One down; second soon

I finishd Belsavis, the first of three planets that are part of the third and final chapter of all of the class storylines with my Sith Warrior character; second to play. Only two more planets to go, and the third one doesn't even have a Bonus Series (although there's the finale and a handful of other non-planet missions to work in there.) I was a little shocked at how quickly it went down; in only two or three days—days, I'll mention where I worked full time and had some busy personal commitments in the evening too—I did all of the Belsavis Heroic missions, all of the planetary story missions, all of the class missions, even the exploration missions, and then did the Bonus Series. I feel like I just did Belsavis with my Knight only a week or so ago (which is true; I'm playing a lot right now) and the first time through it felt like it took longer, even if the missions were different. Just about the only thing that I didn't do that I did with the knight, although this only took a few minutes really, was wander around the map to uncover the whole thing as far as it could be reached.

So, yeah—I've got some experience tinkering with some of the other classes in the past too, where I studiously avoided the force-using classes for whatever reason. And I've watched an awful lot of playthrough videos over the years on Youtube. I think I can say something about what class to play and why at this point, even if I'm still a far cry away from playing all eight of them all the way through. I'll put out the order that I've chosen for my playthrough and why, I suppose, although of course, naturally I'm leapfrogging rather than playing one through non-stop and then moving on to the next. As I go through the post "main story" stuff with my first two classes, I'll start on the next two immediately.

1. Jedi Knight. This is considered the most iconic story, and this is the character that is kinda sorta "in canon" assumed to be the one who actually goes through the expansion packs. Often considered, "KotOR 3" because of this, from a story perspective, it's probably the absolute best to go through first. However, it's not perfect; given that it's a melee rather than ranged combat class, it's a little bit harder to use than some of the other classes. In addition to this, the character is so bland, boring, and lacking in personality that he's really not a great choice to be the masthead for the entire game with the most iconic of the stories. That said, I still think it's the best choice for a story-first type gamer (as opposed to a more MMO style gamer) to play through. Kira as the default love interest is a classic love interest; and let's face it, Star Wars needs to be a swashbuckling romance; a kind of Sabatini novel set in space, in order to work (this is a big problem with Luke Skywalker's story arc in the original trilogy; when they made the change to pawn Leia off on Han and not let Luke have a love interest, that was a major blow to the credibility of the story as a classic story.)

2. Sith Warrior. As kind of the dark mirror of the Jedi Knight, the Sith Warrior is an obvious second choice, and his story is also very iconic and classic Star Wars. I actually prefer to play him a little less on-the-nose petty evil and more of a pragmatist working within a corrupt system (the Sith Empire) and mostly ignoring the light/dark implications of the choices you make. (Although most of them will end up being light even so if you're not some kind of weirdo psychopath yourself, thinking that the darker choices make sense.) One way that the story doesn't work, building a bit on my comments for the Jedi Knight above is that the "default" love interest, Vette, may well be kinda cute in personality, but I just don't really like making love to aliens, so I'm working on the Jaesa angle. The dark side Jaesa is kind of interesting in a twisted, disturbing kind of way, but the light side Jaesa, which doesn't pay out until literally the very end of the game, at the end of the Onslaught expansion, is among the best romances in the game.

3. Smuggler. This fairly classic swashbuckler/pirate/crime lord style story is one of the more attractive ones, and the witty banter and dialogue seems to often be some of the best in the game. Amusingly, the smuggler character has single-planet romance options; he can leave a trail of broken hearts all through the galaxy, which is kinda sorta unique to this character, although a handful of other characters have a handful of single-planet romance options. Risha is the main love interest, however, although I recommend getting a reskin if you can. I'm qualified to buy the blond reskin in the Cartel market, so as soon as I go through her very first cut scene, I'll pop into the fleet and pick that up so I can have her run around as a prettier version of herself first. I played most of the first two planets way back when that's all you could do with this game on free-to-play (and I did it as a girl character too, gack) and it really sold me on the idea that Star Wars can actually be better without the Force and lightsbers. Although I like the way the character was written, a combination of the writing and the limitations of the medium make the character come across as just a bit too passive and beta for all the action that he's capable of getting, though.

4. Agent. I'm actually on the fence if I want to do this one as part of my leapfrog options or the bounty hunter, which I've played quite a bit of as an alt. The agent is rumored to be the first story written for the game, and in most respects, it's the most ambitious; a kind of James Bond in space type character, with three different (although related) story arcs for each major chapter of the main plot. The first one has a 24-like foil the terrorists vibe, while chapter 2 is a psychogical thriller with mad-science tones, and chapter 3 is the big-old globalist (galaxy-wide, in this case) conspiracy kind of story. While the character himself isn't nearly as dashing as the smuggler, he's got this kind of much colder, scarier vibe to him that gives him some of the charm of the darker James Bonds that we've seen; it really is quite well done. That said; again, the romance options, which is an important part of any good Star Wars story (and any good James Bond story, for that matter.) Kaliyo is the default one, and she's a hot mess of drama and baggage. Not a pleasant or attractive girl at. all. Just a horrible choice. However, much later in the story you pick up Raina Temple. Slap a customization on her (#4 is available, luckily, right after you pick her up, and #9 is great too, if you can find it.) and you're good to go. She actually seems like a likable character too, which makes the inclusion of Kaliyo all the more baffling. The only explanation I can think of is that whomever was in charge of that aspect of the story is too irreconcilably beta to have any understanding of what an attractive woman is actually like.

5. Jedi Consular. While the Jedi Knight is sometimes considered the prototypical "heroic Jedi" this one is sometimes described as an "average Jedi." Some people seem to really like this story, but I've heard a lot of others say that it's a bit slow and underwhelming. I figure by the time I come back around to it I'll be in the mood for another Force character, but I'm not expecting to really love this story so much. But we'll see; maybe it'll surprise me. Scuttlebutt is that the default romance option, Nadia Grell, while a little bit funny looking may be one of the sweetest and most likable of the girl romance options.

6. Sith Inquisitor. I don't have a lot of info on this class story either, except that it comes across as perhaps a little too passive; doing too much of someone else's step and fetchit, and supposed to be a double-crossing genius but who can't see obvious plot twists that the players can. Again; I'll play it because I'm planning on playing them all, but I don't have really high expectations on this one really. Not sure what to do with the romance either. The default is the Togruta gal, but I don't really love romancing aliens too much. Maybe I'll hold out and romance Lana Beniko with this character?

7. Trooper. Another class that is often considered one of the poorer ones; a strong start and strong finish, but an awful lot of draggin in between. Plus, the concept just doesn't appeal to me too much. I'll almost certainly not change my mind about putting this one off until nearly the end.

8. Bounty Hunter. The only reason this one is so far back is because I know so much about the story and have played a considerable amount of it with a character who I flubbed up and locked out my companion storylines before finishing them. I actually quite like almost everything about this guy; a laconic alpha of occasionally dubious morality with a very cute sidekick/romance option played by none other than Party of Five and Mean Girls star Lacey Chabert. Also, I want to have the best ability to have loads of cosmetic options, so playing it late means that I will have everything collected by all of the other classes that they didn't or couldn't use available for this bad boy to take on. 

I'm somewhat amused

There's something dodgy with the scale. I'm using the Agent ship from Old Republic, although I could do this with any of the six ships; look at the cutaway version first. This is consistent with my experience of playing the game and seeing the ship both from outside and inside.

However, the official descriptions describe them as much bigger, and these images show people that... must be only about two feet tall. Talk about some weird scaling issues!

Old Republic Update

Not that anyone else cares, as I'm way late on this given that the game is coming up on 10 years old in 2021 sometime, but my Old Republic progress continues apace. I finished, just this morning, actually, the class story for the Jedi Knight, which is considered probably the most iconic and classic of the class storylines. Sadly, the Jedi Knight is also one of the most bland and boring of the characters, and a lot of the missions that he's required to do are hoaky and silly, as are his responses to them. It's as if tiny children tried to come up with moral dilemmas which normal people just find asinine, for the most part. That can kind of be ignored, a bit, and some of it isn't the Knight anyway, it's the Republic class story that is often worse than the class story in this regard (and the exploration missions, which although they give you a handful of fetchit quests, actually bring down the writing quality average considerably because they're usually pretty stupid.)

