasn't on the chart, and either isn't present or hasn't spoken up yet. It's more and more curious as we dig into the details here. At this point I'm pretty confused on the count of what to talk about: Apparently we don't want to talk about Heaven or Outside, but I'm drawing a blank for other topics that might be safe and useful. Someone help me fill out the list of topics that are likely to be either safe or useful?

Anonymous 2014/06/05(Thu)21:57 No. 82158 ID: 3dd384
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>>82148
Whoops! Fixed.

>>82147
There seems to be some resentment on Agatha's part on this, based on...
>>>/quest/577048
>Yukari angrily says "It needed to happen. And Catherine was about as far from an accident as you can get. Neither of you really get how the pools work."
>"Yeah not making me feel better about one of my kids learning to seer." Agatha replies.

The most obvious interpretation is that there's some skill to the Kichi family magic, and Orange's branch of the family doesn't seem to have the knack.

Actually, I'd better add that bit to the chart too.

kichi tree PowderedLight 2014/06/05(Thu)22:26 No. 82161 ID: 421b21
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Here is one with genders and family names.

Though note the color coding and name conventions are part of the translation into English. If you actually asked Catherine to draw one it would be a mixture of kanji, Greek, furigana, and Roman letters for the pronunciation of Orange. (He writes his name with a kanji for the color. His sister's names are written with kanji for purple and red) And she would put the family name first.

Oh and Town is inconsistent about assigning colors to gender. There is enough contact with modern media that the idea that boys are blue and girls pink is not totally wierd but it's not really firm either.

Possibly from the non-human and multicultural influences town has fairly loose gender roles given its economy.

>>82161
...huh. Okay, I'm guessing not assigning Catherine's father a gender role might be related to the "Yeah, well, things happen." Not sure what to make of Sam being undefined, though.

>>82162
Well, not everyone fits neatly into those two categories, even IRL. *shrug*

>Possibly from the non-human and multicultural influences town has fairly loose gender roles given its economy.
I find that quite interesting considering that fishing is one of the most strongly-gendered industries around in Earth/human experience, with on-shore processing usually done by women (possibly assisted by children) and the sailing and fishing almost exclusively done by men.

>Not sure what to make of Sam being undefined, though.
Perhaps a colourless box means some specific status other than gender--perhaps great physical/social distance that renders them existent and alive but not relevant to Kichi family concerns?

Yeah, but having a Selke say process the fish is a terrible idea, but they allow activities humans can only do in much warmer water.

Where as vampires have a tendency to sink or melt or fall asleep in water so..

Uh yeah, I suppose that having selkies to control and use your nets, lines and harpoons in the water makes a huge difference in how your fishing/whaling/aquaculture works. They would be a complete game changer for a fishing industry if there were enough of them willing to work cooperatively/cheaply enough.

Don't get me started on the creepy, undead leech-thingies--my glare is sometimes more hazardous than that of the sun if one particular incident in a bar is accepted as evidence.

Also, in my latest response to the quest thread I was responding based on the perspective of the mortal/divine divide present in Greek myth. Feel free to explain OOC here how head-up-ass that assumption is. :)

Yeah, and even if each individual case of weird* magic is fairly rare, there's enough of them in aggregate that it has a pretty big effect on the culture, making it a lot more accepting of weirdness. Though you know if you are a girl that wants to be a fishermen you might have claim you have the soul of an octopus or something...but its not like someone can prove you don't have the soul of an octopus so..

* if its not rare, then its not weird. Like Shop foxes or Vampires.

>the perspective of the mortal/divine divide present in Greek myth
Yeah, the classical Grecian perspective has always come across to me as... somewhat sociopathic. Morality and divinity are almost synonymous with power.

That old-school approach feels right to me say, in Horizon, if we're looking for a way for our god-child to play the monster among monsters role. Be great and terrible to behold. But Jasper has come back again and again to the concept of justice and right and wrong her mother drilled into her. If she accepts the idea of higher or absolute morality, then she's subject to that. Her interactions with people have to be mediated by what she feels is right.

(...and wow, that's way more concise and better sounding than my response in the thread. Geeze. Sorry about that).

And even if we're only thinking of our advantages, working together with people, and building bonds, counts more in Town than dominion over them, anyways. A cooperative Kichi family we reach out to is more useful than an estranged family we stole their daughter from.

> If she accepts the idea of higher or absolute morality, then she's subject to that. Her interactions with people have to be mediated by what she feels is right.
Well, I think that the higher scope of morality that is inherently implicit in her ability to directly alter fate says that Jasper has higher responsibilities than just doing right by the Kichi family.
On general principles, the principle of trying to avoid causing harm unnecessarily, and by pragmatic estimation I would definitely prefer not to have the Kichi family as enemies if it can be avoided, all else being equal. The problem is that, 'all else being equal' part is an invalid assumption. Therefore we have to actually pay attention to what the costs of playing nice with the Kichi family are: Even going as far towards being nice to them as we hae so far has probably earned us scorn from Entropy, if not others. Do we wanna go for broke and turn ourself into an outcast and object of mockery amongst all the other imperators that we need for support against sister and dad?

