Hmmm. Based on your reply on the slime, I want to run my idea by you before I fully commit to it.
My idea was there are a group of people like druids who had found something like the world tree in Norse mythology. It grew to embody multiple dimensions, worlds, whatever you want to call it. After having lived for several eternities there comes a time where it wishes to procreate, much like other plants would. But given the immense power, the tree blesses one of the druids the seed within their person, guiding them to seek new soil where it can sprout and grow its roots and canopy into new worlds beyond the reach of the current world tree. A person with all the knowledge and power of the world he came from, but the experience of a man whose entire existence is not even worth noting in the life times the world tree existed.
CS template is done, bit I'm working on the example character before it goes up.
@Villamvihar I think you understood the assignment, but the necessary "some asshole" to do the yanking presents issues, as no such person could exist.
@Randomness Not a fan of this idea for two distinct reasons: introduces the idea of other dimensions in a way unrelated to the character's ascension, and the character didn't earn this incredible power, just had it thrust upon them, unrelated to their own agency.
@Dead Cruiser Fair enough. The key point is that he is not pleased at being away from the people he shaped with his own hands, especially as he worked very hard to reach where he is now and was looking forward to some peace.
@Villamvihar I think it would be fine if your character accidentally apotheosized themself through some celestial confluence or arcane mishap, and is unhappy about the turn of events. The only problem is having another agent responsible for it.
Very much the whole "replace the flesh, for steel, replace the heart for gears." so going full Borg-like assimilation except more painful for both the mind and body.
Name - Hashinau-I, also known as, The Mistress of Blades, Sword Sage, Thousand Army Killer, Mountain-Cutter, Swordsman's Doom.
Gender - Female.
Age - 120
Height - 4 foot and 9 inches.
Class - Sword Art Wielder.
Soul Type - Hot Black Flame.
H A S H I N A U - I A N D T H E M O U N T A I N
There is an old tale told in Koshi'ni Highlands, peculiar to the local people there, who have inhabited those lands for countless aeons, of how the Great Mountain, Kuraka-Ko, came to be known as the Split Peak. Today, the Great Mountain is cut down the middle by the Gorge of Tenshai, through which the famous river of the same name now flows. But according to the Koshi'nin this was not always the case.
Long ago, before the arrival of our Great and Bountiful Empire (long may it prosper), when a hundred squabbling pretty kings ruled and warred in these lands, the mountain of Kuraka-Ko was whole. There was no gorge cut through this highest of peaks, and the river Tenshai instead snaked its way through the wide valleys around its base.
In those long ago chaotic days, a stranger came to the lands of the Koshi'nin. A warrior woman from the lowlands below, a mercenary who had fought under the banner of every king and who had bathed so long in the blood of a hundred armies that it had stained her hair the brightest red. Her lips were stained blue from the smoking of Oolachi leaves, and she carried a fine nikishi pipe of bronze and rosewood.
This stranger was Hashinau-I, the Mistress of Blades, the greatest wielder of the Sword Arts to have ever lived, who you no doubt know from countless other stories.
Hashinau-I had grown tired of fighting the wars of men, for men were too easy to slay and she desired a stronger opponent. The villagers, fearful of invoking the terrible wrath of the Sword Sage, delicately told her that there were no worthy opponents to be found amongst them. Hashinau-I only smiled, and told them she had not come to fight any of them.
She had come to slay a mountain.
At first the villagers thought that Hashinau-I was joking, but as her face darkened at their laughter, they quickly realised that she was perfectly serious. Privately they decided that the great swords woman must have lost her mind. But they could ill afford to make an enemy of Hashinau-I, who had once slew the Titan or Yrre with nothing more than sharpened finger nail, so they humoured her, and gave the great warrior their hospitality.
Hashinau-I took up residence on the great peak of Kuraka-Ko, living as a hermit in a little cave below the summit. The people of Koshi'ni would make offerings to her, but seldom did the Sword Sage come down from her mountain. When emissaries from the petty kings below sought her out so that she would take up her blade once more in their service, she sent them away in disappointment, occasionally missing a few of their limbs if she thought they had been particularly disrespectful.
For the first three years, she wandered the surface of the mountain. Getting to know every feature of its sloping sides, its forests and streams, every rock and every crag, how the wind blew against it in the winter, how the sun warmed its flanks in spring. When she knew every blade of grass and every pebble on the mountain, Hashinau-I went back into her cave and started to dig.
She used the sword that she had cut down countless men with to dig a tunnel deep into the back of the cave. Scarce did she emerge from the tunnel, and few of the villagers were brave enough to enter to see it from themselves. Those that did said that she had dug her way deep into the heart of the mountain. Scraping away at the dirt and rocks for years and years until her sword was ground down to just the stump of a blade, its edge incomparably fine.
