Ok, so I feel it's time to call it in and declare the game over. I'm sad we ended it so close to the end, but when there is no interest, there's no point in keeping things open. I'll be closing the main thread shortly.

I'll give everybody two weeks to look through your private threads in case there's anything you said in them that you would rather not make public, and then I'll open up every thread to everybody, and give it a month so anybody who wants to can download everything - I know at least a couple of people who said they might want to.

Additionally, I'm now open to any questions anybody might have about literally anything you want to know about the game; so, if there's any curiosity you would want to satisfy, now's the time to ask! I might take some time to answer some questions since I might need to locate my old notes to check (it's been TEN years since this game began in November 2011), but I WILL answer anything I am asked about. If you don't want the answer to be public, you can ask in PM.

I considered asking to see if anybody wanted to make an epilogue post, but I realized there's no real point - too much would have depended on how the final confrontation developed and it simply stopped developing into anything, so it's no use. Still, if anybody WANTS to offer the other players an idea of what they think their character would have gone on to do, you're absolutely free to, and if you need answers to what I planned for possible results of the confrontation that never took place, as I said before, I will answer any question I will be asked.

Finally, I want to make sure you all know that, even if it ended with a whimper instead of a bang, this game was nevertheless one of the most meaningful things I've ever done in my entire life - nothing else in my life so far that I dedicated myself to has lasted anywhere NEAR ten years long, so to me this game was extremely meaningful. So, even with ending things like this, I'm happy it happened, and am infinitely grateful to you all for having made it possible!

That's a shame :(


I guess to start I'd be interested in the major players, and where they might have gone. I was told what might have happened with Sun Fox, don't recall if that was public knowledge or not.

Was Valador still going to be a major scene and encounter too, or had we done enough that he was going to be wrapped up quickly?

You would have needed to confront him, but the manner of said confrontation would have depended on what sort of agreement you managed to reach with Summer Wasp.

Also, unlike everybody else, Valador would not have surrendered; he would have done his best to win, although I had planned so that you could still win by forcing him to run away. Also, if you were fooled in thinking he'd been made into an ally, or else let him go for some reason, he would still have died - you'd have learned in the epilogue that he had been murdered, although I would not have openly revealed to you that it had been Laughing Shark to do it, only giving you clues to interpret as you saw fit.

So, for most intents and purposes, Valador was going to have a pretty major scene to himself; he might even have been a final boss of sorts, although if you had arranged things so that you had enough allies, it might not have devolved into a straight up fight. One thing that's sure is that he wouldn't have let his plans be destroyed easily.

Valador was one of the four key NPC I came up with before I had completely framed the story in my mind (the other three being Sun Fox, Shining Peacock, and Blue Snake), and he was always envisioned as the ultimate villain of the game overall, although all of the others + Golden Sparrow, the High Priest of Vashna and Vyctar (which I added in at later stages of the planning) had different antagonistic roles assigned to them as I developed the idea into a proper story.
This message was last edited by the GM at 16:24, Thu 14 Jan 2021.

Aww, it's a pity the game didn't get a "proper" ending but yeah, it's been pretty dead in here for some time now. Might as well give it something resembling a conclusion, at least.

I'm curious as to how far Shining Peacock would've gone to get what he wanted - was he really layers upon layers of deception to conceal a dark centre, or was he genuinely out for the betterment of everyone despite having occasionally-extreme methods?

As for Dusk Rat, I had always envisioned/hoped for her "ending" to involve being able to go away and settle herself in some nice forest somewhere, away from annoying humans, where she could befriend the local wildlife (as well as bring along the friends she's already made - Brook, Cloudcatcher, and her rat colony) and act as a sort of nature-guardian protector of the area. Still in contact with the Kai in some way, of course, and keeping an eye out for anything nasty which might show up that she couldn't handle. I seem to recall that "moving out" of the Monastery wasn't allowed or something but eh, I'm sure someone could end up waiving the rules on that a bit, especially if whomever ended up in charge opened up further channels to other nations and stuff (thus likely requiring Kai to possibly be based in other locations anyway). I did say it's what I hoped she would get, anyway ;).

Kai have to return once each year to the monastery to re-swear fealty to the King (assuming that continued in the new way the order was run) but otherwise I guess Dusk Rat could have been assigned to an area. Especially since Shining Peacock could have swung that, I suppose, saying it was scouting or some such.


Sun Snake was basically broken after Blue Snake's death, and kind of limping on just to make sure the order didn't fall apart, since that was his last pillar really. Hence why he didn't really have too much patience with Summer Wasp. Him offering to go as a figurehead really was him offering a lot of himself, and only because Rain Feather had put forth the idea, and given that Valador could have undercut Rain Feather, then he thought he might have no choice.

Was that a danger if Rain Feather had been leader? That knowledge of Rain Feather's origins / condition could have been an issue when dealing with Valador, and beyond?


Sun Snake would have probably retreated in to the background of the order. I mentioned to Shadow privately about a Lorecircle of Shadow, comprised of Divination/Psi-screen/POathsmanship/Invisibility. Basically the idea of staying in the background, and able to either fade away when needed or be exactly who you need to be when called upon. The basis of a benign spy network, in fact :p  Sun Snake might have finally settled and learned Solaris, and perhaps started this new lorecircle, and just quietly taight, or whatever otherwise.

I had hoped Sun Fox might be ok, but there was always the possibility that she might have to face her punishment and go to the Daziarn for her crimes. Was that a known end or could more things have happened to decide her fate?


I was wondering if Sun Snake could have weaponised Nexus, in that he could have used Nexus/Psi-screen (the feedback improvement) and PSi-surge to make the living network Nexus worked on actively 'hostile' to any attempt to use it. So for Valador, trick him to using Nexus in the hopes it would basically explode on him and deny him his guildstaff and and make him fear using any mental disciplines. Not that it would ahve ever come down to a fight.... not if Swift Fox stabbed him first.

In reply to Dusk Rat (msg # 4):

Peacock could have gone either way, but at the point where we left the game, he had settled for Sun Snake's suggestion of making him part of a council of five, because he was confident that he would be able to use it to influence things to his liking from behind the scenes, especially with the immortality method you helped him acquire, Dusk Rat, which he would have perfected slowly across the necessary time.

Assuming nothing changed during the final confrontation with Summer Wasp and Valador, he'd have been happy to let things progress in the way Sun Snake preferred, laying low and acting as a political influence until he was the only one still alive of the original council of five that Sun Snake suggested, at which point the mere fact he'd be visibly immortal would have allowed him to become the most influential figure by default without having any need for taking the role of leader himself.

Dusk Rat would likely have gotten her wish by means of Shining Peacock suggesting it as a compromise; since founding new monasteries was something that had already been mentioned as a plan, but one that would be difficult to put in practice, Peacock would have likely suggested that Dusk Rat could be allowed to settle in an area for a period (say, a dozen years), so that she could establish a spy network with the local animals, use it to get a sense for where best to set up a Monastery in the area, and then leave to move to a new forest and start it over again. That'd give the Kai a political base to work with, Peacock an additional new spy network to use that only a Kai could manage and thus with zero security risks, and Dusk Rat would get to live in the wilds like she preferred AND to also meet and make friend with pretty much every animal in Magnamund, given enough time. All under the banner of still being a member of the Order (if an itinerant one), and for the greater good, of course.

As for the king matter Sun Snake raised, Peacock was confident that, once Dusk Rat was able to get a mate for Cloudcatcher and start breeding the zlanbeasts as potential mounts that King Ulnar might be gifted with, any issues with her that might come from that angle would be waived. And, of course, with a Zlanbeast of her own, it isn't like showing up to visit occasionally would be difficult for Dusk Rat to do. :)

Basically, Peacock would have still been focused on achieving his goals of cleansing Magnamund from all evil, but he'd have not gone the more aggressive way he otherwise might have, and would have rather handled things on a more long-term schedule. Considering how his previous plan, which Sun Snake talked him out of, was to start wars intentionally to create reasons for the Kai to intervene, that was mostly a success, I would say. Peaocok really isn't the type to just stop, but accepting that somebody else might have a better method to tackle things is something a true political genius like him was well suited to accept.

In reply to Sun Snake (msg # 5):

Valador would absolutely have tried to use his limited ability to control Rain Feather against her; although he had less control than he thought he would, she could take no action that could directly or indirectly harm him, so he had a lot of leverage. Assuming you defeated Valador fully, Rain Feather would have been perfect for the leader role, since she had the power of the Sommerswerd inside of her. Defeating Valador and his secessionist plans in a thorough enough manner, or otherwise managing to get Summer Wasp and/or Moon Shadow fully on board like Peacock already was, would have also ensured that Sun Fox was spared; even if not, as long as Banedon wasn't murdered by Valador (a very unlikely thing, since even if he won Valador didn't consider that a goal, although it was one of his extreme contingencies), he would have spoken on Sun Fox's defense and ensured that a few years of prison under his guard would have been the most she could be punished with.

Basically, unless you failed things to the most extreme possible extent or actively campaigned to have her killed, whoever was made leader would have put Sun Fox's fate to a vote and she'd have narrowly avoided punishment. She'd have become a pariah for a time, but she had the work ethic to overcome that and regain people's trust eventually.

For the Nexus idea, it is something that might have been useful against Valador, although it likely would have involved several rolls and not be a guaranteed success. It would have most certainly made that fight easier.

Sun Snake retreating into himself is something that Shining Peacock would have encouraged by helping provide him with research materials and helping him in any project he had, and White Mantis would have done her best to counteract with softer means. I would have likely run it as a small side thread of about the size of the intro threads you all run, with Sun Snake speaking with both and then you as a player telling me where Sun Snake would have gone in the future.

Sun Snake's efforts to forge his own Lorecircle would have been frustrated unless/until he had mastered Craftsmanship, at which point the Lorecircle of Shadows he was looking for would have been achievable, and he'd have been able to instruct others in how to gain benefits from having those disciplines. How he would have gotten there would have depended on which characters you would have told me he'd made a habit of interacting with.

Also, unless he decided to go the way of Black Beaver and secluding himself in a chamber he'd never leave, Sun Snake would have been forced into being part of the ruling council alongside Moon Shadow, Shining Peacock, Golden Sparrow, and either Summer Wasp or White Mantis, depending on whether you managed to persuade Wasp or not. Naturally, Peacock would have been all for helping reduce Sun Snake's workload while Mantis would have done what she could to get him more involved; they would have pretty much become the good/bad angels on his shoulder, although which is which is harder to say.

Aww :(  Was hoping this one could have gone on until the end...

Since everyone had always seemed either disinterested or openly hostile to her own attempts to speak up about Moon Shadow (and with Peacock actively promising to bring Moon Shadow down with him if she'd directly opposed him), she'd developed a tactic of just quietly observing how things were going and then intending to report the situation fully to Moon Shadow at the first opportunity (while not making it too obvious that that's what she planned on doing, just in case).
Spying and infiltration were her main areas of expertise after all.
She'd also sought to use some of her crafting time to quietly arm herself with items intended to counteract some of Peacock's abilities, just in case...
Also she was definitely intent on trying to recover the 5th of the Five Flowers from Valador too, and had planned on honouring her agreement with Wol-Dumar about returning them to the Guild.

Sun Snake actually needn't have worried so much.  He'd managed to at least partly regain her trust after the Maakengorge incident, with that psychic healing scene in the cave.
While she believed his judgement on the leadership thing was clouded, she was prepared to believe that he actually did want what was best for the Order.  And in fact if Wasp or any of her gang had started a fight with him, she'd have immediately sided with him.  Same with any of the group she'd travelled with, and who had accepted her despite learning of her shadowy past self.
And especially Rain Feather, who she'd felt particularly close to after learning her story.

And her mind and soul had pretty much healed already, between the group's acceptance of her, and the soul within the Sommerswerd.  So she was actually a lot more stable than she used to be.  No more creepy visions or erratic actions, totally focused, like light and dark together, the shadow!  :)

And yep, she'd developed pretty strong feelings for Silver Raven, if it wasn't already obvious ;)

Also Shadow can feel free to reveal how she just happened to be carrying a leaf of Oede around with her when it was most needed ;)  hehe.
(Definitely curious about how that would have gone if she'd gotten distracted from her mission to follow it up...  And whether Moon Shadow would have been angry at her potentially damaging the deal she'd been trying to set up and possibly stirring up trouble with Banedon too.  That was a bit of a regret she was carrying around for a while).
This message was last edited by the player at 00:02, Fri 15 Jan 2021.

At the start of the game Sun Snake was definitely being directed by Blue Snake to think of Moon Shadow and Golden Sparrow as disruptive elements trying to take advantage of the vote to further their own more radical agenda. Given Sun Snake had slightly more leanings towards respecting the connection to the king, and a more friendly relationship with that side, that meant Moon Shadow was unfortunately set up as his primary opposition. Shining Peacock was kept off of the radar in that respect.

And at the end of the game when Sun Snake was trying to give all parties an equal voice, Moon Shadow had, despite the circumstances and conspirators, still killed Blue Snake and helped try to frame Golden Sparrow for it. So while Sun Snake undid what damage he could, he didn't think Moon Shadow had any credibility with anyone on the other side at the moment, and instead expected Swift Fox to act as the proxy for her. Interesting that Moon Shadow would still have been able to have gone on to the council.

To be honest, I'm surprised people like White Mantis and Moon Shadow would have been on the council. I was expecting that the end of the game was actually those one step removed would be in the council as a fresh start, and acting for their higher up. So Sabre Fox, Swift Fox, Rain Feather, etc for Golden Sparrow, Moon Shadow, Shining Peacock, etc.

Moon Shadow hadn't killed Blue Snake, Blue Snake had killed himself, with White Mantis passing the suicide off as murder specifically to make things worse for Golden Sparrow; Moon Shadow wasn't involved in that murder in any way. I think you're misremembering here; Blue Snake's suicide was entirely his and White Mantis' plan.

Swift Fox was given the Oede in exchange for agreeing to murder Colin, the leader of the thieves' guild in Toran, who unknown to the rest of you was Laughing Shark's lover. Swift Fox eventually decided not to do this for her own reason; upon been informed, Moon Shadow would have told Swift Fox that it was fine, that she didn't expect the merchants in Toran would ask that of Swift Fox, and that she'd speak with them and solve the matter. Given that, after the end of the game, Colin would leave Toran to go on a sailing adventure with Laughing Shark (who was going to pretend to still be dead so she'd not be forced to come back to the Monastery), the merchants would have eventually accepted, after Moon Shadow took credit for Colin's decision even if she had nothing at all to do with it, that Swift Fox had dealt with him in an acceptable manner. They also learned not to ask Kai to go kill people for them, as Moon Shadow wasn't happy with them for doing it.

Sabre Fox sitting in the council in place of Golden Sparrow is something that might have been possible, if Sabre Fox agreed to it and Sun Snake forced the issue; Moon Shadow would have been the one coming out of the situation with a sterling reputation, having been wrongly accused and then found fully innocent, and she would have encouraged a more forgiving attitude toward everybody, in the name of healing wounds and not fomenting divisions among the ranks of the Kai. I suspect that Sabre Fox himself would have preferred remaining in a less conspicuous capacity as Rain Feather's bodyguard, but that's the sort of thing only he can answer.

And Shining Peacock's support of your plan was predicated on him being one of the five councilors you suggested; that's how you sold him on your plan in the first place, Sun Snake, so he was always going to be part of it.

As for the five flowers, Swift Fox, I don't remember if I told you how they were supposed to be used together, and what it was they did if you had all five?

While I worked out the framing suicide was the original idea, for some reason I inferred that Moon Shadow had been more actively recruited in to helping as the game went on, given Sun Fox as leader was supposed to be the result. Not sure where I got that impression from, but that coloured the assumption. I suppose the question is what had Moon Shadow and Blue Snake talked about before his death? And did Blue Snake just steal / make an arrow similar to Moon Shadow's then?


I had thought that Rain Feather putting herself as leader might have changed Shining Peacock being able to also be on the council, and led to him trying to pull strings from the sidelines. Despite Rain Feather not actually being swayed by Shining Peacock, it would become known that Rain Feather was Shining Peacock's pupil?

Be interesting to see the side threads, especially with people not able to weigh in any more like Laughing Shark or Water Hornet. I don't think there's anything in mine that's objectionable, but of course everyone will see Blue Snake's duplicity for themselves :D


I hoped the five daggers might go to the five council members if the brotherhood/Wul-dumar was willing. Since their combined power was supposed to be equal to the Sommerswerd, if Sun Fox had survived (which you said she would have) a plan may have been for her to do the Lone Wolf thing and walk the world helping with the Sommerswerd as a symbol of the Kai still. While separating that aspect from the leadership and from leaving Sommerlund / the world defenceless from threats that needed a Sommerswerd-level of power used against it.

Blue Snake had intentionally called Moon Shadow to his room to ensure she could be framed for his death, and he'd asked to borrow her arrow, which he knew about, in exchange for offering support to her bid for leadership. Which was a lie, but made it so that Moon Shadow couldn't really defend herself from the accusation of murder when Golden Sparrow made it - hard to answer "why was the murder weapon, that you're known never to leave behind, in the room" when the answer is "I left it there of my own free will". Blue Snake engineered things that way specifically to force Golden Sparrow and Moon Shadow to clash, weakening each other and, as a result, strengthening those who'd be neutral by dint of absence, ie, Sun Snake and Sun Fox.

After she was accused and imprisoned, White Mantis eventually went to Moon Shadow and told her that Blue Snake had killed himself, but she didn't reveal the whole conspiracy or her role in it - she just said the suicide had been so cleverly disguised that she'd not been able identify it at first glance. Mantis also said that she would reveal this, but at a more appropriate time, to humble Golden Sparrow for his arrogant actions, as a lesson.

As far as Moon Shadow was concerned, she took it all to mean that Blue Snake, for some reason, had killed himself and wanted to implicate her, and since White Mantis was the only one who could prove her innocence, she agreed to hold her silence until Mantis revealed things herself, both because if Moon Shadow had spoken herself, her words wouldn't have been believed, and because Mantis had asked her to and she didn't want to jeopardize things.

Of note, if things had progressed to the point of her execution, depending on circumstances it was possible that, instead of letting herself be killed, Moon Shadow might have fought; in that case, you might have returned to a Monastery where the victor in the fight between Golden Sparrow and Moon Shadow would have been named leader by right of conquest. That was one of the least likely possibility, but it might have happened if Moon Shadow was to learn enough of what was going on to decide that letting herself be executed was not the path that would lead to the best future for the Kai as a whole.

Assuming you got the all of the Five Flowers, I would have left it to a group vote what happened to them.

Rain Feather made it very clear that she'd broken with Shining Peacock; given this, he would very strongly argue that his presence on the council was important as a representative of a group that Rain Feather clearly didn't see eye-to-eye with. Also, he might have made it clear to Sun Snake in private that, if he was honest about wanting cooperation rather than wanting all the power to himself, he had to prove it by letting Shining Peacock be one of the councilor, else Peacock would consider Snake to be lying and go back to his old plan of using all of his stored blackmail to thrust the Kai into civil strife. Peacock would be willing to cooperate and share power, but not at all willing to be put aside and have less power than he started with.
This message was last edited by the GM at 10:25, Fri 15 Jan 2021.

Ah, so I had most of the correct vague information, but through not knowing the specifics had inferred that Moon Shadow had come to be given a more active role in the situation. And had assumed whatever initial plan had been thought, it had altered somewhat during all the discoveries. I think in Sun Snake's mind Blue Snake had possibly discussed his own impending death and proposed the Sun Fox compromise to Moon Shadow. That being how he'd got the arrow, and that being the reason for Moon Shadow's silence.

Part of not getting the specifics was of course Sun Snake's own mental state at the time - partially his distress at the death of his master compounded by all the reasons for it that he'd never been let in on, and partially as he had moved on to truly trying to pull everyone together in concert. So that was partially my characters fault and partially mine for not getting all the fine details :D


Though Sun Snake would have been furious with Blue Snake if he'd found out the details. He'd asked originally if both sides would be given a chance to be their better selves. Golden Sparrow was creating his own problems by being so heavy handed, and that's what Sun Snake was trying to help with, at the end. But Moon Shadow sounds like she was just straight up tricked! I suppose that's also why it read as Moon Shadow being more active in her own side. Because I didn't see - so Sun Snake wouldn't - how this was her creating her own problems.


I suppose to explain until the threads get shown, originally Sun Snake believed that the side he was on was for keeping the status quo. That Master Firestone as the head, but Firestone and Blue Snake as a team, were the current leadership and a good team. So he believed that Moon Shadow was looking to put aside that leadership for her own radical side, and Golden Sparrow was looking to supplant Blue Snake then push his own more radical agenda on that side. And that while Master Blue Snake's 'humble those two sides' to help Master Firestone be officially elected was a tiny bit troubling, he trusted his master and guessed tough times called for tough measures. He had no idea the plan. And a little later, as he got to know the group, was more vocal in his worry about doing anything active to humbling people. In fact I want to say that Sun Snake got as far as even pitching the idea of a 'triad' like the brotherhood to Blue Snake as an alternative - where Moon Shadow and Blue Snake would still have a voice )Blue Snake finally being visible and acknowledged for his guidance) behind Master Firestone as Grandmaster, thus keeping the sides in balance. That, too, might have been why there was more assumption of making overtured to Moon Shadow?

