Sure. And I am very aware that my English writing skills are not impressive.
Lex Sedet In Vertice: A Supervillain in the DCU CK2 quest
- Thread starter King crimson
- Start date
- Superhero
- Location
- Milky Way, Orion Arm, 3rd rock from the sun
- Pronouns
- He/Him
i like your ideas except the Facial Recognition one i really think we should hire an investigator to research stuff from the world news and it will also give us a new hero action what do you think?
- Location
- Texas
[ ] Create artificial organs
[ ] Create artificial blood
Are these acceptable write-ins? I don't expect to do them soon, but maybe after we learn about biology?
[ ] Create artificial blood
Are these acceptable write-ins? I don't expect to do them soon, but maybe after we learn about biology?
Nicholas Brooks
Redeemer and Destroyer
- Location
- United States
[] Create a Research Lab (Choose: Biology, Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, etc.) reduces DCs for actions based on what the lab specializes in
[] Invest in Small Businesses (write-in city, must have a LexCorp building)
[] Invest in Small Businesses (write-in city, must have a LexCorp building)
- Location
- California
Ah! Sorry, I just assumed that LexCorp/LuthorCorp was a publicly traded company.
- Location
- Australia
Would be interesting, but I'm not sure Lionel would be exactly happy to explain rampant suffocations (with the lawsuits and payouts that would follow) to a board of directors.
Plus he wouldn't tolerate such an obvious risk of a coup, which depending on contracts could happen even if he has a controlling share, which in his paranoid mind would be enough. He was brought down by an unfortunate tragedy
Edit: Forgot to add -
[X] [armor] Lex Luthor
[X] [armor] Mercy Graves
I think that the likelihood that Mercy will get into a situation where the armour could be needed or required is far higher, considering Pamala will be spending most of her time in the Lex Tower.
Although perhaps we should throw Ivo a bone. I think that if we plan and act carefully we could keep him post-A.M.A.Z.O, if we could both upload at the same time - plus we have some other edge over him that holds against an Amazo, which could be much harder. We'll have to wait for when the A.M.A.Z.O project is close to completion.
@King crimson, could another actor (state or non-state) potentially copy some or all of our progress on the A.M.A.Z.O project? Or is there a chance that dice roles could, for example, trigger a big event such as Injusticeor the birth of the Batman Who Laughs?
Last edited:
Pamela is almost as good for diplomacy actions as for learning actions. We may very well send her on missions outside Lex Tower.
I prefer to use her for diplomacy next turn because we already got two huge discoveries and our stewardship "quota" will be used on those. That means we may not want new discoveries right now
King crimson
Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
- Location
- Los Angeles
Without Ivo it is stupidly hard to copy Amazo (the actor in question would have to get a roll of 405+ after encountering your work)
The dice rolls could cause it but the chances are miniscule and in order to get to that point at least ten years must have passed.
I'll accept both of these write-ins have 200 exp
- Location
- Israel
So what now? Is next post going to be the beginning of turn 4, or will it be more interludes and world news and results of our votes?
[]Invest in non-food crop farming
Is it an OK write-in?
There is a food processing option, but this one is different. I'd love to have an option to start with what humanity already achieved in the form of cotton, rubber tree, bamboo, etc and then expand to whatever Pamela will discover once we find time to put her on learning about botany.
Is it an OK write-in?
There is a food processing option, but this one is different. I'd love to have an option to start with what humanity already achieved in the form of cotton, rubber tree, bamboo, etc and then expand to whatever Pamela will discover once we find time to put her on learning about botany.
King crimson
Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
- Location
- Los Angeles
the next post will be the beginning of turn 5
King crimson
Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
- Location
- Los Angeles
This write-in will be rejected simply because it is an option that will already be available.
Slynnwen
She/Her
- Location
- Fomalhaut B
Once we start seeing heroes pop up, maybe something like:
[] Set up a system for finding/mentoring new metahumans
Would probably require owning STAR labs, but the general idea is that Lexcorp would put out a public ad campaign to the effect of "If you've suddenly gained powers, we'll pay you to come test those powers safely at our facilities." That way we could more easily find new metas to hire, and perhaps keep an eye on metas that don't want to work with us.
