Deedeequest or The Wonders of Mundus: Be Careful Who You Pretend To Be - A Genderous Isekai Quest

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How Dice Rolls Work
  • Informational
    • Character sheet is here.

    Dice rolls are 1d10 + Stat + Proficiency + any applicable bonuses, such as Boons.

    You may spend 3 Tension to Overdrive for a retroactive +5 to your roll (a Determination Overdrive), or +3 to an ally's roll (a Teamwork Overdrive). I will also automatically overdrive to avoid exhaustion or unconsciousness.

    It is possible to critically succeed (on +5 on skill checks and +10 on combat rolls) or critically fail (by the same margins), but rolling a 1 or a 10 does not automatically crit in either case. It is possible to crit retroactively by Overdriving.

    Your stat bonuses have names:
    • Vigor grants a Strength bonus.
    • Agility grants a Dexterity bonus.
    • Spirit grants an Aura bonus.
    • Mind grants an Intuition bonus.
    • Resolve grants a Guts bonus.
    Dice are rolled on a first come, first serve bonus. You only roll for Deedee.
     
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  • Informational
    • Talia B said:
    Entirely original. (Well. Derivative as hell, but not directly based on a previously published story.)



    Yep. The interludes by @bii are on Earth, while the majority of the updates are in the game universe of Mundus.

    If you're not entirely sure how the main character Deedee and her comrades got here, or why, well, they'd also love to know; that's an area of deliberate mystery.
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    It just feels like from the writing itself and the conversations you and certain questers have that there's some kind of previous story or something that I am missing.
     
    Shane_357 said:
    It just feels like from the writing itself and the conversations you and certain questers have that there's some kind of previous story or something that I am missing.
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    This story has been in development for a long, long time, and several of us have been following it while it was still a basic outline, so we already know some of the characters.
     
    Shane_357 said:
    It just feels like from the writing itself and the conversations you and certain questers have that there's some kind of previous story or something that I am missing.
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    I have run a tabletop game in this setting for a small audience before, and I've been working on it for far longer than I've been posting the Quest here, so that may explain some of it. I'm also including entirely fictional asides from the perspective of the in-universe fandom which may contribute to the feeling.

    I am trying to make this accessible to people whose first and only contact with the story is the SV thread, though, so let me know if anything is particularly confusing or where to put a recap.

    It's also possible that I should have started a second thread rather than changing the first number of the chapters; everything labeled 1.x works as a stand-alone story or prologue.
     
    Also potentially helpful: there's a lot of in-fiction lore about the MMO which has been posted in this thread, but - due to not being part of the main plot - has been threadmarked under "Media" and "Informational", and so might be easy to miss if you caught up to present via a pure Reader Mode binge. In particular, Media has some pages from the (fictional) wiki for the MMO everyone's trapped in, and those excerpts have been useful context thus far. :smile:
     
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    Daecl said:
    The mental image of a little girl shoving a suit and the suit bitching about it loud enough to interrupt an infiltration planning meeting is just hilarious to me.
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    I LOVE IT TOO. I always planned to have Mariah overhear some DARPA dudes shit-talking her papa (but not until they dropped some exposition onto who people IRL were blaming for the cyber attack) but my first outline had it when they were recruiting her au pair for the mission and she'd wandered off, not during the briefing. But doing it during the briefing just made it 1000x better.

    Qoheleth said:
    Is DARPA's plan here to Satellite-of-Love the rescue volunteers and have them log in locally?
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    Alas, like Talia I have to plead the fifth. But you'll know more when the curly haired grown up boy shows up again.

    minkhollow said:
    LEG WIN I'm dying over here. (I don't know why we're counting cousins either, Mariah. Genealogy be dumb like that.)

    hmmm lookit that, someone proving Deed's brain weasels wrong!
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    Someone back home cares about her! I'm glad you spotted the Deedee's hospital bed cameo :3

    Also the LEG WIN in Mariah's drawing is... maybe not supposed to be 'leg win' but spelling and handwriting are things. Bonus points if anyone can guess what the Other World Travel Ship "Leg Win" is really supposed to be named.

