After Amelia

[TanaNari]

I was wondering if we could get more details about the magic system your planning to use in Path?

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Sure. Magic's split up into three big groups.

1- Channeling. The use of internal power, or sapping power from the environment and focusing through your own body. Think ki-type martial arts.

2- Imbuing. If channeling's raw power, then this is raw power plus a knife. Creating complex magical structures to build (usually temporary) magical effects. Whether enchanted swords or altering human perceptions to make them forget you're there, it's channeling.

3- Calling. The most expensive, and powerful, and often complex option. Speaking to the spirit world and calling on them to do the work for you. Because the mage isn't using their own power, they can unleash incredible power while still maintaining focus on other areas. But they'll have to pay back those spirits, with interest, for the effort.

Also... it gets political. Power is divided up into six paths- the Primary and Secondary of the color wheel. Purple is untapped potential, chaos. Blue is imagination and change. Green is life and adaptability. Yellow for learning and order. Orange for technology and dominance. Red is energy and decay.


Help Red spirits, anger Green spirits (and often annoy Blue and Yellow). Help Blue, anger Orange, annoy Red and Yellow. So on and so forth.

Generally speaking. If the Call is in the best interest of those spirits... it'll be far cheaper. Using a Call to put out a forest fire by using the power of the forest spirits to ? That's going to be a lot cheaper than asking the fire to stop burning. But depending on the mage's specialty... Calling forest spirits might not be an option, and Calling fire spirits might be incredibly easy.

Of course, a Red mage is probably far more likely to let the fire burn. They're the "death" part of the cycle, after all...

Mages don't tend to Call very often, at least not for combat purposes. When they do, they're playing for keeps. They can expend years worth of good will with their spiritual allies in a matter of minutes. It had better be worth it.


Oh, and you'll tend to see all three blended together in combat. Unless training for a specific thing, these people don't believe in holding back.

 

[LuridThrone]

Neeeeet. So do path mages tend to suit their path/spirit's nature? Seems like a whimsical soul would get along better with Purple than a serious person, resulting in a greater harmony with their allies. Or do you sometimes get people who are stuck with a magic Path that doesnt suit their personality at all?

Also, would it be safe to assume that these paths probably encompass their entire range of themes? Both good and bad? Like say, Green would cover predation as much as healing? And on a similar thought, how much do these things bleed over? Order and dominance are very interlinked for example, as are Change and Chaos. Is that intentional? Spiritual buddies maybe?

Are you up for revealing what Path Amanda is going to be walking? (dont think ive seen it so far!)

 

[TanaNari]

Masters recruit with the intent of advancing their own faction, not the others.

A catholic priest wouldn't really want to teach someone to be a rabbi. Same premise.

 

[LuridThrone]

Heh, so its like that huh? Poor amanda.

*crosses fingers for a poaching subplot*

 

[ArdadLili]

So I'm guessing that flat out combat between peers is fairly rare in the Path system, given that the fights sound expensive for both sides as well as deadly?

 

[LuridThrone]

So I'm guessing that flat out combat between peers is fairly rare in the Path system, given that the fights sound expensive for both sides as well as deadly?

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From the sounds of it, the different Paths dont exactly get along, i imagine there is alot of fighting using Channelling and Imbuing.

Its just rare for them to really throw down hardcore with everything they have because Calling can burn up years of work in minutes, thats not a toll anyone would pay lightly. Maybe you kill the guy, but what about the next enemy that pops up? Ill bet that burning up your spiritual good will is pretty much a death sentence for the oldest mages because everyone youve ever pissed off will know that you cant punch in your centuries-old weight class anymore.

Though i imagine when someone does the fireworks are amazing.

 

[namelis]

From the sounds of it, the different Paths dont exactly get along, i imagine there is alot of fighting using Channelling and Imbuing.

