On making maps and detail

I've put together a pretty big list of features from my earlier maps and notes about the three regions that are now canonically included in DH5. Here's where I'm worried that I might have a problem.

Unless I draw quite small, I may have already come up with more details than I need. Should I, then, actually do three separate maps? Or should I reduce the detail and not show all of these features? Or should I have more than one map for more than one purpose?

If you watch map-drawing tutorials on Youtube, you probably only come across a handful of channels that do it, so you'll probably see all of them. Esper the Bard has a concept of four "levels" of map, and his #2 and #3 would be the ones in play here. He suggests that #2 is the one that you use the most, and it's a "kindgom" style map. In my opinion, it's a really big kingdom, looking at this example, as in scale it seems quite similar to the famous Middle-earth map, which of course includes many kingdoms and is about  the size of Western Europe, give or take a bit. But, I agree that that's a good scale, I'm just not 100% that I can squeeze all of the items I have on a map of that scale drawn on an 8 ½" x 11" sheet of paper. Maybe I can. After all, Christopher Tolkien's map has a fair number of features, and it was printed in a mass market paperback! Although his original was drawn, obviously, on a much larger source.

One possibility is that I have at least one map that shows all three of the regions and their relationship to each other, and then maybe three separate maps for each region that show more detail. Another possibility is that I try to squeeze as much as I can in and don't worry too much about it. To be honest, I don't really know how feasible that really is. Maybe I don't have as much as I think I have. But maybe I accept that I'm trying to make Esper's map #2, not a map #3, which is a much more detailed regional guide, more like the kind that would be included in a module, showing a lot more very specific locations. Let me give an example with some map image files that I didn't have too hard a time finding with bing image search.

This is Nentir Vale, the map that was included in the 4e DMG, and which is already a smallish area, but it's the closest thing to a setting map that 4e really gave us. It's a really nice piece of map artwork, and I've actually picked up a few techniques here and there by imitating what cartographer Mike Schley did with this map, although look at that later at your own leisure. First, just pull it up and check out the bottom right 15% or so of the map, where there's a big bight in the forest, a road and a dot labeled Harkenwold. Even if you open the image in a new window and zoom to actual full resolution image size, you'll see that there isn't a ton of detail around that area

This next image is a (poor) scan of some kind from the module Reavers of Harkenwold. It's the same area, and honestly it shows it at about the same resolution (although it's not even close to being the original source file for the image, no doubt) and yet, we've added all kinds of details. That's probably appropriate, because being that it's a module, it needs to show all kinds of areas that your PCs would visit, including some poor widow's house, a camp in the woods, etc. But some of the stuff is more permanent and notable; there's a bunch more labeled villages, hamlets, steadings, paths, and the hills to the east that are not labeled on the first map are now called the Briar Hills. In fact, it actually changes some things; the place labeled Harkenwold on the bigger map is now a village or small town named Harken; one of many in the whole forest bight region, and now Harkenwold is a regional label rather than a town label. The new paths aren't just additions, too—there's even some minor differences between what's shown on one map vs the other.

Now, I'm not trying to say that one or the other map "got it wrong", merely that the maps serve two different purposes, one being a regional overview, and one being a usable tool to adventure in a smaller, more constrained specific area.

I think that mentally I sometimes struggle with the difference between the two; I want my maps to be able to serve both purposes at the same time, and it's not likely that it will. One does, however, have to accept that in a regional overview maps, that there will be details "on the ground" that the map doesn't always show.

Anyway, I don't really know how big of a problem I have until I start trying to draw it. My original Hill Country and Timischburg maps were each drawn on the same size sheet of paper that I'm now attempting to use to show both of them together, plus a third region yet. It may be that I have too much material for the map size that I'm trying to draw. Or, it tmay be that I don't. I guess I don't really know for sure until I start putting together the sketch-draft version of it and see how much real estate I really need to get everything in. 

As a quick aside, Harkenwold sounds more German than English, especially the name Harken, but The Wold is an area you might find on the Middle-earth map if you look carefully at the greater region of Rohan. A wold or wolds is a word used in parts of northern England to refer to unforested open country; grassy hills, a plateau, etc. Yorkshire and Lincolnshire is where you're most likely to hear it, and it's very much an Anglo-Saxon English word. It is, however, closely related to weald and wald, cognates for each other in Old English and German respectively, which curiously means forested area, i.e, the Schwarzwald or Black Forest. Anyway, I'm a fan of Anglo-Saxon linguistics and archaic or unusual words, so I've got to give the designers at WotC some credit for finding and seizing on this word. It's not that it's hard; like I said, it's right there on Tolkien's Middle-earth map, for crying out loud, but I don't see many people use it. The Hill Country has done so as well; there's a region called the Goldenwolds that is an upland region with tall, golden prairie grasses where buffalo, tarpans and other animals graze.

DH5 and Hill Country = Dark•Heritage Remixed

I changed the blog heading. I'm actually probably going to talk quite a bit more about Dark•Heritage again, especially given that I just ordered a whole bunch of map-making tools from Amazon today. Should arrive soon, then I'll start drawing up my revised map, and I'm not stopping until I make a really good one this time. I've done that in the past for other settings; for some reason, I never got around to doing it for this version of Dark•Heritage.

I spent hours on a really big map, on a posterboard no less, for the last version of Dark•Heritage, the Mk. IV. Now that I'm up to Mk. V, or simply DH5 as I normally call it, I thought a revised logo was in order to emphasize the new emphasis that I should have had all along. I also thought the old tagline of "d20 rules; Call of Cthulhu play paradigm" was getting a little corny sounding. Plus, I'm not sure that my m20 system really qualifies as d20 anymore anyway. In my attempt to be too nitpicky and precise, I'd become just esoteric. Plus, nobody likes a nit-picker, right? My other tagline that I used to sometimes use, "fantasy + horror + madness" seemed better. More evocative, too. Perfect tagline for my conceit of being a pioneer of sorts in the dark fantasy genre that doesn't get as much play as I'd like in the greater fantasy solar system.

Although nobody besides me (and my old gaming group, who spent a few sessions playing a few sessions of DH4) cared about the update from DH4 to DH5, but still; I liked using the Remixed idea that I'd taken to Eberron. And, as an electronic music junkie, the concept of a remix is a fun one to me. If you want to be technical, it's a bit more like a mashup than a remix, though—but again, nobody likes a nitpicker. And I like the way the new logo looks.

Anyway, even though I'm obviously waiting on the art supplies I ordered, I can do pretty good with what I have. Most of the maps I've drawn on my more than 35 year career as a doodler of fantasy maps has just been with a ballpoint pen on typing paper anyway; having varied tip art pens and Bristol board will be nice, but hardly necessary except for the really nice, high class "hi-def" version of the map I'm going to draw. I played around a bit with a regular gel pen on some typing paper today, just sharpening up a few of my techniques for how to draw mountains, forests, coastlines, swamps, hills, deserts, etc. and make them look evocative. I'm going to actually do even more of that in preparation for the "big day" when I draw the Very Serious™ "hi def" version of the map of the setting. I want it to be the best map I've ever done.

Now, this doesn't mean a complete and total change of focus for me, although... I haven't really been in the mood to play and Old Republic today. I logged on for a few minutes, but I've been kinda busy doing other stuff and mostly just claimed my daily login rewards. I'll spend more of my free time on Dark•Heritage again, though. Y'know; like I always intended when I created this blog many years ago and called it Dark•Heritage in the first place. But I don't want to do so much bouncing around that I don't finish things that I start, and I want to get the Old Republic stuff done, and I want to get the Eberron Remixed stuff done. But I also always figured that I'd get to the point where I'd done what I wanted to with Old Republic, and then I'd probably shelve it and forget it for a long time to come. Dark•Heritage and Ad Astra, on the other hand, will always be with me.

As an aside, I put in this Amazon order because I got an unexpected tiny little windfall of a $100 gift card. I never really know what to get when that happens. If there's something big I want, it's not enough to buy it, and I probably already have a plan in place about when I'm going to disburse the budget for it. It's also not so small that I'd just buy stuff without thinking. It was kind of that awkward amount where I had to think about what to get, but nothing was really super obvious. The map-making tools, i.e., mostly some better art supplies than I normally keep on hand, seemed like a pretty good choice, albeit only a fraction of the money I had to spend. I also bought three or four Q Workshop dice sets, because you can always have more dice, and I enjoy having new ones. And I bought a leather bag with three score metal fantasy coins in it; certainly better tokens to use for my Heroism Points than the plastic party store pirate coins that I've had. So yeah; mostly that means I'm frittering away better part of $100 on fancier party favors for a game that I don't have any immediate plans to play and no group anymore to play with either. Sigh. Sometimes having RPGs as a hobby is a tough one.

DH5: Hill Country, Timischburg and... the Daemon Wastes?

It's funny, although maybe not unexpected, how much my work cross-pollinates other projects. I mentioned yesterday that I was getting re-involved with my Eberron Remixed. Of course, the whole point of Eberron Remixed as it grew and I actually got much more interested in it, was remixing it to play on the Dark•Heritage engine. Previous to that, Eberron Remixed had been little more than a handful of notes about tone and theme and a few minor changes to a few minor details. The "biggest" it got was a few notes on how to use Fantasy Hack, which was of course an alternative D&D system, to run the remixed setting. The much more radical and more recent Remixing project ended up with all kinds of substituted races, for instance, which had a cascade effect on at least some of the regions that simply didn't work in the new paradigm. But because I'm using DH5 as the game engine for Eberron Remixed, stuff that I do in Eberron Remixed bounces back and makes me think of interesting things to do with the DH5 setting.

