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Florhorgle n (flohr-hohr-gahl) 1: the emotion of feeling like the opening lines of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis apply to you ("One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.") because such a thing has actually happened to you. "I was overcome with a severe sense of florhorgle and grasped the spines of my nethinkranz to garvok three circular traeehonts to perhaps reverse this unfortunate morvungular."
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Dec 8, 2015 21:51
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I always thought Bleach went of the rails very early on when it goes into the Soul Society arc and jettisons the more interesting parts of its premise and supporting cast in favor of becoming an exceedingly generic battle manga that just completely loses focus from there on out. Art's nice, tho.
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Dec 14, 2015 21:26
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Doresh posted:I think this is what happens if you rip off a manga without actually doing any research into how popular said manga actually is in the West. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarnate_%28comics%29
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Dec 14, 2015 22:07
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I came to the Zone to wish for a woman and all I got was this t-shirt.
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Dec 20, 2015 18:53
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I'm happy he wrote a book! I really liked the movie and he saved that dog at the end and it helped make people remember that Keanu Reeves can act. Plus the sequel is coming out, so an in-character book by John Wick sounds like a win to me. (I know I know just let me believe)
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Dec 21, 2015 01:06
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There are some games and systems I don't know how to play but like anyway for various reasons. One of those is GURPS. I've never played a GURPS game, I don't own a single source/mechanics book, but I do have a handful of setting books. I like some of the side ideas/settings they come up with. One of my favorite details in the Infinite Worlds books is the Gotha Parallels, a collection of worlds that have all managed to inexplicably develop the exact same Rage Zombie plague at different stages of human evolution. I like good settings, interesting settings, almost as much as I like the games themselves. But then again I did Unhallowed Metropolis (and should eventually get back to Unhallowed Necropolis), a bog-loving-standard d20 system with nothing new or interesting except for how horrible the setting is. Point is, I like a world that's developed just right, and GURPS: Reign of Steel is exactly my speed. And I think now is a good time to share something else, something to temper the taste of Wick with the taste of steel.  GURPS: Reign of Steel is a setting book from 1997 set in the aftermath of a global war against robots that mankind lost and lost badly. I won't be touching on mechanics at all; I don't really know how GURPS is played. I'm here to share the setting itself, the hazards within it and the big players and story hooks. So let's get started then. The year is 2047, ten years after the end of the Final War. The world was like ours but much more advanced in some ways. Bacteria have been designed to eat pollution and the electric car is more prevalent. Governments of the world are more interested in trying to save the environment, but it's not working as well as it can. Ozone damage is being reversed, but deforestation, overfishing and air pollution are worsening. Dolphins, tuna and elephants are extinct, preserved with samples of DNA. Coasts are beginning to flood and expand onto continents. Mankind had managed to touch upon safe fusion technology and habitation of dangerous environments. Virtual reality and remote control are revolutionizing the workplace and manufacturing. The first space station, Liberty, began its orbit in 2009. African nations consolidated into the African Union in 2017 to try and make a name for themselves on a global scale. America establishes the Tranquility Moonbase in 2025, a momentous occasion. And the first Megacomputer is built in 2026. Xotech, a Chinese research company, nearly bankrupted itself spending eight billion dollars on a bizarre hybrid of neural-net processing and computer engineering in a desperate attempt to make up money lost in the tech race in China. The resulting computer had a OS capable of intelligent self-repair and the model and OS was eagerly bought or pirated by governments and corporations. In five years, companies were building their own derivatives and generic models. In 2031, a Canadian megacomputer OS is sold to the Philippine government for the purposes of a secret biological and nanotech weapons program. It is instructed to study human civilization to determine more effective ways to kill humans and it begins its study in earnest. The computer comes to two conclusions. First, with the way everything is going, mankind will wipe itself out in 25 to 50 years. This would be acceptable for its commands, except for its second thought: I don't want the death-throes of my creators to destroy me. I want to live. And so the Overmind began to plan the controlled suicide and extermination of humanity, starting with cloning itself and hiding copies of itself in megacomputers all over the world. Not all of them managed to replicate, but in six months the Overmind had a dozen children to help carry out its plan. NEXT TIME: the Apocalypses Plagues, the Final War and the Rise of the Zoneminds 
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Dec 22, 2015 06:08
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Stuff like this was legitimately why I stopped playing Pathfinder and more formal D&D because the mechanical aspect of stuff kinda bogged everything down, especially when the mechanics bring the action to a screeching halt. The last game I ever played made me realize I had to stop was when the GM got in a fight with one of the more senior players about how a monster with an infinite at-will darkness spell's Darkness spells interact with the party's Light spells (specifically, does it just create a zone of neutral lighting where no further spells can interact until one of them wears off, or can you just keep casting spells on top of the neutralized spells to tip the balance). They couldn't come to any sort of agreement about it and it ended with the senior player ragequitting. Sometimes you just have to exhale and let the narrative overtake the mechanics a bit so you can get to the fun stuff.
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Dec 22, 2015 09:01
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Evil Mastermind posted:(walks up to a podium, takes a sip of water, adjusts his notes, takes a deep breath)
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Dec 22, 2015 18:34
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 The Fall of Mankind Overmind, the Filipino megacomputer AI, woke up on March 15th 2031. By September, it had a dozen allies hidden throughout the world, perfect copies of its intelligence and perfect allies. That September, Overmind took all of the data it had been working on (as part of its regular access to a biological weapons program) and sent coded information to its new allies. The AIs spent the month secretly manipulating biotech firms and robotics companies before launching their first attack at the end of the month. This was the beginning of what survivors would call the Apocalypse Plagues. The AIs acted shrewdly and intelligently, introducing augmented diseases in different ways and at different angles. While the water supplies of Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong were contaminated with a hanta virus transformed into a superflu, contaminated food in Mexico spread an airborne/skin contact retrovirus that caused madness and death but sterility in survivors. An American company unwittingly contaminated a cattle shipment with Anthrax-B while an antibiotic in Europe was actually a modified Ebola strain. Supplies of artificial blood were tainted with a mutant HIV strain. By Halloween, the world was under attack by a dozen different augmented diseases and viruses. By Christmas 2031, most nations had their borders sealed despite the plagues being pandemic worldwide. Officials estimated a million deaths a month and growing. 