Goldengirl

Because combat is so forgiving in the games early on, I always go for cranking my mechanics and leadership to 10 as early as possible to get advantage of those early game opportunities.

... I have to cancel. I'm seeing a friend in the hospital. Unfortunately, I don't think this will interfere with future sessions.

For logistical reasons, the Shapers don't want to have to personally oversee flocks of Serviles, so they have various workarounds. Servile Keepers are one, and frequently seen throughout G2-5, Creation Minds are another that come in from the very beginning. Most Serviles are given (just enough) independence and intelligence to do their jobs with a minimum of oversight, but obviously there are still those that go rogue.

Geneforge 5 is in the west. The eastern morass and the rebel lands at the edge of the Mera Tev connect (with some swamp in between). In the south, Gazaki Uss is built just to the west of Gazak Uss from G2, which puts Drypeak between the Turabi Gate and Gazaki Uss. Sucia is somewhere off the coast of Illya, nearest to Dillame. The Ashen Islands are north of the Grayghosts and Burwood. There's no good map that can bring all of these together in scale from the game files, unfortunately.

Blood?

Check your implants. It will have already happened again last year.

birthday sesh. hopefully this time I don't end up with a broken clavicle.

In Geneforge 4, the game mentions that Roamers are based off of dogs, so that's not entirely off the table in terms of possible pets.

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.

There's no reasons to judge someone's character based on a well-founded moral argument. Eating meat that is prepared from endangered animals, in the name of "adventurous eating," sounds like a perfectly fine moral judgment to me. In fact, it's not even just me who thinks this, because it turns out that this principle is enshrined in manifold ways in local and international laws. Food turns out to be something that is the subject of vast ethical debates, from principle based arguments about categorically opposing the eating of meat (as an example), to consequential arguments about the sustainability of eating a global diet (the locovore movement). Having a moral opinion on food is, if anything, admirable and conscientious. I'm with Alorael on this one; being a vegetarian limits my options. That said, before those days started, I had tried alligator. I found it be pretty gamey and not really too exciting. Lutefisk and various other Scandinavian dishes sound revolting, but aren't really that bad; lutefisk is so buttery that it slides past your taste buds before you know it. Lately I've been diving into a lot of Thai cooking, because I crave punishing my taste buds with hot spices, which has led me to some interesting cooking techniques that might be considered weird. Yogurt is probably really weird, if you don't know the concept. Personally, though, jello is always the strangest to me. Consider it my rebellion against my Lutheran potluck upraising.

I feel like this is tautological; excess strongly implies (or denotes, but I don't want to double check the dictionary) too much of something, something to the point that it's bad. In general, there are diminishing marginal returns. I would like to drink a latte. If I drank another latte, I'd probably still enjoy it. If you made me drink twenty lattes, whew, I'd be suffering. This is simply considered a law in economics.

Nothing could possibly go wrong, that would save Jeff's business 100%

Balancing Shaping and nonShaping player characters will be really hard, so it might be best to just make everyone be one or the others. So either no player Shapers/Lifecrafters or only them. By which I mean, no Agents or other nonShaping dominant characters.

Using any of the Geneforge's twice kills you, if the first one didn't already. G5 is the only time I can think that anyone has used two different ones, at least successfully. In G4 it was possible to use them at both Southforge and Northforge, but that would result in death. Since the first time the G5 PC used the Geneforge by definition had to have been a Rebel forge, it makes sense it would be a different template. Most likely, this would be more conservative than the Rebels, and therefore have different balances of reagents. I'll tepidly agree that different templates allowed for different changes and successful transformations; if I recall right, the Drakons did that, too, to become more and more powerful. I'll give, perhaps, the added note that later descriptions in G5 make it seem like the PC was so radically changed (glowing, face sliding around, etc.) that the transformation was less from human/servile to Shaped human/servile, but from contradictory/damaged DNA to restored.

In this case I'm clearly winning, then. #calendard

The founding myth of American anti-imperialism certainly was not made at the time of the Revolution. It, after all, is a myth, not a history, which means that fabricated and anachronistic details were totally fine. I'm toying around with the idea that the Monroe Doctrine may have had a hand in making Americans feel anti-imperial, if at the very least because they were defending the "little guy"... so they could exploit Latin America instead.

I'm willing to bet there's a certain American zeal behind anti-imperialism, however ironic. The country was founded in revolution against the biggest empire, in terms of area, that ever existed (though at that time it was just a really big empire, not the biggest). American historical culture glorifies the Founding Fathers fighting the evil, irrationally oppressive empire - we just wanted to dodge taxes! Federalism balances the despotism of empire by making all states ostensibly equal. So, America's founding mythos is very anti-imperial, ignoring the plight of Native Americans, Mexicans, Filipinos... And Jeff is American.

I wouldn't worry too much about smileys, that's more of a common practice thing than a rule or even etiquette. Smileys are good Other than that, seems like you've got the gist of how to do this. Glad to have you on board.

I don't know how Avadon slipped my mind. (Yes I do, it's definitely the one I've played the least, even less so than Nethergate). Avadon would be great for it, it makes a lot more sense for the companions to not be in your full control, after all.

I mean, I remember playing Dragon Age: Origins and being impressed with the team dynamic. Maybe BioWare could do something good with Avernum. Although, of course, Geneforge would be perhaps an easier fit. Lots of opportunity for real character development, factions, they could probably come up with an AI that would be equally as good as just controlling your own creations... I've always thought that Geneforge had the best character development anyway.

Sorry, friends.

That's really sad, lilith. My condolences. Can you let us know when you put in the timezones, Nalyd?

Those eyeballs keep getting in my damn truck. I just want to do wheelies into the sunset, but then I'll get eyes clogging the engine forever!

Where is that show? I love me some space westerns. Also, is it real or not?

Yep. It's basically an assault raid. You're best bet is probably to speed through and not worry about totally mopping up the place.