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Elves
2021-02-27, 01:14 PM
This is an excerpt from the "Age of Warriors" project.

The Nine Swords Reforged (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aiAI8gchlvQlBKHR3T7_iwlqgLubOmz4/view?usp=sharing) (Google Drive link)

Elves
2021-11-18, 12:29 PM
Updated with (mostly) final draft. Here's a transcript of the stories. The italics correspond to the Tarot sword suite.


Rashid ben Daoud’s majestic scimitar was named after the discipline it was forged to embody. Avid to learn self-defense in case his enemies came knocking, the wealthy merchant hired the Wind Dervishes of Andrama to teach him Desert Wind style. Ben Daoud had been raised on stories of the Dervishes’ fantastic techniques, and now, for an equally fantastic sum, their knowledge became his. When he commissioned his extravagant folly of a sword, he decided that, if it were to be the ideal weapon for a Desert Wind adept like himself, it would have to be perfectly in tune with the elements of fire and air. When he tasked his djinn friend Malaq to enchant it, he begged the sorcerer to give his blade the power to command the very souls of those elements.

Italic
The first sword in this list is the last one Reshar obtained. That night as he dreamt, he saw the nine swords he had gathered. He expected it would be a dream of triumph, but instead he found his mind pierced by doubt. Rashid ben Daoud’s obsession with Desert Wind was his undoing; was Reshar’s fixation with his own blades just as foolish? What had he really achieved in his life? Was the Sublime Way itself not founded on folly, presuming that there can be beauty in cruel battle? Nightmares showed him Rashid’s torture in the dungeons of the efreet, excoriated by red-hot irons. He woke up in the middle of the night, cradling his face in his hands, the Nine Swords pinned on the wall above his bed, gleaming like tainted gifts.

Avenger is strongest in the hands of a bearer with strong convictions who seeks out their moral opponents. Its powers grant you the resilience to continue in the face of unimaginable threats and unacceptable losses.

Italic
Faithful Avenger is the second sword Reshar found. That night in a dream, he saw himself sitting with a sword in each hand—two versions of Faithful Avenger itself, crossed, reflecting the sword’s dual nature, the conflicting moral paths it calls you to choose between. A blindfold was over his eyes, blocking all sight of the world, for the sword preferred that he reach into his inner, spiritual self. The paths of justice and judgment always call for contemplation. The danger is if you hold your beliefs up as defenses, a shield of self-assurance that keeps you closed to other points of view. The sword is a crossroads: it holds many paths. It begs you to remember they all remain open, and grudges you none if they lead to the source of your spirit.

Clarity is deadly in the hands of a Diamond Mind adept who can use its Concentration bonus to full effect.

Italic:
Reshar’s quest for the Nine Swords began in the Astral Plane, amid the wheeling landscape of silver clouds and stars and nebulae, glowing in all the transformational colors. He had done what he set out to do: he had mastered all nine disciplines, and in his school he had united them into a single Sublime Way, bringing harmony to the martial world. His work complete, he now sought enlightenment on the astral paths. But it evaded him. Restless, he journeyed into the realms of the warlike gith—a race famed as martial adepts, masters of Diamond Mind. Reshar dazzled them with his Ninefold Path, taking joy in spreading his teachings beyond the mortal plane. He performed such great feats that the gith commended him to receive a silver sword, mark of the greatest gith warriors. But Forgemistress Veselka, a master adept herself, refused to grant such a blade unless he could prove his worth…by defeating her.

She bore a perfect rapier, a blade forged in the astral stillness of the mind. They dueled, tumbling under gushes of dragonfire as their acrobatics took them deep into the forge’s machineries. In the end, the Forgemistress kneeled. Yet still she did not give him a silver sword, for she saw that he did not truly wish to live in the astral realm. Instead, she offered up a greater gift: the blade in her hand.

As he took it, he saw its slim blade ringed by a cascading crown, representing the mind’s power. In this moment of clarity, he finally saw why he was not yet ready to ascend. He had given his students knowledge, but not inspiration. The blade, but not the reason. For never, he now understood, had he really come to know the disciplines that he professed to master. He had studied them as a prodigy, obsessed with the technical workings of their techniques, brushing aside their traditions—which might demand an adept meditate for years before even entering the dojo. It had let him master them with impressive speed, yet cold intellect had not shown him their meaning. Gripping this blade, he for the first time knew Diamond Mind.

