Esquestria: The House of the Sun - A pony cultist experience

[Pittauro]

And the artifact in the hives… yes. But if we're lucky, there's more than a single 7 artifact out there. Besides, that would've been a touch useless at defending us from Celestia given the lack of mobility…

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it's worth pointing out that the artifact worked for the entire changeling race.

For all we know we might have been able to "metaphysically tie ourselves" to it without even moving it anywhere else.

in any case we don't know IF there's a moth 7 artifact in reach, and of course such an artifact is likely to be the hardest one to scry for.

Lucky that we have a Baldomare, which we can also give a +40 reagent to.

I doubt Celestia getting to Lantern 5 would be something as simple as just a DC roll. That's your Sacrament level! Sacraments, as far as we've seen, are big deals that take a considerable effort! Also there's the question of where Celestia would be getting all these Lantern scraps from, considering her one point of reference is the Watchman's Glass and as far as we've seen, Velvet is pretty unique in being able to wring out occult knowledge from books.

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Celestia has basically "resources: YES" and "Time: YES", as if we translated her turn into Velvet's mechanics she'd have effectively infinite bits, infinite servants, and not much to do with her APs beside studying Lantern and maybe keeping Daybreak at bay.

Take ANY of our personal Sacraments, and she could achieve it in a single turn with little problems by dedicating a few APs to it. At least if she didn't care about the costs and risks (which she likely wouldn't as she is right now).

of course she's not working on Velvet mechanics, but that's not really a consolation. I really expect her to basically go with a single roll on an unknown DC each turn.

as for sources of Lantern... she has plenty of scholars in Eclipse, who might go and search for scraps of lores in ANY Equestrian Library (starting from the royal archives), she might very well seize any lantern artifact in possession of noble or wealthy families if she suspects them of having such, she has 1000 years of experience which, recontextualized thanks to the lores, might give her ideas about past magical trinkets who might be lantern-based...

and for all we know she can just study the same artifact multiple times. It's not like she uses our mechanics.

AND she IS an alicorn. she's NOT a mortal.

 

[Greymere]

@OurLadyOfWires hey Bird, quick question: in the credit options, we can send somepony (I assume we can't credit Velvet's actions) out to search for a Level 7 book via non-RotT means. Is that something we can just do/write-in under normal circumstances?

Because trying to come up with possible schedules if we wanted to fit in both scrying a Moth artifact and finding Baldomare's Level 7 book next turn, I had a thought: since we're probably going to want Baldomare to channel a SH Influence for us next turn to get our personal Sacrament finished, we could maybe look for a Level 7 book via the power of Lots of Effective SH Lore (I think it'd be a +93 - 95 w/ Influence and AotL?) while Jade or Selene, if we manage to successfully get around to studying the Lantern artifact, scry for a Moth artifact with a Level 4 Lantern reagent.

 

[spiderhellian]

Do Level 7 artefacts even exist?

I'd be surprised if there's a stronger artefact than the Moldywarp's Stone out there, and we (well, Baldomare) blew that up.

 

[Greymere]

Do Level 7 artefacts even exist?

I'd be surprised if there's a stronger artefact than the Moldywarp's Stone out there, and we (well, Baldomare) blew that up.

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Level 7 books exist, so I don't really see why they wouldn't? We could also phrase the scry as something like "the strongest obtainable artifact best suited to hiding us from Celestia's gaze" or whatever, which bypasses the question of level entirely to instead focus on purpose.

 

[Earth-Destroyer]

We read our moth book, invite Spoiled to our jail cell, use the Moth Sacrament on Spoiled. Then Invite Mareinette to dinner and make a friend.

 

[OurLadyOfWires]

Heyia. Just chiming in.

This weekend was definitely a Not Feeling It (tm) weekend, so just letting you all know I won't force it if I can't write. So, no updates this weekend.

Hope you are all doing well. I'll interact with the thread properly at a later date.

 

[Zxzx24]

No worries! And take it easy please. If you aren't feeling it.

 

[jelloloaf]

Hope you feel better soon!

 

[Pittauro]

and now we wait...

 

[Shaper47]

If we're lucky, a Moth 7 is laying around somewhere in an insanely difficult Expedition that we can use Names and Velvet and Selene to blitz.

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The Stone of Velvet was probably Moth 7, it even had a focus on keeping secrets.

But it was destroyed.

