Thanks for replying.
The Vault:
A) YES. That we have no grasp on what Eloran society right now is constitutes part of the problem. There's no baseline for a comparison, just optimistic guesses.
I don't see this as being entirely negative, buy IMO it's cause to drop those Other Shoes gently because they'll be landing on people from a great height.
Like this tortured metaphor.
A good example? Seremas. We've all been there. I own Eldest Sons.
Can I tell you anything about it besides that it's divided?
Not really.
By comparison I can your Nishampur is a city of shadows and whispers, where paranoia and lies are the blood and air of it's populace. I can tell you it has The Bone Quarter who's inhabitants are so destitute they're sometimes mistaken for some of the mindless risen dead that shamble around the place. I can tell you about the vast friezes of demons and gargoyles that occasionally shift and slide and take wing. I can tell you that's it's a place who's walls are watched by marksmen looking for an excuse to perforate an intruder and who's streets were patrolled by frustrated Nierites and demons that can smell metal.
Demons, albeit small sludgey ones, also dispose of the garbage. And the beggars.
And there's a lake of blood.
I can tell you,
and I haven't reviewed this image since the last time it was featured in boxed text, about how the Church of the Dark Apostate features a massive frieze that depicts devils and skeletons dancing in roaring fires as a tribute to the Dark Triumvirate.
I can tell you that the rules of the Mark of Sarish involve it being negated by striking a priest, and that all Val are considered priests in the City of Secrets.
I could go on about Palic Val'
Mehen's last moments when he decided the answer to all his problems was to put on Hegrish's Crown and how that was
the last thing he ever did.I could ramble about it's population who appear equal parts terrified and cowed but who live inner lives of surprising hope and genuine piety.
I could go on in similar detail about Grand Coryan, about the market and back streets and the boisterous, worldly shrewd Coryani and about the etiquette of togas and the Legionaires struggling to find work and the gangs lurking around the corners and how Coryan doesn't have a police force but does at least have a fire department -the Vigilus, if memory serves.
And the misery of the Myrantians, and the gore and glory of the arenas and on and on.
I don't begrudge the Coryani being so familiar, they're that important. This is basically their campaign.
But seriously. I know f!ck all about the Elorii by comparison -
especially in character.
Also re: the first point I recall some of the Campaign staff expressing surprise that a few Eloran players losing their characters by deciding to side with The Skinless Lady when she appeared.
I'm not.
Remember those Malfean log books discussing her appearance and how their were doubts about the truths of her claims?
Those almost perfectly echo'd some of the players, because nobody knew
anything!
The idea that Belisarda had come back but had been terribly maimed by the Umor, or darker things, and was shunned by the other nations for so poorly fitting their preconceptions fits Arcanis's kind of narratives just fine.
It set up a powerful, discordant moral dilemma and anchored with a brutally perverse possibility.
So that someone would feed their Hero to that idea is hardly unforseeable -I know at least two hardcore, long-term Arcanis players who gave up their played-from-year-1-heroes to free King Nowen.
That's what this campaign
does.
Interestingly the Skinless Lady event makes for an interesting exploration of Faith in RPG'ing for being an event that was simultaneously nightmarishly awful AND plausibly true.
After all real Faith is doing what your higher power commands, even if it looks abominable on the surface.
And again, that's what Arcanis does. That's why I love it.
Here's my last note on the confusion of playing an Eloran character.
This is a cert from Stream of Consciousness.
Visit to Elonbe`Elorii Benefit:
"You have answered the call of Hanalathir of the Laerestri and the Council of Elders of Elonbe. This gives you a certain measure of prestige, for you would not have been called without the approval and recommendation of your superiors."
"Although you cannot speak of what you know to outsiders, there are plenty of groups and individuals within your own people who would love to discuss your recent exploits deep within the Vastwood."
I'm going to excise the bit about the mechanical benefits for brevity, and make this point:
the player still knows nothing about Elonbe.
Apparently "What Happens In Elonbe Stays In Elonbe" because I partied so hard I don't even remember a single syllable describing the city or it's people.
When I first got that cert I thought I was being mocked. "I've just been given a 'you've been a tourist' cert to a place I'd been hoping to get a breath of for years? Is this actually happening?"
I have spent more time in
Haina, in effin'
Metra, then had anything said about what at the time was what, the 3rd most popular player race in the L.A. campaign -Val, Dark-Kin, Elorii?
B) Like the rest of Arcanis.
Here we go, full stop: WHY?
I'm a big fan of ideas like Evolutionary Psychology (wherein evolutionary survival imperatives inform individual behavior) and I don't see that applying here because the Elorii didn't evolve.
The Elorii don't have a divided pantheon.
They don't have an empire.
They don't have
subjects -even when there were Gar tribes (pre-retcon) within the Vastwood they were mostly left alone out of respect for their role in the uprising against the Sstherics.
What in all this mandates that they should be like the human nations?
It's not just that I'm playing favorites, because I am, but I'm not seeing the logic.
C) Xercel.
When challenged by whatsername he says that she cannot oppose him despite Xercel acknowledging that he has no legal right to invoke the customs of a society he apparently left.
Nothing about that says, "nice guy" to me.
That says, "screw off or I'll atomize you and mix your ashes up with my tea."
