Roleplayer's Rantings - End or Metamorphosis?

Yes. Roleplayer's Rantings would be cease to get updated in the present form.

I think I should draw an end to this particular blog, as it seems quite lean on its own. I have moved couple of important posts from this blog to the new one, Splat! This blog (Roleplayer's Rantings) as such would remain here, as long as Blogger.com chooses it to be here, but there would be no more updates here.

The reason for the shift of host, is that, I can categorize my posts to a blog more finely at BlogCharm. The future posts peratining to Roleplayer's Rantings, you need to go to: http://www.blogcharm.com/splat/Roleplaying/. So, visit the link and bookmark it!

Novella

no·vel·la

1. A short prose tale often characterized by moral teaching or satire.
   
2. A short novel.

It was quite a while back, and when I was engrossed in the role-playing realm of Chaos And Order, that I stumbled into this concept. A novel or a novella based on the realm of Chaos And Order was planned from the very beginning when it was born out of the creative minds of my friend and myself. But I had not warranted that it would turn up that early.

About a month back, the plot for the first novella based on Chaos And Order was designed and was left at that point itself because of the great activity found at the role-playing forums. Now, the forum is vacant for the most part of it, except for one player character who almost ritualistically role-plays and is always there on the other side of the thread to post her part.

That being said, I assume, I have nothing much to do on this(role-play) front, and I should begin to flesh out that plot into a novel. As for this blog, I assume that most of the ranting here for sometime would be on that novella in the making.

A3 Events

Some of the recent events turned out to be quite interesting roleplaying moments. One event that I took part in was the Special Stones Event. And though I did not take part in another event, Kraigon's Curse, it did effect me a lot.

The sessions of roleplays unfolded thus:
For the Special Stones event, we were supposed to collect as many Special Stones as possible. The special stones were dropped by the monsters. And to obtain the rewards, we had to do something as follows.
1. Collect Special Stones.
2. Put 100 on them in a item storage box.
3. Use the item crafter NPC to fabricate a Big Special Stone.
4. Put 5 or 10 or 15 of them in storage boxes and use the item crafting to get a red box , silver box , or gold box respectively.

Well, it sounded simple, and I decided I would atleast get a red box. So, I set out on other quests, and true enough to briefings of the event-organizers, the monsters were dropping the special stones. Then, the day of the end of the event drew near. It was supposed to close by 28-Dec 5:00 am. 27-Dec happened to be my brithday, and I had a tuff call.

I had to slum and go against feeble monsters to increase my monster kill rate, so that I could get enough Special Stones. But there was a catch. Kraigon's Curse was around and that meant players could PK (Player Kill) with out the normal PvP (Player Vs Player penalties). There were all high level characters chasing all the lower level characters who were out on the hunt in the low-level maps.

It was a fun time running away from the high level characters, as my character, Yajna, the Warrior was still in level 16. It was totall chaos, and a game of hide and seek, and mad rush to collect the Special Stones. Finally, on 27-Dec 19:45 I was able to collect 500 Special Stones, make 5 Big Special Stones out of them and got myself a red gift box.

Now, was the moment of truth, as I crossed my finger before opening the box. I was supposed to get a item, but I wondered what use it would be if it turned out to be for some other class that Warrior. And then I opened it. It was a relief. I did not get any item, but I did get 1 million Woonz. That happens to be the currency in the world of Hellmarsh, the realm of A3. 1 million credits was worth all the effort spent for the event.

So, by the end of the day, atleast my alter-ego was a million buck richer. Now, that turned out to be rather good birthday for me.

Notice of aberration!

Those of you who have been reading this blog would notice that all the comments have been deleted. And also you may notice that all the posts were made on the same day, almost at the same time. This is the rationale behind the aberration:

The blog system had been acting up lately and as a result there was a serious crash of the setup. Luckily I could take back up of the posts, and I has been reposted in succession. That was the good part. But the bad side is that the comments were lost. It was not of my intention to do this, but not all happens as one wants, right?

I would also like to apologize to all those who had links to my earlier posts, as they would turn out to be dead link now.

I hope that the blog systems do not commit the same in future.

A3 - Art, Alive and Attraction

I happened to get hooked to the English version of the Korean Game, A3. One can take a side note that I had been hooked to Ragnarok about six months back. Anyway, it so happened that, one of my friends came to visit us, and we all pals planned to haunt the same gaming shack we did about a year back.

