AG11/AN15: Finale - Blowin' In The Wind

[Kasimir he/him]

AG11/AN15: Finale - Blowin' In The Wind

The dark is generous.

Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from us the truths of others.

Such as that Nibbles, the eccentric chef at the Hound and Hustle, was really a Spiked Mistborn, bringing devastation to the village of Tyrian Falls at the urging of a darker master.

Ruin.

The dark protects us from what we dare not know.

Its second gift is comforting illusion: the promise of a gentle end to the day’s labours and harsh words, the way the shadows at dusk soften the sharp edges of the harsh streets of Tyrian Falls where blood has flowed and will continue to flow; world without end. But the greatest of its comforts is the illusion that the dark is temporary: that every night brings a new day. Because it is day that is temporary.

Day is the illusion.

Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light and brings it forth from the centre of its own self. 

With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.

 

 

Blood ran through the streets of Tyrian Falls.

There were those who sought to stand tall, to defend their home, no matter the cost. A shower of fortune cookies with coins baked into them cut down the brave, had the rest ducking for cover, hiding in the shelter of cellars and stone walls. 

Nibbles had his orders from God.

He wasn’t about to let the wretched of Tyrian Falls mount even the most pitiful defense to the koloss that were advancing; like fate, like the doom thrice-denied, falling with the glee of a god onto a cursed village.

Nibbles perched on the roof of the Hound and Hustle, and hummed to himself.

He had his metal vials. He had his fortune cookies. He carved new names of ruin and agony into them, watched them twitch and fall like chickens to the slaughter.

Tyrian Falls lay open, and vulnerable to the koloss to come.

Behind him, Lysia said, “Nibbles?”

He turned.

 

 

The first wave of the advancing koloss surged past the trench and hit the palisade and the berm.

The palisades splintered, and broke with a thunderous crunch, entire sections of painstakingly-planted wood flying wildly. The sound of a world ending.

Without defenders, without fire, without steel, these were only wood.

The koloss charged through all of the pitiful defenses with a triumphant roar, and then the carnage and the terror began.

 

Lysianactomerid surveyed the horizon as the oncoming horde thundered towards Tyrian Falls, watching with a thousand dispassionate eyes. It knew that Nowko would be furious at its actions here, but he'd get over it. Lysianactomerid was irreplaceable; one of the most important resources the Abundance had access to. Its many eyes flitted from rooftop to rooftop, keeping tabs on the situation throughout the village.

Meanwhile, in the inn’s boarded-up basement, another part of Lysianactomerid was hard at work.

The part of Lysianactomerid that called itself Lysia was humming contentedly to herself as she busily worked around Nibbles’ bound and gagged form. He lay on a table in the center of the room, struggling wildly against his bonds. His shirt was torn open, exposing the array of metal spikes through his chest. Lysia clamped an electrical lead to a spike positioned just above his heart, then a second to a spike through his abdomen. Nibbles screamed into his gag as lightning arced through his body.

Lysia patted him reassuringly on the head. “Hang in there, dear, I'm almost certain you'll survive this. Maybe not the koloss, of course, but you laid that bed yourself.”

She laid an intricate fabrial lattice of diamond and heliodor on his chest, positioning it carefully between the two spikes. Immediately, the heliodors burst alight, filling with fragments of Nibbles' spiritweb. Nibbles’s screaming grew more intense, which was interesting. Apparently, the process was painful; Lysia supposed she should be taking notes. A colleague of hers in the Abundance had come up with this procedure, but it was purely theoretical. She was probably the first being to ever put it to the test.

 

 

The dark is generous and it is patient.

It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons reason and the love of neighbours with grains of doubt.

The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will cause those seeds to sprout.

The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the soil in which they grow, and it is the clouds above them, and it waits behind the star that gives them light.

The dark’s patience is infinite.

Eventually, even stars burn out.

Eventually, the curse claims Tyrian Falls.

And another village dies, is doomed, is damned.

 

On the rooftops, Lysianactomerid’s eyes observed the koloss marching ever closer. Then as they crossed a boundary line Lysianactomerid had marked out the previous day, a burst of Spiritual pressure washed over the village. In the basement, the diamonds laid across Nibbles’ chest began to glow with an odd stygian light, the telltale sign of anti-investiture.

Lysia smiled. “Cheer up, Nibbles; you're about to witness history. The first person ever to escape the Tyrian Falls anomaly.”

The gemstones began vibrating, humming to the pure tone of Ruin. The intricate nicrosil cage allowed the gems a small degree of freedom, and the vibration caused them to rattle against one another, heliodor clattering against diamond. Then, all at once, every single gem shattered violently, some of their shards embedding themselves in Nibbles’s bared chest.

