I'm around somewhat but haven't really had anything to contribute currently.

I've been trying to write a kick-ass speech for Valorum and get back up and running with my classes for the last few weeks.

Perhaps I'll continue with the flashback. It might start to seem like a novel if I begin to write a lot.....

OK, thanks. I was just curious.

I'm beginning to feel less guilty about these monolithic posts.

Also, has anyone else had trouble getting the new patch? I've opened ES2 at least 3 times since it came out and I've gotten no update.

About that one, the update is only handed out to people who checked "beta" in the option of the game.

Hmmm. I might need to create a new bio. Criticism and Corrections to my RP post welcome!

That took a turn for the unexpected. Anyway, @Angelic: The former captain's name is Yerem Ashami. Maybe correct that in the speech.

Mistake corrected. Two things, though:

Firstly, does Decius look...Endless, by any stretch?

And two, who wants to talk about the Update 2 preview?

For the sake of keeping everything grounded, I'll now have to call for a big discussion.I consider what just happened very problematic, for reason I'll elaborate in a moment. First, Nibot, could you please post your player reasoning for introducing this event into the story?

Why change race right in the middle of roleplay? Is it because Cravers are met with hostility? Well, a demon Vodyani isn't going to be treated any more nicely.

Also, while I hesitate to make you delete all those words you've written, what you're describing there is just not working. For starters, if Lilith (which is not an Endless name by any stretch) is a Concrete Endless, she can't take over his body. Concrete Endless have their own bodies, that's the point. They consider uploading their consciousness into Dust as the worst kind of atrocity.

Secondly, Conversion into a Vodyani isn't something that's done quickly, and definitely not done remotely. If it were as simple as just having a bit of Dust re-shape your body, the Vodyani would be a lot more numerous. To propose that it's done to Decius in a matter of minutes, within the isolated confines of a spaceship, is ridiculous. 

For others who think that this doesn't concern you, it does. I understand if you want to make interesting characters. I understand that this involves backstory. The point where it falls apart is when you start writing novels about what happened to your characters in the past instead of interacting with other people. This is roleplay, not parallel novel writing. Explore that past by relating it to somebody else, by having it influence the decisions the character makes, not by posting it as a dream sequence of flashback. Nobody can look into your characters minds. Those hundreds of words of flashback? They're just for you. Nobody else can use them.

If there is no post for a while, then instead of writing long texts in a vacuum, go and find out who is there. Then, just have their character talk with your character. If necessary, make a time jump. The trip to Tianquitzli takes a week. We so far covered barely two hours, and those more or less only because I moved time forward. You can all do that. If there's nothing happening, then move time forward until there is. Let those who are currently not there deal with the jump once they're back.

And lastly, just because all your characters have an interesting past, that past doesn't have to catch up to them in the first hour of the story. We barely left port. The amount of incidents in that time make the Saviour look less like a brand-new ship with cutting edge technology but more like a catastrophe magnet. Give it time. Forum roleplay moves slowly. And it's better to have the background come up randomly by some events during the story instead of forcing it into the open by some intruding incident. If there's a bunch of bounty hunters after your character, the resulting story line, which might as well take us over half a year to get through, will be focused on your character, and all the others are mostly spectators. For half a year real time. I hope you can see why this is undesirable.

For the sake of not making the decision worse, I suggest to stop posting in the roleplay thread until we've had this discussion about Decius' transformation. You are all explicitly invited to post your opinion. I don't want to run this as a dictatorship (and I hardly could, given that I don't have more rights in this forum than you), so decisions we make about the style of roleplay should be consensus.

Well, a Democracy does mean we get a 25%  bonus, so that should help. :D

In all seriousness, a lot of what you've posted is fair. In my own defence, I just wanted to give people an idea of what Valorum was going through without just mechanically spewing it in the OOC thread. After that, I planned on keeping a tight lid on long, inner monologue posts like that until one of the other characters convinced him to actually open up. I can delete the monologue and modify the post after it if that'd help.

In terms of what's happening in the game right now, I took the improv-comedy approach and just went along because I wanted to see where Nibot was going with this. I've even drafted half a moderately-sized post talking about how Valorum has 'heard legends of how the Concrete gods turned on the Virtuals in the Divine Schism' and stuff like that. Honestly, I was under the impression that he had gotten your permission on this whole twist, Alien. I'm moderately willing to go forward with what Nibot has put forward, but only if everyone is okay with it.

