Gin, Quick and the band of crazy in between (Q&A)
Jan 9, 2015 10:38:03 GMT -5
jkarr and dcdc like this
Post by ghost on Jan 9, 2015 10:38:03 GMT -5
I will write now about us in total, how we were organized, routine activities and the like, including assassination of CAM and Shiran. This will also conclude my posts of those times. Of course, if you have any questions, I may answer them as well.
4) The gang of crazy and how it came to be:
I will start with the conjecture of the time back then in 2006-2008 era. Magick and all things supernatural were already very common among the playerbase. I could say half the playerbase, if not more downright had something supernatural either in skill list or in their inventory. There were lots of arguments about toning it down, but Staff as well as a lot of players back then, liked it when it was magick heavy. No matter how much of an argument you put about it, people would still defend that the amount of magick in the game was "just right". And every argument on the subject eventually end up with "Be the change you want in the game". The amount of crazy particularly spiked up after the announcement of "End of the World" and staff simply let go of the brakes on the amount of crazy. I shit you not, at some point in the game there were 10 mindbenders that -I- personally knew. This was the time that if you showed any fear RP around mages, people would think you are acting weird. If you were told to work with a mage, let's say a militia PC is ordered to do some job with a gemmed and if you showed any hatred/fear and asked if you could do it with a mundane PC instead, you could expect to be ridiculed for your ignorance.
Another sidenote about the game is that nobody likes to play alone. Nobody. You may like to do it from time to time, but the game's best feature is the player interaction. So, when so many players chose to play supernatural, where do you think they would come for player interaction? The Labyrinth. Yes, some choose the desert, but rinth offers a higher chance of finding interaction since it is small enough that you can walk through the entire area in 2-3 minutes and there is 1 coded lawless clan that most of the times already has multiple players in it. So, being in the rinth, we had to deal with a lot of supernaturals. Some of these did not quite understand the impact of the so many supernatural PCs in the game. So, at the beginning, we would get occasional maxed random elementalist, who would come to the Folley and demand respect like he is some kind of rare jewelry we can not find elsewhere or like he is some super powerful being that we should all bow to. They could get those reactions perhaps a year before, but at the times I speak of, there was always somebody else more unique and powerful than them.
After giving this brief intro, let me start with why and how we became a powerful organisation.
a) Combination of the supernatural classes and magickal items:
In those times, psionicists were really, -really- powerful, but they got nerfed after 2008 a lot. I think they are not worth more than 4 karma now. The power of mindbenders in the game came from that all of their skills were directly aimed at PCs. An elementalist can be a hunter, who only deals with the scrabs, mekilllots and can deal a lot of damage. But a mindbender can not be a hunter. They become severely limited if you only think about coded damage. Mindbenders can (or maybe I should say, could, since they are severely crippled now) control the flow of information, and they could use most of their skills from a distance. The weakness of a mindbender was travel and big hitting damage skills, particularly against mindless critters a mindbender becomes utterly useless. If you provide travel skills (fly, teleport, portal) and provide a coded damage dealing support, the mindbender could just break the game entirely.
So, learning this, the first thing I did was to collect all of the mindbenders that I could, under my wing and keep tabs on the ones that I could not. I liteally -bought- Jace, (or Sera) from House Borsail before they learned about her mindbending powers. She was a House aide, I did not pay money, simply I turned two Borsail nobles against each other and got one of them help her fake her death. Then I recruited her to the Guild. I already had Marin in the Guild. Then, in the merchant houses there was one high profile mindbender, I first told him that I know what he is. He got scared of being exposed, but instead of approaching with the fear aspect, I befriended him. So much so, he would alert me about everything that he thought could be useful for me.
That made 4 mindbenders including me who were actively gathering information for me and I tell you, if something was uttered in the game back then, a mindbender could possibly hear it. Even if you whisper, or even if you just use feels/thinks or the Way (ah the stupidity... some people thought the Way is safest communication and would use the Way for passing critical information), it did not matter. If a mindbender is seeking the information, he could get it. It is not so anymore.
So, 4 mindbenders constantly gathering information mostly focussing on the the high profile PCs, I literally knew everything that was happening in the game. In addition, after learning who is a smart PC and who is not, I would approach the PCs and offer them a deal that they can not refuse.
