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wits-half · 3 days
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wits-half · 16 days
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ah fuck it. might as well.
art 1/2 of my little nightmare-induced horror game idea
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wits-half · 1 month
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Today’s psychotic character of the day is: Philip Buchanon/LaFresque from the Penumbra series
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wits-half · 1 month
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inspired by this image, for which I unfortunately could not find a source :/
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wits-half · 1 month
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Corvo can be described and defined first and foremost by his loyalty. first to the Duke of Serkonos, then to Jessamine, then to Emily. he serves them first, and he serves any other whims or morals second. he does not hesitate to draw a weapon, shoot and fight and kill in their name, and oh I would love to see what this could turn into if he devoted himself to Outsider in such manner
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wits-half · 1 month
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Let's talk about the Chaos System in Dishonored
“Your actions affect the city. A high number of deaths results in more rats, more weepers, different reactions from your allies and darker final outcome.”
The most important thing to note is that we need to distinguish between chaos and morality. A lot of people interpret Low Chaos as Good and High Chaos as Bad which is… not inherently correct. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that while non-lethal takedowns of key targets result in lower chaos, they are not the only thing that contributes to the chaos rating of a mission. I highly recommend reading these two posts [1] [2] by the lovely @kirtlandswarbler who looked into the science behind the chaos system.
It is perhaps easiest to imagine as the DnD alignment of Lawful to Chaotic. Low Chaos aligns with Lawful, the player character going after their targets and not dragging bystanders into their mess. All the takedowns are tactical, some might even say deserved – the Lord Regent hanged for his crimes, Campbell branded as a heretic that he was, Hypatia cured of her madness caused by the serum, Delilah locked in a painted world she desired so. The achievement for completing the game with non-lethal ways is even called Poetic Justice in DH and In Good Conscience in DH2. If the game is completed in a self-serving, bloodthirsty, anger satiating way, the chaos ends up being high – or plain chaotic on the alignment chart. But that is what the chaos means for the playstyle.
Chaos within the world is, in short, the way the world reacts to the player’s actions. The good and the bad, but every move the player makes in the world is a choice, and the world responds accordingly.
Let us set the scene, first, in general terms. In both games, the Empire is at a point of heightened anxiety. In DH it’s the plague, in DH2 the Crown Killer. Both games deal with brutality citizens face from the City Watch/Grand Guard, religious anxieties and terror from the Overseers, gang activity and a tyrannical regime from the Regent or the Duke respectively.
This is the world we walk into as Corvo, Daud or Emily. Everyone is uneasy and somewhat distrustful, and the player character then descends into the streets with a blade in hand, carving their way through a crumbling city to reach their goal. Loved ones go missing. Fathers don’t come back from work, cousins stop responding to letters. Even the elite in their palaces aren’t spared, slaughtered in cold blood with their loyal guard lying close by, staining the expensive hardwood floors. This is the world the player creates in high chaos – a world where no one is safe, and the few survivors live in terror, afraid that every breath they take might be the last. They see no reason to trust their neighbours, become more selfish, angrier- even your allies become more cynical, watching you slaughter your way back to the top, and why are they helping you again? To replace one tyrant with another?
In low chaos, however, the people remain safe. The civilians are allowed to continue going through their day to day life, however harsh it might be. The guards and overseers are spared, for the most part, and the nobles and rich that might go missing? That is their problem. They never cared for the smaller people. Both games open with a large shift in the political landscape – the assassination of an empress, a coup that seats a witch on the throne. And yet people still die of the plague or to the bloodflies. If a couple more members of the parliament die, that is, at the end of it all, just politics. It is among those who meddle with political issues, and not the business of the rest of the world.
The chaos is calculated by the absolute body count, along with a few special actions that the player can take. Most of them make sense. The chaos is higher if Daud blows up a slaughterhouse, killing many in the process, harming an industry, terrifying people who only hear of the event. Saving a young woman and her brother as they are harassed by the overseers over witch crimes they never committed lowers your chaos, because Corvo helped people in need. It’s a balance of the good and the bad you do, in total, rather than the simple distinction between killing and not killing the key targets. The overall chaos remains low even when all the key targets are taken down lethally. However, even if they are all spared, if the player killed every guard in sight just to reach these targets, the chaos will be high.
