MrCaptainMan

I agree, managing chains can be maddening!

I confess I don't remember any patrol dialogue; I must have missed it.

I will definitely be following the rest of the maxi-arc, though, based on this introduction.

Eco.

[ZQ] ZAGMUK Act One: The Herald, Arc ID 266123, by @Sumerian Long (4 small, 1 medium map). Heroic, ‘Ideal for Teams, Complex Mechanics, Magic’ say the Keywords, lvl 10-14. I’ll be taking Robin Copperfield, my lvl 13 TA/Arch Defender, into this, as the description talks of a magical war and the CoT are involved. CoT are bread and butter to Robin

This is apparently the launch of a multi-arc ‘maxi series’!, which sounds rather epic. I’m not sure why, as I haven’t had much luck so far with mutli-slot arcs, but I’m looking forward to this one.

It has 2 plays, 5 stars as Robin starts.

“Paco Sanchez from GC has been working with a hero called Sharru. The reason Paco’s asked for my help is, I guess, ‘cos of Sharru’s connection with a mysterious artifact. Magic’s my bag. Sharru’s gone missing…

[Paco, a canon contact from galaxy, has the right bio. The Title of this mission is ‘ZAGMUK Act One: The Herald’, and the subtitle is ‘Dogmatic Disturbance’]

“Sharru was last seen heading to a warehouse in KR, deep in Skull territory. Trouble is, the warehouse is a Hellion hideout. Nice…

Mission 1: Check out the warehouse

[The Nav instruction header is in Orange, and only the first word is capitalized. The OCD in me grumbles at the lack of consistency across all arcs and missions in the MA here lol. It’s ridiculous, but I kind of wish we had some standards that were accepted by all. I know that RED is often used for important points in a briefing, for example. Mayeb someone could write a guide for what should be orange, what should be red, what should be pink, etc? And the Captialization (or not) of words in the Nav, too. ]

“There’s Skull logos all over the outside of the warehouse, but inside I find a couple of corpses – and by the looks of the ceremonial wounding, it’s the Circle who’s responsible. Those dress-wearing bastiches are following me round! In the first hall I find a Hellion being menaced by a few of the sods. I stretch, whip out my bow, and let em have it. The Hellion doesn’t tell me anything when he’s free, just runs off. I find a few bodies near; they’ve been tortured. I’m getting a grim feeling about this already…

[See, already I’m into it. Around the very first corner there’s 2 CoT and an arsonist to fight, a Hellion in a non-standard captured pose, and some glowies to investigate with system messages. Nothing too epic, but it’s immersing me in the story from the off, and I haven’t even learned anything yet!. One very small gripe stems from my own personal dislike of the bodybags being used as bodies. I personally think its ludicrous that sensibilities dictate no dead body collectibles being in the game; I even think that bodybags are decidedly creepy and arguably more disturbing than some kind of generic corpse object. But this is just an aside; it’s no criticism of your using them here]

“Deeper into the building, I stick some more hellions, and find a CoT altar. The earth and moss on its base tells me it’s come from Eastwood woods. There’s some weird new pictograms on it. I see some CoT up ahead. They don’t offer much resistance when they’ve got a few lengths of wood sticking through them…

[I reach the end of the warehouse – it’s a decent, smallish map – without finding the ‘Raid Leader’ mentioned in the Nav. I backtrack and find him near the start. It’s my bad for not checking the little gantry bit above, but I was assuming he’d be at the end of the Mission. I defeat him, and another instruction appears ‘Defeat The Inquisitor’ – Note the capitals. I scan back through my NPC chat, and see the Raid Leader talking about the Inquisitor at the start. I didn’t notice because I was focused on the hostage etc.]

“After decking the wizard, I head back into the building to look for this ‘Inquisitor bloke. I’m not in the mood for a chat, that’s for sure. He’s spouting off about some Hellion called Tinderbox. I shut him up with an arrow in the throat.. Then I go looking for Tinderbox. I don’t find him, but I do find one of his mates, who I leave in a net for the Rozzers. Sharru’s been taken to meet a Circle leader, apparently, called the Master. So at least he’s alive…

[The Inquisitor and Burn-Out are nicely aligned challenges for Robin. A good opener for me. However, if Merakles consistently spawns up on the higher floor during your tests, I’d think about putting him somewhere else or using another map, to avoid any instances of what happened to me. It wasn’t much of a problem, and it was mainly caused by my erroneous assumption that there wouldn’t be anything important up there, but it would have been perfect if I’d have encountered the triggered bosses in the right order in consistent progression through the map without backtracking.]

“Paco’s got no leads on this Master bloke, but Sharru’s girlfriend, another hero by the name of Helena Handbasket know’s where he is. Helena Handbasket…honestly, some heroes think that just cos they can shoot radiation out of their eyes, or pick up fire engines with one hand, gives em the right to call themselves anything. Helena Handbasket…wonder what her mum thinks of that…

[Paco.s briefing comes over as slightly unnatural. I’d replace ‘him under a doctor's care stat!’ with ‘him into a doctor’s care, stat!’, and I don’t like ‘change his tight-lipped ways’ at all. Nobody speaks like that, surely?]

Mission 2: Search and Rescue

“The sewer where Sharru is being held is chock full of Circle. I see ghosts. I hate ghosts. They really get up my nose. I’ve got to rendezvous with Helena, but I can’t resist sticking some of the ectoplasmic buggers first.

“…They’re quite a handful…

[lol The Circle can be a bit dicey for Robin, when they’re in groups. They hit hard, the yellow-conning ones.]

“After a quick trip to the hospital, I go back to the sewers and carefully clear my way to Helena, who’s engaged in a fight in the first large room I come to. I help her finish them off, and she tells me there’s more hostages down here, not just Sharru…

[Helena’s costume is a bit, er…well let’s just say that I think the veil’s one step too far Her bio contains a redundant word, ‘Though while she is not a’ doesn’t need either ‘though’ or ‘while’ – just one will do]

“We start to search the maze of sewers, and after running down one branch, have to backtrack a ways. We run into a group of 4 ghosts. I hang back at first, but Helena rushes in like a berserker. Tch, it’s true what they say – high heels, low IQ. The bimbo’s down in about a minute. Then they turn on me. I fall cursing the stupid tart”

[This wasn’t my fault. They were around a corner, she immediately aggroed, and they were all yellow. I died too, trying to grab some aggro from her. She conned as an orange lieutenant, btw. Downer, that, but sometimes Allies are idiots lol]

“Another regroup, and in I go, alone. I delve into the sewers, and come to a branch. I hate branches. I pick the right fork, and eventually come across a room with some big spinny things sloshing the crap around. On his knees in the muck is a civilian and some archers. Hah, archers. They ain’t archers, they’re crossbowmen. The civilian seems confused by his ordeal; he mistakes me for Helena.”

[The hostage says ‘Is that Helena Handbasket? She's hot!’, obviously referring to the Ally that could be still with me. It jars a little]

“Sharru is also here, the centerpiece of some kind of Circle ritual./I break it up. He’s too groggy to fight, so I tell him to stay close and stay outn opf trouble. In wish his girlfriend had done the same…

[Sharru’s an escort. I have to say, his costume isn’t hugely inspiring. His bio is ok. Just out of interest, are Sharru and Helena specially created for this, or are they your in-game toons?]

“We make our way back to the fork in the sewer and take the other route…

[I would have preferred not to backtrack, TBH, but it’s only a smallish map – so far lol]

“Those Energy Mages REALLY get on my bloody nerves. In the last room there are more Circle, and another hostage. I free her, after a bit of a slog, and then…hm, where’s the other one. I’m pretty sure I’ve searched the whole of this place…

[Odd. I thought I’d seen everywhere…]

“I decide to get Sharru out of here first, and then come back for the last hostage. Luckily, we find him on the way, in the same room that I first found Helena in…

[I’m not sure if the hostages trigger off Helena’s rescue. If they do, then this one spawned behind me, which was why I missed it. If not, and they’re already there, then I just didn’t see him. On his knees in the muck, he doesn’t stand out too much.]

“I lead Sharru to the exit, and we’re out…

[Paco’s briefing for the next mission includes ‘You'll be pleased to know that Sharru is alive. Thanks to you. And Helena, of course.’, which is a bit rich considering she didn’t do anything to help, really lol]

“So Sharru’s taken to the hospital to join his bird. Paco wants me to go grab Tinderbox; his buddy ‘fessed up where he is.”

[Paco doesn’t sound like a GC street medic, I’m sorry. ‘However, we can neither rely on the villain's willingness to talk nor the truth of his words.’ comes over as a bit too theatrical. I had a look on Paragonwiki for his canon dialogue, however, and it’s very bland writing, so just ignore me by all means]

Mission 3: Arrest Tinderbox

“Tinderbox is holed up in an old office building. The first thing I see when entering is a strange geezer in a smoky cloud wearing a winged helmet of some kind. His name's Hanish, and he’s well mysterious. He seems to recognize me. I give ‘im the once over. His thighs look familiar, but that beard? Nah..

[Hanish’s bio is about as mysterious as they come. I must have a minor nitpick at this part of his bio: ‘he seems to have the power to appear and disappear at will from anywhere he chooses, leaving no trace of his ever having been there.’ Er, if he leaves no trace at all, how do we know he’s been there? I could just say ‘Bam! I just appeared in your flat, and then disappeared from it, but I left no trace!, so you just have to take my word for it!’, sort of thing? I know this is part one of a ‘maxi-series’, but you might want to tone down all the ‘not much is known about this NPC either!’ stuff. I’m very glad he’s here, at any rate; he’s a healer ]

“Hanish follows along as I move into the building. I discover an old safe. I fire an arrow into its lock at it opens! That’s lucky…

[The system message tells me ‘You crack the safe open’ – Robin has NO safecracking skills at all, I’m sure. Does the necklace that’s inside have to be locked in a safe?]

“Inside the safe is a pendant with a symbol like the ones on the Altar in the Hellion warehouse. Interesting…

“We move on, and on the next floor we find Tinderbox. He’s reading from some mystic book or other. He puts up a fight when I try to take him in, and rants about the magic artifact that Sharru was after. He’s put it up for sale on the black magic market. Great. One more strange thing…Tinderbox recognized me too. After I take him and his cronies down, I have a sift through his desk. There’s something odd about just one day a month this year, according to his desk calendar…

[Nice mission, that. The debriefing contains ‘Satanic’ as an adjective. It doesn’t need to be capitalized]

“With Tinderbox in custody, we still aren’t any nearer discovering what this is all about. Tinderbox seems to have gone bonkers. He just says ‘They’re coming’. Whatever ‘they’are, we don’t know. The Master may be able to tell us…and Helena reckons he’s back in that sewer I rescued Sharru from. Sounds like some good exercise. Time to quill up and get stuck in.”

Mission 4: Defeat The Master and his Entourage

“Helena’s waiting for me a ways inside the sewer, beating on some Circle. I give her a hand and we join forces. I’ll try to keep her calm this time. Easy does it, girl.

[I’m expecting the Master to be difficult, so I’ll need the help]

“Sticking a few patrols on the way, we reach the fork. This time, I take the left turn first; to no avail. We turn back and go up the other branch. We carefully enter the other large chamber…and no Master. What gives?”

[Right…this map has one largish chamber near the start, and then two separate curving corridors leading to the same croos-junction, with the branches leading to the other two large chambers. I found Helena in the first chamber, and then I checked out the two final ones. The only place left is the one initial branch I didn’t check.]

“We head back to the area near the entrance in some confusion…

[and here he is. If you’ve intentionally placed him here, just a little way down the first right branch, then it’s a bad map to choose for it because, well, here I am. I’ve just fought my way through the map to what would seem to be the ‘end’ rooms, and no Big Bad. It’s an anti-climax to trawl back to nearly the start and find him skulking in a side passage. On the other hand, if you’ve set his placement as ‘random’, then the map’s not really to blame (although I’d still prefer a more linear one), but you need to set him to ‘back’ to avoid this kind of accident. Remembering the triggered spawns in Mission 1, of course, its possible that defeating the Master will add more objectives…let’s see…]

“Finally. We find him, skulking in a side passage like a ferret in a northerner’s trouserleg. He’s babbling about an apprentice, an Emissary, all sorts. I don’t like him, to be honest. He tries giving me the evil eye. I poke him in it with a sharp stick. After he falls, I reckon I’d better go check out this emissary bloke. Helena’s still with me, thankfully. She’s doing an OK job this time, the silly bint.”

[ah, there we go. Another objective. I thought so. See? IMO if you’re going to use chained objectives (which I heartily approve of BTW), you must try your best to ensure that they are encountered by the player as he or she moves through the map. I know it’s not easy, I’ve got them in my arcs too, but choosing a single path map is a good start. With maps where there are multiple routes, some people are going to go left, some right. Now I’m going to be running up the (now empty) corridors for the third time]

“We run back to that damn middle fork. Which to choose, this time? I head left. The chamber’s empty…

[…]

“Back to the fork, and to the final chamber…again. I was right about this being good exercise! In the chamber, there’s the ‘emissary’ No idea from where, but I’m guessing it’s not Belgium. He’s all dark and smoky, hard to get to grips with. My magic arrows affect him, thankfully. He’s babbling in some strange alien language. I don’t speak alien multidimensional magic lingo, but I’m sure part of what he said translates as ‘Ooh, pointy!’ Anyway, with him down, we leave to tell Paco what went down.”

