One of the things I’ve really enjoyed doing in LAWL RP is drawing the backgrounds, something I never really anticipated happening. So I’m doing a lot of them in this new project and saving them for re-use as a way of making the process quicker.

This is one of the first locations we’ll see next week…

Oh god there’s only a week to go.

That’s a very seasonal greeting for AION, EQ/EQ2, WoW, LotRO, WAR, Vanguard, SWG, Free Realms and PotBS. I’m sure there’s other games with winter themed holidays that I missed, but oh well!

The art for this is actually a Holiday Card that I never got around to printing and mailing out this year. So I thought I’d share it here. There really isn’t anything as festive as decorating a tree with a freshly caught angel. Good thing I’m an Asmodian!

But you’re probably not reading down here for that so I’ll cut to the chase.

Bad News: There won’t be a comic next Tuesday.

Good News: There will be new comics in January. Twice a week.

Chaotic Good News: We’ll be moving to www.lawlrp.com in 2010

Lawful Neutral News: The format for LAWL RP will be changing to a more story driven, original universe setting.

I’ve been working on this for quite a while and finally feel confident enough to sit down and dig into it as a major project. Next Tuesday I will probably share some of the character designs and such in lieu of a comic and maybe a bit of extended universe info as well. I’ll likely be crazy busy in the next couple weeks what with trying to build up a buffer of comics so I can avoid the whole webcomics standard of missed and late updates. Hence the fact that there won’t be an update next Tuesday, but I hope you guys will forgive me.

In the meantime I hope you all have great holidays, both on and offline!

But I totally could see this happening one day so I need to find a pair of those sunglasses for my girl. HAWT.

Forget the Sugar Plums, lately the only visions dancing in my head have had a direct relationship with the Aion Visions Trailer that was released about two weeks ago. Yeah, I know I’m a little bit late in writing on this particular topic, but such is the way of things around here. As expected everyone from Thulf over at the Impetusium Blog to the crew of the Unofficial Aion Podcast have covered what was in the Vision Trailer. There’s still a lot of speculation on how the things shown in the trailer will get into the game, although the dev team have continually said that it’s a vision of Aion’s overall future and not a specific expansion.

What has me most interested is how the changes and additions we see in the Vision Trailer will effect the community and environment for roleplaying in Aion. There’s no argument that it will have an effect on how the RP community in Aion functions, every other game with expanded content has run into this issue. Look at the way the Horde side RP communities shifted to Silvermoon on the release of Burning Crusade. Or how the inclusion of new races in EQ and EQ2 meant an influx of characters. I could go on, but I think MMORPG veterans get the picture.

There’s a lot of things that the trailer covered and there’s no way I could talk about all of them here without turning it into a book. Instead I’ll just focus on the one thing that I think will effect the RP community the most. Namely the new housing areas and either personal player housing or legion specific housing. That is, hands down, the thing that will effect the roleplaying community the most out of what I saw in the vision trailer. I believe this particularly because instead of giving players a single or multiple shared instances with the same exterior entrance Ncsoft has indicated that they plan on implementing this in a village style setting with the ability to choose custom exteriors. While just instanced housing would still be a big change in the way the RP community goes about thing this is something else entirely. You’re not creating just a custom home for yourself, you’re literally building a neighborhood.

I have no idea how the specifics will work, and there’s not much point in speculating on that now. What I do know is that player housing of this scale will cause a couple things to happen. One, some RP that is currently going on in public will move to a more private setting. Depending on the theme of that RP this is both a good and bad thing for the community. On the good side, there’s just some RP that doesn’t need to be public, either because of potential god-modding or griefing or because the content isn’t intended for a universal audience. (Dwarven hand cannon, amirite?) On the down side I love observing random RP between people even if I’m not involved or have no IC intentions to become involved. There’s a certain openness to a community that’s forced to use the same settings. I hope that the neighborhood aspect of the housing will help with this somewhat, by providing an area that is a sort of middle ground between private instances and roleplaying in the bank with everyone else.

The other thing that I actually hope to see happen within the community as a result of housing is something I saw up close and personal in EQ2. The near explosion of player created events with their own setting and atmosphere. At the point that I returned to EQ2 in October of 2007 there were at least five regularly occurring events in the Qeynos RP community alone. (I never really got involved in Freeport style activities.) Before I left again there were so many regular events that there was no physical way I could have attended them all. Besides creating a thriving RP community of active events they also set the mood for various different kinds of RP as well. The Spider was such a different place from Scurray’s place, the Bookworm Cafe, Disha’s, Ivymoon’s, Psia’s Hammer or any of the other places on the ‘good’ side.

If there’s one thing about housing that has me torn between excitement and dread it’s the final scenes of the Vision trailer where they show the village outside of Pandaemonium being razed by Elyos and their war machines. On the one hand I love the idea that the world is living enough to the point that this sort of thing would be possible. Having the threat of attack on your home turf, on your home city is like a giant slice of frosted RP cake. It adds an element of danger that I think is pretty exciting… in moderation. Because as much as I like cake, I can’t have it every night. I enjoy PvP from both an OOC and IC standpoint, but there’s an element of the defensive side to things that makes me groan in the same way I do when I get up to head to my day job. Feeling forced to do anything in a game takes away a certain element of fun, even from things I’d otherwise enjoy.

