Converting SOG to a novel outline

Because I'll be moving several states over shortly, my "D&D" game will be on hold probably permanently, although we are talking about possibly playing over Teams or Google Meet or something similar. But I'm getting kind of motivated to revisit it regardless right now, so I'm thinking what else I can do. The first thing, and one that I've literally been talking about for years but never really done much with, is trying to put together a story, book, or even full-on novel based on the SOG outline. Honestly, it might be more than one novel, given that there are more than five fronts in SOG, especially if I keep my novel length to modest novel lengths before High Fantasy doorstoppers from the likes of Robert Jordan changed the landscape of fantasy publishing forever. Although its funny to think about, the Lord of the Rings volumes are only about 350 pages each, which was considered a long novel at the time. Heck, the entire LotR saga has less than half a million words. Even when you add The Hobbit to the count, it's still only 550,147 (according to the internet.) There are single books in Erikson, Jordan, Sanderson or Martin sagas that are nearly as long as the entire LotR. Sometimes truly less is more.

I think, although I wouldn't run the game this way, that it would make the most sense to split the plot points between two groups of characters who are only occasionally in contact with each other. The obvious choices here are one group with Dominic and Kimnor and the second group with Ragnar and Cailin. 

I also, as pointed out in an earlier post, need to tamp down the urgency of the main front so that it doesn't seem "irresponsible" for the characters to spend more time doing other things rather than focusing on it. I think it makes sense for the groups to start out in Barrowmere together, and then travel together towards Burham's Landing. As they pass Rabb's Hill, they'll meet Eoman Gast on the Savages of the Thursewood front, and that will be the impetus that causes them to split up. Ragnar and Cailin will therefore handle the Savages of the Thursewood and then bring Joan Wilmore back to the Northwoods region where they also run into The Tazitta Death Cults front. Dominic and Kimnor will board a ship and immediately start running into The Pirates of Chersky Island problems, and handle the original Chaos in the North front too. Because Ratling Scourge of the North Shore is a natural outgrowth of Chaos in the North, they'll handle it too.

I need to figure out how they can have a meet-up partway through; maybe in Lomar, and then how to get Ragnar and Cailin to Garenport for the big finale. My outline currently doesn't tie up Chaos in the North and the Tazitta Death Cults very well together, because they're independent, but I've got to get Jairan involved in the Chaos in the North somehow, or at least make the way to reach her in Garenport.

Dominic Clevenger. His iconic look is the traveler's leathers and the coonskin cap

Kimnor Rugosa, grayman shadow sword with a pet psueodragon

Ragnar Clevenger also has the leathers, but uses an axe in his left hand, and has "Viking" hair.

Cailin Clevenger, Ragnar's young wife, turned into a dhampyr

Dark Fantasy X and Shadows Over Garenport and Cult of Undeath

OK, I'm done with HOMM3 posts. I'm done with SWTOR posts. I haven't done much of anything else in several months, but it's time to start working again on DFX and the campaigns.

DFX as a game, of course, is done. I'm not doing anything else with it anymore. Here's the link, just for reference:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i6SlE8bF1mmGmgMKtkj2OHoP_-FrtKAo/view?usp=drive_link

And the character sheet:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ols2sEepL5KwkiqoapwgiVYEKMfSymqC/view?usp=drive_link

But I've posted those before, and when I say that I'm working on DFX, I don't mean on the rules, I mean on the setting and campaign discussion.

I think that I've done everything I need to for SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT, and I don't have anything else needed to run. In fact, I've already started running, although for various reasons unrelated to the game itself, I never made it an ongoing thing. I'm actually more interested, in light of my pending relocation, in converting that campaign outline into a novel outline (or more than one, possibly) and start writing it in my spare time rather than imaging TTRPGs that aren't happening.

But what I really want to do is start migrating into working on my revised CULT OF UNDEATH. As a refresher for people who haven't been reading for years, I originally did CULT OF UNDEATH years ago as an attempt to summarize and adapt the Carrion Crown adventure path by Paizo into a game that I could run. That was a fun project to go through, but what I realized fairly quickly was that I couldn't really do it. There were too many ideas and too many concepts that didn't work for me, and while there were certainly some ideas that I could borrow, there were also a great many that would have to change so much that the whole project would be pretty unrecognizable as an adaptation of the original source material in any way whatsoever except maybe the set up of the story. This sat in this state for a long time until I started doing these campaign briefs, and this 5x5 FRONTS exercise, where I thought I'd dust off the idea and rebuild it from the ground up. I think that I'm ready now to talk about how I'd move from SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT to CULT OF UNDEATH, and how they'd differ. (Lets start calling them SOG and COU to avoid me typing that out over and over again.)

First, whereas my original idea was that I'd propose all three campaigns to the players and let them choose which to do, I'm now going to assume that COU will follow SOG and that if I'm running COU that the players playing it will have first already played SOG (this will carry on when I get to MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTES (MWotDW) too; to play that, you will have needed to already completed COU. But that's not going to be something to talk about for likely months to come.

Before I begin, although you never know until you run it, of course, I have to make some plans, and in order to do so, I have to make some assumptions. I'm going to assume the following about the resolution of SOG:

• The PCs played all five fronts to completion.
• For the Garenport front, the Grand Duke and Duchess as well as their supernatural supporters all ended up dead. This leads to a political vacuum and a great deal of chaos, but that's not the PCs problem, and in fact they probably have plenty of incentive to stay away from Garenport for the short term, hence their decampment to the Northwoodshire countryside, where they pick up the COU thread.
• Since I'm using my sample iconics as stand-ins for the PCs, I am also using the fronts I developed for them. Dominic's is the most developed at this point, having confronted Audrey Hardwicke in Garenport. That was resolved for now, but Hardwicke will have escaped or at least his death can't be verified, so when he eventually comes back again, it won't be shocking. I also believe that Kimnor would have discovered that Bethan is still alive, and while I don't believe that that will have been resolved either, he's not going to be going anywhere near Lomar in the near term, so that will also hibernate. Ragnar and Cailin's story will be the star of the COU portion of the longer meta-campaign. Hardwicke will reappear more in the West, however, and even Bethan will find a reason to eventually leave Lomar. If Kimnor decides to try and find her again, she won't be found until I am ready for her to be found, and she's no longer in town, giving him no reason to stay.
• Joan was rescued. Grym was defeated permanently, and the thurses were pacified one way or another. Southumbria is going to be relatively quiet for the time being.
• The Tazitta threat will have been redirected. The Prophetess was killed and her movement unraveled, but not all of the Tazitta just slunk back into the wilderness; many were stirred up, relocated, and are now running around being a nuisance. The Northwoodshire area was saved, but is still in commotion of sorts, and it is a bit more dangerous now than it was.
• Guarg and Taurek were defeated, but as above; some of the individual pirates now remain on the sea, perhaps more desperate now that they no longer have a haven in Calak or powerful patrons uniting them.
• Burlharrow and the East Marches were rescued, Gothbert has become the new mayor, and if anything he's seeing more influx of homesteaders and settlers who are fed up with what's happened at Garenport.
• There is no chance that the PCs went to the Shadowlands and killed Jairan the Soulless, but whatever machinations she was attempting with the Nyxians and Tazitta cults is done for for now. I do have a thought; what if somehow the PCs were able to redirect Guarg's Ketos to the Shadowlands? Kind of like in Thor: Ragnarok when Thor defeated Hel by siccing Surtur on her, I suppose. I don't think that that means either Ketos of Jairan is defeated for good, but they should be out of the picture for the duration of the meta-camaign, at least, unless I want to have Jairan make a play for revenge later on. I probably won't; I see her as more likely impressed and amused rather than overly put out by their efforts, even if it stalled her plans for the time being. 
• I also believe that the PCs will have strengthened or created relationships with potential patrons that will have them hopping around with stuff to do for a long time to come.