[] Set up a system for finding/mentoring new metahumans
Would probably require owning STAR labs, but the general idea is that Lexcorp would put out a public ad campaign to the effect of "If you've suddenly gained powers, we'll pay you to come test those powers safely at our facilities." That way we could more easily find new metas to hire, and perhaps keep an eye on metas that don't want to work with us.
King crimson
Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
- Location
- Los Angeles
So I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that this write-in is rejected. The good news is that this write-in is rejected because once meta-humans become known to the public this option will definitely exist.
King crimson
Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
- Location
- Los Angeles
So I have once again counted up all the options available in the next vote and it turns out that you guys have about 175 options to choose from. At this rate you'll probably end up breaking 200 by turn 7.
King crimson
Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
- Location
- Los Angeles
Someone else has already requested this and I will try and put the option in spoilers just so that people don't get destroyed by the formatting. I will do my best to accommodate formatting issues to the best of my ability.
King crimson talks about adapting characters for the quest
King crimson
Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
- Location
- Los Angeles
Surprise everybody it is yet another post by me describing how I like to work quests and some personal philosophy. This time I will be focusing on adapting characters. I don't know when the next one will come out but it will probably be either a brief thing on meta-gaming or a list of things I think would be interesting to do for omakes involving more out there personalities and using figures not yet seen by the thread. Anyways without further ado here it is
King crimson Talks about Adapting Character
As you all know DC comics has been around for a while and there are numerous reinterpretations of every character. Since most characters have someone who likes them I try to treat every character with respect. Even ridiculous characters like Beppo the super monkey or Snowflame deserve to be acknowledged and written well. Reducing a character to a caricature or a one off joke is going to annoy someone. I can't appease everyone but I do think treating the source material with respect is one of the key elements to running a successful quest.
I personally tend to stick with sources I am familiar with. This makes it easier for me to write the characters in a believable manner. When a character is too difficult for me to include in the universe a manner that makes sense (characters like Comet the superhorse) or they would actively tarnish a different character (I'm not touching Sleez with a hundred foot pole thank you very much) I don't include them.
The other main component to adapting characters is being able to do something different with them. I will (most likely) never be writing actual DC comics or shows and frankly retreading ground they have already done is boring. If the moment I say a characters name people immediately know every single thing about the character then it makes it much harder to prevent people from meta-gaming the whole quest since they already know which pitfalls to avoid out of character. I like to avoid this by blending a variety of incarnations but there are a few times where I outright rewrite things or significantly alter a characters history while not touching the core components of the character in order to make them more interesting.
Ivo is an excellent example of this. In the Justice League cartoons he is barely given a name drop in the episodes that have Amazo as an entity. In comics he suffers from poor characterization of being a mad scientist with Thanataphobia who built Amazo as a way to gather things to make him immortal (in fact his disfiguring debilitation was only gained after an attempt to become immortal). So when redesigning Ivo to make him work better I looked at the core elements of the character. Ivo's core consists of being afraid of death, being a mad scientist and creating Amazo. In the Justice League cartoon Lex sought to use Amazo as a new body for himself so it was easy to ascribe the same motivation to Ivo himself for how he planned to gain immortality. However this still leaves the reason why Ivo has such a strong fear of death up in the air. The comics version was always rather lackluster (in my opinion) so I wrote a new backstory for him. Using the characters history as suffering from horrific malformations I wrote an origin story that gave Ivo a crippling terminal illness to explain both why he has such a strong fear of death and why he is a mad scientist. This new backstory works well because it streamlines and retains the characters core while not truly inventing anything whole cloth.
On top of that I have five different categories with which I adapt characters. These categories are tonal adaptations, backstory additions, flaw addition, reworking characters who contradict the rules of the setting and transitory adaptations. Every character I adapt falls into at least on of these characters and I think knowing what I am altering and how it improves things is essential for adapting the DC universe well.
