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Captain Bravo
Feb 16, 2011

An Emergency Shitpost
has been deployed...

...but experts warn it is
just a drop in the ocean.

DivineCoffeeBinge posted:

Sadly, we are out of Torpedo Spheres. That is, we have two of them, in the Countess' fleet - but they have been heavily reconfigured, the torpedo launchers torn out and replaced with anti-starfighter weaponry; they're now point-defense platforms.

I thought the real meat of a Torpedo Sphere was the 100+ Turbolasers the drat thing had on it? Can't you just drop one dead ahead of an ISD and watch the lasers chew it apart?

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DivineCoffeeBinge
Mar 3, 2011

Spider-Man's Amazing Construction Company

RPZip posted:

I don't think so? You should talk about it.

Gee, twist my arm. ;)

Okay, so way way way back in the day, early in the game when we were all somewhere in the neighborhood of 8th level, the group was still a bunch of "undercover operatives." On paper we actually supposedly worked for Imperial Intelligence, officially (or, depending on which IDs we were using, the ISB or Imperial Naval Intelligence or or or...). We weren't even in charge of the local Rebel forces, and while we operated out of a hidden asteroid base the main Rebel ships in the area (who were largely doing commerce raiding) didn't answer to us; we could ask them to do stuff but they could say no.

So one day the Alliance says "There's a storage depot that the Empire's been using. Blow it up so they can't use all that stuff."

If you've been following my descriptions of this campaign at all you should probably have already guessed that we said "Or, you know, we could steal that stuff, and then blow up the depot so they only think it was all destroyed."

What was in said depot? Proton torpedoes. Enough proton torpedoes to supply multiple Star Destroyers and their attendant fleets. "More torpedoes than you will ever need," our GM said, clearly not anticipating our future activities. We loaded up something like a dozen large cargo-haulers with nothing but racks of torpedoes and burned the rest of the depot and yay, go team us.

We sent about half of the torpedoes to the Rebel Alliance and then wondered what we could do with the others.

Now, kicking around the asteroid base are large stores of unused and surplus equipment. We had, for example, a large quantity of damaged and/or half-assembled Z-95 Headhunters - late-model upgraded ones that had (slow) hyperdrives. We also had approximately one metric fuckton of protocol droids that someone thought might come in handy somehow.

So, I hit on an idea. What makes up a large portion of a starfighter's mass? All that plating and poo poo you need to keep the atmosphere in, not to mention life support and lights and console readouts and poo poo. What if we could do away with all of that and produce, essentially, an ultra-cheap stripped-down vessel? Well, you can't do that if you have a human pilot, but you could do it if you had a droid brain running the whole thing - and a protocol droid brain has enough processing power to manage it.

The resulting ship was essentially built out of the equivalent of PVC pipe - the ship's skeleton is all that's needed, and it can be made super-cheap. Reprogram the droid brains with piloting skills and plug 'em in, and you can do away with something like fifty percent of the ship's mass.

We built a few hundred of these (that number later increased, but still) and then bolted as many single-use "pepperbox" style torpedo launchers as we could conceivably fit onto the things. So each of these rickety bargain-basement almost-ships could launch a dozen torpedoes, all at once. That's all they could do, mind, but that's really all we needed. Well, I suppose in a time of great emergency they could be told to ram. They're built cheap, after all.

It was the GM who christened them; once he saw what I wanted to do his eyes got a little wide and he said "you want to be like late WWII-era Japan and build the Floating Chrysanthemum Fleet." And I said that yes, yes I do.

The Floating Chrysanthemum Fleet, in practice, is kinda horrific. They work a lot like Torpedo Spheres, which are designed to crack planetary shields, only they're less precise because they use more torpedoes. When using them to attack space stations, they don't hit the space station - they hit the volume of space which the station happens to occupy.

It's woefully inefficient, but brutally loving effective - just swamp a volume of space with massive explosions.

'Course, this is why we're always short on torpedoes these days.

Mikael Kreoss
Feb 13, 2011

by Fistgrrl
So I've been playing in an Age of Reason (IE: Black Powder) FantasyCraft game. Our party is working as freelance adventurers in Egypt, accepting contracts from a Pseudo-Governmental Adventurer's Guild. Our first mission was a simple political escort, and on the second mission we were sent to spy on some dwarven pirates and wound up boarding their ship and killing/capturing them all and sailing it back to sell for absurd amounts of cash. We hit second level after the pirate incident, and accepted a contract to deal with a "Giant Rat."

So we ride out in the general direction it was last seen, riding down the Nile riverbanks and observing the general devastation and crops destroyed to feed what is apparently a bigger problem than we thought. Then we find the footprints.

The newest member of our party takes measurements of one and determines that such a rat would have to be two hundred and fifty to three hundred feet long. We also notice a trapdoor under a nearby boulder and rescue the surviving members of a local farming family who witnessed the attack. We heal them up as best we can, and chase after the monster whose name we find out translates to "Rat of Annihilation." When we finally catch up, we watch it wipe out a small village's defenders as we close in on it. Not seeing any way to really hurt it with the small guns my character carries, he leaps from his war raptor steed and begins to climb the rat's fur while the rest of the party does what they can from the ground. He's followed shortly by our orc fencer, who falls partway up.

It takes five rounds of solid climbing (it's SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS-huge.) and shooting at various baby giant rats that make their homes in its fur, but eventually I make it to the top. The party's Giant healer blasts it with a small cannon, and empties her entire brace of pistols into its face when it closes to try and bite at us. The Ogre melee murderbeast manages to do hurt it, and brings all the attention to himself to keep the rat pups off of the climbers. Our engineer prepares a poison to paralyze it, and takes whatever shots he can with his rifle.

Eventually, my character makes it to the top of the God-rat, taking a shot with his musket that barely misses (hit Vit instead of Wounds), then closes and shoots it point blank in the forehead with a boarding pistol. Critical hit. I put all my action dice into the damage roll, and between good dice and exploding action dice I deal 27 wounds. This is enough to effectively end the fight, though the rat flings him to the ground and flails around in its death throes. He takes one wound, the only actual physical damage he suffers the entire fight.

The ogre cuts it open, and to be sure severs everything he can find in its neck. We cut it apart to figure out what made it into the Rat of Annihilation, picking up a few plot hooks, some items and cash from people who were digested by it, and some adorable baby abominations to raise as pets :3:

TL;DR: We go all Shadow of the Colossus on a giant rat at second level, and have no idea how the hell we're going to top that going forward. Our DM is the best.

Mikael Kreoss fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Jun 4, 2012

DivineCoffeeBinge
Mar 3, 2011

Spider-Man's Amazing Construction Company

Captain Bravo posted:

I thought the real meat of a Torpedo Sphere was the 100+ Turbolasers the drat thing had on it? Can't you just drop one dead ahead of an ISD and watch the lasers chew it apart?

The real meat of a Torpedo Sphere is the 500 torpedo launchers, really; thing is, they're built to serve as siege platforms. Great for loving with a planet - not so great for loving with things that are smaller than planets. They have zero effective point defense, which means squads of fighters - even lovely fighters like vanilla TIE fighters - will tear them to bits, and their bays aren't configured to hold fighter screens of their own. In addition they can only point 50 torpedo tubes (and, one imagines, a comparable fraction of turbolaser batteries) at a ship-sized target at once. The only way an ISD gets severely chewed up by a Torpedo Sphere is if the ISD captain is none too bright - they'll get hurt, yeah, but not effortlessly swatted out of space.