For COU, the PCs will start out in a familiar setting, Cockrill's Hill in the Northwoodshire, but will be inevitably pulled westward towards and eventually in to Timischburg. Timischburg is a kind of Transylvania analog, created by me to take the place of Paizo's own horror subregion, Ustalav, which is also kind of a Transylvania analog. Most of their concerns in the east, in the Hill Country proper, will be left behind except those that specifically pertain to the COU campaign (maybe I should see these campaigns like seasons of a TV show; SOG was the first season, COU would be the second. If it gets that far without being cancelled, then we're on to MWotDW as the third, and I don't have any visibility to what I'd do after that yet. Not only does each season focus more on a different main core area of the Three Realms, but they'll also have different main villains and problems. COU's main front will be undead related and focus heavily on vampires in particular, as is appropriate for something set in Timischburg, the fantasy analog to Transylvania of the movies that I've created.

Anyway, here's the library version of Jairan that I decided replaces my original image. Clearly based on the drow goddess Kiaransalee or however you spell that, which wreaked havoc on the Forgotten Realms many years ago (in actual years I mean, not in setting years)

Relocation

It seems very likely, in the upper 90% likely, that in the next month or so I will change jobs and relocate to a new state, where I'll be in the northern Southeast. Not too far from where my original Colonial ancestors arrived in America in the latest few years of the 1600s or the earliest few years of the 1700s. Although that's neither here nor there, as they didn't stay on the shores of South Carolina for long, and I consider my more immediate ancestors to be backwoods Georgia people, because they moved out west. 

"My people" are therefore pretty solid backwoods Dukes of Hazzard southerners on my father's side, and I tend to favor that culture and personality in my own personality, in other words. My mother's side, on the other hand, were Massachusetts natives who had gone west with the pioneers and grew up as rural farmers in the Rocky Mountain west for generations. My mom still lived in tiny little towns in the countryside of the intermountain West region. I did not grow up rural, although the modest sized town that I grew up in in Texas could probably best be described as suburbia-like, except not attached at the time to any major metropolitan urban area (I think as urban sprawl has grown, that's arguably not true anymore. But I haven't lived in the town I grew up in for ~25 years now. I've felt pretty fish out of water in many ways living in the suburban northern Midwest; this relocation will bring me closer to home in one way; into the South (although I wonder how culturally or even genetically the South still remains the South these days) but farther away from the West, which is my other half of heritage.

I've said before that I feel in many ways more at home culturally in the rural south but more at home geographically in the west. I like the cooler, drier, sunnier weather and the beautiful mountains, valleys, and deserts of the American West. Of course, as noted above, the South isn't necessarily the South anymore as the whole nation has been in commotion and people have moved all over, so I've kind of decided that a solid mostly rural red state like Wyoming or Montana is my preferred place to live, with even western South Dakota or Nebraska or some place like that being an acceptable alternative. But moving someplace like western (but not West) Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, etc. would still be seen as an improvement from my current situation, at least in terms of "feeling at home."

Where am I going with this? My "D&D" game, which only ever had one session before we got too busy and it never seemed to happen again, will be unlikely to have any success in the future. We'll be too dispersed. However, maybe there's an opportunity to find new players in my new location. Regardless, I'm starting to have some new thoughts and stuff going on with regards to DFX, so look for some new content related to that setting later in the summer. 

I'm always hesitant to open up more new areas, but I do kind of like the idea of what's left of abandoned Hyperborea is a Hoth-like mammoth tundra with many glaciers and year-round snow cover.

Hiking » Fantasy

This weekend, my wife and I restarted our hikes in the Midwest. Last year we did a number of them, exploring northern Midwestern areas from the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern (lower peninsula) Michigan to the Hocking Hills State Park in southern Ohio, nearly on the Kentucky border. Most of the hikes were, of course, fairly tame. We're in our early 50s, not in great shape, and my wife has an old knee injury and hates being outside after dark in case there's any kind of animal about, or someone suggests that maybe she should camp or build a campfire. She's strictly a day-hiker.

We drove a fair bit up to the so-called "tip of the thumb" of Michigan, near Port Austin. I've been around a fair bit of Michigan and Ohio in particular the last years since living in the northern Midwest, but my exposure to "the thumb" has been nonexistant. I've spent more time in the upper peninsula than in the thumb, in spite of the fact that it's considerably harder to reach. On the way, we also did some listed hikes near Bay City, which is I guess at the point where the thumb and the rest of the "mitten" come together at the bottom of Saginaw Bay. There we hiked the Pinnebog Trail at the Bay City State Park, and up near Port Austin we also did the Port Crescent State Park trail.

Maybe I have a problem psychologically with being satisfied with things as they are, but whenever I drive around in these rural areas, seeing the interesting names of little rivers, tiny little towns, and then walk around in the woods, forests, hills, dunes, cliffs, mountains, or whatever other feature I'm hiking through, it inspires my imagination for fantasy versions of the same. I've spent a lot of the last few months with my imagination in space opera mode, but if there's anything that may tend to bring it back to fantasy, going on hikes out in the natural (naturalish, anyway. I don't really go very deep in the wilderness) world and poking around through sleepy little farming towns will do it. I've always said that if I had to choose, I'd pick fantasy over space opera, but I'm also glad that I don't have to choose.

To be fair, my love of space opera has less to do with the attitude that it originally engendered of futuristic excitement. I like space opera in particular because it's a retro genre, and it reminds me of the 30s-50s and what people thought the future would be like back then. I like the old pulps where people were in the future, but still acted like they were people from our own cultural past. A sense of nostalgia for what has been lost is a part of my love of both fantasy and space opera; sure—they're both genres that are exotic and fantastic, but they are also both genres that are rooted in the past and my sense of nostalgia for a time when things were better than they are now.

As an aside, this nostalgia baiting is big business, it seems. When I was a kid in the 80s, nostalgia baiting for the 50s was big business, and lots of movies and TV shows were set in that era, perhaps most famously Back to the Future... although it was hardly the only one. 50s songs were even released; I bought 7" records of "Yakety-Yak", "Runaway" and a few others. Nowadays, it seems like 80s nostalgia bait is pretty keen; the whole synthwave musical genre is based around it, and stuff like the popularity of Stranger Things and the music used in the show is just one example of it. Nostalgia, even for things that you never actually had (like me having 50s nostalgia, to the extent that I did) is a powerful thing, and Americans in particular, being a new nation split off from an older one but in a new land, seem like we've always been in the search for roots and a past so we don't feel unmoored in the world, tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, as James says.

Curiously, we seem to have turned our back on formative eras of our own American history; the Old West and the Colonial and Revolutionary period. This is largely because our public square has been taken over by self-hating liberals and foreigners, especially Jews, who have no understanding or appreciation of our founding or what it means... because to them it means very little if anything.

Anyway, what does all of this mean? Am I finally ready to talk about Dark Fantasy X again? I'm not sure. Maybe.

Johhn as the Droidmaster

I've mostly moved my SWTOR discussions to Space Opera X, but here's an interesting screenshot of Johhn using elements that give him lots of floating droids. A Droidmaster, if you will. There's five floating droids here.

