Flipz

Fun fact: I intended to call Tarn the "Hero of Wind" in that farewell toast in reference to Helbaerend (which I thought meant "wind"), but then realized that a.) knowing to say "Tarn of Valco" was pushing it (I could have sworn Thothwick referred to him as such on 53, but no such luck, and we just called him "Tarn" in Drakencourt), b.) Helbaerend isn't wind-elemental, and c.) I was confusing Helbaerend with Vintul, because as usual I was confusing Tarn and Hoke. (I'm not sure why I confuse those two characters so much. They don't even share a single class or Quest in common, and never have! )

"I would not say no to that mask of yours, if you're willing to part with it. And here's your Phoenix Essence back as well--I almost forgot I had it." "I'm glad to have known you, Tarn of Valco. You've been a good friend, a valiant warrior, and a sterling example to the rest of us. Heroica will be poorer for your absence." At just the right time, Schezerade stopped by with a tray full of drinks, and Arthur gratefully claimed one, raising it in the air. "To Tarn of Valco, Hero of Ideals!"

I think that ship battle would have gone a little better if there were things Tarn and U'Voros could have done on their ship to affect the battle (i.e. trim the sails, evasive maneuvers, returning fire via mounted cannons, etc.). I do agree that the undersea battle seemed intended for Tarn, though frankly I don't think it would have ended NEARLY as well for him given his relative lack of SP (there was an attack that could have resulted in 160 damage to him if he'd tried to fight in the Front Row, and even with my SP I had to abuse stacking consumables on a Level 50 Prophet to beat it). And I'm glad Arthur got to go down there, it felt like a good closure to the Ella-Arthur dynamic (since I doubt he'll be seeing her again), and it was nice to have the two Spirit Pool characters interacting with prophet-y things. It also helped remind Arthur of his place in the world--he's not able to save everyone and convince all the bad guys to turn good, no matter how hard he tries. (Ironic that several QMs including Zepher himself have tried to teach Arthur this lesson, but only now in an unintentional way does it actually work. )

Arthur returned to the Hall quietly, having decided to take a few detours along the way. As always, however, he had to return home--home, to Heroica Hall. His silent return matched the mood of the Hall, it seemed; though many Heroes were present, all but a few had lapsed into brooding silence, perhaps due to the lack of new postings on the Quest board. He spotted Tarn and Hybros speaking at the bar, but before he spoke to them he needed to pay off a debt. Arthur approached an old man in green and black, a sack of Gold in hand. "Sergeant McEncy? Your gold," he says, setting a bag of 310 Gold next to the old drunk. "A pleasure doing business with you." He waits to make sure the Black Knight had registered his presence before walking away with a tip of his hat. "Tarn!" he booms approaching the bar, unconsciously imitating a certain Paladin of his and Hybros' mutual acquaintance. "Didn't expect to see you here--I thought for sure you'd be on a boat to Dastan already." He grins cheekily. "I hope you'll remember us lot when it's time to invite guests for the ceremony."

Sad to see Tarn go, but I agree it was a great way to end things for him. I'm honored to have been able to participate with him in his final Quest. If the sets are finished in time, perhaps I could have the honor of hosting your new character's first Quest as well.

Yay! You've finally done it...you've made a Quest I enjoyed even more than 38! (Granted, I still think 38 is a better example of Quest design in general, but that's just because it's a simpler design to analyze.) The battles were short and fun, the characters were interesting to talk to, and the rewards, while small, were very suitable to the difficulty of the fights (and I very much approve of them being mostly gold and consumables). A couple of things: *Zeph, be careful about your treatment of class skills, especially with your characters' attitudes with regards to Diplomacy. You did well with Abel, but a little bit with the thug at the start and especially with the Golden Automaton in particular it started to feel like my Diplomacy skill was totally useless, and the same thing went for my Spellcasting attempt (which was the whole reason I was sent down in the first place ). It worked out well, but like you told me about pre-planned RP in 38: be careful. Character analysis: Tarn: Tarn is a great character to be playing with when you want to avoid intra-party conflict. He has this soothing aura that tends to head off any real venom. As always, I certainly enjoyed your interactions with Ella, but be careful not to forget the other characters present--this was true particularly on the boat. Pretzel: This has to be by far the unlikeliest friendship amongst Heroes. Something about him and Arthur really clicks, and I'm interested to see where it goes. Our characters both seem to be something of a Morality Pet for the other, so there's that. My only advice is the same as I gave to Tarn: keep your focus wide--there were a couple of times where I tried to give Pretzel a subtle hook for interaction, but it wasn't picked up, and it wasn't clear if it was Pretzel or Palathadric who missed it. Final thoughts: I want to see more like this in the future, Zeph. You're good with small Quests and parties, and I'd argue you're better at them than with the big ones. Certainly, you seem less stressed out by them as well.

"I will, Daneeka. And thank you for your help. I hope I get the chance to do it again. The same goes to you as well, Princess Ella." Sensing Ella and Tarn needed to be alone, Arthur gestures to Pretzel, inviting the Paladin to walk back to the Hall with him.

A Heroica Apocalypse, THAT sounds interesting.

