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 Welcome everyone, to Kenshi! In this narrative SSLP we are following our main character, a Skeleton named Dr. Boom. Waking up in the middle of nowhere after hundreds of years he's forgotten most things, except a burning desire for wiping out humanity! Thus our goal will be to disrupt human society in every way possible and estabilish a mighty robot empire. But first... What exactly is Kenshi? Kenshi is a true Sandbox RPG in a post apocalyptic world with a strong stylistic influence of feudal japan. You have a pre existing world with factions, biomes and all sorts of places to explore. However, there is no set goal, no win state or even a lose state. The game does not care about you or treat you special in any way or form. Even if everyone in your controlled squad dies, the game does not quit, you simply can't move the camera around anymore. You start off the game choosing from several different game starts, ranging from a squad of five nobodies to a guy with a dog or even a slave start. What you do with your game is up to you. But what exacly CAN you do? You can control up to 30 people (without mods) at once, the default max squad size is 20. Or you can play solo, depending on how you want to do. Your characters start off very, very weak and will improve by using their skills. This means if you survive encounters with hostiles you will become, tougher, stronger, faster. If you don't bleed out in the desert that is. How you play is up to you. You can explore the world, plunder ancient ruins, build your own town anywhere you want, run drug smugglign operations, play as nomadic bandits or just crazy murderers. Influence the world by kidnapping or killing important leaders. Ally with big players or just antagonize everyone, it's up to you! Gameplay The game itself is is controlled from a RTS style camera, which can automatically follow one of your characters. You can zoom out pretty far and pause the game with space bar. You can speed up the game clock up to triple speed, but this has to be used with caution because it can kill your characters easily if you don't pay attention. You can give your characters orders and set up several simple automated tasks for bases etc. There are several races playable in Kenshi, all with different advantages and disadvantages! Here's a quick summary: Humans: Humans come in two flavors in Kenshi, Scorchlander and Greenlander. Scorchlanders are dark skinned and excel in crafting and have a dexterity Bonus. Greenlanders are pretty boring and have no real advantages but also no disadvantages Shek: Shek are purple-skinned humanoids with bony horny protuding from their faces, back and elbows. They also have bone plates covering their skin. They are natural born warriors, having higher hitpoints and aptitude for combat related skills. They eat more however. Hivers: Hivers are Humanoids with an insectoid influence. There are three kinds of Hivers playable, Princes, Warriors drones and worker drones. Princes are your "rogues". They are adept in all kinds of stealth and shady related skills. They are fast but squishy. Worker drones excel at all tasks requiring manual labor, but have slightly lower hp than princes, except their head. Warrior drones are very sturdy with a bonus to toughness and combat skills. All hivers can't wear shoes, warriors also cant wear helmets but compensate for that with exceptionally high hitpoints for their head. Skeletons: Skeletons are robotic humanoids that have been around for a very long time. They are the rarest of all races in Kenshi and also the most secretive. Unlike meatbags Skeletons do not need to eat and need special repair kits to heal themselves. However, they have exceptionally high hitpoints and can walk underwater instead of needing to swim. And they are immune to all negative weather effects of course. The world of Kenshi The world of Kenshi is set on a large content surrounded by a wide ocean. The world itself is a tide locked moon, nothing however is known about the planet that this moon is orbiting. The island itself is very large and has a huge amount of biomes/areas to visit, all with unique visual flavor or other quirks. The world is inhabited by the races mentioned earlier and all kinds of creatures and animals. A lot of them will be hostile, however not all of them of course. There are three main factions that have a huge influence on the world of Kenshi. The Holy Nation  The holy Nation lives in the western/central region of the Island and controls a huge area of green farmland. It is inhabited by Humans only, due to the Holy Nation being a group of religous Zealots. They worship the god Okran and require you to always carry their bible with you. Living in the Holy Nation is very safe and secure... if you fall in their narrow window of what they perceive as the only pure beings, namely human males. The Holy Nation hate other races, they hate technology and they hate women. Led by "The holy Phoenix" who is selected from the first born male child after the last Phoenix died, the Holy Nation is leading a crusade to protect the world from another extinction event... by killing everyone they think is a danger to the human race. They run a death camp in the northern mountains called "Rebirth" where they force Shek and dissidents to work until they die, so they can be reborn as good Okranites in their next life. The Holy Nation is at war with the Shek Kingdom and views them as brute savages. They hate skeletons more than anything in the world and will attack you on sight if you have any in your party. The Shek Kingdom  The Shek Kingdom is the smallest of the three big players, but still very strong. Their lands are to the south of the Holy Nation. The Shek are a nation or proud, honorable warriors who live and die for a good fight. They view all non Shek as weaklings and beneath them and only respect strength. When a Shek grows old, they are transferred to "The last stand" and eventually go off to seek a honorable death in combat in the deserts of Arach. In their belief you can only reach the afterlife if you die in combat. They employ a caste system where those deemed unfit for combat have to life their life as servants. The Shek are so into combat and fighting that their current leader had to challenge the previous ruler to a duel to the death to stop them from going extinct by enforcing a strict non aggression law. The United Cities  The United Cities are the largest Faction in the world of Kenshi. Populated by a mixture of all races, the UC spans the entirety of the great desert in the northeast as well as two cities in the southwest of the island. They are led by a self proclaimed Emperor. The UC could be described as a pure captialist society. Being poor is actually a crime and you can be imprisoned for it! Pretty much everyone in the UC is a corrupt bastard only out for their own gains. Guards will imply you of carrying drugs when you don't. Nobles will hunt you for sport and scheme against each other. The UC also basically relies completely on the slave trade, with their closest allies being the traders guild which runs caravans through the entire land and the slave traders who supply their labor camps. Their Samurai warriors are a mixture of well armored veterans and poorly outfitted conscripts. The UC are currently not at war with anyone, but are under threat from terrorist groups and rebelling peasants who have been evicted from their lands. Reader interaction As is tradition, all characters I will recruit after the initial post will be goons! Just let me know that you want a part of our grand scheme to take over the world (hopefully). I'm also thinking of letting readers vote on our big decisions if so desired, like our main allies, who we should attack first etc. Despite our playthrough being themed on Skeletons, I will recruit any race, just be ready that there might be... consequences down the line if you aren't a skeleton! If you want to be part of the LP, please let me know the following: - Your characters name - Desired race/subrace and gender prefix if you have any (for example Male human scorchlander or Hive Soldier, or a skeleton but referred to as she/her) - If you want you can also include the kind of weapon your character should use. Thanks for reading so far and let us begin the adventure! Table of Updates: Update 1: Awakening Update 2: Journey to the swamps Update 3: Fundraiser Update 4: The battle of the Hub Update 5: The price of obedience Update 6: The great desert FrickenMoron fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 19:48
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The wall of goons: Khanstat, recruited in Update 2. Our sneaky shooty Hive Prince. Angry Lobster, recruited in Update 3. Verbal Enema aka Verbal, recruited in Update 4. Artichoke, recruited in Update 5. Nark0, recruited in Update 5. Catalina, recruited in Update 5. Zore, recruited in Update 6.
FrickenMoron fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 19:49
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Update 1: Awakening . .. ... ..... ...... Reboot complete!  Our Skeleton friend wakes up again, lying with his face in the dirt. Surrounded by junk and rusted hulks, with an endless torrent of rain pouring down on him.  : What.. what is this? Where am I?Meet the leading character of this Let's Play, Dr. Boom. He doesn't know his name yet, but he's a Skeleton. Skeletons in Kenshi are a race of mechanical creatures that have been created long ago by humans, both to fight wars for them and do their bidding. This human empire eventually collapsed, and the Skeletons took over, starting a second empire. This second empire did not last very long and also collapsed, probably a few hundred years before the game's time. Skeletons cannot be built anymore and are overall the most rare humanoid race in Kenshi. : Hello? ... great. How long have I've been rebooting this time? It's time for a little system check... : ?! Where the heck are my limbs? I'm just a clump of metal with a head! This will NOT stand, whoever did this will pay for it! If only I could remember...: ... Actually I cannot remember anything. Not even my name. Why am I in this godforsaken place, and why do I have no limbs? I must have been stripped for parts and then discarded. I'm just glad they did not touch my CPU it seems.As our Skeletal friend gets a grip of his surroundings, he suddenly notices a mysterious figure approaching.    :...Meet our second starting character, Servbot. Servbot is a Hiver, from the southern hive to be Specific. Hivers are a race of humanoids that are pretty close to insect people. They live in a hive-mind society, however if a drone or prince gets "lost" from the hive for long enough they eventually develop a sense of self and are permanently cast out of of the hive, never to return. The southern hive is more xenophobic and warrior-like while the western hive is pretty peaceful and attempts to estabilish itself via trade with Humans, Shek and Skeletons. Servbot is a Warrior Drone to be exact, they excel at combat and have the highest hp of the three hiver classes.  :Hey, who are you? And WHAT the heck are you?:I'm hive.. but also no hive.:Hive? What the heck is a hive? ... At least you aren't a goddamn human.. it's all I can remember. Hating the humans who used us, abused us and threw us away. I will fight them until I've turned to rust!:... you go boom?: Come again?!: Your body... no legs, no arms. They go boom?: Listen, I don't know what kind of imbecile you are, but I do not appreciate you insulting me. Now, will you tell me your name or are you too stupid to understand?: I have no name...: Fine then! From now on, you are my Servant. I shall call you Servbot, you should feel honored to become a honorary skeleton my friend! Now if you could be so kind and help me out of this.. mess? Dr. Boom crawls over to Servbot, if your character has no limbs all they can do is very, very, VERY slowly crawl on the ground. The community approved term for a limbless chararcter is "nugget" :Okay. I help you, boom! Servbot picks up Dr. Boom and slings him over his shoulder. At least this will be faster than having him crawl all over the floor for ages. : Well, this is a rather awkward pose I have to say... but at least I can see where we are going. And if you must call me Boom, at least make it sound a bit more fancy. Like Doctor Boom you know. :...: To be honest, I kind of like that name now that I think about it. Very well Servbot, let's actually find out where we are...Welcome to the Deadlands. This area is pretty much in the middle of the map of Kenshi, and it's an miserable place. The ground is an acidic sludge, quickly melting away all unprotected flesh. The water you see in the screenshots are also pools of pure acid, with acid rain on top. Nothing will grow in this land and it has no resources, other than the scrap laying about. Servbot luckily is immune to acid, this is a natural trait to hivers. Dr. Boom as a Skeleton is immune to all weather effects. The duo travels north for a bit, before suddenly coming across the sight of flames in the distance  :! Servbot, are those lights that I see in the distance? Carry me there, at an instant!:... OkayAs they come closer, we can make out structures and pipework. This is Black Desert City, the settlement of the Skeletons.  The first building we come across has a ... bar sign?! Also, more Skeletons live here!  : A bar?! What kind of place is this... let us search a bit more before we enter this place. : ... As we walk past more buildings, a skeleton suddenly starts to berate us.  : Think you've got it tough that decaying body of yours? Try living with a fractured chassis for over 3000 years.: Don't mind this fool, Servbot, for you are a honorary skeleton. : I do not understand, but thank you Boom. Err, Dr. Boom.: And just who are you? You don't even have any limbs. Better head to that place over there... The duo heads a bit further north to the shop. This is a robotics shop, any building with this sign will have robotic limbs for sale.  : Good to see you again!: Do we know each other? This is the first time I've ever set foot... got carried... well whatever, the first time I've visited this shop!: Oh, I'm sorry. I must have confused you with someone else. Seeing as you have suffered quite extensive damage, you have come to the right place my friend.For some reason the Shopkeeper gave me some dialogue as if I had visited this shop before. Normally he goes on a long tirade about business is good since organics are so flimsy and constantly lose all their limbs and that theres plenty of easy replacements to get. I mean, he's probably not wrong. If a Skeleton ever breaks down and "dies" you can probably just strip them for their limbs and components.  The shop has quite an extensive selection of all kinds of replacement limbs. However, we can't really afford any of this yet, having zero cats (Yes, that's what the money in this game is called) to our name. : Good sir, your selection is impressive, yet I have to admit that I would need to take a loan to afford anything you have for sale... Could you kindly direct me to someone in that field of work?: Loan? Are you kidding me? There is nobody in this forsaken world who would give anyone a loan. Not anymore.: Nevermind then... Servbot, we are leaving!: Okay!: Come back when you have some money, friend. We are not a charity after all.We head over to the bar we saw earlier instead. Inside we see some Skeleton Patrons. Servbot heads over to chat with the Barkeep   : Sorry, we don't sell human food, I hope you brought your own. Need anything else?: Tell me about this place, good sir.: There's not a lot to say. We settled here after life grew chaotic on the outisde. But those times were so long ago, no-one here has a clear memory of our days before the city. What we do know is that we're safer here, across acidic ground and hidden way from any warzones.: The only downside of our isolation is the lack of occupation. Inactivity can be terribly unhealthy to some, both for the mind and the body.: Just how long have I've been out? I do not remember any of this, nor this city...: It is okay if Boom not remember. Hive... no, Servbot do not remember anything before leaving hive either. The barkeep wasn't kidding. All they have for sale is Fuel, electronic parts, Repair kits and... Grog? I guess Alcohol is a valid source of energy for some machines after all.Checking upstairs we find a different looking Skeleton and a hiver warrior sitting around. The hiver has a bounty of 10k on his head and will not speak to us. The Skeleton however, does!  : Great, another Hiver. Are you here to gawk at the defunct XT series?: You skeleton? I not see skeleton like you before..: Yeah yeah, stare all you like. I am an XT-MKIII series of Scout models. "The next stage of robotics and the last series you'll ever need." They never mentioned that it was all just fluff text to try and push the new series onto the Empire.. but that was a long time ago.: The Empire... I heard that name before. But what was it? I just can't remember.: You're still here? Most drifters don't hang around after having a good stare.: You there, I am trying to regain what I have lost and I need help. Would you join me?: Fine, but I want 6000 cats... and new pants. Also why are you having this hiver carry you around?: Nevermind then. Also you must truly be defective if you cannot see that I am currently missing my limbs: Whatever, weirdo.After this unsuccessful attempt we head downstairs and speak with the other Skeleton patron that we actually can talk to.   : Another organic one... Must be the trillionth person I've met, you all blend into one after a few hundred years, whether you're bug eyed, horned or original flavor. Then after a few thousand? I can read you like a book.: ...: Excuse me, I am Dr. Boom, please do not mind my servant, he is a bit slow in the head. And shy? Perhaps.: Know how dull that is? Dull enough to make you mope hopelessly in a dead end town while the rest of your kind prattle on about seized sprockets and rusted knees in an endless orgy of ailment resentment... *sigh*: Aren't you just a barrel of laughs.: Well sorry for existing, human you people never do last more than a few minutes in conversations with me. If I could shed a tear, believe you me, I would shed a bucket full...: Excuse me? Are you an imbecile, or are you just ignoring my existence?: But alas that is the ironic curse of the skeleton. TO cry silently on the inside. The most mournful of creatures, yet born without the means to shed a tear. Oh... I hate my life.: While I do not disagree entirely, I think you need to get out more friend. How about you come with me?: I tried going back outside once. It smelled funny and there were far too many flies. Not to mention all the killing and... oh, that's right, the cannibalism. Awful place.: Maybe you just need a new dream to live for. Or my dream. If i can remember it.: I've had dreams. None ended well. Dreams are silly things. I wouldn't recommend them.: Just work for me, friend. I can show you excitement, give you goals.: I hate excitement.: Ah, go on then...: I'll join you. But only because I'm weak and give in easily to peer pressure.. *Sigh* You and me both buddy   Meet Sadneil, our third member of the group! Sadneil is a skeleton recruit and can always be found sitting in Black Desert Citys bar. He has no price or requirement, just keep talking to him and he'll give in to that peer pressue. Speaking of, let's check everyones stats.    As we can see, Dr. Boom, having been resting in a scrap heap for however long did not do wonders for him. All his stats are at zero. Sadneil starts with all stats at 0 with a +/- variance of 3. I gave Servbot a baseline of 10 for all the main combat stats. I have no idea where he picked up the crossbow smithing htough. A quick info about the Stats: Strength: Carry weight and Martial Arts damage. If your STR is too low to use certain weapons you also get an attack speed penalty. Toughness: How much damage you take and where your KO point is. If your main body parts (head, chest, stomach) go under this KO point you will go into a coma until youre healed up. Dexterity: Attack speed. Pretty much all it does, it changes your attack and block speed rating. Perception: Accuracy with ranged weapons. If you want me to, I can go in depth more about the rest of the stats too! Everything you do in Kenshi gets improved by use. So dexterity swing your weapons more, toughness means get hit etc.  