New X-files

https://www.cbr.com/x-files-creator-looking-forward-reboot/

Coogler has actually done a decent job with breathing new life into the Rocky franchise via the Creed movies, so there's that. Disney/Fox have been teasing how this will be woke, though, and Coogler is so incredibly pro-black (he's also the director of the Black Panther movies in addition to the Creed movies) that it's hard to see how this isn't Moldy and Scolder haranguing the audience in typical woke fashion. I know that the first Black Panther movie was financially very successful, but I haven't heard anyone other than some black young men who really thought it was all that memorable or was a cultural touchstone; rather it was kind of a perfect storm of a specific kind of demand at exactly the right time to peak. Once it was over, the reaction from most that I've seen was—the movie was actually kind of mediocre and forgettable, and the blackness of it was in the long-run a turnoff, because it wasn't really made to be universal, but to be a black story.

The second Black Panther, of course, was much less successful and was received even more poorly. It wasn't exactly a flop, but it was a financial disappointment vs expectations and hopes, I believe, and I also believe that it killed any interest in another iteration of the franchise. It proved that the Black Panther franchise had nowhere to go, in my opinion. 

Anyway, I was a fan of the X-files in the 90s. The last two revival seasons were pretty pointless, and it's also clear that Chris Carter never had a plan to end the show; he thought he'd just keep going with it forever. But when we thought that maybe it would actually end on a reasonable time and in a satisfying manner; up to and maybe a bit beyond the theatrical movie that came after the 5th season or so, the X-files was amazing, innovative, and fascinating. 

It is, however, a great example of a TV show that's a victim of its own success. Because it was so successful, rather than wrap it up, the producers and the network and even the creator got the idea that they could just keep treading water and making money indefinitely. Carter even specifically thought that he had many more seasons left to go, when the series was already getting tired, the main actors were getting done with the series, and he seemed unwilling to understand that the chemistry and relationship between Scully and Moulder were among the couple of keys to the show's success. Not that the new replacement characters were bad, but people just didn't care about them as much and they didn't grab the audience's attention the same was as Duchovny and Anderson did. 

I've seen both Duchovny and Anderson in various interviews and talk shows, etc. Duchovny actually seems like a reasonably sharp guy for an actor, who got more and more involved in the show as not just its star, but someone really invested in it behind the scenes over time. Kind of the like the Alan Wilder of the X-files, if you will, to make a Depeche Mode reference. Anderson, on the other hand, doesn't strike me as too bright, and most of her interview "performances" make her come across as a bubble-headed bimbo. Kind of the opposite of the character that she most famously played, I suppose.

Not that that's super shocking. The myth of the absolute brilliant STEM woman is largely a myth. They do exist here and there, but in such statistically low numbers as to not really be something worth expecting ever. Most of the so-called "STEM" women I've ever met didn't actually do much science or engineering, or whatever, but gravitated to "soft" elements within a science or engineering organization, related to OB or social stuff or whatever. And the more strident a woman is about trumpeting her STEM credentials, the less likely I am to believe that they really mean much. 

Anyway, all this to say that my expectations for a rebooted X-files show by a pro-black icon (albeit one that's had some success in rebooting franchises to be all black but still being pretty good; I really like the first Creed movie, for instance) and handled by Disney are pretty low. I couldn't get behind the attempts to revive the series with the original cast. I also think the climate is different. What people in Hollywood think are conspiracies among the plebs to be made fun of are actually spoiler alerts, while they have their own bizarre conspiracy theories of their own that they believe whole-heartedly. Nobody trusts the government anymore, but for the exact opposite reasons that liberals don't trust the government, and unless they're talking about government conspiracies to displace, jail or persecute normal Americans and Christians, instead of hiding aliens, it's going to feel like a bizarre artifact of the past rather than a timely social show, like the original X-files was.

Scolds

Edited and shortened from: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=31806 

[T]he last half century of the internet demonstrates the reality of large societies, whether they are digital or analog. Once a society gets to a certain size factionalism is inevitable. The message board experience is the best example, as these platforms created lots of tools to allow people to exist on the same platform but ignore the people from factions they did not like. It never worked. The only solution was peaceful separation in the form of separate private platforms.

This makes perfect sense when you learn about the Dunbar number. This is the number of stable relationships people are cognitively able to maintain at once. The generally agreed upon number is one-hundred-and-fifty. For many people, the number is much lower, so this means in any large group, the typical person will have a sense of belonging with a minority of the people. Consequently, they will be alienated from the rest and there is a short trip from alienation to hostility.

This explains the general sense of unhappiness in modern America. The mass media age has not brought people together as our politicians endless[ly] blather on about all the time, but rather increased the sense of alienation. The normal person is now bombarded with the presence of alien, perhaps hostile strangers. Every online experience comes with someone trying to scold you, lecture you, harass you or they are simply outside what you consider to be normal and acceptable.

Digital life is making analog life less tolerable. [...] [W]e see the horrors of the virtual world jumping into the analog world, as these people now do to our institutions what they did to the internet. For example, spiteful mutants have taken over the court system in New York. Just as we saw with social media, they are using their power to harass normal people. They have litigated VDare into closure simply because they can. This is not much different from what the scolds did to social media platforms with moderation.

New York is like Twitter before Musk. They have law-fared the NRA into bankruptcy, charged Trump with various invented crimes, levied a fine on Trump for denying he committed a crime that has never been demonstrated, litigated VDare out of existence despite never alleging any wrongdoing and sent a growing number of innocent white men to prison for the crime of being white men. Douglas Mackey is the most famous, but there are others like Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman.

There is another important lesson here, a scary one too. The internet has proven too big to control in this way. The scolds got the upper hand for a while, but the cost of endless policing exceeded the carrying capacity. People forget, but the reason Musk was able to buy Twitter is they were in serious financial trouble. He fired over two-thirds of the staff, the scolds, and harpies, because these people did nothing but immiserate the people who kept the site running.

This will apply even more to a continent sized country. New York can make itself hostile to normal people, but normal people can leave. After what New York has done to VDare, every reformer now knows they have to shop for safe jurisdictions to avoid this sort of problem. The same will be true for industries that know they are threatened by the kook squads. The gun makers are fleeing the Northeast because they know better than anyone that there is no reasoning with fanatics.

The point here is that we will see in the analog world what we have seen in the digital world for the last decades. A great disaggregation is unfolding in which normal people seek refuge from the areas now controlled by the fanatics. Further, the social media experience has shown that you cannot last long when you are overrun by fanatics, even when you are systematically robbing them. Even if peaceful separation is not possible, people will seek it anyway.

In the end, this is the reason to be optimistic. A society in which people like Fani Willis and Letitia James are doing anything more than pulling a cart is a society that will eventually destroy itself. For any human organization to survive it must be run for the interest of [the] normal by the sober minded and talented. This is true for a social media platform, and it is true for a country. Nature cannot long tolerate the unfit and human nature will be compelled to do the same eventually.

This is the only reason we had peace throughout the late 19th and 20th century. Following the scolds declaring war against the South, the men of the South mostly sought peace afterwards by migrating West to the empty frontier, to escape the predatory existence of the scolds. It's only been (relatively) recently that that is no longer possible; that the frontier, and separation by distance and local culture has failed to protect people from their toxic presence. I still remember in the 80s when I was young that different places had different culture, and everyone pretty much understood and accepted that, except for a handful of spiteful busybodies who felt it was their purpose in life to hall monitor the entire world. This has always been the Yankee burden, and the critical flaw in their national? regional? cultural? character. Not sure exactly what a Yankee is in this regard. Are they a nation unto themselves; separate and distinct from the Tidewater gentility or the backwoods borderers, like my own people? Or, to use David Hackett Fisher's term, maybe they're a "folkway", although I'd argue that few people understand what it meant by that word exactly.

