And another one bites the dust...
Jun. 19th, 2005 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothEr, another two. That is, Jesse and Nancy decided not to play in our Friday game anymore, giving the excuse of Jesse needing to work late at night and Nancy not having any transportation, even though on the other nights he worked late she seemed to have no trouble getting home at a normal hour...
Anyway, Snowwy made his character, which took a while, and Lazar eventually revealed that he'd intended for us to actually start playing while Snowwy was doing that. We did get a couple hours in at the end, at least.
Fifty years ago, an advanced world-spanning empire died under the weight of its own magic, as the wizards who ruled everyone else went insane and decided to have a war for world domination. The ensuing war killed all the wizards, every last person on the planet with wizard blood, and about 90-95% of everyone else. The land was scoured by destructive storms, shattered by vast genocidal spells, stalked by giant magictech warriors...
Now, fifty years later, most of the world still lives in the dark ages, fearful of letting magic back into their lives, and for the most part preferring a primitive, desperate life on the edge of starvation. Only one city is ennlightened enough to realize that magic -- or at least, magitech, since they don't have anyone who can do real magic either -- isn't inherently evil. It was just twisted by evil men... and under their wise guidance it can be purged of all that is bad and brought back safely.
At least, that's what their propaganda says, and now they've finally decided to send out a team of salesmen/missionaries to spread the good news, and sell food-processors.
Balthazaar, a gold-skinned humanoid thingie, is the captain and leader of the expedition, and the chief magitech engineer behind the construction of their airship. The ship *looks* like a normal airship, a gondola hung below a tame specimen of the floating plant-islands that wander everywhere at the mercy of the wind, but it has magictech secretly reinforcing its hull, enchanting its anchors, and giving it the ability to move somewhat against the wind.
Balthazaar brought along three students, who'll be doing most of the actual work of the expedition -- talking to the destitute foreigners and solving their problems with magitech to build trust and win hearts and minds.
Jardin the centaur is a blacksmith who knows how to use special materials and alloys to do impossible things. He has big plans... an automatic fruit-picker that will propel produce from the fields to a storage bin faster than the speed of sound (perfectly safe, as long as no one moves the deceleration ring)... a floating platform that, instead of falling, stores gravitational energy in a flywheel (be sure to switch it off before it explodes!)... none of them are weapons of course. Weapons are against the law.
Perrel is a 'blind juruki', a race of six-armed scaly humanoids that live in caves and see using magic. He's a chemist (and perhaps a doctor) who specializes in 'medicines'.
Wayne is a 'cytherian', a four-foot snake with arms and wings and blue and purple feathers all over his body. He didn't actually grow up in the same city as the rest, although he was trained there... cytherians mostly live on the floating islands, which tend to wander. He's a weaver, who's practiced in adding magical patterns to his weaves.
Hodge -- Balthazaar's ancient manservant, Rudy -- their cook, and Klasko -- a skymanta herder, filled out the crew of the ship.
Just before they were scheduled to leave, the city council gave them four dozen magitech mirror-relay stations that they were to set up in line of sight with each other, to maintain contact via morse-code. Balthazaar was not pleased with this, as he'd been looking forwards to being away from their constant nagging. To forestall any extra surprises, he took off a bit early, before the planned celebration and sendoff ceremony.
This came as something of a surprise to his students, who didn't get to say goodbye to their friends or anything, but really, they'd been saying goodbye for weeks, so maybe it was a good thing to skip the last bit of mushy stuff.
The council, or someone, sent angry morse-code after them, but none of the crew knew morse code. Wayne borrowed the code-book and worked out a message to send back. "None of us know morse code yet, you are talking too fast!"
After takeoff, Balthazaar vanished into the forge room (doesn't EVERY wooden airship held aloft by clusters of hydrogen bubbles need a forge?) to work on reinforcing one of the unused rooms for use as an experimental magitech lab, leaving Wayne and Perrel in charge (Jardin was needed to assist him). There wasn't really much for them to do, except drop the anchor if the wind changed, so they mostly just watched for anything interesting in the salt desert below.
They passed one strange old man building some sort of magitech altar... Wayne flew down to investigate, but couldn't get any response. He figured it was probably some crazy old person from the city they just left, since they were so close. Perrel didn't think that anyone from his city would be building an altar to the gods, -- they were religious, but their religion was magitech -- but whatever.
The next notable landmark was a field of giant mushrooms. They mused about whether they'd be good to eat (when processed through one of their food processors, of course), and Wayne decided it was Perrel's turn to go down and take a look. So the juruki got on one of the skymantas and flew down to poke at one of the giant fungi.
POOOF!
next week
And that's where the game ended, with Lazar taking the week to decide just how much trouble Perrel was in. Well, that and it was after midnight. By a lot.
Saturday, I got a new video card, which went really smoothly but didn't seem to help as much as I'd hoped -- it let me up the video quality settings without losing framerate, but it didn't let me keep them the same and get better performance, which is what I'd have preferred. Which means that it's probably network lag being the bottleneck at this point, and to get things to run smoothly I'd need to get broadband. Blah.
I should try it out on some non-network game to verify that theory.
EQ2 also decided to show me another bug -- after getting disconnected randomly (by my ISP) I got back on and the 'active spell effects' window that's normally on the left side of the screen was just gone. Resetting the position and opacity of all windows did nothing, except undo all the work I'd done positioning them earlier. Someone I ran into on the game told me they knew how to fix it, and then went through tedious step-by-step instructions on how to get back a missing *hot bar*. Gah.
