And Also With You

Nar Shadda Living

And Also With You

Lately I have been on this Star Wars kick and like I said before… I absolutely blame the Force Awakens hype for putting me in this position.  My good friend Tam mentioned something last night about playing SWTOR again…  that absolutely rings true.  We were both brought up in “good catholic families” so he mentioned something that is happening to me too.  When we hear someone say “May the Force Be With You” it is absolutely instinctual to want to say “And Also With You”.  Even worse…  I have this irrational need to make the sign of the  cross at the same time.  The funny thing about playing this game again is that I guess I did not realize how often I have subscribed for a month or so in the past, that said I guess I am happy I did.  I had access to Section X and the HK-47 quest line without having to pay to unlock it, because apparently I subbed at just the right time.  When it came time to look into Strongholds it seems like I also have a five room Nar Shadda Sky Palace unlocked for free as well.  The cool thing about that is that if I had to choose one of the housing options… it probably would have been Nar Shadda anyways because I have been in love with the concept of that city since I first encountered it in Dark Forces.

For the time being most of us are going through a bit of a lull in Final Fantasy XIV.  Right now I am absolutely enjoying raiding and I really hope we down Ravana Extreme before the launch of the 3.1 patch…  but past that I really don’t have much desire to log in.  I could force myself to grind out the esoterics every week, but my fear is that if I start forcing it… I will also start resenting the game like I have World of Warcraft in the past.  That was a cycle I would get into with WoW, where I would force myself to be there… “for the guild” or “for the raid” and then ultimately it would lead to my cancelling of my account once more.  Final Fantasy XIV is my new home base of operations, and I am happy with it…  I just don’t want to do anything to tarnish my enjoyment.  There is never a point where Lalafell things or Final Fantasy XIV news does not give me warm fuzzies right now…  but I also know me.  I like playing lots of different games, and if I force myself to ONLY play FFXIV it will ruin the experience for me.

The Search for Parts

And Also With You

I have to say I am enjoying the HK-47 quest line.  I spent most of last night working on it and gathering bits and pieces scattered around the galaxy.  It seems like it provided just the right amount of friction, in that you had to go to the PVP area on Tatooine first and once that was out of the way, were able to explore the galaxy at your leisure finding the rest of the bits.  The first part on Taris was the most annoying, because you had to get used to using the scanner to determine if you were close to a piece.  All of the other pieces seem to have a clear path that you can search along, but in Taris it is hard to see the pattern of where the pieces will show up.  Luckily there was a large group of people roaming around looking for it while I was there, and fortunately the quest is fairly pro-community.  When someone finds a piece it stays there for about a minute allowing anyone in the vicinity to loot it.  So when someone finally hit on being 10 meters away from the piece we quickly gathered together and found it.  Essentially to get a piece to show up you have to be within 2 meters, which means a lot of staggerstep movement right around the 10 meter location.

From there I had to travel to the Jedi Temple and the Dark Temple.  These steps require you to have an alt of appropriate level on the opposite faction, and the pieces you get in either can be mailed to any character on your account.  Since I was doing this on my Jedi Guardian, the Jedi Temple was a pretty quick process.  From there I mailed the scanner to my Sith Warrior and I proceeded with the same thing… but this time on the Dark Temple approach rather than the temple proper itself.  After doing all of the locations… essentially my suggestion would be to stay on the path and keep moving forward a little bit until you hit on a piece.  No piece that I found was very far off of the main path, so that at least seems to make life a little easier for you.  By the time I was working on the final piece on Hoth I had gotten pretty decent at the whole searching process and it came the quickest of them all.  Now I need to do both a normal mode dungeon and a hard mode dungeon, and I am hoping that Tam gets caught up so that we can grab Ammo and Sol and run them as a four player group.  As far as plans go for today… I am going to return to leveling on Makeb and plan on binging the Star Wars movies…  since I am clearly apparently going through a phase.

