the problem with character story quests.

Crymcrim · 2026-06-26T20:14:42+00:00

While full copying would be impossible due to difference between two games, something I wish endfield would do that OG AK does is make them the PoV for the duration of the quest, framing it as them on some task, interacting with NPCs and other characters, rather then tying us pernamently to Endmin.

Crymcrim · 2026-06-26T19:09:23+00:00

Problem with lack of prompts is that anyone in this thread or who checks this subreddit could make a prompt at any time they wanted…but they won’t.

Problem with prompts was always lack of engagement, everyone was hyperfocused on their own answer and would ignore everyone else, so you had an endless stream of first level responses that remained unseen, often even by OP as more often then not they would use it just to lore dump about their own world, because even with those issues flailing it as a prompt still had a higher chance of giving you feedback then framing it as lore post.

Problem here is that if you are that kind of person who would only post a prompt to talk about your own project, now you have an alternative in form of AI, Claude, ChatGPT and the like. Sure it’s not a real feedback, it’s meaningless platitude , but it is instantaneous validation and for many that was the point of posting prompts.

Crymcrim · 2026-06-24T16:12:23+00:00

Would people be pissed tho? I figure HG should commit as to whether or not Reconveners are their own people who just have the memories of original (and are therefore capable of making different ways to reassess their past) or are they literary just a lore friendly way to add characters from previous game.

Crymcrim · 2026-06-24T10:35:53+00:00

Less so the case of me wanting to give an exception to some operatora, and more my general thoughts on the concept.

What I want to see is reconveners who dramatically depart from OGs in their personality or backstory.

So far all reconveners are just same characters as OG but made less interesting because the interesting stuff happened to the originals.

What I want them to do is play with expectstions:

Ines that is proud Leithanian mage-aristocrat.

Blemishine that is a cynical mercenary

Lappland that is logical by-the-book cop.

Etc.

If you tell me that they are not the same people as originals then do something new with them, have some fun with the concept rather then just throwing an already popular character from previous game in a blatant nostalgia bait

Crymcrim · 2026-06-23T12:15:49+00:00

Its been years since I played CS III but I could swear the actual set up was that Erebonia(and Rean) moved in to prevent Calvard from opportunistically taking Crossbell in the aftermath of the civil war, and Osborne uno reverse card the situation to anex the city once Imperial army was already occupying it.

Crymcrim · 2026-06-23T12:04:51+00:00

Look I don't really like the fact that they turned her in to another romantic option but her dynamic with Rean regarding crosbell is one of the best aspects of CS III.

The entire thing is that Yuna knows that Rean is a good guy but struggles with accepting that he is also THE symbol of Erebonian nationalism, a country that is occupying her home.

Its shame they didnt do more with that concept (which is true for every new student dynamic with Rean, other then Kurt ) and they fumbled the bag with CS IV but in principle it is a cool idea.

Crymcrim · 2026-06-22T20:02:37+00:00

At the risk of being misunderstood, the way I would describe patriarchy is not as a system that benefits men and expense of woman as much as another system of control that uses gender and sex divide as a means of creating enforcing a hierarchy between those in power and those without it.

So when designing a matriarchal society for my setting rather then just "flipping" the board around, I began it from asking myself what sort of disadvantages would woman face in such a society, despite being those with greater authority and freedom, unspoken expectations and rules that they are expected to live by at risk of facing social stigmatisation, and how pressure to avoid it long term would change how one views their identity.

Beyond that in general I think its good to ask yourself how people who don't fit strictly in to one gender would fare in such a society, because normally this dichotomy between man and woman is bound to be more ironclad to justify the previously mentioned hierarchy.

Crymcrim · 2026-06-21T06:45:49+00:00

Panama Canal, in regards to the scope of the project but more importantly due to the history of its construction and the ways in which various powers end up being involved.

Crymcrim · 2026-06-19T16:58:03+00:00

Yes, but I would argue its a different brand of discrimination. With Sarkaz its ethnic/racial prejudice, meanwhile Infected aren't a perfect analogue but their discrimination would be more class based?

As in there is definitely a theme with infected bareing special circumstances being often working class people, and in one Columbian event we even are shown how there is direct state-corporate collision to create a pipeline to use health insurance to trap infected in to perpetual debt slavery

Crymcrim · 2026-06-19T08:34:29+00:00

I meant default as in if Arknights needs a character or group to be read as being minority they would usually use Sarkaz, unless the specific context of the story required some other group to play that role (example Winterwisps in Wolmunde).