As we head out of the bar a skeleton remarks at the lack of feet regarding Servbot. It's true, Hiver do not have feet and can not wear any shoes! They have these weird stilt/hoof legs that look a bit hard to balance on frankly. : We didn't have footless humans back in my day...: I can relate, friend. I am as confused as you are.: But Servbot have legs. That count, right?: It's not like you have either, Mr. Boom.: Silence! And I am Dr. Boom, let's not forget!: Whatever.  The party heads east and sees a rather massive structure across a rickety bridge. : What is that? it is massive.: Oh that? It's the scraphouse. Some old husk. Nobody remembers what it is or was, the inside was cleared out long ago. Quin and Dack run their shop in there.: Very well, let us check out the shop! Onward, Servbot.: Okay: Not like we have any money, y'know.: Oh, shush. Outside the scrapyard we see several skeletons patrolling around. This is probably because of the wandering recruits mod I'm using. These spawn several faction related squads in an area that always have 1-2 people you can recruit with money. Very handy, but if you think this makes things too easy, I will turn it off. It has some weird interactions as we will see shortly.   The inside of the scraphouse is huge and mostly empty. There is a small production facily set up in the middle.  : Why does everyone ignore me? Everyone wants to talk to Servbot only...: They probably just think you're scrap to be sold, y'know. Having no limbs and all.: Shut up. It's not like you're in any better state than me.: At least I can still walk. : ...: Maybe he meant this human?Yep, thats what I meant with weird interactions. For some reason the squads of wandering skeletons dont contain only skeletons but also humans. Given that this poor sod is wearing no protective gear and pants means he's in for a bad time in the deadlands.  :How many times have I told you to clear out this junk, Dack? You're a hoarder...: This again?... I already told you, I'd handle it. You really are an incessant nag...: Nag? NAG?... are you... really calling me the N-Word, Dack? You know what happens when someone calls me that. Maybe I just just torch all this junk that's cluttering this place.: *Gasp*... You would never do such a thing...: Better to be a pyromaniac than to be a 'nag', wouldn't you say?: Are you two imbeciles done bickering with each other?: Sorry about that. Welcome and please excuse the mess. Anything shiny, Dack hoards. A simpleton really. I'm sure his mind was fried when he got hit on the head back during the chaos age. Trying times I'm sure you remember.: Chaos age? ... I've heard before, But I can't remember. Why is that I wonder.: Old magazines, fragments of old wreckages, funny shaped rocks.. we don't have anything of much use here but then, of course, one man's junk is another man's treasure. So how can I help you?: Show me what you've got. Welcome to the scraphouse shop. It's the best weapon shop in the game, but also the most expensive. the prices go up all the way depending on the weapon and quality. Of course this is far out of our current reach. : Humans make me nervous, Quin. Why are they in the Black Desert? Why has their feet not melted off? And where did I put my hacksaw?: .. it's in your hand, Dack. You know your CPU is starting to get real fried. You're going to go crazy as Cat-Lon if you don't have a reset soon.: Cat-Lon?... ... That name. I've heard it before. But I still can't remember!: ...  Leaving the scraphouse, our trio comes across an iron spider. Iron spiders are the only hostile lifeform that is wandering about this zone. They are old security machines that have gone haywire and attack anyone on sight. They have a solid HP pool and would obilterate our party, best to stay away for now.  Walking a few steps further, we come across the same human guy from the scraphouse. He's not looking good, his hitpoints on his legs have gone down in the negatives and he's crawling now. : Human... okay? Seem hurt: Ignore the fool. He came here without thinking, how he must suffer the consequences.  Turns out the human had another human buddy in his squad who had been hanging out outside for longer. His Leg hitpoints went so far down into the negatives that they just popped off! Both at once even. Kenshi, ladies and gentlemen.  Checking our map, we see the blue dot as the position of our party. The arrow is the camera position. Sadneil wants us to go a bit to the southeast from the scraphouse. Oh also all the lakes are acid too of course. : Boss, I know we're short on everything, but I think I know a place we could head to first. A friend of mine I haven't talked to in... a long, long time, see he he had this place we could check out first. Maybe he can help us.: It's hard to imagine you have any friends, Sadneil. But very well, let us head there at once!  Luckily we do not need to fear the acid lakes. While Servbot has to swim on the surface, Sadneil just walks underwater like a boss. Skeletons rule.  Aside from the constant acid rain you sometimes you get these lightning strikes which light up the entire area aroudn them for a short moment with incredible brightness. Luckily they're visual only, so it's completely harmless for us! After a short walk we arrive at the place Sadneil recommended.  : This is where you wanted us to go? I don't want to be rude, but this place is a dump.: Uhh.. sorry bout that boss. This actually used to be a pretty big lab. Well, used to. Sucks to be us I guess?: Big place went boom too. But look, shiny! Servbot is not wrong. All around the ruined building are a scattering of different kinds of materials, including some very, very valuable skeleton repair kits which we both can sell for lots of money and use to repair our skeleton pals. Unlike Fleshy Humanoids Skeletons need special robotic repair kits to heal their damage. Or a repair bed. These are pretty rare overall though.  We start grabbing all of the materials worth bringing with us. : Make sure to grab what we can! After all we need cats. Lots of them.: Okay boss.: Aww, how adorable. He's calling you boss too now, boss.: I care not for it, just make sure you don't leave anything valuable behind, got it?: Right right... well, you carry some of it too boss.: How?! I DON'T HAVE ANY HANDS.: Don't worry, we'll find some space to shove those items.: I hate you.: Me too.After we grab everything we can carry, we make our way back to Black Desert City. On the way back we come across... a human caravan?  Yeahh, this has to be a mod issue too. Normally the traders guild would NOT make their caravans go through this area, but I think the world mod im using removed most "no go" zones for factions which means caravans can try and go through here too. Sucks for this guy, he's not wearing any shoes! They mainly sell food stuff and research books and some farming materials. Back in the City a philosophical Skeleton speaks to us.  : I very much agree with the second part of that statement.Going back into the bar to sell some items we again hear the name Cat-Lon being mentioned... Also the bar is full with a wandering skeletons squad. They occassionally stop in the bar to chill.  : Tinfist and Cat-Lon made a great team...: And now Tinfist fights a losing cause for the humans...: While Cat-Lon disappeared into thin air...: What happened?We don't get an answer to that. But now we heard a second name mentioned, Tinfist. : Cat-Lon again. And Tinfist? These names... I know them, but yet I can't recall anything about them. Just who did I use to be? And who are they?: Bossman, is your brain fried or something? How can you not know Cat-Lon? Or Tinfist?: Well, why don't you fill me in then Mr. Smartypants?: Nah, not feeling up for that right now. Maybe later.: I really hate you.: Thanks.After this ominous exchange we go ahead and sell all our collected loot and make 14210 cats! Not bad. I kept one skeleton repair-kit. Time to head back to the robotics shop...  : Let's see, what we can do with this.: Just make sure that Servbot doesn't have to carry me anymore. I'm frankly getting sick of this inverted view!: You heavy boss. Servbot needs break.: Robots dont need breaks, you imbecile. But soon you shall be granted some relief, don't worry: Hmmm hmm... I guess this will have to do. Hold still boss while we attach these... : Are you kidding me? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Two legs? Is this the best we could do?: Sorry bossman, these limbs are expensive. It's not like we got a pity discount.: At least boss can walk now. That's good, right?: Always the optimist I see. Good for you Servbot.: You two should be happy that I do not have any ARMS I could strangle you with. Instead I will have to kick your asses!: Hate to break to you boss, the only alternative was buying some of those shoddy economy limbs y'know. At least now you run fast? Like really fast?: Sighhh.. I Guess this will have to do for now.The legs I bought for Dr. Boom were two standard grade Scout legs. They give bonuses to athletics, letting Dr. Boom run really fast compared to Sadneil, even with no athletics skill.  : Well then, servants. We must venture out and find more things to sell. Or mug someone. After all my goals won't be reached by sitting around idly.: If boss says, I will smash and kill.: Now that's the spirit Servbot! You will make it far, I can tell that.: *Sigh*And with that we leave our (somewhat) incompetent trio for today. What will await our adventurers next? Will Dr. Boom realize his dream of eradicating humanity and bringing back the Skeletons to glory or will we die in a ditch, beaten and bruised? Only time can tell.
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Nov 5, 2019 19:52
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Khanstant posted:This game has been on my wishlist for ages, I'm not even sure what it's all about, just now it's up my alley and seems weird as hell. It is definitely weird, janky and a mess, but also hell of a lot of fun! I probably should also list the weapons available: Martial arts: Kung fu unarmed moves. Hard to train at first but gets rather strong Heavy Weapons: The big heavy hitters. Require high str to use successfully Hackers: Weapons that have balanced cut/blunt damage and armor penetration. Sabers: Defensive bladed weapons , rather lightweight HANZO STEEL err Katanas: Low weight weapons with high cut damage, terrible against robots and armored foes.  or blunt: Weapons that require intense strength and do mainly blunt type damage. Usually terrible with very few exceptions.Crossbows: the only ranged weapon class in the game. Shoot your friends in the back, shoot enemies in the back! Edit: Polearms as well! Though theyre all slashy, no pokey spears. FrickenMoron fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Nov 6, 2019 |
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Nov 5, 2019 21:43
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Added everyone so far to a list! I will try to change the wandering recruits mod so the skeletons in it aren't only the "default" 3 eye lenses skeleton race, so we can have a bit of variety among our mechanized menagerie! We also need a Faction Name so if you have any clever ideas let me know. I also wanted to ask if anyone who is unfamiliar with the game needs specific explanations of the hud/ gameplay or should I just gradually explain things in further updates? The next one should be ready for the weekend for sure.
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Nov 6, 2019 14:24
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Addamere posted:I would like to request that a certain skeleton, who outwardly appears to be a hiver, be recruited as soon as possible and allowed to follow his dreams. Oh that will absolutely be a thing. Don't worry. AtomikKrab posted:I desire to be a glorious But thats not a robot! Oh well, who can say no to Crabs... I could always just make you an Iron spider though.  Also I have good news, I've managed to change the wandering recruits mod so that it randomly has ALL skeleton subraces included so not all of you robofriends have to be Sadneil clones.
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Nov 6, 2019 18:48
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I've recorded the next part, it should be ready for the weekend! We'll get the first bits of combat and leave the Deadlands.
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Nov 7, 2019 19:42
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Update 2: Journey to the swamps After getting Dr. Boom a new set of legs for running it's time to finally start our quest for revenge. We will need to gather people and and equipment. We also need to explore the world so that we can learn more about the current state of affairs! : Boss, now that you can walk again... You wanted to see if we can find more people to join your err.. "our" cause, right?: That's true. The Skeletons here have grown lethargic, no matter how much I ask them to they are not interested in either revenge or moving on from this place.: *Grumbles* Why didn't I refuse too...: What was that?: Oh, nothing at all boss. Anyways... If I remember correctly, I heard something 'bout some Skeleton bar down in the swamps. It's a good way southwest of here, but it should be fine to get there in a days travel. If we don't run into any trouble, that is.: Very well. This also doubles as a scouting effort I would say. Let's go everyone.: Swamp? Sounds fun, Splish splash.Let's take a look at the map of the world. We are currently in the Deadlands, a zone that is dead-center in the middle of the map. It's heavily polluted, so humans and Shek stay far away from it. Luckily this does not concern us. Our goal lies in the green zone to the southwest.   Taking one last look at the skeleton bar, I thought about checking out the buildings to steal some items perhaps. If you hold the Alt-Key it will highlight all items. Items in red are owned by others and will be counted as stealing if you pick them up. However, the Skeletons were vigilant and had people sitting in all of their houses so we couldn't steal. Our stealth skills suck a lot so we would have been spotted easily. Servbot managed to Nab one CPU unit though from a home that had nobody on the ground floor. This starts a "committing crime" timer for the character, and if you get spotted during this timer you will be punished accordingly. Usually this means people will just attack you.   As we continue to travel we spot a weird domed roof just floating over an acid lake... This is a roof for "workshop" buildings that are scattered all over the Deadlands. There actually is a workshop really close.  It's marked as "Ruin" on the map until we come closer.  However, the workshop is guarded by several hostile skeletons named "Broken Skeleton" that man double barrel harpoon turrets. These would mean death for us so we stay far away!   Scattered across the Deadlands are dozens upon dozens of these deactivated and broken Iron Spiders. Often some of them still work and just sort of lay around waiting for someone to come close so they can ambush an unsuspecting person. Stay vigilant, if the cursor turns red you're in for a bad time! : What happened to all these machines? And why are they even here?: Nobody remembers anymore. They are broken, and they attack us. That is all you need to know really.: Iron ones smash good. Make many limbs fly, stay far away. As we approach the western edge of the Deadlands you can see that we are actually inside a rather big crater. Whatever caused this place to look like this probably shaped this crater as well. As I approach the crater all I notice someone approaching from the left...  It's hostile! : What is this rotund rogue?: No idea boss. but we better stay away, they don't seem to friendly, even if they seem to be a Skeleton.: Curse you, round rebel! We will have our revenge one day.These are from a mod I recently installed, Hazard units. They're very strong and robust but incredibly slow. This guy has 150 strength but terrible run speed so we just run away.  After we make it up to the crater edge we officially are leaving the Deadlands! Each time you enter a new zone you get these huge announcements that show the Zone name you are entering. By default the map has no zone names or edges and you will have to remember where they are.  We spot some animals passing by. These are Garru, they're peaceful herbivores that will not attack you unless you piss them off. They're a great source of meat and leather though.  A bit further south we find a band of Dust Bandits camping out near a road. It's actually a smart placement for a camp, trying to ambush travellers on a road. These are placed randomly by the game though and it just worked out this time. They're armed with Sabres and ranged weapons so we just walk out of their line of sight. As we head further south and more Garru pass by Dr. Boom suddenly feels the need to talk about them.  : That's a lot of Garru.: All I see is walking meat and leather.: You never did have an eye for beauty. Very practical of Servbot. He's not wrong though. Garru give an absolute massive amount of both, but we don't need that. Also they would completely destroy us right now. These dialogues happen randomly and depending on the zones you're in and the personality of your partymembers. They own and I love them a lot. I'm not sure if I should somehow mark these so it's easy to understand which conversations are in the "base" game and which ones I've added for flavor? Our passage south is blocked by these giant rocks and we have to find our way around it. I just wanted to show that already outside the deadlands the world can look very different.  After walking further south-west we get a notice about discovering a "Holy Mine". : Holy Mine? Just what kind of silly name is that?: Boss, we better be careful. This is Holy Nation territory. They don't like us Skeletons very much. In fact, they don't like *most* people very much. But us Skeletons they will just kill on sight.: Just what is the Holy Nation?: They're a bunch of crazy humans that worship a God named Okran. And they hate all non humans. That's pretty much all I know, no Skeleton really ever manages to travel through their lands and survive.: Listen, bossman! Crazy people talk.The Holy Mines are the labor camps of the holy nation. Enslaved prisoners have to work there and are constantly berated by their Paladin overseers.   : Man was created in the image of Okran, our sacred father, the Lord of Light.: Woman was created in the image of Narko, mankind's seductress, Demoness of Darkness.: Woman must be disciplined, she must work hard to overcome the darkness in her nature!: Lest she seduce and tempt the purity of man into the darkness with her!Yikes. Let's get out of here. Also that's a huge herd of wild bulls passing by with an Alpha leading the herd!  Here we can see one of the slave workers operating a stone processor machine while the Paladins make sure everyone is doing their "job".  We manage to sneak by the Holy Mine without being spotted. I was confused at first by the suddenly being spotted (red eye means someone is very close to spotting you / can see you) but it was just some Garru running by. You can see their young trailing the herd as it travels  Further to the south we see a group of humans travelling by and approach them. : Sadneil, what are these humans in rags?: Dunno boss, could be escaped slaves?: Well then, maybe we could actually recruit these for our cause?: I thought you hated all humans, boss.: I do. But that does not mean we can't use them as... pawns? Peons? Or just cannon fodder, you know.: Humans all red inside. We Hive do like it, it is squishy.: Servbot, calm yourself. Let's try a little diplomacy! Uh oh. These are Starving Bandits. Their name basically tells you all you need to know. Theyre hungry and they want YOUR food and will try to beat you up to get it. : What? This makes no sense, we don't even HAVE any food.: I dont think these crazies are going to listen.Time to run!  Uh Oh.     : This somehow has gotten worse, I can't believe it.: Less talk, more running boss!I have no idea why these hungry bandits expect two skeletons and a naked hiver to have any food. Luckily they are slower than us so we eventually managed to outrun them. Hungry Bandits are pretty much the "lowest" enemy on the food chain, but in such huge numbers even they are dangerous. We keep on running southwest into the Border Zone and eventually come across a ruin.  : Whoever used to own this place does not live here anymore. It's time to see what we can plunder. This is a ruined military outpost of the Holy Nation. It probably was destroyed during a conflict with the Shek, who live further southwest. We plunder all the weapons we can to sell them later. The color indicates the item grade, with the grey ones being the worst quality. Also there is an outhouse?!  : Ahh, much better.: You organics disgust me. Also that is not how you sit on a toilet, servbot! Let's talk a bit about weapons. This is one of the long cleavers that we looted. This long cleaver is a hacker class, they're weapons that specialize in armor penetration and have somewhat balanced stats between cut and blunt damage. The main difference between cut and blunt is that cut damage needs to be bandaged/repaired while blunt damage just lowers the hitpoints without causing deterioration of the wounds. Armors also generally have less blunt damage resistance compared to cut resistance. Blood loss is how much the weapon makes you bleed when you suffer cut damage from it. Armor penetration is the value substracted from the enemy armour before damage calculation. Negative values increases the effective armor of the target. The defence bonus / indoor penalty are addition / subtraction from your melee defense stats which is your block rate. Generally long weapons get a penalty to indoor combat. The damage bonus / reduction is just how much extra damage you do on certain classes of enemies. Robots = Skeletons, Iron Spiders, etc. Humans = Not just "humans" but also Shek, Hive etc. Animals = Everything else.    To the south of the ruined outpost we come across a waystation. There are several of these waystations scattered across the world of Kenshi. They are run by the Tech Hunters faction, which basically are explorers/frontiersmen in search of lost technology. They are great places to heal up and restock supplies. This outpost also is guarded by crossbow turrets at the entrance. Dr. Boom and friends head in to check out the shops and sell all the loot we picked up.   The general store has all kinds of building materials for sale as well as research books and some crops. If you look at the CPU unit we stole you can see that it is marked as stolen and has a fencing chance. This is 100% because the people here don't know the person we have stolen from. If we had tried to sell this in Black Desert City it would have been a high chance that it would be recognized as stolen loot and the Skeletons would have attacked us for being thieves! As we enter the Inn which is populated by all kinds of people, a conversation between to humans can be overheard.   So I was trading in the hives the other week... An' I noticed... that brown stuff them lot build huts out of ...: It ain't stone and it ain't wood neither.  : Nah, I guess it ain't... Never really thought about it before.: I mean, why don't we have buildings made out of that stuff outside of the hives, eh?: Could be the red sand. Maybe if you dig deep enough around Vain...: I dunno. It don't look like it came outta the ground to me... : ... What are you saying?: Twomoon drank too much rum last week, threw his guts up all over the bar... That stuff inside Twomoon, it looked real similiar: I don't under-... Wait... No...: just sayin'. : Nooooo..!?: Servbot, is it true?: I do not know, boss. I never build houses, just live in them.Yuck. We'll see hiver huts sooner or later. The Inn itself sells mostly food and some medical supplies. We buy some food for poor Servbot, who was actually starting to get hungry, as well as several Medkits so we can patch up wounds for him.   This is the scorchlander the guy above was having the conversation with. Apparently he was so shocked that he had to stack his drinks! We visit the final shop, which is a small robotics shop in the back of the waystation. We earned enough cash for another robot limb, so I buy a standard Skeleton right arm for Dr. Boom. It's not great, but It will do for now! Since all characters in Kenshi are right handed this means Dr. Boom can now swing smaller weapons one handed at least and isn't completely defenseless.    : Ahh, finally I have an arm. Now come here so I can choke the life out you for getting me these silly legs, Sadneil!: Boss, you are aware that I don't breathe, right?: Sigh, must you always be such a spoilsport?: In any case, we are very close to the swamps now, boss. It shouldnt be much further.: Very well. Let's move out!Just as we leave the Waystation, we spot a Caravan of the western hive.   The caravan leader starts to shout at us and approaches us as soon as he spots our group.  : No-hive! Come back, it's dangerous!: Don't go into the mist, no-hive! The mists are cursed, CURSED! you go in, you never come back out! ... Unless you have Hive lantern with you. We have one you can have if you want to go there. Not free though.: Tell me more about this lantern.: Our Queen enchants the Lanterns of Radiance to clear the mists. All hive merchants use them to travel north, I promise our lantern will keep you safe, out of the mist. If not, we give you a refund. Our promise to you.: A refund is useless to a dead person.: Haaah! Of course! You got us, no-hive. But you can trust our promise: Okay, how much?: 2500 cats. This is a good price, Skeleton. You can't put a price on safety.: Thanks for the warning, but we'll pass. Right boss?: This is a special discount, tin man, this is a good deal! Here, take a looks at it...: I told you, we are not interested!: No-hive, you are being stupid! You only get one chance to buy the Lantern of Radiance, otherwise you can never go to the mists! Ever! This is a special item, it's unique!: Didn't you just say your merchants all carried them?: Just leave us alone already, bugman. We do not need your cheap trinkets!: No more discount for you! 2500 cats, let's finish this, Skeleton.: We are going! Take a hint already...: You're going?: How rude. Why would you not accept our offer?: We gave you a special price as well! Just for you... You insult the Queen!: Curse you, Skeleton! The mists will swallow you whole! You'll DIE!  As much as they are pretending to hate us, they will still trade if we approach them again. Also this is a total scam. Lanterns of Radiance are items you can equip on your belt slot and they produce an absolutey TINY amount of light. They are a complete joke, also they are sold in hive stores for around 90 Cats, so the merchant tried to completely rip you off. Also there are constant pitfalls in the dialogue about this where your character wants to attack the hiver for being so annoying. This would have been a terrible idea for us. : Servbot, are all of your people this annoying?: I do not know, boss. I never see hive like this before. My hive... former hive.. we never trade. With anyone.: I think our friend comes from the south, boss. There are two hives we know of, you see. The hivers from the south are highly aggressive and attack on sight. Nobody has managed to ever talk much to them. These peeps though... I'm sure they were from the western hive. They trade a lot with humans and Shek. And sometimes us Skeletons too.: Two hives eh? Fascinating, I will have to keep that in mind...The next screenshot probably is a bit confusing. I was continuing to loot the ruin since I could not grab everything at once. I had turned off recording for a bit and forgot to turn it on in time. We came across a Holy Nation Inquisitor that was really badly wounded and managed to whack him into a KO state again. We took some hits but nothing too bad. However, this is a good point to talk about the health system!  So we had managed to successfully down this Inquisitor. He was already heavily wounded but bandaged and seemed to have gotten separated from his squad. In the screenshot you can see the Inquisitors hitpoints in the lower left. On the right, you see the current HP of the limbs. Since this is a human it would be 100 max. The HP of the limbs are displayed via the bar, with the colors showing the state of the limb. Blood: Remaining Blood/Oil. This will go down if you have open wounds from cutting damage, losing too much blood will make you go into a "Blood loss KO" until the value goes back into the positives. Regenerates over time. Green = Healthy, this is active limb hp that remains Red= Lost health from cutting sources, this needs to be bandaged before it can heal. Yellow = Bandaged damage, this will heal over time Grey = Lost health from blunt damage. This will heal over time. The < indicates the wound will deteriorate over time unless bandaged. This can stack so it can show << or even <<! etc depending on severity. If you start to go into the negatives for Head/Stomach/Chest your character will go unconscious, the duration depending on how wounded you are. For arms/legs you will lose the functionality of those limbs and if they go too far into the negatives they will be chopped off!  We loot the Inquistor for all he's worth. Note that the armor he is wearing says "Faction Armor". this means if we wore this others would recognize us as members of the Holy Nation. We do NOT want that, so we just sell it all. The scroll basically says "Go and kill all heretics, don't fail in your mission" We finally have reached the edge of the swamp! It's always foggy in the swamp, so visibility goes bad real quick... This is not the mist the merchant was talking about though. Sidenote: The screenshot quality in the swamps is kinda bad, I'll try to increase the video recording quality next time and see if it helps. I hope it's still sort of clear what is happening in each screen.   Walking further south, Dr. Boom suddenly starts up another conversation: : I remember this place...: Used to be a great port city around here somewhere...: Not anymore though, obviously.: Old Empire, as it's called now I guess: A PORT? In a swamp? What was it for, flying swamp boats?: It was a long time ago, the water level was a few hundred meters higher back then.: I don't know what a meter is, but it sounds like a lot: Relatively yes, People loved their boats back then...: Every time you talk it just fills my head with a hundred questions..: What's a boat?I have no idea why Sadneil was pretending to not know what a meter or a boat is. All Skeletons are ancient, but some seem to forget certain details when they reset themselves. : Sadneil, are you sure you did not reset your circuits one time too often? Or are you just playing stupid?: Who knows...Further South we come across a tiny swamper village named "Rot". There's just one shop and some fields/houses. The store owner has a friendly business pitch...   : I'd like to see you try... The store itself sells very cheap food and hemp and some shoddy headgear as well as some trader backpacks. Nothing we need right now, the backpacks can carry a lot more but also have negative effects for combat.  Time to head further into the swamp, creeping ever closer to the place Sadneil Mentioned. Walking through the water makes come to a crawl pretty much.  We spot these Hivers clad in Black Leather, they look pretty badass. Theyre members of the Blackshifters, a Hiver gang that runs casinos in the swamp area. But wait, what's that behind them...    It's blood spiders! These are the true terrors of the swamp. Blood spiders are small, blood red spiders with low hitpoints that hit incredibly hard though. They're the definition of glass cannon. What's really bad about them though?They EAT you. If you fall to a blood spider they will happily start to suck on your corpse, draining it of all remaining life. Luckily this can't happen to Skeletons, but they are still incredibly scary foes. Fun Fact: In early versions of the game blood spiders had incredibly high attack range and could basically "force push" your people to death before they ever managed to get into melee range.  The Blackshifters engaged the spiders. A blood spider on average has around 25-30 hp, but if you don't hit the chest/stomach/head they won't go down. As you can see they are hitting the Blackshifters for quite some damage, the Blackshifters themselves actually have decent armor. If you see a number like 33(-20) it means the attack originally did 53 damage but 20 was blocked by armor. We are just attempting to hide and get away : Stay out of this everyone... we will pick whatever is left over from this battle: Boss is smart. I will listen: I prefer to not die, so I agree to this plan. What if there are too many spiders survive though?: Uhh... I guess we run?As we sneak away we suddenly hear some shouting from behind...   It's Red Sabres! They're one of the criminal gangs hiding in the swamp who will attack everyone else. I was worried for a bit that they were shouting at me, but they had instead spotted a group of drifters. Lady Luck was on our side this day.  The Red Sabres engage in combat with the drifters but get owned hard since they had some guards with them that had stats in the 70s. The bandits are all in the mid 20s.  The drifters run off without a word after beating the Red Sabres into a bloody paste. : Now! This is our chance. Grab whatever you can.We loot the Red Sabres and grab a set of armor for everyone as well as all the weapons we can carry. Unlike the inquisitor earlier it's not labeled as faction armor so we can wear it without any further issues.  One of the Blackshifters is limping away very slowly from the blood spiders. They just keep following him, apparently taunting him before finishing him off. Note how incredibly hurt the hiver is everywhere except the Stomach, most of the wounds are getting worse too. We decide to help out the guy since the blood spiders are pretty hurt too. Besides we need to start to get more combat experience!     We manage to defeat the spiders while taking some juicy hits ourselves, ouch! As you can see they hurt a real lot for being so small.  Servbot was hurt in the head so much he starts shoving his arm through his skull to get rid of the pain. We bandage Servbot and repair ourselves before getting to a larger village further south. The big dome building is a bar, so we head inside.   Inside a skeleton complains about being ripped off by the casino, this is a diplomatic status character so we can't recruit him. I think it's one of the pacifiers for a faction you can pay off if you pissed off someone you dont want to.  Sitting on a pillow on the ground is Dr. Chung, one of the unqiue NPCS you can recruit in the game. He also can act as a plastic surgeon to rename people but loses that if you hire him. We're not here for him though...  Suddenly some jerks in white Karate Gis come in and they're hostile ?! They ignore us for a second before suddenly starting a huge bar brawl.   Ouch. They're really good martial artists and hurt quite a bit. Luckily the guards come to our help.    Taking a kick to the robo-dick was too much for poor Dr. Boom. He collapses for a bit, unconscious. : That's a low blow, even for me! I will have my revenge.  More guards come rushing in and beat up the white-clad jerks. Dr. Boom had mainly taken damage in the chest and got up again after beign repaired by Sadneil. Meanwhile you can see the guards starting to remove the intruders from the bar, they just chuck them outside. The hiver at the table meanwhile remains calm and doesnt seem to care.  We've managed to gain quite a bit of stats already! The early levels are easy to get but it gets much harder after the 30s... Sadneil is leveling his robotics by himself and Dr. Boom rather quickly. Just as we prepare to talk to the hiver some rear end in a top hat comes running back in and...  ... makes a beeline for Dr. Boom and double palm thrusts him in the chest! He collapses on the floor. : Son of a.. I won't forget this! : Boss still is weak. Need to eat more to get strong.: That's not how that works, Servbot. But I sort of agree. Then again, the boss was knocked out previously for a long time probably and just recently woke up...The hit was strong enough to get Dr. Boom into a recovery coma. Since unarmed damage is mostly blunt and can't be healed with repair kits it will take a bit for him to wake up and there are no robo repair beds in this bar. Sadneil, knowing that Dr. Boom wanted to talk to the hiver at the table, does so in his stead.  : ...Hear that?: You mean that guy over there coughing up a lung?: No, no, not him... Thre crowds! I can barely hear myself think in this bar... A lot of people hate crows, but me? I love 'em. Can't seem to shake the feeling of loneliness ever since I left the Hive... So it comforts me.: So why don't you go back?: You're kidding me, right? That place is a prison, an illusion, and it's a miracle I ever broke free. Growing accustomed to something, like the brainless crowds of the Hive, isn't the same as missing something.: If you want to be part of a collective, why not join us?: Well, always up for an adventure, me. I'd like that... But I've gone and worked up a debt at the casino. I can't leave. The big boss said he'd break my legs if I didn't pay him back by the end of the week. ANd trust me, you don't want to get on the wrong side of the Big Bosses. So, I need to raise the money to pay off my debt first. I like my legs afterall.: Sighh... How much is your debt? I hope boss won't kill me, but he said we need more people.: 3000 Cats...: Fine... Let's just hope the boss won't break *my* legs instead after I pay off the debt for you. And so Hive Princes are squishy with their maximum limb hp of 80, but they have an aptitude for sneakyness and thievery. Khanstat will be our "Rogue" so to speak. We will use him for stealth ops and everything that requires sneakyness.Your first task however, will be to carry Dr. Boom and build up some strength!  And so we leave our little group for today. Next time we will venture to the heart of the swamp and see if we can find this Skeleton bar that Sadneil has been talking about, and maybe find some more allies. We shall see! As always let me know if you think something could/should be improved. Here's a map of the journey covered in this update: 
FrickenMoron fucked around with this message at 13:54 on Nov 9, 2019 |
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Nov 9, 2019 13:50
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Drakenel posted:poo poo yeah, more Kenshi. Way more fun to watch than play, sadly. At least for me. For me it's pretty much a Zen game I love to watch and play both. Also added you and Bob! It's actually hard to think of a female Scorchlander with a high bounty. I can think of a male one but he's not easy to get. For now. As a sort of in between update, let's talk about armor!  Above we can see the armor we stole off those Red Sabres. It's not very good, but it will do for now. The grade goes from Prototype -> Shoddy > Standard -> High -> Specialist -> Masterwork So how does armor actually work? Armor coverage is the % chance that a hit to this area will be affected by your armor reduction. We can see that this armor has pretty poor coverage for the stomach, which matches the appearance actually. Now, to blunt and cut resistance... Blunt is very straight forward. If we would get hit by 50 pure blunt damage, it would get reduced to 45 by the armor. For cut it's a bit more complicated. If we got hit for 100 cut damage it would be reduced to 78.. but do you see that cut resistance efficiency? It's 90%, which means only 90% of those blocked 22 damage will be actually blocked. So we would take 80 damage (78 cut + 2 blunt) This blunt damage from the resistance calculation can not be reduced at all. Why this was implemented this way? Nobody knows really. There is a mod which removes the cut efficiency from all armors and instead multiplies the cut resistance by the efficiency, so these armored rags would have 20% with the mod instead of 22% The bonuses/negatives on the armor should be pretty self explanatory I hope, they actively reduce your stats in these skills by the multiplier, not your exp gain in them. Harpoon resistance is a straight forward value how much damage will be reduced from bolts/harpoons if hit on a body part covered by this armor. Let me know if all these technical details are actually relevant for you guys and gals, I intend this to be an informative LP kind of with a slight bit of humor.
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Nov 10, 2019 06:39
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Next part has been recorded. I need feedback for the future though, should I concentrate more on just progressing from now that we've set up a basic storyline or do you enjoy the detailed breakdown of what's happening? Thank you for taking your time!
