Post by unstableequilibrium on May 20, 2016 0:01:40 GMT
Sound of Silence - A Relatively Basic Random-ish Guide to Sound
By UE (unstableEquilibrium)
Note: Made legibile by maternityDeparted! Many thanks to them.
Note2: 0y, s0me0ne ed1ted 0ut my swears.
So, I’ve seen a good deal of talking about Sound recently. As a native Scout of Sound and participant in about fifteen sessions now, with rerolling the aspect seven times, I’d like to think I know a little about Sound. There’s a lot of rumours about the aspect right now, with various interpretations and variables between each half-formed guide that only lists a few of the total qualities and abilities there are and that you might need, so I’m gonna try and clear some stuff up. I’m just gonna put random things that come to my mind here, if you want something in particular first check out otherwiseGent’s great FAQ (http://archiveofourown.org/works/408350) then request it if there’s no answers there.
Meanings: Noise, Escalation, Understanding?, overwhelmation (it’s a word, don’t argue)
Sound is, quite obviously, linked intrinsically to noise. This means anything from clicking your fingers, to footsteps, to the beat of a fraymotif, to a beat in your head - or even the beat of another person. More on that later. Any kind of sound is, well, Sound’s domain. This is kind of ironic, considering the first myth I’m covering:
'All Sound players are deaf.'
This is false and true. All Sound players are assigned a strange Aurallitude stat, meant to simply be a few points above normal but, in typical Sburb fashion, it’s bugged to all hell. You either have 0, meaning you’re completely deaf, or 1*10^41.3. Let’s just say that your first moments as a Sound player aren’t going to be fun if you’re in that latter group, but at least you’ll know what aspect you are, right?
Right?
Whether you agree or not, it doesn’t matter too much. Sound, like the awesome bro it is, has your back. Treat it right and it’ll do you no wrong. Sound grants you a passive buff on starting the game that grows as you become more experienced at using the aspect that grants you the ability to hear without having to directly use your ears. That’s right, you’ve got reverse-echolocation: your other senses pick up sound and transfer it to your brain so you can still hear, but in so much better quality. i have no idea how people can say they’ve enjoyed music until they’ve played sound. Every sense absorbs and processes sound, and every sense is converted into sound.
This brings us onto the second meaning. Escalation. The basic way to put this is that sounds echo. However, if that echo was of only slightly lesser volume and created two more just like it, that’d keep getting louder, right? Like a snowball rolling down a hill; cumulative growth. More and more and more and more until you suddenly understand everything. it’s kind of a turning point - you get overwhelmed with all the information you’re getting, and have to figure out a new way of processing it all at once without your head exploding. Here’s myth numero dos:
All Sound players are hyper-empathetic.
Completely false. You either fully give into the music (usually if you’re a bit more of a touchy-feely kinda person), becoming MORE empathetic than you naturally were due to being able to fully understand people, or you become a bit more apathetic and isolated to process it all then use it to help or fulfill what you want to do. There’s obviously shades of grey here; I myself belong a bit more to the latter group, but it’s more of a fluctuating state than a constant. Native Sound players are often mixed up with bad Life or Heart players; while we are like them, we don’t instinctively know how to solve your problem if you tell us what it is - we instead know you have a problem, and we know how that issue makes you feel. We also tend to be hyper-aware of our environments and uncomfortable with our senses being blocked out. This means that myth 3:
Sound players will attack you if you hit their senses
Holds a grain of truth. it’s obviously a stereotyped overexaggeration, but we do get uncomfortable with anything around our senses. To be honest, Ears are the least important to us when we’re actually playing the aspect because they don’t do anything, being deaf and all. Just don’t… try to cover our eyes. it won’t turn out well for you or for them.
Right, so there’s a few myths busted and the meanings reasonably well explained. Let’s move on to the juicy bits; Abilities.
Sound 101: Basic Abilities
Welcome to the World of a Sound player. Kinda… quiet right now, isn’t it? Well activate you’re basic passive ability you dumbass, it’s given pre-session for a reason! Most people only realize they have it when they get their first Revelawesome and see ‘oh look a passive ability i wonder whHOLY [expletive]’.
Don’t be that guy. That guy’s a noob.
Instead, activate it as early as possible and get used to your expanded sensory range, because you’re gonna be using it often. For reference, it’s called [Drown in Sound]. Kinda depressing on first glance, but once you experience it you’ll understand why it was called that. This ability inputs sounds into your other senses, then converts all of THOSE into sound again. This means you have synaesthasia for everything. This can take a while to get used to, depending on its severity, but by the time you do come to appreciate everything it does for you you’ll suddenly be in the next session and confused as all [expletive]. Unfortunately, the only way to cure that problem is to simply get used to the changes in senses the aspect offers.
The basic ability also has a small second component; you naturally are in-tune. This doesn’t just mean tonally correct; it means you’re in-tune with the world around you, you’re more talented with both rhythms and melodies (crosses over a bit with some other aspects there but let’s be honest it’s all just one big cluster[expletive]), and you’re in tune with other people. This essentially makes you sensitive to Catastrophes like animals are to a natural disaster; the music playing suddenly goes ominous and you know [expletive]’s about to go down. Fire off a [Calamity] player command if you ever get this feeling - it will save your, and possibly your entire session’s life. Learning how to interpret all the sounds coming in and isolating part of the melody of the world are things you’ll need to learn how to do when you want to more accurately prophesise, and it’s a skill you need no matter what class you are. Knight? Use the beat to figure out where all the enemies are Daredevil style and what abilities they have instantly. Seer? Well, obvious enough; detect feelings and all that [expletive] along with prophecising all the ominous [expletive] you feel. Destroyer classes get to destroy these sounds; i.e, they go after the source before the sound is made and destroy it through sound, preventing the bad [expletive] from happening. or they can cause it. Meh. Beware corruption, though; you’re great at sensing it, but you’re also super-suggestible to it. Just be careful with how in tune you are; when you channel a tonne of you’re aspect then finish a fight or go unconscious, you become hyper-succeptible to any influences.
