Zonorhc

Good point on the arrows. Runescape, it seems, does not need to have much logic behind it.

CHAPTER ONE The autumn rains came early. The eight hundred and ninety-fourth year of the Kingdom of Rallim was coming to a close after plentiful harvests and absolutely bugger all to be interested about. In other words, it was a typical year. Birds still sang, and all that hat. A set of wooden windchimes clunked in deference to the wind. A young man with blond hair blown to the side by wind coming through a crack in the timber wall clanks about in his father's toolshed, replacing spades, hammers and other tools which had no logical reason to have been used that day but were anyway. Such is life. The boy, for ease of remembrance, was named Richard by his father, whose name was also Richard. The net result was that it gave him the name Richard Richardson, which was by far the silliest name in the village of Die Torquin, far surpassing the name of the village itself. Sixteen years of age and bored out of his mind for the past five, he nevertheless did his chores and remained quiet and apparently content, in the hope that one day he would just be a part of the background and could then get away from the blasted place before his parents could stop him. He was a dreamer. He imagined the exploits of heroes in faraway lands, and conjured fantastic beasts of all sorts from the depths of his mind, which quivered with ideas like a clothesline in a hurricane. He used to have a habit of writing things down as he thought about them, but his parents had been against the 'book-learnin'' that the bards who visited the tavern taught him over the years. The last straw was when he wrote a treatise on electroarcanics and designed a contraption which shot great arcs of lightning at things using the power of a little orb borrowed from the local magician. Ridiculously weak, the wizard had described that orb. Bloody well grounded for a month, Richard's parents described him. He hadn't been allowed to touch a book or write anything for two years now. In the rain outside, helping his father with the horse was his best friend, Kalsis. Kalsis was an Amardian like his parents, who had moved to Rallim and arrived in Die Torquin years ago, driving a wagon carrying building and farming tools and miscellaneous icons of Amardian deities, of which they worshiped three hundred and fifty-seven. They were very religious. Divine favour practically covered their home in a maelstrom of godly wrath against heathens. A drunk had once blasphemed twenty feet down the old dirt road from Kalsis' house, and came back to the tavern smelling strongly of ozone and sporting large burns and holes in his clothing. Kalsis was typically Amardian - tanned skin, dark hair and eyes, and unquestioningly ready to invoke the gods. His work done in the shed, Richard stepped out into the light drizzle in time to see his father and Kalsis stepping out of the stables, bruised and covered in mud. Their horse, Aladaranar, had a terrible temper that Richard suspected had something to do with the absurd number of recurrences of the letter A in his name. 'Hullo, dad, Kalsis,' called Richard. 'Hullo, son.' ''ello, Rich.' They were silent for a moment in the manner of males with absolutely nothing to talk about. The smell of roasting pork wafted from the house, and, like all males, they gravitated towards it, being pulled inexorably like asteroids towards an unsuspecting planetoid. 'Well then,' said Richard Junior, as they approached the door, 'now that we have been approximately human to one another, would you like to join us for dinner, Kalsis?' The Amardian boy pulled himself steeply off his course towards Planet Ham. 'Thanks, but mum wants me to have dinner at home tonight. She's pretty mad that I've been spending every evening at Lauren's place. Says she's a dirty heathen. I don't think so, because dirty heathens usually have ritual scars and eldritch tattoos proclaiming their servitude to the dark powers, and I haven't seen any anywhere on -' he stopped himself. 'On?' chorused father and son. 'Oh, nothing. Anyway, yeah, she's pretty mad that I've been getting home late every night for the past few months.' 'Eh? Having dinner at the Heaths' every night, eh? The food's good?' Richard's father was not what you could call astute. 'Er, yeah. Eating dinner. Yeah.' Kalsis escaped the pull of the ham and was walking towards where he had hitched his horse, which, while also bad-tempered, was a field of daisies compared to Aladaranar. 'I'd love to stay, but we're not allowed to eat pork.' 'What're you talking about?' asked Richard Senior as Richard Junior slipped into the house with a wave to Kalsis. 'You eat pork for snacks all the time you're here! You were drifting to the ham about a minute ago!' 'Ah, well, we must, ah... have some vices so as to ah, keep in touch with sin, and ah, as such use our knowledge of it to ultimately defeat it.' 'Ah, I see. You're a pious young man, Kalsis. Hurry on home, and give my regards to your family.' 'I doubt I should do that, sir. They think you're heathens too. Everyone's a heathen who doesn't worship more gods than he can count on his fingers, toes, and other miscellaneous extremities of the body. That's why my parents shave their hair, and mum wears a wig.' * The last market day for the summer's crops was always a very enjoyable and profitable affair, particularly for Richard and Kalsis' mutual friend Marius, who was twenty-four years old and fetched quite a lot of money by travelling a lot, playing music and picking pockets. He always spent his winters in Die Torquin, and this year he had come early because of what he called 'urgent business considerations'. The boys correctly took that to mean that he had annoyed the wrong sort of people and was on the run. As he had no actual home of his own, he spent his winters at Richard's house; Kalsis said - and Richard agreed - that his parents would probably hack up Marius on sight because of his long hair and extravagant attire. Richard's parents did not mind letting him sleep in the barn with the privilege of a pillow and several blankets, because every year he brought back gifts he claimed to have bought on his journeys. He did not eat too much as he neither gained nor lost weight anyway. All he actually needed to survive was food that was at or barely above the quality of iron rations. Before going through the tedium of greetings to the family and returning greetings to the guest, though, Marius had joined them for the afternoon in enjoying the sights and sounds of the village. Richard already noticed that the traveller's coin purse was quite a bit bulkier than it had been when he arrived. He knew that Marius would not steal from him nor Kalsis, but he checked his own pouch just to be sure. 