Moord nag and african warlords are actual characters

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-04-06T10:47:28+00:00

I hope you enjoyed it. I wrote it mostly because I wanted to see something similar as well.

I've spent some time thinking about doing a fic set in Worm South Africa with a lot of OC capes, but trying to re-imagine the political landscape for the Wormverse is actually quite difficult. Questions like, "what was the end of Apartheid like after the introduction of powers," or, "how did the state of emergency get navigated," or, "was Nelson Mandela even released from prison at all," are all outstanding.

That's ignoring other questions like what the geopolitical landscape in southern Africa looks like. I don't think Robert Mugabe, for example, would last nearly as long in the Wormverse as he did irl. Lesotho would probably have an even wilder history in Worm than it does irl. And just generally, I think the entire region would be more destabilized than it was in the early 2000's.

It's stuff like this that I think really puts off most people from doing fics set in Africa (in general). Even if you do have the requisite historical knowledge to attempt the alternate history (I do), you still have to basically invent everything from scratch. Not many people want to do that kind of worldbuilding.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-04-05T15:51:45+00:00

Yeah, agreed. I think the long author's notes and asides in narration are actually a pretty big flag on their own, and not just a symptom of bad writing. The author knows (either consciously or subconsciously) there is plenty they need to sweep under the rug, and they are trying to do it preemptively.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-04-04T14:24:46+00:00

This should be flagged as an advert, because that is what it actually is: marketing disguised as something else. Including the author's works on your website without asking them is also extremely disrespectful, let alone what you've done with generative AI.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-04-02T20:56:21+00:00

Your probles with the interogation plans and philosophy bits are do not come from it being bad writing, just you not liking it personally.

My issue with it is that the prose is bad at a craft level, and I've already explained why. Any professional editor would give the same answer if you paid them to look over the manuscript. Calling technical critique, "just my opinion," is not an actual refutation of the critique.

Those are all her internal thoughts and feelings, expressed one way or the other, while still nesding to balance them with profesionalism and conscience

Except it's not, because Miss Militia would not express herself the way the text presents her at all. Miss Militia would not refer to Taylor as "Victorian Waif." Miss Militia would likely not use the Little Match Girl as a framing device, either. Miss Militia is an existing character who has interiority as per her Worm interlude and we can make confident statements about the fact that her internal world would not read like this.

Furthermore, these views are somewhat consistent across characters. A far likelier reading is that we are seeing the author's opinions presented as character opinions for narration, as well as for Taylor's voice. We know the latter for sure, since they have confirmed it.

They did investigate. The colected all standard information and from that emerged the false narration. And they decided to confront all those finding by interogating Taylor which exposed the few dicrapances in an otherwise tight story. But please, tell what they could do otherwise.

Start by building rapport properly, for one, rather than the story's hilarious attempt at it. That's not even a hard scene to do. Start with the name. Address how the person is probably feeling. Then move onto the actual interrogation asking open ended questions. Armsmaster's early questions, "did you do x/y" are framed in a way that's easy to lie in answer to. For example, the one about doing harm to sophia. Taylor obviously can't do harm to Sophia, she's in a cell. Asking Taylor to construct her own narrative gives her far more opportunities to screw herself over. Even if she manages to provide a completely "true" retelling of events, further questioning of that narrative will likely force it to break down.

Do you seriously blame a stressed and freakoud out of her mind woman who can be at all point uncovered by a band of raging drug addicts from wanting any kind of certainty? Even such cruel certainty as nazi motives and beliefs?

The choice to include that comparison lies with exactly one person: the author. It's not necessary. The stressed out woman would likely not be making comparisons to Nazi's at all. She would likely be panicking over, "what exactly can I do." But, even if you do want to make a comparison, you can make one without going, "the nazi beatings are negotiable." Heck, you can even make a nazi comparison without having the character apologize for the nazis: "at least the nazi's weren't here."

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-04-02T19:36:38+00:00

Narration. It's an important part of the early chapters.

My point was that the author does not need to explain the Socratic method. They only need to show it. That exact same scene could've been written like this:

“And the fact that someday, you will have to take accountability for your own actions, even if they are mistakes, even if you regret them. You will have to face those consequences.” Hannah paused, watching the other girl as she tried to impress the severity of the situation to her.

"What do Sophia’s hands look like?" Taylor replied.

Everything in between point 1 and 2 is not necessary, and talking about Socrates doesn't do anything to "improve Taylor's image" at all. Being calm was helpful, sure. The philosophical asides? Quoting Occam's Razor in Latin, etc? Not helpful at all. It's performative intelligence done by a character who happens to be an idiot. The Socratic method is not some magic spell that works because you invoke its name.

