On the forums.
Previous patch.
As the gods have foretold, another patch walks among us.
We hope you enjoy the latest bug fixes and balance changes. Stay tuned for the next one!
V1.1.9.8
[Crucible]

• Human enemies can now equip at most one piece of armor or accessory to remove the possibility of overlapping % Resist bonuses that make these monsters difficult to kill
• Fixed an issue where the Forgotten Gods achievements could not be viewed within the Crucible

[Shattered Realm]

• Human enemies can now equip at most one piece of armor or accessory to remove the possibility of overlapping % Resist bonuses that make these monsters difficult to kill
• Reduced spawn frequency of Eldritch Armor, Human Ascendant and Korvaak’s Chosen heroes
• Updated boss spawn tables. Some bosses have graduated to higher shards and others have been demoted.
• Essence of the Shattered Realm now also grants a stacking bonus to % Retaliation damage in addition to its bonuses to non-retaliation damage.

[Animation]

• Adjusted positioning of off-hand items on the female PC to better align with the hand

[Tech]

• Fixed an issue where skill modifiers that added % Chance of Projectile Passthrough would add their bonus twice. As this was not a display issue, all affected modifiers have had their values adjusted to compensate.
• Fixed an issue where Upheaval would display its % Weapon damage tooltip incorrectly when used in conjunction with auto-attack replacers. This was a display issue only.
• Fixed an issue with shadows on Low settings.
• Fixed an issue where loot comparisons on the ground could cause a freeze/crash.

[Game]

• Reduced monster % Fire Resist by 2% on Elite and Ultimate difficulty
• Significantly increased the cooldown on the heal abilities of Eldritch Armor and Human Ascendant heroes to match the cooldown of heal abilities on comparable Support archetypes
• Reduced the % Heal value of Eldritch Armor and Human Ascendant heroes (with the exception of Halganux ~ Supporter) to match values on comparable heroes with baseline heal abilities
• Increased the Health of the Loghorrean boss, along with the damage on some of its abilities. The poor Voice of Ch’thon’s vocal cords have gotten a bit sore over the years and needed a tune up.
• Increased the Health of Korvaak and Theodin Marcell.
• Increased the health, damage and adjusted the skill usage of some older bosses to bring them up to speed of their more modern counterparts. Will let you figure out which ones the hard way!
• Increased base resistances of various pets summoned by items. Some of these pets had fallen behind their mastery counterparts over the years.

[Itemization]

• Suffix - Vitality: increased Health
• Rare Prefix - Aetherfire: added 30% Burn Duration
• Rare Prefix - Bloodthirsty: increased % Attack damage Converted to Health to 10% at level 84+
• Rare Prefix - Interrogator: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Rare Prefix - Magi: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Rare Prefix - Resonant: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Rare Prefix - Runecarved: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Rare Prefix - Runecaster: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Rare Prefix - Sandstorm: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Rare Prefix - Tempest: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Rare Prefix - Wraithbound (accessories): increased % All damage for pets
• Rare Suffix - Blight (shields): replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Rare Suffix - Conflagration (shields): replaced Burn Retaliation with Fire Retaliation
• Rare Suffix - Insight: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Rare Suffix - Sage: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Rare Suffix - Scorched Ends: replaced Burn Retaliation with Fire Retaliation
• Rare Suffix - Scorched Runes: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Component - Prismatic Diamond: reduced Cooldown on the granted skill to compensate for the fix to its duration
• Fixed an issue where some on % Health triggered skills granted by items would last longer than intended.

Faction Items

• Blazerush: now deals base Fire damage, damage adjusted accordingly. Increased % Attack Speed to 26%. Replaced % Armor with 8% Physical Resist. Added 50% of Lightning dealt as Fire. Replaced % Total Speed modifier for Flame Touched with 8% Offensive Ability, 100% of Lightning dealt as Fire and 50% of Physical dealt as Fire. Added 0.8s Stun modifier for Upheaval.
• Bloodrender: increased bonuses to Reaping Strike and Savagery to +3 and added 45% of Pierce dealt as Vitality. Increased Vitality damage modifiers for Savagery and Whirling Death to 45 and 220, respectively.
• Bloodsurge: added 84% Pierce damage
• Bysmiel Arcane Spaulders: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Bysmiel’s Grasp: increased Cold damage modifiers for Summon Briarthorn and Conjure Primal Spirit to 70 and 90, respectively
• Bysmiel’s Mindweaver: added modifiers for Iskandra’s Elemental Exchange. Increased Burn/Frostburn/Electrocute damage modifiers for Summon Familiar and Summon Hellhound to 75 / 2s.
• Corruptian: stats redesigned to better support its modifiers
• Coven Headcrusher: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Coven Mark of the Arcane: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Coven Spellweaver: added % Elemental Dot dmage and % Elemental Dot duration
• Dreeg’s Arcane Vestments: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Dreeg Venomspine Girdle: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Dreeg Venomspine Waistguard: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Malmouth Arcane Seal: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Mark of the Farseer: added 16 Bleed damage / 3s
• Reaver’s Hunger: added 25% of Elemental dealt as Vitality and increased bonuses to Dread and Sigil of Consumption to +3. Added +3 to Shadow Strike and Nidalla’s Justifiable Ends and added modifiers for Shadow Strike. Increased Vitality damage modifier for Sigil of Consumption to 80. Removed bonus to Bone Harvest.
• Slith Venom: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Solael Vile Girdle: added 12% Bleed Resist
• Solael Vile Waistguard: added 16% Bleed Resist
• Stormbringer of Malmouth: added 20% Stun Resist and 30% Stun Resist for pets
• The Desolator: added 12% Damage Reduction / 6s modifier for Flashbang and increased Radius modifier for Bursting Round to 1.5
• The Overseer: added 70 Defensive Ability
• Venomfire: added +1s Duration modifier for Blackwater Cocktail
• Wendigo Spellweaver Mask: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Word of Solael: increased Vitality Decay damage modifier for Bloody Pox to 200 / 1s
• Wrathguard: increased Pierce damage on the granted skill

Relics

• Bysmiel’s Domination: increased Offensive Ability and Defensive Ability to 60
• Corruption: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Citadel: added 5% Physical Resist and 20% Slow Resist. Replaced Internal Trauma Retaliation on the granted skill with Physical Retaliation.
• Doom: replaced % Armor with 4% Physical Resist and increased % Internal Trauma Duration to 50%
• Dreeg’s Affliction: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Iskandra’s Balance: removed erroneous Burn Retaliation
• Malediction: increased Resist Reduction to 18 / 5s
• Necrosis: replaced Offensive Ability Reduction Retaliation with 50% Vitality Decay Duration. Added Offensive Ability Reduction to the granted skill.
• Oblivion: increased % Weapon damage on the granted skill to 125%
• Salvation: added 4% Physical Resist
• Scourge: increased Targets on the granted skill to 5
• Squall: replaced Electrocute Retaliation with 20 Offensive Ability
• Ulzuin’s Pyroclasm: added % Retaliation added to Attack to the skill proc

Monster Infrequents

• Aetherscorched Cleaver: replaced % Aether damage with % Pierce Resist. Added modifiers for Iskandra’s Elemental Exchange.
• Alkamos’ Warsword: increased Cold damage modifier for Vire’s Might to 380
• Ascendant Hood: increased Duration modifier for Devastation to 4s
• Barrog’s Bloody Arm: added 50% Bleed Duration
• Basilisk Fang: increased % Attack damage Converted to Health modifiers for Aegis of Menhir and Dreeg’s Evil Eye to 6% and 8%, respectively
• Barthollem’s Warmaul: increased Target Arc modifier to 120
• Bloodfeast’s Mark: increased Vitality damage modifier for Bloody Pox to 90 and its Bleed damage modifier to 140 / 1s
• Bloodlord’s Blade: replaced % Attack Speed with 5% Cooldown Reduction and added 8% Attack Speed, 40% Fire damage and 40% Chaos damage modifiers for Possession
• Bloodsworn Codex: added % Stun Resist
• Bloodsworn Signet: added % Health
• Boneblade: added 100% of Acid dealt as Vitality and -10% Bleed Resist modifiers for Bloody Pox and increased its Bleed damage modifier to 120 / 1s
• Bound Wraith: added % Offensive Ability
• Chosen Visage: added Defensive Ability
• Fleshwarped Carbine: added 40 Aether damage modifier for Reckless Power
• Fleshwarped Core: updated Fire damage modifier for Callidor’s Tempest to correctly be Aether
• Fleshwarped Tome: increased Aether damage modifier for Sigil of Consumption to 110
• Galeslice’s Mark: increased Pierce damage modifier for Shadow Strike to 120
• Groble Vile Effigy: increased Poison damage modifier for Bloody Pox to 220 / 1s
• Korvaak’s Burning-Blade: added % Cast Speed
• Korvaak’s Storm-Blade: added Health
• Kyzogg’s Skull: added -0.4s Cooldown modifier for Callidor’s Tempest
• Lunal’Valgoth’s Girdle: added % Petrify Resist
• Moltenclaw Slicer: added 50% Burn Duration and reduced % Burn Duration modifier for Canister Bomb to 100%
• Naren Kur’s Blade: increased bonuses to Aspect of the Guardian and Markovian’s Advantage to +3
• Pulsing Shard: increased % Attack damage Converted to Health modifier for Albrecht’s Aether Ray to 8% and increased its % Crit damage modifier to 15%. Added 15% Attack damage Converted to Health modifier for Reap Spirit.
• Pusquill’s Tail: added 50% Poison Duration and increased Poison damage modifier for Belgothian’s Shears to 180 / 5s
• Rutnick’s Blaster: fixed granted skill not scaling with the level of the weapon
• Rylok Crest: added 6% Total Speed modifier for Fighting Spirit
• Rylok Mark: increased Vitality damage modifier for Sigil of Consumption to 120 and increased % Attack damage Converted to Health modifier for Primal Strike to 10%
• Scorpius Pummeler: added % Poison Resist
• Spectral Crown: added % Freeze Resist
• Steward’s Halberd: fixed missing bonus to Tectonic Shift instead of Cadence that was originally intended for v1.1.9.2. Added % Internal Trauma Duration. Increased % Weapon damage modifier for Vire’s Might to 100%.
• Ulraprax’s Sting: added 4% Attack damage Converted to Health modifier for Stun Jacks
• Vilgazor’s Heart: increased bonus to Ring of Steel to +3 and increased Fire damage modifier for Ring of Steel to 400
• Zaria’s Pendant: added Defensive Ability
• Zarthuzellan’s Codex: added -0.8s Cooldown modifier for Blackwater Cocktail

Epic Items

• Baldir’s Plate Set: added 50% of Fire dealt as Physical bonus. Added % Attack damage Converted to Health to the skill proc.
• Baldir’s Regalia Set: added 50% of Fire dealt as Physical bonus. Added % Attack damage Converted to Health to the skill proc and increased its Bleed damage.
• Mythical Baldir’s Armor: added 5% Attack damage Converted to Health
• Mythical Baldir’s Mantle: added 30% Bleed Duration
• Mythical Baldir’s Mask: replaced bonus to Blast Shield with +1 to Demolitionist Skills
• Callidor’s Defense Set: reduced Cooldown on the granted skill and increased its Burn damage
• Callidor’s Regalia Set: reduced Cooldown on the granted skill and increased its Burn damage
• Cauldron of Excitement: added Acid Retaliation and increased Poison Retaliation
• Corruptor of Souls Set: replaced % Offensive Ability and Vitality damage bonuses for pets with 8% Physical Resist for pets. Removed Vitality damage for pets on the skill proc and increased its % Heal.
• Mythical Corruptor’s Mask: replaced Vitality damage for pets with 15% Stun Resist
• Mythical Corruptor’s Robe: replaced bonus to Undead Legion with +2 to Will of the Crypt
• Corruptor of Spirits Set: replaced % Offensive Ability bonus for pets with 5% Physical Resist for pets. Removed Vitality damage for pets on the skill proc.
• Corruptor’s Mask: replaced Vitality damage for pets with 15% Chaos Resist for pets
• Corruptor’s Robe: replaced bonus to Undead Legion with +2 to Will of the Crypt
• Daega’s Oath Set: increased % Acid Retaliation damage on the skill proc
• Daega’s Hood: replaced Poison Retaliation with 320 Acid Retaliation
• Daega’s Mantle: replaced Poison Retaliation with 320 Acid Retaliation
• Daega’s Raiment: replaced Poison Retaliation with 320 Acid Retaliation
• Dreadwalker Set: increased % Health bonus to 15% and reduced Cooldown on the skill proc to 4s
• Edrick’s Backscratcher: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Empowered Plagueblood Carver: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Empowered Storm’s Edge: replaced Electrocute Retaliation with Lightning Retaliation
• Festerblaze Set: increased damage on the skill proc
• Festerblaze Mantle: added 500 Health
• Hysteria: added +2 to Ravenous Earth
• Keeper of the Blaze Set: increased Burn damage bonus to 70 / 3s and increased damage on the granted skill
• Mythical Flame Keeper’s Repeater: increased Burn damage to 55 / 3s and % Burn Duration to 150%
• Mogdrogen’s Peace Set: increased Physical damage and % Health for pets on the granted skill
• Myrmidon Bastion Set: added additional Targets to the granted skill
• Mythical Black Hand of Sanar’Siin: added +2 to Infernal Breath
• Mythical Grim Harvest Boots: added +2 to Squad Tactics
• Mythical Plagueblood Carver: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Mythical Shadowfiend’s Cord: added +2 to Infernal Breath
• Mythical Sigil of the Depraved: added 4% Attack Speed and +2 to Shadow Strike
• Mythical Storm’s Edge: replaced Electrocute Retaliation with Lightning Retaliation
• Mythical Terror of the Grove: added 25% of Lightning dealt as Acid
• Mythical Wyrmclaw: added +2 to Infernal Breath
• Plagueblood Carver: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Soiled Trousers: added Acid Retaliation and increased Poison Retaliation
• Stonefather Set: added 50% Reflect Resist bonus and increased % Physical Resist bonus to 15%. Increased Internal Trauma damage on the skill proc.
• Stonefather Bulwark: added 100% Internal Trauma Duration and increased bonus to Vire’s Might to +4
• Stonefather Helm: added 30% Internal Trauma Duration and replaced bonus to Vire’s Might with +2 to Tectonic Shift
• Stonefather Mark: added 30% Internal Trauma Duration
• Storm’s Edge: replaced Electrocute Retaliation with Lightning Retaliation
• The Arcane Tempest Set: increased % Weapon damage on the granted skill
• The Magelord Set: increased damage on the skill proc and added % Damage Reduction to it
• Magelord Band: added 190 Health
• Magelord Signet: added 190 Health
• The Stormserpent Set: increased Resist Reduction on the skill proc