In addition, the magick items were a lot more common back then because it was easier to create them before 2006. A krathi could create magickal items that boost the stats. If you wear rings and wear a pair of gloves over those rings, you could boost all of your stats and someone looking at you would not see the magickal effect. Aside from magickal rings, there were magick weapons. Each elementalist was able to create a unique permanent magick weapon (or a magick shield for vivaduans). Krathi flaming swords, ruk stone maces, drovian shadow daggers etc..
So, that being said here are the events that shaped our group:
i) Assassination of the Council of Allanaki Mages (CAM):
I told you why we killed the CAM, now I will tell you how. As I mentioned, with the mindbenders working continuously on gathering information, nothing was hidden from us. So, I already knew everything that the CAM was working on. I knew they were working on opening the gates of Krathi plane, I knew the major players names and I knew where they were hiding. I also knew they wanted to kill Shiran. They made attempts, but Shiran was a fucking survivor. He could sense a trap before walking into it and he would just change his direction. So, CAM attempted to kill Shiran, they had a very high chance of success, the trap was so good. I was watching this event, and if CAM succeeded, we were ready to run in and steal Shiran's corpse. But Shiran, at the last instant just sensed something was wrong and did not walk into the trap.
This got a huge bounty on the CAM's head. Each member several thousand, I think the number was about 45k in total but there was noone who could kill them. So, the bounty stayed there for about 2-3 weeks.
Way earlier than this, I started to contact one of their members, a whiran, and I would talk to her as an anonimous whisper in her head. I would pretend like I know a lot of shit about the Known world and from beyond. This opened an easy access of watching the CAM for me, to the point that whiran was not scared of me anymore, though she did not know who I was, it is likely she thought I was a staff member.
So, once Bhag told us to stop the elemental gates from opening, I had Quick, Marin (human psi), Hair (a human nilazi, who was beginner level around this time) and Inrof (ghoul warrior) with me. I told the name of the whiran, Quick opened a portal and we walked in. Having 1 strong nilazi among us going against unsuspecting elementalist in a surprise attack, it did not take us too long to subdue them all and bring them to the sewers. After some torture, we killed the ones we captured. My whiran contact escaped, Quick wanted to finish her off but I told him no. I did not think she was a danger to us. I contacted her again and told her that we will let her live and we will leave her alone, as long as she keeps her mouth shut about what happened and does not pursue opening the elemental gates. She sounded genuinely scared and accepted my terms, though, how wrong I was to trust her.
In a few hours, several mages attacked the Guild. The attack was particularly nasty. Because they did not attack the PCs directly, they came and summoned a lot of creatures at safe-quit locations. So, if we logged in to the game, we would be insta ganked by summoned critters or if we wanted to log off, we would die before we had a chance to.
I was not on and Quick organised the defense in my absence. Apparently he started from the locations that I logged off, so hastily he made sure that when I log in, I would not be surrounded by agro critters. When I logged in, he and the group he gathered already had cleared half of what was laid there and forced the mages to flee. He told me to stay put in the Guild back room and it took him another 20-30 minutes to finish through the entire rinth as well as sewers to clear the summoned creatures. Since I was not there, Quick could not learn the identity of the attackers. So, this passed. Couple days later, a half giant mage teleported to us and jammed a magick spear to Quick. We responded immediately and the HG died right there and then. Then, I realized that the whiran I left alive was behind sending these mages to us. So, I contacted her and asked why she did not keep her word. I think her answer was because she was angry at us (or maybe she said it was not her fault, the survivors of CAM wanted revenge) for her friends. But the anger was over now and she, along with couple more mages with her, called for truce. In 2 minutes, we were ready and we raided the tower they were located. We killed everyone. Whiran tried to run, but we kept portaling to her until she too, was killed.
ii) Assassination of Shiran, the Allanaki Templar:
Of all the kills/assassinations, no one gave us a harder job than Shiran. He was so crafty in sensing traps, it was almost natural for him to see them before they took place. That is why, we killed him in the most unusual place and unusual time and partly that is why it brought so much anger from Staff, cause they did not expect we would dare something like that either.
