One day I'll learn how spoilers work.

Good to have it in place.

Enjoying the quest greatly
Thanks for all the effort your putting in

Thanks! The receptions been really good so far, appreciate having you all take part!

Thank you for making this! Is this quest going to be dice based, or will it be more free form? How fast do magic points recover? 1 after each room? Only after sleeping? What counts as an instrument? Bard classes I know have years of training to use a specific musical instrument, which is problematic for a character with amnesia! How much of the current building do you have mapped out already? Just winging it from room to room?

I'm sort of just winging the system as I'm going forward. It's based off Pathfinder, but I'm kinda free forming to make it more manageable in a quest format. If something seems possible but there's a decent chance of failure, there will probably be dice involved.

Likewise, there'll probably be combat at some point. Turn based with some dice, but depending on what you want to do, the dice will probably be weighted in your favor.

Magic points will recover after sleeping. Hopefully 4 is a good number for early on!

What counts as an instrument? If you can make a rhythmic sound of some sort with it, it should probably work!

I have a general idea of the character's past, and some things are set in stone, but I don't know everything. If something comes up like that, I'll make something up and let you all decide what to do from there.

>How much of the current building do you have mapped out already?

Oh current building! My bad. I'm just winging it for the most part, I have an idea of certain rooms and where the character is at, but specific layouts are unknown.

>>141747

That's good actually. Means we can't go the wrong way and miss something you worked hard at to prepare.

...how the flip did that suggestor figure out the cipher? I didn't even realize it was letters! Freaking chilling message...

>>141792
Well, considering how few repeated characters there are, manually solving it would've been a nightmare. Thankfully, transcribing it was all I had to do, because of the power of quipqiup.

>>141801
Used to do them for ttrpg i ran.
To represent the translation efforts of the group.

Symbols instead of alphabet substitution.
If they found another species or ancient language, with random letters revealed based on skill rolls.
Afterwards would use the cypher for any phys reps and hand outs from same source.

As they got better at it, had to start making it more complex.
"Th" getting a single symbol when used in a word. A symbol or alteration to represent a second identical letter, "oo" for example.
One even had a vowel that changed symbol based on the subsequent consonent.

Usually made sure anything like that landed at the end of a session as it gave them something to play around with between sessions.

Tldr:
Nostalgic rando loves cyphers and their useage in adventures.

>>141801

Oh, an online service. Wonder how they do it.

>>141803
It's automated. Cipher decryption can be solved via algorithms.

Yeah I was expecting it to get solved, but not so quickly! Looks like I might have to get a little more clever with em'.

Ah, I realize now that these are probably references to lovecraftian stuff. I haven't read too much of lovecraft lore, so I might not know much about what is going on when it comes to that. will that knowledge be a requirement going forward?

>>141806
Well, uh, if you come up with something that can't be plugged into quipqiup (or a vigenere autosolver like on dcode) it might be completely unreasonable to solve at all. I'd much rather compromise and stop using autosolvers if you don't want them to be cracked so fast, because anything that autosolvers won't work on is going to be insanely hard for 99% of readers.

Well, maybe a phonetic alphabet? I dunno if autosolvers work with that, maybe AZDecrypt does since it's one of the strongest pieces of software for decryption, but I haven't used it much so I don't know its limits.

>>141808
No the knowledge is not required, though it will add a little to the experience (hopefully!) if you know some stuff. I deviate from standard lovecraft lore quite a bit.

>>141809
I don't want it to seem like I'm adversarial, no need to compromise on your part. I have some ideas to make them just a smidge more challenging, but it's never my intention to make them impossible to decrypt for anyone trying to understand them. The messages themselves were a test to see how fast they'd get decrypted in the first place, to see if I could put some minor story stuff in there. It's not my intent to make them necessary to proceed in any regard though. More for theming, they're pretty spooky looking letters.

You all now have some decrypted letters too, so it should make future decryptions way easier.

>>141810
Well if the currently solved symbols stay at least mostly consistent then it should be pretty reasonable no matter what changes you make.

>>141810

Honestly I got a lot more out of knowing what the cipher said. Without that, it's just squiggles to me, pretty, but ultimately meaningless and unimpactful. The message has me thoroughly spooked though!

