Talon Tiger Dino
From the best dinosaur fighting game
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Yeah, but we didn't purposefully try to use our artifact to help either. Figured I'd ask if doing so is viable.
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I know you'd like to have more Confidants, I agree it'd be nice. But I think the Moth powerup is going to be more relevant and more valuable than one lore 0 confidant.
Velvet Covers' personal library, made of read books and manifests:
-All Confidantes, and other ponies who you can trust, have access to the Secret Library.
-Provided the Secret Library can fulfill their leveling-up needs, a Confidante may spend an action to level up in a guarantee way.
-Provided the Secret Library can fulfill their leveling-up needs, a Confidante will roll every turn to attempt to level up automatically.
MOTH: Level 1 ( [1/1] )
LANTERN: Level 2 ( [Baldomare] + [6/2] )
FORGE: Level 2 ( [3/1] + [4/2] + [3/3] )
EDGE: Level 1 ( [3/1] )
WINTER: Level 1 ( [2/1] )
HEART: Level 2 ( [Mareinette] + [2/2 + 2/2] + [3/3] )
GRAIL: Level 2 ( [Mareinette] + [2/2 + 3/2] )
SECRET HISTORIES: Level 1 ( [Baldomare] + [3/2] )
KNOCK: Level 2 ( [Daughter-of-Axes] + [1/2 + 3/2] + [2/3] )
Solid, but not incredible. Two actions over two turns and ~50 bits gets us low-level artefacts we need to study to use, books that are probably lower level than we want, and random reagents (great, but not necessarily useful). Sure we can grab an Oriflamme-equivalent to sell things, but that then takes even more time...
Moth sacrament is a notable power up! To our most important character! Right away!
I know you dream of turns where we have this great economic engine snowballing. It does sound really nice. But I don't think we'll ever be in that position, and we shouldn't seek it out when the Glory is at hand.
Fair on Glory, though ending or no ending presumably glory earlier is better no matter what.I've been sitting on this for a while, and I think I can finally put words to thought.
I feel that some of us are treating this as a checklist or a hard coded game, where crossing all the 't's and dotting all the 'i's will automatically bring us to success. But no, this is an interactive story with game mechanics, and its narrative is highly flexible.
Does it make sense mechanically to use this turn to social? Yes.
Does it make sense for a half-dead Velvet accompanied by her secret service to leave the house to talk to Filthy Rich? Uhhhh.....?
But even more importantly, I feel that some of us are treating Glory as the end of all things, as if reaching there would solve everything, no matter the means. I mean, sure, it may end this quest, but I wouldn't find the Mother of Wolves as a satisfactory ending. Please try to allow what is happening in the narrative to influence your planning and votes, and not choose to burn down the world while we are still in it.
and Mayor mare is the local political figure, in a city where a murder attempt on ANOTHER very important political figure just happened.My interpretation was that Velvet would invite others to her home instead of leaving to visit them, or that the action would be interpreted as them stopping by. Every non-Twilight pony on our contact list is already a "Friend" (save for Mayor Mare, who is an "Acquaintance"), so it wouldn't be out of place for them to come and check on Velvet out of concern.
We don't have the bonus, and we basically would study at half action efficiency. Better to wait for next turn, where we could study both Lantern and Knock artifacts in a single action instead of AT LEAST 2.Personally, I kind of want to get started on the backlog of books/artifacts to research that we have. I know we don't have the bonus for it, but I don't want the pile to get bigger.
beside the absolute atrocity that letting the master proceed with his plan would have been (though RA is not necessarily better, just a different kind of bad stuff happening), I actually think there WAS a chance that "alicorn Master" wouldn't have been... well, evil.Yeah I imagine if we somehow attain Glory with 6/7 Regrettable actions, then we will indeed be saved by the bell when it comes to the Mother of Wolves ending. But the end result will leave a hell of a sour taste and be pretty damn close to feeding everyone to the wolves anyway. Like leaving the Master to be born anew to taint our future ending, only much worse.
