culpit liveblogs fruma

Oh, huh, Aldwell Library is actually really straightforward. Just talked to a guy. I'm only missing one petal.

Got in. Yeah that's. A library.

 

"So, how do we all feel about committing some light terrorism today?"
>Sounds great!

So, the plan is... torment the dam, pick up leftover resources in Auburn (gameplay-story segregation - the Steel Feather site is completely unaffected by Plot destroying it), join up with the Canopy, and kill everyone.

Quill lived? That's... shocking.

...Huh. Deraj apparently was an in-and-out job. Underwhelming. I'm going to assume this, along with the Mistwoods being oddly flat, is a scar of the Penitence District subplot being unfinished when Fruma was pushed.

Here's Arnol. I won't talk much to him.

...Corruption sinewave. The Weaver is still a mystery (and an underused macguffin). My best guess right now is that the Queen wanted to use it to test and... amplify??? Corruption in the area. Or maybe she was trying to read Influence in general. But that's not super dramatic... she treats it like something big, worth sacrificing a powerful Sovereign for, and it's made from an irreplaceable stone. It can't be just a scrying tool.

Zeph/Yuman has been only gently teased. As far as I can tell it's one-sided, but Zeph's a little blushy when Yuman shows up.

Kaio has been a non-character thus far (I forgot to talk to him in the middle of the questline), but he raises a delicious point. We're going to do politics about this! There's plenty of unrest to spark into an active revolt, and that would be excellent for many reasons. I like this plan. This is fun. We could be involved in any part of it, but of course we're going to do the most interesting thing, which is enter the jaws of the beast. Turn ourselves in. Finally figure out the Queen's angle. Superb!

Sui can detect Corruption. Presumably she could detect other Influences too. That's a fun power for the Cursed in general. (I like reading Sui as a general metric for True Cursed, the only other major examples of which are the Twains.)

...Huh. My read on Sui's power was wrong. The 'ocean' is all five elements, she draws on both Water and Air - Water/Air being Ice.

I wonder if the player is True Cursed. We're analogous to Aledar and Tasim, and Tasim is True Cursed, but IIRC Aledar wasn't. Is Sui unusually strong, or is she just normal for a Cursed?

Who's this random Canopy Deer who speaks badly far from the true camp? Let's hear out the changeling. For fun. Ah, nothing. Oh well.

Hm. Seems Zeph/Yuman is not in fact one-sided. Ah well.

I like Kaio. Wise man. So wise, he intentionally rammed himself out of the plot to avoid a mentor death. Strangely, I can't talk to Sui or Quill. I'll ignore that; /classing didn't fix it.

(I'm surprised that Yuman does not deny that he's planning to ask out Zeph at a dramatic moment. He's flustered. But he admits it.)

Argh. I accidentally Qed my mount. I'll transfer my Archer's.

The sad thing about the Blossom of Blades is that they could be effectual. The press is an enormous tool for spreading revolutionary sentiment! Some of the biggest revolutions in the past half-millennium were brought about in major part by print. But they just... have no idea what they're doing. So they accomplish nothing.

I like Bleeding Rose! That's... that's a mood! Yeah! That's rooted in the experience of us as first-world citizens reading so much about the troubles of everywhere else, and feeling helpless to stop them!

Finally, a flash to the Sovereigns. Gikyo is dead (to be revived??), and Soosu is missing - allegedly executed. I don't think she was executed. She could have gone further, I think. I loved her. Tasim is the odd one out here, model-wise. Zhiraok's solution to the Rebellion Problem is to just get one more chance to attack and kill us - this man has not learned that we cannot be killed on the defensive.

Aha! Soosu is still alive! But, captured. Resistant to questioning, because there is literally nothing that can be done to her. She is at rock bottom. No punishment can hurt her at this point. So she's sitting pretty. "Divided by zero" is a very weird way to say "got turned into raw polymorph". Gikyo is, apparently, not mourned. Even the other Sovereigns recognise that they were a total psycho. Both sides in this argument have a point here; Majin's peacocking was a very bad move considering that we are enemy number one in Fruma, but Zhiraok has proven himself to not be nearly as competent as he believes.

