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Questioner

How did the Blood line powers originate and how come the Jae Clan don't have any? Are they not one the "Great Families?"

Will Wight

Not everyone inherits a bloodline legacy. Higher-level sacred beasts can take human form, so some people have sacred beast lineage that gives them certain innate supernatural abilities. That includes the Arelius family, but not the Jai clan.

In most cases, a bloodline legacy means that you're naturally inclined more toward one Path than another, though. Your madra might not be entirely pure, even at birth.

The Arelius are an exception to that.

Questioner

When it comes to the path of the stellar spear's gold sign, is it all their hair? Is personal grooming difficult?

Will Wight

In fact, it is only the hair on their heads. It used to be ALL their hair, and they altered their Path over the generations to change their Remnants so that it only armored the hair on their heads.

Questioner

Is purity and quality of madra only about aspects or mostly about aspects, because I was thinking if it is, then Lindon and Eithan's pure cores are more or less very similar, except that Eithan did something with the soulfire to make it more dense or something along those lines?

Will Wight

So Eithan and Lindon's cores are very similar in that they're using the same jade cycling technique, so therefore they're increasing quantity and using external means to increase quality. So yes they would be very similar.

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.

Questioner

What is the most powerful path and what is the weakest

Will Wight

The most powerful and weakest Paths are difficult to answer, as that's largely a matter of opinion. I'll give you a very powerful one and a very weak one, though:

Path of the Untamed Spark. It revolves around nurturing a flame of life and fire that consumes anything living and is difficult to extinguish. It's a killing Path, and at its height it can depopulate cities.

Path of Shadeleaf. It's a purely aesthetic Path built around molding and folding shadow madra like origami to create pleasing shapes and displays. It has almost no other use.

Will Wight

The Steelborn body is just what Yerin's Iron body is called. Steel isn't a rank over Iron.

I changed from the materials ranking system to reflect a difference in how you advance at Underlord level. Up to Truegold, you're just adding to and refining your madra. There are Remnants involved at Gold, but there don't HAVE to be; TECHNICALLY you could cycle all the way to Truegold without ever bonding a Remnant.

It would take you hundreds of years and a ridiculous amount of unnecessary work, but you could do it.

Whereas Truegold to Underlord is achieved differently.

Questioner

Will, when advancing in the Gold stages is madra quality or quantity the most important?```

Will Wight

Quantity vs. Quality: quality.

Andrew

So are the sword & other deadly artifacts supposed to be a common type of thing in Cradle, or were they just a rare(but deadly) occurrence?

Will

Most people don't practice a Path that's as strictly lethal as this blood/death Path. These guys figured, "If we use the sacred arts in combat so much, then surely the most lethal Path is the best."And they were sort of right, until they all killed each other.

Andrew

By 'common thing', I meant more along the lines of 'ancient tomb with valuable/powerful weapons/treasures that travelers stumble upon and try to loot'. Also, what's the general technology level in Cradle? It seems like a blend of low-tech and madra usage

Will

Then yes, it is pretty common!

It's an old world, in which aura tends to gather and condense naturally over time into very valuable materials/treasures, so treasure-hunting and adventuring can be actual careers.

On top of that, animals can advance into sacred beasts over time, which means that small non-human civilizations can rise spontaneously from the wilderness.

In other words, it would be a great world to run a DnD campaign in. That was not by design, but I'm willing to take credit for it nonetheless.

Technology is pretty medieval with a few exceptions, although constructs have changed things in more civilized areas. I explore that more in Blackflame, where you get to see what a more advanced civilization is like.

For instance, there are mechanisms for audio communication, but they're expensive and they can be blocked by natural phenomena. Likewise, they have aerial transportation, but any number of crazy aura-fueled weather patterns or terrifying flying monsters can make travel impossible, so they tend to stay within very controlled routes.

Also, this is a world where a single individual can become so strong as to be untouchable, so that tends to create a situation in which personal advancement is far more reliable than technological.

Instead of inventing and perfecting a device so that everyone can have an ability, you can just develop that ability yourself.

