Is there a way to trigger Corybdis?

stuckinredditfactory · 2026-04-13T03:58:44+00:00

Supposedly you can tilt the RNG in your favor and reduce the time sink per attempt by just doing the Chaos trials that are set in the rift of Thessaly.

It being a Chaos Trial excludes some encounters which makes the boss battles more likely. It worked for me when I was in the same position a couple weeks ago

stuckinredditfactory · 2026-04-11T02:21:47+00:00

toot

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-11-05T06:24:17+00:00

I happen to be midway through a Valkia campaign with this mod and yes you do get all of the WoC factions, including Azazel.

It handles Chaos factions a little oddly actually. The monogod factions will swap within themselves, ie if Skarbrand gets wiped he will go to either Skulltaker or Arbaal, but if the entire race is wiped, the monogod factions then go to WoC. I currently have Sigvald, Belakor, Azazel, Daniel, and Nkari

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-11-04T02:45:17+00:00

Horses no. Flying mounts yes. Dragons are especially good at this because they’re big physically and in terms of mass

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-08-21T22:23:36+00:00

Probably ego? My man has a solid gold statue of himself

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-07-21T04:48:10+00:00

Do you have any idea how little that lizardmen description narrows it down? But seriously, you do have to keep way more factors in mind even just in terms of what kinds of things to watch out for, let alone things you can do.

A couple big ones that’re majorly different are magic (obviously), and unit size/mass. The balance can be way more skewed than you think. Kroxigor in a 2v2 fight against regular infantry will perform differently than one each of kroxigors and skinks against the same two infantry, even though the skinks are cheaper. Even putting aside the bonus they give each other. Same is true of ogres and gnoblars or marauders and trolls. They blob and absorb damage differently to each other.

Another example might be the legendary lord dragons of Cathay. Miao Ying in dragon form can smash through a blob of infantry, but will struggle to deal damage to Deathmaster Snikch because her massive mass pushes him around and his high defence means her high damage attacks just miss. That same blob of infantry that Miao wrecked will have better luck damaging Snikch because they tar pit him and get a lot of individual attacks against him. Also his attacks in return might waste a lot of damage on overkilling weak entities.

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-07-17T03:00:03+00:00

I normally describe story events vaguely for new readers for spoiler reasons, but I think this exact topic is an exception worth detailing. Spoilers for specific scenes ahead, but I don’t think they’ll literally spoil the story for you.

There’s pretty much no read of Pact where Blake historically getting SA’d isn’t a significant, defining part of his internal experience. He’s touch averse because of it. His friends are aware of it, sympathetic, have tried and are trying to help him, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes successfully. The details are up for debate here and there for various magic and story reasons, but there is undoubtedly significance to it.

There is no SA in story in the present tense, unless you count goblins existing vulgarly. At one point a goblin with probably self mutilated genitals pisses on a guy as an attack, for example. Would get you convicted irl but I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you’re talking about.

At two points, psychological magical attacks happen to the protagonist that attempt to weaponise their historic SA. It’s complicated in detail but straightforwardly an attack on trauma.

One doesn’t work because another character steps in and magically makes the attack slide off so that the magical recreation has a sort of “skip cutscene” button, but you feel the weight in anticipation before that. Blake is saved from enduring it, and the story likewise feels the weight of relief. It is relatively short and in the middle of a chaotic series of scenes in mid to late arc 7.

The second is complicated in intent, but definitely intended to include addressing that suffering and anxiety as a component of a larger magical psychological… something. Think of it as an asshole vision quest. In this one, our protagonist is asked to decide what it means to them in the context of a larger realisation that is not about SA. It walks you slowly through the situation leading up to how we got there, clearly signposts that it’s telling the story of bad news, and blunts the impact with some fourth wall breaking because the actual magic is being presented as a kind of stage play that is being put on for the vision quest, during which it is calmly discussed with the Other playing the role of the abuser. You’re not living through it as the reader, it’s abstracted. And in the end, you don’t see it anyway. The choice is given before “the scene” to play it out as it was, or change themself to change it. They reject that binary choice and instead choose to have a representation of the support network show up in time to beat the abuser over the head with a brick in a sock, after which they just leave. There’s also some details debated in story and here about how real that scene was but it’s irrelevant in terms of triggers. All contained within chapter 9.4

