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Wintersteel: Northstrider and co rules lawyered that Yerin merging with her blood shadow technically wasn't an advancement because she was still an Overlord, and that she technically wasn't a Herald either since only an Archlord and up can take advantage of all the changes that merging with a spirit entails. It was still such a massive upgrade that Saphora went from heavy favorite to certain defeat. But it's still probably more accurate to say she is a Herald than she isn't. Same with Lindon and being a Sage.
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Oct 11, 2020 14:34
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Does anyone have a read on what Lindon did with Dross/Northstrider in the beginning of the book? Lindon was focusing on the link between himself and Dross, so at first I interpreted Northstrider taking interest in Lindon because he sensed a change with Lindon's connection to Dross. But the change in the link coincided with the portal opening, and other people have read it as Lindon opening the portal himself. That certainly would be impressive and foreshadowing for what he could do later, but he could barely open an old portal on his own once he actually manifested the Icon, so it seems like kind of a stretch to me.
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Oct 11, 2020 19:04
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team overhead smash posted:it seems some icons find different things like portals much harder than others. I wouldn't be surprised if the Sage of The End has a hard time creating anything such as a portal but an easy time with destructive uses of his powers. Yeah Lindon is going to be great at those obliteration power words. I wouldn't be surprised if he's actually really good at spacial manipulation too, though. He struggles with it now because he's an Underlord, but that he can do it at all is basically unheard of among his contemporaries, so to me that expresses an affinity. Those portals are more like tears in space rather than creations, anyway. See: the Sword Sage's affinity for spacial manipulation. Plus I imagine they don't call them void keys for nothing. Also, Sage names seem to go <Icon> Sage or Sage of the <Path> so that would make Lindon the Void Sage or the Sage of the Twin Stars, respectively.
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Oct 12, 2020 15:11
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Aargh posted:He's at least Overlord Sage as he triggered his overlord revelation in the fight with Sophara "I am the End" He was trying to trigger Overlord but found an Icon instead.
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Oct 12, 2020 21:04
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Aargh posted:So just to clarify, you're all saying Lindon trained with the akuras before the tournament presumably getting a fair few treasures and elixirs along the way and advancing to a pretty high level of underlord, learnt throughout the tournament, making it to the top 16, lost to yerin after an epic battle where he had to put all his training to use. Then he perfects Northstriders Consume technique, harvests dreadbeasts and bests too level underlords from abyssal palace before getting the diamond veins and killing wo uncrowned underlords, two overlords and one uncrowned overlord and triggered something to advance to sage, a rank that has previously only been available to archlords, except in antiquity, but is still an underlord Yep. Lindon has been punching way above his weight since Ghostwater, and even before he feasted on so many people during the skirmishes, Dross was pretty sure he could have defeated most of the remaining uncrowned competitors. Then he trained relentlessly against all of them in simulations, incorporated Little Blue's madra negation into his pure core, and topped out his Underlord core. He's a goddamn monster.
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Oct 12, 2020 23:45
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Aargh posted:Except where he had his revelation as did everyone else in the book. And then you know, advanced like everyone else, just with an added extra from all the super special techniques Eithan had been training him with "as a surprise". When someone advances to Overlord, the aura around them trembles from their connection to it. After his revelation, something different, explicitly not the aura, trembles. To make it more clear, the book says "He triggered something, but it wasn't Overlord." After he manifests the Icon, Dross even says "Lindon... you're not an Overlord." So uh, straight from the text, multiple times, Lindon isn't an Overlord. It might even be that he could sit down near some natural treasures and progress to Overload with the exact same revelation, who knows! But he isn't Overlord yet.
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Oct 13, 2020 00:19
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oh hell it's been so long since I thought about him I had forgotten his whole backstory. His goldsign is basically a huge snake-like mouth with jagged teeth, right?
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Oct 22, 2020 21:20
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Just finished reading all of Dungeon Crawler Carl, the sequel, and all the stuff on Royal Road based on people talking about it here. Very enjoyable read. I'll probably reread the third book when it gets officially released next month.
