Avacyn

5 minutes ago, PurpleCola said:

i am prepared to become a drowned corpse

p.s im probably reading this wrong but it says that a drowned must give their brine to a thallassos mage in order for the, to become drowned. what about those with ta's already made?

also +1 @Avacyn

p.p.s it also seems like this could restrict the magic being spread

P.S. : Yes, it would mean you'd have to be made re-eligible for teaching if you had a TA up!
P.P.S. : Yes, that's the point for the time being. The intention was never to spread it like herpes.

8 minutes ago, Skale said:

I'm very back and forth on the additions itself. As per everything you right, it is well written, balanced, and interesting. The only problem I honestly have is more of an overall lore issue, I suppose. I don't really think every magic needs an endgame, and I don't think every magic requires consistent additions. But considering this was made with the intent of clearing up an addition made by the LT that was apparently poorly done, I suppose the second point really doesn't matter. Also, I know of two practicing Thallassos users, one of which leaves me questioning whether or not the magic is being handled properly, so until the magic is properly spread, are more additions necessary?

This isn't like any shade thrown at you, I think it's well written and super interesting and if the magic is being handled properly, it would probably be an amazing addition to the server. I guess I would like to be convinced it's wholly necessary? Not that I need to be convinced, I'm a normal pleb, not an LT. It would just put muh poor soul at ease, I suppose.

Totally legitimate concerns/questions posed here.

At the moment, I don't feel secure at all in the magic's current playerbase and this is a step in stabilizing so I can better build and establish a functional group that I'm confident will be able to go forward and keep the magic going in the proper spirit I intended once I'm ready to push it out of my hands. As it stands, I departed in  the magic's infancy, and never got beyond teaching anybody T2-T3 and developing the roleplay I wanted to with the students which is definitely something I made a mistake in doing. This is also something I wanted to include rather quickly after the magic was posted: the character I played and taught people on already looked this way and I want to chisel that element of RP into stone. As for the 'endgame' dilemma, I don't find it much of a problematic endgame, more of an aesthetic reward to people who commit their characters to the heart and soul of what the magic's about, because that's something I take as a personal philosophy with magic/endgame RP. People should be committed when they step into learning something like this, and not treat magic and endgames like sweets at a candy shop. Hope that's sufficient.

Sorry! Just had to assume it was made by the LT since it was never posted or submitted in a public place and the topic was just edited as so:

I'll edit the initial post now.

Intended to replace the LT-approved addition to my lore that enabled uncontrolled connection and teaching among Thallassians, the Drowned will also serve as an almost entirely aesthetic ‘endgame’ to Ketomancy roleplayers who want to commit their character to the magic.

The Drowned

“You do not drown by falling into the ocean: you drown by staying there.” - Old Craetaein adage

Murky is the water the Thallassian treads. Lovers of the sea and all things within it, they yet remain shorefolk: landwalkers in life and spirit. For Nerea, this does not do to see in her prized singers. To give the blessing of the ocean to others, one must embrace it in body, blood, and heart. To truly understand such as she does, one must Drown.

Drowning is not death. It is rebirth for those who undertake it, a second chance at a new life as one of the waves. To Drown is to give yourself entirely to Nerea and the sea you serve, and become one with them entirely. In order to do so, a few key things must be accomplished:

The Drowner must be an expert Thallassian and have learned all the hymns.

The Drowner must be fed the Brine produced by another Drowned.

Would-be Drowners are placed in a sarcophagus or some sort of container to hold their entire body and which can be sealed tight to prevent escape. It is usually wrapped in chains or other bindings to help keep the prison secure and to weigh it down. Once the Drowner is laid within for their final rest as a shorewalker, they are closed within and then lowered down by chain into a Mouth. A Mouth is simply the Thallassian’s term for a cavernous, secluded body of water that Nerea has connected to her home in the Black Depths. The descent is quick, and so is death. Drowning is not a peaceful death, however: tumultuous and violent, yet just like the ocean itself it bears resplendent life within. As the saltwater fills their lungs and breath leaves them in choking gasps, Nerea’s tender embrace grips them and they are forever changed by her magic. The coffin is pulled from the deep and dredged onto dry land once more, and so the Drowned emerges into the world. They are christened with a new title reflective of their personage. ‘The Drowned Sentinel’, for example.

Changed irrevocably, they gain the complexion of a sunken corpse with a somewhat surreal beauty: pallid flesh and milky eyes forever mark their body along with a shift of their hair colour towards marine tones of green and greyish-blue. Curiously, their hair itself seems to be in a constant state of ethereal drift, shifting and swimming about sluggishly as if it were always underwater. Beyond this, there are three key and distinct boons gained from the Drowning.