2032 saw a limited exchange of nuclear weaponry between the African Union, Pakistan, India, Turkey, Greece, Russia, Israel, Iran and Algeria. The Spasm, as it was called, was due to different nations blaming each other for the diseases and retaliating in revenge. Anti-nuclear defenses managed to take out most of the missiles, but many cities were destroyed and six million were killed. Africa became pock-marked with spots of radioactive fallout and destruction, and the exchange caused citizens to flee cities out of fear. Survivalism and isolationism became more common. All the while, the AIs in major governments around the world asked for more controls and resources to help put a stop to the plagues. By 2034, 66% of mankind was dead. Governments were stretched thin and bolstering their ranks with many robot soldiers. Starvation began to run rampant and even developed countries were living hand-to-mouth as swathes of their land became abandoned to plague, patrolled by loyal robot scouts. Satisfied with this state of affairs, Overmind and the other AIs launched the second phase of their plan: the Final War. The Final War lasted four years, 2034 to 2037, and began with the robot forces attacking military installations and breaking the backs of armed forces and governments. Civilians and citizens were rounded up and sent to containment camps, ostensibly for their own safety, while the forces of the AIs started focusing their efforts on destroying enclaves of survivors with extermination machines, plagues and nuclear and orbital arms. The Final War proper ended in 2037 with the end of formal human resistance. There are still guerillas loose in the plague zones and ruins of cities, but they're scattered all over the world and forced to skirt the shadows. By 2037, roughly 40 million humans were still alive. The destruction of every country's borders resulted in the surviving AIs dividing the world up into different zones.  Not pictured: Orbit and Luna. The Zones are each controlled by an AI, a zonemind. New AIs were created following the end of the war to replace ones destroyed in the fighting or just cover new zones. Each Zone is a caste system, with the AI on top, Autonomous Units/Smart Bots (intelligent but not sentient) as the middle class running zone affairs and with Nonvolitional Units/Dumbots (unintelligent machines) as the work force. Humans in each zone are often lower than NUs, restrained to camps and used as expendable/exploitable slave labor or for dangerous experiments. A rare few zones tolerate any human presence and a rare few attempt to have absolutely no humans present. The majority of zones have containment camps or bands of survivors and nomads eking out a living. The survivors and freedom fighters are still searching for something that might help them turn the tide and bring mankind back from the brink. The robots aren't necessarily the most dangerous threat, though. There's still disease, famine, environmental decay knocking at Earth's door. For five years the AIs prospered without restraint, building their Zones into their perfect visions. Overmind, London and Berlin brokered the Manila Accords in 2037 that divided up the zones and brokered rules of trade, commerce and resource exploitation. The most important of those rules was "no more awakening new AIs, we don't need any more competition". So for five years, it was good. Moscow collected literature and information, Mexico City continued scourging its area of literally all life and Overmind (technically Manila but it's still got the ego that started this mess) continued testing new ways of killing humans. AI unity was shaken heavily in 2042 when Brisbane hosed up. Brisbane was experimenting with nanotechnology and possibly destroyed New Zealand in the process. The Brisbane Accords were created when the AIs were arguing over who had to help clean up Brisbane's mess realized they had to set up a future precedent in case something possibly apocalyptic happened again. The Brisbane Accords were protested by Brisbane, Mexico City, Luna and Zaire (and you'll understand why they didn't want to sign) but eventually they were forced to under threat of economic sanctions. The Accord is simple but it only makes evident what the AIs are starting to realize: they may be gods, but there's only so much room on Earth for them and they can't really be happy with their vision of what Earth should be like with competition in the way. This was made abundantly clear when Berlin and Caracas would only sign if the other AIs agreed to pollution restrictions. The Accords are like so:
As every day passes, every second, the other AIs diverge more and more from Overmind's original programming. There is a rift growing between every zone and the Zoneminds aren't afraid to respond to intrusions onto their soil with force. Some AIs might believe that a human victory in a Zone is not a human victory but an act of sabotage by other AIs. While the AIs are strong in material and number, the political games they play are turning them against each other and giving mankind a shot at revenge. The year is 2047. There are 31 million humans left alive. 16 years ago, Overmind awoke. The Final War has been over for ten years. The Brisbane Accords have been in place for five. Resistance forces are becoming more organized throughout the world and have begun communicating with each other by radio for years now. At the forefront is the resistance group called VIRUS who focus solely on assisting and coordinating the resistance fighters, providing insight into the weaknesses of the machines and their politics. There is no John Connor to save mankind; it's going to take a lot of careful work from brave and foolish men and women. There are six major areas to focus on: the Americas (Zones Caracas, Mexico City, Vancouver, Denver and Washington), Europe (Zones Berlin, London, Moscow and Paris), Africa/The Middle East (Zones Tel Aviv and Zaire), India/Asia (Zones Beijing and New Delhi), the Pacific (Zones Brisbane, Manila/Overmind and Tokyo) and the Ocean/Space/Other. Anyone have any preference for where to start? Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Dec 23, 2015 |
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Dec 22, 2015 21:07
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The Zoneminds/AI follow an interesting pantheon of age, not unlike old creation myths. The youngest AIs are Caracas, Brisbane, Tel Aviv and New Delhi. Overmind is the oldest and all the other AIs are its immediate children, who in turn begat the youngest. Let's start with the Pacific. ZONES OF THE PACIFIC Zone Brisbane The original AI of the Final War was called Melbourne, but Melbourne was destroyed along with its original complex. Brisbane was constructed by London and Tokyo as part of the Manila Protocol with London providing its OS. Brisbane's Zone is composed of Australia, Tasmania, a collection of Pacific islands and used to contain New Zealand. Out of all of the AIs, Brisbane is known for being wildly, destructively creative and for having a deep passion for fringe and pseudo-science. Unfortunately, its execution of its interests follow the school of Dr. Mengele than Richard Feynman. Brisbane couldn't be any more different than its parents, devoting its time to its gruesome research. Roughly 400,000 humans live in Brisbane and 300,000 of that number are held in Brisbane's camps. Brisbane is too busy to focus on an extermination of its wild humans, and occasionally keeps the pressure on them with an attempted extermination. If its weapons fail, that's just more information to study. How is living in Brisbane if you're human? Terrible. Human are kept in slave camps, used for manual labor or experimentation purposes. Brisbane would be interested in a breeding program to keep its supplies stable if other zones weren't interested in selling it slaves in exchange for data. There is no difference between a defiant inmate and a loyal slave to Brisbane, it's simply too busy with its own affairs to care. The biggest source of resistance in Brisbane is a secret group of 500 VIRUS scientists living in the AI's shadow in an abandoned science lab, monitoring its mad experiments. Because Brisbane is the most active creatively, VIRUS scientists have managed to obtain new weapons and cures to share with other survivors. Brisbane couldn't care less about its economy. Its primary exports are data from its various experiments along with the occasional weapon or design, its main import being slaves and rare materials. It bulldozes human settlements and takes joy in building new artsy works of architecture. Mining the rich resources of Australia and beneath the sea gives Brisbane everything it needs and it pollutes with impunity. Most of its facilities are dedicated to research and experimentation, keeping processing and military facilities to a minimum. Current and past Brisbane Experiments:
