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PostPosted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 5:53 pm 
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So, the brief version of this character was put into the Domina Cabal outline (even though it was the longest description there), and I've been planning to post a full bio eventually. The history is mostly completed, though the parts toward the end haven't been proofread yet and are undoubtedly a little rough at the moment. I still need to give a description of her personality and the appearance of the ship (both inside and out.)

I'm afraid if I don't post what I have now, I'll end up moving on to other things and leave her incomplete.

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Last edited by Moonbeam on Tue Aug 26, 2014 4:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:09 pm 
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I'm liking what I'm seeing here so far. I think the character itself is pretty solid, and while I would adjust a few things about the enchantments, in general, I think it's pretty good. I can't decide what I think of Genoflora. Something about it is not sitting right with me, but I'm honestly not sure what right now. And I'll have to cross-reference this with the established history of the Dominia Cabal, although it looks like you've done your research here. So yeah, over all, I'm liking this!


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PostPosted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 1:18 pm 
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Thanks. :)

Genoflora was honestly what I was most concerned about. The name is likely to change, intended to be more of a working title. I also think the justification for war is a little weak at the moment from the various plant and insect folk. Then again, I kind of want to keep the idea of these :g: elves being persecuted for not being environmental enough.

I'm curious about the enchantments. Do you mean the way Celesine enchants things needs adjusted, or the specific enchantments that are on the ship do?

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 1:32 pm 
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Moonbeam wrote:
I'm curious about the enchantments. Do you mean the way Celesine enchants things needs adjusted, or the specific enchantments that are on the ship do?

Mostly it just feels to me that the way the enchantments are written and listed feels a little clunky. For example:
Quote:
Runes for binding the ship to obey the orders of whoever possesses its key, runes to make the ship virtually indestructible, runes to protect the people inside from being destroyed in the Blind Eternities, runes to contain the artificial Spark that would have powered it, and many more.

Quote:
He also added a few more enchantments. Including one that would prevent her from trying to remove any of the enchantments that bound her there and another that prevents her from revealing Cabal secrets, even after they were destroyed.

Of these, the only one that I feel is strictly necessary to mention is the obedience one. The protecting the people inside and the artificial Spark are useful, and I would keep them, but the indestructible rune seems a bit extraneous. But the second part, the enchantments the Mentalist added, seem really pointless to the narrative. I think her being bound there is sort of the natural conclusion, and I already assumed she couldn't simply remove the enchantments. Also, while I may be wrong, I'm not imagining her really able to talk, so revealing secrets also seems unnecessary and tacked on.

This actually leads me to another point I didn't mention the first time through. When does she carve her wooden crew? I would assume it was before she was bound to the ship, but it's placing in this write-up makes me think after. Does she have working hands as a ship?

But again, those problems aside, I like this concept in general. I just think it needs to be tightened up in some of those places.


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 1:18 pm 
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Of these, the only one that I feel is strictly necessary to mention is the obedience one. The protecting the people inside and the artificial Spark are useful, and I would keep them, but the indestructible rune seems a bit extraneous.


Thanks. Upon rethinking, I absolutely agree with this. I do think some number of protection wards would have been put in place to keep it from being easily destroyed, but indestructibility does seem a bit too much, and it probably didn't need mentioned here.

Quote:
But the second part, the enchantments the Mentalist added, seem really pointless to the narrative. I think her being bound there is sort of the natural conclusion, and I already assumed she couldn't simply remove the enchantments. Also, while I may be wrong, I'm not imagining her really able to talk, so revealing secrets also seems unnecessary and tacked on.


She does have the ability to speak. If she didn't, it might be difficult to convince people to get inside her because their world is ending. The idea for Celesine was actually inspired by various ship AIs in science fiction (particularly EDI from Mass Effect, though their personalities have little in common). Come to think of it, Celesine is basically a mesh up of a ghost ship, EDI and Noah's Ark, with a Magic spin.

The part about her not being able to reveal Cabal secrets exists mostly to keep that era shrouded in mystery. Of the other three survivors, two have memory problems (Zhiran, and that one Planeswalker from History's End), and one is Ellia, The Endbringer. That said, it's not something I'm all too attached to, and if other people think it won't be problematic to drop it, I have no problem doing so.

Quote:
This actually leads me to another point I didn't mention the first time through. When does she carve her wooden crew? I would assume it was before she was bound to the ship, but it's placing in this write-up makes me think after. Does she have working hands as a ship?


I'm not entirely set on this as of yet, but I believe she uses her other wooden sculptures to make more. Now, if the question is, "where did her first one come from?", then I feel the official answer should be "it is wrong to ask that question, and you should feel like a horrible person for doing so. What? Do you also want to know why everyone in the whole damned Multiverse speaks the same language (except when they don't), how the movie Looper makes any sense, or whether the Chicken came before the egg. You start asking these types of questions, then you need to ask more, and more, and eventually the entire fabric of the Multiverse starts to fall apart. Is THAT what you want? Do you want to destroy the entirety of the space-time continuum, all because you HAD to ask questions that you clearly have no business asking????"

Unofficially, I assume that she either summoned a few of her designs that she stored in planes which weren't annihilated, or she used her magic to control vines that carved the Prime Sculpture. ;)


I think I'll move most of the unnecessarily mentioned enchantments to Ship Description once it's complete.

And thank you so much for your help and your comments on this :).

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 1:27 pm 
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Moonbeam wrote:
I'm not entirely set on this as of yet, but I believe she uses her other wooden sculptures to make more. Now, if the question is, "where did her first one come from?", then I feel the official answer should be "it is wrong to ask that question, and you should feel like a horrible person for doing so. What? Do you also want to know why everyone in the whole damned Multiverse speaks the same language (except when they don't), how the movie Looper makes any sense, or whether the Chicken came before the egg. You start asking these types of questions, then you need to ask more, and more, and eventually the entire fabric of the Multiverse starts to fall apart. Is THAT what you want? Do you want to destroy the entirety of the space-time continuum, all because you HAD to ask questions that you clearly have no business asking????"