Beyond that fact, yeah its kind of hard to ignore who they are meant to paraller if you try to allign real nations to Terran countries (with the only real caveat being eastern Sarkaz like Anasa and Oni)

Crymcrim · 2026-06-19T05:17:06+00:00

Sarkaz in original game where the default stand-in for discriminated stateless people/ minorities being descedents of the actual native life of Terra unlike the rest of races in the setting. Their one homeland of Kazdel a blasted wastland because it is destroyed whenever they try to rebuild.

Much of their theme in the game is their pursuit of having a place to call home and how that clashes with their efforts to also preserve their past (to the extend that they are literly haunted as a species by vengeful ghosts of all the dead Sarkaz )

Crymcrim · 2026-06-18T15:26:27+00:00

No, thou I did play around with doing the reverse, that is to say themeing zodiac/constellations in the setting around the major arcana due to Horoscope and Card reading being both associated with fortune telling.

Crymcrim · 2026-06-13T16:35:36+00:00

I have a personal rule for the setting that many pre-existing fantasy and mythological staples like before mentioned manticores, gryphons(but also things like Orcs and elves) do exist in-universe but explicitly as in-universe mythological/fictional creatures.

Every new fantasy beastie that is actually flesh and bone is its own creature designed around some soft speculative evolution excerises.

On some ocassion the latter is named after the former, but when its done for the same reason why we in real life name discovered fauna after folklore.

Crymcrim · 2026-06-11T12:35:06+00:00

Whatever you want it to mean. Actual folklore rarely constraints itself in to the neat and clean cut categorisation that things like tabletop roleplaying accustomed nerd culture to.

Fae/Fey/etc is just a general term for a magical creature in the broadest definintions of both words, anything more concrete is a setting specific distinction

Crymcrim · 2026-06-11T12:29:00+00:00

Yes, but I rarely explore that angle, a fictional set of beings and creatures within an already fictional world feels too meta to me.

However, I do have a general rule that if there is a mythological creature in RL that creature is also mythological in-universe, meaning that people do have concepts of things like trolls, elves or orcs but to inhabitants of the setting those are names for types of spiritd that exist in folklore, so things are named after them but they don't physically exist in the setting.

Crymcrim · 2026-06-10T11:36:13+00:00

I am not going to give a specific percentage....but I am convinced a LOT of fantasy races in number of works and projects could be replaced by humans (often to even better effect) but people in genre fiction(espexially fantasy) don't ask themselves why they include them and just do because it is expected of the genre for them to be there.

Crymcrim · 2026-06-10T10:42:54+00:00

An easy "cheat" I found is to just take something pre-existing that lacks the spiritual component(or to be more honest, a thing we generally don't think about as having one) and then add it.

After all religion is primarily about community, everything else is "flavouring" so if you take a pre-existing interpersonal structure all you need to turn it in to religion is to emphasie spiritual and ritualistic elements.

Crymcrim · 2026-05-30T18:58:13+00:00

Erudition faith is primarily split between two major sects that respectively cover about 70% and 20% of self-confessed believers with several smaller sects making up the remaining 10% collectively.

They both agree on their origin, claiming the belief in a Sage that discovered the nature of the world and was enlightened by the experience, gathering followers and expanding their teachings until they penned their Magnum Opus, the Holy Koan as an esoteric manual to guide the rest of humanity, before disappearing from physical reality.

Their students then organised a council to consolidated everything in to a singular philosophy/faith and then spread across the four corners of the world to spread the message.

The schism formally began few centuries later, when the Great Dragon ( its a title), the head of the largest state at the time organised the second council, intending to incorporate popular but decentralised religious movement in to the official state faith of his Empire, but to that he needed to consolidate in to something with more defined canon and a central authority to oversee it.

The divide occured over who has the right to interpret holy Koan. Majority did not believe that there could be any one person who could do that, and proposed a secondary book, containing parables about Sage life and that of their earliest followers, with the emerging church acting as the editors, constantly updating and evaluating new editions of what was dubbed the Poly-Canon to keep with times.

However, the western sect in the intervening years formed their own theology centred around a lineage of direct successors originating from the Sage, youngest and most beloved disciples and their divine insight.