Finally, when Hashinau-I had reached the very centre of the mountain, she carved a small chamber there and sat and meditated. For thirty days and thirty nights she sat in complete darkness, unblinking, heart beat and breathing slowed to the point of near death.
On the thirty first day she emerged from her cave, walked down from the mountain, turned her broken blade to it, and cut.
And the mountain split in two.
Before she left one of the villagers asked Hashinau-I how she had done it. How could one woman cut a mountain in half with the stump of a broken blade? Hashinau-I had only smiled enigmatically as she had puffed blue smoke from her nikiseri pipe and said:
"To cut a thing, one must understand it. It took me three years to understand the surface of the mountain, and many more to understand what lay beneath it. But the most difficult part is learning to think like a mountain."
Hashinau-I never visited Koshi'ni again, but she would go on to have many other adventures, and cut many more things. To this day, however, there is still a shrine dedicated in Hashinau-I's honour that can be found at the mouth of the Tenshai Gorge, where the entrance of to her cave could once be found.
@Dark Cloud Consider this: widen your perspective. It is not the body that needs to be made perfect as clockwork, but the world. Every part of the world is a gear, striving toward perfection, but cannot see the greater whole. The Architect sees. He sees that even his entire universe is a gear in a greater machine, and he cannot perfect the design without knowing all of the components.
@Kassarock So more Musashi than Meti. Interested to see how she shakes out, but she should fit in fine.
@Dead Cruiser I wrote out kind of the rough draft of its backstory, but thats basically the barebones idea of the Arc for it that I had, if this doesnt fit to what you were looking for, i can totally come up with a new idea entirely
The Slime was an accidental creation after the Gods of It's Universe attempted to create a space in which would be a trash can of sorts for their failed or unwanted experiments. The Slime's arc is essentially that it was treated as a tool by the Gods, until the Youngest God, one that was upset with their current position amongst the gods, saw the slime as a potential means of boosting their ranking amongst their kind. Befriending the slime in secret, the Young God eventually tricked the It into absorbing the pocket dimension that kept it contained, increasing its power ubsurdly and freeing it. The Young God then used the slimes newfound desire to absorb and learn new things against it, tricking it into decimating entire planets and populations, and leaving a barren wasteland anywhere the Young God dropped it.
Eventually, after absorbing 25% of the universe, the Gods sent one of themselves to investigate the Slime, only for the Slime to completely absorb the pure energy of a God. This both vastly shifted the Slime and Young Gods motive, the prior becoming intoxicated with its desire and the latter realizing their mistake in creating a god killing being who was becoming uncontrollable. The gods attempted to unify the universe in a war against the slime, but after absorbing the power of a god, it became an unstoppable force. With the universe unintendedly sending fleets and powerful beings to confront the Slime on a silver platter so to speak, the Slime absorbed nearly 75% of the universe before the Gods intervened directly.
Confronting the Slime in hundreds, the Gods stepped right into the Slime's trap, as it had created thousands of itself, and forced the 8 oldest gods to hide themselves away into a pocket dimension. There they decided the only way to fix their problem was to reset the universe and start a new again. However after absorbing the Youngest God, with the combined power of the all gods but 8, it was able to break into the pocket dimension and begin absorbing the Old Gods. All until three remained, combining themselves and their power into one final explosion that would have erases their universe from existance as the Slime began to absorb them. They did succeed in destroying their universe, however absorbing the remaining Gods power caused the Slime to ascended to that of a being higher then the gods of It's universe. It's body using this newfound power, seperated It from the collapsing universe into the Void, the space between universes, where it began the slow process of evolving into an Ascended Slime.
More fleshed out backstory of a goblin. Kinda tapers off in detail at the end, but I think the origin story bit is more important than the shonen style escalation/shark jumping that happens after the instigating villein is overcome.
Anyway, enjoy a goblin overturning a generic fantasy universe:
Rita aka: runt, carrot top, humilover, knightstabba, horserida, the greenest knight, the scourge of the forest, the rusta of chains, the rebel of green, the god mounta, the dark lord, the goblin queen, the goblin formerly known as queen, the champion of the small folk, the devil slayer, she who would break the heavens, the first among mortals.
Rita began her life in a goblin clan who were, like many if not most of their kind, enthralled to the service of a dark lord. Though goblins are weak by nature, they breed quickly and the art of their enslavement is older than history, making them perfect cannon fodder for any being higher up the food chain than them (which is basically everyone). Most often they are employed alongside other slave races by dark lords, servants of devils whose names are expunged from existence upon entering a dark pact with their vile masters.
Rita was the runt of her litter, smaller than even the average goblin, but that didn't really matter much other than getting ribbed for it on occasion. During her early years Rita’s life was unremarkable for a goblin. As soon as she could walk she was put to work, toiling away in the small mine she was born in, a slave to the schemes of her dark master.
