Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

“Let’s assume that there is a balance between the two Systems, and a Stat or Skill in one translates to a Stat or Skill in the other,” I said, and Kris nodded. “By using Classes, the PoT system bakes more power into a career path. It’s more efficient, less organic, more focused.”

“The Isparian system is very linear, and it operates off a d100 basis, pure percentage. The Power of Ten system tends to work on the d20, with five percent jumps. They are actually the same thing, except PoT advances in little jumps, and the Isparian System is smoother,” Princess Kristie agreed.

“And there’s a show of lights with every new Karmic Level.”

“That was always fun to see during a battle, especially during the Glory Awards at the end,” Princess Kristie grinned in remembrance. “Especially if it Healed up a lot of injuries...”

“I’m sure.”

“If that is true, and they are equivalents, then Karma spent in one directly translates into the same Stat for the other, be it pure Stat or Skill, right?”

Her eyes narrowed again. “Power of Ten breaks out Ranged Attack Bonus, Melee Attack Bonus, and Caster Level as unique abilities tied to a Class. The Isparian System considers them just more generic Skills...”

“While those self-same Weapon Skills are so narrow that Power of Ten calls them part of Weapon Proficiencies. The idea that massive investment in your Sword Skill doesn’t improve your overall Attack ability is not present in Power of Ten.”

The Princess was warming to the topic. “And the Strength/Coord mechanic that adds to the Isparian Weapon Skills is actually just Power/Strength.” Strength having Might, the ability to lift, carry, and swing with great force, and Power, swinging with speed and control. A weightlifter might have great Might, but move slowly and so have low Power.

You could have Might without Power, but not Power without Might. Moving something heavy both fast and true first required that you have the strength to move it!

There was also the Finesse style based on Dexterity, Coord/Quick in the Isparian system, but we weren’t talking about that here.

“The Mick has a Health of 326 under the Isparian System. However, he’s got a +20 Attack Bonus with his sword, he’s a specialist with it, and he’s got a Strength of 30, with an Endurance of 28. As a Melee/20 and Human/4, /5 or /6...”

She leaned in again, wide-eyed. “Those are Human Exemplar racial Stat bonuses!” she blurted out in amazement.

“It’s like the System is exploiting an existing avenue of growth, or something,” I murmured, nodding along with her. The humans here were not advancing their Stats by Class, after all! “If he maxes Health and Soak...”

She looked between the two. “The Power of Ten System blows the Isparian System away.” His base Soak would be 380, his Human Health 51, and that was without any Feats, Masteries, or Favored Class benefits to supplement things!

“We can assume Karmic investment is investment, but how the System translates it is superior on the Power of Ten side,” I went on. “It also removes the need for all those Skills and Skill Points from the Isparian System...”

“Oh. Ohhhhh...” Kris murmured, staring at that as the Skills faded from one side of the listing, and Melee/20 popped up on the other. “By transferring them to the other system, we free up a LOT of Isparian Skill Points entirely...”

“And he’s going to have all those actual Ranks from Melee Levels to invest with the Karma from his Melee Defense Skill, and that Dual Wield he has, and the Shield Skill...”

Kris looked back and forth. Shield use was a Proficiency, Shield Specialization was a Feat, as were most of the Classic Mitharn Forms in the Matrix system of Power of Ten. Dual Wielding was the Two-Weapon Fighting Mastery tree!

Removing all those unneeded Skills from his Skill Point allocations on the Isparian side would remove the need for 40 Skill Points from the Isparian Schema entirely. Massive amounts of investment in Luminance and Augmentations were obviously just filling in parts of the Exemplar Racial Template!

Even the Magic Defense Skill was tied into it, with Specialization just a Feat to boost it +2 on the Power of Ten side!

The bonuses to Skills were just Luck and/or Insight bonuses applied early and gradually, including as part of the Melee Defense skill, but never ‘typed out’ and defined as they should have been! The fact some stacked and others did not had been something of a giveaway...

“The Isparian system broke up Exemplar advancement into a bunch of manageable chunks, diluting the entirety of its power as an easy advancement road,” Princess Kristie breathed, clearly appalled. “It’s a Legendary Template at Full Exemplar, but they’ve chopped it all up so it loses the cumulative power. Anyone who has this should be Eternal...”

“Aye, talk about your suborning of destiny,” I had to agree, looking at all those bonuses. Taken as bits, you didn’t see the big picture, but start assembling them, and it had been laid out pretty obviously. “Look at what they left out.” I waved a hand, and the missing bonuses filled in.

Her breath hissed out. “The Caster Level, Saving Throw, Health, and Attack Bonuses. Of course...” The real game-clinchers, as it were. “Look at that, they even kept in the basic Natural Armor bonus. Unbelievable...” Everyone thought it was just another Augmentation gift...

“The Fast Healing he thinks is from the land and magic is just his Exemplar Template at work,” I agreed. “Improves with Endurance, it looks like.” I pointed. “Natural Resistances against ALL physical and Elemental energy types. If you translate those over to innate personal spells, I think that works out pretty close to Permanent Resist Energy of the various types for costs modified by Level, but I could be wrong.”

“They use too many zeroes in their Karmic calculations,” Kris groused, and I just snickered. “And why can they only Augment it twice in total, in chunks?”

I eyed the results. “They morphed them into the Isparian Protection variant, not a Resist. So they reduce damage a percentage, they don’t eliminate it up to a threshold. Better for dealing with large surges, not for constant attrition. A combat buff, not a survival or environmental buff, as it were.”

