FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

«‹›2 »

StratGoatCom: Aug 6, 2019; Our security is guaranteed by being able to melt the eyeballs of any other forum's denizens at 15 minutes notice

juggalo baby coffin posted:

ECLIPSE PHASE X-RISKS - PART I FORGOT - I'LL EDIT IN THE HEADER IMAGE LATER!

Sorry I've not done any more posts on this lately, a true homie of mine died irl and I have been channeling my sadness into becoming obsessed with Transformers again for some reason. Also this book just isn't as fun as the Numenera bestiaries. It has all the same OOooOOoOooOOOOooo MYSTERIOUS bullshit that Numenera has, but none of the whimsical stuff.

Speaking of which:

Iktomi Kumobot

translator's note: kumo is japanese for spider
Threat level - Red

So the Iktomi were a race of alien spiders who left ruins across a whole bunch of planets in the gate network, then vanished. Like all vanished aliens, they left behind extremely hardwearing technology that survived until some other race of adventurers found them. One of these pieces of technology is the spiderbot, which has a laser beam, and the ability to curl up into a ball and roll around really fast like sonic the hedgehog. Their limbs can detach and interchange with each other, leading humanity to naturally assume that the Iktomi could also detach their limbs and swap em around. You know, kind of like how we made our cars be able to change tires to mirror our own ability to remove our hands and feet (???).

One thing I don't really get is that, at least in humanity's case, the TITANs made/activated the pandora gate in the solar system, which led to the apocalypse. But the Iktomi left ruins on multiple worlds in the gate network. Did they not have any AI stuff to get infected by the exsurgent virus? The kumobot suggests they did have AI stuff. Did they survive and overcome their TITAN equivalents? If so what was a bad enough dude to make them vanish?

There are no answers to any of these questions, and nobody in the setting seems to give a poo poo about these questions or this other race of advanced aliens.

Hey, if the Iktomi were anything like the 'people' in this universe, it might well have been a common aug. I personally like the theme of 'standing in the ashes of a million cultures that died almost like yours did, trying to shift out the truth of what happened'. Maybe you could find out some way to gently caress over the ETI and give it what it had coming for geological time scales :black101:

quote:

Leftover Special

welcome to the edgelord block of this book
Threat level - Variable

I feel like these should be called 'leftovers special' not 'leftover special'. The first one implies a special made out of leftovers, the latter implies a special that IS left over. Anyway, they're twisted freakin sicko frankensteins built by the drat edgy exhumans because they're like the joker on crack and crime is funny to them. Apparently when you spend all your time trying to build a cool new body for yourself you end up with a lot of bits and bobs lying around, so the logical thing to do is make a frankenstein out of them. Most of the time these are controlled by a low level fork of the exhuman who built them, other time they put the ego of a victim in there to be freaked out, and even otherer times they just have an AI run it till the exhuman feels like hopping in the body to gently caress with normies.

There's like 50 variants of this thing, I'll cover a few:

Limbwalker - The one in the pic, apparently these are built mostly to impress other exhumans or freak out exhuman newbies. If the newbie gets too spooked by it they get killed, like when a crime gang makes you do drugs to get in and its a problem for the undercover cop in a movie.
Spider Head - It's the spider head from The Thing, but with robot spider legs and full of explosives. Everyone loves suicide bomber enemies.
Freezer Trap - This doesn't really seem like a monster so much as a trap. It's an exhuman's victim strapped to an operating table. The victim draws in the player asking for help, but SURPRISE! their limbs were replaced with freezing bombs that go off and freeze the drat team! Classic.
Snack Bar - A prey animal body with the ability to rapidly regenerate so the predator exhumans can just hunt it over and over and eat its sweet flesh. Apparently the egos who get sleeved in these get told they can become a predator if they kill one of the other predators while in the prey body, and sometimes it's even true.

Those wacky exhumans sure are twisted, like the drat movie SAW on crack!

Anyone who would abjure their humanity like that would probably be an S-tier edgelord at minimum, so I'm not precisely surprised that they behave like this. :stare:

quote:

Neurode

i know what i want, and i want it now / i want you, cause i'm mister brain
Threat level - Red

More exhumans, these guys want to be the smartest guys ever, and they do it by making their brains really big or having a lot of brains. And it kind of works, I guess. They mostly attack through drones and other robot proxies, cause they can control a lot of them using their super smart brains. They're pretty weak in person, being a giant brain, but because they are geniuses they are always one step ahead. This is not represented mechanically, so I guess they are meant to be used like a sci-fi Acerak from Tomb of Horrors, ie the GM invents some horrible hell fucker of a dungeon and the neurode takes credit.