Will

Here's a more commonplace example of "treasure-hunting" than what we saw in 'A Sword Unclean':

--There's an abandoned temple at the top of a mountain. It's broken and ruined, but you suspect Cloudgrass will grow in the cracks; Cloudgrass grows wherever the wind is strong, and contains within it vital aura condensed from the wind and clouds.--It can be used to create a Thousand-Mile Cloud, to further someone's advancement in cloud or wind sacred arts, or even drained and purified to make scales. You don't care; you just need to grab some so that you can sell it.--Nobody else has taken it yet because the winds are very strong up there, a cloud covers the mountain 24/7, and packs of Blood Eagles (sacred beasts nourished by the pure wind aura of the area) circle the peak, looking for prey.--They don't watch for an approach through the earth. You're part of a mining clan, and you use your techniques to excavate a tunnel right up and into the ruins of the temple. There's plenty of Cloudgrass, a few ruined lines of ancient script that you make casts of in case a scriptor will pay you for them, and a Blood Eagle sitting on its nest. You kill the bird and its Remnant, taking both bodies back with you--you can sell the Remnant to a Soulsmith and the body to a medicinal refinery.

That sort of thing. The people who go around looking for naturally forming treasure typically have a reliable source of leads, a skill-set that allows them to go where no one else can, and a way to turn those leads into cash.

If you make a career out of it, you typically know where you can go, you find out which of those places have valuable resources there, and you spend your time making a circuit between those locations.

And if someone else with similar skills starts taking your stuff, well, it depends on how strong they are. If they're more advanced than you, that's how life works. Suck it up. If you're more advanced than they are, you threaten them until they leave or you just kill them.

Cradle life!

tlor180

The character to character interactions in Elder Empire are leagues ahead of his other books,(although tbf cradle has a very different focus). I hope the relative obscureness compared to cradle doesn't dissaude will from writing more character focused stories.

Will Wight

Not to bring down the mood, but it kind of has dissuaded me.

IMHO, Elder Empire has two strengths:

1.) The world feels cohesive. It has history and culture and a postal system, different characters have different opinions on people and events that everyone is aware of, there’s shared mythology, etc.

2.) The major characters are a lot more fleshed out.

I believe I can bring some of that over to Cradle, especially having refreshed myself on it by skipping over to OKAK, but back when I started writing EE I thought this was the direction I was going to take my writing.

If you’ll pardon the comparison, let’s say Traveler’s Gate was halfway between a Japanese light novel and a traditional Western fantasy novel. Then Elder Empire would be a step more towards traditional novels and Cradle is a step towards light novels.

Well, one of those did 10-20x better than the other.

So I’m a lot more inclined to keep leaning toward the light novel side, which means not diving deeper into world and character development.

Having said all that, there’s still room to improve my character writing even without changing the formula of Cradle at all, it just comes down to skill. I’m working on it!

acog

It's a tough question to answer since you're trying to guess why someone didn't buy it, and people don't leave feedback for books they decided to skip. Still, I think I'm not alone. I had a small company for years and one lesson I learned in sales was that "analysis paralysis" is real. If the customer is the least bit confused, the easiest thing to do is not make the sale. Look at how many posts there are in this subreddit asking about the proper reading order for the trilogies. Might be a sign.

Will Wight

I actually completely agree with what you’re saying.

My experience is that readers need to think they know what they’re getting from a story in order to pick it up.

Then you have to give them what they came for, as well as a little something extra they didn’t expect.

So, given all that about the structure, here’s the situation I’m actually in: I’m going to start a new series, for which I’m DEFINITELY not doing a crazy new experimental format, and I have to decide whether to make it more like a traditional fantasy story or more like a light novel. (So to speak.)

And I have three data points. The hybrid version (TGT) did very well, the traditional series did relatively poorly, and the one that was most like a light novel performed by far the best.

Now, I too believe that it was mostly because of the structure that people didn’t try EE.

But is it worth the risk to gamble with a traditional fantasy series?

I feel like I’m at a crossroads where one road is covered in fog and vultures while the other is well-paved and raining gold.

RedHavoc1021

It always throws me when I remember Lindon is supposed to be this mass of muscle. I think it’s because he’s so meek, but my mental image always defaults to a relatively small, wimpy looking kid.

