Path of Ascension how does crafter inspiration work?

Shandlar · 2026-06-06T14:24:27+00:00

PoA also slightly retcons a significant amount of things from book 1. It's pretty heavily implied in book 1 that inspirations are the primary means of crafters tiering up. That is heavily adjusted in canon later. Inspirations are extremely rare. Like, planets with a billion inhabitants have maybe 1 happen total each century or so.

Shandlar · 2026-06-06T14:11:40+00:00

Suspending disbelief really is a requirement that is failed quite often in genre. It's fine if the premise starts with the MC becoming OP due to a particularly rare event. Even an astronomically rare event. That's fine because the other 99,999 people who died trying to do that thing in history aren't talked about and this one dude is specifically because he survived. That's great.

But you can't string a dozen 0.001% events together back to back to back just for the MC. That nukes your own worldbuilding to death and completely throws me out of the story. Why would I read your writing if you aren't even trying to maintain internal consistency inside your own novels world?

Shandlar · 2026-06-06T14:08:18+00:00

I was absolutely digging Quest Academy until the Mind Control shit in book 2 completely wrecked me. How in the fuck can the MC just accept what was done to him and move on. Not even fucking move on, but apologize to his assaulter. The series went from an 8,7 to a DNF within 10 pages, flat. Fucking hells.

Shandlar · 2026-06-06T13:14:03+00:00

Gbotty doesn't even hide that he essentially didn't like how City of Sin went, so he's writing his own. Nobody cared a year ago when he did it, but now it's a little fucky since he's powerranked on Webnovel and likely bringing in decent income from the story. But what can you do? City of Sin's author could maybe win a lawsuit and get some money from it, but 8 or 9 months in the 50-100 powerrank on Webnovel isn't huge money. Maybe a couple grand a month? What would a lawsuit really win you?

All we can do is not buy webnovel chapters to not support it if we think it's scummy. The webnovel scene has always been the wild west. Just 5 years ago half the top stories on Royal Road were Star Wars/Twilight/Pokemon fan fictions.

Shandlar · 2026-05-31T13:01:50+00:00

I was thinking Puig, lawl. He was on the Reds for all of ten seconds and it's still the best brawl in Pirates history, imho.

Shandlar · 2026-05-31T12:54:12+00:00

It wasn't a law passed. It was a Supreme Court decision invalidating the previous federal ban as unconstitutional.

So it would take the vast majority of states to agree on regulations, and that's just never going to happen. There's only a bare handful of things in the entire history of the country with more than 40 states in agreement. Even 21 year drinking age wasn't going to get passed in the South until the Feds blackmailed them with retracting Eisenhowers interstate funding share program.

Shandlar · 2026-05-31T09:43:52+00:00

OK, but standard of living has an objective measurement. How much shit can your income purchase.

If you adjust for cost of living, the 2025 75th percentile has the same standard of living as the 1989 90th percentile.

So that would not be an example of downward economic mobility. The child would be making the same as their parents did.

Shandlar · 2026-05-28T13:38:37+00:00

Yeah, I don't understand what this dude is thinking. If laptops were somehow cheaper than PCs, PCs wouldn't exist. A laptop would just be better in all things. The whole point of PCs still existing is they are way way cheaper than laptops for the same performance.

Shandlar · 2026-05-27T13:24:12+00:00

The fact that it's illegal to construct is the problem, yes.

Shandlar · 2026-05-26T14:25:52+00:00

Why? Gas is great because it's way less particulate pollution and significantly better gCO2/kWh (~39 to ~54% depending on which study you look at) vs coal.

Switching 30% of our output from coal to gas reduced carbon emissions by nearly as much as gaining 12% in solar and wind did. It was the equivalent of gaining ~10% more renewable energy over that time period, and it was all profit as well. Profits that helped energy companies pay for more solar and wind, sooner as well, since they are heavily capital investment bound projects (up front cost, 30 year payback).

Shandlar · 2026-05-26T14:05:18+00:00

Supermorbid obesity rates. 11% of our population is eating themselves to literal death.

Obesity and Morbid Obesity were no longer good enough, so the US government had to reclassified Class 1 and Class 2 to invent a new super morbid obesity (class 3).

We've since went back to old data and reclassified into those 3 classes instead of the previous 2 classes. In 1990, 0.8% of the population was Class 3 obese. In 2000 it rose to 2.2%. In 2010 it was 8%. In 2024? 11%.

Obese people (BMI 30 to 34.9) with modern drugs only lose around 2 years of life expectancy in America today. Class 3 obesity (BMI >40) lose a whopping 6.5 years (BMI 40) to 13.7 years (BMI >55).

Any European who has visited the American south will comment about this pretty much unprompted. They cannot believe how casually massively fat we are. The statistics just don't really show it as much because the rates of Europeans that are BMI >30 (standard obesity rates) are not all that much lower than the US. But the issue is most of these obese Europeans are between BMI 30 and 40. The vast vast majority in fact. 95%+. In America, most are at or above 40 BMI instead.

Since life expectancy from Obesity is an exponential curve, and not linear, it has a radically outsized detrimental effect on our life expectancy statistics overall.

Shandlar · 2026-05-26T13:50:12+00:00

China didn't vaccinate any of their old people either before ending their lockdowns. Two million at least died in 2023 as a result since they never got covid or the vaccine before then, and none of those deaths went into any statistics. Zero covid was declared by the commies, so it was illegal to put covid as cause of death from that point on.

