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thelogbookproject · 1 year ago

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The Unity of Skovlan, Entry 19: The Ground

The Unity of Skovlan is an upcoming unofficial supplement to Blades In The Dark about the fall and rise of the Skovlander people. This series explores what it is all about in the leadup to its September release.

The Ground is something entirely new, arising in Doskvol’s Charhollow neighborhood in a way that couldn’t happen anywhere else. In Entry 11: Calibri I laid the groundwork of the landpriests, the ancient Skov spirit-talkers who made deals with spirits to keep communities safe in the days before the lightning barriers, and were stomped out by a combination of Imperial persecution and simple obsolescence. It did not escape notice, however, that the Akorosi have made their Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh and outright hatred of the supernatural into a part of their national and cultural identity, and that makes it something that the Skovlanders can contrast themselves against. The Ground, perhaps with a small group, but perhaps alone as the only one to dare stare into the dark, is reviving the old ways. The old ways of spirit-talking are lost, but by eschewing modern technology, attempting old Skov rituals, and delving into deep sorceries brought to Doskvol by other cultures (in particular the Severosi, who canonically have a long history of using arcane methods to fight ghosts directly), the Ground(s) became something new. They have become immune to the effects of electroplasm, and have gained the ability to solidify the ghost field, making the spectral corporeal. The Ground can walk fearlessly among ghosts and unleash them upon their foes, and none of the advanced technology of the Imperium can stop them. Everyone, ghost and man alike, is afraid of them. Their allies are likely as frightened of them as anyone else, but the Ground’s unique powers make them one of the best weapons against the Emperor in the world.

All Grounds start with two Abilities, Grounding and The Legacy (I’ll get to it). Grounding is the core of the Ground’s power, and lets a crew attempt jobs no one else could. While they are incorporeal, the Ground cannot be harmed by ghosts. But let’s talk about electroplasm. From the base book, electroplasm is the stuff that the ghost field is made of, and is a near-limitless font of death energy. Levianthan blood, by contrast, is a near-limitless font of life energy. Both are refined by the Imperium into a substance called plasm, which effectively can be used like an electrical source. In short, they’re big wet-cell batteries. As an aside, the refinement process to get to plasm is incredibly toxic, and the Imperium’s attempt to put such a processing plant into the Skovlan city of Lockport is what kicked off the Unity War. The Ground can handle plasm just as well as electroplasm, which means that the Ground effectively has the ability to shut down any electrical device. Considering the Akorosi use their plasm engineering as their biggest technological advantage, the richer and more impressive the target (in other words, the higher their Tier), the more likely they are to have a whole bunch of plasm devices, which means the Ground actually kinda scales with their foes. All of the lamps and lights of the city run on plasm, so the Ground is capable of plunging areas into darkness, increasing their reputation for being terrifying. Consider the possibilities if you were to ground out a section of the lightning rails, or a factory’s generator. The greatest of all: it’s not impossible to ground out one of the towers of the Lightning Barriers protecting the city from the swarming ghosts of the Cataclysm. Only puncture it if you’re really ready, but it’s basically the nuclear option in fighting the Imperium. A lot of civilians will probably be in harm’s way.

Augmenting the Ground’s ability to be basically an unstoppable ghost fighter is The Legacy, an Ability that drives you to seek out the genius loci of the city and forge pacts. If you remember Entry 11, the landpriests of the past differentiated between the vengeful ghosts of the Cataclysm and the spirits of the land, far older, that aren’t driven by the same hate that the ghosts are. The Church of the Flesh would definitely call them demons (like anything else spiritual that isn’t recognizably human), but the Ground is capable of seeking out such spirits for power. There are a ton of these, each bound up in the identity and nature of the District they inhabit. The power you gain is associated with the District they come from, so GMs can invent a spirit, but the Legacy benefit is set. Here’s a couple examples.

All of these Legacy benefits are really nice, and, critically, there’s no limit on how many you can get. However, each one requires a pact with the genius loci — they’re not gifts, the spirits want something in return, often ssomething ongoing. The more the Ground picks up, the more their life becomes about servicing their pacts. If a pact slips, they lose the Legacy benefit and likely need to forge a new pact for that District to get it back, but it can be so, so worth it. A Ground with a pact in every District is one of the most individually powerful people in the city.

I love how The Legacy gets the Ground to foster more than just an antagonistic relationship with the spirits, managing the violent and frightening needs of their revolution with the cultural history of their landpriest predecessors. I also love how it gets the crew doing jobs all over the city, which is kind of necessary as Fractured Unity could feel a little claustrophobic if the scope stays just in Charhollow.

I want to do one of the optional Abilities, and I was pretty darn torn between them. I really really like the Ground Abilities, but I eventually decided on Harbinger. As hinted at in the support text there, Harbinger is not the Ground’s only way to keep their Stress down. I’ve played sessions where we’ve basically accepted every Devil’s Bargain, and it’s the most chaotic and fun thing out there, and I want to encourage players to take Devil’s Bargains. Getting in way too deep and needing to take desperate measures (often literally Desperate) to get out is the good stuff. Make your crewmates as terrified when you act as your foes are. Speaking of terror…

We’re going to close on the Ground’s XP Trigger, which is pretty multifaceted. The easy one to work on is the fear one, but the others are so much more interesting (but sometimes hard to wedge in, so the fear is always an option). The Ground is, above all else, an iconoclast. They’re breaking every taboo of as many cultures as possible and forging something brand new, but making it out of what came before. Be traditional and be forward thinking — just don’t be of the now. Get weird. At the same time, consider the value of terror. When people look at your crew and call you terrorists instead of freedom fighters, they’re probably thinking of you. Make sure your fear has a purpose, and know that it can be alienating. A monumentally-powerful many-pacted Ground is the best way to gain individual power, but if you scare off too many potential allies, you’ll still never be as effective as if you had a coalition of compatriots alongside you. Make people question why they do things and think things, break the binaries they live under, and remember that holding up your hands as everything goes dark except your Spooky Lightstaff casting strange eerily-colored light across your face is always cool.

