Ceiling Durkheim

I am filled with wholehearted respect for Jeff's offspring. Good to know they've provided him with inspiration (well, besides the obvious incentive to put out quality games in order to keep putting food on the table). Shima got on my nerves in his sidequest when he warns you to take the side path, gets you led into an ambush, then still chastises you for charging into a trap after it's evident that the only way to the Honored Forge camp is through the central (trapped) path.

I don't think there is. There are options (stun/daze, summon pets to draw fire, run away), but that battle in particular is just hard. I found her a fair bit harder than Moritz'kri himself.

It was shorter than the latest Avernum/Geneforge games, but I didn't think it was that much shorter. I'd call it around 10-20% shorter. It also depends on how you play: Avernum 6 has an enormous number of sidequests, while Avadon has fewer. I'd say that the main stories, assuming one only does enough sidequests to keep from being underpowered, aren't very different in length. If you go for completion (as apparently both the pineapple and the fnord did), then Avadon feels non-trivially shorter. I agree that the ending was abrupt, though. And yeah, Nathalie is easily my favorite character. Rarely is "adorably bloodthirsty" an apt descriptor, but it certainly works for her. Jenell and Sevilin are pretty cool, too. I didn't find Shima all that interesting, though that may be in part because I used him the least. It's nice to see Jeff work some substantial character development into Avadon; such tended to only happen between games in the Geneforge and Avernum series. While Geneforge had a very well done and original setting, the characters all too often felt like mouthpieces for the political issues and alignments in the game, with relatively little character outside of that. The Avadon party members (and other major characters as well) were much more dynamic and fleshed out.

Which makes the Trakovites an interesting case. For the most part, they're even more libertarian than the rebels (they kind of have to be, since even the rebels will kill or imprison them just for speaking their views), except on the topic of shaping, on which they're more authoritarian than the Shapers.

It makes sense in context. The G5 PC is already a former canister fiend, and by the end of the demo section is in the unique position of having used the geneforge two, or possibly even three times.

This doesn't matter nearly as much in Avadon as it would in Geneforge or [especially] Avernum. You pretty much had to use exploits (like the skribbane resale thing in A6) to get to the level cap in those games, but in Avadon you'll hit it by the early part of the endgame if you do all the major sidequests. The infinite coinage from buckler sale is a somewhat more useful exploit, though even then it would be such a slow way to make money that only the most insanely dedicated munchkin would bother to use it.

So...the bag of bones, then? That sounds less like nerfing the item in particular, and more like a more general undead-nerf (the bag of bones was one of the few Nicodemus creations that was actually kinda useful). Makes sense from a realism standpoint, anyway.

We've had self-reproducing trash, self-reproducing bricks, etc. Nevertheless, I will not be satisfied until we have a game with an unsellable trowel generator. Accept no substitutes.

Which one?

It just adds % damage. Backstabs that are also critical hits do delightfully vicious amounts of damage.

I usually find a few in each game, but I agree that Jeff proofreads his games really well. Better than industry standard, which is impressive considering the magnitude of the staff involved in bigger-budget games. And the item descriptions are, as usual, really clever. I'm glad to have them back.

Seconded on this. I like the convenience of being able to exit from a variety of angles (and I'd surmised that this was their purpose), but as long as we're talking reduced walk time, multiple angles of entry as well as exit would be nice. Mostly the difference would be trivial, but there are a few zones (most notably the Beast's Woods, so far) where travel is sufficiently convoluted that allowing for other points of entry would make backtracking there later much simpler.

If you're talking about the quest I'm thinking of, then the best option is clearly to get the target to pay you to lie and say you killed her, which also gets you payment from the quest-giver. Cue Schlock Mercenary-style "we got paid twice" happy dance.

And here I thought I was being all cool and original playing a Shadowwalker on hard. Ah well, kind of the opposite of Yogi Berra's "nobody goes to Coney Island anymore. It's too crowded."

I noticed this as well, but it gets harder. I'm also playing on hard, and I found enemies in the first couple areas could barely damage me. More specifically: Click to reveal.. enemies in the Avadon dungeons and the first visit to Kva were pretty much all trivial, though Ohgroth (sp?) did burn through a few of my healing potions. Then I got to Khemeria, and enemies got a lot harder. Especially the spiders, which leads me to think Jeff's taken a certain TV Trope rather literally. They've been a pretty good difficulty through Khemeria and the second time in Kva, where I currently am. I think it's fairer to say that Spiderweb games (and most games, really) have an early "kid gloves" section in which things are easy, and that this section is especially easy in Avadon. Unfortunately easy, and the transition to more standard difficulty feels a bit abrupt, but this all rates pretty low on the world-ending catastrophometer. Other observations now that I've played through a bit more: I really like the big area maps. A lot of Jeff's previous games have felt a bit cramped, especially in areas that are supposed to be big and wide-open (and of course this was a common complaint about the A4-6 world maps); in Avadon so far they've felt just right (as has the temperature of the porridge). I also appreciate that Jeff included more info on game mechanics in the manual this time.

This confused me for a bit as well. Quiria drops a key that opens some of the locked doors, including one south-ish of where she was, which will get you access to the rest of the prison and the exit.

You can command-click on an item to put it in the junk bag.

Seconded on the visual style. The graphics are obviously not tremendously advanced, but I find Avadon to be pretty in a way that Jeff's previous games haven't been. Especially the character portraits and a lot of the environment/terrain graphics.

I'm not so convinced. Why should a sentient creation shaping be worse than a human shaping? The drakons are certainly nasty, but no more so than human canister addicts. The problem is that there are no restrictions on creations reshaping themselves, and that's primarily because the Shaper government that enforces such laws also enforces laws that would kill any such creation on sight (or subject them to torture/vivisection). In fact, those laws exacerbated the problem, since drakons had to make themselves stronger in order to survive.

And then there are the various men who've married (or live in sin with) body pillows. I for one cultivate a celebrity crush on Trope-tan.

It entertains me that the seller points out that breast milk ice cream is "free range." It's true, but it's the sort of thing that feels so obvious that the very fact of pointing it out draws more attention to the possibility of it being otherwise than just leaving it be would. By which I mean, the point at which we start factory farming humans for breast milk may be the point at which I finally and fully give up on the human race.

Hmm...I usually found that anything I really wanted to stun had high enough stun resistance that stunning blow didn't do much. A shock trall, a shock trall, my kingdom for a shock trall (or, even better, a swarm of G3-style vlish). I continue to maintain that battle frenzy is a respectable ability in A6. Once I get it, I tend to use it in ~2/3 of fights (the easiest and hardest 1/3 are where adrenaline rush is handiest). It only looks bad compared to A5 battle frenzy, which was frankly overpowered. When it's actually a good build decision to get your casters a bunch of mostly-to-entirely superfluous weapon skills in order to get that specific battle discipline...that, ladies and gentlemen, is a really damned powerful battle discipline.

There is no topic drift like Spiderweb topic drift. Though I confess to some measure of confusion as to why your points about grad school qualify as spoilers.

A friend pointed out to me that "Fnord Cola" would actually be a singularly ineffective soda name, since to anyone not in the know it would simply read "Cola" (well, and fill the reader with nameless dread). I'm still debating the whole grad school thing with myself. I'm not entirely certain that academia is what I want to do with my life, and in my field of interest (religious studies; draws on both social sciences and humanities, though I'm more into the former), with its relative dearth of jobs, it pays to be sure. What do you study?

Keep in mind, as well, that the Avernum games are pretty long. It probably won't take you all of A1 to learn the basics.