The Incubators got to them...
Wrung them dry and then moved on to humans.
Wrung them dry and then moved on to humans.
Meguca Micro Empire Quest (PMMM)
- Thread starter inverted_helix
- Start date
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
I have had a brilliant idea on the manual project. It's a long term thing, but it should satisfy the requirements of the Masquerade completely. Here's the idea:
We make Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
Well, not quite. My proposal is that the Serenes make a Magical Girl Anime that is as true to life as they can make it, Grief Spirals and Kyuubey included. Either set in the wild, or in the early days of figuring out how groups work.
Then we can release the manual as supporting worldbuilding, and it might even strengthen the masquerade.
And at the same time that it presents itself as fictional, every actual meguca will realize instantly that this is about the real world, and that the worldbuilding information might be worth checking out.
I think we should aim towards doing this. How much does it cost to make an Anime anyway?
We make Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
Well, not quite. My proposal is that the Serenes make a Magical Girl Anime that is as true to life as they can make it, Grief Spirals and Kyuubey included. Either set in the wild, or in the early days of figuring out how groups work.
Then we can release the manual as supporting worldbuilding, and it might even strengthen the masquerade.
And at the same time that it presents itself as fictional, every actual meguca will realize instantly that this is about the real world, and that the worldbuilding information might be worth checking out.
I think we should aim towards doing this. How much does it cost to make an Anime anyway?
Sinsystems
Patron Librarian
Well according to a quick google search for a single episode of an anime in 2011 costs roughly 10 million yen. So if we want to go with the anime plan I'd probably suggest instead trying to make a Manga first and then just get a suitable studio to make the anime for us.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
A quick googling doesn't let me turn that into 2011 USD, but at current exchange rates, that's about 81,000 per episode.
Well, I knew it was going to be a long term thing.
Sinsystems
Patron Librarian
Although we could probably cheat some of the costs using magic I think it would still be a better idea to try and make a manga first since those are usually a lot cheaper to create.
You can call it hiatus for now. I still have it on my mind, been very distracted of late and lacking in motivation. I've had the update half written for like 2 months.
I finally converted the map but then had no idea how to imbed it so just linked it.
I finally converted the map but then had no idea how to imbed it so just linked it.
So, right now we've basically got another kidnapping situation, right? Be interesting if this is just a group of weekend warriors from one of the hellscapes next door or if one of the Iwata girls that we rather foolishly kicked out several months ago in response to the last kidnapping attempt has managed to sell her soul in enough places and to enough people to put together a revenge squad.
Diomedea
A piece of the continent
- Location
- The interblag
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So, I just reread To The Stars, and that got me re-interested...I probably already gave my speculations based on my projection for local politics, but I need to reread the quest to re-familiarize myself with everything.
You missed this update when thread marking. (I thought there was something missing, took me awhile to find it).
Completed the rough draft of the next Kaoru Training Omake.
Not very pleased with it though, so I'm going to sleep on it and reread it in the morning. Might do some revisions. I do have several things scheduled tomorrow, so I probably won't be able to post it till the evening.
Hmm added it but not sure how to put them in the right order.
So it's been a long while. I pretty much completely lost ability to get myself writing, as well as interest. So before I get to the next update want to say that I'm going to change a couple things to hopefully improve the quest. There's several problems I identified with regards to how this quest went and some of them are rather impossible to fix, but some I can. I hate to do anything like a retcon, but sometimes the writer fails hard enough it's needed.
Number one, I'm going to cave and implement rumors like other empire quests. It didn't fit my initial vision of the setting I was building, but without them problems pretty much always blindside you and that's not really good GMing either. In counterbalance though I intend rumors to be less than accurate and complete fabrication occasionally: just like rumors often are, unlike the perfectly accurate rumors that you sometimes see in empire quests. Technically you could consider this just you gaining access to other groups in a non-hostile manner and not a retcon.
Number two, I'm changing how Puella vs Puella detection works. I'll admit that at the start of the quest I didn't think about it. It wasn't something I properly thought about and it showed terribly. So in the interest of making things better, I'm going to finally admit the failure and fix it rather than let it limp along. So blatant retcon time: other magical girls appear as weaker returns on your magical sense, with larger returns when actively using magic. Stealth and clairvoyance modifiers apply.
Other issues I've not come up with ways to fix:
Research (how to make it useful without ridiculously strong and unbalancing like Research being king in every empire quest always is since I find that damages my SoD in other people's quests).
Hunting rapidly reaching zero danger. Multiplicative modifiers like Kinematics once suggested have their own distinct set of problems. I'm not sure this problem is actually fixable; each sort of method has its own problems.
Well in most of the games the research 'grows' too fast compared to the setting / RL.
In Sage's CORE it makes sense IMO because we have CPU's and we're fairly huge and all that. Oh and it's a Sage quest so everything is OP.
So I say for everything past 'simple' make it take a while. Like X-Com. Research is powerful, but unless you can throw BUCKETS of $$$ and People at it, everything past '101' takes a while.
So let's say a 'Magical Girl Weapon T1' would take a few days with a few people and some $$$.
But Magical Girl Weapon T2 would take a few months with the same people, and way more $$$ / resources and a wide range of Magical Girl weapons to study.
Adding in like double the number of people, having more MGW, more $$$ each of those would reduce a few days off of it.
Eh, but realistically, with enough gear and trained Puella, it SHOULD be near zero danger. Just like well equipped and trained hunters / SWAT teams in real life, the casualties / wounds happen only in FUBAR cases or when intel is way off.