All that changed one day when she was barely a teen. She was randomly hauled away from work, got a spear shoved in her hands and told to match out along with a patrol of other dark minions, mostly orks whom she and her kin were explicitly acting as cannon fodder for. This wasn't exactly unusual, but what was unusual was that the patrol actually ran into something. She’d fought before of course, but rather than monsters or unfortunate hunters the patrol hit an adventuring party.
For most of the minions, things ended as you might expect, the adventurers slaughtering their way through the patrol with ease. For Rita however, who was hurt but not killed in the opening moments, things ended strangely. Perhaps it was because so small, maybe it was because she made made an effort to make her hair nice today in order to impress a now corpse, maybe it was how she just coward among the dead once the fighting was over, maybe it was pure whim, but for whatever reason, the knight (a man called sir Reginald) among the adventurers took pity on her and decided to, for all intents and purposes, adopt her.
Thus began Rita’s crash course in the human world, a bewildering barrage of sights, sounds and experiences during which she acted as something between pet, daughter, squire and mascot for the party who she traveled with for many a moon as they slowly got stronger and better equipped. To protect her own skin, she played the role they wanted her to play perfectly, but inside she hated them. They had, after all, killed her friends and family without mercy. So she plotted revenge in secret but as her worldliness grew, and her very presence among the party resulted in them and others questioning the validity of their ruthless actions against her kind in their war against the dark lord, the need to scheme fell from burning necessity to reluctant burdening commitment.
Maybe if time had been on her side she would have eventually dropped her plans entirely, but in the end her hand was forced. The party, partially out of overconfidence and partially out of a growing sense of guilt about killing more and more of Rita’s kin, went to directly challenge the dark lord. They were not the first to do so and, tragically, they would not be the last.
As the battle began to go poorly Rita saw the writing on the wall and so she executed upon her schemes and stabbed her team in the back. Quite literally in the knight’s case, sliding one of his own spare swords through a weakness in his armor she knew about from helping him put it on before battles. The revenge did not feel good, but it did save her skin, the goblin being able to honestly say to her old master that she had simply been buying her time while traveling with the heroes, waiting to strike at the perfect moment such as the one presented to her now.
For her cunning she was rewarded with a lowly position of command, barely one step up from common underling. She also, however, got to keep the possessions of the knight, including his horse, Sandy. Cobbling together a suit of armor for herself out of the fallen knight’s own, she became the first goblin knight, and swore a silent oath she would take down the dark lord herself, and end his cycle of death that had taken her first and second family from her. To do that, she would have to become stronger.
She rose her way up the ranks of the dark lord’s forces through force of arms, first by slaying her superiors in one on one combat to get a true command (an entirely permissible and even encouraged act), and then by forming an order of green knights, wolf riders armored with hydra scale leather who hunted both the dark lord's enemies and various neutral monsters that stood in the way of him expanding his realm. In doing so, and in focusing her efforts on empowering and actually caring about the survival of her goblin kin, she became something of a dark hero, one who protected the weak minions both from the forces of light and from the cruelty of their dark masters.
As she build up her influence among her people, she also built up something of a repertoire with the forces opposing her lord, changing the name of the game and forcibly ‘civilizing’ their conflict, making herself into someone who was seen as a reasonable, even honorable opponent who could be expected to show mercy and, importantly, expected that to be shown in turn. She built a significant worthy foe relationship with the knights of her deceased adoptive father, one that would eventually prove vital. Casualty rates massively dropped among those who fought in her name even as they remained an effective fighting force, and soon enough she had risen to the top of the dark lord’s ranks. Despite being near indispensable at this point, the lord did not trust her. As he was right to do.
Things came to a head when three of the other right hand minions of the lord attempted to dispose of her, an act that cost them their lives at her hands. The resulting power she would gain was too much, and so the dark lord himself aimed to strike her down. He only succeeded in wounding her, and preemptively sparking the revolution she had been fostering beneath his nose. As civil war erupted among the dark lord’s forces, and it raged the wounded Rita made contact with the forces of light, and convinced them to actively side with her force rather than simply let the war burn to its end and then swoop in to take down the battered victor.
Gazing down upon all this, wolf god, a lesser deity who was worshiped by many of the races who now saw Rita as their savior and spiritual leader (most notably goblins who referred to him as the goblin prince) took notice of their adoration of her and grew jealous of it. As the war raged across the continent, he lured the goblin, exhausted from her wounds and the stress of brokering her alliance, into his domain. There, in a twisting labyrinthine forest, he challenged her to a series of trials that, should she fail them, she would submit to him and become his bride, tying her influence to his. The game was rigged from the start, of course, and so it ended in a game of words where Rita put on the airs of a flustered maiden who refused to talk of consummating a marriage in straight terms out of embarrassment. Thus, after a dance of words about how she would ‘mount him’ and ‘take his sword’ the Goblin exited the wolf god’s domain riding atop Sandy the 17th and carrying the blade known simply as Fang.
