Nayadic control

Hey,
So I've just got to Pro in my second season of playing this game. Finally, a CCG whose economy allows it. Here's the Cultist list I used (in various forms) for most of the climb at rank 4 and above.
It's a fairly classic Cultist deck, though I modified it as I played. Initially I had a Cultist / Soldiers hybrid deck because those bronze soldiers are obviously so good, then I removed the soldiers (apart from Illusionist) and made a deck that ended with too much thinning (Fercart, Dead Man's Tongue, Magne + Tactics...) before settling on that brew.
The game plan is straightforward. You want to win round 3 by spamming cultists that grow bigger everytime you play another cultist, and killing/cloning enemy units into cultist duplicates. You use round 1 to set up the stage for it.
Round 1
Here you need to infuse as many units as possible with the cultist status before triggering the 1st chapter of the Eternal Eclipse scenario. Otherwise, you'd miss out on engine value. To do so, play Deacons and replay one with Teleport. Very importantly, Affan should never be in your starting hand, and infusing him in deck is a top priority. You'll see why.
Then play Eternal Eclipse. Ideally, turn 3 or later. Why? Because on that same turn, you use leader ability. You draw up to 3 cards and put as many back in the deck, so it's best to play it with at most 7 cards in hand - and remember, if you drew a bricked Mage Assassin, putting it back on top with leader ability will summon it, just like with Blightmaker. And now, Affan is automatically played from deck - played, not summoned. That's crucial because, if he's a cultist, he activates the vital chapter 1 of Eternal Eclipse on the very same turn you played that scenario. Meaning even if the opponent can reply with Heatwave or Yenvo, you get most of the scenario's value for the rest of the game.
You may play Ffion round 1 to protect Deacons and Eclipse, especially against Imprisonment or if Affan is bricked in hand or you failed to infuse him.
Afterwards, you can keep playing round 1. This is a deck that does reasonably well at round control, since Morvran + Affan + cultists from the scenario give good tempo. One possible way is a cultist-infused Operator "giving" an Initiate to the opponent, and Duchess' Informant to copy the Initiate (only case Informant is useful, mulligan her away otherwise, unless you've a really good target such as Reavers). This guarantees an Initiate gets into opponent's graveyard for you to copy with Illusionists and Experimental Remedy later.
You can of course save Operator for round 3 and it's great if you can copy the Initiate you gifted to your opponent, but it may backfire if the opponent starts infusing, killing and copying your own units early in round 3. Round 1 Operator simply guarantees there's a target for Illusionists and Remedy later.
Round 2
It's usually best to go to long round 3 since the deck has engines that take time to set up. You can, however, try bleeding with Blightmakers into Mage Assassins if you didn't play them round 1.
Round 3
Payoff time. If you still have Ffion, play him first to protect your cultists, then try getting as many Initiates on board as possible. Play them directly, spawn them with Illusionists, with Vigo... Then infuse low-power enemy units, let them take damage each time you play a cultist and enjoy getting multiple copies that grow stronger each time.
Be careful of row-clogging though: if opponent deploys in melee you should deploy in range row to leave room for copying enemy units.
Vincent can get rid of a defender blocking access to enemy bronze units, but also kill one large unit you've infused. It comically happened to my "final boss": they played an Overwhelming Hunger MO deck, and consumed Yghern with a bronze toad. I don't know why, maybe they were afraid I had a way to destroy Yghern's armor? But I had three Initiates on board, infused the 17-power toad three times and killed it with Vincent. 50 or so point-swing. Final boss conceded with 4 or 5 cards in hand.
Don't be too greedy with infusions though. Remember that infused enemies can get purified, so don't "invest" all your infusions in one unit unless you can destroy it quickly. As a loose rule, infuse a unit twice, then only infuse it a third time if it dies that same turn.
Don't target too large units. A small, guaranteed kill is preferable over an uncertain large one. For example, against ST small tokens make good targets.
Keep in mind...

• You can't infuse gold enemy units.
• Prophet has adrenaline 2. He bricks if you play him too late.
• Experimental Remedy removes the card you played from opponent's graveyard. So, play remedy after Illusionists (and Vigo, who may create an Illusionist). This got me a few times.
• This deck is quite dependent on getting access to the right cards, hence the consistency tools. Oneiromancy will usually pull Eclipse. Royal Decree plays Ffion, Deacon or Operator. Cursed Scroll can salvage a bricked Affan by putting him back in deck.
• Gold units, when infused by Master of Ceremonies to deal 3 damage to the weakest infused enemy, don't care what the infusion is. They just target the lowest one. For example, if you're up against ST and they've infused some 4-power Nayad with Nature while you infused a 5-power unit with Initiate's order, the damage will be dealt to the Nayad, not to the unit you infused yourself.
• Teleport gets rid of a lock. This is Diviner's primary task too, along with removing a defender.