Transitory adaptations are the simplest and easiest way for me to adapt characters. Transitory adaptations is when I can simple lift the character from another adaptation of comics and just shift it from one format to a text only format. An example of this is Brainiac. Instead of attempting to mess around with the convoluted history of the character I simply adapted the existing simplification that the DCAU had already provided me. Transitory adaptations never draw from actual comics themselves since it would defeat the whole purpose of finding a way to cut down on over 70 years of content to draw from.
Flaw addition is another very simple way for me to adapt characters. Flaw addition is essentially where I take preexisting heroic characters and I highlight and zoom in on their flaws in order to color things from the perspective of a supervillain. The best example I can think of this (at the time of this writing) is Lois Lane. In most media Lois Lane breaks into places she isn't supposed to on a hunch and then publishes an article on what she discovered. In most stories this isn't a problem because Lois Lane is almost always right about there being something wrong and her being involved draws in Superman to fix things. By highlighting the flaws of Lois' approach to journalism I make her far more adversarial to Lex and by extension the whole thread by giving light to her issues instead of portraying her as a paragon which she usually is. This actually worked so effectively that people started to hate Lois despite everything she suspected Lex of doing was things he had done. Protagonist centered morality comes into play as well but I think its interesting that we have retained the core of the character (great journalist, highly investigative, very moral and goes with her gut to figure out the facts) yet the perception has totally shifted based off of how those traits are portrayed. It reframes the dynamic of good and bad from what people are used to in this universe without adding anything new at all to the character (in hindsight flaw addition is a misleading title perhaps flaw expansion?)
Tonal adaptions are for things that are too dark or too light for the universe as a whole. Generally these adaptations shift the way the character is portrayed to make sense for a different context. Characters like Beppo are made slightly more serious and given legitimate reason to show up on earth later and characters like the Joker are made lighter (comics!Joker kills babies commits genocides and repeatedly mutilates others. Needless to say I will not be making Joker go that dark even though I plan on retaining the creepy and the crazy).
Backstory additions is when I streamline the backstory to make things make more sense. Generally if I cannot make a character timeline of their backstory then I will simplify. I apply this type of adaptation to characters like Troia and occasionally characters sufficiently removed from earth who got butterflied in some way shape or form.
The final way I adapt characters is those who contradict the rules I have established for the setting. The best example I can think of this is Abracadabra. Abracadabra is a time travelling flash villain ho uses tech from the future to fake being magic. Abracadabra often contradicts the rules I have established for how time travel works in this quest in his attempts to kill the Flash in the past. As such when adapting the character I had to figure out how to get him to comply with the established time travel rules. The core of Abracadabra's character is that he is a time traveler from the future, he fakes having magic and he hates the Flash. The first adaptation I made is that Abracadabra is unaware of the true effects his actions have. Abracadabra has knowledge of the past but it is so far removed from what really happened that it might as well be ignored since it doesn't accurately reflect what will happen. Secondly Abracadabra's whole schtick becomes stealing things from the past. He isn't trying to make himself retroactively famous (since he knows that won't succeed) but he is instead attempting to steal valuable artifacts from the past to sell in the future where they are worth far more. Lastly rather than using a variety of tech Abracadabra relies primarily on using time travel to fake magic in order to cut down on his potential impact on that time period.
I hope this post helped people understand my approach to adapting characters. Feel free to discuss other characters you want to see adapted (including my thought processes) as well as whether or not there might be a better method for adapting things.
King crimson Talks about Adapting Character
As you all know DC comics has been around for a while and there are numerous reinterpretations of every character. Since most characters have someone who likes them I try to treat every character with respect. Even ridiculous characters like Beppo the super monkey or Snowflame deserve to be acknowledged and written well. Reducing a character to a caricature or a one off joke is going to annoy someone. I can't appease everyone but I do think treating the source material with respect is one of the key elements to running a successful quest.
I personally tend to stick with sources I am familiar with. This makes it easier for me to write the characters in a believable manner. When a character is too difficult for me to include in the universe a manner that makes sense (characters like Comet the superhorse) or they would actively tarnish a different character (I'm not touching Sleez with a hundred foot pole thank you very much) I don't include them.