Next time, we’re wrapping up the playbooks with the Mend!

The Unity War releases for PWYW on September 1, 2023. Check out https://tinyurl.com/tuos-details for the rest of this series! Sign up for my Patreon at https://patreon.com/thelogbookproject for a preview, and full early access to the game! See you Wednesday!

#the unity of skovlan #prerelease series #ttrpg

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jackdawyt · 4 years ago

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With no time to waste, we have a tremendous news update on Dragon Age 4’s current iteration known as “Morrison”, as many development secrets were revealed in BioWare’s brand-new hardcover book of “Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development.”

A lot of the questions that we’ve all been asking over the past few years, finally have an answer, all thanks to this book. I will be delving into all of the Dragon Age 4-related content in this book; however, I wholeheartedly advise you pick up the book for yourself because it is filled to the brim with insights, information and behind-the-scenes reveals on every BioWare game to this date.

It’s full of so many captivating, inspiring and amazing stories that showcase BioWare’s incredible journey over the past 25 years.

In any regard, we’ve got a lot to get into, so leaving no stone unturned, we’ve got some updates regarding Dragon Age: Morrison, the current-rebooted project code name of the next Dragon Age game.

Morrison:

Along with this amazing retro-styled font of Morrison’s code name - that I’m totally going to use in future videos and thumbnails - we actually have a small plot synopsis on this working title.

It reads as followed: “Tevinter Bound – a sneak peek at the follow-up to Inquisition.”

“As BioWare entered its twenty-fifth year, the Dragon Age team was hard at work on Morrison, the code name of the long-awaited follow-up to Dragon Age: Inquisition. The game, helmed by executive producer Mark Darrah, will take players to Tevinter as events of Inquisition and Trespasser threaten to forever change Thedas.”

We’re going to Tevinter! Of course, we already knew that based on Trespasser’s ending, Tevinter Nights, and the developers already hinting that, but it is still very nice to see hear that in a plot outline.

In addition, the most interesting factor about this synopsis, is that for the first time BioWare have confirmed that “Morrison” is indeed the code name for the current Dragon Age project, which outrightly confirms that Jason Scheirer’s Kotaku article on “The Past & Present of Dragon Age 4” carries merit and truth to it, meaning that we can indeed trust the entire contents of Jason’s article.

Regardless, sticking with the 80’s retro theme, BioWare staff have themed shirts for the project, and they look absolutely amazing. Please, BioWare Gear Store release these one day, if at all possible, these designs are so good!

The book then goes on to show very familiar concept art that was showcased within the Gamescom behind-the-scenes trailer, however, this time, we have actual descriptions on each of the art pieces, and what they’re portraying. So, we don’t need to spend another 40 minutes speculating about what the pieces could show.

The underwater shot which we assumed to be Isabela accompanied by what looks like Dorian with a sword, an undead and a female dwarf, appears to showcase the Lords of Fortune, a newly-introduced faction within Tevinter Nights.

The synopsis says:

“Where there’s treasure, there’s adventurers braving death to get it. The Lords of Fortune are always on the hunt for treasure-wherever it may be.”

The next shot, which I speculated it as Tevinter’s capital city Minrathous, has a synopsis that says:

“The glittering hubs of Thedas are beacons of civilization and bulwarks against the night.”

Following that, we have the mysterious Antivan Crow lady concept art with the synopsis:

“The Antivan Crows have perfected theatrical assassinations. The Antivan Crows are celebrated for their mastery of stylish slaying.”

And then we have a most recognisable mural, one that many of us have spent way too long staring at, tinfoiling over its endless possibilities. The synopsis of The Dread Wolf Rises concept piece says:

“One of Nick Thornborrow’s beautiful paintings showing an old friend with a shadowy threat!”

Following that, we have Nevarra’s undead operating on a dragon, with the synopsis saying:

“From their Necropolis, the Mourn Watch guard Thedas from occult threats”

And then we have – hold on, what’s this, a new piece of concept art? Roll on the tinfoil, I’ll read the synopsis first and then we can go from there, as it states:

“The Deep Roads teem with evils both new and old, known and unknowable.”

I won’t spend ages delving into a single piece of concept art, but we can see the Deep Roads with plenty of light coming from the surface. It’s a beautiful shot, that I’m sure is building a mood for potential locations in the next game.

The final concept art piece shown is one from the trailer, however, it’s not cut-off anymore. When it once looked like an evil Cetus, it now reveals something even more wicked than a sea dragon... A figure with multiple arms, red eyes, a curved headpiece, holding a spear. Is this an ancient God? Could it be Ghilan’nain? A Lovecraftian sea-hybrid-monster? Or is it just a crazy idea thrown together by a concept artist, because why not?

The synopsis is the most intriguing and provides a further context for the next Dragon Age game:

“The Evil Gods have Thedas in their sights and only heroes can stop them. The shadows of the past stir, and new heroes must rise to fight them.”

There are many “gods” in Dragon Age, the Old Gods, the Elven Gods, the Maker, the Titans, etc. You could certainly consider each of them to be evil too, but on a whim, with the whole “shadows of the past stir.” I’m sure this synopsis is referring to the Elven Gods, given Solas’s scheme that will return the Evanuris to Thedas once more.

Taking my tinfoil hat off for a moment, this book expertly describes concept art stages relating to BioWare, and I need to touch on what exactly these pieces could mean going forward, because they most certainly could just be conceptual drawings without much context for the next game.

The book quotes Dragon Age 2’s development regarding concept art, saying:

“In the early stages of any project, before the concept artists are aware of any writing, they like to just draw what they think cool story moments could be. It’s not unusual for the team to then be inspired by those drawings and fold them into the game as the project progresses.”

And, even further than that, Matt Rhodes, who is the Art Director of the next Dragon Age spoke a few words regarding Dragon Age: Inquisition’s conceptual art stages:

“As multiple teams worked on their corners of Inquisition, lead concept artist Matt Rhodes spent weeks creating images to help solidify and drive a vision of what the game could be.”

