#the gods are also a product of the luxon??

[sicklyseraphnsuch]

New Theory

We consecrate the gods to the Luxon. So the Luxon can transform the gods truly into mortals. And they can have An End.

[essektheylyss]

The reason that Ashton learning about the Luxon is interesting is not because it would change their stance on the pantheon (considering the Luxon is not of the pantheon and therefore any change in opinion on, say, Pelor, would be a false and reductive equivalence), but because their stance on religion as a whole is currently reductive in a deeply unproductive and, frankly, potentially dangerous way, and the Luxon's existence flies in the face of that.

Ashton has a basic but narrow view of how the gods operate: someone asks for something, and the gods answer. He may acknowledge that generally the answer is given as part of an exchange, but might also feel that the extent of his suffering is worth more than the offering usually made. This is a very valid and understandable position! They suffered under some destructive force of nature, and later under the general indifference of the world, and if there are gods who claim to do good in the world*, and suffering persists, how can those gods be considered just?

This is, I must make very explicit, an incredibly complex and old philosophical question in the real world even where the existence of gods is not a material reality, and not one that's going to be solved by a bunch of fandom bloggers, no matter how enlightened one thinks they are. It is also a question that is straight up not a concern in a lot of faiths, so by necessity, one cannot equate "in this context, are the gods just?" to the question of whether worship, as a practice, is just.

In any case, Ashton's concern is more personal than philosophical—his stance is borne not of any intensive questioning of the justice of gods, but because he's been hurt, and he wanted to be helped, and wasn't**. And this is valid, but the extrapolation to "the gods can die for all I care," does attempt to make that equivocation. In suggesting the removal of the source of worship of a large portion of the world, which at least something of the means to act upon that suggestion, they're implicitly taking the stance that their anger alone is worth more than the mundane benefits that collective portion of the population receives from their worship.

It bears noting here that this is specifically about his anger, and not his suffering, because the death of the gods won't change his history. In fact, nothing is going to change that! This is really where Ashton's anger lies, but the anger isn't actionable there, which is why it comes out elsewhere. When funneled in a reasonable and willful direction (such as towards Ludinus) anger can be very productive; this isn't to say that this emotion is the problem in itself. But directing it toward the gods will have a pointed negative impact on much of the world, and will likely not stop those worshippers who are enacting harm from finding other ways to do so, which means it's a net loss in terms of what Ashton wants, which is to keep people from harm.

And drawing attention to the anger is also relevant, because, well, that's where we get back to the Luxon.

Ashton's Rage mechanic is based explicitly in dunamis and, by extension, the Luxon itself. The ability is linked narratively to their fall at Jiana Hexum's house and subsequent patching up by Milo, who dumped a potion of possibility into their head. When Imogen and FCG have entered his mind, the description is similar to the description of concentrating on a Luxon beacon.

There's an argument to be made that dunamis itself more than the beacons individually is what comprises the entity known as the Luxon; the potions were distilled initially from a beacon, and we've seen other forms of the same thing, such as the purple gems in Aeor. We also know that the Luxon is an entity that may go back to before the Founding***, because Essek, a noted skeptic, found evidence of its existence as such in Aeor, an arcane society that attempted to kill the gods themselves.

The Luxon as a divine entity*** has not, as far as anyone has claimed, directly spoken to a mortal, follower or otherwise. The Dynasty believes it has sent messages that their umavi can divine and interpret into scripture, and in theory clerics that follow it can receive information via divination the same way as any other cleric, but none of these involve direct speech, and overall it's not clear that it is in fact an entity capable of communication as mortals would imagine communication.****

This is notably different than the Pantheon as a whole. The primary boon that the Dynasty believes the Luxon has given them, based on their ability with the beacon to escape Lolth's dominion, is to wield more control over one's own destiny. If we proceed under the assumption that this is how the Luxon brokers any relationship to mortals, then we end up back to the idea that the ability that Ashton has gained from the dunamis that was used to seal their wounds was control over, and the ability to act upon, the anger that they harbor.

It's in fact exactly what Ashton asked for, both in his past and now, in this past conversation with the party, suggesting that he'll actually hear out any god that actually suggests they want him. It's also clearly something they still want, given that they went looking for it in Issylra. No matter how disaffected Ashton may claim to be, his actions betray the fact that he does in some way want the acknowledgment of an entity larger than he is.

