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theatresweetheart · 4 years

Note

For the bad thing happens bingo prompts: broken wrist and analogical? could you make it g/t too, somehow?

Student Struggles

Summary: He knew it was illogical and ridiculous to make such an emotionally biased decision. Yet, Logan did it anyway.

Warnings: Broken limb (non graphic), humans treated as lesser, main character referred to as an “it” (non malicious), fear.

Pairings: Platonic Analogical

Characters: Logan, Virgil

Word Count: 3463 words

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It was a precarious predicament.

It certainly wasn’t everyday he tried to sneak out of his university’s anthropology lab harbouring an injured and terrified human in his pocket.

As one of the more respected senior’s of his class, most of the professors that were still there hardly paid Logan another look as he left the lab for the evening.

Still, that didn’t change the fact that he was nervous. Smuggling a human out of the lab without a professor’s explicit permission was an offence punishable by suspension. The suspension itself wouldn’t last much longer than a couple days, but it would leave a bad mark on his crystal clean school record. It would change the reputation he had with his professors—all of which he had so carefully tailored right from his first year in the program.

In fact, most of them greeted him warmly. Asking about his classes earlier, wishing him a good weekend and giving a teasing reminder to study for the upcoming midterms. None of these conversations lasted longer than a few minutes and normally, Logan would have been glad to speak with them. But as of that moment, the longer he was stuck there standing with them, the larger the chance was of him being found out. He knew his professors were very well trained in spotting things that seemed off—an example would be students sitting in the very back row, the furthest away from the lecturer and still getting called out for not paying enough attention.

Long story short, if Logan got caught he was risking his entire future in this field.

A part of him still questioned if this whole thing was even worth the risk. Humans got hurt all the time in his practicum; especially when other students weren’t being careful enough. It happened, so why was this one any different?

Why was the human that had looked up at him with wide frightened eyes any different than the others?

Still, whether or not it was worth the risk, Logan was too far into it now to backtrack. Retracing his steps back to the lab may be considered suspicious, so it was all or nothing whether he wanted it to be or not. Besides, he was also positive that the doors would be locked anyhow, so backpedaling would be pointless. Not that he didn’t have a key to get back in if he truly needed to.

Logan ducked around another professor expertly and he went unnoticed, as the professor in question seemed to be engaged in a particularly interesting conversation.

Or so he thought.

Just as he was about to push the door to the building open, he heard the man bidding his quick farewells for the night before easily catching up with the student.

“Logan,” his professor greeted him with a grin, pushing the other door open before Logan had the chance to escape.

“Dr. Coleman,” he replied after a moment, shouldering his book bag a little more securely.

“You seem to be in quite the rush,” Dr. Coleman said, pulling his coat closer as the cool autumn air swept in through the doors. “Mind if I join you to the parking lot?”

As if he had a choice. Logan only gave a nod.

The squirming in his pocket started up again, this time with more vigor. Slightly paranoid that the little motions would show through the soft fabric, Logan make the quick decision to fully wrap his hand around the human—keeping it still and silent. While that stopped the slight movement from the outside, he could still feel the terrified motions pushing helplessly against his fingertips. Trying fruitlessly to budge his fingers. Of course, to no avail.

While he did feel bad about physically restraining it when it was so obviously in distress, Logan really couldn’t risk being found out this far into the endeavor.

He only hoped the little thing’s heart wouldn’t stop entirely.

However, during the entire ordeal he kept his features mindfully neutral, careful to keep from alerting Dr. Coleman of his current plight.

Dr. Coleman didn’t say anything for a long moment, his eyes flickered over the student and Logan pretended not to notice. Acting off would only make the professor suspicious. Something he really did not need right now.

The professor only hummed softly before turning his attention forward, toward the cars sitting silently under the streetlights illuminating the parking lot in a warm yellow glow. Logan must have spent more time in the lab than he had meant to, if twilight was already falling.

“Busy night tonight, I assume?” Dr. Coleman finally broke the silence and Logan only shrugged nonchalantly.

“You could say that,” he relented. While it technically wasn’t untrue, it wouldn’t be school work like the professor would assume.

Dr. Coleman snickered, reaching into his pocket to draw out his car keys. He clicked the buttons and his car’s headlights flashed in response. “Getting some studying done?”

In a way.

Logan forced himself to relax a little, knowing that the professor had no idea of his little stowaway. “Certainly. Can never be too over prepared for an exam.”

“True,” Dr. Coleman stuck his hands into his pockets. Logan felt relief wash over him when the professor reached his own vehicle. This was the very type of interaction he had been trying so hard to avoid. “This is why you’re one of my favourite students, Logan.”

The praise was nice, but really not what he needed right now. “I appreciate that, Dr. Coleman. But I really do have to get going, as pleasant as this conversation has been.”

As stinted as it had been too, it seemed. Usually, talking with Dr. Coleman didn’t take that much energy. He had engaged the professor in many heated debates over his four years of study. And he would be glad to engage in those types of conversations once more! Just as soon as the human was no longer on his person and in range of being confiscated, only to be placed right back into the same area where it had gotten hurt in the first place.

Whether or not this whole thing was the correct course of action, Logan was sick of witnessing humans getting injured and then being disposed of as if their injuries made them completely useless.

If given the proper treatment and time to heal, they would have a far less percentage of humans succumbing to their injuries or illnesses.

It was unfortunate that so many of his peers thought of the small creatures as disposable. While, no, it was not difficult for professionals to retrieve more right out of their lives on earth, it didn’t make the practice any less morbid or underhanded. Anthropology students should be learning how to assist humans in healing and recovering, not tossing them the minute they were no longer “perfect” in their eyes.

“Fair enough,” Dr. Coleman said, stepping back and placing a hand on the door handle of his car. “I won’t keep you from your studies any longer. Have a good night and take care of yourself. Don’t you be pulling all-nighters, understand?”

“I understand,” Logan repeated back as if on instinct. It wouldn’t stop him from doing it, but it was…nice, he supposed, to know that the professor cared.

It wasn’t like he didn’t have friends that wouldn’t check up on him, he did, but it was different when it was someone that was higher status than you were. Held more sway over what happened in the department. Dr. Coleman was the dean of the anthropology department and he had a lot of power.

The professor nodded his head with a grin, before pulling open his car and stepping in.

Logan let out a breath and turned on his heel. Quickening his pace to his own vehicle, he fished in his bag for his keys. He found them after a moment of struggling one-handed and unlocked his car. He slid inside just as Dr. Coleman’s headlights flashed over him and the professor pulled out of the parking lot, disappearing over the hill leading down to the highway.

Letting his head rest back against the seat’s headrest, he finally released the human from the confines of his hand. Using his now freed one, he ran them through his hair before pulling his glasses off.

What was he even doing?

So what if there was a cruel practice going on at the school underneath everyone’s noses? Just because he was privy to it didn’t mean he had to do anything about it. He was just one person. Logan had friends that were very much human rights activists and into studies and politics concerning the creatures, but none of their campaigns had really gotten the traction necessary to make a true difference. It was a difficult field of study to be in when there were people opposing everything you did.

While Logan always made sure his interactions with the creatures were careful and calculated, a part of him wished he could say the same thing for his classmates.

You would think, at a senior level of study, students would be taking it more seriously. Many of them did, but many of them still used this advantage to handle the humans they dealt with rough and carelessly. To which, the creature would get injured and would then be gone by next morning.

The human currently stuck within the confines of his pocket had been one of the unlucky ones. Injured thanks to a student who had been working in the lab outside of class just a few feet away from Logan—who had conducting his own experiments—they’d dropped the human from a dangerous height on accident, causing the little one to cry out.

His classmate had panicked immediately, obviously unsure of what to do or where to go from there. They’d even gone as far as to check over at Logan to gauge if he’d seen anything and snitch. The student had then gathered the human up as if nothing had happened. They’d packed their papers, shoved it all into their backpack and then deposited the human right back into the large glass terrarium in the middle of the lab, just waiting for someone else to find the injured creature in the morning and get rid of it.

Logan didn’t even have any connection to the human currently struggling to right itself in the soft fabric. Hadn’t conducted any studies with it, observed it or anything else of the such. He’d only heard the helpless cry and decided he wasn’t going to let it suffer in its own agony all night.

The move was illogical and he knew that. Yet, he was still risking absolutely everything for this one little human. His future career was banking on the hope he never got found out.

Logan slipped his glasses back on before sliding the keys into the ignition.

“The amount of trouble you could get me in is unbelievable,” he mused after a moment, unsure if he was talking to the human or not. Either way, the only reaction he got for his efforts was more struggling. So, pulling the gear shift out of park, he made his way back home.

—

“Oh, would you stop fighting me for five seconds,” the student groused, quickly managing to corral the human between his hands again without fully touching him. “If I wanted to hurt you, don’t you think I would have done that by now? Or perhaps, better yet, just left you back in the lab’s terrarium for someone else to find?”

The human only twitched away from his hands, just as he had been doing for the past fifteen minutes. Logan really didn’t want to have to pin him down to get the fidgety creature to be still, but he was quickly running out of options and patience.

“I don’t want to restrain you,” Logan’s voice finally seemed to get the human’s flickering attention. However, now the human’s eyes were locked solely on him, with an uncanny ability to follow his every miniature movement with unwavering attention. It was, all things considered, slightly disturbing to be watched so intensely with such obvious fright and distrust. “But I will if you force my hand.”

The human’s face contorted in an expression that resembled a sneer, before he tucked his injured wrist closer to his chest.

Logan pulled his hands back to himself, watching quietly as the human flinched further into himself. It was very much obvious the little one was touch shy and Logan really wanted to refrain from handling him as much as possible– lest he frighten the human so bad his little heart stopped altogether. “You must understand that leaving your wrist like that will only do you more harm than good. I can assist you in starting your healing progress.”

The human seemed open enough to the idea and Logan carefully extended his fingertips forward, a blatant show of nonaggression and allowing the creature to come to him in its own time. Giving the human the slightest semblance of control may make this entire interaction even the tiniest bit easier on them both.

Its eyes flickered uneasily from its wrist back to Logan’s outstretched hand. It twisted to look over its shoulders, as if searching out an escape route. It hadn’t worked before and Logan knew trying to escape wouldn’t work again. His reaction time was much faster than the human’s, so it wouldn’t make it very far anyhow.

The human in question turned back to Logan, almost as if waiting for the other shoe to drop. For him to act like any other careless student that was ready to mishandle him. The human’s wrist was thin as it was, but now that it was injured (and Logan speculated, broken), it was even more vulnerable than before. Giving up a vulnerable piece of you was a frightening thing and Logan could hardly imagine looking at it from any other perspective but his own. Though, he could safely assume that he, himself, would not be very fond of this situation either if their positions had happened to be switched.

Truthfully, there would be nothing about the human’s life Logan would enjoy. Depending on whether or not he came straight from the earth’s surface and nicked directly from his own life, or if he had been born into a breeding facility.

In all reality, he understood the hesitance in letting him assist. If the human had been handled as recklessly as Logan theorized he had, coming face to face with someone that wouldn’t mishandle him purposefully would be unknown, suspicious and daunting new territory.

“I’m not going to ask you to trust me,” he said finally, the human’s eyes flickered up to meet his own. Surprise lingered in those colourful eyes. “I know you’re frightened and that’s alright. It may be hard to believe, but I really can help you. Only if you’ll allow me, of course. Though, I do think you and I both know that sleeping on that hurt wrist of yours would be uncomfortable at least.”

The human’s good hand clenched, showing Logan the inner battle the little one was facing.

Wanting to ease a little more of it’s stress, he quietly urged; “I will not hurt you, you have my word.”

A moment passed and the human hesitantly stepped forward, his wrist extended enough for Logan to start bandaging.

—

“Why’d you do it?”

The sudden voice very nearly startled Logan out of his thoughts. Virgil had been sitting so quietly next to him, that he’d almost forgotten the human was even there in the first place.

When Logan’s attention fell down to said human, Virgil wasn’t looking at him. He was instead focused intently on his wrist, carefully wrapped in bandages and hanging in a makeshift sling, the best either of them could have done. Logan had almost no experience bandaging such a small subject, so getting it done and in a place where he was satisfied with it was difficult. And Virgil had been working one-handed, so getting the sling to hold properly had been a fight all in itself.

Though, the question was what really nabbed Logan’s attention. “Do what?”

Virgil gave him a look—Logan was getting very familiar with Virgil’s looks and they all usually meant something different—which was a mix between annoyance and genuine confusion, as if Logan really didn’t understand what he meant; which was untrue “Smuggled me out of the lab,” he clarified a moment later, his fingers trailing over the white piece of fabric wrapped around his arm and shoulder again. “You didn’t have to do it, we both know that. I just want to know why you did.”

That was the true question, wasn’t it?

An inquiry that had been on Logan’s mind since that night’s ordeal.

In all honesty, Logan wasn’t entirely sure what had metaphorically possessed him in that particular moment. And while he wanted to be able to give Virgil a straight answer, he didn’t have one.

Logan sat back in his chair, hands resting idly in his lap. The silence was thoughtful, if a bit awkward. As far as they had come in their acquaintanceship (maybe even going as far as saying tentative friendship), there were still pauses that felt tense and heavy. Virgil had certainly come a long way from the first time they had met and Logan was grateful for it, since he was no longer having one-sided conversations.

There were, of course, some topics that Virgil was still too sensitive about to really learn anything, but they were getting there. Logan really hoped that he would eventually get to learn more about what it was like for the human, and be able to go off of that firsthand information to do something. However, until then building his trust was Logan’s priority.

“I don’t exactly have an answer for you,” Logan said after a moment’s pause of brief deliberation. He knew that giving Virgil solid answers was more preferable, since it would ease his anxiety. But this topic was one where Logan, regrettably, didn’t have any solid answers to give.

“Oh.” There was that dejected slump of Virgil’s shoulders, a position Logan was also very familiar with when dealing with him. Disappointment was clear in Virgil’s tone, but he made no move to push for further answers.

Logan felt as though he had let him down somehow. Which was certainly not something he would let stand. He took a long moment, carefully mulling over and debating his next words. “I suppose I did what I did because I couldn’t stand the way they were treating you anymore.” Now that seemed to have drawn Virgil’s attention right back up to him, though he had a brow quirked in question. So, Logan continued. “I know we didn’t have a working relationship prior to my thoughtless, albeit successful, actions. Though, I do feel… better, knowing that you’re safe here.”

Going from whatever kind of relationship they had established here now, Logan couldn’t bear the idea of someone else getting their hands on Virgil. Especially if they meant him any harm. While he could be mean and sharp, there was that anxious and unsure side to him, which proved that a lot of his bark was worse than his bite.

It also did give him peace of mind that Virgil was safe in his care. No more mishandling, no more purposeful injuries and no more testing with stuff that shouldn’t be anywhere near a human.

Virgil’s nose scrunched. “That makes no sense.”

“I suppose it doesn’t,” Logan relented, the ghost of a smile gracing his features. He leaned forwards once more, returning to his laptop to type again. “Though, I’m sure it’s nice for you to know your arm will heal properly.”

Virgil shrugged his good shoulder, leaning back on his hand and looking up toward the student. “Still hurts,” he mused.

Logan hummed. “I’d be surprised if it didn’t.”

The two fell back into a more comfortable quiet. It was broken periodically by soft conversation, but it was mostly filled by the sound of Logan’s keyboard click clacking.

“…thanks,” Virgil eventually said, gently enough that Logan had almost entirely missed it. He paused his typing and his eyes flickered over Virgil’s form, whom of which was tucked comfortably into his hoodie, his eyes looking anywhere other than Logan. “For doing it, I mean. Even though you didn’t have to.”

Logan didn’t force Virgil to meet his eyes, as that would only put unnecessary stress on him. “You’re welcome,” he replied, “I find that your company is quite pleasant.”

While the consequences of his actions were still a very real threat, Logan couldn’t find it in himself to regret his decision.

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repentantsky · 3 years

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6 Unpopular Gaming Opinions

I have a lot of unpopular opinions, and if you follow me on twitter, you might have seen a few recently. However, a simple tweet here and there hardly covers my opinions in gaming that might not sit well with people in this space. I know a lot of people get mad over differing opinions these days, but I have more unpopular than popular opinions, and I think I’d like to talk about a few.

6. If you’re mad about Pokemon games, you’re wrong

Yeah, I’m getting into it right away, and again if you follow me on twitter, you might have seen this once or twice recently, but getting mad about Pokemon to me, always seems foolish. Pokemon as a series has always been what we call a double A experience. Not quite an indie, but clearly not a AAA experience either. In other words, Pokemon is simple, and the crazy amount of Dexit hate, and other controversies about Sword and Shield, the most recent releases in the series are in my eyes, just plain stupid. It’d be one thing to be mad about something not being done if developers were in a similar situation as say, CDPR devs, but to our knowledge that’s not the case. Pokemon, fun as it is, isn’t that serious.

5. Western RPG’s are inferior to JRPG’s by default

There’s a simple reason for this. Games made with the western audience in mind, tend to have the same major flaw that a majority of western games do, they don’t explore the emotions of their male characters, espeically if the lead in a male character, half as well as Japanese RPG’s do. On the one hand, I get it, people still talk about FFXIII like the characters are bad, despite their “major flaws” in many people’s view in the west, simply being that they express their emotions openly. It’s a major problem in Western RPG’s though that the main character if male doesn’t show emotions, and that male characters that do, are seen as weak in the games themselves. This leaves female roles to carry all the emotional weight, which in turn pushes the male power fantasy too far in my opinion, and leaves the main characters boring. Many a western gaming fan would pick Geralt of Rivia as one of the best characters ever made, and while he does occasionally get to show some emotion, my pick would easily be more along the lines of Sora from Kingdom Hearts, or Rean Schwarzar from Trails of Cold Steel, because their emotions makes them more relatable and endearing.

4. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is better than Breath of the Wild

I’m of the opinion as it is, that Breath of the Wild is an overrated game. The climbing mechanics are frustrating, breaking weapons is annoying, and for all the world building and lore that Zelda has as a series, the story is a mess and can easily be told out of order. While Age of Calamity does tell an arguably less emotional story as characters fates are altered from Breath of the Wild, it also tells a more engaging one and characters being on screen longer than they were in the Breath of the Wild, also gives them more time to develop, and be characters we should care about. The Warriors format itself is pretty enjoyable as is, but combined with a story I was more invested in, characters I got to know better than Breath of the Wild ever tried to make them known, and just an overall superior representation of this version of Hyrule, it was simply just a better experience. I can only hope Breath of the Wild 2, ends up having that much story and that much fun gameplay to offer.

3. The Grand Theft Auto series, is kind of garbage

Now I’m really digging deep. The question is whether or not I’m just going off the rails, or digging my own grave. But seriously, these games are boring. The idea was novel at first when we finally San Andreas, be the bad guy, do whatever you want, all that. Sounds good, and it was kind of fun, but the problem is, GTA hasn’t really ever evolved past that. Sure it starts to look better, but the characters in it are stupid, annoying, and bland, games like GTA V don’t know when to end their main campaign, the series never really took the time to develop the few interesting characters it does have, like Franklin, because they just have to fall into the narrative of crime is good, and it’s just not a fun series because the controls aren’t great. You could do worse, sure, but you can also do better, and it doesn’t feel like Rockstar really wants to try. I’m sorry but the GTA games, are just boring and uninteresting after their novelty wears off.

