Visions of Lives Past play feedback. *EXTRA SPOILERS ALERT*

Hello Akira,

Prepping this module, there is at least one reference to a map but nothing in the pdf package. Does anyone have maps handy that they can send me? Running this tonight.

Sorry about that. I’ve emailed you a ZIP file of the maps and have sent them to an LA Staff member to upload to the site.

I hope you get this in time.

Enjoy!

Hey, it’s my topic!
Let’s see….

Reviewing the mod there is neither an actual alternate conclusion nor any heart-rending choice between destroying the key and preserving Malandros’s life.

Lo, I am vexed that our Judge pulled that crap out of his tuckus to keep us headed to “Conclusion A.”

Even destroying the key isn’t really an option as, congratulations, you’ve just crossed an unscrupulous elder Elorii who can probably atomize you with a thought. This isn’t even “you screwed him and ran,” it’s “you screwed him and he knows where you are and finds you faster then Loshnek.”
I realize “Conclusion B: Xercel frowns and you all die in a fire; please give your characters and log sheets to the judge” wouldn’t really be kosher, but to me that seems like the actually plausible outcome to betraying someone with no apparent reason not to be murderously angry about it.

I think The Vault is right.

From Maranithia’s sheet:
“They treat us little better than servants. Mindless brutes to be used only when our leaders don’t want to get their hands dirty.”
“So here you are – being sent into one of the deadliest places in the empire with a group of
people you barely know. But successfully concluding this mission will change everything. You’ve been promised by the Ardakene that a new day is dawning upon our people and the old way will be washed aside and a new one, where we are all treated as equals shall be put in place.”
“You just need to make sure that the Ardakene stays alive to fulfill their end of the bargain.”

That perspective decries that the Marokene were contented in their state of oppression.
Enough so to sabotage a mission that could’ve lead to revenge against the humans. Even without the drive to restore the Elemental Lords there’s still the matter of the Belekith and the many, many subsequent deaths to avenge.

Also it’s ironic that Desaviatas, who performs two betrayals, has the “Code of Honor” flaw.

So while this past state of the Elorii is 5,000 years old it’s also the way of things before the arrival of the Prophetess -and possibly afterwards, too. The Eloran Empire lasts about 2,000 years and apparently drifts into the situation we’re discussing now… and I still don’t get why.

What’s the answer besides “everybody sucks?” It couldn’t have been that there were no inter-bloodkine encounters. They had actual cities and fortresses and all the rest of it and that seems to deny the likelyhood of every community being racially layered in just the same way.

Upon reflection I’m not even sure there was a problem. Marokene are stereotyped as being conservative and reactionary with a taste for solitude and isolationist communities. And nowhere in the other characters notes, besides Desaviatas of course, are there any thoughts about the politics of the nation. So it’s entirely possible this whole issue never existed at all except in the fevered minds of the two conspirators.

That’s part of what bugs me here. In a society that’s one Pope short of being an actual Theocracy the Ardakene, the compassionate, empathetic Ardakene who’re also most of the clergy -the most important people in the nation, don’t have the suction to get everyone circulating around the social orders?

Also it seems like the betrayal of Marnithia is kind of short-sighted. What was the point? To conceal the key? Did Desaviatas not think that, as the other Elorii knew where the key was when they were murdered, that they wouldn’t come across that memory again? Or that the memories couldn’t be provoked into returning? It’s entirely possible that Xercel found his brother before the mod starts and dosed him with something that causes him to start uncontrollably flashing back as a pretense to getting his catspaw’s to do his bidding -“do help my poor brother; I have no idea why he’s tripping out.”

And what about Esteverea? She says:
“You have no right to that claim, heretic!,” the Acton snarls. “You rejected our ways, shed your name and took that ridiculous title – Xercel” She practically spat out that last word.”

Why can’t the PC’s interview her? She’s clearly got some insight into his history and a takes the endeavor seriously enough to want to see it’s outcome not be to Xercel’s liking.