So whether or not Ashton changes their tune on the pantheon doesn't matter in the long run. What learning about the Luxon would do is force Ashton to confront the fact that, first, gods as a whole do not necessarily conform to the limited knowledge they've based their views on, and second, that maybe a god already gave them what they asked for.

And Ashton is still perfectly at liberty to ignore that without consequence—the use of dunamis has never been contingent on belief or worship, as evidenced by the numerous wizards who use it regardless. But it does raise the question for Ashton both of his own worth in the view of something larger than he is, regardless of whether he thinks the gods have already discarded him, and also the very premise on which he chooses where to direct his anger.

It's up to Ashton, as it's always been, to actually decide where to go from there.

*I won't interrogate this at length here because I don't think it's relevant, but I also don't believe the Prime Deities have ever claimed that their purpose, if they can be said to have a purpose, is to do good. Even the temples of Vasselheim orient themselves more toward the purpose of maintaining balance and order rather than any concept of "good", and many of the pantheon who are not explicitly included among the Betrayers have neutral alignment.

**For further commentary on the flaws in Ashton's assumptions around relationship to a god, see here.

***The question of whether or not the Luxon is A God is also irrelevant here, because it has been worshipped as such and confers power comparably to the Prime Deities, so we'll proceed without worrying about it.

****For further commentary on the nature of how the Luxon communicates and enacts its will in the Material Realm, see here.

For further commentary on the general tone of this post, see here.

[primrose-path-of-dalliance]

that time travel experiment room

not precisely detailed as i have no access to the stream on demand, but here’s a summary of the info and implications i gathered as important from matt’s descriptions, prior episodes, and d&d mechanics.

(full of spoilers.)

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the room was lead-lined. this could mean two things, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:

radioactive material was involved with the tests the aeorian researchers were doing in this room. there was also residue on the walls. since matt has thoroughly grounded aeor in both fantasy and sci-fi, this isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

they wanted to protect the room from certain divination spells. lead lining blocks spells like locate object and detect magic from ‘perceiving’ through it. (note: lead does not block all divination.)

the spellwork was a combination of transmutation and dunamancy.

dunamancy, we know, is the magic of potentiality and specializes in manipulating time and space.

to quote the official description of the school of transmutation, bold mine:

“You are a student of spells that modify energy and matter. To you, the world is not a fixed thing, but eminently mutable, and you delight in being an agent of change. You wield the raw stuff of creation and learn to alter both physical forms and mental qualities. Your magic gives you the tools to become a smith on reality's forge. “Some transmuters are tinkerers and pranksters, turning people into toads and transforming copper into silver for fun and occasional profit. Others pursue their magical studies with deadly seriousness, seeking the power of the gods to make and destroy worlds.”

to combine these two schools therefore suggests not only the capacity to travel through time, but to actively change time or one’s timeline.

(in case you were ever wondering why caleb (and liam) selected that subclass out of the official ones.)

the experiments only attempted “a few seconds of transit.”

matt did not explicitly clarify what dimension of transit. what is most likely in context, assuming ‘safe’ experimental stages with time travel, is temporal travel by a few seconds into the past or future.

these transits caused great physical stress on the subjects.

this ties well with essek’s story of a presumed time traveler returning to immediately scatter into dust (e91, 42:09).

the subject leaves behind an “echo.” by the aeorian researchers’ theories, this served as an anchor point for the subject to return to.

another phenomenon called an “echo” has been described by essek in-game and is present in the EGTW as a product of the spell ‘resonant echo’ and the features of the echo knight fighter subclass. these shadowy spectral copies are supposedly “potential selves left to fade in unrealized timelines” (e77, 2:03:04).

the researchers theorized that their work could allow travel to other timelines.

presuming that these two “echo” concepts are the same and accurate, this suggests that the spell transports the subject to an alternate timeline (or the possibility of one) and leaves behind an echo of the subject because their ‘realized’ self is now in another timeline.

if this echo serves as an anchor point, the spell may be transporting the subject by swapping these ‘selves.’

however, they were apparently experiencing problems with subjects that traveled farther than they were supposed to go and never returned, their echoes fading.

this implies that the person traveling has control over where/when they intend to land, not anyone who remains with the spell circle. the person who travels may be the caster.