Anyway, one down; seven to go. The Sith Warrior is starting chapter three, so he's within striking distance of finishing up too. I actually intend to take both of them through the expansions, but I seriously doubt that I'll take all of the characters through them, because ugh. Too much repetition. 

But what to do after finishing the story with the Sith Warrior? Do I want to leapfrog back to the Knight and do some of the epilogue stuff like Ilum, Section X, the Black Hole, etc. and then leapfrog back to the Warrior to do the same again? Or do I want to start a more complicated leapfrogging by adding the Smuggler and Agent prologues into the mix first? With a four character leapfrog, my progress between the four will be slower, and I do want to get to at least Chapter 9 of Fallen Empire with at least one character so I can start opening all of these Heroic crates that I have and distributing whatever armor I pull out of them to the other characters still coming. Which means that I'll probably keep the Agent and Smuggler stuff moving a little slower; I'm thinking that maybe I'll do the epiloge stuff first, then the Smugger/Agent prologues, and then moving into expansions with the two knight/warrior characters. I think according to this plan, I'll get to the crate opening stuff after the smuggler and agent have finished chapter 1, which means anything that I open up that would look good on them can be worn through chapters 2 and 3 and however much of the expansion content I decide to do with those two characters.

I have not, you may notice, thought too far ahead beyond that, because obviously I still have four more classes to do after that; the other Jedi and Sith classes and the trooper and bounty hunter. Who will all benefit enormously from having much more choice of rare armor and weapon cosmetic items, and who therefore may look quite a bit cooler than my "main" characters who had to blaze the trail first without the benefit of being able to follow someone else who unlocked a bunch of crap for them already.

I do really enjoy a lot of the cosmetic stuff, to be honest with you. Star Wars, even the bad movies like the sequel trilogy and to a lesser extent the prequel trilogy always got at least one thing pretty right; the visual design. That said, there are some even cooler things in this game than in the movies, at least conceptually. Although often held back by the limitations of the medium. For quite a while now, my Jedi Guardian has had a black core blue lightsaber crystal with a big, chunky Onderon pummeler's hilt (I think that's what it's called anyway. Regardless, I like the look of it quite a bit.) This makes it kind of look like a darksaber that's blue instead of white, which is a really cool look, by the way. In fact, I like it so much that I've decided all of my force characters will have a variant of the black-core crystals. My Sith Marauder has two black core orange crystals, which are ferocious looking and super cool, and I need to get a hold of the black core green and purple crystals for my other Jedi and Sith characters with their double sabers respectively.

I also had a bit of a strange affectation with my Jedi Knight where I refused to dress him in those dumb brown robes. I have six alternate outfit designed, and I did relent a little bit and have a charcoal gray jedi robe as one of the later ones that I added. In fact, for quite a long time; the first two planets, basically, I wore the craftable Terenthium Onslaught armor followed by the Xonolite armor, with the head uncovered, which gave him a more of a Han Solo scoundrel kind of look. I did eventually come up with my own alternative Jedi classic outfit when I got some kind of dressy tunic of sorts that's mostly tan but with goldish accents. I gave him one of the headbands to look a bit like a crown (although there's an even cooler one in the tactical sets that really does look like a crown; time to upgrade eventually—when I want to spend a million credits and three thousand tech fragments on it, which won't be right away. I've spent too much there between my two characters and my tech fragment budget in particular is a bit depleted.) But mostly, I figure an action oriented knight would wear action-oriented clothing, not peasant robes. That was one of the few major misteps Lucas made on visual design; deciding that rather than Ben Kenobi wearing clothes that looked exactly like Uncle Owen's style because he was living in the same environment in hiding, that that's actually what Jedi dressed like. So, Uncle Owen dresses like a Jedi, even though he's just a dirt poor peasant farmer in a galactic backwater. Maybe he raided Qui-Gonn's closet when he was last on Tatooine or something. 

I did also do a white robe highlighted with blue while on Hoth, but mostly because I thought it looked warm and I happened to get it at the right time to wear it for that planet.

I still think that the way to save Star Wars from itself is to start doing stuff that takes place as far in the future after the movies we have now as the Old Republic is in the past. But maybe borrow some of the color visual design elements that Old Republic did, which make it look familiar yet also a little different to emphasize that yes, this is Star Wars, but it's separated in time from the Star Wars that you know. 

On the other hand, the super exaggerated spikes and pauldrons that a lot of the design elements have are really stupid and need to be toned way down.

Ad Astra armor

 Early on I made, as an example, a Cilindarean commando suit. Think of it as a fully loaded Mandalorian warrior suit, or maybe a bit like Warmachine from Marvel. (Really, they're pretty similar in most respect, except that the Star Wars versions probably have less ammo for their bigger weapons, and there's no such thing as the repulsor blasts.) I'm heading towards the crew of a ship that are iconic for Ad Astra, and it includes two main characters who are partners as well as their associated sidekicks and others who make up their crew. All in all, maybe a half dozen characters, maybe one or two more if you include a droid or two. One of them is an ethnic janissary, and although the janissaries and the Cilindareans aren't exactly the same, I'm using the Cilindarean armor that I already devised in the m20 game to represent janissary traditional armor too; the two groups are related culturally in a somewhat uneasy rivalry yet also alliance kind of fashion, and although janissaries are much less likely than Cilindareans to hire themselves out as mercenary bands, considering themselves blessed to have won their freedom and happy to keep it as armed and very capable militias on their colony worlds, a Cilindarean and a janissary are meant to be more or less equivalent as a military unit.

The second half of this partnership, though, is a renegade Serean knight; one who probably grew up on a planet of one of the colonies and has had, since at least the time of his parents, little connection to his Serean culture, having rejected it and embraced the Christian religion of the Bernese and others of the old Marian Empire tradition (some of the Revanchists are a type of heretic Christian, but most of them have abandoned their faith within the last three or four generations or so.) What kind of gear would a Serean knight (or for that matter, a knight generally) be expected to have, especially one who runs as a kind of privateer/smuggler as a living? And how to do I make sure that his combat effectiveness is about as good as that of the janissary with his fully kitted out suit?

I refer you, again, before we begin, to the m20 document that has the rules for the game, specifically the equipment page. So, let's get started. I think a knight in Ad Astra isn't exactly like a Medieval knight, with the heaviest armor available, but he's also not like a Jedi who just wears dumb brown robes. This character (name TBD) wear a black ballistic cloth flight suit with some embedded shielded plates on them, with another padded jacket, tunic or vest on top of that, which has a built in energy shield. While his traditional weapons are his psionic sword and shield, he also carries a heavy radium pistol, a number of grenades, maybe some additional smaller pistols in another holster or two, and knives in his boot sheathes. He's probably got a helmet, but may not always wear it, prefering often to simply put up the hood of his jacket.

Because psionic powers are penalized with any armor heavier than light, this description of armor will be (and honestly sounds like, anyway) light armor, +4 to AC. This is a 2,000 credit base cost. The really expensive addition is the energy shield, which is unusual on a personal armor set, especially a light armor set (although notably, nothing in the rules precludes it, just setting stuff that says it's unusual.) This adds Damage Reduction 10 against radium weapons and adds an additional 10,000 credits to the cost. (For reference, my fully loaded Cilindarean battle suit costs 18,575.) The knight suit would also have a commlink for 50 credits on one wrist bracer or gauntlet, and a utility belt for an additional 250. It would have, in particular for this character, active shadow camouflage, giving him an armor affinity for Stealth (2,000 credits) and the ballistic cloth is especially treated by psionic sages and warlocks to give it the ability to absorb small amounts of kinetic energy and store it for later use (seen, kinda sorta, in the Black Panther's suit in the Marvel movies.) This gives him also the Acrobatics affinity, so that's another 2,000 credits.