Upon her return to the land of mortals, she learned that the humans had sent a daring force driving into the heart of the war to try and strike down the dark lord, but their fate, it seemed, looked as if it would be going the same way as the adventurers who had adopted Rita. Hearing of this the goblin, still not yet fully recovered, rode to their aid upon her new divine steed. She stormed the dark lord’s fortress with her own knights, linking up with and fighting alongside heroes who were led by a knight who proved to be her adoptive father’s sister. Working together they brought down the dark lord, with Rita striking the final blow that ended his reign once and for all.
The end of the right of the dark lord lasted for all of a minuet, as soon as the news got out Rita was immediately hailed as the new dark lord by both sides of the war. As this supposed betrayal threatened to tear apart the alliance of man and goblin, the devils of the many hells that had empowered the old lord to attempt to slip their malignant tendrils into her in his place. In the end, the knight who Rita had only just discovered was her aunt who sacrificed her life to prevent Rita’s corruption, allowing her to beat it back and seal this one piece of access the devils had to the mortal world once and for all.
Rather than a dark lord then, Rita was instead hailed as the first goblin queen, though she swiftly also became the last, as it turns out having the most powerful warrior in the nation be your leader does not result in good stateswomanship. She, fortunately, recognized this before it was too late, and, after transforming her new kingdom into a democracy, resigned her position as queen.
For a time she stayed and helped ensure the peace between the new nation and the human ones it now lived among, but before too long she grew tired of peace, unable to sit still knowing that there were other dark lords out there and other peoples enslaved to their will. Soon enough the goblin set out on a journey of liberation, traveling across the continent and then across the world, freeing her people, and all who were like them, from the bondage of tyrants of all shapes and forms.
As she fought more and more for the people’s freedom, their faith in her grew and grew and, thanks to her godly steed she learned how to harness this power as a god did (a moment that carved their begrudgingly built friendship in stone, for the god did not attempt to steal this power all for himself as Rita feared he might do) and in doing so she became a near unstoppable force on the mortal realm, which only fueled the people’s adoration of her even further.
Armed with the will of the people the goblin looked beyond the dark lords themselves, and instead took aim at the source of their powers, the many hells from which all evil seeped. At the head of a mighty crusade made from all races, and with the backing of their gods, she plunged into those fiery pits and against all expectation succeeded in rooting out the darkness within. The gods, both fearing her powers and empowered themselves by the deaths of their dark kin, attempted to force the liberator of all to kneel to their will. A mistake they soon came to regret.
Rather than kill them however, for they were the embodiment of good things, just lost in their power, she taught them a lesson in humility as she had the wolf god, forcing them to respect a mortal as an equal, and in doing so getting them to respect all mortals in a way they had never done before.
Her story might have ended there, or perhaps in some calamity caused by her being unable to simply sit down and retire after a life of war, if the overwhelming faith and belief in her from all the peoples of the world, combined with the submission of all the gods to her will, had not breached some threshold of power, and ascended her (and her trusty steed) to the wheel.
There, new tyrants stand tall, waiting to fall to the hand of the meekest of creatures.
So the CS template and example are both up. Seht mostly exists as an example of what I'm looking for in terms of depth/length of CS. This is an easy concept to get too bogged down in details within.
That said...
@Moonlit Ghost Gods aren't beings that our characters will have had direct dealings with before the events of the RP. And while the slime may have a story, it still doesn't really have an arc. Where is its pathos, its will, its drive? That's more important than how many universes it's destroyed.
@DracoLunaris I'm gonna be straight with you, I'm not reading all that. The CS is up, consult the sample for the length of story that I'll be reviewing your character based on. Having all of those details is fine, I just want to work with base-level concepts and themes at this stage.
The bearer wouldn't exactly have the power thrust upon them. This particular person would have spent his life up until that point training and willing to accept the responsibility of the seed. Also, I can nix the dimensions thing. It really only existed to better tie into Norse mythology. The world tree could simply just be a tree with roots that caress and manage the entirety of the one world it's on.
Highly unlikely that would change your mind, and that's fine. I just wanted to explain that detail.
@Randomness The different dimensions thing was the part that would not have worked at all. The rest we can discuss. My main concern is for this character, compared to any other, it would not be "their" power, they would explicitly owe their place to a higher authority, which would be unable to access them once they leave their home world.
The character knows that once it leaves the world he was born, he expects to be unable to commune with it. Any power he has will be granted by the seed. It's like a symbiotic relationship. The seed grants the character power, and the character will seek out the best place for the seed to grow. The world tree's motivation is it has lived for so long, it is seeking to procreate onto another world. Whatever world that happens to be is beyond the tree's control which is why it was granted to a seed bearer to seek the best place of that world.
