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hey there, recovery from volunteering has taken a little longer than expected, so I haven't made the progress I expected to for updating either prologue or mainline this week.
I dont have a makeup this week either, apologies for that.
I did just get done with the next background. I kind of went a bit too overboard with the idea, but I got used to more fundamentals with photobashing and collage work.
The next ones should be easier. Most of the NERs state right now is mapped out behind the QM screen, and a fair bit of it already has backgrounds for when those segpocks are reached. While I think trying to run the prologue simultaneously bogged things down a little it also allowed me to prep backgrounds for the exploration sequence that'll start this update, so even if yall manage to see just how free the range is I won't have to put in the same level of work on backgrounds as I've had to before.
Otherwise I just have to get the final bits of the script done, do some Korite talksprite updates for post-shrine updates, assembly, and then formatting.
I'm shooting for a Tuesday update. There may be a delay after that for a bit, as I have jury duty summons and need to call in to see if I'm actually gonna be serving.
If I am what delays will happen will depend on the case I'm assigned to, but hey this sequence has been intended to be easier for updates since the first planning stages of things.
From here on out the bulk of the work I'll have to do will be
cognions and items when they show up, which I'll roll for now and again
ability usage animations like the one that'll be in this update
the usual script writing and panel assembly
finalizing The Cleric's design and setting up talksprites. I've done some sketches, and beyond the layered effects this'll def be simpler than Caestellau's talksprite.
Updating Klevas's Profile, and setting up the Cognion info post.
Prologue Status
I have all the photos I'll need for the next prologue update, and maybe the one after that. Hopefully will have 5 out in the next coming week, and 6 the one after that. I've aimed for sandwhiching the main updates with prologue ones as content buffers, but they took... well more time than expected at times. If I was a more experienced artist and had the workflow I do now, I might have done that sooner, but frankly I also know I probably would've done better with adderall in the mix before January.
Scripting is fairly outlined, and this is the home stretch of the prologue with a total of 4 updates.
Otherwise
The threadmark index and thread intro has been updated! I'm still waffling on how I want to implement a bigger update, but that won't come until the prologue updates are done with.
Feel free to let me know if there's anything you think could be reworded for clarity, and the same follows with this next bit.
This'll probably be at the end of the update to explain how to engage with the new sequence.
The tricky part of this is that I'm having to make sure this is understandable both by folks on Sufficient Velocity who are probably used to forum quests, and to people on Thousand Roads forums where Quests and Interactive Fiction are much less common. If folks see me posting about this quest in various discord servers and have never read one, I'd like them to have an idea of what to do too.
I'm unsure whether a longer or shorter version works best.
This Quest uses multiple voting types.
With Choices, I've seen ways things can go, and have pre-written options. These will usually be story forks like "enter the left room first". I will try and communicate the risks and rewards, and other details like dice rolls.
With Commands, you can give any controllable character a command prompt. Maybe you want them to use a psychic power to affect the environment, or have one of their pets use their abilities. Maybe you want them to pick up a cool rock, or ask a specific question in a conversation. I may still roll dice, but these are for simpler and quicker actions. You can reference a character's personality traits to better show your reasoning, but I may also choose commands I find funny.
Don't worry if a command isn't chosen immediately. It might come up in a later update.
Dont worry too much about if something goes wrong, my storytelling style leans fluffy and forgiving even if I can go for the throat. Death is not The End - [ Party ] members can die! That isn't to be equated with 'permadeath'. You can play cautiously all you like, but if things take a turn for the worst it isn't goodbye forever. I make usage of something called a 'miracle roll' when it comes to death, and even after the worst happens it's possible a character will respawn somewhere else... but I give no guarantees they'll show back up before the next major arc begins.
This quest uses multiple voting types.
Choices and Write-In Commands are gonna be our bread and butter options
Choices are the classic style you're gonna be used to on SV. I see routes things could head, and you vote from them.
Plans may be something to vote for from time to time. This is a method of 'planning out' how to respond to what just happened, and often combines voting options from a larger list. As this quest gets into Act 1 there'll be a time-management option where I'll request planning-style votes.
Commands are like "anything goes" and "riot quest" voting. Any character you can control can receive a command, and this goes for most updates.
This can be anything from "examine the sign" to "use (ability) on bench", and will usually be simpler actions or things like asking a character a question.
If this confuses you I recommend checking out an old art quest like Problem Sleuth or Ruby Quest. They're both on the old side, but worth reading!
Priority goes to in-character commands for controllable characters, but if I find something Sufficiently Funny there's a good chance I'll take it. Think of this as "anything goes" or "Riot Quest" style (or mspaint adventures / ruby quest if you're old enough to know those..).
Dont be too afraid of using these! My QM style is overall pretty forgiving and I try to avoid too much crunch (even if my systems feel arcane..).
Dont despair if your command wasn't used in the immediate next update.. I just might see an opportunity down the road >83c
You'll see me write some Choice options with a character's [trait] like a command suffix. You can do this in your Command write-in to show the logic as to why a character would act in the way you're prompting them to. The same goes for other command formatted writing you may have seen in updates.
What to Expect
Some actions may require a roll. I'll try and communicate these with Choices, but due to the nature of Commands it's not likely I'll give warning which require a roll.
Combat may come up, and when it does I'll be breaking out a turn action voting style similar to what you can expect in a DexWorks quest, as I've found their style keeps things balanced between not taking forever and being engaging.
Death Is Not The End - [ Party ] members can die, but that doesn't mean we're looking at permadeath. Feel free to play cautiously, but if things make a turn for the worst characters can persist after death through various means.. but dont expect to see them again easily, or without dying affecting them.
I like short and simple, personally! Maybe a good compromise would be putting an info section in one of the early posts in the thread, or as an extra/bonus/info threadmark or something and including the longer, more detailed info there. Then you could give the shorter version as part of the actual update and include the link to the longer version so people can check that out if they're confused or want a more in-depth explanation.
I like short and simple, personally! Maybe a good compromise would be putting an info section in one of the early posts in the thread, or as an extra/bonus/info threadmark or something and including the longer, more detailed info there. Then you could give the shorter version as part of the actual update and include the link to the longer version so people can check that out if they're confused or want a more in-depth explanation.
re: End of Early Post(s)
I've been considering doing a bit in the opening post for a while now, thankfully. what I put down was a more-final rough draft of what I've been toying with.
A bit of it's taking cues from Dexworks' works, such as Terrene Spire, and the current Conscryption (which is inspired by Inscryption)
He makes sure to include in every thread opener an idea of it being "anything goes" or the specific rules, as a lot of Sufficient Velocity is purely based from "vote between these preset options" with some quests allowing write-in options. His style is more informed by MSPFA style where all commands are "write-in" options.
I was leaning towards having the longer version at the end of the first post, or the 'title card'.
I'm currently between whether I want to migrate all the starting posts one threadmark down in the chain, and have the first thread on both forums be a title card / index similar to other fics here, and some SV quests, but I'm also thinking I might save that for Act 1.
Which the current internal consensus for me is "we should have Act 1 be a new thread" for sanity's sake trying to shuffle threadmarks around.
Thanks for the response!
The couple responses I've gotten have been that everything's legible, which was the big concern.
Ultimately I should've done this at the start, but for a while we were in the character creation weeds, so I didn't want to overload folks with information more than I might already be doing
regrettably I will not be getting the update out today. between some depressive moments that cut work yesterday short, and sleep irregularities trying to be ready for jury duty, and errands I need to run this evening, I don't think I'm going to get things done today.
I'm at the tail end of this update's prep, so I should have something soon. I'll know tomorrow how jury duty will fuck things over, if at all.
I was part of the juror group who were dismissed rather than selected for the trial, and my 'cohort' was told we've completed the duty and will not need to come back tomorrow.
Today's probably not gonna be one I get work done, but I wasn't certain of that to begin with.
Zippi fidgets as they patiently wait while Klevas drops item after item into the portal to store away their excess items.. and it amazes Klevas a little as they seem to just vanish into that portal. Vae can see them drop neatly onto one of the tables, or neatly as they can with the bottles rolling to the side a little before coming to a rest. One protein bar drops into the cauldron only for the scrapbook to tip it over, and for the next protein bar to drop on the side of the cauldron.
Vae knows vae'll have to probably organize things in there later, but for now vae relaxes knowing vae won't have to worry as much if there's a need to run from something, or annoyingly have to try and climb up somewhere.
Klevas waves one of vaer arms upwards as if to tell Zippi to close their zippertail, and while it takes a couple tries they eventually get it.
"Huh.." vae says, and looks down at vaer cognion as vae says "easier than expected."
Vae looks back to the acolyte on the shrine's interface and says "I think we're ready to head out.. so is there going to be a map you give me of the NER?"
They chuckle with their usual smile, "Wouldn't that be lovely? An easy linear map from here to the safehouse you must reach.. but such a boon is one beyond this shrine's lowly capabilities."
They awkwardly chuckle, "I am likewise not that adept in seerage either.. one moment.."
a black background with white lines atop it. An example segpock leads to a hallway of doors where a mini klevas pawn shape (marked with the text, where the i's on "mini klevas" are dotted like eyeballs). Door A leads to an lake bed segpock, and onwards to C and D, which lead further to unknown segpocks. B leads to a forest, leading to D, E, and F segpocks. F does not lead anywhere, but the others lead to multiple segpocks. C and D lead to one of the same segpocks, with D and E leading also to the same. An unknown number of segpocks lie between the mini klevas and the goal, which is marked over a set of red doors with S A on one red door and F E on the other. There is an icon of a house in the bottom left corner of the double doors.
Klevas can hear sounds like scribbling from over the interface, and soon the shrine interface displays something new.
"This is a rough visualization of a NER, Klevas," they chirp out, "and also your goal traipsing this NER: a safehouse. There is almost always going to be one located somewhere within a NER, and finding it can involve a bit of guesswork at times.."
"In any voidtraipsing party there will be various roles, and that of the seer is often integral to pathing out from a NER and making passage elswhere." They explain, and scribble on a new note, "The Safe House broadcasts a signal of sorts.."
"Which is a boon to many like myself, as my seerage is limited much like this basal shrine is.."
"But through the connection and your sensorium shared I am granted an additional window into the NER as you traipse its bounds.." They say, "with this I may trace the pull of different routes.." They say trailing off into a sigh, "Yet I cannot trace much further than morsels.. the signal strength and the distance away in segpocks. Thankfully that is as much as most parties need anyway of a seer."
Klevas considers commenting on how much of vaer time so far has been hearing explanations of things that go over vaer head, but vae also considers that there isn't any significant benefit in making an issue out of it when vae could still run into the pursuer from earlier again.. so all vae does is give a nod before looking to Zippi.
Vaer starter bobs with a fresh zeal considering its life only began moments ago, so Klevas begins the same process as vae had before even meeting Caestellau..
Rather than try to head back the way vae came, Klevas begins to search the shrine segpock in hopes of finding the way to the next.
