John is an Arete 6 Mage with Spirit in the middle of a Chantry (where RD stuff is Consensual), with no other Technocrats in the vicinity to witness him being naughty.
John is an Arete 6 Mage with Spirit in the middle of a Chantry (where RD stuff is Consensual), with no other Technocrats in the vicinity to witness him being naughty.
...and Freaky Martial Arts Things are particularly consensual, and Kessler has all sorts of freaky martial arts... and he has someone who he can hit with tremendous precision and speed who can't possibly dodge. Freaky Martial Arts as a focus for Spirit? I'm pretty sure I've seen that anime.
On the flip side, it's worth noting that the Precepts are there for a reason. Pulling spirits into the world isn't *always* the brightest idea.
Part of me just wants to see him shoot the ecstatic through the girl.
I keep getting this recurring mental image of one poor acolyte who happens to have a really high Arcane, despairingly trying to remind the party to let him down off the wall. Please. They've been forgetting to feed him.
...and Freaky Martial Arts Things are particularly consensual, and Kessler has all sorts of freaky martial arts... and he has someone who he can hit with tremendous precision and speed who can't possibly dodge. Freaky Martial Arts as a focus for Spirit? I'm pretty sure I've seen that anime.
So, the Plasma Cannon. It's usually vulgar, except in techno constructs and other similar areas. I had thought that the Prime 5 paradox reduction + prime energy tap thing would counter that. Was that never the case, or does that just not work here anyways?
So, the Plasma Cannon. It's usually vulgar, except in techno constructs and other similar areas. I had thought that the Prime 5 paradox reduction + prime energy tap thing would counter that. Was that never the case, or does that just not work here anyways?
I figure this is a good time to use some of that. As long as we can hit him, returning the favor of absurd amounts of aggravated damage sounds like the thing to do here. Plus I'm not 100% sure if we've used the freem-beam yet, so we might get more surprise out of it than the situation would normally allow for.
ItX cybercommandoes having plasma cannons is an expected thing.
Anti-fortification plasma cannons aren't though.
Though, we may get more use out of a non-plasma trick. Mundane weapons work just fine here, and Kesler has Matter 4 to pull one out (probably easier to get around dox if he uses his own matter rather than the very techno "Universal Weapons System").
Red Alert: Warning. Incoming Missile Strike. You can choose 1 or more targets to protect. Do remember that the more you protect, the worse your protection is. Also, you may want to write-in some form of offensive counterstrike or some other way to beat the tank.
[X] Write-In - countermagic (see Earthscorpion) + AUCV auto-controlled point-defense
Countermagic sounds good, but there are other things that can be done if there are any missiles that are still heading in directions we don't like. The AUCV has multiple anti-missile options: the Electroshock grid ("As a bonus, it doubles as a high-powered lightning gun to shoot down incoming missiles."), and a free-electron laser designed for point-defense applications. The Facility Defense HIT Mark has a Hurricane CIWS and several other weapons systems that could be used to shoot down missiles.
So do the countermagic guidance-spoofing, but have the AUCV take out missiles that are going dumb in directions likely to cause damage Offensively... Well, Yanga is not occupied, so it can engage the tank. Possibly in melee, from below, where weapons are less likely to be mounted. And where any stray FAE explosions will have to go through the tank, first.
John Kessler Is Dead:
[X] "Not enough gun."
...But death's an inconvenience now, nothing more.
[X] Write-In: Fastball Special. With a plasma cannon kicker.
Hmm.... probably not going to be relevent or effective, hell I'm not even sure its possible with his spheres, but ...
[Kessler- Spirit 4 - Matter 4 (Enhancement) - John Kessler is more than the sum of his parts. His is the indomitable spirit of mankind, the iron will to perservere. And he's been learning how to work without the fleshy bits. Destroy this body and his soul will walk out of it. Followed shortly by him ripping himself out of the wall in a body of stone.]
-Potential Forces 3 subcomponent involves an explosion of shrapnel as he rips his way out.
