Katarack21

Why is the setting relevant in this regard? The moral choices you make, would hopefully make you think, whether you're deciding whether kill a guy names Xanzitorp, who happens to be a wizard, or some guy names Joe, who drives a taxi? Are you unfamiliar with the genre? You kill people (lots, and lots of people) to take their stuff and gain power. The moral dimension is pretty much not present at all, and you specifically don't turn fantasy game 'morality' on random taxi drivers named Joe. That gets you arrested for murder. If you were to take the main 'moral lessons' of this game to heart, it would be that feral (badly behaved) children (soulless children with animal souls) should be killed out of hand rather than taught to behave, and religious people should be murdered on sight, because they (exemplified in Waedwen, Durance and Thaos) cause nothing but suffering. So really, I'd caution Fearghus and the developers of this game to avoid morality discussions at all, and treat the game for what it is: casual entertainment. Not feral. Not badly behaved. They grow fangs and claws and gain an instinctive desire to eat any animals they can kill, including their family. Bit of a difference. Taught to behave...these are wichts your talking about, not kids with behavioral problems. ****. The questions in this game revolve around things like moving on from your past, understanding who you are, the meaning of faith. If you didn't get any of that then I can only conclude you didn't pay attention.

I feel like most people just wouldn't care unless the gods were causing some kind of harm. I talked to my wife about this, and her counterexample was Stargate--- but there, the only fake-gods people really objected to were the ones that also persecuted. The asgarde posed as gods as well, but because they didn't do anything super evil no one seemed to really care. Most people in Stargate don't know about the aliens, though; only really the people in SGC. A big part of the show is actually about what makes a god; the basic idea is that power isn't it. Even the Ori are not considered gods by the main cast.

The problem is women are being oppressed, structurally. Equal rights and opportunities is great - almost everyone wants that, I agree (in the West). But equal rights and opportunities aren't the same thing as the law stating that you are equal. If they were, this problem would have been solved decades ago. Men are, effectively, the oppressors, but you have to not take it personally, if you actually want to understand, and not just to sit around feeling hurt and bitter. It's not like most men go around intentionally being sexists (plenty do, of course, but probably a minority in the West). However, even if all men didn't, there'd still be problem because of structure of society, the structure of our laws, and so on. Many aspects of our society, taken for granted, benefit men far more than women. Inheritance is one example. In theory, in most Western societies, men and women inherit equally, but in practice, they don't, not just because men earn more and importantly, earned more in the past, but also because of the way inheritance is taxed, the fact that people are allowed to disinherit women (and have systematically been doing so since time immemorial) merely for being women (indeed, you can do more or less whatever you like with your will), and so on. It's a very complex issue. People love to try to reduce it to equal rights. Equal rights and opportunities, in a REAL sense, is the ultimate goal of feminism as a movement, but that movement acknowledges and understands that the very structure of society and the law can prevent that, even when the law says people are equal. If you ignore that... As an aside, harrassment in STEM is a huge issue. My wife is a developer, and honestly, the **** she's had to deal with is hair-raising, and most of it's from people who think it's fine, think they aren't doing anything wrong, just don't get it... People are being oppressed, structurally. There's an entire system in place--built and designed by one of the greatest geniuses to ever work in media and population manipulation and using all the theories and practices known to psychiatry and sociology--that has the one and only job of manipulating and contorting the thoughts and ideas of the population. The power structure from the 1920's onward isn't really built to protect and serve men--it's built to protect and serve rich people who are also white males. If you manage to achieve a billion dollar net worth, that system will serve you just as readily regardless of your color or sex. This isn't conspiracy theory; the man who did all this literally wrote a book about what he was doing called "The Engineering of Consent". It's clear how this works if you pay attention. Not every white man benefits from this power structure. It's a narrow field of white males who embrace and practice certain accepted, mainstream ideals of aggressive masculinity and have a certain amount of monetary value behind them. A homeless white guy can't walk into a ****ing McDonalds and expect to be treated like a human being. I'm schizophrenic; the statistics on the mentally ill are, to be blunt, crazy. I'm quite likely to be killed by a cop at some point in my life. The power structure that is in control only allows you access to these various forms of privilege if you accept and live by the basic tenets of the power structures ideals. If you don't, you get rejected by the larger culture of masculine power. That's why things like gay bashing happen; it's a social threat to their own concept of masculinity that they are reacting to. The man who doesn't stand around and talk about that girls titties with the other men get's suspicion, disdain, and accusations of being gay; he doesn't get let into the special man club. It goes beyond gender, beyond race, to a basic problem with how our society is structured and the ideals of masculinity in our society. Part of the problem is due to feminism, but not in a bad way. Feminism is awesome; I support the idea fully. The problem is that we've worked really hard to alter the ideas of what it means to be female, but when all that society shifting happened we didn't do the same for males. A lot of the traditional concepts of maleness have had to be thrown out the window, and good riddance, but we *didn't put anything in their place*. There's a generation of boys growing up today who are wondering what the **** it even means to be a man in today's society, and all their cues are being taken from the machine designed to generate profits for reach people. Of course masculinity is going to be ****ed for a while; GI Joe isn't any more healthy a role model than Barbie.

