In Golden Flame

[hybrid flint]

They’re looking at some stuff from Terk Mech & Tech in the future, but right now they’ve got three Everests and a Sagarmatha.

The squad so far:

[shell bison]

Ooooh, nice. Sadly no chomolungma

[balmy obsidian]

Chomo my beloved

[hybrid flint]

And they’re looking at a HA Arthur, a Pegasus, an IPS Gorshkov, and a Kidd.

[noble ivy]

those are some fancy looking everests

[hybrid flint]

May have gone overboard with the kitbashing, lol

[shell bison]

Hells gate is already in the red in terms of budget, might as well sell more

[balmy obsidian]

nonsense

get all the kitbashing you can

who's gonna stop you? shelly?

-# she might actually stop you

[shell bison]

If you describe what peanut butter tastes like she might just authorize the request

[balmy obsidian]

I have this plan for my nhp to use their pilot's player_two neural bypass to learn what food tastes like and transcribe it for shelly

[hybrid flint]

Surely nothing unfortunate will happen because of this.

[balmy obsidian]

It's part of a even bigger plan that ends with the HGSRT being renamed to "Noodles"

[noble ivy]

Its a fair trade right?
the nhp learns what a pb&j tastes like and the human gets to learn about "the horrors™"

[balmy obsidian]

Trade offer

[tame tide]

Wait would that work?

[fading wyvern]

...I don't see why not?

[balmy obsidian]

I don't know. It makes sense to me. We'll see if the GM agrees

[fading wyvern]

I mean

[hybrid flint]

Isn’t the true Calliopeian spirit “if it’s stupid but it works, then it isn’t stupid”?

[fading wyvern]

If you have a Player 2 Neural Bypass and that does work, why not just cut out the middle man and lend the pilots body to Shelly for a little bit

[hybrid flint]

Oh that sounds disastrous

[balmy obsidian]

The pilot doesn't like Shelly nearly enough to lend their body to her

[fading wyvern]

Pfft, fair

[shell bison]

I'm pretty sure one of my players wants to smooch both Siren and Shelly and would be okay with either body jacking into their body

[balmy obsidian]

Despite running Technophile and being accused of being a closet codekisser by the entire rest of the team I would rather not

[shell bison]

Code kisser is a much more PG term for the one I made up for NHP lovers.

[balmy obsidian]

Oh?

What would that be?

[fast parrot]

Is the other one the tobi term?

[shell bison]

Ahem

HOLO FUCKER

[balmy obsidian]

Pfft

Nice

[shell bison]

I'll need to read legionnare for the pilot to NHP links to play that moment with some actual credibility

[thorn hinge]

okay but i need that shirt tho

[shell bison]

Ada, you would

Siren Shipper

[last hearth]

I'm reading through Act 1 for the first time, planning to run it for some friends; I would never have expected to see LoadingReadyRun brought up as a chief inspiration for a Lancer module lmao

[shell bison]

Vex's list of inspirations are varied and wonderful

[last hearth]

Doubly so the:
Jerry Masters owes a lot to Graham Stark’s depiction of a man desperately trying to convince his crowd of eccentric friends and co-workers to just please do their jobs

Since I mostly enjoyed CommodoreHustle/Friday Nights/Qwerpline where he is very distinctly not in that role lmao

Either way this rocks

[shell bison]

yeyeye

[thorn hinge]

Way back before the kickstarter when the book was still in rough drafts, each chapter opened with a quote from a LRR sketch.

[tame tide]

I was shocked when I heard health was one of the music inspirations considering they are my favourite band

[lunar panther]

a few still do open with them

Unfuck This House is apparently one

[thorn hinge]

I was introduced to Health thanks to Vex and this book

[lunar panther]

(my player recognized it)

[thorn hinge]

I don't think that's in the final version?

prerelease draft 7 versus the final version

[lunar panther]

it's still the mission title

it's a quote from that skit afaik? lemme ask the player that noticed it

[thorn hinge]

oh, yeah, there's that as a reference. I just wanted an excuse to screenshot the draft though because it's a great bit

[shell bison]

lmao

[lunar panther]

it is fantastic

[rustic seal]

hypothetically, if Siren were to have a mech, what would they name their mech?

[shell bison]

Sky Lady

Or

The Dragon's Wing

[lunar panther]

not that skit, https://youtu.be/3WZnkyiBG_U this one

[tame tide]

Act 1 finale: ||BEHOLD THE GATES OF FIRE!!!!||

well...

Off to act 2 IG...

If I cba

[clever cloud]

this is sick af

[tame tide]

woe

||# LENS FLARE||

https://tenor.com/view/flashbang-gif-22572243

||POV: Capella just came through the fire gate||

Spoiler text

But yep I'm loading that up RN

[clever cloud]

Fits perfectly with Pixel's token

[tame tide]

shucks

Well, time to uuuh... I've finished making the map... Guess I can just stare at the fact it's snowingn outside???

or sleep

nah lol xcom time

[runic viper]

oh that is so cool

that sells the whole idea of OH GOD REDACTED

[tame tide]

||# FIIIIIIREEEEE!!!!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥||

||There's also the sad version where the fire gate has been destroyed||

Also wanna point out, there's ||just a fucking f orklift and some bins lmao||

Now I'm looking at this like ||Damn now I just need an Ignatius token ._.||

||I can fix him||

[tame tide]

||He now waits patiently, full statblock and all for a couple months time when my players actually get here||

[hybrid flint]

I made one a while back! Dunno if it'll fit your tastes, but...

[tame tide]

OOoh

Theft

[clever cloud]

I would love to include this in the resource sheet, with credit, if you allow it

[hybrid flint]

Go for it!

[warped ibex]

my gf (cassette on retrograde) has a WIP of one, i can let you know whenever that's finished if you wish :3

[tame tide]

OOOH

[hybrid flint]

Oh man ||he's got the HAT||

In-canon, what even is that thing supposed to be? ||A brazier?||

[dire shell]

"Strange Matter", the GMS Everest for one of the players of my IGF run that finally started

it's missing a lot of the other doodads(deployable cover/turrets) but just displaying all that is something I'm pretty happy for;

Since a lot of players are likely gonna change mechs at LL2, I'm trying to make these from a common base:

[main scaffold]

i would hope so

[tame tide]

Depends how soon

I have gained momentum so tbh more likely than not

[main scaffold]

no hurry i just think your maps are stellar quality

[tame tide]

Thannk

[rustic night]

How can all your maps be so good? How many souls have you sold? How many NHPs have you consumed?

This consistency in quality is remarkable

And the quality itself is astounding

[shell bison]

I adore the head design.

[tame tide]

I devour souls of NPCs of ttrpg games lost to scheduling conflicts

I'm a perfectionist, and map maker so they go hand in hand

[dire shell]

Thank you .
Having put the dual pistols aux/aux there I have the funny mental image of the magazine being reload by literally slapping it to the aide of the head with the palm X3

[shell bison]

Oh that's such a neat visual

[dire shell]

Amusingly it came as I was trying to figure a clean visual way of including them when the hands were already full with the HMG and the mortar already taking that shoulder slot.

Then I recalled the gundam head vulcan canons were a thing X3

(But didn't want the same exact design)

[shell bison]

That's fair, don't want replication but inspired by

[dire shell]

It felt like a fitting idea for smaller caliber weapons that almost are essentially designed to serve as point defense(pistols having that threat 3 + reliable; heck the Raleigh hand cannons use of magazine is specifically described in contrast to GMS type-1 pistols being "belt-fed" which might explain that reliable tag... )

[shell bison]

Coming from things like Battletech, most smaller caliber munitions on the machines are last ditch defense or more concerningly, directly meant to target a pilot in the cockpit.

[hybrid flint]

So, mentally gearing up for Snack Run -- do most inter-settlement transactions use manna? Furthermore, how much is a single manna actually worth? I know the Act II draft mentions "one manna for a tomato" as extortionate.

Trying to figure out what price Jerry should set for the players, then what offer ID will actually offer to make Jerry do an audible spit-take on the other end of the line.

[noble ivy]

i think most things a person would use like clothes or food is measured in the thousandths of a manna

[clever cloud]

the Long Rim book mentions that 1 Manna is roughly equivalent to 1 person's 1 day's cost of living. Which includes everything from rent to food

so like.. roughly 150-200 USD if you assume $15/hr was actually a living wage in the US

[hybrid flint]

That's exactly what I'm looking for.

[clever cloud]

but i do suggest you dont do equivs like that to USD

I made a guess when running that that to feed 2M people in what you can reasonably carry in a single transport vehicle, we're talking about a week's worth of food.. So 10M manna made sense

[noble ivy]

i think it says someone can live in luxury on a budget on 1 manna per day

[hybrid flint]

So yeah, maybe .01 manna to feed yourself on a tighter budget.

Let's see... 2m people, about... two weeks, let's say 15 days' worth (just enough to survive until things are fixed up)...

300k manna.

[clever cloud]

yea, reasonable number

i gotta reread long rim dammit

[noble ivy]

yeah, i think manna is supposed to be only used by corporations and governments trading

thats why the local currency has insane exchange rate

[clever cloud]

It makes sense to use Manna with Impact Plaza, or maybe just using that name to give your players an order of magnitude. Most likely the transactions happen in that station's local currency: ingots, icycles, etc

[hybrid flint]

Yeah, the negotiations probably start with an assumption that of course these schmucks are going to convert to Steele Bars

And the exchange rate is nightmarish

[noble ivy]

1 manna = 10 steele bars

[clever cloud]

Given that i already spat out this number to my players, ||Frod stealmann is gonna be sooo much worse. 10B Manna most likely||

[noble ivy]

||thats probably more then some karakin core worlds make||

[clever cloud]

:))

[hybrid flint]

||that's probably more than some Calliopeian worlds are worth||

[clever cloud]

I, singlehandedly, caused major inflation in the entire Union space

[noble ivy]

||definitely since manna is backed by a world's potential||

[clever cloud]

yea ||that's the whole reason Calliope is such a financial loss. Impact Plaza itself is worth more than the entire planetary system really has to offer. The fact that money is moving at all is a miracle and a disaster||

[noble ivy]

i didn't get a chance to do snack run for my SRT but i planned that the entire customer service branch is nothing but a bunch of comp/cons stuck in logical loops and one poor soul that they forgot to fire

[hybrid flint]

"I'm sorry, all our Dynamic Wholesalers are currently busy. The wait time for a Wholesaler is T W O T H O U S A N D F I V E H U N D R E D A N D T W E N T Y F O U R minutes. Please hold, and enjoy the sounds of the Real Steele Band."

[noble ivy]

you know for a fact he spells it Reale Steele

[wispy quail]

trying to figure out how to capture this very specific vibe in my campaign at a critical moment

(i know nukes are relatively speaking not THAT big of an deal in Lancer, but the general idea of the little forgotten indicator light is very cool to me)

best moment would probably be ||Sunbird-1||

[fading wyvern]

I love that

Real phonecall-on-the-red-phone stuff

[austere prism]

There is a control in your cockpit. It's something you were told about in training, read about in the manual, and then mostly forgot about - it is labelled "RWR SENS", and it controls how sensitive your radar warning receiver is. You can see it adjusting downward from its default position as the system tries to protect itself from incoming energy - if you didn't know any better, you'd think the main targeting array on a starship is illuminating you at point blank range

[dusky cradle]

Classic Gundam story happened last session

Date with Jerry turned (one-sided) fistfight, where the ex-albatross Nelson pilot who got asked out started "slapping some sense into our dear Station chief" in the middle of a midnight picnic in hardspace and atmospheric suits, due to || Jerry spilling the beans, told her he murdered one of her own and cannot bear to live it down||

"You don't understand, I'm supposed to be a failure of a chief, find someone more deserving" slaps face

Need to work on the story where he finally ||snaps out of the self-inflicted exile compounded with survivors guilt that lasted decades|| and starts looking forward to ||a brighter future, where he can finally be happy||.

[main cove]

So is it just me or does IGF seem to have the misconception that "nearlight" works a lot like ST warp speed or mass effect eezo ftl? Because I swear "dropping from nearlight" is used a lot as a means of suddenly surprising the PCs or NPCs. Also Jerry's ||"nearlight bolt suicide run into the Tachyon"|| in Act 2 is something I'm not sure is actually doable?

[shell bison]

It could potentially be just the sci-fi trope for the simple effect for story moments. I'm not an expert in the topic but I'm willing to put my suspension of disbelief on it.

[halcyon swift]

nearlight bolt implying instantaneous (or very short) entry into nearlight speeds
dropping from nearlight implies an instantaneous return from nearlight to orbital speeds.

It's not WARP, but once you get to near-light speed, to a close observer, it's as if they've suddenly disappeared.

Similarly, your sudden return from near-light speed to orbital speed will seem like a sudden appearance to the observer.