Of course even if this is possible, it makes things very awkward when he tries to go back to the technocracy, and also definitely risks edging into becoming an inhuman spirit-entity. Plus, the Avatar Storm is a bitch and I'm not sure if there's a NWoD Twilight equivalent on the material side of the Gauntlet in OWoD.
Hmm.... probably not going to be relevent or effective, hell I'm not even sure its possible with his spheres, but ...
[Kessler- Spirit 4 - Matter 4 (Enhancement) - John Kessler is more than the sum of his parts. His is the indomitable spirit of mankind, the iron will to perservere. And he's been learning how to work without the fleshy bits. Destroy this body and his soul will walk out of it. Followed shortly by him ripping himself out of the wall in a body of stone.]
-Potential Forces 3 subcomponent involves an explosion of shrapnel as he rips his way out.
Of course even if this is possible, it makes things very awkward when he tries to go back to the technocracy, and also definitely risks edging into becoming an inhuman spirit-entity. Plus, the Avatar Storm is a bitch and I'm not sure if there's a NWoD Twilight equivalent on the material side of the Gauntlet in OWoD.
Yeah, I wouldn't use that justification. Instead, have him set up a thing where if you don't sterilize the area you killed him in, some of the surviving nanomachines (of course some survived, you have to explicitly work at it to get them all) go grey goo for a short while and "decompress his mind" (he posseses the new body using spirit) after they become a large enough colony to reform into his body.
Something interesting: at spirit 4 you can take your friends into the umbra or make a gate. With stormwarden you 'may' extend your protections to up to four people IIRC.
Yeah, I wouldn't use that justification. Instead, have him set up a thing where if you don't sterilize the area you killed him in, some of the surviving nanomachines (of course some survived, you have to explicitly work at it to get them all) go grey goo for a short while and "decompress his mind" (he posseses the new body using spirit) after they become a large enough colony to reform into his body.
Except that one is already a fully expected given that they will know to counter. In fact, I'm pretty sure that comes default with the body. Leaving nodules buried underground where he's standing on the other hand ....
Something interesting: at spirit 4 you can take your friends into the umbra or make a gate. With stormwarden you 'may' extend your protections to up to four people IIRC.
We know the spirit world is friendly to them here. It's only a few points of Agg gating across. Kessler has very little to gain by taking the fight to territory they're even better off in and where he has to fight hordes of RC-friendly spirits.
We know the spirit world is friendly tothem here. It's only a few points of Agg gating across. Kessler has very little to gain by taking the fight to territory they're even better off in and where he has to fight hordes of RC-friendly spirits.
So, you have Elsa, Brandon, and a handful of consors and acolytes with 1 dot spheres. Facing them is a large horde of kung-fu commandos and a pair of North Korean Akashic brothers (literally). The acolytes and consors you can make up names and backgrounds for-I let you do this because I figure giving you the chance to minmax them means that I don't need to spend time creating characters when you can do it for me. You have a fairly defensible location insofar as that matters. This might be a bit of a problem if Elsa doesn't have a plan. She has a plan, right?
Name: Natalia Grazhdankin
Concept: FSB Cypherpunk
Powers: Mind 1, Entropy 1, Corr 1, Primal Utility 1, and the devil's own luck (Primal Marks - The Devil, a luck-based Blessing, Daredevil)
"Crime": Gross cowardice and dereliction of duty in the Ascension War by refusing to cooperate for fear of having her cover blown
Background: Natalia lives on the edge. She Awoke when working for the FSB cleaning up the mess after the terrorist attack on Moscow and... somehow the NWO and the vampires missed her. Somehow some intel she found led her to the Virtual Adepts, and since then, somehow she's dodged every bullet that came for her from the Union and the other people who are trying to control the Russian government. She solves puzzles! Breaks codes! Sometimes (very rarely) steals things! Keeps track of the intricate web of social contacts within the intelligence community and who's bribing who. And then she went and said 'no' to some Traditionalist contacts because holy shit, she's risking her life in there every day and they were asking for way more than she felt safe doing and then she found that to them, 'no' means 'I'm a traitor'.
