Indulgence Word-of-God Compilation

Indulgence Word-of-God Compilation

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[Beloved]

Beloved allows you to request boons from a concept, which cost 'leeway' based on how potent they are.
The single massive powers given as examples are simply upper limits for what you can do with these boons.
It is not possible to get more leeway, but impermanent effects (like 'kill that one guy, Death') are vastly cheaper and permanent effects can include things like 'manifest an avatar of yourself with some degree of concept-powers you can use freely' or 'give me lesser concept-powers that can improve with training'.

"Can I use Beloved to gain the ability to seize complete control of my Fight dungeons? I’m assuming it would be a high leeway perk, but could be interesting to have to turn that on its head."
I'm leery of letting you take control of something that is literally infinite, with ever-growing power the farther you stray from a central point.
You can use a boon to take complete control of finite (but not necessarily incapable of growing) dungeons, or rather vague and indirect (or absolute but with limited coverage) influence over a true, infinite dungeon.

"How much leeway would it cost to heavily bias the types of societies encountered via interdimensional travel so they usually have a few traits of my choice?"
It depends to some degree on the precise traits, but likely less than 20% for anything not ridiculously improbably.
You aren't actually changing anything beyond the multiversal nexus, after all.

"How much leeway would it cost to gain the [Share] ability without picking that option?"
25-50%

"How much would it cost to make the recharge from [Share] instant?"
Making it instant-instant, allowing you to potentially stretch yourself across a world and instantly empower every inhabitant with an ability that passively corrupts everyone around them towards your will?
Definitely over 70%.
Recharging in less than a second, so you can empower new allies mid-battle?
Somewhere around 20-40%, leaning towards the low end.
Limiting the recharge to a single, specific ability, you could probably halve or quarter the leeway cost.

The best you can do by just spending leeway is get a steady supply of something mildly inferior to leeway.
If you /really/ want to just get more, you can perhaps look at the explanation for the leeway system, that conepts are barred from significant intervention in reality by various laws.
One /potential/ interpretation of this is that there is some kind of vast bureaucratic system controlling reality, the leeway available to your concept representing every favor and potential bribe it has accumulated since it came into existence, saved up for you to spend on unauthorized changes when the time was right.
In that lens, you could perhaps accumulate more leeway over vast timescales- say, a few billion years for every 100% more you want- as your concept scrounges and scrapes for more influence.
Or, if you are powerful enough, perhaps gain leeway more quickly by acting as an agent in reality for other concepts, your own brokering the deals back in Yu-Shan concept-space.
But really, this is a stretch.

Utter impossibilities tend to be expensive.

Leeway is partially about potency of the boon, and partially about its effects on the world.
If it doesn't significantly affect overall population dynamics, or the capabilities of the people you meet, it could reasonably cost less than 10% to guarantee everyone you will significantly interact with in the future is a sexy woman.
Really, in that case, the boon might be cheaper if it makes more people into sexy women- because it'll be providing less info on the future, re: who will be important in your life.

The cost of purchasing a power like brainwashing depends on quite a few factors.
Making it something that needs training or some special conditions to reach full power could reduce the cost.
Removing the training cap, or causing it to scale with some factor, would increase the cost but probably be a good investment.
Less than 3% if you want to be able to rewrite an unexceptional person's mind, without any worries of resistance, in less than a minutes time.
50-70% if you want something like the Anti-Life Equation.

"How much power would it take to seal the dungeon that spawns monsters, or the xiaxia portal, and so forth?"

If we're talking an absolute seal that nothing can ever break, bypass, or sneak through by any means, that will last for eternity, on the same scale as the boon that gives you absolute immunity to all harm?
Probably somewhere between 30% and 60% of your leeway- this is a big deal.
Additional barriers past the first are likely to be vastly cheaper, however, because you can just expand what already exists.
Less than 10% each, easily.
A barrier that is as effective at stopping trespassers as you, in person and at full strength, would be?
Less than 5%.

