The Harvest Moon Consortium

[Izk The Mad]

[quote=chaos_theocrat;12062]Sorry for the accidental closing of this thread (I'm still not sure how it was that happened, but it probably had something to do with me going over it in the middle of the night after being awake for two days straight. Lol.), and I'm posting this to announce it's official re-opening. It's amazing how with a little sleep... you can think a whole lot more clearly. :thumb: - Cheers![/quote]

That sounds like me last time I was on these forums. It is amazing what a little sleep can do.

We (I) need this thread for some off-topic discussions of influences and ideas, I think. In fact, I feel one coming on right now... Tonight, for the second time, I watched the final episode of something that I've become a huge fan of over the last few years, and I'm still in awe. It's called "Avatar: The Last Airbender". Imagine a tv show with the philosophy and moral sensibility of the old "Kung Fu" series, combined with a witty and sometimes silly sense of humor a little bit like "The Simpsons", and an epic magical world on the scale of "The Lord Of The Rings". It's actually a kid's cartoon on Nickelodeon, but it's more intelligent than most of the adult dramas I've seen. It contains a lot of classic themes, like reincarnation, and the mythological hero's journey (Joseph Campbell, anyone?), all with a well fleshed out asian fantasy style to it. It even has great music. Some of the concepts are surprisingly mature and dark, but are handled quite well.

One of the many moments in this series that really impressed me was a journey into the Spirit World, where the main character encountered a being known as "The Facestealer". It was a large and demonic looking black centipede-like entity who once stole the face of the main character's true love in one of his past lives. It's face would change to the various ones it had stolen as it spoke, including a baboon. Very creepy, almost like something from Clive Barker. Another classic was when the hero and friends encounter and travel with a band of wandering minstrels, who were in essence a bunch of stoned and absent-minded hippies. Funny as hell.

I think a lot of American tv these days insults the intelligence of kids, as well as adults. As an artist who grew up watching all kinds of cartoons, it always amazes me how stuff like this is overlooked in mainstream American society, and I just wanted to give it an honorable mention here. I think there are a lot of intelligent themes in it that other members of this community might really enjoy, so check it out sometime.

I even just got a skybox idea thinking about something from it. Hmm...

[chaos_theocrat]

That's something that you should mention "Kung Fu". I used to watch the show "Kung Fu: The Legend Continues" and it was a good mix of drama, action, and philosophy. The movie Circle of Iron was awesome, too. If you liked Kung Fu, you'd definitely enjoy Circle of Iron. The plot was created in part by Bruce Lee, also. Very deep and mystical, as well as full of action!

I've recently been replaying a lot of old games from the DOS and Apple II days. Great fun, even after all these years! Two games spring right to mind when I think of overlooked philosophy: Moebius and Windwalker. I've played both of them through to the end and was amazed to notice that, way back when those were made, they were paving the way for games like Jade Empire by combining action, role playing, and Oriental philosophy.

In Moebius, you had to train as a disciple of the martial arts mystic named Moebius, and search the planes of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire for the Orb of Celestial Harmony while seeking to defeat an evil warlord as well. While old in terms of graphics, it was on par with games like Ultima in depth.

Windwalker had less combat and more mysticism. Tantric dances, spirit exorcisms, astral travel, you name it. The quest was to defeat another warlord and his chief alchemist to free the Emperor. An interesting little bit about the game world, Khantun, is that it was mentioned in passing in one or two of the classic Ultima games as well. Windwalker was more fun than Moebius, though both games are good. Taken together, they present one heck of a saga. A lot of elements from actual Oriental myth and religion were present, like the legendary panda god who guards the peach of immortality. One of the quests was to fetch the peach from his island.

I remember playing Windwalker for the first time when I was a teenager, and taking out a book on Oriental mythology from the local library just to gain a more proper understanding of what was actually going on in it. It's something when a computer game actually imparts a desire to study upon the player. Today, you don't see that kind of depth too often. Now, it's funny also that you should mention Clive Barker, chiefly because...

