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[quote=Mikey;5262]Or more seriously, from whence do animus-beings get their emotional impetus, with no glands. D’glands?[/quote]
Actually an interesting point, but I’m going to prioritize the logical holes that are opening in my cheese and get to that question in a later book.
[quote=Iume;5264]So the reason why Hilda’s links to her illuminaries broke regardless of where she was (material or outer plane) was because they were SITO-O even though it was a mortal-immortal link rather than a direct connection to Tierhallon? In short the links inherited or were contaminated by her SITO and so they mimic it?[/quote]
Will say more once I read Giwdul’s thoughts and digest.
My first gut is this:
All the saints have an answering service, so to speak, they have, I believe, called it their Prayer Queue, so for example they spend a good part of their day going through their Prayer Queues. They also have alert qeues that give them an alert when someone is requisitioning mana above their pre-approved quota, the saint responds to this alert by reviewing the request (real time) and approving or disapproving the request.
All of this functionality is in Tierhallon. So, under normal conditions, everything is routed through Tierhallon, that’s where her Help Desk is located.
That’s prayer and prayer links.
Illumination streams however, run through the saints and then on up. However, once cut, they would have to be manually reestablished. So I think Hilda being in Freehold might be a problem.
Also as is already stated, priests can pull preapproved amounts of mana directly from the Outer Planes, it’s only for things above their quota that they have to route through a saint, or on an occaision like Nysegard.
Digesting all this in chunks
[quote=Giwdul;5258][b]Link Theory:[/b]Link data / facts / things to be explained:
1. A Link is a magical-energy cable connecting two points.
2. All types of Links are variations on this (#1) theme.
3. Magical links can conduct both mana and animus.
4. Magical links can be used for targeting spells, anchoring portals and other similar tasks.
5. Magical links can be used for many levels of communication and power sharing.
6. Magical links are not constrained by material reality (not limited to 3-dimensional space).
7. Magical links break when they are run from the outer planes to the abyss or vise versa.
8. Links can be protected from damage/tampering by placing insulating spells around the links. These insulating spells are called “ciphers”.
9. Various spells can interrupt/interfere-with a link. Some wards have this effect to some degree or other.
10. Links can be anchored to both physical items and souls. A Link can be anchored to a soul by one of two means:
1. Coercive binding spells.
2. Willing recipient.
11. When a link crosses out of material reality, it will appear to extend out from it’s anchor for anywhere between 5 and 50 feet before fading out of view (Assuming you are using wizard-sight or some variation of it).[/quote]Ciphers are not so much shielding spells as encryption. But that’s more of a point of view and how you look at them, could be either. It’s encrypted communication.
[quote=Giwdul;5258]
In the simplest terms, a Link can be thought of as a unidirectional, extra-dimensional, magical ‘tube’ through which mana and animus can flow. While links can conduct raw mana and animus (illumination streams), they can also be used to target spells such as Inter-dimensional portals and most other distance spells.
[/quote]The analogy I use today is that they are VPN tunnels through the internet. Or, in older computer parlance, the are “Sessions” something that web browsers simulate when you log into a site (in the old days they were true private/dedicated links)
Of course, I wrote the rules for this stuff around 1992 plus or minus. I had the Internet, but VPN’s weren’t so much. Dial up modem was probably a bit better.
I think of the link and it’s auto-keep up being like pings, or a “heartbeat” that says both sides of a session are present.
[quote=Giwdul;5258]
Links are not effected by distance, a link between two items 5 feet apart will not require extra power to maintain the connection if you move the two items 500 leagues apart. Once a link is created, it does not require further powering to maintain it.
[/quote]Yes, or very minimal with some types of links.
[quote=Giwdul;5258]
Link Fail-Over:
[/quote]
Agreed[quote=Giwdul;5258]
Note – STIO: When a link passes through the walls of a reality/plain, it picks up a small oscillating vibration from the interaction of the link and the boundaries of that space-time, this is the STIO (Space Time Interaction Oscillation) (need a cool name for this)(this is a hypothetical I came up with to explain the outer-plains → Abyss link breakage).
[/quote]
I like that.[quote=Giwdul;5258]
LL …..