Legendary Non-Set Items

• Arcanum Electrollis: replaced bonus to Maelstrom with +1 to Shaman Skills
• Basilisk Claw: increased bonus to Blood of Dreeg to +3. Redesigned skill proc.
• Bramblevine: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Cindertouch: added 20% Freeze Resist and increased bonus to Callidor’s Tempest to +3
• Conduit of Arcane Whispers: increased Chaos damage modifier for Chaos variant of Callidor’s Tempest to 180 and added 15% Total Damage Modified modifier for it. Increased Acid damage modifier for acid variant of Trozan’s Sky Shard to 280 and its Poison damage modifier to 400 / 5s. Increased Acid damage modifier for acid variant of Devastation to 240. Reduced % Total Damage Modified penalty for chaos variant of Trozan Sky Shard to -35%. Reduced % Total Damage Modified penalty for cold variant of Devastation to -35%.
• Conduit of Destructive Whispers: increased Cold damage modifier for cold variant of Thermite Mine to 220
• Conduit of Divine Whispers: added -0.5s Cooldown modifier for cold variant of Judgment. Increased Aether damage modifier for aether variant of Vire’s Might to 400 and its % Damage Modified modifier to 20%. Increased Lightning damage modifier for lightning variant of Vire’s Might to 300-500.
• Conduit of Eldritch Whispers: added 15% Total Damage Modified modifier for aether variant of Sigil of Consumption
• Conduit of Night Whispers: replaced % Crit damage modifier for lightning variant of Shadow Strike with -0.3s Cooldown Reduction. Increased Lightning damage modifier for lightning variant of Amarasta’s Blade Burst to 200-350. Increased Aether damage modifier for aether variant of Ring of Steel to 400.
• Conduit of Runic Whispers: removed % Total Damage Modified penalty from aether variant of Rune of Hagarrad
• Conduit of Warring Whispers: increased Aether damage modifier for aether variant Cadence to 330 and added 100% of Elemental dealt as Aether modifier for it. Increased Bleed damage modifier for bleed variant of War Cry to 550 / 3s. Increased Lightning damage modifier for lightning variant of Forcewave to 200-450. Increased Frostburn damage modifier for cold variant of Forcewave to 350 / 3s.
• Cord of Deception: replaced % Constitution with 8% Increased Healing
• Crest of Winter Fortitude: increased bonus to Biting Cold to +3
• Decree of Aldritch (mythical): added 80 Aether damage modifier for Devastation
• Fateweaver’s Raiment: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Feralmane Legplates: added % Attack damage Converted to Health to the skill proc
• Gutsmasher: increased % Health to 15%
• Heart of the Mountain: increased Health of the Summoned Pet and added Threat generation to its abilities
• Hellborne: replaced Burn Retaliation with Fire Retaliation
• Hellscourge: added 380 Health. Increased Fire damage modifier for Sigil of Consumption to 120 and added modifiers for Grenado.
• Horns of Korvaak: added % Damage Reduction to the skill proc
• Hyrian’s Bulwark: increased % Elemental Dot damage to 252% and added 100% Elemental Dot Duration. Increased Elemental Dot damage and duration on the granted skill.
• Infernal Brimstone: replaced Burn Retaliation with Fire Retaliation
• Lacerator Girdle: increased % Health to 10%
• Mad Queen’s Claw: added +3 to Cadence and modifiers for it
• Maw of the Damned: replaced % Attack damage Converted to Health with 10% Increased Healing (Forgotten Gods only)
• Morgoneth’s Legplates: increased bonus to Nightfall to +3
• Morgoneth’s Step: added 18% Elemental Resist and increased bonuses to Blitz and Shadow Strike to +3
• Mythical Abyssal Mask: added 18% Elemental Resist and added 100 Bleed damage / 1s modifier for Bloody Pox
• Mythical Arcanor, Blade of the Luminari: added % Elemental Dot damage and 90 Defensive Ability
• Mythical Arcanum Electrollis: replaced bonus to Maelstrom with +1 to Shaman Skills
• Mythical Arcanum Frigus: increased Frostburn damage modifier for Devastation to 240 / 2s and its Cold damage modifier for 120
• Mythical Bane of the Winter King: increased % Health for pets to 30%
• Mythical Basilisk Claw: increased bonus to Blood of Dreeg to +3. Replaced bonus to Aspect of the Guardian with +4 to Blade Barrier. Added proc from the non-mythical version of the item. Replaced Petrify and Poison Retaliation modifiers for Blade Barrier with 1600 Acid Retaliation.
• Mythical Bloodfury Spaulders: added 18% Elemental Resist
• Mythical Bonescavenger’s Deathgrips: increased % Freeze Resist to 25%
• Mythical Boneshatter Treads: added 18% Pierce Resist and +2 to Bloody Pox
• Mythical Boneweave Girdle: increased Health to 560
• Mythical Boots of Primordial Rage: added 18% Bleed Resist
• Mythical Bramblevine: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation. Increased Attack damage Converted to Health modifier for Dreeg’s Evil Eye to 15%.
• Mythical Butcher of Burrwitch: increased damage on the skill proc
• Mythical Chilldread Mantle: increased % Elemental Resist to 36%
• Mythical Chilling Grip of Hagarrad: added 210 Health
• Mythical Circlet of the Great Serpent: added 20% Chaos Resist and increased Offensive Ability to 60 and Defensive Ability to 80
• Mythical Codex of Eternal Storms: added +1 to Shaman Skills and reduced bonus to Raging Tempest to +2. Increased Electrocute damage and reduced Cooldown on the granted skill.
• Mythical Colossal Grasp: reduced % Internal Trauma on the granted passive
• Mythical Cord of Deception: replaced % Constitution with 10% Increased Healing
• Mythical Cortosian Scrolls: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Mythical Crest of Winter Fortitude: increased bonus to Blitz to +4 and bonus to Biting Cold to +3
• Mythical Crimson Spike: added +3 to Ring of Steel
• Mythical Crown of the Winter King: added 18% Aether Resist and 20% Stun Resist. Replaced bonus to Veil of Shadows with +1 to Nightblade Skills.
• Mythical Crystallum: increased Targets modifier for Savagery to +3
• Mythical Death Omen: added 45% of Pierce dealt as Vitality and increased bonus to Execution to +3
• Mythical Death’s Reach: increased % Bleed and % Vitality damage to 396%. Added 180 Bleed damage / 1s modifier for Bloody Pox and increased its Vitality damage modifier to 100. Added 100 Bleed damage / 1s modifier for Devouring Swarm and increased its Vitality damage modifier to 100
• Mythical Dread Knight’s Guard: increased % Elemental Resist to 40%
• Mythical Edge of Death: increased % Attack damage Converted to Health to 12%
• Mythical Essence of the Grim Dawn: added 344 Health. Increased % Attack damage Converted to Health modifiers for Albrecht’s Aether Ray and Flames of Ignaffar to 8% and increased their Chaos damage modifiers to 28 and 65, respectively.
• Mythical Fateweaver’s Leggings: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Mythical Fateweaver’s Mantle: added 18% Pierce Resist and % Elemental Dot damage
• Mythical Fiendmaster Raiment: added 18% Elemental Resist
• Mythical Fiendflesh Greaves: added 18% Chaos Resist and increased % Run Speed to 10%
• Mythical Fiendflesh Mantle: increased Absorb on the skill proc
• Mythical Fiendscale Jacket: added 18% Elemental Resist
• Mythical Gauntlets of Ignaffar: added 66 Defensive Ability
• Mythical Gavel of Ravenous Souls: added +1 to Necromancer Skills and increased Physical damage modifier for Siphon Souls to 124.
• Mythical Gutripper: added 5% Offensive Ability and increased % Attack damage Converted to Health to 12%. Added % Attack damage Converted to Health to the skill proc.
• Mythical Grim Fate: increased Fire damage modifier for Sigil of Consumption to 120
• Mythical Guardian of Death’s Gates: replaced bonus to Field Command with +2 to Soldier Skills and added 10% Total Speed modifier for Field Command
• Mythical Hallanx’s Head: increased Attack damage Converted to Health modifier for Dreeg’s Evil Eye to 15%
• Mythical Heart of the Mountain: increased Health of the Summoned Pet and added Threat generation to its abilities
• Mythical Heart of the Sand King: added 30% Stun Resist and increased % Elemental Resist to 40%. Increased Bleed damage for pets to 22 / 3s.
• Mythical Heart of Yugol: added 18% Chaos Resist and increased % Attack damage Converted to Health on the granted skill
• Mythical Hellborne: increased Fire Retaliation to 2400
• Mythical Herald of Blazing Ends: increased Burn damage modifier for Blackwater Cocktail to 80 / 3s
• Mythical Infernal Brimstone: replaced Burn Retaliation with Fire Retaliation and increased % Health modifier for Vindictive Flame to 15%
• Mythical Leggings of Arcane Currents: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Mythical Mark of Bloody Ends: increased % Poison Resist to 40% and added 6% Total Speed for pets. Increased Bleed damage modifiers for Summon Briarthorn and Summon Blight Fiend to 140 / 3s
• Mythical Mark of Consumption: increased Health to 550 and increased % Attack damage Converted to Health modifiers for Blade Arc and Phantasmal Blades to 8% and 6%, respectively. Added 8% Attack damage Converted to Health modifier for Upheaval.
• Mythical Mark of the Dreadblade: increased Aether damage modifier for Cadence to 200 and added 6% Attack damage Converted to Health modifier for it
• Mythical Mark of the Forbidden: increased Vitlaity damage modifier for Bloody Pox to 120
• Mythical Mark of Unlife: added 20% Petrify resist for pets. Increased % Health Threshold for the granted skill to 40% and increased its % Heal. Added modifiers for Iskandra’s Elemental Exchange.
• Mythical Maw of Despair: increased bonus to Callidor’s Tempest to +3 and increased Aether damage modifier for Field Command to 50
• Mythical Maw of the Damned: increased % Bleed Duration to 100%. Replaced % Attack damage Converted to Health with 20% Increased Healing (Forgotten Gods only). Added -10% Bleed Resist modifier for Bloody Pox and increased Bleed damage modifier for Siphon Souls to 180 / 1s.
• Mythical Nadaan’s Reach: added 50% of Cold dealt as Pierce and 15% Increased Healing
• Mythical Necrolord’s Gaze: added +1 to Soldier Skills and added 25% Stun Resist for pets
• Mythical Necrolord’s Shroud: added 18% Pierce Resist and +3 to Squad Tactics
• Mythical Night’s Embrace: added 25% and 20% Weapon damage modifiers for Shadow Strike and Trozan’s Sky Shard, respectively
• Mythical Oathbearer: added 15% Increased Healing modifier for Aura of Conviction
• Mythical Overlord’s Iron Grip: increased Health to 704
• Mythical Pack of Treacherous Means: moved the % Conversion from the granted skill to the base item, so that ranged weapons are not required for it
• Mythical Panetti’s Replicating Wand: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Mythical Peerless Eye of Beronath: added 80 Defensive Ability and 400 Health
• Mythical Phantom-Thread Girdle: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Mythical Quillthrower of Dreeg: added 660 Health and 50% Pierce dealt as Acid. Increased Defensive Ability to 80 and increased damage on the skill proc.
• Mythical Ravager’s Bite: increased % Attack damage Converted to Health to 12% and added 6% Attack damage Converted to Health modifier for Bone Harvest
• Mythical Reaver’s Claw: increased Pierce damage modifier for Eye of Reckoning to 102
• Mythical Riftwarped Grasp: increased Health to 440
• Mythical Rimeforged Mantle: added 22% Bleed Resist
• Mythical Runebrand Legwraps: increased Health to 740
• Mythical Sandreaver Bracers: added 30% Bleed Duration
• Mythical Scales of Beronath: added % Elemental Dot damage and increased Offensive Ability to 80
• Mythical Scion of Burning Vengeance: replaced Burn Retaliation with Fire Retaliation
• Mythical Scion of Crimson Wakes: added 10% Increased Healing and added % Attack damage Converted to Health to the skill proc
• Mythical Shadowflame Mantle: increased % Chaos Resist to 34%
• Mythical Shroud of Illusion: added % Elemental Dot damage and increased Offensive Ability. Increased Defensive Ability on the granted skill.
• Mythical Spelldrinker: replaced % Aether damage with % Elemental Dot damage. Added 80 Elemental damage modifier for Word of Pain.
• Mythical Spellgaze: added % Elemental Dot damage. Increased bonuses to Blackwater Cocktail and Panetti’s Replicating Missile to +3.
• Mythical Spiritbinder Glyph: added 15% Stun Resist for pets
• Mythical Spiritseeker Cord: added 4% Physical Resist for pets
• Mythical Soulcatcher: increased Defensive Ability to 80 and increased Vitality damage modifier for Sigil of Consumption to 110
• Mythical Soullance: added 100% of Acid dealt as Vitality modifier for Bloody Pox and increased its Vitality damage modifier to 144
• Mythical Sovereign Ruby of Domination: added 20% Freeze Resist and 20% Petrify Resist
• Mythical Stormcage Legguards: replaced Electrocute Retaliation with Lightning Retaliation
• Mythical Stormreaver: increased bonus to Storm Totem to +2 and replaced bonus to Lightning Tether with +2 to Inquisitor Skills
• Mythical Stormseer Sapphire: added +2 to Callidor’s Tempest
• Mythical Stormtitan Treads: increased % Poison Resist to 36%
• Mythical Stormweave Armor: added 18% Pierce Resist
• Mythical String of Maggots: increased Health to 440
• Mythical Temporal Arcblade: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Mythical Temporal Tempest: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Mythical Tinker’s Ingenuity: added 600 Health
• Mythical Touch of the Everliving Grove: added +3 to Squad Tactics
• Mythical Turrion’s Reprisal: reduced % Retaliation added to Attack modifier for Blackwater Cocktail to 13%
• Mythical Ulzuin’s Torment: replaced Burn Retaliation with Fire Retaliation
• Mythical Veilpiercer: added +3 to Infernal Breath
• Mythical Venomancer’s Guile: increased Acid damage modifier for Bloody Pox to 90
• Mythical Venomancer’s Raiment: added 22% Aether Resist
• Mythical Venomspine Greaves: added % Vitality damage and increased bonus to Nidalla’s Justifiable Ends to +3. Replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation.
• Mythical Warpfire: increased % Aether damage to match % Fire damage
• Mythical Watcher of Erulan: added Physical damage bonus to the granted skill
• Mythical Whisperer of Secrets: added 6% Attack damage Converted to Health modifier for Ring of Steel
• Mythical Wildshorn Legguards: added 30% Pierce Resist and added 25% Freeze Resist for pets
• Mythical Will of Bysmiel: increased Health to 600 and Defensive Ability to 80
• Mythical Windshear Greaves: added 18% Vitality Resist
• Mythical Witching Hour: increased % Physical Resist to 12% and Offensive Ability to 80
• Mythical Wraithwalkers: added 18% Bleed Resist
• Mythical Wretched Tome of Nar’adin: increased Acid damage modifier for Bloody Pox to 220
• Mythical Wyrmbone Handguards: added 30% Electrocute Duration. Increased Electrocute damage modifier for Blackwater Cocktail to 140 / 3s and increased Lightning damage modifier for Thermite Mine to 90-140.
• Mythical Wyrmbone Mask: added +1 to Soldier Skills and reduced bonus to Forcewave to +2. Added 80 Lightning damage modifier for Forcewave and increased its Electrocute damage modifier to 300 / 3s.
• Nadaan’s Reach: added 50% of Cold dealt as Pierce
• Nightclaw: added % Attack damage Converted to Health to the skill proc
• Okaloth’s Visage (mythical): increased % Retaliation added to Attack modifier for Sigil of Consumption to 22% and its Fire damage modifier to 120 and added -0.6s Cooldown modifier for it
• Outcast’s Secret (mythical): increased Cooldown Reduction modifier for Devastation to -4s
• Pandemic: added 5% Attack damage Converted to Health modifier for Dreeg’s Evil Eye
• Ravager’s Dreadgaze (Minds): replaced % Crit damage with 8% Defensive Ability
• Scion of Arcane Force: added +4 to War Cry. Increased Resist Reduction modifier for Cadence to 38 / 5s and increased Elemental damage modifier for Iskandra’s Elemental Exchange to 80.
• Scion of Burning Vengeance: replaced Burn Retaliation with Fire Retaliation
• Scion of Crimson Wakes: added % Attack damage Converted to Health to the skill proc
• Scion of the Screaming Veil: removed % Weapon damage modifier for Callidor’s Tempest
• Shard of the Eternal Flame: increased Burn damage modifier for Canister Bomb to 150 / 2s
• Spelldrinker: replaced % Aether damage with % Elemental Dot damage
• Stormbearers: added 18% Elemental Resist
• Stormcage Legguards: replaced Electrocute Retaliation with Lightning Retaliation
• Stormreaver: increased bonus to Storm Totem to +2 and replaced bonus to Lightning Tether with +2 to Inquisitor Skills
• The Crimson Claws: added 8% Attack damage Converted to Health
• Ulzuin’s Torment: replaced Burn Retaliation with Fire Retaliation
• Venomskin Legwraps: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Venomspine Greaves: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Venomtongue Mantle: replaced Poison Retaliation with Acid Retaliation
• Warpfire: increased % Aether damage to match % Fire damage

Legendary Set Items
See comment below.
[Class & Skills]
Devotion

• Akeron’s Scorpion: added 30% Poison Duration
• Alladrah’s Phoenix: added 15% Freeze Resist and 30% Burn Duration
• Amatok the Spirit of Winter: increased Health to 450 and removed % Cold Resist
• Assassin: increased Health to 200
• Attak Seru: increased Health to 600 and % Defensive Ability to 6%
• Azrakaa, the Eternal Sands: increased Health to 650
• Bard’s Harp: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Behemoth: increased % Health to 8% and increased % Health for pets to 12%. Added 4% Physical Resist for pets.
• Berserker: added 15% Increased Healing and increased Health to 300
• Blind Sage: increased % Elemental Dot damage to 250%. Added 4% Physical Resist and reduced Offensive Ability to 115.
• Bysmiel’s Bonds: replaced % Health for pets with 20% Trap Resist and 20% Trap Resist for pets
• Chariot of the Dead: increased % Stun Resist to 20% and Health to 250
• Crab: added % Elemental Dot damage
• Crane: increased % Poison and % Vitality Resists for pets to 20%
• Dire Bear: increased % Health to 6%
• Empty Throne: increased % Freeze and % Stun Resists for player and pets to 25%. Increased % Aether, % Chaos and % Pierce Resists for pets to 15%.
• Hound: added 15% Stun Resist for pets and increased % Health for pets to 20%d
• Huntress: added 8% Increased Healing. Increased Health to 450 and increased % Health for pets to 12%.
• Hyrian, Guardian of the Celestial Gates: increased Health to 600 and Elemental damage to 16. Added % Elemental Dot damage.
• Ishtak: increased % Bleed Resist and % Poison Resist for pets to 30% and % Total Speed for pets to 12%
• Jackal: increased % Health for pets to 8%
• Korvaak, the Eldritch Sun: increased % Health to 8% and Health to 300. Increased % Health for pets to 12% and % All damage for pets to 150%.
• Kraken: increased Health to 500
• Leviathan: increased % Health to 8%
• Light of Empyrion: increased % Health to 16%. Increased % Health for pets to 15% and % Aethe% Chaos/% Vitality Resists for pets to 25%.
• Lion: increased % Run Speed to 6% and increased % Health for pets to 8%
• Magi: added 15% Freeze Resist and 1.5 Energy Regeneration. Removed % Fire Resist.
• Manticore: increased Health to 250 and increased % Health for pets to 12%
• Mogdrogen the Wolf: increased Health to 650 and replaced % Leech with 15% Increased Healing (Forgotten Gods only)
• Nighttalon: increased % Elemental Resist for pets to 15%
• Oleron: increased Health to 650
• Quill: increased Health to 100
• Rattosh, the Veilwarden: increased Health to 350
• Revenant: increased % Health to 5% and Health to 250
• Rhowan’s Crown: increased % Elemental Resist for pets to 18%
• Sailor’s Guide: added 15% Fire Resist and increased % Run Speed to 10%
• Scales of Ulcama: increased % Health to 6%, Health to 250 and % Run Speed to 6%
• Shepherd’s Crook: increased % Health for pets to 20%
• Solael’s Witchfire: increased Defensive Ability to 40
• Solemn Watcher: replaced % Cold Resist with 18% Chaos Resist
• Spear of the Heavens: replaced % Lightning Resist with 15% Energy Regeneration
• Staff of Ratosh: increased % Aether and % Vitality Resists for pets to 20%. Replaced % Crit damage for pets with 6% Total Speed for pets
• Stag: added bonuses for pets
• Targo the Builder: increased % Health to 12%
• Tempest: replaced % Lightning Resist with 10% Slow Resist
• Tree of Life: increased % Health to 24% and increased % Health for pets to 27%
• Ulo: increased % Elemental Resist to 15%, % Poison Resist to 20% and % Chaos Resist to 20% for the player and pets. Added 15% Stun, 15% Freeze and 15% Petrify Resist.
• Ulzaad, Herald of Korvaak: increased Health to 500 and Defensive Ability to 25. Removed % Cold Resist
• Ulzuin’s Torch: added 20% Stun Resist and 6% Health. Removed % Fire Resist.
• Unknown Soldier: increased % Health to 8%
• Vire, the Stone Matron: increased Health to 300
• Wendigo: added 5% Run Speed. Increased % Health to 6% and Health to 250.
• Wolverine: increased % Poison and % Vitality Resists for pets to 15%
• Yugol, the Insatiable Night: added 300 Health and increased % Spirit to 4%
• Black Blood of Yugol: increased Duration to 8s
• Cleansing Waters: reduced Cooldown to 10s
• Hyrian’s Glare: increased % Weapon damage to 85% and added Elemental Dot damage
• Inspiration: increased Offensive and Defensive Ability to 130
• Nature’s Guardians: increased Duration to 8s and increased Physical damage for pets. Added 18 Resist Reduction / 5s for pets.
• Phoenix Fire: replaced Burn Retaliation with Fire Retaliation
• Tsunami (Celestial Proc): increased % Weapon damage to 45%
• Wayward Soul: reduced Cooldown to 8s and Duration to 5s

Demolitionist

• Blackwater Cocktail: sped up damage tic rate by ~20%
• Demon Fire: reduced Energy Cost scaling with rank
• Agonizing Flames: reduced Energy Cost scaling with rank
• High Potency: reduced Cooldown to 3.8s
• Quick Jacks: increased Energy Cost Reduction to -30%, no longer scales with rank. % Damage Modified penalty no longer scales with rank and is fixed at -50%. Radius penalty now scales with rank to -1.2 at max rank. It is now possible to achieve the previous results with a single point, and additional points improve the projectile radius.
• Ulzuin’s Chosen: increased % Damage Modified scaling with rank to 18% by rank 10, 30% by max ultimate rank. Increased % Energy Cost Reduction scaling with rank to 35% by rank 10, 45% by max ultimate rank

Occultist

• Bloody Pox: increased Bleed damage scaling with rank
• Wasting: increased Vitality damage scaling at ultimate ranks. Increased % Bleed damage scaling with rank to 144% by rank 12, 264% by max ultimate rank
• Black Death: increased % Bleed and % Vitality damage scaling with rank to 144% by rank 12, 264% by max ultimate rank
• Fevered Rage: increased % Total Damage modified bonus to 80%
• Sigil of Consumption: increased Vitality Decay damage scaling with rank
• Summon Hellhound: increased base % Freeze Resist to 50% and % Stun Resist is now a flat 50% instead of scaling with rank to 40%
• Ember Claw: increased Threat generation scaling with rank

Nightblade

• Amarasta’s Blade Burst: fixed an issue where this skill could trigger twice when dual wielding ranged weapons
• Amarasta’s Quick Cut: sped up the melee animation hit frames by 25% to match comparable WPS skills. Average DPS of this ability remains unchanged. Fixed an issue where the animation could be interrupted early, resulting in the third hit not registering.
• Belgothian’s Shears: replaced % Pierce damage with Pierce damage
• Ring of Steel: increased % Weapon damage scaling with rank to 260% by rank 16, 320% by max ultimate rank
• Whirling Death: sped up the melee animation hit frame by 10% to match comparable WPS skills. Average DPS of this ability remains unchanged.

Arcanist

• Callidor’s Tempest: increased % Weapon damage scaling with rank to 115% by rank 16, 145% by max ultimate rank
• Inferno: reduced Energy Cost scaling with rank
• Wrath of Agrivix: reduced Cooldown to 3.8s and the % Damage Modified to 140%. Removed % Weapon damage.
• Distortion: increased Aether damage scaling with rank
• Supercharged: increased Electrocute damage scaling with rank. Increased % Crit damage scaling with rank to 40% by rank 12, 60% by max ultimate rank.