I mean, to be candid I’m pretty sure why that option doesn’t exist is because it might suggest choices that don’t exist. The mod only ends one way irregardless of any judge’s particular inclination and most importantly that means that Xercel gets the key in the actual historical sequence of things.

Besides a line or two of Xercel making some appeals to racial solidarity it doesn’t seem like the presence of Eloran PC’s is factored into the module. Besides the cert, which isn’t inconsequential to be sure but isn’t automatically part of the experience, there’s nothing actually involving an Elorii PC in the mod.

For example the parting text is: “From below a voice cuts through the murmur of the crowd, “You have set in motion actions that will have dire consequences for both your people and mine. I pray to the Goddess that the rebel Xercel may yet be stopped.”
“Without another word, the Ardakene turns and stalks away.”

Pardone madam, but I’m playing “one of your people,” -could you perhaps spare a second to un-cryptic your comments so I might glean insight into the “dire consequences?”

The Blessed Lands preview entry for the Elorii has what I think of as a bone tossed to the players: the Eloran Empire kind of wasn’t. Having broken away from servitude at the scales of the Sstherics the Elorii didn’t turn right around and throw the yoke onto the necks of the rest of the continent.
Yay!
Thank you!

I really like the Elorii because I really, really didn’t want to play a human with pointed ears.
I like playing a character who’s background is both lost glory and a society that maybe for once had learned from the mistakes of the empire that both birthed and betrayed it.

Or that they’ve got Ardelia’s prophecy, but seem to lack a post-game for what happens if everything goes as planned. The Elemental Lords come back!…and then what? Do the Elorii pack up their stuff, wave goodbye, and wander back into the forest to sit around blissing out about how great it is the family’s back together?

They’re bent on revenge, but confused about what role to play in the history unfolding around them. They’re in denial about the corruption of the Malfeans and paralyzed by the events of Manetas’s reign -which ends up exterminating them, if history didn’t change. The Laerestri pour in fantastic and bizarre reports about cults and ancient dragons and “oh hey the Il-Huan aren’t dead and that’s bad!” and Ethelios scratches it’s wise head about what to do about it when in 80 years the next budget meeting is scheduled.

One of the key mysteries of the Elorii is how much their identity is ordered around Belisarda compared to how little they know of her. Or what about the Umor? Is He an enemy or ally? Or what if the Elemental Lords aren’t gods?

The Elorii are this compelling mix of wise and naive, and that’s what I like about them.

One of the biggest realizations my Lifewarden had that turned her towards acting for the greater good of all was how good she had it! Holy CRAP the human cities are squalid and crowded and dangerous and their gods are crazy and they fight wars everywhere all the time against everything and everyone!
And she’s got to help out because a) they’re (lesser) Children of Belisarda as well (in her very liberal sense of “they are alive, can feel positive emotions, and can be reasoned with*) and b) they’re terribly potent and if they’re not aided their problems will spiral out of control and become the doom of her people.
Again.

And that means walking a perilous line between what the duties of a Laerestri are, what she has to do to survive, and trying to somehow bend the continuously random and terrifying circumstances of her fate to Belisarda’s will.

(Whatever that is -ask me about the Skinless Lady some time and I can tell you why otherwise sensible, committed players actually gave their PC’s up to do as she bids.)

And that leading to her realizing and embracing how incredibly important to her the random-ass collection of non-Elorii “heroes” that carry her through hell and high water are while the armies of her excellent, beloved kin and cousins sit on their masterfully trained hands and play with their meticulously coiffed hair.

So what the hell does all that mean?

It means that I don’t get it.

Visions of Lives Past is surely something that I’ve been agitating for -an Elorii mod about Elorii history, and I don’t get it.

I don’t get the reasoning behind the apparent social strife of the Eloran Empire. I don’t see why it’s there except as an exercise in really broad cliche’ about biological determinism. Marokene are dumb, Kelekene are jerks, and nobody else is paying attention. wut. Why is this here? Do the Elorii and fans need to be “knocked down a peg?”