On Making the Jump

As I write this, the Kickstarter for Battle Chasers: Nightwar is just out of the gate, and the one for an RPG based on the Infinity Miniatures game should be launching at some point soon (allegedly Tuesday). I find the timing interesting, because these are both cases of properties branching out to slightly different fields. Cross-media is getting me in trouble, but it’s almost always interesting.

On Making the Jump
The date is obviously not still accurate.

Comic->Video Game

On reflection, this isn’t an uncommon transition (although it usually goes Comic->Movie->Game). I was actually directed to this initially without knowledge that Battle Chasers had been a comic. The art (both concept and prototype) is awesome, and I found it a bit familiar. Then I found out that Joe Madureira was the artist and knew why. This one seems to have a few Ex-Vigil staff on board, but it remains to be seen if they can do a turn-based RPG as well as they did Zelda. (I’m not going to listen to any arguments that Darksiders is not Zelda.)
On Making the Jump

Wargame->Tabletop RPG

On even further reflection, I’ve seen this one before too, from Iron Kingdoms. Iron Kingdoms is in a bit of an odd place here, because it started as a d20 Campaign setting and underwent this process in the opposite direction. The resulting minis game (Warmachine/Hordes) ended up as the more popular product. Infinity is actually somewhat similar, in that it grew out of a home-brew campaign setting. Aware of this, Tam attempted to work the rules into a workable system, but it didn’t go very far. (This was before the customizable spec-ops rules existed). Some of the unique characters in the Nomads faction were the original PCs.
On Making the Jump
The current Iron Kingdoms rules are a direct conversion of the Warmachine/Hordes rules, with some additions made for things player characters do that minis usually don’t, like talking to people, or actually recovering from injury. The result is that minis from the wargame are perfectly valid enemies once you give them more than a single hit point. (There are exceptions. Named Casters are generally not going to be reasonable opponents, for instance.) The Infinity rules seem to be going a slightly different route. It’s using a system not based on the minis game, but instead just preserves elements of it. Ability resolution is familiar, but not identical; it still uses d20s in a blackjack-like way, but from there the games diverge greatly. I missed the playtests, so I don’t know that much about it, but it’s a custom system that uses 2d20s to generate a number of successes.
On Making the Jump
While Corvus Belli (The company that produces Infinity) isn’t directly responsible for the RPG, they are producing materials to go with it. I really look forward to seeing what happens with it. The original Bran Do Castro seems to like it, so here’s hoping I do too.

On Making the Jump

As I write this, the Kickstarter for Battle Chasers: Nightwar is just out of the gate, and the one for an RPG based on the Infinity Miniatures game should be launching at some point soon (allegedly Tuesday). I find the timing interesting, because these are both cases of properties branching out to slightly different fields. Cross-media is getting me in trouble, but it’s almost always interesting.

On Making the Jump
The date is obviously not still accurate.

Comic->Video Game

On reflection, this isn’t an uncommon transition (although it usually goes Comic->Movie->Game). I was actually directed to this initially without knowledge that Battle Chasers had been a comic. The art (both concept and prototype) is awesome, and I found it a bit familiar. Then I found out that Joe Madureira was the artist and knew why. This one seems to have a few Ex-Vigil staff on board, but it remains to be seen if they can do a turn-based RPG as well as they did Zelda. (I’m not going to listen to any arguments that Darksiders is not Zelda.)
On Making the Jump

