#and i know aligned continuity family lore can... vary at certain parts

[transingthoseformers]

Oh this is fascinating!

It's always interesting to puzzle out why Megatron went from blue optics to red beyond the show explanation of a show of him going down the wrong path, and this (him originally having red, swapping to blue, and why he probably swapped back to red) is an intriguing one because there's a science to it

[memento-morri-writes]

Witch, Dragon, God!

-@astras-rambles

Ooh, hello, Astra! Thank you for the ask!!

WITCH - What sparked the idea for this world?

I'm not certain which world you want me to talk about, so I'm going to talk about High Fantasy WIP, since that's what I'm most interested in right now, and it has the best answer to this question. High Fantasy WIP is a direct result of my obsession with Dungeons & Dragons. I wanted to write a story that had the vibes of a well-done DnD campaign. (A bunch of misfits save the world and become found family along the way.) I know absolutely nothing about the geography, culture, politics, etc. of this world, but I do have vague ideas for a magic system, as I mentioned in the ask I just answered. I also want to keep some of the most interesting parts of DnD lore around. Specifically there will be some version of tieflings and aasimar (the distant or not-so-distant descendants of demons and mortals and celestials and mortals respectively), a pantheon of gods of varying domains, alignments, and interests, and you can bet your bottom dollar there's going to be warlocks. I honestly think that the warlock class has some of the best storytelling potential in the entire game of DnD, and I've always wanted to play one. (My first ever dnd character was actually going to be a tiefling warlock named Zenara, but the campaign didn't end up happening. I still have them on the backburner to play someday because I love their concept.)

gonna continue this under the cut because it's getting really long, lmao.

DRAGON - Do you write about dragons?

I have yet to write about a dragon, but they will definitely exist in the world of High Fantasy WIP. You can't have a high fantasy wip and not at least have legends about dragons!!!! (There's a post that talks about missing seeing true high fantasy dragons that are smart and have agency, and I wholly agree with it. That's the kind of dragons I want to write about. I frankly don't like seeing them written as just beasts to be tamed and ridden or killed.)

GOD - Does your world have a religion? Is it, in this world, right?

All of my worlds have some degree of religion. I'm personally strongly atheist, but I think that a defining trait of humanity (or humanoid creatures, in the case of High Fantasy WIP) is our determination to believe in something. In our world, religion or spirituality of some kind arose in every civilization on the planet, and for the majority of people it remains a part of their lives in one way or another. So I think it's important that a fully developed world has at least some concept of religion or spirituality. (Again, that might sound ironic coming from a staunch atheist, but I find it fascinating to write and explore human's views on religion, even though I struggle to come up with religious details.) In the world of High Fantasy WIP, there's a large pantheon of gods, each with their own set of domains and duties. They do really exist, since they are able to directly grant their power to (and sometimes even speak to) their followers. However, I find it a bit of a cheap shot to have deities that are 100% good and deities that are 100% bad. Oh there are definitely evil deities with evil schemes, but they have their reasons. And likewise, the "good" deities also have their own plots and plans. I would love to tackle the story of a cleric to a "good" deity who struggles with the realization that their deity is not always kind and good, and not always right. There are no perfect people, and even the gods are no exception. All of the gods have followers, but some people don't follow any gods. However, even for those people it's nearly impossible to deny that the gods do exist. They grant their power and speak to clerics, they influence events in the world, both somewhat directly and indirectly.

[hellsbovnd-archive]

LF RP — JANOS JEN RENATA

The third of four sons, Janos has high expectations pushed onto him from a young age. His family name often preceding him (his two older brothers being officers in the military and his father being a high-ranking engineer), it might take a moment to realize that Janos himself is the family’s black sheep. Having failed to even get into the Magitek Academy despite having a passion for working with machines and magitek, Janos instead became an Architectus in the military in order to serve his country and make his family proud.

