googoogjoob

Hot update: recently read: Three Moments of an Explosion by China Mieville: a very uneven collection of short stories. Too many of them lack endings and close on a striking but meaningless image. But when it's good, it's very good. This Census-Taker also by China Mieville: I am not entirely sure I understood this book. It's very short (a novella) and in uncharacteristically sparse prose for Mieville, but very slippery in terms of meaning (the narrator was a child at the time of the events recounted in the book, making him potentially unreliable) and context (the worldbuilding is only ever hinted at very barely). But it was very well-written and tense and unease-inducing, so I liked it. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard: a history of Rome (obviously) from its founding to AD 212, the point Beard identifies as the end of the first phase of the Roman Empire. Good, readable, easy to understand. Unusual for this kind of book in that it's really a social history; she's more interested in discussing the everyday lives and ideas of the ancient Romans than in recounting every war and battle in detail, or moralizing about decadent politicians and emperors. I like this, I like the aspect of history that illuminates the continuity of human experience over time and across the world. Now reading: The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien To read: Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Stephen Puleo (a dead-serious narrative history) (from the "Discussion Questions" section of the webpage: "What surprised you most about the story of the molasses flood?") A Specter is Haunting Texas by Fritz Leiber (which I originally wanted to read based exclusively on one of its covers) Still gotta read the Decameron... Important recent work by Ann Leckie

Shrug. This is a debate about the relative importance of an addition to the game, rather than anything factual, and is inherently subjective, so "agree to disagree" etc etc. I wonder if, to people entirely new to the series, the Kyass stuff sticks out as obviously as it does to those more familiar with it. Most of the text in the re-remake is grandfathered in from the older versions, and most of the additions are relatively seamless, but I felt that the Kyass area and writing were pretty different, tonally and thematically, emphasizing its enclaved-off-ness. Maybe noticing this made it stand out in my experience of the game more strongly? I don't know.

I, uh. I meant that you can actually kill Grah-Hoth without having Demonslayer, can't you? It's not a good idea, but it's doable. Reforging Demonslayer is a sidequest, killing Grah-Hoth is a main quest.

What I mean is more like... generally, the games assume that the protagonists have done all the optional sidequests. Every Avernum after 1 assumes that the protagonists reforged Demonslayer and used it to slay Grah-Hoth. Every Avernum after 3 assumes that the protagonists purged the Tower of Magi and dealt with Linda. Whether or not a specific player on a specific playthrough does these things, they're canon insofar as the subsequent games assume them. So, although you don't have to interact with Kyass to win the game (I think? been a while since I played the new remake), "optionality" doesn't really have any bearing on the relevance of events or their importance to canon. Basically, I consider the Kyass stuff an important change in terms of narrative and thematic heft, rather than simply in gameplay terms.

A character in one of the later games mentions having been posted to the Za-Khazi Run IIRC, though this doesn't necessarily mean that all the plot elements of that scenario (many of which are optional) are canon.

I had a friend recommend me Locke Lamora, and I was gonna check it out, but then I discovered that it's the first book in a projected seven-book series, with the four thus-far-unpublished books already titled. And at the current rate, it'll be over a decade before the series is finished. And then there's already a planned sequel series, which also will be seven novels long. So, I didn't read it. I'm sure it's good, but I don't really want to get tangled into the marketing nightmare that is modern fantasy publishing.

In the original A New Hope principal photography, Jabba appears as just a fat dude in a fur coat. They did in fact shoot the scene with Jabba talking to Han outside the Falcon, but did not include the scene in the final cut. 20 years later, they digitally composited a CGI Jabba the Hutt (that is, the big worm thing) into the existing footage, over the fur coat man, overdubbed some alien language stuff to replace the original English Jabba dialogue, and edited the resulting scene into the film. Basically, "Jabba the Hutt" was a name for some sort of crime lord that George Lucas had floating around, and 6 years on he re-applied the name to the giant worm man in Jedi. Then, they re-edited A New Hope to awkwardly insert some foreshadowing by making use of the convenient fact that this already-shot cut scene used the name "Jabba" for a creditor of Han's, despite the fact that this Jabba was just a guy in a coat. (Star Wars history lesson over.) Anyway, the result, as far as the moviegoing public is concerned, is that foreshadowing was awkwardly smooshed into the original film, complete with unconvincing, inappropriate CGI.

