COLUMN: Lies and Statistics

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The Colours and Mayhem System for Whisperings (Part 2)
or, Your Aspect Has A Personality Too!
by rubyRubicon [5], timestamp 8-2039534

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(Continued from earlier.)

Hunter (Seer) - This type of Whispering is about detection and pursuit. As is implied by the Seer being the Side B version of the Hunter, this Mayhem can help you notice small details - although, unlike the Scribe, you’re going to have to note them down yourself. Scouts and Guides will find the Hunter’s way of life very familiar.

Corsair (Thief) - If this Mayhem could talk, it would tell you: “Man, screw those other people; we’re going to go have some fun!” To say the least, because going off on your own is dangerous, this type of Whispering is dangerous to have. It’s not exactly going to be smooth sailing, if you catch my drift. Also, FYI: Maturity Quests are not optional.

Archer (Heir) - This Mayhem “pulls strings” from afar. Instead of actually leading you to the right place, it will speak indirectly through the actions of your Consorts, inanimate objects, and Land Familiars. Make sure to look more closely - it’s possible that the Archer is why the Fireflies on the land are all blinking in sync, or the direction in which all the leaves on the trees are pointing.

Tyrant (Bard) - This type of Whispering means “yes” when it says “no”, and vice versa. If it asks you to do something, you are immediately to do the exact opposite. If it tells you that something needs to be done immediately, you can go ahead and take your sweet time. This one is most often assigned to aspects like Rain or Hope, who need to reject what everyone else says, including their own aspect.

Mariner (Prince) - This Whispering is focused on survival. Survival, not growth. If you can’t face the Giclops, you’ll get the sense that it’s not worth the try, and so on and so forth. This is extremely useful for staying alive, because after all Sburb is the game where everyone is going to die. Don’t rely solely on it, because Voids happen all the time, and expecting your Whispering to do your bidding is… not going to end well.

Ruler (Witch) - This type of Whispering will order you around, and you are expected to follow its commands. In this and other respects it is effectively the opposite of the Servant, and thus is the hardest Whispering to have. Graces and Wastes get this one a lot, and their following its bidding helps them keep in control of their powers, oddly enough.

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Anyway. On to the Colours. These are straightforward, oddly enough, and are essentially always correct. When they’re not correct, you get “notifications”, so to speak, that aren’t tuned to your aspect.

Also, none of the colour/aspect pairs make sense. I’m suspecting they were randomly generated or something.

Blood/Breath: Bronze

Mind/Fate: Teal

Life/Doom: Olive

Void/Mist: Iron (bugged as hell, just like everything else in Void, what else is new)

Heart/Rage: Indigo

Rhyme/Flow: Gold

Might/Sand: Cobalt

Dream/Rain: Fuchsia

Light/Law: Quartz

Time/Space: Silver

Stars/Hope: Jet (I had to look this one up. It’s considered a gemstone.)

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Update 8-2040: It seems that there are a few other aspects.

Self/Ploy: Madder

Sight/Sound: Jade

Flesh/Coins: Saffron

Stage/???: Turquoise

Joy/???: Amethyst

The way these are grouped suggests that there may be two other Aspects. However, like Faun they might have been dummied out. This may prove to be an interesting route for investigation.

Angels and Religion: The Scion Cycle and Corruption
by lucidChthonia [3], timestamp 8-2038293

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I come from a world with a lot of religion. A lot of my co-players ended up Corrupted sooner or later. Most of them were Corrupted by the Angels. I won’t claim myself immune, but I will point this out: religions on many pre-Sburb worlds may be there to make Corruption by Angels easier.

Let me explain.

The most common religion-structure on most worlds is the Legend of One with a Dream of a Better Life. In and of itself this structure is innocuous, or at least innocuous enough. The Scion, as I’ll call this first figure, gathers Disciples who see his vision of a better world, and they write a book or disseminate teachings. This in itself is guaranteed never to completely succeed, as any Sburb world must at least have a concept of warfare and violence so as to make sure that its players can engage in combat at all.

The problem comes in when the Authority or Government (either way) decides to go execute the Scion. This does not suppress the Scion’s teachings; it merely drives the Disciples undercover, not unlike putting oil on rough water merely makes the surface look calmer without actually calming the waves below.

