Wonko the Sane

Striker, you’re a mod? Man, you leave for two years and everyone goes and changes on you. Belated congratulations, I guess!

Hey! Not sure what you’ve heard about me, but hopefully good things? I will go on the record as saying I’m not especially good at this game, but I do love playing it!

It had clearly been a nice room, once. The. masterwork chandelier still sparkled, even beneath the built up layers of dust. The fine, old-wood furniture, had certainly stood the test of time, including the two plush armchairs that made the room's centerpiece, as well as the solid oak table between them. Across the room, a half-finished sculpture rested on a workbench. The wall behind it displayed a dizzyingly intricate diagram of stars, points, lines, and curves all crisscrossing over one another, and annotated in a tight, neat script; a trained eye would recognize it as a detailed map of the cosmere -- though it was nearly six years out of date. Set into the opposite wall, directly in front of the chairs, was a grand fireplace, now long dead. It's mantle was set with dozens of trophies, mementos, and curiosities, as well as an old Evanotype displaying two faces, one old and sullen, the other young and grinning. The door cracked open, revealing those same faces. Nowko Lestibournes, Leader of the Abundance, coughed fitfully at the clouds of dust stirred up as he pushed the door open and entered the old Scadrian offices. Behind him, Won LenReen shut the door and put his hands on his hips, surveying the disrepair thoughtfully. "Well, it could have been worse," said Len. "At least all our stuff is still here." Nowko grunted in affirmation, still coughing lightly. He made his way towards the fireplace and the chairs. His eyes swept over the collected treasures of his lifetime on the mantle, lingering on this or that as memory clouded his eyes. Len stepped out of the room toward the kitchens, returning quickly with a feather duster. He began clearing the dust on the two chairs and the table between them. "Did you ever think we'd be coming back here, after all these years?" Nowko dropped into the chair on the right. "Of course I did. I always intended to get the guild back to business, it's my life's work." Satisfied with the chairs, Len set the duster aside and walked over to the letterbox beside the door. He made his way back to his chair with a thick stack of envelopes. "So... why haven't we? It's not like anything was really keeping us," he asked as he sat down and began going through six years of mail. Nowko hesitated. "Well... you know... there was the Unmade situation, and that business with the Idrian succession, and things just kept coming up..." He trailed off uncomfortably. "Anyway, what's done is done. We're here now. Do you know how to get in contact with any of the old guild members?" "A few," Len said, absently flipping through the stack of envelopes, "but not many. It's been difficult to keep in touch, moving as often as we have." "Hmph. I was afraid you'd say that. Well, looks like we'll have to rebuild from the ground up. Reach out to the ones you've got, and see who else you can dig up; then, we'll have to start recruiting." "Sure thing, sir," Len said. "I can get started as soon as I have the place back in order. I'm pretty sure Konwa is still in T'Telir, and I have some ideas on how I can find Dr. Selva; I--" He paused, rereading the envelope in his hand. He frowned, opened it, and began to read. "You're not going to believe this, sir, but I may have found an old member already. This letter is from Professor Longfellow, and it's barely a week old." Len looked up. "He's still in deep cover on Threnody." "What, still? God Beyond, boy, it's been six years! What in Harmony's name has he been doing?" "Studying the local culture, apparently. You know Ashford, when he gets caught up in his research, the world could end and he wouldn't notice." Len continued reading. "He's asking for advice about a developing situation. Apparently, a number of worldhoppers turned up in his town all at once, so he decided to look into it. After some investigation, he was able to figure out that..." Len trailed off, eyes growing wide. He tore through the rest of the letter without pausing to blink. "Well?" Nowko barked, "Spit it out, boy. What's going on out there?" Len reached the end of the letter and looked up at his mentor in shock. "Sir... he says a contingent of Ghostbloods have arrived in Crimson aiming to secure a Dawnshard they've tracked there. Professor Longfellow is asking how you'd like him to proceed." --------- I'll sign up as Prof. Ashford Longfellow, an Abundance* anthropologist who's been in deep cover on Threnody for over 6 years as a local brewer, just studying the local population and otherwise living a quiet life. Depending on which alignment I roll, he's been ordered to either negotiate an alliance between the Abundance and Ghostbloods by helping them recover the Dawnshard, or to keep it out of their hands at all costs. Also, hi guys! I'm back! *I know it's been a while, so quick summary: The Abundance is a joke I've taken way too far over the years; basically, it's a cosmere-wide guild of secret agents and doctors I use as the basis for most of my characters.

In that case, surely it's just a matter of taking the current displayed post count and subtracting it from the post ID of the most recent public post to find the total number of hidden posts, then subtracting that number from post IDs until you find the one that results in exactly one million. It'll only work for a short while -- from the moment the millionth post is posted, until the next hidden post -- but it is possible if people are diligent about it. EDIT: I actually think you only need to catch the number of hidden posts in that interval. After that, even if more hidden posts are made, you can still use the old count to find lucky number 1,000,000.