Tasim's interesting as a Sovereign because he has no connections here. He's not involved in the Thalas-Nasin rivalry, nor is he concerned with a district or mystery, or even educated about being a Sovereign. All he worries about is us. And he's thrown us so many bones - well, at least, up until now. The Queen's handily cut that line.

Two is fun. I like her. She looks huggable. And her obsession with mystique means she is not good at her job. She's excellent at collecting information, but very poor at distributing it and acting upon it.

Aha. Zeph and Rex were marked with a tracking ward. Once again, the rebellion was compromised at step one. Fruma is good at intrigue, especially given that they can pull out magic spells at the drop of a writer's trick. I suspect that, this time, it won't work out for them. Sure, this is the penultimate quest - but, you know what, I feel like maybe this time things will work. A major turning point. The plan partially succeeds - the stage goes up in flames - Apotheosis.

Good ol' Fruman prison cells.

SOOSU!!!!!

She's very honest. She cares for Yusanu, but admits she doesn't care about anyone else. (That's weird. She weeps about not being able to empathise with people, but she... she does care about some. Sometimes.) She also has an excellent theme.

Seems the Queen has been trying to hurt Soosu anyway. Soosu's angry about it, but seemingly just because she thinks it's stupid? She's not hurt, just frustrated. Although, she is sad that Flowers was killed. She cared about the golems a bit. And she cares that she's going to rot for eternity in prison. But... fighting spirit. She's endured depression.

Hi, Two!! You were eavesdropping. You have decided that we were planning to work with Soosu. This is true. We have no other resources. I suspect Two does not have true loyalty to the Crown - she seems more interested in observing our escape attempt than heading it off. (She names the background magic field the Weave. Stereotypical, calls to mind the Resonance Weaver, matches earlier descriptions.) Soosu made it, and now she's trapped by it. Two has apparently offered Soosu a 'proposal' which she's currently rejecting.

Ah, no, Two's note of our plan is the real one - audience with the Queen as a distraction. That's very dangerous. But... will Two stop it? She could. She absolutely could. But she acts like she'll see it play out. So... ugh, fascinating woman. (Why are there eight cells here?? There's only - what, five main Sovereigns and the Spymaster? Why would you need this much containment? I suppose other magically potent criminals might go here.)

Two has put us in a specific spot. Dangerous. A plan's in the making here. This audience was a surprise to the Sovereigns. The Queen is angry. She acted polite and mysterious when we first met, and she seemed to let us play ourselves out earlier - but now we've caused so many messes that she is no longer willing to toy with us. Yet, she'll still talk. It all comes down to the War of the Realms, and we've proven we can keep it in balance. Her mysterious Plan is to invade Dern to root out the source of its power, that's unbalanced the War for so long. (This could have been inferred metanarratively, since Dern is the next and final planned content expansion.) The tournament, 'all those weeks ago' (so this has played out over only a month or two), was to select the correct candidate to fend this off. She picked Tasim... for some reason?? Probably the 'loyal' clause. And now she offers us the choice: join her or perish.

What are the terms?

Betray and destroy the rebellion.

Well, we won't be doing that. Ta! Enjoy your damnation! You've earnt it.

The plan is going off. Thus far, it's working. It won't succeed, at least to its fullest extent, because we knew too much about it - story rules, you understand.

The Queen has her answer. We weren't here to hear her out at all. She recognises that. We are a distraction and a reconnaissance ploy. Her mercy is spent. But Two is assigned to dispose of us. That... well, that won't work. Fate itself decrees our victory here.

Two seems to think things have worked out in our favor. That's good. Whatever her assessments are, they're almost certainly accurate, save perhaps for one or two critical errors (unlikely right now, though potentially one will occur in these last two quests). But she's not on our side. She's playing an obscure game. She could get rid of us; her analyses of our flaws (unnamed) are correct. We're an agent of chaos; we act for ourselves, destroying whatever we must. Not a useful minion. (We could be a butterfly, the wings of change...)

