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

[Talia B]

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.

 

[Talia B]

I'm guessing the lore roll contributed significantly to the social awkwardness and tense tone of the conversation - the party wasn't confident in their Mundane manners or aware of the Contessa's personality and motivations, so everyone was walking on eggshells, if you pardon the multiple puns there. Fortunately honesty salvaged the situation, but I'm guessing the conversation would have gone quite differently if both rolls had succeeded.

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I mean, I read Alesha's problem as a bad case of the lesbian panic, but that does track for everyone else/Deeds in particular. XD

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I asked Talia what we botched with that Lore roll before she went to sleep and yes, both of these are correct. (There were some big things we missed, though. Like holy shit.)

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Yep. Alesha will go more into detail later but at least part of the problem (that your Empathy roll failed to detect) was that she has a crush. Going in there without knowing her intentions or much about Viacruz didn't... help, either.

Well then! Good call @Fabricati on buying up a Lorewise proficiency; even if, this time, it didn't pan out and Deedee fell back on "clueless but charming" (which she's admittedly good at) to avoid disaster, the above conversation is just more proof that it'll be important going forward.

That said... even with that on our side, we're still at the point where a DC10 is a coinflip. Previous level ups haven't given the option to rebuy proficiencies we've already got, which makes me suspect the only way to improve further at this is to exercise MND so that it gets chosen for bonuses the next time Deedee gains level.

Well, something to look out for opportunities about going forward, I guess.

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With the way levelups work in Valor, unfortunately, we're going to be picking between MIN, RES, and hypothetically AGI every level, since VIG and SPR are locked in by her subclass (and Valor's most basic optimization routine, which is keeping two stats capped), and I think it'd benefit Deeds personally to focus on RES for some of these locked vote choices. Then again, we can always get that up a little and then focus on research rather than self-discovery.

On the plus side, unlike vanilla Valor, I believe Talia said we'll be able to buy multiple levels in a proficiency (which is an optional rule that hasn't been officially published yet, IIRC). On the gripping side, I think it's a Slow level cap, which means we'll only get the option every five levels after 1st (6, 11, 16).

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I actually thought it was Fast progression (4, 7, 10...) and will take another look at that rule.

And yes, non-primary stats are not great. That's why Boons and other ways of boosting Challenge rolls are good.

This is... definitely worth thinking about going forward. On the specific random island where Deedee woke up, a handful of entry level player characters, aligned with the pirates, would've been enough to roll the local settlement if we hadn't been there to help defend it.

How many people are in that tent city outside Viacruz? The Contessa says "thousands". Going by simultaneous login caps and region sizes on modern MMO servers (FF14 peak use is about 3k characters per server, with about 10 servers per subcontinental shard), and assuming the players were divided among several starter cities, it might even be over ten thousand. A middling fraction of that population would be enough, especially with a little time spent leveling on the way, to go find a less prominent dominion than Viacruz and set themselves up a dynasty there. A band of marauding adventurers, or even a legion with maybe a raid's worth of adventurers at the top, are probably in people's threat models. An army entirely composed of adventurers is an incomprehensible black swan event.

We've been thinking of this as a refugee crisis, because that's what it felt like to us. To the Mundanes, it looks like something very, very different.

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You'll get to hear what the locals call this soon, when you interface with some that aren't royals. But this is very important to keep in mind.

 

[Qoheleth]

I actually thought it was Fast progression (4, 7, 10...) and will take another look at that rule.

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Oh, the cap going up every three levels would be another story entirely. At that point, skillpoint budgeting matters enough that I'd imagine the cap is really only preventing in-class numbers from going out into space.

 

[Talia B]

Oh, the cap going up every three levels would be another story entirely. At that point, skillpoint budgeting matters enough that I'd imagine the cap is really only preventing in-class numbers from going out into space.

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Levelling a skill is cheaper (1 sp) than getting a new one. I'll also be adding Challenge Techniques and Favorable Insight to the character sheet soon.

 

[Winged One]

6: Extremely trades for. The fleet from part 1 that brought them had sugar, spices and rum in the holds. Also silk and potatoes. Costa Dulce from last chapter was an alt-history sugar plantation with peasants instead of slaves. The implication that there's a New World is deliberate.

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Shows more planning ahead for future expansions than normal.

Missing the lore roll made a huge difference here, actually. Hitting the Rapport roll was very important.

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I asked Talia what we botched with that Lore roll before she went to sleep and yes, both of these are correct. (There were some big things we missed, though. Like holy shit.)

