VOLRATH'S PROFILE

author=NeverSilent
I seem to remember you once posted a chart on the Solest forums that displayed the different characters' political orientations, where Cade was (initially) more left-authoritarian than liberal, and contrasted that with your own views.

Yeah, that was fun. I put all the major characters through that one political matrix text. Cade was on the Authoritarian Left side whereas I'm on the Libertarian Left side (fairly close to Stoic).

What I was saying about some people in that 18-22(ish) range is mostly that they think they just have all the answers, regardless of what their politics are. They say young people in general are more liberal and while that's true when compared to older people, there are still plenty that aren't. These days, I'm noticing that some young people who really want to be contrarian are going the racist/sexist route since that feels more like "sticking it to the man."

15 years, give or take. So Peri was about my kids age when the MotW stuff was going on. Meanwhile, Rana has been trying to rehabilitate Overmoss and take the guild in a different direction as well. She only shows up for this one early scene however, since Overmoss in Peri's hometown that she soon leaves.

D'oh, you're right. Forgot about Finley waking Stoic up. As for the Shadehorn thing, I suppose I should have mentioned that it was a strategy developed before ArtBane changed that...in the moment, I forgot we had fixed it.

I agree that the crystal thing turned out to be a happy accident. Daydream being composed of angels with instruments has a similar story, but I'll talk about that next time.

The battles are still very messy and may be that way for some time. A big part of the reason MotW was completed was that we kept making new stuff even while knowing existing stuff had problems. If we could fix it, we did but we couldn't hold up the project based on that. I hope everything flows better in the final version but there will be plenty of time to address it, I'm sure.

Bradley won't be able to explore the whole continent on that first day. He probably won't even be able to leave East Gallia actually. I think it will be like 4 "days" in the game's story before that becomes possible and the time passing system won't activate until then. I still have to introduce Peri and get her where she needs to be, so plenty of early stuff before the world opens up.

As far as the daily routine, there will be a certain amount of time/energy Bradley has to work each day (this was represented by the bar and percentage in the case of Homework Salesman). The lectures and weapon/magic training will eat some up and the rest of the day can be used for exploration. There will be "weekend" days where there is no school and you can just do whatever you want. Solest has four day weeks, three for school and one day off. There is a certain amount of days in the game's storyline (not sure how many yet but I hope enough to see all over the continent if you so desire) and some important story stuff will happen on most of them. Walking from one region to another will wipe out a lot of a day's energy, so once you "unlock" a place once, you can use a carriage to get there next time and save yourself some time.

Regarding the exposition, I am finding it difficult to balance. Even though it's safe to assume anyone interested in this game has played MotW and perhaps even seen the Clean Slate LP, I can't necessarily write the game that way. I have to cater to new players and each new Solest game brings more material to communicate. Right now, I'm not happy with the Korina Gallius conversation. I may have to move some of that to the second interaction with her so it's not the whole tale right away. But I also felt the need to explain why her last name was a big deal and why she isn't ruling Gallia instead of teaching at the Academy. These are the kind of complicated exposition needs that come up a lot lately.

Common? I am an excellent mercenary, sir. Actually, I think I switched due to the character generator (having to populate a world without something like that is tough, it was tough enough on MotW and I didn't have the entire city of Gallia) and the overall simpler mapping. People were always giving us shit about the maps not being pretty enough so I figured might as well lower their expectations.

Galv script seems to be working, thanks!