Chương 39: Motion Picture Soundtrack - Radiohead (3:20)

[A/N: I have close to zero understanding of technology when it comes to "packet sniffing" and emulators. Later in this chapter, a forum user is going to be talking about all that. I did a boat load of research (I read about three articles and watched a YouTube video) to talk about emulator servers for an MMO. If anything is wrong, please comment and explain to me how it works] THREAD: ZEKE-RUN Welcome to the official Zeke-run thread.

This thread exists as a hub for everything related to playing Frontiers in the style inspired by Zeke's fanfiction. You can use this thread for everything from discussion, guides, theorycrafting, mod coordination, and shared experiences. Whether you are actively attempting a run, thinking about starting a new one, or just trying to understand what people mean when they say "Zeke-run," you're in the right place.

You'll find links to the required and commonly used mods for a Zeke-run <here>, along with suggested locations for second-run saves <here>. If you are confused, curious, or unsure whether a Zeke-run is for you, feel free to ask questions. If you are having difficulty downloading and installing the mods, please check out the FAQ section <here>.

The community is generally happy to help, and you can also reach out directly to one of the run's creators (@FarFieldVanishes) or the current head modder (@8a8yaga) for clarification on rules, mods, or intended playstyles. IMPORTANT NOTE UP FRONT: Z3ke does not participate in this thread. He does not post here, is not involved in the modding work, and is not one of the creators or maintainers of the Zeke-run. This thread is about playing the game, not critiquing the fic itself.

If you are here to complain about, debate, or review Zeke's story, please take that discussion to the appropriate fanfic or lore threads. Otherwise, welcome. Take your time, read the pinned resources, and remember: a Zeke-run is about restraint, challenge, and seeing what the world of Frontiers looks like when you stop rushing through it.

ThreeStrikes Yo Worsso. I finally got around to DLing your realistic fighting mod, and yea… I owe Zeke an apology. I read that post he made where he was fighting the two bandits in his fic. The whole fight was over in like, three sentences, and I remember thinking that the whole thing felt rushed. He didn't make any big action-set piece or create an epic back-and-forth fight. The fics I read traditionally turn fights into half a chapter of choreographed blows and cool moves.

But all Zeke did was stab the two guys and then spend the rest of the next chapter writing about how it made him feel. At the time I was disappointed and kind of put the fic on the backburner. It was okay, but I'm drawn to more action stories, you know? Then I saw people talking about how he discovered a real path through the House of Seasons that we all missed, and I picked up the fic again. It was only when I dled Worsso's mod and had my first bandit encounter that I was like… holy shit.

The entire lead up to the fight was the most stressed I've ever been. My heart was racing, my palms were sweaty, my brain was caught between two different thoughts. One part of me was screaming to attack, the other was doing math about how many hours I'd sunk into this run and how bad it would feel to lose all that to one stupid decision. When I finally attacked, the fight itself only took about three seconds. Two quick slashes and the bandit went down. I backed off, he bled out, and that was that.

I remember just staring at my screen like, holy hell, did that shit really just happen? I've killed more bandits in Frontiers than I can count, but this was the first time that combat really stressed me out. This wasn't a power fantasy. I wasn't some unstoppable god. The fight lasted only a few seconds but I'm still thinking about it hours later. And I've got to say, that scene in the fic makes perfect sense now. Violence is fast and ugly. If you screw up, that's it.

I was a little on the fence about doing a Zeke-run before this. Now I can't imagine playing Frontiers without it. It's turned the game into something completely different from the first time I played it. Mirin' Yea, Worsso's mod humbles you real quick. I got lucky in my run in that I was able to make it to The MIZ without running into anything too dangerous. Once I got to the city I fell back into old habits and I tried to go and rob Two-Toes. It's basically a ritual for me at this point.