I mean, don't get me wrong, a Torpedo Sphere will gently caress up most any ship's day, but it requires vast amounts of refitting to serve as a really effective anti-ship platform, because it's just not built to serve that role - and if you can manage to refit one that much, you can also probably manage to build better anti-ship platforms with the same resources.

What the Countess did with hers, stripping out the torpedoes entirely and slapping on more turbolasers and laser cannons and poo poo, makes it effectively a faster-moving and better-armed Golan space station; they're designed as defensive strongpoints rather than offensive weapons, which is a more efficient refit of the design.

Captain Bravo
Feb 16, 2011

An Emergency Shitpost
has been deployed...

...but experts warn it is
just a drop in the ocean.

DivineCoffeeBinge posted:

In addition they can only point 50 torpedo tubes (and, one imagines, a comparable fraction of turbolaser batteries) at a ship-sized target at once.

Ahh, I didn't know this. The way I'd always heard them described, they were designed to focus everything on a single point, torpedoes and lasers, and punch a hole in planetary shields. I didn't realize they could only bring like 10% of their weaponry to bear on a single target at a time. I'd always envisioned them like miniature Death Stars.

Karandras
Apr 27, 2006

DivineCoffeeBinge posted:

The only way an ISD gets severely chewed up by a Torpedo Sphere is if the ISD captain is none too bright - they'll get hurt, yeah, but not effortlessly swatted out of space.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Tralus_%28Galactic_Civil_War%29

There's some evidence that Torpedo Spheres make amazing mobile Golans with incredible firepower but when you're playing Star Wars you basically have to pick and choose the canon that you think makes most sense (SW has a lot of scale inconsistency issues, for example) and roll with it, so I understand if Your Star Wars doesn't work that way.

DivineCoffeeBinge
Mar 3, 2011

Spider-Man's Amazing Construction Company

Captain Bravo posted:

Ahh, I didn't know this. The way I'd always heard them described, they were designed to focus everything on a single point, torpedoes and lasers, and punch a hole in planetary shields. I didn't realize they could only bring like 10% of their weaponry to bear on a single target at a time. I'd always envisioned them like miniature Death Stars.

Well, they are - they can drop all their torpedoes on a weak point in a planetary shield, no problem. But since all the torpedo tubes are pointed in different directions and poo poo, they're designed to have those torpedoes hit in a precisely-timed sequence that takes advantage of multiple trajectories and all that stuff. For instance, if half of your torpedoes will take three seconds to hit the target and the other half will take 3.5 seconds, you set up a computer to stagger the fire so that the tubes don't all fire at once but the torpedoes all arrive at once.

An ISD, on the other hand, is A) smaller than a planet, and B) moves. Not quickly, no, but quickly enough that the synchronized deluge of fire that a Torpedo Sphere is designed to throw can't be assured of hitting it.

EDIT:

Karandras posted:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Tralus_%28Galactic_Civil_War%29

There's some evidence that Torpedo Spheres make amazing mobile Golans with incredible firepower but when you're playing Star Wars you basically have to pick and choose the canon that you think makes most sense (SW has a lot of scale inconsistency issues, for example) and roll with it, so I understand if Your Star Wars doesn't work that way.

Yeah, I honestly don't know, to be quite honest with you - I'm not even remotely close to an expert on the canon, and mostly I regurgitate what I've been told with the occasional educated guess on my part (like the entire section above). Wookiepedia tells me "Only 50 torpedo tubes could be recalibrated at a time to acquire starship-sized targets" and I run with it. ;)

DivineCoffeeBinge fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Jun 4, 2012

Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

Mikael Kreoss posted:

TL;DR: We go all Shadow of the Colossus on a giant rat at second level, and have no idea how the hell we're going to top that going forward. Our DM is the best.

This got lost in amongst all the torpedo talk, but this is fantastic, do keep everyone updated!

And DCB, your story is fantastic, it barley needs to be mentioned anymore.

Flavivirus
Dec 14, 2011

The next stage of evolution.

Mikael Kreoss posted:

TL;DR: We go all Shadow of the Colossus on a giant rat at second level, and have no idea how the hell we're going to top that going forward. Our DM is the best.

Man that's awesome :D

Big boss encounters like that can be really cool ways to mix things up. I'll have to consider throwing some at my players soon.

GaryLeeLoveBuckets
May 8, 2009

DivineCoffeeBinge posted:

All kinds of awesome Star Wars stuff.

I love reading your stories, they're really epic and I'm glad the DM knows so much about the universe.

In canon, right now IG-88 has inserted it's consciousness into the Death Star II's core and is biding it's time to take control of it. Being super hacker leader of the droids, you may be able to use this to your advantage.

Hankosha
Apr 1, 2008

SISTAS ARE DOIN' IT FOR THEMSELVES

DivineCoffeeBinge posted:

The Floating Chrysanthemum Fleet, in practice, is kinda horrific. They work a lot like Torpedo Spheres, which are designed to crack planetary shields, only they're less precise because they use more torpedoes. When using them to attack space stations, they don't hit the space station - they hit the volume of space which the station happens to occupy.

It's woefully inefficient, but brutally loving effective - just swamp a volume of space with massive explosions.

'Course, this is why we're always short on torpedoes these days.

You could've just slave linked them all to one main ship, equipped that ship with a targeting computer, and used the torpedoes a lot more efficiently, though.*

*I read 90% of the Star Wars EU books

mmj
Dec 22, 2006

I've always been a bit confrontational

DivineCoffeeBinge posted:

Gee, twist my arm. ;)
Now, kicking around the asteroid base are large stores of unused and surplus equipment. We had, for example, a large quantity of damaged and/or half-assembled Z-95 Headhunters - late-model upgraded ones that had (slow) hyperdrives. We also had approximately one metric fuckton of protocol droids that someone thought might come in handy somehow.

Combined with the droid brains, can't you make these into far more accurate hyperdrive asteroids? Or would the blatant sacrifice of droids be too unacceptable for Miles?

GaryLeeLoveBuckets
May 8, 2009

Hankosha posted:

You could've just slave linked them all to one main ship, equipped that ship with a targeting computer, and used the torpedoes a lot more efficiently, though.*

*I read 90% of the Star Wars EU books

You could also arm them with Intruder Missiles and use them to penetrate the shields and eventually overload the shield generators.

Mikael Kreoss
Feb 13, 2011

by Fistgrrl

Flavivirus posted:

Man that's awesome :D

Big boss encounters like that can be really cool ways to mix things up. I'll have to consider throwing some at my players soon.

Josef bugman posted:

This got lost in amongst all the torpedo talk, but this is fantastic, do keep everyone updated!

And DCB, your story is fantastic, it barley needs to be mentioned anymore.

Thanks! The next contract we take will likely be some manner of hunting down the guy who made the Rat-God, or dealing with a growing threat from an outlaw warlord. Both are probably going to be hilarious.

Clanpot Shake
Aug 10, 2006
shake shake!