Its just rare for them to really throw down hardcore with everything they have because Calling can burn up years of work in minutes, thats not a toll anyone would pay lightly. Maybe you kill the guy, but what about the next enemy that pops up? Ill bet that burning up your spiritual good will is pretty much a death sentence for the oldest mages because everyone youve ever pissed off will know that you cant punch in your centuries-old weight class anymore.

Though i imagine when someone does the fireworks are amazing.

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Or when they do burn up their spiritual goodwill will make there enemies think twice about messing with them thinking they felt they could afford to waist that much goodwill I couldn't afford that damb how much more do they have

 

[MadGreenSon]

Path kinda vaguely reminds me of Mage: The Awakening without the bewildering array of information gathering abilities (unless I missed something).

The fun part about Mage for me was always the absolute sharkpit that the politics of the good guys could be. The only constants being: Might Makes Right and You Keep What You Kill.

Because if you boil away most of the flowery language, that's what Mage politics is. Each cabal plays a careful game of spy vs spy and if anyone gets caught, it's either a Duel Arcane or a mildly structured war between cabals with winner take all.

Vampires have a less lethal political system in the NWoD. Think about that, the bloodsucking undead are nicer to each other than the wizards are.

Path looks like it has a bit of that swimming with the sharks vibe, and I like that.


Price, on the other hand, is everything I want in a superhero story. Amelia would have been better without the big, end-of-the-world shit and Price promises to deliver on the potential that was glimpsed there.

Hard to really say more, other than Zach was criminally underused for such an interesting and fun character. He kinda was the Only Sane Man a lot of the time, probably due to his powers making him immune to the transhuman shenanigans. I'd absolutely love to see him center-stage in a world where all the stuff from the latter half of Amelia wasn't going to be a thing.

Do want. Very much.

 

[DoggySoup]

Path Magic or Price. Such a hard choice.
[dice]1750[/dice]

 

[namelis]

All hail the mighty COIN for it knows all

unfortunately I always forget to assign choices to each side before flipping and must always flip twice

 

[Skullbot1]

Voted for Path Magic, but a question about Price. If the strongest characters are pretty much a match for a tank, where's a lot of the conflict going to come from? Because it seems that if humans can take out thousands of tanks with missiles and anti-tank bullets and shit, then the 'parahumans' for lack of a better word, would be taken out as soon as they show destructive or villainous tendencies.

 

[Lubaf]

Suggestion about "Price": Rather then having the World Wars being the cause of "more 'parahumans'" (in reality, the Thirty Years War was probably worse than either WW1 or 2 in all dimensions), have somebody in the 1890s work out how to maximize the probability of 'triggering' in a dangerous situation (say, a chemical ("Vitamin X") that is only found in humans and certain (otherwise toxic) plants). The various Militaries of WWI start supplying their troops with Vitamin X in their rations, in hopes of coming up with a useful 'parahuman'-- but no more than that, as it had been realized by this point that creating artificial situations to create new Supers has a bad tendency to backfire, given the emotional requirements of 'triggering', paranoia being a fairly common "Price", the emotional unpredictability of new Supers, and certain other factors.

Thanks
Luc "Ideas" French

 

[TanaNari]

Heh, so its like that huh? Poor amanda.

*crosses fingers for a poaching subplot*

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Poaching subplots can certainly happen. Pity all the other Masters are fucked up as well.

I'm guessing that flat out combat between peers is fairly rare

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From the sounds of it, the different Paths dont exactly get along, i imagine there is alot of fighting using Channelling and Imbuing.

Though i imagine when someone does the fireworks are amazing.

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It's been ritualized. Generally speaking, Masters acknowledge that two of them fighting without their spirit magic would have the same outcome as if two of them fought while using it. It'll just cause lots more damage that way. Honor duels are the accepted method. Often as part of their political maneuvering. Plus a complex political system in relation to who may challenge who, and how the rules of the challenge are determined.

Zach was criminally underused

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Intentionally so, really. I always did intend to use him for Price when that story came along. Making him too much a part of Amelia would make that impossible.