Unfortunately, bad luck and poor judgement led to trouble following in his wake. Where his siblings are marked as loyal and accomplished, Janos himself is marked as negligent at best, and in six years of service, he failed to earn a single promotion or any recognition for his work whatsoever. He was continually reassigned, never working for too long on any one project and occasionally being moved to different posts altogether, and eventually was relegated to simple maintenance work. Now, as a result of circumstances unknown even to him, he’s found himself in Eorzea: lost, homeless, and scared—but thankfully, not alone.

IN CHARACTER

Profession(s): Eorzean Cover—While Janos tries not to draw too much attention to himself, he often takes odd jobs to make ends meet and help pull his weight in his small circle of companions. Garlean Architectus—He’s loyal to the Empire, still uses his (last known) title in the company of other Garleans, and still believes himself to be in the Empire’s good graces even though “getting lost after being reassigned again” sounds an awful lot like “desertion.” His time in the military was spent primarily in central Illsabard doing maintenance work on weaponry and warmachina, though he didn’t really enjoy the work he was assigned.

Alignment: Chaotic Dumbass. Difficult to tell, but loyal to the Garlean Empire... For now. He had somewhat of a rebellious streak even back home.

Professional Talents: Magitek—Once an Architectus in the Garlean military, Janos learned his way around both conventional machinery and more advanced magitek devices often employed by the Empire. Nowadays, he uses his knowledge primarily to tinker, though much to his dismay he’s only really good at creating weapons... And, well, the quality of those weapons is often limited by the quality of parts he has access to.

Current Residence: Vagrant. He maintains an inn room at The Hourglass, but sometimes he has to move when he doesn’t make enough money to cover the next few days of inn fees.

Likely Haunts: Eorzea at Large—As a vagrant, he can get just about anywhere, provided he has the coin to get there. Unfortunately, as a Pureblood Garlean, he can’t use any magic including the teleportation magicks that make use of the aethernet. Ul’dah—He hangs out around Ul’dah’s markets often, and around Pearl Lane, enjoying the anonymity that blending into crowds there provides.

Hobbies: Tinkering—Janos loves to tinker, and dreams of having a workshop of his own one day back home in Garlemald. But, he’d take Eorzea too, since he’s stranded here for the foreseeable future... Theater—Over the years, Janos has read up on both Garlean and foreign drama, and came to enjoy it quite a bit. While he professes that he would never be able to get up on stage, he has quite a bit of respect for those who can.

MORE INFORMATION: Full Bio WIP | Tag

OUT OF CHARACTER

Hi there! I’m Crow and I use they/them pronouns! I’m generally most active during NA Evenings and Late Nights. I play on Balmung, but I’m open to RP connections from across the Crystal datacenter.

You can find detailed information about my hopes and expectations for RP on my dossier, here. The quick and dirty version:

OOC Communication > All

I am a med/heavy lore-strict RPer. I prefer medium-to-low power levels in RP and character- and plot-driven scenes. I won’t RP with any player under the age of 18 but as long as you’re not making it weird/creepy, I don’t have a problem with underage characters within reason.

I run an FC and an LS, so I can be pretty busy OOC because I have to run a lot of stuff related to that.

I do not really RP on Discord because my attention span is pretty crummy, but I have always been smitten with Tumblr RP as a longform format, so if in-game RP is impossible for some reason, I’m happy to write starters.

In terms of things I’m looking for:

Casual acquaintances and friends! But preferably: long-term plot-focused RP connections! Slice-of-life ain’t really my jam.

Business contacts! Janos is an engineer and a habitual tinkerer and does odd jobs to make ends meet. Maybe he could end up doing something for you?

Pre-established connections based on his background as a Pureblood Garlean born and raised in the capital and as an Architectus in the military (though his situation at the moment is obviously a little complicated).

Recommendations for events to attend? (And company to drag me along since I hate flying solo.)

Discord and Linkshell communities!

DETAILED RP HOOKS UNDER THE CUT!

Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in playing with me then please feel free to send me a message or make a note of it in the tags or comments on this post. My Discord is emet-selch wears prada#5086! If I’m slow please bear with me; I have a habit of getting absolutely swamped with stuff at more or less complete random, and my energy levels vary wildly from day to day and week to week.

tagging for visibility: @balmungrp @mooglemeet @ffxiv-crystal-rp @crystalxivrp @ffxiv-balmung-rp

RP HOOKS

1. Magiteknical Difficulties

Janos is a (former?) Architectus for the Garlean military. While he was generally relegated to maintenance work (and hated every moment of it), he loves working with machines even to this day and would probably be able to fix anything set in front of him given enough time to figure it out.

Given enough time and the right parts, he might also be able to build something for you! Unfortunately, most of his contraptions are dangerous even if they work, with Janos used to cutting corners to make something fast, not necessarily make it good. 

The gunblade he carries is one of his own creations, in fact; dubbed “Bad News,” Janos used misappropriated parts to put it together before he wound up in Eorzea, and has only continued to work on it to this day. It’s held together with proverbial duct tape and it’s a wonder that it works at all, especially because once he got to Eorzea he had to modify its design to make it look less like Imperial models, which involved swapping out some of the better parts he’d slipped under his coat with some shoddier ones he found on Eorzean markets.

2. Eorzeabound

Stranded in Eorzea for reasons unknown to him, Janos has taken advantage of the chance to slow down. After a period of readjustment, he’s settled in to a relatively slow-paced life in Eorzea, and seems keen on treating his predicament like a vacation—although he would like to return to Garlemald one day, he’s enchanted by the local cultures and customs and has taken the chance to reflect on the views that were instilled in him growing up on the teat of Imperial propaganda. 

Janos is curious about Eorzean customs that are entirely foreign to him, such as many of their holidays and their religion. While he remains a staunch atheist (and even lacks belief in any sort of afterlife), he thinks it’s interesting to see how religion has influenced Eorzeans’ day-to-day lives and certain aspects of the different belief systems and cultures of the city-states. 

3. Black Sheep of the Renatas

The Renata family is known for an excellent track record of service to Garlemald in both the military and civil sectors... Except for Janos. Possessed of a rebellious streak that only got worse and more visible after he failed to get into the notorious Magitek Academy, Janos’s track record of service leaves a bit to be desired. With a work track-record that was notably subpar and marked by repeated failures, Janos is regarded as a stain on the reputation of a family that since the establishment of the Empire had been rising through the Garlean social strata.

4. Keeping Up With the Jens

Janos spent six years serving as an Architectus in the Garlean military, though his career was going nowhere fast (something which even at the time he expressed frequent distress over). His track record was marred with failures and he ended up as somewhat of a social outcast, having few friends and mostly being known for being the Architectus who was most frequently being berated by his superiors. It took a substantial toll on his mental health and by the end of his time with the military, he did little but sleep, eat, and work.

Much of the latter days of his service are hazy or non-existent in his memory, a fact which he admits that he “tries not to let bother him too much,” as it’s a bridge he figures he’ll cross when he gets to it. Those who served with him would likely know of some incidents he was involved in, such as an incident wherein several of the magitek bits he’d recently done maintenance on went haywire. After being pressed on it, he admitted that it had been intentional. He also passed out on the job a few times and once locked himself in a broom closet for the duration of his break.

[gascon-en-exil]

I Liked Fates Before It Was Cool!: Revelation Part 2

Prologue

Opening Chapters

Revelation Part 1

Chapters 13-19, in which everyone’s going to Valla even though half of them suck.

Chapter 13

Hey look, Hoshidan scum!

Ok, meme comedy done. This is in my opinion the first really strong chapter of Revelation, with satisfying gameplay, escalation of the threat posed by Valla, and some good character development. It’s an utter tragedy that it takes place against the literal backdrop of Cyrkensia’s ruined opera house, but I can (mostly) live with the destruction of my favorite setting in Fates when it’s so effective at getting results. Azura still gets to sing here after a fashion, and although there’s no cutscene to go with it the results of this particular show do a good job of subtly foreshadowing that Azura and Mikoto use similar pacifying magic from the same source.