He also knew Blue Snake had thought Sun Fox was a good fit for actually filling in the role of Lone Wolf. And Blue Snake's talk of the Firestone/Blue Snake team meant he was advising that maybe the same thing could happen with Sun Fox / Sun Snake when Sun Fox became leader. Of course, thinking that this might be a little bit more in the future, and a means of appeasing people with the likeable Kai being the future. He didn't realise Blue Snake was actually setting that up now.

So obviously Sun Fox having been corrupted was a blow that came at the same time as the discovery of the actual death of Lone Wolf. Sun Snake being a little bit more divorced from his feeling at the time, literally is how I played it, actually let him make some more mature 'Blue Snake' like decisions that ultimately helped re-habilitate Sun Fox. A more emotional Sun Snake would well have pushed her to the dark side. But even then, Sun Snake would never agree with hiding Sun Fox's past, as that just makes her a leader that could be brought down if the secret was found out. He felt she needed to atone for that, somehow, and if Kai willed it, be able to act for the order in some way as Lone Wolf used to.

So with the death of Blue Snake too, Sun Snake was thinking everything that Blue Snake might have been working towards completely undone - no Sun Fox (this was true, in a way), and Blue Snake was dead and Firestone withdrawn. But since Sun Snake had already been looking outside the idea of Sun Fox, and also had been thinking that a team of two was not balanced enough, and three - and then five - working as one was a way to keep the order strong, that's what he petitioned for. So even when he was told more of Blue Snake's true plan, he was already 'nope, not good enough, and not going to work cause you died before I could tell you Sun Fox was got by Valador!' and was pushing in the direction he said.

Looks like Swift called it right.  She'd suspected the use of Moon Shadow's arrow was a frame-up attempt, since by that point she'd gotten the impression that everyone else was out to take her down.  (Verbal attacks on the master of someone who started out suffering from erratic paranoid episodes will do that!)

With regard to the other leaders, after Starfire's drunken rampage with the Sommerswerd (especially with him nearly killing Silver Raven in the process!) made her believe he was just an overly-aggressive muscle-brained idiot who couldn't be trusted with absolute power over every Kai in the Monastery.  And she suspected he was using Golden Sparrow to try to intimidate people into backing him (or else!) hence Sparrow's seemingly increasingly-aggressive attitude towards people.

Blue Snake really freaked her out on a deep level, hence her apparent dislike of him.
Given that she had spent much of her youth building up an impressive collection of mental scarring at the hands of her own father, any psychic contact was a major trigger for her, and Blue Snake's habit of just poking around in everyone's minds was like a torment for her, especially as she knew she couldn't stop him.
Same with the Brotherhood Mage who Mind-Charmed her near the start (a less traumatic means of doing what her father used to do).  I remember at the time I actually flipped a coin to decide whether she'd snap and attack him for that, but he got lucky ;)  hehe.
Returning to Toran was also a bit of a traumatic experience for her, and with her mind being so uncontrolled at this point, her inner flashbacks and fragmented memories tended to get 'projected' outwards without her realising, hence why anyone with psychic ability around her would have been picking up some rather creepy visions :)
As she began to recover more stability and control over herself though, she did actually realise that Blue Snake wasn't the same as her father, and was prepared to try to speak with him at some point, maybe even try to learn how to shield herself better.  This was before finding out he was dead obviously.

Shining Peacock she seriously distrusted right from the start.  Especially with Moon Shadow warning her that he was probably the most dangerous person in the whole Monastery.
Finding out that Moon Shadow had basically kept her from coming under Peacock's control (and most likely ending up going down the same path as Red Dawn) made her even more grateful to Moon Shadow for saving her from that.

I didn't actually know what the Five Flowers were meant to do.  Swift herself got the impression that each one contained an aspect of Ishir's power, and that together they could equal the Sommerswerd.  So she'd initially hoped that the power of all five combined together with the Sommerswerd's power would have been able to overwhelm and destroy the Deathstaff (that was the possible solution she'd hinted at).
Afterwards, she was actually pondering gathering all five and getting them to Moon Shadow and her allies among the Kai in the hope that they would provide a counter to whoever got their grubby mitts on the Sommerswerd.  (Although she was saving that as an extreme last resort, mostly only if Shining Peacock had been the one to take the Sommerswerd (I was curious about whether it would have worked for him, if it still considered him a Kai, what with destroying villages and all!))
But she had fully intended to bring all five back to Wol-Dumar at some point, given that he was the one who told her about them after all.  And for all her other flaws, Swift was never one to break a promise to someone she respected.

As for her epilogue.  If everything had worked out ok, if the Order had been stabilised and she'd hooked up with Silver Raven, and it was happy endings all around.
I hadn't finished all the details and wrote it down yet, but basically, she would have returned to Anskaven in disguise, wandering the familiar streets, trying to make peace with the past.  Lay the Ghost of Anskaven to rest once and for all.
And eventually she'd have met a sad-looking older woman sitting at the harbour looking out to sea, and struck up a conversation.  They'd have talked about the woman's daughter, believed long-dead after her father, an evil-hearted man, abducted her from their home when she was still young.
Whereupon it would be revealed that her daughter was actually alive and better than ever.  Cue emotional reunion...  :)

That was her 'Good Ending' anyway.
If she'd failed to save Silver Raven, I had a much darker 'Bad Ending' on standby, but luckily it wasn't necessary.

If she'd died, I might have brought in another character.  I did think of Sapphire Rose (my character over in Sabre's game at the moment), but she seems a bit too much like Sun Fox (before she went all dark side), though amusing cheerful rivalries with Sabre Fox would have been fun ("whoever kills the least bad guys buys all the drinks later!") :)
Might have played Winter Rain, who was a similar build to Swift (more in the stealthy stalky ninja-esque genre), so could probably have taken over her role in the game easily enough.  But who never speaks, communicating mostly with hand signals and confusing telepathic fragmented images.  Would have been interesting to play that actually :)

Anything in particular anyone wants to know?  No more secrets in the shadows! ;)
This message was last edited by the player at 13:34, Fri 15 Jan 2021.

Sun Snake did detect the mental flash. He assumed it was Rain Feather and I think mentioned it to her (she clearly knew who it was in her response, I think). As a player I wasn't sure if it was Swift Fox or even Dawn Sword instead.


Did Swift Fox know the story of Red Dawn? Sun Snake never shared it as he'd heard it through Sun Fox, so didn't want to betray the confidence, but it did explain Moon Shadow and Shining Peacock's dynamic.

Who would Swift Fox have supported if something had happened to Moon Shadow, anyway?


Also, speaking of Dawn Sword, what was her potential arcs, and what would be her future given where things left off in the story?

In the initial conception, Alyne/Dawn Sword had been meant to be the high priestess of Vashna, but eventually I decided that the story would be more interesting if the kai maiden of sacrifice and the high priest were two different people.

I think everything there was to know about her had been revealed already, and with the death of the high priest, her arc was pretty much completed. Unless something happened to Sun Snake, Dawn Sword would just have tried her best to follow his ideals and learn how to be a Kai the best she could.

As for potential developments before you managed to get her to open up, there had been a lot of possibilities; at the beginning, she might well have been willing to stab you all, if the situation had presented itself. Her original group with the helghasts had been meant to infiltrate the Monastery to steal the Dagger of Vashna, but I think you all had been informed about that? Regardless, she started as an uncertain villain and zealot, so any mishandling of interactions with her could have gone bad very easily. But you all managed to walk that line almost perfectly, which was one of the most impressive things you did.

Swift Fox doesn't know the story of Red Dawn, and I imagine Dusk Rat might also be curious to hear that, but I'll let them decide if they want you to tell them, Sun Snake. :)

Regarding the Five Flowers, they could only be used if five people were able to trust each other to the point their soul could be considered one, at the same time as they were in physical contact (holding a hand that was wielding a dagger being the typical way), which would cause them to be considered a single person by the dagger, while having enough hands to wield all five.

The ultimate power, if all five of the dagger were to be used together in this manner, was to bring back the dead - and I don't mean one of the soul-trapping loopholes Valador used or undead raising like dark magic, but full-on resurrection like the D&D spell, completely repairing the damaged body and then returning its original soul to it as it had been at the time of dead. As long as you had a body to work from, this would have allowed anybody to be brought back to life.

Which means that, had you taken the fifth from Valador and figured the way it worked early enough in the game, and had still had Lone Wolf body with you, that would have allowed you to bring Lone Wolf back to life. I didn't really expect that to happen and wasn't surprised when you didn't manage to do it, but I did want to have the possibility be there in the game, just to see if you managed to surpass my expectations.

Nope, she didn't know Red Dawn's story, although she was interested to find out.  She'd come to see Red Dawn as almost exactly the way she had once been, as the Ghost of Anskaven.  Although it disturbed her that Red Dawn seemed to revel in it, whereas the younger Swift had struggled against it to the point where it almost destroyed her and left her afraid and lashing out at everyone.

But considering she was planning ways to effectively disarm Shining Peacock as much as possible, removing Red Dawn from his control was a priority for her.  Also that well-hidden more compassionate side of her was starting to reassert itself by this time as her mind healed, and she was hoping to find some way to heal Red Dawn's mind.  Give her the second chance that Banedon and Lone Wolf gave to her.  Actually fighting and killing Red Dawn would have been an extreme last resort option for her (especially as she probably wouldn't have won that fight on her own!)
That was one other reason she was interested in the Five Flowers.  She was curious to see if they had the power to heal whatever was wrong with Red Dawn.

I did wonder if they had the power to bring back the dead actually.  I think if Swift had discovered that on her own, she'd have seen it as a huge missed opportunity (something she would have regretted for a long time I expect).  To her, Lone Wolf was the one who really gave her a chance to atone for everything she believed she was responsible for as the Ghost of Anskaven, so she'd have given anything to bring him back.  It was a debt she felt she'd left unpaid, so her loyalty had effectively switched over to trying to salvage the Kai Order, his life's work.  Though she worried that she might have had to resort to desperate measures to do that!

I think if Sun Fox didn't know about that resurrection ability, Swift wouldn't have told her, as she might have taken it as badly as Swift herself did.  Ultimate missed opportunity and all.
It might have seemed a little dishonest to her, but she'd have hoped to protect Sun Fox from that realisation.

If something had happened to Moon Shadow...
Depends on what happened to her actually.  She might have suspected assassination by someone who wanted her out of the way (which, to her mind was quite a long list!)  Though, lucky for Sun Snake, being away on the mission at the time would have given him an alibi there ;)  hehe.
Nearer the end, her main suspect would have been Shining Peacock (though with the added doubt that he wouldn't have bothered, given that he had his blackmail card to play to take her down if needed), so she might also have suspected one of Starfire's crowd, perhaps Starfire himself, or Golden Sparrow.  Her priority then would have been to dig around and find evidence to clear or implicate someone.  It's possible she might have gone rogue for a while there, disregarding orders and making the finding of Moon Shadow's killer her main priority.
Although, it's more likely her feelings for Silver Raven would have acted as a check there, knowing that he was probably closer to Moon Shadow than she was (for backstory reasons.  She knew Silver Raven's history, although would never have told anyone unless he'd personally okayed it.  And in fact she would probably have physically attacked anyone who tried to psychically pull the information out of her mind, if she'd been aware of the attempt).
She would have asked him about what they should do, and basically followed his intentions, effectively completely switching her loyalties over to him.  (Though if he'd told her to stand down and do nothing, she might have been itching to investigate anyway.  But in the end she trusted him enough to follow his lead if it came to that).

If Silver Raven hadn't been around...  Well, chances are Swift wouldn't still be in the game by then anyway.  That was her 'Bad Ending'.
Unless the others could have talked her down (unlikely given that this was "Team Antisocial") she would most likely have just completely snapped then and gone rogue, intending to kill the ones she thought were responsible for Silver Raven's death.  Since Valador was her prime suspect at that point, she'd have gone back to Toran and tried to find some opportunity to assassinate him.
Might have been fun, for a little while, hehe ;)
If she'd somehow succeeded in that attempt and avoided being killed or arrested for it, I'm not sure what she'd have done next.  Maybe targeted the Vakeros who was helping him, if she could have found any clues to his whereabouts...
That could have been an interesting path to play (in much the same way that a horrific train wreck might be interesting!  hehe).
This message was last edited by the player at 10:29, Sat 16 Jan 2021.

Sorry for the delay in asnwering - had a bit of extra writing to do this weekend. :)

Red Dawn's story, as Sun Snake can confirm, was a bit of a tragedy.

Essentially, she had great Kai potential since she was a little kid, but due to suffering through a giak raid on her small village, her powers started to manifest in an uncontrollable manner, hurting everybody around her whenever she felt any strong emotions at all, while her healing and other defensive powers turned on her, causing her self-harm instead of helping her recover, exacerbating a situation where she'd already been an ostracized loner to the point she had become a danger to both herself and others.

Shining Peacock and Moon Shadow stumbled onto this situation, and Peacock, despite Moon Shadow's disagreement, tried to cure Red Dawn by removing the memories of what had caused her such deep trauma, but this backfired spectacularly, by making the outburst random and unpredictable in addition to being impossible to control, while also deeply damaging Red Dawn's psyche. Moon Shadow decided that enough was enough, and that Red Down should be brought to Blue Snake and White Mantis to be healed, but Peacock wanted to fix his mistake himself, and so Moon Shadow struck to subdue him.

However, rather than fighting, Peacock let himself fully open from the attack, suffering permanent damage in order to channel Moon Shadow's power through his own mind, and with this doubled power, he modified Red Dawn's mind once more, this time rewriting it fully as well as giving her an artificial personality engineered to let her control her powers properly. He succeeded, although it resulted in Red Dawn being unable to develop proper social relationships and instead having a very aggressive and dominant way of imposing herself, something which was unpleasant, but also the only way she could be able to retain mastery over her constantly out of control powers.

So, ultimately Red Dawn had very little ability to grow and change, but she was at least able to still live, and it was agreed that she would not be executed for something she had so little control over.

It was also why Moon Shadow was so afraid of Peacock, because he'd intentionally, permanently crippled himself - and in fact, if Moon Shadow and Red Dawn hadn't healed him afterwards, he would have died - just in order to fix the mistake he had made and save somebody else in the way he wanted to (Peacock was sure that Blue Snake would have executed Red Dawn if they brought her to him). Moon Shadow was scared not because he was stronger than her (he wasn't; Moon Shadow is the most powerful Kai in the Monastery despite having less Disciplines than Starfire), but because of the amount of suffering he was willing to undergo to achieve a goal he really believed him. She worried that, if she were ever to provoke Peacock into a true conflict of any nature, taking him down would require her to go to such extent she'd turn herself into a monster, just because of the lengths she knew he'd go rather than admit defeat or let go of something he truly, deeply wanted.

Any opinions on that? :D
This message was last edited by the GM at 17:52, Mon 18 Jan 2021.

Funny how Sun Snake seemed to develop the same sort of ideas for dealing with issues - the idea of being happy to destroy himself in order to take someone or something down. Politically that's what Sun Snake threatened to do to Shining Peacock, though I'm not sure if it was that threat or more likely just politically having Sun snake remove himself, that made Shining Peacock agree to playing the longer game.

I seem to recall that being one of the ideas for dealing with people like Shining Peacock who might try to link in to Sun Snake's mind. In the Maakengorge there was the connection to Vashna that could burn someone's mind, which Sun Snake could have tried to use to pull someone in to if needed, or later the idea of trying to defeat the 'two loremasters would basically be able to attack/defend to a standstill' by creating a feedback loop of both minds attacking Sun Snake's and then using his reciprocity defense and mindfort to have the whole mental connection just be a mess of pain.  Not the best defense to walk away from, especially if you don't have Curing to keep you conscious, but anyway..


Speaking of the Maakengorge encounter, Sun Snake had wondered if that could possibly help Red Dawn. Have her connect to that link. Not sure if something remote could have ever been set up, or if she'd have had to stay aroudn the area. But have her be able to channel her nagative emotions and energies directly at Vashna's spirit, while feeling the connection to all the rest of the life that was fighting Vashna and his followers. Perhaps that balance of a darkness always there but contained, and being fought, could have given her a structure to work with - and an outlet - to have worked on her mind. Assuming Shining Peacock would have ever allowed her mind to change from how he left it. I am assuming not.

Hmm, curious...

And I did get the impression Sun Snake had a bit of a self destructive side too.  Something Swift could perhaps relate to, since she really wasn't afraid to die (given that she'd once hoped to as a release from her early life!)
It's kind of why Shining Peacock could never hope to really intimidate her, even though she knew he was dangerous, she'd never back down.  Threatening Moon Shadow and Silver Raven was the only way to make her hold back, as she wouldn't have wanted any harm to befall them, which I imagine he knew full well.

Almost forgot to ask...  Did Valador actually know about Swift's past?
That little hint he dropped back at the Maakengorge did make me wonder.

Valador didn't originally know Swift Fox's past. However, he was the man who had hired Swift Fox's father for the theft; I'm sure you'll remember that he rose to prominence due to his help in the capture and then his strong position against Banedon in the following trial. Basically, he had intentionally hired Swift's father to fail in the heist, giving him false information and then making sure the security was in the right place to ensure he was caught.

While Valador didn't knew about Swift Fox's past originally, he was investigating it after his most recent talk with her made him realize that there might have been something there; he had suspicions now that she had some fault he could use, but nothing really certain and definite yet. It was likely he might have discovered the whole truth if he spoke with the right person and used that against Swift in the final confrontation, but it was also possible he might have not; I would have rolled for it when you next spoke to see if he'd managed to stumble on the right bit of information or not.

By the end though, Swift was pretty much done with hiding.  So I doubt threatening to reveal her past would have had much effect on her by then.
(Certainly wouldn't have stopped her wanting to take him down and hand his beaten-senseless butt over to Banedon on a silver platter!)

I'm guessing Banedon already suspected Valador might have had a hand in that?

OH, almost forgot, Swift would have been happy to reunite with her falcon friend, assuming he hadn't gotten too attached to Banedon in her absence :)

Banedon actually had no idea at all that Valador was behind the attempted theft of the Guildstaff, nor did anybody else; revealing that would have greatly weakened Valador position, so he did his best to ensure nobody knew. You would likely not have learned it either, even if he learned about Swift's past, since he'd have tried to leverage the information without explaining how he was involved in the whole thing.

Although I hoped you might find it amusing that, in his quest for power, Valador ended up being behind Swift's meeting with Banedon and Lone Wolf and her resulting salvation - in a sense, his villainous efforts created one of the heroes fated to destroy him. :)

Speaking of Valador, how much evidence did we have really against him to make a move on him and actually take him down? Did the bargain with Rain Feather undermine that in any way if so?


Also, how advanced were his powers, both in terms of magic and Kai Disciplines for that confrontation if it turned violent?

Valador had every single Kai-Alchemy spell, as well as a few others exclusive to him, a number of Right-handed spells as well, the ability to combine multiple spells for enhanced effects, and Nexus - he hadn't really focused on any of the other Magnakai Disciplines. He had some access to the base Kai Disciplines, but it was erratic, as he didn't really understand their workings. And of course, he had the Guildstaff which he could use for combat teleportation to an extent you'd probably have been surprised by, since he spent a lot of time studying its workings and perfecting his mastery over it.

Overall, he would have been about as though as Vyctar - with less durability but far more mobility and firepower - if you ended up in an actual fight with him. Of course, there were several ways he could be outmaneuvered; disarming him of the Guildstaff as Peaock had suggested (if you could figure a way to do it) was one, and his connection to Rain Feather wasn't one-sided, so she might be able to turn it back on him.

You recovered some part of one of his creations' body which was marked by his magic, so if you presented that to Banedon, Valador would not have been able to deny it; that would have lost him most of the support of the inner ranks of the Brotherhood, although obviously some people would have still preferred to believe him even if he were obviously lying. It would have definitely destroyed his plan, although he would then have tried to escape and possibly cause more direct trouble if his goals were so directly denied to him.

I wasn't sure if the creature and possibly Sun Fox's testimoney was enough, good to knwo they would have been.

I did think we'd need to rob Valador of his staff, but I assumed merely to stop him running away, rather than it also being a threat in combat itself. I had hoped he only had Nexus, but feared he'd have more things like Psi-screen, etc. Glad to know that wasn't the case. Though his spell arsenal would have been bad enough.

Remember that Banedon showed how a proficient member of the Brotherhood of the Crystal Star did have some forms of psychic defenses - they would not have been as good as what a Magnakai like Peacock or Moon Shadow would have (one of his big weaknesses), but still good enough that you couldn't just fry his mind and be done with it. :)

Im not sure if Foxy would have sat on the council. It would have took a push from most likely Snake, Rain and Sparrow to sit on there since its not really his style. But would have been a nice ending for him though to end up training the martial skills to the next generation of Kai.

Plus he would have been very onboard with fighting Valador for tricking him with the details of thier agreement, even if Foxy had some clever use of it too!

Incidentally, what was the deal with Lobster? Was he unsaveable I would gather?

Also was there a backstory aside from the one we desgined over Vigilance? With the power it had it seemed very over powered in certain scenarios and was literally a lifesaver sometimes
This message was last edited by the player at 14:33, Thu 21 Jan 2021.