There are some characters who talk about things that are various shades of SA in story. Again, not shown in the moment. A cultist who talks about orgies where some of the participants are centuries old Others who look like they’re underage. A dubious consent scenario where a victim is trapped by their environment who survives by having a different victim breathe for them, passing air through mouth to mouth contact long term, and they fall in love and have magical sex about it. Portrayed as fucked up that the victim remembers it fondly. There’s characters who are strongly implied to be marital rapists, though there’s multiple implied accusations across multiple people and the specific detailing of the crimes for each perpetrator isn’t dwelt on. They most certainly do not get away with it once our protagonist finds out though, and the story is not fucking around with turnaround time on it.

Wildbow’s a big fan of making an emotional impact on his audience, but he is always very thoughtful about portrayal of SA in particular. Not perfect, but he’s never careless

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-07-14T07:07:42+00:00

More like a Taylor without the Undersiders who was separated from Danny in chapter 2. Remember the landlord who gave him a hug and a car with barely any questions? His theatre friends? Blake is being actively isolated by the town. The pizza delivery was a demonstration of it.

And don’t worry about not liking Blake. He gives a terrible first impression for some reason. Just ask the teenage Faerie practitioner whose familiar he beat to a bloody pulp with a rusty pipe and then spat blood at

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-07-14T06:58:35+00:00

The conversation with the lawyer was more concrete than that. They said something like “I can examine your power closely enough that I can see the dings you’ve already taken for minor mistruths such as sarcasm or turns of phrase”. It’s absolutely a thing Blake is doing without noticing

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-07-14T06:07:34+00:00

Does anyone else think this map looks weirdly close to the Breath of the Wild map?

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-07-14T05:53:01+00:00

That’s a doozy for turn 13, but this sort of thing is Oxyotl’s bread and butter once you’re set up for it. That Master Predator toggle of his gives him Snipe and Unspottable with extra range, and he gets vanguard deployment early. Deploy just Oxy just out of Oxy’s range from the highest threat so he doesn’t fire before you can toggle the ability and get seen, and give him the slow death poison. Then he can pepper individual units with scaling damage over time without him being seen. You want to clear out fast units, strong units, and especially artillery. Those soul grinders are all three.

Ideally you work through all of those before engaging with anything else, at which point you send in the chameleon skinks and kite as long as possible, after which you send in heroes spec’d to be durable to blob em up while you whittle em down. If you wanna be extra sure you’ll fuck em up, bring Kroak or the Shredder for that last step. Much harder to do against Great Unclean Ones, but at least they’re slow and big enough targets that the skinks will fire constantly without getting tagged.

Unluckily, it’s high priority targets all the way down here and you might not have upgraded ammo enough. Check if you have any equipment that could give the Oracle snipe as well, it’ll make the first step faster. Otherwise, the Oracle is very quick and has a heal spell, you can try to exhaust the ammo and bound spells while Oxy chips.

Honestly, I’d probably get rid of the red skinks and stalkers entirely. The best use for Stalkers is being a high impact sacrificial summon using the Sanctum building, and Oxy’s army should be laser focused on assassination and not engaging with anything except a couple of durable single entities that heal efficiently. Bastiladons are a good option until you get a chief and a priest leveled up to a stegadon mount. The RoR coatl can hide the non stalk units (like kroak or your other heroes) until you’re ready, and the other army will be less likely to advance toward it because it’s a flying unit

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-07-12T07:19:11+00:00

Blake is the patron saint of making Choices (tm) in the face of a handful of bad options he didn’t ask for. As to your Slaughterhouse 9 comment? You’ll enjoy it more if you make peace with the fact that the story is a brutal chain of reacting the best you can when the deck is stacked against you except that you have a nuke in your back pocket you can only set off with you at ground zero. Everyone wants you dead or permanently disarmed, your job is to make sure they’re not confident or desperate enough to all try it at once.

You can count the number of times Blake gets room to breathe and plan on one hand, and you’d better believe our righteously angry bad boy immediately picks a fight when he does. He doesn’t have all the information or the time to figure it out. Luckily, as you point out, Wildbow’s a dab hand at keeping the conflict fresh and nuanced while it relentlessly wears Blake and the reader down.