[tame tide]

I don't get what you mean here... yeah nearlight bolt is a somewhat "fast travel" esque but it's still bottlenecked by the speed of light. And having a nearlight drive and equipment capable of surviving one

Even with safeties in place Nearlight bolts are catastrophic and potentially lethal

Nearlight bolts aren't even limited to IGF. Battlegroup has a "if you wanna retreat you can nearlight bolt out of combat" and roll a table to see how well it goes and I think the best case scenarios are like, half your staff die or your ships systems get overloaded and you face a blackout

IGF is just one of the modules I know in Lancer that properly incorporates nearlight bolts in a realistic manner

||I can only recall 4 times in 2 acts characters are "surprised" by a bolt||
Act 1
||Mission 1, Capella's goons appear
Mission 3, you launch a nearlight drive into a satellite||
Act 2
||Mission Harrison armoury: "Fastball, NOW"
Mission hells gate, Jerry ;-;||

And of all those experiences they're still relatively grounded and apart from the immense acceleration abide quite well realistically and aren't just a "quick warp speed now!" With no consequence

Spoilers fucked up oops

[wispy quail]

it makes physics sense; if someone is traveling towards you at 0.9999c, the light from their ship is going to reach you fractions of a second before they do, considering how close visual range is

[tame tide]

If not communicated over omninet, you're travelling 0.001% slower than the data carrying the info you're bolting

[main cove]

hmmm? I think I was saying the opposite of that? Like "nearlight" in IGF is treated a lot like just "entering warp speed" or "entering the mass effect field" in terms of narrative usage. You even give some examples yourself.

[halcyon swift]

The way the nearlight bolt is described in the IGF does evoke the visual effect of entering and exiting hyperspace in Star Wars, so I can understand the misunderstanding.
But the nearlight bolt doesn't go into any kind of hyperspace, it just suddenly accelerates to near-light speed.

[tame tide]

^

I partially see the connection but it also feels like there's enough evidence on the contrary that it feels more like "super fast" than "going into another dimension"

[twilit star]

I think Lancer also states that Omni doesn’t really function well at nearlight speeds, so you actually need to drop out of Nearlight to communicate over Omni

[halcyon swift]

’ suddenly’ is the key word here.
Because it suddenly enters a speed that is only a little slower than the speed of light, it appears to the observer as if it disappeared/appeared in an instant.

[tame tide]

I was thinking communicating before then bolting

[twilit star]

See at that point it depends on distance from your target. In the same star system that does seem like a good approximation, but as soon as you start going between systems that percentage jumps several decimal places. Omni is instant, nearly no exceptions, while nearlight is… well, nearlight.

[clever cloud]

well, that doesn't make much physical sense. Relativism tells us that if you were travelling at the speed of light, there's no test you could do to determine it's not the universe itself travelling away from you. Light travelling in front of you (like a flashlight) still travels at the speed of light relative to you. Im really curious what the implication is there, cuz there's always a frame of reference in which we're travelling at the speed of light

[tight pier]

I think this is dependent on how specifically the GM frames it in their game. The way the GM describes it can bring it anywhere between "Spaceballs Ludicrous Speed" or "Hellishly dangerous and stressful way to get somewhere really fucking quick"

[clever cloud]

idk why im trying to reason about omni, given that that doesnt make sense but...

[twilit star]

To be fair Omninet doesn’t make much physical sense. Still, because of relativity I think if you were able to converse at near light to someone out of near light a conversation would be able to take place over a couple minutes and an hour at the same time specifically in the same place, which is hard to think about. So I think it’s more a cop out than anything

A fair cop out but a cop out nonetheless

I’m not an expert so I’m not exactly sure how it would work if you could communicate with Omni to people outside nearlight

[main cove]

Literally anything paracausal or related to that doesn't make much physical sense

[clever cloud]

it's already deep magic; it wont make sense. I was just curious at the seemingly arbitrary line drawn in the sand

[twilit star]

Like if time is passing at different rates for two different people how would Omninet communication work?

Genuine question

[clever cloud]

paracausally :^)
communication would experience anti-lag. the person going at nearlight would count that the incoming communications happened before the stationary person actually said them

[halcyon swift]

I mean, like.
act2 spoilers.

||The scene when the entire Caliopean fleet drop form nearlight one by one to come to the Hell's Gate to support you does evoke the impression of "reinforcements exiting hyperspace one after the other".||

That is to say, when viewed from an onlooker's point of view.

[tight pier]

Oh, in terms of narrative use absolutely then yeah

[twilit star]

The thing about Sci-Fi is that different stories often use different words and explanations for what is narratively the exact same thing

Correction to myself actually- that’s just the thing about tropes

It’s not a Sci-fi exclusive thing

[clever cloud]

Ok so like to give some more info. if you're using light to communicate, the stationary person would received data packets with a greater interval than what the moving person recorded, akin to lag. same the other way around. If you had instant comms, the opposite would happen. The receiver would receive a transmission with a smaller interval than the recorder. so in practice it would mean a 1 second voice clip arrived in 0.3 seconds just to put a number on it. This implies that the receiver is receiving data that hasn't been recorded yet. data is going backwards in time, in order to be instantaneous

i wish there was a good way to explain this diagram in like 2 lines.

• light/info travels at 90 degrees off the "space space" plane
• you cannot "see" outside of that forward or backward cone
• if say, something happened on the "space space" plane, the light travels at 90 degrees upwards like a cone of its own. we couldn't instantly see it, but there is some time in our future where our past light cone can finally see this event's light.
• being able to perceive something outside of our light cones is like placing stuff in our past light cone. something that happened "simultaneously," must show up in our past for us to experience it
• time travel

actually the other way omni could work is by making travel instant. like a wormhole. moving along the "space space" plane instantly rather than travelling to your past light cone

that would avoid the "lag" problem all together

noo, the lag problem arises from the fact that each actor experiences different time intervals. even with instant info transfer, you're left with a different "ruler" of time from each reference... faster than light breaks the universe

[maiden ferry]

That scene from the rise of skywalker is good for something after all!

https://tenor.com/view/star-wars-millennium-falcon-army-spaceships-starships-gif-24986548

[thorn hinge]

The existence of Omninet implicitly breaks all concepts of time and simultaneity. If you try to have an omninet conversation with a ship travelling away from you at nearlight (technically at any spead, but the closer to c you get the more pronounced the effect), you'll get responses to questions before you send them.

Example:
You're flying your ship fast enough that 1 minute on your ship causes 2 minutes to pass on Asphodel. After leaving furnace city, your friend there waits one day then sends you an omni message. On the ship, 12 hours have passed. But here's the problem; relativy means that from your perspective, Asphodel is going slower. When you're 12 hours into your journey, your view of asphodel is that 6 hours have passed. You reply to the message. Your friend gets it 6 hours after you leave, 42 hours before they send the message you replied to

A nearlight bolt is just fast acceleration. We don't even know how long it takes to get up to a reasonably fraction of c, just that it's damn fast and kills people without the right protective gear. IGF decides it's fast enough to be surprising. That's nothing compared to the problems paracausality already brings to the table.

[thorn hinge]

In sort, I kind of agree with you, but I just don't see it as a problem. Nearlight Bolts do work a lot like star trek warp or star ward hyperdrive. Flash of light and the ship is gone. The effect is like those things because that's what it looks like when a ship suddenly goes a bit portion of c away from you, or goes from approaching at nearlight to suddenly reaching local inertial averages. My only problem is the unholy amount of acceleration involved, and I can only justify it by assuming that bolts are based on paracausal tech of some sort.

[iron lynx]

...you know, as a physics student I probably should have figured this out, but this answers the question I've been asking myself as to why nearlight vessels can't/don't receive omninet signals

unless the blink somehow "corrects" for time dilation, but that would just be regular signals that happen to travel instantly and don't get lightspeed packet loss

it's more narratively interesting for ships at nearlight to not be omni-synced

[main cove]

IGF lists nearlight drives as needing paracausal materials to work in a side quest. Don't have Battlegroup so totally unsure of the veracity of this claim.

[tame tide]

Interesting... just read the section on nearlight bolts in battlegroup... it states nearlight bolts travel at a significant fraction or the speed of light

Not like 0.999c

Well it's kinda vague for the point IG peeps can easily fill the gaps

[clever cloud]

80% is significant

[tame tide]

True

In my mind I saw "significant fraction" still being small considering C is fast... Like 1/8 or 1/4 C

Also explain to me like I'm five why communicating between nearlight and and "normal" speed doesn't work like this:

We have friend A, who is on asphodel and friend B who is on a ship travelling at nearlight

Friend A sends a message to friend B via Omninet, friend B sees this and sends a text back 10 seconds later

TO friend A it took friend B 100 seconds to respond, friend A responds in 10 seconds again... in friend B's perspective, A responded in 1 second

[main cove]

Could have sworn it's canonically .9c or somewhere thereabouts

[tame tide]

It says 0.995c for a nearlight drive and "A significant fraction" for nearlight bolts. Then nearlight ejections are the incredibly lethal ones I talked about "best case scenario everyone dies" accept that's not best case scenario that's worse case scenario

[trail flume]

My crew is headed into Mines Haunted, we are all very hype

This comes after a downtimes where all of us did nothing but ruins Steele's day

[tame tide]

lmao

[noble ivy]

now thats a productive downtime

[trail flume]

Including useing an orbital launch system to throw 'recycled waste organics' at his station

[tame tide]

😩

ew

[trail flume]

MY favorite narrative descriptions where:
-The Orbital poop cannon
-Handing out 'medical leave' to his high ranking staff
-Enough cyber bullying to make the Horus cell cringe

We really dont like Steele

[tame tide]

As much as the orbital poop cannon is a funny concept it also likely ruins lots of peoples lives in impact plaza than it does Steele 😔

[trail flume]

It's free fertilizer?

(Yeah no, that dosent hold up)

[fading wyvern]

It was a very well aimed shot

[trail flume]

Our Pegasus operstor was at the controls, I trust him to aim well

[worthy root]

Sherman, not Pegasus

[trail flume]

I though Burt was useing the cannon, was it Artery?

If it was the Sherman, I no longer trust

[zenith galleon]

LMAO

the party I'm in just got to ||The Icebreaker||

and the moment ||we saw the downtime actions, one of our party members immediately yelled out "LET'S GO GAMBLING!!"||

[trail flume]

And how did that go?

[ebon hatch]

i would imagine a considerable amount of "aw dangit" unless someone crit failed and woke up in an icebath with a splitting headache and a new tattoo.

[noble ivy]

*wakes up with an extra kidney

[thorn hinge]

I can take a stab at it. So.

There's a formula you can use to determine how much time dilation is happening due to going really fast. This formula will give you an answer based on your location, how much time has passed, and what the speed of the target is. It works for any speed, not just near light: a car experiences time dilation when driving away from your house, but it's incredibly small, so small you can ignore it, so small we can't even meaningfully measure it. Faster you go, the more pronounced the effect. "Relativistic speeds" is a vague term for "going fast enough that the formula is returning numbers we can't ignore". You run the formula any time you want to determine how much time has passed for someone travelling relative to you. It's been three hours for you, they're going .9999c, the formula says they only experienced five minutes. Make sense? Okay. cool.

When your friend sends the first message, 24 hours have passed for them. We plug in to the formula: It's been 24 hours, you're going .8c, and the formula spits out that 12 hours passed for you. A 2-1 ratio. You get the message right then, because paracausal bullshit "instant" data transfer allows that somehow, and then you reply.

According to relativity, there's no difference between you flying away from your friend at .8c and Asphodel flying away from you at .8c.

From your perspective, you've been travelling for 12 hours when you reply. So we plug into the formula: it's been 12 hours, your friend is going .8c, and the formula says it's only been 6 hours for your friend. You send a response. Your friend gets it by magic bullshit messenger, arriving instantly: 6 hours after you left, 18 hours before they asked the question. You have to use the formula both ways, and it applies the same in each direction.

That's why it's paracausal, because it certainly doesn't respect causality. Cause and effect are broken.

[tame tide]

wuh

I'll stick to my core rulebook "assume it's at a rate of 1:10" lmao

That makes my non physicist brain happy

and not scared

[zenith galleon]

they're playing it out now lol

this is the same PC who in events prior to starting IGF rolled triples on their Mourning Cloak teleport core power

:)

[tame tide]

I assumed it would be simple timescale stuff like this

Guess I'm wrong... Very wrong, I'll just keep it to "yeah omni doesn't work during nearlight speeds"

[thorn hinge]

yeah the 1:10 ratio is there to tell you not to use the formula, but it still breaks causality. In my example it's just that the formula was giving 1:2, but this happens for any speed and any ratio, as long as the messages are "instant"

[tame tide]

:head explode:

wait so...

wuh

I need to stick to computer science

[thorn hinge]

Let me try another perspective.

If you're going .8c and the message travels at .7c, it'll never catch you. that makes sense, you're going faster.

If the message is going 1c, (radio, laser, a light wave propagating in vacuum) it will chase you down, and it won't make it to you at the same time it was sent: it has to fly after you. Likewise, your reply has to travel back. In fact, the faster you go, the longer it takes the messages to cross the distance. All this should feel like typical newtonian physics. A train leaves sacramento going 60 and you drive going 30 and you can't catch the train. Easy math.