The Light began to diffuse through the air, investiture swirling with anti-investiture. In the split second before they made contact, Lysia threw a lever, causing an aluminum panel to open on the ceiling, exposing a rapidly spinning plate made of a raysium-atium alloy. Instantly, the investiture began to whirl upwards into a cyclone of black and white mist, forming a column between Nibbles and the plate. In that moment, Lysia leapt forwards into the swirling tornado, and vanished.

Then, the basement exploded as the investiture and anti-investiture annihilated, sending out a shockwave through Tyrian Falls. Buildings blew apart, and wooden shrapnel flew through the streets, embedding itself in passersby. On the rooftops, Lysianactomerid's remaining hordelings became mindless, cut off from the majority of their horde. They didn't have time to react, though, as the blast tore their fragile forms apart.

In the Cognitive Realm, Lysia hovered, hanging over the misty depths by the fabrial levitator strapped to her back. She groaned at the pain of the lost hordelings; she hated traveling by perpendicularity. No matter, though. She could always breed more.

She turned her sights towards Silverlight, and began flying. She had answers to seek.

 

 

He had lived, Corse thought dispassionately, a long life.

It was not, in the end, what he had planned for it to be. But it was not a terrible one. It had been a full life, all things considered: just what anyone got.

He dug the shovel into the soil. Lifted it just so, to the side, and shucked off the load of soil. Planted the shovel again. Each action economical, each action burned deep into muscle after a lifetime of tasks that Tyrian Falls had found undesirable. 

Things like digging graves.

Where would he run, anyway? There was no escaping death, no matter where you fled. And someone had to bury the dead, even if the dead of Tyrian Falls seemed beyond all accounting.

The koloss raised the sword. A lone shadow against the last of the failing light.

He tipped the shovel. An almost-salute, an acknowledgement. A grave unfinished.

Clumps of soil rolled off it, falling like the last grains of sand through an hourglass.

The sword fell, glinting in the bloody evening light.

A crow screamed, and took off, beating its wings, rising ever-higher amidst the smoke that ascended to the heavens like an offering to a vengeful god. 

 

 

There came a turning point in the clash of light against dark.

It did not come from the death of yet another Tyrian Smoker, though two had been slain, and plenty more in other worlds where Tyrian Falls had fallen. It did not come from the surreptitious use of Emotional Allomancy to bend the wills of Tyrianers away from the death of a particular Allomancer, though those abounded as well.

It came as an orphan girl fled Tyrian Falls, a furious mob on her heels.

It came as Alais Short, gambler, and one of Tyrian’s hottest bachelors according to Acks, fell and Halsen shortly after him.

It came as the Jaist and Rind fell separately to assassins in the night.

It came as a blacksmith fell to a rabble roused to bloodthirst by the words of a housewise.

It came as Aralis, the doubter, but nonetheless, with his heart in the right place, was shot multiple times by Lysia.

It came as another Tyrian Falls narrowly eked out a victory against the Spiked infesting them; as Murph fell from a crossbow bolt and Samwise pursued Beagle onto the eastern wall. 

It came as the last survivors of this Tyrian Falls, here and now, found themselves alone against the dark. Against the army of koloss that had fallen upon them like an hour of wolves and red ruin.

Ade had realised this, in her moment of mazed clarity:

They just didn’t have it.

They’d never had it, perhaps. They’d lost before they even began. Or they’d given up the advantage at some point in this struggle, some point Ade couldn’t possibly begin to comprehend.

The Spiked never gave up. They could not be defeated in a decisive battle, in a confrontation of light and dark. The Spiked always rose to challenge Tyrian Falls, to tear it down in ruinous worship of their God.

The brighter the light, the darker their shadow. And in the radiant light of the three Tyrian Falls that had, somehow, improbably endured the onslaught and triumphed, a new, darker shadow had appeared: a world in which all came to dust and ashes.

A world of Ruin.

 

 

Nibbles wasn’t sure what kept him on his feet.

He staggered out the doorway of the wreckage, Pewter reserves dangerously low. That was fine though. He flared Tin, and sensation exploded at once, bombarding him with a thousand uncatalogued agonies, and he bit at the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. Pain from his multiple injuries blazed, all at once, and then subsided to a manageable red-white fire eating at him.

He had to get to the Hound and Hustle. Or anywhere he’d stashed metals. Had to top up on his Pewter.

He shouldn’t have trusted Lysia. It was an alliance of mutual necessity, not trust, but at some point, he’d let his guard down. 

He stumbled out into the streets.

