Fair as Morning Light

This blog will no longer be updated.  Please follow @winterdeepelegy for blog posts about Ciel Sauveterre.

[winterdeepelegy]

OOC: Character Page Consolidation

Hi everyone, just wanted to drop a line and let you all know that I will be, within the next week or so, working to consolidate all of my character pages down to one for the sake of easier management.  It just makes more sense to do it this way, and should help me provide more content for each character rather than treating any of them as an out of sight, out of mind sort of thing (I’m so sorry, Ransetsu). Part of this decision also comes at the start of this year’s FFXIVWrite prompts since, historically, all the writing I’ve done for all of my characters has been posted here, first, to winterdeepelegy before reblogging it to the respective character page that the written piece was about. This has also been the blog I post general XIV content to first, so it has gotten more traffic than any of the others. So with that in mind, I will be posting a list of tags on here related to each character and his or her content which you may feel free to block at your preference if you would prefer not to see content pertaining to any specific one.  Some tags may be used across all characters, such as #IC Happenings, FFXIV Glamour, FFXIV Fashion, Elezen, FFXIV Housing, #FC Stuff, #FFXIVWrite2019 or respective year. So if you’d like to keep up on any of these characters going into September and beyond, please follow @winterdeepelegy if you haven’t already.

Ciel Sauveterre, currently @fairasmorninglight commonly uses the following tags: #Ciel Sauveterre, #Wildwood, #Ciel Aesthetic, #Astral Agents

Ransetsu Ashikaga, currently @roninnokomori commonly uses the following tags: #Ransetsu Ashikaga, Ransetsu Aesthetic

Glace Silencieuse, currently @winterdeepelegy will remain the same. Commonly uses the following tags: #Glace Silencieuse, #just glace things, #Glace Aesthetic, #Colossus Project, #OS&R, #Garleans, #Garlemald, #Imperial Shinanigans, #Survivalist 0178FB, #tw: blood, #tw: gore

Posts will also start to include Boria Litvasch, my recently made Hrothgar.  Expected tags: #Boria Litvasch, #Colossus Project, #Panzer 0264AR, #Garleans, #Garlemald, #Hrothgar, #The Lost

[winterdeepelegy]

Changes to accommodate the above are more or less done for now.  The front page for @winterdeepelegy has been updated with a new background to reflect the characters being represented, and the header has been updated to include their names.  I may or may not update the actual layout at some point, but to be honest, I kind of like the bare bones look it currently has. Going forward, any content for the above characters will be exclusively posted to this blog.  While Ciel and Ran’s side blogs will remain for now, they will not see further updates.  Older content from them will occasionally be reblogged to winterdeepelegy for the sake of posterity.

[winterdeepelegy]

OOC: Character Page Consolidation

Hi everyone, just wanted to drop a line and let you all know that I will be, within the next week or so, working to consolidate all of my character pages down to one for the sake of easier management.  It just makes more sense to do it this way, and should help me provide more content for each character rather than treating any of them as an out of sight, out of mind sort of thing (I’m so sorry, Ransetsu). Part of this decision also comes at the start of this year’s FFXIVWrite prompts since, historically, all the writing I’ve done for all of my characters has been posted here, first, to winterdeepelegy before reblogging it to the respective character page that the written piece was about. This has also been the blog I post general XIV content to first, so it has gotten more traffic than any of the others. So with that in mind, I will be posting a list of tags on here related to each character and his or her content which you may feel free to block at your preference if you would prefer not to see content pertaining to any specific one.  Some tags may be used across all characters, such as #IC Happenings, FFXIV Glamour, FFXIV Fashion, Elezen, FFXIV Housing, #FC Stuff, #FFXIVWrite2019 or respective year. So if you’d like to keep up on any of these characters going into September and beyond, please follow @winterdeepelegy if you haven’t already.