The Z-man seems to be pointing towards separation, however, which indicates the eventual disaggregation of what was once "One Nation Under God" into more than one nation, and likely few of them having anything to do with God. Of course, what "nation" is the scold? Sure, they tend to congregate and have a high preponderance amongst the original Yankee population, which is why the Northeast is so toxic. But they have spread all over the country, intermarried and intermingled everywhere. The Left Coast is essentially a Yankee colony, and most large urban areas have their stink on them, even in Red States. Their admission of tens of millions of hostile and culturally incompatible aliens into our country was a deliberate design to weaken the ability of normal people everywhere to easily withstand or separate from them, because the hostile aliens tend to get favored treatment from the scolds. 

But he makes a good point. There's no living with these people, and eventually people will completely run out of options in trying to avoid them. What happens then?

Once again on the road

Traveling for a long weekend for a wedding out of state. I wish that I could spend some time while out West in the Rockies hiking or sightseeing with outdoor sites, but I won't have any time. Friday and Monday will be mostly traveling, Saturday will be the wedding, and Sunday will be Easter Sunday. That's all she wrote. Not exactly the most relaxing long weekend, and as I'm coming off of a several weeks, if not even several months, of absolutely exhausting, tedious, difficult and toxic stuff going on at work, I really need a break... that I seem to never be able to actually get. It's catching up to me, and I'm starting to really be unhappy with work, and to a certain degree, because work takes up so much of my time, with life in general. I need a break pretty desperately, but it's hard to get one at my current job. I'm also interviewing with someone else right now, but because it will require relocation to a place that's more expensive, because I'll lose my employee car lease, and because if I relocate that'll leave my other son and his family who are living with us temporarily (but realistically, for quite a while longer) high and dry, I have to honestly assess that it will be difficult for them to make me an offer that will make the math work out favorably for me. Even if I would love the job—honestly, I doubt that I'd love it. But I hope not to hate it and be constantly frustrated by it like I kind of am lately with my current job. 

The good news for me is that although I'm not actively looking for a job, I pretty routinely get tapped to interview. This hasn't worked out yet, but it takes time to find a really good job, and when I have a job which I don't like, but which does a pretty fair job of paying the bills, I've got time to get it right. I really hope I don't end up retiring from my current job in 15-20 years, because I really don't want to be stuck doing it that long, but we'll see, I suppose. There are worse things than that, if it comes down to it.

Anyway, my fleeting hobby time has been spent lately with SWTOR, as any readers have no doubt noticed, if there were any readers, not Dark Fantasy X, but I'm always keeping both Dark Fantasy X and Space Opera X in the back of my mind, just in case. One thing that I will do on this trip is take my journal with me where I keep notes for potential games and stories. I'm actually kind of excited about this, although it's not something that I spend much time on. But I'd like to, and being away from my computer for four days is a good opportunity to spend some time with my earbuds in, thinking about Dark Fantasy X and Space Opera X and where, if anywhere, I'm going with them.

Anyway, this isn't exactly where I'm going to be out West, but it's close enough, and if I somehow, I dunno, won the lottery or whatever, here's one contender for where I'd end up.

Once again; leftism = mental illness

https://www.psypost.org/study-woke-attitudes-linked-to-anxiety-depression-and-a-lack-of-happiness/

This one was research performed in Finland on Finns, but there's no reason not to believe that it is a similar condition across the West. (To the degree that Finland is part of "the West." Like Ireland and southern "Mediterranean" Europe and western Slavic peoples, a case could be made that they're an outgroup, or other group within Western civilization, or a para-Western civilizational grouping that isn't part of Western Civilization per se, but is closely related to and still travels with Western civilization.)

The curious part is that women are so much more favorable towards wokeness compared to men. Sadly, and I was offended when this was first presented to me but the data is pretty incontrovertible now; the anti-suffragettes seem to be completely and totally vindicated by the data. 

As an aside, remember when Miss Helsinki 2017 went viral on the Right, where an African girl who looked like a somewhat prettier version of Flavor Flav won Miss Helsinki over about a dozen very pretty European women? Yeah. Finnish men weren't in favor of that, I'm sure, even if virtue-signaling Finnish women reluctantly refused to take a stand against it.

Here's the older link to a Danish study that reached similar conclusions; the most mentally ill group is white, woke women, the least mentally ill is based conservative Christian men.

https://vdare.com/articles/it-s-official-again-leftists-particularly-leftist-women-are-nuts

Of course, this doesn't really need to be "proven", although it's nice that it is. But it's pretty obvious and self-evident. Even SNL made a joke about it on the weekend following Donald Trump's election; all of the liberal white folks in the apartment were chewing Xanax like they were Tic-Tacs.

And don't think that this is unique to Scandinavians, of course. All of the West fits this. And Denmark is about as firmly within Western civilization as you can get anyway.

Where Eagles Dare and Star Wars

I've said before that the middle section of Star Wars is very similar, probably on purpose, to the plot and situation of the popular 1968 WW2-spy movie Where Eagles Dare. I've always liked Eagles, but I hadn't watched it in a while. I own it on DVD, so it was just a question of making some time and doing it. My youngest son likes to watch movies with me, and this was one where we were both in alignment that we wanted to see it, so we watched it this weekend. Because the movie is long and we started it late, we actually watched half of it on Saturday (up to the end of the interrogation scene in the Great Hall of the Schloss Adler. Then we watched the second part last night, which is the escape from the castle, and by far the best part of the movie, with the thrilling murder of a gazillion Nazis, as well as the iconic cable car fight scene. This is the part that especially reminds one of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and the rest of the bunch being stuck on the Death Star. I'm not the only person to have noted this similarity over time; I did a quick search, and found that many other people had remarked on it (some of them also remarked that the part that followed the escape from the castle; the flight to the airport, etc. could easily be a prototype for the truck chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think it's fair to say that Lucas liked Where Eagles Dare. The biggest tell, which I hadn't recognized until now, was the Clint Eastwood's character says to Richard Burton's character, more than once in fact, that "we've got company", a line which Lucas adopts pretty closely when Han shouts to Luke that "we're gonna have company."

He used some other WWII action movies from the 60s; 633 Squadron and The Dam Busters (actually, that one's a little older; from 1955); this is even less secret; he showed this films to his special effects guys saying specifically that that's what he wanted the X-wing fight scene to look like. Of course, the plot and situation is lifted right from those movies, both of which had a very similar scenario.

Dumb virtue-signaling people like to say that Star Wars was a reworking or even a remake of The Hidden Fortress, but in reality, the movie bears very little resemblance to it, in favor of the movies listed above, except for maybe the opening act, and the concept of the bickering droids mirroring the bickering peasants, and some of the other set-up. Where Eagles Dare also doesn't feature the rescue of a princess, which The Hidden Fortress does, but it does feature the rescue of a downed American general who has access to secret plans. Given that princess-rescuing is a pretty time-honored scène à faire, pegging that to A Hidden Fortress is dubious. Certainly, however, the earliest drafts of Star Wars more closely resembled The Hidden Fortress but by the time we get to the movie as filmed, it's at best the source of the first act only, if even that. 

Of course, by saying that Star Wars used these elements, I don't mean to say that they were the Tragedy of Darth Plagiarism the Wise or anything, just that they clearly form the inspiration core that was adapted and adopted to fit into the screenplay as it emerged. There's nothing wrong with doing that, and hardy any writer, even one much better than George Lucas, will fail to honestly admit that writers to that all the time; take an element from some other work, and then adopt and adapt it to fit into their narrative. Assuming that they also adopt and adapt other elements too and mingle them, and twist what's left to be unique somewhat so that it's not an obvious copy-paste routine, then why not?

