Student of Trinity

I thought it couldn't be one per island, but then realized that the reason I thought that was that I was thinking you would proceed through the islands in order, and not go back much to previously cleared islands. But actually there is no good reason to expect this, so I guess it could be one per island. Certainly there have not previously been sects based close to each other, so it would be hard to have two based on the same island. There could certainly be more than one sect operating to some extent on any one island, though.

I agree with Icshi that more than five sects would be too complicated. We've got to have an Awakened sect, because they are one of the moral poles of the game. There also have to be some kind of Taker descendants, since there is the Taker creature left over from G2. Since we're starting in Shaper territory, there should certainly be Loyalists around. So that's the three from G1 that have to be carried on.

Somebody has to be making canisters that the player can use, and neither Takers nor Awakened are likely to do that (since Serviles and Drakons aren't going to be using the same kinds of canisters). Loyalists say No to canisters. So there needs to be a fourth canister-making sect, although I don't expect Barzahl to have survived. Then there is Litalia, possibly representing a fifth sect, but possibly a Taker or Awakened partisan. Her reference to justice doesn't sound very Barzite.

So I figure four or five. I guess five would seem like more of an upgrade from G2, so my final answer is five, with Litalia as the fifth.

Yeah, hey, where's all my praise? Grrrr. Darn bookreaders.

I tell you, everything went straight downhill after Gutenberg. People who rail against the internet aren't going anywhere near far enough. Until we get right back to runes, scratched into potsherds with our Swiss army knives, I see no hope for this entire civilization.

Thank you, Ornk of Death, for one of those perfect poems the internet occasionally serves up. In its honor, I too pledge to leave all stabbing to the professionals who know better how to handle their Swiss army knives. (The Swiss army, for example.) Preach on, brother.

I read Icshi's custom title with a whole different feeling, now.

Since the Shapers are heavily into genetic modification, perhaps Agents and Guardians ARE gender neutral. You're just changed to look like that, regardless of gender. Yes, I think that's it.

The prolific Harry T. also wrote the 'Krispos of Videssos' trilogy, which has a very nice 'alternate Byzantium' setting. As far as I can tell the only real difference he made was to change the names, and (ironically) to replace Orthodox Christianity with a dualistic religion very much like the contemporary Persian Zoroastrianism. At least, he replaces the belief system; the church organization is classic Byzantine Caesaropapism, as far as I can tell. Turtledove's alternative Persians, however, do not become Christian, but something else which is never detailed much.

In my opinion The Guns of the South is Turtledove's masterpiece, and by far the best 'time travelers change the past' novel I've every found. Too bad it seems to have been the trigger for him to start putting out a new book every six weeks and go all blah.

Thanks. I foolishly forgot how old that poll was.

But I don't see it (the one about travel between islands)?

Hey, moderators: any chance we could get my 'travel between islands' poll moved from G2 to this forum? It got decent response and I'm not just trying to revive it, but it would be nice to be able to find it for comparison once the game does come out.

I guess I just feel that with GF there is a missed opportunity. The games are mainly about the dangers and temptations of rapid acquisition of power by unusual means. Yet in totally unremarked parallel with the canisters and modification platforms and geneforges, here are you going from tenderfoot to gazer skin boots within what can't be more than a few days, just by fighting rogues. I feel it would be easy, and very interesting, for the games to offer some explanation for this remarkable capability of yours. Bitten by a radioactive fyora, inhaled a few stray spores from an aborted Taker project -- whatever.

What 13th century Byzantines returning from exile? Do you mean the period between 1261 and 1453, when the Paleologi dynasty had recovered control of Constantinople from the western crusaders, but remained precariously poised between the rival Byzantine fragment of Trebizond, the crusaders' rump Latin Empire, and the looming Ottoman Turks?

If so, um, cool. I know nothing about this period. Did the Paeleologi survive by famously brilliant conspiracy?

Mr.k means at the south edge of Gheth itself, not south of Gheth (the Thahd Dumping Ground).

Item q) has been done by Andrew Wiles, but sure, we could try to find an alternative proof.