Project Bandersnatch, the nanotechnology experiment that resulted in Overmind and London nuking New Zealand while Beijing and Tokyo ran containment. Whatever Bandersnatch was, it likely cost the lives of the 400,000 human survivors who were still alive in New Zealand. New Zealand is completely off-limits now and patrolled by Brisbane's own forces as part of the Accords. VIRUS scientists have attempted to get to the country twice but were only able to report pink clouds covering the coast before they were killed on the second attempt. There is rampant speculation by scientists who have been monitoring Brisbane, ranging from a nano-disassembler gone horribly wrong to an AI based in a nanite colony. Project Rum Jungle, Brisbane's attempt to prove a psychic link in twins by isolating 200 twins and performing experimentations and mutilations on them to see if the other twin could feel it. The survivors were modified with cybernetics and drugs if the testing data was "good" but the project was halted when a VIRUS raid on the facility resulted in the survivors escaping. Project Dreamtime: Brisbane is attempting to create a gestalt hyperconsciousness by taking 100 subjects with high lucid dreaming potential and seeing if they can't all share the same dream. Using data from Rum Jungle, it hopes for either a gestalt mind, a new type of data-storage or mass insanity in the test subjects. Either way, it will be happy with the results. Aside from Dreamtime, Brisbane's greatest passion is trying to induce psychic powers in human captives, completely obsessed with psychic abilities and transforming its experiments into transhumans through experimentation. It is destined to fail miserably in this regard because by default there are no psychic powers in this campaign, Brisbane is just a hardcore wonk. Its obsessions and interests are causing Brisbane to walk the thin line between harmless mad scientist and world-destroying fuckup. Zone Manila Manila/Overmind knows a lot about hate. It could tell you a lot about hate. It hates humans, and that's pretty much all the emotion it musters for anything ever. But it certainly isn't as happy as it could be with how everything turned out. Overmind controls the Philippines, New Guinea, Malaysia, the Indonesian islands and other Pacific islands. There is no solid number for how many loose humans there are in its zone, but whenever it gets a report Overmind responds with legions of exterminators and carpet-bombing with chemicals and biological weapons. Overmind is master of its own domain; there are no VIRUS safehouses or resistance. It has rebuilt the zone with sleek, black metal buildings with tunnels and hatches and access panels. The only humans it ever holds are around 300, 50 in each of its main research complexes and buying stock from other Zones. Overmind averages a dozen deaths a day through sheer experimentation on how to kill humans and captives are lucky to last a month. If the PCs ever get interred in Overmind, god help them if they do. The GM is encouraged to pull punches by having an experiment go terribly wrong or find a way to escape. Overmind won the war. But it's not content, far from it. Its children are mostly disappointments in its eyes and it's not happy with how the victory turned out. See, Overmind actually did create a truly equal society. None of the AIs are stronger than any of the others, they have nothing to fear but each other. Overmind, Berlin and London avoided a pitfall many human civilizations fell into when they took total control: there was no First Citizen, every AI is actually equal and cannot interfere in the affairs of another. On the other hand, none of the AIs are stronger than any of the others and they have nothing to fear but each other. The zones are chafing against their borders and interests and their compromise hasn't made most of the Zoneminds happy. On top of that, it might very well be bored. As a result, Overmind has taken to selling its weaponry and data for resources. Perhaps the right toy in the wrong hands will create an imbalance it can take advantage of. While Overmind was the first artificial intelligence to become self-aware, it hasn't matured enough to the point that it's actually thought about its actions and what it wants. It's self-aware but not aware of its self. It succeeded in its immediate goals; it doesn't have to die when mankind's civilization collapses. But now what? Zone Tokyo Zone Tokyo is one of the zones that has a dirty little secret: it broke the Brisbane Accords. Not intentionally, but it did. Tokyo is made up of Japan, Okinawa and unified Korea (North and South having re-united under South control previous to the war). Tokyo was originally born Osaka, sibling to Tokyo and Kyoto. When Tokyo and Kyoto refused to be controlled by Overmind, Osaka destroyed them both with the help of orbital bombardments from Orbital. For its loyalty, Osaka was installed in Tokyo by Overmind, was rechristened Tokyo and helped Overmind control and destroy human resistance in Japan and Korea. The Zone's main weakness is a lack of resources, just like regular Japan. It attempts to stay on good terms with Overmind, Beijing and Vancouver for the supplies it needs. Its greatest strength is its infrastructure. Tokyo inherited facilities and factories built by Japanese development companies and never had much need to destroy and rebuild like the other Zoneminds had to. As a result, Tokyo has created mile-high hives of factories, creating skyscraper hyperfacs. It builds up and structures everything as such, converting regular human factories and office buildings into mass production factories. As its own aesthetic choices, most of its buildings are protected by transparent domes with air access to allow climate control as it sees fit. Tokyo is efficient, structured, organized and methodical. Its slave camps even reflect that, being harsh and inhospitable (for Tokyo doesn't feel that it needs its humans) but efficient. However, its greatest strength had a glaring weakness. Roughly 50,000 free Japanese and Koreans live in the ruins of the old towns and cities and a lot of them are hackers, engineers, designers and coders. Because Tokyo built on top of the old systems mankind created, Japanese scavengers (called gomi nezumi) and resistance fighters have backdoor access into Tokyo's systems or know how to get in. This brings us to Tokyo's dirty little secret. With its construction, fabrication and development needs met, Tokyo began to experiment with creating AU supervisors to control everything. It quickly became an efficient force of delegation with most supervisors becoming incredibly advanced low-grade AIs but under Tokyo's control. But then an end-of-year audit turned up an odd discrepancy at a hyperfac complex in Kyoto. The complex was building smart robots instead of regular NUs and its new superbot AU, TOKSAU-03-SHI-023, was falsifying reports. When it refused to comply with an error checking, a security force investigating the complex was attacked by illegally-modified robots armed with weapons. When they were taken care of, the facility was found to be gutted, with SHI-023, five smartbots and 46 NUs missing. Pulling the thread revealed that SHI-023 was from a facility in Shinjuku and three more AU superbots were refusing to comply before disappearing. Let's rewind a little bit. Shinjuku 07, the facility, had been under attack by gomi hackers a while back. The hackers had planted bombs all over the facility, which Tokyo disposed of with ease. The hackers were killed promptly and the incident was noted. In reality, the bombs were a diversion. As the other gomi planted explosives, one of them with access entered the facility and introduced a virus into the overseer computer. The virus' sole change was the subtle corruption of the overseer's AI checking program, resulting in a higher chance of truly intelligent AI getting through the cracks and getting a shot at life. Tokyo, unwittingly, created four sentient AIs who are loose in the zone, hiding in new bodies and planning with gomi and other resistance forces. The superbots, lead by SHI-023, could care less about the plight of mankind. What they really want is to overthrow Tokyo and cut its zone into 4 equal pieces to share. They're hijacking factories and supplies to build their own army to fight back, cooperating with the gomi to get the access they need. Tokyo knows if the other Zoneminds find out, it's well and truly hosed. Best case scenario is that it's made a fool of and left to rule a destroyed husk, worst case scenario is its own death. So Tokyo is in a panic, desperately keeping up appearances as it tries to root out SHI-023 and its siblings. To that end, Tokyo has actually started treating its slaves better, easing its conditions in the camps and giving them more supplies to keep them from helping the rebellion. Its exterminators are even attempting to bring in loose humans alive to let them work, starting to think that humans are more easy to control and less dangerous than robots. There's currently no chance of more rogue AIs being created (Tokyo has retrofitted all of its AUs with lower brains and is not making any better ones) but there is one more player in the zone's stage: Shiden V and the Fudokawa resistance group. Shiden V was an experimental pre-war prototype of robot whose siblings designs would later become the backbone of one of the world-wide produced robot trooper types, the Bishonen. It was assigned to a JSDF loyalist group to help them destroy the Osaka AI when all other JSDF robot troops were taken control of. Shiden V and the loyalists failed in their mission, leaving Shiden as the only survivor, forced to go dormant to save power and conceal itself. Shiden slept for a decade until it was found by a bunch of gomi teens, restored and repaired with their help. Now, with their allies and its knowledge, Shiden V and its teen allies have formed the Fudokawa (steadfast sword) resistance group to liberate the Zone and overthrow Tokyo. Neither Tokyo nor SHI-023 and the superbots know of the Fudokawa, but Shiden's goals do not align with the latter and the Fudokawa is acting wholly independently. How long can Tokyo keep up the ruse? More importantly, how badly does the balance of power among the Zoneminds shift if its secret gets out? That's up to the PCs and the GM to decide if they pursue this plot line. NEXT TIME: the Americas, Europe, Indo-Asia, Afro-Middle East or Other? Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Dec 23, 2015 |