A transition from 'Risk/Reward' to 'People/Income' seems to work well enough. The next 'Risk/Reward' from combat can be things like Yakuza 'Elite Monsters' and PMMM. Maybe Gov agencies later on as well.
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Slith10
Back from the dead and ready to party!
- Location
- New Zealand
I might need to read through this again, it's been a while.
This is a good point.
Research does need a careful balance. At the same time, it's one of those things that can be self-correcting, to an extent: as "low-hanging" techs are discovered and taken off the tree, the upper-level versions can be adjusted higher in price, should you decide that the lower version was too cheap, so long as you don't give away the farm with the low-hanging stuff.
Agree with others saying regular hunting shouldn't need to be overly dangerous anymore, and that in the Serene's case the danger from hunting has been replaced with the fact that we simply haven't been as aggressive in expanding as we could/should have, and as a result are in danger of being out-grown by other, less risk-averse meguca groups.
There's also the high-level demon outflow from the deathscape that is Tokyo, IIRC.
With a smidge more doggedness I've written up most of turn 28 main update. I'm considering if I want to give one more vote point on the mini-turn though. The end result might come out of left field. When I considered the goals and motivation of the opponent, it didn't really jive with what I'd originally planned for their endpoint on the operation. So there's a bit of turnabout. Though it was always a matter of neither the player side nor the opponent side really knowing what they were dealing with.
Though admittedly in the intervening time since I last updated this quest I've lost a lot of notes on various things. (Mostly the economic stuff admittedly. I had a ludicrous amount of research into restaurants and courier businesses.)
Though admittedly in the intervening time since I last updated this quest I've lost a lot of notes on various things. (Mostly the economic stuff admittedly. I had a ludicrous amount of research into restaurants and courier businesses.)
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Yeah, when you think about is, the fact that Tokyo is a deathscape has an interesting implication:
This is a relatively "young" world; probably only a few years old or so.
See, the thing is that the existence of these high-level demons, and the fact that they spawn in areas of high population density, should have long ago incentivized the Incubators to find ways to prevent large cities from ever forming. Engineered plagues would work best, I think, and should be relatively straightforward for a space-capable race to create and distribute.
And, well, we talk about Tokyo being a deathscape because of its dense population, but it's not even in the top 40 most densely-populated cities in the world, with a density of roughly 6,000 people per square kilometer (Number 39 on that list, Dafni, Greece, has a density of 17,000 people per square kilometer, and the number 1 on that list, Manila, in the Philippines, has an insane 42,800 people per square kilometer!)
This tells me that Madoka didn't really time-travel back to all those other Witching girls, but instead retconned the universe so that all Witches retroactively ceased to exist, and then back-filled history until the present day. That's an inherently less stable way for things to have worked, because all the old justifications for why the world works as it currently does are not necessarily applicable going forward. For example, any day now the Incubators might decide to wipe all cities of density >5,000 people/square kilometer, or whatever the deathworld threshold is, off the face of the world entirely, just so they don't need to bother paying grief cube bounties anymore.
Now, many of us have probably concluded all of this awhile back; I'm fairly certain @inverted_helix has. The bit that's relevant to the current topic is that the whole system of demon spawning itself is probably only a few years old, which means that it may be subject to "adjustment" as time goes on and we transition from a world where everything exists because Madokami retroactively shoehorned it in, to a world that is rules-based, dynamically generated, and where free will exists. I'm suggesting that demons may become inherently more--or less--dangerous as time goes on, as the world adjusts into actually existing, rather than being the artificial history of Madokami's creation.
It's not the high density that triggers it so much as levels of overhunting.
The situation was in fact fairly stable from the Incubators perspective. Girls that reach Elite status are the ones that are more prone to overhunting to a degree high enough to trigger them, and those Class 3 demons are what take out Elites so that they aren't permanent fixtures. Keep in mind the Incubators profited from high turnover.
Without Elites it's rare to overhunt an area to a degree sufficient to spawn a Class 3 demon.
Occasionally the meiosis factor can create a death zone, but there's methods to deal with that as well.
Also cities themselves are a good thing from Incubator perspective because they represent larger human population and thus more energy gain. The Incubators want the largest sustainable human population.
You know no one seems to have picked up on a connection here. When you "use up" a grief cube you give it to the Incubators usually anyways. And that's a higher energy state for them to use than clean ones. So why did you think they charge you clean grief cubes for services?
They also pay out grief cubes to other meguca for doing certain tasks. (As you saw with the bounty pay out.) That's what they use the grief cubes they charge you for.
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Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
On the topic of research, I noticed something in my own numbers quests.
When research is a sure thing, with a visible progress bar and the assurance that there will be results, SV and SB jump on it relentlessly. But if you hide the progress bar, and remove the surety that what is being researched will have fruitful results, they will avoid it. In my slivers quest people have pretty much given up on research entirely in favor of buying technology from other factions.
I think the problem with research being "not useful" or "utterly broken" is actually on the player end, not the GM end, and is therefore unsoluable.
When research is a sure thing, with a visible progress bar and the assurance that there will be results, SV and SB jump on it relentlessly. But if you hide the progress bar, and remove the surety that what is being researched will have fruitful results, they will avoid it. In my slivers quest people have pretty much given up on research entirely in favor of buying technology from other factions.
I think the problem with research being "not useful" or "utterly broken" is actually on the player end, not the GM end, and is therefore unsoluable.