I have both of the games he made: Undying, for the PC, and Jericho, for the XBOX 360. All I can say is: those games ROCK! Undying painted a grim and creepy kind of Celtic legend background where an evil king was buried thousands of years ago and is now trying to return, bringing a family in Ireland to madness and death in the process. Very Lovecraftian, really.
Jericho delved into Gnostic and Sumerian myths and legends for it's story, about the return of God's first creation (which was corrupt and evil) and how ancient Sumerian warrior-priests tried to keep the creature locked away until the present day when a sqaud of paranormal soldiers with different supernatural abilities had to defeat the "Firstborn" once again.
Several actual Sumerian gods and goddesses had to be fought in it too, including Ereshkigal the goddess of Death. All in all, a very intense game that even featured time travel to Roman times, a Templar stronghold in the Middle Ages, and a bloody battlefield during the Second World War. Clive Barker certainly spares no expense in those games! True classics.
Of course, I'm a huge Clive Barker fan. My favorites of his movies have to be Hellraiser, Hellraiser 2, Nightbreed, and Lord of Illusions. His books are good, too. Recently, I finished reading his Books of Blood, which had a lot of excellent short stories in them. I also read a book of plays he wrote way back, though, but they were *very* poor. One was about people fighting over some chocolate seeds brought over to Europe by Spanish explorers with a subplot involving a woman posing as the pope, and a clown who kept saying "poor fish". I think it was called "Crazyface". Another was even worse: it was about the guy who wrote "The Owl and the Pussycat" taking a cruise on a ship where a drunken conga line shows up once in a while, and disappears just as quickly. Something rather dreadful to do with a Gorilla, too. Truly, Clive Barker is way better at writing horror, than those aweful plays!

But, without getting too much off-topic I'll conclude by saying that I do believe that one of the influences behind my making Knights of the Holy Grail so heavy with myth, legend, religion, and philosophy was playing a lot of games over the years that themselves were full of such interesting and diverse subject matters. Such games are made to fire one's imagination.

[Izk The Mad]

Circle of Iron! Now there's a forgotten classic. I'll have to see if that ever came out on DVD now... (Yes!)

The original Kung Fu blew away the later series, in my opinion, BTW. I did watch "The Legend Continues", but it just felt a little campy. In the original, Cain's mysticism and philosophy had more of a seriousness and contrast against the old west setting, and I think the writing was much deeper. More like Circle of Iron.

I have to agree about the great games inspiring the imagination, especially when the subject matter really makes you think, or puts a different perspective on things. I try to explain to non-gamers that a good game is like a good book or movie, except you're in control of the story, to some extent. The best games elicit an emotional response, as well. KoToR got me a few times, like the choice you have to make when you're playing the dark side. After playing through once on the light side, that betrayal of friends had so much more meaning, too. There have been others, but that KoToR moment has stuck with me. Unfortunately, NWN has never really had those moments for me yet, so I'm trying to make my own.

As for Mr Barker, I've only seen his movies, and the first two Hellraiser movies are classics. Jericho looks very promising, and after your description I'm even more intrigued. I've always been a fan of the Silent Hill games, and there's some similarities to his work in them, as well as some Lovecraft-ish elements. They got under my skin, and I've spent many a late night wandering around those abandoned, nightmarish towns. Good fun.

As usual, I see I'm rambling off topic, so I'll stop here. Hehe! But I guess I was right about needing a place for off-topic things. Circle of Iron really is a lost favorite of mine, and I'm glad you mentioned it. I haven't seen that in many years. I see Amazon has the special edition DVD of it too. :thumb:

[Izk The Mad]

I had to share these pics with Mr Theocrat.

After dabbling recently with some of "The Fountain" stills I have for skybox ideas, I decided to try and make an actual area of it instead, using Chandigar's Aztec Exteriors:

[IMG]http://www.rpgmodding.com/forums/pictur ... tureid=260[/IMG]

This area is tall -five flights of mountain stairs, two levels of raised paver, and a temple on top. All this time, I had no idea you could build mountains with the jungle tree terrain! I also found a new favorite placeable, the TNO cliff ends in CEP 2.1. They completely block movement, even if recessed into the ground. I really need to find a better tree for this, though. I'm currently using several of the new 1.69 trees placed together, and they seem to be high-poly count, or something. Just opening them in the toolset seems to have some lag. Add to that the placeable water animations, and the framerate really drops in this area when standing at the temple.

I plan on making more of these temples, based on different trees, including a "Tree of Woe". They'll be kind of like the forges in Blood Omen: LoK, in that the player will be able to power up a certain magic item with new abilities if they find these hidden temples.

I also decided to make an Angkor inspired area I've been wanting to make for a while. I had always kinda hoped I could talk Chandigar or somebody into making an Angkor tileset someday. While it would've been cool, especially if he made it, I realize what a massive undertaking it would be, and we all have our own projects we want to make or have made. So I finally made the area with his Aztec set, and even made some re-textured "aztec" placeables to dress it up and create "towers":

[IMG]http://www.rpgmodding.com/forums/pictur ... tureid=259[/IMG]

On a skybox note, this area is huge, and when I first built it and tested in-game, the skybox was smaller than the area, and you could walk through the edge. Now it's okay. Weird.