Vigilance's power didn't come from the sword, but from Sabre Fox's connection to it - it was a symbol of his resolution to be honorable and just, an unbreakable barrier around a cherished symbol. The sword would not have had that power in somebody else's hands. He could have potentially transferred the ability to a different sword, but he would have needed to realize that first, which I don't think he would have - Sabre didn't seem to pay too much attention to the details of how his powers worked or put a particular effort into trying to get creative with them. But then again, Sabre Fox was tied with Laughing Shark as the best fighter among you players and was on par with Sun Fox among the NPCs, so he didn't really need to do that.

Lobster was just a very petty, vengeful individual who was taking advantage of the situation to try and survive while being as annoying as possible to the Kai who he had been twisted into believing disparaged him on principle. There wasn't much more to him than that; he was meant as a clear symbol of what Valador's power could do if they were to fall in the hands of the Nadziranim and used to their full extent.

One thing that Valador had done was use to tie both Rain Feather and Fall Lobster to himself as part of the resurrection spell - so, as long as they both lived, Valador couldn't be killed; they acted as anchors to his soul. Rain Feather had discovered this and was working on a solution, but I don't think she'd found a definitive one yet, although she had ideas, they just were too risky to try out and would alert Valador if she did so.

And I expected that Sabre Fox wouldn't want a seat in the council and be happier with Sparrow taking it, while he himself focused on being Rain Feather's bodyguard, but it's nice to have confirmation. :) Making him the trainer of the next generation of Kai would definitely have been something most of the NPCs would have been in agreement with.

Well, Swift was working on anti-magic stuff with Silver Raven.  Not sure if they'd have been able to help Rain Feather find a solution to Valador's 'horcrux trick' there.

I think Fall Lobster and Sun Snake just needed to hug it out :)  hehe.

Good plan, easier to stab someone in the back if they let you wrap your arms around them first!

Lobster would have definitely approved of that. The "pretend to hug to then backstab" thing, I mean. Although, obviously, he'd have been carefully on the watch for Sun Snake to do the same to him; that was sort of his whole thing, after all. :)
This message was last edited by the GM at 14:31, Fri 22 Jan 2021.

Now a very interesting question. Since it was Foxy that assisted in getting Rain Feather back to life, had Foxy said no, what would have been the change in the game?

I remember at the time thinking very carefully about it, even if there was a GM assurance it was on the level. So had I said no, what would have happened in its stead?

Or was the fact that Valador came to Fox the master plan to tug at his heartstrings?

Valador would have kept pushing until he got something out of you or it ended up causing a fight with him earlier, mostly. You might remember that it took several posts of convincing (something like four pages?) before Sabre Fox was willing to accept Valador's offer, and even then, you bargained ferociously and got several concessions out of it.

It was essential for Valador to have a puppet Kai he could control as leader, as it was both a crucial element of his plan and something he'd used to bribe Summer Wasp. He didn't realize Wasp was planning to double-cross him, which made it imperative for him to get you to help him resurrect Rain Feather. If you'd kept refusing, eventually it would likely have devolved into a fight, basically kick-starting the confrontation with Valador earlier - I'd have likely let Rain Feather contribute even if she was still dead, probably via Valador attempting the spell but botching it, or something like that - and resulted in a very different final scene once you reached the Monastery.

It's likely that the meeting with Peacock would have been much more complicated, as well, if you had already defeated Valador when you when you met him. Of course, a mid-air fight with Valador while half the team was short on WP and everybody was scattered throughout the entire ship so that the teleporting enemy could isolate you at pleasure would have made that a much more difficult fight than a straight confrontation.

And yes, tugging at Sabre Fox's heartstrings was mostly the main plan on Valador's part, and as a GM, I had enough knowledge of you as a player to expect you would talk yourself into going for it if given a reasonable enough reason to do so.

Almost forgot, later in the game, Swift did have the Blessed Eye with her, which might have made Valador a bit more wary of using magic against her.
Getting his own Lightning Hand right back in his face might have made him think twice anyway, if he hadn't already figured out what it did.

By the way, will Dusk Rat's story ever be revealed?  'cos I've been wondering about it for (literally) years now!  :)
*pokes Dusk curiously*

Oh, her backstory? Yeah that's a point, I suppose it never came up, did it...well, she started off living in some little village somewhere with a family and stuff, but when she was a small child (I think she was aged around five or so) a bunch of darkspawn attacked and destroyed the place, killing almost everyone. A small handful of people escaped, including the chlid later to be known as Dusk Rat. They all fled into the nearby swamp (it's a place called "Rat Creek" on the map, if I remember rightly, because come on, how could I not give myself some affiliation with a place named something like that? :D), but some of them were already injured and stuff plus, you know, it was a swamp.

So gradually, over the course of the next few days, all the adults died off until there was just this one child left. She sort of obliviously continued bumbling throught the swamp but it was around this point that her innate psychic abilities started to show up and she found she could "talk" to the local wildlife (which included rats, because of course it did ;)). She made a few friends and they helped her find shelter in a large hollow tree (one of those cool-looking gnarly dead ones like you get in Fantasy swamps everywhere) and brought her food and stuff, and she lived there a while...I think it was a few months, at least.

Eventually, I think word got out about the ruined village and it started being investigated or whatever, with people searching for survivors/hunting down the darkspawn responsible. And so at least one Kai got involved, and one ended up in the swamp, probably using psychic powers to detect the last survivor or whatever and eventually found her in her tree.
It was Shining Peacock, of course, and she was very wary of him at first - her friends for some time now hadn't been human, and her last memories of her own kind involved a whole lot of death and stuff, so she wasn't exactly super keen on him being anywhere nearby. But he persisted and kept coming back and sitting nearby and talking to her and generally being non-threatening and stuff, and eventually she got a bit more used to him and was willing to chat. So she told him about her friends and he explained to her how it was she could've made friends like that when other people she'd known wouldn't have been able to do that. He told her she could come with him to learn how to do that kind of stuff better, and also to help protect people so they wouldn't have their homes destroyed and stuff either. She was rather happier with the swamp tree by that point than she had been among her own kind but eventually she agreed to go with him, so off they went to the Monastery for her to become a Kai :).

And of course she always retained some level of mistrust of humans, and an awkwardness around them, finding it much easier to communicate with other species - I can't remember to what level this was mentioned but she ended up basically befriending a bunch of rats around the Monastery and having a little colony around her that she would "talk" to regularly and stuff. She brought two of them with her on the mission, in fact - a sandy-coloured one she called "Sandfur" and a more standard brown-coloured one I never actually thought of a name for.

If Peacock had turned out to do anything to really betray her trust/turn out to be a "bad guy", she would've had it with humans at that point - he was the only one she really trusted (and the only other two NPCs she ever really felt any kind of affinity for were basically unceremoniously insta-killed, one during the main story and the other during a "prequel sidequest" she went on with Sabre Fox while everyone else was doing stuff and we were waiting for the thread timelines to catch up), so if he'd done anything to demonstrate her trust as being misplaced, she would've basically given up on the species altogether, decided to sod the rules, and gone off to live her own life elsewhere. Which would likely have ended up being what I said earlier in the thread I wanted her "epilogue" to be anyway - having a nice forest she could settle down in and make friends with the locals (non-human ones, that is :P) whilst using them to gather news and protect them from any perceived threats. She wouldn't have wanted anything more to do with the Kai and would've protested if they'd tried to tell her to come back because of "the rules" or whatever - she would've questioned what gave them the right to control her like that, etc.

So yeah, that was basically it, I believe. Rat friends! :D

So she was basically like Tarzan, but raised by rats? :)  Cool!

Once Swift's mind stabilised enough for her to regret her previous behaviour, she was hoping to kind of reconcile with her, but got the feeling she was unwelcome at best.

And late in the game she'd come to the conclusion that Shining Peacock was using both Dusk Rat and Red Dawn as weapons, and had determined to ensure that neither of them got hurt if the group ended up having to take Peacock down.  Past experience of being used as a weapon herself meant that such a thing just rubbed her the wrong way.  And she still felt like she owed Dusk a debt for helping to break Silver Raven out of the Darklands.

So, had Dusk been inclined to, she was one of the very few people who could have 'called in a favour' with Swift later in the game.  Although getting her to help Peacock out would have taken a huge amount of persuasion, hehe.  Making her betray Moon Shadow would have been impossible without significant psychic trickery.

Also, Swift herself believed animals were more honest than humans ;)

And I think now you also know why, when Dusk Rat needed to create a place where you could ambush Fall Lobster, she created a swamp-like forest... or, for Sun Snake, why Dusk Rat psychic defenses took the shape they did. :)

Something that I’d forgot. What was up with Rain Feather mother? I assume that it was her we first encountered as we started the mission after getting dropped off, and later on of course. What was her role to play? And did she actually escape?

Sha was working with Peacock from the beginning. From before the beginning, actually; she was the descendant of the Wytch of the Kirludin Islands, and had been moving from place to place, hiding, always feeling persecuted and venting the feeling by occasionally murdering people. While nobody could ever confirm her true identity or guilt, this just caused her and her daughter Masari to be watched with mistrust and be discriminated against.

Eventually, Peacock tracked her down, but he then discovered that Masari had Kai powers. So he made her a deal: he would give her a chance to exercise her power and even give her way to grow that power, if she would in exchange join the group she told him to and pass information along to him. She accepted, on provision that Peacock would also ensure to keep her daughter safe. So she did a lot of evil stuff, but in the process of doing it gave Peacock tons of information that nobody else could access, since he was the only one to have an actual mole of such caliber, and with it Peacock destroyed a lot of evil groups and cults. While nobody else would have cared, Peacock did kept score of how much evil she caused and how much of it she let him prevent, and he judged the cost was worth it.

At some point, she infiltrated the group of Cener Druids that was working for Sejanoz to recover the Deathstaff; that's when you stumbled upon her, she was on the mission to ensure they failed and Peacock got the Deathstaff and had the means to approach Sejanoz without being stopped to destroy him. Of course, she would not kill Rain Feather, so she merely pretended to fight you the few times you meet; she was never serious about actually killing any of you. After Rain died, she decided that Peacock had either failed or betrayed her - she didn't care which - and joined you with the specific goal of getting her revenge on him, personally. However, once you announced your intention of confronting Vyctar in the heart of a Darklord's fortress, she decided you were going to die, and so, after taking advantage of your asking her to be a distraction, she used the fact that you'd let her go on her own to escape, thinking that she'd find a different way to get a Peacock some day.

Out of curiosity, would Swift have ever been able to track down that guy in Toran again, the one who claimed Peacock had burned down his village?  Or did Peacock find out about him from Swift's memory of her battle with him and have him mysteriously 'disappear'?
Not sure if that was ever going to go anywhere anyway, since no-one seemed in a hurry to challenge Peacock about his past activities.

Then again, maybe in a way it did Swift some good to know she wasn't the only Kai with innocent blood on her hands.  Might explain why Peacock had been interested in gaining control over her once, kindred spirits and all, hehe ;)
This message was last edited by the player at 01:23, Mon 25 Jan 2021.

He didn't read Swift's mind about anything, but obviously Dusk Rat told him; she trusted him enough to let him take over her body when your team was fighting the Nadziranim, after all, she'd hardly hide something that might be dangerous to him after he asked her to tell her everything that happened on her mission. Peacock didn't particularly care about it, anyway; he would have been confident about his ability to argue his way out of any consequences for that one. While some of the things Peacock did where of the kind that most people would never be willing to accept (like his working with Rain Feather's mother), he never did anything he didn't think was a net positive in the fight against evil, and that meant he had good justifications ready for nearly anything questionable he'd ever done.

Oh yeah, I remember that guy. Turns out Peacock was basically what TV Tropes calls a "Well-Intentioned Extremist" and was willing to burn down a village of innocents in order to clear out a few darkspawn or something. He explained it in such a way that Dusk Rat was willing to let it go when she questioned him about it, anyway - I think she basically went to him after we'd spoken to the guy who made the accusation and said "So this guy said you destroyed his village - is that true?" and Peacock basically said "Yeah, but if I didn't then a load more people would've died to darkspawn so I regret it but it had to be done". Something along those lines, anyway.

As for Dusk Rat potentially trusting Swift Fox, I don't think that was ever likely to happen - Dusk Rat didn't really trust anyone human except Peacock, and that took a while when they first met. She just found them, as a species, so needlessly complicated and deceptive, saying things they didn't mean, twisting things other people meant, arguing with each other to try and get whatever result was the better for them without worrying about how it might affect other people, and so on. She basically just couldn't be arsed with all the faff and dishonesty and didn't really see any need to bother when she had plenty of friends who were straightforward, loyal, and didn't/couldn't understand any such concepts as deceit, betrayal, and the like. And Swift Fox was an assassin, right? And this was a known thing. So it was literally her job, at one point, to gain someone's trust in order to get close enough to kill them. Dusk Rat would likely never have been able to bring herself to trust someone like that, because as far as she was concerned, if you're capable of doing stuff like that once, you can do it again.

Dusk Rat was basically working with everyone because she had to, because it was her mission. She was just putting up with everyone in between doing actual mission stuff like, you know, fending off darkspawn. I think she only ever entered direct combat once, and that was when (and because) she was alone, when she went into the sewers of Toran after speaking with the local rats and finding out that something down there terrified them, and on exploring she found a giant snake thingy that was all mutated and had metal spikes sticking out of it and stuff.

Oh, do you remember when we all properly teamed up and blew the shit out of that darkspawn camp? I can't remember exactly what everyone did...I think Swifty snuck around and planted explosives, I'm pretty sure I directed the erm...what were they called, not giaks...the flying things...kraan? The ones that were smaller than zlanbeasts. Anyway, I think I directed those to start attacking the darkspawn, and I feel like there were some kind of dog-like monsters too that I was able to antagonise in much the same way. So they started causing chaos, other members of the group did stuff, and eventually someone set off the explosives and the whole place turned into a crater while we basically all crouched behind a nearby ridge overlooking the place and would probably have exchanged cheers and high-fives had any of us been the sort to do so ;). I certainly remember that whole scene as being pretty satisfying since we all basically hid and used a mixture of stealth and psychic powers to wreck the place without anyone getting caught :D.

Oh, since they're not around to say, what were Frost Ferret's and Water Hornet's political leanings? Were there any evil secret plans they were trying to enact? :D

They were both part of Moon Shadow's faction, although from different angles and nowhere near as deep into it as Swift Fox was; specifically, Frost Ferret was something of Silver Raven's assistant, while Water Hornet was something of a favored disciple of Phantom Steed, a bit like the Sun Snake to Blue Snake relationship but much less close and much more filled with distant admiration, since Hornet was a third batch.

Hornet was also in a similar friendship/conflict with Sun Fox as Sun Snake was, with a confused mix of admiration and envy. Hornet also was investigating Peacock's dealing with Sejanoz and Rain's mother, so he might have come up on a more antagonistic side of that confrontation, had he been around for it. Hornet also had some admiration for Valador and Sabre Fox, as the two of them had saved Ruanon from an Helghast in their backstory, so he was very conflicted when it was realized Valador might be a villain, and he really admired Sabre Fox a lot for his bravery and courage.

As Ferret left earlier, the last I had from him was a lot of determination toward saving Silver Raven and, of course, since he had almost been killed by Haxadrom on Valador's orders, he had serious reason to hold a grudge against both of them, but I wouldn't be able to say how that would have evolved if he'd still been around for it - hence why I tended to keep him out of most events, as I didn't feel confident with handling his reactions.

Poor Water Hornet, didn't realise he actually liked Valador!


For some reason I didn't trust Wul-dumar as a player, even though my character had no reason to. Not sure why. Was the mage straightforward and innocent, or was there anything going on with him?

He was a neutral politician with a passion for collecting artifacts. He wasn't an enemy, but he was the primary reason you couldn't just go to Banedon and tell him "look, Valador is evil, we can't prove it but we saw it with our own eyes"; even if Banedon would have believed you immediately, Wol-Dumar would have stopped you from taking any action until you provided some solid proof to him. So... in a sense, there wasn't anything more to him, but in another, he was your biggest obstacle to solving things quickly about the Toran situation.

I hope that helps?

Also, I will be opening up all the private threads to everybody in ten hours or so - I imagine once you've read them all, that'll open a few more questions. Note that the entirety of the game, all threads, covers FIVE different pages - you need to go to the scroll-down option and select page 4 or 5 if you want to see the threads in those pages.

I'll leave the game up for two months so that anybody who wants will be free to download everything in it, but after that I'll need to mark it for deletion, as for the site rules, so if there is anything about the game that you want to save, do it as soon as you're able to! ^_^

Maybe his avatar looked oddly suspicious for some reason? ;)

something that I wondered about, what was the reputation Peacock had with Vyctar? I recall that Vyctar told a story of a certain kai with abilities that sounded remarkably like Peacock. Was there anything to that?

I think the hair colour matched for the time

The hair color matched, yes, because it was him. Peacock annihilated several divisions of Drakkarim on his own, which earned him a big name during the war; he did it with very unsportsmanlike tactics, traps, psychic assaults, and a good dose of carefully harnessed nightmare fuel to pass himself as scarier and stronger than he was to them. As a result, he earned a reputation. You can safely assume that anything Vyctar said about him was at the very least based on truth, with some exaggeration as is normal in fights, and some of it being watching things from the opposing side. Once you know how far Peacock was willing to go to save Red Dawn, it shouldn't be surprising that he was willing to terrorize the Drakkarim into insanity in order to win the war.

Peacock wants the side of good to win, and he's more than willing to go to very extreme length to ensure it; remember, he spared a murderous witch (as in, somebody who killed innocents due to no other reason than anger) and made her into his agent just to have an inside agent among the forces of darkness. You shouldn't be surprised that, in a publicly declared war against people who were allied to the Darklords, he went all out, nor that the result of Peacock going all out was terrifying to the other side, since he prides himself in his skill at presentation. :)

Ok, now everybody should be able to see everything; if people could confirm for me that this worked, that'd be wonderful! ^_^

Seems to be fine, yes

Gonna have lots to read! Before I do a few more questions

Rain Feathers ghost visited Fox in his sleep. I could sense it coming when I saw the opening post of the thread. Was this just Fox alone? I’m pretty sure at least Snake saw her too?

Also, in the private thread where Peacock met Fox during the adventure with Dusk Rat, was there anything involved in this? Or just a filler story?

Rain Feather had a dream meeting with each of Sun Snake, Swift Fox, Dusk Rat and Sabre Fox. You will find a thread for each. All of them are sadly unfinished, as Rain was unable to keep posting in them.

Shining Peacock meeting with Dusk Rat during your memory mission was nothing sinister, just him showing up as the only available authority figure. As I said, he didn't see himself as evil and, where his students were concerned, all he wanted was for them to succeed and be happy - preferably in a manner that made him happy and successful as well, but I don't think that qualifies as strange or evil, does it?

If you'd solved the situation with Summer Wasp, the Kai you saved in that thread would have showed up afterwards among those greeting your return, commenting how she was looking forward to become a great Kai who helped everybody and saved people, just like Master Dusk Rat. Other than that, the thread was really more of a way to give you and Dusk Rat a chance to interact as players and build a connection between your characters than anything else.

Is that Swift Fox that Summer Wasp and her gang nicknamed "Shady"? :)  hehe.
I remember around the start I missed that Laughing Shark was one of Wasp's crowd.  Somehow I'd gotten the mistaken impression that she worked with Moon Shadow, hence why Swift was more open with her than she'd normally have been with someone outside of the inner circle...  Not sure it had much of an effect yet, but I'm still rereading everything from the start for now :)

Was it ever explained why White Mantis actually seemed afraid of being put forward as a candidate for leadership?
(Although I get the impression that political games and healers don't go well together...)

It would mess with Blue Snake's plans as well as put into questions White Mantis' position as the neutral moderating party between the various candidates. Thus, neither Blue Snake nor White Mantis were inclined to let that happen, and since they were in agreement, and working together, there was no real chance of her position changing.
This message was last edited by the GM at 00:44, Sat 30 Jan 2021.

Ahh okies.
Lot of complex stuff going on in the background that we didn't get to see there (or at least Swift didn't.  Such is the price of being an antisocial loner perhaps).

And awww...  Did Silent Mole have a crush on Sun Snake, and he broke her heart?  *frowns at him*

Sun Snake's real superpower was obliviousness :p

I'm glad it's entertaining for you all to read! ^_^

And yeah, Sun Snake totally won the obliviousness prize in the game, there's no arguing that.

Hmm, wasn't there a link somewhere to download threads?  Can't seem to find it if so.  Might be thinking of another forum...

Not sure what order the various sub-threads go in either, I only know the ones that I had access to as Swift.

Interesting seeing things from the perspective of other characters though.  No wonder we didn't talk much at the start, everyone was suspicious of everyone else, hehe :)

It should be possible to click "see all" on a thread and then "D/L" to download, but having never done it myself, I'm not sure.

As for reading order, I can help! To a small extent. The truth is that a number of private threads cover multiple instances where a character would come back to a side thread multiple times throughout the game, at different points.

In general, the Prologues all come first. Sun Snake's prologue is set a considerable amount of time before the game starts (I think a few months), Rain Feather takes place a few days before, and Dusk Rat's is the night before, so reading them in that order would give a more logical progression. Water Hornet's prologue is the exceptions, as, while it starts chronologically a bit after Sun Snake's, it then continues and only rejoin the main story much later (since Hornet joined the game later himself), so I would suggest to threat it like a memory thread - wait for when Water Hornet joins the group in the main story (near the end of Thread VII), and when he explains his presence, go read his thread for the details. Unlike the memory thread, Hornet's prologue contains significant information, and not reading it would reduce understanding of following events.

