Character Conception :: Not A GOD

That may well be. He was given a lot of the credit for designing the flow of City of Villains, and it feels like he was designing a single-player game by making us all follow the single path of Arachnos lackey. That's one of the primary reasons I dislike redside so much: the storyline is too constraining.

I think the single biggest mistake was making Lord Recluse so intimately connected to Statesman. That Cain-and-Abel story is hackneyed enough without shoving it into an existing tale. It would've just been better to make him the latest and greatest supervillain rather than go with the hoary "brother versus brother" routine.

I don't know where you're getting this, but you are provably wrong. My Natural Brute became an Incarnate and I have solid evidence that she is still Natural by the fact that her Origin remained unchanged and she will still call up Natural events and dialogue options were I to go through any. Your claim that the Well changes your origin is unsupported by either lore or game mechanics.

That is incorrect. We don't "define" magic colloquially, because "magic" is an abstract concept in colloquial language, describing most anything mystic and unexplainable, up to an including alien encounters, if the History channel is to be believed. I said this multiple times - City of Heroes has a far stricter definition of what magic is, and it does not include "everything that doesn't fall in one of the other categories."

Magic, for the most part, is defined as spellcasting, or the result thereof. Magic users are either casters, or have had a spell cast on them or an object they possess, and when I say "on them," I include a spell having been cast on the bloodline that they are born into. Tielekku may or may not have invented magic, but that just goes to show you that magic is inventable, in the same sense as writing was inventable. Yes, writing is one form of expression of human thought, but it does not alter the origin of "spoken" language into a subset of written language. In the same way, Tielekku having invented magic and used it does not alter her Origin, which may well have been Natural, into Magic, because it does not alter the fundamental nature of her powers ASIDE from magic.

"Taught," not given. Ermeeth - who is a clear analogue to Greek mythology's Prometheus - taught humans how to use magic. I forget which arc this is in, or if it's in the lore section of the site, but magic was taught to humans, not given to them. Magic is not an object or a specific type of power. Magic is the skill and knowledge of how to affect the world through the strength of your will, I believes Virgil Tarikoss describes it as.

Again, you infer cause by observing effect. Hero-1 (stupid numbers in names!) was given the sword and displayed magical powers. This does not mean he had no inherent magical affinity before that fact. Again I direct you to the Blood Tome, and how the Circle of Thorns use it to abduct descendants of the Mu bloodline who have strong magical affinity without ever realising it or displaying any magical talents whatsoever. If all Hero "ones" are descendants of the same bloodline, then I can bet you dollars to doughnuts that this bloodline is magic-inherent, and that this will be revealed at some point in the future.

Again - no, it does not. You say the Statesman was initially said to be Natural. One can assume he had the potential to develop natural skill and that was what the well enhanced to its ultimate level, or at least to a very high level. This is what I call reasonable doubt.

As for "every other thing" the well does - what other things does it do that are overtly magic-defined? Why be vague like this?

Define "everything." Rather, explain it.

You have infinite universes, infinite worlds, infinite realities, and you draw three examples out of that. What are the chances of those three examples being representative of the entire set. Coincidental? Possibly. Convincing? Not in the slightest. Hell, we have no real understanding of how the well operates and what it chooses to present to the different people it chooses. If I had to make a guess, I could guess that Kheldians themselves may turn out to be Incarnate somehow - alien beings given the power of the Well and transformed into pure energy with divine-seeming powers.

You do realise this is not an argument, right? It amounts to "I'm rubber and you're glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks back to you."

And that is your prerogative. From where I'm standing, Ramiel is the only person who actually knows what he's talking about and everyone else is wrong and mistaken. After all, everything we know about the Well of the Furies outside of Ramiel comes from legends, hearsay, folklore and the secretive hints from both Statesman and Recluse. To be blunt - we don't have idea one what the well might be, because no-one alive really has a clue, and because the actual well is nowhere to be found. Ramiel is the only one who has done research, come into contact with the Well and seen its effects first-hand. In fact, Ramiel is the first one to suggest that the "well" is more than just that one well on that one island.