Whenever I turn on Frontiers and make it to The MIZ for the first time, I search out Two-Toes, find him panhandling, smack him around a bit and take everything he's carrying, and then turn around and flip it for cash. But this time I tried squaring up with him and it went so wrong. I went toe-to two-toes with him and he put me on the ground. Dropped me like I was nothing. I was an absolute embarrassment. I just sat there on the ground thinking, yea, okay, I deserved that.

RainOnAshes Hey Three, how far along are you on your run? Because it's not just the combat that changes. I finally reached The MIZ on my run. I've played Frontiers enough times to know all the optimal paths through it. I know where to get food, where to find water, which buildings are worth hanging around near and which quests are a waste of time. Normally I just beeline my way through the city and ignore everything that doesn't directly benefit me. Last night though, I just walked around the city.

I didn't have any objective in mind, I just wandered the streets and stared up at the structures, trying to imagine what it would actually feel like to wake up there after being isekai'd into the world. That, in my opinion, is what the Zeke-run does best. It slows you down. It makes you think about the weight of all your decisions. I've passed through The MIZ dozens of times, and I don't think I've ever really paid attention to it before.

There are sections of The MIZ where I just don't go into now because, with all the mods installed, it would be way too dangerous for me. PickSocket55 That's been the biggest difference for me too. In most games I laser-focus on the objective. Everything is just a blur as I sprint through the game and I never stop to focus on the small details because that's not relevant to the grind. Now I've been forced to actually slow down and take my time.

I've started noticing how weirdly vibrant The MIZ actually is, even in its broken state. The signage, the scale of the buildings, the people wandering the streets. Even the Deadlands feel different now. The devs mostly reused the terrain for all the Deadlands, but the place hits differently now. I'll stop sometimes and think about what it would actually be like to hike through that heat, with all that nothing around in every direction, knowing that help is days away. Wolololololo I just hate being poor.

FarFieldVanishes Uhhh… wrong thread my dood. Wolololololo Ha. No. I'm talking about n0body's econ mod. It's the one that was made shortly after that one guy complained about prices in Zeke's fic. I think he was talking about hotels and rent and whatnot. N0body made a mod for a more realistic MIZ economy. He took out all the random trash loot that you could find throughout the city with the idea of how many times in real life have you found stuff in the city that you can just pick up and sell to a vendor?

And he also made it so that a lot of the vendors don't buy your trash loot too. Again, trying to make the whole thing more realistic. Have you ever walked into a 7-11 and tried to get the guy behind the counter to buy deer meat off you? He'd look at you like you're crazy. Playing with that mod made me realize how often I used the random trash loot as a crutch in my playthrough. Like, I can't just scour the city for stuff and sell it to a vendor and become a millionaire overnight. It makes the game so much harder.

FopperyandWhm Hey everyone. I figured I'd finally stop lurking and actually post here instead of just reading the threads. I'm pretty new to the whole Fracture-verse, so apologies in advance if I ask anything obvious. A friend of mine talked me into trying Tech Reign a few weeks ago. I've always been an FPS guy - CoD, Battlefield, Battlefront, all those games. I mostly stuck to the multiplayer and never really expected much from the story side of things.

I kind of agreed with my buddy's complaints that shooters don't really do story. They tend to gesture vaguely at a plot and then get right back to the gunplay. That's always been fine with me. But then I played Tech Reign and got hooked. The shooting was solid, but it was the lore that really grabbed me. By the time I finished everything, I was way more invested in the world than I expected to be. That's what eventually landed me here.

While I was poking around this forum, reading through old threads and lore discussions, I accidentally clicked a link to Zeke's fanfiction. The next thing I know it's 3 am, my eyes are bleary, and I'd somehow caught up on everything that he'd written so far. I asked around in the fanfic thread about which game in the Fracture-verse I should play next, and a few people said that if I liked the fic I should give Frontiers a shot.

