Eulora Special Playable Character List

I started re-writingⁱ the list of SPCs for Eulora like normal people, on a napkin. Then it ran long so I moved to a machine, but as I was firing up the editor I realised I'm actually trying to use the wrong tool for the job. After all, youⁱⁱ'd just as rather peek, right ? So here goes :

• The Vampire. Should be a superset of the thief style (can't go into towns, has to live off land broadly speaking) with the added benefit of only being able to move at night and having to feedⁱⁱⁱ off people's^iv BPs^v. Gets some vampire-ish bonuses and of course the point of being a special in the first place : Immortality^vi. Social.^vii
• The Lich. The oldest and therefore one of the most fleshed out^viii of these, the Lich is basically a town-degrader / living curse with fixed position. It will be expensive to get, tough as nails yet very rewarding if destroyed.
• The Ent. You know, ancient tree. Roughly the opposite of the Lich, except not as effectual, and also not ~actually~ immortal.^ix About as expensive to get as the vampire, but not social.
• The Grim Reaper. You probably need to be sitting down for this. So : when a character's time comes, his name is put in a list. The Grim Reaper goes through that list, pops out of nowhere and... attacks the player. If the Grim Reaper is defeated, the victor can... step up and... take up his mantle, thereby becoming the next Grim Reaper! Yep, that's right, PC Grim Reaper and also the ultimate PvP character : you get to teleport to players at the head of armies you didn't even have to pay for and pluck their head off like a chicklet's. How about that ?
• The Shambling Abomination. This chthonic horrorh sews on parts of its defeated foes to its own body. Colossal.^x
• Ghost. If you die, you have the option to stay on as a Ghost. Your principal preoccupation will be to sneak around people's houses at night and torture/murder their children.^xi
• Players will also be able to ascend to divine status (there's a Pantheon of 7 major gods contemplated^xii plus a bunch of smaller fare^xiii, and players can totally become these but that's all I'm going to say for now. Also there's things players can become that don't specifically grant Immortality and therefore are not on this list (Werewolf, Spider Queen etc).

That's about it, maybe I'll add more later. Any artists feel tinkled by all this ?

1. Most of what I do as head designer for that game, or as a writer, or come to think about it as a businessman generally, is re-writing. Try it sometime. [↩]
2. The "you" being contemplated here has been following along and consequently is already well informed on the topic. There's just no practical way to provide a general purpose introduction, Eulora sits by now atop a too high pile of history and is much too complex to casually introduce in a few paragraphs for the needs of the disinterested public. [↩]
3. You get it, everyone else has to pay for their food -- but not this guy.

   As you might intuit, the Creator is not particularly fond of the accursed race! Just like in the legend, except meaningfully in context and for rather obvious reasons. This, incidentally, is my point of pride with Eulora -- that it makes sense, actual, honest to God, meaningful proper sense of all sorts of things you might have heard before playing but never actually thought about nor properly understood. Because it didn't really relate before. [↩]

4. All the Specials are PvP oriented. [↩]
5. Blood Points regenerate while resting, but it takes food to rest. Obviously. [↩]
6. Immunity from old age death. [↩]
7. Meaning it could probably start a coven. Moderately hard to achieve, as far as these go, because of the social angle. Historically vampirism has been a very transparent literary cover for homosexuality, and I intend to honor that tradition, so if you know someone who's in, you will probably be thereby able to join -- provided you can put up with the drawbacks, of course. [↩]
8. It's interesting to read four year old statements like that. Amusingly enough, it's still broadly correct, if a little faned in the particular corners and edges that were only present there to allow some kind of solution to problems that were then perceived, but meanwhile have been otherwise solved.

   And speaking of this : historically the problem with the ECu's pegging to Bitcoin was, "what happens if fiats deteriorate significantly". For practical reasons you obviously can't have an ECu worth more than the average wife, nobody'd be able to play. Yet it's obviously not fair to simply dilute people's Eulora holdings, we're not talking bullshit virtual realities here, backed by bezzle and pipedreams. Eulora is a real place, not the fucking United States. So wut do ?

   The previously indicated solution to this problem was, to quote,

   Minigame announced at some point (I meanwhile misplaced the reference kudos to Daniel, he had it) that should BTC/USD ratios increase significantly, it will float the ECu, but by a degree of magnitude and through the procedure of increasing everyone's cash tenfold, and then adding nine times the base value of all their other items, in cash.

   Fortunately for everyone involved, the ever-expanding in-game meaning of item quality has resolved this problem in a much more satisfactory manner. Henceforth the last word on "what happens if ECu has to be floated to fiat" is : that whenever we feel like doing it, we will, by whatever arbitrary ratio. Player held cash will be multiplied by that same ratio, and qualities of items held by players will be multiplied by that same ratio as well. The output of items such as Magic Bags will also scale accordingly. This not only entirely maintains tight value coupling, but correctly rewards the veteran for his own history. How about that!

   The only catch is that now that the dollar has collapsed past the tenth of a Bitcent, I no longer see the incentive to do the adjustment intimated in the linked material. So what if a base value Multifunctional Samovar is worth about a buck ? Doesn't it look like it's worth about a buck to you ?

   It's true that high base values for items makes it harder to acquire them, which in principle acts as a barrier to entry of new playes. This is a legitimate concern. Yet that same high value also acts as a Veblen marker, which is a good thing in context. In the dispute between "easy and therefore worthless" vs "hard and therefore temper tantrum", the Republic doesn't usually favour the former side, and besides, as far as barriers to entry are concerned the impact of technological difficulties encountered by the walled-garden farmed chickens seems to exceed the impact of the problem here discussed by at least an order of magnitude if not more ; not to mention the happenstance that the most recent update brought about a slowing of both crafting and rare resource utilization in crafting that practically speaking has the exact same effect.

   In short -- we'll probably do one of these ; but later. [↩]

9. In the sense that you may get a decade of play out of one in opposition to the 18-20ish months the average character is currently intended to live. [↩]
10. The game battle mechanic will follow a triplet, whereby all units can be qualified as Hero, Colossus, or Army. Armies get bonuses when fighting Heroes, Heroes get bonuses when fighting Colossi, and Colossi get bonuses when fighting Armies. So basically, if you get real high Leadership and hire a bunch of NPC archers and swordsmen and so on, you'll be moving about the map with an Army. If you just pump up your own battle skills, you'll be a hero - not really able to take on an army, no, but the only hope the town's got when the dragon comes. Or for that matter the Special Character -- no matter how rich your following they're not about to fight the Grim Reaper for your sake. [↩]
11. Children are integral to Euloran life because when you die "you" move on to your successor. Now imagine you spent half a year grooming this future great mage only to have a ghost strangle him in the cradle! [↩]
12. Because hey, 7 months in the Euloran weekly year. [↩]
13. Like you know, go through a lot of bad plastic surgery, become a total gorgon and therefore the Medusa. Or fuck Diana the Virgin Huntress (aka Mary the Mother of Ineptitude in later renditions) so god damned well she makes you a slightly better hunter. [↩]