"While the other Elorii in the module are aloof, and condescending."
Why?
No, really: why?
They get less then a total paragraph of text in the entire module and can provide no information -
can provide no information, to the players.
There's no intent there. There's a hole, a nothing.
Way too late to matter it occurred to me in my last text spooge to wonder why there's no chance to interview any of them.
I dispute that answer is, "because they're haughty" when it's patently "because the author saw fit not to provide any."
Haughty also fails when, say, the attempting interrogator is
A DIVINE SERVANT OF BELISARDA.
Yes, maybe they're
haughty and don't want to talk to the humans -but I gotta argue that there would logically be an exemption FOR AN ELORII PRIEST/ESS OF THEIR CENTRAL DEITY.
That is one of the things that bothered me when I ran the mod: there's
nothing in it that actually addresses an Eloran characters besides a single sentence that amounts "help a fella out, yeah mate?"
D) An Intro mod.
And here's the root of it.
I'm not onboard.
I played So Shall Ye Reap, and I got into that quick enough because the meaning and the mission looked clear from the outset.
Visions of Lives Past involves giving an immortal bully the keys to what was Area 51 with zero explanation and no options.
There's no way there couldn't have been other ways around it. If the PC's decide not to give the key up another Elorii introduces him/herself and says they've got suspicions about Xercel -the renegade btw, and his motives. Give them the key and they'll see to it you get out safe.
Or a Secret Society mission.
Yeah, Reap kinda botched that by letting the SS PC sabotage the entire mod midway through but for Visions having them ordered to argue the key's fate decided one way or another is absolutely Arcanis 101.
Val'Holryn:
1) Here's what I was first told, in person, many years ago by LA campaign staff about the confusing lack of identity built into playing Elorii -"make it up for yourself."
Well, I did that.
And here we are.
So,
no.
The Arcanis team are better storytellers then I am, and with that talent comes the burden of forging the superior plot.
And secondly, there is also
jack-squat-all about what Xercel does if the PC's snub him. Given what we know about Elder Elorii, and particularly Kelekene, AND what Xercel did in his previous mods if the PC's failed him, "offer to shake their hands and wish them well for their efforts" REALLY does not seem like the answer!
Remember "Stupidity Leads to Character Creation"?
I'm gonna file "f!cking with an Elder Elorii Pyromancer" under
stupid and could not IMAGINE that there wouldn't be consequences as light as a disfavor.
Go stand in front of a mirror, look yourself in the eye, and try to take seriously the idea that the same ball of fire and ire that sends the PC's to retrieve the key to the most dangerous storehouse in the Known Lands would be mellow with them betraying him.
G'wan. I'll wait here.
2a) Except there is still no basis for comparison -imagine only hearing the worst news about your culture,
and
2b) this setting is about Coryan.
All the other human nations are satellites of Coryan.
All the plots are about or involve Coryan.
There's a good twenty pages of text dedicated to the fortunes of the royal families of Milandir and Coryan heading up the new edition.
Arcanis is the World of Shattered Empires, and mostly that's Coryan.
Cool. I'm hip. Been here for the whooooole trip.
"that at times elorii politics is as venal and ruthless as human politics."
Yeah, I remember the question of whether the Seremasi were using a secret police unit that disguised itself as Malfean infiltrators to shift the blame for assassinations it was performing.
But here's the bottom line for me.
We should talk politics some time -rather, you and I already do but in this case everybody is figuratively invited.
It's a fustercluck, to be polite. Jeltor and I could spell it out with a little prep and a few hours of everybody's time.
And it's all about being human. There isn't any other excuse.
I am a human. I will be a human 'til the last of my DNA has finally broken down into plain ol' dirt.
I have done a lot of human things in a lot of human places with/to a lot of human people.
I'm not going to get real confessional here, don't worry. But you already know some of it.
And I've got a pretty good grasp on the whole "human experience."
And I categorically refuse, unwaveringly oppose, to meekly accept that in a totally alien species set in an entirely fictional place shaped by wholly impossible events involving another kind of sapients the core explanation for why, over
millenia of practice and progress -and having some portion of everything the fricking
Sstherics-the First Real Empire, have had to say about politics and philosophy, lacking most apparent scarcities and cause for religious schisms, the answer is
hey, people just suck.
No.
...
Hell, alternately the other answer is "yes, special snowflakes."
"That's always kind of been the Elf archetype idea. You're effectively post-scarcity and well-ordered, but your plot armor has worn off and now the young races, crude yet vibrant as they are, run everything. Your time has passed, at this point all you truly can hope to achieve is staving off your inevitable extinction."
"Even the Elorii adhere to this last trope because only the Malfeans are so delusional as to think that there's some kind of victory possible that could bring back the old days; everyone else apparently just hopes to hold hands and sing 'Kum-by-yah' with the returned Elemental Lords until the Sun finally dies in the sky."
"Humans get the other 95% of the setting. You get all the Paths and all the fluff and all the cities and all the nations and all the Secret Societies and all the Valinor and the Kio and Naori and Undir and Australians and every other playable PC option except the Sstherics."
"Me? I get two things:"
"The first is to have a feeble slap-fight with the Sstherics about some mostly irrelevant history."
"The other is not to play a goddamn human."
"That's all."
The end.