The Kyass thing is optional, but then, so is slaying Grah-Hoth, theoretically... the first Avernum is the only one where the player characters aren't actually charged with any task or quest (at first anyway). I think it's a significant change in that it shows a sort of dark underbelly to the governance of Avernum that really isn't at all present in the earlier versions of the game. The changes in characterization don't really materially change the plot- essentially the same events take place in the same order etc- but they retroactively cast the plot of Avernum 2 (and part of the plot of 1) as a giant power-grab by Garzahd, whereas in the originals/first remakes, I don't recall anything implying that Garzahd was anything other than loyal to the throne, and acting in what he believed were the throne's best interests. (He was still horrible and evil, just in a different way.) I actually kind of wonder why this change was made... either somebody pointed out to Jeff that it was weird that this archmage guy didn't show up to protect the Emperor at the end of 1 (in reality, because he probably hadn't been invented at the time the first game was written), or he was altered in an a weird ham-handed attempt to put some foreshadowing in the first game (a la the Star Wars "special edition" rereleases adding Jabba the Hutt into A New Hope), or both. IIRC he makes some ominous foreshadow-y remarks at the end of the re-remake of 2, too. (Too bad the heroes of 1/2 apparently never got around to telling anyone about all this foreshadowing: Avernum would've been a lot better prepared for the events of 2/3 if they had.) Also: I really liked the hydras because 1) they were a unique thing in the river-descent sequence area, which helped give it a different flavor; 2) you could kill them for meat, which mattered a lot more before the re-remake; and 3) there was that one cave where you helped some friendly hydras fight off the despicable, abhorrent, nightmarish chitrachs, which was pretty unique and memorable, despite the relative scarcity of hydras in the rest of the game. The hellhounds/rockhounds (whatever they are) are a lot less interesting, tho maybe I just feel like this cause I've played all the other SW games, and have grown to loathe that big red dog sprite set almost as much as I hate the chitrach one. (Okay, well. It's a distant second, maybe tied with the weird headless buff monster thing, which I never could tell whether it had three or four legs. But still.)

I'd argue that there are some fairly significant plot alterations in the first new remake: (spoilers I guess) the retconned characterizations of Garzahd and Hawthorne are pretty different, and the Kyass subplot casts the Kingdom of Avernum in a different light, in a way that isn't really displayed again until 5. The re-remake of 2 doesn't really change anything except swapping the lovable hydras for the irritating omnipresent hellhounds.

Erika is incapable of breaking the curse, because if she could, the ending of Avernum 3 would be kind of boring. (If she's so smart how come she didn't bring like an umbrella or something to the fight?) (Also, it's possible, though very difficult, to finish the game without Erika's help, in which case I guess she just stays in one of her towers and sulks.) (Alternate timeline fanfic idea: this happens, then Erika dies of intense shame when Manfred becomes emperor.) (The weird disconnect between the plot logic/game mechanics and what's intended to be a big climactic emotional event might usefully be contrasted with Solberg's fate in Avernum 6, which, while not entirely perfect, feels a lot more satisfying in terms of character and plot, and is written better in general.)

It's not really something like The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects or an episode of The Twilight Zone (which the author of I Am Legend actually wrote several episodes of), where the twist is the point of the story, and knowing the twist ruins the effect. If it were, I think the story would've ended much sooner, like an HP Lovecraft story, with the horrible revelation printed in italics as the last line of the novel. It's more about how the protagonist reacts to the revelation: he's a pretty straightforward everyman character who acts in a way that is presented to the reader as entirely reasonable, and the way anyone would be likely to act under the same circumstances. He's developed to show that he acts and feels the way he does for entirely relatable reasons. Then, suddenly, he finds out that he has in fact been doing terrible things. The reveal per se isn't the point so much as the larger themes.