Anyone who’s not a sound player, don’t be a dick about this. There’s a difference between ordering someone as a butler for a joke and telling them to stab themselves to see if they’ll do it. The less experienced they are, the more likely they will, and it’s not fun.
Edit: Also, note this. Despite how powerful Sound can get in a short time, the abilities start off doing weaker damage until you compound them somehow - and when you do, the pluck costs start increasing until they overtake Space's. Any pluck restoration you can get, abuse over any other stat - you can increase all the others, but you absolutely need to keep your pluck high and regenerating as fast as possible.
Sound 102: Big ol' Ability List:
[Forte]: Your average sonic blaster ability. Early to learn, cheap to cast and easy to spam. it deals kinetic and sonic damage for you min-maxers, pushing enemies away and disorientating them. Good enough to shove an imp away or make an ogre topple over if you hit it in the right spot.
[Fortissimo]: Your above-average sonic blaster ability. Probably enough to make an imp zoom off like it came out of a cannon.
[Fortississimo]: Endgame air cannon. You don’t wanna get hit by this. Causes imps to explode from the sheer sonic force and anything bigger to be shoved away. Can even topple some Colossals.
[Piano]: on the other end of the spectrum, creates a basic sonic shield that blocks out some of the external noise and can block weaker attacks. Can be expanded up to how much pluck you’re willing to spend.
[Pianissimo]: You can tell where this is going. All of the basic abilities are a bit boringly named. Better shield, basic scrying of what people are saying is blocked (i.e anything that directly asks for what a person is saying), somewhat blocks the effect of mental influences due to all the charged aspect energy.
[Pianississimo]: And finally to wrap it all off, super powerful shield with complete prevention of any kind of scrying inside of it. All the energy makes a weird bubble that distorts all attempts to look into it. Completely blocks out external sounds and most attacks until you take it down or your pluck runs out. More strongly resists mental influences, but any from inside are massively increased in power on other people inside. Something about them echoing off the barrier.
Psy-buffs in general: Most of Sound’s psybuffs are glitched. They completely sensory isolate the affected individual(s) for a variable amount of time. This isn’t a psybuff, it’s a mental attack. Use on AIs to glitch them out for a while, or spam them on PKers until their mind crumbles. Your choice. Using it on a Consort gets you a bit of land rep depending on how badly they were panicking, but sends them comatose for a few days. Not worth it. Short-term ones are useful as an alternative to Rain’s ‘Lemme think for a second’ one; time is similarly dilated using the stronger psy’buffs’, so you can use them to take a breather from all the ‘noise’ when you’re just starting Sound. As you grow into it, that noise is painful to be away from instead of with.
[Take Five]: if your combo or groove would be broken by a misstep, this skill smooths out the break to lessen the effect. Useful as a fallback throughout the game if you need to chug a funky consumable.
[Seven Nation Army]: Every time you successfully take down an enemy, this skill restores pluck equal to a portion of that enemy’s health. Lets you take on huge groups of enemies at once by stacking your other passives on top of each other and using them to fire huge [Fortississimo]s.
[.I write Sins Not Tragedies]: Protecting an ally or yourself with a shield buffs your flummoxie. The shield can then be fired as an omnidirectional pulsewave.
[Famous Last Words]: Any defeated enemies let off a pulse of sonic energy that disorientates nearby enemies and gives you a temporary but renewable and stackable buff of flummoxie if the pulsewave hits you.
[Four Seasons]: Every second you have a buff on you, any musical effects (fraymotifs, musical weapons and further sound-related buffs, including a variety of Rain’s laughter buffs) increase in effectiveness.
[Psychocommunication]: A Sound player’s thoughts are broadcasted directly into your head. often left on for the entire session after they get used to it, and admittedly can be annoying when they think of certain things. Yes, like your [expletive]ed-up fetishes you stupid Dame of Sound. You know who you are.
[Canon in A Minor]: Firing an offensive attack creates a weak shield proportional to it’s effect around you.
[Cannon in D Major]: The more buff stacks you have on you, the more your attacks grow in ‘volume’ (i.e power).
[Are We Human?]: The higher your combo, the greater your scamperway.
[Are We Dancer?]: The faster your speed, the slower time seems to flow. You can react at normal speed but everyone else moves slow, letting you rack up some pretty sick comboes in a short amount of time.
There’s a whole load of more passive buffs, but you get the basic idea. All of the abilities are strong individually and most can be used on allies to buff them too, but together? once you learn to conduct the band, you create a masterpiece. Anyone have the exact names and descriptions of any other abilities? I’ll add them if you put them up.
There’s a few more directly offensive abilities you need to be immediately aware of.
[Resonance Cascade]: Each buff on you causes more power to be added to this death-star style sonic beam. if you’re hit by this when a Sound player is in their groove, you are very likely to explode and/or implode. Common Beserk Trigger combined with a sudden wave of huge buffs on the person for combat roles.
[Up To Eleven]: Everyone gets [Drown In Sound], then everyone hears each other’s [Drown In Sound] simultaneously. it hurts. Just run away from it or dropkick to the face, either works if they calm down.