After Kaden and Keaton are done lampshading why the party always runs into shapeshifters in Cyrkensia, it’s time for Corrin to step between Xander and Ryoma as they left them back in Chapter 6 - at each other’s throats in a conflict ultimately engineered by Anankos. It’s a good demonstration of what the war between the two nations would look like without Corrin’s intervention, and the crown princes’ characters logically follow from their behavior as antagonists in the other routes. Xander is resolved that Corrin is a traitor and merits only death, whereas Ryoma is more hesitant to accept Corrin’s choice and, unlike in Conquest, willing to listen to their stated motivations when he’s not on the verge of death. Ryoma’s mellower outlook may be attributed, oddly enough, to the strong intimation that he’s got something going on with Scarlet, something I completely forgot about until I replayed this chapter. I don’t blame myself for doing so; in an Avatar free-for-all dating game romances between the other playable characters are naturally going to get short shrift in the story, and it doesn’t help that Birthright doesn’t suggest this relationship at all even though it’s the one route where both characters to survive to the end. And...yeah, there’s that part, but that’s for a bit later. It’s interesting to imagine how the different circumstances of Revelation could have encouraged Ryoma and Scarlet to grow closer in Revelation than they do in Birthright, though realistically it probably just boils down to Corrin not being there for most of their time together.

In any case, Ryoma shares what he knows about the Rainbow Sage - odd how the fourth person to visit the Sage is still Xander on this route when in the others it’s unsurprisingly the opposing older brother - and Corrin and co. are off to follow the path of Conquest 10 and 11. At least there’s no sequence-breaking teleport books this time.

Chapter 14

This time I’m not focusing on the cutaway to Garon and co., because his obvious gloating has reached such alarmingly stupid levels that I have nothing more to say about it. The payoff, such as it is, to that plot thread is still a few chapters away anyway...as is the appearance of Iago and Hans, who have yet to do much of anything on this route and yet get to appear as bosses at a plot-critical moment. Boo.

Let’s talk about unit balancing instead. Elise shows up with her she’s-legal-we-swear panty shot, and one look at the stats of her and her retainers showcases another glaring problem with the gameplay of Revelation. From this point onward, there’s really no point in training any of the numerous unpromoted units the game throws at you, because there’s no time to raise them up to par unless you do a lot of grinding. This is one instance where Revelation’s similarities to FE10 are more superficial than they first appear, because 

1) when compared to just one route of Fates Radiant Dawn is a much longer game, and in fact at 43 chapters still holds the record for the longest individual story campaign in the series. Revelation’s pacing and design suffers terribly from the requirement that it cover the same number of chapters as the other routes.

2) Radiant Dawn also has a massive roster (second largest in the series behind New Mystery) with several units who come behind the level curve, but they’re spread across the course of the game rather than lumped into a span of a few chapters. Examples vary from earlygame recruits just a bit behind (Meg) to underwhelming midgame units (Kyza and Lyre) to a bonus run Est type in lategame (Pelleas). 

3) and most notably, units in FE10 are divided into separate armies with different resource pools until lategame. While the balancing between those is infamously unequal, this setup almost requires that you train more units than you’ll ultimately be sending into endgame, giving even the lesser ones a small chance to shine.

I imagine that the design philosophy behind Revelation is that the player would be expected to spend a lot of time grinding on this route to get its numerous unique supports and raise a much larger army. It seems intended for a slower pace, particularly as this also helps with building up the castle base when you’ve got duplicates of most buildings to upgrade. I still don’t care for it though, because I don’t feel like taking that extra time to raise an oversized army and because some of the recruitments continue to be unexplained in story. Why would two border guards join in the invasion of a foreign port? Revelation doesn’t know or care, but it’ll make you run your new underleveled healer to both sides of this large map to recruit them regardless. At least Elise is mounted....