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Still, I'm glad we hit the Rapport roll. From the speculation of others (always a dangerous thing to draw conclusions from), I'm guessing that we managed to help her understand the isekei folks' mentality a bit, helping her make better policy decisions regarding this apparently fucking nightmarishly dangerous situation. Realizing that we're just a bunch of naive, terrified foreigners from a place with less environmental conflict than she realized was possible and not anyone who actually meant to become a huge superpowered army or bands of superpowered marauders probably opens up options she'd have never realized she had.

 

[bii]

Shows more planning ahead for future expansions than normal.

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Also because one of OWTB's founders is of indigenous descent and decided that if they were doing the whole not quite alt Earth thing, she definitely wanted to make sure that the New World wasn't decimated by disease and thus unfortunately easy to conquer/steal, so yeah, consideration of said New World has been in their minds for a while.

 

[Talia B]

Still, I'm glad we hit the Rapport roll. From the speculation of others (always a dangerous thing to draw conclusions from), I'm guessing that we managed to help her understand the isekei folks' mentality a bit, helping her make better policy decisions regarding this apparently fucking nightmarishly dangerous situation. Realizing that we're just a bunch of naive, terrified foreigners from a place with less environmental conflict than she realized was possible and not anyone who actually meant to become a huge superpowered army or bands of superpowered marauders probably opens up options she'd have never realized she had.

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Most isekai of the kind this Quest is a response to has the main character, who has powers comparable to a JRPG protagonist, topple kingdoms, destroy monsters, and revolutionize industry.

I just asked myself how the peasants, and the kings, feel about that.

Now Deedee is asking herself that, and so is her party.

 

[Winged One]

Most isekai of the kind this Quest is a response to has the main character, who has powers comparable to a JRPG protagonist, topple kingdoms, destroy monsters, and revolutionize industry.

I just asked myself how the peasants, and the kings, feel about that.

Now Deedee is asking herself that, and so is her party.

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It's an important question to ask themselves, yes. I'd guess that for toppling kingdoms, kings are definite nonfans (unless they really hated the kingdom in question, and even then it'd make them nervous), while peasants... well, it could be a pleasant enough fantasy world that peasants actually like and care about their nation. We haven't seen all that much of it yet, but what we have seen makes me think it's possible. That's a weird thought. Destroying monsters is probably a good PR move with everyone unless the monster itself was popular (or is a sacred animal that wasn't bothering anyone). Revolutionizing industry... from what I've read, it's historically been hit and miss among most people and distinctly unpopular with anyone that felt they're doing great under the status quo.

 

[Nerdorama]

Most isekai of the kind this Quest is a response to has the main character, who has powers comparable to a JRPG protagonist, topple kingdoms, destroy monsters, and revolutionize industry.

I just asked myself how the peasants, and the kings, feel about that.

Now Deedee is asking herself that, and so is her party.

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Another quirk here is that, in your stereotypical isekai, the protagonist has the power to topple kingdoms and destroy social systems, and typically does not do this, instead using his power (and it's always "his") to get to the top of a quite oppressive social pyramid and install himself as a kind of colonial Raja. No effort is made to improve the often terrible social situation in the other world, but instead to use knowledge and technology and cheat powers to take advantage of it instead. It's a remarkably direct parallel to imperialism, complete with teaching the silly savages about things only the most enlightened 21st century Earth Man could know about, like crop rotation, or how to cultivate rice.

Contrast Mundus, a place which genuinely seems more egalitarian than a technologically equivalent Earth because it was created to be so by more or less benevolent gods with left-leaning 21st century social mores. There are probably ways to ""improve"" it in terms of feeding more people or creating more political representation, but all in all it may actually not need social disruption, morally, anywhere near as much as other isekai worlds.

And you've dumped several thousand people of the 13-39 gamer demographic in there and given them superpowers.

 

[10ebbor10]

Another thing to consider is that if this is still a video game, then the threats that make the game interesting are going to rubberband hard (regardless of how bad the average online Gamer is, statistics show us that the vast majority of people play good person runs. It's just that the evil stuff is loud and gets posted).

 

[Nerdorama]

Another thing to consider is that if this is still a video game, then the threats that make the game interesting are going to rubberband hard (regardless of how bad the average online Gamer is, statistics show us that the vast majority of people play good person runs. It's just that the evil stuff is loud and gets posted).