• If you're new to the game, the point of Blightmaker is to get Mage Assassin on top of the deck. The result is thinning and good tempo.

Matchups
I don't have time for a detailed guide on each matchup. Just to summarize:

• This list does really well against go-wide decks, especially ST but Reavers too.
• It's strong against other engines in general, to the notable exception of NR Knights because they boost their units too much for them to die and get copied into cultists.
• The deck is quite strong against Reavers. It's easy to infuse a Reaver multiple time, kill it and get 2 or 3 copies that'll in turn proliferate into more Reavers. Remember to leave room on you melee row! Other, you can consider using Illusionists and Remedy to build your own Reaver army.
• NG Renfri Imprisonment has tons of locks, but you'll have tons of valid targets for a lock too, from Deacons to our innumerable Initiates. Overall, I didn't find this matchup particularly oppressive. At least, you'll find easy targets for your infusions.
• NG Knights however can shut you down completely when playing Calveit and only gold units afterwards. Remember, you can't infuse gold units. This happened to me once. Not even a regular Nilfgaardian Knight to infuse.
• SK Raids is a rough matchups. They just kill everything before you can set up anything. That, and their many units with Veil you can't infuse.
• SK that swaps deck with graveyard obviously shuts our Operator trick down.

Concluding remarks
That's it. I'm not pretending this is a highly competitive list, nor that it is perfectly optimized, but it did carry me to Pro in not that long a time, although I made a number of misplays that occasionally cost me games. Overall, I had much more fun with it (and a Tibor Masquerade, too) than with the meta NG lists - you guessed it, Renfri and Knights.
As a side note, that climb was actually fun and more diverse than the sub had let me think. Yes, NG is overrepresented, Renfri is too common in too many archetypes (I think she qualifies as a faction in herself, that contains units from all other factions but no special card), Ivar is a pain, and I've had streaks of facing the same deck 3 times in a row, though not necessarily NG. My personal pet peeve is SK Raids since it feels like a "play card, kill card" loop of non-fun. I don't remember facing Renfri and not having at least some fun. All in all, it was far less repetitive than my laddering experience on Hearthstone or Magic Arena. It may simply be seasonal variance, of course. Or maybe I just got lucky.
Thanks for reading! I hope you learned something and want to try the deck. I'm looking forward to your suggestions / feedback.

I started a homebrew campaign in a homebrew setting with homebrew races and monsters. Some of the content is gleaned from across the internet, some I make for myself. I'm not a very experienced DM, and this is the first campaign for all of my players except one. So let's set the stage.
I am the DM. This is the first time I've run an actual D&D campaign. Half-Elf Rogue (Rogue): Rogue is the first player that joined my campaign, and has often been the only player, several other players coming and going as Player 2 for about a year before we finally managed to acquire a third, and then fourth and now fifth player. They've stuck with me for all this time and I'm very glad of it. Half-Bast/Half-Slime Monk (Monk): Their character was built as a Tabaxi, but catfolk are called Basts in my setting, and there are some significant cultural differences but not much mechanically. They have slime arms, which grant them an extra 5 feet of reach. They joined shortly before the last Player 2 left. Nayad Monk (not actually present): Nayads are to Water Genasi what Basts are to Tabaxi. The last in the long line of Player 2's, they left the group shortly after we entered the building where this great victory occurs. We joked that their mom came to get them. Human Bard (Bard): Joined just in time to be a part of this event. Human Fighter (Fighter): Joined at the same time as the Bard. Party level: 3rd
The mission is to destroy the slave trade. It was the one mission that every single one of my players was entirely on board with. In order to get into the slavers' secret base, which had escape tunnels leading to other parts of the city, the party had raided a warehouse that was the exit for an escape tunnel. It was a massive conquest with dozens of enemies, the party was looting boxes in the warehouse to keep their health up, and a platoon of NPCs were there to back them up. Then they made their way through the tunnels, which were filled with their own wonders and sidetracks, including a Crab Rave Cave and a completely inept cult that was trying to sacrifice a Lawn Gnome. Coming out the other end of those adventures, the party made it to the slavers' secret base. This is where the slavers have been taking kidnapped children, who the party is bent on rescuing.
The secret base is only partly controlled by the slavers, however, with a number of rooms containing things like a game night where Skeletons, Mimics, and Giant Weasels are all playing board games. (The Mimics are the tables and chairs.) These were friendly folks who cared little for the plight of the party. In fact, all Skeletons are friendly in my setting, at least so far. There was also a key that I still don't remember what it was meant for, but I think the Rogue still has it. After finding the last of the slavers and ending them appropriately, the Rogue decided to douse an arrow in oil and set it on fire, shooting it into the ceiling because it was a very ugly ceiling. I don't exactly remember what happened after that, but the building was now on fire and they still hadn't found the children. They also set the NPC Cleric on fire. I've since given them some more fireproof NPCs. After putting out the Cleric and searching most of the rest of the building, they found the room with the children. Rescue complete... almost. They killed some giant spiders that were in their way, though the Cleric was paralyzed and no longer of any help. That's when I started putting some orange stuff on the map (I have no budget and use MS Paint). They immediately recognized that the building was going up in flames, and the route back the way they'd come was no longer an option, so they had to go out through the big loading bay on the far end of the building.
