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Mutagen is the first Spiderweb remake that I would say is superior to the original game in every respect. There's more to the Shaping mechanics, much of the game's (somewhat lifeless) original script has been rewritten to give it more character, there are a few new zones added, with attendant sidequests. If you're only going to play one or the other, Mutagen is the obvious answer. That said, when you finish Mutagen, you'll probably want to play the rest of the games in the series. And while the remakes of Geneforges 2-5 are presumably going to be similarly improved over the originals, the last of the remakes is not going to be out (assuming Spiderweb maintains a consistent release schedule, which is a safe assumption) until c. 2027 at the absolute earliest (and something like 2030 at the latest). So, unless you're willing to wait that long, you'll probably have to get used to the originals anyway; and it'll hardly hurt to have played the original Geneforge 1 before you've played its remake. So it's ultimately not really a huge deal. Have fun.

You only see explicitly-marked rooms in Avadon for a few Hands in the game, but there are dozens, at least, of off-screen Hands out on missions, and many more are recruited over the course of the series. Similarly, you only interact with a few named Hearts (Miranda, Protus, and later Callan is a Heart), but there are a bunch of unnamed "Heart of Avadon" NPCs bustling around Redbeard, and presumably more elsewhere monitoring different aspects of Avadon's operations. W/R/T Hand competence and temperament- in Avadon 1, Miranda deliberately manipulates things so that your party is made up of the most troublesome Hands, and that you're sent on the missions with the greatest potential to radicalize the protagonist and their companions against Avadon. In 3, you're partnered up with whoever Redbeard could grab, rather than the most appropriate or skilled Hands. In extra-game terms, it's just more interesting for the player character to have conflicted, idiosyncratic companions than blandly competent superhumans.

More books. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde & Other Tales, by Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson was a deft storyteller, but honestly not that good at spinning out ideas in the way one would want from speculative fiction, I think. Translation State, by Ann Leckie. It's the new Ann Leckie book. Cozy small-scale space opera drama. I liked it. Good ideas, and central conflicts which have obvious real-world parallels and resonance, but resist reduction to 1:1 allegorizing- excellent, exactly what I think speculative fiction should be. Something that struck me, though, is that though the book has three viewpoint characters/protagonists, from wildly differing backgrounds, they're all very Ann Leckie Protagonist Characters: practical, humble, reserved, a wry sense of humor, no shades of malice to any of their actions. They're likeable, of course, but perhaps not differentiated enough. Van der Graaf Generator: Every Album, Every Song, by Dan Coffey; and Peter Hammill: Every Album, Every Song, by Richard Rees Jones. Track-by-track overviews of the discographies of the named artists. Hocus Pocus Focus: The Strife & Times of Rock's Dutch Masters, by Peet Johnson. An impressively thorough and definitive (up to 2015) work on the band Focus, buttressed by extensive interviews with essentially all of the principals. Really good. Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War, by W. Bruce Lincoln. This completes the trilogy started with In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War (which I read in April, but seem to have neglected mentioning here) and continued in Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution. A solid work, minimally dated (written in the 80s). I am glad to have read it. Presently reading Happy Forever, Mark Volman's collage-memoir which recently came out; and then The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton, by Russell H. Greenan.