This is true; my evaluation of the overall quality of games is inevitably only subjective. This is already happening: the forthcoming, successfully-Kickstartered Yooka-Laylee is an attempt to play on the nostalgia of 20-somethings for the awkward 3d platformers of the late 90s (albeit with smoother graphics); Minecraft has graphics blockier than any 3d game since the late 80s. As time passes, I imagine the Window of Acceptable Nostalgia will progress forward in time as the decision-makers who decide what gets funded and made are replaced by younger people... or at least, the marketing people will decide to try to cater to younger people.

I don't think game design's evolution is teleological; rather, I think it is like a drunk random-walking away from a lamppost (where the lamppost is bad game design). Over time, I think game design has gradually gotten better overall in that designers have a greater knowledge of what does and doesn't work, based on the experience of the past. Designers today have much more knowledge about what not to do than someone working in the 1980s. Control schemes are a good example of this: older console games (especially action games) often have awkward control schemes which force you to contort your hands painfully, whereas now, generally anyway, they're relatively standardized by genre into workable configurations. In areas where modern games are worse than their predecessors, it's usually because of perennial issues and design fads. Writing is a perennial issue: I don't think video game writers working today are really any better than those who worked in the medium 20-30 years ago. Many are inept non-authors who rustle up plots and dialogue on the level of bad 40s pulp fiction. The ones who have more talent are usually people who've worked in other media- film/TV or literature- and don't really know how to properly communicate a story using the medium of video games. Everyone in the mainstream games industry seems to want to make games more "cinematic", and awkwardly import techniques from film, which really do not work in the medium of games, and at best result in games that alternate gameplay with overlong windy cutscenes. Even the supposedly best-written video games released today tend to be clumsy, emotionally manipulative, and unimaginative. Conversely, video game music has never really been bad; at worst it's forgettable wallpaper, at best it's memorable and adds substantially to the game. Procedural generation/randomization is a design fad. It feels like half the games coming out on steam use randomized or procedurally generated level designs, which superficially creates "endless replay value", but mainly just creates dull, forgettable, lifeless level designs. It may save on design effort for the developer, and it might artificially inflate the theoretical amount of "content" in a game, but the end result isn't usually very interesting. There are a lot of things that are now common in video games that will eventually be considered horrible, I'm sure. But on the whole, I still feel that- at least partially because as an art medium, video games are inextricably intertwined with their mechanical functioning, even more so than film- game design will improve over time, on the whole. This kinda turned into a design philosophy essay, but I didn't really intend it to. Oh well.

I don't necessarily mean everything about CRPGs made at that time were bad... I just mean that there are certain features which developers tend to no longer use because they're not very fun (mazes), are frustrating for the user (excessive inventory juggling), or never really had much point in the first place (hunger/thirst systems, at least in non-survival-oriented RPGs). Even the best games of the era, while still good, usually fall prey to what would today be considered atrocious design, and I'm not sure most players enjoyed these things even at the time: they were just included in games because that was part of the genre, and inertia is powerful. Spiderweb games show a pretty clear willingness to adapt and change with the times, while still evoking that prior era of CRPGs. Exile I (or even Avernum 1) compared to A:EFtP is like night and day: the reworking of the inventory system, the addition of fast travel, the rewriting and additions that try to make the plot more than just an excuse for a dungeon crawl, the addition of combat skills which make melee combat more than just extended blow-trading, the (almost total) deprecation of light sources... and so on. I don't mean that Exile I is a bad game per se, but a good number of its features and mechanics aren't terrifically exciting, and cutting them reduces the amount of busywork/technical management burden on the player, without really making the game overall less compelling or fun. I'm sure there are people who miss some or all of these things, or don't like some of the additions, but Jeff Vogel does not appear to be one of them. (I kinda have to admire his almost hard-hearted lack of nostalgia for his own games, and willingness to rework them, sometimes brutally, to be more fun: A:EFtP isn't just "good for a remake of a 1990s RPG", it's good period.)

At least one had Vincent Price!