He might JUST be a Long, but yeah, it's definitely possible.
That said Outsider, while I suppose less urgent, is also more important (play to win instead of play to not lose).The last RA wasn't even due to having two hooves behind our back, it was due to not checking on what the Master was up to ever. And not inviting the Names to the wedding, they could probably have done something as well. We got outplayed.
Which is why we need to shank Copper ASAP and hunt down Windy to whup the wolf out of him. If he can't chokehold that mutt into resuscitating the fresh corpse of a loved one or is not said resuscitated body then he has no business independently pursuing that beast. Otherwise we'll just end up dead-dead instead of mostly dead, down the line.
eh, first action (Evil) is understandable and kind of unavoidable. Velvet wouldn't choose to just die, most people wouldn't either.People keep waging their fingers and saying "nothing good comes from the wolf" and yet we keep using it.
Just because it's regrettable, doesn't mean that it was the wrong action to take.
Wrong morally? Absolutely, one persons life or bodily autonomy does not value as much as fear and danger taking root in the entire world / an entire race.
The best option in that regard would have been to send the Master on their way with Marinette in tow, yet I'm not seeing anyone arguing that we should've done that.
I find Shaper's ideas rather refreshing, be that because they're humorous in a "but what if we were to go the evil root?" or because it's in line with what we already do.
We trade worldwide suffering for personal benefit, but only when it's beneficial enough. Not because it never is.
I'm now pondering if I should redraw some religious iconography for this, cuz Shaper and a few others are shaping up to be our sacrificial lambs.
So three – too many things have not been Sun-damned adding up about your boss.
Or rather, there have been too many coincidences surrounding the Director of the Lunar Bureau.
Enough to make a discerning pony suspicious. Enough to make your cutie mark itch.
I do sort of agree with Shaper in a way -- I think we sometimes want to have our cake and eat it too. This is a horror game where we're grappling with forces larger than ourselves! Through a combination of luck and skill we've been actually quite amazingly successful, but I think that inspires (cake-eating) hubris. And when we take actions that feel good, but aren't geared towards victory, we can pay pretty steep prices.
Yeah, the Wedding comes to mind, a lot. The Paranoia RA is also interesting in this context -- some of the reason people backed it, iirc, was concern about how difficult/impossible it would be to get us to go with a plan that actually involved finding and killing ponies. We decline or put off easier/smaller immoral/not-good acts, and wind up doing much bigger ones as a consequence.
People are allowed to vote for what they want to see and how they want Velvet to behave, for sure. But I think we've gotten a little cocky, demonstrated by this turn but not exclusive to it, and should watch ourselves about that. Hubris can be fatal!
Genuine question: what are the additional problems introduced by the RAs we've done? How have they come back to bite us later on?
Paranoia... saved our bacon with Baldomare? Ash... has made Eclipse's explorations scarier than they should be?
Maybe Softy's cult, though that's pretty clearly not a mess we have to clean up.
The world is a worse place, definitely. But they haven't dumped problems on our lap, as far as I can see.
The downstream consequence of the RA is, well, the worsening of the world and the stains on our soul. But I think the whole trade is that they solve a problem, without issues, for that (large) price. I can see arguments it's not worthwhile, I haven't seen that they've actually been net-not-useful.
Love your depiction of Beyond Reproach! Poor dude, a detective stumbling into an eldritch plot sounds like the start of its own story. And I have wondered whether all our extremely-talented-and-very-morally-upright staff will ever grow suspicious of their definitely talented and UNIMPEACHABLY-MORALLY-UPRIGHT-I-PROMISE boss!
Ugh, Rarity. Curse the random encounter die that had us meet her, for it turned us away from focusing on friending our fellow cultists, leading to a bunch of half-friendships that leave me thinking of could-haves and would-haves. And those cultists needed a friend a lot more than Rarity did. Poor Starry. She just needed one more action. Windy needed more as well. Copper, we never even really touched.