Honestly, when you have sufficiently powerful concept-manipulation, the precise concept you are able to manipulate becomes a lot less significant no matter what you do.
If Death loves you, you could become wealthy by killing your poorness, or do a timestop by killing your temporal momentum.

I believe the finite, non-renewable supply of leeway for boons is important for balance.
If a player wants to produce more minor effects without drawing from this reserve, they could, say, expend some to create a lesser-but-unbound avatar of the concept, or perhaps grant themselves concept-powers.
If someone really wants an endless supply of actual boons, they can even take Ascendant and drag the effects of various boons back into the present from timelines that, now, never were.

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[Beastly]

When your bones are repaired, they are not moved.

'Broken', in the case of your bones, is defined as 'no cracks, not in pieces'.

Your consciousness is sustained by every one of your bones, and can be additionally sustained by specialized shadowflesh constructs.

The ability of shadowflesh to transform is finite.
A given piece can only reshape itself once.

You can learn to turn shadowflesh into any technology you understand.

With raw shadowflesh, some structural supports, and a shadowflesh brain located literally anywhere to control it, you can easily produce variably autonomous minions.

A strand of shadowflesh can be stretched (without transformation) to become thinner than a syringe needle.

The false skin can produce temporary substances that dissolve into nothing after a time.
Doesn't need to worry too much about underlying sources of the substances; your false dick can generate false cum all on its own.
With a bit of experimentation, your false skin can make permanent examples from appropriate nutrients/materials or enduring examples(still technically not real matter) from shadowflesh.
Substances not secreted by the human body take more work to figure out how to produce in this way.

Substances derived from shadowflesh are not technically real matter, merely shadowflesh that has expended its capacity to transform, and advanced magic and tech may be effected by that.
Some effects that would only modify real matter may cause it to dissolve into nothing (it can generate energy in a fusion reactor, but not heavier elements).
You can expect it to act as real matter would for as long as it remains in a living body.

You can learn to use shadowflesh to fuel anything that requires fuel.
That is to say, you can use it in place of mana, stamina, essence, hydrogen, etc.

Upgrades that enhance your meatflesh will similarly boost your shadowflesh.

You can develop shadowflesh structures that do all manner of useful things.
Moving yourself through space without emitting mass for propulsion, and creating pocket dimensions, are two of those things.
How you do those things may vary; you don't necessarily need to go about it in one specific way.
You can control shadowflesh structures as easily as twitching a finger.

Many shadowflesh structures require fuel.
Those that only perform basic movement, perception, and thought do not.

You can learn to create shadowflesh computers.
They are somewhere between normal computers and brains.
They can sustain your consciousness, even if every one of your bones breaks.
They network perfectly through the medium of shadowflesh.

You always know the relative locations of your bones.
Your bones can pinpoint the locations of the shadowflesh around them.
Your shadowflesh has a vague sense of touch and pressure by default, and with experimentation, can be converted into sensory structures.

To kill you, someone must break every one of your bones within the space of a single second, then destroy anything else that anchors you to life (like your human brain, if you still have it).

"Pure ashes" refers to any powdery substance you get by burning something that isn't mixed up with other junk.
You can use wood ash from a campfire, if you make sure to get rid of the charcoal and dirt first.
This is intended as a resource limit to provide some potential problems re: running out of matter, so you can't use shadowflesh to make more ash until you tech up to energy-matter conversion.

With research and experimentation, you can learn to create bones of other substances, sure.
The less like human bone it is(in underlying structure), the harder this becomes.

You can generate a quantity of shadowflesh equal in mass to the relevant bone from every one of your bones every second.

By default, I'd expect any shadowflesh that is no longer needed to evaporate like grimmflesh.

Your false skin is more-or-less a force field that perfectly imitates human tissues.
Sensory organs set on it work perfectly.

"Would a pierced eye still function as well as an unpierced one, or would its functionality suffer as long as the intruding object is present?"
If the thing piercing your eye blocks the few millimeters of nerve-to-nowhere at the back, you can't get sensory info from it.
Otherwise, it's just a matter of the object in your eye blocking out some light.

