I agree with Casilu. The organisations are all crafted to be very ambiguous and grey, with no real 'good' or protagonist organisations. There's always two sides to an organisation: the one from the inside, and the view from the outside. Even when you as a player take a step back and look at all of the organisations, all of the organisations are 'tainted' in their own way.

yeeah... u be wrong.

Most of the Orgs seem to have a view of the "perfect world".

Serenwilde, get the world back to it's natural state wipe the cities, glomdoring and anything else that would dare try to corrupt or destroy the natural state of the world. City dwellers and defilers of nature are scum that need to be wiped from the basin before they destroy the world through their arrogance.

Glomdoring, probably same as Serenwilde but instead of natural state they want it to be "natural" wyrden.

Hallifax, I would say assimilation of everyone one and thing into the collective so that they might have all the resources they might ever want to purse any goal they can conceive. This is not necessarily evil as taking care of its membership is in the best interest of the collective but this is probably because the collective would view on the lines of "maintaining its resources" that may suddenly become expendable.

Celest, reclaiming it's former place as top dog with everyone devout followers of the light, crushing anyone or thing that it feels is a threat to it.

Magnagora, similar to Celest, being the supreme power in the basin spreading the taint to every corner of the world.

Gaudiguch, may or may not have a plan other than build the worlds biggest weed farm and distillery. However, most of the other end games would likely infringe on gaudis love of freedom and chaos, so at some point it would come down to a fight. Though they may also just randomly start attacking people.

With these considered the orgs choices on certain matters becomes rather clear as does the fact that each could condone the utter annihilation of any other org. Even if the surviving orgs managed peace, most combinations of the remaining orgs would probably end up destroying each other. I say this mainly because there seems like there would always be some point where they would come into conflict.

Nnnope! First off, insofar as any organization has a natural bias towards the archetypical D&D morality system, Gaudiguch is textbook Chaotic Neutral. Secondly, there is no "ought" or "right" for organizational roleplay. Every city/commune has reasonable authority figures, and every city/commune has lunatic zealots who want to burn everyone else to the ground. Magnagora has all the typical trappings of a stereotypically evil city, for example, but I don't think any sane, reasonable person in the real world can argue that Celest is a bastion of morality considering the invested racism therein (and ultimate stated goal of wiping out every Tainted individual, whether they be comic book evil or not). And this isn't because the players are taking Celest or Magnagora in the "wrong" direction: it's because that's how things work in real life. Nobody is pure evil or pure good. 'Cept Mister Rogers.

Breidr: take with a pinch of salt all of the (variously biased!) interpretations of the game that the playerbase is throwin' up here, since they're all tinctured by their own experiences. Your best bet is to read through the (excellent) histories on the website if you want to gain some insight on the historical impetus of the in-game organizations. As for the game itself: if you're enjoying yourself, make a few characters to test the water. You'll find a place you enjoy roleplaying in, guaranteed. Once you've got a better idea of where (and who) you want your character to be, then you can ask for more specific advice on stuff like race/class combo or what skills you should be looking at. Best of luck, man.

Yes.

Also, just to throw up my own opinion... I always considered Hallifax Lawful Evil. >.>

However, if you look back, all the guilds can be both "good" and "evil". I can say that Magnagora is evil and Celest is good - but if I played a Mag character then I would likely say Celest is "evil" and Magnagora "good."

Getting more to my point - read, don't judge the place on it's cover, and let your character decide! I had some fantastic debate with someone way back in July about this (still have the logs from it, found them the other day) and we came up with the fact that if everything was looked at purely logically, there's no reason why any of the cities/communes should be fighting at all. But really, your city/commune's going to be based on where your character feels the most strongly about.

The city descriptions are each written a certain way, and that doesn't mean each player is going to play it that way - obviously. And, sorry to burst your bubble, but Gaudiguch is clearly written as Chaotic Good, even if the current players don't play it to that affect. I'd say Hallifax was more of the Chaotic Neutral type from the way it is described... but it doesn't mean much if a player doesn't want to play Chaotic Neutral or Chaotic Good in that specific organisation. However, this is all rather moot and we can argue about it all day if we want but in the end, everyone's opinion's different !

Other than that I totally agree; I wouldn't want to see everyone in Celest taking on the passive vegetarian character who just likes to run around hugging people. One of the main reasons I really enjoy Celest is because of that underlying seed of hatred for any race other than pureblooded Merian, the bloodlust and the general attitude that 'yeah, everything I do... it's righteous, so stfu because I'm not going to listen to it any other way.' I just find it funny that one of the organisations that Celest wouldn't seem to get along with would be Glomdoring, and this is completely based on player's actions and had nothing to do with the game administrators direction, even though it completely goes against Celest's written role and history (though not so much as against Glomdoring's wishes, seeing as their history contains quite a lot of manipulation and the like).

Lusternia is unique because of its racism. I wouldn't have it any other way (and I only wish merian was a more stable race )

I agree, that Gaudiguch is more Chaotic Good. In fact, Halli and them both are, that's what makes it so difficult. Gaudi uses revolutionary ideals to promote freedom, while Hallifax emphasizes science and learning.

