[SUCCESS. CRITICAL SUCCESS EVEN]

---

It feels like you’ve been in here for hours, falling and freezing with no end in sight. Though thoroughly uncomfortable, you’ve kept yourself warm and conscious through a continuous regime of intense exercise while unbound by the laws of gravity. You’ve fallen so far and for so long that you’ve long since left behind the remains of Trexima and his pet snake. Your Rage has subsided by now, leaving you with the mental clarity to appraise your situation. Having faced many powerful magicians at this point of your life, you know that most banishment spells don’t usually result in a prolonged fall down a dark hole. You wonder if your interruption of Trexima’s last desperate spell resulted in your current predicament.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see a blonde woman in a white and purple tabard float towards you. Inscribed on her dress are esoteric symbols which vaguely remind you of the sort you’ve seen in the Eastern lands of Tian Xia. You open your mouth to call out to her but no sound emerges from your lips in this unnatural vacuum. Your unspoken words die on your lips as you make eye contact with the woman. Her eyes – an unnatural purple colour – gleam with a malicious, inhuman intelligence as she unwraps you with her gaze. Her presence makes you shudder as you realise you’re in no position to fight in such a strange and unnatural place.

In an instant, she somehow closes the gap between you and her, lazily stretching one arm forward before flicking you in the forehead with her fingers. Fear turns into anger – ‘How dare she’, you think to yourself – before you suddenly feel the warm air of reality reappear around you. The dimension of eyes and the blonde woman blink out of existence.

---

With a start, you realise that the eye-filled void that enveloped you is instead replaced by a cloudless blue sky and the rays of a hot sun. As gravity reasserts itself and you start to plummet towards a bamboo-filled forest, you have but seconds to figure out how to break your fall. Strangely, the sky is filled with strange creatures floating about – you see some fey creatures, some floating balls of white fluff and other unnatural creatures defying gravity and flying of their own power. They watch you with faces full of shock and curiosity as you plummet by them. Most of your assortment of magical items – chief among them being your hammer – are nowhere to be found on your person.

---

What do you do?
[ ] Tuck your hands to your side and nose-dive into the softest looking brush of shrubbery, trusting in your natural endurance that you’ll at least survive this fall. The option which will hurt the most but also attract the least attention from the denizens of this strange place. (roll for impact and injury, no roll for detection)

[ ] Your Draconic Rage has granted you the ability to imitate those proud and powerful creatures in some extraordinary ways – chief among them is the ability to grow draconic wings and fly. You could manifest your wings and attempt to Maneuver in Flight to break your fall. Such an action might be noticed by the denizens of this area…but surely you have nothing to fear from the locals. (roll for impact and injury with a lower DC, additional dice roll for detection)

[ ] Among the newest Draconic power your Rage bestowed upon you is the ability to momentarily assume the form of an adult Dragon. The increased bulk and wingspan of a Large creature should allow you to easily Maneuver in Flight to break your fall, but almost certainly will attract attention from creatures both within this bamboo forest and beyond. (roll for impact and injury with an additional dice roll and a significantly lower DC, additional dice roll for detection with lower DC)

[ ] Write in – but make it short! You won’t have the time to come up with an elaborate plan.

Your viewpoint character will gradually develop a stat block and acquire equipment and allies. I roll the dice around here, when I post the update. I roll 1d20 for any given task, and additional d20 for every extra rank (corresponding to Trained, Expert, Master and Legendary) that you gain in a related skill, with a bonus die or two if you have other related skills or do something especially effective. The usual DC is 15, which you pass if one d20 beats it, though the DC may be modified up or down based on difficulty or circumstances. If you roll even one 20 or 2 or more dice that clear the DC, it's a crit; if you roll a 1 OR all dice fail the DC by 10 or lower, and no OTHER die beats the DC, it's a crit fail.

---

For example, if the DC to tough out a barrage of Danmaku was 15 and you decided to tough it out with your Greater Juggernaut, you roll 4 dice.

If all dice come up with a number of 1 to 5, that would be a critical fail.