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Mar 19, 2021 02:22
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Compilation volume 2 aka books 4, 5 and 6 rolled in one. e: never too late to shake my fist at autocomplete Dr Subterfuge fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 1, 2021 00:25
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Bloodlines : The way people in Sacred Valley responded to warnings of an impending apocalypse seemed very realistic to me. Realistically frustrating, but I appreciated the restraint in not having everything just work out like it would in a shameless power fantasy. I think the only time I really rolled my eyes was when Mercy spent all that time trying to be nice to that clan of flyers only to successfully browbeat them in minutes once they hit the deadline. That became more palatable when it ended up that browbeating the Wei clan wasn't successful after all. Maybe the sheer number of times the Wei clan betrayed Lindon was a bit over the top, too. But different groups having different reactions both to the evidence of the threat and the methods used to convince them worked well I thought. And I thought Lindon and co going back and actually being able to drive off the Titan was a nice palette cleanser, especially once Lindon finally found the Sword Sage's void space and talked to Elder Whisper. Reigan Shen being a sneaky little rat was just Reigan Shen things. It didn't feel like a betrayal to me since he has always been an antagonist, and I expected nothing better of him. I wonder which is on the chopping clock first: him or a Dreadgod. Probably him, since Monarchs are weaker? I'm excited for more Elder Whisper shenanigans. And maybe Ozriel shenanigans? The title of the next book is certainly evocative of Ozriel, but arguably that's also the path Lindon is on, and the Mad King also has an approximation of the Reaper's scythe now. On the other hand Ozriel is the founding Aurelius, so he's probably responsible for the newly introduced hunger hands, which were stored in that ancient Aurelius vault. But that's only an assumption. Dr Subterfuge fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Apr 11, 2021 |
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Apr 11, 2021 03:15
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30.5 Days posted:A previous book indicated that he was reborn in the labrynth, and we got a neat drawing of subject one in this book, and he's got a bunch of arms I guess, were they all chopped off? Oh poo poo I'd forgotten that passage in Unsouled: "The labyrinth where he died and returned to life" when talking about locations of interest that were details of Ozriel's life. I wonder how that compares to what Jai Daishou pulled off with the Heartguard chest. Regardless, I think Ozriel invaded the of labyrinth, died (temporarily) in the process and either chopped those hands off Subject One himself or he found them deep inside. S1 is the source for all Hunger Madra, and all the artifacts made with it were "harvested" from him, so it wouldn't surprise me if the hands were just... hanging around as raw material. And then Ozriel left them in a family vault along with his bead, meant to be found, but only by someone free thinking enough to ignore the fact the he forbid anyone from going in there.
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Apr 12, 2021 12:32
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GrandmaParty posted:I really enjoy how profoundly over the top Dungeon Crawler Carl is. I wish there was more like it. If you want more of it, the fourth book is mostly(?) finished on Royal Road.
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Apr 13, 2021 12:58
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The first chapter of the first book was posted on Royal Road 18 months ago. He puts out a new update every week or two. It's a crazy fast update schedule. But I think it won't be quite as fast now that the series has more moving parts, and he can do things other than sit at home and write. e: sort of beaten. There are also alpha chapters on his patreon. The royal road updates get some tweaks, and the published ones get some more, but I haven't sat down and done a thorough comparison. It's not a huge amount, but sometimes it is noticeable. Dr Subterfuge fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Jul 7, 2021 |
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Jul 7, 2021 23:47
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Book 5 is underway but it isn't close to done. When book 3 was published all but 10 or so chapters of book 4 were already on royal road. There are only 3 chapters for book 5 on there now.
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Jul 8, 2021 12:36
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Yeah more than a few. At an update per week, one month is 4 or so updates. A DCC book is something like 35 updates. So at the present pace and with what's already written we're talking at last 8 months from now for everything to go up on royal road. Then another few for that to go to a kindle book.
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Jul 8, 2021 13:32
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One of Will Wight’s other series, House of Blades, is another progression fantasy. You can definitely tell it was written before Cradle, and the progression has a breakneck pace, but it’s an enjoyable trilogy.
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Oct 13, 2021 13:35
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Cicero posted:My understanding is that as soon as Eithan releases his restrictions and becomes Ozriel again, he's now subject to the Eldari Pact, which means he can't just randomly interfere whenever he wants to save people. He's able to fight the Mad King because the Mad King himself is an intrusion from an ascended being, but he can't interject himself into 'normal' iteration/world things. Yeah even if Eithan had the power to save someone as Ozriel it seems like the Eldari Pact would have prevented him from doing so unless it was an incursion. The biggest question I have is whether or not he would have broken the marble if someone on Cradle was about to kill him.