From there, it's better to read thread I as the opening; thread 0 starts chronologically before thread I, but the events there cover a much larger span of time, and Frost Ferret (protagonist of that thread) rejoin the main story at a point that is well into thread II. As a result, I would say read thread I first and thread 0 after it, or else read thread 0 before everything else, and then move into the prologues. In any case, thread I should be read before thread II is.

As for the side thread, the best way to go is to just follow along a thread; then, if one or more players have time to themselves (say, staying watch together), or go do something separate on their own (say, a shopping expedition), then you should probably interrupt your reading of the main thread and follow the side thread until the characters in it rejoin the story, at which point you go back to the main thread. The numbers on the side threads (0.0, 0.1, and so on) have next to no meaning - they're not a chronological ordering, a group-based ordering, or any other such ordering of any sort, I just picked the number that I liked the particular day I started that thread and then distributed the remainder as I went. Following the main thread and branching out whenever the thread does (it's generally pretty clear) is the best way to go.

The Memory threads (of which there are three) only really matters for further characterization of their character, and have no real story purpose, so they can be read at any time. In general, a character will mention the events in questions (Sun Snake's first mission in Illirion, Sabre Fox group fight against Starfire, Sabre Fox commenting to Dusk Rat about them having worked together before) in one of the main threads, at which point following to the memory thread to have more clarification would be the natural response, but one could completely ignore them, or read them all before the main story, and in either case get the same benefit from them.

So, after having explained how the side-threads and memory-threads work, the next thing is the reading order of the main threads themselves. While following the story by thread number would make for a chronological sequence, the fact that the groups parted midway through Thread II to go on their own missions and didn't rejoin until thread VI. Given that, I would instead suggest to go with the separated reading - follow the mission of the Toran team first, and then, when the groups join up, go over the events the Maakengorge team experienced, and continue from there.

This is because the adventure of the Toran team took place in the even numbered threads, starting with II, so when you are reading Thread II, following from it to Thread IV and then into Thread VI, and thread VI is also the thread where the two teams joined together. Thus, following them lets the narrative flow more naturally. Then, reading thread III, V and VII clarifies what went down with the Maakengorge Team, and then Thread VII proceeds directly into Thread VIII, so that smooths out the reading experience.

Thus, my suggested order would be to read the prologue threads in the Sun Snake > Rain Feather > Dusk Rat sequence, then Thread I, then Thread 0, then after that the Toran Team story in threads II, IV and VI, the Maakengorge story in threads III, V and VII, and from there follow the threads from VIII on along their normal numbers, reading the memory threads whenever the relevant memories are mentioned, and checking for side-thread whenever the group is split for whatever reason or a player would have a chance to do something on their own while others aren't around (such as standing guard), as there will often (although not always) be one - often this is mentioned in the relative main thread's OOC, although not every time.

I hope that helps! ^_^

Ah yeah, I remembered seeing a D/L link somewhere on another game thread, but not seeing it here.  Not sure if there's something else I need to do to make it show up.
Just a thought anyway.  This is probably the longest RP I've ever been in, so would have been nice to keep a record of it and read through the whole thing again in my own time.

If this had gone all the way to an ending, it would have been an interesting project to write it up in novel form.  Though uncertain how that would work with multiple viewpoints.  A constantly-changing third-person view could get confusing after a while, unless it was handled with a lot more writing skill than I'd ever claim to have.

OH, while I remember, Dusk Rat was technically wrong in thinking Swift Fox was an assassin.  More like she was a weapon.  The infamous 'Ghost of Anskaven'.  So was like blaming a dagger for stabbing someone rather than blaming the person who'd wielded it ;)
Although, yeah, Swift wouldn't have tried to defend herself from that accusation, as she always did believe she was at least partly responsible.  A combination of crippling guilt, post-traumatic stress, and psychic-torture-induced mental damage was at the root of all her issues really.  Psychiatrist's field day.
Her mind had effectively fractured into the 'Ghost' part of her and the part of her that was loyal to the Kai, and when she was emotionally stressed, her personality could switch to either of those causing her to lash out, sometimes at the wrong target.  Being hit by psychic attacks could aggravate that situation too.  And her inability to shield her mind properly meant that if she experienced a flashback, it kind of got projected outwards, without her being aware of it.
Ultimately, she was still just a scared kid whose life had been stolen from her, hiding from a monster (the fact that she thought she had become the monster made it worse).
Sometimes writing her thoughts scared me a bit.  But I like it when I can really feel for a character like that, makes them seem more interesting.  And an (anti)hero with no flaws is a boring one!
Having her learn Crafting was a different path than I'd imagined her following at character creation, but it worked out nicely for her storyline.  :)

The original version of Swift was more in the D&D Rogue style.  Reformed thief whose skills were being put to service for a more noble purpose.  But ultimately a much more light-hearted and fun-loving character.  I figured Laughing Shark could supply the fun quota in this team though.

Sapphire Rose (another Kai character of mine, who I'm currently playing in Sabre's game) ended up inheriting that more reckless fun-loving side.  (And it may yet end up getting her killed!  hehe).

Currently reading the second watch sub-thread after the Vordak/Helghast fight on the way to Toran, where Sun Snake and Laughing Shark are discussing political viewpoints, while sharing some of Laughing Shark's home brew.

That...  looks like quite an interesting experience :)  hehe.

Oh we're back on Sun Snake being oblivious again, are we? It is quite the superpower :p


I recall the discussion with Laughing Shark was fun, good to have the two viewpoints. As I said before, I'd shifted Sun Snake's potential conflicts from Summer Wasp to Moon Shadow, so I think I was more receptive to Laughing Shark. As opposed to how the finale turned out!

Well in this case it seems to have been aided by large quantities of "flavoured bilge water", hehe.

I will properly get to reading over the old threads, but skimmed over Sun Snake's intro one. Funny to see I'd called that someone high up might die as a plot 'woah' moment right away, but was completely blindsided by who it was, even when confirmed someone high up might die. Blue Snake was not even on my radar in the slightest, and I'd guessed Phantom Steed, with Starfire secoondary :)

Though I think once Blue Snake became impossible to communicate, as a player I guessed right away he'd died even if Sun Snake would never have the thought. Still, a very cool plot point out of nowhere yet in plain sight if you know to look for it.

Very glad you liked that! I did try my best to differentiate Peacock and Blue Snake as the two "wants good to succeed, willing to go to extreme methods to get it, very smart but somewhat arrogant, psychic masters" characters, and I thought the self-sacrificing ploy works very well to clarify the difference between them. Peacock is extreme and will make sacrifices, but it tends to be part of plots aimed at achieving an immediate himself. Meanwhile, Blue Snake sacrifices himself and trust others (White Mantis, Sun Snake) to see his plans through, showing his far more group-oriented mindset VS Peacock's self-absorbed position. So, I'm very happy that plot point hit with the proper strength I'd hoped it would. :)

I mean I presume that was why Sun Snake at least got Shining Peacock to a stand still, right? The fact Sun Snake had already torn down Blue Snake's plan showed he wasn't afraid of doing extreme things, and basically threatened to burn himself down to burn down Shining Peacock's ambitions. Since Shining Peacock was fighting for himself to be leader, his normal 'win at all costs' play had the limit of he needed to be in place at the end of them.

As you say, Sun Snake took on that characteristic too of trying to clear the way for others - in this case the rest of the Kai - to try and make the correct choice if not being co-erced by Shining Peacock undercutting them, and so was willing to be politically absented or even dead if that would level the playing field. So yeah, trusting others. Though unlike Blue Snake, Sun Snake didn't like manipulating people (consciously, I think Shining Peacock called him on doing it unconsciously) and so evolved in to more trying to get people in to a positions mutual power so they might have the confidence to make good choices.

Oh yeah, Sun Snake's character development throughout the story was one of the things I really enjoyed about the game; it was a very well done series of turns as the story went along, and I really liked the way he internalized Blue Snake's teachings and then pushed past them to form his own approach to leadership. It's sort of what I hoped for the game to do, so it was great to actually see it done that skillfully. :)

Swift's feelings about him aside, as a player I really liked Sun Snake.
Kind of made me wonder how he'd have reacted to Winter Rain.  Someone who doesn't speak, vs. someone who can throw up huge walls of text at will :)

But yeah, he seemed quite a complex character really.  Much coolness :)

Aww, thanks :)


One of the funny things is that if Sun Snake had stayed more like Blue Snake when he evolved, things might have gone smoother. One of Blue Snake's pieces of advice was to find the weaknesses of others in order to help hide them. It would have worked to elevate Sun Fox, or Rain Feather, to leadership. However, Sun Snake still had a very black and white view even at the end, and so the fact that either leader had a dark secret regarding Valador that could be exploited meant he didn't see how either could be leader. He didn't believe in continuously trying to bury the truth for the greater good, nor wanted to risk the fact it might all be toppled by such a revelation.

Also of course he was quite broken by the end without having had the chance to deal with much except Lone Wolf's death (or at least start to) and so wasn't much use in dealing with Summer Wasp. He just didn't have the patience when she revealed herself to be a third person consorting with Valador, and indeed threatening the order for her own ends. Which is fine as of course it let other characters take centre stage to resolve the leadership.


I liked all the characters in the game (both NPC but definitely players). Swift Fox's and Rain Feather's evolutions were great to too. And once I have time, it will be very satisfying to see the background moves of Sabre Fox, etc to see what was happening with their characters out of sight. And to see what happened with Laughing Shark and Dusk Rat given they both had more time than most - especially Dusk Rat - out of everyone's view.

Yeah, Laughing Shark was a bit of a mystery.  Was she secretly a Shadakine Pirate Queen or something? :)

And did Sylon know her?  (Guessed she was the "Ly" he spoke about?)

Also, what exactly was the effect of the curse on that pirate scimitar I got from Wol-Dumar?  Mentioned that only someone 'born lucky' could safely wield it, so I'd guessed it kind of tipped fate against you slightly, maybe a penalty to rolls made for luck or chance, or an increased chance of failing at risky actions?
Shark was in kind of bad shape when we reunited with her at Argazad...

Cursed Scimitar

+1 additional damage for each successive round of combat versus the same enemy (+1 first round, +2 second round, +3 third round, and so on; no cap)

Each time you draw the sword, you roll for your luck, with even being good and odd being bad.

The first time you roll bad luck, every damage you receive in combat is doubled; the second time you roll bad luck, every roll you make is treated as a 1 no matter what bonus you have on it; and the third time you roll bad luck, you just die.

If you roll good luck, the luck counter goes down to 0, meaning that your next bad luck will reverse to the double damage taken; that means that, to get the "you die" bad luck, you need to roll "bad luck" three times in a row.

If you can get good luck 100 times in a row, it will remove the curse.

Laughing Shark had, as her personal ability, an item that gave her something in the realm of ten rerolls a day, although not each reroll could apply to every roll she made (some applied to combat rolls only, some applied to luck rolls only, some applied to discipline rolls only, one was applicable to anything...); this gave her a possibility of countering the scimitar's curse that none of the rest of you had. You might remember her special item as the fangs/claw necklace she was wearing - each fang/claw gave her a different reroll, with the source of the claw/fang determining which type of reroll it was.

And Laughing Shark was just the daughter of a sailor who died because of the Gnaag wars, who enrolled in the Kai to get her revenge, only for the war to end before she could get to the battlefield and for her to find out that she couldn't just "leave" the Kai. As for her connection to Sylon, while I could explain, I think you'll like it more if you just discover it by reading along; Laughing Shark's prologue/memory thread would be particularly informative, I wager. ;)
This message was last edited by the GM at 17:56, Sun 31 Jan 2021.

Well... it's been too long since I stepped into these boots, and life has just been kicking me round.  I wish it had stopped long enough, but... ugh.

I just hope, well... you'll let me wax poetic for a while on a few things here, and after I get done, I'll open up and answer whatever questions you want to throw my way; it's only fair.

----

When I started developing Rain, for the longest time, I was stuck on what kind of concept I wanted to apply as.  I mean, I figured you had all walks and wanders of life, but to be honest, I asked and was informed the group really lacked a dedicated psychic combat specialist.  So the seed was planted; she was going to be a squishy-caster type- a glass cannon, if you will.  But what of her past?

Enter the next-to-final battle of Book 11: The Prisoners of Time, where Lone Wolf must battle against five of the worst villains ever cast away by Sommerlund, all trapped for eternity in a prison thought inescapable.  The first four didn't really offer much in the way of background possibilities- a druid didn't really sound like they'd use much in the way of psychic power, ditto with a poisoner.  The murderer or highwayman... nah, they just didn't really have all that in the way in definite background information available- too many variables.

But the Kirlundin Wytch, Aieta Nemetah... now there was something I could honestly get my teeth into background-wise.  Give her a daughter, and then a grand-daughter, that had been on the run ever since Aieta had been tossed into the Daziarn- and then have the grand-daughter end up in the last place such a strong dark power could be thought to be found... the rebuilt Kai Monastery.

But what of her outlook?  What of her mannerisms, her... everything?  Make her darkly attractive, in a way- the same black hair, pale skin, and shining blue eyes her grandmother and mother had... but at the same time, remember that she's convinced that if anybody- anybody at all, at the monastery- finds out her secrets, her bloodline, her name, her anything- she'll end up dead at best, tossed into the Daziarn at worst- so make her a loner with a strong, strong distrust of others- but not because she feels better than them, but because she doesn't feel like she can relax for a moment.  (Remember the fifth Harry Potter book/movie, with Mad-Eye Moody?  "Constant Vigilance!"?)

On top of that, she also already thinks she's fated to fall from grace some day- to the point where she willingly embraced the darkness inside because she had zero faith she'd make it as a Kai, and that the darkness in her soul would outweigh the light inside her heart, and because she believed it was what Peacock had always wanted- for her to retain enough of both worlds to be able to become this juggernaut of light and dark that he could unleash on enemies, and that there were only three people in the whole monastery who she thinks she could actively trust-  Shining Peacock (her mentor, the person working with her mother), Red Dawn (loyal to Peacock whole-heartedly and just as messed up as Rain herself is), and Dusk Rat (mostly because Red Dawn kept scaring the absolute bejeepers out of her and since Peacock was the only one who could keep Dawn in line, well...).

So, completely suspicious, paranoid, and an absolutely frozen personality to keep her from forming any other attachments (though despite that, a few formed- Sun Fox was a surprising one I came up with, because she couldn't do her basic physical training alone- but at the same time, it gave her a link to someone she might have been able to talk to... had she not ended up poofing for plot reasons...), and she ends up placed on a mission where she has to work with others.

...yeah, I have more, but I think my wall-of-text stuff is about out for this one.



Oh, and before I forget:

How to Download Threads:

1) On threads that have under 1000 messages (40 pages) of messages, there's an option up at the top of the page, where the page numbers are.  Hit "all" to load all the messages from a single thread onto one page.  (For example, Thread XI has 1010 messages and no option to do this.)

2) If space is a premium, deactivate avatars/fancy backgrounds/etc. to make it smaller.  (This method just gives you a black background anyways, so...)

3) Right-click on the thread page and hit "Save Page As..." (I'm on Firefox, so the option might be different for you), and it'll open up a dialogue as to where you want to save all this.

3) Save to your computer, but with this file format, you'll open it up in the internet browser of your choice, but not actively connected to the net.


More from me later... I think.

I also want to say, because it needs to be said and Rain Feather deserves for this to be known, that I had already set up the group when Rain Feather showed up asking to join the game, and blow me off the water with a RTJ request so good that, even if I already had all the players I had planned the game for, I let her in anyway.

Don't get me wrong, everybody here is an amazing player and I am glad to have had you all along, but when I opened the game, I knew most of you already and I already had agreed to have you play; Rain, on the other hand, I'd never heard of before, and yet she managed to get me to redesign the game to include her on her own merits. That's something I just wanted her to be recognized for, because I know that all of you will agree with me that, regardless of how many complications arose along the way and how things ended, she was absolutely worth having. And, at least as far as I'm concerned, at no point did I ever regret letting her in.

I just wanted that to be on the record. :)
This message was last edited by the GM at 18:18, Sun 31 Jan 2021.

Oh yeah, very cool backstory! :D

I think her and Swift would have been able to find some common ground too.  Sins of the parents, being used as weapons, and all that.  :)
She would definitely have stepped up to Rain's defence if any of Wasp's crowd had attacked her.

I think I missed Shark's prologue thread, hmm.
Just finished the one where Dusk Rat got in a fight with some kind of undead psychic magic cyber-snake monster beneath Toran.  That was a close one, saved by some nicely-timed critical hits there :)

Oh yeah, the only regret in terms of players is when we've lost them along the way - Frost Ferret and Laughing Shark relatively early on, and Water Hornet more recently.


Sorry you're life's still not calmed down Rain Feather, but I'm glad you managed to keep coming back to the game, including now for the closing!

It's on page 2 of 5; I only moved it from PM to the public threads at a later point, as it needed some editing to be properly readable.

And Dusk Rat is a specialist of getting into things well over her head and somehow managing to get past them by the skin of her teeth; it even matches her backstory, if you think about it. The character is really a very interesting take on the "wild survivalist" archetype, in her own way.

Was that fight really close? I can't really remember now, only that I won :D. I think that was also the only fight in whic Dusk Rat directly fought...and of course it was the one she took on solo. Every other fight she basically hid at the back and got the local wildlife and other creatures to basically do the fighting for her, if there was even a fight at all. And on at least one occasion I can remember her having an encounter with a natural predator that she basically just talked to and told to sod off because she posed a greater threat to it than it ever could to her and she didn't want to be pushed into demonstrating exactly why - she preferred to avoid conflict where possible. She could justify aggression against darkspawn because they're darkspawn, horrible nasty creatures that only want to kill things. But even so, I think the zlanbeast counted as darkspawn, right? But she basically made friends with him. She gave him a name and everything :). So she might've started questioning even that kind of stuff, given time...

Mental images of Dusk Rat sitting in a forest hugging a sobbing Helghast that's saying stuff like: "No-one ever wants to be my friend, they just say I'm a horrible undead shapeshifting abomination, then they wonder why I'm so angry all the time!"  *sniffle!*

Haha okay, maybe not those kinds of darkspawn, but at least the ones she could communicate with on a friendlier level ;).

In reply to Dusk Rat (msg # 81):

That's not unexpected. I think it's worth pointing out that there are really two types of Darkspawns - the intelligent ones, and the animals who have been genetically engineered and raised to be extremely violent and aggressive. Remember, Dusk Rat, you were told that the zlanbeast was specifically raised to be tamer, while the doomwolves and kraans you met were raised to be very aggressive; meanwhile, the Acolytes of Vashna were breeding a much tamer breed of kraans. So... assuming you could get your hands on enough of them, it would take a dedicated breeding program to have domesticable darkspawn animals; I'm sure Dusk Rat would have been willing to put in the effort, but that still wouldn't have allowed her to simply turn any random darkspawn animal to her side as easily as that.

Oh yeah, wasn't meaning "Muahahaha I can have an army of beasties" but more "Should we really just be killing these things when they're really no worse than any other predator you might run into?".

In reply to Dusk Rat (msg # 83):

I kind of remember you rarely killing them, and far more often sending them to kill other villains, so it seems sort of a moot point? :)

And on that note, if you consider the body counts of controlled creatures as part of that of the character who did the controlling, I think Dusk Rat has a very strong claim to being the most deadly member of the group, despite her non-combat focused character, isn't it? The only real contender would be Swift Fox, and that'd depend on how we want to count causing an eruption that wiped out a fortress in terms of "being deadly". So, I think there's an argument there for Dusk Rat being the most cruel member of the group, don't you think? ^_^

That was fun :)
Big fortress full of scary lethal enemies?  How can we possibly get past them all?!  Blow it up!  MwaHaHaHaHaaa!

Counting the camp in the Darklands, that's twice we got to blow places up  :)

Standard operating procedure, go in, get the thing, blow up everything when you leave.


Possibly good thing we never settled the leadership...we'd have had to blow the monastery up afterwards as we left.

Swift totally hadn't already worked out a possible strategy for that or anything.  Nope.  Not at all...  ;)


By the way, reading back through this again.  What was the story behind Sylon and that weird sword he used?
I think he was one of the few enemies we came up against who really managed to get under Swift's skin in a way she couldn't easily shrug off  :)  Went from wanting to kill him to being weirded-out by him and sort of pitying him.
Emotional rollercoaster (specifically the kind of rollercoaster that has a chance of messily derailing and killing everyone on it!)

...and now I'm thinking of that timeline where Rebirth gets optioned as a Hollywood blockbuster movie... with Michael Bay as director.

In reply to Rain Feather (msg # 88):

If it was up to me, I'd demand a different director. ;)

Although, if the game was actually optioned, everybody here would get a vote on such a thing, and 1/10th of whatever they paid, too, since this game was the work of all of us together. At least, that's how I feel about it! ^_^

In reply to Swift Fox (msg # 87):

Sylon's sword was just a cursed sword that collected the soul of those he killed and let him drain on their skills. As for his backstory, I'd need to look up if I'd added more to it than what he told you, but I doubt it - he was just Colin's enforcer and bodyguard.
This message was last edited by the GM at 19:32, Wed 03 Feb 2021.

