Whispers from the Deep - Biplanes & Bisexuality

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Character Sheets
  • Informational


    • Character Sheet
    Isabelle Morgenthau
    A Fisher

    Isa (right) and her boyfriend Arren (left)

    Hard Keen Calm Daring Wild
    +4 -2 +4 +1 -1
    Moves
    Creepy: When a comrade sees you perform a ritual, overhears your prayers, or sees signs of your alienness, they lose Trust in you. Once they learn one of your Moves, they are no longer affected, but they gain Creepy as well.
    Deep Ones: You can call on your patrons to Help you on a roll. On a 1, you Break after this mission.
    Blessing: When you dab fresh blood on a piece of working equipment, roll +Calm. On a 16+, take both. On an 11-15, choose 1.
    • Take +1 Ongoing with this item this Routine. (+1 Handling for a plane)
    • The item cannot break or be lost this Routine. (+1 Armour on 1 Section of the Plane.)
    On a miss, you need a bigger sacrifice. Don't disappoint.
    Ideomotor Response: Your plane effectively has a programmable autopilot. It does not have to be switched on and off; it "knows" when you are behind the controls.
    Soul-Bound: When you paint a rune in blood on an aircraft, you are linked. While in flight, you can take incoming Structure damage as Stress, 1-1. You can take a hit that would strike a Component as Injury, or give incoming Injury to your Engine.
    Bond: (Witch move learned from Wulf) When you hold an object of significance and make an emotional connection to it, take 1 Stress. The object becomes a magical Focus, and you learn it's Nature (Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Iron, or Blood).
    Contemplation: When you draw a ritual circle and stay within it, roll +Calm. On a 16+, you come out of it about an hour later refreshed; strike 3 Stress or 2 Injury. On an 11-15, it takes the whole night, and you're unreachable in that time.

    Mastery
    The Bushwack
    Ambush Predator: When you strike an enemy who is unaware of your presence, roll with Advantage.
    Forced Evade: When you fire to scare an opponent off, spend 1 ammo and roll +Hard. On a hit, instead of dealing damage, choose one: Target dives 1, target climbs 1, target loses speed in a forced turn. On a 16+, roll attack dice on them anyway.
    Momentum: When you dive onto a target, add +1 AP.
    Scissors Snip: When you disengage, give an ally +3 towards dealing with your target.

    Familiar Vices
    - Drinking
    - Prayer
    - Dancing

    Vice Progress
    - Breaking Stuff: ☑☐☐
    - Cannabis: ☑☐☐

    Intimacy Move
    When you are intimate with another, choose one of you to get a hold. They can spend that hold to give the other a command: if followed, then forward to their next +Stat move, they will always score at least a partial hit, regardless of what the dice say.

    If you use this move in the air, there are two holds, and they can be distributed however you agree.

    The Company
    People
    • Isabelle (Fisher): The PC. She's out to find her way in the world. 1 thaler per Routine.
    • Arren (NPC- Confidant/Observer): Your cute fish boyfriend. Artist and recently trained observer. 1 thaler per Routine.
    • Wulf (Witch): Former bandit leader. Actually half wolf. Hot as hell. Ex-Goth. 1 thaler per Routine.
      • Hard +3, Keen +3, Calm -2, Daring +0, Wild +3 (Avenger)
    • Minna Hammerl (Soldier): Inexperienced but highly trained soldier and passionate duelist. Speaks all formal-like. The most beautiful woman in the world. 1 thaler per Routine.
      • Hard +4, Keen +1, Calm +2, Daring -2 (Professional)
    • Heinrich Engel (Student): Political science student working on his thesis-slash-manifesto.
    • Anny Meldgaard (NPC - Mechanic): A young half-Fischer, half-Himmilvolk woman from Piav, trained by the mechanics there. Looking for adventure and her origins. Blushes red?
    Aircraft
    • Isa & Arren's Plane: A Teicher Möwen seaplane. Steel frame, liquid-cooled engine. Deeply possessed. 1 thaler per Routine.
    • Fang Howl: Wulf's helicopter. An experimental pre-war model. Liquid-cooled radial. Three wolf moon. 1 thaler per Routine.
    • Pup: Wulf's Kreuzer Skorpion prototype retrieved from a sealed hanger. Gets a lot out of an underpowered engine.
    • Minna's Kobra: An inline-engine powered, wood framed fighter. All around an excellent machine. 1 thaler per Routine.
    • Heinrich's Reconstruction: A canard plane with a 30mm cannon in the nose. Awkward and unstable but hits like a train. 1 thaller per Routine.
    ​
    Stress XP
    3 7
    ​
    Cash Expenses
    41 10.5
     
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  • Informational
    • nixter said:
    How much would it be to upgrade our weapons to 2 balloon guns or a light cannon?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Each Balloon Gun would cost 4, +1 to sync them with the propeller. A synced light cannon would cost 10. They expensive!