Something that I see (wrongly) be brought up is that killing key targets grants you a High Chaos ending, while the non-lethal takedowns result in Low Chaos ending. As mentioned above, that’s not true – they do count towards your total body count, but their deaths do not have a greater weight towards High Chaos. The non-lethal neutralization thus helps maintain lower chaos, but it does not necessarily mean that these choices are the right ones to make. The best example of this is probably Lady Boyle, which is oftentimes brought up as “oh but the morality of this game!!” critique. Death vs. poetic justice has little to do with morality in these games. After all, the protagonist (not counting DLCs) is out for revenge, to an extent, on people who have wronged them and caused them to fall on hard times. Just because a character lives does not mean there are not fates worse than death – like handing a woman to her stalker under the threat of death.
Morality and lethality in Dishonored are two things that don’t necessarily overlap. Lobotomizing Jindosh is, most definitely, a horrible thing and Jindosh ends up begging the MC to rather take his life than let him live without his intellect. There is no doubt that he is a horrible person, and many people tell you so during the game, but is this really the right way to go about things? Is an existence without the one thing you truly value about yourself worth it? On a similar yet completely opposite side of things, when you overhear one of the guards talk about how they have fun killing people who break curfew, is it truly a bad thing to kill them? One or two more deaths won’t affect your chaos all that much. It gets even more worth considering with the special actions that decrease your chaos which involve saving people from getting murdered by overseers or the guard. These actions are often difficult or impossible to perform without killing the attackers (like the guard harassing the girl that worked for Bunting).
These actions then reflect on your surroundings – the more corpses litter the streets, the more weepers and rats there will be, the nastier the bloodfly infestation. With a killer on the loose, there have to be more guards around. Mind you, the special actions that cause your chaos to grow are not enough to tip you over into high chaos alone. And as you, and Corvo/Daud/Emily by extension, grow more cruel, your allies grow more cynical. The Loyalists see Corvo butcher the city, and, well, it’s working. So why shouldn’t they get more cruel to achieve their goals, too? Emily is the most impacted, in Low Chaos growing to be Emily the Wise, the beloved empress of the Isles, asking Corvo innocent questions, while in the high chaos she talks about executions, asks how many people he's killed. Some grow to despise you, like Samuel, seeing the growing corruption and wishing for the quest to be done because they now see that the person they were helping was as much of a monster as the ones they are opposing. If you are cruel, the world will be cruel back, and the world involves those you might hold closest, like your daughter or your second in command.
The world, then, behaves in the way you mold it. Chaos reflects it, the destruction or kindness that you leave in your wake. Of course the murder of a noblewoman on a party she hosted, guarded by tallboys, will cause people to worry. Of course panic will spread when civilians are murdered in the streets. The general population of Dunwall will worry when the medicine that was meant to cure the plague suddenly turns everyone into weepers. But just the same, if people are shown kindness by a stranger without having to ask, they will be soothed. A cruel political leader being executed for the crimes he committed will make people excited, hopeful even. When Emily switches the Duke for his body double, the common people won’t notice. There is no need for fear, with the non-lethal takedowns. Not for those who are not directly involved.
Chaos, at the end of it all, dictates how the world evolves from the brink of collapse. The Outsider says it best, in one of his many speeches. “I have to wonder whether you're going to give if that final nudge, or pull it back from the edge.“ You have the power to tip the scales with your actions. Your choices matter, the big and the small, each life you save and each life you take, because at the end of the game, you are the one that has shaped the world that you will rule.
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wits-half · 4 months
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æ nr mòus: The Inherent Aftermath Part 1 (2023)
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wits-half · 4 months
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The "potion-crafter" archetype of alchemist used in fantasy is often, like, an independent chemist that works off commission or sales to create fireball elixirs or exorcism salves. Is there a grain of truth, there? Did alchemists in any period you studied make a living by synthesizing magical items (like panaceas or DIY-chrysopoeia-kits or somesuch) and selling them on to any willing customer, or was that not really in their domain?
Ha! You know sometimes it can be a bit annoying answering asks like this, because most fantasy media isn t terribly interested in authentically representing history, BUT THIS TIME I can give y'all a specific and direct answer!
