1 I’m definitely going to need more choices Unnatural Skills because I do not have anything prepared for the next roll. If it comes up before I’m ready I’ll probably go with something generic like potions. The thing is, Unnatural Skill is still a powerful perk for its cost and gets more so the more specific it is. You also get boosts from overlaps between different skills, like both smithing and enchanting helping if Joe is making a magic weapon. Potions would stack with Alchemy and give a serious boost in potency to what Joe could make.
AS for the perk combination of Blessing and Skill I’m thinking of retiring it after I finish the main Olympians. It would stop it from becoming an infinite perk that would overshadow other abilities and also mean that I’d only need to worry about eight more rolls. That’s still a lot to go through, but I think keeping it finite would be a good idea, and one I could use while skill seeing through the principles I’ve set up so far.
Bandit Gunsmith was overshadowed pretty quickly by Joe’s resources and didn’t really shine until it hit its critical point with the second roll of Manufacturing Line. I try to keep every perk in mind when writing, even if they don’t all have direct or useful applications at the moment.
Runes will be an easier thing for Joe to deal with since, unlike his Aura weapon, its not forcing Joe to confront his trauma, its just acknowledging what he went through. That’s validating without being emotionally draining. Joe also got expanded skills with other systems of runes, including Fate magic and his weapon enchantments.
2 That was a great essay. I feel like the entities goal of avoiding heat death is something that’s hard for people to connect to. Not because of the goal itself, but because of the creatures holding it and how the goal developed. This wasn’t something that grew from some race’s attempt to preserve their civilization or a reaction to some great existential dread. It was an animalistic acknowledgement that they would, at some point, no longer be able to grow or feed. That was the point of how Wildbow characterized them, but it made it hard to connect to them when there’s nothing tied to the goal but continued existence of a race that never really did anything. Nobody wants to write the story of what happens when the entities reach their goal because there’s nothing there. Continued existence forever, and nothing else. It’s the driving motivation for their entire civilization, but it really feels like a dog chasing a car. If they caught one the question would be ‘now what?’, and without an interesting way of answering that there’s not much motivation to explore it.
When considering Worm and Worm fiction I like to think of Scion and Zion as different people. Zion is the warrior entity, the counterpart of the thinker that is devoted to the cycle and the goals of the entities as a whole. It’s the one that would be focused on finding a way to overcome entropy and understands the cycles as the way to do that. Scion is the part of the warrior that’s running the software ‘Humanity version 0.0.2a’. He’s the one who can actually react to the situation in a non-mechanical way, meaning depression, anger, and the eventual tantrum that was the Golden Morning. I think the great irony is that you could dangle solutions for the heat death of the universe in front of Scion and he would probably not be able to handle the emotional impact of simultaneously succeeding and failing in his objective.
There’s also a bit of a tragedy in the fact that Scion exists only to be able to interact with humanity while insulating Zion from the experience, protecting the entity from any attachments or psychological burdens that would weigh it down after thousands of cycles. Following the cycle Scion would essentially cease to exist, either being shelved or mined for data in support of the next avatar that needed to be created. Scion, as a stripped-down partitioned off portion of a crippled entity running fake humanity protocols is the closest thing we get to a relatable character in that species.
3 The Jesus thing was a joke, though probably gets to be less of one as time goes on. Things will probably get really awkward if Joe gets Glory To… The Legion from the potential Capstone constellation, specifically from the text ‘Through a quick ceremony of sharing blood and declaring yourself blood brothers with a friend you may grant them a portion of your powers from this jump, you may selectively grant them some of your powers or all of them.’. That’s probably when any attempts at denial will fully break down.
“Alright, I know I basically came back from the dead, can walk on water, feed thousands with a bit of bread and fish, cure the sick, and that new Mantra technology does mean I draw power from faith, but I’m telling you, I am not the messiah. Now, drink of this for it is my blood and I will forever be with you in spirit.”
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Lord Roustabout (Lord_Roustabout) on Chapter 69 Fri 10 Sep 2021 10:08PM UTC
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