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TransEmo

is balance generally an important mechanic in cradle magic systems?

Will Wight

I’m not sure how to respond to the balance question, because I don’t know what you mean by balance. Me balancing the Paths so they’re all roughly on the same level? The Paths keeping their madra in balance? Balancing different factions?

TransEmo

more like a general yin yang type deal. like destruction aura but no creation, is that a oddity and most things have an opposite to compliment?

Will Wight

I had a balance element to Cradle for a while, but I ditched it for (meta answer incoming) being more philosophical than fun.

Questioner

How intelligent can Kameira become? Are there any that can Read intent?

Will Wight

Kameira aren't like sacred beasts--they can't actually develop human-level intelligence, though many stories and myths suggest that they do. They are powerful animals, and there are none that can Read Intent.

Questioner

Using a sinister vibe integrate Barbie horse into travelers gate world as a fragment realm.

Will Wight

The air swirls in front of you with a vibrant pink light. Startled, you take a step back, but the light soon snaps into a recognizable shape: a pink-edged doorway into another realm. An endless, perfectly flat field of plastic grass stretches out before you. The clouds seem painted onto the sky. A glossy horse turns to stare at you--it seems to be covered in brown chitin instead of hair. Its eyes bulge as though it can never blink. A woman stands next to the horse, her hand on the animal's mane. Her smile seems to wear her. She looks like a mannequin wearing the face of a human woman as a mask. Though you lock eyes, she says nothing. Her teeth clack together as though she tries to speak, but cannot. You turn from the portal and run. It's best to let a Traveler deal with this.

Questioner

Are Ziel's scripts a part of his path or a workaround around his core injury?

Will Wight

That is part of his path. That's kind of like the Path of the Last Oath that was briefly shown in Blackflame. He's forging scripts. So, therefore, that allows him to do certain specific things with his madra really well.

Decadakon

Will Wight

He could practice Blackflame without a pure core. The pure core helps balance out the spiritual damage caused by Blackflame madra, but the treatment of the Sylvan Riverseed + medicine and/or rest could compensate for that. There are other ways around it.

Decadakon

Will Wight

Questioner

Is the a cycling technique that aids digestion?

Will Wight

The Path of the Crimson Furnace has developed a cycling technique that they use in conjunction with their Iron bodies to eat as many spirit-fruits and sacred elixirs and pills as possible. They gorge themselves on sacred beast meat and sacred herbs, and then digest as quickly as possible. Their Iron body involves stuffing yourself to bursting and then using life madra to accelerate your body so that you digest it quickly. After about two weeks of this, combined with some pills they have developed for the purpose, your body becomes able to do it naturally. It's a great all-purpose Iron body; they are able to receive further benefits from elixirs that improve the body, and much of what they eat strengthens them and makes them tougher. The only downside is an accelerated metabolism: now they HAVE to eat all the time. At Jade, they have a cycling technique to go along with it. It allows them to milk further benefits out of restorative pills and elixirs, and extracts aura from the things they eat, improving advancement.

Questioner

How are scales made and what are they? An inert Forger technique for storing power?

Will Wight

Scales: pretty much, yeah. It's a way to store inert power. They actually take more concentration and skill to make than normal Forged madra, which we'll (probably) go into in Skysworn.

Questioner

If you had the ability to polymorph into one mundane earth creature at will which creature would you chose?

Will Wight

I don't know, I’m thinking of... So, to illustrate to you where my imagination goes, so I immediately am like I want to pick something weird so I immediately thought of like, a jellyfish. I thought that would be like something that I'm like... Ok, you know it's extremely different from the human experience so that would be interesting. But then I think it would probably be something that I would want to be... be safe... something that it doesn’t have any natural predators. I don't know, a blue whale? But then that’s super inconvenient so... Something that is, probably like a.. a housecat probably because then people would take care of me and I wouldn't be in any danger from the natural world and I can blend in, in pretty much any environment. So, yeah that’s pretty... that would probably be my practical answer. In terms of which one would I want to turn into... hmmmm, Silverback Gorilla.

