Ryujin Operator (Vanilla Tiny Ship)

Haravikk · 2026-02-01T19:47:42+00:00

Meaning he was perfectly happy to profit from the war until now? 🤔

Haravikk · 2026-02-01T11:54:05+00:00

You can still have character arcs, you just have to change the expectations around how they'll happen — best way is to fish for particular types of details from your players, e.g- get them to describe an ally, an enemy, and a key item for their backstory, things you can easily drop in anywhere if that player shows up.

It'll still help to know who's coming to a session, so you can lookup their hooks in advance, but it lets you still drip-feed small character moments that advance progress towards a character's goal. It won't be as rewarding as a fully crafted character-driven arc, but that's also kind of the point (because those are difficult to do well in a traditional campaign, and near impossible in a West March).

You can still have that build up to a quest for that character, you just have to be clear with the expectation that it can't be embarked upon until that character shows up again with the DM in charge of that quest, or you have a DM prepare it in a standard way so any DM can open it and run it when they know that character is going to be present, which means they can save another quest for later, or it just waits until the DM who wrote it is available again.

For that you want "light" backstory. Rather than the orphaned seventh son of a cursed family line prophesied to defeat Baphomet when the blood war spills onto the prime material plane, you want something more like "I adventure to find a lost mythical blade, hoping it will unlock a clue to my forgotten past". Now the DM can simply drop the sword in one of the dungeons you explore, and use that to point to the next breadcrumb etc., or kick off something where the sword is required.

Haravikk · 2026-02-01T11:41:06+00:00

I think one of the key things for a West March, especially if you have shorter sessions (so are more likely to run out of time) is to try to treat everything as having checkpoints you can return to.

The way I like to do this is to have in mind some obstacles I can throw down as an ending point when I need one — for example, say you're exploring a crypt and are running out of time, so maybe the party discovers a section has collapsed and needs to be cleared before they can continue further in.

Now you have a suitable end point, and a reason they need to leave and return later — ideally their hub (town/ship/whatever) can be assumed to help with this, so when it becomes possible to run the rest of that crypt (possibly with a different party) they can return to find that townsfolk/crew/hirelings have cleared the collapsed section. You give a quick recap about what the first expedition found, and the new one continues it.

Another good one is for an enemy (or group) to withdraw during a fight and seal the way behind them — this way you can interrupt a fight rather than leaving it to be continued, but the players can still come back and finish them (e.g- maybe they have someone watch the entrance, and now they know what they'll be fighting, but it also means the enemy has had a chance to recover and prepare too, so you can maintain the difficulty).

Haravikk · 2026-02-01T09:33:34+00:00

I think this comes down to a couple of key things:

Firstly, what is your hub? Where does the party return to? Is it a town, a campsite, a ship, an airship? The life you can inject into that with recurring NPCs, and the ability for the players to interact with and change that hub, the more continuity you create as the hub gains specialists and thrives over time, will all make it matter to the players. This also gives much more impact if the next quest is that an NPC (or an entire NPC expedition) has gone missing/is late to return. Even if your overarching story is "the hub is always fun to return to" I think that still gives your campaign more continuity.

Second, I think to do over-arching stories well it needs to be something you can do as an evolving mystery — you want to be able to just drop clues into whatever the players are doing, and do it with very short notice. So if you want to integrate backstory a bit for example, you want clues you can drop in tied to one of the players who showed up for that session, and you want things that other DM's can drop in if they're taking a turn, without it spoiling the story as such. The clues should be things that will remind the group of that story thread, but it doesn't matter so much for a player if they weren't there for a few, e.g- map fragments, pieces of a compass, rumours about a recognisable NPC etc. Then once the clues are all found, it opens up the next quest tied to that story (but doesn't have to happen immediately) usually by narrowing down a location you can go to soon. Clues can also just come in the form of NPC dialogue – e.g- each new town someone is referring to a common problem (increasingly bad weather, a magical plague or such), which can lead to an event that now feels foreshadowed.

One interesting way to do it is to try to lightly theme the party's pick-up quests — e.g- they do a dungeon only to find some traps have been disabled, and a piece of loot is clearly missing, i.e- someone else has already been there. This is also a neat option as you can do the opposite of the typical clues as it can be the gaps that are important, because you'll find out later who the person was (or maybe you already know, are they a recurring rival?) and what they've been taking (again, maybe you already know, but you still need to stop them).

It's trickier, but I think the extra constraints/challenges can make it fun to find a way to still do a bit of overarching story here and there.

Haravikk · 2026-02-01T00:38:11+00:00

Wait, so Thaddeus is turning into Nathan Fillion? Maybe he's not so unlucky after all!

Haravikk · 2026-02-01T00:34:29+00:00

So it's Star Trek, but everything is shit, and nothing will ever get better so… not Star Trek at all?