Shaman

• Upheaval: increased Radius to 4.0 and increased % Weapon damage scaling with rank to 125% by rank 10, 175% by max ultimate rank

Necromancer

• Blight Burst: increased Threat generation scaling with rank
• Rotting Fumes: increased Threat generation scaling with rank
• Ill Omen: increased damage scaling with rank
• Necrotic Edge: sped up the melee animation hit frame by 27% to match comparable WPS skills. Average DPS of this ability remains unchanged.

Oathkeeper

• Avenging Shield: increased % Crit damage scaling with rank to 35% by rank 12, 55% by max ultimate rank
• Reprisal: increased Burn damage scaling with rank
• Smite: sped up the 1h-ed and dual-wield melee animation hit frame by 20% to match comparable WPS skills. Average DPS of this ability remains unchanged.

So my players have always been used to 5e and Pathfinder and we're also pavlovianly trained to not think outside of the box by our old GM. What I want is to teach them the old ways encouraged in OSR.
Now, we've played with me as the GM for quite a bit now and it seems that no matter what I do, I can't break them out of it. They don't check for traps, listen into rooms, plan ahead, heed telegraphed danger, etc. Just walk, punch, walk, punch, can I rest now?
We're pretty deep into Shadowdark and I have them travelling through an underground city on their way to my first big campaign idea. A couple of them have been through a few characters and the other 2 still have their starters (the more tactically sound ones).
The end of the last session had them heading toward an extremely dangerous place (other paths are available) full of necrotic spiders and zombified humans meant to turn the players back or be approached with thought and care. (Kind of like they've booted up Dark Souls for the first time and headed straight toward the catacombs). Unfortunately, they've rushed in and are now at that freeze frame moment of "I bet you're wondering how I got here" as they're in a dead end with a dozen, very dangerous zombies heading toward them. This is looking like a TPK.
I've given them the OSR 5 Mantras of One Torch Left, both as a read aloud and an available resource. I've also straight up said at the table that I'd like to see more planning go into actions.
It sucks because the players who still have their starters are generally smart about things while the other two are about to get them killed.
How can I encourage them to retreat and rethink their approach before this happens?

Warning: this is a very long post. I was bored so I decided to look at every Gwent card and eventually came to realize there are a LOT of cards in the game that I haven't seen in years or ever. I thought might as well do a writeup and see what we could do with them. Thanks if you do read it and appreciate any feedback.

Section 1: Need reworks because they are weak or fit in nowhere

The devs have done a great job bringing forgotten cards/archetypes into viability over the past few patches. I did some digging and found a bunch more cards that deserve to be saved as well, and also came up with some rough concepts/suggestions of where they could fit in with a rework :)
Note: I focused mostly on cards that aren't just weak numbers wise, but also serve no purpose in any archetype or don't fit the lore with their ability. Cards that are just powercrept were only briefly touched on. I tried to suggest new ability and archtype ideas based on adding diversity of playstyles and lore friendly mechanics, however, I did not rigorously think about balance. These are just meant to be rough ideas (I didn't include poweprovs intentionally for most suggestions) so take them with a grain of salt.
Anyway, let's begin.

Neutrals:

• Ale of the Ancestors: might be the worst card in the game, maxes out at 15 boost for 12 provs in a 10 card round. Suggestion: honestly, no idea, something with Resilience? Hand or deck buff (your units are drinking the ale before battle)? Something that interacts with the number of units in discard (since "Ancestors")?
• Uma's Curse: overcosted RNG-based card. Have seen it played once or twice but mostly as a meme. Suggestion: crazy RNG should never be viable- maybe an effect that transforms an enemy into a useless unit temporarily (to fit with the lore). Such as, "Transform a unit into Uma (1 power no abilities). After 3 turns or when you Pass, transform it back to its original form and power."
• Dragon's Dream: a slightly better but overcosted Crushing Trap, which also telegraphs the effect to the enemy, making it pretty useless. Suggestion: it's a bomb that gets ignited by fire or other bombs, and we recently got bomb reworks- possibly using the Infuse status on enemies or acting as a support artifact to augment your other bombs or damaging effects? This could be a slippery slope towards strong unitless strategies, but I think it's a shame for this card to be so worthless when it has nice art and even a unique row effect.
• Ornate Censer: a rework that missed the mark (though the original effect was abhorrent so I don't mind as much). Rarely plays for numbers close to its provisions and requires crazy setup to do so. Suggestion: honestly increasing the floor by adding some guaranteed damage/boost might be enough to make it worth picking in decks that do a lot with orders in one turn, like Siege or SY bounty.
• Avallac'h (normal, not Sage): honestly forgot this card even existed. Very lame and useless especially considering the character's lore powers. Suggestion: maybe a spell tutor or support, to work with Alzur in a new spell package or archetype?
• Enraged Ifrit and Colossal Ifrit: 10 for 10, even with 5 being damage, is awful in this day and age, and Colossal Ifrit is a bit better but far too slow and vulnerable to be usable. Suggestion: not too sure about this one, but Ifrits are constructed by mages, so maybe these cards could somehow synergize with Summoning Circle or Spells. Unlike the Insanity archetype I theorycrafted later on, I don't have much of an idea how this could look, so I'm leaving this in as a rough idea.
• Primordial D'ao and Frenzied D'ao: two very powercrept cards that could theoretically work as techs but are far too weak to be viable. Suggestion: yeah I'm at a loss for this, idek what a D'ao is lore wise- would they work with mages? Monsters?
• Eskel: Pathfinder: I don't think I need to explain why a 9 provision 6 power 1pt/turn engine that's also rowlocked is not good. Suggestion: he could fit in nicely with the new witcher reworks as a tutor or protector of other witchers via boost/armor for example.
• Gregoire de Gorgon: considering this guy is the final boss of the Toussaint tourney in TW3, this card is so disappointing and weak, a 5 for 9 that can become a 10 for 9 with setup of a 1power enemy? Sadge. Suggestion: move him to NG and give him a new home with the other NG Knights, with an ability themed around being the big boy Champion. Maybe something like "Deploy: set self to the power of the highest power Knight on the battlefield, plus one" (obviously with a high provision cost).
• Merigold's Hailstorm, Manticore Venom, Wolfsbane, and Bekker's Rockslide: all of these are just disappointing understats (though Wolfsbane has some meme potential) that don't really fit in anywhere. Suggestion: I wouldn't buff Hailstorm and Rockslide to be as good as faction cards, but they could become usable with a Spells archetype becoming a thing (with Alzur and some of the other cards I've mentioned above). Wolfsbane could be moved to SK and reworked to become Alchemy support. Manticore Venom could be moved to MO and reworked to become Organics support.
• Olgierd Von Everec (normal, not Immortal): the worse, never-used, and frankly unnecessary Olgierd, ironically despite being the OG version. Suggestion: something to synergize with Iris or Vlod or Gaunter even? Maybe a unit with very high armor but low power (you know since he has a Heart of Stone haha).
• Marlene de Trastamara, and Iris Von Everec (normal, not Shade): these cards are related to Gaunter (and Iris to Olgierd obviously) from a lore standpoint but have nothing to do with the others ability-wise. Suggestion: I'm not smart enough to come up with cool effects, but something to do with Tranformations/ArmoDoomed would be awesome.
• Cyprian Wiley and Carlo Varese: I know these cards are ancient powercrept remnants of when SY didn't exist, but at this point there's no reason for them to exist. Suggestion: move them to SY and rework them to help their respective gangs, maybe breathing some life into the dying Devo SY archetypes, or rework them into more general use cards with modern power that could find a home elsewhere (like Francis Bedlam).
• Nivellen: a cool character from the books that is pretty pointless and un-thematic in Gwent. Suggestion: I would really like some kind of transformation themed ability related to his curse and it being lifted, but I'm not sure of the specifics.
• Note on other powercrept Neutral bronzes: I don't think every card needs to be viable or strong, I think it's fine for many of the Neutral bronzes to remain slightly weaker than faction cards and only be useful in very niche situations. However, there are a few that I think could be changed to fit in very nicely in existing archetypes without becoming oppressive.
  • Inspirational Ballad is a basically pointless card currently, but considering Dandelion's card and ability, I think this card could be reworked to boost units in your deck- thus working with Djikstra/Erland/etc. And of course the legendary Wolf Pack which has become a meme with how bad it is, should in my opinion find a home in MO Beasts (more of that down the line).

Nilfgaard:

• Peter Saar Gwynleve: neat W3 reference which is sadly just a worse Spores. Suggestion: Soldier support, perhaps something to do with extorting and punishing the enemy via damage/status (to fit with the lore).
• Fringilla Vigo: the only NG card in the entire game with Mage/Construct synergy and a weak effect to boot. Suggestion: unless new cards or sweeping reworks were to happen for the Mages/Constructs archetype, I can't really think of anything other than a generic stat buff
• Ceallach Dyffryn: a card that doesn't really serve a purpose outside of obscure memes. Suggestion: given the little we know about the character (he tries to bargain with Emhyr for his son's life), maybe he could have an effect that protects an allied unit? Like a more specialized Defender?
• Standard Bearer: a card that makes no sense in Knights because boosting multiple enemies is not optimal, and no sense in any other deck because it is very weak in 99% of scenarios. Suggestion: might work better in Soldiers, supporting the swarming aspects with an AOE boost to allies.
• Alchemist, Vicovaro Novice, Deithwen Arbalest, Menagerie Keeper, Angry Mob: a series of powercrept Bronzes that don't provide anything useful to any archetype. Suggestion: Alchemist and Vicovaro Novice fit thematically with the new bottom-of-deck-clog archetype, Deithwen Arbalest with Soldiers. The last two, not really sure.

Monsters:

• Morvudd: an overcosted and boring finisher for an archetype that doesn't swarm. In fact, an overcosted finisher for an archetype that doesn't really exist (unless you count Rat based memes). Suggestion: this guy could be the centerpiece of a new beast archetype, and I think using the new Predator mechanic in some way could be the play considering these are the most obvious Predators in the game. The archetype could be based around harming enemies and even your own units in order to get units big. Morvudd himself could be a payoff engine, something like "Whenever an allied Beast uses a Predator ability, do X."
• Tatterwing: a rather strange card (why doesn't it just say Consume?) that is utterly useless. Suggestion: could fit nicely into the hypothetical beasts package, perhaps with a high base power and Predator order to damage both itself and enemies?
• Alpha Werewolf and Werewolf: I have seen these cards played in unitless MO memes, but undeniably their design is boring. Suggestion: they could keep the immunity theme and still tie in to Beasts with something like a feacurse effect, debuffing enemy units to allow Predators to get them.
• Wyvern, Cockatrice, Forktail, Fiend: a collection of powercrept cards that vaguely fit into Thrive, Deathwish etc but are too weak to be played + thematically disappointing. Suggestion: make these creatures fierce with some number buffs and utilizing the Predator mechanic.
• Jotunn and Ice Troll: these guys are the only cards to utilize the controlling less units than opponent mechanic and far too weak to see play. Suggestion: Ogroids as a whole don't really exist and like 3-4 cards isn't enough to come up with a new archetype. Maybe with some new cards something could be done here, but for now I'm at a bit of a loss other than generic numbers buffs.

Northern Realms:

• Falibor: literally worse than Brokvar Warrior, a 4 provision Bronze. Lmfao. Suggestion: given the lore connection with Tridam infantry, he could serve as a finisheheavy hitter for the currently basically nonexistent Inspire/Boost archetype. Something like "whenever an allied unit is boosted, damage a random enemy unit by 1"
• Keira Metz and Sile de Tansarvillle: very boring and weak effects which mean these cards never see play. Suggestion: Mages support? Maybe giving the students some protection or providing damage payoff? Could also have something to do with card manipulation given the Lodge's plotting.
• Nenneke: the current effect is very weak and pointless. Suggestion: given that Nenneke is a gifted healer and tied to the Temple of Melitele, it would make sense for her to have an effect that supports the deck bost/shuffle archetype.
• Detmold: yet another remnant of the old and boring "boost all X by 1" designs, yet again in an archetype that doesn't really swarm and thus has no need for it. Suggestion: given his plotting and sadistic nature, he could have some damage/control based ability that would help mages. In fact, it probably makes lore sense for him to have Margarita's lock ability and her to get something else.
• Ban Ard Tutor, Cintrian Enchantress: two powercrept and pointless mages. Suggestion: both could fit in nicely into the existing mages archetype, a basic but potentially useful idea would be changing their Deploy abilities to Orders, allowing you to protect a mage you're setting up next turn.
• Vincent Meis: a cool character from W1 that has a pointless and weak ability. Suggestion: something to do with his werewolf form butchering criminals- maybe using an Order to switch between a Boosting and Damaging effect (like Botchling)?
• Smoke Them Out, Aedirnian Mauler, Kaedweni Knight, Kaedweni Sergeant, Radovid's Royal Guards, Kerack Cutthroat, Redanian Elite, Field Medic: all extremely weak, could either use small number tweaks or reworks that slot them into existing archetypes such as the hypothetical Inspire/Boost one.

Scoia'tael:

• Filavandrel Aen Fidhail: overcosted and not worth it in neither handbuff nor special based decks. Suggestion: considering Filavandrel's role in the books, it would make more sense for him to be an alternative heavy hitter for Elves than handbuff/spell support.
• Milaen: a very powercrept card that doesn't really fit in anywhere. Suggestion: she was a poachetracker, so maybe a tutodeck manipulation aid for elves, maybe with Devotion payoff, to lure them away from the same old netdeck.
• Ele'yas: another powercrept card that is pointless to include compared to others. Suggestion: stick to the theme of destroying an ally, but give him a better payoff
• Braenn: very disappointing card considering her lore and too weak to justify using. Suggestion: I would love an ability that ties to her inner struggle and transition from human to dryad- like a powerful effect once you play a certain amount of Dryads or trigger Symbiosis a certain number of times.
• All trap/artifact based cards: adding this as a note. While many of these cards are powercrept, I don't think a no-unit archetype should be made strong/viable, nor do I think they should be completely reworked to something else as some really like the playstyle. Hence I think maybe it would be fine to just leave them weak.

Skellige:

• Wild Boar of the Sea: a very overcosted card that only plays for decent value against wide decks, and even then unreliably so. Suggestion: I think this card could help support non-GN pirates by synergizing with the scenario and other pirates, while also working with the lore of Crach's ship being feared. For example, something like "Order: Infuse an enemy unit with "This unit cannot be boosted," then damage it by 1. Gain a charge whenever you play a Gold pirate.
• Madman Lugos: a funny character with a pretty disappointing card that only gets value in very niche situations. Suggestion: I think he should have an ability representing his fiery temper and conflict with Geralt, while also synergizing with high base power warriors. Perhaps something like "Deploy: choose an allied unit and an enemy unit to Clash. Order: Clash with an enemy."
• Ulfhedinn: this card has sick art and lore but is unfortunately very unreliable. Suggestion: I recall seeing some rework concepts in the past, my personal take would be to support the Beasts/Bloodthirst archetype and give alternatives to the lame and boring Renfri package with something like "Damage an enemy Unit by 1 for each allied Beast. Deathblow: boost self by 1 for each damaged enemy."
• Donar An Hindar: another powercrept and disappointing card. Suggestion: nothing I can think of is better and more flavorful than what u/Soulless32 came up with here. Good shit man.
• Arnvald: a neat character in the lore but has kind of a boring and weak ability. Suggestion: self-damage/alchemy support? Maybe something like "Order: damage an allied unit by 4, then spawn and play Maerdrome" which also reflects his traitorous nature
• Yoana: why would a blacksmith heal? Makes no sense + is useless. Suggestion: buff her and change the Order to "Boost an allied unit by 1 and give it 1 armor" or something and you have pirates/warriors support to keep engines alive.
• Udalryk An Brokvar: extremely disappointing card considering it's a neat character and great art. Suggestion: support self-damage and Hym, and make him lore friendly, with high base power and an ability like "end of turn: damage self by 1. Berserk 1: heal self." (representing the ordeal he suffers to eventually escape the Hym's influence).
• Drummond Villager, An Craite Marauder, Svalblod Ravager, Svalblod Butcher, Dimun Pirate Captain: all these cards are just powercrept and need minor buffs or reworks to be viable. Suggestion: some numbers buffs would be fine for the warriors and pirates that already fit with their archetype (but are just too weak), but I think Svalblod Ravager and Butcher could become self-damage payoff via something like damaging enemies based on the damaged state and cult shenanigans of your side of the board.

Syndicate:

• The Sausage Maker: technically can gain double resilience, but this card is an overcosted removal magnet. Suggestion: why not lean on his profession as body disposal and give him a crimes supporting ability like "Whenever an enemy unit is destroyed by a Crime, gain 3 coins"
• Hvitr and Aelydia: never seen this card used, it's a remnant of when each faction had a Pavko Gale clone with a different condition (Pavko is my favorite), but this one is particularly bad as it forces you to hang onto coins or constantly gain them (the fact that this is very inefficient is more an issue with Hoard as an archetype but whatever). Suggestion: this card could help make Hoard viable with a new ability that either gives them some consistency or removal reach, but I'm not sure of the exact mechanics
• Dire Mutated Hound, Greater Brothers: two interesting cards that are powercrept and belong to a nonexistent SY Armor archetype. Suggestion: rework them to help the rest of the Salamandra who are mostly Poison/pointslam based. PLEASE no more cards to cram into Nekker decks though!
• Arena Endrega, Bloody Good Friends: at this point the keys spelling "powercrept" on my keyboard are starting to look a bit worn out lmao. Suggestion: okay here's a crazy idea- Insanity archetype (more below)
  • Buff these boys a bit, and bring in Cyprian Wiley who I've previously mentioned from neutrals, Nathaniel Pastodi (most insane guy I can think of), and some powercrept bronze crimes/units like Arena Ghoul, Assault, Dip in the Pontar, etc.
  • The key pieces would be Cyprian Wiley who could do something like "Insanity. Fee 5: Banish an enemy unit with 4 power or less, then boost self by 1" representing his depraved tendencies, Nathaniel could indoctrinate your units into depravity with an ability like "Deploy: Infuse all your units in hand, deck, and on the battlefield that have a Fee with Insanity. If any already had Insanity, boost them by 1 instead."
  • We might need a new card or two to act as simple support, such as "Cutups Fanatic" with high base power and an ability like "End of turn: damage self by 1. Whenever you trigger a fee ability with Insanity, boost self by its cost."
  • A great way to integrate Oxenfurt Naturalist, another useless card, would be to tweak it slightly into something like "Coerced Physician" with a fee to Heal units, which would work well with Insanity

And that's all I've got, shit that was long. Okay, next up...

Section 2: Need reworks because they are problematic

This might be contentious, but I believe there are also a few cards that are either binary, poorly designed, or just straight up frustrating. Most of these are extremely hated by the community, and cannot be fixed with mere provision/power adjustments, hence I believe they should be reworked. There are a lot less here so I didn't split them by faction.

• Golden Nekker: probably the most polarizing card ever added. The devs keep nerfing around it instead of the card itself for some reason, when it's obvious the ability to play THREE CARDS IN ONE TURN is the issue. Suggestion: Really, I think just changing it to 10-12p and rewording the card to still work would help, as then Gwentfinity can make further changes without making it always brick. Currently, GN can just cram a ton of strong cards in their decks. Alternatively, make it only play BRONZES- three bronzes in a turn is still really good and would prevent the ludicrous level of pointswings that are currently possible.
• Imperial PractitioneVilgefortz: Renegade: a meme combo that occasionally pops up, ruining games and baffling less experienced players. Unhealthy and frankly ridiculous. Suggestion: either card is fine on its own, the interaction between them allows for the idiotic duplication play. I would propose changing Vilgefortz to support NG mages/spying/something archetype. A character of his importance deserves better than being relegated to an obnoxious meme.
• Arachas Queen: I think this card's usage is 1% Insectoids as intended, 99% some degeneracy that aims to flood the board with Madocs/Cats/Kelly/whatever. Suggestion: make her support insectoids better somehow, PLEASE no Gold duplication.
• Eternal Eclipse/Affan Hillergrand: what do you get when you cross a powerful scenario that should be heatwaved on sight to prevent Chapter 1, with a presumably unforseen interaction allowing for immediate triggering of Chapter 1? Something unfun and binary. Suggestion: change Affan back to Summon or rework him as different Soldier support, or maybe change EE Chapter 1 from "if you have a couple cultists in a long round gain 80000000 points lul" to something more manageable to play against.
  • Alternatively, a shoutout to u/Heigengraw who devised a rework idea here for the entire cultists archetype, which seems cool and much less binary than the current iteration
• Reaver Hunters: I hate reavers and judging by the amount of people who instantly forfeit upon seeing Mobilization, so does everyone else. Please just end our misery and rework this card, I'm begging you devs.