Klevas considers checking drawers, the spaces between shelves, and even in the wardrobes..
But decides to look towards the back instead, and finds that the rear exit the store would have had does seem to lead out to another segpock..
Klevas looks back to the shrine console for a moment and sees a Korite from within vaer field of vision looking back to the same,
"Do head on," they chime in, "I can remotely set the shrine to its hibernal state."
As this Korite speaks, Klevas sees the shrine console revert to it's original state, "As you can see our connection will remain established just fine."
A pink desert resembling Joshua Tree National Park. The sands, rock formation, and much of the foliage is pink. A rock formation with a natural tunnel leading to an even more pink area that looks larger on the inside is to the left behind a rest area.
The rest area includes a pink concrete bench, a pile of firewood, a camp grill, a large stone by the sidewalk path marking the campground zone, and in front of both the rock and marker are a group of blue wildflowers.
The sidewalk splits with one path leading to a rest stop, and the other behind it. There are blue flowers on the side of the rest stop and in front of a rock at the fork in the path. A one way only sign lies along the path behind the rest stop, and a similar sign with garbled and glitched text sticks out from the vent at the top of the rest stop.
The rest stop has a green button next to its open door, and a pile of fuschia and green buttons cluttering the opening. Next to the rest stop are orange palms of varying sizes, and pastel rocks closer to the viewer with more blue flowers.
In the foreground there is what looks like a one way sign with garbled text and an arrow to the left. Near the rock formation is a sign lying on the ground due to it being severed from the post. The rod still attached to it is dented. The background is a clear sky with only a couple clouds obscurring a snowy mountain rising far on the horizon.
Klevas finds the rear exit leads out... and into a desert of some sort.
Where the sands do not sit idle the desert scrub has taken root, and as vae looks out Klevas can see the desert valley stretch onwards into foothills and mountains alike on the horizon.
Immediately in front of vaem can be seen a rest stop. Some sort of structure sits to vaer right, and vae suspects it may be a restroom.. and to vaer left lies a rock formation.
Klevas can never quite tell where segpocks truly begin and end, as while there looks to be a clear threshhold it looks to be of the same desert even if it looks larger inside the formation than the exterior space says it should contain.
Klevas can be given commands.
Vae could Investigate vaer surroundings, Examine what may stand out, or even use Abilities vaer cognion may have.
Vae can also always Talk with others, and Traipse Elsewhere when the time comes.
This Quest uses voting to direct how the story progresses, and multiple types of voting.
With Choices, I've seen ways things can go, and have pre-written options. These will usually be story forks like "enter the left room first". I will try and communicate the risks and rewards, and other details like dice rolls.
With Commands, you can give any controllable character a command prompt. Maybe you want them to use a psychic power to affect the environment, or have one of their pets use their abilities. Maybe you want them to pick up a cool rock, or ask a specific question in a conversation. I may still roll dice, but these are for simpler and quicker actions. You can reference a character's personality traits to better show your reasoning, but I may also choose commands I find funny.
Please use brackets for each command line.
Your brackets should have an "x" or "X" in them.
A bit of this Quest started out with being inspired by point and click games, text adventures, and stuff like that.
Most commands can be used on what appears within background images, but may be used on inventory contents or a way to prompt a character to think about things.
[] Investigate: pick something to interact with. Roughly synonymous with "Interact" [] Consider: pick something for the character to think about. Roughly synonymous with "Examine" [] Traipse: Pick a direction to proceed from the present location. Future updates will have possible directions marked, and backtracking will become possible. Roughly synonymous with "Go".
These example commands are not required, but should give you an idea how to command characters. Feel free to get creative with your own ideas!
Party members and cognions alike may have abilities they can use in various situations. These range from psionic abilities to skills they've picked up.
Klevas lacks any particular special abilities at present.
To use an ability Zippi might have: [] Zippi: Use (ability) (context, such as "on the wall")
GLOMP!!
Pap
Inventory Access
Reunion
Simple Song
Dont worry too much about if something goes wrong, my storytelling style leans fluffy and forgiving even if I can go for the throat.
Death is not The End - [ Party ] members can die! That isn't to be equated with 'permadeath'. You can play cautiously all you like, but if things take a turn for the worst it isn't goodbye forever.
I make usage of something called a 'miracle roll' when it comes to death, and even after the worst happens it's possible a character will respawn somewhere else... but I give no guarantees they'll show back up before the next major arc begins.
For instance if Klevas is to die while exploring this NER, vae would likely respawn in another NER. I'd likely roll for it to see the circumstances (and there would be options outside of a NER should it happen), but so long as Zippi remains alive they would return to vaem.
(If Zippi is ensouled within Klevas's inner world on death, reunion wouldn't be necessary as they would be spirited away with Klevas on respawn).
Regardless of commands Klevas will Ask Korite about how the path forward looks.
Ooh, feels like we're making real progress! I enjoy the trippy desert scenery. And is that a one-way sign pointing the opposite direction of the one still posted that would have been pointing in the opposite direction?
I think it makes sense to poke around a little bit to get our bearings!
Investigate where? (A general direction / thing.)
As a result of @Nonakin 's command on SV, I'll also be appending "[X] Investigate: Rest Stop Doorway" as a decision of Klevas's as a result of the examine command for the rest stop.
dw, it's not too late at all! I'm currently working on the next update, hoping to get it out for Friday or Saturday
I'll either work it into this update, or the one after this.
EDIT: It will have to be saturday, I don't expect to complete today due to something coming up, and the likelihood I'll need to be away from my computer for the evening.
Heya, I did a bit of a different review style this time around since I admittedly wasn’t fully sure how to best approach reviewing this story as interactive media with a strong non-text component, so I wound up cribbing that review style @Ambyssin uses during Review Blitzes to leave a stream-of-consciousness set of reactions. I was originally planning on reading up to the most recent post, but… uh, there was a lot to get through, so I opted to go up to The Scrapbook for my review since things turned out a bit denser than expected for a read in spite of the low “on paper” wordcount.
Anyhow, onto the review:
The Initial Vignette - In Medias Res
- Ah yes, a lamp store. Definitely quite the lightshow to kick things off on
- So this place is some sort of safe space with a shrine in it, I wonder to whom?
- >this bone and scale rosary lamp . I didn’t realize until just now that this was Original fiction, though duly noted
- Wait, so were the ‘Investigate’ and ‘Introspect’ options pre-selected? Or else how was it determined to choose these two actions out of the four possibilities provided?
- >decentralized peer to peermind interface . Implying that there’s neurally-based communication in this setting? We’re definitely living in quite the wild future if so
- Ah, I see that you provided the first set of choices for the players there, though a [ Profile ], huh? Are we in cyberspace at the moment?
- Oh, hello, one-eyed alien in the hologram
- >a seed of refuge within the Great Rift . We’re going to be finding out an awful lot about that place, aren’t we?
- And alium has a name: Korite, duly noted
- Oh, so the profile is essentially character creation. That’s a clever way of handling things
- So the PC has some degree of pre-existing characterization based off their interaction with Korite. Duly noted for the future. You also have a missing newline at the "You called at a shrine, so beyond the obvious.” line
- Wait, what are SegPocks anyways? Since I feel like this is a big setting detail, but it’s still a bit unclear right now
- >”We have some people who will be out on scouting and maintenance duties. They'll likely attempt to provoke an encounter with it, and decide from there what's the best way to proceed.” Ah yes, there’s a Bubsy meme for this.
- Clerics, huh? I admittedly wasn’t expecting that given the vaporwave aesthetic, though I suppose that given that there’s a concept of a ‘shrine’ that there’s a mystical component to this story
- I was going to ask what a ‘Cognion’ was, but based off of Korite’s explanation, it sounds like they’re meant to be Familiars
- Aaaand Cognions are apparently not above trying to get nibbles from the people they’re bonded with. That’s certainly reassuring.
- On the one hand, I get that you don’t want a giant wall of exposition for all these highlighted terms, but I do wonder if there ought to have been more context cues provided, since [innerscape] kinda meant a whole lot of nothing to me
- >I'm talking about that scrapbook of yours. Small typo here
- Oh, so the hologram allows Korite to do more than just see us. I think. I wonder why the PC wasn’t experiencing senses other than just sight and audio for Korite in that case
- “sophont” is apparently a term for beings with roughly equivalent or greater capacity for reason than humans, TIL
- Ah, I see that you opened another batch of choices. Based off the next threadmark, I’m guessing the “Ask About the Cognion Ritual” option was the winner.
Cognion Ritual for the Uninitiated
- Ominous shuddering shrine is ominous, ditto the distorting furniture and sudden surprise runes. Also, mind your newlines
- Huh. That’s quite the sigil at the shrine basin. I wonder if that pattern is based off anything in particular or not
- And yeah, feeling pretty good about that prediction that Cognions are effectively Familiars
- Kilon sounds like it’s a lovely™ place to be. Or at least I think the implication is that it’s a place
- There’s an idea of a “starter” for Cognions, huh? Do we also get to pick out three from a lineup?
- You have a moment where your transcript for Korite talking about the Klion way is both in the spoiler box and duplicated outside of it right afterwards
- Wait, ‘still-folded worlds’? What do unfolded ones look like, then? Though I wonder how much of this the player character is meant to know, or if this is all supposed to be new to them much like it is for us
- Getting some XB2 core crystal vibes from the description of how this cognion creation process works. We basically start with an outside template and project a part of our memories / persona / whatever onto it, which isn’t that far off from how Blades in XB2 worked.
- I see more new terms with ‘NER’ and ‘demiplane’ there. I’ll keep an eye out for if they get defined later in this section, but they certainly sound important.
- Wait, there are other people here aside from just Korite?
- You have another “your’s” that should be “yours” in the third paragraph under ‘Ask about Korite’s Cognion’ section
- Huh. That’s more than I was expecting from an inventory for waking up in a weird place without a firm idea of what’s going on. I take it that we’ll be needing this in short order
- Trippy scrapbook is trippy
- >”Meditating on any one brings it back to your senses like you could play it over again. It's something that comes to your mind again and again.” Boy, I hope someone meditated on the tunnel pic, since that one looks wild.
- Aha, so we’re getting a traveling bard for our Cognion / Familiar. Always a solid choice for a wandering adventurer
- Aaaand it’s time to make a character, though I suppose we might as well see where that went since it’s the very next post
Who Are You? - Character Creation
- I wonder if it might make sense to do some sort of recap of the choices available to the participants at the end of each post, since I admittedly got thrown in a loop by this opening choice here since I forgot it was presented as a first set of choices about halfway through the prior update
- Actually, I just realized, but how was this selection chosen anyways? Since the only vote on TR for that question chose a different option.
- Those… Voidclams are something else. Especially with those ominous-looking eyes there.