But again, that assumes that the Well's influence is magical in nature, which in turn assumes that anything not defined as Science, Technology, Natural or Science must therefore be magic, and I don't buy that. Specifically, I don't buy it since Natural hasn't been adequately discounted.

Did you also read the part where Merulia is described as an alien, that she is remade into the Leviathan, making its powers alien, and that the Red/Blood coral are pieces of the Leviathan? Because you seem to continually ignore this. "The gods are magic," you say, conveniently sidestepping that one god who is actually alien, without even the courtesy of suggesting she may have been a magical space alien, or acknowledging the fact that ALL of the gods may actually be aliens. Or, hell, Kheldians, for all we know.

Your assertion that the Well is magic hinges, in large part, on the inference that the gods' power is magical in nature, a fact which is contradicted by the alien origin of one literal god.

So why do the Midnight Club get involved? Because the Legacy Chain are involved, and because the Leviathan is largely considered to be magical in nature. And, indeed, why would magic NOT work to affect alien powers? The Rikti are a pretty good example of magic and technology coexisting, and the 5th Column used to be another. How do we know the Leviathan is magical? Because the Circle of Thorns seem to believe so. But they are wrong. Why? Because I trust what I see from the Leviathan itself more than I trust the Circle's Research when they came to the island long after the fact.

So, if I become the avatar of Merulia - an alien being - will I still be magic?

According to War Witch. Virgil Tarikoss disagrees.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Out of curiosity, shouldn't it be impossible to be a Mutant, Science or Tech origin Demon Summoner?

Were I designing the game, then yes, it would be. But to date origins have been largely irrelevant other than as a roleplay option and which Enhancements you use.

Not at all.

Mutant with the power to summon and control Demons. What's to limit them from gaining that ability?

Science can easily fall the same line as mutants.

Tech Origin uses tech to summon forth and control the demons.

And while the powerset is called Demon Summoning, one could easily say they're manifestations of one's imagination/nightmares and made tangible!

Lot's of ways to work around things if one tries.

I was going to post a link to info about Illyana Rasputin as an example of mutants and magic mixing in a "competing publisher's mythos" (?). But alas, as I read through, I see that Marvel retconned away her mutantness. IIRC, in the 1980s when Marvel published some good comics--like the original New Mutants--her proficiency in Magic and I think her dimensional teleportation were connected to her mutantness.

When she was abducted/accidentally teleported to the wrong dimension as a child, she was raised by a demon and eventually returned to her primal earth as a tough-girl master of some of those demons. So while the demon summoning(her sword and armor at least USED to be summoned)/control/battling was related to sorcery, her initial powers that set her on that path were those of a mutant.

But alas, then the '90s happened and the sleaze machine that marvel became turned her from a tiny waif one might identify with (all the original new mutants were quite easy for many teens to identify with), she was transformed into a melon boobed bikini clad pornstar looking sorceress and all her mutant origins were retconned away over two decades of pretty consistent abysmal writing.

Anyways, point still stands, with a few narrative gymnastics, one CAN come up with reasons why one's mutant/tech/science origin character is cavorting with demons.

In a similar twist (though not specifically demon related), I have a villain that looks like a perverse cross between Dr. Strange and Myxlplyx. His kinetics powers are all based around "luck." But he's neither magic nor natural in origin. Rather, he's a former grad student who while doing a residency at the Talos Accelerator (yes, a personal twist in my own local lore--I've placed a particle accelerator UNDER Talos Island. And several of my characters do or have worked there)--anyways, during his residency he helped discover a new sub-atomic particle that is the source of what humans know as "luck." Scientifically inaccurate nonsense? Absolutely. Out of place in a classic comic book universe? Not in the least.

Okay, you have to separate the theoretical genre discussion from the game lore one. This is part of the former. I thought that was clear, which is why I didn't explicitly state it.

We do so define magic colloquially. It's all that stuff in Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and Doctor Strange and The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Knights of the Round Table... those all feed into the colloquial definition of magic. I've never heard anyone claim that UFOs are "magic," not even the nuttier nutcases on the History Channel.