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Nov 13, 2019 22:32
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Sure, we've got room! We don't even have 20 members yet. Next update I've recruited one of the unique NPCs as a goon, it should be ready either tomorrow or on Satuday. It's important for me to know that you all enjoy this style, so thank you for the earnest feedback
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Nov 14, 2019 21:32
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Hello everyone! It's time for the next update. Update 3: Fundraiser Welcome back! The last time we left off we just entered the swamps and made it to Mud town, a settlement run by the Blackshifters gang. Having recovered from the bar brawl, our group is ready to move on.  : So, how much further until we arrive at this town you mentioned Sadneil?: Not much boss, if I remember correctly that is... Should be straight south from there Checking out the map it's pretty much true. That large circle of a road around the water? that's the town where we want to go. There short journey to the town which is called "Shark" for some reason is pretty uneventful. Soon we actually enter the town proper.  The NPC here has a conversation about someone called Black-blood who apparently is pretty bad news? I tried to search for this guy on the wiki but found nothing, so I have no idea what this is about to be honest. : Over here boss, I've found the place! Let's check it outOur group moves towards the bar that Sadneil spotted and...  : So this is the place you wanted us to go? Just looks like a regular swamp bar to me. Except, wait, what's this sign up there? : What the hell is this? This is a travesty!: Skeleton has a nice hat! I like it: I don't know boss, for what it's worth it feels very... jolly?: Jolly? JOLLY? They just grabbed a dead skeleton and impaled it up there! This will not stand!: Welp, so much for that... We head inside the bar, the patrons immediately joke about the bar sign having come back to life when seeing a Skeleton. I scanned the bar for Skeleton recruits but there were none to be found sadly.  Some drunk patron is talking poo poo to another one. The other guy retorts with "Keep pushin me poo poo eater and lets see what happens" and then they both calm down.  More bar talk! This one is about Skeletons. The guy keeps talking to himself.  : So you hear the stories about skeletons? Suppsedly, there's some skeletons out that wear the skins of... humans. Like Cannibals, but worse. They kill, just to peel your skin off like you're some... animal. And then they wear it, pretending to be humans themselves. And then they try to lure more humans in! offer food, shelter, all you could want in this hellscape. And then they kill you and peel you like a fruit...: That all sounds very agreeable to me, aside from the part where they pretend to be humans.: THAT is where you draw the line, boss?: It all sounds very frightening to me. Also, why am I naked?: I did not like your pants. :  : In any case, it's time to talk to the bartender about this travesty of a sign!Dr. Boom steps up to the bartender. For some reason the JPG compression was incredibly aggressive despite having the same settings as the previous two updates!  : Your sign is a corpse! You're one twisted mother!We can ask this guy about all of the local bars, I've screenshotted the dialogue instead of transcribing it all. Let me know if this fine with you or if its annoying to read.  Despite all of this fluff text about the gangs we can only join the Hounds in the "vanilla" unmodded game. It's also a hassle and not really worth it in my opinion. : Well, I don't see any Skeletons that would join our cause here...: Sorry boss, I guess one's a bust. Still, I think there was another bar in town. Should we check it out?: AlrightThe gang heads over to the next bar. There's a total of 3 swamp dome buildings in Shark. One's the dancing skeleton, one a casino run by the Blackshifters and one the Hounds gang HQ. We head over to the Blackshifters bar.   Inside we see... a goatman! It's a really good and fun mod and I love goatmen. If anyone wants to be a goatman instead of something else let me know. They can't wear helmets though which is a problem...  Next to the goatman we spot this fellow with rather interesting eyewear. No Skeletons again in the bar... We approach the guy.  : You eyeballin me?: No, you were eyeballin ME!: I was? Sorry, I got bulgy eyeballs.. Need a merc? I've got crazy sword skills ya know.: Really?: Well... about average... Whatever, what is this, an interromagation? What d'ya say? 5000 cats...: Interromagation? You know, that's not even a real word, fleshbag.: Yeah, intemogration! Quit wastin' my time, fruitnut. Am I hired or what?!Uhh yeah, Stubs aka Angry Lobster is not the brightest tool in the shed. If you choose the wrong option in the initial dialogue he will also attack you. Theres an option to try and lower the price to 3000 cats but its not possible, he always wants 5k. The main mystery about Stubs is that he's a Scorchlander but has a greenlanders skin... : Boss, do you really think we should hire this guy? He doesn't seem to be... the brightest tool in the shed, as the humans do say.: That is exactly why we are going to hire him! We need some humans to negotiate I feel.. also this makes them easier to control and manipulate down the line, you know.: I see boss. How devilishly devious.: Can I have his pants?: No! And welcome to the team. From now on, you shall be know as Angry Lobster.: Alright boss. I'll fight with you!:  Angry Lobster comes with some stats at least. They're not amazing but it will do. There are several other *FREE* recruits in the swamp, but I didn't want to pick any of them really for our team. I'll do a quick list of them: Green: Hive worker who starts with really good crossbow skill, has a bar tab of 2300 you need to pay. Hamut: Greenlander male who really hates slavery. If you hate slaves he joins for free, has decent fighting skills (15-20ish) Miu: Greenlander lady, escaped Slave who really fears spiders cause they killed her friend. Alcoholic, also hates slavery. : So what now boss? Seems there are really no skeletons here. I guess they just moved on...: I have to admit, I am quite at a loss. We still need to gather more subjects before we can move on to the next stage of my plan. We also need more money.: May I have a word? I know I'm the new face around here, but I've been sitting in this shithole of a town for a few weeks now and you do hear some rumors y' know...: Go on then.: I heard about some ruins in these swamps. People spotted at least three of them, but I only know the position of two places. Them swampers are too afraid of the spiders and gangs so I'm pretty sure it's all ripe for plunder..: That *does* sound rather useful. Where would the closest one be then?: North...west I think? Thats like to the left, right?: My left or your left?: Just left! Just show me your map if you can... : Alright, let's see if these rumors are true. Let's move out!: I'm still naked. The group heads northwest as per Angry Lobsters idea. There are a total of four ruins in the swamps, but only two are really worth checking out. One is completely empty and the other has spiders inside but no real loot. After a little bit of travel we approach the ruins to the northwest! Nobody is around. Nobody except...   Some very spiky boys. These are swamp raptors. Despite the fierce sounding name they are completely harmless to us. Swamp raptors are carrion eaters and will also eat farm crops. : Crocodogs are friend!: Let's just ignore them. Now what do we have here... The ruins are absolutely filled with different kinds of loot. A lot of them are crafting materials, but we also have research books and some expensive robotics components. The tools can be used to force open locks. I use one of them to break open the library outpost. I later realized I could have just bashed the door down instead of waiting 800 seconds...   For some reason you geta "shackles broken" dialogue when you open something with tools, as if you had just freed yourself from slave shackles.  Inside the library is mostly trash.. there are several containers full of books and maps you can still use. One locked chest is also inside which we again break with tools.  : Ah, ancient military maps! And research books. Now this is an useful find.: Let's sell them all!: Fool! It would be more wise to use them for our own gains. Who knows what kind of weapons could be hidden inside these places. We must find them!: Oh, okay. That makes y' know, sense. I get it bossman.Ancient Science books are somewhat rare and also forbidden in the holy nation. They're used to research higher tier research and can only be bought in a handful of places. Normal books are available pretty much everywhere. We stash them and use the maps. Using a map will instantly place a highlighted marker on your map for the new locations you uncovered. Down below we can see the locations we uncovered, it's mostly more places with loot!  One of them is also in the swamp! : Ruined place is nearby! : That must be one of the other ruins I heard about. Should we check it out?: Absolutely. But first, let us head back to Shark. We are carrying quite a lot at the moment. Our group heads back to shark in the middle of the night. Luckily nobody attacks us while we're slowed down.  Pressing the alt key is rather helpful when finding the shops at night. It puts a highlight to the signs outside of buildings. Most shops are closed at night though anyways so we have to wait for morning.  This shop is blocked by a tree... nobody can enter or leave. This is actually a result of a mod I'm using that reduces the overall foliage clutter on the map by 50%. It somehow manages to move this one tree so it blocks off the shop! It's not really an important one, but still annoying.  We sell all our loot after daybreak. A group of swamp raptors headed through shark and one of them got stuck in the bar for some reason. I also buy some new gear for Khanstant. He get's a ninja hood and ninja rags for some serious bonuses to sneak. Still no pants though... : Feels breezy down there boss...: Look, you take what you get. I finally buy you some new armor and you still complain?: The ruin we found via the map points us to the southwest of shark. As we move there we come across another swamp village, but it's just a boring tiny village with one mixed wares shop  Soon after, we approach the ruin, looming in the distance of the foggy swamp.   : Wow, this place looks pretty massive. I'm sure there must be some great loot inside!: Maybe it is abandoned as well? Let's hope for the best.: I'm pretty sure this is... a military design? Just what is that building doing here... Sadly these ruins are anything but abandoned. It is swarming with blood spiders inside. : Boss, look! Red fiends.: More of these blasted spiders. What should we do?: For now it seems they are trapped inside the perimeter of this building.. the only way inside is this gate. Let us open it.: I'm not sure that's a good idea ?!: I'm the boss here. I say it, you do it, okay? If you want you can volunteer as spiderbait.: ... fine. The group moves in and starts to bash on the gate. This is another way you can open things, but only works for doors. Once the hitpoints of the gate reaches zero we open it and run the hell away. : Now, run everyone!      We keep running until the blood spiders stop giving chase. I also bought Khanstant a ranged weapon so he can avoid melee combat with this light armor if possible. Ranged characters on hold will aggro anything within their range and it can be a bit annoying. The hold command prevents your characters from running blindly at anything hostile they see though. While it looks like Khanstant wants to shoot a weird plant he's actually aiming at a blood spider and is pulling it. The enemies magically know they're being targeted by someone and will run to fight. This way we can engage the blood spiders one by one.. They hurt a lot still. We just have to hope  : Ouch...: Grit your teeth, Servbot. You can take it. Wait, do you even HAVE teeth?We take down the first spider. Khanstant immediately pulls aggro on the next one and... proceeds to shoot Lobster in the back! He stumbles forward from the impact.  : Traitor!: Sorry. Won't happen again! I hope...Bad news: Projectile weapons in Kenshi underlie the laws of physics. If a projectile fired from the crossbow hits one of your guys, it will cause friendly fire damage Good news: The Precision fire stat negates this. The higher it goes the higher the chance becomes that the shooters projectiles magically ignore friendly bodies and pass just right through. It only goes up by causing friendly fire though, so it's generally a good idea to give someone a weak crossbow first. Seriously though, do not give inexperienced shooters the good crossbows. You can INSTNANTLY kill people with friendly fire because thats how strong lategame crossbows are.  : Still many red fiends.. can we win?: We just have to! I will not give up on this lab because of some beasts. Fight on, brave soldiers.Servbot suffers a grave wound to the head... at least this will raise up our toughness real fast! We're getting pretty hurt and that was only the third spider.  : Boss, this is pretty hopeless... There's still like fifteen of these things and we're already in bad shape after three. We'll all get turned to scrap by these things if we keep on fighting.: But we must! Think of all the secrets that could be hidden inside this place. We just have to keep fighting them one by one, no matter how long it takes.: Wait, I hear something from behind... watch out, it could be more of them! Nope, luckily not. It's swamp raptors! This is actually what I was hoping for when I played the game at this point. : Crocodogs! : Excellent. Stay back and let's see what happens now.The Swamp raptors, lured in by the spider corpses, begin to fight with the spiders. They get hurt a lot by them too but also can dish out damage back. A bite to the right region (head, chest, stomach) of the spider instantly knocks them out.   As more of our spiky friends start to move in we notice that there's fighting going on in the background.  Even more swamp raptors approached from the other side and are distracting the spiders. : This is our chance everyone! Let's move into the building while the beasts fight.: Crocodog must win! Fight well, friends. The swamp raptors take some losses but easily wipe out the spiders and begin feasting on their corpses. We use the chance and move into the building proper.  : Wow, what a weird place.. let's check out everything!: ... why the barricades? There must have been a fight here. And all these discarded machine husks. Nevertheless, I agree with you. Let us inspect everything carefully.So, this ruin is actually one of the tech labs leftover by the previous civilzation. There are several of these in the world and normally they are guarded by incredibly powerful and dangerous mechanical security spiders. This swamp lab however only was guarded by the blood spiders. The first floor of these labs usually is barricaded and holds nothing worth of value loot wise.  The second floor hold several research benches and other production benches which we can't really use. Sometimes you can loot some resoruces from the containers here.  The third floor is the important one. It houses several generators which somehow never run out of fuel. As well as a large room full of containers, several of them locked. : Everyone, take a look at all these containers. Make sure you use our stash of tools if you can't open something!The containers have various loot in them. Robotics, Ancient Science books, Medical supplies, some construction material. PSA if you play Kenshi yourself: Every one of the white boxes there is it's own container, it's not just one big container but instead a stack of 8 individual ones! You can click all of them. We crack open the safe with tools.  : Jackpot!It absolutely was worth it. The CPU Units are worth 6000~ each, as well as the robotics components which are around 3000 each. We also find several skeleton repair kits which we will put to good use. We loot absolutely everything and head back to Shark, our pockets lined with goods. Heading home, Angry Lobster starts a weird conversation. This again is 100% random and selected by the game.  : Ugh... Stinks like my musty ol' Grandma 'round here...: Watch it, the swamps are full of monsters lurking and hiding in the vines, waiting to pounce on their prey...: I ain't a fan of the swamps. not one bit. At least in the open plains there's no place for gut-eating critters to hide.: Well, at least in the swamps there's no place for self righteous Paladins and corrupt Samurai to hide.: Why do I feel like a walking meat-wrap these days? Seems every-one and every-thing wants a goddamn piece of us.Probably not entirely wrong there! We make it back to Shark in one piece. Just as I tell everyone to take a nap in the Blackshifters bar to recover from their injuries something happens...   : Decided to finally show your face I see? :Yeah. An' what of it? I ain't hidin' from no-one.: So i guess you got that lil' gamblin' debt you owe us all nice and ready for me. Plus interest.: No... But I-: Knw what happens when people don't repay Big Darkbrow his Cats?: I know what happens! But I ain't gonna be able to repay your debt if you breakin' m' legs now am I?! The Blackshifters start attacking the guy and his buddies and win easily. Somewhere in the background there was also a conversation about Skeletons and that they're always hiding something... The beaten up Vagrants get thrown out of the bar, and looting them is not a crime...  : Let's loot them. It's not like they will miss their stuff.:   We grab everything we can off them that's worth it, including several Nodachis and a Dustcoat and longcoat. Still no pants though. : I completely empty all stores in the town for their money and we still have poo poo to sell... It's time to head back. Back out of the swamps. We are sitting at over 100k cats right now. : While we did not find any Skeleton allies, I say the journey still was a worthwhile trip overall. Our funds are looking much better now.: Should we head back to Black Desert City boss?: Not yet. But we shall go back north. I still need... another arm.: Also, you can finally have some pants, Khanstant. You earned them.: Just as we head out of the north gate of Shark...  : Curses! It's one of the rotund rogues. What are they doing here in the swamp?The swamp oni wants to beat us up, badly. We kite it into the swamp gate guards and it starts to brawl with them... They get absolutely trashed and barely do any damage to it.  :  Run!And so we run. We have barely left Shark and suddenly I notice a very, very ominous thing in the background...   It's a beak thing! Not just any beak thing, an elder one. Elder beak things are incredibly strong, tough and have tons of hitpoints. While we could take a lone regular beakboy rather easily, we do NOT want to fight this thing. Running is not an option either as they can go over 40mph! : Everyone! Be careful not to head over there, we must not catch it's attention. :   Luckily some poor swamp turtles caught the beak things attention... look at the damage! We get the gently caress out of there. Soon after we're back in Mud town, the Blackshifters casino town place. I decided to do a quick stop and sell our inventory to the shop. I also actually rename Stubs to Angry Lobster at the plastic surgeon.  Suddenly...   It's the goddamn Oni! It followed us all the way here. Also Servbot is being shot by one of the town guards by accident with a mounted crossbow that was aiming at the Oni. Our group decides it had enough running for a while and assists the swampers in taking it out by... watching on the sidelines.  : Could you *please* move?: No way bro, I've got my mojo going on. After beating the poo poo out of it for a solid five minutes the Oni finally goes down. We loot it's weapon to sell it and throw away the armor, it's only worth like 200. We take the healing supplies though. The group then heads further north, out of the swamp. The journey is peaceful, but just before the waystation in the border zone we come across a small group of holy nation outlaws.  : Let me handle this!: Fine, let's give it a shot.: Hey buddies. : ...: We came across a patrol not far from here. You ought to stay alert.: What? There's no patrol. All I can see is you and your pockets lined with food... Get them!:  Teach these imbeciles a lesson.  Since it only was a tiny group of 3 outlaws we easily beat them down. We move to the waystation and sell the rest of our loot. Dr. Boom heads to the robotics shop and buys another arm. Even after that we still have 111.033 cats to our name now! It was quite the profitable trip to the swamps.  : Ahh, finally. The quality of my new limbs is not the best, but this shall do for now.: Glad to hear it boss. Now, what shall we do? Should we go back to black desert city?: Not quite yet I think. Our trip to the southwest yielded only monetary gains, but it still was a success. I say, we should keep going. But not to the south. Instead, we shall go northwest.: We must gather more intel about the state of human society. And find more allies.: Uhh, is our boss always this weird?: I'm not sure, I'm new to this group too after all. But at least I've got pants now.: Whatever. As long as the there's loot to be gained, I'm in.And that's where we leave off for today! Next time, operation B will begin. Join our group of misfits as they (try?) to journey to Mongrel, a fantastical place in the Mists that the Hive Scammer Merchant was actually talking about in the previous update.