Shiran had a lot of enemies. Kharad Tor and House Borsail for starters, but Shiran, being a long lived templar and commanding so many PCs, did not care about making enemies. He also had a powerful mindbender and a powerful nilazi as his pets, which made him a really dangerous enemy. With the End of the World plot and everyone talking about the Dragon, Shiran also had 2 books about the Dragon, they contained critical information.
Then, Borsail and Tor House pooled their money and wanted to buy the assassination of Shiran. I tried to bargain teaching me read/write as well to the price, but that did not work out (long story short, staff said it will take a long time so I gave up). We asked for a very high price (I think I asked for 60k or so) to justify it to the Guild, and we also wanted the books. The houses accepted and we had the contract on.
So, we started by taking out his tools. I exposed the mindbender pet and Kharad had an NPC templar execute her. For the nilazi pet I sent a maxed out assassin who killed her in the middle of Bard's barrel with one backstab. Shiran was furious but did not learn it was us behind those kills.
At this point, we started to weigh our options. Shiran now needed us, since both his tools were taken from him, he would have to come to me for information and if he needed the help of a nilazi. We started to take it slow, considering just working with Shiran. But after the CAM's trap on Shiran failed, Shiran had completed a quest which lended him a lot of powers, a lot of new spells. He was close to getting a Red Robe and he was working on a major staff run plot about a serial killer who was killing virtual nobles and leaving a lot of evidence behind that the plot was critical about the Dragon. So, Shiran became cocky, started to threaten me and Quick about random shit and he even started to treat us like we were his henchmen. If we allowed him to become a Red Robe, we thought things would only get worse. So, we decided to kill him for sure.
We hired couple of ex byners who were wronged by Shiran. These were probably maxed out warriors, they were terribly good in melee. We offered them 5k each and told them to help us kill Shiran and they agreed. So, we started to lay traps. We went through a lot of traps but as I said, he was crafty. He could sense the traps, he would never agree to meet behind closed doors. As an example, our last trap attempt was to take him to the balcony of the bard's barrel and assault him there. He went up the stairs, looked across the room and paused for a moment. Then decided not to meet there. Imagine our surprise and frustration.
Anyway, after Bhag's avatar told us to hurry up about stopping the Dragon and the elemental gates, we were patrolling the rinth and I checked the location of Shiran. He was in the jails, interrogating someone. Quick and I, after a pause thought maybe that is a very good place to kill a templar. No witnesses and if we hurried up, we could be in and out in 30 seconds. Short enough that no one can bring a sizable reinforcement. I checked the corridors of the jails and there were no PCs or NPCs. Even before the alarm was raised, we would be out of there.
So, in about 2 minutes, Quick summoned 4 guardians and we opened the portal to the jails. Strangely enough, Shiran was interrogating the NPC serial killer, he was learning critical information about the Dragon, so he thought the portal appeared in front of him was part of the plot. He did not run. Unlucky of him, he would have on him a particular useful spell at all times, which, if your enemy is a nilazi, will fuck you up instead. What we did not know is another newbie PC templar came in that couple of minutes time, bringing 2 more HG soldiers into the jails. The result was a chaos.
Demons dropped Shiran in 2 rounds and I backstabbed him to finish it off. And suddenly, NPC soldiers started to pour into the jail room. Quick opened the portal back and immediately attacked by a bunch of soldiers, I saw the demons falling one by one and more soldiers kept coming. In the mass combat madness, I did not see what was going on. But finally I entered the portal and came out of the sewers on the other end. The portal immediately disappeared and I was sure Quick was dead. But, instead, he opened another portal and came through carrying the bodies of both templars.
As I said, this received a lot of anger from the staff. They were angry because we did not email them prior to the attack. Though, in our defense, it was a last minute decision from us. They knew before that we were planning to kill Shiran for about a month, but they did not expect it to be so frontal and so ... in the jails. As a result, they animated Red Robes and started attacking us. First they began with summons. Luckily I was inside the backroom of the Guild, so when they summoned, I just kept hitting the door for a minor damage. They tried this a few times, then Quick gathered all the crew in the backroom. In case we had to escape, we would all portal out. Then started psionic attacks. Quick casted a spell that made me immune to psionics after the first one and I had Marin to turn on an area affect defense against psionics, but that did not help. They scored some attacks anyway.