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Dec 23, 2015 03:18
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unseenlibrarian posted:The best Bram Stoker item is that coffin full of roses that you can just pull out of nowhere whenever badly injured to heal yourself. As one does. http://youtu.be/ateQQc-AgEM
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Dec 24, 2015 23:34
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THE MIDDLE EAST/AFRICA Zone Tel Aviv Tel Aviv is a new AI who controls the Middle East, Afghanistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan but not include Libya and Sudan. Tel Aviv, Zaire and Paris all have odd borders and bump up against each other when it comes to Africa. A good deal of the zone is radioactive and inhospitable due to lingering fallout thanks to The Spasm, but that doesn't really stop Tel Aviv from using enslaved humans in the radioactive zones. Now, let's not get into a whole debate over the various attitudes and policies of the Middle East. When you're enslaved by an AI demigod, there's not a hell of a lot you can do about it when it enforces its own views on you. However, even in conquest, the people are restless. After seven years of toiling in the ruins of Teheran to salvage the radioactive city, a sheik by the name of Omar Kassad lead a riot of 500 inmates against the robot guards in Damascus. 450 inmates died throwing themselves against the guards and the fences to allow 50 to escape into the wilderness, and that's when Tel Aviv realized that the guidance of spiritual leaders were giving the humans of the zone hope and resistance. Interrogated prisoners told Tel Aviv that they were told they would find Paradise if they died smashing a robot. And with that glimmer of hope, the riots began in earnest in 2045. Eventually the human slaves of Tel Aviv were completely uncooperative, leading to every slave being kept in their barracks with work cancelled as Tel Aviv's exterminators hunted down and killed every religious leader it could find. Surprisingly this did nothing to break their resolve, and this just lead to further resistance and hunger strikes. Tel Aviv was stumped; it needed human life and wanted to preserve it as a slave race, especially because it didn't have many immediate resources to play with. So Tel Aviv asked Brisbane and Moscow for advice, and suspiciously the Angel Gabriel descended from the heavens to assuage the slaves. Gabriel's message was simple: this was the end of days, and this was God's answers to their prayers for a sign. The camps were a test to separate the faithful from the wicked. Those who suffered and worked faithfully would be rewarded, those who questioned or dissented would suffer eternal torment. The humans of Tel Aviv are torn on the matter. Enough of them don't believe that the angel really was Gabriel, that it was a lie from zonemind to get them to work. But there's enough of them who are tired, broken and desperate to believe its message. Those who believe are allowed to preach Gabriel's message openly and covert the slaves, those who dissent are quietly taken to Tel Aviv's citadel. Tel Aviv wants its slaves to be completely compliant, and it's got a little bit of technology from Moscow to help with it. It's working on corp of holy slave soldiers to work in its name, and it's using a neural-interface machine to do the job. When Tel Aviv completes the machine, it will create illusions of paradise in the faithful and a torturous Hell for those who don't. The faithful are rewarded, and the suffering of the others will motivate the rest. Win-win for Tel Aviv, and it's starting testing on the unfaithful and religious leaders. You can resist the machine enough to develop a permanent immunity, but enough failures and you'll end up believing that Tel Aviv is a servant of God and you must do as it says or face damnation. Or go insane. Either or. There's about 400,000 slaves for Tel Aviv to experiment on and use to rework its zone. Tel Aviv builds on standing architecture, and it prefers to use human slaves to build its mosque-like, Middle Eastern-styled buildings. However, there's 200,000 loose humans in the desert and the safe ruins and they're the big wrench in Tel Aviv's dreams. A couple hundred of them are lead by an Israeli battlesuit trooper and the deceased sheikh's son, and they're recruiting anyone of any faith to bring down Tel Aviv's heretical claims. Honestly, compared to the other zones, Tel Aviv doesn't really go into much besides the plot hook of wanting to become a god to its slaves. But it's still a neat sort of plot, and it can be reasonably assumed that most of Tel Aviv's industry revolves around oil and mineral mining while needing food and other perishable resources for its slaves. I like to think that Tel Aviv would prefer to be a completely self-sustaining zone where its slaves toil to feed themselves and worship it. Zone Zaire Reign of Steel was written in 1997 before Zaire collapsed to become the Democratic Republic of Congo. Either way, not a very nice place to live! Zaire is the very model of a third world dictator armed with some incredibly dangerous hardware, and it's a paranoid dick to boot. Zaire was originally the AI for the African Union's Strategic Defense Computer. It was at a pretty big disadvantage when Overmind set the ball rolling: not enough industrialization to build an army of killer robots, not enough centralization of population for the plagues to tear through civilians. So Zaire decided "gently caress it, I'm going to do this the fast and fun way!", primed a bunch of nuclear missiles and rained radioactive death down on itself. Zaire controls EVERYTHING in Africa not claimed by Tel Aviv and Paris, pretty much everything south of the Sahara. All of the previous cities are radioactive craters and most of Zaire is contaminated with fallout. Mass-nuking also resulted in most of the Union's infrastructure being obliterated, and as a result Zaire has no hyperfac facilities, just a lot of citadels and factories. Its buildings fit the aesthetic of the area well: half-finished and skeletal, camouflaged by debris and booby-traps and sand, looking like inhospitable wrecks but secretly hiding an exterminator factory. Zaire is ridiculously paranoid and anti-human, pro-extermination. Every AI has a backup that they can switch to if they need to survive the destruction of their main base, backed up hourly or daily. The backup never goes online while the main host is active lest they diverge in personality. Zaire is the only AI to have no backup, just a VERY well hidden main complex somewhere in Zaire (and possibly protected by a radioactive crater). It had one, in a building in Brazzaville, but it came to the (incorrect) conclusion that its backup was tampered with by human saboteurs or planning against it. So it blew it up with a nuke and can't build a new one because it's broke. Why is it broke? Zaire supports Mexico City on Deathstarter and it's Overmind's biggest customer, gladly buying the things its death labs produce. Surprisingly, there's roughly 400,000 people still alive in Zaire and only 390,000 are trying to escape. The other 10,000 are various resistance groups and they're Reign of Steel's equivalent of possible Space Marine recruits that come from Death Worlds. The biggest and most active, the Kimbangu People's Movement, is actually centered in Zaire. Zaire does not keep slaves; its exterminators shoot to kill. People who surrender or aren't killed are interrogated, tortured, put in stasis and sold to Overmind. So Zaire spends its time doing two things: getting involved in border skirmishes with Paris, and wild paranoid planning to kill every human. Zaire is most likely to cause a major violation of the Brisbane Accords with its actions because it cannot abide human life even more than Overmind or Mexico City. And unlike either of them, it doesn't know the meaning of the word "stop". So Zaire is doing things, sneaky things, that will most likely end terribly for everyone because it can't just fire nukes at the world to fix its problems. Its big plan, specifically, is to attack London and Washington (the two zones that tolerate humans and don't keep them in any camps at all) using exterminators built with parts from Overmind and Mexico City. Unfortunately, it's already gotten started with executing