[Debriefing has ‘Satanic’ again]

“Paco has some interesting news, when I see him. A mate of his has realized where the symbols are from. 2000 years ago, it seems. No wonder I didn’t recognize the lingo. Before we can talk more, though, a crisis springs. Sharru’s escaped from the hospital, maybe possessed by something. He was spotted near an office. I’d better get over there”

[hmm…this is a bit out of left field. I was expecting something else, I don’t know what. Maybe foreshadow Sharru’s possession here a bit more with the first rescue mission – make it more obvious that he’s involved in some kind of ritual.]

Mission 5: Subdue Sharru

“I find Helena already at the abandoned office. She seems a bit blasé about the possibility that we’ll have to kill her boyfriend…

[She says ‘if possible, let's take him alive.’! If possible? Lol ]

“We fight our way through the halls, and then we meet that Hanish bloke again. He joins us, still rambling about mysterious things beyond d the ken of mortal man and all that…

“In a big room, we rescue a hostage, who tells us that the Circle are preparing another ritual…we’d better put a stop to that, then.

[lol you love these chained objectives, eh? One thing to maybe avoid is ‘Objective Fatigue Syndrome’. This mission started as ‘find Helena, subdue Sharru, and now I’m half expecting, half dreading lots more objectives to spawn every time I complete one. I’m not saying to ditch any of them. But perhaps you could find a way to let the Player know he’s going to be doing lots more stuff before he gets in.]

“One of the rituals is happening in the very same room, so that’s one easily put down. We continue on, and in the next area we find poor possessed Sharru. He’s no match for the three of us. We put him down like a rabid cur”

[which still leaves one ceremony to stop…I can’t help feeling that the Sharru fight should have been the climax to this mission (and I guess, the arc?)…]

“We backtrack for a while, and find the last magic-user and his skirted assistant. Twang, twang, ow, argh, they fall. Victory for the good guys again.”

[The ritual caster spawned in the corridor just after the elevators in the last floor, before the room with the objective that triggered it.]

“Sharru is taken away by the Midnight Squad. They’re going to lock him up. Best place for him, I reckon. Paco’s thankful, and Helena too. Another day, another quiver. I can sleep soundly tonight.”

[End]

Right. Overall, very enjoyable. Tidy up the mechanics to avoid the backtracking and maybe do a bit more foreshadowing for us dense types, and you’ve got a solid arc there. It’d get me playing the rest of the series; depending on exactly how ‘maxi’ it was

Good stuff. 4 Stars.

Eco.

[ QUOTE ]
This is a list of arcs by myself and my absolutely amazing girlfriend.



[/ QUOTE ]

Aw... That's sweet. Gratz!

Eco

Im interested in arcs that use complex mechanics in telling their story. Chained objectives, non-standard use of Allies, Bosses etc, interesting use of animations, that sort of thing.

Eco

Qr - recoloring rad emission brown will make a pretty good /fart powerset.

Eco

Queue is now:

ZAGMUK Act One: The Herald 266123 (replacing Power Play at request of Sumericon)
In Pursuit Of Liberty 221702
The Horsemen Chronicles (Part 1) 195149 or
The Wolfpack Chronicles (Part 1) 242869
Tailor Made 258291
Poi, Demonology, and Everything I Learned From Hellions 164235


Eco

Hillbilly Cannibal Mayhem!, Arc ID 21207, by @Wulfie

Medium Length (2 unique, 1 small map), Neutral. 55 plays, 4 stars as I start it. I’m taking Scoop Malloy in again. He’s my lvl 25 Inv/Superstrength tanker.

He obviously smells a story…

“…Red? Hold the front page! This story’s a firecracker, sweetthighs!…what? I’ll tell ya what – CANNIBALS!!!…yeah, you heard me! I got a hot tip!…from who? From Billie heck. Who’s he? …well, he’s …a…er…well he works for the Family,…at least he says he does…sure, I trust him! Listen, he says his cousin’s a hero here in Paragon! Goe;s by the name of Hannah! Heck says she’s been kidnapped by…look, just take the copy, OK?..ahem…here’s the title…HILLBILLY CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST AVERTED!…what? well, no, not yet, but I’m going to avert it, ain’t I?…Ace reporter Scoop Malloy has once again saved the City from-whaddayamean?…alright, alright, I’ll go save the world and THEN come back and give you the story…but Hold the damn front page!”

[Billie Heck’s the contact, and he’s speaking in a dialect straight out of a SNL Deliverance parody sketch. It’s great. He wants me to go free Hannah from the McCarren clan, a redneck family that Heck’s family’s been feuding with for years.

The acceptance field is ‘Git Er Done! Lol]

Mission 1: Rescue Hannah Heck

[Outdoor map, forest. The maps dotted with the ‘McCarren; customs. There’s McCarren Gals, McCarren Gun Nuts, McCarren Yokels, McCarren Moonshiners, and more, all very much looking the part and with powerset combos to suit. Their bios are funny (The McCarren Gal’s reads ‘This cannibalistic woman of the McCarren clan likes moonlit walks, romantic dinners, honky tonk music, and wanton acts of cannibalism!’, for example). I have some fun beating on them a while, and then hunt for Hannah. There are a few patrols with humorous dialogue too. I find Hannah, free her, and she tells me that ‘Ma’ and ‘Pa’ McCarren should be around here somewhere, and they need taking care of. Sure enough, the Nav now has 2 new objectives, Jebediah and Annie Mae lol. We start looking for the McCarren Elders. We find Annie Mae first; her dialogue is great (eg‘Ah figger her bones'll make some good soup stock,’). She’s a DB/something, and not too challenging. Jebediah’s costume is brilliant, and he whips out a Blunderbuss! Awesome. As we fight, he calls for help from his family (These rednecks sure like to breed big families, eh? ). I’m having so much fun I stay to finish off the ambush.

Incidentally, some of the McCarren customs have webnades, which I hate. I don’t know why, though, but here I’m not very bothered by them. Maybe it’s the tank, maybe it’s the synergy of your customs not being hideous, I don’t know.

After the ambush, I exit]

“Red? I told you, cannibals! In Paragon! Well, just outside of Paragon, anyway…I don’t know if it falls under Paragon’s jurisdiction…does it matter? They were CANNIBALS! Heck was telling the truth! I rescued his cousin-what? …well, I guess so, I never thought about it…no, sweetlobes, of course she isn’t prettier than you! No!…no, honest! Sheesh. So, you held the front page, right?…But…he did?…oh…well how about page two, then? No-page three! Nobody ever looks at page two. Hold page three! I’ll go get some more story!”

[Heck tells me now that I missed a few of the McCarren notables, namely the eldest son Junior, who’s a big galoot who’s ‘soft’ on Hannah. He’s kidnapped her again and holed up in some coal mines. The mission accept is afgain, ‘Git Er Done!’]

Mission 2: Get Back Hannah Heck

[Inside the mine map, I run through into its depths looking for Hannah. The customs are here, I stop and fight a few en route. I find Hannah in a largish cave at the far end, and after freeing her, Junior spawns a ways back in the room. He’s a WM/SD type, big axe and manhole cover, and he calls for an ambush too. It’s a lot of fun. His dialogue and bio are also funny. He drops a clue, some kind of ‘Hex Talisman’]

“…Hey Sweetcheeks, you’re gonna love what I got for ya!-oh, Boss, er, no, I thought you were Red…oh, has she?…with who? Her mother? …right. Did she hold page three for me?…I see…yes, I’m sure the annual speech of the chairman of the Save the Owls committee is of great importance. Well how about page four-no, five?…Seven?…nine? Really? Isn’t that the recipe page? No no, I ain’t complaining, page nine is fine! …what’s the story about? Cannibals!…gotta go, Boss”

[Heck examines the talisman, and reveals that it’s obviously been made by Granny McCarren, a crazy witch who lives in a cave in the mountains. Of course. Perfect end, I think. The acceptance field is the same as the first two lmao]

Mission 3: Defeat Granny McCarren

[It’s the witch’s cave from the KHTF. The popup tells me I can her that Hannah’s already here. I head in, and soon find ‘Granny’s Chest O Horrors’ – it’s a chest to destroy. Its bio says ‘The contents of this chest seem to be regenerating the health of the villains around you.’, though, which is its standard., maybe? In the first big room I find Hannah, and rescue her. We both move on into the cave. Granny McCarren is waiting for us at the far end. She cons orange but is still a boss. It’s a nice fight. After defeating Granny, the mission ends and the arc is finished. Heck thanks you and that’s that.

This is a simple, quick, middling difficulty arc that does exactly what it says on the tin. It kept me chuckling and nodding appreciatively all the way through. The bios, dialogue, and briefings are well-written and amusing and the gameplay is great fun. Top banana. I rated it 4-stars.]

“…hi?…Red? Red! Great! I’m glad it’s you, sweetnose! How’s your mother? What? Why’m I asking? I just thought, you know, since you just had lunch with her…well that’s what Garfield said…oh yeah? Right! Sheesh, Red, your memory’s terrible! Anyhow, nevermind that. I’ve got the story! How about this as a headline…CANNIBAL CRONE CRUSHED IN CAVE!!! Ace Reporter, Scoop Malloy, The Daily Barnacle’s intrepid superhuman reporter, has once again saved the City, this time fro-what? WHAT? …Not again!…well how about page thirteen? Bu…wha…ah…yeah…OK. So, you busy later?…your mother? Again?…”

Eco.

How many missions does your trilogy have in total?

Eco

Yes, ive had it haopen with guarded objects too. When its aggroed either by an AoE or bevause its gaurds see you, uou can attack it.

Eco

BE Prologue: Gangs United, Arc ID 250480, by @Ozzie Arcane Medium length (4 small maps). Heroic, lvl range 10-20. An underground organization is attempting to unite several gangs into one.

I’ll be using my lvl 9 Illusion/Sonic Resonance Controller, Vince Vector for this. Here’s his bio:

“Vince and his brother Phase fronted the mega-successful British 80s pop band Sinderella Sinphony, until discord in the form of Vince's growing love of glam-rock and insane hedonism drove an artistic wedge between them. Vince's second band The Artistic Difference proved a runaway success too, after a few lucrative years, Vince settled into a life of crazy parties, menage a neufs and Vimto and Whack cocktails. His brother Phase had become a superhero in the meantime, and Vince publicly scoffed at his siblings deeds of heroism whilst nursing a secret pride at his brothers selflessness. When Phase became frozen in time during the defense of a convent, the realisation hit Vince like a cold shower of pure morality that he'd better turn over a new leaf. He volunteered for some extreme experiments, had all sorts of zany science done to him, and never aged a day after that! One other thing that remains unchanged since those days...his love of Rock and his staunch opposition to False Metal!”

Here we go.

“Paragon City, The Big Pear, they call it…somewhere…maybe. We never cracked America back in the glory days, me and Vince. They never ‘got’ us, y’ know? But now, well, now thing’s are different. Now I’m here. And so is Vince, I hear. S’funny, I never seem to be able to meet up with him…

Anyway, here I am, ready to rock. Some of the people in this city are right nutters, honestly. This bloke for example. He’s got ‘conspiracy theorist’ written all over him. Says he’s discovered some new organization that’s on the up and up in Paragon, maybe the Illuminati, he says. Ha, get a load of this!

Anyway, it can’t hurt to go have a look, eh? First off, he asks me to go stop a Hellion meeting. No problemo, mister weirdo!”

[The contact is in fact called ‘Conspiracy Theorist – he’s got a massive beard, and just the standard ‘hologram’ bio. ‘Illuminati’ is in red, I’m not sure why yet.]

Mission 1: Stop Hellion Meeting

“Once inside, I find a few Hellions loitering around, as you do. I give em a taste of the Vector’s moves, and they get all confused, heh. Used to work wonders on the groupies, that. These guys don’t do any of that sort of stuff of course, they just fight amongst themselves. There’s trolls in here too, which is pretty weird. I find the leader and take him down, then put the hurt on a horny devil in a cape. Turns out he’s a robot.”

[small map, just right, middling challenge for Vince. The custom ‘President Evil’ is easy]

“So my tinfoil hat guy’s found out a bit more. Big Evil Corporation, boo! The ‘Man’ this time is based in the Rogue Isles, and the next thing for yours truly to do is stop a demonstration of something going down for some Trolls in a cave somewhere. Fine by me.”

[The briefing for the next mission needs tweaking IMO. President Evil is head of a corporation called Evil Incorporated. The contact says ‘Gee that sure is blatantly obvious.’ and then a sentence later calls it an ‘underground organization’. I’ve noticed that your subtitles are very sparse. The first one was ‘Hellions’, and this one is ‘Trolls’. This may be intentional?]