You have enough control over your false skin to adjust its durability, as long as it falls below your upper limit.
Making parts of it completely nonphysical, just an illusion, is relatively simple.

"How strange/strong can the false skin get, exactly?"
Depends on how much you work towards them.
You could use false skin to create a mass of shapeshifting, indestructible slime around a bone core.
Durability, at least, has no upper limit on improvement.
Note that your false skin retains the same total defensive value no matter how thick it is- one meter of false steel armor is twice as sturdy per a given unit of volume as two meters of false steel armor.

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[Nexus]

While you are immune to negative magic, beneficial magic has a superior effect on you.

You don't start with any significant reserves of magic (though you will be able to easily find ways to store vast amounts of magic for later use).
At the beginning, you, personally, generate enough to perform magical effects on the scale of 'core through a tank with a magic missile' a few times a minute.
The magic generated by something depends on various factors, boiling down to 'importance'.
Gods will generate more than mages will generate more than baseline humans will generate more than plants will generate more than stone.
A square kilometer of wasteland, or a hundred people, is enough to double your initial magic supply.

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[Wound]

"You were split apart by a cosmic weapon in a bizarre, semi-conceptual way.
Your resource-generating aspect is now unbound by your resource-consuming aspect. Your cells burn glucose without consuming it, convert amino acids into proteins without actually using them up. Your synapses fire without generating waste or becoming in need of rest.
Your resource-consuming aspect is now unbound by your resource-generating aspect. Your cells can instantly assemble the appropriate resources into new, healthy flesh. Your brain can use hours of accumulated synaptic processes to instantly draft that term paper you need to be writing.
Your weakest link is the fine threads that connect them. Each thread is attuned to a specific type of resource, initially physical, mental, and spiritual. With an investment of actual time and the appropriate resource, you can weave new threads, allowing you to draw more resources out of your resource-generating aspect, store more resources in the space between, and push more resources into your resource-consuming aspect.
In time, you may attain a deeper understanding of threads and resources, allowing you to produce more esoteric things. Externalize Stamina into Ki, Focus into Psi, Spirit into Aura. Unify Stamina and Focus into Chakra, Focus and Spirit into Mana, Spirit and Stamina into Chi."

You start with approximately 300 threads total, 100 each attuned to your physical, mental, and spiritual energies.
The sum of their output is equal to your previous natural resource generation; each default thread is 1% of a certain kind of resource.

The limiting factor is the threads.
Increasing the power of your resource-generating aspect doesn't help them carry a greater fraction of it's power to your resource-consuming aspect.

A default thread extracts resources from your resource-generating aspect quickly enough to fill itself over the course of one week.
Its storage is thus sufficient to contain 1.68 hours of your previous natural resource generation.

It initially takes about 10 minutes to weave a new thread.
Extra resources, improved technique, suitable artifacts, etc. can accelerate that process, but it takes more effort for the same degree of improvement the faster it gets.
Threads can be broken down and used as material to weave larger/better threads.

Once you figure out how, you can freely activate, deactivate, and boost any natural bodily process.

You are wholly sustained by your resources.
Yes, by consuming the physical resources it would take to perform a series of exercises and recover from them, you can obtain the results of physical training- and the same for mental training.
This is only limited by your threads and how much you want to spend.

Your supernatural bullshit is the same as your normal bullshit.
You only heal when you feed physical resources into healing, but can feed them into healing at an arbitrary rate.
Thinking at normal speed is not fundamentally different from instantly completing that term paper you really need to get working on, simply a more measured consumption of your mental resources.

Your internal resource production is more-or-less infinite, but can only be tapped with threads.
Note that resources from other sources, like Player, Nexus, and cultivation structures, are vastly easier to draw upon with your threads than your resource-generation aspect because ~handwave~ your resource-generation aspect is partially out of sync with reality or something.