I always say that writers and game-masters too, for that matter, should be familiar with lots of different fiction traditions and genres, and what makes them work and not work. I've heard of D&D players that not only only read fantasy, but they even only read D&D fiction! I doubt that's true anymore for this guy, since he said that years ago, and I don't think WotC publishes many novels anymore. And even if it was literally true and not some weird exaggerated claim, then that suggests that he probably just doesn't read much at all; I doubt that he doesn't watch TV, movies or play video games of various genres, at the very least.

As Lucas himself proved, his greatest inspiration for the setting of Star Wars was almost certainly stuff like Dune and the Lensman series, and the old Flash Gordon Republic serials, but when it came to plot, his greatest inspiration wasn't science fiction at all, but a Japanese historical swasbuckling film, a WWII spy-thriller, and some WWII war movies.

Switching gears, I watched a YouTube video recently about Star Wars and Dune, and it claims that Brian Herbert called his dad in late May of 1977 telling him that he needed to see Star Wars because it copied so many elements of Dune that it was scary. Then he specifically mentioned the desert planet and the evil empire. If that's really all he could think of, he was really reaching. Evil empires are a stock plot element from all kinds of fiction, and in any case, the most obvious proximal source for the Empire was the caricature of the Nazis that our propagandists have foisted on us to justify our involvement in WW2, not anything out of Dune. It's not clear that the Empire is even necessarily evil in Dune, or if it is, that Paul Atreides and his Fremen jihad aren't even more evil. And a desert planet? That's a little easier sell, but then again, desert planets are hardly unique to Dune, especially given the prolific subgenre of science fiction set on Mars. In fact, Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark double book The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman offers a more Tatooine-like experience, I think, than Dune does. Dune isn't anything all that interesting or unique without the context of spice, the worms and the Fremen, all of which Tatooine lacks. Although the offhand shot of C-3PO walking by a long giant skeleton is maybe supposed to be a veiled Dune reference, and certainly his fear of being shipped to the spice mines of Kessel is a veiled Dune reference. It's a little unfortunate that Star Wars used the word spice at all in any context other than something you put on your food to make it taste more interesting, although it was just an off-hand reference in the one movie until the EU and then the Disney movies (Solo in particular) made it more mainstream again. Of course, Star Wars spice has developed in ways that bear little resemblance at all to Dune spice.

I don't actually like Dune that much as a novel, which I think I mentioned recently in reference to the new movies. I think the movies are better then the book, but they still aren't great. A lot of people think that Dune is to sci-fi what Lord of the Rings is to fantasy. I completely disagree. It's epic in scope, but lacks epic themes. Dune is A Song of Ice & Fire, a disappointing and nihilistic critique of humanity and Western civilization in particular, a dark and cynical downer where there are no heroes, no good guys even, and no good even at all. Everything is dark, tawdry and cynical. 

Also, Dune hasn't had the effect on the genre that Lord of the Rings has, although there it at least comes closer. Rather, I suspect Star Wars is itself the Lord of the Rings of science fiction, or at least it was when we only had the original trilogy. It's the work that's the most imitated and has done the most to make the genre mainstream. Like Lord of the Rings, it also synthesizes older, familiar tropes and puts them in a new context; in Lord of the Rings case, it hangs mythology and old Germanic sagas on an epic good vs evil struggle, where Star Wars takes an even broader selection of genre tropes and also hangs them on an epic struggle of good vs evil, even going so far as trying to justify its seriousness by appeal to Joseph Campbell's debunked and out of favor "monomyth" theories.

Yes, that's another tell of someone who isn't very educated but is trying to appear so; if you refer to Joseph Campbell without even knowing that his work is largely discounted, discredited and not taken seriously at all by academics, then you're just a parrot trying to appear intelligent by referring to an academic thesis that you've heard about vaguely but don't understand at all. Please just stop. Nobody is impressed by the fact that you've heard the name Joseph Campbell and might even know the name of his most famous book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The more you try to summarize the Wikipedia summary of it, the deeper the hole you're digging for yourself for anyone who actually knows the status of Joseph Campbell's credibility to see.

Anyway, here's Johnn and his common law wife Raina Temple on Tatooine, which isn't really very much like Arrakis. In fact, here it specifically has a Lovecraftian vibe to it, although I think that was mostly made up for the Old Republic material, rather than something that is otherwise very present in the Star Wars franchise overall.

Here's a better view of the outfit. It's based on the Intelligence Agent's Armor, with a secondary black (IIRC) dye module, and the Crimson Raider helmet. 

Season 6

It’s now Thursday morning and I’ve had two days to play around with 7.4.1. Some people on Youtube and elsewhere have made a big deal about the addition of the "Date Night" events. This makes me wonder who the devs are targeting with this update, and who the player base is, or who they think that it is. Maybe I'm the one who's mistaken, and the romance options and stuff is drawing more women to the game than I imagined. I like a good romance as much as the next guy, but if that becomes the main focus of a swashbuckling space adventure game, then something is out of whack, by my account. The perfect amount is John Carter and Dejah Thoris from A Princess of Mars. Sometimes the originals got it so right that nobody else can top them.

That said, I don't really care very much about the expansions. Most of my characters go into semi-retirement after finishing the class story and then very leisurely wander over to Ilum, Section X and The Black Hole… if they actually make it there at all. By semi-retirement, I usually mean that I use them for seasons, events, outfit design for concept art for SOX, and other things like that, rather than that I'm actually playing the story with them. I think it's worth taking a moment to take stock of where my semi-retired characters actually are.

• Maark—the most far along; just finished Ruhnuk with him. Not super motivated to go to whatever is next; the new Voss area, or whatever, so when I play him, I'm very slowly grinding for Ruhnuk reputation. Not that I've done much if anything on that the last two weeks.
• Mat Thew—the second most far along; just finished Yavin IV and the Shadow of Revan stuff; haven’t yet gone to  Ziost, but that would be the next step. Not sure that I want to go on past Ziost and change all of the functional nature of his companions.
• Luukke—somewhere on Makeb. Haven’t gone back to see what’s still to be done, but I think I’m almost finished with it.
• Johhn—still on Ilum; I think I’ve done the Black Hole with him too. Or maybe Section X. I’m not really considering using him for any additional story stuff, though.
• Phillippion—haven’t started any post story stuff with him; I’ve only taken him to Ilum to grind Gree reputation (which is now complete.) Might have grinded some other reputation with him over time, like Oricon or Section X—certainly I did THORN and the BBA, but I’m not doing anything else story-wise with him at all. Don’t care to either.
• Graggory—I might have finished Ilum with him, maybe not. I think I’ve got Makeb on his next mission, but that’s been true for a long time.
• Hutran Thanatos—because he’s the most recent to finish, he’s the only one who I’m actually approaching the post story stuff systematically anymore. He’s finished Ilum (except the two flashpoints) at which point I’ll eventually do The Black Hole and Section X with him, and presumably after that, Makeb.

In general, I don’t much care for the post main story expansion stuff. Some of it is visually pretty, like Odessen or Ossus or Makeb or Onderon, etc. but I only go there for aesthetic reasons or to grind some special event or something like that. I don’t really care what happens to the characters after the main story when there no longer is a unique story for each class, and there’s barely a unique story for each faction. Sorta. None of these characters are advancing very fast, and for the majority of them, I really don’t expect that I’ll ever play past Ziost at the absolute most. I’m especially reluctant to use my crafting characters post Ziost, because they’ll lose access to their companions. Ironically, some of my newer characters might be better positioned to move forward past that, because their companions are just sidekicks along for the ride and the combat support.