This. Looks like that lord was going to make that baby his heir, he was not going to kill the girl or something. For Medieval times he did not do anything extraordinary. While cultist are brutal even for that times. They sure did not deserve to live - and lord is punished enough. Should there be the ending - "kill the lord and give everything to the cured girl" - that would be even better. But since it's not possible, I see no reason to just kill the guy. Actually, you have the option to send her to the Berath temple. Looks to me like the best outcome, considering the logical "kill the uncle and get his money" or "go for arranged marriage and enjoy his money through your baby" - does not exist). I didn't get the sense, from the way people reacted in the questline and such, that this was anything normal or accepted in the world of Eora. Judging from the girls reactions aftewards--her fear, her unease, her instinctive knowledge that going back is dangerous--and from the disgusted reactions from both the cultists and your party members, it seems clear that what he was doing was not "accepted mideival practices", and that she was not a willing participant in having his baby.

I'd go with kith. Some of the hardest fights I've had have been against kith. They have what are effectively class levels. They get pretty hardcore.

She gave them the knowledge of how to do this, knowing what would happen--that it would tear apart and destroy both Waidwen, the soul inhabiting Waidwen (Eothos), and the souls of the Dozen as well. She wouldn't have to worry about the knowledge getting out; the problem was self-correcting. Only Durance's unique personality has allowed him to survive so long without being consumed.

Is, yes. It's not just historical and not just a European thing; as recently as the crisis in the Darfur, pygmies were being hunted for bushmeat just like apes.

More Pillars. Imagine the early industrial era in Eora!!

I picked Sagani. I would like to note, however, that I was so disinterested in Pallagina that I didn't bother to pick her up.

Well to be fair then... it's a pretty legitimate concern. It's a bitch for you, yeah, but.. you can't blame the doctor for being concerned. Not only from a long line of addictive personalities, but also an addict yourself, you're probably about one dosage higher away from getting addicted to the prescription meds, whether they help or not. Prescription painkillers are ****ing insidious because you need them to function, but you need to up them because you build tolerance, and then when you taper it the pain gets even worse, and bing, boom, enjoy your new hardcore addiction. I do not envy you. D: My own fault, yes--but it was also over a decade ago, now. I've been homeless, I've watched people dealing coke in the parking lot, etc. My life hasn't been easy in the years since then--but I've never smoked meth again. I've never done any drug since then except smoke pot, smoke cigarettes, and drink tea. I haven't even been drunk in almost 8 years. I'm not looking for vicodins from the doctor to get high. If I wanted to get high, I'd go and get high. There's nothing stopping me from that but myself. There never has been. I go to the doctor because I'm in pain, and I don't want to hurt all the time. I go to the doctor because my hand is cramping into a claw and I can't do the dishes. I go to the doctor because I lost three days last week to curling up and crying in my room from a migraine. I guess my question is this: How long do I have to suffer to pay for one year of my teenage stupidity, and the failings of the family I was born into?

Durance implies that their hate for Eothas, and their belief in Magran, also went into the bomb when they constructed it. I got the idea that it was somehow powered in part by their souls.

My 21 second load times was with a fresh opening of the game.