Suddenly, his life’s achievements, so proud, seemed to crumble before him. And thus, he realized he was bound for one last task, one that would require him to walk the world’s many ends. Sighing, he let his silver cord pull his mind back to the Material. His body was weak from weeks posed in place during his astral travels. His disciples were eager to hear what had transpired in his meditation, but as yet, he kept Supernal Clarity concealed. He told them only that he still had tasks upon the earth, and asked for his traveling cloak.

After the theft of Supernal Clarity, and hounded by blame for the uncharacteristic lapse of hers that caused it, the Diamond Master went to the Temple’s armories and picked out a harsh saber of black adamant. She called it simply my replacement sword, or after a while, Replacement. She had that name carved into it, as an act of denigration and remembrance.

As the Shadow Tiger army approached she had the sword empowered with straightforward destructive enhancements. This was the weapon she bore into that famous battle that climaxed the Temple’s siege.

As the walls were breached, Eight of Nine, the Tiger Claw golem, leapt past the defenders and went on a rampage within the Temple itself. The Diamond Master chased to stop him, racing with horror past lines of bleeding bodies, and confronted him where he stood surrounded by the corpses of students.

Since Eight of Nine was stylized as an anthropic tiger, scholars have seen some kind of symbolism in this duel, because it was the tiger rakshasa Kaziir-Thet who had stolen Supernal Clarity from inside those very same halls.

The Diamond Mistress had never regained the poise she’d had when wielding Clarity, and her new style was a clear deterioration of her former abilities, but it had a new kind of fury, which tried to compensate for prescience with sweeping moves. The robot kept lashing out but she whirled around him, her adamantine blade cutting deep gashes in his steel plating. He fled the battlefield before she could cut him apart. Some of the wounds he had taken even pierced to his chassis, making him even more erratic and unstable to this day.

The Diamond Mistress died later that battle, as a result of her new sloppier and more rageful technique: so at least by validating her discipline’s value. Replacement was then claimed by an unknown member of the Shadow Tiger horde.

Description: A stark dark metal katana set with a single teardrop diamond.

Game Statistics: +5 Diamond Mind adamantine katana; Faint evocation; CL 15th; Cost 75,000 gp; Weight 6 lb
This sword, whose name means Warchant in Common, is a remarkable artifact of proto-history and is forged from meteoric iron. In fact, the mineral kamacite is named after it.

History:
During the sack of the Temple of Nine Swords, Kamate was looted like the other eight, but the Iron Heart golem, Four of Nine, couldn’t bear that dishonor. Needing neither sustenance nor rest, the golem hunted down every member of the Shadow Tiger army it could corner, searching for a lead as to who took his discipline’s sword.

Eventually, his brutal interrogations put him on the trail of a hobgoblin priest of Akaro, the goblinoid deity of storms and war. Goblins have long attributed Kamate’s powers over lightning to Akaro’s blessing. Some legends even claim that before ascending to godhood, he was one of the primordial chieftains who bore it in battle. Rumor said the priest had therefore claimed it as a relic of his god and taken it to the Temple of Lucent Storms.

Four of Nine made his way toward the Temple, but word of his relentless quest had spread, and in the end it was the clergy of Akaro who came to him. Only one port offered passage to the forsaken fjords where the Temple was set, so the hobgoblin priest dispatched his men there in disguise, knowing Four of Nine would have to pass through. When the golem arrived, he found the local boatmen reluctant to take such a strange passenger deep into goblin territory—all except one crew, who were eager to serve him. No sooner had they taken him into open water than they leapt upon him, revealing themselves to be goblin priests using disguise self. They subdued him with magic and rolled him over the side of the ship.

He spent full forty years immersed beneath the waves, helpless and heavy as his body brined and corroded. At long last, however, he was rediscovered in a fisherman’s haul. The fisherman sold his strange find, and Four of Nine was given a proper polishing, so that he could once more speak and move. His skin had rusted off, leaving him with a raw, disfigured appearance, nothing like the work of art he’d been. No intricate engravings; wasted limbs; devoured, ruined hands that could barely grip a sword. But his iron heart was beating.

His first problem was to escape the foundry that had bought him, intending to melt him down for scrap. It wasn’t hard: the workmen fled in terror when they saw the sculpture waking up and moving, and the security guards fled after the first punch. Four of Nine used the foundry’s equipment to give himself basic repairs. He grabbed a hammer and welded it to his damaged hand, then used it to pound iron plates on himself where his armor was missing. His other hand, he welded with iron spikes as makeshift pitons.