For purposes of this game things which are supernatural (gods, demons, etc.) are also Magic, because the game lore specifically states that they are. It says that demons are magic and that Tielekku "discovered magic through her followers", whatever that means. But the Origin of Power clearly states that Magic is superior to divine and spirit powers despite having come from them, and it allows people to bend, shape and tear reality through sheer force of will.

That pretty much sounds like "whatever doesn't fit into the other categories" to me.

You can't claim Magic didn't change the fundamental nature of her powers because you don't know that. Just as I can't claim that she became Magic after inventing it. There's nothing in the lore that says either way. Were I opining on how I'd define it vis a vis genre conventions, I would definitely say she changed from Natural to Magic because she can't go back. But if someone can come up with a valid explanation as to how she can remain Natural while using magic then I'll accept that possibility.

I don't think spoken language to written language is an apt comparison for magic in this game. I think a more accurate analogy is nuclear weapons. Regular explosives are devised from the understanding and application of chemistry, while the atom bomb used conventional explosives applied in a new way to *really* give off a satisfying kaboom. From the tales of the war between the gods and the creation of magic, that's what it sounds like: an escalating arms race.



I can't find where he says that, but that's what it says in the origin of Power, too. However, OoP states that Tielekku devised magic along with her followers. Ermeeth didn't want to teach the CoT how to use magic -- that cat was already out of the bag. What he wanted to do was make humans more powerful than gods. I can't think of a mythical analogue to Ermeeth, but it's not Prometheus. A god wanting people to be more powerful than he is? When has that ever happened in mythology?



If it is, then so be it. At this juncture in time, though, it's stated that Hero-1 got his magical abilities from Excalibur. It looks pretty cut-and-dried.



Not to me. There was no Well in Statesman's first appearance, it was added later.

Were I a Dev working on this Incarnate stuff, I'd go back to the Gaia concept and use that as the almighty handwave to end all handwaves, making it the true source of everything "super" about the universe. From the divine power of gods to the creation of magic to inspiration to achieving athletic excellence. That way you get to have your cake and eat it, too, and all these arguments simply go away.

That would also allow them to keep most of the existing in-game content which pretty clearly was initially designed as having multiple sources of magic, the way religion comes in many flavors.

I wasn't being vague, I just was tired of repeating the list of stuff from earlier posts.


*I* am not drawing examples out of that, those are the only examples we're given. Name another NPC who is an Incarnate. See? It's just Statesman, Recluse and Hero-1.

[quote]What are the chances of those three examples being representative of the entire set. Coincidental? Possibly. Convincing? Not in the slightest. Hell, we have no real understanding of how the well operates and what it chooses to present to the different people it chooses. If I had to make a guess, I could guess that Kheldians themselves may turn out to be Incarnate somehow - alien beings given the power of the Well and transformed into pure energy with divine-seeming powers.

I doubt Kheldians would be retconned like that, but if they choose to go that route, well, it's their game to rewrite as they will.


I don't have a problem with it being Natural -- the power of Gaia or whatever, a universal thing like gravity -- and the Devs are free to define it as such, but in the meantime everything connected to the Well is magical in nature, so it's not completely crazy to assume that the thing is magical, too.

Statesman and Recluse get their powers from a magical intervention, Hero-1 gets his powers from the magical Excalibur, ergo the Well is magic.



I'm not sidestepping the issue, because it doesn't matter where the gods come from because their interaction in the world of CoH is explicitly stated to be Magical. That's the part you keep glossing over and you continue to throw speculation that maybe the Kheldians could possibly turn out to be Magic, which is errant nonsense since they are specifically stated to be either Natural or Science.

Once again, I'm not inferring that. The game lore says that gods are magic.

Depends on how the Devs handle it. I'm just telling you what's in the game, man. Go yell at your monitor if you want.

Where? I can't find anything on it in the wiki. Bat'zul is a demon and the lore says demons are magic.

Even if there is disagreement, WW speaking with authorial voice trumps any secondary character if a conflict in cannon arises.

