Death Among the Stars – Review by ReviewAnon

By: ReviewAnon (name given by the readers)
Originally posted: 02.04.2016
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We got our ass kicked by a lightning snake and then tried to play it cool and talk shit about gods being wanting.

PREMISE
You are Jadyk of the Wormstar, a.. Sort of lich that's actually a worm which got revived into a shape changing super zombie by a sentient evil star in order to conquer things. For reasons. At some point in your past you became one of the three greatest leaders of the Great Necrotic Armada, a legion of various deads from across the stars banding together to conquer things. For reasons. Then something went very, very wrong.

The quest begins as the underground tomb you had been sealed within for who knows how long was broken into, allowing you to play the part of the long sealed ancient evil and burst free to wreak your havoc upon not only the world, but the endless void of space once more.

It had been too long since there had been death among the stars.

Unfortunately centuries spent in isolation and the discovery that your patron creator, the Wormstar, evidently got destroyed at some point not long after your death, as well as the splintering and destruction of your Grand Armada, means you've got a long way to go. Also you're not quite as evil as ancient legends would have lead people to believe.

Unlife is pretty cool, there's war. The living will be dead eventually, no need to rush it. After all, they'll be here forever.

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REVIEW pt1

Mechanics
Pretty standard. Roll 1d100, best of three. Sometimes the QM wants you to roll 3d100 best of three.

But this is a Civ, and not exactly a quest, which I discovered shortly after entering the thread.

So you have the obligatory harvesting of resources, building of units and buildings, recalculation of how many resources you harvested and how much you've spent, more resources spent on upgrades to harvest resources more efficiently and salvaging/tech tree research to get new things. There are a some battles, I suspect there will soon be more battles, but there isn't much to say about them mechanically either.

One neat thing is that most of the units and structures are actually a result of the players getting to throw their ideas at the QM like "wouldn't it be cool IF?" and then they roll with it. It results in simultaneously a more involved playerbase, but also the feeling that there are no real limits to respect, which decidedly cuts down on any enjoyment which could be gained from gaining mastery and experience with a system... When system mastery rewards nothing that "haha, I had an idea!" doesn't reward more. Why even work out strategy with your units when you can just roll up into the next episode with a shiny new toy every time?

I'm not going to explain much of that because, quite honestly, none of it matters. It is walls upon walls of meaningless numbers that serve very little purpose both mechanically and story wise. However, it's worth mentioning, because it purports itself to being a large and integral part of the Civ.

I'll touch on why I'm fairly dismissive over the entire addition of numbers in a bit, even though I am of the understanding that it's a large part of the charm to civ quests.

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REVIEW pt2

Plot
DAtS has very slow plot. Most of your time is spent filling in spreadsheet numbers and running basic multiplication and division on your calculator to add up or subtract your resources and troop count. It plays out much like an RTS campaign where you receive small blurbs of relevant info between large portions of gathering/spending resources and fighting. Sometimes you find a new ally, and they're usually found and then befriended through fighting or giving them resources.

Very rarely you do get some insight into the plot though. Flashes of what happened during the Grand Necrotic Armada's down fall, hints towards the factions who may have been behind it and their actions, and the way the 'verse has changed since. The enigmatic presence of eldritch manipulators known as 'The Masked' who seem to have their fingers in every pot across space that threatens to turn you against your once ally, and said ally whose help seems disconcertingly dubious. There is an information game being played where several parties give the MC pieces of a puzzle they've recolored with their own bias and then leave you to figure out on your own.

Ultimately your goal is to rebuild the Grand Necrotic Armada, but there are a lot of things in the way - Not the least of which being resolving the mystery of what tore it apart the first time, and gathering allies to stand against the current Powers That Be.

However, again, all of this comes very slowly. Only small nuggets of relevant information actually move the plot forward any at all, and they're found few and far between your resource management and miniature stealth campaigns. Almost frustratingly, TWICE we've been given the option to learn plot important details from the Masked, and TWICE the players have chosen to get a new toy or potential ally instead. Note that the allies would have still been there regardless of what we chose, we just evidently wanted them right now.

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REVIEW pt3

Writing
The execution of this civ aside, I find very little to fault in the writing. Honestly a lot of it is of impressive and evocative quality, painting a picture of vivid colors in very broad strokes... Which is ultimately where I started to see issues. The QM is very good at sweeping, general descriptions. They don't get bogged down trying to tell you every single detail of the many instances of mass combat or sprawling new alien worlds they've discovered. It's simple, it's general, it's enough to allow one's imagination to beautifully fill in the rest.

When the QM is pressed to write something more specific, they almost seem to brush over it. Perhaps it's the civ format, but detailed and intricate writing doesn't seem their strong suit, often leading to character interactions and small scale combat feeling shallow or rushed. over 40+ threads into this quest and almost all of the named characters feel two dimensional, at best. There are hints at more expansive personality traits in your generals, but they fall almost painfully into the generic categories of "This is your blood knight, this is your guardian, this is your sneaky hunter".

It becomes difficult to care about them on a level beyond "they are my designated hero units", which I suppose is in line with civ philosophy...? I mean it's essentially writing an RTS, but... It bothers me. They're mechanically irreplaceable (and I doubt even this, honestly) but they don't FEEL irreplaceable. If they died I think we'd go "oh no" briefly and then work on replacing them while noting down that we have a grudge against whoever killed them.

And yeah, I guess if you look at it from the point of view of a lich or something, this makes sense.

But it's not fun or engaging.

