googoogjoob

Warning: this post is a bit long, and also obviously spoilery. A major problem with the Avadon games is that the world is very finite, and it's all basically sketched out in the first game- most of the codex entries are simply grandfathered into 2/3 from 1. By the end of game 2, you've already seen every major region of the world except Svorgald. You've already encountered all the exotic cultures of this world. You've already done great deeds all over. So in 3, you get what are very close to reruns of episodes from the earlier games: the waveringly loyal Khemerian village that must be dealt with (again). Delving into the Corruption to stop Miranda (again). Going into the Warborn lands to storm a big Titan fortress (again). (Though this time you don't get the option to betray your allies.) In each game you have to descend into the depths of the dungeons of Avadon (though for different reasons), and the essential layout doesn't change. The Eternal Prisoner is always there, and you can always free him, but he's always back again in the next game, with most of his dialogue copy-pasted but with the date changed. You always repeatedly encounter a recurring character whose motives are doubtful and who tries to get you to undermine the Pact (Tarkus, the Scout, Dheless/his crystal). The climax of each game is your choice whether to kill or remain loyal to Redbeard (but again, he's always back again anyway in 2/3). Maybe it'd've been better to have a larger world? Or to be more stingy with how much of it you see over the first two games? I don't know. Maybe it'd've been better to keep Miranda's betrayal back until the second game? Or to move the start of the war forward (as Jeff suggests he should've done in the manual)? There are so many ways this could've gone differently and I suppose it's pointless to speculate. Another major issue is the character writing. Jeff Vogel has always been a top-notch worldbuilder, and he's always been able to write memorable, funny characters, but he didn't start really trying to work at character development and character drama until Avernum 5/Geneforge 4. He's gotten better since then, but I think he's still not quite mature at it, and it's still a weakness. It's perfectly fine to have minor characters you only see briefly be memorable caricatures, but even the characters who get the most development- your companions- have a tendency to lapse into caricature. Maybe he spread his effort and skill too thin by trying to do 4-5 character arcs and character developments per game? I don't know. Redbeard and Miranda are the NPCs (besides your party) who receive the most development, and in the first game it really is pretty interesting to learn more about these people. But both gradually devolve into one-note caricatures: Miranda becomes a revenge-obsessed monster and Redbeard becomes, as he himself describes it, a force of nature, single-minded and paranoid and obsessed. Both of them could've made for fantastic tragic figures (Miranda ruined by her inability to put the Pact above her personal life; Redbeard ruined or near-ruined by his lack of empathy that drives the Farlands into a rebellion on his watch, that he is too late to stop). So many possibilities. In the end I think Avadon (as a work of narrative fiction) is good but not great (as a series of games it's obviously really good). It's like a pulpy high fantasy novel trilogy from the 70s or 80s. I think maybe after the next new Spiderweb game comes out, it might be seen retrospectively to be a transitional work, wedged between the high concept, high fantasy earlier Spiderweb games and whatever comes next. (At least, I hope it's a transitional work, rather than the mold any new games will follow. I'd still play the games even if they were all formulaic generic-fantasy romps, because I like the game rules, I like the writing, I like the creative settings, etc. But I'd much rather see Jeff advance and mature as an artist/writer as well as a programmer/designer, and do new and interesting things.)

He doesn't advocate covering up your background, just things about it that might provide leverage to enemies. He openly admits that, for example, he used to paint as a hobby; he just stonewalls on any possible family(s) he might have or have had. The two mysterious portals in his tower certainly imply that he's hiding something though. I don't quite recall but he might mention which Pact state he's from in one of the games... IIRC Callan is from the Wyldrylm and Miranda is Kellem. (Incidentally, Miranda's shade lets slip that she has at least one child, who Redbeard never knew about. Sounds like fertile ground for fan theories to me.)

Redbeard doesn't use soul jars if you fight him in 2, though. (Staying mum about fighting him in 3 cause maybe that's spoilers.) So, sadly, scotch that theory. The fighting Redbeard endings of 1/2 are obviously noncanon anyway. You DO find the potion stuff Redbeard uses to keep alive in both 2 and 3 in his tower, but you never figure out what it is. Also, Redbeard evidently simply doesn't remember his youth or young adulthood. He can't even remember whether he was involved in assassinating Keeper Telera. The second Dirk Gently book does the same thing, with the added feature that gods are created by belief: none exist before humans invent them. I think the necromancy thing is alright, and would be great... if it weren't so similar to the crystal souls. Maybe a better idea would've been to have the "gods" be essentially robots that just think they're dead sovereigns, rather than the sovereigns' actual ghosts imprisoned in a construct body. Oh well.