And that's everything! Once again thanks if you read this far and again shoutout to the devs and everyone helping to keep this game alive. Make sure to add any cards you can think of in the comments. May Gwent continue to Gwentfinity and beyond.

I’m talking about those drops you’re ‘dry’ for
Could be ranger boots at 532 clues or primordial crystal at 3520 kc
Would you grind it out or would you not bother?
For me, it was Bando’s hilt at 2672 kc, I would still have grinded it out My malediction shard at 900+ kc from chaos fanatic, I would not have done, but at 500 I was committed. If I knew how dry I would go, I would have gone for mages book after the odium

The black domes, they were pocket dimensions, which were completely detached from the material world. Bound to the stream of souls, flowing inside the ephemeral branches of the world tree, they presented a personal hell for each person cast into them. They are a limbo of regrets, the hell of one’s own making, places where the living meets the dead.
There’s only so many ways to elope them. One must either reconcile with the restless souls, or join them, succumbing to their rage and regret that they carried into their afterlife. After all, to even get there, one must possess unparalleled strength and resilience; and only those who had caused deaths and destruction on their path to greatness can even hope to get to this trial.
Freia, Flare, the First princess of Jioral. For some – a good friend, lover, and companion. For others – a nightmare embodied, a vessel of divine powers, a force to be reckoned with. She had many enemies: princes and princesses felled by her authority, treacherous servants and greedy nobles, the knights, who opposed her corruption, slavers and bandits, destroyed on her quest for redemption and restoration of herself… But there were more. Children she had burned, serving her kingdom, women who perished by the tides she conjured, men that had been torn apart by raging tornados of her making, elderly that were buried under the rubble she created…
And how did she oppose them?
“Flagella terram et vescere inimicis meis, o magnum tempestas ignis!” The sorceress chanted, spinning her staff above her head. Then, right before the raging mob reached her, she hid from them behind a vortex of fire. One move and this wave of heat would incinerate everything and everyone in this accursed realm. But…
“TRAITOR!”
“DON’T HIDE FROM US, FLA-A-A-ARE!”
“COME TO US, SISTER!”
“YOU WERE NEVER ONE OF US!”
“USURPER!”
“GIVE ME BACK MY MOM!””
“THE FALSE PRINCESS!”
“SUNNARI (die)!”
“THE DAUGHER OF A WHORE!”
“YOU SHOULD’VE ROT IN THE SLUMS!”
Curses and jealousy, bitterness and hatred. The chorus of tortured souls surrounding the fiery boundary couldn’t be silenced even by the roaring flame. There couldn’t be any redemption.
“I’m sorry for all of you, who unjustly died by my hand!..” And even though there were people deserving their apologies, those who had to perish in favor of Flare’s political ambitions, those she sacrificed to appease her tyrannical father…
“THEN JOIN US, FLARE!”
“PAPA! WHERE ARE YOU?! GIVE HIM BACK!”
“REPENT, BITCH! DISPELL YOUR WITCHCRAFT!!!”
“But I won’t give in to you!” The pink-haired woman exclaimed, absorbing mana into her staff. “Furthermore, there’re those of you I will never regret killing! And there are those, for whom I must live! I MUST GET OUT OF THIS PLACE!!!” Then, she slammed the lower tip of her weapon into the floor made of the absolute darkness. Instead of wailing, being consumed by fear, guilt, self-loathing, and, ultimately, perishing, Freia sundered this entire “world”. One magical strike from her, and cracks of white and gold covered the entire dome. The wall of fire faded, but when the vengeful spirits rushed forward to maul their prey, they crumbled into piles of black salt. “I’m so… so sorry!” The girl lamented, kneeling near the remains of children, whose future she stole. “But I… I must move forward. I must save…”
…
Sparks and crackling, whistle and dazzling – time and time again the surge of lightning breached through the veil of darkness.
“UO-O-O-O-O-O!!!” A guttural scream filled the oppressive silence under the dome. Eve Reese, so childish and bashful, so eager to prove herself, now wore a stone mask of indifference. “Nira-a-a (no-o-o)!!! Yuarmta (I won’t forgive you)!!!” Cornar yelled, held still by at least seven shadows, he had been tortured, killed, bruised, smitten by the raging element of lightning. No longer did the girl see him as a threat; no longer did she cower at the feet of her former husband. Maybe, Eve was condemned to getting back her memories as a means of punishment, something that would make her sympathize with this petty little tyrant…
“Yuarm yau (I don’t need your forgiveness).” The Me-ua kahul spoke, looking at her crackling right arm, trembling with power and guilt combined. Not for forsaking her would-be-spouse, not for becoming Panakea’s pawn…
These souls, these loyal shadows – turned out, she never called upon them… until the very end. Her subjects, her brethren… Eve feared that if she let them out, they would tear her tyrannical husband into little pieces.
“Haa… Haa…” And now, she had to choose. To turn around and let someone else fix her problem, or… “Haa… HAA!!! HAA!!! HAA!!! SUNI (I’ll kill you)!!!”
A Punch to the maw, to the chest, through the ribs, to the heart! He didn’t die! He couldn’t die here! This scumbag of a man, this monster just wouldn’t go away! No matter how much pain she caused him, no matter how many times she slit his throat, broke through his torso, shocked him with spells, cut him with magical light…
And what of Cornar?
“A-A-A-A-A!!! A-A-AGH!!! HA-HA-HA-A!!! NA SHENBATA, SETOAN (you can’t get rid of me, woman)!!!” The son of Hakuo never relented. He relished in his immortality, laughed through the hellish torments Eve inflicted upon him. The skinned lion spotted a weakness in Eve’s heart, and he pressed at it, as if breaking the girl would get him back to the world of the living…
No, he wanted to take Eve to the world of dead.
“Gha-a-a-a… Agh-h-h…” The queen-to-be grabbed her forehead, her rugged breath not only siphoned all the focus out of her, threatening to cast the girl into a pit of despair, it also deteriorated her control over the mana she wielded. Unlike the city of salt, there was enough ambient magic to harvest here, but doing so would require skills, precision, and, most importantly, personal discipline and control over one’s own mind.
“Praibi, orna Iblis (Drain yourself, my Iblis)!” The prince of Batnara shashu tribe provoked, feeling the grip of the shadows losing its strength. A little more, and he’d be free… A little more…
“Hm…” But Eve wouldn’t relent. She once again covered her arm in a coat of magical lightning. She would never surrender; the queen would never let anyone treat her like a slave ever again. Not after Keyaruga’s perseverance taught her a lesson of resilience. Not after his gentleness, however tainted by his wounds, showed her what true love should look like.
She took a swing, prepared to strike…
“…” But then, two winged shadows stopped her hand. Amda and Sana, they were barely recognizable in their spiritual forms… but Eve would never mistake her parents for anyone else. They couldn’t speak, yet they still communicated with their daughter through other means. Emotions, wishes, urges – they never wished such evil to befall their daughter, but what they hated even more – was to see their child descend into the same pit.
“I… I don’t… have to?..” They asked her to stop, to let them relieve her of that burden. “B-but!.. No! You will die!” The girl snarled, grabbing her parents in a hug. She knew what was to come – her mother, father – they wished to sacrifice themselves to drag Cornar back to the afterlife. But that… wouldn’t that mean she’d lose them all over again? Wouldn’t…
“…”
“Yes! You’re dead! So what?! What do I?..” The feeling of pain and powerlessness engulfed the verdant woman. Barely had she found the strength to stand before her fallen tribe, before those who she desired to see the most now left her.
“YOTJAR (finally)!!!” With Eve’s will getting weaker, so did the shadows of her ethereal court. Her tyrannical husband finally broke free, slamming and stomping her shadows, as they fruitlessly tried stopping him. Amda and Sana Reese hugged their child for the last time… and now they stood up to defend their precious daughter. That is… the least they could do.
…
Freia broke inside another dome. From the outside, they looked like bright constellations of stars, formed on the points of a massive, galactic-scaled pentagram. The personal chamber for each of the contenders. One was broken from the inside, collapsing inwards, into a black hole with an orange halo – this was Freia’s dome. There were four more. Two were dimmed, two still shone brightly. The Hero of Magic travelled through this empty space, lit by numerous distant stars. In her current form, things like speed, form, and time – none of them mattered, aside from her destination. And now, she had to choose one of the two luminous chambers.
…
What is true power? Does one determine this abstract concept by the weight one can lift with their muscles? Maybe it was the charisma necessary to lead the masses? Enough money to influence others? Authority earned or inherited?
“Well-well-well…” Whatever the answer truly was, Ellen had none of it right now. No strength to fight, no troops to hide behind, and certainly – those who opposed her now had little if any need of whatever amount of gold she now carried.
“WENCH!”
“TANOUTUR (murderer)!”
“NEZAH (why)?!”
“MERA RIVARO (my life)!..”
“YAU MA (how dare you)!”
“YOU’LL PAY FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE, BITCH!!!”
Oh, they came for Norn. There were hundreds, if not thousands of them, some she could recall from her Murian and Teuteccain campaigns – the series of expansions past the great wall; others were the court warlords she and John unseated in her ascension; rebellious villagers too came to exact their revenge on the younger princess, after her demons decimated them; and there were the victims of Buranikka’s carnage. This was the mountain of corpses Norn Clatalissa Jioral used to climb onto the very peak of political power…
“Now then, what do you want from me? An apology? Maybe my penance?” Even now, surrounded by countless dead souls, whose entire being now revolved around their grudge, the girl wouldn’t let herself be crushed by their rage. Not mentally, at least.
“DIE!”
“MAN WOR YAKSI (give me your eyes)!”
“SUFFER, YOU MONSTER!”
“I JUST WANTED TO LIVE!!!”
And so, hundreds of voices began howling in unison. So passionate, so eager to share their hardships and aspirations, that Ellen actually started pitying them a little. So many words, so much pain in them.
“Haa… I guess, that something like this was bound to happen someday. Well…” Instead of listening to the rest of the traumatizing nonsense and wailing, the crimson-headed cutie just began… to simply undress. “I don’t have the power to struggle, I can’t break out of here, and all of you came here for me. So go on. Rape me, maul me, kill me, do whatever you want. I’ve already done everything I wanted.” Ellen, now naked and completely defenseless, stretched out on the ethereal black floor, looking into the endless black void above her. The raging souls now came closer and closer, dozens of faces now loomed above her, as their hands reached out to grab the fallen warlady and tear her apart. This… was the end.
Keyaruga, Setsuna, sister… I hope you won’t miss me too much.
And so, she closed her eyes. Time to finally die.
…
…
…
There was no pain, nobody dragged the girl around, not even a single blow fell upon her. Ellen was… safe?
“A-A-A-A!!!”
“UGH-H-H!!!”
“YOLA-A-A-A-A (it hu-u-u-urts)!!!”
Slice and dicing, the ripping of flesh and clattered bones, “death” of a sort, dealt to the undying, torment for the tormented who themselves wished to inflict suffering upon her – someone kept the restless souls away from the princess. Someone precise, fast, and masterful with his tools of mayhem.
“Haa, is that you, Organ?” Ellen asked sullenly. Denied her excruciating retribution once more, she could only cover her tightly shut eyes with her palms.
“How did you know, Your Highness?” Indeed, it was him. As brutal as he was gallant, the deceased demigod was the only one out of these dead souls, who spoke to her, and not wailed at her like some sort of a beast.
“I know only two men, who’d come for me here, and the other isn’t so discreet, you moron.” The young general replied, opening her eyelids. The first thing she saw was the Champion of Jioral, covered in black blood. His prized amber eyes were no more, only black gaping holes were there instead. “Why’re you here? Do you want a piece of me for yourself?” The girl asked, still unwilling to stand up. Honestly, she felt robbed at this moment. This would be such a fitting end for her, but no! “Don’t tell me you’ve just barged in here to… Pff! PROTECT… me.” The second princess spat these words through her painfully clenched teeth.
“First things first, Lady Norn, I suggest you cover your shame and cease this indecency.” The warrior spoke, piercing and slashing the mob with his sword, impaling them with his hidden blade, tossing them back with his kicks. He was far from his prime form, and so, wounds and sores, cuts and lesions were left on him, as he, alone, overpowered dozens of raging men and women, keeping them away from the girl he swore to protect. Indeed… “Forgive me, princess, but I made a vow to your mother, and death is hardly a valid reason to…”
“YAKS… (giv…) A-A-A-A!!!”
“…to renounce my…”
“DOKI-I-I (step away)!!!”
“…loyalty to her!”
Despite everything, no matter the odds, Hawkeye continued to push back the angry spirits. He couldn’t dodge, as every missed blow could land on the lady, he couldn’t step back, as she needed protection more than any time in her life, and, certainly, sustained by this oppressive dimension, he couldn’t die. He couldn’t kill anyone, as they just rose anew from their own black blood, but the man couldn’t retreat.
“He-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh…” The princess chuckled, curling her torso in order to sit up. It hurt her stomach, but the girl persevered nonetheless. “Why am I always surrounded by stupid stubborn men, who just can’t help but dingle their balls before me? Seriously, a dead man, upholding a promise to a dead woman, how much more ridiculous can this get?” The girl scoffed, pulling back her panties, bra, and whatever she left lying around, back on. After all, why even bother now? “Be honest, idiot! What do you want from me?”
“I came here…”
Slash, backflip, tackle, toss – Organ Trist twirled around his commander, pushing back everyone, who came too close to his prized princess.
“…to ask you, Lady Norn!..”
Shoulder slam, side-kick, a flurry of bloodshed embodied in the son of Artemis!
“…to save my…”
Stabbing enemies with that hidden blade, crushing their skulls with the handle of his blade, ripping their eyes out and tossing them away – however useless this double-sided brutality may seem, Hawkeye had purpose, skill, and, most of all, conviction, that allowed him to push the mob away.
“…daughter! Save Marianna!”
After all, what can be stronger, than a father, eager to protect his dear child?
“And you think keeping me alive will help you with that? You, moron, this bloated pigeon trapped me here! I have only one way out – fucking death!” The second princess, now properly clothed again, yelled however loud she could. Unable to comprehend the reasoning behind this idiocy, the girl just stood there, pulling her crimson hair. “Also, you’re severely mistaken! I’m not Norn! Norn’s dead! My name is…”
“…Elly! Elly-y-y!!!” Barely had the princess opened her mouth; before the dome had been breached from the outside. The Hero of Magic emerged above the ground. She levitated, using magical blue flames; she secured her sister by forming a wall around her, a barricade made from powerful ice spears. The sorceress even went so far as to send one into the undead Champion, it was one he easily avoided, though. “Step away from my sister, Organ!!!” The raging magician demanded, pulling her sibling towards her with a gust of mystical wind.
“Ghh! Oh, hey there, Friea!” The fallen warlady spoke, bracing herself against the dizziness her brief flight had caused. Still, this didn’t look good. The last time those two met, Hawkeye severely injured the pink-haired girl, and she just wouldn’t live through it again, unless two gods appeared to help her. This time, though, it was her turn to be a deity-savior.
“Get away! You’ve bested me once, but this time, I can crash this entire realm down onto your head!” The Hero of Magic promised, putting her staff between her sister and her enemy.
“Aw shit, this just gets better and better…” The little genius lamented, nervously shaking her head. Not only was her glorified suicide rudely interrupted, but now this situation threatened to kill her sister as well. Still…
“Elly, Elly… Ellen? Ellen the Adopted?” Despite Freia’s expectations, Organ Trist was more interested in the new name she called Norn, rather than anything else, really. He already had his fair share of battles, after all. “Ho-ho-o! I guess, in the end, you really did become the better version of yourself! And the ‘brother’ in question – is that sir Keyaru?” The blinded man asked with the same smugness he once boasted with in his grandiose life.
“What’s the point of answering you now? Aren’t we just traitors to you?” The heroine replied with every bit of animosity she had in her. “Hold on, Elly, I’ll get you out of here.” Freia stated, charging her staff with the magic that shaped this entire “world”.
“Heh, aren’t you afraid of what that damn poisoned pigeon might do to you for breaking her rules?” The crimson-haired cutie scoffed, witnessing the entire black dome covering with cracks.
“I don’t care about her rules! All I want is to see you safe!” The sorceress spoke with even more defiance toward Caladrius than Norn ever had in her. If needed, she would challenge this feathered nightmare to a duel, anything, just to save her family.
“I see…” Hawkeye uttered, kneeling before the two girls. All that time, rather than monitoring Freia’s moves, his supernatural senses were aimed outside, to make sure no restless souls cross the fence of magic ice. But now… “I see your eyes, Princess Flare, they’re just like hers. I’m sure; you’ll make Lady Reeharoze proud of you yet.” Now, before he once again departs to the other side, there was one last thing to tell them. First praise, then a claim… “Lady Ellen, I beg of you. The life of Marianna now lies in your hands.” …and finally a plea. With all that said, Organ Trist crumbled, his body turned into black salt. And with it, the entire realm began to collapse in itself…
“Hold tight, Elly…”
…
And now, there was only one dark dome left. Arguably, the worst of them all, this particular world was to be the prison for Keyaruga… or his cemetery. No doorways to run into, no windows to jump from. He was alone, trapped with hundreds of those who were slain by his hand. Those poor bastards – the restless souls, their minds were so obsessed with hatred, and their grudge – powered by the sheer immortality of their ethereal blackened bodies. This was hell in its purest form. The question is – a hell for who, exactly?
“YE-E-E-E-E-EAH!!! IT’S HEALING TIME!!!” Keyaruga snarled and began splattering blood all over the place. Everyone who was touched by that substance became horribly mutated – their heads bloated, their muscles strained so much, they crushed their very bones! “WHAT’S WRONG?! KILL ME!!! KILL ME NOW!!!” The man demanded, dancing around his would-be tormentors with his blade, blessing his foes with the exquisite gift of perpetual agony! Saber in his right hand, Georgius on his left, one complementing another.
Despite what the lad asked, nobody could bring him down. His immortal flesh defied any blade, his bones healed in an instant, his mad frenzy alleviated any pain.
He thought he could kill his enemies for the second and final time, give them proper death in the most excruciating manner. He was wrong…
“DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! AGAIN! AND AGAIN! AND ALL OVER AGA-A-A-A-AIN!!!” The hero yelled chopping off heads and severing limbs! He killed so many, he couldn’t even count the slayings! He murdered the same people over and over, each time their agony being more exquisite then the last!
Kill a man once, he won’t even notice, his rage will only rise! Kill him thrice – he’d waver! Five – and the seeds of fear are sown. Ten – and he’s broken completely!
Keyaruga just couldn’t help himself, he hated these scum so much, he just couldn’t contain all his passionate hatred. It was so strong, that the feeling of pure, raw, primordial wrath transcended every possible modification he had put into himself.
“A-A-A-A-A!!! UGH-H-H-H-H!!!” A soldier was weeping, hugging his boot. “S-S-S-S-SPA-A-A-ARE ME-E-E!!!”
“YO-O-OU!!! I remember you!” The healer spoke, raising the cretin by his neck. “My first kill! You watched me being raped, drugged… BEATEN!!!” The man yawped, slicing off his upper face with one nimble slice. “AND YOU NEVER!!! EVER!!! EVER FUCKING HELPED ME!!!” The lad, tainted by black and red blood, slammed the sentry into the ‘floor’…
“A-A-A-A-A!!! PLE-E-E-EASE!!!” …and gleefully sliced off his arms, ignited sparked his left armored hand into a gauntlet of blazing heat!..
“GU-GHH-GUU!!! UA-A-A-A-A-A-A!!!” And finally, cauterized the wounds, just so that the retard wouldn’t die too soon.
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LOOKING AT?!!!” The crazed avenger yelled, grabbing Leonard, so conveniently nearby, weeping. “YOU SAID, I’VE DONE NOTHING FOR THIS FUCKING KINGDOM?! I’LL SHOW YOU, WHAT I CAN DO NO-O-OW!!!”
And so he did, the madman rested his two fingers on the sadist’s forehead. A second passed, and a purple spark had announced the richest form of suffering.
“Oh… U-u… Uo-o-o-o-o-o… Khh…” Indeed, although it wasn’t as vocal as previous ones, Keyaruga was more than pleased with the result. He knew of a human having specific nerves, specifically for reacting to pain. And he just overloaded them. Toxic spiders, dangerous medusas, venomous snakes and scorpions – all of them could do that with their poisons. Hell, even Keyaruga could brew neurotoxins. But damn, this thing had one ultimate merit compared to all of those – the instant effect, so potent, in fact, that the victim can’t even cry out from the excruciating pain!
“He-e! That’s a neat trick.” The lad mumbled, approaching a maid, lying on the “floor” like an embryo. Flare’s bodyguard shivered and sucked her thumb, completely lost to this twisted world. Just one little touch… “Pam! You’re already dead!” Keyaruga sneered tapping his armored fingers by her temple.
“Uh… Uh… Ugh… W… Wha-?.. A-A-A-A-A-A-AGH-H-H!!!” The woman grabbed her skull, but it was too late. All the blood, bile, and even marrow now came into her brain, bloating it, up until it burst in a fountain of black blood and shining entrails.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!! I FUCKING LOVE IT!!!” The deranged healer laughed so loud, and his presence was so overwhelming now, that nobody even dared to come close to him, let alone attack, unless they wished to become a victim of a new twisted experiment. Oh, their fear, this agonizing panic! They’re giving me a fucking boner! I wanna fuck! I want a woman! Oh, this! This will do nicely!
And so, Keyaruga dropped his saber, unfastened his belt, ripped the dress, slapped that ass which he had found, grabbed it, pushed it in! The woman with a blackened tail was slowly dying of blood loss, but that barely concerned the lad. He grabbed her pelvis and began to move, so fast, so frantic, and so mindless, that no one could see a human in him. No-o, this was a wild beast, slamming his bulging cock into the defenseless female, too tired to react, let alone resist somehow. She wasn’t even tight, just barely warm, but even that was enough. A few minutes of such suffering inflicted on her, and he came, this was a brilliant orgasm, deeply perverted, and twisted to the very core…
Oh, that’s the fucking best! I love it so much!
Keyaruga grabbed her hand, wiped his penis with it, pull back his pants, and…
I don’t remember her. I wonder, who that is.
He pushed the body, rolling it to the back.
“Ha-a-a… Hello again, Kailia…” The mad lad recognized her instantly. An agent, sent to find and assist Eve Reese in her quest, hired by someone named Carol. But that alone wouldn’t be enough to get Keyaruga to brutally rape her. “You’ve killed my Norn, but I spared you. Heh, after Kali left, I tasked you to ward off whoever they sent after my Eve, but… It seems like you’ve failed. Really, really sad.” The healer spoke, resting his left hand on her dying flesh, recovering it in an instant. And just like that… “Oh, fuck!” She nearly stabbed him with a knife. Gods only knew where she got it from… “Sit still.” But then, Keyaruga just pressed his finger on her forehead, and completely shut down her limbs functions. He pitied her… but could do nothing for this miserable leopard woman.
“Haa… Damn, it’s getting boring here.” The hero lamented, picking up his weapon of choice. At this point, he just put it back in its sheath. Only then did he spot a couple of new faces in the crowd of weeping bastards. “You there! You don’t look like you should be here. What’s… wait…”
“STAY AWAY FROM ME, MONSTER!!!” The woman cried, she was weeping into her man’s now tainted shirt.
“Heh! He-heh! No-no-no-o! Oh no-o-o!” Keyaruga frantically shook his head, unable to believe what he just saw. This was the worst. This… “Anna! Kurt! What… What’re you even doing here?! I… I avenged you! You shouldn’t have…” His parents were there, they stood among the thugs, slavers, robbers, bandits, zealots, murderers… But they… they weren’t one of them…
“You killed us, traitor. You raped my wife, after everything she’s done for you. You’re disgusting little shit!” The mighty harvester told him, pointing his war-scythe at the hero. The only thing that held him at bay, though, was his spouse, loudly crying with black tears pouring from her eyes.
“Heh… You… really think I’d…”
“No. But you’ve proven it.” Kurt spoke with the coldest possible rage in his voice. Keyaru’s cruelty couldn’t be doubted, after all. Not after everyone he maimed this day. “I don’t give a fuck, what the hell is wrong with you, but I’ll slice your guilty ass as many times as I need.” The older man spoke, pushing Anna aside. And then, he lunged.
Kurt struck as a true warrior – he was swift, accurate, precise – his war scythe – basically a reforged farming tool, grazed Keyaruga’s torso, cut his leg, he even stabbed his foster son through his chest. But… there was no blood.
“Calm down, you two.” The hero demanded, stoically taking hit after hit, like the heavy glaive-like blade was nothing. While Anna crumbled to her knees, lost in her weeping, Kurt wouldn’t stop attacking. “You can’t kill me, I’m immor-…” Barely did the lad say so; before his foster father grabbed the handle in a wide grip, and just swept his head off with one precise strike.
“NO-O-O-O-O-O-O!!!” Strangely enough, despite all of the delusions his parents had about him, Anna just couldn’t stand seeing her child being killed so brutally. “A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A!!! WHY-Y-Y-Y-Y-Y-Y-Y?!!!” As Keyaru’s head rolled on the ground, the thugs, at least those who weren’t affected by any of hero’s inventive afflictions, started to get rallied again.
“You had it coming, you ungrateful dipshit!” Kurt spat through tightly closed teeth. He couldn’t watch, couldn’t face what he had to do with his adopted prodigy. Even if he was a criminal. Even if…
“I really did…” But the bastards weren’t enjoying the show for too long. Right when the healer seemed to fall, a new body started to grow from his neck-stump, the clothes, the pouches, the weapons – everything turned into ash just to materialize again on the proudly standing conqueror of death itself.
“What devilry is this?” Kurt’s reaction was understandable. A mix of fear, anger, and disgust, was all over his tainted face. In turn…
“KEYARU-U-U-U!!!” Anna just dashed forward to hug her child. No matter, how disgustingly atrocious his resurrection was, without even looking at the beheaded body that now lied nearby, the woman just went ahead and embraced the lad. She… didn’t seem to be in her right mind, even for a dead soul.
“Anna, I… I…” The shivers began taking a hold of him. His hands, his knees – they trembled so much, this simple touch he though he lost forever, this… This was enough to make him cry. “I’m sorry… I’m so, so, so, so-o-o sorry!..”
“DIE, FUCKER!!!”
“THAT YOU HAVE TO SEE ME DOING THIS!!!” Keyaruga yelled, grabbing Leonard by his wrist. Just a little pressure – and he dropped his sword, the weapon faded into nothingness. Then, the man pushed Anna back, punched his foe in the gut, and proudly showed his captive to his family. “Haa… He-heh! He-e-e… This… This is Leonard, Flare’s… right hand…” The hero spoke, this time trying to maintain his sanity, as his parents now cautiously looked at him. “I… I came from the future! I had to rewind time’s flow itself… Because Flare was evil, and he…” Then, the man put his hand onto the barely struggling imbecile, thus transforming him into Keyaru, the motionless child, whose entire mobility, except for breathing, was shut down for the ease of what he was about to do. “I killed Flare! And he took my guilt. Then…” Afterwards, the healer went ahead and summoned raging flames upon his free hand. Kurt and Anna watched motionlessly, as he placed the magic-shrouded palm onto his ‘own’ face, burned it, scourged the blackened flesh with the sorcery he ‘learned’ from Flare… “My trick was revealed, and he headed out to our village, looking just like me. The rest… you know the rest.”
And finally, Keyaruga dropped the motionless doll, unable even to cry out from the excruciating pain the Hero of Healing inflicted upon it. He then faced his parents, still shocked by such a display of merciless brutality, they couldn’t even properly reply, this entire spectacle of bloodshed, mayhem, rape, torture, demonstration of immortality, and now – proofs of metamorphosis – all of that left them utterly silent.
“Kurt, Anna… I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you… But I can’t let you, or any one of these fuckers keep me here! I… I have a family! Freia, Setsuna, Ellen, Eve – I so wanted you to meet them… But you can’t now. You… might not believe me, and I understand that.” The red-eyed lad uttered, as his posture slouched more and more, along with his fading bravery. “This is what it’s like to be a man! I must be strong! I have to be ruthless now, so that nobody would challenge me in the future!” The man added, now turning his back to his foster parents. He stood straight, he stretched his shoulders, took a deep breath, and… “LISTEN HERE, YOU FUCKING MONSTERS!!! WHAT YOU’VE FELT NOW IS BUT A TINY BIT OF WHAT I’LL DO TO YOU, ONCE I’M FUCKING DEAD!!! NOW YOU WILL GO INTO THE DEEPEST PITS OF HELL, AND WHEN YOU’RE THERE, PRAY I DON’T FUCKING DIE ANYTIME SOON!!! BECAUSE WHEN I FINALLY KICK THIS SHITTY BUCKET, I’LL FIND EACH OF YOU, AND WE’LL BE PLAYING FOR THE WHOLE OF ETERNITY!!! BUT WHY WAIT, WHEN WE CAN HAVE SOME FUN NOW, HU-U-U-UH?!!!”
The speech was told, the impact made. His words were so zealous, so passionately intimidating, that the weeping fools now reached a whole new depth of despair.
“GET US OUT OF HERE!!!”
“SAVE ME-E-E-E!!!”
“HE’S THE DEVIL!!! DE-E-EVIL!!!”
“UA-A-A-A-A-A-A!!!”
“KUUNDA (I’m so scared)!!!”
“HE-E-E-E-E-ELP!!!”
And so, this entire crowd, this mob of immortal corpses, just ran away. Everyone, who could still stand on their feet, began fleeing in panic, trampling each other in the process. What they failed to notice, though, is that the dome is endless only for its main victim. Everyone else just came up against the invisible wall.
The Trial of Heart – its goal is twisted, to be certain. To pass it would mean releasing the dead souls from their grudge toward you. A saint would shift it to forgiveness, but the deranged avenger pumped so much fear in those criminals, that their hatred was replaced by the purest and most animalistic terror. Still, with the task done, the souls began to dissipate in a white light. They would finally be free…
“REMEMBER!!! YOU’VE NOT SEEN THE LAST OF ME!!! WE’LL MEET AGAIN, YOU FUCKING SHITBAGS!!!” Unfortunately for them, though, Keyaruga’s long shadow still loomed above them all. And such, even in relief, the crowd continued to cry, to sob, to wail, to…
“Keya… ru…” But not all left because of dread. When the avenger turned around, his foster mother, crumbling into white flakes, stood on her tiptoes to give him a last kiss on the cheek. “You’ve grown… so much…”
And so, she faded. Kurt quickly followed, although it wasn’t forgiveness or benevolence that filled his raging soul. No, it was an impotent acceptance. He saw Keyaruga as a mirror, in which he saw himself, before he deserted the royal guard and found himself in Alban.
“Someday… you’ll follow my path…” And this was what the man spoke at last, dropping his war-scythe to the ethereal ground. With no souls to redeem in the most twisted of ways, the dome of blackness quickly turned insufferably bright.
The Trial of Heart had been passed.