"... Can the resource (power) be refined into a higher quality variant?"
You can increase their raw potency, but this is liable to proportionately decrease the rate at which your threads can extract them.
You can optimize resources for particular purposes, such as an energy very efficient at healing.
You can create resources that can do a greater or smaller variety of things, such as essence that can do anything physical/mental/spiritual/aura/chi/psi/ki/chakra/mana can do or a telekinesis resource that is only suitable for fueling telekinesis.

Once you figure out how to generate cultivation resources internally (instead of gathering them from the environment and storing them like it seems a lot of cultivators do), you can create threads for those specific resources.
This would net you an internal, continuous power supply you can use to fill up your cultivator reserves and cultivate with.

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[Progenitor]

If multiple bloodlines exist, one person can benefit from more than one of them.

Quintessence-based powers can be created to let someone generate and control a form of shadowflesh.

How about this: you can increase the potency of the rift, but the cost in quintessence and required number of people in the bloodline doubles with every extra droplet.
100 and 10, then 200 and 20, and so on.
It leaves a little potential for growth, but isn't quite so breakable.

"Also, the quintessence can be hoarded, right? And can be used to modify existing quintessence-derived abilities?"
Yes to both.
Also, I removed the mention of it in V0.2 to save space, and it was rather poorly worded in V0.1, but any quintessence you accumulate but do not spend works to protect you from unguided misfortune (i.e., anything other than active efforts to screw you over by a thinking being).

"Can you use Progenitor to modify other powers, like making dungeon portals closeable?"
I wouldn't say that you can use Progenitor to modify non-quintessence-derived powers.
You could use it to develop independent abilities with much of the same effects, such as the ability to manifest permanent barriers, warp space, or imbue greater durability into an object.

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[Inheritor]

Any aspect of reality you spark into existence exists in every reality containing one of your sparkborn creations.

Inheritor can be used to create and improve cultivation systems and cultivation techniques.

You can use sparks to create cultivation techniques.
Expect one based on that[super-powerful example technique] to be somewhat less capable than the original inspiration until you invest enough sparks into enhancing your cultivation techniques.
Fortunately, the benefit curve for spark investment is a bit exponential.

One spark is sufficient to learn a useful pickpicketing technique, which you can perform skillfully.
Eleven used to augment the category of 'dextrous techniques' would approximately double its effectiveness.

Sparks accumulate without limit if not spent.

Not really.
The closest you can get to an instant, direct intelligence boost is using sparks to learn an impossible thought-pattern superior to the norm.
Of course, that's just a variant on intelligence-boosting drugs that is less effective in exchange for not requiring materials.

"How conceptual can sparks get?"
You can create objects that are superior for conceptual reasons, such as a shield that uses the concept of protection to stop you from aging.
You can develop mechanisms by which you can interact with concepts, such as a clock that can force time to slow down.
You can create objects that work through conceptual means, such as a pen that lets you edit the word of god pastebin you are in.
...Actually, that last one is a bit overboard.
You can create a pen that lets you erase people from existence retroactively, leaving a hole almost impossible for anyone to notice even though the effects of 's presence linger still.

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[Player]

"If you combine it with You Can Fight, can you come across artifacts to grant you stat/skill points and skill slots?"
You can get achievements for finding loot.
Collect 1/2/5/10/20/50 grade 1/2/3/4/5/6 wands/potions/swords/rings/amulets/skill tomes, say, and extra achievements for anything particularly unique.
Basically, you come across artifacts /and/ get stat/skill points and skill slots- the artifact never acts directly on the Gamer overlay, it's just a special enough thing that it happens to net you an achievement that gives you those other things.

Death resets the benefits from leveling up, yes.
Your Achievements will always remain, and may modify this process, such as a stat-boosting Achievement starting you above 0 in some stats, an Achievement for real mastery of a skill granting you a Skill Slot locked to that skill, or a special Achievement starting you above level 1, giving you the appropriate benefits (including spendable Stat Points and Skill Points) you would have at that level.