Things I have read recently: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman: a very good biography, which won the Pulitzer... there's not a lot to be said about it. It's an excellent biography. Chronicles of the First Crusade (ed. Christopher Tyerman) and Chronicles of the Crusades (Villehardouin + Joinville): reread these, actually. Primary sources on Crusades Nos 1, 4, and 7/8. The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer: a biography of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, the insane protofascist who somehow ended up running Mongolia briefly in the early 20s. A good book, despite some embarrassing errors (I think he refers to the Estonians as Slavs? which is not right.) Life's Lottery by Kim Newman: a "literary" (or at least, non-child-oriented) gamebook/choose your own adventure novel. It is a hell of a thing, and also I'm sure I've missed a bunch of it. The Arabian Nights: a cheapo "Barnes and Noble Classics" reprint of a public domain translation of the core stories + Aladdin and Ali Baba from the Victorian era. Inevitably bowdlerized, but there are some very nice engraved illustrations. My Ears are Bent by Joseph Mitchell: a compilation of the newspaper reporting Mitchell did in the 1930s before he moved to the New Yorker and became the greatest American nonfiction writer of the 20th century, and probably ever. Good, but only really of interest if you want to see where he came from pre-New Yorker. The Northern Crusades by Eric Christiansen: an underwhelming, short, over-broad survey of the Northern Crusades. Much too light on detail about the personalities involved, on details of major battles involved, on details of the diplomatic wrangling with Poland et al... unfortunately this is, as far as I can tell, the only book-length English work on the subject. From the late 70s, revised in 2000 I think? I looked at the bibliography and one of the first sources cited (on Baltic paganism) is by Gimbutas, which makes me profoundly leery. Presently reading: Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic by John French: the autobiography of Captain Beefheart's most-usual drummer/guitarist/arranger. Very interesting in places (insights on band dynamics and personalities, interviews with rarely-interviewed band members, the track-by-track commentary on every album in the back of the book), but inevitably patchy (not a lot going on when he's not actually in the band). The story of one man's relationship with Captain Beefheart, rather than the story of the Captain's career. Over 850 pages of fairly small print: a doorstopper. (Also has some very groan-inducing stuff... I skimmed towards the end a bit and there's a profoundly embarrassing bit where the author and his wife (now Evangelical/Charismatic Christians) undergo a horrible exorcism/faith healing thing where he's LIBERATED FROM THE SPIRIT OF WITCHCRAFT or something.) (Also the author met his wife when he was like 18 and she was like 12/13? and he describes her as beautiful and "jailbait" then... I mean, nothing against them? I'm glad they're happy together after so long. But also: that's super-creepy, dude. Don't lust for kids like that, even if it's for your wife, in retrospect.) I Am Legend by Richard Matheson: the vampire/zombie novel all modern works of vampire/zombie fiction rip off either directly (Night of the Living Dead took a lot from the first film adaption of the novel) or indirectly (the million NOTLD clones). (eg: any work that has zombie-ism or vampirism caused by a contagion as opposed to magic is lifting from this novel.) Terse and snappy like the best 50s pulp sci-fi, it is amazing how badly the Will Smith film botches everything about it. To read: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccacio: the Penguin Classics edition, which features over 150 pages of introduction where the translator explains his methods and decisions and the themes of the novel and stuff, I guess. Very exciting. Some book about the history of gold... it's one of those books on a semi-topical subject (the popularity of gold following the 08 economic crash) by a journalist: one of those books that has suspiciously wide margins, and 1.5x spacing, and is still only about 200 pages long, and which really probably should have been a series of magazine articles in Smithsonian or NatGeo or something, and where you KNOW half the book is gonna be interviews with people interspersed with bits of cursory research into the history on the subject. But hey, it was on clearance for $2 at Half Price Books, and I had a gift card from Christmas. Probably gonna reread Dracula, because it's so good, and because I got a new copy, because my old copy was evidently based on a horrible OCR or the text, replete with horrible typos. Typos, in a public domain book that came out over 100 years ago. At least nick the Project Gutenberg text, guys, it's not that hard. The "new" copy of Dracula I got is a BANTAM CLASSICS edition, probably from the 80s (the introduction is copyright 1981), but I suspect this is one of those lines of public domain books that the publisher never lets go out of print, so realistically it could've been printed any time between 81 and about 2000 or so. There is an ad on the back endpaper of the book from the Ad Council. It warns that unless we do something, the literacy rate of the USA could be down to 30% by the year 2000. God forbid.