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I don't believe that the now-trapped players are going to all go Lord of the Flies like a bunch of repressed British schoolboys, but the possibility is one that is worrying even if you aren't a Mundane. It also only takes a few people like Strawberry Shortcake to cause serious problems when given that much power and a lot of desperation and disruption to their daily lives.

EDIT: And then there's the problem of well-meaning positivism that causes more problems than it solves. Take the t-shirt conversation. It's certainly a privilege, in every sense of the word, to live in a world where I can buy a $50 t-shirt that cost 50 cents and the tip of someone's pinky to make, but dumping that sort of automation onto an economy that employs an enormous labor market at probably subsistence wages already, without any kind of holistic plan for what all those future unemployed spinners are going to do for food, is...not the best idea.

 

[Qoheleth]

Lot of interesting points here @Nerdorama.

Contrast Mundus, a place which genuinely seems more egalitarian than a technologically equivalent Earth because it was created to be so by more or less benevolent gods with left-leaning 21st century social mores. There are probably ways to ""improve"" it in terms of feeding more people or creating more political representation, but all in all it may actually not need social disruption, morally, anywhere near as much as other isekai worlds.

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The verdict is still out, here, I think. Certain specific atrocities (like chattel slavery) have apparently been taken out of the running, but... our actual interactions with Mundanes so far have been limited, and of the ones we've had significant scenes with thus far, 3/4 by my count have also been of high enough social status to be Elites themselves (and that distinction alone - the concept of Elites, of purchasable immortality and superpowers - makes me distrust how egalitarian things actually are). We don't yet know what the life of an average farmer or laborer looks like in this society really, and that could change the picture a lot.

Of course, even if broad systemic injustice is happening here, I'd still also distrust the instinct to try to rewrite it by force of the "modern" (foreign, disconnected) knowledge and overwhelming strength that 2040s transplants are suddenly bringing to the table. Even putting aside political upheavals, the example you gave of textiles as the obvious first target of an imported industrial revolution is a good example of what can go wrong.

...I imagine, now that we're discussing it, that some of our peers in the camps will have such dreams. Probably most of them wouldn't even be villains doing it for personal enrichment and power, like the stereotypical isekai conqueror imagined upthread - just well-meaning folks unaware of the historical tendency for "broad, burly projects to better a society I'm not a member of" to fall flat on their asses and crush something on the way down.

But by the same token... who knows how long it'll take to find a way home. If, as a 2040s transplant, you ever get to the point where "your community" is more on Mundus than on Earth, then it's gonna feel bad, feel counterproductive, to have the the knowledge and power to do something about a problem in your community, but feel like you have to not do it out of fear for what might go wrong.

We helped protect Costa Dulce from a pirate raid even before we knew the attack had other players behind it.
I don't think that was the wrong thing to do.
So there's a line to walk, I guess.

 

[Nerdorama]

Lot of interesting points here @Nerdorama.


The verdict is still out, here, I think. Certain specific atrocities (like chattel slavery) have apparently been taken out of the running, but... our actual interactions with Mundanes so far have been limited, and of the ones we've had significant scenes with thus far, 3/4 by my count have also been of high enough social status to be Elites themselves (and that distinction alone - the concept of Elites, of purchasable immortality and superpowers - makes me distrust how egalitarian things actually are). We don't yet know what the life of an average farmer or laborer looks like in this society really, and that could change the picture a lot.

Now, even if broad systemic injustice is happening here, I'd still also distrust the instinct to try to rewrite it by force of the "modern" (foreign, disconnected) knowledge and overwhelming strength that 2040s transplants are suddenly bringing to the table.

...I imagine, now that we're discussing it, that some of our peers in the camps will have such dreams. Probably most of them wouldn't even be villains doing it for personal enrichment and power, like the stereotypical isekai conqueror - just well-meaning folks unaware of the historical tendency for "broad projects to better a society I'm not a member of" to fall flat on their asses and crush something on the way down.

But by the same token... who knows how long it'll take to find a way home. If, as a 2040s transplant, you ever get to the point of "your community" being here on Mundus, then it's gonna feel bad, feel counterproductive, to have the the knowledge and power to do something about a problem in your community, and not do it out of fear for what might go wrong.

We helped protect Costa Dulce from a pirate raid even before we knew the attack had other players behind it.
I don't think that was the wrong thing to do.
So there's a line to walk, I guess.

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I agree with pretty much all of this, AND we may or may not be in a simulated reality where we can hypothetically entreat/exploit/hack the gods themselves if we max out our Hubris. It's a really fascinating setup born entirely from the concept of "what would being 'trapped in an immersive VR MMO' ACTUALLY entail?"