[Echo, Echo]: Possibly the most dangerous ability out of a large number of aspects. it’s effect by itself? Nothing. However, every time a sound hits ANYTHING (i.e walls, blades of grass, anything larger than a needle tip INCLUDING OTHER SOUNDWAVES as an exception), the sound is reproduced at the same volume. it takes about twelve seconds before a planet just cracks apart, but the pluck cost is so ridiculously high to maintain only Destroyer or Calamity classes can really maintain it that long. if a Waste uses this, then… it’s messy to clean up the damage it deals.
Try to stop them while you can, or your body is probably gonna turn to mush before being evaporated.
Sound 103: The F*** is that thing A.K.A Denziens
From the request, I'll start typing normally from here despite the extra effort needed. Again, if anyone feels like editing the top bit before I eventually get around to it sometime (maybe idk probably when I roll Flow or something) then feel free and you'll get credit or something.
Ok. Denziens. I've met with most of the Sound denziens, and there's a bit of bad news - 2 out of 3 times, they're associated with Angels. This isn't very fun because there tends to be a very small amount of Angelic corruption let off when you talk to your denzien. This isn't anything immediatly dangerous due to it being such a small amount, especially since it trickles off over time, but the more you're adapted to your Sound abilities the more even a small amount of corruption can affect you when you're near a source if you don't know how to control your senses, so please - be careful, and get someone to check. One of the two is a lot worse than the other.
Metatron: This guy will record everything you say and mercilessly use it against you, but he's not too bad. Just try not to get flustered over what he brings up, even though we know that's near impossible with a denzien. He does tend to be very useful in working out immediate problems, though, and getting you to get back to work. Small risk of angelic corruption (after all, he's name stems from the Messenger Angel); recommended way to counteract is simply don't use any scrying techniques near him, but you can keep your passive on; the amount's low enough that it should wash over you if you've got at least a psybuff or two on you. Looks like a white and black snake with many arms holding dozens of books and constantly scribbling stuff down in them. Yes, it does get annoying - no, DON'T destroy the books. He doesn't take it well and he can fire lasers out of those pens. Yes, all of them.
Heimdall: Out of all the denziens I've ever met, this guy is the coolest dude. I mean, yea, he's a snake, but it's like... imagine instead of just being a huge ass, the denzien still made funny jokes and just said things that needed to be said instead of bullshitting about. Yea, Heimdall is actually my lad. Also, no corruption! You can normally hear him singing poems or random songs from your homeworld before you get here, and I got kicked out after I heard him singing Friday and couldn't stop laughing. Yea, just don't laugh at him unless it's at a joke. He has slight vision into the future and skill in beat-related mechanics he's normally willing to make a deal with if you give up another of your senses for that session, which sounds bad but it really isn't much when you're about to fight the Black King and want something a little extra. He wears a large helmet with small wings on his face, and is grey-white with plates of steel going down his body like some unfinished armor.
Gabriel: On the other end of the spectrum, this guy's a pretentious prick and has a bit more natural corruption. Whenever he attacks you as well, you're gonna get blasted with a good few points of the stuff. He's hyper-religious and all about morals and always being empathetic and stuff, and if you do anything wrong he tells you you've sinned and you have to make up for it. Anything wrong at all; tripping over a few minutes ago counts, until you're forced to just accept he wants to make you the best that you can be. At least, that's how you're gonna phrase it so you can actually progress in the game, but let's be honest he's just a jackass. You'll need to turn you passive off when meeting this guy or have another player keep a light watch over you for your session and make sure not too much corruption builds up. For that matter, whenever you see a denzien (your own or another player's) that is associated with one of the two corruption sources, get someone to keep a light watch over you because you suck up corruption like a sponge does when you try to scry the denzien by accident. As you progress you'll learn to block out that corruption intake by only focusing on the presence of angels/others and not the being of them - it's complicated and more of an instinctual thing.
Sound 104: Avatars (In Progress!)
So. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not 100% sure what an avatar of Sound will be able to do since I'm not one yet. However, you do start to occasionally feel things as you start rerolling the aspect over and over again. Small bursts of sound in your head, occasional insights like you're using your passive ability even when you aren't on Sound. My theory for Sound avatarism is that your passive ability will be active on other classes, allowing you to once again convert all your senses into sound and get the premonitions that you normally have. I'd imagine Avatars of Sound would also be ridiculously well timed with fraymotifs, and be able to stack buffs using any kind of musical-based medium even if that buff is not normally able to be built up upon. Possibly they'd be able to use some of Sound's basic attacks as well. Again, a large majority of this - especially the latter part - is just theory, but I'll update this as I hopefully progress towards becoming one.
Sound and Other Aspects:
In my opinion, Sound's best partners in Unbreakable Unions would probably be Flow, Time and Rain. The last one is probably the best combo out of all of them, but also has a chance of making everyone else in the session become more confused than just the Rain player by themselves, and the Sound player is equally likely to go as loopy as the Rain player.
