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Comments
What the fuck is our faction about? Seriously. I mean, let's look at the others.
- Evil. This is pretty self-explanatory and Sartan's history and activities are a huge part of the history of Achaea, and this is a solid thematic niche to fill.
- Light. This is also a fairly self-explantory and solid niche to fill. Crusades, Whitecloaks, etc.
- Nature. This is another easy one. The general "expansion of civilization encroaches on Nature" is a strong theme.
- Chaos. This is probably the hardest one to justify, but I think this latest event has done a decent showing of how chaos and general nihilism can be a rock solid factional belief, and it's certainly a thematic one.
I've only played this game a few months and then really only in Hashan, and I could come up with reasons and arguments to justify all four of those factions as as a distinct faction in and of themselves, and I could do that if they had no faction classes whatsoever.I honestly can't do that for Hashan. I can get the gist of the other factions just from HELP ELEUSIS, but I've been a Hashan citizen for RL months now and I couldn't tell you what Hashan's factional identity is.
If you want to be a 'real' faction, that's where you start. Complain about not having a factional class after you have a distinct factional identity to base it off of.
If anything, the powers used were faction-limited to the Tsol'teth, until Parni released their secrets to the world at large.
The event and help files has spelled this all out fairly comprehensively.
- With sharp, crackling tones, Kyrra tells you, "The ladies must love you immensely."
- (Eleusian Ranger Techs): Savira says, "Most of the hard stuff seem to have this built in code like: If adventurer_hitting_me = "Sarathai" then send("terminate and selfdestruct")."
- Makarios says, "Serve well and perish."
- Xaden says, "Xaden confirmed scrub 2017."
I too was excited when I heard a new class was coming out, and I was not holding my breath that it was a Hashani class, however when I saw that a class was released WITH a skillset called "Shadowmancy" and it indeed was -not- made into Hashan's class, then yes that feels like an insult.
This isnt about "having power to make people mad" as Caelan stated with the general toxicity of his words in this thread. This was clearly about identity for the last warring faction and as feeling as if it was just stolen from. I loved a new class coming out, I and others were shocked to discover it had Shadow-based magic and was not aligned to Hashan, and then to discover later it will never be getting one.
Once again I will like to point out that those that are fighting strongest and insulting the idea of a faction class for Hashan, are those that have not devoted or even been citizens to the Org itself, and are in fact part of Orgs that already have strong identity focuses. It is no secret that faction-based classes create strong identity anchors for that Org. No, this is not about control, this is about identity & roleplay, and the lack thereof by not having it governed by Hashan and Twilight.
Anyway it had been made clear the class will not be factionalized, even with its shadow attributes, nor will Hashan be getting any factional classes. Frankly it does feel very insulting but nothing we can really do about it.
Reason why serpents went to hashan in the first place.
- With sharp, crackling tones, Kyrra tells you, "The ladies must love you immensely."
- (Eleusian Ranger Techs): Savira says, "Most of the hard stuff seem to have this built in code like: If adventurer_hitting_me = "Sarathai" then send("terminate and selfdestruct")."
- Makarios says, "Serve well and perish."
- Xaden says, "Xaden confirmed scrub 2017."
got gud
Yes, Hashan has very strong links to Darkness (the religion), since there's the obelisk and the other monuments to Twilight, but this isn't Twilight's class, so Hashan really has no foot on which to claim it, I don't think.
Not trying to troll or anything! But given that Hashan had zero to do with the development of the class, and neither did Twilight, what's the link, apart from trying to trademark shadows (which is super shady reasoning, at best)?
ETA: The factional classes are all extensions of the Divinities that rule them and Their realms, and given that no Divinity had a hand in the Depthswalker class, I don't see how you could rationally argue it's meant to be one.
When I first saw that Gattan'bahar was able to manipulate a shadow into killing its owner, I assumed this was in relation to the historically known Tsol'teth power of control. I had simply assumed that the Tsol'teth power was even greater than simple mind control, but that they could even force the shadow of another.