This is true, but I mean modern CRPG-standard, basically. The same holds for Eschalon's mapping system: in "old-school" CRPGs automapping was an exception rather than a rule, but to play a CRPG made in the past 15 years or so which doesn't have a tolerable automap system is... well, intolerable. Eschalon adds insult to injury in both cases by forcing the player to spend precious, precious skill points to get their hit-rate and automap to reasonable levels. Also, I kinda glossed over exactly how Eschalon's combat system works a little cause I didn't feel like explaining it in-depth in that post, and I felt like what I said communicated what I meant reasonably well. In Eschalon, the default hit-rate is 50%, but, confusingly, it isn't substantially effected by your skill with the weapon you're currently using, or WHICH weapon you're using, or even by your Dexterity stat. The one stat that affects hit-rate the most is "Concentration", and unless you're pumping skill points into Concentration every single level, you will very rapidly encounter enemies who are fast enough (or at least dodgy enough) to bring your hit-rate down to 25% or less. Even if you're pumping Concentration, you'll still encounter enemies who can bring your hit-rate down pretty low, and combat always seems to degenerate into a long series of misses punctuated by lucky hits. Further, IIRC, Concentration doesn't affect your own dodge rate against enemies, and since you're pumping all your points into it you won't have much chance to spend points on other skills like Strength or Dexterity; thus, the only really viable build in my experience is a big bumbling tank that can slowly chip away at the enemy's HP, unless you want every battle to be wildly luck-based. (In the first game, actually, another viable build is what I guess you'd call "assassin": the game has an extremely broken stealth system that you can abuse extensively. You can hit an enemy- even the final boss- then instantly disappear into half-shadow, without said enemy having any idea where you are, and not even the AI to try to bump into you.) Anyway, I guess you could say Eschalon tries to accurately hark back to the late 80s/early 90s of CRPG design... but you could say, perhaps equally validly, that CRPGs are not made like that any longer for a reason.

Uh. Hm. Strom Thurmond split to form the Dixiecrat party in 1948, 16 years before the Civil Rights Act. After the 48 election, he returned to the Democratic party until leaving in 64 to join the Republicans, a few months after the Civil Rights Act was passed. Both parties had a significant number of racist members at the time, but the Democratic Party had a firm hold on the extra-racist "Solid South" ever since the Civil War. Thurmond left the party because, as the Civil Rights Act (and then the Voting Rights Act) were championed by LBJ (the de facto party leader), and much of the party leadership favored more civil rights legislation. This wasn't a sudden thing, but part of an ongoing realignment in the parties going back to the 50s, with the previously-solid South drifting away from the New Deal coalition over racial issues. They didn't go Republican because the Republicans were especially more racist, but because they were no longer able to prevent the Democrats from moving towards civil rights. The end of the New Deal coalition was cemented by Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1968. Contrarily, Blacks, who had supported the Republican party, generally, since the time of Lincoln, were drifting towards the Democratic party. I don't think it's quite fair to blame either party (as opposed to individuals) for opposing the Civil Rights Act at the time, but the people who opposed it who weren't already in the GOP generally joined the GOP after it had passed, and the GOP proved itself perfectly willing to accommodate racists if it helped them and hurt the Democrats. In general too, the American political parties are both so old that I think it's unfair to criticize either party as a body for its positions outside the current party system: they're both so entrenched that political realignments tend to happen inside the two-party system, rather than via the formation of new parties.

The Amish generally don't vote because, since the President is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, they feel it would contradict their pacifism and conscientious objection, and make them complicit in war. I don't necessarily agree with their choice but I can see and respect the logic behind it. I think it's disappointing that Obama proved to be an outlier in terms of voter turnout rather than the sign of a trend towards greater, broader participation.