Now, I have to equivocate just a bit here. I've earlier said that the Hill Country was the only region of the DH5 setting that I intended to use or develop, and everything else would merely be a brief mention. Then, of course, I decided to add Timischburg, since it was developed enough that I could just stick it on as is. Now, I'm thinking of adding a third region, my pretty heavily remixed version of the Daemon Wastes (originally Demon Wastes) from my Eberron Remixed. It's already remixed enough that it's not very similar, and I'd remix it even a bit more to make it fit; in fact, I'd probably borrow a ton from my old DH4 Baal Hamazi region to give it more detail than presented in the book anyway (I had already kind of handwavishly made some of that in my original remixing of the Eberron Demon Wastes to the Eberron Remixed Daemon Wastes.) Therefore, I'm not so much borrowing an Eberron element, as I'm being inspired by Eberron to borrow and remaster an element of my earlier version of the setting, and tack it on to the DH5 map.

Now, I still don't intend to make this a major element with lots of work and time put into it. I expect to make a somewhat sketchy map of the region, and cut and paste earlier elements, mostly into it the way that I'd already developed them in DH4. The Shadow Marches stuff might even end up being my Gunaakt and getting stuck on there too... maybe. I want to have them available for a handful of elements that I might use them for lightly... while still focusing mostly on the Hill Country and to a lesser extent Timischburg. 

But both of those maps need to be redrawn. Now, to fit together with these new additions and each other better, but they honestly have needed to be redrawn for some time anyway, especially Timischburg, which is being rotated 90º. The maps that I do have were always only intended to be drafts anyway, and I like drawing maps. I haven't done any in a long time. As an aside, I spent some time a few months ago watching a bunch of youtube tutorials on fantasy map drawing, which got me excited about it. I don't actually need tutorials; I've been drawing fantasy maps since middle school in the mid-80s that I think are fairly attractive, if I spend the time and effort to make them neat and not sloppy. But it's always nice to see what someone else is doing and see if they have any cool ideas I want to borrow myself. My own style is heavily influenced by the famous Christopher Tolkien Middle-earth maps included with The Lord of the Rings, but there have been a few sutble other ideas for a few elements that I've seen that I quite like too. After all, maps of this sort have been in print with fantasy novels for a long time. I long ago updated how I did water and forests from the Christopher Tolkien style to one that was less labor intensive, for instance.

The original Middle-earth map that was in my original copy of the books

A video that shows a variety of techniques all rolled up into a bite-sized video. I use some of the alternates rather than the Christopher Tolkien style per se, although it's still very similar in most respects. Basically I've changed the water and coastlines, and I prefer a much less labor intensive forest method. He's a bit too expressive, which occasionally distracts from what he's trying to do, but this video has pretty good information if you're new to this particular endeavor. I'm not, but I still found a few pointers here and there and newer techniques that I liked better than a handful of things that I was doing before. What he calls a decorative rather than functional map, I'll point out, is basically the style used in every single fantasy series I've ever read, though.

And here's the subsequent one he mentioned.

Revisiting Eberron Remixed

Just a quick announcement. I'm not doing anything here on the blog, but if you followed my Eberron Remixed project, I've actually recently kind of rediscovered it and brought it back. It is one of the projects, however, that because it has its own Google Sites site, I probably won't bother crossposting updates here and there, I'll just make them there and occasionally refer to the fact that I'm doing stuff over there.

One side effect of doing things this way is that I sometimes forget about stuff that's disconnected from this, the "main" blog, though. I'd almost completely forgotten about some of my other blogs that I used to spend more time on than obviously I do now, Lone Star Hiker, Synthpop80s and SFKOFFF being the most notable examples there. And I've been making all kinds of Ad Astra updates over the last few months on my Ad Astra Google Site without announcing most of them here. 

Anyway, I'm interested in actually finishing the Eberron Remixed project. I'm a good... I dunno, 2/3s through already? 3/4s maybe? I finished up my review of the longest chapter in the setting book, and reread my entire corpus of work on the project so far just recently. And then maybe I'll continue my Youtube vlog series about it once I'm a bit further along too.

All of this because I'd actually like to get back to RPGs. Y'know, the whole frikkin' reason I started this blog in the first place? I might have an angle on building a new group, maybe. And even if I don't, I want to talk more about RPG related stuff than I have been the last year or two, where my RPG investment has been waning and fallow for a while. This, plus my Ad Astra investment, is the first two prongs of that approach. It is, however, notable to point out that I'm not necessarily always using this blog as the primary avenue to post that kind of stuff, although I'll try to at least make announcements when I think that there's something significant enough new that someone might want to go check out.

Anyhoo, the image below is a link to my Eberron Remixed project, as it currently stands. As pointed out in the Home page, it does expect you to have, be familiar with, and maybe even refer to the 3.5 version of the Eberron Campaign Setting while you're using that document, and it might be difficult to follow if you don't, unless you just happen to know the Eberron setting so well that my esoteric references make sense to you (they wouldn't even to me, and I wrote them!)

Ad Astra and Star Wars

A quick aside. As I'm getting close to finishing the expansion content with my Jedi Knight, and getting closer at least to finishing the class stories with characters five and six (leaving me only two to go; and if I'm skipping much of the content except the class stories for all four of them, it'll all happen pretty fast) I'm thinking that my recording characters are closer to being due to start than I sometimes think. I'm doing what I can to gather the proper cosmetics for them all. One of those is weapon crystals. While in theory it applies to any weapon, in actuality, of course, it only really matters a lot for lightsabers. What have I used, and what am I thinking of using still? 

I haven't been very interested in the "common" crystals, just because they're too bland looking, or we've seen them too many times for them to still be interesting, I guess. While I can't remember all of the crystals that I've ever used for any of my characters, I know for sure that my Sith Marauder was wielding dual amythest colored lightsabers for a while, before upgrading to the black-orange crystals for both sabers, which is possibly my favorite of all of the lightsaber colors of all time. Imagine a darksaber, except instead of a white nimbus or halo, it's a fiery, lava-colored yellow-orange. Just amazing. They're not cheap, so I was hoping to get a good alternative with the charred orange cartel market crystals, but honestly, those are kind of flat and bland in comparison, unfortunately. His companion Jaesa, who wields a dual-saber, I had with first amythest, then white-purple-blue (not to be confused with the white-blue-purple) which I liked, but I've since updated her to the hot orange. I now have hot orange in my collections, and it is an amazing looking crystal, that I'm sure I want to use more of... although I'm not 100% sure where I want to use it yet. 

I can't remember what I did with my Jedi Guardian, but I know that for quite a while now, he's been using the black-blue crystal. I really like all of the black core crystals, and this one is a much cooler color than the hot black-orange, obviously. 

My Jedi Shadow was using crafted lightsabers, and for a while I didn't put any color crystals in them, because I wanted to see the crafted lightsabers in their natural color. I quit doing this, though. I haven't leveled up enough to use all of them yet, but with only one exception, they were all basic yellow. I recently put an extra white-purple-blue crystal in his current saber, but I may end up using the hot orange with him when I update to my next lightsaber again. 

My Sith Assassin has been using the black-purple crystal, which is just as cool as the black-blue. Of course, with a dual saber, you see more of it.

I can't remember what color I used to have with Kira, who was my companion most of the time after I got her up until I couldn't have her any more (I now usually use my security key customized T7.) I'm sure I bounced around with a few different colors with her over time. 

My plans for my next wave aren't entirely finalized. I'm swapping the advanced class for each of my classes, though, so I since I have two dual-saber wielders now, I won't have any next time around. My Jedi Sentinel will be using the rakghoul lightsabers, but instead of their default green blades, I'll be using the special rakghoul black-green crystals, which is probably as cool a color as the black-orange crystal, and I'm really looking forward to seeing him running around using them. I've got the sabers and crystals already in my legacy bank, so I expect he'll pick it up in the fleet as soon as he finishes Tython.

All three of the other lightsaber wielders use one, regular lightsaber from this point on; the Sith Juggernaut, the Sith Sorcerer and the Jedi Sage. The colors I have on my radar, although I'm not sure who will use what, are the black-red crystal, the hot red crystal, and maybe the crafted fire-red crystal. That's a lot of red, though—I'm not 100% sure I want my Jedi Sage using a red lightsaber. But maybe I do, because they all look pretty cool. If I can find a sovereign gold and blue at a not outrageous price, I might think about that one. If not, yellow-blue is pretty similar, althouh more blueish, while the sovereign one ends up looking a bit more purple. Frost white might be an option too. And although I've done black-blue and black-purple already, I didn't record either of them, and I might want to. For that matter, the same might be true of the black-orange.

And I do have companion characters with lightsabers sometimes that can use some of these colors that my actual character maybe does not.

Anyway, that's all discussion about cosmetics, which probably don't matter too much except that I'm recording this for posterity and I want them to look as cool as possible for that reason. Otherwise, I like bouncing around with looks for my characters, although I won't be doing that with my recorded versions. But I've talked more about this than I wanted to already. What I really wanted to talk about was compare where I am with Ad Astra and where Star Wars is.