I was even told that I should try doing a Zeke-run, which is how I ended up in this thread. Here's the part where I feel a little dumb: I don't actually understand what a Zeke-run is. I've read the fanfic and everything, but I feel like I'm missing the basics of what's going on here. What's the appeal? What makes it different from a normal playthrough? And how does someone even start a Zeke-run? Appreciate any insight you all have. FarFieldVanishes Hey Foppery, and welcome to the thread!

I'll start by saying upfront that a Zeke-run probably isn't for you. Yet. That's not saying you should never do one. I'm just saying you shouldn't do one right now. If your only exposure to the Fracture-verse is Tech Reign and Zeke's fanfic, I'd strongly recommend playing more of the games in their vanilla form first before coming back here. And you definitely don't want your first experience with Frontiers to be a Zeke-run. Tech Reign is the FPS of the series.

It rewards fast reactions, aggression, and quick reflexes. Frontiers is almost the complete opposite. It's slower, more deliberate, and way more punishing. If you start Frontiers with an FPS mindset, you're going to be in for a bad time. Half the time with Frontiers, the smartest move is asking yourself whether you should fight at all. Not every fight is equal, and there's a few that are going to cost you way more than they're worth.

Ammo, medical supplies, fatigue, exposure, all of those are things that you need to balance in Frontiers. If you push too hard, too fast, your character can quickly get overwhelmed. A Zeke-run takes everything from Frontiers and dials it all the way up to eleven. It strips out a lot of the forgiveness that is built into the base game and assumes that you already understand how everything works well enough to survive. That's great if you know what you're doing, but horrible if you don't.

All that being said, Frontiers is an excellent game. It's my personal favorite game in the Fracture-verse, and if you're looking for something to play after Tech Reign I absolutely think you should give it a shot. Just do a normal run first. Maybe grab some of the texture packs or quality-of-life mods from the pinned list up above first. The UI can be a little rough for new players, especially since the game is a bit older than what you might be used to. Learn the systems. Learn the pacing of the game.

Get a feel for how cautious the game expects you to be. After all that, if you still want to suffer, that's when you come back for the Zeke-run. EchoCrawl Seconding this. The easiest comparison you can make with a Zeke-run is a Nuzlocke challenge in Pokemon. If you're not familiar with what that is, it's basically a self-imposed ruleset that makes the game harder. You're only allowed to use the first pokemon you catch on each route, and if they faint you have to release them into the wild.

It's meant for players who already know the game well and want a little more challenge. A Zeke-run basically does the same thing for Frontiers. You download a collection of mods that makes the game soooo much harder. It strips away a lot of the early-game safety nets and makes every decision you make matter more. Progression is slower and resources are tighter. You should REALLY do a vanilla Frontiers run first. The early game gives you room to mess up and recover.

The devs knew most players were used to games where you eventually become overpowered. Frontiers teaches you that you can't play that way, but it does so gently at first. The Zeke-run removes that gentleness. FopperyandWhim | The Zeke-run removes that gentleness. | What do you mean? Is it because of the mods? FarFieldVanishes Yea, it's mostly the mods. They get rid of the UI prompts and starter skills. But it's also what the mods don't do that makes everything so much harder.

Most games out there hold your hand for the first fifteen or twenty minutes. You get a safe little tutorial bubble where someone pops up and tells you, "Hey, press R to reload," or "Crouch here by pressing the R3 button to get past this barricade." The game walks you through the rules and explains the controls before it expects anything from you. That's video game design 101. Frontiers does it in a pretty clever way. I won't spoil the story, but the opening has you traveling with a caravan through the Deadlands.

Bandits attack, most of the caravan dies, and the survivors are left scrambling. You learn how to fight, how to scavenge, how to check yourself for injuries and disease, how to ration food and water, and you do it all while the game slowly ramps up the pressure. A Zeke-run skips all of that. You start off in the Glens with no tutorial, no UI prompts, no starting skills, and none of the early gear that you can scrounge up. It doesn't explain any of the buttons to you, it just drops you straight in the deep end.

