Edgwyn

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.

I have always played in a window, so I just tried going to full screen and have the same issue. I have Lion 10.7.5.

The companion quests are all optional

I did it on normal, but with a Tinkermage. I dropped a healing pylon and a iceblast pylon and used melee attacks. The key is to kill all of the opponents in a short time. I was around level 17 for floor one, and it is probably easier for a Tinkermage than a Sorcerer. You definately want to take advantage of the Sorcerers Area of Effect spells to inflict as much damage on as many enemies in as short a time as possible. I attempted the second floor right after the first floor, but was not able to dish out enough damage before time ran out. I did it again a few levels later.

I rushed most of the way to the East, put a healing pylon in place and concentrated on killing the shades. After I had all of the shades defeated, the turrets seemed to stop.

So far, all of the medals have unlocked correctly for me. I only have 19/30 at this point. I am not playing the Steam version, so I do not know if the Steam Achievements are the same as the Avadon Medals. I have not played a SW game on Steam, but in other games on Steam I have had buggy Achievements.

Another way to have adjusted this would be to have had Silke/Rainer take up employment with Avadon (not necessarily as a hand, but as a courier or spy) after she/he escapes. (I am happy that Silke/Rainer escaped on their own, otherwise everyone would be beating Jeff up for the Damsel/Mansel in distress) That would have allowed for more interaction (imagine Silke/Rainer popping up in various maps with information or clues, like the Wayfarer) throughout the game instead of forcing the rebellion decision so early. Then the Silke/Rainer to kiss or not to kiss moment could be based on the player's choice in the end game. As to we do the exact same thing with the hands, but nobody seems to have much of a problem with it. Sure, Khalida, lets go kill the town mayor, anything to ensure your loyalty to me in case I decide to try to off Redbeard in the end game. Actually, I used Khalida a lot, but did not use Alcander and Yannick hardly at all. I did see my character as having more of an emotional attachment to Silke/Rainer then several of the Hands.

I do believe that there were more reasons in Avadon 1 to rebel than in Avadon 2. I saved the game right before the point where you have to make the decision with Silke. I then ignored and instead chose the path of a player who wants to get all of the medals available on Normal and a character who is thinking with the wrong portion of his anatomy and killed my allies and joined the rebels. I did think that Silke's concerns she expresses after the fight were well done, nobody trusts a traitor. After receiving the medal, I opened up my saved game and proceeded to kill all of the rebels with Commander Odil at my side. I found killing all of the rebels a lot more satisfactory then betraying my oath for a kiss. I have proceeded through the game as a loyalist. I have not yet decided if that means loyalty to the Pact as opposed to loyalty to Redbeard.

Sorry about that, I am not sure what happened. My wi-fi connection went out right after I posted, so I couldn't even hunt around for a way of deleting the extra two.

I am sure that there are a few folks in the Pact that want fairness. Of course, I have no evidence of that since our characters never meet any of them. I do believe that Tawon and perhaps Khemeria should have a chance to join the Pact, not that it matters, since the Pact is doomed. In my Avadon 2 posts, I am looking for a way to delay the fall of the Pact and death and destruction that will follow. It is probably hopeless, but that is what our good little hands and Pact soldiers do, buy time for the politicians to come up with solutions. Of course the system breaks down when the politicians have no interest in solutions. Ultimately, the structure of the Pact is wrong. The civilian government (Havnar's council) has too little authority. The Pact appears to be a confederation, not a union. There appears to be very limited mobility and almost no interaction between the civilian populations of the different nations. The regular military is not much better, with the Pact military units that we have met being mostly formed of members of a single nation. Avadon is the one place where people from different nations work together, but Avadon is no longer (if it ever was) working for the betterment of the Pact, only for the betterment of Avadon. It does not appear that people leave Avadon and return to their nations as respected individuals who know that cooperation can bring progress. If they return alive at all, it is as symbols of corruption. If Havnar's council had asserted its authority over Avadon early in Redbeard's tenure, stopped Avadon's corruption, focused Avadon solely on the external threat, desegregated the Pact military and forced the nations with disputed territories to set up joint colonies, it is likely that the Pact would be in much better shape. A less divided Pact would be brought together by the external threat of the Tawon and the Corruption and potentially further strengthened, versus the divided Pact being weakened by those same forces.

I have maxed out my PC at the very beginning of the Temples of Tawon quest, on normal difficulty. I have done almost all of the side quests. I am sure that there are some players who do not do all of the side quests and so are probably not maxing out until later in this quest, or even into the Corruption's Core quest. In terms of balance, it is probably desirable for a player who only did around half of the side quests or so to max out their levels prior to the end of the Corruption's Core quest so that they can do any final adjusting/re-training of their characters prior to starting the Final Hunt. I understand your frustration hitting the level cap so early, but I wonder when the average player is hitting it.

Well, if you want an argument: The lumberjack song is better than the Spam song

I see it more like Yugoslavia. An artificial construct of separate entities with little in common, held together by a dictatorship with secret police. Once the dictatorship becomes ineffective it balkanizes into something resembling its constituent elements which proceed to fight among themselves.

Fairness wise, I think that Tawon should have a chance to join the pact. And if the members of the Pact were rational, it would allow them to re-allocate their resources in a better manner. However, I suspect that if Holkanda and Kellemderiel did not perceive Tawon as a threat, they would devote event more attention to fighting each other, splitting the Pact into chaos.

She is in Avadon in the NE gardens

In tabletop RPGs, the constant expansions led certain ones to become harder and harder to play as rules would get harder to find and more revised. That was often the driving force behind complete redos of the rules, which made the games playable again for a little while before the cycle got out of control again. The two that most come to mind are 1st ed AD&D and Starfleet Battles. The ideal solution would be to have electronic rules files, where the additional material automatically moves into the appropriate place in the rules, so you are not looking in three different places to resolve an attack.

So far, I consider Dharam the only close to rational land. I would therefore hope that they could be persuaded to allow Tawon to join. They still have the threat of the Svorgald raiders to keep them motivated to remain in the Pact. The problem is that Holklanda and Kellemdereil can't come to a simple compromise on a forest and would rather just kill each other. Take away the bogey man of the independent Tawon emporia and there is no longer much incentive (neither rationality nor humanity seem to be an incentive for those two) for them to stay in the Pact and refrain from killing each other. Given the current refusal of the nations of the Pact to resolve issues, the only thing that I think will reunite them, and allow them to make true peace with the Tawon and Khemeria would be for Lilith's vikings to find that external threat, either by accidentally leading it back to Lynaeus after discovering a new continent, or by joining with that threat after discovering a new continent. The Pact (with all of its faults) and Avadon (with all of its extreme faults) can only buy time for the nations of the Pact to either become closer culturally or learn to respect and embrace their differences, and right now, it looks like the Pact has run out of time. Part of the problem seems to be that there is very little interaction between the citizens of the different pact nations. In Avadon 1, there was one married couple between nations, and they lived out in the woods away from everyone. Without the easy transportation and mass communication that we take for granted, it is very hard for the disparate nations to become closer culturally. While Avadon serves part of the function of an empire, they do not seem particularly interested in spreading that unified culture the way that the British Empire did.

Have you talked to Wyetta yet? There are two quests involved in this one. Once you have them, a passage clears between two rock walls in the SE of the map and you can get to the zephyr.