In fact the math works out so there's absolutely NO WAY anything going less than C can come back before it left. That should also make sense: real things can't break reality, lmao.

[tame tide]

But it breaks for anything travelling ∞ mph

[thorn hinge]

Yes! Sending it instantly is just the special case of the travel time being 0. At that speed, ANY distance is enough to break causality

If you can send messages faster than light, but NOT instantly, you can get some time travel effects. How much depends on how fast. say you have bullshit space radio that goes 2c. It still has to travel the distance, but it can always catch someone going lightspeed or less. And when you look at the dilation formula and account for time, You'll start to see problems. You can send a response back and it can arrive sooner than it should be able to. If the distances are big enough (and all the other variables line up), it can arrive before the question was sent.

FLT travel is always time travel.

You can do this with people, if the people are the messages.

[iron lynx]

I kind of prefer "the omni technically does work at nearlight speeds, but it's a really bad idea"

[thorn hinge]

And that's why I don't use blink gates.

[warped ibex]

i'm very tired and not very good with this type of stuff so i apologize if this is incorrect, but to my understanding its like this, right?

[tame tide]

So, assuming omninet works by, sending an internet packet through a wormhole rather than travelling ∞mph... I assume that still breaks things, it would be the equivilant of the person in a car cannot catch up to the train 60 mph at 30 mph, so they teleport in front of the train and crash into it...

IG that also breaks things... Including the car...

[thorn hinge]

Imagine a machine that sends a message, and another that sends one the moment it recieves one. Set them flying away from each other, and change the speed the messages go. Graph out the speed the messages go versus the time dilation achieved by their speed. Faster they go, more time dilation, the shorter the round trip seems to be. When the messaging system reaches past the speed of light, the round trip time accoring to the formula, starts to get negative.

There's other awful results of going FTL, like certain formulas breaking. There's one based on E=mc^2 that if you go FTL you have to literally divide by zero.

[tame tide]

I now have the image of a FTL messaging working by opening a wormhole and throwing a car at a train through it

[thorn hinge]

the problem with this and with Al's earlier diagram is that they both assume time to be constant straight lines. This kinda works, from an individual perspective, btu the connections between them get weird.

[warped ibex]

no yeah i was just talking from an individual perspective - what both parties observe

[tame tide]

Wait so hypothetical... Throwing this out cos what you're saying makes sense somewhat...

If friend A and friend B are travelling vastly different speeds. But both of them have access to a nether portal... if you head into the nether portal both portals are travelling at the "same speed"... IDK I'm getting too sleep deprived for this

[noble ivy]

as in they're not in the setting when you GM?
or like how some people have sworn off air travel?

[tame tide]

Sworn off air travel?

[noble ivy]

won't travel via airplane

[thorn hinge]

the later, and as a joke

[modest hamlet]

Gobless

[tame tide]

Gobless?

[modest hamlet]

God bless

[tame tide]

Oh lol

[modest hamlet]

I replied to the wrong message, but close enough

[tame tide]

wuh

My brain has become an exotic IGF pilot gear

T h e s o u p

[shell bison]

I feel like the protag to some action video game reading all the technojargon from everyone above.

[noble ivy]

(please take this as a compliment) that whole explanation felt like Striga raided the server and sat us down for a lecture
complete with nonsensical anecdote at the end

[thorn hinge]

Okay it's worth noting that "same time" is meaningless unless you're in the same inertial reference frame. There is no "same time" if you're travelling different speeds. So they can both go into their portals, but when they go depends on what perspective we mean by "when"

I hope that clears things up (I'm sure it did not)

[tame tide]

yeah, that's why I put "same speed" in very massive inverted comma's

And my analagy broke half way through so I gave up

IDK I imagine the blink is basically just the nether but you don't have any lighting or textures and there's nothing there

[thorn hinge]

ah, see, the problem is you drew one line shorter than the other. Both timelines are the short one, from their own perspective.

[trail flume]

I tried to read that and now feel like I boiled my brain in Devil Black

[tame tide]

T H E S O U P

[thorn hinge]

THis i show they both see it.

[noble ivy]

I think in the corebook it says that people literally cannot comprehend blinkspace and its just leaves a gap of missing time in their memory

[tame tide]

https://tenor.com/view/cat-cats-explosion-explodes-cat-explodes-gif-10131775219258044191

[tame tide]

Just like me RN

[warped ibex]

Huh. I See.

[noble ivy]

oh god... what does a livestream look like when one is at nearlight

[thorn hinge]

If person A sends a message at 6h saying "wait how did you do that?"

[tame tide]

"...thgilraen ta gnillevart nehw sneppah tsuj yrroS ...dekcuf tib a eb thgim maerts ym kniht I !syug yeH"

[clever cloud]

time travel bby!!

the trick that breaks brains is that the time dilation is not linear. both frames or references are curving away from each other. that's why they both see shortened timelines of each other

[noble ivy]

no wonder ||FEATHER||'s all fucked up

[clever cloud]

super luminal travel breaks soooo much stuff

there's even theorical frameworks that state that something that travels at superluminal speeds must have always been travelling superluminally, and will always be. which.... just means it's going backwards in time??? but then you slap it with the Charge-Parity-Time symmetry and you get normal matter going forward in time at subliminal speeds again

spacetime is fun

[clever cloud]

i highly recommend the PBS Spacetime channel

[thorn hinge]

oh hell yeah, I was trying to avoid getting into the real weeds but that's the fun stuff

I was just telling my partner about this conversation, and they said "FTL is always time travel" in unison with me when we got to that point.

[iron lynx]

relativity is weird

the reason for time dilation is because the speed of light has to be the same in every frame of reference

[main cove]

"Jerry Masters is the Tyrant" full thread when

[modest hamlet]

I think brain smoothness is an evolutionary advantage in interpreting causality

Simply say, "I don't know," when presented with anything contradictory to your understanding

[thorn hinge]

there is no causality here. We have FTL comms and travel, we've left causality behind. Now there's just paradox and unclosed loops and time travel

[modest hamlet]

"I don't know"

[tame tide]

Just say "it's just like nether portals" and nod

[clever cloud]

me when.. me when m-me... *sobs* m-m-me...

[noble ivy]

me when i have enough wrinkles on my brain to experience the horrors™

[tame tide]

taxes

[thorn hinge]

Okay I'm fine with broken causality and time dilation but do not make me have to deal with Teams that stuff destroys my sanity daily

Im in a teams meeting right now trying to not be rendered into ash

[clever cloud]

*Skype call noises*

[thorn hinge]

Im begging here

[iron lynx]

If a stationary observer measures you travelling at .9c, then within your own frame of reference you're stationary (because you are never moving relative to yourself). Time inside your ship is passing more slowly, and distances outside of it seem shorter. Specifically, at 0.9c, for every second that passes for you, about 2.29 seconds pass for the observer, and for every meter the observer measures, you measure about 0.436 meters. You will observe the light as travelling 3E+8 meters in one second, or 6.88E+8 meters in 2.29 seconds for the observer. This means that you measure the light as traveling away from you at c, and the observer also measures it at travelling at c, despite the fact that you're travelling at 0.9c, meaning they observe the light as travelling away from you at only 0.1c.

no matter how fast you're travelling, if you shine a light in any direction, you will always measure it as travelling away from you at c in a straight line

[tame tide]

Atleast you're not trying to finish coursework to an acceptable state that's due tomorrow after a week extension and you're having to get over the fact that I'm failing this coursework and nothing I can do apart from wreck my remaining sanity can finish this coursework in time so I sit aimlessly at 23:48 in a 24/7 uni library hoping I can get something from this coursework fully knowing that I am setting myself up for failure anyway as it's too late to do anything meaningful hahahaha

._.

[iron lynx]

hey you don't know my life, maybe I am in that exact situation

[tame tide]

I feel sorry for you

Help

I must power through...

I have a session tomorrow... ||Send in the clowns...||

[thorn hinge]

Sorry you're dealing with all that. I've been there, and it is NOT fun. Been two decades, but I still remember that experience. It got better for me, I hope it gets better for you.

[maiden ferry]

I had pcs call Impact Dynamics with crucial information about the Frod Stealman investigation and made them act out 30 minutes of "Can I place you on a brief hold as I transfer you to my supervisor?"

[tame tide]

Next session it's... Today now... I can get to it... I require the ||funny theme park mechs... Also...||

Also god damn I fucking love (act 2) ||The crisis above Chameleon comic book art style page... It's so fucking good...||

[trail flume]

We almost completely missed Loki because my crew set the Legion deserter (Me) to talk to the Armory

It did not go well

[tame tide]

I have 3 people with poor relationship with HA ties lmao

[trail flume]

They colonized Ludwig's world and his side lost the civil war.

Not a good time

[ebon hatch]

it's so funny that all of these parties are fawning over Loki, my party took one look at him and wanted to punch him in his smug face

and then they made this since Loki was handing out movement

perhaps the greatest piece of art ever conceived

[warped ibex]

in my experience, both of my parties who have met loki immediately distrusted his smug appearance and HA employment, ||and then immediately grew fond of him once he started helping in Send In The Clowns||

[ebon hatch]

that's how it went for my team, too

"oh, you're chill actually? cool."

[tame tide]

||my party trusted him before send in the clowns and I want to see their reaction once he appears||

[shell bison]

Loki is a top-tier NPC. In the game I get to play in one of the other PCS is dating him right now.

[shell solstice]

Sorry, just saw the causality discussion, and I love it because I am 95 percent sure the designers of the game made FTL work the way it did to make it more fucked up and head hurty, lol

Like, it's all based on real world mechanics as @thorn hinge pointed out, but the funny thing is that it's a specific problem to certain type of FTL.

Depending on the type you don't encounter this problem, at least as far as we know considering we've never tested it.

As an example, in warp travel, your ship isn't moving, space is. You're sitting in a little bubble of space and bend space around you to push the space your occupying forward to a destination, kind of like a surf board on a wave.

This is also how warp gets around the laws of relativity.

However, since your ship isn't moving, if you had a hypothetical means of of instantaneous communication, like quantum entanglement, the effects of relativistic speeds is reduced to ignorable levels.

Which honestly makes sense they choice the styles they did for lancer. A huge part of the setting is "Shit's weird yo." and so using bullshit space magic that doesn't actually solve the problems of physics works with the settings.

[main cove]

Also eezo worked by f*cking with mass to allow for FTL, and SW "hypersoace" worked by going to another dimension with much less stringent physical laws concerning lightspeed.

[pliant ibex]

Like blinkspace?

[main cove]

Yeah basically. But blinkspace seems much more versatile than SW "hypersaoce"

[dusky cradle]

Ah yes, the final piece of the puzzle is complete now

[dusky cradle]

This was made for Masters bout like a year ago, the same campaign still going strong

[balmy obsidian]

i am yoinking both of these and sending them to my group, these are funny as fuck

[past agate]

Jerrycat is on my server and in use, Godspeed

[keen socket]

does anyone have the jerry version of the do it for him meme?

[signal canyon]

I've assumed that the pre-deimos nearlight ships mentioned in the KTB book were fusion torch drives, smoothly accelerating to significant fractions of c, while those in the time of Lancer function differently, able to "spool" somehow using new physics.

[shell bison]

Saturday is the day the real fight begins >:)

[runic viper]

excellent.

make them fear the tone

[twilit star]

How did you get the tiles to actually sync up with the grid?

I was trying for like an hour before I had to give up

[shell bison]

A series of resizing attempts until I just got it to sync up just enough where I went, "Yeah, that's good enough."

[balmy obsidian]

👀 I wonder how they'll do

How many chomolungmas they got

[tame tide]

Hold shift and drag a tile to place it ignoring snapping

[shell bison]

They have one Chomo, scanned it for one quick round and they know it has argus armor. The legit said they would want to bail out if it had fortress

Since it didn't. The party is like, "We can take it."

Wait, why is Siren reaching us on comms?

Me:

:)

[balmy obsidian]

kill it

Burn it down

[twilit star]

Oh my god it’s that simple?

[twilit star]

I mean if you have a Chomo going into that fight it becomes so much easier thanks to the simple fact that you have System Crusher

[balmy obsidian]

we had two chomos

[twilit star]

||You can guarantee knock out a segment of Argus Armor and inflict some burn to bypass it||

[twilit star]

||Ok well then you can knock out two segments, even better||

Like the 3 person sitrep for that fight has no e-defense, Chomos absolutely wreck ||Anti-Capital||

OH OOOPS I SHOULD SPOILER TAG

[twilit star]

Anyway that’s why my SRT struggled, they had 2 Everests and a Sagarmatha and 1 AP weapon amongst all of them

[balmy obsidian]

yikes

[rustic night]

My 1st SRT lost that horrendously

[twilit star]

It was honestly a really dramatic finish tho

[rustic night]

They did ||Dr. Nyambose route|| first and so had the ||Ultra Mega Death Laser||

Guess what? They fired it

Reactor Meltdown

Rush one enemy

4 damage

[twilit star]

One of them self destructed to inflict a structure. And then the pilot finished the fight with Jocky and an unlucky structure

[rustic night]

(Already counting passing the check)

[twilit star]

They won and it was so cool

[rustic night]

The Chomo got blasted and got double 1s

From that point it was downhill

[balmy obsidian]

our dramatic finish was the fight on the ||Tachyon where we decided "You know what? This guy has too much armor, might as well trigger a meltdown despite the 12 heatcap||

wrong one woops

[shell bison]

You know what is crazy?