there is a limit to the temporal ‘distance’ one can travel before either perishing or losing the return path to one’s originating timeline.

it’s unclear so far whether this limit is inherent to the spell itself as it currently stands, to the resilience of the time traveler, to the resilience of their echo, or something unknown.

most importantly:

the aeorian researchers drew some of their knowledge and theories from a luxon beacon in their possession, which they referred to as “the primal artifact.”

the level of knowledge and understanding that would be required to create a luxon beacon defeats the purpose of studying the object. the spell experimentation similarly would make no sense.

referring to it as “the primal artifact” implies that they only possessed a singular beacon and discovered it in such a way as to convince them that the beacon was very old. considering the choice of “primal,” they may have dated it to pre-mortal existence, when the gods were the only beings.

this context and chosen terminology therefore suggests that aeorian archmages discovered a luxon beacon. they did not create them.

[jonthethinker]

After a long day of truly cursed thoughts, I’ve come to the determination that the Cerberus Assembly can act as a sort of Exandrian analog of our world’s Silicon Valley, and I hate it. I hate hate hate it.

The more I think about it, the more it just sort of melds into my mind as fact. I can’t escape it. This is where I live now.

You’ve got this collection of self-proclaimed super geniuses, unbounded by modern social mores and determined to invent a new sort of ethics, with an intent on shaping history and sagely guiding the world into a better future. This is despite the fact that most of the ideas they have inevitably end up making the world worse, and the only thing “new” that they really bring into the world is a bunch of actually very old ideas coated in fresh circuitry/magic.

But let’s dig a little deeper and start getting specific.

They both have these images of fiercely independent, creative bodies desperate to remain free from government control, and sometimes even as a check on that very government. The heads of the Cerberus Assembly outright say their intent is to act as a check on the Crown, and are known to have many secrets the Crown is, to their knowledge, totally unaware of.

Tech companies, particularly in America, have this outward facing very libertarian outlook on things, saying they don’t wish to interfere in the very important process of democracy and free speech, while simultaneously feeling it is their responsibility to fact check those in power and hold them to account, with their “serious vetting” of political ads and the like on their platforms. They also lobby heavily against any and all regulation of their various products and services, preferring to let the “invisible hand” of the market provide the service of keeping them in check, much as the Cerberus Assembly prefers to handle its own problems internally.

But when you really dig into the details this is all bullshit. The Cerberus Assembly, for all intents and purposes, IS the Empire. They run the secret police, for goodness sake. The two are so interconnected, and the Assembly as an institution is so dependent on the infrastructure and manpower, and of course money (because the fancy clothes, giant towers, and expensive sets of material components don’t pay for themselves) of the Empire to accomplish its goals, it can’t serve as a real check on Imperial forces possibly “overstepping”, and it also has no material interest in doing so; the more power and control the Empire has, the more power and control the Assembly has; the less freedom the citizens have due to authoritarian “safety” measures implemented by the Crown, the safer the Assembly itself becomes to pursue it’s morally dubious work and experimentation.

The same goes with Silicon Valley and the various tech companies that fall under its ethos. They will expound continually on the necessary freedom from government control they must have to truly change the world in the ways they think are best, but the primary source of money for most of these companies are governments. They either primarily contract with governments for most of their actual profits or to use its already established infrastructure, as is the case with Amazon, or depend heavily on publicly funded research for their innovations, which is everyone from Apple to Google to Microsoft and dozens and dozens of smaller companies besides. They then even get to patent these publicly funded innovations and hold a monopolized stranglehold on their use. This is not even to mention the starter capital necessary to form many of these companies in the first place itself was provided by governments, with the rather, shall we say “morally questionable” Kingdom of Saudi Arabia being among the top contributors to such start ups.

Even when either of these groups claim to be self-made, it’s all bullshit. So many of our famous tech overlords that supposedly built themselves from nothing started at the upper reaches of society, with more than enough capital and connections to insure they were never at any real risk of failing in the first place. Most even went to the same elite institutions of learning that provide the vast majority of the political leadership of the United States, institutions they had access to due to their wealth and familial connections, not their brains. Elon Musk’s family owned an emerald mine in Zambia for God’s sake, one his family would have never owned without the British Empire being a thing.