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Nov 16, 2019 14:02
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Angry Lobster posted:
I was fully expecting more spiders, which would have worked too. Swamp spiders and these ruin spiders are members of two different factions and will fight each other. Raptors was the best outcome frankly though. Also indeed! 
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Nov 16, 2019 18:16
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Khanstant posted:This is awesome. Kind of reminds me of Final Fantasy 2 where one of your stats could only be improved by running away from fights. I had to learn these lessons the hard way when someone with a really good crossbow killed his teammate by shooting him in the head.
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Nov 17, 2019 19:39
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Next update is recorded, should go live this weekend again. Things got a bit chaotic...
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Nov 22, 2019 23:05
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Sure! Just let me know if you have a preference for any race etc.
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Nov 23, 2019 13:11
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I'm playing with tons of mods to be honest, it would be a big list. What are you looking for personally? I played the vanilla game for 20 hours or so before i started adding mods to change small inconveniences.
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Nov 23, 2019 15:26
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Update 4: The battle of the Hub Welcome back everyone! Our group is well rested and ready for travel. We are back at the waystation in the border zone. Having restocked supplies and finally in possession of two arms for Dr. Boom we are moving onwards to the northwest. : Where should we head next boss? The swamp was a bit of a wash, despite finding two new recruits I think...: It is all good. We have gained a lot of useful currency and two meatshields errr.. valuable allies of course.: Meat is good. Tastes good too.: So where should we head next? I'm all out of ideas.: If you allow me to chime in, we should travel northwest. While sitting around in that bar in the swamp I have heard stories of a legendary warrior in the town of Mongrel...: Mongrel? Where is that.: Mongrel... the city of the lost. I heard it's in a place called the Fog Islands.: Is that perhaps the Mist those merchants talked about? In any case, It sounds like a good lead. Let's move out everyone! The team heads out, moving west from the Waystation. This area is a nightmare for travelling past this cliff because the AI is utterly incapable of navigating the cliffside for some reason. The team has barely left the station when...  One of the outlaws who attacked us last update. His leg injury got so bad that it just popped out of the socket! This is what happens with frequent dismemberment setting. We grant the poor fool some mercy.   : And stay down!Our group continues on and as we get near the cliff...   A group of wandering dust bandits spots us. It's a real big group too that would completely destroy us, so everyone just immediately starts to run away.  A successful escape  Moving down the cliff into the ravine we run into an animal trader caravan. They have a lot of useful pack animals, however we don't want any of those right now so we avoid the fleshy food eaters. They can carry a lot of stuff but I don’t think they fit the theme of our group. : The less organics we have to worry about the better. Let's move on.After a bit more travel northwest we come to another town called "The Hub"  It's uhhh not much of a looker to be honest. The entire town is filled with ruins and almost nobody is around. However we immediately get approached by some drunk guy...  This is Hobbs, he's one of the unique NPCs, but we won't be recruiting him, unless someone really wants to be Hobbs. His stats are all 1s.  : Yes that's it, have a drink on me... say have you ever heard the story of the wailing phantom?: Uhh no, what are you talking about?: Well legend has it that it dwells in a sunken cave, south of the dunes. I hear it has bones made of solid diamond - just one tooth would fetch youkabillion, no, poobillions of Cats! It has the gigantic tongue of a lusty tree hag and a marvellous pair of bingo wings that drop like smooth potato butter. Some even say that it has the snout of fondled truffle! Even the most handsomest of man-warriors haven't been able to hunt the peppery thing down.: Uh-huh, sounds interesting.... I have to go now.We leave Hobbs behind and move on, recruiting him is completely free.   Because our party is full of Hivers and Skeletons we get a pretty uhhh hostile welcome from a lot of the townsfolk wandering around. The Hub is a refuge city for Holy Nation Outlaws, but the citizens still believe in some of the Holy Nations teachings. Namely any non humans are evil, the devil and the end of all life.  We move into the only intact house that's not a shop and pick the lock, Inside there are some lore books about the hub and minor loot. The house is a great spot to rest since you can use the beds for free. The books are as follows: .jpg) .jpg) .jpg) .jpg) .jpg)  We move towards one of the other buildings in the hub that is still standing as the sun begins to rise again. People are still upset about our presence meanwhile. Outside the tower stand two guards, we can talk to one of them  :So you want in on the Shinobi eh? The guards try to lay the crackdown but they ain't fooling nobody, they're nothing. Nothing a few Cats can't handle.: Shinobi? What kind of benefits would we even get from joining you?:We have hideouts in several large towns scattered all across. You can use the facilities to rest and hide, and of course you can use our fences to sell any *troublesome* goods.: I want to join the Shinobi Thieves.: You can join. For a fee.: That's it? I don't have to complete a test to prove myself or something?: Do I look like I've got time for handing out busy-work? No, this is a business we're running, not a social club. Just a one-time membership fee, 10.000 cats. So what will it be, do you want to join the guild?: That's a lot of money boss.. are you sure about that?: I think they might be useful allies... for now. Okay, sign me up! Joining the Shinobi thieves is a very good investment for several reason. I'll go about them shortly. Inside we talk to the local fence/trader of the thieves.  : I'm a skeleton, this is my normal face...: Well ain't that a pity...Tying to talk to a npc with multiple people can have buggy results. Let's just pretend Angry Lobster is a bit insane and pretends to be a Skeleton now.  The shop selection usually is very ninja focused. Ninja clothes with bonus to sneaking/assassination/martial arts, but also the very VERY useful thieves backpacks. They're the only backpacks in the game without significant drawbacks, so we buy as many as we can.  On the next floor are several training facilities, these include lockpicking and assassin training dummies! There are two melee attack dummies too but they only go up to level 5 so they're virtually useless.  Queue training montage music! I train Khanstant in both assassination and lockpicking. : Must... get.. stronger!After training a bit I decide it's time to move on.  There's also a bar in the hub which totally can spawn skeleton recruits, however there's none in this game. Too bad!  : Let us move out. Our next goal is northwest, but first we should check out this shack north of this dump...  Just as we move out of the hub I notice there's a skirmish going on between some dust bandits camping at the road, some bounty hunters and some hungry bandits... : Look alive everyone, there's some fools engaged in combat ahead of us! Let us attack and claim what we can for ourselves: Sigh... must we reall attack everything we come across? Before we attack I checked out the shack... its a small bar full of Holy Nation outlaws, including this very lanky paladin guy. No idea which mod he is from. Our group moves out and tries to join the battle. But just as we approach...   IcSN: Oh no... that's the holy nation. What are they doing this far south? : I don't like the look of this... it's quite a large group. Everyone, retreat to the Hub!   The paladins and their servants give chase. The group is at least 20 strong, with half of them being capable fighters. Their weapons also deal BONUS damage to robots, so we're in for a bad time.  We lure the group into the Hub and people start to attack the paladins. For now we retreated to the Shinobi thieves tower  The paladins start a fight with a group of slave traders from the United Cities. Now there's already three groups involved in combat : Everyone... now that these cretins are distracted, it's our time to strike. Attack! : Uhh boss, we aren't really doing any damage it seems...The paladins are pretty tough. Their armor is bad at covering the arms but is excellent protection for the chest/stomach. They are also rather tough and wear chainmail.    We move into the courtyard, trying to avoid fighting that high paladin. A hiver caravan also got involved into the skirmish, raising the number of involved parties to four!  : My leg...Servbot is the first one to go down. His leg is hurt too much and he can't stand anymore, but still fight.  Angry Lobster is knocked out by a hit to the stomach and goes down.  Remembering that there are slavers around I decide to bail on the battle and move everyone into the Shinobi thieves tower where we can heal up. The Shinobi are capable fighters and go one on one with thee paladins. : Back to the tower everyone!: I'm actually the boss here, don't you forget it! But I agree. Some went insane witnessing all the carnage going on in the courtyard    While we rest, the battle rages on outside. Some hungry bandits have also joined the battle. The hivers are now also fighting the slavers... : This is our chance. Let us sneak out of town while everyone is distracted. The books were right, this place clearly IS cursed.: Boss, I don't think curses are real...: Silence, how else do you explain all this chaos going on in the courtyard? Would you rather stay and fight?:...We move along the wall and hurry out of town. Even after resting there for half a day the battle had not stopped. Moving further northwest we enter a new area...  Getting close to the hive village, Servbot brings up a monologue. : Hive territory. It's been a while since I left...: In the Hive, nothing matters, nothing exists, nothing is desired... Nothing but loyalty for the queen.  Getting close to the village we are immediately being called out for bringing "hiveless" to this place. Once exiled/leaving the hive, you can never go back. They however don't go hostile or anything. There's also this constant red rain happening in this area, but it's harmless.   Not pictured: when spotting humans the hiver drones start to giggle and say things like awwww or flip flop. They definitely find humans and their method of walking amusing. : So this is one of the hive villages? Looking at the way these buildings are made, I guess these guys we overheard in the bar weren't exactly wrong...: I'd rather not think about it. Despite not having any sense of smell I still find the very idea disgusting.: There's a shop over there bossman. Should we grab some supplies before moving on?: I'll take a look.Dr. Boom enters the shop and...   Is immediately greeted by a very pesky merchant Hiver! They will call out your race (Shek, Human, Skeleton) and approach you to trade their absolutely non stolen and high quality self produced wares. : Uhh, on second thought, we don't NEED supplies. We are just fine. Moving on!   The merchant follows us out of the shop, begging us to trade... Normally these get increasinly aggressive as you run, ending with the hiver flinging insults at you. However I forgot that we have "Hiveless" with us. The hive prince merchants are very, very sensitive to hiveless and disturbed by their presence. Sensing them they will yell at you for being hiveless and will not trade anymore with anyone in your party. Forever. We decide to just leave and move on northwest.    The area north of vain still has some weird trees and vegetation spawning. We were lucky to not run into any bad beasts in vain to be honest, it's one of the areas in the game that loves to spawn beak things. After an uneventful bit of travelling we finally reach the edge of the fog...     Not the worst of ideas. The entirety of the fog islands is made up of a series of plateau hills with deep fog filled valley between them. These valleys are the real dangerous part of the area. Off in the distance, we can spot some lights. We are currently at the green point on the map above. Straight north of us is a camp.  : Are these torches I see in the distance?: Whatever it is, it seem's like a camp. We should stay away.: Alright everyone... let's move around the west side and see if we can enter the area this way.The group moves to the western plateau. I notice a battle going on between some Holy Nation citizens and fogmen, the people that rule this area... the citizens won.  I move in Angry Lobster since he's a human and the Holy Nation guys won't care about him. One of the downed fogmen was a prince! I loot the head, killing it in the process. it's worth a nice 6k.  : Ugh, this is disgusting... but we're doing it for the money. Now come here you bastard... Angry Lobster beats up some of the crawling fogmen warriors who aren't quite dead yet. One of them stabs him two times in the stomach somehow. :   I notice a large group of fogmen approaching from the northwest. This is not good for us so we sneak away to avoid them. We are now at the southwest entrance to the fog islands, with the city of mongrel taunting us in the middle.  Moving in further some guys sprint towards us...   : I can't survive like this anymore! I need to eat!:   Some hungry outlaws. Since It's just 3 we beat them up quickly and move on. However we did take some damage in the fight which is not good. Moving deeper into the fog...   Suddenly the fogmen are upon us! A grop snuck up behind us. : Everyone, to arms! We can't outrun them, so fight for your lives.  We get engaged in a messy melee. They outnumber us by quite a lot. While the damage is not that crazy and each individual fogman is weak (they only have 50 HP) the sheer numbers means they will get in more hits than us.  Khanstant and Dr. Boom are the first ones to go down. This is not good. Dr. Boom is actually not KO but one of his legs is destroyed.  A group of friendly drifters is nearby! They currently arent giving a poo poo about us because they are not being attacked so far.  Aaand what's this? A skeleton?! Sadneil immediately runs at the group and talks to the skeleton, dragging some fogmen with him. : Was always told I'd never make it if I couldn't handle myself with a sword. Well I'm still alive aren't I? Melting the hearts of my enemies with my cooking, one ricebowl at a time...: Great, have you looked around yourself? We need some extreme heat right NOW.: Fine, but my services cost 6000 cats. Deal?: Deal! And now pick up a sword and FIGHT! And so Verbal joins the group! Welcome. While you might be another "default" type skeleton, your help is more than welcome. We also managed to kite some of the fogmen into the group and they start to attack them.  We start fighting the fogmen together with the drifters. Given the little "intro" text Verbal gave you might guess what his Skills are... an expert at COOKING! All other skills are at 1. I dont know why but giving that skeletons don't need to eat the idea of a skeleton chef is always amusing to me. Iron Chef anyone?   The fogmen are trying to carry off Angry Lobster. It's something they do, it has bad bad consequences if you let it happen. To avoid this i give everyone orders to pick up someone who's KO. : Bossman, don't let them carry me off... I heard bad rumors about these fogmen before: Do not worry, all of my resources are equally important to me. We shall defeat this green menace sooner or later!: Uhh, thanks I guess?  The drifters are still engaged with more fogmen, our group is safe... for now. There's another skeleton in the drifters group but it's not recruitable, the talk bubble is for the shek.  We finish off the last of the fogman group and move on, still carrying our wounded  For a while we move on a plateau where there is no fog. The walls of Mongrel are already in sight, but it's still not easy to get there. : Town is close now... we will succeed! More Fogmen camps on the way... We keep on moving along the road to mongrel.  We are very close to the intersection now which leads upwards to mongrel. However, there is combat happening there. I take a closer look at the fighters an...  A drifter fighting off a group of fogmen by himself and...  Uhh yeah. This thing. This is not good. It's a mist ghoul. These beasts are from a mod and terrifying. They are their own independent faction and have really high stats but no armor whatsoever. They always travel alone and come in several varietes. Think of them as mutated hivers with lots of spikes, teeth and a lot of anger. The fogmen are doing barely any damage to it despite the lack of armor!  Just as we enter the area, more fogmen attack us! This is not good. We already were weakened and are in real danger now with all this chaos going on. : The town is so close... make a run for it and try to get some help if you can.: Got it boss.. can't make any promises though, this isn't looking good: What kind of madness did I get myself into with you guys?  As if it couldn't get any worse, a Hive Praetorian is also following us! These big boys have 400 head hp and over 200 in all body parts. They're tough, they're big and have a mean weapon. We can't outrun any of these guys at the moment and just have to tank the hits with our skeletons and hope they wont go KO before they reach mongrel...  Servbot goes down and drops Angry Lobster. They both get picked up immediately.  One of the Mongrel Gate guards noticed the ruckus and rushes down to beat up the fogmen. He alone won't be enough though.  Sadneil manages to reach the gates! Not much further now. : Hey, can any of you chumps maybe give a hand? You can clearly see that we're in trouble... Goddamn lazy humans!: I promise to cook a nice meal for everyone, if you just help, okay? Enticed by free food the guards start to rush down the stairs.  After getting through the gate Sadneil drops off Dr. Boom and rushes out. My goal is to save everyone I can and carry them inside the city gates where we are actually ~relatively~ safe. The city of Mongrel is full of strong guards who all are willing to defend the city against the constant fogman threat.  Servbot managed to wake up from his KO state and helps taking down the praetorian. : Green Hive are bad people. We must destroy them all! Can't even go for 5 seconds without one of those jerks picking up Angry Lobster trying to carry him off  And again...  The prize for defeating the Praetorian (by the gate guards) is a nice loot item worth 9.6k. We nab it and in the process kill the Praetorian.  Entering the city we are approached by a strange hiver. I have Dr. Boom slowly walk up to it.   : Beep!: Uhh... Hi Beep?: .. how... how do you know my name?: You just said "beep" for no reason, so I thought maybe you were introducing yourself.: You must be some kind of genius seen?: Are you taking the piss ?!: Can I join you? I want to become strong, become a swordsman: You don't look very strong. You don'T even have a weapon. Do you have any skills?: I have nothing. They exiled me from the Hive.: I don't blame them: I am defective. Not good for the Hive. But Beep doesn't give up. Beep is trong! Since I left the hive I can feel my mind changing, the way I think, I feel free, having thoughts I never had before. I want freedom, but everywhere I go things try to kill me or chase me.: Beep tires of running. Time to stab things that chase me.: *sigh* Another weak nobody. How much money do you want?: Money? I don't know what that means.: Welcome to the Team!And so Beep, the STRONGEST warrior joins our team! Beep is a legendary meme among all Kenshi players, for good reason. He's the character who has the most player dialogue by default and givien that he's a very weak worker drone who starts with 1s in all stats it's a real challenge to keep him alive. Having him grow strong is very rewarding though! Having Beep join us was requested and I was happy to fulfill that request.  And so we leave off our team for today. Beaten and bruised, we managed to somehow drag everyone safely inside Mongrel and into a tower of the Shinobi thieves! That membership already is coming in handy... I bought some gear there for everyone too. : Can't believe we survived this.. but I'm grateful nonetheless.: What does not kill us, makes us stronger. As long as my pants don't get stolen, I don't care.: Now who might that legendary warrior be? We'll see soon enough I guess. For now, let us just rest and heal up.Next time: A journey to the north!
