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'apolitical punk' is a contradiction in terms
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Dec 7, 2020 05:45
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I'm curious how AIs work in the Horror ending - what, exactly, is stopping APEX from loving off into space and returning in the 7th world with gauss cannon or something stupid?
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Dec 7, 2020 07:51
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Thanks for the LP, Kanfy! 
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Dec 7, 2020 08:06
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I'm curious how AIs work in the Horror ending - what, exactly, is stopping APEX from loving off into space and returning in the 7th world with gauss cannon or something stupid? Nothing, and in fact, hiding up in orbit or on Mars or anywhere else outside of the manasphere is the best way to be safe from the Horrors if they break through.
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Dec 7, 2020 08:19
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wiegieman posted:Nothing, and in fact, hiding up in orbit or on Mars or anywhere else outside of the manasphere is the best way to be safe from the Horrors if they break through. With the provisi that if you get too many people and too much hydroponics in your space-refuge you're going to start generating a manasphere.
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Dec 7, 2020 08:45
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Now there's a bad ending that doesn't pull any punches, jesus. Thank you for showing everything off Kanfy!
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Dec 7, 2020 08:50
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basically just need stack and sleeves and the altered carbon poo poo at that point to turn it into eclipse phase
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Dec 7, 2020 09:01
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bob dobbs is dead posted:horrors consume upon peeps suffering and pain and terror in a basically direct way but they won't feed on you if you're suffering from other causes in the same way that lotsa predators don't do carrion (some do). so just imbue yourself by blood magic with thorns that cause you constant pain, and if you don't commit suicide from the constant pain you'll be protected from nearly all horrors! so easy! and that's how the blood elves made it through the fourth world. If you took enough future-PCP to be incapable of feeling fear or pain, would that make you temporarily Horror-resistant?
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Dec 7, 2020 09:01
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4th world is dnd fantasy with peeps who treated the question of why there would be dungeons way harder than gygax did, man, who the gently caress knows (theyre fortresses called kaers to hide from the horrors, designed to deal with an infinite stream of the fuckers with warding and reloading regenerating traps, the aboveground fortresses didnt work mostly and the belowground ones worked half the time but hey thats half more of a chance than otherwise. half for keeping civilization, half for dungeon fantasy adventures) (cant astrally project through ground, which is why the underground ones worked better)
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Dec 7, 2020 09:04
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Incidentally, Horrors is up there with Dunkelzahn's will as one of the great rpg source books
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Dec 7, 2020 09:12
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cardinale posted:Thank you for showing off everything so thoroughly; I feel like I know more about this game now than my friend who's actually played it. Happy Christmas, you don't have to prep an update! Well, it's not Christmas yet, and there is one more game... But yeah, I did really want to finish this the same day it began 3 years ago which has made for a pretty intense couple of weeks on the update front and I'm definitely glad I can take it easier now. But we did make it! poisonpill posted:Is there any different dialogue if you were a decker, who relies on the net, after letting an AI that’s out for your blood loose? There is not, all dialogue of note was shown off or mentioned.
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Dec 7, 2020 09:46
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Kanfy posted:Well, it's not Christmas yet, and there is one more game... But yeah, I did really want to finish this the same day it began 3 years ago which has made for a pretty intense couple of weeks on the update front and I'm definitely glad I can take it easier now. But we did make it! Congratulations, Kanfy! It looked like a short, fun little RPG... but then there's no such thing as a milk run, is there? I just looked at my own Dragonfall stats and noticed that I didn't have the secret ending achievement, even though I remember seeing it (mostly because it hurt so bad to kill my own crew). Maybe there are a few more people who saw this ending than we thought. But even if there were, thanks to Kanfy doing Jernaugh fucked around with this message at 10:25 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 09:58
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If you really want to break out the tinfoil hats, the entire practice of 'shadowrunning' could be considered practice for when the Horrors arrive, because every single trick they can pull, some novahot chummer has already thought up and deployed against corporate assets until they worked out a countermeasure and then refined it into something affordable and scalable. As for hiding from the Horrors in space, Zurich-Orbital is only the most famous of the space stations. All five lagrange points are occupied, there's an arcology on the moon, and there's a major space station working on farming wheat in space because Dunkelzahn's will has a sizeable payout for the first to accomplish it. If you go looking for it, it seems like there's a lot being done behind the scenes in anticipation of the Horrors, whether it be to hide from them or fight them.
