Arctic_Princess

I've only ever had two name pro9blems and, tbh, they were obviously going to be taken (but I was chancing it):

Photon Girl and Paradox

Alternative spellings (substituting 'C's for 'K's in 'CK' ending words works quite well, e.g. Warlokk)

Colours can sometimes help too, although the more-obscure colours don't always work, e.g. Yellow Snow (which I have a sinking feeling is quite popular and probably taken on ALL servers, EU AND US )

It would certainly save a lot of time with regards to the MA and I think, especially with all the new content coming, it'd be neat to have this option available. And, of course, now we have Super Sidekicking, there feels to be more teams out there.

/signed

I think the addition of a 'South' station could be achieved with minor jigging, mainly because the line already exists, wending its way to Brickstown in the South.

I did have a brief thought about a clickable 'Shuttle' near the Indy transport hub (Base Portal, Ouroboros Drop-Off AND station all clumped together) when reading the OP's suggestion but, graphically and concept wise I actually think the shuttle idea is lame .

Also IP is the only zone (apart from perhaps the Shadow Shards) where TP Friend actually comes up against its range limit! Seriously, try it out if you don't believe me.

Peacmaker stands the wrong way, as if the user is not paying too much attention to the graphical interface.

"So what do we talk about? I was just wondering if there had been any response from the Rogue Isles? I mean, how bad is the censorship over htere?"

The figure runs, hits a wall and keeps running.

"I guess we can all talk abot the heros but wer not getting the full pciture are we?"

"Sorry, keyboard.. "

A generic male figure pops into the room, displaying the moniker Peacmaker. It is clear that no thought has gone into the creation of the avatar as it uses the common starting model with no additional flair.

The information box proclaims the user to be from Galaxy City.

"Hi. Im a newbie lol."

"I am interwsted in this discussion. I love and work in Galaxy. That's allpwed, isnt it? We can say where we live?"

"I never seen the likes of that before!" exclaimed the Captain, pointing to skyscrapers that were fast approaching.

"Looks like a bit o' dry land, more's the pity, up ahead." He called to Smith.

"Is there any way to stop the island, Captain?!" Smith's voice was teetering on the brink of sanity: It had been a long day.

"Stop 'er? Why, no. Don't think there's much chance of that! Sea currents are curiously missin' from these parts an' I never had cause to try and steer a whole island before in my life! Don't look much like we got a chance of hittin' that dry chunk o' land without losin' a few teeth!"

Smith looked at the grinning Captain in horror: The old salt apparently enjoyed the thought of crashing headlong into the landmass ahead.

"Maybe..err..we should ask Gramma Perkins to cast a spell? Or something?"

The land got closer.

"Well, run along then Smithy boy. I wouldn't miss this for the World!"

Smith hesitated. In the last mile or so the two had exchanged places with the Captain now standing very close to where the western beach had been and Smith was on marginally higher ground, near a palm tree. A crab was hanging onto the remnants of sand and pebbles at the edge of the island for dear life, its mad little crab legs scrabbling in the air.

"'Ang on, boy! Looks like we got a friend to 'elp us out!" The Captain pointed to a swirl of ever-decreasing circles, joined by really big bubbles on the surface of the water.

Smith clapped a hand to his face. The Captain laughed. Then a gigantic, white whale emerged from the depths of the sea, spouting salt water everywhere and making an un-whale-like roar.

"Ah, good 'ole Scampi! Couldn't bear to be parted from yer Arch Nemesis could ya?! Ahahaha!"

Scampi was the name given to the great white beast of a whale, now thrashing about between the island and the encroaching desert, by the Captain. The two had fought like...well a really big whale and a pirate captain for years.

The Captain, despite having lost a leg to the dreaded thing, often treated it like some kind of overzealous, pet dog. Smith half-expected the Captain to pat its water spout and throw it a bucket of spicy chum.

"Land ahoy!" a frail, elderly female voice called from the entrance to the jungle. Emerging from the undergrowth was a woman in her mid-eighties, wearing a white cotton blouse, a long corsetted skirt, sensible court shoes and thick, horn-rimmed glasses. She walked with the aid of a cane which had a retractable blade at one end (handy for strolling in thick jungle) and a skull motif top (where she kept the sugar for her afternoon tea).

Oh yes! And she also wore a lot of 'occult' jewellery: Skull rings, onyx necklaces with ivory and silver detailing - that sort of thing.

"Been looking at the situation from the Skull Rock Cave and it doesn't bode well for us. Not at all."

Smith sighed inwardly. Although Gramma Perkins was the island's voodoo priestess, she often proclaimed things that were about to happen that had already happened some time ago. But she was old and so it was rude to question her. Besides, sometimes she got things incredibly correct.

"Looks like we're going to crash in precisely four minutes and twenty-three seconds." Gramma Perkins held a wet finger up in the air, nodded to herself and waddled back into the jungle.

Precisely four minutes and twenty-three seconds later, the small island collided with desert. A monolith depicting a giant man with horns stood out in the distance, hills rose steeply across the horizon to the West where the gleaming skyscrapers stood and a few miserable-looking boats stuck out of the dry sands where there had once been water.

