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[quote=LCSpartan051;5244]Hows it looking on the next beta?[/quote]
See discussion in Beta 0 Released as to how the battle should proceed.
[quote=Giwdul;5254]So, I was trying to hash out (in my head) some specifics on how links work and I realized that there is a problem:
Hilda is in Freehold with Trisfelt when the Inferno crosses into the Abyss. Hilda says “my links have just been cut”. Since Hilda was located on Astlan at that time, her links to her illuminaries should not have been cut when they crossed into the Abyss.
At that point, she would have been operating as a link-relay between them and Tierhalon.[quote]Hilda tilted her head to the side, frowning. “I am not sure…” Noticing Trisfelt’s concern, she shook her head. “Sorry, no, I myself am fine. I just have some links to some of my patients and those links were just broken.”[/quote]
Possible solution 1:
Have Hilda be in Tierhalon when the Inferno cross into the Abyss. She looses all contact.Possible solution 2:
Have Hilda sense that something just changed with her links. She then goes to report and looses the links to her illuminaries on Inferno the instant she reaches Tierhalon.
[/quote]Nargh. This is interesting. It wasn’t so obvious before the whole relay thing came up. But it’s pretty damn obvious now.
Regardless of where she is when they go down they should come back when she’s on the material plane, people should be able to relay power to priests in the Abyss using avatars in the material planes….
Snargle.
Thanks
[quote=Giwdul;5257]Question:
When Ruiden was in Murgatroy, he “sensed Talarius’ presence” and ran to find the portal. How did Ruiden sense Talarius’ presence?
Ruiden has a link to Talarius. That link should have been up and working throughout HH.Possible answer 1:
Ruiden’s link to Talarius re-routed through the portal that Tom had created. This would give Ruiden a path to the portal.
Problem:
If links auto-reroute through available portals, the illumination streams of the Avatars and priests at the Citadel would have auto-rerouted through Tom’s runic gate the second he opened it.
Also, whenever someone opens a portal to the Abyss, every bound demon near the Abyss end and every Conjurer near the Material end would find their links auto-rerouted through the portal (Conjurers: “WTF??!!”; Demons: “Whoopee!!”).Possible answer 2:
Ruiden was able to detect the portal (or Tom) via his super-perceptions.
Problem:
This doesn’t explain how he was able to sense Talarius’ presence from Murgatroy.Question:
Sentir Falon has traveled to the Abyss on multiple occasions without being caught by the other avatars or Tiernon. Sentir Falon is a high ranking avatar with a lot of important links to important people. When he travels to the abyss, these links should, normally, be cut and that should be noticed by someone in Tierhallon. Why isn’t this happening?Possible answer 1:
Sentir Falon created a small portal from the Abyss to one of the material plains and threaded all of his links through it while he was in the Abyss.Possible answer 2:
Sentir Falon built himself some type of link-relay gizmo on the material plains that allows him to maintain his links while in the abyss.[/quote]These I have thought about before.
Typically most standard links do not cross planes. Not unless they are built to do so, like demon links and avatar links/illumination streams.
So Talarius/Ruiden’s links don’t cross planes. My intention was that with the portal open, and Ruiden there, his link was able to reestablish quickly because there was also short distances.
Plus, links, normal ones, don’t just automatically reset, unless that has been set up, but that costs mana. So you have to “try and reestablish a link” once it’s possible to connect again. Think of it like a vpn or dial up modem, if the link goes down, it will try to reconnect, but eventually give up until told to reconnect again. The Wand is a link hub and is designed to do things like auto-failover. normal people/avatars aren’t.
Ruiden was always continuously pinging Talarius.
As for the other portals, my answer previously in HH was, and still is, those portals aren’t up long enough for any autoconnection, unless one of the parties is right next to the portal.
Thus, if a deity was purposefully watching a certain area for a portal to open, they could try to connect and would eventually succeed, assuming the portal stayed up. But it’s unlikely that they would/could be doing that. They are not omniscient by any stretch.
This is also the problem with the Interstellar links, yes you might be able to link to something in a nearby star system, but you have to know where it is, or spend a very long time searching. Much like a radio signal from aliens, you have to look in the right direction at the right time, and links are not quite as dispersive as radio waves.
As for Sentir Fallon, I’m assuming he’s figure a way, a device to tether his links and then he shields himself heavily in the Abyss, since technically he should not be there, unless invited, which he sort of is by Lilith, who, of course, can’t admit to inviting him. But could if forced to by the Tribunal.