The crafting characters, if they do advanced story content, it will probably be because I popped into a flashpoint for some reason. I am still trying to grind for a group achievement, after all, although I haven’t done anything with that since coming back to the game a couple of months ago. Too many other things to do!

So, date night and story advancement; I don’t care. Why do I care about game updates at all, then? Honestly, I don’t really. I find them inconvenient mostly, although I’m glad that they add some new elements, some new environments to visit and go do daily areas on (although lately, you can’t do the dailies without first doing the story, which sucks) and stuff like that. And I like Seasons well enough.  I’m doing season 6, and it’ll be third that I’ve done; the other three taking place while I was away from the game.  I’m not sure that the seasonal armors and weapons are all that cool this time around, but the mounts are nice, and I get extra cartel coins, plus season tokens that I can spend on older season stuff that I missed here and there. (Just added the Rapid Recon Walker to my collections in mounts a day or two ago, for instance.) Two evenings of seasons, and I’ve done all of the weekly stuff that I can. Just the log-on bonus and the dailies will get me another two or three reward track elements before next Tuesday. 

I’ve said before that SWTOR always leads me mentally to Space Opera X, and I’ve had some thoughts on the SOX setting, and how to make it potentially much more useful and fun for me by getting rid of the political alignment of most of the systems, and instead having all major political groups potentially operating on any planet. There’s a reason most planets in SWTOR have both Republic and Imperial stuff going on. Even Ord Mantell and Hutta are notable for their neutrality, and its telling that Ord Mantell for both factions was added to the latest update, and Hutta is coming yet this year too. Voss is maybe the poster-child of the neutral planet where both Empire and Republic have to operate discretely, but that’s just a case of mediocre execution of what is otherwise actually a good idea.

And here's Johhn on Oricon in his Daft Punk outfit.

New outfit video for SWTOR characters

SWTOR characters, and what they can represent in Space Opera X, since I like to use SWTOR outfit designer as concept art for SOX.

SWTOR end game

Well, I had mentioned that the lag seemed to be improved. I still had a lot of it playing Taul Kajak on Voss yesterday. I did finish Voss, including the bonus series. There were two major problems: 1) if playing Jedi Knight, then you actually defeat Sel-Makor as part of your class story before you face his minion in the faction story and have a lot of dialogue that doesn’t make any sense anymore, and 2) the bonus series is super long and tedious. I did it specifically because I hadn’t in a while and wanted to see it again, but I doubt I’ll do it with any of my next wave of characters (I guess I’ll do one Imperial character too, just to see how its different.) I also switched to my second combat style to sneak past a bunch of tedious trash mobs, and it completely screwed up my buttons when I switched back. Overall, my Voss experience was pretty frustrating. Too bad, as I think that it’s a pretty planet, at least, but that’s not sufficient to account for all of the other frustrating or dumb things that Voss offers. It hasn’t been one of my favorite planets to actually play. Of course, if I can get rid of the lag by getting a new graphics card and/or motherboard, that’ll be a major improvement, at least.

 I’ve been waffling a bit on whether or not I want to do the faction story on Corellia with this character, or wait for the next one to come around, but I’m thinking I’ll do it with Taul after all. For all subsequent Republic characters, I’ll just completely drop all exploration, heroic, extraneous flashpoints or faction story missions as soon as I hit max level. I mean, like a hot potato. I’ll abandon the missions in my mission log and ignore all of them from that point forward.

Unfortunately, I’ve never much liked the end game planets as much as I wish that I did. Hoth is the last planet that I really like. Belsavis and Voss and even Corellia have elements to them that are cool, but others that are not. I kind of like planets like Ilum and Rishi or even Yavin IV that come later more than I like these three. Part of my dislike of Voss is the “anthropology lesson” that the writers want to subject you to. They are proud of their setting development on Voss, and spend way too much time going over it with you as opposed to just letting you go adventure out on the planet. You’re constantly having to navigate the supposed tricky diplomatic situation because  of the Voss and their weird culture, and the impact of the Mystics, etc. The writers indulged in that way too often with many of the companions in the game, but Voss is where they really let it hang out there for the whole planetary experience.

In any case, with Taul Kajak now ready to go to Corellia, which is the last normal planet, I’ll almost certainly make that my priority, and just do Corellia and have done with it. Then I can check one more character off as “finished”, or moved into semi-retirement is perhaps more accurate, and decide what to do next. I’d kind of like to finish the two Ilum flashpoints with Hutran Thanatos, actually, and then have him do The Black Hole and Section X, etc. And I’d like to grind reputation on Ruhnuk with Maark. And, I’ve got Anstal Tane and Vant Galaide to move forward with, not to mention Mirabeau Tane. Plenty to work on; I mostly just have to decide what of all of those options I’m more in the mood for. And as I get Taul into semi-retirement, I’d like to make some outfit videos with him and Hutran, my two green guys, at which point I’ll feel like their semi-retirement is more legit. I somehow feel like there’s something still to do with them, and I think that that’s really it.

And then last night, I deferred some of my real life responsibilities to "veg". I listened to some music. I watched YouTube videos about the philosophy and text of the Dune books (the more I learn of them, the less I like them. I'm glad that I only read the first one, didn't even finish it, and instead just watched the sci-fi channel miniseries and now the new movies. They were better than the books, in most respects.) And, of course, I played around in SWTOR. I went to Corellia, although not with Taul Kajak; rather I took my old bounty hunter Graggory, my old agents Johhn and Hutran Thanatos, my old commando Philippion and my old gunslinger Luukke to the Spike and spent some time in the rakghoul tunnels. I had earlier reported that I might delete Philippion, but I'm now thinking that I probably won't; he's my only commando, and I won't be able to showcase any outfit videos or anything else using a cannon if I don't have any commandos. Since I don't really need or want a second commando, I might as well just keep him. Too bad he has a dumb name, but the same is true for Mat Thew, Maark Luukke and Johhn in most respects, and yet I'm not getting rid of any of them. Oh, well

I took some video in the rakghoul tunnels and on the surface of Corellia with another low cost outfit on Thanatos, but I haven't edited the video file or otherwise done anything with it, so here's some other screenshots taken earlier of the outfit that I had Graggory running around in. I'll get some rakghoul stuff later. Because there are two daily challenges that give you rakghoul cannisters, and you can do them pretty quickly, I did them both with all five of the characters mentioned, netting me ten new rakghoul cannisters. If I do that a couple more times this week, I'll be sitting pretty with regards to rakghoul cannisters. I'm a little short on bounty contracts, though—next time that event comes around, I'll need to grind a good twenty new contracts or so.

As noted, this Graggory outfit is very "smuggler-like" rather than hunter-like, but I tend to like my hunters to dress in normal gunfighter clothes quite often. Here he is showing off his stuff on Dantooine, Korriban, Balmorra and Nar Shaddaa respectively.

UPDATE: Actually, maybe I'll go back and do the Voss planetary and bonus series Imperial side with Hutran Thanatos, as well as Corellia planetary. And for Republic, I can do the Corellia stuff with Anstal. Because they belong to Operative and Scoundrel. I can sneak past the trash mobs easily. There's no point anymore in worrying about XP or bonus missions, etc (well, there won't be by the time Anstal is on those planets) so the whole thing will be faster and less tedious than with anyone else. And once I've said that I've done it again relatively recently, I won't feel obligated in any sense whatsoever to try it again for quite a long time.

This is part of what I mean by "semi-retirement." Hutran Thanatos finished the main story, he's max level—but there's still plenty that I can do with him, I find, so there's no reason to delete him, and plenty of reasons to still keep him around for certain things and do things with him. I'd actually like to play the next part of the expansions, probably up through Ziost at least with him too... but I feel no urgency to get that done.