[/quote]
This is excellent for the OOOTA (Oak Orks Of The Antilles) aka Demons in Space series that I plan to do.Love the Interdiction wards theory!
Great stuff. Now, I need to follow this where it goes! Will come back to this as soon as I’ve figure out how it plays out!
Thanks
I am sort of leaning towards cleaning up what we can, and then people having lots of questions and discussion on WTF happened and Why didn’t this happen, as they digest things in Book 4.
The whole routing and rerouting thing is something the avatars are not used to. So it’s new to them. And team D’Orc is also figuring it out. There will be questions.
Clearly though, Exador, Ramses and Lenamare (and probably Randolf) would understand this to explain it.
BTW your image didn’t show up, Giwdul. Image linking is a pain, but if you upload images to your albums (top links on right) you can then insert album images fairly easily.
And even more so for intergalactic distances!
I am actually excited to someday get to the OOOTA because there is a lot of very fun/unusual stuff going on out there in the border universes where technology dominates, but some magic does work. In particular shamanism and the gods work, animages work, but complex magic not so much.
The Orcs of Visteroth are also very interesting and we shall see a POV from Morok Death Stealer in this book. They are the Orc Jedi, dedicated to eradicating Unlife, who they consider the “Dark Side”
Obviously this is from a discussion point of view, no Disney/Lucas Films Intellectual Property or Copyrights will be infringed upon.
[quote=Giwdul;5283]Automatic re-connection of broken/severed links:
When the blocking influence is removed from between the two endpoints of a broken link, the link automatically re-connects. It is often asked, how does the link find the pathway to re-connect with itself? Following is an extract from a document containing a possible answer to this question:[/quote]I think there will be a lot of people with different answers, but what if: creation of a link does something similar to a quantum entanglement of the two objects. The Law of Contagion.
The two endpoints will seek each other out, however there are limits to their search potential for automatic reconnection.
If the blocking influence is removed and the same path is available they will reconnect via this path. However, if that path is not available, but there are alternate paths, someone must manually connect the objects along that path, essentially recreating the link.
Devices that can auto-reconnect know certain defined paths, these are the fail-over paths and the device will try each of those paths, if it cannot connect on any of those paths, then a user must come in and recreate the link along the newly available path.
So how about an ARC?
Avatar Response Center (or Console) or AARC Avatar Automated Response Center
It’s a box, an ark, a reliquary that’s linked into the main systems, and it is an avatars primary link point to the god pools and pantheon pools.
She is basically super linked to it, it functions almost as a part of her (like the Wand of Orcus) and is the principle holder of her links.Now, that will explain how she got cut off in the inferno.
In the case of the Interdiction. Suddenly all avatars are cut off from their ARCS, all connections are severed, even those local ones.
What the 5S team has to do in the wee hours is manually reconstruct all the links to the local priests to go to the avatars, these are massive consecration ceremonies or maybe a simple prayer in the presence of a local avatar by a priest.
So that’s what they are doing most of the morning, and that’s why they are tied to the chairs.
When they finally get outside, the first thing the archons have to do reconnect to their ARC and then work, for some time, reconnecting each local avatar to their arc, from themselves.
So: Once restored, the archons at the Isle of Doom are “routing” links from each avatar’s arc through themselves. Each priest connects to the avatars in the Citadel, they in turn connect to their ARC via the archon at Doom.
This is actually more complicated than the simple relay idea from before; it’s getting more detailed, but can explain a lot more.
The avatars are still very tied up, because normally their priests are routed directly to their ARC, but in this case, they have to route their priests to their ARC through the archon. So they won’t be at full operational power, but they will be a lot better off than before.
The key will be is to send down a relay archon and a team of avatars that aren’t tied to priests in the citadel, who can operate at full power, in this case, the Saint George types.
This will severely delay how soon the avatars can get into battle, and buy time for the SL to bring out the Doom Busters.
To be clear this is a celestial reliquary, in my original process it was more a big “mainfame” system, this is a bit more peer to peer.
However, I would bet that regular reliquaries on the material planes could/would have links to the ARC.
The prayer queues that are talked about in the books are basically these things, or at least these are the locus of the prayer queues. Hilda has set certain rules for various priests and this system automatically approves requests for mana, up to a certain point, beyond that threshold, the avatar gets a real time override alert for them to investigate and approve.
