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Chuck: Update 29

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atcDave

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Most of this Update will cover details of the “Call of the Lost Goddess” mod. It is a beautiful and well crafted mod, easily professional quality. But its also fairly recent. This will be written with some spoilers, so skip this update if you wish to remain unspoiled!

*****

Sarah

Imoen and Aerie spent a day at the Planar Sphere, so we stopped by there to pick them up before we went to the Temple of Waukeen.

“That thing is amazing” “Imoen, we should make sure the residents who were displaced by the Sphere get some help getting on with their lives, we can afford to be generous”.

We got to the Temple early afternoon and met with Tharundar Olehm, the High Priest of Waukeen.

Tharundar comes across as a gentle decent man. With a serious need.

Waukeen had been missing, presumed dead by many, since the time of troubles. But he took us to see a Priestess, a prophet of sorts, who had visions suggesting she was alive in the Abyss. Held captive by a powerful Demon Lord. I felt my stomach clench with a pretty good idea where this was heading.

He presented the case for making a rescue, and detailed several arrangements he had made. This was not a hare brained scheme, but obviously this would be extreme jeopardy for us. I reminded myself a few times how far we’d all come in the last year. And really just how capable we were as a team.

We would need to travel via something called The Infinite Staircase, and navigate to a doorway into the right part of the Abyss. I’m no expert on this stuff, but the staircase is Infinite, shoot the Abyss itself is infinite, we will be dependent on a lot detailed information we knew nothing about ten minutes ago. Fortunately Chuck is very smart. So are Imoen and Aerie. I’m sure they can sort this out.

“oof. Oh boy. Infinite Staircase to the Abyss. What could go wrong… Hah”

We had to travel to the city of Waterdeep, at the far north of the Sword Coast. Only Jaheira and I had been there, and this wouldn’t be a trip for sightseeing. We were teleported to our destination, and led to a door to the staircase with no delay.

Its a good thing we have good directions!

We traveled by the stairs to the Abysmal City of Samara. A demon there was being compelled to help us. I can see Keldorn’s skin crawling just being here. I’m counting steps and turns to be sure I can get my whole team back to the staircase quickly if needed.
We were told we needed to attract the attention of Maretta, a Succubus currently in charge of the city. We did this with a series of arena fights.
Soon enough were summoned to meet the boss.

I could see how tense Chuck was, I got the feeling Maretta was flattered by this.

But we were convincing enough as a band of blood thirst mercenaries looking to make some money.
We were sent on a sort of proving ourselves mission, to acquire an “Abyss Rose”. This put us through a series of tests against our baser instincts. Seriously, these were mostly easy and obvious.

“Sarah! Just don’t do anything hostile! Duck or run, but try not to cut him in half!”

We passed this and presented Maretta with a Rose. I told Chuck I did *not* expect this kind of drama for flowers!
Next we were sent to help in a battle of the eternal Blood War. Demons and Devils are continuously fighting and killing each other.

No friendly faces here!

Then Maretta wanted to find what was killing her demons south of the city.

The countryside here is not exactly scenic!
But we did find the beast that was preying on other demons.

Throughout, we had been putting a plan together. We learned a former jailkeeper of Waukeen’s might be willing to talk to us, if we could reach him before Maretta had him killed.
We succeeded, and learned the route into the prison where the goddess was held.

The prison itself was full of wretched creatures. One, a deva, we were able to restore her hope and get her out. A couple, called to us that *they* were Waukeen. Keldorn can detect such deception with barely a thought.

We battled an overseer of some sort, who put up a fight.

Finally, we did find the Goddess herself and broke her loose. She had been stripped of her power, but she could move and keep up with us. As we neared the exit a contingent led by Maretta, with several of her top lieutenants waited for.

Stupid succubus. You should have left the fighting to your more capable flunkies.

Once Maretta fell there was little between us and escape. Stepping back onto the Staircase led to an unforgettable moment.

Briefly, we saw the goddess’ glory return to her.

We travelled home, and saw the Athkatla Temple of Waukeen in the midst of a wonderous celebration. They knew their patroness had returned without us saying anything. And they were generous in their appreciation, although we kept our role in things secret from all but their leaders.
This was a good day. We made some good friends, and left no one dangerous (alive) in our wake.

