Crystal Chaos
May. 29th, 2004 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothTonight we had another session of Lazar's Stargate-themed Shadake-sort-of game. We started out spending a couple hours retrofitting our characters with a modified version of the spell crystals we'd worked with last week, as well as CRPG-style statistics based on our characters that we'd be raising directly from then on instead of raising skills in the normal shadake fashion.
I ended up having the crappiest starting stats (arguably) and the fewest points to raise them with -- Lazar decided to use a luck roll to determine how many crystals we got of each color, and the crystals were more efficient at raising stats when used by someone of the same color, so we divided them up that way... I had 13. Murdock's character Kyrae had 29. The NPC Carmine, with two colors, had 41.
Really, though, because of the way the battle system worked (ATK - DEF = damage), the only person who was at all effective was Croran.
It's a little frustrating to have the rules of the game change under you like that, so that assumptions you made when designing your character (STR doesn't matter much if you're using guns; karma affects luck and not character advancement; potential is used to raise skills which raise effectiveness) were no longer valid. But we knew it was going to be a playtest game before we started, this game even more than others since we're testing a CRPG battle system. Also, the plan is to reset and start over periodically as revisions are made, so the numbers we have now might not be representative forever.
And, lastly, I turned out not to be as ineffective as all that -- I could at least scratch the enemies with physical attacks (the ones that didn't require SP), unlike Kyrae and Nuki.
Once Theta team was gathered in the airlock, JT indicated an interest in the lack of bodies Nuki reported in the control room, and took Carmine with him to check it out while the others went to look for an engine room to disassemble.
The control room was indeed clean -- there were no traces of the weasels left, although the battle had obviously happened at some point, due to the extensive damage to the facilities (claw marks through the screens, and all). Some of the chairs were made of organic materials (leather and cloth) still in good condition, which would seem to rule out the possibility that the altercation had happened so long ago that everything had rotted away.
While searching for any trace, JT accidentally hit a button, and a map of the ship popped up. The corridors struck him as looking a lot like a capillary network of a leaf, or an animal, and nothing at all like what a sane race would build into a spaceship -- but they were curved, on the map, where in real life they seemed to be straight, and that combined with the sheer illogic of the layout meant that Nuki and company were likely to get very lost, quickly. So he took a picture of the map and downloaded it onto his PDA, then contacted them on the radio (they were still in range, because they hadn't turned a corner yet) and told them to wait up while he and Carmine joined them.
The other group hadn't turned a corner yet because they'd stopped to investigate the seemingly automatic lights and doors, and in particular whether the invisibility they'd had JT put on Croran prevented them from triggering. That did seem to be the case. But while they were doing that, they were attacked by a giant, red, demon-weasel -- they managed to fight it off, mostly with Croran's staff, and it immolated, leaving behind little crystals.
Apparently, the squirrels they'd fought on their first mission were normal squirrels infected by LLCs in the same destructive fashion as these weasels had been infected -- which was unlike how Nimune like themselves were affected. None of the party, or anyone else on the base, had changed colors, gotten big and evil looking, or exploded into crystals.
Once the group was all together, JT used the map to lead them towards what seemed to be an important area in the center of the ship -- a nexus of various corridors. To get there, though, they had to go through a 'red zone', like the bridge and the airlock, indicating (they presumed) damage had been done to the ship.
While the previous distortions had been passed off as the map being drawn strangely, the dip beneath the waterline (as that was the red area in question -- a region of submerged tunnels) proved that they were real -- the surface of the water wasn't horizontal relative to gravity as they felt it, until they were actually in the water.
Nuki was sent ahead invisibly to scout, and found one of the doors they needed to go through closed. Bouncing up and down on what would be the floor if the ship was upright got it to open, and black ooze started creeping out from beyond it... so he ran away, back to the group to report.
The dark area was only about twenty feet from what looked like the far surface of the water, so JT recommended they continue on, and volunteered to take the hazmat field analysis kit with him to sample the darkness and verify that it wasn't dangerous -- if someone would cast 'block green' on him, to protect against possible poisons. When he got down there, though, the darkness was gone -- both doors were fully open, and the water was all clear and (according to his kit) pure and distilled.
So the group travelled through the watery area, keeping an eye out to see if the darkness came back, and were surprised by a small dragon creeping up the corridor in front of them, along the ceiling. Nuki spotted it and pointed it out, and they tried talking to it, in their own language and 'Kalian', a secret language of the cult of Kali, which seemed to be the language the weasels used, according to Nuki. Carmine recognized it as a chinese dragon, though, and suggested speaking to it in Mandarin. Croran did so, and it looked surprised, and ran off.