“It was partly to encourage and remind myself of what the potential of this project could be,” Matt says. “We all imagine the finished game. I wanted to get that on paper, to remind everyone we are making something that could be pretty cool.”

So, while we’re all so excited to see these amazing concept designs and imagery, and we love to correlate it all to the next game, remember that these designs are very early work building a vision for the next game, they’re just being used to represent what idealistically the developers would like the game to end up like, or what insane ideas the concept artists have for the game.

Many of these ideas won’t turn out in the final product, but it’s still so nice to see this work already.

Wolf Rook Book:

Moving on, we can put an end to a five-year mystery, we finally have answers on that enigmatic red “Wolf-Rook" book that Mark Darrah has teased for half a decade.

One of my first ever videos on this channel was delving into the early pages of this book, back then I had a hunch that this book was the next Dragon Age game’s early concepts and designs, like a shiny development doc for the team.

And I was on the right tracks, as followed:

“The book was an internal guide for developer and publisher eyes only that summarized the vision for Dragon Age: Inquisition’s follow-up, a project code-named Joplin. The Joplin project has since been revised to such an extent that its code name changed to Morrison, but the red book still contains plenty of ideas likely to appear in the next Dragon Age. While most pages remain highly classified, here are a few Mark said we can publish.”

There’s a small description of The Qunari with some other concept shots, the paragraph reads as followed:

“The Qunari are followers of a religious text of principles known as the Qun. Though Qunari may be of any race, most are part of a race of large humanoids with horns.”

“For ages the Qunari have proven a formidable opponent to the rest of Thedas, almost conquering the continent until a united force of every Chantry nation pushed them back into a tense stalemate. Recent events have reignited the Qunari offensive, however, and their forces are in open conflict with the Tevinter Imperium, while their spies and agents are active in every nation.”

And at the bottom we have a Creatures double-spread page with different concepts very similar to those seen in Inquisition, the paragraph reads as followed:

“Animals, monsters and misplaced magical experiments: creatures stir apart from the conflicts and machinations flowing across the continent. Creatures range from the lowly nug up to the ultimate apex predator, the dragon. The next Dragon Age will feature our widest and most varied set of creatures to date. While often quite simple in implementation, creatures provide variety through differentiated animation and appearance.”

So, “Wolf-Rook” is still relevant, somewhat confirming that the work that went into Joplin, may cross over into Morrison, which is very exciting because Joplin’s vision for a Dragon Age title sounded amazing, so to hear aspects of that work pouring into this new project is absolutely fabulous. I had a hunch that the red book was still valuable to the current project, because we’ve seen a lot of “Wolf-Rook” teased this year, Mark Darrah has not stopped showing off his stash of red books. So, I’m very glad it’s here to stay for the current iteration.

Dragon Age Week:

Next up, we have an update to a story I talked about in March of this year, Mark Darrah teased a picture of his laptop with the BioWare Slack server shown at the bottom of his screen.

One of the channel-titles within the server was one by the name of “DA Week”, and thanks to this book, we know what “Dragon Age Week” actually is:

“Dragon Age Week is a five-day period during which members of the Dragon Age team can pursue creative projects that in some way benefit Dragon Age. The work done during DA Week, and its erstwhile cousin DA Fridays, sometimes found its way into releases.”

“The giants in Inquisition came out of a Dragon Age Week,” executive producer Mark Darrah says. “We also had a board game made that we were going to put into Inquisition, but we just didn’t have time to. It’s referenced. It’s a dwarven chess.”

So, I do wonder what kind of ideas have come out of Dragon Age Week recently that has then ended up in the next Dragon Age. Hopefully, one day we’ll have a new book that tells us Dragon Age 4’s secrets and we can visit this topic.

New BioWare Vision:

Moving on to the final major update, thanks to this book, we have a greater understanding about the vision BioWare have going forward. According to General Manager, Casey Hudson and Dragon Age, Narrative Director, John Epler.

Casey Hudson spoke on the “old” BioWare and how their changing paths to a “newer” BioWare:

“We can’t go back to where we’ve been,” Casey Hudson says, now the studio’s general manager. “The way that we worked, all of those stories and the crunch and eating pizza for six weeks straight and all that kind of stuff, as fun and memorable as it was at the time, those things won’t work for where we’re going.”

As BioWare grows, Casey says it must learn better ways to work while still embodying the values laid out by Drs. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk.

“It starts with the ones that were there at the very beginning with Greg and Ray of humility and integrity,” he says, “Those are super important.”

Other pillars include a passion for excellence and courageous creativity.

“We used to exemplify this not because we were courageous, but because we didn’t know better. We would try things and fail and try something else until we got it right, and it was very experimental. But what can happen is, once you do know the consequences of failure, you can very easily start retreating. And at that point, it actually does take courage to put yourself out there and try something new.”

Casey says. “We’re not super young and inexperienced anymore. We do know better, but we still have to try and do some crazy stuff anyway.”

John Epler shared on the change going on within BioWare:

“I am excited for what the future holds. I think BioWare is changing. I think we��re at a crossroads where we can either accept that and move into the new BioWare, or we can try to cling to the past. We have to be respectful of our origins without being constrained by them. It’s an exciting time and I’m really looking forward to what the next five years brings.”

“’I’m one of those people who is probably going to be here until they have to literally wheel my desiccated corpse out of the building, because I love working here and I love the people I work with and I love getting to come into work every day to have long, detailed conversations about how eluvians work.”

All in all, I’m incredibly excited and optimistic for BioWare’s future, they’re aware of their flaws, while knowing what makes them great. They seek to humble themselves, while changing direction, they want to avoid crunch while being experimental. I think we’re going to see the company bloom when they inevitably release the next Dragon Age, and I am totally here for that.