It's no surprise that Ad Astra started as Star Wars, and then I decided not to play in someone else's sandbox, but I did want to use a lot of the exact same types of influences and have a very similar feel. In this regard, however, I'm more interested in mirroring the feel that was shown—and hinted at—during the first movie only along with the drafts of the first movie, and the comments and directions that Lucas and crew thought that they were going to go following the first movie but before they really got very far along in developing what became The Empire Strikes Back. What exactly does that mean? I actually think that it means I need to be a tad less epic and a tad more swashbucklery. As Star Wars became more ponderous and took itself a bit more seriously, and dug further into the hippy-guru weirdness that the Jedi kind of devolved into, it changed tone, and not for the better. I've discussed that at length before (see below) so I won't get too far into it now.

Another thing that sets apart the original movie, to a lesser extent the entire original trilogy, from the prequels and sequels, is the humanocentrist position on it. We tend to talk about humanocentrism as something that applies more to fantasy than to space opera, but I like it in both for the exact same reasons. And if you look at it, the original trilogy, especially the original movie, are much more humanocentric than what followed, and I think that was part of its appeal, actually. 

Yet another point of interest is that in the original version of the scripts, it wasn't quite so clear that the Empire and the post-Republic Rebellion were the only significant factions kicking around in the galaxy at large. The shocktroopers (which evolved into Boba Fett and eventually into the Mandalorians) were leftovers from the Clone Wars at one point, and exactly what that meant was never really defined. But they seemed to be kind of independent operatives, to the extent that they still existed even. The early Han Solo trilogy of novels published in the late 70s and early 80s didn't have the Empire as the bad guys at all, but rather a faction called the Corporate Sector Authority. The Jedi were also less of a mystical order of self-righteous monks and more like samurai in their original incarnation, the Sith were a tribe of force-using pirates of all things, that were a rival tradition to the Jedi. That got changed into a very ponderous, heavy concept that took itself a bit too seriously; I kind of rather like a more balkanized and independent picture both from the force-using castes and politically overall, which Ad Astra certainly does have. My Jedi are less like Jedi and more like often independent orders of warriors with modest superpowers who could represent any ideology you can imagine, and who don't have any kind of dark side light side angsty navel-gazing about childish interpretations of morality. Imagine a more John Carter and Flash Gordon style scenario, although with characters who have Jedi powers. Maybe not the super over-the-top Jedi powers of the prequels and beyond, but the more modest ones of the original trilogy. And the lightsaber isn't a device, it's a manifestation of their power that just happens to resemble an energy blade. And the stories I'd like to tell tend to be more intrigue and skulduggery driven in many ways. 

In other words, look to a combination of The Three Musketeers, James Bond and John Wayne style westerns for the plots, and the invited comparison to Star Wars really kind of becomes more in the setting; although Marvel comics when they weren't terrible probably is nearly as much of an influence as Star Wars. Especially the cool cosmic Marvel comics lines like the Starjammers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and famous stories like the Kree-Skrull War or the Shi'ar and Inhumans stuff of more recent years (War of Kings, etc.) But with less overtly "I'm a super powerful superhero that normal people can't possibly hope to deal with" kind of nonsense.

What am I going to do with Ad Astra? I dunno. In theory, I'd like to write, but in reality, I've been saying that for years. To be honest with you, if I just tinker with it for my own amusement, and eventually run a game or two in the setting, that's probably enough to make me think it was worth it. If I end up generating stories or even novels, that'll just be gravy. It's hard to imagine that I would do that until I'm an empty-nester though. (Although that horizon is much closer than I'd like to think it is.) That'll be enough to keep my satisfied in an era where I won't ever be able to count on Star Wars itself ever satisfying me ever again.

SWTOR forums

Not that I'm in the least surprised by this, but as I've lurked around the SWTOR forums this last week looking for some kind of update on what the heck is going on with the game, it's clear that the forums are a hive of toxic behavior. I know, shocking, shocking. Never seen that before. Let me be clear about two things up front.

1) Yes, the communication director on the forums is a woman (I presume, and everyone seems to treat her like one.) That does NOT mean that criticizing the communication from BioWare is sexist. Anytime anyone throws around "sexism", that's a clear red flag that they don't want to have an honest discussion about the issue that you're trying to talk about, so they're reverting to pointing and shrieking in an attempt to shut you up and make people forget the uncomfortable questions that you're asking. I don't know whether it's because Star Wars tends to attract more SJWs than I'd like these days, or because it tends to attract more simps and try-hard, cringy betas than I'd like these days. Or, for that matter, I don't know if there's a substantial difference between the two sets of people.

2) Yes, I don't live in BioWare's offices, or Austin, or even Texas. HOWEVER! I'm an ethnic Texan. I grew up there and stayed until I was about 26 or 27. My parents still live in Texas. As do my in-laws. As does my sister. As does one of my brothers. As does one of my sister-in-laws. Not to mention a good half a dozen nieces and nephews. And almost all of my old high school and college contacts. I'm aware of the situation in Texas. Unless BioWare is somehow uniquely and statistically unlikely hit worse and harder than practically ANYWHERE ELSE in the state, the idea that nobody can take a few minutes to post something on their website updating the customers about what their changed plans are because of being thrown off due to snow, ice, loss of power, water and internet across much of the place where the developers live and work is kind of absurd. Nobody is faulting them for being behind. What people are criticizing is not letting anyone know what they're doing. The winter storms are starting more and more to sound like an excuse than a reason for lack of any kind of update. I don't mean an update to the game itself, but an update to the communication with their customers about the game.

3) That said, I don't particularly care about the game update happening or not happening. I'm a little disappointed that we unceremoniously started the Gree rotating event when we were overdue for the Bounty Hunter rotating event, which had been announced. I am getting more and more unhappy about the super defensive stance that the company is taking when customers are—rightly—asking what's going on and when they can have updates that they can actually rely on again so that they know what's going on. Regardless of what's happening in the world, let's be clear; at some point, customers just kind of quietly wander away if they don't know what the devil a company is doing that they're paying for a service to. And not necessarily with any particular malice, or throwing up their hands and telling them to go screw themselves; they just wander away and do something else. It happened to me with Red Dead Online when I got tired of waiting on dumb updates. Even when better (I presume) updates finally started coming out again, I didn't care anymore; I'd moved on. I'm done with RDO. Don't care. Not installed on the PS4 anymore, and can't imagine ever playing it again. 

Granted, that probably would have happened anyway, at some point, regardless of how good the content updates were or how good the communication about them was. But the fact that the content updates we got were the absolutely stupid and frustrating hippy Naturalist role, and we were kept in the dark about what the devil was going on for months certainly accelerated my departure. Heck, if they'd released a Mexico update, and some kind of smuggler or heist role, even if it was just warmed over GTA Online content, I'd probably still be playing now. Even if they hadn't released anything like that, but they'd announced something like that, I'd still have a toe left in the water instead of getting up, moving on and not looking back.

Now granted, I'm not there yet with SWTOR. There's still stuff I want to do with SWTOR. But lots of other people already are legendary players, who've done all of the stories multiple times, and without something new to look forward to, they're about where I was with RDO. 

This isn't a case of people being jerks and unempathetic about the impact of a bad weather situation that has made life uncomfortable for a lot of people. But it is what it is, and throwing around excuses—even good ones—won't change it. 

SWTOR update 2/19

Finished the agent last night. I'm surprised how fast things go when you skip the exploration missions, the heroics, and even the planetary story. I shouldn't be, though... it's obviously more than 50% of the content that you do with each character; maybe as much as two-thirds of what you do. Of course, it's also repeating from character to character, which the class story does not, so it's a bit different, and once you've done it a couple of times, there's much less incentive to keep doing it with each character.

I decided, because I was level 73, that I wanted to cap my level before going to Corellia, which I did by farming XP through some Heroics. I also was maxed out on tech fragments, so I burned some getting better gear while at level 75. However, I doubt I'll use this guy for much. I do have a bunch of tauntaun fruit to get tauntauns on Hoth, but I don't want him to take those tauntauns (luckily, before you "install" a tauntaun, it's bound to legacy, so you can transfer it to another character.) I might keep him around to grind Heroics for cash, although my smuggler will be my main source for that, and I've been transfering much of my excess cash to him to hold on to. I'm also blasting through the Jedi Consular stuff pretty quick; I'm now on Nar Shaddaa, and will likely (easily) finish that planet today too. I'm trying to stay about 4-6 levels ahead of the recommended for each planet that I'm on, which means that for each planet, I take some time to do some Heroics here and there. Half a dozen heroics are usually worth two levels, at least where I am now. I seem to recall that they get less productive over time, as the XP requirement to level up grows. Anyhoo, because the agent is done, it's time to add the Sith Inquisitor to the story rotation. That will leave me with 1) the Jedi Knight, who's doing the post-Iokath flashpoints, and otherwise finishing up the very last of the 5.x updates; about ready soon to move on to Onslaught. Obviously the most advanced character in my stable in terms of story, but I'm also using him for Iokath dailies, because I really want to unlock both sets of armor there at the Republic and Imperial base. 2) the Sith Warrior, who I'm not doing much of anything with. I was using him for dailies, but that's kind of slowed down now. Of course, the bounty hunter week starts on Tuesday, so he'll get a lot of play again. He's on Yavin IV right now in terms of story, so quite a bit further behind the Jedi Knight, and I'm much less motivated to move him quickly. I'm not really motivated to do either of those two characters quickly in their story advancement, although once I'm mostly done with the class stories that I still have yet to do, I'm sure I'll turn back to them again. 3) The smuggler, who is done, retired, and only kept around because he's the armstech crafter and because I use him for heroic cash farming, and 4) the agent, who's done, retired and will also be useful for recurring things like bounty hunter or rakghoul event, or Dantooine pirates or whatever.  5) The Jedi Consular, who's now getting startlingly close to finishing Act I, and 6) the Sith Inquisitor that I'm about to start. Trooper and bounty hunter remain to be done. Except for the Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior, I have no intention of playing anyone else beyond the class stories with this crop. But, keep in mind that...

