Nik, you're back?! Awesome!
1)Is M26 thread the one for Hephaestus shenanigans right now?
Ehhh, kinda? "Hephaestus shenanigans" in general basically got shut down, due to my proclivity for draining PW's soul. M26 did end up being the replacement, and worked a
lot better than Heph ever did, TBH, but even that's kinda dead now as ER is all but over. M26 was pretty great while it lasted though, you would have liked it a lot.
2)Do tokens still matter yet, or not anymore?
Not really. Last mission's prep was the last event where people bought tokens. I ended up donating all my funds to buy assaultsuits and crystal rifles for everyone, since tokens have no real value now.
Do I still have time to upgrade?
I doubt PW would stop you if you did. Tokens likely don't matter that much though, as Maurice would be granted basically anything he wants, within reason. Also, his chances likely wouldn't be improved much by more stuff, as he's actually quite well off--Saint currently has Maurice on ice in his personal warship, IIRC. Although, if you'd
rather Maurice have been left on Heph, we can always say that he was.
I have not read practically anything from what has been posted in my absence, so I'm pretty oblivious to most of the things. Well, I know that ER was supposed to end before the fall, and that there'll eventually be a new (other) game in place, but that's about it.
Fwooooh. Okay. So, since this universe is basically fucked, we decided to colonize other universes. Most of ARM was redeployed to some backwater planet to
kidnap rescue a bunch of people for Heph to use as
guinea pigs colonists (mission 27). Dester's black ops team was sent to Heph, to explore universes, and Saint basically just got handed command of their mission, though there were... difficulties there. In practice, Saint was equivalent in rank to Dester (mission 26).
I don't really remember much of M27, as I didn't follow it closely, and ended up just not reading most of the threads, but it mostly consisted of ARM's traditional handling of civilian populations. One guy went AWOL to buy pizza, while another was injecting poorly understood alien tech into civvies, and most everyone else ran around like headless chickens. And the Vet teams just demolished everything around them.
M26 consisted of a lot of arguing about safety precautions, deciding on a set which balanced safety and speed, then exploring maybe a dozen universes before summoning some apocalypse which nearly killed everyone before Saint dealt with it. Rinse and repeat, with the safety precautions and apocalypses getting worse each time. Most of the universes we explored were useless; typically interesting, often harmful, but invariably non-ideal for colonization. PW ended up just handing us six good options, and expeditions were just starting when, well...
I told you to test with colors! But nooo, you just had to go clone mega-Satan or whatever.
...And our plans were kinda cut a bit short. Heph is basically fucked, as is our main universe transfer facility, but we should have enough resources to regroup with the Sword and set up a new facility. Portals should make it possible to recover the most valuable things left on Heph, such as the Doctor and some autocolonies, but our chances have been significantly harmed.
Currently, we've got the supervets and vets searching for parts to a superweapon in some of the hostile universes, which we intend to use to utterly destroy our homee universe. There's two lurkers here, and while they're clones and therefore probably incapable of breeding, we're not leaving it up to chance. The newbies are just being flung into the six habitable universes for some reason, I'm not really sure why. Maybe Steve is just feeling nostalgic.
The guy who cloned the Lurker has also contemplated going on a "recovery mission" into the heart of his creation, to see if it's possible to retrieve the deathcube. I believe PW said this would be a very foolish idea, but it does seem like something you'd be interested in anyway.
Aaaanyway, all this is kinda irrelevant. Way up above, I said that ER is all but over? IIRC, PW has said he's not going to update any further. Instead, he'll be talking to each player about what their character would be doing in the future, roll some dice, and write up what happens to everyone. And then ER will be done. Finished. Complete. Kaput.
Currently, PW is running a test game of a new system; that's ER Redux. It's supposed to be higher lethality than ER, more crunchy than ER (but less trivial to break), and presumably have less Cerebus Syndrome than ER. He's talked about running a different game--Oroboropolis, which is about holy crusaders invading and trying to kill a massive living demon city--but he hasn't said much of anything about it in a long while.
If you want to get back into a game, I'd like to recommend Ozark's
Omega Legion, which is
essentially ER in a standard high-magic fantasy setting. It's notable for most people playing extremely...
unique characters; I've played a talking cat, and an intelligent evil knife which manipulates and mind controls its wielders. The game is exceptionally good, in my opinion, and captures most of what I've liked about ER, excluding Tinker. Oh, and we were just about to start another mission set.
Another option would be MidnightJaguar's
MainPiston, which is inspired by PW's semi-complete system MainSpring, and set in an alternate reality WWII. MJ's a far less experienced GM than Ozark, but it's still fun, and has a rather hilariously high lethality rate--95.2%, at the moment.
That's more the fault of Egan and I, though....Please stay awhile?