After these as well, staff cooled down. Red Robe contacted me (even though I was immune, and under a psionic defense but it was okay, I could accept a Red Robe being beyond the coded power limitations) and I received some nasty threats. After that, we had some email exchange with staff, just angry angry angry emails on both sides. But it was over
At the end of both CAM and Shiran, we became really really really powerful. Just from Bones alone we got 10 magick rings. Combined magick loot gave my most trusted servants 2 magick weapons each, 1 wand and 2 unique magick items.
At the end of the loot, Quick and I got 7 magick rings each, such that, my dexterity wisdom and endurance became absolutely incredible, and I had extremely good strength on top of it. We handed out a few magick rings to our closest members. I took one of the unique magick items and it was game breakingly powerful. By using it, I would instantly be teleported to a safe room and it could be used even in combat. The other one, Quick and I shared it.
b) Superstitions and the daily madness:
It was after the CAM and Shiran, people started to talk about us both IC and OOC. We started getting attacks regularly, people who thought they were powerful tested their strength against us. But we formed a security protocol immediately, by starting to identify groups with considerable power. Particularly our psionic network, we would identify each significant PC, their allies/enemies, friends, lovers, apartments. We literally went deep here. Cause, we were able to see their stats/backgrounds and every little detail that could define a PC. For example, I was one of the first one to know Templar Samos was a psionicist and therefore, was of the Mind Ministry not War. We identified hidden mages/psionicists and watched them closely. In the desert elves, we knew who was what and what we should be aware of. The only place we went easy was Tuluk. We only dug a few PCs there and let the rest be whatever they wanted to be.
So, after surviving a few attacks, we turned on the offensive. If we caught some people plotting against us, we would go against them first and when we went this way, we removed the entire threat. For example, if 3 mages were in the desert plotting against how to attack us, we went in there first and made sure all of them dead.
This brutal approach gave a pause on the attacks against us. Shortly after, people started to go subtle. A lot of rumors and hate started. Rumors started to grow and that increased the fear effect.
So, we used this. We fueled the rumors by showing the world some crazy shit. We even added superstitions. Given the magick items we collected along with Psionic and Nilazi skill tree and some other elementalist skills, we were able to make people think we were more than what we were. Here were some of what we did:
1) We started a religion:
We made a makeshift shrine and asked people to worship Nilaz. We gave some effort to this too, as if it mattered a lot to us (and it did not, cause we did not get any negative or positive effect from this) we asked random nobody PCs in the rinth to start worshipping Nilaz.
2) We had the power to create echoes and we used it a lot.
Like in the shrine we created, I occasionally would send a creepy echo. People thought this was staff's doing, so they thought this religion thing is real and we were agents of something great.
3) We were able to animate NPCs.
We used this to a great effect. A rinther NPC coming to the Bard's Barrel would start talking to the PCs. Then through this NPC we would give outdated information and add up some more. People were so hungry to NPC interaction, they would call others when something like this happened and almost everyone would be listening to what we were telling them. And we would finish this encounter by giving some weird, spooky information and tell something nice about our gang.
Later on, another NPC would say similar things but instead would say something not nice (but not terribly bad) about us, thus, people would get confused and this would lead to more rumors and more superstitions.
4) When contacting nobles or templars, we would use NPCs talk on our behalf.
This too would give an extra edge to the rumors. Sometimes we would even use scary NPCs, or just heads of NPCs alone. Imagine the effect of seeing this "the head of tall muscular elf sends you a telepathic message: My Lord, Gin just told me he will be late to talk to you, he is busy right now to deal with a few idiots"
5) Pranks. I posted earlier, we did do a lot of pranks.
6) I would pretend like being this creepy voice in some PCs mind and give them some accurate information to trust me, then I would give them the information that I would want them to know.
So... All in all, all this stuff made people believe we were backed by staff. But a lot of our power came from built in game mechanics, we just twisted them a lot. I could not even learn the skill "Gather" after RPing with so many sorcerers and Shattered personally teaching me, cause, "I was not supposed to get that skill" as a staffer emailed me in answer. In fact, after Shiran, we never wanted support from Imms. Because everytime imms were involved, it ended bad for us from that point on. For example, it was common for gemmed to learn some new reaches. Like giving silent casting or making all spells area effect. Most mages back then learned these through imm support. Instead, Quick and I grabbed a female mage nursing an infant child. She knew the reach Quick wanted and Quick threatened to eat her child. She happily taught us what we needed.