He doesn't have a jet pack, but I imagine he owns some kind of small speeder and keeps in "garaged" on the ship when not in use, and he has an optional face shield that would look very similar to the Winter Soldier's face mask that serves as a sensor and HUD interface as well as a breath mask (Perception affinity, +2,000 and 250 respectively.)

This armor, then is certainly in the same ballpark as his partner's fully loaded janissary suit; it's 16,300 not counting the mask and 18,550 with it. I'm actually a little on the fence about the mask. If I were more inclined to tell stories about singular characters, I'd rather let him have it, but since I'm talking about stories about a partnership, I don't think that they both need it. Plus, the psionics powers that he has allows him to do a bunch of other stuff; maybe it'd be nice if they had their own space a little bit more. 

On the other hand, I'm also on the fence about the radium shield. The psionic power negate energy would represent his psionic shield and do something similar, and I could maintain the setting element that this is more of a vehicular bit of equipment rather than a personal clothing/armor piece of equipment. However, I'm also considering maybe giving him a couple of one-of-a-kind warlock powers made incarnate on the armor; maybe catfall and biofeedback. If I do take away the shield, I'll certainly add those, and be much more likely to assume that he does have a facemask, although he may not always have it with him.

Me on Star Wars on Youtube III

 

I was falling in love

 https://open.spotify.com/album/30bWTGXXlc2APoa8Nzss0Z

An underrated, underappreciated when it was new, and sometimes forgotten gem of the 80s (in favor of their bigger hit I Ran), Space Age Love Song is really the best song A Flock of Seagulls ever did, and one of the better love songs of the 80s in general. The original is brilliant, but this much more recent collaborative affair with the Prague Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra is magical. Michael Score, the lead singer and main guy for A Flock said that while the band came together fairly quickly, they struggled to find a guitar player, and had at least a dozen guys come in. Most of them heard the synth heavy sound, which in the very early 80s was deemed sufficient, I guess, and asked them why they wanted a guitar player at all. But Score knew that their sound would need it (he was a big fan of more guitar-heavy traditional indie stuff; the name of the band comes from a line from a Stranglers song, for instance, that they'd just seen in concert together). Can you imagine this song without that insistent guitar riff? It really makes the song what it is, and replacing it with some analog synth voice would have been devastating to the sound.

Anyway, a bit random, I know, but there it is. To make up for my randomness, I'll point out that I'm making updates to more Ad Astra planetary data sheets, I'm just not posting them on my blog. Because I'm also unhappy with the format of Google Sites these days, I'll actually probably transfer them to some offline format (like an odf doc, probably), and if I share them again, it'll be en masse as a pdf.

Watch the original version of the song here with clips from a very early 90s (but still classic 80s style) rom-com movie with a young Jennifer Connelly. Again: magical. I don't necessarily buy into it myself, but there's a consistent theme among many on the internet that Jennifer Connelly in the middle to late 80s (and she still squeeks by in this video, although her buy-by date would be approaching fast) is the most beautiful woman of an entire generation. Again; while I don't necessarily agree with that, she is certainly a beautiful woman, or at least was back then. That can't be denied.

Me on Star Wars on Youtube Part 2

 

Me on Star Wars on Youtube

 

Story mode shenanigans

I make no secret of the fact that I was only interested in Star Wars: The Old Republic as a greatly expanded and improved sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic games, not as an MMO attempting to grab the (at the time) market share from Warcraft. I have NO interest in shared anything, and if I could play the dumb game offline completely by myself and still get all of the content, I absolutely would. So when BioWare toned down the multiplayer and subscription requirements, made the game free to play, and made the character stories a part of the full free to play experience, that's when I got interested in it. Curiously, in order to play it, I went ahead and got a subscription, and I may well keep it as long as I'm actively playing.

But there is still tension between the developers attempts to create a really great, big, CRPG and the business side that said to make it an MMO because that was where all the money was (supposedly) in the late 2000s and early 2010s while it was under development. One such side effect of this tension is that the story can get screwed up if you do things out of order, and it's not hard to do things out of order because of the online multiplayer need to have kick-offs always available. I accidentally kicked off the Oricon missions, which are from the latest expansion Onslaught, on my Bounty Hunter story, even though I'd only finished chapter one (because I had maxed out the level on the character.) What does that mean? It means that all of my relationship stories and companion missions got locked out where I was and I can't seem to engage them anymore. Grrr!

It seems that in order to actually play the game properly, you have to do some research and not get ahead of yourself, accidentally kicking off the wrong quest by talking to the wrong quest giver. Sigh. My bounty hunter was my oldest character, kicking around from many years ago, but left on Balmorra untouched for the better part of two or even three years, and it's disappointing to have him now locked out of being able to finish all of his story content. So disappointing that I actually created a new character to replace him so I can do it again. He doesn't look exactly the same, but he's very similar, and I'm going to do all of the planets that he's done so far again with him. Sigh.

Anyway, I created a tracker on Google docs that you can see, just in case you ever feel the need to have one of these too. The gray boxes are the ones that I've done. In a few cases the order isn't exactly right; the bonus story missions can be (and probably should be) come back to and done later. I also didn't put any of the exploration or heroic missions on them. I'm now picking up all of the heroics at the Fleet right as I start a planet, but let's be honest; I'm mostly doing those to farm for XP and gold and equipment drops. Because combat is actually a bit tedious in this game sometimes, I hardly would be interested in doing them for fun. And most of the exploration missions are kinda dumb, honestly. And there aren't really that many anyway. I keep those turned off on my map and ignore any icons when they pop up; exploration missions I don't want to do and heroics I'm already grabbing at the fleet anyway.

I also marked the bounty hunter stuff that I did already in yellow, for now, although eventually I'll replace those with gray too.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HizeXpP5FMex40lWvKg_aKtfDr5u6xae3iJw-CzRc7c/edit?usp=sharing

It's a little funny to think that back in the day, the game topped out at level 50. With my bounty hunter, I was at the new max of 75 while on Alderaan, near the end of the first chapter. I finished to the same place in the story with my Jedi Knight in the lower 70s range, and I've since topped him off with a few heroics. I'll start chapter 2 soon with him already maxed out level-wise. My Sith Warrior is now in the mid-60s in Alderaan, but I'll be close to 70 if not over it by the time I finish. I suspect that as I play more and more classes, my level at that same point will drop, because I'll skip or handwave my way through certain quests that aren't class specific that I would have already done several times by then. And there's only so much farming I can do before it's too tedious to be endured, so I'll probably do less as time goes on. That said, there's certainly something to be said for going through stuff overleveled. Sure, you have level syncing, but if your equipment drops are appropriate for your level, then you've got great equipment which makes your character breeze through (relatively speaking) Flashpoints and Heroics. I don't have a problem with that myself, since I think, like I said earlier, that combat in the game is pretty tedious and overly long and time consuming anyway. Anything I can do to keep it breezy is a good thing.

Star Wars and Old Republic character notes

I made an off-hand reference in my previous post that I actually thought about a bit more since I made it. Looking at the original trilogy, Luke is the protagonist of the series overall, of course. Han is the deuteragonist. And Leia is the love interest, although there was a curious diversion where she became Han's love interest and Luke had to become a celibate monk or something. Which then later evolved into actually Leia was his sister all along. If you read The Secret History of Star Wars which examines older drafts of the scrips and the comments of the creators and actors, it becomes very obvious that those were later developments, though—the original plan for the script was much more straightforward. When Leia appeared to be the love interest in the original Star Wars, that's because she was. When Ben Kenobi told Luke that Darth Vader killed his father, that's because that was the original plan. Even in the early drafts of The Empire Strikes Back we see Luke's father make a brief appearance as a force ghost or voice or something. The change of Leia to Luke's sister wasn't done until the drafting stage of Return of the Jedi where Lucas felt that he had to tie up the loose end that he'd created perhaps foolishly by making an offhand reference to Luke not being the last hope so that there was more tension; the audience was meant to think that if Luke went to go fight Vader that he didn't necessarily have bulletproof plot armor. 