    Aura said:
    I am unfortunately rather certain that a solid 50-60% of kids will have lost their toy's tails and given them clinical anxiety.
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    ... Possibly yeah. Oops. (Though I suspect half or more of the toys sold actually go to older collectors, since kids under the age of 13 aren't allowed to play AWO. Mariah is just special because her papa is a founding member of the company that created it.)

    notgreat said:
    Oh and also all the NPCs are now fully sapient beings for some reason.
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    You say this as if they weren't before. There's a reason they needed to put the computers up in space and part of it is sheer size.

    notgreat said:
    This kid is the daughter of one of the AI's designers, and was apparently friends with the AIs as they were growing up.
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    Yep! Mariah Thibault, age ten, daughter of one of the founding members of the Other World Tourism Bureau, Julian Thibault aka Papa aka the dude who spent my first interlude screaming and freaking out. (Things didn't work out with her mom, so he's a single dad.) She calls the other founder members aunties and uncles because they're that kind of family friend—and honestly, her dad's family disowned him over getting arrested for hacking so like it's not like she's got other relatives in her life.

    But yeah, since Mariah's about the same age as most of the god AIs, she grew up around them when they were in the multi-year process of being 'awakened.' And Delvar in particular was the one her dad helped in that regard.

    (All the five founders have a member of the Five Elemental Gods that they picked to awaken, whose initial personality matrix was based off their own; they needed them to work in a tight synergy together, since their jobs are so intertwined, and the five founders were very good at maintaining that synergy for their own projects. If people check back to my first interlude, you'll see that I've mentioned them cosplaying as them. And when they've had wiki entries in the media, their corresponding founder gets quoted! ... though only Thorne and Flamma have those just yet.)

    Winged One said:
    [X] ...that expression makes me think she might have started this whole subcultural immersion thing by accident and is just continuing because reasons.
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    I like to think of it as her 'hello fellow adventurers' face.
     
    Talia B said:
    The interludes by @bii are on Earth, while the majority of the updates are in the game universe of Mundus.
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    Yep! The first one I posted was from the POV of Dr Charlene Durante, one of the founding members, in the immediate aftermath of the cyber attack that led to everyone being stuck in the game. The job of my interludes is to give the readers a sense of what is going on back on Earth, while also seeding in information that will become important later! It's my goal that you guys can go back to read them after a lot of the big act 5-8 revelations come out and have them read differently than the first time. Using third person limited with super tight POVs helps with that. Mariah was fun to use for this one, because as a kid, with a kid's priorities, it's easy for her attention to only be on things I want to show.

    Talia likes to say my category of character that I write for I/O is the people who know the spoilers and she's not wrong. Just sometimes they know different ones.

    (I'm quite likely going to write some side story stuff set on Mundus as well, but those won't be threadmarked with the main quest the way the interludes are, because they aren't as important for the story.)

    Qoheleth said:
    Also potentially helpful: there's a lot of in-fiction lore about the MMO which has been posted in this thread, but - due to not being part of the main plot - has been threadmarked under "Media" and "Informational", and so might be easy to miss if you caught up to present via a pure Reader Mode binge. In particular, Media has some pages from the (fictional) wiki for the MMO everyone's trapped in, and those excerpts have been useful context thus far. :smile:
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    YEP. Media and Informational are both really great categories to check out and sometimes we hide little Easter eggs in the wiki articles.
     
    notgreat said:
    Oh and also all the NPCs are now fully sapient beings for some reason.
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    bii said:
    You say this as if they weren't before. There's a reason they needed to put the computers up in space and part of it is sheer size.
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    I mean, our lovely protagonist, who's been playing this MMO for quite a while, seemed to think it was new!
    Talia B said:
    This is... not what you were expecting from the NPCs here.

    That's not what they are, anymore, though. Is it? These people from Mundus? There's something going on, more than canned welcome to Corneria! lines.
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    Aura said:
    Oh, named for Ursula?
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    Ding ding ding! Mariah very much enjoyed the Earthsea trilogy.

