Page 159, part 1:
@Robinton is it too late to inflict DisneyTier I-want-song provoking on the Lumburglars without it being kinda an asshole move?
(The answer is obviously yes, I'm just imagining an even more comedic resolution to the whole affair.)
Lol!
Good questions! And with the Woo Clan so close we might actually get some of those answers @Robinton !
Being a Telepathic Hive Mind is really useful for casual privacy invasion isn't it?
It would have been great! If you hadn't rolled terribly for information. GURPS 3d6, higher is worse, 16. So you got a particularly annoyingly-equipped group, and nobody lost their helmet.
Addendum: Really, IC, I think you should have noticed their helms a bit sooner, regardless. Ah, well. Maybe I'll go back and amend it at some point.
Addendum: I place no guarantees that the Magic-resistant helmets were their only defense.
Write-in.
Which says something about how much investment this would take...
The more you're working
with physics, the lower the cost.
Getting beams of darkness to nominally work isn't that bad.
Getting them to do physical damage is more annoying.
So, there's absolutely a Chef somewhere that definitely deliberately and knowingly, with customer consent, uses Voidshard Dust/Flakes as part of their cooking.
Nope! It was a random fact from a historical drama. Accurate in its main points, but dramatizing the rest. An absolutely weird (and very hazardous) way to cure someone of a curse. Apparently it actually did, historically, save the life of a probably-not-actually-a-princess of the Shining Concord Empire.
But scholars strongly recommend against trying it again, just because of how many ways it could go wrong.
So, when she read the novel and left it lying around, her fellow Herbalist Apprentice spent three weeks trying to research better ways to achieve the same effect. He'd almost forgotten about what even prompted the question by the halfway mark.
As Marta Yarrow tells the Trees with a slight grin: "Obsessed, that one."
Nah, it's much simpler to bring either the Professor to us, or us to the Professor and maintain the link to allow for continuous education of the entire Forest, plot out the procedure over there, and then the Professor could consent to observe the operation in the Forest itself.
Good thinking!
You'd have to grab a bunch of supplies, and maybe build a copy of a room or two - but no reason why it couldn't be done!
This is...really useful.
Especially if we can supercharge it, use our Wraith Friend as a Focus, and Locate Where The Wraith Came From.
Like, I cannot emphasize how much of a potential intelligence breakthrough this is, holy shit.
Time matters in Magic.
So does Space.
And you're looking at a lot of both. And maybe defenses on the location you're seeking.
You'd probably have to have Materson see if he can't apply Eternity to counter the first - and then see if you can't get Space to a decent level to counter the second - to have a chance at a good link.
Probably.
Who knows. Feel free to try! If you can afford to keep it always-on, even without upgrades, it would be a good 100mile-range Portal detector.
Materson. Buddy. Pal. Amigo. {Woodpecker That Nests Inside A Tree While Keeping It Clean Of Parasites}
How would you like to give the Woo Clan (and other assholes we still need to learn the names of) a really, truly, horrible awful rest of their lives? Or at least a swift death.
And it comes from an angle I don't think anyone would expect.
See, while the Hero of Undying Flame {thought recreation, as Granny Miller says it with a bit of teasing/sarcasm behind it}, especially with a {Forest} behind him, could do a lot of damage, that's not quite what we need.
Yes, this plan involves you becoming a Speaker, or at least Connecting deeply enough to draw on our {Resources} with relative ease.
However...
We have this Shadow-Spinner Colony, just right next door.
And a few of us have had ideas about how to make best use of them, with one particular Tree really wanting us to bring them into the Connection.
And I think we all know just how...dangerous such a thing would be.
All we'd really need from there is the big question of, Location, Location, Location.
And you my friend, have The Location Finding Spell, Experience Using It, and a whole {Forest} of Cooperative Casters.
{Acknowledgement of Several Steps Still Undone/Not Started}
{Follow up Acknowledgement that Materson and (Forest) both know how to be Hunting-Patient}
{Sensation of Watching the First Malice-Vines-Resource-Stealers-Attempted-Kin-Slayers Burn}
He ponders for a long moment.
"You're insane."
A long moment more.
"I'm in. Make sure it's plausible, and I'll help."
Good speculation! We should probably care more about the potential answer than we honestly do! That last one sounds pretty neat, though we retain sufficient {Free Will} that everyone honestly probably lucked out with the {Forest} being as aggressively friendly as we are, if that one's the case.
Just because I feel like speculating: If Cali looked into your futures and saw you were going to go evil, she'd have dropped you on a different world.
(Stable Time Loops. What a headache.)
(The prior is believed to be plausible in-universe. This does not constitute GM confirmation.)
Honestly, your {expression of thought/mind/scientific inquest} is also {Fascinating/Attention Drawing/The Sensation Of Many Feet Chasing On Top Of The Ground, Known Only Because Of The Vibrations Felt Amongst The Roots And Trunks}.
GM: I quite like your Treespeak!
Ah.
What are the qualifications for joining, explicitly?
