Deus Vult

The following is a collection of semi-AARy posts I made on Facebook chronicling my various exploits in Crusader Kings 2 the last number of weeks.
---
It seemed I was destined to expand my grand strategy collection having spent so much recent time on EU3; Paradox sale on Steam over the weekend and today is CK2 day. Already spent the entire afternoon as a sort-of-ambitious Sicilian count.
---
Crusader Kings 2 consumes my free time at an alarming rate. I was a tad ornery when Laura was trying to ask me what I wanted for dinner because I was in the middle of a succession crisis, but then I realized a moment later that she had been home from work for a while and was asking what I wanted for dinner because it was 5PM, not noonish.
---
My Duke of Mercia also holds one province in and the Duchy of Lancaster. When the previous pope called the second crusade, it was conveniently at just the right point in time that the Saracen dynasty that held Jerusalem at the time had just finished exhausting their military beating back a rival Muslim dynasty, so when I and a handful of lesser western European powers came riding in there was nothing but ripe sieges and stacks of 2k soldiers everywhere, and when the crusade won I accidentally inherited all of the pope-inaugurated Kingdom of Jerusalem. I now had 100+ holdings which was much higher than the 8 max I could administrate, so I quickly unloaded the four brand spanking new duchies on a bunch of whiny uncles who were mad they didn't have any land. Anyways, one of those uncles decided the Duke of Mercia shouldn't ALSO be the Duke of Lancaster and started a plot (which I foolishly backed) to depose the title for the latter duchy. But being as the ambitious uncle has four kind-of small territories all the way over in the middle east and his opponent controls essentially two duchies worth of provinces in northwest England, he's spent the last several years ferrying over tiny groups of soldiers (started off between 1-2k troops) and promptly smashing them into a much larger force (8k).

The last boats seriously unloaded a squad of 14 guys.

The Duke of Mercia apparently doesn't have any boats (he has a few ports but isn't calling any of his ships) so he's just sitting waiting. I'm waiting for the damn war to be over with (could take decades for the negative warscore to build up at the rate soldiers are slowly being ferried from southern Israel to England) so I can just revoke the damn title anyways (which I can do for free because the cunt supported the pretender in the last succession crisis).

Deus vult.
---
I remembered Steam actually co-operates when trying to take screenshots with CK2 when I noticed this funny little detail up the top-left. My character had just gone from Infirm to Incapable and his wife, Queen Birgitta of England was appointed regent. At some point I'd also gotten an event to have an affair...with his wife. Fun fact: via the gift of tragic irony she's also the highest intrigue vassal I have and is thus my spymaster. I'm several years into Saexraed's grandson's reign and grandma Birgitta is STILL my spymaster.

  
---
Decided to give the ASoIaF mod for CK2, loaded up the Feast for Crows scenario, picked Martell because Dorne is relatively passive to the central conflict, except shortly in Aegon VI landed in Westeros but I couldn't remember canonically if Dorne supported Aegon's campaign (did a little digging on the wiki, apparently the event that popped up where Arianne is sent as an envoy is yet to occur in the Winds of Winter) but he already has secret pro-Targaryen plots afoot and Aegon VI would technically be his nephew so I figured why not.

Anyways, immersion was immediately broken when, in the first battle of campaign, my troops summarily cornered and slew Jaime Lannister.
---
While I wasn't looking, Scotland managed to somehow inherit all of Norway, which gave momentary pause to my future plans to take Scotland for myself. Fortunately, a few years later virtually every Norwegian duchy revolted and at present Norway's back to the status quo. Meanwhile, Scotland has also somehow inherited what's left of Connacht.

Two words: Scottish vikings.

---
I ran into a snag in my England game where midway through an offensive war to unify Portugal (the third Crusade that granted me the Kingdom of Portugal somehow left two counties in Islamic hands) my king died in battle and quickly resulted in a small succession issue that obliterated my slight advantage over the Moorish reply to my offensive. Took a break for a few days (played some Mount & Blade) and then came back to my save before I'd started my offensive. Went smoothly this time.