'Achievements' are meant to be as broadly-encompassing as possible.
You might find a daily-repeatable Achievement to work at an orchard, each time causing you to respawn with an extra piece of fruit and increasing your HP by a few points.
You might unlock the Intelligence stat after graduating from a university, and get extra Skill Slots for every class you pass.
Helping someone develop a super-soldier serum?
Even if you don't use it yourself, that's worth a few points to each of your physical stats.
There are probably Achievements for getting x amount of exp and killing x amount of monsters that increase your level cap, and Achievements for reaching a certain level that increase the rewards you get on level up.

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[Understanding]

You can use Understanding to learn programming languages, and automatically know how you might do something, but you can still get confused when working on sufficiently large programs.
Yeah, it can work on encryption.

You can understand body language as easily as any other language, so better than most people.
You can't infallibly detect falsehoods and acting, but I think it's harder to mask those sort of physiological responses than to lie verbally anyway, so it's still an advantage.
You would be much better at deceiving with your body language and putting out the desired impression, as well.

And yes, you can 'hear' a perfectly silent opponent attacking you from a blind spot.

"Do you have to consciously listen to sounds to understand the language, or just physically hear it? IE, can you pick up a language while sleeping/unconscious?"
The information is processed by your mind to some degree, so if you're completely unconscious, you can't learn new languages.
If you are merely asleep, though, you can.

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[Change]

Change effects your entire body, all at once, and while I'm not sure exactly what it is, it has to have some size limit.

If it has a persistent physical presence, you can use Change to integrate it into your body more safely and effectively than any surgery would normally allow.

I suppose that if you become a being of pure spirit, such that your body is your spirit/soul, you may be able to make a greater degree of changes.
You'd still need stuff like spiritweb samples and artificial soul structures to go beyond the limits of an exceptional human soul.

If spirit-related traits are dependent on some facet of biology, like some sort of physical spirit veins, you may be able to copy the genetic predispositions of others to have a superior version of those biological quirks.

Change cannot directly interact with souls. [Some exceptions may apply]

Yeah, you can just bubble someone with a pile of cybernetics and they'll come out with them all installed perfectly.
With biomods, you can similarly add genetic samples to the bubble for a variety of effects.
Make someone a genetic clone of someone else, mix the samples to make them a hybrid of a few others, or overlay samples that don't encompass entire genomes to just modify the existing DNA.
And, of course, because these things are external to Change they can bypass the built-in stat caps.

If the person being changed thinks these aspects of themselves[personality flaws like laziness] are flaws and wants them to be gone, Change can remove them.

Used to the fullest, it can put people in extremely healthy mental states(including all the benefits of mental youth and maturity simultaneously), but not directly increase intelligence or grant mental abilities the average human lacks.

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[Money]

Longer sessions net exponentially more cash.
10 times longer means 100 times the reward.

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[Pockets]

You have a steel box, open on one side.
-If you fill the box with clay without using Pocket, the Pocket is not destroyed, even once it hardens. Living things inside the Pocket can still leave, but must deal with this obstruction.
-If you fill the box with molten steel using Pocket, the Pocket will be destroyed once the steel cools, sets, and melds with the structure of the box.
-If you rip a gaping hole in five sides of the box, but the holes do not extend to the edges of the sides, the Pocket is not destroyed.
-If you remove two of the sides, leaving the box open on three sides, the Pocket is very close to being destroyed, but is not destroyed.
-If you weld a lid over the opening, leaving a hollow cube, it's no different from closing a bag.

A living thing in a Pocket can look out through the cavity it was inserted into and crawl out whenever it wants.

Sorry, but you need physical contact with a cavity to retrieve objects stored inside it.
As well, looking at old recordings just shows you what's inside the cavity at the time of the recording.

An object you want to store between two other objects pressed together still needs to fit through the opening- in this case, probably the crack where the two objects meet.
That's easier with squishy stuff.
It'll take some work to store something as big as a guitar on your head.

