Triumph

IIRC, gazers are based on the design of the vlish. And vlish are known to have some telepathic ability to herd or direct lesser creations. So it's very possible that the ability of gazers to control other creation is a refined or enhanced variation of that old vlish ability. No, the NPC party members in G2 don't talk. Conversational NPC party members was a new feature of G3 (and something Jeff greatly expanded upon in the Avadon series).

Alhoon, you're blowing this way out of proportion. Please try to see that. The reason no one can "explain" why seeing you edit a post led them to think you're deceitful is BECAUSE NO THINKS YOU'RE DECEITFUL. You shouldn't be personalizing a critique of behavior as a statement on your character or intentions. Slarty (nor I, for that matter) NEVER said anything about your intentions in editing posts, NEVER suggested you were doing it make him look bad or yourself look good, and NEVER said you were doing it to be intentionally deceptive. NO ONE accused you of deliberately doing anything wrong (deliberately editing, yes, but not deliberately lying). I accused you of violating unwritten conventions of forum etiquette, yes, but A. I didn't say it was intentional, and B. that's not exactly a serious moral trespass under any even halfway coherent system of morality I've ever heard of. You are reading way, way, way more into these comments than either of us ever meant. Please, chill. We pointed out how your editing habit has the potential to make subsequent replies look out of place or lack context. The closest I think anyone came to accusing you is this statement by Slarty: But look carefully at what he said! He said, essentially, that it was frustrating or unfair or unreasonable to try to carry on a discuss if you were going to edit past statements after people replied, and then turn around and say "No, that's not what I think." Slarty even offered the PERFECT solution to this kind of thing: saying instead of "You're wrong about what I said." Thus, he didn't accuse you of moral malfeasance, he proposed that you tweak your behavior re: responding so as to help avoid confusion. Here's two key quotes from this discussion Obviously that's not an exact quote of your response to Slarty at the bottom of the last page, but you guys seem to agree that it paraphrases or encapsulates something you expressed. And that was the real moment there was problem, where instead of saying "Oh, I edited that post and adjusted some things" you INADVERTENTLY gave the impression that you'd never said anything different. That spawned Slarty's comments saying, in effect, "Hey! It's not fair to edit your post and then respond in a new comment as if the edited the post where what you'd always said." There's no toxicity. There's no haste to assume you're deceitful. There's no explanation for why you have to defend your character because no one was attacking your character. There's no one convinced they'll never ever reply to anything you say ever again. (As for what Slarty, I point out that he has, so far, made FOUR replies to you in this very thread since he comment up about "not engaging," which suggests his statement wasn't nearly as absolute as you're fretting it is.) You taking ONE post capture ONE moment of frustration from Slarty and inflating it into some sort of general manifesto by the entire forum community that we all think you're a wicked liar. But that's NOT what is happening here. There's just one forum oldbie expressing a little moment of exasperation with someone for not adhering to the unstated conventions of discussion in a setting like this. He went on to offer two solutions: A. you could just say "Oh, FYI, I edited that last post to better reflect my thinking" instead of saying "You're wrong that 's not what I think" and B. he could make the effort to quote whatever you say that he's responding to so that the context of his comments remains clear even after your own thinking has evolved. You even admit there are no direct accusations against you! So, if there are no direct accusations against you of sin, and I and Slarty (presumably he agreed with my last post, given his response to it?) denying any sneaky implicit accusations, can you accept that maybe, just maybe, no one is accusing you, directly or indirectly, of any sins? There's no "lingering threat" of accusations, as you put it. There's nothing for you to be sad about. Just a misunderstanding to overcome and move on from.

My own recollection is that the substance of your comment was meaningfully different, Alhoon. FWIW. I can't give an exact quote, but I'm pretty sure it was substantively different. And I'm, ah, shall we say, 90% certain I've seen other instances in your discussions on these forums where you edited the SUBSTANCE of your posts (as opposed to just grammatical cleanup or minor tweaks for clarity). Relevant quotes from Slarty (assuming he didn't edit them ): Slarty made no accusations against your character, Alhoon. There's a profound difference between calling out someone's behavior and attacking their character. Saying "This thing you did was out of line" is not at all the same as saying "You're a bad person." Slarty criticized the way you were editing your posts, because it made them unreliable as way to follow the discussion. Thus, he concluded that if he wants to respond to anything you say, he needs to quote it, lest your propensity for editing eliminate the context of his responses or make them look unreasonable. He is not and has not attacked your character, at least not as I read his posts. That's NOT an accusation of evil motives or bad character. That's frustration that you're not following accept conventions of discussion of a forum like this (e.g. specifically, that people don't substantively alter their old posts but leave them to represent an accurate history of the discussion). You may want to seriously consider dialing back the editing; if it's not very simple grammatical corrections, and especially if there have been any posts at all since yours, perhaps don't edit and instead just make a new post.