Will Wight

Lindon is a W I D E B O I

Honestly, when I was first designing his character, it just appealed to me to have a protagonist whose appearance was so at odds with his personality.

I didn’t realize how much people’s understanding of his character would form their mental image, even when it contradicts the actual physical description.

I learned something!

Brightbane

Wait a second, was it intentional that Lindon was suppose to be jacked because of his core deficiency?

I just saw this comment a few minutes ago and it clicked in my head that normally even children make it to copper so they can cycle madra to their limbs on the journey to iron and that is what helps them battle gravity.

Since Lindon couldn't do that he had to rely on pure muscle to move around so his whole life was like resistance training. There's so much detail that goes into how books are put together that it blows my mind.

Will Wight

Yeah, that was a big part of the original idea. He has to keep up in physical training with people who are supernaturally stronger than he is.

Lil' Blue

Is madra a series of tubes?

Will Wight

Madra itself is not a series of tubes, but it can exist only in the context of a series of loops and channels that might be described as tubes. Bindings and scripts re-pattern madra in order to control it and produce different effects, so you might say that madra in its natural state is ALWAYS cycling through an interconnected network of tubes. So while madra is not a series of tubes, the system by which the sacred arts can be performed IS a series of tubes.

kruppe12

What effect, if any, would an Empty palm or Madra Bullet (eithan's core - breaker) have on a non-madra user? Could it scramble a reader's senses or some such, or would they just look at you funny?

Will Wight

Just look at you funny. If Lindon Empty Palmed Simon, Simon wouldn't even feel it.

OrgnlDave

Hi Will, what sounds do techniques make? Is sound integral to a small set of types of madra, and things like the Dragon's Breath and Rippling Sword only make sounds due to superheating the air or moving fast or something? Do scripts also make noise when they activate?

Will Wight

Scripts do make a small noise when they activate! It’s something like the strike of a match followed by a hum like a power line, though for many scripts, that sound fades away. As for the sounds of techniques, that depends on the nature of the madra and the technique itself. As you say, something like dragon’s breath would make a sound because of its heat (and because of its destruction component tearing apart whatever it hits), but something like the Path of the White Fox would make no sound.

AlienFromBeyond

For an actual question, what's an interesting type of aura/madra that hasn't been seen/mentioned in the books yet?

Will Wight

I’d like to get into death madra at some point, and we haven’t seen much of it.

Walter

How is Reading advanced? Is it like on Cradle?

Will Wight

Reading isn't trained like the sacred arts because the magic system is a lot harder to quantify than the sacred arts. A madra technique literally starts to crystallize in the practitioner's soul as a binding, so there are measurable and observable effects. Reading is much more difficult to boil down to a tangible process.

Cash4Golda

Are there aspects of madra aligned with emotions? Like anger or happiness madra, or would those be derivatives of dream madra?

Will Wight

They would be derivatives of dream madra. So one of the things I did not do a great job of conveying at the beginning was how the world works, like what aura is, and I wish I had. So I initially didn't want to limit the types of madra because I didn't want to limit myself, I wanted to be able to use any cool powers I thought of. But what I wished later, because what I've effectively done is I have created an elemental system, so wish I had just names the ten or twelve elements that there are on Cradle, and the ten or twelve common aspects of madra. I didn't because its environmental, so maybe in some places...like again, sword madra is effectively just force madra, but it's so distinct and so concentrated that people can cultivate with it, and make sword paths and so on and so forth.

So I liked the idea of it being mutable like that and being culturally different and different people having different paths based on where they've come from and what they've learned, and they're environment and all that stuff. But what I wish I'd done was have a certain number of static elements, because you can mix and match. I think that's the more compelling part of the magic system, is you go "what would a sword/dream path do? what would a sword/storm path do?", and that's cool to think about, that's cool the picture. Where as when your trying to figure out, is there emotion madra? is there leaf madra? is there metal madra? that becomes confusing, because you're like " so okay, my path is not sword and....eyeballs..." and it's like, "thats...play...well, that's not a thing", but it makes you think it might be, and I didn't give a reason why not. So that's one of the regrets I have about developing the system, was I wish there had just been twelve elements, or whatever. 

caffeine-overclock

A few days ago, I asked how bindings are powered/recharged here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Iteration110Cradle/comments/d95b8u/how_are_bindings_recharged/

The consensus was that bindings work as they are described in Soulsmith, where Lindon creates his own water: his core is basically drained from the effort of "activating the binding," where that madra is converted to water madra.