Mission 2: Stop Troll Meeting


“This cave is a fair size, full of goey drippy pod things, not pleasant. No hospitality baskets in sight either. I put me skates on for this one. After too much flying around for my taste, I find some Troll‘s giving it all the Ice Ice Baby rubbish,so I put the moves on em and slap em about a bit. Then I find a Lord Xuma bloke in a scary skull mask with a big hammer. He don’t like it up him, either. When he drops, he goes ‘bzzt click, so I guess he’s a robot too”

[Arachnoid map, and there’s a little too much backtracking. The enhanced Trolls are a middling challenge, and Lord Xuma (impressive armor etc he’s got) is less so. I was confused at the subsequent debriefing, which contains this: ‘and yet another group of villains is involved in this...’ – I must have missed something, because I didn’t notice any new group. You might want to make some more overt reference to a new group being involved, same for Mission 1 TBH]

“The next mission Mr Paranoid’s got for Vince involves the Family, who’re about to get a kicking from reps from the Big Evil group. I’ve gotta go save em. Dubious, this, but I’m in for a penny already, eh? Besides, the contact wants me to destroy any Superadine stashes they’ve got there”

[Eh? I’ve got to go rescue the Family?]

Mission 3: Stop Raid on Family Base

“There’s all sorts of geezers inside this warehouse! First off, a dirty great Vahzilok tries to get nifty with me, then I spot a Goldbricker fiddling with the control box to some remote clockwork. I’ve got a job to do though, so I keep focused. I motor on through, and find some barrels of superadine. Then I get jumped by a weird looking corpse geezer, shooting electricity at me. There’s Fifth Column in here, too. I free the family, one of them helps for a while. In the final room I meet a crazy Psycho Ninja character. He’s not another Big Evil robot, thankfully, so I get some satisfaction this time.”

[The custom Vahz has a name ‘Cadaverrific’ which strikes me as silly, I’m afraid. There’s a typo in the Family dialogue ‘why you're hear’ should be why you're here. This mission was more fun than the previous ones, because the objectives were more varied, but I’m still getting a bit ‘meh’ about it in general. The Bosses in the missions seem a bit random and unconnected. First the was president someone, then Lord someone, now a Psycho ninja, the first two were robots, this one wasn’t…]

Mission 4: Shut Down Big Evil Base

“So finally, its time to get it on with the Big Evil crew on their home turf. This dilapidated base is where the Boss, the human Succubus – nice name…where she hangs out, along with various supplies I have to dismantle.”

[Another small map. I’m really glad you picked small maps for the most part for this.]

“And once I’m in, it’s a doddle to find the bits and deal with them. The Human Succubus is a tasty bit of skirt, unfortunately she’s what we call FBM – Fit But Mental. I have to put her down”

[er..she’s in a different villain group? There’s a typo in her clue ‘she was defeat’ should be ‘she was defeated’. She’s another easy fight]

“Well, that’s that sorted. I think I did some good today.”

[So, hm, this arc was a bit underwhelming, TBH. With the slow pace of low-level Controller combat, especially Ill, an arc needs some variety to keep my interest up, and this was a bit sparse in terms of story and/or objectives. The best missions were the ones with the extra smashy/collecty/rescuey things to do. There was only one clue in the entire arc, which was a shame. I’d suggest beefing up the story a bit, and adding some more objectives. Well done for sticking to small maps. I’d be careful with Defeat Boss encounters; the attendants can sometimes spawn far from the Bosses, leaving a Player wondering what he’s missed. I rated this 3-stars.]

“I feel like some bacon and eggs, now. Where’s me pan?’

Eco.

[ QUOTE ]
Cap,

Very interesting commentary! I love the whole idea and hope some others pick it up.

WN

[/ QUOTE ]

thank you.

I fear a lot of poeple will be 'tl;dr' lol, but thats life i guess lol

eco

[ QUOTE ]
Because the main "bad guy" of this arc Dr, Disco Fever, was so well received I decided to bring him into CoV as a "real" villain. The other day I was on an ITF with him when someone on the team asked "Are you that guy from the Death to Disco! arc?". When I told them I was they said "My friends love that arc!". It made my day.

WN

[/ QUOTE ]

Lol thats awesome.

Eco.

My Queue is now

Hillbilly Cannibal Mayhem 21207 (didn't have banjo in the title, but it did have it in the description!)
ZAGMUK Act One: The Herald 266123 (replacing Power Play at request of Sumericon)
In Pursuit Of Liberty 221702
BE Prologue: Gangs United 250480
The Horsemen Chronicles (Part 1) 195149 or
The Wolfpack Chronicles (Part 1) 242869
Tailor Made 258291
Poi, Demonology, and Everything I Learned From Hellions 164235

Not neccessarily in that order.

When these are done, I'll be adding Quid Pro Quo to the wossname, but for the Audition only, on a mission-for-mission basis. The Audition is 6 missions long, so that'll get submissions 6 missions worth of review

Eco.

Every Rose, Arc ID 17702, by @Kitsune9tails It’s Long (4 Small, 1 Unique Map), Villainous, 32 plays, 4-stars as I start.

This is marketed as an ‘alternate’ starting arc for ultra low villains, 1-10. Cool. I’ll take my seldom-used lvl 5 Ice Blast/Pain Dom Corruptor Szron in. Here’s his bio:

“Ice flow nowhere to go Ice flow nowhere to go Lost in the blinding whiteness of the tundra They call him the shrew, Arms in short, Then with the claw Whiteness, Nothingness, Endlessness Death The whiteness of the Pales in comparison Oh my god! Who the hell are you? I’m little Johnny Frostbite moving around Freezin’ you up freezing you down Like an icicle Comin’ in your tent like a cold night scissor bite Arctic death Infinite night They call me tundra boy because I move like an arctic lizzard When the Blizzard strikes I disappear like a pipedream All that’s left is the gleam Of a tent peg Boosh, Boosh, Stronger than a moose Don’t lock your doors or we’ll come through your roof top Stop look around take your mind off the floor Because The Boosh is loose and we’re a little bit RAW! Ice, flow, nowhere to go Ice, flow, nowhere to go Lost in the blinding whiteness of the tundraaaaaaa!”

…er, British forumgoers or those of our American Cousins who like British comedy might recognize that that’s the Mighty Boosh song Ice Flow there.

Szron is Polish for Frost, he’s sort of loosely fashioned after the Black Frost character from that show (very very loosely. So loosely he’s basically untethered, in fact), and I have no freaking idea what his Voice will be like. I’m a tad worried he’ll attempt to rap, in fact, and if he does, all I can offer is my apologies.

Off you go, Szron!

“Every Rose, eh? What are you looking at, boy? Eh? I come in ‘ere, I do, and I thinks you’re looking at me funny, boy. I don’t much like it when folks looks at me funny. I’m a villain, see, I’m a bad sort! If you keeps looking at me funny, I’m going to do something painful with your eyes. Painful and rude. I’ve got uuurges, boy! Don’t make me sate my urges with your eyes, boy!

Cos I’m a villain, see!

This little sort, she’s a cute little thing and no mistake, she’s got dirty eyes, looking at me…

Little Pollyanna hardbody like a spanner
Winding me in winding me out
Give her a clout [slap!]
Shout!
Pollyanna Hawthorne likes
A bit of sore brawn
Szron’s on the case
Boat race frowning
Drowning
Crowning for the Circle of Thorns
Case that I took
Get the book
COS I’M A VILLAIN, SEE,
I’M A CROOK!”

[…Christ…sorry…]

“Yes, you be sorry, boy. I’ve got my eye on you, boy…”

[...anyway, Pollyantha Hawthorne, the contact, represents the CoT and has a job for Szron. A simple recovery of an ancient tome of some kind from a nearby warehouse. There’s a typo in the briefing: ‘practicioners’ should be ‘practitioners’.]

Mission 1: Recover the Ancient Tome.

“Oooh, I love’s a good copper-beating, I does, boy! Oh, yes, Freezing a bobby and shattering him into thoouusands of sparkling red icy shards is fair music to my cockney ears, boy! I loves it, I does, I loves it! I tell you, boy, when I gets an opportunity to have some fun with the barkers, I tends to go a little crazy! I can’t keep control of my uuurges, boy, I does things to them, terrible things, awful things, boy, things a man shouldn’t do to another man, boy!

Out of walls hearing the call
Of the wild crack cold
I’m old
Like a glacier
Face yer going to get it
Now, with the rozzers
All over
I’m in clover
With the fight
And the cold of the night sit tight and listen
When their Froze face glistens
I smash it and the tinkle
Tinkle
Tinkle
Tinkle
Of the dead coppers tears
Is music to my ears!

“I tell ya, boy, I has a right good old knees-up in that warehouse, boy! Aaall of ‘em, boy, all of ‘em! I DOES THEM ALL!!!

And I finds me not one, but TWO, magical books, boy! Two fer the price of one, see? It’s cos I’m a villain, boy! I’m a bad sort!”

[I had a total blast (Excuse the pun) in that mission. I Cleared it, in fact lol. Corruptor’s are great fun, aren’t they? The map’s an Arachnos warehouse map, just the right size, nice and linear. The crates unfortunately have this bio ‘This is a large cargo crate you used to sneak onto the Sky Raider ship. Blast your way out of here!’ – which I think needs to be altered. The books I find confused me a little bit – I thought I was only looking for one book. However, upon getting the last book there was an ambush of Tuatha, and I didn’t catch what they said. I realized that Szron didn’t have NPC chat enabled. I’ve rectified that now. It’s possible that whatever they said would have explained why two books. Good fun opener mission]

“Ooh, this little Pollyanna, she’s loving the Szron, she is! She’s positively DRIPPING with gratitude, she is! Why, I do believe if I was to show her my elbow, boy, she’d fall to her knees and worship it, yes she would. And you would too, wouldn’t you, boy?…Yes you would, boy, because if you didn’t I’d be forced to do something horrible to you…”

[Pollyantha is pleased (not as pleased as Szron makes out, I have to say) with the result, and offers me help with a spell of my choosing. It’s quite nicely delivered, the actual spell being left up to the Player’s imagination. One of the ingredients however, a certain type of coral, is not available, and so I decide to go looking for it. The wording of the briefing puts the Player in the active role, too, which is nice.]

Mission 2: Find Magical Coral.

“So it’s a ship I’m heading to now, boy, to find this magical coral, this loverly jubberly magical crystal coral for my spell. D’you know what my spell is, boy? Do you? Do you WANT to know what my spell is for, boy? Heh heh, I don’t think you do, boy, oh no, cos’ if you knew, boy, you’d most definitely fill your pretty pink knickers with about 8 pounds of brown…sticky…POO, boy, yess, that you would. Best you don’t know, boy.

“Inside this ship, there’s a whole new lot of flatfoots for old Szron to dilly dally with, boy, and some youngsters too, oh, it’s like they’ve put on a spread fer me. I’m afraid I has another one of my little turns, boy. I shows em all my elbow, and you know, boy, that ain’t pleasant…for them, anyhow…

[The ship has been out collecting coral for Dr Aeon, the popup tells me, a nice touch, and its populated with Private Security Guards and some customs which fit the setting well. They’re young grunts, up and coming security guards, and they make a nice addition to the mission. There are a few destructible Crates dotted around (Standard bios) and half way down the map I find a glowie, and it’s my coral. Grabbing the coral spawns a Coralax ambush, which I deal with easily]

“Oh, boy, I’m feeling it now, oh yes…Im going to get my spell cast, boy, and it’s going to put a shine on the day for old Szron, don’t you think otherwise!

Mission 3: Complete the Ritual.

[Pollyantha tells me that The Ritual Master needs protecting, but that more than one CoT spellcaster will be casting the spell. This mission is in an outdoor graveyard map. There’s vahzilok here. They’re quite challenging at lvl 5 ]


“In with the dead I said
Gather round the grave to rave at the sound
The ground
Is cold
And I like it like that
The fat fat earth
Gives birth to the cursed
But I’m worse
And I sing, cos I’m old and cold and I’ve said it before
I ain’t nice, you want more?
I’M A VILLAIN, SEE, BOY!!!

“These stinking rotten corpses, they fancy theselves a bit, don’t they? I’d freeze their elbows off if they had any. I fair don’t want to bother, boy, I’m on a schedule, here, but I do em anyway. Cos I’m a villain, see? It’s in me blood!

[I’m expecting to ‘protect the Ritual Master’, but as I creep round the map, it strikes me that maybe the waves of attackers (if that’s whats going to happen) might be stocked from the spawns on the map. If so, maybe taking them out now might be a good idea. Luckily, Szron gets a bit arsey with them too.]

“I go into a veritable FRENZY, boy, it’s an ORGY OF DELICIOUS VIOLENT DEPRAVITY!!! I put icicles where icicles have no right to be put, boy, if you catch my drift, and I think you do, I can tell by the loverly tasty look of terror on that young shiny boyish face of yours…

[So I’m running round the map gleefully blasting Vahzilok, for no other reason than it seems to be mindless fun. Clearing All on an outdoor map? Low levels are obviously where it’s at. Actually, I am definitely brought home by this how much great potential the MA has for showing new players some of the cool maps and mobs that they would otherwise have to wait a long while to see through canon arcs. This arc is a good example of this, so far.]

“Biff, Baff
Piff, Paff
Fipp Fapp
Oh you naughty
Forty more
I even the score to nil
And then up on the hill
The magician
The mission is in
My cold dead fist
She’s kissed
And I’M WELL INNN!”
[I decide to have a look for the Magician, and…I can’t find him lol. I clear the lower level, and then go up and around the top, clearing to the edge, and then I go back, and eventually find her! It’s Pollyanna!]


“It’s little Pollyanna
With her magic an ‘er
Hair all red
She said
Szron’s gotta save her,
Dirty little raver
Get down, Polly
She’s a jolly little fighter
With the right to the bright rite all right
TSSSSSSSSS!!!”

