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
    • [X] A rundown of social relations in the town, in broad strokes. Blocs and families that tend to stick together, and ones that tend to be at odds. Individual rivalries and grudges that are notorious enough to not be secrets.

    Yeah, this is basic stuff, but it's stuff the PCs really need to know, so a good place to start.
     
    [X] A rundown of social relations in the town, in broad strokes. Blocs and families that tend to stick together, and ones that tend to be at odds. Individual rivalries and grudges that are notorious enough to not be secrets.

    agreed, this is a solid vote
     
    No Peace With The Furries: Endocrine Promenade, by QV
  • Apocrypha
    • I think I can leave it open for a little longer; I'm hoping to get more topics of discussion. Say till Wednesday.

    In the meantime, I commissioned some particular fanart that I've wanted to do for a while and have a better excuse to now that we're going into a murder mystery.

    Please enjoy this first look at No Truce With The Furries, my take on Deedee's skill spread in Disco Elysium.


    Endocrine Promenade - Vigor
    Awaken girlhood fantasies you were denied. Love and be loved.​

    Cool For: INVERTERATE ROMANTICS, PRIESTS OF FLAMMA, VICE DETECTIVES, SHAMELESS SLUTS

    Endocrine Promenade is the long-denied animal within you, the beast finally unleashed to indulge and enjoy. It enables you to drink and flirt and sleep around with fewer negative side effects. It also helps you investigate matters of lurid overindulgence - if you need to understand those stoned out of their mind, acts of testosterone-poisoned violence, or the sexual dynamics of a community, you need to know how to dance at the endocrine promenade.

    At high levels, Endocrine Promenade makes you a woman of unrestrained pleasures, an unrepentant party bicycle making passes at anything that moves, intoxicated by your own estrogen and also all the wine you've drunk. But at low levels, you'll be too innocent to be effective. Without a working knowledge of vice, of how people are motivated by the animal instincts of fight, flight, feed and fuck, Mundus will be difficult to understand.

    Art by QuantumVaudeville, who also did the art of the cover of the first book.
     
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  • Apocrypha
    • Part of the problem is that a lot of time the blame is going to hit classes of minorities that make Vinyedo uncomfortable socially and materially; non-resident or resident-but-not-citizen gamblers and sex workers, peddlers and tinkers, brokers and merchant bankers, and those dubbed criminals or 'criminals' branded as pickpockets or sellers of false goods. And many if not most of these iterant classes would also be ethnic or religious minorities, like RL medieval Jews and Romani or free people of color in the Antebellum era. Those judged likely to have no stake in society and morally dissolute enough to turn cloak to the bandits are going to get accused by their neighbors and, unless we confirm who the real culprits are, those accusations might be the basis for lashing out.

    [X] Is there anyone in town who did not seem to need the Jubilee among the growers and vintners and other great houses of Vinyedo and might resent such generosity flattening the high position they had risen to?
    -[X] Or conversely are there any of the big farmers and masters of their craft who seemed to have come to a point to especially need their lord's absolution, and might become embittered at becoming so dependent on another's charity?
    -[X] And also within the staff of the big house and your lord's estates, are there any butlers, lady's maids, stewards, or the like, who are known by the rest of the servants to have grievances against the way his lordship runs his household and might feel personally slighted by his decisions? Denied promotions, cut off from personal service attending him, and so on?
     
    bookwyrm said:
    [X] Is there anyone in town who did not seem to need the Jubilee among the growers and vintners and other great houses of Vinyedo and might resent such generosity flattening the high position they had risen to?
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    Oh, this is a promising tack to take. It would definitely make sense that "BTW there's a debt jubilee coming up" is going to affect motive... especially since the crime is one related to rearranging who's going to make a profit at the eleventh hour and who's going to eat a loss.

    I wonder about the exact wording, though. We've already seen that our protagonists (who, like us, are most familiar with 21st century wage labor as the paradigm of commerce) are separated by a meaningful culture gap from the socioeconomic paradigm Iustina considers normal (considering, for example, her reaction to our description of Lord Molinaro as her "boss"). We'll probably get the necessary info regardless, but framing it in terms of hard feelings for having to give or accept "charity" might get us another one of those "y'all weird mercenary foreigners with a weird foreign mercenary take on everything" reactions.
     
