[Feedback]Arcs written by my girlfriend and myself

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

Review done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Running this on my fire/EMelee tanker, +0/x2 with bosses on.

As a side note, the umlaut may mean extra myth and/or metal, but it makes this arc a real pain to search for, as its unique distinguishing word needs some jiggery-pokery to work out of a conventional keyboard.

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New feature: contacts can have bios. Guessing this hasn’t been touched in awhile as it still has the standard AE contact description.

Apparently there’s an upcoming dimensional incursion that the usual guardians are too usual to actually go after, much as the real wreckers couldn’t go in after the WEB.

It’s called a tower, but really it’s just a bunch of crazy magical places stacked on top of each other with no rhyme or reason. Standard D&D fare, then. Let’s see what’s inside!

Renamed Diabolique/Black Swan/Infernals. with a side order of DE and storm elementals.

One of the obelisks I have to destroy is actually behind the boss fight that spawns it, between it and the door. This is probably a vagary of cave maps dealing with the “middle” setting more than anything else, but it might be worth looking for another one that doesn’t have this problem.

Anyway, my princess, er, intended rescuee is in another castle, but at least I’ve reestablished a link to the outside. Or rather, some kind of astral brainjack as I’m still in the tower.

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...I think? Did I come out in between missions 1 and 2 or was I stuck there?

The contact’s a bit muddled on the point, telling me that my body’s going through some kind of portal that even the Keepers don’t know what it is. In addition to getting my some backstory on Tannhauser, who was apparently a questing knight who found the goddess of love.

It’s going to turn out to be Slaanesh, right?

Anyway, I head into some kind of lbrary, start flipping around, and awaken a sort of EnAssault/Pain guardian who thinks I’m Oranbegan. ...were they even active a thousand years ago?

Rooting through the books, it seems like Tannhauser would do anything for love, but he wouldn’t walk away (so probably not Slaanesh then), and now he’s going to spew darkness all over the city in some kind of cosmic snit fit.

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Exactly how I get to the Hall of Echoes I don’t know, but apparently the Circle projected into this place a while back which explains the confusion. In self-defense, or were they interested in taking a goddess apart for spell components? I have a gnawing dread it’s the latter.

And since this place is apparently going to be made of memories I suspect I’ll know by the end of this mission.

Wisps and Hydra represent terrible memories, which is pretty fair.

I pop my ally, find a memory of an earlier, still sane, Tannhauser, and then get an objective to find another echo of his, which is somewhere back in the caves as the first one was in the boss room at the end.

Somehow Tannhauser 2 knows my name. I guess it’s just weird magic being weird.

Okay, hang on. Tannhauser was around when the Oranbegans warred with the Mu? That was dawn-of-human-history old, and I thought he was a little more recent than that.

Anyway, in attempting to steal the secrets of creating a clone dimension to keep Venus trapped forever, he ticked off the Circle and one of them placed a curse on him, rendering him completely unlikable. I’m not sure there was all too much magic involved there, but it certainly didn’t help.

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So Tannhauser completed his gate trap thing and ending him may very well destroy all love forever, so I should be careful not to do that in the process of saving the world. Well, I’ll see what happens.

I free some sacrifices who had somehow been ported in, take out Orion the hunter (who got wrapped up in Tannhauser’s angst field), and finally confront the man himself. He doesn’t seem inclined to run as his health goes down, though, and I worry I’m doing something terrible.

Oh good, he ported out. That’s a relief.

Anyway, the ritual’s foiled and the dark tower is open to intervention, so everything seems to be coming up in my favor.

Hmm. Okay, apparently when I went into the Hall of Echoes I somehow projected myself into his actual past. ...it strikes me that this may be an interesting way to proceed, but we’ll see.

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Oh. Spirit City. Would you believe I was expecting Arachnoid caves, given that this is the corrupt version?

There are at least web cocoons working as weak points, so it’s not all bad.

Hmm. Was Aisynia intended as a pure support character? She didn’t use any attack powers that I could remember. The designated helper system may be crippling her, as I found Reen first.

(It’s odd that both the Keepers I found seem to be dimensional refugees.)

Fortunately no crystals show up here to distract my allies.

...up until the boss room, anyway. Agh. Fortunately the BS/Shield isn’t crippling.

And finally, freeing Venus, a Solaris recolor. I was kinda hoping we’d do something like lead her against Tannhauser, but as one final mop-up it’s not so bad.

Strangely no souvenir, though. I’m betting this arc was starting to strain at the seams a little in its day? That’s something else that’s changed.

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Storyline - ***. There are a couple of weird wire-crosses going on with the story. Yes, weird stuff happening just to set the atmosphere isn’t exactly rare in occult-type comics, but even so, these bugged me.

First is getting astral-brainjacked back to my contact just as I get sucked through a portal in Tannhauser’s Mysterious Dungeon, resulting in two simultaneous trippy experiences. I wouldn’t have a problem with either of them independently, but both the Gate and the Keepers are complete mysteries at this point, so having them both do mysterious things at the same time just results in this impenetrable CGI blob, because I don’t know what’s what. If you still wanted to have that nifty effect going on, then maybe the connections between floors are outside the tower proper, and the Keepers send me in having briefed me on their plans to, I don’t know, use a magic circle to blow a bubble of reality and stick it in the stream between floors so we can talk for a bit. This gives me something to expect, which makes anything I don’t expect therefore a product of the Gate.

Second is the revelation that when I was walking through Tannhauser’s memories I was actually affecting his past somehow maybe kinda. I’d think that might be mentioned as a non-beatdown solution to this whole thing, since at one point destroying Tannhauser means destroying love, but the arc ends with a conventional bossfight and that loose thread is just sort of flapping free. It was actually better as a just a weird thing that happened to happen - the extra explanation from the Keepers makes it seem important when it actually isn’t.

Design - *****. Missions are busy and full of evolving objectives. Stock mobs are used in creative ways, and when necessary customs step up.

My only real complaint here is that there’s a little too much in the way of Oranbega and Oranbega derivatives, but I don’t think this is something you can actually help if you want to do an arcane dungeon. Unless you want to go totally bonkers and use Croatoa as a floor or something, but with the complex nature of most of the missions that’d be a bit of a recipe for disaster.

Gameplay - ****. As an unfortunate intersection of the complex missions and the vagaries of map choice, some of the maps can put objectives behind you even when what spawns them is a boss in the front of the map. And while the big blue Oranbega is pretty visually stunning, as an Oranbega-alike it can randomly spawn crystals that mess with the allies I’m supposed to have for the final boss fight.

These aren’t necessarily things you can help. They’re more properly problems with the game rather than anything you deliberately introduced. But they may be worth addressing, and there are exceptional arcs that have tried to work around problems more properly present in the game.

Detail - ****. About the only thing that bothered me here is Tannhauser’s timeline. He’s presented as a questing poet-knight with a doomed love, which is very age-of-chivalry, and overall his look and powers reinforced that impression. But he’s also written as operating back at the start of the Oranbega/Mu conflict, which was sparked by Ermeeth going “hey kids, MAGIC!” and the ensuing spontaneous bout of atheism, placing it sometime around the dawn of humanity. Did I miss that he used his gate to go back in time for whatever reason, maybe?

Overall - ****. An ambitious arc that reaches out for a fantastic plot, flavorful settings, and intricate missions, but because of this it’s a bit of a bumpy ride. It’s good, and it can be great.