KhorasForum

And I'll start off with some bug reports There are many links to the Coalition which are dead, such as on the Site Map and the big Ithria map. It's possible to do a Google search (Khoras Coalition) to find it, though.

Also, on the Company page, the link to "Drakkellian Alliance and Aslyum" is to the Coalition (though it doesn't work). Don't know what happened there.

Cheers, folks!

After multiple year hiatus, I'm back to playing GURPS in a fantasy setting, which can only mean one thing: Khoras! Just wanted to say thanks to David for keeping this wonderful resource going. Cheers!

Just wanted to say great job with making it 10 years. I've been active on this site only for bits and pieces over the past year or two, but I enjoy it immensely. Khoras is my favorite fantasy setting, and has become the default location for my friends and I to play in, whether it's D&D or GURPS. Thank you so much for putting your creations online for all to enjoy.

Great job, and keep up the good work.

Assuming that Khoras is a globe, and there are no other large continents that aren't mentioned, it would seem that if one were to start in the Shard Wasteland and continue north, up over the north pole, the first thing you'd run into on the southward journey would be the Shidar Wasteland.

Is that right?

On the site map, "Stone Beak" is a broken link. There's one to get you started ;-)

Ah well, too late and too much of a hassle. I've managed to hack my tracking program to do something like what I need it to do, so nevermind now :-)

Thanks for the guidance 

Just two quick questions regarding how the cultures of Talis and Kalimura would react to my adventuring party.

The PCs arrived in Orrojek, and two of them were identified as mages. Their magic items confiscated (they have just one, plus a book that was obviously about the arcane), and were told very sternly that if they practiced any magic within Kalimura, they would likely be shot immediately. After this warm reception the party bought some horses and rested. The next day they decided to do some research on Talis before they left, and went to the Flayed Priest.

While there Qulloch identified two of them as mages with a methkari crystal in his walking stick, and decided to get them arrested. While the group was reading in his library, he notified the city guard as to what was about to happen, then made it look like he was magically set on fire by one of them (he used some alchemy to light the back of clothes on fire temporarily). The two mages were summarily arrested and taken to that precinct's jail. They were told the next day they would be taken to the capital's prison, and would shortly have a trial. That night, however, the two used their magic to teleport out of the jail, and the entire party road their horses out of Orrojek, heading south.

How hard would the Kalimuran government track these people? Would they send messengers to every major town with composite portraits? Would they say "They're gone now, and good ridance"? Would they scour the nation for them? The group is currently a few hours ride south of Orrojek, sleeping in a field off the side of the road. What do they have to fear if they don't return to Orrojek? Also, how prevalent are methkari crystals outside of Orrojek?

Now for Talis. Humans coming out of the east that don't dress like Kalimurans: Will they look to trade with them? Attack them? Avoid them and stealthily watch to see what they do? The phellysians are used to karthasians, grum, and the bathynians. There are some humans and other races in Talis, but not much. So I'm not quite sure how xenophobic/isolationist the phellysians are.

Lastly, the PCs -will- try to get into Rexilar's ruins. What will the normal (non-Crimson Scourge) phellysians say to this? Will they wait outside like Myrians, waiting to kill them for their transgressions? Will they ask them what they saw? Do their codes apply to outsiders?

Thanks for the input!

I generally don't -try- to make things complicated. Here's how I do it:

-Get a very detailed world (For this campaign, I'm stealing yours).
-Present this world to the players.
-They make very detailed characters, with backgrounds, history, and motivations.
-I then create "shoves," where a force in the world alters the status quo for a character. For each character,this is their starting point, what gets them "adventuring."
-The characters move about in the world, interacting with things in an attempt to resolve their "shove".

Inevitably, the characters get involved with other aspects of the world, which may or may not be related to their original shove. The shopkeeper they talked to, the caravan they traded with, the dragon they heard about, the maurauders that raided them, etc. Even if when a player resolves their shove, they are hopelessly entangled in a myriad of other factors that will lead them to further adventures.

This idea extends to other PCs. Even if after 4 sessions one of the PCs resolve their own shove, at this point they have forged friendships with the other members of the party, and so will be inclined to help them with their own shoves.

The hardest parts of this method are creating the detailed world (Which is why I'm stealing it. Plus Khoras rocks), and engineering shoves that will keep characters going. A shove that resolves completely in 2 sessions may be enough to get the action started, but everything afterward may feel like an artificial continuation. Better to create shoves that can be partly resolved early, then expanded upon, then resolved a little bit more, and expanded upon again. This keeps the PCs in touch with their roots, their past, and provides a continuous source of conflict for the story.

