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I remember hearing a lot of Midkemia is basically a tabletop RPG scenario written down, I don't know if that's true or if everyone writing scenarios at the time was ripping off Tolkein so people just assume it's true. Whether it came out of TT or not, the Tolkein influence is there and real though it's not as shameless a lift as some others I could name. I fell off the books when they got a little too cyclical, but I've definitely got some nostalgia for the original set (three or four books depending on how you count) flaws and all, but I have a lot more nostalgia for this game than any of the books. anyway my vote is that you turn around and go to the other side of the map. Always. 
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Sep 10, 2021 19:44
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 03:05 |
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Snugglecakes posted:Bookmarked! Wish you better luck then I had, as the LP curse hit me hard in trying to LP this game. I'm glad someone beat me to the punch. That site was the most antique HTML ever but the most helpful BAK site ever. I was trying to dig up a rehosted link in another tab when I scrolled to this post, so heck yeah  JustJeff88 posted:I was aware that it was based on his personal RPG experiences and I assumed that the other main antagonist civilisation was based off of something that iI have not heard of, but that remark about Pug and Thomas is one of the dumbest opinions I've heard on the Internet - no mean feat. cmon. this is needlessly hostile, it's okay to just say "I don't agree with that take" or ask why or even to let it slide rather than this Psion fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Sep 11, 2021 |
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Sep 11, 2021 06:38
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PurpleXVI posted:my general impression of him is that he's a decent person, and what mistakes he makes in writing(like not being good at female characters with agency in the earlier books, a bit of exoticism regarding the Tsurani, etc.) is well-meaning and/or due to blind spots, rather than because he's an rear end in a top hat. This is my take on him circa whenever I fell off reading the books as well. Quite a few of those blind spots are seemingly based on just uncritical acceptance of genre conventions in particular. As for the rest I'm glad it's all figured out and settled but I'll just agree tone is hard on the internet and I think "i'll just hyperbole harder to demonstrate how much I dislike hyperbole" is extremely likely to backfire as a strategy, but good work on everyone being responsible. What forum is this  e: One other thing. The primary writing for BAK was straight out of Dynamix and Feist had very little involvement. Per wikipedia, quote:Feist states in his afterword to Krondor: The Betrayal that he was busy writing The King's Buccaneer during the game's production and that the plot, text, and new characters were created solely by designers Neal Hallford and John Cutter. Feist did have editorial final say on the game, but most of what Hallford and Cutter created was left intact. basically the dynamix team nailed it on getting the feel and voice right, which is cool and good. I have not turned up any specifics on what was changed and it'd probably be massive spoilers right now anyway, but I'll go looking later. Psion fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Sep 12, 2021 |
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Sep 12, 2021 00:47
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Guildenstern Mother posted:Fun fact I learned from drinking with some ex dynamix developers, there were a shocking amount of strippers in the office on a near weekly basis. I'm more than willing to bet at least one of them ended up in cheap renaissance cosplay and in the final game. lmao well I guess now we know your motivation for following the thread!
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Sep 12, 2021 19:09
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Scale is one of Feist's biggest issues and it's thankfully not relevant here whatsoever, so yeah. We get all the benefits and none of the downsides, basically. Also this is an excellent, excellent start: Going off route is fun and lucrative (or can be anyway) and for those of you who eyed that extremely expensive sword in Yabon and thought 'I wonder if anyone was insane enough to grind for that' the answer is yes and giving it to Gorath should probably be classified as a crime. It's not just that you can wander around and do stuff - it's that the developers accounted for it and put in dialogue and events and stuff to reward you for wandering off course. You can still completely beat the game and have a full experience just following the 'expected route' though so it's never required or obligated. It's just neat.
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Sep 14, 2021 18:56
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Guildenstern Mother posted:I hope those insane grinders found the much cheaper shop for that sword before the grind was over. Full price for a greatsword, smdh. not my first time no, but afterwards yeah I figured out the trick
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Sep 14, 2021 23:57
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I think you should leave at least one quest undone per chapter just to drive completionists up a wall. but really though I don't have a preference on how thoroughly you scour Midkemia for quests, it's really what you think works well for pacing the LP, in my opinion.