- So at least some Cognions are capable of symbiotic behavior. I wonder if that means that there’s some sort of ‘fusion’ mechanic for Cognions in this game
- Yup, based on Korite’s dialogue we got our confirmation on there being Cognion fusion. It’ll be fun to see that one get unlocked
- Huh, preselected name, but everything else is floating. That’s definitely different. I wonder what ‘Zrom’ means in this setting given that it was specifically chosen as a default
- >those species choices . If the audience didn’t choose ‘Spooper’, I’m going to be so disappointed.
- And lots of selectable options for character creation there, including defaults of the five species that are selectable. I honestly wonder how on earth you handled voting for this, since you’d think that almost every player would propose something completely different from the next one. I mean, judging from the next proper update, it looks like we already have an answer at least to the name of the PC, but…
The Scapbook
- Oh, so we’re getting more backstory behind each of those photos in the scrapbook last update. Neat.
- So ‘Zrom’ apparently was a gamer, or at least that’s what I’m getting from the pond photo
- And he went to conventions back in the day. Did they play competitive Melee, too?
- Oh, well that tunnel fluff text sounds ominous there.
- Oh, there’s more pages here. I wonder if first-time readers are meant to look at this or not. If not, it probably makes sense to have some way of noting things for readers to skip it until they reach a certain point
- >’so many creches to find a trinket within’ … is that a typo? Or is that a deliberate word choice that there’s groups of babies of… something in this forest?
- Huh, whoever built this underground place looks like they had a thing for Classical architecture
- >‘Zrom’ is a furry. Well that answer the question of what sorts of conventions they went to
- ‘Depthscraper’, huh? Are these just vertical shafts with floors dug into the hollow, or is this something like the Geofront from Evangelion? Though ‘Zrom’ apparently was once an underground dweller
- Creepy store looks creepy
- I can’t tell if these sticky notes are meant to have happened before the start of the game, or if these are from later posts, but either way, ‘Zrom’ has certainly been running around quite a bit. Probably screaming, too.
Alright, time for the recap. But that was definitely a different experience. Very imaginative too since the aesthetic and the flavor behind this setting that we’re in is full of things that you don’t see a lot of all together in one story. Thus far, it’s been doing a pretty good job at feeling alive as a setting even if we’re still more or less stuck in the backroom of a lamp shop at the moment.
As for issues that I saw, be mindful of little typos and formatting errors since they're a bit distracting to read. I also noticed that you dropped a lot of terms without much context to figure out what they are. That might have been a deliberate choice on your part if the player character is meant to be getting thrown into things and learning as they go, but if so, you might want to emphasize the character’s thoughts finding different concepts unfamiliar and going “oh, that’s what that meant” a bit more in others. I also noticed that you seem to be drawing feedback from multiple sites beyond just TR, which while fine and good especially if the other sites generate more volume of feedback, I wonder if there’s a way for TR readers to be more clued in on what those other forks of this interactive quest are contributing, since it was admittedly a bit jarring at a couple points to see players submit answers to certain prompts and then the narrative choose something completely different. Like the votes are votes, but I feel like there’s something missing for being able to see how different choices were ultimately settled on in the present version of the game.
I’m not really sure how applicable or not this feedback will be to an interactive work, but hope it was fun to read @Meridian . I don’t know when I’ll get back into this interactive quest, but it’s definitely interesting enough that I could see myself making submissions if I ever fully caught up with things.
Thanks for your patience, and best of luck with your future interactions in this story.
As Klevas considers how to proceed, Zippi begins to investigate the new environment. Whether getting a closer look at the camp grill or the flowers they seem curious about this space, and Klevas finds vaemself thinking how the second place you've ever been to will probably be that much more interesting than the first.
Shifting weight from one "leg" to the other Klevas finds the sand too shifts around vaer tendrils. They're not too warm, but vae could imagine standing too long on the sand or the pavement alike could get uncomfortable..
Vae supposes vaer thankful there's a bench if vae sticks around for long, or even had to camp here..
Klevas was getting used to the idea of a threshold as the point where two segpocks might connect, and amidst the scenery the Rest Stop was what drew vaer attention first.
Specifically what lay about the doorway made vaem ask of Korite: "Any leads?"
It takes but a moment of them turning their attention to whatever interface they've played with on their end, and they answer a question with one of their own, "Yes, but why to the point so quickly?"
Instead of answering back immediately vae crouches to look at the buttons strewn about in the doorway. The assortment reminds vaem of where Caestellau enchanted vaer possessions, and the colors speak to vaer [ Creative ] side.
Would they be worth using in making a new instrument? Klevas feels like it's been too long.
"If you were worried about taking something belonging to someone," they chime as if to answer a question before it was asked, "unless a NER is so well-traveled.. you can assume that what you find has either been abandoned and unowned for some time, or spawned into existence free for the taking."
As Klevas looks about the rest stop vae notices that there seems to be a green button beside the door into the rest stop.. vae thinks it looks like one that should be on an elevator, but doesn't know what it would do if pressed.
For that matter vae finds vaemself asking, "Who propped the door open?"
A rock is wedged in front of the door to keep it open. The door has a handle on both sides. It has vents so it isn't for safety or anything like that...
"Have you considered it was born propped open?" Korite muses, "Have you looked up at the sky lately Klevas? Have you noticed there is no clearly defined light source? Have you noticed many of the shadows are independently informed of where they should point from each other?"
Vae feels slightly overwhelmed at the amount of questions asked, but understands this is probably a 'rhetorical question' and that no answer is truly being asked of vaem.. but vae still respond, "No? Why would it be 'born' at all?"
"This segpock had to have come into being somehow. You may as well call emerging from the uncosm of countless unconscious minds a birth.." They explain, and 'lean in' to however they record their projection, "Listen Klevas, it isn't my job to work out what a segpock was before it ended up in this NER. It could've been someone's dream, and that dream could've been based on trips they took to a park as a kid.. and it could've been based on a brochure they saw in passing. This could just be the result of a person's lifetime of visits to the park collapsing in on themselves as they breathed their last.. and that's before throwing in that the void plays endlessly with the contents that comprise it. This segpock could be the result of a thousand memories stitched together.." and when they finally lean back into their seat they sigh, "Sometimes it's worth questioning why things are, and sometimes it will serve you no benefit. The question is whether you want to change the state of the world around you, I guess."
Klevas rocks back and forth to tilt vaemself in a nodding motion, and says "So the door was always propped open?"
"I don't know. Nothing in the notes I can access about the 'open or closed' state of that part of this segpock," they say, "Could've been another voidtraipser, could've just been that way to begin with."
After a pause the acolyte flashes Klevas a wry grin, "Still waiting on an answer, by the way~" prompting Klevas to stop lingering on the door's status of being propped open.
Vae notices there is a small flower bed of the same blue flowers found throughout the segpock. Klevas feels [Curious] about their scent, and if they contain a natural dye of some sort given their strong color.
Vae wonders if they're safe to eat... maybe they'd be good in tea? Klevas feels like vae'd heard about a tea dyed blue from the flowers used for it.
Klevas notices that one of the signs posted throughout the segpock looks like it is sticking out of the.. is it an air vent? Vae doesn't think it's a chimney of all things, but the sign seems to have been wedged into that space. Vae wonders if it's stuck there... and what it's supposed to say.
Vae considers asking Korite who would put it there, but the idea of how to get it down appeals more. Vae could try to climb up atop the rest stop via the gaps in the wall or the palms... or maybe vae could ask Zippi to climb up?
Klevas decides..
[X] Investigate: Rest Stop Doorway
Klevas can feel Korite's attention on vaem.. "Hunch." Vae states, as vae looks into the rest stop..
The buttons strewn about are a different set of colors and shades, but it looks too similar for vaem to ignore, prompting vaem to ask "Can a NER have the same Segpock twice?"
(Korite statement of response bodily) "It is possible, but existing documentation does not show this segpock intersecting with the desert... but such is what happens when a NER is forced to re-align itself." They say, and Klevas can feel their gaze scan over the stairway as it leads down into depths unclear as the first time, "I expect what you bear witness to is one and the same segpock that you had traipsed prior."
Making vaer way over to the rock formation, as the alternative is hiking through the brush and up the mountainside in hopes of finding another connecting point to another segpock.. Klevas contemplates if it's really a natural rock formation.
The shapes all feel natural enough, but vae could swear the one atop feels like it should slide down and off...
"Worried about it collapsing on you?" Korite chimes in as though having read vaer mind, "Unlike the stairs this little tunnel's reliably been a part of the documentation for this NER, so by all accounts it should remain stable."
The smile the acolyte has as they interrupted vaer thoughts leaves Klevas suspecting they can see more than vae might want.
"If it's that much of a problem you may want to consider practicing warding when you get to Rememaudlin," Korite says as if to answer the question lingering in the air, "but hey, you can also ask me to let your doubts remain unanswered."
"Could ask you to stop as well," Klevas notes, and puts vaer tendrils to the rock face at the entrance, "Sturdy enough for flowers to grow.." vae says, looking up to see the same blue flowers growing throughout the desert collecting the same place where the moisture does.
Klevas feels like they are still within the same segpock, but the lighting has changed as they come out the other side only a short distance away. As though it falls differently, as though the skylight it filters through is a different rose-tinted lens coloring all below.
The blue flowers crowd the scenery before vaem, and Zippi bounds ahead to frolick among them, before bounding onto a rock to look back at you.
"I had grown certain this was the other path.." Korite makes note as you look ahead. "I am certain that the rock formation leads to the other means of egress.." They say, and begin to speak only to cut themselves off with a sigh, and starting again make out "it is documented" and cuts themselves off again with a groan, "this should be a safehouse route.."
Vae looks ahead, and seeing an archway that only connects to a cliff-face hazards a guess by asking "Wrong?"
"Yes, something is wrong," They reply with little delay, groaning as you can hear rapid tapping through the connection, "because of course the quick path dissociated in the re-alignment!"
Their frustrations return to the same cycle with little clear end.
"I.." Klevas begins to say, but is cut off
"The good news is that I have determined the (Technically) shorter path!" Korite exclaims, "And the bad news is that the segpocks are only adjacent, and that the longer path is (now) the shorter path!"
Korite immediately disappears from the chriilth'tyn's field of view, and for a moment it seems as if the connection had been remotely closed.
A distortion rolls through their senses for a moment informing vaem that this is not the case. Vaer left with the impression that the psychic scream had been 'muffled'.
The process rattles Klevas causing vaem to once again tense, tendrils drawing tight around their instrument concerned for dropping it.. but as vae looks about vae only sees Zippi staring back at vaem expectantly. Vae feels a little relief at knowing that however Korite is venting their frustration.. at least it isn't affecting the NER?
Vae feels like vaer first day in the void has been hectic enough without an alien managing to break something just by screaming.. so this is fine, right?
Vae feels like it'll need to be fine, as vae can feel something... like there's a thought vae can't let go of, as the connection widens back to its prior bandwidth and the acolyte returns.
Klevas is initially unsure, but still chooses to ask, "Are you.. okay?"
The acolyte says "No. The next segpock is still there, but you personally have no means of reaching it."