Sound and Flow are awesome together because of their focus about buildups and buffing. This combo is terrifying in that both aspects usually take a couple of minutes to really get into the flow of things normally, but when together? It takes a matter of seconds to bounce buffs of each other and launch what can only be described as Armageddon. So, you know how Breath and Flow make fire tornadoes? Well, if a Sound player fires out any of their blasts, it picks up the fire and brings it along for the ride. Also, making a slight edit on [Resonance Cascade] via a bit of freestyling, I managed to make an ability that I called [Resonance Collide] that counts both your buffs and requires both of you to cast (you'll be doing the brunt of the work though, they just add some fire in there) that makes a death ray. It's cool, but hard as fuck to get right - just be careful if you decide to try and figure out how to do it. I would try to explain it but we only managed it once when we got our Kickstart from our duo fraymotif. Talking about that, [Hot Beats] (do fraymotifs keep the same name?) tends to be really, REALLY fast paced. Your Flow player can keep up with it but you practically need [Are We Dancer?] at a good level before activating it or else you'll fail it near immediately. If you do it right, then this combo can quickly buff both each other to ridiculous levels.
Next, Sound and Time. The concept's relatively simple, if a bit more passive than the other two - Sound gets a foreboding feeling or figures out something's wrong, Time KNOWS that something WILL go wrong and what it is, and so together they instantly figure out what's happening when. It can get scarily accurate as they figure out your emotions nearly as well as a Heart player does or seem to be constantly looking into the future. When you buddy up with a Timebro, you'll quickly get almost a mental link as you both basically read each other's mind and just know what the other person's thinking. The synchronization between you two will be epic. You also help each other with your problems; Sound knows when Time is getting stressed or feeling down about something and is empathetic enough to give them a hug or talk about feelings but not push too far unlike Heart, whilst Time helps Sound deal with all the foreboding feelings they get and help them solve the issues before they happen whilst giving them someone sturdy to talk to about their more depressing feelings. In a fight, you can't sneak up on this combo. It's basically impossible. Time adds a tempo to Sound's melody, making a powerful musical combo that, again, stacks buffs really nicely. Timeclones can be used to stack additional buffs onto the two and make use of AoE buffs multiple times from the Sound player. Once again, any ability like my described [Resonance Collide] works really well because it absorbs the buffs from all the clones as well to use, but it's limited in power because the Time player has trouble adding any direct additions to it; you might be better off just using [Resonance Cascade] with an AoE charging instead, which is a lot easier to freestyle. Fraymotifs tend to have steady pulses that give big buffs each time you both move in time with it.
Finally... Rain and Sound. Sound players quickly learn the Rain player's way of thinking due to their natural passives, and can translate for the rest of the team. The Rain player, on the other hand, learns how to manage the insanity into a constant melody or pulse. This is already a huge positive, but it's just scratching the surface. Rainbow Bullshit and Sound Waves just have some kind of natural synergy that makes anything hit by a combined attack be disorientated and hit with a burst of Rain's madness-inducing effect. Their Fraymotif (called [Sound of Madness] in my session) sounds incredibly strange and alternates between rocking/heavy and nauseating. Then we get onto dupliclones. Exactly the same as Time, the dupliclones all can use the buffs that Sound gives, but when all of them start using Rain's buffs as well? Rain buffs are laughter - which is a Sound. This, in turn, increases Sound's power, which further increases Rain's power times however many clones they have in the area, which... well, you get the idea. [Resonance Collide] fires off what can only be described as a [Requiem of Sunshine and and Rainbows] in a laser form. I'm fairly sure it can damage bedrock because of how stupidly high the damage gets when it's focused if the two players have been buffing for a minute or so. If these two start glowing with rainbow pulses coming out of them, it means the buffs have reached a critical point and the game is starting to glitch out with how intense and how many particle effects it's trying to generate, and unless you're fighting an endgame boss is a sign you should run or else you're basically going to be hit from just the aftershock of an attack which is basically a beserk trigger without even being their Unite Synchronization. I mean, sure, most Unbreakable Unions have attacks like this, but the point is that there's so many buffs increasing its power it just microwaves anything it hits. I've seen a Unite Synchronization from this combo once; not from a first person perspective, but as a Sylph of Space that session, and... I don't even know. Even thinking about what it was made me and the Void player want to throw up while we were still in those classpects. I'm fairly sure that it's at a huge risk of messing with Trickster mode and Saccharine Doppelgangers just because of how much it fucks with reality itself because of how much Sound has buffed the Rain player up, and at the very least it's probably best to never go back to that place unless you enjoy different laws of physics.
I'll never be able to look the same at the Black King again after seeing the aftermath of that.
Just, uh... for all these combos, try to keep an eye on your pluck. If you run out while charging a larger attack, it's probably not gonna be pretty, and practically all of these burn pluck ridiculously fast.
Q & A:
Miscellaneous section for specific questions in the thread that I want people to see.
From maternityDeparted:
Sort of. The Orchestra is a weird whispering; it involves a lot of different instruments, including voices, and there's a few more instruments of the one you play (so a bit of bias towards it). The Orchestra likes things to be working together as a whole, so it might have been literally working together with the other whispering and creating a 'better' overall result, so it made it understandable for you. The times that it didn't make sense were the times all the other instruments were playing instead - since you weren't a Sound player, you could only hear a bit of The Orchestra flowing with the other whispering at once, so it was translated only by one instrument. At least, that's my theory from what other co-players have told me when I've played Sound. It is basically translating what The Beat is saying directly into musical notes and playing whatever's the result to you. It would probably get lesser in effect the further away from your Union co-player you are, but while you're close one or two instruments will probably play along just like the Sound player will probably be hearing a more steady rhythm (i.e a Beat) in The Orchestra that makes it easier to comprehend.
By UE (unstableEquilibrium)
Note: Made legibile by maternityDeparted! Many thanks to them.
Note2: 0y, s0me0ne ed1ted 0ut my swears.