The critical detail being that Lindon's own madra is drained from him into the weapon to activate the binding.

So far, so good.

Then, in Uncrowned, we see Yerin activate an Archlord weapon. The explanation we're given is that her new diamond channels kept her from being destroyed by using it two stages too soon. I guess if it's an enormous amount of Yerin's madra being ripped out of her into the weapon, this explanation makes sense, except...

Where did Yerin get all that Madra?

It's described as consuming the enormous arena stage, and being so much that Lindon's arm was ripping at the seams trying to control it all.

Has Yerin been using the HEPW? I can't imagine her having all that madra in her cores, especially after a long fight with Lindon.

Will Wight

The madra can come from the substance of the construct or from the madra forming the binding itself, which is how independent constructs work and why they cannibalize themselves over time.

Since Yerin can’t afford to subsidize an entire Archlord technique with her own madra, she puts as much as she can into activating and controlling it, and the rest of the power comes from the sword itself.

Which will cut down on the sword’s lifespan unless it receives serious maintenance.

caffeine-overclock

Yessss thank you!

So if Eithan wanted to activate an Archlord binding, and hypothetically also had diamond channels, he could do so without damaging it?

Will Wight

He could! Technically any Underlord can, if they have some way to handle the stress it puts on their spirit. It’s just usually better to have a weapon you can control and activate consistently with no risk.

Questioner

Are there types of madra that cannot be combined into a single path?

Will Wight

Yes, there are. There are definitely incompatible types of madra, it depends a lot on how the madra is expressed and what its source is. So in a lot of ways water and fire would be incompatible elements obviously as you would expect. But of course we have a character in the series who does follow a path that unifies water and fire so there are no absolutes I guess. But like for instance you couldn't blend life/death madra because it would be death madra. That would be it, that's all it would be. However, you could and this is a path - I was going to show off in the uncrowned king tournament but didn't end up having the time - where you could have a life madra AND death madra so what I was going to do is run into this guy who could use life madra and death madra because he had split his cores. Everybody's mentioned that as a possibility that everyone's aware of but rarely people use so I was going to have another person who had split their cores and they were doing this life/death yin-yang thing and I thought that would be fun but alas we didn't get to... Lindon's going to be the only yin-yang duality cultivator I guess.

Ruff

Will Wight

@Ruff I thought there are so many prime madras

There are, but different cultures and sects disagree on what they are. There are greater aspects and lesser aspects of madra. Greater aspects are universal and usually elemental, like fire or water. Lesser aspects are the weird things that practitioners can do to their madra over time to make it take on a certain quality, like making it sticky or in the shape of a snake. Lesser aspects are what make everything confusing.

I'll be going into this eventually in the books, but I haven't up to this point because A.) most characters aren't aware of this, and B.) I'm trying to find a way to explain it so that it makes the magic system less confusing instead of more confusing, which is what I'm afraid of.

Daniel

So if there is sword mandra that gathers on edged weapons does that mean there is club mandra that gathers around blunt objects?

not a madra expert

From what I can tell of the world and the usage of Madra in particular, I think the most analogous form of "blunt" madra would likely be named "force madra" or somesuch. Sword madra seems to have less to do with swords specifically and more to do with cutting or sharp edged implements. I'm reasonably certain (fact checking would be appreciated) that Jai Long has "sword madra" in his sacred path, yet he uses a bladed spear rather than a sword. As a side point, the name sword madra just sounds so much better then sharp madra or cutting madra that it makes sense to use it.

Will Wight

You've nailed it.

Sword aura is really force aura gathered to a sharp edge, but what they call force aura is generally weaker and diffuse, so sword aura is brighter and easier to see.

And I absolutely do call it "sword aura" because "cutting aura" or "sharp aura" sounds ridiculous.