VoN6, can someone explain how the dragon plays into the story?

[Zilta]

*sigh* why do people insist on retconning things. in most cases it just makes things worse/more confusing. I can appreciate the logic of having quest progression go by level but I would really like it if they just changed things back to the way they were.

But like most things I wish for (exceeding the speed of light, the ability to stop time, a reasonable security line at the airport) its not going to happen.

[Antheal]

I was thinking about some of the comments we received during our recent Monster Madness competition, where some players were unaware that Velah was in the game in two places where she wasn't looking very dragon-like. After reading this thread, this seems like a good place to show her in her "human" guise. This comes from the Chronoscope, where she can be seen chatting with Cydonie (prior to the split where the two go their separate ways over their disagreement about the Vault of Night):



This is a neat thread! I love thinking about all the goings-on in this series of quests.

Don't you mean "Elven" guise?

[GotSomeQuestions]

*sigh* why do people insist on retconning things. in most cases it just makes things worse/more confusing. I can appreciate the logic of having quest progression go by level but I would really like it if they just changed things back to the way they were.

I think it's neat to see easter egg cameos, though, like the Velah cameo in Chronoscope (shown above), or the Orphne/Barrow cameo in Partycrashers. That kind of thing helps tie quests together, and it would be really hard on the designers if they could only use future characters for them.

[HumanJHawkins]

You are all forgetting something... The reason VONs end with a dragon is because something more than a year before VONs were released, a new game came onto the market called "Dungeons and Dragons Online. Except it was widely mocked and derided because it had exactly zero dragons.

If they were doing a 1st level quest involving wolves and bears at that time, you can bet someone would have gotten sick of it and put a dragon at the end.

[Alabore]

And if u like the idea, try to push a plan to go about and make the 'text make sense' at least in the quest logs

^^^
This.

And, while I understand my characters are no saints, I'd like a stronger rationale for levelling a whole drow tribe, beyond the "that's what the quest objective says" thing.

...

I can live with the idea of a dark, brooding anti-hero.
In a sense, nobody can fight evil without becoming tainted or jaded to a point.
But some quests would really beg for better text.

You know, for the scant few role-players, single-player game addicts, and novel lovers among us who actually real the fluff and pretend there is some kind of backstory and overarching plot...

[Kraki]

You are all forgetting something... The reason VONs end with a dragon is because something more than a year before VONs were released, a new game came onto the market called "Dungeons and Dragons Online. Except it was widely mocked and derided because it had exactly zero dragons.

If they were doing a 1st level quest involving wolves and bears at that time, you can bet someone would have gotten sick of it and put a dragon at the end.

To steal from a previous poster: Point of order.

The Vault of Night was Module 1 and it came out in early April of 2006.
This is nowhere near a year and probably is less than 50 days after release. I'm too tired right now to count from Feb 24th (I think that was Head Start?) to April.

As we know, the joke then became "Dungeons and Dragon Online".
/refrains from beating the dead horse which is the company that begins with the letter A.

[knightgf]

Velah, as far as I know, is a chaotic evil being. NEVER to be trusted. NEVER predictable. Heck, personally, every time I see it, I wish I could give it one good swing of my Buster sword and destroy it instantly in human form, no matter how good or evil it's cause is. (Yes, I refer Velah as an 'it' because I cannot determine the EXACT gender of the dragon, not the human form it is in.)

Who knows why it decided to venture into the vault of night? Maybe what it said about prophecies and dragonshards is true. Maybe it was really looking for something else in the vault of night instead...something far more sinister. Something the vault's guardmaster would hope never be found. Or, who knows? Even a mindflayer can't read the thoughts of a chaotic evil being.

However, if it were me to guess, the dragon was looking for those necklaces of prophecy gained through raid loot in the chest. I believe that the lightning necklace has prophecies about the stormreaver, since his associated element is lightning, while the fire necklace has prophecies about either Shavarath or the desert and the Dinji forever bound to it, I have no clue which, if any are likely to be true. Unfortunately, even though the necklaces say they have important information about the prophecies, I cannot read them or get any text out of them for some reason...anyone recommend me to a translator?

[NinetyNineTails]

Velah, as far as I know, is a chaotic evil being. NEVER to be trusted. NEVER predictable.

My understanding is that Eberron dragons aren't color-coded by alignment the way that more traditional D&D dragons are. While red dragons are traditionally all Chaotic Evil, that's not the case in Eberron.

Do we have any data about what alignment Velah actually is? Anybody tried using a bunch of different aligned weapons on her to establish her precise alignment?

[Junts]

And a different developer said Dispel Magic strips Mantle of Invulnerability from liches, but that doesn't make it true either.

You're making the intentional fallacy: pretending that statements made by an author regarding a creative work override the contents of the work itself. For example, George Lucas will tell you that Phantom Menace is a good movie, but examining the film itself demonstrates otherwise.

That's an inadequate analogy. Its more equivalent to Lucas saying "x element in the Phantom Menace retcons Y event from A New Hope", and in terms of SW canon, those kinds of retcons and statements -are- true.