...I've concluded that I need to do all of this over again, and record it this time. Of course, I'll have access to better cosmetics this time around too. 

Anyway, another thing that occurred to me, although it's not surprising by any means, is that the prologue and Act I seem to be tied together very tightly for each class, while Act II and Act III are kind of separate, subsequent stories with a different theme, often a different villain, etc. However, Acts II and III are three planets each. Act I is four planets, plus the two planet prologue. Act I is as long as Acts II and III put together. At least, in theory.

Update 2/21: I fininshed chapter 1 with the Jedi Consular. I watched a video recently about the Jedi Sage and the Sith version of that class build (I can't remember the name of it off hand) and although it was mostly about the mechanics of that advanced class, it did make an offhand comment to the fact that the Jedi Consular story was "not a fan favorite." I'm halfway done now; between the prologue and Act 1, which is longer than Acts 2 and 3, I should be at about halfway. I'm level 39, and finding that I need to do a round of heroics almost every planet if I want to maintain my position at about 4-5 levels above the planet's expectation (i.e., I was level synched on Alderaan and the Act I conclusion down to 33-35 or so. The file I have says Alderaan was level 28, but I was clearly synched to a higher level than that when I was on it. However, the level synch synchs you to the highest level of the planet's range; it looks like Alderaan is level 28-34. So I was synched to 33 or 34; I can't remember which. In fact, it may have changed slightly as I advanced through the planet. 

It looks like I'm probably OK for a while. I just looked up the level ranges, and I should be good where I am for all of Act 2 (plus, I'll no doubt advance several levels doing Act 2.) It's not until Belsavis that I'm in a level 41-44 range. By the time I get there, I should actually be at least level 44. I'll keep an eye on my level and do some runs of heroics if necessary to stay where I want to. As it is, I could skip to Hoth and do it without worrying about level synching catching up to me. Of course, the way level synching works is that I can synch upwards too, but that's not great, because your passives and gearing will be underpowered, regardless of what the level synching does.

In any case, I so far haven't minded the story. I actually thought it was kind of interesting, albeit a little repetitive, and it kind of resolved itself very suddenly and abruptly. I agree that it's not likely to end up being my favorite of the bunch, but it's not going to be my least favorite either. I'm a little disappointed that I don't have any super interesting companions yet, though, including no romanceable one. I prefer having a romanceable character pretty early and having lots of time to watch it play out. That's one thing that I found a bit disappointing with the agent; sure, you get Kaliyo early, but she's a terrible, unlikable hot mess, so I romanced Raina Temple instead. You don't get her until Hoth, and the romance feels pretty rushed. You don't get the Consular's romanceable companion until even later on Belsavis, so it'll almost certainly feel even more rushed. But I'll report back on that when it's done. 

Meanwhile, I've also done all of the Korriban stuff with my Sith Inquisitor. I don't know how much I'll like or dislike this class story. I've heard lots of people say it's their favorite, but I've heard others kind of blow it off as not that good. Eh. I do like, so far, the sarcastic comments options that it's been given. More classes need more dialogue variety like that. The two Jedi in particular suffer from being unsufferably bland sometimes. Although it was a little tricky, and I had to do a few conquest things here and there to bump up some XP, I managed to get to level 15 before leaving Korriban. It's nice to know that that's doable. Because I just finished Act I with the consular, I think turning to this guy today and doing the Black Talon and some Dromund Kaas stuff is called for as my main endeavor today. Tomorrow, my weekly reputation will reset, so I'd like to spend some time with my Jedi Knight getting Iokath stuff done. To be fair, I have some unspent Iokath reputation, so I can get reputation with any farming, and I can farm to save reputation for later... but I'm feeling like I don't want to get burned out on that too.

UPDATE 2/23: Well, now we have more problems. While I didn't particularly care about the delayed staging of game update 6.2.1, since it wasn't going to change anything (I don't think) that I particularly cared about, it does seem to have had some other side effects that I didn't anticipate. The game update seemed to be focused on what I consider minor things, or things that I don't really participate in much, like Uprisings, amplifiers, and ranked PvP, etc. But apparently the update was what was going to set the schedule of recurring events. The Bounty Hunter event was announced, which they haven't done in quite a while, and instead for some reason, we got the Gree event again. As someone on the SWTOR forum said, when I went to go see if there was any news about it, the Gree event is one of my least favorite of the recurring events. (Other than Life Day.) I haven't been super excited about the Gree event either, and when we had it (just a few weeks ago) I actually went and checked it out. Doing the dailies and getting reputation is more tedious and cumbersome, for me at least and my playstyle, with this event than with any of the others that I've participated in. 

Honestly, I'm not sure that I like the idea of events only occuring once every other month, or whatever. Why can't we just do this stuff all of the time? I'd love to find out that they had a plan when it's time to shutter the game, to make it for sale as an offline game, and that all of the content has been modified to be played solo and offline, including all of these "limited time" events just being stuff you can go do whenever. 

I've spent quite a bit of time in the rakghoul tunnels doing rakghoul events, and I've spent a fair bit of time doing the Dantooine pirates event. I've dabbled in the Gree and Dantooine swoop bike events, and been less impressed with them. I've also only dabbled in the bounty hunter event, but that was one that I was more anxious to get into more. The other events, like Life Day, etc. are not the frequently occuring ones; it's those five that I wish we could do more often.Maybe if they made two of them available at once? Anyway, bleagh.

Maybe instead I'll focus on my Iokath reputation. I cashed in my saved reputation that I had left over. Didn't quite get to Legend on THORN (unless I forgot that someone else was hanging on to some stored reputation awards, which might be true.) Both Iokath tracks are at Friend, and both are within striking distance of Hero before even hitting the weekly cap. Because Hero is all I need to unlock the armor sets that I want, I should be good to do this week. I'll spend some of the time that I would have been grinding bounty hunter missions into grinding Iokath dailies and unlock those two armor sets, I think—the gray Republic one with the glowing blue tubes and the visor that lowers when you draw your weapon, and the pretty cool black with red highlights Sith armor.

The mask and lockdown hoax

https://joerizoliopinions.onlinegroups.net/groups/joe-rizoliopinions/messages/topic/5TCwkDUfl9Q9h0OpKZKf0E

Quoting a portion of the link:

I have a PhD in virology and immunology. I'm a clinical lab scientist and have tested 1500 "supposed" positive Covid 19 samples collected here in S. California. When my lab team and I did the testing through Koch's postulates and observation under a SEM (scanning electron microscope), we found NO Covid in any of the 1500 samples.

What we found was that all of the 1500 samples were mostly Influenza A and some were influenza B, but not a single case of Covid, and we did not use the B.S. PCR test. We then sent the remainder of the samples to Stanford, Cornell, and a few of the University of California labs and they found the same results as we did, NO COVID. They found influenza A and B. All of us then spoke to the CDC and asked for viable samples of COVID, which CDC said they could not provide as they did not have any samples. We have now come to the firm conclusion through all our research and lab work, that the COVID 19 was imaginary and fictitious.

The flu was called Covid and most of the 225,000 dead were dead through co-morbidities such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, emphysema etc. and they then got the flu which further weakened their immune system and they died. I have yet to find a single viable sample of Covid 19 to work with. We at the 7 universities that did the lab tests on these 1500 samples are now suing the CDC for Covid 19 fraud. the CDC has yet to send us a single viable, isolated and purifed sample of Covid 19. If they can't or won't send us a viable sample, I say there is no Covid 19, it is fictitious. The four research papers that do describe the genomic extracts of the Covid 19 virus never were successful in isolating and purifying the samples. All the four papers written on Covid 19 only describe small bits of RNA which were only 37 to 40 base pairs long which is NOT A VIRUS. A viral genome is typically 30,000 to 40,000 base pairs.

With as bad as Covid is supposed to be all over the place, how come no one in any lab world wide has ever isolated and purified this virus in its entirety? That's because they've never really found the virus, all they've ever found was small pieces of RNA which were never identified as the virus anyway.

So what we're dealing with is just another flu strain like every year, COVID 19 does not exist and is fictitious. I believe China and the globalists orchestrated this COVID hoax (the flu disguised as a novel virus) to bring in global tyranny and a worldwide police totalitarian surveillance state, and this plot included massive election fraud to overthrow Trump. 