No boat this time: he scaled the mountains, using his pitoned hand. A few falls onto bare stone—nothing but a few more dents in his already ruined body. Hard rains made him start to rust again. The rain continued, deepening with thunder. By the time the goblin temple came into view, lightning was flaring on all sides. The priests were in the courtyard, performing a ceremony to welcome the storm. He ignored them, scaling the temple’s sides: a fearsome figure in silhouette, a junkheap man of living iron, with a hammer hand and a hand of spikes, and glowing red pinpoint eyes in the darkness of the storm.

In the shrine, a figure stood before Akaro’s altar, back to him. So this must be the priest he sought. The figure turned to face him, a towering goblin with Kamate in his hand. Their duel echoed through the nave. Though the goblin’s skill was godlike, Four of Nine fought like a machine, never making an error. Forced to his knee, the warrior admitted Four was worthy to wield Kamate. Then he vanished, his sword clanging to the ground. Four searched the nave in bewilderment, seeking where his foe had fled, but noticed something else. One of the tombs in the alcoves was carved with the name of the priest he had been seeking, with a date of death scribed twenty years ago. Confused, he looked up to the altar. The statue of Akaro looked just like the warrior he had faced. (DC 40; Storm God’s Blessing).

Legacy Rituals
The following ritual unlocks the epic powers of Kamate.
Storm God’s Blessing: You must stand without shelter in a lightning storm, where Akaro’s avatar will manifest and challenge you in battle. Only by defeating him can you gain his blessing to unlock the greatest of Kamate’s powers. The avatar is an epic-level hobgoblin warblade of Divine Rank 6. Cost: 200,000 gp. Feat granted: Epic Legacy (Kamate).

Italic:
Kamate is the third sword Reshar uncovered. In his dream that night, he found himself in a storm of rain and lightning. He knew then the agony of Kamate, for the blade was stuck in his chest, piercing his heart. Yet incredibly, it kept thudding on, an impossibly strong, almost comically loud beat. It pushed him on, and he walked forward in excruciating pain. He realized the sword would be piercing his heart forever—but that his heart was as strong as adamant and would force him to live on, no matter through what loss or wound. Now he saw through lies like the beauty of violence, the glory of battle, the elegance of steel. Kamate is nothing but a thing of woe: a tool of murder, the requisite of a heartbreaking world.

When he woke, he reached for his chest, where he could still feel a phantom pain. He didn’t know how he could continue with his quest, having felt the agony these weapons deal. Yet the sword, gleaming by his side, would not let him rest. It had many more lives to take.
Here it is: the bright sting, bane of giants.

Italic:
Eventide’s Edge was the sixth sword Reshar found. Once more, as in his youth, the Master sailed to the isles where Setting Sun is practiced—those mysterious isles, beyond both dawn and dusk, which one can reach both from the east and from the west—seeking a blade in which the discipline’s heart was clear. From ship to ship he went, to the most distant ports. At last, a barge towed him under mists to the Temple of Strength Reversed. When an adept with bright eyes under a weathered face showed him Eventide’s Edge, relating his adventures as a young castaway, Reshar knew he had found what he sought.

As he drifted off by the side of the fire, the man’s words still sinking in his ears, he saw his new friend as a youth, rowing his raft on the open sea as he escaped the island that had cost him years of his life. A setting sun sat upon the open waters, swollen and orange. With nothing to bind it to him, he had plunged Eventide’s Edge into the very planks of his raft. He didn’t want to lose it, but if he lost the raft he would be dead regardless.

He might as well have been sailing on the back of a leviathan. The ocean is a huge, intractable foe, far larger than any of us. But with the simple lever of an oar, we make it take us where we need to go on our long voyage.
Umbral Awn offers a powerful magic of darkness, but lures its bearers like prey into the Heart of Night, where they fail or find ruin.