The criteria for becoming a Radiant are only loosely related to their oaths. Shallan was not selected because she was exceptionally true to herself -- she was probably the least true to herself of any character in Way of Kings. Pattern came to her because of her artistic inclinations, and especially because of her exceptional facility with lying. There's a certain kind of personality, distinct from any Ideals, that draws each kind of Nahel spren. As best I can tell, Adolin is a fine example of the personality for Edgedancers. It's true that he might fit slightly better as a Stoneward, but he's still a pretty good match here. As has already been shown, he's repeatedly demonstrated a moral urge to stand up for the downtrodden, regardless of how technically they fit your exacting definition of "forgotten" or "ignored". Remember we aren't talking about a Skybreaker here. It doesn't matter whether a dictionary would call Kaladin ignored -- it matters how Adolin feels about it. And it's clear that, just like with the prostitute, with his brother, and in several other cases, his fundamental motivation here is a moral belief that not helping downtrodden people would just be *wrong*. He's not living by any oaths, that's true; but he's clearly demonstrating that he strongly believes in the general principles there. Additionally, there's the mentioned ability to tell Shallan, Veil, and Radiant apart -- and that isn't the only use of that talent. Adolin has frequently shown himself to be an extraordinarily good listener, almost uncannily so; he regularly picks up on subtle cues and semi-conscious signals that no one else can even spot. Honestly, aside from his swordplay, probably his single most emphasized talent is his remarkable ability to understand and connect with people.

It doesn't really matter. My order will go in to kill Elkanah; tell me if you guys decide to change it.

Sorry, everyone else, but when Elandera admitted that Manukos had tried to use his bead, so we had less atium than I thought, I didn't want to take chances on Nobledra losing our hold over the game. Manukos, you got lucky in that I was more unsure of your actions than Elandera when we submitted the plan. @Straw, what do you mean, "Who will win"? We vote no lynch today, then tonight I kill Striker and Elkanah converts him. The game is effectively decided.

Okay, yeah, looks like El orchestrated that whole nonsense. We can't check with Abstrusity to confirm, but I do know that El was the loudest voice in his ear from cycle 1; she dictated most of his actions. Before she died, we were joking about how we'd made the game too easy, and she mentioned she was considering giving herself a bonus objective of making sure she was the only player in her House to win. I guess she went for it. By the way, when this is over, if you want to understand everything that happened, read my PM with her. She absolutely dominated this game, with me as her faithful lackey. She had firm connections with literally more than half the playerbase four hours into the game, and in the end, Stink, Snip, and Shqueeves are the only players who she didn't get control of.

@Elandera We can't kill you until after Manukos uses his atium. This has been a thorn in my side for a while now, especially when you took out Shqueeves while he still had an atium. (Did El tell you to do that? Because I'm still not positive what happened that night, but it looks to me like El decided to abandon us to pursue an alternate win condition she set for herself.) You're right about the wait, though. Both houses are reset to 0 attempts right now, unless you or Manukos went looking for another extra bead last night. 3 cycles until a guaranteed success. 2 successes, actually, though the second is kind of meaningless. We could make both you *and* Manukos kandra, I guess. @Straw if we did that, would House Venture have no winner? Or would Devotary win from beyond the grave? For tonight, we need to be careful. If we convert two players, one house will win, the game will lock up, and we'll be forced into the failsafe vote.

Okay! The Nobledra Alliance is now officially in control of the game, so we don't need to hide anymore. To everyone else, we've basically been running this game from Day 1. We've exerted influence over every kill, and every player who's won so far has been one of us. There are now two beads of atium in the game -- one in Nobledra hands, one not -- which is one fewer than the amount we'd need for every remaining player to win. We can either lynch somebody and win tonight, or wait around until another bead turns up. I'm okay with either, but I'm guessing most people would prefer the latter?

Well, I promised I'd post before rollover. Lemonelon. Coda. Good game, guys.

Public announcement: I'm going to play this game a little differently from usual. Glancing over the rules, it seems like there's going to be a lot of politicking in which absolute honesty would be a severe disadvantage. So I'm going to allow myself to lie in this one. It doesn't count against my streak if I warn you, right? I meant to say this before the game started, but never got around to it.

Sorry for the inactivity over the last cycle; I meant to find time to post, but never managed. I agree with the Lemonelon lynch, both for the odd posts others have noted, and because pretty much every player in the game is dependent on Lemonelon's alignment to one degree or another. Not enough time again, but this time I promise to be back before rollover.

Lot to say, but no time. For now, I'm going to point out again that DeTess was the person who made the train happen, with nothing more than a parrot of Snipexe's argument. I scanned Devotary as evil, so my scan is valueless. Sart is in the clear, and has some moderate trust where I'm concerned. DA has always read as tonally elim to me, so I've learned not to trust my reads of him. That said, he made some solid points last cycle, and I had read him as village. His late-cycle argument against the Lynch, though, is troubling. He had to know that he couldn't change the Lynch that late with such an overwhelming lead -- but if he'd pulled one or two people off it, he could have killed the majority, and kept us from learning how it works. Lum being killed, though, is not an argument against him. It seems far more likely that Lum was killed because if Devotary flipped as "reverse scanner" like people were hypothesizing, Lum would have been confirmed good.