(Bit of a digression here, but if these forums aren't for overanalyzing these games, what are they for?) As of Avadon 3, it apparently is not possible to step down as Keeper: in one ending, you (as Keeper) attempt to resign but are captured and restrained by your Hearts and forced to keep the job till you're murdered. It's been retconned that you can only leave the office in a body bag, which is very strange and conflicts with other information in the Codex. (For example, there were prior interregnums in the office of Keeper, and Redbeard was installed in the position by Hanvar's Council rather than by slaying his predecessor. He mentions in 1 I think that he can't even remember whether he was involved in slaying Telera, who held the office several holders before him.) In light of this, I'd argue that Redbeard isn't especially wicked or brutal per se, but is rather an inevitable product of the world and laws that produced him. The Pact is an essentially untenable proposition in the long term (mainly I think because of its constitutional incapability to incorporate new states, and also partially because of the essential unaccountability of the Council to the people at large), and Avadon (and thus by extension Redbeard) are the only things capable of holding it together. Killing Redbeard just means another like him will eventually seize control of Avadon, even with oversight by the Council (Redbeard maneuvered his way into the position by posing as a weak, ineffectual compromise candidate); and dismantling Avadon means either the Pact will fall, or the Council will recreate it under another name. If Redbeard did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Khalida's motivations are very confused, because 1) she deliberately lets many of the camp-dwellers escape in favor of slaying Trupo; 2) Trupo himself is not a deserter or a bandit, but she demands you slay him; 3) she seems to want to gain Redbeard's approval for her acts, despite being willing to rebel against him at the first excuse; 4) Khalida herself is a Hand rather than a member of the regular Pact army, and normally desertion would be an issue of internal military discipline- it's not her job and it might be outside of her legal powers to hunt deserters. I think it's perfectly understandable that Khalida might resent the deserters, and blame Trupo for sheltering them, but on the other hand she doesn't seem to actually care very much about punishing the deserters per se so much as pursuing a personal hate-driven vendetta against Trupo. She's made less sympathetic because of how irrational and illogical her acts are, how unclear her goal is, how she's willing to compromise Avadon's interests (Redbeard mentions the deserters might've been useful informers), and potentially how she's abusing her power essentially to murder a guy. She also pressures you into complicity with the act, and acts sanctimonious if you refuse- she just totally refuses to sympathize with you if you decide against murdering a man in cold blood. Contrast this with Botan, who wants to save the lives of people who are technically criminals, regardless of the cost; or Sevilin, whose target may have been technically pardoned, but who is still a criminal, personally murdered several Hands (who were Sevilin's friends), and is of no further use to Avadon; or with Alcander, whose motive is naked greed, but who doesn't really intend to hurt or kill anyone in its pursuit. None of the other Hands in any of the games pressures you to knowingly murder innocents in the same way, except arguably Rudow, who has his own, other problems. UNRELATED: but this seems like a good place for it since it's relevant to character discussions: anyone else notice/scratch your head at the apparent change in Avadon 3 of "you have to kill the Keeper to become the new Keeper" from being the de facto state of affairs to, evidently, the de jure? The Codex still has the grandfathered-in entry about the pre-Redbeard Keepers, and mentions interregnums and Keepers not succeeded by their assassins; but in the game itself, everyone acts as if it is The Law that you have to personally murder the Keeper to succeed them. In my opinion this pretty drastically changes part of Redbeard's characterization: in the earlier games his iron grip on power and paranoia were at least potentially self-serving, and he feared external assassins just as much as internal ones, but as of 3 his paranoia is more focused on his subordinates, and it's apparently justified by the law.

They never leave: you just have to get them to say they'll return to their village, and then go tell the questgiver about it.