It is no secret the Tsol'teth have a large branch of magic. In lore we saw they could do things from opening a screen to see Nicolas and his armies, to manipulating DNA to create new life, to even summoning Pazuzu at one point (which shows some connection to demonic magic). I didnt think it too far fetched they had some shadow manipulation.
I can say without a doubt that I was shocked when the skill associated with their class was Shadowmancy and was based on not only manipulating shadows, but also conjuring and spreading it as well.
Point is, Hashan can do the same. I agree that Depthswalker fits Hashan's theme to a T, but you don't have to wield a banhammer to make a class "yours". If enough of Hashan wants to, you can write/roleplay volumes about incorporating the class into your society. Start naming things after Tsol'teth. Use its powers in city rituals. Borrow lingo from it in everyday expression. This is all 100% possible and within your reach, it just takes a little more effort than being handed the means to strip skills from players you don't like by the Admin. (Which, you know, is a pretty bad mechanic anyway. It's why Guilds went away, after all.)
It was as if the darkwalkers got some kind of sick joy out of dicking me around. Finally I managed to sit one down and get some real answers about what the heck was going on here. That's when I learned, that their "darkness" wasn't about lack of light, at all - It's about deception and obfuscation.
Something tells me that you know that, though.
But it is a fun new toy with cool flavour. I mean, who wouldn't want to keep it all to themselves? Generous, fun-loving people who want others to have a good time as well, that's who. All that's happening by continuing to whine that you should be able to take this away from people when it is only associated by name and clearly not by meaning, is you're putting a huge sign around your neck that says, "i'm a greedy douche."
I'm all for fighting for what you believe in but you just want to hurt people. If you spent the same amount of effort you have bitching on the forum, starting up a clan in Hashan and helping depthswalkers with understanding their class and generally being cool about it, you could have become the spoken center of all things dpw.
edit: Aerek expanded on this very point beautifully while I was punching up my post.
On-topic: thank you, achaea, for giving me a scythe. I waited my entire life for this moment.
Currently available: Abs, Cnote, Keepalive, Lootpet, Mapmod
My one lament is that the entire Hashan forum brigade could not or would not put it into terms like that. Embrace what he's talking about because it makes you a credible threat and gives you a motivation. Purge the world? Reclaim the world? Enslave the world? Destroy the world? Those all pale in comparison to remake the world so that none of your enemies exist and there's nothing that could threaten you. Seriously. You're the only side who would get to have something to rule and have no possible threat to your existence. Slaves could rebel, someone could rediscover Necromancy or Occultism, two guys could start paving roads again because stepping on thorns hurts, you can't lord over the fact that you blew up the world because there's nothing left, but rewriting the universe is the ultimate "No, we win" button.
Make that more visible. Don't make people wait to learn about it because people are going to start looking for something more exciting. Your first experience in Mhaldor is getting branded and told that you need to claw your way out of the ranks, Ashtan sends you onto the Chaos Plane by yourself, and Hashan says "Go look at the Sunderlands. Pretty cool, right? Stick your hand in that crack. Isn't that neat? Watch out for the spectres!"
Hashan needs to actually do work to defend its claim to shadows, whether that's internally by whipping up some awesome RP about it or externally by brutally hunting down and killing everyone dumb enough to ASK CERTIMENE BECOME DEPTHSWALKER. The fact that it took this long in the thread to get someone who wasn't even from Hashan to explain things is a problem in making a compelling case on Hashan's end, not the administration's.
Hashan might WANT to think it has that theme but it doesn't actually have it.
You guys are honestly selling yourselves short by saying you can't. You can make it so that every DW basically -wants- to go there for the awesome rp, and then while they are there just introduce them to the wider concepts of Darkness and such
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
1. The disconnect here is not understanding what sort of control the Gods have over the Tsol'teth's skills and how the hierarchy of power stands. If we accept that a God is the final authority on Their realm, but the Tsol'teth - as @Makarios has said - 'don't draw any of their powers from a god's realm, they'd never use something tied (probably even tangentially) to one of the divine' then does this mean that Tsol'teth are God-level powerful, to be able to create their own magic that does not answer to any of the existing Achaean Divine?