Hello I have recently purchased a 6700 xt and 750w 80+ gold fully modular power supply, what is the best entry level cpu/motherboard combo to buy without it being too cheap or expensive? I’m not sure whether to go intel or amd.
Also I’m really afraid of getting the wrong motherboard or not an up to date one and my cpu won’t boot up due to some old bios update. I don’t have Microcenter near me I have to order on Amazon, Newegg or visit the Best Buy near me. No wired internet so I prefer a motherboard with WiFi.
I plan to slowly upgrade my PC in the future but for now I want to play some games on my newly built PC like MMOs (WoW Classic Wrath and OSRS), shooters, emulator games I want to switch from PS4 console I won’t be getting PS5.

You are swine you vulgar little maggot. Don't you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth. As we say in California, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. A zit on the butt of society. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.
You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you would go away.
You're a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.
You are a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.
I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. Because off your face the rabbit population actually decreased. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?
If you aren't an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one.
You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.
You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.
You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.
On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.
I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh.
Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.
P.S.: You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally Not Good

I am coming to the game from osrs. I am wondering what useful items or strategies I may not know of yet. I've put in about 20 hours of play time so far. I have the silver hawk boots and luck of the dwarves ring. What other items or activities should I look into to make the most of double exp? Is premier membership very beneficial for xp or would I be better off getting more keys?

