Okay, so as it turns out, I'll be far too busy this semester to run this game at all, and running a game only during the holidays is far from ideal. So, I'm pulling the plug. Then again, this game's pretty much dead anyway since there's been no IC actions since the last update. As such, I'll be consolidating and posting my notes below
The PCsI'll be starting off with the PCs. I didn't plan too much for them actually since a lot of this was done on the fly, but I did assign each of them something to get involved in the night before, as well as Overload and Awakening (exploding into eldritch fuckery) effects.
As mentioned in the datasheet, Fist of God functions by increasing the damage dealt by a punch not the force. This is very important as it determines how it acts with more Impulse dice and when it goes out of control. See, the punch doesn't really have to deal any damage in the first place for it to have an effect, as it is perfectly capable of raising something from zero damage. Which is to say the punch doesn't actually have to hit. Or even happen.
A punch that never even happens. That is where the real destructive power of this talent comes into play. With enough Impulse dice Janet would have been able to just obliterate foes just by thinking about punching. Not even them specifically, just anything related to punching and her targets would get obliterated by a barrage of nonexistent strikes. It can even temporarily negate whole concepts by making them go cry in a corner like what her Overload did to the concept of "nothingness".
Awakening effect was basically just more of that, taken to the extreme. Swathes of reality would just start vanishing at random. Objects get blown apart from unseen attacks. Reality itself begins to falter, reeling from the impact of an invisible barrage. The concept of damage and punches would start losing meaning. The restraints would be slowly lifted. It'd go from "everything is breaking" to just "everything ever is doing everything ever". The affected region would just stop making sense. All description of it would just consist of me mashing the keyboard. If anyone is still in there when it hits that point, they'll wake up once it ends to find themselves in an absurd but likely dangerous situation.
The previous night, she got into numerous bar fights. During one of them, she was stabbed through the heart, hence the stains and Jacklyn's mention of her receiving medical aid. In one such bar fight, at the Broken Elbow Lodge, she had an Overload, razing the entire damn block. Her tape was looted from a White Knight she killed.
Ugh, Amorphous Tendril wasn't fun to work with. I had an awful lot of trouble thinking up of Overloads and higher Impulse usages for it, not really sure why, I guess it's just that it isn't as easy to extrapolate "whiskey tentacle of stabbity stab stab". But the idea I ended up settling with is that it could split into more, massively alter its proportions and exert greater amounts of force until Stacy is just launching herself through the city and ensnaring foes like some sort of semi-eldritch version of Rico Rodriguez.
As for the only Overload I managed to pre-write for her it is as follows: The user goes into a trance-like state. The tendril will split into multiples, protectively encasing the user. The splits happen in frame-skips that are synchronized with the user's heart beat. The user and tendrils will then move synchronized with their heatbeat. Again with frame-skipping, though the tentacles noticeably pulsate, again in sync. They will levitate and begin to move in an arbitrary direction. Those who try to attack will be impaled.
Her Awakening effect consisted of the tendril splitting weaving back and forth in he very flesh, turning her into a meat puppet before disconnecting from her chest completely. They would then spread, covering the entire area and unearthly creatures partially formed from her memories would arise, partially fused to the environment. Like some sort of twisted whiskey-scented Garden of Eden. Her possessed body would then stab and drag its way around with the tentacles, patrolling the area.
The previous night, she, along with Loser, and David got roped into a job wherein they were meant to take out a Curfew vehicle transporting various supplies hidden inside giant plushies. Somehow, Loser displaced the contents of three plushies before lodging himself and David into two of them. Stacy then stole all three plushies along with a fourth one containing a medical supplies destined for Moonbeam Bar & Grill. The "bomb" was just a sealed container made from the memories of a bomb.
Yeah, Shape Shift basically lets Rachel become Xan. The degree to which she could alter her own physical properties was demonstrated in that encounter with the Five Eyes Nightmare, wherein she managed to turn herself into something that could catch and kill the metaphysical being that was attacking her. With more Impulse dice, she'd have been able to just completely ignore conservation of mass, assimilate matter and start turning parts of herself into regions of twisted reality or new laws of physics entirely.
