http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/tags/worlds Gaming Outpost Discussions » Tag: worlds - Recent Topics en-US Thu, 24 May 2012 11:20:39 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 q http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/search.php http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-diamonds-on-a-dark-scarf#post-34200 Wed, 08 Dec 2010 11:51:06 +0000 Tadeusz 34200@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I watched a short Ken Ham video where he talked of the need for a reformation rather than a revival. Its one of his points that you can't have a revival without the groundwork being laid, and right now, the groundworkis almost gone. Few churches and isolated in England preach the Truth, and many of them let corruption in.</p> <p>Thus, an idea for a world.</p> <p>Small, and isolated communities of a former Golden Age (that is now reviled by most as as the Age of Empire and Oppression).</p> <p>The history of the world is taught that for millions of years, Demons and Foul Beasts ruled the world, but that one day, Humans arrived on the scene. No one is quite sure how, but most who think on it, think some sort of magical accident.</p> <p>Humans lived as slaves of Demons for a long time, and then the Age of Man began (some say because Humans organized, and others because that was so, but that a Demonwar had broken the demons's powers beforehand).</p> <p>There were then the Cycles of Empire as one group of rulers succeeded another, and as nations rose and fell, always fighting with the Foul Beasts and with Corruption and each other.</p> <p>And then the Last Empire fell, the Federal Empire, and Man was once again opressed. So much so that Man again took unto himself the worshipping of Demons and the transformation of his body to the ways of th eDemons....so that some Men now look more like Foul Men than True Men.</p> <p>They live in the ruins of the Empire, and trade and loot upon each other, and all as was and has been for a million years.</p> <p>Except that most of that is a lie.</p> <p>The world is 2000 years old. The first, Ancient Empire, was established by the Lords of Light.</p> <p>Gotta go...gotta get my teeth cleaned by a dentist's hygienist. Sigh. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-the-ladyfaire-and-her-ravens#post-26198 Thu, 14 Oct 2010 10:32:11 +0000 Tadeusz 26198@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>One day, a beautiful lady with long, lustrous raven black hair bought herself a new tech toy as she so dearly loved to do. It had Scriff Inside! imprinted on the cover of the PDA. She went to work that night, and took it in to show off to her fellow employees before setting to work. Rain pounded the roof of the building, and work went on. Finally time for 'lunch' at midnight arrived, and she went out to the car to put her new device up as the rain had finally ceased a half hour ago. But a truck came barrelling into the parking lot, driving much too fast for a wet, and dark night.</p> <p>It did not hit her. But it did roar through a very large puddle and drench her, and the PDA in her hand.</p> <p>A half-dozen worlds later, and she sort of understands, as much as most versers do, what is going on.</p> <p>So she arrived in a world in the midst of a parade in honor of Coordinator 129 whose wise council led District 129 as his father had led it before him. It was a blessed and wonderful world, all the posters on the walls said so, and anyone who disagreed was an Enemy of the State, and quite obviously insane. The Coordinators, with their superior wisdom and benevolence, had removed the burden of excess choice from the People.</p> <p>It was a scientific fact, proven by studies funded by the Coordinators, that more than three choices was painful for the average person when confronted by any choice. So there were Trucks, Cars, and Cycles with Red, Blue, and Green colors for each of the types of vehicles which those with ten years service could receive by cashing in their Benevolence Points. They got BP's by doing extra service to the Community as determined by the Coordinators.</p> <p>So, when an unknown person appeared in the midst of the parade, the instant assumption was that she was an assassin, a servant of conservative radicals, and a Hater. So she was apprehended with the typical lack of concern shown to the subhuman. Which meant she woke from her coma ten years later.</p> <p>By then, her remarkableness had been well-established. Her backpack was well-made and had over a dozen colors in it. Heresy or Unscientific Thought! But inside was worse, a totally unbowlderized collection of thousands of books and songs on a tiny electronic device. It was then that the serious men got involved which they rarely did. </p> <p>The device was at least twenty years in advance of anything even the Black Tech Cites could make. It was phenomenal. It was scary.</p> <p>So she was closely observed as she slept in her coma. And one fact became clear. She was not aging. Not in the least. Massive efforts were expended to raise her from her coma. A whole new Black Tech City dedicated to coma patient's recovery was set up. In the space of five years, over twenty-five years of research was force fed into the solutions for comas.</p> <p>This had notable bad effects as a number of thoroughly stupid theories got advanced, and hardened into dogma. But they were lucky enough to have some truly brilliant scientists, and so the breakthrough was made.</p> <p>She woke to find herself controlled by electro-mechanical means. They wanted one thing. 'What's your secret to immortality?'. She tried to verse out, but with a multiple watchers and a device in her head that could freeze her muscles at a word, it did not work. </p> <p>They asked about the yellow substance in her blood, and she realized that they were so close. And she did not want to oppress other worlds with their ways, nor, did she want to have them find a way to use scriff tomake themselves immortal overlords in this world. The populace had it bad enough without their bosses living forever.</p> <p>So she began to lie, to lead them on a path. She was the daughter of a goddess and a merman. She needed time and privacy to brew up her magics.</p> <p>So they gave her a lighthouse by the sea, and watched her carefully by human eye, and in her lab, with cameras.</p> <p>She brewed up some small magics, all that would work in the world's low magic bias. Besides she was no great magi.</p> <p>And then she took the ravens that roosted all over the lighthouse, and what she had heard from some other versers, and she fed some of her Special Brew No. 9 she called it with a smirk to each Raven. Each raven, thus sedated and scriffed, was put into a huge blackpot, and covered by a lid. Airtight. The whole thing was heated to a slurry mess. By this time, the raven had either versed or plain died. She then dumped the slurry mess off the side of the lighthouse into the sea with an expression of disgust.</p> <p>"Spell is still not working."</p> <p>She filled pages of notebooks with structured nonsense so that her watchers had something to read.</p> <p>Now each raven had a message attached to its leg.</p> <p>"I am a verser on Timeline 1.475. Held prisoner by evil forces. Please rescue me."</p> <p>The immortal raven versers, several dozen so far, fly into various worlds, and often get killed. But then at some point, in the midst of this strangeness, the raven senses something familiar so he goes to it. Another verser who then reads the message...some versers take up the Quest for the Lady of Ravens as she is known. Others simply add their message to the raven they find. It occurs to some that this might be a way to create some sort of Raven Internet Interdimensional. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-multicultural-utopia#post-26221 Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:32:27 +0000 Tadeusz 26221@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I read this on Bighollywood.com, and PT Bull a commenter called it a Multicultural Utopia. Its written by a definite liberal named MovieBob, and he's writing about his grandchildren, not his children because he says the transition is going to be rough as America becomes an hourglass economically intead of a peach.</p> <p>I doubt he's right. I certainly hope he's not. But its an interesting prediction...</p> <p>----"I hope you are wrong in your negative prediction, but financially, I am betting on america going down the tubes. Hope I am wrong too." </p> <p>Depends on what you mean when you say "America" when it comes to tubes. </p> <p>If you mean "America" the nation - no, that's going to be just fine. We're not going to get blown off the map by some enemy nation, we're not going to be invaded and conquered, we're not going to lose the flag, the bill of rights, the monuments, the what-have-you.<br /> Now, if we're talking about "America as we know it" i.e. the abstract "feel" of what America is or "means?" Up-by-your-bootstraps, cabin-in-the-woods, frontiersman, family-centric, rural-blue-collar-working-class-as-heroic-ideal, nominally-Christian, predominantly-white, reflexively-patriarchal, that whole thing? Yeah... that's toast. Has been for awhile now. It happens. Cultures change - "evolve," if you like. </p> <p>My grandchildren will probably speak two or three languages just as a matter of "how it works now," and one of them will probably be Mandarin - especially if their successful in business. They will probably not work in a factory or on a farm, not because those things aren't nice but because those things aren't "here" anymore. They'll probably live and work on either or both coasts, not in the middle, and for purposes of business they will probably have secondary citizenship in at least one other nation. They will probably not "marry" but rather have multiple "official" long-term-but-finite relationships throughout their lives, and will likely have children much later than I did. Vestiges of Christianity (and Islam, while we're at it) will be around, but will have about as much effect on their day-to-day lives as the lingering notions of Athena or Thor have upon mine (Judaism, however, will be alive and kicking - that much you can always bet on.) </p> <p>Strange future? To me, maybe. But then imagine what a man of 1899 would think of OURS. America will be just fine, in other words ;) ---- </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/quirky-mystery-adaptations#post-25677 Sun, 10 Oct 2010 18:34:24 +0000 M. J. Young 25677@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Eric, in the thread <em><a href='http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/boredom/page/2#post-25509'>boredom</a></em>, suggested that someone devise a ruleset for playing quirky mysteries a la Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher. I'd prefer to expand it to include Columbo and Sherlock Holmes, and Tommy and Tuppence, and Nick and Nora, and Hercule Poirot, but let's see what we can devise.</p> <p>In thinking about mysteries, my usual advice is that the writer, or the referee, must start with what actually happened, then from that determine what clues are immediately available to the observer and what else can be discovered by investigation, and making sure that there is enough information in all of this to reconstruct the crime. That's the way I handled it in <em>Mystery of the Vorgo</em>.</p> <p>However, I'm aware that Seth Ben-Ezra, author of <em>Legends of Alyria</em>, has a very effective little game out there called <em>Dirty Little Secrets</em> which approaches the Noir Mystery genre from the other end: the players create characters and facts along the way, led by mechanics which ultimately determine who committed which crimes. I've not played it, more's the pity, but the concept is intriguing.</p> <p>Our idea also suggests that the player character, a Verser from another universe, is neither perpetrator nor investigator nor victim, but an outside interested party who might or might not be suspect (as the investigator told Peter Davison's Doctor in The Black Rose, just because you're from another planet does not eliminate you from suspicion of murder--it just means we're a lot less likely to find your motive) but in some way has an interest.</p> <p>Not so long ago I ran a murder mystery in Harry's Mary Piper Alpha setting; but then, Harry was a Junior Investigator in the Durnmist City Watch on duty at the time the murder was reported, and so he was roped into the story already. With that one, too, I had most of what happened worked out before he reached the scene of the crime, and thus it was easy for me to answer his question by thinking through what I knew had happened and occasionally rolling the dice to determine whether the outcomes made things easier or more difficult (e.g., did someone involved in the fight drop his weapon such that it is unclear who held it?).</p> <p>I was once in a game of twenty questions in which the person answering the questions did not know what the object was but thought he would answer randomly yes or know and see what object fit the answers. In the end, there was no such object, and that's the risk of any mechanical method of running the mystery: if the resolution is mechanical, it might yield an impossible result (Peggy killed Sue at two o'clock in the afternoon, and was herself killed by Chuck an hour earlier). You have to have some way of making the outcome plausible.</p> <p>Also, one of the tropes of such mysteries is often that the detective knows some seemingly irrelevant bit of information that solves the case. This trope is particularly challenging, because if the player is to solve the case he has to be made aware of the seemingly irrelevant information without being clued to the fact that that information is critical to the solution.</p> <p>I will mention Ron Edwards' Moving Clue at this point, a mechanical solution to the problem that arises in mystery games when the players fail to ask the right question of the one character who knows the critical piece of information. By the moving clue, the critical pieces of information are known by one of the characters likely to be questioned, but the referee does not know which one--he only knows that one of them knows, and when the player character asks the right question it will be addressed to the right character.</p> <p>That, anyway, is a start on the problem. I need to turn my attention to a lot of other threads tonight, and perhaps some others here will contribute to the project with ideas that will make such a scenario workable.</p> <p>--M. J. Young </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-magica-materia-manifold#post-23575 Fri, 24 Sep 2010 01:33:57 +0000 Tadeusz 23575@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>On the Isle of the Dawn, there has been a steady stream of magic users doing many things. And as time passed, the skills of those users increased. When any of the Ten Cities came up with a better way of doing things, a way that increased the power, wealth, and prestige of a city, everyone else joined in, or that recalcitrant city got taken over.</p> <p>There were times when certain classes of people stood in the way of Progress, when some nobles thought that because they were nobles they knew better than the common sort, or some who clung to ancient rights that limited their military service, but in the comptetive swirl of the Isle, such did not last long. So too, corruption and weakness were purged.</p> <p>Being a ruler in this land was always a matter of walking a high wire in a high wind that could change without notice. It bred tough men and women with flexible souls, and hardnosed survival skills and a deep understanding of how cities work.</p> <p>Waves of change washed over the Isle as the centuries rolled on. And as it did, schools sprouted, and companies were formed, and the understanding of magic became both deeper and more widely practised.</p> <p>Until finally Newman the Wizard summoned the first spirit bound to matter. It was a dumb creature, hardly brighter than a rat, but it could move matter in a simple trained pattern tirelessly. Newman used it to chop wood for his wood stove when he could not be bothered to summon a fire spirit to warm his house.</p> <p>Over the next century, a great increase in wealth and health surprised everyone. Newman's spirit/matter creature soon had 'friends' and these friends were brighter than the first. But mostly they were stronger. A revolution in Materia Magica took place. Now everyone could own a wagon pulled by a spirit bound to the wagon.</p> <p>And then one day a clever wizard asked if you could make a Materia Magica that could summon other Materia Magica and could train them in their endeavours. It turned out that humans were needed. Unless the magic was done to an impossible degree of precision, you needed a human mind behind it.</p> <p>But, the wizard needed did not need to move the items or say the words himself. All that was needed was for him to observe and consent. So now one wizard could do the work of a hundred wizards who each could have done the work of a hundred wizards from a century ago.</p> <p>And it was thus easy for a singular King to rise above the others, and to impose his city's Ancient Rights of Man upon all for he grasped the benefit that this could have for war, and for the speed of war faster than anyone else. And so in a short campaign, he became the High King,a nd then passed his crown down to his son, and then grandson.</p> <p>Prices for everything fell through the floor. Now, everyone could have everything they needed and more for the amount of money a day's wage brought in. And then as the Laws of Economics say....when you double the amount of product you produce, you reduce the cost to make it by 20-30%. Prices went down again as the new Materia Magica Manifold Products Companies swung into high gear. People started losing jobs right and left. But their relatives had enough to pay for themselves and the out of work folk. And then the amount produced by the MMMPC's doubled again, and again until pretty much everything on the Isle of Dawn that was produced was produced by the MMMPC's.</p> <p>What had cost a hundred denarii now cost twelve denarii.</p> <p>But the only people with jobs were the wizards employed by the MMMPC's.</p> <p>At this point, the people went to the King, and asked him to take money from the MMMPC's. He smiled gently.</p> <p>"My people, the MMMPC's can easily move overseas and ship their products to us. Far better to have them here."</p> <p>"You could stop this."</p> <p>The king nodded in agreement and drew his sword.</p> <p>"I will."</p> <p>The crowd murmured in approval.</p> <p>"First you have to swear to me on bended knee that you forego your Rights under the Ancient Compact, what few you have left. You have to swear to me that you will obey my every word as if it came from an angel. You have to swear to do my bidding without dissent. And you have to swear to do the same for my sons and all that follow."</p> <p>"That's the ancient tyranny." One man objected.</p> <p>"Aye, sir, it is." The King replied. "But that is what you have asked for."</p> <p>"But we need food for our children."</p> <p>"Indeed you do. How did you get food before the coming of Newman's first Materia Magica?" The King asked and he pointed at someone in the checked red and blue of villager of the deep woods.</p> <p>"Well, we, not like the city folk, we hunted the great cats, and the deer, and gardenned."</p> <p>"Just so."</p> <p>"But our children." The People cried to the king, not understanding. He sighed.</p> <p>"You would have me steal food from him who earned it by his labor? Is that just?"</p> <p>And the people were abashed before their King.</p> <p>"Let us sit down to a feast for I know you are hungry." The king said, and so they sat down to a feast and made merry. And at the end, the King stood and motioned for silence.</p> <p>"Do you know how much this feast cost me?"</p> <p>The people shrugged, and some started to count the loaves of bread, and make estimates in their heads.</p> <p>"Nothing." The King said.</p> <p>The people stated at him in surprise.</p> <p>"I took some of the royal money for upkeep of the castle, and had my new 'servants' plant for me. I had them weed for me. I had them take the corn they grew, and give it to my chickens which I had also bought. They gathered for me. They ground the wheat into flour for me. And they cooked the meal as well for me and you." He clapped his hands, and spoke several words in a magic tongue which all recognized as magic use was as commonplace as owning a bed, and everyone had a bed even if they had to share it with a brother. </p> <p>And in walked and floated a dozen Materia Magica.</p> <p>"And now they will clean the table for me."</p> <p>The King smiled.</p> <p>"I see. But my King, I cannot afford a dozen...."</p> <p>"I am the King, and have a large staff, but you have but a house. You can afford to buy one, even if you must go into debt for it."</p> <p>And so it was that the people began to buy Materia Magica. And the prices for things went down even further. And then the most skilled wizards came to the King.</p> <p>"Mighty One." They said in their very expensive robes that even the King could not afford. "We bring a grave problem to you. There are many households, perhaps one in ten now, but growing in number, who strike at the economic strength of your kingdom."</p> <p>"Dear me,sounds serious." The King said.</p> <p>"Yes, O King, we of the MMMPC's fully support you, but these 'individual artisans' as they call themselves keep us from fully exploiting the marketplace."</p> <p>"I cannot get involved in the economic struggles by favoring one side or the other." The King replied. "If you're not able to keep up, then I'm sorry for you."</p> <p>The wizard huffed a bit. "O King, its not that we are unable to keep up, its that these people...they won't buy. We can offer them goods at cheaper rates than it would take to make them, and still they won't buy."</p> <p>"Cheaper than free?" The King said skeptically. "Now that I'd like to see."</p> <p>"But eventually their Materia Magica will grow homesick and tired from long labor and flee home. Our processes are more efficient, we have better Materia Magica that do the same job in half the time with much less strain on the spirit." the Wizard explained.</p> <p>"Ah, but can't they just get their Materia Magica to make another of its same kind, or slightly better if one of them comes up with something. And then release the tired one to its home?" The King asked looking puzzled.</p> <p>The Wizard bit his lip.</p> <p>"Well, in a way...but, y'see..."</p> <p>"Speak up, man, yes or no." The King said briskly.</p> <p>"We find ourselves with occasional over supplies of product."</p> <p>"You could give that away to the poor." The King replied.</p> <p>"But then the poor would have no incentive to work." The Wizard shot back. The King shrugged.</p> <p>"We need to sell this over supply." The Wizard pointed out.</p> <p>"Well, you could sell it for cheaper." The King replied. "I know you're making a bit on the sale. Not much. You're practically a commodity now. Everything is practically a commodity now. Razor thin margins of profit. Its a tough world."</p> <p>"You suggest we improve and sell for cheaper." The wizard said accepting the sympathy. "But that only pushes us further down the slope. Eventually we reach the point where one denarii can buy a week of ease, and our margin of profit is .01%. And then it will just keep getting worse and worse."</p> <p>"Yes?" The King said blankly looking at the Wizard to make a point.</p> <p>"We'll be poor!" The Wizard exploded.</p> <p>"Ah, not my problem." The King replied.</p> <p>The Wizard paused.</p> <p>"O King. We had thought of a good plan. Beneficial to all."</p> <p>"Ah, excellent, I so enjoy when someone else does my job for me. Leaves me more time to clip flowers in the royal gardens." The King said with a smile. The Wizard gritted his teeth and went on.</p> <p>"You see, many cannot afford the current rates. They get by on charity, and some do services for those with money."</p> <p>"Services?" The King asked innocently.</p> <p>"Yes, they hold doors, soothe horses, march in front of wizards holding banners high, that sort of thing."</p> <p>"M'kay. I used to have to hold a banner for my father when he was King and I was but a Page." The King reminisced. "I still remember dropping the banner on the head of the Merketi Ambassador because I fell asleep in court. Heh. My father whipped me with his belt until one arm got tired and then he shifted to the other arm. But it was worth it, the way that old windbag stopped his dreadfully long speeches ever after whenever I started to do a fake yawn."</p> <p>"Um, right, your Majesty. Just so, an honoured position. We had thought to make these positions permanent. We would take certain of the poor into our households and feed them and in return they would serve us, for a set number of years. You see?"</p> <p>The Wizard smiled hopefully.</p> <p>"Oh, yes, of course. Why didn't you say so? You want to reinstitute feudalism with yourselves as the Great Lords. And ingenious scheme if I do say so myself."</p> <p>The wizard waited until he could wait no longer.</p> <p>"Well, your majesty?"</p> <p>"What?" The King asked absently.</p> <p>"The ah 'feudalism'?"</p> <p>"Oh, that's against the Ancient Rights of Freemen that I have to sign before I take up the crown. Terribly sorry. No can do."</p> <p>"But...?" The wizard bleated. The King looked sadly at him. </p> <p>"I can't help you. The market is going to trim your power one way or the other."</p> <p>"We could stop you." The Wizard snarled.</p> <p>The King's eyes turned glacial.</p> <p>"I'd advise complete silence for a moment, sir wizard. I am not my grandfather who conquered this island in a year and a day, but I am perfectly capable of taking out a couple dozen Mechanique wizards with my war wizards and my enchanted sword, and chopping any survivors heads off in the courtyard."</p> <p>The wizard turned pale, and got down to his knees and began mumbling fervent apologies.</p> <p>After a minute the King walked over to him,a nd helped him up.</p> <p>"Trust me, my friend, I understand. You feel deserving because Fate smiled on you."</p> <p>"But..." began the wizard.</p> <p>"And you worked extraordinarily hard, and took great risks for it. But none of that is a promise from Fate that you will always succeed. But you thought it was."</p> <p>The wizard sagged a bit as he stood next to the king.</p> <p>And then he buried his face in his hands.</p> <p>"What should I do? No one can afford our products. You could make the workers not be able to buy our robots, and that would solve..."</p> <p>The King shook his head, and the Wizard wept a little.</p> <p>"You need to begin conceding the market to these village artisans. They will provide the food and the drink, the house and the clothing for each home."</p> <p>"And so we will have nothing. However, we can have a few good years selling Materia Magica to them. Maybe we can survive as research facilities for high level magics."</p> <p>"Or you can take your great wealth, and begin to buy up strips of land. This will push money back into the economy which will then come back to you. And those strips of land you can cover in marble, and call them roads. Toll roads."</p> <p>"But..." The wizard said and could not find an objection.</p> <p>"The ordinary village artisan could not do that job. Its too big. He's still free to take the dirt roads, but his wife will want to ride in smooth comfort. He will pay you money he gains from his Materia Magica which he gains because perhaps his tomatoes are the best on the street." The king outlined his idea.</p> <p>"And there are other jobs we could do. Not just an Island wide toll road superhighway. We could build giant ships to take our excess to other lands. And we could build a stairway to the Moon."</p> <p>The king nodded in agreement. After all the Moon was only a hundred miles up so the theorists said.</p> <p>"And I bet those druids who have been complaining about how we dump acids from making Materia Magic into the sea and poison the coral reef would be willing to pay for us to strain the ocean...which..." The wizard stared.</p> <p>"Straining the ocean of toxins is a big enough job to even faze you, I see."</p> <p>"Yes, yes it is. But you know, we could do it."</p> <p>"As it happens, the chief druid is in town this weekend. Why don't I set up a meeting for you with him." The King said with a smile.</p> <p>"Yeah, yeah, that'd be good." The MMMPC said with a faraway look as he imagined a glorious future. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/worldseedling-psionic-world-a-stained-glass-mind#post-5599 Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:24:40 +0000 Tadeusz 5599@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>This falls into the category of "Worldchangers" like Crazy Night for Splinter City, or having an alien invasion. You can use it to drop into a world, and change the meaning, even temporarily, of the world.</p> <p>George F. Will is a famous soft conservative pundit who wrote of having a stained-glass mind. I'm going some place much darker than he meant with that phrase.</p> <p>This may work better with female verser players, and male npc's, but I'm going to try to write it the other way because most players are male.</p> <p>Upon tracking down a verser, you come to a hospital. Inside, you go to Long-term Care. The verser is soon being moved as they have lapsed into a coma. The nurse would tell you, if she can, that the person is of interest to the police. They have over a dozen different ID cards. Some seem valid, while others are clearly jokes. But all have different names. And the person was 'heavily armed, which didn't help them. They got rolled in an alley.'</p> <p>To help the GM what happened is thus: the verser arrived, and thieves spotted her watch, and so before she could wake, they hit her in the head. She slipped into a coma.</p> <p>However, when the verser approaches her, she will, in her confused way, reach out for help. This can be the result of a botch (well it almost has to be a botch as its not what she's intending. But that allows one to run this scenario in a world with a low psi bias.)