The Outrider of Ishgard

Here’s what I spent all night doing!!!!!!! A map of Coerthas and Dravania, specifically with an eye to reconciling the world maps and zone maps (and 1.0 with 2.0+) in a way that emphasizes information important to me as a roleplayer, like overland routes and rivers.

Was it worth it? … Probably not. I mean, I did want to draw my own map for Greening Coerthas purposes but I should have just drawn a messy blobmap instead of trying to do this.

Long long rambling commentary below cut:

BEHOLD: a 118-page compilation of (almost) every scrap of lore about Ishgard I could find – its social organization, history, religious beliefs, and culture.

Every piece of lore is sourced with a footnote in order to make it easy to look up – and to tell canon from my informed inferences and wild speculations. This makes the doc a little heavy and slow to load; my apologies! To look up a topic of interest, I recommend giving it a second to load, then using Ctrl+F to search.

like, it's established so early on you don't have to think about it, and I expect the writers also didn't think too hard about it when they were first putting together the worldbuilding. but we teleport through the Lifestream. we dip in and out of the afterlife every time we go anywhere long-distance. and this is such a normal part of everyday life that major settlements basically all have giant crystals in the middle that are meant to facilitate this kind of travel.

Can only handle people. You can teleport yourself. But you can't teleport things that aren't actually yours. So like... your purse or your backpack can come along, but not the crate or oranges you want to sell in the next town over. Gotta take that on foot or by chocobo or cart.

(This is why the 77 caravans still make bunches of money.)

There is a hypothetical limit to the number of teleports a person can safely handle. (Back in 1.0 this was the "anima" system.) I assume that no person ever actually teleported themselves to death, though, so that's why they took away the limits in 2.0. I think it's implied that most people get pretty tired after teleporting, though, and perhaps there are some who cannot do it at all.

If you teleport together as a group only one person has to pay the teleport fee. GROUP DISCOUNT!

Teleport fees are automatically deducted from your gil balance in the game, but it's assumed you toss some coins at the guard after you arrive at your destination and they just didn't bother animating that because it'd be silly.

In 1.0 all the teleport crystals got destroyed by Dalamud causing the aether to go haywire. Most of them got eaten by voidsent, but Camp Revenent's Toll in Mor Dhona exploded into the hot radioactive mess that it still is today, and the site had to be abandoned.

Lord Lolorito personally paid for Sharlayan scholars to come by and build new aetherytes to replace the ones that got eaten by Atomos voidsent. Your teleport fees are going to him.

Because the new Scions of the Seventh Dawn refused to pledge their fealty to Lolorito, he put a statue of himself in Vesper Bay instead of an aetheryte. Giant middle finger to Minfilia.

As the warrior of light has proven, there isn't any hypothetical reason why someone can't just attune to aetherytes in other dimensions and use them to dimension hop. Or go to the moon. Or the end of the universe. (Guessing Y'shtola wasn't in her "real" body on the First so it doesn't count for her. And there's no aetherytes left on the 13th.)

A master post of Thomas Romain’s art tutorials.

There’s not enough space to post all of them, SO here’s links to everything he has posted (on twitter) so far : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. 

1: interior design

2: detailed buildings

3: drawing streets

4: eye level

5: shadows

6: characters in layout

7: lens views

8: background shadows

9: eye level

10: street slopes

11: futuristic city from reference

12: animation layout stages

So far I've got the entirety of MSQ up to the start of the Shadowbringers patch quests, the Crystal Tower raids, the archer and bard quests, seasonal events from the past few months, and the first few snippets of optional dialogue (I'm trying to focus on catching up first, but I couldn't not include Emet-Selch's occasional optional lore drops).

I'm also still tinkering with little layout and feature things as I go — I just added sticky headers so you can tell where you are in the middle of the script. :D

Link below! ⬇

We are writers. Yes, we write of death and broken dreams and horrors beyond human comprehension, because all of those are parts of life.

Today, we’ll explore some commonly used terms and how they correlate across real and virtual photography! Check it out:

Please like and reblog this post if you are an active Final Fantasy XIV blog focusing on one (or more) of the following: roleplay, writing & worldbuilding.

It does not matter how active you are at all three, only that you participate in some of it and would like to follow more likeminded people.

The bigger this post gets, the more people can have a look through it and follow people they like the look of! You can also reblog this post to give a little blurb about yourself, which I'll reblog back here, or even make you're own separate post tagging @mooglemeet that I will reblog for extra traction!