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    Very slowly catching up, and figured I should leave thoughts as I go. Apologies if I'm duplicating conversations.

    Sengachi said:
    .. huh. Dang.

    Let me check if I'm getting this right. The Mundites became accidentally sentient because, in their haste, the AI gods put their semi-sentient frameworks inside the same class of body / resource allocation as the PCs. Now, the semi-sentient frameworks are meant to pass a Turing test, at least a cursory one, but not to have any internal awareness. They're like a philosophical zombie, the lights are on but nobody's home.

    But their new bodies had all of the processing power and space necessary to sustain sapience. The semi-sentient frameworks acted as kernels inside these vastly expanded boundaries, or maybe the other way around, as fertile soil for the kernel of sapience to take root in. Either way, they rapidly developed internal awareness to match their external behavior.

    If I've got this right, that's maybe the most plausible sci-fi explanation I've heard for accidental program sapience.
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    Huh, yeah, that is a really cool explanation. Though it still leaves unanswered the big moral question for me: why can NPCs still die? At least, it doesn't seem like they've all gained adventurer immortality, and stories of danger and adventure become much more morally fraught if their victims are suddenly fully sentient. Why haven't the gods tried to put the world on pause while they decided how to not accidentally do a bunch of murders?

    Maybe they're able to backup all "dead" NPCs?
    Fabricati said:
    .... Of course adventurers(read: Players) are placed in the sim ad-hoc with the infrastructure needed to sustain them.

    dear holy shit tho the resources needed for that must be intense, at least if they're using pure digital computing...
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    Though if the framework for an adventurer is enough to sustain full consciousness, enough that NPCs in it became sentient… maybe none of the players actually survived whatever caused this? If they're now fully digital emulations of their own minds, that implies the originals got deleted. Which would fit with the comas their bodies are in. I'm guessing the gods are attempting to preserve the copies in the hopes of eventually uploading them back into their brains, to restore them to life.
     
    BagFullOfLizards said:
    Very slowly catching up, and figured I should leave thoughts as I go. Apologies if I'm duplicating conversations.
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    Please don't feel the need to apologize for speculation, I live for this.

    BagFullOfLizards said:
    Huh, yeah, that is a really cool explanation. Though it still leaves unanswered the big moral question for me: why can NPCs still die? At least, it doesn't seem like they've all gained adventurer immortality, and stories of danger and adventure become much more morally fraught if their victims are suddenly fully sentient. Why haven't the gods tried to put the world on pause while they decided how to not accidentally do a bunch of murders?
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    Maybe that would require time they don't have. Maybe holding a mind as pure data outside of a simulated body is a terrible idea if you want it to remain sane. Maybe there's a good reason to allow for mortality. Maybe there are practical limits to what they can do, at least for now. Maybe it is unethical, they're bastards and DARPA needs to shut them off.

    Or maybe it's none of these.

    Take your pick, and keep in mind none of these are mutually exclusive.

    BagFullOfLizards said:
    Maybe they're able to backup all "dead" NPCs?
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    Resurrection magic definitely used to be a thing for Adventurers, before. The party - and most everyone - really doesn't want to see if it's also buggy now, for obvious reasons.

    BagFullOfLizards said:
    Though if the framework for an adventurer is enough to sustain full consciousness, enough that NPCs in it became sentient… maybe none of the players actually survived whatever caused this? If they're now fully digital emulations of their own minds, that implies the originals got deleted. Which would fit with the comas their bodies are in. I'm guessing the gods are attempting to preserve the copies in the hopes of eventually uploading them back into their brains, to restore them to life.
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    If this is the case, then why did OWTB send Ralph - and some of Durante's closest friends - in after people? Durante, at least, thinks saving them is possible, and the OWTB has gone to great expense to preserve the playerbase's bodies. It's possible that this is out of false hope or is a PR move, but what if it's not?

    Ask questions, it's the only way you'll learn anything.
     
    Talia B said:
    Maybe that would require time they don't have. Maybe holding a mind as pure data outside of a simulated body is a terrible idea if you want it to remain sane. Maybe there's a good reason to allow for mortality. Maybe there are practical limits to what they can do, at least for now. Maybe it is unethical, they're bastards and DARPA needs to shut them off.

    Or maybe it's none of these.