2. Final Fantasy VII is just, okay, the remake is also pretty mid

To me personally, Final Fantasy VII is one of those games that really survives on nostalgia, and little else besides. Like, it’s a fine game, passable in the world of Final Fantasy as a whole, but some of it’s plots are not well handled or don’t seem to go anywhere, the ending kind of makes everything you do past a certain point completely moot, and Cloud’s pride is the cause potentially thousands of dead people because he didn’t back away when he knew he should have. Sadly, the remake doesn’t do much better. While it does give more detail to the story, and takes better care to make it make sense, it also is still pretty much the same story, and that’s boring to me. I’ve played this game, I know how it ends, (though possibly not in the remake) it just doesn’t grab me like it seems to have done for so many people. Even saying that, I still like the game a lot, because it’s Final Fantasy, and the series will always mean a lot to me, even the worst of it, but Final Fantasy VII, for me, is just okay, and the remake telling pretty much the same story again, doesn’t endear it to me.

1. The Last of us Part II, is fantastic

Yeah, something a little more recent to spice up this wild list, why not. The Last of Us Part II, is simply a fantastic game, with a well told story, fantastic characters, and great pacing. It doesn’t shy away from problems in our current society like sexual identity, it’s open to the fact that people are different than each other in ways that many people aren’t comfortable with, and it does it’s part to make open-minded people uncomfortable, by having them play as the woman that killed Joel. A lot of people who hate this game, seemingly can’t get past the fact that it does these things, and look at the game as it’s face value, which is sad, because if you’re willing to challenge yourself, you might find an amazing experience here. Yes, the gameplay isn’t the best, but just like the first game, the story is something far more in depth than anyone could have prepared for. It’s a masterful story, and a great send-off to Naughty Dog, who I personally cannot see myself supporting unless they change the way they develop games. Still, I admire what’s here, and what the developers did with what they were given.

And there’s some of my unpopular opinions, do you have any of your own? Let me know in the notes below, and share this if you feel so inclined. If you want to see more of my unpopular opinions, feel free to follow me on twitter @RepentantSky, since that came up twice, and have an excellent day.

#the last of us #the last of us part 2 #final fanatasy 7 #final fantasy 7 remake #gta #gtacommunity #gta5 #hyrule warriors #breath of the wild #JRPG #western #rpg #pokemon #nintendo switch #ps4 #ps5 #witcher 3 #cdpr #cyberpunk 2077

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agent-cupcake · 4 years

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Dimitri and mental illness

**Warnings for Blue Lions spoilers and armchair psychology

Depending on who you ask, Dimitri is an innocent sweetheart whose actions are entirely excusable and justified or an unforgivable war criminal and overall terrible character. Arguments for both sides have been exhausted, usually in the form of the popular Edelgard versus Dimitri debate, but I feel that both statements are heavily flawed and, truthfully, I think I take more issue with the former. Does it strike anyone else as rather patronizing that the audience (and the game, to an extent) treats Dimitri like an innocent, broken uwu soft boy both before the time skip and once he begins his recovery arc? Of course, a lot of this can be blamed on the awful pacing and poor writing of said recovery (which is the most valid structural critique of his character imo), but there’s a lot to be said about the fan depiction of Dimitri and the way people treat his mental illness. I think the reason this gets me is because I see it as an extension of the problems I have with the romanticization of male-specific mental illness. In this case, “all depressed boys are emasculated, soft, sad bois” and “anger is an accessory that is vanished once the cute boy takes it off” with the related sentiment of “the only two real mental illnesses are depression and anxiety, with a splash of PTSD for argument's sake”. And, speaking of arguments, while many people bring up mental illness in regards to the discussion around Three Houses characters, it is often supplementary to support their points rather than the main point unto itself. Dimitri’s mental illness (aka, the thing his entire arc is predicated upon) is mostly given only a passing recognition in the discussion of his actions. Even then, it’s often used as a justification to defend or lambaste him.

TL;DR Dimitri is a flawed person with a debilitating and incredibly well written mental illness that, while not excusing his actions, allows for further exploration of his character and a well-deserved shot at a recovery arc that is not usually awarded to people with the “non-traditional” mental illnesses. Furthermore, the game offers a wealth of insight as to what they intended his mental illness to be, the symptoms that manifested, and a plausible background to match up with it all and I have the receipts to prove it. Let’s go~

“Me? Oh. Um. Please forgive me... It's difficult to open up on the spot, don't you think? I'm afraid my story has not been a pleasant one... I do hope that doesn't color your view of me, but I understand if that can't be helped.”

I know that mental illness can be singularly caused by a traumatic event or events. That is, generally, how I see people framing Dimitri’s mental illness. My argument, however, is that the Tragedy of Duscur was not the genesis, but the trigger for issues that would exist otherwise. Perhaps it’s due to my own personal experience with mental illness, but I’m almost always more inclined to believe that issues stem from an unlucky combination of many things.

Regardless, my evidence to entertain the idea that he would be naturally predisposed to mental illness is slim. Aside from arguing that it wouldn’t be out of the question for his mother to have been unwell while she was pregnant with him considering she would later die of plague (a cause that in and of itself is subject to skepticism), I would bring up his Crest. In-game there is clear proof that Crests have wide-reaching effects on the person, there are actually a few analysis posts that hypothesize that Crests could be the reason for certain character motivations. In ng+, the Crest of Blaiddyd is called the Grim Dragon Sign. There’s no definitive proof to point to here, but if his Crest was one of the reasons for his mental deterioration it would follow other rules set in-game. Rather than inherited human genetics creating the blueprint for mental issues and the writers having to face that issue on its own terms, it was the Crest’s influence. This goes along with the fact that the game never overtly references Dimitri’s illness, essentially using “the dead” as a blanket symptom of his problems. Both these things are cool ways to imply a possible way to read more deeply without having to use anachronistic medical terms.

Side note: There’s something uncomfortable about the idea of a Crest that gives the individual inhuman strength and mental issues. Grim Dragon indeed.

My next point is one that I don’t see being brought up too often in regards to how it might have affected Dimitri, likely because the events that came later in his life far overshadow it, but Dimitri lost his mom when he was young. The date is not given, but I think it’d be when he was about six-ish. Admittedly, the timeline is strange and non-specific around here but if that were true, it would mean that the plague, Dimitri’s mother’s death, and Lambert and Rodrigue’s war campaign to subjugate the southern half of Sreng would all have happened around the same time. Dimitri says he doesn’t remember it, but that doesn’t necessarily matter. At six years old he had lost one parent and the other one left him to go on a battle march, leaving this child without any sort of parent figure to console him in a country that is culturally opposed to expressing emotion. Lambert will probably always remain a mystery, but I think it could be fair to say he was a poor father. Or at the very least a distant one. Dimitri was undoubtedly a sensitive child (if we’re to judge by the sensitive person he grew up to be) and during the years where he was actually becoming old enough to remember, he had nobody to teach him how to properly navigate and manage his emotions. Emotional neglect in a child who is predisposed to being emotional and empathetic can leave them suffering from a sense of isolation, an inability to ask for help, and a predisposition to having break downs as they get older.

But three-ish years later, possibly one of the best things that ever would happen to Dimitri came to pass and Lambert married Patricia. Dimitri adored her.

“I share no blood with my stepmother, but to hear you say that... It pleases me greatly. She was the one who raised me. I suppose it makes sense that we would share certain mannerisms.” (Dimitri’s B support with Hapi)

I don’t think Dimitri’s feelings about Patricia can be overstated, as I feel it’s one of the most defining aspects of his reactions to things that happen later on. Dimitri talks about Patricia more lovingly than he talks about Lambert. She was in his life for around four to five years but had such an impact on him that even his mannerisms are similar.

Soon after, a ten-year-old Dimitri made his first friend that wasn’t knightly, who didn’t embody those Faerghus ideals of stifling emotions and swinging swords.

People point out the Faerghus crew as Dimitri’s best friends, and yet Edelgard is the one associated with his best memories. It’s just my own assumptions, but I think that it’s because both Edelgard and Patricia gave Dimitri space to be an emotional child, to not have to be the knightly prince who had no emotions and engaged only in the most masculine of activities. And, I mean, look at them. He’s learning to dance and she’s bossing him around, absolutely no regard for propriety.

It’s pretty clear that Dimitri doesn’t feel romantic feelings towards Edelgard in the academy phase, but I think it would be fair to say she was his first love when they were young. He essentially says this was the best year of his life and establishes Edelgard as someone very precious to him (as well as the daughter of one of the most precious people to him). Strong feelings beget strong feelings, do they not?

Google says that eleven to fourteen is the general age of male puberty. It’s the time that kids begin to more fully define how they’re going to emotionally interact with people and the world at large. Meeting Edelgard was at the cusp of this period of Dimitri’s life, and the Tragedy of Duscur was right in the midst of it.

And we all know what that turned out.

Dimitri’s accounts of what happened during the Tragedy are... conflicting. This CG of an unharmed Dimitri in a field of corpses is... conflicting.

“My father...was the strongest man I knew. Someone I loved and admired deeply. That said, he was killed before my eyes. His head severed clean off. My stepmother, the kindest person I had ever known, left me behind and disappeared into the infernal flames.”

I’ve seen people create a plausible scenario in which Dimitri’s recollection is entirely accurate, where he saw Lambert call for revenge and get beheaded, saw Glenn’s ruined body and face twisted in pain, saw his step-mother disappear into the flames, and all despite the raging chaos of the battle and how people would undoubtedly be targeting the prince, but I think it makes more sense that his memories are unreliable. Dimitri suffered a severe head injury (very important to keep in mind) at Duscur. Maybe that happened early on, after seeing who attacked Lambert but before he was an actual target himself, which merely made him look dead. Maybe he saw a version of the events he described, but through the filter of confused head trauma, smoke inhalation, and intense terror. To think that his recollection isn’t exactly entirely reliable sets a precedent for his later skewed take on reality.

Regardless of opinion, though, the facts are that Dimitri left Duscur with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

After that, from thirteen to seventeen, Dimitri was pretty isolated. Most of the people he cared about were dead. His entire emotional support system (Patricia) was gone. He saved Dedue (although they were definitely not on even terms, that relationship is unbalanced to the extreme) and occasionally saw Rodrigue (who I have no reason to believe was emotionally accommodating in any way considering the way he sees Dimitri as an extension of Lambert to his dying breath). Again, it’s strange. People act like Dimitri was super close friends with the Faerghus crew, that he was surrounded by people who loved him (although it is clear there is a lot of love there), but he never presents things in a way to imply that’s the case. In fact, he highlights his isolation:

“In Duscur, I lost my father, stepmother, and closest friends. I didn't have many allies at the castle after that. In truth, I had only Dedue for companionship.”... “I once had people I could confide in. Family, friends, instructors, even the royal soldiers. But they were all taken away from me four years ago.” (Dimitri’s C support with Byleth.)

Two years passed before the next time Dimitri saw his friends and it was a war campaign, putting down the rebellion in western Faerghus. Dimitri speaks about those battles from a place of deeply affected emotion, expressing empathy, pain, and disgust with his actions and the killing.

“I recall coming across a dead soldier's body. He was clutching a locket. Inside was a lock of golden hair. I don't know to whom it belonged. His wife, his daughter...mother, lover... I'll never know.... in that moment, I realized he was also a real person, just like the rest of us… Killing is part of the job, but even so... There are times when I'm chilled to the bone by the depravity of my own actions.” (Dimitri’s B Support with Byleth)

I love this support, honestly. It’s so very telling about the destructive quality of empathy. Although caring can be a good thing, it’s also arguably one of the most destructive of Dimitri’s qualities. His empathy is what presents him with situations he cannot accept, the thing that pushes him to disassociate from reality so he can be rid of it and fight without remorse like he was taught to do by his father and other soldiers. Dimitri is a man of extremes. Either total control or none, without any room for error. This dialogue is also the first time Dimitri brings up reconciling himself with reality and hints to the fact that he has been unable to do so. This is contrasted perfectly in this line from Felix,

“The way you suppressed that rebellion... It was ruthless slaughter and you loved every second. I remember the way you killed your victims. How you watched them suffer. And your face...that expression. All the world's evil packed into it...” (Dimitri’s C Support with Felix)

Dimitri doesn’t deny this. Just like all of the other terrible things Felix says, he takes it without protesting in an act of what I think is stilted contrition. Although, it’s not just in supports that Dimitri’s contrasting behavior is brought up. The Remire incident probably works as a good reference for what Felix saw all those years back.

This is the first time we see Dimitri’s darker side in full. The similarities in the situation to what is shown to have happened in the Tragedy of Duscur are interesting. The fire, the utter chaos, strange figures watching it all from above. This is another case of a perfect disaster. I wonder if his ultimate snap would have been so destructive if not for Remire.

Anyway, this draws parallels to his and Felix’s separate recall of the rebellion because later Dimitri apologizes.

“Professor... I...I'm sorry you saw that side of me in the village… When I saw the chaos and violence there...my mind just went completely dark.”

Dimitri is unreliable. A lack of control, a separation of self, and becoming consumed by a dark rage only to come to his senses later, full of shame and a sense of confusion about why. From my own experience, it’s not unnatural to come out of an episode like this without being able to explain what was happening and being baffled by your behavior. This firmly establishes Dimitri’s uncomfortably fast mood shifts in relation to his trauma from the Tragedy and confirms all of the warnings Felix had given. When Dimitri was faced with a reality he could not accept, he lost control of his emotions and his mental state shifted to adapt accordingly.

This is when I’d also like to note something interesting about how Dimitri discusses his trauma. He is very honest and open about his experiences, explaining exactly what happened to him to Byleth. However, he uses the truth to hide. In recounting the events of the Tragedy of Duscur, in talking about how his family died and saying how badly it hurt him, he does not make himself vulnerable. When he admits weakness, he does so in the past tense or apologetically, vowing to be stronger. “Stronger”, aka, he’ll be better in suppressing his emotions.

“I always strive to keep my emotions at bay, but... Sometimes the darkness takes hold and...it's impossible to suppress. It just shows you how lacking I am... I have much to learn.”

Dimitri lies by using the truth, shoving down his feelings, and blaming himself rather than attempting to figure out how to handle his emotions. In his own words:

“Everyone has something that is unacceptable within them. I certainly do, and I'd wager you do as well. I wonder which is best, Professor... To cut away that which is unacceptable, or to find a way to accept it anyway...”

Good advice Dimitri. Might want to keep that in mind.

It is at this point is when I’m going to get into my personal thoughts and armchair psychiatry nonsense.

First off, when I mentioned earlier about “non-traditional” mental illness, I did not mean abnormal or rare. Although people mostly just point to Dimitri having PTSD (and depression) as the source of his issues, I’m going to use all of my above information to make the (decently common) argument that Dimitri is schizophrenic, which is, contrary to popular belief, not too unusual. I state that with the caveat that I understand that there’s a lot to be said about schizophrenia and the tumultuous relationship between mental health and fiction. However, now is not really the time to go into mental health politics and representation or the many lies spread about the illness so instead, I recommend that you read into the topic if you’re personally interested (This has some good information).

At the very least be aware that this IS sensationalized.

That said, Dimitri does not, to my understanding using grossly simplified terms, meet the qualifications generally (very generally) used to diagnose schizophrenia through the majority of the White Clouds chapters. These qualifying symptoms include, but are not limited to, the duration of the psychotic episode, the concurrent presence of hallucinations and delusions, and a greatly lowered ability to keep up with basic quality-of-life tasks. You only see these symptoms in the final chapter of White Clouds and the first few of Azure Moon. This isn’t unusual, however, because schizophrenia manifesting fully in younger individuals is extremely uncommon, sometimes taking years to trigger during a person’s late teens. And since the diagnosis generally relies on the occurrence of a psychotic episode, it can be mistaken as other mood disorders. Actually, the idea of him having a mood disorder was one of the things that caught my eye originally. Prodromal symptoms such as depression, irritability, headaches, sleep disruption, and mood swings are common in bipolar disorder (and, of course, schizophrenia).

Still, I don't deny that Dimitri has PTSD and depression, only that I don’t think PTSD is his main (or only) issue. In reality, PTSD and schizophrenia are closely tied. They share many symptoms, even the symptom of psychosis. There’s also evidence that those with genetic precedent to develop PTSD overlap with those at risk for schizophrenia, and that the nature of PTSD triggers can act as a severe stressor to aggravate a schizophrenic episode.

(From here)

This falls into the realm of being uncertain where one ends the other begins, highlighting the lack of concrete understanding about schizophrenia and the dependency of diagnosis and treatment to rely entirely on the individual experience, but that’s not a conversation I’m actually qualified to have.

The study that truly caught my eye and while researching for this was one called “Psychiatric disorders and traumatic brain injury”. As I mentioned, at some point during the Tragedy, Dimitri sustained severe head trauma. We know this because of his development of the rare inability to taste called ageusia. I was originally interested in following this narrative thread because, as you might know if you follow true crime cases, there are many murderers who recall having sustained a head injury as children. Not that Dimitri shares similar psychology to people that kill and eat their victim's feet... Although his body count is higher. Besides that, head trauma, in general, is known to be linked to mental illness and altering a person’s behavior. There is even a correlation between TBI (traumatic brain injury) and schizophrenia.

From the study I linked above:

To put it more simply, patients in the study who had suffered TBI and developed schizophrenia reported that their most common symptoms were delusions of persecution, auditory hallucinations, and aggressive behaviors. The auditory hallucinations were often voices. Many of the subjects experienced psychotic episodes two or more years after the initial incident (although, as I mentioned, Dimitri’s age could also have something to do with the timing as children rarely have fully developed schizophrenic episodes). Furthermore, the behaviors classified as an absence of normal behaviors called “negative symptoms” (which include apathy and disordered speech) were rare in this testing group.

Dimitri exclusively displays “positive” symptoms of schizophrenia (“positive” meaning the presence of symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions). He also clearly suffers from delusions of persecution in his belief that Edelgard is the sole instigator of Duscur and the war and that he immediately accuses Byleth of being an Imperial spy upon meeting them post time skip. I think it’s pretty fascinating how closely Dimitri’s symptoms follow the outline of the study, especially with the aggressive behaviors, as those aren’t actually very common in schizophrenics.

In very, very simplistic terms, if I’m right and Dimitri was born with the genetic blueprint for schizophrenia/PTSD (through Crests, inheritance, or environmental causes) and later suffered severe head trauma in an event that also gave him PTSD in combination with his pre-existing parental issues and stilted emotional development, then this could definitely create the type of person who loses all sense of reality, can’t control his emotions, and is prone to episodes of murderous rage when being reminded of the trigger (however tangentially) of losing everything he loved.

However, I’ll add real quick that the study I mentioned should be taken with a grain of salt.

I use it mainly because I thought the similarities were interesting and it shows that there was more thought put into Dimitri than maybe people appreciate.

This brings us to my final point; Some kind of twisted joke.

A major point I saw being made as proof of how terrible Dimitri is as a character was that he blamed Edelgard for the Tragedy of Duscur (a time where she would have been twelve). More accurately, he blamed her for everything that had happened and the thing is, I don’t disagree with that critique entirely. However, this is a case of him being a bad person, not a bad character. This might seem like an odd distinction, but I think it changes the scope of deserved criticism.