If you rolled a 2, a 4, a 5, and a 6, that would be a failure.

If you rolled a 2, a 4, a 6 and a 15 OR if you rolled a Nat 1, 2, 3 and a 15, that would be a success.

If you rolled one Nat 1 but rolled 1 Nat 20 or 2 dice above 15, that would be a Critical Success.

I'll admit, I was a little tempted to roll for intimidating the ground, but this doesn't look like that type of story.

But more seriously, we're a barbarian, and one of the strongest ones around at that. Why hide when you can just turn into a dragon?

[X] Among the newest Draconic power your Rage bestowed upon you is the ability to momentarily assume the form of an adult Dragon. The increased bulk and wingspan of a Large creature should allow you to easily Maneuver in Flight to break your fall, but almost certainly will attract attention from creatures both within this bamboo forest and beyond. (roll for impact and injury with an additional dice roll and a significantly lower DC, additional dice roll for detection with lower DC)

[X] Among the newest Draconic power your Rage bestowed upon you is the ability to momentarily assume the form of an adult Dragon. The increased bulk and wingspan of a Large creature should allow you to easily Maneuver in Flight to break your fall, but almost certainly will attract attention from creatures both within this bamboo forest and beyond. (roll for impact and injury with an additional dice roll and a significantly lower DC, additional dice roll for detection with lower DC)

[X] Among the newest Draconic power your Rage bestowed upon you is the ability to momentarily assume the form of an adult Dragon.
God I love dice

[X] Among the newest Draconic power your Rage bestowed upon you is the ability to momentarily assume the form of an adult Dragon.

[X] Among the newest Draconic power your Rage bestowed upon you is the ability to momentarily assume the form of an adult Dragon. The increased bulk and wingspan of a Large creature should allow you to easily Maneuver in Flight to break your fall, but almost certainly will attract attention from creatures both within this bamboo forest and beyond.

Very interested to see where this goes! Wish you good tidings writing this.

[X] Your Draconic Rage has granted you the ability to imitate those proud and powerful creatures in some extraordinary ways – chief among them is the ability to grow draconic wings and fly. You could manifest your wings and attempt to Maneuver in Flight to break your fall. Such an action might be noticed by the denizens of this area…but surely you have nothing to fear from the locals. (roll for impact and injury with a lower DC, additional dice roll for detection)

Full dragon transformation would probably result in shrine maiden deployment. Big youkai aren’t anything special but dragons have particular symbolic power around here and one showing up out of nowhere might be construed as the start of an incident or a major power moving on someone else’s turf.

Just Wings should be fine though, probably at worst construed as either a magician’s spell or a vampire’s wings like remi. Boy I sure hope we don’t crash into Tewi and ruin her day when we hit the bamboo!

>>70220
Eastern dragons do, not western winged ones. It wouldn't even appear for most denizens of Gensokyo to think them as similar beings, it's Europeans who called East Asian 龍 "dragons" despite them being very different.
But also what do you mean you don't want to show off by causing incident?

>>70221
Possibly but also A we have never seen anything western dragon like show up in Gensokyo youkai or otherwise before and B western mythical figures tend to be MORE powerful in Touhou lore due to having a wider spread of acceptance and belief in the outside world. Yukari obv doesn’t care or has a plan cuz she shoved us in and probably knows enough about what we are not to panic but plenty of other players in Gensokyo might not respond too well to “there’s a western dragon that just popped up out of nowhere and we don’t know what it wants”.

Dragon power is all fun and games until a centipede gets on your ass.

>>70223
A) Precisely because of that there's no reason [most] Gensokyans would jump to eurocentric conclusions.
B) Wat? To say it politely, [CITATION NEEDED].
> might not respond too well
And what will they do, throw tons of harmless bullets and amulets at us? Even if incidents in Gensokyo weren't theater which is harmless for everyone participating and therefore there's literally no downside, why risk aversion with barbarian of all things? That's plain unfun.