Klevas rocks vaer torso back and forth to nod, saying "Okay.."
Cutting off any further inquiries, Korite says "I need a moment."
The connection dims once more, and it's readily apparent once more how vaer head feels a little emptier than it has since vae activated the shrine. Being around others feels like a weight in its own right, but the psionic connection since the shrine has been a constant presence since it began... and vaer not sure if vae wants to be left alone for too long.
Klevas feels like they could probably reach the safehouse on their own, but isn't sure enough of the idea. It's different now knowing there's something worth avoiding in the NER, and vae feels lucky that vae didn't run into the [ Pursuer ] as it patrolled the NER.
Klevas doesn't feel like vae would have known what to do if vae had. Vaer response probably would have been more panicked than the first time, whether freezing up or running without any idea where vae was going.
Running into a corner and turning about only to see that gas masked head and gaunt form blocking the only way back..
Vae freezes up, and you prompt vaem to intone vaer instrument to call to Zippi. They immediately perk up looking at vaem with the same excitable interest, scampering through the flowers and between the rocks to reach vaer side.
Vae isn't quite sure where to pet Zippi, but brushes a tendril against the part of a mask shard they aren't gripping. The starter briefly flinches, but leans into the touch when they realize they're not going to be hurt. It's strange due to the icing glaze coating the ceramic, but so long as Klevas is gentle vae doesn't feel like vae'll break the glaze.
You prompt Klevas to head back to the main area as there was still more to check out, and so vae walks back to the rest stop through the tunnel, and vae thinks about how otherwise vae'll just be standing around waiting for Korite to come back.
The desert segpock vae'd traipsed into had a number of different signs posted about. Vae'd already noticed the one atop the rest stop, but vae'd passed right by the one that was toppled..
On closer inspection it wasn't toppled, but broken off.
Cut maybe? Klevas looks at the rod still inserted into the sands next to the rocks.. and notices it looks kind of like a cut, kind of like torn fabric.
So why did it look like the bar was dented on the part still attached to the sign?
Klevas doesn't know what could have done it, but feels like it is free scrap metal just laying there. Vae also realizes with the dent that it could be treated like a curved handle for the sign, and used like a blunt object maybe? Vae doesn't feel too confident about vaer strength when it comes to using it as a weapon, so maybe vae could use it for putting bread in an oven.. but vae realizes that's probably a silly use for it.
Vae might get tired carrying it around in vaer tendrils, but vaer inventory has plenty of space to spare. Whether the sign is taken or not, vae has options.
Klevas realizes vae'll have to decide on what to scavenge from the segpock later, as vae can feel the connection return to it's previous strength once more..
"I will keep this one brief.." They say as they bring up another visual to the chriilth'tyn's field of view.
"I know which direction is which now. I am not yet certain how long the available path will take you, but it should be under 10 segpocks. This does not change that the only way forwards (at present) is along that staircase."
The image shows Korite commenting on the disconnection of the desert from what they expect is an urban segpock, note labelled "Dissociation. How unfortunate."
Another note next to the rest stop says "Yeah Sorry"
unknown segpocks are labelled with repeated question marks, or brief guesses at what they are seeing.
It is clear to both Klevas and Korite alike that there is only one way forwards to safety for now.
The [ Party ] can be given commands
They could Investigate their surroundings, Examine what may stand out, or even use Abilities they may have.
They can also always Talk with those around them, and Traipse Elsewhere when the time comes.
[]Klevas: Attempt to climb the rest stopKlevas will attempt to climb the side of the rest stop to reach the roof and retrieve the sign. (Success requires a 75 or higher on a d100. Failures under 33 result in an injury for Klevas, may make future actions harder.) []Zippi: Attempt to climb the rest stopKlevas will attempt to give Zippi a boost up the side of the rest stop so that they can put the sign directly into the inventory. (Success requires a 65 or higher on a d100. Failures under 25 result in an injury for Zippi, and will disadvantage them in combat.)
[]Traipse Elsewhere: See where the Button Stairway leads. (If not chosen this update, Klevas will opt for it in the one after this).
Hey! Well, I'd meant to get this posted for Friday, but things get in the way now and again.
I'm unsure if I'll be updating the following week, as I do want to work on the prologue update I've been leaving on the wayside.. plus this next one could take me the whole week to work on, and idk if I'd be able to get it out by this coming friday, or saturday, or sunday =w=;;
The one thing I've been aware of with this sequence is that once I finally got us out of the vintage store segpock, it's all a lot easier... so long as I have my background images prepped. There's a detail or two that still needs prepwork, but we'll see how it goes.
Aside from that, did you know that the other forum I mirror this Art Quest on, Sufficient Velocity, is celebrating their 10 year anniversary? I didn't realize until the announcement was made here, but it's kinda funny both have April Anniversaries right?
This update doesn't require any majority voting, but some feedback reminded me that I should be putting reminders to check the votes on the other mirror, as that helps transparency and collaboration.
Well, I was and am intrigued by the sign, but... for whatever reason I really want the flowers more at the moment, lol. Can never have too many pretty flowers. Let's do it.
Well, I was and am intrigued by the sign, but... for whatever reason I really want the flowers more at the moment, lol. Can never have too many pretty flowers. Let's do it.
I know with some prior updates it was a Choose One, but folks are welcome to submit multiple commands (unless I specifically specify on an update otherwise, like a majority vote / plan vote). I was just listing out different things from the update that could be collected, when anything in a background image is generally gonna be fair game for open-ended commands.
last update Solarstream on SV submitted two commands and I pursued them (in-part because Examine / Investigate amount to basically the same thing on a point of movement to another area, admittedly).
[x]Klevas: Ask Korite if putting oneself in their own inventory is a bad idea.
[x]Zippi: Attempt to climb the rest stop
Depending on the outcomes of both of those, i.e. a go-ahead from Korite and actually climbing the rest stop,
[x]Klevas: Put self in inventory and then remove self.
In-depth Response to Murkrow's Liveblog - Guest Starring Allium!Korite
Hello to SM, I'd meant to respond to your review (I'd been hyped for it, wasn't sure how much or little you'd read, I know this is a bit hard to gauge scope for as a work), but also wanted to get my update out on-time as I could.
I was originally planning on reading up to the most recent post, but… uh, there was a lot to get through, so I opted to go up to The Scrapbook for my review since things turned out a bit denser than expected for a read in spite of the low “on paper” wordcount.
yeahhhh, unfortunately Image Description text, and Spoiler Box text, both aren't typically counted in the wordcount due to how xenforo works, whether we're talking about me posting to SV or TR, so things seem lighter than they are...
I was hoping to ask whoever got rolled to just read the new update, because I wanted to see if that would mean an extra command submitted for the update, but I couldn't get the update out before the signup deadline. I felt bad in hindsight for how confusing it probably was for Canis and you alike.
Next time I'll probably ask folks to just read 'The Prologue - 1' update, as it's a little more coherently written and provides some leadup to where the protagonist is by Update 1.. which was a whole spontaneous process itself as I'll say in a bit.
This is actually a local vintage store in my metro! I got this photo when I was stopping in to see the new location (after the original burned down due to some... not great practices, sadly). At least I'm pretty sure this was from after the fire, rather than before (I did take photos from a visit beforehand, but I dont think I have those anymore).
- Wait, so were the ‘Investigate’ and ‘Introspect’ options pre-selected? Or else how was it determined to choose these two actions out of the four possibilities provided?
This all started as a mock-up vignette piece I'd made to prototype storytelling stuff for this type of narrative, which I posted with the accompanying descriptive text to a discord server I'm in. It was meant to just be a warmup sketch, and I did it on september 1st 2023
The title for this update comes from an ill-advised choice... because woops... friends responded selecting the hypothetical Commands.. and I felt encouraged
A couple friends selected introspect and Investigate, the former of which was easy for me to do, as it only took the rest of the week to get around to finishing it.
Investigate...
Well, for that I had to sketch out Korite, and then I had to actually draw them in CSP, and then draw all the assets, texture, palette, write out all their dialogue, setup the ui, do the background image or two...
So it took until October 3rd for me to be done with that, and October 7th is when I posted the thread on SV.
it went from "this is just a sketch, feel free to play along" to "oh, people are playing along, this is the demo that'll get me to start a project seriously for once"
...because I've been prototyping this sort of mystery dungeon narrative in a few different forms 4 or 5 times up to then I think?
I'll get to the main review later, but, suffice to say.. pretty much the bulk majority of issues with the first few updates, are the result of me doing my first serious project in years, with only a couple under my belt, and how up until I was actually working on the other parts of the first 'update', I didnt have anything concrete on the characters. Eschate, the 'deity', was one I'd cobbled together from what came to mind relevantly from the segpock itself. Frankly, when it comes to the 'weirdcore' and 'dreamcore' aesthetics as inspo sources, a deity who's specialized in the conceptual sphere of nostalgia is... well let's just say it's a bit generic. I still have characterization to work on for them, but only because that'll inform motivations / daily lives of those associated with them.
Not quite! I could go tongue in cheek by saying "you are the cyberspace" or "cyberspace is you", but the exact cosmological stuff shifts about now and again in the background.
I could also say "The mind is the soul is the body is the mind", because the boundary lines between mind and neurology and 'soul' and consciousness and so-on are only so tangible / real in a work like this.
The 'reality' experienced by characters is inherently abstract, and 'not real'. I've called it by varying terms, narrative unreality, narrative reality, so-on.
There's a lot of ways it happens, but the setting is an idea of "where do dreams go when you forget them? where do we go when we dream? what if you rode by accident a bus line that had been discontinued before you had been born? where do black holes go? what lies beyond death? how do you defy entropy? what is the nature of the dark forests of the universe?" type of answers.
'folded' reality or 'material' reality as I and in-universe characters call it, refers to "hard-sci" realities like our irl one or that of certain narrative fiction, but it also just refers to the "default" state of universes before things go awry.
This going awry is referred to as "unfolding", the way that reality breaks down and becomes surrealized, becomes other, becomes free from the constraint of physics to the point at which thermodynamics is a consensus reality hallucination that operates so long as you have not freed yourself from it. A part of the implication I have is that all worlds, all species, all their alternate future timelines, all inevitably converge on an ascension beyond their material reality whether they chose to embrace it, or things had to be initiated by force due to mutually assured destruction being done by those on the planet with power.
There's only so much I intend to play with of the potential the setting has at any given time, but the answer is Beeg Implications in the background.
Onion AU Korite is now a mental image in my head.
(about an hour later)
I can't blame you for this, but I also can't blame just myself for this.
I'd link to a tumblr post about "our friend the allium" but I cannot find it anymore because apparently there's a DSMP member who's named that as well.
ty! a part of it is that for many Quests have Character Sheets.