DCB you have to be wondering, in the back of your mind, if you'll ever be able to play SW again after this. Will any campaign ever be as epic?

DivineCoffeeBinge
Mar 3, 2011

Spider-Man's Amazing Construction Company

Clanpot Shake posted:

DCB you have to be wondering, in the back of your mind, if you'll ever be able to play SW again after this. Will any campaign ever be as epic?

Honestly? Not that worried.

I like Star Wars, but I'm by no means a fanatic. I wanted to get in on the game because it's a game my friends were playing, and that our GM wanted to run. He's one of those guys where if he wants to run it, I want to play it.

That said, the consensus does seem to be that once the game ends I'm probably going to end up running the next one and that's where the pressure is. Heh.

SirPhoebos
Dec 10, 2007

WELL THAT JUST HAPPENED!

Wild guess as to what's up with the Second Death Star:

It's being controlled by IG-88! :haw:

(yes, that is canon)

BrainParasite
Jan 24, 2003


SirPhoebos posted:

Wild guess as to what's up with the Second Death Star:

It's being controlled by IG-88! :haw:

(yes, that is canon)

Droid Emancipation Proclamation?

SirPhoebos
Dec 10, 2007

WELL THAT JUST HAPPENED!

BrainParasite posted:

Droid Emancipation Proclamation?

No, since it's IG-88, it'd be more like a "gently caress This Gay Galaxy" Proclamation.

Elector_Nerdlingen
Sep 27, 2004



Right, so this isn't epic or starwars, but I hope it will be funny.

We had to recover some kind of macguffin to defeat the baddie. I can't even remember what it was, might have been a magic sword.

We tracked it to an elf village, and they said they'd had it for centuries, but 50 years ago, the guy who was the custodian of it went off to slay a green dragon and never returned.

So we went off in the same direction, and eventually found the dragon. We talked to it. It tried to bribe us to go away and said it was old and weak and didn't want to fight.

The whole time, Flynn (my ranger) is yelling at the party that dragons are sneaky bastards and not to trust it, just kill it! Kill it now! (I had, in character, made some checks and realised that this dragon wasn't very old, and also that dragons don't exactly weaken with age).

They disagree. They don't want to fight an old weak dragon.

I respond with "dragons just get stronger and stronger as they get older!"

They disagree. They want to bargain with it. The dragon offers to trade the macguffin for the Sir Alistair's (fighter) plate mail. I tell him not to do it, it will attack the second he's unarmored. He disagrees.

It attacks the second he's unarmored. The DM says "I can't believe the dragon talked you out of your armor, dumbass".

We drove it off eventually, resurrected the fighter, and wound up beating the bad guy. The dragon was yelling about how it'd be back as it flew away. I'm sure it will be back soon enough. I am going to fight it without armor, just to make it better when we win.

I'm intending to give Sir Alistair poo poo about this forever (Sir Alistair and Flynn have a semi-friendly rivalry going on about who's the most badass martial guy). I made him a banner with a pantsless warrior running from a dragon, and I'm going to paint his shield with the same picture while he sleeps.

DivineCoffeeBinge
Mar 3, 2011

Spider-Man's Amazing Construction Company
Never EVER let him forget it.

Because it's funny.

HiKaizer
Feb 2, 2012

Yes!
I finally understand everything there is to know about axes!
So continuing our adventures in the land of Mages with too much power, or rather beginning, our group suffered the usual contrivances of getting a party with absolutely no shared backstory together. The basic background to the game was that the Church(es) and the Mage Council often played power games against each other and at the moment the churches weren't doing so well. The city had a local pantheon that was based around each of the schools of magic. We only really saw the Necromancy deity's presence, which was unsurprisingly the Two Faced Goddess of Life and Death (who giveth just as she taketh). The Cleric belonged to the church of the War God who held the portfolio of Evocation, but as I previously mentioned the Cleric basically did nothing with this and he stopped coming after two sessions so we never learned more. The other notable church in the city was for the God of Conjuration, who had an inquisition against demons. This was relevant for the Warlock but we never actually had much dealing or exposition regarding them outside of one memorable evening.

So we were to meet together in the church of the Necromancy Goddess. In my case this was easy, I got tossed out once Dr. Frankenmage decided his procedure was a 'success' and lay bleeding to death somewhere in the city. I got picked up and nursed back to health, and as such had a debt to repay. The rest of the party was there either due mostly to boredom, or for some kind of obscure powerplay. I didn't really pay much attention, and almost every other plot was derailed due to the combined antics of myself and the automaton. Regardless we were informed of our mission:
:catholic:: You need to go down into our crypt and put a stop to whomever is raising the dead.
And so we did. There was some question of why we had to do it and the church that specialised in Necromancy couldn't, but the answer was something to do with vague politics and also go do your party cohesion quest obedient peons. We discovered a number of regular skeletons and one that had been imbued with horrible evil green eldritch (note not capitalised!) runes that could cast Magic Missile. But the Warlock and myself made short work of most of these encounters, the Wizard only having a single Magic Missile prepared, along with some random utility.

We also found some tombs in there, which was plot exposition for the Warlock and the Wizard. The Warlock came back with a new talisman around his neck, having had a good long chat with his 'grandad' and the Wizard just got told not to mess up. Unfortunately, she was in a party with the Warlock, the Automaton and myself and thus she was doomed. We got to the end of the crypt after fighting a nasty ghoul and saw that there was a hooded and robed figure doing something very evil looking with an hourglass. He was shooting arcs of magic the same colour and consistency as that skeleton that had magic had runes carved into it, so my Monk's immediate reaction was to punch the hourglass. The GM made me roll for it and I got a 20, and rolled fairly well on damage. As a result the hourglass exploded into shards and the robed figure stumbled back, revealing a face half dead and half alive. Clearly this meant that the guy was also undead and so the Automaton, Warlock and myself went to town on the young punk's face while the Wizard and Cleric stood on shocked and yelled at us to stop. After a catchy one liner, the Warlock dealt the killing blow. Then the Automaton searched around and found a secret passage. Inside was an altar to the goddess, and being the impulsive creature he was he fiddled around in his sack of stuff and pulled out a lizard. The skink was dead, until the Automaton gave it as an offering and the Goddess returned it to life, with a white marking of a third eye on its head.

Anyway we left the crypt and went up to the priestess to tell her we'd finished the task. Then then king Archmagister rocks up with the Principal of the Academy of Magic (effectively the 2IC of the city) and we found out the identity of the kid we killed! Well, the Automaton and my Monk found out, everyone else knew. Teenage wannabe Necromancer was the principal's son and the kid had decided that becoming a Lich was definitely a promising career move at about ECL 3. The Wizard and the Cleric were fairly cowled by the prospect of political retribution, the Warlock being somewhat disgraced already took the chance to taunt the pair of magically and politically powerful mages, the Automaton got distracted and ran off to the market and I treated the mages like any other person. And as the mages were fairly arrogant and insufferable this was an interesting interplay. After all was done the Wizard ran off to find the Automaton and plot revenge against the Warlock and the Cleric went back to the temple to report in about the results. This was the last time the War God was ever mentioned.