    Take your pick, and keep in mind none of these are mutually exclusive.
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    I'm not necessarily considering regular mortality, I'm more thinking of things like random monster attacks. This is a dangerous world; it pretty much has to be in order to give players something to do. And it doesn't matter if a quest is based on a bunch of NPCs having died, because they're basically props anyway.

    But that calculus changes if every failed escort quest, every hired mercenary who dies in a battle, is an actual sentient being. If every town guard who dies defending a "rescue the besieged village!" quest before you get there was just as smart and self-aware as the players. And yet as far as I can remember there was no word of sudden peace breaking out, of anything that would count as a PvE encounter getting less common. Why haven't the gods done anything to reduce the risk of a violent death from a world they theoretically control, now that each of those deaths carry so much more weight?

    The only answer that makes sense to me is that for some reason they can't, given that I assume them all to have a decent sense of morality. Which leads to the question of why they don't appear to have any sort of admin access to this world.
     
    I presume it will become apparent if resurrection works properly for adventurers relatively soon - people fuck up and it wouldn't take long at all for that news to reach everyone.

    Very soon if we're going to be running into the same group of pirates we ran into at the start.

    That's more or less how it went down in Log Horizon - everyone tried to avoid testing it. But, well... people are only so good. And the rumor mill had that particular piece of news across the entire area in hours, at most. Being semi-immortal or not is kinda important.
     
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    In that case, you have to ask: what possible positive good is there for monsters to exist in the first place?
     
    Talia B said:
    In that case, you have to ask: what possible positive good is there for monsters to exist in the first place?
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    Honestly it probably depends on what Monsters are. Because in real life most predatory wild animals were considered monsters at one point or another, and there have been dissertations written on the value of any one of them.

    If monsters are just mindless beasts that exist to kill and destroy? Well, even from that you can get challenge and growth, though monsters are... a poor impetus for that, since they cause a lot more loss than needed to promote growth.
     
    Talia B said:
    In that case, you have to ask: what possible positive good is there for monsters to exist in the first place?
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    Didn't an interlude go over that? The AI actress behind their master doesn't want to reveal the unreality of Mundus as the Mundanes remember it. I tentatively disagree with her decision, but neither she nor I know everything.
     
    Winged One said:
    Didn't an interlude go over that? The AI actress behind their master doesn't want to reveal the unreality of Mundus as the Mundanes remember it. I tentatively disagree with her decision, but neither she nor I know everything.
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    That's a reason for monsters to continue to exist (and, as you say, a bad one!). It's not an affirmative reason they should exist in the first place.
     
    Echidna-mun also seemed to think there was an ecological component to it. That comment about how "the monsters I make feed many and fertilize more" sounds similar to hostile animals in real-world ecosystems which would put things out of whack if they were to suddenly vanish.
     
    Actually, I wonder if anyone has attempted the Echidna quest and had her personally and OoC berate them for trying to do such a horrible thing in something so close to real life?
     
    Winged One said:
    Actually, I wonder if anyone has attempted the Echidna quest and had her personally and OoC berate them for trying to do such a horrible thing in something so close to real life?
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    I feel like, if she's worried about staying plausibly IC (and there's reason to worry IMO - a Mundane Echidnist seems like the #1 type of personality to respond to fourth wall enlightenment by going Full "Usurp the Gods" Xianxia) the easiest way would just be to... make the early personality modifications implied by a Seeking-ish storyline mysteriously fail to "take", thereby locking further progress. As much as she might want to go into a full Green M&M "I am talking directly into your ear now" moment, it seems like it'd be borrowing trouble to do it directly. Maybe delegate the lecture to someone like Sio, who's on a direct line to the Fourteen and can deliver the message with some plausible deniability as to who the original sender was.
     
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    Qoheleth said:
    I feel like, if she's worried about staying plausibly IC (and there's reason to worry IMO - a Mundane Echidnist seems like the #1 type of personality to respond to fourth wall enlightenment by going Full "Usurp the Gods" Xianxia) the easiest way would just be to... make the early personality modifications implied by a Seeking-ish storyline mysteriously fail to "take", thereby locking further progress. As much as she might want to go into a full Green M&M "I am speaking directly into your ear now" moment, it seems like it'd be borrowing trouble to do it directly. Maybe delegate the lecture to someone like Sio, who's on a direct line to the Fourteen and can deliver the message with some plausible deniability as to who the original sender was.
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    I meant a player attempting the Seeking quest itself, not a Mundane trying to do something similiar. Since we already know she's more of a GM than a genuine villain.
     
