Age of Ideas: Very Scary SolsticeElected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Habit of Perfection" (excerpt)
The seeds, or some say origins, of conflict began growing among the Greater Ideas as covetousness met unguardable thoughts. Was there any chance for cooperation or at least retaliation, or was everyone doomed to succumb to the predations of the furthest Ideas? Would the Age of Ideas end before the universe itself? Would an actually useful Lesser Idea ever show up? Perhaps some questions were never meant to be answered.
Luck looked to the Ideas of Convergence and Divergence, seemingly opposites, and derived the Idea of Growth from them. This revealed a large Lead of some sort likely closely associated with Growth and Quantity.
Luck also absorbed Manipulation which has had the effect of clarifying a Lead on Luck alteration Projects.
Unique or maybe Contradiction attempted to accrete Convergence into Contradiction only to have the two annihilate! This ambiguous Greater Idea also attempted to copy
Luck and
Idol but ironically only succeeded in grabbing
Luck. Maybe the conjunction of
Chaos and
Unique is an unfavorable sign for
Luck.
Silence continued to ruminate on improved denial and discovered two paths. The first, an
ad hoc Project, would make the refutation of free Lesser Ideas slightly easier for a token amount of
Silence's concentration. The second was a Lead to improved argumentation which may or may not not involve using the Idea of Silence to silence rebuttals.
Silence also reinforced the Idea of Rejection with Pariah and attempted to absorb Existence which
Idol refuted successfully. Could it be that Existence not existing is just that compelling?
Fate thought deeply on one of the two largest Leads, and having made significant progress on it, found that it would most likely lead to something having to do with coherence and a linear ordering of things.
Chaos ruminated on Project Scramble and the concept of Trade. The Trade action, should
Chaos choose to pursue this Lead to the end, appears to enable Greater Ideas to exchange Ideas without anything else happening to the Ideas. As with most results of Leads, its immediate utility seems questionable, but it's likely something special could turn up in the improvements.
Chaos also tried to copy
Contradiction from
Contradiction and
Unique from
Unique which would have made the latter paradoxically less
Unique (or maybe not?), but neither of these copy attempts panned out. (It is said that the former will happen in the past, but the exact meaning of this is hard to pin down.)
Idol turned inward and became more real in some as yet unknown sense by accruing a point of Crystallization.
Idol also dithered on the argument over Existence existing and inexplicably gained the Idea of Harvest.
Contradiction (or maybe it was
Unique) began fading. Unrelated to this, the Idea of Tradiction appears to have decayed into the more stable Idea of Tradition with unknown side-effects.
The current divination shows little has changed, but what else is new? There is a new alignment involving
Silence,
Contradiction, and
Chaos which is expected to be unfavorable to both
Silence and
Chaos (the latter of which may account for
Chaos' lack of success in copying Contradiction and Unique if one ignores silly nonexistent things like time). There is also a new alignment involving
Contradiction,
Luck, and
Idol which appears to portend a beneficial change in
Contradiction and
Idol's fortunes.
The trend toward increasing self-awareness among the Lesser Ideas continues, and some of them may even be approaching the threshold of self-sufficiency. Most of the Lesser Ideas are too small to enumerate or study, but there is a palpable excitement as one of the grand Leads reaches the half-completion mark. Here are the strongest Lesser Ideas:
- Boundary (:2, sentient)
- Consistency (:2, sentient)
- Relevance (:1)
- Sacrifice (:1)
- Glory (:4)
- Acquiescence (:2)
- Addiction (:2, sentient)
- Alignment (:3, sentient)
- Balance (:2)
- Correspondence (:3, sentient)
- Normal (:2)
- Projection (:2)
- Merriment (:4, sentient)
- Gluttony (:4)
- Bifurcation (:4)
- Revelry (:4, strong, sentient)
It is currently the Age of Ideas. Speech has been discovered but not Naming. Three actions are available for each Greater Idea.
Unnameable One (Glass)
- Orbit: 0
- Ideas: Luck (weak, sapient!), Growth (strong, sentient), Quantity (strong), Understanding, Manipulation
- Crystallization: 0
- Leads:
- Luck alteration (2/2A)
- Improved Luck alteration (0/
32A) - Something big involving Growth, Quantity, and Desire (0/6A)
- Projects:
- (TURN-TO-TURN) Internal Luck alteration: Minuscule improvement to all personal rolls (Accepts Luck, 1A/turn)
- (TURN-TO-TURN) External Luck alteration: Minuscule change to all of another Greater Idea's rolls (Accepts Luck, 2A/turn)
Unnameable One (Stirk)
- Orbit: f
- Ideas: Unique (sapient!), Scarcity (sapient!), Luck (weak, sapient!)