>>82243
I'm sorry, but that just seems hyperbolically alarmist and besides the point, as far as I'm concerned.

Yes, we have other responsibilities and obligations. Yes, this isn't our only priority.

None of which means we don't try to do what we think is right in this situation.

>the costs of playing nice with the Kichi
>Do we wanna go for broke and turn ourself into an outcast and object of mockery amongst all the other imperators
We don't actually know what these costs are, and it seems to me you're making fairly drastic worse case assumptions. Yes, worse case scenarios are worth considering, but I have a hard time swallowing those hypotheticals as justifications for inaction now.

And the character has made it quite clear what she wants to do, here! She already affirmed a desire to try and make things right. And she made it quite clear she's more interested in having friends or family than living up to the possible expectations of other deities, if that's what it comes down to.

There's also the whole Regions thing you're not considering, here. Reaching out to, and working with the Kichis is exactly the kind of slow, honest, relationship-based stuff that Fortitude rewards. That's an additional benefit to consider. Long term, this makes us stronger.

>>82243
Okay. So you're worried about Imperial politics. I'll admit that this is an angle I hadn't considered.

Here's my thought process on that:

Mom thought that an Imperator associating with humans was kind of humiliating on its face, but now Entropy is spending his time running a school for mortal kids, where his son (!!) is Student Council President. To me this is implies either that Mom's viewpoint on this were not necessarily standard across Imperators in general, or else that the political landscape has changed since we fell.

So we need more data. Honestly I think Entropy Jr is our best bet there, since I don't think we've met anyone else who knows about the current political landscape, and he doesn't seem terribly enamored of his dad.

Until then, it's vital that we not burn any bridges that might prove to be important once we understand what's actually going on. The Kichis operate their shrine, which - so goes the current theory - is probably either a tool for Imperators in general or us specifically. As the folks who understand it, they need to be on our side and at their full effectiveness, and they're already sort of emotionally unsettled by Jasper and what she means to their family; even if you view them in a tool-way, my read is that playing up our divinity here will not help resolve that, and until/unless it's resolved they will not be as useful a tool as they could be.

So that's one potential bridge we don't want to burn. The other is the bridge to other Imperators who treating humans as worthy of attention is weird and dumb. At this time, I don't think what we're doing is going to be sufficient necessarily to do that, mainly because either they're not watching very closely (in which case it'll only start to matter when we start to exert ourselves politically) or they are already watching (in which case, given our behavior so far vis other Fortitude residents, I daresay we are already sunk).

I've got to catch a plane so I'll stop here. I admit that the above thoughts might be biased in directions that cater to my preferred behavior, but eh, I don't know what I should do about that.

I'm concerned about what it would take to 'solve the Kichi problem' and how badly it can go wrong in many different ways. The social/political issues for Imperators is just one, obvious, straightforward kind of risk and damage we really shouldn't be sneering at. When I started thinking about what a guaranteed solution probably means it went worse from there.

I started writing up what a solution would look like and why all the options suck. I'll skip right to the options that suck the least unless someone wants to check my work or see what I am adamantly rejecting, and why:

The least risky potential options are asking other Imperators for advice and help, and non-fate-molding solutions. Apparently Catherine's birth involved magic from the pools and this suggests we may be able to facilitate the development of another Kichi seer, but if it was that easy wouldn't they have already done that? (If the pools are sentient I'd like to get their opinion and advice on this actually, and just talk to them.) Learning more about our powers and options definitely belongs on the to-do list, but it already was and I'm not confident this leads to 'a solution' that's worth using since our domain doesn't directly include fertility. It would probably be good to make friends with more Imperators--for this issue fertility powers or love/romance powers may be able to solve it with a bare minimum of risk, fuss and damage--but can we make friends with those Imperators, and what does it take? It seems more likely to me that we're going to help them in a much slower and more mundane way if we do it at all, something like helping them to hire someone, adopt someone and/or develop the seer aptitude in other family members so they aren't as badly harmed by Catherine's absence from the business.

That last option isn't necessarily bad but we don't know how long it takes and what that means not doing. If we have to pick one of these options I'd say choose that one but it may still be worse than spending that same time on learning astrophysics, swordsmanship, training and equipping the local militia, and other more direct preparation for our deadline. The less prepared we are when sister comes the worse it will be for everybody around, and we can't afford to spend lots of time inefficiently or ineffectively here. Fortitude aiding and rewarding cooperation may come through for us, and motivated aid from the Kichi family may be a serious asset then, but that's still a risk.

