Shroud of the Avatar Fantasies

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Tahru, Feb 2, 2018.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. Tahru

    Tahru Avatar

    Messages:
    4,800
    Likes Received:
    12,170
    Trophy Points:
    165
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    Spite
    Please share your crazy Shroud of the Avatar fantasies. Many, if not most, of us has had a crazy or insane dream about it. Just for the fun of, share that secret story.

    My story made me wake in sweat some nights ago. I had not even been able to play for a while because I am in the middle of a big move. There I was in a camp. I was wearing my typical avatar leathers. It was a dirty place, not unlike a typical tent campground of today. Looking down near what used to be a fire pit, there were scrapes of leather on the ground that probably held food, tossed aside and neglected by those that came before me.

    I heard a sound in the trees ahead. It was as subtle as an elephant crushing bamboo and bones laid in it's path that drove fear straight up my spine with the shock and surprise of a lightning strike. As I looked up, the fog was thick strangling the sun with its weight. Through the mist I could just make-out the rock face that marked our destination, our safe place. The very tip of it was covered in ice that had frozen over it in layers like dreadlocks.

    We had no choice but to move forward as our food was gone. Turning back meant certain demise. While that should have been enough to make my feet walk forward, I was stuck. So paralyzed in fear that I was not sure if living was an option. Would it even be possible to make it? Would it be better, as weak and tired as we are from the long journey to just give up? Even lifting my arms to protect myself seemed fruitless.

    Stuck in this thought for what seemed like an eternity, I felt like I was trapped in a vortex created by an antlion in the sand. With every move I took, the pit was pulling me deeper and deeper.

    But somehow, and I really don't know where it came from... I woke.



    I guess that could be a nightmare, but it was not something I did not want to revisit, like a nightmare. I tried to reenter the dream to see how it ended with no luck. I have the same problem with my dreams of winning the lottery.
     
    Last edited: Feb 2, 2018
    Spartus, Sir_Hemlock and Cerus like this.
  2. Sir_Hemlock

    Sir_Hemlock Avatar

    Messages:
    1,194
    Likes Received:
    2,292
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    here is just a small piece of one of my fantasies...

    Avatar + companions Bonaventure, Majellan + Shamino, at some point in an adventure...
    Avatar; white shirt baring golden ankn. Long blonde hair, chainmail, shortsword, gorget, backpack
    Majellan; white hooded robe, staff with ram skull
    Shamino; green tunic, leather pants, animal skin wineskin (gift for Dupre), mace, flaming oil
    Bonaventure; ill/plague, bares weight on scabbard, haggard, staggered movements, plate mail /chain leggings w/bedroll, iron flagon,

    ...the party passes under black interlaced archways entwined with dark red roses, others with purple grapes with large dark-purple/bluish leaves
    a fastidious merchant opens and shuts windows depending on rain
    the towns inner cobbles deteriorate into mud imprinted with carriage wheels, horse hooves and the footprints of guards + citizens
    a carriage akin to Cob 'n' Co carriage thunders by, horse-nostrils puff with steam, the driver screams to clear the road, guards look on, nonplussed
    an aristocrat tosses a few gp to the street beggars through the window
    some shopkeepers have laid out various wares + market stalls outside their stores
    party walks N. looking for an Inn. Majellan + Shamino complain of ravenous hunger
    party walks through Britanny museum, the curator is busy dusting, plush red carpet w/gold tassels in room middle, inside exhibits are encased in glass with plaques: Gwani cloak, Korangs fang, Silver horn, inventory note kept by Shamino in SI, various books detailing Si, Pagan + Britannian history, skull + crossbones pirate flag etc...
    outside again, light precipitation subsides, the sky has cleared, atmosphere brightened, citizens enter the streets with busy routines
    party presses onward to towne center; LB Castle
    lower left castle tower inaccessible due to restoration works... AND so on...
    in the castle rear grow gigantic blue/yellow flowers from thorned leafy patches (the seeds were given to LB by a man from Skara Brae. he is an inter-dimensional time traveler who brought the seeds back with him from ancient Pagan, which was once a veritable paradise akin to Eden, before the destruction)

    ...the quest goes through stages until a girl child joins the party (the female ver. of spark, for comedic relief)
    Avatar is ill at healer so Bonaventure leads party
    Bonaventure is mortally wounded in dungeon depths, party on verge of starvation
    ...and on and on the fantasy goes until someone gets...eaten geez lolz thats enough typing!
     
    Last edited: Feb 2, 2018
  3. Sir_Hemlock

    Sir_Hemlock Avatar

    Messages:
    1,194
    Likes Received:
    2,292
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    I has this great dream once I was in a computer store + they had all the boxed Ultima's there + some others 'Ultima: Forbidden Sanctuary' add on or some such that doesn't exist for u7 + u6 part 2 lol? + I was pickimg them up when I came upon SotAvatar Online , gee, the screenshots looked like a really cool ver. of U7, loaded the game (i find you don't wait for installation or loading in dreams lol,), got into game, moved the avatar through the starting area + wilderness for 10seconds with joy + woke up :(
     
    Spartus, Leelu and Ahuaeynjgkxs like this.
  4. Leelu

    Leelu Avatar

    Messages:
    1,450
    Likes Received:
    5,732
    Trophy Points:
    125
    Gender:
    Female
    Location:
    This Side Of the Mountain
    It begins on a crisp mid summer morning. Fey light has just begun to wane and soft ribbons of morning sunlight begin to intertwine and softly dance through the darkness of the forest.
    My slumber ends with the sweet caress of the gypsy moths fluttering wings.
    A vast moan echoes throughout the canopy . Then a pause and a blood scream reminiscence of the ancient days of he, who is never to return.