We had anticipation of playing the old, but still addictive game of Diablo II. Sadly, the Blizzard fellows had put up some patches onto Battle.net and the terminals at the GameDrome did not have the patches up to date. So, we thought we should try A3. We were pretty daunted by the effort it took to complete the initial boring quests, since we just wanted to get out and do some hunting. Since that did not happen, we moved to Ragnarok, and hunted for couple of hours.

But that is not what this is all about. (Yes, else why would I have bothered to title this entry as A3, right?)

After all that, I still felt there was more to A3, and visited it all alone, and patiently went through it creating a new character, a warrior named Yajna. Come to think of it, it was a good strategy of the Blizzard's to market a single player cum multiplayer game. That way, people get to understand the game mechanics without any rush and then pump adrenalin in the multiplayer games.

After that, I got a couple more of my friends to the same place, and we were hunting the monsters down. Then, when it started to seem pointless, we did come across some quests that were creatively woven into the game world. The first one was the Kadru's quest to get his hammer. This involved hunting a monster named Hemmerd.

Now, it was quite fun, handling these monsters as a team. There was another warrior(Agni) and a mage(Chandrika). Getting the Hemmerd kills under me was easy as I could just beat them down. But the other two were weaker, and we had quite a bit of tickling times, where I had to first soften the beast, and then they would take on it. Then we proceeded to take on more of them.


Then we went upon to hunt Breas:

Followed by Amadys:

The quest follows to kill quite a bit of Temple Knights:

I have completed the quest, but they are yet to. We are yet to get free-time that overlaps each others, and we would be hunting them. (That would be on the Reyden server).

Our RPing apart, let me give some links on A3:
A3 India Website
A3 Asian Website

And I also remember seeing some good wallpapers at the Boyis Website based on A3. The links that go directly to the wallpapers are here:
Wallpaper 1
Wallpaper 2
Wallpaper 3
Wallpaper 4
Wallpaper 5
Wallpaper 6
Wallpaper 7
Wallpaper 8
Wallpaper 9
Wallpaper 10
Wallpaper 11
Wallpaper 12
Wallpaper 13
Wallpaper 14

Thats about it for now.

Disclaimer: All pictures shown here are copyright of Actoz Soft and Ani-Park.

Diversion

The Chaos And Order RPG Forum did fall into the abyss of inactiviy.

But I know that I do not keep myself inactive if I can help it. Hence, I took a diversion to keep myself involved in the realm of Chaos And Order.

I went ahead creating a comic based on that realm, with races that are not yet introduced to the game.



I even hosted it up at Smack Jeeves: Firman Tales

Hope I do not fall into the zone of inactivity here too, and keep myself driven to update the comic as regularly as possible.

Another period of inactivity.

Yes, it looms ahead again. It happened last time and now it seems it will happen again. Last time, I and the other admin(Kala Yama) went on a vacation and the roleplaying forum fell to the haunts of inactivity.

I struggled a bit and got it up and running. I even found a good Game Master (Sakaren), but he dropped out saying he had a writer's block and he would come back, but he did not know when. And this weekend, I need to push away from my usual life, board a train and visit my parents. I would be there for a week and a half, and that means no computer, let alone internet connectivity.

Situation looks real bleak and I do not know what am I to do.

Writers' block

I have heard this before from many other people, and wondered if it was ever possible to exhaust the never ending stream of thoughts and ideas a mind would create. Now, maintaining a play-by-post roleplaying forum based game, Chaos And Order, I come to realize that such a thing exists.

The point lies in the fact that it is not the stream of thoughts and ideas have ceased, but that we momentarily loose the abillity to visualize them. This happens when we are usually overwhelmed by the immensity of all the things that are bombarded at us. Every stimuli results in a response and formation of idea too seems to be a response. Thus, numerous ideas stream at the point where it is visualized, and that seems to result in what all call as writer's block.

Chaos And Order was setup by my friend and me, by the end of Dec-2004. It seemed to flourish with initial thrust but soon it started walking the corridors of inactivity. But some where at the later part of Sep-2005, it kicked of again, and has been going in good pace. My other friend had issues with real life, and could not give any time to the game, but I trudged on. I even found another one, who chose to be a GM.

I just hope my present writer's block does not mark the begenning of another waning period.

Effect of commitment

As I said in my other blog I am initiating this blog as a result of the commitment I made. Setting this blogs takes a bit of effort, but I seem to have caught the groove of it.

I think that is it. Future posts should contain less of the 'origins of the blog' and more matter on 'roleplaying'.