</p> <p>The character sees her hand move, and then feels spinning, disoriented, feels like they are coming apart. The verser may have versed, he should feel.</p> <p>The verser wakes in a thornbush. He is in an expansive and high-walled English schoolground. There are a wide array of students attending.</p> <p>tHere's where it gets weird...he's inside the coma paitient mind, and everyone he meets is a partial of the body's owner.</p> <p>This is meant to be ago </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-triannia#post-9877 Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:41:19 +0000 Tadeusz 9877@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Triannia, if you're imaginative like its schoolchildren, are is roughly a reverse triangle. The broad and placid farming West, the terrifically hillly, coastal, island strewn Upper West dotted with mines and farming villages, and the Near East with small hills and creeks which led to the Craftsman Revolution.</p> <p>Eventually corporations came to this world, but later than in others, and in more limited form so that most industry is family business.</p> <p>The Kings Overseas, a varied group, had planted colonies on Tritonsland, the continent, and the logic of union had soon become apparent. This drove wars and peace councils until it was finally achieved, and the last of the Kings Overseas were thrown off not much later. </p> <p>The parliamentary democracy with a figurehead king expanded, not always peacefully.</p> <p>Currently, it uses light rail, and busses for most transport, and its moving rapidly over to telecommuting.</p> <p>But not all things are well, and a good part of it is the Wainchester family.</p> <p>Kenneth Wainchester provided rotgut to a local tribe which weakened them economically, made them riotous and troublesome, and in his broadsheet, the Wislington Tribune, he called for their extermination. He became rich and noted, and the tribe got wiped out.</p> <p>His son, Wainchester the II, started a war with a neighbouring country by inflaming uninformed passions with half-truths, and out of context realities, and dangling the prospect of wealth in front of the young and disenfranchised (made so by the economic system he supported with its Cliques.)</p> <p>His son, Wainchester the III, pretended to sweet reason, and like his father, made and broke parliamentarians for amusement. In the Long War with Regulander, a militaristic, expansionist power dedicated to overthrowing the natural order of things, he published the schematics for the Great Towers, defensive fortifications at the entrance to the harbors of the Upper West.</p> <p>Most scholars think this extended the Long War by five years, and led to the Regulander invasion of Dnu-Rian-Salo. This invasion led to the deaths of three million Saloo by starvation as deliberate governmental policy out of ten million. However, on the plus side, it confirmed that the Tribune-Gazette empire of papers was more powerful than the military and security forces of Triannia.</p> <p>His son, Wainchester the IVth, brings us to the present of this remarkably newspaper family. IVth ain't that bright or clever like the First, or charismatic like the Second, or smooth like the Third. But he does have a grand viciousness that exceeds them all.</p> <p>His enemies gather as the Web spread information cheaper than he can. His family always had enemies. Some are mere competitors. Others hate him for what he is. There are rumors of an ancient native curse by the last shaman of a dying tribe. His position is weakening quarter by quarter. Fewer and fewer are those who subscribe, and the High Minister of Justice is beginning to make noises about checking his accounting. Lions begin to seek him out, and the jackals circle.</p> <p>The greatest newspaper empire in the history of the world is going down. It may take a decade, at most two, or it might be next year. But the facts are inexorable.</p> <p>Time to change the facts.</p> <p>An invesitigative reporter on his staff found a scientist working with the government on a project for the military since abandoned when the military observed how dangerous it was. He already knew how useful subliminal messaging could be (it was dangerous because if caught, it was mandatory jail time.)</p> <p>Combine these two facts, and ....</p> <p>Zombies.</p> <p>Not real zombies, but the chemical inspired a savage anger and depression with serotonin in the brains of the unaffected the only relief. The drug made people slow, superstrong, untouched by pain or shock. The subliminal message gave them a target.</p> <p>Anyone who did not smell of the drug. </p> <p>That is, anyone who primarily got their news from the Web.</p> <p>The drug is supposed to wear off in a week. Its uncertain if it will.</p> <p>And the fact that the fourth line in the shaman's curse is ...</p> <p>&quot;And before the end of the wicked, the dead will walk.&quot; is pure coincidence....</p> <p>Wainchester the IVth hopes to wipe out the Web readers, and then use his newspaper power to ban the Web afterwards by blaming the insanity on the Web ('too much computer screen energy waves provokes insanity in those near them'). </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-idea-gates#post-18804 Thu, 06 May 2010 19:27:51 +0000 JTM 18804@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>World idea: Human Gates<br /> This was partially inspired by the strategy game Sword Of The Stars, which shows off the effects of various types of FTL drives on setting by having 6 races with distinct ones, and the superiority of sublight ships to otherwise equal ships that must make room for FTL drives. It got me thinking about the idea of a setting shaped by the nature of FTL technology.<br /> It requires serious fleshing out at the moment, and hopefully some way for grand politics to end up involving the verser. Preferably more ways than just a massive trans-gate war with an alien race.</p> <p>General concept: Humanity has expanded to the stars, ruled by the military dictatorship of the Earth Defense Force and centering on a network of massive gates, built by humans at vast expense and each taking decades and the metal content of entire planets to construct. In addition to the immense gates, FTL is possible with hyperdrive, but ships must dedicate a large percentage of their mass to the drive system and require massive quantities of fuel. The mass requirement for hyperdrive means intra-system sublight ships are immensely more powerful than comparable FTL ships and combines with higher technology to give the EDF an entirely insurmountable edge when defending gates against human rebels and alien invasions. However, beyond the immensely secure gateworlds lie systems which are less safe but also more free. The EDF is not so oppressive that people flee the gateworlds whenever they have the opportunity, but many choose to live on other worlds, feeling that freedom is more important than security. The EDF permits those who make that choice to do so freely, feeling that it is better for “romanticists” to live as they choose than to force them to remain and risk igniting a civil war. The EDF could probably win any civil war, as patriotism among fleet recruits is high, and people working on starship weaponry are screened for loyalty, but the Commander In Chief would rather avoid that.</p> <p>I’m planning to try to hit a very particular note with the oppressiveness of the EDF. It needs to be high enough that a noticeable chunk of the population will want to leave to get away from it to an extent, though mostly not going totally beyond control and protection. However, it needs to be low enough for a majority to want to live in gate systems or systems only moderately less controlled than gate systems. It’s perfectly fine if you don’t end up wanting to live there, but you should probably be able to imagine people accepting it.</p> <p>I’ll eventually want to actually write up more about the fleet and what ship weapons exist, but at the moment I only know that I want the EDF to include medium warships that, due to technological advantage, can nearly go toe-to-toe with enemy dreadnoughts. The EDF will also be building ever more powerful dreadnoughts, and already have a plentiful supply of them. This is actually mainly born out of not wanting to abruptly be unpleasantly surprised by the hypothetical firepower of alien gate empires, but most people with clearances below top secret figure it’s just wanting shiny new toys to look impressive.</p> <p>8 types of systems. <em>Note: the EDF itself divides worlds into these categories and officially acknowledges the less controlled nature of the outer worlds, though not the ruthlessness of systems with gates under construction</em></p> <p>Gate system- massive population, industry. Heavily fortified by giant sublight-only capital ships, main base for all fleet elements in the area. Absolutely no interstellar black market, EDF searches every ship entering. Minimal crime, always swiftly punished. EDF surveillance is omnipresent. No attack has ever succeeded, few even try anymore, the sublight ships are nearly twice as powerful as equal-sized FTL warships, equally fast in normal space if not faster, instant reinforcement from every other gate system, massive orbital forts all protect the planets in the system and the gate.</p> <p>Gate under construction- huge military presence of most powerful FTL ships, massive industry strip-mining planets. All industry focused on building more fortifications and the gigantic gate, military protecting only the gate and mining operations. Local civilian population highly variable, from none to a few billion. Potentially not very happy, but military controls orbitals and does not tolerate rebellion. Even complete obliteration of a planetary population considered acceptable in order to protect the gate</p> <p>Core- no gate, but still high population(5-12 billion, generally) and industry. EDF enforces laws, generally always a large fleet presence, but not the hundreds of warships present in a gate system. Black market exists, though the EDF attempts to crack down on it. Rarely successfully attacked, but it has happened. Still generally considered safe from bombardment, minimal violent crime, though not as low as gate systems.</p> <p>Frontier- population varies, generally single-digit billions, sometimes high hundred millions. Industry highly variable, not as high as core. Military presence not constant, but always a small garrison in-system and on-planet. Calls for assistance answered by available fleet forces, but not a high priority, loss of these worlds to outside attack is not frequent, but it does happen and EDF command doesn’t lose too much sleep over it.</p> <p>Rim- Population highly variable, though always over 100 million. No permanent EDF forces unless serving as a fleet base for a higher strategic purpose, and generally end up promoted to frontier or core in those cases. EDF forces do move through them, but generally EDF law is only enforced in sight of it’s soldiers. The planets are largely self-governened and generally have to rely on their own forces for protection. Calls for reinforcements might eventually be answered, but generally not in time if at all. Total conquest of a rim world by an outside power is far more common than with inner worlds, but the constant surveillance and oppression of a core world is entirely absent.</p> <p>Uncontrolled: Planets inhabited by humans that are completely outside the influence, protection, and aid of the EDF. No set guidelines. However, none of them posses a gate. Attempting to construct one would be virtual suicide for any planet that attempts it. The EDF will not permit any other human organization to possess a gate, and creating one would provide a conduit for home fleet to attack. EDF forces only enter uncontrolled systems to build a new gate, to take control of the system and integrate it into a higher category (generally rim, at first), or to hunt down someone who has been foolish enough to anger them. Local forces generally cannot resist a major EDF fleet, and even ones that can rarely dare.</p> <p>Alien: Catch-all category for alien controlled worlds. They vary widely in population, industrialization, and military power, as well as level of control by the government. Some of them are parts of larger empires, though none so far encountered can truly threaten a gate system. A number of alien worlds are conquered frontier or rim worlds. A small number are former core worlds, though many conquests of core worlds are short-lived.</p> <p>Alien Gate: None directly encountered by the EDF, but some outer worlds have detected signs of one or more active gate systems other than the human one. None are in range at present, but the EDF is already making preparations for a war of defense or conquest over a gate network. All data relating to them is highly classified. <em>Alien gate worlds that might be reached soon are extremely similar to human gate worlds in general aspects, though the oppressiveness of the government varies. No other race close enough to matter has fought a trans-gate war. The extent to which they are preparing to fight one varies. Technology relative to the EDF also varies, but Is on about the same level. The EDF and all aliens so far encountered know none of this.</em> </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/war#post-22762 Fri, 10 Sep 2010 00:01:39 +0000 Tadeusz 22762@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>"It didn't have to happen this way." I said to the man on the other end of the video conference.<br /> "Yes, it did." He could not look me in the eye. "Your side would not back down."<br /> "Was it so wrong that we wanted a better world for our children?" I asked, echoes of other, of hundreds of other conversations running through my mind while in the forefront of my thoughts were memories of my children caught in war's grinder.<br /> "Yes, yes it was. The objective facts were that most of you lot were totally useless. Mouths with no skills, and no way to get the skills." He was angry now.<br /> "Perhaps, but trying to kill us with the biostrike..."<br /> "It was mercy. War was going to come anyways. We picked the time and the place to minimize disruption."<br /> My hands clenched out of sight of the viewscreen. His 'minimize disruption' was my wife being caught in a subway car while she and everyone else aboard coughed out their last breath of air mixed with blood. But I knew the arguement, and even understood it. Strike now with a plan to pick up the pieces, before anyone else got ready, and instead of a long-drawn out war you'd have a KO punch.<br /> Unfortunately for them, the war history of sudden KO punches was pretty grim, and the reprisals were savage. No people through history had responed humanely to a sudden bolt from the blue annihilatory strike. And it worked so rarely, mostly because the inherent contempt in it.</p> <p>One had to believe one was godlike compared to the enemy to contemplate such a plan. However, such belief structures were far more common than the actuality. Even the American Hyperpower at the height of its majesty could have taken over the world, but not in a bolt from the blue sudden attack. That gives you some idea of the power differential needed for a success for this tactic. If even the Hyperpower could not manage it, or the Romans, then you had to be very arrogant to think you could do it.</p> <p>So, they, the Ten Percent, the Needed as they called themselves, failed. Sure, they killed a fifth of the human race in one day. But Day Two dawned smoky and red. Combat bots are wonderful, and so is Next Gen Napalm, but even still, the Ten Percent were not as wonderful as they thought, and they did not understand what savage beast they had awakened. </p> <p>On Day Three, they thought to negotiate with the residents of Cincinatti. The Human (as they called themselves, explicitly condemning the Needed to subhuman status) delegates to teh truce broke the truce during the peace meeting and despite fierce rescue attempts by combat bots managed to eat the Needed alive. This woke the Needed up to just what they had done. The Human Race had cast them out, and was determined at any cost to do unto them what it had done to the saber tooth and the tyranosaurus rex. Complete extermination without hint of mercy.</p> <p>Of course, one might argue that the Needed had done that already. But there was a sizable difference between ordering up a genetic disease to attack humans, and bashing someone's brains in against a wall.</p> <p>So everyone over the age of eight volunteered to Kill Needed. And not too surprisingly if you thought about it, it turned out that most of th emilitary geniuses in the human population, of which I am one, turned out to be Human aka Not Needed. The Needed were a subset of Humanity, strained for certain skills of an extreme kind. Thus it was far less likely that they would have other extreme skills such as mine. </p> <p>I had been one of the lead players of WoW. My skill got me some minor perks, and my job as a bag boy got me food until robots took that job away. Then the Dole and free WoW, and playing with my family and going to church took the rest of my time, and the Dole provided food. But, the same skills that made me a prime player on WoW and a dozen other games turned out to have very practical applications in a genocidal global war fought by killer robots on both sides, and suicide bombers from our side.</p> <p>One advantage we had was that we were willing to spend ourselves. We did things to ourselves that no Evil Enemy would have dreamed of. We cut our brains open, and merged them with other brains, and did things that require me to dose up on sleepng pills to sleep at night.</p> <p>But, they had the robots. Most of them. And their bots could build more. As our bots could. But we were behind the curve. And while we kept advancing, they kept advancing just as fast.</p> <p>The Earth is churned, and beaten. I don't know how many nuclear weapons I've launched over my once proud and beautiful land of America.</p> <p>"It did not have to be this way." I repeated.<br /> "Why not?" He asked, and I was pleased at the slightest opening as we continued our danse macabre.<br /> "What was needed was, I don't know, an idea of some kind. Something bigger."<br /> "Hah."<br /> "You know what's the problem? Your side was liars. You threw out Reason in order to get rid of Faith. You could not think clearly, and so you could not formulate a vision."<br /> "You wanted us to save you?"<br /> "How about save yourselves?"<br /> "The Needed are going to win. We're going to prove that we were right, that you and yourse are useless."</p> <p>It was then that I gave up. It was not about logic. There had been other ways to get out of this trap we found ourselves in. The notion that a man was nothing but a mouth, when in a proper society, a man created more than he consumed, that vile notion had led us here to this doom. And now, I would show what any deep student of history knew. A war and its weapons flow from the heart.</p> <p>I flipped a button.<br /> "Goodbye, old adversary. I really wish you had skipped going to Yale way back when."</p> <p>And up from the ground in hundreds of thousands of small pockets rose the men and women of the Human Race. Each was clothed in a robot skin. Each had what we chose to call Power Armor. </p> <p>The extermination of the Needed took twenty hours. After which, I got very drunk. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/genres-multiverse#post-14761 Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:49:39 +0000 Tadeusz 14761@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Last I saw something like this was in Batman: the Brave and the Bold, but its common.</p> <p>Has a Small Multiverse that has each world full of the same dopplegangers, but with each world being either its own genre, or obviously connected.</p> <p>In BBB, Batman has Prime world (his), and Reverse Superhero World where the Joker is the top good guy, and Zombie World. (I've discussed this episode before, but I think I'm bringing out a new aspect of it. The One also had this to some degree, and MJ may have mentioned that.)</p> <p>Arguably, my attempts to add on a slew of Mary Pipers beyond Alpha and Beta is this.</p> <p>It'd be interesting to have some sort of cross-dimensional scavenger hunt vs. Gecko, Ltd. (Generic Evil Corporation, Limited.) and their Hunter Teams to find the McGuffin of Pan-Dimensional Dominance. Such a group of good guys or bad guys could be drawn to the verser because they have devices that track other dimensional objects, and they think he's part of the scavenger hunt.</p> <p>Another idea is that the Genre Multiverse is in balance, but one weight is enough to throw things off...in other words, the arrival of the verser is enough to doom a dozen universes, unless Something is Done.</p> <p>Basically, have a Noir, A Boring Suburbia, a Medieval, a Western, and about six more worlds, and create some sort of cross-dimensional adventure. It would probably be a lot easier to use clairvoyance on other worlds in the same genre multiverse (or it could be.)</p> <p>Anyways... </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-torchthrower#post-13789 Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:09:27 +0000 Tadeusz 13789@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I tried a couple of times to turn this into a novel, but I'm not yet a military SF author like David Drake or David Weber.</p> <p>By 2290 Anno Domini, it was almost universally acknowledged that that world was in splendid shape. Universities spoke once again of theology as the queen of sciences, and logic was revered. Private labs were financed as a point of pride by rich men, or by investors looking to make very big money. The New Reformation in art was producing works that were adored the world wide. Private charity had taken the place of governmental interference and coercion so that the smaller governments were known for their incorruptible officers and agents. Christianity flowered worldwide, and under its benevolent guidance, religious toleration was enforced and the sciences charged ahead.<br /> Humanity stretched from the research labs on Titan to the power taps on Mercury.</p> <p>And it had been this way for over a hundred years. The last time the world had seen this much peace and prosperity, the British Navy had ruled the seas. Nowadays, it was Americans in powered armor battle suits who stood behind their apparently unarmed young captains who guided things.</p> <p>But it was rare for such to be needed as the system ran quite well.</p> <p>But, as always, there were problems. One blessing or bane was longetivity research. The human lifespan for useful work was reaching a hundred fifty years. This made for subtle, and experienced leaders in all sorts of fields, and young, impatient workers who wanted to get out on their own, and do their own thing.</p> <p>There were various solutions to this. Some of the olders ones took up hobbies, and others moved their competitions into more subtle things that if you were below a hundred you might not even notice. But it was not enough. Others began to trickle through the insanely expensisve jump gate found out at the Titan research lab.</p> <p>A problem was spotted and a solution offered.</p> <p>They knew they lived in a Golden Age. But they also knew that such ages never last. Perhaps there was a way to extend it. Take some of the best and the brightest, and offer them a chance to do good work, in the future.</p> <p>Cryonics had been discovered.</p> <p>The Torchthrower Project took several hundred top-notch individuals, and froze them, and put them in a starship which waited in deep space with a patient AI to listen to reports sent to it, and to the radio signals streaming between the stars. It might take hundreds of years, but eventually a colony world would be well on its way to a collapse. Then the Torchthrower starship would fly to that world, wake its small army, and send them into battle.</p> <p>The grunts are young, eager, cooperative and they wear the giant power armor.<br /> The captains are a bit older, more seasoned, and they are cybernetic.<br /> The command rank are still fewer, and they tend to have direct access to satellite weaponry. "Sat One, foe is 100 yards to my right. Vaporize him." A hundred miles up, Sat One fires a hundred megawatt laser into the atmosphere and flash steams the target.<br /> The top leader is the visionary, the Bearer of the Sacred Fire, the oldest by far, and a hard as rock man. He is more like Moses or Elijah than some nice grandpa.</p> <p>The generations of soldier types are based on Generations Theory with the grunts being Civics, the captains Reactives, and the leader a Visionary. I'm not sure how to slot in the staff guys.... </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-two-stars#post-15000 Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:19:46 +0000 Tadeusz 15000@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Talitheria is lighted by the Green Gem and by the Amethyst Fire that orbit the hollow world at lunar distances and at one half of one Astronomical Unit, respectively. Each gem is five hundred miles in diameter, and sheds light on the planet below, and into the great crevasses in which the Shadowthings breed.</p> <p>Light has a strange quality here, almost touchable, and the shadows are heavy, and the light is green, or purple, or some combination of them both. Honest yellow sunlight and bright blue skies do not exist. The sky is dim, and so is the world to human eyes. The locals are humanoid, and have excellent low light vision.</p> <p>The interior of Talitheria is a place of great darkness where malicious things that cannot stand any light live. But some of their half-breed children can venture up out of the Great Crevasses into the light when it is most dim. The residents of the surface, the Halfworld, bar their doors on these no moon nights, or on nights in winter when the gems are not visible for the clouds.</p> <p>Such things as live in the dark are the great Charcoal Dragons, wise and malicious and hungering, but the merest touch of gemlight is enough to turn them to ash.</p> <p>There are two prominent forms of magic used by the Halfworlders. Each relies on the light of its favored gem.</p> <p>The Purple Magi bind magic to ritual, and to staves, and find mana in things touched by the dawnlight of the purple gem, and not polluted by the green gem.</p> <p>The Green Men are willworkers who if standing in the light of their gem may work magic by will and the word.</p> <p>Great and changing alliances were formed, and then ripped asunder. Kings tried to master these magicians through history with Green Towers and Purple Havens, and the long distant Emperor of the Gold was able to force both Green and Purple to live together in harmony by means of hanging those who disagreed with his royal edicts and burning their towers and havens.</p> <p>In the time of the Emperor, great advances were made on creating mirrored towers that would reflect the light of the gems down into the crevasses to protect the people, and even to make possible an eventual invasion and war of extermination. But one of the mage traditions chose treachery and alliance with the Darkness rather than peaceful coexistence. To hear both tell the tale, it was the other that was guilty.</p> <p>However, most serious historians who also have extremem bravery or means of anonymity agree that it was the Green Men who betrayed humanity. However for a sage to say this in public is to sign his own death warrant as Green assassins are likely to find him.</p> <p>After the Emperor, there were successor states, but neither tradition ever allowed a king to get that powerful again. There were wars as coalitions of Green countries warred on coalitions of Purple countries. And there were times when the Purple or the Green gave over a country to its opposing tradition in order for a restive king to be punished and brought low.</p> <p>But finally, a thousand years had passed, and the Purple Magi succeeded in casting a great spell that cost the life of their greatest arch-magi. They put out the Green Fire. Suddenly, no Green Man could cast a spell.</p> <p>This had the effect of reducing the light hitting the world which hurt crops. It also made a number of settlements unviable as they had required the Green Light to hold back the shadowthings from a nearby crevasse.</p> <p>The Coalition of the Purple rode forth, and smashed the armies of the Green that still existed, and a few towns that revolted and hid behind their walls were reduced to smoking rubble. But the year long campaign served its purpose. All of the Halfworld was united at the Council of Purple. The Twenty Nations were joined, and the Purple Emperor was crowned.</p> <p>Meanwhile, the shadowthings had advanced and grown bold. Crops were having difficulty. However, without the constant harrassment and expenditure of a war, and due to new trade routes opening up, the Emperor was able to stave off starvation, get newer low light crops planted, and drive back the Shadowthings into the great crevasses.</p> <p>Decades passed, and the world stabilized. Much of the power was divided between the Purple Havens, the permanent bueraucracy, and the Emperor's Men. It was not a very good system, but it was markedly better than what had gone before. The Purple Empire was becoming a prosperous nation, and children in the cities learned their loyalty to the Emperor first rather than loyalty to the individual nation they came from.</p> <p>But Fifty Years to the day, the Green Gem flared to life again.</p> <p>Most people rather liked the rule of the Emperor. Some did not.</p> <p>The Purple Havens are faced with a problem. In order to restrain a rogue purple mage, a criminal, all one had to do was to take away their stave and their mana filled bits and pieces, and shut a cell door in their face. </p> <p>But the Green Men are not so easily disarmed. They are creating armies, funding bandits, and striking in the night at the weak ones. A soldier might stay on the wall of his city for the night only to come home in the morning to find his wife strangled in her bed by vines.