This is basically what happened to Stevos when Teragdor did his special ritual.
I’ve always had something like this in mind because otherwise, Saints/Avatars would be continuously barraged with requests and couldn’t function on a daily basis. They could never sleep, go to the bathroom (and by this I mean take a bath as Hilda does, since they don’t do #2 or #1, as that would be profane and blasphemous)
This just codifies it better so that we can understand what can and cannot be done and what happens in situations like this.
It also answers the Sentir Fallon question. He can go to the Abyss without alerting the entire multiverse.
avatars can either handle connections manually themselves (as they did in the old days) or they can delegate a connection to the AARC. But in all cases, they are in charge of the AARC.
Now this means that only the Illuminations streams inside the Interdiction are cut off. So what Sentir Fallon sees is going to be a bit different.
In the case of Beragamos and Tiernon; I assume those two have a personal link. As do the prophets/attending archons, and I would guess that all avatars have personal non-AARC links to their boss/subordinates/colleagues
[quote=Iume;5291]Does this mean that the link to a saint is established by a mortal linking themselves to a reliquary?If so, how are mortal links maintained to saints once the connection to the reliquary is cut?[/quote]
The mortal prays or a ritual is performed that links the mortal to the saint/the saints AARC depending on the saints schedule.
I see the AARC as basically a proxy device for the saint/archon. I am sure there are times when the saint is working in live mode, in fact for rank and file like Hilda, that’s probably her day job. But when she needs a break, rest, or special mission, she hands stuff off to the AARC.
Remember, saints almost never “answer” immediately in our world. In the case where mana is needed, the avatars would need an offload mechanism as well and get alerted if his/her attention is required.
And to be clear, not every pantheon/god/avatars would work exactly this same way.
[quote=GameGraphix;5241]The Storm Lords don’t know from where or how the priests & avatars are getting mana – so they don’t know of that there are others outside the interdiction…
but one way to get allies to withdraw forces / support from a your enemy is to threaten their base of operations or supply line – forces the ally to reassess their priorities on what is more important – their own resources or their commitment to their ally[/quote]
Exador made a guess as to what they are doing, so they have that.
I agree with the idea, I just don’t see it as being completely feasible for them at the moment, at least not with conventional resources.
Ant this is what I’m pondering, they need non-conventional forces at this point to pull their butts out of the fire.
So the questions are:
1) What unconventional force(s)?
2) Where to deploy?Now, true, they can threaten the Isle of Doom (presumably) but that won’t cause the avatars to retreat, they are relaying from all over the planet.
The problem is, this time around, they picked the wrong target to use their super magic on, due to Tom’s return to Nysegard and Hilda following him. They expected the 5S to be looking the other way when they pulled the interdiction and so just wipe out the citadel with no one the wiser.
They ended up doing it right while everyone was staring at the Citadel. [b][color=blue]Oops, The priests had their body camera’s on, and now everyone knows what the Storm Lords were doing, and no one likes it.[/color][/b]
Now they are rather screwed.
Hmm, that’s not inconsistent with one of the Lacuna’s and the shift in strategy I was planning for Sutekh and his allies.
[quote=Giwdul;5252]Getting the equipment to the battlefield is not a problem. They have been planning this for a thousand years or so right? They just need to pull out and set up the pre-fabricated runic gateway that leads back to the main arsenal. The one that was made a couple hundred years ago, stashed in the emergency-backup wagon, and forgotten about.[/quote]
That’s the spirit!
Now if I just knew what that thing was!
Yes,
I’d been thinking about a summoning of an Eldritch Horror, but some super beast they have locked in their dungeons might be a lot better.
Great line of thought!
Yes, that’s really been the problem all along for him. Even as a simple Greater Demon. Some people were like “where’s the romance?”
And I’m like, “He’s been in a strange world, in a strange body, hated by half the people he meets, the other half are nuts, and it’s only been a month. Getting a date is not his first priority.”
It’s very hard to focus on romance when you’re life is in complete chaos and you fear you are losing your mind.
Now, true, some great romances are sometimes spawned in such times, but those are typically between experienced adults that are otherwise very competent and confident. However, many of those don’t last either.
