Duvors

"Darn." Grace will search the trash instead.

As soon as it was clear that the creatures were hostile Sam's sword was out of it's sheath and held above his shoulders in a double-handed grip. "Right," he said, "let's get to work." Battle Order and suggested Actions Angor - attack Battle Ant, front row Magnhildr - attack Battle Ant, front row Old Bones - attack Big Rat, front row Yelana - attack Big Rat, back row Okooid - Lightning Spell at enemy with most health, back row

Grace will examine the closet.

Grace will examine the papers on Seymour's desk. "We should probably decide where we're going to search once we're done here as soon as possible." she says. "I'd suggest continuing down this side to 1a, Mallory's quarters."

@Lind Whisperer "Nope." Sam said upon seeing the giant snake creature, "we're not going that way. To the vermin!"

"To be honest, I don't think whoever caused the blackout was working with Ezra. It just seems so uncoordinated. But anyway, Gabriella is right. We should probably get to inspecting the private rooms as quickly as we can. We can start with 1c, Seymour's room, 'cause it's right next to Arthur Peck's.

"Ah, no. I'm more-or-less the worst fighter in the tribe. I am a very good pickpocket though. Why I don't know, but I am. But let me be clear, That prophet isn't the only one I've ever met, and let me tell you they're strong. The fact that MONAD was able to fight him on even ground and seemed to be winning is the most concerning thing about the whole encounter. Magellan might be the only potential defense against him my tribe could have." "He wasn't dodging your questions, you stopped asking him any because you got mad about the Moppets when he mentioned them. From what he said it sounded more like he was having difficulty describing what he'd seen than intentional evasiveness. What I could gather was that people 'healed' by MONAD superficially acted as they had in life but... not. I'll admit he wasn't very clear. We also kind of left without asking for the specifics of how they came to be fighting, so all we got was the he was trying to stop MONAD out of revenge or some such. But he did start muttering about how everyone was dead at the end in a way that certainly sounded very remorseful." "Errr, you did see all the potions he was drinking, right? You might not be familiar with it but that stuff is strong and he was drinking it like a fish drinks water. And he was in fact injured, I saw that much. And why would two people that powerful fake a fight for the benefit of a bunch of rubes that they couldn't've even known were there? A simpler plan would simply to be to waltz into my town offering to solve all its problems for them, like what Magellan described, and then do whatever bad things they wanted. And what would be the point of sending us on an errand after random ingredients? If they needed them for something they could just get them themselves couldn't they?" "Maybe, but I think that assuming those two are playing some sort of overly complex trick on us for no apparent reason is a little overcautious. Just a little." OOC: As you can see here, he is in fact at less than full health. The statement that he was healthier than any of us was a relative term rather than an objective one.

"Ah, dinner! Erm, for you all that is." said Sam, trying to identify what animals they were.

Grace will check behind the bookshelves.

"Well, uhh, that's kinda what I expected honestly." "Seconded, I'd like to get as much done as possible in the time we have left."

"Uhhhh- Maybe? I don't remember anything about who I was when I was alive soooo... But considering how long ago that was they'd be dead by now." He paused contemplatively. "I suppose in a sense I consider all my tribe 'my' children. I was there when each one was born, I watched them grow up, I played with them, helped them, healed them, fought, killed, and hunted for them. Choosing whether to leave on this quest was certainly hard enough. Yes, I'd say I have children." he sounded a bit reluctant to say this, as if he wasn't entirely comfortable with this realization.

"Just because someone's body is in good condition doesn't mean their mind is. The man probably just had to kill a number of mindless bodies that just used to be his friends." "Holograms? This far from a large city? In the middle of the wilderness? Where exactly do you come from? You say your home is mostly ice, but that doesn't match up with the plasma rifle and that visor." Sam scoffed. "Unprotected?" he said, "surely you don't think I'm the only fighter in my tribe? They're about as protected now as they were with me there, that is to say that if MONAD attacks they're screwed. I don't think anyone there could match the firepower he put out back in that little spat, and the same goes for that prophet. I don't think that MONAD would follow him though, he seemed utterly unconcerned with either him or us and was probably only fighting Magellan because he attacked him first. There still is the danger of him attacking my village, but that would've been there anyway. As for Magellan I don't think he's some sinister schemer planning to eat my children or anything like that. To be honest he seemed utterly harrowed and in no fit shape to take care of himself. And anyway," his voice became a little more tense at this juncture, "even if I didn't trust him I'd still extend the offer. You never deny help to someone in need, because someday that person may be you."