The market had been occupied by the GM's pet NPC, who was to alchemy what Fizzban is to magic. Except flashier and more consistent I suppose. The Automaton on the other hand was amazed and filled with wonder by the showmanship of the alchemist and decided that he needed buy lots of potions. He didn't really care what they did, as long as they looked or smelled interesting. He also away the quest reward, which was 1PP each to a blacksmith in return for a railspike. My character went down to the slums to check out the local catpeople's situation and to find somewhere to sleep. He got accosted by a crazy woman who said he was Moses their destined saviour and the one to lead them out of the city and then proceeded to turn around and go back to the market. The alchemist managed to sell him some salmon flavoured healing potions (even I was technically a human at that point I was still a Weretiger). The Warlock had a chat with his dad who basically told him to be less obvious and more discrete about his stuff and being the bored, but still moderately rich kid that he was the Warlock decided to invite the Automaton and myself to his manor for a chat. As the Wizard 'owned' the Automaton she was also invited and then the Cleric came along...because. Except that the Wizard had gone to the inquisition against demons and blabbed that the Warlock was using illegal and nasty infernal magic. So there were a few other guests and the Warlock had to hide his tome of elder magicks gardening tips and talk his way out of the situation.

Things were pretty fun at this point, because the Automaton and myself, who knew nothing about magic, were the most vocal in discussing the matter. While I was first leading the inquisitors away from believe that he was using demon magic as the debate continued he began to say some somewhat condemning things. It came to a head when we had to describe his Eldritch Blast (again note capitalisation) and the Cleric of all people saved the Warlock. Failing his spellcraft amazingly he managed to convince the inquisitors that the Warlock was in fact casting Magic Missile, to which my monk agreed because he didn't know about these peoples "heathen" (i.e not Divine bestowed by gods he believed in) magic and the cleric did. So after we'd finished the Pheonix Wright scene and settled back down again (I had gotten the first LA component of Weretiger which gave me a bit of Wisdom, NA and the ability to turn into a medium sized Tiger with no stat adjustments or special abilities; so I curled up in front of the fire) an assassin decided to get revenge on the principal's son by casting Melph's Acid Arrow on the Warlock. This had an interesting effect where the Warlock went into ragemode and used some ability the GM cooked up that he had little control over and summoned a terrible Eldritch gate and dragged the assassin's soul down into the abyss. It was a decidedly :stare: moment for the party. The Warlock manifested his increased demonic influence by having smouldering eyes that literally burned in his sockets, which startled myself and the Automaton. Dashing for the nearest vase we doused the Warlock's head which shocked him out of Devil Trigger and stopped his eyes from smouldering. This didn't really help either of our understanding of arcane magic at all!

Then the next day we got invited to have a personal meeting with the Archmagister.

TheAnomaly
Feb 20, 2003

AlphaDog posted:

I'm intending to give Sir Alistair poo poo about this forever (Sir Alistair and Flynn have a semi-friendly rivalry going on about who's the most badass martial guy). I made him a banner with a pantsless warrior running from a dragon, and I'm going to paint his shield with the same picture while he sleeps.

This reminds me of a game I played way back in the days of 2e. We had a character who wanted to play a Paladin, but rolled a low charisma. The DM said he could just up his stats to play the pally, but the guy smiled and said no, he'd rather play a fighter who just wasn't likeable enough to be a paladin. Thus was born Erick.

The guy intentionally played up the no personality aspect of his low charisma. He had no strong opinions, other than that we should always be good. And follow good gods. The other two players in the game involved me, a thief priest of a chaotic good god of anarchy and rebels, and a chaotic good wizard who followed the neutral god of magic and the chaotic neutral god of having a good time (the gods followed were Heironious by the fighter, Tritherion by the thief-priest and Boccob and Olidamarra by the wizard if you remember Greyhawk).

This went on for a while, and we hit the fighter is 7th level range and started to pick up a following. We hired a bard to go ahead of us and sing about our exploits to the towns we were heading towards, because we were all egotists and snarky bastards. After a couple towns, some townsgirl got all googly eyed over the man in full plate mail who only revealed his face to the people he was going to kill. We decided to run with it, and started rumors that he was the most desireable man in the kingdom - every important eligible woman we came across or helped was rumored to have been his lover, or to have wanted to be his lover. We started rumors that he only spoke 3 words at a time, and only to those his god had sworn him to protect. He would only speak a full sentence to the woman he was destined to marry.

Women began to flock around him whenever we arrived in town, and the bard begin to stay farther ahead of us and take messages via spells because he was starting to get angry at the embellishments of the bard we'd hired (we weren't telling him that we were behind it). We convinced him that the bard had gone off on her own, was getting rich and famous off of our stories . To make matters better, the players girlfriend joined our game as an actual paladin from the order who had left to track down these rumors of a wayward paladin and bring him back into the fold, and instantly fell in love with him. He continued to play up his character, not knowing the full depth of the rumors or who was behind them.

She began to question the chaotic characters about the rumors, and we revealed to her that we had done some auguries about his destiny and were given this information from his god (We were really good liars) and it was all 100% true (it wasn't). Then he made the mistake of telling her that her order needed to accept everyone. In a complete sentence, in front of the high temple of his god, in full view of hundreds of people after we'd killed wiped out some dungeon full of something or other. We managed to keep this going, without either of the players realizing that the romantic subplot was completely in the hands of the other two players in the group. We kept feeding info to the bard, and she to us, to keep her ahead of the other two. Her stories were always accurate and usually out before we even got into the next town, so the paladin began to believe this was all fated by her god. The fighter, on the other hand, thought that the bard was constantly scrying on us and invested money in getting better and better proof against scrying spells. This all culminated in a fight against the big bad evil half-demon demigod of the setting. Right after we'd killed off his big lieutenants, the fighter decided to take off his damaged helmet and reveal his face. The DM had him roll an intimidate check and the demon fled, fearing that fate itself had conspired against him.

The look on his face when he explained to him why he'd gotten the intimidate check and exactly what was in the stories and who had started them was priceless.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
You turned your buddy's fighter into The Stig without him catching on, and that's beautiful.

Captain Bravo
Feb 16, 2011

An Emergency Shitpost
has been deployed...

...but experts warn it is
just a drop in the ocean.
Last night's game was pretty badass. One of my players rolled a new character, since we're a real small group I made a Fighter to go along with them, and came up with a new storyline to go along with the new PCs. M rolled a tanky Paladin named Bartholomew, and T kept his heavy-damage Rogue named Albrecht.

The backstory for Bart is pretty basic, his order sends him to a town full of atheists to try and convert them all. Al, however, has got a whole deal where he's a member of an order of thieves and assassins. The head of the order is his father, but has never told him. While on a mission, he recieves a message that they're going to get raided, and by the time he arrives back they're all missing. So, he starts hanging around with Monks and Paladins of the order that was planning the raid to try and get some information, I.E. Bart's church. A little bending of the truth later, and he's infiltrated the group to spy on Bart.