Oh, and it was through meeting Rarity that we met Twilight and started that absolute trainwreck of a relationship. Without the Twilight action sink maybe we could have nabbed Copper too. Curse that die. Curse it twice. Curse it thrice, even.
This isn't even correct. Bringing the Names was still behind: inviting everyone on our contacts list, initiating Cadance into the Lores, and getting 500 bits. Even if you removed every vote for Rarity, inviting the Names still wouldn't have won.
eh, Outsider (winning) is currently limited in how much effort we can put on it.Yeah, this feels accurate. I'm not sure entirely sure how to balance it with "Focus on winning, not not-losing".
I think the current idea is to go social turn, so we're likely going to rank up 3 contacts between a mix of "Applejack, Cherilee, Mayor Mare, Filthy Rich and Spoiled Rich".So here's an idea of a Complacent action we're taking in the immediate present: Thinking of befriending Spoiled Rich for the Moth Sacrament, rather than using one of our current Friends (elevated to Good Friend and Leashed).
If I had to pick, I think Married Couple, Applejack and Mayor Mare, but I don't have that strong of a preference.On that note, thoughts on who we socialize, if we do so? I'm thinking Filthy and the Mayor and... Applejack? Maybe Cheerilee?
Thank you for giving me an excuse to write about why we need to recruit Applejack(Pinkie and Rainbow too).We should try and get Applejack on board then, since we're set up for teaching her lores too.
So if an opportunity comes to save Celestia and maybe get her horn back, she is very likely to take it. And of course there is that nice bonus of a foundation for the Harmony Victory(just in case).
Things could always go sideways, we don't know Twilight current mental state only that she isn't ready to join Soft Sweeps cult, but if we are going for that, having Mareinette smooth talk Twilight would make things...smoother.So if an opportunity comes to save Celestia and maybe get her horn back, she is very likely to take take it.
Can we save the atomic option for an Emergency? Because that is what Mareinette is.Things could always go sideways, we don't know Twilight current mental state only that she isn't ready to join Soft Sweeps cult, but if we are going for that, having Mareinette smooth talk Twilight would make things...smoother.
Until it is offered by the QM, no, it is not.A solution to our Daybreaker problem.
"Intercalate"
"This ritual recapitulates the Sun's abominable fate. The proper things, in the proper manner, in the proper order. Glory help us all."
-CD: IRRELEVANT
-Cost: Celestia
-Duration: Instantaneous
-Effect: THE SUN IS DIVIDED AND THIS IS ITS WOUND, a new daughter "Áine"
[THIS IS A REGRETTABLE ACTION]
Oh.... come on.A solution to our Daybreaker problem.
"Intercalate"
"This ritual recapitulates the Sun's abominable fate. The proper things, in the proper manner, in the proper order. Glory help us all."
-CD: IRRELEVANT
-Cost: Celestia
-Duration: Instantaneous
-Effect: THE SUN IS DIVIDED AND THIS IS ITS WOUND, a new daughter "Áine"
[THIS IS A REGRETTABLE ACTION]
That wouldn't count as a regretable action anyways because Velvet would get a new daughter and Velvet would not regret that. It would be like Soft Sweeps 2.0A potential solution to our Daybreaker problem.
"Intercalate"
"This ritual recapitulates the Sun's abominable fate. The proper things, in the proper manner, in the proper order. Glory help us all."
-CD: IRRELEVANT
-Cost: Celestia
-Duration: Instantaneous
-Effect: THE SUN IS DIVIDED AND THIS IS ITS WOUND, a new daughter "Áine"
[THIS IS A REGRETTABLE ACTION]
The Wolf solution to the Master problem was fucking metal. It's the highlight of the story.
Reading the quest's story, the Master's actions clearly demonstrated it to be too powerful to contest or even perceive even for the four alicorns, and just plain impossible for mortals. So the players defaulted to 'grin and bear' attitude towards Master's activities. It was the reasonable and practical course of action.How did our morality prevent us from trying to figure out what the Master was doing while they were gone?