There was Paula Volsky's excellent fantasy novel, The Wolf of Winter, about drug-induced necromantic powers (among other things). The necessary drugs all tended to drive users into a particularly vile dementia, eventually.

On another note:

Ah, sheet. Here I was keeping my cool very well, all things considered, and then I make the mistake of looking through the G3 teaser page carefully. It looks very cool. It seems that you get to drag along an Agent and a Guardian, probably schoolmates, for a while. And it will be cool to craft one's own items.

Now it is harder to wait. Grrrr.

Dudes. The glowing green goo is for external use only.

Keep pushing West a few maps. They're surprisingly close to Barzahl's stronghold of Rising.

Who do you expect to see in G3?

I think it ought to be a Dragon. I mean, like a Drayk or Drakon, only really huge and with city-burning fire. I'm hoping it has something to do with the fires that were mentioned in some G3 teaser text.

My own best bet is that the rapid gain in levels is actually some kind of side effect of the canisters, which only occurs when an actual born-and-bred Shaper uses a few of them. Only a very few such Shapers have used any canisters even in G2, and they are all (a) already secure enough when they started on canisters that they might never have had to fight much and thus discover the experience effect, and ( stark raving mad.

Trouble is that you can beat the game and rise to enormous power without ever letting a drop of that bright green goo touch your skin ...

Clawbugs might not help Barzahl so much, but if that's a problem he's got lots of Glahks.

Whuppin' a few Glahks every morning before breakfast would give him back the sixpack abs he had in Shaper school.

As to running the city, why would he even bother, if like me he could take the whole world singlehanded? Tell the boys to hold the fort a few days while he picks up a dozen levels, killing things that need killing anyway because they threaten Barzite borders. Then make like a PC and go stuff the Geneforge down Easss's throat.

Here's the best rationale I can see for downplaying the PC's uniqueness.

All the G2 factions are really extremely weak, and know it. They could certainly defeat the PC if they concentrated all their assets for one pitched battle, but even if they did that they would be no match at all for a Shaper army. So they have to work all out at growing strong enough to resist the Shaper Council. They all have hopes for doing so, but these plans all take time, and require them to disperse their strength to work on several different projects in parallel. In the meantime they have a window of vulnerability in which a single Shaper, catching them strategically if not tactically by surprise, could rub them out piecemeal.

On this argument, Barzahl might be able to defeat the Takers the same way the PC does, but taking time out to do this would slow his work to put together a force that can defeat the Shaper Council, and he can't afford to risk even a few days' delay in that desperate race against time.

I think there are some problems with this rationale, though. All the factions send you right off to warn the Shaper Council as soon as you have neutralized their last local rival, so it doesn't seem as though they were largely ignoring each other to focus on the much harder task of resisting the Council. And none of them behaves towards you as though they imagine that their survival is at your whim.

You might be able to argue that it wouldn't actually take a historic titan to destroy the G2 factions in their windows of vulnerability. But it seems to me that the factions all think themselves to be pretty safe from a young Shaper apprentice, even if he has picked up a few things in his short visit to the Drypeak range. So it seems like there must still be something pretty unusual in the PC's rapid rise.

Perhaps it isn't so crazy that the main NPCs don't remark on this. Barzahl and the Takers might be too megalomaniacal to let themselves believe anyone could be a rival, and the big problem with the Awakened is that their only sane leaders are pretty much out of the loop as far as understanding real power is concerned.

But I still think there ought to be some narratorial indication that the PC has come a long way surprisingly fast, reaching higher levels of personal proficiency in a few days than senior Shapers like Zakary, Sharon, Barzahl and Shanti have managed in their whole careers.

We must have patience.

The arts of the Shapers may only be acquired

by many years of painstaking effort and study.

Acquired responsibly, that is. We wouldn't want

to get what we want too quickly, reach dizzying

heights of power in mere days, and devastate the

landscape all around us by recklessly absorbing

magical viruses by the dozen until we glow and

shoot fireballs from every pore.

Of course not.

I guess I wasn't clear enough about my point. In particular, my topic title didn't reflect my actual topic. So I have now changed it.

