: And I find no compelling evidence that Fallen means
: anything more than Fallen Lords
: Perhaps, but then I sure wouldn't want to be in such a
: state. I'd tend to think they don't hurt that much, as
: much as Turquine's flavor says.
Well, yeah, you wouldn't want to be a Shade. Most people wouldn't. Turquine obviously wasn't real enthusiastic about it, but he agreed because he's a crazy revenge-obsessed Dark mage.
I mean, would you be *more* likely to want to be a Shade if the very guy responsible for your transformation warned you that he was going to torture you mercilessly afterwards? That doesn't inspire confidence.
: Not in the slightest! It wasn't even Bungie approved. The
: guy in the Bungie store is the only one even remotely
: related to Bungie who said that it's 'A valuable sorce
: for Myth history.' This tells us nothing. It says no
: where in the book that it's Bungie approved, only that
: it has the permission of Bungie to make it, if that.
: On the cover is says "Based on the Award-Winning
: Computer Game from [Bungie logo]".
Come on, you can't make GURPS Myth without the permission of the owners of the franchise. And Bungie-permitted is Bungie-approved. They're notoriously protective about allowing their storylines to be developed in other formats.
And Jim Ruiz, the "guy in the Bungie store," doesn't just get to sell and plug whatever he feels like that day. Does Alex have to come to your house in his robes of state and give you a signed affidavit that Bungie approved of GURPS? If they allow it to be published with half a dozen of their people in the credits, and plug it and sell it on their site, then obviously they approved it.
: I believe it was in one of those long interviews you had
: to downloud a few months back
oh yes, and Santa's Head
: told us here on the Asylum.
Santa's Head told us that Scott Campbell "talks about the original design documents from Bungie." Not "reads from", not "shows to us," not "waves around on the end of a broom handle," but "talks about." I talk about the design documents too. So does everyone else on the Asylum. As in "I believe the design documents contain X," and "boy, I wish I had the design documents."
Other than that, every MJ posted statement about their story qualifications has completely omitted the design documents. Andrew Meggs said "Scott Campbell wrote the story, but he's spent a lot of time researching all the sites, every line of text (written or spoken) in both games, and even the GURPS stuff." Santa's Head said that Scott's knowledge is based on "based on all of Myth's original text, of which I am not the expert I'd like to be."
And all the audio interviews I've heard run something like "It's our job to figure out a good story to fill in the holes left from Bungie's games." Design docs aren't mentioned.
Now I don't think MJ is at all being intentionally cagey. And if there's a place where they actually say "Yes, we have the design docs, and we're adhering to them," then I'll be very happy and rank Myth III on the same level or slightly below GURPS. But I haven't ever seen that statement, so please, if you find it, point it out to me.
: Nevertheless, it is proven time and time again their are
: many errors in it, errors which clearly show that
: Bungie was not fully interested in GURPS, especially
: in making it perfect. That's more than reason enough
: right there.
Bungie's own products contain errors. If GURPS contains more errors, then we rank it below the the original games. Which we do. But that's no reason to throw it out when we know how much Bungie contributed to its creation.
: Actually, it does. They have everything. Take Two gave
: MJ all information and all the crap Bungie ever had to
: give, and MJ now holds supreme rights over it. They
: are free to change the story as they please and do
: what they want. Going by Bungie-only history is as
: absurd as going purely by TFL canon, seeing as Bungie
: tried to correct itself in M2. This is still done, but
: not widely practiced, nor economical.
Bungie tried to correct *itself*. Same people, same information, all the design docs. Just a revised and more consistent world. MJ's world cannot be perfectly consistent with Bungie's because they're different people and have a different informational set.
We were never told what Take Two was given by Bungie, except the rights to the engine and franchise. Design documents were not mentioned.
And again, what do legal rights have to do with it? If the Mythworld you're interested is in defined as the sum total of the information provided by anyone legally empowered to do so, then why would you care about discussing it? The only reason I can understand to do story analysis is if some group of people have a consistent conceptual world you're hoping to approximate.
And if your focus is determined by legality, then GURPS should be gospel. Licensed and sold by the legal owners of the franchise.
: I personally disagree. We've pretty much beaten the dead
: horse that is Bungie for endless months. There doesn't
: seem much of anything left we can do.
Like I said, we may choose to drop Bungie story discussion and switch to MJ + Bungie story discussion, but they're two different realms of study.
: Lol, tou chet. Then again, there is no disproof over the
: final line of that argument (which I came to a
: conclusion to by truly acting out both sides, as you
: recall): MJ has the rights now, in full, so what they
: say goes, and MJ already impugned it. That means we
: have to wait until m3 comes out.
See above for the disproof. :-) Besides, there's no objective argument to that. You're waiting until M3 comes out; in the absence of design doc confirmation, I'm not. Personal choice.
: I think my own explanation regarding undeath is far
: simpler and makes more sense, personally. Those guys
: are Zombies and the others are Self-Aware, but bound.
I wasn't even trying to explain it. All I was saying are that there are two clear categories of Un-beings in the game. You can call them Zombies and Self-Aware Undead, or Undead and Unliving; doesn't matter.
: Well, it just doesn't seem necessary. I woudn't mind
: discussing it under my posts's thread
and maybe there
: should be a different term used besides
: "Unliving" that is just Dead in my eyes (har
: har).
