Vera

The precise locations of the caches is pretty handy (especially for those of us hunting down a bare handful of missing ones). Wow!

In addition to being his daughters' names, Cordelia (King Lear) and Miranda (The Tempest) are originally Shakespeare references! (He named his daughters with his favorite names, which came from reading Shakespeare? I am impressed!) https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/52xrub/im_jeff_vogel_i_run_spiderweb_software_since_1994/d7oa2xe/ Although given Miranda's personality in Avadon vs. The Tempest, the name is honestly the only resemblance of which I know. It's funny that he named his daughters after two of the prototypical good/innocent types in Shakespeare. I am now eagerly awaiting the end of my workweek so I can actually hunt through Avernum/Avadon for Shakespeare/Renaissance/various theater references. Apparently theater is one of his non-game hobbies. I went all the way back to Spire just because I wanted to see if Zagat was the guy who ran the inn (or if he sold food). Sadly, no. (He lets you fight in the arena and references the possibility of you becoming monster chow, though!)

Mostly I've only named possibilities which are strange enough coincidences to be noteworthy. Entwhistle is a very unusual name which I've only ever heard ONCE. Likewise, I've only heard Cynthia+feathers once, Molly+giants once, Marlowe and Zagat as names I've only heard twice, etc. (Zagat was a pulp sci-fi author, which seems, to my limited knowledge, extremely likely to be something JV is or was once into.) This is particularly significant because literature is my area of specialty (and has been for 12 years), and it's not often I see so many names jump out at once! Ha! But I've got no real commitment to being right, I just find the potential for literary references funny. I mean, the idea of a Greek goddess making a cameo in Avernum as a librarian, providing feathers for all the pens in Avernum, just cracks me up. (Seriously, the Empire's not sending down birds or feathers, right? So where WOULD they come from?) Currently checking out all the Scimitar / Abyss names to see if there's more possibilities to reference The Who. I don't even like The Who.

I'll try to work through the games mores systematically and come back at some later point with a large list, and not just a random post like above, ha. I am sure there are probably a reasonable number of literary references which may only be able to be perceived in context. Agreed that Marlowe seems questionable. I just thought it would be amusingly appropriate if that were a genuine namesake. Here's some more plausible ones: - Molly Whuppie is a Scottish fairy-tale with three girls (one named Molly) and a giant. The Molly in Bargha talks about being scared of giants. (I have to say, that is actually an excellent reference, seeing as Bargha does have giant troubles. If that's a coincidence it's hilarious.) - Cynthia is another name for Artemis, and Artemis was often portrayed as a winged goddess. (There is a line in Bargha about you wondering where she gets the feathers for her pens.) - Angus Calder was a famous Scottish academic (literature, arts, also politics). There is a publishing company named after him. - Bela - maybe the actor who played Dracula in the 30's? Don't remember the movie but Dracula's body and aging is a big deal in the book. Edited to add: there's references to him being "ancient" in the dialogue. Edited again to add: From EftP in Spire, all highly questionable but maybe others who browse this on occasion may be able to confirm/deny if there are identifying details: - Zagat might be the scifi author. - All that Cliff is coming up with in my brain is "Cliff Notes" - Eustace - from one of the Narnia books OR a character from a weird Nathanial Hawthorne children's story. Seems even more questionable than other references in Spire list for various reasons. And Entwhistle might be the guy from The Who?

Just met Prynne in Bargha in A:EftP and she has scarlet hair. If that's not a reference to the novel The Scarlet Letter I'm, uh, a dancing monkey or something. There seems to be a reasonable chance, given that, that Marlowe (again, EftP in Bargha) refers to the Renaissance English dramatist. Quite appropriate, given how his life and his plays had to do with sketchy people, bad deals, murder plots, political intrigue, power grabs, and the like. I'm willing to bet there's at least a handful more references like this I just miss because I only pay attention to* names of quest-givers.

Sounds like my impressions are fairly accurate. Maybe at some distant point in the future I'll be in the mood for political intrigue and pessimistic worldviews, but I've never been very attracted to that. (Isn't there enough of that in real life? Can't I have my escapism?? Ha!) I was an optimistic, indiscrimate, adventure-loving kid when I first played Exile 3 (my first game). I kind of miss being that way. I may give BoA a try. I do recall enjoying a lot of the fan-made scenarios for BoE, and I notice a lot of them were remade for BoA when I browsed that forum just now. I tried Nethergate several times (both old version and remake, although my aging brain no longer remembers what the old version even looks like). Despite hours of play, I could never get far enough to feel like I had any grasp whatsoever on an overarching plot. All I know is that I was either helping the faerie-ruler-person with something, or not helping, for reasons I didn't know, with minimal understanding of how this would really affect the two groups in the game or the world as a whole. So I never got past the Fomorian skull quest. This is kind of the other end of the spectrum from my personal difficulties with the two series above. In Nethergate, none of the things I was doing felt like they mattered to or made an impact on anyone at all except the Faerie-folk, despite some vague hints about Celts and Romans and conflict and whatnot. And the important Faerie-folk were, IMO, pretty bland. Alas.

Longtime lurker trying to get some reasons to play the rest of Spidweb's games while waiting for the Avernum 3 remake. So, I beat the first 2 Geneforges, and tried some hours of Avadon 1 and 2. I own everything Spiderweb has put out (including most of the older versions; one of the Exiles was my first game purchase in the 90's). So I generally love the old-style indie RPG genre and I play a good number of these games multiple times. However, I just cannot get into the plots of Avadon and Geneforge. Mostly I endured those hours of trying because I enjoy some mindless grinding and questing and character-building sometimes. So, I'm hoping someone can talk me into them or tell me why they're good/fun/worth playing for the plot. (Or, someone can talk me into not trying, because I don't feel obligated to like all the games; I just want to.) I loved Avernum/Exile because I had a real sense of helping people. Even Avernum 6 gave me that satisfaction at the end (I beat it 3 times to get variations until I found one I liked) despite its frequent downer moments. I think in that series, there is a strong sense of your character(s) being invested in the future of the world they're in. There's a fairly immediate and better sense of real crises facing large numbers of innocent people, which you can be a part of. This feeling kicks in within an hour or two of starting most of the Avernums. However, I just feel this incredible sense of detachment in Geneforge and Avadon. It doesn't feel like there's much TO care about or protect or help in any of these games. The games spend so much time having you choose where your loyalty lies. Once it becomes all about taking sides or helping various individuals benefit, and there's marginally few missions where I can feel happy I did them, I just give up in either annoyance or boredom. Part of the problem is probably also that I don't really enjoy having games which are all about the edgy grey morality and where you can never feel very satisfied with what you've chosen. But I feel I could have gotten over that if I could have felt like I had something to care about or be attached to in these games, something that helps justify the edginess. But nope. I don't really care about the outcome of the various factions or countries. (In Avadon 2, I kind of cared about the love interest, but once I realized that I had to join a specific side for that, I was extraordinarily annoyed.) Maybe I'm too emotionally invested in immersive fantasy of saving the world and helping people? Anyhow, if I had to characterize the difference between the games I could finish, and the ones I couldn't, it would be: Power squabbles among proliferating factions that have far-reaching societal effects (Geneforge, Avadon, Avernum 5 to a much smaller extent) vs. Large crises facing groups of people and places, including innocents, with power squabbles affecting the outcome at times (Avernums 1-3, 6, even 4, I suppose). I'm sure this doesn't really do the games justice, so if someone can give me something to look forward to in the games I haven't managed to get through, please, do so!