I'm not going another round on this. I've said what i wanted to say and you keep ignoring the overwhelming preponderance of game lore and citing a couple *possible* outliers which may or may not fit into the regular cannon. Perhaps your examples are simply mistakes which will be corrected since they stand in opposition to all the rest of the lore. This isn't Star Trek where one character pipes up and says, "This universe/timeline feels wrong!" and everyone runs around trying to alter reality to fit the view of one crazy person. In CoH, the single voice of opposition is an aberration and should be discounted when so many counter=examples exist.

That makes sense to me.

So I question why are similar justifications not valid for the Well?

It's been some time since I've done origin of power, but isn't that where the indication/hints of a predecessor 'origin' came about?

My technomage Demon Summoner uses hard light holograms.

So, after you get your Alpha slot you can now only use Magic origin enhancements even if your origin was something other than Magic prior to that? Because otherwise your statement is tangibly incorrect by the laws of the virtual universe you are arguing about.

It seems pretty clear from the in-game descriptions and effects described that the source of Incarnate power is a sort of cosmic power that encompasses all origins.

Precisely, and they've been setting it up like this for some time. All other origins of power are branches from a parent source. Magic is but one aspect of this. Technology another. You don't give up your own nature by getting closer to the true source.

No, but what if Rolland from the circle of thorns used the web? He would still cast spells, he would just be supercharged. The web is tech or science, so does he become tech or science despite still using magic?

Power never dissapears, it's just transfered. The power went from Meriluna, to the Levithan, to you. You dont change origin when your imbued with the power, my SoA still fired rifles, and flug grenades. The only difference was the ammount of power he could put behind it. What origin is Meriluna or the Levithan? Power is something that can be used, origin is how the power is used. And power can be transfered. It is little more than a commodity.

It may just be me, but I dont see this. In fact, it seems as if they're trying to make statesman and recluse seem weak, and give players an ability to surpass them.



Out of curiosity, which god does the muscular boost make you the incarnate of, because I thought none of the player incarnate were representatives of Gods. Oh, and trapdoor doesn't seem to represent a god, while being connected to the well's power.

Dont know why, but I always read WW's part as saying Tielekku was a human. Makes no sence but I did, my bad. Wait:

Second, magic is a skill, more specifically:

So how it is in the game, is simple. People access power, and use the power. The origin is how the power is used, and the source of power is irrelivent.

Simple. I get power from the well, doesn't matter if the well is magic (and this hasn't even been show, or even likely), and I use the power in my tech. Guess what, I'm still tech.

See, thats a game engine limit, not a real imaginative limit.

I, for instance, can see Batman (for example) taking out a Kronos Titan one on one. If he can keep dodging the thing, scramble it's trackers, get it to shoot the wrong way, stuff like that. That is what Defence pretty much does. Now, if he gets hit by it he's still street pancake.
Now, a Kronos Titan is a big walking tank. It also has a lot of weaknesses that can be exploited. Uncovered joints, exhaust ports, even weapon barrels. It can't do squat against anything that got up on it's back.

All it takes is a little imagination to get around the slightly rigid game movements and mechanics that are purely a technical limitation.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Her worshipers invented magic, and she learned from them. As a god, and the first one (god) to use magic, she became the god of magic.

So this belief is incorrect

And this one

So the basic lore behind magic says, that magic is a learnable skill, a method of using power. Not inherantly some intervention by a god or deific representative. And that it was given from humans, to gods not the other way around.

Yes, actually, it would.

Informed Ability.

Saying a character or, in this case, object (or is it a character?), does or does not have an attribute does not make it true, especially if you then go on to write it in a way that shows it does not or does have said attribute.

Yes, it is: in more of the hamhanded railroading we've been getting lately, Ramiel presents the player's ascension to Incarnate-hood as a not-quite Stable Time Loop. He's here to get you Incarnate powers because Future You needs them to fight the Coming Macguffin (sic). Ultimately it comes off as you going off and making a Faustian bargain because some guy who says he's from the future told you to. (We have no way of knowing if Ramiel is actually from the future, if what he showed you was actually in any way representative of any future events, or if Ouroboros in its entirety is legit, etc.)

No.

It only matters if the well, acting like the polka dancing chicken, had an effect on how you use the power.

