scrape_r_rational/data/cache/7b2mlz.md

[RT][WIP] Worth the Candle, ch 58-59 (Panopticon/Myriad)

Post:

Link to content

Comments:

• u/cthulhuraejepsen:

  I am dealing with a little bit of seasonal affective disorder right now, so chapters will be a little slower than previously. Ironically, National Novel Writing Month might break my streak of doing more than 50,000 words a month.
  

  • u/knite:

    If it helps, these chapters were still excellent!
    

  • u/Hust91:

    You write this?
    
    I've been catching up the last month and was horrified when I caught up!
    
    Thank you so much for a really awesome story where the characters actually go "huh, that's funny..." when something doesn't add up, and it often leads them somewhere!
    
    Are we ever going to find out how exclusion zones work?
    
    Oh, and is he ever going to read up on what the magical fields actually do instead of going from his old conceptions (referring to his thoughts that high levels of blood magic rarely has useful stuff in the high tiers. I mean, what if the high levels lets you control your own blood the way Magneto controls metal? Just keep tapping it and have telekinesis!)?
    
    Oh, and I'm loving what you did with magic systems, still hoping he'll find something that can be exploited to hell and back (high level revision magic lets you make a savepoint? Dun dun dunn! Control magic has an infinite-capacity insect control spell? High level mental or social stats lets you understand and persuade people on the same level, and with a similar terrifying effectiveness as a superintelligent AI? Logic plague on your enemies! Your cause is now their cause)
    
    TL:DR; Thank you for an incredibly awesome read!
    

    • u/cthulhuraejepsen:

      Well, I can't answer any of that, because spoilers, but there's a lot of story left to go, and I have a list of roughly 40 things that I want to get to or that I consider "dangling".
      

      • u/derefr:

        I’m curious: how much outlining did you do before you started writing WtC? I can’t imagine writing at the speed you do if you’re having to also pause to refine the worldbuilding and plotting, so how much of that is already locked in place?
        
        I mean, obviously you’re getting a speed boost from having built up all the “source material” for the worldbuilding in the context of running RPG campaigns. But that still doesn’t explain the speed at which you’re doing the plotting.
        
        Unless... it does? Is quick, reflexive plotting a skill you can build by DMing, the same way that dialogue is a skill you can build by participating in improv? Is DMing something you would recommend someone who wanted to get faster at coming up with satisfying plots?
        

        • u/cthulhuraejepsen:

          I think when I started I had a five page worldbuilding document and a two page outline (of which we are now about one third of the way through). Outlining too much can make you unwilling to change course when it becomes apparent that you should, so I tend to shy away from doing it too much. My primary tool is to instead jot down extended notes on things that are mentioned, and keep track of things that have been mentioned, and how much weight has been placed on them, along with the intended payoff for them.
          
          Quick, reflexive plotting is a DM skill ... for a certain type of DM. Some people do the DM thing using only modules, never deviating from what someone else has written or making only small "localization" changes to fit it within their campaign, and I don't think that those types of people deal with plotting enough to get that good at it.
          
          For someone like me though, tabletop games have a much more sandbox feel, and no plan survives contact with the enemy, so you either continually suck as a DM when things run off the beaten path, or you get good at spinning up a new story out of whole cloth when the old one falls by the wayside because the players did something unexpected. You get used to racing just ahead of the plot, building a bridge just before the players cross it, and figuring out when to bring back threads that were dropped or put on hold. If you have a long-running game that's been going for a year, you have this entire arsenal of characters, places, and items that you can call back to with some regularity, and if you have copious notes that you only use a tenth of, there's always some new revelation. So yes, I would suggest DMing if you can find a group, because part of tabletop gaming is improv, and part of the DM's job is to improv a plot.
          
          And this is all *so much easier* in prose, because you have a better read on the characters, there aren't out-of-character moments that derail the plot, you can ensure that you're actually going to get to payoff the things that you set up instead of just letting them languish, etc. (And if you're not writing serial fiction, you can use your authorial time travel powers to retroactively insert clues or foreshadowing, if you need to.)
          

  • u/FormerlySarsaparilla:

    Would a wave of approbation and encouragement help? I've been hooked on your story since I found it and refresh every few days for more chapters! Wonderful work so far, love the progress the writing and the characters have made.
    

  • u/mojojo46:

    Have you tried something like this? 
    
    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075H39NDL/ref=sspa_dk_detail_0?psc=1
    

    • u/cthulhuraejepsen:

      This is my current regime:
      
      * Get better sleep.
      * Take 300mcg of melatonin an hour before a reasonable bedtime.
      * Take vitamin D supplements.
      * Do lightbox therapy for half an hour in the mornings.
      * Spend something like a half hour exercising every day.
      * Install f.lux or equivalent on all screens.
      