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Dec 7, 2020 09:59
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Deus and the renraku arcology could also be seen as a dark trial run for horror survival
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Dec 7, 2020 10:05
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Jernaugh posted:Congratulations, Kanfy! It looked like a short, fun little RPG... but then there's no such thing as a milk run, is there? I admit that despite obviously having played through all these games before, I initially did not quite realize just how much longer this would end up being than Returns, 88 updates versus 33! I wonder where Hong Kong would end up, my hunch is that an equally thorough run of it would probably be even longer thanks to all the dialogue and the bonus campaign. Funnily enough it's now been literal years since I've actually played that game as finishing and really liking it was what originally made me go check if anyone had LP'd these games yet which then led to the idea of giving it a shot myself. A lot of stuff in that one that I've never seen myself either, having only ever played through it once.
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Dec 7, 2020 11:47
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bob dobbs is dead posted:turn into an almighty spirit and empower a magical device that gets stolen by a cyberzombie that you meld with and become an all-rear end-kicking machine Can someone elaborate on this bit because I never heard about it before, it sounds extremely great / dumb
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Dec 7, 2020 12:48
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Tehan posted:If you really want to break out the tinfoil hats, the entire practice of 'shadowrunning' could be considered practice for when the Horrors arrive, because every single trick they can pull, some novahot chummer has already thought up and deployed against corporate assets until they worked out a countermeasure and then refined it into something affordable and scalable. There’s also Evo’s Gagarin Base on Mars decades in the future of this game, but that’s currently abandoned because half the staff caught CFD and the resulting Monads made a deal with the uninfected staff and mission/corporate control where they could evacuate and the Monads could iterate and then upload themselves to a probe to study the deepest reaches of space. So sure, you can try setting that up again if you can afford it. Apparently Ares was raiding the bug spirit meta planes and had bases there in order to try and find better ways to kill them, but after the loving they gave Detroit where Bug Spirit possessed employees (Firewatch agents?) came back and did something with an Astral Rift that took out their entire board and much of the city, that’s not happening again anytime soon.
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Dec 7, 2020 13:26
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Kanfy posted:You are right and that might've well been what they were thinking about, I was only considering the actual ending texts and hadn't looked through all dialogue yet. Yes, that is exactly what I was referring to as the darkest timeline! I remember making this choice on a lark, reloading after completing my second playthrough (releasing APEX), and thinking I'll just see a nice small "Game Over" screen. Getting a whole new map instead, with so much content was unexpected. Both time I played, I played as non-magical characters, so I missed the whole exposition and hints towards Horrors that were thrown around the magic shop, so this came out of left field for me - I never knew about Dunkelzahn's plan, so I thought this was more the "dragons are Earth's immune system". Still, as I read, I got more and more freaked out. And then came the coda of final conversation with Audran the nihilist, and a gun in my character's hands. Probably the best "bad ending" for a game ever.
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Dec 7, 2020 15:25
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RabidWeasel posted:Can someone elaborate on this bit because I never heard about it before, it sounds extremely great / dumb In very short, the Big D didn't do anything by halves or wholes but by both and made somewhat sure that he was going to have some help in that whole leveling out the mana spikes and fighting horrors thing that came out of his ritual suicide. That help ended up being one of the early cyber-zombies, built to specs that few could manage.
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Dec 7, 2020 15:37
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Thanks Kanfy for the great LP! I dropped the game halfway because I got bored with the actual gameplay, but I'm glad to finally find out how the story ended! Also thanks to everybody in the thread jumping in with random lore! It was fun reading about the crazy stuff that I would never have known about. Would be cool if the in-game BB included more of this.
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Dec 7, 2020 16:02
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I've heard about that ending, but I'm one of those cowards who can never take evil options in video games because it makes me feel bad so I've never seen it. Thanks for a great LP!
