Darmian

Our intrepid explorer @TerroirNoir has been working their way slowly through many an AE built by myself, @cranebump and @Ankylosaur (not to mention a detour into holiday AEs). And @Zhym has listed them all here so far.

Like others have said, see my sig 🙂 Well I prefer neither. I HAVE created standalone arcs, and trilogies (3 arcs with 15 missions) that aren't task force style things. And I've made something I describe as a long form "streaming style TV" series, consisting of a single prequel arc of 5 missions and then 3 "seasons" of story comprising 15 missions each. I think this is actually necessary for most AEs. Players IMO like to see new and different enemies as well as old favourites and mixing and matching the two can really pay off. Despite what I said above, if it doesn't add to the narrative or aid the story then I think I'm getting it wrong. I'm not saying I'm getting it right! But narrative drives things. If I'm creating an AE I never have a "cool enemy" or setpiece idea and then shoehorn a story around it. For me it has to be the other way round. You know I don't know what this means. There are a lot of moving parts to AE building. It looks simple but it's got its trickiness. And some of it is not intuitive. One thing I've learned in testing when something interesting but unexpected happens is to make a note of the parameters used and file that away for later, in a "how do I make it look like I meant that to happen' way That entirely depends on what the player(s) bring to them. I write mine so anyone can play them. That said all of mine are canon related or canon adjacent. In fact the two Praetorian trilogies are designed to fit directly after Neutropolis but before hitting First Ward. Not incredibly difficult but there are some challenges. Like most things it'll depend on your difficulty level. I like to do as @cranebump says and find spaces and cracks in the Lore and fill them as best as I can. As for plugging my stuff? I've been fortunate enough to get several Dev Choices and they and the rest of my AEs are in my signature.

Number Six's arc rejigged a bit so a Praetorian can actually go to Last Bastion. I mean really.

Not considered this! For lower level Gold I just pick up some Grenades and Plasmatic Taser from TFV, mainly to keep Ghouls the hell off me!

I did enjoy!

I've advocated for having a "floating box" between the Target and Nav boxes for a long time. I usually have it filled with NPC Dialog and Cut Scene Captions. Useful.

Now you know where you're going at least!

I don't know if I have a thing, beyond obscure Lore maybe.

Nice to see. Looks like you've kickstarted a trend here, @Ankylosaur.

Underground First Ward & Night Ward. No need to explain where they came from as we already "know" they're there.

There's an entire origin story to Noble Savage in Praetoria. Aaron Walker - Unofficial Homecoming Wiki

The easiest way is to highlight the part of your text that you want coloured and then a dropdown should appear and you simply select it. Same for bolding and so on. Now, you CAN do it manually with HTML tags and so on, but that uses up your character allowance, and that is a precious commodity. The one thing about doing it manually is you can use (mostly) colours not available in the small dropdown list. Similar things in there for bolding and italics and so on. With the select option it is possible to go OVER your character allowance safely but you better hope you have no typos because you have to edit it manually if there is, and it will throw up an error message that you have too many characters. So, it's remove all of that nice formatting and check for errors and then reapply. It's a pain in the ass but now you know.

Yeah, nice to see another "one of us" surface! I enjoyed that a lot. Great first arc!

That doesn't work because she doesn't recognize 12 in "The Husbands of River Song", and in that she even has a photo of War, and he was hidden away from most.

I suppose she does. My build doesn't look exactly right, since the billboard image has parts not available in the costume creator but what can you do? As for deep dive? Well, I suppose so! I simply like meandering around the game world and making notes on things that I see. Who knows what you might find? I recommend others do it too. It can be fun!

She is not!

Well, even taking him at his word on that, it's still bollocks, You shouldn't kill off two of your top team for no damn reason like that without it contributing to the forward narrative. Like @TerroirNoir2 said above, Statesman (and even Psyche) biting the dust in an Incarnate Trial in the War would have been far more satisfying. It might have even been a copy of the Alpha/Omega team thing as reported from the Rikti War, with the players being one team and Statesman et al being on the other, One of my other bugbears here is the complete removal of Statesman from the game after his death. Given the progression of time versus leveling in the game that makes no sense. I'd love to see Statesman standing in IP still running his TF...UNTIL you play WWD and then he phases out for Ms Liberty. Kudos to the Homecoming Devs for returning the OG version of the Lord Recluse TF to the game where at least you can face him as a foe via Ouro.

Hey now, there's limits to what I can do with an AE! Just ask @Ankylosaur or @cranebump! The most I can do is state a sort of "meanwhile, elsewhere..." sort of thing. The following two have a bit of "meanwhile, elsewhere..." especially the final arc.

Hmm, post hypnotic suggestion from Wade through Malaise/Mayhem to eliminate Mayhem's alternate if possible? So even if he thought of a non lethal way he subconsciously didn't use it? I'll have to go through WWD again to check things, it not being on the wiki.

I don't know about genius but I wanted a real reason for WWD to exist, otherwise it sort of sits to one side of things up until then and doesn't make any narrative sense beyond being a thing where two major heroes die.

Right. Deep breath. We go back to Primal Earth and its Darrin Wade to start. We all know what happened in Who Will Die, and to me it seems implausible that Wade could have done it. Come up with the plan? Possibly. Actually doing it? No. And I don't even mean grasping the power to do it, that's fine. People seizing great power to do good or evil is a common theme in a super human milieu. No, it's that he has no reason to. Literally none. There's some hand waving post the event that it paves the way towards him wanting deity status but that does not work either. But there is a reason for Statesman to die when he did. Dying then removed him from participation in the defense of Primal Earth against Praetorian invasion. Statesman is alive until the opening moments of the Underground Incarnate Trial. And then in WWD, which is happening concurrently with the start of the invasion, Statesman dies. I posited that removing Statesman was a Praetorian plot. In fact I think they surely had quite a few of those. This being but one of them. Malaise and Mother Mayhem are aware of and have been seen in the Shadow Shard, so Rularuu is known about on Praetoria in some circles. Malaise used this Wade to psychically influence the Primal version to murder Statesman. In fact there are cut scenes in WWD where if you look at it from this position Malaise is simply conversing with himself or rather his Primal self, while possessing Primal Wade. Of course he's not doing that directly, just... nudging and guiding. Dropping "memories" and knowledge in as needed. Until Statesman is taken off the board. All this abuses Praetorian Wade and drives the poor guy rather mad.

Well, I do like to fit in the odd snippet of lore here and there.

Welcome back @TerroirNoir2!

Yeah. That doesn't work anymore since Soul Extraction was changed.

Yeah, @cranebump does pretty fine atmospherics!