When the above king's grandson inherited (his direct son had died to illness) things were very smooth. No rival claims and he cleanly inherited two kingdoms which were under gavelkind succession (which is tough to do, he had at least one eligible uncle and/or brother and I'm not actually sure how it technically happened). Things were great until his two eldest sons starting warring over separate duchies in Portugal (which was still under low crown authority which permits intra-Kingdom warfare). This wasn't unmanageable (I was actually using it to my advantage to try to maneuver the elder son into a stronger position on succession) but then the Duke of East Anglia decided he wanted independence and dragged two other duchies with him. Even THIS wasn't unmanageable but the Fatimid Empire took advantage of the situation to decide he wanted Jerusalem back. With ~2/3 of my potential forces attempting to pacify the other third, I managed to put down the rebellion and bring all my forces into the far east side of the Mediterranean JUST in time to lose the entire Kingdom of Jerusalem to war score.

I actually wasn't too discouraged by losing Jerusalem (one less kingdom title to worry about doling out on succession), but I used it as an excuse to rage-revoke the primary titles of everyone whose rebellion caused me to lose it.

Anyways, I played for a little bit after that, but attempting to mitigate the gavelkind succession of the Kingdom of Ireland and Portugal was more daunting than I was prepared for this afternoon so I decided to quietly retire that campaign for now. The lesson learned here is not to create titles that have de jure gavelkind succession until you ALSO have the ability to create the title one level above it. For instance I basically should never have created the title for the Kingdom of Ireland because it's liable to pass to my heir's sibling and thus completely invalidate the effort spent uniting the Irish mainland. I still would have had to deal with having Portugal and Jerusalem thrust on me, but dealing with 2-3 extra kingdom titles is better than 4.

I started a game as King of France, since I have yet to touch them in a grand strategy game and immediately found another set of problems. Like England, France starts with primogeniture (unlike, say, the Iberian kingdoms), which is much much easier to deal with compared to gavelkind. Unlike England, France starts with no established crown authority which isn't a real disadvantage by itself but means that your internal politics are going to be in constant turmoil as your vassals bicker incessantly and makes individual dukes who accumulate power potentially dangerous. In addition to all that you start with the very menacing HRE looming to the east.

I actually had to start twice. Both times the HRE went full on angry war for the laughably tiny county of Gent. The first time just as I was marshaling all my forces, my uncle decided he should be king and took about a quarter of my forces with him. My 10kish army was getting stomped by the 30k HRE stack when I realized I could just surrender Gent at absolutely no penalty aside from losing the county. When I restarted again, I just gave him Gent and then reclaimed it like 5 years later when the duchy that held it declared independence from the HRE. It seems that the size of the HRE is mitigated by the same problem I'm dealing with--the low crown authority means that basically your "country" is a bunch of tiny duchies constantly warring with each other while you're busy trying to deal with world politics, and the HRE has the added problem of elective succession which means there's only really going to be brief windows of time where there's actually a unified HRE to be worried about knocking at your door all at once. They're already suffering somewhat from a number of independent nations popping out from the empire.

Anyways, the constant intra-kingdom warfare is really chaotic and I'm just trying to hold on long enough for my next heir to institute medium crown authority which'll put an end to internal disputes. Then I only have to worry about my dukes poking the sleeping dragon to the east.
---
After reading about a von Habsburg count to HRE challenge I decided to give that a try. Had a really slow early game that picked up steam when I convinced the emperor to give me the Duchy of North Burgundy but then came to a screeching halt once medium crown authority was instituted and I couldn't even press de jure duchal claims when I was finally in the position to.
---
Woke up yesterday at like 6AM thinking about my France campaign. The trouble I was having planning ahead was that I wasn't sure where France should go in the endgame. I always like to plan on shooting for the de jure empire of my chosen country but I can't foresee what the next goal is after forming Francia, but laying in bed thinking about it I was starting to get psyched up to just go for it and see where it takes me.

But as I sat down at my computer, before I loaded it up I did a quick review of the wiki tabs I had up and I was looking at the tab on succession laws trying to think more on dealing with gavelkind succession when I was reading the section describing seniority succession and the section mentioned that it's a useful tool for unifying the Iberian kingdoms which sounded really interesting so I went and started a game as Leon instead.