One of them has the ||Catastrophe Beam|| installed.

[runic viper]

Got to the funny particle fight in mission one

My wannabe gengis player decided to 1v1 mr burns and uh. Isnt losing. We had to end mid session but i am rather concerned at this development

[twilit star]

||the image of a Ghengis walking up to Capella in act 5, and as they are unable to harm each other with their main weapons, just drop them and spend the whole fight Improvised Attacking each other like two titans brawling||

[noble ivy]

||and now i have the mental image of Capella and Ignatius as mr burns and smithers...||

[shell bison]

Some real haymakers thrown in that fight

[tame tide]

Yeah ||I have a ghengis in my first party lmao||

So I wanna see how that turns out

[fossil lion]

https://tenor.com/view/standing-here-i-realize-gif-24728653

[floral glacier]

||Fort Cerberus|| has about 30 seconds of warning in Act 1

[worthy root]

New fear unlocked. Toilet crab

[shell bison]

I'm so happy people are embracing that dumb little doodle

[trail flume]

It's The Crab

[shell bison]

Live Vent Crab Reaction

[trail flume]

Best reaction image

[shell bison]

I have several, some crab related, some bunny related

[worthy root]

I also have some bunny related ones

[runic viper]

im not sorry.

[runic viper]

where is that from hehehehehhe thats really good

[worthy root]

Iirc, it's clipped from the picture of the wrenchy running away from a vent full of crab

[runic viper]

ohhhhhhh

im clipping that myself

[shell bison]

Actually no, it's an image a player of mine made for the express purpose of vent crab funny

[runic viper]

oh fair, it is infact exactly that

[signal canyon]

Mission 1 spoilers: ||My group saw combat on the snack run for the first time yesterday and, keeping in theme with their apparent incompatibility with the concept of "negotiations", failed to establish any terms of engagement with the Hellhounds.
The former Mirrorsmoke merc refused to guarantee no casualties, while our Caliope-born wrenchie was willing to fight to the death to protect the food. The streamer princess was far too excited to be streaming from a cockpit after decades of real-time displacement to mince words, while the Nestorian hacker was probably busy hotboxing their repurposed Forefront mech or something.||

[main cove]

Honestly the whole Nestor debacle is like one of the biggest Ls Union ever took. ||They lost to like a 1980s irl level fascist-capitalist government so badly that said government managed to reverse engineer mechanized chassis somehow and fight them off.||

[signal canyon]

Union failed to act, but ||chassis falling into Forefront hands had more to do with the Albatros not anticipating that they'd fast tracked the development of a surface-to orbit railgun||

[main cove]

Still doesn't really change the fact that ||for a while some random low tech dissidents had Union on the ropes in this 3rd party wirld while in Solstice Rain/Winter Scar an opponent of equal strength didn't end in complete humiliation every engagement.||

[fading wyvern]

||IIrc that happened the other way around. The albatross fucked up and dropped cold fusion tech into the hands of said 1980s fascist capitalist government a good few years before union arrived to deal with the planet in earnest. ||

||Union deployed a force that would have been sufficient to handle a 1980s level fascist capital government but when they got there, there was a cold-fusion mecha wielding science-future 1980s fascist capitalist government who'd had time to reverse engineer the tech and understood it well enough to put up a lot more resistance than was budgeted for instead. The entire bloody Nestorian conflict basically happens in the time period between that undergeared union force arriving and the time it takes for Unions reinforcements to show up and handle things through brute force.||

||Tl;DR, relativistic logistics are a bitch.||

[signal canyon]

In my game (based on my interpretation of some cryptic stuff in the Ross tapes from act 2) ||the Forefront was also receiving transmissions of paracode from an unknown horus cell late in the war. Their grasp of what they were dealing with was limited and it created all kinds of side-effects. They were also attempting to create their own prime 3rd gen nhp to counter Union mechs fielding Asura clones. Fortunately that nhp never received its combat conditioning and was ultimately smuggled to Calliope in a stolen mech by one of the PCs||

||Of course Horus knew the Forefront wouldn't last, and they always intended to collect anything interesting that grew from the seeds they planted in the chaos on Nestor.||

[clever cloud]

I broke the curse! ||Capella didn't lose his Boarding Leash||

[shadow cave]

Regarding Nestor, the sequence of events goes as follows:
1: A Union Recontact Team touches base with Nestor and tells the planet that Union exists and that they are actually part of a vast diaspora of humanity, not as they believed, the only humans in the galaxy. The recontact team then leaves, having given them the tech to get in touch with Union about integration.
2: Instead of joining the Union, the entire political system on Nestor self destructs, the Forefront arises in one major Nestorian power, goes full fascist, conquers the rest of the planet, and specifically positions itself as anti-union and isolationist.
3: The Forefront, doing what fascists always do, is so dreadful that the resistance on Nestor use the left-behind tech to contact Union and beg for help.
4: Union sends out a DOJ task force equipped to fight a 1980's tech level global fascist power.
5: The Albatross turn up, decide to be big damn heroes, and somehow manage to yeet their entire supply of mecha directly into forefront hands, how the Albatross, possibly the most elite force of independent mercenaries in the orion arm manage to screw up this badly is completely unexplained, and is roughly equivalent to a SEAL Team getting taken down by cavemen.
6: The Forefront, in a matter of years, reverse engineer cold-fusion technology, human augmentation, mech chassis design, mass produce the chassis and deploy them in large numbers.
7: The Union DOJ team arrive, and discover that thanks to the Albatross their enemies are now much closer to near-peer than they would like. Rather than being over in a couple of months, the intervention takes five years and incurs a lot of casualties.

8: This includes, during this time, Union mecha taking hits that cause their NPH's to cascade, and IMMEDIATELY begin to go eidolon, as described in the Ross Tapes.

9: The DOJ intervention is eventually successful, but by this point most Nestorians, heavily propagandised to, hate both sides, Forefront and Union, roughly equally, and many of them flee the system, ending up in Calliope.

Honestly, the sequence of events and the timeline make perfect sense. What doesn't are the twin plot tumours of A: why and how did the Albatross get their asses kicked so hard? aren't they supposed to be, like, good at this stuff?

and B: how the heck did the Forefront master every aspect of how to build an effective mech force, from coldcore reactors to the weird little paracausal bits and bobs that seem to be necessary (not to mention the substantial human augmentation needed to be an effective pilot) without anything resembling orbital industries or any prior knowledge of the tech or industrial base needed. They don't even have printers.

especially since, to quote Lidel Ross himself "right-wingers are famously bad at solving problems"

There are many peculiarities in the story, and certainly the only really good explanation for the Albatross' dramatic loss is that the Forefront was receiving help and assistance. A 1980's tech level fascist government does not have surface to orbit railguns capable of destroying a capitol class ship without someone lending them a hand.

HORUS are certainly active on Nestor at the end of the conflict with Union DOJ/HR, but I don't think they were there to begin with. They don't come in with the Albatross, and the technology the Forefront use against the Albatross isn't described in a way that makes HORUS involvement prior to that seem likely.

My head canon, because it's what fits, is that the initial Union Recontact Team had within it a SecComm fifth column element, who left the nascent Forefront with enough technical knowledge to build their surface to orbit emplacements, and the ideological push needed to send them down the rout to true fascism, knowing that the Union would eventually get there, and wanting another thorn in their side, and that the plan worked beyond their wildest dreams, creating an embarrassment that hangs around DOJ/HR's neck like a milstone more than a decade later.

[fading wyvern]

Honestly, I kinda want to blame GMS for the coldcore stuff

Their engineering is supposed to be rugged, easy to replicate, and damn near idiot proof

Also I'm pretty sure you don't need augmentation to be a mech pilot

Or Paracausal stuff

[wild flame]

re: "how did the albatross lose"

"Technologically superior yet drastically outnumbered force loses to Numerous Locals" is not exactly an unheard-of phenomenon

[shadow cave]

Valid point on GMS stuff being rugged, easy to replicate and nearly idiot proof, but it's another matter to comprehend an entire field of science that has never existed before by looking at the tech itself.
I was under the impression that the vast majority if not all mech pilots had some level of augmentation to interface with the chassis' control systems, this is not a setting where pilots use foot pedals to control things, at minimum some very advanced haptics with a degree of man-machine-interface appear to be nessessary.
All chassis are implied, though never stated, to incorporate some level of paracausal technology, which is a major reason that they simply don't show up until post Diemos SecComm, it's one of the things that in the setting to act as the nessessary magic for mecha to be viable. Bipedal mecha are in every way inferior to almost any other mechanism for getting weapons into combat, unless you have some way of supressing basic physics in favour of the rule of cool, so some level of paracausal tech HAS to be included to overcome things like the basics of the square-cube law, Lancer is actually a pretty hard sci-fi setting, other than the one or two way's it's not, and chassis is one of them.

As regards "Technologically superior yet drastically outnumbered force loses to Numerous Locals" is not exactly an unheard-of phenomenon. 100% agree, except that it's not even that simple here, it's not really 'technologically superior but vastly superior forces loose to numerous locals" at all. Makteba Tarsus, who we have to presume to be competent, show up, make their heroic demands, and proceed to get absolutely bushwhacked, including getting their ship (which we can presume to be a frigate at least, so capitol class) shot down by a surface to space railgun that is 100% impossible to build with a 1980's tech base, let alone hide in such a way that it's not spotted from space before it fires. Their forces on the ground are also exterminated or forced to surrender completely. That's not just a strategic blunder, that's absolutely such a dramatic level of 'this isn't how it's supposed to work' that it very strongly implies a third party.

[regal acorn]

Hey guys, just curious. There aren’t any actual plays or podcasts for IGF by chance is there?

[shell bison]

As in active live streamed games?

[thorn hinge]

"The Lost Caravan" is doing an IGF live play stream, and a few people here have talked about doing something like that. I have recordings of all 41 sessions of my game so far but don't want to put that up unedited and don't have the time to edit all that. But I might get around to it some day.

[regal acorn]

Sweet. I’ll check them out thanks.

[fading wyvern]

They don't need to understand it, they just need to be able to copy it. And not even well at that

Even if they skip out on most of the paracausal stuff that makes piloting it feel natural, they can make up for it in numbers

And it's not like you need the paracausality to be build a cyclone pulse rifle

[shadow cave]

True enough, they don't have GMS standard level weapons though, their frames are using basic rotary cannons. It's just one or two things that strongly hint towards them having an outside backer, nothing conclusive.

[fading wyvern]

Even half assed and poorly understood it's enough of a force multiplier to upset the combat arithmetic

[signal canyon]

I kind of thought it was a grave tactical error on the part of the Albatross, motivated by their sense of like... gallantry I guess? That and incomplete intel. They probably figured they should drop out of nearlight in full view of the planet's population to make a show of their presence and intentions.
Also maybe fascist late-stage capitalist worlds that so closely mirror old Cradle aren't actually the norm for diasporan cultures? When it comes to human rights crises, perhaps the Albatross are more accustomed to dealing with feudal tyrants than a military industrial complex with unlimited budget.

[shadow cave]

Agreed. Ultimately it's supposed to remains uncertain, a traumatic reality lost in the fog of war for all concerned.

[shadow cave]

Honestly, the Albatross certainly misread the situation, and no, the Nestorians are quite unusual in basically reinventing industrialised late 20th century fascism effectively from the ground up. But still.... where does that surface to orbit rail cannon come from? and why didn't a Makteba that has presumably fought technological-peer pirates etc not spot it from orbit? the power demands on a thing like that in a society that doesn't have fusion power must have been very obvious indeed...
I just feel like things don't pass the sniff test, but in ways that are intentionally uncertain so that GM's can fill in the blanks themselves.
At my table, Nestor's downfall and the reason the Forefront were like that was because of secret SecComm loyalists inside Unions recontacting project. At someone elses table it could be Horus, or just the Forefront getting lucky, or the Albatross being overly arrogant.

[signal canyon]

Another intriguing possibility: despite knowledge of their origins being repressed or forgotten by the populace long ago, some element of Nestor's elite was either always aware of or recently rediscovered their ancient colony ship.

Now I'm imagining them unearthing something in their equivalent of the 50s, building a base over it but keeping it otherwise quiet. They study the pre-fall tech but it doesn't effect their overt tech level very much.

