Kho and I have decided to talk out any remaining obstacles to his acceptance directly over Discord DMs, so there won't be a public re-review here anytime soon.

Before I returned from work, BBeast addressed your response, and I thank him for taking the time to do so and clarify my statements in such a succinct manner.

Because I know that almost everyone reads these public reviews and have their own things influenced by what I say about others' sheets, there nonetheless remain a few remarks that Kho made that warrant a response here for everybody to see.

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[quote]If the GM team has personal issues with the practice of reusing previous characters, whatever the reason for reusing them, then that is a personal gripe and should not - in my view - be held against a sheet when judging whether it is to be accepted or not.[/quote]

I certainly have biases, however this one against the recycling of characters is my own. When delivering these reviews, you may notice that I often switch between saying 'we' and 'I' because I try to make the distinction between my personal opinion and that of the GM collective. There are the occasional few topics on which a review's feedback comes from me alone, or from Mutton and BBeast without me, and I try to make such instances somewhat clear through my wording.

[quote]I understand that you believe that this act of recycling has resulted in actual issues, and I will cover those as we go through them.[/quote]

Yes, and I'm glad that you were able to recognize that. I gave you as much feedback and candor as I did because I know you better than all of the other people that I've been reviewing, and I trusted you to not just rationalize my criticisms as being the spiteful and unwarranted judgements of someone who's salty over seeing a character that he doesn't personally like.

[quote]Martial Combat is not a broad portfolio. It is in fact exceedingly specific.[/quote]

Agreed. If it wasn't clear, my objections of breadth were entirely directed at your [i]description[/i] of Martial Combat because I thought that Seihdhara's powers (as described) surpassed the limits of such a Portfolio. I already told you this on Discord, but I'm repeating it here so that people don't scratch their heads and wonder why 'Martial Combat' was accused of being too broad. Short answer--it wasn't.

[quote]
I would, firstly, like this Athena-Ares dichotomy to be done away with when it comes to Seihdhara and Narzhak.[/quote]

The possibility of this dichotomy came up in some discussions on the Discord, and I had (erroneously, it now seems) thought that you were on board with it.

[quote]
The word ascension refers to 'to going up'. This 'going up' refers to rising up through the sphere to the highest one of all, the Great Dark. It does not refer to teleportation. Returning to Galbar likewise refers to a manual journey downward, and not to teleportation.
This is all basicall this: A student finishes training under Seihdhara. Seihdhara gives them a grassblade. She tell them they can go home if they like, or if they want adventure they can set out on pilgrimage to the top of the world. The person then decides for themselves what they wish to do.[/quote]

I think that you are still hazy on one very fundamental aspect of Spheres: [i]traversing them is [b]extremely[/b] hard.[/i] Ascending to Veradax is quite comparable to "ascending" to the Moon in real life. It will take divine intervention or an extremely powerful force of magic or technology for mortals to traverse the Spheres; this is something that even gods will struggle with in the beginning of the RP. Natural connections are unstable and highly unsafe, even Gateways are meant to often be somewhat difficult to traverse for mortals, and beings that leave their native Sphere can sometimes experience ill effects from doing so, because they're bound to the essence of their own plane and might well be unaccustomed to that of any other. For instance, any living being that were to pass through the Sky of Pyres would almost certainly die just because the aura of death is so potent there and the nebulae of smoke from the braziers is anathema to life itself. Other Spheres may well be much more habitable of course, but for another (more mild) example I point to Ehomakwoi and how the darkness of that cavernous Sphere of stone is such that mundane torches and the likes often don't even work there. (Good job Commodore, btw, I don't know if I ever praised you for that detail but I like it.)

The takeaway of this paragraph is that mortals won't simply walk up to the Seal, or go on pilgrimages to the Great Dark. Gods can abduct mortals to their Spheres, or eventually make Gateways that can perhaps allow entry to mortals under certain conditions, but from your tone and wording I don't think you realize the difficulty of travel and the implications of such challenges when it comes to thinking of how mortals will interact with the Spheres.

Most of the Spheres are very distant and inaccessible places to the mortals of Galbar, which is why we try so hard to emphasize that they should have a substantial effect upon the metaphysics lest they exist for the entire length of the RP whilst still managing to hardly contribute to the setting, like Arcon.