Anyway, I had to share my latest creations/distractions.

[chaos_theocrat]

Amazingly, prior to my work on my City of Londra prefab, I was myself in the process of working with the Aztec Redux set! I had considered, for a time, doing a remake of the old Apple II game "Empire of the Overmind" using the Aztec sets... but eventually the project got a little too big for it's breeches so I moved on to the projects that I finished up and released recently. What I had built for the cancelled project, was quite good stuff!

The first part consisted of a jungle level with a lot of raised terrain here and there, with paths going up and down, to simulate climbing through the trees and vegetation. Past that, was a field with a herd of grazing roths. The player had to acquire a serpent staff in the jungle that would summon a serpent to scare the roths, allowing passage into the mountains via a trail the roths were blocking. In the mountains, you had to hitch a ride on a flying steed to get to the second half of the game, where things got a lot more open-ended. The second half featured exploring mines and trying to find a way into the dungeons beneath an ancient castle built with the Aztec buildings. Solving all the quests in that part of the game would give the player access to another world (literally) where even more adventure awaited. I got the first world finished, but the second world was where I realized I was in way over my head so that's where it ended and I moved on to other things. In the castle garden, I had one part where the player had to get the last seed from the "Tree of Life", which eventually played an important role later on the storyline. Likely, I was very inspired by "The Fountain" when I added that plot device. In the PC version of Empire of the Overmind, the tree was just an apple tree you had to get an apple from. Eating the apple got the player a seed that I never did find a use for in the game. Hence why, in my attempted remake, I totally reworked the storyline to be more mythical and interesting. What it was that, I think, had reminded me of that segment for a bried moment, was your own "The Fountain"-inspired scene. I must say, the Aztec Redux is a beautiful set!

Speaking of the Aztecs, the addition of skulls into the architecture in your other scene there actually has historical accuracy... since the Aztecs did, to some extent, feature death and sacrifice as art motifs although not on so massive a scale as that. I helped a friend of mine with a school project involving the Meso-American cultures about five or six years ago, so back then I studied extensively about them... although I had an interest in the subject since I was a child. I remember watching documentaries on the Aztecs on PBS when I was like five years old, and wondering about their lost civilization. Recently, I watched Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, and I came to the conclusion that he had the Mayans confused with the Aztecs in his story. The Mayans in his movie had the heart-removal sacrifice, while that was an Aztec tradition. The Mayans usually clubbed or bludgeoned their sacrificial victims, which the Incas also did except that the Incas buried the victims in caves up high on cliffs, or in the mountains, besides. The city of Machu Pichu being built up high in the mountains was another motif in Meso-America. Since the gods "lived in the sky", the people who lived up higher lived closer to the gods, in their philosophy. The Aztec Pyramids often represented the "Mountain of the Gods", or in some religious cases the "World Mountain"... similar to Viking belief in the "World Tree" or "World Ash". A place that was the center of their cosmos. I am amazed how in fact there is even a tradition among certain Meso-American tribes and cultures where the people are descended from a "tribe who came from across the sea", and one text I read mentioned a name for the homeland of those ancestors that sounded a lot like Atlantis. So, it is even a very likely possibility that some Meso-American ancient civilizations may have been descended from people who left Atlantis! Which, for me, just makes the subject all the more fascinating still. Hey, who knew this would get educational? :rolleyes: Ah well, it couldn't be helped... since I'm something of a scholar on occasion, or so I've been told! Time to say "farewell for now".

[Izk The Mad]

[quote=chaos_theocrat;12535]...the addition of skulls into the architecture in your other scene there actually has historical accuracy...[/quote]

That's why I did it, and the Mayans used the skull motif, too, though not to the extent that the Aztecs did. The Aztecs actually adorned whole walls with carvings to look like stacked skulls. I was really going for that big rounded tower with faces that Angkor Wat has at its corners, and the skulls fit in perfectly, especially w/the Aztec tileset!

[quote=chaos_theocrat;12535]Hey, who knew this would get educational? :rolleyes: Ah well, it couldn't be helped... since I'm something of a scholar on occasion, or so I've been told![/quote]

Hehe, I'm going to have to start calling you Professor Theocrat, although Professor Chaos has a better ring to it. Is there going to be a test afterwards?

I enjoyed reading your post, and while I tend to forget a lot of the details I've learned over the years, I should mention that I'm an avid "armchair" archaeology buff myself, and at one point back in my school days, I was going to major in Art History and ancient cultures. My bookshelves are stuffed with books on the Mayans and Aztecs, as well as other cultures. While I think the Mayans may have used a heart sacrifice at some point (later on, in more desperate times?), what always amazed me was their willingness to use their own blood in rituals. The men used to do some rather painful sounding things involving stingray barbs, for example. Try not to think about it too much (keyword=men). Ouch!