Or, does this mean that Twilight's moniker as 'God of Shadows' is not literal, meaning that He champions subterfuge and other 'shady' professions but does not have complete control over the realm? Or a third possibility, that Twilight normally would control shadows but the Tsol'teth are so powerful (perhaps Aldar level) that they have discovered things even He hesitates to disturb? I feel as though many questions would be solved if an active Twilight would awake and help the population understand where He stands on this, but of course that's not an option now bar a Celani taking over.
2. For the second part: Based on the storyline, knowledge about the skills was intentionally released to all by Parni because he felt that Achaeans would need it to fight the Tsol'teth threat, so it suggests that the skills are both extremely ancient and more powerful than anything Achaeans have access to right now. He didn't grant them exclusively to Hashan, nor did Hashan earn any right to being the champion and wield control over the class and skills because they had such low visibility during the events leading up to its release. However, no one had any idea that it would be a shadow-wielding class, so arguably this is not Hashan's fault.
However, it isn't too late for Hashan. With the class still in its infancy, you can do exactly what @Hellen and others did with Alchemists; make yourselves a bastion for Depthswalkers. Promote your ideology and find thematic links to tie it in with the class. Get some of your good fighters and scholars to take up the class, pull it apart and establish yourself as a centre of learning for newbie Depthswalkers. There is a reason Hashan, for a time, was being looked to as Alchemist central - because people put in the effort to make it so. Now you must do so again, if it is what you want. The admin have said that you won't have a hardcoded factional class, and while that might be 'unfair', that doesn't mean you can't make yourself the preferred home for it by yourself.
3. Someone has already expressed this earlier in the thread, but the most important thing for Hashan now is not a new class, it is a core identity. You have said that you are embracing the 'Court of Shadows' title. Does that mean that Hashan is also embracing Darkness as its core ideology? I'm sure there has already been progress towards one end or the other, but if you really want to be a factional city, that means the citizenry of the city believes, supports, and actively works towards achieving the goals of your Divine Patron; in this case, Lord Twilight.
I don't know what the Great Work is, but historically Darkness has always meant being deceptive, influential, puppet master-type roleplay - taking all sides and no sides if it achieves your own ends. Darkness may rank low in terms of world threats now but that wasn't always true - for a while, everyone feared and hated the Order of Darkness because of how wide their reach was. You never knew - even the order members didn't know - who a Darkwalker was, which made them a huge threat to all. I, personally, think that a mercenary black market city with its own motives would be super cool to play in. What if you could come to Hashan to find any information or gossip you needed? Or hire any mercenaries to do the dirty jobs no one else will touch? It's such a grey area - some people will consider it a huge threat, some people will be dismissive, some people might seek to influence Hashan to its own ends. And played smart, that could be extremely fun. But is that what Hashan wants to get behind, or am I totally off base on this? You must decide.
I say all this from an outsider's perspective, so take it with a grain of salt. But tl;dr: even if the class isn't hardcoded as belonging to you, own it anyway. Make Hashan the destination of choice for young Depthswalkers. Give the other cities a reason to ban it. Get the Darkwalkers to push the connection with the class and how Shadowweaving makes them stronger. Use it in your rituals. I don't know. Be creative. Nothing is impossible in roleplay.
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I hope that the next city that raids Hashan helpfully points out that they too are maintaining their identity by razing the Eventide Alehouse.
Alternatively, as people have stated and you have continually failed to do, you could take all the effort you're putting into this inferiority complex and make Hashan a place where Depthswalkers want to go.
[spoiler]The forums can be unnecessarily dramatic at times, and it's unfortunate that some people just like being spiteful and bitter for no reason, which of course just engenders more useless vitriol. However, looking beyond the theatrics, it seems as though some Hashani expected to be handed a factional class just because Hashan is the only 'faction' without one, and the new class particularly stings because it matches the flavour of a lot of things that you would want in a Hashani factional class, yet has explicitly been said it isn't one and Hashan will probably never get one. I can understand the disappointment. Frankly speaking, in some respects, Hashan is just unlucky that way the same reason some people were unlucky to not be able to make it for the final Bal'met closing event, thereby missing out on an honours line.
