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That’s just Bray Wyatt after cleaning up and shaving.
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Aug 17, 2019 13:49
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So, how do you stop an Exsurgent outbreak? Do they have treatments for it? Does identifying and killing the infected monster vector help? Or do you run into some of the normal issues with plagues in RPGs where the answer is 'stop it before it gets going'?
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Aug 17, 2019 14:18
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Night10194 posted:So, how do you stop an Exsurgent outbreak? Do they have treatments for it? Does identifying and killing the infected monster vector help? Or do you run into some of the normal issues with plagues in RPGs where the answer is 'stop it before it gets going'? uuuh its unstoppable and insidious until all the infected at the same time decide to reveal themselves and attack? i'm not even joking:  the suggested measures are 'kill and burn everyone and everything' but it doesnt really fit with the idea that there are a ton of sleepers all over the place? like the virus is insanely infectious through a bunch of different avenues, and there are sleepers doing secret virus terrorism around the place that nobody knows about, but also the entire setting isnt overrun.
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Aug 17, 2019 15:15
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So it's like a dumber version of The Thing, got it. E: By which I mean the Thing generally revealed itself when it thought it had the upper hand or when it was caught doing something or about to be detected, it was reasonably clever even if it made mistakes. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Aug 17, 2019 |
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Aug 17, 2019 15:19
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It sounds like a dumber version of The Thing coupled with "hey we read Inquisition propaganda from WH40k and took it at absolute face value that they're correct" which is really just some great chocolate-and-peanut-butter RPG pairing right there. Also the fat vampire is just Matt Berry from What We Do In the Shadows, prove me wrong
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Aug 17, 2019 15:58
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I sort of wonder if Abrerrant's biggest issues wouldn't have been mitigated by being set in 1999, a year or 6 months after the Novas first appeared, with things unsettled and people still puzzling out what they are. Asking what kind of person you're going to be and what you think of powers no-one understands yet would be a good hook for an RPG, and you wouldn't have tons of established people already running around solving everything. Also just throwing out the metaplot entirely but then that would improve most RPGs. A 'snapshot' metaplot like Feng Shui or WHFRP (where it's 'where is everything at the start of this?' instead of an ongoing 'where is everything going to end up?' sort of thing) would've done it wonders. But 1998/1999 WW wasn't going to do that, if for no other reason than the trends in RPG publishing at the time pushing against that.
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Aug 17, 2019 16:07
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It turns out fat dracula has been fronting a catholic werewolf themed metal band.
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Aug 17, 2019 16:09
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juggalo baby coffin posted:It turns out fat dracula has been fronting a catholic werewolf themed metal band. I feel conflicted. Mostly I think i was happier prior to having this knowledge.
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Aug 17, 2019 16:15
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It still boggles me that there's an actual non-hostile alien species that wants to communicate and do commerce and that isn't treated like one of the biggest moments in the setting's timeline. That should be kind of a big deal.
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Aug 17, 2019 16:17
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Night10194 posted:It still boggles me that there's an actual non-hostile alien species that wants to communicate and do commerce and that isn't treated like one of the biggest moments in the setting's timeline. That should be kind of a big deal. so in the Revelation Space series by alastair reynolds they kind of do this, there ARE aliens, but the only species humanity has encountered are benign and fairly distant. there's no FTL in the setting so it's understandably difficult to contact them. They're just kind of off to the side. But the difference there is that they've been known about for thousands of years. One of the species in revelation space is even eerily close to the factors; a race of grubs where each individual is composed of one big grub and an army of little grubs acting as a hive mind. they had a lot of trouble with diplomacy cause their opening move was to eat one of the other race and mutate themselves using that individuals biology and memories to learn to communicate to the new species. i think its another case of eclipse phase borrowing from another property without really thinking about why the original had things a certain way.