And don't get me started on Atlantis, or other similar theories. Personally, I love those ideas. The ancient peoples of this world were far from primitive, and some, like the Mayans, or the Egyptians or Chinese, were capable of things we're only just now learning for ourselves (or re-learning, I suppose). The Mayans were especially gifted at Mathematics and Astronomy, and one has to wonder how all that came about, especially considering most of their North American neighbors were living in bark huts and teepees. I'd have to say there's some big pieces of the puzzle missing. I've even read theories about the Mayans having something to do with the lost tribes of Israel, and there are parallels to the story of Adam and Eve and the Great Flood in their mythology, IIRC.

More importantly, on an unrelated note, I have to mention a movie I watched last weekend, "The Call of Cthulhu", a black and white silent film made way back in... 2005! It felt like an actual old silent movie, like Nosferatu or something, and was completely true to the story. I was very impressed. It's the first Lovecraft inspired film I've seen that didn't take liberties with the source material, and as heavily worded as his stories are, it was interesting to see it all told through just the acting and the brief captions. Well worth seeing, IMO, and only 47 minutes long! Also, I found this link: Cthulhu for President T-shirt while on that IMDB site for the movie. I may have to buy that, especially being election season!

Well that's enough history and Cthuhu for now, I guess. See ya!

[chaos_theocrat]

Recently, my revisiting of the classic Ultima games gave me some new and interesting ideas for Nwn. I've made a re-creation of Killorn Keep from the game Ultima Underworld 2: Labyrinth of Worlds, and will be posting that to the Vault when I've finished touching things up with it. Rather than being a reimagining of the place, it's a straight-up port that should be quite the popular prefab amongst the many Ultima fans in the Nwn community. I had actually built the prefab while playing that level of the game, so it's spot on, save where differences in the game engines required some creativity.

I have always found the places in the Ultima games to be as fascinating as the characters that inhabit them. In Ultima, unlike games such as Final Fantasy, it's the same world or universe that is evolving and changing as the games go on in the series. In the Ultima games from Akalabeth up to Ultima 3, it's a more dark and chaotic world, while Ultima 4 through 6 is a kind of golden age, with Ultima 7 through 9 representing the decline of a civilization and it's efforts to rebuild itself following that decline. I like how in Ultima Underworld 2, you get to hop around the Ultima Multiverse and see what other worlds in that setting are like. For me, Killorn Keep was one of my favorite levels because it was, essentially an "evil" version of Lord British's Castle. One thing I'm only just learning from replaying these old games again now, is that the Kilrathi from Wing Commander are a part of the Ultima series as well. How I discovered this was fairly interesting...

I was playing Ultima Underworld 2, and in Killorn Keep there were all these cat creatures the inhabitants kept for pets. The names of these creatures were "Trilkhai" , which was over my head when I was a kid but now I see it to be a mixed-up variant of "Kilrathi". Which, naturally, I took to be just a coincidence... until I met a character later on in the game who told the history of the Trilkhai, and how they once were an anthropomorphic feline race who traveled the stars and fought against humans. When finally the humans defeated these creatures, they de-evolved into the Trilkhai over time as they fell into decline. Then, I read in the official Ultima chronology that in the time of Ultima 1, the evil wizard Mondain recruited aid from a race of savage, starfaring creatues. The final piece of evidence to prove that the Trilkhai were indeed the Kilrathi, was that in Ultima 7, a crashed Kilrathi spacecraft could be found. Proof that, at some point in Ultima's history, humans fought the Kilrathi just as they did in Wing Commander. I realized that this battle was a reference to the space battles in Ultima 1, where you had to fight Mondain's starfaring allies which I now realize were the Kilrathi. And that is just one example of the kind of depth Ultima has.

I think Origin based their Wing Commander franchise a little bit on the ideas pioneered in Ultima 1's space battle sequences, since Ultima 1 was done first and Wing Commander was created much, much later on.

The notion of Mondain's space allies being the Kilrathai, I believe, was a result of two things: the developers wanted to give those allies more of an identity, after Wing Commander came out, and decided to include both the crashed ship in Ultima 7 and the Trilkhai in Ultima Underworld 2 as a means of working the Kilrathi into the Ultima universe as those creatures.
Plus... they could be always looked at as Easter Eggs, if nothing deeper.
Which, in my opinion, was a brilliant strategy, since the Kilrathi were an already-recognizable race of creatures to fans of Origin's space games.