History
As his forces prepared for the assault on the Temple of Nine Swords, the Shadow Hand master made a pilgrimage deep into the Plane of Shadow, vowing to either come out with the power to overthrow his enemies or be destroyed there as the previous wielders of Umbral Awn had been. No one knows what happened on his journey, but he emerged leading a host of shadar-kai and shadow monsters, wielding fearsome new techniques and armaments. Having triumphed where its previous wielders failed, he felt confident that he had surpassed through sheer force the warning that Reshar had insinuated into his life with the gift of that ominous dagger, and swore he would reclaim it when the Temple fell—ready, now, to unlock the full scope of its powers. Five days later, he lay dead, slain in combat with the Spirit Seeker. (DC 40; Succeed Where They Failed)

Legacy Rituals
The following ritual is required to unlock the epic powers of Umbral Awn.
Succeed Where They Failed: You must journey into the depths of the Shadow Plane, to the Fortress of Forgotten Hearts, where the shadar-kai work their forges of black fire. They will recognize Umbral Awn, claiming that, had the Shadow Master possessed it when he came to them, they could have empowered it enough to make his victory impyrrhic. They may be willing to empower it for you as well, at the cost of 200,000 gold pieces. First, however, to overcome their skepticism of those “thieves” who practice a discipline which they see as the rightful property of their home plane, you must overcome the Trials of the Black Swan in the Palace of Shadow—house of the shadar-kai grandmasters. Cost: 200,000 gp. Feat granted: Epic Legacy (Umbral Awn).

Italic:
Umbral Awn was the seventh sword Reshar obtained. As the sun set, the night seemed to come on darker than usual, and he knew what was coming. That night shadows oozed into his dreams. Yet they came to him not as a threat but as a friend, shielding him from judgment and harm. Here, unseen and unknown, his most private thoughts and intents were free to flourish, both the good…and the bad. Shielded by shadows, he saw himself committing acts of deceit and theft, his innermost desires unrestrained, safe to know no one was watching. Severed from society, he became unknown even to himself, more of the thoughtless shadows than his own entity. Like some kind of wraith, so far from real life...Faces, places, names, what were they? Why step into the glare and bear their scorn, rather than the safety of this umbral womb?

Hard light struck him awake. Whatever his dreams promised, they couldn’t stop the mechanical process of the sun. Reshar looked at Umbral Awn with a furled brow, knowing the danger he brought back to his school. Yet Shadow Hand too is part of the Ninefold Path. He brought back only the truth of what already lived there, something the absence of a sword could never eradicate. Better, then, to bring it into the light.
Thungrim set Unfettered with dull, clouded quartz and gray pebbles—all he had at hand—not jewels, a reflection of what his life had become trapped in this cave. It was a far cry from the imperial blades he once worked, but was made with one purpose: to be the instrument of his deliverance.

Italics:
Unfettered was the eighth sword Reshar found. As he drifted to sleep that night, he dwelt upon Kanithiak’s tale of captivity. Dreaming, he saw himself gagged and chained, surrounded by his enemies’ blades, forced down to his knees upon the cold hard ground. No prison is promised to be escapable, yet with the weight of the earth beneath him, Reshar sensed he might one day wrestle himself free, if only he could regain his footing. From the solid earth on which he sat, strength flowed up into him.

Many resent the earthly bonds in which we as material beings are held, craving sublimation into spirit. Enlightenment, to them, means freedom from this grossly solid world and all the ways in which it can weigh on and bind you. But grounding can be strength as well as limitation. Thus, if you find yourself tied to the earth, stand with your legs firmly planted. From this position, no one will shake you, and you can rattle any barrier.
When the Tiger Claw and Shadow Hand masters were exiled, many of their students left the Temple alongside them. At that point, most believed the plan was simply to found a new school where the two “dishonored disciplines” could “be practiced freely”—for they’d taken up the idea that the issue was about the other masters scorning Shadow Hand and Tiger Claw. When it became clear that the Tiger Lord and Shadow Master were bent on full-out revenge, many even of the students who had sided with them left. To prevent these defectors from revealing their plans, the Tiger Lord, a long-tan-haired ferocity of a man, did something terrible: he sent Eight of Nine, the Tiger Claw golem, to hunt them down. They fled from him through the autumnal glades, to no avail, and all died torn apart by the crazed robot’s claws.

