Stalwart Ebonheart

Small World After All

Yesterday I had a pretty interesting chain of events happen, that have left me all warm and fuzzy.  At some point yesterday I tweeted a general complaint about how steam seems to be incapable of flagging on a machine level that we have already installed the various pre-requisites like DirectX.  This tweet seemed to develop a life of it’s own as it got re-tweeted around a bit and favorited.  Most of the people were extremely familiar to me, but one of the folks retweeting was completely new.  In my current mode of trying to reach out more to help foster the community I followed Maevrim.

It turns out the two of us have been running in the same circles for years spanning two different games and two different servers.  For the bulk of her time playing World of Warcraft, it seems as though she was in the guild Gnomes Will Eat You on Argent Dawn… a guild House Stalwart folk are very familiar with.  During the old days our two guilds did quite a bit together, and these days my raid has the very amazing Frosti… that has a sort of dual citizenship with characters in both House Stalwart and Gnomes Will Eat You.  Turns out she also plays on Faeblight where the House Stalwart Rift branch is located.

To make things even more awesome, she is looking for a new guild home.  Of course my guildmasterly ninja instincts started kicking in and I have been trying to welcome her into the Stalwart fold.  Its true… we are kind of like a cult but I promise that our koolaid isn’t poisoned much.  Scan a few hours later, turns out she was on a podcast and I somehow got mentioned.  Now I seem to have missed the reference or it was said before or after the started recording.  But all of this makes me realize just how small and relatively tight knit a community we have.  Like I said the other day, it is all a matter of perspective.  We might think we are alone in the void, but then something happens to make us realize just how connected we are as a whole.

Stalwart Ebonheart

Since April 4th 2014 will be here before we know it, I figure it is time to start planning for the House Stalwart Ebonheart Pact branch in Elder Scrolls Online.  For some time I have known that I would be playing this game at release, and my hope is to successfully weave in time of both it and World of Warcraft.  The goal is to play a few nights a week, because really I am a sucker for anything Elder Scrolls…  and you would have to cause a real cataclysm to keep me away from it.  For a long time I have also known I would be aligning with the Ebonheart Pact, in part because my three favorite races are the Nord, Dunmer and Argonians.  After an impromptu poll of the folks who signed up on the brief Tamriel Foundry site we had… it seems like that is the case for most of the guild.

Since House Stalwart has always been a social guild… and more family than anything else… I thought I would open things up this time to my blogger family as well.  I know Maric and some of the Mercy Corps folks will be joining Stalwart in this endeavor, and my hope is to gather up as many good people as I can before the launch.  I am sure a good chunk of the current and former Stalwart members will be joining us as well.  Basically all sociable folks are welcome spending they are agreeable to the standard House Stalwart Three Tenets.   While I founded House Stalwart in World of Warcraft, the ethos that I helped foster has spanned so many games and will likely move into even more in the future.  My hope is that we will keep creating a connection that transcends the games we happen to be playing at the time.

If this type of environment sounds like a good fit for you, then please follow this link to our forums.  I created a brand new forum thread this morning, trying to gauge how many people we will have at launch.  If you have any issues setting up a forum account either drop me a line here, or ping me over twitter and I will see what I can do to assist you.  Also of note, we are primarily a Eastern Standard/Central Standard time zone guild, but have members with a pretty wide variety of playtimes.

Nightblade Finishing School

This weekend I also dipped my feet back into Rift spending a bit of time Saturday and Sunday working on my Nightblade.  I am not sure if I will ever make a third level 60, but I really do want to finish my rogue off who is currently sitting and 70% through 58.  While I enjoy the Storm Legion content on one level, on another it feels extremely grindy.  As such during the course of leveling Belghast to 60 I stalled out no less than four times.  Similarly Belgrave has stalled out quite a few in the process of getting this far along.  Maybe I am just spoiled by the brisk pace of leveling in games like World of Warcraft or even Final Fantasty XIV… but getting through Storm Legion feels like an absolute chore.  I do however really want to spend some time pushing through it.

This weekend I spent quite a bit of time doing Instant Adventures and they made the process feel a little less painful.  At some point I also want to spend some time in dungeons… but for whatever reason I seem to always get Stormbreaker Protocol… which for those not familiar with it is the Rift version of Oculus.  Essentially it is that one dungeon that makes almost the entire party disappear.  I feel like I really need to get adjusted to the Rift controls a bit more before stepping foot into a dungeon, though honestly I was killing things in Argent Domain last night as efficiently as I ever was.  More than anything with the impending release of 2.6, I want to dust off my Rift account and finally push the Nightblade across the finish line.