@DragonParadox, is there no option for them to help with the restoration to reduce APs we need to spend to fulfill obligation to Porter?
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
^^^This.
Money alone, we're on the hook for ~$6000 a month just for feeding nine ghouls at the same rate as 18 adults. Building their summer/fall wardrobes will cost another couple hundred dollars apiece, even with shopping used clothes only, and we'll have to get them a winter/spring wardrobe as well before October; its Chicago, so it will start getting chilly early.
Camping gear so they arent sleeping rough, sanitary supplies(soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, lotion), protective gear and weapons to deter attack, books and other entertainment. I wont be surprised if we end up spending the better part of 20k in the first month, because there's a bunch of setup costs that cant be avoided.
Not to mention we are going to need to facilitate and process paperwork if they all agree to us moving them aboveground and into lodgings where they'll feel safe and provide transportation.
Which probably means buying a mortgage of a ~5 bedroom house and moving them all in two to a bedroom.
Fortunately, the 2006 housing crisis should be popping off, so house prices are due to fall precipitously.
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- Location
- Canada
Can they help with the clean-up/rebuild of Last Station? I think it would be good for them to see that their new patron is interested in building something; Nothing quite like purpose to help people self-actualize.
So, am I reading it right? Ghouls here are demigods (many times removed) of a fallen / cursed summerian goddess who was cast from Heaven by her father, Anu?
They are supernaturally tough and strong, and we are sheltering and feeding them at -3 difficulty discount until and unless we renovate the Underground. It really should be ok.
Still, ok, I can see the reason not to expand for now.
[X] Split the guardian party!
-[X] Those that have lived down here for a long time, help with security, keep other factions away from the Last Station
-[X] The ones who haven't spent long time in the Underground, like the girl who still remembers her table manners, return to the daylight world and serve as your helpers there
Oh yeah, havent voted.
VOTE
[X] Help with security, keep other factions away from the Last Station
Basically, I've made my arguments.
We do not currently have the financial or other logistic resources for any sort of large scale recruitment progran
Especially since we have no numbers for how many people we could potentially be talking about.
Could be 50 or 5000.
This doesnt mean that we should be turning away people we meet.
If we or the ghouls we recruit run into more CoDs by serendipity, or in the general area of the Last Station, sure. Them's the breaks.
We just shouldn be attempting to ramp recruitment massively.
Also, it would be nice to get some experience with a small number of recruits/rescues before going scaling up.
Provides experience with the sorts of problems one would have to deal with.
VOTE
[X] Help with security, keep other factions away from the Last Station
Basically, I've made my arguments.
We do not currently have the financial or other logistic resources for any sort of large scale recruitment progran
Especially since we have no numbers for how many people we could potentially be talking about.
Could be 50 or 5000.
This doesnt mean that we should be turning away people we meet.
If we or the ghouls we recruit run into more CoDs by serendipity, or in the general area of the Last Station, sure. Them's the breaks.
We just shouldn be attempting to ramp recruitment massively.
Also, it would be nice to get some experience with a small number of recruits/rescues before going scaling up.
Provides experience with the sorts of problems one would have to deal with.
I mean they do have some raw strength to work, but these people are not a construction company, all their skills went into 'surviving undertown'
Yes, though not because it is and extinct language but because it is demons, Molly now has a natural affinity with the accursed and the damned which allows her to know certain spinets of lore about them, flashes from minds long passed from the earth, fragments of fragments of primordial darkness
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fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
This feels wrong headed to me. These ghouls are intelligent beings that have been making the best of their situation. Now their situation has been crap, but they have been making the best of it. Self organization into bands, getting hold of armor and improved weapons, etc. Now they are working for us and their situation has markedly improved. We should not expect them to suddenly become more helpless than they were before we found them.
Give them all cyber-phones have them recuiting other members of undertown who we also give cyber-phones. Tell them to coordinate to help each other and make the best of opportunities.
Opportunities such as one of them finds a place that is willing to hire and tells others. And other things that I can't think of at the moment. Yes we will also give them other help, but there is no reason that we have to act like they have all suddenly become helpless dependants. The more of them join up the more the amazing power of coordination should help them all.
I was taking off the chuff. Yes ghouls are not generally useful to us in combat roles for many reasons especially transportation. We mostly want to hire them all as a probiotic so the new BBEG can't just pick up mooks or set up shop unnoticed. Which means that we want to expand rapidly. Minor improvements to their lives on a large scale add up from a quality of life perspective.
Just sticking to this band for now only makes sense if you have plans to try and train them into some sort of elite unit.
[X] Split the party!
-[X] Those that have lived down here for a long time, spread the word, the powers that be are going to react to your message of succor soon so you need to get it out there as fast as possible
-[X] The ones who haven't spent long time in the Underground, like the girl who still remembers her table manners, return to the daylight world and serve as your helpers there
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They are all scions many many times removed of Lamashtu, yes. The beings Harry calls Uber-Ghouls in canon are much closer to her, more like minor demons themselves, creatures of the spirit world. Modern ghouls are the descendents of those ancients and humans.
Keep it security.
Less room for site accidents, and site security of thos sort does not require anything more complicated than being visible.
Construction isnt unskilled labor.
They arent THAT supernaturally tough. A lot of ghouls get hunted and killed by mundane and supernatural wildlife.
There's a reason they are generally regarded as the bargain bin mooks of the supernatural world.
Yes, lower difficulty. You still have to invest the effort/resources to get them so, and that increases with your number of rescues.
Worst of both worlds.
