#arc notes

[project-rebirth]

{1}

Refers to the Precure Hunter arc, the arc which takes place before this one chronologically (The Shirai Arc).

[hollyhockash]

Arc Notes: Scionic (2/8)

Today, the arc notes for the Scionic quest set!

Arc notes for Knight

I’m going to do something unprecedented and outline two separate Knight arcs here, because it turns out that there are two distinctly different Knight arcs possible, and both of them are to an extent represented with this quest set.

Knight (farmboy variant)

Taking Up the Sword

Things You Must Learn

I Knew Your [Absent Guardian] or Deep In the Jungle

Relearning The Way

The Inheritor

This order of the arc is loosely based off Eragon. (Yes. I am going to admit that I read that book many times as a kid. My parents bought the book because I read very quickly and it was the thickest book they found in the YA section of the bookstore.) To a lesser extent, there is also some influence from Steven Universe.

The first quest is you taking a good long look at your Token and thinking about the fact that you’re going to have a Legacy to fulfill. In the second, you generally take on a temporary mentor and go through some training that teaches you how to best use your Token. After that, either you learn a terrible and shattering thing about your Absent Guardian, or you’re yanked out of your quest for the Legacy (possibly forcibly) and settle down with some unrelated people for a while.

If you choose to go on to Knight 4, at the beginning of the quest, you realize that your Legacy is something that must be done, and you’re likely the only person equipped to deal with it. But you have to make yourself a person who can pursue it, because you’re coming off a quest in which you’ve either failed (I Knew Your [Absent Guardian]) or not tried (Deep In the Jungle).

The further optional Knight 5 is you managing to use your own talents in concert with the Token in order to resolve something related to your Legacy.

Knight (princeling variant)

Taking Up the Sword

Deep In the Jungle

Relearning The Way

I Knew Your [Absent Guardian]

The Inheritor

This order of the arc is loosely based off The Lion King. Very loosely.

In the first quest, as with the farmboy variant order, you examine your Token and discover or think about your Legacy. In the second quest, though, you’re distracted from your quest by a group of unrelated people and their unrelated culture - on the one hand, they teach you that you don’t need to be super-serious and thinking about your Legacy all the time; on the other hand, they also teach you that your Legacy isn’t an intrinsically important task. This results in an emotionally taxing quest 3: at the beginning of this quest, you receive a rude awakening to some part of your Legacy, and thereafter you struggle with guilt that you’ve turned away from what you should have done. (Perhaps because it is something only you can do, and your absence resulted in dramatic negative consequences.)

Quest 4, if you use it, is you setting out to try and make up for the fact that you’ve neglected your Legacy, and quest 5 is you finally succeeding at doing something about your Legacy.

Arc notes for Aspect

Things You Must Learn or Deep In the Jungle

Taking Up the Sword or Deep In the Jungle

Deep In The Jungle

I Knew Your [Absent Guardian]

Relearning the Way

This Aspect arc started from the fact that I Knew Your [Absent Guardian] begins with a shattering revelation, and Aspect 3 ends with a shattering revelation (and, as such, I Knew Your [Absent Guardian] would have to be an Aspect 4 quest). I’m not sure how well the rest of the quests line up, but I tried my best.

I would strongly suggest only using Deep In the Jungle once. Just because I’ve listed it three times doesn’t mean you should play it three times. The quest is just that versatile.

Quest 1 begins with you being stuck in regular training - or with you being stranded with a bunch of people you don’t understand. Either way, you end Quest 1 with discovering the Token, and move on to Quest 2, where you either explore the possibilities of your Token or a foreign culture helps expand your mind. On Quest 3, you have to learn the culture of a place that you don’t understand, emphasizing all the misunderstandings and wacky antics along the way.

Should you continue to Quest 4, you learn a terrible secret about your Absent Guardian and then try to pursue your Legacy in light of that knowledge; and should you continue to Quest 5, you have lost the ability to use the Token and must go through emotional turmoil to regain it.

