There was nothing special or secret about the pigeon. This just reminded me of it.

Esme would have had to do so many composure checks.

Apostate says, "So Bhandn’s GM notes are kind of hilarious: “Bhandn is cursed by Limerance for flamboyantly betraying his vows in a past life. He was one of the guards in the Bijoux and made the unbelievably mistake of talking to Sapphire and taking her advice, as she trained him wrong as a joke. As a godsworn knight, he had the sword which was the heirloom sword of House Morganis (ie Aleksei’s cardian house in olden times), and he was oathbound to help defend the Metallics, as a sign of the Faith supporting them. However he both contributed to the Great Fire, helping them escape the Bijoux (by unwittingly undermining the defenses), and when at the meeting with the metallics and cardians, he broke ranks and ran for it, and actually cut down the Metallic he was bound to serve in a cowardly attempt to curry favor with Cardia. He was executed anyways. sword is #8098"”

I think “lol, lmao” is appropriate here for Bhandn’s past life, but I am not an expert in saying that unlike others. Anyway, I think discovering what happened here would lead to quite a few places, some of which might be heretical as far as the Faith was concerned. >.> So let me itemize where I see this going.

• I see extensive conversations with the Faith, starting with Esme (hi @RightMeow) as Archlector of Limerance, and quite possibly with the Legates and Aureth (hi @sao), maybe Preston (hi @Narson) about the nature of Vows and divine curses. One thing I think will be abundantly clear to him: he wouldn’t try to directly atone for the Vow breaking, in that I don’t think he would try to go the opposite direction. Definitely do not see him swearing Godsworn Vows lol; he’d see that as a “hi Limerance, can I slap you by taking Vows even though my past life was a Vow breaker?” I see Bhandn being more “I deserve a curse for something like that, past life or not, but that doesn’t mean I have to repeat my mistakes.” In other words, I think his form of atonement would be more in the nature of acceptance and carrying his own cross, so to speak. That is to say, he’d put up with that curse for the rest of his life as Bhandn, in the hope that said curse is removed for his next life.

• If the curse from Limerance is part of what led to his painful reactions to seeing Malar and Malardin – I’m still not clear on this particular point – it has a very practical application, albeit a debilitating one (and potentially fatal if by himself when it happens). This I think he would actively pursue, in terms of possibly trying to mitigate its worst effects. So, maybe find a way to turn it into Malar detection, kind of like how Thesarin had Legion detection? But, it’s possible this isn’t an achievable matter if it’s built into the nature of Limerance’s curse.

• Dear Sapphire. We need to TALK. I actually put in an action to try and get this to happen. This is visible on his char page as action 4471. This action was brought about by the following plot pitch and goal I made. The idea was to try and kick off that plot pitch, but the goal was to a) address What Happened with Sapphire in the past; b) try to convince her to not act like Veil for 1 second and collaborate on dealing with More Serious Issues.

PLOT #1452
[Where Light and Dark Meet]

In the distant past, the Metallic Order and the Fractal Order joined hands to seal a dangerous force in the world. Now, a new threat is gaining strength that threatens the present day people of Arvum and perhaps even those who remain of the Fractal Order: the Metallic Traitor once known as Orichalcum, who yearns to be a god. He has been gathering items of power infused with primum, sealed Arvum from external aid, and recently made a move to obtain a means to bring the Fractals to his will through the use of ancient Writs that already bind them. Should he succeed, it would increase his power to even greater, perhaps unstoppable heights. Action must be taken to address this.

The Unforgiven (#1373)

Scope: Venomously Ambitious, Status: Active

Description: (To redo) This is about recruiting people who understand that consorting with Fractals is probably going to condemn them in society’s eyes forever.

• With respect to Fidelis itself, I am unsure how that would have progressed other than by playing it by ear. Becoming an adept I think would have been a major progress point for him at dealing with the sword. Petraea was very clear that the sword was imbued with primum, and that conversation and other factors led me to believe I needed to find a way to get Bhandn magesight so he could study the sword himself. Given that others had adverse reactions to magesight’ing it, I had the thought that since he was clearly attuned to the sword, it was “safer” (super air quotes) for him to use magesight than others. I’d really like to know what the primum was in the sword for, unless that was how Limerance was cursing him. That would be funny. “You think it’s magical? Sure, we’ll go with that.” Either way, finding out about the nature of the sword’s magic was on my shortlist, but I stalled trying to get magesight because I was a dummy and didn’t reach out for help from anyone, even staff. I thought I was on the verge at one point, but that was based on my own conjecture.

• Since he was one of the jailers of the Fractals while the Bijoux’s containment was active, I kind of wondered if there was the possibility he could rehabilitate its magic somehow. Not necessarily to recapture Fractals, though that was probable, but anyone who was proving magically dangerous. I had Orichalcum in mind when this thought came to me. This would’ve been a more side pursuit, and part of his magical growth I think, as well as part of how he’d be indirectly telling Limerance “hey I’m trying here.” Resolving past issues in a non Vow breaking way, in other words.

Anyway, that’s my rambling about my sekrit and what I think it would have done for character progression, thanks for reading my Ted Post.