Exador recreated the DA’s work using Lenamare’s work.
It’s a very terrifying information, that the powers that be are not going to like. And yes Stainsberry is going to be reporting this.
It’s very dangerous because it makes it [i][b]relatively[/b][/i] straightforward to kill gods.
If you could run a variant of Lenamare’s wards, with this much power for plane stopping, it would cause problems. Fortunately that would take a lot of power and be very unstable, hard to keep going.
This is why in Lenamare’s case, he can’t stop everything at once. The power and complexity of keeping something like that going is nearly impossible. Even with the bigger wards in Freehold which can do much more complex things than his school’s could
Now the beacons are even more precarious because they are beacons and have no runic pentacle under them.
As it is, Exador and Ramses are concerned about the ships getting out of alignment and breaking the circle.
If I were the tribunal, I’d like to have those with the knowledge of how to do this either destroyed or tossed down a very deep pit, never to be seen or heard from again.
[quote=Mikey;5223]About the missing D’Orcs… could they still be inside the Doomalogues, but in suspended animation to generate mana for the force fields that keep Net’s people out? Maybe Dis as well, and he was recently killed by a power surge?[/quote]
Anything is possible, but the battle was not actually that close to the Doomalogue, Orcus was in the process of plowing the elves and their allies into the ground on their home territory. Or something like that.
[quote=GameGraphix;5226]Some early morning thoughts / questions….
[list][*]Why is Tom in hand-to-hand combat in the battle??? He does have access to mana, so he could be doing some animagic(sp) – or at the very least take on the form of the Living Flame like he did in the first book – this would be an effective form to use to battle undead and ice dragons. We haven’t seen Tom perform any animagic during the book, like bk1 or bk2.
[/quote]The living flame would be very good against zombies, ghouls and vampires. True.
It’s not that useful against liches. They are so cold that it takes a lot of fire, and lightning doesn’t work on them. However, he should be trying these things to learn them. Will do that.Here is my thinking on the others:
He felt, and thinks in the book, that the zombies are low enough level that others can deal with them, while he takes on bigger threats, like the Zombie dragons. My intention is to add more of this in the continuing battle scene.
He doesn’t really want to go against the ghouls, yet, because they are people, sick people and if you walk through them in the form of flame, you are going to have a very very unpleasant situation with burning flesh, screams of agony as they run around burning to death. So, I’m thinking Tom, the 17 year old doesn’t want that.
Yes, they are all horrible, vampires too, but I think he hasn’t yet, accepted how truly evil these creatures are.
[quote=GameGraphix;5226]
[*]Some one mentioned the need for the transition scene for Tom before the battle….could be interesting to have a “suck it up buttercup, it’s time to put on the big boy pants…you have a lot of people depending on you,…you’re the only one that can do it” scene….and it would be interesting for Talarius to give the slap around the face for the following reasons:[list]
[/quote]
Yep.
[quote=GameGraphix;5226]
[*]Now that Talarius knows how demons are created and that Tom is only 17, he has been treating he more like a human….I’m sure that Talarius has had to mentor/train young men as Spires or Knights-in-Training, especially before a battle….this would be something that he would have done before
[*]It could also act as an epiphany for himself to get through some of his own self doubt that he has been struggling with[/list][/list]
[/quote]
Yes, not sure if I can get that squeeze in here, but going forward that is part of the plan.[quote=Iume;5227]If the interdiction went up w/ the a doomalogue inside wouldn’t the doomalogue’s connection to the Abyss be cut? If the interdiction becomes common you would just need to put Tommus and the local doomalogue inside the interdiction. Then they’d be trapped until Orcus gets outside the interdiction’s perimeter. If he tried to send an D’Orc it would fail, right? Since the chain of links goes Tom -> wand -> Abyss or Doomalogue -> Abyss. Based on what has been described he is unable to route Mt. Doom through a D’Orc since it seems they can’t draw on it directly like an avatar can with a godpool.[/quote]
Yes, if the interdiction surrounds the doomalogue it would be cut off.
What Tom/Orcus would have to do is get the D’Orc outside and then do what he did with Tal Gor and work with the D’Orc to create a link to Doom. Possessing the D’Orc he could create a link, bind it to the D’Orc and strengthen his link.
Now, you’d probably want a pretty strong D’Orc to funnel mana through, but you could do it.
We are going to want to go into more detail on who can access the power of doom. The warlocks and shamans can do so through Tom, presumably any mana using D’Orc could do the same.