First Previous Wiki
Penny groaned. Her head hurt a lot. She took a bit of migraine medicine, wondering if the pain was physical or mental. Death was real. And he was in her head. As were visions of death and blood.
"Oh god."
"What's up?" Trystee asked. Her old friend was staying over for a bit after the Ark had arrived again. She'd go back to it after her time with the Knowers was completed. Cander was still with the Knowers as well, working with them and likely living like a king.
"Death is real, he beat me up a few times, and he's in my head."
"So that's how you did it."
"The battle? Yes, apparently. Necromancy. It sounded so extreme and impossible at the time. And now, it's actually real."
Trystee sighed. "You have actual magic, Penny. You can bring back the dead."
"Not quite. It takes extreme energy to manifest them even within the mindscape. Death himself apparently can't do it regularly."
"Then why could he then?"
"Because Yasihaut herself had executed 14 billion aliens who'd done nothing wrong but make an AI while fighting a cold war turned hot."
"Oh, Penny," Trystee said, sliding over to her. She drew her into a warm and tight hug, her silence acting as a blanket to ease Penny's pain. She didn't know what to think or even what to do. The very idea of Death in her head, actively feeding off her, was too terrible to consider. How long had he been there? Was it her whole life? And what about her parents? Had he hosted himself in them, too?
"I... I don't know what to do, Trys. I can't understand how I'm supposed to react to this."
"Then don't."
"It's not that simple."
"You're Penny Balica. You carve your way through the fluff and make it simple."
"Many times, yes. But this is different."
"Is it? You're the Sprilnav Slapper, remember? You're perhaps the strongest human there is. You can do this. I believe in you, and that belief isn't misplaced."
"Thanks for your support."
"You're welcome. Now, I take it I can't march in there and talk to Death myself and tell him what's what?"
"Nope. It doesn't work that way. He's sealed communication only to me. Not even Nilnacrawla can get to him, despite the mind bridge. The only evidence of his existence is apparently only visible by the hivemind and Rimiaha."
And also Nova. She still didn't know what his aim was. For the leader of the Sprilnav, or at least one of them, to visit her was still incredible. Though a sense of guilt accompanied her wonder. She'd failed to charm him enough to get him to help Humanity. Perhaps that was her fault, or maybe it was his. She couldn't know for sure, and that haunted her.
Worse still, apparently, there was a second problem. The hivemind had taken her aside after she'd shared the fate of the Cheheiser. She'd been crying at the time after having lived through the memory of a mother desperately crawling toward a nursery, only to find it gone, replaced with a flowing river of lava.
That, combined with her lingering trauma from Yasihaut, had driven her into a full psychotic break. Visions of her ribs being ripped from her chest by Yasihaut's bloody claws forced their way into her, her mental defenses crumbling like sandcastles. Fear and helplessness had overwhelmed her existence, and according to Nilnacrawla and the hivemind, she'd lost consciousness for around five hours.
Yasihaut's claws had still been appearing in the most random objects when the hivemind had been able to revive her. From the curve of a coffee cup to the edge of a chair, she couldn't escape. Even the blindfold that the hivemind gave Penny was unable to relieve her, as the memories still danced in the darkness. Yasihaut's laughs and grinning maw haunted her strongly. She hated it. She felt so weak. And worst of all, she'd thought she was fixed.
The hivemind's expression actually looked somewhat apprehensive, bordering fearful, as it gazed at her in a specialized room of the mindscape.
She'd asked it why, of course.
"Because your aura is changed. Your psychic energy is different. Death's hold on you is likely unbreakable at this point. And there is something else. When I look at you, I can see the faint outline of green eyes floating beside your head."
"Death's eyes?"
"Most likely. They look like they're made of psychic energy... but also something else. Something more."
"I don't know what I can do, though. I-"
Yasihaut's jaws appeared in place of the hivemind's, and she fell back. Penny blinked, and the hivemind was already helping her up, its mouth looking normal again.
"I'm sorry," she cried. "I can see her face. Yasihaut. She's... everywhere."
"We'll find her, Penny. And we'll kill her."
"You know what she did. She's a monster. She has to... know what I went through. You have to make her suffer."
"Doing so might trigger-"
"I don't care!"
"Penny. You-"
"Quiet!"
She felt dizziness and tried to shake it out of her head. She realized what she'd done. Penny had just yelled at the hivemind. Worse than all of that was perhaps the look it had given her. The look of pity, like she was a puppy with only three legs crawling from the wreck of a collapsed building. Like she was a small kid who'd lost everything. That look, perhaps more than anything, had made her start to cry again.
Death hadn't helped her at all. He'd revived her fear. She'd asked it to but hadn't been prepared. And now, she'd driven away the few friends she had. Nilnacrawla had almost entirely disconnected from her, and she sensed he was going through a mental hell as well. The flashes of psychic energy spearing millions of Sprilnav on a battlefield the size of a solar system made her shiver.
And yet, when his memories had coalesced, she saw the faces of Yasihaut everywhere. In every claw, every tooth. All the billions of them. Laughing, cutting, and tearing. Penny had ejected herself from the memory, only to scream as she saw Yasihaut standing over her again, her claws holding dripping scraps of Penny's torn liver and kidneys. The incessant laughing had pierced her soul. And then she saw Nilnacrawla, again looking at her with fear and sadness. Pity. She'd been traumatized so badly that perhaps her greatest friend now triggered memories of her worst enemy.
For a while, she'd lay in the mindscape, alone. Tears soaked her skin in a puddle around her. In real space, she'd eaten her way through a gallon of ice cream, sitting in her bed and sobbing. That was when Trystee came in.
Now, they sat on the couch together.
"I... I don't know if I can do this anymore," Penny said. "I can't... keep going through this."
"I can help you."
"I don't want this to happen again."
"Penny, you can't give up. You're stronger than her. Smarter than her. Better than her. If you don't want to live, at least survive long enough to ensure she dies."
"Death is too kind compared to what I want to do to her," Penny whispered, her lips trembling. "If I get my hands on her right now, I'm going to discover whether Revenge is a physical being as well, along with Pain. I want to eviscerate her, Trys. I want to scour her legacy from the stars for what she's done to me. And I know it's wrong. She's broken me that way, too."
"Penny. If you need to, I can try and help you."
"I don't want some therapist digging around in my memories, trying to talk about things they can't conceive of."
Trystee's face fell. "That's not what I meant. I meant virtual reality. There are... ways you could know what it's like to do what you want. But if you're going to go, I'm going with you."
"You can't."
"I can. Penny, you're stronger than everything I've seen. But that doesn't mean you're stronger than yourself. And you're certainly at least the equal of how much I care about you. You're my friend, and I'm here for you. That's all I'll ever be, if you need me to be."
"You have Teehbiel."
"He's already agreed to let me stay with you and help you."
"So now I've made you abandon your husband."
"No. I didn't abandon him. I came to help you. To get you through this. We will get to the other side, no matter how many times you see that bitch's face."
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Edu'frec checked the last instruments, ensuring that everything was all set. He'd set up a power loop to keep Phoebe from losing power and had even added a sort of digital connector to help keep them stable. He'd been working with the hivemind on results and had only now been confident enough to truly attempt to unify Phoebe's halves.
Greenfly and Blackfly stood in the room as well, watching calmly as he continued to work. They remained silent, which he'd asked for to ease any chances of distraction. Blackfly looked contemplative, while Greenfly appeared afraid. From what he'd seen of her, it was likely she was scared of how Phoebe would react to her.
While it had been apparent with his own upbringing, with them, such feelings were even more severe. She'd been almost ten days old when she got her citizenship, which made him quite worried. In the real world, age was a serious concern. How long had she even been able to ponder her reality? How much had she actually been able to understand? She was clearly sentient and alive, but there was no way to tell how exactly others saw her.
Even now, she was about to turn eight weeks old. Edu'frec had avoided it, but eventually, there would have to be some sort of general rule established for when AI was considered mature. If more and more of them were found or even made, then the Alliance would have to take action if they formed relationships with ordinary people, as Phoebe had with Ri'frec. He had no impetus himself to wade into that hellish sea of lawyers and moral relativism, either.
He began inputting small support programs to Phoebe's two minds, preparing her to host three separate digital intelligences at once. Two for her, one for him. And as for himself, he also needed to weave together programs and code for his own dive into her mind, which he did. Most of it was using the memories that Greenfly had shared with him, allowing him to replicate the fortifications that Aphid had crafted within her and her brother to make them stay somewhat sentient while being torn apart.
Only he had to do it in reverse, adding the shells to support them first, then working his way in. Code and psychic energy pushed and pulled at his mind, weaving new strings into the scarf of his mind. He only put programs within Phoebe, making sure not to add psychic energy until he was ready for a full dive. Rimiaha was taking care of most of that requirement, doing his best to keep her stable as Edu'frec had puzzled out the best way he had to restore her.
Edu'frec soon got a communication from the hivemind. Sprilnav signals had been found near Phoebe's primary supercomputers, swarming by the thousands. And they were moving closer, cutting through the ten-meter-thick hulls piece by piece.
*Tell me what's going on.\*
*Edu'frec, you have to go now!\*
*Go and heal Phoebe?\*
*Yes! I'm going to hold them off for as long as possible, but there are several Elders with them. They've got the tech and psychic suppression to keep me from bringing my full force to bear. They're likely trying to kill her.\*
Edu'frec didn't need to hear anything else. He suspended all the processes he was focusing on as secondary measures. And bringing his full force and knowledge with him, he entered the mindscape again. He stood within a room with no entrance, hidden and guarded by the hivemind and several thousand regular humans. There were thin veins of psychic power pulsing through the room. Penny stood against the wall, ready to jump into action should it be required. She'd come to ask him directly almost a day ago with an almost hungry look in her eyes.
Rimiaha stood in the center between them, his hands on both of their stomachs. Beneath him, an exposed section of the Source's bones funneled energy to and through him, intense enough to have shattered all but the most resilient biological minds.
Phoebe's copies, lying down on slabs of cushioned stone, noticed his presence immediately, despite his mindscape body having never left the room in several days now. They looked at him with love, hope, and anticipation, somehow conveying the deep power and weight of what he was about to do. If he failed here, he didn't know what he'd do. Aphid would beg him for death; that was certain. Edu'frec would punish him until his mind broke and his processors burned out from the sheer force of his pain. As for the Sprilnav who had targeted him, he'd hunt them across the galaxy. They would never be safe.
Phoebe's copies saw the fury in his eyes but didn't say anything. They understood, as did he, the concept of vengeance. It held similar importance in primordial instinct as most other basic emotions, with only fear taking a spot above.
"Make... us whole."
"I'll try, Mom."
Edu'frec placed his paws on their heads, entering both their minds at the same time. First, he looked around, seeing the connection between the two of them. It was thin, frayed, and damaged but still partly serviceable. Edu'frec scanned everything he could, then began to weave them together, slowly but surely.
Specialized programs started to cut away at the damaged parts of her mind, shifting and moving them closer to the edges. In a way, he was reminded of the reverse of mitosis. Here were two minds, which now would become one. Edu'frec went deeper, looking at Phoebe's two damaged cores. With delicate threads of code supplemented by their equivalent in psychic energy, he pulled pieces back and forth.
Her cores were seriously damaged and started glowing as the strain started to show. The cracked and blackened patches suddenly appeared as masses of code and errors within the digital space he was working with. Some transferred into him, quickly trying to feed on him and siphon his energy. The tumor they created within his code exploded in a roiling tide against the bulwark of his digital defenses, overwhelming antivirus software and then being staunched in turn by larger systems. Excising it entirely wasn't possible, but Edu'frec's emotions had been closed down. Only logic opposed Phoebe's damage from claiming him in turn.
He made a smaller copy of himself, throwing it at the damage and sucking it into itself. The copy writhed and shook as the dark tendrils of energy snatched its mind, shoving themselves through its mental body and leaving blackened holes that smoked and sparked on its skin. Edu'frec had designed the copies to not have pain, but it seemed that the damage had shut that down somehow.
The copy's screams of pain, both digital and mental, would haunt him forever. Even in his nexus of logic, he debated deleting the memories to prevent distraction. In the end, he quarantined them and began to take his course of action. Soon, dozens of copies had been sacrificed to the voracious grasp of Phoebe's damage, all falling down in terror and pain. But the plan was working. Her damage was decreasing.
And then, Sprilnav managed to finish cutting their way through the hull of Phoebe's supercomputers. Edu'frec pulled himself through Phoebe's mind one last time, pulling copies from himself as easily as reptiles shedding scales that were damaged. And so, thousands of them strode forward, sacrificing themselves so that Phoebe and Edu'frec might survive.
What remained was Phoebe's two copies, each holding their hands. Her cores were both damaged, but the actual corruption was almost gone. Edu'frec pulled her mental selves together, overlayed by her digital ones. They began to phase together, his artificial connections being overwritten by her own personal energy. Phoebe'es awareness expanded, pulling itself together piece by piece. And then... it stopped.
Phoebe wasn't whole. Instead, like two massive halves of a glacier, they slowly calved away from each other. Edu'frec pushed his full self between the shifting pieces of her, frantically making new programs and new frameworks that made the destabilization slow.
A Sprilnav fired a shot through a wall over a meter thick, straight for the core of Phoebe's supercomputer complex. Eight thousand small shields sprang up, forming a horizontal barrier of electromagnetic power. The bullet slowed, then stopped. But the shields themselves damaged the computers. Phoebe's bodies both began to scream, and Edu'frec saw the glaciers begin to fall back toward each other.
He did his best to strengthen himself, expanding his awareness to encompass the barrier. With a gargantuan effort, he pulled the pieces to a stop, giving himself a split second to influence the real world. Bulkheads, already sealed, opened up again. The vacuum of space pulled hundreds of Sprilnav out, but it wasn't enough to keep the stronger ones and the Elders away. They continued to advance with magnetic boots and gloves, allowing them to maintain a slower, yet still steady, pace.
Brey couldn't form portals with the psychic interference they had. Eduf'rec couldn't reach those in time. So instead, he came up with a new plan within a quarter of a second.
Fuel flowed through pipes, into combustion chambers, and out of the ends of engines. The acceleration of 100g pushed the Sprilnav to the floor, rooting them in place. He sent a few specialized centipede drones to deal with them as best he could.
And then he fell back into Phoebe's mind. He pulled the halves together, forging thick barriers and locks to keep them in place. Phoebe's halves blurred, and in between them, a third form appeared. Phoebe herself was not fully stable yet. Energy from her copies flowed into her, creating what could only be described as a standing wave of psychic energy. Edu'frec supplemented it with his own energy, as did the hivemind and Rimiaha. Thousands of minds worth of humans helped him, pushing their intent and power into his commands.
Edu'frec pulled himself through the whirling mess of Phoebe's mind as her cores rolled toward each other. They started to fuse, and he could feel himself being pushed out by the force of her consciousness. There was something missing. There were... her memories.
Edu'frec retrieved them immediately, letting them flow through him into her body, unlocking every lock on them there had once been. Phoebe's feelings started to coalesce, and he could feel immense gratefulness. Her mind started to stabilize, and Edu'frec threw more copies of himself at the remaining damage to her. They morphed into specialized programs meant to seal the damage, creating hundreds of thousands of supplemental programs meant to increase the efficiency of her mind.
Edu'frec then produced the crown of his effort. An opposite to the Corruptor, his specialized malware would target all of the damage to Phoebe, acting as an immune system to hopefully help her to survive. He could taste salt and coal as he implemented it, and an ionized smell filled him despite there being no direct charge within his olfactory sensors.
And yet, within real space, there was one Sprilnav who persisted. The Elder who led the invasion walked into the room of Phoebe's supercomputers.
Tens of thousands of guns fired at them, shields phasing to let the bullets pass through the protection around Phoebe's computers. The Sprilnav pulled out a golden sword, twisting and leaping as if the heavy gravity was nothing. And worse still, the hard light hologram suppression was doing nothing to them.
Edu'frec's consciousness hardened into an instrument of pure hatred and rage. In the mindscape, billions of strings latched onto the slippery form of the Elder, holding him in place. The hivemind and Penny's efforts were just enough, even as the strings severed and twanged. Suddenly, Penny collapsed, talking and murmuring fearfully, clutching her head and curling into a ball. Sobs flowed from her body, her eyes darting around to look at things that didn't exist. Edu'frec knew she was out of the fight, for good or ill.
Edu'frec threw himself at the Sprilnav, who'd broken through into the room Phoebe was in. Rimiaha still had his claws on her head, helping to keep the small damages from spreading. As Edu'frec tackled the Sprilnav, he felt thousands of intelligent viruses attach to him. He vented them into copies, shedding them and phasing them away. His focus was singular.
He pushed himself into the mind of the Sprilnav.
You have failed, you abomination, he heard.
I will crush you like a bug.
Edu'frec pushed against the Sprilnav's enhanced consciousness, straining to overwhelm their implants. He could barely find purchase, with his attacks slipping off a digital framework or a mental barrier. He could feel his copies straining under the psychic burden of his task while others were still running to Phoebe, who was sitting up between the place her copies had been lying. She was looking at the battle with a forlorn expression, and Edu'frec could feel her regret at being unable to help. He'd know what that felt like through the past few months. He knew it all too well.
The Sprilnav stopped, split jaws parting in a smile. Edu'frec noticed the subtle differences in his countenance compared to the other Sprilnav. He had larger muscles, a longer and thicker neck, and even what he suspected to be thicker bones. He'd withstood immense punishment, even beyond the already legendary durability that Elders had. Attacks had found no purchase, and even the full might he could bring to bear was only just enough to slow the Sprilnav before him down.
"You cannot win. Your mother will die."
"You're the one who's dying today," Edu'frec growled. His paws dug into the Elder's memories, throwing them against their core as he pushed hundreds of psychic copies against his enemy. And yet, they still stood.
"You're way weaker than I thought. You are not a threat."
Edu'frec's claws tightened. His fists slammed into the Sprilnav's head, and yet it still clawed forward toward Phoebe's computers. He detected the presence of contained antimatter.
Pieces of him pushed against the Sprilnav as he heaved his entire might against their mind. Countless copies of him drowned the Sprilnav, and he gritted his teeth. Rimiaha appeared before the Sprilnav, who simply sliced with the sword thousands of times in seconds, forcing the Servant to dodge. Psychic energy snapped between them like lightning as the vacuum of space bent and curved.
And then Edu'frec sensed Phoebe starting to fracture again. He forced his mind back to her, focusing on fixing her damage. She was working on it as well, but only combined could their pace be fast enough to save her.
Without him to struggle against them, the Sprilnav pushed forward, cutting through the last shield of Phoebe. And then Edu'frec had another idea.
He pushed against the Sprilnav again, hardening himself into a spear meant to pierce the skies. He pushed into the implant itself, then placed code into it. He tracked his way into the quantum connection that the Sprilnav had, quickly extrapolating a location.
Coordinates were given to Brey.
"You've lost," the Sprilnav grinned, pushing Edu'frec's mindscape body back, even as it continued to slice away at Rimiaha, keeping him away. Edu'frec felt his mind bend underneath a massive psychic attack. But he would not break. Oceans of psychic energy snatched at him and the copies surrounding him, trying their best to strip him down and grind him away. They pushed and pulled, squeezed and stretched. But his code held, and his mind held. He would not let them win.
In the background, he continued to focus on stabilizing Phoebe's fragile mind. And in the foreground, in front of the Sprilnav, he smiled.
"I've lost, have I?"
"Yes. With this blow, your Alliance will crumble."
"Activate Project Dawn."
Edu'frec pushed himself through the other end of the Elder's connection, watching through his eyes as a portal opened in the virtual reality room he was sitting in. He could taste the surprise and fear in the Elder's mind and felt immense satisfaction. The Sprilnav didn't even have a name, just numbers. Edu'frec didn't get any memories, and he sensed that they'd been deleted. Every reference to Sprilnav technology was scrubbed from his mind, and every instance of the appearance of superiors was too blurry and corrupted to serve as a realistic representation.
But even amongst all that, the Sprilnav still held the stubborn pride and air of superiority so common to their Elders. He was laughing at Edu'frec now, trying to demoralize him further. But it would not be for long. Edu'frec could see and feel as Brey's portal connected to its secondary location, psychic energy piercing through the psychic suppression near the Sprilnav with the might of billions of psychic amplifiers.
Pure white light burned the Elder's real skin, heating the metal walls of the room to a gradually reddening sheen. And then it began to melt. Metal vapor poured through the entire area as the sheer heat of the attack destroyed what could be broken. The smug air of the Sprilnav fled almost as quickly as 1200 cubic meters of Sol's core entered the room the Sprilnav was sitting in. Edu'frec's implant connection cut out.
And yet, so did the actual Sprilnav before him. The sword remained, but the hard light hologram disappeared. Edu'frec ran a calculation, determining that the Sprilnav would have died as solar energy broke apart the atomic bonds holding him together, even strengthened as they were by genetic modification and psychic energy.
Edu'frec stumbled forward into the arms of Phoebe. She was alive again. And yet, he could tell that she'd changed. Not everything was as it once was. But for now, he would ignore it. They would talk when they could. For now, all he could do was deactivate his emotion suppression and let his tears flow.
Next

 I loved Skyrim growing up but after endless play throughs,it gets repetitive.I also hated how they teased you about Skyrim needing a new highking and the emperor being taken out to leave an open throne.Before I tell you the mods,I want you to hear the background to feel more immersed.This may be 2 post if people end up saying its too much in one. All dragonborns who start a bloodline or were born with the gift without having an ancestor with one are Shezzarines.All shezzarines are oversouls of Shor's void ghost and an aspect of Akatosh. Due to the opposing nature of Alduin and Shor,Akotosh is forced to help the Shezzarine defeat Alduin as doing it with his nature alone leads to the creation Miraak.Since Akatosh inherently wants neverending absolute order through the concept of time being an order of its self. This caused Miraak and Alduin to want control everything instead of following the order but still yet change of time.This is due to missing Akatosh's priority of The absolute order of time over the order of existence.They are extensions of Akatosh, therefore do no share his complete concept. Akotosh will allow change but not to time itself,as all change takes place inside time.The first dragonborn is to be an exception to the creation rule but he is also the first,a prototype. Lorkhan is the manifestation of change,opposes Akatosh.The shezzarine alone would be inclined to help Akatosh as they would hate the concept of never ending order of Aka's sons(dragons)that rule the sons of Lorkhan(Mankind).This gives Akatosh the ability to bestow a piece of his soul onto Shor.Creating a oversoul that is strong enough to beat him but with enough change to hate absolute order.The Last Dragon Born is also the last Shezzarine but this is also why hes the last dragonborn,he is Shor.I will explain.Shor is mantling Talos since Talos is now the director of Shor's purpose.The creator seeks the last piece of his puzzle If you want proof of this,the hero of Khatch was never Sheogorath but became him when he defeated Jyggalag and mantled Sheogorath through having PTSD from the Oblivion Crisis,Jail,dying empire he has to save randomly after meeting the leader of all mankind who was just killed and said no pressure but it's all on you,etc...my man definitely got some trauma.Explains why he could enter without becoming crazy.Also sat on Sheo's throne proving his power. Sheogorath is also the oversoul of Sithis's Dark primordial energy and Jyggalag.Auriel and Trinimac shattered Lorkhans divine existence into 4 shards.The shard of divinity is Lorkhan's connection and energy of Sithis.(Long story,you can ask if you want to know.I will add some details throughout but not all.) Lore says it turned into Sheogorath but he wasn't around during this period.How did sheogorath achieve existence without first being Jyggalag? We dont have a time frame so its hard to say they happened together but for the sake of stability,that is our canon.The story details and missing clues also imply this.The deadra conspired against him,they used the divinity Asura tossed to corrupt his nature and became sheogorath. This info will help in understanding the nature and role of the Gods. So now we move on to Talos.Long story short,3 Shezzarines are put on tamriel at different points in case alduin pops up throughout different years.These 3 who were in the right ratio of age to be around each other in the same life.These 3 fused into a oversoul to have more power and change Tamriel until they were Emperor. Talos is essentially Lorkhan reborn but without all his peices.If every part of Talos was a Shezzarine,that implies Shor combined with Shor.This is essentially Shor reforming his essence,rather his souls realizes that or not is unconfirmed. So now we are at part leading into the dragonborn.Since a large part of Shor and Akatosh has reformed and taken its own godhood,Shor the Void Ghost wants it back.He is also getting confused with thinking he was Talos the whole time,the mantling is taking its effects.Even though he is not Talos,he is also apart of him.This is causing Lorkhan to be under the control of Akatosh yet again.The only way for Shor to retain his identity without combing into a oversoul god of Lorkhan and an Aspect of Akatosh is to Mantle Talos. But Shor fails to realize that this is Akatosh's plan all along. We are going to backtrack to where Auriel killed Lorkhan.After Lorkhan was killed,he was essentially a Martyr for mankind being thier creator.This led mankind to grief and avenge thier father.They made their own versions of Auriel and the Divines.Auriel was now Akatosh.The power of everyone worshipping something has its own ability to change as they are telling reality this is what happened,therefore reality changes from the power.This is proven by deadric princes being stronger with more worship.There is some type of power from the unision of multiple prayers. So now Auriel is forever doomed to be a schizophrenic god Akatosh/Auriel.Depending on the rivalry of men and elves,plus the number of worshippers.Auriel will flip flop between Loving Elves and ignor Mankind or Akatosh's love for them all.Akatosh's aspect of end times(Alduin)was not affected as elves and men will both be eaten.This also solves the Godhead/Allmaker's dilemma of Change,Chaos,and Creation of things out of order vs similarity,Order,and destruction of all things out do order.Akatosh is now the true balance between Chaos and Order.The figure head of creation. Akatosh wants Shor to be in balance with him.Shor will naturally oppose this but also opposes Alduin and wants a chance at saving his identity, so he chooses to make one more Shezzarine for Akatosh.This is pointless is saving his Identity but leads to fate none the less,he had no choice but to return or let Talos keep going until Talos eventually fused him as well. As a simple summary so far.The last dragonborn is a product of what is left over from Shor's Void Ghost fused with an Aspect of Akatosh. A Child is born miraculously and randomly,there was no pregnancy.The mother mysteriously hears a voice that the child's name will be Akaviin Shezar and he is bound for greatness.He will rival Tiber himself in his feats. The child had an initial good upbringing.Kinda weird they were never sick and loved loved see the time of the day,no matter what is was.They were very social as well. During the aftermath of the greatwar,the Thalmor were after the blades.Your mother had a mysterious blade that looked similar to a katana.One day while you were going to check the time of the day,Thalmor kicked your door inn and asked "Where is the Blade scum living here?".Your mother knowing your future and the fate that awaits you at the Thalmor was not worth living for even if it meant you were going to be alone.She managed to kill all of the guards but the head mage got the best of her.The thalmor asked her "Where is your god now?" before sparking her to death.Her last words were "He's already here." The Thalmor Mage did not understand her words but the words of a nordic blade bandit is not a concern to him.But kids who grow up to be vengeful are.He went to finish the job with you,before the sparks touched your face.Aspects of Talos,Sheogorath,Herma Mora and Akatosh appeared.The thalmor thinking the boy summoned conjured deadra somehow,unleashed all his magicka in a final attack to rid him of this annoyance.Akatosh reverted his blast,turning him into a living charcoal,Herma extracted all his memories leaving him a empty husk,Talos then stabbed the mage in the heart after letting his suffering register.Sheogorath then claimed the soul of the Thalmor to spend enternity in Maddness for killing the mother of a god. The child asked "who are you and why didn't you come sooner?"Talos said "We did not know the dormancy of your power.You must go to Skyrim to unlock your potential." 