Nothing else stood in their way before the nexus, which proved to be a giant, largely empty, non-euclidean storage room. The outer wall was a twenty-three sided regular polyhedron, and the inside was filled with triangular shelving. Gravity was 'down' to each face and each shelf, with lines of sight shifting to keep gravity steady along each line.
If it's hard to describe, it was even harder to navigate, but after a lot of searching they found what seemed to be the only thing left in the room -- an alien antigravity vehicle, which Croran named the 'Rascal Scooter' and JT called the 'Slowmobile', since it didn't seem able to go faster than walking speed.
It wasn't very big, but it was more than strong enough to carry all of them, so they decided to use it as transportation, since they HAD to take it back with them, as the only piece of portable technology they'd managed to find.
So they headed next for another nexus in the rear of the ship, which they figured would be the engine room -- it was underwater, but they all had breathing masks. On the way, they stopped to pick up a rope they'd left behind in case they wanted to climb back up the way they'd come, only to have it come loose as they tugged -- good thing they hadn't had to rely on it.
Nuki decided that he was sick of being invisible (it didn't seem to wear off on its own, although Croran's had worn off when they fought the red weasel demon) and attacked the wall, which did dispell the invisibilty, but also provoked a response from a disembodied voice, presumably the ship's computer, speaking in Kalian. 'Please take out your frustrations in the designated aggression area.' An area lit up in blue on their maps.
Yes, the PICTURE of the map they'd copied to everyone's PDA from a digital camera was updating in real time, now, and all the other functions of the PDAs were gone (they'd actually noticed this earlier, but this was the first time it really mattered). JT suggested they go to the designated aggression area, to see if they could get their hands on any weapons, since weapons were one of the things they'd been sent to find. Nuki asked out loud if the computer could show them the armory, but there was no response, and the blue highlight vanished.
So they headed to where the blue highlight had been, and found a sort of arena. It looked deserted, but JT decided to use his psi-empathy to try to sense any hostiles lurking in wait... which the computer picked up on, and took as a request. 'Summoning aggressors. Battle 1, begin.'
Doors opened, and two 'goblins' (demon-weasels), a blue and a black, swam into the room. They had powerful magic attacks, but Nuki managed to do enough SP damage to them with one of his spells that they couldn't cast very many, and a useless giant Manta JT summoned (he figured out later that it was an 'air manta', and had been struggling underwater) drew most of their attacks, since it was the least well armored. Nuki and JT could only barely hurt them, but applied various status effects, while Kyrae spent his time casting 'speed' on everyone, and Carmine healed.
Croran did most of the killing -- and to strike the final killing blow on the second goblin, he transformed into a giant green owlbear-like creature! The rest of the team backed off, looking at him nervously, but he was fully in control of himself, and soon changed back. Still, it was kind of disturbing to realize that yes, as the video had seemed to indicate, the LLCs they had were the same ones that turned weasels (and squirrels) into ravening monsters.
JT was careful not to summon any more enemies, since most of the team was out of SP. It turned out that there *weren't* any more enemies, though, and that the engines (or whatever had been in the back of the ship) was gone, smashed to pieces. They collected some debris, even though it all looked like solid plastic, then headed to the control room to pick up some of the more mechanical-looking controls they'd seen there.
While disassembling things, though, they somehow managed to activate the self-destruct, which had been waiting for authorization all this time. They raced out of the ship on the slowmobile...
...then got out and pushed, because it was so damn slow. The exit portal couldn't be summoned inside the spaceship, due to radio interference, but it was waiting for them at the airlock. So they flew out (on the slowmobile) past it far enough to not get killed by the opening discharge, opened it up...
...and the ship exploded, in what looked like a nuclear blast. Fortunately, they were shielded, since a cone behind the portal was empty of fire and heat and light, as all that had gone through the portal, into their base. Oops.
The portal remained open as the explosion subsided, though, which meant that the generators and the disk at least had survived, so they waited as long as they could to give the room time to cool before hovering through. They were lucky -- most of the energy of the blast had been filtered out by the portal itself, much like foreign bacteria and gunpowder seemed to be.
The scientists were very excited to be able to study a working antigravity device, and the apparently optically-transmitted computer virus was also quite... creepy. The head of the base ordered that from now on, equipment would be quarantined after a mission as well as personell.
During the debriefing, they mentioned Croran's transformation, and over the next few days tests revealed that yes, everyone who'd been infected by an LLC was able to transform into some other creature, and that *almost* all Nimune were able to control themselves... but if they weren't, it was impossible to subdue them without them vanishing in a flare of energy, leaving behind crystals. Going berzerk was thus a very bad thing.
last session | next session
We found more red, blue, and black crystals... I think the dragon might have been supposed to be green, and I think we may have been supposed to fight it, which means Croran got cheated out of his crystal fix. Oops!