I think that you seem to want something that's fundamentally at odds with Geneforge's design philosophy. Geneforge uses level scaling for experience because it aims to be relatively balanced- the average player should be at or around level X by point Y in the game, such that the game does not become too easy or too hard, so long as the player is progressing through areas appropriate to their overall progress through the game. But most of the game's maps are optional. It's possible to win the game- to really win it, getting a proper ending- while engaging minimally, if at all, with half the maps. Level scaling on EXP means that most players will finish the game at level 19 or 20 without necessarily clearing every map, and that's what the endgame is balanced for. Further, some maps are heavily slanted towards combat, and some towards noncombat problem-solving, such that not every character is necessarily going to be able to get through every map. Some maps have very desirable loot, and some have important lore revelations. Some are super-hard challenge maps, which, by design, only a minority of players will clear. This- the combination of areas being optional, and areas varying in their challenges and rewards- is deliberate. It makes the world feel like something that exists beyond the bare needs of a video game plot, and it positions exploration and experimentation as interesting things for the player to do. Removing scaling would fundamentally break the game, and undermine these design goals. It would mean that players could reach the endgame at a much, much broader array of levels- and either the endgame would be balanced for the low end of the range, and thus too easy for more thorough players, or it'd be balanced for the high end of the range, and obligate players to clear much more of the map to have a chance at beating it. It sounds like what you want is something like the latter- not necessarily a higher level cap, but a more steady stream of experience spread evenly across the gameworld. But that'd mean much slower levelling (and regular levelling is another Spiderweb design goal), and obligate players to clear much more of the gameworld to have a chance in the endgame (undermining the free-form, open design of the gameworld). If the main or only thing you find rewarding in an RPG is gaining experience at a constant rate throughout the game, I'd recommend you look at the Avadon games instead, as their much-more-linear design means that you gain experience at a more consistent rate.

I guess I have read some more books. Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis. It was alright. As I noted in my previous post, there's sort of a clash between Lewis's MO (an obsessive, materialist documentation of American mediocrity) and the story here (scientific ideals vs the pressures of "real life"). Martin Arrowsmith is a genuine hero, who saves thousands or millions of lives, but most of whose problems are extremely petty and of his own making. The ending of the novel (Martin and his friend bug out to a cabin in Vermont to do Pure Uncontaminated Research forever) aside from being unrealistic, feels like a cop-out from the actual scientific conflicts the novel documents. Border Worlds, by Don Simpson. A weird arty science fiction comic that went through a few fitful incarnations before sputtering out, and then was revived 25-odd years later as a nice hardback collected edition with new material that draws it to a (tentative) close. (This is fine, because it's pretty clear that it was always an aimless experimental sort of thing, and it was never going to have anything like a coherent overall arc or a satisfying ending.) I enjoyed it. The Old Man in the Corner: Twelve Classic Detective Stories, by Baroness Orczy. The first proper "armchair detective"; it takes a superlative storyteller to get away with stories like this, where the sleuth is a passive observer who constructs the course of events from his seat in a cafe, but Orczy was such a storyteller. Something that struck me reading these stories is Orczy's fixation on disguise. Fully eight of the twelve stories here involve disguise and/or imposture, with culprits using these tools to confuse the timeline of their crime, or to lay false trails; two of the other stories also involve issues of identity, though not deliberate disguises. This is of course a theme eminently evident in Orczy's most famous creation, the Scarlet Pimpernel, though it was interesting to see how prevalent it was here as well. The Last Days of New Paris, by China Miéville. Kind of a dud. "Nazis and the French Resistance fight a never-ending war in a warped Paris populated by living Surrealist art pieces and demons" sounds cool, but in practice the book is unmanned by Miéville's shift away from conventional SFF worldbuilding to an "artier," more amorphous "anything goes" approach- it's hard to have stakes when it's not even roughly clear what can or cannot happen. Fanservice is also a problem- almost all of the book's imagery is poached from real-world Surrealist art, to the extent that this novella needs endnotes explaining which works Miéville lifted the stuff from. The result is a book with some intermittently striking imagery, but which is slack and almost absolutely devoid of heft. The Bully Pulpit turned out to be so overstuffed and unfocussed that I've left it on the back burner. I'm currently reading W. Bruce Lincoln's Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War, and a book of stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, and The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce.