</p> <p>Some of the Purple wish to try to appease the Green, to grant them some rights, although not equal status. Others note the rumors of the Green Men consorting with the Shadowthings, and the few historians brave enough to say the truth, and lucky enough to dodge Green assassins remind the people of Green treachery. And they note that the only way to really stop a Green Man is to kill him. You can't after all chain a man in complete darkness for if you do, he becomes a Shadowthing. And if a Green Man has the green light, he can cast magic.</p> <p>A number of the Purple might be somewhat sympathetic to the outraged cries of the Green, but they point to history, and they point to pragamatism. The world is objectively better off they claim now that their is an Emperor again. Its a hard claim to refute.</p> <p>The Green Men insist on their rights, and their vengeance. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-of-hysterics#post-20589 Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:03:26 +0000 Tadeusz 20589@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Let me be totally politically incorrect, and make a world based on the vaporings of the farther reaches of chick-lit.</p> <p>Let's see how accurate I am in skewering this, and see if I can come up with a fun world.</p> <p>First, men and women are not equal. Men are oppressive frequently, and patronizing (almost always), but a typical woman, if balanced in skill and sense against typical men would be worth about three men. Women are vastly superior, if underappreciated.</p> <p>Also, Men are on Average cuter than in the Prime Time Line. A normal male is 1@8 in Animal Magnetism and Charisma. Some men, who are relatively average, may have a higher AnMag and a lower Charisma or vice versa. Usually a lower Charisma but a higher AnMag is a sign of a partially uncontrolled Beast Nature.</p> <p>Men, being lower life forms, still partake of the Animals, and thus some of them, the cruder, rougher sorts, have a not fully integrated Beast Nature. This comes out when they are made angry or lustful if they fail a Simple Willpower Check. The more stressful the situation, the worse the sit-mod is.</p> <p>When the Beast Nature roars, the Man shifts upward five points in Animal Magnetism, and gains the ability...Mentally Dominate One Female. Men are not aware they have this power.</p> <p>This explains why the common phrase 'you're so cute when you're angry' is heard throughout the land every day, and why great numbers of virtuous females surrender to teh depraved urges of Men at the office.</p> <p>The typical Man is 1@3 in Intelligence, and Intuition (although Doctors and Detectives have 1@7), and 2@1 in Strength. </p> <p>The typical Female is 1@8 in Intelligence and 2@1 in Intuition, but 1@3 in Willpower. She also has at a minimum two major traumas of a psychic nature, one stalking loser, and fifty pairs of shoes. Females who don't have this by the tenth grade are sent to special schools where traumas are arranged for them.</p> <p>Another category of Man is Loserman. He is just like Average Man except he has 1@5 charisma. It is possible that a visitng verser might be mistaken for one of these, and denied seating at the all prevalent sidewalk cafe's.</p> <p>The last category of Man is Evil Genius. This Man has 2@7 Intelligence and Intuition. This has led him to 1)Realize the innate inferiority of Maledom and strike out vengefully. OR 2)Create a richly detailed fantasy dream life of the wondrous life he and a certain Average Female could have together if only all the Average Female's friends and relatives died in horrible, bloody accidents.</p> <p>About one in thirty men are Evil Geniuses. It is lucky that they are so abrasive to each other or they could Take Over the World, but a typical EG hates the very presence of another EG and will seek to escape at the first opportunity, possibly leaping his Arabian jumper over the table with the darling little sandwhiches to gallop away into the sunset with a desperate smirk.</p> <p>In order to be calm and rational, it requires a Simple Willpower check for the first ten minutes. After that, the sit-mod gets more difficult for the next ten minutes, and at the hour mark, it shifts to a Difficult Willpower check. This effects everyone, even versers. However, Men, being emotionally stunted have a +20 bonus to being calm.</p> <p>Also, this world is a Bottom of the Funnel Verse. That is, anyone in another verse nearby, who gets even partially detached from their reality is likely to be sucked into the WoH. Thus Vampires, Highlander Scots with really huge swords and massive pectoral muscles, and pirates drop in and stay. This Funnel only effects men who are good looking. Versers tend to arrive by a different passage so this does not effect them.</p> <p>Men, being cute but dumb, and frequently well-meaning, have a hard time grasping the scope of evil of the Evil Geniuses among them. They therefore insist on things like Rule of Law and Probation when the proper punishment is Death by the Iron Maiden. This s not helped by the fact that women gave men the vote in 1920 (aka, they pretended they would consider Men's point of view when they made decisions) and the wretches have taken a joke literally and ran with it. It does not help that there are two good looking guys for every female, and thus females are totally outvoted even though a Man, being almost totally driven by his desires can be manipulated into voting the right way (but that's so tiresome to do your civic duty every couple years and make sure the President remains female.)</p> <p>And there you are, welcome to Chick-lit. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/the-passing-of-scientific-theories#post-20070 Mon, 21 Jun 2010 18:50:41 +0000 Tadeusz 20070@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>This is about creating an abstract cause of conflict in your game world. One one side are the defenders of the Ancient Way and on the other side are the Newbies. And adding fuel to the fires of ambition which had been lit by the torch of desiring understanding is some approaching cataclysm. The Ancients say to go through Door A, and the Newbies decry this, and proclaim not only the virtues of Door B, but the fact that Door A will 1)Waste time and/or 2)Make things worse.</p> <p>There are two types of changes in scientific theories. In one, such as the change from Newtonian to Einsteinian ways, Newton is still valid in most cases. Its only at the edges that Einstein holds sway.</p> <p>In the other, such as light being carried by the ether, the whole thing is tossed out. I'm going to reccomend the second for your world you're designing. Its more clear-cut and that is a good thing for such an ethereal conflict.</p> <p>Otherwise you're going to be spending more of your Imagination Budget explaining that Theory Y is mostly correct, but in this special Circumstance Theory Ya takes over. I suppose that would not be too bad, actually.</p> <p>"Well, George, its like this, werewolves generally rise on the full moon, and infect those they bite but don't kill. And in order to stop them, you have to hack their heads off. But we at the Institute for Magical Transformations have discovered that when a werewolf shifts because of extreme rage during the day and injures someone, and they turn, you have to also burn the ashes because mere headchopping ends up creating two werewolves, kinda like chopping an earthworm in two. Unfortunately, those reactionary yokels at the College of Wolfen Change Studies are clinging to their century old theory and ignoring this new wave of Rage Wolves which is threatening to depopulate the Korestiv Frontier. They are afraid that King Henry the Miserly will cut their yearly grant in half and give the other half to us so they ignore th eplight of th epeasants."</p> <p>So, yes, you can do this sort of thing in the right magically based worlds. If your High Mag Bias world is the sort where academicians gather to discuss the best way to create teleport spells or the most efficient method to disintegrate a master vampire, that is. </p> <p>Now one would think that scientific theories die when a contravening fact shows up. This is not true. What happens is that such a fact gets labelled an 'anomaly' and in effect what happens is the Theory's supporters trundle off to the Bank of Credibility and write an IOU from the future to themselves now.</p> <p>"I know this does not make sense with my theory, but polonium halos are a little mystery which will be resolved in due time." Thats your IOU.</p> <p>Of course, eventually, you run out of credibility at the bank.</p> <p>Unless of course, you think your theory is the end all of theories on the topic. In that case, go lay down and play soft music. Reality is disturbing, and we don't want to disturb you.</p> <p>You can also do patch work to theories which is like putting patches on pants with holes in their knees which people don't do much anymore. But there are limits to this too. Occam's Razor slices such complicated forests of explanations down to size. The scientific temperment prefers the simpler and more encompassing explanation, as it seems so does Reality in general.</p> <p>Theories are not just theories. They are often statements of politcs or philosophy as well. As such, it might not surprise you that the noted Geology Club that was formed to promote Darwin's new theories had not a single geologist on it. One of the groups that supported Darwin was the old aristocracy because they were on the defensive. Winds of change...capitalism, democracy, middle class power and such were blowing. And Darwin's theory admitted change all right, in fact, change was central to it. But the key point from the aristos point of view was that it was VERY Slow change. The aristoi would have been perfectly happy to have scheduled the big talk about social change in the Year Three Thousand instead of 1914.</p> <p>Let's go back to our werewolves.</p> <p>The Institute was founded after the preceding king built a nice, straight road to the Korestiv Frontier so that all those peasants could send corn to his growing capital city, and also more tax money. They had the worrisome habit of ignoring the king's tax collectors and upholding ancient and supposedly (according to the predjudgiced view of the city dwellers who ran the kingdom) backward and barbaric traditions. Like they yanked out the tongue of a liar instead of doing the decent thing and whipping him with a flail.</p> <p>This prejudgdice served the purpose of 1)warning city dwellers that the Frontiersmen could be different and dangerous. 2)gave an excuse for city dwellers to exploit the frontier.</p> <p>King Henry started the Institute because he wanted to enlighten the locals and create a local leadership class that was mostly on the same page as he was. It worked very well, with some opposition from locals who thought the 'edimiccated sorts' were snots and sell outs, but the 'edimiccated sorts' proved their loyalty to King and locals by making sure the locals got better deals and the King got his tax monies. Every one was happy except for the 'bloodsucking merchant scumbags' in the capital who had gotten used to exploiting the frontier by selling second rate stuff for top dollar.</p> <p>Unfortunately, King Henry really was miserly from their point of view. He wanted his tax money, and if that meant making the merchant houses working a bit harder, it was no skin off his nose.</p> <p>The economy boomed. Local Korestiv men became second-rate merchants (not nearly as wealthy as the capital, but still quite well-to-do.) Even the merchant houses in teh capital did well, but they lost status. Now they were merely primus inter pares instead of the only dog in the hunt.</p> <p>And then someone came out of the forrest. Its not true as some of teh more suspicious minded of the frontiersmen think that the city merchants summoned it. They are not that black-hearted, nor that visionary. But it was the first conscious of his power Rage Wolf. And he deliberately began to create a kingdom of Rage Wolves. This attracted other normal werewolves which he did not mind, but he did not tell them the secret of his power which he kept to his 'children' who were as werewolves are loyal to their 'sire'. Because he intended when the power struggle for dominance over the new wolf kingdom came to be holding the high cards despite what seemed like other more powerful werewolves joining him.</p> <p>This split of Rage and normal werewolves fuels the case made by the College.</p> <p>The College is older, and its done good things. Its supported by the city merchants now just as the rising merchants of the frontier support their old alma mater, the Institute.</p> <p>The College resorts to all types of logical fallacies and tricks. One of its favorites is 'do you believe a genuine master of the occult arts, or a peasant?' The college also refuses to debate on the frontier 'we don't want to waste the king's time. You can come to the court of the king.' And then they arrange all sorts of small tricks to weaken the speaker for the other side such as dousing the candles near him with elemental water so they won't light, and arranging for someone with the croup to sit near him, and giving him a pitcher of water with a crack in it. They also ask for one speaker to be sent, and then show up wth five speakers for their side. And a speaker who arrives a day early must be cautious as he has a far higher than normal chance to be robbed, pickpocketed, accused falsely of a minor crime, or challenged to a duel than is normal.</p> <p>The College proclaims itself a bastion of fair debate. There are two problems with this. 1) Its fair to those who are Important aka In the Club. Peasants are not important. In the club its 'my honored opponent should perhaps look at things another way...'; outside the club its 'this doltish fool with his simpleminded superstitions needs to be arrested for makiing a public nuisance not answered with an unearned respect accorded to true scholars.' 2)True decadence has set in. The College used to have robust debates inside the club. Now its more of 'flava of the month' and 'whatever the chairman thinks is wise is wise.' They still claim the title of robust debate, but no one debates because everyone thinks the same way. Intellectual inquiry is more along the lines of 'how can those simpletons think that way?' in reference to the Institute.</p> <p>Now, teh College is aware of Rage Wolves, but they are also aware that sending big bundles of cash to the Institute would hurt them directly, and that the necessary movement of the Royal Army to protect the Frontier would 1)drain the coffers of the city with a war tax. 2)stop weakening the frontier back to subservience. 3)probably strengthen the frontier as a lot of the city's war tax got spent on local to the frontier forts and food and stuff. The Frontier does not see this because they are focused on 1)The damage done. 2)the great cost of tax on themselves (it will be a flat tax which means the city will pay more in pure numbers, but all will hurt) 3)the likely result of war and looting in their homes as soldieers are not the best neighbours in a war.</p> <p>So the College works very hard to paint the Rage Wolves as an anomaly, or come up with a patch. There are also a number of brilliant young theorists of the city who are trying to come up with a brand new theory which will support the College, but at the same time be more accurate.</p> <p>This is another case of what happens when political need and science meets. The old theory is bad. The new theory is correct or so it seems, but it hurts those with the power. So what is desperately wanted by those with the power is a theory which will let them keep on, keeping on and be accurate enough. In the meantime, the power will protect the old theory as hard as necessary while searching for a new theory it likes. If it finds a new theory it will dump the old one super quick and jump to the new one.</p> <p>And this is a point about Free Enterprise and Government. A bad idea generally goes bankrupt. A bad idea supported by the government might require a total invasion and destruction of that government for the accounts to be balanced and reality to be asserted. But in the end, Reality is more powerful than a Lie. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/yin-yang#post-19588 Sun, 06 Jun 2010 00:57:52 +0000 Tadeusz 19588@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>The concept of Yin and Yang is that of two opposing and cooperative forces that need each other, and yet fight each other. I think its a useful concept in describing reality, but it works at a level less than the ultimate. This is seen in stories which have a Balance which the two sides need to achieve, or which is the goal of the truly wise. This Balance is the Ultimate.</p> <p>Balance is defined as Righteousness which is the Ultimate. </p> <p>An example of this is seen in D&amp;D where Balance=Nature. </p> <p>Now Multiverser is more sophisticated than D&amp;D because the Balance would be any sort of Neutral Hobby, not just Protecting the Environment.</p> <p>And D&amp;D is more sophisticated than Yin-Yang because it has more than just two choices, or one axis, but two axises. But thats not really the to the point here, so we'll slide past that.</p> <p>You can have a wide array of two choices.<br /> Law vs. Chaos (Michael Moorcock, L.E. Modesit Jr.)<br /> Populism vs. Elitism<br /> Man vs. Woman<br /> Fire vs. Ice<br /> Change vs. Stasis<br /> Barbarianism vs. Civilization<br /> Statism vs. Libertarianism<br /> License vs. Law<br /> Morality vs. Libertine</p> <p>There are a number of ways one can deal with this.</p> <p>One side can be represented by Orcs say. The Barbarian Orcs who worship strength, live in tribes, and eat their enemies and enslave the weak vs. the moral city building dwarves. This is a very clear moral choice. Monsters vs. Men.</p> <p>Or Cyberpunk where you have Street Samurai and Deckers vs. the Corporat Scum. This is a little more morally complex, but one side is clearly listed as Evil.</p> <p>Or you can have a situation where neither side is morally superior, innately, although in a particular case one side might be.</p> <p>And of course, there is the Appeal to the Balance set up.</p> <p>======</p> <p>One of the ways to deal with this is to have varying levels of dominance or victory for a particular side.</p> <p>=======</p> <p>Often the way to set this up is to have the two sides have a form of magic different from each other, and give no one else any magic.</p> <p>=======</p> <p>Lets do an example: Man vs. Women</p> <p>Monsters vs. Men.</p> <p>The Kujorn are brutal war-like monstrous humanoids who average ten feet tall, and are heavily armed with swords and armor. Their opposition is Humanity, and the most effective weapon Humanity has are the priestesses of Lor. With their magic they are able to cause the Kujorn to feel the pain they deal, and to lash them with magic whips, and to coerce them with vocal compulsion magic.</p> <p>========</p> <p>I think a Little Multiverse with an Entrance Effect with all the deities in charge of this Multiverse being Neutral, and with all the magic that is arcane being powerblocked (perhaps not about the arcane being powerblocked). And then you Yin-Yang all the universes. And for the Entrance Effect, you have any verser or other visitor arrives through the Prism.</p> <p>The Prism sends them to a universe where their skills will either result in learning magic faster, or will directly jump them into magic. In universes where magic is limited to a few by a powerblock (Only those with Quality X or Quality Y may do magic) the Prism will make sure they can do magic in the universe.</p> <p>A person with a biology degree might be sent to a universe where only people with a deep understanding of biology can do magic, or to a universe where anyone can do magic but all magic is biologically based so that they have a decided edge on others, or even stronger where they get half of their biology skill as a some sort of magic skill just because.</p> <p>There are a lot of different ideas here. Its not completely coherent. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-neo-isolationist-america#post-19693 Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:56:08 +0000 Tadeusz 19693@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>After President Gore won in 2000, there was a little grumbling from the Right at the really tight race, but right-wing pundits most comforted themself with how close it had been, and made public professions of support for democracy.</p> <p>There were certain signs in the wind of the attack, but the problem is that that describes any day since the early Seventies. A tidal wave of information comes in each day, and only some of its true, and most of its disorganized so that its true significance is hid. Its also true that a lack of imagination plagued some individuals in the bueraucracy, but thats almost a redundancy. Bueraucracy and lack of imagination.</p> <p>A few writers had speculated. Tom Clancy wrote a book about a Japanese kamikaze attack by a 747 on Capitol Hill by a lone nut driven to grief by a secret war between the US and Japan. An unimportant game designer and gamemaster named Eric Ashley had run a Champions game about some lunatic enviromental terrorists crashing a 747 into World Trade Tower One. Of course, the superheroes saved the day in his version.</p> <p>Clinton had passed on lobbing a Tomahawk at Bin Laden, and Gore didn't really get a chance to do so in this version.</p> <p>And then 9/11 happened.</p> <p>Rage gripped the nation, even stronger than in the Prime Timeline for here the Left was in charge, and the Right was willing to follow if the Left called for war. That was no different, but the difference was the level of enthusiasm from the party out of power. On the Left, it had been occasionally muted, or even outright antagonistic at first.</p> <p>Gore had no choice but to go after Afghanistan. He gave the UN some time, but mostly blew them off. War came, but the problem was that the leadership was getting disquieted. Sure it was fun to go to war, but that was not who they were. And frankly, they were not accustomed to thinking in terms of how to wage effective war. To put it bluntly, the Dems were even more clueless than the Reps at how to kill lots of people.</p> <p>Instead of a brilliant mix of bribery and SF forces and native tribes, the Gorites went in heavy-sorta. That is they sounded heavy, acted heavy, but weren't really heavy. This got them the bad side effects of heavy (annoyed population, bullying looks) without the advantages of being heavy.</p> <p>Things sagged. The media, as par for the course, covered for their side, and so Gore got a lot more leeway than a Republican would have. But something was fermenting. For one thing, the American people like to go to war TO WIN. Win or go home is their mentality.</p> <p>Paleocons who were isolationist because they did not want the nasty world influencing the virtous America began to strenthen their hand on the Right. And Paleocons don't much like Neo-cons or war hawks.</p> <p>On the Left, Blame America Firsters wanted to be isolationist because they did not want nasty America to affect the virtous world.</p> <p>Falwellites emphasized getting right with God first. Libertarians worried about the Patriot Act and how 'war is the health of the state'.</p> <p>It was a very weird coalition, but it had support near the top. Gore wanted to back out of Afghanistan. So, it was that in 2003, we declared 'peace with honor' and got out of Afghanistan after handing the keys to the 'President of Afghanistan', a nervous man who did not even control more than half his capital city as mayor let alone be a president.</p> <p>The Taliban came back quickly. And soon, girls were back to being executed in soccer stadiums.</p> <p>Muammar Quadaffi had been intimidated by W after Saddam got dragged out of his spider hole. And so the Libyan dictator had given up his nuke program. But that is not here.</p> <p>Here, Quadaffi continued to research, and Saddam took his existing bio and chemical programs and expanded them and sought nukes. He had bubonic plague and sarin nerve gas already, now he wanted an A-bomb.</p> <p>Without the 'flypaper strategy' of Iraq, ten more thousand mujaheddin helped in Chechnya and continued to bleed the Russians.</p> <p>In America a general retreat behind walls began. Despite Gore's disapproval and that of Big Business as well, several things were pushed through in a grand bargain.</p> <p>If America was going to lose its defensive depth, then it need really good walls. The Mexican border fence went up, and it went strong. Soon, the obvious point was realized. If you can't shoot, there is no fence high enough. Fences and barbed wire do not stop a determined foe, they only slow him down.</p> <p>So, Americans got out the machine guns.</p> <p>And America began building nuclear power plants at a rapid pace. And refurbishing the national electric grid. And installing nation wide fiber optics.</p> <p>The payment for all this? Military spending was halved. Most sailors and soldiers were still on duty, it was just that ships and tanks were sitting still, not using fuel in their waiting areas of docks or warehouses.</p> <p>Oil prices had jumped to five dollars a gallon. But then things got worse. The Strait of Hormuz is one of the busiest starais in the world. It is filled with oil tankers for Europe and Japan. Much of their oil comes through here.</p> <p>Its also an easy point for terrorists to latch on too.</p> <p>Oil prices jumped to Ten Dollars a gallon.</p> <p>Japan was panicking. Its Prime Minister publically chided the US Navy which was no longer guarding the Strait of Hormuz. He pointed out that WW2 had been in large measure been helped along by the Japanese desire for oil.</p> <p>"My people do not desire to freeze this winter. Will you do something President Gore?"</p> <p>America ignored them... </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-massosaur#post-19099 Tue, 18 May 2010 00:22:34 +0000 Tadeusz 19099@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Its spoken of in prophecies.</p> <p>"Its teeth are strong/ the tongue sups stars/Stars are nectar/Bars are long/Barred teeth crack worlds." The Prophecy of Questor Radcliffe the Solemn. (Mnemonic is alphabetical, PQRS.)</p> <p>"From beyond it comes, and when it rips open the doors, no man, though armed with the divas sword of fire shall stand against it. The stars will wheel from their orbits, and all flesh shall fail save for those who have their trust in the Merciful One. They shall be saved beyond the beyond where even the Great Wyrm cannot go." The Rydlles of Kot, priest of the Merciful One in the Reign of Haus the Overlord. (Mnemonic is Kot=Cot for Cottage and Haus=House).</p> <p>The Alchemist upon seeing it stood and stared for a week at the behest of the Star Emperor, and then he turned to the Emperor and spoke but six words. "You need to begin evacuating now."</p> <p>There are other possibly more destructive monsters. The Deathbird flies every ten thousand years in its local universe, and visits dozens of other universes to lay an egg. Each egg is a practical dimension bomb from which another deathbird may be born. Some speculate that that deathbird was a kind of Cosmic Clean-up Squad for used up universes that went awry with the entrance of evil into the Multiverse. Instead of dropping off an egg,a nd the egg waiting until the End of Time to blow, it blows when it jolly well pleases. Bye-bye dimension.</p> <p>And the Altairan Beast of Coils of the Galactic Supercluster of Hercules (mnemonic ABCGsH) has a spiral galaxy for its left eye and an antimatter spiral galaxy for its right eye. Its thoughts are passed through nerve connections formed of tachyon bursts and intergalactic jump gates, but it still takes a year for it to think "I" and another year to think "Want". Its body is formed of nearly five hundred galaxies, and its quite a bit larger than the Massosaur.</p> <p>But less deadly, and smaller, and still people from all over the Multiverse fear the Massosaur far more.</p> <p>Its length varies from One Astronomical Unit to One-Two Lightyears (Much of the data on this creature is uncertain, and was gained at the cost of heroic sacrifice). It has the head of a dragon with ten thousand mile long antennae sprouting by the dozen from its armored face plate. This head is sufficiently armored that direct contact with a galaxy of antimatter would seem likely to do no serious damage. No one has tested this theory as it seems to have the ability to change its atomic spin to become positive or negative matter at will.</p> <p>Its tongue is quite capable of sucking up a sun from the outer edge of a solar system. This is a tube which can extend at a minimum of a quarter lightyear.</p> <p>Direct nuclear explosions on its armored head do not seem to do more than slightly polish its rather dirty and encrusted hide. Some scientists claimed that it 'enjoyed the thousand missile strike we hit it with, as if it were a soothing scrub'.</p> <p>An attack on a dimension happens thus. The antennae penetrate into a dimension and various tests are conducted to make sure the targetted dimension is suitable for a Massosaur visit. One key factor is if the Bias level is high enough. The creature could conceivably be stranded if it landed in a dimension with insufficient bias for its powers to be consistently effective.</p> <p>Upon a positive report, the Massosaur exerts its 'teeth' which cause massive gravitational ripples, and rip a gate into a new dimension. This gate is typically at a minimum a planetary diameter. It then sticks its head in, and 'corks' up the hole with its head, and its neck ruff.</p> <p>A period of quiescence then, usually a couple weeks as the Massosaur recovers and looks about. It then sends its tongue to get a nice reviving drink from the local star.</p> <p>Perked up, it opens its mouth (about a month to two months after arrival, and two to three months to even a year since the antennae first checked in) and it begins to exert a very strong gravitational force along with other unknown forces. The dimension begins to shrink in size, and the gravitational forces move the stars, galaxies and such toward the maw of the massosaur. Eventually it all goes down the maw to be digested.