The same can be said for the Assembly. The upper classes of the Dwendalian Empire are lousy with mages and magic users. If they don’t have a place to climb among the nobility, they work for the Assembly, and hope to climb there. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the only poorer mage recruits we know anything real about all were sucked up into the service of the Scourgers, one of the few arms of the Assembly known to regularly interact with societies lower reaches and not so positively at that, and had their familial identities obliterated in the process. Both of these groups are of the upper reaches of society and serve the upper reaches of society, and we should never think anything less.

And this brings us to the ideological framework both of these groups think with. They are both full to the brim with people who are individualists to the extreme. They all believe they are singular actors in the great tapestry of history, who got where they are by hard work and dedication, and anyone who isn’t there just didn’t do enough. The folks living in the tent city outside Zadash? lazy layabouts who simply have not applied their mind to be something greater, or perhaps their veins are just full of bad blood. Poor former factory workers in Detroit whose jobs have been moved to places where labor laws are weaker and wages are lower? If they’d only taken their education more seriously, they could be where I am! Or maybe they just never tried to be an Uber driver or delivering for Grubhub, because that’s how you really pull yourself out of poverty.

Meanwhile, most of the groups consist of people who have never once known real adversity and certainly not the hardship of poverty nor the lack of social and political power that position entails. They are blinded to the reality of most people in the world outside their rather small one, and thus have no understanding of the material hardship that most people experience during their everyday life.

You see this most clearer in the manner in which they try to solve what they see as societies great problems, with no clear thought put into the consequences of these particular solutions. In our world, this is particularly obvious. Uber is painted as an innovative means of transportation on a budget, when in reality it’s just a fleet of untrained, underpaid, non-unionized taxi drivers using their own personal vehicles at their own expense. Elon Musk is seen as this super genius when his solution to LA traffic wasn’t a more robust public transportation system or slowly reconstructing the city to be more pedestrian friendly, but instead to build a massive network of single car elevators under the city to zip cars to key hot spots faster in a manner people less anxious than me would still call risky at best. I mean most of these people think the key to ending poverty is teaching people to code or giving them STEM education, even when in a capitalist economy the only thing a sudden flooding of new coders and STEM educated folks would insure is that the jobs that require those skills will see a sudden massive drop in pay and benefits as the pool of prospective employees becomes over-saturated and individual workers no longer have any bargaining power to protect their once rare jobs. You already see this in animation and video game design, and you’ll certainly see it elsewhere.

For the Assembly, despite being praised as the brightest arcane minds of Wildmount, seem to get most of their ideas either by stealing them from others or digging them up out of the ground. But this is just the nature of empire; it’s always easier for an empire to consume than it is to create. So as little as they think of the Dynasty, they are eager to steal every little bit of knowledge they’ve discovered about Dunamis, and without the faith and moral sense the Luxon-based religion imposes, they will never be forced to put the use of this rare and dangerous magic into perspective. Imagine what harm they can cause with gravity and time magic when they don’t have that religious pressure to consider the value of life and choice. But this makes sense when their main sources of inspiration are the wizards of the Age Of Arcana; you know, the wizards whose hubris nearly destroyed the entire world and spurred an apocalyptic war that sent society into a dark age in which the gods themselves abandoned them? A+ inspiration material if you ask me.

Even the culture of these two groups in regards to how they regulate themselves is so eerily similar. Think of Delilah Briarwood. Member in good standing of the Cerberus Assembly. Also, worshipper of Vecna and talented necromancer. Only expelled from the Assembly after involvement from the Cobalt Soul, even when you know every other member of the Assembly almost certainly had loads of information on this lady.

It just makes me think of all the weird, right-wingers and Nazis who occasionally get expelled from the heights of Silicon Valley whenever some journalist exposes them, and how quickly their colleagues are to condemn them even when so many of them either knew this person was this way well before they were exposed or actively agreed with them and still do. I mean, think of how protected Bill Gates is, because of how much his philanthropist image has served to insulate and protect the gross consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of so few, even when his fortune was built on stolen ideas, military funding and research, and a hardcore software monopoly for well over a decade or two. Also, his philanthropy has done nothing to help African people build their own institutions of power independent of European and American influence, and have help distract us from the damage really caused to the entire continent by earlier colonialism and later capitalist imperialism.