Around him, villagers were screaming, cut down by koloss. They ignored him, of course. God had willed otherwise. 

Lysia’s—whatever that was—had blasted a wide swathe through Tyrian Falls, leaving buildings unrecognisable, as though some farmer had come by and swung his scythe at harvest. Multiple fires had erupted through the village, voraciously devouring everything in their path. The jars of oil he’d buried at strategic locations were doing their intended job.

Nibbles nearly stumbled over a corpse and fell flat on his face. Wasn’t sure he recognised who it was, either. Several blows from a koloss sword, with all the force that entailed, had rendered what was left unrecognisable.

Around him, as the last of the light faded, and the world crept towards the long dusk, Tyrian Falls died with a final whimper.

 

 

Days later, a young man was shovelling soil in the graveyard of a distant village when he heard a faint caw.

A shadow fell over him. He paused, leaning on his shovel and shading his eyes with his upraised hand as he looked up.

He felt a sharp pang of regret, mingled with grief, and remembered love.

The familiar crow, bedraggled, weary, and thin, landed on the fence with another caw.

Dirk knew, then, that his father was dead, and Tyrian Falls had fallen.

 

 

The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins—but in the heart of its strength lies its weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.

In one Tyrian Falls, a farmer hatches a mad plot to flush out the Spiked in their midst, trusting to the integrity of a banker and then a small group of friends. In another Tyrian Falls, a band of companions sacrifice themselves without hesitation, falling one by one to keep a scholar and caroler alive. In a third Tyrian Falls, a carpenter with a crossbow and an obligator make a desperate final stand against the last of the Spiked.

Love is more than a candle. Love can ignite the stars.

AG11 has ended! Thank you to @Wonko the Sane who provided Lysia's segments of the write-up. Credit goes also to Matthew Stover's Revenge of the SIth novelisation, which this write-up adapts because Penguin made me lean into the prequel memes anyway so let's just go full hog

This year's pass winners are @Archer (Indigo Weasel), @Sart (Ivory Dragonfly), and Seoni- oh sorry, @Fifth Scholar (Amethyst Scorpion.) Congratulations!

Players are reminded to take the opportunity to fill in your logbooks, as the mods will be cleaning out the accounts and changing the passwords after a couple more days.

Thank you to everyone for playing in another year of the AG, and keeping SE alive. The Spiked may have won, but in the end, the true winners are the friends we cold-bloodedly murdered and stabbed in the back along the way

Wait, that came out wrong...

 

 

Player List:

Spoiler

1. @Aeoryi: Amber Vulture - Sauve Chad (Ruinous Skeptic) - Village Vanilla
2. @Fifth Scholar: Amethyst Scorpion - Malmoc (Herbalist) - Village Vanilla
3. @neil the beguiled: Azure Mouse - (Watcher) - Village Smoker
4. @Wonko the Sane: Charcoal Hyena - Lysia (Tinker) - Spiked Mistborn
5. @CadCom / @DrakeMarshall: Chartreuse Penguin - [Ade]mordna Niugnep - Village Vanilla
6. @Experience: Coral Swan - Acks (Matchmaker) - Village Soother
7. @TwinStorm: Cream Tuatara - Hayden Vendel (Drunk) - Village Lurcher
8. @Aeternum: Emerald Falcon - (Observer) - Village Vanilla
9. @RoyalBeeMage: Fuchsia Ostrich - Kael Voss - Village Rioter
10. @Archer: Indigo Weasel - Nibbles (Chef) - Spiked Mistborn
11. @Sart: Ivory Dragonfly - Sew (Hopeful Orphan) - Village Smoker
12.  @KelsierApologist: Magenta Albatross - Alais Short (Gambler) - Village Vanilla
13. @Stick.: Mauve Crocodile - (Jaist) - Village Tineye
14. @stiltedmoth: Melon Dingo - Rind (Orphaned By Mistwraiths) - Village Mistborn
15. @Lord Spirit: Mint Heron - Byrar (Unlucky Craftsman) - Spiked Smoker

 

 

Docs:

Spoiler

• Master spreadsheet
• Spiked doc
• Dead/spec doc

 

Edited February 3, 2025 by Kasimir

[Araris Valerian he/him]

Hey everyone, thanks for playing!

As usual, this is when the mod team likes to announce the changes we have planned for the upcoming year. The general goal of these changes is to try and get some larger size games running this year, and to make our community more accessible to new players.

Before all that, however, there are a couple of changes to the moderation team. @CadCom joined the moderators during the middle of last year, and he's already been a lot of help spreading the work of IMing games, so please welcome him! And @StrikerEZ has decided he's too busy right now, so he's stepping down.