Those charts actually exist because the pain cannot be measured, or verified. It's all subjective--what you say is an 8 might be a 5 to somebody else, etc. There is no "pain unit", no discreet measuring system. There is no way to objectively quantify pain. Yep. This is, incidentally, a large part of why people with chronic pain issues have such a hard time getting the regular medication they need without meeting with suspicion that they're junkies or the like. It's a pretty serious problem that leaves many people suffering needlessly when their doctors won't believe them on what they're experiencing. This is true. My fiance has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome; her main symptoms, beside dislocating joints and such, is simply severe chronic joint pain. I have a badly healed boxers fracture on my right hand and chronic arthritis in all of those knuckles, along with migraines. Both of us have real problems getting the pain medication we need because of this very issue. Because obviously you guys suffering from severe pain your whole life is just the price one has to pay to keep those dirty drug-seekers from getting their hands on medication they don't deserve! I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that fortune has smiled on you in the sense that drug addiction (especially the insidious "But RX is safer." strain) hasn't touched you or yours in a major way. I can't speak for them, but I have. My mothers a crack head. That's not hyperbole, I mean that as a statement of literal truth. My mother smokes crack; she is an actual crack head. Drug addiction is rampant through her side of the family; cocaine, heroin, alcohol. It hit my brother and sister, too; I'm the only one who ended up without a major monkey on their back, and it was mostly by luck. The reason I have a hard time getting prescription pain killers is because I was heavily into meth amphetamine for about a year when I was 19. I moved half-way across the country to live with my dad and entered treatment, and I haven't done it since. But all of that is in my medical records, and as far as any doctor is concerned I'm just a druggy looking for a fix.

I've had exactly the same experience as sparklecat. Started fine, got slow, improved slightly, got slow again. I have an SSD and plenty of RAM. My CPU is a little slow--it's a Core 2 Duo 2.13 Ghz--but the game doesn't suffer any major slowdowns or issues outside of save/load times.

"Many times, the reaction is overwhelmingly hostile."

Fridge Brilliance: It has to be a sacrifice. That implies the giving up of something of value, and they know that you don't value that companion Bearprovider 4. However, nobody ever promised the sacrifice was worth it.

"Have you ever sired a Hollowborn child?" "I'm a ****ing Death Godlike. I'm sterile. So you tell me."

I agree that, Wheel or not, the soul ecosystem almost certainly predates the gods. I was just thinking that the gods made some changes in it (I thought it was the Wheel part, 'cos it brought a water wheel to my mind, but I'll need to replay the endgame carefully, and see what exactly is being said about it there) to turn it into a power source. I think the Collector's Book mentioned a hypothesis of new souls being birthed deep within the adra formations, so perhaps the god-makers had a surplus of souls, failed to predict a population boom, and figured it won't hurt if their gods use that surplus as a power source - maybe even the surplus itself was causing some problems, so it seemed like a "two birds, one stone" solution. @Katarack21: I think I've missed that bit of some souls returning stronger, but either way, I doubt one soul could fatten up enough to attain godhood. Thaos's memory suggests you need about 1000 or more souls to make a god, and those were ancient souls, much stronger than modern ones. Perhaps the Adra Dragon was trying to do something along those lines, but failed either due to not having the technology needed for fine soul manipulation, or due to its main soul not being strong enough to pull this off. Who knows, though? It's been 2,000 years since the Engwithan Empire fell. That's a lot of time to game strength. Specifically, Caldara de Berranzi (the dead dwarf in a tree) said "Souls pass on. Some say through the adra stones, which are the blood-viens of the world. They leave the world for a time and are reborn into it, sometimes more than they were before, but usually less and seldom the same."

That's about duo nationality, not duo citizenship. Not all nationals are citizens, and the regulations of one aren't fully applicable to the other.

But not superstition and physical appearance. If you were born with hair covering your entire face, life was going to be terrible.

More complex, I think. Woedica has the portfolio of vengeance...I think Skaen gave her that, and follows her until she succeeds in her rebellion. Then, at the apex of her glory--only after she has won--he will take his portfolio back, and she will be powerless against the other gods. That's what Skaen does. He only gives his blessing until you are no longer being oppressed.

That last one under the spoiler tag--I don't think that's an omission. I think that's deliberate; I think it ties in to the whole series of events.

Both sides are full of strawmen, passionate hyperbole, and gleeful trolls. I honestly don't care about the entire argument. I go through life treating everybody with as much empathy as I can and as fairly as I can, more or less distancing myself equally from everybody. My experiences have taught me that no one group is more likely to be good or bad than any other; everybody is equally likely to hurt you for their own benefit. You learn who they are, and then decide if they fit with how you want your life to be. There's really no shortcut. Everybody else can scream however loud they like about this or that. It's meaningless.

Raedric does! I was expecting to get arrested a bit more for going around in a cloak with the symbol of Eothas on it, though. Awesome! That is good to know.