All the Overloads I had written for her were basically just different ways of saying that she turns into Xan. The three are as follows:
The flesh begins to move on its own, expanding, stretching, forming figures of molten flesh that arise from her and refuse to obey orders, seeking to obliterate all Nightmares in the area regardless of allegiance. They'd start hindering her own attempts to escape, but will still protect her from harm, all while using their shape shifting abilities to ensnare and brutally murder targets in a genocidal frenzy, which as you may imagine would make her a lot of enemies and break allegiances very, very quickly.
Bloodless wounds open up all over her body making Rachel resemble a hive, looking like something out of a trypophobic's nightmare. Mindless insects would fly outwards, transforming into parasites capable of consuming and reshaping the City itself. They then proceed to rapidly construct strange hives and die, their final movements being strange and unnatural, such as ripping off their own limbs or congregating into a mound of tiny corpses. The new hives would then begin to construct and unleash insectoid Nightmares.
And of course, the obligatory Xan Classic: exploding into a formless mass of flesh with countless eyes and maws, in addition to protrusions and organs for which there are no names. Foes caught in the blast would be consumed by the mouths, crushed beneath external, wheezing lungs or drowned in torrents of blood, their bodies serving to fuel its expansion as it anchors itself into nearby buildings. It'd take a while to revert, and the structural damage to the surrounding area could easily cause buildings to crumble and collapse.
Her Awakening would have just transformed her into something ineffable. Unspeakable. Unknowable. Something that lurks in the corners of vision, spreading its influence through the City, its purposeless machinations carried out by its spawn that can assume any form. It'd really depend on what her last thoughts were. Because her ability would carry it out, to the best of its unthinking ability, even though she is no longer alive. And no, it would not be helpful. I mean, even if she was thinking "MUST. PROTECT. FRIENDS." it'd probably just bombard the party with colossal metaphysical condoms constructed out of the screaming faces of OH&S inspectors.
The previous night, she just hit on a lot of people. Mostly Nightmares. Managed to get their phone numbers through a combination of Persuasion and Shape Shift. So quite a few of them wouldn't have even been able to recognize her if she contacted them. I'd have rolled for gender and nature when she called one of them, but I already had one prepared - Xii. Xii, is a strung up corpse. Its limbs are bound and its body marked with countless wounds that smolder with lightless fire. Its bindings act as tentacles. It can only be seen by Dreamers, and resides in the Seaside Shrine. It'd have been jovial and helpful, content with just watching the party ineffectually flail their way through the City. She also was supplied with a phone card by Curfew.
With more Impulse dice, The King Pen would have began to use more supernatural abilities, literally turning the world into the messy notes of a writer and filling in the present, with Steve's Hangover talent able to enhance or direct the effects. It'd mostly stick to the realm of what is physically possible, but perfectly fine with improbable, like making Steve perfectly executing the series of actions needed to do something by pure chance.
The Overloads are quite interesting in that they don't change the current circumstances. They don't cause massive explosions or anything, instead they begin to rewrite Akasha itself. Remember how it was reportedly gathering Whistleblowers under its banner? Well with each Overload, the City would acknowledge its existence more and more. The normally disorganized Whistleblowers will begin marching with a bit more purpose. You'll start hearing of viscous attacks, powerful Nightmares being slain in single combat by The King Pen. Dreamers will suddenly start remembering how that being played an enormous part in the previous night. Its influence will grow more and more, even though it isn't even a Nightmare and isn't physically doing that. Whistleblowers will begin to salute and assist you. Taoists will begin to hunt you. You're The King Pen's loyal retainer after all, and the whole world will know your name.