Voted for Path Magic, but a question about Price. If the strongest characters are pretty much a match for a tank, where's a lot of the conflict going to come from? Because it seems that if humans can take out thousands of tanks with missiles and anti-tank bullets and shit, then the 'parahumans' for lack of a better word, would be taken out as soon as they show destructive or villainous tendencies.

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Same place it always does. I mean, most of Spider-Man's villains are weaker than a modern tank, too. The symbiotes were stronger, but they were never standard villains to begin with. Why weren't all of them blown up? Same deal.

Suggestion about "Price": Rather then having the World Wars being the cause of "more 'parahumans'" (in reality, the Thirty Years War was probably worse than either WW1 or 2 in all dimensions), have somebody in the 1890s work out how to maximize the probability of 'triggering' in a dangerous situation

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Well, they got plenty of new supers for the Thirty Years War as well (though they used different words- like 'warlock' or 'saint' depending upon the personality of the super). And they eventually did what all mortals do and died of old age, assuming nothing else killed them first. But as populations increase and war becomes increasingly more horrific and costly to nations, there's just all around more supers.

Oh- and creating supers intentionally is a bad, bad plan.

 

[Argentorum]

So in Price where do super powers come from? Also space whales?

 

[dasstan]

So in Price where do super powers come from? Also space whales?

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Who cares? I'm not asking to be rude, or anything, but Tana has said Price is going to be a more street level story. The source of powers is immaterial in that sort of setting.

 

[TanaNari]

So in Price where do super powers come from?

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Who knows? The souls of great warriors of the past, a bizarre ability to tap into the collective human will, the leftover remains of a dead god, the next stage in human evolution, they're all in an elaborate dream world that may or may not be run by computers keeping us enslaved to harness us as a power source. Could be anything, really.

In universe a lot of people suspect their powers are demonic in nature... that they sold their actual souls to gain the power they're harnessing. The way Price's powers work, people with that belief have a lot of circumstantial evidence in that direction.

A specific plot point of Price is no one will ever find out the source of powers.

Also space whales?

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Except that. It's also not genetic. Or if it is, it's a gene possessed by all humans and no other lifeform.

 

[LuridThrone]

So, Price is what happens when a Dating site achieves sentience and bootstraps its self into a singularity AI then?

 

[Cosmic Dream]

Path Magic sounds the most immediately interesting to me, with the unfortunate paranormal romance vibes of the short description disproven by WoG.

Midara could be cool as well, but somehow it seems to me like something I'd much prefer to read as a complete book rather than in a serial post format. Perhaps because its a completely foreign setting instead of 'reality plus supernatural hidden world' or 'reality, only shifted three alternates to the left'.

 

[Togathrek]

Any of the ideas are fine. I'd suggest going with the one you are most into.

Sooooo. It's how you're planning to monetize it that I'm a bit iffy on.

Now, I'm going to keep things vague. I used to write fanfiction. After many years, I actually did break through the slush pile and now have an agent, a novel that's big 5 published, foreign rights deals, etc. I've done a lot of research about this, and I've got practical experience. You can believe that or not.

It sounds like you want to go pro. And it sounds like you really want to work on another serial (as opposed to doing a single complete novel).

I am not convinced that patreon is the way to go for you at all. A serial means you can't trad publish, but, especially with your awesome writing pace, it is perfect for self publishing on Amazon. You can quickly put out the first part of your story priced at 99 cents, then every succeeding part gives you lots of opportunities for giveaways and bundles and different pricing schemes.

I mean, you write SO fast that the sheer volume and rate of your output would drive your visibility, even if it were slower with you going with betas and having to find royalty free images for the covers (until you can pay for professional freelance editing and commissioned cover art).

And if you want to give people the option of reading the story for free, you can price new parts at $2 or whatever, then every few months you can make the older parts free.