Of course, it had the additional benefit of giving another subconscious reason for why Leia was diverted in her role from Luke's love interest to being Han's love interest. In my opinion, nobody really needed this; I think subconsciously everyone got it anyway. Although Luke was the protagonist and Han the deuteragonist, everyone also understood implicitly that Han was an alpha and Luke was considerably less so. In spite of his non-protagonist role, Han was the one that men identified with or wanted to be because of his character (this was maybe less true for younger boys) as well as the member of the pair that women were more attracted to. And part of that had to do with how the script and later casting and acting played out in the first movie. I seriously doubt that it ever occurred to Lucas to make Leia shift her love interest focus from Luke to Han until after the first movie was finished, at which point it seemed maybe a bit more obvious. In fact, obviously it didn't; when Lucas had Alan Dean Foster write up a sequel for Star Wars, this shift hadn't happened. This is Splinter of the Mind's Eye which was also meant to be a low-budget sequel to Star Wars in the event that it didn't make enough money to merit a big budget sequel, which is the outcome that Lucas expected. And in that book, Leia is quite clearly still Luke's love interest; Han only gets a brief offhand mention, and Luke and Leia have all kinds of flirty moments with each other. Although Foster had a lot of leeway in terms of what kind of plot he developed, he did work closely with Lucas, and Lucas' only input to the plot outline was to remove a space dogfight which would have been effects heavy and therefore expensive to film. Other than that, Mind's Eye is the "truest" sequel to Star Wars in some ways; i.e., the sequel that held most closely to the spirit of the first movie, before Lucas got more ambitious and serious and "mythic" as the critics love to say in Empire.

In any case, I've now made sixteen characters for Old Republic, mostly so I can get the free Shae Vizsla companion for all of them. After creating the characters, I had to watch the opening cut-scene, close out the tutorials (why isn't the game smart enough to recognize that if this isn't my first character on the account, I obviously don't need the tutorials again!?) and go find the mailbox right outside of the opening cut scene location so I can open my mail, which is how ou unlock Vizsla. As well as the two pilot outfits, the old anniversary fireworks and a few other perks for new players and subscribers, etc. as it happens. And then after I did that, I logged out of that character, and decided that I'm going to be done with them until I open them back up.

I started off making eight characters. As I mentioned in my earlier post, which talked about my preferences for space opera protagonist, deuteragonist and love interest characteristics, all of these eight characters are human males. In fact, they all use the same body type and I think I even picked the same face style for all of them. This isn't meant to imply that I made the characters all look the same (although I did have at least a bit of that idea in mind) because they don't. I have different shades of skin tone from pretty darkly tanned with sunburned cheeks on my bounty hunter to pretty pale on my two Sith characters. The bounty hunter, which of course I inherited from my free to play days, has light blue eyes and my agent has green eyes; the others all have either the silver-chrome or the wolf-eyes gold colors, which I unlocked via cartel coins. And they have a variety of hair styles and colors from nearly jet black to silver-white, although some kind of brownish or blondish is the most common. My trooper even has gray hair, although in the lighting in which I picked it, I thought it looked more like a grizzly brown, so that was kind of an accident. But I think I'm going to keep it anyway. Makes the guy look older and more experienced (which is funny because in the cut scene, he's called "kid" by the other guy doing the talking; Gearbox or whatever his name was. This one was my trooper.)

But then I made eight additional characters, which I may or may not get around to playing through with. They are all women, so I can get the other dialogue actor's performance, and they are all non-humans so I can more broadly unlock the races if I ever come back. I can't remember exactly how I did it, but the last one had to be a cyborg because I was out of more alien choices to pick from. I didn't spend the cartel money to unlock the Kit Fisto race; nautolan, or whatever they're called, or the cathar or the togruta. Not only do I not want to spend real money on those options, but I don't really love any of them anyway. Again, I can't remember exactly how I did it, and I may not even ever play them anyway, but I think I have my two sith are the Darth Maul style zabrak and a trueblood, although I can't remember which is which, and my bounty hunter is chiss and my agent a rattatak. She almost looks like she could be Kaliyo's sister, which may influence how I play her, if I ever do. My two jedi are a Eeth Koth style zabrak and a miraluka although again, I can't remember for sure which is which, and my smuggler is a miralian and my trooper a cyborg.

Because each story class has two variants, which are "repeated" with cosmetic difference across factions, I was able to spread those out as well a bit. With my first pass, with one exception (the vanguard trooper variant) I avoided any of the class options that had healing options with my male characters, because that's a multiplayer option that I set my companion to do passively otherwise, while I focus on DPS-style, mostly. But with the second wave of girl alien characters, I finally went ahead and have the other variant on all of the ones I picked. If nothing else, the weapon choice will look different for them.

Old Republic Progress

Just a fairly quick note on my progress on Old Republic. People may well say; dude, that game is nine years old and most Star Wars fans have played it through years ago. Yes, that's true. However, I'm slow. Plus, because of the recent Steam launch earlier this summer, there are probably more people playing than before; in fact, there is some evidence I've seen here and there that suggest that more people are playing right now than have played in a long time. (This is true for other video games I play too; probably related to people being stuck at home and being monumentally let down by other avenues of entertainment. Movies, TV, most books, even sports all suck right now, so people are turning to video games for their entertainment. Those are starting to attack them with wokeness too, but the rot is considerably less far along in the video game world than in Hollywood or New York or in the NFL and NBA, etc.)

So with my free to play account, I had played the bounty hunter up through about halfway through Balmorra, including doing most if not all of the planetary missions on Nal Hutta and Dromund Kaas. But I was playing on an older computer that still had Windows XP, and when that OS was no longer supported, I had to stop playing for the better part of two years, I think. I was already super behind even then. Now that I've reinstalled it on a newer rig, I've sprung for a subscription temporarily. I may go ahead and keep it as long as I'm actively playing, because it seems like it offers a number of benefits. One that is a temporary benefit is that it offers Shae Viszla as a free companion, even before you normally have access to a companion, I've found. Because of that, I'll probably go ahead and create a character for every class, although I don't intend to play them yet; just enough to get that Mandalorian gal as a companion so I can use her when I do play those classes.

I did go ahead and finish the first chapter. This sounds small, but keep in mind that the prologue and first chapter, especially when done in conjunction with all of the planetary missions and heroics, as well as a few flashpoints and whatnot here and there, is at least as big—probably bigger—than the entire Knights of the Old Republic game was on it's own. The end of the first chapter for each story arc is also a major stopping point in the plot; it's kind of like I've watched the entire first Star Wars movie (about a bounty hunter, in this case, not a budding Jedi wannabe) after I watched an entire prologue movie that we didn't even actually get in reality. My character has been leveled up to max level for most of the time that I was on Alderaan before I went to the end-game (of this phase) starship insertion, so I've been building up a decent collection of Legacy levels and legacy drops on equipment; plus, green bar drops are now pretty awesome stuff, at the 270+ level equipment. I find that I still spend money almost as fast as I get it, though—probably related to my constant desire to tinker with cosmetics—so that's the only thing that I wish I had more of; credits. I've bought even a handful of cartel coins, but given that that's real money and not in-game "money" I probably won't do that anymore; I'll just save up my monthly drops of cartel coins from when I'm subscribed.

In any case, it seemed like a good time to furlough the bounty hunter for a while now that I'm halfway through his story arc, so I started up a Jedi Knight character as well, and I've finished Tython and am plowing relatively quickly through Coruscant with him, in an attempt to get my second real companion and romance option (Kyra) as well as my own spaceship, which makes a huge difference. I'm also trying to get a speeder; somehow my bounty hunter has three all of which I got for either free or pretty cheap. It seems like getting one for my Jedi will not be either, sadly, but it's a game-changer to have one instead of having to run around on your feet like a chump at half the speed. (The inclusion of fast travel is another game changer, although you can only use it to travel to places that you've been before. And you still often need to speeder around to get to exactly where you're trying to go after you've fast traveled to a taxi location or whatever. I think that's a subscriber perk, though.) My plan, after getting to the end of Chapter 1 for the Knight was to start a Sith Warrior and then a Smuggler, doing the same thing, before then turning back to the bounty hunter, probably and advancing some of my other characters that have been furloughed. Although maybe I'll add an agent in there too.