[It’s an easy fight, and the mission completes]

“Ah, that brought a lump ter me froat, boy, I tell you. Me and Pollyanna are going to make sweet sweet music, I can tell. She LOVES, me, boy, oh yes, she loves me! I’ve a mind to collect her some presents as a show of my affection and desire ter make an honest woman out of her.

…HAHAHAHA ahh, Old Szron’s jokin with you, boy, of course. An honest woman? I’M A VILLAIN, BOY, WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR?

“Anyway, she wants me to go and kidnap some poor little innocents. Me, Szron, kidnap? Oh, boy, she knows me only too well. I’m a bad sort., you see, boy, I’ll willingly steal away babies from their mothers and sisters from their fathers. I’ll steal them away and do terrible things to them before I hand them over to her, boy, terrible, awfull, DESPICABLE things! Oooh yes, I’m a bad sort…Here, suckle my elbow or else…”

Mission 4: Show up at the ‘family reunion’

[The text explains how I set up a family reunion for some civilians that are of the bloodline the CoT require. At the apartment building, however, the Legacy Chain and the RIP are here too to stop my fun]

“I’m in like a slick wick, slidin’ all about in the candlegrease, my boy, ooh, yeah, feel it, feel it, can you feel it, boy? I’m in, right in the building, running around, slapping them down, boy, the rippers and the lovely little pansy legacy chainers waving their big choppers all about like woofsies, boy. I grab a pair of tarts and they’re right up for it, but I keep on looking for more. I finds me a grasper too, I’ll slice him well up later as a naughty aperitif before my main course of twin bints on a bed of jellied eels doused in Spanish Fly sauce, eh boy, EH BOY, EH, WADDYA THINK? Go on, boy, tell me, don’t be afraid…Am I not a bad sort?”

[I have fun in the map, icing up rippers and legacy chains. I kidnap two women – the dialogue is quite funny, at the expense of the Legacy Chain. Then I kidnap a Family man. I thought there were only three to kidnap, the Nav says ‘2 Citizens to hide away, one last citizen to kidnap!’ When I get all three to the exit, however, the mission completes. Outside, the Debriefing contains a typo ‘will mak a’ should be ‘will make a’. The briefing for the next and final mission tells me that the CoT is so impressed with my work that they are going to make me a member. A covert member, so I won’t get wossnamed by the Ritual of the Thorn.]

Mission 5: Join the Circle of Thorns.

“Oh yes, boy, this place reminds me of the London Dungeon, only with less fat bludgers hanging around naggin me for a slurp of me peas n gravy. I’m going to feel right at home in here, boy. I think ill go on a proper London bender, as a matter of fact. Here I go boy, watch out, look out, HERE I COME!!!

[This map is a little too large for my usual tastes, especially since its an Orenbega one, but I’ll see how it goes.]

“There’s my little Polyanna. Oh yes. I see off the Chainers giving my girl the eye and she lets me get me hands on her box…

[Pollyantha is one of the three magicians I need to enspell me, and my ceremonial Thorn is also here, in a locked box near Pollyantha’s spawn point. I take it. Pollyantha accompanies me as an Ally then]

“I finds a magic type, all cosy with his books, and a few Legwarmers giving him some gyp. They soon sees the error of their ways, believe me, boy, oh yes. Then I run about like a muppet, boy, LIKE A FLAMING MUPPET, trying to find the last magician, and my mood, well, I tell you boy, It isn’t pretty, oh no. OH, NO!!!

[Hm…I don’t like this map. It’s nothing hideous, there’s no demon portals or massive tall annoying rooms, but it’s not very linear. Plus it’s got a few transport portals which leave Pollyantha behind.

The worst thing is, however, that I can’t find the final ritual caster. I don’t know what to do. I run around the entire map, and Clear every last Legacy Chainer. There’s only actually two rooms, one large one, where Pollyantha was, and the little one nearer to the entrance., there was a second ritual caster in there. The corridors are clear. I even lead Pollyantha to the exit, in case that works, but nope.

What a shame to end it this way.

I won’t rate it, since I can’t finish it. Overall, very enjoyable. I don’t often Defeat All just for the hell of it, but it was great fun. I’d like to have seen a bio for Pollyantha, she came across as a nice character (quite a pleasant individual, made a nice change from all the ‘Pah! I am a mighty wizard, and you are a peasant!’ rantings of the Canon contacts). Her idle animation when she was an Ally was nice too. That last map – it’s not as bad as I thought it was originally, but there is a little bit of backtracking. On the subject of maps, the graveyard map was a lot of fun, but if I’d have been set on just finding Pollyantha, I might have gotten irritated, since she spawned right on top of the tallest hill and that was the very last place I looked.

A nice alternative to the canon stuff, certainly.

Incidentally,Szron was level pacted to a lvl 1 when he started this arc. My pact partner gained 4 levels, and then Szron gained 1 whilst doing it, showing how much XP it gives. ]

“Out for the count
Szron’s arsed out
The grouts no laff
When I open my caff
There’ll be no tea
Time for me
Tea for two
Time me and I’ll put a spell on
YOOOOOOUUUUU!!”

Eco

Level range? Is it Heroic or Villainous?

Eco.

Qr - if the 'choose your own team size while soloing' thing is not in the MA, will the rewards for farming using it be greater than those from an MA farm? If not, it wont dent the MA farming signiducantly.

And does this new shiny tool mean i can start TFs when solo now?



eco

Qr - one way to sort of get around the current filesize limits is to split your arc over two slots. That way you have 200kb for it. If you leave the mission total at 5 you can effectively use on average double the 'stuff' in each mission. In practise, since you'd need a slot for 2 missions and anothet for 3 missions out of your arc, youd have 50kb per mission for the first two misdions and 33kb per for the last 3, bit thats still a ways up from 20kb per mission the 'normal' wsy.

Of course, dping rhis you'll have to put up with the 'each slot must stand alone!' purists criticising, downrating, or somply ignoring your arc.

Eco

Synapse explains that the rest of the FP are in another dimension, and that he’s unavailable for numerous comic reasons. It’s down to the Player. What is?

It’s Lord Recluse. ‘Something seems to have spurred him into action’ , and he has a Doomsday Device capable of sending the whole planet into a ‘dimension where pain is alive!’. The AE array will teleport the Player to the heart of Grandville itself, and the Player, once there, just has to Save The World.

Mission 6: The Five Star Bandits

Save the World

Of course, the Player doesn’t end up in Grandville. He ends up in an Arachnos base map (Arachnos Set – Large – Arachnos Set 7), which doubles up in this mission as a spaceship. The entry popup sets the scene for that with a comment about slightly reduced gravity and the distant thrum of mighty engines.

This is a linear map with three floors and no side branches. The objectives are simple enough. 5 EBs and a few glowies on the way to feed story, wityh a dash back through the map to destroy a destructible and Save The World at the end.

I love this mission and I love the custom group that features. The title ‘The Five Star Bandits’ came to me during the badge-farming debacle, and it immediately made me think of the book The Cyberiad, by the Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Len. Lem is one of my favourite authors, and The Cyberiad is awesome. I recommend it unreservedly.

It inspired the custom group The Galactic Constructors that are the Big Bads for this last, epic mission.

I say ‘epic’, but in terms of mechanics it’s quite simple and nowhere near as dramatic as The Praetorian mission, for example. It’s epic, really, in what happens off-screen, as it were.

When the Player arrives, he doesn’t know what’s going on, but as it’s timed (45 miniutes, plenty of time to do the mission really, I wanted the timer to more suggest urgency than actually cause any mission fails) I wanted to let the Player know what he had to do, so here I reluctantly provided my pet hate, the Magical Infodump, and the Nav sets out a list of objectives. 3 datanodes to access, 4 Constructors to defeat.

The Player still doesn’t really know what’s happening, though. The first encounter is with one of the Galactic Constructors, Eukracious.

Here’s Eukracious’ bio, to illustrate what the Galactic Constructors are:

‘Not all that is tiny is small. Reach out a hand and squint one eye, and you can hold a sun in the palm of your hand. The Galactic Constructors built the Universe out of nuts and bolts and bits of old junk they found in the dirty corners of their workshops, or so they claim. Eukracious fashioned the rocky planets from the cinders that his forge spat out one day, and then set to cleaning the scummy mold growing between the cracks in his great stone floor. This fecund green became the growing things of the biosphere; Life.’

All the Constructors bios have the same first three sentences. They are massively powerful, and are(or at least, they claim they are) the creators of the universe.

Whether or not they did create the Universe is open to debate. Either they did, or they are massive liars lol.

However, these being s are immensely powerful, easily capable of squashing one of Earths superhumans without even thinking. Here, of course, they have to be manageable.

Eukracious is a hard/standard Earth Control/Thorny Assault EB. He’s a little feller:



His animation is Pry Bar, and he talks about aligning the ‘harmonic oscillator’ during his unaware dialogue, and says that something called ‘The Power Source’ is undamaged after a long time, and that’s good.

He’s a tough enough fight, being an EB. He usually takes a half tray of inspires for MCM. During the fight, he only has one line of dialogue, and he doesn’t speak to the Player. He calls out to someone called ‘Lem’, asking ‘Who let this amoeba onto the Ship?’

This treatment of the Player as an utterly minor irritation is continued through the other Constructors dialogue.

After this fight, the Player finds 2 datanodes. To avoid the Independence Day thing of humans being able to use alien computers, I simply have the Computer do all the work, forming a mental link with the Player. Lem is the ships computer, and he, through the datanodes that the Player accesses, lets the Player know something of what’s happening. Lem is also appalled at the apparent primitivity of the player’s brain, mental strength, etc. He also gives the reason why the supposedly godlike Galactic Constructors are here as mere Ebs:

‘You've confused the Manifestatotron with your primordial DNA! The Masters will be shadows of their normally Godlike selves until you're purged, you, you...vacuole!’

The Player continues through the ship, meeting more Constructors, Ninoricous, an extreme/standard Ice Blast/Electric Blast EB:



Zrirl, a hard/hard/Fire/Storm EB:



Corpus, an extreme/hard Dark Melee/Sonic Resonance EB:



and finally Primis, an extreme/hard Grav/Psionic Blast EB:



All the Constructors have idle animations that suggest they are engaged in some mechanical work, welding, jack hammers, tech scanners etc. Their idle dialogue also gives the impression that they are readying something referred to as ‘The Collector’ to reclaim ‘the Power Source’ that they apparently left here decamillenia ago. Bright players will no doubt remember the subtitle of this mission. Incidentally, the idle dialogue referring to the work they’re doing uses the jargon of how mechanical clocks work



The dialogue during the fights is mostly directed at Lem, complaining that, for example, ‘Lem! One of the vent-scrapers has gone haywire, I think!’ and ‘It has a hole near the top that’s…bleating! Lem, turn it off, please!’ To the Constructors, the Player is not particularly even alive, it seems. There’s some humor in a few of the comments here.

The ship would be a bit bare with just the Constructors, so I set Storm Elementals to a custom group called ‘Servitors’, as the group for the mission. They have no dialogue, and I think do quite nicely as odd entities inside the ship. They’re also not too hard, not too easy, and of course they look sufficiently alien to be anything, really.

That reminds me, all through the arc, wherever I have a Defeat Boss objective, I set it to Only Boss Necessary for success if I can. This isn’t to make it easier. I’m conscious that stealthers might be trying to ghost through only doing the minimum. If my Nav says ‘Defeat Primis’, and the Player does that without defeating a Storm elemental that happens to have spawned just outside the room he’s in, it can be annoying and confusing.

The last Constructor, Primis, finally talks to the Player after detecting that the player ‘thinks!…sort of…’. During the fight, Primis reveals that of course, The Power Source is in fact our Sun. They left it here a while ago and now the Collector is almost ready to take it back. The Five Star Bandits. There are five of them, and they want to steal the Sun. No hyphen, see?

Upon Primis’ defeat, the datanodes in the last room allow Lem to pityingly tell the Player that defeating the Constructors won’t do any good. The ‘Manifestatotron’ will soon realign, and that when they remanifest, they’ll be considerably more powerful, and in fact approx 1 AU in height. Lem babbles on, secure in the knowledge that he’s talking to an utter poltroon, that the only way to save the Earth would be to destroy the 17-movement Jewel pod located at the front of the ship. This would apparently both stop the Collection, scrambled the Ships navigational records (so preventing them from returning), and warp the ship 13,320 million light years away.



So then the Player has a dash against time back to the front of the map to where the pod is.

When he’s destroyed it, Lem, in shock at the amoeba’s success, says he’ll get rid of the player before he causes any more mischief (And says that realigning the signal is too much hassle for such an insignificant speck, otherwise it’d be deep space instead lol).

The exit popup wonders if foiling the theft of THE SUN counts as Saving the World…

But Synapse merely comments on a weird solar eclipse and some kind of explosion out by Venus, and then returns to berating you for having failed to defeat Lord Recluses plan. Which failed on its own, by the way, because it turns out that his Doomsday Machine designer was French.

‘send the entire planet Earth into a dimension where pain is alive!’?

‘pain’ is ‘bread’ in French. So, not so much of a threat. I don’t explain this stupid little joke, and a few times I’ve asked in chat channels if anyone knows what ‘bread’ is in French, I’ve got ‘huh? Nope’ from most people, so I assume that a lot of times it won’t be understood, but there you go. Some people have got it, which is nice.