Drowned are able to breathe underwater. They may still be choked, suffocated, asphyxiated, but water is no longer a hindrance.

Drowned’s bodies no longer bear any blood, and instead Brine flows through their veins. They do not need to concentrate on using the Pelagia to turn their blood into Brine. This grants a second, stranger effect to the Drowned: Their mutations induced upon themselves through Anagennos no longer have any duration.

Drowned are able to create and implant Pelagia just as Nerea is. They are also able to strip another of their Pelagia by simply unmending the sutures and removing the coral heart.

Additionally, two key weaknesses are earned through the transformation.

Drowned are susceptible to magics that target impurities and imperfections in the soul.

Drowned are susceptible to great harm via radical changes in body temperature. Their watery lifeblood can be frozen or boiled with more ease than a blooded being.

Redlines:

- Drowned require a CA to play.

- Thallassos TA’s necessitate the teacher being Drowned to be valid. They are unable to connect anyone otherwise and cannot be teaching.

- Drowned are not any more durable, strong, or even physically weak than they would be otherwise.

- Drowned are not undead. Their souls are in a warped state of being induced by Nerea.

- Drowned cannot coincide with any other creature types/soul twisting magics. Fjarriauga, Wraiths, Wights, Shades are all examples of this.

- Drowned are thusly harmed by Ascended and Clerical magics.

38 minutes ago, OneGhoulyBoi said:

Because, again, Necromancy is a ******* candy shop. Hunter's giving it to everyone and ghouldom to every ******* idiot that comes across.
 

stop stealing skins

Just now, Evocress said:

 

Aspect energies is the same as druid energies. They're just another term for mana which I have seen being used by the druid community in describing the magic and how it's different from others; eg: void energies = mana from void.

 

The reason why I have written aspect energies is due to the druids not having a direct hand in the creation of the resin, being an aftermath. Then when I go into describing druid energies it is when the druid is directly tampering with the resin/amber.

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This is actually wholly incorrect, though.

Mana does not come from the Void-- it doesn't come from anywhere. It is an existent, corporeal part of the world we dwell in and is essentially the building blocks of existence itself: everything is made of mana. Mana is used when spellcasting as the body's fuel for the feats its undergoing, but to say people channel mana or get it from the Void or any other source is wrong.

 

You keep saying "druidic energies" or "aspect energies". These are very vague terms. What are they?

STOP  ! STOP  ! PST OPS  S TOP  TSOP STO p JOE LSTOP  STOP SO P DONT ******* DOSTP  

Just now, tavern_roleplay said:

says the man who wrote an entire convoluted diatribe describing how he can quench his katana in demon blood

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t. brainlet who didn't use the thesaurus right when looking for a bigbrain word

1 minute ago, tavern_roleplay said:

 

the post I made wasn't even targeting you, but okay

 

but for real, I think lotc lore these days relies on sounding cool while lacking any real content or original ideas. we have a ludicrous breadth of lore and none of it is more than a foot deep. there are hundreds of special creatures and now you can collect their blood to make magic swords or something. do these creatures rp having magic blood? I actually wouldn't know because the lore is too opaque.

 

the best fantasy writing reserves at least a little bit of realism and tries to juxtapose the magical against the mundane. it tries to make magic make sense in the loosest terms but doesn't leave an opening where readers would be just be puzzled by it. it creates a sense of mystery and a suspension of disbelief that lets ridiculous tropes like forging blood into swords slip by. lotc lore can't do anything like that because every other character is the incarnation of tahariae or an ascended lv100 planeswalker archmagus or something else, and nobody seems to have a problem with people being able to shoot lightning out of their hands or bring the dead back to life.

 

there is no gradient between magical and mundane on this server. there is nothing between "just some random dude" and "an actual demigod." magic is boring because it is the functional analogue of carrying a gun, it does not interact with non-magical characters besides to threaten or kill them. nothing dares to break that precedent because writing lore is essentially writing gun legislation. the lore team is petrified by the task of balancing everyone's magics against each other, and lore writers are trapped in a vortex of outdated lore and byzantine rules.

 

lotc lore is extremely stupid. people write it to alienate other players and make themselves more powerful. everything exists on arbitrary power levels that half of the server can't even claim to understand. it is overflowing with barely-thought out concepts and outdated arcana, and all of it is written in a language of bad fantasy clichés. 