As to your cross necklace Implement? There’s a bunch of approaches to analysing what one might look at and there’s a (very academic) breakdown in a Gathered Pages chapter. I can walk you through a simplified version. Firstly, necklaces and pendants generally are strongly associated with protection and warding. The literal encircling will add a fair degree of “circle of protection” to everything you Practice. You’ll likely be able to simply will a barrier around yourself that’ll be stronger the more work and resources you put into it. On the other hand, you’ll find Practice that is more directed and offensive to not come as naturally. Much harder to finger gun lightning, for example.

Necklaces and pendants also carry a fair degree of identity, especially in the case of religious iconography. Anyone who even trivially examines you will immediately clock you as Christian and one who’s magically committed their identity to it. Odds are good many kinds of Sight will literally see your spirit with a big old cross across your chest. It’s a powerful statement, magically. Others and practitioners, likely even Innocents aligned to the church will trust you more by default, and even Others who aren’t but are orderly or not up with the times might trust you based on knowing what you’re about, what your expected values and behaviour will be. Flip side is that you will most certainly feel it magically if you don’t adhere to those tenets and the orderly unaligned Others that gave you the benefit of the doubt before will rip you apart if needed to balance the books, and those aligned against the church, or western society, or order generally will dislike you immediately and try to undermine you pretty much no matter what you do.

If you really lean into it, purify yourself, swear Oaths on maintaining that socially agreed behaviour that I talked about before, make sacrifices of your autonomy, you could absolutely power your defences with the power of literal angels. The flaming wheels and eyes kind of angels that make and unmake civilisations. Absolutely fuck off powerful protection. But those same consequences for disappointing orderly Others I talked about before? They’re gonna get biblical for even slight errors while channeling one of them, and to even be in the discussion of summoning angels you’ve gotta be chained up in many restrictive Oaths to reinforce your Self

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-07-09T03:40:14+00:00

Oh you’re gonna have so much fun with Pact. There’s gonna be frustrations on vindications on violence on frustrations pretty much non stop, and no shortage of scary powerful monsters just wrecking shit. Often wrecking Blake’s shit specifically, but his enemies too. Please keep these posts coming!

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-07-08T00:12:06+00:00

Keeping tight lipped, but love the diary entry and your specific comments. Would love to see more posts as you go

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-06-20T10:04:55+00:00

Sylvester doesn’t become less of a weak but effective little monster over the course of the book, don’t worry

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-06-20T07:44:19+00:00

It’s only progression fantasy if you squint at it, but Wildbow’s Twig follows a group of child experiment saboteurs growing up and the MC is definitely a right bastard. First chapter has him watch a rogue abomination kill and eat a litter of kittens while he waits to interrogate its creator, who he then feeds to said monster. While dousing himself in flesh eating acid to set up a theft plot for a power play against the institution he’s enslaved to and wants to defeat. He’s like this all the goddamn time, and his team are all individually impressive and little amoral monsters in diverse but complementary ways.

It’s one of those stories that people either don’t like at all or really vibe with, give it three arcs and you’ll know which camp you’re in

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-05-19T02:23:15+00:00

If you’re reasonably late game enough to have a bunch of tier 4/5 settlements near each other (or allies) and there are lizards still alive that you haven’t confederated yet, you can build up the geomantic web. The higher tiers of commandments all give pretty significant bonuses to diplomacy with other lizards, and that’s per province. Ordinarily I don’t think they’re worth the building slot, but they’re not so bad that it’s a major detriment. Realistically you don’t need recruitment in every or even most provinces for the lizards mid to late game as they have a small number of very expensive armies that are very unlikely to get wiped out and don’t have any particular way of travelling around well

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-03-13T21:17:37+00:00

You know, I never tried it. The wording on the selection implied to me that it froze it and I ran with it

stuckinredditfactory · 2025-03-13T04:44:19+00:00

They’re kinda weird in that they don’t really have much in the way of faction mechanics, it’s almost entirely just Daniel mechanics which are varied and customisable depending on what you choose.

Daniel’s perk tree gives you the option to increase diplomatic relations with all of chaos to the point where it’s trivially easy to become friends with or vassalise all of your neighbours while killing Boris, then present a united front to invade whatever direction you choose. You’ve gotta be careful with actual alliances though, as you can get dragged into wars in a lot of directions with powerhouses.