Specifics or it didn't happen. I can find nothing of Ghaldring ever describing his first encounter with Litalia, certainly nothing that would verify she ever came anywhere near Drypeak or saved him from a Shaper assault. You can disregard all evidence aside from Litalia's obviously super sketchy G5 claims, or you can recognize that you might be scapegoating Litalia and turning her almost into a propaganda symbol, an emblem of all that you see wrong with the Shapers, even though she doesn't deserve it. I don't quite understand your love-hate relationship with Litalia, but regardless, facts matter. If G3 was from the Shaper point of view, then it did an incredibly awful job of making the Shapers look like good guys. Meanwhile, the game you claim is from a rebel point of view actually did a far better job of humanizing the Shapers and making their cause seem sympathetic or valid. No, the truth is that G3 makes both sides look vicious and cruel. The rebels come out slightly worse, yes, but not because the game skews to a pro-Shaper portrayal.

You keep going on about Litalia. Let's review the facts. Litalia's "original" origin story, as told in G3, is that "I was sent to a remote outpost, where the Shapers were weak and confused, and they had let things go wrong," adding that the problem was "A lack of discipline. The environment was harsh, and the serviles had become disobedient. And then rebellious." No mention of drayks or drakons or canisters or Drypeak or being part of a larger force of Shapers sent to suppress an uprising. After the incident, she fled her Shaper handler and later encountered Ghaldring in the wilderness. In G4, she spins a different tale. "I was a Shaper. But I was ... disillusioned. Then I met drayks and drakons, when I had been tasked to hunt them. I gave them the chance to speak with me. And I saw that the Shaper ways were not just." Later she adds "I was sent, with a Watcher, to deal with disloyal serviles. I did this by slaughtering them." Presumably, if this telling is true, then after being "disillusioned" by the first incident, she was assigned to hunt drakons and drayks and instead found and joined them. But that's rather different than saying she fled her Watcher and met Ghalding next. Then, suddenly, in G5, she claims she wasn't an apprentice being tested before becoming a full Shaper. No, she was a promising, powerful Shaper given an important mission - a mission to Drypeak to purge the mountains of the works of a rogue Shaper. Then she led assault on the rebel base, and there in the underground lair, met Ghaldring. She helped him escape and joined his rebellion. Do you notice how different this tale is from the story told in G3 and G4? The first two stories are different, but with some significant overlap. Not until G5 does she start claiming she was a mighty Shaper given important missions who conquered a rebel fortress only to save Ghaldring. Suppose I were doing historical research on a person (I mean, that's actually what I do in real life). And I found this hypothetical person had participated in a famous battle of some war, and left two accounts of his involvement. The first account was in a letter he wrote just a few years after the battle, and in it, he described his behavior as rather pathetic, melting down in combat and running for the rear. The second account comes from many years later, after he had become somewhat famous and the head of a large organization, and in it, he told a dramatically different version of the same battle. In this telling, he was a powerful and impressive warrior who played an important role in the outcome of the battle. Which of those two accounts would I believe? I'd say it's overwhelmingly more likely the first account is true and the second is false. Can you see how Litalia's stories fit a similar mold? My inclination is to be highly suspicious that Litalia actually had anything to do with Drypeak. I find it highly plausible that as she positions herself as savior of the land, leading the world to accept Trakovite wisdom, she decided to adjust her origin story to make herself sound more glorious and important and thus more worth following. She'd rather present herself as a full Shaper who singlehandedly saved Ghaldring than a mere hopped up apprentice who suffered a meltdown after killing some serviles and was later found by Ghaldring. Or perhaps she's delusional thanks to so much self shaping abd believes it all. Yes, MAYBE the G5 story is the true one. Maybe. But it's also eminently possible that she made that part up, appropriating details from other stories to make her own history more impressive or for some other reason, and was never part of the Shaper assault on Drypeak. Something to consider.

I'm only running 10.10.5 (Yosemite) and the same version of N:R as you, and it works fine for me. Which makes me wonder if one of your OSX updates somehow broke it? Might need to email Spiderweb about this.

It's possible to wipe out everyone everywhere, if you really want to.

