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Alchemical Solutions [Worm/Exalted] Thread 6: Fatal Fires Flagrantly Fry Frantic Friends, Family

Carrnage said:
well behemoth irradiates the landscape whenever he fights.
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He contains the radiation to a range of about a hundred feet, in defiance of normal physics. It's bad but manageable, even if it requires tearing out and replacing large sections of the city.
BobTheNinja said:
We don't know for sure that the city is completely doomed. So far the damage has been relatively limited in scope. It's still severe of course, but not unrecoverable. This of course could change depend on what happens with Echidna, but still, with the amount of damage Behemoth has taken by now, I'm not sure how much more he can dish out himself.

Of course, if Behemoth decides to turn himself into a nuclear suicide bomber or something then yeah, we're pretty much boned.

Quick Note: Currently at Chapter 20.3 in Worm.
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Well, uh, that quick note makes things awkward. I'm pretty sure we (and Taylor) have spoiled several important Endbringer-y things, and Taylor is probably going to spoil more even if we don't. Read faster!
 
Harish said:
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You're right. Gromweld's probably just having fun trolling us. I mean, it's not like he'd give a choice that's a trap and will get us horribly killed, right?

Edit:
BobTheNinja said:
Quick Note: Currently at Chapter 20.3 in Worm.
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Why are you even in this thread? It's been nothing but massive spoilers since thread one.
 
We're pretty sure to survive this due to flashforward. Lethal damage wouldn't kill an exalt so quickly, but she'd be out cold to be retrieved or forgotten until after the fight. Everything else is up in the air though.
 
Amorous Intent said:
You're right. Gromweld's probably just having fun trolling us. I mean, it's not like he'd give a choice that's a trap and will get us horribly killed, right?
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My roll-checks at least mean I'll pick up on invisitext.

I have a building paranoia that Grom will wait until after my roll-estimation post to sneakily edit in some relevant invisitext, though.
 
Well, I think I just figured out what one of our higher priority charms should be, not just for ourselves but for every single other Alchemical we Exalt:
OMNIPRESENT GUARDIAN DIRECTIVE
Cost: 5m, 1hl [1m]; Mins: Wits 4, Essence 3;
Type: Reflexive
Keywords: Combo-OK, Obvious, War
Duration: One scene
Prerequisite Charms: Any Wits Augmentation, Tunnel-
Fighting Tactical Omnibus Implant
A gimbaled assembly is installed around the Alchemical's Tunnel-Fighting Tactical Omnibus Implant, allowing for limited prescient situational modeling, assisted by a supplementary connection to the Design of Autochthon. When activated, this Charm allows the Alchemical to more efficiently defend a complementary unit in close formation in which he is a special character. The Champion is a blur, sweeping arrows from the air with his blade or allowing blows intended for terrified soldiers to bounce off his mighty armor. This Charm makes sure that the overwhelming majority of soldiers shed by a unit due to damage or Magnitude loss survive the experience. Their fate is diverted from death to disorganization or flight, allowing them to be collected or rallied for numbers later. If this Charm faces a conflicting effect that guarantees that defeated soldiers within the Exalt's unit die, it adds the Alchemical's Compassion in automatic successes to the contested roll.
Submodules:
Riot-Dispersion Attack (Charisma 5, 3xp): Whenever a unit enhanced by this Charm attacks another unit, the benefits of the Charm may be extended to the enemy. No one is killed by the attack, but the unit is scattered and members may suffer injuries as a result of casualties as normal. Yet, this damage is capped as necessary to whatever number of levels will not prove fatal. Use of this bonus is optional and must be declared in Step One of the attack.
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Yep. Think about how useful it would have been to have that in this fight.
 
Amorous Intent said:
Why are you even in this thread? It's been nothing but massive spoilers since thread one.
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It hasn't been that bad. Sure, I learned something new about Behemoth, but I still don't know any of the Endbringer origins, backstories, or motives, which are the really major spoiler points for me. But I'll continue reading Worm tomorrow so I can proceed through the quest without reading something I'll regret.
 
FunkyEntropy said:
Well, I think I just figured out what one of our higher priority charms should be, not just for ourselves but for every single other Alchemical we Exalt:




Yep. Think about how useful it would have been to have that in this fight.
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I was trying to sell that during character creation but it didn't get through. But then we don't really have a lot of slots, and would likely have cost us optical enhancement.
 
Amorous Intent said:
You're right. Gromweld's probably just having fun trolling us. I mean, it's not like he'd give a choice that's a trap and will get us horribly killed, right?
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Not only did you link one of my more loved comics, but you have the Surveillance Camera Robot Stripper as your avatar. I approve of everything about this post.

If people hadn't noticed, I actually cut the last update off before things got absolutely pear-shaped; those that paid attention to my Preview Map likely saw that my original plan was to go all the way through the Noelle portion of the fight in 4.4 as well. Gonna have to re-do rolls now!

Finally, I've had this song stuck in my head all day:
IF IT BLEEDS WE CAN KILL IT
 
veekie said:
I was trying to sell that during character creation but it didn't get through. But then we don't really have a lot of slots, and would likely have cost us optical enhancement.
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It would have taken up three slots, actually - one for OGD, one for the Wits augmentation, and one for OGD's prerequisite.

Speaking of the prerequisite, Tunnel-Fighting blah blah, we should design a replacement charm that fits its same niche (and hence counts as OGD's prerequisite) but applies towards open spaces instead of closed ones.
 