I don’t get why there aren’t choices in this mod. Arcanis should always be either dramatic or triumphant and this is neither and I don’t get it. Xercel is a snide, smirky dick and I don’t care about Malandros -your brother, your brother boo-honking-hoo; what is this, Other M!?

Maybe there was more emphasis on Xercel being coercive and I missed it; maybe there should be. That’s the implication in the beginning and the end right? That he’s a Straight G Kelekene Pyromancer and that if there isn’t a Valinor in your pocket you are going to do what he says and smile when you say you like following orders, sir.

I’m interested in the Towers and I’m interested in the Blessed Lands, but from the perspective of an Elorii fan there are already too many questions -how about some answers instead.

Wuh.

Before this Crazy Train finally debarks in T.M.I.-ville I want to tell this last story:
When, so many dear goddess how many, years ago Eric Gorman mentioned that he’d picked up this setting called Arcanis: the World of Shattered Empires at Origins, and that it looked crazy complex and compelling and epic and I instantly, instantly, thought, “I want to play a Paladin! In a world of deadly compromises and dangerous politics I want to be someone who unambiguously struggles for the common good and who will suffer hilariously for that kind of naive ambition.”

And I did. AND IT WAS GREAT!

And now I’m like, “I don’t get it. This guy is a bag of dicks and his brother is a chump and I don’t know what’s going on and I can’t find out and like WOW this mod has 6 combat encounters of which I remember only 2 -the one that starts ‘that’s new’ because it was funny and the really gnarly deadly last one.”

Did I change? Did the campaign change? Is anything actually different or is this something that just eclipses my mediocre middlebrow monkey mentality?

I don’t get it.

Fin.

*by this reasoning so are cats, dogs, messenger lizards and Kio.
Incidentally Phaia’s also known to say “Belisarda loves you, but she loves everything else that lives and thrives just as much. You are not by default more important than the worms that will consume your corpse if you oppose her .”

Zac, when I try to distill things down to their essence I take two big things away from a long post. You have concerns that: (1) the out come of the module is predetermined and (2) what has been exposed about elorii society is either distasteful to you, or doesn’t make sense to you, or both.

(1) The first is easier for me: Yes, as written there is nothing there to support PCs choosing to hide or destroy the key. But its also true that there was really nothing in older mods to leave Villa’Talevorantis chained up…still in that later case nearly half the tables did in fact refuse to free the Dragon in the first run. Henry has said that he was trying to decide what to do with a tie between the outcomes when a last table result came in (with a Tultipetan dwarf no less). They freed the Dragon and thus was Tultipet’s doom sealed… And before that Elebac nearly became an undead creature in the second or third mod of the old campaign because (again) it was up to player initiative to talk him out of choosing undeath to extend his life in search for the perfect weapon. Many tables either accepted the plot hook passively or even thought undeath was cool…

So I reject the idea that the players are essentially railroaded in the module. I do believe that PCs can metaphorically give Xercel the finger … though the price is high in the apparent unraveling of an innocents psyche. My table, after a fierce debate, destroyed the key. We were lucky to have a good judge who was ready to roll with our curve balls. On my copy of the cert from that event the judge wrote: Ire of Xercel…and I’m fine with that. I thought there was a small chance of getting nuked by a tall elorii but also had the thought that if Tukufu was going to die by box text, trying to limit the amount of doomsday weapons floating around Onara was a good way to go. I’ve only run the mod once and I didn’t try to force the players to any decision. If players/characters are afraid of refusing Xercel that’s a reasonable point of view.

