Our first spam on the new forum! We're moving up in the world! I switched registration back to invite-only and deleted some spam users. I've left Joyna here for the moment to test banning, although I'm sure this bot won't be back. Of course, I edited the post to remove images, links, and tags, but I can't help but critique the way it created a list in Markdown. It just put "O" in front of list items... We can delete this topic if people find it distracting, but for a brief while, it feels like a little activity back on the forums. 😛

Interesting suggesting. Autonous came to mind as a character who doesn't respond to the typical human dialogue prompts, but I didn't think about his connection to a "bank."

Hmm, perhaps I should repurpose this as a Summer 2020 Chron Challenge...

I'm inclined to agree with all three of those. I'll add the 20th anniversary ones under the tribute section and the speedruns one to the useful information (though it might move if someone can think of a better subject).

Bumping this for reference. It had somehow gotten buried several pages back. I finally updated by the way. It's not much but (hopefully) better than nothing.

@Wizard Well, domains are relatively cheap and even if he doesn't want to keep the website up, that doesn't necessarily mean he wants it taken over by a porn domain. Long running website domains tend to be a good target for scammers and spammers.

@Buzzzzy said in The Riddle-Master of Hed: Morgon seems to be the protagonist of the first book. gandreas said "Tavara" is an anagram of/reference to "Avatar," the player character in the Ultima games… Maybe some insight could be gained by looking at that character as well...

Stream posted to Youtube: https://youtu.be/gXH_-XkNn2E. It was fun; thanks all!

Thanks for making this thread, BW! 😁 Since the livestream, this topic felt like the last important thing to discuss. Tree of Life was confirmed an incomplete side-quest, Seldane as a language with historic inspiration, and then the hints given about the Cythera sequel. Looking back through the prophecies, I'd thought of a couple comments as well. First Prophecy In the first prophecy, I agree with your uncertainty about the Lost returning. See, I'd initially figured the "Voice of a God" referred to Alaric and the Lost being the mages, but then with the Voice being destroyed as the last act of the Tyrants, it must be a reference to the Cult of Scylla, which makes sense given the religious overtones tying them together. But that does leave the question of Lost. It makes me wonder as to the nature of the Scylla themselves. Perhaps a subservient species to the Undine or exiled or something, but are they trying to come back in opposition to the Undine? Or are the Undine themselves the Lost? Tavara said the Undine played him for a fool with Abydos, but he was clearly still associated with them during the times of the Cult, despite UrSylph saying the "traitor" attempted to subvert the humans by worshipping false gods. Second Prophecy Again, I agree with most everything you say about the second prophecy. I'm also baffled why it says the Traitors do not fail since that seems to invalidate the Comana brothers. But from what we know about the Cythera sequel, it's not clear that we actually saved Alaric at the end, so I guess they didn't fail? If so, it's also unclear whether or not they were responsible for Alaric's fall or something more insidious (recall gandreas specifically called out "trust no one" when we spoke with Jhiaxus during the livestream). The Hidden does seem like the Undine since they joined forces with the Traitors, but my initial thought was the Cult of Scylla. That feeds back into prophecy one where the connection between the cult/scylla and the undine is not completely clear. In this case, I think assigning Master to Alaric is the most reasonable interpretation. The in-game mention of Master is interesting though. Perhaps the Hidden are the scylla and they are trying to overthrow the Undine? Comana may also have been trying to overthrow the Undine in the same way Tavara was working with them while seeking personal revenge. Third Prophecy The third prophecy beginning with the end of the second age and passing of the Great Unifier lines up with the first and last line of prophecy two, suggesting to me that the "Second End" is a reference to the second age ending. The rest is really open to interpretation. Are there more Air and Fire around to wreak havoc? We know the land will break into pieces, so is the One to Many Cythera itself or a reference to the crolna being broken again? The world is mentioned as being sundered separately, and so is the Opener of Ways (crolna from prophecy two) but as One. The Fifth Element seems to tell us how the Cythera saga will end. I thought humans had been referenced as a fifth somewhere before but may be misremembering. These "Walkers" seem like something different. I suppose today that refers to zombies, but I expect here it refers to humans or a class of humans like evolved mages. Those are my long rambling thoughts about the prophecies. One and Two are mostly clear. I just question the exact nature of the Cult of Scylla and how they tie into the Lost/Hidden. That question affects a couple little things, but in the grand scheme of the things, we know the third prophecy is more concerned with Alaric's death and the havoc of the other elements until the "Walkers" appear. I hope this covers a lot of the discussion that was had about the prophecies on Discord. Thanks again for making the topic! ... This reminds me I still need to make a topic about difficulty level in Cythera.