That's what Echo means when he says it removes the gentleness. FopperyandWhim Okay. I'm starting to get it. But what exactly is a Zeke-run? And if I'm going to play vanilla Frontiers first, what mods should I be looking at? You mentioned texture packs and quality-of-life upgrades, but is there anything specific I should DL? Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. FarFieldVanishes Well, the Zeke-run wasn't some big, formal challenge when it started.

It kind of just grew up organically out of the fic. Frontiers has always been my favorite game in the Fracture-verse. I've replayed it sooooo many times. When I found out that someone had written a fanfic where a guy gets isekai'd into Frontiers, it went straight to the top of my reading list. At first, I tried following along with the story in-game. That turned out to be way harder than I expected. Getting to the Glens early in vanilla Frontiers is borderline suicidal.

Then Zeke heads out to the House of Seasons, and that's end-game content. Normally you have to grind for hours to build up your character, and you need to get a guilder from a rare mob drop, and probably hire some mercs before you head to the House. By the time I was ready for the House, I was massively over-equipped compared to how Zeke was written. So I tried something a little different. I decided to try and play as close as possible to the fic-Zeke as I could.

I took off my armor and weapons and just went into the House in my travel clothes. That's when all the weird shit started happening. I found the route through the House that Zeke described and managed to find the diary that he mentioned, and it all snowballed from there. I mentioned it in the fic thread. Other people tried it. And that's basically how the Zeke-run was born.

If you go ahead and read all the Frontiers forums, you'll see a bunch of people talking about the House of Seasons and the new peaceful route through it. It's kind of standard practice now to try and make your way there quickly so you can unlock dimensional storage for the rest of the game. But a Zeke-run takes all of Zeke's fic a touch more seriously, and tries to replicate all his actions in hope that we can unlock more missed content.

The core idea is simple: we try to hew as closely as possible to Zeke's experience in the game on the assumption that he's not just writing a fanfic, he's actually pointing at hidden or overlooked lore that the rest of us have missed. The only way to discover that lore is to put yourself in the same fragile, underpowered position that he's in. We've got a huge modding community on this forum. They're most focused on updating the various games to look better on modern computers.

They deal with graphics and texture packages and framerates and adding QoL features. After the House of Seasons arc blew up, a bunch of modders came together and we all started wondering if we could play Frontiers in the same way that Zeke does. If you look at the top of this thread, there's a pinned mod list there. Some are required for the Zeke-run. Some are just commonly used mods. For vanilla Frontiers I'd recommend the mods under the texture packages (especially the environment ones) and the basic QoL fixes.

Those are the mods that aren't going to change your progression or the balance of the game. It just makes the game feel smoother. For the Zeke-run in particular, the required mods do things like slow skill leveling, remove all starting skills, start you in the Glens instead of the Deadlands caravan, strip out most of the UI guidance, and make combat so much more difficult. There's a mod that removes starting skills, and it was one of the first made for the Zeke-run.

Normally, when you create a character in Frontiers you get your choice of five starting skills. They are pretty easy to grind in the early game. That mod gets rid of them and starts you with 0 in everything. There're also some mods that exist just to allow you to follow Zeke's route through the fanfic. They mostly just rework Deadlands travel so it's still dangerous but not instantly fatal to an underleveled character.

In vanilla Frontiers, getting out of the Glens as a new character would be almost impossible, so that mod gives you more of a chance to survive. Another mod is the train bandit encounter. It's a dynamic event that may or may not trigger when you travel by rail. It's not guaranteed to hit for every trip you take. Sometimes you make it through the Deadlands without trouble. Sometimes you don't. That is honestly on-brand for the fanfic because you're left wondering if and when the bandits are going to attack.

It always adds a bunch of anxiety to any playthrough. When it triggers, the fight is messy and cramped and terrifying. Exactly the way that Zeke described it in his fanfic. Then you've got the House of Seasons mod which removes the guilder requirement and reworks the approach so it's a lot more accessible in the early game.

