Ravenswing

Coming in late so...

Annette is independently wealthy due to the magic of compound interest. Why? Because I felt like it.

Jason Caine is the same, 8000 years of amassing money is bound to leave you with resources.

Louise, on the other hand, and most of my other characters, are 'comfortable' and that's all they need, so it's all they have. Louise even has to do some rather distasteful work to earn the cash she needs.


As far as level goes... throw away characters I ignore it for. The odd times I've had gods or the like turn up, they were about level 2 with awesome cosmic power, and got deleted soon after. Levelling them was stupid and pointless.

Annette's early life story was entirely based around her need to be assessed at level 35 so she could join Vanguard and cut up Rikti. So, yes, I view level as an assessment of 'threat level' made by... well, the FBSA is as good an agency as any for it.


ETA - within reason, yes the level of villains applies. See recent fiction regarding Skulls shooting Louise.

My congratulations. There hasn't been a patch this disasterous since the Arena Issue IIRC. Thank you for deciding to fix it right in the middle of prime EU time. Next time, test it.

Forget the Toads, Guns are the Future of Witches
Paragon Tattler, January 29th, 2011
Magic has taken a distinct turn for the scientific on the streets of King’s Row with the arrival of the Gunwitch, a heroine who uses a pair of custom pistols to strike fear into the criminal fraternity. The Skulls gave her her name, it seems, because her guns fire bullets which seem to aim themselves, and have even been known to follow victims around corners. They claimed she used witchcraft to hunt them down, that she could see in the dark. The Tattler has heard rumours that she wears dark glasses so much to hide the fact that she is blind, but can clearly see somehow. However, in an effort to understand the stunning mistress of pistols better, we spoke to experts in the fields of ballistics and firearms to see what we could learn.

Doctor Gabriel Farnsworth, Chair of Advanced Weapons Study at the Founders’ Falls campus of Paragon University, agreed to watch a few clips of Gunwitch in action. ‘It appears that the young lady uses spin-stabilised, rocket-propelled ammunition. What we call “gyroc” rounds. If you imagine each bullet having perhaps three of four small jets which fire from the sides, spinning the bullet to give gyroscopic stabilisation, and driving it forward. Such a bullet could, conceivably, steer to home in on a target, or even fly around corners.’

Regarding the special ammunition Gunwitch has been seen to use, Doctor Farnsworth had this to say, ‘These cryogenic rounds operate in a particularly interesting manner. Detail is lacking, but they appear to employ some form of super-fluid which freezes on contact. One could theorise that the rapid expansion has an ultra-cooling effect, the fluid sticking to its target like a sort of reversed Napalm. The technology involved in this ammunition is quite extraordinary, highly advanced. If this “Gunwitch” created it herself she has considerable skill and knowledge.’

Brad Sieforth, head researcher at the Austin Institute for Cybernetics, has been doing research of his own into the Gunwitch. ‘I’m quite convinced that she’s a cyborg of some kind,’ he told the Tattler. ‘I’ve talked to a couple of witnesses who say her eyes are blank, no pupils or irises. I think her guns are part of a total, cybernetic weapons system. There’s no telling how much of her is actually organic, she could even be fully synthetic. The Unity Vigil has a number of synthetic humanoids, artificially intelligent and very hard to distinguish from normal humans. It’s possible that the Gunwitch is a synthetic copy of Nitoichi, who is one of their members. She’s certainly one attractive package. I‘d like to get my hands on her schematics, that’s for sure.’

One other theory has presented itself for the origin of the enigmatic vixen. ‘Portal Corp. has been keeping fairly quiet about the rise in Praetorian refugees over the past months,’ says Lidia Boyd, an expert in extra-dimensional threats with the Rosenberg Foundation. ‘Praetoria, or Upsilon Beta 9-6 as it is officially designated, is a parallel Earth generally considered to be a “dark mirror dimension” where good is evil and vice versa. There has been a recent increase in incursions by heavily armed Praetorian forces, rumours of spies and Fifth Column-style sleeper agents. It is known that Praetorian technology, particularly regarding weapons and robotics. Considering that Gunwitch is a near-duplicate of the known hero Nitoichi, it is quite possible that she is a Praetorian.’

So, who is the Gunwitch? Robotic copy? Evil Preatorian duplicate lulling us into a false sense of security? The Tattler is here to find out the truth.

The other thing to keep in mind is that PG13 likely means different things to different people, and is here being applied by American mods and being looked at by European players (since most of us discussing this are).