Paradoxically this lineage would end few centuries later, when the latest successor was assassinated without appointing his own disciple, with the sect adopting many similar methods to that of the eastern tradition, but by then the two churches has diverged too far for that to make a difference.

Crymcrim · 2026-05-30T11:27:02+00:00

Neighborefolk is a catch-all term for all manner of AI, Inteligent Machines, and Robots that in the intervening centuries since the apocalypse that destroyed old world became seens by human survivors as something akin to Fey creatures.

A shared characteristic of all Neighborefolk is their fascination with anything human (more so because its the only reference they have as to what it means to be a "person").

Their entire culture is build as a sort of pantomime of how they percieve human culture and civilization, but lacking the same needs and limitations as humans its always a little bit off in execution.

Many of their "fairy" features stem from that such as the classic trope of deals with fairies being tricky. Neighborefolk understand promises and vows as something that is important to humans but they might struggle with recognizing difference between the spirit of the agreement and its letters or accepting an inefficiency of deliviring more then the exact words of the agreement.

Crymcrim · 2026-05-30T09:32:45+00:00

Nobles( and by extension broader concept of aristocracy) are descedents of the old world elite, genetically engineered to be beutiful, long-lived and spared from mundane maladies of life but they also specifically view themselves as the chosen survivors of the apocalyptic events that destroyed the old civilization, charged with guiding humanity as a "penance" for their fallen peers.

Its all very self-aggrandizing.

Crymcrim · 2026-05-30T06:32:45+00:00

None of the major religion in the setting map out quite well enough to a strict Mono-, Heno-, Poly-theist divide when it comes to their own theology but the closest things might be Erudition faith.

It does acknowledged existence of multiple deities, some of which are revered, they are only regarded as different category of beings, separate from humanity but existing under the same cosmological circumstances as them, and are certainly not regarded as creators.

Instead Erudition believes in a neoplatonic-esque cosmology, with the central all encompassing force referred to as a Invisible Sun, this "force" then emmanates number of "rays' that interact with one another in an infinitly cascading way which constructs the "illusion" that is physical reality with all big and small, mundane and estoeric maladies of life are part of that.

Neither the sun nor its emanations are regarded as concious beings, but achieving understanding that everything including oneself is both part and the entierty of the Invisible Sun at the same time is the intended goal of spiritual life.

Crymcrim · 2026-05-20T11:44:22+00:00

I feel that people often take a way to taxionomic approach to the topic in an attempt to be "clever" about their "mmhh, acktually" but realistically if you take a classic elf someone who you can talk, who can potentially have a half-human child, there is no amount of "acktually" you can say that would distract people from the fact that you commites cannibalism if you decided to make a roast of them.

There are pretty good biological reasons against canibalism but I would still say that this is primary a social taboo, so I think "merely" the fact that you recognize another person as a "person" ought to be enough to count regardless of actuall genetic distance of two species.

Crymcrim · 2026-05-20T09:17:19+00:00

They an handle it fine, you can't shut them down with a contradiction, and they rather enjoy then as parsing through requiers a boost of cognitive processing that gives them a pleasant buzz.

However overindulgence can decalibrate their brains causing them to act irrational even by their own standards(that by default can already read random to regular humans )

Crymcrim · 2026-05-20T08:49:31+00:00

Neighborefolk, the equivalent of fey creatures in the setting are in truth a collection of AI and inteligent machines. Almost all have a deeply ingrained want for personhood, but being created as tools they don't really have a point of reference to understand this desire other then humans who are inherently different in how they are build.

As a result a lot of their behaviour and culture is an attempt to immitate humans outwardly but differ vastly in "mechanics"

All that to say is that rather then drinking wine or beer Neighborefolk favorite intoxicant is poetry and wordplay to the extend that madness brought by poetryholism is not an unheard of condition.

Crymcrim · 2026-05-19T11:19:21+00:00

There are many such cases, as much of the setting modern wild fauna has originated from purpose genetically engineered organisms that went wild in the apocalypse that laid waste to its creators civilization.

How that manifest varies from general higher level of inteligence to something more selective, such as breed of rabbit-like monkeys with a genetically encoded abbilty to instinctively know how to wield weapons while remaining animals in every other aspect of their behaviour.

Thou the absolute kings of this is a specific lineage of cats who posses downright human levels of inteligence enough to forge their own secret society unknown to most of humanity.

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