You put all those mods together and you get a version of Frontiers where you're fragile, underprepared, vulnerable, and forced to actually pay attention to the world instead of relying on the UI and stats to help you out. EchoCrawl Hey Foppery. At this point, Zeke-runners mostly fall into two camps. One group just loves the fic and wants a tougher, more immersive version of Frontiers. They want something that feels closer to actually living in that world. The second group is here for the lore.

We're convinced that Zeke is quietly highlighting bits and pieces of the setting that the rest of us have walked past for years, and we're all trying to follow the breadcrumbs. As a newbie player to Frontiers, you shouldn't join either group. Just enjoy the game your own way and, if you really like it after playing it for a while, then you should come back here. FopperyandWhim Okay, yea, you're all telling me to do a vanilla run first. I probably will, but all this sounds incredible.

So you guys are doing a Frontiers run as a classless person to simulate being as close to Zeke as possible. But what about what happened in the fic where he was worried about being unanchored and classless and disappearing? Isn't that a problem for the Zeke-run? FarFieldVanishes Nope. The whole unanchored thing isn't a problem in Frontiers, it only exists in Shards of Time, the game that came after Syndicate's. Pro tip: never play Shards. It's a horrible mess.

Shards was Severance System's first attempt at 3D and they absolutely didn't have the tech or the engine chops to pull it off. The motion blur is aggressive and the spatial distortion effects are… a lot. Most people can't play more than 20-30 minutes without feeling nauseous. I will say that there are a few heroic modders who've tried to stabilize it over the years, but the community never rallied around the project. Shards doesn't have the greatest of reputations, and thus most modders don't want to work on it.

Back to the unanchored tag. In Shards, if you intentionally stayed classless and then hit certain story flags in the game, you were treated as invalid. It would take 21 in-game days and then the game would flag you and you'd eventually get kicked back to the main menu. The save was corrupted and you'd get a prompt to roll a new character, and that was that. It's one of those bugs that never got properly fixed because Severance went under and Horizons scooped up the IP and moved on.

And since it only ever existed in Shards, we don't really have to worry about it in Frontiers. You can stay classless as long as you want without the game nuking your save. FopperyandWhim Okay. That's good to know. What about the Valley of Echoes stuff? Where are the mods that are related to the bone mountain that he describes? MangoChutney We haven't completed the VoE mods yet. Trust me, we're working on it. Modding this stuff takes a lot of time.

I'm one of the modders here and I'm working with a couple others on the echo textures. We're mostly taking the House of Seasons assets and reworking them a little to make them look like fallen Vash and Concordant soldiers. That alone is a massive project. After that, there's still a ton more stuff to do. We've got to build the underground basement that Zeke and the others discovered. We need to implement the sound bubbles (which is honestly a nightmare from a technical standpoint.) We also need to figure out how to make the bone mound actually move and balance it with the combat so your character isn't immediately killed. We're also waiting on more info from the fic about the Rockstar class. A bunch of us are trying to create the Persona skill and allow for the implementation of an actual Rockstar class, but all that is basically on hold until Zeke writes more in the fic. FopperyandWhim Got it. So… if the whole thing isn't finished yet, how do people actually do a Zeke-run?

Wouldn't you just hit a wall once you're out of the House of Seasons? FarFieldVanishes Yea, and that's exactly why every Zeke-run ends up having two saves running side by side. Zeke's fic doesn't update every day. That's just the reality of the situation. It's not fair on him to think he's going to give us 5k words every day. Gotta wait for quality, right? Well, in the same way that we have to wait for Zeke to update us with the fic, we also have to wait for the modding scene.

Modders can't exactly build content for parts of the story that don't exist yet. And when new chapters do drop, mods take weeks or months to catch up. We're always going to be a little behind the fic. That's just the reality of the situation. Early on, people kept hitting the same problem. They'd catch up to the latest chapter and then… what? Just stop playing entirely? That's not fun. So the community came up with a workaround. Every Zeke-run has two saves. The first is a pure Zeke-run.

