Sat Nov 2 13:03:40 2013

At 8 o'clock PM, Day of the Moon, 14th of the Month of the Ancient Darkness
on the Theran calendar Ruknubuk perished, never to return.

Race:	orc
Class:	berserker
Level:	51
Alignment:	Evil
Ethos:	Neutral
Cabal:	None, None
Age:	56
Hours:	338

Ruk was my favorite char I think I have ever played on CF. I accomplished pretty much every goal I had with the character and had a lot of fun on the way.

My goals when I rolled Ruk up were...
1.) Get a tattoo from someone other than Thrak as an Orc
2.) Have solid PK success in every single PK range (specifically I wanted 50 kills by 30, 100 by 40, and 200 by the time I died)
3.) Related to 2 I wanted to distend all the way to 51 in the 30's
4.) Get Chief
5.) get the slaver edge
6.) Get a second adapt/legacy/skill etc

I was able to accomplish all of those except for number 6. I got a lot of imm love and positive experiences from other players but someday, someday I will finally get a meaningful mechanical reward other than con or a cabal edge!!!!! :P please don't read this as a complaint because I was 100% satisfied with what I got as RUk.

Ruks role was very simple and straight forward. He had a deffinition of strength that was very orcish in nature. The only strength that matters is that of your fist and that the weak exist to serve as slaves to the strong. And that he was the strongest. In practice that basically meant I wouldn't work with people unless they made some overt act of submission (paying tribute, kneeling as slaves, etc) and reacted with extreme violence against anyone who tried to suggest they were equal to or superior to Ruk. Some might paint that kind of role as power gaming (as it basically made 99.99999% of the mud my enemy) but I didn't fair weather on the drawbacks of that mindset (accepting easy allies that would have been very beneficial to me).

So goodbyes (I am going to forget tons of people just post and I will respond)

Imms: I don't know if it was one of you or many who kept sending me the orc poop and cracked skulls but it cracked me up. It was also nice to have ingredients I could use in snares fed to me, even if snares almost never got used.

Enlilth: Thanks for the tat and the interactions. When you were pretending to be an entire horde of orcs and kept coming up with things to get I was torn on 2 fronts, the first is the list was ludacrissly massive and random. The second is that Ruk really wouldn't do things for a bunch of nameless orcs that were not kneeling to him :P That con quest really was a challenge as I was in a pretty tough spot range wise as an orc and had only 4 deaths left to get 16 kills, it really focused me on tightening up my game though.

Whysidan: I swear my PK chars are like catnip for you, always end up having you drop in (like with grippledank and ganicus). It was always a pleassure and I was cracking up when I ran into your shrine to steal your holy ashes so I could be more of a priest orc.

Lyristeon: Thanks for the banter and setting me up with the CON at the end there, I was down to 2 deaths left at that point and had not been able to get a chief challenge for close to a month. without it I would have had an extremely brief stint at chief.

Mortals

Yegtheg: You don't seem to post in the forums but I thought you were ok. You were way too much of a softie within the orc village as Ruk was openly challenging you when I was in the 20's and after being rebuffed didn't do a very good job of hiding his inner motivations and feelings on the topic (intentionally cause he was too dumb to be crafty). When you kept logging out immediatly to avoid the chief challenge I was pretty pissed. I didn't squelch you after the challenge (or ask for help during) because Ruk believed his own aura was so great that nobody would dare challenge him and to squelch to avoid a challenge would be a sign of fear and therefore weakness. Same goes for calling in allies, RUk believed personal physical strength was the only kind and it wouldn't be fitting to ask for assistance with something like the challenge

Fegul: You were fun to run around with, sorry we didn't actually group up much but after 300+ hours of basically rolling around solo having others in the group just wasn't part of the routine. I was also in silent tower a crapton during those times and its not an easy place to bring along a buddy to.

Empire:

Gedunthos: Interesting interactions, I was hoping you would be the one to figure out all you had to do was go through the motions of appeasing Ruks ego and you could have had a powerful ally/tool (I was open to being manipulated you just had to do it right). Congrats on getting emperor you put in the work for it and I expect good things.