Arc notes for Storyteller

Taking Up the Sword

Things You Must Learn

Relearning the Way

The Inheritor

I Knew Your [Absent Guardian]

In the first quest, you seize the chance to take a Token - only to discover, at the end of the quest, that the Token comes with the baggage of the Legacy. The second quest is the general sentiment of “fine, if I’m going to have to pursue the Legacy, I may as well take the time to learn how to do it properly first”. And the third quest is the Token objecting to you using it in the way that you have, and you having to figure out how to respect it and the Legacy that comes attached to it. (Because a mystic sword for fighting evil is not exactly going to be pleased if you only ever use it against stuffed dummies. OK, unless the dummies are evil.)

Should you continue, the fourth quest is you actually going and taking a good chunk out of the Legacy. The fifth quest, if you go that far, is you learning that the job is even larger than it first appeared - and that you will have to keep going if you want to get anything done.

Arc notes for Mystic

Things You Must Learn

Deep In the Jungle

I Knew Your [Absent Guardian]

Relearning the Way

The Inheritor

In this quest set, you never really have that period of fascination with the Token that the other arcs get. You spend quite a lot of time scared of it, in fact.

In the first quest of this arc, you know you’ve got a Legacy, and are doing training to take it on - training that you assume that you will be doing for years and years to come - only to find the Token on your doorstep. You spend the second quest attempting, and ultimately failing, to escape your Legacy. At the end of this quest, the consequences of ignoring the Legacy fall on you, and you then have to spend quest 3 attempting to contain the damage. Near or at the end of this quest, there’s a moment where you’re certain you’ve failed, but somehow - random chance, dumb luck, new powers spontaneously emerging from the Token, divine intervention? - your massive loss turns into either a narrow loss or a narrow victory. (If you’re going on to quest 4, it’s probably a loss, but if you’re stopping here, it’s probably a win.)

In Quest 4, you are emotionally devastated by everything that’s happened, and try to piece yourself back together. In quest 5, you go out and wield the Token and follow your Legacy, this time out of choice rather than necessity.

[hollyhockash]

Arc Notes (Curious Ventures 2/8)

So, here are this quest set’s arc notes!

Note: Despite the fact that a gamebreaking story may involve increasing one’s capabilities and stretching one’s limits, there is no Aspect arc ordering for this quest set. I couldn’t get the quests to fit well enough. If you really need one, take A Scientific Adventure from the core and rearrange it into its Aspect-arc ordering, then rip out and replace most of the quest flavor options.

Notes for Bindings arc

Tentacle At Your Heels or De Facto Expert

Three Wrongs Make A Left?

A Desperate Gamble

Binary

And Another Thing...

There are two Bindings 1 quests on this arc! Be careful with that.

Bindings is the canonical order for this quest set. It should be simple to see what’s going on: you are dogged by either Corruption or your own insecurity; you try to get a handle on your problem and, through some rather foolhardy observation and experimentation, reduce it to a scope you can actually comprehend; you implement a daring plan to fix the problem. If you go to Quest 4, you decide to see if you can generalize your fix, or if you can figure out why exactly it worked. And if you go to Quest 5, you have to go back and fix your social interactions, since you’ve spent too long neglecting them.

Notes for Storyteller arc

Binary

A Desperate Gamble

Three Wrongs Make A Left?

???

And Another Thing...

Storyteller 4 doesn’t seem to exist on this arc, but it should be easy enough to slot in something from a related-looking quest set. I decided to sketch out this arc anyway, because one type of character on this arc is clearly a Storyteller.

So, you start off looking into things in the Game with real interest. Then you realize that there’s a big problem that needs fixing, which you proceed to attempt to fix. I say “attempt” because you’ll probably patch something up... but in the third quest of this set, you’re going to have to grapple with the Game and attempt to wrap your head around what’s been going on.

I couldn’t get this particular quest set to shake out a Storyteller 4 quest by any stretch of the imagination. So for the fourth quest of this set, you may want to try Fighting Back or Something Better.

And Another Thing... is, in this case, a metaphorical descent, if you play through it.

Notes for Knight arc

Binary

De Facto Expert

Tentacle At Your Heels

And Another Thing...