Mmm, I don't think this has been mentioned before, but it seems we butterflied Noelle into being in Brockton Bay earlier? Because iirc then she shouldn't be here already in canon. So we managed to make things worse(tm), again. Oh Worm.
 
FunkyEntropy said:
It would have taken up three slots, actually - one for OGD, one for the Wits augmentation, and one for OGD's prerequisite.

Speaking of the prerequisite, Tunnel-Fighting blah blah, we should design a replacement charm that fits its same niche (and hence counts as OGD's prerequisite) but applies towards open spaces instead of closed ones.
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The charm description doesn't relate to what it actually does. What it gives is a close order formation with all the benefits of a dispersed formation. White Wolf fluff and mechanics sometimes mismatch like that.
 
FunkyEntropy said:
Well, I think I just figured out what one of our higher priority charms should be, not just for ourselves but for every single other Alchemical we Exalt:
Yep. Think about how useful it would have been to have that in this fight.
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That requires that there's a complementary unit in close formation for which the Alchemical is a special character. Special characters can be targetted with called shots, and if we broke formation we'd lose the benefit. We have to be right there. It also costs a health level to activate for a scene. I don't know if we'd need to re-activate it for any new complementary units we joined -- I think it's an enhancement to us so we wouldn't need to respend the cost. We would, however, need to re-apply it for each scene, losing a health level each time, although hopefully Gromweld would be forgiving as to what constituted a 'scene' if we had that kind of charm.
 
Gromweld said:
Not quite sure where people ever got the idea that "Scenic Route" equaled "Easy Mode", or even "Easy Mode Endbringer Fight", to be honest.

The only "Easy Mode" Endbringer battle I've seen done well was in Hope Through Overwhelming Firepower, and even then there were casualties in the thousands.
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Gromweld said:
Again, I don't recall ever stating that this was 'Easy Mode' outside of the vote itself, and the 'Scenic Route' vote specifically said "Things will be rough." I'll talk about this more after the Arc 4 Interlude, but the other two Endbringer battles would have been completely different scenarios and thus not really comparable in terms of difficulty.
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So I finally managed to scrape together the will to PROVE YOU WRONG! Bwahahaha! (kidding, kidding)
Gromweld said:
For those interested, this is indeed the easiest Endbringer attack of the three.
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At least Behemoth we can fight. Leviathan dedicated to destroying Winslow and the Cradle simply can't be stopped. And Simurgh is a whole new kettle of wtf.
 
Gromweld said:
Not only did you link one of my more loved comics, but you have the Surveillance Camera Robot Stripper as your avatar. I approve of everything about this post.
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You know, my new avatar is actually pretty relevant to this thread. Not only are we a ridiculously sexy (magical) robot girl, we're a walking panopticon. :D
BobTheNinja said:
It hasn't been that bad. Sure, I learned something new about Behemoth, but I still don't know any of the Endbringer origins, backstories, or motives, which are the really major spoiler points for me. But I'll continue reading Worm tomorrow so I can proceed through the quest without reading something I'll regret.
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So basically, you don't care about any of the actual spoilers, and you're worried us spoiling things that literally never come up in the story.
 
Amorous Intent said:
So basically, you don't care about any of the actual spoilers, and you're worried us spoiling things that literally never come up in the story.
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They come up. We get theories and possibilities and the (solid) reasoning behind them, just nothing absolutely word-of-god concrete.
 
Amorous Intent said:
So basically, you don't care about any of the actual spoilers, and you're worried us spoiling things that literally never come up in the story.
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Except for the bit about Behemoth's core, I haven't seen anything in this quest that I'd count as a spoiler, at least I don't' think. Wait, no, there was another thing about Behemoth from earlier that one of the members posted, but that was it.
 
RCa said:
They come up. We get theories and possibilities and the (solid) reasoning behind them, just nothing absolutely word-of-god concrete.
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You'll excuse me if I disagree. The "explanation" we're fed tells us absolutely nothing about how they were created, who created them, or why they're connected to [REDACTED]. The explanation we're given for their motives doesn't even make sense, because as far as I can tell, they're utterly failing to accomplish their supposed objective, not that there aren't a ton of hints that the Simurgh has been planning for things outside of said objective. The only reason you have to believe that bit of wild speculation is how they just kind of stop after [REDACTED], except that can be trivially explained by it utterly blowing the Simurgh's endgame plans out of the water.

I'm sorry, but four words does not an explanation make.
 
Amorous Intent said:
I'm sorry, but four words does not an explanation make.
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I was thinking more of Fortuna's interlude and their apparent original purpose of keeping the world's conflict simmering without boiling over too much, which then feeds into their origin, backstories and motivation (or at least why they hold back and why they pick particular targets). The [REDACTED] stuff is far less concrete, yes, and my earlier post was badly worded.
 
Amorous Intent said:
[Endbringer Stuff]
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RCa said:
[More Endbringer Stuff]
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I decided upon an interpretation that makes sense with everything I've read in canon, Wildbow's posts on the matter in the comments on his blog, and what posts on the matter I've seen here on SpaceBattles. I haven't approached him directly about it, because I've gathered that he still wants to keep some things in his pocket for when he does a sequel. Said sequel may invalidate my current plans/interpretation, but... well, Bullshit Magical Robot Communism flips tables and does what it wants.
 
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