Sadly the great white beast, Scampi, who was caught between a rock and a hard place, had opened its mouth as if it were about to bite down on the desert and tear a chunk of it off. Instead, and for reasons unknown to anyone in the immediate vicinity, the shock of impact locked Scampi's jaws into their wide-open state and he now acted as an impromptu and very bumpy bridge between the island and the mainland. Mounds of sand had poured into his gaping maw. For extra effect a shool of fish flew out and lay on the baking desert floor, flapping their tails until Nature took its course.

"Bit o' luck there, Smith." The Captain called out, a lone tear rolling down his cheek.

"I spent many a long year brawlin' with Scampi. I shall be sad for a while..."

Smith waited for it.

"Now where's me pipe? I fancies a smoke!"

My vote, if it's worth something, would be to turn this into a competition. I can foresee, no matter how civil everything starts, the person who ends up publishing the arc getting all the rewards with bitterness and resentment following shortly afterwards.

It's a touch cynical but I'm sticking to that Cassandraic vision as opposed to a Utopian/Voltaire Satire 'Everything is Best in the Best of All Possible Worlds'.

That said, I'd like to chuck in the story thread which has been tantalisingly dangled in front of me when reading the CoH comics. The one that features Castle and various other Heroes (including War Witch in her phased state) has an exciting (depending on viewpoint) bit where Ray 'Positron' Keyes muses that War Witch is a good kid and that he is working on a way to get her back to 'normal'.

AFAIK it's not been followed up on - yet.

Thanks for the reply BUT I do believe it's something I want to do that the MA doesn't support

It's a shame but I think I'm just going to have to rewrite some elements of the mission. Having allied civ patrols with objective-spawned Security Guards will probably make slightly more sense as a workaround.

Cheers for responding.

I have that sinking feeling that I am trying to achieve something which cannot be done. However, my knowledge of the MA has some large holes in it so I am hoping that I can get, if not an answer to my question, at least a decent workaround.

I have a mission that involves an Ally. She is pretending to be someone else in a civilian setting, allowing the player character (who, for the purposes of the mission, is pretending to be her 'personal assistant') to go off and sabotage things whilst she averts suspicion.

I would like to either:

a) have an ally, surrounded by friendly civilian NPCs, who upon getting near her will give out the relevant clue and follow you, leaving the civilians behind.

OR

b) have an allied boss with a civilian surrounding group who will give out clues when you get near her but will not follow you.

I want to avoid having to defeat any enemies around the Ally, for storytelling reasons.

I would also like to keep the file sizes for custom groups down on this arc.

I look forward to responses. If I need to explain more then please say so.

Cheers!

Land amidst the sea felt the pull of threads.

"Somebody's trying to pull us in, captain!" a scrawny boy, wearing a plaid shirt, called to an older gentleman.

"Nothing we can do about that, Smith my boy. Nothing at all."

"Were you expecting this?" The boy's faced was screwed up in confusion and disbelief.

"Gramma Perkins may have mentioned something of the ilk. Ill winds and new horizons, boy. You can't have pleasure without a spot of pain."

This tract of land was, in a geographical sense, an island. It was far too small to be a continent and far too big to be a rock. It had hailed from a sunnier clime and so palm trees dotted the sandy beaches, which in turn led to thick undergrowth and a rocky outcrop at the centre of the island. Perched on the top of the rocks was formation which, to those of a certain persuasion, would be described as a skull. Albeit a large skull carved out of rock with tiki torches laid out all around it in a circle.

To others it may have looked like a cheesy, tourist trap of a desert island complete with pirates, voodoo priestesses, cannibal pygmies and talking parrots.

The truth was that both were correct. It was a living land, dictated at some point in the evolutionary cycle by the power of a story.

And it was travelling towards the growing patchwork of lands at a steady pace...


((Okay, I hope I haven't got the wrong end of the stick with this! As I'm not entirely sure of the 'geography' of everything at the minute, I await further instructions and help to decide where this 'island' might fit in.))

I vote for Frostfire!

After years of fending off attacks from the Superhero Community, Trolls and various other fauna of The Hollows, Frostfire is saved from a deadly Rikti Assault by the New Freedom Phalanx/Freedom Phalanx 2050 - led by Honoree (just taking the idea and running with it!) and helped by the 'timely' intervention of Ouroboros.

It turns out that Frostfire's very own powers (Fire and Ice Control) are instrumental in maintaining the timestreams and, after some time, he joins the Phalanx convincing some of his former criminal Outcast buddies to help out. He is a villain redeemed and returns to the values he once had before he became a criminal. Things move on and in true comic book irony, his cosmically important powers launch him into a career as Guardian of Ouroboros.

I have succumbed to it and am trying to recreate the FF characters through the medium of AE. I will NOT be publishing anything with them (and I'm having terrible trouble with El Diablo) as they no doubt infringe copyright but am willing to share them with other peeps.