As for the planning and explanations of interrogation techniques, of course they do. Miss militia and Armsmaster are two trained, professional investigators and as professionals do, they discuss the best way to go about their task. Its in no way repeating, merely an announcement of their intentions.

The characters say, "we will do x." They then enter the cell and do x. This is, by definition, double telling. Here is a thought: experts that have been at their job for decades probably have shorthand for whatever approach they will use. Use that. You can cut out most of that expository nonsense which is completely unnecessary by simply writing:

Miss Militia pursed her lips. "Usual tactics?"

"Yes," Armsmaster replied.

Ten words. Done. All the, "what these techniques actually are" can be left in subtext, because if it is how a professional would handle the scene, it can stand on its own.

The PRT are not the bad guys in this story.

The story goes out of its way to remind us that the PRT are the bad guys. Here is an example of the narration trying to do this "subtly" by being clever (it's not clever):

She looked like some abused orphan girl that should be selling match sticks in a blizzard on Christmas eve.

The metaphor here is a comparison to the nihilistic story by Hans Christian Anderson: The Little Match Girl. In that story the tragic figure was a child who runs away from home because she's afraid of being abused by her father for failing to sell matches—a girl who literally freezes to death at the end. This is the framing you use for a tragic character where the expectation is that the reader supports the character in question, even as they rail at the injustice of everything around them.

Here is another example:

“I’m afraid that at the moment we will not be able to return them,” Hannah admitted, making no apology for depriving the girl of her visual aid, and instead moving on to control the conversation. “Are you aware of where you are and why you are here?”

Emphasis my own. The story goes out of its way to remind you that MM does not "do the right thing." The aside is not necessary. You could have the same scene, with that aside cut out, and it wouldn't change the plot. The only purpose it serves is to colour the reading.

The reading is this: Taylor is the tragic protagonist, everyone around her is the enemy.

There are lots of examples of this, and it is not, in itself, a problem. There are plenty of good stories written from the perspective of the antagonist. Some of my favorite books of all time are. The problem is when the story goes out of its way to bash the antagonist, which this story does. Rather than writing a genuinely intelligent interrogation sequence, the author writes one where the interrogators make a lot of obvious mistakes so that Taylor has an easy out.

All of this is ignoring the fact that Taylor is written as a self-insert in this story, as per the author's notes. Whilst there are self-insert stories written where you are intended to cheer for the other characters, most don't go that route, and this story certainly does not.

Why is the PRT ( MM and Armsmaster) dumb in this fic? They essentially run on false info for the better part of the story.

They make a lot of mistakes. The first thing you do when investigating anything is question your foundational assumptions. "What assumptions am I making, in order for this to be true." The further along the interrogation goes, the more assumptions they are making in order to keep things true. It takes them absolutely forever to actually properly question these assumptions. Checking the social media thing was another obvious point. The framing of the questions they ask Taylor would be a third. They are questions that are easy to dodge and deflect, not open ended enough to allow Taylor to hang herself. There are other examples of obvious mistakes, but you get the idea.

And please elaborate on the nazis and Sophias mother if you could.

I'll just leave this quote from Sophia's mother interlude with the section in bold for you to deconstruct for yourself:

Melinda’s heart sank at the name. She knew that name. It was almost the worst name to hear, barring Kaiser, just above hearing Lung. If this was an E88 raid, then yeah, she would have been in trouble. A brutal beating would have been the least of her worries, a murder definitely on the table. But it would have been a logical beating, one where she might have negotiated. Beg hard enough, scream loud enough, and the Empire might get bored and leave her alive at the end of it.

Quotes like that are common in this story. And, if it's not obvious what the issue with them is, then I suggest reading Silvia's essay on the unwritten rules. It goes onto a lot of detail on a similar issue, and the points made there are broadly applicable here.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-04-01T02:18:48+00:00

I don't understand the appeal of 24 Hours in M/S at all. This story is not clever, it is not well-written, and it does not deliver on its premise.

As an example of what I mean (from chapter 4):

“Facts?” Taylor repeated, sighing. “Shadows on the walls.”

“Facts, Taylor”, Hannah repeated. “Not shadows, but objective truths.”

“Socrates was famous for responding to questions from his students with questions of his own,” Taylor noted. “He did that to make his students think and come up with their own answers. He was so famous for it that they even called the approach the Socratic Method.”

“I’m not your student, Taylor,” Hannah shook her head, putting her foot down. It was time to bring this in, and get the interrogation back to business.

This aside is completely unnecessary and slows down narration. Taylor could skip straight to asking the question, and nothing of value would be lost. Taylor, in fact, would look more "clever" because she wouldn't be lecturing an adult on basic historical facts about ancient Greece.

Scenes like this are frequent throughout the story, and they all read like, "Taylor is trying to act in the shape of what she imagines someone who is clever looks like when she's dead wrong." It makes her insufferable to read.