Crisis over, Tasks over, arc over. Synapse reels off the entire list again, ‘All I asked you to do was ….’ and throws up his hands at the Players utter failure as a superhero. He informs that they’ve decided to give the spot to Mediocre Man, who ‘performs deeds of massive heroism that go completely unrecognised on a daily basis - and THAT'S what we want! See you round, 'hero'!

With the freedom to use 200kb for the arc, I was able to spend time on system messages, new bios for all the Praetorians, and other little things. There’s a lot to discover if it’s taken slowly. I think I’ll be doing more multi-slot arcs like this. I know some people have a rabid aversion to arcs that span more than one slot, no matter how short they are, but you can’t please everyone


So there you go, the creation of The Audition. I hope that was at least mildly interesting to some people. I don’t know if any other MAuthors might like to do this sort of exercise; I for one would be interested in seeing how other writers go about creating their arcs.

Happy MArcing!

Eco.

The briefing for Mission 5 starts with an admission from Synapse that ‘we're just going through the motions now, aren't we?’. The next Task is one that should be absolutely, completely, definitely impossible to mess up. He explains that standard practise for the treatment of villains in the Zig who’ve shown repentance and good behaviour, after a while, is to send them a hero to give them a little talk and explain how society is ready to accept their remorse and forgive them. There’s a villain called Titanicus Explodaboom waiting in the Zig’s Giant Cvillain Hi-Sec facility for just such a visit, and the Player has to go do it.

Mission 5: The Acappellaclypse

Forgive Someone Of Their Misdeeds

For mission 5, I wanted to bring in another villain briefly mentioned in The Echo – Silencio Shanty. The actual line referencing him in The Echo was ‘Anti-Noise has already been used to villainous effect by Silencio Shanty and his Humming Mummers in their efforts to bring about the Acappellaclypse’ – and when I wrote that it was just a funny line, and I had no idea what it was about. Now, for The Audition, I was going to have the Player foil whatever was described in that line.

Silencio Shanty and his Humming Mummers. The Acappellaclypse. That screamed ‘musical mission!’ to me, and that is what I made. The entire narrative of Mission 5 is delivered in rhyme, starting with the entry popup, which reads ‘This ain’t the Zig, you dig?’, and finishing with the exit popup.

I wanted it to come across like a broadway musical type of thing, and wrote the ‘lyrics’ over a few days in a local restaurant.

When the Player enters, it’s a cargo ship interior map (Cargo Ship Set – Small – Cargo Ship Set 1. Some people don’t like these, but I find them useful for linear missions. I wanted a nice big echo-ey space to set my opus in lol. The villain group are all identical, and look like this.



They are standard/hard Sonic Attack/Thermal Radiation. In groups, they can be a bit of a handful, but they’re certainly not difficult. There are two types, Hummers, who are the lieuts, and Mummers, the minions.

The first piece of ‘music the Player sees after the popup is a patrol acting as a choral intro. Then, there are a number of chained boss defeats using lieuts. I put the bosses on soapboxes and their guards using the boombox anim so they’re easier to spot. As they idle, agro, are damaged and defeated, they ‘sing’ their lines. I used musical note symbols from Word to add a visual cure to the ‘lyrics’.

This ‘musical’ has an intro, then a few sections, telling the story of Silencio Shanty and his plan.

It’s pretty simple. Silencio Shanty hates all the little irritating noises that plague everyday life.

‘Screaming babies on a plane,
Headphone users on the train
Cellphone shouters on the bus
HE JUST WANTS TO STOP THE FUSS!’

He has therefore decided to stop it by using Anti-Noise. The Player finds a destructible halfway through the map called the Krokenburg Amplifier, and the mummer guarding it sings

‘Anti-noise, comin' soon
Like a sonic poison
to stop all the
Bedlam and blaring
Cacophonous scaring
The jingling jangling
Bingling bangling
He will put a stop!
To aaall the soouund in the World!’

Once that’s destroyed, the Player carries on into the ship, and meets morer hummers who comment, in song, on the Player’s attempts to stop the plan.

I am quite interested in $Name, $Class, etc. I was thinking about how to get the Player’s name in a rhyme, somehow.

I thought about this over a few glasses of wine in my local, and it was a fun thinking time for sure lol. But obviously, there’s no way I could get anything to rhyme with $Name, or $Class either.

I had to have a play with them, though, so for the next section of the mission, I had the Mummers comment on the Player.

‘Here comes $Name, we’re not scared!
In fact, we can’t believe
He dared!’

And then

‘He could be a Blaster - no disaster
He could be Defender - heroic pretender’

etc. All the ATs get a little dig.
Then, the next Boss sings

‘Oh-ho! He’s a $Class!
Oh-no! Not a $Class!
Anything but a $Class!
We’re not in the mood for a $Class!’

Which usually gets a laugh.

After that, it’s Silencio who spawns in the last room. Silencio is a hard/extreme Sonic Attack/Sonic Resonance EB .



His ‘song’ is a Supervillain rant about how, when he’s done, ‘NO ONE WILL REMEMBER SOUND!’. Half way through the fight, however, he realizes that ‘the Krokenburg’s broken, I scream and I wail – MY PLAN’S NOW DOOMED TO FAIL!’, and then after another verse of diatribe aimed specifically at $Classes, poor old Silencio gets the entire output of the anti-noise device pumped into his ears instead, which finishes him.

His demise coincides with ambushes. I personally like large waves of middling difficulty minions, and I love the final chorus of Mummers here, who, along with all the patrols that spawn too, filling the map, sing out the ‘killing word (yeah, Dune) “La!!!’ as they attack.

After the ambush has been dealt with, the Player can read the clue that Silencio’s defeat drops. It tells, in (I like to think in a slowish string-accompanied happy melody) of how Silencio, after taking the Anti-Noise to his ears, starts smiling blissfully, and then declares his new-found love for the world. At this juncture, the clue has the Player break into song

‘The anti-noise from your device,
It’s made you DEAF, it’s made you nice!’

And Silencio agrees. The last lines of the musical are

‘“I’ve remorse, of course,” Silencio sings,
“For the trouble I’ve bin producin’”
“It’s OK’,you say,
“It’s your lucky daaaay,
I GIVE YOU ABSOLUTION!”’



So there it is, he’s been forgiven of his misdeeds. That’s the mission over.

Mission 5 took the longest to write, I think. I’m very proud of it. There are more lyrics in it than the ones I’ve quoted here, of course. I’ve had feedback saying that Players have died because they were spending too much effort on singing along lol, which is music to me ears, if you excuse the pun.

After a last winking exit popup, it’s back to Synapse for another drubbing. This one’s the most sarcastic yet, but it’s the last Task/mission now, and it’s serious. In fact, Synapse doesn’t even say that it’s a task, as such. Before the acceptance , there’s a large font red caps warning that the last mission is timed (DO NOT START IF DOWNTIME IS NEAR), as I got one unfortunate piece of feedback from sb who started it and couldn’t finish it before downtime.

Mission 4 and 5 were originally in a different order, but after Mission 3 I felt that a shorter one would be better next.

The villains in both mission 4 and 5 are both mentioned in throwaway humor clues in my previous arc The Echo (they crop up as entries in a Crey Archive computer list of various superhumans).

Mission 4 features Mother Superior and her villain group the Habitual Criminals. They were described in The Echo as a gang of ‘bank-robbing cyborg nuns from the future’, which gave me an outline to work from. Firstly, I created Mother Superior herself. I wanted a big beefy looking woman in some kind of nuns habit-style outfit, so black and white, with a dash of cyborg look if possible. Her minions would be similarly attired. I gave Mother Superior a big religious looking hammer, made her hard/hard War Mace/Pain Dom, and made the minions (‘novices’) hard/hard Katana/Invul



The Habitual Criminals were described as bank robbers, so Mission 4 would be set in a bank. This lent itself to the Resist Temptation Task. Also, with the Habitual Criminals being from the future, it was feasible that they might want to take their loot back to the future. If they did, then there might be no trace of it, and so the Player would be blamed, hence failing the task.

Going up this path led me to the plot of Mission 4.

Synapse tells the Player that his next Heroic Task is to Resist Temptation. All he has to do is be teleported to the First National Bank, where all guards and recording devices have been removed, and the Vault has been left unlocked, and then not steal anything. This’ll be absolutely easy since the Player merely has to do nothing to succeed.

Mission 4: The Habitual Criminals

Resist Temptation

Upon entering the array and arriving at the bank (Unique – Banks - Bank Exchange 1, its all on one floor, its very small), the first thing the player hears is a patrol whose dialogue explains entirely the mobs plan:

“Ha! Stealing gold bullion from the past! The perfect crime! Mother Superior's a genius!”

“Yes! And our cloaking shields are untraceable in this era! No-one will know we've even been here!”

Then, in the second corridor, Mother Superior herself awaits. Her idle dialogue says that she’s just used the ‘temporal transferatron’ to send one ‘sample bar’ to the future, and in a little while it’ll have isolated the temporal signature of this age’s gold, diamonds and ‘money’. All of it. Which will then be transported to the future. Yep, this villain isn’t satisfied with robbing one bank, she is trying to steal ALL the wealth of the world in one go (She actually says it’s the year 2525, which is a reference to the wonderfully appalling show Cleopatra 2525).

The Player basically just mops up the novices as he goes, then defeats Mother Superior, then destroys the Temporal Transferatron, which is about to do its fiendish work. There’s a ‘bullion manifest’ glowie en route, which lists the exact amount of gold in the vault, and at the very end there’s a safe glowie which has the player counting off the bars. Just the one missing, of course. Mother Superiors dialogue during the fight calls for aid from her sisters, and finally commands them to use their ‘Personal Time vortex Inducers’ to TP back to the future, “Leave no trace!”

The Mission complete clue further explains how all bodies, bits of the Transferatron etc have been drawn back into the future, leaving the Player alone in the bank.

In order to have there be no evidence of the habitual Criminals, I had to make this a Defeat All. Lol, Witness my comments in any ‘Defeat all = BAD, RARRGH!’ threads in defense of the beleaguered Defeat All objective. This defeat all can be completed in about ten minutes if you know what to expect, and I’d say 15-20 tops if you’re a slowcoach. There were 15 mobs in total to defeat not counting the Boss in the run I just did.

At this point upon exit, I let the Player at least try to tell Synapse what’s happened, but Synapse scoffs at the ridiculous story. The poor Player, having just foiled the biggest bank robbery in history, has Synapse accuse him of theft, “One bar won't be missed, is that it?”.

I have received one piece of feedback from a player who got really quite angry at the way Synapse was treating him, but only one, thankfully

Synapse gives a brief intro to Praetorian Earth, and says that it has an evil version of the Player, called ‘Dark $Name’!

The Third Heroic Task is to Defeat Your Evil Twin. Synapse says that by “reversing the polarity of the AE Array's neutron flow, we've been able to isolate the extra-dimensional biorhythmic sinecode of your fiendish doppelganger!” – He’s going to teleport Dark $Name to the Pocket D monkey fight cage, and the player too, for a simple one-on-one fight.

So patently, the monkey cage doesn’t exist in the MA, and more importantly, it’s impossible for me to engineer a fight between any Player and a double of themselves. Even trying to make some sort of generic custom would be a total disaster. So what I decided to do was put the player in the place of his Evil Twin. They’re supposedly identical, according to Synapse, so the Player could be mistaken for his double to comic effect.

Mission 3 ended up being quite long, and fairly complicated in terms of objectives and mechanics. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot designing it.

Mission 3: Double trouble…Doubled

Defeat Your Evil Twin

Once in the mission, it’s obvious this isn’t the Arena Cage – the player by now shouldn’t be at all surprised they’re somewhere else. This is Tech standard set – lLarge – Tech Standard Set-2. It has three floors, and a very few side tracks.

The entry popup describes an intercom announcement “All minions heed: the presentation of Operation "Evil Plan" to Tyrant does not mean 'The Cato Initiative' is to stop. Minions must continue to attack the Boss without warning at any opportune moment.”

This gives a clue as to what’s happening. The Player has been teleported to Dark $Name’s base on the day that he is to present ‘Operation “Evil Plan”’ to Tyrant., although this won’t be totally obvious to the Player until more clues are delivered to him or her as the mission progresses.

‘The Cato Initiative’ is a reference to Cato from the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films. Dark $Name, like Inspector Clueseau, apparently holds the view that unexpected attacks from his servants will hone his skills etc. It also gives a comedic reason for why the Player is going to be constantly attacked by ‘his’ minions.

The map features customs from the ‘My Evil Empire’ custom group. These are supposed to be the minions of Dark $Name, remember, so one would assume their costumes would in some way reflect that of Dark $Name, who is supposed to look like the Player.

The minions that the Player encounters are ‘Lackeys’, (hard/hard Rad Blast/Pain Dom), dressed in Pajamas, ‘Flunkies’ (hard/standard AR/Rad Emission), dressed as chefs, ‘Peons’ (standard/standard War Mace/Regen), dressed as baseball players, and ‘Stooges’ (standard/standard Superstrength/Dark Miasma), dressed as bullfighters.







Why are they in these odd costumes? All will be revealed.

