The Arx Secrets Thread
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I remember very clearly being told not to look into some information/secrets of Esme. So Esme did what any good, God-fearing zealot would do.
She smiled. Said of course.
Then in secret became a legendary occultist to understand the secret/information better. Being shot down IC (and a bit OOC) just branched her story in a new way.
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@Wizz Well, you see… if nobody else is investigating their own secrets, that leaves the STs free to only do plot for the folks who are tricking others into not investigating!
My insane work schedule didn’t help, and I shouldn’t expect people to drop everything and answer my stuff now, but needing to find an ST to run plot and then the wait list didn’t help keep my squirrel brain focused on the MU. There was lots of ‘oh that’s cool’ and ‘we should meet to talk about things’, but actually putting plans into motion… I could never really commit at the right time, in the right way.
When I’m not bogged down at work, I’ll go dig up the secrets for Ysbail as far as I understood them, but any deeper meaning beyond it is anyone’s guess.
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@RightMeow I feel this. I was often warned off of trying to dig in to reincarnation stuff as Azova. And the last thing I wanted to do was cheese it and try to get an NPC to tell me. I regret not taking that leap, honestly.
Until the very end, it was a pretty pervasive thing it feels like, to discourage people even if it was just IC. Only so many times an avenue of rp is closed off before you give up OOC as well.
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The IC discouragement (provided it was just IC, which, sigh) made total sense with a lot of secrets, but could definitely get overwhelming and if people were already hesitant about digging into metaplot, it was really easy to accidentally push them into shying away from it. It’s definitely something that needs to be considered going forward, even if Arx 2 ends up not having character secrets (if it does, they’ll probably be handled differently anyway), or on any game with a similar idea.
That said, there are very few things that irked me more than players putting OOC pressure on other players to stay away from their own plot hooks.
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@Rinel said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
I was JUST informed Arx ended. A round of applause. Truly. It was an immense effort, and it looks like it paid off wonderfully.
Rinel’s FIRST secret was that she could access a secret room in the Labyrinth that contained a book that was being constantly updated–possibly by Vellichor? I don’t know. But I was too scared to do anything with it, and so I never did any actions, and that ended up spiralling into Rinel getting removed from the Scholars and banned from the Labyrinth. Staff was kind enough to give her a second secret, which was:
…I don’t remember. I think it was magic. She did the cleansing ritual and got told to fuck off by the Gods for her various and sundry heresies, which had a pretty profound impact on her mental health, and she ended up going down the path of the druids, for a bit, while still worshipping the Gods in her own heretical ways.
I loved that character; I loved Arx. I’m glad it concluded instead of winding down into inactivity. Stories are always better when they have an end, no matter how sad.
There will always be a little bit of Rinel Tern in me, and I’m genuinely grateful for it.
Yeah, a quick glance at her original secret was that Vellichor was sending her information.
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@kalakh said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
@Rinel said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
I was JUST informed Arx ended. A round of applause. Truly. It was an immense effort, and it looks like it paid off wonderfully.
Rinel’s FIRST secret was that she could access a secret room in the Labyrinth that contained a book that was being constantly updated–possibly by Vellichor? I don’t know. But I was too scared to do anything with it, and so I never did any actions, and that ended up spiralling into Rinel getting removed from the Scholars and banned from the Labyrinth. Staff was kind enough to give her a second secret, which was:
…I don’t remember. I think it was magic. She did the cleansing ritual and got told to fuck off by the Gods for her various and sundry heresies, which had a pretty profound impact on her mental health, and she ended up going down the path of the druids, for a bit, while still worshipping the Gods in her own heretical ways.
I loved that character; I loved Arx. I’m glad it concluded instead of winding down into inactivity. Stories are always better when they have an end, no matter how sad.
There will always be a little bit of Rinel Tern in me, and I’m genuinely grateful for it.
Yeah, a quick glance at her original secret was that Vellichor was sending her information.
I can only imagine his reaction as she continued being herself.
“SHUT UP AND READ THE BOOK WHY ARE YOU TALKING NO STOP THAT ALL OF THAT IS WRONG JUST READ THE BOOK”
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Over the course of Arx, I had several bits that didn’t really stick and one that only sort of did. That was mostly due to environment, but his Secret was also really neat.
As an aside about that environment part, when I was having trouble finding a good place to be, it was suggested that I consider the Laurent family. That was a good decision and essentially all the folks I encountered there were welcoming and pleasant and not at all pushy. Many kudos. But this is the Secrets Thread.
So, I made an OC and requested a Secret, which was the style at the time, and got a super interesting one, but one that was closely tied (in my mind) to the Actions system that would eventually gum up because of huge numbers of requests. I’m sure that a more persistent and/or more creative player would have found a way around that, but I didn’t.
Naka Laurent had an ability to study an existing Clue and reveal more to it that had previously been hidden. He learned through RP that there was a Ritual that had a similar effect, but he could do it without any obvious preparation, just by spending his time looking at the Clue and considering it. I used most of his Actions to do this and only found a couple Clues, here and there, that it didn’t work on. Usually I’d direct him to those Clues that had obvious redacted portions, were surviving fragments of larger works, and so on.
So, those players who felt that Clues changed sometimes were correct. I wasn’t necessarily the only one doing it, but I was someone who was.
Naka was kind of a generic bumbling Scholar with only a few friends who would go to tea and collect a fat check from House Laurent for just existing. And, then, occasionally, he would, also without great personal effort, “force” staff to go back and add more to the lore. It was great fun, but also added a great deal of work, and, as it became more and more obvious that staff were greatly overworked and I couldn’t put my finger on that workaround that would go without putting in more Actions, I just kind of drifted away from the game.