Something like a dozen small children in tow, the party entered the loading bay at the back. The front was blocked off by big double doors. And then those doors opened, revealing a very big robotic scorpion. The players were still level 3, the scorpion was CR 7. Monk ushered the kids back into the other room, but the fire was nearing, so they couldn't stay for long. Rogue tried every extra weapon they had collected (several) to no avail, all while leading the scorpion on a chase around the loading bay. Arrows shot at it would get stuck in its armor and snapped. They tried using a net, but that got caught in the armor as well and shredded apart. The only thing they had going for them was speed, which is exactly what I'd intended. The giant robot scorpion's speed is 20. For anyone wondering where I got a giant robot scorpion, the actual stat block has the name Nui-Jaga on it, which is a creature from Bionicle. I'm doing a project for building a whole Bionicle homebrew, and I wanted to test out one of the monsters. The reason things kept getting destroyed by the scorpion is that I made an ability for it called Trample, where it deals damage against any large or smaller creature or object whose space it moves through. Tough metal moving parts rip things apart. And it did a LOT of damage, so it didn't need to attack to utterly destroy the party. Again I remind you I chose this creature because of its low speed, so that the players could outrun it.
At this point, the front of the building is open, and while the Rogue has the scorpion distracted, the Monk starts carrying the children out. Children are slow, but the Monk is really fast, however she had to slow down because when she tried carrying some of the children to safety, several others followed her. This is where the Bard and the Fighter show up, their first session. Fighter has played D&D before, so knows what they're doing, and Bard actually reads all the material related to the character they built, and they get right into it. Despite the scorpion's high HP and AC, they all manage to mostly keep out of its reach and they successfully save all the children. (I was not going to allow the children to be harmed at all, but the illusion of peril is my tool.) Only the fighter got hit by the scorpion, punched in the back and sent flying. Finally, the scorpion's many HP were depleted, and a tired party watched as the slavers' secret base burned and collapsed on top of the monster that was much more dangerous than they should probably have been facing. But the encounter went as I'd hoped, and the resulting shares of XP sent all four of them to level 4.
I may have handed them a totally unbalanced encounter, I'm not sure, but I did my best to offer it to them in a way that let them rise to the challenge, and I have high hopes for their future.

(Cross post from /Halo. Also some Halo spoilers within.)
It's the weekend, all play and no work. I spent this particular weekend replaying some of the more memorable levels within the MCC and FoR. What was surprising, and almost instantly struck me was how much more coherent and well paced the narratives are in MCC circa entries, as well as FoR. Now, I realize that Joe Staten from Bungie wrote the majority of these titles and it certainly shows. He's a wonderful writer who (in my humble opinion) grasps the core concepts of writing both convincing and enthralling science fiction.
I then went back to Halo 5 and while the fandom is in some agreement as to the tragically jarring pacing within Halo 5, I feel as though there was something worth telling within Halo 5's narrative. Halo 4 set up a beautiful, and I still believe unappreciated, motif in John 117 realizing that he is not a piece of hardware but instead a human being. It was a narrative tie in to Cortana's legacy as a sentient AI and the question of "does that make her hardware, or a living being?" Very impactful, and something that has a lasting effect on players. Why Halo 5 did not delve into this in a more meaningful way beyond AIs basically going rouge is unfortunate a missed opportunity to pull against John 117's held beliefs. The other differences I noticed between Halo 5 and the other entries was that the narrative structure did not play off the world as much as the previous entries. In science fiction, world building and character building are often regarded as something interwoven, a symbiotic relationship if you will. Because hard science fiction must build believable worlds which extrapolate outwards with present day technologies and attitudes, it is imperative that character development interact with the worlds within the narrative as they would each other. Halo 3: ODST did this the best from my viewpoint, especially with Buck. Buck reacted to the environment in ways that evoked very palpable emotions. A great example was when the Assault Carrier began to glass New Mombasa and Buck recalls the same happening to Reach. Unfortunately, Halo 5 lacks this dynamic symbiosis within it's characters and environments.
From my understanding, the current writer of 343i Brian Reed was previously a comic book writer. It's very difficult (speaking from the experience of writing published science fiction) to transition from a vignette style narrative that quickly transitions from cell to cell (this may be where Halo 5's pacing issues stem from) to a longer form style that relies heavily on expert pacing. Now I'm in no way an endless treasure trove of science fiction writing knowledge, but I have been around the games industry and publishing industries enough to comfortably call myself an expert of such matters.