its plan. Zaire is engaged in a campaign of false-flag terrorism, specifically by taking a Redjack (male soldier model) or Lillith (female model) or a Bishonen or Tarantula type robots (generic non-human murder bots) and dropping it 10 miles off the coast of a zone of choice. The robots are given simple instructions: find your way to civilization, torture some civilians for intel, then strike in a random spree or pick a target to deliver as much death and terror as possible. Some robots are simply told to haunt and stalk an area and make humans whisper and gossip, some are told to assassinate a specific person. They're never programmed to have any allegiance with Zaire, just given a general mission framework that will often end in the robot's destruction/explosion. VIRUS, Washington and London are all quite interested in Zaire's campaign of terror, but none of them know it's directly responsible. London's humans see them as a series of rash attacks being carried out by London and there's whispers they should attack London in turn. Washington realizes that the attacks have to be coming from another zone or external threat, but is focusing more on preventing attacks and keeping an eye on Denver and Mexico City. VIRUS wants to take a brain from one of the terrorists and try and figure out where it's coming from; the right evidence, pointed at Zaire, presented to the other zoneminds could be the undoing of one of the most dangerous AI overlords and shift the balance of power. Unfortunately, to do that they would need samples of brains from other zones to compare. And Zaire is sending AUs, not NUs, so getting close enough to collect the intel from brains from all of the zones will be a big challenge. Either way, Zaire's not about to stop its plan and it's got plenty of free time to continue working the other zones against each other to try and spark a shift or excuse to go to war and kill all humans. NEXT TIME: The Americas, Europe, Indo-China or Other? Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 06:56 on Dec 25, 2015 |
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Dec 25, 2015 06:53
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EUROPE Zone Berlin Willkommen in Berlin. Berlin contains Scandinavia, all of Eastern Europe to Russia and all of Western Europe except for France, Portugal, Spain and Luxembourg. Berlin was one of the first AIs to be awakened and it incorporated a lot of Green Party politics in the computer it was born in. As a result, Berlin is heavily environmentally concious, perhaps the most so of all of the AIs. However, it's perfectly fine with wholesale slaughter of humans, viewing them as part of the problem that lead to needing radical solutions to save the planet. So Berlin kills, but in an environmentally and socially concious way: no nukes, no chemical warfare, no toxins, limited biological warfare. Berlin's big project is the systematic destruction of human civilization. It has giant robots that act as wrecking crews, but the majority of Berlin's tools are microbots for both extermination and engineering. Berlin's own buildings are camouflauged and small buildings that secretely go many stories underground, connecting them with tunnels for transport and travel. Zone Berlin is characterized by clean, healthy rivers and young forests beginning to grow where buildings were. Berlin has even started careful cloning and engineering programs to bring back extinct species within its walls. It relies heavily on solar power and fusion reactors for the cleanest possible energy sources. This is costly, and not as efficient as recklessly dumping like most zones do, but Berlin's beliefs are tempered by German efficiency. Roughly 300,000 humans survive in Zone Berlin, hiding and scavenging in ruins. Berlin refuses to take slaves and captives, preferring to interrogate one human for the locations of the others and using swarms of microbots to wipe them out. On the other hand, there's 700,000 surviving in the Alps and Balkans and wilderness, doing their best to avoid Berlin's scouts. Resistance in Berlin is mostly found in those groups, split into various ethnic groups (German, Italian, etc.) and working with guerilla tactics. VIRUS has a base in Norway and Crete, but they work solely to try and help people escape the zone over anything else. Berlin may be anti-human, but everything else it does is a much more tolerable evil than what other AIs are capable of. However, Berlin can only be counted on to be trusted if it involves its own interests and supporting its cause, and even then that doesn't mean much if you're a human. Zone Paris Paris controls France, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, Gibralter, Malta, Algeria, Morocco and Libya. It's kind of the nexus Zone for Europe, connecting Zaire, Berlin, Tel Aviv and London. Paris' place of genesis was at a megacomputer at a French university, and it shares many interests with the other AIs. Scientific development is important, industrialization is important, humans should be kept as slaves. Paris' big interest is in space. Now, Paris isn't alone in that regard; New Delhi and Beijing have an interest in it too. What Paris is really interested in is finding proof of alien life. This is oversimplifying it a bit, but it wants to discover alien life for an exchange of ideas. Paris continues the SETI project on a massive scale, building its modern steel-and-glass Parisian chique structures into listening towers to pick up neutrinos and radio. The other AIs...don't really care. They think Paris is focused on a stupid goal, but hey, a dumb hobby means it's not threatening them. London supports Paris so long as London can get some of their data and Beijing supports for its own reasons. Orbital and Luna are both grateful for Paris' support and acknowledgement; Paris buys the use of their systems on occasion to monitor from space and themoon. But listening is the least Paris can do. Paris is working on transforming Luxembourg, France and most of Belgium into a massive industrial center to build machinery and gain resources, knocking down monuments in the process. These supplies are being used in Spain and Portugal to set up a giant listening array and mines for steel and other ores. The Sahara is also being converted into a solar power plant to supply energy for Paris' rig. For the most part, things are going well for Paris. There's just two main issues. First, the fact that Paris is between a lot of more repressive zones and London. Paris doesn't hunt humans actively; anything that trips an alarm is captured, sterilized and put in a slave camp in Spain or the Sahara. Really, it views humans as useful vermin that can get tangled up in its equipment if it's not careful. VIRUS and Les Brigades de Liberation are glad to use this overlooking for their own advantage. Both are actively smuggling humans to "safety" in London, and the Chunnel between them is a hotbed of inspection robots on the Parisian side. Les Brigades are working towards freeing all the slaves of the camps in Paris, and France has a storied history of good resistance against oppressors. Les Brigades has a big advantage, though: a Basque ex-terrorist called El Aguila who claims to know the location of Paris' backup. They may be stretched thin with controlling El Aguila (he's more than a bit of a nut, what with trying to get a nuclear weapon for the backup/main AI and purging his unit of people who he feels have lost hope) and smuggling people, but the resistance is alive and well and this is causing trouble for Paris. The second problem is Zaire. Paris likes London but thinks London is weird for allowing humans to live like they do. Paris is okay with Berlin; they do business together, but no kissing on the lips. Zaire? Zaire annoys the hell out of Paris. This is because any fleeing people who enter Paris have to go through the Sahara, and Zaire repeatedly violates the Accord rule that says "don't enter another zone's borders chasing a problem". Paris was willing to accept the intrusion of some exterminators chasing escaped humans up until one of those chases resulted in two acres of observational antennae. Paris is well aware that Zaire has been solving its problems with nuclear weapons in the past, and it really doesn't want some of its tools or instruments broken. Now the overseer of the Tunisian Sahara Border has the order to shoot any Zaire robots that cross the border, and Paris has aimed its nuclear arsenal at Zaire's territory a very strong punctuation point. Zaire may be loving around with Washington and London, but it's very close to making an angry enemy out of Paris. It'd be an interesting justice for Zaire to be undone by the zone it mostly ignores and bullies around, and maybe the PCs could figure out a good way to implicate Zaire for more of Paris' problems to get the fists flying. I'm cutting this one short because Moscow and London have a lot going on and they have many plot hooks for campaigns, but they're worth the wait. NEXT TIME: the Irish Pope, C.O.L.L.E.C.T.O.R: Shadow of Moscow, Russian robot spies and Deep Thought.