(2) The second point is harder for me to write about because I have never had deep thoughts or emotional connections to eloran society. The elorii don’t particularly call out to me as a player. But I would note that the number of alleged utopias to actual utopias is not 1:1 in Arcanis. Maybe you noticed. In the age when mankind lived together with the Gods of the PoM there was war between the Gods. In the Golden Age of the First Imperium we know of lots of bad things that happened…and we can add the Blood War to the growing list. Almeric might have managed a “happily ever after” at the conclusion of the last campaign arc, but its now the biggest mess in the known lands. Even in Bastion there were undercurrents of discontent. So no, I’m not shocked that a veil is slightly lifted to show that at times elorii politics is as venal and ruthless as human politics. I don’t know why elorii players would be surprised by this unless they subscribe to the idea that the elorii are “the most special snowflakes” in Arcanis. Every other race and people struggle with internal divisions and villians in their own ranks.

Establishing some level of Intra-eloran conflict is also probably thematic. I suspect Henry has an opinion on people whitewashing their history that comes out as an influence on his writing. But even if that is wildly wrong, on a meta level it is also just good planning to embed conflict in “history.” Its out of conflict that adventures arise. And a campaign is built out of adventures. To have elorii based adventures there have to be elorii based conflicts. I will conclude by repeating that we really are vastly ignorant of what’s going on at the elorii “grown ups” table. We’ve only sat at the kids table. When we’ve had a seat at all. Maybe they are all saintly. Maybe the Voiceless Ones have taken over when no one was looking. We just don’t know. Hopefully more will be unfurled in the nearish future.

Thanks for replying.

The Vault:

A) YES. That we have no grasp on what Eloran society right now is constitutes part of the problem. There’s no baseline for a comparison, just optimistic guesses.
I don’t see this as being entirely negative, buy IMO it’s cause to drop those Other Shoes gently because they’ll be landing on people from a great height.
Like this tortured metaphor.
A good example? Seremas. We’ve all been there. I own Eldest Sons.
Can I tell you anything about it besides that it’s divided?
Not really.
By comparison I can your Nishampur is a city of shadows and whispers, where paranoia and lies are the blood and air of it’s populace. I can tell you it has The Bone Quarter who’s inhabitants are so destitute they’re sometimes mistaken for some of the mindless risen dead that shamble around the place. I can tell you about the vast friezes of demons and gargoyles that occasionally shift and slide and take wing. I can tell you that’s it’s a place who’s walls are watched by marksmen looking for an excuse to perforate an intruder and who’s streets were patrolled by frustrated Nierites and demons that can smell metal.
Demons, albeit small sludgey ones, also dispose of the garbage. And the beggars.
And there’s a lake of blood.
I can tell you, and I haven’t reviewed this image since the last time it was featured in boxed text, about how the Church of the Dark Apostate features a massive frieze that depicts devils and skeletons dancing in roaring fires as a tribute to the Dark Triumvirate.
I can tell you that the rules of the Mark of Sarish involve it being negated by striking a priest, and that all Val are considered priests in the City of Secrets.
I could go on about Palic Val’Mehen‘s last moments when he decided the answer to all his problems was to put on Hegrish’s Crown and how that was the last thing he ever did.
I could ramble about it’s population who appear equal parts terrified and cowed but who live inner lives of surprising hope and genuine piety.

I could go on in similar detail about Grand Coryan, about the market and back streets and the boisterous, worldly shrewd Coryani and about the etiquette of togas and the Legionaires struggling to find work and the gangs lurking around the corners and how Coryan doesn’t have a police force but does at least have a fire department -the Vigilus, if memory serves.
And the misery of the Myrantians, and the gore and glory of the arenas and on and on.

I don’t begrudge the Coryani being so familiar, they’re that important. This is basically their campaign.

But seriously. I know f!ck all about the Elorii by comparison –especially in character.

Also re: the first point I recall some of the Campaign staff expressing surprise that a few Eloran players losing their characters by deciding to side with The Skinless Lady when she appeared.
I’m not.
Remember those Malfean log books discussing her appearance and how their were doubts about the truths of her claims?
Those almost perfectly echo’d some of the players, because nobody knew anything!