>>141809
Auto solvers might still work but youd have to do a little squiggle work.
Best guess vowels, assign letter replacements to them and same for consonants.
See what the solver spits out.
Might be more time consuming but it would be guided by the help of the solver rather than going in unaided.

popping on my foreverdm hat for a moment...
as long as the information in a message isnt critical to the point it would be a progression roadblock then the complexity isnt an issue.

If it is essential and were stumbling on it the questmaster could, on request or protagonist impulse, do a skill check and provide a few translated elements to nudge us back on path.

Tldr.
Rando still likes cyphers. Thinks this one was good.

Anonymous 2024/03/06(Wed)20:48 No. 141829 ID: 273c18
File 170978691741.png - (55.67KB , 808x821 , symbol.png )

Here's the big symbol in the background, isolated from the rest of the text.

>>>/quest/1085670
I actually didn't know about the Armanen circle runes, I made that image for a dnd game a few years ago when I was looking into Norse stuff.

Didn't intend for it to mean much more than being a magic looking runic circle back then. After researching a little bit into what they were inspired by, I kinda wanna change it. Just wanna make it clear I'm not trying to hide nazi shit in the quest, that'd be lame as hell.

Also if it would help, I could post future pictures with texts isolated from everything in here.

Oh they're pseudo-runes, not real runes. No wonder I didn't see them in the big wikipedia page on runic languages.

>>141832
It's fine, image manipulation is part of the puzzle imo.

>>141831
Nah, it's cool. Like I said in >>/quest/1085670, I just wanted to know what they were, thinking they were somehow lore relevant. I myself hardly knew what those runes were and what their significance was before I found them on Wikipedia. I had no intention of accusing you of inserting Nazi symbolism when I made that post, to be clear on my part. Probably should've put more thought and context before posting it in hindsight. Apologies.

All that aside, I'm absolutely loving this quest's narrative direction. The Lovecraftian twist honestly took me by surprise! Can't wait to see more from you!

If theres an image were having a mental chew on, we'll probably post a copy here.
To avoid cluttering the story flow.

Quick aside:
I am enjoying this quest.
Looking forward to seeing where it goes.

>>141834
I didn't get the feeling I was being accused, just wanted to make sure I got it out there once I realized the origins. All good.

Also thanks for the appreciation! Makes running it worth it.

What story is told an infinite amount of times, and is never any different? Doesn't seem like she's only talking about the banality of mortal life. Maybe I'm reading too much into this. Would it help to tell her that every generation is a new iteration in a genetic algorithm going back billions of years? Why was she suddenly having an existential crisis in the middle of cutting some dude? Did she feel like she couldn't stop from killing him? Or like she can't stop him from dying of something other than old age? Ultimately all that matters is she doesn't want to kill him, but her reaction is very... puzzling.

>>141840
It does seem a bit strange, doesn't it?

Just want to say, that's an adorable outfit for Tanna. Yay Ponchos!

>>141853
Lol thanks, I had a lot of fun drawing that one. One day she might have clothes to draw on the regular.

>>/quest/1086039
I forgot to respond to the "significance of the eyes" portion of this post, I'll do it next set. It was an important question to ask.

>>141854

I was going for her reaction to be like "Yea yea... wait, what was that part about my eyes?" so... mission accomplished!

I don't know that it's a great idea to bring up those strange visions she's only half aware of, though. Don't want to expose too much, too early. Maybe better to dance around the subject a bit, until we learn more or it becomes more urgent?

Well, just my thought on it. The eyes really are a nice touch though.

Trip 2024/03/17(Sun)20:40 No. 141874 ID: 2f41db
File 171073325695.png - (17.60KB , 500x500 , 171005287687.png )

Another good update.

In the spirit of feedback and communication, i just wanted to say
This post

>>1085983

Makes me smile,
Every time i scroll past it to check the new happenings.
I know its just a tone setting,,light hearted aside, but its adorable.

>>141874
Thanks! Sorry for taking a bit longer with this one, ended up having a lot of real life stuff going on, and I'm a pretty slow drawer.

I love scrolling past that particular image too, gotta sprinkle in the relief once in a while.

>>141876
No apologies needed.
Entirely understandable.
Always worth the wait.

Im relatively new im regards to commenting but the folk here strike me as inordinately patient types and its a good example to follow.

