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Vlish in Geneforge series.


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Let's all pretend im not heavilly procrastinating in face of my up comming exams and that my sanity was actually not left at the door. Am I the only one who absolutelly hates vlish. Throughout the whole series with no exception. Is this a normal atitude towards an interesting and usefull creation? I really cant stand them. Only one i can tolerate in terror vlish from g3. Why? I'm usually moderatelly rational. Anyone else in the same position?

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Alhoon is right. Replacing the graphic wouldnt help. They are... just wrong. And tbh on fire shaping i only like from drayk upwards. And on the last geneforge i only liked kyshaks. Not that i dislike the rest though. And battle it doesnt matter which game it is i'll always have a rothgot. They are sweet. On the later games i put them above war thrall even.

Also Nim, i feel you very much. Its like: "monster come back here! Monster wat u doin? Monster stahp. Im not done killing you"

 

And nah man. The vlish is horrible horrible. But i think you can take them to the end. They are easier to maintain than roamers clawbugs and cryoas. Magic resistance is a huge plus really. I think if i can take my searing artila to the end you can take your vlish too. Maybe add some strenght and endurance points. Prolly will help.

 

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They are... just wrong.

[snip]

The vlish is horrible horrible.

 

That's why I like them. They're one of the really alien looking creations. They're one of the only creations I'd ever actually feared. Those, along with other things like servant minds, turrets, living tools, the strange flora, etc, make the world especially interesting for me.

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Honestly, vlishes creep me out. And then I come here and see people suggest you make seven of them in G3.

 

But maybe they would taste great barbecued.

 

Delicious Vlish seems to have had the same idea when creating his account.

 

As an avid fan of seafood i would agree. Maybe thats why it feels wrong. Its floating killer seafood on earth that is smart. Its like food trying to subjugate us. Imagine telepathic brocoli trying to eat us. Imagine the brocoli now mostly lives underground and it hunts us like the worms from dune. Fear the man eating brocoli! But even mighty owen has to agree 7 vlish asap makes you nearly untouchable in geneforge 3. Not that i ever tried. But i know for one the normal artila is more powerfull than a roamer by the time you get the roamer if you got the artila asap.

 

 

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That's why I like them. They're one of the really alien looking creations. They're one of the only creations I'd ever actually feared. Those, along with other things like servant minds, turrets, living tools, the strange flora, etc, make the world especially interesting for me.

 

Im sure fighting a big floating eyeball that's also crazy and also can shoot killing energy and kill you with a thought is scarier. The glaahks are also scary but highly impractical they'd have to be lightning fast at stinging you otherwise you could doge and trip the thing

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Im sure fighting a big floating eyeball that's also crazy and also can shoot killing energy and kill you with a thought is scarier. The glaahks are also scary but highly impractical they'd have to be lightning fast at stinging you otherwise you could doge and trip the thing

 

I mean yeah, they were pretty worrying too. They never felt as alien though, probably because they're very reminiscent of beholders from D&D. I got a fair amount of exposure to them through various Baldur's Gate games. Vlish also show up much earlier when I'd feel much weaker.

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I mean yeah, they were pretty worrying too. They never felt as alien though, probably because they're very reminiscent of beholders from D&D. I got a fair amount of exposure to them through various Baldur's Gate games. Vlish also show up much earlier when I'd feel much weaker.

 

Ah unfortunatelly i was born too late for baldur's gate. I like other bioware games though.

But yeah flying killer calamary feels too alien. And touché on them appearing much earlier. But i did enjoy killing them.

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Vlish are delightful, the weirdest creation of the weirdest branch of shaping. Squishy, yet deadly. Intelligence with no way to meaningfully communicate with humans. Zones full of Vlish are usually eerie places, places where one wrong move can mean getting swarmed. Fantastic. (Glaahks are also great, and I wish they featured a little more in the story, even if only in the background. I don't recall even learning what they were designed for in the first place.)

 

But the one creature that really scared me...was my first glimpse of a Drakon in GF 2.