    You could recoup some of those costs by selling the old guns, though.
     
    Last edited:
    [X] Train Arren as an observer.
    [X] See about reducing drag on the plane. Get newer, less ragged parts in.

    open_sketchbook said:
    Each Balloon Gun would cost 4, +1 to sync them with the propeller. A synced light cannon would cost 10. They expensive!
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Thanks. Well I guess we will wait on upgrading our weapons until after we finish this mission. I think the balloon guns may offer us a nice balance between firepower, weight, and cost.
     
    Last edited:
    The machine guns will still be better against unarmoured targets thanks to their bonus hits, though if we're going to be flying solo for a while, a setup that can handle a variety of opponents is probably desirable.

    [X] Get Arren some training with that rifle of his.
     
    Any kind of training will cost 2 thaler. Arren can be trained as...

    - A gunner.
    - An observer (giving a bonus to eyeball).
    - A co-pilot.
    - A fixer (giving you bonuses to some job stuff)
    - An Attendant (he'll remove another point of Stress)
    - A Guard (he'll be good at fighting on the ground)
    - A Mechanic

    He can be trained in additional fields for +2 thaler each (ie: 2 for the first job, 4 for the next, 6 for the one after that...). You could, for example, train him to be a Guard to defend you on the ground as well as an observer to keep an eye out.

    Using his observer rifle will fall under observer duties if he's using them against aircraft, and Guard on the ground. They are very different skills!
     
    Last edited:
    [X] Train Arren as an observer.
    [X] See about reducing drag on the plane. Get newer, less ragged parts in.

    The most important part of early dogfighting was spotting the enemy and getting the first shot in. Pilots like the Red Baron weren't great stunt pilots, but they were good shots and aware of their surroundings. Plus, having Arren in the back to shoot at bandits can't hurt.

    We should probably make sure he understands the clock system, though. Without a simple system, it'd probably take him minutes to call out a sighting.
     
    [X] Train Arren as an observer.
    [X] See about reducing drag on the plane. Get newer, less ragged parts in.
     
    [X] Train Arren as an observer.
    [X] See about reducing drag on the plane. Get newer, less ragged parts in.
     
    [X] Train Arren as an observer.
    [X] Reduce Drag

    Alright, this is probably a great time to walk y'all through how Drag works and how I'm reworking it.

    Right now, Drag is huge, because it directly saps from engine power. This means that adding any amount of Drag to something is kind of huge and has a significant impact.

    One thing I've found is that trade-offs are much more satisfying if you have some "wiggle room" provided by break-points. By giving Mass break points every 5 units through the Mass Penalty system, people much more actively create and stick to target masses (of multiples of 5, minus 1.) That works really well, so I'm going to mirror it over the drag.

    Now, this is really kind of an experiment here so you'll need to bear with me. Currently, your plane has 7 and 14 power. I want to try to broadly match that as a target, so let's start converting.

    Firstly, your airframe gives you 1 Drag right now, so I'll make the tractor airframe give 5 drag. That's easy enough.

    Your radiator was given the -Drag upgrade, but it was a little too much anyway. So I'll make the radiator provide 4 drag, and have your upgrade subtract 2. So you're at 7 drag.

    Most of the drag will come from your wings. Right now biplane wings are 2+2xA drag, so where most of your drag is coming from. The scheme I generally want is that more wings should work better for lighter craft and scale more and more poorly, but I kinda got it backwards. I also want to try making the increments smaller. Let's try 2 base + 3 per Area, and make it provide 4 base lift + 1 per Area. To get the 10 lift you had before, you'll have a 6 Area wing and 20 drag, which equals 4 total. That's the same as before!

    Finally, your tail and second seat each gave 1 drag before. We'll knock the drag off the second seat, because it's in-line with the hull, and put 2 drag on the tail (because we don't want to make it too unattractive in the new system) giving us a total of 29 drag! One more for the new little prop to power your intercom gives us... 30 divided by 5 = 6 Drag Penalty!

    Hey, you came out of this with a bit more power! I'm going to remove the streamlining you got by default, and here's how it's going to work now. Each point of Streamlining reduces 2 Drag for 1 Mass, and costs +1 thaler for each additional level (1, 2, 3, 4, etc). The added mass represents the material being added to shape the air around your plane, while the money represents the expertise to streamline properly.

