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Slarti

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  1. What you may be missing is that A4 was a 2005 release. If you've played the most recent Avernum 1-3 games, those were remakes released in the 2010's. The remakes have a newer game engine entirely, and A4 is actually the older game.
  2. You could just go back to the updated initial post that lists the actual cameos. A3 does actually have a very specific reference to Shirley: Monoroe province is a slight alteration of her last name. All of the provinces, apparently, were named after Jeff's ex's (plus Mariann, of course). (Also, I'm not sure whether there are any random Shirley's in other Spiderweb games, but sharing a very common first name is definitely not enough, by itself, to establish a connection. Everything included in the list has something beyond that, anyway.)
  3. It's his mother. His ex-wife Shirley shows up a few times in this very thread...
  4. Nice catch! Thanks to Google Books and Jeff's seminal oeuvre The Poo Bomb: True Tales of Parental Terror, I can confirm that his parents were George and Sharon.
  5. It actually doesn't look like this is a Spiderweb reference at all. This game is heavy on the Latin borrowings, including most of the location names (e.g, Lumen, Vigilus). Avernum is on the map -- as are other Latin underworld references (e.g. Acherus Quarry). I do think this kind of "reverse cameo" would be interesting to track, though.
  6. Welcome! These are not known bugs in any version of Exile, AFAIK. (And using the older graphics is 100% okay and shouldn't cause you any issues.) As you've no doubt noticed, Exile doesn't generally guide the player to exactly the right spot to proceed, the way we are sometimes used to in more recent games. This includes in conversation; sometimes you might have gotten general directions from an NPC, but without bringing up the specific keyword at issue, you don't actually get the required information in-game. It's not enough to know it as the player; you actually have to hear it in conversation from the NPC. If you have the conversation, then reload a previous save, then of course it won't have stuck. You can tell these moments because the dialogue will end with a parenthetical note such as: "(You take note of this.)" Since you previously got stuck with something along those lines, I wonder if that's happened again? The ritual is separate from using the seal on the fresco. To do that, you need to have been instructed to do so by Aydin. Is it possible you either (a) did not hear "(You take note of this.)" from Aydin, or (b) reloaded after hearing it? If you heard that from Aydin (and have the seal) you will see the second dialogue below instead of the first. It's pretty, but irrelevant. You are mainly interested in the small depressed area Aydin described to you, in one corner of the mural. The depression looks tailor-made to fit your royal seal.
  7. Oh, you know, there might be a checksum in there somewhere. That issue came up with the Mac App Store version. Probably hard to get around that, if so
  8. Hiya! In theory, if the Android version stores its data the same way (in text files), it should be possible in the same way -- just find the data and replace the appropriate text files. However, I don't know if it does; things might be bundled up and compressed (or simply encapsulated) differently.
  9. When you attack in Exile, the game first looks up a base hit rate that is dependent on your weapon skill level. This is from a table, not a formula, and (true to what the in-game help says) the first few points make a big difference. From 0 to 20: 20,30,40,45,50,55,60,65,69,73,77,81,84,87,90,92,94,96,97,98,99 Strength and Dex (and Int) offer their bonuses, (like +5% to hit and +1 to damage, spell bonuses for Int, level-up HP bonuses for Str, etc) at predetermined levels. They use their own lookup table: -3,-3,-2,-1,0,0,1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,3,3,4,4,4,5,5 So the gains come at 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 16, and 19. Str/Dex/Int affect enough things that they generally have more use, but getting weapon skill to 3 immediately, and a bit higher later, can still be worthwhile. It depends how much you want to abuse Bless, really. Luck does a number of things. - Pick locks / disarm traps - Chance to reduce damage taken by 1 - Chance to remain at 0 HP instead of dying - Party luck affects item drops They are just 10% to-hit bonuses. You might be interested in the topic below: https://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/topic/13484-code-dissection-munchkin-style/
  10. Hi Twalls, Two requests as a moderator: 1. Please don't resurrect 5 year old threads unless you have something new to say. 2. Please don't post EVERYTHING in capital letters. Thanks. Just trying to keep the boards easy to use for everyone.
  11. It actually wasn't meant for Win95 at all -- the Exile games were all developed for Mac. Windows ports came later. (And frankly they had a somewhat unique UI for any system, at the time, though the 3.0 versions removed some of these elements.)
  12. This is interesting! Am I right in seeing that the main edits are to things like window borders, and not to character or terrain graphics?
  13. I think this is a little misleading. I don't think anyone has ever been able to actually duplicate every single thing that did in between an uncorrupted save and the container bug appearing -- gameplay involves far, far too many small things happening for that to be the case, particularly since the moment the bug triggers is very likely prior to the first moment the player sees evidence of it. Also, we do know certain things that used to cause this bug -- for example, in A4, Jeff confirmed an explicit connection between using "backtostart" and this bug occuring. This has been changed or fixed in later games.