"In [our] absence, the shards destabilise". Okay. That's a weird turn of phrase. Two has referred to the 'shards' before. I suspect she has a gift of fortunetelling. And right here, one paragraph after I suspected the idea, there's a flaw in her knowledge. She doesn't know why fate is growing strange as we're removed from the field. So she'll take the other option. She'll show us the futures she sees (I'd say 'right again', but it's still the same dialogue...), so that we understand what role we must play to avert catastrophe. And we will prove we can play it. (To the tune of her remixed theme.)

I wonder if this links to the Forgery and AHC.

She has first examined our reflection. But she's found emptiness. There's no self here. That, of course, is known. As a nameless, customisable player character, we cannot have a personality. And we have no accessible memories of Fruma. But that void doesn't hurt us. That emptiness is our ally.

So many cracked mirrors. These are the devastated futures?

The Emerald Trail, torn apart by Dark. Or Cinfras by Light. If either side wins, the world is lost... and one must win. (Curiously, Knells, unlike the giant hook things, don't attack you.) Orphion has better PR, but is fundamentally the same as Saphanis - it'll destroy everything, turn it all to Light. Judgement from above... purging every part of the world which stinks of life. Because life is Dark. And thought, reason, Light? Is that why the Dark makes things strange, while the Light sterilises? Or am I just wildly spinning a narrative of Apollo and Dionysus?

But there's a third future Two will show us. Both sides in the War of the Realms are terrible. But we? We're dangerous too. We claim to serve Fruma... but what we're doing could, apparently, tear it out of reality entirely? This isn't even Void Holes, there's no purple outline. Fruma's just gone.

Oh! Oh! We're finally here! We're at this place! I found this earlier and immediately identified it as a quest location, but I forgot I'd found it. Some time long ago, Two was part of something bigger... all erased. Here's their tomb. She must have sacrificed them all. Now she prays to their silent ghosts.

We've passed Two's test. Now triumphant music.

...I hate this Gendarme Kenshi. I've died three times to it.

Okay, fourth time w/ potion's the charm. Liked running back through the Queen's Recruit area. "The Palace: Just like the province, it exists only to please the Queen." I guess that is a technically correct read of her desire to create a peaceful land.

The Market Square is our town center. Aelumia is a whole region, so the 'town' has to be a subsection. Fuhue's scheduling is apparently quite dumb. Clock kings, I tell ya.

...heh, meeting the Businessman again. Amazing.

...And it cuts there! Wow! Just when I was like "ugh, this has been going for two hours, I needed to do something else today". You're clearly expected by the music to immediately run into Apotheosis, but I won't be doing that. That's for tomorrow.

...God, I'll be done with Fruma by tomorrow. Most anticipated content update, and even at my glacial pace it's been... well, okay, a month ain't bad.

________________________________

I suspect the legendary 'Anathema' is the secret weapon of the Dark. There's really nothing else it could be this late in the game.

 

I'm kinda sad that I didn't stick around in Light Cinfras much because those Amber Bells were really cool. And I didn't attack the Cherubs enough.

 

They are indeed other futures, im glad at least one person clocked that analogy.

You're right here! Dark assimilates stuff into itself, while Light scrapes all the paint off the canvas to make its own things.

This isn't meant to be your actions directly, it's just meant to be what would happen if the Realms of influence weren't kept in check.

 

What I meant was, Dark seems organic and Light seems inorganic, and Dark seems chaotic while Light seems ordered, so I figured: Light judges life as Dark, Dark judges order as Light, so Dark seeks to eliminate order and Light seeks to eliminate life.

 

Assuming that Apotheosis is longer than Ensemble of Hope, I do not have the time to play it today. 2-3 hours doesn't fit into my schedule unless I make my problems worse.

But I do have a whole Aelumia Citadel to explore, and SDs to collect. I need the XP for Apotheosis anyway.