    Nagii and I swiftly cross over to a sturdy branch and climb as high as we are able. A faint wisp of smoke is meandering up into the vast above the tree line.
    Again a scream of great agony. As I thought, another Avatar has trespassed into my forbidden valley.
    Nagii spreads her dragon wings and I quickly step onto the sothel and away we go.
    I am thankful the wind has turned gentle and is not stingy with its warmth, for often Mariya is angry.

    As we get closer to the meager fire, there I can see that Haggernab has the foolish Avatar pinned to the forest floor. Alas there is no blood, for she has been gentle.
    Now Haggernab's visionnage is not for the faint of heart. She looks perfectly beautiful to me and my kind, but unto Avatars she looks like a huge Liwyatan on land. Of course her smell alone does not endear her to human folk, but to us of fey lineage it is uneventful.
    As I perceive, the screams that are issuing forth are but those of enormous disgust and retching. Nagii and I can not help but softly laugh at this morning delight.

    Nagii and I land just slightly above the campsite and I whisper to Haggernab, "You have done well fair friend . Now let the Avatar free so it may scamper off out of these woods. "
    As quick as silver fire, the uninjured but quite fleet of foot human runs to the opening I have made available for its escape. Of course, this particular Avatar will carry a stench of great magnitude for a fortnight, for I have heard that Haggernabs mucus is not well liked among human kind.

    With a glimmer of amused laughter, Nigii and I start for home.
     
    Spartus, Tahru, Ahuaeynjgkxs and 2 others like this.
  5. Sir_Hemlock

    Sir_Hemlock Avatar

    Messages:
    1,194
    Likes Received:
    2,292
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    I luv stuff like this
     
    Tahru and Leelu like this.
  6. Tahru

    Tahru Avatar

    Messages:
    4,800
    Likes Received:
    12,170
    Trophy Points:
    165
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    Spite
    Wonderful stories!
     
    Leelu likes this.
  7. Spartus

    Spartus Avatar

    Messages:
    80
    Likes Received:
    184
    Trophy Points:
    8
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    St. Louis, Missouri
    I read/write so much technical stuff these days that my poetic vocabulary has atrophied to a withered husk. (That is one reason I like that people still write poetry/stories, and like the "My song of the day" thread).

    First, some context on my dream:

    I daydream about game mechanics, not stories. Like others that lived through the '70s-'80s, I knew a time when the "home computer" did not exist and then saw it enter people's homes. Today it is called the microcomputer, desktop, or PC. We had books, television, movie theatres, board games, the outdoors, school teachers, and our imagination. We were living the MMORPG but just didn't know it, as each new experience about the world, or each new thing we saw on broadcast television expanded our reality. My neighbor's dad had stacks and stacks of National Geographic magazines which showed him glimpses of the larger world, as even adults didn't know where the boundaries were. At the library, I read books on the unexplained, science trivia books, encyclopedias, and at home I watched Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of... to try to find those boundaries. We didn't have all of those explanatory cable or YouTube documentaries. There were old Verne/Wells movies from the 1950's-60's in re-runs like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, First Men in the Moon that we watched on projectors in school or on broadcast television that showed the early boundaries of reality, yet our real boundaries weren't that much different. We still didn't know what was at the bottom of the ocean, what was in the center of the earth or inside the moon... We didn't have to create as elaborate fantasy worlds, as much of the real world sufficed, as it was still a mystery...

    Today, partly due to Internet-enabled smartphones, we have the perception that the world and universe is small and that the set of unknowns is minimal--this is not the case. Once you start to explore or interact with the world again, away from such communication networks, without the filter bubbles, you go back in time and the world gets bigger again.
    My daydream:

    Firstly, in my dream, there is a spirit, a feeling of energy, a spark, that is internalized by the dev team, motivating them to build something that pushes the boundaries of what we think possible. I watched the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch on the live stream yesterday and that was such a spark. Whatever one may think about the event, the man, or the company, they did amaze many people, and this will inspire others to strive to do great things. Without space exploration, we wouldn't have Ultima with its space shuttle--it inspired Garriott the programmer to dream of such worlds (and later become Garriott the astronaut). I identify in many ways with this coupling of Medieval Fantasy Worlds + Space Exploration, being inspired to learn programming in large part because of playing Ultima on a "high-tech" Apple II+ while growing up in a neighborhood of aerospace engineers near the site of where the Mercury capsules were constructed. Musk, of SpaceX, was also early game programmer.