I think that's always been a problem with the series. You get barely any interaction with others regarding your companions apart from reporting to Callan/Redbeard about their incompetence/treason. It'd add a lot to see Dedrick sparring with Kaede, or to have Polus accidentally let slip that Nathalie still has a teddy bear, or for Torch to get in an argument with Botan. As-is, their concerns and worldviews are very neatly segregated from the rest of the world, and they're all perfectly willing to follow your lead in the field without complaint (usually). It'd also be nice to see more of Redbeard interacting with others. He obviously gets by far the most characterization of anyone in the series, but you only see him talking to others when he's, like, intimidating insubordinate underlings, or screaming at Miranda's shade. I wanna see Redbeard give an LBJ-style "treatment" to a member of Hanvar's Council... alternating between wheedling, promises of future aid, vague threats, outright pleading. He obviously has to be a very canny politician as well as a brutal warrior, but you don't really get to see much of that side of him.

The most interesting dialogue and character insights you get in Avadon 3 are from the remarks your companions make when important things happen in the field... but obviously you are going to necessarily miss 60% of these, and you're probably going to never really use one or two of your companions anyway, so they stay in the camp and remain blobs that constantly spout their concerns. Incidentally, I thought it was hilarious that you can repeatedly tell Rudow that you want nothing to do with his treason, and even snitch on him to Redbeard, and he always just laughs it off and assumes you'll still help him. (Which to be fair is true... need that super-good shaman jerkin.) It's true... but it's so blatant that it's absurd. ("Rudow... I think you're committing a crime of the highest order and I refuse to continue to help you." "Hand <GETPLAYERNAME>, I know you have passing doubts, but I know you'll help me when the time comes." "Rudow, I reported your actions to Redbeard. I advised him to kill you ASAP to stop the leak of information to Protus." "Oh <GETPLAYERNAME>, you always were such a kidder.")

Khalida was interesting and sympathetic in 2, but in 3 she really crossed the line with her sidequest. Other sidequests in the series involve doing unpleasant or unwise things, but generally the (human) victims are legitimately bad people who have been protected or ignored by Avadon for political reasons (Xenophon, the Honored Forge clan, Cahil & co, the Gray Raptors, etc). Trupo and his followers are guilty of (at worst) sheltering bandits, and most of them are refugees and shell-shocked deserters. To retain her loyalty, Khalida demands that you murder them. She comes across as even more brutal and stiff-necked than Redbeard, but without even Redbeard's Machiavellian ends-justify-the-means logic, just violent hatred. Ironically, her character arc in 2 revolved around her memory loss and fugue states caused by the dungeons (whether it's mundane PTSD or something more magical isn't explained, but the effect is the same), but she has no sympathy for soldiers traumatized in the war who refuse to keep fighting. This massive lack of empathy on her part just sucks all of her sympatheticness right out of her and leaves her a barbaric mess.

As-is I think the gods are too similar to crystal souls: spirits of the revered dead brought back into powerful temporal forms by the rituals of their followers to provide advice and guidance. The only real difference is that crystal souls don't need the intervention of their followers to create their physical form, but even then you only have hearsay that the gods' bodies are necromantic creations. The conception of the gods' existence and power fluctuating with their followers' devotion and attention is more interesting, I think, and could provide an interesting angle on the clear Roman-esque deified emperor thing.

Vitality is automatically restored to max when you return to camp.

Said opera also has exactly two named characters.

I'm not saying "these names should be on the list", I'm saying "these names strike me as conspicuous and might be fruitful ground for further inquiry". The Mohawk thing is a pretty wildly incongruous feature in what is otherwise a pretty grim game (the character herself talks to you about Redbeard committing war crimes), suggesting some sort of in-joke or personal reference; the form of the name (Hungarian) suggests a potential avenue of research. I'm not personally acquainted with Mariann Krizsan and I'm not inclined to try to dig through others' lives to find out what the secret behind a video game character's name is. I'm just trying to convey that the facts might imply a particular point of entry for an in-joke. Also- when I say "intentional reference", I do not mean in the sense of a content-related reference: obviously nothing about Zhethron's Keep evokes any plot points from Gravity's Rainbow, or whatever. I mean that the names are intentionally drawn from a particular real-world source, the referent of which would only be clear to the initiated (eg, people who've read Pynchon and Wallace). I'm sorry if I was unclear: I meant "intentional reference" to mean basically the same thing as "cameo" is used to mean in this context.