>[...] but now Entropy is spending his time running a school for mortal kids, where his son (!!) is Student Council President.
Conflict is a lot better at harming, risking or damaging things than it is at protecting them, so I'm pretty sure that Entropy needs all the help he can get to try and make Horizon safe (enough). Scorn, desecration and murder, remember: He set up the school as a power source.
It works by getting the students to tear each other down, do some nice Capulet on Montague level intrigue, omnipresent bullying and the occasional murder for a power-pill and to keep everyone terrified and vicious. He probably wants us there to scare his vampires silly as a threat they can't harm directly, which would leave them pulling out all the stops on intimidation, psychological warfare, other manipulation and trying to use Jasper against the other vampires. Jasper's mere presence as someone resistant to their charms probably desecrates their personality cults and triggers a rising tide of scorn for one thing. (Catherine's vision of us as a terrifying brute that beats little sister within an inch of restarting the war probably has something to do with what we'd be like after enduring years of that vampire bullshit and killing a few of them. Imagine how powerful her scorn would be.) Heck, him hanging out in person makes more sense if it's also secretly a temple considering the risks of having a temple turned against the Imperator. He might still think that it's humiliating to deal with the mortals that closely but it seems to be how he's coping with picking up the pieces after the world ended.

I'd think using fate or fertility magic or miracles or what have you to replace Catherine as a seer is... a rather literal take on making amends.

I would think one of the easiest ways to start making amends would be to be careful in how we actually make our claim on Catherine. So she's not as absent in their lives as she could be. Or well, to in our alliance find ways to help them gain what she might have netted them. (A chosen one can be a path to prosperity, but not the only one). Or try and affect the circumstances so they benefit from us, and they're in a stronger and position for the next one.

>it may still be worse than spending that same time on learning astrophysics, swordsmanship, training and equipping the local militia, and other more direct preparation for our deadline. The less prepared we are when sister comes the worse it will be for everybody around
I would object, strongly, to that view. Building bonds and relationships with people is not frivolous preparation. According to word of god, a network of friends and allies is one of the few things that might actually help if it came to a direct confrontation with sis.

This is also edging onto what kind of character we want to raise. I'm not willing to settle for someone who puts all her effort into preparation for conflict, and scorns those around her for the approval of distant others. Interpersonal relationships are important, and she shouldn't have to forsake those for a looming future, or for fears of offending some distant pantheon.

>I would object, strongly, to that view. Building bonds and relationships with people is not frivolous preparation.
I didn't say it wasn't but we don't know if it is the best preparation. At the dinner table we're currently sitting at the Kichis have mumbled about infighting with the Susonov--is making friends with them something that comes at the cost of other friends? It goes back to the question of opportunity cost: What are we giving up to do this instead? Putting in the same time and effort with the rats may help us and Fortitude more, to mention just one possibility.

>>82290
>we don't know if it is the best preparation
...and we never will! This may be princess maker quest, but it's not princess maker. We don't have the full spoilers for the game in front of us. We can't sit down and plan our every move in advance, and maximize our time spent on various activities to get the perfect return.

The best we can do is explore our options as we go, and make what decisions make sense based on the information we have when we have it.

If all you want to consider how much time and effort we allocate to which goals and to which people, that kind of seems like a problem for later. When we're schedule deciding, say. And perhaps after we're done this initial jaunt of trying to meet everybody and map out our options as best we can for informed decisions. Look, weighing opportunity cost is all well and good, but I find it pretty fundamentally frustrating when the question of "can we afford to interact with these people at all" suddenly becomes the topic of debate when we are sitting down and talking to these people, and trying to find a way to work with them. For better or for worse, we're already in bed with the Kichi to some extent.

>but I find it pretty fundamentally frustrating when the question of "can we afford to interact with these people at all" suddenly becomes the topic
Ah, then there was a misunderstanding. My point was that we can't promise anything, and that it would be irresponsible to commit to doing something we don't know is even (practically) possible. I absolutely was not saying we shouldn't have dinner with them (again/regularly) or that we shouldn't keep our eyes open for opportunities: We just can't promise to fix their heir problem.

>We just can't promise to fix their heir problem.
Well no, that would be presumptuous, and premature. And honestly, could very easily come across as insulting.

But at the same time, Jasper did already accept personal responsibility for it. In my opinion, she already committed to doing something, even if the how and the what and the when are very much up in the air.

(Well, technically, we accepted responsibility for what happened with Catherine, not directly for making sure they have an heir. It's a related issue, but not the injustice itself to be righted per se).

>can we afford to interact with these people at all
Sorry if that's not what you meant in the moment, but it's what I read as the logical endpoint of the whole appeasing disproving gods by limiting disproved-of interactions with mortals thing.