    Winged One said:
    I meant a player attempting the Seeking quest itself, not a Mundane trying to do something similiar. Since we already know she's more of a GM than a genuine villain.
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    How do you know they can tell the difference between a player and a mundane Adventurer?

    (And how would you know one way or the other?)
     
    Winged One said:
    I meant a player attempting the Seeking quest itself, not a Mundane trying to do something similiar. Since we already know she's more of a GM than a genuine villain.
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    Oh yeah, I meant a Playerbase initiate, too. I think the right move is to not tip her hand to anybody, because word gets around, especially from the lips of someone unhinged enough to try this stunt in the first place when (if they sought out the trailhead of the storyline) they almost certainly have OOC foreknowledge of what it'd mean for their real ass minds.

    Like, yeah, there's probably some players who already know Echidna-the-TCAI exists and is different from Echidna-the-character. But if the bit from the wiki about it being a data mining detail is any indication, that number is probably pretty slim, and there's not really an upside IMO to making it less slim, other than maybe under very controlled circumstances.

    Talia B said:
    How do you know they can tell the difference between a player and a mundane Adventurer?
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    Huh. I had been assuming that, even if the Fourteen had to stuff PCs and NPCs into the same runtime environment as an expedient, there was some sort of bookkeeping or metadata they could check after-the-fact, especially if the person in question had their explicit attention. Gnomon stuff. It'd be very interesting for the discussion of "how do people get back into their meat bodies"... and for that matter "does it have to be exactly the same people who get back into those meat bodies"... if that's not the case.
     
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    Qoheleth said:
    Oh yeah, I meant a Playerbase initiate, too. I think the right move is to not tip her hand to anybody, because word gets around, especially from the lips of someone unhinged enough to try this stunt when they have OOC foreknowledge of what it'd mean for their real ass minds.

    Like, yeah, there's probably some players who already know Echidna-the-TCAI exists and is different from Echidna-the-character. But if the bit from the wiki about it being a data mining detail is any indication, that number is probably pretty slim, and there's not really an upside IMO to making it less slim.


    Huh. I had been assuming that, even if the Fourteen had to stuff PCs and NPCs into the same runtime environment as an expedient, there was some sort of bookkeeping or metadata they could check after-the-fact, especially if the person in question had their explicit attention. Gnomon stuff. It'd be very interesting for the discussion of "how do people get back into their meat bodies"... and for that matter "does it have to be exactly the same people who get back into those meat bodies"... if that's not the case.
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    I never said they couldn't tell, just asked how.

    And here's a question to keep Hikaru and the thread up: assuming Gnomon can tell that way (and you're right, it probably can and does tag them as players), can all of the gods tell?
     
    Talia B said:
    And here's a question to keep Hikaru and the thread up: assuming Gnomon can tell that way (and you're right, it probably can and does tag them as players), can all of the gods tell?
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    Oh lol. Yeah that isn't guaranteed, especially if "divine portfolios = access control lists" speculation turns out accurate. They might have to explicitly hobnob about it. "Hey Gnomon is this idiot one of ours, or one of Earth's?"
     
    Qoheleth said:
    Echidna-mun also seemed to think there was an ecological component to it. That comment about how "the monsters I make feed many and fertilize more" sounds similar to hostile animals in real-world ecosystems which would put things out of whack if they were to suddenly vanish.
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    That was my intent in that line! Monsters may be monsters, but they still poop and die, which provides fertilization for plants. And they are, presumably, mostly made of meat, so people can hunt them for food.

    That said, that was a side thing I wrote for fun. Whether or not it's canon is up in the air- I'm just the one who wrote it. The canonicity of it, or of any individual line or interpretation, is up for debate. But vicious and terrifying creatures are still part of an ecosystem, as are the gross parts. Would the world as it is shown, at its current level of verisimilitude, be able to continue to exist and feed itself, without monster poop to fertilize crops? Without dire bear meat to feed people through winter?

    I don't know either. I just see people with a nice little fire of speculation and I'm here to fan the flames with a turbo-ultra heavy-duty fan for refrigeration units. Get that fire really going.
     
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