Some play with what shape it takes, whether it's diagetic or not, so-on. This means that it exists within the narrative's reality as well as it does for the audience.
ex 'diegetic music' is the common example, where the music being played as part of the soundtrack is being played and heard by the characters, whether this is them at a concert, or if it's gonna get played for laughs. A lot of the 'game abstractions' in this setting are diegetic in nature, and facts of daily life for many inhabitants of the void.
A part of this comes from that one of the big format inspiration sources, Fortuna, has Character Stat Screens regularly throughout the comic, and at the start of each 'run' of the in-comic videogame the reader-avatar (named "You" if not named anything else) character creation is done with the starting characters.
There's a lot of ways I could have a narrative like Questant start, and I could probably talk about this for a bit too long, but I want to try and have some balance between premade and audience made characters.
...unfortunately for an environment like SV, some takes from veteran questers advise against having any character creation, as that makes a huge-ass Potential range of narrative routes, and only so much of your audience, typically those that voted for the winning result(s), will stick around.
Profiles in this setting are intended to be, to some degree, diegetic in nature.
Characters can interact with their profile, overhaul the design, and check if not innately sense that of others.
I have a bit in the prologue where the POV feels the invasive sensation of Caestellau's name and pronouns on meeting em for the first time, which if I'd known I'd be writing that I could've incorporated it into meeting Korite.
Technically spoilers: Only to so much of an extent!
They were literally 'born' 'today' in-narrative, about ~1 hour(s) before vae reaches the shrine, and only after character creation is done does vae have a true 'physical' form to speak of 83c
The audience is still at this point of the narrative encouraged to influence characterization through their commands, whether projecting onto Klevas or not.
Vae only has 3/4 personality trait slots I have as the default amount, at present, so this could go a fair number of directions for what vaer final characterization will amount to.
Ripperoni in pisseroni, guess I gotta go fix that on both sites.
Oh... Hm, I think that was intentional? I thought the sentence / paragraph structure felt cluttered? Sometimes I make idiosyncratic choices that are non-standard, and I think that was probably one of them. I could probably just fix it, that'll probably flow better.
I'm not terribly surprised seeing vaporwave. The two big influences for this setting, due to the timing of the pandora's lasagna and all the stuff I've been into in the 10 years leading up to it, were the Weirdcore (oddcore, strangecore, are synonyms more or less) and Dreamcore aesthetics
A lot of the nature of the aesthetics is that beyond thematics, the visual motifs are fairly fluid for the comic.
Different Demiplanes will have different grounding themes or visuals, different characters will have different personal senses of style, so-on.
I really need to work on establishing how I present a style each time I design a character, because my intent is for a [ Party ] of characters to be able to range HEAVILY in visual vibe the way "gays at brunch" memes would.
When you have radical bodily autonomy, and other forms of radical autonomy, you get to do some interesting things to yourself... and that means visuals too.
...I'll also admit that 'Cleric' is one of the less well-defined 'ways of being' (classes) for the setting, as divinity ends up being a fair bit more likenable to something like ENA or Kill Six Billion Demons, or various other settings out there, where "sufficient magic is indistinguishable from divinity" could be how things are phrased.
Cultivation of power and how one plays with the conceptual structure of reality, what concepts you imbue into yourself, so-on.
Deiformes tend to be like demiurges, they are the Djed of the demiplane they play host to, unless they've established additional anchors / pillars / support structures (something Rememaudlin is currently working on establishing a second of), which'll be something visually apparent when I get to the animation
Unsure if I'll coin a neologism, or just lift Djed for the metaphysics. I'm fond of synonyms!
That's one way of thinking about it, yeah!
I'm running Questant here as well as SV, because Cognions are a staple for this setting.
They're the collectable mons of the setting.
Cognion, as I think I tried to put in the dialogue, are any 'creature'. A dog and a dragon are both equally viable cognions, and so too would be your typical Alien (the horror series) 'alien'.
Don't tell anyone I told you this, but pursuers are viable cognions as well~ though I think I'd compare them to a psuedolegendary in terms of 'power scaling' (which I overall try to avoid if I can help it?)
Close! In theory some sophonts probably are letting their cognions bite a chunk out of them as part of the cognion's diet, since plenty of people are probably tearing off chunks of their cognion for their own daily culinary habits (for instance, Klevas's starter could break a piece of itself off, that would be Just Plain Edible)
The quote in question was about stray cognions, such as the wild ones you can encounter in a NER, or in the rare case a wild one wandering an inhabited environment (though such behavioral problems would be handled more readily by the public / local governance, the way a feral dog trying to hunt a human would be handled, potentially).
Not all mountain lions are gonna see a human and go "yeah, I could take that down, this'll be easy", but now and again, especially if they've managed it before, they just might try...
That sort of logic is what informs some of my views on The Pokemon World and why it'd be important for casual trainers to have a journey to the next town over to pick up a relative's pharmacy prescription as a rite of passage. Get used to having the family poochyena fend off pidgeys or an ariados that thinks it can have a stray childe as a meal.. and that sort of headcanon stuff is what informed cognions as a concept when I started working on them
- On the one hand, I get that you don’t want a giant wall of exposition for all these highlighted terms, but I do wonder if there ought to have been more context cues provided, since [innerscape] kinda meant a whole lot of nothing to me
Yeahhh, I figured some ideas would be self-evident enough, but I really should have gone for the infodumps I wanted.
I liked Homestucka lot as a kid for just constantly dumping worldbuilding concepts on me.
Only later did I learn that a lot of what I liked about homestuck was Hussie purposefully breaking 'golden' writing rules as part of the theory behind how homestuck was made, such as the bonkers act formatting.
Soooo I've tried to err on the side of caution and Just Get Shit Done, and assume that if readers dont understand the concept, they'd
[]Ask Korite About: (thing they dont understand).
The problem is that how I also handled the usage of bracketed speech changes to be more worldbuilding accurate... which meant I also wanted to be more sparing with invoking it.
The idea with bracketed speech is that it bypasses linguistic communication by directly translating the schema and composite concepts into the other party's brain, to prevent miscommunications or misunderstandings. Somewhat subjective in nature, but enough to let someone know what a [dog] is to a human.
I also was on a weird timer with my anxiety and "when am I ever going to show anyone but my friends in dm's or a server or two this setting", along with how I was much more sluggish with my writing and artwork.
I'm still on a bit of a timer, which is what makes going back and reworking things hard, but this tempts me. I'm hoping to do weekly updates so that there's some consistency and reliability to me as a QM / writer, and thus have a reliable audience responding to posts, and doing a batch of revisions could... mean delaying any new updates for at least a week or two maybe? There's enough I'm trying to juggle as much as this review reminds me I should smooth out the mainline opening.
...that and SV has a 20 image per post maximum for free accounts. Forum-supporting subscription accounts at $5 usd can do 30, and $10 at 50.
And then for every image I want to put in the thread, I have to either draw new assets, live with a messy sketch, but overall have to setup the dialogue and the panel itself.
aagh, idiosyncratic misspellings once again show up. ty for pointing out typos, I've only had so many of these pointed out by friends or readers so far.
- Oh, so the hologram allows Korite to do more than just see us. I think. I wonder why the PC wasn’t experiencing senses other than just sight and audio for Korite in that case
Korite essentially works as a customer service representative / adventurer dispatch / npc who gives quest rewards for dungeon crawlers..
So they're fairly experienced with using the Shrine (which, I keep thinking you mean the shrine when you say "pc" because that's what it is in essence lol)..
I'd phrase it as like, they work from an office cubicle, and their arms (detached and floating behind the FOV that records Korite, which is why I dont draw them with arms so far) are working on the various interfaces that are projected in front of them.
They're not like, a 'high tier' esper or anything like that, but they've gotten used to working with the psiware the office of Eschate has available for the Communications Department. So they're pretty used to the whole suite of tools available to them when answering a shrine questant's call.
Normal calls amount to people who (typically) have worked with Eschate's office before, and are doing either fetch quests (gathering reagents from the NER, catching cognions, doing scouting missions, etc), or they're a first-timer to making contact with Eschate's demiplane and those who work there.
Klevas, our PC, is not by any means a standard questant caller. Vaer call is more like an Emergency Services call having been placed.
Since shrines are one of the easiest 'civilized' resources to encounter in a NER, working Comms / Shrine Maintenance essentially comes with the assumption that now and again you're going to hop onto a call and it'll be "hey, uh... I dont know where I am? this statue spoke into my head that I could use it? what's going on??"
Korite is just experienced enough with this assignment schedule that they've done this type of call once or twice before.
Typically, someone who Just Works Here might escalate the call.
Korite, relatively confident this wouldn't be too big of a problem to resolve, decided to handle the call and not escalate it.
Anyway, the shrine is a remote access point for the systems Korite is making use of from their end.
It's not a very high-quality one, it's essentially the base tier of shrine that they could've created and then installed into the NER.
Given all that was done with it, I want to say that it's probably a little better than bare bones, but it's like beginning a skype call from a windows XP computer, and someone on the other end is using a much more modern system to receive and moderate the call from.
Or, I guess for the call center analogy, Klevas is calling from a landline, and Korite is answering vaem from a desktop computer at the call center.
The hologram is audio-visual, and technically a portal through which iirc smell can travel for the incense / the incense is being projected through the connection into the other space because it's 'easy' to transmit, same with Korite's psionic influence pushing through, BUT all Klevas can get is base stuff.
Korite can do a lot more though.
I'd probably put it at that Korite can see The Whole Segpock from a 3rd person perspective, investigate it, and snoop on anything within it. There's like, various particulars I could probably spend some time hashing out, but Korite knows how to use the tools accessible to them, and even the barebones shrines would still give them a good window into what's going on in the caller's immediate surroundings.
As I went for in the latest update, Korite can also sense a fair bit about someone's emotional state or thoughts, due to the fairly direct connection between Klevas's consciousness and Korite's via the interface.
Klevas is at best a latent psychic, and can maybe get phantom qualia from the connection throughout the call, but otherwise...
If the average person opens the front door to their home, and finds a completely dismantled car within their living room, with countless automotive tools also within the room.. they might be hopeless at trying to figure out how to put it all together without external help and a bit of time going into it? Not the best analogy I suppose.
yeah, I have some issue with "human being" and "person" and "personhood" and "people" as default terms when it comes to trying to write non-humans?
humanocentrism, I guess would be the phrase, is something I want to try and avoid in a casual sense, as much as I'm going to be limited in my ability to write xenofic, but it bugs me now and again when I see non-humans say "I'm a real human being too" when humans dont exist in the setting at all, if that makes sense.
Soooo instead of "sapient" or "sentient" as terms analogous to 'person', I opted for Sophont due to it being a comparative rarity, sounding nice, and just working for both it's literal definition and how I can use it in an abstract sense with an unfamiliar audience.
Unfortunately, I should probably explain the more jargon-y psychology and parapsychology terms I use in my writing, even if some of the intent is the mystique.
ah! that's something I wanted to get to for the overall review, but some of the intent is like playing a game in a setting you've never checked out, where terms are flying by you, and if there isn't an in-universe encyclopedia, you kind of have to get from context clues and make headcanons.