As I’ve been trying so desperately to illustrate, Dimitri snapping wasn’t just because of Edelgard being revealed as the Flame Emperor. Rather, it was an unlucky combination of many things. His grasp and interpretation of reality were already hazy at best by the time she was unmasked, slowly falling apart as his prodromal symptoms worsened. Going into the fight, he believed the Flame Emperor to be responsible in whole or in part for the worst thing that had ever happened to him, guessed at Arundel’s involvement, had found (and lied about) the dagger, and was rapidly mentally deteriorating. While Dimitri suspected Edelgard’s involvement to some degree, he did his best to act like it wasn’t true.

Dimitri didn’t want it to be true. To the extent that he was willing to lie to Byleth (and to himself) to avoid reality. He cared deeply about Edelgard. The best year of his life was spent with her, she was his first love, and she was the daughter of the step-mother he adored. Strong feelings beget strong feelings, do they not? This reveal confronted Dimitri with something that he could not accept, so his mind sidestepped the issue altogether. Delusion convinced him that all of the fears and worries he had beforehand were related, all into one larger delusion that Edelgard had sole responsibility. It’s not right and maybe not even excusable, but it falls in line with everything else.

Edelgard and Dimitri. Bound by some twisted fate but forever doomed to be separated, unable to understand the other’s chosen path.

I do recognize the flaws of Dimitri’s character and arc. There are some pretty major flaws. I have parts of a post typed out about his shoddy recovery and how I’d fix it that, hopefully, one day will see the light of day as well as many complaints about the way the story is hindered by the need for flexibility to accommodate gameplay and a happy ending.

But, despite that, this has all been a very long-winded way of praising Dimitri’s writing. His mental illness has a surprising amount of depth and I loved studying it as intently as I did. I learned a lot about his character as well as about mental illness in general.

Ultimately, Dimitri is neither an innocent sweetheart whose actions are entirely excusable and justified or an unforgivable war criminal and overall terrible character. You can feel bad for his pain and his struggle with his illness and understand that as a reason for his actions, but you shouldn’t use it as justification. He had the opportunity to seek help before things got too bad. He was selfish with the mismanagement of his emotions and goals. However, he also was a victim. Dimitri worked to recover and mend the mistakes he made while he was unwell, which is a side of this mental illness that is rarely shown in media.

I wholeheartedly believe that, love him or hate him, Dimitri is the most well-written of the Three Houses characters,

#dimitri #fe dimitri #dimitri alexandre blaiddyd #fire emblem 16 #fire emblem #FE3H #fire emblem three houses #i spent an ungodly amount of time on this feel free to share your thoughts

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your-turn-to-role · 4 years

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said i was gonna write a meta centered on this conversation and this is where my head's at, so i wanna talk about the fact that vax and gilmore do have a lot more in common than most people realise? (at least more than most people talk about)

(as a disclaimer, this is not a ship war post, i love vaxleth just as much as vaxilmore, but also it's easier to see the reasons why vax and keyleth like each other because they're both player characters and we know them very well, gilmore we see a lot less, so a lot of his character and motivations you have to piece together afterwards. but matt still puts a lot of thought into who gilmore is and why he does what he does, a lot more than we ever see, so there's definitely more to it than the "he's pretty" gilmore likes to tell people)

on the surface, they're very different people, sure. vax doesn't understand shit about magic, magic is all gilmore does, vax wears his heart on his sleeve and if he has a problem you're going to find out about it, gilmore is all about emotional masks and a jovial front as a means of protection, even just in appearance and attire, gilmore's very colourful and deliberately so, while vax's main colours are black and more black. but when it comes to where they came from, how they approach problems, what they find fun and interesting, they're extremely in sync

both have a complicated relationship with their (surviving) parents, never really feeling fully loved by them - vax was entirely neglected and shunned by syldor, and when we meet gilmore's parents, though they're nice on the surface, they also don't believe vox machina about gilmore saving a city, gilmore left home and never came back to visit despite being able to literally teleport there at any time, which says a lot about how tense that relationship has been. related to that, both have biological reasons for being an outcast, vax as a half elf, gilmore as a rune child, two things the book itself say are often shunned in most societies, and definitely things they've both faced consequences for being. (we don't know what those consequences were for gilmore, but, there's a reason he hides it)

they're both rebellious, they both still have a bit of something to prove, they both do their best to live in the moment and get past problems by distancing and refocusing, both would do literally anything for the people they love, and neither will ever leave a person in danger. their chief philosophy is "life is short so take what you want, trust those around you, love recklessly. don't waste time on regrets or wishing for things you can't have". they're both fascinated by magic and drawn by things that are fast paced and unknown and exciting, things are always more interesting when they're fun

in a way it's easy to think of vax as the reckless one of the two of them? because gilmore runs a shop and vax is vax, "runs headfirst into danger with no backup at least once a week" vax, "this bird can fly 480ft a round and there's nothing you can do about it" vax

but this is also "ran in to fight thordak with no backup in case vox machina were in danger" gilmore, "spent well over 1000 gold on a heroes feast because vox machina were hungry and didn't feel like going home" gilmore, and, of course, "pushed vax off a cliff with no warning to show him he has wings because despite the fact that we're still in an awkward post break up phase and despite the fact that less than an hour ago someone who looked like me almost killed him, i know he'll still trust me and this'll be the best way to show him" gilmore

and he was right, because they do understand each other on that level no other character quite reaches. and vax knows it too, and knows him

and this exchange, i think, is one of the most telling of that

just vax's slightly mournful "that guy'll be fast" and gilmore's joking-but-serious "he'd better be", like as much as it's a joke it's also them both acknowledging what worked here and what didn't

anyone who knows vax knows speed's his whole thing. his boots of haste are canonically his favourite possession. the first time caleb used expeditious retreat in campaign two everyone joked that vax was back (though he didn't get nearly close to vax's top flying speed of approximately 55mph). vax thinks on his feet, gets bored easily, hates when things are still.

it's not a trait often praised when it comes to romance tropes? speedy characters are also flighty, moving too fast is a sign of not thinking, even when both partners are that way, any romance they end up in will end with them settling (and slowing) down or it'll end in disaster.

and in a way this falls into the same pattern as well, because obviously things didn't work out for them, but the biggest difference here is that that isn't a bad thing. vax isn't wrong for being vax, and gilmore's the same, and wants the same thing, would be happy with the same thing. (really what doomed this relationship as a romantic endeavour was just luck of the draw, liam's said the only reason vax decided to be with keyleth was the fact that he was around her every day, whereas he only saw gilmore every couple months, so what would have been the same feelings towards both of them had the chance to become a lot stronger for kiki, if their places were reversed he would have been just as happy with gilmore, and obviously gilmore would with him)

(which is why even after everything, they remain friends to the end, and we know they talk sometimes for hours about their lives, because even if they can't have that connection as a romantic one, having someone around that gets them like that is a huge help)

people get up in arms easily about defending vax vs defending gilmore, especially when it comes to the breakup and whether vax acted like an asshole or not. and honestly believe what you want about that, i'm not gonna argue it. but this conversation, they're both telling the whole truth. yes, this was sad, and yes, this hurts, but that's life. they've been through far more painful things for less. and yeah gilmore's gonna move on, because that's in both of their nature, but they both know whoever he's gonna end up with is gonna have those same qualities. maybe another adventurer, maybe not, but someone who sees the tragedy in the world and refuses to let it continue, and someone who sees the excitement in the world and refuses to let it pass them by

and they know no matter what there's still love between them. (they both make it clear, constantly, how much of that there is, far more than either really knows what to do with). and while, ultimately, vax was right in this conversation, it wouldn't be long before they faced a battle he wouldn't walk away from, gilmore was right too, in that life is unpredictable, and all you can do is make the most of every moment in front of you. (and no matter what happens to gilmore after the story ends or wherever and whatever vax is now, they're never gonna forget each other)

#do you ever think about matt on talks confirming that post canon gilmore made a vax inspired line of magic items?#bc i do #constantly #surprising absolutely no one i just really love vax and also gilmore and i wanted to get at least one of my feelings about them down here #cr1 #critical role #cr meta #vax'ildan #shaun gilmore #vaxilmore #text #meta #cr thoughts #vax'ilmore

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Rage Over the 2020 Election Could Last Well Past Trump (NYT) For many Trump supporters, the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden Jr. this week will be a signal that it is time to move on. The president had four years, but Mr. Biden won, and that is that. But a certain slice of the 74 million Americans who voted for President Trump [do not feel that way]. On the contrary, interviews in recent days show that their anger has deepened. “I can’t just sit back and say, ‘OK, I’ll just go back to watching football,’” said Daniel Scheerer, 43, a fuel truck driver in Grand Junction, Colo., who went to the rally in Washington this month, but said he did not go inside the Capitol and had nothing to do with those who did. He said he did not condone those who were violent but believed that the news media had “totally skewed” the event, obscuring what he saw as the real story of the day—the people’s protest against election fraud. “If we tolerate a fraudulent election, I believe we cease to have a republic,” he said. “We turn into a totalitarian state.” He continued: “This just isn’t like a candidate that I didn’t want, but he won fair and square. There’s something different happening here. I believe it needs to be resisted and fought against.” Mr. Scheerer said that he was not advocating violence and that he was not part of any group that was. But he echoed the views of many who supported the recent events in Washington: a fervent belief that something bad was about to happen, and an instinct to fight against it.

Biden to propose 8-year citizenship path for immigrants (AP) President-elect Joe Biden plans to unveil a sweeping immigration bill on Day One of his administration, hoping to provide an eight-year path to citizenship for an estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. without legal status, a massive reversal from the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies. The legislation puts Biden on track to deliver on a major campaign promise important to Latino voters and other immigrant communities after four years of President Donald Trump’s restrictive policies and mass deportations. It provides one of the fastest pathways to citizenship for those living without legal status of any measure in recent years, but it fails to include the traditional trade-off of enhanced border security favored by many Republicans, making passage in a narrowly divided Congress in doubt.

Make America California Again? That’s Biden’s plan (Los Angeles Times) After four years of being relentlessly targeted by a Republican president who worked overtime to bait, punish and marginalize California and everything it represents, the state is suddenly center stage again in Washington’s policy arena. California is emerging as the de facto policy think tank of the Biden-Harris administration and of a Congress soon to be under Democratic control. There is no place the incoming administration is leaning on more heavily for inspiration in setting a progressive policy agenda. The incoming administration is embracing some of California’s most pioneering initiatives, such as programs for rapidly decarbonizing the electricity grid and tuition-free college, as well as more obscure, incremental policies. “California is not just about pushing the envelope, it is about tearing it apart,” said former state Senate leader Kevin de León, who helped the state implement some of the innovative ideas the incoming administration wants to pursue. “The state is full of disruptors and malcontents who are impatient and have no problem challenging the status quo.”

A new COVID-19 challenge: Mutations rise along with cases (AP) The race against the virus that causes COVID-19 has taken a new turn: Mutations are rapidly popping up. The coronavirus is becoming more genetically diverse, and health officials say the high rate of new cases is the main reason. Each new infection gives the virus a chance to mutate as it makes copies of itself, threatening to undo the progress made so far to control the pandemic. So far, vaccines seem to remain effective, but there are signs that some of the new mutations may undermine tests for the virus and reduce the effectiveness of antibody drugs as treatments. It’s normal for viruses to acquire small changes or mutations in their genetic alphabet as they reproduce. In March, just a couple months after the coronavirus was discovered in China, a mutation called D614G emerged that made it more likely to spread. It soon became the dominant version in the world. Now, after months of relative calm, three more potent variants have emerged.

Russian Court Orders Aleksei Navalny Held for 30 Days (NYT) A judge ordered the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny to be jailed for 30 days, ahead of a decision that could put him behind bars for years, after an extraordinary, rushed court hearing on Monday held inside a police station within a day of his return from Germany. Moments after the judge announced her decision, Mr. Navalny called for protests in a video message to his supporters. One of his top aides, Leonid Volkov, said Mr. Navalny’s nationwide network was preparing to organize demonstrations across Russia on Saturday. The fast-paced events came the day after Mr. Navalny, who spent months abroad recovering from a near-deadly poisoning, was arrested at a Moscow airport on accusations of violating the terms of an earlier suspended prison sentence.

Russia’s Putin marks Orthodox Epiphany with icy dip (Reuters) Russian President Vladimir Putin, dressed in nothing but a pair of blue swimming trunks, immersed himself in the freezing water of a cross-shaped pool near Moscow on Tuesday, observing an Orthodox Christian ritual to mark the feast of Epiphany. Russian state television broadcast footage of Putin, with the air temperature at minus 14 Celsius (6.8 Fahrenheit), removing a sheepskin coat to enter the icy waters and submerging himself three times beneath the surface, in front of an ice-sculpted cross. Putin, 68, grew up under Communist rule where open shows of religion were frowned upon. As president, he has become a frequent attender of Russian Orthodox ceremonies, and has given the church a major voice in society. Each year on Epiphany, Orthodox believers immerse themselves in rivers and lakes to commemorate the baptism of Jesus Christ in the River Jordan.

The cost of avoiding 39, and the profits therein (Foreign Policy) Afghanistan’s traffic authorities are to stop issuing license plates with the number 39 in a bid to cut down on bribery. The figure is considered shameful to Afghans because of its associations with pimping and prostitution—a notorious pimp in the city of Herat reportedly drove a car with the number—leading car owners to go to great lengths to avoid the taboo combination. In announcing the move, Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh said that drivers had spent as much as $300 to persuade traffic officials to give them a more favorable plate number. Abdul Qader Samoonwal, an official at Kabul’s Traffic and License Registration department, suggested a more nefarious motive behind the aversion to number 39 in an interview with NPR in 2011. “Car dealerships and those who work for the mafia started the rumors about 39 so they could buy cars with 39 plates cheaper and sell them back for higher prices after changing the plates,” he said.

Amazon Web Drama Draws the Wrath of India’s Hindu Nationalists (NYT) Bollywood once again has fallen into the cross hairs of India’s Hindu nationalist ruling party—and major Western streaming services like Amazon and Netflix increasingly find themselves caught in the middle. Two separate criminal complaints were filed with the police over the weekend against the makers of “Tandav,” a splashy new big-budget web series on Amazon. The fast-paced political drama, which seems to borrow heavily from India’s political scene, may cut uncomfortably close to current events and the country’s biggest controversies. The complainants, which include a politician with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, have insisted that the government pull the series off the air or take out key scenes. Among other objections, they accused the series of disrespecting Hindu gods, belittling members of individual castes and sullying the office of the prime minister. If the police find merit to the complaints, Amazon and the show’s promoters could wind up in criminal court. Defenders of the show say those complaints are pretexts. The pressure on Amazon to drop the series, they say, is part of an increasingly intolerant atmosphere in India that affects even Bollywood, India’s film and entertainment industry. Actors, comedians, producers, artists and anyone who dares to question the government, even indirectly, can find their careers in peril, they say. The true objection to “Tandav” may simply be that it’s too real. The opening episode looks almost like a newsreel. It cuts from farmer protests to student protests to police killings—all events that have happened in recent months under the administration of Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister. Even the episode’s title is provocative. It is called “Dictator.”

North Korea’s Kim could be planning missile launch to welcome Biden administration (Washington Post) North Korea appears to be taking steps toward a new test of a powerful submarine-launched missile, U.S. weapons experts said, as it steadily dials up the pressure on President-elect Joe Biden. Last week, a beaming Kim Jong Un presided over another demonstration of his country’s military might in a nighttime parade in Pyongyang, kicked off with a fireworks display. Now, it appears he might be planning a very different fireworks display to greet the incoming U.S. president. On show at the parade was a new ballistic missile designed to be launched from a submarine, with state media over-enthusiastically describing it as “the world’s most powerful weapon.” Satellite evidence has emerged of work at a naval base in the port city of Nampo on the country’s west coast that suggests preparations could be underway for a test launch of a similar missile. While the evidence is not conclusive, it does fit a pattern of steadily more aggressive posturing from North Korea’s leader.

Chaos as snow hits Japanese highway, 134 cars in crashes; one dead (Reuters) At least 134 cars were involved in a series of crashes in Japan on Tuesday when a snow storm struck a stretch of highway and one person was killed and a dozen hurt in the chaos. The crashes occurred on the Tohoku Expressway in the northern prefecture of Miyagi at around noon, on a stretch of road about 1 km (half a mile) long, the government said. Some 200 people were caught up in the crashes with 12 of them sent to hospital. Parts of Japan have seen unusually heavy snow in recent weeks.

Thai woman sentenced to 43 years in jail for insulting monarchy (Reuters) A Thai court on Tuesday sentenced a 65-year-old woman to more than 43 years in jail for sharing online posts criticizing the royal family, her lawyer said, the country’s harshest ever sentence for insulting the monarchy. Her sentence comes at a time of unprecedented youth-led demonstrations in which protest leaders have openly criticised the monarchy, risking prosecution under Thailand’s strict law known as lese majeste, which carries a 15-year penalty for each violation. Anchan Preelert pled guilty to 29 separate violations of sharing and posting clips on YouTube and Facebook between 2014 and 2015, her lawyer, Pawinee Chumsri, told Reuters. Authorities briefly stopped using the lese majeste law in 2018 but police started to invoke it again late last year after leaders of the protests, which drew tens of thousands of people, began openly criticising the monarchy. Since November, more than 40 youth activists have been charged under the law.

Israel moves to rein in rights group over ‘apartheid’ use (AP) Israel’s education minister says he is banning groups that call Israel an “apartheid state” from lecturing at schools—a move that targets one of the country’s leading human rights groups after it began describing both Israel and its control of the Palestinian territories as a single apartheid system. The explosive term, long seen as taboo and mostly used by the country’s harshest critics, is vehemently rejected by Israel’s leaders and many ordinary Israelis. In a report released last week, the rights group B’Tselem said that while Palestinians live under different forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, blockaded Gaza, annexed east Jerusalem and within Israel itself, they have fewer rights than Jews in the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Israel seized east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 war—lands that are home to nearly 5 million Palestinians and which the Palestinians want for a future state. B’Tselem and other rights groups argue that the boundaries separating Israel and the West Bank vanished long ago—at least for Israeli settlers, who can freely travel back and forth, while their Palestinian neighbors require permits to enter Israel.

Vapes (ABC News) A University of San Diego study published in the journal Pediatrics found trying an electronic cigarette or vape before the age of 18 more than tripled the chance of becoming a daily smoker, with the risk increasing from 3 percent to 10 percent. Who could have possibly foreseen that giving teenagers access to one of the most addictive substances on earth, but flavored like candy, would lead them to eventually pursue that same addictive substance, but made to look cool? From 2013 to 2019, youth vape use increased from under 5 percent to 30 percent in the U.S.

#headlines #news

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calligraphist-artemisia · 4 years

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Quid Pro Quo

Summary: While everyone's healing after their first fight against Haggar's super powered Mech, Coran brings up the perfect way for them to relax and pass the time: a fun game of Monsters & Mana! While Shiro argues the value of (once again) playing a paladin, Keith goes for a more unexpected role.

Also posted on Archive of our Own - under the username Kishirokitsune

Quid Pro Quo

Quid pro quo - a favor or advantage granted or expected in return for something.

The aftermath of their battle against the Komar Mech found the paladins of Voltron in a rough state. While the lions protected them from harm to the best of their ability, there were still injuries and each of them had spent two long weeks confined to their beds in the med-bay so they would have proper time to heal from their ordeal. And even after that, they were released under the condition that they take it easy for another week.

After being active for so long, it was hard for any of them to patiently sit around and do nothing, especially when there was so much that needed done.

It was Coran who came up with a solution to their boredom.