 

War is Chaos, Light and Dark are Order.

 

Odd.

________________________________

"Haha," Says Queen, "Everything Okay, Province Safe"

I get the impression this is Aelumia's premier satirical newspaper.

________________________________

Fruma was ostensibly founded 800 years ago. Obviously, older versions long predate the Queen's organisation. I imagined the Queen's rule to be thousands of years old, but... well. The Equinox was only 1000 years ago, and she can't have gotten into the world before that.

________________________________

I'm highlighted in blue not to buy the expensive drinks. That would usually indicate an SD, but Aelumia only has one (filed under the Highlands), and it's in the University. So that's probably a gag at the expense of the hairs of the player's wealth.

________________________________

Good lord, Aelumia's dangerous. It's packed with minibosses in tight quarters. Almost perfectly gets across the theme of active revolution here, but you'd need for there to be an allied side present and actively fighting to make things hectic enough.

 

Okay, the first random cave I did apparently has a secret, Spymaster Two, in it?? I assume that's the purple person at the telescope??

I also fought a Sun Judge, by which I mean I put up a party on Pfinder and someone killed it for me because I absolutely could not. Apparently if you try to fly above Aelumia you'll get lasered and killed. But I didn't do that before fighting the Judge.

Ah, the person was an Inquisitor. They were watching... what, the Roughworks? I think the implication is that they were watching Elise specifically... but she's dead.

________________________________

Pff. Sudoku gardening for a SD.

________________________________

Okay this is not sudoku. What is this. I've seen people play this. I don't play this. I will guess the rules.

________________________________

Oh! It's a butterfly!

________________________________

I subtly screwed it up. Argh.

________________________________

If I'd been designing Aelumia, I would have given it a strong theme of Overworld Dungeon. To some degree it accomplishes this. But Aelumia really ends up being a hectic dash, searching for key points, because the enemies are so ridiculously powerful that I can't fight them. Someone with a strong build could - I watched an Acrobat kill the Sun Judge in very good time, and presumably that would make killing the regular Aelumian enemies fairly easy - but I'm still qualified to detect difficulty spikes, and I haven't been killed by overworld enemies in a while. In any case it's a maze full of ridiculous enemies and that's not really Overworld Dungeon. At least not a good one.

I mean, it's still high-quality, it's Fruma.

 

Different inquisitor

________________________________

Everyone else I've seen has said Aelumia is their favorite region specifically because its so hectic and tight and the enemies are so strong, youre the one person ive seen thusfar who has had a negative reaction.

 

...Did that Chancellor know we're not a student? (Did figure out the puzzle.)

________________________________

Tasim is 'Special Sovereign'. Huhuhu. Queen, what are you doing.

________________________________

The thing is, if the enemies are too strong I just run through them. They're an annoyance. An annoyance which sends me back to the Market Square several times before I finally figure out how to run past them correctly. (Also the Sun Judge is just insane. That's a bigger health pool than most main-quest bosses.)

To be fair, at this point I'm running Morph for the endgame levels. I assume that at this point it's not the greatest? But it shouldn't be super outclassed, you've said strength scales slower at 100-120. And it was handling every other region perfectly fine, the only troubles I've had are the interminable boss fights.

My favorite region aesthetically is the Highlands. In terms of actual gameplay, it has to be the Roughworks; I think that's the strongest chapter of the Fruma questline I've played thus far, and Apotheosis would have to do a lot of work together with Ensemble of Hope to flip my opinion to Highlands. Every region is fairly strong, but thus far only Auburn and RW have been properly stellar, to me. Mistwoods felt like filler - it wasn't, but there was a definite sense that something was missing. An introduction to Aldwell, the subplot with Deraj. Highlands... I mean, I don't remember any quest super well - my memory's bad, and because these are all a chain they blend together - but thus far what have we done?