To be fair, the provenance of this is unknown, so I can't independently verify that this is actually true. However... it fits the general pattern of vast over-presentation of the Chinese virus numbers which has been reported and confirmed multiple times by multiple sources. There does indeed seem to be a new strain of "flu" that does indeed have some different symptoms, such as loss of smell and taste. But we don't know enough about it to justify even a fraction of what we've done as a society to combat it. 

Star Wars is done

As a franchise. There just isn't really anything that I care about anymore that wasn't made several years ago... at least... if not several decades ago. The Dark Herald, an anonymous blogger with Arkhaven, spells it out. I'll be quoting lots of his post: The LucasFilm Civil War is Over.

And Star Wars lost.

The abrupt and extremely petulant firing of Gina Carano from LucasFilm has made [it] abundantly clear that the Return of Luke meant absolutely nothing.  

Any good warm fuzzies that came from that were strictly the result of fan projection.  There undoubtedly are people at LucasFilm that aren’t happy to see their life’s work thrown into a raging dumpster fire.  But they are not going to be able to do anything about it. 

These people are the holdovers from George Lucas’ day and Lucas was a Gamma Boss.  There is no way in hell he kept around anyone who threatened his delusion bubble.  Any "old hands" at LucasFilm who don’t like the way things are going are fundamentally the kind of people that feel that "the first nail that pops up, is the first that is hammered down."  Because that is how George Lucas ran his business.  If there was any kind of problem between the boss’ opinion and naked reality, then it was reality that always had it wrong because George couldn’t be.  That was the kind of company he handed over to Kathleen Kennedy.

I strongly suspect that this is absolutely true. Obviously, I don't know George Lucas personally, but he's a public figure, and the public figure for a franchise that has been just about my favorite entertainment franchise for most of my nearly 50 year life. I think a lot of his personality has come through over the years for those who pay attention enough to deduce it. He's a super defensive control freak, riddled with insecurities and one who doubles down, triples down, and quadruples down (ad infinitum) on denial when something that he's trying to do isn't working.

He was also a genius, or at least he was. At one point. When he made the first Star Wars, he tapped into a starved market, and did it quite well. His marketing strategy and merchandising strategies were genuinely extremely clever. Under his loose direction, the Clone Wars did quite a few things right; many of them surprising so. But he also made the prequels, which are bad movies, crippled with bad execution, and not really featuring the best ideas to begin with. But either way, I suspect that this post gets it exactly right about the kind of people who were Lucas loyalists under KK's Star Wars. Not the kind to really fight. Even Dave Filoni comes across as a sycophantic beta most of the time, and Jon Favreau is an outsider altogether.

The firing of her most popular (human) character over tweets that SJWs disliked shows where the company’s priorities are and always will be.  And it’s not like Gina Carano is some raging Far-Right firebrand. [...]  Her posts were only vaguely Right-wing in nature.  Although, that was enough to get her run out of Hollywood on a rail.  

Her agent dumped her, her publicist quit and Amazon stopped selling Cara Dune action figures.  Which made Hasbro stop production on Cara Dune action figures and if Hasbro isn’t completely Woke that must have had them pulling out their own teeth in impotent rage at Disney. Because apart from Baby Yoda, she is the only Star Wars figure that has had significant sales in years.

Now, I understand there is going to be a certain number of people who can’t understand it.  Why are the goblins at Lucasfilm are so determined to cut their own throats? I mean, it has to be obvious at this point [doesn't] it? The Reylo trilogy was an utter disaster and by any reasonable standard, the high Republic is an abject failure.  If they are going to keep their jobs, they need to assure that their company is healthy, and to do that they need to have products people will pay money for.  Making Star Wars fans happy and engaged is in their own self-interest. LucasFilm needs to be profitable, right? Right?

Oh, that is so adorable.

That's been a hard lesson for people to unlearn, because it's a delusional wishful thinking lie. Corporations do not care about making money, or at least they don't care about making money through sales. The way that they make money... or rather, the way that the people who run them make money, is by raising financing, paying themselves big, fat paychecks, and then moving on before the whole thing collapses. CEOs and other corporate leaders seriously could care less about customers, unless a customer revolt somehow gets into the news, becomes a trending topic, and impacts the ability of the corporation to attract investment financing. 

While not limited to entertainment or tech companies, it's especially notable in those sectors. Appeasing customers and getting your revenue through making them happy is an old fashioned idea. Probably a white supremacist one, because only white people care about customers. Especially if the customers are mostly white people and male—it's probably a feature, not a bug, that you're pissing them off. Way to go, LucasFilm and Disney!

At this point, LucasFilm has settled comfortably into the model of corporate parasitism. And the uber-Woke senior executives at Disney are delighted to be fed upon by the incompetent.  

You have to remember an SJW infestation is a convergence of grasshopper-people.  

They create nothing, preserve nothing and leave nothing behind.  

When grasshoppers have finished devasting and devouring a once productive ant colony, do they sit around trying to rebuild it?  After all, that would be in their self-interest wouldn’t it?  To have a healthy ant colony that they could regularly harvest makes more sense than destroying it.  But no, grasshoppers are grasshoppers, they destroy and move on to the next target.   The Woke are no different.  When LucasFilm collapses under its own weight due to their undermining they will move on to another property and begin the process all over again.  Unconcerned by lessons of failure because they are fundamentally unable to face the lessons of their own mistakes.

The more visceral synonym of locust probably works better than grasshopper, but that's a minor nitpick. And isn't it ironic that A Bug's Life has become a metaphor for the corporate parasitism embodied very notably by Disney itself?

So what is the future of Star Wars?  Well, it doesn’t have one.  Kathleen Kennedy remains in charge because (and this is crucial), Woke Disney wants her in charge. Let’s be clear about something else, there is NO plan in place to walk back the Reylo trilogy.  No retcon in the making.  Hobo-Luke swilling testicle-boob-monster milk is still the official future.  The grasshopper-people at LucasFilm are utterly committed to it.  They couldn’t care in the least that it will lead to the franchise’s destruction.  

They would much rather have Star Wars dead than lose an inch of ground in [the] culture war.

I have said before that the Last Jedi wasn’t the worst fight.  It wasn’t the biggest fight.  It was just the last fight. It was the break-up fight.  The one where I am walking away from this relationship because I don’t care anymore.

If that was the breakup fight then the Return of Luke was the one-night-stand with the Ex.  You got together to discuss some unfinished business and for a moment you thought the magic was there again.  But the next morning your Ex was back to doing the same stuff that caused the break-up in the first place. Nothing had changed

And nothing will change with Star Wars.

I'm perfectly happy continuing to consume my older Star Wars products. And working on my alt-Star Wars products, even if it's just for my own amusement and never amounts to a novel or game or anything else. Star Wars, Marvel, Disney, the entire entertainment industry, and for that matter, America itself, are basically Bernie's body still being waved around by Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman, who are desperately trying to pretend he's still alive long enough that they can make their getaways before the Mob catches up to them. Those who are perceptive enough to notice that Bernie has already been dead all weekend get a totally different kind of entertainment watching the clowns traipse around wearing a corpse and trying to pretend that that's not exactly what they're doing, but those who earnestly want more decent Star Wars content are going to have to get used to disappointment.

SWTOR Story Order

Sadly, playing the Old Republic isn't exactly obvious. It's not really open world, and if you screw it up, you can end up cutting off your story content before you're actually done. I did this myself with my first character, a bounty hunter named Graggory (which in retrospect seems like a normal name. The naming allowances in this game are pathetic.) Anyway, I created a Google Sheet that put everything in order, and color-filled each cell as I finished it (or skipped it, as is increasingly the case with repeating content.) But I found another flowchart online. I don't want to just "appropriate" someone else's work, so I'll write it up myself as an annotated list. I've linked to my Google Sheet before, but this actually seems like possibly a better option to show how stuff should be done, and in what order. I'm playing strictly as a single player, and eschewing any required multiplayer content. Luckily there's only one or two places where multiplayer content is required, mostly associated with the 2.x updates, i.e., the Rise of the Hutt Cartel era.

Before we begin; here are the various eras so far released for the game:

• Class stories (1.x) The OG content, somewhat updated, now, but still available as part of the free to play experience.
• Rise of the Hutt Cartel (2.x) The introduction of Makeb, as well as the macrobinocular missions, the seeker droid missions, CZ-198, Oricon and more. Now available for free to play.
• The Shadow of Revan (3.x) As well as a number of flashpoints, this added the Shadow of Revan storyline, and two planets; Rishi and Yavin IV. Available to free to play players.
• Knights of the Fallen Empire (4.x) Although not really divided into worlds the way it had been previously, but instead chapters, it does have some relatively open areas, including parts of Odessen and Zakuul. This content is not free to play, nor any that follows.
• Knights of the Eternal Throne (5.x) Structured the same as the 4.x update, but adding the open world content on Iokath and ending with Ossus.
• Onslaught (6.x) YOU ARE HERE. Although it's late due to the winter storms making it difficult for the devs, 6.1.2 (or was it 6.2.1?) was supposed to have launched yesterday. I presume, however, that new content for Onslaught is about over, and in 2021 we can expect a 7.x update sometime in time for the 10th anniversary of the game at the end of the year. It does add two new open world environments, Onderon and Mek-Sha, as well as a bunch of other story-centric content like story-mode flashpoints, etc. 