And I do want to be clear that I never got a single hint of a complaint or hesitation about it. It was a personal decision to step back and, then, one day, I just never logged in again. I didn’t know for sure that that was my decision until weeks after.
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@CUmush Naka was a delight!
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@CUmush Hi! I played Cristoph, me and Mabelle’s player were just talking about how great you were.
Naka WAS a delight.
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@CUmush LOVED Naka!!!
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Ok wait actually I have two questions because I’m legitimately curious:
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what the HECK was the deal with Driskell Stillwater
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what was the nature of the Thirteenth? Was it a divinity of its own accord, or some sort of natural rule of the universe, a mirror through which the gods were reflected, or both?
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@Rinel said in The Arx Secrets Thread:
Ok wait actually I have two questions because I’m legitimately curious:
- what the HECK was the deal with Driskell Stillwater
He was a PC whose player made up a bunch of stuff.
- what was the nature of the Thirteenth? Was it a divinity of its own accord, or some sort of natural rule of the universe, a mirror through which the gods were reflected, or both?
Tehom was Aion’s counterpoint.
she/her | playlist
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Relevant on the question of Driskell Stillwater, from the AMA Apostate did (https://play.arxgame.org/dom/cal/detail/7532/)
Apostate says, “Bless Driskell, but one should take everything they said, tie it up into a tastefully decorated package, and then yeet it into the sea. By happenstance they might have said something accurate somewhere in there but I have not yet seen it.”
let it be a challenge to you
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Tehom is basically the Abyss. Much like Aion is the Dream.
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@Snackness One of THE MOST emotional scenes of my Arx career as Khanne, that gargantuan scene!
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@ThatGhosty
It was good stuff. -
Kind of adjacent to an Arx secret, but did revelation 30 (“Fable Knows Your Name”) have a large impact on PCs? Or was it more aimed at people during the time it was first introduced?
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@dvoraen I just know I played Oswyn freaking the hell out when he got it. I thought he was in Big Trouble.
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@dvoraen it scared the fuck out of me when I first got it, lol
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I came on staff well after a bunch of people had got that one and it was fairly normal, but my impression was it was one of those things where it was useful to keep track of who had hit a certain milestone of knowledge, but was otherwise just a neat thing to freak PCs out.
The way revelations work is that clues are assigned to them, and they’re given a target number, at which point the revelation is triggered. The target number is based off a clue’s rating, so if your target number is 60, and you’ve got two clues with a rating of 30, the revelation pops. You can do more with it, like require certain clues to be known before a player gets the revelation even if they’ve passed the target number, etc, and there are a number of revelations that were never meant to be obtained by PCs that have a number impossible to reach with the clues assigned, that were used largely to organize GM notes/information.
So the Fable revelation has a massive number of various clues assigned to it, particularly ones about magic, and PCs could hit the target number with any combination of those. Staff can also look at a revelation and see who actually knows it, so if we wanted to send a vision out to everyone that had got a certain revelation, it was pretty easily done.
RE: Tehom, one thing I think might not have been entirely clear to players is that Aion and Tehom aren’t really entities in the same way the gods are, they’re more like the two basic forces of reality. Aion isn’t just the Dreamer, but the Dream (aka, the physical world) and Tehom is the Nightmare (aka, the abyss, the physical world’s dark reflection). This is why Aion didn’t have a seraph or Tehom a herald…they don’t need agents to enact their will or be their representatives, because they basically are everything, or at least contain everything.
Edit: for the curious, unless I’ve missed some, there were 60 clues attached to Fable Knows Your Name:
Primum in the blood
Blood magic frauds
The Castle of Count Corso
Curious Case of Countess Cosette
Copper’s notes on magical sleep
Inquisitor Dalere’s report
Unnatural coincidences
Red Warden Memo
Laughing at a Leer
Sanguis Primus, a fragment
Let the sleeper awaken
Aldwin’s Memories
Mad Murderer Of the Boroughs of 993 AR
The Ring of Duchess Vedette
I Must Forget
Writs, An old journal
Thus came the Despite
Breaking Mirrorborn
The First Conclave
Francesca on Galling Brass Censers
So, You’ve Joined the Forces of Evil
The Triarch Demanded It
A Fractal Forgiven
Haunted Mementos
The Thinnest Point
Obsidian, Onyx, and Jet
Hard To Read With No Light
The Unwritten Word
Lianne’s Analysis of Ravings
A shadowy, smiling monopoly
On Demon Binding
A Treatise on Prophecy
Navarre Strongoak Don’t Live Here No More
Teatime with Onyx
Interrogation Log of Prisoner #7835
The Madman of the Panopticon
Death and Oblivion: A Cautionary Tale
Demonic Tissue Sampling
Lord Barton’s Ravings
Weaving - the style of Pure Magic
Casting - Shav Nonsense
Demon Worship and Black Stone
Alrec’s Evil Twin
Dying Old Gods
Mostly Normal Bringer Head
House of Questions, the living taint
Petrichor’s Prayer of Stewardship
Palladium’s Recollections on the War
The Twin Sister of Lydia Nightgold
The Blighted Land Soil Conditions
Lovely Groves in the Oathlands
Missing Headstones
Percephon’s mirror at the blight
Perrach and the Bringer
Sugan’s Mirror
A Puzzling Genealogy
A Dream of Pyrite
Claw for Claw
Say My Name
Fractal of the AbyssThey’re all mostly from season one, I think.