We arrived alone with Sui. She wanted to vent her rage by attacking Majin immediately, but we diverted her to instead setting up in the Highlands. We got ourselves a hotel room and investigated the local chapter of revolutionaries, only to find that despite their high position they were vapid and incompetent. Then we attacked Majin's castle, with Sui heading for Rex and Zeph while we 'distracted' Majin with a tour of his house and then meeting Two at the overlook to get key lore. Also at some point before that Tasim yelled at us to come over to the dam and he complained that we killed his gay lover consensually. After meeting Two and collecting everyone, we started Ensemble of Hope. Rex formed a plan to form better plans by reconnecting with the Canopy and finding some nebulous resources in Auburn (I think just Kaio?). This went off more-or-less without a hitch (just an annoyingly long wave fight), and so we collected every surviving member of all 3 resistance groups. The ultimate plan we formed was to distract the Queen with an attack at the gates, us taking our audience, and a riot while the real strike team attacked the Market Square via tunnels in the massive mountain under Aelumia, which happened off-screen and was entirely successful, setting up our home base given that Aelumia, although narratively a city, is not mechanically a city. Our audience was sour; we confirmed that Soosu wasn't executed despite the public message about the Soosu Incident, but it turned out that the Queen's Plan for us involved betraying the revolution and then doing whatever-the-hell. We rejected this, but avoided execution because of the gate attack and riot distracting the Sovereigns, leaving behind Sovereign Two to kill us. She did not do that; whatever her mysterious schemes to protect the world are, the Queen is not an imperative in them. She sent us roaming through her blessing to show us the disastrous end-states if the War isn't controlled (while implying it's theoretically possible to kill both Beasts, but there's no practical way to do so - handily resolving my 2.1 read of the setting wherein the only reasonable reaction to the world is to speedrun spaceflight and leave), and something about how we explored them confirmed to her that we care in the correct way and aren't biased to either side. She decided that this meant it's best not for her to kill us, although we don't need to stay alive to help The Scheme. Two then released us into the Queen's Palace to fight our way out on our own; I had fun with this up until the enemies got very, very annoying, and killed me repeatedly, breaking immersion since I respawned in Hyloch. Movement spells also let you skip almost every fight; with careful use of teleport, the only mandatory enemies were the Gendarme Kenshi and one Gendarme Sentinel in the Kenshi's room. Killing the Kenshi spat us out in the gardens (the Queen's Palace transforming at this point into the entry to the Wartorn Palace raid), where Rurie showed up and showed us the Market Square. Quest complete.

...I think it's The Missing Piece that makes me rate Roughworks so highly. Every stage is probably about equal in quality aside from Mistwoods, which is like, one point off.

 

Impressive. I struggled with it for a bit before giving up because I didn't get the rules. I got the vibe I was supposed to end up with a butterfly but ended up with a large block of nothing in particular. I assumed each number was an amount, so to speak, that you were supposed to apply to the puzzle.
for instance
1
1
1
I would have put like htis
invalid
blank
invalid
blank
invalid
but was it that it switched between flower and non-flower instead of adding a space? huh.

 

The rule that I assumed, from seeing people play with these puzzles on their phones, was that the numbers indicate the size of separate segments. The 15, for instance, indicates that the entire row/column is a single block. 1 1 1 1 indicates four separate 1 blocks (two of those being the outer borders). 1 11 1 indicates one 1 block, one 11 block, and one 1 block (going left to right for rows or up to down for columns); given the 1 1 notes on the second-to-exterior rows and columns, we understand that there's an inner border of invalid spaces after the outer border of valid spaces, so 11 must be the entire row interior to that border, since a 15x15 space is 11x11 if it has a two-thick border. Et cetera.

________________________________

Huh, there's an orrery here. Normal Earth With Normal Earth Continents is one of the planets; some are recognisable as Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, Mars, but not all seem to be the real planets. I misidentified one as Antichthon before realising it wasn't an equal distance from the Sun as "Earth". I assume we aren't meant to assume Wynnworld is literally just Earth with magic?