I've also put the "expected" level for each character at each step, although if you 1) are a subscriber and therefore have faster leveling, you may exceed it, and 2) if you do all of the exploration and planetary stories you'll get more XP and may exceed it, and 3) obviously, if you do both, you'll probably exceed it by quite a bit. When I'm playing through and doing all of that (which I'm not doing now, because most of the exploration and planetary stuff is repeated and I want to get through everyone's class story before I revisit most of it) I hit the game's max level of 75 sometime at the end of the chapter 1 or early to mid chapter 2, which is obviously super early. You were supposed to (originally) have hit the original level cap of 50 near the end of chapter 3 and in theory, you're not supposed to be level 75 until Onslaught. That's OK. The game's level-synching means that you're generally OK no matter what level you are, although being higher level is better even with level-synching, because you'll have more abilities unlocked and better equipment.

Anyway, without further ado, here's the story mode order, with some minor commentary by me. Italic stuff is optional/group and can be skipped if desired.

• Starting planet (Tython, Korriban, Ord Mantell or Hutta). Levels 1-10. There isn't really a distinction between class and planetary story at this point, there's only a few Heroics available, and the planets are about half the size of most of the rest of them in terms of area to explore and missions to do. If you're done and ready to move on to the fleet but aren't level 10 at least, I recommend hitting up whatever exploration missions you missed and maybe repeating the Heroic a time or two. Be at least level 10 before leaving, at which point you'll be taken to the Republic or Imperial fleet, can do some shopping, and hit up the optional (but highly recommended) single-player story flashpoint on your way to the next planet.
• Esseles (Republic) or Black Talon (Imperial) Story Flashpoint. While technically optional, this is highly recommended, and suitable for single players. It's pretty story heavy and is obviously meant to be played through.
• Coruscant (Republic) or Dromund Kaas (Imperial). The capitol planet for your faction, a good twice the size of your starting planet, and split into class and planetary story lines, along with a good selection of daily repeatable heroics and exploration missions. At the end of this world, you'll get your class's spaceship, and end the Prologue, officially starting Act 1. At the transition between acts, each class story also has a transition period of varied complexity. For the most part, it's pretty simple here, but for some classes and some transitions, you may end up bouncing around briefly to up to three or four planets or areas for cut-scenes and action sequences; although they are much smaller in scope than a planetary or class story on a planet.
• Hammer Station Flashpoint. This flashpoint does not come in a solo mode and cannot be played (well... is not supposed to be played) by a single player by himself. It's too bad that these kinds of flashpoint exist without also offering a single player option for those who wish to play them that way, but there it is. Because there is no single-player option, I consider this not only a can-miss, but a should-miss. I don't really appreciate the group content, I suppose. I have played this one with my Sith Warrior, though; the only one of my characters (I can't stand using the word toons here) with which I've dabbled in group stuff.
• Taris (Republic) or Balmorra (Imperial). Although as you start act 1, you are given, for most classes, both this mission and the next one at the same time, you're actually supposed to do this one first. You will actually hit both planets regardless of your faction, although the timing and order is different, and curiously they changed the appearance somewhat for the Imperial side, making it a night-time environment. After finishing the class story, you will also have an optional bonus series on these planets that you can do, which is somewhat like a truncated version of a second planetary story (and usually related to the planetary story) but which rewards you like a heroic (which seems a little cheap given the investment of time.) Needless to say, these are also optional like the heroics or exploration missions (or even the planetary story, if you come to it.) The expected class level for this planet is level 16. If you're still under 20 when you finish, you might consider some of the optional stuff.
• Nar Shaddaa. The first time both factions come together on the same planet at the same time, for level 20 content. There's an optional bonus series here too for each faction, although you won't be eligible to pick it up unless you're significantly over-leveled, so I'll note it below when you're "supposed" to do it. However, since the entire thing is optional anyway, I wouldn't hesitate to just go ahead and play that one if you're high enough level to qualify for it.
• Athiss Flashpoint. Like Hammer Station, this one only comes in group modes and is entirely optional.
• Tatooine. Both classes are again on the same planet, this one the most iconic and classic of all Star Wars planets. Tatooine is pretty big, has plenty of exploration missions, heroics and more, and there is a bonus series for each faction. According to my chart, you can actually play this bonus series after finishing the planet, or at least are supposed to, even if you're on the "standard" level track. I've always played it (if I play it at all) immediately after finishing the class and planetary stories, but what do I know; I'm usually over-leveled considerably. The planetary mission for each faction is technically different, but very, very similar. You're meant to be at least level 24 for this planet. In addition to the regular stuff, there's a lot of little one-off missions here (companion character mini side-quests, transition areas, etc.) as well as it being one of the planets that may host the rakghoul event periodically; the Star Wars equivalent of a zombie plague outbreak.
• Mandalorian Raiders Flashpoint. Can be picked up in the groupfinder or on the surface of Tatooine, this one, like the last three mentioned, is not a story-required one, and does not offer a mode for single players.
• Alderaan. At at least level 28, you can come to this very iconic planet. Old Republic has reimagined the native Alderaanians as quite dark-skinned, although whether they're supposed to look more African, more Polynesian, or more Hispanic is difficult to tell, and there are plenty of plain old white-folk among the natives too. I had thought that the iconic trooper NPC Jace Malcolm was supposed to be Alderaanian, given that you meet him here if you're doing the Republic bonus series, as well as his presence on the planet in one of the cinematic trailers, but apparently he's not. Jaesa Wilsaam, a Sith Warrior companion character, hails from here, although I use a customized appearance version of the character, so I tend to forget what her "default" look actually is. As with Tatooine, the planetary missions are extremely similar regardless of which faction you play, and there is a bonus series that you'll probably have to pick up later. It is also one of the potential rakghoul plague outbreak sites. It is also the last full planet in Act 1, and the story for each class shifts considerably after doing this planet and the transition stuff after it. 
• Cademimu Flashpoint. Another one that I wish BioWare would modify to include a single player mode for, but there isn't. You can pick it up on Alderaan or from the group finder icon no matter where you are.
• Nar Shaddaa Bonus Series. If you aren't over-leveled, this is where you'd do the Nar Shaddaa bonus series; after your transition but before embarking on the first Act 2 planet, I presume. 
• Balmorra (Republic) or Taris (Imperial). Act 2 for each class includes a significant shift in the story; each of the Acts could almost be considered as a separate movie in a trilogy that the three acts collectively make up. While it's certainly tied to what came before (and what comes after) there's usually a completely different plotline that you're following in each of the three acts. This is also the last time the factions are on a different planet at the same stage, although certainly you'll notice that they are on the other planet that they didn't do before. Other than the starting planets, eventually every character will do every planet, although like I said, the environment is different on Taris—Imperial Taris is at night-time while Republic Taris is during daylight. This means that you can't see your counterparts wandering around somewhere on the planet's surface, because technically they are different environments (although built from the same models). This planet is meant to be played at level 32.
• Balmorra (Republic) or Taris (Imperial) Bonus Series. Apparently, you should qualify to play the bonus series as soon as you finish the class stories. Of course, they're optional, as always.
• Taral V (Republic) or Boarding Party (Empire) Story Flashpoints. Like the Esseles and Black Talon, this flashpoint is meant to be played as solo (or you can do a more challenging version with a group) and is part of the story; you're meant to play it. Both can be picked up on the planet's surface as you finish up Balmorra or Taris respectively, or from your ship, or on the fleet, or from the group-finder icon. Both also lead immediately into a second flashpoint that also comes with a solo mode and which you're meant to play.
• Maelstrom Prison (Republic) or The Foundry (Empire) Story Flashpoints. The continuation of the story from Taral V or Boarding Party respectively. While not strictly speaking necessary from the point of view of your class story, these flashpoints are an important part of the "meta story" of what's going on in the galaxy, and will be much more important later in the game to have played. Again; technically optional, but meant to be played and highly recommended.
• Quesh. A very small planet, that looks like it should have been the second half of the also very small Hutta (except with a slightly more reddish color pallette), this is the first planet in some time to not feature any kind of bonus series. The class stories tend to be quite short, so the planetary stories are somewhat recommended, even if you normally are skipping those. Meant for level 36. In addition to the class and planetary stories, Quesh becomes a minor destination on a number of other side-quest type activities, act transition stuff, and more. 
• Hoth. After the short stint on Quesh, both factions will head to Hoth next, where you're meant to be level 37; only one level higher than Quesh. Hoth is a much larger environment, with lots going on. The planetary stories and bonus series are quite different, there are unusual exploration achievement possibilities (i.e., getting free tauntaun mounts and stuff). It is also the last major planet on Act 2, so while there's still the transition from 2 to 3 to do, you will start the third and final phase of your class story after finishing Hoth. 
• Alderaan Bonus Series. Although I've already done it with every character with which I meant to do it by this point, if you're leveled at the "expected" rate, you'll qualify to go back to Alderaan and do the bonus series after finishing Hoth.
• Colicoid War Games Flashpoint. There are two flashpoints that can be picked up on Hoth, but both are not story required and there is no solo player version of them, so only play them if you care to do group raids.
• Kuat Drive Yards Flashpoint. As the flashpoint above, although curiously there is a reputation track you can work on associated with this flashpoint. Sigh. They really need single player versions, as I've said before and will no doubt say again before finishing this post.
• Belsavis. This is the first major world of Act 3 for each class. There's actually quite a bit going on here, but some of it isn't meant to be consumed quite yet; think of it merely as your class story, and the planetary stories, and if you're over-leveled, you can do the bonus series too, although you're "supposed" to go back and do that later. If you're an imperial, you will also get the beginnings of the optional but fascinating Dread Masters story arc, which is a kind of meta story arc that isn't really related to the classes per se. Belsavis was meant to be played at level 41.
• Voss. This is a planet and culture made up by BioWare specifically for this game that has not, to my knowledge, made any other appearance anywhere else. As well as being one of the prettier planets in terms of scenery, there's plenty going on here, of course, including class stories, planetary stories, a bonus series (see below) and a reputation track which is mostly done by completing heroics. Meant for player level 44.
  