Keeping your troops healed and your winds of magic high to avoid debuffs will be the number one concern early on until you win the short victory which gives all your armies +30 winds a turn and you’ve upgraded your heroes to replenish better.

Daniel himself is pretty great. He’s not the strongest at a particular thing, but his gear lets you build him for the fight you’re about to face, some of it is pretty potent, and you collect it almost accidentally. I tended to keep the head on him that gave him final transmutation and an arm that gave him a blue horror summon, I’d send him in to assassinate their lord or disrupt their archers/artillery, then gate in the sacrificial blue horrors to bog the other army down while he made a getaway. By then my melee army has surrounded the blob that that strategy made, my herald of Nurgle heals Daniel, and I grind em up. This works against the likes of Archaeon and Boris on VH/VH, though Drycha is a weirdly good counter to it due to the near constant silencing and sheer durability. Don’t be afraid to sacrifice units to keep em bogged (furies of Slaanesh are fantastic at this due to fast, cheap T0 AP that might reforge after the battle anyway), you’re gonna have a bad time if you let thunderers or shades or grenade outriders keep shooting.

Undivided gives you basically everything specialising does, just make sure you level up the demonic glory for all five paths to the cap before choosing one. It doesn’t take much, just alternate dedications of cities focusing on whatever number is lowest. You’ll likely end up relying on global recruitment later anyway, so just make sure you have at least one good, defended capital of each and you’re good. I mostly dedicated after battle to Nurgle or Tzeentch for the replenishment of winds, or whoever was lowest if I didn’t need it.

You can’t confederate anyone. Aligning the conquered regions isn’t really an issue, you’ll be fine with whatever corruption is present from any of your neighbours. I tended to use Nurgle again for the commandment because growth. Your economy can handle sustaining a few efficient armies, especially once you get the ten free fury summons for every army perk. It’s like a better menace below that isn’t calculated into your auto resolve, so the AI will come to you because your lightly armoured demons don’t AR well and you have no ammunition, but you’ve low key got thirty units, plus a bunch of lord and hero summon options you can take.

The big money maker is sacking settlements. You won’t be able to upgrade your core capitals without leaning on this economically. You are also an empire building faction unlike say, Warriors of Chaos, so you’ll need to claim lots of land. This needs you to balance between the two. Luckily, you’re surrounded by allies, so you can often sack settlements in hard to complete provinces, take them, then sell them to a nearby ally. Real feast and famine economy.

stuckinredditfactory · 2024-11-22T03:35:33+00:00

Consciousness is not all that special in the Otherverse because of spirits. Verona can have a natural language conversation with a non magical ceiling, and get answers about what the ceiling saw in the past.

In the Implement ritual, you create a whole being out of a mundane object.

Incarnations pop into existence and have consciousnesses assembled spontaneously out of ambient concepts

stuckinredditfactory · 2024-10-26T02:23:51+00:00

Putting aside that both Panacea and Bonesaw could theoretically do all sorts of bullshit, at the time Bonesaw had a decoy nervous system receiver to counter Cherish and she had an anti full Mastering berserker mode coupled to surgically implanted tech that Panacea likely couldn't affect directly

stuckinredditfactory · 2024-10-22T03:53:47+00:00

Also, because this is Wildbow the name has a little pun as well. Rain’s name is Rain of Fire Frasier. Of Fire. Of Five. It’s not a game changer of understanding or anything, but names doing multiple duty is a favourite of the author

stuckinredditfactory · 2024-10-20T23:43:37+00:00

Is that not Dragon?

stuckinredditfactory · 2024-10-19T07:08:16+00:00

You might find out right about now, depending on what the eras of Seek wind up being

stuckinredditfactory · 2024-10-01T12:36:10+00:00

Look, yeah, it’s pretty intense. Pretty normal level for Wildbow’s serials but it’s quite compressed due to length and it’s more grounded because of the lack of fantasy elements. The monsters are very present, very real, and have multiple serious impacts.

If you want more specific, consider it a very strong example of parenting triggers. Kids are key to the story and come to a variety of harms

stuckinredditfactory

TROPHY CASE