Huh.

I guess I would have said, "she carved them for the ship before she became it," but that's just me.


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 1:35 pm 
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I dunno, Raven, I thought you'd be on-board for destroying the Multiverse.

Since tragedy like that really gets the wind under your sails.

This post started out innocently I swear.

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Cool boat person by the way, Moonbeam. I'm sorry that I don't have much to say about her. O_O

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 1:43 pm 
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I dunno, Raven, I thought you'd be on-board for destroying the Multiverse.

Since tragedy like that really gets the wind under your sails.

As Raiker Venn would likely point out, tragedy isn't worth much if there's no one left alive to experience it.

So, I'm not up for destroying the Multiverse, per se. Only vast portions of it...


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 5:03 pm 
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As Raiker Venn would likely point out, tragedy isn't worth much if there's no one left alive to experience it.

So, I'm not up for destroying the Multiverse, per se. Only vast portions of it...

The Shifter would argue that tragedy isn't as fascinating as watching the dominoes fall in the first place. Everything else is just long winded pomp.
True art is fleeting.

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 8:41 pm 
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I like what you've got here a lot, although like Raven I'm a little shaky on the homeworld... I think the sole thing that's throwing me off is the bee-folk. It's something very strange in an already strange setting. I... kinda love the idea that someone named "The Sunflower King" could actually be a sunflower though. >_>

I think the strongest element of this is the way it clarifies how one of the members of the Cabal was drawn into their conflict due to her own political agenda. There's a fascinating Greek Classical Tragedy element to her story that I really, really like. I'm of two minds on the sparsity of her time with Vasilias... part of me wants to see more, and part of me feels like leaving that blank for the moment and filling it in with stories later would be more interesting.

As usual, you've shown a remarkable command of our established canon. o_o

It'd be really cool, by the way, if you commented more on other stuff, since you've clearly done a lot of reading of our materials! I mean obviously I don't mean to impose since I know commenting takes time but it'd be cool to get your input on other projects up since you obviously have a good sense of what you're doing.


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PostPosted: Thu Aug 21, 2014 1:17 pm 
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I like what you've got here a lot, although like Raven I'm a little shaky on the homeworld... I think the sole thing that's throwing me off is the bee-folk. It's something very strange in an already strange setting. I... kinda love the idea that someone named "The Sunflower King" could actually be a sunflower though. >_>

I think the strongest element of this is the way it clarifies how one of the members of the Cabal was drawn into their conflict due to her own political agenda. There's a fascinating Greek Classical Tragedy element to her story that I really, really like. I'm of two minds on the sparsity of her time with Vasilias... part of me wants to see more, and part of me feels like leaving that blank for the moment and filling it in with stories later would be more interesting.

As usual, you've shown a remarkable command of our established canon. o_o

It'd be really cool, by the way, if you commented more on other stuff, since you've clearly done a lot of reading of our materials! I mean obviously I don't mean to impose since I know commenting takes time but it'd be cool to get your input on other projects up since you obviously have a good sense of what you're doing.


I've tried to comment on other works, but then I find that I don't have much to say that haven't already been said, and then I feel awkward since I don't really feel like part of the community, and then I tend to leave without ever posting the comment, and feel horrible afterwards...

Part of the problem is that I can only get on the internet through my laptop at WiFi spots, since I have no internet at my house, and instead save most of the stories to my computer to read later. By the time I get back, most of the criticisms I had have already been fixed, and the parts I enjoyed are no longer at the front of my mind (or, in the case of War of the Wheel, an entire new chapter has been posted that I need to catch up on). I will try to comment more often, though.

As for Genoflora, one of the changes I'm making in the next version of this (which will include the description of the ship, but probably not the personality) is to make the bee-folk neutral in the conflict. If I remove them Bees, then I want to use something to replace them as the :u: race (even though it doesn't matter, since the whole plane was kind of destroyed). I'm thinking about Florans based on these for blue.

And yeah, the Sunflower King was originally envisioned as having the appearance of an actual sunflower, though I figure his petals are probably violet, given the color of Genoflora's sun. And since I have nowhere to add it to the bio where it feels natural (Perhaps I will include extra info about Genoflora in a separate section later), I'll just mention it here. I imagine the mountain Florans, to be about twice the height of their plainswalking cousins. They are a society that worshipped the sun, and anyone possessing an appearance resembling their sun, or a great amount of height to allow them to more easily drink from it, were greatly revered. The Sunflower King had both of these, and used them to form his own cult that believed he was sent directly from the Sun, and eventually gain a following large enough to establish himself as the ruler of the Plain and Mountain Florans.

On Vasilias: I really had no idea what to do here. Oddly, there seems to be a lot more information regarding the Cabal than one of the M:EM's oldest 'walkers. In the case of the Cabal, I was able to weave her into the narrative of their struggle. With Vasilias, just about anything I do would have a direct effect on his history, which I don't feel should be left for stories to do, not another character's biography. I really would like to see (or possibly even write) some stories with Vasilias in his early years later on.

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 26, 2014 4:06 pm 
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Version 2 is up. Ship description has been added, and a few minor changes in the history have been made.

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PostPosted: Tue Aug 26, 2014 5:10 pm 
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I decided to skim through this. I mostly like it. There's some points I feel could be polished, but I don't feel like going back over the thing to lay them out right now.

I wonder if you've read The Cruel Finale yet? I recall the Dual-Walkers having a bunch of mortal kings and such rather literally ferried in from off-plane to witness their games.

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