Dragon Age Day

Before I leave you, Dragon Age Day is quickly approaching, and it seems BioWare have plans this year. EA Community Manager, Jay Ingram tweeted about fans asking questions for the Dragon Age team, in prep for plans on Dragon Age Day. I’ll link the tweet down below, so you can ask as many questions as you’d like! It seems that BioWare may stream on Dragon Age Day, so do watch out for that, and give them a follow on their Twitch, also linked down below:

https://twitter.com/JayKingIngram/status/1325197450907275264

https://www.twitch.tv/bioware

Regardless, this is where we part ways. There was so much that this book uncovered, I highly recommended picking It up for yourself, it’s truly worth it to any BioWare fan. There was also some future Mass Effect stuff, but I’m saving that for a future video that I’ll do at the start of the new year. And I most likely will do future videos on other topics revealed in this book.

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st-just · 4 years ago

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Or, well, by way of example, here’s the faction write-up I more or less just finished, since I’m relatively happy with it. (though 0% of the nice formatting and fonts survived the transition to tumblr)

The Sublime Commonwealth

All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of Light and Reason.

“The Janissaries of the Sublime Commonwealth have long since done away with their Emperor, but by no means freed themselves. These ascetic technocrat-monks now administer a grand and modern state, governed by the Enlightened Virtues of Reason and Compassion. They strive to flense themselves of sentiment and partiality, the better to architect paradise”

Also Known As: The Clockwork Republic, The State of Reason, The Esheri Imperium

From labyrinths of archives and offices in Central – once Old Esher, and still full of all the glory and self-regard required to call itself the City of the World’s Desire – the vizers of the Grand Secretariet rule over a modern and enlightened empire that stretches over vast swathes of two continents, and their experts and ‘advisers’ exert great sway in nearly all the minor stats with the good fortune to find themselves bordering the font of civilization and progress.

The eyes, mind and heart of the Commonwealth are the Janissary Corps, the tyrant-slaves who, having given up all claim to comfort or legacy, raised from infancy free of sentiment and partiality, can be safely entrusted with all the powers and temptations of high office. Propaganda, of course, but truer than most- the grandfather of the last Padishah-Emperor discovered a ritual to evoke a cool and alien light, which seeped through the eyes of the exposed and left them bereft of self-preservation or -regard.

He and his heirs conquered half a continent with such reliable slaves, before the last discovered quite fatally that such treatment was no proof against persuasively argued and surreptitiously spread philosophy, and that a guillotine's blade forged in the light of reason cared not for divine protection or miraculous aid.

The Secretariet learned of the rising continent’s later than most, but spared no expense making up the lost ground, especially as every new report made clear all the resources and potential just waiting to be exploited. The arsenals and shipyards of the capital and all the eastern ports worked on nothing else for years, and whole provinces had one family in ten chosen as colonists. The far northern border was so badly stripped that the Illyric Empire felt able to openly fund a rebellion of the Witch-Cults which perpetually trouble the area.

But the expedition was a glory to behold, fully assembled. Commanded by a newly formed Committee of Hanrui - filled with a representative of each of the Imperial Committees and an expert metaphysician, chaired by an impeccably loyal spymaster – the fleet made landfall and effortlessly overpowered the hopelessly outclassed natives.

Of course, no one is enough of a fool to believe things will keep going according to plan from here.

MIL 4: The Sublime Leviathan employs no monstrous hordes, no hosts of the air or demons of the deep, its soldiers, in the main, must eat and drink like any other men, and must be led and driven into battle as any other army. But the clockwork leviathan of state whirs endlessly, ensuring that they never lack for bread or water, for lead or powder, for wagons or uniforms, for leadership or strategy. Applied at the proper time and place, the roar of field artillery is just as fearsome as that of dragons.

ECO 6: It took years of brutal campaigns to bring all the petty gods and spirits who so haunted the Old Kingdom to heel, to try each and denounce them in turn for tyranny and negligence in their use of power. But the results speak for themselves-the fields of the Republic are fertile, the weather mild and perfectly scheduled, the wildlife docile and placid. Flat and wide paths connect every market town to its provincial seat, and iron roads and grand canals connect each town and port to Central, the seat of all intellectual, political and cultural life, where novelty and innovation in every field is so rapid as to leave new arrivals bewildered and terrified.

ESP 5: While not particularly well-liked by the princes of the earth, merchants and factors from the Commonwealth can be found in very nearly every port, and with their trading ships come their informants and agents. The Academy spends at least as much of its time studying human culture and psychology as it does more physical matters, and the Secretariet’s political technologists and historians make use of every discovery in leveraging a society’s fissures and tensions, as well as all the ancient but effective tools of spycraft.

MOR 5: The Committee of General Enlightenment provides universal, compulsory, Enlightened education to all children from the ages of 6 to 16. The Committee of Industry and Progress provides work and bread to all who come to Central seeking it. And of course, the Committee of Public Safety provides swift and impartial justice to all those who disturb the peace. The Secretariet rules without patronage or corruption, and has dedicated itself to the extinction of famine and paupery. If the scions of broken dynasties or those who cling to superstition still mutter and scheme in dark corners, they know well enough to stay well clear of the cool light of day.

ADV 3: One might expect those of adventurous disposition to run screaming from a life in the State of Reason at the first possible opportunity. Generally speaking, one might even be right. But the Commonwealth has as much need for heroes as any other land, at least for the time being. The Grand Encyclopedia, the universal collection of knowledge, has already outgrown the first archive built to house it, and the world has yet to show any sign that it might soon run out of secrets. And so the Encyclopediests, misfits and habitual malcontents who might otherwise chafe at life in the Clockwork Republic, are outfitted with all the novelties and experiments they desire, sent off with fanfare and welcomed home with feasts, so long as they return with some new secret wrested form the depths of the earth or the hearts of men.

MAG 2: The Padishah-Emperor ruled by the grace of Heaven, holding court over the spirits of the earth and sky, granting patronage and sanctuary to every alchemist and witch who brought a pleasant new illusion to his presence. Different stars shine over Central now, cooler and more distant. The ifrit and naaids no longer trouble those who walk the wild places, the power they hoarded put to more Enlightened use. Most of the court sorcerers fled like rats like a sinking ship, or else died with their sovereign, and the generation since has since few Will-Workers of not rise to replace them – the Encyclopedia by now includes whole tomes on witch-cults and divine invocations, but the consensus of the Ideologists is that anyone suitable to undertake the initiations described can’t be trusted to do so.