[leaden roost]

Gosh I adore the design of the Imp, but I find myself wondering why it wasn't given the gift of a main/aux mount to help out using its antilogic blade, with an aux/aux you're jumping through hoops to use it, and even swapping one of those attacks out, on an apponent with 2/3 conditions you're still doing roughly the same as what you could be with just using a Main melee in the flex, which would still proc hunter 3 and allow you to use the antilogic blade that way. A main/aux would just make the frame able to use the antilogic blade as an addition rather than... just an alternate route with more effort for the same damage, and that's not even factoring things like Duelist 1 giving accuracy and armour of NPCs. Whilst I'm aware the core bonus to upgrade a mount to a main/aux exists, I simply feel the most fun part of the Imp should feel fun and rewarding from the get go.

Also IGF is great fun and I'm loving all of it so far keep up the amazing work :3

[twilit star]

Good to know, but this is the wrong place to talk about the Imp since that’s Act 2 content. You wanna go to the #gm-corner In Golden Flame Feedback thread

[compact aurora]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/645137498577698833/1309814257084530708/8c9b9004d8f49672be4839db2e25099f_2.jpg?ex=6742f316&is=6741a196&hm=270c26de279df696a773adafb1c2b2b94dccb0b954330851ae4c593aa3e5e802&

this but Hellsgate

@shell bison

[shell bison]

Lmao

[leaden roost]

Ah, I'm just a player and didnt want to spoil myself on content I haven't seen...

I guess I'll repost it there and just... no peeking

[twilit star]

Oh wait nevermind then

[shell bison]

IT HAPPENED AGAIN.

CASCADE ON THE ||SUNBIRD FIGHT||

[fallen geyser]

This change has now been implemented.

I would probably have implemented this off the weight of "switch it to Main/Aux" alone, but I was particularly impressed by your well-reasoned argument, so I made implementing the change a priority 🙂

[leaden roost]

Yippie!

I'm glad, I look forwards to having some real fun in this thing :3

[runic viper]

ohh excellent my wanna be imp player will love this

[balmy obsidian]

||Loki my beloved||

||We have only met Loki for a session and a half but if anything happened to him I would irreversible meltdown the entire opfor and then myself||

[pliant ibex]

:^)

[wild flame]

yeah he's extremely friend

[shell bison]

Lokii is very friend shaped

[worthy root]

I made him a Voider instead of a Mirage, and the players appreacted the mobility

[twilit star]

Some tokens I made for my PCs in our IGF campaign. First time I ever made tokens and I’m pretty happy with them

[noble ivy]

I love the Orchis’s “apple” crop top

Might wanna spoiler mark that

[grizzled wasp]

Alas for an edit spoiler pic button

[noble ivy]

My kingdom for a good app UI for discord

[grizzled wasp]

Guess what we just encountered (spoilers obviously though we are like two/three sessions in and this is one hell of a note to learn)

[grizzled wasp]

Pretty sure if this happens, the world ends. Thanks for the correction tho

[noble ivy]

No problem

[twilit star]

It’s meant to be a screen lmao

Oop replied to the wrong message

And it gets cut off before I can fully put on the words “Appleman”

The player is a KTB defense broker and the screen is meant to constantly be scrolling by advertisements like a Times Square Billboard

[grizzled wasp]

Terrible. Just terrible 10/10 character idea

[twilit star]

He said he was KTB to the head of the Icebreaker Borealis Tech Union during one of the chapters (if you know you know, not that big a spoiler tho), and immediately got booed and jeered away

Anyway I’m a big fan of how I managed to use the Iskander and Saladin Retrograde sprites to make the hands around the Ushabti for the Pegasus

[hybrid salmon]

Spoilers for a combat in Act 1, Mission 1
||Thinking about tweaking A Face To A Name into a Breach and Clear sitrep from Enhanced Combat, with the objective modified to defeating Capella alone, in the 4th sector. Worried my squad will assassinate Capella first, maybe after the Latch Drone + whatever Grunts, do the emotional high part of the encounter - and then have to mop up everyone else. Any advice for this?||

[fast parrot]

|| what i did was modify the terrain/map to really favour him? I put down a lot of size 1-2 walls/pipes because acrobat/explosive jet allows him to easily bounce over those to play the cheapest game of peek-a-bo. That made him very hard to kill due to his seige armor.

What i would reccomend instead is like...

narratively killing capella is optional. they can just leave. They don't have to fight him.

So maybe build the sitrep with that in mind?

Could do enhanced combat terminals to open the doors or something? ||

[proud tinsel]

Spoilers for Chapter 3

||Did my 30 minute warm up art for today, and had done the Badstarr fight last night and used Atlas Core Power for the first time and the dice were really on my side. Great time. He missed me about 10 times point blank. I'm calling it "Howl."||

[dire cloud]

||He missed me about 10 times point blank.||
||He truly is a breacher.||

[hybrid salmon]

||So more of an extraction anyways?||

[fast parrot]

|| sitrep gtfo was how i read it? cuz it's like... andros is a bastard but the mission is to get the printer doodad home||

[proud tinsel]

||Dummy exposed himself trying to do it as well, made short work of the entire encounter in two rounds. Felt pretty good after spending a handful of missions rolling snake eyes on damage.||

[main scaffold]

HOLY BASED

[wild flame]

What Kurohyou 2: Ryu Ga Gotoku Ashura-Hen OST - Born To Be Wild does to a pilot

[proud tinsel]

Oh hi Toaster

[proud tinsel]

Yeah, glad I introduced my GM to the Kurohyou OST, he read my mind with that one.

[main scaffold]

hello logez

[proud tinsel]

It's me plasma if you didnt notice

[balmy obsidian]

[main scaffold]

oh i most definitely did! ye

[ebon hatch]

He sent me the character's playlist, I heard that song and the fuckin AMV started playing in my head

"Oh shit wait a minute, I can work with this."

we had the joke going of "every time the camera wasn't focused on Ness, the song would stop, and every time it went back to him the song restarted"

[twilit star]

One of my players wasn’t able to show up today so my other two players and I did a full filler session of Hell’s Gate interactions

Some personal plot relevant stuff happened as the SRT looked into things, Stims got passed to Printloaf, and most importantly Jerry had a medical emergency and the SRT took the opportunity to just fix him and give him a doctors visit, spa, and a full meal working from broth to solid food and vegetables

And at the end of it all giving him a full nights sleep while they help handle his paperwork

[balmy obsidian]

Drew the squad before we hit LL2 next session (maybe i don't know) and i have to do it again aaaaa

[tight pier]

we and our players did something dumb (this was my idea) and we ended up democratically choosing these

act 2 spoilers kinda

||
(ones with art not in the book):
Logic: Player NHP, The Heart
Rhetoric: Player character, Morgan
Volition: Player character, James
Inland Empire: NPC, Subtext Isfur Cowards
Empathy: Player NHP, Buzzsaw
Physical Instrument: NPC, Surayya
Half Light: Player character, Fennel
Reaction Speed: Player character, "Temporary"||

(these are probably wrong in some way)

[tame tide]

Imo: ||I think Andros doesn't fit into electro chemistry IMO... but idk who does...||

||Print loaf deals in stims... but I assume doesn't use them, and thor could also fit because of his alcololicism||

[thorn hinge]

Cerulean Enceladus maybe?

[lilac tartan]

Our teammate’s GMS seems so strange

[tame tide]

"Nice... everest... was it always that large?"
"Yeah... ummm, I got fomorian frame"
"Oh yeah did? What licence?"
"Lancaster... uuuh edited it so ummm the the whitewash heals itself... yep..."

[lilac tartan]

In our campaign Jerry truly said “I’m glad to see there isn’t anyone piloting a Horus mech among you the team”

Cinderella: Ri-right?

Jerry: What

Cinderella: Ah, em, no, nothing

[balmy obsidian]

-# horussayswhat

[dense crescent]

IIRC you don't need augmentations to pilot, it just makes it way easier

Hardsuits grant the ability to interface fully with any given mech. Piloting without some level of personal protection and without the streamlined controls provided by a hardsuit (or similar suite of equipment) – colloquially referred to as “riding naked” – is possible, but is mostly the domain of old-fashioned and daredevil pilots.

I think there's some cool ideas that could be made up to explain the other stuff
Maybe the space railgun wasn't built with 20th/21st century tech. Maybe there's some pre-Fall technology from the colony ship that seeded Nestor that was rediscovered sometime but kept hidden/not used to improve the living conditions of Nestorians. And when the fascists took power and found out about it, they decided to make a giant surface-to-orbit gun after finding out there were leftists in space.
The Forefront adapting so quickly to GMS tech could be explained if there was even a single traitor in the Albatross. A single person willing to sell out this information in exchange for security and comfort for themselves, and maybe others close to them. They're just some petty diasporan tyrants after all, what's the worst they could do with it? Surely reinforcements will just wipe them out as soon as they get here...

It's definitely not what you'd expect from the Albatross as a whole, but all it'd take is one of them not being willing to die to deny them that info.

[shadow cave]

All valid points. I seem to have hallucinated the idea that pilots 'required' some degree of neurological augmentation... hmm... i genuinely don't know where i got the idea that the neural bridge for piloting a mech was inherently an invasively implanted item, but until people started challenging me on it after this comment thread got going i apparently was firmly convinced of it.
My reading comprehension skills clearly need work lol.

[dense crescent]

I 100% only remember it because of the words "riding naked"

[shadow cave]

legit

[dense crescent]

There's also the uncomfortable question when anything bad happens in the Lancer setting... ||"why did GalSim allow this? did GalSim want this?||
||to which: presumably if GalSim wanted this it was to prevent something even worse from happening (which is still pretty fucked up that they made this decision without consulting the people who'd actually die from it y'know, but that's GalSim), but also even if the 5V are perfectly omniscient (which they might not be) the humans operating them aren't, so they could very well have just missed this||

[shadow cave]

Also, I like the idea that the first response of the fascist elements of the nestorian government to the discover that there are 'space leftists' is to seize power, and the second response is the creation of a huge technologically absurd super weapon (very on brand, see the Empire in star wars), with the tragedy being that this is the one time in recorded history that the deep-seated authoritarian love of absurdly huge railway artillery actually paid off...

[shadow cave]

regarding the question of 'why do bad things happen in Lancer when 'The Ministry Of Future Events' exists... have you considered that GalSim and the Union Deep State surrounding it may actually be the real bad guys of the setting? GalSim was 100% on board with SecComm and the staff monitoring the Voices did not change with the revolution.

[dense crescent]

yeah but that feels off-brand for the setting to say "Union is secretly evil actually"

and also kinda... boring?

I dunno
every other fictional massive sci-fi goverment is already secretly or non-secretly evil

I like the idea of emphasising their... humanity more. For SecComm to happen, they were taken over by reactionaries same way CentComm was. And for ThirdComm to happen, they presumably had their own revolution (a "||UIB shadow war||" is a pretty cool thing to imagine).
The emotionless omniscient computers aren't the ones running the show, they're just the search engine for whichever humans are sitting between the chair and keyboard at that moment.

[dense crescent]

there's also an element of like... survivorship bias to it? or the opposite of that?
like we don't talk about the 999 times where the Albatross really did just completely squish some petty Diasporan fascists and everything went according to plan

[tame tide]

||I believe union CAN/could have stopped the Nestor conflict much easier, but due to scope of Union resources they either didn't look close enough into Galsim, messed up the simulation or don't have the resources do perfectly fix EVERY fascist diaspora government perfectly||

[vast zealot]

I don't think the Forefront need a fancy high-tech railgun tbh. If you don't have ethics or care about collateral damage you can bury a bunch of nuclear warheads and then stage them to launch a shotgun blast of high-velocity shrapnel into orbit

[dire shell]

I'd mention that as others mentioned before Nestor didn't exist in a void but was itself, like many others, a colony seeded either prefall or like FirstCom/etc.

It being 2020ish in tech level in their present doesn't mean it's the ONLY tech they ever had but likely only that something in the colonization process/subsequent history led to them losing most of their tech and to regress to that level.
The rail gun could essentially be my new but "old" tech reverse engineered by them.

Like for all we know they could have reverse engineered something that wasn't even a weapon but was just some system originally designed to chuck cargo in orbit etc and -then- turned it into a weapon

[shadow cave]

mmmm.... my only problem with this is that authoritarians do love their giant stupid cannons...
now if you want a scrappy autonomist resistance force taking down an HA or KTB battleship in orbit by shotgunning it with nuke accelerated manhole covers Operation Plumbbob style... now that's my jam

[shadow cave]

agreed, ultimately Nestor is not given enough 'screen time' to have there be a definitive answer except 'the truth that is real for your table'

[vast zealot]

just salvaging the electromagnets from an old colony ship's fusion torch drive could be enough

[twilit star]

Hey how do Calliaunic people existing and SSC wanting to kidnap Aunic people while being in Calliope mix?

[shell bison]

Probably don't mention they are aunic at all.