I always thought that Origin had brilliant story ideas, far better and more mature than other games that game out when they were first made. One could only imagine, if Electronic Arts had of done Ultima Online as a single-player, offline game using the exact storyline from the UO expansion pack "Lord Blackthorn's Revenge", adapted as a possible Ultima 10, using just Ultima Online's engine, nothing 3D, it would have been far more popular with the die-hard fans of the classic Ultima games. Now, the Blackthorn storyline is all but forgotten since they ran it once in the Multiplayer game and then it was over. For the curious, this is a synopsis of that storyline:

Lord Blackthorn was re-constructed as a cyborg by the evil Exodus, the half-demon, half-machine spawn of Mondain and his apprentice Minax. This Exodus is not the one that was destroyed in Ultima 3, but rather it comes from an alternate dimension where he was never defeated but instead took over Britannia, prompting a resistance movement against him. His allies, the Juka, came to UO's Sosaria with him in an attempt to take it over like he did his own Sosaria. Blackthorn's transformation was Exodus' first step towards doing so. To make himself untouchable, Exodus set up his base in the parallel plane known as Ilshenar, and used that as a his launching point for incursions into UO's Sosaria. Eventually, as the story went on, Blackthorn recruited allies for Exodus called Betrayers, who in turn were made into Cyborgs like Blackthorn. The idea behind this whole setup was that players had to go to Ilshenar, fight against Blackthorn and the Betrayers, and then make their way to Exodus' lair to destroy him. The Juka served as the footsoldiers in Exodus' army, which also consisted of battle machines and golems. The Juka's sworn enemies, the Meer, served as allies to the people of UO's Sosaria against Exodus. A very cool setup!

The problem was, that in UO, they never fully took the storyline through to it's conclusion. When Blackthorn was destroyed, that was it. The event was said to be ended... and they went on to develop Age of Shadows, a totally unrelated expansion instead. They even had an Exodus creature that is in the game's code for the players to battle, but he himself never made an actual appearance except in the backstory. So players never had the option of carrying the battle to Exodus as originally envisioned. Had it been an offline, cardinal Ultima game, this would have been developed to it's proper conclusion. That, in my honest opinion, is the problem with UO: they come up with amazing ideas for the game, then they scrap those ideas after players just start getting into them. The expansion pack known as Samurai Empire detailed one of the lost continents of Ultima 1, but no detailed plot behind it was ever worked out save for a very basic outline of a story that seemed to hint at a Sosaria in search of a new ruler after Lord British and Lord Blackthorn were gone. What that had to do with the overall idea of Samurai Empire, no one may ever know since that too was dropped when they came out with Mondain's Legacy, an expansion pack whose only purpose was to add Elves into UO, a race that hadn't been heard from since Ultima 3, if I remember correctly. Here is what I think: instead of using those storylines as "events" for UO, they should have used them for single-player Ultima games that continue after Ultima 9.

Firstly, instead of taking place in UO's "Alternate Sosaria" as UO does, they could have made direct sequels actually set in good old Britannia.
Consider how that story would have gone! Each game could have used the UO engine as a single-player game instead of a MMORPG like they did:

1. "Ultima 10: Lord Blackthorn's Revenge" Where players put an end to the reborn Blackthorn and the alternate-dimension Exodus. This would have to be a tribute to Ultima 3, and so they could have worked the Elves into it.
Since Blackthorn actually died in Ultima 9... this, would have made sense.

2. "Ultima 11: The Samurai Empire" Imagine exploring a continent unheard of since Ultima 1, like in Serpent Isle, but an oriental setting with Samurai and Ninja. And a backstory about going there in search of a new ruler for Britannia with Lord British and Blackthorn gone. The word for that, is epic!

3. "Worlds of Ultima: Age of Shadows" Which could have turned the whole Age of Shadows concept into an epic game where players have to make peace between the Paladins of Luna and the Necromancers of Umbra, in the end going into Dungeon Doom to defeat the evil Dark Father there. I liked the idea as they did it in UO, but it was flat and never fleshed out.
This all takes place in the world known as Malas, set in the Ethereal Void.
The reason for going to Malas could have been: Britannia's new ruler faces attacks from the Dark Father, who seeks to dominate Briannia from Malas. The player must journey there to stop him, as they once stopped Exodus.
Malas is in the throes of it's own Dark Age... like Sosaria, during Ultima 1.