I was profoundly disappointed, actually, to see the most trite of all fantasy cliches crop up so early in the series. I even have a 'no dragons' rule on all media: if there's a dragon in it, on the cover, or even in the title, I will not touch it. Exceptions have been made for J.R.R. Tolkien, Gene Wolfe, Terry Pratchett, and Spiderweb Software, but only grudgingly. Comes of reading too much generic fantasy, I suppose.

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Like several here, I stayed away from Vlish because I just didn't like them.

 

 

But the one creature that really scared me...was my first glimpse of a Drakon in GF 2.

 

 

He came up to demand tribute when I was still pretty weak and I got spooked just for a moment...one of the best moments in the series.

 

Come on dude! The first drakon you see in g4 is actually scarier. But as a whole they arent scary. Maybe the concept. With their calm calculative inteligence. Innate magic and ability to shape. Lost that on g5.

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Tolkien and others who predate the existence of dragons as a fantasy cliche, probably deserve that exception. I think it's really a question of using dragons in a restrained, deliberate way. Exile did that with the Five Dragons, and G1 did that too with the three Drayks. The Drakons in G3 and beyond though were pretty disappointing.

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But the one creature that really scared me...was my first glimpse of a Drakon in GF 2.

 

 

He came up to demand tribute when I was still pretty weak and I got spooked just for a moment...one of the best moments in the series

 

GF5, Unbound. Came up while I was fighting something (I was level 11-12 or something) and I didn't see the creepy ba... son-of-unidentified-father before he made an attack ... and wiped half my creations before I knew what hit them. I got spooked for a month, not just a moment.

 

"Alhoon scares easy!" You may say.

"Alhoon was careless!" You may say.

"Alhoon was unlucky!" You may say.

I am not alone. Oh, no. I am NOT alone.

have shared my terrible, terrible fate. You listen the at 5.22 the haunted laugh of someone that learned what true desperation tastes like.
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re: Dragons, Drayks, and Drakons. I'm going to go ahead and agree with a general aversion to dragons in fantasy media, because more than anything they just seem to be lazy copy-and-paste storytelling that relies on tropes rather than originality. I think Jeff avoids that, by and large. The dragons in Exile all have personality and built up character, acting and reacting in a world of humanoids in fairly interesting and unique ways. The Avernites don't just have a blanket hatred of them, nor a blanket friendship. There's nuance. In Avadon, they're subject to a complicated world of politics and clientelism. In Geneforge, we see that they have a very strong political bend, brought on by genocidal actions, that leads them to some rational (but extreme) strategies in warfare. There can be Awakened Serviles, but the concept is almost exclusively impossible to imagine for Drakons. Drakons and Drayks have a lot of dragon tropes that don't really seem necessary, such as gathering hoards or being named as they are, but they're also a lot more angry and irrational in almost all situations than you get with your typical wise dragons. I want them to be revised and be better so that they are Drakons and Drayks, rather than dragon-esque Creations, but they do alright.

 

re: Vlish. My favorite parts of Jeff's games are the alien parts. The Vahnatai, the vlish, the ancient tombs of forgotten cultures, where all of the carefully built up culture and rules that the game has given you just stop being relevant and you're back to pure exploration and discovery in a hostile and dangerous world. It's very Lovecraftian, and I like it.

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I was long ago persuaded by this post -- http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3173 -- that there is no need to demand outright original creatures in fantasy tales. (Though I give applause to writers who really try, especially if the creatures are supposed to be more like sci-fi aliens...Lovecraft's efforts with the Yithians and the starfish-headed Old Ones come to mind.) Cliches can be used to tell a story and cut through the need to build everything from scratch. The Creations are supposed to be designed by humans, what's more natural than that they'd reach into human imagination and legend, and make what they found there? Besides, the Vlish aren't so different from what you might see on the cover of an old sci-fi pulp. And the real point is, original or not, Jeff uses them to tell a good story, and let the player make it his own.