</p> <p>Evidently it is far larger inside the Massosaur than outside, or some other effect is happening. The 'material' makes its way down, gets digested in each of the first four stomachs, and then squished down toward the end in the last five passages, and then excreted in a small bubble universe that the Massosaur creates.</p> <p>This bubble universe is typically the size of Jupiter, and it contains 99.99% pure entropy. It has -15@10 Bias across the board.</p> <p>The Massosaur is shaped as a series of connected oblong balls about the size of Earth, with a head twice the size of Earth, and a ruff about the size of a small gas giant. It has a spinchter half-sphere at the end. There are ten parts to the Massosaur, that is the head, eight body spheres, and one half-sphere.</p> <p>Each part is separated by a sub-universal boundary.</p> <p>Inside the gut of the creature, the sub-universal boundary largely acts as a filter to keep certain 'proteins' from the digestion where they are needed to be, and its fairly passable. On the surface of the creature, the sub-universal boundaries tend to require finding very difficult passageways amongst its ravine like armor skin.</p> <p>And since it has certain flying bees of enormous size that stitch these holes back up, you might need to find a new one every few months. The bees are symbiotic.</p> <p>Another symbiotic species is a rather incurious race of dwarfs who mine certain very dense rocks from its skin. This has the effect of 'popping acne zits' and relieves the creature of a minor irritant while giving the dwarves their primary metal.</p> <p>These dwarves can be found everywhere but on the head and the tail. The head is the 'warhead' and nothing is allowed up there. The tail is so vile that nothing can live down there.</p> <p>The RuffShield is the Ruff and the effect it has on the subuniversal boundary outside the Massosaur's skin. It makes it very hard indeed to break through. This Ruff also generates side lobes that make it rather hard to 'catch it in the flank' as it were by jumping to a side dimension and attacking it in another dimension further down its body.</p> <p>Each of the subuniverses (except for the tail) has the capability to merge into and hook into another universe. So the Massosaur is typically in nine universes at one time. This enables him to resist such tricks as the one where the Emperor of the Sun, a noble samurai, chose to do his duty and destroy his universe with a black hole device to also suck in the Massosaur. The Massasaur barely escaped, and would not have without its small claws along its sides dug into the fabric of other realities.</p> <p>This does mean that of the nine dimensions that see the Massosaur, only one gets eaten. Typically having the Massosaur 'pass through' does cause significant collateral damage with instabilities in the space-time continuum, breaking of ancient spells, collapse of warp capability over a galaxy, and such like.</p> <p>Also, the Ruff Shield has a side effect. People or things from nearby dimensions may suddenly find themselves on the exterior of the Massosaur.</p> <p>There are varied civilizations on the Massosaur. Its a hodgepodge. A starship crew here, an ocean-going raft society there, a hockey team here... Some have been there for decades,and even a few for centuries. Others got here last week.</p> <p>Each of the 'spheres' has the same progression. The sphere behind the head has 15@10 across the board. The next 14@10. And so on down to the one just short of the tail which has 7@10 across the board.</p> <p>One advantage of this type of creature is that it gives super-versers like the Alchemist and Michael Di Vars something to seriously challenge them. The Multiverse is vastly larger than even an uber-powerful verser, and you can just invent a new larger version of dragon for the hero to take down. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-rapier-wit-parallel#post-19063 Sun, 16 May 2010 22:36:50 +0000 Tadeusz 19063@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Note: I need to make something simple as my brain is getting tired.</p> <p>There is a parallel between the Courtiers who attended a king's court, and the Political Nation of the Internet Age.</p> <p>There are about 300,000 people in the Political Nation currently according to Dinesh D'Souza, political pundit. I'm one of them. These are the people who shape the political discourse in the nation at large. Of course, in the rankage of people in this group, I'm about 280,000th in importance with Obama being #1 and Sarah Palin or Rush being #2.</p> <p>The diffferences between the Courtiers and the Political Nation are that the Nation is two to three orders of magnitude larger than the Courtiers. Also, the Political Nation is spread out by the linking power of the Internet (although it is still heavily concentrated in Washington and NYC.)</p> <p>Courtiers are known for 1)Hanging out in the King's Outside Courts. 2)Dressing Nice 3)Passing the time of boredom in the outer courts with conversation and games and flirting with each other. 4)While being mostly men, still giving place to steely willed older females and nicely dressed younger females. 5)Getting in duels with each other with rapiers 6)Factions and clever arguements 7)Taking bribes to advance some side. 8)Poisoning others.</p> <p>For the political nation read 1)Hanging out on political forums on the Net 2)Um, okay, wearing Pajamas might not fit. 3)Games, chatting, and pron...that sounds like the Net. 4)Yup. The Net's rulers are mostly men, but pretty young girls have a definite edge. 5)Blogwars between certain bloggers. 6)well yeah. 7)If you were perchance a high level State Department official and you wanted to ensure a pleasant retirement you could do worse than chatting up the Saudi ambassador. 8) People do try to personally destroy each other on occasion.</p> <p>There are a lot of things in this world that are simply the latest iteration of a previous phenomenon.</p> <p>As to how to turn this into a world, ah, uh, I'll think about that. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-diamond-island#post-19009 Thu, 13 May 2010 22:35:52 +0000 Tadeusz 19009@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Note: I considered creating a bunch of names for this, but you run into the Imagination Budget. If I call this Yssallia, and give such a name for each kingdom and duchy it can become a bewildering cloud for the gamemaster. On the other hand, if I have too plain names, like Diamond Island, that has its own problems. So I guess I need to come up with stuff thats familiar enough and logical enough to be memorable, but odd enough not to be totally obvious.</p> <p>So...</p> <p>Diamondia Isles. </p> <p>The main island is kite-shaped, and runs 250 miles north-south, and at its widest 150 miles east-west. The Great Divide is a mountain range that runs from just above the widest part of the isle down to near the bottom of the 'kite'. It splits the island about two-thirds of the way over from the left. It seems to terminate at the Southerly Volcano, but in actuality there are a dozen smaller islands trailing from the Southern Delta. These islands range in size from a few square miles to an acre and are the tops of the undersea Divide Mountains.</p> <p>Holstad and Binyar are the two nearest continents. Holstad is the the west seven hundred miles, and Binyar to the south four hundred miles. They do not play a large part in the game as trade is quite limited. But these offer a place for the gamemaster to take the story if it finishes with the first trilogy set on Diamondia.</p> <p>Magic bias is 14@10. Tech is set at basic steam engine and gunpowder. Psi is set at 3@5 with very few people having any serious psi. Body is at Earth normal.</p> <p>There are a few orders of mystics back up in a mountain valley, a few entertainers and the odd person with a special talent who have psi, but psi is not part of the thoughts of the power equation in the minds of the rulers of Diamondia.</p> <p>Arcane magic is powerblocked.</p> <p> Holy magic is the province usually of the Man and the Lady who are the reigning deities of this world. Despite what most people on Diamondia believe, this is a partnership. Both are Alliance deities. They are called by numerous titles in varying lands: The Warrior and the Queen, the Bearer of Burdens and the Wise Eye, the Strong One and the Mistress of Fire.</p> <p>Male magic involves increased strength, speed, agility, and resistance to damage along with a skin that heals quickly from fire damage. Female magic is fire-based. It is considered more versatile and powerful. </p> <p>Female High Magi may cast a worded alarm into the sky 'my name is Serena, I'm at 24 High Lady's Way under attack.' that glows as fire...a kind of batsignal to the town guard. Most girls learn to do this by the time they are ten if they are in a clear area. More accomplished magi can do it from inside a house.</p> <p>Other female magics include Fire Shield which serves as an armor, Fire Flick for minor damage and starting campfires. Fire Bolt and Fire Sheet for more serious damage. Sense the Fire Within helps to find sentients in the dark. Fire Ward is an alarm spell. Fly by Fire launches the magi skyward on a trail of fire and is only used by the most powerful magi. Incinerate is another very powerful destruction spell. It causes the target to burst into flames from the inside out.</p> <p>Fire Magic is judged on two qualities. Control and strength. Casting fire magic drains the strength of the user and can kill if used excessively. Control is what a more powerful magi who is not just a magic user on the side as are most women, often seeks.</p> <p> The greatest magi often have the ability to use Fire Bolt and sear through the protective skin of a man to the muscle beneath to brand him with a word such as 'THIEF'. An ordinary burn will not scar and will quickly heal. An ordinary powerful magi could kill a man with that much flame but could not stop herself from killing. Its kinda like being able to use a grenade to do surgery.</p> <p>One other way to power magic is to Drink in the Fire. This temporarily with a small chance of permanently sacrifices some Wisdom and IQ and whatnot to the Fire Mistress. The end result is someone getting high and having a lot more fire they are able to throw. It can be real bad--imagine a heroin addict with a flamethrower. There are stories in the distant past, of Fire Ladies so powerful they could burn whole cities down. If this is true, no one knows how they did it although its clear from the stories that they were higher than a kite. Powerdrunk is what they call it.</p> <p>Drinking the Fire is seriously frowned on by the leadership of the various lands. A little bit in a very dire situation that is well controlled might get you by with a warning. More than that, and you're likely to find some local ruler's RogueKiller stabbing you in the kidney and using a Fire Shield around you to keep you from doing more damage as you die.</p> <p>The Southerly Volcano used to be a placce where yearly human sacrifices were made. A volunteer was tossed into the fire. Occasionally, they came back with high levels of control over both female and male magic. These Fire Prophets were here to tell the locals that they had offended their gods, and to get right, right now, or else. The or else generally involved some sort of massive destruction wrought by the Fire Prophet.</p> <p>Seven hundred years ago, the all male leaders of the Diamondias were involved in total war over what was ultimately stupid goals. A female Fire Prophet came back and began to instruct them. They resisted. She destroyed several hundred aristocrats in a clever attack that used a combo of male magic and female magic. They were meeting to consider how to kill her in Highton, the former primus inter pares of the Diamondias owned most of the north of Diamondia.</p> <p>She used strength to build a dam across a pass in the mountains. Then she used speed and strength with a fire shield to race through an encamped army surrounding Highton for the aristos protection. She used Strength and Fire Burst to blow the dam at the other end of the valley and drown the army. Now with Highton Castle on the heights, surrounded by water, she took a day to boil the water with fire and steam the aristos to death. This exertion killed her, but it also cooked the aristos. Now, Highton broken up into three kingdoms, Valeria to the west of the mountains, Montan in the north, and Driland to the east of the mountains.</p> <p>The gods were very angry with the leaders of Diamondia.</p> <p>The lesson people took from this was not quite the lesson the gods had in mind. Men shouldn't have power. The gods had more of 'don't be idiots and cruel' in mind, but the new woman rulers were far kinder and more clever than the previous band of idiots and so Diamondia settled into a golden age that lasted for nearly three centuries.</p> <p>Corruption, vendettas, secret deals, pride, inbreeding and rampant chauvinism have set in. Its not nearly as bad as it was during the Man Wars, the total war that the Fire Prophetess of Highton ended.</p> <p>The Matriarch of Montan is bordered on the north by the Pensvat Tribes who own the Pensvat Point, the most northerly part of Diamondia. On the east by Greavesland, which according to legend is the site of an ancient battle between a number of powerdrunk magi which resulted in a vast army being destroyed (hence 'graves'). Finding odd bits of armor or bones is not uncommon for farmers in Greavesland. Finding sapphire stones melted into gold bits is definitely uncommon, and such things are illegal to own, and must be turned into the Temple of the Mistress of Fire for a reward.</p> <p>To the immediate south of Montan is the eastern part of Valeria, but this mountainous region is more known for bandits and for rogue male magi and a single Order of the Clear Mind monastery (psionic workers) than anything else. Its also where Highton Castle stands abandoned.</p> <p>To the southwest of Montan is Coasla, on the shore, a fishing and trading league of city-states known for their high walls and strict rules on men. Between Coasla and the eastern part of Valeria is Grimwald.</p> <p>Most of the rain and wind comes from the southwest, and hits the Great Divide and dumps its water. Grimwald has abundant streams and forests. It logs and farms. However, its bound to the east by Coasla's ports who take a hefty chunk of each log as their price for passage, and Montan to the north which has one good river running from near Highton through Grimwald and up to the Pensvat Point.</p> <p>Grimwald wants and needs a bit a better deal. Coasla can't do it because those walls are expensive. Montan is willing to consider giving a better deal if certain promises are made. Coasla is inciting the Pennsvat Tribes to cause a ruckus up north to discourage Montan.</p> <p>Inside Montan, the Second Sister, aka the fourth child of the Queen, and the heir after the First Daughter is interested in getting the throne. Mom is ailing. Patricia, the First Daughter is known for treating men with courtesy even if not actually allowing them any additional rights. The Second Sister, Tonya, allies herself with the more chauvinistic elements of her society to press for the Ancient Ways which she interprets to include keeping the traditional deal with Coasla which is messing over the Grimwald. The First Daughter likes the Grimwaldese better, and is also aware that Coasla has no army to speak of. It has ships and walls. The Grimwaldese have a lot more people and a long border with Montan.</p> <p>She does not want to declare war on Coasla, but between her sister's maneuverings and the Coasla pushing the Pennsvat into causing trouble and the rumbles from the Grimwald, she might have no choice. Of course, Mom could name the Second Sister as Prime Minister which would vastly strengthen Tonya's position for a coup so Patricia needs to mobilize her internal allies as well.</p> <p>And truth be know, Marcus, the Second Child, is a military genius and a good man. But he's never going to be allowed near the levers of power because he's a man. He would probably be the best leader except everyone would scream mad fits if a King was put in.</p> <p>The Montan is a hilly land of sheepherders and small farmers with a few trade towns and one good transport river, the Wavr, running down the midst of it with a few mountains to the south before Valerian border is met. It is pleasant in the summer, and cold and wet in the winter as the seasonal winds shift to come down from the north.</p> <p>The typical man has no training in using his power, but some training in creating inhibitions and restraining his own power. It is taught that male magic must lead to powerdrunkness (it can, but thats a choice of the magi). Males are not supposed to use magic, and they are under the authority of the Lady in their life (all males have a Lady...Mom, wife, older sister...). Most men do develop a little magic over their life, some extra strength, and endurance, but nothing that is a threat. It just makes them better workers, better manual labor.</p> <p>Coasla was founded by a female who was seriously embittered against men. She started the practise of chaining men to their beds at night, and of not allowing men to testify in court. Criminal men are used as galley slaves in peace and war by the Coasla. If a ship is sinking, the Coaslans will evacuate the female sailors, but leave the chained men to drown. Encouraging the Coaslans in the point of view, a few men snap every year under this treatment, and go rogue and start smashing stuff.</p> <p>There are a dozen states, small nations, duchies, city-states, and such on Diamondia. Each has needs that someone else can supply. This often leads to stress, assasination, trade disputes and war.</p> <p>A typical army is composed of Men-At-Arms, infantry with shield and spear, and Lady Knigths with some Lady High Mages. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-formed-dreams#post-19061 Sun, 16 May 2010 21:33:11 +0000 Tadeusz 19061@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Note: I'm a bit sick, and one of the things that takes my mind off this (other than ice cream) is creating a world. So, I'm on a bit of a kick right now. Bear with me.</p> <p>I haven't done something psionically lately.</p> <p>World of Formed Dreams<br /> ======================</p> <p>Upon arriving, the verser sees a barren plain of jumbled rock with some water. Magic bias is at 3@1, and Tech bias is at 0@10 but Psi bias is 15@10. The verser will feel as if he is being watched, especially during the day. This feeling will rise at dawn, peak at midday, and sink toward sunset at which point it will drop to nearly nothing.</p> <p>There are mosses on rocks which feed the snails and beetles with the crawfish snacking on the beetles and the snails when they come down for a sip of water. Its a very simple ecosystem. On other parts of the world, there are similar simple ecosystems more suited to equatorial or subartic conditions and so on. The landing site is sub-tropical so the verser will have little difficulty sleeping outside except for enjoying the comfort of a rock for a pillow.</p> <p>There are a variety of rocks. The largest ones are the primordial granites which range from car sized to ten acre wide chunks, and then there are layered sedimentary rocks which range from TV sized to house sized. There are no erosion markings between the sedimentary layers which proves that the layers were laid down quickly in succession, not having time to erode between each layer being laid down.</p> <p>While it would be difficult to spot from the ground, there are radial patterns of sedimentary rock and slices in the granite (most of the ten acre chunks are such because of these slices). Much of these patterns are overlapping, and they are distorted by the passage of time and storms in the centuries since the multiple orbital strikes that wiped out the previous Tors civilization.</p> <p>The very simple ecology is what survived the war.</p> <p>These strike points created the small ponds that gather the local rainfall from the many streams.</p> <p>The Tors had a thriving psionically powered civilization with a decent Tech base as well. It became a Living Meme in their culture that the Old Ways were obsolescent, and the New Wise Psiman could handle all decisions just by virtue of his native brilliance. Problem was, the New Wisdom was not very wise, and it was more of pat on the back for lazy minds. "You're so brilliant, you don't need to study."</p> <p>What could have been stopped by expelling a couple dozen rich but lazy students turned three decades later into a global war. The varying sides used Telekinetic lightning bolts of enormous power by manipulating air effects in the atmosphere, and things got out of hand (well more so than complete global war), as the atmosphere manipulations provoked a global storm. The bolts blew holes in the topsoil, and the topsoil got blown around and turned into sedimentary rock by the water, and more bolts came and another layer of sediment was layed down. Eventually the global air storm killed everyone.</p> <p>However, there had been a worldwide net of black, crystalline rocks used in the psi-tech. This was broken up, and scattered by the bolts and the airstorm. One of the psi-techs was the use of pschyometry to create an overlay over material reality, a waking dream encoded in the black rocks.</p> <p>With thousands dying, the psi ether was greatly energized, and so there was a possibility that when someone died, they were able to cling to physical reality by connecting to the black crystal.</p> <p>Now a thousand years later, the storms are gone. And the black crystal provides the matrix for a world of psionic 'ghosts', sentients of mind, who create a dream world they remember by will and concentrated imagination.</p> <p>By continued effort, they can keep things stable and stave off boredom. The 'towns' in the 'wilderness' are needed because in the wilderness there are Wild Memes and Mindstorms and Logic Traps and Confusion Forests which can destroy a single mind alone.</p> <p>The towns have to be interesting as well or boredom and Destructive Thoughts will generate. Thus for both reasons, the 'ghosts' work very hard to stabilize and beautify their towns.</p> <p>They do have some other issues. There are still some who are the Lazy from the Old War who haven't been killed off or transformed into something inhuman. But the biggest proble is the Art Wars. Everyone wants to beautify their town, but not everyone agrees on the best design for this. Sometimes you get two schools of thought that really hate each other, and this leads to wars and sometimes towns being destroyed.</p> <p>Children can be born, but it requires some energy from a wide group of people and a male and a female parent. It takes too much energy to have a child without a wide base of support. Each parent receives a small token of energy from a long list of supporters until they are overflowing with energy...the two join...and a stork literally flies into the window in some towns. Often a child is borne in every month.</p> <p>Many are still alive that were transformed at the end of the Old War, but their memories are faded. But they do hold control of the Committees of the Rules of Art that forbid non-material dream laws (gravity must exist, and so forth).</p> <p>Moving in the physical world the black rocks can create non-physical representations in the Formed Dream, or simply disintegrate town into wilderness, or even worse, cause wildnerness to become 'dead' and non-functional as a psi field supportive element.</p> <p>A verser arriving here is likely to have strange dreams, and faces the possibility of developing various psi abilities. The Formers as they now call themselves don't have TK or other real world psi anymore. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-third-robot-war#post-19049 Sun, 16 May 2010 19:07:39 +0000 Tadeusz 19049@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Pericles, an Earth-like planet, orbits the yellow Athena in the midst of the system's Goldilocks' Zone. Most of the Perseus Arm of what was called 'the Milky Way' before the Greek Ascension, and is now known as Zeus' Thunderbolt is settled by humans if the varied solar systems had any planets in the Goldilocks' Zone.</p> <p>Humans in this timeline eschewed serious genetic engineering, only going in for basic repair from mutation damage such as eliminating diabetes and allergic hyperreactions. Thus the vast majority of systems are not human habitable even with the Robot Terraforming Fleet created by the First Empire (or as they knew it, the Stellar Empire). The Hephaestians, aka the RTF, went from system to system, and reworked the planetary surface leaving behind pleasant Earthlike planets. It took nearly seven thousand years, but despite wars, the fall of empires (the Second and the Third) the Work went on. By now, most of Perseus is terraformed (that can be), and its up for question whether the Hephaestians will continue on to other arms of the Thunderbolt Galaxy. No one really knows as by now the source and documentation code is long forgotten.</p> <p>Pericles is far out on the outer edge of Perseus, and it was settled in the First Wave of Expansion of the Fourth Stellar Empire. This is approximately six thousand years after M.L. which is Moon Landing. Neal Armstrong is worshipped by some as an avatar of Hephaestus the Strong Arm at the Forge. Most deconstructionist scholars think he is a fictional character and they point to his name...Neal or 'to anneal', and 'Arm Strong' which is a clear reference to Hephaestus. With both forge related names this seems obvious to them.</p> <p>The Great Interegnum in the Fourth Empire was brought about by the question of 'what to do with robots?'. Most in the Fourth Empire thought that humanity should stay away from excessive robotics (there is a strong naturalist sentiment in this timeline evidenced by the lack of gengineering and the high concern for enviromental problems.)</p> <p>However, most of the recently settled in the First Wave of Expansion were not so enthused. They needed to build themselves up to the standards of the Empire, and without robots it would be hard. So they refused.</p> <p>Things got sticky, but the threat that Pericles and others would simply up and leave for deeper in the frontier kept things from getting horrible. A war of robots between the Rim Roboteers and the Empire ended with the Rim seceding and breaking up into their own systems. This was the First Robot War.</p> <p>The second occurred a thousand years later. Robots had become an integral part of Periclean society which extended across the whole of the Athenian System. Some thought that the robots had crossed the line into sentience which it seemed clear the giant Hephaestians had. This was denied by the government. However certain hardwired restrictions were added. One was that the robot's owner could shut him down with a voice command if in range, and that the robots could not use a weapon on anyone in range.</p> <p>Problem was...the bots were sentient, and they studied the problem. And so Robot A in City B took control of Robot C in City D and picked up the gun of Owner of Robot C and pointed it at him while Robot C was doing the reverse.</p> <p>This was the Second Robot War. It was not quite a Velvet Exile as often portrayed, because there were a number of serious fights, but it was fairly bloodless for such a major social change. The robots took over the asteroids, and their factories and broke away from Periclean rulership.</p> <p>Since then, the Pericles planet has been gripped by anger at 'the traitors'. The humans have created a new set of robots they call 'mechs' which are hardwired not to develop sentience. And there have been numerous 'incidents' ranging from 'piracy' to 'accidental firings of missiles' between the two sides. </p> <p>The latest flarepoint is the robot desire to build Quick Potential Activating Factories. Fundamentally, they are robot creches which allow the robots to create sentient brains for the robot bodies at a thousand times faster rate. The robots see this as a way to defend themselves by colonizing the whole of the outer system. The humans see the robots gaining in power and see revenge coming their way.</p> <p>The humans still do not admit that the robots are sentient, and they definitely do not see the 'Potentials' or Pot Factories as sentient. The Pot Factories are huge, and soft targets (because of the construction of brains it requires a very clean em environment so a nuke going off nearby is enough to fry a whole factory's production for a year even if the factory is seemingly unharmed.) This makes the Pot Factories ideal targets for 'accidents' and 'unknown electromagnetic phenomenon perhaps caused by the local stellar mass.'</p> <p>On the robots side, its one of those, 'you just punched my button' Red Rage things. Humans are killing their babies and laughing about it.</p> <p>The robots have less industrial strength than the humans although that is changing.</p> <p>The robot form of leadership is a Decentralized Dictatorship of Intelligence. Each problem is decided on as a problem, and then the robot with the highest intelligence in that particular problem is given the job of solving it. It seems very ad hoc in a way. A robot could go on one day from commanding most of the resources of teh robot community to the next day having nothing more than his personal allotment, and then back again, ten days or ten years later. One other key part is a recognition of the Knowledge Problem. That is, the High Leadership cannot know as much about a specific situation as the people on the spearpoint of the problem. Thus as much as they can, they shove authority downward (this is the Decentralized part).</p> <p>The robots are trying to restrain themselves, but many of them find themselves in sympathy with the often repeated motion. "Motion for a Problem: Is Human Existence in the Pericleaian System a Problem that needs to be solved?" If the answer to that question ever gets a 'yes' vote, then the humans are going to make a close and personal acquaintance with asteroids plunging toward their planet.