“So, a built-in Necklace of Protection, as it were, but only naturally effective to Gold Level, with an arbitrary improvement to... two types to Pyreal, or one to Platinum, as it were.”

“They don’t get the normal Resistances or any Immunities like you do, so don’t be envious. Theirs are just more suitable for dealing with high-end combat...”

“Well, that’s a pretty solid basis of comparison,” she admitted. “He’s literally a Twenty in waiting, just need to realign him and get him properly Geared out. Makes me wonder how the people behind him are doing...”

“Well, between the two of us, I bet we can make a heck of a difference,” I noted, and she nodded slowly in agreement.

And the Mick was going to be the very willing guinea pig for all of it…

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Pulling out of Hebian-to was a silent affair. The undead didn’t do a lot of scouting of the countryside, content to hold the city and its immediate environs, especially the shoreline. That did allow lugian or tumerok scouts to creep closer to the place and study it from afar, but with undead able to keep their posts for literally weeks straight without moving, it was a boring job with not much to see.

The fact that the souls of those cursed undead were simmering with a new light of hope, able to see that their long vigil would, at some point, come to an end, was not visible to the eye of even the best of their scouts. The outside tribes would probably be surprised at just how savagely the undead would fight if pressed right now…

The Mick alternated between riding and running. Kris’s first lesson was on the basic lightfoot techniques, and the man was lapping them up with a hungry expression. He had grown to maturity in a world where there was always something new to learn, ways to expand, and having done precious little of that in the last decade and more, instead calcifying into a specific set of skills, the opportunity to expand had instead triggered those basic drives that had made him who he was.

If that meant he really had to learn how to Meditate, well, that was what the new Mark to his Wisdom was for, and Kris guiding him along the route to touching the energy inside him that was his and his alone. Ki was not drawn from the world, and if magic crashed and burned, ki would still be there, still be useful, even if the highest functions of it were not.

The fact that magic was here, and he was a very Senior Powered in the Isparian style, meant the Arcane Fist was just perfect for him, however.

I wasn’t just riding, either. I couldn’t keep up with either of them without using magic… but I could use magic, ergo, I could keep up with them. I had my own lightfoot to get used to, the Sun Stride much more precise than Waveskating Steps, which was the foundation of Princess Kristie’s style. As she was starting the Mick on the Ocean Dragon disciplines, that made perfect sense.

Going from relying on drawing power from the ground and superhuman physical vigor to walking on a constant stream of ki coming out your heels might have seemed a stretch, but that was what the Princess did all the time, so she had loads of experience she could heap upon him to help override his reliance and muscle memory of an earlier time.

Yeah, he had to muscle around his soul. Yeah, he had to open his dantian and get the ki pumping through his blood. Yeah, he had a LOT of work to do in order to increase the size of it, but he was starting off at a very high point, and as soon as the first point was working, he shouted out in delight, clenching his fists and throwing them at the skies.

While ki was great for spellcasters, there was no doubt that it benefited warriors the most. And while he was very Senior Powered… it was in the Isparian style. In the Power of Ten’s Matrix style, he had basically just earned his first Level in Monk, stowed his armor away, and was running around like a fool with a +10 enhancement bonus to his foot speed, leaving only the whisper of a trail as he did so.

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“Oi, Jacko, we’re off to see the shell!” the Mick waved at the skeleton out in the water, wearing a ratty bandanna and holding a rusty cutlass. Kelp was growing on it.

The skeletal pirate waved back at him, sort of, watching us go by without moving. It was the dark of the night, and really a bad time to be sightseeing, but the Mick knew we both could see in the dark freely, having shared that with him through the Mark-link (another wondrously useful tool to a scout!), and he knew where he was going.

The thing he wanted us to see was a nefane shell, one easily three times the height of the shell of the tentacled thing the Tremendous Monuga had ripped out of the lake in front of us a week ago.

“It used to sit offshore, mind ye, not far from the Shoreward, making up its own island of sand and flotsam and whatnot. Enough storms, tho, especially these last few years, pushed it right up on shore, an’ here it’s sat.”

Kris and I studied it, running our hands over it and looking at different things… and sharing them with him, much to his consternation and wonder. He simply wasn’t used to the kind of tactics and information sharing that we were.

At the same time, he was sort of remembering a lot of fights against the things, their acid and force-spitting spells, the psychic charge and smashing impacts of their tentacles, the speed they could move at when a-chase, and really, just how bloody goddamn annoying the things were everywhere they popped up.

Kris caught a stray thought, her tremblesense echoing through the steely rigidity of the shell, tracing the veins of runic circuitry basically grown into the thing via psychic crystal growth inside the very structure of it, forming natural defensive enhancements to the material which my magical senses confirmed were still residually active. It was why it hadn’t decayed, grown brittle, and fallen apart over time.

In other words, another nefane that could come upon it could likely move right in and either absorb its energies or use them to spur its own growth.

“This isn’t the biggest one you’ve seen?” she asked him.

“Nay.” He was equal parts storyteller and grim scout, delighting in the position and realizing the ominousness of the information. “On the Dark Isle t’ the north, when it rose from the sea, there were shells of nefanes or sleeches or whatever they were, left discarded behind. Some o’ the natives staying there used ‘em for homes.” He looked at this massive small hill of a shell, then tilted his head back, picturing it.

I brought up a massive square Holo in front of him to give him some perspective, and he actually took a couple steps back, going slowly back through his memories with the tested perspective of a scout.

Stood on end, it was nearly twice as tall as this massive shell would have been in the same position.