This actually isn't really the case. “A major study from Gallup’s Jonathan Rothwell confirmed this. Trump support was correlated with higher, not lower, income, both among the population as a whole and among white people. Trump supporters were less likely to be unemployed or to have dropped out of the labor force. Areas with more manufacturing, or higher exposure to imports from China, were less likely to think favorably of Trump.” “Even in the general election, while support for Trump is correlated most strongly with party ID, the second biggest factor, per the analysis of Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner, was racial resentment. Economic pessimism and income level were statistically insignificant.” Trump didn't win because he appealed to the disaffected poor- Clinton actually won more votes than Trump among the poor. He won because he appealed to the racial fears of the white majority that fears losing its majority. There are real economic concerns. And Clinton wasn't tremendously better on them than Trump. They just aren't what decided this election. The problem, I think, is that it's very easy to use economic problems in combination with, or as a smokescreen for racial fears and insecurities: "the Mexicans are taking our jobs!" "China is taking all our manufacturing!" "Welfare queens!"

This is true, but what I mean is that the concerns of that war are so remote from today's concerns (in our postimperial world) that it's difficult to relate to them immediately: if a Bourbon personal union of France/Spain had happened, the consequences would've surely meant a lot to the people of the time, but in retrospect it's hard to say things would've been very different. The everyday lives of the average non-noble people of Europe wouldn't've appreciably changed, unlike they did during the Napoleonic Wars or World War II. Things would only have changed on a grand scale, in a system that is now essentially irrelevant. Same with Lynaeus, mostly: the Tawon ruled most of the continent once before, and there's not really any indication that they were particularly cruel or demanding overlords. They certainly didn't accomplish much in the way of eliminating local national identities. If they conquered much of the world again, what should that matter to the player? Why should it matter to the player which overlord the people of the Kva pay homage to- their king or the Tawon emperor- unless they have an anachronistic belief in the rightness of an order of nation-states? Essentially what I mean is that the stakes in the Avadon series are much too high: that is, on too high a scale. You never get any idea of what's at stake on a personal, immediate, sympathetic level, so the conflicts become cold and intellectual. In Avernum 2, it's clear that what's at stake is the Avernites' fundamental rights to dissent and creativity and individualism. If the Empire conquers them, they'll be lucky to survive as slaves, and even if they were given amnesty and allowed to return to the Empire, it'd be a return to the stifling conformist political order that ejected them in the first place. I think the Geneforge games (mainly the earlier ones) have a similar problem: you just don't get to know enough people to care about the issues on anything but the most abstracted level, like a philosophical thought experiment. Only with 4/5 do you really get a feel for the personalities behind the issues. In Avadon, the personalities behind the issues are essentially Redbeard and Dheless; Redbeard gets shallower rather than deeper over the course of the series, and you spend like ten minutes with Dheless and all he gives you is some vague national revanchist pride stuff. Maybe Redbeard's methods are justified; maybe Dheless's rebellion is justified; but we just don't get enough information to make this decision.

America gets the president it deserves, I guess.

I had this problem a lot with the games. It's like reading about something like the Seven Years' War or the War of the Spanish Succession: the issues at stake are so remote from my experience in the present, the alliances are so arbitrary, the causes so nakedly realpolitikal and self-interested that, while maybe interesting intellectually, I can't really bring myself to identify with either side, or to root for either, or even just to think one side is more "right" than the other. The Pact doesn't really have any ideals it stands for. It's just an entity desperate to preserve its imperial hegemony over the Farlands. Some of the constituent nations are maybe more admirable than others, but on the whole they're all in it out of self-interest. You aren't just fighting to defend the Pact nations, which would at least be sort of sympathetic; you're also fighting to restore the overbearing, nearly master-colony relationship between Pact and Farlands. Redbeard is a man with a powerful vision, but it's a very short-sighted vision incapable of inspiring. And then the ending straight up says that nothing you fought for mattered in the end, anyway: maybe you bought another few decades before the Pact tore itself apart for good, or maybe you made it happen a few decades sooner. Whatever. It's hard to care about the internal disputes of the Pact nations either... the Beraza Woods thing is like viewing the Alsace-Lorraine issue as an American: who cares? Why should I care whether the semifeudal mageocracy or the clannish, feud-ridden tribal collective gets this terrible forest?

