Shepherds of Haven (WIP) (DEMO UPDATE: 3 Aug 2021)

Technically, this is a discussion forum, not a chat. It’s kind of hard strolling thought multiple post by the same person while reading a forum thread. Also, posting one after another by a single person might trigger the forum’s anti-spam mechanics which would close this thread.

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Yes @DudeInArmour,

Not multi-posting keeps the thread clean and is pretty much forum etiquette–we all learn to do it around here! And keeping threads confined to their main topics instead of derailing is also important, too. :slight_smile: There is also an off-topic category for whenever you want to start new posts about something, but those are closely watched to avoid unnecessary clutter, too!

To quote someone for context, just highlight what you want to quote and a little grey button with the word “Quote” will pop up!

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Technically, chatting is discussing live. But I understand. Perhaps not fully tho, but I will post less(?). It’s worth mentioning that that this thread is already HUGE.

You could remedy that by replying to people in one post if no one else have posted after you or quoting them. There is no need to post separately since that above function is available in this forum.

Anyway, we are clearly going off topic. @rinari I apologize for the off topic post. =)

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So you are saying that I should do this : [quote=“rinari, post:2244, topic:34470”]
To quote someone for context, just highlight what you want to quote and a little grey button with the word “Quote” will pop up!
[/quote]

To quote and @rinari to mention someone so that I can have a clean post? @ParrotWatcher you owe me some explanations mister.
I believe I’m getting the hang of it. Thank you for your patience
The quote function is slightly underwhelming

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I think your beginning [quote=] has to start on a new line on its own for it to work!

So it should look like

[quote=“DudeinArmor, post:2247, topic:34470”]

instead of being on the same line as your other text, if that makes sense. :slight_smile:

It’s very helpful when replying to a long post or to multiple people to provide context and avoid confusion!

Of course, we were all new here at one point. :slight_smile: I would also suggest reading the community rules, since I saw that you posted on a “dead thread” earlier! This isn’t stated specifically in that FAQ but I believe threads are considered “dead” after three weeks of no one posting on it! There’s also this thread by one of CoG’s founders and the admin here explaining things to newcomers!

No problem at all, no need to apologize! :slight_smile: At the rate we’re going I feel like we’re going to hit 10k before the game even resumes again LOL.

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The MC is the lovechild of Robin

Morgan is the mc confirmed.

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I am suddenly deeply depressed my MC doesn’t have pointy ears.

I would have loved for them to have been a Half-Elf.

:sob:

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Sorry, I would have too! For the purposes of the story the MC can’t have several different possible biological parents. In the original novel series, the main protagonist obviously was a fixed character with a fixed background. :slight_smile:

On a different note, I’ve gotten lots of questions here and on Tumblr about how the book is doing and when ShoH is going to start back up again! After much fumbling with HTML I’ve figured out how to put a progress bar on the Tumblr sidebar (pretty sure you can only see it on desktop). Now you can track how I’m doing in real time, lol. It has been slow going with the edits and rewrites so far, but hey, 5%! Only twenty more times and I’ll be done! :slight_smile:

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@rinari

Summary

So I’ve noticed that the amount of gold we get after finishing a job is randomized. The first time I picked the bodyguard job, I only got 10 gold. The second time I did it, I got 30. 30 gold compared to only 10 is a big addition to the gold I already have when buying a weapon and armor. If I initially have 100 gold +30 then I buy a weapon(50) + bracers(30), I would still have 50 gold to spare, which is preferable to 30 if I only had 110. god am i a greedy bitch

So what if instead of randomizing the amount, make it fixed and then make the jobs vary in how much time it takes to finish it. So the more time consuming the job is, the more money you get paid. But that would also mean less time for other activities.

Of course, this is just a suggestion and feel free to ignore this!

Edit: I just discovered that we can get discounts from Chandry. More gold for me to spare!

On another note, if it’s not too much to ask, can we have an option to politely decline Chandry when he asks us if we would like to purchase a tweet? Like maybe saying “No, thanks” or just a simple shake of the head.


When did the MC start learning magic? Is it before their Flower/Wreath Day or after?

Also, would it be difficult to romance certain ROs if I play an MC who has a Norm heritage but is skeptical?