I ended up having the crappiest starting stats (arguably) and the fewest points to raise them with -- Lazar decided to use a luck roll to determine how many crystals we got of each color, and the crystals were more efficient at raising stats when used by someone of the same color, so we divided them up that way... I had 13. Murdock's character Kyrae had 29. The NPC Carmine, with two colors, had 41.
Really, though, because of the way the battle system worked (ATK - DEF = damage), the only person who was at all effective was Croran.
It's a little frustrating to have the rules of the game change under you like that, so that assumptions you made when designing your character (STR doesn't matter much if you're using guns; karma affects luck and not character advancement; potential is used to raise skills which raise effectiveness) were no longer valid. But we knew it was going to be a playtest game before we started, this game even more than others since we're testing a CRPG battle system. Also, the plan is to reset and start over periodically as revisions are made, so the numbers we have now might not be representative forever.
And, lastly, I turned out not to be as ineffective as all that -- I could at least scratch the enemies with physical attacks (the ones that didn't require SP), unlike Kyrae and Nuki.
Once Theta team was gathered in the airlock, JT indicated an interest in the lack of bodies Nuki reported in the control room, and took Carmine with him to check it out while the others went to look for an engine room to disassemble.
The control room was indeed clean -- there were no traces of the weasels left, although the battle had obviously happened at some point, due to the extensive damage to the facilities (claw marks through the screens, and all). Some of the chairs were made of organic materials (leather and cloth) still in good condition, which would seem to rule out the possibility that the altercation had happened so long ago that everything had rotted away.
While searching for any trace, JT accidentally hit a button, and a map of the ship popped up. The corridors struck him as looking a lot like a capillary network of a leaf, or an animal, and nothing at all like what a sane race would build into a spaceship -- but they were curved, on the map, where in real life they seemed to be straight, and that combined with the sheer illogic of the layout meant that Nuki and company were likely to get very lost, quickly. So he took a picture of the map and downloaded it onto his PDA, then contacted them on the radio (they were still in range, because they hadn't turned a corner yet) and told them to wait up while he and Carmine joined them.
The other group hadn't turned a corner yet because they'd stopped to investigate the seemingly automatic lights and doors, and in particular whether the invisibility they'd had JT put on Croran prevented them from triggering. That did seem to be the case. But while they were doing that, they were attacked by a giant, red, demon-weasel -- they managed to fight it off, mostly with Croran's staff, and it immolated, leaving behind little crystals.
Apparently, the squirrels they'd fought on their first mission were normal squirrels infected by LLCs in the same destructive fashion as these weasels had been infected -- which was unlike how Nimune like themselves were affected. None of the party, or anyone else on the base, had changed colors, gotten big and evil looking, or exploded into crystals.
Once the group was all together, JT used the map to lead them towards what seemed to be an important area in the center of the ship -- a nexus of various corridors. To get there, though, they had to go through a 'red zone', like the bridge and the airlock, indicating (they presumed) damage had been done to the ship.
While the previous distortions had been passed off as the map being drawn strangely, the dip beneath the waterline (as that was the red area in question -- a region of submerged tunnels) proved that they were real -- the surface of the water wasn't horizontal relative to gravity as they felt it, until they were actually in the water.
Nuki was sent ahead invisibly to scout, and found one of the doors they needed to go through closed. Bouncing up and down on what would be the floor if the ship was upright got it to open, and black ooze started creeping out from beyond it... so he ran away, back to the group to report.
The dark area was only about twenty feet from what looked like the far surface of the water, so JT recommended they continue on, and volunteered to take the hazmat field analysis kit with him to sample the darkness and verify that it wasn't dangerous -- if someone would cast 'block green' on him, to protect against possible poisons. When he got down there, though, the darkness was gone -- both doors were fully open, and the water was all clear and (according to his kit) pure and distilled.
So the group travelled through the watery area, keeping an eye out to see if the darkness came back, and were surprised by a small dragon creeping up the corridor in front of them, along the ceiling. Nuki spotted it and pointed it out, and they tried talking to it, in their own language and 'Kalian', a secret language of the cult of Kali, which seemed to be the language the weasels used, according to Nuki. Carmine recognized it as a chinese dragon, though, and suggested speaking to it in Mandarin. Croran did so, and it looked surprised, and ran off.
Nothing else stood in their way before the nexus, which proved to be a giant, largely empty, non-euclidean storage room. The outer wall was a twenty-three sided regular polyhedron, and the inside was filled with triangular shelving. Gravity was 'down' to each face and each shelf, with lines of sight shifting to keep gravity steady along each line.