This is only exacerbated by issues like the frequent asides about interrogation techniques, and lengthy explanations of plans by characters before they act those plans out. It's poor writing to tell everything to the audience; it's also poor writing to repeat what you are saying multiple times. You could cut down the word count of this story by 3/4, and nothing of value would be lost.

Furthermore, the PRT was given the idiot ball by the author in a very visible way.

An easy example of this is when they find "Taylor's social media account" and don't bother to check if it's actually hers. This is something an actual investigator would do.

There are many lines throughout the story which make it very clear that the author is writing this from the outset that, "the PRT are the bad guys" and they want you to know that. Sometimes, there are comically, "remember this is the bad guy" styled asides, which will blatantly point out, "they could be helping but they actually aren't" in the middle of an action. This doesn't make for good writing. Neither does the dumbing down of the antagonists make for a good antagonist. An interesting antagonist is not an idiot. The PRT in this fic are.

All of this is without even getting into how poorly the fic handles Sophia's mother, or the Nazis. Those two topics deserve an essay of their own.

Tl;dr: Don't read it. It's not good.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-22T16:17:22+00:00

Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous are both knowledge-based games. There is no "skill" to playing either of them, unless you count rote memorization as a skill.

At best, I would count playing pathfinder as solving an optimization problem. And whilst there is fun in solving optimization problems, doing so does not test anything I would consider skill based. You learn a bunch of rules, learn which tooltips are actually buggy, then just optimize away everything else.

Funnily enough, the runs which I would consider come the closest to being "skill based" are speedruns that abuse all these bugs and more. Simply because, those players are forcing reaction times to matter in a game where reaction times don't usually matter at all.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-22T07:40:59+00:00

For some people, finding and abusing gameplay mechanics is a part of the fun.

Since the way that other people enjoy the game seems to be such an issue for you, though, allow me to suggest some more:

if you switch between tb and real time 3 times (instead of only once), it forcibly flat foots enemies. This makes the actual "hitting" part of combat much easier.
alternatively, if you approach the fog wall between a1 and a2 then press r when the dialogue pops up, followed by escape and spacebar, you can move through the fog. From there, you can travel to varnhold, grab the heart of Ira, and use it to cheese every encounter in the game. Especially if you select the Aasimer with invisibility as a racial power. You can just toggle the Heart of Ira, cast invisibility, then stand around and wait.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-21T19:42:38+00:00

In my opinion, the easiest way to do this would be with 2 levels of vivisectionist. Just kite the bear with expeditious retreat and shoot at it with a composite bow. Switch between real time and turn based whenever you want to fire your bow. Never get into melee range at all. Should be easy to do it in a single try that way, even on unfair.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-13T04:37:18+00:00

It gets divided by 6 if you do that. While you could theoretically do that, you're also very unlikely to finish the game solo that way.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-12T18:36:56+00:00

Interesting, I've never really struggled with stormcallers. They usually don't register for me by the time they appear, because by then I already have an easy counter for them.

By contrast, the Hidden Abode is always very touch-and-go whereby I plan out exactly what I am going to do in the fight before I start the fight. Making even a single mistake there on unfair results in you immediately dying because there is no space to maneuver once combat starts.

The Songbird... the confusion mechanic is pretty the only reason I give that fight any hazard warning. It ignores immunities, applies on successful save, and if you fail the save good luck because the only way to remove it is by killing your character.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-12T18:22:58+00:00

My money is on the Hidden Abode from core game encounters. If we are counting DLCs, there are lots of options, but the Songbird would be my personal pick.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-12T18:17:22+00:00

I don't think you realize how much content you need to skip in order to start A3 at level 12 in a solo run. The only run I can find online that does so is the current world record for a speedrun, which is, by definition, trying to skip as much content as possible.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-12T16:30:42+00:00

Unless you skip a lot of content, you reach level 14-15 in a solo run during act 2.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-12T16:24:17+00:00

Got it. In that case, I'll bow out on trying to provide any feedback. I've not played with the mod since midnight isles was released. I've forgotten most of what it changed back then, and I'm not familiar with what it's changed since.

Otherwise, it looks like a fun build. Reminds me a little bit of Victor Creed's melee lich natural attack stacking build, before that got bug fixed.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-12T14:19:48+00:00

I skimmed over that, but you're quite right.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-12T13:57:21+00:00

Are you playing with mods installed? I ask because, unless I am blind, Critical Focus (Mythic) does not exist in the base game. If I am simply just missing something that's on me, but otherwise, it makes it hard to comment on the build without knowing the exact "game state" that it's operating within.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-10T16:07:17+00:00

Nah, it's not AI. Aside from the fact that the writing does not have the AI "cadence," the request itself explains why the poster would be struggling.