I love Halo and I would love to see it's narrative thrive and become a masterwork in the medium. I've given some ideas in previous posts but I never really got into the nitty gritty of what makes good hard science fiction, and what makes or breaks a narrative arc. It's a long shot 343i will be reading this in its entirety, but I do feel as though a bastion of context would be helpful for both 343i and the fans to look back on to perhaps cultivate the narratives of future titles. If anything, I hope this will inspire some of you all to pick up writing. It's a great skill to have, and more importantly it's a fantastic way to let loose your imagination. I'll be using two books here to help me out, and if you're interested I urge you to pick them up. They are fantastic resources if you would love to learn how to write science fiction. The first is by Flint Dille and John Zuur Platten and is titled Video Game Writing & Design. It's a fantastic read for how to write long form video game narratives. The next is an collection of well known writers (some I can personally vouch for!) giving some insight into writing within the genre and is titled Writer's Workshop: Of Science Fiction & Fantasy Great little books with some of the biggest names in sci fi lending their expertise. These books are also cited below my post, so feel free to check that out as well.
What's the difference between hard sci fi and is "meh" and hard sci fi that is a must read? It's actually not very well understood, because narratives are very subjective matter. I may like something that you may not and vice versa. However, there is a general consensus as to the road map for what makes extremely well reading sci fi. Three factors to remember when writing hard sci fi such as Halo (in long form narrative, not short hand as with comic books) are as followed.
World Building: Hard sci fi relies of believable worlds and the authors ability to craft these worlds in a way where the reader enjoys exploring them. Now, believable worlds can encompass a lot of things and raise a lot of questions. What makes a world believable? How does a world built itself when written? What about characters!? Simply put, world building is when an author crafts a universe (or in this case a game's setting) and creates a setting where the reader can suspend their disbelief and inhabit it subconsciously. When Forever War was being written by Joe Haldeman he had just gotten back from his tour in the Vietnam War and wanted to build a world which reflected how soldiers felt during the war. Forever War is a great sci fi novel, one of the best, in which future soldiers fight wars light years apart from each other. Battlefields are so far away that when they reach them, due to time dilation of space travel, years or decades have past. Haldeman built his world around the notion of what the Vietnam War felt like, a forever war. Just with his fictional soldiers, when they return to Earth everything has changed from the centuries they have been gone. The Vietnam War paralleled this, as soldiers who came back to the States were met with an unfamiliar landscape. Halo CE: and Halo 3: ODST had some great aspects of proper world crafting. Stepping on Halo for the first time in Halo CE made the player feel as though this was an undiscovered landscape, you wanted to explore and take it all in. The characters knew as much as the player did, so the environment and world felt unique and unexplored. Even your enemies knew hardly anything of Halo, which made the narrative that much more compelling. Halo: ODST did something similar. You as a lone ODST had to explore a familiar yet unfamiliar (New Mombasa has been laid to waste, creating an unfamiliar landscape within the familiar) setting in order to gain clues. It was very compelling, mostly because you the player knew very little of your setting, but as information trickled in you became apart of the city.
Halo 5 had beautiful settings but lacked an inspired or freshly written world. Settings changed, but as they did the player was immediately given all the information up front in intro cinematic, or even worse given no context to the world they were dropping into. I dare say, that Halo 5 read more like a scantly laid out comic book than it did a long form narrative world. Larry Niven (ironically an author who inspired Halo with his Ringworld series) was very careful to tickle information in on a mysterious setting, drawing the fell of discovery out until it was absolutely necessary to give the reader information. The games Bioshock and Spec Ops: THE LINE also did an incredible job of building their respective worlds up as a slow and gradual pace. Halo 5 in comparison was an exerciser in jarring fast paced transistor that were more akin to exposition dumps than actual narrative leading. As Niven said himself, "You should always lead readers into your worlds, never push them." Remember how Reach lead players into the conflict slowly? Imagine if Reach's first level was New Alexandria, would you have context as to why this was happening beyond "Reach is being attacked?" Halo 5, as you remember, began with the Osiris team flying (literally) down a glacial mountain to which twenty minutes later Jul M'Dama was brutally killed. What was the context for any of this beyond the poor introduction of Osiris? I still don't quite have an answer to that. If anything, the Argent Moon mission should have been Halo 5's level opener which unto itself was not very well developed as a singular constructed world. Which leads me to a great quote from the father of cyberpunk William Gibson. "If readers come out of your stories with little context as to what you were attempting to craft, then your next work should be a guide to shelf organization." Organized worlds, with context that is smartly constructed to lead readers/players through the narrative is what world building is all about and is critical to sci fi.