That said, I’m still fairly optimistic. If the villages are on a vulnerability timer similar to the fortresses in the Abyss then that will make things a lot better, if not perfect. I admit that seeing Altdorf sacked twice in a day sort of stomped all over my mood on a couple occasions and the vulnerability system removes that as a factor. In the end all I can do is wait and see how things are implemented, but I don’t think even that one shadow could smother my enthusiasm for where the Vision trailer will hopefully take us.

PS: The devs for EQ2 put together an awesome Tavern Guide for the 2008 Brewday Celebration. They only highlighted ten taverns across four servers but you can get a good idea of the variety that was available then.

]]> http://lawlrp.inkbard.com/?feed=rss2&p=126 0 http://lawlrp.inkbard.com/?p=124 http://lawlrp.inkbard.com/?p=124#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:00:28 +0000 Gallirand http://lawlrp.inkbard.com/?p=124 This is something that I know I’ve heard people asking in game. Why DO some of those Spriggs have wings? Does it have anything to do with the Sprigg, Spriggan, Spriggle thing? Do Kerubs have the same issues later on? And finally, what the hell ARE those things out in the middle of Reshanta?

Mysteries of our age.

Oh Warhammer.

No other game has inspired the love/hate relationship that Warhammer did for me. I had unquestionably the best experience I’ve ever had in an MMO while playing this game, and at the same time I had some of the most frustrating and generally upsetting times there too. And while it’d be easy to say that all of my frustration was in response to game mechanics and such, that’d be unfair. Roleplay certainly played its part. Or to put it more accurately, my crazy fanaticism for lore made some things difficult to appreciate as time wore on.

Warhammer was a game that I first really started following after a couple people pointed out the extensive nature of its lore. Twenty-five years of lore as preached by player and producer alike. My mind boggled at it at first and I delved into what the web had to offer me. There were a few wiki style sites out there that offered what I thought was a rather detailed collection of articles on various aspects of the Warhammer world. Oh how wrong I was.

Now, as much as I love lore I think it’s really just an extension of my deep affection for research. I took a class in college about Conceptual Design and the instructor for it was very adamant that we learn how to research as part of the process. Creativity is wonderful but that experience taught me that the world often offers me ideas that I could never have thought of on my own. The Warhammer universe is an amazing example of this sort of thing but I wouldn’t really learn that lesson until about four months after I created my Knight.

The server she’d been born on, Ostermark, had just been merged with Phoenix Throne and I was trying very hard to view it as an opportunity and not a death knell. The point I tried to focus on at the time was that it offered me a whole new group of people to get to know and roleplay with. In the process of that I started reading through the archives of the Phoenix Throne RP forum on the Warhammer Alliance site. And I found a thread about Doomings.

This is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about when I say that the world offers me ideas I never would have thought of on my own. Thinking about my character’s dooming, and how she’d have reacted to it and what it’d mean to her opened up some new perspectives that I’d never thought about before. When the author of that article, Charbel, followed it up with an article about the Knights of the Blazing Sun I was hooked.

With the encouragement from a couple friends I started searching for what Warhammer books I could get my hands on, which sounds a lot easier than it is considering that a lot of them are out of print. But still I managed to get my mitts on a stack large enough to crush a baby.

A baby such as would need crushing.

In sifting and searching through those dusty tomes I found out a huge number of things that I hadn’t even concieved of. I really cant emphasise this enough, there were thousands of pages of knowledge suddenly at my fingertips. And in some ways that ruined the game.

There were a lot of things that I’d overlooked, or done myself that contradicted the lore that I was now immersing myself in and.. that suddenly bothered me. It was always hard to look past the people that completely ignored how the Warhammer world worked. After reading that lore it became impossible.

To be completely honest I’m not sure how to feel about the whole scenario even today. On the one hand it would have been amazing to actually play in the setting as it was presented by Games Workshop. On the other hand… what I had wasn’t really BAD in any way. Quite the opposite. I had a lot of fun with things that were pretty out there in terms of what the lore would allow. Should I have ignored the lore and continued to run with things as they were? Or should I have tried to educate people as someone had done for me?

Unfortunately thanks to a variety of events in game and out I’ll never really know what would have happened. I do still think about it at times like this and wonder about all the plans I’d made. When I left Warhammer my Knight was on the cusp of total corruption into a Chosen of Tzeentch. Sometimes I feel like I should dig those books back out and explore the rest of her story, the one that lies beyond the Chaos Wastes.

And with the first eleven levels of the game being offered for free on the Warhammer website and Phoenix Throne being merged into one of the two available servers I may just get that chance. In weird ways Warhammer keeps finding ways to entertain me and make me smile.

PS: If you’re an Ostermark or Phoenix Throne refugee with a hankering for some fun Warhammer reading I have to plug the Cinematic Roleplay Dueling as the best way to get your fix without a subscription or a fist full of Games Workshop books. Aeternis of Warhammer Alliance was gracious enough to collect them all into two PDF volumes that you can find available for download.

I honestly forgot how much I enjoyed drawing some of these characters, and the opportunity to do them in color was great. Though I did have way too much fun drawing the daemonettes.

In any case. There will be another blog entry this Thursday! I’ll be changing the header to reflect the new update schedule but I’m going to make an attempt to blog about RP and such every Thursday in December.