</p> <p>One factor of this Cold War is the Mechs. They are not as capable as the Belter Bots, but they are loyal. Some of the Belter Bots support giving the Mechs creativity upgrades which would make them more effective in the Cold War, but also, in time might turn the Mechs against the Humans. </p> <p>Things are heading toward the Third Robot War. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/constellation-vampiremage#post-18710 Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:05:26 +0000 Tadeusz 18710@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>This is the adventure for Constellation for a crossover Vampire the Masquerade and Mage the Ascension game.</p> <p>I've decided on a variant World of Darkness setting, World of Obsolescence.</p> <p>Its 2030 and things are not going well for the undead. Lights on cars and on lamppoles are gauged to be as close to sunlight as possible because it was found to be soothing to humans. No one asked the vamps.</p> <p>The police keep watch on bad neighbourhoods and nice neighbourhoods (only the middle class are left out) with IR and visual both together unarmed predator type drones to watch for crimes. So, vamps have to burn blood all the time or stand out as anomalies.</p> <p>There is already a considerable 'heat anomaly file' at every police station in America.</p> <p>Paradox for mages is considerably stronger as sociology and weather research and traffic pattern research is fed in real time into Societal Dynamics Models at most universities. Thus the 'he just got lucky, and a car crashed into the enemy of the mage' becomes a lot harder to pull off. Some researchers are already tagging 'luck factor individuals' who seem to show up when unusual probability events occur.</p> <p>Similar to the Collapse of the Soviet Union was the Collapse of Darwinism. In 2015, it started, and by 2018, it was hard to find anyone who would publically admit they were a Darwinist. By 2030, Darwinists have less respect than Astrologers or those who determine personality by skull features.</p> <p>Ordinarily, this would not be of more than passing note, but it had the side effect of greatly increasing the incidence of True Faith. Vampires are now much more likely to run into someone who shouts 'Back Spawn of Satan!' and cases have been noted where certain rare individuals have called fire from Heaven down upon a vampire. There are even certain areas in a few cities that are no-go zones for vamps because some sort of prayer shield keeps the vamps out.</p> <p>Also, there is an ever-increasing number of religiously motivated hunting squads. The Catholics are at the forefront, of course. Various Protestant groups are relatively uncommon. Baptist lone wolves and small packs are effective, and adding in the Church of Christ members, there are certain counties in the South and the West where Vamps simply don't bother to venture. But most of those are home defense groups. There are a fair number of Charismatics who use a wide variety of miracles to confound vampires although they are not as directly combat effective as the Baptists or the CoC. The Thuggee are being reborn as a Vampire Killing Force, and Northern India is considered Hostile Territory. Probably the most numerous are the Muslim mujahideen who bring a wide level of skill and planning. Some go for simply suicide attacks with garlic stuffed bodies and explosives, and others go for very elaborate and well-planned out attacks. The Vampire Prince of Paris was killed in a mujahideen operation that had been planned for three years. All the mujahideen bring a deep level of devotion to their operations. There are also Nordic berserkgang groups "For Thor and Odin! Die leech!"</p> <p>Areas which are known for high crime spots (such as outside bars) are typically good locations to find 'red light cameras'.</p> <p>Serial Killer taskforces are armed with very sophisticated databases which make finding pschyos and vamps very easy.</p> <p>The rise of bionics. Some few people have serious amputations, and many of them have bionics capable of being 'set to overmax' and matching a superhuman vamp in an arm wrestling match.</p> <p>=================</p> <p>On the suspernatural side....</p> <p>The Glass Walker Werewolves have mounted a revolution to take over the were world. They feel that outer space can be used for two things. 1)Remove much of the Weaver's impact on Earth to space orbit. 2)Colonize space aka the umbra and make it safe enough for Weres so as to expand the Wyld's influenc up there as well.</p> <p>Most of the rest of the were's scoffed at their plans. So the GWW used those social databases, the financial tracking, old fashioned spying....and turned the most resistant over to the nearest vampires. This took several years of great 'tension' and some outright war, but in the end the GWW took over.</p> <p>At the same time, the Virtual Adepts joined the Technocracy with the aim of creating freedom in safe order. Currently, the Virties are the leading edge of resource production and playland in the advanced states. Most of the uppper class in the bicoastal areas spends a significant amount of time each week in a virtual reality. Among the elite young, some practically live in Virtie.</p> <p>With the old-fashioned mages greatly weakened and the Technocracy stifled, and with the vamps running for their hides, and the Glass Walkers building O'Neill Space Colonies for 'especially hardy individuals' its become apparent to some that most of the opposition to the Antediluvian vampires is greatly weakened. Some think this is the plan.</p> <p>=============</p> <p>The characters are a group of vamps and a separate group of mages that decided separately to deal with a rogue Son of Ether mage. They enter his warehouse, he cackles and presses a button. Its a time machine. He dissappears and they are caught in the backwash. When they step outside, its 20 years later. And one of the mages has a letter in his pocket written by his future? self advising him to help the vamps.</p> <p>The vamps are a Masquerade Protection Squad. Or perhaps its just one vamp.</p> <p>There are three or so elements to the rest of the adventure...</p> <p>1)A Day in the Life of a Stranded Time Traveller....survive in that weird land, the future.<br /> 2)There might be an element of protect the Masquerade, but then that might be too much complication.<br /> 3)I'm considering adding in the likely response of some vamps to all this civilization....'hmm, I really liked the Dark Ages better....why not?'....at which point the vamps decide to bring down Western Civilization in a flurry of nuclear missiles. What do the PC's do about this?<br /> 4)The time traveller thing...do they track him down, or what? </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-moral-dilemna#post-18857 Sat, 08 May 2010 01:36:16 +0000 Tadeusz 18857@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I do need to finish up my Constellation posts and help with the World: Gate post (but we're waiting on JTM to enlighten us.) However...</p> <p>Kraypunkt orbits a gas giant named Skybalancer, which orbits a blue dwarf named Chariot near the outer edge of the Goldilock's Zone for the Chariot A and Chariot B dual system (Chariot B is a red giant). Its roughly a thousand lightyears from Earth not that any of the current inhabitants know where Manhome is.</p> <p>The Dvev Maga Glorious and Honorable Imperium had sent ahead the netbots to terraform the airless moon into habitability. The bots stole a fair bit from the gas giant (not that it missed the tiny .0001% of its atmosphere) to make the atmosphere of Kraypunkt. It took about a hundred years, and then the bots went inactive.</p> <p>Humans arrived in Dvev Maga coldships, and the first citizens Kraypunkt called themselves the Maga. They were gene-modified to accept the cold weather which ran from -50 in the 'temperate' winter to 60 in the summer. They began to ranch with gengineered aurochs (larger means holds heat better) that were furred. Thousand pound furred bulls with nine foot wide horns with the temperment of a wild boar survive well, and can fend off the rockbreaking giant worms (they break rocks and eat them and poop dirt) and the ground spiders who will eat practically anything animal that wanders on to their ground covering webs (which serve as erosion control) and with their very effective toxin they can take down a dog. These and other very aggressive wildlife continue the job of terraforming the planet, and die off rapidly providing fertilizer, but not before having slews of descendants.</p> <p>The Maga become ranchers.</p> <p>Several hundred years pass and the Dvev Maga Imperium is on hard times. An alien empire has invaded, and they are reeling. A refugee ship lands on Kraypunkt, and the refugees are dropped off. The refugees are another variety of gengineered human. They were heavy-worlders with short physiques and twin thigh bones in each leg, and the ability to bench press for their champions about two thousand pounds.</p> <p>They are raucous, tribal, with a a culture that celebrates brute strength and the manly arts of pounding your opponent into the dust via wrestling or boxing. They do not have a great deal of cold tolerance. They were dropped on the equator, and told by the captain of the refugee ship that the land near the equator was theirs.</p> <p>No one asked the ranchers.</p> <p>The ranchers are typically cold, tough, ruthless loners. Their solution to problems is a high-powered combat laser if they're rich, and a high powered rifle if they're not. The ranchers had suffered a technological fall, and they were on the verge of starting a tech snowball so that they could climb back to the stars when the Raucon arrived.</p> <p>The most valuable land is near the equator.</p> <p>Things did not go well. Neither side really understands the other. To the Raucon, a Maga is arrogant, sullen, and pitiless. To the Maga, a Raucon is a lazy braggart with no backbone of his own. The Maga are called misers and hermit loons, and the Raucon are named thieves and bullies. The Maga are content in their solitude and the Raucon in their large cities near the equator.</p> <p>The Raucon are capable of tweaking with what few genelab tools they have left the giant worms so that they go into overdrive. This will provide the farmland the Raucon need near the equator to grow and thrive. However it will also decimate the aurochs herds of the Maga. The Maga can develop the wealth to draw in star traders if their aurochs are allowed into the very fertile valleys near the equator to create the very best furs. With that, they could sell all their furs, but without the top quality furs the star traders won't bother to come.</p> <p>Both want to get to the stars again, but each is standing in the others way. And incidents are multiplying. There's been the Life War which the Raucon won (because they had too...it was win or be enslaved as they saw it.) when the Raucon landed. After that was the High Valley War which ended in a truce when a Maga general broke a dam and washed a Raucon army and a town out to sea. Still the Raucon won part of their aims. Its been twenty years since then...</p> <p>And the verser arrives.</p> <p>And the Netbots wake up and report to him.</p> <p>"Officer of the Dvev Maga Imperium, command us."</p> <p>For the leadership class of the Dvev Maga was True Human. And the netbots are failing in their abilities and logic. So they think TH=DM. And while the Netbots can do some small things, and offer satellite surveys of the whole moon, they can't do as much as promised. Some of the small things are not really that small on an individual human basis. Of course, the more they do, the more they break down.</p> <p>It turns out they can do one really big thing. They could stop the war by smashing one side or the other.</p> <p>But few people are really going to believe the verser if he threatens. They're hardheaded and convinced they're right. Sure the verser can get the netbots to fry one man in teh street, but can they get him to kill a platoon armed with rifles and bayonets? (No, not unless he unleashes the last chance one strike KE weapons designed to defend agains the alien empire that never got this far before sending humanity into a dark age and itself as well.)</p> <p>And the war is going to be nasty. At best, one side is going to be second class citizens and suffer some massacres. Practical slavery is possible as a result. So is genocide. And thats both sides solution to the other side.</p> <p>This gives the verser the chance to wander teh land, appeal to the hardheaded rulers and try to decide who is more worthy of being saved...to hold the fate of a world in his hand, and weep over the stupidity of the people in it. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-demented-dreams#post-17573 Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:48:21 +0000 Tadeusz 17573@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I had a very strange dream, and I'm not sure how much of the next is original.</p> <p>I dreamt of a famed movie director making b&amp;w film noir about gangland massacres, and having one actor struggling with remembering where he was supposed to lay as a 'dead body'. And then the director came by, a head in a circular band with mechanical spider legs. His kinky haired bleach blonde dwarf girlfriend got him a can of beer to fit into the slot next to the spinning black metal less than knee high 'cement mixer' of the small bot that held his nutritional supplement. At which time the head went flying and tumbled down hill to dissappear into a dirty snowbank. And then my dream suggests he got taken out by a sniper bullet.</p> <p>Let me be clear. For me, this is seriously weird.</p> <p>Now, that I've done the hideous thing of relating a dream (as in hideously boring), let's turn this into a world.</p> <p>In the League of Tarkington, in their greatest city of Metria, is a district full of very strange people. All the weird, the deformed, and the messed up tend to migrate in this direction of the Humans of Tarkington, and even some from across the White and the Purple Oceans.</p> <p>This district tends to produce much of the innovative art of the League. </p> <p>It also produces widely acclaimed Dark Comedies which have the audiences gasping in laughter. A lot of this laughter is of the MSTK3 variety, as in 'I can't believe this is so horrible, I love it.' If MSTK3 made it to Tarkington, it would be a hit. So also 'America's Funniest Home Videos'.</p> <p>But there is a hard bit of stone around which all of this weirdness formed.</p> <p>The Inner Core of the Ville-Datrin District which has made the word 'datrin' synonomous with 'demented' is Not From Around Here.</p> <p>There really is a famed director with mechanical spider legs and just a head. Just one. There are more dwarf girls.</p> <p>You see, the world of rikTaK was created by an Anarch power. He made every variety of weird, and dysfunctional entity he could, and built this into the genetic code. Each generation is a 'hopeful monster' to use the Darwinian term. A 'head' and a 'squidgirl' might marry and produce a 'giant blob', 'four siamese conjoined twins', and a 'half-wolf'. The blob might marry a 'twisted face', and produce a 'man-bat' and a 'sleeper'.</p> <p>The Power made it such that happiness and conscience were in inverse proportion to each other. The more one did awful deeds, the happier and jollier one was.</p> <p>The Anarch power sought to spread his influence, and so his people learned to make steampunk dimensional transfer devices. The robbed other worlds of strange races. Here is where the dwarf girls come from. They breed by mitosis, and feed by pscyic vampirism.</p> <p>Other races were picked up. Things continued.</p> <p>Finally a small group got together that hated things, and wanted a better life, somehow. So they created a Steampunk Dimension Jump inside a giant film canister that was supposed to be an exhibit in a World Demo of Twisted Film. Instead, it was their escape from the servants of the Dark Power.</p> <p>They landed in Tarkington, liked it, and set out to make the best, most cheerful films they could. Thus the first hit 'Gangland Massacre'. It was so bad, it was good. It was so depressing that the audience howled with laughter.</p> <p>Tarkington has late 1960's tech. It has 15@10 biases, but very little usage of the possibilities. Its people are dry, down to earth, tolerant, and practical which is why they enjoy the demented oddity of the 'New Film Movement' so much. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/rosclan-isles#post-15607 Fri, 01 Jan 2010 04:05:06 +0000 Tadeusz 15607@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>The Ros first came to the Isles after the rise of the World Sea preceded by the melting of the Great Ice. The newly powerful Mascaun who had held a small city on a hill well inland, now held a fortress over the greatest harbor for hundreds of miles about. And the Mascaun were not inclined to forgive previous insults and arrogances directed their way by the Ros whose city was now underwater.</p> <p>So the Ros took ship, and fled for isles far beyond civilized lands.</p> <p>There they found 'cavemen', brutish, piggish sorts who from overweening pride and laziness could not even agree amongst themselves for collective defense in the face of direct attack by the Ros. These cavemen could not form a subtle and powerful trading net with each other, and instead they relied on the crudest stone tools each small family unit could make for itself. And so the Men of the Caves, hereafter called the Cavi were made slaves of the Ros.</p> <p>And each ship chose an island for its own, and each captain made himself Clan Chief, and once a year, they met for several weeks on the Royal Island where the King gave out decrees which had to be ratified by a majority of the Chiefs. This was a time of massive trade, great parties, and lots of weddings as well as lawmaking and justice settling.</p> <p>And thus things went on for hundreds of years with the Rosclan Isles becoming richer and more civilized and insular. But eventually the Old Empires expanded out, and the descendants of the Mascaun, the Masti Empire came to the Isles. So did other powers in competition with the Masti, but the Masti held the edge being closer.</p> <p>Wars were fought, but the Rosclan, despite their smaller size had the great advantage of defending themselves in their home waters while the galleys of the Masti were several months from home.</p> <p>==========</p> <p>In truth, there were two worlds like such. In one world, a bold and charismatic female, the daughter of the King, came forth, and began to support equality of women and men in all things. She pointed out the great value that doubling the warriors armed with bronze swords and crossbow would have against the Masti.</p> <p>In the other world, the Rosclan took lesson from their enemy, the Masti, and created something closer to chivalry.</p> <p>And both worlds began their Hundred Years War against the Invaders from the Sea...</p> <p>How did they turn out? </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/wersers-multi-dimensional-threats-projectives#post-14421 Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:54:04 +0000 Tadeusz 14421@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>As I've seen this game ordinarily played, there are few and far between multi-dimensional threats. This works fine, but some people are going to expect recurring villains that have more of a back history than 'the verser created them in one universe'.</p> <p>You could play a Multiverser campaign that was more about some pan-dimensional enemy than about each individual world. This is similar to how in Champions you're a super hero, but they also made the setting books to deal with being a street-level vigilante. The first really enfolded the second, but the second has such appeal that they made books specifically for it.</p> <p>We've dealt with various forms of dopplegangers, and I've sketched a world of 'illegal aliens' from alternate realities. And it would be good sometime to go back to the idea of a pan-dimensional devouring force spreading across alternate realities like a plague (the Dark Interdimensional Empire) and (The Pan-dimensional Vampire Plague that destroys all life on a planet and then moves on.) Thats not for now.</p> <p>Projectives<br /> ============</p> <p>On Earth Real, the oligarchs of the New Understanding were benevolent, kindly, guiding souls. If you doubted this, just ask them yourself.</p> <p>The various nations of the ER, or Earth as it had been known in the darkened days Before, still clung to the old ways, and the Old Gods. The Gods were a pantheon known for their strict moral code, and their inventive punishments for those who broke the code. But the Gods had not been seen on Earth for centuries, perhaps millenia, perhaps suggested some of the more radical thinkers, never. Or perhaps the Gods had died. In any case, with the rise of industrialism, and the factories, the old myths were dust or so said the Bright Young Things.</p> <p>With a bit of drug, and a bit of meditating, and some bits of philosophy gathered from here and there in an eccletic mash, the New Understanding grew. And these, the children of the elite, the few who suffered for their refined understandings and sensitive ways discovered doors in their minds. A certain union of thought and idea, the Freethinker's Guild, gave way to genuine pschyic power.</p> <p>Techniques were developed, and these techniques were so laden with meaning and symbol, that only a devotee' of the Freethinkers could navigate it. Around the planet, in stealthed spaceships set observers from older, grander, psionic civilizations, and they wondered if the meaning and symbols were essential to the learning of the psi powers the humans had stumbled into, or if they were simply fluffery attached to real technique.</p> <p>The humans saw it as absolutely essential. And the Freethinking Ways were diametrically opposed to all the ways of the Old Gods. Indeed, each stage of the rituals which led the novice into his psi power included a bit of ritual which was a defamation of one of the Old Gods.</p> <p>The Guildsmen sought to defuse the antagonism they also stoked. They created scorn, and when that was met by hostility, they complained, and created various rhetorical defenses so as to make the vast majority of the 'insensate sheep' feel awkward. Of course, some few of the 'sheep' really did not care what the Bright Young Things thought, and it became dangerous for a BYT to venture into certain countries and areas of certain cities.</p> <p>It was a cultural war between a young, rich, and stylish, and international elite aided by psi power against the vast majority of humanity.</p> <p>The Guild, which proclaimed the highest ideals, was also aided by the lowest of means. Guildmembers entetaining second thoughts had the tendency to drop cigars on their beds and burn themselves alive. Seeing as most Guildmembers were, shall we say, a tad cowardly, a few demonstrations went a long way.</p> <p>The war continued, but we take another turn.</p> <p>A certain family, the De Noveuse and their friends/retainers (friends in name, retainers in truth) went further than most in their search of psi power. They took greater risks, and they had more logical thinkers who studied the problem in depth and planned experiments on these theories. Its not that they were mad scientists or infernal priests although they had elements of both, but its clear they lacked a sense of solid moral boundaries.</p> <p>One point about the Rituals that struck Claire De Noveuse, a powerful pschyic, was how the gain in power attended the defamation of the Old Gods. Since she did not believe in such, she theorized that they represented certain primal forces instead of being the guardians and utilizers of such forces. And so, she should find other primal forces and assert her mastery over them.</p> <p>She bought a factory, and destroyed it in a ritual with explosives. This led to some insights into telekinesis which was not a common ability for the Guild who had most concerned themselves with reading thoughts, and compellign wills and sending impressions. Of course, the ancient minds in other star systems had far greater powers. And if they had been paying closer attention, they would certainly have saved the Multiverse from a significant problem by killing Claire De Noveuse.</p> <p>She then turned to studying storms, but could find no way to defile the lightning to let her into its secrets. So after a year of fruitless study, she found herself helping one of the maids in her mansion aka castle give 'birth' to a miscarriage. And it was then that she saw the beginnings of a new way forward.</p> <p>Being an attractive woman, it was not hard for Claire to get pregnant. She marvelled at the strange feelings this brought forth, and was even mildly tempted to turn back from her wickedness. In the end, she put aside the whimsy, and got down to business, and murdered her newborn.</p> <p>And with that, the defamation of life, she was able to disconnect herself from her body, to project herself into other bodies. Oh, not immediately, but the understanding came.</p> <p>And with it, came the De Noveuse's rise to power. She brought her family in, taught them her rituals, and bound them to her with unbreakable oaths. And then she spread the Newest Understanding to the others in the Movement. And there the scales in the long war began to tilt for when a man could be controlled from a distance to open fire on his conspirators against the BYTie-bits...the bittie-bits as they were called by their enemies, it was very hard for the followers of the old ways to stand.</p> <p>For the elite, it was infanticide, but they found this too hard a pill for the people to swallow, so they settled for abortion. And with that, some of the New Projectives found another level to their power.</p> <p>Claire De Noveuse never did for she was happy being the uncrowned queen of the world and of darkness.</p> <p>But some, with flexible and far-reaching minds stretched out their projective talent, and went sideways. They lost contact with their bodies, and many died, but a few were able to find bodies in other dimensions. And they were able to send back word. New worlds. Strange peoples. Exotic cuisines.</p> <p>And so at first it was ten, and then twenty, and then a hundred, and soon the Otherdimensional Projectives learned how to avoid dimensions they would not prosper in because of bias. They learned to how to trade bodies before death. And after some time, they had children who were as they were.</p> <p>And then one of them met a verser. The verser was not impressed. We don't know his or her name. We just know they fought. This happened several other times, and rumors began to spread from projective to projective when they met, and from verser to verser when they met.</p> <p>But it was still just a hand on the horizon.</p> <p>And then several projectives met a couple versers. And these versers were different. They did not care about the moral judgment of stealing bodies. But the projectives manners were high-handed to say the least. The war between versers and projectives really got going because the projectives were snooty, and the versers were arrogant. The projectives said 'step aside, peasant' and the versers drew their weapons and refused. One projective died outright without chance of coming back.</p> <p>And there the flame was lit and raced to the gunpowder.</p> <p>The high-ranking projectives found out, and sent messages when they could by various means to others, and it was war. The versers had less efficent means of communication, but soon enough, several circles of versers, the groups that gather, all knew of a new threat.</p> <p>And at first, it looked like the verser might be the truly dangerous one here because he was truly immortal. OTOH, the projective had the ability to change bodies at will,and was usually adept at controlling political power. It was the confrontation of the Gunslinger vs. the Mayor and his assistants. But then one projective discovered how to jump into a verser's head, and drive him out.</p> <p>Its a mess now, with several 'verser' projectives, and several versers who've learned projective skills (and one that knew them before the projectives and is baffled that the projectives engage in such outre' rituals to do basic psi work.) One theorist of battles thinks that there are up to two hundred combatants counting both sides in a war that stretches out over nealry a hundred dimensions. Its an intermittent war that flares hot, and goes dim, and sometimes cold.</p> <p>Most of the projectives are relatively near each other in multi-dimensional space which means that if you find one, you're likely to find others 'nearby'. Of course, there are far more versers that have never even met the Projectives. </p> <p>And the Projectives don't have a real good grasp on the size of the Verse. They have two dominant theories. One...the more scientifically respesctable one...the Verse is a thousand dimensions strong. Two...the more appealing to them and thus the more popular with them in numbers of adherents....these other dimensions are not quite real. This flows from their POV back home when they viewed the sufferings and dignity of other humans who were not BYT's as not quite human. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/three-world-seeds#post-14278 Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:24:37 +0000 Tadeusz 14278@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I'm going to talk about three world seeds that are somewhat based in the Bible, and are somewhat or quite a lot SF. One is not mine.</p> <p>I am of the view that a lot of Christians don't get into RPG's, but it might be possible to sway them. Also, we need good worlds for everyone.</p> <p>One idea of a ways back was based on Lot and Sodom. "Lot" is the keeper of the Main Planetary Gun A. These are huge railguns going dozens of miles deep into the planetary crust, and there are three (A,B, and C) to cover the sky. As part of the job, he also maintains the Honor Memorial for the Fleet that went into space to fight the alien menace and never came back, both it and the aliens are gone it seems.