- Ah, I see that you opened another batch of choices. Based off the next threadmark, I’m guessing the “Ask About the Cognion Ritual” option was the winner.
close!
my updates shift a bit, but I do want to entertain "so long as multiple options have been chosen, every option could be used someday" as a thought for Questant.
You aren't alone in wondering. Nonakin's speculation was Crafting Grid like minecraft, which was sort of the intent.
Loosely based off the max number of reagents and then the result in the center, but also partly "I am using the symmetry tool, time for an asemic alchemical / ritual circle design"
Nope, that's the name of one of the alien species.
Kilonnese homeworlds are a *throws dart at a fantasy kitchen sink* "oh hey it landed on middle-earth this time!" deal.
The Kilon, like a number of species, doesn't have a single fixed timeline, or single fixed 'home universe', similar to how humans in the voidverse are.
Kilon as a species almost always come into existing on mid to high fantasy setting's planet where there are at least 3 to 7 (or more) other species.
Not in this Quest, because I decided to make everything harder on myself 8))))
This is another layer to "I made the audience do character creation and bogged down my Quest" as an issue.
My recipe for a voidverse narrative typically amounts to "oh no, you somehow aren't in your home reality anymore... well, you gotta survive somehow I guess, and this stranger is offering to give you a pet specifically to help you survive", and then they do in-fact present you a lineup of three (or more) to choose from.
The hypothetical 'game' (or really, games) that could exist in-setting mirror this, with the 3 being either randomly generated, or selected from a preset list.
'Starter' cognions are defined by a single capability: An Inventory System.
Any cognion with an 'inventory core' installed, or having an innate inventory system, is considered acceptable in many demiplanes and traditions as what you could give to a stranger or a child who has never had a cognion.
The point is so that they are given an easily accessible schema for how to interact with and understand the world around them, among other reasonings like "you wont tire out hiking for miles on end as easily if you aren't having to carry around 40 to 50 kilos (somewhere around 100 lbs) of gear with you to stay alive.
You dont need a cognion to use an inventory system, as Caestellau in the prologue exemplifies, so think of this, and Klevas's scrapbook, like training wheels.
- You have a moment where your transcript for Korite talking about the Klion way is both in the spoiler box and duplicated outside of it right afterwards
- Wait, ‘still-folded worlds’? What do unfolded ones look like, then? Though I wonder how much of this the player character is meant to know, or if this is all supposed to be new to them much like it is for us
What happens to the contents of a world (whether country, planet, solar system, or galaxy, or cosmology for those that dont have planets) varies!
You could end up with demiplanes, or segpocks.
Both are by essence videogame level skyboxes, to make it simplest as possible.
I also have "the space around you is constantly shifting and will not stabilize for long in the shape it is presently" as an idea for procedurally generated game setups, where backtracking is a pipedream. Just like the idea of dreams as a constantly shifting tapestry.
I also have the sort of cosmology that's the result of Feel Good Inc being my fav music video for a month or two as a kid, where a planet is shattered into sky islands, and the 'surface' is now a hellish craggy magma and tenebrous crust.
Unfolded is the state of all things in the void. It's a casual dichotomy to refer to "pre-void places and peoples" and "post-cataclysm worlds".
There's sweeping generalizations I can make with a lot of things about the setting, but the project is at times meant as the sort of sandbox where the answer really is:
what do you think they look like? what should they look like?
The Player Character is not meant to know anything Korite is talking about outside of what Caestellau already explained to them, and just about all of it is meant to be new on a level of "you are a 18 year old who walked into the wrong classroom and have been sitting in on a graduate studies course for 30 minutes now, and you understand very little" I think? Unfortunately, that's not something I know how to write too well, at least immersively.
If it's not sufficiently explained
- NER: this is the setting's answer to Mystery Dungeons, The Backrooms, silent hill's 'otherworld', mon game routes, dungeons, so-on, to some degree. they're technically a form of colonial organism, and the cells of it's body are the segpocks (levels, pocket dimensions, memories as spaces, so-on) that comrpise them
- demiplane: like a NER, it's a pocket dimension that is itself a collection of interwoven pocket dimensions. these tend to be analogous to a person's personal minecraft server, but usually much smaller in scope. One human demiplane example I can give that I recently drafted is "VerdanDeLyon", which is an alternate history version of the french city of Lyon, which is post-unfolding as well. The whole cityscape and possible some of the outerlying spaces of it's metro whether suburbs or outskirts, is probably One Big Space, if not a series of Large Spaces which fluidly interweave.
Have this music video that may or may not help visualize how segpocks come into play as a concept with both NERs and Demiplanes.
I'm hopefully gonna have more than those two things worked out as concepts, but I lack names for what other routes do exist for how things 'exist' cosmologically =w=;;
Oh, Korite isn't in the NER at all.
They're in Rememaudlin, which I would phrase as "if the mystery dungeon is in the PMD world on the sky continent, (Korite) is in Lavender Town in GSC", due to the whole nature of 'parallel dimension' theory being mangled the way I use it. This NER itself isn't 'physically' connected to any demiplanes or places.
There are other sophonts within the NER:
Caestellau, the stalwarte (class) hybrid (species) who assisted [ You ] get to the Shrine before having the party split during the prologue (those updates are not yet out)
A shopkeeper NPC who doesn't know anything is currently 'going wrong' while Caestellau is scouting the NER, who I sketched in a mockup in an extra
And there is (1) sophont who will be within the NER later:
the Cleric who'll be in the NER in (indeterminate amount of updates) in order to rendezvous with Klevas and get them escorted to Rememaudlin, and shown around
- Huh. That’s more than I was expecting from an inventory for waking up in a weird place without a firm idea of what’s going on. I take it that we’ll be needing this in short order
Yeah, this inventory setup was one I devised in the planning stages for "what random items could've been scavenged en-route to the shrine", and show up early in the prologue updates.
Ah, close but no cigar, that's just the random cognion keeper from the example (which was intended to be like the opening intro to a pokemon game where you see the professor and A Pokemon ; but I wanted to show 3 aliens and 3 mons).
This was just an excuse to show off Meluch as being Some Random Dweeb who also has more than one cognion they keep around.
Meluch is probably recruitable, as it's not like he has any huge reason to keep hanging around Rememaudlin after his divorce.
- I wonder if it might make sense to do some sort of recap of the choices available to the participants at the end of each post, since I admittedly got thrown in a loop by this opening choice here since I forgot it was presented as a first set of choices about halfway through the prior update
Yeahhh, I realized after this or another update that it was probably confusing.
I'd seen quests on SV do it like that, but frankly... those were textventure style quests, rather than Art Quests, so I really should have grouped my options towards the end... but then the problem is the images and prose...
Mm, yeah that's why a recap would be best.
I'll explain this in the response to main review, but a fair bit of the early updates were Majority Choice voting.
This means that while Negrek's vote was the only one on TR, there were 3 separate votes on SV.
One chose for the first option, and two voted for the second option. That makes it 1, 2, 1, and thus that the option that was chosen won the vote.
I could've had Korite exposite on each of their three cognions... but I'd have to draw three cognions, write out three sections of dialogue, and then write out any dialogue or exposition that results from them, and then assemble all the dialogue into the panels that would need to go into the update, and then I'd need to format everything for the post.
When Act 1 happens, Klevas will have the option to hangout with Korite during freetime events, and would get the opportunity to either meet the cognions, and/or battle them (battles will be called "cognion conflicts" because heehee alliteration and conflict resolution wordplay)
So at least some Cognions are capable of symbiotic behavior. I wonder if that means that there’s some sort of ‘fusion’ mechanic for Cognions in this game
In theory all cognions are capable of symbiosis and-or fusion
idk about 'unlocking', that's a cognioneering skill Klevas would need to work up towards if not having someone else do it for vaem (cognioneer ; think pokemon professor, as a mad scientist, as a pokemon breeder, so-on)
that said, yes there's a lot of cognion-centric mechanics to play with
oh, nah, 'zrom' is a result of the profile cracking and obtaining a gap, causing the void to fill it.
There's theoretically no real meaning to it, just a name that came to me.
Since this update was close to halloween I decided to add them in since I already had carte-blanche from Nonakin to use his cosmosdex species.
I really expected them to get picked, lol! None of the spooper options voted for won the majority vote sadly, and Nonakin's chriilth'tyn design won the majority vote.
The hilarity was that I expected the audience to walk into the brick wall of "you chose the vriska palette" I didn't expect it to be one of Nonakin's submissions.
He didn't realize until I dm'd him, and I expect it's because I used two different vriska palettes that aren't immediately clear either, the one that got picked was slightly edited. (It's her Land Palette, and then her classpect / godtier palette with green added in).
You can see why some people just drop from reading a quest at the start... because their fav character creation options didn't get picked.
I pay attention to that risk a bit too much I think, and I don't think it's a guarantee as that's not how I personally read things... but some people do apparently. I imagine it's more of a factor if say "hey look at this multiverse narrative I have, who's the character and what's the setting"
because it's on a forum where a ton of Worm and W40K fans alike are, those options if given by the QM, are likely to get chosen now and again.
Some people refuse to read Worm fanfic at all, and I do relate to "oh, the main character will be from media I avoid, okay bye"
I honestly wonder how on earth you handled voting for this, since you’d think that almost every player would propose something completely different from the next one.
Majority Voting =w=
A lot of Quest readers (or Players / Questers / Voters) will vote for other people's ideas, because Plan Voting generally requires Most Popular Wins
I was really tempted to go for "submit one option" so that we'd get a Make An OC type of result, but I wasn't sure that'd be enjoyable or cohesive in the end =w=;;
- So ‘Zrom’ apparently was a gamer, or at least that’s what I’m getting from the pond photo
- And he went to conventions back in the day. Did they play competitive Melee, too?
- Oh, well that tunnel fluff text sounds ominous there.
- Oh, there’s more pages here. I wonder if first-time readers are meant to look at this or not. If not, it probably makes sense to have some way of noting things for readers to skip it until they reach a certain point
They in theory aren't meant to, but the problem about Quests is that...
Character Sheets update
how many different updated character sheet posts do you want to scroll through to get to the latest one, if it updates nearly every update, and it updates weekly and runs for 2 or 3 years.
The alternative is having one post that you update over time, but this means new readers will see Present Day Spoilers, rather than what it looked like at update 1
Sufficient Velocity has more BBCode formatting to be able to do 'tabs' on a post, but TR only has about half as many formatting options.
For things like profiles for each party member and then their cognions? I'm gonna have to make an info page that says "hi, do you want the info? go to SV" due to that.
I tried to say don't read if you aren't caught up, in a fasion
this indicates that character creation was finished, and it even has a date stamped onto the spoiler box.
I made a bad assumption that new readers were paying attention to the date updates were posted, as that's my usual reading habit for Forum Quests =w=;;
- >’so many creches to find a trinket within’ … is that a typo? Or is that a deliberate word choice that there’s groups of babies of… something in this forest?
