Darth InSidious
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Posts posted by Darth InSidious
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Haven't finished a book in a while, but the last thing I got through was Borges' short story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Currently also reading the Rule of St Benedict and Bleak House.
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I like how obyknven is slowly losing the use of the finer points of English grammar. Is he eventually going to be left with only nouns and uninflected verbs, like a kind of handbag spambot?
On the topic: more techno-salvationism ITT. The next hot thing will, doubtless, be calculating the precise orbit of the human soul.
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I don't really mind, provided it's not yet another version of the towers of hanoi (vel sim.) or a pointless reaction-time test. As others have said, it needs to fit in with the world and the setting.
Which reminds me of another point: enough with the temples with pointless sequences of rooms. People do not, in general, build temples full of pointless rooms full of guards and treasures. They usually construct them quite carefully, with purposes in mind for separate spaces. So why do almost all RPG temples tend toward "treasure room A, guard room B, treasure room C" design? We get almost no hint of any sacred purpose to the building. You might as well scrap the word 'temple' and just call them all 'sacred banks'.
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Sounds like it's time to cue the Ominous Latin Chanting...
"Somewhere over the past few centuries, Latin became the "ominous" language" - orly? What about the fact that throughout the European Middle Ages, Latin was a very ominous language to the common people?
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If this game fails then Obsidian will make a side-scrolling, romance heavy Planescape-themed ARPG written by David Gaider.
Will it be called Dark: Shadows Rising, by any chance?
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Please, please, no painfully unfunny "game humour", hilariously zany characters included. If the game needs humour it could actually be... funny.
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I'm hoping for a kind of Egyptian/Mesoamerican/Mesopotamian mashup, with a good dose of Sumerian pessimism and a heavy gnostic flavour. I want gloomy, mysterious cult, full of strange sacred books that hover on the edge of comprehension, and dark, disturbing, hidden rituals.
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My own idea is that the gods are mysterious, unkown, unknowable, fickle, distant and utterly unpredictable. Their behaviour, their agendas, their way of thinking, their origins are all completely unknown, and can only be grasped at by allegory and tales which point toward the truth without ever encompassing it. They are infinitely above humanity (unless they aren't), and they don't deign to explain themselves to humanity, or to interact with men except when and if it pleases them. How many there are, whether they are all different or merely aspects of one another, their meaning... these are all very good questions, and each has many, many contradictory answers - which might all be true, or all be false, for all we know.
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... I am the things that are, that will be, and that have been. No one has ever laid open the garment by which I am concealed. The fruit which I brought forth was the sun....
... I am in my name. My name is a god. I do not forget it, this my name...
Must the pantheon be another watered-down take-off of over-simplifications of Greek or Norse belief? It's a bit boring, isn't it?
Why should a god be 'of' anything in particular, and why shouldn't they interfere in whatever they damn well please to, or not?
Why should a god manifest in any particular form?
Why should the gods care?
Why should the gods not be two, seemingly exclusive, things at once? Or three? Or sixty-three?
Why should there be a set doctrine of the gods?
Why should the gods fit our conception of deity?
Why should the gods be known to the masses, and why should they manifest to anyone except their priests?
There should be semantic, not formal-logical, associations at play in the religions of this world.
In short, why should the system make sense from an RPG-writer's point of view? This is meant to be a religion, not a splat-book article, or a mathematical equation. Ambiguity/multivalency make a religious system (or asystem) more interesting, not less.
There has to be something transcendent about a god, or at least other, to make them worth worshipping.
Some suggested names, which may obliquely indicate something of the gods' natures:
Gath, the Unwinding Serpent or The Lapis-Eyed One
The One Who Is Not
Ashar of the Great Place
She Who Loves Silence or The Smiling Weaver
Yuehueloti, the Veiled Mirror
Wind
Unhearing
The Dreadful One or The Six-Fold Chrysanthemum
The Jade Bottle or The Mother of Knives or Smiling Shalu
The Nine Copper Lords
He of the Southern City
Gath-Ashar, the Weary Spider
Yuehueloti-Shalu, the Angry One or The Tomorrow-Ruler
Wearing-Two-Masks
Kishgal the Bailiff or The Lord of the Roof or The Standing One
and so on.