Right off the bat I had to consider the same issue that I was slightly vexed with when I tried starting as Castille: do you make an early grab for the other Christian kingdoms so that you have full control over the push into Moorish territory or do you keep the alliances and risk them either calling you into wars with very weak positioning and/or taking land for themselves and putting you into a weaker position. The advantage of starting as Leon is that you're already playing the eldest of the Jimena kings; a quick survey of my neighbors showed that the king of Castille (to whom the king of Leon is heir) was the heir of Galicia, so I decided I would try to grab Castille and hope Galicia falls apart. Castille starts weaker than Leon, but when I declared war they called in Galicia and Navarra. But I had a little luck on my side, Galicia's Duke of Portucale started a faction to hand Galicia over to me, so I marshaled my forces and bitchslapped the small contingent from Galicia so the Duke of Portucale could mop up and give me a nice birthday present before turning back to Castille.

So less than a few years in and I held all three of the western Iberian kingdoms. Nice start. There was a slight wrinkle; Galicia's crown authority didn't start high enough for me to convert it to seniority succession right away. I decided I was fine with this though since I got the duchy of Portucale out of the deal, which meant when my king died his son would inherit the two counties comprising what remained of the Kingdom of Galicia while I got to keep Leon, Castille, and the lower half of Galicia. As it turned out, it got a little better, because the King of Navarra was the senior-most heir, so on succession I picked up Navarra when I lost Galicia--but this was only a temporary boon, it too couldn't be converted straight to seniority but I only needed its resources long enough to expand decisively into Moorish territory. By the time I lost Navarra's three provinces I'd gained 3-4 times as much territory by expanding south. Playing in the afternoon yesterday I steadily advanced south taking more and more territory.

I was gonna continue the advance today but I've been distracted watching CEO 2013 all day. I briefly tried to play while having the stream run on my second monitor but I accidentally won the Second Crusade for Jerusalem (again, seriously I didn't want it this time, I arrived late when the warscore was already like 70-something, beat down a 13k enemy stack and didn't even have time to start a siege--somehow that had given me the highest contribution rating and before I could load my troops back onto the boats to run off with my Crusader trait I suddenly had a whole new kingdom under my belt--quick aside: somehow the Kingdom of Jerusalem started with seniority succession, so one less massive headache to deal with) and suddenly had a lot of minutiae I had to deal with and I didn't want to have to divide my attention so I'm saving the county handout for later.
---
Taken at the start o' my last session. I've since expanded farther south and control about half of Ghana (had truces with both Jerjerid and Almoravid so I had nowhere else to throw soldiers). Had some trouble following my last succession that was eerily reminiscent of the trouble I ran into at the end of my England campaign but I managed to ferry troops over in time to save northern Jerusalem from an opportunistic Jerjerid attack. As I was taking a chunk of Ghana, there was a Catholic crusade for Hungary, which is the western tip of Cumanian blob there; it was won and picked up by a single HRE duke who is now probably busy trolling the emperor.

     

One if by Land, Two if by Viking Longboat

Recent screenshot from the ongoing Russia game. A lot of really amusing and interesting things here. To begin with, the USA and Canada (the latter, strangely, south of the former) have both emerged from what was perviously a large Scandinavian colony. Louisiana is also it's own sovereign nation now. Likewise, so are Haiti and Mexico which are both noticeably drifted away from their real-world locations (granted Mexico once stretched up through California). It's hard to see easily here, but there's one lighter-green island in the southeast Bahamas which comprises the whole of Brazil, separate from th darker green Portugese colonies. The darker purple is actually Burgundy, which has inherited most of France and are now vassals of Milan (the greyish-purple), who is the current Holy Roman Emperor and controls basically all of Europe west of Russia/me except where Spain and the UK would be. The merigold-yellow is Scotland, which has random colonies all over the world.