    My dream is for SoTA to capture this feeling of unexplored vastness, immense complexity, and mystery by having us enter a world, not knowing what the boundaries are, not knowing what the possibilities are. Early games had an advantage here since we were still defining what was possible (nobody knew) in hardware and the associated software. Today, the digital computer is fairly standardized, with compatible hardware and standardized game engines, so part of the mystery is gone.

    I do enjoy worlds that allow multiple modes of play, but I dream of a world where I can "travel" to a far away place away from the other people that are playing a mode that doesn't interest me, perhaps being the only player to traverse that space or see that thing. And I want to build my own mini worlds in this place using my own effort, knowledge, and time. In my childhood, we played with our group of friends in the woods, built forts, treehouses, dug caves, invented ad-hoc systems, we didn't just go there to explore or play with random groups of strangers. The real world is this way--we can travel across country and cultural boundaries, essentially different "rulesets" within the same world.

    I dream of a world so big and mysterious that people make it one of their goals to create a civilization for the purpose of understanding this world; to socialize primarily to help us categorize and uncover these mysteries, invent new things, like a center of learning, groups of scholars, a Library of Alexandria, etc. If people want to sail the seas or go to space, they first find out if there really is "space", and they gather the knowledge needed to build machines to go there. In my dream, you meet travelers from other places, far away, with different customs and rulesets, who possess machines that only work in their world, but not yours. Perhaps the travelers' machines have different properties, magical/transcendental, in your world.

    In my dream, people aren't different because of the roles they are playing, they are different because they've lived different lives in worlds with different rules. In my dream, new resources are discovered in the world, but people don't know what they are or what their use is.

    I dream of bustling towns where people have jobs, go to work each day since it benefits them and provides value to others, where they can hang out in a public place (perhaps playing a complex crafting minigame until someone stops by to request a transaction). Some players might not work but hang out in arcades, passing the hours playing minigames, interactive fiction, or procedural dungeon crawls.

    But I dream of a changing world also threatened by natural disaster and monsters. Guards are patrolling for people's safety, healers and protectors roam the land and can heal at will, there are abandoned constructions and objects all over the countryside from past players that can be used/salvaged. Human conflict is inevitable, but I dream of an option to travel far away to safer "country" if needed. If that country is too draconian, I will travel to a freer world.

    I dream to be able to use my time to craft real machines that perform a real world function or learn real-world knowledge. Players could design working 3D models that could be used in-game and also be printed and assembled into working machines in the real world. Perhaps there is a land called Searth (SoTA Earth) that has the same characteristics as our earth. When you learn recipes, taxonomies, methods, they are the exact same as the real world, down to the minute detail, pulled from real-world databases. DAoC did this to a minor extent with their mythology. So when you stop playing the game, you take away usable knowledge into your real life, like a virtual school or encyclopedia.

    I was an early fan of VRML, and the idea was that HTML was just a stepping stone to VRML, and that web pages would be replaced with 3D buildings, and walking to different rooms would take you to different areas of a web page, like a complex Zoomable User Interface that took advantage of our brain's spacial processing. I still think such interfaces would have value in allowing us to store and recall knowledge, a living wikipedia.

    Instead of promoting addictive gameplay, my dream is a game that inspires people to want to stop playing so that they can apply or test their knowledge in the real world... When I was a kid, I didn't go to the library to stay in the library reading. I read the books so that I had the knowledge to build or apply the concepts that I read about to the real world. The real world was the playground, not the virtual world. I learned how to read and apply before I learned how to observe and write. The library was merely my instruction guide to get me started.

    Then, in my dream, when you encounter something in the real-world you don't understand, you log back into the game with your observations and present them to the scholars to see if they are making any headway on it. Perhaps they have a "magical simulation" of what you are encountering in the real world... This duality of worlds has always fascinated me and I like MMORPG anime that explores these concepts--they don't have to take over one another, they can sometimes complement one another.​

    In fact, that's why I taught myself how to program when I was very young--the games inspired me to find out how they worked, so I stopped playing them and began studying computers instead. That's really why I liked Ultima and UO, not because of the games necessarily, but because they showed me that there was more to our real world than what I thought possible, that games like that could even exist. If I couldn't figure out in-game what the boundaries to the world were, I looked out-of-game to find the answer.

    I like to invent things, but I only decide to actually fabricate something if it has never been made before, to try to bring something new into existence for the first time. Storytellers (like Garriott's mention of Joseph Campbell) and inventors have somewhat different goals. I see SoTA more as an invention than a story and so I hold it to a different standard, but it has not yet met that standard. I realize I'm probably not the primary demographic and other people have different dreams than me, but that's the gist, or structure, of my dream. It's not filled with colorful imagery, but you can fill in the details.
     
    Leelu and Sir_Hemlock like this.
  8. Vallin Tregres

    Vallin Tregres Avatar

    Messages:
    943
    Likes Received:
    1,357
    Trophy Points:
    93
    My dream was simplistic. I was decorating with stackable blocks for hours, and hours, and hours, then awoke in a cold sweat and decided to take a break from the game. :confused:
     
    Leelu and Sir_Hemlock like this.
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.