• Red Reaper Flashpoint. An optional flashpoint that you can pick up on Voss, which does not have a single player mode.
• Voss Bonus Series. I'm not sure why they decided that you're supposed to leave Voss to go do the Red Reaper and then come back and do the bonus series rather than the other way around, but it probably doesn't really matter. This one is complicated, but contributes, if I remember correctly, to your Voss reputation track, plus it takes you to some of the best scenery in the game, so if that interests you at all, I recommend it. It is time-consuming though. 
• Hoth Bonus Series. If you weren't already high enough level to do it, you're supposed to be high enough level now to go back to Hoth and do the bonus series.
• Directive 7 Story Flashpoint. Although it's an aside from a story point of view that has nothing really to do with your class stories or even the meta story of what's going on in the galaxy, you're actually meant to go do Directive 7 here, and a solo version of it is the default. 
• Corellia. You're closing in on the end of the original content now. At level 47 (keep in mind that the original level cap was 50) you go to Corellia, the last of the class story planets. There is also a faction planetary story here, but no bonus series (although there's an entire separate area that can be considered a detached bonus series, if you like; see below.) Once you finish your class story on Corellia, (and the transition to the end) your class story is considered complete. There's more to do, of course, and more story content to consume, but from this point on, it isn't class specific, and is (at best) faction specific. You'll also have your class story "lit up" on the main page before you pick your character at this point; if you get all eight of the class stories done, you'll be a Legendary Player. Finishing the class story also grants you another special ability for your Heroic Moment ability, so the more class stories you've finished, the better the Heroic Moment will be.
• Belsavis Bonus Series. You're meant to go back and finish this one now, if you haven't already.
• Ilum. The next little bit is considered the "Interlude" and is a kind of epilogue to your class and planetary stories, meant to take place before the 2.x update which was Rise of the Hutt Cartel. This stuff is heavy on the meta-story, since the class stories are over. You're meant to be level 50 on Ilum; it was originally post story free-roam kind of stuff, although there is a "planetary story" arc and some story-mode flashpoints that are single player friendly that you're supposed to play through here. Ilum is a small planet, but there's a second half that is solely devoted to the Gree recurring event.
• The Battle of Ilum Story Flashpoint. This is the first of the flashpoints that you do after the Ilum planetary story missions, and can be (and is meant to be) played alone, although harder modes for groups is also available.
• The Flase Emperor Story Flashpoint. Another meta-story heavy flashpoint that everyone is meant to play, either single or group.
• Eternity Vault Operation. Operations are like group flashpoints, except even moreso; not only is there no single player option, but while flashpoints assume a group of four players, operations come in either eight or sixteen player groups. They are very complex and difficult, and are really kind of off the radar for most single-player type solo players. However, BioWare made the very questionable decision to make them integral to completing a tangent yet long and intriguing storyline about the Dread Masters. It was previewed slightly in the Imperial planetary stories for Belsavis, but this is the first portion of the story arc proper, and—of course—if you're a solo type of guy, the only way you'll ever see it is on Youtube.
• Karagga's Palace Operation. A second operation that is part of the Dread Masters plot.
• Kaon Under Siege Flashpoint. Part 1 of an optional two-part story related to rakghoul virus related mad scientists and plague outbreaks, this one is sadly not available for single players.
• Lost Island Flashpoint. Part 2 of the optional two-part story introduced in Kaon Under Siege.
• Explosive Conflict Operation. The next part of the Dread Masters story, and again, an operation.
• Black Hole. This is the "bonus series" for Corellia, but you have to land here separately as if it were a different planet, curiously; on your way to the surface, you have to select this instead of the regular landing spot, and you can't get from Black Hole to "regular" Corellia and vice versa except by flying in your ship, or at least going up to the orbital station. Meant to be level 50, and technically optional, (technically everything after the class story is optional) but I'm considering all of this stuff as part of the expected content that you're expected to play—except for the stuff that requires grouping.
• Terror From Beyond Operation. The next part of the Dread Masters story, and again, only available through the operations grouping function.
• Section X. A separate part of Belsavis, which works much as the Black Hole works on Corellia. Everyone can do it, it's meant for level 50, it has a reputation track, but curiously, it's part of the Dread Masters stuff. At this point in the game, they were really encouraging and/or expecting that everyone was doing grouping stuff, and weren't working very hard on making solo player friendly content, necessarily. It's also where you start the HK-51 quest; a long, involved quest that has you bouncing all over the galaxy looking for pieces of HK-51 (who's identical to the old HK-47 droid from Knights of the Old Republic.) I haven't actually finished that quest-line with any of my characters, but the first quest is really fascinating, and should be done in its own right, in my opinion. Section X is also the last 1.x era content, and everything after this point is 2.x Rise of the Hutt Cartel content. 2.x raised the level cap to 55, but at this point, everything was assumed originally to have been level 50 or lower. If I recall correctly, most of this post-storyline stuff was DLC that came out after the game's launch and was meant for capped level players to play.
• Makeb. This is the main Rise of the Hutt Cartel planet. You're supposed to be level 50 to start it (although you're expected to get up to 55 when you're done) and there are no class stories here, but very different faction stories for Republic and/or Imperial, as well as a reputation track that you fill by doing repeatable heroics and dailies. A lot of people think Makeb is one of the prettiest planets in terms of scenery, which I can't argue too much with (although Voss and Tython are more my style, I guess) but it's difficult to navigate, and I personally find the dailies more tedious than most.
• Toborro's Courtyard Operation. My file calls this an "instance boss" but it's like an operation that's also similar to the world bosses that every planet has. I haven't done it, and solo players wouldn't.
• Macrobinocular Questline. This is a long questline that has you going to all of the past planets and looking up stuff. There's some "boss" regions on some of the planets, but not all of them, and after you've spent all that time doing it, the only way to complete it is a Heroic 4 which requires a group. D'oh! Again; BioWare was not really prepared yet to accept the fact that most of their players don't do groups, although they've since confirmed that their data suggests that that's exactly how it's done. Not sure why they haven't adjusted that Heroic 4 in light of that to make this finishable by all players. Still worth doing, even if you can't finish it, because the journey is pretty cool, even if the destination is unreachable for single players. It is a tangent with another separate bad guy who is mentioned often in the metastory after it happens.
• Seeker Droid Questline. Like the macrobinocular, you can do a lot of this on your own, but it's optional, and you can't actually completely finish it without grouping. It is tied in, in at least some of its content, to the Dread Masters tangent storyline.
• Scum and Villainy Operation. The next group-only part of the Dread Masters story.
• Czerka Corporate Labs Flashpoint. Not a solo one, although you can go do dailies and a reputation track on the CZ-198 world without having done this flashpoint, if you want. It's actually part 1 of 2 linked flashpoints.
• Czerka Core Meltdown. The second part of the two-part linked flashpoints. Not doable alone.
• CZ-198. Although this is the same private moon world as the two flashpoints above, you can go here solo and do dailies and stuff, and it's worth doing because you can get reputation and buy some pretty cool stuff. Plus, the planet itself is an interesting one. Again; too bad that this soloable stuff is related to non-soloable stuff, that BioWare really needs to come up with a solo version for. Meant for level 55; the level cap during the 2.x.
• Oricon. Another level 55 area. While you can (and should) do a lot of stuff here as a solo player, this is heavily tied to the Dread Masters storyline, and you haven't seen any of the operations for that plotline if you only play solo, nor can you finish the storyline that you'll do here without doing two additional operations. A lot of players recommend skipping this entirely if you're playing solo, but I actually quite like the Oricon planet; it's environment and theme, and the stuff you can get on the reputation track for doing the dailies. I think it's worth doing, and you can read a summary or watch videos of the operations on Youtube to find out what you would have done if you were willing to group for an operation. This is a major miss for BioWare that they made this content, which is considered one of the best storylines in the game, up there with the better class stories, missable to the majority of the players. I can understand why they did it in the first place, but it's a little harder to understand why they haven't adjusted it to make soloable flashpoint alternates to replace the operations so that single players can see the whole thing in game, not just from someone else playing and streaming or recording it. This is also the end of the Rise of the Hutt Cartel content (except for the two operations noted below); after this is the Prelude to the Shadow of Revan, or Forged Alliances, which is the lead-up to pretty much every phase of the game following this.
• Dread Fortress Operation. Part 1 of a two part conclusion to the Dread Masters story; only playable as a (at minimum) eight player group.
• Dread Palace Operation. Part 2 of the two part conclusion to the Dread Masters story.
• Korriban Incursion (Republic) or Assault on Tython (Imperial) Story Flashpoint. The Prelude to the Shadow of Revan is four linked flashpoints, which you can play solo. Integral to the storyline as it moves forward from this point. While the order of these two is reversed for Republic vs. Imperial characters, in reality they're not exactly the same; if you're a Republic character, you're invading Korriban and defending Tython, for instance, whereas if you're an Imperial character, you're doing it the other way around.