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Nov 5, 2021 21:52
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Speaking of progression novels, I just finished the third He Who Fights Monsters and boy howdy was I not a fan of that epilogue. Like how the first two ended, it feels very much like a web serial that has been lopped off a bit after the end of the most recent climax. Only this time while our protagonist is in limbo whole new (boring) elements that at best feel like they belong in the beginning of the next book are shuffled into something that kind of sort of feels like an epilogue (but also sometimes like the beginning of the next book) and then it just trails off. And looking at the blurb for book 4: Is that the Farrah I think it is? The one that we spent a lot of time mourning, jk actually alive due to the act of astral beings for some reason? Is book 4 actually any good?
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Nov 9, 2021 03:41
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I should really pay more attention when you all are talking about litrpgs I haven't read. Just got to the end of book 4 of the Dungeon Lord series only to realize that was the one where the author had been MIA for a while. Though apparently book 5 is finally in the hands of the editor now.
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Nov 20, 2021 16:41
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I like Dungeon Lord a lot but be warned the series is incomplete and the author has been working on the next book for years. Updates when they come are from the editor, who is only slightly less in the dark than everyone else.
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Feb 21, 2022 05:44
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PerniciousKnid posted:10 is where most of the best crawlers tap out, 13 is the record, 15-18 is the big party I think. 18 is the hedonistic party floor for the rich and connected. It's unclear what role if any tourists have on floor 15, but that should be the only other one in that range that might have external people. 10 is such a common place for people to bow out that the people who take the deal are called "tenners," though the vast majority of crawlers are dead before that floor. "A lot" of crawls end on floor 9, the first floor that's possible, and it normally seems to have an absolutely abysmal survival rate even if it doesn't lead to an "extinction." Victorkm posted:For some reason I think their TV host friend made it to 13? Could be mistaken though. Really most of the plot hooks right now are dead set on 9 so I'd assume that level will have to happen unless Carl somehow blows it up and kills everyone at once. Odette took her deal in front of the stairs to 13. It's unclear if she beat the extremely powerful guardian or not beforehand or not, but she didn't go down. Most of the hooks right now are built around 9, but 12 is slowly getting built up in the background, and a surprising amount of stuff has been said about 15.
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Apr 8, 2022 19:07
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Mage Errant 6: Definitely felt incomplete to me. At the very least whatever Kanderon is doing should have resolved instead of cutting off right before the thing happened. Honestly I was kind of hoping that something interesting was going to happen with the Index. I won't be sad if sphynx mom can come back and be happy with Hugh though. The kids' journey felt too easy and I don't think the emotional payoffs were enough to support it, not without some sort of confrontation or conflict to draw out the themes better. (I did like the letter, though). Alustin's slow corruption at the hands of the Tongue Eater was probably my favorite part of it. It feels like an appropriate consequence of his betrayal. The kids lack a cohesive analogue for their own feelings about the betrayal. The new Warlock bond is probably the closest but it never really gets tested.
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Apr 29, 2022 16:57
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BananaNutkins posted:drat, I thought THIS was the self-pub thread. Thanks for the cover advice. I'll scroll through and find the self-pub thread, wherever the hell it is. It's linked in the name on the quoted post Here
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May 11, 2022 06:08
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Speaking of Defiance of the Fall, it took me a surprising amount of time to realize the insane frequency with which the author uses the phrase "with [some] <emotion>" to color an action and oh god I can't unsee it.
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Jun 21, 2022 15:56
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Cicero posted:He's supposed to be this bigass bruiser but everyone just gives him anime protagonist babyface instead. To be fair by Reaper his face doesn't scream thug anymore. Now he looks.. stern I guess? He want from looking like a "sect leader’s evil son" to looking like a sect leader.
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Jul 1, 2022 02:47
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Oh yeah the comic itself is pretty generic looking webtoon nonsense. I guess "to be fair" wasn't the right way to put it. Lindon McBabyface should be looking like a stern leader. He moved past looking like a brute once he became an underlord.
