Theory Crafting

Welcome To Astlan Forums Into The Abyss Theory Crafting

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  • #2771
    Maou
    Member

    Wizards lack objects to store great quantities of mana. To store a large quantity of mana one needs animus, and animus is found around life. The more experienced and intelligent the lifeform the better. People however don’t like enslaving the souls of others solely to make better items, however egoswords are somewhat tolerated, provided they gave consent.

    Blood magic is the most powerful. By that I mean if you wish for a truly devastating spell or item, you need to sacrifice something, so either you sacrifice yourself, which is commended, or you sacrifice others, which is reviled. A pragmatist would do the later on a field of battle. A hero or fanatic would do the former. Pragmatist are more numerous, but fanatics are more tolerated. It’s just difficult to collect and retain animus as it often naturally tries to disperse once removed from its body.

    Certain items can channel and retain mana better than others, but animus could still improve these, so it’s relative.

    #2767
    Rosver
    Member

    My mind just go bust with all the things you are discussing.

    #2756
    Tizzy
    Member

    You are mean, think about the poor author! Although I do have very little sympathy for the bozo transcribing my story.

    If you don’t have time travel to fix all the implausibilities, mistakes and oversights in your work you end up looking like you slapped the book together in a matter of hours just to get a quick buck!

    Now, of course, that’s probably true if you have such things, but you don’t want it to [i]look[/i] like it.

    So my point is, Time Travel is required to fix sloppy writing. Just like dream sequences (it was all a dream!) are required when authors back themselves into a corner which they’re not smart enough to get out of plausibly otherwise (which seems to happen a lot on TV)

    #2753
    Iume
    Member

    Okay, so, …

    I’m re-re-re-re-reading this book again (WTF makes it so addictive?) and I’m picking up on new details here and there which lead to me speculate on certain things. What are your opinions on these theories? Anyone have others to share?

    – Tom’s demon weed came from a guy who smoked an old-fashioned pipe. Was it Tizzy in disguise?
    – Do Rupert and Tom have the same father?
    – Tizzy only pretends to be crazy. Maybe he is Concordenax is disguise or one of his chief agents.
    – The book everyone is after contains all of the true names of demons (princes & archdemon’s too). This book is why Concordenax was able to be #1. Perhaps he created / bound the earliest & most powerful demons or was just really, really good at getting information.

    Also, this next is a a silly WAG. I don’t really think this, but hey – why not?
    – Tom is a pre-Concordenax being who goes back in time, grabs a whole lot of divine mana, become Concordanax, recruits Tizzy, and instructs Tizzy to ensure events come to pass, i.e., make Tom a demon.

    #1141
    Iume
    Member

    Conspiracy ahoy!

    #2754
    Tizzy
    Member

    :-”

    Clearly, the only idea here that could remotely/possibly be true is the last one.

    The others are just too far fetched!

    But the last one, the pre-concordenax things, that’s got a serious ring of plausibility to it.

    After all, isn’t every SF/Fantasy story better with Time Travel?

    I mean think how boring Dr Who would be without time travel? It would just be a nutter living in a police box!

    #2755
    Korwin
    Member

    [quote=Tizzy;312]:-”
    After all, isn’t every SF/Fantasy story better with Time Travel?
    [/quote]
    I disagree!
    The only time Time Travel is good for an SF/Fantasy story is, when it is an story about time travel (from the beginning).

    #2757

    So, the last bit about tom going back in time did seem likely but I would like to elaborate on what I think would happen, tom either gets shunted back in time by Ramses or Ramses teaches tom to do so on his own, tom then becomes the concordenax ( did I spell it right?) And disappears to become teirnon ( did I spell that right? No? Sorry.) Or the same thing happens except its tiernon that shunts tom back in time and tom does or does not become tiernon.

    #2758
    Tizzy
    Member

    Now, this theory is starting to sound like one of the author’s D&D campaigns…one that went on for about 6-7 years..

    By the end, this sort of stuff was getting rather common. There was one wizard Mooo where the player came late to the campaign so just showed up at level 7 with a very vague back story

    Several years later, he was like 23rd level, and had an apprentice, Looo, who coincidentally was 7th level when he failed his saving throws and was sucked down a wormhole.

    Oddly enough he emerged from it in the past, and needed to take a ship, and found a (flying) ship with the other campaign members on it back when they were 7th level, so he just called himself “Mooo” and thus looped himself.