All SSC really only care about selling products on the breaker and keep an eye out on that secret thing in act 2

[dense crescent]

what an interesting question C:
@dry junco

[iron sedge]

I think there are various ways to enlargen the error bars for ||GALSIM||

and that ||SecComm is still out there.||

[modest hamlet]

perhaps stupid question for Vex

Did you or whoever did the Calliope system information in the adventure plug everything into Universe sandbox or something? Because all of the values mathematically either make sense or are very close to making sense.

[pliant ibex]

Yes, AIUI- or rather, the system was created, and Vex put a ton of work into making absolutely everything make consistent locational sense

[modest hamlet]

AIUI?

eithere way

fuckin incredible work

I realized because I wanted to set up a system in universe sandbox, so that I could more easily visualize Calliope in my head. As I was plugging things in I started seeing that the values that influence others all automatically lined up between orbital distances, masses, radii, and the like and I was just incredibly impressed.

Stellar work

no pun intended

[pliant ibex]

As I Understand It

[modest hamlet]

ohhh

[pliant ibex]

Like AFAIK (as far as I know) but fancier

[modest hamlet]

yeah

[pliant ibex]

I believe there are even images from a universe sandbox (maybe not the specific one) in the book

With views from for example, Amphion or Asphodel

[clever cloud]

How Vex generated the images for all the planets

[tame tide]

Oh damn the images were generated from it

[hybrid flint]

Hey, anyone in here have any fun experiences with NHP co-pilots in their campaigns? One of my players is interested in picking up a SISYPHUS, and I wanna lean into the weird.

[tame tide]

Have you read page 199

[hybrid flint]

Yeah, I have! That’s actually exactly the kind of thing I wanna lean into — weird little probabilistic “coincidences” as the player takes their LLs.

All culminating in a “reunion” from the SISYPHUS’s point of view.

[maiden ferry]

I had Millstone be a secret NHP a player got that messed with the PCs by occasionally responding to things just before they said them

the PC wanted a KAIROS nhp from the intercorp licences and it worked just as well

[shell bison]

Well, one of my players wants to turn their Comp/con buddy into an NHP

[maiden ferry]

||I'd let them, but its literally just a compcon capable of operating the NHP-grade equipment and its Mind from act 2 letting the whole thing work||

[shell bison]

How'd you know that was my plan? :)

[maiden ferry]

anything remotely relating to compcons flows to one lake

[shell bison]

truuuue

[dire shell]

Got 2/4 of the party's starter mechs done

Amusingly I made the both of them using the same base drawing I created for myself to which I now add every new variations of head/chest/arms/legs that I create thus far through these starter mechs

[wild flame]

this is awesome

[dire shell]

(The logic is that most starter mechs are ditched by LL2 so I wanted something allowing me to make art of starter mechs faster while still being "compatible" style wise to my usual style)

Also for the sake of my spoons I'm using a minimalist coloring style on purpose for the art I'm doing for this game this time around

[wild flame]

NGL i really dig the minimalist color pallette, it works super well

[dire shell]

I was inspired by one of the other artists here in Pilotnet ngl

They have a style using minimalist colors that I really dig and I'd wanted to take a jab at that ever since

[past agate]

NICE

[fast parrot]

I gotta say , your art style looks immensely based

[lilac tartan]

Swift and Macaroni(by me)

Cinderella( by his player, not here)

[shell bison]

Ooooh, what a crew

[main scaffold]

tonight on igf;

shit's fucked, yo.

[balmy obsidian]

yeah that tends to happen

[main scaffold]

we are entering that part of chapter 4

||the fucked up spire||

mega giga ch4 spoilers obviously do not click this

[hard falcon]

am still alive and group finished ch3 last session. Did break a mech with ||Bad Star||. The affected pilot proceeded to beat the man bloody (but not dead) with his bare hands when the ||ultra|| mech shut down.

The phrase 'I think I hate you as a person the most' was uttered

[hybrid salmon]

First session take two (take one had to be cancelled) is tomorrow...

time to hope foundry doesn't break :3333

i'm in the hell's gate mindset already

[dire shell]

oof that sucks
My first session had to be cancelled once due to an health issue; though on my end take two last tuesday did work out

[tame tide]

Added names to enemy callsigns

For ||Send in the clowns|| Lmao

Just fills the whole boxes

[balmy obsidian]

We had ||Shrek||

We saw ||Shrek|| and we blew up ||Shrek||

[hybrid salmon]

Btw, just as a style thing, probably going to be testing things out with my players in any case, but how much narrative/rp do you like to include between combats in a mission?

[tame tide]

Depends on the mission, depends on the combat

I tend to have

"This session is combat, this session is RP" because combat takes so long for me, so when it's back to back combats I try to hurry the narrative up as much as possible if I can fit it to move onto the next combat if I don't believe there's enough time to stretch a full sessions worth of narrative out, but I I believe there's enough then I stretch out a whole sessions worth of narrative

||Mission 1 is relatively easy for me, session 1 was ALL narrative, mission briefing, team meeting eachother and going to the bar, meeting NPCs. Session 2 was all combat with shoo the vultures, tiny amount of RP before they went onto session 3 straight into Denial of Service. Then session 4 stretched out gathering of data from DOS, going back to the gate, travelling to the tachyon then exploring it||

[shell bison]

Plume is back, a new version, but she's back. ;v;

[coarse marsh]

our group started mission 3 last night, and this has been my state all through work today lol

[main scaffold]

Finally assembled my character's Manticore after using the same token for 3 chapters straight

BLACK ELEPHANT ALPHA

HORUS MANTICORE

[past agate]

BADASSS

[coarse marsh]

oh hell yeah

[fast parrot]

its the boy

[clever cloud]

because this is IGF and we all love to get technical, you could.. but you need a laser of the same magnitude that could match the same frequency and phase of the orbital laser to cancel out... which means you need a second orbital laser to parry an orbital laser

[thorn hinge]

Eh. Parrying is more about redirection of force, not outright cancelling it. A basic electromagnet could deflect an orbital laser depending on the range to target and relative strengths. half a degree of angle change over orbital distances would throw it way off

[coarse marsh]

brb gonna strap an electromagnet to my mech

[balmy obsidian]

i will parry the orbital death laser with an etch a sketch

[clever cloud]

Mirror

[shell bison]

Could a ronin tech the laser tho?

Royal guard it

https://tenor.com/view/dmc-sugarcoat-royal-guard-gif-14172541423208480769

Also, one of my players decided to get modded on the ice breaker, Kat will now be Cat modded as a Cat themed mech league fighter

[noble ivy]

cat mods are a slippery slope
First you get cat ears and then think "oh, might as well get some tail and eye mods"

next thing you know you've traded your thumbs for paw pads...

[balmy obsidian]

what happens if the pilot already has biomods that are entirely not cat related

but they get the augmented reality cat ears anyway

[noble ivy]

3 sets of ears...

[shell bison]

Oh they already went full car girl

Tail, ears, she can even purr now

I'll post her hell fire mech

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1297371616954814464/1312484396699353198/image.png?ex=674ca9d8&is=674b5858&hm=dc103e419c2ba6960a576100a350fd0fc612550598e26cadebfe159da1ec1fc1&

Jinx coded color bombs everywhere

[balmy obsidian]

oh hey cheschire cat smile

very good

[shell bison]

Her and the grandpa of the party went into the league. Good matches.
The Prospector and Mad Cat are the new challengers

Her roll for build up hype and persona involved plugging her merch

[balmy obsidian]

i'd buy it it's a kick ass design

[coarse marsh]

yeah that’s dope

[shell bison]

POV: She is post catnip

[fast parrot]

Orbital defense shield: 4000 ronins

[dire cloud]

https://stupidpenisx.com/LithPyro/status/1699497883064500712

[noble ivy]

please stop encouraging strikers to stand directly under the super weapon

[shell bison]

"Nah, I'll tech it" -Striker main

[noble ivy]

"Nah, I'll-"

https://tenor.com/view/ffxiv-louisoix-final-fantasy-gif-15070709

[wild flame]

Dragoons standing directly in the orange circle "nah bro it's cool I'll elusive jump clear right before the cast finishes I gotta finish this combo" (it's me, I'm dragoons)

[tame tide]

Humungous mission 2 spoilers don't ever click ever!!!!!

I got bored and ||Loki as a minecraft skin lmao||

[tight pier]

awesome

[trail flume]

Crew just got to chapter 4, turns out a Magma Hammer makes exploration pretty easy

50 AP Explosion on a stick opens alot of doors

[fast parrot]

Magma hammer?

[shell bison]

During ||Send in the Clowns|| One of my players characters, Yue "Plushie" Blodwen decided she wanted to get up close and personal in a fight against the Deluge(I put him in for spice) that had ties in the disappearance of her totally not boyfriend Tarben Mikali. He rolled one and got cored out.

Amazing art by @regal comet
And PC belongs to @leaden roost

(secret bunny friend in the corner c:)

[regal comet]

https://tenor.com/view/rascal-gif-2725213266379078240

Daz me!

[hybrid flint]

Coming up on 1-3 — I wanna hear your takes on S1GN4L. How’d you personally make this dork the most annoying person in the system?

[clever cloud]

pretend you're in 2011 and start talking like you're a youtube comment

give him viper speed and yell First!

[shell bison]

Hit a fat vape loud as you do L33 SP34K

[mild robin]

I didn't even have to do anything the l33t sp34k was enough to make my party want to turn him into a pancake

[clever cloud]

i started "reading my PC's tweets"

as if i were reading their online presence mid fight instead of paying attention

[fading wyvern]

I made him sound like a gamer bro

[hard falcon]

Statistics say that we're heading into mission 4 with 0.6 NHPs per player shown to be a lie. Actual math dictates 0 NHPs per person. NHPs Georg (Lorelei), who has three NHPs in her mech is an outlier and should not be counted.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/458718151212007428/1313339741470720031/Four_Minds_As_One.png?ex=674fc673&is=674e74f3&hm=baba1bf9ebfa85116c975c7d05c43cee08172f93de0bc3c8175d3c71d0c53a1c& she even drew the new mech in question

[noble ivy]

Is she running an Iconoclast "power of friendship" build?

[hard falcon]

basically

she's got iconoclast, technophile -and- the Osiris (who is just the ||Ozzy|| personality, but named Hel)

Emperor frame fits in because of a devil's bargain wherein her original technophile NHP (Switch) used the ||Mass Drivers from Unforgiving Terrain|| to piggyback into some SSC backends. She couldn't use any of the technophile talents for the rest of the mission, but Switch would return after the mission with stolen frame data. And also return split into Lamb and Dia

[noble ivy]

you turned switch into a deimosian?

[hard falcon]

no, the player just named their NHP from the start 'Swithc' so my brain went 'well that's not going to get confusing, ever'

[shell bison]

the classic big three icono build set up

[noble ivy]

a iconic trio

[mild robin]

🍅

[noble ivy]

[hard falcon]

I'm unfluffing your pillow for that

[shell bison]

Lmao

[shell bison]

Context: One of my players decided to have S1GN4L join the Gate under bribing him to help with tech issues. Another player is now asking him to investigate something since he found the thing others wanted prior to ch1.

[tight pier]

This is perfect S1GN4L dialogue to me

[shell bison]

Remind me to tell you about the time Vex told me one S1GN4L and his code Dojo

[tame tide]

._.

Wut

[fading wyvern]

The squad's all together

Jerry's Angels reporting

[fossil lion]

gonna be running the first bits of mission 3 in a bit, and i do need to ask: does anyone have ambient music suggestions for Furnace City? the document in the pins doesn't seem to have any

[shell bison]

Let's gooo

[shell bison]

The details are a little hazy thanks to the fact we were all getting very drunk at an IRL lancer meet up, but essentially a hold over from the original campaign vex was in was that signal was a gym bro for coding and he had a code dojo

[fading wyvern]

Tech Bro S1GN4L ftw

[coarse marsh]

does anyone here happen to know who did the art for the exterior of furnace city?

[fading wyvern]

zhjake, pretty sure

he did all the big locational shots

https://bsky.app/profile/zhjake.bsky.social

zhjake (@zhjake.bsky.social)

artist
◽ http://twitch.tv/zhjake_draws
◽ https://ko-fi.com/zhjake
◽ http://vgen.co/Zhjake
◽ http://zhjake.tumblr.com
◽ https://x.com/Zhjake

Bluesky

[coarse marsh]

thank you!

[fading wyvern]

Obligatory watch for spoilers if you're a player cause there's art for some big setpieces in act 1 on his socials

[tame tide]

That is in fact a description

[wild flame]

Vex 1-turned this incarnation of S1GN4L

[shell bison]

Yeyeye. Like I said I was just drunk when we talked about it.

[noble ivy]

I can only imagine the sheer rage required to melt 2-3 structure in a turn

[hybrid flint]

yeah, turns out that just having a shitkid melting through absurd amounts of reactor stress was enough to inspire undying hate

They ended up shoving him into one of the Seeder’s mines, which they then detonated. Sent him blasting off the asteroid, Team Rocket-style, after which the remainder of his crew surrendered with a “yeah, we don’t really like him all that much, honestly”.

