Edgwyn

I am curious how many of the folks who are debating the $20 versus $8 for 40 or so hours of enjoyment pay $4 for 15 minutes of enjoying a (insert five adverbs here) latte or cappuccino at Starbucks. That said, while the MSRP is always higher then the sticker price, this markup does seem a bit extreme.

The blushing was indeed a dead giveaway, and it was certainly not subtle. I just do not think that it was extreme as some of the other posters to this forum have stated. I think that had the exact same dialogue played out in real life, some folks would have missed the fact that Silke/Rainer was interested in them.

The other part of this is that many of the people commenting in this forum were anticipating a romance and so were looking for "coming on" and so were biased to interpret "I would like it if we could patrol together" as "I would like it if we could patrol together because I want to have 2.1 kids with you" without even considering the possibility of "I would like it if we could patrol together because you are more competent than the last five people I had to train." To get a truly fair view of the Silke/Rainer interaction, we would need to hear from people who had no idea that there was going to be a romance option in the game and see how many of them even noticed that she/he was open to the possibility of a relationship/hitting on the PC.

For the first eight to ten years of my kids lives I would have almost all of their Christmas gifts bought by now. Shopping in late November and anytime in December is a pain.

The heavily textured sand is of course the rough ground. The darker color sand is the uneven ground, medium color is the old roads and light color is general areas. The confusing part with the darker color is that when it runs under another color, it still behaves like uneven ground. So for example if you see the road color crossing a band of the darker color, like you have just East of the starting point, the road color sand that crosses the band of uneven ground will behave as uneven ground and ensnare you.

Does that mean that a bunch of us just got thrown off of a bridge

During this visit (you can come back later to take on the Dragon when you are more powerful) you are scurrying around, trying to find Miranda while avoiding the Dragon. There are two passages that leave the chamber of the infernal to the East. If you take the Southern most of those, you can scurry across the main chamber that the Dragon is in and get into another side chamber (just slightly South of a due East line from the passage that you exit from). You proceed to explore this chamber, find a passage out, scurry across the main chamber into another side chamber, and so on until you find Miranda.

My build on Normal was very similar to Mikus'. My Shaman was INT/END based, middle skill column primary, left skill column secondary (I do not like summoning creatures). Primary attack was Spirit Claw, I only used Javelins when I needed to outrange a turret. Used the area of effect spells for groups of monsters and healing on my party. He was with me at least 2/3 of the time. As a game play/interface suggestion, now that we can change the gender of the PC, how about being able to choose the genders of our companions?

The infernal is an optional fight, you can skip him for now (come back later with full party and additional levels) and just move on like Randomizer said.

I struggled a bit with keeping my characters alive at the start. As a result, I gave my characters more endurance than normal, which has the dual benefit of increasing health and vitality. Since Dexterity is no longer overpowered, I mostly ignored it since I like melee combat instead. With the healing scarab (which can be purchased) for the TinkerMage, their survivability goes up considerably. As to the party that you mention (Blademaster, Tinkermage without turrets and Shadowwalker), it may be doable at a lower difficulty level, but you are giving up all area of effect attacks in exchange for dex based missile attacks which are not as powerful in Avadon 2 as they were in Avadon 1. A dex based Tinkermage without turrets is probably on par with the fact that I played Avadon 1 (twice) with a strength/melee based shadowwalker, doable, but not a good idea. The Tinkermage class is different from the standard character classes and requires some practice to get used to. When I first started playing Avadon 2, I found the concept innovative, but as I do not like summoning, I figured that I would not like it. As I went through the game and started to figure out when to use the different type turrets, saw lots of enemy attacks go against turrets instead of my precious skin, and started killing enemies with turrets, it was easy to see that the Tinkermage with turrets is the exploit of Avadon 2.

The cheat code is "resetboats"

I wouldn't say it is that different, I would keep it in the general category of fiction writing, and I am struggling to think of a non-pejorative word but I think I need to go with it is an incomplete form of fiction writing. That is not a reflection of its literary quality or how engaging it is, but the fact is that the author provided less of the necessary creativeness for the work. Of course the next discussion could be how many original plots are there. Doing the comparison thing, I liken it to acting in live theater versus tv/movies. They are both acting, but in live theater you get only one take (and may have to sing or dance) and so it has been considered a more complete form of acting (despite not paying as well) than acting in tv/movies.

No, you are correct, probably very little corruption. In fact I am hoping for the Svorgald and the mysterious lands across the Ocean, though that would be hard to manage in a land based series.