>Sorry if that's not what you meant in the moment, but it's what I read as the logical endpoint of the whole appeasing disproving gods by limiting disproved-of interactions with mortals thing.
If that were the case we'd have to go move to a mountaintop because we wouldn't be able to stay with Granny Ashley and Ms. Bentenmaru, probably couldn't attend Entropy's school, maybe couldn't accept tutoring in meditation from the Susonov. I'm not prepared to sacrifice all of our life amongst mortals just yet, but it's another thing entirely to value 'making up for taking Catherine away' over 'saving ourself and Fortitude from whatever sister has planned.'

>to value 'making up for taking Catherine away' over 'saving ourself and Fortitude from whatever sister has planned.'
Which I never argued we should. Meaning we've established we both thoroughly missed each other's point the first time round and have been arguing at cross purposes. :p

>Jokes on them, then. If Jasper's already committed herself to making this situation right slash just after what happened, then we're pretty much on the hook for that already. Or finding a way to accomplish something equivalent.

I guess, but this seemed to be pretty strongly stating a goal for the to-do list. It didn't specify a time-limit though, and it may be reasonable to slot it in sometime after little sis comes to visit.

Yes, (re)stating a goal, not a mission statement to put before all else. Side-quests needn't derail the story, but they're good for personal growth and enrichment.

And I would be highly surprised if we managed to find a way to make up for significantly changing the course of their lives / Catherine's life in the few years before we're supposed to attend school and run into sis, yes. It's a long term thing. (Well, mortal-long, anyways).

So Love : {Hate, Reason, Duty, Justice, Anger}

As Hope : {Despair, ???}

I need to come up with a "counter-part".. hmm. Actually it might have already happened!

>>82330
This statement/request seems to be missing relevant details unless you want a random answer: A counterpart for what/whom/where?

Hope: Despair, Cynicalism, Mistrust...
I wanna say close-mindedness but I'm a bit iffy on that.

I need a counter part to Jasper for a Black* Arc. They should proBobly have a relationship to some concept that is a counter to Hope in the same way Reason, Duty, Justice, Anger and Hate are counters to Love.

That is unless Jasper is actually on a Green Arc.

Which might work better for how we have been playing her/her situation.

Though explicitly preparing for her sister would be yellow.

er. Posted what I meant to post here in the IC thread. X |

Oh, hey, they're just analogy vectors. Neat.

>So Love : {Hate, Reason, Duty, Justice, Anger}
<base emotion> : {<opposite>, <defies / immune to>, <formalizes as>, <can idealize to...?>, <negative consequence>}

I think my guesses as to how duty and justice relate are the weakest and / or hardest to put into words, but if I try the same thing for hope...

As Hope : {Despair, Probability, Dogma, Conviction, Delusions}

>>82351
Poo, you just beat my post.

>Though explicitly preparing for her sister would be yellow.
Hmm. Well, at least some of the last argument was focused on that, but I would have thought learning how to operate in our new world, and longer term growth striving for understanding and justice were our big goals. Sis is just one problem that lies on that path we'll need to find some way to resolve. No that there's anything wrong with preparing for the obstacles, but neither the preparation nor the confrontation should be ends in and of themselves.

Y'want 'opposites to hope' eh? I'll give you a list: Catastrophe (including specific flavours like famine, plague, war), certainty, decay, deprivation, disillusionment, entropy, inevitability, instinct, intimidation/fear, isolation, knowledge, oppression, probability, propaganda.

If you want something different specify additional parameters.

Thanks!

Did we... did we just give you the inspiration to take the horsemen of the apocalypse and put them in as an opposing team? Because dudes that were each supposed to destroy a quarter of a world with no additional help seems a little bit of a hard-mode opforce for a little girl that misses her mommy.

>>82429
I'm not PowderedLight, but if the point of this exercise was to find a foil for a Black Arc, then the foil is probably not going to be that sort of blatantly antagonistic/overpowering force. Generally speaking what you're looking for is more someone who meets you on friendly terms and makes a tempting case on behalf of the "other side", whatever it is.

If it's something like "despair", they'll need to either be really charming or have a really good argument up their sleeve. Practically speaking, something like "probability" or "inevitability" is easier to swing since it's not got those negative connotations.

I wouldn't be surprised if the name 'Riders' came from the Riders of the Apocalypse, but they aren't the Riders of the Apocalypse. They're basically people like Jasper's dad, but a lot of them're weaker than that. More on Jasper's level.

Instinct might make the most hilarious mirror to Jasper, but if I'm reading the 'unreality' part of the Excrusians correctly it might be a bit too natural. Mind, nobody has said that the B-arc character was going to be an Excrusian....

(Cue references to the B-Arc from HGttG series full of hairdressers and military types?)

Well Jade's brother caused the KT extinction, and set in motion the Earth's grief that eventually caused the Scientific/Prosaic world to exist.