My interest in the Jedi diplomat and Sith sorcerer, as well as the trooper (whatever those classes are called; I can't even remember off-hand) are considerably less, so I was going to get to them later after I've done the ones that I really want to do. However, like I said, getting a free and relatively cool companion right away up through October 5th means that I'll probably actually create all of the other characters I want, maybe mail them some gear so they don't look like n00b chumps, unlock the companion which if I remember correctly from doing the Jedi Knight requires at least a little bit of playtime and a few cutscenes before you can use, and then having them sit waiting to "really" start until later. It's just too good an offer to pass up, and I want to do all of the characters eventually anyway. Why not create the characters so I can get the perk?

This begs a few questions, though, or maybe even an entire discussion on the nature of swashbuckling space opera. I'm finding that so far I think I really only want to create characters who are 1) men and 2) human. At least for my first pass. Why is this? In part, it's because I'm 1) a man and 2) human. But it's more than that. It occurs to me that all of the stars of the original series and the prequel series too are 1) men and 2) human. Oh, sure. Princess Leia and Queen Amidala. But they aren't stars as in the protagonists or deuteragonists sense. They're the love interests, which is a different role; swashbuckling action movies with women pretending to be men is off-putting. That said; after I've done all of the stories as a man character, I might be interested in doing it again as a woman character just to do it differently. That's a bit iffy, though, given how much I will have played the game by then.

I also find that the aliens work better as sidekicks and antagonists. Every time I think I'll make a zabrak or chiss or mirialan character, I find that it just doesn't feel right and I end up not doing it after all. Maybe this is related to my embrace of humanocentrism in fantasy; a humanocentric space opera is a little different; it's more about the protagonists, deuteragonists and love interests than it is about the setting overall, but again—it's surprisingly consistent with the Star Wars movies, if you stop to think about it. I think that unless I'm redoing the stories a second time, that they just wouldn't feel right without a protagonist who's a white, human, and young-looking man. That's just the way action stories to Americans need to be to not feel "off." And, admittedly, being a little off sometimes for variety isn't a bad thing. But I don't want to go all the way through the entire story for each class feeling off. 

Then, I also need to figure out which of the characters I actually want to do the expansion scenarios with. There are eight unique stories for each class, and then the expansions are the same (more or less, although with some minor variation between dark and light choices) regardless of which character you play, so there's no reason to play them with each class unless you just can't get enough of repeating them.

If you think about the fact that my bounty hunter playthrough, which is only halfway done, is about the size of the entire first KOTOR game, then this game is thoroughly massive compared to KOTOR. Some people say that the stories aren't as good as the KOTOR story, but most fans suggest that the better stories here are as good, and only the weaker stories are lesser than KOTOR. Granted, after I've finished the bounty hunter and Jedi knight, I doubt I'll go back and do all of the planetary missions with each character and focus more on the class missions instead (which, admittedly, means that they'll level up less fast too, but that's OK; I'm at level 75 which is supposed to be an end-game expansion level, and I got there less than halfway through the bounty hunter storyline. Which, in the original version of the game topped out at level 50 at the end-game of Chapter 3. Trying to figure out "how many KOTORs worth of content are there in this game" is probably a difficult question and pointless anyway, but the answer is clearly "at least a dozen." It's that big, and especially when you get into the Eternal Throne expansion storyline, it's as amazing and galaxy-shattering as the KOTOR stories or the original trilogy movies, if not even moreso in some aspects. Valkorian/Vitiate is as good a villain as Palpatine. In some ways, he actually might even be better.

I feel like it's a little bit of a shame that this is the venue that we have to get this content; I'd almost prefer to have a Clone Wars-like Old Republic show that adapted these storylines into a visual story arc that you watch as an action show. In some ways this is what is offered to us, except that the graphics are hit or miss and the action scenes are interactive in a hot-key combat sense, but not very immersive or exciting, honestly. The real "charm" of Old Republic, if you want to call it that, is the talking heads stuff, quite honestly, which is why I wish that it'd be converted into a new venue, because I really miss the good action scenes; blaster fights, lightsaber fights, chase scenes, starship combat, etc. It's OK in game, but does not compare at all to what the movies offer us, or even the Clone Wars or Mandalorian show. Although I don't trust anyone to do that without messing it up with wokeness and nonsense, of which there's already a bit of it in the game as it is (although the worst of it is ignorable if you just don't pick options that show it.) So what we have is likely the best that we'll get, and as we go through it, we just have to imagine what it could be like if done differently. But look how weak Rebels was compared to the original Clone Wars series, and even then Clone Wars was fitty-fitty, and The Mandalorian was much more average than it should have been. Lucasfilm just doesn't have the chops to make good stuff for the big or small screen either one.

In many ways, this is like watching the prequel trilogy anyway. You can imagine what Lucas was trying to do, and see that grand vision, but what you actually got was a very flawed execution with a lot of misses and challenges that you have to overlook, and the end result is unsatisfying in some ways and disappointing, not only because it just doesn't quite work, but even moreso because you can see how with a little bit different execution, it could have. 

Old Republic

I haven't made a new post (although I have had a number of YouTube videos posted about D&D and other things) but as I'm now back at home again after several weeks on the road, and back to sitting around at home working, but also just mostly being at home, I've engaged in video games again. I've started working on rebuilding my streak for daily challenges on Red Dead Redemption so I can be ready and set for the October outlaw pass that we know is coming in the next few weeks or so. They've also released some great new clothing items, which are fun to wear because they look pretty nice. But the Naturalist role is still very hit or miss. I like the legendary animals, but I've found that the Gus clothing are all kinda samey after a while, and not all that cool to begin with (why can't we have the hood without the coat, already?) and Harriet and literally everything associated with her is absolutely terrible. Granted, I think that her idiot aggressive and bullying SJW approach is supposed to be kind of a joke, but it's not a very funny one, because there's no remedy to it other than to refuse to engage in the role. You can't tie her up and throw her off of a bridge, or feed her to an alligator or bear; you can't catch her tent on fire and watch her burn alive and then piss on her body, which is exactly what I'd want to be able to do.

So, I haven't been doing too much beyond the basics of keeping a streak going and earning cash to buy the cool new clothes, especially the ones that will go away soon. Unfortunately, there are more gold bar gated items than I'd like, but that's always been the case. What I've actually spent a good deal more time on is the Old Republic, though. I've picked up my old bounty hunter game, where I was only about halfway through Balmorra, and I've burned through that planet, Nar Shadaa and Tatooine now, including all of the planetary missions. Rather than run off to Alderaan, I've also spent some time on Ilum, because you could pick up some missions there on the fleet. I'm trying not to get ahead of myself, though, with jumping up to a expansion before I've finished the main story, other than some basic flashpoints and other simple missions that I can do that don't have any bearing on the story.

I've decided to spring for a subscription, obviously, and I've not only nearly finished Chapter 1 (finally) but my character is now level 69; fairly close to the max level. Heck; I've even got it on during work and I do crew crafting skills in the background on one computer while I'm working on the other. Anyway, I don't have too much to say about this other than that I'm doing this, but here's a few observations:

• Combat is kind of tedious and not really all that fun. Just jacking up the hit points of enemies to make them take longer to kill doesn't make it more fun either, although at least some opponents do have some tactical stuff here and there. But mostly it's just key-mashing your way through the combats.
• I wish there was some kind of vehicle chase action scene of some kind. That's a major miss.
• Playing on the Imperial side but not being overly "evil" is probably the best to avoid silliness. I think BioWare took to heart the complaints that they had from the earlier Knights of the Old Republic game about how dark side options were just petty and stupid; sadly, it seems that the light side options are now idiotic hand-wringing rather than actual heroism or goodness.
• No sensible person will ever pick 100% light or dark. My character is about four-fifths light to one fifth dark, and I'm sometimes surprised that being true to your word and not lying is dark side, when you knew going in that that was your mission. For that matter, saving bad guys isn't always a good choice. Ever hear of a thing called justice, BioWare? Of course not. They're SJWs. But most of the missions themselves and their obvious resolution default to favoring the light side, even on the Imperial faction.
• I haven't gotten into the weird higher level pervert romance options yet, but in the age where the Democrats and their surrogates in Hollywood and elsewhere are cratering into scandal after scandal of pedophilia and harrassment, it doesn't come across as a good look. Honestly, it never did, but it seemed like relatively harmess if moronic virtue signaling a few years ago. Now, it comes across as shockingly tone deaf.