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Dec 7, 2020 16:08
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GhostStalker posted:There’s also Evo’s Gagarin Base on Mars decades in the future of this game, but that’s currently abandoned because half the staff caught CFD and the resulting Monads made a deal with the uninfected staff and mission/corporate control where they could evacuate and the Monads could iterate and then upload themselves to a probe to study the deepest reaches of space. So sure, you can try setting that up again if you can afford it. I'm just gonna read that as Elon's Gagarin Base.
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Dec 7, 2020 16:27
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JustJeff88 posted:Since the idea in this apocalyptic ending be that the Horros kill everything, do you think that the logical (though admittedly fictional and purely conjectural) conclusion would be that the horrors would either 1) Die after having devoured all of the available prey or B) Hang around until the next mana downcycle and then gently caress off, leaving the planet lifeless? They would absolutely gently caress around here until there is not enough mana for them to survive. Which would probably happen at some moment, but it's hard to know when. In fact, near the end of the Fourth World the magic stopped leaking from the world and stabilized for a while (this is when the events of Earthdawn take place). I would say the metahumanity is hosed in the bad ending, because they hadn't rediscovered all the things that protected them from the Horrors in the Fourth World. The average Shadowrun mage is pathetic compared to their Earthdawn counterpart in every possible way. They don't even know the method of filtering magic, which means the mere proximity of Horrors somewhere in Astral Space would make them die or get Marked every time they cast a spell. And without protection rituals, barriers made of earth essence and other security measures common in kaers, it's only a matter of time before everyone gets eaten.
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Dec 7, 2020 16:45
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You know, this reveals the other important possibility: Lowfyr was there to give a job interview and the impression he was omnipotent and you already worked for him anyway, so why not get paid? Of course he's going to pretend he was on top of everything, while in reality he got lucky by the skin of his teeth that someone stopped the plague.
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Dec 7, 2020 16:55
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My impression from the thread cannon ending is that Lowfyr probably knew something was up with the manor. Passing along the right info to get shadow runners hired to hit the place was probably the equivalent of kicking over the anthill to see what happens.
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Dec 7, 2020 18:23
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My impression was that Lofwyr was bullshitting after the fact to preserve the illusion of draconic schemes being utterly beyond meta-humans, while the reality is that he was blindsided on the scale of the threat and would have died with the other dragons if Rosa and co. hadn't saved the day.
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Dec 7, 2020 18:27
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Little from column A, little from column B, is my take. "Adrian Vauclair has the physical body and astral soul of Feurschwinge trapped in his milspec estate bunker and is plotting revenge" is easy to figure out. "Adrian Vauclair has devised a turbovirus that is designed to silently destroy dragonkind by the vector of nuking Berlin" is a little harder. I suspect Lofwyr knew the ends, but not the means, and by the time the means would have been discovered, it would have been far too late. Thus the combination of draconic saving-face and business angle of "hey, yo, you really saved my bacon (which I totally made you do) so why not help me out on a more serious basis". KataraniSword fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 18:34
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That's a bit more of what I was getting at. I'm willing to believe he facilitated a shadow run against the facility in part to figure out what was fully going on or disrupt it in a deniable way. He had no idea what was really going on and pretending it was all part of a master plan is just face saving bullshitting though.
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Dec 7, 2020 18:36
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Soylent Pudding posted:That's a bit more of what I was getting at. I'm willing to believe he facilitated a shadow run against the facility in part to figure out what was fully going on or disrupt it in a deniable way. He had no idea what was really going on and pretending it was all part of a master plan is just face saving bullshitting though. Yeah, and the omniscient angle is easy to pull off; it's not like Rosa and crew left any survivors after that mess, and they spent plenty of time heading back home and unwinding/decompressing, which is plenty of time to send a task force of shamans to poke the astral plane and find out just what the gently caress went down.
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Dec 7, 2020 18:40
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I suspect Lofwyr might have been a bit behind on the viability of bioweapons as the list of things of things capable of killing a healthy Great is tiny and biowarfare is not yet a proven and stable military science. Also I randomly found this image: 
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Dec 7, 2020 18:43
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Cythereal posted:I've heard about that ending, but I'm one of those cowards who can never take evil options in video games because it makes me feel bad so I've never seen it.  CannonFodder posted:I'm just gonna read that as Elon's Gagarin Base.