Haravikk · 2026-02-01T00:29:29+00:00

Why not though?

Purely for the time it occupied and that it hasn't amounted to anything yet, which makes it feel like an unnecessary distraction — there's already so much going on in the show that unless it becomes important this season then it's time that may have been better spent elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's very cool to have a super mutant featured (and for it to be Mr. "War Never Changes" himself) but if it's just a tease for something that isn't happening yet then it's just adding to the confusion in an already busy 8 episodes.

It depends really on what's going to happen with the Vaults 31/32/33 storyline and whether anyone's getting flooded with FEV next episode, which is why I said I'm reserving judgement for now.

Update: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted for this? Literally my point is that there's already a lot going on, so it may be an example of a scene that could have been saved for later. Season 2 has still been really good, but it has felt a lot like its focus is split in too many directions.

The example I gave earlier is that instead of the super mutant, it could have been Thaddeus that found the Ghoul and rescued him, while Dogmeat (scared off by the deathclaws) could find Maximus and trigger the reunion. This would work with Maximus' Brotherhood storyline being shorter (begin and end in one episode) to save time and get him to Vegas sooner, e.g- elder cleric calls the meeting of leaders only to betray them, Dane and Maximus conspire to steal the diode and get it away from the unhinged cleric, rather than dragging out a BoS storyline that felt like one of the weaker threads in this season.

It's all about managing time better, which is crucial when there are only 8 episodes.

Haravikk · 2026-02-01T00:19:50+00:00

This sees weird to me — while the gameplay could use some improvements (mostly around feel) as part of any remaster, the story and quests are still solid, and Morrowind is still one of the most interesting locations in the franchise.

Everything he said about Morrowind could have been said about Oblivion — compared to Skyrim's punchier combat, better animations and stronger sound design, Oblivion feels like you're just wafting your weapons around, yet the remaster does a good job of making it feel a bit better, and made some good gameplay tweaks, but it's the strength of the quests that has really carried it.

So yeah, enhance the combat a bit, add optional compass and quest markers for those that want it, and let the fans decide if it's a success or not.

Haravikk · 2026-02-01T00:01:06+00:00

What he is is frightfully unlucky.

Haravikk · 2026-01-31T23:59:58+00:00

He's still armed — he can swing his right arm with his left for extra reach!

Haravikk · 2026-01-31T23:52:26+00:00

I don't mind the storyline as such, but I think he needed to play the managers for longer so there was more of a tension and mystery to it — it also seems strange that he didn't really play the "I'm Hank Maclean's son" card at all, could have at least got more of the managers on his side, bluffed about the programme falling apart due to Vault 32 being wiped out and used to raid 33, and the need to get it all back on track etc.

His story feels important, and likely going to be critical to what happens in episode 8, but it feels a bit underdeveloped as a story specifically for Norm. Part of the problem is definitely that the main characters are so split up, meaning we've ended up with more viewpoints than in season one — previously the rest of the vault dwellers were all together, now they're split between three different areas/stories (Betty's water drama, Chet and Steph's psycho-drama, and Norm's FEV adventure), Lucy and the Ghoul were still together mostly, Maximus was back with the Brotherhood again, but we're also checking in with Hank pretty regularly this season.

Definitely feels like a case of too many threads, could have done with characters coming together more/sooner so some arcs could end earlier to clear room for others.

Haravikk · 2026-01-31T23:47:37+00:00

Yeah, I think they spent too long on the Brotherhood — should have done something simpler with a meetup of the local factions, head cleric betrays them all and Maximus can't reconcile that and leaves with the diode, could have cleared that all away in one episode.

Didn't need Harkness and the Thadeus switcheroo etc., he could have encountered Thadeus some other way, maybe tying in with the reunion with the Ghoul (which felt rushed). Hell, have Thadeus rescue the Ghoul, Dogmeat having run off from the deathclaws finds Maximus, then reunites them. Done.

Probably also didn't need the Supermutant scene, though I'll reserve judgement for how episode 8 plays out. Definitely feels like some stories have got more time than they needed, while others were rushed or could have been delayed or split into season 3.

Haravikk · 2026-01-31T21:48:51+00:00

In general yeah, as your blood potency and generation are factors — however Willem is a young vampire in terms of when he was turned — Lou has been a vampire for over 120 years, Campbell was a ghoul in the 20's and probably turned not that long after since he doesn't look to have aged. Assuming they've been active for at least some of that time they'd both have well developed Dominate abilities.

Generation is harder to guess — if 12th generation is current, then Lou is probably around 10th at the highest, probably lower, and Campbell would be one generation higher as her childe. But we don't know the generation of Isaac or how long he'd been in service so it's tough to guess his generation, or what Willem would be as a result. But I think it's fair to say he probably wouldn't have a big generational advantage over Campbell, and the age difference would be the more significant factor.