Anyway, I'm so far quite enjoying being back in, although I continue to wish that the Old Republic had been converted into some other kind of medium and cleaned up by a writer who isn't pyschologically disfunctional and creepy. That said, even with a lot of virtue-signaling and women acting like men, and strangely diverse human populations, and whatnot, it's still better Star Wars material than almost anything that's come out in the last twenty years, and certainly better than anything Kathleen Kennedy touched.

Friday Art Attack

 It's been a quiet week. It's actually been a busy week, which means that my efforts on my blog, my Youtube channel, and elsewhere have been quiet. So, the last post I made was a slightly delayed Friday Art Attack, but now it's time for another one.

The only thing otherwise that I've done that's on topic, and it's relatively significant, is that I've read the newest Dresden Files book. I actually had stopped paying very close attention because it had been so long, and when I looked; lo and behold! A book had been released just a few weeks ago. Because our public library is in pickup by appointment mode only, stuff isn't getting checked out very often, so it was available. I got it over the weekend and finished it a day or two ago. It's not my favorite book of the series, but it's not my least favorite either. It feels kind of like an entire book of set-up for the next book, which at least is scheduled to come out very shortly; in late September, actually. I've already put that on hold at the library too; the lockdown and mask hysteria crap won't end until November 4th, at least.

Anyway, on to the art!

Knights of the Old Republic characters put in the classic, original Star Wars poster format. Kind of brilliant, actually.

Nagash and his rebirth. I've probably posted some version of this art before, but I still love it.

Nothing super dramatic, but a classic example of what Star Wars looks like in its quieter moments.

Some kind of furry, gigantic viper of some type. Really nice. 

Nightgaunts attacking some of the more esoteric Paizo iconic characters.

Exotic cities at night.

I think this speaks for itself. It's not quite as exotic as the old video game from the 80s called Joust, but it's a similar idea.

Just brilliant.

The largest of the gorgonopsids from the late Permian.

A classic D&D demon. A quasit, if I recall the artwork correctly.

Lovecraft and Innsmouth turned into a pulpy b-movie.

The Jabberwocky vs. some Paizo iconics. Honestly, most of the Paizo iconics are pretty stupid, in my opinion. But then again, Paizo has become a nest of SJW corruption, so that's not shocking.

Another image of the jabberwocky. Which, while classic, isn't really a folkloric animal, which is probably why they tend to become much more dragon-like over time.

The Jaguar King! Nice stuff here!

Space opera ship battle. Nothing special, but still great.

A great image of a jedi.

And one of the cutest of the pterosaurs in a pretty realistic fashion, even if the trees behind him are very stylized.

Friday Art Attack (delayed)

 

Dux bellorum, the title in the earliest texts given to Arthur (not king.) It translates more or less as warlord, although more literally, it's actually Warduke. I'm pretty sure Gary Gygax would have known that, if the name Warduke rings any bells. Although the character he created sounds more like the Horned Helmet character of Frank Frazetta fame. See below...

This is a pretty iconic style image. I don't know why that place looks like Orthanc, but those characters don't look like Aragorn and Gandalf and Merry really, at least not to me.

Goblins from 4e. Nice image, actually.

Some kind of Greek warrior. I dunno. Nice picture, though.

The tyrant lizard king in a quieter, more artistic moment. But still showing off his impressive chompers.

I don't know for sure what's going on here, but this is a cool image. Always remember; in my fantasy, magic certainly exists, but it's ALWAYS unnatural and therefore extremely hostile to human life. Yeah, yeah... that's an elf, it looks like. But still. Elfs, if I have them at all, are also uusally unnatural and extremely hostile to human life.

A couple of landscapes from Dromund Kaas, the capital of the Sith Empire in Old Republic.

Castle Ravenloft! What a great, iconic image. It doesn't hurt that Ravenloft is, of course, copying great iconic imagery from Dracula. One of the strengths of D&D was its ability to incorporate classic elements and turn them out as recognizable pastiche. When it tried to be more original is often where it went wrong.

Very early concept art for the "supercommando". As you can probably tell, it ended up evolving into Boba Fett, but there was a whole concept behind him originally that was different, as was the Clone Wars of which he was supposed to (originally) have been a leftover.

Some more intriguing Star Wars concepts.

A fascinating landscape of a fantasy port city.

Some Assassin's Creed Odyssey art, if you go with the female version of the main character, I believe.

A typical day in the gallery forests of the Morrison Formation, with two Diplodocus emerging from the forest into a ferny meadow.

Nedry from Jurassic Park. The little guy is the Dilophosaurus from the movie. The big one is what an actual Dilophosaurus woulf have looked like.

DEUS VULT!

I'm not quite sure what this desert warrior thing is; maybe a hobgoblin or something, but it's a very cool image.

Luis Royo. I once kicked off an entire campaign based around this image. Turned out great, too.

Some kind of spirit of the wild type thing.

Shipyards in deep space.

A pastiche of the famous Death Dealer character created by Frank Frazetta (I told you to see below.) This does seem to be a more proximate visual inspiration for Warduke, even if the title itself seems to come from Arthur.

Grr... Google!

I've deliberately been using Google Classic Sites because I greatly prefer it to New Google Sites. I do grudgingly admit that New Google Sites is probably better at looking good across multiple platforms, including phones, whereas Classic Sites was optimized for your typical computer monitor or laptop screen. However, it had a lot of customization options in terms of the look and feel of the site that New Sites does not have.

However, I just got an email from Google that if I don't migrate, eventually my sites will disappear. Sure, sure, this wasn't set to happen for over another year, but I figured why wait if I have to do it anyway? I'm only going to get more used to New Google Sites by using it. I'd rather not, but if I'm not going to have a choice anyway, might as well do it sooner rather than later. 

I went ahead and migrated all of my sites, although I admit that some of them may not be relevant, or they may be redundant with each other too, but I'll clear that up later—I can always delete sites I don't need later. This is especially galling because I just set up the Eberron Remixed site a week or two ago, and I'm still fairly heavily involved in editing it. Anyway, I may yet play around with the formating, or more likely I'll just have to forego having any kind of really custom formating anyway. Maybe that's for the best, given that I want it to be cross platform viewable anyway, I guess.

Anyway; I missed the Friday Art Attack last week after trying to get it back up again, so I'll make sure and hit that later today.

Someone else's Eberron Remixed

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eberron/comments/eg1h6r/homebrewed_khorvaire_revised_map/

Pretty interesting. I mean, he didn't remix it in the same sense that I am, and I strongly suspect that he's still using regular 5e D&D rules, but he remixed the geography to turn Scion's Sound into a proper, big, epicontinental sea, not unlike the Baltic, as he keeps saying. This allows him to create different strategic and political challenges as well as have proper naval activity and piracy going on.

Plus, it's a nice map. Some of the other changes, like adding more settlements that he pulled from other official sources, and increasing the populations of many of them so that there's a bit more urban centers than the setting otherwise posits, allows for better intrigue and skulduggery too.

Anyway, pretty nifty.

Eberron Remixed vs Dark•Heritage 2

I've spent a fair bit of time the last few days fleshing out the content of my Eberron Remixed wiki page. Much of that is material that I otherwise might have explored on my blog, and I will likely cross-post a good deal of it later once things slow down just a bit. But one thing that I noticed; while going through the mechanics, I thought of a few minor updates that I will almost certainly get around to adding to my Dark•Heritage 2 document, changing the revision from 2.4.1 to 2.5. The changes aren't huge, but they did kind of beg themselves and when I thought of them, I kind of wish that I had thought of them earlier.