I mean, imagine the scenario 1 year from now. Your original serial is done, it has 30 parts. You can price the big omnibus at $9.99. You can price the mini-compilations (1-10, 11-20, 21-30) at $3.99. You can price the individual issues/episodes at $0.60, except the first 4 parts, which are free. You can have the occasional giveaway during holidays where you temporarily drop the first mini-collection to free. Your one serial constitutes 34 products, each of which has a chance of climbing up Amazon's visibility algorithms.

It's also, I think, the best way to make money off of a small, devoted fanbase--they're going to buy all your stuff, and you'll be generating a lot of stuff, which feeds into a more devoted fanbase that will start to grow itself.

A lot of people have made enough from self publishing on Amazon this way to quit their day jobs. I could be wrong, but I don't think you'll make nearly as much with patreon.

There's also more of a possibility that, the Amazon route, when your story is long enough for you to release omnibus editions, that a publisher might want to pick up your story.

Yes, competition is tough everywhere for making money by writing fiction. But Amazon has ridiculous presence. The potential ceiling for your income is probably way more. Also, as you move onto yet other stories after this next one, that will only add to your backlist and becomes passive income.


---A little more thinking


On the other hand, I guess if you don't care about Amazon exclusives, then there's nothing stopping you from going on Patreon AND self-publishing with Amazon/Kobo/etc.

Honestly, I suppose I'm put off by just one aspect of Patreon. It has terrible interface for browsing its projects. I mean it sucks. It really only has basic search, and shows a few entries per category. That means that you as an author will be totally dependent on your own website and such for discoverability and visibility.

This isn't as big a deal for musicians, because they can put stuff out on youtube to get views and then use Patreon to monetize.

There... isn't really an equivalent for writers. I mean, I guess you could have a blog (an entirely separate endeavor that also takes huge effort to build an audience for). Otherwise, your best discoverability would be happening on Amazon anyway. And if you ever got to the point where you've got enough fans through Amazon that they're a big enough group of people to significantly affect your Patreon income... I suspect that they'd just be buying your stuff through Amazon instead.

Now, things with Patreon may change. It's pretty new. If they improve browsing and discoverability, that would really, really make things better for everybody.


---


So, yeah. I kind of expanded this post by quite a bit, because every once in a while, I do spot fanfic writers who can obviously go pro successfully....

And most of them never do. Nothing wrong with that, but I kinda feel like it's a waste when writing obviously makes them happy and they ought to be rewarded for it (materially).

You can definitely succeed at this. You're one out of a TINY percentage of writers with the discipline to go like a goddam machine, and that's actually the biggest element of success for a creative writer.

Good luck!

 

[Sheaman3773]

I was looking at Wordpress. Seems to have a good rep.

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Mm, I seem to recall Wildbow mentioning some distasteful new policies of theirs in the comments section of one of the recent chapters of Twig. About how they were shifting around perks that used to be free and making you pay for them, or something along those lines. He's also complained about it messing up the formatting a huge number of times.

But if you go and ask him, I'm sure he'd talk to you about this sort of thing.

 

[TanaNari]

Alright, after much deliberation and soul searching and writer's block... I've decided that Price is the one I'm going with. It's the one I can do the most with, and explore the human elements the best in. I realized that there's a flaw with both Second Nature and Path... namely, I don't have actual plots for them. I have a richly developed setting and I have interesting characters. But I don't have an actual story to put them through. And while that worked out in its own way for Dune, it doesn't bode well for what I intend to do.

That narrowed me down to Price and the Midara Series. Price got the bigger vote... and as was pointed out, Midara's probably not the best for a webserial. It's more a Traditional Publishing workhorse. Actually, not even that. Midara: Paradox was *originally* written as the script for a traditional fantasy RPG video game. Long story short... that didn't happen. Can't say it won't happen in the future, still working on that, but didn't happen then.

It sounds like you want to go pro.

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Yup. And this is a lot of useful information to have.

And it sounds like you really want to work on another serial

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Less a serial and more a series. Think Discworld or Game of Thrones as relatively recent examples. Each story a new book, new main character. Possibly overlapping secondary characters. Possibly former main characters being secondary major characters, or vice versa.