Andrew

Okay, I'm a bit confused on how Cradle has that many people living on it. I know Will said that the planet is bigger and that vital aura helps to keep people alive, but I'm still not sure how it has such a huge population if there are so many dangerous conditions(monsters, remnants, kill-happy people, poisonous plants, etc.) and how there doesn't seem to be much large-scale agriculture(at least from what we've read). Is there agriculture that we haven't seen? Are they completely immune to disease? Is the planet just ridiculously huge(many times bigger than earth) to the point where that stuff could happen and still support a population of billions?

Will Wight

It has many times more surface area than Earth.

Also, as B pointed out, we haven't seen any REALLY civilized places yet. We'll see a city in Blackflame, but even that will be a relatively small, isolated city.

Thanks to vital aura and the power of madra, there are lots of inhabited places in Cradle that would be uninhabitable on Earth. For instance, there are cities on the bottom of the ocean. And on the surface of the ocean. And on the clouds.

Daniel

The inside of a volcano? The top of a rainbow? The back of a turtle? In a glacier? On a glacier? Under a desert? Suspended on a moon beam? Floating on sunlight? Deep under ground?

Will Wight

No moonbeams. And I would describe the city floating on sunlight as walking on sunshine, woah-oh-oh.

Questioner

Was Northstrider originally a fish species?

Will Wight

He was not. At no point was he anything but human.

Questioner

Are the sacred animals bound to their stage, or could one, asy orthos for example, advance further?

Will Wight

Sacred beasts can and do advance. However, they cycle naturally, so their advancement is different from humans. Orthos has been stuck at the Truegold stage for decades, and he has long since given up any hopes of reaching Underlord, even if his consciousness was stable enough to support the advancement.

Questioner

Sauron vs. Sha Miara

Will Wight

This hasn't been explored yet, but basically the nature of Sha Miara's madra is countering and controlling other people's skills.

He could raise armies, and she could banish them or take them over. Any spell he cast, she could break it.

More than that, at her level, she could simply walk into Mordor. She'd leave it a crater. She's the nuclear weapon of her nation.

Questioner

Additionally, those colored rings of madra that Lindon sees around the sword sages remnant! Those just little cool visual effects? Extra soul spaces (will yerin find some presents as she advances?) Or are they indications he has more than one path!?!

Will Wight

They are little extra powers that the Sword Sage gained over his long career that he had stored in his soul. They became part of his spirit over time, and merged with his Remnant when he died.The only spoiler is the nature of what those powers were.

Business-Worry-5731

Jai Daishou never should have pulled that trick. I refuse to believe a JUDGE made that mistake and believe it's more likely Will wrote himself in a corner and didn't have a choice.

Will Wight

There’s a lot of argument going on, but I see where you’re coming from. Even in Blackflame, I was worried people might think this, so I tried to set up for it.

What I was going for is that this is the sort of mistake an imprisoned ultra-powerful death god figure might make. He’s not used to being so weak.

That’s why I had the exchange with Naru Huan afterwards, where Eithan thinks back to the last time he was mortal and realizes he’s never made this mistake even then. Ozmanthus was used to operating on this lower level of power and his techniques were more lethal.

Now Eithan’s using a less-lethal Path—intentionally, but it’s still inconvenient when he has to kill someone—and it’s been thousands of years since he’s fought like a mortal. Plus he doesn’t have access to his full memories or mental capacity.

And his character flaw is, and has always been, arrogance. Even at his full power, he was trying to solve problems himself.

I could have written it so that he fails to kill JD because pure madra isn’t lethal enough, and JD escapes. I chose not to because I wanted to show him making a mistake I thought was reasonable for his character.

But I understand feeling the way you do! If he had his full measure of skill and understanding, him making any mistake at all is suspect.

Tim

Will, are the seven Judges and the various members of the Divisions bound by Fate as well.

If that is the case, doesn't that mean that Makiel has power over all of them.

Or, does one, by joining the Abidan, get the keys(figuratively speaking) to free oneself of the Shackles (Fate)?

Will Wight

Fate guides the actions of the Abidan as well!

