Aran

Thanks! I think I have; I just didn't know that "Greys" was what they were officially called. BloodMoon, why would Jeff Vogel name an archmage after a historical Viking?

Oh. I'm not that familiar with alien lore...

Originally Posted By: Vinegar and Engine Oil —Alorael, who will grudgingly not argue that the vahnatai are collectively a reference to the Greys. Are the Greys from one of Stephenson's books too? I've only read Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, Quicksilver and Confusion so far.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba General Gabor Krizsan is the one who named the province. So he is. I should read my own wiki more often.

Originally Posted By: Slarty Monoroe is fairly obvious after Krizsan. I suspect that somebody noticed those two, posted about them which specifying "two", and then somebody else leapt to the conclusion that it applied to all six and posted it. And once posted, such things become known facts and are repeated for ever and ever, occasionally garbled along the way. I'm liable to do that myself - for example, I nearly pointed to another post as support for "Midori" being such a cameo, before actually reading the link.

True: http://www.spidweb.c...mezonechat.html

And as I said in the game forum thread that inspired this, Trainspotting was cameo'd in one of the towns of A3.

That was a real name? Hehe... there have been several (non-real) Solbergs on Spiderweb since, and one of them is tied to a pretty infamous plagiarism incident back in the day. By the way, the Foglios have two characters in their famous Steampunk fantasy Girl Genius named "General Krizsan" and "Professor Vogel", and I wouldn't be surprised if that's on purpose too. But this list is for cameos in Spiderweb games, not the Vogels appearing in other cameos. I think there were more Krizsan references in the series than those two - IIRC there was a well-off/military/aristocratic family who were both the namesake of the province and the family of the exiled Krizsan. Also, http://pied-piper.er.../2018/p5#000114 : Giving me meme reversal: Now whenever I read about the C functions, I think of the towns.

Originally Posted By: Slarty there were entire towns of NPCs named after TV shows And one after the characters of Trainspotting, I have heard. I don't recall which town it was - Wainscotting would seem to be the obvious guess because of the name, but I think "Sick Boy" was in Shayder.

Originally Posted By: Sleeping Dragon I think one of the stranger things Jeff did with names was change the one mage's name in Avernum 3 from Jordan to Bojar. Jordan wasn't exotic enough for him, I guess. True, but it did make him memorable. Bojar sounds too much like Bjorn, the guy who designed the Halls of Chaos. The funny part of this story is that he changed the name while keeping the real-life cameo unchanged: E. Jordan Bojar is part of Studio Foglio (which occasionally does graphics for Spiderweb Software), and is credited for the logos of Avernum, A2 and Nethergate. So if you run into a rogue mage named Ellis in some later game, you know who it is.

To such an extent that it is hard to convince most people that a wiki is not a Wikipedia (see topic title). Also, heh. It's amusing that after the original GF wiki project was never got off the ground, we may finally see a successful attempt.

Earlier versions of Geneforge, A4 and probably also G5, use a scripting language that looks like AvernumScript. The engines differ enormously, but the syntax appears to be the same. AvernumScript is well-documented in the manual for Blades of Avernum. You may be able to pick up the differences by looking at the scripts that came with G5.

Quote: Killing the shade is a worse idea. If it were actually possible. I did my very best, but after getting it down to a very low HP level, further attacks just did not affect it. Even though the attacks did normal damage, the shade did not appear to lose HP. In fact, I did exactly what has been advised against - heavily shielding and blasting the shade with all I had - but I still passed the test. I didn't know it was possible to survive this and fail, unless perhaps you ran away or started summoning.

Quote: At least you can't learn it. Does that mean you can use the character editor to get it? Not that that would be useful, since the result of RoS is purely scripted, and Jeff wouldn't script something that can't happen.

My first reaction to this topic title was: "There are only two AoE spells - Heal and Convert".

I think I mostly did "Advance, CoB, CoB, Retreat from LoS" in the later battles of Bahs, and trained at least two of my characters up as mages (possibly giving all of them enough levels to Haste). But it's been years since I did that, so I may have the details wrong.

I checked the strategy central and can't find any link that describes which NPCs can craft which items from what materials. I know there is a leather worker and an alchemist in Formello, but where does the steel go? Is it even worth hanging onto until then, or will I have far superior weapons? And what trinkets should or shouldn't I sell - iron is useless; what about gold?

Originally Posted By: Randomizer You'll still be playing the game in your sleep and eventually you will visit places that Jeff didn't create. If you happen to do that, please try to hold on to the memory while starting up the BoA Scenario Editor. Because that would seriously rock.

Quote: Eliza and Shaftoe Whoa, has Jeff been reading Neal Stephenson? Edit: He has, apparently. And now I need to actually play the game, because I still didn't get around to even downloading it.

(Off-topic:) Originally Posted By: macdude22 By storage I mean mom's house, what else would she do with all those empty rooms now that everyone has moved out, she'd go crazy that's what. So did you program them to produce dirty laundry too?

Originally Posted By: thi'serbated tiulen-formature tiemos David Eddings - Guardians of the West. Should I keep reading it? Its kind of meh so far, but does it get better? I'd never suggest you stop reading a book you've started, but if you found the beginning "meh", the rest will not exceed expectations. You will probably care about the story enough not to put it down. But it's no surprise that the good guys win (sorry, spoiler tags?). Click to reveal.. The one main character he does kill off just at the end is barely significant, and in fact is bereft of a purpose. His passing is repeatedly foreshadowed ("one of you is going to DIE!") and then mourned grandly. Basically, Eddings killed a supporting character and went "Woo! Tragedy! Victory at great cost! See how deep I am?" I'm not knocking Eddings' writing skill though; it's better than I can do. Besides, I obviously enjoyed Eddings enough to read his entire works (all 19 or so) again this year, and I just finished Eragon a second time too. ---- Ever since I finished Cryptonomicon some years back, I've wanted to find out about some of that stuff for real, so I'm about to start on Schneier's Applied Cryptography. I just hope it's not way over my head.

Originally Posted By: Khyryk Eye Originally Posted By: BlueRivets I want Windows!!!!!! For now I need spoilers to satiate my thirst. More like, I want a MAC so I can play it now! Message Authentication Code? It's called a Mac.

It is worse. (I actually just noticed I had two chapters of the rewrite done months ago, so even though it likely won't get done, I've put them up.)

Geneforge no, but I wrote part of a Vahnatai novel for Nanowrimo once. It is rather mediocre. I made a start at rewriting it, but since it cannot be published for obvious copyright reasons, it's not really worth it...

Originally Posted By: The internet is your playground, complete with bullies. —Alorael, who can barely conceive of the possible horrors of villainy by bureaucratic committees. It's evil done by the most evil leadership possible! That's already the status quo the world over, isn't it?