During the chaotic nighttime battle that ensued when the Temple of Nine Swords was breached, the Tiger Lord made his way to the vault where Tiger Fang was kept, intending to reclaim it. Impulsive as he was, the defenders knew he would try this, so they’d surrounded it with deadly traps. He found the kukri unguarded on a velvet pillow, in a glass case which he had only to shatter. In the dark glass of the case, as he strode toward it, he saw a tiger’s reflection, not his own. Then he reached out and smashed it, and hell came down on him with spikes, pits and darts. An alarm sounded, and the Windlord and Ironmaster arrived within moments, running in from opposite sides of the room. They felt like they were fighting a dying animal as the Tiger Lord flailed around on the ground, bleeding, his legs broken, unable to leap or pounce but still full of menace. Eventually he overexposed himself, Kamate plunged through him from behind, and Desert Wind sliced his head off. The disgusted Ironmaster took the Tiger Lord’s kukris, stabbed them through the bottom of the dead man’s jaw so they came up like fangs in his mouth, and threw the severed head out over the wall, down into the Shadow Tiger army’s ranks—proof that one of their commanders was dead.

Italics:
Tiger Fang is the fifth sword Reshar found: a dagger of heedless conquest, thoughtless savagery, kamikaze onslaught. That night, as he dreamt, he saw two men departing in anger, their swords cast to the ground, their faces turned away, while others, stern and assured in their victory, looked on. Overhead, the skies were gray and curdled with gathering clouds. Though he knew not why, Reshar woke with a deep sense of unease. The skies were as gray as his dream. He took to the road.

As the Tiger Lord and Shadow Master plotted the downfall of the temple that had cast them out, the Shadow Master went on a pilgrimage deep into the Plane of Shadow. Among the prizes he returned with was a gift for his friend, a replacement for Tiger Fang: this sinister and necromantic knife, bound with devastating spells to drain life. In the battle for the Temple, the Tiger Lord ripped through living invaders with its power before being crippled and felled in an attempt to reclaim Tiger Fang. But the cursed wound he dealt to the Windlord with this weapon is said to have weakened the other master, leading to his death in combat later that night.

Description: The kukri bears the Shadow Tiger emblem (a gnarled black paw with outreached claws) and the stamp of the shadar-kai forges. The grip is black, the blade is dark metal, and the pommel is stylized as a black tiger head.

Game Statistics: +1 enervating doom burst maiming cursespewing enfeebling keen kukri; Strong necromancy and faint transmutation; CL 18th; Cost 162,000 gp; Weight 2 lb.

The sword is made of white adamant, a rare variety of adamantine that’s silver-white instead of black. It embodies a simple truth: the last and, in the end, sole bastion of your cause is you and those who stand with you.

Italics:
Citadel’s Blade was the fourth sword Reshar found. After three days’ sleepless vigil at the fallen paladin’s tomb, the image of that monolith followed him into his dreams. All his life, Reshar had known White Raven adepts to be leaders of men: bold warlords and strategists. And yet, so often, their quarrels and claims for glory or eminence, or pursuit of powerful positions—or of conquest—seemed to blind them to their discipline’s heart, the defense of others. Here, buried in this tomb, was a man who fought and died alone, without comrades or glory, in selfless defense of those who had only shown him scorn and would never know his name. Was not his blade a better symbol of White Raven than the overjeweled saber of whatever latest warlord had risen to prominence?

In reality the knight’s tomb was plain, but in this dream it was an edifice of marble, sculpted with the armored figure of the knight lain at rest. The rest of a protector, justly earned.
Corpses coated the temple ground, pincushions for swords and knives, vultures’ for the taking. Like an armorer’s dreamworld, swords and weapons lay everywhere, frozen in or fallen from the hands of or stuck in the fallen. The severest dawn, pale and without judgment, opened over us. Rather than ending the nightmare, the emergence of light brought a swift death for any defender who hadn’t been wise enough to flee. Those who had, the varags would hound for days on end. Dozens of august masters had perished, but no one cared to count the bodies save for nine. The Shadow Tiger army laid them out in a line: each of the Nine Masters, fallen.

Leaderless, most of the Shadow Tigers dispersed with whatever plunder they could grab. The shadar-kai, content to have massacred mortals who dared practice Shadow Hand, swiftly returned to their home plane. Others remained to fight for the turf, trying to convince themselves they had conquered something. They had not. They sat in a hollow fortress in a remote mountain valley. It was no longer a place of any importance.


People will never stop boiling in their past disasters, least of all sublime adepts obsessed with perfection. Being less than we were meant to be isn’t acceptable. For decades, the recriminations raged: the honor duels, the vengeance for fallen masters. Decades of pain for the events of one shameful year. It had been years since any flag flew the black paw, and all anyone wanted was to go back in time. For there seemed to be no way of reclaiming what we had, or to grasp the harmony that might have been instead of so much grief.

