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[Flying Dice]

Ordering your minions forward with a wave of your hand, you charge at the downed golem. The carnizelle leaps over the pair of grappling constructs and body-checks the armless zed, knocking the off-balance corpse back a short distance. It rips and tears at the cold flesh as the zombie snaps its jaws in frustration, unable to get a grip on the carnizelle without hands. Meanwhile, Basin flows up the body of the "lead" zombie as you've named it, forcing itself into its open gullet. You can see the zombie's throat bulge visibly as Basin makes his way downward. Now that you're closer you can see that this one looks different because it's dressed in tattered red leather. Shards of broken bone protrude visibly from much of its body.

Yikes! You'd almost forgotten about the large golem until it made a grab for your leg. Stumbling aside, you lay hands on it as your armed golem continues to attempt to keep it on the ground, trying to draw the animating energy from it as you did with your shrine earlier. You feel a sensation of something rising to the surface and start to believe that you're doing it, though the power feels unfamiliar and foreign. It's at this point that the energy snaps with an audible crack, blasting you down the corridor, bouncing off a wall with a meaty thump. A few bits of bark flake off, falling to the floor. You feel a sharp twinge in your injured arm as you watch the large construct push itself off the ground, dimly lit by the green glow of your wand, snapping one of the arms off of your many-armed golem. The black-robed zombie with arms turns towards where the carnizelle zombie is savaging the armless one, slowly advancing on them. The leather-clad zed stands still, looking about as confused as a zombie can.

Spoiler: Status (click to show/hide)

Health:
Body: Heavy bruising; slightly ill
Right arm: Burnt, discolored, & fractured arm, enclosed in bark;
Power: 0/6
Power: 1/1
Power: 3/4
Equipped:
Ragged black robes
Candletree wand (lit)
Inventory:
Rocks
Wrapped carnizelle meat
Small brass & iron amulet

Spoiler: Party (click to show/hide)

Undead carnizelle (1)
Basin (2)
Many-armed rock golem (3/3)

Spoiler: Combat Map (click to show/hide)

Yellow @: You
Blue dot: Basin
Brown g: carnizelle
White a: arm golem
White G: big golem
Red and black zeds: zambies

[] Use power on the big construct.
[] Try to use sulfurous power again.
[] Advance towards the rear.
[] Write-in.

[My Name is Immaterial]

Have we pulled out our amulet yet, to see if it does anything?

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Mm, darn. Do we think we'd get a different result on a smaller construct? Zombies couldn't have taken more than 2, while that golem's probably 4+.
Amulet's a good idea, but we shouldn't count on it.
The golem's slow, so we could always lure it back (using rocks to keep it's attention!) to a large room and go around it.
I'm gonna wait to see what other people think.

So now our whole arm is encased in bark, not just the old wound?

[Flying Dice]

So now our whole arm is encased in bark, not just the old wound?

((The bark is still confined to the area around the burn/gash. Which, to be fair, is about eight inches long.

In other news, I've finished drawing up the political structures and international relations of the area we're in, as well as the plots for an initial adventure or two as a source of information and materialist satisfaction, and the basic structure of the religious mythology. Still to do: determine lower level chains of type-relation for the pantheon, sort out the personal relations of various deities, develop interesting characters for the major factions that you're not likely to encounter right away.))

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Woohoo! Glad to hear of story progress!

Also: would like to point out: exploderizing a zed's head likely won't kill them here- if we can animate a chunk of granite, then the constructs don't need a brain to function. More effective application would be removing arms & jaw.

[RAM]

The magic does seem to be relative to the whole of the object however. Animation will probably dissipate if a construct is sufficiently disfigured...

Point the wand at the golem and focus all your green into it.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

We're going to have to do something about that arm.

Umm, yeah, if RAM's idea doesn't work, make one more close-in skirmish against the colossus, using green power to transform his constituent minerals in to WEAK ORGANIC FILTH!

If shit goes south again, or the corruption doesn't work, I think we should focus on just neutralizing the damn thing- retreat back to the treasure room, or some location we can kite him to which we don't really need to revisit ever again, and try to cause a cave-in- rapidly animate/deanimate walls until we cause a big fall.
Have our creations keep the zombies busy, and we can hold the giant's attention buy pegging it with rocks.

Try not to move our arm too much? Just thinking of the crepitus..

[Lenglon]

yeah, but the condition it (the arm) was in before wasn't much better, and we learned a lot about the green power that way. for example, the bark is still there, but if you look at the status we got the power it was infused with back. we might not need to leave the green power in the candle for it to stay longer-lasting.

and i dont think killing the enemies in front of us will be a permanent solution. they were animated by someone, and judging from how our power returns to us after it is no longer applicable, the one that made these will simply get his power back and make more of them. that magic drain plan from before still sounds like a very good one as a result. if we can keep it from going back to the original caster, we'll weaken his power and strengthen our own, with signifigant long-term benefits. may i suggest that we use the green power on the floor around the large golem/the large golem's feet to immobilize it, and then try to drain it again? use the sulfur power on any zombies that interfere?