A Desperate Gamble

Unlike the other arcs for this quest set, a Knight arc is clearly focused on becoming - on living up to The Role of Gamebreaker, rather than (or, possibly, in addition to) expanding your knowledge or fixing problems. You’re not doing it for others. More than anything, you’re doing it for yourself.

The first quest is about you trying out gamebreaking in the theoretical sense - not for any particular reason, just because you find it interesting. The second quest is about the fact that you’re not confident enough in your abilities - which will be this arc’s Vice - and the third quest is about trying and mostly failing to deal with the intersection between your gamebreaking and your life.

Should you go onto the fourth quest, you repair your social relationships a little; and if you want to continue after that, the fifth quest will be about, well, doing some actual gamebreaking.

Notes for Emptiness arc

De Facto Expert

A Desperate Gamble

Three Wrongs Make A Left?

Tentacle At Your Heels

Binary

As noted with the Knight ordering, the character on this quest set is likely to already have significant self-esteem problems. Unfortunately, the Emptiness arc won’t make these problems any better. To be precise, it will make them worse. But maybe that’s the story you want to tell...

In the first quest, your daily life involves chronically underestimating yourself. In the second quest, you become fascinated with a bug and are sucked into trying to fix it. The third quest is about the increasing bugginess of the Game eventually overwhelming your ability to believe that you can fix reality.

The optional fourth quest is about having the knowledge of The Bugginess of the World always lapping at your heels. The even more optional fifth quest is about deciding that even if you can’t fix things you can at least know things.

[hollyhockash]

Arc Notes: A Basket of Dogs (Dogs 0.5/5)

There are five possible stories for this arc! Let me explain them...

Notes for Shepherd arc

Just Another Day

Puppies!

Everything Short Of The Divorce Lawyer

Take Your [Charges] To Work Day

Barn-Raising

The canonical order for this quest set is, of course, Shepherd. You think about your life, and then you get the Charges dumped into your lap. You’re stuck in taking-care-of-Charges mode for a good long while. After that, you deal with the way that having the Charges has colored other people’s perceptions of you. If that’s not enough, you take your Charges with you on an adventure, and - if you go to quest 5 - your Charges help you do something awesome.

This Shepherd arc is unusually likely to start directly at Quest 2 and proceed on from there. Another option is to replace the first quest with something else.

Notes for Bindings arc

Just Another Day

Puppies!

Take Your [Charges] To Work Day

Barn-Raising

Everything Short Of The Divorce Lawyer

This arc is a sketchier than the Shepherd arc; it exists because sometimes the hellspawn are, in fact, literal hellspawn. The first quest only works here if you already have some expertise with things like the Charges, and if you stretch it a little; feel free to replace it with something more apropos.

In the first quest (which is the Bindings alternate “Am I Okay?”), you think about what purpose you’re actually supposed to have, given that you’re already bound to something. (This only works well if your character already has Bindings arcs.) Then you decide to take on the Charges, because if you have all this knowledge of the wicked things you may as well put it to use. After that, you use the Charges to help you do something useful.

If you so choose, you can then use the Charges to help you do something cool. You might then finish the arc by trying to figure out what to do with all these Charges now that you’re done with them.

Notes for Storyteller arc

Take Your [Charges] To Work Day

Puppies!

Just Another Day

Barn-Raising

Everything Short Of The Divorce Lawyer

So, you start out taking a bunch of Charges on a field trip. This goes great, but then reality ensues: taking long-term care of the Charges is a lot harder and more of a slog than it looks. So you probably have to retreat inside yourself and figure out why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Should you continue to quest 4, you emerge from the previous quest and have your Charges help you do something incredible. Quest 5, though, is going to be a slog - you know you can’t support them long-term, so you have to tear everything apart in order to make something that will be more sustainable.

Notes for Knight arc

Just Another Day

Everything Short Of The Divorce Lawyer

Take Your [Charges] To Work Day or Puppies!

Puppies!

Take Your [Charges] To Work Day or Barn-Raising

You start off wondering what your purpose is. Then you get the Charges shoved in your face, which is a duty you keep trying and failing to get out of (and happen to learn how the Charges work, along the way). After that, you either use your newfound competence to lead your Charges into an adventure, or are thrust into a completely different context filled with small children. (The latter is the alternate Knight 3 “A Fish Out Of Water” option.)