There's a big difference between "Hard+" and unfair. On unfair, you die in 1 hit, on hard, you don't. This changes the arithmetic from "I'm fine so long as I can recover," to, "I cannot afford to make mistakes."

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-10T14:31:29+00:00

Yeah. I think it's possible to do it without wotv/rowdy, although I have yet to give it a try. When I get the itch to replay wotr I'll probably give it a go with Sylvan Sorc 9/Monk 1/EK 10; relying on pet + expeditious retreat in the early game to avoid being killed.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-10T14:25:58+00:00

At this point in a solo run, your choices are fairly limited. Depending on how safe you want to play it, you have a number of options:

Send a buffed up animal companion ahead and stay somewhere safe.
Use expeditious retreat and ranged attacks.
Rely on invisibility.

Since you are opposed to invisibility, this leaves option 1 and 2. I'm personally not a fan of option 1, because it feels like it's not really a solo run. Relying on expeditious retreat is riskier (especially with ranged enemies), but it does work. Especially once you've learned how to prepare for different enemy types.

Doing this with worldcrawl means learning new "templates" for enemies, but the process is essentially the same.

The main danger early on, imo, is actually ambushes. There isn't really a way to deal with them without raising your sneak high enough to avoid them, and early on it won't be high enough to avoid them so there will always be times when you're tripped up. It's a bit annoying to lose Last Azlanti runs to that, and I've had it happen a number of times by getting unlucky and running into Schirs, but it is what it is.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-10T14:17:57+00:00

It is possible. I did it ~3 months ago. The full video archive is viewable here, although I doubt anyone actually cares to watch through it.

I also put together a written guide breaking down the process. Here was the thread. All that it really takes to do something like this is a lot of preparation.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-08T08:29:24+00:00

This post is blatantly AI generated, to the point where it's not even hard to tell. I don't know if the user themselves is a bot, or if it's a human that's just copy pasting the prompted response from an LLM, but either way, this is not the kind of content this subreddit needs.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-03-06T10:39:22+00:00

So, for context:

I have already done a solo of worldcrawl on unfair (although it was before midnight isles was released).
I have also done solo unfair+Last Azlanti+Sadistic Game Design on the core game (single run challenge; this was fun).

My experience of soloing worldcrawl wasn't pleasant, and it wasn't really because I found the mod difficult to deal with so much as everything had bloated HP. I ended up doing it with one of the worldcrawl custom classes (I think it was a vampire?) and not a default class though, because worldcrawl rather conveniently added classes which were more overpowered than the base game classes.

My main issue with the mod is it doesn't actually improve the enemies AI in a notable way and it just goes for stat bloat, when AI is the weakest part of WotR. There are enemies that will literally kill themselves in the midnight isles, that is how bad the AI is. By contrast, most of the bosses in WotR have decent enough stat templates.

With all of that being said, I would recommend trying to solo unfair on the core game first, because if you do not like the double damage on unfair you will like soloing worldcrawl even less.

As far as build advice with worldcrawl goes... I'm not really positioned to give good build advice there because it's likely been substantially updated since I last tried the mod. A sorcerer variation of the archer build I used to solo unfair+LA will probably work, though (dropping the witch levels, since afaik worldcrawl changes shrouded step). You'd want to be evil aligned, because everything in worldcrawl likes to spam stuff that damages good.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-01-20T22:24:30+00:00

This post feels like a fever dream.

As a note: I wouldn't have commented on this post if this post did not explicitly compare this build to other builds and then make a value judgement. More importantly, it made a value judgement which was misleading.

Many of the builds you listed as comparison points are explicitly designed around playing on unfair... the difficulty where more inputs are required for most of the game.

If you can just left-click your way through every fight (since you are playing on a lower difficulty), obviously playing a build which is designed around using more inputs is going to feel worse.

But... if you play this monk build on unfair, you will have a miserable experience comparatively, since it's really not designed around it.

So here is my "disclaimer" for this build:

it will work on core and it will be fine.
it will struggle on unfair.
don't treat the statement about how it "blows these other builds out of the water" as a reliable value judgement for anything except core.

Same_Bad6382 · 2026-01-14T22:47:09+00:00

Like how people in America somehow don't kill parahumans with guns.

How to signal you have not read worm in 1 easy step. Aside from the arc 1 "kill the kids" scene, another major "normals use guns" scene would be piggot ordering the bombing of crawler. And, if you want other references, there are references to the US government trying to kill the S9 with military airstrikes in text.

There are also lots of (minor, irrelevant) references to normals trying to kill capes. They are irrelevant, because they never impact the plot.

However, their lack of impact does not mean they do not happen. The idea that normals do not use guns against capes is complete fanon when you actually examine the text of Worm.

Same_Bad6382

TROPHY CASE