And it's just the characters. And just FF for the mo - as discussed earlier Tombstone and Black Jack need Dual Pistols to be fully-realised

And you're no doubt right about moving her constantly with that Panzer. Also she might have Banishing Blade (the Blind attack) at that point. It didn't help when she went crazy after being hit and ended up beating up poor Bullet before I had a chance to use a Heroic Remedy, leaving just Black Jack to save the day. He did. But then he is awesome. Good old Limey Lure.

I like Man-O-War but found him more useful in the first campaign (with all the robots) than the second. However he does get extra Sean Connery Win points.

My take on the FF and FFvT3R playable characters:


Alche-Miss - Grav/Rad Controller - Lift, Propel, Dimension Shift, Ennervating Field - it's all there! - and with the Energy APP as Tangler said, minus Total Focus - oh and with a 4-slotted Brawl for her 'Slap' attack!

Bullet - The closest to his bullet flurries is Dark Melee but he also has a Whirlwind so maybe Martial Arts/Super Reflexes with the entire Super Speed pool? Or even Martial Arts/Elec Armour due to his 'charged' ability.

El Diablo - Fire Blaster / Fire Manipulation Blaster

Eve - Plant Control / Arrows Controller - I think this suits her perfectly, especially with Seeds of Confusion and the Hold.

Man-Bot - Super Strength / Energy Aura Brute - especially with the Endurance Drain power. He is one of those characters that, depending on how you play him, he can be a multitude of things at once. He could even be an Energy/EM Blaster (Nova and Conserve Power) or an Energy/Kin Corruptor.

Man O'War - Electricity Melee / Invulnerability Brute with Mu Mastery

Mentor - Mind Control / Psi Blasts Dominator

Microwave - Rad/EM Blaster with Temp Invulnerability

Minuteman - Invulnerability / Mace Brute

Reserves:
Blackbird - She's a strange one but one of my favourite characters - in the first game she's a Scrapper with a very useful Cold blast (want for APP - Cold Mastery!). In the second game she gets access to a Sonic attack so I guess either Sonic or Ice Blaster or Corruptor. No idea for secondary though. I really wish they'd given her a 'Secret Identity' story in the second game.

Iron-Ox - Invulnerability / Super Strength Tanker
Law - Broadsword / Scrapper
Order - Invulnerability/ Mace Tanker
Supercollider - I have never bothered with him!

Youth Team:
Ant, The- I see the Ant as more of a Mastermind with /Poison as a Secondary. It's true he'd got a mean punch but the thought of an Insect MM is too appealing.

Liberty Lad - Martial Arts/Super Reflexes Scrapper OR Martial Arts/Ninjitsu Stalker (for the gadgets)

Sea Urchin - Force Fields / Electric Blasts Defender


Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich

Tombstone - Dual Pistols/Dark Corruptor - ftw!

Quetzalcoatl - Empathy Defender but then the rest of his powers were poor melee attacks. Difficult one this.

Green Genie - Someone was on something illegal when they designed this character. She's more like a Warlock in WoW (has no idea but thinks that's the class that turns people into chickens) than a CoX AT. I suppose you might be able to get away with Illusion/ but again, no idea for the secondary.

Black Jack - Dual Pistols/Devices Blaster OR Traps/Dual Pistols... you get the idea!

Tricolore - Katana/Super Reflexes (with NO mez protection, possibly my least favourite character in the game - silly Enrage...)

Sky King - Assault Rifle/Devices Blaster

Just a thought (pardon the pun) about Praetoria and Mother Mayhem's thought police - how many of my characters could claim immunity from her intrusion? Would I want/Would it be advisable to break this potential new element of canon? In doing so would I open up my characters to having their minds read by people who go a bit overboard with their psychic characters (in the nicest possible way)?

And what about my own psychic characters already in existence? It would feel like godmodding if all of them were 'immune'.

Hmmm, I know this is all supposition as we don't know how the thought police are involved in Going Rogue yet. I'm interested in hearing from others on the matter.

I'd like to add another dance:

Wuthering Heights

Complete with swishy/swirly arms and legs

And I'm prepared to wait for that. Issue 20?

What I found very confusing is that when the Fonts are destroyed, it doesn't make the waterspouts go away. At least if it did that there'd be a benefit of destroying them apart from the mission objective.

I guess they're just not designed that way.

And I hate the mission!

And I agree with Memphis Bill on the Mole Machine thingy too. Who thought that one up?!

Just an addendum to say that I've now updated the description but have decided to keep the story arc title of 'Simplicity'.

I'm going to stick with the loosely-connected storyline otherwise that's a whole bunch of rewrites. I'm not being lazy (!), I just think that if the arc proves successful then I can run another story that follows from it which will explain more about the Guild.

Cheers Tangler for taking the time to critique what I've done so far.

I will make the cosmetic (spelling and formatting) changes first and then work on the story a bit more.

I think I'm going to have to trim Depserado's bio down as I must have reached the word limit! The same for that likesthem bit. Grrr, me and my verbosity.

Cheers!

***

I have made the changes, I'm not entirely sure how best to string the missions together more coherently.

And I'm still stuck for title/description. Calling it 'Going Rogue' would be arrogant and misleading.

If anyone else would like to try out the updated arc then please do. Further feedback is always good.