And it’s not clear, yet, that some of the senior D’Orcs can’t do it as well. We just haven’t seen that yet. But we will get a glimpse with Morok Deathstealer in battle. He is an animage specializing in the martial disciplines. Kinetomastery, Body Mastery, Spatiomastery, and Temporamastery.
[think jedi or sith given appearances]Yes, because I’ve been obsessing all the other very good/important issues that you guys have raised.
I am not completely surprised, I’ve had very mixed feelings on that Citadel siege and the battle in particular.
Just can’t seem to get it “right” I’ve actually been pondering it for some time, that was a lot of my hesitation in writing the other stuff since Alpha-0, my obsession on knowing exactly what to do for the battle.
One question for people:
How much overall time should be spent on the battle for the entire book?, how detailed should it get/can it get before it becomes a chore.
I’ve read a lot of battle scenes that can start to wear one down, trying to avoid that, but yet make it sufficiently serious/difficult/potent. Not a cakewalk.
The thing is, the Storm Lords pulverized the cities on the Isle of Doom. So they have some heavy artillery to bring to bear–if they were prepared for such a battle, and I am not sure they are. I don’t think they brought their D’Orc smashing equipment. They were relying very heavily on the beacons to cut off the priests and then use traditional air and ground troops.
Now they are in trouble. Do I let them pull out the heavy stuff, the stuff they probably wouldn’t have lugged half-way around the world?
This is the sort of thing that can make this battle much bigger and difficult. But it will take up more space.
And I’m OK, with going over the space limits I’ve imposed, if the paperback has to cost more, it does. But I don’t know how much people will enjoy spending so many pages on the same battle.
[quote=Iume;5234]There is an easy way to save space. Unless you have something else to write with the various Orc clans heading to their local doomalogues you can just cut most of it out and rewrite it into more of a tell than show. Similar with Vaselles POV. At this point those journeying aren’t adding much emotion to the tale and they dilute any suspense for what is building on Nysegard. [/quote]
Yeah, I’m thinking if I need the space, it would be a very short scene of
Trevin: “Ariel agrees”
Zargvarst: “OK, Grove interlocuter, you verify, you give us your word they gone, we sit here while you verify.”And scene…
[quote=GameGraphix;5235]The Storm Lords know that Tom / Orcus is in the fight…and they know that Tom’s staging area was the Isle of Doom – instead of bringing their big guns own to the Citadel to fight….they could try to get Tom to withdraw by threaten the Isle of Doom with the big guns…..we then have a fight at two locations and Tom and Co. having to co-ordinate between the two…[/quote]
Only problem with that is that they can’t get their forces to the Isle of Doom in any short period of time. Most of their available fighting forces are at the Citadel, they are also spread out covering their occupied territory.
They are spread rather thin.
They’ve got about 300,000 troops deployed, now yes a lot are zombies, but the limit is how many necromancers do you have to control them.
Now, that’s basically the same number of troops that the US deployed at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I believe including mercenaries. Typically it was on the order of about 200,000 actual troops, the numbers are complicated.
They also have to hold down a big chunk of the planet.
Not sure they have easily deployable resources, plus there is staging and travel time. They don’t even have any intelligence on the ground on the Isle of Doom because they did not know Orcus was back. (or if they do, communication is very slow) So they don’t know what forces he has there (turns out Sekmekt, Phaestus and their avatars are there–which they don’t know, but Sphinxes can easlily crush their armies)
I doubt they could even do anything against the Isle in less than a week, just from staging and transportation.
Now, they could, of course, do a smaller force of massive power (Yog Sothoth anyone? –no they can’t really do that—but they could do an eldritch abomination of some sort, I do have one in mind)
But then it might be more effective and safer, to go big here at the Citadel.
[quote=Burien;5230]I had noticed that book 1 had a Tom+Jenn feel,then book 2 Jenn+Gastrope felt a little forced. I dont see anything in this one except Gastrope’s constant fear of Jenn finding out how much he is hiding from her. Just too many trust issues to make that relationship work, I dont think it would ever not feel forced to me. Jenn just hasnt been around enough of the Toms poeple to find out how wrong she is about him. One good trip to doom could fix that, or the Astlan doomalogue when it opens.[/quote]
Yeah, she’s coming up an epiphany, I’ve got more scenes with her, Gastrope’ and Tal Gor, just not sure how much space I’ll give that story in this book. I know I have to do a scene about Ariel’s answer, how much more happens, the mental addition of 2+2=epiphany? Not sure how the space will look for that in this book.