However, after I did get the Threshold scene, I was made aware that there was no more restriction on the effects of Adept magic than anyone else. It was a difference of where the magic comes from and how it’s used. A Mage understands and commands the magic around them, an Invoker uses the power of a powerful patron (the Pantheon, a major spirit, the restless dead), and an Adept channels their own magic into power. Any one of the three could pick from all sorts of characterful effects.

In my case, Adept still suited me fine–again, I didn’t see Thesarin as taking on that sort of patron as an Invoker or doing the studied and intentional approach for a Mage. Adept seemed like the one that could express itself just in terms of Thesarin willing the effect into happening. But since there were all these options, I spent some time mulling over if I wanted to try a different sort of theme for Thes’ magic, if there was something else I/he could settle on for his definition; not that another option wouldn’t have included options for combat, after all. Even just in Thes’ family there was someone whose command over the land itself let her direct it against her enemies, someone whose magic could heal grievous wounds or cause them, and someone who could call down starlight to defend the people he cares about. I did give some serious consideration about whether I could figure out a take on magic that highlighted something else about Thesarin as a character.

Having given it that thought, though, my conclusion was that no, there isn’t anything else that defines Thesarin that way. Other characters are their truest selves as a singer, or a ruler, or an artist, or a healer, or a lover of the stars, even if they can fight when called to do so; Thesain would be the first to say that they are, almost certainly, better off for it. I decided that being true to the character meant keeping his magic restricted to enhancing his fighting prowess, plus the fire effect I mentioned that really just functioned as an aesthetic/thematic varnish on the fighting. (Plus describing how some monster that Thesarin had stabbed was starting to burn from the inside was cool as hell.)

Once I’d settled on that, I actually had a bit of trouble working out the whole spread of Attack/Defense/Utility/3 Cantrips. Attack was simple, “fight better;” Defense I more or less just settled on “fight better but defensively & don’t burn to death in the fires I start” (some people made some good suggestions on using the fire effect as a defense, but I did really want the fire to be a varnish on preternatural fighting more than the focus). I decided on magically delicious battlefield presence (inspire his side & terrify his enemy) and wilderness pathfinding as Utility and one Cantrip, although I kinda flipflopped on which would be which. For the other Cantrips I had Mage Sight, which took one, and the Legion-detecting Sight from Thes’ first Secret as another once I’d confirmed that it was different from Mage Sight and also from Soul Sight. (I also joked at this point about taking a magical Sight to determine what kinds of magical Sight someone else had, which could be called the Sight Sight.)

Pry my hypothetical kitties from my cold dead IC hands.

All cats are racist. They just don’t have one unified definition of race. It is completely arbitrary.

@insomniac Will you elucidate on the bit you wrote about adepts and “more options for magic than I’d initially thought”? I was never really clear on their details other than they turned primum inward as a kind of augmentation, iirc, and even then I might be missing the mark with that summarization.

Not insomniac ofc, but I bet I know what he means: for a lot of Arx time I think that most people, myself included, thought that adepts were limited specifically to fighty physical sorts. That is: magic used to enhance physical stats and combat ability. But adepts are just drawing primum from themselves to do magic, and the magic they do doesn’t have to be about physical enhancements. So being an adept doesn’t mean you’re just one type of magic user: it’s about where your magic is sourced from, rather than what you do with it. So more flexible than I think a lot of people thought. (Again, myself included!)

Magic obviously too. What was yours? I like to hear the personal spins on rostered/non-OC characters.

Oh, and magic too, didn’t answer that.

So I’m proud of this one–this takes a sec but bear with me. Years back @Aria did an action to collect the oral traditions of the Prodigals Riven had been collecting into books. I started writing out some of these folk stories in the Whites, some of them involving an antagonist named Wildfire whose motive and characterization in every story was aggression and mass murder (and so the protagonist needs to think of something clever to either save everyone from Wildfire or to save Wildfire from whatever invincible opponent he plans on trying to 1v1). What I never told anyone outside of some Black Journals was that Wildfire was Thesarin’s nickname in his wilder days, and the story is a generally wildly fictionalized version of his pre-Compact exploits.

So fast forward years ahead and I need to make the decision about magic. I definitely settled on Adept quickly, study & control or invocation of a higher power really aren’t Thesarin’s Thing and my impression at the time was that Adepthood was tied to magic as performance-enhancer rather than more esoteric effects, which suited my concept. The Brand was simple; Thesarin has already tattooed his entire life on his skin, so he already has a forest of marks defining his identity; “they’re magic now” is a pretty direct step. When it is made clear to me that an Adept has a lot more options for magic than I’d initially thought, at first I do try to work out if I should expand things–can something else really define him? And my conclusion is “no;” he can try really hard at other parts of his life but when the question is “who is Thesarin Riven, what defines him, what is his truth” then as much as he might complain or regret it the answer is “he commits horrible violence.”

