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TreeQuest: Magitech (Riot Quest)

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HeruKane said:
Hey can those Wraith become our friends? That would be cool. Like if they have no reason to be hostile then maybe we can turn them to our side.
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Keeping them from attacking would require...
...Between ensuring they don't remember that they should be hostile, and keeping them fed adequately on your Magic... I think roughly 4 successes each per turn.

Though you'd get an immediate project to see if you could Connect to them fully and convince them to work for you now. Which, if successful, would naturally reduce it to 2 successes each per turn, and that would get the benefit of... probably your Growth bonus.

So, short-term quite expensive, but long-term actually quite feasible. IF you want to invest the resources.

Dire Bats are considerably cheaper to contain and feed, FYI.
 
Robinton said:
So, short-term quite expensive, but long-term actually quite feasible. IF you want to invest the resources.
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Oh man this is tempting, so very tempting. That said I'm not sure if we are at a point where this would flow logically - I mean until you mentioned it I didn't think about it. But yeah, us expanding our 'friends' /bonded creatures/not sure term, to include wraiths and other magical creatures etc would be nifty.

But yeah, this is tempting. So very tempting.
 
Honestly, the Wraiths seem like too much trouble to tame for not enough benefit, to me. Like, spending 4 successes/turn on maintaining each instance of a being which, in common RPG terms, has 1 HP seems... a bit steep to me. They'd need some major non-combat utility for me to even consider it.

They'd be more interesting as a reference for us creating a pure-magic entity, in my eyes, and those, as mentioned by Robinton, are extremely expensive to maintain.
 
Sir Plusse said:
snip
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Well, if not in form of friends, than maybe like possible source of energy or as test subjects? Their nature sounds very unusual. I'm not sure what tools we have at our disposal, but studying the strangest representatives of the local fauna may give us ideas.
 
Do note that from what we've seen, this kind of thing might be a general problem with Monsters (especially those made by our Nemesis), in that they're basically hard-coded to be hostile, and would take constant effort to override the remote attack commands. Unless we get some way to break that conneciton, which would in turn require us to take the place of supporting their bits that operate in defiance of physics.

Since we have actually determined that Monsters in general receive energy and compulsions from some kind of external source.

Probably would be much easier to try to capture some of the Bats and use them to study Monster Hijacking before trying something complicated like a Wraith.
 
Yeah like I like the wraith thing as a player, but I can't see it as an act for this turn from the perspective of our tree/forest. It seems OOC and stuff since how would we know about it. But connecting to dire bats, sure, that is what we do - dire bats are living beings so we connect to them the way we connect to other things.

So what I think I'm going to do is ask that we have some sort of description or event in story that could make the whole thing about wraiths/creatures of magic make sense in character as a potential option. Maybe as a sub field of Beast Magic or something - Monster Magic maybe.

But yeah, the idea of this is interesting even though I don't think at this exact second we would focus on it.
 
Robinton said:
Based on the way you rolled for my original interpretation... I think the two Lesser Wraiths that were causing problems aren't going to get much done this turn. Too busy wondering what their names are and what they're supposed to be doing.

And that's ignoring the lot of points people gave Arthur Scrat...

...Though if you'd prefer to attack yourself, I will transfer your rolls over to the direct attack instead. I don't think the final result will matter.

(Rolls safety for Millers... lesser critical success.)
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The only key thing I'm concerned about is ensuring that the 'intervene for the Millers' necessity was covered.

If 'intervene for the Millers' was accomplished based on the original role achieved through your original intention, then I'm willing to be satisfied with the original outcome rather than mess with anything.
 
HeruKane said:
Yeah like I like the wraith thing as a player, but I can't see it as an act for this turn from the perspective of our tree/forest. It seems OOC and stuff since how would we know about it. But connecting to dire bats, sure, that is what we do - dire bats are living beings so we connect to them the way we connect to other things.