[halcyon swift]

My first IGF session was delayed by one day due to a personal factor of one of the players.😭
On the bright side, I'll be able to make extra preparations one day

[shell bison]

Wooo! Tell us all about it and the party

[hard falcon]

so, this is tangentially IGF related, butit concerns a character later on so, spoilers for a particular chapter 4 individual.
||I've started watching DS9, because i ran out of Lucifer to watch while doing my morning cross-stitching. I have not seen DS9 prior to this. But, I'm listening to Sisko talk to entities in the Bajoran Wormhole, and discussing the nature of linear time, and that they put value in expecting the unexpected.

And I cannot stop thinking about TRIPLE-POINT. So many lines just feel like either what a human might say to them about their simulations, or even what CAUSTIC might say.

This specific exchange, is going to be at the back of my heaed when the players have their date conversation with CAUSTIC

[ENTITY]: Baseball? What is this? 
SISKO: I was afraid you'd ask that. I throw this ball to you and this other player stands between us with a bat, a stick, and he, and he tries to hit the ball in between these two white lines. No. The rules aren't important. What's important is, it's linear. Every time I throw this ball, a hundred different things can happen in a game. He might swing and miss, he might hit it. The point is, you never know. You try to anticipate, set a strategy for all the possibilities as best you can, but in the end it comes down to throwing one pitch after another and seeing what happens. With each new consequence, the game begins to take shape.
[ENTITY]: And you have no idea what that shape is until it is completed.
SISKO: That's right. In fact, the game wouldn't be worth playing if we knew what was going to happen.
[ENTITY]: You value your ignorance of what is to come?
SISKO: That may be the most important thing to understand about humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers. We explore our lives, day by day, and we explore the galaxy, trying to expand the boundaries of our knowledge. And that is why I am here. Not to conquer you either with weapons or with ideas, but to co-exist and learn. ```||

While DS9 may not be in the main list of inspirations, this is still so incredibly resonant, which is a sign that someone knew what they were doing. And for that, I value IGF's writing even more.

[hybrid flint]

Brilliant connection, and something I am absolutely gonna steal for my own game.

[hard falcon]

Also, as a fun aside, I decided to go weirdly meta with callsigns this time around.

For Combat: ||Pressure Point|| we have this gang (I added the colour names in roll20 and haven't set them up in comp/con):

Meta: ||These are the assorted favourite colours of the players, and myself.||

For Combat: ||The Swarm||
||There's a lot here, but six names specifically: Sapphire, Onyx, Carnelian, Chrysolite, Topaz and Amethyst are the assorted birthstones for the players - Chrysolite, the only one who doesn't start on the field, is my own birthstone||

And lastly, for Combat: ||Event Horizon||
||I'm sure it's obvious what the theme here is, based on the priors||

[thorn hinge]

I can't speak for Vex or the rest of the act 2 writing team, but trek in general and DS9 in particular are always inspirations for my creative works. Even if I'm not specifically referencing or taking something from there, it's a big part of the canon of sci-fi media I was shaped by.

The prophets in particular and their non-linear existence are a big part of how I see unshackled NHPs in general, just in a non-deterministic universe instead of a deterministic one. For the chapter 4 elements you're talking about ||I see Triple Point in a similar light, but it can't even keep the timelines straight anymore. VORSHUNGMOTOR in particular seems to be showing timelines that happened differently, and I made quite a meal out of that idea. THat one scene became and entire session with 20 something different timeline simulations showing my PCs in various different realities (including their appearances as NPCs in other GM's games)||

[twilit star]

I feel like playing an Aunic PC in IGF would be really fun, for a variety of reasons

[tame tide]

I don't know enough about the Aun to execute Aun characters ngl

They could do very funky bond bullshit tho, with good explanation if they were a Mind

[twilit star]

I was more so thinking about potential refugees getting really icked out about the Faith of the One, but yeah weird Aunic tech is also a thing

I can see Minds and Firmament being relevant, and with Calliope being the worse place in the Long Rim to flee from SSC it’s another interesting element

Out of all the modules I’ve seen, Aunic people have a better excuse to be in Calliope than most other established settings imo

[hybrid flint]

So, one of my players just handed me the keys to the fucking kingdom when it comes to future story beats:

He’s playing a disgraced Albatross knight who was boots-on-the-ground during Nestor.

[shell bison]

EYO???

Oh that is JUICY

[hybrid flint]

Right???

I feel like I’d be doing the story a disservice if he didn’t meet ||Ignatius pre-Cult.||

I’ve also got a station kid whose dad died in the Demon Winter, and a HA black ops clone who got burnt for a failed attempt to steal Aunic firmament tech for a certain ||Dr. Valentinian||…

[shell bison]

Niiiice

That's some good party synergy

[tame tide]

Hell yeah

[thorn hinge]

Cruye's main game has an Aunic Mind PC that's had a hell of a time, they just got through ch4 iirc. In the remix game she made ||McArthur's sister|| an Aunic Mind too, and that led to some fascinating interactions with my character (a reformed cult spy). My PC has (ch4 spoilers) ||powers similar to Annabelle McKenzie, and McArthur's sister realized they were extremely similar to Mind powers. I have no idea where that plot is going but I'm here for it. ||

Also Franka's PC in the remix game was a member of the Nestor intervention Makteba who recently found out one of his oold wingmates is around...

[twilit star]

||CHIEF IS AUNIC!?||

[thorn hinge]

This is specifically a detail in Cruye's remix game, not canon outside that. And I don't know if they're related or adopted sisters either, so who knows really.

[shell bison]

And here I thought I was exotic being a witness user with empath

[twilit star]

Honestly the most fun part has to be seeing the extent of Union Space Paracausal Science and just going “what in the Fresh Crimes Against Metat Aun is that?”

It’s one thing to be a fish out of water, it’s a whole other thing to be a fish out of water who has a very similar but also extremely different framework they’re working with

Like going to another planet, seeing “oh you guys have Croissants too,” and then it grows spider legs and starts skittering as they explain Croissants are a type of pest.

It’s a perversion of your existing framework rather than something completely outside it, which to some people is worse

[hybrid flint]

Speaking of perverting the familar, do any of y'all have a good reference to look at in regards to a run-of-the-mill Faith "Sunday service"? I wanna really punch in that these guys seem relatively reasonable and omnipresent in Calliope.

[twilit star]

I wouldn’t know I didn’t grow up Christian

[rustic night]

[SPOILER - Mission 1, Chapter 1]

||I've ran S1GN4L's fight once again for a new group, and, well:
5 Players
2 Mechs exploded
1 Mech was destroyed||

||S1GN4L is brutal||

[wild flame]

But is he hated on a deep, personal level by all of the PCs? Because that's the most important part.

[rustic night]

My first group loved him (???), my second and third group hate him

I've never seen someone utilize Frag Grenades (pilot) mid-combat prior to this

||I am afraid for Andros' fight, considering that there's only 3 mechs standing, one with 1 Struct/Stress||

[woeful saddle]

references as specific things likely for a sunday service on calliope, or general hallmarks of weekly services in IRL religions?

[tame tide]

(Power at a cost)

[tight pier]

they'll fix it :)

[shell bison]

Just have npcs offer their mechs in return

just bring them back :)

[hybrid flint]

The former. I'm mostly familiar with the rhythm of a normal service, but I'm curious to see how that'd translate to Hell's Gate, or Icebreaker, or wherever.

[twilit star]

||Andros is a lot easier, speaking from experience||

[rustic night]

||I know, but, 3 mechs, y'know?||

[shell bison]

Time to cash in some favors with NPCs, or Militia spares

[tame tide]

Behold

A ||Hell's hounds executioner||

[hybrid flint]

big boi

[fast parrot]

Wide fella

[tame tide]

When making homebrew NPC class tokens I tend to just gothrough the homewbrew tokens in retrograde and go "cool yep that has good weaponry"

[hybrid flint]

That’s one of the DFG frames, right?

They’re always excellent for beefy lads

[tame tide]

ye

I realised I have quite a decent amount of custom tokens so Ima upload them

[halcyon swift]

Sorry for being a few days late.
It's hard to find the time to sit down and write something when you have a one year old baby at home😭

My IGF has just started, and the players haven't even met Jerry yet, so I don't have a lot of interesting stories to tell

Our SRT team name is Pillars of Hercules.
The members are

Nui , a girl born in Hell's Gate, whose grandmother (a doctor and mech pilot) was killed by Andros about 10 years ago, she inherited her grandmother's mech and NHP co-pilot, and together with the NHP, she decided not to cycle until she got her revenge on Andros, because NHP“didn't want her feelings and obsession to be reset by cycling”.
(NHP is from iconoclast.)

Arkham, the youngest child of a family that fled HA for political reasons and became pirates on the Long Rim.
His pirate band was annihilated by the IPS-N and he was the only survivor. He was rescued by Nui 's grandmother
After the death of Nui 's grandmother, he felt obliged to take care of Nui and prevent her from doing something stupid on impulse.
He is the captain of the Pillars of Hercules.

Carlos, whose mech wreckage was picked up by Hell's Gate salvagers a year ago and found to be alive in the cockpit (some kind of artificial hibernation maintained by medication).
Possibly due to the effects of hibernation, he is unable to recall his past memories, and the only clue he has is a notebook he carries with him, which is filled with incomprehensible jokes and has the name ‘Carlos’ on the cover.
He thinks he should be a comedian, performing stand-up comedy at the GMS Standard Bar.

Arctos, an outlander from Asphodel and a former weather witch.
The community she was born into has a terraforming device that requires 12 witches to work together, and being one of the 12 would have been a great honour for her community, but she wasn't chosen. Losing her purpose, she left her home and drifted through the system on a freighter.
After accidentally displaying a talent for mech piloting during a pirate attack, she joined the Hell's Gate militia.

Our SRT's mecha.
Nui on the left, Carlos in the top centre, Arkham in the bottom centre and Arctos on the right.

(Still a draft, finding the time to finish it will be a tough task)

[shell bison]

Lovely crew and look forward to hearing their misadventures

[halcyon swift]

I'm looking forward to it, too

We're playing in text chat, which is a lot slower than normal
I'm still trying to get a handle on the pace to see if I can speed things up, but I don't expect to be able to complete the mission 1 in three months😭

There's an anecdote that might be worth mentioning

There is a superstition in the tech industry in the country I live in that if you put a green-packaged snack called a ‘Goodie’ on your computer, the chance of it crashing drops dramatically and it stays working well for a long time

So one of our SRT members, Nui, decided that the way she accidentally ‘broke’ printer was by discovering that the Goodie on the printer's mainframe were a hundred years out of date, so she took it upon herself to throw them away

[noble ivy]

that reminds me of a story where some radar technicians found a weird metal box filled with rat bones attached to the radar dish and when they removed the box the whole system refused to work.

they tried everything to trouble shoot it but it was only fixed when a senior technician welded the box back onto the dish

[halcyon swift]

Wow, this is way cooler than putting snacks on computer
It's like some kind of technological necromancy

It also seems to be very ‘Caliope style’

[noble ivy]

the best part is that the senior technician didn't even ask what the others tried so far. they just walked in, put the rat box on, and walked out.

[halcyon swift]

Where can I find the details of this story?
I'd like to share it with my players.

[noble ivy]

I remember reading it on tumblr but i can't seem to find the original.
but there's not much more to the story then what I've already said

[halcyon swift]

gotch, thank yon☺️

[tame tide]

@twilit star Hey I recognise that name

[twilit star]

:)

Wait where did his callsign go?

It’s supposed to be “quickshot”

[tame tide]

Oh ffs I know what happened

I edited the doc wrong, I did a ctrl+f then must have had that box selected instead of "Creator"

MB

[twilit star]

lol

Fixed it no worries

[tame tide]

I was well confused lmao

[thorn hinge]

I've seen goodies in action, even participated in that tradition a little. Sometimes it's not food but a small toy, a few coins, or something else non-descript. Sometimes there's even plausible theories as to why it works, as in the old magic/more magic story. Never heard of rat bones, that's a fun twist but I'm better it's a tumblr story.

[twilit star]

I feel like if I named the guy who got their callsign because their wife left them “Al” that’d be very passive aggressive against you

[tame tide]

Lmao yeah that was what I was thinking 😂

Found it funny tho

[halcyon swift]

I had Chief Macarthur send a letter to the SRT members
‘Any objects around the printer, including but not limited to sticky notes, snacks, tools, or any decorations, are part of the printer's setup parameters. Unauthorised changes to the parameters by anyone not involved are strictly prohibited.’

[past agate]

yessss

[past agate]

That’s awesome

[halcyon swift]

This is from a case I heard about.

Soon after a new employee of a precision manufacturing company removed a ‘Goodie’ from a robotic arm's mainframe, a serious loss of control occurred, causing millions of dollars in damage.

After that, the employee was punished for ‘unauthorised change of parameter settings’.