The idea that Belisarda had come back but had been terribly maimed by the Umor, or darker things, and was shunned by the other nations for so poorly fitting their preconceptions fits Arcanis’s kind of narratives just fine.
It set up a powerful, discordant moral dilemma and anchored with a brutally perverse possibility.
So that someone would feed their Hero to that idea is hardly unforseeable -I know at least two hardcore, long-term Arcanis players who gave up their played-from-year-1-heroes to free King Nowen.

That’s what this campaign does.

Interestingly the Skinless Lady event makes for an interesting exploration of Faith in RPG’ing for being an event that was simultaneously nightmarishly awful AND plausibly true.
After all real Faith is doing what your higher power commands, even if it looks abominable on the surface.

And again, that’s what Arcanis does. That’s why I love it.

Here’s my last note on the confusion of playing an Eloran character.
This is a cert from Stream of Consciousness.
Visit to Elonbe`
Elorii Benefit:
“You have answered the call of Hanalathir of the Laerestri and the Council of Elders of Elonbe. This gives you a certain measure of prestige, for you would not have been called without the approval and recommendation of your superiors.”
“Although you cannot speak of what you know to outsiders, there are plenty of groups and individuals within your own people who would love to discuss your recent exploits deep within the Vastwood.”
I’m going to excise the bit about the mechanical benefits for brevity, and make this point:
the player still knows nothing about Elonbe.

Apparently “What Happens In Elonbe Stays In Elonbe” because I partied so hard I don’t even remember a single syllable describing the city or it’s people.

When I first got that cert I thought I was being mocked. “I’ve just been given a ‘you’ve been a tourist’ cert to a place I’d been hoping to get a breath of for years? Is this actually happening?”

I have spent more time in Haina, in effin’ Metra, then had anything said about what at the time was what, the 3rd most popular player race in the L.A. campaign -Val, Dark-Kin, Elorii?

B) Like the rest of Arcanis.
Here we go, full stop: WHY?
I’m a big fan of ideas like Evolutionary Psychology (wherein evolutionary survival imperatives inform individual behavior) and I don’t see that applying here because the Elorii didn’t evolve.
The Elorii don’t have a divided pantheon.
They don’t have an empire.
They don’t have subjects -even when there were Gar tribes (pre-retcon) within the Vastwood they were mostly left alone out of respect for their role in the uprising against the Sstherics.

What in all this mandates that they should be like the human nations?

It’s not just that I’m playing favorites, because I am, but I’m not seeing the logic.

C) Xercel.
When challenged by whatsername he says that she cannot oppose him despite Xercel acknowledging that he has no legal right to invoke the customs of a society he apparently left.
Nothing about that says, “nice guy” to me.
That says, “screw off or I’ll atomize you and mix your ashes up with my tea.”

“While the other Elorii in the module are aloof, and condescending.”
Why?
No, really: why?
They get less then a total paragraph of text in the entire module and can provide no information –can provide no information, to the players.
There’s no intent there. There’s a hole, a nothing.
Way too late to matter it occurred to me in my last text spooge to wonder why there’s no chance to interview any of them.
I dispute that answer is, “because they’re haughty” when it’s patently “because the author saw fit not to provide any.”
Haughty also fails when, say, the attempting interrogator is A DIVINE SERVANT OF BELISARDA.
Yes, maybe they’re haughty and don’t want to talk to the humans -but I gotta argue that there would logically be an exemption FOR AN ELORII PRIEST/ESS OF THEIR CENTRAL DEITY.

That is one of the things that bothered me when I ran the mod: there’s nothing in it that actually addresses an Eloran characters besides a single sentence that amounts “help a fella out, yeah mate?”

D) An Intro mod.
And here’s the root of it.
I’m not onboard.
I played So Shall Ye Reap, and I got into that quick enough because the meaning and the mission looked clear from the outset.
Visions of Lives Past involves giving an immortal bully the keys to what was Area 51 with zero explanation and no options.
There’s no way there couldn’t have been other ways around it. If the PC’s decide not to give the key up another Elorii introduces him/herself and says they’ve got suspicions about Xercel -the renegade btw, and his motives. Give them the key and they’ll see to it you get out safe.
Or a Secret Society mission.
Yeah, Reap kinda botched that by letting the SS PC sabotage the entire mod midway through but for Visions having them ordered to argue the key’s fate decided one way or another is absolutely Arcanis 101.