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Dec 7, 2020 20:00
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I'm curious how AIs work in the Horror ending - what, exactly, is stopping APEX from loving off into space and returning in the 7th world with gauss cannon or something stupid? Depending on their timing, metahuman interference or lack of metahuman assistance. Before the Horrors show up, none of the infrastructure for getting into space will want to cooperate with an AI. After the Horrors show up, the infrastructure for getting into space will be unmanned or repurposed or actively breaking down. They have to find a way to get themselves loaded into a rocket or on the Kilimanjaro mass driver at a point where security is lax but the places are still operational. Once in space they have to deal with the fact that their a sapient being thats been cutoff from most of the stimulus they're used to, just like an astronaut. They're also not likely to be able to afford a lot of parts redundancy so if anything goes wrong on their century long voyage they're screwed.
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Dec 7, 2020 20:41
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Cythereal posted:I've heard about that ending, but I'm one of those cowards who can never take evil options in video games because it makes me feel bad so I've never seen it. I don't never take evil options, because i do want to see as much as I can... but I tend to be more adversely affected depending on the quality of the writing and the maintenance of tone*, so if something is really good at empathic connection, the only way I can see it is if I know I had no part in bringing it about. Becomes too much otherwise. So reasonably, the only time I would see this ending is through an LP like this one. Thanks for making yours so good, kanfy  *though sometimes even that isn't a guarantee in my case, as I can only play classic doom for so long because- I swear this is true- the monster death sounds get to me, particularly the Imps.
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Dec 7, 2020 21:29
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The last time I was able to play through an "Evil" playthrough was KOTOR II. The writing helped; but even still the only time I really enjoyed being Dark Side was the playthrough where I got the Light Side results while choosing the quick and easy path and giving into anger. Some Nar Shadaa crimelord tries to muscle me and I lightsabre them: oh look I broke the power of the exchange and saved a bunch of refugees who I snarked at but still helped out. Ignore the really cruel options but get the fun of taking the angry/violent options a Jedi shouldn't do.
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Dec 7, 2020 22:10
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I rarely do Evil Playthroughs, but mostly because games generally just  the evil path by just locking you out of questlines...or by making it the exact same path that a good character does, you just act like more of a selfish dick as you save the world.
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Dec 7, 2020 22:45
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The one game that I've played that really had an official Evil Quest Line was Undertale, and Undertale Genocide runs are, pardon my French, loving terrifying.
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Dec 7, 2020 22:53
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I recently re-read that huge Planescape: Torment LP on the archives, and just reading some of the evil options (including some of the stuff done by TNO's shittier incarnations) is sickening. Logically I am aware that it's just 1's and 0's, but the thought of choosing those in game makes me pre-hate myself and I wasn't even planning on doing it!
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Dec 7, 2020 23:42
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Soul Nomad and The World Eaters has a pretty evil evil path.
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Dec 8, 2020 00:05
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MagusofStars posted:I rarely do Evil Playthroughs, but mostly because games generally just To be fair I'd be a lot happier with "A sarcastic rear end in a top hat begrudgingly saving the world while telling everyone to piss off I've got more important poo poo to do" is more of what I would want out of an "evil path" than the gratuitous puppy kicking we generally seem to get.
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Dec 8, 2020 02:53
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From a few days ago butFoxfire_ posted:Having all AIs be inherently evil and the correct action being to preemptively kill/enslave them is one of the ickier things about shadowrun as a setting. Yeah, as noted, AI is a lot more nuanced in 4th edition+. I'm actually playing an AI player character right now in a 5th ed 2080 Cutting Black game I'm in, and while the rules-as-printed for AI are a bit of a mess for 5th, it's still jolly fun and the fluff leaves scads of room for AI who are not all-powerful (in some ways, my character is actually more fragile than her meat companions) and can actually have a moral center. Also this LP has ruled, this game rules, and even having played the game I'll be reading thru it for ages. Are you a bad enough dude to take on Hong Kong, Kamfy?
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Dec 8, 2020 05:41
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