'Still seeing that Claudia girl, Kalsis?' inquired Marius as he eyed a passing girl from the next village down the highway towards the city of Drasin to the south. Marius enjoyed the company of young women almost as much as Kalsis did, but he enjoyed the company of money more. He hefted the girl's coin pouch and poured the contents into his own after some consideration of obscure factors not relating in any way whatsoever to basic ethics. 'No,' replied the Amardian. 'It's Lauren now.' 'Oh, her. Blonde hair, blue eyes? Slim girl? Your parents think she's a dirty heathen?' 'Thanks, Marius,' said Kalsis, 'you just described every young lady in the village.' Richard managed a short laugh. 'You're getting tired of them, Kalsis? Why, you've only been in bed with about six or seven.' 'Yeah, well I was thinking of going away for a while to look for something more exotic. Maybe in the north? What's it like in the north?' 'More machinery, Kalsis,' said Marius. 'What, not thinking about the Amardian girls, either? How about the Ventarans? The tribals in the big forest to the east?' 'Not the Amardian girls. They're very beautiful, but no. With them it'd all be about the ruinous nature of the sins of the flesh, and how you should only ever do anything of the sort with your wife,' Marius' face contorted into a look of horror mixed with indignant offence, and Kalsis continued, 'and the only time I think they'd feel satisfied and scream "Oh gods!" is when they're sticking a sacrificial knife into a goat. As for the other types of girls, I haven't seen them.' Richard's attention wandered away at Marius' reply of 'Oh, you should see them. They're like...' and began to scan the crowd. More people had turned out onto the wet cobbles of the village square than he had expected. The rain had cleared up a bit. It seemed to be shy of crowds. It was nice to see Commerce happening, anyway. Farmers were selling the last of the summer's corn and whatever else they had grown in the summer along with animals and their various secretions. Richard never really paid much attention to farm work. Sometimes, on days when the wind would blow westerly, he would sneak away from his chores and climb atop the windshield of raised earth and trees to listen. The wind off the Great Deep would blow the sound of the waves and the smell of salt very far inland. He had never seen the sea, but imagined it as Marius described it to him: like a lush field of summer's wheat blowing in the wind, only blue and with big things with teeth swimming in it. He didn't put much effort into imagining the big things with teeth. To him, the sea that he imagined was beautiful. The wind changed to south-westerly, and blew hard for a moment, stripping sodden leaves off trees and flapping canvas over stalls. As Kalsis and Marius talked about girls and their various talents, Richard thought about thought and magic. Thought was magic, wasn't it? Or was magic thought? He tried to remember what the wizard said to him when he borrowed some magic stones to try and create power to make his flying machine work. He tried some more. He failed. Marius was poking him in the side. He managed an inquiring grunt. 'I said, it'll start to rain soon, and it's a pretty long walk back to your farmstead.' Marius took his large backpack from the empty wagon they sat in, and hefted it onto his shoulders. 'Yeah, and nothing interesting happened this year anyway,' said Kalsis. 'Might be because of the early rains. Nobody feels like going outside for too long. I think I'll go home, too. No sticking around having a go at the village girls tonight. Dad wants me to get ready for the Festival of Lamnae, who is the goddess who Brings the First Rains of Autumn.' 'You know, Kalsis,' said Richard, 'for a sinful sort of person such as yourself, you're awfully good at remembering the names of these gods and what they do. And you even observe their holy days.' 'It helps, my friend,' replied Kalsis, 'to know who you're in trouble with and to, at least once a year, make them happy.' 'How did you manage to provoke the wrath of the goddess of the first rains of autumn?' asked Marius with a raised eyebrow and an incredulous expression on his face. 'I didn't. At least I think I didn't. Never hurts to be on the safe side. That and dad'll have my ears if I forget to lay out the Holy Orange Umbrella.' * Two hours later and Richard was seated at the dinner table with his parents and Marius. They ate in silence as rain lashed against the windows and pounded on the roof, demanding entry without an invitation. Marius had brought for Richard's father a sturdy pewter flagon and a set of wines and spirits from the north, and for his mother a gold necklace with real emeralds in it, the provenance of which he was not at liberty to divulge because of 'business considerations'. Richard knew he stole it. For Richard, he had brought a polished steel dagger with a silver crossguard in the shape of two eagles' heads, with rubies inlaid for eyes. He claimed that it was a gift from a friend, and this excuse was one so unlike him that Richard had no choice but to believe that he had not merely transfered the possession of the object behind its owner's back. 'So you'll teach young Richard here how to use that knife, eh?' asked Richard Senior, while Richard Junior's mother Agatha pursed her lips and gave Marius the glare of an overprotective female parent. 'Yessir, don't you worry about that. If he knows how to use it, he's less likely to hurt himself if he ever has to cut any... thing. It's always a good idea to know how to protect yourself, sir, as you obviously know from the size of that club hanging by the door, and the excellent state of repair of that crossbow you keep on top of the fireplace. A Smith and Gullynock "Obliterator" Mark Three eighth-inch lever-action light crossbow, no? Last year's model?' Richard senior nodded with a broad smile. 'Got it shipped down from Mellias during the summer. I heard there'll be trouble with wolves this winter.' Marius smiled. 'Well prepared. If you can keep a secret, however, I will tell you a little something I heard on the grapevine.' They nodded, Agatha somewhat more hesitant than the males. 'It won't just be wolves you'll be having trouble with here in the south. I was travelling along the border on an errand for one of my benefactors when I heard from some off-duty soldiers that there's been a lot of Amardian movement recently. Your friends down the road wouldn't know about this, because it's pretty recent. What I saw along some of the mountain paths, however, is more worrying. I intend to go back to Mellias in the spring and tell my employer that there are Amardian troops filtering through the border as we speak, and it'll be bad for his business. I'm not supposed to tell anyone too soon, because any undue panic will let them know that we know what they're doing, and that would make them edgy. Bad for business, you see.' 'What are they doing?' asked Richard Senior. Everyone around the table had become silent. Food had ceased to be consumed. Even the rain seemed to be listening. 'They're preparing for war.'

