Darmian

Like many a thing, the impetus that made it great, those initial people and their goals/abilities/dedication - whatever anyone may think of them - that did not carry forward it seems.

OOPS! Sorry! Can I interest you in some Praetorian AEs to soften the blow? LOL. Should have spoilered that.* Now, I COULD be wrong, you see what you think when you get to Vetrano. * Spoiler tag since added for those who come later to this.

No, I get it, I just don't see how they could do it, that's all. I don't even know Edit: Spoiler tag added.

Well, that's different!

Head canon contained in 45 missions in the AE. No spoilers.* *HAHAHA!

Apologies for the level reduction, but in writing these (The Spark of the Blind and Damnatio Memoriae, as well as a Loyalist trilogy) my goal was to have missions a Goldsider could continue on with when they cap out of Neutropolis at level 20 but before taking either the Rift missions or going to First Ward. Thanks for running it. 🙂

A thought. For a given value of "now", that being post the Magisterium incarnate trial/Number Six/Mr. G/New Praetorians, the only part of Praetoria that "safely" still exists - oh it's a laugh - has to be Night Ward. I could be wrong on that obviously, but the Seed of Hamidon and the DE are simply not there pre Cole's nuke, and there's no reason to think they would be there after.

The lore is gloriously fuzzy in lots of ways. So many hooks that can feed into other things, and because a major part of how I enjoy playing is spending time in the AE trying to write arcs that, with a bit of a squint, could exist*, that I end up falling down rabbit holes of lore, just to try to get thing right for myself. * My rule of thumb for myself when writing is simply "could this be an arc that a player missed and could later find in the ouro crystal?"

I think, like in many a thing, we're on the same page here 🙂 My cavil is simply sorting out, not the fuzziness, nor even the unreliable narrator, but the frankly contradictory incomprehensibility of a few things.

While I'm 100 per cent agreeing with you, I also, having waded through many a text, have wondered "Ok OG Dev team, a little more effort here, yeah? Seriously?" As I mentioned above, and I'll expand briefly, I've been concentrating my current efforts on Pre War/immediate start of the War, and attempting to reconcile Pre Going Rogue Praetoria - of which there's a few bits - with post Going Rogue Praetoria. That in particular I'm stating was just, to use a phrase from home, banjaxed. If you're going to revise/retcon then don't leave bits hanging. I've sorted a fair bit out to my own satisfaction but there's a few items that simply need text removing or rewritten to fix it. And frankly it should be done.* *If anyone now decides to jump in and say that can't be done or in fact should not be done "because that's how it was at shutdown in 2012" then take your gatekeeping nonsense elsewhere.

As usual, excellent work, @TwoDee. My own explorations have been tight into the immediate Pre War period, leading into the opening salvoes. As you know it's murky to say the least. As an aside have you spotted the dead supers in Night Ward? My assumption, I think reasonable, is they were members of early Powers Division who died in the Hamidon attack. That's an assumption but based on the fact there's no visible Powers Division structure/hierarchy in First Ward when we get there and no overt part of the War is fought there or in Night Ward (Vetrano's arc and the Sorceress Serene arc are vital but side theaters).

Those are good guidelines, @TwoDee. My replay/investigations into First Ward though were aimed at seeing how much detail of the War is known/mentioned/whatever in the First Ward arcs as a whole, especially if you play as a 24 carat Gold who just goes to First Ward after Neutropolis and never crosses the Rift to Primal. Trying to tease out those nuances. I tweaked your original timeline to say that Terra Volta was the first proper attack on Primal and thus the actual start of the war, again, Apex literally tells us this himself. Unless we were to just keep going back and include Jenkins and Tina as the start, which I don't think (a) they were (just crossover skirmishes) and (b) no one needs that headache anyway! My only issue with Praetorian Duray is even allowing for his floating consciousness from clone to clone, we still don't know how many of him there are, and whether those minds are (a) the original mind (There's a piece of text story where Cole personally kills one of him and orders a replacement and it reads like the new one won't know what the old one did) or (b) are any of them the original? Why the hell didn't the OG Devs have a Dev position called Continuity? Sigh.

This I like, though have FW's Underground be 40 - 50, since you can, with a bit of effort, get to 40 by the end of Night Ward, but another 5 level gap would be punishing.

I'm also now imagining one of the Resistance hubs of the Underground in Night Ward, ruined and partially drowned, with ghostly contacts and trainers and so on.

We're already here.

HAHAHA! Wouldn't that be great? Apart from

There's one or two others! Chimera for one.

Sigh, things can be situational. If you think it breaks the CoC then lodge a ticket about it and move on. GMs will decide on the actual nuance of the possible offence, everything else is just waffle in the end. "Are you offended?" "Yes!" "I'm not though!" and there we go on ad infinitum.

To be fair, the old lore bible and the later lore AMAs are effectively transitional. There's a difference between a script and a shooting script+sides that come in to make the final movie, to mangle an analogy. If there's a position for Dev Lore continuity/script editor/"no, that contradicts that, what the hell were they on that day?" then I need to mail them a list of things they already probably know and will be annoyed to receive!

So no playing Suppositron then?

@Sunsette, while maybe not germane to your idea, @Ankylosaur wrote an interesting AE that touches on, effectively, "Non Praetorian Praetorians", It can be found here. [Neutral] [45-54] Ninjas In the Wind - Arc ID: 40394 - Mission Architect - Homecoming (homecomingservers.com) Now, I really SHOULD be advertizing my own Goldside AEs, but this is well crafted and worth a look.

I actually know how that feels to a certain extent.

Well, back to Praetoria Proper 🙂 Not quibbling with you, @Sunsette, just a gentle reminder to other readers that First Ward (and Night Ward) are still part of Praetoria...just to one side a bit.

Well, there's already a static animation for carrying a body bag, so that's a start!

Recluse is fine IN an AE mission instance though, so it looks like it has something to do with him being a contact. The bots seem to have recoloring issues inside though, so I'm unsure what exactly is going on here.