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nice blog post

12 minutes ago, tavern_roleplay said:

man is it just me or has all of lotc's lore gotten really stupid 

thank you for yet another exceedingly insightful post of yours, i look forward to the next time you look for my name on the forums to comment on something i say i really appreciate the special attention uwu
 

12 minutes ago, Sir K Andruske said:

I don’t agree with the horror blood one. Why would horror blood have a painful effect on mages? Also horror blood isn’t supposed to last. When it is spilt or the horror dies the blood eventually dissipates. That is why it is a hard ingredient to use in blood magic despite its boons. 

Let's pretend it's an excessive amount of mana. Also, the blood is pretty quickly mixed with water, so we're also gonna say that watering it down and creating the mixture lets the blood remain there, albeit diluted and unsuitable for blood magic.

2 minutes ago, Jeiku said:

have you re-applied to the lt yet?

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yeah you commented on it

Here comes a quick bit I did that aims to provide some mundane and low-fantasy worldbuilding to some of the more 'normal' aspects of roleplay life. Ideally this should need no monitoring at all- death to applications and the bureaucracy involved. Run wild with some detailed blacksmithing roleplay.

~=~=~=~

The Beastsmith’s Arsenal: Fourth Age Forgery

“And by the heat of the fire I found him, swinging his hammer with such haste and vigor I thought it miraculous. Verily, he smithed at incredibly high speed.” -The Beastsmith’s Arsenal, Vol I., Foreword

All but forgotten are the drake-smiths of the First Age, their ironworks masked beneath the heavy and old layers of secrets and ash from the burning of each previous era. Steel and hearth and flame are not things easily buried, though, and so it was inevitable that their work would resurface elsewhere. While the scaled and crowned children of the Titan may have reclaimed the true heritage of their Dralachite, what became of the ancient language of the forge that the strongest of Man’s children knew so long ago?

The answer lay far over the seas and through the temperate storms of the ocean, upon the shores of a land called Aeldin, where monsters and men have a long and bloody history with one another. Deep within the halls of the Hexicanum, in the old forge of the Marked, an aged smith of the venerated beast-slayers claimed elder knowledge of the forging techniques long lost to the ebb of time. It would be Griffith of Gwynon, a member of the Hexicanum and a student of the old man’s, who put quill to ink and then to parchment and began scribing a text, to pass the techniques onward. Thusly, The Beastsmith’s Arsenal and its subsequent volumes were borne.

 

~=~=~=~

Volume I: Blood-Quenching

“It was a gorey place, reeking of blood: that odorous, coppery tinge in the air. Blood was kept by the barrelful. But for what?”
 

It is known among the beastsmiths that the blood of monsters has keen properties upon metal when forgeries are quenched within it. The recipe is simple: A barrel must be filled with three parts water and one part blood for an even balance, and so the mixture is still suitable for extinguishing the heat of tempered steel. Over years of experimentation, the effects of different monsters’ lifeblood upon weaponry and armor has been documented and still continues to be learned.

Dragonblood --- Sometimes the most difficult to collect, the blood of all dragonkin grants a noticeable heat resistance to steel. Not much damage is inflicted upon swords which are oiled and lit aflame.

Striga blood --- A rarer sort, striga blood acts as a sort of ‘blood thinner’: cuts inflicted with quenched weaponry bleed for longer, the blood flowing more freely.

Fjarriauga blood --- The chilled blood of the ‘frost witches’ simply gives a residual chill to metal. Though not the most practical in combat, it’s seen some use in keeping wine and ale cool.

Bryophite blood --- The saplike blood of the Bryophites grants a very weak poison to quenched steel. Wounds inflicted hurt a bit more.

Aengulic blood --- The holy folk of Aeriel and the Keepers of Xan possess a unique lifeblood within their veins that grants a shimmering, gilded appearance and often makes things appear more valuable than they are.

Infernal blood --- Opposite to Aengulic, the blood of the Inferi has been observed to give a darker, almost smoky tint to metal quenched within it.

Horror blood --- Mystical and otherworldly, the spilled blood of Voidal Horrors grants steel a unique pain inflicted upon those connected to the Void: the typical mage will feel more pain from the blow of a weapon quenched this way.

It must be explicitly noted that any attempt to mix blood with one another to produce layered effects is disastrously corrosive to the metal and will result in a ruined project.

~=~=~=~

Volume II: Ingot Infusions

“It was bizarrely religious the way he sat before the melting steel, and yet I myself could not help but marvel at the way the Dreadknight’s gauntlet bubbled and oozed into molten liquid. A machine of gore and war, reduced to slag.”