But no. The poster above me has the right of it.

HYatT? Err.. stupid auto correCt. HGttGT?

>>82451
Uncle asteroid.

>>82460
HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

>>82460
Yes, the five-book trilogy.

Was just reading some 4 chan quests, and wanted to thank you guys for being nice.

It makes it a lot more fun.

I've been here long enough to know that a decent quest with a good author deserves aid; I'm not just being nice I'm trying to help you entertain me.
Or, more simply: You've earned it.

Thanks.

Thanks.

I have fanart.

Its kind of awesome.

O rly?

http://tgchan.org/kusaba/questdis/res/76929.html#82637

Hee!

If that's what she actually looks like it's not hard to imagine Catherine finding her incredibly cute, but she seems a little... immature to inspire lust.

>>82675
How old is everyone, anyway? I realized that at some point I assumed she was more in the preteen zone - like 9 years old apparent - but the stuff with the Kichis does seem more early teenagerish.

That's a bit of a ret con on my part. Or it's possible Jasper's human form grew some when she was sleeping.

I would say the fan art is about right. So she looks about 11-14.

Catherine looks like a tall 9 year old. She is actually 12 but doesn't look it.

> If that's what she actually looks like it's not hard to imagine Catherine finding her incredibly cute, but she seems a little... immature to inspire lust.

Well. . There's a number of things going on there.

Oh also the chuubo core rules are available as an epub. Its rules are only partially relevant to this quest, but I am only modifying the setting lightly.

Actually, I am going to change the 9 and 12 above to 11 and 14.

Fits how I have been writing them and I did some math wrong earlier that made me think she had to be younger.

My attention is wandering so might be a few days before I update.

>Unless you're part of the animus, I suppose.
So, I was inspired to look up the dictionary definition of animus after reading this, to make sure I knew what it meant. I did, and I'm pretty sure that the Jung-definition is what was intended, but I'm amused by the idea that I might be Jasper's spite, malevolence and prejudice.

Question from the lazy: quest link? where's s the quest link?
I'm on mobile and I'm not digging thru pages ans pages to find it aight Ty

>>83168
Second (current) thread: http://www.tgchan.org/kusaba/quest/res/576019.html
Original thread: http://www.tgchan.org/kusaba/questarch/res/541026.html

> We also could use a manual or reference for all the powers you're supposed to get, or could get, so we can pick what we want to work on first.

Hmm. I am a little un sure of how much of this to tell you all.

I think I should, but not sure how to make it natural to the story..as I am not sure how much of it Jasper would consciously know?

grr..

>Hmm. I am a little un sure of how much of this to tell you all.
I've been very happy with not ever seeing the crunchy rules, stats and dice part of this gaming system you're supposedly using.

...as fun as mix-maxing a build can be at times, I'd kind of rather not see the underlying mechanics, yet. Trying to explore and learn and build while messing with character development and juggling things has kind of been the fun challenge, here.

That said, if there are things that are hard choices, there are ways you can set up the choice, or make the choice obvious to us, if you feel you need to. There's a continuum between having the rulebook in front of you versus choose your own adventure style total disconnect between consequences and decisions (turn left? Death by spiders. Turn right, candy!).

>...as fun as mix-maxing a build can be at times,[...]
One guideline that has been meaningfully given in the past is, "If a player needs to know more than what was in the last three quest updates to make a useful suggestion it's too complicated." If the puzzle can be condensed into a less-than-Bob-sized single update however... you can inflict some surprisingly fiendish puzzles on us and get us to solve them.

Okay, with that in mind I am going to put a summary of powers she has already used/mentioned/knows about.

There's not really any minmaxing of powers to do at this stage, but this is stuff you voices should have sort-of-conscious access to.

Once I have a wiki account I can move this there so it will be updated as things happen.

Things Jasper can do:

Stuff she could do before falling:

She can turn into a giant monster. (ball of fire).

With a lot of time and work she can turn back into a human form after turning into a ball of nuclear fire.

She can suffuse a scene with her nature. (Adding the region property "There is a reason for hope.")

She can turn her eyes silver, pulling up her fathers nature in her mind.

If she suffuses a scene while her eyes are silver, the property is instead: "The ending has already been written."

(To put it in Warhamer [40k] terms she changes from Tzeentch hope to Nurgle hope.)

She is Immortal, unkillable except from sustained, massive, miraculous overkill by beings that can cheat.

Stuff she can do now:

She can emote with the sun/sky.

She can search through sunlight, would take about an hour to search through all of Fortitude that is directly lit by sunlight.

She can eat things that would hurt a human, and feels like she could eat gods.

Mundane skills:

Court Etiquette.

Fighting.
Being cute.