"Ah, uh, thanks? Why were you keeping them in your... never mind, I don't want to know. What are these little metal thingamabobs?" Grace turns the scanner on the evidence presented to her.

"Well, that doesn't really tell us anything. Though it's odd that there doesn't seem to be even remnants of spittle from someone's breath. I wonder..." Grace will scan the bottle of cleaning fluid to see if there's any DNA there.

True, but if a species renders it's own planet uninhabitable then there's no moral high ground to claim. True again, but as I said the League wasn't supposed to be primarily fantasy. And I think you may be feeling that they were intended to be more sympathetic as they were written as being democratic as opposed to autocratic, but that can be a misleading sentiment. Currently I'm viewing them as being heavily over-militarized, expansionistic, and consumed by a type of condescending cultural imperialism. They were certainly eager enough to prosecute a war that a large part of their population didn't want, hence the succession. As you may have noticed my attitude to equalizing factions is not to make them equally good, but to make them equally bad (or equally flawed is possibly a better way of putting it). This might not appeal to everyone, but in this context I think creating a half-full universe works to our favor. It acts as an incentive to our players to attempt to change things for the better. Or ride the rollercoaster all the way over the edge of the cliff depending on what happens.

OOC: Don't worry, we're not going anywhere. "Well, we were heading across these mountains anyway. And dragons sound intimidating, but I'm sure this is nothing we can't manage." Sam said with a confidence he didn't feel. He'd never fought a dragon before, but the stories he'd heard were not heartening. "Will do. If you're not coming with us I'd suggest heading to my village. It's just south of here, and certainly better than being by yourself in this frozen waste." At the intersection Sam stops to take stock of their choices.looking back at the party following him he said: "Well, I still think we should go right, movement or no movement. But considering we know almost nothing about this place I feel we should come to a consensus before going on."

"Well I'd still like to have a look at the weapon anyway. It seems kinda important." Grace will scan the drawers with the bicorder to see if there's any DNA evidence. "Okay, this probably shouldn't be here. Tell me, who's supposed to be able to access this room?"

Grace throws her hands up in exasperation. "Well it would've been nice if someone told me that! What, do you people think I can read minds or something? All anyone mentioned was that his hands were injured. How do you even know his prints were on the weapon? I thought you didn't have any fingerprinting kits aboard. In fact, let me see this weapon, I'd like to check it out for myself."

"I only have to say that if I'm actually going to arrest someone. I'm just asking this guy a few questions about what he remembers." "Will you stop that? This man is clearly distressed and confused, as anyone would be if they've been unconscious for several days. Threats and aggression aren't going to do anything except make him frantic." "Yes, we're in space. Mr. Parry, I'd recommend you lie down and rest for a while. You seem to be suffering from a concussion and possibly retrograde amnesia. And drink some of that coffee while you're at it, small sips. You've been unconscious for several days and are probably suffering from severe dehydration." As she speaks, Grace will scan the man with the bicorder in order to glean any information she can.

I know, but I'd rather avoid having a direct parallel to the destruction of Cyre, especially since in that setting it was the very mystery of it's destruction that resulted in the 'Cold War' atmosphere. I wouldn't mind a species who lost their homeworld to pollution or nuclear war or being forced out by colonists though as I think the idea has some merit. As for the similarities the war possesses to the last game, that was somewhat intentional. But I don't think it's that alike. The recent nature of the war, the fact that it had no clear winner, and the possibility of it's restarting give it a very different atmosphere, and unlike the last game everyone involved is still around and a major player in some capacity. The factions I suggested in the original post were less 'fantasy vs. sci-fi vs. orcs' and more 'sci-fi+some fantasy vs. sci-fi vs. orcs+some sci-fi'. I think the reason the League came off as primarily fantasy is because I made a detailed write-up for the only 'fantasy' faction in it, which probably made it come off as more prominent and important than it actually was intended. Makes sense. On aesthetics I feel that the 'slow' FTL that most spaceships use would look like the stars were just speeding past you really quickly whereas the 'tunnels' opened by a Gate would look like this.