If you want to continue the quest set, reality comes crashing in: you’ve forgotten that having Charges includes having responsibility for Charges, and you have to go back and work on that for a while. And if you want to continue the quest set after that, you test your mastery of leadership-of-the-Charges against some sort of gauntlet.

Notes for Aspect arc

Just Another Day

Puppies!

Everything Short Of The Divorce Lawyer

Take Your [Charges] To Work Day

???

I was almost going to not have this arc until I realized that Everything Short of the Divorce Lawyer was a perfect Aspect 3 quest; then most of it fell into place, except for a quest 5. There isn’t any quest 5 on this arc - feel free to substitute in someone else’s quests, or even a quest from one of my other quest sets.

You start off stuck against the notion of purpose. The Charges show you a new perspective on life, but you haven’t really wholeheartedly accepted them into your life - in quest 3, you try to remove yourself from association with them. (This does not work at all well.) At that point, you learn something shattering. Optionally, you can then go on to take your Charges with you on a terrifying journey into the unknown.

[hollyhockash]

Arc Notes: The Dramatic Tales of Cecelia Favreau (Dramatic Tales 0.5/5)

And here are the arc notes for "Dramatic Tales"!

Aspect

Neurosis

In the Strangest of Places

The Blogosphere

Fighting Back

Time to Mourn

The Aspect arc follows the order of "Literary Medal-Bait" closely and thus plays very similarly to it. But I'll explain anyway:

You begin kind of blocked off, stymied from further growth by the fact that you have insecurities and such that you have to take care of. Then you find a strange friend that shows you a new perspective on the world. Taking this new perspective on the world into account, you run your blog, and things get... stranger, and stranger.

You might then wind up fighting against a strange threat from deep in Paradox Space. Should you continue after that, quest 5 clears out some time and space for you to properly process what happened.

Shepherd

Neurosis

In the Strangest of Places

Time to Mourn

Fighting Back

The Blogosphere

The other arc structure that I wanted to make sure worked well was the Shepherd arc, because the character I'm making that needs this quest set is going to be on at least some Shepherd arcs.

Your ordinary life is kind of troubled and neurotic... and then it is interrupted by the fact that a new community or group has come onto the scene. There, you find a strange friend. With this newfound help, you manage to let yourself properly mourn for your losses rather than sit on them awkwardly.

Should you choose, you may then proceed to fight back against a strange, larger-than-life threat; and if you'd like, you then settle down with your blog and do some cool stuff on it.

Knight

In the Strangest of Places

Neurosis

The Blogosphere or Fighting Back

Time to Mourn

Fighting Back

There is something you want to be; and your Strange Friend is showing you the path to get there. But you have some mental blocks that you need to understand and address before you become the person you want to become.

Quest 3 has some choices: you can use either The Blogosphere or Fighting Back. Perhaps you're taking your place on the Internet, and the process of doing so is strange and stressful and full of anon hate. Or perhaps you have to forge your new role out of piles of dead timeclones and desperate gambles.

Maybe you have to come to terms with yourself, and the things you didn't or couldn't do. And maybe, after that, you have to finish becoming the person you want to be: by standing up to a threat that's come to you through the Furthest Ring.

Bindings

Neurosis

In the Strangest of Places

Fighting Back

Fighting Back

The Blogosphere or Time to Mourn

While this quest set isn't exactly complete, it's close enough that you should probably be able to fill it in around the sides.

You begin by examining, and worrying about, the ways you've been marked by doing the things that you do. (If this is your first Bindings arc, you should replace Quest 1 with something else.) Then you help a Strange Friend learn how your world works. After that...

Well, the thing about quests 3 and 4 is that Fighting Back can be the first or second of them, but not both. If you take Fighting Back in quest 3, you then have to expand your scope in quest 4 (possibly taking a bigger quest about changing the world to prevent the thing from happening again). If, instead, you want to use it for quest 4, quest 3 will be something rather smaller in scale. I don't have specific recommendations here, unfortunately, but if it comes up in play you should have an idea of what to do.