Hope youre doing well.

I just want to say that I love this quest!

>>141882
Thank you! It means a lot to read that, hope I can keep meeting expectations.

So for how I plan on doing combat, I'm generally going to take suggestions and try to mash them together and act like Tanna. Tanna is decently smart with her category 3 intelligence, so she'll usually pick try to make the best option out of everything.

I like to codify things as well, so below is a reference document of stuff that I’ll try to set in stone in relation to this quest.


https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddQBe4rbaabuj_iRA-ig6LbSgBUWltFjToTDtGsmoqc/edit?usp=sharing

>>141925
Sounds fair.
The first round went well.
Different suggestions bled into each other nicely.
I like the dice mechanics here and prior.
Good fit for the quest.

Next update is going to take a little bit. It's a bigger one, and I got a few things irl I gotta do.

Thanks for the heads up.

Will be patiently waiting.

Jeez, the response to the last update were super in depth. I just finished story boarding them. Thanks for the engagement! Now I just gotta start drawing it out lol.

There any questions mechanics wise by the way? As I'm going along, I thought of some improvements to the system I could make, in particular towards spells. I'll ask about this again after chapter 1 is done, not going to change anything now.

I think in terms of systems it seems all fine.

Considering things, the only area im a little blank on would be the casting.
Namely how many times. Id it a set amount on daily refresh or a loosely defined capacity that can be stretched at the cost of inducing fatigue and associated debuffs?
How closely does it hew to PF rules?
Stringently or adopting the general shape of it in regard to spell levels, casting types and domains of power?

All of the above is for my own clarification.
As i said, the systems work and are serving the story well. No adjustment necessary.

I like the magic so far. We got a lot of use out of simple illusion spells.

The scroll of paralyzation only working on humanoids is odd. I guess you are planing to have a big monster that could be cheesed with paralyzes.

I'm a bit concern with the "cognitohazard" mechanic. I've see this getting abused and ending up very stupid in SCP articles.
The concept work best when it's a immutable true of the universe that goes against normal sanity. A more realistic version is the "forbidden knowledge" that is more cultural dependent and hard to talk about in the abstract (if you ever came across one of those you know).
In this case it seem to be the influence of deities over mortals, that's fine as long as the gods are not too human in behavior. I guess it's a literal "when you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back" kind of deal: the gods react to be contacted by the mortal observing their symbols.

>>142024
At the moment, it's only adopting the general shape of the Pathfinder 1e ruleset. I wasn't sure when starting the quest if it would be too complicated or not for readers, since 1e is fairly complex. So I wanted to make things a lot simpler. But I think I was probably being a little to careful, I'll probably be slowly adding complexity as things go on that follow a little more in line with Pathfinder.

I kinda like making a system up as I go along though, so I don't think it's ever going to be 1 to 1 Pathfinder.

>>142029
The scroll of paralyzation I probably should've just let you use on anyone. It's a Pathfinder holdover of "Hold Person", which can only be used on humanoid typed creatures.

As for the whole cognitohazard thing. Honestly, when I first started I had no idea what that was lol. I can't really go to much into what I plan on doing with things, but I'm going to try to not punish or negatively affect the main character for you all just talking about things. As things go on, I'm hoping stuff will be understood more. I love seeing theories on what's going on, and it kinda makes me think sometimes if those theories were actually the case.

>>142031
sound choice.

A degree of quick familiarity for fresh readers, but freedom to adapt to needs and setting.

Hahahah, I like making people look things up! I win points when that happens, see?

;)

Hah, happy to oblige. Was an interesting topic, has given me a few different ideas

Hi Capitulize! A bunch of questden authors have been doing a card duel thread in the style of Yu-Gi-Oh https://questden.org/kusaba/quest/res/1034777.html and we were wondering if you wanted to have Aldequest represented in some way as a character/trap/spell card? Thanks!

PS, been enjoying the quest so far!

>>142132
That sounds fun, sure! Do you need anything from me? I can pop into the Discord if needed.

Thanks! And your permission is all that was needed. We'll design a fun little fanart card based on something or someone from Aldequest ourselves that the duelist characters can use in quest at a future update, so jumping into discord isnt necessary (unless you want to design a card for us)

Hope you look forward to what we make! Ill let you know when an Aldequest card shows up!