Like I explained at the time, we badly need a majority. The lynch was already decided by 6-1 lead. I'd rather lynch someone else, but if we're lynching Devotary, we might as well learn how the types work.

All right, it looks like the people have spoken. Devotary. Still not comfortable about this, especially about the lack of resistance to it, but a majority is worth it. I'll try to be around again before turnover, but it's D&D night, so I can't promise anything. And yeah, I, too, am scanning Devotary, just in case.

I'm not at all comfortable with this early train on Devotary. I agree that the last-minute vote was suspicious, but not enough to warrant this kind of mob response. So, I'm going to vote DeTess to widen the vote options, and because she started the train. That said, I still think we badly need a majority lynch to figure out what exactly is going on, so if Devotary remains the top lynch when I get on later, I'll switch my vote over. I also wanted to point out that @Lumgol has done a lot of talking this cycle without dropping a vote.

This intrigues me enough that I'm going to make the extremely unwise decision to play multiple games on an already tight schedule. I'm going to be able to at least check in every day, though past that it's anybody's guess. But I don't want to miss out on this. Abundance character to come later (after I come up with one for my other game ). I can pretty much guarantee I won't be doing much RP, though; sorry.

That makes so much more sense! I scanned Sart as a Determined Thug, which was really throwing me for a loop, making me question all of my reads. It's still possible he's playing the riskiest Elim game ever, but it looks unlikely to me. I seriously doubt it's as easy as "you get opposite results". As Devotary pointed out, it's too easy to course-correct that, and turn the entire Village into alignment scanners. I suspect it's either random, or there's some other trick. In any case, it's an even bigger priority than before that we get a majority lynch today, guys! We need to understand how this all works.

Except that there is exactly one way in the rules to learn someone's Type. Are you saying you think even a majority vote will only give us a number? Or that a non-majority will give us the number anyway, despite apparently having no way to make use of it? Neither sounds reasonable to me.

So in your scenario, if I'm Steel Type 2, then the only thing withheld from my GM PM is the number 2? That doesn't seem like enough. It says we don't know our own Type; that has to mean something, doesn't it? That's entirely true. Learning each others' roles is not really helpful. The thing you're leaving out, though, is that roleclaiming also allows for information roles to share their findings with the thread. If no one ever claims (and there's not private communication), then these roles only ever help the people who have them. I'm sticking with the lynch I started, though I admit I wasn't as certain about my suspicions as others seem to be. It was just my best read for C1. Now that it's happening, I think people should move for a majority lynch, so we can decide the "Type" question once and for all.

*Sigh.* I'd written a full post, went back to check some details, and discovered the Shard had only decided to save a single paragraph. I'm going to scramble to retype it all in my remaining time, so please forgive any mistakes. --------------- I don't have a lot of time in the middle of the day, and I just spent most of it catching up. (Plus typing and retyping this. ) I also broke my laptop recently, so posts from me are going to be a little more sparse than usual, and might not get to RP at all (I'll try to at least create a character this evening, though). Anyway, it's always good to get a vote on record, so I'm going to go with Striker for the way he "innocently" floated the idea of a C1 roleclaim. I am not at all happy with his "I wonder if anyone will do it? It could be good, could be bad; who knows!", followed shortly by "No, you guys, I wasn't advocating it -- I was just curious!". @StrikerEZ, I can't imagine that your first post was not trying to encourage a roleclaim. If you sincerely agree that it's a Village-negative play, that was a very bad idea. On the subject of roleclaims, I agree that they should be withheld this cycle, until information gatherers have a chance to do their thing. Right now, it does nothing but draw targets. I'm not certain how I feel about roleclaiming C2 or C3, though. As has been pointed out, we're at a pretty sever information disadvantage right now, and we need to mitigate that as soon as we can. If any role is capable of starting a PM or other private communication, then I think their contacts should let us know by C3. I'm not sure why everyone seems to have latched onto the idea that "Type" means different powers for the same metal. I can think of at least three things it could mean, and "different powers" is the least likely of them. The rules say none of us know our own Type, and I was told my power; I assume the same is true for everyone else. I, for one, am really eager for an early majority just to pin down exactly what a "Type" is.

If El is this excited, I feel like I have to play.

*Sigh.* I'm sad we didn't get to use the True Ring ending. I definitely wanted to say that the reverse-lynch is a fascinating mechanic, that I'd love to see enter into the long-term SE lexicon. It proved a little difficult to balance, but I think that's a product of our total inexperience with it. It was a fun, unique twist on the game, and I think that once we get a better grasp on how it plays, there's a whole world of possibilities that it opens up. Bravo, El: this was really cool. EDIT: I don't know if summons work in edits, but @Kasimir. If, instead of you, Striker had flipped good, would I have gained trust in your eyes? Because that was the point of "if Striker flips evil, I'm looking at you". I didn't communicate that well with my team, though, and Fifth ended up moving the vote to you, so it ended up looking like a very clumsy Eliminator play.

Oh. See, this is why I prefer long, well-considered posts. And... you're welcome, I guess? Am I on it? It feels like I'm on it. I can accept the private motivations. I guess we'll see how this goes. I have to go to bed, now; see you (hopefully ) tomorrow.