Character Development:: Ray Bradbury, who wrote The Martian Chronicles once said that ""If your characters can play off their environments, sci fi pretty much writes itself." While I'm sure this was more a symbolic quote than a factual one, it makes sense in the larger context of how to write characters in science fiction. What made Star Wars so compelling was not necessarily the setting, but the characters. themselves and their interplay on the worlds George Lucas constructed. Lucas followed the typical Joseph Campbell's Heroes Journey and used the motif so effectively that Star Wars became a cultural phenomenon. Funny, because Joe Staten of Bungie used this same motif and method when writing Halo CE, Halo 2 and Halo 3. Another fun fact is that Halo ODST was just a retelling of Dante's Inferno in a sci fi setting. Don't believe me? Here ya go. The characters in these Halo games played so well off their environments, whether it be a city, a ship or a ringworld that we wanted to follow then through novels, comics, anime, film and other lore. We grew attached to them not only because they were well written characters, but because they were apart of this amazing universe we fell in love with.
Halo 5's characters aside from John 117 and Cortana felt stagnant and uninspired. Locke was given no background unless you watch Nightfall and the rest of Osiris was left bare unless, again, you had known to brush up on extended lore materials. Even Blue Team suffered an inexcusable lack of context and development. One minute their on Argent Moon, and the next they are on Genesis. We never really see them interacting with their setting beyond getting to point B from point A. In addition, Osiris was criminally underdeveloped during the narrative. Locke went from "Chief BAD!" to "We can help, Chief" in the time it takes my 3000gt VR4 to cross an intersection. Which is to say, none at all. Buck should have been an anchor for Osiris, a character who knew the brutality of war and ideally should have been questioning Locke and their mission. Instead he is relegated to comic relief and quick one line sentences of doubt such as "You know, they are going to hate us." I can assure you Buck, I do not hate you. I just hate your character development.
David Brin, author of Startide Rising says this on character development. "You have to write characters who you actually would love to get a cup of coffee or chum around with. Alternatively, ones you want to punch in the face. If a character leaves you with the sense of, well, I have no clue who he was or what his purpose was there! Then it's time to go back to the typewriter." Remember Buck circa ODST? You know what, I wanted to get THREE cups of coffee with that guy! He was charming, and was a character I would follow into the roughest battles. Tartarus circa Halo 2? I wanted to punch him in the face, and then punch him a second time! In Halo 5, I could really care less about the Warden because he had little to no context, I was the worst thing you could be in a narrative. Indifferent. What made Buck so compelling in ODST was absent in Halo 5, I just didn't care one way or the other about his character. The only character I was really attached to was Chief and only because of the phenomenal writing in Halo 4 which provided context to his dilemma in Halo 5.
Moral of the story is this. Character should be motivated not by quick solutions, but instead context and slow character development. Give your characters time to breath and time to let down their guard. Have them become apart of the world, instead of relegating them to cheap one line follow through.
(Note that I thought Cortana was well done in Halo 5. And I will not go into Locke's character development because, there just wasn't any to speak of.)
Believe-Ability: Halo is a great space opera, because it is grounded in real science (for the most part) and I have no trouble holding my sense of disbelief because while traveling faster than light isn't possible, opening up corridors of slipspace through gravity wells sure as hell is! But I am quickly jarred back into reality when Jul M'Dama is stabbed once, then keels over. Yes, because that nano weave crystalline fiber armor that the Covenant wear can shrug off any damage, but one knife, is just too much.
Do you know why Star Trek was such a successful show? Because it was grounded in reality, it was believable and most importantly the technology within the series was eventually made into reality. Yep, flat screen TVs (Viewscreen), cell phones (Communicator) and geo tagging (Tricorder) all became part of our everyday lives. A series is prolific, when it can become reality. Halo did this for so long, so very well. It was the first game to popularize power armor, something the United States military and Japan are actively developing now. It theorized railguns and guass rifles, to which now the United States Navy has a working prototype railgun.
Why is it that so much of Halo 5 is just so, unbelievable? While the weapons are grounded and the science still remains very tangible, the simple interactions with characters just doesn't make sense. The battle with Jul, the one shot blow to Cortana in the form of a Monitor, Locke being able to go toe to toe with Chief (Spartan 2's even without upgraded Gen 4 armor were capable of devastating any Spartan 4) and the most egregious example of Cortana being able to control Forerunner Guardians within the Domain which was stated in the novels to be a means of information control, not applicable means of control. IE, you can control the flow of time and information within the Domain but not actively use it to control constructs. Greg Bear, the authors of said novels has said in relation to his book Hull Zero Three If you make something feel real and tangible, people are going to want to delve in further and further until they begin to understand how these things function in the real world. With Halo 5, besides the weapons, ships and gear, I didn't want to know how Locke was able to so easily kill Jul, or how Cortana can control the domain from within. I just, wanted it to make sense in the grander context of the narrative. But hey, at least the musical score throughout was great.