The first thing to do is to find some clues. They are front-loaded, not far from the entrance. However, in the same room stands Chimera, enjoying a cup of tea and idly talking to a minion about ‘your leader’s plan’ When attacked, Chimera recognizes Dark $Name, and says “we've been waiting for you - Come on, we've time for a bit of a wrestle... “, suggesting that he and Dark $Name have done this sort of thing before. It’s well camp, this mission, by the way. There are a few suggestions in the dialogue that Dark $Name and some of the Praetorians are a bit closer than a purely professional evil supervillain partnership would normally dictate.

During the fight, Chimera protests that the Player is being too rough (presumably when he and Dark $Name usually have a ‘wrestle’ Dark $Name isn’t trying to Defeat him), and then shouts that Dark $Name must be making a power play, since all the Praetorians are here and that something called the Superhuman Immobilizer ray is ready.

I needed to have a Boss fight here to set up the premise that the Praetorians might think that Dark $Name is committing treachery, and to feed some more narrative to the Player.

The clues in the room are a painting of ‘you’ at a barbecue being chummy with Tyrant (who’s wearing a comedy breasts chefs apron, reinforcing the high camp of this mission), a bookshelf full of books on cloning (foreshadowing the details of Operation “Evil Plan”), and a wall safe containing the Superhuman Immobilizer Ray gun (set with quite a long timer on the progress bar to encourage Players to fight Chimera and the few mobs in the room first). Once that’s gotten, the Nav changes to ‘6 Praetorians to subdue, 8 Clone Vats to destroy’ and the map spawns these objectives (Triggering multiple objectives off one collectible is a boon – I needed to be able to ensure that the Player encounters the S.I.R. for example before finding any other Praetorians or the Clone Vats).

6 Praetorians. Chimera took a trayful of inspirations on my blaster, he spawns as an EB. I don’t know if any players have looked at that and just quit at the thought of soloing 6 more Praetorians lol.

How to you ‘subdue’ 6 Praetorians without having to fight them?

That’s what the Superhuman Immobilizer Ray is for!

Here’s Neuron, for instance:



He’s set as a non-combat, non-follow Ally, in the Clipboard animation. His Unaware dialogue is “I wonder if Anti-Matter's having fun at the costume party?”, which explains why Anti-Matter’s not in the mission (AM isn’t available for some reason in the MA).

When the Player is noticed, the minions attack with “Come on guys, attack! Wait till $heshe says 'Not now Cato!' - it's really funny!”, and Neuron, thinking the Player is Dark $Name, comments “I do approve of this hands-on approach to training your troops, Dark $Name”. When he’s ‘freed’, his animation changes to Enemy Captured – Energy Field, his dialogue says “This presentation - Powerpoint, or Keynote? - Hey! The Immobiliser! You snake!”, and the system message reports ‘You have immobilized, and hence defeated, Neuron, Synapse's Evil Twin’.

I set the both Ally Animations after rescue to that captured Energy field, and put the Ally Lost and Ally Found dialogues as ‘When this wears off!” and You traitor! Tyrant will not stand for this!” and similar stuff like that.



The end result is, Neuron stays in one place, and the Captured – Energy Field animation cycles repeatedly. Neuron gets lifted into the air encased in sparking green energy, then falls to the ground, gathers himself, then is lifted again, struggling, over and over, and the Player can leave him there and move on to the next Praetorian.

It’s quite a neat effect (Unfortunately, the MA is a bit lazy when it comes to keeping tabs on the animations. Sometimes one or two will fail for some unknown reason, which is a shame, but it works most of the time).

What the player experiences is the effect of having subdued a Praetorian without having to fight it.

Chimera’s clue earlier explains why the SIR won’t work on him, by the way (he and Tyrant were away on a fishing trip when Dark $Name scanned the Praetorians for their [jargon] to prepare for the immobilizing of the FP).

All 6 Praetorians are treated in the same manner. I deliver the story via the dialogue. With 6 rescue ally objectives, there are plenty of dialogue fields to get the info across. Neuron also drops one more clue, explaining the details of Operation “Evil Plot”:

“-Replicate DNA of Freedom Phalanx
-Clone Freedom Phalanx
-Lure Freedom Phalanx to Secret Base
-Immobilize Freedom Phalanx (Keep alive and immobilized for gloating purposes)
-Send clones to Primal Earth
-Profit”


Also, there are 8 Clone Vats:



They are labeled, for example, ‘Numina Clone vat’ – this one’s bio reads “This Clone Vat is home to an evil clone of Numina, growing, vile and depraved. It must be destroyed!” When it is, the system message says “You have destroyed Numina’s Evil twin”

There is a Clone vat for each of the main members of the Freedom Phalanx (including Citadel, yes. The guards dialogue for this ‘explains’ how this is possible lol)

The dialogue for the various minions guarding the clone vats and waiting with the Praetorians reveals the reason why the minions are costumed so oddly.

“I wish I'd pulled duty at the other base today - I bet the party rocks!”

“ So our cool outfits went to the costume party? Everyone there's wearing the same costume?”

“Dark $Name! It's not our fault! The costume suppliers sent us the wrong costumes!”

“It's a real shame, those new costumes were awesome. They looked just like the Bosses, too.”

“I hear Dark Beyonce's gonna be singing at the party at the other base today.”

etc. There’s lots more.

Some of the dialogue plays with the fact that the exact look of Dark $Name is never spelled out, but it’s supposed to be akin to the player’s. Diabolique says, “ I fear nothing! I await your leader's rumored frighteningly ugly countenance with interest”, only to scream “AAGH! IT'S A MONSTER! - Pass me the sick-bag!” when she sees the Player, for example.

Working through the bases three floors (it’s a fairly linear map too, with only short side branches), the player finds and destroys all 8 Clone Vats and ‘defeats’ each Praetorian, ending up at the final room.

The Nav by now says ‘Subdue the Last Praetorian’. The end room has Tyrant in it and an accompanying minion.



His animation is Tapping Foot, and his unaware dialogue starts off innocuous enough, wondering when Dark $Name’s going to arrive for his presentation. To an unaware player, he looks like another ‘rescue ally’, but he’s not. He’s a Defeat Boss (Chimera’s earlier clue explains that he and tyrant were away on a fishing trip when Dark $Name scanned the Praetorians for the Immobilizer ray, which is why it won’t work on Tyrant).

Tyrant’s unaware dialogue does give a clue that just walking up to him expecting to defeat a minion and be done might be a bad idea. The fight with Tyrant can be a hard one. It took a whole tray of inspires for my blaster.

Bear in mind that the Heroic Task for this mission is to Defeat one Evil Twin. The Praetorians and Clone Vats have allowed the player to defeat 14 evil twins so far. I didn’t feel that this was enough.

During the fight, as well as saying things like “I thought I knew you so well, Dark $Name! You even showed me your mole! And I showed you mine!”, Tyrant shouts “ACTIVATE THE PROTOCLONES!”.

Three ambushes were originally spawned here, but it was death for the Player. I toned it down to one ambush on Defeat, that spawns fairly far from the player (with a clear dialogue sign that there’s an ambush coming), and three more required objectives, all of which spawn in the same room (It’s a v large room, so there’s no problems with these spawning on top of the Player). The ambush and new spawns are ‘Freedom Phalanx Protoclones’, parody mishmash reject combination clones of the Freedom Phalanx.


Tyrant also shouts ‘EMERGENCY TEMPORAL SHIFT!” upon defeat, a wink to Dalek Caan’s Most Awesome Villainous get Out OF Jail Card Ever IMO, and allows Tyrant to escape (to be able to deal with the real Dark $Name’s return later).

The Player then has to simply deal with three more spawns of Protoclones. They are all very close, so there’s no backtracking required. There are three to each of the three spawns – States Alley Brawler (standard/standard Superstrength/Invul), Sister Posinapse (hard/hard Elec Blast/Rad Blast), and Mantidelmina (hard/hard Archery/Emp). They are all lieut level. They look like this:



and at Heroic challenge are middling difficulty to defeat when together.. They have more (hopefully) humorous dialogue, and provide a bit of final multiple foe action.

Once the last is defeated, the mission is over. A clue tells the player he feels the teleport signal locking on once again.

The exit popup congratulates you on defeating “approximately 27 Evil Twins”, and also points out that when your double returns to Praetorian Earth, he’ll no doubt be suffering too



Synapse is flabbergasted that you have apparently once more failed to do what he asks you. He says that Dark $Name was locked in the arena cage for a while, ranting about how unjust this was and that when he returned to Praetorian Earth he was going straight to Tyrant for assistance in invading Earth in revenge.

So here, the Player has performed a heroic deed that’s way over and above what Synapse actually requested him to do, and this time the Player has included in his heroics Synapses task too.

By now, the Player should be in no confusion as to the setup for the missions in this arc. Synapse sets a Task, Player ‘fails’ but actually succeeds, Synapse yells at player, repeat.

So with the first Heroic Task ostensibly failed, Synapse gets a call from Swan (and his dialogue here parodies Lassie Skippy and Flipper and those ‘animals communicating with humans’ tropes where the human merely gives all of the supposedly transferred information in the form of “What’s that, Skippy? Little Tim’s fallen in the well? Over at Farmer Bob’s place? And the water’s rising? And Little Nell’s with him too? And her foot’s caught in a bear trap?” etc).

The situation for the Second Heroic Task, according to Synapse, is that Statesman and Citadel are in Siren’s Call fighting the Jade Spider, but they’re beaten to near exhaustion and they’re on the verge of giving up hope, so the Player has to go to SC and provide them with some inspirational support, and Inspire Another To Greatness.

I put ‘The Jade Spider's on the rampage’ in red in the briefing – red is often used as shorthand for what the mission’s objectives will be. Obviously the jade Spider isn’t available as a mob in the AE, so this is clearly not going to be happening. I’d like the player to anticipate the malfunctioning teleporter from as early a stage as possible; the humor may come over better if the Player is aware that whatever Synapse says isn’t going to be what occurs.

So, with Synapse sending you off with “now it'll send you straight into the jaws of the Jade Spider itself!”, you enter the AE array

Mission 2: Spider, Spider

Inspire Another To Greatness

I wanted some big names in The Audition. Lord Recluse had been on my mind for this one for a while. A legend (probably false) associated with the Scottish King Robert the Bruce tells of him hiding from the English forces in a cave, watching a spider repeatedly try to spin a web, eventually succeeding. Robert was inspired by the spider to “try, try again’. I thought it would be amusing to reverse the ‘spider inspires mortal’ thing, and have the Player inspiring LR in some manner.

The Player arrives not in SC, but in an underground cave. The Nav reads ‘explore’.

I chose the Unique – Arachnos – Arachnos Submarine base map for this, because I initially wanted it to be called Spider In The Bath, which would have been a nod to a lovely oldish British childrens TV show Spider.
I was also taken with the image of Lord Recluse with a loofah. He must at some stage have a bath, right? In the event, it also fit with Robert the Bruce being inspired in a cave too!

The water section of the sub base map may have provided a loose link to ‘bath’, but I couldn’t think of a reasonable way to get Recluse into the water, and more importantly, the mechanics of the mission would dictate an alternate approach.

I didn’t want the Player to fight Lord Recluse. He’s too hard, in any case, for most solo players, but also, the Player is supposed to be inspiring him, which would suggest using him as an ally or a hostage/captive. I wanted to avoid backtracking, so ‘lead to exit’ was out (lots of people don’t like these, too). In order to have LR feature throughout the mission, I needed him to be with the Player from the front of the map to the mission complete at the end. This map is totally linear and not too long at all, so it’s a good choice for a steady fight-through

I renamed it ‘Spider Spider’ to remove the bath reference, and put LR as a non-combat Ally set to Follow, spawning at the front. He spawns in exactly the same place every time, just around the first corner. The dialogue for this ‘free ally’ objective has LR complaining that Statesman has foiled his evil plans so many times that he’s just fed up and totally demotivated.



His attendants protest that surely something can be done to bring his evil ambition back? Enter the player.

As the player aggros, LR can’t be bothered to deal with it himself, but when the Player defeats his attendant arachnos, he says that he is mildly amused, and that he’ll enjoy watching the Player’s no doubt fruitless efforts to escape. He also gives away how to escape, namely by destroying a destructible at the other end of the map. A line about an ‘Invulnoshield’ deals with the non-combat nature of LR here.

Freeing LR triggers the other objectives. There are only 2. One is the destructable ‘timelock mainframe’, and the other is the max number of patrols to fill the map. This gives the map a much more dynamic feel as the Arachnos mobs wander about. The Player can of course stealth through, but it’s quite fun I find to clear this one as you go.

I reversed the concept of the ‘ally lost’ dialogue for LR by having him say ‘Hold, insect. I must attend to matters. Wait.” when the Player loses him, and “you may continue with your fruitless, yet I must admit, determined, escape attempt.” when he is ‘found’ again. It gives the impression that he has decided to lose you, not the other way around, and also foreshadows his reaction at mission complete.

The final room can be quite mayhemic, filled as it usually is with patrols. The mainframe spawns in one of three points, the one up next to the giant video screen of LR being the best dramatically of course. Once destroyed, a clue reports that LR has been so impressed with your plucky determination in the face of all these Arachnos trying to kill you, that he has decided to renew his evil machinations against Paragon etc. “Consider this with pride, insect - you have inspired Lord Recluse!” Then the teleport kicks in and the Player is returned to Synapse.

