Essentially this comic series will serve as the platform for my "After Action Reports" for our latest iteration of the long running marathon Paradox Interactive conversion game played between me, King of Men and others. Accounting for the years between 1066 AD and 1968~ AD covering every single year inbetween with FOUR FourX Grand Strategy games by Paradox Interactive.
The marathon is played once a week on saturdays for four hours every week and takes about 2-3 years to complete all four games with players joining and leaving between games and sometimes sessions as nations rise and fall, as of now this is The Great Game III as 2 other campaigns have already been completed with me 'winning' the first one, losing the second and now I'll try again in the third.
Currently due to issues I would rather not discuss I cannot currently partake as a permanent nation during the CK phase and will thus be only 'subbing' other people's nations as they need it and will comment on the actions and participate between sessions as an 'Immortal' essentially a character in game whose actions are controlled between sessions and roleplayed by the 'peanut gallery' to add immersion, increase participation and increase our pool of potential substitutes.
The story for Rasputin is that the background world of Earth is actually a "All Myths Are True" setting of which I am borrowing heavily from Dungeons and Dragons so I can spiffy Mage duels as Rasputin is actually in my interpretation not a mad 20th century monk mystic but a powerful wizard on the same level as Fisdantantilus, Szass Tam, and Xykon. Borrowing heavily from the recent literary gem I discovered "The Dwarves" Rasputin's goal is to make a magical "veil" that covers as much land as possible (foreshadowing justification for the overly large historical Russian empire hrrm?) that increases his power in relation to the size of the veil established!
So thus not only is he required to manipulate Russian politics up to the present day but battle and fend off rival wizards such as Kosche the Immortal within Russia itself and other powerful wizards, witches, sorcerors, mystics and shamans such as Merlin, Seigfried, Odin, and others from across the world in the continuing eternal struggle for ultimate magical power!
Speaking of, I'll be needing Public Domain Character names of famous 'mystics' and wizards from across history including antiquity like Merlin if anyone has any obscure suggestions that I can name drop please tell me!
I'd recommend trying to find a different configuration for the text bubbles in the last panel. It doesn't read well as it is now.
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Blayne Bradley
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I can never quite figure out how to handle it, as clearly reality dictates that I cant just rearrange the characters to match the order in which they speak, but it ends up being difficult to determine whose saying what, the clunky solution is to visually place the bubbles in order left to right even if it means the buble being far far away from the person speaking.
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If you have the time, I think it will flow better this way:
Top left - "So, demons and devils..." Top mid - "Appears a priest.." Top right - "I will enjoy..." Bottom mid - "Kill the pedophile..." below right of that - "Lolicon is not..."
Also, now that I'm looking at it more...in the future, you should think about making the outline of the hut roof in the background a thinner line. That heavy contrast is really distracting to the eye. As a general rule, heavy contrast things will jump off the panel. It's a good way to really put something in the face of the reader.
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Blayne Bradley
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Ok here's two more I think we got some improvements.
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I've resurrected Rasputin. I think you may want to wrap up this intro storyline, though; we reached 1205 today, putting you 140 years behind. Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Blayne Bradley
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The "current session time" story arc I don't plan as being accurate on a session by session basis as the Great Game II comics were but more of a planned story arc that makes references and takes current events into account while taking of course all credit for those events happening
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If the mentor (incidentally, were we given his name at any point?) has a counterattack to deal with the loss of his protection, why does he act so worried about its breaking? I could understand "Crap, this is going to hurt", but not "Crap [implied: I'm going to die]". Also, by ordinary D&D rules a single kick, even from a giant-sized cleric, ought not to incapacitate a demon capable of casting Disintegrate and suchlike powerful spells. [/nitpicks]
Edit to add: By the bye, you should read the HP:MoR chapters dealing with the intent to kill. Why does the cleric cast a defensive spell as his first move? He should take the initiative and move to the offense. Then he wouldn't need to worry about having his defenses breached; he would make the demons worry about having their defenses breached. Act, don't react; make the enemy react to you, not the other way around.
I suppose you could argue that he's a peaceable old man in the usual course of things, doing his best at a task he's not really trained or suited for. Though that does raise the question of why he's apparently prepared for combat at the drop of a hat, as opposed to having, say, a bunch of healing spells readied. You'd think that the average cleric deals with more heart attacks and agricultural accidents than demonic incursions.
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Blayne Bradley
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I've been trying to move away from the Munchkin mindset for a more entertaining story... That and I have very little experience with clerics
Well in all the manga I've read where "I am not left handed" seems to be pretty much the deciding rule of combat it always seems to be the case that especially! When a character has a comeback he must at least seem worried Whether this is because the character in question simply forgot he had said comeback ready or was simply wanting to let the enemy drop their guard is an open question
And huh, I'm honestly stumped which splat book is the MoR?
But I mean as a wizard if I'm caught with my pants down my first impulse is to turtle up, just me subconsciously projecting there.
quote: You'd think that the average cleric deals with more heart attacks and agricultural accidents than demonic incursions.
You'ld equally be surprised how crazy prepared PLAYERS are as well at least compared to the contexts of even when they play in Low Magic settings, not to say specifically the character is a player (he isn't) but he is eccentric.