We are going to have a couple of additions to how signups work for games. The first is a minor change: new game signup threads now must include “Sign Ups” in the title to make it more clear where new players should go to join a game. The second change is that we will now have an option to extend signups indefinitely until a minimum player count is met. Games of this nature should have “Extended Sign Ups” in the title, and we will try to run at least one extended sign up concurrently with the more regularly occurring games. Part of what we feel gives Sanderson Elimination its identity are the crazy, massive games we run like the Kingkiller Chronicles University games and various games involving all of the shards of Adonalsium. Hopefully this addition will let us get some more games like these off the ground!

While this doesn’t constitute an official change, we’d like to bring the level of competitiveness down a notch or two in our games. Kasimir has been conducting surveys with a number of players, and one common point of feedback was the feeling that there is more pressure now on individual players to perform, and less room to “hang out”, more or less. While there will always be a competitive element to SE, we’d like both new and old players to be comfortable signing up for a game just for the experience, without having to feel like they are letting their team down if they can’t/don’t want to play at the same level of intensity as other players. So keep this in mind for future games that you play.

Lastly, as a part of efforts to invite new players to the community, we have a couple of final additions. @Kasimir has created some signature banners over in the SEAcropolis thread, so if you are so inclined take a look and pick one out (and link it to the subforum, which you can do by double-clicking on the image once it's pasted into your signature). @little wilson has posted a new onboarding + Q&A thread so that anyone that visits us will be able to find their way around more easily.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of the above, and here’s to another year of gentlemanly murder and roleplay!

 

Edited February 3, 2025 by Araris Valerian

[Stick. she/her]

ahahaha my id reads were absolutely comical huh 

 

i only got Neil sart and fifth (only from the dead doc too). I’ll take half a point for archer being weasel since he was my 2nd guess for that

[Kasimir he/him]

34 minutes ago, Stick. said:

ahahaha my id reads were absolutely comical huh 

If you meant absurdly conical...

[OoklaApologist She/her]

Tyrian's hottest bachelor confirmed! Thanks for the great game @Araris Valerian and @Kasimir

[Ookla de los Cuervos he/him]

well done, I enjoyed watching you guys!

[Experience he/him]

enjoyed coming back to this game, wish I had been on at rolloever for more than half the turns so I could have been less helpful to the elims with my soothes :P.

17 hours ago, Araris Valerian said:

Hopefully this addition will let us get some more games like these off the ground!

[neil the beguiled]

i will return in a year. look out.

(gg!!! had fun being here. who knows if the above is even true but was nice to join into this. and apologies for any unknown language from my end i love alphabet soup.)

[The Unknown Medallion he/him]

4 minutes ago, neil the beguiled said:

i will return in a year. look out.

(gg!!! had fun being here. who knows if the above is even true but was nice to join into this. and apologies for any unknown language from my end i love alphabet soup.)

 

No wait come join the Olympics before you go. We have bodysnatchers and Lucky Lights and Big Chew bubblegum and maybe potentially wrestling it'll be fun!

Edited February 4, 2025 by The Unknown Flame

[|TJ| he/him]

20 hours ago, Stick. said:

ahahaha my id reads were absolutely comical huh 

Hi stick, missed you too :P. 

Well, technically you got Raccoon right too :P. 

[Kasimir he/him]

After-Action Report

Araris will probably do his eventually. I wanted to get mine done early on. But then life happened. So here we are.

• Distro/Balance

Overall, I don't feel the distro was particularly problematic. In fact, we went for a fairly mild/milquetoast distro, which maybe violates Tyrian/AG expectations a little, but at the same time, sometimes you don't want to just run fancy distros for the sake of breaking expectations. This was a safe distro and went pretty ok—Mistborn Village-side, a Lurcher, two Smokers, two Emotional Allomancers, and a Tineye. This seemed pretty fine against most options an Elim team with two Mistborn could bring to the table. Smokers to block any Emotional Allomancy the Mistborn could rand, a Lurcher for kill protection and in case the Mistborn drew Steel (which only happened once anyway), two Emotional Allomancers for prospective firepower, and their own Mistborn. 

Mistborn are highly situational and generally underperform a dedicated role on a Tyrian game, so we weren't too concerned about the Elims being OP - in most cases, it's usually just better to have the Coinshot/Lurcher etc over the Mistborn. That being said, sometimes of course the lucky rand at the right time is great.