Rian Johnson as director, I want Sun Snake spending half an hour ranting about how the leadership election is like a series of doughnut holes :p

Or sitting on a bench in a park in Toran with Alyne talking about how life is like a box of chocolates...
(Or whatever the Magnamund equivalent of chocolate is.  I refuse to believe in a world where chocolate doesn't exist in any form!)

Ok, this discussion has gotten me wondering who would play the parts of all the characters now :)  I do that sometimes with interesting stories.

Maybe it would work better as a TV series (in this case it unfortunately got axed before the last season finished, so we never saw the ending) :(
This message was last edited by the player at 21:11, Wed 03 Feb 2021.

Hamble was Shadow's hot chocolate equivalent. Circling back around to Sun Snake being oblivious again :p


For absolutely no good reason I'm going to say Michael Fassbender for Sun Snake :D Maybe because you wouldn't be able to tell if he'd go good or evil for the end.

Alyne would definitely be happy about that. :)


I can see that - it fits with the way I imagined him.

What about everybody else? If we're doing casting decision, it'd be fun to see what everybody's picks for everybody else would be.

I think Blue Snake's picture was Paul Bethany, not sure if he would be my first pick, but he also could work?

Well Swift was at least partially inspired by "Hanna" from the movie of the same name.  (Albeit a much darker backstory than the movie's 'dark fairytale' atmosphere).

Swift's birth name Sanna wasn't just a letter switch though, it's the short form of a Scandinavian name meaning "lily", and it might have been the similar spelling that suggested the movie to me at the time.  (Curiously enough, she later acquired the weapon called "Orange Lily" which came from Anskaven, her former home town, which was a spooky coincidence!)

Anyways, the movie version of Hanna does look a bit like my mental image of Swift, so, would go with the same actress, Saoirse Ronan (yep, I had to look up how to spell that!)

https://cdn.onebauer.media/one...tfill&format=jpg
This message was last edited by the player at 22:45, Wed 03 Feb 2021.

Let’s see...

Renora - this one’s easy: a friend suggested Adrianne Curry, and I agree with her on that.

As far as Rain herself, well... that could be more difficult.  I actually didn’t have a look in mind for her when I designed her, but I took cues from the picture of her ancestor in Book 11- I carried over the long black hair, and I went with blue eyes because there are plenty of Darklord artifacts that radiate blue fire or energy, and pale skin because I figured it fit the character.

I’ve heard three - Odeya Rush (as she portrayed Fiona in the movie version of The Giver), Freya Tingley, and Alexandra Daddario as she played Annabeth Chase in the Percy Jackson films.  (Megan Fox would be waaaaay too easy a choice for her, though.)

Uh, I must say I hadn't pictured Rain like that at all; Megan Fox especially seems like she's not as pale as you described Rain. I can see the other three, to an extent, but in all case it does redefines how I imagined Rain a little.

Well, they were just suggestions- like I said, I hadn't really picked out a person to base her off of.

Who did you have in mind?  I'm open to suggestions!

Oh, I don't think I've anybody directly in mind; of those you suggested, I think the second one, Freya Tingley, is closest to my mental image. I just had pictured Rain as having less striking, more average looks that could be lost in a crowd (outside of her eyes, of course), which are difficult to find for an actress, understandably. :)

I'm also not sure why, but I thought of her as taller than the rest of the team, even though I'm not sure there's been any particular descriptions in that sense.

Does any of you has any comment about the other PCs choice, or the NPCs? I'm really curious now to see how different everybody was imagining everybody else.

Funny I don't recognise any of the suggested Rain Feather names (except for Megan Fox, presumably Jennifer's Body Megan Fox :p ) so can't comment there.

Was watching Thor Ragnarok last night, and now I have this mental image of Starfire and Golden Sparrow acting like Hulk and Thor respectively. :p

In reply to Sun Snake (msg # 100):

I can totally see that. :)

As for the actresses Rain Feather named, you can just google it? That's what I did for most of them - Alessandra Daddario and Megan Fox I'd already seen in other things, but the other two weren't names known to me. I'm just going by look when I said "not what I was expecting".

I googled their appearance but don't know how they act so harder to imagine it :)

Hadn't heard of any of those either (been a bit out of the mainstream for some time now).
Looked them up on image search, and yeah, I'd agree Freya Tingley is the closest to how I imagined her :)

I recognise the portrait used for Starfire, and yeah, the face looks like I imagined him, although I'd pictured him as being taller and more muscular.
The Blue Snake portrait was exactly how I imagined him, although I think I only ever encountered him once, at the briefing at the start, so couldn't really get to know his character all that well.  (I mostly just know Starfire from reading him elsewhere, especially in the bit where Laughing Shark talked to him after returning to the Monastery).


Moon Shadow, I'm not too sure...  (Kind of ironic that Swift had almost no contact with her during the game time, apart from one short meeting at the start hehe.  Kind of wish they could have met again.  Also kicking myself for not asking Silver Raven if he could contact her mentally, dunno why that didn't occur to me).

White Mantis, hmm, Cate Blanchett, in a similar style to Galadriel from Lord of the Rings?

Shining Peacock...  Hmm, that's a tough one.

Valador.  Oddly enough I'm thinking Jared Harris, who's got some good history for playing scheming masterminds with cold calculating personalities.  But the appearance doesn't match my mental image...  (Which is now stuck comparing him to Kiryu in Sabre's game!  Oddly appropriate since he gave poor Moon Dancer nightmares!) ;)

Black Beaver, that portrait suits him perfectly somehow :)  No idea who that is though, isn't he the guy who played Ares in the Xena series?

Anyways, just thought I'd toss those into the mix, the others I'd have to think about, and I gotta venture out into the plague-ridden wilderness outside to scavenge supplies (*makes mental note to watch less zombie movies...*)

I was thinking about Vyctar the other day in terms of his role in the story, since it seemed that he was aware of Lone Wolf's demise, if this was the power source they were looking for in order to turn him into a darklord, or perhaps was that changed from the Deathstaff?

How was Vyctar created and changed his character? Since he did indeed have a noticable change after the death of Zahira.

Vyctar was there specifically to recover Lone Wolf's body, yes, and he had no idea about the Deathstaff, or any interest in it other than in a "I suppose that'd make for a nice weapon" sense. Which is why he was so quick to relinquish any claims to it.

Vyctar knowing about Lone Wolf being dead was a side effect of Valador's plot; Valador, due to the Guildstaff, was able to learn about Lone Wolf's death immediately, and the Nadziranim Valador was working with to create the hybrids learned of it through him. The Nadziranim Vyctar was working with was in disagreement with those who were working with Valador, in that he did not believed there was any gain to be made in trying to copy the Kai and put them under Nadziranim control, and was sure that could only ever possibly backfire; instead, he thought that replacing the Darklords by having the Nadziranim evolve into new Darklords was the way to go. He did have some access to Valador's research through the other Nadziranim, and thus knew how Lone Wolf's body could be used to help achieve that, so he sent Vyctar to retrieve it; the Nadziranim knew he would need a human component and was confident that he would win the unavoidable personality clash once it came time to absorb Vyctar. Vyctar was privy to the overall plan, although not of Valador's involvement with the Nadziranim, and was on his own confident that he would overpower the Nadziranim.

Vyctar and Zhira were definitely in love with each other. Zhira had been assigned to Vyctar by the Nadziranim many years before the beginning of the game (basically as soon as Vyctar's unit started working with the Nadziranim), and initially, Vyctar was just trying to make the Helghast more human so that it would show more emotions and thus be easier for Vyctar to interact with - ie, so he could fool and misdirect the Helghast. However, due to the fact that Helghast in a human body can feel emotions that they are unable to feel in their undead form, Vyctar efforts to encourage the Helghast to experience more and more emotions (initially under the guise of perfecting the Helghast's ability to pass for human) made it become more and more human, and feel a growing sense of gratitude for Vyctar for having encourage it down this path, which eventually developed into love once Vyctar started showing genuine affection of his own. Zhira was aware of Vyctar's motivations (that he had been encouraging the emotional connection to manipulate it at first), but didn't particularly care (manipulation being a natural instinct for Helghasts), although the gratitude only evolved once Vyctar moved from manipulating Zhira for his sake to manipulating Zhira for the Helghast's own sake, in a sense.

Vyctar, meanwhile, had unconsciously encouraged the Helghast down a emotional path that matched what he would want in a companion, so he began to like what the Helghast was becoming more and more, and thus he began doing it consciously, shaping the Helghast into his ideal partner. They were both aware of the plan of Vyctar becoming a Darklord and very much looking forward to it - the Helghast even encouraged the plan, because all Helghast are psychologically conditioned to see themselves as a Darklord's subordinates. That means that Helghasts without a Darklord master consider themselves incomplete, so it would have been psychologically soothing as well as something of a mark of superiority over other Helghasts for Zhira to be the only Helghast in the world who had a Darklord to obey to, and at that to be the only Helghast who had a Darklord they themselves had chosen, rather than having to make do which whichever Vashna had assigned you to. They both actually shared the vision that the forces of darkness had been running things wrongly of late, and that the two of them would set them to rights and usher in a new era of glory for the Darklands as a whole, with the two of them as the rulers of it.

While he was a very well developed character, Vyctar was actually supposed to be a minor opponent, something less threatening and smaller in scale than the other threats; primarily, I had wanted to have a Drakkar force be in the area with different goals from everybody else to create a more dynamic environment, and while I did my best to make Vyctar and Zhira an interesting villainous couple, I didn't expect for their plan to go as far as it eventually did.


To tell you the truth, so did I; as in, I liked the face even if I knew the actor (David Whenam, I think he's called; the photo is from the interpretation of LotR Faramir) was about half the size of Starfire the character. Then again, there's plenty of techniques to make an actor look taller and bigger than they are (see, Josh Brolin in Avengers IW), so I think it might work; just picture him as being substantially bigger.


That would be correct, although sadly Kevin Smith (the actor in question) died back in 2002. I picked that avatar for Black Beaver specifically because I liked the contrast between the character's personality (morose and didn't like the company of people) and him being the most handsome of the Starting Five, with the "dark and brooding" look.
This message was last edited by the GM at 15:50, Fri 05 Feb 2021.

Vyctar...

Karl Urban, Skurge style? :)
https://resources.stuff.co.nz/...&optimize=medium

The human version of him anyway.  Darklord version would probably be CGI.
This message was last edited by the player at 15:52, Fri 05 Feb 2021.

That's... really not what I had in mind; he looks a bit too soft compared to the harsh image of Vyctar I have in my mind. And also a bit too young, since Vyctar is over 40. It's interesting you would picture him like that; food for thought.

I seem to recall that Vyctar even toyed with the idea of the Kai and Drakkar allying at one point. Was that all words? Or was it more of a ally with us or we will kill you kind of thing?

It was wierd as Foxy respected Vyctar initially as a fellow soldier, even if Vyctar didnt respect him, But if nothing else even Vyctar ackowledged that it might take his entire platoon just to take down Foxy
This message was last edited by the player at 16:35, Fri 05 Feb 2021.

I'm guessing that was more Sun Snake's pipe dream than anything Vyctar ever considered, but it would be interesting to have that confirmed. Sun Snake thought the Drakkar, free of Naar, even evil, would be better to deal with. Especially under someone like Vyctar who had a more nuanced approach to conquest.

Of course Vyctar was trying to be a Darklord so that sadly put any hope from Sun Snake's mind.


Oh, and since Thor Ragnarok was just referenced again, can I ask we play the entire game again, with no changes except White Mantis is Cate Blanchett as Hela :p
This message was last edited by the player at 16:51, Fri 05 Feb 2021.

Hmm, more sort of Conan the Barbarian style?

I'm reading through Team Swift's threads for now, taking a stroll down memory lane :)  At the bit where they found Silver Raven.
And it just dawned on me, if I'd known the power of the Blue Iris at that time, could it have destroyed the chains?  Could have saved myself some trouble there.

And yeah, I liked Vyctar.
I doubt he'd have liked Swift though.  She didn't fight fair.  In her view, an honourable duel just gives your enemy a better chance to kill you! ;)

Also, would be happy to play it again, but I think I'd try a different character.
Unless someone is thinking of setting up another game?
This message was last edited by the player at 16:55, Fri 05 Feb 2021.

Vyctar knew that, regardless of Sabre Fox's protestations, the Kai would not work with him once they knew his goals, and of course, seeing as you killed him once you learned of his plans, he was 100% right about that. He would have allied with you, in the sense of accepting your help in achieving his goals if you offered it and being willing to agree never to attack any Kai who didn't attack him first, but he knew you would not agree to that.

So, I guess the question would have to be turned around: when Vyctar went on a world-conquering crusade after properly unifying the Darklands and Hammerlands under his absolute control, would the Kai have let him be? He would not have attacked the Kai himself first, because he was fully aware of how dangerous they were, and he would have went about his world-conquering in a very pragmatic fashion. But he was very much aware that coexistence was impossible.

Thus, it's not that Vyctar had no respect for Sabre Fox, he just thought Sabre Fox was hopelessly naive. And, of course, he never once believed that Sabre Fox had actually changed sides.

Thor Ragnarock is awesome and I do think that Cate Blanchette would fit nicely in the role of White Mantis, although not the Hela version; that's a bit too intense, and White Mantis is supposed to be relaxing. :)

I have no plans to run another game of this, although I'm happy to let anybody who wants to make use of everything in the game as they see fit for any plans they might have.

As for my personal interpretation of which actors would fit which role, I'd like to keep my picks for last, after having heard from everybody else, especially where NPCs are concerned - if I say what I think would be a good fit for Vyctar in my mind, or for any of you players, or for people like Shining Peacock, Valador, Sun Fox or Alyne, it would make it impossible for you to make pick that reflect your own sensibilities. As I mentioned, none of the actors you all named so far was one I would have though of when picturing your characters, even if a few (like Sun Snake's pick of Fassbender) fit with my mental image, and it's very interesting for me to get a sense of the different ways you all envisioned this story we went though together! ^_^

Hmm, curious who you imagined Swift as being like now :)
Hanna was closest to how I imagined Swift.  Not quite as tall, and with messier hair, but definitely that sort of style, agile and fast.  Hair and eye colours are spot on though.

Maybe there's someone who fits the image better, but I can't think of them off the top of my head for now.

Also, if I had run through the game with a different character, I'd probably pick Winter Rain who could cover Swift's role quite well (and, I'm sure her team-mates would agree, better and less erratic than Swift herself.  Communication might still have been an issue though, hehe).
This message was last edited by the player at 18:00, Fri 05 Feb 2021.

I can't really offer any ideas on any real-life people who would play Dusk Rat - I never have a clue any time I see any discussion about that kind of thing. I could compare her to some characters, though...like, I dunno, she's sort of a cross between Wednesday Addams (from the films), Merida (from Pixar's "Brave"), and erm...I dunno, Hiccup (film version, "How to Train Your Dragon" series). Maybe some other people? There's probably someone who's an even better fit that I can't think of right now, but, well, I can't think of them right now ;).

I can totally imagine Dusk Rat as Wednesday :)

https://i.pinimg.com/originals...17f84f43ff7b254c.jpg

Well, seeing as there's been no more answers, I'll give my own vision of every character than, and hear what the opinions are. :)

As far as Dusk Rat is concerned, Maisie Williams is the one that springs to mind more easily (most people will know her as Arya in "Game of Thrones"), as she has that small, scrappy feeling to her very well.

Sabre Fox, given his choice of avatar, I always envision as black-haired young Brad Pitt; my ideal visualization would be what he looked like in "Interview with the Vampire", with the scar added on.

I think that Sun Snake, Swift Fox and Rain Feather all already gave the names of actors that would fit them well enough to mostly match my imagination; if I hadn't had their suggestions... I think Daniel Craig (the most recent James Bond, for anybody who's not aware) for Sun Snake, young Jennifer Lawrence (about what she looked like in X-Men Fist Class) for Swift Fox, and actually Christina Ricci (that'd be Wednesday Addams) for Rain Feather would have been my original suggestions. But, as I said, the actual players' picks for them feel much more fitting, now that I've seen them.

That leaves us with Frost Ferret, Water Hornet and Laughing Shark as PC without an assigned person.

For the way she handled herself and the level of energy she showed, I think something like young Sigourney Weaver would have been a near perfect fit, although, after Rain mentioned her, I do think that Megan Fox as of her more recent action roles would be fine, if she was just a bit less attractive - Shark is supposed to be somewhat plain and extremely tough.

Water Hornet I believe could be interpreted by an actor like Martin Freeman, with that very "everyman" look, although he'd obviously need to be twenty-five years younger than the actor is right now, and Freeman wasn't yet an actor twenty-five years ago. And I really have no idea who to go with for Frost Ferret, since his one most defining characteristic was to be undescript.

As the honorary PCs, Alyne is supposed to be stunning, so I'd be going with Scarlett Johansson for her, only with her hairs black and very long, as that's Alyne's style. For Sun Fox, somebody with a more compact and athletic build would be best, so maybe Kaley Cuoco as she was in "Charmed" would be a good fit, although Sun Fox's hairs are very very curly, much like her avatar, so try to picture that.

Silver Raven I think would be more of a Eddie Redmayne (which most people likely know from the "Fantastic Beasts and where to find them" franchise these days), maybe? The thing about Silver Raven is that he's a very effeminate-looking man, it's part of his backstory, and it's very hard to find a male actor, especially Hollywood actor, with a properly effeminate, bishonen look. It's quite vexing, and I'm very open to suggestions on this one.

Now, as for NPCs, I suppose Valador and Shining Peacock should have place of pride here, shouldn't they?

For Valador, Tom Hiddleston would be the only pick I'd go with; considering how many times Thor Ragnarock was mentioned so far, I don't think that's gonna be an actor that people here are unaware of.

Shining Peacock is more difficult, because he's so very charismatic and difficult to pin. I think perhaps Christian Bale would be a good choice, as he's an actor with a great ability to remain very seductive in a wide variety of very different looks.

Moving to the others, the starting five are relatively easy, since three of them, as said, already have an actor avatar, and I already agreed to Swift Fox's suggestion of having Cate Blanchett take the White Mantis role. That leaves Phantom Steed, who I'd assign to Ewan Mc.Gregor as of his lock in "SW Revenge of the Sith".

As for the other three "big" Kai, Moon Shadow I always imagined as Eva Green, who I imagine is most famous, especially among British people, for her role in Casino Royale, although when I envision her for the game, the version in "Miss Peregrine's home for peculiar children" is more what I have in mind. I think Robert Pattinson (of "Twilight" fame) would be perfect for Golden Sparrow, since he has that mix of wild and confident down very well, and for Summer Wasp, I think Shannen Doherty in "Heathers" has just the right level of arrogant and comforting to fit the bill - the hair color doesn't really fit, but that's not as important for Wasp as for others in my mental image of her.

My ideal actor for Vyctar would be Rutger Hauer when he was in his forties, which would be around the time he starred in "Blade Runner" and "Ladyhawke", and for Zhira I would say India Eisley as she looked in "Social Suicide", where she was twenty-two, would be a perfect fit. This is obviously not the kind of casting that would be workable in real life, but that should have been clear from the other actors I picked above (Maisie Williams wasn't yet born when "Interview with the Vampire" was filmed, for example).

And since Wol-Dumar already was assigned to Christopher Lee, I think it'd only be right for Banedon to be given to a young Alec Guinness, right? Sorta gotta fill the wise mentor quota, and all.

I think that's it for most of the important characters; I can't possibly go after every single small one, since this game has dozen of them. Still, I'm open to comments, critics and, most importantly, everybody else's opinion on their preferred picks! ^_^

Cool, that was actually my first impression, just wasn't sure if it was intended or not :)

Not sure about Shark's pick there.  I kind of imagined someone tougher looking.  More buffed-up, so to speak.
Can't really think of anyone like that off the top of my head though.

Anyways.  So we can make this into a movie.  All we need are huge funds, and also the use of a time machine so we can pick up cast members at the right age.  Easy! :)  hehe.
This message was last edited by the player at 10:56, Tue 09 Feb 2021.

In reply to Swift Fox (msg # 116):

That would be amusing, yes.

Although I must admit, the last thing I imagined to read was that Alien's protagonist didn't look though enough for you... what sort of imagine would you have in mind then, when you thought of Shark?

And by the way, I might have mentioned it before, but just to be entirely clear, my headcanon is that Laughing Shark fought and sneaked her way out of Argazad to make it to the town's port, stole one of the boats there, and sailed it to Toran on her own, but once she made it there, she neglected to inform anybody she'd survived, because she had enough of playing at being a Kai and wanted to go back to being a pirate instead. And, as I said, if Valador escaped you all, she would have ensured he didn't escape her. It seems like the only adequate sendoff to such an incredible character. :)
This message was last edited by the GM at 14:21, Tue 09 Feb 2021.

Well, if you're going with Aliens characters, I was thinking more Vasquez than Ripley.  I dunno, have to think about it.

Might have been intriguing if Swift did go back there looking for her :)

Actually, she could have been easily persuaded to just let Shark go.  Dunno if there was a way for her to modify her own memory so that the leadership back at the Monastery would have believed a faked report of Shark's death (assuming they would have memory-dived Swift just to confirm it or been warned by Divination if she was lying).  Swift did kind of owe her one for her help breaking Silver Raven out of Argazad after all (not to mention Colin being responsible for ending the slave trade, she wasn't sure if he was a good guy or not, but when Raven told her that she decided he was)...