Wargame->Tabletop RPG

On even further reflection, I’ve seen this one before too, from Iron Kingdoms. Iron Kingdoms is in a bit of an odd place here, because it started as a d20 Campaign setting and underwent this process in the opposite direction. The resulting minis game (Warmachine/Hordes) ended up as the more popular product. Infinity is actually somewhat similar, in that it grew out of a home-brew campaign setting. Aware of this, Tam attempted to work the rules into a workable system, but it didn’t go very far. (This was before the customizable spec-ops rules existed). Some of the unique characters in the Nomads faction were the original PCs.
On Making the Jump
The current Iron Kingdoms rules are a direct conversion of the Warmachine/Hordes rules, with some additions made for things player characters do that minis usually don’t, like talking to people, or actually recovering from injury. The result is that minis from the wargame are perfectly valid enemies once you give them more than a single hit point. (There are exceptions. Named Casters are generally not going to be reasonable opponents, for instance.) The Infinity rules seem to be going a slightly different route. It’s using a system not based on the minis game, but instead just preserves elements of it. Ability resolution is familiar, but not identical; it still uses d20s in a blackjack-like way, but from there the games diverge greatly. I missed the playtests, so I don’t know that much about it, but it’s a custom system that uses 2d20s to generate a number of successes.
On Making the Jump
While Corvus Belli (The company that produces Infinity) isn’t directly responsible for the RPG, they are producing materials to go with it. I really look forward to seeing what happens with it. The original Bran Do Castro seems to like it, so here’s hoping I do too.

Short Fiction Friday: Prodigies, Part 2

[Another installment of Short Fiction Friday, about a few NPCs from my current Shadowrun campaign. Once again, if you like the art, while I’ve used it for my NPCs, credit goes to http://tapastic.com/series/fisheye — the comic that’s the source of these characters.]

Nick knew the Boston underbelly better than his companions. He hadn’t grown up there, but it was similar to the warrens he’d been driven to when his family cast him out. He returned to old habits quickly, and found places to hide. It had been a while since he’d used his talents, but they came back to him quickly. He made sure they couldn’t be found while they got situated, and he suggested they all stick together. Ken agreed, and Alice was in too much shock to argue. Nick worried about that, but had other work to do first.

Short Fiction Friday: Prodigies, Part 2

Without any kind of formal training, Nick had a hard time explaining technomancy, and what it was he could do. Using his power felt like merging with a computer– on the rare occasions he tried to describe it to someone, he’d liken it to falling backwards into a swimming pool. He was eternally curious how ‘normal’ people worked with computers, because he couldn’t imagine it was like what he did. He swam through streams of data and made little edits and slight alterations as he saw fit. He was aware of defenses, tuned to keep out normals, and he’d developed weapons against them, more fluid and unpredictable than any program. He could even create clones of himself, which would do things he needed them to while he wasn’t around, as if they had a mind of their own. Maybe they did, he wasn’t sure.

He’d been accused of being spacey, before his family had thrown him out for being a “mage freak”, and he’d never been able to explain what was going on. He was paying attention, as best he could, but he was also paying attention to a hundred other things– someone’s nearby text messages, what the screens in four other rooms were displaying, what the cameras were showing. In middle school, he’d been picked out as an easy target and had a larger boy give him grief. It became apparent quickly that the bully was smart enough to seem innocent, sometimes remotely harassing Nick with programs he’d written while sitting attentively in another class. Months of attacks followed; Nick was small and not especially quick-witted, and being distracted by the constant technological cacophony around him made it hard for him to fight back. He spent most of a school year with some injury or another and no friends, thanks to the other boy’s dedicated efforts. It was the first time he’d actually tried to change any of the digital things he observed, and it turned out he was rather good at it. Setting the bully’s phone to blast illegal porn (swiped from another computer he’d found) at full volume in the middle of class had been satisfying, and disabling all inputs so it couldn’t be shut down was doubly so. He considered it justice for the technological, social, and physical abuse he’d endured, and when he glimpsed the boy being led off by Boston Police he didn’t feel any remorse.

Now, his passive awareness was laced with intent. He could feel the gentle tug of Alice or Ken pulling him along when he slowed down, but his mind was ahead of them, checking cameras and making sure they didn’t walk into the field of view, or disabling them if that was impossible. It was exhausting, and sapped his attention, but he knew that they’d be ID’d and found if even one camera saw them. He insisted that they all stick together, explaining why, and the three traveled as a group for the first month of their lives in the shadows. Alice’s money bought them food that first month, and Ken found odd jobs to do to supplement things.

