Medical supplies... What kind are we talking? Are we talking about a glorified first aid kit with antiseptic, gauze, light bandages, collapsible splint, and a needle and thread? Or are we talking a trauma kit with actual drugs, simple surgery supplies (scalpel, amputation saw, forceps, clamps, etc), and that class of supply? Is it all cold steel and alchemy, the stuff of lesser technology; or are there cauterizing tools, light bladed scalpels, and arbitomatically purified and purposed medicine vials?
I just want a glorified first aid kit, I'll buy the trauma kit after the prologue
Alright, 20 C.
Uh, posting incomplete sheets is useful for getting feedback you know? Especially since it'd save you quite some trouble if something important about your character turned out to be unworkable.
Naw, I mean that I'll just post one in the thread here rather than edit it into my first post and then say "done" in a new post.
Ahh.
Anyway, it seems self-evident that the best way to deal with the taint is to set up some sort of lightwall or series of spotlights all along the coast to prevent that icky egg stuff from getting spitted onto land. No more taint demons then once you get rid of all the existing ones. No more tainted ones, and the Tyranny of the dark is effectively broken, since now its just cold and dark instead of cold, dark and filled with demons.
Eh, dream big right?
Lychnaea is significantly larger than Eurasia. That would be an almost unimaginably enormous structure, not to mention the power requirements and logistics. Plus you'd have to navigate the crystal megaliths and enter the deepest dark to make it even close to complete.
Very big dream.
So, I decided to take Mutei Braineating to its logical conclusion. As such I have a pretty firm biography in my mind when I was making the charsheet (which mostly consists of a couple hundred generations of Mutei parents gifting their brains and all their associated memories to their children once they near death, leading to an ancestral memory that stretches all the way back to when the Mutei first arrived on the continent. Storing such a ludicrous amount of memories has quite a few drawbacks and the transferral process isn't perfect in any case. Still, ancient primeval memories haunt Marban's nightmares, of ships travelling through a even darker void, of strange lights sprinkled through the sky. Sometimes he has difficulty differentiating between the present and a time long past, only existing within some deep recess of his mind.) However, super-tired right now.
Hoping we can be some sort of team of combat researchers delving into long forgotten tombs and the like so my ridicolous scholar specialization can be marginally useful. Like seriously, my character is a walking library of secret knowledge, forbidden knowledge, unknown to anyone else, but not really anything else beyond that.
Name: Marban, Rememberer MXV
Captain: Yes
Race: Mutei
Archetype: Remember of Suffocating Knowledge
Attributes (80 points)
Strength: 10
Finesse: 5
Speed: 5
Grace: 0
Wisdom: 40
Brilliance: 20
Skills + Special Abilities (5 points)
Scholar
--Natural Philosopher
Lore Master
--Disciple of the Old Ways
Disciple of Time
--Ancient Lore
Gear:
Description:
Personality:
Biography:
Mechanically, you've spent 6 of your 5 skill points. You can't reach tier 3 in any one skill at start.
Fluff wise, keep in mind that the memory transfer process attenuates considerably. If you get four fifths of the major memories (which is optimistic) of the original, then the next in line gets only a bit more than three fifths of the original memories. After ten generations you're retaining only about 10% (at best) of the original, and you're running into other problems.
The Mutei mind is designed to hold more memory than most, but it's still not perfect. The memories that last the longest between transfers are the ones with the strongest emotional connections. The Mutei who are passionate about their science can preserve critical knowledge for generations, but the other emotions add up as well. No life is without sorrow, without fear. A single lifetime brings scars, old regrets and hurts that people simply learn to live with. The fact that those scars are almost certainly passed down when gifting the mind... It can be a terrible burden, and a reason why some brains are simply preserved until they are needed again.
To keep an inheritance line alive since the wandering era, that would be crippling. Specific memories would be all but gone, but flashes of anger, irrational phobias of objects you've never seen, grief welling up from nothing... A person with that much memory would receive both respect and pity anywhere in Mutei society. You can do it, but it's a hard character. Even with the shadows of memory from that far back, you'd have no frame of reference to interpret most of it.
Hm, let's just post a sheet as it's complete. No use in cluttering up the first page, yes?
Name: Mudren Gude
Captain: Yes
Race: Bale
Archetype: Munchhausen Sniper
Attributes
Strength: 20
Finesse: 10
Speed: 10
Grace: 20
Wisdom: 10
Brilliance: 30
Skills + Special Abilities
Cadet Training (Rifle)
--Inner Rage
Weapon Aptitude (Rifle)
--Execution
Cadet Training (Polearm)
--Inner Calm
Speaker
--Voice of Doubt
Description: Mudren Gude is a Bale with a distinctly coppery look to it, something of a dark reddish brown in color, carapace mottled in places with greenish spots. It's a little on the small side for a Bale, and not very shiny - the carapace, if anything, looks a tad bit crumbly, and does seem kind of unhealthy without any sort of frame of reference, though it would stand to reason that the average Bale would not spend much of their day polishing their own carapace given that they can shift out of it just as easily, and that, indeed, much of the metals in them would reasonably be in mineral form and thus quite stony in appearance. Nevertheless, the same somewhat crumbly, mostly unconvincing look is retained whenever Mudren shifts into a different form, usually preferring to take the form of either a chattel if speech is not required or a rough approximation of a Sal-Leifnin or a Kadi in social situations due to perceived similarities between it and a Bale. As for other accoutrements, Mudren Gude appears to insist on covering itself with quite a few bits of random plant when in the wilderness in imitation of a ghillie suit or perhaps for later snacking purposes.