4. "Ultima 12: Mondain's Legacy" This could have ended the entire Ultima series as it began... in a way. The game could begin, with people nearly having forgotten the Avatar, and the Codex being lost to time, while the new ruler of Britannia struggles to find a way for the people to remember the Virtues after so many years. Rather than just being the introduction of Elves, how cool would it have been to fight a Mondain who had returned to life! This time, no Avatar is around to Save Britannia, and it's new ruler needs a new hero to vanquish Mondain one final time. One way Mondain's return could have come about is this: in Ultima 9, the Guardian lied to the Avatar about being his evil half, just to get the Avatar to cast the deadly spell Armageddon. The Guardian is, at last, revealed to have been an evil deity that Mondain once worshipped who used the energies of his and the Avatar's deaths to resurrect Mondain from the dead. This could be said to have happened at the end of Ultima 9, and all this time Mondain has been biding his time and waiting to strike. The player fights him and so destroys him, and with no Guardian to save Mondain this time... that is the end for Mondain. Britannia's new ruler declares the player as the new Avatar, and thus begins the entire cycle anew. Part of the plot could have revolved around recovering the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, which Mondain has and is trying to pervert into a Codex of Ultimate Evil, as he did with his Gem of Immortality in Ultima 1. Hence, the player reaching Avatarhood by at last recovering the Codex, like in Ultima 4, from Mondain's new stronghold: the Stygian Abyss. Sad, isn't it, that the developers didn't think of all of this?
Best of all, everything would have remained true to Ultima the way that Richard Garriott created it: as an immersive single-player RPG experience!

I remember an old trailer for Ultima 9 that showed the hands of a clock, counting the hours up to 9. But a clock has 12 hours, so if each game is an hour in the history of Britannia, it would have made sense to take it all the way to the 12th and final hour. This final Ultima trilogy (10, 11, 12) could have been called "The Age of Redemption", since this would be the rebirth of Briannia after the events of the "Age of Armageddon" during Ultima 7, 8, and 9, with the clock poised to start anew. All very fitting, when you think about the way Ultima's storylines followed their themes.
Think how fulfilling and satisfying this would have looked as a timline...

"The Age of Akalabeth":
Ultima 0: Akalabeth
Ultima: Escape from Mount Drash

"The Age of Darkness":
Ultima 1: The First Age of Darkness
Ultima 2: Revenge of the Enchantress
Ultima 3: Exodus

"The Age of Enlightenment":
Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar
Ultima 5: Warriors of Destiny
Ultima 6: The False Propther
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss

"The Age of Armageddon":
Ultima 7: The Black Gate and Serpent Isle
Ultima Underworld 2: Labyrinth of Worlds
Ultima 8: Pagan
Ultima 9: Ascension

"The Age of Redemption":
Ultima 10: Lord Blackthorn's Revenge
Ultima 11: The Samurai Empire
Ultima 12: Mondain's Legacy

"Worlds of Ultima":
The Savage Empire
Martian Dreams
Age of Shadows

Notice how each "Age" of Ultima uses a specific type of engine for it's game. "Age of Akalabeth" was the most primitive, with wireframe black and white dungeons, and little or no color in the games that came out then.
"Age of Darkness" saw a revamp of the engine to accomodate the color overhead game worlds, while the dungeons were still wireframe and B&W.
"Age of Enlightenment" saw the transition from Ultima 1's engine to the engine used by Ultima 6, Savage Empire, and Martian Dreams. Then, the "Age of Armageddon" saw the shift from overhead into full 3D. In what I think should have happened next, they could have used UO's engine to create create the "Age of Redemption" games. Then, they could have waited until the whole single-player saga was over to create UO as an online MMORPG for those who want to take Ultima to that level. What has this to do with Nwn? you may well ask. Given the Nwn community's rising interest in the classic Ultimas, and Ultima remakes, it got me thinking about how different the history of the series could have been, had they thought more about what they were doing... and less about how much money they could make with online subscriptions once EA bought Origin.