When the future has no hope, people look to the past. It seemed the storm always spun around one question. Had the Nine Swords never come there, would Reshar’s temple still have fallen? Though it was the theft of Supernal Clarity that triggered the Nine Masters’ feud, some say their tensions were by then already seething. Perhaps without Reshar’s presence, inter-discipline enmity was bound to reassert itself, having such deep roots in history. Who knows. Whatever the likelihood, the point is, it could have been different.

I never think in terms of fate, but I choose to think in terms of what we gained. I believe Reshar’s ninefold style had to end so that a thousand styles could be born.

There are some who say that, if the Nine Swords are reunited, Reshar will return, or his temple be revived, or somehow else that what we had will be restored, as if they were the shards of a broken vase. Many devote their lives to this purpose. But not in wisdom. For what now would it matter were that school revived? What would it be had it endured now but a relic? Are not the truths taught there now commonplace? As any truth that is one must become.

Though its end was tragic, and bleak indeed the years that followed, the Temple, in the end, had served its part. There, nine paths of the Sublime Way converged. But the Way winds on. If we are to walk it, our place is not to linger at a crossing. If the Swordmaster lives, the reason he doesn’t return to us…is because he is no longer needed.

Do not seek the Nine Swords. And if you find one, find it as Reshar found it: a source of dreams, not the relic of another’s dream. Not his—now gone and surpassed—nor that of any other former bearer. Their intents for it ended when it left them. When you wield it, it is what it is, no more, and is yours to define. Whenever found, it is found for the first time.

It is this that lets its legacy always go on.

Miss Disaster
2021-11-22, 05:51 PM
Wow! Terrific work, Elves! I'm really, really excited to read the final draft. I'm predicting your book is going to noticeably rekindle interest in 3.5 Bo9S game mechanics.

Ranged Ranger
2021-11-30, 01:34 AM
As always, Elves, your work on polishing and formatting these is gorgeous...

On a marginally related note, your PM inbox is to full to send you this directly and I don't want to get in trouble for necroing the main AoW thread so I'm putting this here:


Just letting you know that I am making progress on the TOB:AOW Arborea discipline...

Also, in the original TOB it says that "Most martial powers fall into one of four categories: boost, counter, strike, or stance. Some maneuvers don't fall into any of these categories, but these are exceptions to the rule." and then gives a definition/description of each type...

Several of the Age of Warriors disciplines and the expansions to the original nine have maneuvers that are labeled as belonging to new categories: rush and utility...

Do theses new categories have an official definition/description somewhere? Is the existence of these new categories mean that there are no longer supposed to be uncategorized maneuvers?

Elves
2021-12-03, 07:32 PM
Wow! Terrific work, Elves! I'm really, really excited to read the final draft. I'm predicting your book is going to noticeably rekindle interest in 3.5 Bo9S game mechanics.

Thank you. It won't, but it doesn't need to. But it's also a low priority. Part of the reason I stopped is my own issues with the subsystem. Still, I'll post some stuff I have.

Could the d20 system as a whole ever have a resurgence in some form or another? It's not impossible, Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous is fairly popular right now. It would probably have to be through a video game.


your PM inbox is to full to send you this directly and I don't want to get in trouble for necroing the main AoW thread so I'm putting this here:
Sorry to leave you in the cold. My intent wasn't that you had to go off and do it alone but that we could brainstorm from the ground up.

Yes, no more untyped mvs. Move actions are rushes. Miscs are "utilities" for lack of a better word.

I think the key words for this discipline are "passion" and "freedom". Namestorm: Wild Passion (sounds like a fruit juice), The High Passion, Wings of Freedom, that type of thing. Someone in the old thread had a great metric for a discipline name -- needs to sound cool for someone to yell "I am a master of [discipline name]!" That's our test.

Visually, what springs to mind are many-colored feathers, sort of like a senmurv or a lillend, which do live in Arborea.

So how does a chaotic good person fight? The defensives should be about free movement, breaking bonds, and resisting mind-affecting fx. The closest existing options are Iron Heart surge and Diamond Mind counters; neither are available to crusaders while this discipline is, so it's okay to have some redundancy -- opening up similar options for CG crusaders. The self-buffs should include a line of passions similar to rage effects, but without the action restrictions and with something different than a Str boost. For the rest I think inspiration should be drawn from the gods and creatures of the layer. And that's pretty much all that's needed. There are a lot of these to get through, so it doesn't have to be perfect, just conceived with clear intent.