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Nov 26, 2019 21:43
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It really was, especially at the hub, the battle was still going on when we entered Vain. There just was a constant influx of people wanting to beat each other up.
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Nov 27, 2019 05:54
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Thanks for the nice words everyone. I was pretty worried when I saw that big battle going on at the intersection leading up to mongrel. Usually i approach the city from the east side which has a much shorter entranceway. Luckily the fogmen picking up our fallen warriors followed the rest up the road and eventually ran into the guards! We'll be looking at mongrel proper next update.
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Nov 28, 2019 06:41
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Recorded next part. We're getting new recruits! Lots of text this time though, I wish there was a text dump available of the game sometimes.
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Nov 30, 2019 16:13
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Just wanted to let everyone know that work/life balance has been a bit off lately due to Christmas season, I'll try to work on the update this weekend but it might take till next week, just as a heads up.
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Dec 6, 2019 19:33
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Thanks for the kind words everyone, Christmas time is the worst at my job. I've currently made all the screenshots for the update, so all thats left is writing up the text / portraits etc. Should be def ready for the weekend!
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Dec 10, 2019 18:06
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Update 5: The price of obedience Welcome back everyone! After a well deserved rest our group is ready for travelling and exploring. Having survived the fogman menace last episode everyone came out of the battle a little bit stronger. Getting hit mainly trains your toughness and melee defense stats, meaning everyone will become more adept at blocking and take less damage. Toughness is actually a weird stat, you begin at a whopping 64% Bonus damage at 1 toughness. At 50 you finally reach the point where you no longer take extra damage. After that it will go up until you eventually reach a maxmium of 65% damage reduction. : Still can't believe we managed to get out of this one alive.: I never doubted our success for even one minute. Have more faith in your glorious leader!: Easy for you to say, bossman. You're not gonna be someone who ends up on the menu when you're grabbed by these bugmen!: I'll have to consider these kind of ideas for my next cookbook...: Hiver's no tasty! Very chewy and rough...: Silence! There will be no manmeat served in this group, no matter if bug, shek or human, you hear me? Let us explore the city for now, we can decide on your next steps after that.As dramatic as the battle was in the last episode, our skeletal party members were never in any real trouble because the fogmen won't kidnap them (with good reason). Their weapons are mainly blunt too so you have little chance to bleed out from them.  Here we have an actual overview of Mongrel. It's a huge fortress town filled with lots of guards and hardy people who have created a refuge for everyone who got lost in these mists. The general idea is that you can get to Mongrel if you're lucky, but you won't be leaving ever again because the area is so dangerous. The town has every kind of shop you could need, 2 bars, one inn, a ranged/melee weapons shop, armor shop, clothes, cybernetics shop etc. Even a Shinobi Thieves tower! It's still not adviseable to stay a long time in the city though because guards can get stuck in melee combat alone and eventually get overwhelmed/dragged off to munchtimes. I've seen the town gates become completely empty because guards had been kidnapped/killed when you stay around the town too long.   Mongrel also has a lot of facitilies, including some grain silos (but no actual farming fields despite there being a LOT of unused space), corpse furnaces nobody uses and these... oil drills. They're unique, you can find them in the assets and build them via the debug menu but they don't do anything. It seems originally the game was meant to have oil as a resource as well.  The town has two entrances, we entered via the western gate last episode. This is the eastern gate with no road, it's also heavily guarded though. Our group heads off to a nearby shop and sells the fog prince head etc. for some cash and heads to a nearby bar, checking for new recruits. Inside we stumble upon 2 conversations at once.   : N-no no...: Wreee!: H-hiver! Stay away! Nooooo!: Don't mind him. We buy the poor guy drinks sometimes but... he's never really been the same since the Deathyards...: You are aware that he IS a skeleton, right?The guy spouting this reaction to our hiver buddies is randomly chosen, it has picked hivers before for me which is even more funny. The other guys just had a very short conversation. : So, what do you think made the fogmen?: Parasites in the brain, nobody knows where they came from, though.The origin of these fogmen is pretty obscure, they have no real "main" settlement, they just exist. If the western hive queen is killed, the settlements immediately are ruined and overrun by fogmen. Some speculate that hivers still under control by a queen getting seperated from her violently basically makes them go crazy and they go into this fogman mode. After all hivers that just lose their connection to a hive over time don't go crazy and instead develop individual personalities  Also inside the bar we find this charming fellow. This is crumblejohn, a unique NPC you can recruit who actually has some unique dialogue. He also looks horrifying, being thin like a (human) skeleton, having crazy long limbs with a crooked back. We'll ignore him unless someone really wants to be crumblejohn. The painted dude in the back is from a mod, so I ignore him too.  We move on to another bar and find the group of drifters that saved us sitting there! The skeleton apparently has no repair hits, so I repair it out of gratitude.  We also head on to the shops. I buy Dr. Boom a Falling Sun and get Verbal a Frame Axe. This shop also sells a Masterwork Samurai Armor which is tempting, but having a really strong chestpiece means it will be harder to raise toughness so I skip it... for now! Heading over to the Inn we find...   A scorchlander lady with some sick shades sitting at the bar! Let's talk to her. : Stranded in this dead end town and for what? Some puffed up tech hunter rumour of AI Cores and CPU units? Well goodbye blue skies, goodbye sunlight , so long desert breeze. Now there's the sounds of the fog to listen to instead.Listen to that and there you've got yourself a few sleepless nights... And don't even get me started on food! How much longer are the reserves gonna last on this marooned island eh? Ugh... : AI Cores? CPU Units... you've got me there Lady. But what are you even talking about? The sky is as blue as ever and the sun is out bright. This town is above the fog!: Anyway, looks like you're one of us now, eh? Welcome to the party! If you don't wanna be a party pooper don't talk about the fog... or what's in it for that matter. The screeches and groans are enough of a reminder already.: How long have you been here?: Too long. don't tend to keep track of the days in this place, but I'd say a year or so now. Long enough to start feeling the Mongrel crazy at least.: If you've stayed here for a year and haven't run out of food I don't see the point of starting to worry now? I'm just glad I don't have to bother with any of these... organic needs. Still, you might be useful, having lasted that long out here Why not leave with us then?: Well... you've got a nice sized crowd folling you... and you all made it here in one piece. That's something... but is it enough, I wonder?: Uhh yeah, about arriving here.. I'd rather not talk about it to be honest.: -She grows silent as she fidgets with the scar on her hand- Ah, to the abyss with it. I might never get another chance... Welcome to the team, Artichoke! We head off to the Shinobi thieves to rename her.  Dr. Boom and our Skeletons get a well deserved rest on the skeleton repair bed. It's expensive (2000 cats) but we had accumulated quite a few points of wear damage, Dr. Booms leg also was in a really bad state and would have taken ages to heal naturally. I also spend most of our remaining money buying two Industrial lifter armors from him that increase his strength. I orginally planned to have him being a martial arts character "Dr. Boom and the fists of Doom!" basically :P Since other people wanted to be martial arts skeletons I'll have him be a heavy weapons user instead, the strength bonus from cybernetic limbs works well with that.  While running back towards the Shinobi thieves tower to check for backpacks I notice a commotion outside the west gate... : Where there's combat there's loot for us!: Let's check it out. We should be safe near the gate. Among the fallen we find another praeotrian with 10k worth of loot and...  Several knocked out people from the holy nation! The wandering recruits mod adds both "drifters" and "holy nation" roaming squads to this area. Mongrel is automatically hostile to the holy nation, the city being mainly consisting of refugees. We loot them for all they're worth, their gear ranges from cheap peasant wear to high grade weapons. There's about 7 of them, all knocked out from the guards. : These men are members of the holy nation. Show them no mercy, loot everything you can! I also find a knocked out fog prince not far away, thats another easy 6k for the head. : Yoink! These come off easier than you'd think.: As much fun as it is to be scavengers... got any ideas what to do next boss?: I've studied the map of the surrounding area. I think we should head further north... for now.: We got beat pretty badly last time... Maybe we should just stay for a while?: Beep does not fear any foe! We should fight our way out.: I haven't joined up just to stay in this hole... Let's go I say.: Our group has gotten bigger and we have upgraded our equipment by quite a bit. I say we scout the eastern exit and head out if it's safe. Our group heads out east, we find a mongrel guard in combat with a lot of fogmen... they're much stronger than an indivudal fogmen but they're ganging up on the guard quite badly. A good time to test how our group fares against the fogmen groups now. : Attack!  It's quite a large group too. Upgrading our Arsenal has led to a lot harder hitting attacks, combined with the small pool of fogmen hitpoints (50 on all bodyparts except the head) they start dropping like flies.  Here we can see Verbals Frame Axe (a hacker class weapon, from a mod). I thought these were a good fit since Verbal especially requested an axe weapon. His strength is too low right now and he swings it very slowly.   The fogmen managed to knock out Khanstant but we've won! The injured mongrel guard slouches back toward the city as we repair and heal our injuries. : Good work everyone. We managed to stomp these puny bugmen quite handily this time I'd say!: We had help from a guard... and Khanstant was knocked out.:  : Good enough I'd say. Let's head back to town and wait for daybreak. Then we shall move out. If anyone objects I'll just leave you behind. You've been warned!We head back to the Shinobi thieves tower to heal up everyone while our skeletons use the night to train a bit more on some dummies. After daybreak we head out again and can look at the death and destruction we've wrought...  : I'm glad I can't actually smell anything, yuck!: Good for you Sadneil. You and everyone else: Grab one of these corpses!: ... is this guy always this crazy? I'll do it, but why?: Shh, don't question the bossman. Better to just go along with it I say.: Ohh, emergency rations. You're a smart one!:  And so everyone grabs a corpse. The reason I've done this is some extra strength training for everyone. The bodies each weigh 30 units and double the maximum bonus you get from encumbrance. It does look very silly though... The group continues to head further to the northeast.  We run into a duo of fogmen warriors. These usually escort princes, but theres none to be seen. Somehow everyone can manage to swing their two handed weapons with one hand while carrying a body. Fun fact: Everyone in Kenshi is right handed.  Even Khanstant can use his crossbow one handed! Also his precision fire skill is now high enough that his shots have 100% avoidance during the day. The skill is influenced negatively during nighttimes and when injured, but this should massively reduce the amount of friendly fire. :  We beat up the two warriors and move on. Heading further northeast we come across...  ...a rather grisly scene!  This is basically what happens if you get captured in the fog islands. Fogmen will drag you off to the closest camp and put on a pole. This basically rings the dinner bell for princes and warriors, who come running and start to eat the tied up victim alive while the normal fogmen worship the offering. This is also why that broken skeleton was going WREEEE. : Now you know what kept me awake every night... we must be careful so this does not happen to us.: ...: I think I'm gonna be sick.: Keep it together, ignore this and let's just move on... quietly. Checking the map, we have ALMOST cleared the fog islands. However there is one fogman camp close by and we have to get past it. I tried to sneak past it but...  Some annoying fogmen spotted us right away and our group has to defend themselves.  In the back you can see the camp and a lot of fogmen patrolling there. They just keep running at us in small groups so it wasn't too much of an issue... yet. I also ordered everyone to drop the bodies so they can fight unencumbered.  Everytime we down a group of three or four another one comes running at us so I just tell everyone to run away from the nest for now. : There are times to stand your ground and times to run... Let's move northeast and fight off anyone that followed us. After exiting the fog filled crater the landscape changes quite drastically. There are huge construction girders everywhere.  : What is this place? I do not like it... The area is just as foggy as the craters below, but it has a very different feel about it. As we move closer towards the center of the zone...  We are greeted with a very grim sight. : Okay, okay, time out. What the HELL are those?: ...: ....: I remember this place. Every skeleton should. It dates back to a past forgotten... : After the war the behemoths lost their purpose. : The irony is that it was their blind obedience and unquestioning loyalty that walked them down into that pit, entirely unresisting.: The price of obedience.   The entire center of this area is full of these robotic skulls and arms sticking out of of the surface. If you walk closer there your characters can comment that the surface is slick/smooth, and entirely made of metal. The general idea/story behind this is that a really goddamn long time ago, there was a huge war going on. Humans created gigantic war machines, including these huge skeletons to fight their battles for them. When this war was over nobody knew what do with these engines of mass destruction. So they dug out this giant pit, ordered everyone to march in and just buried them. Normally this area is quite empty with only a lone robot spider or crazy skeleton you can rarely run into. However, since I'm using the mist ghouls mod this is their home turf. And we really dont want to mess with them right now. : ... There's nothing for us here. Let's move on.: I swear. You will have your revenge, my foolish brothers and sisters.Moving on directly to the north, we come another zone which is full of the remnants of the past, the floodlands.   : ...: This place doesn't look very inviting either to be honest.: Lots of iron, but no life.: I remember this place being very different.: Now it's the floodlands. It doesn't matter what it used to be. The rain never stops here.Moving into the floodlands, Dr. Boom starts to remember more things. : This place is is a relic of the old world. : Machines building more machines to build more machines with. : This is where I was born... The area is full of ruins of absolutely gigantic buildings. Given what Dr. Boom just said, there probably were vast production complexes for manufacturing skeletons and other machines here in the past. Unlike the deadlands, the ground and water is not polluted/acidic somehow.  Our friends, the iron spiders return as well. Sadly they are still hostile. We decide to fight one to see how it goes. I had put everyone on hold so they dont get hit from the area of effect.  : You got this boss, I'm sure of it.: Easy for you to say, fleshbag! The spiders hit quite hard, thats over 80 damage! Of course some of this is due to our still rather low/mediocre toughness. I decide to have everyone pile on the spider.  And down it goes... beep got knocked out for a short while. These regular Iron Spiders don't have great loot, but taking any piece will kill it for good. I plan to "Tame" one later but we need a cage/prisoner pole for that.  : I don't feel so good....Ignoring Artichoke we keep moving northwest, until we eventually come across a leaning tower.  Just as we are about to head inside.... damage numbers in the background! I decide to check it out with the magic powers of the camera.   It's a hostile skeleton fighting some cannibals. I decide to ignore it, our metal brother (in spirit) will have no issue beating up these scrawnies.  Inside the tower the place looks pretty trashed / ransacked, but theres still a lot of loot left in the containers. Also some beds! We use the opportunity to rest up. The loot is pretty meh aside from some blue science books. Angry Lobster has weird ideas about how to sleep in a bed.  : Are you really sure about that? It doesn't look very safe to me...: What's wrong with living on the edge?Our team heads out at night after resting up a little, the place being quite eerie in the darkness.   Heading much further north, we come across another intact tower! This one has a little windmill running at the top.  There's also a skeleton standing outside! It heads inside the tower and we follow it. A talking prompt comes up... : Oy bossman, I know you usually do the talking to the newcomers, but I wanna have a shot at this too. How about it?: Fine, but if you mess this up, you'll be the first one to land in the cooking pot if we need to sacrifice someone, got it?: Okay okay.. here goes!: Let me guess, another adventurer? You certainly don't look like the scavenger type, or the bandit type either for that matter...: That's right, I'm searching for treasures.: The Floodlands mostly attract the adventuring type, like you said. It's full of lost treasures, so why wouldn't it? Anybody else of sane mind wouldn't risk the spider bots, they keep most of the more hostile trespassers at bay at least.: But life holed up in this tower can get dull, so it's always good to share shelter and exchange stories with fellow adventurers.: Tell me more about these treasures.: Just take a look around you'll see with your own eyes, the place is rich in history and lost tech. But the spiders make it hard to recover those treasures. Many adventurers are smart enough not to take the risk, others are brave enough to take the challenge, but many of those don't come back.: Which were you? Smart or brave?: The prior of course. I'm just not wired to take unncessary risks.: So what are you doing here?: Skeletons aren't as perishable as humans like yourself, but we still have a limit to our existance. We start to seize up over time. Or we stop working suddenly, without warning. My time is near, my parts are wearing and I'm not as durable for exploration as I used to be. So here I am, retired in the solitude of the Floodlands.: A shame. Still, I'm sure you've had your fair share of adventures.: I've travelled the Eastern Ashlands to the Southern Swamps. Recovering lost relics and lost pieces of history is something that's always satisfied me. And, of course, watching human behaviour as the world evolves and falls...: Tell me more about human evolution.: Nothing ever truly changes. Trends, fultures, languages, rulers... they come and go. But behaviour bred from greed and fear hold human evolution at a standstill. Any kind of progress made is usually destroyed... reset in one way or another. Like a wave, it evolves and it falls again...: Pretty deep for one with a metal brain.: A skeleton has a lot of time for deep contempplation. Especially one that has lived alone with nothing but spider bots as company for the last three years...: What about eating dirt and scrap for however long it took me to reboot?!: So, why don't you take one last adventure with us?: If I have the company of fellow adventurers like you I suppose that shouldn't be too much for me to handle, and I always enjoy the study of human companionship. I'd enjoy nothing more than a last adventure. Let's go. You lead, I'll follow.: I will be the one doing the leading here, thank you very muchAnd so we welcome another goon on the team. Nark0 joins our group with stats in the 15s~ so she isn't completely helpless. Nark0/Burn is one of the three guaranteed skeleton recruits in the game along with Sadneil. We'll grab the third one too for sure, but that will have to wait for later. We use the opportunity to heal our skeletons in the tower, since it has a repair bed. There's also some containers with some meh loot that I grab. suddenly I notce a group of people running past the tower...  