Ciel Sauveterre, currently @fairasmorninglight commonly uses the following tags: #Ciel Sauveterre, #Wildwood, #Ciel Aesthetic, #Astral Agents

Ransetsu Ashikaga, currently @roninnokomori commonly uses the following tags: #Ransetsu Ashikaga, Ransetsu Aesthetic

Glace Silencieuse, currently @winterdeepelegy will remain the same. Commonly uses the following tags: #Glace Silencieuse, #just glace things, #Glace Aesthetic, #Colossus Project, #OS&R, #Garleans, #Garlemald, #Imperial Shinanigans, #Survivalist 0178FB, #tw: blood, #tw: gore

Posts will also start to include Boria Litvasch, my recently made Hrothgar.  Expected tags: #Boria Litvasch, #Colossus Project, #Panzer 0264AR, #Garleans, #Garlemald, #Hrothgar, #The Lost

[voidfirenate]

Father needs help

Ill be short and sweet, -INHALES- My Father has suffered in a motorcyle accident and needs some help.

Click here to support Father Recovery Help organized by Brittany Shanks

This is my family! On the far right in blue is me and the man at my side is my dork of a dad, Roy, whom needs help. As of this morning, he'l

Hes pretty busted up and already has some pre-exsisting conditions that makes this hard. My family is struggling as is so losing my fathers abilty to work is a tough blow. Any help is appreciated even if it be sharing on your tumblr or facebook or anywhere. Thanks bunches QQ

[fairasmorninglight]

[kulvefaggoth]

Yo if you’re a FFXIV blog or just post a lot about FFXIV give this post a like or a reblog i’m trying to have it take over my tumblr too

[nhara-tia]

Shattering the Shield

Trouble follows the Astral Advent and its members around like a bad gil coin.

The white crystal from the beach party had started causing trouble once more. Left under the care of the Arcanist’s Guild, the mages were performing some minor aetherial tests upon it, when one in particular attempted to cast a Protect spell upon it to shield it for storage. The power of the spell was magnified beyond anything that had previously been seen and was considered unbreakable. Thus, were the Agents called in to assist with breaking the barrier down.

It seemed a fair number of people were interested in assisting, almost twenty people in total, and N’hara had a feeling a few of them were there to try and smash the damned thing to bits, but nobody could do anything unless the shield was broken. The arcanist responsible for casting the spell, a man named Hartsald, escorted the group to a secured location near Summerford Farms. The barrier itself was roughly the size of a chocobo and shaped as a tesseract, something N’hara was clearly not anticipating.

The first attempt to damage the shield was met with a violent physical repelling of Zaius’s punch. The second attempt was a vortex of air, which the barrier responded by attuning itself to ice to better resist the element. It was proposed that assaulting the barrier with an element to which the current shield was weak to would allow them to break it. With wind used, thanks to Dylan, fire was next. Aulen, Martin, and Edari Garani provided the fire, which retaliated with wind.

N’hara, Sejad Moon, and a strange mage supplied the ice, which did not retaliate, but opened itself up to physical attacks while it quickly attuned to earth. Cerina, Aulen, Balthius, Ciel, and Lian’dr Garani joined N’hara in bombarding the barrier with physical attacks.

The pulse of aether that was released by the shattering Protect spell caused the barriers that the rest of the group had used for defense against them. Reks, Dylan, and Suwan were trapped in barriers of water, which slowly began to fill and threaten to drown them. Sejad was encased in a shield of unaspected aether, and Sergei was locked in his own Heart of Stone, along with another barrier that encased the rest of the group, save Cerina, Balthius, and N’hara, who had been physically close to the crystal at the time.

Weapons of all types were brought to bear against the barriers, shattering them one at a time to free their allies from their entrapment.

Once the shield surrounding Sergei had fallen, the highlander retrieved the crystal, using his skill at withholding the use of aether to maintain a measure of control over the artifact. With the knowledge that the crystal would be strongly protected by such a barrier, the guild decided to stash it in a back room somewhere and leave it to gather dust, unable to affect the outside world.

The arrangement seemed acceptable for the moment, and with the crystal in hand, Sergei led the group back to Limsa Lominsa for proper storage this time around.