Returning home, we saw our militia performing maneuvers.

A graduation of sorts. Looking ready to defend their homes.

5 responses to “Chuck: Update 29”

  1. Zeno Avatar
    Zeno

    “No friendly faces” is a great pic! And that spider looks like it could sub in for Middle Earth. What kind of prompts generated that?

    Sarah taking out the Succubus looks good, as does the Overseer battle.

    I’ve been experimenting with new camera views/perspectives. What did you use for that in “no friendly faces” and the “overseer battle”?

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  2. atcDave Avatar
    atcDave

    The spider was “gigantic spider-demon with human-like face, with razor like teeth and glowing red eyes”. I was hoping for something Shelob like (except for the face!), and was pleased. I had to keep going “bigger” on the size prompts (“huge” and “massive” were not nearly big enough).

    the “no friendly faces” prompt was “leaps from a rock towards a demon”. That was one of those that was fussy getting the movement in the right direction. Several results had Jaheira leaping in the wrong direction entirely. I described the blue-skinned devil in some detail, the others were a happy accident.

    The render with Sarah and the overseer was mostly defined by “cinematic action” and “blurred motion”.

    so often with Co-Pilot I feel like my words are just the tip of the iceberg. The AI itself seems to understand the genre. I often start with very sparse descriptions and see what the AI wants to do. Then I start adding details and tweaking the elements. Honestly, this is entirely an area I feel like you do much better than I at telling a story with the pictures.

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    1. Zeno Avatar
      Zeno

      I’m not sure what your overall process is, but mine basically looks like:

      1. Take notes while I play – both a skeleton of events and anything interesting or unusual that happens.
      2. When I reach a good stopping point, I write up the story of what happened.
      3. I note anyplace in the story that looks like a good place for an illustration (or several).
      4. I go through trying to render those – picturing in my head “what would this look like in a comic book”? Sometimes in the process of rendering it I either stumble upon something better than I had in mind and change the story, or have so much trouble in rendering that I change tack because its just not working.
      5. I usually render at least 20, and sometimes as many as 100 variations of a particular image – tweaking as I go and saving off anything that looks workable.
      6. Then for each render I go back and sort through what popped out for the most promising candidates – and see how will the Editor can fix up those if needed.

      Examples: I tried to get Blaze and Glory charging the orcs in the swamp, but it *would* *not* do that. It refused to give Glory horns if Blaze was in the pic. Orcs got horns. Anyone or anything else in the pic got them. But not her. The editor is good at *removing* horns, but sucks at adding them. So I just rendered the orc fort and moved on.

      Conversely, Blaze and Dawn starting to develop a bit of a thing just fell out of how they looked together in renders. Hadn’t even thought of that beforehand.

      One other thing I do, I have found that the “pay Pro” version of coPilot and the “free” version can differ substantially in how they render things. So I often try in both because sometimes one works much better than the other. the “Pro” version seems better at landscapes and special effects. The “free” version is often better at keeping my characters straight. You can see the difference because the “free” images are all square while the “pay” images are wide aspect.

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      1. Zeno Avatar
        Zeno

        The two versions seem to differ in the filter as well. The “free” version absolutely refused to the the “interrogation” scene, while the “pay” version gave me lots of variations on it.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. atcDave Avatar
        atcDave

        I guess my target is more movie than comic book, otherwise my process isn’t too dissimilar. Although it sounds like yours is more thorough. I typically keep notes as to what I want, sometimes even do renders as I go if something really juicy comes up! And I often find, once I start writing, I come up with two or three more that make sense to add.

        it does sound like your follow up process is a lot more thorough? And no doubt, you have more of an artists eye than I do. The thing that really fires my imagination is just *seeing* my characters and team. Sometimes seeing other characters, and places. Sometimes a good joke or bad pun! My mind doesn’t go to the action as much, but I can plainly see you do much more with movement and action. Most of my action is the two or three things that really excite me (largely involving armored warriors crashing into things), and trying to emulate cool things you’ve done, but in my style!

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