Man, what's the deal with the rampant inactivity recently? I know life is kicking me in the megablocks, as it is for many of the QMs, but most of us still manage to check in once a day, even if we can't do more than say "I'm too busy to post".

"No idea--that was mostly the Prophetess speaking, not Ella. But we're not the first to come after this book, and I don't think we'll be the last. Ella, care to open it up and see what we're dealing with?"

OOC: That's from my fight, actually. Did you guys not get loot? I haven't had time to go over your fight in depth.

"No clue. The Prophetess would know more, but I don't think we can speak to her at this point. Apparently the people above wanted the book as well, and they had a Prophet of their own after it--and a powerful one at that. The...representative they sent mentioned his master wanted to use the book to heal the world, but it rang more like one of Ulric's lies." He glances toward Tarn and Ella's embrace. "That book seems like more trouble than it let on. I say we read it, find out what the hell the deal is with it, and lock it away in Byblos' library before it gets someone killed, like we did with the Pandemonicon."

Arthur coughs violently, expelling large amounts of water onto the floor of the boat. His eyes snap open, and a flurry of razor-sharp ice crystals burst forth from him before dissolving to powder. He sees Tarn hovering over him and grabs the Raider's arm to pull himself up, gripping the man's shoulder in worry. "Ella--" He looks around frantically before spotting Ella with the chest. He slumps relievedly, leaning on the Raider for support. "She's safe. She's yours now." He coughs roughly, black ink mixed with a little blood spattering everything in front of him. He reaches in his pocket reflexively, finding the spoils of battle there--Ella must have dealt with those, too. He decides to hold on to them for now, at least until he knew how the others had fared. "Daneeka...you may want to work on the 'ascent' phase of that thing. Just saying." He looks out over the water at the sinking vessel. "Anyone want to tell me why I'm looking at the sinking hulk of the ship we used to get here? Or why Ella and I had to fight off competition down there for the book?"

I'll just leave these here... These two represent a lot of what I've been putting into my upcoming Cathedral of Mercutio Quest (and why it's taken me so friggin' long to prepare it). Meanwhile, the other Quest I'm working on (aimed more at new players) focuses more on this (though my Cathedral Quest does as well):

I'd offer to check you, but...well, you know...

You may want to look at this. That was my last major barrier to getting all the sets rendered, and from there to launching. That said, it's still going to be a bit before I have time to host something that intense. Fortunately for everyone else, though, I'm working on a MUCH smaller one-shot as well--it probably won't be started for a few months, either, but at least there's a possibility I could run it with my current schedule, even though that schedule will probably be history by the time I get to run it. It's aimed at low-level Heroes as well, so it's pretty ideal all around.