I DID name him in the first chapter but plan to retcon it upon reading some Russian folklore to of the many many MANY famous warrior-monks.
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Blayne Bradley
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Also to add, the two female fiends are meant to fit somewhere in the succubus/enrinyes category, my reading of them is that they COULD have good spellcasting abilities but they arent exactly known for high amounts of hp, so a good sized kick outa make em worry.
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quote:You'ld equally be surprised how crazy prepared PLAYERS
Well no. I've GMed campaigns in my day. But except in very unusual campaigns players, by construction, are expecting to go into situations where it's kill or be killed. Of course they have the heavy artillery handy. This guy is just sitting about his village, teaching his apprentice, and his crazy preparedness ought to be for "Ivan cut his hand off with the axe, and Grigorii's bad heart seized up when he saw the blood".
quote:And huh, I'm honestly stumped which splat book is the MoR?
I thought you were following it, but on second thought you didn't post in the discussion thread, so I guess not. Talking about this. Read it; it is awesome.
[quote]Also to add, the two female fiends are meant to fit somewhere in the succubus/enrinyes category, my reading of them is that they COULD have good spellcasting abilities but they arent exactly known for high amounts of hp, so a good sized kick outa make em worry.p.quote]
It's been a while since I looked at the unarmed combat rules, but most demons have damage reduction (ie they're effectively immune to anything but magic) and even giant-sized kicks don't do that much damage in the first place, because the rules are set up to work with first-level characters of 1d8 hitpoints and longswords that do 1d8 damage per hit.
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I was actually wondering why you hadn't been posting in the Harry Potter thread Blayne. Seems like your thing.
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Blayne Bradley
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Aha so that's what you meant, well I haven't started reading it yet, I do mean to eventually but its alot of subconscious hesitation regarding fanfiction I gotta overcome so its taking me a while and waaaay too much other stuff to read/watch to distract me so its been a little too easy to put off, regardless of how good it is.
quote: This guy is just sitting about his village, teaching his apprentice, and his crazy preparedness ought to be for "Ivan cut his hand off with the axe, and Grigorii's bad heart seized up when he saw the blood".
Well there's a fair bit of addendum additional backstory that I haven't explained yet thats sitting in the back of my mind, the world you see is full to the brim with wizards/arcansists/alchemists/clerics in a "all myths are true" kind of setting (so folks from myth/urban legend such as Nicholas Flamel are 'real' and actual wizards in this setting) and out of them a fraction are "Immortals" wizards who through various ways empower themselves using nation spanning veils which take leyline energy and convert it into arcane energy to fuel their immortality (there are exceptions).
As such there's a good sized niche for wizards/magic users to be traveling around in order to practice their art for one liege or another since times immemorial and sometimes even to other planes (heaven, hell, the void, the far plane, etc etc to other worlds, etc) so the ones that don't die and actually do manage to grow old would have seen and experienced alot, so if your something around level 20 and retired to your remote village your bound to have maybe upset a few people and would have SOME preparations in case of a random demonic incursion.
As you'ld note however despite being in a setting where he could with some effort acquire various magic items or scrolls hasn't apparently any dismissal spells or items prepared which would've ended the fight in the first round so clearly he wasn't 'that' prepared (either has only 1 or 0 see below).
I would say he was much more prepared for a mongol attack than a demonic one.
That and while I do roughly have the story planned out did not plan out the encounter, so I'm going by what looks cool over what would a player do, as a player controlled caster cleric is a lot of rather in oots style drawing anyways uninteresting special effects tug of war, and why have that when I can have an old guy punching people out.
I mean based on my skimming of the PHB for Cleric spells and abilities there's not that much outside of dismissal you can do to fight demons other than to buff yourself up into CoDZilla mode (which the above cleric kinda is doing) and physically WHAM on them until they're tomato paste, it's that or dismissal unless he only has ONE prepared and either way he wouldn't want to use until the lesser demons are out of the way and focus it on the balrog.
You generally rarely face high level arcane profficient fiends it throws alot of battle tactics into a loop, he COULD use Anti Magic field, but it would leave him a weak frail old man and well, THEY'RE DEMONS with natural strength and unarmed attacks.
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Blayne Bradley
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: I was actually wondering why you hadn't been posting in the Harry Potter thread Blayne. Seems like your thing.
Well I don't want to be spoiled afterall.
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It is my personal opinion that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is among the best things I've ever read, ever.
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I am immensely troubled by the following possible scenario: Tomorrow, you sub Golle, piss off vR with backchat, he destroys Finland in retaliation, you are consumed by guilt over what you did to Golle's backup nation, in a fit of despair you go out drinking, you belligerently get into a quarrel with the bartender, it turns out that revolvers do not in fact have safeties, you fail to win the respect of the Yardies and, even worse, you die without having read HP:MoR. Dude! You have no higher priorities than reading this awesome fic! Get thee to the link!
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Blayne Bradley
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I can't sub tomorrow as I have work from 11 to 4 until the end of november, hopefully Ill get laid off in december so it applies to unemployment insurance.
But fine I see your point I'll get to reading it once I'm finished with The Inner Chambers.
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