4) The gang of crazy and how it came to be:
I will start with the conjecture of the time back then in 2006-2008 era. Magick and all things supernatural were already very common among the playerbase. I could say half the playerbase, if not more downright had something supernatural either in skill list or in their inventory. There were lots of arguments about toning it down, but Staff as well as a lot of players back then, liked it when it was magick heavy. No matter how much of an argument you put about it, people would still defend that the amount of magick in the game was "just right". And every argument on the subject eventually end up with "Be the change you want in the game". The amount of crazy particularly spiked up after the announcement of "End of the World" and staff simply let go of the brakes on the amount of crazy. I shit you not, at some point in the game there were 10 mindbenders that -I- personally knew. This was the time that if you showed any fear RP around mages, people would think you are acting weird. If you were told to work with a mage, let's say a militia PC is ordered to do some job with a gemmed and if you showed any hatred/fear and asked if you could do it with a mundane PC instead, you could expect to be ridiculed for your ignorance.
Another sidenote about the game is that nobody likes to play alone. Nobody. You may like to do it from time to time, but the game's best feature is the player interaction. So, when so many players chose to play supernatural, where do you think they would come for player interaction? The Labyrinth. Yes, some choose the desert, but rinth offers a higher chance of finding interaction since it is small enough that you can walk through the entire area in 2-3 minutes and there is 1 coded lawless clan that most of the times already has multiple players in it. So, being in the rinth, we had to deal with a lot of supernaturals. Some of these did not quite understand the impact of the so many supernatural PCs in the game. So, at the beginning, we would get occasional maxed random elementalist, who would come to the Folley and demand respect like he is some kind of rare jewelry we can not find elsewhere or like he is some super powerful being that we should all bow to. They could get those reactions perhaps a year before, but at the times I speak of, there was always somebody else more unique and powerful than them.
After giving this brief intro, let me start with why and how we became a powerful organisation.
a) Combination of the supernatural classes and magickal items:
In those times, psionicists were really, -really- powerful, but they got nerfed after 2008 a lot. I think they are not worth more than 4 karma now. The power of mindbenders in the game came from that all of their skills were directly aimed at PCs. An elementalist can be a hunter, who only deals with the scrabs, mekilllots and can deal a lot of damage. But a mindbender can not be a hunter. They become severely limited if you only think about coded damage. Mindbenders can (or maybe I should say, could, since they are severely crippled now) control the flow of information, and they could use most of their skills from a distance. The weakness of a mindbender was travel and big hitting damage skills, particularly against mindless critters a mindbender becomes utterly useless. If you provide travel skills (fly, teleport, portal) and provide a coded damage dealing support, the mindbender could just break the game entirely.
So, learning this, the first thing I did was to collect all of the mindbenders that I could, under my wing and keep tabs on the ones that I could not. I liteally -bought- Jace, (or Sera) from House Borsail before they learned about her mindbending powers. She was a House aide, I did not pay money, simply I turned two Borsail nobles against each other and got one of them help her fake her death. Then I recruited her to the Guild. I already had Marin in the Guild. Then, in the merchant houses there was one high profile mindbender, I first told him that I know what he is. He got scared of being exposed, but instead of approaching with the fear aspect, I befriended him. So much so, he would alert me about everything that he thought could be useful for me.
That made 4 mindbenders including me who were actively gathering information for me and I tell you, if something was uttered in the game back then, a mindbender could possibly hear it. Even if you whisper, or even if you just use feels/thinks or the Way (ah the stupidity... some people thought the Way is safest communication and would use the Way for passing critical information), it did not matter. If a mindbender is seeking the information, he could get it. It is not so anymore.
So, 4 mindbenders constantly gathering information mostly focussing on the the high profile PCs, I literally knew everything that was happening in the game. In addition, after learning who is a smart PC and who is not, I would approach the PCs and offer them a deal that they can not refuse.