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Jul 1, 2022 04:53
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Cicero posted:Dreadgod was unsurprisingly great. Emeriss made some kind of deal with the 8ME after everyone else left from that meeting she called. I imagine the fact that they are not technically monarchs does give them a since of security. Overall I was a big fan of Dreadgod. While there was definitely setup it didn't even really feel like a setup book to me since we got quite a few payoffs. Dross coming back was especially great.
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Jul 6, 2022 02:29
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30.5 Days posted:well they're clearly setting up the gang to be the new abidan so I'm curious what all the slots will be. Ziel is obviously the Titan, and Lindon now seems to be the ghost. Yerin being the wolf seems like a fit, and maybe charity as the Phoenix. Not sure whether eithan will stay the reaper or be the spider. Having orthos, Lil blue, and dross be judges just seems way too comical, but they spent so much time in this book going "wow there sure are seven of us, huh?" that it does seem to be a possibility. The gang might have some parallels to the judges, but Eithan's plan for them is to be outside the confines of the pact, able to actually effect change instead of... doing whatever Mikel is doing.
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Jul 6, 2022 13:21
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I'm assuming he's going to give the monarchs the ultimatum to ascend or die after killing all the dreadgods and concentrating all their power into himself and making weapons out of their corpses. They would have to leave behind some system that forces monarchs into a position where they can't stick around and restart the problem though.
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Jul 7, 2022 03:26
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Important to note that the Abidan Presence is very much not for free. You either need to swear their oaths and live under their fairly onerous rules (especially from the perspective of a Monarch choosing to live on Cradle) or steal one and be marked as an enemy of the strongest force in the multiverse.
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Jul 7, 2022 16:48
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Also, Northstrider's main thing is he doesn't like the Abidan at all and wants to be free from them, so his plan for ascension is to gather enough resources on Cradle so when he does leave he's in a position where he is still able to be independent. The other factor behind Malice and Northstider falling in with Shen is seriously trying to kill the Dreadgods genuinely poses an existential threat to the Monarchs. That's how the last crop of Monarchs died, after all. Lindon's association with the avatar of Destruction was already enough to get Northstider and Malice leery of him because that created an uncertainty potentially challenging their independence as Monarchs, so its not that much of a surprise that they saw Shen as the lesser of two evils.
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Jul 7, 2022 17:15
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My impression in Iron Prince was that the stats on suits were at least partially dependent on the people that they were attached to at assignment, and that something like what the MC got wasn’t trivial to hand out to everyone. Granted that’s more because of the sort of questions that get raised if that’s not true than something actually supported by the text. The best it does is correctly point out that the kind of power that the MC’s suit promises in the future would indeed be loving terrifying if placed in the wrong hands. The fights I found myself starting to skim were the ones that were purely being spectated. The attempt at spectacle wasn’t nearly enough to make of for the lack of stakes and emotional core, so it became a long winded way to try to demonstrate what more advanced suits were capable of that didn’t actually seem particularly necessary. I also found the way surprise is conveyed in the story to be pretty grating. It wasn’t just the reactions to the MC’s suit that consistently veered toward shocked disbelief, it was drat near every surprised reaction in the story.
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Aug 23, 2022 18:03
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nrook posted:I haven’t read the series, since it doesn’t seem like my thing, but I haven’t seen many people who get turned off of it later. For people who stopped reading it, it seems to be mostly folks who always hated the main character, hoped they would grow into someone more appealing, and stopped reading when it became clear they wouldn’t. I'm good with Jason's character as long as there's someone around to tell him he's full of poo poo. There's a point where that really stops happening where I almost put it down.
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Aug 24, 2022 05:01
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Nah part of why he gets in trouble is he is tall, broad shouldered, and has resting thug face. His parents are described as statuesque. Even without blackflame he looks like a sect leader's evil son whose gaze comes off more like a glare. Blackflame eyes make it even worse.
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Dec 19, 2023 00:38
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Shirtaloon writes He Who Fights With Monsters. He also has like the second most popular author Patreon. That one isn't really about changing the system, more of an exploration of how having a lot of power can change a person. The MC can be pretty obnoxious.
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Feb 22, 2024 17:45
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