That's the save where you follow the fic as closely as possible. You take the same route as Zeke, make the same choices, operate under all the same restrictions as him. You don't metagame and you don't do anything that Zeke hasn't done. When the fic stops, or the mods haven't caught up yet, you park the save and don't touch it. Right now, the path goes from the Glens, through the Deadlands, into the House of seasons, and then on towards The MIZ.

Once you reach that point, the run freezes until new chapters or new mods come out. The second save is where the real fun begins. That's the "what if I got isekai'd into this world?" save. Once you've caught up with the fic, you let your run diverge. You make your own calls, take jobs that Zeke didn't, and explore places that the fic hasn't touched yet. A lot of people use that save to just live in The MIZ. They do courier work, wander into the Under-MIZ, or head out into the Deadlands to see what they can see.

It's a much harder game where you're much more fragile, but a lot of people enjoy that. It makes everything seem so much more realistic. RedCarpetWrath | wander into the Under-MIZ | Hot tip Foppery. If you ever end up doing a Zeke-run, NEVER go into the Under-MIZ. That's just straight suicide right there. It's so much more dangerous than in the vanilla game. No one in their right mind would head down there. FopperyandWhim Ha. I'll take it under advisement.

And the two saves make a lot more sense than what I was picturing. Uh… slightly different question. People were arguing on the fanfic channel about Corva the other day. They were saying something about his ankh trick only working in Syndicate's Wake and no one would be able to prove what he did was lore accurate. Does that come up here? How are you guys going to deal with that? Mirin' Quick heads up, we don't really do fic arguments in this thread.

We're not associated with Zeke and none of us can speak for his intentions. If someone wants to critique or debate the story itself, that usually stays in the lore or fic discussion channels. EchoCrawl Yea. We view the fic more as a reference point for the mods to do their work. This thread is more about gameplay and how to replicate, or approximate, Zeke's experience. FopperyandWhim Oh. No, sorry, that's not what I meant. I'm not here to argue about the fic.

I was just confused because someone said Corva would only do the ankh thing in Syndicate's Wake, and I didn't really understand why all that mattered. Why there specifically? And why aren't the modders planning around it if it's important? FarFieldVanishes Ah. Okay. That's a fair question and it deals less about lore and more logistics. The short version is that Syndicate's doesn't exist anymore in a playable form. All the servers were shut down after Horizons Entertainment bought the Fracture-verse IP.

With no servers for the game and no offline mode, we can't play it. There have been attempts to bring it back in the form of fan-run servers and emulation projects. The problem with that is that Horizons is extremely litigious. Every time a fan server gets anywhere close to functional or public, cease and desist letters start flying. And running a fan-made server for a dead live-service game is already a nightmare even without a corporation breathing down your neck.

You're talking about rebuilding backend server logic with incomplete documentation, reverse-engineering networking code, handling exploits and security without access to any of the original tools, and a whole host of other issues. Most fan-made projects stall out long before they're playable. The few that do make progress on Syndicates get shut down almost immediately by Horizon's lawyers.

MangoChutney As far as why the community is sure that only the Syndicate's Corva would try and steal a classless body with an ankh, it's because that's the only game where he actually died. In all the other games he's mostly just a background NPC. He doesn't really go on any missions. He's there just to help guide you and give you info. So if he's not putting himself in danger, there's no reason for him to try and pull off his ankh body-stealing thing on you.

In Syndicate's, one of the last raids in the game saw Corva getting killed. The idea is that, if your character could make it to that raid as a classless nobody, maybe Corva would interact with you differently. 8a8yaga I can answer this on the technical side. I'll try to explain why emulator servers are incredibly difficult to create. Short version is that bringing back Syndicate's Wake via an emulator server is structurally hostile to the way the game was built.