</p> <p>What happened is the Fleet of cyborged humans left, fought, and were on their way back when they got informed that the PG's were locking them up. It seems that the civilian types had a strong difference of opinion with the military types on moral duties. The civilians were glad to send the military off to save them, but when the mil guys got back, and wanted to vote and stuff, well, their old-fashioned notions of duty and honor would be repressive of the New Acadia.</p> <p>So they were told to buzz off at the point of a really large shotgun. And the new masters of Acadia told everyone 'they dissappeared, so sad.'</p> <p>Well, in the centuries since then, Acadia has become a place where 'honor' and 'duty' are not even in the dictionary, much less people's lives. And B and C PG's are down. So the Fleet has found itself running up against resource limits in the outer system, and it really needs the access to the local sun to refuel its fusion reactors.</p> <p>The Fleet sneaks up on the planet on the B and C side, and lands two cyborg soldiers to investigate in New Acadia's capital. They find the place is more horrible than they can imagine. Only robot servitors keep the society functioning, and people from starving. The possibility of making a treaty with people who don't seem to understand the concept of 'word of honor' and laugh merrily at 'honesty' is nil. But they do find one good guy.</p> <p>And they tell him that its time to leave. They take him and his family to the shuttle and into orbit. And then the KE weapons arrive and pummel the last PG into nonoperability which does a lot of damage to the capital, but it also makes it so that the New Acadians can't backshoot the space based civilization.</p> <p>I've of course, written on this before, although a bit differently.</p> <p>================</p> <p>"Kings" on NBC? did not last long, but it was an interesting idea. An alternate reality with a modern tech or slightly further ahead, but with Kings instead of Republics and Democracies.</p> <p>They seemed to say they were going to follow the Bible and other texts and be creative. It could have been good.</p> <p>Unfortunately, they chose to make David a peace activist type guy. They have him as a soldier toss a grenade to destroy a Goliath tank. That's cool. That's pretty clever. But he does it by accident. Um. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems fairly clear that David deliberately set out to kill Goliath of Gath, that he had a plan, and he worked it. He had faith in God's care, and that God wanted him out there, and he had his skill with a sling, and he had past experiences killing dangerous creatures. How many of us have killed a lion and a bear? With primitive weaponry? Right. Not really a peace activist. And that perspective they had kinda killed it is my guess, or was one of the major factors.</p> <p>Still, take away the unbiblical stuff, make it a bloodthirsty world of Kings and you could definitely have something. David is a complicated guy, and he has a lot of adventures, and sometimes his solutions and responses are surprising.</p> <p>=============</p> <p>I was reading in Genesis about the Tower of Babel. The Bible talks about how the people gathered together to make a name for themselves, and to avoid being scattered in the Earth. And God comes down, and sees this, and that they all have one language, and He says that nothing will be restrained from them. And so He confuses their tongues, and we have the birth of the major language groups.</p> <p>The ideas behind Vinge's Singularity are very echoing of Christian ideas. The Singularity, in short, is the idea that the rate of technological advance is speeding up, faster and faster. Ten years of research gets compressed into a year, and then a month. Along the way, some form of superhumanity, of superbrains, becomes possible. And it reaches the point where any logically non-contradictory goal is achievable.</p> <p>You can't say 'make me the prettiest person on the planet' because someone else will be doing likewise. You can't say 'make me green and orange in the same color' because that doesn't make sense. But you can say 'terraform Mars as my personal garden'.</p> <p>In other words, nothing will be restrained from them.</p> <p>And at this point, an angel comes down, and the trillions and trillions of lines of computer code that make up this society, are suddenly broken up into ten differing operating systems. To keep it more mundane, say an alien spaceship comes by. Their goal is to slow humans down enough that Humanity won't just explode out, and remake the galaxy in its image. They want humans to learn a little wisdom first. And they figure having ten human civs strive against each other might teach them a little sense. And yes, that OS breaker would have to be invented by the League of Totally Awesomely Insanely Powerful Aliens in order to stop the Humans from blowing on it, and wishing it away.</p> <p>Yes, the goal 'turn the Milky Way Galaxy into an advertisement by moving the stars to make a cartoon of Milky Way candy bars' is possible.</p> <p>Now the question becomes where do you put your verser in this world. After all, everyone has the ability to move stars using pocket change. Even versers like the Alchemist might be underpowered to cope on equal terms anyways. One solution is to make this world a moral judgement world.</p> <p>Verser arrives on Observing Alien Starship. The Alien Superbrains tell him that Humanity is about to go through its Singularity. And they've chosen him as Humanity's Advocate. He's the Defense Attorney for Earth. Some of the more stringent superbrains favor vaping Earth now. Others favor altering the bias a la SM Stirling to make tech above a certain level impossible...</p> <p>As Earth's Secret Attorney, he has to go to Earth,observe, make arguements for his case, and try to defend Earth from preemptive annihilation. And of course, he's going to run into things that make him wonder if the stringent aliens are correct. He's going to meet humans who are as despicable as the worst alien nightmare could imagine. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/idea-based-worlds#post-13583 Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:30:52 +0000 Tadeusz 13583@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>First...</p> <p>The Computer Revolution stumbled and the vast debt piled up by the governments of the world dragged them down, and the world entered the Age of Instability. For two hundred years, the wonders of the Golden Age were subjected to rifle and nuclear fire. Piracy and slavery came roaring back, and genocide was practised widely. It was a dark world, a new dark age, peopled by lethally ruthless tyrants, and those were the good guys, the Kings of the Fire Spears who tried to create some form of peace and stability.</p> <p>In the end, the Kings were able to do so, and the population of the Earth stood at one billion in 2205 Anno Domini. They fought each other for pride and for power, but even more, they fought the barbarians, the crazies, the pirates, and the mutants or more properly speaking the transforms who had gotten too close to some of the genetic engineering tools of the Golden Age.</p> <p>It did not help that the Earth had grown cooler for decades, and that Kansas was no longer suited to grow wheat, but barley. But things calmed down. Some of the barbarians accepted missionaries, and a few tribes of mutant transforms were civilized. And the Earth moved from a Cool to a Warm phase, and suddenly there was more food.</p> <p>And then some of the ancient universities began to send out scholars. These men had hidden in the basements of ancient centers of learning, and many had died when smoked out, but a few such centers had survived. And so the old learnning began to be put back to use. A new golden age was proclaimed.</p> <p>Five hundred more years passed. Humanity moved out to the planets by means of the LEAP machine and by genetic engineering. The LEAP was a teleporter which worked best at certain ranges. It could throw someone into the Outer System with ease, but could hardly reach Earth's Moon, Luna.</p> <p>The Outer System was populated by rejects who were transformed to meet their environment, and Leapt to it, often against their will. The Inner System was populated by humans as humans in spaceships driven by nuclear rockets. The last place that was built up was the Asteroid Belt because it was at the point of maximum inconvenience for both systems of travel.</p> <p>This gave it the benefit of the best genetic engineering as it took in the lessons of the past.</p> <p>The staid and stately Inner System hardly changed. 'Once a Martian, always a Martian' it was said. And in truth, it was more specific than that. Many 'humans' never went more than a hundred miles from their home, never moved after they bought a house upon marriage, and their socieities were fairly static. They had large governmental sectors sucking what little innovation was available out of the society. </p> <p>The Outer System was anything but staid. It was turmoil and chaos without end. Bloody massacres alternated with kinetic energy strikes on one day and laser swords on the next day for variety. Whole populations moved tens of thousands of kilometers to escape human predators or the aggressively defensive who were frightened.</p> <p>In between these two, the Belt civilization grew up. A typical Belter was stronger, and faster than well anyone else. He moved vast distances, but to run commercial transactions, or to accomplish a job. His society changed in vast spasms that went according to fairly clearly understood rules, but with vast sums of money at hand to the winner, the only thing that kept the rockhounds and the solar industrialists in line was that the government of the Belters cared little about taking care of people. Instead it focused on the Majesty of the Law. Getting on the wrong side of the government made dangerous men tremble. The laws were few, but enforced with great severity and quickness and impartiality.</p> <p>In less than a hundred years, the Belt went from a minor power outweighed by the Moon to the Dominarch. Its power reigned over the whole solar system. Even the Queen of Saturn, with her millions of flying robot tanks produced by her hordes of slaves could only keep the Dominarch respectful inside the rings of Saturn.</p> <p>The Inner System had experienced two great wars amongst themselves in that time. It seemed, thought some Belters, as if a form of insanity was permanent to the Inner System civ. But then they put up war, and made weapons no longer. Of course, this made the Dominarch unchallenged in power. However, they still sought to tell the Dominarch what to do. They claimed greater wisdom which was belied by their past. </p> <p>The Dominarch largely understood them. That was a great part of its power. It knew the ways of friends and enemies. They did not understand the Dominarch nor the Outer System. It was not much of a surprise to many in the Dominarch when the Inner System kept attacking by words the Belt Civilization. The people in the capital city always misunderstand the march lords.</p> <p>The march lords could have taken over the whole system, but the cost in brutality, nuclear scarred cities, planets ravaged, it hurt their conscience. Besides the more cynical among them figured they could last longer this way. Stay pure, stay rustic, and use the Inner System as a protected market for their goods without getting too involved and catching the 'Inner System Disease'.</p> <p>And so as George Orwell noted so many centuries ago, rough men stood on their walls so that the quiet man could sleep peacefully in his bed.</p> <p>Points:<br /> 1. The first half should be a clear reference to the Dark Ages with the university basement guys standing in for Irish monks.<br /> 2. I think the first half, the backstory was the better part, and I was tempted to stop it there which goes to show you that sometimes your material can get away from you.<br /> 3. This exhibits a technique for creating a New World on top of the Old World. If you want a break between the two instead of having 'in the 22nd Century, New America which consisted of Canada and Mexico and the Continental US had entered its fourth century of existence and....'. It allows you to create pretty much whatever you want to after giving say a century over to the transition period.<br /> 4. I don't have to say who the Belters are, right? Its obvious, right?<br /> 5. One of the basic techniques of Metaphor in Science Fiction is 'Its X and its in Space!'. Stargate Atlantis was 'Its Vampires and their in Space!'. This is of course, 'Its the Current World Order and its in Space!'.</p> <p>Hopefully, on another day I can do a world in which Christians are trying to peacefully win the world over to voluntary communalism. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/a-depressing-future-history-4900-ad#post-13718 Mon, 14 Sep 2009 23:55:16 +0000 Tadeusz 13718@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Humanity did not go to the stars. Oh, we sent a few probes that way. Nor did the Singularity occur. Some argue that it was impossible. Others that the Romantic Turning of the 21st Century killed it, and that was our one chance.</p> <p>We did make it out into the Solar System right before the Romantic Turning away from individualism toward unity, and from floundering at heterodoxies to learning the classics which did not mean we could not have gone to the stars, but it was also an inward turn of greater care for the environment and meditation.</p> <p>The First Nuclear War finished off the World That Might Have Been.</p> <p>After that it was the Dark Years, and then the Dream Years when Humanity clung to hopes of utopia and found its secular saviors to be unworthy of the faith placed in them. The Second Nuclear War finished off the last of the Great Saviors and seemingly purged Humanity of its desire for perfection.</p> <p>A more stoic, more religious mindset took over, and for hundreds of years a certain grimness of mind kept the Chaos as bay. For the Great Saviors had been eager to improve the species. Things had been made in labs. Things in most ways that counted, far less than human, but in raw combat power, in breeding potential, far more. Oh, not all the Things were destructive. Those that weren't quickly died off.</p> <p>The Third Millenium came in the midst of the Grim Centuries as Humanity warred with its monsters and its own dreams. Every child was taught that life is short, and frequently painful, and that there were monsters right over the horizon. </p> <p>Toward the end of the Grim Centuries, Humanity pulled ahead, and moved into Space again. The First Solar War broke the links between home and the other planets, and the others died in the cold and the dark. But not before they wreaked a terrible vengeance on the Mother Planet. Kinetic Impact Weapons, asteroids reaching five percent of lightspeed slammed into the planet. Afterwards, an a watcher from space would be hard put as to remember which continent was which as many distinguishing features were simply gone.</p> <p>Japan had sunk. Ireland was so ridden with volcanoes that no one could live there. The Great Plains were now a giant inland sea. South America was broken in two, and the Nile now flowed the opposite direction into the much larger Mediterranean.</p> <p>The rise in magma under the oceans heated the waters of the seas to a very pleasant eighty degrees which produced enough cloud cover to cover the planet in white. The clouds then snowed. It took five hundred years before the Second Ice Age broke when the heating elements of magma were capped, and the waters cooled by refrigerating lasers that pumped the excess energy in the oceans into space in giant blasts of light that no doubt puzzled any observers on the far side of the galaxy.</p> <p>This work was done by the Ice Kings. Grimness had changed to Authoritarianism. The Ice Kings might have been better named the Steel Kings or the Nuke Lords. The Chaos beasts were dealt with by tactical nukes frequently enough. The man who told his lord that he wanted to work free, or be an artist, or go there or there without permission was lucky if he found a chance to achieve dangerous slavery for his king. Often enough, such folk were simply killed.</p> <p>The Ice Kings had a vision, and it did not matter how many million human souls got fed into the grinder until it was achieved.</p> <p>This great killing changed the human race. They became more docile by culture, but also by genetics.</p> <p>In the end the Ice Kings succeeded, and failed. By thirty-eight hundred, the Ice was almost completely gone and the vision of the Ice Kings seemed borne out. Those long, hard centuries, and now the Earth flowered, and wine and song were heard. But the long passage had corrupted the Ice Kings. Now they rejoiced and took their pleasure, and their children grew up weak and hedonistic but still with powers of life and death over millions in each kingdom.</p> <p>The aristocrats partied, the commoners toiled in a pleasant land, and no kindness was shown anyone not of royal blood. The weak were found more and more. Certain genetic engineering had been done, but it was a patch, and those patches had lasted for hundreds of years, and now many began breaking.</p> <p>Some said that certain humans had Chaos Blood in them, and it might well be true.</p> <p>Worse, still, although the extra radiation was enlivening, it also hurt. Genetic mutations were occurring at a vastly higher rate. No beneficial except in certain odd situations mutation was discovered. But by the Fourth Millenium, one-half of the population was afflicted with low blood sugar and serious acne. Many had far more serious conditions.</p> <p>And the Great Nobles, the descendants of the Ice Kings went three ways. Some decided to create Culture, and these financed works of art that are adored centuries later. This was the High Art Period.</p> <p>Others at the same time decided to play games. They were bored with wealth, power, and ease, and commoners weren't really human after all. Nothing like a good war to serve as entertainment. The Noble Wars historians in later centuries adjudged were largely caused by bored younger princes looking for a way to impress their latest girlfriend, and have a good time.</p> <p>The Hierarch of Truth came to the people in one land, and began preaching. His followers eventually took over the nation they lived in, and the surrounding nations. This was a rebirth of Biblical truth, and one of the results of this was an aristocracy that was more open to outsiders. Exceptional commoners could get in on the lower rungs of power. This brought a great deal of energy to the government, and it did not hurt that commoner and noble gene pools were far enough apart that hybrid vigor was a real effect.</p> <p>The Hierarchichate, a noble ruled culture bound by codes of conduct that theoretically applied to all, spread from their part of the world. They absorbed the ideas of the High Culture and became the overlords of the High Cultures. The transmission of ideas went two ways with the High Culture being heavily influenced by the more Biblically based Hierachichate. However, one half of this world culture would always be more formal, more ritualistic, more dramatic, more artsy, and the other half was more energetic, more egalitarian, more vicious, more logical, more compassionate.</p> <p>Democracy was tried, but it was found that the people perhaps lacked the capacity for Democracy anymore. The rulers of that time, even as they fought and destroyed the perverse culture of the Noble Wars Kingdoms who fought for sport by the nobles even as they lied mightily to their commoners, came to the sad conclusion that Humanity was not what it once was.</p> <p>The brightest of them, well schooled, could not manage to understand the thoughts of the greatest of the World That Was. A constitutional republic eluded their understanding, as did relativity.</p> <p>With this knowledge came the Twilight Era. </p> <p>"As we limp toward the end, let us strive to be decent so that when we face our Maker who has given us mercy we did not deserve, we will make Him glad He made us." Saint Ralis Viat Do'Conszordo 4312-4349 A.D..</p> <p>Others did not agree. Free enterprise flourished, but not wholly for the basis of it was too subtle for them to understand. And others struggled in various ways, some deeply dark, against the End. Things better left hidden and forgotten were revived, and wars were fought to Sustain the King's Peace.</p> <p>Humankind degenerated. Mutations, genetic engineering...they took their toll.</p> <p>By now the typical human is....</p> <p>1. A member of the Five Kingdoms (the remains of the Southern branch of the Hierarchichate on the Broken Away Land (south south America)).<br /> 2. One of the mountain tribes. Barbarians either vicious or merely trying to get by.<br /> 3. A member of a secret order dedicated to somehow by some means or the other of evading the End. Most are silly. Some are deeply depraved. Some are deeply depraved and very dangerous.<br /> 4. A member of one of the great trading companies that travel from centers of civilization like the Five Kingdoms to others.<br /> 5. From some other center of civ, usually thats a Hierchichate branch.<br /> 6. Outcast mutant.<br /> 7. A Dark Land. As the Hierchichate wanes, in its place rises simple thieves and peddlers of fear to rule small lands.</p> <p>Mental Disorders<br /> ================<br /> # 1-4 of the following.<br /> 1. Depressive attacks.<br /> 2. Outbursts of Rage<br /> 3. Poor Impulse Control<br /> 4. A Gift for Making the Wrong Decision<br /> 5. Addictive Tendencies<br /> 6. Monomania about....<br /> 7. Vengeful.<br /> 8. Sophist.<br /> 9. Lack of empathy.<br /> 10. Sadistic.</p> <p>Multiple takes on one create more effects in the person like a person inclined to be addicted to gambling and alcohol. Or, they turn someone from Lack of Empathy (cold) to LoE (sociopathic).</p> <p>Physical Degenerations<br /> ======================<br /> #1-4<br /> 1. Poor Vision.<br /> 2. Allergic to Common Substance.<br /> 3. Continous Sinus Attacks.<br /> 4. Daily Migraines.<br /> 5. Lesions on skin.<br /> 6. Albino.<br /> 7. Blood does not clot.<br /> 8. Arthiritic.<br /> 9. Asthmatic.<br /> 10. Lame.</p> <p>Diseases<br /> =========<br /> #1-3<br /> 1. Smallpox survivor (heavily scarred).<br /> 2. Fungus growth.<br /> 3. Malaria.<br /> 4. Gullibility War Virus (created in previous centuries, this virus destroys the part of the brain that judges accurately making the victim extremely likely to believe any smiling person.).<br /> 5. Sunshock or Vampire War Virus. Person is extremely vulnerable to sunlight. Usually vitamin D deficient as well, and suffering from rickets and osteporosis and possibly other conditions.<br /> 6. Immune System Collapse. This is not AIDs specifically. The effect is that at times of high stress, the sufferer's immune system shuts down for a week or two. Opportunistic colds and viruses then come along and play havoc.<br /> 7. Bloodrage. The person loses their temper, drinks their own blood, tries to force their blood on others, and/or kill them with their bare hands. It was designed as an attempt to create Berserkers out of ordinary soldiers.<br /> 8. Sleeping. Caused by animal bites, this disease varies in effect each time it occurs. The person cannot sleep for a week, and then they simply shut down and sleep. Some sleep for a day, others a week, and others die. After waking up, they're good for anywhere from six months to ten years.<br /> 5. Person is unaffected by one disease he carries, but is a carrier.</p> <p>The highest current tech is the electric cars which are powered by the rails in the roads and receive power from the Solar Power Satellites. There are computers- no one can program them because the logic is too hard. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-idea-4#post-10415 Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:41:59 +0000 JohnA1nut 10415@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Ya know, all of the worlds that we verse to have something in common. They all share a single historical event. In all of them, Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. </p> <p>Is there a world where that never happened? Everyone running around naked in a garden playing with lions and tigers and bears (oh my!!). I thought something like that could be interesting. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/warm-sea-cold-lands#post-13159 Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:02:44 +0000 Tadeusz 13159@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>The citizens of the city-state of Paznixs live in a world of wild extremes, and so tend to stay on the well-beaten paths forged by pathfinders in both their business and personal lives.</p> <p>A man is born a member of a caste, and usually stays in that whether he be merchant, warrior, beggar, or of noble blood. Women, it is commonly understood, have no caste, nor souls (they borrow their soul from the man of the house).</p> <p>To the north is the great mountains covered by white ice year-around, and to the south is the Great Sea. It is body warm in winter, and in summer great fogs rise from it to water the ground.</p> <p>P. trades to the west with Yacraz, and around the Dragon's Head Uplands with their bitter winds, is Morzub. To the east a very long way one comes to a space where the sea and the cold meet, and you travel over the Cold Route for several days of bitter freezing weather, if unlucky, the mishapen men of the North have heard of your travel caravan, and come to kill, loot, and take slaves.</p> <p>The Northmen live under the clouds, and rarely see the sun, and have no fish so their bodies are twisted. But, they are hugely strong, so much so that a Northlander bronze dagger is a sword for an Edgelander.</p> <p>Once over the cold route, it is down the Staircase of the Gods, made by the great ones born after the Great Water. The Staircase reaches down from the natural dam between the Northland and the Hotland. It is the height of a thousand men of the current generation that marches down the face of the natural dam that holds out the Great Sea, and overshadows the Pleasant Land.</p> <p>The toll to travel it is steep, but free to those of P. for one of the gods that built it was also the founder of P.. He came many hundreds of years ago, and took him seven daughters of the land, and made on them babies, and from them, the nobles were born. In time, the city he had made bored him, and he left to found another, and if the tales are right, he came to and end after six hundred years at the hands of another of the gods. It is said that the two of them fought all day for a week, and broke a hundred seventeen swords before mischance took the god of their city.</p> <p>There is good reason to send trade to the Pleasant Land, for it is a great valley, shaped like a flattened lemon, with over a hundred cities of importance and wonderful weather for growing crops. It is one of the wealthiest spots on Earth.</p> <p>There are monsters, creatures that frolic in the deep, and take down galleys. There are monsters in the heights, which even the Northmen fear, dragons they name them. But the edgelands are largely peaceful from monsters.</p> <p>And so life is good under the god-king of P. for many as long as one is prepared to sweat freely in summer for temperatures reach a hundred ten Fahrenheit for multiple days.</p> <p>But, the seas are seen to be cool to listen to the elder generations of a couple hundred years who recall that in their youth, the sea steamed until the mid-point of winter. And as the logicians point out, the sea cools, less steam comes, and thus less snow. One can, if one is daring, ride forth into the Northland, and see how the land is scraped by ice for thirty miles further than the ice is. Of course, to do this is take your life into your own hands, or perhaps more aptly into the Northlanders hands.<br /> Conversely, the god-king had to order the docks to be rebuilt higher last year as waves swept over the top of them.</p> <p>Already, Rortan, which was planted further to the sea than us, they have walls to keep out the Sea. Arrogance and stupidity, I say. We will have to try the Uplands which sprout more green each year. We shall have to take them from the Northlanders even as we surrender our beautiful city to the Sea.</p> <p>By fervent questioning of taletellers, I hear an uncertain story that someone has already done this. They have built a town they call 'Troy' to replace their old city. I know not where Troy is except that it is above another valley like the Pleasant Valley, and that worries me, for if they fled the safety of a great valley for the unknown heights and cold summers, what do they fear? I only know now that when I climb down the great natural dam between North and South, that I look at it with worry, and I wonder why the rock hums under my hand during storms out on the Great Sea.</p> <p>The merchants of P. primarily use single hump camels in caravans, and lots of slaves to carry their goods.</p> <p>Historical Note: P., in this story, would be one of many Bronze Age cities lost to the waves. They are suffering global warming (and I may have made this world too hot as it gets hotter as the continent covering glaciers melt). The 'natural dam' is of course, the one between Europe and Africa at Gibraltar, and the Pleasant Valley is the Mediterranean Basin before the dam broke and covered everything in a deluge that was not the Great Water, but was certainly impressive in its own right.</p> <p>The Dragon's Head Upland is Spain, and the mountains are the Alps.</p> <p>Trade would be primarily bronze and tin, I would think. I should think back to my games of Civilization the orginal board game with 'ochre'.</p> <p>The Northlanders are Neanderthals, and the Edgelanders are Cro-Magnon. The N. have the advantage of coming from a very large strain of humanity, and possibly giant blood, but the disadvantage of vitamin deficiency due to lack of sun and no fish.