The problem there is that sublight drives take something along the order of several hundred years to make interstellar journeys. That's a bit slow for this universe I'm afraid and doesn't allow much wiggle room for a MM to just handwave travel times. Normally in the old game ship transit usually lasted for a few social interactions with npc crew and maybe a battle or mini game regardless of distance because anything more would rapidly grow stale. The main exception to this was when the journey was the main element of the quest. Now, sublight interstellar ships in the form of generation sips would be an interesting setting, but I think that's a little bigger than what you're talking about. In system it's probably fine though, which is what it think you're suggesting. But I have to point out that we shouldn't assume that natural technological progression would follow hard sci-fi lines. Despite the superficial similarities to our universe, the fictional one we're devising clearly runs on entirely different laws (see; magic). Eh, the fact that most 'evil monster man' designs look much the same and that some people have made pictures of red orcs isn't really a convincing argument. It's not really important though, mostly the lava monsters make me think of demons because that's basically what they are. In fact I'd like the aliens to have multiple skin tones because, well, alien ethnicities aren't done often enough. If you want to separate syllables them I'd suggest using a hyphen, it's what they're for. Oh yes absolutely. I just feel that the names of things should reflect the fantastic nature of the setting even if they are scientifically understood. For instance I've become attached to the idea of saying 'druidic sciences' instead of 'life sciences' (mostly because the nature skill also lets you learn spells). Something else. The Ancient Empire was supposed to act as a unifying progenitor for humans, elves, and dwarves to explain why they all looked so darn similar, vague at the start of the game and defined more later. Their relics are mostly only found in ancestral space of the three species and nowhere else. The Gates (and maybe a few other structures) were built long before them by civilizations so ancient nobody can even guess at what they were like. If the Ancient Empire was Ancient Egypt then the Gate Builders would predate Akkad. You know this actually brings us another objection I had to the whole 'planet destroying' thing; I don't thinking of the factions should have that kind of power. As I said, having planet destroyers running around would essentially make war impossible as it would act as the ultimate nuclear option. To be honest this is kind of what I was referring to with my 'spheres' idea. In fact it was your 'Saturn Family' that put me on to the idea, as that made me think of a setting where the planes of existence are based on the planets as depicted in medieval astrology. I was thinking that smaller, less powerful creatures could slip between spheres fairly easily but bigger, more powerful creatures have a harder and harder time getting through until the strongest have to be let in by someone on the other side. In the end I don't think this needs to be defined at the start of the game, it's something to be worked out later. But your basic idea is good, you need all those scary space demons to come from somewhere. Well, the gates were only supposed to have one in any star system, so that's more or less how they'd work. An idea I had was that you can only open a tunnel between two gates at a time, and after that the gates need a set amount of time to recharge. So the gates would probably have set departure/arrival times for when they're activated, with gates that have multiple connections cycling between them. This last bit means that the fastest route between two places can sometimes change based on where some gates are in their cycle.

"Miss, I don't think you're going to get much more out of him now. He's obviously a little out of it at the moment, trauma and exhaustion, all that stuff. I think further questions can be saved till he's feeling a little better." Sam tilted his head quizzically. "Yes," he said, "I already knew that, because I looked, with my eyes." He stopped to consider that statement a moment. "Well, eyeholes. Are you sure you're not just a little over-reliant on that visor thingy of yours?" "Well, you know that they always say. The best way through a maze is to follow the right-hand path. Sooo... east?"

"Let's have a look at that." said Sam, taking the note. Sam would've scowled at this if he could. While he didn't know for sure the man was starting to sound a little delirious, like he wasn't entirely there

"Will you stop that? It's not helpful." @BobGrace turns to address Ezra. "She's lying,' she said, "there is no poison, have some coffee." She offers him a cup, vowing internally to cuff Gabriella if she knocks this one to the floor. "Your name is Ezra Parry, you're on the Excelsior heading to Alpha Centauri. My name is officer Grace Jones and I'm here because a few days ago someone killed another passenger, one Alfie Peck. You went missing around the time when he was killed and were only found yesterday, unconscious in the storage area with the codes to the escape pods. Apparently you were knocked out when a suitcase fell on you and have only just been revived. Do you remember what you were doing in storage? Or why you're on this ship?" Grace says all this in the calmest and most comforting voice she can manage, talking a little slower than normal so that Ezra can understand her clearly.