This mission is very simple mechanically, contains just two objectives on a very linear map, yet I feel manages to do something unusual with the elements we have, and also provides an enjoyable fight for those who want it. I like to clear this mission when I’m testing it. I often feel it’s a shame there isn’t any dramatic music included in this map, like the Zig Breakout one and some other sewer maps,.

Synapse is of course amazed at the Player’s apparent lack of commitment to the Task in hand, lol. However, “It's lucky for Paragon that the Jade Spider runs off solar power and that today was a tad cloudy in Siren's Call!” handwaves Statesman and Citadel’s earlier problem, and we move on to The Third Heroic Task.

I’m going to start the Audition now, and as I play through I’ll comment on it as I go.

The Audition, Arc ID 221240 by @MrCaptainMan

The contact is Synapse. He tells the Player that it’s actually him, not an AE construct. He’s ‘piggybacked the AE hologram to contact you.’ This conceit introduces the idea that the arc is not a ‘holodeck’ type affair, but real. Explaining that he’s really somewhere else, using the AE hologram like a videolink, also eases the narrative device about the AE array being a teleporter coming up soon.

Synapse tells the Player that the FP want the Player on their team, and all the Player has to do is succeed in The Six Heroic Tasks.

Not much else is explained before Synapses ‘So, you in?’

The mission accept dialogue is ‘Uh…’, which is immediately followed by Synapse saying ‘Great! I like a bit of 'Can Do' spirit!’ Synapse speaks in this style of voice for the whole arc. His chirpy, blasé tone is not particularly canonical in terms of his voice, and that’s intentional. This arc is a comedy. I made all of the Player’s dialogue as non-committal as that ‘Uh…’ where I could. Synapse basically acts like a brash, oblivious parent having a ‘discussion’ with a child, only with a big cheerful ‘can do’ grin on his face, and I wanted the player to be as silent as possible. In my mind, the Player’s attitude to Synapse is sort of amused, slightly exasperated ‘going with the flow’ during the briefings. When in the missions themselves, there are other reasons to proceed, usually involving saving the world or preventing some sort of serious villainous event, or simply trying to escape back to the AE building.

The First Heroic Task is to ‘Succeed Against Overwhelming Odds’ (A little altered, for the better I think, from its original). Synapse tells the Player that ‘Commander Curmudgeon and his Grumpehemoth Legion are running amuck! There are ONE HUNDRED Frownobots on the rampage right now!’ in Skyway, and that the Player has to stop them. The Player must use the AE array to get there; Synapse has ‘reversed the polarity of its neutron flow so it'll act as a short-range teleporter’ – this is of course a reference to Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Who, a running gag in my arcs, and also introduces the mechanism that will produce all the problems; the malfunctioning AE teleporter.

I put the ONE HUNDRED in red caps in the briefing. Hopefully the player isn’t thinking that he’s actually going to have to defeat 100 customs, although, you never know…that’s only 30-odd spawns of three I guess. Anyway, one hero vs 100 ‘Frownobots’, (whatever they are, lol), is sufficiently ‘against huge odds’ to fulfill Synapses task, but what happens in mission 1 is both more in terms of achievement and less in terms of mechanics.

Mission 1: A Date With Destiny

Succeed Against Overwhelming Odds

Entering the AE array, the Player is teleported…but unfortunately not to Skyway. I wanted an alien planet, far, far away from Earth. The first malfunction had to get the Player about as far away from Skyway as possible. The Unique-Outdoor-Eden Outdoor map is perfect for an alien planet, although it had two slight problems. One is the Arachnos Flyer parked in it, and the other is that its map didn’t work work. This has been fixed with Issue 15, thankfully, but it was a small annoyance to Players unfamiliar wioth the map at first. I have the entry popup mention that the multiple moons in the sky suggest that this is another planet. The first Nav instruction is simply ‘Discover what’s happened’.

A patrol somewhere on the map gives some flavor dialogue containing the phrase “Stay awhile...stay forever!”, which old-timers might recognize from an old C64 game called Impossible Mission

The map obviously has an Arachnos Flyer parked on it, which was a problem. I solved it by integrating it into the narrative of this mission. The map has a very few mobs dotted about, they are all identical. They are Destiny, grav/emp standard/hard minions.

Their bio is enigmatic and offers no answers. For Destiny’s look I went with something akin to a blue-skinned alien from Star Trek, the kind of alien babe that Kirk would have bedded.



The only other thing on the map is a destructible object. It’s a Council Stasis pod, labeled ‘arachnos lifepod’, and its description says that its cracked, so the occupant must be dead, but that maybe it’ll hold a clue. I don’t like to lead the Player by the nose, but I also don’t like the idea of randomly smashing stuff up just because ‘it’s a destructible, ergo I smash it’.

Initially, this clue was a collectable, a small pile of bones, to be exact. But finding it on the map was a nightmare. It was awful, really. I chose the Stasis Pod as it was the largest destructible I could find that fit the story. I don’t believe in making Players jump through more hoops than are necessary for the story. With the stasis tube used, it’s really easy to find now and proceed with the story with minimum faffing

The clue contains info on Destiny, who it’s revealed is “...a hive-mind. One mind, a million bodies...”, and suggests that destroying “the four focus nodes” may let the player escape. The unfortunate occupant of the lifepod ended up here after an otherwise undescribed wormhole collapse. It should be clear by now that the Player is supposed to be Destiny’s new mate/partner/companion, and the fate of the previous one says what that will entail.

Destroying the pod triggers the first of four more destructibles. These ‘focus nodes’ use the Rikti Portal Stabilizer object, again as they are huge and easy to spot. They spawn one by one with their guards, who are also Destiny, and the dialogue for their guards (and for the patrols that destroying each one triggers) shows Destiny (one entity, remember) growing more and more frantic and erratic as she/it alternately pleads with her ‘beloved’ and threatens, to stop the Player destroying the nodes. The dialogue contains lines like “wait…coherence ebbing...” and “can’t maintain…signal lockout” to show the entities blocking of the teleport signal is fading.

Here, of course, I have to rely on the player not just going back to the flyer and exiting lol. The ‘unable to leave’ schtick is unfortunately unenforceable in the MA as yet.

Destiny actually gets a bit plaintive towards the end, saying that she/it is suffering “dissipation of self…” etc. I didn’t mean it to veer towards poignancy, but I feel a bit sorry for Destiny tbh. I’ll be returning to her in a future arc.

The last focus node provides a climax for players who want to have a big fight. I loaded the Destructable with the max number of ambushes.



There are 12 Destinys all told. The dialogue gets more and more strident with each ambush, until the focus node is destroyed and the mission completes with the map filling with patrols, all saying “…alone…again…”. Players with range can stay and duke it out, grav/emp isn’t too troublesome at easy, even in groups. Melee only Players will be ok with a few Break Frees too, or they can just exit.

The humor inside Mission 1 is quite light, save for one I think quite good line in the lifepod clue, but it’s a shortish mission with a self-contained story and fairly dynamic action. I think it’s a good opener.

Back at the AE building, the exit popup muses if there’s still time to get to Skyway. After defeating, technically, a million mobs, another hundred shouldn’t be too difficult. Synapse, however, says it’s too late and berates the Player for not going to Skyway. Blue Steel sorted it out instead apparently.

The Audition, by @MrCaptainMan, arc ID 221240

The Audition’s been up now for a few weeks, and I thought I’d try to give a ‘Director’s Commentary’ sort of explanation of how and why I designed it the way it is. It will be fun for me, and it might be interesting for anyone who has played it, and it might garner a few more plays too, which is always nice. There may also be some small value in it for other arc writers in seeing how someone else develops an arc.

I’ll play through it on my main, MrCaptainMan, my lvl 50 En/En Blaster. He’s the toon I tested it on.

The Audition in its current state is one arc of 6 missions, split into two parts. Initially it was 5 missions long, and published, but a mysterious unexplained filesize jump occurred and it went massively over the 100kb, and since its published 5-mission form had already been edited down a lot from its original concept, rather than cut any more I decided to add a mission culled from the original and publish it in two parts of 3 missions each. As far as I’m concerned it is one arc, not two, but obviously some folk will refuse to see it that way because of the ‘5-slots = maximum’ parameter they put on a single arc size. I decided to live with any downrates or criticism (or differences in play numbers for parts one and two) and have endeavored to make the third mission a little more ‘epic’ than the previous two in order to give a biscuit to those Players who feel that each slot must stand alone.

The level range for The Audition is 40-54. A few of the missions have custom groups only, but one has Praetorians in it, and I also wanted to make a more challenging arc than The Echo, my previous. Missions 3 and 6 often taxed my Blaster, although I was able to solo it through with judicious use of inspirations. In narrative terms, even though it’s a comedy, it fits better for the FP to be offering higher-level characters a place in the squad than lowbies.

The Audition is specifically aimed at solo players. The narrative and the way the mobs and NPCs and text refer to the Player don’t make sense if applied to a team.

As for the challenge level of the arc, I state in the description that it’s ‘very challenging’ and intended to be played at Heroic Difficulty, challenge setting 1. I’d personally rather my arc was experienced the same way for every player, and controlling the challenge level (or at least attempting to, by requesting that the Player play it at my preferred level) is another way of ensuring this. I have had feedback from Players saying it’s too difficult; on investigation, every player who has reported this has been playing it at higher difficulty levels. Those that have taken my recommendation to try it again at Challenge lvl 1 have then reported it as just right. Most of the arc is easy enough; the challenge arises in Missions 3 and 6, which feature AVs and multiple EBs respectively, and from ambushes which feature a large number of minions that are easily handled when single but in groups may prove overwhelming.


The basic premise for The Audition is that Synapse contacts the Player on behalf of the Freedom Phalanx, offering the Player the chance to join. To do so, the Player must succeed in the Six Heroic Tasks. Each mission covers one of those Tasks.

The Audition was born from just an idea for a title, ‘A Date With Destiny’. That title of course carries an image of some major fated event for sb, but also, if taken literally, could mean a romantic meeting with someone called Destiny. I imagined the creature/mob that features in Mission 1 as a ‘teenage girl’ type alien obsessed with the Player in a kind of ‘OMG BFF!’ style, and needing to be fought off for some reason. Around the same time, an image of Synapse saying exasperatedly to the Player ‘Where have you been? When you didn’t show up, X went on a rampage!’ caught hold of me.

I thought that it would be funny if Synapse gave the Player a job to do that was worded like ‘Do X’, and then the Player got teleported to the wrong place where he or she basically did ‘X’, and then on the mission complete Synapse would be castigating the Player, unaware that the task had in fact been done (or even bettered).

At the same time, the rather too long title ‘So, You Wanna Be In The Freedom Phalanx, Eh Mr Fancypants?’ occurred to me and wouldn’t go away. I later used this as a working title and even referenced it in silly teaser ads in the MA Arc Finder Channel, ‘Coming Soon from the maker of The critically acclaimed (by my mom) arc The Echo, SYWBITFPEMF!’ and suchlike.

I love the Monkey Island point n click adventure games from Lucasarts. In the first game of that series, the Player has to perform the Three Piratey Trials in order to become a Pirate. Another arc idea I had featured a number of Heroic Tasks for the FP to set the Player in order to be admitted to the FP.

These three separate strands came together in the original idea for The Audition. I knew that A Date With Destiny would be a simple mission using just one custom mob, as Destiny would be either an army of clones or a hive mind or identical robots or sth. I realized that the mission objective for such an army could be ‘Succeed In The Face Of Overwhelming Odds’, which sounded just right for one of my Heroic Tasks.

So, for this Task, for example, Synapse would ask the Player to ‘Succeed In The Face Of Overwhelming Odds’ by, say, going to Striga and defeating 500 Council, but somehow the Player would end up facing Destiny, and I’d have the narrative explain how the Player had defeated ten thousand clones instead. Then, the Player could get shouted at at the debriefing by Synapse for not succeeding, for comedic effect, after having more than fulfilled the spirit of the mission task.

After deciding that A Date With Destiny would be right for a Task, I started thinking about the others. Each mission would need a similar setup. A suitable sounding Heroic Task to perform, the ostensible mission that Synapse wants the Player to do in order to succeed in that Task, and the actual mission that the player does instead, still fulfilling the Tasks parameters or doing better than them.

I would also have to come up with a way to have Synapses requirements as stated in his briefings met as well, in spite of the player failing to solve them.

This setup and structure would give me ample room for comedy dialogue, I thought, and also produce an arc where each mission would be quite standalone, giving me the opportunity to experiment with varied objectives and villain groups in a sort of ‘anthology’ style arc.

The actual Tasks themselves were fun to decide upon. I wanted a list of things that every hero would be expected to do in the course of his or her career. One afternoon in a break between lessons, I sat in my favourite near-work restaurant with a pad and streamed ideas. The list I came up with was:

Succeed in the Face of Overwhelming Odds
Overcome Your Own Limitations
Inspire Others to Greatness
Resist the Temptation to Use Your Powers for Selfish Gain
Forgive Someone of their Misdeeds
Defeat Your Evil Twin
Temporarily Join Forces with your Nemesis to Fight a Bigger Threat
Save the World

These seemed to cover most stereotypical Big Challenges that various Superheroes in comicbookdom have at some stage had to overcome. Spiderman, for example, has definitely done them all, often repeatedly, and sometimes in the same issue!