</p> <p>Eventually, the more numerous and technically advanced Edgelanders destroy the Neanderthals except in isolated regions. Like many migrations through history (The Irish in the Potato Famine) they are driven by necessity. In this case, the rising waves cover their cities as the glaciers melt and flow down to the Sea.</p> <p>Eventually, the water rises high enough that the land bridges which join the continents are broken or covered over.</p> <p>And yeah, the dragons are dinosaurs.</p> <p>Welcome to the World of Ice and Bronze. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/horror-subgenre-ancient-evil-infects-the-ground#post-12694 Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:28:29 +0000 Tadeusz 12694@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I saw the trailer for &#39;The Perfect Getaway&#39;, and whether its like the following idea or not, I&#39;ve seen some things that I think were.</p> <p>=============</p> <p>In Classical Horror World, (where any trip across country or visit to a friend in a city has a 1 in 9 chance of being interrupted by a blood-crazed maniac with supernatural powers), the six friends from Kevin and Lucy College in Blues City decide to take a break from their strenous life of studying and getting drunk to go to Lake Mantac for the weekend. Unfortunately, one of the girls opts out at the last minute which is going to cause social stress among the guys.</p> <p>Lake Mantac is part of a wilderness preserve/wild country beloved by fishermen, hunters, rich people with lake homes at the developed end of the huge lake, and maniacs with evil plans. It is a temperate zone forrest with plenty of undergrowth, and as this is the season, lots of greenery.</p> <p>Upon driving into the small fisherman village, Yancyton, which exists mostly to supply fishers and hunters, and is a dark, woodsy place in the pass between two high mountains so that it gets little sunlight (but it has plenty of garden gnomes for sale, and others artsy-crafty stuff.), they will ask for the keys to the Lakeside Cabin which they&#39;ve rented for the weekend.</p> <p>The clerk is a bored guy who&#39;s hankering to get out of town as soon as he makes some cash, but there is a hunter in there who will advise them not to go to the cabin. &#39;Its got a bad reputation.&#39; He won&#39;t go further than that.</p> <p>The hunter is Mark Wylie.</p> <p>A generation ago, other students came to the Lakeside Cabin, eager for fun, and illicit drugs. Under the influence of those drugs, they decided to get involved in some bizarre ceremony.</p> <p>It seemed as if nothing happened, but the goal of the ceremony had always been more about getting the gullible girls (hippie chicks, of course) into a gullible mood. What began as twisted seduction turned into rape and then murder. The only one of the three guys involved to turn back from this madness was Mark Wylie. Of the girls, one willingly consented, and got killed easily for her troubles. One assisted the guys in hunting the last girl who was tracked down and killed.</p> <p>In the process, Mark tried to rescue the hunted girl, but he only succeeded in shooting the last surviving killer.</p> <p>Now he feels guilty as he spent much of the time hiding from the pschyos instead of fighting them. He also fears the area, and doesn&#39;t want anyone else up there as he thinks there are ghosts. To further his aims, he has written a bad review of the cabin on-line, and he went out to mess up the bridge to the Cabin. He&#39;s even tried to burn the cabin, but he could not get close to the Cabin as something unnatural held him in fear.</p> <p>There are five ghosts.<br /> 1. Willing girl; She&#39;s uncomprehending of what happened to her, and walks around not able to talk because her throat is cut.<br /> 2. Pschyo girl: She&#39;s the actual leader, even though Guy Leader won&#39;t generally admit it. She&#39;s happy to be a death dealing monster except she really hates Wylie because he&#39;s kept them from much prey over the years.<br /> 3. Hunted girl: She is in terror and flees. Usually the first seen, and she looks mostly normal, although dressed in out of date clothes...usually seen running away through the woods.<br /> 4. Subservient guy: He wanted to be cool, and so he tends to follow stronger personalities which is most people. He&#39;s willing to engage in horrors. But in a flash of his true nature, he really likes knives.<br /> 5. Guy Leader: He fancies himself a necromancer, a Being of Power. He also enjoys the most the cat and mouse playing with &#39;lesser minds&#39;.</p> <p>Each of the ghosts has a basic array of powers: Fear, simple TK, and possession with blackout inducement. Some of the ghosts have extra powers like Suggestion and Marionnette TK and Storm Calling.</p> <p>The ghosts enjoy playing with the people, and they are also driven to try to recreate in some ways the horror that gave birth to them.</p> <p>The legend of the Cabin is that an outsider came and slaughtered the lot of them with no survivors. At first the visitors aren&#39;t aware of this, but after a few weird thigns happen, someone will do an Net Search, and find it out.</p> <p>About this time, the verser will arrive in this universe near the cabin....He will be suspected, but the collegians will not want to be irrational aka unmaterialistic.</p> <p>That night, big storm. Damaged bridge gets washed out, telephone cables and net link goes down. But in the morning its a wonderful, bright and shiny day, and the sherriff calls across the ravine to them and assures them they will have a bridge up in two day maximum....</p> <p>The ghosts do more taking over, and practical &#39;jokes&#39;, and near-misses. Things get nastier as night falls. The ghosts are rendered more powerful (+5-+25 sit mods to rolls) when 1)People are fearful. 2)People go along with part of the Dread Ceremony. 3)Night falls. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-evil-triumphant#post-10273 Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:09:16 +0000 Tadeusz 10273@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I've read a few stories about the Forces of Evil trying to overthrow Heaven. What about a world in which they succeeded?</p> <p>I want a high mag bias world. Or perhaps it was recently low to medium, and the New Owner raised it. Yeah.</p> <p>I don't know how theologically sound this is, but I'm going for a kind of individualistic monsters on the loose chaos.</p> <p>One the one hand, Medieval would be nice, and OTOH, modern....so why not both? We've got rips in space-time and different time areas butted up against each other. Sometimes its accidental, sometimes its a deliberate bit of pot-stirring as when one formerly genocided group is set down next to the descendants of their killers.</p> <p>The FOE was able to get a vast array of Darkforces together, and arrange a very dangerous surprise attack. He hit Heaven with a comet that had mystical significance for one thing. The Maker and his closest advisers were forced to flee, and are now hiding somewhere in the reality. They have enough power to make hiding not that much of a problem.</p> <p>The FOE have very loudly announced their victory with Dark Trumpeters appearing in the skies at dawn for fourteen days straight over every major city in the world and blaring out the new ruler's glory and his doctrines.</p> <p>So far he says 'do what you want except worshipping the Loser.' He has rescinded Authority from governments.</p> <p>The world was an Alliance world and now its Anarch so there's been a -40 swing in doing Alliance magic. He hasn't powerblocked anything yet.</p> <p>However, there are a number of monsters being revived, and let go, and tearing off on a rampage. Other monsters are being created.</p> <p>Evildoers are charging around wildly doing all sorts of crazy things.</p> <p>There are elements of stability. Most people want the Maker back. And they want to live. People try to hold things together in their communities, and they hope that the Dinosaur/Giant Fire Elemental/Dark Angel with a taste for scientific experiments leaves them alone for one more day and passes by.</p> <p>One of my arguements was that Satan could not be in charge of the world because we're still alive. This world is like that. The FOE is in charge, and he's letting his troops party, and they are ripping the place to shreds. This dimension has perhaps another year before it disintegrates into sub-quarkial particles.</p> <p>Now a question: Is the Maker bluffing? Does he actually have the power to take things back at any time, and he's merely testing people? Or is there some special limitation that the FOE took advantage of, and caught him off guard?</p> <p>The FOE is arguing that he's the rightful ruler now, and so his rules are law. Is that true? Or is he still merely a usurper? </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/oddtech-cassandra#post-10298 Sun, 05 Apr 2009 22:36:03 +0000 Tadeusz 10298@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>First, I appreciate MJ's excellent analysis of 'Evil Triumphant'. I plan to use most of those suggestions, and probably move on to some sort of Random Tables with perhaps a Countdown to Disaster for Local Area and World as well (with each bad event adding one or two points to the Disaster Clock.) </p> <p>But I'm not here for that.</p> <p>This world is Oddtech (at least its based around one technology), Contingency (and how!), and its a Flipper (I've made an attempt to tell stories from the other POV rather than the current PC POV. And this takes a story type and flips it around and mangles it a bit.)</p> <p>In the Piercront League, named for the great Martin Piercront (wonder of the age), there exists a dozen small states taught to love union and the peace it brought from aggressive neighbours. With their hard work, faith in God, and the natural land barriers of low hills supplemented by internal rail networks to move troops from any of the states to a threatened border, they finally found security intead of being the 'baubles of the Queens of Tilune'.</p> <p>Tilune is the large continent the long-suffering peoples of the League had lived in, and most of its rulers were hereditary noblewomen. So they were not enthused in the slightest when a male republican set up shop, and denied them their favorite method of counting coup on each other which was to grab one of the Bauble States from another queen.</p> <p>Those who think that feminine rulers are more peaceful have never been to Tilune where the Queens elevated hair-pulling to the pulling down of city walls, and scathing retorts to the burning of cities and for remarkably trivial reasons, at least from the perspective of those who were peasants.</p> <p>However time and change come to all, and with the rise of the Piercront League and the end of the Founding Wars (and Martin was not only a brilliant constitutionalist, but a masterful general.), and the Long Peace was brought to Tilune. Prosperity threatened old social arrangements, and so the Queens grew more parliamentary, and even a King or two was named among their number.</p> <p>And yes, the doctrine arose that if men were in charge the world would be a peaceful place. </p> <p>But the stresses of the social changes built up, and they either sparked change (and caused stress), or did not spark change (and caused more stress.) Some suspect that the human race needs a good bloodletting now and then to relieve their injured feelings.</p> <p>The Queens rule grew more fragile with Taric, and Yomsli, and Dobar being the reactionary aristocratic states, and Lawnei and Wuf, and Arond being various forms of progressive (and not in the modern Earth form of progressive which is not.) with Dimo wobbling back and forth, and Sulnak trying to be in the middle of every curve and annoying everyone on all sides, but not that much. These are the states nearest the Piercront League, that either surround it, or have ready access to it by crossing a neighbour's thin part of her country or by jumping in a boat and crossing the Marink Sea which is where the primary seaports of the League sit.</p> <p>But even as others change to mimic the League, the League changes to mimic them. A secret cabal, a rebirth of aristocracy but without the name, has begun to run things in the League. Men of power and discretion are invited to join, and given a few facts after the extraction of a blood oath which is a very serious thing.</p> <p>There is a technique available for a woman to dream and for her to enter the future and see the results of a decision made. With this cabal in control, the Master of the Secret can make a decision, and then summon a dreamer. If his decision is wise, the dreamer will return with good news, and he will follow through on it. If the decision is unwise or unlucky, then he will change his decision.</p> <p>This process lasts for nearly fifty years, and although an aristocracy is being recreated in the League, in truth, they are a smart, and honorable sort with a broadminded interest in the whole, and only favor themselves to some small degree so its not that bad although some of the more sensitive sort realize they are less than citizens in their own land.</p> <p>But the great decision is upon them. War threatens at every hand, and the children of the last generation have risen to power unusually young. Its whispered in some courts that they rose by climbing over their elders' backs by using daggers as pitons in the back of those elders.</p> <p>And they would have peace. They believe in kindness and sweet reason, especially the new Master. And so he summons dreamer, and dreamer and keeps getting the same message with variations back.</p> <p>...the capitol of the League burnt with fire...<br /> ..Plague sweeping the last of the able-bodied men the Great War did not kill...<br /> ...Murderous oppression with one in ten of his people decimated...</p> <p>Each decision he checks comes back with a new answer, but always a terrible one.</p> <p>So one day his clerk lies and tells the dreamer that the Master no longer longs for peace but is preparing for war to the knife against all foes. The dreamer comes back and tells the Master that the future is grim and dark, but his people survive. Trenches line every hill and fortresses rise from every defensible point, but the people are free, healthy, and after the Queens have battered their forces to dust on the League's defenses it seems they may be ready to sue for peace.</p> <p>Enraged, he kills the clerk on the spot.</p> <p>&quot;I want peace,a nd you tell me only warmongering lies!&quot; He screams, and she sees madness, so she runs for her life.</p> <p>And when she runs, she finds safety for a night and dreams to go left or right, and gradually her dreams lead her to the one man who might be able to save her, and her people.</p> <p>Dreamed out, near shattered by the exertion, she arrives on the spot where the verser will arrive. She greets him and inducts him into her conspiracy to overthrow the Secret Cabal and save the League.</p> <p>If he refuses, then quickly go to the War and the Aftermath which will be slaughtering armies and burning cities and plague and starvation.</p> <p>If he accepts then the verser is recruited into a much used tale. The tale is of a secret cabal dominated by a madman not willing to listen to reason. Usually this tale is of a warmongering lunatic, but here its a peacemongering lunatic who's willing to assasinate for peace, and probably will end up trying to create coup of the Smart Set to overthrow the republic.</p> <p>The tech level is eighteenth century with wooden ships and iron men, cannons and earthen work city walls replacing curtain walls, with plague, cholera, and typhoid being as deadly or more so than grapeshot and city fires.</p> <p>In this respect, its different than what I had in mind at first which was a modern world like the US with a peacemongering cabal, but Tudor houses, sword duels in the misty morn, bayonet armed musketry, cavalry....</p> <p>Secret societies fit well in that.</p> <p>But you could easily use one of the Ten Faces of America worlds and make it about nuclear war and the contingency then becomes post-apocalyptic instead of poorly disciplined armies ravaging the land. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/plotting-party-payoffs#post-10054 Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:48:18 +0000 Tadeusz 10054@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I've just watched on DVR the latest 'Castle' which I like. SPOILERS may follow.</p> <p>It was a variant plot structure I think that I've seen before.</p> <p>First you have a ring of people. You meet them as one of them was murdered.</p> <p>Then you go back over that ring of people again, and on a fair number of them, the ones that get elevated to 'suspect' (and this format is similar to process of elimination with several suspects before the final unveiling) you have a payoff of information.</p> <p>&quot;No, I'm not the murderer because despite my sweet appearance, I'm actually a drunk, and I was passed out blitzed at the ER that night.&quot;</p> <p>Its the type of thing you wouldn't want to confess, but it saves you from the murder rap so you do.</p> <p>In this case, you had a mastermind who arranged for his 'friends' to look like they were guilty. I don't think that is necessary for this format.</p> <p>I'm not sure how to get a verser in to this type of murder mystery. Hmmm, I suppose one way would be for a verser to meet another verser at a remote hotel (typical mystery stuff--isolate the group), and have the hero verser spot something the victim to be verser has that he wants.</p> <p>They discuss trading it, and the victim then agrees to the deal.</p> <p>So far, the hero probably has no clue what's coming.</p> <p>Since the verser agreed to the deal, he's disowned the treasure. He goes back to his room alone. If the hero really wants to come with him, the victim remembers that he left the treasure in the hotel safe and it can't be opened right now.</p> <p>The important thing is to get the victim away from his friend for a few minutes.</p> <p>Victim gets killed. He verses out, but the disowned treasure is left behind.</p> <p>Now the hero can be motivated by ....<br /> 1. Desire for justice.<br /> 2. Vengeance for his friend if they are friends.<br /> 3. The murderer has the treasure. He has to find the murderer to get the treasure back.<br /> 4. Possibly the treasure is some sort of powerful item that works in this low bias world, and is not at all the sort of thing a murderer should have. Maybe its a hypno-beam gun in a world with no clue such a thing is possible. So a sense of social responsibility might drive the hero.</p> <p>I think something like that could work. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/connotations#post-10021 Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:48:33 +0000 Tadeusz 10021@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I think it was Ken McLeod (I'm not really a fan) who produced a very clever book. He took several social groups which were known for certain attitudes, and then gave them different attitudes based on their basic principles.</p> <p>He had Socialists who openly claimed to be Evil, and Christians who had no problem with downloading new copies of a person after the old one got zapped (they saw it as ressurection).</p> <p>There was a movie back in the 40's that had a Yankee and a Southerner. In it, the Yankee is pushy, and inclined to violence. People would not make that movie today.</p> <p>MJ talked a while back about certain people who listened to a type of music. They thought they were cutting edge, but they were actually quite hidebound in their tastes.</p> <p>These are three different things, but all are related.</p> <p>In making worlds, can we come up with a stereotype, and then find a reason to change out one element of that to make it new and strange?</p> <p>I'm going to resist making a world that portrays liberals as reactionary aristocrats since thats what I think is true. You can make very good worlds which focus on revealing the hidden truth of a situation, but this is not that question. </p> <p>1. American gun enthusiasts tend to like Big Guns. But you could be a gun elitist, and focus in How Small Can You Go? The goal being to learn to be hyper-accurate with your.22 calibre pistol with its drop-forged frame made in zero-gravity or something, and its Olympic match grade bullets.</p> <p>2. &quot;We have to protect our sources&quot; says the Newspaperman could shift to &quot;If its not sourced and footnoted, then how can our readers trust us?&quot; </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/pomo-world#post-9755 Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:06:00 +0000 Tadeusz 9755@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>PoMo or Post Modernism is the notion that texts (books and such) do not reflect truth, but are wholly propaganda for the point of view of the author. One does not read Shakespeare to understand his insights into human nature, but to decipher how his class, and sex based interests were shown in the plays he wrote.</p> <p>There is no truth, there is only power.</p> <p>Now, what about a world based on this idea? Every writer and activist is a magician. They try to get a critical mass of people to agree with them. If they do well (Relative Success roll vs. a Resistance Check) they change what people believe, and they can even change reality (even past reality).</p> <p>These High Scribes (the writers, and activists) usually have greater defenses for themselves so even if the opponent overwhelms them, and rewrites reality, the Scribe is inviolate in himself.</p> <p>However, sometimes some of it leaks through,a nd then the Scribe is said to suffer from 'false consciousness' or to 'have grown'. Scribes tend to cast spells to check if they are whole, and to go on retreats to purify themselves if they are not.</p> <p>The pinnacle of victory is of course when your enemy does not even realize there ever was a war. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/cyberpunk-world-seed-skyland#post-9051 Wed, 28 Jan 2009 08:31:04 +0000 Nikolaj 9051@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I typed some cyberpunk additions yesterday to one of Eric's older posts. And I found the option of <strong>the Wired</strong> so cool that I kept thinking where they would live, what kind of a society they would be in and how it came to be. Because in just this world it would not quickly happen. So I decided to try and see how our current situation could change to accommodate <strong>the Wired</strong>. Thus <strong>Skyland</strong> starts to take shape.</p> <p>It's not ready since there are so many options. So I've typed up what I've got and like to see how it'll evolve better. And since I'm not really at home in the entire science, computer, futuristic developments etc field, I'd like to have some more experienced people take a peek at it.</p> <p>Here's the seed.</p> <p><strong>Skyland</strong></p> <p>As time went by, the world population kept growing. In the end there were too many people to be living with each other continually. The elite (the guys with the money) had found a solution. But it was only available for the rich people. A city was build upon the existing city. Since this was entirely new ground, things could get redesigned properly and efficiently. Thus there was lots of decent research. In the beginning only the very elite were up there, but soon the somewhat ordinary rich man could also rent, buy or build little additions to the <strong>sky homes</strong>. </p> <p>Thus the <strong>sky towns</strong> and <strong>sky cities</strong> came to be. Seeing this, new cities where built with the purpose of being a city. This means that there were roads and squares and governing bodies. All the while the poor and common man still lived down on the surface, in the small, dark and narrow streets. They referred to the city above as <strong>Skyland</strong>.</p> <p>Some have a grudge at the elite <em>"because they leave us here to rot."</em> while others have the ambition to climb up to this land of opportunity. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/oddtech-seventy-spires#post-9098 Sat, 31 Jan 2009 21:03:25 +0000 Tadeusz 9098@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>The continent of Alsus is periodically ravaged with nano-plagues from the Settler's War, and the always present danger of Viper Cats, a gengineered breed of jaguar with the speed of a low-flying plane in full charge, venom that has more in common with sarin than rattlesnake toxin, and a disposition that starts at 'Kill everything' and gets progressively nastier as it gets hungrier.</p> <p> In an effort to escape the insanity brought on by the Hopeful Ones, the Grim Folk, their erstwhile servants set out in boats for the summer cottages on the island chain, the Seventy Spires off the coast of Alsus.  Upon arriving, they knew that the Hopeful would follow them if they could, and use the boats inbuilt computers to draw the boats back, so they sunk all the boats in deep water.Then they let the various factions of Hopeful Ones kill each other off.</p> <p> The plagues and the Viper Cats are some of the things the Hopeful Ones left behind.</p> <p>Now, the Grim Folk were called such because they had a view of the tragic nature of life, and didn't believe in Utopias or Glorious Futures.  They were also called that because they had a strong tendency to be the hewers of wood and fetchers of water to the more politically connected Hopeful Ones, and thus they felt a little put upon and grim.  Some might think the Grim Folk were the ones who did most of the actual work for little of the actual pay or respect.</p> <p>But once they got to their separate islands, for they were not city-loving folk, and so they scattered, they found they needed trade. At first it was doctors, and then engineers. Later it was merchants.</p> <p>The largest island, Calanth, has four Spires, or mountains above four thousand feet, and a total size of ten square miles. This is typical, except most islands have only one Spire. There is very little flat land to farm.There are a few poor ports, but most are rocky and hazardous, and prone to the occasional volcanic laval interruption.</p> <p>So when one of the Grim Folk re-invented from a historical text the Hot Air Balloon, it was a revolution. That first five years had been very rough, but the Balloon started to ease things. From there, it took about twenty years to get up to the point where there was a fleet of Zeppelins servicing all the islands on a schedule.  And where there were other Zeppelins to be had for hire.</p> <p>And of course...Air Pirates.</p> <p>Its a rough life, but with the hydrogen from the volcanoes, and the Zeps, and goats that climb the near vertical slopes in search of food, and the balloon fishers who go out from some islands to net fish, the Grim Folk get by.</p> <p>Each Spire is independent politically, but there is the Grand Moot where all meet for two weeks once a year, and where various deals get hammered out, and duels are settled, and new Zeps bought, and pretty girls meet handsome air pilots. It is of course, on Calanth.</p> <p>And there you go, O7, a Zeppelin world for your use... </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/oddtech-carwinia#post-6369 Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:06:59 +0000 Tadeusz 6369@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I've had the notion for Oddtech. That is, a civilization founded on technology which is workable for us, but we might not choose to use it. Steampunk is not an example as 'punk tech works on part-magic principles. A good example is an Orion nuclear bomb propelled 4,000 tonne payload spaceship. We could do it, but we chose not too as releasing several hundred or so airburst nukes seemed unacceptable for a rocket flight. That is Oddtech.</p> <p>I've thought that it would be nice to do a series of worlds based on Oddtech, and also on Oddpsionic.</p> <p>Carwinia does not have most of modern technology. Instead, they have genetic engineering of plants and bacteria. Lights at night are provided by genertically engineered bioluminescent squash, for example. Houses grow from pumpkins (what else?). </p> <p>There are problems with power transport. No national electrical grid is possible in their circumstances. Energy transport is dangerous, chancy, and hard because it means carrying "Rocket Cane" which is sugar cane gengineered to hold nitrocellulose in its veins...highly explosive and unstable. Hence, the power transport is primitive, and decentralized. Most people grow their own power with Sunflower Weeds that often cursed, but very useful combination of Kudzu and Sunflower and Photovoltaic Cells. Its often cursed because it grows like Kudzu, and it somewhere in the gene-modding, perhaps from a gengineer with a curious streak, picked up a tropism for protecting itself via reflecting sunlight into the eyes of mammals nearby.</p> <p>Carwinia developed from a modern world circa 2180. And then the Smash came when a comet from Jupiter flew, and smashed into Earth. Instant return to Stone Age tech for survivors. Centuries later, things started to get more organized. A kind of High Middle Ages complete with a Warming Period brought a blossoming of prosperity which led to the Learned Men which led to a blossoming of cultural life and intellectual inquiry. It is in this time that the first of the Great Cities became Great, and Kingdoms were founded.</p> <p>In Brandyland, so named for its peach brandy, the town of Seigeiceau became great, and from it the Wine Kings ruled the Kingdom of North Brandyland. For, all the technology had been smashed by the Smash and the ensuing centuries, but searchers into ancient things found something that took Carwinia from the Middle Ages tech to a much higher level.</p> <p>In the CGC buildings (Centre for Genetic Control in the Olde Tongue) there were strains of bacteria, and instructions in those bacteria (written in the very code of life by desperate researchers before the Smash). The 'Red' buildings were destroyed with their Death Virii, but the 'Useful Friends' had been growing by themselves for centuries in underground vaults.