Sorry if what I've done is wrong, I will now ask permission before making any such major change! :)

I wasn't happy with what Decius was as a physical character to his more mature mental voice. I thought that writing the character was cool, but figuring out how bug internals work and interact (especially with large organisms that don't appear to have exoskeletons) was quite hard. I tried to find a way to change my character, and this was what I came up with. It isn't great, but it allows for more future communication, and sets up clear reasons for what he is doing and why. It also shows who his enemies are, and adds some spice. It might not be the greatest change, but I think it just stuffs him into a smaller package of the same thing that he was. He has the same constraints, weaknesses, and strengths but is also in a more streamlined package. I will rewrite the Decius change back in if you like, and am happy to do so. I also feel that there is a lack of action right now, but this in retrospect was not the way to fill the gap.

For Lilith's namesake, I figured that the group she is a part of is somewhat different than other Endless. I guess something I didn't make clear was the creation of her force that she is a part of. She fights for a niche group of Endless that after the Endless scattered took as much tech as they liked from the abandoned arsenals and scattered into the stars, burning planets for their own enjoyment. I modeled them after a sort of rogue band of evil-empire like guys or like some of the evil forces from Homeworld. Although it wasn't really an Enldess name, I felt like it fit for a princess of a nomadic empire that was large enough to be dangerous, but not large enough to be mentioned in lore.

In my mind, or how I saw it, Lilith didn't take over his body. Part of it was left unexplained so we could discover it, but I might as well spill my plan of the arc anyway. I do think these things out, you know. Decius wasn't entirely organic. When they took him out of the arenas, they gave him implants to help him fight and to allow quick adaptations and changes to his conscious world for greater control. The hallucination displayed to him before death and transformation was loaded onto his memory chips during his gunnery test when he was not conscious of threats to being modified. This allowed them to also set parameters on his mechanical parts to have them destruct in a way that appeared to be a mechanical malfunction which caused his subsequent death. The group had been trailing him for months and knew of his position; the suit was his punishment for leaving, crafted just for his specific torment. They had had previous versions of his mind from earlier loaded onto the suit before deployment, and all that was left were the newest of memories and functions to be imported. You wouldn't learn this until later, of course, but Lilith also has access to his mind and the ability to change it. He is also not necessarily Dark Vodyani, more like a kind of shell made by the bad guys to trap him and use him like the Vodyani.

I understand that it's not right to write long back stories for your character, but I saw no alternative. If I had said, "Oh, and Decius is magically transferred to the cargo hold, now in a new body. He wakes up and calls for help from Valorum, and has no idea why he's now a space vampire," it would not work either. If it is necessary to delete it, I happily will. However, I now have a form of character that is better adjusted to interacting with others and that I can write for more descriptively. Before I couldn't write that Decius felt the warm blood oozing from his wounds, his life force slowly draining away, because bugs don't have blood. I now have the ideas of the internal mechanics of his body and can write for damage in battle. By extrapolating from the existing lore I can have better flexibility as a writer. Again, if you would like me to stick straight as a ruler to the wiki, I will. It's just nice to be able to expand the lore to make it more. Please tell me if I'm incorrect in any way, I will gladly change.

Nibot wrote:

Sorry if what I've done is wrong, I will now ask permission before making any such major change! :)

I wasn't happy with what Decius was as a physical character to his more mature mental voice. I thought that writing the character was cool, but figuring out how bug internals work and interact (especially with large organisms that don't appear to have exoskeletons) was quite hard. I tried to find a way to change my character, and this was what I came up with. [...] He has the same constraints, weaknesses, and strengths but is also in a more streamlined package.

I can understand that given this approach, you end up not having fun playing your character. That is something we have to find a solution to, because this has no point if people don't have fun. However, I think you overthought things, and in the wrong direction. Nobody here is a graduated biologist (if any of you are, shut up, not the point), and if you get stuff wrong about their biology, nobody would mind. Especially since Cravers aren't Earth insects anyway. If you got something wrong, you could have just said "That's how it works for Cravers" and we would have moved on.