    (For all that she's not at all emotionally mature—I edited in a note that she's meant to be read as neurodivergent, because it was pointed out that it wasn't as obvious as I thought it was—she's very capable of reading above her grade level if it's something that pertains to her interests. )

    Qoheleth said:
    I mean, our lovely protagonist, who's been playing this MMO for quite a while, seemed to think it was new!
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    The Mundanes she interacts with now have been sentient for a while. What this means for her prior experiences with the NPCs... (broad shrug)
     
    bii said:
    Ding ding ding! Mariah very much enjoyed the Earthsea trilogy.

    (For all that she's not at all emotionally mature—I edited in a note that she's meant to be read as neurodivergent, because it was pointed out that it wasn't as obvious as I thought it was—she's very capable of reading above her grade level if it's something that pertains to her interests. )
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    I mean, her headspace seems reasonably normal-ish to me, but then people assure me I'm a little bit unusual myself, so I guess that doesn't prove much.
     
    [X] [ACE] Start flirting with her and see what happens. She said she's already making excuses to get backrubs from us...
    [X] [SIO] Let her know I know and teach her to fit in better.

    Fortune favors the bold. And even if she doesn't, Sylphan does.
     
    bii said:
    The Mundanes she interacts with now have been sentient for a while. What this means for her prior experiences with the NPCs... (broad shrug)
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    Okay. Uh. Hmm. That's... significant information. New information, too, unless I missed something big in an earlier update.

    Like, sure, yes, Shadi (for example) would remember a past where she was a person the whole time. But both of the comprehensive theories I've seen for why people are trapped, right now, rely on the idea that the Mundanes gaining actual personhood (rather than just an initial state with implications of personhood) relied on Io's conspicuously relevant ability to self-divide (whether via my theory that Io accidentally got its hand caught in the Mundane-making machine, or BagFullOfLizards's theory that Io is RPing as every Mundane at once). In either case, the people-Mundanes would have come into existence at the same time that Io got bullet, which wouldn't be nearly long enough ago. I guess you could reconcile BFoL's theory with this via the argument that Io has been sentient for a while, and the servers were (according to Mariah) launched into space in part to make room for the Fourteen's giant brains, but that's quite an Obi-Wan truth and this reply thread would have been a weird way of delivering it.

    On the other hand, to interpret it the obvious way... to posit not only that verisimilar Mundanes have been living their lives for a while, but that hosting a world's worth of genuine people was part of the original design, enough that it'd've influenced OWTB's server venue decisions... wouldn't it run into the usual ethical/moral/theodical issues with creating people to live in what is deliberately a world of strife? That's a possibility I've been carefully sneaking past up until now; it'd imply... not great things about the Tetradekatheon, or the devteam, or both - all of whom so far have been portrayed in a pretty sympathetic light!
     
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    Qoheleth said:
    Okay. Uh. Hmm. That's... significant information. New information, too, unless I missed something big in an earlier update.
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    I don't think it's as clear cut as the NPCs having always been sapient, and that wasn't intended to be a reveal. I've actually talked with Bii about it since and it's something we considered in an earlier draft, but it's probably not the case in the final story that the NPCs were always sapient. It is meant to be novel.

    Qoheleth said:
    On the other hand, to interpret it the obvious way... to posit not only that verisimilar Mundanes have been living their lives for a while, but that hosting a world's worth of genuine people was part of the original design, enough that it'd've influenced OWTB's server venue decisions... wouldn't it run into the usual ethical/moral/theodical issues with creating people to live in what is deliberately a world of strife? That's a possibility I've been carefully sneaking past up until now; it'd imply... not great things about the Tetradekatheon, or the devteam, or both - all of whom so far have been portrayed in a pretty sympathetic light!
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    But you're quite correct that if there are real people involved - sapient people - then on some level OWTB or the pantheon or both did something monstrous.

    I mean, just because the literal megacorporation OWTB and the AI it employs are sympathetic figures doesn't mean that they have to be infalliable or even good. The Contessa is a sympathetic figure, and also sends adventurers out to kill potential problems for money, some of which are sapient people.