Books I have read in the past month: The Bonus Army: An American Epic, by Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen. The current standard work on the Bonus Army, a protest march of unemployed WWI veterans who, at the height of the Great Depression, demanded that the federal government pay out early a bonus that was promised to them. The government responded by sending in the military. The vets did eventually get their bonus, four years later, but nine years before it was promised, and the struggle fed into the passage of the GI Bill of WWII. The book itself was good and thorough, though noticeably written by journalists rather than historians- lots of focus on picturesque detail, not so much analysis of trends or mass forces. World War One British Poets, Candace Ward, ed. My response to poetry is extremely variable. Some of this stuff (eg Owen, Sassoon) was great, some (eg Brooke, Gurney) I thought was pretty bad, and a lot (eg Graves, Hardy) just did nothing for me. World War One Short Stories, Bob Blaisdell, ed. Probably inevitably this is heavily slanted towards British authors. Equally inevitably, it's a mixed bag. Some pieces are excellent- the excerpt from Barbusse's Under Fire; C. E. Montague's "A Trade Report Only"; Somerset Maugham's "The Traitor"; Mary Borden's harrowing, moving "Blind"; Katherine Mansfield's "The Fly." But then there's the maudlin and the facile beside these; and the uncomfortably bloodthirsty "Mary Postgate," by Rudyard Kipling. The BOZZ Chronicles, by David Michelinie and Bret Blevins. This compiles the entire run (six issues) of the short-lived mid-80s comic of the same name. The premise is that the titular character, a thickset, eight-foot-tall pale green alien, is stranded on Earth in the 19th century after his spaceship crashes in England. He is consumed by boredom and ennui on this backward planet. To distract him from killing himself, his self-appointed sidekick, a Cockney prostitute named Mandy arranges for him to solve mysteries. (His other sidekick is an American cowboy, Hawkshaw.) This was very goofy and very fun. It's not really high-caliber as either detective fiction or science fiction, but it's consistently very entertaining. How the States Got Their Shapes, by Mark Stein. A book about how the US's states assumed their modern borders. This ended up being pretty dull. Since it's ordered state-by-state, lots of material is repeated (sometimes three or four times). Since it's about a settler colonialist state, the explanations for borders tend to be "Congress tried to make states roughly the same size" or "a perfectly rectangular shape would've included hard-to-govern land on the other side of a river" or the like. Grim. Great Speeches, by Abraham Lincoln. It's crazy to think that there was a time when the president of the USA gave speeches that were consistently worth paying attention to. Last of the Dragons, by Carl Potts & co. The compiled run of a brief low fantasy comic (evil monks sail to Northern California with their tamed dragons, opposed by an old samurai and a young ninja). It was enjoyable enough, but its brevity means it was too short for niceties like character development or much atmosphere. Civil War Adventure: Books One and Two, by Chuck Dixon and Gary Kwapisz. An odd revival of the war comics format (initially published in 2009 and 2011), and an atypical application of the format to the American Civil War. These were fun, but they inevitably take, basically, the "Civil War enthusiast dad/uncle" perspective- lots of interest in the ground-level experiences of soldiers, little if any interest in the ideological or economic aspects of the war. They veer close to Southern apologia not so much out of actual ideological commitment so much as out of unabashed sentimentality, and typically American fondness for the underdog- these are comics that will show poor white Virginians fighting to "protect their homes," but then also feature a long, almost maudlin story about the Battle of Milliken's Bend, the first substantial action in which Black Union soldiers saw action and proved their worth. So, okay, I guess. Presently reading The Bully Pulpit, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (which is kind of overstuffed), and Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis (which has, I think, an odd mismatch between its subject matter and Lewis's typical form).

You are correct. The "Complete Saga" on GOG includes Avernum 1-3 + Blades, as in the games that came out 2000-04.