I'm just someone who thinks caution and context are important for any kind of social decision-making, and I'm just anticipating Talia throwing options and NPCs at us that are "actually wait, that's just colonialism" if thought about and I want to be on the lookout for them, AND someone who just really appreciates this kind of self-aware approach to genre tropes.

 

[Qoheleth]

I'm just someone who thinks caution and context are important for any kind of social decision-making, and I'm just anticipating Talia throwing options and NPCs at us that are "actually wait, that's just colonialism" if thought about and I want to be on the lookout for them

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Absolutely with you there.

 

[Talia B]

I don't believe that the now-trapped players are going to all go Lord of the Flies like a bunch of repressed British schoolboys, but the possibility is one that is worrying even if you aren't a Mundane.

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Well, of course not.

Most of the people here are just folks, not the kind of people who had those kinds of superiority complexes and aggression taught to them, like the students of the specific school system William Golding was condemning.

Or, say, Gamergate.

 

[Talia B]

How many people are in that tent city outside Viacruz? The Contessa says "thousands". Going by simultaneous login caps and region sizes on modern MMO servers (FF14 peak use is about 3k characters per server, with about 10 servers per subcontinental shard), and assuming the players were divided among several starter cities, it might even be over ten thousand. A middling fraction of that population would be enough, especially with a little time spent leveling on the way, to go find a less prominent dominion than Viacruz and set themselves up a dynasty there. A band of marauding adventurers, or even a legion with maybe a raid's worth of adventurers at the top, are probably in people's threat models. An army entirely composed of adventurers is an incomprehensible black swan event.

We've been thinking of this as a refugee crisis, because that's what it felt like to us. To the Mundanes, it looks like something very, very different.

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This is important enough that I threadmarked it.

We crunched some numbers in response to this post, using the FF14 figures as baselines. In ten years, I expect an impassioned screed on a forum like this from someone about how the numbers are laughably low, because turnabout is fair play.

Did you know, by the way, that the armies sent on the Crusades were about 10-15 thousand people strong? Or that Roman legions were about 5K each? Alexander the Great's impossibly huge, unstoppable armies were about 32 thousand.

It's something worth thinking about.

 

[Qoheleth]

We crunched some numbers in response to this post, using the FF14 figures as baselines. In ten years, I expect an impassioned screed on a forum like this from someone about how the numbers are laughably low, because turnabout is fair play.

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If all else fails, you can probably handwave it by fudging the numbers on exactly how big Chimaera's geographical footprint is ("neurohelms gotta have low pings; anything more than 400 miles from Vegas was totally a separate cluster! ")

 

[Talia B]

If all else fails, you can probably handwave it by fudging the numbers on exactly how big Chimaera's geographical footprint is ("neurohelms gotta have low pings; anything more than 400 miles from Vegas was totally a separate cluster! ")

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This was entirely a self-own because I like yelling at SAO's numbers.

Turns out they based it on Everquest's launch. Still low, but an understandable mistake, not a jackiechanpullingouthair.png mistake.

 

[Talia B]

Heads up that I got knocked out by very necessary errands today. I will write the update tomorrow, get it preread, and post it along with a vote on Thursday, to get us back on schedule.

Look forward to some futbol and some free time with Alesha and Hikaru in the near future.

 

[bii]

Look forward to some futbol and some free time with Alesha and Hikaru in the near future.

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Futbol will be brought to you by @FoxHana with a little help from me.

 

[Strunkriidiisk]

I am indeed very excited for futbol.

 

[Talia B]

Just started writing chapter 2.2.3: Highly Responsive To Prayers, which will feature a nutritious lunch with a woman dying of thirst, foreshadowing of the coming of the dread splort Sloccer (sometimes called Flutbol), and mad theology.

Please wait warmly until it is ready.

 

[Winged One]

Just started writing chapter 2.2.3: Highly Responsive To Prayers, which will feature a nutritious lunch with a woman dying of thirst, foreshadowing of the coming of the dread splort Sloccer (sometimes called Flutbol), and mad theology.

Please wait warmly until it is ready.

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I refuse. *turns on fan*

 

[FoxHana]

As they entered into the baths, Ace felt herself distracted.

Not just by the fact that she was getting in the baths with Alesha. Or, well, yes, that, but not for the reasons she'd expected. What Alesha had said to Deedee… Did Alesha not know? Or did she know, and was just…

She shook her head. That couldn't be right.