Awakening: Nightmares and part of the Mad City violently explode into their components, relevant ones rush into Steve as his identity is explosively purged. The King Pen manifests ontop of him as if overlayed, and what remains of them both are combined with the harvested thoughts and sensations. From this arises a new Nightmare, The King Maker. Reality becomes rewritten, all Whistleblowers and various other Nightmares become its subjects, and many appear en masse to bear witness to the coronation. The Whistleblowers, despite lacking voices of their own will chant "The king is dead! Long live the king!". This new Nightmare has additional information-manipulation powers in addition to being virtually immortal (the Stress rating of killing it is far higher than the already high rating to defeat it), while its subjects become far more coordinated (for example, A Zeitgeist is Stress 5, n Zeitgeists are Stress 5+n, under The King Maker, n Zeitgeists are Stress 5n), increasing their influence upon the City, this sudden shift in power having potential to turn the power struggle into war on the streets. You'll start seeing Kings, Nightmares that have been granted dominion over their kin simply because The King Maker wills it.
So yeah, last night, he acted through The King Pen, using it's regeneration to win so much at Russian Roulette, they started adding more bullets to the chambers until there were more bullets than chambers. He then blew all the cash on booze, and got into a barfight wherein he fired the vast majority of the bullets. Yes, the vast majority fired, and he still had twelve shots in the morning. He won a lot of games.
Out of everyone's abilities, I must say, Pygmalion was by far the easiest to write for. Might have something to do with playing Ib. Anyway, with more Impulse dice, the definition of "art" becomes far looser, going from what is classically considered art, to encompassing Dadaism, allowing random knick-knacks to be animated and imbued with seemingly unrelated properties, to just animating reflections in people's eyes so that a copy of every single Nightmare in sight just jump out and gank some poor sod.
I was planning on writing some more Overloads for him later, since the initial three were all had a similar theme and may have been boring if used consecutively, they are as follows:
Summons behave oddly, their movements become strange and unnatural, their joints bend the wrong way and they make horrifying expressions as they perform strange rituals, often killing themselves or each other. They do not respond to attempt to control them. There's no directly negative effect, other than the fact that they aren't performing their intended purpose, but something like that attracts attention. And in Akasha, you do not want to attract attention, not when Nightmares are willing to kill for the slightest of perceived infractions.
The summons seem to also have the ability to animate art. They begin to tear apart their environments to create artworks to animate, artworks that are getting progressively better and better at doing so. A grey goo scenario unfolds until they all run out of power and collapse inertly, leaving a devastated area covered in illustrations. This has a more direct consequence. The artworks just don't give a damn. They'll use anything, including the mutilated limbs and arterial spray of Nightmares and Dreamer alike so long as it's in reach. Not to mention that they'll draw quite a bit of aggro, though thankfully causing enough chaos to make it hard for anything to attack immediately.
The artworks go into a frenzy, violently maiming themselves and their foes to create a large, horrifying image. They then stand guard over it, all while staring at their summoner expectantly, as if waiting for them to give it life. This one's more of a double-edged sword, because unless the foes are exceptionally powerful, the summons will quite literally tear them apart. Also, in case it isn't abundantly clear, animating that image is not a good idea. It would force Impulse to dominate, allowing the resulting Overload to invert reality, so that everything becomes a painting, and that single image would be all that exists, something that is evidently quite hard to undo.
When he Awakens, it's just a free for all. Everything becomes fair game. Images from apophenia become animated. Martial arts become animated. Ideas become animated. Entire scenes that are simply arrangements of other entities become animated. A horde of artworks erupt forth, their powers eldritch, their lich-like forms sustained by shards of Andew's memories, their rampage will be bloody and random. All patterns will drain in their wake, for all patterns are art, and all art is their domain. The illusion of a cohesive world, formed our the pattern-finding minds, will crumble. Before them, the world shall become a disjoint connection of meaningless sensations, happening not because of any real law, but because it is happening.
The previous night, Andrew ended up fighting Bourgeoisie Nightmares, which due to an Overload that created a gestalt monstrosity of all images within a massive area (as in, everything there was no longer compatible with sight), escalated to the point that giant nuclear monsters were duking it out against the erronous summon. The Bourgeoisie remember that. And they aren't the kind to forgive him for that.
Forgotten Eternity, in addition to the usual tricks of "stop time, stab in face" and "stop time, push atoms together, unleash thermonuclear explosion, run away" could, with more Impulse dice, allow Lily to find artifacts and anomalies that only exist in time stop and harness their power. We're talking about entities that shouldn't even exist in a mad world that permits so much else, entities with existences that are revoked before they can even begin to exist, and she'd be bringing them to bear. It'd be a gamble each time of course, seeing as there's no knowing what it does, only that it shouldn't be able to do that.