    With great power comes great capacity to make horrible mistakes. If you're in that position of power, and you're lucky, those mistakes will be accidents.
     
    Figuring out what she meant by Leg Win is why I was dying over it. XD As noted elsewhere, it's similar energy to the one Calvin and Hobbes fic where Calvin is diagnosed with '80 HD' and wonders why it's so important that he has 80 of them.

    (I think that was a Yuletide fic? Seem to recall reading it on the old Yuletide site, so it's probably on AO3 now, but bugger if I remember the name.)
     
    Talia B said:
    I don't think it's as clear cut as the NPCs having always been sapient, and that wasn't intended to be a reveal. I've actually talked with Bii about it since and it's something we considered in an earlier draft, but it's probably not the case in the final story that the NPCs were always sapient. It is meant to be novel.
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    Okay, cool. That was the main thing I was perplexed about.

    As for the rest... well! It's certainly my inclination to assume this colossal mess of a situation was the type of tragic mistake that nobody involved really desired. Maybe it's my inner Battler Ushiromiya talking. But, well, it's as you say - there's a lot of gray area of "foolish negligence" between innocent accident and deliberate malediction, especially if you're running around with godlike powers over a virtual world. I suppose, as the story progresses, we'll see where things really lie on that spectrum.
     
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    Vote closed
  • Voting
    • Scheduled vote count started by Talia B on Dec 3, 2021 at 11:51 PM, finished with 57 posts and 23 votes.
    [ace] [sio] [x]
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  • Voting
    • Well, that was unanimous for Sio.

    Update... not sure when, but I'm aiming for Thursday.
     
    Game It Out 2: The Neverneverglades Thunderdome and Dice Rolls for 2.5
  • Informational
    • After some discussion with my cowriters, I'm ready to begin work.

    But first, an annoucement and an opportunity.

    I'm going to be wargaming out the conclusion of the next chapter like I did last time - it worked then, it'll work now! Specifically, I'm going to run that wargame on December 15th at 6:00 PM Pacific until around 9-10. We will need 6 players, one for each of Ace, Alesha, Deedee, Hikaru, Sekhmet and Siobhan; if I get a whole bundle of people, I may assign them to the opfor (a fancy way of saying they get to play monsters).

    Indicate your interest in this thread and I will PM you all.


    May I have the following rolls:

    Aura + Mysticism, opposed - 14 vs 17, Failed...
    Resolve + Composure, TN 10 - 14, Success
    Aura + Healing + Favor of Ubasdjet, TN 17 - 21, Success
    Int + Empathy, opposed - 16 vs 17, success at cost?
    Aura + Rapport, opposed - 18 vs 14, success
    Int + Empathy, opposed again - 12 vs 11, success!
    Int + Empathy, opposed yet one more time - 8 vs 11, Failure
    Aura + Rapport, without the benefit of the the Sylphan Boon, Opposed - 11 vs 8, Success!

    Let me know how it goes.
    Talia B threw 6 10-faced dice. Reason: opposed rolls in order Total: 31
    9 9 9 9 6 6 1 1 3 3 3 3
     
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  • Informational
    • If I end up having to wait until 7, can I still be Sio?

    I'll roll the first int+empathy.

    ETA: Oh shit, that's good.
    bii threw 1 10-faced dice. Reason: Int + Empathy (+4?) Total: 9
    9 9
     
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    bii said:
    If I end up having to wait until 7, can I still be Sio?

    I'll roll the first int+empathy.
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    It would probably be for the best if you kept playing as Sio, yes. You know more of her actual backstory than the readers do, after all.

    Not that Deedee didn't know she got a bowlderized version.

    ETA:

    Ahahahah. I may call that a success at a cost, but that'll raise more questions to the thread.
     
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    I'll take that first roll.

    14? No idea what our opposition is looking like, but 14 is a pretty high number in this system.
    Winged One threw 1 10-faced dice. Reason: Aura+Mysticism Total: 6
    6 6
     
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