One big question though...
Did that trap Frost Ferret set with the Crystal Explosive in the lab ever catch anyone? ;)

It's kind of on par with sabotaging the wiring in the giant warship in Argazad and setting a magical trap on Baron Sadanzo's safe in the books and never finding out what happened with them afterwards!
This message was last edited by the player at 14:48, Tue 09 Feb 2021.

In reply to Swift Fox (msg # 118):

You know, now that you've mentioned that possibility, I can kinda see it, but it also brings to mind that probably a latina actress like Michelle Rodriguez would probably be a superior fit for Laughing Shark, since she did mentioned herself has having darker skin than the rest of the team a couple of times.

As for the trap... I honestly wouldn't be able to tell you; with how badly damaged the fortress was during your escape, there's a substantial chance come rubble collapsed on the room, and you killed the Nadziran yourself so that one wouldn't be entering it. On the other hand, if the room had survived, somebody at some point would likely try to ransack the Nadziran's laboratory, probably another Nadziran or similar dark sorcerer, and the bomb would destroy the laboratory and probably kill them, too. So... consider it a future evildoer preemptively destroyed, but with no precise date as to the when.

Hmm, yeah, her too.  Basically, someone who's really good at playing 'tough girl' characters and looks like someone capable of swinging a mean punch when needed too.
(Also helps if they have the ability to mangle speech effectively too, hehe).

Still reading through this.  Years of posts take time, especially since I'm not on it all day.
Read all of Team Swift's adventures up to their arrival at the Maakengorge (kicking myself at some of my older posts, hehe), read through Shark's storyline (epic adventure on its own!), and been reading Team Snake's threads now too.  Just got to the bit where Vyctar left with LW's body and the Sommerswerd.
I'm sure I'm missing bits here and there though since it's not always obvious where side threads split off.

(*heads back in to wander the maze of huge walls of text...*)  :)

In reply to Swift Fox (msg # 120):

What do you think of Rain Feather's first dream thread, the one with all the symbolism? I really liked that one, if I'm honest, and you should have already read it, so I'm curious of your opinion of it.

The one with the different versions of her and the animals representing the rest of us?

I liked that one :)  Was very cool.
If there was more than one dream thread though, I might have missed the others.

Oh that reminds me.  Was the girl Rain Feather met back in Toran also a latent Kai?

Also, nearly forgot to ask again...  Could Shining Peacock have used the Sommerswerd, or would it have considered him to be too corrupted?
I remember being curious about that at one point :)
This message was last edited by the player at 23:41, Wed 10 Feb 2021.

In reply to Swift Fox (msg # 122):

There are the various dream threads where her ghost appeared to each one of you, but those were much later; that with the animal you was what I was referring to. Glad that you liked it! ^_^

Lym did not have any Kai power, she was just an albino kid with a very weak constitution and a bit of anemia. Albino people can be more sensitive to strong light, incredibly so in a few extreme cases. Other than that, she was a perfectly normal girl.

Shining Peacock would have been able to use the Sommerswerd, yes, although he's a bad swordsman so it wouldn't have been very useful in his hands. Valador, however, would not have been able to access the sword's power, and Fall Lobster (or any other hybrid) would have been destroyed if he tried to wield it.

Me again...  Nearly finished the read-through now :)

Not sure if I already asked somewhere else (can't remember if so), but was it actually possible to "fix" Red Dawn, or was there nothing at all left of her original personality?

And could Fall Lobster have ever been cured of his desire to give Sun Snake stabby hugs? :)

Absolutely not on the Fall Lobster question; the dislike of Sun Snake, heightened to undying hatred, was the only thing left of his original personality that hadn't been destroyed by either the process of creation or the Nadziran's tortures. Without that as his absolute driving force, he'd have become a vegetable.

On the Red Dawn question, the fact of the matter is, it's not like she had an original personality that Peacock deleted and replaced; he changed her memories of her infancy so that she was not left constantly incapacitated by her mental pain and was able to control the powers. The personality of Red Dawn was fully her own, developed through her life, as a result of her experience, only that it was interpreted through the filter of a fictional infancy and different feelings and sensations than what she would have otherwise had.

If some different memories could be found that allowed her to control her powers and not be incapacitated by her chronic pain, inserting them would require a total rewriting of her memory again, the exact same way Peacock did the first time, except you'd be deleting over twenty years of memories, instead of just a few. Assuming she didn't die from the sheer pain of that (Sun Snake can confirm that messing with memories is impossibly painful), Red Dawn would not be getting her original personality back, but rather be, once again, rewritten from inside out.

Even if one was somehow able to collect the original memory of Red Dawn's infancy and re-implant those (which would leave her a cripple in constant pain and with constantly randomly firing powers), there'd be no equivalent substitution available for all of the memories she formed after that point, so in the worse case scenario she might gain something like a split-personality disorder or likewise.

And, of course, Red Dawn herself would not willingly subject herself to this procedure, which would make it extremely hard to actually apply, since she has full knowledge of how it works and would oppose it every step of the way. She's quite happy with the person she currently is, and would see that kind of procedure as attempted murder. Peacock explained her situation to her quite thoroughly; part of the reason Red Dawn is in love with Peacock is because she fully understand what he did to her and she's extremely grateful for it. Which, I know, is not good at all from an outside perspective, but she wouldn't particularly care for other people's opinions.

So, that's a very long-winded way of saying "no", I guess, but hopefully the explanation makes the answer easier to understand?

Also, is there anything you want to comment on what you read in the various side-threads, like Dusk Rat's mission or the various conversation Sun Snake had with pretty much everybody? I'd be curious to get an opinion of it all. :)
This message was last edited by the GM at 22:33, Thu 18 Feb 2021.

Been reading through this in bits and pieces for weeks now, so lots going on to comment on.
Just made me wish it could have run all the way to the end, 'cos I'd have liked to see a lot of stuff resolved (especially if all that magic absorbing/reflecting gear we made up during the last crafting thread would have made the fight with Valador an easier one) :)

And Swift would have definitely been looking for ways to sabotage Peacock's attempts to gain immortality ;)  hehe.

Speaking of which, did we actually have some means of destroying the Deathstaff?  I know the Sommerswerd couldn't do it, and the Five Flowers didn't seem to be destructive in nature (except for the Blue Iris perhaps).
I remember Peacock seemed insistent on getting it to Black Beaver and letting him find a way of destroying it (although me and Swift were pretty sure he had no intention of actually destroying it, given that Beaver seemed a bit too enthusiastic about tinkering with dark artefacts and crafting techniques.  Swift got the impression he was a bit "mad scientist" at heart).

Anyways, yeah, would probably take way too long to list all the thoughts I had.  (Also I'd have to start reading from the start again and note them down as I went!)

Definitely liked Shark's story though.
And part of me was kind of feeling sorry for Sun Snake by the end (although maybe that's what he wanted!) ;)  hehe.
This message was last edited by the player at 23:17, Thu 18 Feb 2021.

Well, I'm glad you enjoyed it, if nothing else. :)

Black Beaver would definitely not have immediately destroyed the Deathstaff, he'd have wanted to study it and learn from it for however long. Once he was done, if he failed to find a way to destroy it, the Deathstaff would probably have met the fate of the Dagger of Vashna and Helshezag, being put in the Vault of the Sun for safekeeping until a way to destroy it could be found.

Peacock didn't particularly care what fate the Deathstaff would have had, other than in ensuring Black Beaver had the time to study it and knew he had to thank Peacock for being able to do so. Keeping Beaver constantly founded with artifacts to study was one of the ways that Peacock kept the man's support, which he then used for his plan (such as having extra Seeing Stones crafted to carry out his plan), and bringing him something as unique as the Deathstaff was bound to earn Peacock a lot of leeway.

Aside from that, Peacock would have cared little if the staff was destroyed or not; he'd have preferred if it was, because he's in favor of destroying evil things, but if it couldn't be, he'd just have looked for ways to use it to further the cause of the Kai. That's just the way Peacock works, very utilitarian.

Yeah, I guessed Black Beaver would have been crazy enough to be more interested in studying it than destroying it.  Although I'd assumed that was part of Peacock's plan, that him and Beaver were working together, and that the Deathstaff was part of his immortality trick, enlisting Beaver to figure out how it worked and how he could use it.

Not sure how he'd have done it otherwise, unless he'd gotten Sejanoz to turn him into a vampire too (dunno if vampirism in this world can be 'passed on' like that, or if it's more sort of 'arcane vampirism', (like Neclord in the Suikoden series)).
But yeah, Swift would definitely have dedicated herself to finding a way of thwarting his attempt at immortality, whatever it took.  She was ok with him joining in with Sun Snake's plan (though didn't trust Peacock not to have found a way of leveraging the situation to his own benefit), but she would definitely NOT have wanted the Order being stuck with him for eternity (bad enough they had to put up with him for ONE lifetime, hehe)!

As for the actual leadership debate, after the event at the Maakengorge, she'd kind of given up on talking it out with the others.  She'd become convinced that Sun Snake's judgement was too clouded by Blue Snake teaching him that "Moon Shadow is the enemy, she's out to destroy the Order", and knew she couldn't match him when it came to swaying others to the cause ("His walls of text!  They're over 9000 words!!!" :o hehe).

If she'd known Summer Wasp better, she might have played on Wasp's own dislike of the Order becoming a division of the King's Army to try and sow the seeds for an alliance with Moon Shadow at some future point.  But either Swift didn't know her well enough to think that would work, or I'd forgotten what I learned about her.  Wasp just wasn't someone I was focused on as a potential flashpoint in the debate, so her appearance at the end kind of blindsided me while I was focused on Golden Sparrow and Shining Peacock being the dangerous ones.

Ultimately, Swift had fallen back on her usual tactics of lurking in the background, gathering information, and eventually reporting everything she'd learned to Moon Shadow at the first opportunity.
She'd then have followed whatever orders Moon Shadow gave her (though if she'd really told Swift to stand aside and let Peacock win, she'd have been suspicious of him playing his blackmail card.  That's the only situation that might have made her deviate from Moon Shadow's instructions.  In which case she might have conspired with Silver Raven to try to find some way to take down Peacock or break his influence over her).
Inwardly, she kind of hoped Moon Shadow would go along with Sun Snake's multi-leader plan, since her experience with memory-diving the Five Flowers had made her see the sense in that (and tactically-speaking it would have been an interesting way of defusing the power struggles if everyone else accepted it).  So she wouldn't have objected to being told to work with that.

The only thing that would have provoked a significant reaction from her during the standoff with Wasp at the end would have been if anyone had attacked Rain Feather or any other member of the group.  She'd have immediately sided with them and fought back against their attacker, though she would have deliberately fought to incapacitate rather than kill.
(If someone had attacked Peacock though, she'd have just (metaphorically) sat back with popcorn and observed, focusing on gathering information on how he fought.  Just in case it was useful... For... Reasons!) ;)

Anyone has any other questions about Swift, feel free to ask.  Like I said, no more secrets in the shadows. :)
*giggles creepily and sharpens daggers...*

Moon Shadow would have agreed with Sun Snake's plan, so I imagine Swift Fox wouldn't have a problem with that.

And Shining Peacock sort-of explained his plans for immortality in Dusk Rat's separate thread - have you not yet read that one, perhaps, or were you left confused by it?

Ah ok, hadn't gotten to that one yet.
All the side threads seem to be more 'tangled up' near the end.  Some of the earlier ones show up later, and vice-versa.

And I'm easily confused to start with...  (O.o)'

Currently at the bit when we're on the Skyrider heading back home, so will just read any remaining side threads and fit them into the right places in my head hopefully :)

Yeah, that's the point where I started using the same side thread for multiple conversations across different spans of time. And the threads are timed based on the time the last post in that thread was made, which confuses the order some more. Not much I can do about that now, however, other than apologize, so... I'm sorry?

No worries :)  I'll just reorder them in my mind.
It would be more confusing if it was just reading a simple story, but having actually controlled one of the characters and taken them through those events does help solidify the proper order that things happened in my mind :)

I noticed the conversation between Swift and Raven on their flight from Argazad ended up near the ending threads somehow too.
That was definitely a defining moment in Swift's character evolution, so glad to see it didn't end up staying hidden like other PM stuff.
(In-Character, Swift herself might have been a little annoyed at having that moment broadcast to the world though, hehe) :)

I wonder if everything I made visible changed anybody's perception of other characters?

Still haven't managed to look over the threads yet, though got less busy now so should have time. From the little I've skimmed over Red Dawn seemed a little more reasonable and RainFeather and Red Dawn had a better relationship than I thought they did. Very surprised she knew what had happened to her, I thought Shining Peacock had hidden that from her, and so that was one of the things he had hoped to undo.

And Sun Snake was all broken by the end, so you should feel sorry for him! It wasn't a trick :p

Yeah, Sun Snake was set against Moon Shadow at the very start, and very much of the 'what's wrong with how things are going already' mindset, but did change his outlook and was genuine in what he was saying. He even busted up Blue Snake's plan well, much better than I thought since I didn't realise it was all going far more on track than it was anyway :p

Well I can still only see my own private messages, and those directed at me.
But yeah, being able to see what was going on in other characters' side threads was intriguing :)

Also, just got to the one where Sabre met with Valador to resurrect Rain Feather by pinching a bit of Lobster's soul.
The weapon he used for the ritual made me double-take a bit, hehe :)

Kind of amusing that Valador didn't know it was magical.  Definitely wonder how the soul fragment in the dagger would have reacted to what it was being used for there, probably wouldn't have been best pleased with Valador :)

Probably not, no.

Speaking of, any reaction to the fact Sabre Fox had a perfect chance to get the dagger to you, and refused to? I was curious to hear what Swift as a character would have thought of it, but then Sabre Fox (perhaps wisely) never brought it up, so I wonder what you make of it now that you know it was so close to being in your grasp. :)

And yeah, Sun Snake, when you get around to reading the Dusk Rat side-thread (the one named "the shadows of a large wing"), Peacock explained that Sun Snake's position was so strong he wasn't sure exactly how to tackled it; what you did with your character there was really interesting, in my opinion.

Yeah, I'm reading over the Shining Peacock/Dusk Rat team thread now :)

And yeah, that was kind of a missed opportunity for Sabre too, considering that if he'd taken the dagger from Valador there, and got it to Swift and Raven, and they'd figured out how to use all five, the group could possibly have resurrected Rain Feather in a safer way with no strings attached ;)
(Certainly Swift would have been happy to at least attempt it, given that she at least partly felt like she had failed to save Rain Feather by navigating the temple traps quickly enough).

Also...  Aww.
*hugs poor Sun Snake*
At least Swift didn't hate him.  Just thought he was a bit naive and judgemental  ;)
I'm not sure if he'd have been able to patch things up between them to how they were before the teams separated, but he definitely got close after they memory-dived the Pink Rose together.  Maybe over time in the epilogue :)

Curious what everyone else's epilogues might have looked like...

Well, that's something only the players involved could say, which likely means we'll never know, since I think everybody who is still around and wanted to offer their opinion on the matter already has.

Finished reading Team Peacock's thread.
That tree thing was CREEPY! (O.o)'

Interesting how, as Peacock was explaining his plans, he seemed totally hyper-focused on Sun Snake as being the only possible threat to him...

Swift likes it when she goes unnoticed by potential enemies ;)  hehehehehehehe.
Also being a psychic wrecking ball didn't save the High Priest of Vashna from Sabre...
And maybe Hornet would finally have snapped after being called a bug once too often...
And even if he had defeated Sun Snake...  Dawn Sword would have avenged him! :)

Shining Peacock, being an NPC, was entirely unable to spot the PC halos of everyone else and so underestimated them :p


So Shadow, have you actually said how you assumed the game would end as we went along, and which decisions had a major effect that changed how you saw the game ending? It sounds like Vyctar's plans weren't on the radar until our group took an interest in him, Valador's fate was only sealed because of Laughing Shark, and Sun Fox was most likely to have turned evil (so Blue Snake's plans would really have come undone).

One of the other big ones was killing Haxadrom so early in the game. If he'd managed to survive, his presence would have substantially changed the situation, giving somebody who would have acted to try and keep Sun Fox from reverting to your side, an additional player in the complicated situation at the chasm, and possibly even have precipitated an earlier confrontation with Valador, depending on how things played out. So that changed a lot.

Another thing I didn't expect to happen was you all fully managing to convert Alyne to your cause. I don't know if I've said so, but in my original conception of the game, Alyne and the high priest of Vashna were meant to be the same person, but I changed it shortly before you met her, when I realized it didn't really line up well with the rest of what I'd planned. Even so, she was very loyal, so the fact that you managed to turn her really changed things; if you had failed to turn her, then Alyne would have been a spy in your ranks, and that would have severely changed how things went down when you started interacting with the Acolytes.

Rain Feather stabbing Zhira in the back I honestly hadn't expected; I mean, Zhira was an Helghast, so it wasn't that surprising, but I expected the two of them to work together. If Zhira hadn't been killed, Vyctar might have stuck around for longer, and you all would have definitely had better shot of negotiating some sort of truce with him, although as I said before, Vyctar was never going to give up on his plans to become a Darklord. So, that'd have been mostly in your hands; you are correct that I didn't expect Vyctar to make it as far as he did.

A huge one was Rain Feather's IC death. If she hadn't disappeared, than that would not have happened, and in the game as it actually went, I decided to make her IC death meaningful by using it to stop the summoning of Vashna. Without me giving you that one for free, from how things were otherwise going, I honestly expected that the High Priest would have managed to succeed into his plan, and obviously if that happened things would have developed very differently.

Peacock honestly thought Sun Snake was the only person he had to worry about; and in the end it was Sun Snake who forced him to concede his plans, so perhaps he was right? It's hard to say how things would have gone if things went into a fight - you saw what Peacock was capable of in battle, both when he took control of Dusk Rat to help you fight the Nadziran and when he scattered the Acolytes of Vahsna, so don't assume he'd have been an easy kill just because he was not a physical threat. That said, I honestly didn't expect a fight with Peacock to happen.

One that I didn't expect to happen but would have been very impacting if it did was if the second group had failed to find and destroy the Nadziranim camp in the Darklands, which likely would also have included Silver Raven being turned into a Kai-hybrid; that would have likely led to a second attack to the Monastery, probably after you'd gone back there, and a big huge fight with them, although that was avoided long before it became a possibility. This would have likely been compounded if the failure to save Silver Raven was because Swift decided to actually try her hand at killing Colin; that would have probably led to a early confrontation with Valador as it'd have absolutely wrecked his plans, and if Laughing Shark had still been in the game when that happened, I have no idea what she could have done. There's a lot of things that could have caused the situation in Toran to go in different directions, but it's difficult to say for sure what'd have happened without having played it; what the team did was one of the most likely scenario in my head, but until it happened, I had no idea it that'd be the one to win over the other more likely ones.

I can't think of anything else in particular right now that I didn't mention before, but if you have any doubts, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer! ^_^

I vaguely recall that Silver Raven got fixed based on me OOC asking the GM something like "So this game doesn't seem to have knowledge rolls but is there any chance I would know about some kind of cure for this?", and then being told "Well, there's this super rare leaf thing called an oede leaf..." or whatever it was called, so I just had Dusk Rat mention that since that was all I had...and it turned out someone in the group actually had one of those that they'd picked up from somewhere, so that was handy :D.

If things had ever come to a fight with Peacock I'm really not sure what Dusk Rat would've done - she'd've wanted to assist Peacock, of course, but at the same time wouldn't have wanted to get involved in any fighting, not Kai versus Kai. So we wouldn't really have known what to do there...

Swift knew Peacock was dangerous, Moon Shadow had always warned her of that from Day 1 (which I now realise was based on her own direct experience of his methods).
But ultimately, there was only one person in the world that Swift was truly afraid of, and he was dead (I had wondered if he'd somehow escaped his death and would turn up later as a plot twist, becoming Swift's personal nemesis).
So really, while she knew that Peacock would be no pushover, she wasn't actually afraid of opposing him if she thought it necessary.  What was the worst he could do?  Kill her?  In her early years she'd actually hoped to die, so death was one thing that she wasn't afraid of.  Psychically torture her?  She'd already experienced that, it was nothing new to her, except that now she had the means to fight back.  That would only have made her more determined.

The only thing that really had any power over her was threatening those she cared about, primarily Moon Shadow and Silver Raven.  And I suspect Peacock knew that that was really the only hope he had of exerting some sort of control over her.  But at the same time, that made her see him as a threat and made her more determined to find a way of stopping him.  Ironically, if he hadn't promised to bring Moon Shadow down, Swift might have been content to just leave him for Sun Snake to deal with.

She wouldn't have tried to fight Peacock directly.  In fact, she likely wouldn't have fought him at all, unless he pushed her into a fight.  (And she knew that wasn't his style, so felt fairly safe from direct harm from Peacock himself (though she was alert for the possibility of him mind-manipulating someone else into killing her or setting Red Dawn loose on her)).
Swift's entire skill set (mainly the parts of her inner power that had been awakened as the 'Ghost of Anskaven') was based around infiltration, evading guards and traps, seeking out weak points in the enemy or their infrastructure and striking at those with intent to weaken or destroy the enemy in a single attack.  When she was thinking tactically, she preferred to avoid fighting unless she knew the target was in a weak enough position to take it down instantly before it could raise an alarm or damage her.  And she would never attack an enemy directly head-on unless she had no other choice, her fighting style just wasn't suited to that, like Sabre's was.  Stealth and exploiting weaknesses were her main weapons.
And she was tenacious too.  Though she often seemed to lack patience, she knew the value of waiting for the right moment.  Unless something forced her to act quickly, she could hold back and just watch and wait ;)

(The times when she seemed to go berserk and fight angry was due to mental damage she had suffered early in her life giving her a 'darker personality' based on the Ghost of Anskaven, and that was mostly triggered by some form of stress or heightened emotion or psychic attack.  By the end of the game, her mind had been healed considerably, and she was working tactically rather than angry).