REP 2: The Commonwealth is not greatly beloved in the courts of Hanrui- few kings particular enjoy the spectacle of their brother monarch’s vizers and soldiers declaring him an Enemy of Reason and beheading him before a cheering crowd, fewer still the ever-present subtext in the Republic’s propaganda that this is an example to be emulated. On a practical level, however, the Secretariet is quite pragmatic in its foreign affairs, perfectly content to act in the realm of the possible. The constant thefts of guild secrets and sacred mysteries does regrettably ensure that there will always be interests opposed to them, regardless.

Territory 1: Symponia: Renamed as it has been remade, the appealing natural harbour was turned into a modern seemingly overnight through prepared materials shipped over and metaphysical techniques to increase the fraction of the day that could be used working. Spilling out from it in all directions is a neatly ordered grid of a growing city, carefully spaced gas lamps ensuring that business can be done at all hours of the day. And beyond that, the farms and mines that already existed have been rendered many times more productive by freely shared Enlightened techniques and technology. Something which, combined with the wondrous novelties and medicine freely sold on newly available credit- has done much to reconcile the native population to their new government.

Adventure Site 1: The Hollow Peak: A truly ancient mountain, far older than the rocks and soil around it, its interior worked and hallowed out as the home of some ancient behemoth-or its cage. Reality around it is weak and scarred from some long-forgotten trauma, which has ensured it never stayed empty for long. Most recently, its outer reaches have been refashioned to serve as the last hold-out for the native priest-king displaced from his palace by the Commonwealth’s arrival. Deeper in, all manner of spirits and monsters live-and in the grand chamber at the centre, his slumbering draconic god, still fat and happy over the last sacrifices offered up to it- for the moment.

VIP: 6

Academic Hira “The Sword of Reason”, Special Adviser to the Secretariet on Irregular Warfare (ESP 2): The Commonwealth’s foremost political technologist and practical historian, Hira is the ideal Janissary- orphaned during the Revolution and raised entirely in newly established state orphanages and academies, they were one of the first class to be initiated into the Janissary Corps raised and trained entirely free of superstition, and according to Enlightened precepts. A prodigy in both official doctrine and the social sciences, Hira is the epitome of a true believer, and something of a folk hero amongst the Corps- perhaps unsurprisingly then, they find themselves constantly on foreign assignments, without enough time back home that they might start judging their superiors against the ideals they represent. What free time they do have is spent proactively serving the Common Good, both through simply solving whatever problems they come across and acting as an experimental subject for any new treatments the Committee on Metaphysics has devised, something that admittedly has provided an arsenal of useful techniques for use as necessity requires.

Strategist Valens “The Organizer of Victory”, Executive Member of the Committee of Public Safety (MIL 1): A masterful logistican and military planner, ten years ago Valens was the prime architect of the Commonwealth’s exemplary victory in a border war with the demon-worshipping Free Cities to the west, and has since more or less retired from direct military affairs to focus on doctrinal reform and grand strategy, beyond serving on what is probably the most influential committee in the Clockwork Republic. An ardent proponent of the expedition, he was a natural choice to organize and lead it, and took to the task with all the enthusiasm and dedication to be expected of a Janissary. While he is no more capable in a fight than any other well-trained soldier, the personal Guards regiment attached to his command, and his encyclopedic knowledge of exactly what he can demand of his troops and all the ways they can be used, more than make up for the lack of especially superhuman strength.

Encyclopediest Hayy “Thrice-Damned”, Candidate Member of the Committee of General Enlightenment (ADV 1) One of the most famous men in the Commonwealth- despite the significant disadvantage of never taking any public credit for his discoveries or having his history be publicized – Hayy is beloved by his superiors and envied by his peers for the secrets he has brought into the light of day, and by the masses for the dramatic (and quickly adapted for mass consumption) adventures he inevitably gets into while retrieving them. Famously having joined and risen through the ranks of three separate mystery cults before making off with all their treasures and secret rituals, it is widely rumoured that he was at one point a prince of some petty kingdom, who turned his back on his inheritance of tyranny and superstition and was rewarded with a new life in the service of Principle. Truthfully, he cares mainly for truth-to the extent he is committed to the Commonwealth, it is to the project of the Encyclopedia, and an end to secrets. Though he has certainly shown no sign of minding all the celebration or fame or adventure.

Coordinator Nese “The Clockwork Savant”, Standing Member of the Committee of Industry and Progress (ECO 1): Nese is, as almost everyone who knows her would say, a thoroughly miserable snake of a woman, insufferable when she is right and in denial when she is wrong, only even close to trustworthy because she is too much of an alcoholic to keep many secrets for long. She is also, sadly, the foremost mathematical mind to come through the Academy that anyone can remember, a true savant who was showing up trained scholars before she hit puberty. Combined with surprisingly keen political instincts, she naturally rose to a seat on Industry and Progress-and was, at a scandalously young age, the de facto authority in the Commonwealth on international trade management. Her presence on the expedition is not wholly voluntary (while most Jannisaries do not have any friends in the sense that they are supposed to avoid personal relationships which might cloud their judgment, Nese has no friends in the sense that almost everyone who meets her hates her), she is so far actually enjoying the ability to lay out an economy in a sensible manner, without being trapped by the compromises of those who came before her.

Academic Cahit “The Scarred Scribe”, Executive Member of the Committee on Metaphysics (MAG 1). While hardly someone you’d want in a duel of sorcerous might or laying down fireballs to incinerate an enemy army, Cahit is one of the most perceptive and learned magical theorists alive today. Their talents and specialization lie specifically in cosmology and metaphysics, and ritualistic alteration of universal properties. Alone, they are more or less useless. Combined with the dozens of assistants and hundreds of labourers seconded to them by the Committee of Industry and Progress, it is their efforts that set and schedule the weather around Central prior to the almanac’s publication each year. A close collegue of Academic Hira, their dedication to the Commonwealth is second only to their burning desire to know all the secrets of creation – though, after the accident which left them with their current fearsome appearance, they very much prefer the safety of theorizing over direct experimental work.