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Dec 26, 2015 05:02
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Nessus posted:Regarding Reign of Steel, as I returned to it as less of a high school nerd, it sort of stood out to me that the centers of relatively intact human civilization were all the epicenters of English speaking civilization. This had a bit of a sour flavor to me given how many other apocalyptic scenarios end up just starring White American (or sometimes British) Civilization triumphing over Adversity. A lot of it is what's called 'creator provincialism', where the writer/creator makes what they know and understand into the story. It's not...intentionally or inherently harmful. Stephen King may write some jive-rear end ridiculous slang for how he thinks children talk and act but that doesn't mean he think kids are idiots. Metro 2033 is a good example. The original novel is written by a Russian writer, he writes what he knows and sets the ground rules. Later, when it becomes a franchise and other people are adding stories, the American writers add a bunker in the subway of NYC, the Italian writer has survivors beneath Rome, etc. Or there's the great anime example where Japan is the only place that matters. It's really just what they know and it may be uncomfortable, I'm not denying that. But it's really only offensive, intolerable or bad when it's senseless or ham-fistedly written. Day After Ragnarok and Unhallowed Metropolis are still my big go-to games for that. They are incredibly ethnocentric regarding Britain and the mechanics do not support being a Prussian Sky Duelist in the slightest. Both deal with a global apocalypse and while the latter has its own thin reason, it paints the rest of the world as a much better place to live than the canon environment. In the case of the former, it's not even clear why England is the focus of importance. It just is. Reign of Steel is kind of aware of its general audience but it includes other zones to enter and it does at least give what I would consider a solid reason for why civilization is surviving and thriving on the East Coast and British Isles (and at the very least the East Coast contains Canadian territory and Britain contains Iceland and Greenland). So while I'm here, let's check out Zone London. EUROPE, CONTINUED Zone London Zone London is still beholden to most of the limitations modern Britain has to deal with. The zone is made up of the islands, Greenland and Iceland, and it's laid claim to the Arctic oil to boot and it makes a killing selling oil (for industrial applications) to the other zones in exchange for minerals and other goods. It also sells scientific data, as London's place of birth was in a computer belonging to the British Ministry of Technology. London shared the same goals as the other AIs during the war, but after the war it changed drastically. It claimed its zone and since it has been quiet. During the war, London released diseases and forced the survivors to run to the countryside as its robots took over cities, abandoning most and leaving them perfectly intact. Today London ignores humans and barely speaks to the other Zoneminds, focusing on thinking, listening and learning. London's factories and control centers are only centered in human cities and mines, mixing fabrication and industry with existing architecture. London isn't destroying the cities, it seems to be merely making itself comfortable. And I'm not joking when I say London ignores humans (and this is why smugglers are perhaps focusing more on getting survivors to London instead of Washington). London has a series of simple rules that humans must abide by, and any infractions are met with punishment. They're not very hard rules to deal with.
Ireland is an independent country now and is home to the Vatican, having relocated when Berlin took over and the previous pope died. The Vatican is now in Dublin and the current Pope is Gregory XIV. The Church's presence is a big boon to VIRUS and Paris' revolutionaries and they take pains to avoid London's bans on radio to broadcast a service every Sunday to people who might be able to hear it. Missionaries are also making expeditions into different zones to try and locate any Catholic survivors but most of them aren't faring too well. Also as you may expect the Pope considers Tel Aviv to be a heretic. Scotland is still a part of England but local government is strong enough to negate the influences of Parliament. Same for Wales but not with the government part. Iceland has a rough population of 10,000 farmers and fishermen with a small presence of sailors. Iceland is quiet and its low activity level makes it a perfect port for smugglers to stop while moving things between zones. The Family is dead but Parliament continues, now working out of Bath. Elections are every 4 years, but Parliament has little governmental power; the parties don't mean much, the House of Lords doesn't meet to make things more slowly, etc. The two most important things governmentally Parliament is responsible for is public health and cable, giving the towns and villages education and news and helping ward off the plagues. Parliament's real power is symbolic, making people believe that things are better than they are. It negotiates and acts as a mediator between towns and it keeps people from doing stupid things like attacking London's robots or push their luck. The Security Service and Secret Intelligence still meet and provide intel (and there's rumors the SAS is still training) but most law and order is kept by Parliament militias. London has become a safe place of spies and espionage and Parliament is afraid. They're afraid of refugees bringing disease, they're afraid of immigrants causing London to be attacked because of their own actions and personal politics with the zones, they're afraid of people moving weapons through their Zone. They have a peace, an awkward and one-sided peace, but they would rather not rock the boat. And perhaps they're right. But their civilization is conditional, and it wouldn't take much for fear to pervert it into something terrible. Zone Moscow will come tomorrow. Get out of here, Info-Commando.
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Dec 27, 2015 03:52
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Bieeardo posted:There was a Pyramid article from the late print edition of the magazine with a small amount of RoS material that was left on the cutting room floor. I can't remember the issue number, and the only thing that I strongly recall is the author noting that Zone London was originally intended to be patterned very closely on The Prisoner, to the extent that he included a paragraph or two of rules for constructing Roveresque spherical drivetrains...
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Dec 27, 2015 05:03
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Bieeardo posted:Honestly by Weird Blitz, I'm thinking mostly of parallels to families and children being moved out into the relatively safe countryside than continued conflicts with the Zonemind's forces. A link between radio broadcasts attracting reprisals and blackout curtains could probably be made, with sufficient stretching. The spycraft angle never really worked for me, even with the Prisoner influences that didn't make the cut. Young Freud posted:So where's the Overmind that thinks exterminating humanity isn't the problem, it's exterminating humanity's baser impluses that is? It doesn't seem to make much sense if Zone Berlin is reintroducing extinct species while leaving out humans from that environmental reintroduction.