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Say what? You are trying to tell me that the whole forum saw that? Or what sort of witchcraft do you use? Also perhaps the biggest mistery is : will you sent people to Mars before Elon Musk?(on your website you are described as a researcher in science fiction, those people build rockets right?)
Edit : Is the Ket culture inspired by Eastern culture(because it seems more organized than the other cultures, parallel which we can use to compare Chinese, Japanese cultures vs European cultures; also the Ket’s word is unbreakable seems centered around honor and whatnot, looking a bit like Bushido…Blade won’t kill himself right? Pls he won’t)

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Thanks for the suggestion! At the moment I’m adverse to making anything take up more time than 1 slot, because I feel like the risks–not having enough time to do what you want–are more permanent and negative than not making as much gold as you would like! (Some gold is still better than no gold, but losing time in the day is always negative, in my mind.) So the risk would probably deter people from doing a side job more than anything!

And yes, not only can Chandry give you discounts, but you can receive bonuses and rewards for actions taken throughout the game. :slight_smile:

Hmm, this one’s interesting! I can always throw it in there, but Chandry will react negatively to even a polite rejection, lol! Saying “I’m not a bird” is the true neutral option with him!

After! They didn’t know any magic at all when the Revenant attacked, which is why they were so hesitant to use it when Zori was telling them to.

It depends on what you mean by skeptical! :slight_smile: Norm characters like Shery, Trouble, Chase, and Lavinet may have a hard time if your character is anti-Norm, Chase and Lavinet in particular!

Whenever you post on a thread, it gets moved to the top, where everyone can see! :laughing:

No, haha! We did work with some people regarding the Mars One project, but it became pretty clear early on that it was pretty much just science fiction and not a feasible, real-life concept. (TLDR: a company sends the first four people to Mars by 2024 and pays for everything by live-streaming their efforts on Mars as a reality show/documentary. But because there’s no way to get back from Mars, it’s literally a one-way trip, so 1) the people would die there, and 2) there was no real feasible concept about how to replenish their food for the rest of their lives/supply the building materials needed to create living structures.)

We also worked with some engineers who were using 3D printers to fabricate lunar structures and an author who was pioneering the idea to build towers taller than Everest! On my end, though, I was literally only researching science fiction. I worked for Project Hieroglyph, which aims to 1) combat the trend of dystopian science fiction (which frequently depicts an apocalyptic world or just a very shitty future, which has all sorts of cultural effects) with science fiction that proposes ideas that can improve our future, and 2) bridge the gap between writers and engineers/scientists so that they can collaborate on giving ideas a shape in reality.

Ket culture is somewhat inspired by feudal samurai culture, but it’s also just as inspired by ancient Greek kleos (or honor-based) warrior culture, with a smidgen of Anglo-Saxon thrown in. Ritual suicide is not a thing in Ket culture, but dying honorably in combat is. :slight_smile:

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… Say no more. I know what my character will be, I just haven’t decided until now.

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There is an interesting fact in your book : all the diminished except elves have direct combat advantages(ket have arma, mages have magic and hunters go berzerk when they see demons) while elves and norms have long-term advantages(elves live a lot so they can perfect themselves and norms have ingenuity/their technology evolves with each generation); also you described the elves as the first beings, beings that walked into both worlds. Do elves have a secret power? A direct one, like the ket or mages(because them, unlike the hunters can use their powers freely)

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Elves in this world are a little bit of a combination of Ket and Mages, with long lifespans thrown in. They have some innate magical abilities, referred to as “small magicks,” which enable them to communicate with animals, possess the gift of tongues, ward their territories, and hide themselves from view from outsiders. (They’re more like charms or talents than real magic, and the small magicks like the wards can fail.) Elves will never be as strong as Mages in the magic category–but they have more of an affinity for it than, say, Norms. Likewise, they are more physically-adept than the average Norm, possessing greater strength, speed, agility, grace, and heightened senses, which sort of comes from the Ket side of things–but they will also never be as physically-strong as a Ket with arma.

Hope that makes sense! Basically the Elves have a little bit of everything, plus long lives! The one thing they sorely lack is the adaptability for change that the Norms have!