Well, that's my current thoughts on things for tonight. In answer to more relevent things... while I am a big fan of Lovecraft, I never cared much for Silent Movies. I saw Metropolis years ago, and found it irritating having all the text screens popping up in between the action. I am sure in the old days of early cinema, this was quite an achievement, but personally, I do much prefer the Anime version of Metropolis any day. Of course, this is a matter of purely personal preference... and is not meant in any way as a slight to those who enjoy Silent Movies. They just aren't for me is all. I do think, in that way, I am a creature of the modern age, as the saying goes.
Ironically, my grandparents never liked Silent Movies either, and they were from that era. So, I suppose it isn't just a modern thing. It is a matter of different tastes. Like some folks prefer games from certain eras, such as the 80's, and others enjoy better the kind of games made in the 90's, or the kind of games made today. In that regard, I like games from all kinds of different eras. One day, I can play games like Akalabeth while another day I can enjoy playing Oblivion. So, I can understand very well that many folks can likewise enjoy Silent Moveis just as much as "Talkies". I am glad, therefore, that you enjoyed it and that it was faithful to Lovecraft. In my honest opinion, they should always do adaptations faithful to the original. I hate nothing more than when they take drastic liberties with established franchises and turn them into things unrecognizable from their source. The worst example of that, being some of the Dracula movies. My favorite was Brahm Stoker's Dracula, since it was the closest to both the original story by Stoker, and the true history of Vlad the Impaler which was considererd to a degree in that movie. Another good Dracula movie that is one of my all-time favorites was Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula. It worked as a kind of prequel to Brahm Stoker's Movie and considered both history and fiction in telling the tale of how Dracula first became a vampire. (Of course, in history, he wasn't a real vampire, but we are talking about the movies, and no self-respecting Dracula movie, even calling itself the "True Story" should leave out the vampire aspect of the mythos. It's just too important to not consider. Source material should always be sacred.

And, considering how long this post is... I'm signing off for now. :thumb:

[Izk The Mad]

I gotta respond about the silent film, because I'm not a fan either. Not at all. In fact, I can barely stand to watch anything that's not color. I still highly recommend The Call of Cthulhu to any Lovecraft fans. I think you'd be surprised. I'd hate for a true Lovecraft fan to miss this based on the fact that it's not a "talkie". Since it was made in 2005, there's something different to the cinematography, and how the scenes were handled (compared to an old silent movie). Plus it's only 47 minutes. What really impressed me, I think, was watching the "making of" extra afterwards, and seeing how they did a lot of it. The cardboard and plywood structure they used for R'lyeh risen from the sea was quite impressive in the movie, for example, complete with the appropriate weird geometry and angles and symbols. Then I found out they built it all in somebody's backyard, and the ocean was just black plastic sheeting with a fan blowing under it. The guys who made it impressed me, too. Basically a bunch of Generation-X'ers sitting around in t-shirts. My kind of people.

I've never played any of the Ultima games. There's been so many great games over the years, and only 24 hours in a day. They've always sounded fascinating though, and reading through your descriptions, they sound more so. And I have to say, being a two-fingered typer, that was a heck of a post! I have to add I'm constantly amazed by the amount of projects and games you get involved in, Professor Chaos! If you could bottle some of that free time, I bet a lot of people around here would pay top dollar for it, myself included!

[chaos_theocrat]

It sounds like some very good cinematography on the part of those who made the Call of Cthulhu film! It is always impressive when a movie of any kind is made on a smaller budget, yet appears to have been made on a far bigger one. It kind of reminds me, in that way, of Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings animated movie. The animation for the time it was made, back in the 70's... was leaps and bounds ahead of what Disney was doing then... even though they didn't have anywhere near Disney's budget to make it.
It is the same thing with the original Star Trek, which is still watchable to this day. It just feels so much more epic than its' own production costs.

It reminds me, also... of back when I first started doing projects for Nwn. A lot of the people on the Vault had thought that a large team was behind some of them. When they learned that I did almost all of it just by myself, that I was in fact the team, they were very surprised, since the quality of much of my work is typically that good. And, while speaking of my work...

So far, I've finished the Killorn Keep prefab. I just need to do some screen shots for it and then submit it to the Vault. Then... I can resume work on my Ravenloft project. It is coming along fairly well, and will incorporate all of the surviving material from that old Castlevania project that I once had embarked upon. A lot of custom content is going into it... so it is the most ambitious module I've attempted since Knights of the Holy Grail. There has been a lot of material released to the community for Ravenloft, so it's hard to decide what to include and what not to. But I am quite happy with how it is all coming together... so, with any luck this "castlevania" type project should succeed where the old one failed. Also, unlike Knights of the Holy Grail, there is less of an MMORPG feel to it... and more of the feeling of a true D&D game going on. It will be just as dark and gritty, though, as is my typical style for the modules I write. In that way, fans of my previous modules will feel right at home with my version of Ravenloft. Quality stuff.
I am keeping my fingers crossed on it actually being possible to complete.

Back on the subject of movies, though! Ever read Wendi Pini's Law and Chaos? It was a book about her attempt to create an animated Elric movie based on Michael Moorcock's The Dreaming City and Stormbringer. You may or may not remember Wendi Pini as the creator of Elfquest, a series of fantasy comics about a race of elves, which was popular back before anyone was producing quality fantasy comics except perhaps for Conan.
The book showed all of the art and footage that she created for her Elric project... but in a way it also showed just why that project did not work, and on just how many levels it was confused in the direction it had taken.