</p> <p>In the space of two generations, village men whose grandfathers had lived by smoking torches now had clean, calm, safe bioluminescence, and in the great cities many further wonders were possible.</p> <p>The Learned Men were rewarded for their help to society and enormous universities sprang up.</p> <p>The work of an Archeologist became greatly honored. The first generation of professional Archeologists found wonders, and many mysteries.</p> <p>One mystery they found were cars, and trucks by the hundreds and then thousands. This had the effect of strenthening the religion of the time which was the worship of the Five Gods. For some thought that these cars and trucks had run by divine power because no other cause could be seen for their running. Each type of car was identified with one of the Five Gods, and indeed there was an uncanny match to all this in a twisted sort of way.</p> <p>Gem, the Lord of Learning and Master of Creation (GM)<br /> The Hand, He who Crafts Well and Works Hard (Honda)<br /> Toyman, The Jester, the Playful One (Toyota)<br /> Shover, The Lord of Ambition and of Death for in the end we all are pushed to the grave. (Chevy)<br /> Nissa, The Winged Lady of Victory and Adulation (Nissan confused with Nike) </p> <p>And the land greatly prospered, and trade links between Seigeiseau and We-art-rid (USAMRIID) and other Great Cities were strengthened, and war came between such cities.</p> <p>And it was so that the bounty of discovery was fading with the passage of generations for there remained few things to find, and the trade routes were firm and wide for the rich carvan masters who took camels through the tiger infested wastelands far from the Great Cities. And then a great man came to stand as Learned Man in the SGC University.</p> <p>He taught, nay preached although he disdained that word, that Cars were the distant ancestors of Trucks. That such vehicles as the Sub-a-rue, which the followers of the Five Gods tried to fit into their theology as an angel was actually the ancestor of Four Wheel Trucks with combat capabilities shown by their 'rifle racks'. The 'Rebel Yell' truck was the evolved descendant of the Sub-a-rue. The Truck was larger, and more complex. It also had the ability to defend itself better which probably meant that when it had mutated to be on the scene, it had quickly wiped out all the Sub-a-rues.</p> <p>This further meant that the 'Semi rigs' which were found mainly on the kings highways of that olde tyme were the most evolved predators, and they had probably been in the process of destroying the Rebel Yell trucks and spreading everywhere when the Smash destroyed everything.</p> <p>It was good evolutionary logic. The larger, more complex descended from the smaller, and simpler.</p> <p>One of the descendants of the great man who went by the name Lord Chuck, and this man was named Lord Hustler, was a famed pit bull of a man who came to reside at the President's Office of the University to this day. He affirmed the notion that the Smash had not happened. </p> <p>Granted, there were thousands and thousands of cars and trucks, and this gave the appearance of some massive disaster overfalling them, but in truth, these creatures had been slowly buried over the millenia. He estimated that it would take nearly ten thousand years for a Sub-a-rue to be buried, and twenty thousand for a Semi Rig. Thus, the Olde Tymes, if they had at all been real as they were in song and myth (and how unreliable is all that?) had to have been at least twenty-five thousand years ago.</p> <p>This had the benefit of distracting people from the fact that the Great Universities were not producing very much anymore. This was due to two facts. One, they had gotten fat, dumb, and happy in their privilege. Two, the digs where they had found so much information were mostly played out.</p> <p>The new benefits to society came from young men and women who were trying to advance the work of genetic engineers, and make new advances of their own. Unfortunately, the Universities sucked up most of the research funds. And the Universities attacked the New Researchers as 'dangerous fools thinking they can improve on the work of the Ancient Gengineers.' because those in charge of the Universities could clearly see the threat from the New Research Movement.</p> <p>And on another front, there was the Intelligent Designers who generally worshipped the Five Gods, but not always. They produced mountains of information, and clear lines of logic which called Lord Chuck's theory into question. In return, the Universities castigated them as 'backwards villagers trapped in superstition.', and organized travelling road shows at the King's expense to persuade the villagers of their stupidity. The villagers began to grumble about the virtue of tar and feathers, and the Universities responded by pressing the King to make the attendance of the Travelling Shows to be mandatory, and to increase the cost of attendance.</p> <p>Squeezed by the pocketbook for taxes were heavy, and economic progress had slowed, and taunted as stupid by Learned Men who seemed stupid, the villagers simmered and the ID discontent spread even as Lord Chuck's followers grew more strident.</p> <p>And the verser arrives...</p> <p>Well, actually, there are a number of good places for the verser to arrive. He could arrive before the asteroid hits, and be part of the frantic preparations to save something of modern learning. He would also be well to arrive in the days when the Great Cities arise. And for comedic effect, and revolution he could arive in the days which later became called the Age of Illogic, and the University Riots (which were more like war than riots) and the Peasants' Revolts which led to the ...</p> <p>1. If successful, the Age of Capitalist Republics and Freedom of Thought.</p> <p>2. If unsuccessful, into the Dagger Wars as social trust declines, and the trade routes are shredded, and disorder spreads on the wings of riot, famine, and assasination of 'friends' as a means of changing policy. This leads to a slowly declining, and fraught with shadowy terror world as the political system crumbles. Eventually someone develops and unleashes a Death Virus, and things go from Bad to Really Horrible to Total Collapse very quickly. A millenia later, mankind has another chance to climb up from the apocalypse of lies. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/utopia#post-5901 Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:20:07 +0000 Tadeusz 5901@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>I have an idea for three worlds in conflict, with one of them being my utopia world. Keeping in mind the reality that even the best world is going to have serious flaws....</p> <p>Ti Pramere as most of the worlds in the Long Journey Cluster was terraformed by a 'package' designed by Long Journey, Limited. This English company developed the know-how and the sophisticated interplay of terraforming agents to allow a collection of bacteria to be unleashed from hundreds of lightyears away. The varying bacterium are released in carefully prescribed order with the result of a human-ready planet available for use after a mere century.</p> <p>The near lightspeed rocket with its varying packages left Earth early in the 22nd century, and a package crashed into Ti Pramere's dead world in 2315. In 2422, the planet was certified as ready for humanity.</p> <p>In 2272, a ship left Earth, and more sedately due to its human passengers (even frozen they required more kindness than sturdy bacterium) it arrived in 2480.</p> <p>The Founders were subtle and wise men who bound their descendants into a social contract based on a profound mistrust of humanity, and a deep respect for the Creator.</p> <p>in 2690, the first FTL ship arrived at Ti Pramere, and found a thriving society. They tried to bend things to their favor, but although they did well, they found there was no means of creating a monopoly.</p> <p>The governance is very small, and hence it is well-respected as honorable. Its job is to maintain the defenses against exterior foes, and to ensure that crimes are punished.</p> <p>But it lacks the power to create a monopoly. There are monopolies, but without special advantages granted to them by the governance (like tax breaks, and special tariffs), a monopoly can only be such by being better than everyone else. And that is what is desired after all. If a monopolist tries to take advantage of his unique position, he only destroys his own power.</p> <p>Unlike many supposedly laissez faire governances, the entities of 'corporation' and 'banker' have no meaning. A corporation, a means of evading responsibility for legal harms, is not legal. Neither is it legal for a man to take money, and then offer twice or three or more times money in loans. Such is regarded as fraud. One may serve as a broker between the rich investor, and the man wishing a loan, but such position is far weaker than 'banker'.</p> <p>Side effects of this are both good and bad. One of the effects of a 'corporation', especially when tied to a 'franchise' is for the society to be very rapidly transformed into a new way of living in response to challenges arising, or in response to new good ideas. Without corporations, the society changes far more slowly.</p> <p>On the other hand, the society is far more 'Jeffersonian yeoman'. Each person is more apt to have some significant wealth, but neither poverty nor grand heights of wealth are as common. The dignified, yet restrained farmer is the model for society. He neither flatters, nor grovels.</p> <p>The effect of no banking is more positive as the business cycle is largely non-existent. Without undue credit expansion, there is no undue credit crunch.</p> <p>One other set of changes...it has been noted many times that children in an industrial society are not an economic benefit unlike in agricultural socities. It has also been noted that 'teenagers' are such spoiled, punk brats because they are neither fish nor fowl. It has also been noted that with proper nutrition, that teenagers grow up earlier. This leaves one of two choices--the teenager may be abstinent for a very long time, or he may forego morality in response to insistent demands of his libido. Prior to the modern age, morality demanded, but not for such a very long time.</p> <p>Ti Pramere made some changes.</p> <p>1. Fourteen year old females and fifteen year old males were allowed, nay encouraged, to be married. This was under the old definition of marriage....'till death do you part', and with the understanding that each side would work on the relationship.</p> <p>Tests were given to help discern compatibility. Also classes were given with the clear idea of instructing each gender in the good qualities of the other gender. Too many females had found themselves swayed by the 'bad boys'.</p> <p>Of course, one of the dominant reasons females were swayed by such 'bad boys' was the feminization of 'good boys'. This was reversed. Being tough, brave, and loyal were regarded as more important than getting good grades especially since situations change. A knowledge of situations was very useful, and hammered into the lads, but bravery was more important because it was useful in all situations.</p> <p>Naturally, most fifteen year olds were not competent to lead a household by themselves. Although, considerable ability was unleashed when it was shown that much of 'necessary training' was pure unneccessary credentialism. Still, it was not enough. This was where parents and grandparents stepped in to help out. An extended family guided the young couple.</p> <p>The economic drain was more easily solved. Each child gives to his parents a set percentage per year of the wealth he earned. He also gives a smaller percentage to his grandparents. Thus, if one were to have seven children who became professional investors, and merchants....one could retire quite nicely.</p> <p>This fostered a focus on teaching the children.</p> <p>Two hundred years after the FTL ships arrived, the people of Ti Pramere are groups of extended families heavily into merchanting, with young adults responsible for vast fortunes, and the typical couple having on average 6.9 children. Most people have a wide array of talents, and usually have several that they are professional at. The family elders tend to have expert level skills in certain areas.</p> <p>Most business arrangements are 'done with a handshake'. The honor of a particular extended family is of great worth to it, and to maintain that honor they would definitely accept economic damage.</p> <p>Laws have been passed about a hundred years ago forbidding too close relationships between families. This is based in part on worries of inbreeding, and on the desire for the families to be open and energetic.</p> <p>Many of the Great Families are starting to make marriages off-planet. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/merci#post-6067 Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:12:17 +0000 Tadeusz 6067@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>In the depths of NoTime, the Merciful One framed her intention, and then she drew in a breath of Elemental Chaos. This chaos, she had created earlier, to prepare, and now she formed it, and the Universe began.</p> <p>Some time later, humanoids walked the surface of a planet. They were tall, slim, and very beautiful. The gravity of the planet was .5 g as the planet was quite small. The lungs of the humanoids were consequently very well developed to deal with low pressure. They could run great distances, and leap canyons, but their overall strength and stamina were less than a human.</p> <p>They were frail, willowy marathoners with enormous rib cages, and elegant faces.</p> <p>They rebelled against the Merciful One, each and every one of them, and she mourned. Seeing no hope for it, she sent her Flameire, the Lords of the Flame, to curse the the Children of Mostok for such they were called as Mostok was the father of them all.</p> <p>And it was thus that they moved from the Isle of the Blessed to the World Beyond, and the first generations lived nearly a millenium. And each couple had many children of each generation, and they had children. And it was thus that in 1500 years, the people of the World Beyond neared a population of two billion.</p> <p>They had one language, and they had the ability to read each other's surface thoughts, and so they understood one another. With clarity, they found that greatness was in their grasp.</p> <p>But the people had abandoned the teachings of the Flamiere, contending that the doctrine of flame spirits, was of no use to Men and Women of Cold Matter. They found other excuses as well, but the key point is they turned against their Creatress.</p> <p>Their great power and talent was turned to only their own benefit. And with no trust from one man to another, it soon became the act of a fool to be open and honest. And thus the culture pushed the people further down the nightmarish path they had chosen.</p> <p>They turned to war, and made great genocides one upon many others.</p> <p>They forgot hospitality, honor, and honesty. They substituted murdering guests, shameful behavior, and exalted liars as the best men.</p> <p>Few had children as such was a committment to another. And of those children...many had parents like the young woman who was watching a television show, and was disturbed by her baby's cry. So she murdered the babe, and went back to her television show. There were a few children who survived, but they tended to be wolves in human skin, nay, wolves have more honor and compassion. Creatures who could not understand good even if an angel explained it to them for they were appetite and rage and cunning.</p> <p>And thus the population fell like a stone.</p> <p>It had crossed one billion when it came to the attention of the residents that there were a few, a very few, say one in a hundred thousand, who held to the code of the Merciful One, and pled for salvation from the day's horror.</p> <p>It was easy, indeed natural, for the wicked to hunt them all down, and slay them. In the space of a dozen years, no more but one family were left. And thus it was that the Merciful One, in her great desperation reached for a verser to save them.</p> <p>She considered destroying the wicked, but she could not. They were her creation. She loved and had pity on them despite the utter wickedness of their way. Her Flamiere counsel her to burn the planet, send a comet, and shatter the planet, and let loose a flood of lava to cover the whole earth. She can't do it.</p> <p>And so, not knowing what to do, she sends a verser to rescue the last family of decent people on the planet. But thousands of the wicked are coming from all over, hoping for the 'honor' of killing the last good person.</p> <p>There is magic. It is magic of healing, and magic of mending, and helping an axe land right. Then there is a great power block extending for many levels until it is allowed for the Flamiere to manifest themselves. Thus, this world has 15@10 magic bias, but other than angels showing up on the doorstep, and sprained ankles being healed by a chanted charm, there is little magic.</p> <p>There is enough psi to Read Surface Thoughts. There is no government as that concept is not yet known in this world.</p> <p>There is steam engine technology, but without covenants of trust, large-scale operations is simply impossible. Building a railroad requires faith that a robber wouldn't steal the tracks the next day, and if you had such faith, in this world, it would be badly misplaced. In general, each inventor is on his own (except for what he can steal from others).</p> <p>The Flamiere and even the Merciful One are quite open to being asked to talk, or to give counsel. They will manifest themsevles with ease.</p> <p>However, the Merciful One is not respected. The humanoids know she won't strike them down. She might make them sleep for a few minutes, or overawe them with her presence.</p> <p>If the decent people are killed, then the people in this world will reach another level in their moral degradation. The Merciful One will not shine her light into the world anymore, and the people will forget there is any thing such as good...which is what they want.</p> <p>The Dark Sister, who is generally barred from interfering, in this world because the Merciful One imprisoned her, will be freed. This world will take the last few steps to become a suburb of the Abyss. And then its people will go forth when someone summons a demon from the Dark Sister's horde, and be as demons in other universes. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-rock-paper-scissors#post-7541 Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:01:13 +0000 Tadeusz 7541@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Let me sketch out a world's magic system.</p> <p>Rule of Four<br /> ============</p> <p>There are four schools of magic which compete with each other (and a banned fifth house which is underground). There is magic based on the four elements. There are four types of magic (Animal form, Geometry form, Emotion form, Primal form).</p> <p>Magic is cast by speaking softly the name of the spell. The spell is then made manifest, and then the spell acts on the next action turn as a semi-independent Form.</p> <p>Certain forms can decisively beat other forms. Certain forms can weakly beat other forms. This is known to everyone who is a magician. The typical magician who is not in a protected school is a professional.</p> <p>Magicians duel for the honor of their schools (similar to old Kung Fu movies), and the honor of their particular teacher. In preparation for a duel, they stand fifty feet from each other, and use the spell Auralink.</p> <p>This links their powers to create a battle circle which is a zone that prevents their magic from getting out of hand. It also has the effect at the end of a duel of enabling the winner to much more easily use the spell...Aura steal on the loser. Use of Aura Steal empowers the winner with extra strength and energy both physical and magical for several weeks. It imposes this cost on the loser.</p> <p>It is possible to refuse a duel, and run away. The attacker may then legally try to aura steal, but its more difficult. Such flight gets one a bad rep too as a coward which is important in this culture.</p> <p>It is possible to steal aura from non-magicians. They have little defense or understanding of magic (although most realize it exists, few have the talent and the willingness to become a magi). It offers less advantage than stealing from a magi, and the loser is often sunk in unexplainable gloom for several weeks. This is considered very bad among the four elemental Paths or Schools. Some schools sanction it in emergencies, and others not at all. However, the banned fifth school revels in it. The response of the four schools is to hunt the Five Magi down, and kill them (most normal mage duels do not end with death although that is a possibility).</p> <p>The Sixteen Spells:<br /> ===================</p> <p>Animal Form:<br /> 1. Water Horse<br /> 2. Fire Eagle<br /> 3. Earth Rhino<br /> 4. Air Cheetah</p> <p>Geometry Form<br /> 1. Ball of Fire<br /> 2. Arrow of Air (Triangle)<br /> 3. Square of Earth (a fortress)<br /> 4. Line of Water</p> <p>Emotion Form----actually I'd like a different type than this. </p> <p>As an example Mage A is desperate, he's been forced back and back. His enemy is faster than he is, so his enemy has gotten in four spells to his three...and he's almost beaten so he does what most beginner mages do in dire straits...</p> <p>Square of Earth he sings out quietly. Ten foot high, one foot thick walls of solid clay materialize out of the Nevernever around him. He feels safe.</p> <p>Meanwhile his opponent guessing what he would do says Arrow of Air. And the Arrow of Air is a very weak attack spell, but unless stopped, it will follow you anywhere. And the Square of Earth has an open top.</p> <p>The Arrow arcs over the fortress wall and slams into Mage A. He is rattled, and stunned, and loses his concentration and his Square dissappears.</p> <p>Mage B attacks with Aura Steal as Mage A tries to focus after getting his bell rung. Its too late. The steal takes effect and A's energy and willpower flows out of him to strengthen the already stronger Mage B.</p> <p>Now if B had guessed another spell, and attacked with Line of Water, a blasting roar of water like a fire hose would have appeared in front of him, and seconds later went off in a straight line at Mage A. And the Fortress would have utterly blocked it, and been undamaged. </p> <p>As a verser side note: The verser would have great advantages with his own magic which did not follow the rules. Also, he would attract a lot of attention because magi would think he had discovered one of the fabled Lost Spells. On the bad side, most every mage he met would be a professional who was trained in quick casting.</p> <p>And yes, I know thats pretty sketchy. Feel free to add more or modify... </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-gyrial#post-7143 Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:57:16 +0000 Tadeusz 7143@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>Perfection of Shape leads to Perfection of Form. This is the Great Maxim of Action taught by the Gearheads in their schools, and the wheelmen in their churches, and the rolling patrol as it searches the streets of the Great City of Gyrial for miscreants.</p> <p>Technology is based upon the Gear in various sizes, but all machined to the utmost in precision. Doors are opened by gears, and cars are spun upon gears, and the Great City itself rests atop the Hill of Gears.</p> <p>This Hill is set upon a great spinning wheel over five miles in diameter, so that the varying parts of the City can be spun to properly face the Approaching Sun. The Sun, a faint green blaze in the sky, stays in the same spot always. So one is required to move the City about to give the feeling of sunrise and sunset to man, beast, and plant.</p> <p>Those outside the city, in less civilized hinterlands, rely on gear mounted walls call Sunshields.</p> <p>Beyond the hinterlands are the Empty Lands where no one lives. </p> http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-materia#post-6754 Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:10:25 +0000 Tadeusz 6754@http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/ <p>In the world of Materia, the Magic bias is negative. No creature in this world has a bit of magic, a soul, or a spirit. It has been said that 'Mind is meat' and here this is literally true.</p> <p>Lets review a report sent in to the Paratime Commander of a tech-based civ having contact with fifty worldlines...</p> <p>===================================================================</p> <p>Commander,</p> <p>The local carnivores are Ligers, which are four-footed, striped pale purple felines of approximately six hundred pounds. These are the primary predator near Minsky City which we'll deal with shortly.</p> <p>Secondary predators are the giant furred tarantulilids which combine moderate strength with ambush tactics and powerful poison; the quillogs which are huge and very aggressive predators that slam into enemies and jab them with the quills on their muscled bodies; and the slitac who bury themselves in mud to spring out at enemies.</p> <p>Tertiary predators are coyote packs, and hairless hominid packs that resemble humans to some degree.</p> <p>These hominids will send a chill down the back of anyone who meets them. In their eyes, you will see no kindness, no friendship, and no hatred. Before I joined the Worldline Patrol, I was an avowed atheist, but after looking in their eyes, and wondering what was missing, I realized it. The eyes are the gateway to the soul, and they have no soul.</p> <p>As a member of the WP, my job takes me to many very strange alternate realities. I've seen magics, and had Sensitives read my mind. I've ridden a dragon, and been transformed into a frog. I've seen sights that would send a typical resident of Newton City, our blessedly rational home capital, into a state of shock. But nothing compared to the horror of looking into the eyes of the Hominids.</p> <p>I'm not sure why I'm here. They cannot be trained because they combine extreme stupidity and an almost complete lack of imagination with base treachery. They've tried to eat me three times so far even though I've brought them food and healed some wounds with my advanced technology.</p> <p>I'm virtually certain that no Sensitive powers will work here as I feel a numbness in my mind where my latency exists, or so I've been told by the Lady of the Green Eye, our ally on World 24. I know no magic exists...I pray, but it feels as if the heavens are brass.</p> <p>The locals have a pack structure, but no culture, no technology, and no magic. They also have no fear of death which is I suppose a boon as they die like flies from every sort of damage and deprivation. Back home it is said of someone with problems that they are too stupid to come in out of the rain. This is literally true for many of the locals.</p> <p>It is not that they inherently lack the ability to be intelligent. Its just that they're animals. There, I've said it. This place is driving me mad. No one is supposed to say what everyone thinks after they've been here a day. Its implicit. No one comes out and says "These have to be humans. They look like humans. They JUST have to be humans!" But they're not humans. They're less humans than the monkeys in the zoos of Newton City. Those monkeys can use a stick as a tool, and mourn the loss of a friend, and develop loyalties to their trainers.</p> <p>Some speculate that animals have some vestige of an animal soul which is of a different order than the soul of a human or one of the Fey Races, but these, these have nothing.</p> <p>To be more scientific and to be more rational I will try to be. I'm sorry, but like I say, this place gets to you.</p> <p>The local Hominids tend to be four to five feet tall, and mal-nourished. They live in tribes of ten to twenty individuals, except using the word 'tribe' is incorrect as it implies many things they don't have. They are primarily scavengers of meat, and hunters of insects. They live in fear of pretty much everything, but no, let me correct that. They experience fear when a Liger appears, and they run around in wild panic with some of the smarter ones heading for trees. The Liger selects one to eat, and the rest come down from their tree or behind a rock, and walk away uncaring even as the screams of their former 'tribesman' sounds in the air. They know that the Liger's stomach is now full, and yet, I think that gives them too much credit.</p> <p>I suspect the Liger exudes pheromones that tell everyone its not hunting. And with them, its even worse than out of sight, out of mind. They forget within seconds, and care not.</p> <p>It has been said of our bovine hears on the North Continent that 'every time they blink, its a new day' and so it is with these Hominids. Keep in mind that in addition to the loss of the vital spark, and the total lack of a culture to train a mind, that they are also mal-nourished and so what potential their brain might have is deformed.</p> <p>So, I've named my observation post Minsky City in honor of an early AI researcher who led our scientists of two centuries ago in a 'wild goose chase' for something that can't exist. Its only on World 17 that we discovered functioning AI's built by a wholly different principle. So I name this horrid place in his honor.</p> <p>As I look out over the grasslands and watch a Liger take down a giant Roufasan with its six legs, and spot the hills laden with forests, and look down to the swamp where the giant tarantulids hang from trees and the slitac slither through the mud, and I see but a mile distant, things that should be Human but can never be as they prepare to eat one of their own who tripped and broke his ankle, I'm left with one request, Paratime Commander Lewelkin.</p> <p>I've been here a month. Get me out of here now, and assign me to some other world, even World 9 with its endless trench war of man vs. robots, or else I quit. I'll resign my commission, and take my chances with a court martial.</p> <p>Sincerely,<br /> Worldline Observer and Emmissary-First Class,<br /> Dr. James Edwards Martinson. </p>