More books. Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914-1918, by W. Bruce Lincoln. A solid, thorough account of the period named; while I've read about the Russian Revolution(s) before, what struck me in reading this was how Nicholas's ineptitude and intransigence torpedoed not just the monarchy, but also the chances of basically anyone but the Bolsheviks. His refusal to grant a responsible government in 1915 or 1916 made anyone to the right of the SRs or Mensheviks untenable (the Kadets still wanted to push for Istanbul in 1917!), and this in turn put most of the socialist parties on the wrong foot; only the Bolsheviks ended up having any sense of the moment, or any ability to seize it, in 1917. Anyway, I'm going to read Lincoln's books on the years leading up to WWI in Russia, and on the Russian Civil War, next. The Necklace and Other Stories, by Guy de Maupassant. Maupassant was a master of the short story form- but his stories also regularly come across as shallow and facile to me. Ball-of-Fat is excellent, though. The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, by Toby Wilkinson. Something like three millennia of history; Wilkinson goes for a straightforward political history over the more-typical focus on the ancient Egyptians' religious beliefs and material culture, and succeeds spectacularly. He synthesizes a tremendous amount of (often very fragmentary) material into a strong, coherent narrative. Five Great Short Stories, by Anton Chekhov. Very good; Chekhov could condense a novel's worth of themes and events into a tiny space. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka. Also very good. It's striking how, a century later, Kafka still feels extremely contemporary. Nemesis, by Agatha Christie. I started reading this and then gave up maybe a fourth of the way through. Misery. The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco. Not really bad, but I felt like this book tried to do several things at once (detective novel, historical novel, novel of ideas, etc) and didn't really 100% succeed at any of them. It's a likeable book, but not really a great work of art. Currently reading: a history of the Bonus Army, and anthologies of WWI fiction and poetry.

The essence-filled tubing running around the frame indicates that it's Alwan (meaning it's not a chair, it's his support frame thing). Nobody else has anything like it.

It'll run the most recent remakes of Avernum 1-3, Avadon 1-3, Queen's Wish 1 and 2, and Geneforge 1: Mutagen. Spiderweb games where there's no version of the game that it will be able to run are: Avernum 4-6, Blades of Avernum, Geneforge 2-5, and Nethergate. These are all 32-bit, and won't be updated to run on a 64-bit engine. Spiderweb is currently working through remaking the Geneforge games, though it'll be some time before they're all done (as in, several years); and I believe the plan is to eventually remake Avernum 4-6 as well- and perhaps Nethergate. Eventually there should be versions of every Spiderweb game, except Blades of Avernum and possibly Nethergate, that will run on post-Mojave versions of MacOS, but it will be some time before that's the case. There may or may not be hacky ways to get these games working on newer versions of MacOS (via eg emulators). I can't speak to that.

No, unfortunately. You just kinda have to learn by doing; saving often is advised.

Unfortunately, it isn't directly available for download. Nethergate's sounds are "baked in" to its executable, and I'm not sure how possible it'd be to extract the music from it. The music was composed by Bjørn Arild Lynne, a prolific composer for video games (Avernum 4 and Geneforge 4 also use tracks he composed for their title screen music), and the track was probably licensed by Spiderweb rather than commissioned for the game specifically. If you really want to track down the track in question, the best course of action would probably be contacting either him (here's his Facebook page- his standalone website seems to have gone down in the past few months) or Spiderweb (contact page here) and asking them about it.

Books. Oh no. The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom, by H. W. Brands. Pretty good. Relatively breezy; not really a parallel bio so much as the story of the end of slavery in America as related through the acts of two pivotal figures. Not enough detail on Lincoln and colonization, perhaps inevitably. Tolstoy: Selected Stories, by Leo Tolstoy. Alright. Too often straightforwardly moral/allegorical, intermittently brilliant (cf "The Death of Ivan Ilych"). Tolstoy is a guy who I can respect even when I disagree with his particular moral positions, which is not infrequent. The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela. The Novel of the Mexican Revolution; I found it only intermittently effective; its fragmentary structure and deliberate emotional distance from the characters and events in it were kind of wearying. If Death Ever Slept, by Rex Stout. Another Nero Wolfe novel. This one was pretty haphazard. It feels like Stout himself didn't know "whodunnit" till the last chapter. What Have I Done?: The Stories of Mark Clifton, by Mark Clifton. Post-Golden Age, pre-New Wave science fiction with thematic preoccupations of paradox, psychology, hypocrisy, etc. Some of it fluff, some of it quite good (Clifton won the Cordwainer Smith Award for Unjust Obscurity some years ago). It's sad that Clifton died before being able to develop further as an author, as the later stories are much stronger than the earlier ones. The Great Thinking Machine: "The Problem of Cell 13" and Other Stories, by Jacques Futrelle. Futrelle is famous for the title story here, and for dying on the Titanic. These are fairly barebones puzzle-story-type detective stories. They were entertaining, but Futrelle is remembered for that one story for a reason. The Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories, by Arthur Morrison. Quite good; appearing during the Great Hiatus, Hewitt is kind of a deliberate anti-Holmes, being a brilliant detective who happens to be an extremely normal guy. The Best Dr. Thorndyke Detective Stories, by R. Austin Freeman. The inverted detective stories- a form Freeman invented- are good, especially the first, "The Case of Oscar Brodski." The more-conventional stories here are inconsistent and can feel kinda padded. The Best Max Carrados Detective Stories, by Ernest Bramah. Notable as the first blind detective of fiction; these stories incorporate popular melodrama into detective fiction in a way that has been retrospectively seen as foreshadowing Golden Age detective stories (the first batch of Carrados stories appeared in 1913). Charming, but not all-timers. I am currently soldiering my way through the thorough and very dense "Passage through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914-1918" by W. Bruce Lincoln. I am at last to 1917. They just offed Rasputin. The end is in sight.