 

 

I don't deny that some of the other creatures have stronger abilities...but by the time I met the Unbound, I knew they were coming. That first Drakon was something I wasn't prepared for. (Scaring me, even for a moment, with a cartoony-looking dragon ought to win Jeff some kind of award!) And the ending was spooky too, as the implication was that time was against the Shapers and humans in general....as the geneforging Drakons would shape themselves into more powerful creatures, who'd in turn shape themselves more powerful, growing less restrained as they grew stronger...and the humans unable to join in the "arms race" because of their laws. In the later games, I was used to it; but in GF 2 it was new.

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I don't find the Drakons particularly like I imagine Dragons. I am quite comfortable seeing and imagining them as big, humanoid lizard things which is nothing like how I imagine dragons of cliche fame. Even the name doesn't make me think of Dragons although I obviously see the striking similarity. As an example, I hear pear and square to be very similar sounding but have absolutely zero difficulty in knowing one is a delicious soft fruit and one is a hard, angular 2D shape.

 

Long story short, totally different in my eyes and emotively richer as a result.

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Actually i disliked drakons in g2. They were all strikingly rude. 3 and 4 gave dragons personality in all honesty. And yeah humanoid winged lizards seems more acurate than dragons. And lets remember they used essence orbs in the earlier versions. And unlike the traditional dragons these have a human kind of power as opposed to mythical power. And their way of thinking is also very human albeit having their own culture and politics. They don't have the whole alien way of thinking that tolkiens dragons have(i figure that realistic mortality comes in play here. Other dragons are seriously biologically immortal or absurdly long lived. The drakons while though are very very mortal. Naturally scales and innate ability to breathe fire or do basic magic makes them thougher. But one one one drakon versus shaper are around evenly matched i think.)

So all in all. While dragons are a cliche and drakons weren't scary i don't think the idea conveyed was the traditional overplayed thing.

Also agree with alberich about demand of original creatures. They are great. But not necessary for good fantasy.

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Sooo. I'm assuming i shouldn't include dragons in my book... Well they werent supposed to be included anyway. But nice to know. I'll erase the mention.

 

i mean, you don't have to do a thing just because one person said so. use your own judgement as to what they contribute to the work.

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GF5, Unbound. Came up while I was fighting something (I was level 11-12 or something) and I didn't see the creepy ba... son-of-unidentified-father before he made an attack ... and wiped half my creations before I knew what hit them. I got spooked for a month, not just a moment.

 

"Alhoon scares easy!" You may say.

"Alhoon was careless!" You may say.

"Alhoon was unlucky!" You may say.

I am not alone. Oh, no. I am NOT alone.

have shared my terrible, terrible fate. You listen the at 5.22 the haunted laugh of someone that learned what true desperation tastes like.

 

I have to agree first unbound appearance in g5 was alarming and surprising. I died sometimes before actually realising it was an unbound.

 

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i mean, you don't have to do a thing just because one person said so. use your own judgement as to what they contribute to the work.

Good point. But im still ways away from completing it. Just measly 20 pages I'll figure if their mention is relevant in time. But as i said i don't think they'll feature in the story even. Its not aimed that way.

The reason why asked is because i want to make a quality book and no better judge of what that is than a reader

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I also think that the name Vlish dont fit it nicely. I think it should be called Squiggles or something...

 

I've named several of my Vlish Squiggles lol. I love the weird floaty guys. One of the more interesting creations. And so useful. Probably the best mid-tier creation. I found Glaaks more off-putting for some reason. probably because I'm cool with octopi and squids but certain bugs are still a little unpleasant. They remind me of the american house centipede a little bit. Plus getting stun-locked is not fun.

 

Artillas look so cobra-ish I often forget they're really worms. Clawbugs are cool cuz scorpions are just badass instead of creepy.

 

if we were to encounter any of these in reality, I imagine the rots would probably be the most unsettling. being a giant rotting acidic corpse traipsing about. I suspect that they would smell truly awful. Other powerful creations would be scary because of the awe factor, but rots have the "ick" factor that's honestly worse imo. Much like how some people feel about Vlish.

 

Poddlings, now I hate those. they both look disconcerting and are irritating foes.