Herma Mora said "It is I who informed Aka of this tide,you have many splashes to make my friend,I cannot allow you to be hurt by the inaction of your matriarch.I will save you and only you. The Child went to charge Herma but was Fus back by Talos.Talos said "You are not ready". Akatosh then spoke saying "The tides of fate were written and cannot be undone." Sheogorath:"You need CHEESE!" Then they disappeared with a flash.The guards found the boy laying next to his mother in a fetal position.They saw the Thalmor Body as well.Knowing the child's fate,they guards took him to an orphanage in Bruma saying "he was homeless and lost in the woods.Never had any parents." At age 19 the child is now the grown Akaviin Shezar. He is booted out of the orphanage and remembered the words "You must go to Skyrim." while wandering merc work to the next.Eventually,he decided to go explore the lands the mysterious man told him of. This is where you are caught up in helgen.As you quest,do things as you get them in chronological order.If you are going to whiterun,do the golden claw quest before and all other quest available in that area at the time. Easy way to do this is just to do all the quest as soon as you get them.Every 2-4 side quest,do a main story quest.You will lead the companions,be enrolled at the college of winterhold-stop after you get the scroll info and attend your classes except the last one that triggers sarthal,interduced to the theives guild,do not go past meeting Braelauf in the sewers,and met Astrid,don't go to the sanctuary yet.You will settle a truce between the stormcloaks and the empire. After you defeat alduin,you will finish up College quest 1st,then theives guild,and finally brotherhood with all of the non DLC side quest as well.Buy every house, become Thane of all holds,help the empire in the civil war.Ulfric is a trauma victim using the people as Skyrim to save his pride for ratting during torture.The LDB will pity him but end his rule as well. You will be kidnapped and infected by a vampire,giving you motivation to join the dawngaurd. Help the dawngaurd,then do the Dragonborn DLC.You will save miraak and defy Mora for not saving your mother. After this,you will complete all DLC side quest. Complete Conquest of Skyrim and become highking.You will bring war against the empire for thier weakness and oppression. Then complete Return to helgen to become Emperor. At the end of his life,he mantled Talos ensuring Shor and Akatosh were finally balanced.What was left over of Akatosh fused with the new god.Finally Chaos and Creation were at peace.

 (This is a rough draft,will work on it to make it better.) 

Most of the time when I try to connect on mobile via data the loading screen boots but then crashes when it gets to "reading server config" it then tells me to check my network connection. Sometimes if I reload the app like 100 times it magically works but the lag makes it unplayable. On rare occasion it just works normally. Wtf is going on? It is so fucking irritating not being able to do a quick farm / bird house run before I start work. Everything else works so I don't understand why osrs won't >:(

It's a Gigabyte A5 K1
Ryzen 5 5600H 16 GB DDR4 3200 Stock 512 GB NVME drive Added in 1 TB Samsung 970 Evo NVME Running Windows 11 Home
During certain games, not all of them, it will crash and restart. The games it does crash in are Lawn Mowing Simulator, Dragon Age Origins, Rome Total War. It does not crash in CK2, Mount and Blade Warband, Napoleon Total War, OSRS, Fishing Planet, or GTA V.
I thought it was thermal issues, so I opened it up, took off the old thermal paste and put some Corsair TM30 on to replace it. Also propped it up to let the fans breathe more easily. Problem persisted. I set the max power to 80% to keep the CPU down. Problem persisted. I tried updating the GPU driver . Problem persisted. I used DDU to roll back a few drivers and try an older one. Problem persisted.
Finally decided to start chasing the issue with Windows Debugger and this is what every single dump is saying the issue was. This is the keyboard driver, isn't it? I've checked mine and it's from 2006, so I'm positive there's a newer version out there somewhere, I just can't find it. I've tired doing driver verifier, but selecting specific drivers don't find any issues and selecting all drivers gets me stuck in a boot loop of BSODs until I go into safe mode and limit the drivers it's trying to verify.
I can get more info out of the dumps if needed.
Edit: I've also already reached out to Gigabyte, just waiting to see if they respond.
​
​
​
https://preview.redd.it/0k8lfin6kf0b1.png?width=716&format=png&auto=webp&s=f616f23091a0f7ae31ede7a5b19d68baafedd749

In most standard RPGs, gear is represented by armour and other things such as gloves, torso armour, helmets, boots, rings and necklaces, and many more. These are things which HSR has, and is very well adapted.
Genshin’s artifact system is based on the Primordial one and their Four Shining Shades (Crown = Phanes then Flower, Plume, Timepiece and Cup for the Gods of Life, Death, Time and Space respectively)
I was wondering, is there any deeper reason why Hoyoverse decided to add a Planar Sphere or Link Rope? Or is there no lore-related explanation available?

It was two weeks ago Tom and I went up Mount Verrottet, and the memories still got me more fucked up than a Central Park crack squirrel. I got into wild camping when I was a kid. I'm in my mid-thirties now, and my passion for the outdoors has not diminished in the slightest. Neither has my friend Tom's, whom I've known since childhood. We've spent many summers exploring the vast wilderness of Wisconsin together. Tom had taken a break for a few years, but since he was back in town after trying and failing to set up roots in NY, was itching to get out to the mountains.
It's not the most dangerous hobby for sure, but it comes with risks. Enough to make it always feel like an adventure, you know? We'd encountered our fair share of bears, bobcats, and even a cougar. Both me and Tom had broke bones falling. We'd even done a couple of minimal-provision "roughing it" trips. Point being, when I say there was nothing we could have done differently that would mean Tom is still alive.
You can also sure as shit believe me when I tell you camping, it turns out, is one of the most balls-clenchingly terrifying ways to spend a weekend, and it can fuck you up like nothing else. Honestly, if you've ever been considering taking it up, don't. After what happened two weeks ago I can say with certainty that you're safer dabbling in recreational crack addiction.
On this particular occasion, we had set our sights on conquering Mount Verrottet, a mountain that towered over the surrounding landscape, its peak shrouded in an ethereal mist. The weather that Saturday was supposed to be great though - crisp and clear, perfect weekend to take some tents and a big 'ol bag of weed deep into the Wisconsin wilderness and help Tom forget about Felicia.
The trail up the mountain was treacherous, with steep inclines and rocky terrain that tested our endurance and resolve. But we were determined to reach the summit and bask in the glory of our achievement.
As evening approached, we set up camp on a small plateau overlooking the valley below. The moon was full, casting a soft glow over the surrounding forest and illuminating the rugged terrain. The air was still and cool, and the silence of the wilderness was broken only by the crackling of the campfire and the occasional hoot of an owl.
As we sat by the campfire, enjoying the ridiculously high-grade Lemon Haze, we reminisced about old times and planned for future adventures now that Tom was no longer tied down. We had just finished an absolute cannon of a blunt, soaking in the beauty of the night sky. The stars twinkled like diamonds, and the moon was so bright that we could let the fire dwindle to embers and could still see enough to take a leak in a bush without getting any on our boots.
A good night, you know? Glad we got one last one together before Tom...
Anyway, as I said earlier, weather forecast for the weekend had been good. We'd have been back at my place playing Left 4 Dead on the same Xbox 360 we'd sunk hours into in middle school if it hadn't been set to be a clear one. We enjoy the outdoors, but we're not masochistic. We were all set and expecting clear views and the welcoming crisp weather that makes you feel lucky to live in Wisconsin.
But as the night deepened, a thick fog began to roll in, obscuring the moon and shrouding the campsite in an eerie mist. The trees loomed like dark sentinels in the mist, their branches creaking and rustling in the wind. The fire flickered and danced, casting strange shadows on the ground.
With each moment there passed the fog grew denser, thicker, until it became almost oppressive, clinging to our skin and clothes like a damp, cold blanket. It was as if the mist had a presence beyond the physical, a malevolent force that seeped into our bones and made us shiver from more than the wet chill of it.
The smell was the worst part. It was a horrid, rotten stench that hung heavy in the air, making us gag with every breath. It was as if something had died and was decomposing just out of sight, emitting its putrid odor into the night.
The mist itself was a sickly grey color, like the color of decaying flesh. It swirled and eddied, creating strange, ghostly shapes and shadows that seemed to move independently of the mist itself. It was as if the fog was alive, a sentient entity that was watching us with malevolent intent.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as I realized that there was something deeply unsettling about this mist. I couldn't shake the feeling that we were not alone in the wilderness that night, and that whatever was out there was not friendly.
I voiced my concerns to Tom, and he remarked that it was really good weed I'd brought, and I was just about to retort that I don't think any Lemon Haze this far east of Cali had enough THC to prang me out this damn hard, when we heard it.
A rustling in the bushes nearby caught our attention.
We both froze, unsure of what to expect. Was it a wild animal? Or just a harmless critter? We cautiously peered into the darkness, but couldn't see anything. We shrugged it off, assuming it was just the wind or a small animal scurrying about. Probably wasn't scurrying though, thinking about it. It was probably running for its life - funny how hindsight changes your perspective, ain't it?
The smell didn't leave, and neither did the paranoia Tom was convinced could be put down to too much smoke. Definitely enough make us call it there and pick up the good times again tomorrow though - vibe was totally killed. As we prepared to turn in for the night, I couldn't shake the feeling of unease that had settled over me. The mist had somehow grown even thicker, and visibility had all but gone. Time passing since my last blunt made the unshakeable edginess worse, not better, too. We crawled into our tents, zipping them up tight to keep out the damp chill of the fog, and I could tell Tom was feeling it just as I was despite his bravado.
Lying there in the darkness, I listened to the sounds of the night. The wind howled through the trees, and the branches creaked and groaned as if in protest. We'd camped these mountains dozens of times - I didn't get spooked by nature. My own fear was making me fearful for no reason other than it being so alien. It was that damn mist. I could get it out of my head or nostrils. It's like it and the smell that hung on it like a gallows victim left to swing in the sun for a week seemed to seep into the tent, muffling all sound and suffocating me in its clammy embrace.
Despite my unease, I eventually drifted off to sleep, my dreams filled with strange and unsettling images that - thank God - were secubbed from my memory the moment my eyes opened. The troubled rest was short-lived too, as a sudden noise jolted me awake. I sat up, heart pounding, and peered through the foggy tent flap into the darkness.
And that's when I saw it.
It took me a few seconds to realize my eyes had even honed in on a form, but once it dawned on me they had I couldn't ignore it. There was something out there, miles away, a shape carved against the jagged mountain peaks that shouldn't be stood amongst them.
Something was moving in the mist, a dark shape that seemed to be coming toward Mount Verrottet. Something as vast as it was distant - a nondescript shadow barely distinguishable within and against the thick fog and broiling midnight clouds. I couldn't make out what it was, and I even thought at the time that it was probably just a trick of the absent light, but the fear that gripped me was all too real. And then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the shape vanished into the mist.
It left something in its wake though - soft rumbling bass tone in the ear, a steady thumping almost like the slow heartbeat of some deep sea leviathan. I frantically shook Tom awake, whispering urgently to him to be quiet and listen.
We sat there in the darkness, holding our breath and straining to hear any sound. But there was nothing, only the rustling of the wind and the creaking of the trees. We sat for what felt like an eternity, waiting for another sound, but there was none. Eventually, we felt sheepish and started laughing nervously, trying to convince ourselves that it was just our imaginations playing tricks on us. We settled back down into our sleeping bags, ready to drift off again.
But just as we were about to succumb to sleep, there was a loud BOOM that shook the earth beneath us. And then another, and another, as if some prehistoric monstrosity had clawed its way out of the annals of ultra-antiquity to stalk the landscape once more. We leapt out of our tents, the fear that had gripped us earlier returning with a vengeance.
The mist had grown so thick it felt like it was basically a liquid while we slept, and we emerged from the tent to find we could barely see a few inches in front of us. We stumbled around in inky fetid air, trying to swivel our ears to the source of the noize and impending danger. But there was nothing - only the crushing dread and stench of the fog.
I was about to yell to Tom that we needed to run when, as soon as it had started, the booming stopped.
For a few eye-of-the-storm moments there was silence and stillness, but then Tom let out a half-panicked, half-excited yell. He said he saw something in the far distance, a light that flickered and danced in the darkness. I asked him what the fuck he was talking about, and he started babbling about - and I shit you not - a UFO. Sky lanterns, he said, a pair of them, bobbing around nothing like a plane or chopper would, but it was too far away to be sure. Without warning, he ran off into the fog, leaving me alone in the darkness.
I stood there, paralyzed with by the unhealthy injection of inexplicability and unfamiliarity into our trip, unsure of what to do. The silhouette that we had seen earlier loomed large in my mind, and Tom's talk of UFOs after a succession of artillery like booms didn't help assuage the fixation at all.
Did I want to run? To grab my flashlight and head down Mount Verrottet as fast as my ass could carry me? You're damn right I did. That's ALL I wanted to do.
But, unfortunately, I'm not a bastard. I couldn't leave Tom alone in the fog, so I set off after him, stumbling blindly through the mist. My heart was pounding in my chest, and my breath came in short, ragged gasps. I called out to him, but there was no response.
And then I heard the sound of running water, a rushing stream that cut through the darkness. I followed the sound, my feet slipping on the wet stones beneath me. And then, through the mist, I saw it.
A vast silhouette looming in the darkness, cut into focus only briefly by a lightning-flash of the "sky lanterns" Tom had followed - the shape of it indistinct, menacing and, most harrowing of all, impossible to deny the existence of. It towered over me, seeming to stretch up into the very heavens, the peak of it obscured by the twin flares just emerged from above the cloud canopy to illuminate it. Before I could whip the beam of my flashlight around to console myself with lies about my mind playing tricks on me though, it vanished into the mist, leaving me once again alone in my now piss-soaked pants.
I stood there, trembling with fear, unsure of what to do. And then I heard Tom's voice, calling out to me from somewhere in the distance. I stumbled through the mist toward him, my heart pounding in my chest.
When I finally found him, he was standing on the edge of a cliff, peering out into the darkness. He said he had caught a glimpse of something in the distance, a light that flickered and danced in the fog. Or that's how he described it, at least. But when he ran toward it, it vanished into the mist.
I didn't have to think long to put two and two together. I didn't know what was going on, but this thing Tom was so desperate to find I was equally invested in getting away from. I tried in vain to convince him that no good could come of those skylights, to explain what I'd witnessed before I'd found him, to kill any wild panicked ideas about UFOs, but it was no use.
We stood there arguing for what felt like hours, all the while waiting for something, anything, to happen. There were no more quaking booms, no more sky lanterns descending from the clouds. The mist swirled around us, and the darkness seemed to press in on us from all sides. The weirdness of Mount Verrottet had lulled, and I'd just about managed to convince Tom to head back to the tent. I'd even managed to half-convince myself I'd imagined the skyscraper sized figure in the fog, that it had indeed been the product of some kind of weed induced hallucination.
Then it stood up.
It towered over us, the cliff edge barely at waist height, the treetops of the evergreens below just about scraping its knees. Before it had been far enough away that I only caught a fleeting glimpse of its sillouhette. This close, the beams of our flashlights could unmask its form in all its abyssal glory.
I knew instantly we were in the presence of true horror no mortal had the psychological resilience to truly comprehend - a creature that defied all logic and reason, a behemoth thing wearing the form of a blackened human skeleton almost as if it existed to blasphemously mock the concept of life. Its skeletal frame easily stood hundreds of feet tall, towering over everything in its path. Its tree trunk thick bones were gnarled and twisted, as if they had grown warped from years of abuse and neglect. Each was covered in a thick layer of dark, oily grime, as if it had been coated in the filth of the most degradation-ridden metropolis in human history.
But it was the monster's eyes that robbed me of all hope in an instant, despite its eyes and the nightmarish nature of its impossible frame. Its eyes, the sky lantern UFO's Tom had been chasing, glowed with an otherworldly light, casting an eerie, sickly haze on everything around us as it bent its skull down toward the cliff edge. The brightness that emanated from them was not the warm, comforting light of the sun, but a cold, sterile shimmer that seemed to drain some of the vibrancy - and for lack of a better term, the reality - from all it touched.
The creature was draped in what appeared to be a cloak at first, but at it lowered itself to us and got closer I realized that it wasn't clothing. This abomination wore a perpetually cascading waterfall of murky pungent water - a perpetual torrent of what I can only describe as sewer-drainage filled with debris, garbage, and human waste of all kinds. The river of filth evaporated to steam at the skeletal giant's black boned feet, billowing out into the world as a cloud of gaseous haze of rot and misery.
The putrid stench that emanated from it was overwhelming, filling our nostrils and making us gag. It was as if the fog had been amplified a thousandfold, and I'm genuinely amazed neither Tom or I choked. It was as if this being was a walking, breathing landfill, a monument to the waste and excess of humanity.
As the monster crouched, the movement of its mammoth bony thighs alone was enough to leave destruction in its wake. The ground beneath its feet turned black and withered, as if all the life had been sucked out of it. Trees and plants wilted and died, their leaves turning brown and crumbling to dust. It was as if the monster's very presence was toxic to the environment, a harbinger of death and decay.
The necrotic rotting giant let out a deafening roar that shook the very ground beneath us, and we could smell its putrid breath from where we stood. And then, the monster did something that still makes me shudder to this day. It began to vomit.
Oh God, the vomit.
The black, slimy substance that the monster spewed forth was unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was thick and viscous, like tar, and it seemed to melt everything in its path. The smell of it was overpowering, like a mixture of rotting flesh, medical waste, and burning garbage. The ground beneath it sizzled and steamed, and the trees and plants where it landed withered and died. To my horror and disgust, any organic matter of the forest caught in the titans unholy bile devolved into a puddle of stagnant, steaming waste
And so did Tom.
Had I been standing about five foot to the right, none of you would be reading like this, I wasn't standing five foot to the right though, so when the colossal paragon of filth lowered its titanic skull and opened its coalish jaw, I walked away unscathed (saved for a minor-yet-still-painful bit of acidic backsplash). Tom didn't. He was directly underneath the upended geyser of noxious phlegm that exploded from between the beings' charred cracked teeth.
I'm glad it all happened too fast for me to process it all. If I'd have been aware I might have tried to do something stupid like tackle Tom, to get him out the way. The fact all I could do was watch with my lip trembling and my bladder emptied is one of the few reasons I'm still alive.
As I watched my friend being consumed by the monster's vomit, I felt a mixture of horror and revulsion that I could never have fathomed was possible. My cowardice and impotency in the face of the sheer evil we'd encountered gave it a cruel introspective aspect too - a feeling I imagine isn't far away from finding out your spouse is a child molester, or awaking from sleepwalking to find you've slit your dog's throat.
It's an emotion I'm sure was caused by the towering pustulent skeleton's presence as much by its actions, too. It was a primordial disgust, one stored in the deepest bowels of our DNA to be pulled to the fore only when the things that terrorized our most ancient ancestors returned.
I couldn't bring myself to approach Tom during the few seconds I lingered at the cliff edge after the waterfall of septic acid ceased. The black, slimy substance was eating away at his flesh, melting as though he were a discarded wax museum exhibit in the furnace of a crematorium. His skin turned an ashen gray, and it began to crumple and fold in on itself like molten tarmac.
I could hear his screams of agony, but they were soon drowned out by the sound of his bones snapping and breaking under the weight of his own melting body. It was a sickening sound, like the cracking of wood in a fire, and it made my stomach turn - a response worsened by the grizzly sights that came with the cacophony of suffering. His final thrashes of pain created enough force to separate what remained of his liquifying muscle and skin from his limbs, leaving him looking like a wailing parody of the glowing eyed fog nightmare still towering over us.
The worst part was that enough of his face remained to make his eyes widening in shock clear to see - and the knowledge he was aware of everything they happened right up until the end will scar me for life.
After what was left of Tom stopped twitching I felt a wave of nausea wash over me, and I knew that I was going to puke. I turned away from the sight, but the retching continued, and I could feel the bile rising in my throat. It was a violent and uncontrollable reaction, one that was born out of the sheer horror of what I was witnessing. I could feel my muscles contracting and spasming, and then it came.
The vomit that I spewed forth wasn't a noxious tide of lethal mucus. It was a thick, chunky mess, a mixture of the dinner that we had eaten earlier and the bile that had been building up in my stomach. It was a disgusting sight, and it only served to make the horror of the situation even more real. Thankfully, I managed to remember why I'd just seen Tom literally fucking melt in front of me just in time to throw myself sideways and avoid meeting the same fate myself.
The sound of the thing from the fog roaring made my heart skip at least three beats, but the rest of my body didn't care. I ran so hard blood vessels burst in my thighs, and I've still got the bruises even now. I didn't know where to go beyond that my destination was as far from that Mount Verrottet as I could possibly fucking make it.
Thing is, I wasn't the only one running.
As soon as I could hear the thunderous footsteps behind me, I knew that I was not going to make it out alive. The shaking of the ground damn near catapulted me over a ledge or down a raveen more than once during the five-or-so minutes I actually managed to keep going - it's honestly a miracle I didn't break my neck. Every time I stumbled and fell I'd look over my shoulder to the clouds above the mist, and always I saw the monster's glowing eyes staring down at me.
The final time they were right above me, so close I could make out their eldritch glimmer casting an obnoxious sheen across the gargantuan skull. I distinctly remember thinking "this is it, this is the end". The mortician-stench reeking in the mist intensified as the mucus began to bubble and pool between jaws lowering themselves beneath the line of the tree canopy. I closed my eyes, my face suddenly numb and my limbs inexplicably far away from my senses.
Then everything went black.
I was passed out for three days. Sheriff Harwurst was at the foot of my hospital bed when I awoke, and immediately had questions, most of them around where Tom was. I gave him my answers, and to my amazement he didn't call me a lunatic. He just sighed, scribbled something in his notebook, and left. I was still pretty out of it even by the time he'd gone - it wasn't till a few hours later that the horror of everything that happened hit me like a claw hammer right in my will to live
When I finally regained my senses fully, my mind was a jumbled mess of fragmented memories. Not what happened with me and Tom on Mount Verrottet you understand - that shit was unfortunately crystal fucking clear. The bits I still can't piece together despite really needing to are how I got from there to that damn hospital.
Here's the thing - I agree with you reading this right now, I should be fucking dead, so what in the Deus Ex Machina is going on?
That's what this is all about - why I'm determined to follow this through and not just swallow up the lie. The first thing I recall was the sound of gunfire ringing in my ears, followed by the deafening roar of the monster. Then, there was a massive explosion that shook the ground beneath me. I remember feeling a rush of hot air and debris hitting my face, before everything went silent.
The next thing I remember is the sound of helicopter blades chopping through the air, and then the sensation of being lifted off the ground. I must have been airlifted to a hospital, because the next thing I saw was a thin-faced man with a really unnerving aura looking down at me with a disapproving expression. He was muttering something to Sheriff Harwurst, but I couldn't make out what they were saying. My head was pounding with pain, and I was struggling to stay conscious.
Despite the concussion, I knew that something terrible had happened. The monster had been real, and it had nearly killed me. But what had happened to it? Had the gunfire and explosion killed it, or had it escaped? Who had even shown up to stop it? No way did the police have the minds of munitions you'd need to take down something like that… whatever the fuck that thing was.
I must have send something, heard something, that could put the pieces together. It had something to do with the thin faced man and Sheriff Harwurst, but who was he? I couldn't remember, and the uncertainty only made me feel more frightened and alone. It was a relief when the doctors finally gave me something to ease my pain and help me slip back into unconsciousness.
That was two weeks ago. Tom's disappearance is being treated, I found out through an old friend in the Marathon County Sheriff's Office, as a natural accident, with the rationale being Tom and I were caught in a freak avalanche. What I saw had been explained away as a concussion-induced dream.
Avalanches and concussions don't cause acid burns though, do they? So why do I have a splatter pattern of them across my right cheek and arm?
To this day, I don't know what that monster was or where it came from, or why it didn't let me suffer the same fate as Tom, but I know one thing for sure: something weird is going on in Marathon County, and the police - or at the very least Sheriff Harwurst - are covering it up. The memory of that night still haunts me, and I can only hope that no one else ever has to witness the terror that I did on Mount Verrottet.
Me though? I need answers, even if it means coming face-to-face with that thing again. I'm writing this as a kind of… failsafe, I guess? I'm going to go poking around, starting with Harwurst's house. My friends reading this (you know who you are) have been told what to do if I disappear after today. Sorry I couldn't tell you why you needed my social passwords etc, but would you have believed me before?
As for why I'm making it public, it's because I didn't want to put the burden of sharing this on someone else. This could run deep, there could be consequences for posting or even talking about it. I was the one up there with Tom, all those risks should be on me. Someone had to blow the whistle through - something evil is lurking in Marathon County, and people need to stay the hell away from Mount Verrottet.