The Awakened, Barzite, and Taker endings to G2 are all fascinating pieces of alternative history to me, what-if scenarios for the Geneforge world. We can see presented with the godlike authority of the game's author (rather than mere speculation) how it could have been. In a way, I think these endings make the canon ending more meaningful, by showing that things didn't have to happen to way they did. The course of history was contingent on the choices made by the Shaper Apprentice, and had those choices been different, instead of the events we know as G3-5, history would have taken a different course.

Wow. How long did it take you compile all this?! Very impressive!

Wow! Impressive work! Thank you.

So the true definition of "rebel" is actually "those who share my views"? I will also just say that you may not have seen all there is to see of the Awakened's plans. They may still be naively idealistic, but they also may not be quite as out of touch as you think.

Come on, Alhoon. Here's the dialogue when you meet Nora: "The commander of the warren guards is patrolling the halls. She is a guardian, and her armor is still in good shape. You would guess that she came to Drypeak recently." Then she introduces herself thus: "I am Nora, a Guardian of the Warren." BOOM. And no, nothing in the dialogue of that zone suggests the guardians are really just outsider guards.

Shaka, when the walls fell. Yes, Slarty, that's what I think. I was poking a little fun at the fact that Alhoon has some stringent standards of what a true Shaper is (as I recall, he found Alwan insufficiently orthodox!), not discounting my own example. Also, love today's PDN.

Uh, you seem to have missed Zakary's chief bodyguard. She's explicitly identified as a Guardian, and she's a woman. Of course, under your taxonomy of "True Shaperhood," maybe working for Zakary disqualifies her as a valid example.

...So they are rebellious but NOT rebels? LOL. No it's not. The Shapers are know to exterminate those who violate their law (as you've referenced repeatedly with the story of Litalia et al.). Every group in the Drypeak Mountains knows it's only a matter of time before the Shapers come and try to wipe them out for they way they break from Shaper orthodoxy. It's perfectly possible for an Awakened or Barzite to be making war preparations while insisting they don't want war and only want to be left independent to go their own way. "I don't want to fight a war with the Shapers, but I also don't want to be completely defenseless when the Shapers inevitably come to murder me." (The Takers, of course, do desire to wage offensive war against the Shapers, so that's a little different.)

Re: zones you found boring: No one makes you clear all the zones. For anywhere you need to go / anything of game importance you want to do, there's almost certainly more than one route, so if a zone bores you to death, there's a strong chance you can ignore it with no serious consequences.

I can't wait until you meet the Barzites. Hee hee hee.

There is someone you'll meet who particularly desires shaper equipment.

My first thought upon reading this was "Wow, I knew Slarty loved Aodare, but that seems a bit much." But then I started wondering if you actually had someone else in mind.

Well, you have a history of not being convinced by anything anyone says. More than once, you've put forth a theory, and then when people offer points that don't mesh with whatever your theory happened to be, you deny, explain away, or otherwise devise reasons to reject that information. I'm glad we can put this particular debate to bed, at least.

I don't expect this convince you, but off the top of my head (I don't remember every minor character in the series) there's definitely a female guardian in the very first town of G2 (and there's absolutely no indication that there's anything atypical or unusual about this). Happy now?

This. This is the best thing. I'm cracking up imagining the Great Vlish Apocalypse.

Tell us again which Geneforge games you've never played, Alhoon? I forget. Your failure to play the earlier games undermines your ability to speak accurately on what they do or don't say. In addition, you persist in ignoring gameplay / story segregation, and keep trying to take aspects of the game that aren't meant to serve a lore-conveying function (such as Jeff's limited, low-budget art assets) and force them to carry world-building significance.

Geneforge 5 plays fast and loose with previous explicit canonical facts (the second continent? The size of the shaper council? The age of the Shaper empire?). Given this fact, one might argue that other things in G5 should at least be taken with a grain of salt, not automaticallly accepted as accurate reflections of the Geneforge world, particularly if they stand out as weird, unusual, or contradictory in any way. IIRC, nothing prior to G5 gave any indication that any of the shaper classes were segregated, and there's no basis in the games' lore for thinking women are better at magic than men. Your theory simply doesn't have support outside a few wonky data points in G5, the game known for getting stuff wrong. There's just not enough evidence to build your spellcaster-matriarchy. (While I'm not going to argue the point at any length, I also just have to say that the history of human rights in real life is a LOT more nuanced than "Everything was awful until the Enlightenment happened and things started to improve.")

You're carrying around uranium, that radioactive substance, right?