 

Am I the only one who is surprised there weren't more creations that were intended specifically as pets. Especially as until the stuff in the games starts to go down the world had been at peace for so long. You'd think they'd have at least a few creatures that were soft and fluffy instead of death machines. Or something that's a soft and fluffy death machine, dual purpose.

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Well, all intros I've seen say they did. And they show really cute, small fyoras and lizard-like creatures in intro and ending pics.

 

Imagine a shaper circus with battle alphas fioras and other beasties doing tricks. And being taught how to make a proper bow. Must look amazing.

But then creatiom rights and stuff. Serviles might find it demeaning. But doing tricks is markedly less tiresome and dangerous than building stuff. Not to mention its fun.

 

 

 

But yeah. Pet fioras were possibly the cutest things in the whole series

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I actually liked how the Drakons were handled in GF, the idea that instead of just being a big dragon monster it's a race of dragon-like beings who are the epitome of shaping gone out of control, who've shaped themselves into existence and went on to steadily driven themselves madder and madder and become mirror images of the very shapers they oppose. The way the Drakons became like the shapers and the way their arrogance caused tension in the rebellion was a big theme in G4&5 especially. The greed+hoards thing was a relatively minor concession to typical dragon tropes, but even the way their avarice was handled I thought wasn't too "generic dragon". If the Drayks and Drakons had just been big dumb monsters and not intelligent beings it'd be different.

 

And yea the little Fyoras in the art are super adorable.

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Even the name doesn't make me think of Dragons although I obviously see the striking similarity.

I've encountered some not-dragons-at-all-honestlys in my time. They're usually terrible.

 

Drakons are written well enough, but they do hit most of the checkboxes for generic dragons: greed, arrogance, vanity, cleverness (but not thoughtfulness or introspection), fire-breathing, people-eating, etc. Ghaldring and the one that opposed him in G5 are the only drakons that I would say are actually interesting.

 

Remember, a lot of cliches in storytelling are born because they are so good that people still love them even after they've seen the same thing a million times.

Some of us are less tolerant of that degree of saturation (it's also possible that I'm jealous because phoenixes are much less popular than dragons). And there's no limit to the realm of fantasy; why always hang about in the same place? To me, when it starts to feel familiar it ceases to feel like fantasy.

 

The main reason for 'no dragons', though, is that I'd noticed a pattern of bland, uninteresting stories being mainly the ones with dragons in - I could have also gone with 'no elves' or 'no magic swords' but those don't sound quite right. I have read good books featuring dragons, and even a few featuring awesome or really interesting dragons. Smaug from The Hobbit (one of my favorite books) is the archetypical dragon, but he's a small part of a larger adventure, a perfectly-calculated spice instead of the main dish.

 

Honestly, I probably don't need that filter now, because the internet makes getting good recommendations much easier. It's been a long time since I read a total dud.

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Some of us are less tolerant of that degree of saturation (it's also possible that I'm jealous because phoenixes are much less popular than dragons). And there's no limit to the realm of fantasy; why always hang about in the same place? To me, when it starts to feel familiar it ceases to feel like fantasy.

 

The main reason for 'no dragons', though, is that I'd noticed a pattern of bland, uninteresting stories being mainly the ones with dragons in - I could have also gone with 'no elves' or 'no magic swords' but those don't sound quite right. I have read good books featuring dragons, and even a few featuring awesome or really interesting dragons. Smaug from The Hobbit (one of my favorite books) is the archetypical dragon, but he's a small part of a larger adventure, a perfectly-calculated spice instead of the main dish.

 

Honestly, I probably don't need that filter now, because the internet makes getting good recommendations much easier. It's been a long time since I read a total dud.

 

Well yeah, of course cliches can be poorly used. I certainly do not find every book that has a dragon in it to be necessarily good book. Dragons can indeed be written blandly, especially since they're so popular that everyone wants to use them in their stories. It's just that when I see a Dragon in a book, it grabs my attention.

 

I think it goes without saying that with every cliche, some people people with love it and some will hate it. You can't make everybody happy.

 

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