As the group walked back, N’hara’s attention couldn’t help but be pulled back towards the strange mage in a black cloak that had assisted them, assisted him with the ice attack. He knew a good number of people who worked for the Astral Agents and the number of people who were aware of the crystal, aware of the barrier, and were a miqo’te with purple fur was a dangerously small list…

Featuring the @astraladvent

[whitherwanderer]

to the people who complain about performance RP;

Forgive the mild rant, but I was a bit baffled by various complaints about performances, so I figured I’d shed some light on the ones I’ve heard lately.

“I can’t take it seriously when it’s electric guitar and synth in a high-fantasy world.”

Understandable.

But also, consider this. We’re looking for something that gets people on their feet, gets them interested in listening. Unfortunately, by today’s musical standards, a riveting baroque ballad on a lute doesn’t quite slap like it used to back in the 1600′s. Don’t get me wrong. They’re still beautiful pieces, but they don’t always convey the intended message to a crowd with modern conventional thinking.

Not only that, but there’s only so many studio-recorded covers of modern songs played on ancient instruments that exist on YouTube, believe me. Once upon a time, I thought I was going to exclusively play oud and lute pieces. I quickly realized how unrealistic that was.

Besides, most of us actually try pretty hard to make our instruments make sense in the XIV universe with things like magical amplification and sound distortion. Take a breath, put down the lore book and suspend your disbelief for three minutes at a time to simply listen. This is supposed to be fun.

Also, here’s a polite reminder that Allag exists.

“[Performer’s Name]’s songs are all the same.” Alternatively, “Every performance I see feels the same.”

First of all, listen to yourself say that again and tell me that’s not incredibly callous to say about someone’s hard work. We put hours into agonizingly re-writing these songs to make them XIV-relevant, macro-ing them, and practicing them until our timing is flawless. Remember that, please.

Second, yes. This, in the real-world music industry, is called a “genre” and it’s generally where all songs of a similar style fit into. But sarcasm aside, performers often operate in the genres that they themselves enjoy. We apologize for not having the same taste as you in advance, and hope that instead of complaining, you’ll find something you like in the songs that we bring to you. Or you can just kindly mute until the next song comes on.

And because it takes us so long to prepare these songs and we’re not professional songwriters, nor paid to do this: Yes, you’re going to see some of the same songs over again while we work on new material. That’s probably because we, the performers, REALLY like them and are proud of our work enough to want to show it to everyone we possibly can. I’m not going to apologize for that. Not even sarcastically.

If every performance feels the same to you, perhaps you’re not looking very closely into the song and what it means to the performer. All of us performers hand-pick those songs to say something to the listener, or simply to bring you a good show.

If, after all of this, you’re still unhappy, maybe performance events are not for you.

Tick off /yell chat and stick to your RP, or simply RP elsewhere. We won’t mind. We’re here to tell a story. We’re here for the people that want to watch, mingle, and/or cheer us on.

But do us all a favor and keep the complaints to yourself.

[idanwyn-et-al]

As someone who is both a musician IRL and enjoys other people’s creative IC performances very much, I support all of this. These performers aren’t just copy-pasting lyrics; there’s a ton of innovation, dynamism, and visuals that bring their FFXIV song covers to life. If you’re going to attend a performance event, I think it’s not only polite but beneficial to really pay attention to what these people do; it’s good for the spotlight to be on others from time to time, I promise. It will give your character something to be inspired by and grow from (even if that is the character not liking the music, though that’s always kinda eyeroll-inducing to me, but you do you).