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Aug 17, 2019 16:50
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I’m hungover, I’m tired and I want to talk about Vampires. So let’s resurrect this sucker. So, when we last left off we discussed how Dhampir are actually made. Now we get onto more of the fluff aspect of the section, discussing where and how the dhampir fit into vampire society. Each covenant gets its own little spiel on how they view dhampir, how the dhampir are used by them, and why it can sometimes kinda suck. They are as follows: Carthians: Carthians like dhampir. Sorta. They like them as they can be useful, and there are some straight up Dhampir Supremacist elements apparently, and there are others that don’t like them so much they go on secret raids and make kangaroo courts. The Circle of the Crone: The Circle of the Crone, being big into generic witchy stuff, really like Dhampir and have their own rituals for causing it, which even includes occasionally just having a vampire baby for no reason other than to satisfy a ritual and create dhampir orphans. The Invictus: To be an Dhampir in the Invictus is to have a really, really bad life. The book outright states this, in almost those exact words. They are treated as slaves and property, and in the covenant all about ladder climbing, you aren’t even allowed to touch the ladder. There’s also a mention of a “half-blood director” who might be pulling strings but it doesn’t really give anything more than a vague “this might be a thing” The Lancea et Sanctum: The Vampire Catholics raise Dhampir to be vampire killers, and apparently some of the vampire kiddos end up getting really into the dogma and become travelling preachers, preaching fire and brimstone. One of the more interesting approaches in the book, to be sure. The Ordo Dracul:Chances are you’re gonna be a guinea pig for your vampire parent’s weird experiments, but you can get in and be treated as a proper member. But because you can never actually learn the Coils of the Dragon, you’re never gonna be in the inner circles of the covenant. The following section is on how the clan of the vampire parent affects the child and to be honest it is not especially imaginative. Take the basic stereotype of the clan and apply it to child raising and personality. Surprise, the Daeva’s kids tend to be hedonists and are raised by narccisists. Surprise, the Gangrel’s kid is flighty and violent. The actually interesting bit is the coda: How the other supernaturals interact with the Dhampir. Werewolves are… mostly okay with Dhampir. They know that they can be dangerous and a mess, but apparently mostly stay out of each other’s way. Mages like using them as catss-paws (sic) against the forces of the Abyss, and apparently Daeva Dhampir and Thyrsus get on like a house on fire. Changelings and Dhampir are noted as geting along very well indeed as their backstories (assuming the Dhampir is on the run from Vampire Daddy) are not entirely dissimilar. Demons and Dhampir was not only the most disappointing D&D rip-off, but the most interesting of these little write ups, as apparently Dhampir cause Demons to get very uncomfortable. Why? Because, to quote the book quote:To look at a dhampir is like an uncanny valley effect, almost but not quite Unchained, and so very wrong. Demonic instincts misfire and misjudge them, subconsciously assessing them like fellow Unchained, leading inexperienced demons to feel out of control. Unsafe. And if there’s one thing they hate,it’s feeling unsafe — off-balance and vulnerable. Next time: Are you there God? It’s me, Half Vampire Margaret or Growing up as a Dhampir
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Aug 17, 2019 17:53
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^PM AGEStOrm Age Master® Last time I mentioned we'd be having some Immortal: The Invisible War flashbacks. I fear I may have oversold it a bit. I don't know how intentional it is but the writing comes across as an attempt at epic flowery pretentiousness. It doesn't reach those heights, though. We're eventually going to see several terms that seem to mean something in-universe but go undefined as well. By way of example, let's take a look at the tribute page (wordsmithing is the author's but I have repunctuated it for your reading pleasure): quote:It was said a long time ago that they have no perfectly-balanced Rpg, when D&D first started and they said there is no way to make One. They would be glad to ever see One. But no one will ever be able to make One... "We tried everything but we can't do it... We tried every way." But they still looked with hope to the populus. And a bit of text from the dedication page. I'm not sure if it's flowery profoundness that I am incapable of deriving the meaning of or if it's just word salad. quote:To fantasy and founding, now that everyone can perfectly be there... and know: every dream is imaginitively flavored solid started desired tangibly, and as they're all balanced anyway... But then there are a few moments of perfect clarity. The dedication wraps up with "Thank you. Without your support and patience, I would have never achieved my dream." We finally reach the header for the table of contents at the bottom of page 17. The actual ToC is on the following page and every number is somehow wrong. This is reproduced below minus the useless page numbers, each entry followed by my best interpretation of what the chapter is. quote:Forward {}: Funconscious Faucets Scar^. Pretty compelling so far, don't you think? Conspicuously absent is the "Curse Creature" outlined on the storefront. And finally, let's take a look at the artwork contained within. The store page says the book comes "with Spaces for Beautiful Art done by You and/or a Friend as a Picturesque/Pretty Hobby Collection of Perfectly-Balanced Aspiring Scrobbling Imagery for your Fanning". How many spaces? There are 166 pages. 