By splitting them, you drop the strength of both parties, so someone who would have been intimidated to retreat by nine or ten ghouls might try their luck against four or five.
And frankly, Molly doesnt need aboveground helpers yet.
And certainly not unskilled ones.
DarkLight140
Credit to Team
- Location
- Lost in my thoughts
Speaking of that, should we assume that no matter what we set them as their task we will be able to get a full summary of all useful knowledge they know on that topic? Who lives where, factions, danger levels, paths and navigation, entrances and exits... there's a lot of information that Molly could really use when moving from bumbler to player here. A permanent job as undertown guide/navigator is probably not suitable for more than one of them but it seems like the task with the highest immediate return of everything they can offer.
[X] Split the party!
-[X] Those that have lived down here for a long time, spread the word, the powers that be are going to react to your message of succor soon so you need to get it out there as fast as possible
-[X] The ones who haven't spent long time in the Underground, like the girl who still remembers her table manners, return to the daylight world and serve as your helpers there
-[X] Those that have lived down here for a long time, spread the word, the powers that be are going to react to your message of succor soon so you need to get it out there as fast as possible
-[X] The ones who haven't spent long time in the Underground, like the girl who still remembers her table manners, return to the daylight world and serve as your helpers there
Yes, they will tell you as much as they know.
Fair enough.
Markedly more helpless? Making the best of their situation? The canonical mortality rate for wild ghouls in the Dresdenverse is 90%. Yes, 9 out of 10 wild ghouls dont live long enough to survive to adulthood. Causes of death being everything from traffic accidents to regular sickness to predation by supernatural predators and mundane animals(animals hate them), to suicide.
Their making the best of their situation is still pretty goddamn horrific. Established clans do better, but this isnt one.
Do recall that our first encounter with this particular group had them feeding on a stray dog.
And making contracts with Kattrin.
Willing to hire who? How many places in a city will hire twitchy randoms with no paperwork and no skills? In the United States?
And are you confident that people who have been living underground have the social skills to work in a human workplace without snapping and ripping some poor fool's throat out for intruding on their personal space or startling them?
Forget cyberdevils.
Cellphones dont work underground, I am reasonably sure no ghoul here has one, and we cant afford to spend 1 Essence per phone for every person's phone anyway.
We have literally no idea how many people there could be out there.
You dont make open-ended commitments with no information, limited resources and no experience.
I'm not infantilizing them. It's just that this stuff is really, really, hard. People end up trapped in homelessness and poverty without supernatural bullshit every day, and they can't grit their teeth and pull themselves up by their bootstraps even if the core issue that knocked them into a death spiral is resolved.
I expect they'll work like dogs to get out given half a chance but removing their hunger, as significant as that is, is at best a quarter of one. It's basically getting them to the same starting point as an impoverished mortal after the race has already been running for years.
More than that, we're sort of hiring them and sort of taking them in as subordinates beyond the measure of modern employment. We can't really pretend otherwise when we're making ourselves so important to their lives and futures.
Both ethically and practically it's good practice to take up some of their interests if we expect them to look after ours. Reciprocation builds loyalty instead of simple dependency.
At the most basic level I think that means paying better than working at a Wendy's, supernatural healthcare or no. Ideally it means more than that, but I feel it's a good litmus test for determining when we're failing really badly.
Ten loyal people built up from nothing are worth a hundred disposable goons.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
And the fact these ghouls seem to be adults or close to it means that they are well above the curve. Also that even small amounts of help can make a large difference. For example they obviously have been able to get food somehow well now they don't need to eat as much and we can use TLF to cook up that food with superhuman results. That is something that scales the more ghouls we recuit.
Or leadership rolls to help organize them to help them help themselves use both TLF and IPE which means that we get solar levels of successes at it.
Also the fact that ghouls situation is terrible is not a reason to help less of them. It is a reason to give help that scales over large groups like MIS, Organization, large cookouts, etc. We have many charms that allows us to give a little help to everyone down here. The fact that we can't easily give more help to everyone seems like no reason not to give the scaling help we can give.
This will be a clan very soon. Work can be found in many places and hiring agencies have made it clear that many places are very willing to hire unskilled people in bulk where a single person would have a hard time finding any work at all. But if they can't their situation has not gotten worse then if we hadn't spread MIS.
Do you think that we are going to get more then a thousand ghouls in the first week or something?
[X] Help with security, keep other factions away from the Last Station
You're hand waving away issues without actually addressing what would happen if we're wrong, and how we'll get enough breathing room to build past treading water if you're wrong and we get thirty more guys in the next three days.
Helping the largest number of people possible requires building up the foundation to do so, not drowning ourselves before we can find a place to stand.
Edit: Not to put too fine a point on it, but if it's that simple why do vanilla homeless exist? Not all of them have issues that'd stop them from trying this.
The sort of places they can go under the table in the manner they require aren't exactly nice or particularly lucrative.
The problem is that we have no idea how many we'll get because it won't happen on anything like our schedule. All of the solutions you've mentioned are direct personal scale things, and we don't want to be doing this every hour of the day.
You're hand waving away issues without actually addressing what would happen if we're wrong, and how we'll get enough breathing room to build past treading water if you're wrong and we get thirty more guys in the next three days.
Helping the largest number of people possible requires building up the foundation to do so, not drowning ourselves before we can find a place to stand.
Edit: Not to put too fine a point on it, but if it's that simple why do vanilla homeless exist? Not all of them have issues that'd stop them from trying this.
The sort of places they can go under the table in the manner they require aren't exactly nice or particularly lucrative.
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