UPDATE II: Good and bad news on the rakghoul tunnels. I didn't realize this before, but if you fast travel straight from the tunnels to your spaceship, it still shows your location as in the tunnels, which are treated as a separate world from the world that you're actually on. This means that if you exit your ship, you go straight to the tunnels too. Nice shortcut! Also, and I think this seems to have been changed, it seems almost impossible to draw aggro now in the tunnels unless you literally attack one of the monsters. You can literally walk through them and not draw aggro. This is very convenient too. The bad news: I forgot that you can only do the Jeelvic mission once per character per week. If my goal was to get 30 rakghoul cannisters, I'll now need to do it at least two more days than I thought, or with more characters than I thought. Or, I can settle and get less. We'll see how it goes. Taking five characters just to ride around and binocular the ceiling in a few places each isn't the most exciting thing, but it's pretty quick and harmless and gives me the currency I need. Sadly, all of the other missions just give reputation, and I'm all done with reputation.

I guess I could do the Heroic 4 and group up with somebody or other, maybe... Might be nice to try something different, and maybe I'll even get grouping credit for it on the social achievements.

Graggory on Dantooine

Hutran Thanatos' rakghoul hunting "discount" outfit

Graggory on Korriban

Graggory on Balmorra

Hutran and Raina about to enter the rakghoul tunnels...

Graggory on Nar Shaddaa

Forced ranking of class stories; what would I change?

As part of my mother of all SWTOR reviews, I ended up doing a forced ranking of the class stories, least to most favorite. Then I released a modified version of it later. I guess this is the third one, although I'm focusing more on "what would I change" rather than the ranking itself. 

I think with my most recent playthrough, I'm finding that all of the tech classes are preferable to me to force-users. Especially because you can use more varied mechanics to represent them now. That said, that is a personal preference that has little to do with more than the fact that I like guns better than lightsabers. Part of that is the many, many trash mobs you have to face. It's much less tedious, for whatever reason, to engage them by just standing back and plinking at them with the 1 key than it is having to move around and engage them in hand to hand. That's a very esoteric and kind of strange rationale for preferring the techs to the space wizards, but there you have it. It is what it is regardless. If you could take that element out of the picture, I think my previous ranking would still work; least to most favorite: consular, inquisitor, trooper, knight, agent, warrior, smuggler, hunter. With the caveat that the daylight between all of the top 5-6 classes is extremely small, and very minor tweaks could make them move many spots, because they all have essentially the same score, and it comes down to fine-tuning the decimal places. For this post, however, let's just do the force-users first, and the tech classes second, in this order: consular, inquisitor, knight, warrior, trooper, agent, smuggler, hunter. So; what would I change?

First off, let's again reiterate the criteria for why a class story succeeds or fails. There are several elements: 1) main character characterization, 2) the actual plot, 3) companion characters, especially girlfriend options (again, I almost exclusively play male characters). I had mechanics in there, but given the greater flexibility now, I don't think that matters as much. Although clearly I have my favorites in terms of mechanics too (gunslinger, mercenary, powertech, sniper.)

Consular. One of the consular story's biggest weaknesses is the boring main character who has no character. There needs to be a serious rewrite where the concept of the "earnest Jedi who speaks in boring fortune cookie expressions" is replaced with someone who resembles a real person, cracks some better jokes, has some more interesting opinions, etc. This is a systemic problem that affects both Jedi classes, so I won't get into details here, but I think BioWare's writers got caught in the "righteous, liberal vision of a serious hero" paradigm, and the problem is that the character is such a boring cypher with no personality that it's just frustrating to play him.

Of course, the consular's companions are pretty weak too. I never had much interest in Dr. Lizardo, who you have to run around with for several planets as your only option, while he constantly gives you lizard anthropology lectures. The only possible exception is your girlfriend character, who isn't too bad, if a little mouthy, pushy and self-important. Still, she could be much worse, and some of her worst traits come across as more immaturity rather than true character flaws. But she's not really very cute, and you get her very late, so you have no opportunity to have a proper romance with her. Plus, honestly, there's no chemistry between you and her, and that's mostly on the writing of the main character himself.

The plot is also sadly kind of flat. The dark side plague that you run around healing and the Manchurian candidate dark side brainwashing that you encounter has some potential, but it never quite seems to live up to it. They also are very similar and kind of bleed into each other, which amplifies the repetitive nature of it even more than it already is. And your villains aren't very memorable either. The other element that you do as part of your plot, running around with all of these entitled, bratty little princess diplomats, is more tedious and frustrating than fun. Honestly, the entirety of the consular story needs some serious overhaul. The main idea, of a dark side plague of some kind followed by sleeper agents who don't even know that they're sleeper agents, has some potential, but it needs a more interesting character, more interesting companion dynamics, and the adversaries and plot problems to be solved need to be much more lively.

Inquisitor. Here, the main character himself or herself—and this is probably the only class story where I actually think it works a little better as a woman—isn't really too bad. But the companions are mostly pretty lackluster, and the plot is mostly kind of silly. To the point that you wish that they'd committed to making it a farce instead of trying to pretend that we can take it with a straight face. If the whole thing had been more light-hearted, the plot itself could have worked. But the character really needs better companions. If you play a girl, you have a serviceable if pedestrian romance option, but if you play as a guy, all you get is a severely unlikeable weird alien girl. Apparently, Khem Val is romanceable, although only in the Ossus+ expansions where super gay and weird options were something that they made a point of offering. I can't imagine it for either a man or a women; the "morose monster" is, at best, only vaguely humanoid to begin with. You don't get Ashara, the romanceable alien, until you finish Taris, which is not as bad as the consular geting Nadia Grell on Quesh, or wherever it is that you finally pick her up as a companion, but it's still too late, in my opinion. Romanceable characters should be available on the first or second planet.

The villain is also really flat. You never really understand what his beef is with you, or why either of you should care one way or another about each other.

Knight. The Knight actually has a pretty good story, marred by two somewhat glaring problems; 1) lame main character, who really needs a lot more personality and spunk to feel anything at all like a real person (see similar complaint for the other Jedi character noted above). Tython is also a very rough first planet, where you are put in one hoaky moral dilemma after another where the "light side" choices are all stupid and the "dark side" choices are mostly just childish, and no matter what you pick, the stick in the mud Jedi council will lecture you like a Karen hall monitor about it. The story improves tons when you leave Tython, you get a great girlfriend character, probably the best in the game, even, and you get her on the second planet after having already interacted with her a lot on the first planet.

The plot itself is mostly pretty cool, albeit somewhat repetitive, for the first act, but it's a little silly when you're part of a strike team to go kidnap the emperor and bring him to Tython to turn him to the light side. Lolwut? I remember in college hearing about an idea floating around in Kennedy's CIA about sneaking into Cuba and shaving Castro's beard off, thinking that that would cause his government to fail. This idea is only marginally less stupid. Still, the Jedi Knight story mostly delivers interesting swashbuckling action, thrilling heroics, and over-the-top melodrama, which is pretty iconic to the Star Wars franchise, after all.