Now, they get to the town, repair an old church, snoop a bit, so on and so forth. I'm trying to give equal time to both of them, but by the time they start to finish up with an ambush I'm feeling like maybe I've been concentrating on Bart too much, and it's time to give Al some major face time. So the big reveal happens, and the reason that the town is full of "atheists" is because they're all actually part of a secret church. The same church which Al's old order belonged to. So he convinces them he's cool, and the group infiltrates their enormous underground cathedral. He drops some information that Bart's order knows they're there, and in exchange the head priest dude tells him about his order. I tell him that his order was raided before anyone had a chance to respond, and by the time backup arrived only a few people were left alive. Women, children, and a couple of men who ran and hid instead of fighting. The men have been imprisoned for that, and the women and children are scattered among other orders. He promises more information the next day, and asks them to spend the night, which they do.

Al tells Bart to keep quiet, don't mention that he's a Paladin, and they'll stay one more night before leaving and reporting to his higher-ups. Meanwhile, he tells me that if poo poo goes down, he's going to hang Bart up to dry. (Admittadly, he said that he didn't want to cause friction in the party, but I told him to do what his character would, and let me worry about keeping everything together. I had a plan.)

So the next day arrives, and the head priest takes them back to meet with the Grand Head of the order. Talks start off nice, until this sequence of events:

(Paraphrased slightly, because I don't remember exactly what we said.)

:catholic: Now, how about you explain to us exactly how this church knows about us? Nobody should know about us, we've kept extreme secrecy on this matter. In fact, you're the only one who seems to know all about this. How do you know that they know?
:ninja: How do I know? Because this man is a Paladin of their order. I've stuck around with him to get information.
:catholic: What!? You would bring a Paladin of their order into our most sacred cathedral!?
:ninja: Well yeah, but it's fine, we can just kill him now. Here, I'll help.
:catholic: Yes, yes, kill him now. Let him be your little scapegoat, and then you get away scot-free and go back to his church, hmm? You know, you were the only one who wasn't there when your order was raided...
:ninja: ...
:catholic: Did he tell you who we found, when we arrived? Among the cowards who fled instead of fought? The head of your order. Your father.
:ninja: What!?
:catholic:I'm sure you know of our teachings, Cowardice Breeds Cowardice. Tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you a head start.

The door opens behind them, they take off running. After a chase sequence, a mysterious gift from someone, and a sacrifice from some members of Al's order who still believed in him, they manage to make it back to Bart's HQ.

:ninja: Welp, we're going back there. So that I can kill them all.

Elector_Nerdlingen
Sep 27, 2004



TheAnomaly posted:

Starting rumors about party members.

A similar thing happened in my Hackmaster game.

"Honor" and "Fame" are two actual game mechanics in that system. You raise your honor by boasting about how awesome you are, and by doing awesome things. If people see them or hear about them, your honor goes up more. If you lie about exploits, your honor only goes down if you get found out. Fame is a weird formula with honor*level and a few other things.

But you can boost your fame by hiring bards and criers and stuff. You can see where that's going.

Yeah, the PCs managed to become so loving famous, via pouring all their spare gold into hiring bards and stuff, that they managed to tell the king "you need to give us a castle because we're just that good" and get clean away with it. They got the castle and attendant lands and vassalage. They were about 5th/6th level.

They'd also call out and duel anyone who said they weren't as great as the bards said. They'd cheat to win, too (via magic and/or getting groupies to sabotage their opponents), so it looked like they were doing the right thing and defeating powerful, honorable opponents.

Alignments? Neutral, Neutral Evil, and Lawful Evil spread across 5 characters. An evil campaign that was fun and went well.

Edit: We played Everyone Is John again the other week, while drinking heavily. One guy who doesn't like to GM anything said he'd have a go at being Everyone Else. Another guy who seems to love derailing games decided that his Obsessions revolved around getting horribly drunk. He was trying to make sure that John was drunk enough to be useless to other players. The Everyone Else guy started the game with "John wakes up, blinking dust from his eyes. It's really hot. He sees a sign by the roadside that says something a a language John doesn't recognise, then underneath, in English, 'Welcome To Mecca'" (The guy being Everyone Else had just spent a couple of months over there on some engineering project, and his take on it was "Yeah, just try to find a beer over there, it's the world's biggest pain in the arse").

Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 08:50 on Jun 5, 2012

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

I just reread some of my older posts and I realized something about my game. Backstory:

My Lovely Horse posted:

My players hosed up negotiating with an elder dragon because they weren't prepared to offer him anything more than "people we know might want to make deals with you, but it's totally up to them."

My Lovely Horse posted:

My players are off to negotiate with an efreet sultan about him stopping his attacks on other planes. The one kind of creature with better negotiation skills than a dragon.
That negotiation has since gone down, they managed to pull it off, and they managed it because they were offering the efreet services they and only they could and would do. It's not much of a story, but I like how you can see they learned something there, and I didn't realize it until just now.

Nucular Carmul
Jan 26, 2005

Melongenidae incantatrix
I got invited to a group that had collectively decided it was tired of D&D, they were going to play Shadowrun. I hadn't played it before, but had heard about the setting and was interested, so I said why not! One of them was DMing, I made a face, some of you may remember my posts in the Shadowrun thread. Anyway, we do some sessions, and people are interested in the system, but there is general dissatisfaction with the actual roleplaying, one guy in particular felt like deadweight because he wasn't able to hack much despite being a hacker (DM was pretty much treating it like D&D with guns)

Crossing my fingers and praying I wasn't overstepping some unknowable bounds, I offered to run a campaign. They accepted, and I told them to just make characters, let me look at the sheets, and give me a day after that. I let them make 500 BP characters, figuring they would get more excited with more toys. One was on the fence and hadn't actually decided on whether he was going to play, so the three that did presented me with a werewolf sort of concept that didn't shift to a human form; he was just always a hairy ninja (with Latent Awakening, something that can allow a character to use magic if you the DM lets them awaken midgame), a night one elf combat mage who has a badass body and a nice set of heavy armor, and a six armed dude with a minigun and a shitload of guns and swords complete with the Astral Hazing (essentially the Piss Off All Mages Everywhere quality)

Well, that's about as ragtag as it gets, a bunch of crazy metatypes with such disparate qualities they have very little reason to work together. But I am really damned interested in this system and I'll be damned if I let a few weak learning sessions destroy their interest, so I make it work. I created an area in Puget Sound outside Seattle that has crazy magic fluctuations, the mana seems to flow oddly, creating concentrated areas in which mages can explode things with relative ease, and negative zones in which they struggle. I have three factions in the area ; one of the megacorps wants to incite a war among them for mysterious reasons.

One of my players is quite vocal about his hatred of hippies, so I made one of the factions a group of eco shamans and tribal warriors who call themselves Defenders of Gaia, and started the campaign with the corp asking the group to find a man who will be their contact helping them set up this war, and the Defenders were the ones holding him out in the middle of the forest. The ninja wolfman uses his nose and tracking skills to locate the group from the last known coordinates of the contact's RFID chip. I describe the eco shamans and warriors, and point out that several of them are around a campfire, singing, dancing, and playing drums.

I finish my description and give the name, Defenders of Gaia, and the guy playing the mage immediately yells "HIPPIES :byodood:" and proceeds to create one hell of a distraction with the walking weapons platform. The campfire immediately gets hit with an area fireball, and the six armed man with the guns rakes the area with minigun fire. Meanwhile the ninja wolf sneaks to the tent where their contact is being held, proceeds to stealth take down both guards and sneaks off with the contact while the other two finish massacring the camp.