The other main component to adapting characters is being able to do something different with them. I will (most likely) never be writing actual DC comics or shows and frankly retreading ground they have already done is boring. If the moment I say a characters name people immediately know every single thing about the character then it makes it much harder to prevent people from meta-gaming the whole quest since they already know which pitfalls to avoid out of character. I like to avoid this by blending a variety of incarnations but there are a few times where I outright rewrite things or significantly alter a characters history while not touching the core components of the character in order to make them more interesting.
Ivo is an excellent example of this. In the Justice League cartoons he is barely given a name drop in the episodes that have Amazo as an entity. In comics he suffers from poor characterization of being a mad scientist with Thanataphobia who built Amazo as a way to gather things to make him immortal (in fact his disfiguring debilitation was only gained after an attempt to become immortal). So when redesigning Ivo to make him work better I looked at the core elements of the character. Ivo's core consists of being afraid of death, being a mad scientist and creating Amazo. In the Justice League cartoon Lex sought to use Amazo as a new body for himself so it was easy to ascribe the same motivation to Ivo himself for how he planned to gain immortality. However this still leaves the reason why Ivo has such a strong fear of death up in the air. The comics version was always rather lackluster (in my opinion) so I wrote a new backstory for him. Using the characters history as suffering from horrific malformations I wrote an origin story that gave Ivo a crippling terminal illness to explain both why he has such a strong fear of death and why he is a mad scientist. This new backstory works well because it streamlines and retains the characters core while not truly inventing anything whole cloth.
On top of that I have five different categories with which I adapt characters. These categories are tonal adaptations, backstory additions, flaw addition, reworking characters who contradict the rules of the setting and transitory adaptations. Every character I adapt falls into at least on of these characters and I think knowing what I am altering and how it improves things is essential for adapting the DC universe well.
Transitory adaptations are the simplest and easiest way for me to adapt characters. Transitory adaptations is when I can simple lift the character from another adaptation of comics and just shift it from one format to a text only format. An example of this is Brainiac. Instead of attempting to mess around with the convoluted history of the character I simply adapted the existing simplification that the DCAU had already provided me. Transitory adaptations never draw from actual comics themselves since it would defeat the whole purpose of finding a way to cut down on over 70 years of content to draw from.
Flaw addition is another very simple way for me to adapt characters. Flaw addition is essentially where I take preexisting heroic characters and I highlight and zoom in on their flaws in order to color things from the perspective of a supervillain. The best example I can think of this (at the time of this writing) is Lois Lane. In most media Lois Lane breaks into places she isn't supposed to on a hunch and then publishes an article on what she discovered. In most stories this isn't a problem because Lois Lane is almost always right about there being something wrong and her being involved draws in Superman to fix things. By highlighting the flaws of Lois' approach to journalism I make her far more adversarial to Lex and by extension the whole thread by giving light to her issues instead of portraying her as a paragon which she usually is. This actually worked so effectively that people started to hate Lois despite everything she suspected Lex of doing was things he had done. Protagonist centered morality comes into play as well but I think its interesting that we have retained the core of the character (great journalist, highly investigative, very moral and goes with her gut to figure out the facts) yet the perception has totally shifted based off of how those traits are portrayed. It reframes the dynamic of good and bad from what people are used to in this universe without adding anything new at all to the character (in hindsight flaw addition is a misleading title perhaps flaw expansion?)
Tonal adaptions are for things that are too dark or too light for the universe as a whole. Generally these adaptations shift the way the character is portrayed to make sense for a different context. Characters like Beppo are made slightly more serious and given legitimate reason to show up on earth later and characters like the Joker are made lighter (comics!Joker kills babies commits genocides and repeatedly mutilates others. Needless to say I will not be making Joker go that dark even though I plan on retaining the creepy and the crazy).
Backstory additions is when I streamline the backstory to make things make more sense. Generally if I cannot make a character timeline of their backstory then I will simplify. I apply this type of adaptation to characters like Troia and occasionally characters sufficiently removed from earth who got butterflied in some way shape or form.