For extra points, try to interweave shoves and storylines. In my campaign, the old martial arts master for one player could very well be the necessary person to talk to for another player's shove. This is partly just the Law of Conservation of NPCs (http://www.20by20room.com/2006/04/small_idea_the_.html), but can extent to other plot elements, too. Interconnectedness between factors makes the world seem to run without the PCs, having relationships without the PCs' direct interaction. This makes the world more realistic, and thus more fun :-)

Provided that the lighting conditions are -exactly- the same throughout the 30 hours (which they are), would it be possible to construct a single filter and apply it to the whole thing? Again, all that needs to be done is to make the video uniform in brightness (making the dark areas lighter and the bright areas darker). Since the dark and bright locations are in the same location all the time, I would think this would be relatively easy. Second by second editing is completely not necessary, I don't think. But again, this isn't my area of expertise.

There are 16 DVDs, all but one of which has 2 hours of video on it (the odd one out just has 1). I'm assuming this is uncompressed, as it was made with by writing a video feed coming from a simple IR-sensitive camera to plain old DVD-R+s with a low-end DVD recorder.

David, do you have high speed internet? Because I could create a torrent or directly email the video to you. Or I can snail mail it. At that point, however, we're talking about a turn around time of over a week. I'm currently working on another hack of our tracking program that may give us useful data, so by then I may not need edited video. Could still be nice to have, though.

Hmm...so it looks like Rexilar was in fact alive about 62 years before the creation of the morphians. Problematic, since he's supposed to have helped in that project, according to my campaign. Hm....

Two options:
One, bump the conflict between Threll and Rexilar forward about 100 years. Doesn't actually affect much.

Two, say that Rexilar imbedded a bit of his life force in one or several "copies" of himself, which went on living, doing things. These copies/splinters/less Rexilars may be needed to complete the ritual to bring him back. That is confusing and adds complications to the background, but could be cool because I already have two such mysterious NPCs that could be Rexilar copies. Very, very old Rexilar copies.

Of course, the party just wants to get to Rexilar to talk to him about the morphian project, and how to cure an associated disease afflicted one of their members. It could be they only really need to talk to one of the copies, then.

Hmm...

Well, I've done some toying, and I've done some fiddling, and I've deduced that I'm not good at this.  So, I need a bit more advice.

What is there in the video editing program world that is free and/or open source, and has a good user interface? Because the hacking that I thought I'd be able to do in Ethovision is probably no good, which means my last option is to edit the video itself. Now I can try to do this myself, or I could try to take this to a professional ::coughDavidcough::, if the price is right.

Of course, I have no idea what exactly I'm getting myself into, for either option. I have 30ish hours worth of video on DVD, all of which needs to be editing using the same basic filter. Is it in my best interest to do it myself, or send it to a professional? If I send it to a professional, what sort of rate am I looking at for this? $10s? $100s? $1000s?

Thanks!

Quote from: David Roomes on June 15, 2006, 09:56:56 PM
As with everything on the web site, use what you want. But feel free to alter whatever you need to for your campaign.

Oh, don't you worry about that :-) I doubt that Rexilar and Sorov worked on morphians in their early years, or that Lord Vaul is actually a morphian, etc. I just like to try to deviate from the presented world as little as possible, because it makes things a hell of a lot easier.

Well, we only really run weekly, at best. And I've sworn off writing my own summaries of the sessions, because I always end up putting in details that I didn't tell the players. Then the players read the summaries and say "Wait a minute!" and go galvanting on some "clue" I left them, in a completely metagame fashion.

So, the summaries are up to my players. And evidentally my players are bums :-) I think we are two sessions behind in the campaign log, but it might be three. They spent at least one session in Asylum, then sailed out of there, running away from the Company. They're about to make landfall in Orrojek, on their way to Talis to "find Rexilar." There are a lot of details in between, of course, including the Ring of Flesh, Orctown, the Agrarian Guild, the Company, the Guild, mysterious amorphous attackers, suicide, etc. We'll see if I can't get one of my players to right those up.

As for what you're producing David: put up what you want to put up :-) It's your site. But if you want to detail persons, places and things that are going to be affecting my players, I would be nothing but pleased!

I wrote up a lengthy reply, but then the internet died over here for a second, and I lost it. So, I'll just ask one quick question:

How can Threll imprison Rexilar when he's dead from sickness? Or was the dating just a clerical error?