By the way, bugs have blood, they just don't have a closed circulatory system. But a Craver's internal anatomy would certainly differ from that of an Earth insect in that regard, simply because the processes that make that kind of simple anatomy work for 3 cm bugs doesn't work for a 3 m alien. Cravers have a closed circulation, and very likely are also warm-blooded.

However, maybe I should stress this point more when I re-write the species list given the new patch: You brought some of that effort on yourself by choosing a species from the second row. They are there for a reason, because one needs some dedication and effort to write from their considerably more alien viewpoint. If one just wants to play a guy without hassle, then the first row is for that. If you want to have an easier time roleplaying, changing to a different 2nd row species might not be the best step.

Nibot wrote:

For Lilith's namesake, I figured that the group she is a part of is somewhat different than other Endless. [...] He is also not necessarily Dark Vodyani, more like a kind of shell made by the bad guys to trap him and use him like the Vodyani.

LorkDarkon just shinobi'd me, but I'll rephrase his points in prose: While the ES2 Craver intro might make it look recent, the Schism and decline of the Endless are ancient history. Unimaginably ancient. After the two factions of the Endless managed to nearly annihilate each other, another species managed to build up a space-faring civilization. Then, people wrecked from that civilization got stranded on a planet, and stayed there so long that they not only forgot their past, but also that the civilizations on that planet managed to go from bronze-age peoples to the space age. To put this into perspective, the time from Earth's first records of history, to the present day, they thousands of years of struggle and progress, all the things forgotten and only recovered in pieces by historians much later? It's microscopic compared to the time that separates the fall of the Endless and the time when our story is set.

And the Endless that survived their civil war were too far scattered and too few to recover any scraps of their civilization, and all died out far before any of the modern factions were formed. If it hadn't been so, then there would still be an Endless empire today. All that remains of the Endless are scattered relics and speculations of the historians looking at them. ES1 included a few individuals that survived until modern times, but the point there is: It's more or less three people. In the entirety of the galaxy. All of which only survived because of extraordinary circumstances and more or less long times spent inactive.

Also, even with your clarifications, your explanation doesn't work. The Vodyani conversion and their suits are clearly based on Virtual technology. A Concrete Endless would rather eat their own heart than contemplate the use of such technology.

You make a point of mentioning Decius' implants, but according to the ES 1 Artbook, there's nothing special about a cybernetically enhanced Craver. They don't have any compunctions about chopping off their limbs to replace them with better robotic parts, and Craver "medicine" doesn't bother trying to heal, because it's just easier to graft on replacements. Which I guess isn't a criticism of your point, I guess, just information.

Anyway, I'm open to suggestions how we can avoid this departure from lore while still making roleplay fun for everyone.

In Nibot's defence, a lot of Endless lore has been lost to time and the galaxy as it is has no clue what specifically happened millions of years ago. Some planets are Lava or Ash types, and some are Burning Gas Giants, but who's to say that they were like that before? Modern scientists can only speculate that these hostile planets just formed that way, but they could have been temperate planets once upon a time before some warmongering Endless came along and decided to torch them for a laugh. 

Not only that, but a galaxy is a big place. Just because Amplitude has only made 3 Endless Heroes doesn't mean that there are only 3 still alive. Each of the Vodyani Saints has a Virtual Endless bound to them, and Enav St Lyeaor's backstory says he found a Gas Giant/Dyson Sphere that was still inhabited by Virtual Endless. So there isn't a big enough Endless population in the present to make a minor faction, per se, but that's not to say that there can't be others still alive, controlling someone or acting behind the scenes. Keep in mind that, compared to the spacefaring races of the modern era, the Endless were technologically godlike. Some handful of surviving Endless could very well be alive and trying to manipulate the galaxy and rebuild their old empire. Or they could just be insane and not think of the new races of the galaxy as worthy enough to evolve further.

A Concrete Endless using 'Vodyanification', Decius' new body,  and how it got on the ship are all topics I can't defend, sadly, but even though Nibot hasn't done a perfect job of executing the beginning of this story arc, it's still plausible to a fault and I'd be lying if I said that I didn't find it interesting. If we stumbled across a temple during the Saviour's journey and woke something up that was better left resting, it would have made for a better introduction to a long-lost evil like 'Lilith'.

Mokinokaro wrote:

I honestly have no idea how to reply to recent developments.

Same here, good news is that I finished my exams and I should be able to work on the RP. Lets have a good time.