Of this list, ‘Overcome your own Limitations’ seemed the dullest of the lot. In addition, I couldn’t think of a way to limit the Player in order for him or her to then succeed in the overcoming part. With two missions, I could have level-limited it for the first one perhaps, and done something with that, but space was also an issue, so I shelved it.

Joining forces with your Nemesis would be easy enough to do with an Ally, probably, but I abandoned it because I’d have had to create a custom mob that would have to satisfy every player’s idea of what their own particular nemesis would be like, a near-impossible task unless I could come up with something clever. I toyed with the idea of having your nemesis ‘off screen’, communicating through a comlink, etc, but nothing great jumped out at me for it, so out it went.

That left six Tasks to fit into five missions. Reluctantly, I decided to drop Defeat your Evil Twin, as the idea I’d had for it would have used up a massive amount of space probably, and I wasn’t sure it would work anyway.

Which left:

Succeed in the Face of Overwhelming Odds
Inspire Others to Greatness
Resist the Temptation to Use Your Powers for Selfish Gain
Forgive Someone of their Misdeeds
Save the World

The order was different to start with, but the start and end missions were the same. Ending the arc with Saving the World seemed apt.

This was the state it was first published in, and I got 10 or so plays, with pretty good feedback, but then its filesize jumped, and I decided to put Defeat Your Evil Twin back in. The Audition was ‘off-air’, as it were, for a few weeks as I split it into two parts, added the extra mission and tweaked the others (now that filesize wasn’t a huge problem, since I had 200kb for the whole arc, I was able to slightly expand some parts of the other missions, reintegrate lines cut from the briefing dialogues etc).

The Audition is tagged as Solo-Friendly, Comedy, Mechanically Complex. It’s level range is 40-54, with the exception of Mission 3, which is 50-54 as it contains 2 Praetorian AVs which proved too much for lower level squishies.

Here's one I prepared earlier

Ctrl + Alt + Reset! Aka Time Loop, by @Bubbawheat. Medium length (2 tihny, 1 small, 1 medium map). Neutral. The level range is 15-30, so Ill be taking my lvl 25 Inv/Superstrength tanker in. His name is Scoop Malloy, he looks like this and here’s his bio:

“Scoop Malloy, Paragon Times. What’s your view on recent rumors that the far-away look in Azuria’s eyes ain’t just down to contemplating the higher planes of existence? Some folks say that eye of newt ain’t all she’s brewing up in her cauldron these days, you get my drift? Now I ain’t disparaging the old girl, but she does seem a tad lax in keeping hold of certain Magic Items locked in her vault, right? Just plain dumb luck, or is it that popping too many mystic mushrooms on top of a quart of hoodoo juice gets you a mite too ‘otherworldly’ to be in a position of Ethereal Authority? So, what’s the story? You can trust me, I know what’s what in the Realms of the Arcane. See this, holding up my pants? I didn’t win this at a coconut shy, that’s a magic belt, that is. It’s the Magic Belt of Arathapathathath. Gives me my magic powers. So, come on, spill the magic beans and Ill quote you as ‘a source’. Azuria’s hiding something, I’d stake my Pulitzer on it!”

The contact is Foreshadow, and the mission description suggests that the mission will involve being locked in a time loop. Scoop is on to the story!

“Red? It’s me, Scoop!…Yeah, I know, I owe ya’ dinner. Where? Chachi’s? OK, but never mind that now! Hold the front page! I got a doozy for ya! This is big, sweetness! Garfield’s gonna love it! Danger! Romance! Corruption! Heroics! Aliens! Time Travel! Giant robots! Vampires! Octop-what?…well no, possibly not all that, but I’m sure there’ll be a lot of it….yeah, I remember the last story I rang in…that wasn’t my fault! The source swore blind there was a giant robot on Striga somewhere…y’know, I still think there’s a giant robot on Striga somewhere, in fact, I’d stake my…er, yeah, that. Look, just shaddup and type this down, OK? This is it, sweetlegs, this is the big one!

“Ahem..Ace Reporter Scoop Malloy, 35, reports mysterious goings on amongst the cloistered ranks of Wyvern, the shadowy private security organization owned and run by Delia Huntley. Hollows Hero Foreshadow (age unknown) contacted Scoop Malloy with information that Wyvern was holding a strange temporal anomaly of some sort. Scoop bravely volunteered to retrieve the item…that’s all for now, sweetlips, I gotta go check out the Wyvern base and grab the doohickey…yeah, sure. I’ll check back with more later!”

[The briefing from foreshadow is concise and clear. Wyvern have confiscated a temporal anomaly, and Foreshadow wants it. Scoops to go into the Wyvern base, retrieve it, and leave]

Mission 1: Check out the Wyvern base.



“Wyvern, huh? Never liked Wyvern. It’s the arrows. Law enforcement types generally try a ‘low damage’ sort of approach, at least in theory they’re supposed to, right? Tazers, nightsticks, they’re for subduing criminals, yeah? Kinda hard to pull your punch with an arrow. Nah, there’s something not right about Wyvern. They’re hiding something, I’d stake my Pulitzer on it!

[The map is a warehouse. All I have to do is to retrieve whatever is causing the temporal disturbance. Around the first corner I spy a computer terminal glowie. I figure it’s worth checking out, but it proves inconsequential. I go on, and deal with a few Wyvern. I meet ‘Agent Marx’, who talks about ‘it’, and when he goes down I take ‘it’ from him. It’s a weird sphere, according to the clue drop. The mission completes. Time to return it to Foreshadow. I exit]

“Hallo, Red? Just checking in before I return to my source with the gizmo I was talkin’ about…What? Ya know, the doohickey I told you about like an hour ago…I did so! …I did, I’m tellin’ ya! I told you to hold the front page!…It’s not gone to print yet?…but…well, hold the front page, then! Something screwy’s happening, I’d stake my Pulitzer on it! …yeah, I know, I owe ya dinner! Chachi’s, yeah, sure! Sheesh. I’ll get back to you after I speak to Foreshadow.

[Foreshadow greets me with the exact same dialogue that he said in the initial briefing. I tell him I’ve already done the job and have the artifact. He demands to see it, and it’s not what he wants, apparently. He thinks I’m joking with him, and asks me to go get ‘the artifact’ again.]

“What did I tell ya? Screwy! I tell ya, if I’m trapped in one of them time-travel loop hoop things, I’m not going to be happy. My cousin Frank’s son, Elipsoid Lad, he got caught in a temporal whatsit one time, and ever since, he’s had to eat lunch before he eats breakfast! It ain’t good, messin’ with time travel. Anyway’s, I figure I better go back…or maybe not back, if I haven’t been there yet…see, I’m already gettin’ confused. I’ll go check out the warehouse, maybe I can find out what’s happening.

Mission 2: Find Information on the Artifact

“when I get inside, the artifact’s gone! I coulda sworn I put it in my pocket…damn, maybe that computer has some useful info…

[I return to the computer I spotted ‘last’ time I was here.]

“Some files labeled ‘T.Splitter’ and ‘T.Shifter’ look interesting, but they’re encrypted. Maybe Marx has the codes…

[I hunt for Marx. He’s in the same room as last time]

“Agent Marx seemed like he didn’t know me, he was spouting the same stuff as last time. He dropped the artifact again, only this time it’s like bigger and more complex. Also he gave up the codes…

[There’s a new Nav instruction, which leads me back to the computer. A new glowie has spawned in the location of the computer, which is nice – I didn’t know we could do that now! Oh, nice password for the files, btw lol]

“Hm. I think I just got zapped back in time again. My head hurts. Have I still got the artifact?…[whrrrclikclik]…Red? Yeah, it’s me, Scoop. You still holdin’ the front page?…Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah, I know, dinner. Yes, Chachi’s, check!…Shaddup, just hold the front page! I’ll get right back to ya!

[Foreshadow starts his spiel again, and I interrupt him this time to tell him about the two artifacts. I’m not sure if I’ve actually still got the second artifact at this point. Me, I mean, not Scoop. Scoops even more confused lol]

“And Foreshadow’s not helping, blabbing the same old lines again. He eventually tells me to go to the lab and get the two artifacts.

Mission 3: Get the Two Artifacts.

“OK, this time, things are definitely screwy! The warehouse is cluttered with junk, this time. Someone needs to give me some answers. And where am I going to find the damn artifact in all this mess?

[there are 15 possible glowies to investigate. They all have near instant timers, so its not arduous. The clues are humorous nods to some sort of time travel reference or a science fiction or fantasy series. The Time Warp from Rocky Horror, Red Dwarf’s Talkie Toaster, Harry potter, for instance. I didn’t spot a Doctor Who reference, which I thought would have been a no-brainer lol. Eventually I find myself back at Marx, and this time around he tells me that “Steve” has the second artifact.]

“I tell ya, I am more confused than a buzzard who’s been given a keg of brandy for Christmas. Steve? Who the hell’s Steve?

[I exit}

“Red? It’s Scoop. I was just wonderin…when was the last time we spoke?…that long, huh? Yeah, dinner, Chachi’s…Look., hold the front page, ok?…I’ll tell ya later”

[Foreshadow starts again, and I cut him off almost immediately. It’s time to go back in. Again, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to have the artifact with me now or not. Scoop’s utterly bamboozled]

“Right. I’m going to go in and start punchin heads till I either get outta this mess or go doolally.

Mission 4: It’s finally time to break this loop!

“The warehouse is different, this time. Shortly after I enter, I bump into Agent Steve. He’s babbling like a loon, but he tells me he has the Time Splitter and that something called the Time Shifter needs to be kept away from it. I go deeper, and then encounter a weird robot thing. It’s like an advanced version of the artifacts I found. It talks! And it attacks me. I smash it to bits, which feels good, but it ‘resets’ time, I think. I carry on, fighting off weird devolved Wyvern mutants. I find Agent Marx in the last room, harassed by the creatures who used to be his own men. I free him, and we head to the computer that’s present. It’s no help…

[The last room…’Destroy Time Shifter’ still in the Nav. I guessed it would respawn elsewhere, but I assumed it would not involve backtracking. I’ll go back into the map.]

Back into the warehouse, I find the Time Shifter again. It’s grown stronger. I frit my teeth and dive in…

[Its now conning Orange, so I eat my tray and pile on. It falls, but it’s not the end…;( Just ate all my inspires and now I’ve got another ‘hunt the boss’ and he’s probably going to be stronger this next time.]

“After the Time Shifter falls this time, I hear it near the entrance to the warehouse. This time it’s shorting out or something. Maybe the Time Splitter I have is acting on it…

[I’d forgotten about the Time Splitter, tbh. Still, I’m glad it wasn’t an EB!]

“I paste it easily, but something tells me it’s not over yet…

[the nav now reads ‘Destroy Time Shifter Once and for all!’, so I guess this is the last time. However, I must say that all these multiple re-iterations of the Time Shifter and the need to destroy them aren’t really delivered to Scoop very clearly by the clues. I’d suggest adding sth like ‘as Time Shifter falls, you feel your innards twist as time warps around it’ or sth, and foreshadowing this earlier somehow. There’s a lot of backtracking here, too.]

“I head back to the last room again, and there’s the Time Shifter, now advanced into some kind of weird static object, guarded by holograms of its former selves. Me and Marx make wreckage out of it.

[The clue at the Time Shifter (destructible object now) end says its rusted as if much time has past – typo here – ‘hundereds’). I think that what’s happened is that the artifact has been evolving, possibly by sucking time from the warehouse, and that the Time Splitter has acted like paraquat on it, forcing it to evolve too fast and thus destroying it. I think that’s what’s happened, but if so, I’d make it much clearer if I were you.]

“We exit, and report back to Foreshadow. That Time Shifter doodad was suckin’ all the time from around it and usin’ it ta evolve. I guess Marx’ time Splitter was too much for it. Still, all’s well. This’ll make a great front pager!

[lol so the debriefing explains that yes, the Time Shifter was doing all that. Everything is explained, but I spent most of the arc being really confused, even about small things like whether or not I had the artifact with me at various points. Maybe you could state in the exit popups that it’s gone, if that’s supposed to be the case every time. There’s a grammar hiccup in the debrief “felt like they trapped” should be “felt like they had been trapped”, and a typo “hide it's presence” should be just “its” with no apostrophe.

Overall, It’s a lovely concept, and a fun arc. Bashing Wyvern is easy enough and satisfying. The combat versions of the Time Shifter are well-made and fun to fight. The mission with all the glowies (which I suspect are optional – I’m sure I didn’t get all of them before the mission completed) seems a little too ‘laff-riot’ for the tone of the rest of the arc, but the clues are funny.

My two biggest gripes are that it’s too confusing, and there’s a lot of backtracking in that last mission. I actually liked the way the first few times the map was the exact same one, and would have liked to see that continue. If there was perhaps a set of two maps that were identical in layout but one was degraded in some way that would be good.

So, a little disappointed I’m afraid. I like Time Travel stories, personally, but I do value clarity, and this could definitely be clearer. The rating is somewhere between 3 and 4 stars, and I’m going to let the coin fall to the 4-star side because even with the confusion and the backtracking, I didn’t die once, I wasn’t mezzed, there was no Last Mission Giant Map Syndrome and it had a rickroll in it. ]


“…Red? Hold the front page! I gotta-what?…Already?…Ah, damn. Ah well, never mind…listen, you free for dinner tonight? I was thinkin’ about Chachi’s…”

Eco