I'm not objecting at all to the fact that the PC is incredibly extraordinary.

I'm objecting to the fact that no-one in the game seems to notice that the PC is incredibly extraordinary.

Here is something I'd really like to see addressed in G3, especially as it seems to begin with you as a student in a Shaper school.

How come in these games your character can come in as a powerless apprentice, and within days accumulate enough power to wipe out everyone and everything, where the supposedly brilliant likes of Barzahl and Trajkov, supported by many talented followers, have been unable to get further than they have in months of effort? Why doesn't Barzahl, for instance, realize that cleaning out a few clawbug colonies would do him as much good as a canister? Or would it?

In other words, the ability to gain levels so quickly from experience earned must be something unique to the PC. Fine, this is a magical world. But why doesn't anyone ever comment on a fact that ought to surprise everyone involved? The PC must be the Shaper-world equivalent of Mozart, Newton, and Alexander the Great all rolled into one.

In G1 it might not be so hard to explain that nobody finds this remarkable. The serviles expect shapers to be godlike, the sholai don't know what to expect, and perhaps Goettsch imagines you to be even more heavily augmented with canisters than you are. And perhaps you yourself are too inexperienced a shaper to know that advanced shaper skills usually come with decades of training rather than days of killing rogue fyoras. Or perhaps it could be chalked up as a side effect of the canisters. Sholai who have apparently gobbled down dozens of them are as wheat to your sickle, but perhaps the canisters have additional subtle effects on an actual shaper.

In G2, though, it's quite weird that none of the experienced powergatherers in the game remarks upon how very much faster you can gather power than they can.

Yeah, I don't hold it against them that there is a certain amount of repetition of basic motifs. Between the internal logic of the game world, and the constraints of game mechanics, certain situations are bound to be common. Good design involves using as many actually different situations as possible, and finding ways to make the analogous situations feel different. I feel that Jeff has done well on both counts with G1 and G2. As long as the similarity isn't bad, it's actually good, at least in my book -- variations on a theme are nice.

So, for instance, the Infested Woods in G2 are much more tangled geometrically than Pentil Plains in G1, and they have a weird vat, a lurking servile, a spawner, and a valuable herb. Infested Woods is a creepy, spooky place, while Pentil Plains is noonday violence with a tragic background (the ruined farms).

Oh, and I don't find it so hard to believe that Trajkov and Barzahl would rather have you tackle Goetsch and the Takers, respectively. It's far from obvious who would win an all-out Trajkov/Goettsch or Barzite/Taker confrontation. By the time you can do the final mission for either B or T, you can also toast them. So I think it's fair to say that both tasks really are beyond the capability of B or T without you.

Even if they do have some shot at doing their big jobs themselves, Trajkov and Barzahl are both leaders of large groups, with huge long-term ambitions, so neither is going to be keen on staking everything on one very chancy venture. Whereas if this stranger from nowhere can do it for them, great; and conversely if the stranger fails, that at least gets rid of the stranger who might be a rival, and is bound to weaken the opposition to some extent.

Examples of repeated tactical challenges:

Low level party vs. mixed Thahds and Artilas, in challenging numbers. A fairly safe staging area, from which you are warned of what lies ahead, is provided.

G1, Pentil Plains; G2, Infested Woods

(Pyro)roamers spread out over a map, but swarming you if you let them.

G1, those marshes; G2, those other marshes

Shades plus radiation.

G1, Power Core; G2, that crystal mine

Enough clawbugs that you can get swarmed.

G1 and G2 both, several places.

Vlish that will gang up and hunt you down.

G1, Pentil Woods, Junkyard; G2, Medab Road, others

Augmented superdrakon goes medieval on you.

Okay, this one was new to G2.

I don't really want help with my anticipated Artilas, of course. My point is that there are some predictable kinds of challenges in the GF games, especially early on. It might be amusing, especially for those who are most rabidly champing at the bit for the new installment, to list some of the obvious ones, so that we can later reflect on how Jeff creatively expanded the palette of GF challenges, or failed to do so, in G3.

Laying out a forum policy for 'Help!' topics is an excellent idea, of course. Does this forum support stickies?