In addition, the magick items were a lot more common back then because it was easier to create them before 2006. A krathi could create magickal items that boost the stats. If you wear rings and wear a pair of gloves over those rings, you could boost all of your stats and someone looking at you would not see the magickal effect. Aside from magickal rings, there were magick weapons. Each elementalist was able to create a unique permanent magick weapon (or a magick shield for vivaduans). Krathi flaming swords, ruk stone maces, drovian shadow daggers etc..
So, that being said here are the events that shaped our group:
i) Assassination of the Council of Allanaki Mages (CAM):
I told you why we killed the CAM, now I will tell you how. As I mentioned, with the mindbenders working continuously on gathering information, nothing was hidden from us. So, I already knew everything that the CAM was working on. I knew they were working on opening the gates of Krathi plane, I knew the major players names and I knew where they were hiding. I also knew they wanted to kill Shiran. They made attempts, but Shiran was a fucking survivor. He could sense a trap before walking into it and he would just change his direction. So, CAM attempted to kill Shiran, they had a very high chance of success, the trap was so good. I was watching this event, and if CAM succeeded, we were ready to run in and steal Shiran's corpse. But Shiran, at the last instant just sensed something was wrong and did not walk into the trap.
This got a huge bounty on the CAM's head. Each member several thousand, I think the number was about 45k in total but there was noone who could kill them. So, the bounty stayed there for about 2-3 weeks.
Way earlier than this, I started to contact one of their members, a whiran, and I would talk to her as an anonimous whisper in her head. I would pretend like I know a lot of shit about the Known world and from beyond. This opened an easy access of watching the CAM for me, to the point that whiran was not scared of me anymore, though she did not know who I was, it is likely she thought I was a staff member.
So, once Bhag told us to stop the elemental gates from opening, I had Quick, Marin (human psi), Hair (a human nilazi, who was beginner level around this time) and Inrof (ghoul warrior) with me. I told the name of the whiran, Quick opened a portal and we walked in. Having 1 strong nilazi among us going against unsuspecting elementalist in a surprise attack, it did not take us too long to subdue them all and bring them to the sewers. After some torture, we killed the ones we captured. My whiran contact escaped, Quick wanted to finish her off but I told him no. I did not think she was a danger to us. I contacted her again and told her that we will let her live and we will leave her alone, as long as she keeps her mouth shut about what happened and does not pursue opening the elemental gates. She sounded genuinely scared and accepted my terms, though, how wrong I was to trust her.
In a few hours, several mages attacked the Guild. The attack was particularly nasty. Because they did not attack the PCs directly, they came and summoned a lot of creatures at safe-quit locations. So, if we logged in to the game, we would be insta ganked by summoned critters or if we wanted to log off, we would die before we had a chance to.
I was not on and Quick organised the defense in my absence. Apparently he started from the locations that I logged off, so hastily he made sure that when I log in, I would not be surrounded by agro critters. When I logged in, he and the group he gathered already had cleared half of what was laid there and forced the mages to flee. He told me to stay put in the Guild back room and it took him another 20-30 minutes to finish through the entire rinth as well as sewers to clear the summoned creatures. Since I was not there, Quick could not learn the identity of the attackers. So, this passed. Couple days later, a half giant mage teleported to us and jammed a magick spear to Quick. We responded immediately and the HG died right there and then. Then, I realized that the whiran I left alive was behind sending these mages to us. So, I contacted her and asked why she did not keep her word. I think her answer was because she was angry at us (or maybe she said it was not her fault, the survivors of CAM wanted revenge) for her friends. But the anger was over now and she, along with couple more mages with her, called for truce. In 2 minutes, we were ready and we raided the tower they were located. We killed everyone. Whiran tried to run, but we kept portaling to her until she too, was killed.
ii) Assassination of Shiran, the Allanaki Templar:
Of all the kills/assassinations, no one gave us a harder job than Shiran. He was so crafty in sensing traps, it was almost natural for him to see them before they took place. That is why, we killed him in the most unusual place and unusual time and partly that is why it brought so much anger from Staff, cause they did not expect we would dare something like that either.
Shiran had a lot of enemies. Kharad Tor and House Borsail for starters, but Shiran, being a long lived templar and commanding so many PCs, did not care about making enemies. He also had a powerful mindbender and a powerful nilazi as his pets, which made him a really dangerous enemy. With the End of the World plot and everyone talking about the Dragon, Shiran also had 2 books about the Dragon, they contained critical information.
