Marcus Aurelius's page

Hey, Marcus. I really appreciate your careful analysis, and Jeremy's too. After a good chunk of reflection. I think I understand my objection to the storyline better.

You actually make some very valid points, and you weren't the one I was criticizing anyway. I think that Carnival of Tears could be improved and that the consequences for the actions of both sides (i.e. the loggers and the fey Syntira) should have been resolved a lot better.

Unlike stories such as Macbeth and Hamlet, where we are simply uninvolved observers looking at at tragedy as it unfolds with nothing to do but see the culmination of events that have been brewing throughout the narrative, a module must, instead, actively involve the PCs within the framework of the story. After all they should be the people who make or break it.

This clearly does not happen with Carnival, and that is the fundamental flaw with what should have been a brilliant adventure. This is why I would alter it when I actually get around to playing it.

I'm dubious about the virtue points being any use, because if Syntira is as kind a person as she is made out, she will see, herself, pretty early on that she has made a desperate mistake in calling in the Cold Rider in a pique of anger at the loggers.

Instead I would have her actively seek out the party as early as she can and explain to them about the terrible mistake she has made and is by now unable to prevent(not wait around for them to be seen as good enough to behold her wondrous presence first). She made a foolish bargain and though she hurts for the fey who were destroyed by the loggers, she neither has no wish to see innocent children slaughtered in revenge for it. If she is not that kind of character then you can't feel any sympathy for her or her position, which from a story bent sucks.

Now that being said, innocent people are going to die. That's integral to the plot. She tried to fight evil with evil and as we see in our world today, doing this doesn't work and mostly causes the innocent to suffer.

So as soon as possible (Screw the fireworks display), the party needs to get about and close down as much of the trouble before it gets out of hand, first on the list being the sled ride!

The carnival patrons may be oblivious, but the PCs aren't.

The party needs to be thinking evacuation plans and getting the help of any who are not yet fully under the control of the evil Fey. They need to know about the foul mouthed henchmen Prig and do as much as possible to prevent him returning to his master the Cold Rider.

Quinn to me is a red herring or basically a useless character as he currently stands for most of the plot due to his almost comatose infatuation with his trapped wife and his stupid bargain with the Cold Rider. If the PCs can capture the Prig bastard soon and destroy the shard then Quinn can become be a much needed ally, or if the PCs communicate to him that the Soul Gem is in the hands of the cold rider's evil pixie. Well Quinn's probably got as good a chance as any of catching and killing the little runt as anyone else if not more if he is as acrobatic as he is made out.

Suddenly Quinn can get back in the game.

I would cut the death tolls down per attraction, and get Syntira to help out as best she can too, if she really cares that much.

The Cold Rider can be isolated from his power position quite easily with a clever group of PC's.

But there should be consequences at the end. Syntira, Quinn nor the loggers are innocent of guilt and all should be made to resolve their differences in light of what happened, with the PCs being the one's calling the shots. Arbitration whatever? The town should not just turn evil or be wiped out so easily. But reparations on both sides could be negotiated and good XP rewards for the resourceful PCs who ended something that without them would have been a massacre.

Big problems for me
(1)Too many guilty onlookers not taking responsibility soon enough.
(2)Loggers not caring about the demise of the Fey's home in the name of profit.
(3) Too many innocents being killed and the party unable to act usefully and informedly until they accrue enough Virtue points.

These are the things I would change, but at its heart the adventure covers some very important and challenging issues that mirror much of
what is wrong in our world today.

So when you suggest the Book of Mormon is a fairy tale made up by men, it seems like the pot calling the kettle black to me. Why is your made up fairy tale any more valid than someone else's?

What you might be missing here, but I may be wrong is that the bible is a book about God's interaction with mortals here on Earth. But the bible is also written down by mortals from limited perspectives, and therefore put into story form things (i.e. scientific things) that man at that time and to many degrees now do not fully understand.

The big disconnect here is the fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is a cancer in Christianity and in many faiths and needs to be excised. Christianity, or any other faith is what it is "faith", True Christians should not and must not try to prove God by the bible. It cannot be done.

God cannot be proved, because if he could we would be God! His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. He reveals himself solely through prayer and believing faith, and the bible is an aid to those who believe. It can only be read with the guidance of God's Holy Spirit. If you do not believe then the whole bible is meaningless, and indeed contradictory. But there are historical portions that can be borne out by contemporary non biblical texts and are verifiable.

Christ came to show man a new way to live, and prophecies of his coming are there in the text, though the words probably meant little to the prophets of the time.

Fundamentalists on the other hand believe that the bible can be forced to prove God, and they use all kinds of disingenuous methods to do this. Creation Science is perhaps the most pernicious. Fundamentalists appear to be unwilling to accept that there are large sections of Scripture that they can verify either scientifically or by individual wording. They spend their lives poring over every phrase to fit the world, and rather than accept there are some things too big for them to understand invent numerous kooky theories to prove their positions. Unfortunately all they manage to do is alienate people who might have potentially found faith. No-one knows the mind of God, and any attempt to codify Him via the bible is heretical and pointless.

Only God brings men and women to knowledge of him, and Christians only hinder this work by squashing God into the realms of their understanding. It cannot be done.

True scientists pursue truth, and as the entirety of creation is based on Truth, then honest science will produce honest results.

Evolution is a good working theory and I stand by it as a scientist. The world was not created in seven 24-hour periods. The original Hebrew doesn't even say this either, it refers only to the vague notion of seven 'time periods'. But it doesn't matter how things came about. I am sure that the science is correct to the best of our current understanding. What science continues to reveal to us is that the complexity of everything we study increases the more we study. I am sure we derived from some line of primates (we come from the dust of the earth, we were not just put there!)

John Calvin once remarked that there were two phases of God's hand in Creation: The creation of life and the creation of the human soul.

Damn you, Legolas ...... *j/k*

Okay, in regards to the Crossbow, Pros in comparison to bows are: greater range, bigger damage dice, cheaper than Bows, simple weapons, 'easier' critical chance than bows.

Greater range, only as regards a typical bow. Longbows fired by trained marksmen could fire further than a crossbow.