“Eventually, everyone fails you. Whether through betrayal or weakness, they cannot take the next step with you. It is the nature of being more that others must be less. It is the nature of seeking greatness that others pale in comparison to you. Feel no shame, it is simply the way of things.”
—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar
They burst into the lowest chamb...
2025-10-29 16:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post“Premonition is, at its core, a flawed form of magic that can never be successful. There are simply too many factors for it to ever work as intended. Time is not linear but branching, with every decision that we make, and every electron splitting off from an atom creating an alternate future that your foresight might glimpse. Abandon it for folly. Or you’ll walk the path of the Aions in...
2025-10-27 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post“One aspect of mana that remains outside of mortal reach is chaos. We often see eidolons manifest with it as their defining characteristic, but no mortal has ever been able to access it. We are creatures of reason, so magic that is inherently without reason is inevitably going to be anathema to our thought processes. As our thoughts are our magic, so is chaos magic outside of our reach....
2025-10-24 16:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post“Trust is a fool’s invitation. Ultimately, the only living creature in the universe that you can be entirely certain of the intentions of is yourself. When you trust, you put a knife in a traitor’s hand. When you trust, you accept that your fate is no longer yours to make but a plaything for whosoever you have handed over the reins to. Trust is suicide with extra steps.”
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2025-10-22 16:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post“Completing your mission is of the utmost importance. It is essentially impossible to get past the inherent cowardice encoded into every life form, the survival instinct that says that living to fight another day will be the best way to achieve your goals in the long term. Sometimes your survival and your success are at odds with each other, and the sooner that you come to accept that, an...
2025-10-20 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post“Sometimes I have to do the right thing. I hate doing the right thing. It always ends up costing me more than I’m willing to pay. I still do it, because otherwise I can’t sleep at night or look myself in the mirror. But it still sucks.”
—Selected Daybook Musings, R. Clarendon
In the chaos of battle, Sylvas had gotten turned around, but these new arrivals ...
2025-10-17 16:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post“Proposal Three: The shikari are the cause of the Aion’s downfall. A predator that the magic-reliant Aions had never encountered before, and which could dispatch their defenders faster than they could cast. An outside context problem for a species that was entirely devoted to magic. These creatures have proven themselves quite capable of planetary annihilation on a grand scale in contem...
2025-10-15 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post“Proposal Two: The shikari are the watchdogs of the Aions. Knowing that they would no longer have a physical presence upon this plane of existence, the Aions recognized that they would still need something here to protect the resources that they were leaving behind for specific purposes. To this end, they created the shikari, a species so deadly that only beings with magic at their dispos...
2025-10-13 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post“Proposal One: The shikari are the Aions. Faced with their inevitable decline, the Aion people instead chose to divorce themselves from magic and their higher brain functions, leaving behind only their bodies, which they had enhanced beyond all recognition, into the pinnacle of what can be achieved without magic. In this way, they could ensure their own continuation despite whatever arcan...
2025-10-10 16:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post“The problem with Aion defenses is that they’re always an outside context problem. They’re never straightforward or easy to navigate. They always have to be approached with a novel solution because it seems that the Aions were allergic to doing anything straightforward at all. You have to approach them with the mindset of a philosopher and scholar instead of a tomb-robber, which was p...
2025-10-08 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View PostHey everyone! Happy Tuesday!
I am here with a non-Starbreaker post to announce that my latest new series – Aetherforged is available now! Co-written with the awesome Harmon Cooper, this book is a wild cross of Epic Fantasy, Academia, and Deckbuilding (but with a twist!) that I'm sure will tickle some of you! But even better than that, I’m here to tell you all today that the book is av...
2025-10-07 15:21:10 +0000 UTC View Post“What we know about the Aions fills up only a very tiny corner of what they were. We lack almost every piece of the puzzle, and much of our attempts to understand them come not from examining the evidence that we have but from pondering the empty shapes in our knowledge, like guessing at a puzzle piece by looking at where it would join to what we’ve already completed. We don’t even kn...
2025-10-06 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post“Eidolon incursions are the most common cause of a planet’s death. Second is necromancy. Third, shikari outbreaks. From there, we have a massive drop-off in percentages until we reach natural disasters, magical accidents, prolonged internal warfare, and other fringe cases. The numbers are weighted so heavily in favor of the top three that if all others were ignored, statistically, there...
2025-10-03 16:00:21 +0000 UTC View Post“While one might consider a creature without magic to be ill-equipped to face a world in which magic exists, one would be grossly underestimating the limitations of the physical. Magic allows us to go beyond our own limitations, but that is in no small part because our limitations are set so far short of the actual possibilities. How strong can a living creature become if it spent all its...
2025-10-01 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post“The shikari have a hive-like social structure with a single queen that lays eggs, reproducing through partial parthenogenesis. Some of the shikari seem to have special adaptations that are coded into them at inception, including any future queens that are deliberately spawned only when a colony had overtaken its entire environment, and the next stage of expansion beyond that planetary bo...