If it's hard to describe, it was even harder to navigate, but after a lot of searching they found what seemed to be the only thing left in the room -- an alien antigravity vehicle, which Croran named the 'Rascal Scooter' and JT called the 'Slowmobile', since it didn't seem able to go faster than walking speed.
It wasn't very big, but it was more than strong enough to carry all of them, so they decided to use it as transportation, since they HAD to take it back with them, as the only piece of portable technology they'd managed to find.
So they headed next for another nexus in the rear of the ship, which they figured would be the engine room -- it was underwater, but they all had breathing masks. On the way, they stopped to pick up a rope they'd left behind in case they wanted to climb back up the way they'd come, only to have it come loose as they tugged -- good thing they hadn't had to rely on it.
Nuki decided that he was sick of being invisible (it didn't seem to wear off on its own, although Croran's had worn off when they fought the red weasel demon) and attacked the wall, which did dispell the invisibilty, but also provoked a response from a disembodied voice, presumably the ship's computer, speaking in Kalian. 'Please take out your frustrations in the designated aggression area.' An area lit up in blue on their maps.
Yes, the PICTURE of the map they'd copied to everyone's PDA from a digital camera was updating in real time, now, and all the other functions of the PDAs were gone (they'd actually noticed this earlier, but this was the first time it really mattered). JT suggested they go to the designated aggression area, to see if they could get their hands on any weapons, since weapons were one of the things they'd been sent to find. Nuki asked out loud if the computer could show them the armory, but there was no response, and the blue highlight vanished.
So they headed to where the blue highlight had been, and found a sort of arena. It looked deserted, but JT decided to use his psi-empathy to try to sense any hostiles lurking in wait... which the computer picked up on, and took as a request. 'Summoning aggressors. Battle 1, begin.'
Doors opened, and two 'goblins' (demon-weasels), a blue and a black, swam into the room. They had powerful magic attacks, but Nuki managed to do enough SP damage to them with one of his spells that they couldn't cast very many, and a useless giant Manta JT summoned (he figured out later that it was an 'air manta', and had been struggling underwater) drew most of their attacks, since it was the least well armored. Nuki and JT could only barely hurt them, but applied various status effects, while Kyrae spent his time casting 'speed' on everyone, and Carmine healed.
Croran did most of the killing -- and to strike the final killing blow on the second goblin, he transformed into a giant green owlbear-like creature! The rest of the team backed off, looking at him nervously, but he was fully in control of himself, and soon changed back. Still, it was kind of disturbing to realize that yes, as the video had seemed to indicate, the LLCs they had were the same ones that turned weasels (and squirrels) into ravening monsters.
JT was careful not to summon any more enemies, since most of the team was out of SP. It turned out that there *weren't* any more enemies, though, and that the engines (or whatever had been in the back of the ship) was gone, smashed to pieces. They collected some debris, even though it all looked like solid plastic, then headed to the control room to pick up some of the more mechanical-looking controls they'd seen there.
While disassembling things, though, they somehow managed to activate the self-destruct, which had been waiting for authorization all this time. They raced out of the ship on the slowmobile...
...then got out and pushed, because it was so damn slow. The exit portal couldn't be summoned inside the spaceship, due to radio interference, but it was waiting for them at the airlock. So they flew out (on the slowmobile) past it far enough to not get killed by the opening discharge, opened it up...
...and the ship exploded, in what looked like a nuclear blast. Fortunately, they were shielded, since a cone behind the portal was empty of fire and heat and light, as all that had gone through the portal, into their base. Oops.
The portal remained open as the explosion subsided, though, which meant that the generators and the disk at least had survived, so they waited as long as they could to give the room time to cool before hovering through. They were lucky -- most of the energy of the blast had been filtered out by the portal itself, much like foreign bacteria and gunpowder seemed to be.
The scientists were very excited to be able to study a working antigravity device, and the apparently optically-transmitted computer virus was also quite... creepy. The head of the base ordered that from now on, equipment would be quarantined after a mission as well as personell.
During the debriefing, they mentioned Croran's transformation, and over the next few days tests revealed that yes, everyone who'd been infected by an LLC was able to transform into some other creature, and that *almost* all Nimune were able to control themselves... but if they weren't, it was impossible to subdue them without them vanishing in a flare of energy, leaving behind crystals. Going berzerk was thus a very bad thing.
last session | next session
We found more red, blue, and black crystals... I think the dragon might have been supposed to be green, and I think we may have been supposed to fight it, which means Croran got cheated out of his crystal fix. Oops!