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Sep 16, 2021 19:33
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Catching up a little. The tuning fork  I don't know if that's new to me or if I'd forgotten it. I think it's new. Learn something every day! e: beaten to the puzzle situation but yes you use the cannons to blast the rods
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Sep 23, 2021 20:38
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Tortolia posted:In fairness I was probably playing this when I was 13 or so, and there are definitely other games in that era I came back to later and realized that I was approaching them extremely incorrectly. Yeah this is why I think the tuning fork is new to me, not forgotten knowledge. I'm sure my thought process was Bad guys = kill bad guys, that's how it works!
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Sep 24, 2021 06:18
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh, no, that's perfectly fine pedantry, because I literally cannot keep track of what happened in Silverthorn and what happened in Darkness At Sethanon, since they start out extremely similarly with a Nighthawk attack and then a secret departure from Krondor on the part of Jimmy, Arutha, etc. Not just you, at least -- I reread those when this thread started and the same thing happened to me. A couple times I was thinking 'ok now is when xyz events happen, right' and no, it was in the other book. Eventually I remembered to ask myself if a specific person was present, since the party composition (so to speak ) was different and that got it squared away.
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Oct 12, 2021 17:52
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 "What the gently caress, Owyn." 
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Oct 13, 2021 20:46
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"oh look, an updat---"  Just confirming, yes you can investigate locks. I knew that when playing back in the day, I do not know how I knew. And the ratio of keys to locks is absurd - 70+ common keys for 8 common locks. What. Whaat. I tried to look up a Midkemia timeline and it requires some conversion of dates (all based on years of reigning king whoever) but best I can tell, there's an 11 year difference from Arutha and Anita, so they're 28 and 17 when married. Does that change the overall point not really. On the other hand he's pretty casual about the progress of time, so perhaps the game is slightly closer to canon than you'd think with Delekhan patiently waiting a month for you to wander around! One book has a huge number of events compressed into less than a year and others casually have four year jumps between chapters. As for the Mockers I get you - a lot of the books and this game try to make the claim it'd be "more trouble than it's worth" for Arutha to bring in the army and boot the Mockers but they're always light on details of how or why a romanticized organized crime syndicate is plot immune. But I think future books give evidence, what with the truly ludicrous chains of events Feist had to set up to keep the Mockers as part of the setting. To me that says authorial decision to keep the faction in play at all costs. After all, D&D campaigns need thieves.  Psion fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Oct 20, 2021 |
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Oct 20, 2021 18:56
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LeastActionHero posted:James is way better if you're a dumbass kid and beeline straight for Krondor in chapter 1, then get stuck in chapter 3 and wander the entire map before stumbling in to how to advance the plot. whatup first playthrough experience buddy
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Oct 25, 2021 00:57
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I think you'll actually find the best spell is Nightfingers, as we've discussed. I think my vote for worst spell probably goes to one that, ironically, the BAK Help Web author quite liked a lot - we haven't seen it yet iirc so no names, but I found it needlessly time-consuming to set up and use, especially compared to some of Owyn's other, very powerful, spells. it comes down to 'why take 2+ turns to kill someone when you can just do it in 1' but maybe there's a secret interaction or reason to use it I never figured out. Psion fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Oct 25, 2021 |
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Oct 25, 2021 20:03
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PurpleXVI posted:
"This is the Lockpicking Lawyer, and what I have for you today is a Webber lock..." This line never sat right with me. I don't know why James of all people would be so quick to claim a lock is unpickable, considering his prior profession. Even if he wasn't Ace Lockpicker, other Mockers would be, so he'd know unpickable is bullshit.
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Oct 26, 2021 20:37
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Impossible. A Webber lock cannot be picked.
Perhaps not by you, but one skilled in the arts of subtlety, he may know how to penetrate even the most difficult of locks. It is a matter of patience.
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PurpleXVI posted:Also someone really brought out the thesaurus for this game. "Enfeoffed"? If you tell me you ever heard this word before, I will call you a liar. I've heard it before  (because I've played this game before) but I don't remember it whatsoever and for all I know you just made it up as a trick so who really knows?
