"Systematic Fiction", Jumpchain, CYOAs, the Celestial Forge and (You)!

A treatise exploring the latest... advances? in fanfiction

After staring at that title for thirty seconds, novice web fiction readers will be like “uhhh… you mean those Gamer fics? Where the main character has video game stats that he levels up by grinding or quests? Like Worth the Candle, Play Test, or A Daring Synthesis?”.¹

Nope. I don’t mean Gamer fics, or LitRPGs, or anything like that. We’re going significantly more meta with this. For starters, the Celestial Forge makes the main character of a story stronger every 2000 words.²

You read that right. Whenever the writer adds another two thousand words to their story, 100 Celestial Points, or “CP”, are deposited into the character’s pool.³ Then (usually immediately) a dice Roll is made. The roll selects an invention from a massive table of items, derived from existing fictional franchises. Thor’s hammer might cost 600CP and require saved up points, while a Star Trek space gun might cost only 100CP.

The rolls are truly random. The writer cannot plan around the items they get, only react. An external System is deciding the flow of the story. Hence, let’s call the Celestial Forge part of a genre we’ll call Systematic Fiction, or Sysfic for short.⁴

A casual history lesson might be warranted first.

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The Prehistory of Sysfic

CYOAs begat the Jumpchain, and the Jumpchain begat the Forge.

“CYOA” means Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, but confusingly does not refer to the popular book franchise here. For our purposes, it refers to an incredibly specific series of rulesets for fanfiction writing and concepts.⁵

Mid 2014, an image album is posted on Imgur. It gives the reader a prompt: you’re now in the Worm setting. You have n points and can pick a background, perks, complications and powers. Spend your points wisely, and survive the plot! This is the quintessential storytelling CYOA:

Here’s one of the pages. You have to choose one power, and then exchange a limited pool of points for additional benefits (such as immunity to Thinker-type superheroes, the famous “Blank” perk, as if the OP bullshit wasn’t enough), as well as pick up drawbacks (like having an assassin after you) in exchange for more points.

This Worm prompt wasn’t the first time someone made one of these,⁶ since the image mentions “generic superhero CYOA”, but this is definitely the example that solidified the genre, and the most often used as fanfiction fuel.⁷

Many CYOAs like this one, but unrelated to Worm had already taken over 4chan’s /tg/ board at this point⁸ (and failed to move to /qst/ board in 2016, which is a sore subject)⁹ and communities like /r/makeyourchoice.¹⁰

/tg/ itself spawned the Jumpchain around August 2014, which keeps the CYOA aspect of “choose your powers, then let’s write”, but formalizes it as part of a bigger system, as you “jump” from one fictional world¹¹ to another, “beating” them and growing your collection of powers and companions.

Let’s say you enter the Harry Potter world, use points to buy a wand and some OP spells, select your house as Gryffindor, write yourself as the hero that defeats Voldemort and gets Hermione as a companion, then consider the world ended and move onto the next universe with her to, say, Star Wars, where your protagonist disarms Sith Lords with Expelliarmus, or maybe uses the new Force powers he just bought. Each major work of fiction has a “Jumpchain Document” made by some fan that you can follow.

Just like CYOAs, they often have storytelling elements like drawbacks and benefits. Shout out to how fucking boring this drawback would be in an actual story.

Companions… at this point I would be lying to you if I omitted this: many Jumpchain player-writers do it for horny reasons.¹² There’s this whole system (which is technically not JC but has a similar target audience) called “Waifu Catalog”. If you click that orange link, you’ll realize it has basically become a whole single player TTRPG that happens to involve writing. It concerns “capturing” fictional female characters with magical tattoos on behalf of a shadowy corporation, and that’s all I’ll say here. Most jumpchains are clean, thankfully.

A minor part of one Waifu Catalog ruleset.

You’ll notice I used “player-writers” above. In my view, that’s the distinction that makes a systematic fic. Quests, while featuring many of the same mechanics as these, don’t have the writers force themselves to play by an external game’s rules.

Many of these systems got popular in the fanfiction writing world, I think, for two reasons. The first is the obvious one, people love self-inserting into their favorite works and go on adventures/have sex with their favorite characters. All these choices and drawbacks make the authors feel closer to their stories, they add an element of reality and (admittedly weak) stakes.