PROLOGUE In the year 895, a peace of five hundred years was broken. The arrogance of one man brought needless suffering and destruction to countless lives, all in the name of glory and misguided ambitions. The war was bitter, and laid waste to vast tracts of land for three years. Men were called for. Men went forth from their homes with the blessings of their mothers, fathers, siblings, children. Men went to battle alongside their closest friends. Some men returned home with the blessings of the battlefield: disease, wounds of the body and wounds of the mind - wounds that would never heal. Many men did not return at all. Through the entire carnage was a continual buzz of learning in the great cities far from the conflict. Development of weapons and strategies to win the war. Men learned to use masses of their fellow man as pieces in a game. Out of the haze of war came a cadre of battle-hardened men. Comrades in arms who would walk through all the abysses and back together. The smallest of these powerful pieces would be the dagger slipped into the armour of the knight. Sixteenth Company.

Have yourself trampled by gazelles, you useless prat. Ahem. My theory behind it is that runes already function in that way - otherwise how could you carry absurd amounts of them without their singularly inconsequential weight adding up to an obscene number? In theory, when you buy or "withdraw" runes, you're only transfering power from an abstract source to the actual stone, which you only have one of. When you "run out" of runes, you still have the stone, but it doesn't have enough charge to do what it's supposed to, so you head back to the bank or shop to get more charges. For rune essence, same deal. Get hunks of semi-magical rock, toss them at an altar and they all go boom - and the combined energies of the essence and the altar get sucked into the stone you're always carrying.