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Nov 4, 2021 06:34
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PurpleXVI posted:
I see you've figured out why Owyn attaches himself to the plot of this story Schwartzcough posted:Oh no! Two moredhel! There's no way Owyn and Gorath could've handled that without getting captured! the game has probably thrown dozens at you at this point and you can always brute force it, but yeah they were apparently very proud of the wordchest and were going to make sure you dealt with it ... or else!
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Nov 17, 2021 02:22
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Based on the progress of the LP, I think a direct path game is going to eat a similar amount of time as this except for chapter 1. That was an astounding amount of exploration whereas the direct path from LaMut to Krondor, even with a few minor detours to explore, is nowhere close to the breadth of things you can do. Genuinely a difference of hours there. But 2/3? Pretty similar. like think of it this way - a main path run of Chapter 1, maybe 10% of what we saw. Main path runs of 2/3? Probably 80% the same. Future chapters, we'll get to them when we get to them. Also it feels like there was a genre-wide expectation to explore at least a little bit when BAK was released, so it's not like you were intended to do 0% of the sidequests. If nothing else, you'll want gear and skills to fight the ambushes along the way, which act as a soft check on leveling up.
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Nov 17, 2021 21:54
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I believe they did, it was somewhere in that update also while Martin Longbow may be canonically longbow man, I find it entirely believable he'd dunk on every nerd with a crossbow if required
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Dec 1, 2021 07:13
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I think the first time I played this game I got caught out by both the Chapter 2 and Chapter 5 cast splits, so it bit me in 2 but on the other hand James was fully ready to roll over 5. also it's hard to overstate how extremely good that sword of lims-kragma is. It's not always the most obvious but a very reliable, hard-hitting sword is just really nice when you really need to keep a chain of one hit kills going to scrape enemies off your evil seek caster
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Dec 2, 2021 00:01
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PurpleXVI posted:Hey, he stopped to put a sweet-rear end .gif on his wall first. Oh, it's basically the entire cast. Locklear ~canonically~ has sunstreaked hair so that's why there was that throwaway comment about dumping his head in a barrel of pitch way back when, but he's the only one who gets the textual 'yeah, we know, it's different' go figure why.
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Dec 13, 2021 02:29
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Yeah, there's a limit. Fictional universe, but the author is a human living in our world, writing books to be read by people living in our world, and the history of using fiction as a lens to examine our world is as long as the history of fiction. There's meaning in what, and how, they choose to write about. You can only excuse so much. (this is not specifically about Feist) Psion fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Dec 13, 2021 |
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Dec 13, 2021 19:31
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PurpleXVI posted:But it still feels like Feist portrays most of Kelewan's slaveholders as "alright," rather than abusive pricks, and the Tsurani as a whole as "alright" except for a few bigger assholes in charge. In general Feist very much seems to try and portray the whole Empire vs Kingdom conflict as "it's just a few dickheads jockeying for political power, the Tsurani are actually good people There's a lot to unpack in the Empire trilogy but the main arc consisting of Mara rejecting traditions wasting good people and eventually realizing that means rejecting the concept of slavery entirely kinda speaks against that interpretation, no? Like if there's one sentence to describe Empire it's Mara rejecting a profoundly hosed up culture and working to change it - first out of desperation but then eventually out of revulsion over how broken it is. are there problems galore in the details from start to finish, absolutely and completely yes. The entire plotline with Kevin especially, about as much of an insert character for the concept of Kingdom Nobility as Wesley Crusher was for Gene Roddenberry on TNG. At least the depiction of a non-Kingdom culture wasn't quite as hosed up as in Prince of the Blood? Psion fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Dec 14, 2021 |
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Dec 14, 2021 20:48
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" despite the fact that they are INSANELY warlike, keep slaves, use slaves and prisoners for lethal bloodsports for their own entertainment, etc.
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Rogue AI Goddess posted:From what I recall, if you kill Makala and run away from Dreads, you can loot a third Staff of Macros from his body. according to the handy BAK Help Web, he has a Staff of Macros with Steelfire and Dragon Plate Armor with flame root oil (so frost immunity) applied. So yeah, he's apparently enough of a magician to break the sword-only rule for Naphtha. Gameplay supporting characterization I guess
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Dec 14, 2021 20:52
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 03:05 |
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Gorath deserved better, it's true
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Dec 14, 2021 23:26
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