Name: Dr Dmitry Belov
Concept: Doctor in way over his head.
Powers: Linear sorcerer - Art of Healing, Art of Biografting - since he uses the Technodigm for these things, without a hospital the latter is entirely useless and the former is mostly useful for stabilising wounded people.
"Crime": Being a tool of the Progenitors, publicly speaking out against alternative medicines and getting them banned from the hospital he works at.
Background: Look, man, he's a doctor. He heals people. In normal hospitals. Yes, he's a very good doctor. That's because he learned field trauma in the Russian army in Chechenya. He doesn't know shit about any mystical conspiracies. Yes, he's near the top of his field and lots of rich oligarchs come to be treated by him and that means he has a lot of influence with the hospital and he used it to get some quack peddling alternative medicine kicked out, but that doesn't mean some... some crazy guys should come after him and accuse him of working for 'the Technocracy'.
Name: Ulitsa Krysy (real name unknown)
Concept: Dinna dinna dinna dinna dinna RATMAN
Powers: Mind 1, Spirit 1, and a rat totem spirit. And his 'klaive'. Which is really a shotgun, but technically counts as a klaive because there's an axe built into the stock.
"Crime": Vigilante violence against Rogue Council drug dealing operations
Background: Masked vigilante. Warrior of justice. The "Street Rat" is the scourge of all criminals and... oh, he got beaten up by Rogue Council thugs after he made himself a nuisance and dragged off. He still hasn't told them his name, but from the gravely way he talks, it seems pretty likely he's a former addict who's found God (or at least a rat-spirit who wants the drug dealers gone). Does not have a no guns or no killing rule. At all.
Name: Josephine Bartalone
Concept: Hermetic ecologist
Powers: Forces 1, Life 1, Spirit 1
"Crime": Stumbling across the Rogue Council base, not being trusted enough to keep quiet.
Background: Not every Hermetic is a stuffy librarian, and not every ecologist is some flower child. Josephine was studying ecosystems long before she realised that she had gnosis and could understand the inner and outer paths of the world, and she keeps on working with it because that's how she gets paid - and because goddamnit, the world needs someone to keep an eye on it and the threat of climate change. All she was doing was following rumours of a healthy wolf pack close to Moscow - and that's a sign of how much of a rank noob she was, because a more experienced mage would have been more scared of werewolves. Instead, she found Rogue Council fanatics who didn't trust a French woman who worked for a charity which was part of the scientific establishment and whose initials just happened to abbreviate to "JB". Arguably, she's still better off than she would have been with the werewolves.
So, you have Elsa, Brandon, and a handful of consors and acolytes with 1 dot spheres. Facing them is a large horde of kung-fu commandos and a pair of North Korean Akashic brothers (literally). The acolytes and consors you can make up names and backgrounds for-I let you do this because I figure giving you the chance to minmax them means that I don't need to spend time creating characters when you can do it for me. You have a fairly defensible location insofar as that matters. This might be a bit of a problem if Elsa doesn't have a plan. She has a plan, right?
[ ] (3.0x) Yes. (Write-In).
[ ] Yes, and it involves holing up until someone else can help.
[ ] (0.0x) No.
Elsa snaps her fingers. "Explosives. We need explosives."
"Don't we always?" Brandon responds absentmindedly, already diving through stacked crates lying under the racks of guns. "Bullets, bullets, bullets, more bullets jeez were these guys planning to fight World War Four or something- there!"
Elsa barely gets a hand up in time to catch a brick of Semtex flown at her head, and her enhanced reflexes can barely catch the coil of detcord flying past her head. She blinks artificial eyes in surprise, but her combat instincts have her legs already in motion down the armory's entrance corridor.
The cyborg's augmented eyes scan the ceiling, looking for seams of rock and potential weak points. She's no engineer, but she knows a thing or two (or ten) about explosives and the applications thereof, and she's been in enough collapsing underground bunkers to know that every tunnel can be un-tunneled with sufficient boomsticks.