..I think so yes. I believe it was meant to be cache, so I'm not sure how the fuck that got corrected to creche??
Chriilth'tyns dont nurse their young on the surface due to them being a subterranean species, so I don't think I'd meant for that to be creche by any means...
Im so glad vaem being a furry came across.. but I'm unsure whether the convention(s) were furry ones. The memory doesn't specify, hm...
You could always try and prompt the PC to try and recall more, or project that theory onto vaem.
- ‘Depthscraper’, huh? Are these just vertical shafts with floors dug into the hollow, or is this something like the Geofront from Evangelion? Though ‘Zrom’ apparently was once an underground dweller
woops, originally wrote the following for the classical architecture because I forgot which came first
Close! it's a music venue in Portland Oregon.
I took the photo on halloween when I went to see Frankie & The Witch Fingers with my bf, his wife (my metamour), and the wife's gf (metamour by proxy). they're a psychedelic punk band I recommend to folks if they already like Gizzard Wizard.
This was from the rooftop, I have sensory overload, so I had to take a break or two, and when I was trying to go downstairs to get back to the show I accidentally ended up on the roof because oops, it didn't go back to ground level that elevator, and I wanted interesting photos lately anyway.
anyway, the answer is yes! it's a corruption of the speculative architectural term 'earthscraper', which is a proposed architectural method for ecological preservation, adapting to climate change, and avoiding tectonic disruptions to cityscapes.
in the case of the chriilth'tyn, the species article for the cosmosdex doesn't say too much on their homeworld (due to it being a 'not important' planet, it doesn't have an article, and many of the old articles are shorter, and Nonakin's style isn't one for excessive detail), so I hashed out a number of questions with Nonakin in DMs for how I could approach writing and worldbuilding with the species.
Due to my own penchant for enjoying subterranea and earth shelters alike, I embraced the idea that they dont build surface structures, not permanent ones at least, because their cities and societies are all largely subterannean anyway in nature.
A 'depthscraper' is, as I've wanted to define it, an arcological settlement. We're talking metropolitan areas of 250k upwards to millions of inhabitants. The Big City, built into cavern systems and carved out and reinforced.
I wanted to try and capture the idea of looking out at a cityscape horizon, and then shift it to be an approximation of a cavernscape.
Glad it did, I found it via openverse like the other public domain photos. It's a Spirit Halloween in the process of closing / was abandoned sometime in the late 00s.
Huh, apparently I didn't set up the alt text like I thought I had, but the question I have I guess will be saved for when you get to the cognion ritual.
- I can’t tell if these sticky notes are meant to have happened before the start of the game, or if these are from later posts, but either way, ‘Zrom’ has certainly been running around quite a bit. Probably screaming, too.
The narrative starts in-media-res due to wanting to try out starting a story "in the middle" for a while... though in practice it's just in the middle of the prologue dungeon crawl sequence anyway.
The sticky notes are all representative of different segpocks within the NER.
I didn't write them as screaming, in part because my biases filter into how I write characters a little, and because I write NERs and this setting as being fairly forgiving a fair bit of the time.
I dont know if I'd have had the heart to run this straight from the start, just because "well you died, gg no re" wouldn't be very nice to the character or the audience.
Thus far, it’s been doing a pretty good job at feeling alive as a setting even if we’re still more or less stuck in the backroom of a lamp shop at the moment.
yeahhhh when I started this out I told myself I'd have a tight character creation, encourage people to experiment, and get the first few updates done with through the course of two or so months.
and then I burnt out and took a month or two hiatus, and had to take the next month or two to work on the rest of that sequence!
I only just got us out of the lamp shop!
I told myself I wouldn't let it drag on forever, and that's sort of what happened anyway.
On some level this is why I curbed what exposition I was already flying into (and sharing way too much of the setting all at once), because the wordcount could be 3 times as much as it is at present easily, and all that just from one character's personal perspective and take on how the world works!
Yeahhh, I realized a few updates in, and since I wasn't getting this sort of feedback I wasn't preoccupied with fixing that issue.
The problem with this sort of medium is that rewriting your first wonky updates... isn't done a lot?
It has the exact same issue as rewriting the first 3 chapters of your long-running fanfic in that you could alienate old readers who liked it that way, and then you'll have higher quality that runs right into "oh, wow this is rough" after that retcon is over.
That might have been a deliberate choice on your part if the player character is meant to be getting thrown into things and learning as they go, but if so, you might want to emphasize the character’s thoughts finding different concepts unfamiliar and going “oh, that’s what that meant” a bit more in others.
It sort of was! The idea was that either through the audience asking questions, or through reptition, things would become more clear.
Unfortunately, I ran into the gamedev pitfall of imagining the type of player who picks up the game, rather than tailoring to waht gamers are actually like, I guess?
I also think this writer bias came into play: I'm not great at imagining misconceptions I don't have? I may be phrasing this wrong, but when I play a pokemon gym that is a math puzzle, I don't fail it on purpose even though that means I'll get more battles, because I dont want to get wrong answers!
It's not exactly realistic to have the character Just Understand Things, and I think this is overall a gap in my ability to write.. learning? I'm not quite sure what I could be doing better to show a process growing that way, and I'm not sure I want to have a lot of my wordcount be that when things need establishing to get through them, but god it'd work better if I did.
I think another analogy is that... I was not as confused about how SBURB worked or the other gaming abstractions worked as the homestuck characters were on my first readthrough, even if the exposition and writing was illustrative and helped me understand them, I think those moments pulled me out? I don't like when games force me to get wrong answers for story's sake when I can understand the riddle or puzzle plainly (I love you Twewy, but, also, I am in pain during every new day's New Puzzle).
A part of the problem is also that I intended [ You, the PC ] to be a 'blank slate' for the audience to project on.
The closest I got to that was Nonakin's own projection of his own con experiences via the entrafresh object, and I think I could've telegraphed things better, though I also have wanted to play out a mystery pretty badly with the PC background.
I'm showing a bit more of my hand than I want to be, but at this point it's been months and the existential breakdown Klevas could've had isn't something I want to play out either.
If you want to have the curtain pulled back, here you go for a whole chunk of why the narrative is a little wonkier than it needs to be:
They're Today Years Old, and born with a mostly mature consciousness, and An Approximate Knowledge Of Many Things. vaer amnesia is an assumption vae made, and was then reinforced, that vae thinks is the true state of reality. It isn't, because vae spawned into existence at the start of the prologue. All vaer memories did not exist as memories belonging originally to vaem, at least when we're talking about the main scrapbook memories.
Those memories, aren't even from all the same person. The halloween store is a spooper's memory of a spoopermarket, or a random alien visiting the spooper homeworld visiting one!
I also consider vaem to be a sponge for info, to a degree, but also psionically sensitive to [bracketed] info, though that's something I wont have revealable until Act 1.
Quite literally only Sufficient Velocity is the other host location for the Quest, and the only other place commands come from.
TR has a lower member count and is not familiar with Quests, so I expected the audience here to be at a disadvantage.
This, from veteran questers, isn't a recommended practice, sort of due to that factor.
It kinda sucks, but I was worried SV wouldn't interact with the narrative enough, in-part because I wasn't getting new feedback on discord for the demo, and SV only had sparse commands to submit due to pre-made majority voting being the most common, and problem sleuth style Anything Goes being relatively uncommon (to where people could consider it an experimental risk, I expect, when it's part of the fundamental history of forum quests to me =w=;; but alas, it's a medium that has existed in different ecosystems and aged over two decades or so now, and I only got into it a decade into it's existence online, as mspaforums was a newcomer back then)
I wonder if there’s a way for TR readers to be more clued in on what those other forks of this interactive quest are contributing, since it was admittedly a bit jarring at a couple points to see players submit answers to certain prompts and then the narrative choose something completely different.
I do literally include an author's note on the first tow updates indicating that this quest is mirrored and that TR is not the only source of commands or votes.
This Quest is being run and mirrored on Sufficient Velocity in this thread. I intend to mirror to MSPFA too.
My priority here will be mirroring updates every so often.
I can take votes / commands from this thread, BUT an update's posting may be delayed a week or more (for instance this is being posted in whole so far two weeks after the first SV update). Informational slash worldbuilding or similar posts will be delayed, but the SV thread is threadmarked.
Quests are a form of interactive fiction where you as the audience get to decide character actions, tactical plans, and other things in a narrative. There are two other quests, aka forumventures or Forum Adventures, in the text adventure style. As an Art Quest that means there's a bit of a hybrid style going on here.
I'd meant to make a thread explaining the concept of quests about a year back, and may do it still. I still intend to run a pokemon sandbox quest on here when I get back to it. In the meantime SV has an (albeit old) thread on this.
OK and that's the update folks. This took me a week longer than I'd meant for it to as a result of having a busy week, and the one ahead is it's own. I'll probably close voting around halloween. It doesn't help that I added a fifth species to the lineup due to seasonal and "lol, skeleton field for each species" reasons.
Character creation is taking place on both forums. Feel free to vote in favor of what's submitted there, and vice versus.
I do encourage those who are on both forums and reading (literally just Nonakin, who I asked to join SV due to being a brainstorm collaborator interested in when I finally ran things) to mirror their commands, and he does that most of the time in later updates.
For the character creation command, I do also link to his post on SV.
Like the votes are votes, but I feel like there’s something missing for being able to see how different choices were ultimately settled on in the present version of the game.
Yeah, and I wasn't using Quotes as much for the old updates.
I could go back, but here's a problem:
Cross-site Quotations don't work.
BBCode for quotations on most forums is "user (on this forum) in post (on this forum) said: this".
The formatting for the user, the post link, and those details is forum-specific.
I quite literally cannot get the field that says "Spiteful Murkrow" to link to your post if I mirror it to SV, at least to my knowledge. I want to say I could maybe have it set up as [bbcode for hyperlinking, url, your name as the hyperlinked text] as the "(string)", but I'm not sure if by default xenforo sanitizes things, and the quote would just read as "longass bbcode instead of just the name as a hyperlink".
When I try to use a name for the quote, rather than just an empty non-attributed quote, it tries to link to a nonexistent post by a nonexistent user, even if the name specified was the same as a user on the forum, because there is no post to link to (the number, if I supplied it, might link to a post on this forum only)
I have my concern that if I try this out, I'll just end up with an erroneous link to a random post on the forum.
SV and TR might handle this differently too, because SV has a lot of custom BBCode.
One of the problems with this format of narrative is that just because you voted doesn't mean your vote will win.
In an "anything goes" quest, it also doesn't mean among 30 votes (a number I'm not likely to hit for a while, but I've seen dexworks on SV reach around that level), it doesn't mean any of your commands specifically will get used. Some quests are more accomodating, some are less.
Whether for my desire to have an engaged audience or 'feeling charitable', I want to make sure I incorporate any and all commands.
wrt the discord demo, the best I can probably do would be "command from discord demo" as the name of a quote. this would differentiate them from the Example Commands / Autonomous Commands I wrote for the prologue leadup to the 'start' of the quest.