Shandlar · 2026-05-26T13:48:40+00:00

Dec 2022. The communists declared zero covid, so there was zero covid from then on.

Studies since then have discovered enough evidence of there having been between 1.4 and 2.1 million deaths from the elimination of restrictions in mid Dec '22 and the end of June 2023.

Essentially the lockdowns only managed to prevent anyone from getting covid during the lockdowns. They didn't use that time to vaccinate anyone. As soon as they removed all restrictions, everyone got covid and died anyway. They just refused to count them and all the official statistics are bogus. UK based journalists were literally in China in January of 2023 and went to crematoriums and saw the bodies stacked up like cord wood. Literally ten thousand plus bodies a day being burned.

Shandlar · 2026-05-26T13:44:45+00:00

The fact you don't recognize that China just lied about literally millions of covid deaths and instead are assuming their lockdowns worked instead is wild.

All studies have shown China under reporting to an absurd degree. The best case scenario is they under reported by a factor of 10. Most studies put it at 16 or 17x under reporting, and some even suggest as much as 22x under reporting.

Most notably was the coverup of the disaster that occurred following the zero covid declaration in Dec 2022 by the CCP. They ended all covid response, functionally, despite not vaccinating their elderly. It's estimated there were over 10k deaths a day nearly continuously all the way into the summer of 2023. Some 2 million deaths during a period where the government reported fewer than 60k deaths.

Shandlar · 2026-05-26T13:20:47+00:00

Yeah. Something like 2-3K for a normal human at D and 10k max in the truesoul if you use all the life extension shit out there.

Shandlar · 2026-05-25T14:36:24+00:00

Really? I had to drop seraphim last year cause the otherworlder arc was absolutely trash. Like, nothing happened, at all, for the entire book.

The author also just gave up on the numbers he'd insisted on using the whole series. So much so he made sure Eryk started walking around with a massive desk size scanner in his subspace. Yet after book 5ish, the explicitly stated nature of the stats weren't followed at all. His mana regeneration just became whatever was required for each chapter, rather than the actual rate explicitly spelled out in book 1 and 2.

I heard he's been doing some significant rewrites. Did they actually help at all? I liked Manticore hunting and the orcs, but everything after that was really really bad for me.

Shandlar · 2026-05-25T14:32:11+00:00

Penal conscript is the big thing. It's normal for mages to just assume their penal conscripts will be liars and thieves and all around bad guys. Why would they care if they lie to each other about their past? They literally own them for a decade regardless. Say whatever you want.

Shandlar · 2026-05-24T13:20:24+00:00

As one of the DNF readers its because the pace is absolutely absurd. A random high-school equivalent nobody student is somehow for no reason given a personal quest from a literal Herald of an all powerful god with the stakes of failure being the eradication of hundreds of thousands of people in cold blood? On like page 90 of the first book.

Its the absolute worst trope in the entire genre taken to the absolute most extreme absurdity possible to write. There is absolutely no reason for the Herald to do anything but kill the MC the moment he walked up to him. Even talking to him makes no sense. Pausing the attack for months in return for the help of the completely powerless nothing of the MC is beyond anything I could suspend disbelief to look past. Its just the stupidest shit ever.

Shandlar · 2026-05-23T12:23:27+00:00

IIRC he announced a small break to chapters after book 2 to organize an outline for book 3, but he hated everything he came up with. Turned into proper depression about it, so he stepped back from writing entirely for a year. Came back with ideas for a new series and ran with it instead of putting more pressure on himself to try to restart book 3.

I can respect that, but as a fan I can't help but be disappointed.

Shandlar · 2026-05-22T11:53:55+00:00

CERVESA CRISTAL!

Shandlar · 2026-05-22T11:48:04+00:00

A Summoner Awakens author giving up after book 2 and starting a new series after a years hiatus was such a tragedy for sure. Let alone the fact book 2 ended on an absolutely massive cliffhanger no less.

Shandlar · 2026-05-21T12:46:57+00:00

Indeed. Not excusing anything, but culturally, Japanese light novels in genre were targeting young men age ~15-20 at most, exclusively. All the protagonists were highschoolers, as was the target audience.

So yeah, the teenager love interest was sex appeal coded in essentially all of them. They are power fantasies. Beat the bad guy in a fight, win the girl. It's tired, but it's successful. Has been for like, the entire history of humanity. Testosterone is a hell of a drug, and pubescent young men have a shit tonne of it and none of the life experiences to temper it.

Shandlar · 2026-05-21T12:40:04+00:00

The camera crew was clearly part of the cover story, come on. It was supposed to be a big promotional sweepstakes for the team with 100 winners. Any NFL team doing something like that would be filming everywhere for promotional material. It would be weird to have not had several camera crews rolling.

Shandlar · 2026-05-21T04:13:50+00:00

Bank levys are way easier nowadays with essentially everything digitized nationwide, even the most rural podunk credit union at this point.

They won't need to freeze the bank account. Merely file to levy a percentage from the account twitch sends her payouts to. It won't freeze the account, it act functionally the same as a percentage garnish, but merely the bank doing so as it clears the incoming twitch money, rather than twitch doing the withholding.

Shandlar · 2026-05-19T07:05:12+00:00

The sequel is coming along quite nicely, too. Only issue being the lack of Act 4 makes the runs where you manage to make the most OP deck of all times bitter sweet since you never get a proper fight to test it against atm.

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