While I haven't read much fan fiction written in the last 20 or so years, female authors were definitely in the vast majority. I don't know if they were lonely, but they covered all walks of life, but tended towards meeting the societal norm of successful. Of the groups that Lilith mentioned in paragraph 4, "queer" was probably the only over-represented group (other than the fact that almost all of the writers were female). I got the impression that for a lot of the writers it satisfied their need for a creative outlet that they were not getting in their regular lives, and that it was a form of escapism. By escapism, i mean not just the folks who write themselves or who they wish to be into the story, but also what Lilith said about "give them someone they can relate to". There are several very good female SF/Fantasy authors who got their start in fanfic. I am sure that their reasons for starting in fanfic varied, but I believe that lack of confidence, ease of getting published as an unknown female, ease of getting positive feedback (remember, my reading is prior to the web), and respect/enjoyment/desire to see what happened/relating to a respected author's characters were important factors. Now, that the cost of entry into the fanfic world has dropped to nothing (use a computer at the library), it has become easier for marginalized groups to participate, but I suspect (but obviously do not know), that there are just as many non-marginalized writers of fanfic as their used to be. I on the other hand am not part of a marginalized group, and could not write bad fanfic to save my life, much less good fanfic or good fiction.

Don't worry, we could still make that ending really depressing also. For example: You set up your nice little farm with Silke/Rainer, you are happy for three years then one of the rampaging rebel fractions comes through the area and burns your whole farm down and eats your cows. I really prefer happy endings, like in A:EftP, but unfortunately I know better than to expect them from SW. Maybe Jeff will surprise me and Avadon 3 will end with a peaceful and united Lyneaus with a non-corrupt/non-abusive Avadon that focuses on external threats, the corruption and exploring the rest of the world. I can hope, right?

I would think that using the established characters would be more problematic in terms of legal issues, but is certainly very common. The Trek community of the 70s-80s had lots of bad fanfic of Spock falling in love with a poorly disguised Avatar of the author, and so was often better when it stuck to the principal characters. The Darkover fanfic tended to have a lot more OCs in it. Trek was of course a visual media whereas Darkover was exclusively in print adding some data points to Lilith's third paragraph.

Yes, I enjoyed the Thieves World series and its spinoffs a lot, though I did not succeed in getting into Heroes in Hell which was a shared universe by many of the same authors. And now that Lilith mentions Cthulhu, while I never read it, there are some authors that I read who got their start writing cthulhu fanfic well before the 70s.

Modern fan fiction was available for consumption in the 1970s if not earlier. There were plenty of little magazines publishing crappy Star Trek and Darkover stories. That led to paperback anthologies of the best of the stories (see Best of Trek (title) and Friends of Darkover (author)). Certainly the web has made it easier and far cheaper to put crappy fanfic out. While I can't speak to earlier, I am pretty sure that the Baker Street Irregulars were publishing Sherlock Holmes fanfic prior to the 70s. The big impediments to publishing fanfic were the price of printing and finding enough buyers to cover the cost of printing. Reduced printing costs and increasing population density made fanfic possible. The popular adoption of the web interface made it depressingly easy (finding alt.startrek.creative was a little bid harder). What Randomizer said on "legal claims of the creators" is very true. A legal dispute between the series author and a fanfic author ended the official Darkover fanfic. Mostly as a teen I read the Star Trek and Darkover fanfic that met the standards of paperback publication. Since then I have found that there is plenty of great material from published authors out there and tend to stick to it. I have found interesting a subset of the shared universe genre, which in many ways is published author fanfic interesting. There are anthologies of stories from other published authors that take place in Eric Flint's 1632verse or David Webber's Honorverse among, I am sure many others. There are different than actual collaborations, but a reminder that published authors are fans as well.

Maybe the Pact can turn all of the Hands into tax collectors. That would make Avadon even more popular.

I ended up with a ton of money and consumables after buying every charm I could find, but I play on Normal. Maybe next time I should by furniture for the houses to soak up that extra cash.

There are two endgames. You either stay loyal to Redbeard or you kill him. If you stay loyal, your companions do as well, irrespective of your completion of the loyalty quests. If you choose the path of betrayal and murder (for bad or good reasons), then your companions will desert you unless you have gained their loyalty through completion of their optional loyalty quests. Completion of their loyalty quests puts their personal loyalty to you higher than their loyalty to the organization that you all are supposed to be serving.

So, was the swallow African or European?

The limitation on turrets is your characters vitality. I do not like running back to the Pylon to recharge, and so that limited my deployment of turrets. I played most of the game with just a single TinkerMage and enjoyed the healing torrent/freezing turret combo. The two turrets would absorb a lot of attacks and then heal away most of the damage each round. On Normal I rarely found myself needing to heal my turrets, the healing turret kept the other turret and my party alive for the duration of the fight.

Here is a link that shows their release years http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/142277/Spiderweb-Software-Timeline

In the last game, I am pretty sure that their loyalty only mattered if you were doing the ending where you betrayed Redbeard. Otherwise I do not think that they betrayed you.