The Great Arvash-to-Rhavas Retcon

The Real Interstellar Privateer: Rhavas

I’ve finally given in and admitted that I might as well blog as my main rather than an alt.

TL;DR – Arvash’s (one of my low-skill alts) name has, in most ways, been stricken from the stories in this blog, and replaced with Rhavas (my main).

Rhavas has always been my main, and the character that experienced most of the stories in-game that are described here. For reasons of not wanting to get unwanted attention due to blog notoriety (I’ve seen many other bloggers mention it) and not wanting to attract stupid wardecs to my corpmates, I decided originally to hide it and write under a pseudonym. I chose “Harvas”.

Coincidentally, both of these are palindromes of Avshar, one of my favorite book villains, from Harry Turtledove’s Videssos novels. Rhavas and Harvas are names he also uses in the books.

Unfortunately, both Avshar and Harvas are taken in-game. So … when I won a couple of contests, it was really annoying to try to get the prizes routed to an actual character. So I erased Harvas and found a palindrome that wasn’t registered – and Arvash was born.

Arvash served well - for a time

As Rhavas searched out and documented Shattered, among other things, and I got active on Twitter and the Forums, his pseudonym (Arvash, if you’re playing along at home) gained a fair degree of notoriety.

And now, with CCP Dropbear actively driving the wormhole story, Arvash the toon could really get involved. Except for the fact that he has almost none of the skills described in Shattered. He can’t even use scan probes, much less fly a CovOps.

So I was faced with a dilemma. I could try to pretend, which likely would fail utterly in an IC/RP setting like CCP Dropbear’s effort. I could try to step in and say Arvash was Rhavas, while leaving the blog alone. Which would also likely to be called BS in-game.

I actually solicited CCP Dropbear’s advice. He had a delicious idea, but one I didn’t think I could pull off without many hours of planning on how I was going to avoid “getting arrested” RP I didn’t want. I almost did it anyhow because it would have been great fun.

But in the end, the most straightforward answer was to simply go through 60 blog entries and give credit to the man who really lived Shattered: Rhavas.

Thanks for your patience with this shift.

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