The archetype of the potion-crafter you're talking about almost definitely has its roots in an actual pre-paracelcian european medical profession; the Apothecary.
There were three types of doctors in the 1500s. There were diagnosticians, the people who went to school to learn about anatomy, and were allowed to call themselves "doctor." There were surgeons, the low-skilled workers who were in charge of hacking off limbs and draining bedpans. And there were apothecaries, basically the medieval equivalent of a pharmacist.
If you were a wealthy merchant, and you went to a doctor for your runny nose, he would look you over, and give you a prescription that you were supposed to take down to your local apothecary, so you could buy a potion from them.
But these prescriptions weren't exactly strict. A doctor might prescribe you an exact list of ingredients with the amounts, or he might just prescribe you "a healing ungent of cooling and drying herbs." So the apothecaries occasionally had some wiggle room based on supplies and expertise.
The important thing to remember, is that apothecaries were NOT considered magicians or alchemists.
That is, until Paracelsus came along.
See, good ol' Paracelsus was a radical innovator. He was one of the first physicians in history to be all three types of doctor at once. He was a diagnostician, a surgeon, and an apothecary. He argued that all doctors should have knowledge of their entire profession, and that no doctor was above suturing their patients wounds, and mixing their patients medicines.
He was also, crucially, an alchemist and a magician.
Alchemy was the cutting edge of technology for the time, a practice regarded with equal parts awe and suspicion, but it was more the realm of glassblowers and metallurgists than doctors or botanists. Paracelsus disagreed. He argued that if it's part of God's creation, it should be used to heal the human body.
This extended to magic. Paracelsus figured that you had to factor in things like "the movement of the planets and their influence on the earth." And he was known for prescribing patients things like "astral talismans to be worn about the neck." A practice that, even for his time, was often seen as backwards and superstitious. (Although given how harmful medieval medicine was, the astral talismans might have been your best option sometimes.)
Paracelsus was a radical. People fucking hated him, especially when he was alive. But his ideas were extremely influential, and exploded in popularity after his death in 1541. I can confidently say that the fantasy archetype of the Potion Brewer is based on Paracelcian physicians, the doctor/alchemist/apothecary/magicians who followed his theories.
Here I'll link my Patreon if y'all wanna support my research! I have a whole section on Paracelsus.
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wits-half · 5 months
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Le Larousse pour tous: nouveau dictionnaire encyclopédique - 1909 - via Internet Archive
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wits-half · 5 months
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Snow Sculptures by Andy Goldsworthy
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wits-half · 5 months
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a collection
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wits-half · 6 months
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Pietà (1626, oil on canvas) | Daniele Crespi
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wits-half · 6 months
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Jean-Bernard Restout (1732 – 1797)
Morpheus, detail.
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wits-half · 6 months
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Johannes Leonardus Kleintjes
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wits-half · 6 months
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Paintings made by Gustave Moreau (1826 - 1898)
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wits-half · 6 months
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my dad's dealer, floating in the void: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called “what are you willing to become” 😳 you’ll be zonked out of your gourd💯
me: yeah whatever. i don't feel shit
5 minutes later: dude maybe im not fit to rule an empire. maybe everything wrong with dunwall and serkonos is a reflection of my indifference
my three doppelgangers standing behind me: chain us together and turn into a monster and tear us apart. it'll be funny
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wits-half · 6 months
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How to enable cheats and console commands in Dishonored 1
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In honor of switching to a new laptop and therefore having to reenable all my shit I have decided to finally sit down and write this post. Here is my quick startup guide to cheats and console commands in Dishonored 1 plus some other stuff I find useful. Start the game at least once first to create all the necessary files if you're doing this on a fresh install.
Turning off company splash screens that normally play upon startup: right click on the game in your Steam library, then go down to "Launch options" and simply type in the following: -nostartupmovies
Letting you alt-tab out of the game without the game automatically throwing up a pause screen:
open [your username]\Documents\My Games\Dishonored\DishonoredGame\Config\DishonoredEngine.ini
ctrl+F the following text: bPauseOnLossOfFocus=TRUE
change TRUE to FALSE
Enabling cheats and console commands:
open [your username]\Documents\My Games\Dishonored\DishonoredGame\Config\DishonoredInput.ini
under [Engine.PlayerInput] add the following line: m_PCBindings=(Name="F1",Command="set Console ConsoleKey comma | set PlayerController CheatClass class'DishonoredCheatManager' | EnableCheats")
Press F1 to enable cheats, press comma to open the console. You can edit these key bindings to something you're more comfortable with obviously.
note that other people online will tell you to set both the key that opens the console and the key that enables cheats to the same key, however I found that this meant the console commands would break if you transitioned between levels or loaded a save. Assigning them to two different buttons fixes this, although you do have to press the EnableCheats button once evrey time you transition to/load a new map.
