We've seen your take on a self-insert isekai, a Jumpchain, a Villainess Otome, a SysApoc, a Dungeon Core, and now a System-POV LitRPG. What would a Celestial Forge AW fic look like, if you were to write it from base principles?
I had to go refresh myself to see what that actually was, and will hope that Makin isn't lying to me:
Whenever the writer adds another two thousand words to their story, 100 Celestial Points, or “CP”, are deposited into the character’s pool. Then (usually immediately) a dice roll is made. The roll selects an invention from a massive table of items, derived from existing fictional franchises. Thor’s hammer might cost 600CP and require saved up points, while a Star Trek space gun might cost only 100CP.
I actually had an idea similar to this while watching a terrible anime, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. The idea was to write a webfic called One New Power Every Chapter. This was mostly because I thought this was exactly what that anime was doing, and wondered whether there was a way to make it good, or at least funny. (I sketched out a plan for a 10 chapter thing where the protagonist beats the Big Bad in chapter three and then just keeps getting more and more powers.)
I'm on record as not liking things to be randomly decided for me when I'm writing: I've gotten enough of that over the course of my life in tabletop games. So the dice-rolling aspect doesn't really appeal to me, nor does going with a pre-approved power list. But this is part of the fun of the genre, so I guess if I'm not ditching everything, then I would come up with my own power list and figure out how to make the random "pops" work without screwing up the story.
Let me think for ten minutes.
Alright, ten minutes have passed, and I'm still hung up on the "random" thing, which really does seem like it screws with the ability to write a good story, especially if done on relatively short word counts. I genuinely don't know how you effectively set up problems to solve if you don't know what tools your protagonist will have when he gets to them. (I had the thought that you could pre-roll absolutely everything and peek ahead, but this felt out of spirit to the improv nature of the genre.) I am going to ignore this aspect for now and assume that in this alternate universe where I wrote a celestial forge fic, I would be doing it as an exercise to get better at this sort of improv style of pants-heavy writing.
Here's part of my gimmick: we roll every 3K words (short chapters), but the thing we're rolling for falls into two classes:
Powers from such greatest hits as Telekinesis, Flight, Strength, etc., maybe 30 in total, possibly taken from one of my existing superpower lists
Permanent modifiers to an existing power, increasing magnitude, range, precision, etc.
When you roll, you're either rolling for a new power or for a modifier, and the more powers you have, the more modifiers are likely to be rolled, slowing down "actually new" stuff. The modifiers are individual to each power, but progressive, maybe borrowing from Mutants & Masterminds measurement table where possible.
Let's say "new power" gets a single ticket, then each existing power gets 3 tickets plus an extra ticket per modifier? I feel like this makes new powers more rare as we go on, and also means that a powerful power acquires extras more often, rich-get-richer style, in a way that's probably good for our protagonist having a mechanical identity. (Probably I would do some tweaking to this, with a penalty to make sure the "main" power doesn't run away with it entirely, a malus based on how far a power is ahead of the next least modified power.)
Eventually our protagonist would have a character sheet with something like:
Teleportation: 1000 mile range, unwilling passengers allowed, 20 ton limit, reaction speed, 1/second
Sand Manipulation: Sand Attack 2, Sand Generation 4, Sand Shield 3
Mind Control: Basic
This, to me, is much more manageable, and maintains some of the gacha element: you can high roll or low roll, getting something that massively expands abilities or pushes in entirely different directions, or you get more straightforward +1 abilities that are still good and maybe even great. We've removed some of the "Swiss Army knife" problem where you have a bunch of bullshit unrelated powers, half of which never get mentioned again.
(Late addition: I would also love to include special linked modifiers for individual pairs of powers, so you could like ... teleport sand at x10 the efficiency or something? Teleport twice as far if your target location is sandy? Something that interlinks powers.)
And what kind of story do you tell with this?
One that constantly escalates, I guess. One that can take ownership of the power creep.
Let me think about it for ten minutes.
Alright, here's the pitch:
Demons have come up from across the multiverse to take over Earth. As part of Gaia's natural immune response, people are Kindled to great and terrible powers of different varieties. This inevitably kills the host with speed in proportion to how much power they're given: if you have a weak Kindling, you might live another decade, but if you have something that can actually make a difference in the protracted resistance (the war was already won by the demons) then you might have as little as a year. Maybe as little as three months. Maybe a single month in the worst cases.
So this has been going on for some time, and our Kindled are more or less superheroes who are primarily concerned with beating back the brutal occupation, though they're split on how this should best be done and what the best course of action is. This is complicated by the fact that their powers are a death sentence, and that's a tough thing to handle. There's a history of martyrdom and almost an expectation of it, if you're strong enough.
So this is the world our protagonist gets his powers in, and as he grows more powerful over time (something that doesn't happen with Kindled) he's extremely aware that more power means he's likely accelerating toward his own death.
This is the main tension: our protagonist is certain that he's going to die, and fast, and every new power ticks down the estimate for how long he can keep going. He needs to make the most of the power, needs to accelerate into winning this thing for humanity. Because our protagonist really doesn't want to be a martyr: he wants to save himself, and knows that one way of doing that is to crush the demon invaders so hard that the lifeforce of the planet stops flowing through him.
I think whether or not this story succeeded would be a matter of what kinds of powers were rolled and when, and whether I could successfully write a set of chapters where e.g. the protagonist blows up a mining facility without precisely knowing what the protagonist's powers will be for the climax.