The only Overload I had for her was based on the first act of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Basically it'd freeze time in a completely different way. Everything can still move, but each event has been frozen, meaning new instances of it cannot occur. A coin that landed on heads will, for the duration of the effect, only ever land on heads. Punch a foe, and your punch will only ever hit that foe regardless of circumstance. On fire at the time? You'll be burning, the fire neither spreading nor extinguishing until the effect ends.
Her Awakening would have unleashed the forgotten artifacts from the eternity that is their prison. While free loot sounds good, it isn't so good when it's flying out at high velocities, firing off randomly while manifestations of the universe's tendency to destroy them go haywire, targeting random objects, all while random areas start getting frozen in time for random lengths. Nightmares struck by an artifact will assimilate it and mutate, drastically changing the power balance.
The last night was spent mostly running away from everything and stumbling around, but she did manage to secretly slay some Taoists on behalf of the Bourgeoisie, making them somewhat friendly to her. Unbeknownst to them, she was the one who evac'd Andrew after his fight, stopping time and dragging him away.
Yeah no, Metaman has no notes. It doesn't need any. The Impulse and Overload effects are literally just "do whatever comes to mind, regardless of all logic or reason".
Awakening effect would have made Metaman subsume him completely. Making it Metaman all day, every day, in a continuous state of Overload. A rampaging god.
Last night, well, he managed to somehow remove the contents of three plushies before stuffing himself and David into them. He also beat Rachel with a crowbar after her shape shift copied the form of his girlfriend, leading to a fight during which he fell off a roof and she turned into three separate trucks that ran him over.
Double Team with more Impulse dice begins to play fast and loose with the definition of "enemy". Place a copy and let gravity focus on it while you fly. Let it take the heat for walking into a crowd, unloading a tommy gun, and get off scot-free. Hell, he can even instantly regain Stability Points by making a copy take the loss, though it's one of those double-or-nothing sorts of deals.
The only Overload I had written was that the copy would start stealing parts of the existence of others to make itself whole. It might be the claws of a foe. The heartbeat of an ally. It cares not. It would go on a rampage of sorts, and you'd better stop it, because while it has a part of you in it, all damage it takes it transferred to you in proportion. A living voodoo doll, formed from stolen parts.
Awakening: Anyone familiar with the Luis Borges story, The Zahir? It's about the eponymous object, something that will cause obsession in anyone who gazes upon it. It will haunt their nights and, eventually their days. They will be so fixated upon it, that eventually, they will not longer be capable of doing anything at all. Eventually, they won't even be able to think of anything else, they will not even be able to remember anything but it, they will not even be able to anticipate anything but it. They will forget the outside world. There will no longer be time. There will no longer be an outside world. They themselves will cease to exist. For the Zahir is all that they will ever perceive. It will become their new reality. Well, open David dying, his body will shatter and leave behind a permanent copy that acts like that. Everyone who sees that would basically have to remove it from their minds somehow, probably through judicial drug use or Impulse talents. And even after that, it will forever be a part of the City. Something that could be just around the next corner, or the center of another faction of Nightmares who seek to spread its influence.
Last night David directed Janet to Moonbeam Bar & Grill, and got roped into a job to take out a Curfew transport, and another job to protect that very same transport. As far as Curfew is concerned, he succeeded in the latter through questionable tactics and excessive skullduggery.
The WorldEverything here other than the Lore section is just an explanation of what each location is based on. You know, to help me deny being high at the time of writing them.
Akasha is the realm of forgotten memories. When someone forgets something, that something ends up here. Everything in it, other than the Dreamers are comprised of such. Nightmares just parts of their world and attach it to themselves, the "purer" ideas and sensations, just completely disjoint and without context are the most valuable as through them, a Nightmare can modify themselves or create something with a very fine degree of control. Conversely trying to use something like someone's childhood memories will invariable taint it with unwanted content. So Nightmares don't actually attack Dreamers for sustenance, and often not out of sadism. It's either paranoia, for Dreamers are often hired to do the dirty work of more influential Nightmares, or because they can't tell the difference between Dreamers and other Nightmares that they cannibalize.
