kfrar
Aspiring Encyclopedia
[X] "All right, I get it. I'll keep things on the down low for now."
[X] Yoink the Book
Losing that much Diseased Lunatic is unfortunate, but inevitable. On the positive side, we have installed critical magical defenses, and when the Phantom Blot moves in I expect he'll crowd out at least some other Intrigue threats. He could feed information or the like to these other threats to have them fight us by proxy, but I don't thiiink he's the type? So that's maybe something.
If we want to boost our Intrigue defenses further, I don't think we have many options available. In terms of things that would directly help, we can spy on our employees or maybe have Wile E. set up a trap.
The former has the advantage of applying to DEI as a whole, though I'm guessing we'll need to succeed on the action multiple times with multiple different heroes if we want to cover the entirety of DEI. Unless we crit with the Commodore or something. The downside of this action, of course, is that it costs an Intrigue national action and has a fairly high DC.
The latter only costs a personal action, and we can probably spare Wile E. with our crit on recruiting Stewardship (and Learning) heroes, but it'll probably only affect our headquarters even if it does actually have an anti-Intrigue effect. At the same time, I'll never turn down an opportunity to make DEI headquarters more of a trapped hellscape than it already is, so I'm pretty keen to try this one.
Though there are a few more speculative and long-term defensive options we could take. The most obvious one I could think of would be fully integrating the Dickens Detective Agency, because I feel like getting an entire family agency of Intrigue assets on board could improve our Intrigue at an institutional level. But we don't know exactly what "a more permanent" relationship with the Agency would actually look like, and it could easily only come with offensive Intrigue benefits, so we can't bank on them helping here.
...maybe recruiting Spydah would unlock pentesting Personal Actions? I wouldn't count on it, but I could see it happening.
For more in-house stuff, we could maybe boost up our Normbot AIs? Laser weapons won't make them more capable of spotting sneakiness, but better AI might, and we might get that with Wendy coming on board. But that's a few turns out at least, and the idea that they would appreciably help our anti-infiltration efforts is a stretch.
Alternatively, if we did research the Tron Laser and get a better look into cyberspace, we'd probably unlock actions to better secure our digital assets. But that would be a serious commitment that I'm not willing to make right now, especially when neither Doom nor Toffee are known for hacking. Maybe it'll be worth looking into once we're further down the AI tree? Eh.
And maybe there'll be more Occult stuff we can do, with the Satan book and Malifishmirtz and maybe a Morganian Encantus in the pipeline, but I have no idea what form that would take.
The last option I can think of to better secure our Intrigue scene would be to learn more about or completely eliminate the various Intrigue threats, but that's easier said than done. The Corporate Espionage DCs aren't very friendly, and "just eliminate the hostile Kings" isn't particularly helpful advice.
[X] Yoink the Book
Losing that much Diseased Lunatic is unfortunate, but inevitable. On the positive side, we have installed critical magical defenses, and when the Phantom Blot moves in I expect he'll crowd out at least some other Intrigue threats. He could feed information or the like to these other threats to have them fight us by proxy, but I don't thiiink he's the type? So that's maybe something.
If we want to boost our Intrigue defenses further, I don't think we have many options available. In terms of things that would directly help, we can spy on our employees or maybe have Wile E. set up a trap.
The former has the advantage of applying to DEI as a whole, though I'm guessing we'll need to succeed on the action multiple times with multiple different heroes if we want to cover the entirety of DEI. Unless we crit with the Commodore or something. The downside of this action, of course, is that it costs an Intrigue national action and has a fairly high DC.
The latter only costs a personal action, and we can probably spare Wile E. with our crit on recruiting Stewardship (and Learning) heroes, but it'll probably only affect our headquarters even if it does actually have an anti-Intrigue effect. At the same time, I'll never turn down an opportunity to make DEI headquarters more of a trapped hellscape than it already is, so I'm pretty keen to try this one.
Though there are a few more speculative and long-term defensive options we could take. The most obvious one I could think of would be fully integrating the Dickens Detective Agency, because I feel like getting an entire family agency of Intrigue assets on board could improve our Intrigue at an institutional level. But we don't know exactly what "a more permanent" relationship with the Agency would actually look like, and it could easily only come with offensive Intrigue benefits, so we can't bank on them helping here.
...maybe recruiting Spydah would unlock pentesting Personal Actions? I wouldn't count on it, but I could see it happening.
For more in-house stuff, we could maybe boost up our Normbot AIs? Laser weapons won't make them more capable of spotting sneakiness, but better AI might, and we might get that with Wendy coming on board. But that's a few turns out at least, and the idea that they would appreciably help our anti-infiltration efforts is a stretch.
Alternatively, if we did research the Tron Laser and get a better look into cyberspace, we'd probably unlock actions to better secure our digital assets. But that would be a serious commitment that I'm not willing to make right now, especially when neither Doom nor Toffee are known for hacking. Maybe it'll be worth looking into once we're further down the AI tree? Eh.
And maybe there'll be more Occult stuff we can do, with the Satan book and Malifishmirtz and maybe a Morganian Encantus in the pipeline, but I have no idea what form that would take.
The last option I can think of to better secure our Intrigue scene would be to learn more about or completely eliminate the various Intrigue threats, but that's easier said than done. The Corporate Espionage DCs aren't very friendly, and "just eliminate the hostile Kings" isn't particularly helpful advice.