The Dappled Ashes were probably Moth 7.

But they were destroyed.

Maybe the Mare in Trees left something behind though.

 

[jelloloaf]

On the topic of Celestia's new Lantern abilities, I've just recently had a probably-bad idea. What if we got her to try and follow a false lead? We know that Path through the Nightmare can be tuned to avoid doing any actual damage, and if she's busy chasing down a mysterious dream-spirit then she won't be closely scrutinizing her trusted commissioner that is definitely above all suspicion.

I can think of a lot of different ways that this would backfire, and it would definitely not be great for Celestia's mental stability, but maybe a little bit of dread would counter the fascination? (And perhaps she'll turn into a filly too)

May be "dosed" to stop at a certain point, as in "before target goes insane" or "as soon as target is sufficiently frightened/intimidated".

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[Shaper47]

Snip

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Celestia has a base 80 general bonus and a large sanity bar.

The Pathway through Nightmares isn't going to do pretty much anything.

I'm not seeing where dream spirit lead comes from either.

 

[Pittauro]

there's even a risk of her sanity bar being a bit down due to, you know, Daybreaker, and we don't WANT her to lose more sanity points!

A crazy Celestia is unlikely to just retire quietly, it's far more likely to become an... EXPLOSIVE problem.

 

[DelightedOne]

I'm surprised no one said anything about Celestia's progress in Lantern making her mental state worse due to mono-focus in a lore. Or at least I did not see anyone mention it.

 

[jelloloaf]

The Pathway through Nightmares isn't going to do pretty much anything.

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I'm not saying we shouldn't try and keep raising our moth, just trying to point out that it isn't necessarily the only way around this obstacle. Thinking outside the walls and all that.

I'm not seeing where dream spirit lead comes from either.

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IIRC, Luna's nightmare centrally contained something pretending to be her sister. If something similar happens to Celestia, I feel like that would tap into a big motivation for her to figure out what's going on. If not, well, there's no way to track it back to us without knowledge that would already be disastrous for her to have anyway.

and we don't WANT her to lose more sanity points!

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There's more than one kind of mental instability. Celestia right now seems to be under the effects of something fascination-adjacent (Lantern association, mania, etc.), so my reasoning is that dread would counter it, or at the very least contribute to a different doom-clock than the one we already have; not make her closer to Daybreaker.

 

[Shaper47]

Luna's nightmare centrally contained something pretending to be her sister. If something similar happens to Celestia, I feel like that would tap into a big motivation for her to figure out what's going on

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That ritual was called out as being unique as a Moth Name was casting it.

Normally it's just a fire and forget ritual.

But the real issue is that the best way for Celestia to figure out what's going on is lantern. So giving Celestia more motivation to study lantern is counter productive.

 

[jelloloaf]

But the real issue is that the best way for Celestia to figure out what's going on is lantern. So giving Celestia more motivation to study lantern is counter productive.

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I agree, PtN isn't a good idea. I'm using it as an example to show that we have a whole bunch of other potential approaches that we could try in addition to just raising moth faster than Celestia raises lantern. Perhaps we could somehow take advantage of Mareinette's ability to social-mimic us, or we could reveal Luna before we get discovered to distract Celestia; any number of things. I think one of the big strengths of quests is that we can come up with unique solutions, which is what I want to try and explore a little.

 

[Shaper47]

I'm not saying we shouldn't try and keep raising our moth, just trying to point out that it isn't necessarily the only way around this obstacle. Thinking outside the walls and all that.

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I think one of the big strengths of quests is that we can come up with unique solutions, which is what I want to try and explore a little.

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Well how about seeing if we can reduce Celestia's lantern lore level.

And by we I mean Baldomare.

Mareinette can do it for Grail, and she made it so her Church does it for Heart.

As a lantern Name shouldn't it be possible for Baldomare to drain the light of lantern out of Celestia. A light snatcher can do it for fascination afterall.

 

[Greymere]

I'm surprised no one said anything about Celestia's progress in Lantern making her mental state worse due to mono-focus in a lore. Or at least I did not see anyone mention it.

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I think a few people brought it up. Problem is, I'm not sure any of her Lore affinities (Heart, Grail, Forge, Lantern) would really help balance out her problems. Maybe keeping her Lores balanced would help even out the effect, but honestly all her affinities just seem uniquely suited to feeding the Daybreaker Problem(tm).