The invention and temperance of various alloys has remained a part of smithing knowledge and practices for centuries, though since the discovery of steel and bluesteel and their near-perfect practicality there has not been much ingenuity in the matter of ingots and material used during the forging process. The beastsmiths, however, through experimentation and the dangerous collection of various parts and trophies, have found a few pseudo-alloys by combining the remains of magical creatures and beings with their ingots during the smelting process. Just like with the techniques outlined in Volume I, mixing these effects proves disastrous for the metal.

Apelpinium --- A combination of the slagged armor from a fallen Dread Knight and any practical alloy. The addition of the once-mundane metal’s dark, eldritch infusions results in an odd alloy that is significantly heavier and denser than normal. The metal itself takes on a darker color as well, closer to black iron.

Ossitation --- Not an alloy itself, Ossitation is the use of magical bones of a particular sort (See: Compendium entries on Liches and Darkstalkers) by grinding them into a fine powder and dusting the line of the ingot mold before pouring slag. The result is a metal that does not easily chip or dull: while structural damage and the wear and tear of battle will still ebb away at it, the superficial lustre will remain pristine, almost idyllically so.

Petrite --- Perhaps the strangest of infusions in the slagging stage, Petrite is a result of the crushed and dusted remains of a Golem’s core being added to an ingot while it is being set. Whenever the metal is cool, it takes on a rough, almost stony texture to it and could be mistaken for rock itself though bears no structural improvements or weaknesses in comparison to unaffected metals.

~=~=~=~

Volume III: Mundane Techniques

The drake-knights of Gwynon use old dragonflame smithing practices to achieve their vibrant hues of red.

Alas, reader, you come to the least marvelous of all there is to read in The Beastsmith’s Arsenal. Outlined here is an ever-growing list of materials and techniques with much lesser effects to be used at your leisure and your own ingenuity. Experimentation is encouraged: perhaps you will discover properties and uses I overlooked when scribing this.

Draconic

Dragonhide, when tanned and cured into leather, makes for a sturdy material for grips. Dragonbone, while being dense and difficult to shape, rewards effort at chipping and carving it over a long time: It bears surprising flexibility, making it an interesting substitute for wood in weaponcrafting. ‘Dragonflame’ smithing is a technique adapted from the old work of the First Age Drakesmiths and simply refers to tempering metal for very long times at high heats in order to produce vibrant hues of red in steel.

Undead

Ghoulhide or the rotting skin of any undead being has proven entirely impractical and its use is not advised. However, the bones of fallen liches and darkstalkers have a keen durability and have seen use in weapon handles and ornamentation for armor.

Monsters

While the bestiary of known monsters in the world is far too vast to cover and detail the uses of all their bodies, let it be known that monster hide is a durable and suitable replacement for regular tanned leather in just about any situation. Utilize different textures and colors to achieve the desired appearance of your weapon’s grip. Monster bones have not proven any better than a regular animal’s in crafting purposes. The strung innards and hairs of monsters have also seen prolific use as bowstrings.

 

yeah i am responsible for this one .. . . . ... -,-

I'm not up to detailed snuff about how Shapeshifting magic functions, but knowing what I do about it, Tahariae's magic would not. It's like turning the soul back into clay and briefly reshaping it to be another animal, where Ferals turn into big furry doggyfuckers which are unnatural hybridizations between mortal and beast.

Just now, TheCritsyBear said:

What you're saying here is that their magic would harm them when transformed, whereas how it is currently they can't cross ( read: can, but not without silly 'groans' emotes ) wards even when in descendant form.

That's how it always should have been. If it was accepted lore in any other form it was an oversight and incongruent with existing lore standards.

1. Tahariae magic will harm them while mid-transformation/transformed. There's no way to skirt around that. Azdrazi superior forms are harmed because it's a metamorphosis (even temporary!) and a physical impurity, a flaw to the Descendant's form. 

2. No idea why Xan magic would've harmed them in the first place. It's pretty clear within its lore that it harms Dragonkin / dark things.

3. While the Feral affliction is a major twisting of the soul, I guess there's some dumb 'deity clause' in Ascended lore since they rewrote it? I'm not entirely certain about Patrons being considered under that, but I suppose there's room for a case to be made.

So Tahariae magic will harm Ferals, that's the end of it unless Tahariae magic itself changes.

sm fuckin H if its REALLY that much of a problem @y'all MT fuckers then wait a g d day