Gem lasers? Seriously? Are you not aware that a LASER is just light amplified through stimulated emission of radiation (hence the acronym)? Basically, it is an amplified, focused beam of light. What do the facets of cut gemstones do to light? That's right, they scatter it. Scatter =/= focus. Unless you can find some way to refocus the scattered light and then bounce it all around into a single beam again, which is a needless waste of space and mirrors. Ah, but wait. You made a last-second save by saying it's more of a "spell shooter". You mean - wait for it, this is the tricky part - a mage? Who could fling spells around without having to stick a (presumably) enchanted gem into a bloody great cumbersome machine? If you're going to put forward any more suggestions, I would suggest at least a minimum of 800mg of logic and an IQ greater than your shoe size. Your spelling and use of punctuation are terrible. ... And yea, he did attach the Sanctified Promethium Canisters to the Holy Flamer, prayed to the Emperor to lend unto him strength with which to purge heathens, and was so empowered to pull with his finger the Blessed Trigger. And the enemies of the Emperor were smoten with Divine Fire. (You got flamed)

Twin katanas. Please. Be realistic. Those are four-foot long pieces of metal designed to be used in two hands in any sane (exception: Miyamoto Musashi) prolonged form of combat. Dual-wielding them would be ridiculously difficult and more dangerous for you than it is to your opponent. I think the dual-wielding "OMGUBARDUBBLEWEPONZLOL" stuff has been shot down enough times that it should be put to rest. If there's any dual-wielding, it'd be of small weapons or a combination of large and small one-handed weapons, but not two large one-handed weapons. Lances are, for all intents and purposes, spears that are used while mounted. The "jousting lances" are glorified bits of wood that are designed to shatter on impact. A really long spear would be a pike.

The chu-ko-nu was a Chinese weapon and is severely overrated by ignorant people. Technically all crossbows should be two-handed, because you simply can't effectively aim and fire a standard-size crossbow with one hand. One point against it is that the firing lever is operated more or less at the back of the stock even though it connects further ahead, and another is that you can't operate said lever with only one hand on the weapon without breaking your wrist either while aiming or after firing. For the record, an arbalest was not a "heavy" crossbow so much as it was a siege crossbow, smaller than a ballista but bigger than the actual heavy crossbows with steel arms rather than wood.

To be frank, party hats only look like crowns to the blissfully ignorant.

Ooh, look. An argument in the making. dude you could have saved yourself the time and just said scimmy ownz long it's that simple :/...but if you wanna go in detail... 1) scimmy is curved and shorter which gives it a better swing and momentum to get it started. 2) the scimmy's curvature enables it to cut through the air like butter. not even butter. like...very soft butter....like butter that's been melted. 3) the overall structure of a d scimmy gives it balance, multi side swing control, a comfy all size grip, and it's a scimmy! What else could make the d scimmy better?!huh?! 1) The scimitar gets less momentum than a longsword BECAUSE it's shorter and lighter. The curve has nothing to do with the speed of the swing whatsoever. 2) Again, the curve has nothing to do with the swing. The only use for the curve is to focus kinetic energy into one point on impact. However, as a weapon that is lighter than a longsword, it shouldn't deal as much damage that it does. Design flaw on JAGeX's part. 3) All weapons have designs that give them balance. Otherwise nobody would use them in combat. A scimitar's balance, unlike a longsword's, pulls more towards the pommel than the crossguard, because the blade isn't (or at least, SHOULDN'T - design error by JAGeX) be as wide as the longsword. It's a light weapon which originated in a desert. That is why it's designed to cut through flesh easily, because nobody had to bother with armour. In fact, its performance is poor against plate mail, owing to the fact that it's so light.

Slingshots? Stupid. Useless as a weapon. Slings? Go for it.

Sheesh, that guy is stick-thin. Give his arms some muscle. And with no change from your previous work, he still has a receeding chin. It's also a very unnatural posture, and the robes just flare out suddenly at the cuffs, without any volume to the rest of the sleeve.

Drown yourself, you spoiled elitist brat.

Excuse me, but you are elligibile to be an Australian citizen after two years' residence. Just because someone is of a particular ethnic group doesn't make them a "foreigner". Throw the lot of them in jail. That way, you don't get stupid claims on government racism. Or just have them all shot. The world could do with a little less mob activity. I'll say it again. The government needs to grow some balls.

