Quin

Hah! Totally called the Well.

I've posted a mirror in .doc format here.

I've ended up going back to Vana'Diel (Final Fantasy XI). It is older than CoX, although not by much.

The closest I've come to this is probably Final Fantasy XI, for all it's flaws. Sure, there's still towns, but it is possible to travel to some very isolated places that few other players really bothered with, a bit like the Shadow Shard. When I used to EXP off Bombs on my Summoner, I usually went out of the way to find places where I wouldn't be disturbed by passing players, and I wasn't disrupting any nearby EXP groups. The only people I'd usually see were other summoners. The closest city to Uleguerand Range is (or was, before the introduction of Abyssea made more fast travel options available) four zones away.

Since there was no requirement to be near some sort of crafting table, it was possible to field craft supplies. I was no cook, but I often took out ingredients for Silent Oils and Prism Potions, in case I needed stealth buffs in magic-aggro areas.

More recent changes to the level cap have meant that most of the non-Abyssea zones are a little less...well, scary, for lack of a better word. When the level cap was 75, areas designed for level 75 characters still had a lot of stuff around that could be considered challenging, the areas themselves felt hostile. With the cap now at 99, these areas are a little more trivial, although I've noticed the devs have thrown a few curveballs by adding some really high level mobs to old areas in far off corners.

灰は灰に、塵は塵に。
幻は幻に、夢は夢に。

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Illusions to illusions, dreams to dreams.

Well, I've been meaning to buy some webspace for a while in order to store my university portfolio work. I've registered unionroleplayers.co.uk as a domain for the space, but if it doesn't work out, I'll dump the name and grab another one, and re-purpose the space for personal projects.

So yeah, no guarantee that this will go anywhere, but it's a start nonetheless.

I brought this up on the Union Roleplayers Steam group that Nitro made, but I figure I should air it a little more publicly. Obviously, a lot of us are dismayed over the closure of City of Heroes, however, I'd be more than willing to try and set up a community elsewhere (For when these forums go dark), so that those who want to keep in touch and keep their plots going have a place to do so.

I know Forum RP can't really replace City of Heroes, but it's better than nothing, surely?

I'm willing to register something like unionroleplayers.co.uk out of my own pocket for a while, but I can't run something like this alone. Would any of the Unionverse peeps help?

As much as I'd like to agree with this, "No art time necessary" is not a magical shortcut that will drastically reduce implementation time.

This is why you go to D on Union. We're saner.

Honest.

I -might- be able to come along. Put me down for two, since my SO is likely to be along too.

Oh wow, it almost fell an entire dollar.

I often find that Japanese names seem to follow their own particular grammar rules that bend around the existing ones for complex things such as compound kanji and whatnot. It's one of the many things that I found impossible to understand during my short residency there.

However, it's something I enjoy trying to understand, so glad I could (sort of) help.

EDIT:

What it seems you're looking for is "Gurokaze no Rikimaru" (Written 黒風の力丸), "Rikimaru of the Black Wind", where the "guro" in "Gurokaze" has a double meaning.

The kanji for black (黒) can be pronouced "guro", like novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (石黒 一雄, Ishiguro Kazuo, the first kanji there meaning "stone").