So then I’m thinking about it further, with the advice from people about how personal magic is, and I decide to tie in the Wildfire stories. So in addition to the preternatural prowess I’d already had in mind I decided to add in a fire effect when he gets going, where fire starts to pop up around him as he fights. Thesarin, the violence he commits, and the barely-directed fury and hate that drive him to do so are a metaphorical raging inferno, but because it’s magic there is also literal fire everywhere. He is the Wildfire of Greenwood and ash and death follow him.

@Rinel said in The Arx Secrets Thread:

Was Azazel always capable of Devouring things as powerful as gods and their reflections, or did he get supercharged by it?

No, he started very smol. He got bigger by eating so many secrets over so many years, until he was big enough to start eating really powerful beings. And the more he ate, the more powerful he became.

… yes lemme… just… yeah

First off was his voice. The roster bio had him down as a man of few words, while my characters tend more toward sesquipedalian loquaciousness by default, so I found myself doing what I came to refer to “Karl Urbaning” my posts. (See, during the filming of Dredd (2012), the lead actor went through his script with a sharpie to blot out unnecessary lines because “Dredd talks less.”)

With that starting point, though, I wound up putting together what I think was a fairly unique voice for his dialogue (although I obviously had my inspirations) to make it clear that he’s not from around here without dropping in foreign words or zee fonetik aksent. Word order, dropped words, word choice that I wouldn’t generally use, so that were another character wouldn’t usually have thought something Thesarin ain’t oft had cause to reckon it. I don’t know that I always hit the balance of sounding off while being intelligible but I did try.

A bit more broadly, his whole… quasi-reluctant grizzled getting to old for this shit backstory built off of what was in his bio but was at least as drawn from other inspirations and characters as it was anything he came along with. Part of it was just being an over-40 surrounded by under-22s, part of it was just an appreciation for takes on the “old gunfighter” trope and inspirations from Bill Munny to the Bloody Nine, part of it was that his backstory had him as a super-popular barbarian war leader and I was working out what he might’ve done to get to that point. Also, I do just generally love the whole trope where the guy who generally acts as a level-headed voice of reason backslides and you get to see the person they were before they tried to work on themselves. I had been sitting on some of those “ague that walks, flood that laughs, butcher of champions and breaker of heroes, the Wildfire of Greenwood who leaves ash and death behind” lines for years and didn’t drop them until the endgame scenes.

& on the other hand, I enjoyed giving him some world-weary wisdom that he liked to drop over and over because sure he’s a barbarian warlord turned nobleman but he’s also a father of four. I always find it extremely funny hearing the stories from massive celebrities about how no amount of international acclaim or fanatically devoted fans will ever make their teenage children think they’re cool and I figure that applies just as much to fantasy heroes. (“Oh my gods dad we all know you lived in the woods a hundred years ago.”)

@Roz said in The Arx Secrets Thread:

Death definitely does not act human. She’s a mad goddess.

Maybe I should have just said “more obviously active in the world.” Dance of Skulls, etc.

Granted, that was one time, but it was a pretty big deal

You do one zombie apocalypse…

What twists/alterations/etc did you make that was not on the sheet but just became a thing for the char?

Esme was not sheeted to be a zealot, but I kind of took it and ran. It started as a joke and then it just grew from there.

Also the fact she couldn’t lie to anyone while looking at them. Her eyes were her tell. I did that because (hate it or not) I could get purple in my pose and wanted something the other person could react to in case I forgot to say something or give an indication in the pose. As her eyes always broadcast what she was thinking/feeling.

Magic obviously too. What was yours? I like to hear the personal spins on rostered/non-OC characters.

Bhandn
I saw Bhandn’s magic as being relevant to color. Not like: “this glows a given color if it’s magical,” or that he does the equivalent of D&D’s color spray or prismatic ray for his use of it, but rather his magic would be something a bit more subtle.

For example, if he perceived something aligned abyssal, it might seem shadowed, whereas an elysian-alignment might be perfectly clear to his eyes like he had perfect vision of it, even at a distance. If the magic was primal and maybe had to do with Fire, it might be like a reddish tint to the air or his perception of the object, similar to someone looking flushed.

My reasoning for this was that he kind of sees the world in a more direct way. “It’s a sword, it’s made of X, X should look like this.” Lines of thinking like that. Buuuut, if he ends up an adept, I don’t think it works that way since adepts’ magic, iirc, is based upon your self-perception or to that effect? Kind of why I was curious what others in the know thought of this.

Aendal
Bhandn’s retainer I imagined as a nascent mage. He mostly learned about the world through the written medium. Just like you can read a story in a book, a scholastic treatise on a subject, and so on, I saw his perception of magic as being somewhat similar to how I imagined Platinum did (I got the impression Platinum saw magic as a formulaic, perhaps mathematical study; this is partly based on a scene with Silver in the Nox’alfar embassy). So Aendal might see “arcane writing” he wouldn’t necessarily be able to read (fully understand what magic was done) until he learned more about it. Kind of like how you need to look up a word in the dictionary. You can recognize a language by its characters and style, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can read it or understand it without study.

Death definitely does not act human. She’s a mad goddess.

Maybe I should have just said “more obviously active in the world.” Dance of Skulls, etc.

Granted, that was one time, but it was a pretty big deal