[fairasmorninglight]

A lot of great points above.  The players behind performing characters do put a lot of time, effort, heart, and soul into what they bring to the stage.  It’s not a simple matter of slapping pasted lyrics up on the screen, at least not anymore.  That worked several years ago, but with the tools we have in game now, we can do so much more than what we could when some of us first started way back in early ARR.  Back then, it still took time, but less than it does now, to cobble something together.  Performance RP has evolved by leaps and bounds since 2013. It’s always a challenge and, sometimes, it can feel very competitive. Most performances, or their venues, give some idea ahead of time as to who will be performing, so you can reasonably tell whether it’s someone you want to see or not, if you’re familiar with them or their content.  Consider this before going to a show.  If you’re not sure about how someone performs, ask around.  Someone is bound to have some idea since a great many performers are now veterans of the in-game stage.  And if they’re not, give the newer ones a chance. We all had to start somewhere, and we all had (and still have) our teachable moments.  As far as justifying various sounds and instruments, as the OP pointed out, Allag left a lot of stuff behind.  Skysteel Manufactory is a thing. Garlemald is also a thing.  Defectors, stolen tech, and black markets are a thing. Airships and even SUBMARINES are available to free companies, both of which are powered by Ceruleum.  Aetherial wheels are common in FC houses, and these collect aether for various purposes.  Orchestrions exist! And no one needs to sit there and constantly turn a crank to make them play, they’re powered somehow!   They also have a means of projecting sound built into them, otherwise what’s the point? What about Mammets and magitek light rods? All of these things exist in the game.  Players and performers have everything they could possibly need to bring more advanced instruments and devices into performances.  Yes, FFXIV can be considered a “high fantasy” setting, but there is no shortage of technology, and the game has been around long enough that all those resources could have easily leaked into plenty of accessible markets by now.  So you can try and make the point all you want that electric guitars and synth sounds don’t fit into the game. Call them Electrum guitars of you don’t like the word electric, or even Levin-powered.  Anything and everything is possible, and all of these elements have been a regular part of Final Fantasy as a franchise forever.  If you have trouble stomaching that, you’re probably playing the wrong game.

P.S. It costs you nothing to let people play however they want.

[fairasmorninglight]

Re: Symphony

Enjoy the symphony tonight, for whoever’s going.  Unfortunately, due to RL circumstances and IC artistic differences, Ciel will not be present.

[nhara-tia]

Prism

The sun was high in the sky, the drinks were cool, the food was hot off the grill and tasted amazing. The Astral Advent was enjoying a Moonfire Festival party with friends new and old alike.

N’hara found himself enjoying the company of quite a few people: Aulen, Louma’li, Suwan, and a new member of the company named K’zhiroh Tia. There were others, Ciel and the hrothgar Iex Amox, Edari, Zaius, Balthius, Autgar and Martin, Sergei and Viktor, Tarot and Geofri, Avenio and obviously Berrod… it was quite a party and everyone was enjoying themselves. The festivities even included a fireworks display, a sky filled with brilliant lights… until the third volley.

The fireworks fizzled and fell dead, but what came to the ground wasn’t a dud firework. A crystal crashed down hard onto the beach, striking a segment of wall and creating a streak of near white. The crystal was brimming to bursting with aether of every element, both astral and umbrally aligned. The point where it struck was stripped of all aether and, as Iex and Sergei discovered, drained the aether of away of any living substance that touched it for a prolonged period of time. The crystal itself seemed to over-empower any usage of aether used in its proximity.

Reks’s connection to natural aether as a conjurer gave him a pounding migrane. Suwan felt like he was suffering from aether sickness. Aulen’s fire magic lost control for a moment. Every moment the group was around it, they could just feel how wrong the whole thing was. Not wanting to get too involved, Berrod sent for the Yellow Jackets, the lominsan authorities arriving promptly to confiscate it and take it away.

The rest of the party was “celebrated” in an almost solemn silence, everyone doing what they could to unwind after the tense situation. They had more questions than answers and N’hara hoped that it was the last they would ever see of it. But this was the Astral Advent and things were never that simple…

Featuring @astraladvent

[fairasmorninglight]

Summer Splash

[snow-and-sea]

Character Profile: Darren Fisher

Keep reading

[fairasmorninglight]

💰 - Your character just found a fat sack of gold on a bench. What do they do with it?

Depending on where exactly it is, she’ll turn it in either at the nearest Grand Company office or inn counter.  Someone’s probably looking for it, and she’s well off enough that she has no reason to keep it.