And how does a Protectorate go from Protectorate to Full Member, no particular reason for the asking
?
(With the League's Feet Voting Policy, what is actually preventing the Ants from declaring themselves a Protectorate No More and applying for full membership/independence/"the political equivalent of telling CT&Friends to fuck off"? A lack of knowledge?)
Lack of knowledge.
And the laws + courts were set up for Two-Legs.
They do require "at least 500 people," and it's debatable just how many 'people' the Ant-Colony has, since no single individual is sapient.
Oh, well, if they can get set up elsewhere, here's the one that SV Ate.
Adversity: that which we challenge, Enterprise: the progression of our growth, Ūrere: (latin for "to burn") our burning ambition!
The Three Word Motto of
The Adventūre Association!
Phaeron Factions.
It's the remnant of a much larger and older organization, and technically dates to before the Cataclysm.
What are the requirements of being able to send an Ambassador?
That the League is willing to accept your ambassador.
Which, right now, they wouldn't be on any permanent basis. Unless you showed them a lot of good ways to make money off of accepting you, and/or were trying to join.
I wonder how they define technology...
Elven Technology: Anything the Ancient Elves did or created. Mundane Technology, Pattern Tech, Magic, Magitech, etc.
They'd confiscate and archive a
Wish if it's pre-Cataclysm and they could figure out how to manage it.
Though in practice, any currently-understood not-calamitous Magic gets ignored, even if it is really powerful.
And,
in practice, something like the Laser Rifle gets ignored as "not powerful or rare enough to merit a pickup team unless we're in the area anyway."
I wonder how my Action went. It'd sure be bad if I poisoned the Souls of the entire Forest from a little tomfoolery.
Good question.
A minor breakthrough of some sort I think.
(It would have been "no progress" if not for the write-in bonus.)
He might have traveled a very far distance using his Accountant Money in pursuit of Adventure.
...True.
Kiynwich Kingdom it is.
Any particular reason not to share our "We're pretty sure this is the Sarah that Last Star mentioned to us" logic?
Share it widely, and you'll presumably become more of a target.
But share it locally? Should be fine.
Could we use Gravity as a Combination with our Negacion Pairs to develop indirect artillery fire?
Yes.
Even your Lens Trees are giving you a slight ability to, effectively, fire around obstacles.
Hmmm. If we pair Void with Ending, could we raise the bar on the number of successes they need to get information? Or are they too similar?
Sounds plausible.
Ah, so Seers see Fate while Time Mages see, well, Time.
I imagine Fate is probably about as dangerous as Time to try to muck around in trying to learn.
Arguably, both could reasonably have access to Postcognition, with the Seer seeing The Fate That Has Happened and the Time Mage seeing The Time That Has Passed.
Seers may see Fate, Time, The Next Country Over, or flat-out Messages (senders vary and may include "your ?possible/actual? future self").
That said, mucking around with Fate isn't
as dangerous. Mostly because hardly anyone ever gets any results out of an attempt.
...what's the word on active deniable Monster Assets? You know, as a hypothetical
Were the Monster Assets only deployed against troops already ignoring the Rules of War?
Great, move along, and for goodness sake don't bring those spiders near us.
You're more likely to get into trouble for
having Shadow-Spinners than deploying them in this case, deniable or not. And even
that is probably not going to cause too many problems - not if you genuinely have them more-or-less under control.
Something for Armor as well hopefully?
Fair point.
Hmm. Proper safety procedures first, but honestly this sounds like a very...useful asset, especially if we can link it up to our Long Range Pollen Deployment Method.
Oh, that's horrifying. I love it!
The cleanup is going to be a
pain, though.
Unless you want the nearby fields all slowly resisting Magic more and more for decades, before sprouting a ton of tiny crystals...
That one Tree who has been trying to get us Spider Pets is to be commended for their bravery and also their fortitude.
@Pyro Hawk's Tree just got a decent crit. Or possibly lost its mind altogether - but the odds against that are great given that it got "best of two rolls" and mind-loss was always very unlikely.
The Woo Clan has to have limits, because otherwise they'd either be explicitly already Winning or everyone would constantly be at Active War against them, but the fact that they do have some method of exploiting their doctrine and declaration of Ownership for esoteric effects means that they have some basis for pulling off more related bullshit, and as I've said Information is a key part of warfare.
Oh, they absolutely have limits. As I think someone mentioned later, I didn't put them on the Continental Map, and for good reason - only the Kiynwich Kingdom wouldn't
crush them if it came to a straight-up no-holds-barred war, and even that is only because said Kingdom is slowly crumbling from within.
By contrast, they're probably the largest expansion-driven 'fish' in the 'sparsely-populated region' 'pond'.
There might be an old Archmage holed up somewhere for Research that's stronger. Maybe a few Monsters too.
I wish whomever actually does this good luck!
@Prime 2.0 had a version for the original quest. I can't find it with a quick search, alas, but it did exist.
OK. I'm tired and right on the edge of not making sense anymore. To bed I go.