Soviatos: I never had double digit con over rank 40, malice sucks, that is all. Aside from that single Supplication there was literally just about nothing a solo shaman could do to me.

Gharzal: You sort of lucked out on coming into your power as I was trying to get rid of the last bits of my Con. We had some good scraps but honestly I could have forced every fight into a draw as long as I avoided getting locked in a room or lagged out by a buddy. Having divine saves just from 2 skills and 1 piece of gear that i could make was really nice, having a pile of skins, cure blind potions, and teleport potions, made getting slept a real non issue. You are doing a good job from what I can see though and you and Ged are going to build a pretty powerful empire, I look forward to the next couple of months of empire is OP and we need to balance the scales posts :P

Herald: KNEEL!!!!! Ruk went kind of nuts on the heralds because by his view of what strength is you guys were more or less the lowest rung on the ladder. When you guys kept asking goofy and not being afraid of RUk it drove him nuts, hence all the warring with the Inn.

Battle: There were a lot of you, Skulda was a terror for me most of my lower rank life. More recently klib is really making a strong showing (and I think you have a luck stat of 25 because it was like clockwork that I would attack you and 1 round later all my dam redux would drop). Crrya and Gilut you both just got intimidated too much and as a result you gave me way too much control in our fights, don't assume that I will always make the optimal call or be in optimal position, it looks like I always was because you let me approach you when I was ready, instead of coming after me and forcing me to make/pay for mistakes.

Fort: So many healers and paladins so so many.

Scion: Had a great relationship with Sehdara, he really got how to interact with RUk. In the mid ranks Zhenyen tried the whole, what are you going to do for me because I am chancellor and you are just an orc but when I hit hero that changed. When you told the other scions not to mess with me Ruk interperted that as you telling your slaves that they were now Ruks slaves and so Ruk treated them that way. Strangely none of them really tried to correct that view even when Ruk told it to their faces, sure they said scholar not slave but that was the extent of their push back.

Missing lots more but I got some work to do, post and I will respond.

You were just a ton of fun to watch and interact with (which I did in a number of different ways and on a lot of different fronts). Well done.

=w=

Excellent. It's watching character's like this that makes me glad that I came back to interact with them. Watching you demand a tribute from someone who killed you made me wish you were under my sphere. As soon as I knew you wanted the con for the reason you did, I was all in. Well done and thanks for giving the playerbase a great ride.

Without giving away too much as I'm still active, there is basically no way in the beginning, and especially now late in the char's life of him being dominated by anyone. If I have to lie to you and kneel (see: last 4 emperors) I will... but you are just an orc, and I'm far better at ambush killing with more versatile hide. If I don't think you can make good on a threat, why empty my pockets even a little bit... I'm content to hide until the appropriate worst moment. Also huge on the idea that I am in empire for a reason IC, I know you can't stand up to anyone who can take a hit or two and me in the backrank without some luck, and I am all about hiding behind someone with squishy thief chars. Can't argue with results, right? I am fairly certain I would (and I think almost did or did once?) get my ass handed to me in any toe to toe fight with you. I remember a good bash at the fort trying to retrieve where I just barely got away in very very poor state of health.

I stick to my guns though, and I like that you didn't take the easy out for the same 'viable ally' benefits and stuck to yours. Immersing in a character is something I like to see and try to do, otherwise it's more a player and not a character that people are interacting with, so good show, thanks for the compliments, and GLWYN!

I was wondering about that. I made a lot of mistakes the few times we worked together, like iceballing your slaves, but never much in the way of verbal interaction.

After I dropped a full spell down on you in Arkham, Zhenyen warned me to lay off before I dropped the cleave, and I fully expected you to come at me afterwards. You didn't, never addressed me as slave either or made any demands. I wondered about that especially when 'bash ke' landed on your charmie instead of Keara when we were chasing her in Voralian city - by that point I had entirely ruled out 'respect/fear' as the reason for not introducing your tusks to my face.