The second: they’re training wheels for newbie writers. It’s funny, because you often hear that ideas are the easy part and execution is what differentiates a TRUE AUTHOR from the plebs, but most of the time people fail at even the first when writing a self-insert fic. Writing any words at all is hard. The Forge will let you forget about stakes and plotlines, or at least have an easier time with them: just respond to the implicit prompts, and reap the gacha rewards.

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The Celestial Forge

It’s so fucking funny that COVID is responsible for what we know as the Celestial Forge system, but it is. Early during 2020, LordRoustabout takes the word count concept from an obscure Jumpchain bonus that forced jumpers to write at least 500 words per world¹³ and makes it more integral to the concept: words = power. He ties that into an existing compilation of Jumpchain powers already named “the Celestial Forge”,¹⁴ puts it all together.

This is a variant jump mechanic that I developed during confinement due to the current global circumstances. Like with the ‘Heavy Is The Quill’ complication from the Alt-Chain Builder this ties points to your wordcount, except wordcount becomes the only source of points available.

To begin select a jumpdoc or other list of entries as the source for your purchases. Then select Point Progression, Purchase Method, and Purchase Frequency.

The V3 of the document has 351 pages filled with powers like these.

He then explains how he’s already been using this concept for his magnum opus for two months: the founding work Brockton’s Celestial Forge.

I’ve found the main advantage of this system is that it increases engagement with the story and encourages you to keep writing (I've just broken 140,000 words).

The training wheels are on. Systematic Fiction is created.

Brockton’s Celestial Forge is both the best and worst example of a Celestial story. Best because it codifies it so well from the get go: you’ll notice the title references the main location of Worm, setting in stone this is not really a type of jumpchain. Despite using its powers, there isn’t going to be jumping at all, the guy sticks around.¹⁵

Worst, because it somehow gets to over two million words, beating the original novel by a good margin. It does so by excruciatingly describing powers and their interactions at length (you don’t need to read this):

I now had actual cybertonium. I had an upgraded design taking advantage of the enhancements to the material. I had Exotic Compatibility allowing me to treat materials as iron, bypassing multiple nightmarish aspects of nanofabrication of exotic components, including the need for atomic scale power lathes. I had Build Rome increasing my production by a hundred-fold while countering the practical issues of one person operating at that rate, and I had Shipping the Product multiplying my output by a factor of five. I could produce over five million handcrafted nanobots every minute.

Of course, these were nanobots. Five million nanobots had a fluid volume just under a microliter. As much as the Matrix valued tier one nanobots, they weren’t going to be a substantial portion of its mass any time soon. The Matrix was alright with that. As long as there was a continuous stream of production there was no concern over the fact that it would take two years of continuous work for me or a duplicate to produce a liter of nanobots. And tier two nanobots were still deemed ‘acceptable’.

I had to wonder about the intelligence I had been cultivating when the most advanced form of nanotechnology on the planet, a union of dozens of advanced fields of physics, engineering, and quantum principles, wrought from mythical, divine, or theoretical materials further enhanced by unfathomable forces, all crafted to a level of quality that stood as a physical impossibility, an near perfection that could not be attained in the material universe, and then bound with enchanted energies, spiritual forces channeled through its structure until it existed as something greater than any machine could hope to be was deemed as ‘acceptable’, all because there was a better version of the work possible.

The Vehicles constellation passed by as I wondered if this was how Aisha felt when she saw me lament the compromises I had to make in designing her armor.

This “constellation” thing is the way his brand of the Celestial Forge works:

• Every 2000 words, he invisibly gets 100CP.

• Around that point, a roll is made for the current constellation (themed groups of powers, like “Vehicles”, he just goes sequentially through them) and outputs a power.

• If the random power can be bought with the current CP amount, it is bought. Otherwise, the points are banked until the next roll, and the constellation passes by. This means that it’s completely possible that five unlucky rolls in a row (10000 words) will lead to unpurchasable powers, until 600CP is reached, which can buy anything.

It’s rare that other fics use the constellation element, though. I haven’t read any that do. Most of the time it’s either more or less abstracted in order to avoid repetitive writing, with some self-inserts being able to reject powers and save points for later,¹⁶ fully aware of the meta aspects of the forge.

Hilariously, an early reply to the very first Reddit post instantly zooms into one of the main problems of the Celestial Forge, and this fic in particular:

Actually, if this is a way to turn jumpchain into a viable and entertaining story(and it is pretty good admittedly), your method suffers from overexplaining what your powers do, just a little bit.

