Misteyes

Well, I play a member of Stillglade Fane's mage police (or extraterritorial murder team, depending on how you look at it). If your character is openly a black mage, I'd be happy to hit you up with that as a hook. If your character is more subtle about their black magic, you might find some like minded souls in the Mysterium. There's a few other mage-LS's/FC's out there, but I don't want to speak for them.

No connection to other FF worlds that we know of. During the Lightning Returns crossover event, Yoshi P. did say that there was a basis for it in FFXIV's cosmology, and made a big deal about how it was "the real" Lightning. Presumably, if the FFXI event was also canon, it could be inferred that Vana'diel is also one of the reflections. None of this is confirmed to be the case of course, and even if it was, it would not necessarily mean that any game in the series besides 11 and 13 had reflections.

I just assume it's that the organ was damaged in a fight. If you want to get bat wings off of bats, you need to kill them without pulverizing them, transmuting their bones into spiders, or blowing them into itty bitty pieces.

Actually (and this is what I meant about my opinions having changed over the years), I find that as a healer, I have very little investment or control over what my character is actually capable of. If someone loses a finger and they want to play a nine-fingered character, obviously we can't heal it - but it goes the other way, too! If someone calls to my character on a linkpearl, begging for her to come quick, she gets there, and they have their arm ripped off. If I say, "I'm sorry, I can try to stop the bleeding, but I won't be able to give you your arm back," when they were hoping to be magicked back to perfect health with a few days bedrest, that's in many ways worse than healing someone who didn't want it. We healers are exactly as powerful as people tell us to be, no matter what the lore says.

To call this out specifically - one of the SCH quests has you go around and heal those people, and you actually do miracle many of them back to health in a single spell. They recover instantly, despite their ailments having plagued them for months (even complicated illnesses like alcoholism and PTSD). That would seem to refute the idea that magical healing can't heal old wounds, but I chalk this up to the WoL being special. The "average magical healer" wouldn't have been able to heal those people, or else they would have been tended to a long time ago. My opinion's changed over the years, but I think it's totally valid to say the WoL (and to a lesser extent, the other Scions) are leagues ahead of the rest of Eorzea. If M'naagho stumbled in with those same wounds to Maelstrom Command (or even the Conjurers' Guild) instead of to the Rising Stones, she would have been lucky if they managed to keep her alive long enough to deliver her message.

I'm not sure I agree with this assessment of the disciplines. In brief: Conjury is communion with nature and the elements - and to a lesser extent, the Elementals. Most Conjurers never directly witness an Elemental, but all Conjurers meditate on the elements. To a Conjurer, each element is important, and each carries a specific meaning. A Conjurer's meditations are contemplative and philosophical, feeling the element-tinted world around them and from which they draw their power. Thaumaturgy is mental discipline. Despite its its element-aligned spells, it has nothing to do with the elements philosophically. To a Thaumaturge, Fire is a tool for burning things - nothing more and nothing less. Because their power comes from within, Thaumaturges are very concerned with how to increase their potential. a Thaumaturge's meditations are forceful and introspective, controlling the ebb and flow of aether within their own soul. Arcanima is precise application. Arcanists study and refine how to shape and apply small amounts of aether for maximal effect. Grimoires are toolboxes filled with ways to more finely shape aether than they could with their minds alone. Arcanists don't meditate, because aetheric capacity isn't much of a concern for them. Instead, they spend their contemplative time practicing formulae, and staying up to date on the latest techniques and literature. Arcanima -> Thaumaturgy/Conjury: Arcanima can't create fire out of the geometries, because the amount of aether that goes into a fireball would overload their books. Fireballs are sledgehammer compared to the razors that Arcanists are used to swinging. Thaumaturgy/Conjury -> Arcanima: Thaumaturgy and Conjury can't be used to summon Carbuncles, because their tools (mental discipline or the blessing of nature) are too clumsy for the fine-detailed manipulation needed to create a Carbuncle. Thaumaturgy -> Conjury: Techinically possible, but hazardous to the caster. Ask Sylphie's mother how this one worked out for her. Conjury -> Thaumaturgy: I tend to RP that Conjury can use all 6 elements (but doing so is not the same for them as it is for a Thaumaturge - a Conjurer can't force an Astral shift in Nature to increase the force their spells, the way a Thaumaturge can in their own soul). Conjurers tend to be most practiced in the ones that are necessary for day-to-day maintenance of the Shroud, hence Earth, Water, and Wind. Conjurers don't practice with fire or lightning because no one likes forest fires. All this doesn't mean that a Thaumaturge can't cast Virus. They clearly can (game mechanics are lore, too) - but they're using Arcanima when they do it (with the geometries inscribed on a glove or a plate on their staff), not Thaumaturgy. Also, none of this applies to jobs. WHM seems like it would have the same limitations and CNJ, and SCH seems like it would have the same limitations as ACN, but SMNs absolutely can use elemental magic, via Egis. BLMs theoretically could draw on the planet's life force to fuel Cure spells without burning themselves out. I don't know enough about AST to talk about them.

I've been looking for something on this front for a while too; I'm playing a Hearer and would love to have some Gridanians to wax nostalgic with about the good-old-days before we let all those outsiders into the Shroud. If you want to get something started, let me know. My character name is Kerin Misteyes. (In-game is better than PMs, I don't check these forums except when I'm really bored.)

This is the second time I've heard this, but I haven't seen its actual source. The bit about deaspecting crystals as part of the refining process doesn't appear to be in your quotes. The closest being the comment from a Conjurer about it being from "long dead life." Do you (or anyone, really) have the original source for that laying around?

My RP background is Neverwinter Nights servers, which have a very different set of social norms than we see here (they resemble LARPs), due to the presence of DMs who have authority above other players. 1. Yes, a couple of times, but I'll focus on just one: My character was involved in a plot with very high stakes and lost. The DM overseeing the plot offered me a chance to save my character, which I refused. 2. Some of my long-time RP buddies quit the server. It was completely silent, the players didn't talk to me nor the DM involved about what happened; they just stopped playing in the days after my character's death was announced. This sort of thing is fairly common in NWNRP-culture, too, but no one really talks about it. We all accept permadeath as necessity, so there's sort-of an unspoken rule against complaining about a permadeath (especially one that wasn't your own character) - but at the same time, we all play for fun. If the death of a character makes continuing to play someone whose RP was heavily tied up in theirs un-fun, there's nothing else to do but quit. 3. I'd have more problems with someone who says that they'll never kill their character no matter what than with someone who says that they might kill their character unceremoniously. That said - I don't RP to just be an audience to other people's writing, and I doubt many people do. If you are planning on killing off your character, make sure that the people you commonly RP with are invested in the reasons why your character is dying, and respect the agency of other players at all steps along the way.

I push the button. OOC politicking and gossiping stops. When people don't get along, they talk to eachother and either work out their problems or resolve to go separate ways; either way, they are honest with everyone else about what happened. Everything else goes on as it is right now (or possibly goes as McBeef described; that's an appealing outcome, too). ( To those who know me: if you think I'm probably talking about you, I'm probably not. :love: )

I know from reading these forums that there's a few other people out there playing Hearers and other Conjurers of Stillglade Fane. I'd like to put out some feelers here. I am looking for Conjurers who continue to be involved in the Fane's affairs or the upkeep of the Wood, or who are presently receiving training from the Fane. I'd imagine it's a small enough community that such characters would know eachother, at least in passing. Shoot me a PM here or a whisper IG. If there's enough of us, we can get a linkshell going!