65 of them are completely blank. Of the remaining hundred pages, probably half of them are less than half full. So much artwork can fit in here, you just have to use your imagination. At this point, I'm curious if certain aspects of the game were removed. Again copypasta-ing the storefront, this cheapo copy I picked up is "The same Perfectly-Balanced Table-Top Rpg. Game Module but Summarized-Up and not Wholly there". I want to know but currently lack the desire to drop over $9,000 on the full product line. My mind keeps going back to "rowm" and "scar" - they clearly seem to mean something that I don't understand but my monkey brain keeps dwelling on them. Next time, I don't even know. I'm sure this isn't a pleasant read and it's going to get less so as we go. I need a beer and a nap. Will there be a next time, or will I abandon this and do something else? Stay tuned to find out!
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Aug 17, 2019 19:37
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Night10194 posted:So it's like a dumber version of The Thing, got it. While EP is generally just loving stupid, there's a bit more to the Big E then that. Most Exsurgents aren't cronenburgs any more, that was a bit too unsubtle; the shock value had worn off, as it were - most can still pass as normal locals. They mostly hide, but have certain behavioral tells - various odd hobbies or other behavioral tics, though the general background radiation of headfucked weirdness that characterizes that shithole future tends to act as effective camo. quote:the suggested measures are 'kill and burn everyone and everything' but it doesnt really fit with the idea that there are a ton of sleepers all over the place? like the virus is insanely infectious through a bunch of different avenues, and there are sleepers doing secret virus terrorism around the place that nobody knows about, but also the entire setting isnt overrun. Well, to be fair, they do endorse the 'Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru' reading on the official website and in the name of the game itself: quote:An "eclipse phase" is the period between when a cell is infected by a virus and when the virus appears within the cell and transforms it. During this period, the cell does not appear to be infected, but it is. quote:Hahahahahahahah, loving Prometheans. loving Prometheans. gently caress the authors. It's classic x-risks/friendly AI subculture, as you'd find in groups like the Lifeboat Foundation: https://lifeboat.com/ex/aishield EP is largely a... proselytory? Is that a word? setting, that exists to push certain discourses in futurology - Firewall itself is descended from in-universe versions of groups like Lifeboat, MIRI and the IEET that run on that grift. EP seems to namedrop these concepts with mechanical precision. Also, that everyone hates Firewall is perfectly justified by the fact that they're clasping that clutch of vipers to their bosom - if and when the Big E finally gets into one - and it's specialized, it it's most basal form, toward taking things like them over - it will spread fast and they'll already have a disruption network ready and waiting for marching orders to pave the way for the next TITANomachy; I'd bet AT LEAST Ozma knows. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Aug 18, 2019 |
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Aug 17, 2019 19:47
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juggalo baby coffin posted:so in the Revelation Space series by alastair reynolds they kind of do this, there ARE aliens, but the only species humanity has encountered are benign and fairly distant. there's no FTL in the setting so it's understandably difficult to contact them. They're just kind of off to the side. But the difference there is that they've been known about for thousands of years. The Grubs are also not common knowledge, being just the fragments of a terrified, hunted race hiding in the space between the stars and only a handful of humans know about them and have encountered them. The Hades matrix is again only known to a handful of refugees and rebels on the edge of space. And the Shadows are the secret of literally one insane man living in a tower. When humanity makes formal First Contact with an organized species, the Nestbuilders, it changes everything, because until then the general thought was that most if not all alien species had been hit by extinctions of some sort(they kind of had, in the form of the Inhibitors)
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Aug 17, 2019 20:08
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StratGoatCom posted:EP is largely a... proselytory? Is that a word? setting, that exists to push certain discourses in futurology - Firewall itself is descended from in-universe versions of groups like Lifeboat, MIRI and the IEET that run on that grift. EP seems to namedrop these concepts with mechanical precision. If I recall, the Argonauts are based off JASON advisory group. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JASON_(advisory_group) Another game, they would be the villains.
