Re: Delayed welcome - new member

From: Jane Williams <janewilliams20_at_...>
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:37:37 -0000


> As the years rolled on, I re-envisioned whitewall based on the
rather
> cool map of schliemann's troy, since i always thought that
whitewall
> should be something on that level of cultural significance

Oh, yes, very much so.

> We have two GM's in our campaign, and if I had any creative control
> over the other half of the campaign, then comedy tolkienesque
tunnels
> running from boldhome to whitewall would be an absolute no-no,

Well.... I have to admit that if I was using that, I'd have a heroquest  level journey through the Underworld replace any mundane tunnels. But tastes differ, as you say, and I'm sure some people will like the idea.

> I mean, what's guided teleport for?

Rather less common in HQ than in RQ.....

Did you find the idea in Rob's campaign of using the Mists of Tarthcaer as a means of teleporting to WW? Usually, if men try to approach this Vingan temple, they get "lost" in the mists and deposited at some apparently random place on the perimeter. But the High Priestess is a Mastakos devotee, with rather more control over them than had been expected. She used them to move the whole party to WW. This isn't something anyone can repeat without her help, so again we don't mess up general logistics.

> My map had a troll ghetto, which looked similar to Crabtown, and
this
> was built over the tunnels that wound through the karst upon which
> the city was built through which I imagined the trolls impoting and
> exporting via the Kitori and the Argan Argar cult.

Very nice. I've always felt we needed more tunnels, and troll smugglers.

> we have already planned our humakti
> character's death (little does he know) for some kind of rearguard
> action where all the humakti volunteer to go and meet their god
> whilst others make their escape - serves him right for worshipping
> Death.

I can think of a couple of options quite early in the siege. There's the Shargashi Incident, where a few hundred foaming berserkers took a short-cut through Hell to land in the basement. A separate Lunar attack was ordered on the outside, expecting that the Shargashi on the inside would remove most resistance. Unfortunately for them, the bit of basement they chose was full of Humakti.... it may even have been the temple, I'm not sure. We then got a mild case of the dead Sea rising and washing them down the plughole back into Hell - along with quite a few Humakti, unfortunately. That's a critical bit of back-story for my Swords campaign, and there's some rather nice fiction about it, too.
http://runegate.org/whitewall/wiki/Rana%20In%20Hell

Later in 1619, when the Bat attacks, we again have the Dead Sea rising in the basement, and Humakti doing a "last defence". We originally invented this to give non-flyers something useful to do :)

And then of course at the end of the siege, there's those 23 bodies...

> The new images of Whitewall are fantastic, and will replace the map
> that we have been using so far. I love the idea of using outlying
> forts, which makes me think of Khe Sanh and Dien Bien Phu for a
good
> sense of a slowly crumbling outer perimeter and all the associated
> pathos and sense of general doom.

Tarkalor's Gate is going to be taken, retaken, fortified, magically strengthened, etc etc, as the siege goes on. For what that particular outlying fortress looks like at one point, I gather you need to look at Castle Stahleck (sp?) where Tentacles is held, from the watchpoint above it. John Hughes ran a freeform up there a few years back. Or, I've got some unfinished fiction set on the Gate that required me to do a rough layout. But it'll change as time goes on anyway: well, I change it twice mid-story. How did Insterid report it to Kallyr....? "....just came up with some fancy magic or other to turn Tarkalor's Gate into Tarkalor's Hole in the Wall. They were trying to work out how to get the gatehouse back when I got there..."

> the sense that
> i'll never be able to acquire quite enough information from the
site
> to be entirely consistent is a little frustrating though.

Well, ask here and we'll try to help.

> However,
> I'll try and build up the confidence to put little bits of my
vision
> of the siege on the site. It's quite a leap of faith though.

Great! We'll look forward to that. Your vision is just as valid as anyone else's, remember, all we need is to avoid clashes that make the whole collection less useable.

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