The first one is that I realized that an important element of adventuring had been left off; how to deal with suffocating and drowning! I've added a section for that in the Other Hazards part of adventuring.

I also added a new twist to the spellcasting rules for a natural 1 where there is a risk of a permanent decrease of 1 to your Sanity score when you fail a roll badly. You get another chance to not lose the Sanity; i.e., you have to fail a second check to have your Sanity score permanently reduced, but still—it kinda seemed obvious. 

And I modified the Shadow Sword class, making it pretty much exactly the same as the Jedi class that I had originally based it on; i.e., instead of a sneaky minor ability, I gave it a modest suite of psionic powers heavily influenced by the stuff you see Jedi do in the movies. Viola! Although based on the Jedi, it's kind of a combination of the soulknife and the psion in terms of its role in the game, and the only way to bring psionics in at all.

Anyway, I recommend you again to my Eberron Remixed site if you have any interest in that project, because I'm advancing material faster there than here, although I will eventually get around to crossposting my Remixed discussions here too. I'm not 100% sure which of all of these changes will for sure make it to Dark•Heritage 2.5, but probably all of them except the change to the Shadow Sword. And I'm considering even that.

Funny how activity in one area seems to always cross-polinate in another for me. 

Eberron Remixed has its own page

https://sites.google.com/site/eberronremixed/

So far, I've adapted (and by adapted, I mostly mean "copied and pasted" my Dark•Heritage 2 rules with a very few minor tweaks to be Eberron workable; although fitting the Eberron setting into the rules I already had was one of the key conceits and part of what made it interesting to me. I did, however, add the three signature Eberron races that weren't already in DH, and made a reference to Dragonmarks.

More work will need to be done expanding on my early precis for adaptation to the setting half of the site, but that's still in Coming soon... mode for now. That said, check it out!

Revising Eberron Remixed to be compatible with Dark•Heritage 2

Reading through my older blog posts, I was struck by how cool Eberron was with a few minor tweaks to fix some of the niggling issues that it has. I had toyed with this idea in my EBERRON REMIXED tag a couple of years ago. Then, after adopting m20 to be usable for Eberron, I updated it to Fantasy Hack. I could simply leave it there, of course, as a perfectly usable in that mileu, but I've largely left Fantasy Hack to the side, and prefer Dark•Heritage 2 now, as similar already as they are. What would I have to do to convert EBERRON REMIXED into this system, and what impact would that have on my remixing of the setting?

First, let me revisit some of my guiding principles for the remixing project. I'm actually not cutting and pasting, but rewriting and potentially slightly tweaking them here.

• Eberron's high concept was a swashbuckling game of derring-do in a D&D kind of setting. D&D, at least at the time and in the edition that Eberron was developed, was a highly static game of cautious, grid-based tactical combat, which is completely at odds with Eberron's concept. 4e, as near as I can tell, was even worse in this regard, although I suppose that the combat was at least more over-the-top in some ways. I have no idea if 5e is more in alignment here or not, and I don't really care to find out as I have little interest in learning 5e, but the first point of order remains making sure that your system is in alignment with the concept of Eberron and actually supports that concept. I'm quite happy with DH/m20 in this regard. Although I recognize that other systems could also accomplish this goal fairly well, because I've settled on m20 variants, that's the only system that I'll be discussing with regards to remixing Eberron.
• I've come to appreciate over the years the wisdom of the much more humano-centric assumption that Gary Gygax himself would have had, as well as that of the writers that he was creating a pastiche of, such as Leiber, Howard, and others. Eberron spotlights non-human races significantly, and I've rejiggered the setting to be much more humano-centric in its assumptions, with "demihumans" and monsters appearing much less frequently, although still being available as need requires.
• Anything that reeks of wokeness and social justice dogma is remixed out. Eberron, as published in the 3.5 era, was before wokeness was even a term, but the concepts are still there. In general, this means stop pretending that men and women are interchangeable widgets, and changing the sex of potentially a great many important NPCs. (If they were to even show up in my games, which is probably unlikely anyway.) It also means that the Christan church stand-in, the Church of the Silver Flame needs to have its "oh my gosh, so oppressive!" snide insults completely removed from the setting. For that matter, I also prefer to have actual Christianity be the default religion of most people, rather than a stand-in for Christianity. And as an American, rather than a European, I also prefer to focus more on local pastors and whatnot leading congregations rather than big, centralized organizations vying for power. That was one of the main things that the American colonists wanted to escape from, after all.
• Because Eberron was designed specifically to be a setting where everything from D&D potentially had a place, it lacks coherency sometimes. I'm perfectly OK with pruning esoteric D&Disms out entirely and not replacing them, to be honest with you. My design goals for remixing Eberron don't have to be the same that Baker had when he designed it in the first place. Some judicious and occasionally ruthless editing of concepts that never really fit very well is acceptable, and even desireable.
• Eberron is very big; the remixing project is taking a relatively light touch on the details of the setting, focusing instead on big picture stuff. That said, a "protagonist" area would be essential for actually playing the game; y'know, a place where most of the action actually takes place. Here, I think the single best setting element, Sharn, as a place of fantasy noir type stories, is this place. I also know that yeah, zipping all across the continent and beyond is a feature of the setting, the modules, the novels, and what's expected generally from Eberron, but I tend to think that there are more local opportunities for adventure than most gamers realize, possibly because not enough of them get out and experience what the local adventuring possibilities in real life actually are. Sharn and its surrounding environs are therefore where any more detailed localized remixing would take place, although honestly, I probably won't bother too much with that until I'm actually at a point where I care to play with this.

Now, Fantasy Hack, or at least my EBERRON REMIXED version of it, accomodated almost all of the demihuman racial diversity in Eberron. The first thing that I need to do in adapting Eberron into DH is remapping the races from Eberron into the races that exist in DH. The signature races of Eberron need to be present, of course, otherwise it wouldn't exactly be a very good translation of Eberron, but some of the other D&D races that otherwise aren't selectable in DH can be translated into something else. I know, I know--that will make the setting diverge in a number of ways from the setting as published. In fact, it's probably a beachhead into a more thorough remix of the setting than the Fantasy Hack version was. That's OK. If you want something a bit more closely hewing to Eberron as printed, the Fantasy Hack revisions can be seen with the earlier posts that have this same tag, while those going forward from this one will be more of a departure into a different take on the setting. That's actually what prompted me to do this, though--the concept of a more thorough departure sounded intriguing enough that I wanted to start exploring it piece by piece, step by step and little by little. This actually helps with the second goal of the setting remix guiding principles, actually. Some of the demihuman groups will become human, and my demihumans are actually demihuman rather than "non-human." (Gygax seemed to use the word to refer to races that were more aesthetically pleasing, like elves and halflings, etc. rather than to imply that demihumans were actually part human and part something else, like the prefix actually means semantically. Maybe parahuman was really the word he was looking for.)

The Fantasy Hack races list is as follows; I'll start from there and see where I need to diverge.

• Human: +1 to all skills
• Elf: +2 to MND
• Half-elf: +1 MND, +2 to any skill(s)
• Dwarf: +1 STR, +1 to AC as natural armor
• Halfling: +1 DEX and Stealth affinity
• Gnome: +1 to DEX, +1 to MND
• Goblin: +1 DEX and +1 to Subterfuge
• Orcs (and Half-orcs): +2 to STR
• Hobgoblins: +1 STR, +1 to DEX
• Warforged: +1 to STR, +2 to Acrobatics, no stat increases on leveling, but are immune to mind-influencing magic, and do not need to breathe, eat, drink, etc. 
• Shifters: +3 to STR, -1 to MND, +1 to Survival skill, -1 to Communication skill.
• Changeling: Can change form as a single action, +1 to Subterfuge, +1 to Communication
• Kalashtar: Can spend 1 HP to establish a two-way mindlink with a creature it can see, which enables telepathic communication, +1 to Communication, and +1 to Knowledge

The DH5 list is more modest, but of course, it doesn't technically have the Eberron specific races, which could be added (keep in mind that the Wose race from DH5 is both conceptually and mechanically identical to the shifters. Let me post that, and then I'll post a side by side where I map one list to the other and discuss how to do that.