Nah. Try living in Hallifax for a while. The city is clearly Lawful Evil.

Preeeeetty confident that Hallifax is deliberately played up as Lawful Neutral to provide a counterpart to the Chaotic Neutral Gaudiguch, due to the whole passion versus pellucidity theme they have goin' on. While we're all inherently shackled by our bias, I'm not sure how anyone can argue that Hallifax is a chaotic society in any way.

I don't know where you're looking that you get Gaudiguch as chaotic good. It's not evil in the same way as Hallifax, but it takes the stance of not caring about good or evil outside its narrow interpretation. And there's a pretty evil (but in an interesting way) undercurrent to the "paradigmatics as control of belief" element of the Illuminati.

Doesn't seem very useful to try and apply D&D labels to Lusternia. Even if you came up with something everyone agreed with, what would that get you?

Did someone just try to label Hallifax Chaoitc? Really?

I know what you mean about coming out of the portal being daunting and in some ways the portal process is even more confusing than it helps.

In terms of choosing a character and choosing a guild/city/commune, I myself, have tried to play several times with several different characters over the past couple of years, but it took me ages to decide on a character and guild that I liked. I found reading the information on lusternia.com about the cities and communes, and the races before creating my character this time, REALLY helpful. I went at it from the point of view of, I am going to read all of these and decide which one I think I will find the most fun playing.

I am not going to give you my opinions of the various guilds, cities and communes, as I am only a relative Newbie myself. And I really do believe that it is about personal choice, and about deciding what is going to make the game fun for you. That is what someone told me, when I was complaining that I didnt really know what I was doing and that it was all confusing. They told me to read all the descriptions and decide which of them would be fun for me to play.

I eventually decided on the Institute in Hallifax, and am having a ball playing there now. But there are lots of cool places to play in the game. Decide which of them is the right fit for you.

Hallifax?? Chaotic?? Really??

I'm fairly sure I found a picture of the culprit.

You can play any type of character you can imagine within each of the different organizations. There are just going to be slight difference on justifying your actions. Just read up a bit on the histories.

Want to slaughter children?

Hallifax - Its for scientific research
Gaudiguch - They impeded your path to Enlightenment
Glomdoring - For the Wyrd!
New Celest - Makes sure to say they are tainted
Magnagora - Make sure they are not viscanti
Serenwilde - Survival of the fittest... (sp?)

Serenwilders killed a baby once...

There was a storm and Stewartsville revolted.

It was a lot, lot, lot more than once.

Pretty much every time a village punished someone for their actions, it was Serenwilde they punished, and it was something everyone else has dozen a jillion times. So I still have mixed feelings about it.

Thanks, this helped a lot. My thinking is, once I get a driving force and basic set of goals my character should start to take shape and I can play from there. All Guilds are available in all cities, am I correct. If so, then choosing a city based on what I "beleive" is going to be the single most important decision of my life. It will help me shape the way I feel about some things and open the door to deeper thought. Heck, I may try all the cities, there are no limit to the amount of characters I can run, right? if that is the case then I am almost set.

I'm trying to dig more into races. My default is usually Human. mostly because I'm lazy and in most games, human can work with anything. If I do some more digging and find something I really like, I might give it a shot. The fact that Dwarves get a bonus for being drunk sounds like fun (even though I'm not a fan of Dwarves being portrayed as obnoxious idiots who drink a lot and such )

If you mean that each city/commune has a guild for every one of the 5 archetypes (mage/druid, guardian/wiccan, warrior, monk, bard), then that would be nearly a yes, except that Gaudiguch and Hallifax don't have their monk and bard guilds. Yep. It's like what most people here said. Determine what you think your character believes/wants to believe in. Then, from there, pick your guild within the city/commune which agrees to your principles/beliefs/personality the most.

As for character creation, the number itself is not an issue, I believe. If I remember the character-creation rules correctly, the restrictions would mostly revolve around multiple-character-playing at one instance and creating characters for the sole purpose of boosting/aiding your main/other characters.




I recall a small discussion between my ooc friends where they said humans are the sort they'd pick if one of their immediate goals is achieving Demi (lvl 100) as soon as possible, because of their higher experience gain. And, they're quite flexible in that they evolve (change stats) based on your archetype. If you want something highly customized for the guild (and particularly the specific guild skills you choose), you may soon desire another race. We have some races that have specific stats if you are in the city/commune and skillsets they are 'attuned' to.

I wasn't that oriented with my surroundings when I first came out of the Portal (did a lot of silly things, really) and my friends from whom I heard about this game weren't even around then..so the exploring itself together with the help everyone gave me counted a lot. Still have a lot to learn, explore, and get used to, but there's enjoyment in that. Most, when you take out the in-city/commune and in-guild roles, are friendly and would glad to help out anyone with a question, so you won't have so many problems about getting lost. Explore and enjoy!

You can have as many characters as you want. However you cannot be logged in to more than one character at one time. HELP SECONDS I think is the scroll that deals with multiple characters. You can look at it in-game or from the website.