Personality: Mudren Gude is a Bale that tries its best to not be defined by absence - in this case, the absence of a past, and many statements about it must necessarily be tempered with 'for a Bale'. It is quite sociable for a Bale. It is also somewhat direct for a Bale. Very inclined toward adventure by any definition, and seemingly quite lacking in any form of fear other than the most immediate of survival instincts. All too eager to reveal its secrets for a Bale, or so it may seem, though it seems to have an inordinate fondness for hyperbole while doing so. It handles its weapons with a perhaps non-obvious enjoyment that might be easily mistaken for deadly certainty and competence most often seen among arthropod-likes, given its unusual body language. Most importantly, though, Mudren's mind is, as it is all too eager to describe, really quite immeasurable, and the information contained within entirely impossible to reliably quantify by any, including, of course, Mudren Gude itself. Nevertheless, any who meet it are all too keen to form their own idea of exactly how much Mudren Gude knows, how much it happens to be willfully lying about and how much it is genuinely confused about - the only thing everyone could honestly agree on, however, is that all of those categories together amount to just about everything that can be known.
Biography: nature abhors a vacuum, and despite the best ministrations that magic can manage, so does the mortal mind. It is a great and terrible thing to have one's memories forcibly removed, but the mind can adapt, will adapt. And so it has happened with Mudren Gude, one of a great many of its kind, stranded in an unfamiliar place without any sort of context beyond its name, a bare-bones amount of self-knowledge, some rudimentary ability at killing and a generous comprehension of an entirely alien language. But recollections soon would follow, little inklings of a former life of glory amongst its peers, an important mission of some kind, a heroic destiny perhaps foretold by the will of the Lights themselves, or cryptically scribed with Phari light into the ancient walls of the crystal-fortress of the Great Conjugators of Bale, or handed down by mysterious gods of darkness seeking to manipulate the Bale into doing their evil bidding (which it is probably not supposed to know yet, Mudren thought at the time and semi-consciously filed the thought away for potential later application in the overarching narrative). It is not easy to pinpoint a period when this sort of thing may have gotten out of hand, as it does seem entirely reasonable to Mudren that it has always been this way, and is merely recalling things as time goes by. Including from periods after the fateful day it happened to wake up with a severe case of memory loss, as it happens. Memory is a fallible thing after all, and requires constant improvement, especially when there's a point to be made.
Now, whatever the case of its narrative, one thing is quite plain - while its version of events is never quite complete, it can be with certainty said that Mudren Gude has assuredly done something with its life up until this point, though any determined investigators are unlikely to be terribly bothered about what exactly that might have been - the point is, it does appear to have acquired a reasonable selection of weaponry and other items along the way, and perhaps enough in the way of resources to start its own mercenary company (in case one happens to be curious, its answer for resource obtainment in both cases happens to do with some form of buried treasure, though it's clearly a recent development given that the details of it have yet to be worked out and kept reasonably straight).
Equipment (carried):
Deadeye's Steam Rifle - 125 C
Inert Clockwork Egg (x12) - 20 C
Crystal Charge (x12) - 20 C
Plain Steel Halberd - 50 C
Glass Scope - 25 C
Whatever things this can all be carried in, assumed to cost about 14 C or so altogether, making for a round 300 in total costs when including armor.
Armor:
Mudren Gude's Assorted Accoutrements
Defense Vs Polearms: 0
Defense Vs Blades: 2 (+10 C)
Defense Vs Blunt: 0
Defense Vs Pistols/Rifles: 3 (+21 C)
Defense Vs Bows: 3 (+15 C)
Defense Vs Phari: 0
Attribute Penalties: none
Description: not exactly a suit of armor as such, these accoutrements are more a collection of stuff that Mudren has chosen not to digest yet. It's mostly quite a few bits and pieces of easily cracked and broken debris - these serve to take quite a bit of energy out of incoming munitions as well as impede the progress of sharp objects, though perhaps are not quite so effective against heavier weaponry.
Special: None.
How's that, then?
Excellent, and a very cool idea... for a Bale.
I wouldn't eat saltwater fish ever considering the sheer concentrated evil that makes up the ocean apparently. Nothing is safe!
Questions!
- Why doesn't the taint flow up the Veins of God?
- Would augmenting life allow stuff like upping memory capacity and/or intelligence? But specifically memory capacity.
- Too many awesome skills, not enough points. CUUUURSE YOUUU!
For the first point, two reasons:
First, the Veins of God, and the rivers running through the mountains of the Temani, all empty along various places of the Pure Shore. The Pure Shore is a long region of coast where asynchronous lighting from shoreside and sub-sea lighthouses have created a buffer region of perpetual light on the water. Sometimes the land lights the water, sometimes the water lights the land, but, regardless, it's virtually impossible for the taint to get into the rivers.
Second, the taint fades in pure water. Not a tenth as quickly as it does when exposed to light, but enough so that Tainted Souls can't poison a town's water supply or serve an individual a tainted glass of wine without the individual immediately noticing the salt and spitting the liquid back out.
As for the second point... A reserved yes. Augmenting the brain of a creature you don't want to have to dispose of will definitely require arbitomancy. Which gets you into the trouble with intent again. The capacity to remember
more is not necessarily a good thing, particularly when those memories could crush the psyche of their bearer if remembered simultaneously. In the words of H.P Lovecraft, "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Intelligence is equally hard, since how intelligent a person is can be largely a matter of perception. Letting someone modify you forces their definition of intelligence upon you, and modifying yourself can reinforce your insecurities about your intelligence as easily as anything else.
Author
Topic: Lighthouse: The Age of Destiny, the Age of Ruin (OOC Thread. Game Started!) (Read 20866 times)