All the servers have been shuttered, which makes every step normally taken to create an emulator server, if not impossible, at least much more difficult than you're thinking. There are generally three ways to build an emulator server for an old MMO. The first is if a person gets their hands on the actual server software. A lot of the private servers that you read about for old MMOs get their start because of leaked server code. If you've got that, all you need to do is clean it up, recompile it, and then rehost it.

That would be the easiest way to get Syndicate's back up and running again. The second way is through client-side authority and packet reverse engineering. Basically, you sniff the connection and log every packet sent between the server and the client. Then you analyze all that info to figure out the packet structure. After that all you've got to do is build a server that deals with all the same protocols, as well as creating the server-side logic.

Thankfully, a lot of old MMO logic lived on the client, so that would be a little bit easier. It's still going to take a ridiculous amount of effort to do all that work. I'm talking about hundreds of thousands of man hours. The third way is a mixture of the two. You take partial leaks of the code, old packet logs, old dev docs, and years of trial and error. Eventually, you're able to build an emulator server. This is how things like early WoW emulators were created. Here's the problem though.

There are three things that Syndicate's did that makes emulator servers difficult to implement. The first was that Syndicate's was aggressively server-authoritative. That means that basically everything in the game happened on the server-side and not the client side. Packet sniffing gets you almost nothing useful here. You can see that something happens, but you don't really understand the how or why of it. The second is that critical logic of the Syndicate's server ran on proprietary middleware.

Even if you perfectly recreated the gameplay logic of the game, you'd still be missing a lot of what made the game function at scale. And the third, and biggest problem of all, is that Severance Systems had ZERO leaks of their code. It was locked down tight. When Horizons bought the IP and then shuttered all the servers, all that code remained locked down. Not only that, but Horizons will threaten to sue people into oblivion if they try to create emulator servers. I know what you're asking.

Couldn't you just recreate Syndicate's from scratch? In theory? Sure. In practice, you're not going to. You'd need to rebuild all the combat logic, recreate NPC behavior trees, approximate world events with no reference data, guess at drop rates, timers, triggers, and thresholds, and so so so so so much more. And if you did all that? Horizons would still shut you down because you're reproducing copyrighted behavior. StarryNight | The few that do make progress on Syndicates get shut down almost immediately | Yep.

And nobody is trying to build a fan-made server for Syndicates at all anymore. wink wink FarFieldVanishes I don't know anything about that, and wouldn't answer if I did. FopperyandWhim | I know what you're asking. Couldn't you just recreate Syndicate's from scratch? | I actually wasn't able to follow much of anything you said enough to be able to ask that question. But what I get from trying to read your post is that it would be very difficult to get Syndicate's back up and running. DeaderThanDed OOOO!

Big news guys. Maleviolent's new mod should be dropping today. I was testing it earlier and the short version is that it is insane. It soft-limits certain skills at the character creation screen. You remember that scene where Zeke tried to use a sword and somehow tripped himself with it? Yea, this mod is supposed to be like that. When you create your character, an RNG assigns you a handful of skills that you have no natural affinity for. If you try grinding one of those skills, you're likely to critically fail it.

You miss swings or fumble your reloads or whatever. You can grind up the skill, but it takes so much longer than normal. It's maddening in the best way possible. I always play ranged in Frontiers. It's basically my go-to at this point. So of course the RNG gods decided that shooting was my failure skill. I got myself a pistol and lined up a clean shot on a bandit. Pulled the trigger. Miss. Okay, the sway on my shooting is pretty bad, but I can work with it. The second shot was also a miss. So was the third.

By the eighth bullet, I hadn't hit a single thing and the bandit was on me, bashing my head in with a bat. I had to ditch the gun and started leaning into knives and traps. Fights I would've taken without thinking suddenly felt like a terrible idea. I scouted more. I ran more. And it was so much more fun. It's still a work in progress, and Maleviolent said they plan on tuning it a bit more in the coming days, but it already slots perfectly into Zeke-run setups. Just wanted to share.