Chapter 15

Seriously, look at this. These two join in the same chapter, what the hell. This isn’t even mentioning that these are also some pretty random recruitments. Shura is awfully nonchalant on hearing that Corrin got his revenge for him, and Nyx has no more reason to be here than she did in Conquest 9. With her it really feels like the writers had a great (if highly fetishistic) concept for a character and came up with a plausible backstory only to find that there was no way to fit her into the plot, so...here she is. On a related note, Nyx is the only first generation character other than Gunter to outright not appear in one route, and at least there’s an explanation for Gunter’s absence in Birthright. Her presence really is just that random.

Before doing the write-up for this chapter I read back over what I’d written for the Sevenfold Sanctuary in the other routes. The gameplay of the Revelation iteration offers nothing really to speak of, lacking either Conquest’s class and skill-themed rooms or Birthright’s power jump. The Rainbow Sage uses an alternate old man sprite initially to make it less obvious that he’s repeating the same trick he pulled in Birthright, but his exposition at the end is worth the trolling for finally confirming that he is indeed a dragon and giving us the obligatory Fire Emblem name drop. Fates’s cosmology reveals itself to borrow mostly from Jugdral of all places, though I’ve never yet seen anyone try to piece together the scattered hints of worldbuilding to link the twelve dragons of the two settings. I’m certainly not going to attempt it, because even with divine weapons and draconic-blooded families in the mix there’s remarkably little to conclude definitively that the First Dragons of Fates are/were the dragons that appeared to Jugdral’s Crusaders. My pet theory aligns it a bit more with Tellius because of certain other observations about Fates’s setting and because something is going to have to connect the dragon laguz to the rest of the series’s lore eventually.

Chapter 16 + 17

I’ve been pretty down on Revelation thus far, and at first I was fully prepared to rip into these two chapters in similar fashion...and then I finished playing through them and changed my mind. If I had to pick one moment from FE14 to represent in miniature the beautiful mess that is this game, with all its inventive concepts and missed potential, its stirring emotional moments and lazy copouts, I would choose these chapters. In spite of everything they nail the very best of what Fates offers on an emotional level, and as a midgame climax they land almost as well as the Branch of Fate lands as an establishing moment.

And yet there’s so much wrong with them! Hans and Iago have never been flatter or more inconsequential antagonists; note that before this point in Revelation they’ve done nothing aside from knock Gunter off a bridge and use an illusion to piss off the Wind Tribe. The Ryoma/Scarlet angle is abruptly dialed back to the friend zone, presumably to make it okay for the Avatar to bone them, while Hinoka abruptly joins in the action after having been forgotten about for eleven(!) chapters bar one throwaway mention in Chapter 13. Xander and Leo’s apparent betrayal of Nohr has little bite to it even from Iago as Garon might as well not exist by this point, and their retainers fail so hard as backup I almost always just send them to a corner to wait out the battle. Speaking of which, the trend of underleveled units reaches its zenith, here where maybe four of the eleven units obtained in these chapters can reasonably be used without grinding after this point. It’s even worse than the torrent of garbage units the Archanea games throw at you, because at least those sometimes come with nice stuff in their inventories (hence the “Free Silvers” tier jokingly used on some of the DS tier lists back when those were popular). And to cap it all off the ticking timer that’s been running from Chapter 7 up until this moment, of the skies over Hoshido and Nohr switching as the moment that the portal to Valla will close, makes no sense either (meteoro)logically or narratively except to add unneeded urgency and entice a few of the characters to the Canyon. For that matter, since Revelation appears to take place in the same time frame as the other two routes it’s baffling that this bizarre bit of worldbuilding goes unmentioned in them. Wouldn’t it be kind of a big deal for Nohr to get a normal sky every few decades, and for Hoshido to get a bad one?