So, I’ve seen a good deal of talking about Sound recently. As a native Scout of Sound and participant in about fifteen sessions now, with rerolling the aspect seven times, I’d like to think I know a little about Sound. There’s a lot of rumours about the aspect right now, with various interpretations and variables between each half-formed guide that only lists a few of the total qualities and abilities there are and that you might need, so I’m gonna try and clear some stuff up. I’m just gonna put random things that come to my mind here, if you want something in particular first check out otherwiseGent’s great FAQ (http://archiveofourown.org/works/408350) then request it if there’s no answers there.
Meanings: Noise, Escalation, Understanding?, overwhelmation (it’s a word, don’t argue)
Sound is, quite obviously, linked intrinsically to noise. This means anything from clicking your fingers, to footsteps, to the beat of a fraymotif, to a beat in your head - or even the beat of another person. More on that later. Any kind of sound is, well, Sound’s domain. This is kind of ironic, considering the first myth I’m covering:
'All Sound players are deaf.'
This is false and true. All Sound players are assigned a strange Aurallitude stat, meant to simply be a few points above normal but, in typical Sburb fashion, it’s bugged to all hell. You either have 0, meaning you’re completely deaf, or 1*10^41.3. Let’s just say that your first moments as a Sound player aren’t going to be fun if you’re in that latter group, but at least you’ll know what aspect you are, right?
Right?
Whether you agree or not, it doesn’t matter too much. Sound, like the awesome bro it is, has your back. Treat it right and it’ll do you no wrong. Sound grants you a passive buff on starting the game that grows as you become more experienced at using the aspect that grants you the ability to hear without having to directly use your ears. That’s right, you’ve got reverse-echolocation: your other senses pick up sound and transfer it to your brain so you can still hear, but in so much better quality. i have no idea how people can say they’ve enjoyed music until they’ve played sound. Every sense absorbs and processes sound, and every sense is converted into sound.
This brings us onto the second meaning. Escalation. The basic way to put this is that sounds echo. However, if that echo was of only slightly lesser volume and created two more just like it, that’d keep getting louder, right? Like a snowball rolling down a hill; cumulative growth. More and more and more and more until you suddenly understand everything. it’s kind of a turning point - you get overwhelmed with all the information you’re getting, and have to figure out a new way of processing it all at once without your head exploding. Here’s myth numero dos:
All Sound players are hyper-empathetic.
Completely false. You either fully give into the music (usually if you’re a bit more of a touchy-feely kinda person), becoming MORE empathetic than you naturally were due to being able to fully understand people, or you become a bit more apathetic and isolated to process it all then use it to help or fulfill what you want to do. There’s obviously shades of grey here; I myself belong a bit more to the latter group, but it’s more of a fluctuating state than a constant. Native Sound players are often mixed up with bad Life or Heart players; while we are like them, we don’t instinctively know how to solve your problem if you tell us what it is - we instead know you have a problem, and we know how that issue makes you feel. We also tend to be hyper-aware of our environments and uncomfortable with our senses being blocked out. This means that myth 3:
Sound players will attack you if you hit their senses
Holds a grain of truth. it’s obviously a stereotyped overexaggeration, but we do get uncomfortable with anything around our senses. To be honest, Ears are the least important to us when we’re actually playing the aspect because they don’t do anything, being deaf and all. Just don’t… try to cover our eyes. it won’t turn out well for you or for them.
Right, so there’s a few myths busted and the meanings reasonably well explained. Let’s move on to the juicy bits; Abilities.
Sound 101: Basic Abilities
Welcome to the World of a Sound player. Kinda… quiet right now, isn’t it? Well activate you’re basic passive ability you dumbass, it’s given pre-session for a reason! Most people only realize they have it when they get their first Revelawesome and see ‘oh look a passive ability i wonder whHOLY [expletive]’.
Don’t be that guy. That guy’s a noob.
Instead, activate it as early as possible and get used to your expanded sensory range, because you’re gonna be using it often. For reference, it’s called [Drown in Sound]. Kinda depressing on first glance, but once you experience it you’ll understand why it was called that. This ability inputs sounds into your other senses, then converts all of THOSE into sound again. This means you have synaesthasia for everything. This can take a while to get used to, depending on its severity, but by the time you do come to appreciate everything it does for you you’ll suddenly be in the next session and confused as all [expletive]. Unfortunately, the only way to cure that problem is to simply get used to the changes in senses the aspect offers.
The basic ability also has a small second component; you naturally are in-tune. This doesn’t just mean tonally correct; it means you’re in-tune with the world around you, you’re more talented with both rhythms and melodies (crosses over a bit with some other aspects there but let’s be honest it’s all just one big cluster[expletive]), and you’re in tune with other people. This essentially makes you sensitive to Catastrophes like animals are to a natural disaster; the music playing suddenly goes ominous and you know [expletive]’s about to go down. Fire off a [Calamity] player command if you ever get this feeling - it will save your, and possibly your entire session’s life. Learning how to interpret all the sounds coming in and isolating part of the melody of the world are things you’ll need to learn how to do when you want to more accurately prophesise, and it’s a skill you need no matter what class you are. Knight? Use the beat to figure out where all the enemies are Daredevil style and what abilities they have instantly. Seer? Well, obvious enough; detect feelings and all that [expletive] along with prophecising all the ominous [expletive] you feel. Destroyer classes get to destroy these sounds; i.e, they go after the source before the sound is made and destroy it through sound, preventing the bad [expletive] from happening. or they can cause it. Meh. Beware corruption, though; you’re great at sensing it, but you’re also super-suggestible to it. Just be careful with how in tune you are; when you channel a tonne of you’re aspect then finish a fight or go unconscious, you become hyper-succeptible to any influences.