>>70225
Our two western Hus are Hecatia who is a very minor western god and explicitly stated by ZUN at the time to be the most powerful character and Clownpiece the Lampid who is stated to be obscenely powerful for a fairy. The explaination as to why this is is because they are part of a pantheon and belief system with more influence and therefore more faith fueling them. Western Dragons are a major symbol in British culture and Britain is the major nation that spread its influence throughout the entire world. I don’t think it’s a very far reach to say that western dragons are just as powerful under Touhou logic as eastern ones.

>>70226
> The explaination as to why this is
I've found no such explanation anywhere. ZUN just called Hecatia powerful and moved on. Seems like a fan invention.
> Our two western Hus
Did you really forget poor Remilia and friends? Aside from SDM - not only named crew but also very western Koakuma and explicitly western, imported hobgoblins - there's Prismrivers, and many more characters with unclear western influences (Alice, Rumia...). Of those, only vampires are especially powerful, but this is better explained (so far as such explanation is even necessary) by their oni nature. Therefore, your theory breaks under most direct canonical facts.
Further, there's no such "touhou logic" as "outside belief of a certain people powers unspecified creatures arisen within those people's culture", and it is most demonstrably wrong - why do we have Gensokyo in first place if outside belief in unspecified youkai at large were enough for them? Instead, it's stated that Barrier isolates locals from outside world influences, therefore it cannot matter how highly anglosaxons or whoever else think of themselves.
So, all of it is a very far reach, possible if the author decides so but by no means arrivable by textual analysis as a canonical certainty. In general, it's a weird western fandom thing to take "faith = power" as a fundamental axiom of Touhou and make very far-reaching conclusions, while in canon it's broken on every other turn - it's clear it has a certain and restricted domain of application and should be used with extreme caution.
(Besides, we don't even know whether Eastern dragons are that special - we've only encountered specific very powerful entities like Dragon God after all. I'd rather agree with you here, but interpretation can also run the other way - say, there's Meiling the Still-unspecified Youkai...)

Loving this discussion, anons. Since things have slowed down a bit, I'll elaborate on a few things and talk about the early end to voting that I propose.
>>70224
I haven't forgotten about Momoyo.

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> arguing about Eastern vs Western Dragons in Gensokyo.
My view on the matter is that Eastern Dragons have religious significance in Gensokyo, while Western Dragons don't because Western Dragons dont have religious significance in Eastern religions and spirituality that underpins Gensokyo. The Western inhabitants (Hecatia & the SDM residents) dont perceive Western Dragons with any level of religious significance IIRC.

That being said,
> a Western Dragon is still a very dangerous thing
A Western Dragon is 8-12 feet worth of muscle, wingspan, jaws, claws and Dragon breath. Just because people dont start worshipping it doesnt mean its not dangerous. Besides, people could mistake one type of Dragon for another...
> Eastern Dragons exist in Pathfinder
They're called Imperial Dragons and exist in the not-Asia equivalent region. Some Imperial Dragons also have religious significance (like pic related, a Sky Dragon) and Im inclined to say that the average Gensokyo resident would see an Imperial Dragon as a kind of Eastern Dragon.
(Also fortunately for me I wrote that Barbarian's been to Tian Xia before in the intro post. I'd say he knows about those types of Dragons).
>Its a moot point because the Barbarian's first choice of Dragon Transformation is not an Eastern Dragon
I have in mind a preferred choice of Dragon Transformation to describe, should that choice win. It's not going to be any of the Imperial/Eastern Dragons because there's a new splatbook coming out about Dragons in November and I dont want to have to retcon my work later. There are 8 Remastered Dragons, so if you all want its not too hard to narrow the choices down.

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The only other thing I have to add to the vote debate is that you can grow Draconic wings at will, while Dragon Transformation is on a 10 minute cooldown.

---

Anyways, given that the vote looks quite solidly in favour towards 1 option, I propose ending the voting period early.

Voting will close at [timer=25/10/11 07:00+8]. At or around that time, I will close the vote by making a post announcing the closure and also make the rolls which will affect the update post.

The update will still come at the end of the fortnight. This arrangement just gives me 4 days to write an update and proofread it.

Let me know if you all are OK with this arrangement.