AVADON 4: you play as a young man/woman toiling at a dead-end job in an obscure corner of Lynaeus... then you get attacked by assassins seemingly at random! and find out you're one of Redbeard's children!!! Then it turns out that the bad guy... is Miranda's son/daughter who she mentioned in passing once!!! And you gotta travel the world seeking out Redbeard's other secret families, and your half-siblings!!! And team up with them to save the Pact again, or something.

You meet those Svorgaldi settlers in Botan's sidequest... which isn't really the same, but was actually one of my favorite parts of the game because it showed a group of people with human concerns in a setting not stereotyped by their nationality. I was really disappointed by the lack of more development on Redbeard in 3. The entire series is essentially about him: Miranda's betrayal, the Farlands war, the spiralling internal disputes inside the Pact, are all kind of his fault, stemming from his black-and-white view of the world and lack of empathy. And yet, at the end of the series, it's hard to say you know more about the man than you did at the start. Part of the problem is that he's a profoundly static character: almost all of the time he's just slouching around in his current bunker and waiting for you to take the initiative. You don't get to see him interact with other characters enough- how would Redbeard treat a nominal equal or superior (eg, a council member) to their face? How does he cut the deals that lead to the deaths of innocent people in return for political favor? How does he keep going so intensely for so long? (And "magic" is a pretty unsatisfying response to this.) What does he do in his off hours? Where did he get the apparently unique magic he uses to stay strong and youthful? We never get to see any of this. We don't even actually see Redbeard interact directly with Miranda except briefly in 3- and the relationship between them is one of the main threads of the series. Also w/r/t the world getting exhausted: the super-linear nature of the Avadon games and the immediate series of tasks you're ordered to do means that you basically get railroaded through most of the areas of Lynaeus, and it's hard to get much more impression from them than a name, a biome, and an unusual local cultural quirk that the local elder/leader/commander can explain to you. Further, since you travel directly to flashpoint areas by portal, the world feels claustrophobic and small. (You don't use portals so much in 3 but the point holds true because the levels are spread in-universe hundreds of miles apart on the overworld map.) Each area is too homogeneous as well. There's supposed to be a temperate northern reach of the Kva, but we never see it- just the cactus-strangled desert hellscape of the south. The Tawon Empire is meant to have great marble cities filled with rich, cosmopolitan citizens- but all you see is a lot of swamp and some remote temples and a provincial village. It's a shame. Semi-related: I think part of the problem with Avadon's characterization, contrasted with Exile/Avernum's, is that everyone has to be part of a "faction". Nobody gets to have really unique desires other than your companions, and everyones' needs are framed by their faction... It's very genericizing. Exile/Avernum, on the other hand, has a world full of dissenters, rebels, oddballs, weirdos, etc, each of whom has their own angle. It makes for less macro-scale drama, obviously, but allows for more and more interesting micro-scale drama. In Exile/Avernum: That woman in the fort at the start of the first game wants to know if her sister is okay and where she is. The Nephil bartender guy whose name I also forget sometimes has issues with racism from humans. Blacksmith man has a nonfunctional copy of Demonslayer as a conversation piece, and dreams of one day seeing the real thing. In Avadon: Some shamaness woman wants you to fetch her some comfrey seeds, because she's a nature woman and of course she does. Other shamaness woman wants you to remove squatters from a magic stone circle... because of course she does. OTHER shamaness lady wants you to stop a local drake from upsetting the balance of the Green Refuge... because of course she does. I still like and enjoy the Avadon series... just a lot of the time it feels like a lower-budget Bioware RPG. (Sorry for the long aimless post but I gotta lotta thoughts to put down here.)