I agree! But- just because he pulled back on using cameos doesn't mean he can't or won't start using them again. There might be other cameos in Avadon 1/2 that everyone missed; I posted the Spencer/Davis and Pynchon/Wallace things here because they're conspicuous and very much fit the pattern of prior Spiderweb name cameos, such that I'd be very surprised if they were not cameos. The names are just so incongruous in context that it's hard to believe they're not an intentional reference to something. This also is true. That said, I suspect a real-world person connection with regards to Magdolna and maybe Virag on the grounds that 1) they are both Hungarian feminine given names and 2) Mariann Krizsan immigrated from Hungary to the USA in the 70s. A quick googling reveals a good dozen or so "Magdolna/Magdi Krizsan"s with internet presences, so I suspect one or both names are references to friends or relatives of Mariann's... perhaps she has a cousin who got an embarrassing haircut recently?

It's odd that Avadon 3 alone of its trilogy would have name cameos, but maybe he's just getting back into the groove of them after the dearth of cameos in 1/2? It is a mystery. (Alternately, maybe his name generator broke and he had to reach for new names on short notice.) Spencer and Davis are conspicuous in Lynaeus by virtue of having real-world names, and that they're paired up (they even share their dialogue) suggests very very strongly to me that they're meant to be a reference to Spencer Davis (and his Group). Unless Jeff has a pair of friends named Spencer and Davis, the musician seems like the most logical reference. (That they're named at all strongly suggests that it's some sort of cameo: none of the other guards in Avadon, Zhethron's Keep, etc have unique names.) I wouldn't have thought Wallace was a name cameo except for his proximity to Pynchon, when of course my mind jumped to that other great writer of postmodernist doorstoppers. Incidentally, also very conspicuous and maybe cameos- all flavor characters on the main floor of Avadon: -Magdolna (described as having a Mohawk hairdo, which strongly suggests some sort of in-joke to me) -Virag -Erhard All have real-world names. "Magdolna" and "Virag" are both Hungarian feminine given names, which sends up flags regarding their potential connection. Erhard is a German name, though, so maybe it's not connected to the others.

I'm replaying the game as a different class and I noticed, what's, uh. Not quite a bug, but a discrepancy? When you meet Eye Laria in the dungeons, she describes herself as having been Head Librarian, and then reassigned to other duties following Miranda's betrayal, because they "didn't need librarians". But in Avadon 2, the head librarian is Eye Berenger, who explains explicitly that Redbeard sought him out as the best librarian in Kellemderiel, as they needed a new librarian to help rebuild the library. Also in Avadon 2, Laria is a tinkermage working on Avadon's defenses, and has nothing to do with the library. (Berenger has disappeared as of 3, maybe fleeing during Protus's purges of Redbeard loyalists.) Avadon 3's "Laria" also first appears in the dungeons as a tinkermage, then her sprite mysteriously switches to that of a sorceress by the time she reaches Zhethron's Keep, where she has no turrets or anything. I guess you could try to explain this as Laria being promoted to Head Librarian, briefly, between the ending of Avadon 2 and Redbeard's disappearance, but it seems more likely that Mr Vogel passingly confused Eye Laria with Eye Leira from Avadon 1, who WAS the Head Librarian, but who dies in the attack on the castle in the endgame. EDIT: Further confusing the issue, the commander of Fort Foresight in Avadon 3 is Eye Leora, whose dialogue portrait is a reuse of Eye Leira's from Avadon 1.

The central cavern guards in the Avadon dungeon in Avadon 3 are named Spencer and Davis. (Tho funnily enough the Spencer Davis group aren't named among the musicians in the thanks section of the manual; but what else could they refer to?) Not noted here before (apparently?) but all the Avadon games have Hanvar's Council, named after the in-universe Overlord Hanvar, who in turn is probably named after the Warden Hanvar of EverQuest, also namechecked in Avernum 4. (An unusual singleton name reference, but given that the name has been used before in a different Spiderweb game, and was very definitely a reference then, it seems reasonable to assume that this also is a reference to EQ.) EDIT: The Pact commander of the forces at Zhethron's Keep is Commander Wallace, and the quartermaster is Craftmaster Pynchon.