Though, if nothing else, feeding Celestia her other Lores (Grail, Heart, Forge) might distract her from focusing on Lantern as much, which means more time for us.

There's more than one kind of mental instability. Celestia right now seems to be under the effects of something fascination-adjacent (Lantern association, mania, etc.), so my reasoning is that dread would counter it, or at the very least contribute to a different doom-clock than the one we already have; not make her closer to Daybreaker.

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That's not really how Dread and Fascination interact here, though. They don't really cancel each other out, they just compound on each other.

 

[Pittauro]

IIRC, Luna's nightmare centrally contained something pretending to be her sister. If something similar happens to Celestia, I feel like that would tap into a big motivation for her to figure out what's going on. If not, well, there's no way to track it back to us without knowledge that would already be disastrous for her to have anyway.

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Luna's nightmare is a bad example, as it was done by a MOTH NAME BEING SERIOUS ABOUT IT, and he did the ritual... differently.

A normal ritual is basically a mental attack. The Master used it as a way to gather intel, with the mental damage basically being a side effect.

This would be like if we could Redemption of the Forge to turn Velvet from a beautiful Lady into Big Mac, in that both things are at their core using forge to change the body.

In short, we can't just use rituals for things beside their stated effects. The only time that happened the ritual was done by an UNBOUND NAME, the ONLY ONE in this quest thus far.

There's more than one kind of mental instability. Celestia right now seems to be under the effects of something fascination-adjacent (Lantern association, mania, etc.), so my reasoning is that dread would counter it, or at the very least contribute to a different doom-clock than the one we already have; not make her closer to Daybreaker.

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Dread does not counter Fascination. If it did, we would have gone for BOTH Fascination and Dread in that Nat100 SH multi-history update where we could have gotten Neighnia at the cost of 1 dread.

you get the maluses from both Fascination and Dread TOGETHER, instead.

If I remember right, to counter Fascination you basically give up APs to boost your odds of removing it, while to count Dread you instead accept massive maluses (I think -50) in one or more categories of rolls (basically "giving up" on them, not putting in the effort)

I agree, PtN isn't a good idea. I'm using it as an example to show that we have a whole bunch of other potential approaches that we could try in addition to just raising moth faster than Celestia raises lantern. Perhaps we could somehow take advantage of Mareinette's ability to social-mimic us, or we could reveal Luna before we get discovered to distract Celestia; any number of things. I think one of the big strengths of quests is that we can come up with unique solutions, which is what I want to try and explore a little.

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I don't think we actually have more potential approaches.

Celestia is EXTREMELY unstable. so unconventional approaches are likely to just set her off.

Luna is currently unwilling to go to Celestia, so that's not really an option unless SHE changes her mind.

we could in theory try to distract her by introducing other lores, but that means we need to introduce them AND convince her to study them over Lantern.

And the problem is, we don't have much time to do all of this, because in the worst case scenario she might reach Lantern 5 in 4 turns.

And we can't exactly use Mareinette to social-mimic-us with Celestia unless we basically have her do ALL of our commissioner work in our place, as we can't predict WHEN Celestia will come to visit.


As of right now, if Celestia's Lantern reaches our Moth, a conflict is inevitable. Our best options are thus to keep Moth ahead of her (doable up to Moth 5, and maybe more if we get a good artifact after that), to hope a fully trained Luna will come up with an idea, hope that Memory of Light research path will give us something.

That's it.

Well how about seeing if we can reduce Celestia's lantern lore level.

And by we I mean Baldomare.

Mareinette can do it for Grail, and she made it so her Church does it for Heart.

As a lantern Name shouldn't it be possible for Baldomare to drain the light of lantern out of Celestia. A light snatcher can do it for fascination afterall.

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Mareinette was a Name in the fullness of her power. And it was even implied that she wasn't really trying, that it was basically how Velvet interpreted a normal conversation.

But Baldomare is in the Wake, with a fraction of her powers, AND is not really trying. AND we also recently found out she's kinda sorta injured in an unclear way.

In other words: It's not in her character sheet, so we can't ask her to do it.

I suppose the closest we could do is... try to create a ritual to drain someone of lore knowledge. Possibly a variant of Incision of the Heart mixed with Path Through Nightmare where we're cutting away their knowledge of the lores as a form of mental attack.