He rounded up everyone and giddily took them down to the common room, where he had commandeered a round table for their use. There was a hand-drawn, gridded map spread across the surface, a handful of dice, and a set of five familiar figures.

“You save the game pieces?” Lance asked, sounding delighted. He swooped in and picked up the model of Pike, cradling it in his hands.

Allura smiled as she stepped up next to him, reaching for Valayun. “This is brilliant, Coran! But are you sure you have time for this? You and Shiro are perfectly able to go out and help with reconstruction.”

“Sam said that if he sees me working for the next twenty-four hours he's going to tie me down and make sure I get some rest,” Shiro said. “This sounds like the better choice.”

Pidge snorted in amusement, but didn't comment on it. She looked delighted to hold her figure of Meklavar once again.

Only Hunk looked a little concern, though it was quickly revealed that it wasn't over the game itself. “But Keith didn't play with us last time and he doesn't have a model.”

Coran twirled his mustache, a twinkle in his blue eyes. “Don't you worry about that, my young friend! I found a machine here that prints models in 3D and have already made new ones for our adventure today. They will all be revealed when the time is right. Now sit! And we shall resume our journey through the magical realm of Aurita!”

It didn't take them too long to get settled in around the table. Coran chose a spot at the top of the map, with Keith and Shiro to his left and right. Pidge was on the other side of Keith, followed by Hunk, then Lance, and finally Allura, bringing the circle back to Shiro. Each of them picked up a game pad and found their character, reviewing theirs stats and refreshing their memory of how the game worked.

“Before we begin, does anyone want to create a new character?” Coran asked, looking pointedly at Shiro.

Shiro crossed his arms over his chest. “I'm happy playing as Gyro. I don't see what I'd want to change characters.”

The other paladins – minus Keith – groaned in exasperation.

Coran hummed as he booted up his game pad. “I thought you might want a backup in case anything...unfortunate should happen?”

There was a moment of silence in which Keith looked up from his game pad to raise an eyebrow. When no one chose to elaborate on that, he went back to creating his own character, wondering what he'd gotten himself into.

“Coran, is something going to happen to Gyro?” Shiro asked.

“Only the dice know,” Coran replied mysteriously.

Shiro sighed as he selected the character creation screen. “I don't understand what you have against me playing as a paladin. I like being a paladin.”

“Can we make a rule that he can't make another one?” Lance asked.

“Now, now, far be it for me to stymie Shiro's creativity. If he wants to rewrite his backstory so that there is a third brother, then that's up to him,” Coran said. “Let's see... we've had Shiro and Gyro. What shall be the third brother's name? Hiro?”

“I hate all of you except for Keith,” Shiro said, prodding at his screen.

Coran gave them all a few more minutes while he searched for the storyline he wanted to use. It was bound to be a fun one, especially after his talk with Keith the day before. He had been sure that the others would be interested in another quest, but Keith hadn't been part of the original game and he wanted to include the current Black Paladin in their fun.

As it turned out, Keith had an interesting idea, and Coran had the perfect plot to go along with it.

He glanced up, smiling softly as he watched Allura lean over to Lance to ask him about something. Hunk appeared to be mumbling spells under his breath and then checking his game pad to make sure he got them right. Keith had his pad turned so Pidge couldn't sneak a peak at what he was doing, no matter how hard she tried.

It warmed Coran's heart to see them all having fun after everything they had been through.

He cleared his throat to get their attention and begin the game. “Tales of your miraculous defeat of the mighty and powerful wizard known as Dakin have spread far and wide across Aurita. Townspeople rejoice wherever you go and you no longer want for food and drink. Today we begin in the wilds of the Mysterious Forest, on a quest for a king of a distant land. It appears his daughter, Princess Mora, has been kidnapped and it is up to you all to save her!”

“A princess?” Lance's eyes lit up.

Hunk groaned. “Oh no... Coran, does it have to be a princess?”

“Yeah, can't we rescue a handsome prince instead? It doesn't always have to be a damsel in distress,” Pidge complained.

“But rescuing a princess is a staple of all classic stories! C'mon, guys, don't take this from me!” Lance begged.

Allura rolled her eyes.

Coran looked at them peevishly for interrupting his storytelling. “Are you going to let me continue, or would you like to run this campaign on your own?”

No one spoke again.

“As I was saying...”

If not for the haunting sounds of wildlife, the Mysterious Forest would be a beautiful place to explore. Trees towered overhead, their branches reaching out to cast shade over the ground, while still allowing in enough light for the underbrush to thrive. A single main path, comprised of dirt compacted under heavy travel, wound through the forest.

A sheer mountainside rose to the right of the path. It looked as though the rock had been carved away some time ago, though by what, no one knew.

Valayun led the way down the path, her bow knocked in preparation for trouble. She had heard tales of bandits and thieves who lurked within the woods and knew it was best to be ready to anything. Her blue eyes wearily scanned the underbrush, watching out for any movement.

Behind her was Pike and Block, who quietly talked to pass the time. Pike was particularly excited about their current quest to find a kidnapped princess, and was disappointed that no one else seemed to share his enthusiasm.

Meklavar traveled behind them, her ax at the ready. Her stonesense screamed that something wasn't right, and she was easily the jumpiest of the party.

Bringing up the rear was Gyro, who looked around with a sense of wide-eyed wonder at the beauty of the wilderness around them. He was particularly taken with the brightly colored flora and the pleasant smells they emitted. He felt like nothing could possibly go wrong. After all, the weather was pleasant and their quest had only just begun!

What could possibly go wrong?

“Shiro, roll for perception,” Coran instructed.

Shiro frowned. “I thought I already did that.”

“You did. Now I need you to roll a second time,” Coran said.

Everyone leaned forward to watch Shiro roll the die, eager to see what it would stop on. There was a collective groan when it tipped over one final time to end on “two”.

“Tough luck, Shiro,” Keith said sympathetically.

Coran's delight was obvious to everyone and he toned down his cackle to a snicker, hiding his face behind his game pad. “Suddenly, there is a loud crashing sound from the cliffside! Something has knocked into the precariously perched boulders up at the top, jarring them loose. They fall, picking up speed as they go, and while they make a great deal of noise, Gyro is too busy admiring the flowers to pay attention. Will anyone warn our poor paladin of the danger he faces?”

“How do you not hear a landslide?” Pidge asked with a shake of her head. “Nevermind. I'm the closest to him, so I shout out to try and warn him.”

“Shiro, another roll, if you will?”

Shiro sighed and rolled again, not at all surprised to see another roll number. Even the dice gods were working against him. “Am I dead?”

“Oh, I'm afraid so. You hear Meklavar's warning, but aren't able to move in time and are crushed by a landslide,” Coran rattles off as though commenting on the weather.

Shiro gave the Altean a petulant look as he sent over the data for his new character without being asked.

Keith watched the exchange with a furrowed brow. “Should I make a second character now, or...”

“You don't need to. Shiro just has really bad luck,” Pidge reassured him.

Coran took a moment to scan through the new data before jumping back in. “Our heroes take a few hours to mourn their fallen friend and construct a small monument in his honor.”

The loss of Gyro the Paladin dampened even Pike's spirits. The four heroes continued on their way, searching for the entrance to the caves where it was rumored that Princess Mora was being held.

“Does anyone else think it's weird that we haven't seen any bandits yet? You'd think they would at least have traps laid for us,” Meklavar said.

“Are you trying to jinx us?” Pike demanded. His eyes scanned the foliage critically, as though he expected something to immediately jump out and attack them.

Valayun uneasily slowed, closing the distance between her and Pike by a few paces. “Maybe we've gone the wrong way?”

“Can't be. This is the only path,” Block said. “Unless they didn't take the path?”

Meklavar shook her head. “No, you're right. They must have taken the path, especially since they have a captive with them. We would be able to see if they went another way, wouldn't we? There would be broken branches and stuff.”

They looked to Valayun in the hope that she had some skill in tracking, but she was just as confused as the rest of them.

The four of them stopped walking as a debate broke out over whether they should keep going or if it was best to go back and look for tracks. Pike and Valayun were for staying on the path, while Block and Meklavar wanted to go back.

And that was when things went from bad, to worse.

A howl pierced the air just before a massive wolf sprang out of the underbrush, taking all of them off guard. It used its advantage to pin Meklavar to the ground and opened its mouth to reveal a row of sharp, white teeth.

Meklavar closed her eyes, praying that someone would save her, or else that death would be swift and painless.

Pidge laughed as Kosmo licked across her cheek before he lowered his paws and padded over to the do the same to Keith.

“It's nice to see you too,” Keith said with a chuckle. He patted the cosmic wolf on the head, and once Kosmo was satisfied with the attention he received, he crawled under the table to take a nap near his favorite people.

“A new encounter has begun and it's time to figure out attacking order! Everyone, go ahead and roll your dice,” Coran instructed. “And just for fun... Shiro and Keith, the two of you can roll as well.”

Shiro trepidatiously reached for his die.

The sparkling light of Block's magic formed a barrier between Meklavar and certain death, which gave Valayun the opportunity to lay into the beast with her arrows. It reared back, releasing Meklavar from its grasp, and that was when Pike rushed in to pull her to safety.

“Are you alright?” Block shouted as he began charging up his next spell.

“I'm okay!” Meklavar quickly called back. She took a moment to reorient herself and then unhooked her ax so she could jump into the fight.

Arrows flew and spells were slung. A gleaming ax swung against the side of the beast. Pike's sharp blades danced as he flitted about.

None of it appeared to do more than anger the wolf.

“Should we run?” Block asked.

“Do you really think we can outrun that?” Pike asked in disbelief.

Block ducked behind a tree for a little extra cover. “Maybe if Valayun summons one of her magical steeds and I enchant my staff to fly, we might stand a chance at getting away.”

“And what would that solve?” Meklavar demanded. “We run and leave the princess with those bandits? Even if we get away, we still need to come back this way and there's no guarantee that this creature will be gone.”

“Meklavar is right. We have to deal with this now,” Valayun agreed.

Pike loudly shrieked as he barely dodged a swipe from one massive paw. His voice went high as he asked: “Does anyone have a plan for that?!”

Meklavar thought for a moment. “Maybe if we all attack it at once and hit it from different angles. That might confuse it enough that it won't know who to go after.”

“It's worth a try,” Valayun said. She selected a summoning arrow and fired it into the air. A moment later, a flying horse swooped down and allowed Valayun onto their back. She took to the skies to distract the beast, giving her allies enough time to get into place.

And then their assault began anew.

The beast snarled in rage. Just as they had hoped, it didn't know who to go after first. It turned to look at each of them, but each time it tried to attack, someone would hit it from another angle.

A horn trumpeted.

From within the forest, a man with dark hair came riding in on a magnificent black steed. He lifted his sword high and joined the battle.

The beast didn't last long after that, and as it lay dying on the forest floor, the adventurers approached the newcomer. One-by-one, they introduced themselves, until all that was left was for the stranger to speak his name.

“I am but a simple ranger, traveling with my fearless companion,” he said, fondly patting his horse's neck. “My name is Paladin.”

In that moment, anyone in or near the common room was treated to the sound of the Paladins of Voltron losing their minds over a single sentence, while Shiro sat back and looked very pleased with himself. Coran was laughing so hard that he was crying.

Once Coran calmed enough that he could speak clearly, he wiped away his tears and coaxed them back into playing their game.

With the addition of Shiro's ranger, they discovered that they had missed a second path and it was only thanks to his tracking skill that they were able to find it. The new path was a shortcut, leading directly to the caves, while the main path would have eventually branched out, with one trail leading up to the top of the mountain and the other leading out of the forest. Coran was the only one disappointed that they no longer needed to fight their way down through the mountain.

They charged ahead into the caves with their spirits renewed, and Lance happily showed off that Pike held torches in his inventory, after buying them during his and Shiro's mini-session with Coran.

“So is Keith actually playing, or is he just here to watch?” Lance asked as he rolled to dismantle a trap that Hunk nearly triggered.

“I've been playing!” Keith protested. “You've seen me roll!”

“Oh yeah? Then where's your character?” Lance challenged with the air of someone who knew they had already won.

Coran stepped in before things could escalate to shouting. “Keith and I discussed his role before we began, and I have sent him messages to determine where he currently is and what he's doing. Be patient; he'll join you soon.”

“I didn't know these things could send messages,” Pidge said, looking at her game pad with renewed interest.

“My bandmates and I always used them to enrich our experience with the game. Not only can it be used to send messages between the Lore Master and one of the players, players can also send group messages. Depending on the race you've picked, you can choose to send messages in that language, and it will only translate for anyone who has knowledge of that language,” Coran said. “Though it's more like gibberish than an actual language. Now, where were we? Ah, yes...”

The team of eager adventurers continued on their way, dismantling traps and using their wide range of skills to avoid trouble. They only got lost once and that was when they encountered a small party of bandits, who kept dropping their weapons and were incompetent in general.

Pike pilfered anything useful before they moved on.

“This is way less interesting than Dakin's lair,” Meklavar said, sounding disappointed. “Where's all of the treasure? The interesting weaponry?”

“Well that's why they kidnapped the princess, isn't it? They're holding her for ransom so that then they'll have treasures,” Block suggested.

“I don't know why you keep saying things like that when you know it's just going to bring us more trouble.” Pike directed his words to Meklavar, who ignored him. “Besides, just because you haven't found anything, doesn't mean there's nothing here.” He grinned and jingled his coin purse in front of her face.

Paladin frowned at the blatant theivery that was being flaunted in front of him. There was no point in saying anything. Pike had only laughed the first time he scolded him for it.

“Meklavar, can you read anything with your stonesense?” Valayun asked.

Meklavar placed her hand on the wall and frowned. “There is... something. I can feel it more strongly now. I think there's another dwarf here!”

“That's good, right?” Valayun asked.

Meklavar shrugged. “Not if they're one of the bandits. Then we might be in trouble, since they'll be able to tell we're coming.”

“I don't like this,” Block said nervously.

“All we can do is keep moving forward. If we stop to worry about what could be, we'll be here all day,” Paladin said. He took the lead down the hall, not waiting for anyone to respond, and the others hurried to fall in line behind him.

They all kept their weapons drawn. There was every chance that they were walking deeper into an ambush and none of them wanted to be caught unaware.

Every now and then, Meklavar reached out to touch the stone walls, trying to get a feel for what was going on. Just before a turn, she hissed out “wait!”

Paladin brought up his sword in time to block a strike from another blade. The clang of steel-on-steel rang out in the tunnel, impossibly loud. Paladin grit his teeth and bore down, refusing to let the assailant take an inch.

“Who are you? What are you doing in this place?” demanded the stranger.

“We're here to beat you and rescue the princess!” Pike exclaimed from the back of their line.

The stranger frowned. “They kidnapped someone else as well?”

Paladin let up a little, puzzled by that statement. “What do you mean 'someone else'? We only know about Princess Mora.”

There was something very strange going on, but no one could feel that more than Meklavar. Her stonesense sang, but not in a way that indicated danger. “Paladin, I don't think he's one of the bandits.”

The stranger rolled his eyes. “Do I look like a bandit to you?”

Behind Meklavar, the others made sounds of protest - “Of course he does!” - but Paladin evidently agreed with Meklavar and slowly lowered his sword. He kept it at the ready, just in case.

Valayun refused to lower her arrow and kept it trained on the stranger. “Who are you? How do we know you're someone we can trust?”

“Because I believe I'm the one you were sent to rescue,” he told them. “My name is Mizerik, son of Princess Mora.”

“Nope.” Lance shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest. “No way.”

Pidge appeared utterly delighted by the twist. She turned to Keith with a grin and raised her hand, palm facing him. He looked puzzle for a moment and then held up his hand the same way.

“High five?” Pidge asked.

Understanding dawned on Keith's face and he gently clapped his hand to hers. “What are we doing this for?”

“Because we're dwarf pals! This is going to be so much fun!” Pidge said. She picked up her gamepad and began to intently type something.

“You two planned this?” Allura asked, looking to Coran.

He beamed at her. “Keith had the idea after I explained a bit about how the game works. It's all part of an even bigger story I have in mind. I figured that since you all could use something to do, I could do a bigger campaign than the last time. This is only the beginning!”

“I think we'll be able to find time for that,” Shiro said, sounding amused.

“Still worried that my dad might make good on his threat?” Pidge asked.

“You think he won't?”

Pidge wasn't going to argue with him on that.

Coran let them talk for a moment while he took a drink of water. They'd been going for a while and could probably wrap things up soon, or at least take a break before heading into the next part of the campaign.

He scrolled through his chosen story and decided that he'd wait to see what they wanted to do about the remaining bandits first. There wasn't any treasure to find, but the odds were that they would press on until they found something interesting, and he had a misleading side-plot involving a mysterious key if they really wanted to go that route. He almost hoped Keith would convince them that it was unnecessary, but the thought of getting to send them on a wild floklop chase was highly amusing.

It was all dependent on whether or not they took Keith's deal. There was something his character was after, and in exchange for helping him, he would grant a favor.

What was it the humans said again?

Quid pro quo?

#voltron #fanfiction #monsters and mana #no pairings #between vld season 7 and season 8

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metalgearkong · 4 years

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The Last of Us Part II - Review (PS4)

8/14/20 ***SPOILERS***

Developed by Naughty Dog, released June 19th, 2020

The Last of Us was a game I wasn’t originally a huge fan of when it came out in 2013. Despite it receiving astronomical praise by fans and critics, it took me a couple times completing the game before I fell in love with it. What truly made The Last of Us special was not necessarily its concept or gameplay, but its storytelling and characters. The depth of the interpersonal drama and raw emotion on screen was the true core of the game, with the stealth-action, zombies, and other aspects more like icing on the cake. The Last of Us ended up being one of my favorite games of all time strictly based on execution, even if the game as a whole still isn’t perfect.

The Last of Us Part II was my most highly anticipated game of 2020, and it feels strange to be on the other side of it finally. This game has been polarizing for fans, and as it turns out, I feel conflicted on the game as well. I finished it a month or so ago, but only now getting my thoughts written out. While some aspects are daring, jaw dropping, and gorgeous, other aspects detract from what is an unexpected story not quite living up to its potential. I respect this game more than I love it, and while I do think critics have been too kind in review scores, the exceptionally low user reviews have been far more incorrect. This is a solid, epic, deep, beautiful, emotional campaign which will deliver its money’s worth, but many contentious points will dictate how much you enjoy this blockbuster of a video game.

One of the aspects I like the most about this game is how similar the gameplay is to the original. Many people I suppose would want more change or innovation in the 7 years since The Last of Us, but personally I’ve always been a fan of sequels that retain what I like about a series. If it changes too much, it becomes too detached from what I enjoyed or got used to. Changes Part II makes are subtle, but natural for the genre and world. The player can duck and go prone in waist-high grass to conceal themselves, a dodge button has also been added, and a huge addition to combat and stealth is the addition of attack dogs who patrol with their owners. Dogs can pick up your scent until you distract it, adding to a lot of tension anytime enemy K9s are around. And yes, I found it difficult to shoot the first couple of dogs I encountered as they yelp out in pain when they get hurt or die.

Part II picks up I believe 5 years after the original. Ellie and Joel live in Jackson, the town they town the become a part of at the end of The Last of Us, and seem to be thriving in a community with food, power, and systems in place for relative safety from the outside world. The story is told in a much more chopped up chronology which I found to be detrimental to the pacing. The first game had a straightforward narrative and it worked very well, and this game has to dice up its story to make it seem more complex, but just comes off as pretentious. For example, by the end of the prologue (about a hour and a half) you play as three different characters. This leads into the strange structure of this game’s story, aside from having the linearity chopped up at times.