To be fair, Wendi's vision of Elric as depicted within her book was beautiful and elegant artwork. Elric himself... was portrayed as appearing elfin, even effeminate, in his appearance while his homeland of Melnibone was a truly impressive sight, with soaring arches, elaborate domes, and tall spires for the buildings and their interiors. I was reminded instantly of Japanese art of Elric that I've seen, but Wendi's version had a softer edge which set it apart even from the Japanese Elric. All of the characters were portrayed as beautiful as their respective character could be, and all the settings in the story were as lovely as possible. Ironically, this is one of the factors that kept the movie from being made. You see, when she got to the end of Stormbringer, where the world is consumed by Chaos and armies fight for control of it... she was so saddened at having to kill off so many of the characters she came to love, that she just couldn't do the art for all the parts that showed their deaths. The exceptions being the death of Cymoril and the deaths of Rakhir the Red Archer and Zarozinia... as well as Elric's slaying of Jagreen Lern and Elric's death when Stormbringer turned on him. All of those death scenes, she did depict. The other factor that was the final nail in the movie's coffin, was that Michael Moorcock thought it was just too beautiful and too romanticized to accurately portray the darkness of his Multiverse and it's characters. So that saw the end of the project.
Perhaps, had Wendi Pini not allowed herself to become so attached to the characters, she could have found the strength to kill off those that had to die near the end. And, had she just added a bit of an edge to the whole thing, making her Multiverse a darker and more surreal place, being less of a bright fantasy world than the one she was creating, then I do believe Moorcock would have found it much more to his liking and we would have had an Elric movie years ago. In many ways, Narnia is darker than Wendi Pini's Elric... and that definitely tells you she was on the wrong track.

My thoughts on her depictions: Elric should be elfin, even effeminate, but he should seem vulnerable, angst-ridden, and at times sickly. Likewise, I think Melnibone should be a place that has a fading beauty to it, rather than being bright and shining as it may have been in it's glory days. It is also meant to be a place where horrors intermingle with the beauty in a way that blends the horrific with the sublime. None of this sense was at all present in Wendi Pini's work, where even the death scenes just looked like the dead characters had fallen gently to sleep. Even the comics got the look of Melnibone correct, which in turn inspired my equally correct Melnibone Nwn prefab. Wendi Pini's Elric really was just too "beautiful" to be accurate to the Elric stories. Had her project not been Elric, it would have made a beautiful, even Oz-like fantasy. But Elric is not meant to be Oz-like, no matter how beautiful the Melniboneans as a race may be in their outward appearance. Which reminds of another project that failed:

Reportedly, Moorcock didn't like the film version of The Final Programme, an adaptation of his Jerry Cornelius saga. It was a movie that *actually* was completed, and released back in the 60's. I can imagine that his total dislike of it is the primary reason why it has never been re-released on DVD. I saw part of it years ago, and I can understand why he disliked it so much! It begins as a modern take on The Dreaming City with Jerry in the Elric role and his brother Frank in the Yrkoon role, with their sister caught between their rivalry. It was dark, and appropriate to Moorcock's novels, and the whole middle of the movie was as perfect a retelling of the Jerry Cornelius story as was possible in the 60's. But then, it just rushed to the end and left a lot of the story out, and whereas in the original novel Jerry Cornelius transformed into a beautiful, angel-like hermaphroditic being... in the movie, they insulted both the original story, and Michael Moorcock, by having Jerry become a caveman! To this day, I honestly can't imagine why they chose to do that. Even a woman dressed in unisex clothing, or a man dressed in feminine clothing, would have been closer to the novel than a stinking, smelly caveman. It being the 60's, whoever thought of the image of a caveman was probably on too much drugs! Truly, a total disaster that resulted in a movie that ended up as much a joke as Austin Powers.

That said, it is time to sign off for the night and get back to my projects. - Farewell for now!

[chaos_theocrat]

Well, I've got good news and bad news regarding my Nwn projects.

Firstly, the Good News!
The good news, is that Killorn Keep was successfully completed and released to the Vault, so anyone interested in that prefab can get it.
Secondly, the Bad News...
The bad news, is that in my attempt to merge my Ravenloft module with the remnants of my old Castlevania one, I ended up overwriting the new project with the old, before getting any chance the back up the new one.

I see it as a sign that the Ravenloft/Castlevania merge was just not to be. Therefore, I'll be moving on to other projects that should turn out better. :thumb: