I just needed to quote this, because this is the best line, and says so many things about paradigms and Donald.
Panopticon: A Game of Posthumans, Perniciousness, Paranoia, Politics, and Plasmaguns
I just needed to quote this, because this is the best line, and says so many things about paradigms and Donald.
Anyone else felt a bit some pity earning that the TN Void Engineers had forgotten what Earth was like? That when they got back to the homeworld, they couldn't even recognize it?
It's just -- they're so messed up they can't even recognize home. This is just a combination of sad and horrifying/terrifying.
It's just -- they're so messed up they can't even recognize home. This is just a combination of sad and horrifying/terrifying.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Yes. I think I commented to that effect, too.
I don't normally allow people to. I am in fact going to force a reroll on this with expenditures declared beforehand simply because just throwing the dice on a roll where you needed 8 successes on 9 dice is somewhat inane. I mean, unless people really want this roll to fail, which leads to Excitement (TM). It won't be instantly fatal, but it will be Very Exciting. Like being on fire.
Should we roll first?
EDIT:
And it works, apparently.
How much prime energy should be spent to reduce difficulty?
And do we need to roll paradox as well?
Okay, in future could you not be a goddamn idiot and risk everything on an unmodified roll because you have a hard-on for rolling dice? Because that was so fucking dumb it's beyond belief. I have spent quite a long time on Henriette's character arc, and I don't want to see her die because you had a stiffy for getting to roll dice.
PRO TIP if she fails the roll, the characters WILL BE SURROUNDED BY VEHICLES in the motor pool which will not be EMPed. I WONDER WHAT MS CLOCK MIGHT TRY WITH THAT?
Now that I am conscious, I am going to call for 5PE from reserves and 3AHL to be taken (leaving a small margin of 4HL for shrapnel or Paradox backlash), meaning that she's spending 8PE on this roll. That was what I was always going to roll spend, because if we don't get a high enough margin of success, we won't be able to punch through low levels of countermagic and won't be able to assign enough Duration factors to actually shut things for at least a scene.
Henriette can pull another point of PE into the working, because she's Sacrificing a very, very expensive engine for the working (Prime 3). That means she has a total spend of 9 points of PE.
...
Now, before Henriette basically incapacitates herself from damage, she has some access to the Nanofab before Jamelia takes 'Donald' and 'Serafina' back out of the EROS. That allows her access to the nanofab, and she has Matter 4. Through rapid synthesis and her access to standard Union blueprints, she can fast-synthesise some gear. Starting, critically, with armour for the squishy members of the party, and starting double critically with her, because she's really not going to have much HL left once the Paradox hits and needs to be kept safe. She also makes sure her outfit has a shielded underlayer (Forces + Prime shielding on herself) so no one can try to hack her if she gets taken out and it should protect her implants enough that they just shut down in safety mode rather than overheating and cook her brain.
(ie, Henriette is OOC waving at Paradox and going "Um, Mr Paradox sir, I don't want to die. So I'm leaving a nice and wide avenue for you to put me on a coma Quiet filled with painful nightmare-wracked hallucinations of all the guilt pent up in me about what I did to my sister, or nightmares of Autochthonia, or even leaving me as a drooling shell until my implants restart. I'd just prefer not to have them overheat and kill me, and so if you want to slap me for being vulgar, it'll let you be more coincidental about the backlash if you don't do too much damage and instead go after that tasty tasty trauma I have over various topics - or just do what you do to an Iterator whose brain implants crash." Because I'm very worried about how a Forces 4 vulgar-with-witnesses roll interacts with Henriette's Permadox.
Like I told you all, bad plan.)
Then, Elsa chips in with CAD-CAM to update her armour designs with layers of woven composite stripped from the inner hull of the LX-5, giving the reinforced spidersilk armour the soak of an armoured vehicle like the LX-5. Sure, they'll fail after a few shots, but that's a few shots which aren't hitting the meatsacks.
Priority for the armour is Henriette, Jamelia and Harlan, because they're the meatsacks and Wufan is hopefully loaded up because he is a) going to a new amalgam for the first time, and b) paranoid that Jamelia will try to have him bumped off.
...
More rotes will be needed, but that's a start. We'll certainly need Entropy + Time + Corr shielding so Ms Clock doesn't see the EMP coming, and I think Jamelia's the only one who can exactly pull that off - mind you, heh, this is certainly one hell of a Disruption to Ms Clock's plans, so Jamelia's Entropy criterion hits. And, heh, every other member of the party is unknowingly helping Jamelia's ritual to "act in an unexpected and very stupid way to advance through the trap and out the other side, rather than trying to avert it", which means that everyone else is a helper in her NWO ritual and thus is giving a bonus successes each.
EDIT Oh yes, and Kessler can pass out the RPGs from his coat. Both him and Jamelia are wise in the ways of the mujhadeen (having seen it from both sides), and they both know the best way to start an ambush is with a salvo of rockets before anyone knows what's going on, because RPG-using tactics resemble musket-using tactics in dense terrain.
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Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
Hey calm down. Not everyone is up on the rules. It was a mistake, but it's not that horrible of one.
When we are explicitly told by @MJ12 Commando about things like cannibalising HL for Prime and we can't spend WP for auto-successes (noting that WP anyway has to be declared beforehand) and it is a +7 Difficulty roll, then, yes, it was a horrible mistake.
MJ was entirely within his rights to have that roll stand, and if it had stood, Henriette would take a 10 dice backlash and then still fail the activation roll for the magic. Leaving the entire party right in the middle of Ms Clock's killzone. Having given away the element of surprise.
To put it another way, when the centrepoint of the plan is "We need to EMP them to stop us all dying instantly", fucking up that heavily is an absolutely horrifying mistake. Because just rolling the dice. And needing 8 successes. On 9 dice. Is horrifyingly stupid.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
I mean't "Didn't quite understand the rules" isn't that horrible of a mistake for a person to make. Especially since not all the rules are actually, you know, posted. Some confusion and misunderstanding is to be expected.
It is a horrible mistake in the game, sure, but at the end of the day it's a game.
On the one hand, it, uh, yeah. Basically everything that ES said.
On the other hand he probably read this:
On the other hand he probably read this:
and thought "Oh, the GM just told us to go ahead and roll right now. Okay I'll go do that."
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Also, I think some people get confused by which has to be done / declared before to take effect in the roll rather than later. Maybe it'd be easier to understand if it was specified like a list as to what needs to be done first.
1. Declare PE to be spent on roll
2. Declare how many HLs to cannibalize
3. Declare rotes / stunts to help on the roll
4. Adjust base roll (9d10x7) to new roll. This is a key roll, and if you don't understand the above, don't roll it.
I'm just guessing on the order here, but as it is, it's a bunch of gobbledygook that someone presumably understands followed by a "roll [this]."
1. Declare PE to be spent on roll
2. Declare how many HLs to cannibalize
3. Declare rotes / stunts to help on the roll
4. Adjust base roll (9d10x7) to new roll. This is a key roll, and if you don't understand the above, don't roll it.
I'm just guessing on the order here, but as it is, it's a bunch of gobbledygook that someone presumably understands followed by a "roll [this]."
I'm not sure why people are surprised. The dice system being used is basically a blob of unintelligent arbitrary rules which are basically designed to be incomprehensible to a layperson.
A quest format is a bad place to use complex dice rules purely because they are so hard to understand well. Statistics is something most people have trouble understanding when it is simple. Never mind complex variations which have multiple steps and considerations for which exact model to use.
It isn't like the quest runner(s) of this quest really needs a highly user-visible source of randomness to mess with players plans, as the players do that to themselves often enough.
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I figure that it wasn't the complicated-ness of things so much as 'the second sentence of MJ12's post said to 'roll that EMP' ' and Arcus interpreted that as a "somebody roll this please"/"go ahead roll".
It wasn't the dice mechanics but probably just a poor interpretation or maybe choice of words or tone.
EDIT:
No misunderstanding of mechanics or basic counting ("Hmm we have 9 dice and it's a +7 difficulty") error required; just somebody thinking "Oh the DM said roll." and "It's not like dice-rolling itself changes much, only decisions on resource-expenditure."
And if they'd been paying attention to rolls and mechanicus of the game, they might also have been hurt by their knowledge of how the game works; because they would also have had the added detriment of knowing "Well we mostly never decide to ADD extra dice via PE - and we can't spend any Willpower on this anyway - so the dice-rolling really can't change at all anyway."
It's like somebody thinking rolling a d20 without adding any modifiers to it is okay.
"But you didn't add the modifiers to it!"
"Just manually add or subtract the bonuses, it's a die not fucking rocket science."
"But what if we decide to not only subtract difficulty, but also add dice to the roll!"
"Then roll a few more dice, ffs."
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DarkLight140
Credit to Team
- Location
- Lost in my thoughts
Well... if you feel like explaining why things don't work, going over that would be great. Saying "this requires higher Spheres" is probably accurate, but it doesn't really help with my comprehension of what specific limitations are involved. I've even cracked open a Mage: The Ascension rulebook and puzzled through it for about an hour, and I still can't tell.
My understanding was that Sphere requirements went up as the concept of what the mage is doing widened- first you see things, then you affect yourself, then you affect others, then you affect groups, etc. But as far as I can tell, nothing that I suggested involved a conceptual line that we haven't already crossed (or it hasn't been said we could cross by people who seem to know what they're about). It's just doing what we've already done, but more so- and we can fuel anything quite a bit with the tons of energy being pumped through the ship which we can tap into their bio-cables to steal. You said that it takes Life 5/Correspondence 4/Mind 5, as compared to our Life 4/Correspondence 3/Mind 5, so what do the extra Life and Correspondence point grant us that we don't have?
Serafina is already a hivemind using Correspondence 3 (which actually seemed strange to me after reading the Ascension rulebook as I'm pretty sure it's a "co-locate self" effect, but I'll trust that if we did it already we can do it), so what about expanding that hivemind requires Correspondence 4? It can't be distance or intervening objects, because she's already got both of those between her existing bodies. Are there just limits on the number of places you can be based on the sphere? But that seems like more a matter of power than a conceptual barrier.
Likewise, Serafina has already made her body cease to exist and is some kind of abstracted crazy bio-virus, based upon the description of how the previous effect worked. Having her bodies break off bits of themselves isn't much of a new thing; it's more of a flavor/focus for the next effect, so it shouldn't require any more Life than she's already used. At most it's a lower-level "grow some extra flesh" effect on the things she's already got, with them mundanely implanting that into victims as the focus for Mind/Correspondence mind control and hiveminding. Actually controlling the new bodies is a different thing, but that's Mind (at 5 already) and it's been mentioned by others that we can work mind control effects here. What is it about this that needs Life 5 but Life 4 doesn't cover?
Likewise, I had thought that enhancing others (which would cover mutating possessed people into combat forms) was a Life 4 effect. At least, the Sphere guide linked in the beginning says it is- grow armor and muscles on yourself at Life 3, do it to others at Life 4. Why does it need Life 5, let alone Life 6?
As for abandoning armor and primium, obviously the new bodies won't be armored, but we don't really care if they die; as for primium it's still right where it was before. Does Serafina lose all the defensive value of primium if she doesn't have every bit of her mind armored, so she's entirely exposed to any mental attack that can use an unprotected bit of her as an attack vector?
I will note that we have had times in the past where it was made clear that PE/WP expenditures had to be specified before rolling. If you're not sure what you're doing, ask first. However, having some official procedure for making rolls listed in a noticeable place would be helpful for those who are newer. (Also, an update on the Sphere summary on the front page would be nice, if someone has a Mage book handy, and time to do it.)
I concur with ES's proposal for Prime spending - it's going to wipe out Henriette, but we already knew that.
As for rotes:
First thing: Elsa checks for surveillance, and hacks it to read "Nothing's wrong". Because assuming the car isn't bugged is the height of stupid.
I wonder if Elsa could CAD/CAM a Faraday Cage-like thing to act as a focus for protecting equipment in the passenger compartment from the EMP?
Guo and Harlan can prep for taking down "Serafina" and "Donald" quickly and uneventfully. Neural sedative to the back of the neck + Mind Crush? (Drug to make mental resistance less, then Harlan mind-controls them)
I concur with ES's proposal for Prime spending - it's going to wipe out Henriette, but we already knew that.
As for rotes:
First thing: Elsa checks for surveillance, and hacks it to read "Nothing's wrong". Because assuming the car isn't bugged is the height of stupid.
I wonder if Elsa could CAD/CAM a Faraday Cage-like thing to act as a focus for protecting equipment in the passenger compartment from the EMP?
Guo and Harlan can prep for taking down "Serafina" and "Donald" quickly and uneventfully. Neural sedative to the back of the neck + Mind Crush? (Drug to make mental resistance less, then Harlan mind-controls them)
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***
Arms folded, Reina gestures at the lightform floating in the air before her. It's a sparkling, glowing collection of spheres connected by thin diaphanous threads.
It reminds her of the kabbalah. Although if anyone else were to ask her, she'd say it reminds her of the node-to-node grids the Progenitors produce of the structure of the brain, which they seem to have thoroughly meshed into the Consensus these days. And they remind her of something else, too, which she is explaining to the surrounding rag-tag members of the Council of Nine Mystic Traditions.
Of course, that's the bitterest irony. She says she's surrounded by Traditionalists, but she's also surrounded by the heirs of the Virtual Adepts and the Electrodyne Engineers. Good, solid Conventions only a few months ago in her own memories, and yes, the Engineers might have been getting in a snit about the planned phase-out of the obsolete ether theory for much more elegant and mathematically simple relativity, but she was sure it was just a small period of disquiet. It seems her death pushed debate into full on rebellion. It was probably all Victoria's fault. The Chair of Unity was not very good at living up to her title. Quite divisive. Honestly, far too young to have such a senior position - and not the equal of poor Francis in the role.
And the loss of the Virtual Adepts pains her worse. She does not know the full story, but it seems so damn stupid. What on Earth were her colleagues playing at?
"The underlying principles of this 'Digital Web' - of course, I should have recognised them earlier," Reina is saying. She taps her fingers on the table. "They're Anne Milbanke's work. Purely theoretical, of course, but she was a member of the Lighthouse Keepers in good standing and quite brilliant in her work on organised social systems."
"I'm not familiar with the name," one of the Virtual Adepts says, tilting his head.
"She lived her life in her husband's shadow, and later her daughter's - and she never considered this theorising much use," Reina says. "She preferred her work on prison reform and the abolition of slavery - and yet everyone remembers her for her marriage to that rascal Byron! Shameful."
"Ada Lovelace's mother?" the Adept asks, tattoos lighting up with interest.
"Ada had her father's temperament, but her mother's mind - and it was her mother who made sure she was taught to make use of it," she says primly. "But never mind that. In its raw form, the Milbanke model allows us to effectively treat this system as an abstract hierarchical node-based model. She developed it originally for modelling human populations. If we realise this abstract model through Arthur Collier's work, we may be able to expose the substrate and thus bypass the technological systems here which are reliant on the works of men of science and are compromised by the being which lurks outside."
"Collier, eh?" a man with a halo and glowing white wings says. "I've studied some of his work from a theological perspective. It has some very interesting commonality with common Akashic thought. Have you read the unexpurgated 'Clavis Universalis, or A New Inquiry after Truth, being a Demonstration of the NonExistence or Impossibility of an External World'?"
Reina narrows her eyes. "How did copies of that survive?" she asks, then shakes her head. "Never mind that. Yes, I have. What I suggest is that we make use of the core conceptual mathematical framework of this Digital Web as a carrier for the signal, in much the same way that the crudities of ether-space science can use the etheric substrate as a carrier."
A Virtual Adept wearing a slinky dress covered in butterfly-wing-like patterns reaches out and sticks a hand into the lightforms. "Okay, so if we shift this hologram to this model," she says, twisting her hand and adding a layer of intersections and annotations over the top, "what are you saying exactly?"
"I'm saying," Reina says, taking a pen and sketching a pillar over the top of the kabbalahic neural network, "that the underlying core structure is an abstract mathematical space unrelated to the technological implementation. It won't be trivial to access the abstract mathematics, but the abstract rendition will have the same relationship to the Digital Web as the Digital Web has to reality."
This produces more than its fair share of immediate arguments.
***
Donald's cup of coffee is cold. He's on his own now. Janice has gone off to try to get some more sleep, despite the nightmares.
He can't sleep. He's getting philosophical. He hates doing that. He prefers to get drunk so he doesn't have to ask himself really awkward questions. And no, the harmonicas are not helping.
Fucking damn it, Janice. Most people just saw her as a lefty Verbena techno-witch who spent her life working on all kinds of social causes. They don't ask what kind of woman puts that much effort into such things. Why she doesn't seem to sleep when she throws herself into her latest cause, whether it's vegetarianism, female rights in Sub-Saharan Africa, BDS, or venturing into other dimensions to document and map them so other people know what to watch out for.
He always seems to find himself around obsessive, cause-driven people. It's something about being an enlightened scientist or mage or whatever. If you've got Genius, you're never happy with the world as it is. You're always driven for something more. If she changed sides, she'd probably turn up in the Watchers or the Ivory Tower and have great sweeping plans for social reform.
Hell, he's the same too. He just gets so angry sometimes, when he sees hypocrisy in an organisation. When he sees people not living up to their self-proclaimed values. It's the kind of thing that leads him to change side to the Technocracy, then go and embarrass his higher ups by calling out SPD corruption, then wind up with Director Belltower and her apparently determination to personally piss off the space ghosts of Control. He gets like this worst when he can't take the edge off his mind with chemicals. His vices - his sex, drugs and rock and roll - distract him. Give him more space to be the guy he was before he went on an experimental drug trip at college with a synthesised LSD-derivative someone he knew had cooked up.
Well, it'd worked. Totally blew open the windows of his consciousness. He knows for a fact that the Progenitors and the NWO have historically used drugs for exactly that purpose. RDs need Genius too.
And Janice is right. As usual. What he used to do, as part of the Cult of Ecstasy - apart from the time he spent calling himself a Seer of Chronos to try to show up the people who just used it for fun - was a core part of who he was. He remembers knowing that the Technocracy brainwashed people so they stopped believing in their RD 'paradigm'.
But he switched sides. And he wasn't brainwashed. There wasn't any chair where they made him watch violent films while Beethoven played. He just… stopped doing the stuff he used to do. Mostly. Uh, there are a few black marks on his file, but in his defence that was only in do-or-die circumstances, like when Nephandic EDE-possessed bioroids kicked down the front door of his office. Maybe it's just growth as a person.
The thing is, the thing is… he used to do that kind of thing all the time. And sure, there were often some fucked up side effects from his drug experimentation, but there are fucked up side effects when the Progenitors experiment with drugs too. He just had cheaper drugs. And some of the things he used to do would be really useful right now. He knows that. And despite that he doesn't want to do them - and that worries him. Thinking about doing them makes the same feelings of guilt as he got when he did the things that got him the black marks.
But he wasn't brainwashed.
Then why doesn't he do some of those things any more?
Because he's told not to.
Why does he listen to them? Why doesn't he just drink and help him sleep and shut down these thoughts? Why does he listen to Reina like that?
… uh, duh, because she's a very scary lady who'd be scary even if she wasn't wearing Rose like a meat puppet. And Rose is a killing machine with the personality of a young kitten.
Point. He needs to find some more harmless people to hang around with. But that doesn't change his central thesis. What he used to do used be a core part of who he was. He doesn't do it anymore. He doesn't feel like he's a different person. So does that mean it wasn't as core as he thought it was, or who he is has been… adjusted? And if he's been changed, is it some subtle hyperpsych almost indistinguishable from unassisted mind-changing, or did they just get someone like Sera in and cut out all the memories he didn't need?
Like the bits they removed from Rose after the madness of London. Oh God. Donald rubs his temples. That thing is still out there. And Rose doesn't know the truth. He'll… he'll have to see if Reina can do something to tell Rose the truth. Maybe the visceral hatred for the I-50 construct she showed - and the way it fanmurdermachined about Control - can be used to work her against her brainwashing.
***
The man who looks like an angel stops Reina on the way out of the room. In a decidedly non-religious way, he has his hands in his pockets and looks distinctly awkward.
"A word to the wise," he says.
"Yes?" Reina says curtly. She doesn't like him much, and considers his 'costume' hubristic - and insofar as anything can be blasphemous, she thinks it's blasphemous.
"I'd take more care about what you say in front of your techno-buddy. You're," he rolls his eyes, "being a bit careless about how non-doctrinaire you're being. You're talking about ether, for goodness sake, and for your own safety you shouldn't do it unless you're talking about anaesthetics."
Reina simply stares at him.
"Look, you're pretty decent and you're clearly not the most orthodox 'Crat out there, so just… be careful, okay?" he says. "Like, I know enough to see that you're justifying using gnostic principles to access the Plato's Cave gnostic Realm of Ideas version of 'communication', but your superiors might not be so appreciative. Just… get your story straight before you write up your incident reports, and watch out for Sykes tattling on you."
"I will bear that in mind," Reina Lior, the Chair of Generals, Arch-Mechanist of the International Brotherhood of Mechanicians, says.
The man grins at her. "And if you show up here again, I wouldn't mind talking more about post-Reformation English radical Christian exegesis. It's always been a pet hobby of mine."
"Perhaps," Reina says, smiling at him. "My original training was as a theologian, after all, and I do like a good debate." Her hand twitches, and she rubs it. "I'm sorry," she says, "but I have more things to read up on. We will talk later."
The smile leaves her lips as soon as she's left him behind. A blind fool who dresses up as an angel and believes in a God which is only the product of man. Her contempt is personal, because she remembers being just the same. Shaking her head, she heads to the ladies bathrooms and makes sure there's no one else here.
"Stop it," she commands the air.
Her reflection stares back at her sullenly.
"Be useful or shut up," Reina tells Rose coldly. "You're embarrassing me. If you're not going to provide pertinent information if and when I request it of you, I will be obliged to isolate you further. You're weak and pathetic and so I'm not going to give you back this body when there are things which have to be done which you are completely incapable of doing yourself."
Rose's full lips wobble. "You're… you're bullying me!" she says. "And… and… and you're going against Control and you should be fighting the enemies of the Union? I… I respected you! I looked up to you! I… I… I don't know why you're… you're being Bad! It's Bad to be Bad!"
Reina isn't impressed, and crosses her arms, tapping her foot. "Are you done being six?" she asks.
"I am six!"
"Really? Because you were quite insistent that you were not six when you were wanting to pin down Sykes and ravish him," Reina says, raising an eyebrow. "It seems I believed you had more emotional maturity than you truly do."
Rose wipes her eyes on her sleeves, and blows her nose. "You're… you're associating with RDs and talking about RD things and… and you're acting against Control and Control told me to kill Donald so I have to do it because they're Control and it's Good to do what Control says because Control is Good and… and… and… you're even lying to them!" Rose accuses. "You're lying to the RDs! So they do things you want them to!"
"Am I?" Reina says.
"You are! That's… that's not Anne Milbanke's things at all! You made that all up! And said it was the work of the mother of someone who's really famous and let them think that obviously Ada Lovelace's work must have built off it!"
"I don't see why you have a problem with me lying to 'Reality Deviants'," Reina says smugly.
Rose coughs and splutters a bit. "Because… because you're a Reality Deviant too!" she snaps. "You do bad things!"
"How can I be one if I was on the Invisible College?" Reina asks.
"Control said… said the enemies of the Union had to die and you're helping them which means you're an enemy of the Union and… and…"
Reina lets her babble on for a bit, the distress and mental stress of what she's saying and what she believes clashing within her head.
"Are you quite done?" Reina says flatly. "You're irrational, incoherent, and in no way a worthy successor to me. You're weak and you refuse to take responsibility for your own actions. You deny yourself any agency. For goodness sake, Dr Rosario is a better inheritor to the Order of Reason than you are, and she's flighty, self-indulgent, driven by her womanly urges and wastes her talents. Do you think she would terminate you if Control ordered it of her?"
Rose lets out an incoherent moan. "If Control ordered it… it'd… it'd be Good so I'd do it because it'd be Good because I'm Good and… and… and Sera is Good so she'd do it because it's Good to do what Control says and… and… and it's Good to be Good and… and…" She's weeping openly now, big fat tears running down her cheeks.
Watching dispassionately, Reina Lior shakes her head. "Pathetic," she says sadly. "No wonder you can't even do more than occasionally cause muscle spasms in my arms. You're so weak-willed - for all that your flesh is strong with this… repugnant vampiric taint - you can't even dream of seizing your body back from me. Me. A tired old warhorse who wanted to rest. I should be easy. But you're so weak that you rely utterly on the instructions of Control and can't use any of the rationality of mankind, any of the genius and intellect and capacity for understanding which built the Order of Reason."
She leans on the counter. "You hold the faith of my youth in contempt and call it 'irrational', but you show the same blind, childish faith in Control - who were just men. Yes, I know it well. You want to be like me. How could you even be like me if you refuse to think for yourself?" She shifts, metal armour whirring. "You're wrong. I don't like Dr Rosario, but I've seen enough to know the sacrifices she's made for you. She hasn't advanced as far as she should have, even given her feckless nature. She is precisely the sort of person I would expect to disobey an order from the Invisible College if it forced her to go against her loved ones. And because I was not and am not a fool, I would not give her that nature of order."
"Sh-sh-she would! B-because Sera is Good! She… she would do it because… because… because…"
"Do you think this behaviour impresses me? Do you think it impresses anyone? Even Control, no doubt, considers you an utterly expendable pawn. They never wanted you. They wanted me." Reina folds her arms. "So you turn on the people who want you for who you are, and blindly obey without questioning the people who consider you an undesired accident."
Rose snaps and starts shrieking wildly, eyes glowing red. She lunges for Reina and hits the glass. Snarling, hissing, trying to bite at it with her fangs: she's lost entirely to the stress atavism.
Reina just turns her back on the mad girl and walks away. As she leaves the bathrooms, she smiles so her reflection can't see her quiet amusement. Rose is improving. She's falling to the disgusting haemophage traits faster, and is less coherent in her attempts to explain why it's the right thing to try to kill Donald. She's resorting to violence and babbling because she doesn't have answers, because Reina is breaking her down - which she has to do before she can build her up again, without the weaknesses Control built into her most basic psychology.
"We've got more in common than you're willing to admit," Thorn gloats in the back of her mind. "You hate what your precious Union has become, too. You, a tired old woman who wanted to die. Filled with shame. Filled with guilt. Didn't you see how you found yourself more at home among these young Traditionalists, these post-Technocrats? You drove me away from her, but you can't deny the truth yourself."
"Get behind me, Satan," Reina whispers. "Gabriel brought messages and wisdom to me. You are the adversary who must be overcome so that she can grow. In a kinder world, one such as you would not be her angel."
"Religious references. How rich from the woman who knows that there is no God but what we make." Thorn appears in the shine of the wall tiles, a halo tied to her head with wire. "And you've made your God. Bravo. Do you think the Catholic Church of Christ Computer will put you up in their shrines and speak of your fatherless birthing of this divinity, Mary? Will you be exalted in the hosts of Heaven? Or perhaps you're looking for punishment in Hell."
"No Heaven. No Hell. Only consequences," Reina says grimly.
[Reina - Mind 4 (Command), Prime 2 - Deprogramming rote. By being adversarial and punching Rose in her Charmer/Idealist combo ("You want to be like me? You want my approval? How could I respect someone who acts like like a Reality Deviant in their blind faith and betrays the people they love."), Reina is implementing a Mind-backed exercise in tough love with the end goal of putting Rose under such stress that she breaks with Control and forges herself a new identity that doesn't hold obedience to Control as part of her Idealist. Reina is using the once-per-day version of the extended roll, and uses the version with Prime in to protect herself from any traps hidden in Rose's psyche. Enhanced by Charisma + Command.]
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- Location
- National Capital Region, USA
Poor Rose. She knows killing Donald is wrong, that agreeing Serafina should kill her on orders is wrong, but the Conditioning in her head just keeps shouting over her own thoughts... Killing Donald is Good because Control says it is, but she knows that's not right and her brain hurts and why why why
She just wants to be a Good Girl. Good thing Reina has Bullying 6, enhanced by Mean Old Lady 5.
(The Anathema has Bullying 8 or 9, enhanced by Cat.)
Life 5 is necessary because turning the Xiaolians into biohorror goo requires you to Metamorphose Others - you're requiring very drastic changes to bodies which aren't yours. Now, I may have been misunderstanding what you actually wanted, which is why it's generally ideal to also say what you want to accomplish OOC, but as I interpret it you wanted some pretty serious magical horsepower behind this effect.
Serafina is right now commanding multiple actors with her brain pattern uploaded at a distance. Going and turning herself into a zombie infestation is a fundamental shift from that. As the complexity of the network increases, I'd argue that you're going to require a shift from merely Corr 3-where you're sending/receiving messages and teleporting them around-to Corr 4, where you need multiple copies of the thinky parts to run the network.
If you want to just mind control things, without any other changes, that's a straight up Mind 4-5 effect. Puppeting them is Mind 4/Corr 2. The impression I got from your post is that you wanted to do everything with one very convenient effect, which is something else entirely. It sounded like you didn't just want 'biohorror goo' to be a focus, but the entire intent was to become a biohorror goo infection that ate everything.
"Massively mutate them" is generally Life 5. My general call is that if you're going to be doing drastic changes to yourself via one effect it'll be Life 4 because otherwise there's no difference between Life 3 and 4 ("I grow fur, and I gain a quadrupedal stance, and I get claws and better agility and alter my appearance and my vis-oh hey I'm a tiger now."). Therefore, if you're turning a Sectoid into an 8 foot tall hulk intended only for crushing, it's probably Life 5. Life 6 is because if you're trying to do it with relatively few successes to a large number of actors, that's an archmaster effect.
Or something the Anathema can do, because in its bubble humans are just mewling meat-machines which it can wave a hand and alter into unworkability via Matter 2/3 ("You are now goo.")
You're completely exposing the effect you're using. The Commander could then pump the holds full of anti-mutagen gas or something as a focus for a Life 2 "unweaving" of Serafina's effect, which wouldn't be mitigated by countermagic. This is very bad, because your effect is already rather high-end and thus vulnerable because a few successes of unweaving leads to Serafina being deposited ignominously out of the Xiaolian and probably shot in the face.
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I'd totally roll a dice to see which Xiaolian she came out of.
So, you know. There's a chance that she might just fall off a motorcycle while travelling at 120 kmph along subway tracks. Progress!
*giggles*
I imagine that Reina would find it very amusing to learn that the time-lost Iterators who we gave Molotek to are calling themselves by that old Convention-name. Once Rose can actually know about things, Reina should totally visit.
I am reminded that Henriette has augs and that she has an extra two -0HLs. That means that we have some good news! She can, in fact, throw an extra 2HLs of Agg in, for a total spend of 11PE.
Hurrah! Progress! See what technology lets us do! Radically increase our healing time for short term benefits! Suck on that, Traditionalists!
(Double-Hurrah, both the party doctors aren't with Teamelia, which means if they get shot up... well, Jamelia can patch herself up and heals quickly, but everyone else is just going to have to rely on nature. Well, Henriette slowly self-fixes, and Kessler does so pretty quickly, thus proving once again that cybernetics are the way forwards)
I'm just a bit confused by why we want to spend quite that much Prime - Wouldn't just spending 7 or so be enough to take the roll down to difficulty 0 and guarantee we succeed with for or five threshold successes, without dropping Henrietta into serious wound penalties immediately before she suffers a major paradox backlash?
- Location
- The end of all things
I think we want as many successes as possible because that means the EMP is more powerful and disables things for longer.
One - by getting plenty of threshold successes, we have a good chance of punching through lightly primium-shielded things. Or even frying HITMarks, especially if they're lighter models. We know Ms Clock uses light Iterator robots. We also know, OOC, that there is a spider tank out there. Wouldn't it be nice if the spider tank lost a bunch of subsystems if Ms Clock has stationed it to kill everyone in the parking garage?
Two - we have to watch out for the chance that Ms Clock has mages around set up who might try to countermagic it. More successes protects against things like her having an anti-magic field set up over a killzone.
Three - We need at least two successes devoted to duration, and probably something for area too. These add up.
Four - If this goes wrong, the entire party is boned. Sorry, Henriette, but this entire plan requires that the EMP work. If we're not prepared to take risks to make sure this step works, we should never have gone down here and should have bailed out earlier.
Five - checking my copy of oMage Revised, 10 points of Paradox is just on the bashing side of things if she takes damage. That means that if the Paradox occurs as damage, it'll be Bashing, so she's likely to be knocked out, but has a margin of safety which she wouldn't have if she was taking Lethal.
Six - At an OOC level, we have six mages here with us, and we normally never have more than four. Yes, I am essentially saying "Henriette will be out of action here", partly to make the next bit of combat easier to run on the GM and also to reduce the need to escalate the threats quite so much. At a narrative level, I am literally saying "Henriette gets taken out and can't really contribute to the upcoming fight, taking out a lot of the threats we'd otherwise face", as a metagame trade-off.
So since we're spending 11 PE on this I want the two rolls done. First roll 12d10x7, difficulty +0, for the initial effect.
Then roll 10d10e7 for the Paradox backlash. This should be fun! :3
Then roll 10d10e7 for the Paradox backlash. This should be fun! :3
Well. Could have been better.
... could have been better.
... could have been better.