This was actually something of a revelation to them, as they thought they had moved beyond Fate's reach when they left their Iterations. However, even the Abidan have a Fate.

Makiel doesn't have power over them, exactly. He doesn't control Fate; that would be like trying to manually control gravity.

He and his teams *manage* Fate, making sure people don't screw it up. If humans didn't have free will, there would be no need for the Hounds. But because they do, they can act in ways that might (generations down the road) send Fate spinning out of control.

Hounds look into the past and the future to determine the chain of events that might lead to this sort of thing happening, then they take action to prevent it.

Illar

What would a "screw up" be? Wouldn't anything that someone did be part of that world's natural evolution?

Will Wight

No. That's effectively the premise of this whole concept: that Fate can be defied, eluded, slipped.

Now, waking up and ordering a sandwich for lunch is never going to send your world into a downward spiral because you were destined to eat pasta and you have confounded the powers that be.

Resurrecting a certain dead person, trying to invent time travel, drilling a hole in the universe, looking into the future and working very hard to subvert what you see there, THAT is the sort of thing that knocks Fate off-course.

Questioner

Ok so you have stated that chicken exists in cradle. So my question is regarding sacred chickens. What madra type would the chicken have to use to become the most tasty sacred chicken?

Will Wight

Blood path. That way they get all meaty.

Questioner

Does or did the Abidan every bother to research esoteric sacred arts? 

Will Wight

Not really. What the Abidan did was they had...again getting into spoiler territory, oh no. 

They had research facilities that they used to investigate the more fundamental nature of madra why certain aspects are on cradle, why things are, how sage works all that kind of stuff and they tracked that back to the function of The Way and that was really how they got off cradle. 

So in that sense, they did but what they were really doing is they were looking into the origin of how sacred arts work and they were looking for other worlds and they were looking for deeper effects. 

They were almost tracking sage authority backwards in a way. 

But did they research strange types of sacred arts? 

I mean, in their quest to do this, sure, but in the sense of are they trying to create new paths nobody ever seen before? 

No, not really. 

Questioner

We've seen resonance in soulsmithing. Can the techniques on a sacred artist's path resonate with each other? As in, could you have a path where your abilities, when used together, create something stronger than sum of each of the techniques used?

Will Wight

The canon that Lindon uses sometimes operates on the principle of technique resonance, so saying that these techniques work together better than they work separately. So you're asking if there are Paths that do the same?

Yes there are. But it's not something that is typically the foundation of a Path, because it would be like a suicidal technique - not literally suicidal, as in it wouldn't necessarily instantly kill you - but it puts a higher burden on your spirit and your madra channels and your body, than using them separately would.

So typically Paths are not designed like that. But there are techniques that can be used together. One of the problems with that is it's often hard to use two techniques together that are similar, so it's hard to use one striker technique from one hand and another striker technique from another hand - that kind of thing.

Questioner

Is it possible for Fiends of Chaos to not be inherently dangerous to humanity? So instead of wanting to destroy everything like Urgnaught, the Chaosfriend wants to completely master cooking for example.

Will Wight

Uh, Yeah.... Not really no, but it's possible for.. the example here was, instead of wanting to devour all of existance is it possible for instance for them to want to for instance master cooking. So that kind of thing is absolutly possible, but what the issue with fiends of choas is they are inherently destabilizing to the order that existance requires so they are going to kind of be unraveling reality as they as doing it so it is always going to be a problem

Questioner

What do people do on cradle who don't pursue sacred arts?

Will Wight

To a degree, advancement in the sacred arts is an act of survival. Almost every adult on the planet is at least Iron, because that's essentially the minimum it takes to interact with the world on a normal level. However, many of Cradle's people don't consider themselves "sacred artists" per se, because their life does not revolve around the pursuit of advancement. Aura and madra are still a part of their lives, but not personal power and achievement. Cradle certainly has farmers, but farmers who can pull the rainclouds closer with Ruler techniques. They have chefs who can determine your tastes by reading your feelings, doctors who can diagnose you from across the room by sensing your blood, and carpenters who shape wood with their spirits.