No love for shamans... personally I think I'd like shamans an awful lot better if you had a 4-slot party: with only 3 slots to fill, it feels like kind of a waste to have one slot filled by what's basically a support class, especially because with scarabs and scrolls you can distribute healing duties to other party members. As for characters, Nathalie is obviously best. I was kind of disappointed with the potential endings for her: either she's dissatisfied still, and goes and disappears (presumably searching for more power), or she's somehow satisfied with the knowledge she gleaned from the secret library, and becomes totally fine. Neither really felt like a satisfying end to her arc: I always thought that her claims that she'd be content if only she had access to the Avadon libraries were kind of a lie she told herself and eventually maybe came to believe, and that she would never really be satisfied, regardless of how much power she had. I was hoping she'd, like, keep obsessively attempting to hoard more and more power until she ends up dying when she tries to fight five dragons at once, or something.

Trying to come up with (relatively) recent titles nobody's mentioned... Expeditions: Conquistador is a really good turn-based RPG... It's kind of like Heroes of Might and Magic or King's Bounty in that it has an overworld/battle area distinction and some resource management, but like a Spiderweb RPG in that the combat is mostly small-scale skirmishes with a few persistent, levelling hero characters fighting a bunch of enemies. Also like a SW game in that it has a complex, morally ambiguous, branching story, with different factions you can side with. The sequel, Expeditions: Viking is coming out next year, and should be good too. Miasma 1/2 are obscure-ish, brief XBLIG/PC games with turn-based tactical RPG combat. Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion isn't really an RPG, more of a turn-based tactical wargame, but it has an RPG-like focus on story and character development (with a very large cast), and a very detailed fictional world (including a huge in-game encyclopedia). The Telepath RPGs (http://sinisterdesign.net/) are pretty good. Planet Alcatraz is a decent tactical RPG, but closer to (read: a knockoff of) Fallout 1/2, than to Spiderweb. Also, it has an atrocious/hilarious translation from Russian, incredibly poor voice acting (which never matches the subtitles) and some uncomfortable sexism/racism/homophobia, which is disappointingly common in Russian games. But hey, it's four bucks on Steam. (The sequel is also on Steam, but isn't translated into English, which is maybe just as well, because it apparently reuses 90% of the maps from the first game.) Honorable Mentions: Frayed Knights (decent old-school dungeon crawler; first person w/ turn-based party-based combat; worth mentioning cuz a) it's good and it has good writing) Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire (isometric turn-based tactical RPG; I haven't played it, but I've had it strongly recommended to me) PS I'd personally recommend against Eschalon. They're brief, repetitive, frustrating, and dull, from the barely-there story (you wake up with amnesia at the start of BOTH the first two games, despite being the same character; the plot doesn't really happen until the third game), the inexplicable design choices (a default 50% chance to hit, instead of the CRPG-standard, D&D-derived 95%; you need to spend precious skill points to have an automap at all; chest contents are random, so you'll often fight through a trash mob to be rewarded with literal trash- unless you savescum), and frankly the intense tedium and frustration of playing them (get ready to spend half your time in-game sleeping, because you only regain health very slowly, and healing potions are scarce, expensive, and precious). They're also super-short, especially the third one, which ends right where you'd expect the second act to get going. Hope Basilisk's mooted sci-fi RPG turns out good, though.

Oh... is this so you can't screw up the scripting during the final return to Avadon sequence? It'd be nice if it sent you back to Foresight until then, then swapped back to one of the other bases once you trigger the final sequence flag. Since your companions jump ship when you enter the portal, you have to run all the way back to the Fort from the lair to retrieve them, every time you use it. (It's pretty jarring in in-universe terms too, cause Zhethron's base is (in-universe) weeks of travel from Fort Foresight. Though it's not like travel time is totally consistent in plot terms, either.)

