To be fair, Celestial Forge fics are rather tough to write without the "empire building" aspect. And your comfort zone is the adventurer story, so it was gonna be a struggle either way.
You did mention a interest into Inspired Inventor or Tinker of Fiction. And to be frank, it would probably be easier on the pacing rather than using Celestial Forge. Ssince Inspired Inventor uses charges and Tinker of Fiction focuses on one tech at a time for X amount of time so you can dictate how much tech/knowledge is used.
So you need a power that is not too powerless but not too overpowered? why not try Worm CYOA's Shaper power? as far as I know theirs only 2 interesting fic that is centered around that power that exist and managed to end. For Tinker powers v5's Fictional Engineering is good too not weak and not too strong depending on which sci-fi setting you choose. Though v3's Apprentice is good too adding the mental archive and tinker ability it also has limited escalation as the users need training and combat to improve.
Maybe a specialty route instead of a broad range of techs? People do love when someone munchkins, which is probably why your Light of the Forge fic did well in the beginning and somewhat later.
I mean it doesn't have to be obscure. You could have probably done this fic with your knowledge of DC or MCU tech.
There's Inspired Voyage (ST: Voyager / SI) and Inspiration Strikes! (A Quarian Pseudo-SI/OC in Mass Effect).
Do you have any idea how broken that power truly is? It lets you create any amount of biomass arbitrarily, or manipulate any existing biomass arbitrarily, up to and including jacking, duplicating, or boosting whatever superpowers it has!
Was not aware of their existence, going to read them now.
And Cherico made an interesting story with an Endbringer Shaper SI and what your implying is an SI with morals off and also are shards and entity organic? I thought their made of crystalline structures.
Dude, I used to be the guy who read fanfic, cursed that so many great fanfic ideas stopped after a few chapters and were never finished, and wished those fanfic authors would just work harder.
Whatever else the Entities are, the author has made it pretty plain that they're alive, not machines. So I choose to treat them as life forms. And fuck, it's not like silicon-based life doesn't have ample precedent in sci-fi.
I feel that while you're probably right, a simple limitation that would be fairly reasonable is to consider the fact that the cyoa talks about biological life forms. Why this is relevant is the fact that Zion's species could be considered something similar to nanobots in how they reproduce. And nanbots unless designed to be biological wouldn't fall under shaper's powers.
Why do always the good ones get abandoned ;-(
I see that's why you thinking that the Shaper is too OP still its not something a arbitrarily limitation that it cannot affect Zion's species can't solve. If your really sticking with the Tinker/Inventor theme why not just pick 1 to 3 sci-fi franchise and like the ToF grant the MC the tech base of that franchise and its best not to pick a sci-fi franchise that is not useless or overpowered but still useful to make a difference or impact in the setting where the MC is in like Its practically a heavily nerfed version and limited of CF and ToF.
I am kinda sad about this. While you feel you don't know as many series as others, the ones that you have shown that you know very rarely (if at all) get used, such as Shadowrun and Rifts. I think you could bring some really obscure things to the table in a Tinker of Fiction story, but if it is not meant to be it is not meant to be.
There is also Inspired Mass (an Inspired Voyage spinoff) by the same author as inspired voyage.
My analysis, for what it's worth: the problem with Celestial Forge, and most CYOA-alikes is that they are, fundamentally, designed to break a setting. And Light of the Forge worked because Rifts is both a setting that kinda needs to be broken a bit, and also has high-enough-power players that it takes a while to break them.After the recent trial-and-error, one conclusion I have come to is that you guys were right. The Celestial Forge is even clunkier to work with if you don't random-roll. The potential power in there is immense, and the degree of randomness is necessary to slow your roll enough to actually have a story instead of a curbstomp. I tried alternate methods of slowing the pace in this story, and while they were working they weren't working great.
Pure random-roll of course has its own drawbacks, as "Light of the Forge" proved, but in hindsight I did hit on something valid there with 'random roll but veto and/or pick something less awesome than your roll'. It lets you slow the roll, but you don't have to give any artificial excuses for not speeding the roll up. If the dice don't give it to you, you don't get it, even if you can maybe get a lesser consolation prize.
Of course, I've already tried a "Light of the Forge". So I don't think I'll ever actually try the Celestial Forge again. Two experiments, two different approaches at using it, two failures at roughly the same point. Abandoning a fic depresses me somewhat, so, when I finally try again - at whatever indefinite future date - I shall very likely try something else.
Inspired Inventor, OTOH, has the problem of too much too fast. This works in Worm v1 CYOA because Worm's a fucking cosmic death world, you literally cannot be too powerful there for the plot. Even Kaleidoscope with the chain taken COMPLETELY off at least still lets you get out a complete one-shot (as I've already demonstrated, plug plug) off. The solution taken by Slayer Anderson's "Industrious", which has II exist but really slows down the recharge rate (in that fic, its 1 charge/month) looks very promising, and I already recced that fic earlier but by all means I'll rec it again. So, that's a long-range possibility. Although right now there's a fic doing it and doing it really well, so I ain't gonna head-to-head against that.
One other suggestion was Tinker of Imagination. That one I probably won't ever use - the ability to ignore the Tinker Cycle and conjure your own materials and specialized tools from the getgo means that any MC I wrote couldn't NOT go all SupCom inside the first 24 hours. As for regular Tinker of Fiction... I've read ToF fics, and the fun there is using all sorts of obscure stuff from obscure franchises in creative ways, and I do not know as many franchises as those guys do.
I do have an Essence of the Innovator I might use in a future tech-wank fic, and which I'll link here so people actually remember it exists. It's old and obscure.
tldr; We'll see what the future brings someday, but it likely won't be the Celestial Forge again.
Chapter removed, story dead, unfinished rewrite as a farewell gift.