The most controversial moment of the game is the moment of Joel’s death and how it occurred. While this event was not unexpected for myself and others, the manner of which he died is what’s justifiably pissing people off. A brand new character is introduced named Abby (and one of the three characters we briefly play as shortly before) and without any background or indication of who she is, brutally tortures and executes Joel in front of Ellie’s eyes. It’s not difficult to see director Neil Druckmann cackling with satisfaction of his subversion of expectations. It’s simply toying with the emotions of fans, and he has to expect and stand by any criticism he’s gotten for how this scene went down. However, this moment does make more sense as the story unfolds, but its no less a heavy handed and manipulative move for the sake of auteur video game storytelling.

Ever since I witnessed the brutal death of one of my favorite video game characters of all time, my only though was “they better justify this.” It was never “this is horrible and irredeemable, and “Naughty Dog is off its rocker,” like many people seem to have reacted. It was gut wrenching, but I knew Naughty Dog has a pension for organic characters, and in the back of my mind I knew I had to give this game its fair shot, and see if and/or how Naughty Dog justified a scene liable to piss off virtually every single fan of the original game. This is a poor spot of the game, but the structure of the game itself is, for me, the biggest issue of Part II. In the end, I don’t mind Joel’s death as much seeing the context surrounding it, although it still should have been handled entirely differently.

Neil Druckmann proudly pulls a Metal Gear Solid 2 move, and entirely switches protagonists for a huge portion of the game (about 45%). Abby turns out to be the main character once the halfway point of the game hits. Following Joel’s death is about 9-11 hours playing as Ellie on her revenge quest to find Abby and kill her. The motivation is justified, being in the room with Ellie as she watched her father figure die in agony in front of her. Ellie’s portion of the campaign makes sense, Abby’s makes less. The structure of the story comes to a high point mid way through, where Abby and Ellie finally meet to clash. After all this build up, and around the same time of the game where the first game had its conclusion, everything halts and resets.

We are suddenly dropped into the Abby story, showing her side of things, and why she would want to kill Joel. I do think the story directly surrounding her motivation is well done, but the problem is, a large portion of Abby’s story has literally nothing to do with Joel or Ellie. We effectively see why Abby would want revenge on Joel, but then we have to tag along on a major side journey while Abby helps a trans kid and his sister escape the cult they grew up in. I get that it helps develop more empathy for Abby as a character, but Abby’s story should have been at least cut in half to keep the overall story more focused and flowing. Many times while deep into Abby’s story I honestly forgot what the point of what I was doing is, and was getting confused on which events had happened and which hadn’t.

Abby herself is a good character, and after all has been said and done, she is the third best character in this series so far. It’s a shame though that so much of her story is a direct waste of time, despite more of an excuse for more of the same great gameplay and set-piece moments. Empathy and perspective are the two big themes of this game. The best thing I can say about Part II is it convinced me of something I thought was near inconvincible: it made me like and root for Abby after the scene of Joel’s death. However, while the theme of the game is “all of your enemies have their own backstory,” Par II doesn’t teach us anything new whatsoever. Abby’s father was the surgeon Joel killed upon saving Ellie from the Fireflies at the climax of Part I. But Joel (and Ellie) killed a lot of random enemies in the first game, most of them players won’t even remember specifically.

The fact that we have an entire video game showing us the perspective of one single person who wants revenge on Joel is a story that doesn’t need to be told. Any NPC we killed in the first game had family or friends who would also want revenge on Joel as well. We don’t learn anything new. This whole series is just marauder against marauder. Joel has never been a good guy, and that’s never been a secret. Joel is shown as an anti-hero even before the conclusion of the first game. It’s partially what makes him such a cool character. We only rooted for Joel because we were seeing things from his perspective. If the first game was entirely about Abby and Joel was framed as the bad guy, the results would have been the same: Abby would be our point-of-view “hero” character, while Joel was clearly the villain. Part II is not the epiphany Neil Drukmann likely wanted his audience to experience.

As anyone can see, the graphics and performances of Part II are incredible. While the story and structure are nothing too special (because it ruins its great moments by long drawn out heavy handed moments), at least the game itself is engaging to play and is gorgeous to look at. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest myself, and the game mainly taking place in Seattle, I enjoyed being totally waterlogged throughout the entire experience. If the story isn’t depressing enough on its own, the weather will certainly get to you. The core characters themselves are portrayed extremely well via motion capture and voice acting as well. I’m wondering why Neil Druckmann didn’t just make a Netflix series beings he is clearly so focused on the character’s interpersonal relationships. This is especially true for Joel and Ellie once again. Side characters are well acted, but have less of an effect on the core story, which is a huge tragedy when so much effort was clearly put into bringing them to life.

There’s no doubt Naughty Dog accomplished their specific goal in making you as depressed as possible. To be honest, it reminded me of some of my favorite books about stories of conflicting emotions and ending on depressing notes. Even though Part II is far from perfect, it’s still a juggernaut of a single-player game with amazing graphics, acting, responsive gameplay. I like the ways it proved me wrong on stuff I thought was unchangeable, and for that, it has my deep respect. It may not be for everyone, not even fans of the first, but if you come at it with an honest open mind and let yourself drop your ego enough to take in this entire story, I think it’s a daring piece of media that might age very well in time.

7/10

#the last of us part ii #naughty dog #ellie #abby #video games #review #ps4 #playstation 4

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dndplus · 6 years

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In-Depth: Villains, Part 2

Again, if you’re hear to learn about making a villain for your adventure/campaign and you’re a newer, less experienced DM, I highly recommend you look at my posts titled ‘Getting Started’ first, specifically the ones about making an adventure.

They can be found here:

Getting Started: Making An Adventure, Part 1 Getting Started: Making An Adventure, Part 2

If you’re here and have not looked into Part 1 of my In-Depth on Villains, it can be found here:

In-Depth: Villains, Part 1

Hello again!

We’re picking up right where we left off with the steps I laid out in Part 1. They are:

Motive, Station, Mentality, Ability (Essentially, all of Part 1)

Introducing the Villain to Your Party (We’ll start here)

The Villain’s Lackeys

Evolution

The Hill They Die On

Most of the actual “Creating” happened in part 1 with identifying a villain’s MSMA. This is only a small part of a villain, though. Having a good one made does little if they way they’re presented and used isn’t also done appropriately. For some, simply being a menacing figure is at the end of your dungeon is enough. That said, you can’t simply having one basic, menacing figure after the next over a twenty level campaign, can you?

Introducing the Villain to Your Party

This is important, make no mistake. When the party first meets the villain is just as important as when they kill it (assuming the villain doesn’t win, of course).

There are several things to consider when you introduce the villain, but the MSMA of that villain go a long way in helping you determine the details. Here’s a few basic introductions to start:

1. The Guy At the End

This is the most basic of all introductions. Essentially, an NPC in need of help will describe the villain to the players, and the players will run into them at the end of their dungeon and fight to the death. Believe it or not, as basic as this is, it can be compelling even for a campaign’s BBEG.

I recall a specific example here of an Aboleth who worked so secretly that discovering his name was an event of enormous importance in the campaign. He was never seen (or interacted with) until the very final confrontation. Rather, the players dealt with a legion of spies (in the form of Deep Scions) that acted as the main source of their player-to-villain interaction.

For simpler villains, you really can just stick them at the end of the dungeon and call it a day. The scale may go up as your players increase in level, such as in who gives them the task, and what they’re there to accomplish, but at the end of the day there’s always room for a simple “they’re the guy at the end” situation.

2. The Power That Be

A powerful politician. A corrupt member of the military or guard. The ruler of an evil kingdom. This villain is best introduced to the players through their importance to the region, without any mention to the fact that they’re to be an enemy in the future. This builds precedence, and creates drama when their involvement becomes that revelation to really kick things off down the line. It fits will with the noble-as-a-thief trope I went into detail on in Part 1.

In some cases, this villain meets with the players directly before the two groups turn adversarial. They could be someone the players report their heroic deeds to, and are thus congratulated and even rewarded. They could be a person of importance they bump elbows with while at a gathering for the rich and powerful, whether it be for something completely unrelated or not. Regardless of what you do, when this chance meeting happens, I advise finding a way to show the villain isn’t entirely genuine. This could be as blunt as them being mean to a servant, or dismissive of plights of people they think of as ‘beneath them’, but it can also be more subtle than them. The villain could be trying too hard to appear kind to the players, such as by offering favors and help should the players ever need this. This approach is particularly devious, as your players will never turn down a favor from someone who seems powerful (especially if it seems like going to them is what you intend for them to do in teh future). In this way, you create a situation where the players learn of a plot by the villain without knowing who it is yet, and thus delivering their involvement directly to the villain themselves.

3. The Old Evil

Some villains have a history of being a villain. They enact schemes meant to disrupt life for good folk and cause disorder wherever they go. They may also be a great, roaming beast that’s awoken from a thousand year slumber that the players will need to assemble help against. Regardless of your particular brand of ‘ancient, terrible evil’, you can be certain to evoke an entirely different atmosphere when you introduce this villain through a story reminiscent of the Boogey Man.

Of course, how you reach the ‘ghost story introduction’ of your villain is important as well. Show the players the effects of the villain first, such as a village in ruins at the hands of their methods, or if the villain isn’t meant to pay off until much later, put the players IN the event that terrorizes a village/city/kingdom.

In Conclusion...

Regardless of how you choose to introduce the villain, and there are obviously more than the three I gave you to get started with, remember that your villain is unique. Two different villains with the same introduction should play out differently, sometimes even drastically so. A cocky, arrogant noble is going to be blithely charismatic, whereas a cold, uncaring sociopath who cares nothing for his people will likewise be a stalwart and serious individual.

The Villain’s Lackeys

This applies to every villain, even ones without ‘actual’ lackeys. I know that may seem strange, but we’ll get that particular type of villain in a moment...

For starters, consult your villain’s MSMA. Their station as a crime lord is going to put the criminal element front and center as far as lackeys is concerned. In contrast, a warlock may have deep sea monstrosities, wicked fae, or terrible fiends at their disposal. A crime lord who’s also a warlock might have both.

How do you handle that situation, though? Typically, the beings of a patron’s background (in the case of a warlock) are of a higher power level than commonplace thugs. In this scenario, your crime boss might employ a wide variety of thugs, bandits, and the like, and have a single, somewhat powerful fiend/fey/eldritch horror as a sort of ‘mid-boss’ to the adventure.

Some villains don’t really have minions, but may live in places that are simply fraught with danger. A Behir lives in a secluded cave, one that’s particularly hard to reach, and could have any arrangement mountain monsters between the players and itself. This could be a contingent of trolls, or a group of stone giants. It’s important to understand these aren’t true lackeys, of course. In the instance of a villain like this, the players will be able to sneak by whatever stands between them and their intended target, which can drastically alter the course and pacing of an adventure.

More significant villains are going to employ a greater variety of minions, including other villains! Keep this in mind when you have two greater villains operating in a similar realm, as a ‘mid-boss’ type, lesser villain can be the thread that ties the two together.

Other villains have far less complicated lackey situations, but ones that should still be heavily considered. Liches and necromancers, for instance, will employ the undead. It’s important to know a lot about undead minions when you select what they command, though. Some liches may have apprentices who weren’t quite up to the task of achieving lichdom themselves, which would create a Boneclaw. Other liches might have a Cadaver Collector employed, which suggests that they are mechanically inclined, a fact that can be reflected in their lair and the traps they employ later. Finally, a particularly sadistic and wicked lich may be host to a Devourer, suggesting a connection to the Demon Lord of Undeath Orcus himself!

A villain’s lackeys tell a story about the villain themselves, as well as what they do and what they might become. In that vein, we move on to...

Evolution

This section will be short, but it’s important. It does not apply to minor villains, as they are meant to come and go in a short period of time. Moderate and major villains, however, can be the focus of multiple adventures. Their schemes, as well as their defeats, can shape how they present in the later segments of an adventure.

A villain who succeeds in stealing a powerful object may acquire new abilities, or perhaps that same villain kidnaps a renowned tinker and adds mechanical wonders to its list of lackeys.

On the contrary, a villain who is defeated may set itself up to better counter the players’ own abilities, or retreat to a place where it is more powerful.

This can happen in reverse, as well. Players may simply find a villain becomes more nuanced and dangerous as they grow closer. The tactics used to achieve victory may prove less effective as time goes on, or they could reach a point where they need to evolve by finding outside help.

Whatever the case, always be mindful of how the successes and failures of your villain are going to shape their actions. It keeps things from becoming stale, and empowers the notion that the players are fighting a specific character, and not just ‘whatever the DM throws at them that session’.

The Hill They Die On

Another short section, and the one we’ll conclude on. There are scenarios where your players will kill a villain before you planned to have them die, and that’s fine.

Applaud your players for pulling something like that off, whether it be because they were exceptionally clever, or your own inexperience made it possible. It’s at this moment I’ll say something I may not have said yet: always be ready for the next adventure. If your players pull off a surprise victory ahead of schedule, knowing what their next adventure is to be and letting them find their way to it will allow you time to finish the session without canceling too early. This will then give you time to prepare assets and properly build the entirety of that next adventure.

Unexpected scenarios aside, your villain has a limit. There is both a point in time when the villain must truly ‘lose’, and when your players will yearn for something new. There are a few ways to do this, but what’s most important is to understand their motives.

A necromancer looking to learn about the undead will die on the hill of ‘backed into a corner with nowhere to go’. It’s not significant, but a necromancer of that sort is not a significant villain. A necromancer working tirelessly, maybe even selflessly, to use profane magics to resurrect a loved one will sooner die before let the players foil their plot, and that is the hill they die on.

Some villains will still try to escape after their plot is foiled, only to find they have nothing once truly beaten. This villain may fade into obscurity, beaten but not dead, or that villain may develop a personal vendetta against the players. That adventure finds the players as targets, with the villain pushed to their absolute limit as they attempt to assassinate the players in a murderous rage with no regard for their own well being.

Villains have an expiration date; a period of time where their involvement as the players’ main antagonist is interesting. You can save them if you want, keep them alive to be used as a lackey to a greater villain, perhaps purely to strike at the players out of spite, but they are still no longer the main antagonist in that scenario.

I end this post here, on this somewhat dour note, because you may feel particularly proud of a villain. That’s great, be proud, and even keep that villain for later. A villain in one campaign can come back in another as an undead, or a devil, or after some other grisly transformation, and when they do they’ll be interesting again. What’s most important for now is that you say goodbye and congratulate your players when they triumph, and then get excited as you start the MSMA for the next villain they’ll love to hate.

#D&D #D&D 5e #D&D&EE #Dungeons and Dragons #Dungeon Master #Dungeon Master Tutorial #Dungeon Master Guide #Villains #DM #GM #BBEG #DM Tutorial #Campaign #Campaigns #Adventures

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mrmallardsmobileposts · 5 years

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Prince of Persia: Sands of Time holds up pretty well!

I bought the Prince of Persia trilogy at my friend's suggestion in 2016. I asked him for some input on a game sale that was going on at the time and he told me that they were some of his favorite childhood games. Based on his recommendation, I bought the trilogy.

I haven't picked up a Prince of Persia game since then. I played the first one for about 30 minutes, hated it and shut off my console.

Here's my reasoning: around the time I played Prince of Persia, I was just coming off of the Mass Effect trilogy. I had only gotten a PS3 in the last few months of 2014 - my first PS3, ever - and ever since that I had been playing catch-up on all the landmark titles I had missed over the console's lifespan. I had played the Jak remasters, but I grew up with all of those. Aside from a gameplay demo of Warrior Within as a kid, Prince of Persia was an unknown series of games to me.

While Mass Effect had its jank, railroading and poorly aged graphics in certain respects, it offered a new dimension of freedom that I was not accustomed to in video games. You spend most of the games farting around hubs, shooting up corridors of enemies and stuff - tackling each new mission on your own terms, at your own pace. It's a game series that prides itself on how free and open-ended it feels.

So to drop into a game like Prince of Persia after that is a bit of a rude surprise.

My initial opinion of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was that it was too railroaded. I felt like I was being throttled, restrained, and I didn't like it. The cutscenes weren't updated very well, the camera was a jank machine and the VA was pretty bad. All in all, I was unimpressed by it - everything about the game was working against it, in my eyes. It wasn't a game that appealed to my gaming tastes at the time.

That was two and a half years ago. It took a brief fixation on RPG games, a general sense of burnout regarding the rest of my prominent games library and a GVMERS documentary on the history of the series to bring me back around to the idea of playing Prince of Persia.

I'll get the negatives out of the way - Prince of Persia is dated. In some areas more than others, but this game shows its age in all of its crusty glory - poorly remastered cutscenes, rough facial animation and VA work, wonky camera. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is a 15 year old game, and it shows plain as day.

Combat is pretty clunky too, even in this run I didn't like combat so much. It felt like they were put in to break the flow up between parkour sections, and I frankly didn't like combat all that much.

But when Prince of Persia does something well, it excels at it. The pillars of this game are its gameplay, aesthetic and sense of progression.

First of all - the parkour is fantastic. Looking at it through the lens of a 2003 PS2 game, this gameplay mechanic would have been revolutionary at the time - and as someone who hasn't played Mirror's Edge or Assassin's Creed, it was revolutionary to me as I was playing it. This is the main draw of the game - you're dropped onto a room, the game tells you to get out of it, and the exit leads to another room. Hell, it goes as far as to tell you how to get through most of the puzzles.

When I first played the game, I felt trapped. I felt railroaded. I just wanted to play more open world games, and that is the furthest thing from what Sands of Time actually is. The game is very linear, and I didn't want to play games that were overly linear at the time - I grew up playing games like Jak and Daxter and GTA, and I was chomping at the bit for more gameplay experiences like Mass Effect. That's not to say that I would only appreciate games like Mass Effect at the time - I think I was having a blast with Catherine around the same time, which is a pretty limited puzzle game - but linearity in the same sort of vein as this Prince of Persia game was very much not my thing. Even God of War is less strictly linear than Prince of Persia is imo, because the combat offers a sense of freedom and creativity to it and I feel like I'm always in control when I play those games, even if I'm being sheparded along a straight line the entire game.

The problem I had with Prince of Persia is that I was looking at it through the wrong perspective - it was unavoidable at the time considering my tastes, but it still warrants mentioning. I wasn't looking at the game in the sort of way that really highlights its strengths, and the aspects of it that appeal to me now were lost underneath all the stuff I couldn't stand at first glance.

I'm a sucker for puzzle games - Tetris, Puyo, Tangrams, I love a good puzzle game. I'm not the biggest fan of action games with forced puzzle room sections, though - pressure switches, time gates, collapsing floors etc. So you'd think that I would hate Prince of Persia for how much of the game is made up of these puzzle sections. But it seems to me that the combat, the action of this game, plays second fiddle to the puzzle-solving. I hate this gameplay when it breaks up the focus of the game - the story, the action. I hate when it's used as an arbitrary roadblock. I hate this shit in games like Jak 2. But this game is all about switches and pulleys and wall-running. It's about getting to that next checkpoint and marking your progress as you jump and flip and swing through a collapsed palace in India. The game is very slow and methodical - Prince of Persia, when boiled down to its purest form, is a puzzle game. And that aspect of it has aged really, really well.