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PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt1

I like RTS games, I enjoy the army building and resource crafting. I like it because it is a graphical medium where all of the math is handled by computers designed specifically for this purpose. This has none of those things; There is one poor QM who probably has spreadsheets filled to the brim with information that pumps out the walls upon walls of numbers we're assailed with through out the civ. There's no exploration, there's a post saying I found something... Which honestly just feels like I got it handed to me. I don't even really want to call this a game unless you catch it live; It's just a text log of someone else's campaign history.

Every so often you find things that could lead to research, and I hesitate to even call it 'research' because it's literally just "you found something you don't have. Toss it into the pot/thinktank and adapt it?" - And this includes not just technology, but other RACES as well. Again however, most of it just feels handed to you. The only difficult thing you ever struggled to get was the ability to melt down Sunscales, and that's just because all the ones you tried to toss in the pot before went Allahu Akbar on you like rude little shits.

You exist as some undead zerg thing which honestly has very little emphasis on anything being undead at all and ends up coming across more as wacky aliens and fantasy horror with the named cast members just being skeletons... Jadyk himself doesn't even have to be a skeleton, he just is. It's been noted he could change his form to whatever. Hell, Lorgul doesn't need to be a skeleton, he's just a sentient medium infused with void fire. Necrotic energy in this quest means nothing about being undead evidently, because it can be used by pretty much anyone, and most other energies seem to be able to mimic it in one way or another. A lot of the energies just seem the exact same.

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PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt2

Almost all of the numbers are meaningless. HUGE portions of the quest are dedicated to posting numbers of resources consumed, gained, spend, troop count, etc. and they all amount to nothing. Every thread lets you read the OP post then scroll down anywhere between 1/5th and 1/8th of the entire thread before anything besides numbers happens. And then you can often skip another full 1/5th or so of the thread towards the end because numbers. You can skip pretty much all the anon chat because it's numbers. This only leaves you MAYBE a quarter of the thread (this is a generous estimate) of anything even being worth reading.

But when I say the numbers are meaningless, I'm not saying this out of scorn; They are actually meaningless. They're this needlessly detailed spread of units which cost X to make, or produce Y amount of resources, which get cycled into and out of your storage. You focus on building an army out of this in set amounts, but this army is rarely used in its bulk for anything. When it comes to scouting, you just hear abstracted descriptions about things going out to gather information. When it comes to fights, you hear abstracted information about how your forces move, and how they kill or die. When it comes to ANYTHING in the quest, what you hear is just abstractions.

That's GOOD. That's how it should be, it keeps the reader from being bogged down in details. However, once you realize this, you look back at your numbers and wonder "why"? What is their purpose? Sure you have 1500 talons or what not, but all that means is you'll still see "your swarms of talons bound across the field". You have a ton of ships? Congratulations, you have a fleet! All those soldiers? You have squads!

The exact numbers don't matter at all when you're reading about anything they do. They're just numbers on the wall to look at and gaggle over, which have absolutely no bearing on how you succeed or fail.

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PERSONAL THOUGHTS pt3

"Of course they have a bearing on that! Our tactical deployment of-"

No. They don't. Around thread 21 or so, even the players are looking at all the numbers and realizing they're just unwieldy and pointless. This is around the time they start asking all the individual troop counts to just be paired down into macro measurements of groups, squads, factories, etc. They don't want to build 72 Talons anymore, they want to build 1 group of talons, which equates to like 150 units or something.

Why? Because the individual unit doesn't matter at all.

"But what about how we equip our unit-"

No! Your units are just assumed to be equipped with relevant things! At no point in the quest has there ever been a situation where you ran into an obstacle you couldn't surmount because you didn't bring the right equipment, and eventually the QM and players DO just say "well okay, they'll just be equipped with what works on creation".

"What about our upgrade uni-"

No! All of your units get upgrades when you unlock them! They're all the same!

"But we don't want to send land units to the water planet..."

Then don't! Your troop number count has nothing to do with what type of unit goes anywhere! It is effectively the exact same to just say "We send our underwater units out to check on this" as it is to say "We send 2 squads of underwater units out to check on this". It will be described the exact same, with the broad and general writing of the QM to avoid getting bogged down in numbers.

"B-But war is a numbers game and-"

NO! Every single conflict can be described as "We're greatly/slightly outnumbered" or "We outnumber them greatly/slightly". No numbers required for this at all, the addition of numbers does absolutely nil towards improving the war experience when your tactical decisions are fluffed in stylized action based writing about what your unit types are doing instead of your exact number of units.

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CLOSING

Objectively, I'd recommend this quest to someone who likes RTS type games, or people wanting to get an idea of how to effectively write mass combat or exploration without getting bogged down in details. Personally however, I wouldn't recommend archive binging this quest to anyone.

Jump into a current thread, ask the players what's going on. I burned out 3 times over the course of a mere 30 threads (then cried a little when I found out 10 more had run since) from just how difficult it was to care about anything going on when nearly every post was a wall of contextually meaningless numbers or descriptions of a fight happening. Those are things that are fun to play in real time, but worthless to anyone trying to read in bulk.

It's a civ that I can only assume flourishes in real time, much like the genre RTS is literally "Real Time" Strategy. To anyone who can actually look at the archives of something like this and enjoy it, you have both my respect and admiration... But given that the plot moves at a glacial pace and very rarely, if ever, does anything of import actually require previous knowledge of going ons - Just jump in. Anons can fill you in quicker, and with far less pain, than you trying to sift through it all yourself.

I found much of the 'mechanics' of the civ to be completely extraneous, as they only served to add pressure to the QM and an imaginary minigame for the players to piddle with, because the actual numbers didn't really have any gravity on the events of the campaign. I guess that numbers minigame is the charm of a civ, but I feel their inclusion was a waste of effort that could have been spent elsewhere.

And finally, Eyegores are consistently the cutest unit. I felt more attachment to the poor little guy who wanted to go home than anyone else in the entire quest.