Now see if I was a really smart brain monster, personally I would put myself in one of the many giant robot bodies on the market, maybe even design my own really good one using my smart brain, then live like Krang from teenage mutant ninja turtles. That's like the best of both worlds. You could still have a whole network of drones and cameras and traps and whatever, but you'd also have an extremely killy robot to live in.

The little chat bubble sidebar says that although most Neurodes claim to have purged themselves of primitive human emotion, the most effective way to get one to make mistakes is to remind it of its pre-neurode life. Probably by calling it a bitch nerd and threatening to swirly it. There's also a thing saying nobody has ever heard of one successfully becoming a watts-mcleod psychic giant brain, BUT MAYBE THAT'S CAUSE EVERYONE WHO SAW IT GOT KILLED BY IT OOOOO!!!!

(the psychic giant brain is not statted)

Although I've made fun of the Neurode a lot here, I do like it. The idea of achieving singularity level intelligence biologically is cool, brain monsters are cool, the implementation is just a bit lazy. It gets no special skills, it just has high skills and high intelligence stats. You could swap the stats of the Fetch and the Neurode and it would make no loving difference because neither have any unique powers, just a butt ton of skills.

I also don't get why only exhumans would want to push the limits of how smart you can get. There's the menton morph that is a standard body meant to be smarter, but if getting smarter is just as simple as daisy chaining regular brains or cyberbrains, why aren't non-evil people doing it?

Speaking as a retro software enthusiast, I think I have a guess; it's like trying to run some flighty old games on your top of the line 3900x and 2080ti - it both runs the game too fast, and the changes needed to support that speed mean that either the game doesn't respond right to the new hardware, or certain older features were deleted; either you get erratic behavior from trying to run a mind intended to run on a human brain, or you gently caress about with hex editors trying to make the ego something that works correctly on the thing and bork the drat thing or cause the thing to get buggy and weird - and given that exhumans are consistently edgelords at best, you don't want to see what happens when they get erratic. The arch isn't really compatible with things intended to run on savanna apes. Mentons are like a somewhat faster Savanna ape that, while less powerful, is close enough that a human ego runs without too much bugginess.

Seriously erratic behavior seems to be a consistent issue with amplified intelligence substrates in this universe - the Hyperbright morph, basically somewhere between a normal menton and this gobbet of head cheese is a pretty janky piece of shite that needs regular doses of brain drugs to avoid getting seriously brokebrained, a janky metabolism that runs like a blast furnace to run that brain and literal cooling fins to avoid the brain matter overheating. It's like multithreading, you need to tinker the software to specifically use the capability. And Neurodes are both created by the equivalent of the idiots who build these alarming constructs in the Bitcoin threads and don't care about erratic behavor.

Though how the gently caress you can put a human brain tape on a literal intelligent octopus and have it run is beyond me - at least uplifted birds are still tetrapoda. Those things literally evolved eyes on an entirely separate path then we did!

Edit: one risk I note they didn't bring up is that a Fetch and a neurode may be hard to distinguish at first, and if it came off the Cronus or Akonus codelines, it may either run much more smoothly out of the box, or be able to adapt itself to the new substrate without too much trouble. The fact that Creepers or TITAN nanoswarms or some previously unknown exsurgent horror might start coming out the walls at random if the Proxy made the wrong call in tasking a team would certainly up the pucker factor in Neurode extermination runs. :stonklol:

StratGoatCom fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Sep 2, 2019

# ¿ Sep 2, 2019 12:46

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 17, 2024 04:06

StratGoatCom: Aug 6, 2019; Our security is guaranteed by being able to melt the eyeballs of any other forum's denizens at 15 minutes notice

juggalo baby coffin posted:

Self-replicating Nanoswarm

Threat level - Ultraviolet

So uh, this is the exact same thing as the creeper. Remember how I said the fractal was very similar to the creeper and seemed redundant? Well, at least the fractal was a different shape. The nanoswarm is exactly the same as the creeper, even down to its powers being basically 'does whatever it wants'.

I think the biggest difference is that you can :flame:

a Nanoswarm and have it work, somewhat - or at least enough to make it gently caress off for a while. That, and the things need air or water to get around, unlike a Creeper. They can also be printed out of a standard nanofabricator, I think, giving them the ability to show up anywhere that could be hacked, on paper at least. In practice, probably much harder to hax aboard.