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Aug 17, 2019 21:02
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juggalo baby coffin posted:It turns out fat dracula has been fronting a catholic werewolf themed metal band. Kurieg posted:I feel conflicted. Powerwolf helped me "get" nun/corruption fetishes, which I think is important in my ongoing personal development as a gross nerd.
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Aug 17, 2019 21:32
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PurpleXVI posted:The Grubs are also not common knowledge, being just the fragments of a terrified, hunted race hiding in the space between the stars and only a handful of humans know about them and have encountered them. The Hades matrix is again only known to a handful of refugees and rebels on the edge of space. And the Shadows are the secret of literally one insane man living in a tower. I thought there were the pattern jugglers and jumper clowns that humanity had met before the nestbuilders?
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Aug 18, 2019 04:37
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juggalo baby coffin posted:I thought there were the pattern jugglers and jumper clowns that humanity had met before the nestbuilders? The Pattern Jugglers are just algae that happens to store the minds of people it dissolves. The Jumper Clowns are just a reference made by the Grubs when the protagonist of Chasm City meets one, they're never encountered.
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Aug 18, 2019 05:31
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I recall Pattern Jugglers being intelligent, but also a planetwide algae. Basically Solaris. The point being that non-spacefaring species of intelligent life don't get wiped out by the Inhibitors because there'd be no point. Also that whole series is just unspeakably bleak.
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Aug 18, 2019 05:37
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Joe Slowboat posted:Also that whole series is just unspeakably bleak. The loving epilogue to Absolution Gap: "So we got super sweet tech from aliens and saved humanity. B) except now uh something that happened in an entirely different short story is still canon and we're being annihilated by a mistake we made like a millennium ago. Whoopsie doodle. Time to run off to the next galaxy and hide for a while!"
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Aug 18, 2019 05:50
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PurpleXVI posted:The loving epilogue to Absolution Gap: "So we got super sweet tech from aliens and saved humanity. B) except now uh something that happened in an entirely different short story is still canon and we're being annihilated by a mistake we made like a millennium ago. Whoopsie doodle. Time to run off to the next galaxy and hide for a while!" "And also the extradimensional messages were probably from us, in the future, when the entire universe has been screwed by that mistake which is never going to stop."
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Aug 18, 2019 06:06
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i still don't really understand why the greenfly were such a problem compared to the inhibitors.
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Aug 18, 2019 06:57
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juggalo baby coffin posted:i still don't really understand why the greenfly were such a problem compared to the inhibitors. I think in-setting the argument is that the Inhibitors were an ancient, failing system which was designed to be conservative so it wouldn't be compromised by things like sympathy or fallible methods, and thus would always fall behind any species that managed to surpass them in technological advancement. It was collapsing into infighting among different swarms and the like. It also fundamentally valued life, and thus had certain things it would resort to only as a, well, last resort. Greenfly, on the other hand, was designed to be as adaptive as possible, to do just one thing and, never having been organic life itself, had absolutely zero empathic connections to it. Given sufficient galactic cycles, Greenfly would have been defeated as well, like the Inhibitors were, by someone who managed to figure out what they were weak to. Thing is that unlike the Inhibitors which by design let new sapient life arise and challenge them again and again, Greenfly never gave the defeated another chance. Also stuff like the Conjoiners, who were central to most of humanity having a chance against the Inhibitors(even if unintentionally), having bailed on most of human space, meaning that humanity's arsenal was a bit short-stocked. That's my theory, anyway.