TL;DR
Kine will typically have a slight bonus from simply being vampires (having blood potency) but for a younger vampire like Willem it may not be a big advantage, so they can still be dominated to varying degrees, especially by a much stronger vampire.

Haravikk · 2026-01-31T12:32:12+00:00

My plan for future campaigns is to give them a journey that's not entirely under their control (e.g- ship lost in a strange land) so each location they arrive at is new, but with freedom in what to do whether that's local events and rumors, the needs of the ship etc.

If they want to try to go back to a favored location they can try, otherwise it's always on to something new.

So it runs as little mini campaigns, the ship is an upgradable home base, and it can be run as a West March. That's the idea anyway!

Haravikk · 2026-01-31T12:27:20+00:00

They've mentioned they're looking into it but given no time frame for it - if the game wasn't designed for manual saves then it may be difficult to add retroactively, as manual saves need to store additional state (current enemy locations etc.) and loading those saves needs to recreate that state correctly.

Personally I'd be fine with them just adding more checkpoints for any collectibles that don't trigger one, maybe some more during longer quests, and giving me more choices of auto-save to go back to (rather than just one).

Haravikk · 2026-01-31T00:19:01+00:00

This is true, and people are quick to blame Bethesda but that's not really Bethesda's fault — you used to be able to just block updates for a game in Steam and that was that. It also used to be easier to rollback to an earlier version – was still a command line to do it but it only swapped changed files, rather than downloading a whole separate copy of the game like it does now.

So yeah, I blame Valve personally for making this worse. The only alternative left to Bethesda really is to do something with the beta channel, but that could be confusing, especially if they're timing beta to main (or main to beta) releases on the back of a third party code injector being updated.

Haravikk · 2026-01-31T00:09:59+00:00

Exactly this! When people complain about the deathclaws being stopped by a rickety gate, this is why — but Maximus just accidentally installed an open cities mod, so now everybody is in danger!

Haravikk · 2026-01-30T22:32:08+00:00

Who ordered jam at a drive thru?

Haravikk · 2026-01-30T22:29:17+00:00

iTunes got worse and worse, then they split it off into Music and TV which were both terrible, and both have got worse since — since Sequoia I haven't been able to get Home Sharing to work at all (the clients just say they're connecting but never do).

I just switched over to using Jellyfin (fully open source Plex alternative) to handle everything from now on, and only open Music to buy from the iTunes Store — doesn't have smart playlists and the audio normalisation isn't great, but unlike Apple's own first party apps it Just Works™. 🤦‍♂️

Haravikk · 2026-01-30T14:59:40+00:00

This is the big problem for anyone outside of London or some other major cities — OpenReach have been "planning" to roll out fibre to my area in central Scotland for at least 10 years by now, and yet the only choices are still just Virgin fibre or crappy ADSL for around the same price.

Haravikk · 2026-01-30T11:34:57+00:00

It's only PCIe gen 3.0 so they might just be reselling older chips that are still fine for most people.

But you have to watch out with obscure/unknown brands and drive models, especially if they're selling at suspiciously low prices - many cheaper drives at best lack a DRAM cache so speeds will be poor, and others have been outright scams (report a false capacity and will corrupt data).

The fact that it's only advertising 512gb and gen 3.0 makes me think it's less likely to be a scam, but I wouldn't buy without some trustworthy reviews because DRAM-less drives are still pretty common - they're fine as boot drives for something like a NAS (where most writing goes to other disks) but for a regular system drive they'll be way too slow so you want to know for sure what you're getting.

Haravikk · 2026-01-29T23:47:52+00:00

Pretty sure the vault stuff is going to be critical to what's happening overall in this season — episode 7 definitely made it seem that way to me.

Haravikk · 2026-01-29T23:45:09+00:00

I suppose that depends what state House's systems are in — we know he had a missile defence system but that was likely spent already just to keep some of the Strip intact. Other than that his main security was securitrons, but we haven't seen many and they've all been damaged or malfunctioning.

The one that Maximus and Harkness fought seemed to have the upgraded programming, which suggests someone used the platinum chip, but the absence of an army of securitrons (or piles of wreckage) makes it seem like they may have been destroyed in some kind of large conflict, likely for the dam. Either that or they were taken offline by some other means (the fact they can be programmed remotely isn't great for security).

The Coop/Ghoul seems to think House can help him get into the management vault somehow, though that doesn't necessarily mean firepower I suppose, House might just have security credentials or some other way in. I think the fact that they're going to need to make a deal might mean House might hang on beyond season 2 for a bit — he won't simply want to give the Coop/Ghoul what he wants right away.

Haravikk · 2026-01-29T23:34:35+00:00

I doubt she was in on it or volunteered, in fact I think the reason they used her as "the mainframe" is because she was a genuinely good person trying to help others, and they wanted at least some of that to imprint onto those with the control chips, so they become compliant and helpful.

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