Oh also I stayed up way too late trying to make a Heretical incestuous* dynasty take over the British Isles on Crusader Kings II, so might be a few days before I post more.

* There was apparently a branch of Christianity that believed that Lucifer and Jesus were brothers and buddies, that the god of the Jews was an evil imposter, and that brother sister marriage was holy.

Man, /fiction/ has to makes sense....

I am shocked, shocked that she can't incinerate things at will without transforming 'big' like that. She also needs to get that respawn time down badly; there's no way she'll be a credit to the team if the match ends before she can get back on the field.
Perhaps the easiest potential offensive power she has at her disposal is discrete emission of energy within the electromagnetic spectrum. to start with it might not be so discrete though, or discreet. Learning what she could try and do with corona manipulation might be even more important to do for starters however.

>>83405
As someone who treats Christianity as fiction, I'd say that apparently fiction doesn't have to make sense if the audience is sufficiently fanboy or the work sufficiently fanservice to get away with it. I'd say this explains both why the movie makers thought they could get away with Highlander 2, and why they failed (and also why it should never be watched).

>With a lot of time and work she can turn back into a human form
Hmm. Maybe she knew that, but I don't she ever explained that there was a delay to us. Good to know.

>suffuse
Is that a conscious action, or a passive one? Is there a cost or upkeep to keep it running (or any other reason we couldn't leave the hope beam on all the time)?

>She can search through sunlight
Now that is useful. One thing we might want to practice is the ability to skim quickly, so we could use this ability to say, figure out where in town someone is. (I mean, we don't need to resolve a full topographical map of everything the light touches to go "oh, Catherine's over there".

Also has tactical applications. If Jasper gets practiced at keeping fully aware of everything the light touches in a smaller area around herself, that could be a big advantage in a fight, say. Obviously there are weaknesses and counters, but situational awareness is a useful ability.

>I am shocked, shocked that she can't incinerate things at will
Technically, this is a list of the abilities she already knows about. Throwing fire around at will might just be something she never had cause to try.

Although if we did try direct offensive applications, we might not just get flames. We might, say, end up throwing around radioactive plasma. Or lasers. Kind of depends on how literal, and in what way, our domain is.

> As someone who treats Christianity as fiction, I'd say that apparently fiction doesn't have to make sense if the audience is sufficiently fanboy or the work sufficiently fanservice to get away with it. I'd say this explains both why the movie makers thought they could get away with Highlander 2, and why they failed (and also why it should never be watched).

I kind of liked Highlander 2, then again I think I was high on pain medication after getting my 3 pairs of wisdom teeth removed.

> Is that a conscious action, or a passive one? Is there a cost or upkeep to keep it running (or any other reason we couldn't leave the hope beam on all the time)? 

If she lets it build up over 5-15 minutes she can do it about 5 times a chapter. (I.e. it uses one unit of miraculous power.) (I.E. a will power refresh. Right now I am trying for a chapter a season. Was a chapter a week when stuff was happening faster.)

If for some reason she needs to have it happen immediately it would almost completely drain her. (I.e use 4 mp out of her max of 5.)

Eating mirraculus beings/energy or bringing pRoblems on yourself can get you mp. Powers and Excrusians have an easier time getting mp then Imperators do, /and/ most of their abilities happen instantly. Therefore despite many of them not being Immortal they still win "white room" fights against Imperators.

Sleepy. ..

>Eating mirraculus beings/energy or bringing pRoblems on yourself can get you mp. Powers and Excrusians have an easier time getting mp then Imperators do, /and/ most of their abilities happen instantly. Therefore despite many of them not being Immortal they still win "white room" fights against Imperators.
Then it's clear that Jasper needs to develop larger energy reserves and better energy input for her miraculous level effects.

As far as the main quest goes, nobody disagreed with my reassertion of the schedule proposal, and the balance of opinion favours having our first visit with the Titov this month. Unless someone speaks up I'd say you're safe to work from that unless there's still some confusion or disagreement somewhere that got swept under the rug somewhere.

ProBobly going to be a few more days.

Okay, I've gotta ask: Church of the Subgenius?

Hmm. I know of them even own some of their books but it's proBobly me drawing on some of the same sources not a direct reference. What brought them up?

>>83643
as someone with only the most cursory knowledge of the organization I'm guessing it's your habit of capitalizing the "Bob" in "probobly"

I was trying to figure out why you spell probably with two "o"s and capitalizing the first B in it suggested this was a reference to someone named Bob. J.R. "Bob" Dobbs is the nominal focus of the Church of the Subgenius, so that was my first guess for which Bob.

Anonymous 2014/07/19(Sat)12:55 No. 83819 ID: 3dd384
File 140579975429.png - (86.25KB , 250x250 , foreshadowing action.png )

>>/quest/584429
>The hills here must have been much steeper, maybe cliff like, before these rocks came tumbling down.
Huh.