Problem is, she's an Alicorn with really high rolls. We're likely to fail such a confrontation, and EVEN if we succeed that will make her even MORE unstable and paranoid.

After all, how many people would know she's pursuing this avenue of research? How many would know to target her NOW?

There's the ponies in Eclipse, and then there's the few other ponies she's meeting personally and somewhat regularly, which would be presumably Velvet, Fair Trial and Cadance.

I think a few people brought it up. Problem is, I'm not sure any of her Lore affinities (Heart, Grail, Forge, Lantern) would really help balance out her problems. Maybe keeping her Lores balanced would help even out the effect, but honestly all her affinities just seem uniquely suited to feeding the Daybreaker Problem(tm).

Though, if nothing else, feeding Celestia her other Lores (Grail, Heart, Forge) might distract her from focusing on Lantern as much, which means more time for us.

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just to be sure, where those other affinities of her mentioned EXPLICITLY, or where they just our assumption? I forget.

 

[jelloloaf]

and he did the ritual... differently.

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you get the maluses from both Fascination and Dread TOGETHER, instead.

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Thanks for the correction. I've been distracted diving into the Enigma ARG lore and writing my finals essays, so I think I'm starting to forget what's canon where.

As of right now, if Celestia's Lantern reaches our Moth, a conflict is inevitable. Our best options are thus to keep Moth ahead of her (doable up to Moth 5, and maybe more if we get a good artifact after that), to hope a fully trained Luna will come up with an idea, hope that Memory of Light research path will give us something.

That's it.

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I know that I'm not likely to find anything useful, but I just don't like the idea of giving up and accepting that there's nothing to find, period. By all means, if my ideas are terrible and will never work, tell me, but I'm going to keep coming up with wild theories because I believe that there's a possibility of stumbling across something workable.

(Also, I need an outlet for my moth-delusions, and this is the social circle that will give me the minimum number of weird looks when I start going on about how the number five isn't real. )

 

[Maer]

(Also, I need an outlet for my moth-delusions, and this is the social circle that will give me the minimum number of weird looks when I start going on about how the number five isn't real. )

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Explain more. You may have Mothed into an incredibly important mathematical concept! (Also hearing wild concepts like this is appears fascinating whether serious or not.)

Besides that, theorizing never hurts. Having Jade explore the MoL and stuff like that doesn't hurt unless it interferes with factually important survival and progression stuff. Caring for friends and family does not hurt.

I love hearing your ideas, even if they don't quite jive with the vague sense of what would work that we've gathered in this world.

Could we ask how Mareinette drained Lore knowledge from us, then tailor that into a ritual to cast on Celestia? Yes, probably. But unless we target the entirety of Eclipse as well, it'll be too targeted. And an AOE version is likely gonna be FAR too expensive to be worth it for long.

Though… could we maybe take inspiration from PtN and our Leash to create a ritual that makes someone unconsciously avoid Lore-related stuff? Just… have trouble noticing or keeping their thoughts on it? A sort of mental block? That might be a Malus we could tack onto Celestia to slow her down… not sure it's possible, but it would be pretty interesting if we could manage it…

 

[Shaper47]

But Baldomare is in the Wake, with a fraction of her powers, AND is not really trying. AND we also recently found out she's kinda sorta injured in an unclear way.

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We are working fixing that though.

In other words: It's not in her character sheet, so we can't ask her to do it.

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Not necessarily.

We can do write-ins for sending our Names on actions.

But we'd have to ask first before we can say it's impossible.

 

[Quaxotia]

I was wondering, if we are looking to introduce the Bureau to lores and probably Shining Armor and Cadence by extension, do we have to worry about Celestia probing those two ponies in particular? Because I doubt that we can reliably keep their moth higher than Celestia's lantern.

I would think not because the mechanic is specifically linked to Celestia against Velvet Covers, but I would expect at least Cadence to bump into Celestia on occasion. Can we assume that their fates will also be tied to Velvet in that they just won't be searched for random lores unless Velvet screws up and gets discovered by Celestia?

 

[Shaper47]

I was wondering, if we are looking to introduce the Bureau to lores and probably Shining Armor and Cadence by extension, do we have to worry about Celestia probing those two in particular?

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Yes, too high to soon would be suspicious for us.