So what I think I'm going to do is ask that we have some sort of description or event in story that could make the whole thing about wraiths/creatures of magic make sense in character as a potential option. Maybe as a sub field of Beast Magic or something - Monster Magic maybe.

But yeah, the idea of this is interesting even though I don't think at this exact second we would focus on it.
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If any of us are invested in digging or underwater projects, they might see wraiths as a worthwhile opportunity.
 
If we study wraith we could have ghost trees charging at our enemies.
The sheer weirdness might confuse them to believe it is just illusion magic. And then BAM they get hit by a ghost branch.
Robinton said:
Some careful scanning showed a couple of weaker Monsters - a handful of Dire Wolves, which are only mildly concerning for your Creatures and are content to ignore you altogether - passing by. Further, extensive analysis of them… Well. There's some part of them generating or being given new energy, in a way that defies the known laws of Magic. But not the known laws of Ancient Technology. (Though admittedly the Dire Wolves' method must be quite utterly unlike Ancient Technology's method or your Sensing Trees would feel the same flicker of something from Monsters that they do Ancient Tech.) The resulting energy, it must be said, behaves quite a lot like Magic - and, indeed, it might well be Magic from some very weird distant source, perhaps. It is not, however, fully under the control of the Monsters and their Wills, as you can feel the Magic-or-whatever push the Dire Wolves to hunt, attack, and destroy, far more than their natural instincts would already cause.
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Also this could be interesting to look at after combat. Study the dire wuffs and compare them to our normal wuffs.
 
Sir Plusse said:
They'd be more interesting as a reference for us creating a pure-magic entity, in my eyes, and those, as mentioned by Robinton, are extremely expensive to maintain.
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These things are built to drain living things, and obtain a lot of energy from that. They aren't built to be efficient or low-cost. To paraphrase Ryuugi, "You can cross a lot of gaps if you're willing to fill the space between with corpses."

It's possible to build a pure-Magic entity that's designed to be very low-energy and highly-efficient. Some Wizards/etc intentionally build that sort of thing, for obvious reasons. "Runs on just 10 calories per day, and has a searchable index of every word it's ever scanned, plus keeps an eye out for anyone trying to stab you in the back! Unbeatable bargain!" Not simple to build - nor are they typically drifting about for anyone to just randomly recruit - but they're quite useful.

And, yes, most of these Monsters are built to be quite... hostile. In the Lesser Wraiths' case, "endless hunger for the energy of living things" is a chunk of their programming. Dire Bats are naturally occurring, but these in particular seem to have had some of their instincts broken in the process of making them guaranteed to attack Newton Village (sloppy work, TBH).
 
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Robinton said:
These things are built to drain living things, and obtain a lot of energy from that. They aren't built to be efficient or low-cost.
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Hey, still sounds usefull.
Drain attackers and charge the shields. Or maybe even develop shields that drain attackers and strengthen themselves.

Or If we get good at finetuning the drain amount:
Drain until KO for non-lethal takedowns of enemy. (to study, to save innocents brainwashed/magically manipulated/forced to attack us)
 
Robinton said:
It's possible to build a pure-Magic entity that's designed to be very low-energy and highly-efficient. Some Wizards/etc intentionally build that sort of thing, for obvious reasons. "Runs on just 10 calories per day, and has a searchable index of every word it's ever scanned, plus keeps an eye out for anyone trying to stab you in the back! Unbeatable bargain!" Not simple to build - nor are they typically drifting about for anyone to just randomly recruit - but they're quite useful.
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Good to know, though I still feel like it'd be a lot of work to get from these wraiths to something efficient enough to be worthwhile.

I feel like a lot of the "inefficiency" might be derived from them actually having combat ability, though, so that's probably one way to cut costs... I mean, I expect something like half the energy they drain goes back to fuel their draining spells.
 
Robinton said:
(sloppy work, TBH).
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This says a lot actually!

One of three things offhandly.