Oh, that's the Lunarian codes in my phone acting up.

Unless you are involved with NASA they are probably safe, and not at all a reality deviant mimetic attack.

I am a little nervous because this is your first real conflict. And the Titov magic cheats.

>>83949
Makes me want to cheat back. But then we get into Vizinni double-think games, and I'm not confident that'll get us anywhere good. For example:
>>/quest/585116
>>Chaos she wept; Chaos she raged.
>References to their heritage? They're the heirs to some kind of higher being, who created them, or endowed them. They seal / guard her or a part of her? Hard to tell distinguish how much is literal versus a legacy.
It's a quote. In fact, a lot of what Isabella is doing here is a quote, one way or the other. If you really want more context, we can discuss it, but it's one of those things where my knowledge of the topic might be inaccurate, and where "knowledge of the topic" in general leaking into Jasper's awareness would be inherently risky.

>>83949
...It almost feels appropriate. We're up against something that hides and lies and cheats- behind double means, a proxy, and unfair powers. Kind of a fitting opponent for an unmistakable illumination of truth and justice. :V

Still, figuring out how to fight back right is going to be tricky. Busting out full sun powers doesn't feel like the right answer. My last suggestion was basically stalling- trying to play her out more, give us more to work with.

>>83977
Admittedly I was making guesses and trying to fill in bits of the cryptic double-talk with what information we already had.

Inaccuracy might be more dangerous than OOC knowledge. I mean, we've already established, in-story, that we know things she doesn't. We've explained concepts, sciences, philosophies, the birds and the bees (how did we not use those words. Missed opportunity for her to amusingly misinterpret the saying), quotes poetry and stories. But being wrong could really hurt us.

>>83978
Yeah, inaccuracy is the most clear risk here. But I wasn't talking about metagaming as the other inherent risk; I was willing to pass that off as "cheating back" if nothing else. It's more that the stuff Isabella is referencing has a small chance of having a memetic/magical payload if handled improperly.

>>83980
Also, it's possible that she's testing whether we'll recognize all her oblique hints, which is another reason why it might be best to ignore them.

Just to be clear, even with the Titovs cheating, this is still an unfair conflict in Jasper's favor. So feel free to experiment a bit. This is fun.

Cheating to win against more experienced cheaters is unlikely to work. Think about that, c'mon.
We are the light, we don't flinch from and distort the truth. If they manage to find some painful truth to wield against us that suggests we are not here for a social call like we expected and we should comment that it is rather rude to attack a visitor.

>experiment
I wonder... does the inside of this temple count as a different region? If so, truth was implied to be a part of the region's trait.

>There's a magic here that is as much of Truth as it is of the Outside

Maybe if we tried to suffuse the seen with our nature (illumination) we could reinforce the aspect of the region that's advantageous to us.

>>84008
Whether we admit it or not, WE are of the outside too: Even if we are an imperator we're the child of one of the more potent Excrusians.
I'm not sure I feel nearly half-enough chutzpah to want to explore that though.

Even if we reinforced both sides of the coin, that could be advantageous to us. If she's already bitten off more than she can handle, we'd only be exacerbating things for her if we cranked up the juice.

I think we only affect one side at a time, though, if our suffusion of hope changes depending on if we've gone cold or not.

>>84058
I was thinking a little more drastic and exploratory than that: Have we ever been this close to Outside before while conscious? I suspect that Jasper has abilities written down on our character sheet we don't know about because we've never considered ourself an Excrusian (or some other kind of Outside force) before.
Of course playing around with powers you don't even know you have during a confrontation is all kinds of bad idea unless we get lucky and we have something applicable and user-friendly in our hidden stats list. It's more likely that we either don't have anything more useful than distracting/counterproductive or anything at all to draw on there.

I'd agree Jasper probably has capabilities we haven't explored yet, and/or that she doesn't know about.

I'm not entirely sure they'd be available if we don't mode-shift cold, though. It might not just be a denial of one side of the heritage, it might be a compartmentalizing. We really haven't spent much time cold. ...or even tried to hold a conversation with Jasper when she's cold. I kind of what to do that at some point, just to see if we can gauge how much it changes her personality. And so we know how to deal with her if and when we have a tactical reason to be that way for more than a few moments.

The other problem is that it may be less a problem of undiscovered abilities as underdeveloped. If we ultimately have to make decisions about who and what we are, it's hard to know in advance if we want to shape ourselves in the ways necessary to develop those powers.


Still, I'm not sure how any of this influences whether or not trying to suffuse / influence the region to our advantage is a good idea.

Hmm. I am surprised no one is talking about the earring. Was I too subtle with the parallels?

You mentioned an ear stud, yes. Not sure what to make of this information unless we're receiving a hint that either this is someone little sis is influencing or some kind of mirror.