The final way I adapt characters is those who contradict the rules I have established for the setting. The best example I can think of this is Abracadabra. Abracadabra is a time travelling flash villain ho uses tech from the future to fake being magic. Abracadabra often contradicts the rules I have established for how time travel works in this quest in his attempts to kill the Flash in the past. As such when adapting the character I had to figure out how to get him to comply with the established time travel rules. The core of Abracadabra's character is that he is a time traveler from the future, he fakes having magic and he hates the Flash. The first adaptation I made is that Abracadabra is unaware of the true effects his actions have. Abracadabra has knowledge of the past but it is so far removed from what really happened that it might as well be ignored since it doesn't accurately reflect what will happen. Secondly Abracadabra's whole schtick becomes stealing things from the past. He isn't trying to make himself retroactively famous (since he knows that won't succeed) but he is instead attempting to steal valuable artifacts from the past to sell in the future where they are worth far more. Lastly rather than using a variety of tech Abracadabra relies primarily on using time travel to fake magic in order to cut down on his potential impact on that time period.
I hope this post helped people understand my approach to adapting characters. Feel free to discuss other characters you want to see adapted (including my thought processes) as well as whether or not there might be a better method for adapting things.
- Location
- Australia
Since Ivo's illness is terminal, is it possible he will die before the A.M.A.Z.O project is complete? Is that rolled for?
King crimson
Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
- Location
- Los Angeles
Yes and yes. As a set time approaches the check he has to pass grows higher and higher with complications like stress adding to it
A moment with Ivo
- Location
- California
A Moment with Ivo
Professor Ivo woke up in pain, as he did every morning. It wasn't a sharp, localized pain, but a throbbing pain that permeated every cell of his body- not surprising given his sickness. When he first felt this sickness, the pain had paralyzed him in bed. Now, though, it was a reminder of what he was fighting- each throb a tick in a countdown to the end of the life of the world's smartest man. That thought alone made him roll out of bed, into his laboratory.
Professor Ivo walked towards his workbench where he booted up his newest designs for AMAZO. While his start at LexCorp had been rough- the bald businessman had asked him to work on security of all things- these past few months made him more satisfied with his decision to allow Lex Luthor to benefit from hi brilliance. Not only had Luthor finally seen fit to fund the AMAZO project, but he even built a room in Professor Ivo's lab so that he could work on the project every waking moment. As a plus, Professor Ivo didn't need to see the walking ignorance that was humanity outside the lab and the one-person lab was 100% brilliant.
Alone, the Professor worked on his research. That is, until the door opened and the owner of LexCorp walked into his lab.
"Good Morning, Professor Ivo," Luthor said in his usual baritone.
"Luthor. Why are you bothering me?"
Luthor paused a moment, probably not used to be spoken to that way. It wasn't that Ivo disliked Luthor- he seemed to have half a brain and he was a lot better than his little blonde assistant or the red-headed toy he had hired. Its just that Professor Ivo had better things to do than to coddle a billionaire.
"I just came to see how things are going," Luthor said as he booted up another computer that was connected the lab's network. It was a solo lab, but that wasn't its initial design. The Professor showed his restraint by just grunting and trying to ignore the meddler. An hour of silent, productive research passed until Luthor spoke again.
"These designs are...revolutionary. The advancements in AI, production, microchips..."
Ivo looked up a moment from his computer.
"Everything I do is revolutionary," Professor Ivo said with every ounce of modesty he had.
Luthor looked at Ivo a moment and shrugged.
"Yes, well...I'll leave you to your project," the second-smartest person in the room said before leaving.
Ivo looked at the person exiting the lab. Maybe Luthor had 3/4 of a brain in that head- it had only taken an hour to realize the brilliance of Ivo's designs.
However, his musing was cut off by another throb of pain. A moment lost that should have been spent on his project.
Alone, Ivo worked again on AMAZO. Worked on his fight against his own worst enemy.
King crimson
Confusion Will Be My Epitaph
- Location
- Los Angeles
Short and sweet but provides insight into how Ivo thinks. I like it have 500 exp and the omake is canonized.