The first is, our opponent might be an amateur/inexperienced, meaning all of their work presently has flaws in it, though as they release more and more creations against us they'll become better and better.

That a potentially "inexperienced" player has access to portal deliveried bombs has further implications...

The second is, we're dealing with someone experienced, but throughput limited. They see how fast we're growing, don't like it, and want us to stop, or at least stop existing. They figured that only had so much time before we became a bit too much and made this assault on a rush job.

The third is, they have a Boss of some sort who is Not Happy, and has given them a specific time table to remove us by. This assault is them rushing to meet their deadline and is composed of several "Good enough" measures as a result.

Hm. Well, there's no reason it can't be multiple. Inexperienced with Limited Throughput and a Deadline, likely a very literal one.

I still say Inexperienced because otherwise they would have dropped more than one Bomb.

Right now, my vibes say that they're actually in that Cave that we can't Sense through, and that we should make a hard pivot into excavation there over the next few turns and set a regular exploration action there to try to figure out what's going on in there.
 
Hmm, I'd be leaning more towards it being rushed. We saw that the Vines were pretty well thought out and even had deliberate self-destructs installed to keep us from controlling them, suggesting that our Nemesis is pretty competent at monster-making.

But the Bats are just meant to be chaff to distract from the more dangerous monsters and attacks here; they were probably just grabbed and crudely reprogrammed en-masse since there needed to be a lot of them and they needed to be ready fast.
 
Razzocnor said:
But the Bats are just meant to be chaff to distract from the more dangerous monsters and attacks here; they were probably just grabbed and crudely reprogrammed en-masse since there needed to be a lot of them and they needed to be ready fast.
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The bats weren't chaff, they were assassins.

The enemy plan here was actually pretty thorough.

You've got Occumorts, which are huge heavy-hitters, and will absolutely murder any conventional resistance.
You've got Wraiths, which can just walk straight through physical barriers and are immune to non-magical attacks.
You've got Hellhounds, which can burn through magical defenses, aren't half bad in a fight, and are fast to chase down anyone who tries to run.
And you've got the Dire Bats, who are explicitly trying to ambush Old Man Materson and any other wizard types with poison.


Honestly, it's the sort of plan that SHOULD have worked quite well. It's not subtle, but it IS overwhelming. It ran into problems because the Forest and Newton Village had prior warning, and because the forest shot the eyes out of the snakes on Round Zero purely on spec.
 
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I wouldn't be surprised if the poison bats are noticeably better done than the bulk of the bat swarm; remember, only four of the bats were poisoned, the rest have mostly been distractions and swarmers.
 
Walliseatscheese said:
Right now, my vibes say that they're actually in that Cave that we can't Sense through, and that we should make a hard pivot into excavation there over the next few turns and set a regular exploration action there to try to figure out what's going on in there.
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Honestly I'm pretty divided on whether we should go to the Cave soon or wait until we have Light/Darkness Negacion because in tnat case they probably are a vampire.
 
So, we capture some Dire Bats, brainwash befriend them, and have them explore the cave for us.

Bats like caves. It's a thing. And since they're ex-enemies, we don't have to feel too bad if they run into something scary.

Maybe there's a whole enslaved Dire Bat colony down there we can liberate.
 
@Robinton could the Wraiths cost 4/2 Resources per turn instead? the cost would be the same but it's less annoying than always spending actions on them and probably can be justified with "they feed on our lifeforce".
EDIT: at least maybe once we are Connected to them.
 
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Space Jawa said:
Dare I say it, but the idea of 'befriending' anything but then treating that new "friend" as a 'disposable asset' strikes me as kind of...I don't know...evil.
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Well, yes, it's definitely on the shady side.

Morality is funny sometimes. You kill a bat right now, it's fine. Let that same bat live several more weeks, then send it into peril, you're evil.
 
Personally, my goals are as follows:

1. Keep the Forest Alive
2. Keep the Village Alive
3. Keep our Animals Alive

And that's it.
 
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