However it is important to remember also that up until relatively recently, Hashan was by no means a faction. It was, to put it straightforwardly, perhaps simply a 'darker' version of Cyrene. It was best known for its infighting, its constant borderline OOCness on all levels, and perhaps at best some Serpentlord thieves and Merchant shops. I mean no disrespect to past Hashani politicians when I say this, but on a world level Hashan has done very little to establish itself as any kind of player to stand toe-to-toe with Targossas, Mhaldor, Eleusis and the rest.
That may not be its own fault. Mhaldor and Shallam - now Targossas - were always intended to be factional players and conflict-generators, and that has been the case from the very beginning, so there was never any doubt. Eleusis draws some parallels in that even though Eleusis has existed for a long time, it has also only become a world power recently through a combination of players who have pushed to make it a threat and some admin help with reinforcing its identity as the champions of nature. It wasn't so long ago it was known as basically a green Cyrene.
Hashan, for as long as I have played, has never had that concrete identity to rally around. Again, take this with a grain of salt as I have never been Hashani, but from what I can see it has struggled internally and externally to settle on a direction or a proper ideology for many years. It is commendable that the current leadership is trying to turn things around, but you have a lot of catching up to do to earn the right to be called a 'faction'. What do you represent? What is your goal as a city? Why should others see you as a threat? It will take a lot of work to be able to formulate answers to these questions that the whole city will support, especially as you don't have an easy stereotype to point to as a reference. Yes, it won't be easy work, but if you are serious about this then you already knew that.
Having said all that, it shouldn't matter that you will have to put in work, because that is the only way that your fledgling faction will gain any respect - perhaps even more so for creating it yourself and not depending on tropes or hardcoded admin privileges. And if you can establish that you are serious about the roleplay you are trying to push, the admin may even give you a hand - because you have earned the right to be recognised and rewarded. The only way to shut the naysayers up is just like any other business: produce results. Until then, Hashan doesn't 'deserve' anything because it hasn't shown that it does. All the signs point to great beginnings, but you have to sustain the momentum to get any credibility. Only then can you turn your focus to trying to be the go-to place for any class, never mind getting a whole factional class to yourself.[/spoiler]
I know from experience how hard this is and I fully support people who are trying, whatever it is that they may be doing or however small the capacity, to unify Hashan and give it purpose. Many people have said for years that Hashan could be one of the most interesting cities in Achaea, if all its shades of grey were given a purpose. Don't let the negativity being shown here get you down. See it as the opportunity Achaea has always promised: to make a lasting difference.
Stories by Jurixe and Stories by Jurixe 2
Interested in joining a Discord about Achaean RP? Want to comment on RP topics or have RP questions? Check the Achaean RP Resource out here: https://discord.gg/Vbb9Zfs
Yes the idea is to try and incorporate it into the city's culture. It really will play a big part in enriching the 'Court of Shadows' culture.
The way some of us see it is that these are Tsol'teth arts that are generally alien to, and likely beyond, us and now that they have been introduced to the 'upper world' society, it would need to be anchored to the realm that is closest associated with it: Hashan and the Court.
Abilities would be addressed as a form of building a deeper bond to Twilight and the strength in his element (or something of this such). The Research attribute of Terminus will fit well into Hashan's drive for knowledge and power. It should be rather interesting.
The whole thing about how wide the reach of the Twilighters and how you never knew who they were is sort of defeated by "oh, it's everybody in Hashan." Similarly, when your city theme is "backstabbery and subterfuge" it's a lot harder to actually do some effective backstabbery and subterfuge. That kind of thing works a lot better when you have something like the old Triumvirate of the Night and a city that's sort of causeless and you have to wonder what their game is, because you never know who among them is a Darkwalker. It works less well when you know that's their thing.
It's also a small scale thing. It worked for the Darkwalkers because they were a small elite group and they were dedicated. It doesn't scale out very well. Somebody will let the plan slip if you tell too many people about it, so it tends to be exclusive instead of inclusive.
My point being, like many others, having a factional class isn't going to provide you with an identity, you as a player base have to do that for yourselves.