This is to say as bad as our world is, I now definitely don’t want to live in Wildemount. I don’t want to live a world where Mark Zukerberg can cast Disintegrate. Not ideal. I guess I’ll just have to work that much harder to fix this one and not depend on learning Dunamancy to just put us on a different path. Bummer.

[yfere]

A Lonely Wizard

“He’s been traumatized, he’s looking to change his life direction” the M9 say of Jeff, the character of Jester’s Ideal Target for proselytizing. It’s a bit, but it’s based on fact--people who are vulnerable, traumatized, lonely, or who recently made life changing decisions (new move, new school, divorce, death of family/friend etc)--these are the people whose sense of self is flexible enough and lacking enough social ties that they can be appealed with the most success to reinvent themselves by joining a new organization or cult.

But these people needn’t be drawn into something that harms them. I believe that Essek, the lonely researcher, stands as an example of a character with the potential (lol) to fall in with many sides of the Empire/Krynn conflict--it is the Mighty Nein’s intervention and offers of friendship that have the likelihood of assuring his loyalty to them (nevermind the Dynasty or Assembly or anyone else), and their continued investment in that friendship which could secure it.

I mean, I certainly can’t be the only one who noticed that Essek’s political alignments and general perspective make an entanglement with the Assembly look very beneficial to him. This is what he told us about his thoughts on the war:

1. Den Theylss as a group as well as Essek in particular is interested in legitimizing the Dynasty in the eyes of the world at large, including the neighboring country of the Empire. They likely believe peace and perhaps even cooperation with the Empire as essential to achieving this mission, since the war only makes polemic against the Dynasty easier to swallow. Meanwhile, Essek is also of the belief that the Assembly, if conducting extralegal research, probably would want the war to cease for the simple reason that doing so would help them keep their research more protected and secret. 

2. To accomplish the goal of bringing conflict to a standstill, Essek is straight up willing to withhold information from the BQ and/or lie to her face, betraying his office as Shadowhand

3. Brass tacks, Essek straight up doesn’t care for the Luxon as a religion or a cultural institution. He wants to study the magical potential of the Beacons without having to navigate the trappings of the Luxon religion, and believes their potential is best plumbed when they’re looked at with an objective eye. He theorizes they may be constructed magical artifacts or weapons, rather than the body of a god. In essence, Essek has the same general research perspective as those in the Assembly have so far demonstrated--and he’s eager to reverse-engineer their research when presented with the vial of liquefied dunamis from Caleb.

4. Essek has also pretty much stated outright that he’s more willing to work with the Assembly than with the monarchy of the Empire, as he believes (correctly, from what I’ve seen) that they have more in common with each other, a shared perspective of their respective priorities. The way he discusses this is slightly hypothetical and more in an effort to convince Caleb that maybe targeting the Assembly for their ulterior motives isn’t the most productive course of action. But it’s possible to extrapolate from this an anti-monarchial sentiment directed at the ruler of the Dynasty as well.

5. “I am one mind, they are many” Essek is lonely. He is trying to accomplish difficult, at times politically fraught research with zero support structure, let alone friends. He’s desperate for Caleb to swing by to talk magic--Caleb offers an exchange of information and items in return for helping with Nott’s spell, and Essek acts as if helping would be a favor to him instead, saying he would give breakfast as a “thank you”--for that and for the dinner, as if they hadn’t invited him and they weren’t already deeply in his debt. He talks about help with research as the main means the M9 could repay their favors to him, discounting political information he’s offered as worthy of the same repayment. Potential romance aside, Essek’s tentative but deeply invested attempts at reaching out speaks to his isolation, his need for someone to be at his back. 

The people at his back could be the Assembly, so, so easily. But instead, there’s the Mighty Nein, not beholden to either.

“The Traveler was there for me when I was lonely. He is a good friend.” Jester argues to Jeff, and this is what convinces the lonely Jeff to worship the Traveler. To Essek, Yasha said her loneliness became worse after meeting the M9, because she learned what having real, good friends was like. And Essek watched as Caleb and the Mighty Nein outpoured their love towards Nott the Brave and all her decisions, promised her she would always be one of them and they would always stand by her, no matter what she wanted or decided.

What lonely person wouldn’t covet that, being a part of that?