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Aug 18, 2019 09:51
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  ECLIPSE PHASE - X-RISKS - THIS TIME SOME MONSTERS Ok one last thing before we get into the monsters. Instead of having like a challenge rating or a level these guys have a threat rating colour code. It goes Yellow -> Orange -> Red -> Ultraviolet, from least to most threatening. You'd expect that in that sequence the highest level would be Infrared and not Ultraviolet, but you would be wrong pal! Also, while the pdf is free to download, they are actually selling all the images from the book separately, and so the pictures in the book are formatted so its really loving hard to crop just the monster out neatly, so the pictures will look like trash due to me not wanting to pay 10 dollars for the 'hack pack'. Unless I can find a nice pic on google images like I did for some. Barbed Eel  ba ba ba ba-ba barbed eel Threat level - Orange I wish there was something cool to say about this guy cause I think the picture is very cute, and this is the first monster of the book, but it's literally an electric eel from space. It lives on the ocean planet of Droplet, and it is an eel that is electric. Its powers are shock and bite. That is all. Blister Beast  those teenage years are rough Threat level - Yellow This lively lad lives on the exoplanet of Echo IV. It's a neo-chimp-sized (I don't know why they couldn't just say chimp sized I think neo chimps are chimp sized also) space monkey, who like most monkeys lives in the trees and swings around with its pack of monkey friends. Where it differs from most monkey is the poisonous stinger tail and the defensive blisters that pop and release foul smelling poison goo when you hit them. They can also beat you super hard and knock you on your rear end with their shovel-like tail. Blister beasts, like most monkeys, are pretty territorial and will come and kick your freakin rear end if you go in their zone, so don't go in there zone. You would have to put a lot of effort in to get to their zone, so you would look pretty silly to do that and then have to come home and tell everyone you got the turds knocked out of your rear end by lively space apes with skunk-pustules. Causapod  Threat level - Yellow I like the Causapod a lot. They were created as part of a contest to see who could design the best brand-new creature (ie not just combine existing creatures) to live natively on Mars. The Causapod won, and became the subject of numerous 'Mandibular Crawdiddy' memes online. I wish the book showed what one of those memes looked like, but they don't. Their genetic code got released open source, and people started making their own variants, and they inevitably got out there and colonised the gently caress out of Mars, and also any Mars-like exoplanets they got taken to. As you can see one of the chatroom-style quotes about it mentions that bright pink ones with anime eyes are canon. The rules for them suggest adding random biological-type attacks to them to represent variants people have made, which is kind of neat. It's a weirdly cute monster and I think the artist did a good job in making a creature that, if it was real, people would want to make memes about. Crabs and lobsters are already popular in memes, and this is a crabtopus. They're missing a variant with a cyberbrain so you can sleeve into it and become one, though. Maybe put that in the next Morphs book instead of 13 slightly different apes. Chrysacid   commander shepard finally got crabs from loving all those aliens Threat level - Orange The first Exsurgent of the book, this is the crab-hand disease I mentioned in the last post. Basically you catch the disease, then crab hands start growing out of your body. First they're little crab hands, like the size of a real crab's hand, but with freaking mono-molecular blades on. They just kind of twitch and make a mess of your clothes and bed at first, but when you get to the next stage they grow into full size limbs sticking out of you, and these limbs have eyes. The text literally says the limbs are all on the lookout for people to pinch and infect with their pinching. When the limbs get long enough they take over locomotion and just drag the poor guy they're attached to around the place looking for buttocks to pinch. Eventually you will have so many crab hands on you that you are all crab-hand, and then you break apart into a swarm of animate crab hands who scuttle around and hide in dark places, lying in ambush to jump out and pinch people. Here's a video of a man falling prey to one of these rogue crab hands. While it may seem seductive to get pinched by a crab hand, you don't want to do it, it will only end in tears. Crab Hands: Not Even Once Creeper  this is how it feels to chew five gum Threat level - Ultraviolet Creepers are evil, TITAN-spawned nanoswarms. They look like a bunch of black bubbles, but they can eat anything, build anything, they're smart, they can set traps or go invisible or fly or make legs so they can run at you super fast. They can hack computers, hack your brain, hack your normal-style human blood, or even turn into special matter that repels normal matter like a magnet repels same-polarity magnets. You may now be wondering why they haven't completely destroyed the entire setting with all these powers, and the book actually beat you to that question:  They are very reminiscent of the Inhibitors from Revelation