While I may have closed voting on which of Korite's cognions will be in the next update (I'm working on posting to SV rn), I am marking this one down in my notes for the next one, ty!
otherwise, Negrek's un-used command I expect you're referring to does get used...
just not in the immediate following update.
it gets used in the update after that, which is after the cutoff for your reading session.
whiiiiich *rolls hands* I alluded to commands sometimes getting used in later updates if they aren't chosen, but I understand how that might be jarring.
dw, just about everything is applicable, and this liveblog review is honestly the most feedback I think I've had so far?
I'm considering mirroring it to SV just because "hey, I got a review that I responded to in detail, which may clarify some things in the quest, or just be a fun read"... and Allium!Korite.
I hope I'm not too rude or pointed in this response, because AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA I wasn't sure there'd be a review from catnip at all. Next time I'm gonna have to specify a cutoff point (I'll probably put to CoRi - UnIt), tho the parts I want feedback / interaction on most are later updates, which... frankly I expect is a problem for catnip fics, asking for someone to read later chapters means a lack of context.
Thank you for your patience, I know this is a bit experimental, and atypical, for fiction on the forum, so it means a lot to have someone read along and make the amount of comments you did.
It's been fairly helpful to have Negrek cheering in my corner, and it's likewise nice to have another person's eyes on this.
"why did this take all day", well word counter is saying it's 10k... though beyond bbcode formatting and quotes from Murkrow, hopefully its closer to 5k?
Frankly, dont worry about reading this all at once, I got what I needed from the review (which was a lot! ty so much! fuck!!)
the following is largely copied and pasted from the prior update.
unfortunately some BBCode content is unable to be properly mirrored aside from screenshots. I may try that at some point.. but the text wouldn't be able to be copy-pasted.
I'll try and post some of it in quote boxes.
[X]Zippi: Attempt to climb the rest stop
Klevas will attempt to give Zippi a boost up the side of the rest stop so that they can put the sign directly into the inventory.
Success requires a 65 or higher on a d100. Failures under 25 result in an injury for Zippi, and will disadvantage them in combat.
Both pockets will by default be filled with a handful or two of buttons.
1d6 = 3 ; +2 Klevas now has 5 scoops-worth of buttons from the Desertified Button Stairway.
Klevas picked flower stacks comprise 3-4 sprigs of the blue flowers found in the Pink Desert Segpock of this NER. Klevas picks flowers from around the Rest Stop and Segpock.
1d3= 1 +1 = 2 Rolls of Blue Flower Sprigs. Klevas puts them in vaer messenger bag.
Klevas retrieved The Fallen Sign and put it in vaer inventory.
due to heavy BBcode. I just dont feel like trying to edit all the bbcode out of this one.
This is a fun one, as I've had the answer to this sort of idea set since a few months or so back.
If folks get to experimenting, well yup your starter is a portal to the Inner World and exploring those memories with ease.
Just, yknow, turns out it is risky doing that in the middle of a random place.
Since the plan involves "remove self" realtively easily, I'll be accepting that..
Still, since I rolled accidentally, yknow what I'm gonna be setting that as the result for rolling if anything goes wrong while inside.
This is because each turn that someone explores their innerscape / inventory while in an unstable location like a NER, or in a space that lacks privacy, this roll is to check is something happens to either the host environment or if there is a disruption.
This would range from the NER realigning itself and causing the innerscape exit to be a different segpock, or worse with the innerscape becoming unmoored from the segpock entirely.
This would range from a wild cognion wandering into the core memory, a predatory cognion trying to hunt Zippi or enter the innerscape.. and in a demiplane or similar space others might pass by, the risk of sophonts entering your core memory and possibly messing with things or ambushing a party member.
At 43, the roll isn't bad, so I'll be using it to do something I was already planning for.
This means I'll be rolling for where in the NER the [ Pursuer ] ended up after chasing Caestellau and your Party Lead.
( Secret Dice Roll = PASS )
Dont worry it's a merciful roll, I just can't share where I placed them down.
Every other turn I'll be rolling for the Pursuer's movement from here on out.
What do you think of the prototyped inventory formatting I'm working on?
There won't be a vote for 2.5, as it'll be dialogue / worldbuilding followed by the actual update with the inventory contents.
While Zippi fails to climb the rest stop, I will be having Klevas still attempt to do the inventory fuckery. Since Zippi was not injured, this won't have any penalties or further issues.
And this shitpost in response to a review given on Thousand Roads, which I may mirror due to the worldbuilding content of it
"alium" reminded me of the tumblr post meme, Our Friend The Allium, and the idea popped into my head of "Korite if the deiforme spheres were just slightly different"
no 2.5 update, or 3 I guess. at least not yet. I'll probably roll them into one.
things are delayed until next week anyway, probably. I have appointments during both tuesday and thursday, both some of my bigger workdays. if there is an update this week it may be sunday, as I've got plans saturday.
I haven't been able to get much of any serious work done for most of the last week, for one reason or another. Most days have amounted to "hm, really wish I hadn't bothered with taking my adderall" because I would've rather taken a tolerance break if I'd known it would play out this way.
I'll probably have another empty update at the end of this, whether I try a makeup update or not, just because I should really do a tolerance break.
drabbles for the anniversary will either get their own thread or be posted here. we'll find out tomorrow if I finish the third.
This oneshot involves a loose pov of experiencing delusions brought on by psionic causes.
All three are gonna of these are gonna be along the lines of horror theme-wise, and I'm doing my best to tag them appropriately.
Feel free to let me know if something else would have been a better tag
🛑 Content Warning 🛑
Oneshot contains themes of unreality, parasitism, and ideation of self-harm to resolve the parasitism. Some bodyhorror too.
🛑Content Warning 🛑
The dentist's office was a bust.. okay maybe not a total bust because there were still a bunch of dental tools, and more than expected with the traffic the NER supposedly had seen lately. The other voidtraipsers were probably just taking instances that spawned rather than fucking up the noemes of the segpock, so it isn't like the place would be empty... and yet someone had looted the fancy chairs.
Lila swung their leg out against the side of a chair in the waiting room in frustration, and groaned out "Who the fuck loots the chair?"
The whole point of the trip to this NER was the rumor that despite it being an [ Abandoned ] dental office segpock shit was mostly intact right? The trashed exam room they expected to find a broken chair, and yeah it was wrecked. That room reeked of memorial traces and everything pointed to the original owner of this memory being the sophont who trashed the worse parts of the office.
Ultimately? That's all fine, as it isn't like they'd run into some sort of irritant while checking out the store room where they kept the laughing gas. They felt more riled up as they'd gotten closer to the boundary to the segpock they'd originally came from, and knowing there wasn't anywhere left to check was pissing them off! This whole detour ends in knowing they either need to queue up another search process for a segpock with what they want, or they have to go and hunt down either someone dealing in an obscure piece of furniture, or a demiere that can weave one together from their memories.
Their focus had wavered on whether to try and chill out, or whether to scream to let off the tension of knowing they'd have to fork over more essencia to get everything right. They'd miss the look of the waiting room.. whoever had the idea to model a waiting room off the internal view of their species' maw? Sick, iconic behavior to pull off, and a shame whatever happened that made them leave the place abandoned like this..
Passing through the gap in the replica of some alien's maw.. the need to itch themselves was worse.
Before? Okay, sure it was enough to try and ignore. It'd gotten a little more annoying as they were packing up, but now?
It was a lot worse.
It was like someone had slipped them something special. Just a little treat to have some ants under your skin seeing what their new home would be like in the long-term. Just a little open house for every arthropest in the demiplane to live it up and pretend they could afford the down-payment for one night.
Leaning against the wall they rolled a sleeve up in the hopes that everything was normal...
There was a vein that looked like it was writhing underneath their skin. It wasn't off to the side minding it's business, oh no, it was out of place and bulging just enough to raise the skin.. and it was too soon to tell if that was just inflammation fucking around and finding out or if there really was something inside them.
If they went back into the dentist's office and set everything back up.. maybe they could get a better look, and maybe get it out...
If it was getting bad like this then it probably couldn't wait until the safehouse..
They had to be sure pressing a finger to the skin, and the shift underneath as they applied pressure was like that of an animal in distress as it'd been caught. They didn't wanna claw it open, but they had to know..
And then it was gone.
At least from that vein on that arm..
But it was gone.
No inflammation. Nothing trying to get away from their grip. The vein was where it should've been to begin with..
They should be relieved, but they can only feel themselves closer to panicking. The sensation wasn't gone from elsewhere on their body.
If it wasn't something in a dirty closet they'd inhaled, and it wasn't a self-reproducing concept that had wormed itself into their memories..
This was probably an aura then.. and that meant the [ Pursuer ] of the NER was nearby..
They bolted.
One exit, three exits, two exits.
They knew the way they came and it didn't.
This should be easy, but that didn't mean they had time.
The mossy hallway had been caved in further down, and as they stomped through the grass dotted with flowers in that eternal sunsetting warmth they could feel their veins coursing with the sensation of life that new their warmth.
A single prick had become several, and several had become a couple dozen overheating love bites.
The maintenance hatch was still open, and it still lead to the back-stage of a dance floor.
The distant sound of the slot machines pinged off, and those live bites bloomed into dozens more reminders of what sustenance they could provide to the needy.
The nagging feeling that a past party member was right played itself out as they tried to creep over to the dj booth for a better view of things, as the need to cry out was one they struggled to suppress. This pain wasn't real, and they knew that on an academic level.
They'd also been told that for most species only physiological pain actually existed, and that the conscious experience of pain was a cognitive matter.
So really it didn't matter if the pain was real in origin.
They didn't need to know what it was like to actually be made a host with fervor, or to be buried in a nest of angry eusocial fuckers.
The [ Pursuer ] provided all they needed to know.
They only needed one peek over the booth to know it was standing on the threshold of the path they needed to cross to get into the main area of the casino.
Its shape was like that of a biped, but the outline had been filled in with a shitty looped image of swarming maggots. Everytime one would dive back into the shifting mass to avoid a predator another would push forth from the swarm to take its place... and the sound of the slot machines was joined by the dull drone like that of the maggot's future filling the air.
The sound of a swarm without one flying about was just another layer to this aura... and the last thing they needed to know was how bad it'd get from triggering the pursuer.
They ducked down and began to try and think a route around it.. but this may as well be a dead-end.
Could it hear? If they threw something they could misdirect it and sneak by the other way around the dance floor...
They reached into their bag in hopes of finding something that'd make enough noise and make sure it wasn't something they needed to go back for.
🛑
Oneshot contains themes of unreality, parasitism, and ideation of self-harm to resolve the parasitism. Some bodyhorror too.
🛑
I enjoy the trippy desert scenery. And is that a one-way sign pointing the opposite direction of the one still posted that would have been pointing in the opposite direction?