"You know, if you're going to collapse this tunnel and bury us all alive," Brandon's voice echoes down the narrow passageway, "at least do it right!"
Elsa blinks. Again. "Excuse me?"
"There's a seam of porous limestone above you; place a powerful enough charge in there, and you should be able to cause a major fissure in the nearby rock. Or better yet, place several charges across the tunnel and down the length, and if they're detonated in sequence, we can hit the resonant frequency of the limestone and make it pulverize some of the nearby granite," Brandon continues, his tone turning thoughtful. "Elsa, place that first charge directly above you in the first seam of lighter-colored rock you can find! Natalia, get me anything around here that goes bang!"
Elsa's cybereyes weren't exactly built for the task of "percussive underground geological engineering," but their LiDAR and millimeter-band sonar suites are still functioning capably enough, and they put together a picture of what the Traditionalist spy has planned. She shrugs and slams her fist into the limestone above her head, ignoring the dust she's kicked up, and quickly tapes the first block of Semtex into place. With Brandon's instructions, and more bricks of Semtex thrown down the corridor like footballs, the eight-meter corridor is soon wired with an impressive dotting of detcord-wired plastic explosive. The other prisoners wisely take cover in the cramped armory, two of the more experienced ones grabbing ear and eye protection.
"And before you ask, yes I did learn more than my fair share of geological engineering," Brandon says, as Naryshkin dashes for the relative safety of the armory. His eyes are fixed on the glow of her phone's display, and two Russian military-surplus detonators rest on the table in front of him. "You would not believe how many bunkers I had to search for back in my analyst days," he continues distractedly, as the complex shudders from aboveground explosions.
Elsa shrugs as she ducks behind cover. "I just figured that you liked the feel of rock-hard things in your hands. Or maybe you were all about that explosive finish, the one that gets gunk on everyone?"
"I'm quite cosmopolitan in my extracurricular tastes, you know. Male, female, tentacled monstrosity from the Great Beyond - what's not to like?" Brandon quips back. "Now, unless you can tell me the exact microseconds that I need to space these two detonations apart, kindly zip those very gorgeous lips of yours."
"You're a baseline meathead. How can you tell the exact time to fire them?"
"I have a cell phone. More accurately, I have your cell phone. Also, shut up."
Brandon takes one last glance at the phone, then sets it down and picks up the two detonators. He crosses himself, flipping the safeties off and staring intently down the well-wired corridor, and even Elsa's enhanced reflexes have trouble noticing the tiny delay between the two detonators firing.
Blinding light. Prickling heat. Choking dust.
But when the cloud has settled and the various survivors have gathered their wits together, they find themselves stuck in a small room behind an impassable seal of fallen rock. Brandon gasps for air, coughing out dust from his lungs, and Elsa notes sourly that although the spy's face and hair are covered in dust, his suit and tie are unmarked.
"Well," he wheezes. "That went about as well as can be expected. What now?"
[Elsa - Forces/Matter 1 (cybereyes) and Forces 2 (plastic explosives): Kessler told Elsa to hole up with the survivors, and goshdarnit she'll take those orders literally. If the NK commandos and their Terrible Tag-Teaming Twin Terrors want to take her down, they'll have to punch their way through a whole lot of rock to do it first. Enhanced with Terrorism+Int]
[Brandon - Time 1/Entropy 1/Prime 2: The lesbian cyborg daredevil ninja might have the right idea with this whole "buried alive" thing, but she lacks a certain panache to pull it off properly. Like, say, a solid practical grounding in geology and the physics behind "how to insert a MOP into Iran's nuclear program." (MAXIMUM CLEANLINESS) Brandon may not have a 35,000-pound bunker buster bomb to work with, but some timed detonations to take advantage of limestone's particular resonant frequency should collapse the corridor, no problemo. Enhanced with Terrorism+Int]
If the NK commandos want to reach Elsa and Friends, they either have to clear the obstruction or jump through the gap via other means. (Correspondence or Spirit, most likely) The first route slows them down and puts them in a good killzone, and the second deprives them of their commando backup. Being able to bounce bullets off your pecs is all well and good, but even someone able to punch through tanks will take time to get through meters and meters of Prime-enhanced rockfall.