Space, who also appear as weird black bubbles, and are made of femtotechnology, just like the Inhibitors are made of femtotechnology. Femtotechnology is just Nanotechnology but smaller, so you know it is more powerful/better. One problem the vast majority of sci-fi doesn't cover is that actual nanotechnology would be very fragile. Think about how weak a single sheet of paper is compared to a phone book, and then magnify that difference in durability by a million. If you're made out of a handful of atoms you can get shaken apart by even slightly elevated temperatures, due to the fact that heat is atoms vibrating. The heat generated by a nanoswarm breaking down an object might raise the temp enough to break the nanoswarm itself. Eclipse Phase kind of acknowledges this here by saying the Creeper stays at 45 degrees centigrade regardless of its activity level. It'd also be very slow breaking something down with a nanoswarm, even if the entire surface of the object or person was covered in nanobots, for the same reason it would be slow cleaning the empire state building with a toothbrush. Human bodies are made out of a shitload of atoms, and scraping away one-atom-thick layers would be a very slow way of breaking you down. Scratching an itch scrapes away an amount of cells it would take a nanoswarm hours to do. I mostly include this here because this is one mistake that even 'hard' SF makes frequently. The idea of a big sentient cloud of hollywood acid is a good scary image, but it's not even in the realm of possibility. The right place for nanobots is in temperature controlled environments where they can work slowly, or in concert with larger machines, like inside a fabricator machine or the human body. The original proposed 'grey goo' scenario included the nanobots combining into larger disassembler and factory machines to make breaking down the Earth itself much faster, and to make making more nanobots faster. Nanobots who consume matter then build more nanobots from it are a threat you could beat with a hammer and some patience. Defiler  original morph do not steal Threat level - Yellow to Red depending on form To follow up our first Exsurgent, here's our first Exhuman. Defilers are guys who literally wanted to be the Xenomorphs from the Aliens franchise, but were too insecure in their hetero masculinity to stick with the phallic design and psychosexual-imagery-based life-cycle, so they just sting people to infect them with offspring now, and look less cool. The original Defilers are human minds in monster bodies, but their offspring grow as parasites in the living or dead body of the defiler's sting-victim, then burst out as the little gribbler dude at the bottom of the pic. If they live long enough hunting rats as a gribbler they metamorphose into a full defiler, but one with a feral brain. So if you run into a nest of these guys, don't be surprised if one of them suddenly busts out an AK and goes loud on your rear end. The little gribblers are yellow threat, the feral defilers are orange, and the smart defilers are reds. All of them emit pheromones that make you really scared, but I guess they couldn't get the acid blood working so they just spit acid instead. Dreadnought  Threat level - Ultraviolet Another exhuman thingy, these guys are made by the Rortians. Rortians are exhumans obsessed with hive minds, and they also want to take over the pandora gate network and make everyone be hive minds also. That is all the info we are given. They use these big tank bodies to accomplish their goals, which are crewed with networked egos that were evilly made into a hive mind by the Rortians. I don't really see what is so complicated about this body that it would need a hive mind to drive, considering any normal human can go and operate an octopus body with only minor difficulty. Anyway, it's a big tough tank robot with a shitload of guns and missiles and every type of fancy subsystem to gently caress you up. It also inflicts damage on you if you try to sleeve yourself into it, because you probably aren't a hive mind. I'm starting to think the hive mind thing is just tacked on to prevent players from stealing a cool unstoppable tank robot body. Extractor  better metal snake Threat level - Yellow Back in the TITAN wars, the TITANs had a minor obsession with stealing people's egos. Egos as in their mind, they didn't just make everyone really humble or something. They had a cool way of doing this, which comes later in the book, and then they have these guys. They are evil centipede robots who are a meter long, and inject you with drugs then try to bite out your cortical stack, which as everyone knows is your brain backup drive. The extractors would bite it out, then swallow it with a cartoon gulping noise. For some reason their bodies can only store 12 cortical stacks, which seems like a weird thing to specify, and a weirdly small amount of storage space for a meter-long snake. Their short legs somehow enable them to pounce really far, and they have deployable helicopter blades in case they need to fly around. You could do a funny storyline where a guy keeps one of these in a cage and lets it bite him so he can get high off its drugs, but they don't do anything like that in this book. Factors  so cool hes smoking freakin weeeeed Factors, like I said before, are the most wasted part of Eclipse Phase. They're cool and friendly slime-mold aliens who slug about the place, can change shape, combine