  14. Sounds like we're all back on the same page now. For orcs, the Tolkien material was "corrupted Elves" rather than poorly executed imitations: Melkor got to some Elves before the rest of the Valar did, "corrupted" them, and then "bred" them somehow. It was a major point that the Valar could not create independent life on their own. It was actually the Dwarves who were created through imitation, by Aule, essentially automatons until Iluvatar took pity on them.
  15. I put in the "solely" qualifier, FWIW, not because I think multivariate decisions aren't a thing, but because I wanted to see if anyone could point out a decision that was clearly based on "not offending people" versus that we were assuming was based on it. (The posts that followed provide a pretty good example of why I was worried about this: "not offending people" was even blamed for a change that it was assumed happened -- but that, when we looked, in fact never did.) It seemed like this would be the easiest way to assess Edgwyn's assertion one way or the other: i.e., if this is truly a common thing, then maybe there's a clear example of it, even if most instances are murkier multivariate issues. I think part of the issue here may be different senses of what "offending people" means. I guess I'm used to hearing that argument in sort of a don't-clutch-your-pearls context, where it's set up as a counterpoint to free speech -- and often used to minimize and dismiss arguments that something is causing material harm by pre-emptively dismissing it as "hurt feelings" rather than assessing and analyzing the argument itself. We'd probably quibble over some of the details, but I'll say "fair enough" to this on a general level. I continue to be confused by the concept that someone is offended on behalf of orcs. What in the world am I missing here? Also, I'm not sure I understand how any of the reasons given here or in the link are about people being offended at all. Seriously asking for help understanding, what am I missing here?
  16. Completely agreed, Kel. Indeed, this was the spirit of my question. The claim I was responding to was that same question in statement form: that some things were changed specifically "to make them less offensive."
  17. There is, by the way, some ability to look into this directly. Here's an excerpt from an article the lead 2E designer wrote (Dragon 121, if you're googling), mid-design, after he had solicited player feedback on removing some character classes from 1E: "Assassin - Still dead. Again, this is more a matter of mindset than a separate occupation. The unique abilities don't work, in my opinion (the Assassination Table is a crock). The question of image that came up had nothing to do with any kind of religious pressure, as some of you mistakenly thought. Sorry, it's much more mundane - a lot of potential players have been turned off by bad experiences with uncontrolled assassins destroying parties, campaigns, and fun for everyone else. No fun at all." This is a great example of something where many people assumed (and still assume) it was about offensiveness, but it wasn't at all.
  18. That's part of what I'm getting at, but I'm not restricting it to players being offended either. Let's look at what my original question (it was a question in response to your claim, not a statement of its own) actually was: My original question was just as narrow: I asked for something changed "solely because" people were offended by it. I have no doubt that the BADD people were offended, and that plenty of people were offended by the nude women for a variety of reasons. But that was true in 1977 too, so if "offended people" were enough to make them change it, why'd it take three-plus decades for them to act on it? I propose that "offended people" was not enough, on its own, to make them change anything. Your original statement was specific: not just that people were offended, but that changes were made because of that. That second part is where there's disagreement. It's the causal link at issue.
  19. Those same monster manuals listed alignments for all elves, all dwarves, etc., despite the rules making it clear that player characters could be of any alignment. Nothing about that alignment listing was absolute. Fun fact: the 5th edition monster manual still plainly lists orcs as chaotic evil, so this hasn't even changed: You will understand, I hope, why this makes me suspect that this conviction that everything has changed because people got offended is being taken a little more seriously than the reality is...
  20. Trying to parse this out. Does raising an objection to something, because you think it's bad, automatically qualify as being offended by it? Or is there a distinction?
  21. Is this "default assumption" actual in the rules, or is it just the general mythos that players are steeped in regardless of D&D? What you're describing is something that may have changed organically inside individual players and inside the culture at large, but not something where D&D itself pulled the rug out from under anyone. Indeed, this is something that individual DMs have always run to suit their taste. You could find DMs in the 80's who ran maybe-the-orcs-aren't-that-bad campaigns, and you can find DMs today who run inherently-evil-kill-on-sight campaigns. The rules have never prohibited either. So what even are you alleging has changed here, between editions? That the rules spend more sentences mentioning the possibility of non-evil orcs? And that they somehow included these extra sentences because they were worried players would be offended if they didn't? That's not really a QED -- it's just a speculative assertion about designer motives, put forward without any evidence whatsoever. This is exactly my point! Edgwyn stated (and the rest of you seem to agree) that D&D "modified some things with each edition to make them less offensive". You are all providing examples of things that were changed, but so far, nobody has provided any evidence or argumentation explaining why these changes were clearly made "to make them less offensive."
  22. The question at stake is: "Do you have an example of something that was modified or removed from AD&D solely because people were "offended" by it..." Complaints made 20 years after they stopped publishing it cannot have caused its prior modification or removal unless you're alleging time travel.
  23. Yes, this is precisely what I cited above -- this link is from 2020. What I don't see is anything that suggests (let alone shows) that these comments were made when it was originally published, let alone that WotC changed or discontinued it as a result.
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