I beat Avadon 3 earlier this morning. It was pretty good, I enjoyed it. Anyway tho I found some bugs and I don't really know where the best place to report them is? Here? Steam forums? Via email to the support address? I'm going with here though. Spoilers if you haven't beaten Avadon 3, obviously. -Foresight spies quest triggers the "to the north..." spies escaping dialogue even if you're coming through the secret gate- seems like you need to have activated the escaping spies event first to be able to cut them off and fight them? -same quest- after having cut off and killed the spies, if you take the overland way 'round back to the fort, the "to the north..." event fires AGAIN when you reach the appropriate area, despite said spies being dead -after using the Fort Foresight portal to return to Avadon, using the Avadon portal dumps you back in Zhethron's Lair (which I assume it's not meant to do, as the destination of the Avadon portal changes from the Refuge to the Lair when Redbeard moves camp); this isn't game-breaking obviously, but it's pretty irritating -during the final battle with Redbeard, at one point he staggered and the dialogue mentioned that he's being affected by the "poison which Protus put in his healing potion"... despite my refusing to let Protus taint the potion earlier (maybe it's assumed that since I'm fighting Redbeard, I turned on him long before?) -not a bug, but somewhat incongruous: in the ending, the text first says that I (paraphrasing) "work behind the scenes to undermine Avadon's power and reach"- presumably because I earlier announced my intention to become Keeper and then step down; however, the ending later states that under my Keepership, Avadon reaches "new heights of power and prestige"- maybe because I became Keeper at all? It also mentions that I, as Keeper, both try to make peace without sowing the seeds of future rebellions, AND set up the conditions necessary for future revolt

Oh, no, I don't mean to imply that any of the ideas in Avadon are stolen. I just mean that there are some very interesting coincidences between the settings of Avalon and Avadon. Beyond the initial settings, the games diverge wildly in plot, characterization, etc.

Both of these are true, but I think Siege of Avalon and Avadon are set apart by several unique features: In them, the central fortress doesn't actually rule over the nations that are part of the organization being the biggest. In Avalon/Avadon it's more like NATO or the CIS: all the states involved in the pacts in the games are part of them voluntarily, as part of a defense against external forces, not as a result of being coerced into submitting to the international organization or conquered. Incidentally, the name similarity thing could be a total coincidence, but given the other factors, that seems less likely. Also, another thing: in Avadon, the five member states of the pact are represented in Avadon's insignia by a five-pointed star; in Avalon, the seven member states of the pact are represented by a seven-pointed star. (This is probably just coincidence cause it's such an obvious symbol, though.)

Hey, alright, so. Haven't posted here before, but I've lurked for a while. Anyway: Years ago I played an episodic RPG called Siege of Avalon. It's pretty good (well-written, allows a diverse range of strategies), but with a few serious issues that prevented it from being a hit (the episodes were overpriced, for example). The company that made it, Digital Tome, were working on a sequel, but folded soon after releasing the final episode of Avalon. You can still find CD-ROM copies of Siege of Avalon around, but as far as I know you can't actually buy it digitally anywhere. Anyway, this is all relevant because of some interesting similarities between Siege of Avalon and Avadon: in Siege of Avalon, an uneasy pact of several member states, each with a distinct culture and traditions, band together to defend themselves from an external threat. The pact is defended and enforced by a centrally-located fortress led by a charismatic, forceful leader. The player is a new recruit who arives at the fortress at the start of the game, and the game follows the recruit as they perform various tasks for the people and factions inside and out the fortress, accompanied by a pair of allies chosen from a diverse bunch. There is the requisite set of betrayals, shady pasts, spies, and reversals of fortune that any good RPG has. Now, the previous description pretty obviously correlates with Avadon in broad terms, and I've never seen these similarities between the two games noted before. There are, of course, many differences between the two games, ranging from the minor (Avalon has seven member states to Avadon's five; the heads of state of several of the nations are in the fortress itself) to the major (the fortress in Avalon is under siege, restricting the player's movements to the immediate environs; the leader of the fortress in Avalon is essentially a soldier and general rather than the Machiavellian schemer that Redbeard is). Also, there's the obvious title correlation. I don't by any means intend to suggest that Avadon's plot is ripped off or copied from Siege of Avalon- the two games play out entirely differently past the initial setting. But, I do wonder if the setting of Avadon was influenced by Siege of Avalon. If it isn't, it'd be a very interesting coincidence. As an interesting side note, Bjorn Lynne, noted demoscene musician, composed much of the in-game music for Siege of Avalon; he also did the title music for both Avernum 4 and Geneforge 4. Further, incidentally, the first episode of Siege of Avalon (of six episodes) is freeware, and well worth checking out if you're into RPGs. (Though, considering this is the Spiderweb forum, I think it's safe to bet everyone here is into RPGs.)