So, what does this have to do with Reality? Well, it's a boundary world of sorts, between the real world and the world of dreams. Indeed, you can see some symptoms of that in the desynchronization that occurs. Different people perceive the Akasha far differently. The Eye of Judgment screams someone's personal failures in their own voice. The business cards and phone numbers alter a person's perception so that they perceive their location. Indeed, "everything is everything" as was said. You aren't in the real world. You aren't making real actions with real consequences. All you're doing to something that affects your expectations of what you are going to perceive. Stacking the decks so to speak.
You could have literally just stood right there and willed yourself to perceive an exit and you'd have won immediately. Normally you'd call that insanity, or solipsism. After all, you didn't really find the exit. All you really was imagine it really hard, pretend that it was there, lie to yourself. That isn't reality, that's just delusion. But in Akasha the two are one and the same. A stronger example of descynchnization was when Andrew entered the Monolith Hotel. He saw the doors swing open, he saw the image on the cosmological horizon. He was sucked in. Dragged in. Everyone else just saw him walk through solid wall. Indeed, if Rachel put the phone on speaker, there'd be another example, because everyone else would seen her claw out her eyes, bite out her tongue and rip out her throat before writing the message on the wall in blood before lying down and making blood angels (just like snow angels, except with blood) on the floor. She wouldn't have, to her, the phone would have just gone on speaker like a normal phone.
So, if it's a boundary world, to the real world, and the world of dreams, could you have escaped to the later instead? Yes. You could. That was actually the objective. Reality IS the world of dreams. Reality isn't real, it's all just a butterfly dream, one that is hard to wake up from. Identity. That is your identity in this little dream of yours. Impulse. Your own impulses. What you really are, leaking through, distorting your dreams. When Identity is subsumed by Impulse, "you" die. Your identity dies. You Awaken.
You are not who you are. The world is not how you see it. Everything that holds true in this butterfly dream of yours is utter nonsense. The first person to die in-game would have learned that. Because they would have woken up and remembered that they are the taste of pancakes. As in literally, their soul, what they really are, is just the raw concept of the taste of pancakes, hanging out in the waking world living the idyllic life of the taste of pancakes. It wouldn't even have a description, because the human mind is too filled with the drivel invented by their little dream world to comprehend it.
When someone Awakens, they can choose to leave a trace of their true form in Akasha, sort of like recollecting that dream and using it to help those still slumbering. This is called a Memento. Its wearer (so in this case, someone who remembers the taste of a very specific stack pf pancakes they never had in alarming detail) has their maximum Impulse pool raised by six, and full access to their Memento's Impulse talent as well, able to wield it either by itself or even in conjunction with their own. And it also makes them very dangerous to certain Nightmares. Furthermore, the Memento would be able to communicate, through brief feelings and sensations, basically a way for people to still RP and interact with other PCs despite being dead. Plus you can't lose a Memento unless either it or its wielder chooses to leave, and you can't acquire one unless both accept it, preventing people from just getting lost or wielded by random strangers.
The limited communications would also make it basically impossible to communicate the PM'd info clearly. For example, here's something I prepared earlier, it's what the wearer would hear if the Memento tried to explain what was really happening:
The pancakes sing to you, oh how they sing to you, their sweet buttery flavor revealing the unknowable, the ineffable, the inconceivable. Yet you do not listen. You cannot listen. Your mind too feeble, your thoughts too human to understand the secrets unraveled by the heavenly fluffiness. The syrup screams to you, first in desperation, then in exasperation, and finally in frustration, but in the end, it falls upon sightless ears.
The other implication is that it guarantees some kind of happy ending. Seeing as even if everyone dies, they can still go happily frolic as inanimate objects and sensations in the Waking World.
Okay, what I like to do is to combine concepts together based on the flimsiest tangential relations, helps make weird stuff.
So, the field is evidently a field of grass. Blades of grass. So it became a field of blades. Which is a field-based image of devastation. The other two coming to mind being a burning field and a barren field. The latter contradicts the whole "blades everywhere" bit, so I combined in the former, arriving at a field of burning blades.