Quest 5 either means that you've somehow established yourself as The Owner of a Blog, or that you're going to need to take some time to sift through the wreckage of your life.

Emptiness

Time to Mourn

In the Strangest of Places

Neurosis

Fighting Back

???

I wanted to at least sketch out a partial Emptiness arc for this quest set: RV Chuubo's is a setting shot through with silver in general, and as such Emptiness stories are often told there.

It isn't quite complete, but if you need a Quest 5, you should be able to find something to use there.

[hollyhockash]

Arc Notes: Missing (Missing 0.5/5)

Here are the arc notes for Missing!

Notes for Emptiness arc

The Emptiness arc is the canonical ordering for this quest set, and as such is relatively straightforward. You start out without hope. A companion gives you hope, but the hope turns out to be futile. You self-flagellate for a while, maybe, and then figure out that self-flagellation won't get you anywhere.

Let's move on.

Notes for Bindings arc

So, this Bindings arc is a little bit of a stretch. But I have a character whose primary color of arc is blue but who might be on this quest set, so I decided to try anyway.

First up, the thing you're working with isn't so much the thing that is... as the thing that isn't. You're harnessing the power of being empty. You purposely widen the maw of the emptiness inside you, and reach in a hand, and drag out kicking and screaming gods. This is not advisable! If nothing else, it'll result in a great deal of personal suffering! But there are some characters who do this kind of thing.

So let's go to the quest list itself: "Lost Soul: Reward Offered" usually plays out the "Am I OK?" Bindings 1 alternate. "Companionship" is usually about the notion that the Companion might need help understanding, or interacting with, people like you. "A Fruitless Search" might not be so fruitless after all - you don't get back your Treasure, no, but you get some other compensation for your time.

Then maybe you risk it all on "heroism" that is actually self-flagellation. And, if you keep going, maybe you realize why you did all of this stuff and the results aren't necessarily pretty, but they're there and now you get to deal.

Otherworldly

As with Ever After, there are some characters who take this kind of thing as an intrusion upon their sense of self - something alien but possibly harnessable - rather than the influence of the bleakness of the Outside.

Note that, if the thing that took your Treasure was the malice of another human being, you will almost certainly be on Emptiness, rather than Otherworldly -

Something that is fundamentally acceptable, something that is part of the nature of the world itself, something like death: experiences of great loss can connect you to such things without hollowing you out on the inside. But the malice of other human beings - that's a different story. Because in integrating your experience with the malice of other human beings, you must acknowledge, on some level, that you too are perfectly capable of that kind of malice - and that you must make the choices not to do so.

Anyway. The first quest is usually played as "The Hole in the World", the alternate Otherworldly 1 quest. Something has gone wrong. You have experienced loss. You probably try to stopgap that loss by acquiring the companion that has the thing you don't have; but that doesn't help, ultimately. The thing that's growing inside of you is the knowledge that a thing such as this exists in the world; and, until you learn how to integrate it, you throw yourself into adventures trying to fix it.

Maybe you try to look for the thing you lost - and learn, along the way, that such a thing can't be taken back, but you retain the memories, and the lessons, that it taught you.

Maybe you reconcile yourself with the knowledge that such things exist in the world, and resolve to make yourself shine all the brighter.

Aspect

This Aspect arc is also weird. Either you repeat Blame twice, or you replace one of the places it shows up.

I mean, it starts up simply enough - you're stuck behind the fact that you don't feel like your situation is worth improving. You acquire a companion that stretches your imagination. Then, while dealing with the way this stretches your imagination, you end up subject to an increasingly ridiculous procession of weird shit resulting from your current state of emptiness (or, more likely, replace Aspect 3 with somethng more obviously related to social situations).

Aspect 4 is either the continuation of this procession of weird shit except with a darker tone, or some replacement with a quest about dealing with something more straightforwardly terrifying and supernatural; and the last quest is about you trying to fix what's broken and getting hopelessly lost instead.

[hollyhockash]

Arc Notes: Newcomer (Newcomer 0.5/6)

There are five different arcs to play with this quest set! Here's some information about them...