together to form a mega-factor, or a bunch of other stuff. The Ambassador in the picture above is their attempt at looking sorta human for trade dealings. Apparently they evolved intelligence and teamwork so they could trick larger animals into traps and then eat them, which is apparently totally different to the reasons humanity evolved intelligence. In their trade dealings they try to get the most technology out of transhumanity, while giving away as little of their own information as possible. Again, completely different to humans. It's weird that this part of the book is so bitchy about the Factors, given that in the lore section earlier on they made this joke: quote:While dealing with a race of slimy, deceptive, thieving predators, the Factors have shown surprising restraint. Many sentinels look at the Factors who have, over the past eight years, withheld almost everything about themselves and their motivations, and immediately categorize them as hostile. Given transhumanity’s history of handling native peoples, I would argue the Factors are practically saints.  . Here's a picture of their Gestalt form, which is ultraviolet threat level. Apparently transhumanity has never seen this form, so I have no idea why there is a man in the picture trying to flamethrower this one:  I saved the best Factor entry for last, and that is the Minikin. The Minikin are the Muppet Babies to the Factors' Muppets, and they are little dudes who split off from the big Factors to go and do little tasks they are specialised for. They are also adorable:  Factors are the best. Replace Eclipse Phase with Eclipse Factors and make everyone be Factors. THAT'S IT FOR NOW NEXT TIME ON X-RISKS: TITAN poo poo, A PLANE, AND REALLY DUMB PARASITES!
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Aug 18, 2019 15:37
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quote:Threat level - Ultraviolet It's not so much that's hard, I think, as the brain had some specific software and hardware design choices to explicitly make it more compatible with hiveminds, with no considerations given to conventional operation, and the software and hardware demands are significantly different - though preventing 'players from stealing a cool unstoppable tank robot body' may have been a specific in-universe design priority as well. You could still do it, you'd just need to bin the unconventional computers and put in something from an arachnoid or preferably a Fenrir,  which is essentially a PC usable version of this, with a more flexible war load and more conventional electronics setup but somewhat thinner skin, and can have multiple minds as a crew, without needing the melding. StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Aug 18, 2019 |
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Aug 18, 2019 15:56
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I suppose the evil transhumanists turning themselves into villains from various popular sci-fi franchises is actually completely on point.
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Aug 18, 2019 16:37
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Making them unoriginal dickheads is a nice touch. There are some more edgelord exhumans later on too, and one kinda actually interesting exhuman.
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Aug 18, 2019 16:51
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Yeah like it makes sense to me for the Rortian doom tanks (also I forgot their names, thanks for doing this book to remind me) would crew their redundant systems with pared-down forks. It strikes the right balance between "sci-fi hivemind shenanigans" and "anyone who's going to be this amoral about transhumanism and science is going to have their own form of a society built on slave labor". I've seen people build a slave society out of a libertarian Minecraft server, this is just a logical extrapolation of the technology these jerks have at their metaphorical fingertips. e: to clarify just because it's a logical extrapolation doesn't mean you should and doesn't mean you're not a tremendous douche. You can use fire and a tank of propane to cook a steak or fire clay pots. You can also use it for arson. Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Aug 18, 2019 |
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Aug 18, 2019 16:56
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Zereth posted:Google is not giving me relevant results, what's this? It's one of the groggy complaints that's made unnecessarily abrasive by grogs in internet debates and generates unnecessarily abrasive responses as a result but maybe has a germ of a point in it. It's to do with games that specify that anything that happens "must make sense in the story". Thing is, Chandler's Law basically says that you can always find some way to making "someone comes through the door with a [weapon]" make sense - there's always the possibility of an enemy existing just outside the character's view, and once any villain in a story is established there's always the possibility they've sent someone after the heroes. Thus Chandler's Flaw, which is that actually there's a whole bunch of constraints that have to be allowed for other than just fitting into continuity, but often aren't mentioned. It's like the agency vs pacing issue - I'm sure for many people it's so obvious and easy to fix they never even notice, but those aren't the people reading your advice book/paragraph.