All right, here's a tutorial for those folks who went through the difficulties I went through! Tutorial: Nighttime Rendering and In-Scene Light Sources The first step, of course, is to build your model. In this case, I'm using a very small-scale mock-up of the final scene I want to render, simply so that it's faster to experiment with specific settings via trial and error. You may want to try this as well, at least when you're first getting started with the renders. Your next step is to achieve the nighttime look you want for overall lighting in LDD2POVRay. For me, the color "Midnight Blue" works best; set the lights on the Lights tab to RGB 25, 25, 112, and adjust the intensity as desired. For the following image, I set the right light intensity to 45% (representing a strong direct source of moonlight from the moon), left light intensity to 25% with shadows disabled (to represent reflected light and to keep the shadows from being too dark), and top light to 10% (since in my image the moon isn't really coming from straight above). I also set the ambient light to 40%, which is important because most of the lighting in nighttime shots will be either from ambient light or from in-scene light sources. This is the result: Miniscale_Cathedral_Courtyard_Mockup_Midnight by Poochythegenius, on Flickr Next, make sure you know the colors of the parts you want to place lights in, and try to make sure no other parts share that color. Most of the time, you'll want to use Translucent Fluorescent Orange (Material ID "47") for things like flames and torches, but whatever color(s) you choose, be sure you know their Material ID, available from the Peeron Color Chart. Once you have your model built in LDD, save your model as an .LXFML file. Once you've done this, you'll want to open the LXFML file in your text editor of choice--I use WordPad, since I'm on Windows, but Mac users can get a free program called TextWrangler that will work just as well. Once there, you'll see a document that looks something like this: LXFML Coordinates by Poochythegenius, on Flickr There are two things of importance here. First is the text I've highlighted in blue--this is the string you'll want to search for. You should have the material ID from the Peeron chart I linked earlier; if not, look it up now. Once you have the number, use the "search" function of your text editor to search for the string materials="##", where ## is the Material ID from the Peeron chart; this will take you to the entries for the bricks in that color. Now comes the other segment of highlighted text: the coordinates. The transformation field contains a lot of numbers, but only the last three are needed to place the light source in the scene. Copy these numbers to a separate file, and if you have multiple parts in different colors be sure to note which ones are which. Now comes the tricky part. Run the LXF through LDD2POVRay with the nighttime settings from earlier (along with any other personal choices--in my case, I'm using outlines for a cel-shaded look), but this time instead of letting the scene render when LDD2POVRay asks if you'd like to start rendering, say "yes" and then stop it prematurely. Now we are going to insert some additional arguments to the POV-Ray window. Once you've closed the render window, you'll see a large text field with a bunch of what looks like computer coding. Make sure the tab with the name of your LDD model is selected, and then paste the following code into a new line: light_source {< -0.40218925476074219, 5.8889670372009277, 2.0000004768371582> color rgb <255.5, 147.5, 41.5> fade_distance 0.3 fade_power 3 } This will create an omnidirectional light source that will fade out over distance (like real lights do). You should now click the "render from INI button, make sure the INI file generated by LDD2POVRay is selected, and hit "Render" (being certain to save when prompted, otherwise the changes you've made won't be taken into account). There are a couple of things to note, however. 1.) The numbers between the <> brackets should be replaced with the coordinates you copied from the LXFML file. (Be sure to add spaces between the numbers, as POV-Ray wants spaces while LDD does not.) 2.) The "color" argument should be set according to the type of light you're creating. For me, I was simulating torchlight, so I chose the color of candlelight, which is RGB 255, 147, 41. (This page has a lot of helpful RGB values for various light sources.) The decimal after the color is another way to adjust the light intensity; I find that going much higher than .1 tends to make the light too bright for a night scene, but it's up to you. 3.) IMPORTANT! These numbers will be off! LDD defines its parts from their corner, rather than their center, so as it is, your light source will be on the corner of your part instead of inside it. It will take a little trial-and-error to get your light source to move inside the brick--remember that even a change of 0.1 is a substantial distance at this scale. For the gem piece commonly used as a lighting source, I found that adding +0.3 to the x-coordinate and +0.7 to the y-coordinate achieved a workable result, though I'm sure I could have accomplished even better results if I had been even more precise. You may also want to play with the "fade distance" and "fade power" fields to make your scene be more or less illuminated by your light source. In any event, when you're finished moving the light source to the appropriate point within your brick the result should be something like this: Miniscale_Cathedral_Courtyard_Mockup_Light_wshadows by Poochythegenius, on Flickr This is perfect for simulating what things will look like when lit by LEDs, so if you're going for realism you can stop here. However, if, like me, you're rendering for a more artistic or "in-universe" result, we need to go a little further. First, go back to the text field we had before. Now, find the code you added earlier and change it to look like this: light_source {< -0.10218925476074219, 6.5889670372009277, 2.0000004768371582> color rgb <255.1, 87.1, 1.1> fade_distance 0.3 fade_power 3 shadowless } The shadowless tag will prevent your light from casting shadows, so the shadows from the edges of the gem will not be rendered. However, this also means the light will no longer take the jewel's translucency into effect, so we have to darken the light's color ourselves. After some trial and error, I came to the numbers you see above, with the following result: Miniscale_Cathedral_Courtyard_Mockup by Poochythegenius, on Flickr And that's it! You now have a lit night scene; repeat for all of the other lights within your scene and you're ready to go!

WBD, did you guys steal that thing from the PM?

A question for the QMs who have used underleveled ally NPCs (i.e. Expert Classes below Level 30, Advanced Classes below Level 15, etc.): how did you calculate that NPC's base health? Or did you just give them a health total based on the HP the Heroes had?

Also, if you miss Endgame's upcoming Quest, Kinto also has one in the pipeline--no offense, but assuming I make it on Endgame's I'd almost rather you ended up taking Kinto's, just so the timing of Dual Dragoons would work out (and now that gives me a Quest idea hmm....... ) By the way, Baltarok-ers, I feel your pain--as someone who abided by the "don't read other Quests" request both in Dastan as well as in my current Quest, I'm positively itching to know what's going on up above. (It doesn't help that Zepher's activity patterns give me the distinct impression that our actions above and below the surface are having direct effects on each other--though it's also possible that's just good old paranoia talking. )

Oh, yeah, you'll be even closer to 40 than I'll be, huh? (Though of course, you only have one more Shadeaux Quest to go before you can Dragoon.) Maybe if things work out we can take our last Shadeaux Quests together and Dragoon as a team.

Some of it will be. But I find Google Docs spreadsheets and documents to be superior in general, so it's better to convert to it anyway, even if it will take a little bit of reformatting.

If it was something like Cannoneer or Alchemist or whatever, yeah, I'd be fine waiting. But Dragoon actively punishes you if you don't rush to get and use it.

I was referring to the already-existing Shadeaux Quest Kinto had mentioned--hoping it might get moved further up the pipeline what with Endgame's finale on the horizon. And yes, going on a Quest DOES depend on it offering Shadeaux rep at this point, at least for me. I'm going to be past Level 30 when I'm done with 92, and that doesn't leave a whole lot of room to gain two full Quests' worth of rep before Level 40, especially given that few QMs seem to be doing "small" Quests at all, and fewer still being both small and offering Shadeaux reputation. :neutral:

I think this is the first time ever we've seen a Light spell actually used for light via a Mage's spellcasting ability. I'm looking for two Shadeaux Quests before Endgame hosts his finale, because I can see that sucker taking Arthur well past 40 and I want to Dragoon before that happens.