- Crystallization: 0
- Leads:
- Projects:
- (GLOBAL UNLOCK) Improved Copy action: Regardless of how many Greater Ideas target an Idea with the Copy action at once, the targeted Idea is only weakened once. (Requires 3A, accepts Quantity or (Unique and Contradiction))
Unnameable One (micelus)
- Orbit: 4
- Ideas: Silence (sapient!), Rejection (strong), Release
- Crystallization: 0
- Leads:
- Improved denial (3/3A)
- Rhetorical training (0/3A)
- Projects:
- (TURN-TO-TURN) Silence Lesser Idea aka Improved Refute (Accepts Silence or Rejection, 1A)
Unnameable One (Demonic Spoon)
- Orbit: 8
- Ideas: Fate (sapient!), Continuity, Direction, Order
- Crystallization: 0
- Leads:
- Interesting big thing of some sort (3/6A)
Unnameable One (crazyabe)
- Orbit: a
- Ideas: Chaos (sapient!), Exchange, Complexity (sapient!), Confusion (sentient, weak), Inversion (strong)
- Crystallization: 0
- Leads:
- "Trade" action (1/2A)
- Scramble Project (1/3A)
Unnameable One (TricMagic)
- Orbit: c
- Ideas: Idol (sapient!), Image (sapient!), Desire, Belief (sapient!), Harvest
- Crystallization: 1
- Leads:
- Something big and interesting (requires Boundary?, Direction, ? ? ?) (0/6A)
Unnameable One (Nakéen)
- Orbit: 2
- Ideas: Contradiction (:2, weak, sapient!), Tradition (unstable!)
- Crystallization: 0
- Leads:
- Unstable Ideas (0/2A)
- Piratical project (2/2A)
- Improved synthesis (0/3A)
- Principle of Explosion (0/4A)
- Proof by Contradiction (0/3A)
- Poof by Contradiction aka Improved refute (0/3A)
- Projects:
- (GLOBAL UNLOCK) Improved Copy action: Regardless of how many Greater Ideas target an Idea with the Copy action at once, the targeted Idea is only weakened once. (Requires 3A, accepts Quantity or (Unique and Contradiction))
Greater Ideas can perform
twothree actions every turn despite the lack of coherent time:
- Absorb: Absorb an Idea from the ambient Ideosphere. Where two Greater Ideas compete for the same Idea, the targeted Idea is given to low-Crystallization and low-Orbit Ideas in equal measure (with Orbit taking precedence in ties). Opposition by other means (such as Refute actions) result in opposed rolls also with Orbit and Crystallization modifiers.
- Accrete: Strengthen an owned Idea by sacrificing another one. May fail and annihilate both Ideas if the sacrifice is too close to an inverse of the target Idea.
- Agree: Create a related target-owned Idea of your choice and an owned Idea of the target's choice. Both sides must have a sapient Idea, and both sides must sacrifice an Idea. This action must be accompanied by at least one line of dialog from both sides.
- Argue: Attempt to remove an Idea owned by another Greater Idea. Requires an owned sapient Idea and must be accompanied by at least one line of dialog. Modifiers: -Rebuttal from target, -High target Crystallization
- Ascend: Decrease Orbit by 1. Fails if a Greater Idea occupies the resulting Orbit. Can be stacked to move across multiple Orbits.
- Compare: Select two owned Ideas to generate a related but random new Idea.
- Copy: Attempt to weaken a target-owned Idea and create a weakened owned copy. Cannot be stacked by the same Greater Idea. Modifiers: +Higher Orbit.
- Co-Ruminate: Contribute to investigating a Lead.
- Create/Destroy/Modify: Create, destroy, or modify something. Nothing interesting happens, strangely enough...
- Descend: Increase Orbit by 1. Fails if a Greater Idea occupies the resulting Orbit.
- Disavow: Disown an owned Idea.
- Dither: Create an entirely new owned Idea.
- Extrapolate: Attempt to generate a new Idea from an existing owned one of your choice (within reason). Modifiers: +Lower Crystallization.
- Fade: Default action. Greater Ideas fade to irrelevance over 3 turns, after which another Greater Idea may arise in their Orbit.
- Forget: Attempt to decrease Crystallization by sacrificing an Idea. The older the Idea or the closer to the Core Idea, the greater the resulting decrease. Recently acquired Ideas are unlikely to reduce Crystallization by more than 1-2.
- Practice: Use an Idea to run a Project. This renders the Idea unavailable for as long as it remains bound to the Project but still vulnerable to hostile action. An Idea can be loaned to anyone else's Project, but only the owner(s) of a Project can control the results.
- Refute: Attempt to destroy an unowned Idea. Can only be attempted by a given Greater Idea against a given Idea once a turn. Modifiers: +Similar owned Idea, +High Orbit
- Resolve: Increment Crystallization.
- Retract: Attempt to invert an owned Idea. Modifiers: +Lower Crystallization, -High similarity to core Idea (if not core Idea).
- Ruminate: Work on turning a Lead into a Project. Most Leads take 1-4 actions to complete.
- Synthesize: Sacrifice opposing owned Ideas to generate a stronger Idea not opposed to either. Result can be specified within reason.
- Teach: Weaken an owned Idea and create a target-owned also weakened copy. Modifiers: +Lower target Crystallization, -Higher Orbit
- Transcend: Currently swaps Orbits with a neighboring Greater Idea. Requires permission from the target.
A number of actions are unknown as of now.
Notes on action resolution:
- Actions with modifiers or described as attempts are random, i.e. rolled with a 3d6.
- Action randomness propagates to all actions involving the same target(s).
- Orbit modifiers work out to half the difference in Orbits rounded down.
The next update is scheduled for 96h (4d) from now or after everyone posts whichever comes first.
Author
Topic: Age of Ideas IC: Hello World (7/16) (Read 4557 times)