Curious to see what people think once it's further along.

PRIVATE MESSAGES From: CrushDaddyXx To: MushroomCleric Subject: quick ping / big idea Hey Mushroom, got a minute? I'm going to cut straight to it: I'm the next primary for Zeke's fanfic. I've been cooking something up for a while now. Something big. But it's not a one-person pitch. If I talk to Z3ke about this, he's going to completely ignore the pitch because he thinks that I'm going to try to get him killed. OR, the arc I'm pitching is going to be too big for just one primary to handle.

I'm reaching out to the next three primaries in line to see who's willing to link up. Z3ke trusts both you and Story. You two were the first people who actually helped him shape the fic instead of just nitpicking his decisions. If you back this and we go in together, there's a real chance he actually listens instead of immediately defaulting to vetoing the idea. From: MushroomCleric To: CrushDaddyXx Subject: RE: quick ping / big idea You don't exactly bury the lede, do you?

Congrats on the primary role I guess, but you've always been pitching for him to get involved in way more fights. I'm kind of liking how the fic is going. It's a mix of fights and also realism where Z3ke is just a normal guy stuck in an abnormal situation. He's not going to want to delve head long into danger. So, what's your plan? From: CrushDaddyXx To: MushroomCleric Subject: RE: RE: quick ping / big idea Fair. Totally fair.

Rather than try to explain my plan badly in text, I'm just going to send you what I've got. I made slides. Don't judge me. [Attachment: UNDER-MIZ_OPERATION_RECLAIMER. pptx] Short version, I want Z3ke to head into the Under-MIZ. I want him to hunt down and take out the Reclaimer. And before you say it, no I'm not trying to get him killed. The whole plan is centered around asymmetric fighting and minimal heroics with maximum payoff. Open the file before you yell at me. From: MushroomCleric To: CrushDaddyXx Subject: …

you're kidding, right? I actually laughed when I saw the title slide. You can't be serious. The Reclaimer is basically a walking apocalypse. It's an industrial horror show. Zeke has spent, what, three arcs establishing how out of his depth he is? He barely survives bandits. He spirals for a few chapters after killing. There is no way that he agrees to this. From: CrushDaddyXx To: MushroomCleric Subject: keep reading I know. Just… keep going. You're still on slide 3. The plan doesn't start for another few slides.

From: MushroomCleric To: CrushDaddyXx Subject: … … okay, hold on. I'm at the part where you break down the Reclaimer's behavior loops and how you want him to fight the thing. I hate that I'm actually saying this, but this is actually… smart? You're not pitching a straight fight. And if Zeke fights it like this, it could work. I still think that Z3ke's first instinct is going to be to say no to this, but at least it doesn't feel like you're trying to get him killed for entertainment purposes.

From: CrushDaddyXx To: MushroomCleric Subject: THANK YOU. I know I have a reputation as a combat gremlin, and yea, I want action. I want blood. I want tension. I want something more than just internal monologues from his fic. But I'm not trying to break the story he's telling. This arc would force him to confront the Under-MIZ, and if we do it right then he comes out stronger for it. So, what do you think? If you go in with me, we can pitch this together.

I'm still working on the other people who would be primary after me. From: MushroomCleric To: CrushDaddyXx Subject: … yea, I'm in. I still think that Z3ke's going to resist this plan. But, at least you're not reckless. You've shown here that you have a good idea on how to make him stronger. If you pitch this as a justification for all the slow burn that we've had so far, he might accept it. I'll back you. I'll help frame the pitch so it's not like you're just telling him to go punch a Cthulu god in the face.

Send me the draft of your pitch and I'll help tune it. From: CrushDaddyXx To: MushroomCleric Subject: deal Oh man. If Zeke goes for this, then the arc is going to be legendary.