Also, once she started learning crafting from Silver Raven, as well as being a new purpose in her life, it would have also given her another means of creating and exploiting weaknesses in enemies, by creating items and equipment to cover her own weaknesses and enhance her strengths, as well as disrupting or countering enemy abilities to some degree.  She'd already been looking into ways of neutralising Peacock's abilities, as a Plan B in case Sun Snake couldn't talk him around.
And she had Moon Shadow and Silver Raven to talk to about how to defeat or destroy a particular type of magic or craft (such as the means of gaining immortality!)  I doubt either of them would have been enthusiastic about letting that go either.

So yeah, that was a bit longer than I'd expected, but hopefully helps in figuring out if Swift could actually have posed more of a threat than she seemed to.
There was more to her than just an unstable invisible stabby nutjob :)

She was extra-wary around Dusk Rat anyway, since, not knowing about the Seeing Stone she carried or Peacock's ability to act through it, she'd gotten the impression that Dusk had mastered some kind of intensely powerful unstoppable magic.
And she definitely wouldn't have done anything to hurt Dusk.  She did believe she owed her a favour after all.  (Maybe help in breaking free of the Order and settling down in a forest somewhere if things didn't go to plan and Dusk didn't want to stick around any more?)  :)

EDIT: Almost forgot to ask...  Did Peacock ever explain to Dusk exactly what was powering those Seeing Stones?  Kind of wondered how she'd have taken that  ;)
This message was last edited by the player at 17:32, Sat 20 Feb 2021.

I think Swift Fox and Sun Snake spotted Shining Peacock's acolyte illusion had flaws, as Shining Peacock was not one for fine details and was more a big picture thinker. At least that was how it was communicated to me, I believe?

I think Sun Snake was always looking for ways to neutralise Peacock in fear of what he might be, but would not actively have attacked him unless it was revealed he was in some way 'evil'.

I think back in the Maakengorge Sun Snake was trying to feel him out with the area Sun Fox had  purged. It was like 'if he's not false, there's a really cool area he should feel that might make him happy about Kai's power, and if he's false and tried something to sun Snake's defenceless mind there's this nifty ability burning Vashna bit that Snake could hold Peacock too so both Snake and Peacock's their powers get burned, or at least reduced. Which even then, would force Peacock to act through other Kai, not take away his ability to contribute, so it wasn't about taking him out.

Of course, Peacock refused, so it was hard to tell if he was false - so was warned of the danger - or was just paranoid. Since Sun Snake didn't know Peacock thought Snake dangerous, and also was very shielded with his mind by default, he didn't know what to think about that!

If he was eventually shown the light place, Peacock would have found the experience interesting, and probably thanked Sun Snake for it, but as I think I made clear earlier when I answered Swift Fox's Sommerswerd question, he wasn't anywhere near as far gone as to be hurt by the light. Of course, as you noted, Peacock was very much worried about Sun Snake, and thus was not inclined to trust him, certainly not enough to open his mind to him.

And the illusion wasn't imperfect, so much as it was calibrated for non-Kai; Peacock had no reason to expend the effort required to fool you, especially with a potential battle ahead, so he didn't try. Also, he was augmenting the illusion by pushing images into the Acolytes' minds, to cover for the imperfections in the illusion; they didn't saw them because he was shoring up what they were perceiving with psychic attacks. To the Acolytes, the dragon looked 100% real and with no visible defects at all. Which is why he wasn't bothered when the two of you mentioned the illusion wasn't perfect - it hadn't meant to be good enough to foll the two of you. Doing that would have required a lot of effort out of Peacock, as well as likely necessitated that he attack you psychically, and at the time he had neither good reasons nor the inclination to do either.

Peacock himself also would not have initiated a fight, himself, unless he was forced into it; as an actual politician, his first instinct would always have been to try and find a way to beat you with words, and fighting was very much a last resort he didn't want to, especially because he knew that even highly trustworthy disciples of his like Dusk Rat and Rain Feather would have balked at supporting him in such a situation, and he really didn't want to ever authorize Red Dawn to cut loose on a fellow Kai.

So, you know, just as Sun Snake was wary of Peacock and planning against him, so too was Peacock always doing the same. It was one of the most fun things about the whole experience, to be honest; not everyday can I play a true "battle of the masterminds" against such a skilled adversary! ^_^

Interesting that the backstory is that Sun Snake and Shining Peacock had worked together previously, and so apart from Peacock's willingness to pull levers like blackmail, and the reputation with women that Sun Snake had never actually seen, there was nothing to pre-dispose Sun Snake against Peacock really. However, Rain Feather really did hint at a darker picture of Shining Peacock. She seemed to hint that Peacock had basically insinuated  'get rid of everyone else' to get the Sommerwserd. Although I think Rain Feather mentioned it was to do with instructions in a dream, or some such, and Sun Snake had questioned if that was to do with her engaging with her Right Hand magics.

So what was the truth of all of that/ Skimming through Peacock related threads to see what's he's like with others does reveal him to be less evil than painted, and proved that people such as Banedon and Sun Fox who had good things to say about him weren't being fooled :p

Edit: Oh, and showing Peacock the light area wasn't a weapon, it would really have been a 'isn't this cool' thing. It was jusyt from Snake's own personal experiences knowing how dangerous the Vashna bit was close by, he thought if Peacock was false and tried anything he could have used that to stop any attempt. It was certainly a 'be open and friendly but have a nasty backup if you get played' idea.
This message was last edited by the player at 18:50, Sat 20 Feb 2021.

I did wonder at the time if the dragon illusion wasn't something like a cardboard cutout with a lifelike image on the front.  When viewed directly from the front, it looks perfect, but from the side, you can see it's just a flat image.

Swift really didn't like him as a person either.  With Moon Shadow's warning, she was likely at least a little bit biased, but deep down she kind of hoped that another Kai wasn't about to directly oppose them, and maybe even if he is dangerous, that doesn't mean he's out to get us.  The very first time they met in-game, she was like: "Ok, he showed up just in time to save us from getting turned into pincushions by a few hundred acolyte archers.  I suppose that earns him some leeway."
But he just seemed to keep rubbing her the wrong way with everything he said.  Then again I doubt he really cared about what she thought of him.  Seeing the whole picture now, I'm guessing he was just playing nice for Sun Snake's benefit :)
(Should have tried group-hugs maybe!)

Out of curiosity what was all the magical gear he had on him?  Definitely curious how much of his power came from that rather than his own abilities.
I'm guessing the refilling dagger container was a WP potion, and he did say his gloves were more magic resistant than Korlinium, but not sure what else he might have had that was less visible.

Ok, so... this is embarrassing to admit, but I lost the Character Sheet for Peacock; I'm not sure exactly why or when that happened. That said, I have a general idea of what his equipment was supposed to do, so I can give you a general idea of it all.

The most important item was the crystal dagger that was enchanted to be an ever-refilling container; basically, a liquid inside of it would regenerate itself to fill the dagger after it was drunk. As it happened, the dagger was filled with Pure Shrueberry potion - which, if you remember (or check the Herbalism thread) refills the user's WP to max, and then raises the max by 1. As you can imagine, since Peacock had that dagger for a long time now (about four years), and every time he drank from it his WP cap grew by 1, he had a WP total in the hundreds - as I said, I lost the actual number with the sheet, but it was somewhere around 600 or so.

The cloak was Alverian, the same as Alyne, which meant it was magic-immune and could be used to repel it. I believe the two golden chains were each imbued with different defensive spells, but I'm unsure as to which ones; similarly, the armor was enchanted, that one I believe with something enhancing agility and reducing fatigue. The gloves were lined with platinum and had a spell-amplifying effect, making anything he would cast more powerful, and the boots were enchanted to improve movement to some extent.

I'm not sure about everything, sadly; I honestly hadn't realized I'd lost his sheet until just today.
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:21, Sat 20 Feb 2021.

Aww.
Hmm, even with those ones, it sounds like if it did come to a fight with him we'd have needed the entire team.  And there would probably have been a few fatalities...

On the plus side, powered-up spells would have been useful for us if Swift reflected them back at him :)
And we were already trying to prep everyone with anti-magic gear for taking on Valador.

Ah well, was just curious anyway.  I suppose we'll never know if we could have beaten him now :(
This message was last edited by the player at 21:37, Sat 20 Feb 2021.

You could have; it would have been difficult, but possible. He didn't really have any real physical combat capabilities, and his END was still that of a normal human (compare to Vyctar's absurd amount).

This holds true for every enemy; even Vashna, if you happened to fail badly enough that he was resurrected, would have been possible to defeat if the whole team worked together, although he would have been the hardest of the lot. Same if you somehow found your way to Sejanhoz. None of the enemies were invincible, just different flavors of "very hard".

Note that, when left the time to do it, you and Sun Fox were able to pulverize a fortress; you shouldn't underestimate the amount of power you had available to you. :)

Yeah, the fortress didn't fight back though, so not much of a fair fight.  We just set it on fire and watched it burn :)  hehe.

Curious what kind of stats Vashna would have had.
I did imagine he'd have been a lot more powerful than Vyctar, being a proper Darklord rather than a 'manufactured' one.

Vyctar was a bit more versatile, with the various tricky abilities from his equipment, all the magic, and the multiple limbs with different effects. Vashna would have had more raw power and a couple of brutal area-of-effect disabling effects, as well as higher stats (especially CS and END), and of course he'd have had the unique ability to turn anybody he killed into an Helghast immediately, which would have made him stronger (especially if you fought him with disposable Acolytes of Vashna or the High Priest lending support), but it wouldn't have been so big of a difference. I would say Vyctar was a full-on Darklord in terms of strength, if one who had not yet had time to get familiar with his own powers; if I'd had stats for Gnaag or Zagarna, they would have been similar to Vyctar, although not identical since each Darklord has their own personal powers.

How did you find running the combat system anyway? The basic LWRPG always seemed odd when trying to have multiple combatants around, and I never really got on with the Zipp rolled CS idea. It was disconnected from narrative - for no good reason one day you could be significantly better or worse than another, far exceeding other bonuses - and mechanically the decision on whether to reroll CS or concentrate on WP when resting was not interesting. While I liked the fatigue aspect to CS, WP was far more important, so if you did take the CS reroll it was just a case of being punished for a low roll for a second time or punished for having lots of combat, both of which would have left you low on WP anyway so it's just a feel bad.

I'd actually never considered that aspect of it, to be honest; it's certainly a valid point to make.

One thing I really like about the combat system is that it really allows for the ability to have a single enemy be a reasonable threat for multiple opponents, which is actually a very hard thing to achieve in most RPG (D&D/PF is very bad about this). This also works in the other sense, allowing large battles with multiple combatants on both sides, or a single player fighting multiple enemies, in a way that feels realistic without horrendously heightening the workload.

A second thing, which I also like but is only really relevant in a PbP environment, is how fast a combat goes by; going in batches of five rolls each turn generally let us go through a battle in a single post, and thus usually a single day, which allowed for including a lot more combat than in most other stories. Plus, when I broke out the battles that went one roll at a time, like the one with Vyctar, I got the sense those felt much more epic due to the comparison with the normal ones. Having that available as a GM tool is nice.

On the other hand, even as I tried to inject more strategy into the combats, it still doesn't come even close to the level of granularity that a system like Pathfinder allows, and now that you brought it up, it very much doesn't have the same flexibility and breadth of options when it comes to character creation either. So, in that sense, it leaves somewhat to be desired.

I'm not sure if there's really a way to solve that problem without losing the other benefits, however... do you have an idea how you'd go about it, Sun Snake?

In terms of tactics and character creations options, it is harder with a set of simpler stats.  I always wondered if trying to make CS, EP, and WP be the 'average' of two substats would be an idea in character creation. So like D&D/Pathfinder six bonuses in total to play. So you have CS is the average of an agility and a melee bonus, EP is the average of a strength and a fitness bonus, and WP is the average of an intellect and perception bonus. So you could have average stats for your three main stats, but still have interesting strengths and weaknesses underneath that for your normal Tests. And then there would be more balance and fine tuning if you then syphon off points from one stat to another - you areaffecting more non-combat bonuses for example pulling a point of average CS to your average EP, for example.

In terms of tactics, it seems like raw CS bonuses are a little limited, and that splitting up the four ways damage can be affected - you give more/give less and take more/take less - might allow more flexibility.

So you can have basic tactics that are like +1 or +2CS in attack but -1 or -2CS on defense (sovice versa, and are net neutral), and then on top of that have more complicated tactics where you can commit more resources for blanket +2CS, or a good tactic only buying you (or an ally) a attack damage boost/received damage reduction.

It obviously makes combat tactics harder when you already have a whole host of disciplines to make useful first. So you don't want to let a tactic do for free something that a discipline does.

I think the way the system is set up, it makes CS much more valuable than everything else, which is why I had so few +/-CS abilities against a lot more +/-damage ones. I feel like having too many ways to modify CS would weaken that; after all, a difference of 6 CS can bring you from a bad outcome (say, taking 5 damage while inflicting only 3), to a quite good one (say, taking 3 damage and inflicting 6). Whereas with the damage increases or reduction, things tend to get more equalized.

I'm not sure how much it's worth it to have attributes; the idea in itself isn't bad, but there's not really much to be affects by these traits in the system. END and WP are more of a pool thing, and I think moving CS more toward a pool system (instead of the hybrid that it is with the roll thing) makes it clear that these are resources, rather than attributes; in that sense, the game doesn't really has any attributes at all. If they were added, then having something for them to affect would be useful, but in a d10-based system, even just a +2 is a huge bonus (each +1 is a +10%, so +2 is a 20% increase in success chances), and with both Disciplines and items already providing some bonus, adding an extra source of bonus might cause the pileup to lead to making rolls meaningless due to bonus overload. The only way I can see to avoid that would be to switch to a d20-base, but even if that could be made to work (it would require reworking the combat results tables at least a little bit, if nothing else), I'm not sure it'd be enough.

So... overall, the idea isn't uninteresting, I'm just unsure if it'd be possible to work it in while retaining the simplicity that is the system's greater strength.
This message was last edited by the GM at 00:10, Sun 21 Feb 2021.

Basically because disciplines take up all tactical space (i think you even made weapon difference a discipline thing), and the damage splitting being the only way to nuance combat (which is what disciplines are doing), I don't think you can do much to add tactics to combat.

I think you'd just need to pare back how powerful disciplines are, so they either allow you to do ready available tactics for less 'cost' or provide an extra boost.

I would have loved to see the High Priest's reaction if we'd killed Vashna right in front of him, hehe :)

Always been interested in ways of tweaking the system a bit.  Particularly in ways of 'customising' characters more.
For example, a character built more as a 'front line fighter' with Weaponmastery and all the other physical boosting disciplines might be weaker in psychic combat, but would hit harder and be more resistant to physical damage.  A character built with Psi-Screen, Psi-Surge, Nexus and so on would be more powerful in psychic combat but might be weaker physically, dealing less damage with physical weapons.  An 'all rounder' character might be average at everything, but more balanced and able to take on any role as needed to cover any weaknesses in the team.
Maybe something like D&D stats that affect the main scores like CS, END, and WP.

Also I'd been thinking of having 'psychic duels' be possible too.  Similar to Dusk Rat's spirit form fight with the ghosts in this game.  Still tinkering with that.
Maybe having magical battles work similarly, some spells can overpower others or block/counteract others.

Also I think I'd remove the "instant kill" results.  Maybe just knock the affected character out of the fight for a bit, leave them stunned and vulnerable for a round or something.
If it was a special effect that was actually designed for an instant kill critical (like the Kagonite Arrows) then maybe, although it would only be possible with magical weapons designed with that ability, or ones that took advantage of a weakness, like fighting a Helghast with the Sommerswerd, for example.
Using that against PCs would definitely be a rare occurrence.  End of story arc boss fight stuff at the very least, and I'd likely have some kind of signal (Sixth Sense alert or something) to warn the players that the enemy was capable of that and let them work out some way of countering it.

Got some ideas anyway :)
This message was last edited by the player at 01:50, Sun 21 Feb 2021.

Yeah, any combat system which results in you instantly dying at the single roll of a die can sod off, basically. It's the same with save-or-die (or at least save-or-get-fucked) mechanics in, as far as I can tell, every edition of DnD except Fourth - your entire character, all their progress, their personality, motivations, skills, everything that's happened to them up to this point become entirely irrelevant as their continued existence is abruptly reliant not on something they can do, but something their [i]player[/] has to do - roll above a certain, arbitrary number on a single die. Sure, that arbitrary number might be a bit lower if they have some kind of stat that contributes a bonus to the roll, but it still renders the entire character, and all the other work put into them, basically worthless. That happened to one of the NPCs (the main one I liked, even if Dusk Rat found him kind of annoying) in the "prequel" side-thread that I did with Sabre Fox. Got a bad roll in combat - boom, instantly dead :P.

It was one of the only things I kind of hated about the original LW books- you're pretty much required to keep working on spiking your CS through the first batch of books for the two fights we all think about when we think of unfair fights in Lone Wolf- Kimah in Book 9 and the Chaosmaster in Book 11.

If you don't go out of your way to spike your CS, then there's a good chance you're going to end up on the bad side of the combat record and get yourself squished in one shot- I think it's like a 20% chance per turn you could get squished in each of those fights if the RNG you used was just any sort of cranky that day?

Though it makes me wonder, just what is the absolute highest CS score you could have at that point in each book, I wonder...?  I used to hold onto the Adgana I found just for those specific battles, pretty much...

I remember I almost lost Rain to one of those sudden death mechanics with the Agarashi in the chasm, but that one I'll take responsibility for. :)

Those fights are one of the reasons that I say I don't really like the "increase CS" effects, because they tend to create this "scaling upwards" effect that I feel makes mooks pointless. I do think I managed to keep that one in check into this game, more or less - and speaking of Swift Fox's question about psychic duels, Rain, I believe you can confirm for me that there were situations I presented to let psychic abilities get around CS differentials where this game is involved, yes?

As for the specific CS, I can't remember right now, but there were certain threshold to be met to be able to win those, especially the Chaosmaster. Although I personally never found Khima to be that difficult - I think there was a ring that could be used against him, or something else which made him manageable? - but had a lot more trouble with the timed Kraan+Vordaks fight at the end of book 8, as that one is literally unwinnable if your original starting CS is less than 16.

About Dusk Rat's point over one-hit-kills, this is a long-standing argument between me and Dusk Rat, made even more weird by the fact that I mostly agree that save-or-die mechanics are mechanics that should be used sparingly if at all. However, I believe that, if there's no risk, then the game is pointless; your victories would have been diminished if there hadn't been a very real risk of you getting killed as you won them. I also believe that a RPG only has sense when the choices have consequences, and that has to include bad consequences following up from bad choices.

Of course, in Stalwart Trout's specific instance, he was killed by the equivalent of what in D&D would have been a critical hit from an enemy higher in level than he was. I don't know a thing about D&D 4E - does it not have critical hits available for the enemies, or is it absolutely impossible to die at all? Because a crit on a low-level opponent that doesn't have a sturdy build tends to be very lethal in most systems.
This message was last edited by the GM at 12:04, Sun 21 Feb 2021.

Well the way I would have worked instant kills would have been to restrict them mostly to magical weapons specifically designed with an instant kill mechanic.  Those would have been tough to get hold of, either being extremely expensive (thus requiring you to put all your cash/trade items into acquiring that one item at the cost of anything else useful you might have picked up then) or else just hidden or otherwise hard to find, requiring a very difficult challenge to get your mitts on the item.  Crafters might have an easier time making them, if they can find the right materials.
Also items that take advantage of some kind of weakness in an enemy would still be able to hit with critical instakills.  For example, rolling a 'K' result while fighting a Helghast with the Sommerswerd, to use the same situation as mentioned above.  It's specifically created to kill creatures like them, so should have a very powerful effect on them.
Using items that way would be more of a tactical detail for players though, rewarding them for taking the time to research/figure out an enemy's weaknesses before rushing in to fight it.

But normal weapons wouldn't do the instakill critical.  More likely they'd just stun the target for a round or otherwise leave them vulnerable, perhaps with damaged equipment or a lingering injury or something similar just to represent that it was a pretty nasty hit.

Also, I liked the example that Sabre used in his game when we fought against the Nadziran.
For those not following it, the enemy there had a spell or ability that gave him an instakill attack for one round, but it was clearly signalled, so that became a tactical thing where we could go on the defensive and try to avoid or block the attack, or use our own special abilities to try to stop him using the attack at all.

End of story arc bosses (Like Gnaag in the LW books for an example), would be more powerful than others, so might have the ability to instakill an enemy.  But I'd only use that as a single round thing that cost them some resources to use, so they'd use it once or twice at most.
And it would be clearly visible to the players in some way.  Either a Craftsmanship like ability that warned a player that the enemy was 'charging up' some kind of powerful magical weapon with the potential to kill the target.  Or a Sixth Sense alert in the case of a natural ability.
Either way, it should be visible, letting the players make a tactical decision to avoid or neutralise it.  If they ignore it and charge in anyway, well, they can't say they weren't warned!