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When you put it like this, elves look like major badasses(I’m sure it has nothing to do with your profile picture :slight_smile: ).
I’m not exactly sure I follow the “adaptability for change” thing. You mean they don’t change their traditions, their clothes or you mean they generally stay the same in terms of personality and beliefs(hmm so you say they are conservative -just like old people- well it kinda makes sense…after all, they are old people, judging by the standards of everyone else)

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Both! They are very conservative and very resistant to change, partially because time moves so differently for them. If you think new iPhone models come out too quickly for you to keep up, or there are new words of the year that become incomprehensible to you as you get older (‘yeet’ and ‘bae’ are on the way out, ‘bde’ is already somewhat outdated, ‘mood’ is still in?), Elves are like that, but with everything. It’s like “hey there’s this new thing called trains that just got invented ten years ago!” (which to an Elf is like… last year); and they’ll be like “horses have worked just fine for the last 4000 years for me, thank you, I don’t need to change my whole routine for some gimmick that will go out of fashion in like three months

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So you say trains we’re invented?
Also disclaimer : in the end, it’s your book and you decide how advanced the technology is(you could have robots made of sticks,leaves and stones) but please hear me out.
You said that the norms still use flintlock weaponry, and that technologically they are inbetween 1500-1800 and that revolvers are out, but they are new and therefore not common.
However, from what I gathered, the norms are actually closer to 1900(1890) to be more precise.
In the book you mentioned rubber bullets(flintlock can’t use bullets because the bullets have the powder incorporated in the projectile, so to speak; also flintlock are somewhat recognized for being shitty, having no accuracy whatsoever, not to mention the fire rate so I personally doubt flintlocks drove away the diminished), rubber bullets being invented about 70 years later that the modern bullet(the one with the powder incapsulated, it was invented around 1820) so we have rubber bullets around 1890(when rubber became popular) the revolvers appeared around 1850 and it’s worth mentioning that during the WWI the infantry used machine guns(so maybe we get a machine gun prototype, not revolvers).
It’s your choice on what to do next. I just wanted to point out this thing(I compared it to human advancement). Also I would like to suggest an idea : maybe we won’t get machine guns and maybe revolvers will still be a rarity, but please at least make the flintlock obsolete and give us rifles(rifles shoot accurately and are reloaded faster, being an actual match for magical races, unlike the flintlock, which is a joke).The main difference between flintlock and rifles is that rifles use modern bullets(and the barrel of the rifle has cylindrical ridges inside it so that it inputs a spinning motion to the bullet, while the flintlock’s main disadvantage was that the owder was separated from the bullet, which caused the lead projectile to hit and bounce off the walls of the barrel, making the shots imprevisible -to an extend- , also making flintlock a hassle to reload) I used wikipedia (along with Civ VI entries -yes I read them all; I got that bored a week ago)
I feel silly for pointing this out(since it’s a fantasy game) but between bottling things up and subsequently losing sleep and expressing my opinion in what I hope is a constructive manner, I chose the obvious.

Ooh didn’t know that! That’s actually even better!

I was just asking because my MC is a bit of a snob :sweat_smile:
But please don’t feel pressured to do it if you don’t want to! I’ll just go with the “I’m not a bird” :grinning:

chandry she’s being polite, why u still like dat

Sorry! I meant an MC who is skeptical about the One-God and the old gods.

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Yes, even in the prologue you get extra gold if you save Prihine! :grinning:

Respectfully, the Norms aren’t really close to any time period of ours, because it’s not our world. :slight_smile: I use time periods as comparison to help readers, but like I said earlier, it’s really a pick-and-choose mixed bag of some real-world parallels, with way more fantasy and steampunk elements. Because the world of Blest has such a wildly divergent history and evolution from our own, I don’t think that worrying about specifics or real-world comparison is too important. :slightly_smiling_face: This is all just my opinion, of course; I respect yours and the research you put into this!

But imo, talking about what flintlocks can or can’t do or using so many real-world parallels to guide the story is a moot point. This

is cool, but it’s ultimately irrelevant to the history and timeline of Blest. They have/had very different resources available to them than we do here, and very different cultural and political forces driving their development. If we go down the rabbit hole of “in 1890 we had X,” there’s no reason to also not point out that we also had electricity, telegraphs, submarines, and batteries. You know? :slight_smile:

Probably more importantly, too, is the fact that guns in Blest don’t work like our guns: I say similar to flintlocks, or that I imagine then as more like “19-century revolvers and pistols with magical/steampunky elements.” But the actual mechanical processes are by no means identical to our own, so again, worrying about how rubber bullets work with our guns or when they were developed in our world isn’t too necessary. I appreciate all of your efforts and thoughts, but I’d personally like to focus on nailing down the story of the game and the characters populating the world than worrying about how the technological integrity seems to hold up when compared to our own!

No need to feel silly, I do really appreciate the constructive discussion! :grinning: I hope I made my points clearly, too!

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