"Ace?" Alesha looked behind her, at the trailing vixen. "What's the matter?"

"Huh- Oh. Nothing." Ace lied, easily enough. "Just not sure what any of this is. Is this a knife in the baths?"

"I'm sure Hikaru would have something to say about the lore here, but I can't say I know the details myself." Alesha shrugged. "I get the basics, at least. A basket for laundry, then a cold bath and a hot bath, I think?"

"Why are they separate?" Ace wondered aloud.

"It's good for your skin." Alesha responded. That… didn't make much sense to Ace, but okay.

Still, she just followed Alesha's lead. Quick rinse in the cold (oh, god, Ace was so bad with cold water), then the hot soak… That was nice, at least.

In the hot water, Ace let herself relax, closing her eyes, sinking down below to blow bubbles in the water. Childish, maybe, but god knew she could use the relaxation. Her shoulders were so stiff- Not something she was used to dealing with.

"If your shoulders are causing you problems, I can help with that." Alesha offered.

"Okay, are you a mind-reader?" Ace couldn't help but give the instant reply. "How did you know?!"

"I'm no mind-reader, I just can hazard a guess that your figure didn't look like that before Mundus."

"... Guilty." Ace lowered her head again, burbling in the water. "I'm no longer jealous of big boobs, what can I say?"

Alesha laughed, and shifted around behind Ace, and… Oh. There was a sudden pressure on her shoulders, pushing gently into her back, and suddenly Ace understood, intimately, how her cat would turn boneless sometimes. She suddenly never wanted to move again.

"Hhhhhow are you so good at this." Ace managed to get out, half-sinking below the surface again.

"You're not the first girl I've met with those kinds of proportions." Alesha's response was calm, but with a note of amusement to her voice. "Though, admittedly, I see more of them on posters on my daughter's wall."

Ace flushed. "Listen, it was a joke, I wasn't planning on keeping this charactYOUR WHAT."

There was a pause, and Alesha's hands stopped, before she started laughing- Uproarious, hilarious laughter.

"My daughter? Jasmine. Didn't you know?"

"No, I- I guess I missed it somehow? I just- I mean, I thought-" Ace stammered, trying to realign her mind with the new facts.

"You thought?" Oh, god, Alesha's voice was so friendly, but Ace knew this felt dangerous.

"I mean- You look like-" She sighs. "... Right. Your avatar's age doesn't really match up to your own, does it? You in the general sense."

"What, have you thought this is what we're all like behind the screen, too?" The amusement was palpable.

"Maybe? I mean, I never met any of you until all this happened!" She lowered her head in shame, though she had to lift it up again as her nose went under. Whoops. Breathing is still necessary, as it turns out! "I mean, I'm… kind of the odd one out here, aren't I? I…. You all know each other, you're all old friends, and… I'm just sort of tagging along because I don't have any other ideas on what to do."

"Oh, Ace…" Alesha's voice was softer, now. More comforting. "You don't need to worry. You're in the Company now, if you want to be."

"I do! Just…" She lowers her head. "I don't know anything about you. Not really. Any of you."

"Well, I can tell you we're not like this IRL." Alesha's voice was comforting. "We actually mostly hang out through playing tabletop games together. Sekhmet's a fair bit taller- So is Hikaru, obviously- And in the real world, Deedee's rooms with Sekhmet. Given that he does like women, people mistake him and Sekhmet for a couple all the time."

Suddenly, those massaging hands felt a lot less comforting to Ace.

What happened next was… something of a blur to her. She made some excuses. Got out fairly quickly. Redressed, joined the others.

But now, her mind was spinning a mile a minute. What was her place to say? What was her place to do?

Did Alesha not know? Or… Did she know, and she still…

Nothing had changed. She still hadn't figured it out. And these troubled thoughts circled around, unable to fade.

 

[FoxHana]

For what it's worth, I view my role in this whole project as just being the Weird Ace Cryptid. I only appear randomly, in the middle of the night, post writing or lore or shitposts related to Ace, and then vanish for a long time once more, the only proof of my existence being blurry photos of a foxgirl in the distance.

I'm very fortunate Talia approves of this strange hyperfixation cryptid form of helping.

 

[Talia B]

For what it's worth, I always considered Ace your baby, which is why I keep pokin you about doing her side scenes.

Then, apparently, vanishing into the night.

I probably should do more writing from her POV, I just want it to be absolutely clear you contributed her, her personality and her role in the story.