Anyone who’s not a sound player, don’t be a dick about this. There’s a difference between ordering someone as a butler for a joke and telling them to stab themselves to see if they’ll do it. The less experienced they are, the more likely they will, and it’s not fun.
Edit: Also, note this. Despite how powerful Sound can get in a short time, the abilities start off doing weaker damage until you compound them somehow - and when you do, the pluck costs start increasing until they overtake Space's. Any pluck restoration you can get, abuse over any other stat - you can increase all the others, but you absolutely need to keep your pluck high and regenerating as fast as possible.
Sound 102: Big ol' Ability List:
[Forte]: Your average sonic blaster ability. Early to learn, cheap to cast and easy to spam. it deals kinetic and sonic damage for you min-maxers, pushing enemies away and disorientating them. Good enough to shove an imp away or make an ogre topple over if you hit it in the right spot.
[Fortissimo]: Your above-average sonic blaster ability. Probably enough to make an imp zoom off like it came out of a cannon.
[Fortississimo]: Endgame air cannon. You don’t wanna get hit by this. Causes imps to explode from the sheer sonic force and anything bigger to be shoved away. Can even topple some Colossals.
[Piano]: on the other end of the spectrum, creates a basic sonic shield that blocks out some of the external noise and can block weaker attacks. Can be expanded up to how much pluck you’re willing to spend.
[Pianissimo]: You can tell where this is going. All of the basic abilities are a bit boringly named. Better shield, basic scrying of what people are saying is blocked (i.e anything that directly asks for what a person is saying), somewhat blocks the effect of mental influences due to all the charged aspect energy.
[Pianississimo]: And finally to wrap it all off, super powerful shield with complete prevention of any kind of scrying inside of it. All the energy makes a weird bubble that distorts all attempts to look into it. Completely blocks out external sounds and most attacks until you take it down or your pluck runs out. More strongly resists mental influences, but any from inside are massively increased in power on other people inside. Something about them echoing off the barrier.
Psy-buffs in general: Most of Sound’s psybuffs are glitched. They completely sensory isolate the affected individual(s) for a variable amount of time. This isn’t a psybuff, it’s a mental attack. Use on AIs to glitch them out for a while, or spam them on PKers until their mind crumbles. Your choice. Using it on a Consort gets you a bit of land rep depending on how badly they were panicking, but sends them comatose for a few days. Not worth it. Short-term ones are useful as an alternative to Rain’s ‘Lemme think for a second’ one; time is similarly dilated using the stronger psy’buffs’, so you can use them to take a breather from all the ‘noise’ when you’re just starting Sound. As you grow into it, that noise is painful to be away from instead of with.
[Take Five]: if your combo or groove would be broken by a misstep, this skill smooths out the break to lessen the effect. Useful as a fallback throughout the game if you need to chug a funky consumable.
[Seven Nation Army]: Every time you successfully take down an enemy, this skill restores pluck equal to a portion of that enemy’s health. Lets you take on huge groups of enemies at once by stacking your other passives on top of each other and using them to fire huge [Fortississimo]s.
[.I write Sins Not Tragedies]: Protecting an ally or yourself with a shield buffs your flummoxie. The shield can then be fired as an omnidirectional pulsewave.
[Famous Last Words]: Any defeated enemies let off a pulse of sonic energy that disorientates nearby enemies and gives you a temporary but renewable and stackable buff of flummoxie if the pulsewave hits you.
[Four Seasons]: Every second you have a buff on you, any musical effects (fraymotifs, musical weapons and further sound-related buffs, including a variety of Rain’s laughter buffs) increase in effectiveness.
[Psychocommunication]: A Sound player’s thoughts are broadcasted directly into your head. often left on for the entire session after they get used to it, and admittedly can be annoying when they think of certain things. Yes, like your [expletive]ed-up fetishes you stupid Dame of Sound. You know who you are.
[Canon in A Minor]: Firing an offensive attack creates a weak shield proportional to it’s effect around you.
[Cannon in D Major]: The more buff stacks you have on you, the more your attacks grow in ‘volume’ (i.e power).
[Are We Human?]: The higher your combo, the greater your scamperway.
[Are We Dancer?]: The faster your speed, the slower time seems to flow. You can react at normal speed but everyone else moves slow, letting you rack up some pretty sick comboes in a short amount of time.
There’s a whole load of more passive buffs, but you get the basic idea. All of the abilities are strong individually and most can be used on allies to buff them too, but together? once you learn to conduct the band, you create a masterpiece. Anyone have the exact names and descriptions of any other abilities? I’ll add them if you put them up.
There’s a few more directly offensive abilities you need to be immediately aware of.
[Resonance Cascade]: Each buff on you causes more power to be added to this death-star style sonic beam. if you’re hit by this when a Sound player is in their groove, you are very likely to explode and/or implode. Common Beserk Trigger combined with a sudden wave of huge buffs on the person for combat roles.
[Up To Eleven]: Everyone gets [Drown In Sound], then everyone hears each other’s [Drown In Sound] simultaneously. it hurts. Just run away from it or dropkick to the face, either works if they calm down.
[Echo, Echo]: Possibly the most dangerous ability out of a large number of aspects. it’s effect by itself? Nothing. However, every time a sound hits ANYTHING (i.e walls, blades of grass, anything larger than a needle tip INCLUDING OTHER SOUNDWAVES as an exception), the sound is reproduced at the same volume. it takes about twelve seconds before a planet just cracks apart, but the pluck cost is so ridiculously high to maintain only Destroyer or Calamity classes can really maintain it that long. if a Waste uses this, then… it’s messy to clean up the damage it deals.