• Human: +1 to all skills.  
• Skraeling: +1 to DEX and Stealth affinity.  
• Orc: +2 to STR.  
• Goblin: +1 DEX and a +2 to the Subterfuge skill.
• Cursed: Racial affinity for Stealth, +1 to Athletics and +1 to Knowledge. 
• Jann: +1 to any 2 skills, and also have the fire strike ability; they can infuse one attack per day with the power of the ifrit and their weapon will burst into flame doing an additional 2d6 damage for 5 rounds. 
• Kemling: +1 to DEX, a racial affinity for Stealth, and the ability to see in the dark with a biological equivalent to night vision goggles.
• Nephilim: +1 to MND and a +1 to Knowledge and Communication.
• Wose: +3 to STR, -1 to MND, +1 to their Survival Skill, and -1 to their Communication skill.

What does DH5 not have that Eberron does?

• Elf. I know that elfs are very much standard to D&D, but I've deliberately not used them in DH5, figuring that they don't really fit. I actually don't think that elves are important to the setting unless you're specifically using Aerenal in some fashion, but if you are, I actually think the Nephilim can stand in for the elves here. Since there are no elves, there also are no half-elves, where a specific race of humans (without differing stats) can replace them. In fact, in the spirit of making the whole thing more humano-centric, maybe Aerenal should be a primarily human nation, with its own Aereni ethnic group, ruled over by an overcaste of the Nephilim.The dark elves of Xen'drik, on the other hand, were represented by kemlings. I'm not sold on this, necessarily, or even the concept of making Xen'drik an important part of the setting that I'd expect people to go to, and there are other places that I like kemlings. But it's possible for there to be two completely unconnected groups of kemlings, I suppose, so maybe it's best to keep it as it is for now. And the Valenar elves can, of course, just be a small faction of Nephilim that left Aerenal, just as the the setting promises anyway.
• Dwarf. Elves and dwarves are the two races that scream "vanilla fantasy" to me. (Especially with that Tolkien spelling instead of the more standard elfs and dwarfs.) I know that both have their roots in old Germanic if not even Indo-European folklore, but they are not presented in fantasy settings, most of the time, as they are in that kind of folklore. If they were, they probably wouldn't be a playable race anyway. Can you imagine the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, for example, from the Dresden Files trying to be translated into D&D with its members as playable characters? If I'm not going to do elfs, I'm not going to do dwarfs either. That said, I have less resonance with the Mror Holds and the notion of dwarfs as the Swiss bankers of Eberron. If we need Swiss bankers, just make them more like the actual Swiss; an ethnic group of humans from the mountains of the Mror Holds.
• Halfling. In Baker's attempt to get away from the "stereotype" of the hobbit and make halflings cool, even though the concept is fundamentally uncool, he made them dinosaur-riding Plains Indians, if you accept a very strange, and kind of hippy interpretation of Plains Indians. I prefer a much more savage and dangerous type of Plains Indian; y'know, the kind that we actually feared and respected, and I'd already decided that the jann were where I'd use them. 
• Gnome. If the halfling already isn't very cool, then gnomes are the halflings' even less cool, nebbish older brother. A nation of spies and gangsters is a little strange to think of on its own (how exactly does such a nation survive, for one thing? They have to have someone to prey on, and that makes them fundamentally unstable as a nation on their own and a threat and enemy to everyone else.) It's an insufficient twist to make the gnomes salvageable. I actually think that replacing the gnomes of Zilargo (and elsewhere) with the Cursed makes some sense, though. It retains the vibe of normal people don't really trust them, even if they don't necessarily have an in-your-face reason not to, and it also works that they've had to develop means other than overt strength to maintain their positions in some cases. 
• Hobgoblin. Orcs and hobgoblins are already conceptually exactly the same thing. I overlooked that with my earlier attempt to translate Eberron into Fantasy Hack and made a unique hobgoblin stat line, but I'm not willing to do that here. The orcs will replace the hobgoblins in Darguun and other areas where orcs and goblins might have association. The orcs of the Shadow Marches will, on the other hand, not be orcs at all, but rather skraelings, which seems to fit them perfectly. Most other pockets of orcs here and there across Khorvaire will also be replaced by skraelings.
• Warforged, kalashtar and changelings need to be actually brought in, as they are in the Fantasy Hack iteration. Being signature races to the Eberron setting, it just doesn't seem right to not include them. That said, warforged can actually be taken out if desired with surprisingly little problems to the setting itself, other than that you don't have the Lord of Blades as a potential villain, and changelings can just be dopplegangers and monsters rather than playable character types, and their frequency reduced without upsetting much of anything either. And kalashtar can be a human group.
• Shifters and woses are already the same thing. Use whichever name you like. I think I prefer shifter for Eberron and wose for DH5, but whatever.

Besides races, what are a few other changes needed? I never actually adapted any Psionics rules to the EBERRON REMIXED project, although I think I probably referred you to the m20 compilation document and m20 Psionics as a suitable replacement. I actually am less intrigued by this than I was at the time; I think that if psionics needs to be in at all, beyond the kalashtar racial ability, they can simply be Shadow Swords to represent their psionic abilities. The Shadow Sword is kind of the Jedi from STAR WARS REMIXED (later AD ASTRA) but with the force powers removed and the lightsaber replaced with a manifestable psionic blade. If you wanted to go to a form that had more psionic powers again, you could always port the actual Psionic Knight class (i.e. fake Jedi) from AD ASTRA since the Shadow Blade is already quite similar. Replace the ability to cloak yourself in shadow with the ability to use Psionic Powers, as listed here. I'm not sure that I necessarily recommend doing this yet—to be honest with you, I always thougth psionics sat uncomfortably next to magic in D&D. Do one or the other depending on what flavor you prefer for your magic in your fantasy setting, but having them both as alternates to each other was always weird. But that said, I think I'd at least allow this if someone really wanted to play a psionic character, pending further review of the concept, where I might decide that it doesn't really fit after all in the future.

For that matter, my magic system is more Lovecraftian rather than Vancian. Doesn't that potentially impact one of the major setting assumptions of Eberron, i.e., very common low level magic applied to objects to make them mimic some aspects of what is done with technology in the real world? Well... yes and no. Yes in the sense that if you really stopped and thought about the implications of such a change, it would make sense that it undercuts that element of the setting. Then again, it would hardly be the first or even the most egregious element of a setting that doesn't make sense if you really think through the implications of including it. And since the PCs aren't meant to be street light makers, or even lightning rail makers, it's kind of a moot point; at no point am I interested in exploring how these things were developed or how they're manufactured and maintained, so there's no point in really trying to worry about it or explain it. I mean, do you know how light bulbs are manufactured and how electricity gets to them? You can probably say something about noble gases and the filament and hydroelectric power and power lines, but the answer is, no, you probably don't, unless you work for a power company directly involved in making sure that it happens. Does that impact your ability to accept the real world because you don't know how that works? Well, it shouldn't with your fantasy world either.

Besides, although I didn't convert them per se, because utilizing d20 elements in m20 is usually a pretty straightforward task, the Dragonmarked feats still exist after all and I've always said as much. One can simply assume that the Houses maintain and create these items, as the setting mostly says that they do, and if the feats themselves don't cover it, you can assume that there are other, higher-level House secret feats that the artificers have that you as a player character don't.

Other than that, for now, I think that my previous conversion of Eberron to Fantasy Hack doesn't need to be supplemented by anything right away beyond what I've detailed here to be further converted into Dark•Heritage. But don't forget, if you were to try and use this, to go ahead and implement all of those changes too. Maybe I'll even create a small little classic Google Site to house this put together in a better format; i.e., not just a handful of rambly blog posts that occasionally over-write each other.