Much like Amelia, I intend to tell each new story from many different perspectives. Each character, the main character in their own story. First person perspectives as was done in Amelia- because I've fallen in love with what I can do with that- and I'll *start* with the goal of what Amelia looked like toward the end, with approximately 10k stretches of a single character's perspective before swapping to the next. Each book, if I plan right, should only total around 100-200k words or so.

Unlike Amelia, I'll keep a cap on the sheer number of players per scenario. Four or five major players in any given book, no more. I can't give a cast of twenty characters the screen time they deserve, so I'll have fewer characters.

... Until the next book, at least, which will have a different pool of five or so major players.

So, Price is what happens when a Dating site achieves sentience and bootstraps its self into a singularity AI then?

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Throw in a little bit (or whole fucking lot) more legitimate darkness than I could do with Amelia... after all, you have so many "I win, fuck you" buttons in Amelia that it's not funny. Let's run down the list.


Death of a Hero: First book in the series, Zach's perspective. It'll be as much an intro to the setting as a book unto itself, watching a Complete Newbie evolve into a hero. The process sucks. Because there were so many more horrific things I wanted to put him through in Amelia but never got the chance. Like, oh, Dream Girl could have been a full book in most stories...

Also, you get to meet Kitten. She's basically the stuff of Jack Slash's wet dreams. Victoria's powerset, but ice claws instead of electricity and she's also a sadist and a rapist. Yay. Zach fights her real early on. She gives him the moniker of "whipping boy", and is responsible for him having his first Jump on his first night out.

In Triplicate: The first story that explores the pairbonding effect in significant detail. May be second. May be third. May be fourth. Yay for nonlinear stories. You'll also get to see what I do with Baal and (maybe) Dream Girl.

Dysphoria: The mileage I intend to get out of Eric's story. Price doesn't have things like biomods or an Endslayer Army to save him from, well, everything wrong in his life. Transgendered is sorely underrepresented in fiction as is. To say nothing of his fucked up mafia family that won't just be removed from the story within the same three chapters as he's introduced as a character. This is a POSSIBLE second book. Might come (much) later.

Nothing Given: Tentative title for the tentative third book. Maybe fourth. Beth. Again, her story, but without the brain modding easy fix. Social Anxiety Disorder is a legitimate, serious, illness. This is a pretty damn big turning point for Zach's story as well. And it introduces The Fears. When the group has names like Aglio (fear of pain), Thana (fear of death) and Saphos (fear of being buried alive)... yeah, they're kinda dicks.

Paid In Blood: Akaihana's story in depth. I expect it to probably be the darkest story in the batch thus far. Which is saying something considering what the above three are going to be like. Poor Akaihana. Mer might also feature pretty heavily in this one. She's the character I based my interpretation of Sveta off of.

Thicker Than Water: Remember Kitten? This is where you learn about her past. There's a *reason* she's so fucked up.

Buyer's Remorse: Zach's next turn as a main character. Poor kid just can't catch a break. But he does have new tricks never seen in Amelia, and that's fun.

Don't Be Afraid: The Fears are back. Bad Things Happen (TM). So many bad things.

 

[GladiusLucix]

Reading through the plot summaries, they all seem to boil down to "Horrible things happen to likable characters." I know there's probably going to be some good things happening to them, but you just seem to be bragging about how much you're going to have life shit on them, which has really turned me off from being at all interested in the series.

So, good luck, and I'll see you again when you're doing a lighter series.

 

[Snake/Eater]

Have you setup a Patreon account yet for us to sponsor you for stuff,like buying books for research on topics related to your story,hiring website designer for your website.and hiring a artist for imagery.

 

[TanaNari]

So, good luck, and I'll see you again when you're doing a lighter series

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Eh, if you liked Amelia's more street level moments, you'll probably like this. But "lighter series" isn't likely at any point in the near future. Of every option, only Second Nature really lends itself to "light", and that's going to require finding a partner to make happen. A partner that knows how to art a whole lot better than I do.