Anyway, Snowwy made his character, which took a while, and Lazar eventually revealed that he'd intended for us to actually start playing while Snowwy was doing that. We did get a couple hours in at the end, at least.
Fifty years ago, an advanced world-spanning empire died under the weight of its own magic, as the wizards who ruled everyone else went insane and decided to have a war for world domination. The ensuing war killed all the wizards, every last person on the planet with wizard blood, and about 90-95% of everyone else. The land was scoured by destructive storms, shattered by vast genocidal spells, stalked by giant magictech warriors...
Now, fifty years later, most of the world still lives in the dark ages, fearful of letting magic back into their lives, and for the most part preferring a primitive, desperate life on the edge of starvation. Only one city is ennlightened enough to realize that magic -- or at least, magitech, since they don't have anyone who can do real magic either -- isn't inherently evil. It was just twisted by evil men... and under their wise guidance it can be purged of all that is bad and brought back safely.
At least, that's what their propaganda says, and now they've finally decided to send out a team of salesmen/missionaries to spread the good news, and sell food-processors.
Balthazaar, a gold-skinned humanoid thingie, is the captain and leader of the expedition, and the chief magitech engineer behind the construction of their airship. The ship *looks* like a normal airship, a gondola hung below a tame specimen of the floating plant-islands that wander everywhere at the mercy of the wind, but it has magictech secretly reinforcing its hull, enchanting its anchors, and giving it the ability to move somewhat against the wind.
Balthazaar brought along three students, who'll be doing most of the actual work of the expedition -- talking to the destitute foreigners and solving their problems with magitech to build trust and win hearts and minds.
Jardin the centaur is a blacksmith who knows how to use special materials and alloys to do impossible things. He has big plans... an automatic fruit-picker that will propel produce from the fields to a storage bin faster than the speed of sound (perfectly safe, as long as no one moves the deceleration ring)... a floating platform that, instead of falling, stores gravitational energy in a flywheel (be sure to switch it off before it explodes!)... none of them are weapons of course. Weapons are against the law.
Perrel is a 'blind juruki', a race of six-armed scaly humanoids that live in caves and see using magic. He's a chemist (and perhaps a doctor) who specializes in 'medicines'.
Wayne is a 'cytherian', a four-foot snake with arms and wings and blue and purple feathers all over his body. He didn't actually grow up in the same city as the rest, although he was trained there... cytherians mostly live on the floating islands, which tend to wander. He's a weaver, who's practiced in adding magical patterns to his weaves.
Hodge -- Balthazaar's ancient manservant, Rudy -- their cook, and Klasko -- a skymanta herder, filled out the crew of the ship.
Just before they were scheduled to leave, the city council gave them four dozen magitech mirror-relay stations that they were to set up in line of sight with each other, to maintain contact via morse-code. Balthazaar was not pleased with this, as he'd been looking forwards to being away from their constant nagging. To forestall any extra surprises, he took off a bit early, before the planned celebration and sendoff ceremony.
This came as something of a surprise to his students, who didn't get to say goodbye to their friends or anything, but really, they'd been saying goodbye for weeks, so maybe it was a good thing to skip the last bit of mushy stuff.
The council, or someone, sent angry morse-code after them, but none of the crew knew morse code. Wayne borrowed the code-book and worked out a message to send back. "None of us know morse code yet, you are talking too fast!"
After takeoff, Balthazaar vanished into the forge room (doesn't EVERY wooden airship held aloft by clusters of hydrogen bubbles need a forge?) to work on reinforcing one of the unused rooms for use as an experimental magitech lab, leaving Wayne and Perrel in charge (Jardin was needed to assist him). There wasn't really much for them to do, except drop the anchor if the wind changed, so they mostly just watched for anything interesting in the salt desert below.
They passed one strange old man building some sort of magitech altar... Wayne flew down to investigate, but couldn't get any response. He figured it was probably some crazy old person from the city they just left, since they were so close. Perrel didn't think that anyone from his city would be building an altar to the gods, -- they were religious, but their religion was magitech -- but whatever.
The next notable landmark was a field of giant mushrooms. They mused about whether they'd be good to eat (when processed through one of their food processors, of course), and Wayne decided it was Perrel's turn to go down and take a look. So the juruki got on one of the skymantas and flew down to poke at one of the giant fungi.
POOOF!
next week
And that's where the game ended, with Lazar taking the week to decide just how much trouble Perrel was in. Well, that and it was after midnight. By a lot.
Saturday, I got a new video card, which went really smoothly but didn't seem to help as much as I'd hoped -- it let me up the video quality settings without losing framerate, but it didn't let me keep them the same and get better performance, which is what I'd have preferred. Which means that it's probably network lag being the bottleneck at this point, and to get things to run smoothly I'd need to get broadband. Blah.
I should try it out on some non-network game to verify that theory.
EQ2 also decided to show me another bug -- after getting disconnected randomly (by my ISP) I got back on and the 'active spell effects' window that's normally on the left side of the screen was just gone. Resetting the position and opacity of all windows did nothing, except undo all the work I'd done positioning them earlier. Someone I ran into on the game told me they knew how to fix it, and then went through tedious step-by-step instructions on how to get back a missing *hot bar*. Gah.
