New project after a long absence.

Hey folks.  Sorry again about the long absence, and I regret my only excuse is that Xenoblade Chronicles is just so good!  I need to be careful before buying another open world…

First up is a status report.  I got through the first chapter of Victorian Evil before lack of interest and talk in my gaming group of moving to Eberron got the better of me.  That project is on hold, and I am not greatly impressed with my work ethic, working offline every other day to perfect it.  While I expect to return to Victorian Evil again, I need to recommit to this blog first and foremost.

I was much better impressed with my work ethic back in the long, long ago, when I was blogging every day, even if only just a little bit.  That’s going to be my new commitment.

Finally, on to subject.  While I expect to try to chip in a few blogs here and there to other game worlds, I just can’t let Xenoblade go just yet.  Finding Victorian Evil to have been such a great concept, and my problem solving a great way to spin out blog material, I’m going to try the same thing again, this time within the universe of Xenoblade Chronicles.  To be clear, I derive no profit from this work, and if you paid any money for what I am posting on this blog for free, you were ripped off.  This is purely a fan made gaming exercise.

Now to whet your appetite, just in case Xenoblade hasn’t gotten on your radar (as my own group obsesses much more for Sony rpgs anyway):

I always start with a description of the world, of the two titans the Bionis and the Mechonis.  Even thinking on it now, the striking scene from the Distant Fingertip on the Fallen Arm, the erie lights beaming out of Valak Mountain by night fall, or the iconic rainbow swamp gases billowing softly about Satorl Marsh, geography and place are huge in my mind.  Xenoblade isn’t set in just any old place, or even a world very much like ours; it is alien and beautiful, and stretches the creative imagination, not to any limit, but beyond where any normal person would put a limit.

I’m just now thinking that this may not be the best way to introduce this world.  People tend to see setting as just something that’s there, background with no real meaning.  I have a four year Honours in Classical History; I know better.  But what’s a better way to sell an unconvinced group on a game world?  Character options?  Every world has that, and some in spades!  Perhaps with a challenge?  Defy fate, or live forever as food for the Mechon!  That could impel Reyn and Shulk to heroics, but most gamers will only play a game as long as they believe victory is possible. The world itself is massive, and there is so much else to explore, but it’s far from endless. What else sets this world apart, or makes it special?  

Together into this questions is the question of when, in its long history, the adventure takes place.  I could write an adventure for copycat heroes who want to mirror the main quest of Xenoblade Chronicles, an age that I will call the Fall (because the Bionis and Mechonic both end up fallen in that age).  Or I could stage in the long ages before, for example in the Age of Binding when Zansa has just been bound.

There are many loose ends in the narrative that adventurers could fill.  For example, Zansa attacks Meyneth and the two gods are wounded; Zansa is then bound by the High Entia, one of his enforcer races.  But it is a pretty prominent plot point that the High Entia have all been turned into Telethia and sent out to attack Meyneth’s Machina.  The Machina Capital would be overrun in the present by Telethia.  How do they bind Zansa?  Easy, for they had an extremely high level cleric or Ether Wizard who had learned to master his transformation.  This is just one of the little gaps that Monolithsoft left in the narrative, and these gaps are not impossible to fill.  They just need creative use of adventuring class characters to make them happen. 

This setting is deep and immensely complex, with loose ends such as the Age of Giants, the Rise of the Homs and Mechon, the origins of the Nopon, and an infinite number of treasures, divine and otherwise, building out the world.  For my next post, I think it prudent to cover the building block of all life and everything in the universe, ether, in depth, but in time this setting could be as rich as any other.