I really was going for Jenn & Tom in Book 1, but felt that her prejudices would be too much to overcome, but on the other hand Gastrope’ might not be right either. They’ve both got some growing up to do, some developing.
I actually cut out some stuff on them in Book 2, not sure, at this point (based on what I remember) how much it might have seemed to help.
I really do not know what is going to happen on the romantic side. In large part because we are only like 2 earth month’s in on these people knowing each other, at a max.
I’ve also put some other feelers out there for Tom, including Zelda and Tamarin, but to date, not feeling it. I’m starting to feel like a dating service….D’Harmony or something like that.
The only couple that rather works for me is Hilda and Trisfelt, but it’s sort of a January December romance….and then what faith would they raise the baby half-saints in? and etc? :d/
[quote=EyeDeKay;5237]Hmm sense Hilda is two hundred plus years old does and trisfelt I can’t remember but presumably less then 50 years old. Does that count as cradle robbing?
[/quote]
Absolutely! That’s what I mean by January-December romance. Normally the term is “May-December” (because May is spring,and you’ve got a spring chicken)
But this is a bit more extreme, and I think she’s 400 years old, don’t recall now, on the timeline though.
[quote=LCSpartan051;5161]I think that the whole interdiction think should happen much closer to sunset. Perhaps the avatars were planning some sort of massive holy mana blast that required the unlife to be within a certain range, but then they were cut off just when they needed it most. This would allow the fighting to get pretty heavy without allowing too many people to realize the philosophical implications of being cut off. Perhaps this would be when someone from Hilda’s group dies, or comes very close to death before Tom shows up. He could then toss the nearly dead person into the abyss(one of the rooms in the Mortal Suite) and thus save their life and earn Hilda’s goodwill(maybe). The moat would prevent them from being instantly overwhelmed.
I have an idea about fixing the whole “The inter-planar interdiction shouldn’t affect links between different planets” thing. What if instead of making the spell an “Inter-planar link-breaker”, what if it just exponentially increased the mana required to form a link/gateway from the current location to anywhere outside the spell. A “Local” gate would require significantly less energy than a gate between planets/planes. Perhaps this is also why none of the avatars can use any of their links priests outside of the interdiction to act as an anchor for a gate since they couldn’t muster the mana for creating a gate to them. Also, Tom’s links would go through the gateway, not through the air. The gateway to the Nysegard Doom could act as a “Window” to outside the Interdiction. Creating the gateway in the first place would be very strenuous for Tom, but he has the full resources of Mount Doom to call upon.[/quote]
Just got back to this.
I am going to move around the fighting, for one thing, it’s not just that the Unlife are testing during the day, they are still setting up camp and digging in. So they don’t have the resources to devote to full attack.
However, since they are most vulnerable during the day, and while setting up, I would argue that they would want the interdiction up during the say as they setup camp and assembled their siege engines. They will have brought a lot of prebuilt parts for siege engines, but they would have been too slow and awkward to bring fully assembled.
As for your link suggestion. That is exactly what I did. The mana requirement for a link to go through interstellar, or inter-galactic distances is far far greater than going through other planes (such as the Astral plane–which is how Shamans on Starships communicate over such distances)
Because links are interplanar by default, they will take the cheapest, lowest mana route to their destination. Going through real space is too costly. Specifically, I say that if he needed to force an interseller link he’d need to be able to concentrate and expend a lot of mana, hard to do in battle, however, an intergalactic link would require some magical artifacts to act as transmitters/boosters etc.
Thus Orcus, probably not even knowing where the other worlds were in real space didn’t have time to try and force localverse links.
[quote=fallen_one_84;5162]jacque sparrow was he from a mana rich world?
maybe romdan?
since it says some where in the book that the gods remake their favorite time periods on each of their worlds.
may be pirates of the Caribbean happened on romdan.will the black pearl show up?[/quote]
My head is still spinning with the plot suggestions. [lol]
Not clear, I was thinking about this. Technically, he probably should have been the Prophet rather than attending archon. We really don’t know yet where archons come from vs saints. I think they are basically saints after their first phoenix cycle.
I find it more plausible that jacquesparrow decided to go on vacation and incarnated as the captain of the black pearl. Maybe every thirty thousand years or so he incarnates on a different world and does variants on PoC. Sort of like people who vacation in West World.
Except the other characters are real people, not androids.