And again, if any of this is explained in expanded lore that is a horrible, just HORRIBLE way to introduce certain aspects into your core and main narrative. That's akin to me giving you a math exam without the questions, only the answers. While that sounds nice, in the narrative sense it's just nonsensical. Folks should not have to go on an Easter egg hunt to enjoy the main meat of the core narrative. Extended lore should be a nice little treat, not a necessary primer to the final exam.
Do as Aldous Huxley said in context of his novel The island "Give them, all of it. Give them simplicity, accomplishment and all they wish for in one location. A utopia on the grandest scale." Halo is a narrative on the grandest of scales. Make me believe that, again.
Hope this was worth your time, and I do hope you enjoyed the read. Below are the citations for the books I used, do check them out! Halo Nation, you guys rock. Synth out.
Knost, Michael, Neil Gaiman, Lou Anders, Lucy A. Snyder, James E. Gunn, George Zebrowski, Jay Lake, Nayad A. Monroe, Orson Scott. Card, Pamela Sargent, G. Cameron Fuller, Nancy Kress, Harry Turtledove, Jude-Marie Green, Joe W. Haldeman, Nisi Shawl, Alan Dean Foster, Alethea Kontis, Elizabeth Bear, Jackie Gamber, Michael Knost, and Max Miller. Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
Dille, Flint, and John Zuur. Platten. The Ultimate Guide to Video Game: Writing and Design. New York: Eagle Pub., 2007. Print.

It's the weekend, all play and no work. I spent this particular weekend replaying some of the more memorable levels within the MCC and FoR. What was surprising, and almost instantly struck me was how much more coherent and well paced the narratives are in MCC circa entries, as well as FoR. Now, I realize that Joe Staten from Bungie wrote the majority of these titles and it certainly shows. He's a wonderful writer who (in my humble opinion) grasps the core concepts of writing both convincing and enthralling science fiction.
I then went back to Halo 5 and while the fandom is in some agreement as to the tragically jarring pacing within Halo 5, I feel as though there was something worth telling within Halo 5's narrative. Halo 4 set up a beautiful, and I still believe unappreciated, motif in John 117 realizing that he is not a piece of hardware but instead a human being. It was a narrative tie in to Cortana's legacy as a sentient AI and the question of "does that make her hardware, or a living being?" Very impact, and something that has a lasting effect on players. Why Halo 5 did not delve into this in a more meaningful way beyond AIs basically going rouge is unfortunate a missed opportunity to pull against John 117's held beliefs. The other differences I noticed between Halo 5 and the other entries was that the narrative structure did not play off the world as much as the previous entries. In science fiction, world building and character building are often regarded as something interwoven, a symbiotic relationship if you will. Because hard science fiction must build believable worlds which extrapolate outwards with present day technologies and attitudes, it is imperative that character development interact with the worlds within the narrative as they would each other. Halo 3: ODST did this the best from my viewpoint, especially with Buck. Buck reacted to the environment in ways that evoked very palpable emotions. A great example was when the Assault Carrier began to glass New Mombasa and Buck recalls the same happening to Reach. Unfortunately, Halo 5 lacks this dynamic symbiosis within it's characters and environments.
From my understanding, the current writer of 343i Brian Reed was previously a comic book writer. It's very difficult (speaking from the experience of writing published science fiction) to transition from a vignette style narrative that quickly transitions from cell to cell (this may be where Halo 5's pacing issues stem from) to a longer form style that relies heavily on expert pacing. Now I'm in no way an endless treasure trove of science fiction writing knowledge, but I have been around the games industry and publishing industries enough to comfortably call myself an expert of such matters.
I love Halo and I would love to see it's narrative thrive and become a masterwork in the medium. I've given some ideas in previous posts but I never really got into the nitty gritty of what makes good hard science fiction, and what makes or breaks a narrative arc. It's a long shot 343i will be reading this in its entirety, but I do feel as though a bastion of context would be helpful for both 343i and the fans to look back on to perhaps cultivate the narratives of future titles. If anything, I hope this will inspire some of you all to pick up writing. It's a great skill to have, and more importantly it's a fantastic way to let loose your imagination. I'll be using two books here to help me out, and if you're interested I urge you to pick them up. They are fantastic resources if you would love to learn how to write science fiction. The first is by Flint Dille and John Zuur Platten and is titled Video Game Writing & Design. It's a fantastic read for how to write long form video game narratives. The next is an collection of well known writers (some I can personally vouch for!) giving some insight into writing within the genre and is titled Writer's Workshop: Of Science Fiction & Fantasy Great little books with some of the biggest names in sci fi lending their expertise. These books are also cited below my post, so feel free to check that out as well.
What's the difference between hard sci fi and is "meh" and hard sci fi that is a must read? It's actually not very well understood, because narratives are very subjective matter. I may like something that you may not and vice versa. However, there is a general consensus as to the road map for what makes extremely well reading sci fi. Three factors to remember when writing hard sci fi such as Halo (in long form narrative, not short hand as with comic books) are as followed.