Then, Borsail and Tor House pooled their money and wanted to buy the assassination of Shiran. I tried to bargain teaching me read/write as well to the price, but that did not work out (long story short, staff said it will take a long time so I gave up). We asked for a very high price (I think I asked for 60k or so) to justify it to the Guild, and we also wanted the books. The houses accepted and we had the contract on.
So, we started by taking out his tools. I exposed the mindbender pet and Kharad had an NPC templar execute her. For the nilazi pet I sent a maxed out assassin who killed her in the middle of Bard's barrel with one backstab. Shiran was furious but did not learn it was us behind those kills.
At this point, we started to weigh our options. Shiran now needed us, since both his tools were taken from him, he would have to come to me for information and if he needed the help of a nilazi. We started to take it slow, considering just working with Shiran. But after the CAM's trap on Shiran failed, Shiran had completed a quest which lended him a lot of powers, a lot of new spells. He was close to getting a Red Robe and he was working on a major staff run plot about a serial killer who was killing virtual nobles and leaving a lot of evidence behind that the plot was critical about the Dragon. So, Shiran became cocky, started to threaten me and Quick about random shit and he even started to treat us like we were his henchmen. If we allowed him to become a Red Robe, we thought things would only get worse. So, we decided to kill him for sure.
We hired couple of ex byners who were wronged by Shiran. These were probably maxed out warriors, they were terribly good in melee. We offered them 5k each and told them to help us kill Shiran and they agreed. So, we started to lay traps. We went through a lot of traps but as I said, he was crafty. He could sense the traps, he would never agree to meet behind closed doors. As an example, our last trap attempt was to take him to the balcony of the bard's barrel and assault him there. He went up the stairs, looked across the room and paused for a moment. Then decided not to meet there. Imagine our surprise and frustration.
Anyway, after Bhag's avatar told us to hurry up about stopping the Dragon and the elemental gates, we were patrolling the rinth and I checked the location of Shiran. He was in the jails, interrogating someone. Quick and I, after a pause thought maybe that is a very good place to kill a templar. No witnesses and if we hurried up, we could be in and out in 30 seconds. Short enough that no one can bring a sizable reinforcement. I checked the corridors of the jails and there were no PCs or NPCs. Even before the alarm was raised, we would be out of there.
So, in about 2 minutes, Quick summoned 4 guardians and we opened the portal to the jails. Strangely enough, Shiran was interrogating the NPC serial killer, he was learning critical information about the Dragon, so he thought the portal appeared in front of him was part of the plot. He did not run. Unlucky of him, he would have on him a particular useful spell at all times, which, if your enemy is a nilazi, will fuck you up instead. What we did not know is another newbie PC templar came in that couple of minutes time, bringing 2 more HG soldiers into the jails. The result was a chaos.
Demons dropped Shiran in 2 rounds and I backstabbed him to finish it off. And suddenly, NPC soldiers started to pour into the jail room. Quick opened the portal back and immediately attacked by a bunch of soldiers, I saw the demons falling one by one and more soldiers kept coming. In the mass combat madness, I did not see what was going on. But finally I entered the portal and came out of the sewers on the other end. The portal immediately disappeared and I was sure Quick was dead. But, instead, he opened another portal and came through carrying the bodies of both templars.
As I said, this received a lot of anger from the staff. They were angry because we did not email them prior to the attack. Though, in our defense, it was a last minute decision from us. They knew before that we were planning to kill Shiran for about a month, but they did not expect it to be so frontal and so ... in the jails. As a result, they animated Red Robes and started attacking us. First they began with summons. Luckily I was inside the backroom of the Guild, so when they summoned, I just kept hitting the door for a minor damage. They tried this a few times, then Quick gathered all the crew in the backroom. In case we had to escape, we would all portal out. Then started psionic attacks. Quick casted a spell that made me immune to psionics after the first one and I had Marin to turn on an area affect defense against psionics, but that did not help. They scored some attacks anyway.