Warrior. The Sith Warrior is the dark mirror of the Jedi Knight, and if you sometimes have to choose a few dark side options on the Jedi just to not be a ridiculous parody of a liberal hero, you have to mostly choose a lot of light side options as the warrior to not be a tactically obtuse, childish psychopath. I personally find the character most enjoyable when I play him as a kind of reformer, who finds the insane dictates of the worst of the Sith counter-productive to the growth and success of the Empire, not to mention worthy of summary execution for its own right. The Sith are maniacs, and while that's kind of how they're supposed to be, it also begs the question of how their society ever formed in the first place, much less managed to last as long as it has. The early stuff has a kind of rough Spartan agoge feel to it on occasion, which kind of works, but later it's just nothing but insanely counter-productive whims and backstabbery. This weakness carries forward in the faction stories of all of the Imperial classes to a fair degree, but it really only applies as a plot point in the class story that you have to ignore and pretend that it isn't there for the two Sith classes. In the agent class, on the other hand, it's a plot point, but is treated much more reasonably, and the Imperials are constantly careful and cautious and also sometimes kind of resentful of the prominence that the Sith and their stupid ideas are given. For the most part, they do their best to stay out of the Siths' way and ignore them, so that they can competently run an Empire. 

Because the Sith Warrior isn't bound to try and be serious and heroic in the minds of writers who don't understand either dimension, he actually is kind of a likeable character and feels like a real person. This is true whether you play him more dark or more light; he's still a more interesting and likeable character. I prefer him, as noted, a bit more light, but I can understand wanting to do either.

While none of the characters hit five home runs with their companions, the Warrior and the Knight both do pretty well, and have at least three or four pretty good, interesting ones. Quinn isn't exactly likeable, but he is interesting, and has some interesting plot elements inherent in his story. Vette is a likeable girlfriend, and if she wasn't a funky colored alien without any hair, I'd like her quite a bit better. Jaesa is another really interesting character, but if you run her light-side, she disappointingly doesn't offer the romance option that you kind of want from her. The writers, to their credit, took this feedback and added an expansion romance that is very satisfying; kind of suggesting that you had a lot of romantic tension all along that she tried really hard to put aside, but ultimately failed to do. But the expansion is out of scope for this discussion, so I'll say that I was always just a bit disappointed in the romance department with the Sith Warrior. Jaesa having a real romance option was a must, and having Vette be human would have been nice too. 

Trooper. The plot of the trooper is surprisingly good. I think it would be greatly improved if they admitted the obvious; this guy isn't really a soldier, he's more like a spy or hitman; an "asset" as they call them in the Bourne or Bond or Mission Impossible movies. I also feel like the second act when you're recruiting your team falls a little flat; there are a few where you can quite sensibly tell your CO that you don't want this person on your team, but you have to pick him up anyway (Tanno Vik being the most obvious here, but Yuun is also super boring.) The main character himself, again, has the same problem that the Jedi have; the writers want to promote him as a serious yet heroic figure, and they have no idea how to do that without taking out all personality and character, and making the main character that you play super boring. The villains get to have more fun, and the smuggler by his nature, but these three all get really short shrift, because being told what to do by superiors and being good little boys and girls who follow orders without any attitude is what the writers think a good guy hero is, and they can't seem to add anything at all to that without making them boring. But as I said before, the trooper was a pleasant surprise to me; in spite of foreseeing the things that I wouldn't like about it accurately, it turns out that they weren't as bad as I feared, and the other elements were mostly done fairly well. 

Elara Dorn is the romance option, and she's actually quite charming in many ways. I mean, as a real man if she were a real woman, I'd probably get tired of pursuing her with the hard to get attitude that she sometimes has, but that's an artifact of the way the game is structured; you can't have the romance finish up too early, so there's nothing else to do about it other than accept that you need to wait until the right pacing moment in the story.

I also feel like the trooper suffers more than most in terms of losing focus after Act I is done. This is true to some extent for all of the characters, but what follows for the Trooper until you get to the end is worse than most. Also, the second villain you get isn't very well developed or interesting.

Agent. The agent has a really interesting story, and although there is occasionally a loss of agency (no pun intended) inherent in it, the plot is probably among the best of all of the class stories. However, as I've said before, the companions are among the worst in the game. The only one that I really like is Raina Temple, but even then I have to swap her out for a prettier customization, and you get her way too late to have a credible romance with her. Kaliyo, who's supposed to be your romance option, just isn't attractive at all in looks, in personality, and especially in baggage. The idea that any man of value would have an interest in a woman like that is laughable. What's wrong with the writers? Are there not any actual men among them, only really toxic betas and women?

A better romance companion, which you pick up earlier, and better companions in general is the main thing that the agent story needs.

Smuggler. The smuggler struggles a bit with this same problem, but if you stop worrying about trying to fit what the game thinks your characters want to hear and just doing what you should be doing anyway, the smuggler works better. (Ironically, also true in real life.) It's another case study in how the writers don't seem to know jack squat about what alpha males are really like and what women actually want. It's not so bad that they made the successful men into the villains, like in Revenge of the Nerds or Beauty & the Beast, but if you're willing to take a few hits on companion approval and maybe not flirt with every single NPC that it gives you the opportunity to flirt with (most of whom a real man wouldn't be all that interested in anyway) the smuggler is a charming and engaging character to play.

I am a little frustrated that Risha, your default romance option, isn't "officially" a companion until the end of Act I, even though she's on your ship and is an NPC that you interact with a lot. It almost feels like you pick her up at the end of Coruscant, but you don't really do so completely in terms of being able to use her as a companion or customize her appearance. She's also a bit pushy and holds out too long too, but again, there are structural reasons why it has to be this way, even if it doesn't really feel right from a chemistry perspective. And, of course, you have another romanceable option among your companions, but not one that I can take seriously, so I've never pursued it with any of my many smuggler characters, nor do I intend to.

I also feel like the second act where you do privateer work is a bit weak. And the attempted plot twist feels more forced rather than clever or natural. The whole freakin' game I was saying, bring on Rogun "the Butcher", but we're "supposed" to be afraid of him the entire time. Kind of frustrating too. The whole point of a character like the smuggler is that he takes his own destiny in his hands and makes things happen, but you have to be way too much of a follower here. I know; to some degree that's dictated by the structure of the game, but a good writer at least doesn't allow you to notice it so much.

Bounty Hunter. The hunter plot isn't super complex or deep, but it works pretty well. The whole concept of the Great Hunt is a little dubious, but once you accept it, it works fine and some of the hunts in particular are actually fairly interesting. This is especially true for the Eidolon on Nar Shaddaa and Tiresias Lokai on Tatooine. As weak as the Great Hunt motivation is in some ways, it does seem to feel a little better than what follows, where you're still doing hunts, but the motivation for doing them seems even weaker. The Great Hunt contrivance is contrived and forced, a bit, but the Black List is worse. It's a little bit of a shame that the writers couldn't quite manage to rise above what they did and create something that feels just a bit more compelling. Should have probably watched more classic westerns and gangster movies before writing this. There's nothing wrong with what we got, it just feels a little too safe and not quite creative enough somehow. A kind of deja vu, too obvious plot.

I don't really love Torian Cadera as a companion, because I don't really love the standard EU presentation of Mandalorians, but I'm sure that I'm the exception there; I think otherwise that's kind of popular. Mako is one of the best girlfriends in the game, in my opinion, and Gault is pretty fun. Blizz is... whatever, and I don't know why I have to take Skadge at all; in a realistic world, I'd never accept him on my ship; I'd have killed him as quickly as I could in game as a psychopathic criminal and villain who had started targeting me and my crew to scam. Mako is also your first companion, way back on planet one, which is really how most of the girlfriends characters should be, honestly. Kyra being at the end of planet two is the only other acceptable alternative, and all of the other classes who don't do that are doing it wrong.

I'm not sure how they could have done this without making the game quite a bit bigger than it is, but the attraction of the smuggler and hunter in particular is that you kind of want to disassociate them from the faction. The smuggler isn't really a Republic agent, just like the hunter isn't an Imperial one, but you're constantly dragged back in as if by an inescapable event horizon.