Not sure if it'll work out this way (surely we can, actually, send a more careful message to Canterlot?)
Even though I don't think I did her reaction right, and man dialogue feels tough, and I think the writing itself was a little choppy.
Reading the quest's story, the Master's actions clearly demonstrated it to be too powerful to contest or even perceive even for the four alicorns, and just plain impossible for mortals. So the players defaulted to 'grin and bear' attitude towards Master's activities. It was the reasonable and practical course of action.
Fenrir's not the sun-eater though, that's SköllIf you are going to swallow the sun with the wolf, have the courtesy to at least have the name be Fenrir.
This is probably my biggest regret of the quest.The Master was Moth 7 and lived to regret it, they were so spooky that the early questers refused to engage and discover or work with the character behind the theatrics.
I have my doubts that things would have turned out any better if we didn't give them Baldomare. Because then, the changelings would still have their perfect disguises, Chrysalis would still be running around as Luna (and had accurate suspicions of where the cult was headquartered), and there's a very real possibility that we would have ended up on the hostile end of both the cult and the changelings at full strength. Which strikes me as... not a great situation to be in.I really liked the Master as a character, and looked forward to getting to know them better, but then we trusted them with Baldomare's bindings when we shouldn't have (pushing them to douse the lights), then we had the cult split, and then the Cadence decision came up and all hope was lost.
Lmao"I immediately trust you, and I believe everything you just said," the Deputy says, to which Iron Button nods in agreement.
I am noticing a distinct lack of Biedde here, @OurLadyOfWires? Shouldn't Follower AP be 10?Rarity: 1
Jade Whistle: 1
Fluttershy/Comet: 1
Baldomare: 1
Mareinette: 1
Velvet Axe: 1
Selene: 2
Household servants: 1
More reasons to get Baldomare's books and DoA's key!There were several things I wanted to write about.
Because here, Velvet Covers is without any of the Lores. She is without any of the pillars that dragged her away from her old self. She had the same mental fortitude she had during the period of her life before the quest started. And what is more, right now she is at a lower point than she ever was. She has, without a doubt, never had anything as bad as this happen to her in her entire life.
She died. Or at least she should have died. This is not something that can be shaken off with some remedy and a few days in bed. This was clinical, medical death.
And with that, several things could have been written about.
However, Velvet Covers also suffered damage to her brain. So, she could neither comprehend what was happening to her, nor could she understand what happened around her.
In a sense, this was more traumatic to her family than to herself.
So, this confusing and unpleasant morass of sensations was all we were left with. And this would have extended itself for a whole month, until you stopped Dancing With Death.
How lucky we are, then, that fair Mareinette is interested in helping you.
If you wish some other Name had stepped in, maybe you should have befriended them by now. If not, or if you like Mareinette, then this is probably fortunate. Still, this is neither a reprimand nor a praise, just my own thoughts on this.
What pushed the Master toward dousing the lights wasn't about us giving them Baldomare. It was about the cult's (read: Velvet Cover's) lack of dedicated progress toward any of the other win conditions.
However, other characters also have their own agency and interest. And even though you have not yet befriended any Names, there is one among their number who is interested in you out of her own volition.
And since no other powers were there to contest here, this is how things happened.
I think the general idea, last I checked, was that we take out Copper via Name squad and use the Bureau to clean up the lesser cultists?So, idea, maybe bad.
We were planning to send Biedde with a team to deal with Copper ASAP, right?
That means sending Bureau after her is redundant, even if it would likely increase the morale.
However, maybe somehow turn their attention to Windy? He remains a hidden threat, for now he did nothing to us but until we can at least speak to him it might be wise to consider him an enemy...
By the name standards she is a a solid mid-grade monstrosity. Thankfully we never met any Nowhere-Names, especially Crowned Growth ones. But even among the Ligeans she at least has (or had) strong contenders for the title of the most monstrousAll Names are inherently monstrous. Mareinette's monstrous traits are just more obvious than most.
She's already reached out. All we need to do is grab her hand (hoof?) in return.