      So, yep, got a 10,000 lux lightbox, and I've either adjusted to the intensity of it so that it's not giving me headaches, or I've figured out the right positioning. I am somewhat back to normal at this point, having thrown every solution that I could at the problem short of CBT, moar light, or moving somewhere that's not so dark.
      
      The big problem, now that I can do something other than just staring blankly at a screen, is that it takes a good chunk out of my day when I'd rather be writing.
      

      • u/xamueljones:

        I don't know if you would find it helpful for me to say anything about SAD, but in my experience it's usually better to say something than to stay silent. Even if the individual in question is sick of hearing more unsolicited advice, so sorry in advance.
        
        Eliezer Yudkowsky has a wife who suffers yearly from SAD and she has posted the different [methods](http://agentyduck.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-experiences-with-sad-interventions.html) that she tried and what the results were. The winning method was to build a [lightbox](https://arbital.com/p/lumenators/) way more powerful than anything available on the market
        

        • u/derefr:

          To be clear, Eliezer’s solution wasn’t a more powerful lightbox (in terms of lux to your eyes at any instant) but rather to make each room into a lightbox you could exist inside, so that you were always experiencing the effect of artificial sunlight, rather than only experiencing it for 15mins per day. (AFAIK, despite having way more bulbs, the room isn’t as bright as a 10000lux lightbox—but it doesn’t need to be. That intensity is only required because of regular light-therapy’s short duration.)
          

          • u/Izeinwinter:

            I also suspect it works because Brienne spends her entire day in places where they can string up LEDs to their hearts content. Because I did consider if this was an idea I could appropriate for commercial purposes, but if you spend 8  hours a day in an office or a factory, you do not just need to be a firm that sells light armatures designed for "Fuck-off" levels of Lux, you would have to be experts at persuading peoples bosses to redo working environments...
            
            Which, of course, then spawned a secondary idea, but thats an entirely separate question. There has been a lot of research on productivity and office environments, but.. I do not recall any that tried to just turn the place bright enough to grow wheat in winter. It might have quite considerable impact if there is a lot of undiagnosed SAD in the workforce..
            

      • u/mojojo46:

        Whelp, sounds like you've got the easy things covered. Glad it's helping, at least, even if it does take a lot of time...
        

• u/Gigapode:

  So how about some massive speculation based on chapter names hey?
  
  Chapter 38 is called Panopticon, which wikipedia tells me is an institution built so that one person can observe any/all of the inmates without the inmates knowning it. 
  
  This might be a reference to a DM watching June and co. but more obviously to the facility *originally* being a panopticon controlled by the mind of one entad, which may no longer be true. Did the facility start as a panopticon with one warden that has since split into multiple wardens as the party theorises?
  
  But after the party discusses the possibility that there are conflicting minds operating the defenses, the golem immediately appears to parley, becase they were being observed. They are lead to assume that there are factions and that the female golem did not intend to carry a void bomb to them, but this isnt confirmed.
  
  Potentially all the variants/minds within the entad and all the inmates are controlled by the soul mage, which is where I am trying to fit the name of chapter 59 into it.
  
  Do sentient/sapient "entads" have a soul that that might be subverted by a super-powerful soul mage? When they improsoned the best soul mage in there, they probably took that into account in the defenses. So its probably not the elf in charge of everything unless they could gain control of the entad without soul magic.
  

• u/Izeinwinter:

  Uhm. I am not exactly sure what all this says about the soul-mage they are trying to recruit. He remade at least twenty souls in his own image. Or, at least, told the party that. I mean, I get doing soul-surgery on his fellow inmates.
  
  - If they are all the kind of people who earned an elven-life-without parole sentence, they were probably extremely unpleasant company - 
  but turning them all into self-forks when they are all also still stuck in the prison, or alternatively, heading for the hells? 
  
  Possibilities : 
  
  1:Liar, liar, pants on fire? 
  
  2: The soul is too complicated to do free-form personality modification, and there was only one person in the prison that would cooperate after being patterned into a prisoner.
  
  3: Some magical reason to have lots of similar souls on hand.
  
  4:Just really, really narcissistic
  

  • u/None:

    >3: Some magical reason to have lots of similar souls on hand.
    
    This was at least partially addressed in chapter. Apparently they're similar enough to confuse the prison's ID systems. So there was at least some practical benefit to this.
    

    • u/Izeinwinter:

      Uhm. You know, this could potentially be leverage. If he also made the shorter-lived inmates into forks, he might literally be in dozens or hundreds of hells now. So, he might be along for the ride if there is a chance to do something about the hells...
      

• u/cthulhuraejepsen:

  Typos here, please.
  

---