#writing #total war #abhari #kinda

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dnd-vigilante · 4 years ago

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Fountains of Power

Once planes of existence in previous Crystal Spheres, The Fountains are massive sources of energy that reside on the Physical Realm. They can be interacted with and even harnessed by mortals. There is no Veil left to keep these from spilling out into the world, and their entire hexes are overrun by their presence.

The Fountain of Fire

Once the elemental plane of fire, the Fountain of Fire is all that remains of its once infinite ancestor. It is infused with the once god Volcanis, and exists as a massive Volcano, spewing lava and ash across the entire hex. Fire elementals and other creatures that once resided in the Plane of Fire cling closely to this volcano, fearful of straying too far from the remnant of their source of power.

Volcanis [The Molten Soul]

Once the great unifier of the Alizarin Imperium. He once brought people together through challenges of strength. Through fearless suffering and hard work, people achieved their best selves. Volcanis himself is long gone, only a remnant of the once grand god remains. A force obsessed with War and the grave remains, twisted and without focus, Volcanis rages within the belly of the volcano in Mount Mimica.

The Fountain of Light

When the Cataclysm struck, the Plane of Light crashed into the Astral Plane, shattering and destroying it. Remnants of it still exist in the Domain of Life, but the bulk of their power resides in The Fountain of Light. The hand of the First Angel, petrified and disembodied, holds a crystal aloft that radiates the power of the Light Domain. This is The Broken Palm. Thousands of Petrified Angels, frozen forever as weeping figures, gaze upon the Broken Palm as light eternal spills across the ground.

Anything that approaches the Palm may trigger the Angels, who absorb some of the light energy to attack trespassers and protect The Palm.

DEEP LORE: These are the many Angels of Danayu. The Broken Palm was made when these angels protected Danayu as she fled The World Ship. They became petrified to defend themselves from the Void, becoming inert and left in eternal mourning to cloak themselves. While some Angels walk the physical realm in disguise, a mortal that returns to the Fountain may resurrect its power if it can placate the angels and rebuild the Broken Palm.

The Fountain of Shadow and Grave

The Umbral wind was shattered during the cataclysm, leaving behind a mass of negative energy. This formed around itself, having lost the ability to drift upon the wind, creating a singular point of power. In a sixty mile area dwells an ancient city of darkness, Fel’Penumbra, once known as the Grand City of Bastion. This city acts as a lightning rod for lost wandering souls. A counter to the other domains, as it is not picky who or what it pulls into itself. The Fountain of Shadow pulls on the darkest and deepest desires of mankind, it tricks the souls of the dead into believing they are being called into the Astral Plane. The fountain thrives off of negative emotions and the disruption of natural order, it twists the souls of those that enter, changing them into small pieces of itself. The souls of Men, Demons, Devils, Dragons, and all others dwell within. Twisted by their grief, sorrow, anger, and passion.

The Fountain of Shadow is not a place for mortals to tread. To the outside, the city appears empty, an unnatural silence covers the region as if a thick fog was pressing down upon those that looked upon it. Spirits dwell on both sides of the gate, those that patrol the cityscape are tormented spirits, those that have traveled back through to the prime material.

Mystery: The only creature on record to ever emerge from the fallen city was a vampire. Ancient history speaks of a human alchemist and healer whose name is lost to time, who sought to preserve his own life and the lives of his family. As old age began to claim him, he despaired of finding an alchemical solution and turned to black magic. Not long after, a force appeared to them and revealed a means by which he could achieve immortality: a dark ritual was performed that involved drinking the blood of a celestial within the city of shadows, Fel’Penumbra.

The Fountain of Tempest

The churning remains of the Great Sea of the The World Ship are now an eternal storm that spans twenty miles across. Floating around the planet, The Fountain of the Tempest circles the globe every 10 years, bringing chaos and destruction with it. However, it's magically charged rains leave massive blooms and growth for those that survive in its wake.

The Fountain Arcana

The Fountain Arcana is a massive font of wild magical energy. This is the result of the calamity that broke the remainder of the hundred oaths and the residual upheaval of the ley lines of Bastion

The Fountain of Arcana differs from the movement of the Magic domain: rather than filter through the The Feywild and the Faciem Arcana, it is a constant gout of raw magic stuck on the physical realm. It is connected to the once great soul islands of the world ship that have merged within the earth. It pulls on their torn souls, producing waves of unstable magic and destruction upon the world.

Sorcerers who tap into Wild Magic are tapping into these unstable ripples of magical energy. Furthermore, the Fountain Arcana is a place of great interest to the void. The Energy is completely derived from pure Reality, which nullifies forces of Unreality that are too close.

The Fountain of Forge

The remnants of the Domain of Teshezim, Highlord of the Dwarves. Teshezim saw that The Void feed upon the magic of creation, in which the Dwarves are uniquely blessed. Rather than fight the Void directly, Teshezim grabbed the Unbound during the cataclysm and built a Great Forge, hiding away the secrets of ancient artisans and literally working to build a new Crystal Sphere before the old Spheres were completely obliterated.

Deep in the ruins of a great sanctum, an anvil can be found, ever ringing. This is where the spirit of Teshezim resides. Look for the signs in electric blue. There you will find a magic as old as both worlds. Teshezim is the Anvil of Creation, infused with the power of the Forge and Nature Domains. Teshezim bound his Divine Body to the Anvil, anchoring the new world and giving rise to the Crystal Sphere we now call home. To this day, the Anchor is guarded by a sentient whip, a malicious magical artifact that carries both the Void and part of the soul of Vecna within.

The imprint of Teshezim’s soul has been ousted to the Ethereal Plane. Any great Dwarf that takes up the blacksmith’s art will hear the The Ever Ringing Anvil in their heart. If they make the journey and rediscover Teshezim’s resting place, the Fountain of Forge may be unleashed, and Teshezim may be reborn to wield his hammer yet again.