The aesthetic of the game - the arches, the stained glass, the pillars and ceiling domes and ever-present banners and cloths - has aged pretty gracefully as well. The geometry tends to be pretty simple most of the time, but it works - it's not a graphical powerhouse like the God of War titles, but the developers made a very pretty game world with the technology they had available at the time and they made so much of it directly interactive with the player's actions in the game. It's commendable.

Also, regarding God of War - there's no way that the Prince of Persia games weren't a primary inspiration for that series. About halfway through the game, I realised that Prince of Persia is basically an earlier God of War with weaker combat but stronger puzzle-solving. They're both third-person action games that aim to replicate historical settings with some degree of accuracy to the pop-culture impressions that people have of those settings. One of God of War's biggest draws is that gorgeously realised interpretation of Greek mythology - and Prince of Persia is just as successful in capturing that swashbuckling Arabian Nights setting that it uses. On a smaller scale than God of War, but that's not an issue - the compact nature of Prince of Persia's running time and game setting is one of its most appealing factors.

Sands of Time is a short game. I finished it in six hours, spread out over a couple of weeks - I got all the health upgrades, I kinda ballsed up the Sand Orbs but I got a whole lot of them, and I beat the final boss. One thing that kept me motivated was the completion percentage attached to my game file.

Every save point is located somewhere between 2-4% of the gameplay. Every time you hit a save point, you see your progress in the game go up, little by little - so by the time you stop playing, you know you've played though 15% of the game or so. Next time you might play for less time, so you only hit a handful of save points and go about 8% though the game. But now your completion rate is 23% - next time you play, try and reach 30%! From there, you try and get yourself to 50% completion. You tackle the game in these bite-sized chunks and watch your completion number go up little by little, and it motivates you to keep going for a higher number. This aspect of the game has aged amazingly well, at least if you respond to this sort of motivation - if that sounds like it's gonna be a motivating factor for you, then you might just enjoy Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

This game is a mixed bag due to its age, but underneath the jank and the poorly aged aspects sits a very solid skeleton of a game. You might not like it compared to flashier games like God of War, but I enjoyed its earnest presentation, satisfying campaign length and rock-solid fundamental gameplay.

#prince of persia #Prince of persia the sands of time #Prince of persia sands of time #sands of time

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southeastasianists · 6 years

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It’s a long drive to the city of Tanjung Balai in North Sumatra, Indonesia—almost five hours from the provincial capital of Medan, on winding roads past emerald green paddy fields and through palm oil and rubber plantations. The city is one of the main ports in North Sumatra, and connects both Malaysia and Singapore with Indonesia. Like many port cities, a large proportion of residents in Tanjung Balai make their living from the sea.

Meiliana, a Chinese-Indonesian and a Buddhist, was no exception. Having lived on Jalan Karya in Tanjung Balai for eight years, she owned a simple store selling salted fish with her husband, Atui. But in July 2016, Meiliana’s life was thrown into disarray, and in August 2018 she was sentenced to one and a half years in prison for blasphemy by the Medan District Court.

How it all began

It started out almost as a throwaway comment.

In July 2016, Meiliana walked across the road from her small house on the sleepy street of Jalan Karya to buy breakfast buns from Kasini, a 51-year-old Javanese Muslim who owns a small shop selling sundries. It was something she did almost every morning.

Kasini and Meiliana weren’t exactly friends, but they had a cordial relationship. At Eid-ul-Fitr, the end of the Muslim fasting month, Meiliana would bake cakes and take them to Kasini’s house.

On that fateful morning, as Meiliana paid for her buns, she had a request for Kasini. “Can you tell Wak [grandfather] to turn down the volume of the mosque speakers? It’s so loud it hurts my ears.”

Kasini’s father, 75-year-old Kasidik, has worked at the Al Ma’shum Mosque since 2007 as one of its caretakers. Five times a day, he walks the few feet to the mosque from the home he shares with Kasini and her children and puts a cassette in an old-fashioned tape player. The azan (prayer call) then rings out across Jalan Karya, reminding Muslims that it’s time to pray.

Karsini didn’t think much of Meiliana’s comment, other than wondering why, having lived just ten paces away from the mosque for the last eight years, she was suddenly bothered by the sound of the azan.

“I did think, why is she saying this to me?” she tells New Naratif. But the mood was calm, and Kasini passed the request on to her father. He, in turn, told another caretaker, who then told the imam (the spiritual leader of the mosque).

That comment, first made over a breakfast bun, then started to take on a life of its own.

Just a few days later, Kasini and Kasidik noticed that the street outside Meiliana’s home was suddenly clogged with cars and motorbikes. People started showing up at all times of the day and night, and they could hear shouting. At one point Kasini says she thought she heard Meiliana’s eldest son exclaim, “We’re all adults here! What’s wrong with you?”

Word of Meiliana’s comment about the mosque speakers had spread from a neighbour to her father, from a father to his co-workers, from the co-workers to more neighbours, and from the neighbours to social media. The message got distorted as it passed from one to another, and eventually people were saying that Meiliana had tried to stop the Islamic call to prayer and insulted Islam, violating Indonesia’s infamous blasphemy law (Pasal 156A KUHP), which carries a maximum five-year prison sentence.

A few days later, Meiliana’s husband Atui went to the mosque to publicly apologise for his wife’s comments. Meiliana was either too scared or too stubborn to go with him. In the end, it hardly mattered; her husband’s apology failed to insulate her against what happened next.

Prominent Islamic organisations, such as Front Umat Islam (FUI), successfully pressured the police to file an official report (link in Bahasa Indonesia). In 2017, the North Sumatra chapter of the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI), one of the largest Muslim organisations in Indonesia, issued a fatwa (a non-legally binding but official pronouncement on Islamic law) against Meiliana. A mob proceeded to riot, pelting Meiliana’s home with rocks and bottles. They then set fire to Buddhist temples in Tanjung Balai.

Kasini claims that Meiliana was originally taken into custody for “her own protection”, as the authorities were worried she’d be lynched if she stayed at home. But instead of protecting her, they charged her with blasphemy.

According to one of Meiliana’s lawyers, Ranto Sibarani, the court proceedings were chequered at best.

The prosecutors presented the fatwa and a written statement from a witness at the riot outside Meiliana’s home as evidence. Sibarani claims it was mostly based on hearsay; no recordings of the original comment were provided. “They brought the mosque amplifiers as an item of evidence,” Sibarani tells New Naratif. “The officials welcomed the rioters with open arms. The case was heavily influenced by an intervention from the masses.”

A sense of disbelief over the legitimacy of Meiliana’s case continues to loom large. “She did not commit blasphemy. What she did was offer a neighbourly complaint, and that is not an insult to Islam,” Ismail Hasani, the research director at the rights advocacy group Setara Institute, told The Washington Post. “More generally, we believe that the blasphemy law itself does more than anything else to limit freedom of religion in Indonesia.”

Particular to Meiliana’s case, there’s also been a debate about the volume of the call to prayer, and whether a request to lower it qualifies as blasphemy. In 1978, Indonesia’s Religious Affairs Ministry released (link in Bahasa Indonesia) instructions on how to properly manage the volume made by a mosque amplifier, prioritising melody over loudness; Indonesia’s current vice president, Jusuf Kalla, has also advised mosques in Indonesia to be mindful of the volume of their speakers, and dispatched technicians to help fix faulty amplifiers.

Kasini says she feels “exhausted” by the case. She had to go to the police station countless times to give her testimony about Meiliana’s comment, and once attended court in Medan to give evidence. She says that when she made her statement to the judge, Meiliana was not there to hear the testimony against her, so the former neighbours didn’t have to face each other.

When asked if she believes Meiliana committed blasphemy, Kasini shrugs her shoulders and looks confused. “I don’t know anything about the blasphemy law, so I just leave it up to the judge. He must have known what he was doing,” is all she will say.

Kasini isn’t the only one who’s exhausted.

Meiliana’s story is one of fatigue for anyone who has tried to follow the trajectory of Indonesia’s nebulous and opaque blasphemy law, and the myriad cases that have unfolded over the years, always following a similar pattern.

Here, the cycle continues: frivolous litigation favouring the offended and mobilised mob; a president’s inability “to intervene in the legal process”; an outpouring of signatures in an online petition (link in Bahasa Indonesia); political convenience.

The blasphemy law in Indonesia is built upon all of these things—this is the story of how it’s wielded, how it unfolds, and how it (still) stands.

Indonesia’s problem with blasphemy

The blasphemy law has its roots in the administration of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno. Signed into force by Sukarno in 1965, the law was originally meant (link in Bahasa Indonesia) to “accommodate requests from Islamic organisations who wanted to stem the recognition of indigenous beliefs.” It was later used as a way for President Suharto, the authoritarian second president of Indonesia, to prosecute anyone who dared to criticise his government.

Attempts to revoke the law have failed on more than one occasion. Indonesia’s fourth president, Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid—who wrote an article in 1982 for Tempo magazine entitled “Tuhan Tidak Perlu Dibela (God Does Not Need to be Defended)”—was once involved in an unsuccessful petition to revoke the blasphemy law. In July 2018, a petition launched by the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in Indonesia, who claimed that the law inhibits their religious freedom, was also rejected.

Anyone who stands accused of blasphemy in Indonesia also faces a tough legal battle with little chance of acquittal.

“Since 2004, there hasn’t been an appeal [in blasphemy cases] that has been granted by the court,” Andreas Harsono, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, tells New Naratif. “Out of 89 cases [in Indonesia’s sixth President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s administration], 125 [individuals] were convicted. And out of 20 cases, 22 [individuals] were convicted in President Joko Widodo’s current administration.”

One of the more recent blasphemy cases involved the erstwhile Jakarta governor, Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, who was sentenced to two years in prison under the blasphemy law. Accused of insulting Islam for having quoted the Quran while on the campaign trail during the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, calling for Ahok to be imprisoned.

Although the scale of Ahok’s case was far greater, the patterns in Meiliana’s case mirrored his.

A continuing streak of religious intolerance

At the very heart of Meiliana’s case—and all of the other cases preceding it—is Indonesia’s continuing streak of religious intolerance.

Tanjung Balai is known for having a sizeable Chinese-Indonesian population; Chinese traders, arriving by sea, started to pour into the area in the 1800s. According to official records, the city has just over 185,000 residents, 157,000 of whom are Muslim and 11,000 of whom are Buddhist. At times in the city’s history, tensions between the different communities have flared.

In 2009, Tanjung Balai bore witness to the removal of a Mahayana Buddha statue. “The appearance of the Buddhist statue elicited a violent reaction from Islamic leaders. Wahhabi leaders under the United Islam Movement (GIB) organised rallies and protests in May and June last year, calling for the statue to be taken down. They argued that it tarnished the image of Tanjung Balai as a Muslim town,” wrote Human Rights Watch in a report.

Following Meiliana’s comments in 2016, a mob tore through the city and targeted several of its 16 Buddhist temples.

This outbreak of violence is now considered to be one of the worst examples of racially motivated mob “justice” that Indonesia has seen since 1998, when rioters attacked primarily Chinese-Indonesian communities in Medan, looting from shops and attacking local residents. The riots then swept across the country, leaving 1,000 people dead.

Atu is the 68-year-old caretaker of the Tiau Hau Biao Buddhist Temple, which sits on the estuary of the Asahan River in Tanjung Balai. The air is heavy with the scent of drying fish, and fishermen sit in front of the temple and cast their nets in the shadow of its crimson roof.

Atu has worked as a caretaker of the temple for 10 years, since it was first built, and works from 5am to 8pm, seven days a week. His main duties include sweeping the floors and replenishing the incense. Back in 2016, he was at home when the temple was attacked in the middle of the night. When he arrived in the early hours of the morning, the building was still aflame.

“I don’t know how much gasoline they brought with them, but they sure used up every single drop,” he tells New Naratif. Atu, and local residents who had come to help, set up a crude pump system to funnel water from the river to quench the flames.

It took over an hour to put the fire out.

Once the flames subsided, Atu saw that the roof of the temple has been destroyed. The statues had been burned. The floor tiles smashed.

The restoration of the temple to its former glory took several months. According to Atu, the money promised by the government to help pay for it never materialised. Instead the refurbishment was made possible by donations from the local community.

19 perpetrators were eventually caught. According to news reports, “Eight were charged with looting, nine with malicious destruction of property and two with inciting violence”. All were given sentences ranging from one to four months in jail. Despite having ransacked official houses of worship, none of the rioters were charged with blasphemy, because no one filed an official complaint against them—one of the stipulations for someone to be tried under the law.

Atu laughs dryly and shakes his head when asked about this. “Not fair, of course it’s not fair. They should have got longer sentences.”

He also says that the case appears to show a trend towards rising religious intolerance in Tanjung Balai. “We used to be more united, but now the different religious groups have started to split,” he explains. “For years I went to sea as a fisherman and left my family at home. I never worried about them.”

Now he can’t forget the sight of his beloved temple burning in the morning light.

The attacks on temples in Tanjung Balai certainly appear to show worrying echoes of the race riots that traumatised the Chinese-Indonesian community in 1998.

Sirojuddin Abbas, a researcher at Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting (SMRC), says that Meiliana’s case shows how the blasphemy law is being deployed to punish members from minority groups. “The target is always a member of the minority groups,” he says. “That still is the thing that has not healed from our majority groups: their distrust. In a pluralistic town, for example, even if there’s only a person who is not a Muslim, not having to hear excessive noise from a mosque speaker is still a human right.”

Atu dismisses the idea that the people who attacked the temple were hired thugs, brought in to stir up racial unrest. In 1998, it was thought that members of the Indonesian military deliberately did just that to spark widespread riots and deflect attention away from the failings of the government, which led to the fall of President Suharto after 32 years in power. But, despite the fact that these attacks in Tanjung Balai seem to have been less tightly organised and politically motivated, it doesn’t reassure Atu.

“I heard the rioters were mixed,” he says. “Some outsiders. But they must have had someone on the inside. Someone from Tanjung Balai.”

After news of the fire at the temple spread, Atu says local residents started visiting in droves to check out the damage. Buddhist festivals are held at the temple every January and October, and are popular events with the local community. Muslims also come to watch the colourful festivities.

Atu says he hopes for a bigger crowd than usual this coming October, due to the publicity that the blasphemy case has sparked, which has actually raised the temple’s profile. He feels that a large, mixed crowd of spectators will be a good thing, and that local Muslims getting a taste of Buddhist culture which will help bolster relations between the different communities once more.

“But this year, the police will be guarding us,” he adds.

The politics of blasphemy

Rising religious intolerance is one way of looking at Meiliana’s case. But there are other lenses through which to examine this issue. One of them has to do with the question of whether religious intolerance is a mere manifestation of political expediency.

In April 2019, Indonesian voters will go to the polls to elect a president. As both candidates, current President Joko Widodo and former Major General Prabowo Subianto, look to curry favour with Muslim voters in a country where 87% of the population is Muslim, changing the blasphemy law could be a risky move that could cause a backlash from more conservative sections of the Islamic community.

As Savic Ali, an activist with the Jaringan Gusdurian network of progressive Muslims, says, “I think [Prabowo and Jokowi] won’t make concessions with regards to the blasphemy law. Jokowi wants a safe position, as to not anger his Muslim voting base, and I think Prabowo does, too.”

And it goes beyond just individual voters.

Ali continues to say that two of Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisations, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, won’t allow for the possibility of the blasphemy law being completely revoked anytime soon, as both believe it to be an important tenet of Islamic law. Fast forward to the presidential elections in 2019, and it’s likely that both Jokowi and Prabowo will be wary of alienating voters affiliated with either organisation—or indeed the organisations themselves, who hold significant political power in Indonesia.

Another warning sign that the blasphemy law is unlikely to be overturned or discarded anytime soon is the appointment Ma’ruf Amin as Jokowi’s running mate in the race for the presidency. Amin, who is the chairman of the MUI and known for his conservative views on Islamic law, initially said that he deplored the violent riots in Tanjung Balai following Meiliana’s comment. But, this did not stop the North Sumatra chapter of the organisation issuing a fatwa against her in early 2017.

Amin has also thrown his support behind other high-profile blasphemy cases in the past, and wields significant political and judicial influence. “He plays the most important role in sending people to jail, like Ahok,” says Harsono, in a reference to Amin’s statement against the former governor of Jakarta, widely thought to have been one of the driving forces behind his conviction.

Another example of the way politics and the blasphemy law are entwined is evident in Meiliana’s case when you consider the collateral damage: her family. Sibarani tells New Naratif that Meiliana’s son is still “afraid of the sight of a crowd” after the riots outside his home. Jokowi has said that he can’t intervene in legal cases or in Meiliana’s appeal, but there are those who think that he could show goodwill in other ways.

“He needs to say something about the need for Meiliana’s family to be, say, socially and psychologically rehabilitated,” says Abbas.

A few words from the president could perhaps go a long way in helping Meiliana’s four children to heal—still, he has remained silent, presumably so as not to offend any members of his conservative fanbase.

Yet again it seems, politics has turned the blasphemy law into a matter of convenience for those jostling for power. This refusal of politicians in Indonesia to engage in discussions about the blasphemy law has serious implications, and muddies the waters about its essential premise.

While outright revocation may not be on the cards, in its current form the law is porous and easily abused. Not everything can or should fall under the umbrella term “blasphemy”, and one of the main criticisms of the current version of the law is that it’s overly broad, encompassing a range of other issues like hate speech.

Ali says that, for serious situations that could be construed as blasphemous in nature, like urinating on a Bible, for example, there needs to be a revision to the law instead of an outright repeal. But for other cases, such as a complaint about the volume of a mosque speaker, the law needs to be clear about what the term “blasphemy” actually means. “Several points of the law need to be amended so that it can’t be a catch-all law,” he says.

As it currently stands, the only thing that’s clear is that the core meaning of “blasphemy”—and what it should encompass—is something that’s confused and confusing in Indonesia. And the lack of political will to even discuss potential changes to the law means that the absurdity of the very concept of blasphemy still remains in the shadows.

After all, were there people rightly convicted according to the blasphemy law in Indonesia?

For people like Harsono, this question goes right to the heart of the issue. “Of course there weren’t. How do you interview God?”, he says.

Hope for a change to the law?

Politicians might not want to rock the boat, but there might be a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

Since her sentencing, Meiliana has had some support from surprising allies.

As well as a Change.org petition with over 202,000 signatures, members of both Muhammadiyah and NU have criticised Meiliana’s sentencing—although not the blasphemy law itself, other than to say that it was incorrectly implemented in this case. Still, “both of these statements are unprecedented,” says Harsono. On Twitter, Indonesia’s religious affairs minister, Lukman Hakim Saifuddin, offered(link in Bahasa Indonesia) his services as Meiliana’s key witness if needed.

Though conceding that the situation is “bleak” and that electoral prospects are likely to get in the way of either presidential hopeful wanting to fully embrace reform, Abbas says that public support for Meiliana gives him cause for optimism.

Sibarani tells New Naratif that Meiliana’s counsel plan to file an appeal. This will add yet another chapter to her story, and could have repercussions across Indonesia if it’s successful. “If it goes through, we hope that it can be a legal breakthrough,” he says.

Until then, Meiliana’s former home remains shuttered.

A neighbour tells New Naratif that Meiliana’s husband was forced to move. Several members of the Chinese community from Jalan Karya asked him to relocate, as they were scared that they too would be the victims of reprisals and violence—tarred with the same brush of being “anti-Islam”. The neighbour also says that the couple had to give up their salted fish business on Jalan Asahan as they lost their permit to operate in the building as a result of the outcry surrounding the case. It’s unclear who gave the order for this to happen.