• Gameplay

It was a little strange for a Tyrian AG. Honestly I think that's great. With new(er) (to this format) players like Aet, Aeo, Neil, Moth, Kelsier, Spirit, TwinStorm, and RoyalBeeMage playing, actually a lot of the known Tyrian meta was thrown out the window. In a way that's neat because you can see players litigating the same issues over again, e.g. the role of Smokers, without any particular baggage. (I suspect this was also behind Aet's early dismissal of the actual team comp - potential unawareness of how Mistborn historically perform in Tyrian games.) Too, some players were way more casual about roleclaiming in thread, which was balanced by the fact not everyone was paying attention, and the amusement value from giving Fifth heart attacks  There was also a lot more RP than usual which was nice to see!

In general, the balance seems to be fine. The Village did score a number of own goals, e.g. by allowing the TwinStorm exe to happen, which cost them a Lurcher. At the same time, the Elims had their kill blocked twice, which should've put them behind, but in the end, was evened out by some lucky rolls (Hyena drawing Steel that Night, and then the game-closing Zinc after the Village had murdered all their Smokers for...being Smokers I guess.)

A reminder to everyone that Smoking does matter in the endgame because by then, Seeking probably won't save you (maybe the calculus is different if a Seeker is alive but by that point, people had to have realised there was no Seeker or second Mistborn likely) so there is no net negative to Smoking. You might as well try to block Elim vote manipulation!

A shoutout to @Archer for honesty. Mid-game, when we realised that Wonko might need to be replaced by a PH, we consulted Wilson as the interim IM, who ruled that Archer could puppet Wonko's action slot once but that we had to get a replacement if he didn't show up after that. Fortunately, Wonko was in recovery by then and returned. Nevertheless, Archer requested we login to the Hyena account so that anyone who was checking for logins wouldn't believe that Hyena was excluded from having put in the kill. This was a fair request as despite login tracking discourse, players also do not generally expect puppeteering to be allowed—it's not without precedent, but it's extremely uncommon.

And that's it from me. Kas out. Signing off from my first stint as an AG co-GM. Hope you all had a good game, and once again, thanks to everyone for playing, and thanks to @Araris Valerian for GMing, and uh, @little wilson for emergency IM decisions as we only discovered we were flying without an IM mid-game when the Wonko situation came up. Still laughing at how the hell it happened, and how I was so out of it I just said 'ok' and didn't remotely understand until I'd slept on it  

[Stick. she/her]

5 hours ago, Kasimir said:

Nevertheless, Archer requested we login to the Hyena account so that anyone who was checking for logins wouldn't believe that Hyena was excluded from having put in the kill. This was a fair request as despite login tracking discourse, players also do not generally expect puppeteering to be allowed—it's not without precedent, but it's extremely uncommon.

Thank you

[The Unknown Medallion he/him]

7 hours ago, Kasimir said:

This was a fair request as despite login tracking discourse, players also do not generally expect puppeteering to be allowed—it's not without precedent, but it's extremely uncommon

I'd like to raise the question of whether we should have an official outlook on puppeteering, just like we do with foreseen absences and editing in votes. It's come up several times in what feels like recent times to me, and generally the GMs seem to be more ok with puppeteering than not, despite our continual insistence that it is atypical and not to be expected.

I just think it might be worth a debate, or at least a consensus to have a clause in every ruleset like we do for Inactivity filters. 

[Kasimir he/him]

On 2/8/2025 at 1:37 AM, The Unknown Flame said:

generally the GMs seem to be more ok with puppeteering than not, despite our continual insistence that it is atypical and not to be expected.

Are you referring to Drake's 'your power passes to another player' rules here? Because I'm not thinking of any recent puppeteering games, unless I was away when it happened. The case I had in mind was an early Joe game.

[The Unknown Medallion he/him]

1 hour ago, Kasimir said:

Are you referring to Drake's 'your power passes to another player' rules here? Because I'm not thinking of any recent puppeteering games, unless I was away when it happened. The case I had in mind was an early Joe game.

There was one that made it official I think (ran by Araris?), and a few other cases that I don't remember many details about. 

So, not in objectively recent memory but it felt recent. 

Most of those times, the GMs allowed it (I think Elan said no) because it just feels bad when the elims get screwed by inactivity in a way it doesn't for the village.

[Kasimir he/him]

Incidentally, I'm a little surprised no one noticed the white text  

On 2/9/2025 at 10:06 PM, The Unknown Flame said:

Most of those times, the GMs allowed it (I think Elan said no) because it just feels bad when the elims get screwed by inactivity in a way it doesn't for the village.

Fair, I do think a PH is the optimal solution but recognise that two cycles can suck until then. And there's cases like Spirit and Tani where they can't be on on Sundays and sometimes I feel we should be able to make accomodation. IDK.