After a few hundred years, the Authority will crumble to the usual revolutionary struggle. This is when you stop calling the Disciples’ descendants a cult and start calling them a religion. In the resulting power vacuum, the Disciples’ descendants, their newly completed holy book, and whatever’s in that book can come to prominence.

The Angels tend to like getting into that book. Often an Angel is in a Disciple or two’s past, and the Angels enjoy self-inserting themselves in as the Scion’s assistants in the afterlife for some reason. They are always called Angels, of course, and they cannot be gazed on by mortal eyes. (Merely a precaution to prevent them from ever being described properly in the holy book.)

Of course, most followers of the religion in question never read the holy book, never really take it seriously, respect the ability of others to believe what they wish, and thus are essentially harmless. In fact, I think these people are cool. They’re less likely to engage in behavior that could get them in trouble with any omniscient powers that be, after all, so they don’t take advantage of anything in private.

However, there is a class of religious people that are truly dangerous in Sburb. They are the people who take their holy book completely seriously. Including the verses about stoning unbelievers and sacrificing themselves for their religion. These are the ones who have actually read their holy book, take everything literally, and thus end up reading into the book things that the original Scion and Disciples never intended to put there.

This is the person that you definitely need to keep an eye on. They will probably recognize the Angels and actually think it’s a good idea to follow them. They are more prone to [Questant’s Lament] as well. Putting them in an Unbreakable Union with a nonreligious person (not the mildly religious people outlined above! the highly religious person is likely to find them a prime candidate for proselytizing) is extremely advisable.

If you have someone like this in your session, good luck. Feel free to use the comments to share your stories.

The author would like to apologize to scribblingMorel for not knowing about the concept of cultural relativity.

COLUMN: Lies and Statistics

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The Colours and Mayhem System for Whisperings
or, Your Aspect Has A Personality Too!
by rubyRubicon [5], timestamp 8-2038386

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As usual on the Lies and Statistics team, we’ve been asking the Seers to look at literally everything in the game in order. So today’s topic is Whisperings. (This is going to be full of spoilers for the first timers, so don’t read on if you haven’t organized yourself a Homefree yet, an’ all that.)

Different people get different Whisperings. The Whisperings, if you didn’t get the memo, are a sort of “spirit of the aspect” - for example, if you have the Breath aspect, you’ll get the Breeze, and the aspect of Rhyme gets the Groove, etc. The Whisperings will guide you on your quest, or… not. It depends on exactly what personality you get.

The game seems to organize the Whisperings in terms of two categories, one of which is called Colours, and the other of which is called Mayhems. The Colours are generally named after metals, gemstones, or dyes (except for Olive and Teal, who happen to be Odd One Out Buddies). The Mayhems are named after professions. For some reason, Side B Mayhems are also valid Titles.

Colours are associated with the Aspects. I’ll write them up later; some examples are Rust (which is associated with the Time and Space players), Jade (associated with Life and Doom players), Indigo (associated with Heart and Rage players), and Iron (associated with Void and Mist players). This is actually fairly straightforward and surprisingly not buggy. Unlike the ones below.

Mayhems, in contrast, are occasionally associated with certain Titles, sometimes with certain Aspects, and otherwise random. The vast majority of you will get Side A Mayhems, which are straightforward and will be detailed below. In about 5% of cases, you’ll get a Side B Mayhem, which is almost the same as the corresponding Side A Mayhem (and thus they will be talked about in the same entry). The name of the Side A Mayhem, unless otherwise noted, is used here to refer to both the Side A and associated Side B Mayhem.

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Side A Mayhem (Side B Mayhem) - notes

Servant (Maid) - This type of Whispering serves you, without preference or care. The Ward and Heir roll this Mayhem almost uniformly, which explains why the Whisperings love them so much. If you’re not an Inheritor and you roll the Servant, consider yourself extremely lucky, because you will get all of the favors (all of them, oh Skaia why did I make that joke). If you really hate Whisperings, no luck - the Servant is really difficult to alienate.

Rebel (Page) - This type of Whispering collates information in detail and presents you the results. This is probably the most useful Mayhem to roll - it’ll help you prioritize, and is really useful for hearing about what the Denizen did this morning or whether someone’s on your planet. The problem is that this Mayhem is very easy to alienate if you don’t respect it. (I recommend meditation at the nearest Skaian Summoning every day.)