The latest remake (titled Avernum: Escape from the Pit, to be unambiguous) was released on both PC and Mac. The differing version numbers between the PC and Mac releases mean different versions of the same game, not that they're different games. There are two reasons the PC and Mac releases have different versions: First, the Mac release came out a few months before the PC release, and it received a patch before the PC release (so Mac version 1.0.1 is (more or less) equivalent to PC version 1.0, and Mac version 1.0.2 is equivalent to PC version 1.0.1). Then, several years after release, the Mac version received an update (version 1.1) to move it to a 64-bit engine, ahead of Apple dropping support for 32-bit programs. So, while the PC release of A:EftP is on version 1.0.1, and the Mac version is on 1.1, they are fundamentally the same game, in basically the same state. Anywhere you buy Avernum: Escape from the Pit- direct from the Spiderweb website, or from Steam or GOG- you'll receive both the PC and Mac versions of the game.

They're absurd. Definitely. Absolutely. I have no idea what methodology VG Insights is using, but the A3 sales number they give is unbelievable. If A3:RW genuinely only sold 15% the number of units A:EftP did, Spiderweb Software would almost certainly be bankrupt. PlayTracker's sales numbers are, similarly, unbelievably high- I wonder if they're basing their numbers on concurrent players/playtime? In which case these lengthy 25-hour-plus CRPGs would have terribly skewed numbers. SteamSpy's numbers are rough, and should be taken with a grain of salt, but, having talked to indie devs about this, I know they're always at least in the right ballpark. SteamSpy shows A:EftP selling 105k copies, A2:CS selling 64k, and A3:RW selling 103k copies. These are eminently plausible numbers. They indicate that A3 is actually still probably the most popular of the trilogy, though not overwhelmingly so- it has a comparable number of sales to the first game, despite having had six less years of being on the market, and six less years' worth of sales and bundle appearances. The influence of the relative features/story/pacing/etc of the games on their relative sales (as in, does 1 selling the most copies mean it has the most appealing story, etc?) is i think kind of moot. For these things to have an influence on the purchase or not of a potential buyer, that potential buyer has to have experience with them before their purchase (or, on Steam, before they decide to refund the game or not); and we simply don't know how many people are playing the demos before making their decision to buy the game or not. There are, I'm sure, people buying A3:RW based on their experience with E3/A3, but I think there are too many confounding factors to think that these aspects have a decisive influence on any given number of consumers. Anecdotally- I've encountered maybe half a dozen people who aren't hardcore Spiderweb fans- and often aren't even CRPG fans broadly- but who played a Spiderweb demo off a demo disc or the like at some point in the 90s/00s. I've never encountered anyone "in the wild" who's played a more-recent Spiderweb game demo without it being recommended to them by word of mouth or a review or the like. Consumer habits have changed radically. The main use of demos these days is as pre-release marketing (cf the "demo fest" type events Steam does regularly), rather than as a way of letting consumers "try before they buy." I suspect consumers today are much more likely to end up owning and playing a Spiderweb game because they picked it up for very cheap in a Steam sale, or got it collaterally in a bundle, than because they were hooked by a demo.