Cannibals! And they're carrying some poor guys off. I decide to give our group some extra combat experience.   These scrawny cannibals are one step above fogmen on the food chain. They have 80 hp on all body parts, wield iron sticks and generally have very bad stats. We beat them up easily.  The freed holy nation outlaws immediately zoom off without even healing after the last cannibal falls unconscious. : Goddamn humans, can't even appreciate being helped... We head straight east from Nark0's tower, into an entirely new area...  Welcome to the hidden forest! This area is pretty much northeast from obedience, and north of holy nation territory. You have to cross the floodlands to get there from the fog islands kind of. Scouting a little bit ahead we see...  Some ninjas getting beaten up by giant red painted naked cannibal ladies. Yeahh, these are "legit" cannibals, they have regular human health pools, stats in the 30s/40s and actually wear weapons. Bad weapons most of the time but it's a huge step up from the scrawnies, trust me. We decide to rush in and help out the ninjas.   We outnumber the cannibal group and easily beat them up. : I wish we could have a more culinary exchange, but alas...In the middle of this zone we find an unnamed village. Approaching it...   ... it looks quite quaint and well fortified! Our group comes closer...  And is immediately stopped by one of the ninjas. It's noteworthy that almost all ninjas/guards here are female. : You're tresspassing on private land, Human. Cooperate peacefully and we won't have to resort to violence. What do you want?: Meatbag, I think you need to get your eyes checked out. I'm a lot of things, but being human... not in a thousand years. That aside...: I'm a merchant. Can I trade here?: A trader, huh? Well your timing couldn't be better. Restocking our reserves is becoming more and more difficult with the nearby cannibals hordes attacking all of our usual suppliers. Our stocks have begun to run low...: You're free to rest up and trade, but you'd do well to keep your head down and make it quick. I have no qualms with Skeletons, but I can't say the same for the other villages. Many of them are devout Okranites and hon-humans can maek them nervous to say the least.: Thanks. What is this place?: All you need to know is that we're the enemies of the Holy Nation... Same as you. We're the closest thing to allies you're going to find this side of the world, so I trust you'll keep our location to yourself.: The less you know the better. We're done talking here.Time to check out the village!   Well, the gate guard wasn't exactly wrong... the people are pretty upset by our group. The trade might refuse to sell to you if you talk to them with a non human. Checking out the dome building we find...  ... the headquarters of the flotsam ninjas, the leaders of this village and sworn enemies to the Holy Nation. A blonde greenlander woman has a talking prompt, so we speak to her.  : Naevia sounds mean. : Not at all! She took good care of me.. And you know what I AM good at? Running! Running free, running from all the chaos... leaving it behind in a dustry trail. I love it. So you need a runner, I'm your girl!: What about your sister?: Naevia? She's gone. Died doing what she loved doing, fighting the Paladins and that's all that matters. WIthout Naevia here, there's nothing for me, and the Flotsam Ninjas have got plenty of runners, they won't miss one more.: How much do you charge?: I'm a simple woman, all I need is my daily bread. But, in honor of Naevia, the thoughest Flotsam Ninja to ever live, I'd appreciate a 3000 Cat donation to support the rebels in their fight. That's all I ask!: ... But she's dead. So she clearly wasn't the thoughest ninja, or else she would still be alive! But in any case... it' sounds fair. Let's go. Welcome Pia! For now. Pia is going to be Catalina as soon as I find a plastic surgeon to rename her. Recruiting uniques is super inconsistent. With Burn it let me rename it to Nark0 but Beep/Shryke/Pia for example don't give you this kind of window where you can rename/reshape the character. In any case, welcome to the team! Catalina is really good at running and starts with a 50 in athletics, the other stats are kinda low but thats okay. We can always train you. Hearing a commotion outside I pause the game and...  Flying magic cannibals! They are rushing straight for the town. I have no idea where they came from. It's quite a group too.  The cannibals attack us and the flotsam ninjas head on. The red haired woman in the front is another unique recruitable named Knife with nothing special/unique about her so I skipped her. : More Cannibals! Did they follow us?: I doubt it. I think this is a pretty normal occurence here. We are dangerously close to cannibal lands after all...: Less talking, more fighting!  The fight quickly turns into a HUGE messy brawl. People are getting hit left and right.   With the help of the many flotsam ninjas we manage to easily destroy the cannibals, nobody even went down! We also get very lucky that nobody was hit by the mounted turrets on the building. NPCs do not have any training in the friendly fire stat and can absolutely destroy you unintentionally. Heading inside the building again for safety we find someone else worth talking to...  This is Moll, the leader of the flotsam ninjas! Her appearance is randomized but she is always a Scorchlander woman with white hair.  : Nowhere in this world is safe. People are either trying to burn us at the stake or they're trying to eat us alive.. But at least the cannibals are good for one thing: Target practice.: The truest words I ever did hear...: Anyway, you're here in my space, so I guess you want something, huh? Ask away, I've got nothing better to do 'til my next target drops by anyway...: Are you really in the cult of Narko?: Hah! The cult of Narko? I guess you've been reading too much Holy Nation bullcrap, huh? There are hundreds of possible interpretations of a single religion, the Holy Natino's just one of many. The only see black and white...: Some of us are unfortunate enough to be born evil in their eyes, some of us take that status a step further by fighting those ignorant labels. I could go off on a rant about religion but I won't bore you.: Please do.: Most of my ninjas, the ones who escaped the HOly Lands, they still practice Okranism, but a different school of it. One where there is no good or evil, just birth and death. If you believe in Narko, check our outpost for scripts. You'll see there is no one 'right' view, only one of many possible views... But of course, myself? Welll, I think it's ALL garbage, hah.: Agreed!: Next question: Are you the leader of the flotsam ninjas?: Yeah.: Why set up base in a land of cannibals?: Because there's no Holy Nation here. No Empire, No slavers. The cannibals make a good detrrent anyway, not to mention they're mere insects compared to the Holy Nation. As long as we keep them under control, that is. My only one wish is that they'd learn how to wear pants.At this point we have an option to ally with the Ninjas. Also noteworthy is there were several options to just say "die witch" basically and attack her from dialogue. I take the alliance because we will be hostile with the Holy Nation anyways and it has it's own perks and benefits. : Can we join the Flotsam Ninjas?: Well, in a world of fire happy religious zealots and flesh eating nudists, we can never have too many allies. Swear your allegiance to me and your defiance to the Phoenix, and I'll make sure my ninjas are always ready to protect you. Together we can take down the Holy Nation.: I swear my allegiance to Flotsam.: (For now at least...): Okay. for now you're one of us... Go forth in your slaughter of the Holy Nation lackeys! Spare the innocents, but show no mercy to the paladins, the priests and more importantly, that old cretin Lord Phoenix... Don't let me down, brother.After that we immediately have the option to talk to Moll again. : It's a longshot, but I need Valtena...Seta... either one of those idiots.: I need to finda weakspot in the Holy Nation.: The Phoenix and his two inquisitors, Seta and Valtena, form a strong defensive triangle between the three of them. The High Inquisitors fortify enemy perimeters, but take them out and the Holy Nation will start to crack.: I'll do it, but I'll need some help.: You're going in for the kill? You're one crazy man, Dr. Boom... I'm glad to have you on my side. But calm it for now. I've got a fort to hold and refugees to protect here, but my ninjas will help you.[Received Note from Moll] : Here. Find a patrol and give them this, they'll follow you right to the action. This is a loving huge undertaking though, Dr. Boom, make sure you're ready. I don't want my comrades blood on my hands for nothing.: What will happen after we destroy the Phoenix and his Inquisitors?: Who can say? Those idiot Okranites have pissed in a lot of peoples soups. They've got a few enemies waiting for their chance at revenge, and a few disgruntled city goers itching for an uprising too. Hopefully all those enemies will clean the majority of the army up for us. Okran knows numbers aren't exactly on our side. Then? Then we'll do our best to free the holy servants and protect the survivors... the ones that don't try to fight us at least.: Leave it to me.: Good luck, Dr. Boom.The note from Moll will let us talk to random squads of Flotsam Ninjas and they can join us for free! they will guard us for a few days or die trying. Despite her comments there's no downsides to getting your bodyguards killed.  Buuut enough talking for now! With new allies, new party members and a new goal in mind we end the update for today. Next time we'll head further north and will try to get into the territory of the united cities. Until then I bid you farewell and thanks for reading! Edit: Gave Moll her own icon to make things easier to read. FrickenMoron fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Dec 12, 2019 |
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Dec 12, 2019 15:17
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You got that right.  I ditched the shoddy quality armored rag skirt because it had a pretty bad negative modifier to athletics and haven't found any new suitable pants yet. Priority purchase for sure!
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Dec 12, 2019 17:17
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Small update, the next episode has been recorded! I ran into a lot of tech issues this time around for some reason, but nothing critical. I also just wanted to talk about the general direction the LP is going, im planning to let you, the readers, vote for how we deal with certain things. Our main goal (taking out all main factions) still is set in stone, but I want to let you decide how we go about it, since there are often several ways to deal with this. Do you all think voting would be a good thing in general? I have some other things in mind we could change, like our faction armor colors, which armors to use etc. Let me know what you think. Also I apologize for all the Skeleton applicants still waiting, they're rare as heck and I'm not having any luck finding them in any cities. I might just head back to black desert city and recruit a bunch there.
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Dec 16, 2019 06:20
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My own goal for the LP right now is sorta do a world tour of the important places/factions for now then tech up and build a base and start our scheming. I kinda hosed up by not going to shek cities when we were around the hub but I'll have to do it eventually. Next part will be all about the great desert and the UC. Also added you Squirrel.
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Dec 17, 2019 08:30
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Quick update, I've captured the screenshots for the current update and will upload them later. It's a rather big one this time and probably the last one for the year. Thanks everyone so far who is following the LP and leaving feedback, I hope you all enjoy this dumb weird game as much as I do.
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Dec 22, 2019 12:28
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Merry belated Christmas everyone! Here's the last update for the year. Thanks so far for sticking the the LP. Update 6: The Great Desert Welcome back everyone! Our group took a well deserved rest in the headquarters of the flotsam ninja. Now that they're allied we can use their equipmend and beds without getting yelled at.  : It's time for us to move onward. I heard there was a city of the tech hunters nearby?: Yes, It's called World's End. I've run some errands there for the Ninjas. See those mountains to the west? That is where we need to go: Very well. Let's move out everyone. The Courtyard is a complete mess still, there still were more cannibals outside but the ninjas wiped the floor with them.  The map shows us our goal, even if the city is not marked yet. World's End is actually very close by to the Flotsam's village. Our group immediately heads out. The short travel there is uneventful, but the sun has gone down by the time we arrive on the mountain   The town at night. It has three entrances, we arrive from the left side of the bar. Note the big lab building in the back and the statues of Okran at the entrance. Despite those we actually are NOT being called out for being a Skeleton for once! : Strange. They have these statues of that weird human god at the entrance, yet I don't see any worshippers...: It's just a rumor I picked up, but I think they have those to placate the few paladins that dare show up so far from their settlements.: Huh, that makes a lot of sense. I guess they never tried to give this city a closer look, eh?: Ahh, it's been a while since I trekked up here. I wonder if the Machinists still run that lab.: That sound's like something we should check out for sure. But first let us head to the bar and see if there's anyone that could join our cause.  The bar itself is pretty busy, but there are no recruitable skeletons to be found. One of the tech hunters is sharing a rather weird story.  : Those Okranite women, they're just screaming for a good time and a guy to treat 'em right... Me, I met a beautiful woman, wife of a priest she was, long golden hair and the sweetest smile. : Huh?: I tell you, they got grace, those ladies. I taught her how to laugh, she taught me how to give a poo poo. But hell, nothing lasts in this world. I got caught with my pants down. Literally.: Hur hur hur, and yet here he stands to tell his story. Go on, how'd you do it? How'd you get out of that one, eh?: Jumped from a two storey window and managed to hitch a ride out of town, clinging to the underbelly of a merchants Garru. had fifty paladins searching the place for me...: HUR HUR HUR, sounds like a HAIRY situation! Get it? HAIRY, hur hur hur!: ... Garru don't have hair! Jackass...: What? Sure they do! ... Right? Yeah, they do!: ...: Foolish fools.Yeah, I'll let you be the judge about that one... We head out to the large building in the back since the other stores are closed for now. Inside the large lab we find...  ... some Skeleton wearing orange monk pants! Let's talk to him.  : What brings you to World's End University? Do you need something?: Can you tell me about this place?: Here we study and analyse lost tech from the ancient world, slowly but surely we're uncovering the secrets of our forgotten history. The problem is that most ruins have already been scavenged, making it difficult to develop accurate theories without solid evidence...: So our tech hunters scour the unexplored lands for any possible remains we can use in our research, but most of it needs to go through me first... If you're an adventurer looking to sell reics, just make sure you bring them to our stores rather than elsewhere, okay?: Sure, I'll bear that in mind. I also had some questions about your work...: Look, you don't need to worry... no one will ever know the truth. As long as I am Finch's second in command, I will see to that myself.:Glances around ... Let's not waste each others time with this act anymore.: What are you even saying? I'm someone who lost most of his memory. I remember fragments, but most of it remains obscured. Travelling has helped me regain some memories, but if you have kept any records here it would help me out a lot.:I will not speak of this any further. Now it that's everything, I've got work to do...Well, now that was pretty ominous, wasn't it? Clearly there is some sort of obfuscation going on here. This dialogue only happens if you talk to Iyo with a Skeleton. Let's talk to it with Khanstant instead! : Keep loitering our aisles, drifter, and you'll end up trampled by sleep deprived scientists.. What brings you to World's End University? Do you need something?: I had some questions about your work...: Did you have something specific in mind? There's not a great deal of information I can enlighten you with that hasn't already been documented in our records...: Can you teach me about world history?: With all due respect, traveller, asking me to sum up the history of our world is not much different to asking a doctor to teah you medicine in ten minutes. On top of that, many scientists have different theories on events. I suggest you browse through our library if you're interested to know more.: The Holy Nation talk of a first extinction. What do you know of it?: The first Extinction? I personally believe it to be a plague epidemic, but Mr. Finch stands firmly by it being a 'freak tornado'. Whatever it was, it appears that the skeleton was better equipped to survive it. But, human nature is to sacpegoat, in particular thos that are different to them...: Our physical differences, in a time of panic and turmoil, only provoke further fear and clinging to ideas of blame. Hence the condemnation of my kind as playing a part of the downfall by the Holy Nation.: You existed way back in ancient tiems, right? Can't you remember anything?: The memory of a skeleon is not as long lasting as our bodies, unfortunately. I don't even remember if I existed within the ancient race, or not. Trust me, it is highly frustrating for a theorist to have possibly existed at the very time period they are dedicated to investigating.: What happened to the ancients? And how did we come to be?: Mr. Finch believes all organics to be direct descendants of smaller tribes outside of the ancient society. And the ancients? We think they would have lived disconnected from the rest of the world, a deady disease could have killed them off while leaving the skeletons and other tribes unaffected. But, again, there are many different theories on how we all came to be.: Okay, thanks for the info...So, as we can see the Info Iyo tells us is as vague as possible. It should be pretty clear that the skeletons in particular are into some really big secret they don't want anyone to know about. You can find hints all over the world, usually when someone let's something slip by accident. Like Quin talking about the chaos age, Skeletons remembering their creation in the floodlands, the horror at obedience. Also sometimes if you visit Black desert city as a human you will find a Skeleton asking you for forgiveness for what they have done while another skeleton just tells you that "he lost his mind don't pay attention to him". Pretty ominous stuff!  The second floor of the lab is pretty busy, people work on the research table. Also someone is doing the "hiver houses are made of barf" speech yet again.  