2025-09-29 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post“The way that mages are taught to fight is multi-faceted, but it lends itself equally well to inter-ship combat as it does to direct interpersonal confrontations. The problem that most mages of the Ardent encounter when placed on duty aboard a ship is that they find themselves extremely limited. There is a division of labor aboard a ship, with each mage fulfilling a certain duty, while th...
2025-09-26 16:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post“Some mana is inaccessible. While our affinities grant us access to a broad spread of the mana in the universe, some floes of it are untouched and untouchable. Beyond even our ability to sense. It is these that we often see the eidolon feasting upon. And it is these that make up the majority of what is channeled and contained in a world soul. Some call it dark mana. Invisible to us, unusa...
2025-09-24 16:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post“Your squad will become your friends, no matter how hard you try to avoid it. Even if you start off loathing every single one of them, hating everything they do and wishing they’d all drop dead so you could get reassigned, by the end of your first fight, they’re going to be closer to you than kin. You’re going to know how they think, how they move, and how they react on instinct. It...
2025-09-22 16:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post“Standard operating procedure for any clandestine organization is to go in soft, make your presence invisible, don’t let anyone know that you’re there until you’re done, and, for preference, not even then. Make them think it was an accident or some mistake of their own. Don’t let them know that you did anything at all. Except sometimes that procedure is stupid. Sometimes, even if ...
2025-09-19 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post“This universe is composed of infinite diversity in infinite combinations. Whatever collection of celestial bodies the mind can imagine can be found somewhere out there in the expanse of space. Anything that you can dream of is out there somewhere.”
—The Trouble with Telemetry, Silyn Blaithe
Sylvas was up before the rest of the crew as usual, positioned in th...
2025-09-17 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post“For the duplication of the self produces ethical dilemmas as yet unthought of. Whatever is created is you, but only at the moment of its conception. After that moment, all that it perceives and does begins to differentiate it from you. It becomes its own person at the moment of creation, and that can be difficult for the average person to even grasp, let alone contend with. Imagine that ...
2025-09-15 16:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post“This troth I forge, with no expectation
Of reciprocation nor love returned
No promise I beg
But asking only this
Live until hammers no longer ring
Until the forge fires of the stars burn out
Know only the embrace of mother-fire’s warmth
And never the cold of the empty beyond
Have every treasure, and every craft
Have all that your heart might desire
Only th...
“While humanity was still divided into nation states in the cradle of its homeworld, the dwarves had spread beyond their own system to begin prospecting and mining the asteroids contained in the belt beyond their star’s light. But with their increased power and capability, they encountered a problem. An ever-expanding market with no buyers. In the other sentient species that they have e...
2025-09-10 16:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post“Of the myriad and varied species that make up the Empyrean Alliance, none are more stalwart in their support of its ideals than the dwarves. While there have been isolationist factions among the elven people who would have happily seen the entire enterprise dissolved, the dwarvish have never even contemplated such a course, seeing the other members of the Alliance not only as friends to ...
2025-09-08 16:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post“Those who study the eidolon in its natural habitat are few and far between, primarily because its natural habitat is a chaotic dimension filled with eidolons that want nothing more than to kill anyone and everything that is not an eidolon. Yet there have been periods where they were successfully observed on their own side of the dimensional barrier without summoning having occurred, and ...
2025-09-05 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View PostThe vault is the most sought-after of all the remnants of the Aion civilization, not because it has any greater value than those things discovered outside of the vaults, but because of the degree of organization that went into their creation. With the foreknowledge of their own impending end, the Aions crafted the vaults as a beacon of light to throw into the future. A hope that others migh...
2025-09-03 16:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post“Null-space is something of a misnomer because it implies that it is a place. A place with nothing in it, but still a place. Rather, null-space is the absence of all things, including all laws of physics, all mass, energy, everything. It is an entire plane of existence at the farthest extent of the dimensional range that is entirely devoid of everything. There have been arguments that it ...
2025-09-01 16:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post“Digging through the ruins of dead civilizations is the prerogative of those species that have survived, and nowhere is that truer than in the case of the Aions, from whom so much of our modern understanding of the universe has come from. In the remains of most dead civilizations do we often find one or two sparks of enlightenment from which we might some day ignite some small flame, but ...
2025-08-29 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post“Violence is never the answer.”
—Lies the Elves Told Me, Fal’Vaelith
The blow hit him in the jaw, which, through the power of his embodiment, currently had the density of a compressed planetary core. A fist was really just a collection of small bones bound together with meat, and on contact with Sylvas’ chin, all those small bones decided to go their sepa...
2025-08-27 16:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post“There is no such thing as a criminal. There is a person who has been pushed beyond the limits of the law by their circumstances or who has made bad choices so that they can survive and thrive. Both of these are matters that can be addressed more fully by changing the material conditions under which they live than by doling out punishment. If people are given better circumstances, and bet...
2025-08-25 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post