The group returns safe and sound, everyone is feeling great because they all got to do cool in-character things, they get paid, which is great because money is pretty much the only carrot on this stick keeping them working together, what with the rear end in a top hat mage, the rear end in a top hat with Astral Hazing, and the silent rear end in a top hat ninja.

So I move us on to the meeting with the contact in a cafe in Puget Sound. He outlines several jobs that can be done in any order; the basic idea is to attack each faction while disguised as another to incite them to fight each other. Unfortunately, before they can squeeze more plot details out of him than I'm willing to dish out at the moment, the troll faction introduces itself by having an argument with a group of orcs. In the process, the trolls "accidentally" shoot the contact in the face (quotation marks because this was my intention all along). The fight is broken up in spectacular faction by the party, but in spite of their efforts to save him, the contact dies.

Now they're in "oh no did we gently caress up :ohdear: " mode, but I suggest that they loot the contact. They do, finding some conveniently placed business cards and keys to the contact's house. We had to end the session there, but they were pretty excited about moving into the newly dead guy's crib and figuring out how the people on the business cards can help them. Plus, they now already hate two of my factions for the area, and are feeling like badasses, and most importantly, they are back to being really excited about Shadowrun again :3:

Section Z
Oct 1, 2008

Wait, this is the Moon.
How did I even get here?

Pillbug
Crossnerd culture here, but please tell me SOMEBODY told one of the victims to "Get A Haircut, Hippie" mid massacre.

GaryLeeLoveBuckets
May 8, 2009
So last night we're playing Pathfinder, where the party has been mysteriously transported through the mists to Ravenloft, kill some werewolves, and then have to do a mission for Strahd to be forgiven for killing his property. We've been on the road to a little town that is seemingly a million miles away for 2 sessions now and have moved maybe 2 inches on the map.

We stop in a village and are staying in the inn when we hear violin music around midnight. We ask a few locals what's up and they say the blacksmith plays the violin all night in jaunty tunes ever since his wife died. We see him in the morning and he's all tired and has a sickly baby with him.

The Cleric tries to do some Heal checks to see what's wrong and the blacksmith finally explains that his dead wife shows up every night at midnight to nurse their baby and he can't resist her. She asks him to play the violin for her since she loves it, but the baby keeps getting sicker and sicker. The Cleric realizes she's a wraith of some kind, we determine it's because she's a Vistani (gypsy) and the guy didn't burn all of her things when she died as is their custom, namely, the violin he plays that is strung with her hair.

We stay with him in the night until she comes and apparently she's ridiculously hot. Me and the rogue fail our Will saves and are stunned for 4 rounds by her mesmerizing beauty. She creepily charms the husband and takes the baby from him, then starts nursing it with her ghost boob, draining the baby's life force. The monk tries to grab the baby from her but he's unsuccessful. Our sorcerer wants to blast both mother and baby, but instead wakes me up from the trance by shaking me for another save and this is where it gets crazy.

I cast Enlarge Person on the baby, making it easier for the monk to grab. He snatches it away from her and the sorcerer starts Magic Missiling her every turn while the monk takes off. She chases after him, phasing through people and doing poo poo tons of damage. The Cleric is channeling positive energy and wrecking her, and the rogue wakes up from his stupor just as the monk finishes his lap around the house with the Small size baby.

The rogue takes out his holy water and douses the baby in it, then tries to grab it from the monk to throw at the ghost mother. This is a 2 week old infant. The DM informs him that he'll automatically fail a Dark Powers check if he does that, since it's pretty dark sided. She's hell bent on beating the poo poo out of whoever has the baby, so they douse it again and then put it on the ground. Then she tells the charmed husband that he needs to protect his child and he starts wailing on us too.

She goes to pick up the baby and I cast Grease on it, infuriating her since she fails two Reflex saves to try to pick it up. The husband runs over and tries and fails as well. The rogue wants to slide the baby across the floor at her after throwing more holy water on it. It should go without saying that at this point the soaked, Enlarged, Greased baby is crying in an odd baritone.

The Cleric and Sorcerer finally finish her off, but she'll come back again every night until her unfinished business is resolved. We clean up the baby and convince the husband that he needs to burn the violin, and he finally agrees. The DM has this to say about the fight on facebook today:

DM posted:

You know, I was a little upset last night that what should have been a very creepy scene of a ghost-mother killing her baby slowly by being a mother to it was turned into an episode of The Five Stooges with the sorcerer trying to burn both baby and mother alive, the rogue trying to treat the baby as first a shot put then a bowling ball, and the baby getting both Enlarge Person and Grease cast on her...but then I thought about it. A 3 foot tall newborn baby crying in baritone wails as she's manhandled by complete strangers and sliding almost frictionlessly across the floor as her ghostly mother rages at those trying to keep her from her child. Out of context, that's pretty loving creepy...

Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund
Jesus Christ, I would have just run with it. By the time your enlarging the baby and its sliding around all over the place I would be absolutely pissing myself laughing. I mean you'd at least introduce one of those weird "stable door" doors and have the baby slide through the open bottom half before closing it and seeing the mother flip over it.

I think the only way to make that in anyway better would have been to put on the benny hill soundtrack and watched some Buster Keaton.

LuiCypher
Apr 24, 2010

Today I'm... amped up!

Once upon a time, my friends and I were playing GURPS. We don't play GURPS very often anymore, as we (and as I'm sure, most of you) discovered that it's more fun to make characters than it is to actually wade through the rules. Nevertheless, good times were had in this particular campaign.

The setting was a futuristic Sci-Fi campaign - the usual setting for most of our adventures, aside from the one time I described a zombie apocalypse one-shot in the present day. I decided to play my typical Sci-Fi character type - a robot. I kid you not that in most games, when I have the ability to play some kind of robot character, I do it. I have an odd fascination with post-humanism brought out by watching the Galaxy Express 999 movie as a kid. As such, I enjoy playing robot (or droid) characters as it enables me to sort of detach, observe, and not concern myself with more 'human' affairs - while also contending with the possibility of having had multiple lifetimes through wiped memories, changed-out skills, and constantly trying to remain up-to-spec and relevant in a constantly advancing world.

I digress. My character was an old robot gunslinger, complete with Clint Eastwood poncho. If you know anything about GURPS, you would realize that despite having a decently high number of points, being a sentient, free-willed robot requires you to take a lot of fluff advantages (Doesn't Breath, Doesn't Eat, Vacumm-Sealed, etc.) that cost a lot of points at the expense of others. Even so, I got to take some pretty cool ones like Magnetic Feet and whatnot. Given that we had a Disadvantage limit, there wasn't much of a way for me to min-max the crap out of my character given the concept. I think I did manage to throw in a homage to Bender though, by making him reliant on alcohol for fuel.

Given that I couldn't min-max, I sort of paled in power compared to the other characters. Namely my friend who made an all-powerful min-maxed Space Vampire. This guy could tear robots apart with his bare hands, take a beating and keep on ticking, and overall kick rear end. Needless to say, after we started the game he kept throwing his power around acting like the biggest badass in the room. Seriously. No one could hold a candle to this guy without dying a few times first. He also made sure the other PCs present know he was hot stuff and not to be trifled with. Moreover, he constantly threatened my robot gunslinger. Even after the GM magically got us all on the same ship, the tiger-blooded Adonis-ness of his vampire kept pouring out. He did not get rid of one disadvantage, though - his vampire need to rest in a coffin for hours without waking.