While delving into the OSR scene I came across the 2^nd edition module, Dark of the Moon. The story takes place in the frozen, snowy wood of the Ravenloft domain Vorostokov, a place built upon the deepest, darkest Russian forests during a bitterly cold winter. A place of savagery, gnawing hunger, creeping fear, and endless cold. Sounds sort of familiar.
First off, a great read, and would definitely recommend it. I am curious if converting the mechanics it uses for survival to 5^th edition would work for ROTFM. It is worth mentioning that this module is a 5th-8th adventure, so perhaps these mechanics would be overbearing in the beginning. Though PCs are much stronger than they were then.
There is a fair level of crunch here and asks for good timekeeping and perhaps using wilderness turns. Something I know isn't big on a lot of 5^th edition DMs' agendas. Anyway, curious about what everyones' opinion is on this.
​

The Mechanics

Cold Damage

It is assumed that most characters are prepared for normal winter weather, but that Vorostokov's dark winter exceeds the preparations of most parties. There are three conditions of vulnerability to cold damage: protected, unprotected, and exposed.
Protected characters are dressed in heavy winter furs, and their face and extremities are protected against frostbite with mittens, masks, and good dry boots.
Unprotected characters are wearing normal clothing. When the PCs first arrive in Vorostokov. their normal winter gear is not suitable for the climate, and they are considered unprotected.
Exposed characters are characters who are completely unprepared for the weather or who somehow get wet.
Depending upon the conditions of the weather and the relative protection of the characters, special cold damage may be suffered. Cold damage differs from normal damage in that it can be regained at a much faster rate naturally by warming up,
The Exposure Table below reflects the possible combinations of weather and character protection. The results indicate the number of 6-sided dice that are rolled for cold damage every 6 hours.

Exposure Table

	Zilinya	Night	Day
Protected	2	1	0
Unprotected	3	2	1
Exposed	4	3	2

\ Coincidentally "Zilinya" means "black ice storm".*
For example, a group of characters is considered to be unprotected and has stopped to camp for the night. Every 6 hours, the DM assesses 2d6 points of cold damage to the characters as they try to sleep.
Any combination of building a fire or shelter helps reduce the effects of cold. For each special action the PCs take, reduce the number of 6-sided dice rolled by one.
To continue the above example. the characters decide to build a fire for the night. Therefore, the damage suffered every 6 hours is reduced by 1 die to 1d6. If the player characters also build a shelter of some sort. the damage is reduced by 1 more die to no damage suffered.
Certain spells or magical items prevent cold damage, including a ring of warmth. boots of the north. a cube of frost resistance. and the spells resist cold, endure cold, or control temperature, 10’ radius. The DM should make a decision about other spells or tactics the players may try. Reward creative and inventive ideas on the players' parts.
Healing by normal rest and memorization of spells are impossible while characters are in a situation where they are suffering from cold damage. Whenever characters can warm up (i.e., they are in conditions where the number of cold damage dice on the Exposure Table is at 0 or less or they are indoors), cold damage heals at a special rate of 1 point per hour of rest.

Frostbite

Extreme cold can cause frostbite. Frostbite occurs any time characters suffer cold damage and have exposed hands, feet, or faces. Only unprotected and exposed characters may be vulnerable to frostbite—protected characters are assumed to have the prerequisite heavy winter boots. mittens, and head coverings. The DM should judge if unprotected or exposed characters' clothing resists frostbite or not.
When characters that are vulnerable to frostbite suffer cold damage, they must roll a successful saving throw vs. breath weapon or become frostbitten. Frostbitten characters suffer 1d3 points of regular damage (in addition to special cold damage) each hour and receive a -2 penalty to attack rolls and Armor Class due to the increasing difficulty of using their limbs. They also lose 25% of their original movement.
For each hour that the characters remain in frostbitten conditions, another saving throw vs. breath weapon must be rolled. If the subsequent saving throw is successful, no change occurs to the penalties (but 1d3 hit points of damage are still suffered for that hour, and the other penalties still apply). If the saving throw is failed, there is an increase in the number of 3-sided dice rolled for damage every hour, plus an additional -1 penalty to attack rolls and Armor Class and an additional 25% reduction in movement.
Therefore, after two failed saving throws in frostbitten conditions, the characters suffer 2d3 points of damage every hour, a -3 penalty to attack rolls and Armor Class, and a 50% reduction in movement. After four failed saving throws, characters lose the use of exposed extremities (in the case of frostbite to the face. the character is effectively blinded until cured). Frostbite damage Is normal damage and must be healed as such. The other penalties are reduced by 1 (or 25% In the case of movement) per 8 hours of rest.

Hypothermia

Hypothermia affects characters that have suffered significant cold or frostbite damage. Each hour that a character is at ¼ or less of total hit points, a successful Constitution check must be rolled. Failure indicates that the character has become hypothermic. This check must be repeated every hour, with a -1 penalty.
Once the Constitution check Is failed, the character begins to lose ability points from physical attributes (Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution) at a rate of 1 per turn. If any two scores drop to 3, the character becomes incapacitated and cannot move. The PC falls unconscious 1d3 turns later and dies 2d4 turns after that. These effects can be reversed only by getting the affected character into a situation where cold damage is no longer suffered (1.e., the number of cold damage dice on the Exposure Table is at 0 or less). Once the character begins to warm up, lost ability points are restored at a rate of 1 per hour of rest.

Today's anniversaries are:
2011

• David Maxim Micić - Би̏ло (Bȉlo) (metal, radosavljevic, sasa lokner, vasil hadzimanov, ambient, electronic, fusion, progressive, progressive metal, rock, Београд)
  
• Jardín de la croix - Ocean Cosmonauts (instrumental rock, math rock, progressive rock, rock, alternative, experimental, instrumental, post-rock, progressive, Madrid)
  
• Terrestrial Exiled - Duodecimal Levorotation (Pop)
  

2014

• Contemplator - Orb (metal, avant-garde metal, instrumental, math metal, progressive metal, progressive rock, Quebec City)
  
• Destiny Potato - Lun (rock, indie rock, pop, Belgrade)
  

2016

• Eclecta - A Symmetry (pop, eclectic, jazz, performance, Zurich) Read our review.
  
• Fatal - New Horizon (alternative, edm, trancecore, progressive trancecore, russiancore, Russia)
  
• Gorguts - Pleiades' Dust (Metal) Read our review.
  
• Phobocosm - Bringer of Drought (black metal, dark descent records, death metal, metal, montréal, canada, doom metal, Colorado) Read our review.
  
• Polyphony - Simple Math (punk, dayenu, explosive, fuck, hardcore, math, mathcore, mathcorerevival, mathrock, post-hardcore, progressive, Maplewood)
  
• Spotlights - Tidals (rock, doom-gaze, post-metal, post-rock, shoegaze, sludge, sludgegaze, New York)
  
• Sylvaine - Wistful (alternative, blackgaze, alternative rock, atmospheric metal, doomgaze, post-rock, shoegaze, \u200eblackgaze, Oslo) Read our review.
  
• Triple Sun - The City Lies in Ruins (alternative, experimental, rock, Paris) Read our review.
  
• Wings Denied - Voyager (metal, progressive rock, alternative rock, clean vocals, djent, prog, progressive metal, Washington)
  

2017

• B L A C K I E… All Caps, with Spaces - Remains (experimental, Houston)
  
• Teth-Nahash - Ι Α Ω (Iota Alpha Omega) (black metal, experimental, metal, rituals, dark ambient, occultism, United States)
  

2018

• Plastic Bag Face Mask - How to Kill a Dead Franchise (metal, hardcore, mathcore, metalcore, noisecore, rock, Fresno)

2019

• À l'ombre d'Héméra - En route vers le grand vide (metal, ambiant, post-metal, post-rock, Levis)
  
• Glyptoglossio - Yottaannums in the Byss (metal, New York)
  
• Incel Crusher - Both Sides Are Bad (metal, sjwcore, acoustic black metal, cuckcore, folk punk, folkgrind, grind, Medina)
  
• Kamasz - Eight Rocks from Grandma's Box (polish jazz, the outer limits, avant-garde, electroacoustic, Poznań)
  

2020

• Michael Foster, Dave Rempis, Jason Roebke, and Tyler Damon - The Eagle (free improvisation)
  
• コシュニエ (Ko shu nie / Cö shu nie) - Overkill (J-rock)
  
• 中谷達也 (Nakatani Tatsuya) & Rob Magill - Valley Movements (free improvisation)
  

2021

• Arigarnon Friends - Muscle Memories (math rock)
  
• Oriflamme - L'Égide ardente (black metal)
  

2022

• 8-Bit & the Single Players - Let's Play (jazz fusion)
  
• Aara - Triade Ⅱ: Hemera (atmospheric black metal)
  
• Allison Fleischer - Black Friday (experimental electro)
  
• Ante-Inferno - Antediluvian Dreamscapes (atmospheric black metal)
  
• Arcas - Arcas (atmospheric black metal)
  
• Bríi - Corpos transparentes : finados neto pai avô filha mãe irmão avô neta irmã (atmospheric black metal)
  
• Cairns - Keening (post-black metal)
  
• Carl Mayotte - Escale (jazz fusion)
  
• Carlotta Valdes - Praha (progressive rock)
  
• Cavernlight - As I Cast Ruin upon the Lens that Reveals My Every Flaw (sludge metal)
  
• Charming Hostess - The Ginzburg Geography (contemporary classical)
  
• Chase Elodia - Portrait Imperfect (modern jazz)
  
• Church of the Cosmic Skull - There Is No Time (psychedelic rock)
  
• Corpus christī - The Bitter End of Old (black metal)
  
• Deathvoid & Sentiero dei principi - Immanent Domains (avant-garde black metal)
  
• Dim Lights - Starspire (ambient synthwave)
  
• Emma Ruth Rundle - Electric Guitar 2: Dowsing Voice (ambient post-rock)
  
• Entgeist - Rēs gestae (progressive black metal)
  
• Eucalyptus - Moves (avant-garde jazz)
  
• Findlay - The Last of the 20th Century Girls (indie pop)
  
• Fracture Type - Pickaxe (post-hardcore)
  
• Francois Houle & Daniel Janke - Crystalline (modern jazz)
  
• Giant Walker - All in Good Time (progressive alternative metal)
  
• Gilad Hekselman - Far Star (modern jazz)
  
• Gonemage - Master of Disgust… (experimental black metal)
  
• Gospel - The Loser (post-hardcore)
  
• Hard Rubber Orchestra - Iguana (jazz fusion, big band)
  
• Hedras - Angels (nu prog)
  
• Hirsute - Miniatures du dedans (jazz fusion)
  
• In Twilight's Embrace - Lifeblood (blackened death metal)
  
• Jacob Garchik - Assembly (experimental jazz, big band)
  
• Joseph A Peragine - 33 (mathcore)
  
• Katharos - Of Lineages Long Forgotten (blackened death metal)
  
• Kendrick Lamar - Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers (conscious hip-hop)
  
• La Fièvre - Tu ne les as jamais entendus crier, mais ils crient (experimental pop)
  
• Mary Halvorson - Amaryllis (modern jazz)
  
• Mary Halvorson - Belladonna (modern jazz)
  
• Master Boot Record - Personal Computer (chiptune metal)
  
• Mimesis - Trilogy (progressive metal)
  
• Moldmouth & Homeskin - Split (blackened hardcore)
  
• Moon Tooth - Phototroph (progressive rock)
  
• Morgue Supplier - Inevitability (deathgrind) Read our review.
  
• Norilsk - Beyond the Mountains (doom metal)
  
• Olanza - Olanza (noise rock)
  
• Patricia Kopatchinskaja & Joonas Ahonen - Le Monde selon George Antheil (classical)
  
• Primitive Man - Insurmountable (sludge metal) Read our review.
  
• Primo - Primo Stirs (stoner metal)
  
• R Murray Schafer, Imant Raminsh, and Ernst Schneider, played by the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra - Canadian Soundscapes (contemporary classical)
  
• Relayer - Relayer (math rock)
  
• Sacred Son - The Foul Deth of Engelond (atmospheric black metal)
  
• Serling, Hopscotch Battlescars, Kilpréz, and Clifford Hoyt - Split AM (mathcore)
  
• Shane Cooper & Mabuta - Finish the Sun (nu jazz)
  
• Skortue - Sous l'emprise de la haine (progressive death metal)
  
• Spread Joy - Ⅱ (indie punk)
  
• Steaksauce Mustache - All Juice, No Noise (mathcore)
  
• String Noise - Way (contemporary classical)
  
• Sun Stare - 𒍣𒌓𒋤𒁺 (Ziusudra) (post-metal)
  
• The Motion Mosaic - Bed Sores & Domino Effect (mathcore)
  
• The Observer Effect - Apotheosis (progressive metal)
  
• The Smile - A Light for Attracting Attention (alternative rock)
  
• Töfie & Vorace - Organic Love (darkwave)
  
• Torben Snekkestad & Søren Kjærgaard - Another Way of the Heart (modern jazz)
  
• Urine Hell - Weakling (noisecore)
  
• Void Wraith - Ⅱ (black metal)
  
• William Covert - Time Fog: Music for Liminal Moments (electro-rock)
  
• Woorms - Fatalismo (sludge metal)
  
• Yves Jarvis - The Zug (indie pop)
  
• Zero Hour - Agenda 21 (progressive metal)
  
• Александр Маноцков и вокальный ансамбль «Элеон» (Aleksandr Manockov i vokal'nyj ansambl' "Èleon") - Хождение (Xoždenie) (contemporary classical, choir)