World Building: Hard sci fi relies of believable worlds and the authors ability to craft these worlds in a way where the reader enjoys exploring them. Now, believable worlds can encompass a lot of things and raise a lot of questions. What makes a world believable? How does a world built itself when written? What about characters!? Simply put, world building is when an author crafts a universe (or in this case a game's setting) and creates a setting where the reader can suspend their disbelief and inhabit it subconsciously. When Forever War was being written by Joe Haldeman he had just gotten back from his tour in the Vietnam War and wanted to build a world which reflected how soldiers felt during the war. Forever War is a great sci fi novel, one of the best, in which future soldiers fight wars light years apart from each other. Battlefields are so far away that when they reach them, due to time dilation of space travel, years or decades have past. Haldeman built his world around the notion of what the Vietnam War felt like, a forever war. Just with his fictional soldiers, when they return to Earth everything has changed from the centuries they have been gone. The Vietnam War paralleled this, as soldiers who came back to the States were met with an unfamiliar landscape. Halo CE: and Halo 3: ODST had some great aspects of proper world crafting. Stepping on Halo for the first time in Halo CE made the player feel as though this was an undiscovered landscape, you wanted to explore and take it all in. The characters knew as much as the player did, so the environment and world felt unique and unexplored. Even your enemies knew hardly anything of Halo, which made the narrative that much more compelling. Halo: ODST did something similar. You as a lone ODST had to explore a familiar yet unfamiliar (New Mombasa has been laid to waste, creating an unfamiliar landscape within the familiar) setting in order to gain clues. It was very compelling, mostly because you the player knew very little of your setting, but as information trickled in you became apart of the city.
Halo 5 had beautiful settings but lacked an inspired or freshly written world. Settings changed, but as they did the player was immediately given all the information up front in intro cinematic, or even worse given no context to the world they were dropping into. I dare say, that Halo 5 read more like a scantly laid out comic book than it did a long form narrative world. Larry Niven (ironically an author who inspired Halo with his Ringworld series) was very careful to tickle information in on a mysterious setting, drawing the fell of discovery out until it was absolutely necessary to give the reader information. The games Bioshock and Spec Ops: THE LINE also did an incredible job of building their respective worlds up as a slow and gradual pace. Halo 5 in comparison was an exerciser in jarring fast paced transistor that were more akin to exposition dumps than actual narrative leading. As Niven said himself, "You should always lead readers into your worlds, never push them." Remember how Reach lead players into the conflict slowly? Imagine if Reach's first level was New Alexandria, would you have context as to why this was happening beyond "Reach is being attacked?" Halo 5, as you remember, began with the Osiris team flying (literally) down a glacial mountain to which twenty minutes later Jul M'Dama was brutally killed. What was the context for any of this beyond the poor introduction of Osiris? I still don't quite have an answer to that. If anything, the Argent Moon mission should have been Halo 5's level opener which unto itself was not very well developed as a singular constructed world. Which leads me to a great quote from the father of cyberpunk William Gibson. "If readers come out of your stories with little context as to what you were attempting to craft, then your next work should be a guide to shelf organization." Organized worlds, with context that is smartly constructed to lead readers/players through the narrative is what world building is all about and is critical to sci fi.
Character Development:: Ray Bradbury, who wrote The Martian Chronicles once said that ""If your characters can play off their environments, sci fi pretty much writes itself." While I'm sure this was more a symbolic quote than a factual one, it makes sense in the larger context of how to write characters in science fiction. What made Star Wars so compelling was not necessarily the setting, but the characters. themselves and their interplay on the worlds George Lucas constructed. Lucas followed the typical Joseph Campbell's Heroes Journey and used the motif so effectively that Star Wars became a cultural phenomenon. Funny, because Joe Staten of Bungie used this same motif and method when writing Halo CE, Halo 2 and Halo 3. Another fun fact is that Halo ODST was just a retelling of Dante's Inferno in a sci fi setting. Don't believe me? Here ya go. The characters in these Halo games played so well off their environments, whether it be a city, a ship or a ringworld that we wanted to follow then through novels, comics, anime, film and other lore. We grew attached to them not only because they were well written characters, but because they were apart of this amazing universe we fell in love with.
Halo 5's characters aside from John 117 and Cortana felt stagnant and uninspired. Locke was given no background unless you watch Nightfall and the rest of Osiris was left bare unless, again, you had known to brush up on extended lore materials. Even Blue Team suffered an inexcusable lack of context and development. One minute their on Argent Moon, and the next they are on Genesis. We never really see them interacting with their setting beyond getting to point B from point A. In addition, Osiris was criminally underdeveloped during the narrative. Locke went from "Chief BAD!" to "We can help, Chief" in the time it takes my 3000gt VR4 to cross an intersection. Which is to say, none at all. Buck should have been an anchor for Osiris, a character who knew the brutality of war and ideally should have been questioning Locke and their mission. Instead he is relegated to comic relief and quick one line sentences of doubt such as "You know, they are going to hate us." I can assure you Buck, I do not hate you. I just hate your character development.