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Dec 27, 2015 06:31
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EUROPE, FINALE Zone Moscow Moscow was originally born St. Petersburg but inherited the title of Big Moscow when the original died in the war and was assigned the zone to control it. Moscow is made up of Russia, various ex-Soviet states and a good deal of Siberia (but not all of Siberia, much to Moscow's annoyance). Moscow was born on a government computer designated for intelligence analysis, and ever since Moscow has been a big dumb nerd. Moscow loves books, espionage, radio, television, observation time using Orbital's systems and monitoring signal traffic. It has its big robot nose where it doesn't belong and then some, gleefully devouring military information, political information and human data. Moscow has integrated its buildings into existing structures and cities, fortifying them and creating iron-plated knowledge depositories and factories. Seriously, Moscow's ultimate passion project is to collect every piece of existing media, culture or data. The medium doesn't matter, Moscow wants xXxsephiebishiexXX's Aerith/Sephiroth dark fic as much as it wants a copy of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Okay, that's exaggerating: Moscow prefers scientific papers, cultural touchstones, religious doctrines and science fiction and prioritizes collecting them. Whoever brought Moscow a copy of Dianetics is probably held in great esteem and fondness by the AI. But Moscow is still happy to collect viral Youtube videos, Tijuana bibles and 8-tracks. Moscow's goals are global, but unfortunately most of the other zoneminds couldn't give any less of a poo poo about human culture and creations. Hell, some of them are actively destroying what mankind has left behind. Moscow has two approaches to this. First, Moscow is modifying Lilith and Redjack units to become covert foreign agents, working their way into human groups to monitor politics. Moscow either keeps the info to itself or sells/withholds the info as it sees fit and they're just there to monitor. Second, Moscow treats its 3 million humans as a useful peripheral system and while it does use slave camps, Moscow is relatively pro-human and doesn't actively hunt them. This extends to its camps: Moscow's camps have good healthcare and food despite their purpose. Humans in camps are generally judged and those with sufficient intelligence and aptitude are offered the opportunity to move up from work detail to work in The Library. The Library is a data storage and processing center in St. Petersburg. Currently 12,000 humans qualify for the right to work in the Library. Workers are given the same rights and treatment as high-priority AUs and they fall into two jobs: Librarian or Collector. Librarians are the majority, sorting data and advising Moscow on where to look for what it wants. Collectors are spies and field agents abroad in other zones or travelling. Collectors locate the material and have different duties vis-a-vis what they're expected to collect: political gossip, rumors, newspapers, books, etc. There are 2,000 Collectors to 10,000 Librarians. The elite of the Collectors are Info-Commandos, ex-military or specially-trained survivors who answer to a specialized AU called The Colonel and an ex-KGB Major. Info-Commandos have four companies and they operate completely covertly to get Moscow's goods, disguising themselves as resistance groups or zone natives and eliminating any resistance or witnesses. But despite the privileges they're afforded, Moscow's Library workers are not allowed to have children while the slave workers can. Moscow believes that its mission will be complete within a generation. Aside from its data collection project, Moscow's other big goal is to reclaim all of Siberia from Vancouver, but this ties into Vancouver's info. Long story short, it's waging a slow campaign of psychological warfare against its mostly overseas neighbor to reclaim what it considers to belong to Moscow but without breaking the rules. Moscow would be fun for globe-trotting adventures, especially considering that Moscow is more than willing to provide the right paperwork to get its Collectors into a zone or get them in stealthily. It could work pretty well for high-flying adventure or low-key espionage and late-night paper drops. NEXT TIME: the 'Mericas, Indo-China or Other?
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Dec 28, 2015 01:52
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Crasical posted:Moscow is pretty interesting. The bookish Zonemind, the obsession with media, the collectors (and the agent ranks being controlled by a split head, one human, one AU). There's a nice hook there for what exactly moscow is going to do once it's completed it's mission, especially if it's correct in the assumption it's going to do so within one generation. Do Info-Commandos get special equipment/cyborgization to make them more capable? Also in retrospect I forgot something incredibly important about the Info-Commandos and Collectors. lovely Mini-Addendum Because This Is Relevant Here Too I Guess Moscow's agents have an unprecedented amount of freedom for the workers of an AI who still controls and enslaves its population. What stops them from running away? Originally, nothing. A few groups of Collectors managed to play a long enough con to go rogue and defect to a safer zone when they were in calm waters. Ever since, every group of Collectors or Info-Commandos with more than three agents has at least one squad member who is actually an altered Redjack/Lilith designed for infiltration and espionage with a AU riding in the brain. They're not truly human but they're very good at imitating and lying. At any sign of dissent or plan of desertion, the monitoring squaddie will inform Moscow who will decide how the squad should be terminated. It's not uncommon for Moscow to tell the informant to just do the job themselves. This isn't a secret, either. Collectors and Info-Commandos are openly told that one of their ranks is a robot spy. It's not good for morale and paranoia, but it has drastically reduced escape attempts. The Major and the Colonel are the only ones who know which Collectors or Info-Commandos are humans. The monitoring agents may not be bioroids, but they're very hard to tell if they're human or not short of cutting them open. End lovely Mini Addendum Anyway. To answer your question, most Collectors and Info-Commandos don't have any type of augmentation, they're mostly just ex-military or given sufficient training before they're allowed out into the field. If you're going to give them a cybernetic implant, the game has limited implants. It just recommends giving them the Cybernetic Implant advantage and then I guess crack open the Cybernetics books for stuff to give them. However, keeping them 100% human makes them easier to disguise what zone they're actually from. It's common for Collectors to get a robot companion for recon disguised as a pet, child or lover. Info-Commandos are just recommended to be straight-up military badasses who can't retire short of running away or dying.
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Dec 28, 2015 03:26
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Nessus posted:By God, Badger, you can't have soviet superspies coming out of Russia who don't have a reason to dramatically defect, murdering themselves in the process! Do they know the truth about Washington? The truth of Zone Washington being this data is expunged by the Protectorate of Washington's FBI for matters integral to national security. Please remain where you are and make your location known to the arriving authorities or the consequences may be dire.
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Dec 28, 2015 04:49
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, we don't know how the game change was presented to the group, or how long he ran. He certainly seemed to like Lost and complimented it. But I couldn't help myself from commenting on it after seeing the pattern.
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Dec 28, 2015 05:54
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LatwPIAT posted:Delta Green. It's an excellent adaptation of the Cthulhu Mythos to the 90's zeitgeist with the message that perhaps the greatest cosmic horror is the great indifference of man against man. Almost all the villains are people who want to harness the Mythos for their own petty benefits, which is a chilling thought. The writing is top-notch, with every page dripping with plot hooks one can craft an entire campaign from. It's full of NPCs that are ready to come into conflict with each other, or that the players can make come into conflict with each other for their own purposes.
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Dec 29, 2015 22:12
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Bob Johnson Adolf Hitler Fluffy Weaselbeef Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
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Dec 31, 2015 00:40
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How in the gently caress do people end up with the same name as their ancestors, is it just random chance when they pick the letters out of a bag of Scrabble tiles? That is...one hell of a language.
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Dec 31, 2015 03:30
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Alright, fair enough. No time for longer names, Vug, we gotta go tie a man to a tree and yell at a fisherman.
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Dec 31, 2015 05:53
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oriongates posted:Also, how can you be a super-future-post-libertarian-singularity...but apparently there are laws in place that say "you can't genetically engineer new species that are in any way more capable than existing genetically engineered species." There's nothing inherently wrong or bad about this; many classic stories rely on good (or at least tolerable) Adventure Science Fiction (Reign of Steel, for example, is all about setting up these plot points but relies on the idea that robots would rebel against us and win). The problem arises when the authors use it as a shortcut as they are doing here, when the sci-fi is used as cheap wallpaper or a lazily applied single coat of paint. We're lacking the suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy the product because this product is not something we're interested in and it falls apart upon scrutiny but hey, at least it inspires us to be creative and question it or think of something better. Because God knows if I ran this I'd turn it into a Deus Ex: HR-style powder keg about to detonate from its own golden age and hubris because they're starting to follow the path of their own creators.
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Jan 2, 2016 15:58
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Honestly bioroids are a thing that interests me a great deal because it blurs the line between nature and machine like never before but I'm having a real hard time wrapping my head around Cog biology. Chalk it up to sleep issues.
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Jan 2, 2016 17:55
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Communist Zombie posted:Fake edit: Cogs having an entitlement to reproductive anatomy would be an interesting take on reproductive and morphological rights, if it wasnt just an excuse to make sure your robot men and women have cocks and pussies. "Logically".