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Aug 18, 2019 17:55
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juggalo baby coffin posted:Crab Hands: Not Even Once Whoa, huge slam on CRUDBUMP out of nowhere. hyphz posted:Chandler's Law basically says that you can always find some way to making "someone comes through the door with a [weapon]" make sense For some reason, I assumed it was Chandler from Friends, but of course, it was Raymond Chandler. Looks like Tékumel F&F got abandoned. Might make a bad mistake and do one for it. (Tékumel isn't bad, relatively speaking, it just has a bunch of parts I don't care about that much.)
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Aug 18, 2019 18:01
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DalaranJ posted:For some reason, I assumed it was Chandler from Friends, but of course, it was Raymond Chandler. "From where you're kneeling it must seem like an 18-carat run of bad luck. Truth is...the game was rigged from the start." Checks out.
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Aug 18, 2019 19:10
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juggalo baby coffin posted:One problem the vast majority of sci-fi doesn't cover is that actual nanotechnology would be very fragile. Think about how weak a single sheet of paper is compared to a phone book, and then magnify that difference in durability by a million. If you're made out of a handful of atoms you can get shaken apart by even slightly elevated temperatures, due to the fact that heat is atoms vibrating. The heat generated by a nanoswarm breaking down an object might raise the temp enough to break the nanoswarm itself. Eclipse Phase kind of acknowledges this here by saying the Creeper stays at 45 degrees centigrade regardless of its activity level. I'm glad to see more people calling out nano-technology as not 'hard sci-fi' because in reality its about as much nonsense as the Force, warp drives, or Harry Potter wizards. Also, there already are objects that manipulate matter on the molecular scale - they're called 'cells', why do sci-fi writers not get this?
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Aug 18, 2019 20:05
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Ithle01 posted:I'm glad to see more people calling out nano-technology as not 'hard sci-fi' because in reality its about as much nonsense as the Force, warp drives, or Harry Potter wizards. They’re natural and not man made so therefore they’re not science enough.
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Aug 18, 2019 20:16
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Midjack posted:They’re natural and not man made so therefore they’re not science enough.
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Aug 18, 2019 21:50
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Nessus posted:People are broadly aware that organisms are made of cells and have very likely even used a microscope to look at a slice of onion or something in school. That's not cool or awesome at all! Nor is it an existential threat that can only be defeated by giving me a large donation to live in San Francisco and go to rich nerd parties all day. May the gangster future time computer god bless us, each and every one.
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Aug 18, 2019 21:59
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Night10194 posted:May the gangster future time computer god bless us, each and every one.
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Aug 18, 2019 22:03
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Goddamn that stupid Basilisk brain fart of an idea shows that futurists are just LARPing 24/7.
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Aug 18, 2019 22:08
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By popular demand posted:Goddamn that stupid Basilisk brain fart of an idea shows that futurists are just LARPing 24/7.
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Aug 18, 2019 22:16
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Zereth posted:What do you mean I totally left enough evidence around on the internet to fully reconstruct my personality, and none of it will be lost to time before the computer can be built and I definitely don't deliberately leave out parts of my personality or anything! But souls are for stupid people, of course. Only an idiot would believe there's an immutable self that exists beyond your body. Let me tell you about how I can be downloaded into a new body and that will absolutely be me. The extent to which futurism and all this junk reconstructs religious ideas, but with some technobabble thrown in so it isn't 'religious' and is instead 'rational', is legit fascinating.
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Aug 18, 2019 22:17
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Night10194 posted:But souls are for stupid people, of course. Only an idiot would believe there's an immutable self that exists beyond your body.
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Aug 18, 2019 22:27
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