Try to stop them while you can, or your body is probably gonna turn to mush before being evaporated.
Sound 103: The F*** is that thing A.K.A Denziens
From the request, I'll start typing normally from here despite the extra effort needed. Again, if anyone feels like editing the top bit before I eventually get around to it sometime (maybe idk probably when I roll Flow or something) then feel free and you'll get credit or something.
Ok. Denziens. I've met with most of the Sound denziens, and there's a bit of bad news - 2 out of 3 times, they're associated with Angels. This isn't very fun because there tends to be a very small amount of Angelic corruption let off when you talk to your denzien. This isn't anything immediatly dangerous due to it being such a small amount, especially since it trickles off over time, but the more you're adapted to your Sound abilities the more even a small amount of corruption can affect you when you're near a source if you don't know how to control your senses, so please - be careful, and get someone to check. One of the two is a lot worse than the other.
Metatron: This guy will record everything you say and mercilessly use it against you, but he's not too bad. Just try not to get flustered over what he brings up, even though we know that's near impossible with a denzien. He does tend to be very useful in working out immediate problems, though, and getting you to get back to work. Small risk of angelic corruption (after all, he's name stems from the Messenger Angel); recommended way to counteract is simply don't use any scrying techniques near him, but you can keep your passive on; the amount's low enough that it should wash over you if you've got at least a psybuff or two on you. Looks like a white and black snake with many arms holding dozens of books and constantly scribbling stuff down in them. Yes, it does get annoying - no, DON'T destroy the books. He doesn't take it well and he can fire lasers out of those pens. Yes, all of them.
Heimdall: Out of all the denziens I've ever met, this guy is the coolest dude. I mean, yea, he's a snake, but it's like... imagine instead of just being a huge ass, the denzien still made funny jokes and just said things that needed to be said instead of bullshitting about. Yea, Heimdall is actually my lad. Also, no corruption! You can normally hear him singing poems or random songs from your homeworld before you get here, and I got kicked out after I heard him singing Friday and couldn't stop laughing. Yea, just don't laugh at him unless it's at a joke. He has slight vision into the future and skill in beat-related mechanics he's normally willing to make a deal with if you give up another of your senses for that session, which sounds bad but it really isn't much when you're about to fight the Black King and want something a little extra. He wears a large helmet with small wings on his face, and is grey-white with plates of steel going down his body like some unfinished armor.
Gabriel: On the other end of the spectrum, this guy's a pretentious prick and has a bit more natural corruption. Whenever he attacks you as well, you're gonna get blasted with a good few points of the stuff. He's hyper-religious and all about morals and always being empathetic and stuff, and if you do anything wrong he tells you you've sinned and you have to make up for it. Anything wrong at all; tripping over a few minutes ago counts, until you're forced to just accept he wants to make you the best that you can be. At least, that's how you're gonna phrase it so you can actually progress in the game, but let's be honest he's just a jackass. You'll need to turn you passive off when meeting this guy or have another player keep a light watch over you for your session and make sure not too much corruption builds up. For that matter, whenever you see a denzien (your own or another player's) that is associated with one of the two corruption sources, get someone to keep a light watch over you because you suck up corruption like a sponge does when you try to scry the denzien by accident. As you progress you'll learn to block out that corruption intake by only focusing on the presence of angels/others and not the being of them - it's complicated and more of an instinctual thing.
Sound 104: Avatars (In Progress!)
So. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not 100% sure what an avatar of Sound will be able to do since I'm not one yet. However, you do start to occasionally feel things as you start rerolling the aspect over and over again. Small bursts of sound in your head, occasional insights like you're using your passive ability even when you aren't on Sound. My theory for Sound avatarism is that your passive ability will be active on other classes, allowing you to once again convert all your senses into sound and get the premonitions that you normally have. I'd imagine Avatars of Sound would also be ridiculously well timed with fraymotifs, and be able to stack buffs using any kind of musical-based medium even if that buff is not normally able to be built up upon. Possibly they'd be able to use some of Sound's basic attacks as well. Again, a large majority of this - especially the latter part - is just theory, but I'll update this as I hopefully progress towards becoming one.
Sound and Other Aspects:
In my opinion, Sound's best partners in Unbreakable Unions would probably be Flow, Time and Rain. The last one is probably the best combo out of all of them, but also has a chance of making everyone else in the session become more confused than just the Rain player by themselves, and the Sound player is equally likely to go as loopy as the Rain player.
Sound and Flow are awesome together because of their focus about buildups and buffing. This combo is terrifying in that both aspects usually take a couple of minutes to really get into the flow of things normally, but when together? It takes a matter of seconds to bounce buffs of each other and launch what can only be described as Armageddon. So, you know how Breath and Flow make fire tornadoes? Well, if a Sound player fires out any of their blasts, it picks up the fire and brings it along for the ride. Also, making a slight edit on [Resonance Cascade] via a bit of freestyling, I managed to make an ability that I called [Resonance Collide] that counts both your buffs and requires both of you to cast (you'll be doing the brunt of the work though, they just add some fire in there) that makes a death ray. It's cool, but hard as fuck to get right - just be careful if you decide to try and figure out how to do it. I would try to explain it but we only managed it once when we got our Kickstart from our duo fraymotif. Talking about that, [Hot Beats] (do fraymotifs keep the same name?) tends to be really, REALLY fast paced. Your Flow player can keep up with it but you practically need [Are We Dancer?] at a good level before activating it or else you'll fail it near immediately. If you do it right, then this combo can quickly buff both each other to ridiculous levels.