Pilot (Mage) - This type of Whispering will drive you. Think demanding coach, or better yet think the master guy from Karate Kid. This is one of the most demanding Mayhems to roll, because you’ll be subtly nudged to QUESTS FOREVER, and you’ll have no idea whether the Quest in question is important or not. Thankfully, the Pilot usually shuts up when you climb onto a Land Bed, or else you’d never be able to sleep. Usually.

Infidel (Knight) - This Mayhem is almost uniformly assigned to Void players. It can also be found associated to Lands with the descriptors Angels or Glog’oht (in this case a good thing! Whisperings can’t be corrupted but they can carry corruption). It’s why Void’s whisperings do almost nothing. The Infidel and Knight are so thoroughly bugged that I have no idea why they’re even listed as valid possible Whisperings. NOTE: If you are a Void player and you don’t get Infidel, something is very wrong with your session. 

Scribe (Rogue) - This type of Whispering is especially concerned with details. If you don’t remember something, your Whispering probably does. (But you really can’t count on it to reproduce your plot chart on demand, otherwise you could be left in the cold at a crucial moment.) The Scribe is one of the few Whisperings that sticks around a permadead player’s body rather than just dissipating - if you ask nicely with the pendant on, you might just get information about how they died.

Mother (Sylph) - This type of Whispering nutures. It’s like having a Life player constantly sitting on your shoulder like the shoulder-angel/shoulder-demon cliche. The Mother loves directing you to consort villages and Crystalanthologies. However, if you get a scripted game disease or come near someone who has one, it will constantly hassle you to find a cure or a Life player. (This is useful for detecting the Carapace Plague, and extremely annoying when doing the Plague Doctor quest.)

COLUMN: Lies and Statistics

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The Mechanics of [Eye of the Storm]
or, Atomik Meltdown: Yet Another Hidden Stat
written by lucidChthonia [3], timestamp 8-2038113

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[Eye of the Storm]. Weird move, right? It basically wipes out any emotional perturbation you might accumulate while a Breath player. To figure out how it works, I had our growing Seer-network look into the underpinnings of the move. The results are… interesting.

It turns out that pretty much everything in Sburb that is considered a “mental status effect” uses a secret stat, [Atomik Meltdown], which, when defined, causes a certain amount of mental instability. When casting a knowledge effect such as [Red Pill] or [Endless Climb] that may have mental effects, the spell will increment your [Atomik Meltdown] stat.

[Eye of the Storm] thus works by temporarily copying your [Atomik Meltdown] stat to the [custom_stat] field, which means that your Prankster’s Gambit or Horseshit-o-meter is probably not a good idea to tamper with for the duration. When [Eye of the Storm] is cancelled, the stat gets copied back to [Atomik Meltdown].

The story gets weirder. The effects of psy-buffs actually buffer this number, subtracting a set amount from the absolute value to keep one’s Atomik Meltdown total down. Being attacked by anything by surprise, getting annoyed with your denizen, or someone breaking up with you increments your [Atomik Meltdown] stat. And of course, the stat is preserved across sessions, and there’s no real way to clear it forever.

And here’s the kicker. [Atomik Meltdown] is stored as an unsigned integer. All berserk triggers actually work by decrementing it until it wraps around below 0 and skyrockets to… oh, about 1099511627776. (For comparison, most first-session players have the number in the thousands range, veterans tend to hover around twenty or thirty thousand, and one million is apparently where the game gives up and declares “batshit insane”.) The number naturally rubberbands back to the zero value over time, but during the adjustment period, the unfortunate Player is mentally unstable.

Now, this might make you wonder if your Void player can fix your head by erasing your [Atomik Meltdown] stat. Don’t try it. The unfortunate players that this was tried on immediately went berserk, because apparently when the game detects that the stat no longer exists, it’ll set it to the highest possible value.

nonlinearEmptiness would like to use this space to apologize to pseudoProgrammer for sending the latter player into Space Prankster mode.

ETA: There’s a Breath player in the comments who reports some success in casting [Eye of the Storm], decreasing their custom_stat, and then ending [Eye of the Storm] to copy the number back to [Atomik Meltdown]. Use at your own risk.

Not much to see here yet. This’ll be a FAQ post eventually. For now, see Sburb Glitch FAQ for context.