#world building #Vigilante Gaming #dnd #domains

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castellankurze · 6 years ago

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freestyle rewriting the heresy yet again

because stuff occurred to me last night after that post about the traitor primarchs

if you wanna do the greek tragedy right every traitor primarch should have a primary flaw and a lesson that they fail to learn which overcomes them in the end

Fulgrim is obsession, or ‘perfection is the enemy of the good.’ Fulgrim has been good at everything his whole life. he turned Chemos from a dying shitpit into a vibrant and peaceful world, and when called up to become a warrior and commander he became a damn good one. He even built up his legion from almost nothing after disaster nearly wiped them out. But now he’s actually competing with people on his level and it gets to him. He trains himself almost religiously, struggling to cut away the imperfections. He expects his legion to always improve; uniformly, to Fulgrim there’s nothing more disgraceful than failing to better yourself, no matter the circumstances, no matter how unreasonable it may be. It’s what leads him to letting Fabius tinker recklessly with the legion geneseed. To steal a line from the stewniverse “if I’m not perfect then who am I?”

His friendship with Ferrus is something that should be cast as the anchor on Fulgrim’s flights of fancy. Ferrus is prosaic and hardworking and responsible, gruff and bluff and earthy; he acts as a balance to Fulgrim’s mounting fanatical belief that he must be the best at everything at all times. Ferrus’ death can thus be cast as the loss of reason amidst the insanity of the heresy, and it’s what snaps Fulgrim’s last ties to sanity leaving him to plunge himself and his legion wholesale into the service of Slaanesh.

Perturabo is cold logic, or ‘humans aren’t rational.’ Perturabo believes that the ideal being is a Renaissance Man, the great thinker, expert in all fields, unburdened by such petty things as ‘emotion’ or ‘bonds’ or ‘human interest’. Perturabo believes mankind is best served by shutting up, sitting down, and working. Human error is a failstate and not to be countenanced. But people don’t function like that, fundamentally can’t function as if they’re datasheets on a page, and Perturabo gets irked when they don’t. Because even Perturabo doesn’t function like that, not really - he’s like one of those rationalists who claim they can operate perfectly logically, then throw a screaming tantrum when faced with a conclusion they don’t like.

Perturabo alienates everyone around him - his brethren, his legion, even his homeworld. To his eyes, they all fail him by not meeting his standards; they’re all too human, too soft. Perturabo’s insistence that he is incapable of failure is what tragically leaves him wide open to manipulation by Horus, who drives him and the Iron Warriors further and further into their self-dug bitterness and isolationism until Olympia itself revolts and the last nail is pounded into the coffin.

Konrad Curze is vengeance, or ‘fear exists to be conquered.’ Curze took control of Nostromo through savage terrorism, cowing the populace and the gangs and the murderers who preyed on people through shocking acts of murder and barbarism. He’s so good at it, though, that he never acknowledges the critical flaw - when he leaves Nostromo, he takes away the object of people’s fear, and he never setup a system to govern them without the threat of retaliation. The Night Lords become staffed with psychopaths and murderers, their unity as a legion slowly fraying. Curze himself sees torturous visions and nightmares, but it’s all without context, and he doesn’t particularly like wearing the device the Emperor made for him to curb the worst of it because he feels like it makes thinking difficult, so he just does without, becoming more erratic and unpredictable. In the end he lets himself be done in, with the line ‘death is nothing compared to vindication’ which can arguably taken as a recognition that he had become the kind of monster he once hunted.

Angron is, of course, rage or, to quote tumblr, ‘the hate you feel will warm your heart but leave you cold in the grave’. Of all the primarchs he’s the one with whom you can most do the cycle of violence thematic. He’s taken as a slave as a gladiator, leads a revolt, he’s ‘rescued’ by the Emperor on the brink of a crushing defeat, and becomes a rampaging one-man slaughterhouse loosed upon the galaxy. Angron’s response to his mistreatment is two-pronged: a total rejection of any authority deemed untrustworthy, fueled by his upbringing and the Emperor’s high-handedness, and a colossal hate-on for anything and everything. Angron wallows in his hate, because for him hate and violence are easy. The result is that he’s something of a foil for Perturabo - Angron doesn’t think, because he doesn’t like to think. The World Eaters become a riot of bloodthirsty killers, the librarians and chaplaincy first sidelined and then, at least in the case of the former, eliminated, because they’re not savage enough.

If the plot device of the battle cybernetics (’Butcher’s Nails’ in the BL series) is kept, it’s primary use is as a plot device to show the cycle of abuse - Angron has it forced on him as a child, he forces it upon his legion in turn. I’ve never been a great fan of the Nails as a plot device (especially in the BL series; it makes things too easy) because it’s not like they’re necessary to push someone into a Khornate rage, but they can work as a tipping point to help push the legion over the edge, especially back by Horus’ manipulations.

Mortarion is resentment, specifically, ‘bitterness is a poison.’ Like how Angron wallows in rage and Curze wallows in the fear he causes, Mortarion wallows in bitter hatred. He hates the aliens who ruled Barbarus, especially the one who raised him, he hates the poisons of his homeworld itself, he hates the Emperor, and most of all he hates himself. Mortarion falls into the trap of constantly comparing what we might have been to what we are - if he’d been found by humans. if he’d landed on a different world. if he’d taken the Emperor up on his offer of aid. if he didn’t need to wear a damn rebreather. Nevertheless he surrounds himself with the trappings of his home, poisons and toxins and rad-weapons because they’re his, dammit, and fuck you for trying to take them away from him. Mortarion keeps slogging onwards with what he’s got because there’s nothing else to him.