 

[Greymere]

I was wondering, if we are looking to introduce the Bureau to lores and probably Shining Armor and Cadence by extension, do we have to worry about Celestia probing those two ponies in particular? Because I doubt that we can reliably keep their moth higher than Celestia's lantern.

I would think not because the mechanic is specifically linked to Celestia against Velvet Covers, but I would expect at least Cadence to bump into Celestia on occasion. Can we assume that their fates will also be tied to Velvet in that they just won't be searched for random lores unless Velvet screws up and gets discovered by Celestia?

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If we're doing it unofficially? Yeah, it seems to be something we'd have to worry about, since Bird previously mentioned Celestia as a reason why we can't induct Cadance into the Lores right now (plus Velvet's technically still recovering a bit), and that things might be a bit different if we e.g. had a Moth artifact to cloak Cadance's Lores

If we're doing it officially though, i.e. the Bureau collectively starts investigating and learning the Lores, I imagine it wouldn't be a problem because at that point Celestia would be aware that it's happening instead of her spotting something unusual within Cadance and Shining Armor.

Could we ask how Mareinette drained Lore knowledge from us, then tailor that into a ritual to cast on Celestia? Yes, probably. But unless we target the entirety of Eclipse as well, it'll be too targeted. And an AOE version is likely gonna be FAR too expensive to be worth it for long.

Though… could we maybe take inspiration from PtN and our Leash to create a ritual that makes someone unconsciously avoid Lore-related stuff? Just… have trouble noticing or keeping their thoughts on it? A sort of mental block? That might be a Malus we could tack onto Celestia to slow her down… not sure it's possible, but it would be pretty interesting if we could manage it…

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We could also go the other direction and instead of making a ritual that drains Celestia's Lantern, we make a ritual that helps conceal our own Lores?

 

[Earth-Destroyer]

Man hard to imagine the quest if the Master's ritual had not been so strong and Luna either had not gone mad or crit rolled escape Celestia's following her.

 

[jelloloaf]

I love hearing your ideas, even if they don't quite jive with the vague sense of what would work that we've gathered in this world.

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Thank you <3

Explain more. You may have Mothed into an incredibly important mathematical concept!

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I don't have time for a full write up at the moment, but from the success of my previous research paper, I think that I may have discovered a new creative niche; I'll slot gematria into the schedule after the one about why exactly Moth is so concerned with cutting hair. But until then, I'll leave you with the hint that The Mother of Ants is the fifth Hour of the day, and that Jesus Christ is cited as having received five piercing wounds.

 

[Pittauro]

I know that I'm not likely to find anything useful, but I just don't like the idea of giving up and accepting that there's nothing to find, period. By all means, if my ideas are terrible and will never work, tell me, but I'm going to keep coming up with wild theories because I believe that there's a possibility of stumbling across something workable.

(Also, I need an outlet for my moth-delusions, and this is the social circle that will give me the minimum number of weird looks when I start going on about how the number five isn't real. )

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sure, feel free to try and come up with alternatives. Who knows, maybe you'll actually come up with something doable, We'll certainly never come up with alternatives if we don't at least try to brainstorm.

But keep in mind that Bird has run out of ways to tell us that Glory is there, please go get Glory, I'm begging you, and we could EASILY be ready in 3 to 5 turns, as that's how long it takes us to get basically >4 Sacraments, AT LEAST 2 Names, and prepare more artifacts to bring with us to help our rolls.

Though… could we maybe take inspiration from PtN and our Leash to create a ritual that makes someone unconsciously avoid Lore-related stuff? Just… have trouble noticing or keeping their thoughts on it? A sort of mental block? That might be a Malus we could tack onto Celestia to slow her down… not sure it's possible, but it would be pretty interesting if we could manage it…

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In theory maybe.

In practice, keep in mind Celestia has very high bonuses from being an Alicorn. We're talking >+50, and unknown traits. Maybe more if she's trying to use wards and other stuff through conventional magic.

 

[Maer]

I'm not saying it'll be easy or LIKELY to work, but a ritual like that might be possible. Perhaps something more heavily Moth focused, helping to encourage forgetfulness? Stealing the Lore secrets from her mind in her sleep?

A bit of Moth to steal away the memories of pain and suffering, Winter to draw out the memories of better days and calmer times… maybe SH if we want to get ambitious and show her worlds where she and Luna are together and happy…

A sort of specialized pseudo Soothe-the-Night in ritual form focused on Celestia…? Hmm…