One idea I had was that there are several 'tiers' of divinity, not in the sense of a hierarchy but rather that there are several spheres of reality with their own associated gods. The gods of the material plane would mostly be concerned with material things, the weather, fire, plants etcetera, with domains ranging from an entire planet to 'that pile of rocks over there' and power to match. These are the gods that players interact with regularly, the animist nature spirits and fairies and sprits of the ancestors and pantheons living on mountaintops. Gods in 'higher' or 'lower' spheres are concerned with more abstract concepts, good, evil, all that jazz. These are the ones that interact with the world via intercessors and agents, as for whatever reason they themselves cannot enter 'our' sphere (at least, not without someone opening a door for them). One element of this is that the souls of mortal beings are in fact divine in-and-of themselves, which is what allows them to control magic. Arcane magic is distinguished from divine magic largely via the harnessing of internal power as opposed to the channeling of higher power. I'm not really sure about having a defined origin myth or connecting all the gods, I'd rather let players create their own religions and deities to populate the universe. Well, the Krassar aren't Roman, or even Roman-like. I only mentioned Romans in connection to their political situation being somewhat like the post-Roman Italian principalities, the former heartland of an empire that is now politically disunited and prone to infighting. I hadn't envisioned any particular cultural aesthetic for them other than beings sort of inspired by the Chima crocodile people, having superficially 'tribal' aesthetics while being just as advanced as anyone else. I initially envisioned them as having hitched their fortunes to the rising star of the orcs but I've since moved away from the idea of the orcs being a major power. I mean, it's nice, I like it, but the lava monsters don't really make me think 'orc' so much as 'demon'. Also, that is way to many apostrophes. Tone it down a little. This is rather similar to something WBD mentioned to me he called 'Etherium', a sort of intangible substance people manipulate to cast spells. To be honest I prefer his name for it as your idea with it's antimatter and alternate universes teeters over lip of being overly like real-world science. I'd rather hew closer to a universe that functions on clearly spiritual causes rather than materialistic causality. And attempting to explain something as entropy-defying as magic away scientifically doesn't sound right to me anyway. If you feel like a lot is being put on your shoulders I'm sorry, I didn't really think about how much you were taking on here. But look, if you're feeling like you're being asked to do all the work yourself you can ask for help, I don't think anyone here would be unwilling to make tangible contributions. Well all want this to be a success after all. I think you're being a bit overconfident in saying that something like that is bound to happen simply by virtue of the setting. In the last game even things that were planned from the beginning ended up never happening. There were numerous locations (Pyr and the Eversummer Islands come to mind) that were never visited, and plotlines like orcish slavery in Eubric that were supposed to be important and ended up being mostly ignored. In light of that I don't see why a planet will inevitably be destroyed in the course of the game simply because it's a trope of the genre. I'm not objecting to destruction per-se, it's more that blowing up planets annoys me in general. I'm perfectly fine with some of the more toned-down ideas Classic_Spaceman mentioned. I'm not really a fan of that idea. Aside from it being a near-exact replica of the events of the Last War from Ebberon, it seems that would lead to a more Cold-War-like atmosphere. I was envisioning the situation being an interbellum period, with a second war breaking out being a very real danger. In that scenario the possibility of planetary destruction becomes the nuclear deterrent that prevents such a war from happening, a consequence so terrible that no-one would risk it. My own ideas at the moment have shifted in the direction of two major powers going to war with each other and fighting for a while before one suddenly has a major rebellion while the other has a number of planets that didn't agree with the war secede. The situation briefly depends into chaos before the fighting grinds to a halt and the now four major groups sign peace terms. The ultimate situation is one where there's a tenuous peace that almost no-one is really happy with but they don't have the strength to challenge. It's not perfect, but it gets the atmosphere across. There are several differences between Mercuton and what you're suggesting, mostly in the fact that it didn't represent the entire elven civilization, and that it's ruins were still visitable adventure locations. Anything capable of outputting the utterly nonsensical about of energy needed to destroy a planet (like, say, an exploding star) probably wouldn't leave that much behind. And no, I'd still object to it regardless. I have said several times that I do not like blowing up planets as a fictional device and I'd like know why you seem to have so much trouble understanding that. This is sort of what I'd been thinking. My idea was that the setting would consist of a fairly well explored core area with a fringe of wilder space surrounded entirely by unexplored systems. I hadn't even thought that the entire Arm was explored, let alone a whole galaxy. Well, when I came up with the idea of Jump Gates I envisioned them as each having a limited number of other Gates they could connect to, some only connecting to one and others to hundreds. Some gates would have connections that bypass nearby gates to go to ones much farther away while others have been destroyed by unknown forces. I did envision some systems having no gates, but they'd be scattered rather randomly around known space rather than concentrated at the edges. In fact the intent was to have most unexplored space behind gates nobody knew how to open, to emphasize that these were structures made for the proposes of long vanished empires rather than the convenience of the current crop of spacefaring civilizations. Spooky.