>>84128
It did prompt me to read back and figure out how exactly we got the Hayashi earring. Unfortunately, it's hard enough to tell what exactly was going on there that I'm not sure what Isabella having one would imply, even if we assume the means was the same.

>>84128
I noticed the earring was a parallel with Jasper's. Simple opaque (dull / reflective?) metal stud instead of an intricate danglely crystal thing that refracts light. An opposite. Several opposites, really.

Didn't see a way to use that, though. I mean, if she can use it like a focus or tool, maybe we could deprive her of it to weaken her, but the game / conflict has been all verbal / magical / spiritual so far. Trying to rip something out of her ear doesn't feel proportionate / appropriate.

>>84154
We could always ask where she got it. That might be an interesting discussion.

Actually wait, two further thoughts on this front:

If we know what Jasper's earring helps her with, and we have guesses as to Isabella's nature, we might be able to infer what her earring does. Maybe infer the nature of the play she's making.

Mother McCormick described a girl wearing a single earring as part of an outfit of mourning. I'm not sure if the rest of Isabella's outfit was described to fit that dress code, but the question might not be so much where she got it, but who she's wearing it for.

Oh, dang it, I forgot the ability Jasper used to make her earring when writing up her abilities above.

Binding: By listening to someone's hopes for the future, Jasper can create a token that gives her an ability related to the person/hopes
. The miraculous-ness of the ability scales to the blatancy of the token. A mundane skill with colors manifests as a small earring. A magical or minor miraculous ability as an blouse, or rainbow colored hair, or antenna. A major one as full scale wings, or a tentacle of fire.

>>84160
>A major one as full scale wings, or a tentacle of fire.
Or perhaps an extra aaaaaa~rm?

Anyway, yeah, this helps. If Isabella has a similar ability for whatever her deal is instead of hope, then it feels like >>84157 's suggestion of "who are you wearing it for" could, with a little effort, be turned into a lovely double question, that would apply both to the funeral garb implication and the superpower implication.

>>84160
Huh. So the earring came from binding the hopes of the glass-worker then, when we listened to him talking about the future.

Well, that's certainly an added incentive to get people talking about themselves. And we might be able to foster it even, if hope is part of our domain. Nurture it, let it to grow over time, and/or bolster the scene with a suffusion of hope, before attempting a binding. This is something we can invest in long term, for higher returns. (For instance, if we eventually temper Catherine's suicidal recklessness to be with us into belief in some kind of future for herself... character growth equals tangible power rewards).

...I'd suspect we have an Etruscan opposite for this kind of binding, though. If going cold changes our region influence from "There is reason for hope" to "The ending has already been written", we can probably bind something other than hopes when cold.

>>84163
Sounds good then. Taking a stab at offense instead of just reacting to Isabella.

Okay. Tried my best to turn that into a suggestion Jasper could use. Not sure how well I worded it as a double question, but maybe someone else can do better.

>suffusion of hope
To be clear, if we end up using it, I'm fine with the slower buildup model. I think it might be an interesting thing to try, but not worth blowing all our juice on.

>>84167
We could try *ASKING* you know, they might want to have a little hope and if we do it with their blessing they're far less likely to misinterpret it as an attack.

>>84174
...I would sort of consider influencing the underlying nature of the region to work to our advantage in the middle of some kind of elaborate social / spiritual combat to be an attack. It's intentional. An attempt to undermine what she's doing as much as maybe legitimately changing positions.

>>84175
And offering it as a gift which might help them achieve a better fate than the one they already foresee might defeat the idea that this is, or should be, a conflict or confrontation.

Hmm. You all are awesome.

>"No, she doesn't need anything from you yet. She just might need a T.A. or a class president if you are interested in the position? Its still a ways off of course.˝ Isabella says her cadence making the kind words sound like a rehearsed threat.
Oh... fsck. Well, that's me clueless for the moment, I'll go read some other things and see if I can come up with some ideas, anybody else know what to make of this?

>>84333
It was a good answer - snappy and well-prepared. But it also ended the line of discussion in a satisfactory way, which means now we have a chance to decide what to talk about instead of fielding Isabella's leading questions.

That could be getting back to the questions that brought us here. Or, alternatively, it could be a "reach out and try to connect" moment - asking her about her art, for instance.

Perhaps reasserting that we're here to learn, find friends, allies and teachers, and pay our respects to what is would be a good idea.
We could expand on that by saying, "I don't know as much as we need to about who mom was and what she did, or dad either. Anything you would like to share about them would be helpful. You also seem to know a fair bit about how to approach and talk to Excrusians; do you also know about the same with Imperators?"

>>84378
That works fine as a suggestion.

Yes, someone should post that where Jasper can see it.

>>84401
Okay, I will go back in time and do it six hours before this suggestion just for you. ;)