You can use cleavage as a cavity to store things.
If the breasts are ever pulled apart so they don't touch, everything stored inside falls out in a safe but comical manner.
Don't need to worry about stuff falling out otherwise.

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[Fight]

As long as it is appropriately dangerous and capable of inflicting long-term consequences, a dungeon can inflict any reasonable kind of consequences.
This may effect the loot; it will often be designed in such a way that it helps prevent/deal with whatever consequences the dungeon tries to inflict, or inflict similar consequences on others.

"Can the dungeon contain items that grant extra [Beloved] leeway? Or is that impossible?"
Nothing that grants extra leeway.
Maybe a source of wish magic, if you go deep enough.

You can determine the overall dungeon theme, yes.
No matter what you pick, expect wilder environments the deeper you descend.

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[Grow]

You initially possess the talent of an average person in the setting, with whatever minimum boost may be necessary to make cultivation actually possible.
You begin as a non-cultivator, and must take the first steps yourself.

"Is the potential increase[from training to a higher cultivation level and resetting] cumulative or based on your high score?"
It's based on your high score.

Regardless of what happens to the connection to the xianxia world or where you go in the multiverse, you should retain the potential to cultivate.
Some forms of cultivation may require resources(including whatever Qi-variant they use) that don't exist in a given world, or in useful concentrations, mind you, but as long as you have or can get the resources needed, the portal is irrelevant.

How about this: your world has to be very big, have cultivation of some kind, and have a few xianxia tropes of any kind.
Say, Shadowrun could be made compatible by stretching it out onto a ringworld, allowing mages and adepts to train so hard they eventually become dragons, and including "random level-appropriate bandits", "a series of cultivation-boosting minerals that grow simultaneously rarer and more potent", and "this one random peasant on the other side of the world has ridiculous luck".

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[Share]

Granting people the benefits of [Fight] with Share?
They'll definitely be just as permanent- to make them temporary when you can't close them manually would be an upgrade- and be able to scale with the power of the creator at the time of creation.
The only remaining areas to limit it are then loot, scaling, and size.
On this matter, you can probably just pick one- do you want the lesser dungeons to:
-Generate generally crappy loot, thereby messing with the adventurer powerscaling because that loot is what lets them build their stats.
-Not scale, or scale significantly slower, as you delve deeper, thereby forcing the dungeon creator to grow stronger if they want to generate better loot.
-Be locked to some finite size, thereby necessitating a greater number of dungeons, with more monsters near the entrance that need to be culled.

"If we share [Beloved] with someone, how much leeway would they have relative to us?"
That's actually something I never considered, for some reason.
How about this- they have the standard 100% leeway, but the concept granting them boons is weaker and/or more limited in scope than your own.
Some of the boons they try to get will run up against limits of versatility (their particular form of death can't kill temporal momentum) or potency (the concept backing them can't generate barriers above a certain strength, even when trying to make it scale with them).
Your concept can bully their concepts, in ways that don't provide significant mechanical benefit.

You can grant ability to cultivate, cultivation talent, and cultivation level.
Given how xianxia works, I'm pretty sure instantly creating cultivators a few stages below yourself isn't overpowering.

Your level of cultivation buffs every persistent boon- if you called down an avatar of your concept, they will grow stronger as your cultivation improves.
If you used a boon to get access to a power set, you will find it easier to develop powers within that set, and they will be stronger, as your cultivation improves.

The nemesis does not get anything from the 'You Have' or 'You Can' sections.

"How much leeway would it cost to just straight out kill the nemesis right away?" (with [Beloved])
There's a strong argument to make here that they would naturally burn their own leeway to try to counter such an attack.
This could end in a few ways- both of you could run out of leeway with nothing accomplished, or you might get your nemesis crippled or permanently wounded in some way if they were at less than 100% at the time of your attack.
With an advantage of less than 25% over their own leeway reserves (not taking into account what they spent that leeway on, and definitely more expensive if they somehow become vastly more powerful than you) you could just kill them instantly.

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