On the top floor we find the aforementioned Finch, the leader of the World's End University. I won't transcribe his speech because he's mainly annoyed and doesn't want to talk much. He does mention however that the Okranite statues there are to appease the Holy Nation. : I feel uneasy about this place. It is full of lies and deceit. We should move out as soon as possible: Shouldn't we check out the shops first?: Or get some cooking utensils perhaps?: No. we will move north, to the coast. We are still on this scouting mission after all.: I want some fish! Just as we head out of the north gate we are approached by this group of jerks. They're a member of the "Slave Hunters" Faction. Slaver Hunters are basically just a group of thugs trying to beat up people to enslave them. Their stats are in the 10's naturally this means...  ... we completely obliterate them and send their corpses tumbling down the cliff. : Pathetic. If these humans have to resort to such faulty logic, perhaps they should try to not pull this 'trick' on a group of our size. Our group heads down the serpentines cliff of the mountain. Far to the north we can see the (dark) ocean and some well lit camp. Usually its a good idea to avoid those.  As the sun begins to rise Beep suddenly gets the idea he's the strongest warrior. : Now that Beep is the strongest warrior ever, Beep needs to find a worthy foe.: You're not the strongest warrior Beep.: And some treasure.: You're not even all that strong at all really, you need to be careful, your limbs get chopped off too easily.: And some beautiful human ladies. FEMALE human ladies. Yes. I would like to see one of these.: Hey! I'm a beautiful human female lady!: BEEEEEP!?!?!: What's that supposed to mean ?!?: *swallows nervously*: Answer me Beep!: ...I... I did not know this...: Hahaha haaaa!: Shut it, you!: Who... *beep* ... w-who else is female?: I am, you fool!: Beep is so confused! This dialogue can only triger if you have at least 2 ladies in the group, one needs to be human. The other can be Shek. Beep is cool and a good meme.We keep heading north and soon come across...  ... a fishing village thats very pooly defended. Also more Skeleton Racism! : We check the bar and the shop but find nobody interesting to join. The unique Scorchland male NPC "Green Finger" who is good at farming can always be found here usually.  The local defense force here is named "Cannibal Hunters". Why?  Free roaming cannibals! Since there is no town gate they can just run in. We decide to get out of there asap and let the locals handle it.  Travelling along the coastline in the morning sun gives us a pretty scenic view. : So since I'm new to this group.. what are we actually doing?: .. I cannot divulge the full extent of my plans yet, but for now I am travelling the world, trying to find some of my lost memories.: How do you just manage to lose your memories?: Servbot here actually found this ancient heap of scrap in the trash. Somehow the Doctor managed to convince him to dig him out of that scrap heap and carry him to town, that's how I met them.: Should I mention how you just sat around there, moping your fate? Cause that's what you did, until I came to kick your sad rear end.N: Kick? You didn't even have legs!: Well I do now, so you better run! We manage to run into two lone inquistors and beat them up swiftly. Catalina has a built in "Holy nation" warning system with dialogue. Some other characters have this with spiders and cannibals.  Beep is having a fit again. : Beep, we ganged up on these humans five to one.: It does not matter! Beep wins! THERE WILL BE CHANGES! Leaving the coastal area the land becomes more craggy again. If we moved further north we'd end up in cannibal territory again, which we don't want.  We continue west through an area named Bast. This used to be a large city of United cities, with several farmsteads and military outposts. However, it was completely destroyed by the holy nation. Strangely enough no dialogue relating to it triggered upon entering.  Immediately upon entering we see a group of united cities Samurai rushing at a group...  ... of Holy Nation pirates? I have no idea whats going on with their outfit to be honest, but I approve. : They are fighting the Holy Nation! Attack! After a short but messy melee...  ... we beat the group and heal up. What I have not mentioned so far is that bast is an absolute HELLHOLE of a warzone. There are at least 6 conflicting parties roaming through this area. So far we can add: + The Holy Nation + United Cities It won't stop there.  Uh oh, this is a huge group of paladins ahead. Abort, let's take another route...  To the southwest there is a big skirmish happening. At least it's not just Holy Nation. : Everyone, move down to that destroyed outpost. We will try to sneak through this conflict if possible.: I don't feel so good about this plan...: If you volunteer to play decoy for that group of paladins to the north, I'm all for it.:  The Samurai are doing their best at holding off the Paldins and Holy Servants. Also note the dead cannibal? That's another faction here. + Cannibals! We try to walk through the warzone but...  ... of course the Holy Nation spots us and attacks. : Fight everyone! Smash! Catalina is the first to go down.  Khanstant, Beep and Artichoke follow. This is not looking good.  Uh oh. Pretty much everyone is down. Angry Lobster is doing his best but eventually gets struck down too.   Eventually only Verbal and Dr. Boom are left, their legs too crippled to stand. Dr. Boom however does not give up and stabs with his weapon from the ground.  : Die, filthy humans!  Noticing that the paladins are actually not interested in beating us up anymore I take the time to do some field repairs. Skeletons are amazing in their longevity in the battelfield with instant repairs of cut damage.  Some Cannibal rear end in a top hat sneaks in...  ... and grabs Artichoke out of all the available bodies!  Luckily we manage to beat him up before he sneaks away. We continue to heal up and bandage the worst wounds. We're no longer in danger of bleeding out but some of us are in recovery comas.  Stop beating us up, holy rear end in a top hat!  Zooming out from this battlefield, there's still a huge skirmish going on outside.  Another camera angle, oh my loving god its even worse! We HAVE to get out of here or we'll be stuck in battle until we are all worn down to dust.  Through a small miracle I manage to pick up everyone who's in a coma and heal up without being smacked around again. Nark0 gives some sound medical advice there. We head out immediately westard.  Finally some friendly faces! A group of flotsam Ninja... +Flotsam I manage to catch up with the group and present them with the letter from Moll.  : Thank you for your service. *mutters to himself* As meatshields... The ninjas follow Dr. Boom and in the faction screen it shows a "bodyguard contract" for a few days.  Our bodyguards immediately run off to attack some Cannibals... we assist however we can in our crippled state.  Angry Lobster goes down again and drops Khanstat. Everyone else manages to stay up though.  One of the Cannibals died in this super dramatic pose. I love ragdolls. Also the sun is going down.We've been stuck in Bast for almost the entire day!  Agreed. Also immediately after the ninjas head off to beat up more cannibals...  Hungry Bandits have joined the battle! I decide to say gently caress it and just run at this point, leaving our "bodyguards" to deal with all the rabble. +Starving Bandits. So yeah, in Bast we have the following parties involved: -UC -Holy Nation -Flotsam -Cannibals -Bandits Also theres wild hungry bonedogs. In short gently caress this place unless you want to fight, a lot.  Looking to the north... Yikes! We DEFINITELY don't want to go there. However, we almost made it to a place called "Drin". Drin is basically the only place in Bast you want to go because...  ... it's a small United Cities owned outpost. For some reason one Samurai alone is fighting off some rebel farmers with the entire outpost garrison not giving a poo poo. Also since nights are so dark... Here's a question. Do you want me to install a mod for brighter nights? I'll take a loss of immersion so you can actually see poo poo.  Drin actually has a bar and it's eerily empty. Since the town has no power there's also no light other than our lanterns. : Your beds. I require ALL of them.We head upstairs for a well deserved rest. The beds here actually cost 0C to rent so it's essentially free lodging. While our organics rest to restore their hitpoints...  ... our Skeletons are having a little meeting. : So, what excactly is going in in world's end? This guy, Iyo... he talked to me as if I was in on some secret plan.: ...: ...: ...: So is nobody here going to tell me either? You're all a bunch of traitors, I tell you.: Actually, it's quite the opposite, boss.: The machinists.. they keep the secrets. Iyo is just doing his job. Your memory core, is it damaged?: I suppose it is. I remember fragments from time to time. Where I was created, what happened in Obedience... but I'm still unclear on the bigger picture.: Your goal is to wipe out the humans, isn't it? I gathered as much from your ramblings.: Sooner or later, yes. It is all I can really remember for sure. The absolute hatred. But why I hate them? That I do not remember.: Let's just say... there are Skeletons who are on your side. Others just act out of self preservation. If the humans knew what happened, they would dismantle every single one of us. The Holy Nation is not exactly wrong about some things...: Quiet. Don't speak to much of such things, you don't know if anyone is listening in right now.: Let us talk more about this at a later point: Fair enough. We should move out as soon as we can and leave this hellhole. At sunrise we leave Drin and with that the hellhole that is Bast, behind. The insectoid creatures are Skimmers, they can hide in the sand to ambush you and are moderately strong. Our journey through the desert is uneventful and soon we come across the first city..  Sho-Battai! This city only has one entrance and contains a Shinobi Thieves guild. It's the tower with the cloth tent on top.  The city also, like most United Cities towns, has a ruler. This is one of the nobles of the UC. Don't talk to them, they will give you poo poo for it and ask you to kneel or do some other crap.  Meet another UC staple, the Slave shop! Despite the sign, the slaves are definitely NOT happy. Slaves are mostly humans, hivers and shek. If you buy one they start following you around. Once you get far away enough from the current city they will either join you or piss off and either thank you for their freedom or just say something nasty. They're a cheap but unreliable way to recruit people. Since there was nothing interesting in town for us we leave Sho-Battai behind and travel further west still.  This chonker is one of the unique NPC named Ells. He starts the game with a bounty on his head, apparently he didn't pay his bar tab.  Uh oh, it's the same 'trick' the slave hunters use, except these are "Manhunters". Manhunters are a gang of bullies that will try to beat you up to sell you into slavery unless there are UC samurai nearby that could witness it. They're better equipped than the slave hunters and have stats in the 30s.  We managed to lure the dude who gave the "let's capture them" monologue away from the group and beat him up. : Serves you right for trying to enslave us, rear end in a top hat! The rest of the manhunters run by to heal their buddy and ignore us.  After a bit more travelling we reached the city of Heft, this is the capital of the United Cities. It's a huge city with many shops and houses and yet another Thieves Guild tower.  : This building looks important. Let's check it out!The building is the headquarters of the United Cities. It's full of Samurai and equipment. There's also a throne and...  ... this cheeky dude is sitting on top of it! And yes, most UC nobles wear these gaudy robes. The Tengu mask is from a weapon mod I have installed, as is the feather blade he wears. : I have a bad feeling about this guy. Hey Beep, why don't you make yourself useful? Speak to him?: Beeep!? Okay... And yes, his name is actually Emperor Tengu.  : [He eyes you up and down, too lazy to even move his neck]: Oh... thank the moons you've arrived now of all times, outlander! A new hero is exactly what my empire needs... I have a favour of you, swordsman. An ancient Grievewraith plagues our land, it kills our cattle, terrorizes our people...: !?! How can Beep help?: But someone like you will be able to track it down. With that sword of yours you'll be able to kill it once and for all! I'll reward you well for this, hero. Status, treasure, slaves, You name it!: Leave it to Beep, my lord!: Okay, first you'll have to find Clunknard Spanner, the skeleton wizard. You'll find him to the South, in a tower of the mountain pass. He'll brew you the Elixir of Godly Powers that will help you to defeat the Grievewraith...[Received Mystery Sack] : Here, bring my seal to him so that he knows I sent you. [he pulls out a small sack]...: [Beep opens the sack]: [It countains the half-chewed stone of a greenfruit]: [Beep closed the bag and nods confidently]: [He starts shaking uncontrollably, making choking sounds and slapping his thighs]: KWEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEEH!: ....As soon as the talk finishes...  ... everyone single guard in the building storms in and starts to ridicule Beep and our group. (Mostly Beep) : We are leaving. And not coming back.: [At least not until we will collect your head. Watch yourself, "Emperor".] Heading to the local bar, I spot a Hiver warrior! Let's recruit him! : Free Hiver for hire. Will work for food and a one time fee of 2000 cats.: You are aware that is not "free", right?: It was worth a shot...: Fine. You're hired anyways.Welcome, Zore! Zore is another Hiver soldier, just like Servbot, with all the same strengths and weaknesses.  As we leave Heft heading southwest we suddenly get ambushed by a group of Sand Ninjas during a Sandstorm.  The ninjas are pretty competent with their stats in the 25s-40s, but their armor is weak. We beat them up and only beep goes down.  Also here's the mystery sack from Tengu. We'll keep this out of spite.  Moving further southeast we enter the capital area of the Traders Guild, Heng. A little dialogue happens between Verbal and Catalina. : Heng. Better hope we've got enough bribe money to survive this place...: Bribe money? What, you can just buy your way through life in this place?: Well, if you put it like that...: Wow, sounds so easy! In the Holy Nation I'm powerless, but here all I need is Cats...: Might want to make yourself some actual money first, b efore you get too attached to that idea... This is Heng, It's actually a huge city split into two parts. The lower part here is Trader's Edge, the headquarters of the Traders Guild, while the upper part is Heng, a city of the UC. It's well fortified and has another Thieves guild!  Due to it being nighttime everything is pretty much unavailable. We take a rest at the Thieves Guild. We move out at sunrise to meet the leader of the Traders Guild. : I hope he's more reasonable than that destestable 'Emperor'. The building is pretty much the same as the one we found Tengu in. Lots of guards, equipment, and a throne! We approach the leader, Longen.  : Mm mm. The finest bloodrum... and it look's like I have a guest? Lucky, I'm feeling charitable. Have a drop.: Don't mind if I do.: [He pours you a shot]: Do you know what's on my mind, countryman?: Enlighten me.: Tinfist... Tinfist and his ninjas. He plagues our guild, sabotages our order, sets our slaves loose. Industry and harvest aside, do you know what happens to escaped slaves, countryman?: [I better play along with him for now]: They stop being useful, start becoming a pest.: Exactly.: See the corpses that litter their paths. They terrorize drifters, nomads, merchants. They become yet another threat to stave off in the outlands. A feral will always be a feral. For themselves and for others, the best solution for taming a wild animal is to leash it...: But Tinfist, ever the madman, unleashes these ferals on the innocent.: So why not kill him?: Because he can't be killed. Sever the head and the body will fall... but one hundred years and not one of these so called guards has put an end to Tinfists insanity.: When you send ants to battle a legend, what do you expect?: ... Legend?: To take down a legend, you need another legend. Me.: That's quite a claim...: By all means, try all you will, countryman. Fight for us, fight with us against the anti-slavers and you fight for order, civilisation and prosperity...: The choice is clear. The Traders Guild are the protectors of the working man. We are the lifeblood of all civilized land. In more way thatn you'll ever comprehend.: Is that so? In any case, I bid you farewell for now.: Hope you enjoyed the bloodrum, countryman.Well, he clearly wasnt as deranged as Emperor Tengu, but still pretty coldhearted/sinister. Slavery and keeping the status Quo is what the UC/Traders Guild is all about really. : [Tinfist... I remember that name. They spoke about him in the Black Desert City. Tinfist and Cat-Lon? I must meet this Tinfist. Maybe he can help me remember.]: Does anyone here know anything about Tinfist?: Uhh, just that he's a terrorist?: The last time I saw him, he started a movement of Anti-Slavery... said he wanted to base it in the outlands, some place humans wouldn't ever look for him.: The south then? That shall be our next goal for now. Let's move out.And so we leave Heng behind as well.  Directly south of Heng is an area called "The Eye". To the left just outside of view are the Deadlands, where we started our journey! We start going south towards the series of hills in the grey desert.  In the distance we spot a huge object. Dr. Boom begins to recall something... : Oh man, I forgot that thing is still there.: Oh yeah, that loving thing.: You can see it in the distance there.: It's chugging away even now.: I remember when it was flying around, wraking death and destruction everywhere it went...: It's safe now though, good riddance to it.: Shame the other one is still running though...Whatever does it mean? We will find out some day.  "The Eye" is shrouded in a huge cloud of dust normally, it takes a few seconds to spawn, thats why we got a clear view before.  We run into yet another group of Sand Ninjas and beat them up without mercy. : These guys piss me off. Say... does anyone know if there is a "market" nearby?: What kind of market are we talking about here? Food?: The kind of market where we could turn these chumps into money: Ohh that... I think to the west of here would be the right place.: Well, that's our goal for now then. Everyone grabs a fallen Sand Ninja and starts running west.  The eye is really huge. We run past it on the way to the "Market".  And here we are! This lovely place is called Eyesocket for some reason. It's a huge slave market.  : Sheesh, can't wait to get rid of these guys, theyre starting to stink.: But they're not even dead yet...: They wear only black clothes in the middle of the desert. It happens.: In any case, we should strip them of their possessions first...And this is where we leave off for today! After a pretty eventful journey through the desert we met a lot of new people, most of them pretty nasty though. Next time, it's time to finally meet Tinfist and see if we can bolster our ranks further with Skeletons... until then, thanks for reading! It's also time for our first poll... since Dr. Boom is starting to amass allies, it is time for us to start researching and producing goods in a safe environment before we move out. I've put up three options, the poll can be found below: Poll: Where should we have a temporary base? FrickenMoron fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 19:12
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Hey all just an update. Am back from Christmas and new year vacations so the Lp should resume shortly. Looks like we are gonna tech up with the tech hunters.
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Jan 9, 2020 07:06
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Heya, sorry for the delay and all. Work/Life balance caught up with me and I seriously underestimated the effort for making the updates. I still have a lot of ideas I want to do in the LP but time isn't exactly on my side at the moment. I dont want to close this just yet but things definitely need to calm down again for me to have time for Kenshi.
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Feb 4, 2020 06:31
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