Ithle01 posted:

These entries are just so ... boring? The writers create a setting with so much potential and then they just go and write a crappier version of the monstrous manual.

The concept at least needed to be split across 3 different books to give enough time and space to each - Exsurgents and TITAN Gribblies, Exhuman and Transhuman Bullshit and Alien Exoplanet Fuckery. The thing is crammed into too small a space, making it so none can really get the coverage to work.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2019 12:30

StratGoatCom: Aug 6, 2019; Our security is guaranteed by being able to melt the eyeballs of any other forum's denizens at 15 minutes notice

JcDent posted:

Leftovers' special implies that exhumans cut up off the shelf morphs instead of growing them custom. You'd think dickheads rich enough to do it would be able to skip that step and just engineer the MK III Edgelord.

I read it as that a lot of these idiots are the equivalent of those morons with the walls of GPUs in the buttcoin threads - rich enough for a lot of consumer hardware, not really rich enough for that much bespoke work; not to mention, leftovers from experiments

# ¿ Sep 3, 2019 18:13

StratGoatCom: Aug 6, 2019; Our security is guaranteed by being able to melt the eyeballs of any other forum's denizens at 15 minutes notice

Ithle01 posted:

I don't know what coverage you could give these because with few exceptions they're about as shallow as a puddle. Comparing these to Shunned by the Moon is no contest and that's a game where being a rampaging murder machine is built into every character.

Well, for the exsurgents you could do maps of activity across the system, draw out some guesses about larger patterns of activity/agendas, how they operate and establish Exsurgent 'undergrounds' to move resources around, what kinds of Exsurgent tend to be found in some regions, go into greater detail on TITAN experiments or sites, draw out the concerted counterexsurgent strategies used in various areas by both Firewall and the other groups, go into some details on Iapetus, such as maps, or maps of the various Quarantine Zones period, new viral strains and lists of sub-quarantine zone sites of interest, like Caloris or Zrbny Limited's automated mining asteroid, Persons Of Interest, such as known Exsurgents or sleepers, people suspected to be either, groups suspected of having or being made of such, and folks like the sample trader in the X-threats book. There's any number of ways that could be used to flesh things out somewhat.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2019 02:43

StratGoatCom: Aug 6, 2019; Our security is guaranteed by being able to melt the eyeballs of any other forum's denizens at 15 minutes notice

JcDent posted:

Meanwhile, Glory was created by a TITAN that used to be a 4chan server

MYRMIDON was a TITAN cluster that specialized in military leadership; maybe not a 4chan server, but Glory being.... Glory makes a degree of sense as something created as a final 'well, gently caress you too' booby trap to anyone picking over it's corpse - possibly even to other TITANS, since the bastard things were known to have slapfights between each other.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2019 15:41

StratGoatCom: Aug 6, 2019; Our security is guaranteed by being able to melt the eyeballs of any other forum's denizens at 15 minutes notice

Mr. Prokosch posted:

The Wolf reviews are reminding me why it's my favorite nWOD line but it's awfully absurd to imagine blood covered wolf snake-heads walking around on the street holding conversations with politicians and shaking their hands with forked tongues.

Yeah, I mean, imagine noticing that against the types already there.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2019 07:12

StratGoatCom: Aug 6, 2019; Our security is guaranteed by being able to melt the eyeballs of any other forum's denizens at 15 minutes notice

quote:

telling a story about how Sicko TITANs used to chain civilians to the warbots as living armour so people wouldn't want to fire at them, and how it was super traumatizing

Between this and the fact they tried obsolete manned ones against the TITANs, I think the devs played Star and Earthsiege as well, PurpleXVI... pity they didn't learn much.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2019 13:34

StratGoatCom: Aug 6, 2019; Our security is guaranteed by being able to melt the eyeballs of any other forum's denizens at 15 minutes notice

JcDent posted:

And somehow that turned into a series of games about being a neosavage tribesman doing 300km/h in power armor.

They were people that hosed off out into deep space to get away from the corporate hellscape that had sprung up after the Earthsieges.

Night10194 posted:

The main thing I learned from Earthsiege II is that I (not very) secretly love giant stompy robots with guns. And shooting things in the foot so we can swarm over them like ants and take their spare parts and guns for delicious 'build me more giant stompy robots' points.

Man, Earthsiege II was fun.

E: Man, when you think of it from the perspective of the Cybrids, getting salvaged after a disabling shot must have been one of the most hideous fates imaginable. An AI unit sitting there with leg damage, unable to move its body, until salvage teams cut it apart? That's kind of hosed up to do to a sentient being.