Atui has now moved to the city of Medan to be closer to Meiliana in prison, and is trying to build a new life.

When asked how she feels about this, Kasini looks pained. She wasn’t the one who made the original comment about the mosque speakers, but if she hadn’t passed on Meiliana’s request to her father, then perhaps none of this would ever have happened.

Does she think that Meiliana truly committed blasphemy and got the punishment she deserved?

Kasini looks lost for words. “Well… why did she buy a house so close to a mosque?” she says. “And why did she live here for eight years without any problems? Even if we had turned down the volume, she would still have heard the sound of the azan.”

Pressed again, and asked if this was fair and if she feels responsible for Meiliana’s fate, Kasini’s chin starts to tremble and her eyes fill with tears. She looks completely overwhelmed by the firestorm this case has caused—and which has consumed her life for over two years.

She insists she was just the messenger, when she passed on the words that ended with a woman in jail and a family torn apart.

Finally she looks up from the floor.

“If I’d known this was going to happen…” she says, her voice breaking, “then maybe I wouldn’t have said anything at all.”

#Southeast Asia #Indonesia #Religion #Islam #Blasphemy

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phoenixagent003 · 3 years

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The Castle Campaign Diary 01

I have long, long thought that buried in the new X-COM games is the recipe for a great D&D campaign. Something about that core loop of base-building and going on missions feeding into each other, coupled with the ability to customize soldiers, is just so captivating, and the turn based, class based combat gave me the same kind of warm fuzzies D&D usually does. Except, you know, it was guns instead of swords, and aliens instead of monsters. And I actually really missed the swords and monsters after a few dozen playthroughs of X-COM.

So, a while ago, I started crafting some fairly simple systems centered around researching and crafting magic items, and some base building mechanics largely cribbed from the Artisan Followers section of Strongholds and Followers, and eventually I had enough of it built that I was ready to put it in front of the my longtime and long suffering friends and players. The result is a campaign I’m calling the Castle, which, with any luck, will be the campaign I run for my friends for a long time to come.

I started off the way I always do, floating the basic pitch of the campaign to my friends, and when they seemed receptive enough to the concept (Though, I think they just really wanted to play D&D and were willing to accept my weirdness as the price of admission) for me to float them a few documents to get them started with character creation, laying down the basic state of the world, starting level, and what races were most common to the world. And also clarifying that this was a standard fantasy setting, something we have to do in my group because we have played D&D with just about every kind of coat of paint you can image.

When I was first coming up with the campaign, I was more focused on the structure than story or setting, so I didn’t actually put too much thought into the broader world, but I did eventually decide that the campaign takes place in the distant past of the same world I created for my Glintchasers novels and shorts. I think that decision was mostly motivated by laziness, but the side effect is a nice bit of synchronicity in any future worldbuilding tidbits I come up with for the campaign. I’ve already used the game as an excuse to figure out the original names and origins of the gods. And it already came up in game! That shit was literally never going to come up in the books.

So, speaking of the game, how did it go?

Well, to be honest, it got off to a slightly rocky start. I began the campaign with the players traveling through the wilderness in search of the ruined castle that was going to become their home base, and that I think was a good decision. It was a very evocative starting point. But then I ruined it by trying to force the characters to roleplay too early. As part of the journey through the woods, I had each player roll on a Travel Events chart I crafted for the game, which is basically just a roleplay prompt chart, but the players were not yet super comfortable with their characters, and the prompts of the chart were a little too vague, so they kind of floundered a bit and it was a little awkward. Towards the end though, they did start getting into it. One of the players got the result of seeing a shooting star in the night, and he really hammed up how his character interpreted it as a sign from the gods that they were on the right path.

So maybe it wasn’t the players, maybe some of the prompts were just crap. I think I’ll get a better handle on that as we start using it more.

Eventually, the players arrived at the castle. The secondary characters, who would be like the extra soldiers or B-Team if this were an X-COM game, scouted out the grounds of the castle while the A-Team, everybody’s main characters, went inside the castle itself. And of course, after a bit of searching around where they found some rooms and tools that would become their downtime facilities, they found some bandits it in the process of ransacking this ruin for whatever its worth.

Given the premise of the world being that its basically post-apocalyptic, I wanted to be careful to not make these guys too sympathetic. This was supposed to be the first combat where the players try out their characters. And I was worried since the world has been set up to be a very scrappy, survival of the fittest place, that the players might feel bad cutting down people trying to look for resources. So I played the bandits up as assholes, who immediately mark the players as walking loot drops, and they refuse the players offers of peace and immediately charge in. Later on in the campaign, I’d be more than happy to introduce a greater degree of moral complexity to some of the encounters, but for now, it’s the tutorial fight, and the games about fighting monsters, I didn’t see the need to overcomplicate things.

And that was really all the excuse everybody needed to go ham. The poor bandits actually really didn’t stand a chance. The “main” party’s roster is

Tina Cox, Aasimar Paladin

Selena Caslana, Dragonborn-descended Sorcerer

Camden Wayne, Artificer

Bartholomew Knightengale, Human Paladin

Dominik Leoguard, Human Fighter

So yeah, with three high armor class, heavy hitting characters, the bandits didn’t really do much more than scratch a couple of the PCs. But they had a blast, and everyone actually did a really great job of roleplaying their character during combat, which is not something you always see in combats but on reflection, I actually think my group is pretty great at doing consistently. Dominik and Bartholomew’s players especially really enjoyed the fight, since they were playing comically proud, crusading knights and effortlessly deflecting the blows of these bandits really played into the fantasy of their characters.

Dominik really shined towards the end when the last few enemies were on elevated balconies, and he, a high strength polearm user, actually had just enough reach to stab at them with a running high jump. And because he took the Charger feat, he did a lot of damage (I know Charger is actually bad, and honestly the only reason Dominik’s player took it was because he’s new and doesn’t know its bad, but hey, he managed to get some good use out of it this combat).

The last bandit actually managed to survive like three attacks on him from everybody rolling consecutive super low rolls, which just added to the hilarity that was that fight. After a few rounds of just obliterating these bandits, it took like three people to finish off one guy.

After the fight was over, I announced that the characters officially had the run of the castle, and gave them the rest of the handouts they would need to keep track of the campaign’s metagame, and gave them handouts for “Mission Leads” which are the short, episodic little quests they’ll be embarking on from the castle. And actually the first couple of them take place on the castle grounds. They needed to clear out the surrounding land, and they needed to clear out the lower levels.

But this was the point where I had to remind the players that this campaign was using the Gritty Realism resting rules, which if you don’t know, are variant rules in the 5th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide that say a short rest is eight hours, and a long rest is week. And immediately the two paladins and sorcerer, who had burned literally all their spells were like “Oh God! We’re useless for a week?!”

And, you know, the thing about 5th Edition D&D is it’s supposedly balanced and designed around the party having like 6-8 medium-difficulty encounters between each long rest, but the way I run things (and this is a problem a lot of people seem to run into), it’s often atypical for the party to get into more than one or two fights a day, so when I decided to structure a campaign after X-COM, a game where if you soldier gets hit they can be out of commission for a good chunk of time, I figured this was the perfect opportunity to bust those rules out and see what the game looks like when the party has to pace themselves a little bit more.

I haven’t really seen much of that yet—so far the group’s standard operating procedure is still to long rest after a single encounter’s worth of fights, but that’s partly because they’re still at a stage where they can get away with that. There isn’t currently a ticking clock forcing them to consider their time wisely, but there will be soon. And for now, just the realization of the players that they needed to be more conservative with their resources or cop a week on the bench was enough sign to me that I think these rules are a move in the right direction.

And one thing the rules did immediately facilitate was the B-Team! The players realized “Hey, there’s all this stuff we have left to do to clear out the castle grounds, but we’re tapped for the day—let’s send our secondary characters to take care of this.” And just—yes! I could not have scripted it better. The players immediately latched on to the secondary characters as a strategic option to use when they were out of commission with zero prompting from me.

So, the players sent a B-Team out to clear the castle grounds while the A-Team recharged their batteries, and this encounter led to my favorite part of the whole session. For reference, the B-Team sent out was:

Emily Thomas, Tabaxi-descended rogue (Tina’s player)

Kyle Reiner, Human Fighter (Selena’s player)

Issac Scout, Human Ranger (Camden’s player)

Kale Vulpix (Bartholomew’s player)

While the B-Team was clearing the castle grounds, they ran into some bandits and some undead. And the undead killed the bandits, the B-Team killed some of the undead, grabbed the treasure the bandits had on them, and then retreated. Which was technically mission success, but then—again, with no prompting from me—Tina’s player did a write-up of Emily giving a mission report to Tina about what happened. And since the B-Team didn’t clear all the undead, Tina told Emily “If those undead aren’t cleared out by the end of my long rest, you are going to scrub the floors of this castle until you can eat off them.”

I loved that. That was basically everything I was hoping to get out of this campaign’s structure in one hit. There was a player reflecting on how the mission went, thinking about the consequences, roleplaying her downtime, and taking the initiative to essentially create her own quest. I immediately awarded inspiration for that, and then I gave inspiration to all the character who went with Emily to go clear out the undead, which ended up being Kyle and Issac again.

And them clearing out the undead was the end of the session. And overall, I thought things went really well, excepting of course the slightly awkward start. Immediately after things were over, all the players pretty much immediately told me that they liked the campaign’s whole shtick and were looking forward to more, which was music to my ears and I think a pretty good sign things are working as intended. Event the first bandit fight, which was kind of a cakewalk, was still fun, and it served as a proof of concept for a little extra ability I’d given them.

Thanks for checking out the campaign diary! I’ve been running D&D since 2015, and I’ve wanted to share my experiences with it for a while, but this campaign was sort of the first time I ever actually knuckled down and started writing about it while the experience was still fresh in my mind.

Huge thanks to my players for being as amazing as they are, and I’ll see you all in the next write up.

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crasherfly · 3 years

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I thought I’d have something important to talk about today...

About 30 minutes into my therapy appointment I had run out of things to talk about. I had done my best to summon...something...anything...to the surface.

But I had nothing. I got nothing for this space either.

I’m doin’ fine. Like, I’m not any worse than normal or anything. I just...am having kinda a blank week/month. It happens.

I’m trying to get back into running now that the gym is closed. It’s hell. I miss my weights. I know I’m going to be okay. It’s just going to take some time to really get my head around this. There are bigger problems in the world than my personal fitness and self-image. I have better safeguards in place for myself, emotionally, so I know I’ll come out of this better than I did during the the start of the pandemic. I’m taking this as an opportunity to improve and come out stronger in a different way.

I’m still sober. Haven’t decided if I’ll have a beer or two for Thanksgiving. I didn’t give this much thought when I started. But now I’m here. I guess I’ll have more thoughts when and if I end this streak. I wouldn’t say that it’s been a lifechanging experience, but it’s been good to break routines and try something new.

Haven’t done much else beyond the usual gaming and other nonsense. More on that below. :)

Aight let’s talk about games.

I picked up a new TV this week at Best Buy! I’m uh, like, a third of the way ready for the new generation! If it’s a bad tv, please don’t @ me. We got the one that made the most sense for us.

Now just gotta find a Series X and a Yamaha receiver that can do 4k. Simple. Right? RIGHT?

Had sorta a light week for games. I worked a lot on DND stuff this week- more on that below, or, if you’re especially curious, you can find my DND blog HERE.

Red Dead Redemption 2 (PS4)

I’m not sure what prompted me to get back to the world of Red Dead Redemption 2. I had no prior inkling that there would be anything newsworthy happening in RDR2- but of course, we now know that soon Red Dead Online will be a stand-alone game of its own, the single player campaign relegated to the backseat as an add-on feature.

I first spent time with the single player world. Needless to say, spoilers to follow here, so if you’re still behind on this game’s story- well, read no further.

Still with me? Great. Okay, so it’s no shock that Arthur dies at the end of RDR2. It had to happen. It’s a damn shame because i found him infinitely more relatable than John Marston of the original game, but to each their own.

Arthur dies and you go through a kind of reset where you take over the story, such as what’s left of it, as John Martson. It’s a bit of a momentum killer, from a power curve point of view, but from a narrative view- it’s necessary. The ending to the main “campaign” is pretty good. You get revenge and the story wraps up nicely in anticipation for the the start of the game that...released a generation ago.

I...okay, I’m not getting into this here. This isn’t about my thoughts on the campaign, which I swear are mostly positive! (I actually think RDR2′s story is far and away superior to the first game’s, and it’s not a close contest, prequel issues aside) This is about why I came back to RDR2.

I guess I needed a big, immersive game world to get lost in for a while. And RDR2 certainly offers that. It doesn’t quite have the variety of its big brother, Grand Theft Auto 5. And it isn’t nearly as spontaneous as say, Yakuza 0. But it is still very, very big and chock full of narrative secrets. So much so that I found myself surprised by how much game was still there after the final credits rolled.

I took my hand at bounty hunting, bought a few new pieces of equipment I hadn’t seen before, and trolled around towns as a downtrodden, violence prone John Marston. I found some new secrets I hadn’t seen before, including a couple of cinematic moments with characters from the previous story. It was fun! I killed probably...5-7 hours just trolling around the virtual West.

I will say it got a little tiring hearing everyone I met tell me how great a guy the previously killed protagonist was. Like. I know he was great! I played as him! I wish I still was! Ah well.

This experience has me thinking about how...SERIOUSLY...we analyzed RDR2 when it first came out. Like, the discourse surrounding this game’s narrative experience was freaking BREATHLESS. But I think something that got lost in all that talk about the story- and more importantly- the culture of the studio behind it- is just how incredible the world they built really is.

The world the devs for RDR2 built is simply...massive. Massive to the point that it might actually be unknowable. The only scale I can think to compare it is that of the Bethesda RPGs, and even then, that feels like a rough comparison.

Of course, size isn’t everything. They have to populate the world too, and again, they manage to do so with striking detail. Every city, town and settlement feels real. I mean, I still remember the first time I rode into Valentine and was struck in the face by the sheer choreography of it all. It actually made me want to make my character WALK instead of run, ‘cuz I didn’t want to break the immersion of the moment. That’s the arresting power of this game world.

Rockstar announced that the RDO experience will live on for at least the foreseeable future. There’s going to be plenty more written about the culture of Rockstar and the indulgent microtransactions that their games are trending toward. I’ll leave that to the journalists.

But as a player? I’m glad the game world will continue to find life. It’s too massive, too finely crafted to merely be discarded by something as arbitrary as the passage of gaming “generations”, if that’s even really a thing anymore.

I have more thoughts specifically on playing Red Dead Online, but I’ll have to save them as this is already running long as it is. I also don’t think my thoughts are terrible revealing. You know what RDO is gonna be when you log in, and for the most part, that’s what you get. I think it has fewer problems than GTAO, but it is still a tightly controlled experience- likely by design.

Muse Dash (PC)

Muse Dash is a rhythm game where you tap a combination of 2-3 keys on your keyboard to the beat of a catch J-Pop song. Your character, or muse, on screen, dispatches foes who serve as visual cues for your keystrokes. You must string together as many perfect sequences as possible. There’s a combo meter and HP system in there too, if you’re into that kind of thing.

I first encountered Muse Dash on V-tuber Gawr Gura’s livestream. Unfortunately, the video appears to be missing from her archive now. I was struck by how much its short, energetic tracks reminded me of a different rhythm gaming experience- Dance Dance Revolution.

Fun fact- I used to be a DDR FIEND back in my high school days. Had my own mat and everything. I even used a barstool for extra support so I could hit those really intense combos.

*sigh* To be young and able to play DDR without risking a heart attack...

Anyway, suffice to say Muse Dash caught my eye. An endless supply of J-pop tracks, cute anime visuals, and some low-key rhythm gameplay? Tag me in!

It’s made for a good, chill change of pace. The price of entry is low...like, five bucks on steam? And you can purchase more songs if you’re into that. I recommend it!

Dungeons and Dragons: Ghosts of Saltmarsh

As I said above, most of my freetime last week went into prepping for my local DND group’s campaign set in the world of Saltmarsh.

If you really want to hear a play-by-play, I’ve linked my related blog above.

Overall? I really enjoy the world of Saltmarsh. It’s spooky and moody. There’s pirates, but there’s also no shortage of sea monsters, ghosts, cultists and even vampires to keep you busy. It has strong Dark Shadows feels, where many of its included modules feel reliant dramatic tension and investigation ahead of a dramatic showdown with a big, bad monster of the week.

I still have a lot more prep to do, but at least for the moment, I can take a breath and ease up. The first session went well and the players seem curious. I hope that keeps up as we really start to dig in to the world itself. I’ve never run a full city before, and finding ways to insert all the separate modules as plothooks has been a challenge unto itself. I’ll be sure to let you all know how it goes!

Anime

I haven’t watched much lately, and that admittedly sucks. I tend to go in phases, and lately, my time just hasn’t been going to anime the way it has in other seasons.

I’m still very into Jujutsu Kaisen and am tracking with the season ending to Fire Force. I’m avoiding season 2 of Re:Zero like the plague, partially because I need to wait until the full season is done so I don’t have to torture myself by waiting week to week, and partially because I just know season 2 is going to absolutely destroy me in ways I’m not sure I can fundamentally handle right now.

I keep meaning to go through my queues and create a proper watchlist across VRV, Crunchyroll and Funimation. Maybe I’ll do that later tonight.

That’s all for this week! Hope everyone has a good and safe Thanksgiving.

Haven’t played anything on multiplayer for a while now. As always, if you have a specific game you’d like to play online, my DM’s are open. Please feel free to send me an invite <3

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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Remastered — Strength in Numbers

May 14, 2020 11:00 AM EST

PlatinumGames’ 100-hero action game gets its much deserved second chance.

In 2013, PlatinumGames released The Wonderful 101, and it almost seemed doomed from the start.

It was an experimental action game coming from a studio that, while highly respected, wasn’t known for producing titles that broke the bank. On top of that, the game was a Nintendo-published exclusive to the Wii U, a console that was struggling to find its footing and unfortunately never did. Critically, the game fared well. Commercially, it bombed.

But for the few people The Wonderful 101 did reach, it struck a chord. Its gameplay premise was — and in many ways still is — pretty unique, its characters were colorful and charming, and its story was delivered with a presentation and sense of humor so earnest that it would be hard for anyone not to at least crack a smile at.

There was a good game here, albeit rough around the edges. A cult classic that fans and PlatinumGames both believed needed a second chance, especially now that the studio is much more of a household name thanks to its work on NieR: Automata and Astral Chain in the years since.

Flash forward to 2020, and The Wonderful 101 received just that. Taking matters into its own hands, PlatinumGames crowd-funded and self-published The Wonderful 101: Remastered through a Kickstarter campaign, giving it a shot to find a larger audience nearly seven years later, this time with versions for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PC via Steam.

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“The remaster doesn’t fix every complaint the original Wii U version may have had, but the quality of life changes it did bring are welcome.”

By and large, The Wonderful 101: Remastered is the same game from 2013, but comes with a few notable adjustments and updates to make it work on modern platforms, as well as to make things a bit more approachable overall to new players. The remaster doesn’t fix every complaint the original Wii U version may have had, but the quality of life changes it did bring are welcome.

Up front, load times have been heavily reduced from the Wii U, drastically cutting back on the downtime spent in the loading screen’s training area, and getting you into missions much, much quicker.

