The Carrion Fields - Viewing topic #18

nepenthe	Sun 08-Oct-06 04:32 PM
Member since 04th Mar 2003 3430 posts

#18, "Nexus"

Big Ass Quest_(tm) is not yet finished and the full scheme of things is yet to be revealed. However, I'll try to anticipate some of the first questions and answer them.

Why Nexus? Didn't you guys take that thing out?

Yep. Granted, that happened while I was gone and I didn't really weigh in on it.

Nexus went out largely because, at the time, no imm was interested in running it.

Of all the Heir-to-Master cabals, I think Nexus had the best original idea. Warlock made a lot of sense to me and I liked it a lot, but it just was too niche in membership and activities for CF at the time. Scion was, at best, a generic evil cabal until Valg revamped it to make it into the much cooler version presently around. Nexus, on the other hand, I always liked in theory -- it had a cool, distinctive power and role. It fell down in practice primarily because it always suffered for active imms -- it almost seemed like there was a curse that anyone who became a Nexus imm would get too busy in real life shortly thereafter to help much. Vahlen/Kahosarin/Ordasen was the exception to this, putting in a ton of time and effort, but ultimately he was just one low level imm.

When I say the cabal really needed imm oversight, I don't just mean in the sense of picking leaders, policing the cabal members, etc., but also in the sense that Nexus had a lot of unique mechanics that needed careful observation and tweaking that just never happened.

Interesting mage cabal ideas never seemed to materialize. Most of them felt like Master-in-a-skirt to me, generic conglomerations of mages who would together gang Battle and gather shinies. After a few years of not getting much of anywhere putting one in, I decided to put forth the idea of taking a second stab at Nexus, volunteering myself to help run it in an attempt to put my money where my mouth was. Here we are.

Why not Master?

I could give a lot of answers, but essentially, because it was me getting the ball rolling and volunteering to take the bulk of the work to see it happen, and I wasn't interested. I did my time in that prison.

Also, I thought about it, and really... I couldn't see most of the Master powers making it into the game again unscathed. Is a Master without transform or scourge really still Master? Eh.

Isn't it just lazy as #### to put an old cabal back in?

I can honestly say I've put more time into getting this cabal ready for its rechristening than I ever did on the first draft of any previous cabal. See below; also, some of the details won't be apparent just yet.

This old Nexus good/evil balance thing was retarded. I'd group with them, and two minutes later they'd switch sides and start bashing me! Why bring that back?

Short answer, we didn't. That system has been extensively reworked until even the math geeks on staff didn't want to look at it anymore. If it's still a little off, Nexus (eventually) will balance several things, of which good and evil are but one.

As an aside, if you're thinking about making a character for this cabal, you'll probably save yourself a lot of suffering if you pick neutral for both alignment and ethos. Yes, I'm aware that old Nexus didn't work that way.

Great, I'm ready to roll! I still know what the power combos are from the last time this cabal was around.

You probably don't. I also know what the power combos were and plotted accordingly. The powers were also extensively reworked.

Yes, there's still a bond as the signature power of the cabal, but it provides different benefits than before for every class. In most cases some of the old benefits are there as before, some of the old ones are gone, some exist in a modified form, and some new ones are introduced.

There's also still a Vanguard of the Balance, but it's completely rewritten and more than a little different. I won't explain how it works just yet because I don't want some of you drooling on my forum.

Well, I still know what the Nexus dogma is so I'm good there, right?

Not necessarily. Obviously there will be some similarities but a lot is changing as well.

Didn't it really suck to be Nexus when you couldn't bond?

Sure did! That's factored into our scheming too.

Won't there be a ton of mindless murder gnome shifters now?

Not for long. If you had a gnome shifter turned evil and maimed in the past, I probably did it. Now I'll be watching that cabal.

Any other questions, feel free to ask. Some can't or won't be answered just yet, though.

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