Notes for Knight arc

Please Read Before Posting

Frist Psot

Groupthink or Error 404

Integrity

Something Better

I think this is mostly straightfoward - it's a tale of assimilating into a group, but then extracting out what you could actually learn from them and having the self-respect not to fall for all the stupid (not all at once, anyway). Maybe you then stick around and try to improve the place. Or maybe you just cut the quest set short and try again somewhere else.

Be careful of the fact that there are two Knight 3 quests! I know I've emblazoned this everywhere, but it's for your benefit: I don't want you to look silly if you end up doing two Knight 3 quests in succession.

Notes for Aspect arc

Please Read Before Posting

Groupthink

Integrity

Something Better

Error 404

You really do fall in with a group on this arc - fall into it headlong, rather than tiptoeing in as on the Knight arc. You go straight from being too scared to participate with them to ending up way into their lore. And by "way in" I mean "way too far in".

I seriously considered making Frist Psot the 3rd quest, but it wouldn't really make sense for you to introduce yourself to a group after you've went and been an angry drunk on their kool-aid. Anyway, I figure you can get enough weird social situations out of Integrity on your own. If you do want to slot Frist Psot back in, you'll need to tweak the flavor quite a bit, but it can be done.

I explicitly made Something Better more martial than I'd originally intended it - dragging in elements of Sburb itself - so it'd work for Aspect 4.

Notes for Shepherd arc

???

Please Read Before Posting

Frist Psot

Something Better

Integrity

Unfortunately, this Shepherd arc lacks a first quest! I guess you'll have to figure that out for yourself.

The thing about this Shepherd arc is that it assumes that the "trouble you have to conquer" from your past is your own shyness/intimidation - that Frist Psot is the story of you pushing past your innate timidity and finding it far more rewarding than it first appeared. So it's a bit tenuous, and not all that repeatable. All the same, I include it anyway because The Heart's fourth arc feels Shepherdish.

Notes for Storyteller arc

Frist Psot

Integrity

Groupthink

Something Better

Error 404

The thing about the Storyteller arc is that by placing Integrity before Groupthink, you begin by stating that you agree to some things about the community but not others... and then you end up falling into the rabbit hole anyway, because it turns out that holding up sacred principles is a lot harder than it looks.

The funny thing is that by making Something Better Aspect 4-worthy, it also became Storyteller 4-worthy! That was a nice side-effect.

Notes for Mystic arc

Please Read Before Posting

Groupthink

Integrity

Error 404

Something Better

Like with the Aspect arc, you fall headlong into the group. The thing with the group is - they're orthogonal to your Principle. They're not antithetical, no, but orthogonal is bad enough for luring you off the path. (It's arguably even worse - if you backtrack, at least you still know where the path is and that you could go forwards on it; and if you get pulled out to the side you can get completely lost and never find your way back. That metaphor got away from me. I hope it still makes sense.)

Anyway, then you try to figure out how to reconcile the group with your Principle, in Integrity. It doesn't work. I think it makes things worse. I think you bend your Principle too far out of shape during the attempt and it temporarily deserts you, and you have to struggle to get along without it for a while (Error 404). Then maybe you're wiser, afterwards...

[hollyhockash]

Arc Notes: Cracked Pedestals (Pedestals 0.5/5)

This quest set has five possible full arcs! Some of them are pretty tenuous if you look at the quests alone. I’ll explain more about how to use them here.

Notes for Shepherd Rissa Hier’s arc

To give you some more context for what’s going on, instead of giving you the usual notes (this quest set in canonical order seems straightforward enough to me), I’m going to excerpt a bit from Rissa Hier’s upcoming playbook:

Myra disappeared a while ago - and nobody knows what happened to her. You’ve discovered her writings, her tutorials, and eventually the code she wrote (which is really well-documented). They’re fascinating. Windows into the mind of a brilliant woman who turned the full force of her reasoning to computers and how they worked.

After someone figures out how to hack Sburb.org’s server software, you end up volunteering to help maintain the codebase. Only to try to back out when you discover just how large the Sburb.org codebase is. It’s worth it for Myra’s often-snarky, always-useful comments, buried throughout the code.