But somehow despite all that when the Nohrian brothers show up in Chapter 17 and the music switches to “A Dark Fall” (quick aside, but one thing I love about Fates as a whole is its soundtrack) I fully got what the developers were going for, and to see all the royals finally interacting with each other - something sorely missing from Chapter 6, if you recall - and calling a truce to face whatever awaits them in Valla together just sealed that feeling. The Hoshidan and Nohrian contrast to these two chapters followed by a scene of Corrin’s families united for the first time really sells the main draw of Revelation, even if for some of them the buildup to that moment was rushed (Takumi, Camilla) or just not there at all (Hinoka). Yeah, it comes with the distinct aroma of Avatar-centered plotting like everything else on this route - as Ryoma actually points out in Chapter 16, funnily enough - but even though some of the particulars are undercooked and most of the circumstances are downright silly I can completely get on board with this group of people in this moment banding together to, uh, jump off a bridge before an interdimensional portal closes because the sky is changing color and...ugh, never mind.

Chapter 18

I will say this for Valla: I really enjoy its visual style, a sort of supernaturally-ruined pastoral idyll that resembles nothing like the world above. It also helps that it’s not tied directly to any real-world cultures like Hoshido and Nohr are, and its nods to Middle Eastern, Indian, and exclusively in localization (I think?) Greek cultures come across in the series’s more typically understated fashion. Of course that otherworldly quality lends itself to more frustrating map mechanics, so it’s not entirely a positive. This one isn’t so bad provided you’re fielding a bunch of royals to activate all the Dragon Veins - and really, it’s not as though the player needs another excuse to use them to the exclusion of almost everyone else.

But of course the big moment of this chapter is Scarlet’s death. The bit with the flower is a painfully obvious hint to recall when it comes time for the reveal of her killer, but nevertheless the sequence does well despite that and some awkward staging with battle models. What doesn’t work quite as well is the reintroduction of the Ryoma/Scarlet angle just to add more punch to her death...completely ignoring the possibility that Corrin might be married to either of them (and Scarlet just undergone what had to have been one of the most hyper-accelerated pregnancies in all of fiction, if you want to be really sadistic). Because of their earlier buildup this may be the most egregious example of Fates needing to ignore its own support mechanics for the sake of the main plot. In any case, if Corrin didn’t shack up with one of them the scene after the chapter is pretty solid. I consider it comparable to Lilith’s death scenes on the other routes, since she also dies taking a hit for Corrin, but as the circumstances are less random and Scarlet actually gets most of her characterization outside DLC it’s much more effective overall.

Chapter 19

Enter the strange child with the oversized forehead. At least it’s not immediately obvious that’s he’s evil, I guess?

It’s interesting to note that the Valla chapters are structured almost as a route unto themselves, having to establish a new set of characters previously unseen in Revelation and not seen at all in the other routes. Although in terms of gameplay they function more like an extended endgame in the vein of Radiant Dawn’s Tower of Guidance, bizarre architecture and all. I’ll be talking more about Anthony and Arete and the others later on, but I wanted to note the setup for when I talk about it in the next post. 

The intro to this chapter also delves into a bit more of Fates’s cosmology, specifically its deified dragons. Xander asks what only Iago thought to question in Conquest, namely why Garon would worship Anankos and not the Dusk Dragon, only to get the obvious but still technically necessary reveal of Garon’s true nature. I do like that the First Dragons are vague enough in their presentation that I could believe either that the Dawn and Dusk Dragons are just different interpretations of Anankos or that they’re all separate entities. As I recall however this is somewhat muted by the knowledge that the emotional payoff re: Garon is going to be rather muted when it finally happens, so this really is just more vague worldbuilding. 

Oh, right, the chapter. It’s Conquest 15 with a bigger party and entirely too many items drops on the optional path. Why the developers think the player needed so many items thrown at them in a game with no durability and a route with no shortage of funds I’ll never know.

Next time: Revelation Chapter 20 - Endgame