My honest opinion on this. The government should grow some balls. Hell, Downer already did it with his "If you don't like it here, get out" line. Move in with a few SAWs and threaten to blow the faces off anyone who so much as lifts a finger in a threatening fashion. Open fire when they do.

Wrong. It's based on dominant arm, because more strength means you can draw the string more easily. In case you haven't already realised, you CAN turn your head to sight down a shaft.

Obsidian can't hold an edge. It's too brittle, and blunts extremely quickly. Steel is far superior.

He already did. Idiot.

Do you not know how to read? Those things are "realistic" for the purposes of the game because - get this - THEY DON'T EXIST IN REAL LIFE, so JAGeX can do whatever the hell they want with those. The fact that you have hitpoints and stats are REPRESENTATIONS of abilities and skills that you would have in real life, or within the FANTASY WORLD, as part of the game MECHANIC. Weapon fighting techniques, however, DO exist in real life. To represent things that exist in real life unrealistically within a game hurts suspension of disbelief, which is what allows people to take a game seriously. Without a grounding of realism that people are familiar with, they will either be uncomfortable with or ambivalent towards the elements which ARE fantasy. Runescape is a REPRESANTATION of a pseudo-medieval setting with elements of fantasy worked in. Fantasy itself works only when you can compare it to real life, and for such a comparison, you need a grounding of realism.

Agriculture. Once humans learned that they didn't have to move around to get their food anymore, they settled down, built cities and started thinking about more than just where their next meal is going to come from. In time, lands became prized for agriculture, and people had to create more imaginative ways of killing each other in order to protect their territory and keep themselves fed. If we had not developed agriculture, we would still be largely nomadic, and would never have discovered those things that were crucial for an established urban area or could only be feasible in one, such as pottery, metallurgy, engineering, roads, writing or high diplomacy. Without cities, we could never have had organised conflict, and remember that a lot of the technology we take for granted today was developed in order to aid a war effort. In effect, if we hadn't learned to grow our own food in the first place, we wouldn't have any problems with famine, because we would just move on to better areas. Agriculture also degrades soils over time, and this backs up my previous statement.

My main gripe about pixel art on this board is that the subject matter hardly ever changes. Sure, it keeps up with new equipment trends in-game, and that is understandable because this is a gaming forum, but it's all very bland and dull. Almost everyone copies the same look that they see in the game, and there's very little actual creativity involved in the art, to say nothing about technique or lack thereof. And I agree that too many people start creating pixel art with money as their only motivation. Art for art's sake, I say. You'll never actually improve if you only make cookie-cutter art for absurd sums of digital money.

Actually, two-handed weapons usually take the off-hand above the main hand. With two hands, you don't actually need to worry so much about the dominant hand, but what you DO need to worry about more is presenting a larger profile. Leading with your off-side would mean that you would want to lead with the weapon as well, otherwise you're covering nothing. If you lead with your dominant, you'll have a hell of a time balancing because it just doesn't FEEL natural. For example, pike formations always nead with their left, to ensure unit cohesion (everyone's facing the right way) and to make sure that when the midden hits the windmill, their right arms aren't going to get cut off. Also, the strength of the dominant hand is useful for bracing weapons for either setting against charges, or in the case of halberds, greatswords, etc., for holding the thing steady. You want your strongest hand at the pommel or nearer to the butt of the haft to counteract the imbalance there, and to give more leverage to the left hand which is AT the balance. Moving the half of a greatsword's hilt near the pommel effectively means you control the balance of the weapon, because you're movnig that counterweight around and using your off-hand as a fulcrum. Back on JAGeX and messing up, it does matter. Suspension of disbelief. You can't honestly expect me to take it seriously when a veteran combatant makes back-handed swings from base to chief with a greatsword.

They don't actually have backs, per se. They're essentially just balls. I didn't mean for them to actually have three-dimensional depth. As for time, about an hour. Took about half of that time procrastinating and working out composition.

Well, it's the newest thing I decided to do involving the little round dude (and dudette). I liked how it turned out. As usual. Comments? Criticism?

And Guild Wars has a much better combat and PVP system than Runescape? I don't see how the game itself comes into this. The main argument for it is that you can only push your attributes so far, but you can slide them up and down to suit particular strategic needs. That won't work in Runescape, but it sure works in Guild Wars.

Guild Wars runs perfectly on a 28.8kbps connection. You'd only experience latency when downloading updates, new areas, and when the servers are overloaded. Otherwise, you'll have minimal if any lag.