Good point about transliterated as a separate branch, Buzzzzy! I guess it's true that we don't know what all was inspired by Egyptian or Greek, and you and Pallas are right about the original intention for the language possibly being different. Adding their names and places makes sense too. I recall having some discussion in the past about whether Ayrit and Maayti are the formal place names or more general terms like "home."

Mereku Barolein

Thanks for the transcript, BW! It's opening in a separate window for you because the .rtf file downloads and gets recognized as a TextEdit document by your system. You can disable automatic opening of downloaded files to avoid that, so it would just go to your download location and you could choose what to do with it. That's considered a little more secure but wouldn't change much otherwise. To avoid the Rich Text version download, here's a plain text version which will open directly in most browsers: cythera_20_transcript.txt

❄️🎄❄️ ＼ ＿ ／

@Buzzzzy said in Cythera Speedruns: Music and fading have never worked on my SheepShaver build for some reason. This is a symptom of pre-2013 Sheepshaver builds which lack support for the gamma ramp functions frequently used for fade effects. The main indicator is the screen being visible instead of black during sleep (you can see how the time & location pane updates live). Those older builds were also more likely to stumble over audio, and a number of games like EV Nova and Ferazel’s Wand will crash. E-Maculation’s forum has a nice collection of recent builds if you’re looking to update. 🙂

@Troyen said in Frozen Heart: I wanted to tag it "The Retsy Chronicles" as that's the name of the series, but there's a 15-character limit. There is a way to change it, so I put it up to 25 chars. I'm betting you can edit the tags in your post and have it update. Not sure though.

You're right, the underground path basically traces along the mountains. So it's probably nearer the headwater ruins area.

I’m not certain why you’d be concerned. Didn’t you read that the Otaekodu is only there to help :p ? I kind of figured that part would be a favorite for people.

I feel compelled to complain more about the Ultima user interface. As I mentioned, it's too much like a DOS game for my liking with mediocre graphics and bad UI, but honestly, that's being a bit generous about the UI. Just trying to test the different games, I found you can't exit from the main menu, only in game, and the method of exiting changes every single game! Sometimes it's X or Q, it could be ctrl-x or alt-x, or maybe alt-ctrl-right-click-x-q! AAAGGGHHH! It's really awful. It should not be so hard to save and exit. Anyways, I toyed around with the Exile series the other day, and it's another franchise very similar to Ultima and Cythera. I guess I'd never played these turn-based RPGs outside Cythera, so I had no point of reference, but all of them have underlying commonalities in terms of dialogue, party management, and combat. Exile is actually pretty nice. The plot is interesting, and each game further builds on the world and lore. You get a lot of control over each member in the party and combat is fun. I found the controls much easier to understand. It's hard to beat the simplicity of Cythera's modular system, but Exile feels more like a Mac game than Ultima ever could. While I liked the story, Jeff Vogel, the creator of Spiderweb Software, must have loved it! Not only did he remake Exile in the early 2000's as the Avernum series, but he remade it a second time in the 2010's by rebooting Avernum I, II, and III. That's a reboot every 5 to 10 years; even Hollywood would be jealous!