Universal

I've been seduced by Eropa Universalis III the last few weeks and I'd like to write a little bit about my learning experience because it's really a very intimidating game until you take a little bit of time to learn it and then it becomes absolutely amazing once you have a reasonable grasp of how to play it (it's like Dwarf Fortress lite in that regard).

I first got the game quite a while back, installed it, played the tutorial, loaded up a game as England, was absolutely vexed by the UI and immediately gave up and uninstalled it.

So I reinstalled it a few weeks back in search of boredom soothing.  I went into it with a little more conviction this time.  I decided to go with Scotland, figuring I'd be vaguely safe while I can sit back and watch the world unfold as I learn how to play the damn thing.  Unfortunately the early mission Scotland usually gets is to claim that one little island in the far north that's held by Norway.  I tentatively moved my army up to the island and threw out a Declaration of War hoping the large sea between Norway and here would be large enough to belay retaliation, perhaps at least as long to seize the island then promptly sue for peace.

Less than a month of siege and Norway dropped a stack twice the size of my army onto the island.

So that was a bust.  I decided to look for a better newbie nation.  I was trying to avoid picking a larger nation (which are generally safer and indeed easier) because I didn't want to have to figure out how to manage a large number of territories at once.  I discovered that Portugal is an excellent newbie nation since you can pretty much just ally Castille and forget Europe exists as you sail off to colonize the entire sunset.  However, Portugal has a very boring early game since you basically do nothing but wait on your tech in order to get Quest for the New World.  Not yet having accustomed myself to the pace of the game, I felt weird sitting and doing not much for literally decades at a time in game, so I gave that game up.

Next I decided it was time to dive into a larger nation, but I thought I might shy away from Europe since I was unfamiliar with the politics of the period.  Instead I went over east and picked Ming, which occupies a comfortable position sitting on most of China.  Ming turned out to be an excellent choice for someone who's not-completely-new-but-still-doesn't-have-the-hang-of-things.  Ming has a solid strategic, economic, political, and diplomatic position but has its choices limited as a function of the Imperial court mechanics.  Basically your nation has three factions which each enable only a select number of gameplay options at a time, which as it turns out is excellent in not only teaching you that these mechanics exist as distinct organisms but also teaches you when and how to balance using them.  When Eunuchs are in power you can trade and colonize, you can only build when Bureaucrats are in power, and you can only allocate missionaries and most effectively build armies when the Temple faction is in power.  Also, since your policy slider choices influence the balance of these factions (and if you go looking for guides they'll tell you to prepare to Westernize) it also serves as a very crude introduction to slider strategy.  Finally, since your north borders are lined with multiple barbarian hordes you get plenty of practice engaging in warfare.

At some point I got bored with Ming (once you get used to what every faction allows you to do it quickly becomes stifling not being able to do everything at all times), so I tried Portugal again but couldn't get a solid grasp on colonization mechanics.

Briefly tried a game as Iroquois in an attempt to recreate this amazing AAR but quickly gave up and decided I might come back to try again later. 

So I started a Muscowy game instead!  And here's where I finally got the hang of things.  Set out with a goal of Westernizing and forming Russia and things ballooned nicely from there.  Being that you're landlocked for most of the game it's nice only having to focus on land power, and since you're in a great position to maintain military dominance you don't have to spend much time puzzling out early economic and production policy--you kind of grow into it as your expand your territory.  Westernizing is not as brutal as it is for other nations since you start in the Oriental tech group, so it's a nice little intro to that mechanic.

This screenshot's now two days old and a few years short of a century have passed. I've since colonized all the way to the east coast of Asia (grabbing all land that wasn't already claimed) and swallowed up all the barbarian hordes between me and Manchu/Ming (including Kazakh which you can see here). Had a brief war with Persia, grabbing all their northernmost provinces. Every couple decades Lithuania declares a reconquest war, dragging Scandinavia and an assortment of other random allies with them. Every time I punish Lithuania pretty heavily for it. The first few times I barely beat back Scandinavia, who would always ask for peace as soon as my eastern armies where in a position to end their stack, but I got sick of them re-signing treaties with Lithuania so in the latest war I took about a third of their European territories (they have a ton of colonial territory in the west).