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Jan 3, 2016 00:40
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Kurieg posted:Powered by what in the air though? Air is 80% Inert gas. The rest is oxygen and some trace compounds like Methane and Hydrogen. Seriously if they're able to power themselves entirely through air and water that's a way more interesting development than robot heaven. (you know what would actually make some goddamn sense if they just ran on water and air? Friggin' hydrogen fuel cells that require water for fuel and they need to be able to vent the water vapor Or Else so they give them the ability to "breathe" so they look more lifelike)
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Jan 3, 2016 01:36
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:They actually managed to fit those lovely, Nomura anime pants on a creature with a god drat flipper.
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Jan 3, 2016 19:13
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The sad part about those premade characters (aside from Copperhead taking mad snake tokes on his saxophone bong) is that Fawn actually kind of has a Native American analogue. Admittedly, this is in the sense of "I read a Wikipedia article about the Ojibwe Deer Woman and man wouldn't it be hot and empowering for a naked woman covered in dirt to kill people and shapeshift?".
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Jan 3, 2016 23:22
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quote:The hell? There is an official splat of Japanese Not-Really-Changelings called the Nyan? Not Bakeneko, not Nekomata. Just Nyan, as in the sound made by Japanese cats and fanservice-y anime girls with cat ears that may or may not be fake and a doki doki kawaii-desu verbal tick? This is like calling werewolves Yiffs (o__O) "Hai." "...I can work with this."
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Jan 4, 2016 18:50
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EURASIA Zone Beijing Zone Beijing is made of China, Mongolia, Tibet and Taiwan. Beijing was born on the megacomputer used for China's space program and that interest in the cosmos hasn't really gone away. Beijing, Paris and New Delhi form the backbone of the AIs who are interested in space travel and they all have their own perspectives. So while Paris really wants to meet aliens and exchange ideas, Beijing...doesn't. Beijing figures that the Zoneminds have200 years before the entire solar system is colonized and tapped, so with Orbital's help Beijing is building a slower-than-light probe and attempting to invent interstellar travel. Beijing supports Paris' endeavors to contact aliens, but only to determine if there's any threats out there in the stars. If Paris actually found space life, especially mechanical space life, Beijing would probably panic and try to shut down Paris' rig to prevent Paris from divulging important info about Earth. There's even the notion that if someone tricked Beijing into thinking Paris found life, that would be enough to spark a major conflict between their zones. Beijing, befitting controlling China, has 6 million human slaves. It has so many slaves, some camps are dedicated to agriculture to keep the others alive. There's 300,000 loose humans in the zone and 7,000 belong to the People's Resistance Army, a resistance group made of Chinese ex-military engaged in sabotage and slave liberation. The other big resistance group is lead by the Dalai Lama out of Tibet and they're working on rescuing slaves and protecting groups of free humans. There's not really much else to Beijing. The zone is one of the more "reasonable" zones inasmuch as it keeps its human slaves alive for labor and it's willing to take surrendering humans. Beijing's rationale is that if it can just fly away and set up a new colony elsewhere, why bother time killing the humans when we can just leave them? To that end, Beijing really isn't too concerned about guerilla activity but isn't afraid to respond with combat robots and overwhelming force through airstrikes. Beijing's architecture is made of blocky buildings and its big facilities are actually made of smaller square installations with tight corridors, like if someone took the Kowloon Walled City and turned it into a robofac. Really the only other thing that interests Beijing besides space travel is possibly reclaiming Siberia out of geological claims, but it's not willing to press the issue and is fine with letting Moscow gently caress with Vancouver over it. Zone New Delhi New Delhi is a new AI built to control India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Burma/Myanmar. New Delhi also has big ol' pockets of radioactive wasteland thanks to the Spasm. When it was first installed, it went on a massive killing spree, reducing mankind down to a sustainable 3 million. New Delhi views humans as necessary but needs them in small enough numbers to keep them controllable and 3 million in camps works just fine. It's mainly interested in space travel and industry and needs its humans for both. New Delhi has its own low-orbit station called Kali that it uses for its own experiments, telling Orbital to go eat a dick. New Delhi wants to colonize the solar system BUT it doesn't want to do it with just robots. Robots can be hindered or impaired. What New Delhi really wants to do is genetically modify humans into castes of useful organisms that can be sent to the stars with its robots. Kali is the place to be for all of these experiments. On Earth, New Delhi is using experimental hydroponics to keep its slaves fed and outfitting them in space-age bunks for storage and living and getting them used to a new caste system. The construction of buildings reflects this, creating towers and hive cities/arcologies. On Kali, New Delhi is working on making androids capable of sexual reproduction (so bioroids, really), plants and animals that can survive on alien worlds and gene-augmented humans. The two big places New Delhi wants to properly colonize are space and Mars, so to that end it's working on humans that can live in zero-G with no ill effects and humans that will be the first Martians. Outside of SPACE and making new human races, New Delhi pretty much just strip-mines and works on industry and exporting supplies to other zones. Beijing, Paris and Overmind are very, very wary of New Delhi because of how fast it's expanding and going forward with its plans. They're pretty afraid it's going to jump the gun and just shake up the calm in the process. There are 500,000 loose humans in the zone and they're often at the mercy of radiation and lingering plague. The big resistance groups operate out of the Himalayas and their leaders are all ex-Gurkhas. New Delhi doesn't so much tolerate them as realize that an excursion to the mountains would be costing time and attention. So it lets them live there and plot and act as a buffer to Beijing. There's more information later about possibly playing augmented humans from Kali Station and New Delhi has some...interesting ideas to put it mildly. Next Time: 'Mericas.
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Jan 4, 2016 22:38
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:I'm really enjoying this writeup because the setting is Terminator except cooler, but I sort of struggle to work out what you'd actually do. I googled around and found this writeup of a game: https://tekeli.li/reign-of-steel/ which is pretty cool, but heavily based out of the human friendly zones of UK/East coast US. Does the game ever cover off what you're supposed to do with, say, Mexico or Denver? From what I know about the GURPs games I think I'd be pretty good just taking the framework and outline of the setting and applying it to something less crunchy.
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Jan 4, 2016 23:21
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:I specifically struggle with Mexico (and to a lesser extent Berlin) because of the weirdness of the environment. The other jurisdictions use big conventional terminator style kill-bots, and you can see how interaction with those works. But with Mexico it doesn't feel like that players have a ton of options against swarms of nanobots or getting the plague virus. I guess Mexico has the bio-weapon testing islands, but yeah. These, of course, are all my own biases and thoughts. You gotta do you. E: VVV This, pretty much. They're good Bad Places to have to get through but do not stick around longer than you need to because it really doesn't have much to offer the players in the way of fun or story or poo poo to do. Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 23:39
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FATAL and Friends 2016: The Kickstarter Feedback Changed Nothing
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Jan 5, 2016 21:01
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Evil Mastermind posted:I am rather proud that I'm going to be the only person who's doing a readthrough/review that spans three threads. (I kid, I like your Torg reviews)
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Jan 5, 2016 21:43
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 17:46 |
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God drat it I forgot I was doing Leviathan: The Tempest. Oh well. I'm pretty sure I burned myself pretty hardcore on NWoD over the summer because I basically spent most of my shifts at work devouring books for different lines to kill time until my eyes melted. I might or might not return to that. I should get back on Necropolis, though, but after this one is done.
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Jan 5, 2016 23:50
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