Short Fiction Friday: Prodigies, Part 2

In the second month, they turned to stealing. It started simply– they didn’t have enough money for a full box of biscuits, so Ken bought a half-box and swapped it right after checkout, when he knew no one would catch him. Ken had a knack for that kind of thing, and it kept them eating. He needed to be alone, though, which meant Nick couldn’t protect him. Nick, for his part, was exhausted from the constant vigilance, and was fighting illness. Alice had been keeping to herself, mostly practicing magic and giving the other two money, but the stress was getting to her. They were living in a forgotten concrete box, one of ten thousand like it in the city, and had to occasionally fend off other vagrants. Magic was the easiest for them, and with years of training and natural talent, they easily outclassed anyone who encroached on their space.

The problem was, their use of magic garnered attention. The first few invasions of their adopted home were by the very desperate: violent, drug-fueled types who were beyond reason. Alice had tried to give them a scare, but they were too far gone for it to register. Ken had been out, and Nick had looked up from lying semi-conscious in bed to see Alice get grabbed by two men larger than she was. There was a flare of light, then just Alice and two piles of ashes. Alice got quiet after that, and as Nick slipped in and out of consciousness he saw her talking, crying, and talking again with Ken, and the next time a frothing troll burst into their space she incinerated him without a second thought, an icy expression on her face.

Short Fiction Friday: Prodigies, Part 2

What became a problem was when the sane people tried to move in. They could be reasoned with, and when Alice started conjuring flame, they backed down and fled. Word spread quickly of the mage-kids and their location, and they started having obvious gang members, several fully armed, watching their location. Ken suggested, once again, that they move. Nick had already scouted another location but was feverish and exhausted; they couldn’t go out without him and he’d only gotten sicker. The move was more than he could handle, and as Ken carried him through the Boston streets, he desperately fought to stay conscious so he could turn off that next camera, to fend off the specter of men in uniforms with guns descending on them, that none of them could entirely forget.

Nick lost about a week after that, sick and bedridden. Ken had somehow managed to steal two weeks of food and some medicine, and he and Alice were nursing Nick back to health while ensuring he wasn’t needed to go out. They were out of money and Nick couldn’t keep this up forever. They needed some way of paying for things and they needed to be able to stop worrying about the cameras dotting every street corner.

Ken was the one with the plan, as usual. He was very, very good at finding creative solutions to problems. Near the end of the two weeks, when Nick was finally feeling better, Ken walked in with a large white box. He set the box down and pulled both Alice and Nick outside with him. As they walked, he pointed a camera out to Nick. “Watch that camera, but don’t turn it off unless it tries to alert someone about us”. Nick had seen the camera alerts and had shut them down, but it was taxing to do so; turning the cameras off pre-emptively was usually safer. Ken seemed to know what he was talking about, though, and the three of them walked into sight of the camera, Nick bracing himself for the systemwide alert ping that never came. For the first time in nearly three months, they were standing on the street in full view of a camera with no need to worry. Nick could only stare at Ken as they walked back inside.

Short Fiction Friday: Prodigies, Part 2

Ken was quiet as they walked back, but beelined for the white box as they settled back in. Alice was full of questions and Nick was simply confused, but Ken wasn’t answering anything until he opened the box, passing out some of its contents and showing off the rest. He handed Alice and Nick new ID cards, with new, unfamiliar System Identification Numbers. They were new identities, high quality disguises to make sure they couldn’t be found. They could operate freely, independently, without worry. Ken smiled a tired smile. “We’re going to have to do a bit of work to pay those off. Sorry.”

Ken also held up the box, showing off the rest of its contents. There was a large cake inside, obviously from a higher-end pastry shop above the plate, and in chocolate was written “HAPPY BIRTHDAY NICK”. Another, smaller box contained a single serving of crème brûlée. That night the trio celebrated, relaxing for the first time in months. It was the best crème brûlée Alice had ever tasted.