Feeling threatened, my robot gunslinger attempted to figure out just how to get rid of this guy. I couldn't kill him in a fight - he would just close the distance and with 20 Strength or something he'd end up tearing me to shreds - but I had to do something.

I then realized that in space, the useless robot fluff advantages are actually quite, quite useful.

Making my way down to the cargohold, I quickly located said Space Vampire's coffin. Knowing that he couldn't wake up unless someone actually started forcefully destroying his coffin, I made no threatening moves. I simply picked up the coffin and began moving it.

The GM and the PC looked at me quizzically. "Where are you taking my coffin?" he asked.

"I'm just moving it to a nicer location", I replied.

I dragged it all the way to the airlock. Standing in the lock itself, I turned on my magnetic feet, hit the button, and spaced the vampire.

With all of my fluff advantages, I had no need to breathe, was sealed against the ravages of vacuum, and couldn't be sucked out of the airlock. As I waved goodbye to the vampire, the player started to figure out ways to claim the vampire wasn't dead.

"Well, I don't need to breathe so I don't die!"

"Yeah? Well how are you going to eat? You need to do that or else you'll die, right?"

"Yes, but..."

"And God forbid you open up the coffin when a sun is facing you."

"Well..."

The GM tried to save the character by saying a Space Whale came up and ate him, but it wasn't very in theme with the campaign and the player cheerfully admitted that I got him good - I used what were seemingly pointless advantages to put myself in a "combat" situation with the vampire where I could maximize my strengths and place him in a checkmate position, despite all of his insane min-maxing.

We then played Paranoia and everyone died more times than we could count. Sometimes multiple times even before the clone backups arrived on the scene.

FredMSloniker
Jan 2, 2008

Why, yes, I do like Kirby games.
Technically you could have done all that without being a robot (well, maybe the lifting and toting part required robot strength, but I'm sure you would have found a way to manage it). It did have a certain class value that overriding the outer door mechanism from inside the ship wouldn't have, though.

That said, I'm more curious about this:

LuiCypher posted:

We then played Paranoia and everyone died more times than we could count. Sometimes multiple times even before the clone backups arrived on the scene.

How did you manage to get a single clone to die more than once?

disaster pastor
May 1, 2007


FredMSloniker posted:

How did you manage to get a single clone to die more than once?

Friend Computer's latest innovation, the Local Back-Up Clone! Each Troubleshooter carries a clone of himself or herself on his or her back. The clone is in Modified Joyful Stasis* using a wonderful system in which stasis is triggered to end as soon as the Troubleshooter's life signs cease.

(* Please note that Modified Joyful Stasis ends regardless of whether or not the Troubleshooter-killing situation is still in progress, so an unlucky clone may experience an extraordinarily brief lifespan.)

Exculpatrix
Jan 23, 2010
Another fun 7th Sea session today.

In a previous session the party had inadvertantly started a small peasant rebellion in a Montaigne village a few days ride from the capital. From there they'd travelled to the capital to seek medical treatment and check up on a friend of theirs who was performing at l'Empereur's court.

Unfortunately, they'd left a couple of injured nobility loose in the village after dealing with the rest. Nobility who'd seen their faces. So as Captain Ursidae and The Baron are mingling at court, unarmed and in their finery, who should arrive? The injured noble, here to beg for assistance putting down the rebellion. He of course recognises them, they're arrested, and promptly thrown into a cell beneath the palace.

The rest of the party, who had been recovering from their injurie, hears rumours on the streets that something happened at the palace. The detail range from it being a pack of anarchists trying to blow up l'Empereur to it being a pair of Avalonian spies. They figure out it's probably their friends and start putting together a rescue plan.

Linnus, the party's mad inventor/anarchist gets in touch with some of his Rilasciare buddies (a secret society opposed to the nobility), and manages to secure maps of old tunnels that run beneath the palace. The problem is that these tunnels are mostly flooded. The solution? To invent the submarine.

One large barrel, sealed with wax and leather, and a crankshaft powered propellor later, plus a pan of potassium nitrate to burn for oxygen, and they had a crude submarine. Very crude. Leaking, in fact. Oh, and they had no window or method of producing light underwater, so navigation was difficult.

They set out in their crude submarine/underwater tomb, and through some extremely lucky rolling manage to get into the bowels of the palace before the sub completely fills with water. Drenched up to their necks they sneak into the building and pluck The Baron and Captain Ursidae from their cells.

Captain: "You came to rescue us! But how did you get in? And why are you dripping?"
Linnus: "We came in a submarine."
Captain: "A what?"
Linnus: "It's like a boat, only instead of going on the water it goes under it."
Captain: "How... how many of these can you make?"

Sneaking through the building to avoid guard patrols they eventually find themselves on a balcony overlooking a large hall in which a meal is going on. At the far side of the hall they can see a courtyard leading out to the rear of the palace and freedom. Suspended over the hall are a series of chandeliers. They naturally decide to take the most swashbuckling route to freedom. Swinging from chandelier to chandelier they cross the hall. As the final chandelier swings forward with the four of them on top Captain Ursidae cuts the rope, allowing it fly forwards, and Linnus shoots out the giant window in front of them with his flintlock pistols.

The chandelier flies through the air, out the window, and crashes into a stable in the courtyard as the party leap off it and into a haystack. Chaos ensues as horse bolt loose from the ruined stable. Guards are running everywhere trying to work out what on Earth has happened. The party sees two wagons bearing the imperial seal, wagons that had been heavily guarded until a quartet of people riding a chandelier came smashing out the window and caused chaos. They leap onto the wagons and accelerate out the gate, figuring this is the closest form of transport.

A chace scene ensues as they try to ride these two wagons through the twisting streets of Charouse, musketeers on horse back chasing after them. Linnus clambers atop one wagon and begins firing back, drawing and shooting with his brace of pistols as fast as he can manage. The Baron, who's driving the rear wago by himself decides to jackknife it, sending it tumbling onto its side, while he leaps to the other wagon. He pulls it off flawlessly, managing to not even scuff his waistcoat. The fallen wagon provides enough of a roadblock for the party to pull away and dart down a side alley. There the Baron works a bit of glamour magic to disguise the wagon as a haycart.

Linnus goes to see what was in the back of the wagon that they just stole.

Linnus: "Captain... you might want to look at what we've got back here."
Captain: "We haven't accidentally kidnapped l'Empereur, have we?"
Linnus: "No, it's something that's actually good. I think we've stolen their warchest."

So yes, the two wagons had been carrying the payroll for the army out on the Ussuran front. The party's escape vehicle had about 80,000 Guilder in the back, enough to buy and provision a decent size warship.

They're now talking about using their money to set up their own drydock facility and start producing better submarines to revolutionise naval warfare. Linnus is wondering if he can afford to open a foundry and invent the steam engine. I'm looking forward to seeing what four glory hungry swashbucklers with vast amounts of wealth and a crazy inventor will do to overcome future problems.