After describing the wall as merciless, I decided to make that more literal by making it comprised of merciless figures. Hanging judges who deal out the death penalty without remorse, hence the hammers, the nooses because I made them literally hanging. The blades for lower bodies came into play when I linked them to something else that hangs: the Sword of Damocles. The thread of starlight holding up a blade was a metaphor I used years ago, so I mixed that in. Another name for wall is blockade. In an early draft of the OP I wrote for Perplexicon - Down the Foxhole, I described a planetary blockade as a "bukkake line of orbital devastation" (which unfortunately Corsair rejected), so I grabbed that and the firing squad imagery a line of orbital weapons invoke. And yes, they would have indeed started spraying white-hot lead (as in literally, like a murderous fire-hose) if people started hitting them or trying to climb them.
The spiders were from a nightmare from early in my childhood wherein I was chased by a toadstool with scythe-like spider legs that dripped with venom. I took the shape of a mushroom and correlated it to a tesla coil, and then the head of a tesla coil with a tokamak. So yes, if people angered them by loitering, hitting them, or being too loud, they would have risen up and started spraying lightning bolts of nuclear hellfire.
The fountain was just based on that Dada sculpture, "Fountain". It was carbonated because soda fountains.
The mountains of clouds are like that because earlier this year, I was in a car on the way back from Queensland when a tempest hit. I remember gazing up and watching the clouds before the storm began, they were so thick and layered that they looked almost like a mountain range. I then added an Illuminati Eye because its sometimes depicted being in the sky. It was changed into the Eye of Judgement and given the shouting gimmick when I linked the eye imagery to Doubt Man's level from Kingdom of Loathing.
The sea itself is based on the Sea of Trees in Japan, a popular place for suicides. In this case, it's more literal, with it literally being a sea of Red-Black Binary Trees, a kind of data structure that balances itself to optimize performance, hence the weird rules that govern them. I made them out of blood because it worked well with the morbidity of it all, and you know, because dried blood can appear black, while fresh blood is red.
The Pillbugs are based on the two most common forms of suicide in the real-life Sea of Trees: hanging and overdose. That's why they looked like pills beneath the armor with coils of rope in their mouths. The angular, alien armor was just there for style
If the party didn't outnumber them, you'd have found that they take two successes to kill normally. Their armor protects them from the first, but breaks, halving their Stress rating.
Iceburgs, they're just a pun. The insects inside are basically angry masses of methamphetamine that swarm like hornets, relentlessly pursuing all who dare disturb them. Again, because Ice. And Black Ice, from cyberpunk fiction by extrapolation.
Coral smokestacks was just because some corals look sort of like masses of tiny fleshy smokestacks.
Bridge was billboards just because I wanted a material other than wood
Well, no-one saw this because you blew it up, but here's their notes:
Closer to a cathedral to a shrine, build amidst the bleached bones a sea monster that looks like it's been ripped straight out of the pages of a picture book. It seems to be under construction and undergoing demolition at the same time. One one side, construction workers with blurred features scramble amidst alcoves to construct a sandstone wall. On the other side, they're tearing out the stained glass and smashing apart the plaster.
The murals are dedicated to forgotten gods, while the centerpiece, a lolcat picture watches indifferently from its place above the altar. Figures dressed in ecclesial robes walk around holding smokeless thuribles, blood and pus swirling beneath them. Countless hands wrap around them, like portal bulwarks.
A single spear is buried in the altar, razor wire flowing freely from it like a rose bush. The foot of its handle blooms with an enormous flower whose filaments are the trunks of impossibly thin trees.
Human corpses hang from the incomplete ceiling upon meathooks. Some of them are attached to parts of the ceiling that aren't actually there.Firstly it's based Illbain Church from the notes of the original Perplexicon. I connected the comparison of the church being like the ribcage of a beast, to that sea monster that Gae Bulg was made from. Speaking of which, that's the base idea of the spear in the altar with its razor wire. It's being simultaneously built and torn down to illustrate how quickly both such endeavors are carried out in Akasha. The workers are Locals, automatons of sorts used by Nightmares for manual labor.