As far as posting to the forums goes I follow the following practice:

* I don't go over excessive in either violence or sex, though that's my interpretation of both.
* If I feel a story pushes the limits too much, I use the PDF method FFM describes.
* I am supremely confident that, if the Mods thought that I had exceeded the bounds, they would tell me and I would take the story down. When I met Ocho at HeroCon he told me that my old sig picture had been borderline, but had passed, so I'm quite confident that they will pick me up on things if I go over the limit.

(I'm also conceited enough to believe they actually read my fiction, if only for amusement. )

Haven't put it on yet. It's mostly for the new 500 series cards.

However, it might be an idea to indicate which card you are using.

Who is the Gunwitch?
Paragon Tattler, January 20th, 2011.
Tall, attractive, seen wandering the streets of King’s Row in a corset and mini-skirt, and the spitting image of hero and model Annette “Nitoichi” Barrington, the woman known as “The Gunwitch” was first spotted by the Tattler at the recent trial of Nitoichi. Back then she was the mysterious double, but her personal fame has grown somewhat since and she is now a well known figure around King’s. Given that Nitoichi has never really courted the press, Gunwitch may even be better known than her sword-swinging sibling. But who is she, and where did she come from?

‘She started turning up last year,’ one King’s resident told us, ‘sometime in late August or early September. She made a real pain of herself with the Skulls and you can only think well of her for that.’

‘I heard the Skulls started calling her “The Gunwitch” on account of her being able to, like, bend bullets around corners and stuff like that,’ another said.

When asked where she came from, however, there seems to be a no one who knows and is willing to speak. There are rumours, however; suggestions that she had to run from Lord Recluse, rumours that she hid among the streetwalkers of Industrial Avenue to avoid Arachnos hit squads. Gunwitch may not be as clean as her King’s reputation makes out, and there are even whispers of her involvement in a murder case where a number of people vanished from the rich Lesco Heights district.

‘The Gunwitch is a valued member of the King’s Row crime-fighting community and there are no current police investigations where she is an active suspect.’ That was the response from King’s Row police precinct. Some of the individual officers were rather more assertive.

‘She’s one of the good ones,’ Officer Frank Turner told us. ‘She came to King’s, she lives here, and she helps the people here. She isn’t one of those heroes who just uses this town as a stepping stone to the big leagues. I don’t care what she did before she came here, or even what she’s done to put food on the table since; what counts is she’s saved lives, cops and civilians. Leave her alone.’

The Tattler is used to this kind of police attitude to Press Freedom, of course, and we will continue to seek out the truth behind the secretive, ultra-sexy girl the city has come to know as Gunwitch.

That is ignoring the point, I think, which is that evil requires a choice to do something you know is wrong.

The alien isn't, in it's own view, evil if it does not consider what it's doing to be wrong.

From an outside view, it may be classed as evil.

Evil is subjective.

Well, the problem is that there's no such thing as a 'traditional' vampire. What we tend to think of as the traditional vampire, the Stoker-type vampire, is a romanticised version of the myths of eastern Europe. The original creature is a thing of darkness and disease, two things the locals feared.

Since unexplained sicknesses of cattle are among the horrors caused by vampires, one could assume they could subsist on animals, so they would choose to prey on humans, and doing so might be considered evil. However, almost by definition, vampires as originally conceived are 'evil' because that's exactly what they were supposed to be. They come from a time when 'evil' was an absolute. Our modern conception of evil being a choice, and our enjoyment of the idea of the tragic monster is what has turned them from evil monsters to the things we see in Anne Rice books, White Wolf games, and Twilight.

Evil is a viewpoint, and generally not a symetrical one. Few poeople view themselves as evil. Moral, and more importantly, immoral and amoral are rather more useful as terms in this discussion


As an aside, my problem with vampire characters is that they aren't vampires. What they are is gods with fangs and the personality of a depressed Emo. They're an excuse for power-play, but hardly the only one.

The reason we don't bother arguing with FFM is simply that he refuses to consider opinions which aren't his own. He rationalises them out of existance, ignores them, or denies them.

Some of us still like him dispite all this! Go figure.

I think I've dropped from one TF before everyone else did, and that was because I had work in the morning and it was getting early. They knew beforehand I'd have to leave if it got too late.

However, I generally only do TFs with friends, which does make a difference. When you know the folks on the team, there's more of an urge to stick with it, and usually more of a consensus that it's all gone horribly wrong when it has.

I have a character who'll be so using the mini-pet.

Nice reward pack.