    You've got 7 thalers to spend after hiring a guy and training Arren, so you could potentially remove 6 drag from your aircraft. Any amount of streamlining right now we'll reduce your drag penalty by 1, but 3 levels of streamlining will reduce it by 2. 2 levels won't have a mechanical change but will give you more wiggle-room if you attach more crap!

    - [ ] 1 level of Streamlining (1 thaler)
    - [ ] 2 levels of Streamlining (3 thaler)
    - [ ] 3 levels of Streamlining (6 thaler)​
     
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    What's our current mass penalty, tho?
     
    Oh shit, that is important. Your plane is 43 mass right now.

    I've just boosted the drag to mass ratio a bit after doing some more test planes, so its -2 drag for 1 mass now. You can get 1 level of streamlining without penalty.
     
    [X] 1 level of Streamlining (1 thaler)

    Duh.
     
    [X] 1 level of Streamlining (1 thaler)
    Seems like the obvious choice for me; don't really want to spend money on something that'd just be a trade-off.
     
    2-13: Letter from Irma
  • Threadmarks
    • [X] 1 level of Streamlining (1 thaler)

    The courtyard market was already open, so you and Arren quickly split up to handle your tasks for the day. Arren was meeting with a merc he met last night for some training with his new rifle and the basics of being a flight observer, while you were hunting down somebody who could clean up your plane a little and do some streamlining. That didn't take you long to find; one of the first places you saw was the "Areodynamic Engineering Guild" and within moments of stepping through the tent flap you had a pair of mechanics following you out to the lake, tools in hand.

    Somebody had pulled your plane partially ashore to work on overnight. On the left-hand side there was the small windmill, nestled in among the crossed spars, while resting on a hook on both dashboards were the headphones, wired up through the bottom of your seat. You quickly worked out you were supposed to run the wire up the back of your jacket to prevent getting tangled, and were pleased to see the wire would pull out with minimum effort in case you needed to leave the cockpit in a hurry.

    As you inspected your guns, which had shiny new bolts and screws, you noticed the right-side ammo bin hatch hanging open. Peering inside, there was a note taped to the top of the engine compartment. The handwriting was genuinely terrible, but the message was sweet.

    Hi Isabelle!

    I took the liberty of repacing youre ammo belts while I was here, but youll have to pay me if you want any more. I didn't no what tracer you wanted so I picked purple because it doesn't sell very well. I hope you like it. Sorry I had to I wanted to throw your old ammo into the lake!

    Irma

    PS: Kiss Say hi to Arren for me!
    ​
    Chuckling, you stashed the note on Arren's seat, next to the torn wax paper his rifle had come in, and checked inside. Sure enough, the old tin-cased surplus was replaced with shiny new brass casings, crude rounded bullets with sharp new ones, ratty grey canvas belt replaced with a sharp white ones. You closed the hatch and beckoned the engineers over.

    "Yep. I can see where you'd be getting that wind resistance." One of them said, brushing his moustache pensively. "We'll tighten up some of those plates for you, but the best thing you can do is get a nosecone on there. Take us, what, an hour?"

    Sure enough, it took almost an hour exactly. One of them took some measurements and headed back inside while the other walked around the plane, smoothing out and tightening parts, replacing the hinges on the ailerons with new ones that were flush with the canvas. His partner came back with a little metal cone, complete with holes for the propeller blades, and the two of them afixed it over the nose of the craft.

    While they were working, you watched Arren's training in the distance. He was standing atop a broken fountain in the yard, arms out at odd angles, while his instructor walked a circuit around him. You didn't really know what purpose that training served, but hopefully it was useful.

    --

    You turned in early that night. Arren arrived shortly after you, sporting a new belt with cartridge pouches and a pair of writing pads on each thigh. The belt had a full harness under it with a line, so he could tie himself into the plane and remain safe, even if he was standing during a sharp turn. He spent some time babbling excitedly about his training; apparently the exercise had been about learning to call out directions by the hands of a clock, and was followed by lessons in estimating distance and shooting at moving targets. It sounds like he learned quite a bit.

    The two of you settled in to your tiny bed, facing the dusty window, his arms around you and his breath tickling the back of your neck. You let sleep pull you under.

    - [ ] Choose your Advancement​
    - [ ] Choose from the Personal Moves​
    or​
    - [ ] Choose from the Bushwack Moves​
     
  • Threadmarks
    • I'm leaning more towards Ambush Predator than Forced Evade. Hopefully, almost all our battles will start with us attacking out of the sun or clouds. I'd rather kill enemies quick at the start of the battle, and rely on our wingmen/speed to keep them defensive. I'm open to debate, though.

    [X] Ambush Predator
     
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