Psychic duels, I had in mind as being something like establishing a mental 'link' with an enemy and essentially fighting them in a kind of 'arena of the mind', where each character can use their psychic skills to create attacks and defences.  The down side being that being so mentally focused would weaken your physical senses, so you wouldn't be able to fight physical enemies coming at you, making you rely on the rest of the team to protect you while you concentrated on taking down the psychic enemy, kind of like spirit walking.
And it would mostly be used as kind of a 'boss fight' mechanic.  As an example, the leader of an enemy army, who was a powerful psychic who could mentally boost the fighting strength of his troops on the battlefield, but who was physically hard to reach, like behind a barrier or inside a castle.  Engaging him in a psychic duel would force him to stop boosting his troops or risk weakening himself against the attacker, and could potentially take him down and remove him from the battle if the attacker won the duel.
(I'm always in favour of multiple solutions to a problem though, so that would only be one way of dealing with that example situation.  Another could be sending some stealthy character in to assassinate the leader during the battle!)

Magical duels would work in a similar way, expanding the spell lists to give various ways of attacking and counter-attacking and defending.  Still tinkering with that.

Most of this is from my experience of playing D&D too.  Playing a Wizard class character requires very different tactics to playing a Fighter class character, so I'm trying to think of ways to bring that over, letting each player pick their own style of play and develop their character from there along their own path.
Technically the Kai would only be a single 'class'.  But individual people have their own talents and areas of expertise, hence why you could always pick and choose Disciplines from the start.

I suppose I'm just experimenting really.  The existing system is fine for the gamebooks, where there's only ever one player and getting killed basically just teaches you what to avoid next time around 'cos you can start over again anytime.
But when there's a longer storyline with multiple players involved things get a bit more complex.

Anyways, most of my own stuff is kind of a permanent work in progress anyway.  I'm lousy at balancing things, I keep tweaking one thing and finding that broke something else, hehe.
This message was last edited by the player at 12:59, Sun 21 Feb 2021.

Yeah, to be fair to Lone Wolf it's supposed to be instant kill in the same way that taking the wrong path is instant kill. And it only kicks in if you are ridiculously outmatched by an opponent - you have to have a combat ratio of -9 or more and roll a 1 (or 1 or 2 for -11 ratio or more).

Those gamebook fights just show how hard it was to balance for the Sommerswerd - if you take the non-Sommerswerd route they were doable, but possessing the Sommerswerd put them almost entirely out of your ability to pass unless you started with a high CS.


I think low level characters are just squishy in many systems. Dice rolls aren't something the player is doing though, they are a way to arbitrate the effect of the world vs the effect a character has. A low level (and so low skilled and low experience) character shouldn't have so much plot armour they can shrug off the difficulties of the world. But it does mean that doing things as if they are a 'standard' hero tends to get them killed quite easily.

4th edition basically made low level characters less squishy and a little bit more like starting heroes in books/films, with more skill and staying power from the start. It also made the bonus progression and difficulty smoother, so you were always in the sweet spot of things being roughly your level of difficulty both in terms of fight and skill challenges, so narratively you're always presented with obstacles you can overcome, rather than stumbling in to many skill checks and fights you are outmatched for unless specialised.

Edit: 4th edition critical hits are pretty brutal, it's automatic max damage on all dice (no messing around with confirming crits), and magic weapons get to roll extra dice for their pluses. And fourth edition has more encounter freshes and daily powers that roll multiple dice. However, as said, even starting character have more hp (it was a standard amount plus actual con score). It also helps that there are far more ways to refresh hp (it's played more as stamina, so you can have a 'second wind' during combat to restore a quarter of your hp, and after a battle if you can take a brief rest you can spend additonal of these 'surges' to restore hp. These healing surges become your low level hp that are being wittled down fight to fight, and battles themselves you're less likely to be one shotted.
This message was last edited by the player at 13:05, Sun 21 Feb 2021.

Oh sure, there should be risk, and decisions should mean something. But that's the point - a situation where "A Bad Thing is attacking you, roll 1d20 and score above 12 to not die" has nothing to do with decisions. There are no tactics, there is no choice. You just arbitrarily have to roll a thing and score a certain number and if you succeed at that then congratulations, you can continue playing. Otherwise, oh whoops, you died, game over, you have zero continues, goodbye.

The combat in this game can't really be compared to something like DnD, because there you actually have tactics, positioning, initiative, etc. If you have magic armour or weapons or whatever that do cool things, you can use them. If you want to hide behind cover and get extra protection as a result, you can do that. And that's without getting into all the inter-party stuff that can go on with different members synergising with each other and generally co-operating. It's not just a roll-off between two dice and then comparing the results on a table. Yeah, if you get hit too many times, you'll run out of hp and die but being on the receiving end of a crit doesn't mean you instantly die - as Wuffy has explained, Fourth Edition a crit deals max damage on all dice that would be rolled for the attack (plus extra if the attack was dealt with a magical weapon...but that's more from the player end since monsters have their own attacks as part of their statblocks). But you can fight stuff a few levels higher than you and still smash its face in, it depends what it is. And if things look to be going badly you should (hopefully) have the option to retreat. And if a fight looks like it's gonna be too tough going in, then the GM should ideally scatter some clues about that indicate such, so the players have the chance to go "Hmm, hang on, should we be doing this?" in order to possibly just nope out of it entirely, or at least not charge in recklessly when diplomacy might be a better approach.

Even in DnD you generally can't be one-shot by stuff through outright damage, not unless you're already really low on health and get hit by something that deals tons of damage. In Fourth Edition you only die to damage if you go below your Bloodied value (half health) in negative digits. So say your max hp is 50, you die if something smacks you down to -25 or lower. Otherwise you fall unconscious at 0hp and start making Death Saving Throws each turn, and just need to not fail (roll under 10) three times. Being hit while unconscious will automatically give you extra failures as you can be coup-de-graced but you can also be revived if you manage to roll a Natural 20 or if an ally can chuck you some healing, or at least use a Heal skill check to stabilise you or something.

But then, DnD isn't based off a single-player gamebook series which is, if it's anything like other gamebooks I've seen, generally pretty heavily weighted against you already. I've seen gamebooks where picking Option A early on instead of Option B means you don't end up getting some obscure-seeming item which turns out to be the one thing required to beat the final boss, and therefore you get insta-killed with no means of knowing how you could've done anything differently, short of reading through all the pages to try and figure out what went wrong. DnD is all about being part of a team (well, unless you're playing solo, in which case you may still get NPC allies ;)) and putting your resources together in order to figure stuff out and face down adversity. If all that can come to nothing because the character's player didn't roll above a 12 that one time, then what's the point?

Fighting Fantasy is the gamebook series with many of those 'one true path' things, Lone Wolf with the disciplines, etc tended to be a little more forgiving, combat balance notwithstanding in some books.

Yeah, there's several books with multiple paths to success and only a handful with big fail states; Book 2 is actually one of those which is worse about it, while on the other hand, book 5, "Shadow on the Sands", is probably the best gamebook I've ever read and one with a multitude of possible roads to success, including accounting for the possibility of different abilities and inventories between people who started playing in that book and those who accumulated stuff from playing the previous four, and it only kills you when you make a genuine mistake in how you handle things. Lone Wolf as a series is probably better than most others, although outside of the Lone Wolf I've only read a limited amount of gamebooks, so maybe one of our other players has more knowledge of the genre might be willing to offer a more nuanced perspective on it?

Still traumatised from playing through "Creature of Havoc"...  (O.o)'

I actually enjoyed that one :) Funny mentioning that one after speaking of dice rolling rather than getting ot chose what your character does though :p


Lair of the Sorcerer or whatever it was called (book 24) was the one that really got me. Even when you get all the items to line up, even with the best skill score... the actual fight is still a case of 'lose two combat rounds with the boss villain and instantly die'. It's like... dice smashingly unfair.


The Deathtrap Dungeon books had as part of the game of the dungeon that you were looking for items, so could get to the end then fail because you didn't find them all. But that seemed logical, because it was actually a game (within a game).

The one that made no sense was the first Port Blacksand book (City of Thieves?) where you haave to collect three items to kill the bad guy. Fail, and game over. Except.... thenwhen you go to get the guy, your wisard advisor is all 'wait, I made a mistake, you only need two of them...not sure which, good luck!'. So a) you could have had the right two ingredients to start with, but are stopped from trying, and b) you don't know which two, there are no clues anywhere about this, so literally even if you fought to get all three for a while first, when you finally get to the end of the book you have a literal 33% chance of winning, as it's a pure guess!


Speaking of Port Blacksand, the newest book they released (Port of Periol or something like that) is kinda an interesting 'walk around everywhere from old books' except to cram in all that nostalgia, there's no real decision making. Every decision where you make the wrong turning is basically instant death, and some battles just have the unfair 'not have the right item, then die' to make them hard. I think some of the decisions you can be advised about ahead of time, but it's still pretty brutal one true path!

One of the few gamebooks I read was Avenger! from the Way of the Tiger series; that one was interesting in that there definitely were portions where "you either have this item or you die", or fights were "you don't have this item/ability, game over", BUT on the other hand, there were always at least two alternative paths to avoid those situations - and most of the time, the game provided indications on what the right path was, although they required paying extremely careful attention to what happened. And of course, while the various fights in the game were mostly up to die rolls (and I believe that only two were mandatory, and every other one was optional), the final fight was unique in that you had to choose which techniques to use against your opponent round by round, and needed to string up a logical progression (based on what was known of the villain) to win the battle. It was very interesting.

I think Dusk Rat would probably like the "Virtual Reality" series more; that one has very good reviews across the various adventures which are all independent from each other, although I only personally played one of the lot (Twist of Fate), so, while I quite liked that one, I can't vouch for the rest. The series' claim to fame was that it had no die rolls at all, using only your decisions and the disciplines you picked at the beginning to determine outcomes; so if you didn't take a skill that made you good in a fight, you better avoid putting yourself in situation where you had to fight, and so on. Twist of Fate had something like four different paths to choose from and, interestingly, two different "successful" endings. I replayed that one a lot.

Fabled Lands was an interesting series in that it was a sort of experiment in "freeform exploration" gamebook, with each numbered section being a location rather than an event, and each book being a wider region of the world; it was interesting, but by its very nature it resulted in a bit of a scattershot structure, and the series was never finished so a number of world region were missing and thus impossible to explore. I'm not sure I'd recommend it absolutely, but it's a curiosity if nothing else, although it pretty much confirms that location based exploration is better done with videogames, rather than gamebooks, whose real strength (however rarely it's actually realized) is in the ability to create multiple-path stories much more easily.

On that note, not sure if I mentioned it, but "Magium" is a phone App (although I believe there's a PC version as well) that is basically a virtual gamebook, and also one with no die rolling, several very divergent path (as in, it's possible to get party members killed in a book, and then the following book accounts for that and offers hugely different paths depending on who is still alive), and is very well-written, although still currently unfinished (the author releases a new chapter every few months, every books has about eleven chapters, and the author stated there's still at least two books to go after the current one is over). So, that's also one where bad things only happen based on your choices, which again is probably the best approach to a gamebook, since randomness is another of those things that videogames have a much easier time implementing.
This message was last edited by the GM at 23:31, Mon 22 Feb 2021.

I've... actually taken up collecting gamebooks and the like- it's amazing what you used to be able to find at garage/yard sales and flea markets before everything went to blazes.

Among my collection (alongside the piles of Choose Your Own Adventure and Time Machine) and on my tablet, there are a few I have to give a shoutout to because they've been worth a lot of replays:

- I've been rummaging through Steve Jackson's 'Sorcery!' series, even though I have little to no idea as to what I'm doing with it.  All I know is that it's a lot of fun to try and muddle through, even if I can't seem to figure out how to progress in it.

- Choice of Games puts out a good number of 'books' on mobile, and they've since expanded to Steam as well.  There are lots of possibilities out there, but I've had the most fun with the first three books of the Heroes' Rise set (The Prodigy, The Hero Project, Herofall).  This is a publisher where you'll have to do a little bit of digging because they have so much to play- they even have licensed books in some White Wolf properties.  There's 113 of their books on Steam, so... at least there's a lot?  You might pay from $3 to $8 for each, but honestly, I've not really regretted anything off their list yet.  Plus: you can share saves between PC and mobile versions.

- Dungeons and Dragons put out two kinds of gamebooks in the 80s- there's the usual CYOA with a D&D theme, but there's also a pile of gamebooks much like Lone Wolf, only each is a self-contained, individual adventure run on a variant of what I think is first or second-edition D&D.  It's a simple enough system, but it's got enough meat to kill an afternoon.

- There were a few gamebooks set in the Lord of the Rings universe- I have a pair of them, and they're pretty good for being that old.  They even come with regular and advanced rulesets if you want a challenge.

There's a couple of games that kind of straddle the line between gamebook and RPG, as well- I can point you in the direction of a few of those, too, if you want.

In reply to Rain Feather (msg # 170):

That brings back memories, as well as a bit of envy - "The Shamutanti Hills" is the first gamebook I ever played, but I was never able to find the others, and in general gamebook never had as much of a market here, so they are difficult to find.

You ever play "Hyperspace"?
That...  Was...  Weird!  Hehe.

Yeah, Creature of Havoc was ok once you figured out how to decode the language thing, and get into the habit of shifting page references at the right times.
It had a lot of dead-end paths though, but it wasn't like: "You made the wrong choice, you're dead!  Your life and quest end here!"
It often just continued normally, as if you'd made the right choice, and even offered you more choices.  Lulling you into a false sense of security.  Except that, from that point on, EVERY choice you'd pick would eventually lead to your horrible death!  hehe.

And that bit in the final area was just evil.  You wander into the wrong room, and the door locks behind you.  Also you have to fight an enemy in there.  You win the fight, no problem, you think.
So you might explore the room, looking for shinies...  Then the enemy you just killed regenerates and jumps you.  So you fight it again!  You win again, and think, ok, that was weird, I'd better get out of here.  So you examine the door that locked behind you.  Before you can figure out how to open it, the enemy gets up and attacks you again!
Yep, you're basically looped into fighting this thing again and again and again for eternity, or until you die, or just give up, hehe.

But yeah, it was certainly an interesting challenge, very different from the usual "go through a dungeon, kill stuff, get shiny things, ???, profit!" of other Fighting Fantasy books.

I've never really been into gamebooks. I've played one or two and I've seen a couple played via livestream but that's about it. I'd rather have more choice in the adventure beyond "You see a monster and decide to charge at it before it sees you. If you have <item> turn to page X. If you don't, turn to page Y" and it's like...yeah, but what if I don't want to charge the monster? What if I want to hide in a tree and wait for it to go away, or maybe just retreat back the way I came and go somewhere else? Or maybe I want to try and use my rope to set up a trap for it. Or maybe throw that vial of poison I picked up at that other place. But the game is like "No, you must only take these options and if you pick the wrong one, you are dead...but we're probably not gonna tell you which is actually the wrong one so haha good luck with that". I realise some are probably better about it than others and actually do give you some kind of chance, but eh...I'd rather play a game where I'm more in control of my character. Otherwise I'm not playing the game, but more being played by the game, and any choice is out of my hands. If my character's entire survival comes down to something I have to do (eg roll a specific number on a die), then I'm not sure what the point is. I might as well be "roleplaying" as an emotionless, barely-sentient golem/robot thing ;).

If you liked "Tomb of Horrors", you'll probably like "Creature of Havoc" ;)  hehe.

Actually in that one you kind of have an excuse for your character being a bit barely-sentient at the start.  Since you start off with no memory, no identity, and driven mostly by pure instinct which basically boils down to: "You find a thing.  Can I eat it, or can it eat me?"

Sorcery is a great series. I was loaned Crown of Kings to start with, to get thrown in to the deep end, and then many years later found Khare in the library. It's taken years of waiting for the reprints before I managed to get all four books and actually play through it as a campaign.

I believe I could still lay out all 48 spells - probably with costs and items if needed - from memory with few pauses / mistakes :p


There's a small series called the Catacomb series for TSR (https://gamebooks.org/Series/68/Show) that seems pretty insane. Not sure if that's the ones you mean Rain Feather, or if that's something else. The system itself is simplistic, but it seems to have many fun small choices and just a good humour to them. Especailly gnomes 100, dragons 0, which is based on Dragonlance!

Played a lot of the Fighting Fantasy books.  The local library had a few of them in, those and the Choose your own Adventure ones were my first introduction to interactive books, followed quickly by the Lone Wolf ones, which the library also had a couple of (unfortunately not all of them, especially not the first series, and not in any kind of order, so was slightly confused about the actual storyline for a while!)
"Ok, so basically, I'm a medieval Jedi?  Not sure who I'm supposed to be fighting, but I'll figure it out in time.  Oh, there seems to be things trying to kill me, so I'll just kill them right back and hope they're evil!"  hehe.

They had one of the Freeway Warrior books in too.  The 3rd one, if I remember right.

Played through the Avenger series too.  Like the Tenchu games in book form!

Good times :D

Also Dusk Rat would be proud of my other Kai character.  She's currently setting a bunch of Kraan loose to fly free as the wind! :)

So, just to check, has everybody ensured they have saved everything they wanted to save from the game? I will be putting it up to be deleted in two weeks, after which it could take anywhere from one day to six months before the site remove it, so if you haven't saved what you need from it, you might want to hurry up and do so!

Also, Swift Fox, I'm wondering if you managed to finish your re-read or not? I must admit that having your ongoing commentary, especially on the stuff you didn't see (like the various Memory/Prologue threads, or various private threads, such as Dusk Rat's adventure with Peacock or Sabre Fox's negotiation with Valador) was very interesting for me to read, to get a sense of how well I managed to convey what I wanted to through those threads. :)

I haven't really started re-reading yet, but I can save the pages over the weekend for when I do!

Is there any way you could tweak Thread XI into one thread with 1000 posts or under and the overflow in another extra thread?  I'm trying to archive the gameplay threads on my HD and it's the only one that won't expand into a single-screen view- I think that's the reason why, but I could be wrong!

There's two more threads which are above 1000 posts, actually - OOC 7th and the "Dusk & Sabre Memory" - but if you use the D/L function, then it'll visualize the entire thread anyway (just without the avatar pics), and then you can save it as a html page. So, you could try that.

If it does't work, I could try and compress the whole thing (as in, every thread as I have them saved on my PC) into an archive and send it via e-mail to any of you who wanted it or didn't feel up to going through every thread themselves. That would involve giving your e-mail to me, however, even if only in PM, and I wouldn't want anybody to do that if they don't want to; while I wouldn't misuse that information, you have no way to know that. Which is why I suggest at least trying the D/L button first. Note that the button doesn't appear on the responsive version of the site, only on the traditional one.

Let me know if that works! ^_^
This message was last edited by the GM at 19:29, Thu 04 Mar 2021.

"D/L" function is GM only I think.
I've only seen that appear once before, and I was a GM in the game where it did.  Not seeing it here anyway.

Finished the read through, but I don't think I'll save it.  Combination of limited drive space at the moment and the fact that it remains unfinished (though this is probably the longest I've ever seen a forum-based RP run for).

Uh, you appear to be completely correct, Swift Fox; I'd never noticed that the D/L function was a GM only option. Then I guess having me send the whole thing to anybody who wants it is really the easiest and only solution? That's a bit annoying, but I suppose if anybody is interested, let me know.

For reference, the total of the uncompressed files is 47 MB, and the compressed archive in .rar is 12.7 MB. I'm not sure if that'd take up too much space or not.

So, Swift Fox, any comments to make after re-reading everything?

Hmm, mostly just cringing at some of my earlier posts and enjoying all the bits I didn't get to see (which definitely cleared up some stuff I didn't quite 'get' during the game)  :)

A lot has happened since that first day we set out together.  Both on and offline!  hehe.

Alright, I'll be signing the game up for deletion tomorrow - according to the site rules it could take anywhere from one day to six months before the game is deleted after I do that, but I think it's time for it.

If anybody wants me to send them the .rar archive of the game, you can ask me either through rmail, or in the other game I'm currently running (called Wicked Spheres), if you prefer that, at any time. If you have any other requests, or just want to tell me something, that's also a good way to find me.

Well, with that said, I just want to make one last note that it was great to run this game for such an exceptional group of players, and that it has meant more to me than I can easily explain, and that's mostly the merit of you all, as players. So, a lot of thanks for making this story possible.

And thank you for running it!


I know where to reach you to ask for the archive when I finally have time to pour through it :)

Anytime :)

If you're ever running another one, let me know.
Still got some character ideas yet to be explored.

In reply to Swift Fox (msg # 186):

I'm very taken with the evil game I'm running right now, but if I ever start another, I'll certainly be looking to you all as possible players before I go looking for anybody else - which, as I'm sure you all remember, is what I did with the Wicked game, as well. :)

It was a very good experience, infact Im thinking of using Foxy in any more games I run that require a front line fighter :)

On that note, if anyone is interested in playing another LW game, please send me a message and I can set one up.

Since im currently running one with just Swift atm, I like the single player aspect of the game that makes it a bit more casual and not prone to people doing more than others so its your own adventure.

So if anyone would like a single player LW adventure please let me know :)

Considering we're literally fighting against time and the universe in the other game, I'm not against a little help :)  hehe.