The game runs at 1080p on all platforms (bumped up to 2160p on PS4 Pro, and dropped to 720p undocked on Switch) and targets a 60 fps framerate. It doesn’t always succeed in hitting that mark, though, dropping in sections where there’s a lot happening on screen. The Wii U version had the same problem. But to the remaster’s credit, it’s much less severe, and hardly an issue when it does occur.

Difficulty has also been rebalanced when it comes to the easier options, tuning them to be a bit more relaxed for anyone picking up the game for the first time, while keeping the normal and up difficulties intact. Controls for special gameplay sections can be viewed again by clicking in the left stick, whereas they disappeared for good as soon as you hit the A button in the original. And the game now offers hints for certain puzzles and fights where it wasn’t communicated effectively what players needed to do the first time around.

Finally, to compensate for the loss of the Wii U Gamepad, The Wonderful 101’s picture-in-picture display option is now the default for puzzles and mechanics that made use of the second screen. That display is customizable, too, allowing you to change the size of the second window and drag it to any part of the screen as needed, or put both displays in an even dual-window view altogether.

The Switch also adopted the Wii U Gamepad’s touch controls in portable mode, allowing you to draw out Unite Morphs on the Switch’s touchscreen, should that be your preferred control method for that mechanic.

Now, onto The Wonderful 101 itself.

In a set up inspired by Super Sentai in Japan or Power Rangers here in the West, the game puts you in control of the Wonderful 100 (pronounced “One-Double-O”), a superhero task force sent in to protect Earth from an imposing alien army known as GEATHJERK (an acronym for Guild of Evil Aliens Terrorizing Humans with Jiggawatt bombs, Energy beams, Ray guns and Killer lasers…I kid you not).

Rather than controlling just a single character at a time, the game lets you play as a team of up to 100 heroes at once from an isometric viewpoint. By finding Wonderful Ones hidden throughout the game or recruiting citizens to lend a temporary hand, you use abilities called “Unite Morphs” to fight off aliens often far bigger than you, solve puzzles, and take out GEATHJERK’s ranks one-by-one.

Unite Morphs are activated by using the right stick to draw basic shapes, which will cause team members to quite literally form together to create a weapon based on what you drew, with the size of it and the amount of damage it can deal dependent on the number of members in your group and the charge of your Unite Gauge in the top left of the HUD.

It’s a highly creative way to approach combat, but summoning the Unite Morph you need isn’t always as easy as it could be. The Wonderful 101 moves at a breakneck pace and requires quick thinking as a result. Gameplay goes into slow motion to give you a second to draw the shape you need, but it doesn’t always register, which can be frustrating when you see a mechanical fist about to drop on you as soon as you let go of the stick or when you see your Unite Gauge drain because one Morph keeps getting confused for another.

There are several main Unite Morph abilities that you will use heavily throughout the game, which are introduced gradually through an ensemble cast that stand front and center at the Wonderful 100 and serve as the stars of the story. Wonder-Red, for example, is a stoic young leader that can summon a giant fist to punch through enemies; Wonder-Blue is a sword-wielding hothead with authority issues; Wonder-Green is a skilled, but spoiled, sniper; and Wonder-Pink is a bubbly, but short-tempered diva with a whip.

Each character’s ability is based on their weapon, and can provide their own unique advantages in combat depending on what’s in front of you. Facing an armored enemy? Wonder-Pink’s whip can yank their shield away. Airborne foes? Wonder-Green can shoot them out of the sky.

“The Wonderful 101 unabashedly tries to throw everything it has at you every step of the way.”

Each cast member also has their own distinct personality, which shines through even more in their character models thanks to the game’s toy-like art style and exaggerated movements. They all have their own backgrounds and reasons for becoming a hero, too. Some are tucked away in the game’s character files, while the layers for others are progressively peeled back as the story progresses, offering some surprisingly touching moments in a game that otherwise presents itself as unbridled fun.

The Wonderful 101 unabashedly tries to throw everything it has at you every step of the way, and that’s made perfectly clear with the first operation. By the time you complete it, you’ve already fought off hordes of GEATHJERK soldiers, met Wonder-Green and learned his Unite Morph, fought more aliens and the stage’s boss inside a baseball stadium, chased the boss through a Star Fox style rails shooting section as he tries to get away on the back of a mechanical two-headed dragon, fought that dragon (and him again), then put on the finishing touches with some of the most stylish quick-time events out there, all set to an incredible theme song that’s been re-recorded with an orchestra just for the remaster.

It’s great, and every operation carries its own variation of that formula, some definitely to more success than others. But that aforementioned breakneck pace can be a double-edged sword.

The Wonderful 101’s story is spread across nine operations, with all but one being broken up into three sections. The first two sections usually consist of the standard action combat, with a gameplay twist or two thrown in there along the way to keep things interesting. The third, meanwhile, is always a grand spectacle of a boss fight. It’s a three-act structure perhaps unsurprisingly similar to a typical villain of the week episode of Power Rangers, and usually takes about 45 minutes to an hour to complete the first time through.

While there’s nothing wrong with that approach, I’d argue the setup is at its most effective when taken in small doses, playing one operation through, then coming back later to do another.

Playing large chunks of the game all at once, seeing each operation continually try to one-up the last didn’t take long to grow tiring. Some stretches of gameplay felt too stretched out, the big, multi-phase boss fights went from an exciting challenge to feeling like a chore after a while, and the 12-15 hours it takes for a first playthrough felt like an eternity.

Personally, I still very much loved the game, just not that I shotgunned it in nearly one sitting the way that I did for this review.

“So maybe, with The Wonderful 101: Remastered, ‘not for everybody’ includes at least a few more people this time.”

The Wonderful 101 isn’t a perfect game, but it’s definitely a unique one. Instead of having just one hero to control, it has many all acting as one. It tries to make every boss fight an absolute spectacle, while throwing in an entire section that’s a reference to another game, because why not? It never takes itself seriously, yet knows its characters well enough to produce genuinely heartfelt moments. It’s rough around the edges, but gives everything it has. In a way, the game encapsulates everything PlatinumGames is.

The Wonderful 101 is not for everybody, and while the Wii U didn’t really do it any favors, I think it’s initial reception was proof of that. But time has passed, tastes change, word of mouth spreads, and appreciation grows. So maybe, with The Wonderful 101: Remastered, “not for everybody” includes at least a few more people this time.

Also, the orchestral recording of “Tables Turn” is…well, wonderful…I’ll see myself out.

DualShockers’ original The Wonderful 101 review

May 14, 2020 11:00 AM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/05/remastered-strength-in-numbers/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=remastered-strength-in-numbers

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zippdementia · 5 years

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Part 60 Alignment May Vary: Finished with One, Starting Another

When last we left our would-be heroes, they had come out of the house they had just finished fighting the last of the Dragonlords in. Bloody and exhausted they stumbled onto the street outside only to find themselves surrounded by the remainder of the horde.

Row after row of goblins looked on at them, though when they began speaking it was not about the two heroes, but about the slain Black Beast at their side: “The Beast has fallen...” The Goblins looked different, too. This entire battle, Nysyries had only seen them enraged to a literally rabid froth. She had seen them tear men limb from limb in a frenzy of blood lust. An insight struck her then and she grabbed Aldric’s arm:

“It was the Beast. Something about it drove them mad!”

The Hobgoblin lieutenants arriving on the scene behind the Goblins seemed to realize something was wrong. One shouted out something in Goblin. Another raised his whip.

The Goblins turned as one and set upon them. The cries of the Hobgoblins were full first of indignation, then rage, then fear. But the carnage did not last long and soon the Goblins were looking for more targets. And there were Nysyries and Aldric, bloody and too weak to fight back. The Goblins advanced.

... and were cut down as riders hammered past the two heroes and slammed into the horde with blades flashing in the light of the fires burning all over the city. “Follow me!” cried Xaviee from atop the lead steed. “For Vraath Keep! For Brindol!” The Lion guard riding behind him echoed the cry, though it was soon drowned out by the frantic yelling of the Goblins as they struggled to flee the riders.

The trumpets blared victory. The remaining enemy poured out of the gates. The defenders cried out that the day was won.

What to do Next?

I had always planned for the Battle of Brindol to be the defacto ending of my Red Hand of Doom Campaign and the Fane of Tiamet to be the transition into something quite different. I’ll talk about that “something different” in a second.

First, I wanted to thank everyone who has read this far. Just covering the Red Hand material alone has taken up 86,453 words. Along the way, I’ve tried to give advice on how to convert the adventure into fifth edition. I veered wildly off course at some point as the campaign became more and more my own, filled with my own twists and catered to the stories and styles of my own group. Maybe that in itself is the greatest lesson: the best thing a DM can do in any adventure is to pay attention to his/her adventurers and to let things veer off course if that’s what feels right.

I’ve also learned a lot about converting from the two editions in general while doing this campaign and as a result created some much more “official” conversions for one of my favorite pathfinder adventure paths, the Carrion Crown. You can find the links to my continuing efforts on those adventures here.

That said, while maybe I wasn’t able to do an exact conversion for Red Hand of Doom, I hope that my playthrough was at least useful in offering advice on each section and giving some examples of how to run things to make them go more smoothly. And, barring that, I trust it was at least an enjoyable read.

Now I have one last piece of advice: if you intend on ending your campaign after Red Hand of Doom, then don’t go to the Fane of Tiamet. Whether The Fane of Tiamet is a slog--a fairly uninteresting dungeon crawl through numerous out-of-place demons--or a decent dungeon that ties together the final steps of Azor Khul’s plan and culminates in a satisfying boss fight is beside the point. The real problem with it is that it comes after the Battle of Brindol, which is the lynch pin of the entire campaign.

The Battle of Brindol is such a high point in the campaign. Whether this city stands or falls is on the shoulders of the players. Everything that has happened up to that point boils down now to whether the players can survive and emerge victorious in the horde’s push against humanity and the forces of good. If the players fall in the battle, at least it is a glorious fall. And if they succeed, it is a natural end point to the campaign. This is believed to be the case by so many DMs that one of the most common changes I see suggested for running Red Hand of Doom is to replace the final fight against the “who is this guy?” at the Cathedral with Azor Khul himself and have done with it.

The Fane, after all that, is just another excuse to kill the players.

So the only reason to use The Fane is as a stepping off point to something else. If you do decide to take your party there, consider how it can serve not as the ending to Red Hand of Doom (which as stated should be the Battle of Brindol), but as the beginning of something else...

Maybe the Fane turns out to be just one of many Fanes, one for each head of Tiamet, and they all have to be shut down, all across the world.

After defeating the Aspect of Tiamet, maybe the players are pulled with it into the Nine Hells, where they now have to figure out a way to survive long enough to make it back to their homeworld. Along the way, they are recruited into the everlasting war between Demons and Devils.

The players reach the Fane and defeat Azor Khul, but never face off against the Aspect. Why? Because the fight against Azor Khul is a part of the Hobgoblin mastermind’s ultimate plan, the final steps. While he distracted the players, Tiamet has emerged in her full glory into the Material Plane and now an entire new campaign must begin against the Mother of Dragons.

I have my own idea for how the Fane will lead to a new campaign, one I’ve been working on for over a year. The remainder of this post will be dedicated to the set up for that and future posts will begin the fourth season of my campaign journal, called “Spelljammer.”

And so this marks the end of the Red Hand of Doom campaign journal. Overall, I enjoyed a lot of what the campaign tried to accomplish, though I think more than just numbers need to be updated to make the conversion work. The design of the adventure surprised me with how focused it was on combat over roleplay and its pacing suffers a lot throughout the adventure.

The opening is great, with the players having to clear out Drellin’s Ferry before the arrival of the horde. It sets up a very clear and present villainous presence and a solid goal for the players. And if you count the Battle of Brindol as the ending, it serves as a wonderful conclusion to this threat, mirroring the events in Drellin’s Ferry only this time the players are strong and experience enough to stand against the horde. It creates a wonderful sense of character growth and completes a very clear arc.

Compared to that, the middle sections are weak, hampered by a lack of clear explanation for why the players are going to these places. If I were to run the adventure again, I would have the players protect the people of Drellin’s Ferry until they reached Brindol and then Brindol would become a home base from which to strike out at the horde. Here they would learn through spies that the horde was maintaining two strongholds where they were producing weapons for attacking Brindol: one in the old Kingdom of Rhest and one in the Thornwaste. Not only would this set these quests up like tactical strikes, with the players knowing why they were going to these locations ahead of time and what basically to expect, but it would also give them a chance to form relationships in Brindol before the climatic battle, making the events of that Battle feel all the more personal.

In the end, I think most of what I gained out of Red Hand of Doom as written was inspiration. We managed to have a solid campaign despite the way it was laid out and a lot of this came from me adding material based on little hints within the material that were never officially expounded upon. The Lady Dagger plotline, for instance. I found the best success with Red Hand of Doom came from not being afraid to use the material as a jumping off point, as something to inform a greater story and a greater world.

Which is what I’m about to do with the Fane.

Sidetracked

The aftermath of the Battle is a time for celebration and for mourning, in equal measure. We take into account the sheer scope of the victory: the heroes have, on their own, defeated the three most powerful lieutenants of the horde and crippled its main force. They are awarded medals of valor, declared lords, and given the titles “Heroes of Brindol.”

Also to be celebrated is the ascension of Xaviee Domico, officially, to the Lordship of Vraath Keep. This is a little emotional for me as a GM, because it completes a storyline begun all the way back with Tywin. Xaviee was simply a throw-away NPC that tied Tywin’s past into the present but he grew into a formidable presence in the main storyline. Seeing the Wytchwood reclaimed by the forces of good was the goal of Tywin and it brings a touch of nostalgia for me, especially as that player is no longer gaming with us. No matter how things fell out between us all, I raise a glass to you, sir, in appreciation of seeing Tywin’s dream completed.

Another character who began as a random name for an NPC they did not defeat in combat was Aldric Alwright, now being played by the same player who brought to life Shando and Traki and Abenthy. He brings the same gravitas and complexity to Aldric as he did his previous characters and some of our best post-battle scenes come from him. First, he is present when Lord Jarmath gets news of Tredora’s death. Jarmath flies into a rage, railing against the city that let his love fall, damning them and her god to hell for their failure to save her. But Aldric calms him, first with sharp words (”this is not behavior becoming of a lord”) and then with a soft brotherly embrace during which both men shed tears (”she would want you to be better than that”).

Aldric also visits the battlefield outside of the city, where the cavalry under his command followed him into death against the Behir, Varanthian. Here, Aldric says a prayer that he learned from the Green Company, urging the souls of the fallen to find peace and to move on to the afterlife. As he intones the prayer he distinctly hears the horns of the Green Company and hears their long-dead voices speaking the words along with him. Then he gathers his belongings and decides it is time to find Varanthian, who escaped, and end this long search for revenge. And he believes he knows who to talk to.

Having done a little digging after the battle, Aldric was able to discover, if not the identity of the strange visitor he had prior to the fight who offered him Varanthian’s location in return for Lord Jarmath’s death, at least his most likely employer. Lady Kaal, one of the ruling council of Brindol, whom with Aldric has shamelessly flirted (with no return on his advances) and whom he now has learned is the secret ruler of the thieve’s guild in town and who has a less-than-secret rivalry with Jarmath.

Lady Kaal’s mansion is in the Eastern part of the city, the part that was furthest from the city and the only part completely untouched by the ravages of the Battle of Brindol. Kaal, surrounded by bodyguards and minions, does not seem surprised to see Aldric and the two engage in a wonderful exchange of words that is 2 parts veiled menace and 1 part questioning accusation. Most of the menace belongs to Kaal. The best accusations come from Aldric.

After failing to get Lady Kaal to admit to knowing the Green Garbed Man (as we have come to call the mysterious stranger who approached Aldric) he does at least get her to seem uncomfortable as he questions her about the desired murder of Lord Jarmath. Lady Kaal does keep her cool for the most part though and never rises to the bait Aldric lays, only betraying herself through small flickers of her eyes and twitches in her fingers. She makes another proposal to Aldric:

“I do not know who this man who approached you was, but I do believe I know the information he knew and can pass it on to someone who I trusted.”

“And how would someone go about gaining your trust, my lady? Aside from the, ahem, services I’ve already put at your disposal.” Aldric cocked an eyebrow and stared significantly downwards towards his codpiece. When he looked up, smiling devilishly, he was met only with a cold stare, however.

“You misunderstand me. The service has to be something I actually want,” Kaal said scathingly. “And I wouldn’t set a man to do a task he couldn’t complete.”

Even Aldric had to admit to himself, that one stung a bit. Lady Kaal continued...

“With the time for war done, I begin to believe that Lord Jarmath’s time is also coming to a close. Rumor is spreading about how he took poor Tredora’s death. I’m not sure I trust a man so roiled by emotions to lead in a time of peace.”

“You have someone else in mind?”

Lady Kaal’s smile was all teeth, white and straight. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

The agreement that the two come to is this. Lady Kaal will be throwing over a dozen parties around town tonite to mourn the dead and celebrate the living. Most everyone remaining in the city, as well as those trickling back in, will be in attendance. Kaal wants Aldric to attend as well and to suggest to whomever will listen that a change in leadership is needed and to suggest Lady Kaal might be up to the task of ushering in an age of peace, while Lord Jarmath should be condemned for failing to lead properly during the battle. With Aldric’s newfound fame and position, Lady Kaal knows that his word will carry enough weight for her to do the rest of the work herself to change the leadership of Brindol. In exchange, if she feels he has spoken enough on her behalf, she will gift him the location of Varanthian’s lair.

While Aldric is pondering all of this throughout the remainder of the day, he and Nysyries are called into Lord Jarmath’s presence.

Jarmath has disturbing news for the two of them. Clearly unsettled, he tells them that they captured some of the Hobgoblin captains during the battle and questioned them. While the Hobgoblins did not survive the questioning, they did divulge that another horde would soon be raised and sent on to Brindol and that this risk would exist as long as their enigmatic leader, Azor Khul, survived “in the Fane.”

What is the Fane? It is a legendary place in the Elsir Vale, a hidden valley deep in the western mountains of which little is known as no one who ventures there ever returns. Ever. Still, despite their services rendered to the city, Lord Jarmath must ask of the two heroes of Brindol: will they go there and end the threat that is Azor Khul?

Beginning Anew

The night’s festivities go well, for the most part. The party meets someone new, a paladin named Carrick who was, until the Battle of Brindol, considered the hero of Brindol. A little perturbed at having his title replaced, but more curious about the two heroes who have saved the town, he decides to volunteer to accompany Aldric and Nysyries to the Fane. He is a half elf, fairly quiet, very straightforward, and radiating an air of power.

Nysyries gets drunk with Immerstal the Red, who accidentally sends himself into an unknown dimension when he drunkenly enters his pocket brothel without actually removing it from his pocket first, folding space time around him and disappearing.

Aldric spends the night trying to play both sides, backing lady Kaal without disparaging Lord Jarmaath. His efforts just barely succeed and the town’s feelings begin to shy away from Lord Jarmaath and towards holding a new election and making Lady Kaal the new leader of Brindol. The whole experience calls into question Aldric’s alignment. He began as an evil character and someone who would do anything to achieve his revenge. Yet now he is discovering limits: he was not willing to betray Lord Jarmaath. Was it his mercenary training that prevented him from betraying his Lord? Does he fear about the future of Brindol under the rule of Lady Kaal? Or does he simply not like being told what to do? Aldric has much to ponder as the party makes its way towards the Fane.

#dnd 5e #dungeons and dragons #Red Hand of Doom

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