David Brin, author of Startide Rising says this on character development. "You have to write characters who you actually would love to get a cup of coffee or chum around with. Alternatively, ones you want to punch in the face. If a character leaves you with the sense of, well, I have no clue who he was or what his purpose was there! Then it's time to go back to the typewriter." Remember Buck circa ODST? You know what, I wanted to get THREE cups of coffee with that guy! He was charming, and was a character I would follow into the roughest battles. Tartarus circa Halo 2? I wanted to punch him in the face, and then punch him a second time! In Halo 5, I could really care less about the Warden because he had little to no context, I was the worst thing you could be in a narrative. Indifferent. What made Buck so compelling in ODST was absent in Halo 5, I just didn't care one way or the other about his character. The only character I was really attached to was Chief and only because of the phenomenal writing in Halo 4 which provided context to his dilemma in Halo 5.
Moral of the story is this. Character should be motivated not by quick solutions, but instead context and slow character development. Give your characters time to breath and time to let down their guard. Have them become apart of the world, instead of relegating them to cheap one line follow through.
(Note that I thought Cortana was well done in Halo 5. And I will not go into Locke's character development because, there just wasn't any to speak of.)
Believe-Ability: Halo is a great space opera, because it is grounded in real science (for the most part) and I have no trouble holding my sense of disbelief because while traveling faster than light isn't possible, opening up corridors of slip space through gravity wells sure as hell is! But I am quickly jarred back into reality when Jul M'Dama is stabbed once, then keels over. Yes, because that nano weave crystalline fiber armor that the Covenant wear can shrug off any damage, but one knife, is just too much.
Do you know why Star Trek was such a successful show? Because it was grounded in reality, it was believable and most importantly the technology within the series was eventually made into reality. Yep, flat screen TVs (Viewscreen), cell phones (Communicator) and geo tagging (Tricorder) all became part of our everyday lives. A series is prolific, when it can become reality. Halo did this for so long, so very well. It was the first game to popularize power armor, something the United States military and Japan are actively developing now. It theorized railguns and guass rifles, to which now the United States Navy has a working prototype railgun.
Why is it that so much of Halo 5 is just so, unbelievable? While the weapons are grounded and the science still remains very tangible, the simple interactions with characters just doesn't make sense. The battle with Jul, the one shot blow to Cortana in the form of a Monitor, Locke being able to go tow to toe with Chief (Spartan 2's even without upgraded Gen 4 armor were capable of devastating any Spartan 4) and the most egregious example of Cortana being able to control Forerunner Guardians within the Domain which was stated in the novels to be a means of information control, not applicable means of control. IE, you can control the flow of time and information within the Domain but not actively use it to control constructs. Greg Bear, the authors of said novels has said in relation to his book Hull Zero Three If you make something feel real and tangible, people are going to want to delve in further and further until they begin to understand how these things function in the real world. With Halo 5, besides the weapons, ships and gear, I didn't want to know how Locke was able to so easily kill Jul, or how Cortana can control the domain from within. I just, wanted it to make sense in the grander context of the narrative. But hey, at least the musical score throughout was great.
And again, if any of this is explained in expanded lore that is a horrible, just HORRIBLE way to introduce certain aspects into your core and main narrative. That's akin to me giving you a math exam without the questions, only the answers. While that sounds nice, in the narrative sense it's just nonsensical. Folks should not have to go on an Easter egg hunt to enjoy the main meat of the core narrative. Extended lore should be a nice little treat, not a necessary primer to the final exam.
Do as Aldous Huxley said in context of his novel The island "Give them, all of it. Give them simplicity, accomplishment and all they wish for in one location. A utopia on the grandest scale." Halo is a narrative on the grandest of scales. Make me believe that, again.
Hope this was worth your time, and I do hope you enjoyed the read. Below are the citations for the books I used, do check them out! Halo Nation, you guys rock. Synth out.
Knost, Michael, Neil Gaiman, Lou Anders, Lucy A. Snyder, James E. Gunn, George Zebrowski, Jay Lake, Nayad A. Monroe, Orson Scott. Card, Pamela Sargent, G. Cameron Fuller, Nancy Kress, Harry Turtledove, Jude-Marie Green, Joe W. Haldeman, Nisi Shawl, Alan Dean Foster, Alethea Kontis, Elizabeth Bear, Jackie Gamber, Michael Knost, and Max Miller. Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
Dille, Flint, and John Zuur. Platten. The Ultimate Guide to Video Game: Writing and Design. New York: Eagle Pub., 2007. Print.