The ultimate goal is to delay the commandos long enough for whoever's powering the Correspondence wards to learn the many and varied uses of highly-energized matter be plasmagun-ed, at which point Elsa and Friends can teleport safely home via her GTFO patches.
Well, Spirit can slam people into the Anomaly without pushing them through, right? The idea behind Orsino using the carrier as an shield before dunking his face into it suggests it's possible. So, by bringing the blasphemy of Technocratic Science into this place of magick and fluidity we have committed a sin against the world.
And the world isn't particularly mindful about who it extracts its price from.
[Spirit 4? 5? - Thicken the Gauntlet and slam it into the mages (or the mages into it), with the focus of blasphemous and vulgar Technocratic plasma angering the spirit world. Hopefully coincidental.]
So we toss Svetlana hard enough to snap her neck, as cover for anti-fortification plasma cannon, whose use is a focus for punishment from the Gauntlet in its AoE.
Also, I think we should consider what we're going to focus Henriette and Mari on. The Daemon can presumably handle itself by phasing into the ground, but do we care enough about the PRINTMarks to put effort into saving them, or should Mari help cast the redirection? What should it be redirected towards? The tank? Maybe, if they've got access to Elsa's positioning data, the Akashic Commandos, who will probably not be as capable of tanking (heh) a Forces 5 missile strike as the actual super-tank?
... Actually, @EarthScorpion - could we counter a Koschei-esque shenanigan with Spirit-based agg damage? Something like "Kessler goes Sidereal on the Verbena and punches her in the soul; take damage and I don't care where your heart is"?
I'm...pretty sure Spirit doesn't work like that. It only does that sort of thing for well...spirits or at least, dematerialized/astrally projected persons.
Sorry, what North Korea would that be? The one Technocratic propaganda has told you about?
To put it another way, it ruins the point if North Korea is not, in fact, a viable alternative to the Technodigm. Yes, it could feed its population if it wasn't for the fact that the Technocracy is carrying out a slow paradigmatic suffocation of it, because the Akashics there are not fools and while they know that hunger is an illusion that the enlightened mind can discard, not all men have reached such levels of enlightenment.
We can, however, assume North Korean internal propaganda is broadly true-and that says that the materialistic, decadent West has so much more than they do. They don't starve but it's not exactly a utopian existence. And to fight paradigmic warfare, they must engage in paradigmic warfare. So you get the broad strokes roughly right, but not the details. North Korea is a state where you are forced to believe in the divinity of the leader and the justness of the military-they just know that this belief is necessary, because without it, the state will crumble against a hostile invader which seeks to annihilate it. Russia and China were allowed to let North Korea thrive via fake shows of aid because the socialist members of the Union, amusingly enough including Iteration X, found North Korea an interesting ally of convenience. This is only a delaying force, though, and with their collapse the NWO can engage in intense propaganda about communist collapse, which combined with the paradigm pressure from Seoul, starts a cycle of decay which leads to further radicalization.
But it was never a really nice place, because it had to enforce a paradigm without a neat white lie which makes questioning it difficult in the first place because doing so is crazy talk.
For all that the traditions are a pack of poorly organized weirdos, their accusations against the Technocracy have quite a bit of truth to them. Such as the whole thing about the the Technocracy being Massive Goddamn Liars who don't even seem to care about the truth and lie to their own people all the fucking time, I mean, holy shit. North Korea is one example. Another is the whole Reality Deviancy thing. I mean, the Inner Circle knows about the whole Consensus Reality thing by definition. There was nothing to stop them from making the party line, say, Reality can be Kinda Fluid ok, but the Technoparadigm is the best since it makes things the best for the masses as a whole since it lets them eventually use the cool stuff, which is both a very good argument and quite possibly true! Back that line of thought with superhuman social attributes and skills and mind magic, and you could make the most convincing tretise for science over magic ever. But what they did is create the theory of Reality Deviancy, where if you're not doing things their way you're contributing to the breakdown and annihilation of reality, which was almost certainly developed for enslaving legitimate moral outrage to ruthless politics, so they could more easily get otherwise good people to murder the enemies of the Technocracy without asking questions.