[noble ivy]

and as the campaign goes on the list just keeps growing

"snacks, tools (broken and intact), religious iconography, sacrilegious iconography"

[floral glacier]

I had a lot of fun running that

[tame tide]

Ok

Giving an ||ID mech a system with "HA" in the name feels wrong and out of character for ID so I renamed it||

[hybrid flint]

||I mean, SteeleWall was right there||

[twilit star]

No they wouldn’t be that clever

[noble ivy]

||Steelewalle?||

[hybrid flint]

Never underestimate the creative power of sheer, unbridled egomania

Excuse me, “””creative”””

[twilit star]

||He’d probably call it the “Steele Cagee”||

||Or the “Rodericke Roadblock”||

Which is adjacent but undeniably worse

[noble ivy]

always put the extra ||e||

[floral glacier]

YO THAT RULES

[timber verge]

Joined an igf game in ch3, playing an ||outlander terraformer who’s settlement was taken by the kidnapping squads, he hates Steele more than anyone, just did the first dome combat and it was so sjfshfsbs
Steele shows up and he immediately shoots the first monitor he sees
Truly the most hatable ceo in the long rim||

Fox is so normal

[shell bison]

I get the vibe that one player in my game will have the same reaction

I intended to play him as a fail handsome jack but with food based puns and no charisma

[timber verge]

Awful <3

[noble ivy]

its so easy to fuck up a handsome jack

[past agate]

🔥

[noble ivy]

which is exact energy i want to go for when my players meet him

[timber verge]

||the thief mission caused a lot of tension because fox was basically entirely fine with killing the thief and wiping the data, since he’s solely focused on saving the people in the dome and is pro burning forge, but the other pcs were all horribly conflicted, ESPECIALLY the pc that was an SSC genetic experiment||

[shell bison]

UH OH

[timber verge]

one of the other pcs is an ex hellhound who is extremely wary of the blacksmith so she didn’t want to either

[shell bison]

As for some of the lines I wrote for Steele
What's your hurry, blueberry?
Here's your mission, persimmon
Howdy Do, Honeydew!
Let's tango, mango

[timber verge]

Oh I hate it

[shell bison]

I may have also hinted to my players that he ||wants to make a play for ownership of the system|| funny act 2 thing and also prepped a speech when he's done going Funny salesman from hell into "Just an actual power hungry madman"

_
You see, the thing about your ideas is this. You lack vision. What, Calliope becomes this little bumpkin system where we all don't starve or have easy transport from one VENT CRAB INFESTED STATION to the next?!?! No, no you see the only thing that has ever made change for the better is power...

Real power

Power I am going to get for me and mine so someone can finally take this good for something system and bring it to the damn forefront of what this system can actually be. POWER CHANGES THINGS...

And I will be that beast at the head of the pack_

I'm actually kind of proud of it truth be told

[timber verge]

Ugh I hate him so much

[shell bison]

He's supposed to be very hateable.

Hmm, I still smile at the day we did [ACT 2 SPOILER]

[noble ivy]

the trick to writing/playing him is that he's not a handsome jack
he's a guy who really wants to be handsome jack

[shell bison]

I try to think of handsome jack voice, then put a small nasal tone over. Like Daniel Southworth did for vergil in DMC 3

[noble ivy]

oh god,
i just realized that i do the same thing for Loki's voice in chapter two

||and he's definitely the vergil to switch's dante||

[shell bison]

....Well now I can't unsee it.

Switch going "Wacky Wahoo Pizza" on stream

[noble ivy]

the style meter is how fast chat is going

triple sss is just seeing a blur of emotes rush by

[shell bison]

It's all vent crabs pogging

What's Loki's meter?

[noble ivy]

he also has a stream chat for some reason

[shell bison]

This also doesn't help since my crew playing just did an arc and agreed that ||Odin's|| theme is Bury the light because it SOMEHOW FITS WELL??

[floral glacier]

Hah, that is a fun tonal choice

[shell bison]

Hi Xeans!

[twilit star]

I really hope my Zheng and Pegasus players are able to bring their core powers to the ||Steele Dome because they will be able to smash so many monitors for free||

[timber verge]

niceeee

im running kobold so my cp is. make lotta rocks

[twilit star]

Good choice for an outlander

[timber verge]

yee it was a flavor pick loll

gonna swap off it at LL4

[twilit star]

Aww, not enough Kobold pilots out there :(((

If Enhanced Combat is allowed you could always make a play to upgrade to Salamander

[timber verge]

true true

LOL

[void nest]

I have been itching to play my Salamander Build. Not only because the frame looks super cool but I also really like the Backstory I made for them.

[twilit star]

Salamander literally evolves from Kobold according to the Enhanced Combat flavor text so if you want your character could use the exact same frame they’re currently using

[timber verge]

Oh really? That’s so silly

[candid elbow]

Oh, what LL is this meant for?

[thorn hinge]

In Golden Flame starts at LL0 and will eventually go all the way to LL12. Act 1 ends with the players at LL5, and there's two more acts planned and in progress.

A few GMs have started it at LL2-4, often coming off other campaigns like Wallflower, with some success.

[timber verge]

At LL2 rn w Kobold, ch3

[candid elbow]

Oh I was meaning as a GM planning on maybe running it

Thanks, all!

[timber verge]

Ah yeye lmao

[hybrid flint]

Whoever suggested Gebura 1/2/3 for combat 1-3, I like your style.

[floral glacier]

Henlo!

[heady topaz]

Oh hey I've done the same thing for bossfights in my game too lol. For final fight in chapter 5 i used Binah 1 2 3

[dusky cradle]

"The term apologist indicates that Blacksmith did something wrong, and here I am apologizing for him"

"Incorrect, as he did nothing wrong, except not killing Steele"

[timber verge]

LMAO

[dusky cradle]

I presented him as the most obnoxious HR agent you'd ever seen, a face just waiting to be punched, that kinda worked as half the players decided that they've finally understood the motives of the Church afterwards

Imagine being so punchable you'd make the players relate to the baddies of the game

[timber verge]

oh thats crazy

[dusky cradle]

"Improper consecration of servers may lead to unexplainable failures" moment

Some of them is probably integrated in the code though

[hexed berry]

Alright yall I think it's time for me to finally buy In Golden Flame

[maiden ferry]

https://tenor.com/view/oogway-my-time-has-come-gif-8019684

[shell bison]

Welcome to the club

[thorn hinge]

Enjoy!

[hybrid flint]

...I think I've found my inspiration for ||Feather.||

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVIl8zJL9rI

Read the lyrics on this one, if you can.

[shell bison]

I offer siren fan art from one of my pcs

[shell bison]

oh this slaps, thanks for the recommend!

[past agate]

Tall

[noble ivy]

is siren tall or is she just smol?

[shell bison]

Both

[balmy obsidian]

I really should get our siren a "#1 best pilot" mug or trophy or something

[noble ivy]

My players are finally meeting siren tomorrow
Any tips on how to play her?

[shell bison]

Depends, you want it formal or badass

[noble ivy]

i think i'm leaning more towards badass

[shell bison]

Have they completed the outpost for the S1GN4L fight or are they still there?

[noble ivy]

just finished the fight

[shell bison]

So they're still at the listening post? Good, you could make a last ditch troop transport of hell hounds come in to try and retake it and then here comes Sky Lady to gun them down out of a 2G rush over to meet the party. It's what I did in my game for a more dynamic entrance for her.

[noble ivy]

i don't know why but i find it hard to find a "voice" for more high energy characters like her and Switch

[shell bison]

Played Green Day's She's a Rebel in the background doing so

[noble ivy]

yoooooooooo
that'll make them like siren faster then anything i thought of

[hybrid flint]

I'm playing her a lot like Vasquez from Aliens -- cocky, a little brusque, but all-business when the chips are down.

[shell bison]

I stick to her drill sergeant persona. All Business but has a soft spot for the party as time lets on and then she gets the arrogant streak.

I believe my Calliope Card Project has her intro card in there with the Dragon's Tooth

But just in case

[noble ivy]

speaking of that, have any of you had an issue of quicklinks just not working in google docs?

i tried looking up fixes myself but nothing seems to work

i only ask cause i noticed this problem then i started using alot of the gm resources

[shell bison]

I'm not sure? Best we investigate that the links are still active

Also, we have more Siren fan art

[shell bison]

And one last reaction image

[floral glacier]

... Is that Ivy Deadlock giving her a hug?

[shell bison]

Lmao, no it's her PC, Kat Tastro Phe (Bondarchuk), jsut got her catgirl mods after we did some ch2 finale downtimes.

[floral glacier]

Aaaaaah okay x3

Very cute

[twilit star]

Where’d she get such an accurate (and tall) subaltern from?

[tame tide]

Sick art 🔥

[shell bison]

Just a fan art, she's currently in a scuffed combat subaltern. Now in color too

[thorn hinge]

Isn't Kat working on a new subaltern for Siren?

[shell bison]

It is in the pipeline of many a downtime actions

[silver pumice]

hello igf chat (throws art of my character in the au where they're an ||elect|| here

(by crainx on the artfight server, from an art trade!)

[shell bison]

OOOOOOH

[silver pumice]

i love Lynk, Drawn by the Flame so much. strange little bastard <3
not like baseline lynk isn't already a very strange little bastard but

[shell bison]

Oh Seraph, did you see the Siren appreciation posts?

[silver pumice]

indeed!! siren my beloved.......

[hybrid flint]

Hey @tame tide , do you have an un-marked version of the tiles for Anti-Capital?

[tame tide]

Unfortunately no, those tiles are a lot of effort to make

[hybrid flint]

Ah well!

[halcyon swift]

Successful completion of the draft

[shell bison]

OH THAT'S SO COOL

[hybrid salmon]

GMing spoilers (Act 1 Mission 1)

||My party did Beat 3, not Beat 4, to start our campaign, and I'm wondering if I can use the time gap between Beat 4's "golden path" and Beat 3's to my advantage. While they were on a freighter with Impact Plaza yet to enter sensor range by many light-minutes still, the militia did Beat 4, and something went wrong, something that would cause Capella to snap back on the militia for revenge more than usual. Thinking either a paracausal/liturgicode weapon was deployed by someone trying out a HORUS toy that they plugged in when they couldn't repair their mech the normal way (no printer), or something with a piece of debris from the Taychon explosion, traveling backwards in time, assumed incorrectly to have its origin at Hell's Gate. Any other ideas?||

[floral glacier]

Putting my map for the week together and

Sure, Inkarnate, "Vases"

[hybrid salmon]

"vases"

[wild flame]

Vases and Vase accessories

[tame tide]

YEp

"Vases"

[fossil lion]

S1GN4L's "vase" collection

[noble ivy]

I just ran the "funny" part of mission 1
||Its was SO FUN watching my players slowly my players gather clues of just how fucked the tachyon is||

||one of my players rolled a nat 1 when he checked out FEATHER's casket and i gave him a choice of either nothing happening, or he takes four stress in exchange for learning something||
||He of course chose the latter and i had his character suddenly experience FEATHER's traumatic mental state prior to cascading||

[shell bison]

👀

[noble ivy]

||I wanted to have my players learn not only where FEATHER came from, but what she experienced during that.||

||So if all the trauma and sorrow she endured caused her to cascade. why wouldn't her casket hold traces of those same intense and unbearable emotions?||

[hard falcon]

I see you're evoking the reaction from readers that your pfp does

[past agate]

jolly marcile

[twilit star]

||Sucks that Bonds only unlock at LL1 so I couldn't do stuff like that||

[noble ivy]

||idk, I just had them keep track of stress before they actually unlocked it at LL1||

[hybrid flint]

You know, I forget -- does Hell's Gate have a flag/insignia, or is that a bit too organized for Calliope?

[shell bison]

I don't beleive we have a flag or insignia for Hell's Gate but I think Vex made a flag for furnace city

[halcyon swift]

Changing the mecha to Chibi scale to be used as a Token

[trail flume]

Had another fantastic session tonight in Chapter 4, it's.... Interesting

Taking an Iridia mech down here certainly was a choice I made...

[timber verge]

Oh boy, which one?

[trail flume]

Enyo! Big ol hammer lad

[thorn hinge]

Vex made this a long while back

[shell bison]

Yoink~

[shell bison]

I can see these on a kids shelf in the gate after the party starts making a name for themselves.

[hybrid flint]

That’s just jank enough to work.

[floral glacier]

Wrong channel x3

[timber verge]

Oh that’s sick

[hybrid salmon]

I'm doing some ms paint for scenes a particular ship near the end of Act 1 Mission 1
(one of my players has aphantasia, and it helps me too)
Spoilered for spoilers and a depiction of ||a corpse suggested to have committed suicide||

[shell bison]

Oh good heavens.

[hard falcon]

setting up for Combat: ||The Swarm||

[wild flame]

friend shaped ||mining equipment||

[tame tide]

Love the fact the spawns just a drawn circle lmao

Little thing, ||this here is meant to be a drill||