it would be interesting to see some gnostic influence on the religion here. i am not sure how the soul will factor into the game mechanic, but i think the gnostic idea of everyone having a piece of the divine within that has been corrupted by the material earth which can be awakened by pursuing spiritual knowledge would be interesting. also, some of the dualism in gnostic teachings, a creator god who is the source of all that is good and all that is evil might be refreshing when compared to recycled Greek and Nordic pantheons you usually see in fantasy games. the rest of the pantheon could be filled out with aeons/archons and maybe a separate demiurge are removed from the divine by a flaw that is also representative of the portfolio they cover. maybe through in some Zorastroan ideas of chaos and creation to give it a little more flavor, and perhaps reinvent the traditional alignment grid that you usually see in D&D inspired worlds.
otherwise, Camazotz. nothing cooler than a bat god of the underworld who represents death and uses severed heads to play basketball.
Why not borrow Blake's pantheon?
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Don't you like birds, Enoch?
Sure, but that doesn't mean that we're allowed to talk about male chickens around here.
A coq-block?
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Don't you like birds, Enoch?
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Only thing that makes sense to me is it spells out "One Pro Here" if it's a snake cypher (not sure what that's really called but ouroboros is a snake so I'll go with it
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The oracle of Google mentions not the wheel of time, when these statements are put to it.
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Berenzen: No, it doesn't. Atrocity would need to be .XX. not .X. .
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It's usually classed as a semivowel, since it can be used as either a vowel or a consonant.
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<!--. T . X X I T X -->
<!-- There is no sleep for the Watcher. -->
Looks like it is 'eternity', then.
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I believe the word is INFINITY.
Seems a likely candidate since they seem to be doing pairs of words organized by the first vowel(aa, ee, ii, and so forth). After Infinity it will probably be Obesity.
Neither "infinity" nor "obesity" fits the pattern.
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I like the idea of . and X being vowels and consonants, but how do you justify the Y? The Y at the end of "eternity" is a vowel.
Y is a semivowel.
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Looks like I was right, then.
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I'm still holding out hope for a fantasy setting combined with high technology, i.e. fundamentalist religious order keeping the world in a dark age while rebels use scientific developments to advance their goals. But that's just me - generic fantasy is just too boring for my tastes, I'd much rather see a twist on it.
... And "evil religion keeping the world in a dark age" isn't generic in your view?
It seems like each letter of first hidden line in source will be revealed every day. Yesterday it was:
<!--. X . X X . X X -->
Today:
<!--. X . X X . T X -->
Well, there doesn't seem to be anything to differentiate here, so my guess is that X = consonant, and . = vowel. So we'd have an eight letter word, running v-c-v-c-c-v-T-c. My guess is the final combo is one of a limited number of options - most likely H, S, or another T.
Of course, that's just speculation, and not much use at this point.
ETA: Assuming the code is that simple, got it.
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The distinction between snakes and dragons is fairly elastic, but the point is irrelevant. It's clearly the ouroboros.
Not sure what its significance is. It may simply be decorative, since the ouroboros in the ancient world could symbolise eternity; it could therefore here simply have meaning in that it surrounds the number, as a symbolic representation of '4' here referring to four days.
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Enough with the manufactured 'identity' schtick already.
As members of the irritable-and-reactionary-non-brylcreem-using-newspaper-ignoring-left-handed-blue-eyed community, we feel outraged/horrified/shocked/appalled/gratified that this disgraceful/shocking/outrageous/appalling/positive behaviour/speech/action/omission...
Gaming is an action not an identity. If it forms such a large part of your life that it begins to look like one, it is time to turn the machine off and go outside.
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Yes, yes it is. And the state is a racket designed to extort from you. I mean, what have they ever done for cont. p94
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Happy Pascha, everyone.
Honestly, I prefer the Filipino tradition of voluntary crucifixion over the ridiculous consumer whore parade that Easter has become in English-speaking countries.
Is it possible to only like one or the other? Personally I'm no more a fan of acts of extreme self-mutilation than I am of orgiastic consumerism.
Interesting thought if Christ suddenly changed his mind after Gethsemane.
Call me old-fashioned, but I thought that was the point of the Agony in the Garden.
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Fine Art
in Way Off-Topic
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What marvellous humility, to identify yourself as among the profane without even the egotism of words! And what stupendous self-mortification, to do it over and over again...