Oh, the Technocracy doesn't lie as much as you think about North Korea. Sure, there's no famine and when they say 'North Korean nuclear tests' they actually mean 'Forces 5 mages' but people see 'lies' and immediately jump to the idea that the opposite side is true. North Korea in Panopticon is not a nation of happy hippy everyone-is-allowed-to-thrive freedom. It's not some kind of disunited, medieval place where the wizards are allowed to roam free and there's minimal paradigm so everyone can use the magic they want and the truth they want. Those were the Middle Ages. And if North Korea was like that-there wouldn't be a containment policy. The Technocracy could have rolled them at any time. They were rolling wizards like that since the Order of Reason. They have become even better at rolling wizards like that, because they could set up an invasion of a million NATO soldiers who held that significant belief, and would spread the technoparadigm through the place.
No. North Korea shows that alternate paradigms are powerful and equally viable, but because they can't lie to themselves and say there is no such thing as paradigm-they have to enforce paradigmic conformity in much the same way the Technocracy does. Except they also have to defend against this other paradigm, and they can't do it by just insisting it's quackery, because everyone knows belief doesn't change reality. The Cleanest Race is still applicable-North Korea is a fascist, racist kingdom. It just happens to not be a basketcase with terrible quality of life, even if it's not as good as what the Technocracy provides (probably because they deliberately don't want to give progress and modernity any hooks). The North Koreans being allied with the Rogue Council is not an irrelevant detail.
Russia and China were allowed to let North Korea thrive via fake shows of aid because the socialist members of the Union, amusingly enough including Iteration X, found North Korea an interesting ally of convenience. This is only a delaying force, though, and with their collapse the NWO can engage in intense propaganda about communist collapse, which combined with the paradigm pressure from Seoul, starts a cycle of decay which leads to further radicalization.
And of course, providing aid is one of the most pernicious weapons. All those foreign-branded aid-packages say one thing, and that is "You are weak. Your government cannot feed you. We, the outsiders, can."
(The influence from allied Rogue Council factions is probably how North Korea has become such a large producer of crystal meth. The main trick is that they've probably adjusted the local paradigm so only slothful outsiders suffer from the negative side effects - if you are one of the purest race, you can do meth and as long as your soul remains innocent and clean, it will just help you transcend the limitations of your body)
Oh, the Technocracy doesn't lie as much as you think about North Korea. Sure, there's no famine and when they say 'North Korean nuclear tests' they actually mean 'Forces 5 mages' but people see 'lies' and immediately jump to the idea that the opposite side is true. North Korea in Panopticon is not a nation of happy hippy everyone-is-allowed-to-thrive freedom. It's not some kind of disunited, medieval place where the wizards are allowed to roam free and there's minimal paradigm so everyone can use the magic they want and the truth they want.
They were in space/the Umbra. Hothoused flowers grown in safe places, away from the paradigmatic warfare and harshness of mass Sleeper consciousness. Places where the paradigm was so finely engineered that the only thing out of consensus was "actions taken to serve the Technocratic Union". Places where a MJOLNIR fired by a Virtual Adept would work perfectly, but the exact same gun fired by a Technocrat would explode. Places the NWO couldn't infiltrate because pretending to be a Traditionalist was impossible [1]. Compared to them, North Korea is a brutal, resilient outdoor plant hardened to resist the freezing and unpredictable climate of the mainstream Consensus.
And then all those pretty little hothouse flowers had their ties to Earthly nodes cut in the Dimensional Anomaly and without Earth to leech primal energy from, they... drifted away.
The Rogue Council knows those places well. They're the places they haunt, their MECHAs and their Chieron Stations and their Autochthonias.
[1] Blanc: "I'm sorry, that just meant we sent in people who didn't realise they were reporting to people we'd compromised. But yes. Those places were a pain."