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Well, when using meta-gaming logic, I suspect the GM just rolled up a newspaper rulebook and bashed us over the head for trying an unexpected & potentially over-powered technique.
We can try it again, but A. We shouldn't try on the golem, it's too big and last time we tried it we broke our damn arm & B. I doubt Mr Dice will let us do it at all, so we'll likely just end up rag-dolled again until he specifically tells us we can via a relevant encounter.

He'll likely just break through a green floor trap, so I maintain we'd have to block him off with a large amount of stone, (which he could still eventually shift, but would likely take him a while).

Another question I have about the candle: What happens to our power as it burns down?

Lets not worry about who/what animated these things until we run into it- it could be anything, from a mad-sciency one-shot ritual to a friendly equally-lost abomination to a sanctioned state black magician. Once we see something that indicates what it was, then we can start preparing for it.

[Flying Dice]

Here's a bit of a hint. There's nothing there that you couldn't have gotten from what I've posted as part of the updates and it should help you avoid dead-end (hopefully metaphorical) routes of exploration of your powers. I think it's only fair, and I don't like to come off as a dick who is deliberately obtuse just so I can do my mouth-covered "OHOHO" laugh when players don't pick up on the hints I leave. 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You're coming at the problem from the wrong way. I chose the words "prana" and "graft" for specific reasons, closely related to the mechanics of the system.

life force or vital energy

and

transplant

Each of the various powers is based on prana. When you use a power, you are channeling prana. The type of power you obtain depends on the type of gem that the prana was stored in. The power is different from most of the other sorts which you have and will encounter, and it is different for a very basic reason having to do with how it functions. All that was already available in what I've given you, and I'll refrain from elaborating, both to leave you some fun and to avoid spoiling anything too early. I just don't want to frustrate anyone by accidentally being too vague, leaving everyone wondering what the hell I'm talking about.

This is a bit of a thorny situation, so I'll wait until later tonight to update, unless a bunch of people dogpile me demanding updates NAO. Good news is that I've got most of my end-of-semester work done, so I should have more time to update.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Thank you for the update & interest master Dice, it's appreciated. 

Subjective Feedback:
I'd say the only problem we have is our ignorance- the only power we've seen so far is our own, and until we encounter these 'other' powers, we really have no idea what they could be or even that they exist. So right now we're still playing in the learning curve of the game, and trying to explore things that are dangerous is, well, dangerous.

However, this ignorance is also a major strength of the game:
What I really kinda want to do with this game is just sit down in a nice laboratory somewhere and experiment with our prana, to get to know it's properties & capabilities, so that we don't break arms experimenting on hostile several-ton rock golems. However, this limitation affects gameplay in a special kind of way- it's a good thing, because this feeling of exploration, learning & danger is unique, and so long as we don't straight up lose the game, this difficulty just makes it more intriguing, more exciting, more rewarding for learning and applying what is truly hard-(L)earned knowledge.

Dropping us hints is a good way to keep us from lingering in the dark too long & hurting ourselves too grievously, but it's our learning & exploration, & dealing with our grievous self-inflicted wounds that really powers the game forward.

So..yep. Subjective feedback.



I maintain we should lure the golem to a large, empty, uninteresting room & trap it inside, and if we want to experiment further with the power animating these constructs, come back and work with some of the zeds (after de-fanging them).

[Flying Dice]

Spoiler: Tangent (click to show/hide)

Yeah, that echoes my own thought process fairly well. I don't want to leave you completely in the dark, but I also don't want to just infodump everything. In the short term your main question is "What the hell can I do with this?". In the medium term it's going to be something closer to "I need to figure out as much as I can about this system as a whole." There's also the overarching questions of "Who am I?" and "Why am I here?" I'm trying to build this story on a very fine edge between knowledge and ignorance, and it's difficult to do that successfully while also keeping the game aspects of it balanced. In other words I don't want to give you the keys to auto-win these encounters, but I also don't want to let you Bad End through constant forced trial-and-error experimentation because you don't have any other options. With that said, if you collectively decide to do something really stupid and follow through, I will bring the hammer down, proceeding from crippling injuries on up. 

In other news, the pantheon is shaping up. Holy incest Batman!! Literally. Good thing deities don't need to worry about genetics.

[~Neri]

Remove green power from arm, it is making us sick.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

We've got the green patch on the arm and a treecandle, but are only missing one green power- is there still energy in our arm, or is it in the wand? If it's not in our arm, is there anyway to un-discolor our flesh/unpoison ourselves? (I'd guess not, so hopefully we only got a moderate dose of toxin..)

Also: not sure it's caused by the green yet, though it's certainly the lead suspect. Hopefully monitoring it provides some insight- if it gets worse, we can devote serious investigative resources to it, but in the meantime, what do with the constructs?

[~Neri]

Kill the zombies with basin-splosion inside body (have basin enter them and then stretch until they explode.