The developers response indicates the storyline they intend to be utillizing in future content.

[Kraki]

Anybody tried using a bunch of different aligned weapons on her to establish her precise alignment?

Unless she has changed since epic, she is actually Chaotic Evil. Holy Burst Greater Bane was always the grail of dragon whallopers. I only ever got a Holy Longbow of Greater bane.

Always link that as you go through the door just to get the reaction out of people.

[Coldin]

I never liked the alignment system being black and white. Where evil meant inherently bad. Velah is obviously chaotic as she broke rules to get what she wanted, and she clearly didn't care for the dwarves that stood in her way. But she was interested in examining the dragonshards kept in the Vault of Night to prevent a possible doom in the future. So...evil with good intentions.


That said, I still don't like how the Devil Invasion now takes place BEFORE the events of the Shroud or Amrath.

We went to the Vale of Twilight to stop the devils from making Shavarath coterminous and starting an invasion. The devils took revenge by attacking the marketplace (presumably to be beaten back by the Twelve, though it's possible adventurers had a hand in this through the time travel if we keep that canon). Then the Twelve venture to Amrath to make sure the Devil forces never invade Eberron again.

[Angelus_dead]

I never liked the alignment system being black and white. Where evil meant inherently bad. Velah is obviously chaotic as she broke rules to get what she wanted, and she clearly didn't care for the dwarves that stood in her way.

Velah's plans were really grautiously evil and are about as sensible as Plan Nine From Outer Space. She wants to read a thing in a bank, and she's got a mind control mojo that works on the bank designer / administrator. So what's she do?
Option 1: Mind control, mind control, mind control.
Option 2: Legions of Aurum assassins, homicidial robot symbionts, and let's say a plague of necrotic zombies.

That said, I still don't like how the Devil Invasion now takes place BEFORE the events of the Shroud or Amrath.

Devil Invasion was always before Amrath. The only real causality break is that instead of the Shroud conjunction being a shocking new thing, devil incursions would instead be minor outbreaks that happen from time to time.

[SynalonEtuul]

No comments about how the new story is terrible?! Come on, the old story was SUPER COOL and I always read it when we had to re-run 1-4. I'm glad we don't have to do that anymore, but why did the story get changed?

[Velexia]

DDO has a storyline?

So... where do all these adventurers come from that keep washing up in shipwrecks on Korthos Island?

From "The Island of Lost Children", kind of like Eberron's very own Lamplight caverns.

When children are born, they are sent to a faraway island, to protect them from Kobolds (who eat babies) (which is why we kill so many Kobolds, and it also explains why there are no children in Eberron at all). When they mature, they go on ill-fated journeys to the mainland (because none of them know how to properly build or sail a ship) and the survivors end up washed-up on shore. Those survivors then become adventurers!

[Velexia]

It's a very long fall but feather fall is a very strong power in this acse

Correct me if I'm wrong but this is what I understood.

Feathers fall just as fast as boulders sans wind and other obstacles... You'll burn up on re-entry regardless.

[Elaril]

I never liked the alignment system being black and white. Where evil meant inherently bad. Velah is obviously chaotic as she broke rules to get what she wanted, and she clearly didn't care for the dwarves that stood in her way. But she was interested in examining the dragonshards kept in the Vault of Night to prevent a possible doom in the future. So...evil with good intentions.

One could argue that preventing one's own doom is self preservation, which isn't necessarily an act of good.

[Angelus_dead]

You'll burn up on re-entry regardless.

Know what happens when you burn a Red Dragon?

[Velexia]

Know what happens when you burn a Red Dragon?

Do we really need to get into the debate about how "immunities" break down in extreme circumstances? (...and by that I mean, no longer make sense).

Blackbone Skeleton... Immune to fire. But is it 'really' immune, or just so resistant that for "normal" game circumstances it might as well be. Drop a blackbone skeleton into a volcano and watch it turn into ash, or better yet, launch it into a star.

I don't care how 'resistant' red dragons are to fire, you toss one through the atmosphere and it'll be dead on the other side.

The only thing that has any business being actually immune to fire is a fire elemental... because it "is" fire (note: Salamanders are types of fire elementals).

[Gkar]

I was thinking about some of the comments we received during our recent Monster Madness competition, where some players were unaware that Velah was in the game in two places where she wasn't looking very dragon-like. After reading this thread, this seems like a good place to show her in her "human" guise. This comes from the Chronoscope, where she can be seen chatting with Cydonie (prior to the split where the two go their separate ways over their disagreement about the Vault of Night):.

That btw violates the timeline for Cydonie as was given in the intro lore to GH (yeah, I know, that's long since purged from the public record but still...). In that intro lore, which occured after death of Velah, Cydonie clearly had no idea what her teacher was up to and she hadn't heard from her in quite some time.

[Gkar]

Feathers fall just as fast as boulders sans wind and other obstacles... You'll burn up on re-entry regardless.

Not in D&D physics where feather fall lets you safely fall any distance at a slow speed.

If players can do it...she could do it.