Gossip-y question: What's the most work you've ever put into something (place, encounter, etc.) only to have the players sidestep it entirely? What was it?
Sean guessed right here. Mission 4 probably the biggest, since I had maps and shit for that, with traps and stuff set up. And then boom, all gone. Never let it be said that I will not allow players to escape the path I had set for them. The railroad gets blown off the tracks regularly around here.
I'll jump into the bandwagon and ask how potent is my potion, #30?
As for Q&A I have few questions and what-ifs about Samsonite Abyss.
- What was the Forest?
- Did scientists figure out anything from those 'tree' samples?
- What if Thomas had won the will roll to resist Lighteater posession?
- Was noise making Tower's only reason to exist?
- What if idiots never awakened Lighteaters? How easy the mission would have been?
- How useful would the noise control staff have been?
- What caused Lighteater in the Tower become the inert puddle on ground? And why it didn't just go and activate Citadel when it has physical form before meeting the idiots?
- Why did the Wurm kill Charro?
- Was it even possible to communicate with Lighteaters?
- Just how did the Wurm got down down the massive cliff? Or was it different one?
- Why did Lighteaters eat light...?
- Were there anything usefull in pits of Pitted Land?
- On scale from 1 to STAN, how cruel death would resulted from attempt to climb down into a pit?
- Did the team miss anything fun or usefull?
1. Fractal antennae if I remember right. Those were the tip tops of buildings and shit buried in the "sand".
2. Nothing special. Fairly mundane materials honestly; isotopes of carbon that we don't have and that seem to go mildly radioactive in our world. Interesting but not terribly useful.
3. Hard to say. He might have forced it out of himself, or he might have gone symbiotic. If he had gone symbiotic he'd have been able to freely manipulate the sand.
4. The tower? No. That was a place they used to live. Hive like thing. See, they had no capacity to see. The noise makers were their equivalents of street lights.
5. Depends. You guys never made it to the center, remember. You had to retreat. The ultimate goal was never reached.
6. Hard to say. Maybe it was sleeping. Maybe it got something from it's encounter with Thomas that let it reform and continue it's actions. Did we notice any differences with him after that?
7. If I remember right the Wurm killed Charro because charro happened to be standing in the wrong place as it passed.
8. To a limited degree maybe. You could certainly speak to them but their comprehension of that speech might be very different.
9. Ever see a centipede climb a wall?
10. Because they were hungry.
11.Some stuff. If I think I stuck some neat materials down there.
12.Depends on how well people could fight. There was clearly shit down there that caused problems, but unlike stan it was the kind of problem that conventional combat could deal with.
13. The citadel and what waited inside. Never did quite find out what happened to that guy's brother eh?
Unrelated rambling: The Samsonite abyss is one of those rare missions that came to me almost wholesale from a dream. Most missions have a more mundane origin. The Dam mission came about because I had recently taken a boat tour around a man made lake on a dam. The Current mission in the desert came from me reading "Declare" by Tim Powers and "Animal Weapons" by Douglas J. Emlen. Just like the game itself game from Road side picnic, Forever War, Planetes, and several other inspirations. But the Abyss was a dream pure and simple with nothing beyond that. And I like it for that reason, because It doesn't have any conscious points of reference. I'm tempted sometimes to create more missions and games like it, though rarely do my dreams give me anything terribly useful. Well, interesting, but not useful in this game.
Oh, I got another one. What was in the boxes of the STAN mission? Any potentially useful new tech?
Nah. But the Ancient, non-organic AI (The likes of which I mention as inscrutable machine gods) which was buried down there might have been useful.
Doctor has amps.
Ever heard Dali talk about drugs?