• Assault on Tython (Republic) or Korriban Incursion (Imperial) Story Flashpoint. You'll go immediately from the past solo flashpoint into this one; they are linked as a two-fer.
• Depths of Manaan Story Flashpoint. This flashpoint is now the same regardless of your faction, and introduces the very first Alliance stuff, or the prologue to it, more accurately. It also revisits one of the major planets from the earlier hit game again. Again, like the rest of this four-part flashpoint series, you can and should play all of them solo.
• Legacy of the Rakata. The final of the four linked flashpoints, and again, revisits the Rakata Prime planet from Knights of the Old Republic. After this, you actually do the Shadow of Revan 3.x material. I don't know if these flashpoints were originally released as content leading up to the DLC, or if they were part of the DLC; I believe the former, but as we move into the next phase, we get new planets and a new level cap of 60.
• Rishi. One of my favorite planets; the piratey beach planet of Rishi has a definite theme and tone that is really pretty different than anything we've done to date. You're supposed to be level 55 to play this planet, and it's pretty fun, with dailies and a reputation track that gives you some pretty cool stuff, including some of my favorite armor pieces. There are two embedded flashpoints that you do as part of playing through Rishi, and while there are multiplayer options, they are designed as solo flashpoints first and foremost. There's also an operation associated with Rishi. You don't do them before or after, though—all three of these are embedded within the Rishi narrative if you do them. The flashpoints, in fact, you have to do to advance the story.
• The Ravagers Operation. An operation, and like all operations, optional.
• Blood Hunt Story Flashpoint. I like how they created a lot of story flashpoints at this stage of the game. Keep in mind that even the story flashpoints from the main 1.x iteration of the game weren't soloable at first, and you were expected to group up to play them, or you couldn't do them. Only later did they make them soloable. These others from this 2.x~3.x phase and beyond, however, were designed with a solo mode included from the get-go. In my opinion, all of the flashpoints should include a solo mode, and the Dread Masters operations should have been flashpoints too... with soloable options. But I may have already mentioned that half a dozen or so times in this post alone...
• The Battle of Rishi Story Flashpoint. The conclusion of the Rishi part of the Shadow of Revan.
• Yavin IV. Meant for level 57 and above characters, Yavin IV is a planetary story place that you can do fairly quickly and there aren't any flashpoints on it, but there are dailies that you can go back and do for the reputation track, as well as an optional operation, mentioned below. You fight Revan as the final boss on Yavin IV, but then there's an epilogue or transition attached that leads into the next story phase after that.
• Temple of Sacrifice Operation. An operation. If you're into those kinds of things, you can do it, but it isn't necessary for the story.
• Ziost. An interesting conclusion to the Shadow of Revan. You play this planet, but you can't go back to it ever again, because if you try to, it's changed. If there are things you wanted to make sure that you did, you'll either have to do them with another character, or stick around long enough to finish them before concluding this stuff. After the planet has changed, you can wander about the new version of it doing dailies, mostly for the reputation track. Ziost is meant to be a level 60 planet.
• Colossal Monolith Operation. An instance boss, like the Toborro's Courtyard earlier.
• Knights of the Fallen Empire. This was the 4.x update to the game, and the stuff in this expansion works very differently from what preceded it. First of all, you will lose all of your companions, and get new ones. Secondly, there is no longer a faction storyline, there's just one storyline. This was off and on true for everything following the class stories, but it's especially true now. Thirdly, there aren't any planets anymore. Rather than going planetside and wandering around looking for the icons for the story arc, you play chapters. Now granted; the chapters take you to planets, but you don't have that free roam kind of thing anymore for most of those planets. The first half of it (up through chapter 9) were released at first, with subsequent chapters drizzling out over a couple of months or so later originally (a moot point now, of course.) You do get a bit of your free roam capabilities back, at least with regards to your new base of operations on Odessen after this point, but you never go do planets like Vandin, and just wander around like you can on most planets. You also get a whole laundry list of star fortress and companion alerts to do, which are kind of like mini flashpoints to unlock some of the companions of various characters from the original 1.x phase of the game. Most of these are on planets that you already know. For the chapters that came out after this midpoint (10-16) you're supposed to be level 65.
• Knights of the Eternal Throne. Although shorter than Fallen Empire (only nine chapters), this 5.x stuff works very much the same as the second half of Fallen Empire did. However, after you finish the chapters, you go back to something not too unlike what we've been doing after the class stories; planets that you can go to to do your missions, and then dailies and a reputation track to give you an excuse to stick around. The level cap went up to 70 for 5.x, although you're only meant to be 65 to start, of course. 
• Uprisings. There's a long list of uprisings that were also added as part of 5.x. These are meant to be like group flashpoints (there's no solo mode for any of them) but shorter and quicker to do. They don't have any important story implications; they're just stand-alone mini-adventures.
• Iokath. This level 70 planet is the return to something more like, say, Yavn IV or Rishi in how it works, and it takes place after the chapters of Eternal Throne are complete. Unlike most reputation tracks to date, there are actually two reputation tracks, depending on whether you ally your Eternal Alliance with the Republic or the Empire. You can, however, switch and do dailies for both, so you can advance both tracks. There's some cool armor and a few other things doable here, so it's worth spending some time on the reputation upgrades. 
• Gods From the Machine Operation. An operation associated with Iokath, for those who like operations. Other than the dumb Dread Masters format, operations became completely optional for those who like that kind of stuff, while the devs recognized that most players aren't all that interested in that kind of play, which was probably a good move. (Again, if only they'd fix the Dread Masters so everyone can see that plotline in some format.)
• Crisis on Umbara Story Flashpoint. After the Iokath storyline is done, there are three linked story flashpoints that can be played solo; in fact, given the plot in them, it's a little hard to imagine them being played as a group, although the option does exist, as with all flashpoints. 
• A Traitor Among the Chiss Story Flashpoint. Part two of three of the linked flashpoints.
• The Nathema Conspiracy Story Flashpoint. Part three of three. Following this, you get another planet which was the latest 5.x release and which led into Onslaught.
• Ossus. Also called Jedi Under Siege, although this is the format we're used to now, right; it's a free roam planet with dailies for reputation, but a planetary story mission that doesn't vary by faction or class. Jedi Under Siege is the mission title, Ossus is the planet. 
• Geonosian Queen Instance Boss Operation. The by now obligatory little operation associated with the new planet.
• Onderon. The new(er) planet for the Onslaught 6.x release. We've been in 6.x for some time, and I suspect that the original plan was a 7.x release in 2020, if the China virus hadn't interrupted it while everyone panicked and made fools of themselves with mask and lockdown cults. As per the now familiar pattern, there's some planetary story stuff, tailored to the Empire/Republic dichotomy, and dailies for reputation. Oh, and there's the...
• Nature of Progress Operation. ... obligatory optional operation associated with the planet. This is, however, to date the last operation available.
• Mek-Sha. A planetary story, but the dailies are a bit different; you can actually only do one daily per day, and it has you traveling across the galaxy for various reasons. Mek-Sha is a level 75 planet, the new level cap, which is still in place as I write this.
• Objective Meridian Story Flashpoint. Another story flashpoint, according to the pattern that's been around since Shadow or Revan at least.
• Echoes of Oblivion. I'm not quite sure what to call this. It's not a planet, exactly, it's not a flashpoint; it's kind of like a chapter from the Fallen Empire or Eternal Throne phase of the game, except... standalone. Unlike the late era stuff from earlier versions of the game, it doesn't point to what the 7.x theme will be, although maybe that's because there's still more content yet to come for 6.x before 7.x launches. If 7.x does, that is.
• Spirit of Vengeance Story Flashpoint. On the other hand, there's a lot of Mandalorian-themed stuff on the build-up to this flashpoint. If 7.x has more of a Mandalorian theme, that would hardly be surprising, given the recent success of the Mandalorian streaming show.

Anyway, that's it for now. I'm very curious what 2021 will bring. Most people who play think that that some kind of 7.x update is inevitable, but of course, it's not really. There may be iterative 6.x updates until the game shudders and dies... which honestly, may be closer to reality than we know. It's coming up on ten years old now at the end of 2021, which is an insanely long time for this type of game. We tend to think that it's a decent revenue stream, but that only makes it a decent profit center if costs are kept to a minimum, after all. Which means not a lot of money can be put into development of new content. (And keep in mind that SWTOR was the most expensive game ever developed at one time. It's still the second most expensive even now. I don't think it really ever came close to its goal of supplanting World of Warcraft in its heyday, but then again, it's still around, so that's something...) And at some point, that comes to an end and profits dribble down to basically nothing. That's part of the reason I've really dived into it the last few months and will be doing my recording project on it; once the game is gone, it's gone and that's that. I want to have something to remember it by when that happens.