It's fun managing the absolutely massive empire, but it's basically just down to waiting for someone to blunder into a war with me so I can steal their stuff.  I'm looking forward to finishing this game off and moving onto a more challenging nation.  I might try Portugal again now that I have a firmer grasp of most of the game's mechanics.

Also, this is my 100th post, am I cool yet?

Hopes Inverted

I'm in need of a break from World of Tanks (which I've been playing profusely for the last month or so), so I came across Arcane Saga Online and decided to give it a try.  Unfortunately I got halfway through customizing the controls before I realized there was no option to invert the mouse Y-axis, which makes the game unplayable for me.  Had the same problem with Perfect World Online a while back and had the same solution: immediately uninstall it.

So I was thinking to myself, if I was going to play a fantasy-stylized Korean AMMO with outlandishly clad women I might as well play THE fantasy-styled Korean AMMO with outlandishly clad women--for I recalled at that moment that Tera is now free to play.

And it shall be so.  Downloading the client as I type this.

I played the beta a while back with Callsign (I think I probably made a post about it back in the day) and was unimpressed, but I'm in need of a quick fix and its had some time to stew so let's see how it's doing.

Also, did I make a post about the Firefall beta yet?  I'm in the closed beta for that and it's interesting if pretty empty at the moment.  I'm concerned because it's being patched with actual content VERY slowly and it's already approaching open beta.  I played it a lot for a few days before getting pretty burnt out on the same grinding waltz of content for xp and materials (high level ARES missions and Melding Tornado events which are lovely for xp and the obligatory Thumper grinding for mats).  I'm hoping I can come back to it in a month and there'll be more to do, but I already haven't played it for a few weeks and when I checked on it yesterday there were just handfuls of random bug fixes.

Fallout Soon, Fellow Wastelander

I've been playing through Fallout: New Vegas again to keep from being driven nuts by my shitty DSL internet (which has been practically unusable for large portions of the day for months now).  I had a dream the other night that would make a really cool premise for a new Fallout: it started just before the bombs hit and in the dream the player character was a child in the back of some bus on some school field trip or something.  The PC survives the blasts but is turned into a ghoul, which immediately gave me several interesting ideas for a number of angles for the story to develop:

-We could get a peek at the world immediately post-bombs (ghoul form would make the ambient radiation a non-issue from a gameplay perspective).
-Otherwise, the player could get trapped somewhere only to be rediscovered in "modern" times.
-The player could stumble across something that reverses ghoulification.
etc etc

If you really wanted to out on a limb you could turn the whole ghoul/not-ghoul thing into a set of Dark Souls-esque game mechanics.

In other news, I tried the Marvel Heroes beta over the weekend.  Got through the tutorial and briefly perused the forums before I decided it was completely not worth the waste of time.  The former was hella boring and promised a lot of future grinding that if I wanted to commit to I'd pick a better game (made me kindasorta want to play some more Path of Exile) and the latter was filled with the requisite fanboy forum-denizens who are happy and willing to swallow developer cock instead of acknowledge any form of criticism.

It's bizarre how much they're pushing the game's status as an MMORPG, because you get silly stuff like this, specifically #8. It's an ARTS.  Diablo clone if you prefer.  It's free2play and it's the shady kind where if you want to play a particular hero you're going to need to shell out cash for it or grind ad nauseam.  It wasn't eye-catching or interesting in any novel way, but don't take my word for it--go try it yourself.  I'm just saying I found it really really boring.

More like Bioshock Infinitely Lame

Adapted from a series of posts I've made elsewhere.

Bioshock Infinite: I'm not impressed. Tried too hard to one up the look of its predecessors without properly capturing the spirit. The story is not extremely engaging, nor particularly thought provoking. It touches on themes of political ideology and sociology to justify the setting without exploring them with any depth or finesse--which could have been an improvement upon its forefathers' flimsy pedantic, black & white morality shortcomings. The gameplay is disgustingly linear (although to its credit they at least try to hide it) and is at best a cash-in on the series' iconic imagery and at worst a cash-in on generic actiony spectacle shooters.