So please tell me, how is the well is behaving that any effect on how I use it's power? If you cant, than it doesn't matter what the well does or how it acts because it's irrelevant. I get it's power, and I use it. That's it. All it can influence is access to it's power not the manifestation. You have a good argument for Statesman and Recluse, but they're weak, and my characters arn't, and my characters don't get taken over by an overgrown water fountain.


And ignoring the lore that doesn't agree with your position doesn't make your argument true. The story that the player runs through is as much a part of the lore, as Statesman drinking from the well. The story the player runs through, does not have them becoming magic, it has them unlocking access to a source of power. The well does not control how the power is used, it is up to the player to decide that, and it doesn't make the player the representation of a god, it gives them more power to use in a way they are capable of.

If you go through the incarnate process, it stands to reason that you would be an incarnate in the future. That is not hamhanded railroading. So the contact for starting the incarnate content saying your going to be an incarnate isn't railroading anything, sorry it just isn't. I guess, that's not actually true. If you never want to become an incarnate, your railroaded into that story about as much as having your character never fight the clockwork king yet you run Synapse.

And while the character fights at the future Ouroborus, motive isn't defined, The objective of getting to Ramiel is, but motive for why is not. Why you want the power is never defined. Why Ramiel, and the letter sender wants you to have the power is explored, but why your character wants the power is up to the player.

Faustian bargain? The potential for that would exist if you were allowed to take the fast path, but the only option is the slow path and the lore for that shows the only danger there is temptation of gaining the power faster. No faustian bargain here.

And yes, silos has finally been outed for sure as nemesis but that doesn't mean Ramiel is a nemesis plot.

She does, according to "The Scroll of Tielekku". "The Origins of Power" was written by a new dev who Did Not Do The Research (badly, with Critical Research Failures in the Reichsmann TFs) and whom is no longer with the company. It's just plain wrong, should be ignored and should probably be removed.

In all capacities.

I'm not sure what you mean...

Again, no.

You're reading too much into the wrong things and not enough into the right things.

... tells the sory of how she harnessed the power of magic and tought it to gods and mortals.

I can harness the power of electricity and teach others to do the same, doesn't mean I invented electricity.

I can harness the power of the internet and teach other to do the same, doesn't make me Al Gore.

See how that works? Harnessing the power and teaching it, isn't the same as inventing it. The Origin of powers arc simply details how she gained the ability to harness magic. She learned it from her followers. From there she went out as the Goddess of magic and taught others to harness magic as she was taught.

Still no contridiction.

Oh yes you are

And you can always take the "Well of the Furies" as the rationalization by Bronze-Age people of something that was completely outside their worldview. The Well is a place where... something... briefly passes through our universe; contact with it changes you in ways dependent on who and what you are when you come in contact with it, giving you immense amounts of power. The first people to come in contact with it became the early gods -- to use a line from Zelazny's Lord of Light, "taking on an Aspect and raising up an Attribute". As some of this empowerment got 'loose', its having been filtered through human perception gave it labels, even when those labels only approximated what the bits really were.

The Well and the boosts you can get from it are power; that it was labeled "the power of the gods" shouldn't keep you from going after it. "People get so used to looking at the universe in terms of little labeled boxes that they come to believe the universe is made up of these boxes. If you change the labels, you don't change the universe; you just change your way of looking at it."

I'd argue that she flat out makes her own case that she's wrong. "There were no mutants before 1938, but I'm older than that, but that's ok, I'm not a mutant, I'm special."

Krylov doesn't say there were no mutants before 1938, just that his records don't show any. Either way, the "no mutants before 1938" thing can be safely ignored.

So...if Dr. Strange casts a spell on Spider-Man that permanently makes him stronger, Spider-Man would forevermore become magic origin? Or maybe he's tech origin since he invented those web-shooters?

Depends how you define "demon." If you define them as denizens of a demon-dimension, then nope, it's entirely possible to access it through other means. The game never says they're specifically "magic."

Magic-users say that. Of course they think it's superior.

Where does it say that?
Right, because WW is an expert in all things magic? So, um, why do we bother dealing with that Akarist guy?

Well that's the nice thing, it can be easily ignored, since the entire thing is narrated to you by people who have a vested interest in telling you what they want you to believe.