The meathooks and corpses are just there because they'd be really out of place in a cathedral
The robed figures are basically the trauma of victims of sexual abuse by priests of the Catholic Church, given form. They look holy and whatnot, yet corruption swirls beneath them. Their thuribles emit a ringing that continues to haunt their targets long after it first harms them. The hands represent how the church shielded the culprits for so many years, protecting the perpetrators from justice. It's a reversal of the idea of healing hands and the laying of hands. They also use thuribles as meteor hammers because they're Nightmares, they don't give a damn about what they're made from or meant to represent, if they can use it to mess you up, they will use it to do so. Also to give respite from a topic far too dark for this silly little game to cover >__<
Firstly, that payphone can be used to find anyone or anything whose phone number is known. How payphones in Akasha works is that they alter the user's perception of reality ensuring that they'll find the person they're calling nearby, though they won't know where. The person being called will also be alerted and know the location of the person who called them. Anyway description for dialing a number would have been as follows:
The hiss of static is what does it. The straw that breaks the camel's back. The butterfly that flapped its wings. It interferes with the haze of background noise, drowning out some, amplifying others. You hear sounds you didn't notice before, following them with your eyes, you notice stalls and buildings you didn't see before.
Tracing your gaze back to where you stand, you realize it's snowing. It's been snowing this whole time and you only just realized it now. Snowflakes, each one identical to the last flutters from the skies. When they touch your skin, they warmly melt with the sensation of a lover's caress. The gears are nowhere to be seen. You are standing on a beach of tepid snow, against a literal sea of neon. The reef is gone. As is the eye and the artificial sky that hid it.
You see a clouded night sky illuminated with countless stars in vivid colors, stretching all the way to the horizon. It'd be romantic, almost, if it weren't for the giant aurora-wreathed lamprey mouths that softly sing a dubstep-metal rendition of Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.The shops were either generated using Piecewise's Mechanical Muse to get base ideas, or in the case of that fire shop and cutting implement store, created by Corsair. Not sure why I went for the mechanical aesthetic of the harbor, I suppose it may have been because I originally envisioned it as a massive industrial area, so some of the ideas from that stayed. The vantage points had enemies on them, but they would also allow people to get a good view of the crowd and its behavior, making it easier to navigate it and removing some of the more dangerous combat encounters as they'd know what signs there were of them approaching.
Most of the outside were just descriptions I wrote for other purposes that were then reflavored to give them more of a weird, psychedelic feeling. The moat is new, though it was just a simple inversion of properties from solid fish swimming through liquid water to solid water swimming through liquid fish, easy way to make something appear weird without needing to make too much an effort.
The interior is evidently based on a teahouse, though matching with some of Curfew's more Lovecraftian influences, the scrolls and books on the wall they have in place of tea contain forbidden secrets. They're basically filled with the psychic equivalent of firey genital-seeking spider swarms. So yeah, good job not reading them I guess?
The area has a high quantity of Soldato Nightmares as they've been ordered to protect Jacklyn, seeing as her medical skills are invaluable. Except what they don't know, is that Jacklyn is actually a Sleeper Nightmare. A mindless automaton that just happens to act convincingly enough to pass off as a human. Its Hangover talent was surgery, and it's Impulse talent was Mariachi's armory which allows it to summon a guitar-case filled with firearms.
Well first up the keys and door are based on the concept of a hash function, more in the context of a hash table than a password hash though. You give it the key which is completely arbitrary, and it transforms into something that correlates into a specific location with it.
So the idea is, it's a Curfew-operated safehouse, the clock was installed later when the Taoists became more of a threat, it also fit with their whole Cinderella theme and was based on the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Only here when it hits midnight, it's less nuclear holocaust, more Taoists manage to break in and start attacking people. Remember when Rachel had that pseudo-stroke? Imagine that but with twice the Stress rating hitting every single person in the room. Yeah, you don't want to stay there till midnight. The idea was that it would force the party to go look for another safehouse as they can't stay in their current one forever.
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Topic: Overhang - Sorry (Read 30309 times)