Again, I was simply proposing a classification technique. To be honest, I think that when you start bringing things like "quantum foam" and "creatures drinking in spirit from the ether" you're outside the realm of discussible Myth story analysis--it's certainly an ingenious and attractive theory, but I don't think it's particularly provable or unprovable. So I must pass on discussion. :-)
And while I'm not committed to any particular explanation of Undead versus Unliving, or Zombie versus Self-Aware, I have to say that both "you can make self-aware Undead if you have the Dream of Unlife" and "you can make self-aware Undead if they don't have a chance to lie around as corpses with their brains rotting" are simpler explanations than a thirty-paragraph post. ;-)
: Ah, yeah; he didn't technically die, like Connacht didn't
: die to become Balor, right?
Yup.
: That did not happen ingame. Only what is presented to us
: by the game makers actually happens. If we don't see
: if happen, it's offstage. All we can tell from such
: experiments, interesting and fun to watch as they are,
: is that Bungie, or our future MJ, didn't take their
: precious time to fix a menial error which had no
: relavance on the game anyway :-).
It did not happen in-game, but we've seen both Alric and Shades fight in-game so often that I think we're justified in estimating their success in a potential fight. We can believe that a Myrkridia can outfight a Brigand without ever having seen it, because the game gives us a good idea of their relative combat skillz.
Anyway, Alric can lose vs. Sinis on Legendary if he has no experience. It's probably hopeless to ask which difficulty level corresponds to the "real Mythworld," but this clearly makes Alric vs. Shade fights an open question.
: Narrowly focused?
Shades don't seem to have much magic that isn't devoted to killing targets in front of them or raising the dead. Whereas I would guess that Alric or another Avatara would have a fairly wide range of magical talents--we've seen him teleport and crack a cliff face, and I'm sure there are many other things he can do. Hence, in a prepared conflict where each combatant had a chance to set traps or escape routes or give himself other indirect advantages, Alric would do better.
: Maybe, but I severely doubt Shades and Fallen Lords are
: related enough to be interchangable. If they are, then
: they are and you might be right. If they aren't, then
: she's just a Fallen Lord. We simply do not know either
: way, as this has not been revealed (but I hope it is
: in m3
like Shiver being made a Shade or something :-).
: All we can do is commend you for your ingenuity.
In the interests of simplicity, I would consider most or all Fallen Lords to simply be high-powered versions of extant creatures (high-powered both because they were extremely talented to start with and because they were backed by Balor), plus a few extra perks. A living mage, taken to Fallen Lord level, becomes The Deceiver. A Shade, taken to Fallen Lord level, becomes Shiver. An unliving or living hero, taken to Fallen Lord level, becomes Soulblighter. Et cetera.
: But, then, what about the Deceiver? He was an Avatara
: too. His Falling, as much as or less so than Shiver's,
: is rapped in mystery. We just don't know.
The Deceiver, evidently, never died. He's just a Balor-enhanced, thousand-years-of-practice former *living* Avatara whom Balor "bent to his will". That so little is known about Shiver's past suggests that she was either Dark or dead for most of the time that Myrdred was a living Avatara. So I'd guess that Shiver died early on in the Wolf Age and was either Shadified on the spot or raised later and Shadified by Balor (if anyone can make Shades out of long-dead corpses, Balor can. And perhaps Shiver's spirit is generally more "loosely attached" than most, so her deaths frequently leave her spirit behind).
Or maybe she just wasn't an Avatara at all. The games don't actually say.
: But why was Moagim there? And, from the conversation, I'd
: lean towards he and Alric being enemies. Alric's
: definitely an incarnation of something though, since
: it had to be during the Wind Age. I believe this since
: no Shrine of Nyx would be left standing high enough to
: kill any archmage, alive or undead. That means it has
: to be during the Wind Age, before those structures
: were destroyed (since Moagim didn't arrive until after
: Connacht got rid of the Trow). The logical conclusion
: then is that Alric was, being from the Wind Age, the
: incarnation of Mazzarin.
Well, the conversation doesn't say that Alric saw Sinis die, merely that he knew him beforehand, then saw *or* heard that he'd died and thought he'd seen the last of him. So he could be a contemporary without actually being present at Sinis' defeat.
Even after Connacht's attack plus a thousand years of natural erosion, Sword Age Rhi'anon and Rhi'ornin still contain walls and columns twenty feet high. So I believe that Connacht's destruction of the Trow cities could not have been total. Which means that there could still have been partially-standing buildings in smaller and more remote Trow cities of the early Wolf Age.
I personally think Sinis' defeat *did* happen in the Wind Age. But I think that (as discussed above) Moagim Reborn must have been alive for at least several decades before he actually appeared and started his Great War; he had to mature and marshal his forces just like any other Leveller. So he could have been around for a Mazzarin-shade to defeat a good Sinis--or even for a living Mazzarin to defeat an evil Sinis. We don't actually know when Mazzarin died, but GURPS characterizes it as "decades before Connacht." And it makes sense that Mazzarin would have died late in the Wind Age, when you think of how incredibly screwed the Light must have been after the Watcher rose to prominence and killed him. I don't see how the Cath Bruig or the Province could have survived at all if they had to wait several centuries for Connacht to take his place.
: Well, Sili, I'd say this is one of the most peacable and
: agreeable(litterally) conversations we've ever had.
: I was thinking recently, "Why endlessly debate
: something if the person is never going to give at all?
: For fun? Ok, I cam buy that
" But I just realized
: how much we're flexing on both sides and coming
: towards common terms. It's a positive sign.
Are we? I didn't notice. :-) I sure hope we are, because if I don't quit blathering and focus on Seventh God soon I'll be suffering the indescribable tortures of Creation.
--SiliconDream