I'm a pretty huge fan of the first Bioshock; I even liked the much-less-critically-successful sequel. I think what really killed Infinite for me was about halfway through the game when I realized I was basically playing Dishonored in a floating cloud city without the stealth mechanics. I kinda wish they'd given it a different name instead of Bioshock.

The game just didn't have any humanity: take the first Bioshock where even the average mook (not even taking into consideration that care was given to creating personalities for every archetype of splicer) was identifiable as a person who fell from various levels of grace into the mutated hell of plasmid overuse (plasmids, also note, were more than a gameplay mechanic and was quite central to the overarching plot). In Bioshock Infinite at every stage you're gunning down faceless zealots of various flavors, with virtually no distinguishing characteristics amongst them--the most egregious example being Cornelius Slate's soldiers, whom you have no reason to fight and have absolutely no reason to fight you other than that the Hall of Heroes apparently was in dire need of local adversaries.

Honestly, the most exciting part of the game for me was the brief moment in the ending sequence where you end up in Rapture (I was actually kind of hoping there'd be an even longer nod to the first game, maybe witnessing the plane crash before you enter the lighthouse).  And even that moment was partially spoiled by the cockblocky way the sequence conveniently puts down a recurring big bad which would have made an excellent boss fight somewhere instead of just getting tossed in the trash heap with the rest of the plot.

It's a cushy themepark ride; significantly more style than substance, content only to briefly amuse you with flashing lights until the ride commensurate to the ticket you paid for is over. 

An irrelevant long-winded post about Solomond Island in the Secret World that nobody I know will understand or really care about

I originally wrote this 4/6/2013.

I really love Solomon Island as a quest-chain, even though I have a lot of complaints about it.

At the beginning of the Secret World you discover that your character has somehow swallowed a super-power bestowing bee whilst sleeping and wakes up discovering that they have the power to wreck their apartment over the course of a week.  You're quickly whisked away to one of three factions representing a covert power struggle.  They all essentially do the same thing: tell you that you're now super awesome, that there's some evil something that needs to be dealt with, and that you as an unwitting newbie have to go sort that shit out.  Not much motivation given, but eh that's what you've got to go on.

You're immediately shoved off to Solomon Island, a "small" island off the coast of Maine, where a mysterious fog is terrorizing the place The Mist style complete with zombies, Cthulu-esque horrors, an evil cosmic life-eating infectious force, a convenient rift between the dimensions of Earth and Hell, ghosts, evil giant burrowing insects, and a few other varieties of supernatural terrors.

