While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

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Yui108 said:
So I have a bit of a problem. I was reading Dan Simmons wonderful
Olympos and I forgot to take it on the plane. I'm now out of town for two weeks and really don't want to wait that long to see how it ends. Can anyone give me a good summary of the second half of the book. please?
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Achilles and Hephaistos wake Zeus up. Zeus goes homicidal on Hera and her coterie, drops Achilles into Tartaros, and declares himself the One God. Hockenberry goes back to Olympos on a spying mission and happens to witness this, which was Zeus' whole plan for resurrecting him in the first place (and letting him QT, which he can actually do without the medallion): he wanted a historian to record his moment of supreme glory in the postliterate age. Hockenberry then witnesses Achilles bring the Titans in from Tartaros to invade Olympos and beat Zeus the hell down, and Hephaistos feeds him a heap of exposition to help out with that. Achilles then fights Zeus in single combat on Ithaka and rips his guts out. Hephaistos and Nyx start working on getting the gods on their side and winning the war against the Titans, while severing the connection between Olympos and Ilium!Earth.

Meanwhile, Harman and Prospero take the Eiffel Tower tram system from India to the Himalaya, where they reach a big freaking tomb-cum-library for an emperor a millennium or so dead (still in our future), along with the hibernating body of his posthuman girlfriend, Moira, who looks just like Savi. Harman wakes her up and she basically tells him how to get ALL THE FACTS from the library without sigling or reading them all, which he does. Then he goes to Spain to hike the Atlantic Breach back home to help out Ada and Daeman and the rest, who are besieged at Ardis Hall, because Prospero won't fax him over there and because Prospero has to deal with the calibani in the Mediterranean. He ends up making it up to a centuries-old Global Caliphate terrorist submarine full of what apparently are black hole bombs or something, gets radiation sickness, gets really freaking depressed about how much humanity sucks, and almost dies before Mahnmut and Orphu's mission finds him.

The moravecs are getting ready to Do Something about Setebos, who has basically taken over Paris Crater and turned it into a giant glacier cathedral of doom, when Circe contacts them from her hideaway on one of the orbital asteroids in the rings and demands that they deliver Odysseus (Ilium!Odysseus, not Ardis!Odysseus) to her, presumably for sexy fun times, or she'll destroy their ship. Which they do, whereupon Ardis!Odysseus goes to the asteroid in the Ardis Hall sonie, kills Ilium!Odysseus, and basically blackmails Circe into fixing a lot of the problems that are leading the universe to a total quantum breakdown. Then they leave Earth orbit for more sexy fun times. Hephaistos then cuts Ilium!Earth off from its connections to Olympos, and basically drops the city of Ilium, along with the portion of beach where the Achaian army was huddled in a last-ditch bastion, fighting the Trojans, onto the same spot on the old-styles' Earth. The moravecs beat the living piss out of the voynix and save Ada, Daeman, and the Ardis refugees. And finally, the threatened approach of "the Quiet", another deity-like power, scares Setebos into vacating Paris Crater for dimensions beyond.

And, uh, happy ending? More or less.
 
MjM said:
Derping in my Herp
Click to expand...

First of all I apologize to Thlayli and Iggy for interrupting their game when they had a cunning plan to win. It ruined the atmosphere of the game and suggests that we really need to do something about quits and rejoins etc. so they're more fair to the players already involved.

Playtesting results: Thlayli's modifier with AI Victoria was only +5 and she voted for herself, which coincides with this help post on these forums that suggests you need a +8 modifier to win*. Additionally, Victoria was a nominee in both playtests, even with no war. As a nominee, Victoria should always vote for herself (even with the modifier to Julius, which was +8). Thus, homeyg/MjM would have won the game regardless if a human player had joined as Victoria or not.

We can replay it with a full complement of human players for Babylon, Rome, and Japan if necessary but I don't think the results would change.

*Note that the requirement necessary for winning a diplomatic victory is very different from that necessary to propose resolutions, which is a much lower threshold
 
I live in Montreal ;) There's always the fear of the police jumping you... but not for drinking, only for wearing red squares.
 
[17:36] <+tf2rance> when is dd tomorrow
[17:36] <+tf2rance> I'll be there
[17:37] <+Luckymoose> 8 pm
[17:37] <+Luckymoose> I'll let kraz post
 
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