Have you setup a Patreon account yet

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Unfortunately, no. I'd rather have some kind of product *first*, and then start up Patreon and the like.Togathrek also brought up a few interesting points about using Amazon. I'm not afraid to do both, however. Alongside the whole blog thing. Whatever helps boost visibility.

 

[dasstan]

I've decided that Price is the one I'm going with.

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Oh, well, that's disappointing. I was looking forward to seeing what you would do with something not as closely related to Amelia in terms of tones and themes, but it's not like I won't read it, so...

 

[LuridThrone]

Price was always my first choice, so yay. The idea of paired powersets was one of the coolest parts of Amelia and now we get moar of it. Sure it sounds dark, and there is a difference between doing good dark fiction (ala Worm) and being a pointlessly boring sadist against your characters (ala Sword Of Truth), but Tana did just finish the Darkest Fixfic, I think its a pretty safe bet that he can handle doing nice evocative darkness without burning his readers out.

So i for one welcome the coming darkness! ...Any idea when were gonna see the first chapter? Days/weeks/months?

And now that i think of it, are you going to use that whole 'unpaired capes tend to be violent' thing from the omake too? Could explain some of the psychos. XD

 

[TanaNari]

I was looking forward to seeing what you would do with something not as closely related to Amelia in terms of tones and themes

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That was never on the table. I like the darker tones, I like the disturbing themes. Trans(and outright NON)humanism will always be in anything I create. Broken people doing their damnedest to mend one another, and failing as often as not is a thing that will always be in my writing. Human frailty, and the giving up of humanity to remove said frailty. Those concepts will be a feature in every work I ever make, because I love that sort of literature.

The only thing that was ever a real option to change up was the setting.

Price is going to have its pairbonds and synergies and power boosts at the sacrifice of what you love for what you need to save it.

Midara was going to be... well, a science fiction setting with use of magic instead of technology. Nonhuman races created intentionally, godlike beings controlling their own massive swaths of territory and imbuing their followers with power, and again with the options of sacrificing Self for Power.

And Path... heh. Hehe. Yeah.


Except, to a degree, with Second Nature. And even that's very nonhuman in theme by definition, since you've got the alien mindset of the fae to deal with.

The idea of paired powersets was one of the coolest parts of Amelia and now we get moar of it.

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And more perspectives on it. Amelia was already too messy to truly, fully, explore power synergies and pairbonding. Price won't have that problem due not having Endbringers (or anything like them). Street level is where it'll start, and street level is where it'll end. At least for the individuals involved.

Any idea when were gonna see the first chapter? Days/weeks/months?

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Soon as my muse starts working again- I've been looking at the same four paragraphs of Price: Death of a Hero for weeks now. Amelia was massive and I'm sorta decompressing. Since the Price books are looking to be arc based, and each arc its own book of around 200-300k words, that'll be more edible. But I still need a breather and to rebuild some motivation.

 

[ArdadLili]

Well, Price doesn't really tickle my fancy, but if/when you start something afterwards I hope you'll make it known here.

Good luck. ^_^

 

[Beyogi]

Reading through the plot summaries, they all seem to boil down to "Horrible things happen to likable characters." I know there's probably going to be some good things happening to them, but you just seem to be bragging about how much you're going to have life shit on them, which has really turned me off from being at all interested in the series.

So, good luck, and I'll see you again when you're doing a lighter series.

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Yeah. Author's chewtoy stories are tiresome. Oh well, I'm out of ideas for how to continue the plot. Throw in some body horror, some utterly pointless cruelty, some secret service conspiracy that makes the body horror even worse and then the mafia comes and sells the protagonist as a sex-toy after addicting him/now her to drugs after the secret service had already cut of his limbs.

 

[tEN]

Out of curiosity, how many people voted for Price in order to not get Path Magic, but actually would have preferred something else?

I mean, Price will still be fun, but it was always my second option, and I'm seeing other people voice similar things.