But then 'This is kind of hosed up to do to a sentient being, no wonder they keep trying to kill us all' is the Siege games' entire thing.

And then we get Missionforce (basically the Battletech TBS to ES's Mechwarrior), where it's basically the whole cycle that started that shitstorm starting over with the Bioderms... and anyone who played the later tribes knew how that ended. Missionforce has probably one of the best integration of themes and gameplay I've seen in a game for a while.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2019 20:06

StratGoatCom: Aug 6, 2019; Our security is guaranteed by being able to melt the eyeballs of any other forum's denizens at 15 minutes notice

quote:

Whipper

i wasss onsssssce a maaaan
Threat level - Yellow

This is a strain of the exsurgent virus that turns you into the thing in the picture. Then you scuttle around on your tiny little legs and whip stuff with your deadly, deadly tentacles. They constantly, eternally whip their sharp tentacles around like its meatspin dot com up in here. It seems like maybe one of the most useless things you could turn someone into, compared to all the other exsurgents, since when guns exist your tentacles are much less useful. I guess that's why it's threat level yellow.

Worth noting that some of these can use guns and tools, which, for obvious reasons, ups the threat level dramatically.

Wrapper

it's SO HAPPY!
Threat level - Yellow/Orange

quote:

Now we're talking! This is my favourite guy in the book, and that is 90% down to the art. It is a big jolly starfish that drops onto your head and eats it. Pretty much exactly a classic D&D monster, except this is an exsurgent, so that happy starfish used to be a man. If I could be one exsurgent it would be this guy or the wastewalker. They can't digest artificial stuff, so they just barf up any cortical stacks they swallow, which means they have a small ecosystem of extremely lazy TITAN robots hanging around their hunting grounds, hungry for those stacks. They can't get enough of those stacks!

The chat bubble has a guy getting mad people keep deleting his edits to space wikipedia where he is adding the 'mind wrapper' variant which has psychic powers and puppeteers the bodies of people it drops on. Everyone else is telling him its not real, but he is adamant that it is. The entry confirms that it is real, btw, which is why this entry has two threat ratings. It would be fun to be a giant happy starfish with mind control powers, imo.

He is actually she - having gawked at Firewall, she's... well, Firewall suspects her, with good reason, to be something of a closet exhuman - you missed the funniest part, namely that they're afraid she'll engineer one.

PurpleXVI posted:

Except!

Firstly it's a pod morph, so in EP1 it's arbitrarily more garbage than the others both in stats and in types of equippable mods.

Secondly, being a rare specialized weirdo plantimal morph, there's not even the excuse that "it's the only thing we could get you on short notice!" because no one would sleeve in this except on purpose to be a plant.

Thirdly, being a plantimal rather than a plant it doesn't even look particularly plantlike, and it's crammed full of cybernetic components, so you couldn't even give it a reason to exist for camouflage/infiltration purposes.

Because Eclipse Phase 1 likes to penalize you for being anything other than a Metal Man or a Meat Man as generically as possible.

Only uses I can think of is that either you're going to The Plantimal Planet and need something that can run on the local food and won't immediately stick out like a human or robot to immediate examination, or you're the kind of Async that needs a non-human body to not go scatty and this appeases the virus - though you'd have to upgrade to a brain box to get most use out of it. The Scurrier is far more useful as far as I can see, being a bilaterally symmetrical vertebrate, that can glide, doesn't have to lick EVERYTHING - one of the more significant drawbacks to that pod, I'm sure you can see - small enough to get everywhere, and in a pinch can be tweaked to pass as something like a odd looking Swarm Cat.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2019 13:31

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 17, 2024 04:06

StratGoatCom: Aug 6, 2019; Our security is guaranteed by being able to melt the eyeballs of any other forum's denizens at 15 minutes notice

LatwPIAT posted:

Well no, but actually yes.

As a Call of Cthulhu-style climatic eldritch abomination that you're genuinely not supposed to have a decent chance against (which is the inspiration for these: the Whipper is an ill-tempered Elder Thing and the Creeper is a Shoggoth) they're decent. Short-ranged so you might have a chance to run away, but likely to kill you with no recourse very, very fast if you get close.

Outside of that specific role, they're not going to be very fun.

Though if you're clever, you can give them a bad day with any number of environmental owns - like in X-threats, some whippers got rekt when someone put down some super future lubricant and sent them careening into each other, with obvious effect given their blade-tentacles.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2019 17:09

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

«‹›2 »