    Which is why when he became Archimage of the local Guild, he would refer to himself as Mooo the Mobius Magi of Might based on the idea of a Mobius strip.

    But that was pretty much par for the course for this wizard, who was at some point turned into an intelligent crown and so had his apprentice wear him and thus “possessed” the apprentice. Which was fine up until a Mind Flayer accidentally teleported inside the central crystal that was Mooo…

    So anyway, my point (me, Tizzy) is that you shouldn’t give the author guy ideas like this.

    He’s all too likely to be tempted.

    But he’s already heard from a lot of readers who’ve threatened to throw rotten e-apples at him if he tries to do something like that.

    #2759
    Rosver
    Member

    Time travel. I actually hate many of these time travel stories. The author seems to use time travel recklessly that it became cheap. Others try to use it as very fancily, often to the absurd.

    Not to tell that there aren’t time travelling stories I do like. Those often use it sparingly or simply.

    After all, you really don’t need this time travell stuff to have an exciting and interesting story.

    #2760
    Maou
    Member

    Would it be possible for the same person to be summoned from multiple splinter realities or to have a relative from a splinter reality summoned after one of the branch points. While it is true that you could not visit any reality apart from the main stabilized realities, it could still be possible to summon souls from less stable realities before they collapsed due to a small difference as the loss of one soul in most instances wouldn’t change the grand scheme of things. This could be used to summon more souls than should exist. It might even allow somebody savvy enough to realize they could possibly some multiple variants of their soul to empower themselves giving them more energy as they collapsed in themselves.

    Just a theory mind you as two souls that were identical at their creation should be able to merge without incident and would likely have a positive effect.

    #2761
    Korwin
    Member

    [quote=Maou;684]Would it be possible for the same person to be summoned from multiple splinter realities or to have a relative from a splinter reality summoned after one of the branch points. While it is true that you could not visit any reality apart from the main stabilized realities, it could still be possible to summon souls from less stable realities before they collapsed due to a small difference as the loss of one soul in most instances wouldn’t change the grand scheme of things. This could be used to summon more souls than should exist. It might even allow somebody savvy enough to realize they could possibly some multiple variants of their soul to empower themselves giving them more energy as they collapsed in themselves.

    Just a theory mind you as two souls that were identical at their creation should be able to merge without incident and would likely have a positive effect. [/quote]

    Did you read “Deja Vu Ascendancy”?

    #2762
    Maou
    Member

    No, but splinter realities in some instances have parallel versions of yourself. This changes in some interpretations to include all parallel world, but in this one it seems to be only a major event would change the general course of a world. Tom’s death could in theory be a minor event that got swept up by the primary timeline as he only died because he went to the party and he might not have gone in some instance. Stretching things a bit their, but people could die in splinter realities, but due to most iterations of themselves living they might go on, I am not an expert in parallel world so I won’t go into more detail.

    A major event that causes a schism would result in two near identical worlds, and it would take a generation for the identical beings in both worlds to die off. For all I know due to Earth being a magic wasteland it might be hard to access the astral plane from the primary reality and only a slightly unstable and collapsible side reality might allow it. If Tom wasn’t snatched it is highly likely he would have thought himself to have been quite high and that he wasn’t smoking Mary Jane, but for all intents and purposes would likely not visit the astral plane again. The summons of the wizards might even have resonated with his reality and called him.

    All this could be true, or it could be mad ramblings. My thought was merely that a reality without any significant magic would protect the soul of its inhabitants. Astlanians wouldn’t think to try and then use the demon to call out an identical soul. Demons wouldn’t have the knowledge or the drive to see if they could summon themselves as people all assume that if they were taken that they will be gone from their old world entirely, and some of them might in fact be the main version and a minority could be from side realities or vice versa.

    #2763
    Tizzy
    Member

    I think it’s really a question of how recent the splinter reality happened, and how different the alternate being was.

    There are minimum resolution levels in splinter universes to which one can connect.

    So you can’t connect to too close a splinter cell from the one in which you have an affinity. I.e. once you find a version of a plane, you nearly always end up going back to that plane since your splinter gets aligned to that splinter.

    So, my guess would be that if you had two Earths, and a person born in 1990. Then 9/11/2011 had escalated to a nuclear war, changing things dramatically, after a period of time, say 10 years the divergence would be greater the resolution limit and you could could fetch someone from boths splinters.

    This is just speculation on my part. I am not an expert. It’s a guess/theory.

    #2766
    Tizzy
    Member

    Hmm, interesting…

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