After these as well, staff cooled down. Red Robe contacted me (even though I was immune, and under a psionic defense but it was okay, I could accept a Red Robe being beyond the coded power limitations) and I received some nasty threats. After that, we had some email exchange with staff, just angry angry angry emails on both sides. But it was over
At the end of both CAM and Shiran, we became really really really powerful. Just from Bones alone we got 10 magick rings. Combined magick loot gave my most trusted servants 2 magick weapons each, 1 wand and 2 unique magick items.
At the end of the loot, Quick and I got 7 magick rings each, such that, my dexterity wisdom and endurance became absolutely incredible, and I had extremely good strength on top of it. We handed out a few magick rings to our closest members. I took one of the unique magick items and it was game breakingly powerful. By using it, I would instantly be teleported to a safe room and it could be used even in combat. The other one, Quick and I shared it.
b) Superstitions and the daily madness:
It was after the CAM and Shiran, people started to talk about us both IC and OOC. We started getting attacks regularly, people who thought they were powerful tested their strength against us. But we formed a security protocol immediately, by starting to identify groups with considerable power. Particularly our psionic network, we would identify each significant PC, their allies/enemies, friends, lovers, apartments. We literally went deep here. Cause, we were able to see their stats/backgrounds and every little detail that could define a PC. For example, I was one of the first one to know Templar Samos was a psionicist and therefore, was of the Mind Ministry not War. We identified hidden mages/psionicists and watched them closely. In the desert elves, we knew who was what and what we should be aware of. The only place we went easy was Tuluk. We only dug a few PCs there and let the rest be whatever they wanted to be.
So, after surviving a few attacks, we turned on the offensive. If we caught some people plotting against us, we would go against them first and when we went this way, we removed the entire threat. For example, if 3 mages were in the desert plotting against how to attack us, we went in there first and made sure all of them dead.
This brutal approach gave a pause on the attacks against us. Shortly after, people started to go subtle. A lot of rumors and hate started. Rumors started to grow and that increased the fear effect.
So, we used this. We fueled the rumors by showing the world some crazy shit. We even added superstitions. Given the magick items we collected along with Psionic and Nilazi skill tree and some other elementalist skills, we were able to make people think we were more than what we were. Here were some of what we did:
1) We started a religion:
We made a makeshift shrine and asked people to worship Nilaz. We gave some effort to this too, as if it mattered a lot to us (and it did not, cause we did not get any negative or positive effect from this) we asked random nobody PCs in the rinth to start worshipping Nilaz.
2) We had the power to create echoes and we used it a lot.
Like in the shrine we created, I occasionally would send a creepy echo. People thought this was staff's doing, so they thought this religion thing is real and we were agents of something great.
3) We were able to animate NPCs.
We used this to a great effect. A rinther NPC coming to the Bard's Barrel would start talking to the PCs. Then through this NPC we would give outdated information and add up some more. People were so hungry to NPC interaction, they would call others when something like this happened and almost everyone would be listening to what we were telling them. And we would finish this encounter by giving some weird, spooky information and tell something nice about our gang.
Later on, another NPC would say similar things but instead would say something not nice (but not terribly bad) about us, thus, people would get confused and this would lead to more rumors and more superstitions.
4) When contacting nobles or templars, we would use NPCs talk on our behalf.
This too would give an extra edge to the rumors. Sometimes we would even use scary NPCs, or just heads of NPCs alone. Imagine the effect of seeing this "the head of tall muscular elf sends you a telepathic message: My Lord, Gin just told me he will be late to talk to you, he is busy right now to deal with a few idiots"
5) Pranks. I posted earlier, we did do a lot of pranks.
6) I would pretend like being this creepy voice in some PCs mind and give them some accurate information to trust me, then I would give them the information that I would want them to know.
So... All in all, all this stuff made people believe we were backed by staff. But a lot of our power came from built in game mechanics, we just twisted them a lot. I could not even learn the skill "Gather" after RPing with so many sorcerers and Shattered personally teaching me, cause, "I was not supposed to get that skill" as a staffer emailed me in answer. In fact, after Shiran, we never wanted support from Imms. Because everytime imms were involved, it ended bad for us from that point on. For example, it was common for gemmed to learn some new reaches. Like giving silent casting or making all spells area effect. Most mages back then learned these through imm support. Instead, Quick and I grabbed a female mage nursing an infant child. She knew the reach Quick wanted and Quick threatened to eat her child. She happily taught us what we needed.