It goes like this: Your jumper gets new powers, then describes them what they are in detail,¹⁷ then counts that description as a source of points leading into a loop where there are multiple chapters where the plot doesn't advance very much.

As of 2024, the Brockton’s Celestial Forge thread on Sufficient Velocity has over 47000 replies, four million views and over 5000 regular readers. It’s still going.

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The Variants

Azdoine opines PQ and ToF are more “reverse jumpchains” and likely to be related to CYOAs than to jumpchain docs, but… it’s close enough? There has to be some influence.

The Celestial Forge is actually two things: the list of “Forge Powers” plus the “The Weight of the Quill” words=power system. So the simpler variants simply swap out the forge for something else, and keep the wordcount gimmick, creating three main subgenres:

• Celestial Menagerie (early 2021): roll for new magical creatures and monsters you control! Exemplified by Brockton’s Zoo of Myth and Legend.

• Celestial Grimoire (late 2021): roll for new magical abilities and spells! Exemplified by Ascension.

• Celestial Reliquary (2024): roll for new magical items! Its creator has certainly used it a lot in his own works, but I’ve also seen it used in combination deals like The Celestial Roulette.

There are some other, more obscure versions¹⁸ that I rarely see used in practice, like the Darkest Tome (2022) which has diabolist/dark summoning perks.

Other fics simply use another of LordRoustabout’s suggestions for point generation instead of messing with the source too much. Instead of words, maybe it’s every new achievement. I haven’t found any of these fics to have generated any genre on their own. Most of the time, these ruleset changes only make point generation more or less frequent, or more or less directed. Gacha God (a Celestial fic in all but name)¹⁹ gets a random MCU item every four chapters or narrative milestone, for example.

Beyond here, thing start getting looser, Wiki Warrior (2020) fics grant powers based on the “Random Article” Wikipedia button. But the writer chooses when to roll the dice in the original fic:

I have a page open on a d-20 dice roller and another on wikipedia, whenever Taylor pulls on her power I'll roll the dice and that will determine the number of times I press "Random Article" on Wikipedia. It will also determine how long her summon sticks around; 1-5 for a minute, 6-10 for an hour, 10-15 for a day, and 16-20 for forever.

Others, I don’t know if I would consider sysfic at all, most of the time. Tinker of Fiction (2019) has new tinkering powers alongside single fictional tech trees, for one week, then next week you usually get a new tech tree and lose the old one.²⁰ But I think many writers pre-choose the trees their characters will get, and word count is only indirectly tied here—you can easily compress and extend time as much as you wish as a writer. Quoth one such author:

It doesn't have the "new shit every 1k words" thing that the celestial forge fics have but instead uses in-universe time to allow for new tech trees. Still brokenly overpowered, but without needing to have pacing issues to gain power. I'm also a bit different in I roll my new specialties from a list as opposed to the other ToF fics where they're picked by the author in advance.

Finally, the original Projection Quest (2020) is, as the name implies, a quest, with the forum’s players (not the writer) choosing what fictional character Taylor will get to summon, not the writer. But there are other quests based on it, like A Pale Imitation, that add rolls to the equation and a fuckton of rules to determine the summon,²¹ or straight up solo fics like Who Are You Today which just roll dice at specific points in the story. It would be pretty trivial to run this as a sysfic, but even non-quest examples of this would lay right on the line separating sysfic from the creative space beyond.

Some of you may be thinking, should we count generic LitRPGs (2013)?²² I’m actually not sure, because writers tend to design their own systems top to bottom, and while they’re rails of a kind they don’t force the writer to do anything they don’t want to at any point, they actually make writing harder… further research is needed, let me know what you think.

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Systematic Fiction

So, one of the points of this article is not having to describe what a Celestial Forge fic is every single time I review a story based on it, doubling as an informational/historical look for you readers.

Another big reason to write this is an attempt to fix the terminology. “The Celestial Forge”, at the very beginning, referred only to a set of powers on Pastebin. Why is the term being used now to describe any stories that use the words=power concept, the “Weight of the Quill”, or stories that don’t feature anything celestial? There’s clearly something else we’re grasping at, a cultural movement even,²³ so let me try to define it.

A work of Systematic Fiction (or sysfic) is:

• A fictional work where the author uses external, usually RNG-based systems (not other people, that would be a Quest) to determine significant aspects of the story.

• Nearly universally self-inserts with heavy multi-crossover elements.

• Often using word count or arbitrary thresholds as triggers for the random mechanics.

• Examples are the Celestial Forge and its variations, as well as CYOAs, Jumpchain and Wiki Warrior fics.

Is this term useful? Time will tell.

This diagram really shows how loosey-goosey the definition is, but whatevs.

And here’s the xkcd comic everyone is thinking of right now:

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Epilogue: Sysfic Review Lightning Round

Before you leave, I need to apologize. Over the last few months, I’ve been systematically avoiding reviewing this genre of fiction on my monthly review posts. I was like “sure, I’ll save them for that celestial article I’m working on”. Only now, staring at the basically-finished factual sections above, I realize that 1. most of the fics aren’t good enough to bother with even a medium sized review 2. they kind of blend together 3. do I really want to pollute that perfect piece of historical research with this?

I’ve hinted at it, but this is the time to say it: sysfics mostly fucking suck. Much like fanfiction compared to published books, the barrier of entry is so much lower that it’s going to attract a lot of trash writers. That’s fine, since they are possibly a fast way to get better at writing, but still. Brockton’s Celestial Forge is unironically one of the better ones, and I doubt anyone will be able to finish it. Most of the other decent fics I’ve already reviewed a long time ago.

So I’m just gonna dedicate a single paragraph to each of my recent reads for future reference, and leave it there:

• Weasley is our King: Ron Weasley gets the Grimoire, and words are only ever generated via AU worldbuilding changes, which are delivered in long swaths of incredibly tedious exposition. One of the worst I’ve read.

• Folklore: A bit of a generic Grimoire self-insert in Worm, but the guy actually assembles a team and makes friends, so there’s a healthy amount of dialogue. It’s fine.

• The Brink and Back: Tinker of Fiction fic in Cyberpunk 2077. The setting carries this fic, and especially Jackie, the deuteragonist. Unfortunately, NOTHING EVER HAPPENS. The guy just makes new weapons and goes to sleep, almost every day.

• I Cast Fist: Grimoire fic in the DxD world. A bit interesting because I hadn’t read a DxD fic before this, but very interesting in that the guy is using a subtype of the Grimoire that only gives him anti-magic spells, despite his desire to be a wizard. A slightly funny generic shonen otherwise.

• Wizard Beyond the Wall: Once again, a Grimoire fic (I guess I built my backlog during a brief Grimoire gold rush or something), this time in the ASOIAF world. It’s not winning any contests, but I actually enjoyed reading this one, with its wildling focus as our guy tries to broker peace with Westeros.

• Is It Wrong to Take a Chance in the Dungeon?: This (wait for it) Grimoire fic takes place in Danmachi. Like Folklore, this one only stands out in that the character isn’t a loner and becomes a teacher to others, but is otherwise horny and lame.

• Did I seriously not read a single Celestial Forge/Menagerie fic in these last three months? This is making me look so fucking unprofessional.

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Well, I hope that was entertaining, and that we all learned something. I know I’ve complained a lot, but I’m excited for the future and the unique fics this shit could bring. One of these days we’ll get a sysfic that’s actually universally praised… I’m sure…²⁴

Do you think I got anything wrong? Am I missing a critical point of Celestial history? Let me know.

1. A normal person will be like “whoops closed the tab”.

2. To put that number in context, throughout the 77,000 words of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (if using only 100CP powers) Harry would have received thirty-eight unique fictional powers by the end of the book.

3. I’ll mention this later: the standalone concept everyone knows was technically named “The Weight of the Quill” by its inventor, but in practice everyone just refers to it as if it was an inherent part of the Forge or whatever subtype it’s used in.

4. Procedural fiction was taken, so kaisheng21 and I quickly brainstormed this term to encompass Celestial Forge and a few other gimmicks, because I really really really didn’t want to type “Celestial Forge and Celestial Forge Accessories” one hundred million times. Have a glimpse behind the curtain:

5. In theory CYOAs and jumpchains can be “played at home” without even penning a proper story, just writing down your choices and maybe a short summary of what you’d do in each jump, treat it as an optimization/munchkinry exercise. In practice I think it takes a very specific type of person to do this without dying of boredom.

6. I can find posts in /r/makeyourchoice from 2013, but they’re simple social media prompts like these:

Which aren’t really story prompt CYOAs as we know them. One of these did trigger a story, though: …And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes.

Tumblr user azdoine, who seems to be an expert in CYOA, wrote a more detailed overview of the transition here.

7. This CYOA is popular enough that you can just enter the community, say you’re writing an “Inspired Inventor” fic, and everyone will instantly know what you mean.

8. Courtesy of /r/jumpchain when I asked for a few more details, for those interested in them:

Fearless-Reaction-89: I think Quicksilver first posted in [/tg/’s] CYOA General, although I can't state that with confidence; I discovered jumpchain when it was already Jumpchain Thread 2. [See azdoine’s post in a previous footnote for a note on this]

Suhreijun:/cyoag/, a sub general in /tg/, kicked Jumpchain out to form their own general because we had reached the activity threshold - a metric that /cyoag/ arbitrarily decided where once a cyoa started taking up a lion's share of posts and attention from other cyoas it had to go. Before Jumpchain, QS and some others from early Jumpchain were in Magical Realms instead. All of this happened around August 2014 - the conception of idea and release on /cyoag/ was probably around a month to two before that.

The old tg archives no longer track back that long, but you can see that thread 15 was around late August, and back then we used to have 2 to 3 threads a day. (https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/34365666/#34373520)

/qst/ was not actually created formally until 2016 (April 2016 if you go by /qst/'s wiki, and the /qst/ archives appears to support this). Before that, quests were run on /tg/, but there was a community vote in /tg/ back then where the majority decided that the quests were taking up too much space and needed its own general. It had been a sore point for some /tg/ veterans that /cyoag/ and Jumpchain weren't kicked out at the same time since both (along with a few other cyoa related sub generals at the time) were closer to quests than they were to traditional games (again, by their metric).

9. /qst/ hosts quests. Quests have their own little history, described here by the excellent 1011686, but are ultimately irrelevant to this post—the players and the author are not the same person.

10. I cannot find a single classical CYOA post there before 2017 (possibly due to how shitty Reddit search is, let’s be fair), so I’m going to assume the CYOAs we’re familiar with took over the subreddit very slowly.

Also, I complained about the r!Animorphs guy using too many emdashes, but this is like my eighth footnote in ten seconds. But as one reader said:

11. I’m pretty sure there are jumpchains that use “original” jumps not tied to any piece of media, but they’re rare enough that I’ve never read a single one. Maybe the final jump in Bond Breaker counts, but that’s kind of its own genre-bending story.

Bond Breaker and the very famous Sleeping with the Girls have no genetic connection to jumpchains proper, by the way, even though they’re cosmetically similar and I wish I had an excuse to bring them up more often here.

12. Just look at this page (18+ warning) if you don’t believe me.

13. This is simply a “drawback” that allows you to get slightly more points for your initial selection per world. I’m not aware of any major jumpchain using it, but the training wheels started within this humble pdf, which I’ll pointlessly mention here was initially created on May 17, 2017 by a /tg/ anon:

14. This was a simple pastebin list of Tinker-themed fictional powers made in 2016. According to Irukan:

The original Celestial Forge (that pastebin list you linked) was created by Red and posted in 4chan's jumpchain threads back in... 2015? 2016? as well as Digital Pun-Pun, Genetic Augmentation Machine and Garden of Eternity. Basically collections of perks and items following a theme to become the best at it. […] But the Brockton's Celestial Forge story was what made it really well known as a story prompt

15. Well, when he’s not wasting 10k words monologuing inside his pocket dimension… shit, he created his own fictional lockdowns.

16. "But do you REALLY need to make the Forge more powerful?” Addiction is a powerful thing.

17. The author apparently said that’s less a flaw of the concept and more the part he finds most fun to write. Without being able to examine all possible interactions of his powers in detail, he would get bored and quit.

18. There’s a seemingly exhaustive list of Worm related sysfics and sys accessories here.

19. I’m actually not 100% sure there was a direct link between the Forge and this fic, but it’s from 2022 so I assume at least the inspiration trickled down.

20. The original writer of Tinker of Fiction decided to make some balancing decisions for his own story, and now it’s common for other ToF fics to just… accept it as a metarule of the power.

The other main thing is the protagonist is 12, recently orphaned and related to Taylor in some fashion.

21. The full ruleset is available here, but here’s a glimpse:

22. The first LitRPG could be the manhwa The Gamer, released in June 2013, or shit like Dragonlance, which were books based on an adapted D&D campaign and first released in fucking 1984. I’m going with the former date.

23. I already spent my allotted use of “zeitgeist” for this decade, unfortunately.

24. Wait, we didn’t talk about (You) at all! How are (You)?