[fairasmorninglight]

🍰 - What is their favorite type of dessert or sweet? 😂 - Your character is moved to tears. What’s a kindness that another showed to them?

Although seen with a decadent slab of strawberry cake, above, cinnamon rolls are her go-to if available.  The gooier, the better.  Second to that, a mille-fueille, after which she named her loyal coeurl friend.  Cinnamon Roll didn’t suit him quite as well for a name.Just... being heard.  And that’s not referring to her music.  Off stage, Ciel is actually a very private person who has a tendency to keep her troubles to herself, no matter how bad they are.  When she sought help last year during the Rising, reaching out was difficult, but she found several good friends who were more than willing to listen to her at length, and who understood.

[fairasmorninglight]

“I feel like I’m rubbing elbows with the queen right now.” Rune grins at Ciel - from @gaggle-of-dorks-ffxiv

She winks playfully in return of the compliment, “One of many, dahling, but don’t go spreading that around, aye?  You do and they’ll lock us all in the tower for sure.”

@gaggle-of-dorks-ffxiv

[fairasmorninglight]

Deep Shroud Wanderer ——————————–

Bow of the Wanderer (Meadow Green) Scintillant Circlet of Aiming (Lavender) Weathered Fili Gilet Gliderskin Gloves of Aiming (Nophica Green) Brightlinen Bottoms of Aiming (Soot Black) Gliderskin Boots of Aiming (Default)

[fairasmorninglight]

Deep Shroud Wanderer --------------------------------

Bow of the Wanderer (Meadow Green) Scintillant Circlet of Aiming (Lavender) Weathered Fili Gilet Gliderskin Gloves of Aiming (Nophica Green) Brightlinen Bottoms of Aiming (Soot Black) Gliderskin Boots of Aiming (Default)

[fairasmorninglight]

MSQ finished on Ciel!  Thoughts below the cut.

What a hell of a ride.  I had a LOT of skepticism coming into Shadowbringers.  For starters, way back near the end of Heavensward when they were setting this up, the direction they took Minfilia, the Warriors of Darkness.... I hated it.  It looked very much like they were starting to dip into every terrible cliche just to fill spaces in between patches.  And they redeemed themselves in completely unimaginable and outstanding ways, they proved my every assumption wrong, and I could not be happier for the level of creativity in not only proving those assumptions wrong and restoring my faith as a story-loving player, but in crafting this incredible epic with so few flaws, and so much love behind it.  I almost didn’t order Shadowbringers, and I’m glad I changed my mind at nearly the last minute. The music is out of this world (with a couple of exceptions).  There are a lot more vocal pieces with this soundtrack, and I can’t wait to order a copy whenever it’s released.  Much of it will also lend itself very well to a piano collection, but from 1.0/ARR all the way up through ShB, they now have enough vocal tracks to put out an album just on those, and I really hope they make one. Most of the zones are beautiful.  A couple of them are a little too familiar, but different enough to have their own identity.  It is, after all, supposed to be a reflection of the world we knew, so some similarity is to be expected.  I wouldn’t go so far as to call it laziness in design, because the other areas like Il Mheg and Amaurot are anything but lazy designs.  It’s impossible to choose a favorite area. Hell, it’s impossible to choose a favorite NPC.  There were several in Stormblood that I couldn’t stand, but there’s not a single NPC I actively dislike in Shadowbringers.  They’re not just pasted in (like Grynwat or however you spell it).  Everyone has a presence, an important role to play, and motivations.  Dulia Chai is hands down an unexpected favorite, and it seems as much for a lot of people also, but I’m also glad to see where they went with the Exarch in bringing back a character we hadn’t seen since ARR, and not wasting him as a presence in history. Glamours...  there was so little in SB which felt glamourable.  Finally, they’re putting sets into dungeons and drop boxes which take to glamouring exceptionally well. I still have several new glams to finish, and I have high hopes for whatever else may be coming. This is just the beginning of the expansion.  I can’t wait to see what else they show us, and how they try to keep the steam in this train.