Of course I gave you a fairly sought after weapon that I couldn't use myself later on, which put me in the 'paid tribute' category but until then I couldn't figure out why I wasn't being subjugated/victimised.

I think we ended things two for two, PK wise. I didn't have the same interactions with you that I did with Fegul or Yegtheg and so I didn't have the built in distaste for you that I did for them but you being hunted and the logs gave me the drive to want to fight you. I guess that I didn't have the same hesitation after learning to fight the other orcs that some folk did with you but you certainly surprised me a few times. Overall, great char. Good luck with future ones.

Phenomenally well played character. Great RP. Great PK. You were definitely a powerhouse and deserved all the kudos you got. Loved all of that.

I knew I couldn't do anything against you once you got rolling, but you never really gave me much of a choice. But that's what I hated about you too. You pushed your agenda a bit too hard, which kinda sometimes took the funstick away from me at times. You knew I couldn't do much against you (no matter what I tried), but for a few weeks straight I knew that the second I woke you'd be at the village striking and taunting - and forcing me to play your game.

Alas, it was great Orc RP. You did your job well. I even loved fighting you at times. Just not all the time.

Anyways, good luck with your next - and if there's any takeaway you can get from my post is just to remember that everyone plays the game for their fun, not just yours.

I loved interacting with you as Zranagar. You were the reason I even rolled that character up, to tell the truth. I'm usually against active characters posting logs (because people roll things to kill you specifically exactly as I did, sorry), but you really made me remember what was fun about CF. At first I rolled my eyes when you showed up and killed my practice mobile... Then we started the RP and ended up in a bit of a stand-off. Really a memorable interaction, and bringing it full circle from cowering to cleaving you was just ever so satisfying.

Cheers, and I hope you got that same satisfaction out of Ruk's life.

GLWYN. I'm assuming it will be one brutal AP. :)

I didn't interact with you but the one time, but I'd heard a -lot- going around IC about Ruk's goings on. Well played and feared.

I can't recall how many times I saw you killing somebody in a town, but you were gone before I could get over there with guards. Thanks for keeping me awake some days.

Maybe one day you will kill me insight into orcs weakness against an villager spear/mace.

Either way had no issues dying (which I did often) to you. Just at some point I had to stop letting you pick the fights.

One of the few, I felt like I had no chance against. All because of how good you were.

Well done.

GLWYN

You got manhandled because you were intimidated by me. This gave me 2 advantages. The first is you switched from using tactics that worked to those that don't, spear negates normal bash but a slave and savage feeding gives me orders of magnitude more defense than a typical warrior if you are warring bashes. Your best bet was to maximize damage (hit Ruk; cranial or hit;Ruk drum).

The second downside to being intimidated was that I was hunting you, instead of you hunting me. You missed out on exploiting my moments of vulnerability (which an Orc really has many of) and let me have a great deal of control over my own level of risk.

nt

Burzuk may still have you though.....

If only he could have resisted replying too some of the logs featuring him, it would have been better.

I am going to miss this Orc *sniff*

Insanely well played in all aspects.

I was party to your deaths I think about 3-5 times and proud to say I avoided your kill/rape/eat/poop on the face combo. (Big, hearty RL laugh when you came at me with that one)

I am surprised I never fell to you as many times as we crossed paths and as freaking dangerous and well played as you were. That last fight with Ardorn was scary and took all I had not to word out when I couldn't flee and return due to your slave giant. I bided till the last moment and it worked out. Luckily I resisted those 2 spine breaks or you would've survived or won the encounter. That time Rihujac and I got you with entwine was actually the first time I experienced an entwined orc. We pulled it off but damn, just beastial.

Through more than one character. :)
Can't say enough about a well played orc even if there were
plenty of times I was pissed that it was ME on the dinner plate.

I loved your character and role! I know Aglaron is the polar opposite of that statement but that is IC and this this isn't. Good job all around and I look forward to seeing another wonderful character brought to life.

Wish we had better play times so I could go toe to toe as a master of all seven paths. Oh well...

GLWYN

Edit: So awesome you had two death posts.