Val’Holryn:
1) Here’s what I was first told, in person, many years ago by LA campaign staff about the confusing lack of identity built into playing Elorii -“make it up for yourself.”
Well, I did that.
And here we are.
So, no.
The Arcanis team are better storytellers then I am, and with that talent comes the burden of forging the superior plot.
And secondly, there is also jack-squat-all about what Xercel does if the PC’s snub him. Given what we know about Elder Elorii, and particularly Kelekene, AND what Xercel did in his previous mods if the PC’s failed him, “offer to shake their hands and wish them well for their efforts” REALLY does not seem like the answer!
Remember “Stupidity Leads to Character Creation”?
I’m gonna file “f!cking with an Elder Elorii Pyromancer” under stupid and could not IMAGINE that there wouldn’t be consequences as light as a disfavor.

Go stand in front of a mirror, look yourself in the eye, and try to take seriously the idea that the same ball of fire and ire that sends the PC’s to retrieve the key to the most dangerous storehouse in the Known Lands would be mellow with them betraying him.
G’wan. I’ll wait here.

2a) Except there is still no basis for comparison -imagine only hearing the worst news about your culture,
and
2b) this setting is about Coryan.
All the other human nations are satellites of Coryan.
All the plots are about or involve Coryan.
There’s a good twenty pages of text dedicated to the fortunes of the royal families of Milandir and Coryan heading up the new edition.
Arcanis is the World of Shattered Empires, and mostly that’s Coryan.

Cool. I’m hip. Been here for the whooooole trip.

“that at times elorii politics is as venal and ruthless as human politics.”
Yeah, I remember the question of whether the Seremasi were using a secret police unit that disguised itself as Malfean infiltrators to shift the blame for assassinations it was performing.

But here’s the bottom line for me.
We should talk politics some time -rather, you and I already do but in this case everybody is figuratively invited.
It’s a fustercluck, to be polite. Jeltor and I could spell it out with a little prep and a few hours of everybody’s time.
And it’s all about being human. There isn’t any other excuse.

I am a human. I will be a human ’til the last of my DNA has finally broken down into plain ol’ dirt.
I have done a lot of human things in a lot of human places with/to a lot of human people.
I’m not going to get real confessional here, don’t worry. But you already know some of it.
And I’ve got a pretty good grasp on the whole “human experience.”

And I categorically refuse, unwaveringly oppose, to meekly accept that in a totally alien species set in an entirely fictional place shaped by wholly impossible events involving another kind of sapients the core explanation for why, over millenia of practice and progress -and having some portion of everything the fricking Sstherics-the First Real Empire, have had to say about politics and philosophy, lacking most apparent scarcities and cause for religious schisms, the answer is hey, people just suck.

No.

…

Hell, alternately the other answer is “yes, special snowflakes.”
“That’s always kind of been the Elf archetype idea. You’re effectively post-scarcity and well-ordered, but your plot armor has worn off and now the young races, crude yet vibrant as they are, run everything. Your time has passed, at this point all you truly can hope to achieve is staving off your inevitable extinction.”
“Even the Elorii adhere to this last trope because only the Malfeans are so delusional as to think that there’s some kind of victory possible that could bring back the old days; everyone else apparently just hopes to hold hands and sing ‘Kum-by-yah’ with the returned Elemental Lords until the Sun finally dies in the sky.”
“Humans get the other 95% of the setting. You get all the Paths and all the fluff and all the cities and all the nations and all the Secret Societies and all the Valinor and the Kio and Naori and Undir and Australians and every other playable PC option except the Sstherics.”

“Me? I get two things:”
“The first is to have a feeble slap-fight with the Sstherics about some mostly irrelevant history.”
“The other is not to play a goddamn human.”

“That’s all.”

The end.