So here's the full back story, it comes in a few parts (if you're the sort of person who cares about spoilers and think you might want to play the Secret World someday, you're probably not going to want to read the rest of this):
-At some point a thousand years ago, a contingent of Mayans escorted by some dark evil god invaded Solomon Island looking for...something.  Unfortunately the island was then occupied by a tribe of native Americans called the Wabanaki.  The Mayans proceed to slaughter the Wabanaki, who do their best to fight back, and are in danger of being eradicated when, conveniently, a group of Norse explorers wielding a powerful light artifact show up and join the battle on the side of the Wabanaki to push back the Mayan expedition.  The Norsemen and Wabanaki together set up powerful wards to protect the even bigger even more powerfuler artifact that the Mayans were after before the Norsemen depart and are summarily sunk some distance out by what can be assumed is some remnant of the dark god's power.
--As a silly aside, the powerful light artifact which is the focus of the Solomon Island quest, is never directly named, is the source of my favorite line from the Darkness War ("TheNorsemenhadbroughtwiththemthepoweroftheirgodsandthiswassomethingtheMayanswerenotpreparedfor."), and is heavily implied to be the source of all of Solomon Island's troubles, is Excalibur (if you check the Verangian's buff when he uses it during the Darkness War, it refers to the sword by name).
-Flash forward to modern times, a fishing boat from the island goes missing for some time but eventually returns sans part of its crew and with the rest suffering from some insidious hallucinations.  They're followed very shortly by an abandoned shipping barge that had disappeared from the same area several years before which is itself accompanied by a dense fog that covers the island.  The people who escape the fog (perhaps by hiding in a supermarket), eventually find the rest of the town empty but for a few days until the missing contingent of citizens return for a mini zombie apocalypse.  Also, there's Cthulu-inspired sea horrors invading.
-It's also established in the introduction of the game that there's an overarching malevolent force called the Filth that has been popping up (and promptly covered up) all over the world.  Somehow, and at the same time, they also choose this exact moment to pop up on Solomon Island.  I think at the time that the game was released it was meant to be surmised that the Filth were the harbingers of the 2012 Mayan apocalypse and that shit was getting worse as time marched towards December.  The link is less apparent now that December 2012 has come and gone, but it's alluded to a couple times early on and promptly forgotten as though it was perhaps something that would be more present-in-mind if played parallel to 2012 IRL.
--It's implied that the shipping barge had discovered the wreck of the Norse ships and had recovered Excalibur.  From here it's not clear if the dark powers behind the fog were attached to the sword (I thought it was implied in a few places that the fog was a direct result of the sword's power being brought back to the island) or simply following in an attempt to claim it...somehow.
---A man who has been pursuing the means to open a portal to Hell so he can become Hell-Stalin and liberate the everyday working demon, conveniently succeeds in doing so RIGHT on Solomon Island AND at the same time as the fog, which also opens a ton of related unstable portals in one whole corner of the place.
---The local secretly-Illuminati-controlled college has a sudden alumni ghost flare up at the same time.  Also, there's a haunted amusement park and mansion, but it can possibly be assumed they were haunted before the fog rolled in.
---A race of evil insects who had apparently burrowed under the island for some time (I think it's implied that the Mayans brought them over but I can't quite recall) suddenly decide its time to set up shop on the surface.
---Also, every local legend about angry spirits or backwoods creatures?  Yeah, they're all true now.  Bigfoots, wendigos, angry hauntings, evil possessed scarecrows, even the village idiot who oversees the junkyard is now building giant trash heap golems.

While all of these are basically convenient explanations for a variety of quests, it starts to get comically out of control while you're on your tour of the single most supernaturally unlucky island in the world.  There's a very convoluted transition from where you go from investigating the cause of the Draug's invasion to stopping the Filth from getting their filthy hands on the Gaia Engine.  The first part of the island is the strongest, narratively speaking, especially since it's focused only on the sea monster invasion, but by the time you move on to the second part of the island everything else starts kicking into overdrive.  The entire thing kind of overstays its welcome too even from a gameplay standpoint; by the time you're done with Blue Mountain, if you've done everything there is to do, your character progression (which is tracked by an approximation based on the number of skill points you've spent and the abilities you've unlocked) should be somewhere around QL7 out of a max of QL10.

I kind of wish the Filth subplot would have played a backseat, maybe as a subtle behind-the-scenes manipulator, to the Cthuluey Draug plot, for no other reason than that the sea monster invasion was an infinitely more interesting thing to explore in an MMO than garden variety corruption #53.  Actually, now that I think about it, it could perhaps be argued that the first part of the island, Kingsmouth Town, reaches a climax when you defeat the Ur-Draug at the wreck of the Polaris, which might explain why the Draug are suddenly second-string villains by the time you reach the Savage Coast on the other side of the island.

Anyways, I applaud The Vanishing of Tyler Freeborn for at least attempting to tie things together, even if its conclusion is rather weak.  The link between the sea creatures and the Filth is extremely not clear in the base story.  Issue 5 attempts to tie them together by coming to the implied conclusion that the ancient Norse ship was sunk by the Filth, which "evolved" along its own, separate path to the Cthulu-type horrors with zombies con queso we see in Kingsmouth Town et al.  In my opinion it cheapens the Draug as primary villains, but at least the effort was made to tie up that loose end.

To top off my complaints, Solomon Island ends on a horrendous cliffhanger that's not resolved in the current content.  There's another minor kick-to-the-balls moment in the inter-mission transition for the Illuminati where it's implied that there's dozens of other weapon-artifacts that you may-or-may-not get to see, but that's maybe more forgivable.