Upon opening the console, enter your command of choice. You can dump the full list of cheats theoretically available with the usual UE tools, however not all of the ones in the dumped list actually work. In fact most of them don't. So instead of giving you the entire - mostly useless - list, here are the ones I have confirmed to work and which you'll most likely actually want to know. Words in italics need to be replaced by numbers or phrases as seen in the examples. Bits in brackets are my added explanations.
Fly (no gravity for the player, however collision remains on)
Ghost (neither gravity nor collision applies to the player) (this will also make it so you don't trigger events that happen when you reach certain locations, which can break events and maps pretty badly)
Walk (undo either of the two above commands, reenable normal gravity and collision for the player) (sometimes if you're in a Fly/Ghost state while loading a different level your collision gets all fucked up, use this command to set your gravity and collision back to normal if that happens and then reenable Fly/Ghost if desired)
God (makes it so the player cannot get damaged or killed)
PlayersOnly (probably the most important command in this entire list for me, this essentially pauses the entire game except for the player. Note that this can break the game pretty badly, especially if you do things like attack enemies, kill people, go into locations that are usually loaded in after you hit a certain trigger spot and so on. Use with caution if you're intending to actually play the game.)
AddPower InsertYourPowerOfChoiceHere LevelAsAnInteger (all powers are simply their in-game names written without spaces, except for Agility which is Celerity instead. For example: AddPower Blink 2)
RemovePower InsertYourPowerOfChoiceHere (I find it useful to go MaxPowers -> RemovePower Shadowkill if I want to get somewhere, kill someone and then mess with their body lol)
MaxPowers
MinPowers
MaxUpgrades
MinUpgrades
GiveBoneCharm (gives one random bone charm)
GiveMoney NumberAsAnInteger
GiveRunes NumberAsAnInteger
DisSlomo TimeDilationAsAnInteger (Slows down the game if time dilation is set to between 0 and 1, speeds the game up if it is set above 1. Maximum is 10. Useful to quickly get through cutscenes.)
DisSlomoFull PlayerTimeDilationAsAnInteger WorldTimeDilationAsAnInteger (same as above but with individual settings for the player and the rest of the game world)
Console Events Console Events are small scripts the developers preprogrammed that let you do things like skip to other maps, skip to specific cutscenes, sometimes add items or trigger certain events and so on. These are all called by the command "ce". There are global console events that function everywhere but notably each map has unique console events specific to that map. Not all of them work but just try the ones you see listed!
ce InsertConsoleEventNameHere (for example: ce SkiptoHubFromBoyle)
Loading maps The "start" command lets you start any map at any time. Listing all of the available maps would take up a ton of space so instead, go to your [wherever you installed Dishonored]\Dishonored\DishonoredGame\CookedPCConsole for the base game and \Dishonored\DishonoredGame\DLC\PCConsole\DLC0[5/6/7] and search for "_P.upk". The quotation marks are important. Every file that ends with "_P.upk" can be started with the start command. Note that some of the maps, like the intro Tower, don't function properly when started this way, some of them drop you off at 0,0,0 instead of your intended starting location, and in some (like the Pub) you have to perform a console event (see above) to start the necessary scripts upon loading the map to make NPCs etc. load in, so if you're trying to actually play the game you're better off just loading the individual level through the vanilla level select screen. You can load the base game main menu map with the command "start Dishonored_MainMenu_Env", however you need to enable cheats to explore it as it doesn't have any collision enabled. The DLC menu maps are unavailable through this command as they don't have spawning points for Corvo set in their data.
start InsertMapNameHere (for example: start L_Ovrsr_Back_P)
Now go be free my children! The rules of this world no longer apply to you!
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