Darmian

Well, it was me who brought up the gatekeeping comment, but I'll clarify that I mean it in a narrow sense. I posted a pic of an example from "A Hero's Epic" where I want three words removed to smooth out the timeline. Not undo it or write over it but smooth it out. Gaps are fine. Grounding things is fine. Preserving the intent of the lore is fine, and I mostly agree with it. Mostly. I've done a set of AE arcs that would probably fit right into some of the backstory of your guild, @TwoDee, Loyalist and Resistance, since they're designed to slip in between Neutropolis and taking the Rift missions/going to First Ward, rather than what your SG might think of as flights of fancy! My gatekeeping bugbears are simple. The game as it shut down in 2012 is not preserved in amber, it lives, and breathes and moves, and it's actually a good thing that it evolves or even corrects itself along the way.* *I have various suggestions elsewhere on the expanded uses of Paragon Dance Party/Studio 55/Rikti Monkey Fight Club, but one of the first reactions I received for an early suggestion on making PDP a viable space again - simply because (a) it's there and (b) in HC's current state recycling existing assets is I feel a good thing - was that it was shut down for a reason, ie the arrival of Pocket D, and should be left that way "because". Horse shit. It is THAT sort of gatekeeping that gets me exercised rather than any other. Similarly with the suggestion to remove three words from the Jenkins example, a response I got was, effectively, well it's supposed to be there. SMH.

Flying V Industries was named after a famous racehorse of the 1930s and 40s, Flying V. Not of the caliber of War Admiral or Seabiscuit, nevertheless regionally famous.*

If I had a penny for every time this happened, well my donations once a month to HC would be a LOT bigger.

Now, I don't think he should permanently retire, but as you say reprioritize. Him being away for a bit, in character dealing with the fact that despite his oldest frenemy being dead (and AFAIK Libby's only remaining family), he STILL isn't the top of the food chain. So vanish for a bit, get his act together, then come roaring back as the threat he really is. Actually smart, actually a good leader. There were reasons troops followed him and Marcus Cole over the top of trenches in WW1, so let's get him filled out more. My suggestion involved Daos being effectively Prime Minister of the Etolies while the King is away, and if you thought Old Stefan was cold...well now. And while I was cheeky above, I'll mention in passing some of what is in my headcanon AE that would feed into that:

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.