PunkBoy
Aug 22, 2008

You wanna get through this?

DivineCoffeeBinge posted:

'Course, this is why we're always short on torpedoes these days.

Please tell me this is going to be a plot hook that leads to an alternate Starfighters of Adumar.

DivineCoffeeBinge
Mar 3, 2011

Spider-Man's Amazing Construction Company

PunkBoy posted:

Please tell me this is going to be a plot hook that leads to an alternate Starfighters of Adumar.

Honestly, while I've not read that book, that does sound suspiciously similar to the place we keep referring to as the Warrior Planet on account of how its people seem to have the same culture as the Klingons, who we brought into the rebellion by giving them better fighters and explaining to them that they could get in even cooler battles.

Beardless
Aug 12, 2011

I am Centurion Titus Polonius. And the only trouble I've had is that nobody seem to realize that I'm their superior officer.

PunkBoy posted:

Please tell me this is going to be a plot hook that leads to an alternate Starfighters of Adumar.

Only if they get to hang out with Wedge, Hobbie, Wes and Tycho.

VanSandman
Feb 16, 2011
SWAP.AVI EXCHANGER

DivineCoffeeBinge posted:

Honestly, while I've not read that book, that does sound suspiciously similar to the place we keep referring to as the Warrior Planet on account of how its people seem to have the same culture as the Klingons, who we brought into the rebellion by giving them better fighters and explaining to them that they could get in even cooler battles.

I like the idea of bribing a warrior race with new weapons and cool enemies to fight.

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HiKaizer
Feb 2, 2012

Yes!
I finally understand everything there is to know about axes!
Continuing my story;

We were given an invitation to meet with the Archmagister. I rather, I should say 'invitation' because we would probably meet a Wizard death squad if we didn't. Apparently the guards in the city were about 10x more competent than the assassins. :iiam:
So we met with the rear end in a top hat in charge of the city who basically told us off for killing his buddy's son and said that we had to do something for him or be killed. Then he had some words for my character in particular, being the notable racial oddity (Automaton excluded) and it went something like this:

:smug:: Oh by the way I know what you are.
:what:: That's nice, and?
:smug:: I'm going to send an army to invade you country.
:what:: Okay that's very interesting, can I go now?
:smug:: No, you are forbidden from leaving the city!
:what:: Uh, why? Don't you hate me and want me out of your sight?
:smug:: Now that I've told you my plans I can't let you tell the Kitai (name for the cat people, the GM spelled it differently but I can't remember how as it was odd)
:what:: Okay so why did you just tell me that then?
:shepface:: Just do what I say before I kill you myself.

I know the GM was trying to come up with a compelling reason to keep me in the city (I'm not sure why, as I made it quite clear I intended to find Dr. Frankenmage and punch him to death for what he did to me) but it didn't really work out the way he wanted. The Automaton was also fairly annoying to the Smugmancer, actively getting bored and walking out of the room while the Smugmancer was still talking to him. The guy decided it wasn't worth the headache trying to reason or intimidate him and just let him go. So we got our next task, go investigate some warehouse for...something. It was clearly a test and so the Smugmancer told us nothing useful or what we were actually doing. The warehouse was in the slums where the cat people lived. So there was a lot of staring as we walked through because a bunch of clearly wealthy people from the upper city (the city was on a mountain and arranged into tiers, the higher you lived the wealthier and more powerful you were) were fairly out of place. I was probably the one who fitted in place the most given I only wore simple pants and a tunic due to needing to get naked quickly when I wanted to shape change. Along the way the creepy old cat woman looked at me and I walked quickly by, and a street urchin tried to steal from the cleric. The automaton and I, being the ones with the good spot checks were the only ones to notice. So I followed the kid and demanded to see what he had stolen.

It was the Cleric's holy symbol.

Normally in any other game I would I have taken it back immediately, but in this game my character did not actually believe the local gods really existed. Furthermore a poor kid in the slave slums could pawn off a silver holy symbol for a reasonable amount of cash and so I let the kid go, but told him stealing from mages was a dumb idea. He said thanks and scampered away to go buy all the booze and catnip he could. The Automaton was curious, but after explaining that the kid needed the holy symbol more than the cleric was satisfied with the situation and didn't mention it. On the other hand, this lead to a particularly amusing situation when the Cleric went to cast a spell and found it was there. He didn't seem very happy for some reason when I explained that it got stolen and that he really didn't need it because his magic was all a sham anyway. We were in a city fortunately so getting another one wasn't really a problem. The warehouse was somewhat familiar to my character though, because as I went in I recognised the place. It was where Dr. Frakenmage had experimented on him and left him to die. So I promptly spent the next few minutes smashing it to pieces with a nearby iron bar. When the party asked why I merely explained all the blood on it was mine, to which they were a little surprised and shocked given there was a lot of dried blood. Fortunately while I had my little time alone with the operating table the rest of the group actually looked around. However aside from a collection of nasty and very unsanitary surgical tools the place was empty. As we were leaving I managed to make a very high DC spot check (I could jump, tumble, spot and listen really well and not much else skill wise) and notice the assassins behind us. This time though they were catpeople and thus about 25% more competent than the local assassins.

I got to have a bit of fun chatting to them in Kitai in front of the group. Basically after a lot of avoiding questions on both sides I admitted I was here because the Smugmancer told me but had no loyalty to him. The assassins replied they wanted to kill the Smugmancer and also possibly the guy that had been in the warehouse. Then they talked about a few things which the whole party could hear, and mentioned they planned to kill some mages who were doing bad stuff. The Warlock who had taken a liking to my character decided this was fine with him, because he approved of Dr. Frankenmage getting his just deserts. The Wizard on the other hand was making GBS threads her pants at obvious treason, and the Cleric was...I don't know actually. I think his personality had been overused with the whole holy symbol shenanigans and had shut down before it was used up entirely. As we left the Smugmancer teleported in and was crowing about how he had proof we were treacherous. He also ignored the point that if he could see what we had done he didn't need to have us actually go in. Once again he chose to respond to logic and common sense by making vague threats and being annoyed. I have no idea why the guy didn't just cast slay living at that point, aside from the GM not being a dick.

The party sort of splits up at this point, the Automaton being bored already and going to the church to talk to the priestess about the Smugmancer saying he'd kill people (as in the Automaton's mind only the goddess of Life and Death had the right to do so, did I mention the character was adorably naive at times?) , the Cleric going to get a new holy symbol (and was never seen again, probably a wise move on his part) which left the Warlock and I standing around. The Warlock decided to sass his 'grandad' (his pendant allowed him to speak to him) who responded by making him grow horns, his skin turn read, smell sulphurous and get really mad. The Warlock suddenly angry as heck vents his rage by shooting an infernal fireball somewhere and scaring a poor catkid. Little boy runs off to his mum as the Warlock calms down and returns to normal as some guards teleport in and tell him to stop doing magic in the city. The kid brings his mum with him who gives the Warlock a chewing out and manages to be far more threatening than any character in the game to date. So I decide to take the Warlock for a training montage to teach him stillness and to control his emotions.

Next session he turns into a mini-Balor, and we got our Dorf Knight.

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