Next, Sound and Time. The concept's relatively simple, if a bit more passive than the other two - Sound gets a foreboding feeling or figures out something's wrong, Time KNOWS that something WILL go wrong and what it is, and so together they instantly figure out what's happening when. It can get scarily accurate as they figure out your emotions nearly as well as a Heart player does or seem to be constantly looking into the future. When you buddy up with a Timebro, you'll quickly get almost a mental link as you both basically read each other's mind and just know what the other person's thinking. The synchronization between you two will be epic. You also help each other with your problems; Sound knows when Time is getting stressed or feeling down about something and is empathetic enough to give them a hug or talk about feelings but not push too far unlike Heart, whilst Time helps Sound deal with all the foreboding feelings they get and help them solve the issues before they happen whilst giving them someone sturdy to talk to about their more depressing feelings. In a fight, you can't sneak up on this combo. It's basically impossible. Time adds a tempo to Sound's melody, making a powerful musical combo that, again, stacks buffs really nicely. Timeclones can be used to stack additional buffs onto the two and make use of AoE buffs multiple times from the Sound player. Once again, any ability like my described [Resonance Collide] works really well because it absorbs the buffs from all the clones as well to use, but it's limited in power because the Time player has trouble adding any direct additions to it; you might be better off just using [Resonance Cascade] with an AoE charging instead, which is a lot easier to freestyle. Fraymotifs tend to have steady pulses that give big buffs each time you both move in time with it.
Finally... Rain and Sound. Sound players quickly learn the Rain player's way of thinking due to their natural passives, and can translate for the rest of the team. The Rain player, on the other hand, learns how to manage the insanity into a constant melody or pulse. This is already a huge positive, but it's just scratching the surface. Rainbow Bullshit and Sound Waves just have some kind of natural synergy that makes anything hit by a combined attack be disorientated and hit with a burst of Rain's madness-inducing effect. Their Fraymotif (called [Sound of Madness] in my session) sounds incredibly strange and alternates between rocking/heavy and nauseating. Then we get onto dupliclones. Exactly the same as Time, the dupliclones all can use the buffs that Sound gives, but when all of them start using Rain's buffs as well? Rain buffs are laughter - which is a Sound. This, in turn, increases Sound's power, which further increases Rain's power times however many clones they have in the area, which... well, you get the idea. [Resonance Collide] fires off what can only be described as a [Requiem of Sunshine and and Rainbows] in a laser form. I'm fairly sure it can damage bedrock because of how stupidly high the damage gets when it's focused if the two players have been buffing for a minute or so. If these two start glowing with rainbow pulses coming out of them, it means the buffs have reached a critical point and the game is starting to glitch out with how intense and how many particle effects it's trying to generate, and unless you're fighting an endgame boss is a sign you should run or else you're basically going to be hit from just the aftershock of an attack which is basically a beserk trigger without even being their Unite Synchronization. I mean, sure, most Unbreakable Unions have attacks like this, but the point is that there's so many buffs increasing its power it just microwaves anything it hits. I've seen a Unite Synchronization from this combo once; not from a first person perspective, but as a Sylph of Space that session, and... I don't even know. Even thinking about what it was made me and the Void player want to throw up while we were still in those classpects. I'm fairly sure that it's at a huge risk of messing with Trickster mode and Saccharine Doppelgangers just because of how much it fucks with reality itself because of how much Sound has buffed the Rain player up, and at the very least it's probably best to never go back to that place unless you enjoy different laws of physics.
I'll never be able to look the same at the Black King again after seeing the aftermath of that.
Just, uh... for all these combos, try to keep an eye on your pluck. If you run out while charging a larger attack, it's probably not gonna be pretty, and practically all of these burn pluck ridiculously fast.
Q & A:
Miscellaneous section for specific questions in the thread that I want people to see.
From maternityDeparted:
I actually have a question that I'd like to see someone more aware of Sound as an aspect clarify! I've only shared a session with a Sound player once, back when I was a Thief of Time one of my coplayers was a Mage of Sound. The Beat... started speaking to me? Whenever I had an Unbreakable Union with the Mage. It wasn't as loud as The Orchestra can get, or anything along those lines, but something that instinctively felt like The Beat did very clearly say things I could recognize as proper phrases. Mostly hackneyed idioms from my native pressession about time, like, 'a stitch in time saves nine' and 'time flies when you're having fun'. Was this a legitimate effect of our Union? A glitch? An ability mimicking my Whispering?
Sort of. The Orchestra is a weird whispering; it involves a lot of different instruments, including voices, and there's a few more instruments of the one you play (so a bit of bias towards it). The Orchestra likes things to be working together as a whole, so it might have been literally working together with the other whispering and creating a 'better' overall result, so it made it understandable for you. The times that it didn't make sense were the times all the other instruments were playing instead - since you weren't a Sound player, you could only hear a bit of The Orchestra flowing with the other whispering at once, so it was translated only by one instrument. At least, that's my theory from what other co-players have told me when I've played Sound. It is basically translating what The Beat is saying directly into musical notes and playing whatever's the result to you. It would probably get lesser in effect the further away from your Union co-player you are, but while you're close one or two instruments will probably play along just like the Sound player will probably be hearing a more steady rhythm (i.e a Beat) in The Orchestra that makes it easier to comprehend.