Then some loop of ~ATH somewhere posts what’s clearly Myra’s video will to the site. She’s dead. She killed herself. Why did she kill herself? She’s got plenty of former friends and mentees contemplating that question, but - even though you never knew her - you find yourself getting sucked into that question, too.

Essentially: the idea of volunteering to help with Sburb.org occurs to Rissa at the very end of Someone Awesome; that video, Myra’s will, posts during Rissa’s first iteration of Feet of Clay. Shenanigans ensue.

(Incidentally: This volunteer position is the same one Samantha volunteered for, back in the day.)

Notes for Emptiness arc

I suspected - and friends confirmed, relatively early on - that this arc had a lot of silver woven into it. Replayers have not lived pleasant lives, and by Shepherd arc standards this arc is very, very sad.

By the standards of an Emptiness arc, on the other hand, this is almost upbeat.

The arc storyline is straightforward - Undertow has you lost and without guidance, you find someone cool to follow in Someone Awesome and then promptly have your hopes dashed with Feet of Clay; in Responsibilities you’re struggling with the sheer size of the work you’ve taken on, and in Onwards you come to terms with your Mentor’s disgrace/death.

Notes for Aspect arc

Hero worship doesn’t get you anywhere. That’s the problem with having a mentor, if you’re on an Aspect arc - you’re so obsessed with the way they do things that you can’t see past it to the way you should be doing things. Onwards lets you push past this in a mostly mature fashion, as does Responsibilities. It’s almost like this isn’t the same set of quests at all!

Feet of Clay is where this quest set gets a little tenuous. In that quest, on this quest set, you and your Mentor are struggling against the same thing - loneliness, perhaps, or being hunted by the Azurites - but you hold your own, manage to win yourself back, and they can’t. They fall.

It’s generally a good idea to go on to Undertow after this, or to proceed to a next quest set that starts somewhere dark like Down, or at least take some breathing room to experience your losses before you go back to the top.

Notes for Mystic arc

You’re lost, and your Mentor offers you a way out. They’re fascinating! But they’re a trap. You follow them around blindly for a while. Thing is, you get to Responsibilities; your Mentor might try to help you, or talk loudly about helping you, but they aren’t actually helping you at all. (Maybe they’re working at cross purposes! Or being counterproductive! Or too absorbed in complaining about their own problems to you to be useful.) If your Work works it’s because your other friends or other forces have aligned to make it possible, not because of anything to do with your Mentor.

If you cut off the quest set at this point, separating yourself from your Mentor, shortly after this quest, is relatively uneventful. (Although they might return at some future point.) In Feet of Clay, if you decide to continue on instead, that’s when you realize that you’ve lost the way, by following your Mentor; your footing keeps crumbling out from underneath you, and landmarks keep shifting. Your response is to try to cast this increasingly incompatible/toxic [1] mentor figure out of your life, but their teachings have hooks sunk deep into you and tearing them out is painful.

If you manage to make it to Onwards, you’ll figure out how to synthesize your Mentor’s teachings with your own sense of what is right.

Notes for Storyteller arc

I almost didn’t make this quest set have a Storyteller arc; Storyteller-type characters remain relatively unchanged and this arc is about learning something. But on the other hand, I was about this far from making Rissa Hier a Creature of Fable. So I think I’ll leave it in.

This Storyteller arc is about tangling your self-worth up in someone else, and then having to untangle yourself back out, and the things that can result. It’s dangerous for a Storyteller to try and subsume their identity to someone else’s, because it’s possible that they could succeed (not that this is what’s happening here).

[1] I believe that toxic relationships don’t always require a toxic person. So I’m not necessarily blaming your mentor here! There are many relationships that break because both partners are at fault - or due to mutual compatibilities, where neither partner is at fault. It’s like a drill sergeant trying to teach a beehive tricks - even though the drill sergeant and the bees might be perfectly good on their own, it’s the expectations between them (and how they act towards each other) that sets everyone up for failure.

Incidentally, I guess that means that after I give my (hypothetical future) kids the birds-and-bees talk, I’m giving them the drill-sergeant-and-bees talk?