________________________________

The Aelumia Library secret discovery seems... distinctly unfinished. There's a sense of progression since you have to climb many sets of stairs to reach interactable books, but there aren't many interactable books, and there's no climax. The place is also mostly bare; pretty build, much wow, so many books, there's barely anything to do despite the sheer scale of this subzone.

 

To be honest I'm not a biggest fan of it either, it works really well for the Ensemble of Hope segment, but it's kind of tiring after the first few times you're there. There was one cave in particular that I had to cheese to get past the first room, because the enemies could kill me in like 2 seconds. I think a lot of Fruma is a bit too challenging for its own good, and Aelumia is an example of that. The Highlands, Mistwoods, Roughworks, and Auburn Forest all have a few mobs that probably hit rather hard, but they can be evaded. Practically everything in Aelumia hits hard, with none of the space to avoid them.

 

If it's any consolation to the hard-laboring Fruma team, I've found myself - at least in the past year or two - to be quite intensely critical of things I like. I find flaws very easily - especially typographical errors - and while enjoying Fun Awesome Things I tend to sniff out the Errors and Disagreements. Last year I found my current favorite video game, and this year I'm so incensed about its design that I'm planning out a complete rewrite, redesign, and setting transplant.

________________________________

I've suspected that I missed something by quitting immediately after finishing Ensemble of Hope. But, my thought is, "when your cave enemies are substantially easier than your overworld enemies, to the point where overworld enemies following you into a cave is a death sentence that may require you to sacrifice a chest, you have a balancing error".

________________________________

Kipchak Grenadiers have like 5-10x the health of typical cave enemies.

 

YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO STILL BE USING MORPH

 

Another strong opinion I have about Fruma is that the health of most of its quest bosses should be severely slashed. Bosses aren't actually made more difficult by having high health past a certain point; it just means that they take longer to fight and are more frustrating and costly to lose to. I think the worst offender is Gikyo, because they have six phases that each individually have standard Fruma boss health pools, which is completely ridiculous. They took like twenty minutes to fight. I recognise that sustain Lightbenders are one of the lowest-damage archetypes, being substantially designed as healers for raids, but come on. This is just ridiculous. I recognised a problem at the time of the first Syndra fight - aka the first main boss in Fruma. It's unreal.

________________________________

Man, what's even the point? Can't collect it over your run because right at the end it gets outdated and you have to quit, it's ridiculously expensive even if you do use it because set items are no longer distinguished from the mass of regular items that are almost always never worth a look, not even any options left for lazy people to design a functional build that gets them through most content at a suboptimal but functional pace. I didn't have any problems using Morph for 2.1 on everything n or did I have any using it for Fruma all the way up to the Highlands and now I'm being told it's Supposed To Be Bad. This is disappointing and irritating. I'll have to do a Build now. Why would you do this to me.

Oh wait hang on. I can just keep using it. It still works.

________________________________

I have to say I like Fruma's cave design, generally. They're a lot more creative than 90% of the caves in Wynn, simply because they ignore the fact that the system is called a 'cave' and use it as a label for all sorts of industrial sites. (Usually industrial sites.)

________________________________

Huh. You can cheese the so very annoying Gendarme Knights by facetanking them. They don't put their shields up if they're a block away from you and you're using Morph to ignore damage.

________________________________

Well, that's all Aelumia content done - and I have 100% cave completion, although the content book won't recognise it because some weirdo coded the Aelumia caves and Northern Outpost as level 119 and level 120 when you realistically do them at 117-118 for Xp. I have also discovered that, as I was expecting, that door in Market Square will later open, because if you run against it from the side of the industrial quarter, you're warped through. Faulty script wall!

 

I've just realised. Arnol feels like someone's OC who gets shoehorned into the story. Like, idk, a Kickstarter backer character. Kind of the vibe. You're expected to be into them but they're not and they're everywhere. But at least they aren't intrusive?

I've also realised that I still don't have a satisfactory answer for the tightening security on the Tournament and its ultimate abrupt closure.

 

How many caves in SI are actually caves though?

 

90% =/= 100%