Oli!

Ten minutes to start!

It's always 5:00 somewhere.

oh shit

Reminder that we're on for tomorrow at 9 EST!

This may be relevant.

i210 gear is confirmed to be among the things possible to pick up in the Airship Exploration content. I'm not sure if we know the iLevels of Void Ark gear.

Antiquated gear is the i200 stuff you get from farming Esoterics. i210 versions are gotten from trading drops gotten from Alexander Savage levels to a merchant in Idylshire, along with your Antiquated gear.

click this

There is a big difference between reclaiming an area that you know the ins and outs of because you basically designed it yourself, and taking over a bunch of hostile territory where other people are even more firmly established than you are, is the thing. They're also interested in capture, not nuking everything and dancing on the ashes. You can either chalk it up to the Garleans knowing what they're doing, or the Alliance being hilariously incompetent and partying it up while the Garleans snuck themselves back in, but the point is that they're back and resupplied either way.

Because the Garlean Empire is massive, and could totally dwarf what little resistance a hastily patched-together alliance could provide. Killing their leaders and disrupting their plans to use Ultima Weapon destabilized the empire's footing on Eorzea, but considering they control one and a half continents or more at this point, there's little reason why they couldn't have overtaken fortresses that not only are strategically positioned to their advantage, but also contain technology that only they know how to use. It's likely that the Alliance wouldn't even be able to get the gates closed without Cid's help or something. It's less "yay, we won and now the Garleans are gone forever!" And more "yay, we stalled them by killing their generals and destroying their Super Duper Doomsday Device so that we can buy more time and get our shit together!"

In the 2.x quests (after Operation Super Duper Original Endgame Content), they're treated as still being held. The hit that was done in OSDOEC seems to have only destabilized the Castrums, or killed everyone originally in them, prompting the Garleans to send more. To unlock the Binding Coils, you have to kill your way into Limsa's Castrum in order to survey the dig site, and during the Crystal Braves storyline, you have to stop someone from fleeing back to their Garlean masters within the big Castrum in Northern Thanalan, and have to save one of your fellow Braves from being captured in the Castrum in Mor Dhona. When the Doman children ask what Mor Dhona is like during a cutscene, you have the option to tell them (in a rather reluctant way) that Revenant's Toll is a "stones throw away from an Imperial Castrum," implying that it is still a danger, and very much active. You also bomb the crap out of some of their supplies to sabotage their efforts a few quests later. It's therefore safe to say or assume that most of the Castrums have been remanned and restocked.

Postponed to this coming week, since only two people ended up being around. That said, please reaffirm your interest! I'd like to keep people on who already signed up, but if other people who come along want in, they might end up taking some slots if I don't hear back from the people I didn't see (Altonio and Nalli, you guys are safe since we already talked).

Adalhaid will come as MNK. I have the quest this time :ahriman:

Oliwat and his family have ties to the Order, so he'd be down for this.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Give it a go, you'll like RP more as a result. I'd have to Fantasia + Name Change, but that'd cost me too much. And I'm too busy for a third character. Keep the character and name. Just change their concept.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Give it a go, you'll like RP more as a result.

She's already on Balmung. I already started RPing with her. I would honestly just suggest retconning the character. It's not as bad as it sounds, and there are honestly more interesting, more open, and more lore-friendly approaches to the sort of themes you want to get at.

I've got you covered. Dozolmeloc Gem is proof that Forename is true black mage. Gem brims with magical power. Without the Gem of Shatotto, impossible to control, the most powerful black magic is! Squaaawk! Lost control, these mages did. Aether within their own bodies ignited! Burned alive from the inside. Painful way to die, it is.

You can keep the emotionless nature. Some people have trouble expressing emotions. Others, due to upbringing or physical trauma, are incapable of expressing, understanding, or describing emotions. Maybe something went wrong in the cloning process. Maybe she was "programmed" that way (and we know that some form of mental programming exists for clones; the two encountered in the Crystal Tower storyline had the memories of their original copies imprinted into them).

There are plenty of interesting things that you can do with clones, including but not limited to: -- Pondering whether or not artificial life is really life. -- Pondering whether or not you have a "soul." -- Reflecting on your legacy as one of the last remaining living remnants of a power-hungry and honestly rather terrible society. -- Reflecting on the fact that you have ties to a society that not only no one else has, but also happens to be dead. -- Reflecting on memories embedded into your brain that may or may not be yours. -- Are you really the person you're a clone of, or someone different? -- People sure are gonna want to come after you in order to get some of that Allagan Knowledge Goodness. See? Tons of stuff, and all good.

It's more than just a face and a mind, really. For a machine to be a machine while still not knowing it, they would have to: -- Not only eat and drink, but starve and stop functioning if they don't. -- Crap and piss after they eat and drink. -- Sweat. -- Not only breathe, but require breath. -- Take visible, human-like damage, regardless of whether or not they can feel it (bruise, bleed, break, etcetera.) -- Weigh within the normal confines of a humanoid (the metal, stone, etc, that Allagans make their tech out of is heavy stuff). -- Not interact in fishy ways when encountered with energy or metals (magnetism, etc). -- Not interact in fishy ways when encountered with liquid (short-out, lose articulation in their joints, etc). -- Have facial expressions that are built-in and perfectly articulated, something that we, with all our current real-world technology, are not yet capable of properly doing. -- Probably some other stuff I didn't think about. Now, other things aside, as soon as you've gotten to the point where you've built a robot that can take a shit and bleeds when you cut their robo-arm off, not only have you gotten to the point of Questionably Robotic, but also the point of Questionably Useful. Why would you go through all the time and thought needed to build a working digestive system for a robot, especially when your civilization has done a bang-up job of growing their cloning and biological industries? It just seems unnecessary. I think you could get more mileage out of an Allagan clone.

Meet my new Highlander character, Chocobo-bo Cho-Choco.

They don't even have faces, and they're likely mindless as well. Also, if the character is already made, Retcons are still possible. The OP asked for advice and thoughts, and we're giving them.

The two with the afros look so happy with their lives. It's amazing. Afros make everything better, I can confirm this. mod note: merged in from another thread

To get back on topic: I wouldn't do it. As stated beforehand, the ability of Allagans to make robots that would require Rick Deckard to pull out his Blush Response tester is questionable. They can make things that look like humanoid mannequins, but they're still markedly inhuman. The real prowess of the Allagans sits in genetic and biological manipulation, so a Clone would go over more nicely, while still allowing for trans-human and existential themes. Don't get me wrong, I love robots. I think robots are great. I shove robots into every piece of fiction I make because F-Yeah, Robots. But I don't think that there's enough in the setting to justify it other than using Allagans as an Ancient Civilization version of Applied Phlebotinum through the logic of "they can do all this other stuff, why not This," not to mention that I don't think there's enough In-Universe hooks to really be able to play a character like that out to their fullest. Other than running around and poking Allagan ruins to make Slightly Cooler Stuff Than Usual happen, there's very little that Being A Robot opens up for a character like that.