Magnus the Red is haughtiness, or ‘ivory-tower intellectualism.’ When you’re willing to learn and Magnus is willing to teach, he’s a great guy. When he’s willing to learn and you’re willing to teach, he’s a great guy. But Magnus has been either student or teacher for most of his life, and he has trouble defining a relationship outside those bounds. He’s that guy who’s an expert on anything he’s studied for five minutes, even though you know he never heard of it six minutes ago. And if you’re better at him than something, well, it’s something he’s never studied. Magnus can be exasperating, and, in considering the fate of his legion, dangerous. The Thousand Sons have a very strong ‘for me and not for thee’ streak to him, delving deeply into study of the warp and sorcerous practices that scream Bad Idea and ignore any attempts to warn them off of it, because they know better. They’re not going to fall into any traps. Even the Council of Nikaea, what should be taken as a dire warning to shape up, does little more than throw Magnus into a extended snitfit about the Emperor’s unwillingness to see things his way.

Horus is, of course, ambition, and ‘pride goeth before a fall.’ When the Emperor retreats from the Crusade to, you know, run the Imperium, Horus takes over the campaign trail personally, spending long years heading up the Imperium’s conquest of the galaxy, and as the awards and adoration and adulation and accolades and other a-words pile up he starts getting it into his head that he ought to be the rightful ruler of the whole shebang. While recovering from wounds on the planet Davin, he’s introduced to the powers of the warp through the warrior lodges there, and so strikes a fateful bargain to sway the greater power of the Imperium’s war machine to his side along with his brothers and topple the Emperor. He becomes a creature unlike any seen before or since, a font of Chaos power such that even the four great powers seem more held than holders of his leash. Drunk on power - both the political and very, very real kinds - it’s not until things fall apart aboard his flagship that Horus realizes how very, very badly he’s fouled up.

Lorgar is zealotry, or to be more accurate ‘you can’t externalize self-righteousness.’ Lorgar frames his mindset as a search for truth, but really what he wants is what everybody wants: to be on the right side. Lorgar’s problem is that he fundamentally cannot internalize the idea that morality is what you do, or to quote Horus Rising ‘we must be mighty because we are right, not right because we are mighty.’ Lorgar grows up steeped in the old faith of Colchis, but when he starts having visions and the existing power structure rejects him, he overthrows it because he knows he’s right, the universe told him he’s right, and when the Emperor shows up he feels validated, and doesn’t even notice how Emps is a little put off by the displays of veneration. When he goes on the Crusade he turns it into a literal religious crusade, stopping at every planet to fully convert it before moving on.

Eventually the Emperor shows up to kick him into gear, because the Word Bearers are the S L O W E S T legion by far and their ties to other legions are fraying and maybe put down some of the religious stuff. Lorgar cannot reconcile this discrepancy between the image of the God-Emperor he believes he understood perfectly and the actual Emperor telling him to cool it and basically dissociates himself into next month. Eventually this one dude named Kor Phaeron who Lorgar’s known since they were kids suggests maybe Lorgar should go back and look at the old faiths again, at which point Lorgar starts digging into a new, and to him, even bigger ‘truth’ than the Emperor. Then a dude from the Sons of Horus arrives and shit goes buckwild. But for all the work he’s done, Lorgar still can’t see himself as anything but a vessel for truth, effectively sheltering himself under the Horus and the Chaos gods instead of the Emperor, and when things go sideways on Terra he all but collapses because he can’t understand how shit’s gone south again.

Alpharius, finally, is the inferiority complex, or ‘don’t define yourself by your relationships to others.’ Alpharius is not only the last primarch, he’s the last primarch to be publicly discovered, so late in the Crusade that the Emperor’s already handed the reins over to Horus. As a result, everyone else has an achievement list as long as their arm and people won’t stop fucking comparing Alpharius and the XX Legion against the others. Alpharius is an A+ tactical commander, but this shit makes him mad as hell. He names the XX the Alpha Legion to emphasize how badass they are and drills the shit out of them at the chapter, company, and even squad level until they know their shit backwards and forwards.

For Alpharius, there’s no question of whose side he’s on, because Horus is his big bro and he doesn’t care for the Emperor. Ironically, despite his keen strategic mind, Alpharius is unable to recognize the bigger picture of how Horus and the other traitor legions are...maybe getting a little sketchy? He just knows this is gonna be his chance to get back at the folks who shit-talked him and his boys. Instead of joining the march on Terra, the Alpha Legion goes across the galaxy, harrying the Ultramarines, the Space Wolves, and the Dark Angels. But unlike Alpharius, Guilliman can stay focused on the big picture, and though delayed it’s ultimately the word of the reinforcements coming in that causes Horus to throw down with the Emperor. Of course the Alpha Legion goes on their merry way, until the fight at Eskrador where Alpharius finally gets to stick it to Bobby G - he dies, but he’s lured the Ultramarines into an untenable position and ultiamtely they’re the ones who have to retreat. But afterwards, the blind spot comes back into play, and the Alpha legion ultimately fragments and goes sailing into the Eye of Terror and the other warpstorms along with the other traitor legions because nobody knows enough of the Plan anymore.

this post got longer than i meant it to be but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ what can i say even though it’s been almost a decade now since i stopped seriously following 40k books i still have The Thoughts about the little plastic dudes

#40k #Horus Heresy #long post #primarchs #kurze writes #kurze rants

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natsukoarts · 4 years ago

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New grydscaen Hacker Logo Designs

New Year New grydscaen - Cyberpunk Reboot 2021

Today I started desgning new logos for the cyberpunk "grydscaen" series to kickoff the new round of hacker character designs WIP for the "grydscaen: hack the mainframe" RPG trading card game promos and kickoff of my new newsletter and the release of the new release of the special edition "grydscaen: the seal maker 2nd edition with a cool new cover featuring bio hacker Hiro Yamaguchi the Velveet Hour terrorist who bombs the subway. The first logo design featured in this post is the mascot avatar for the illusive DNA data pirate anti-government rebel hacktivist group, the Black Holes lead who claim militiant strategist and mastermind Gryphon as their leader.

The idea behind the new designs was the re-release of four grydscaen books specifically grydscaen: war book 2 when the Atlantea Federation attach the Pacific Territories in the City, grydscaen: alliance book 3 when Packrat Saicho and leader Faid Callen is wounded starting an internal Packrat civil war, and grydscaen: insurrection boook 4 where the Psi Faction team is deployment direct to the Atlantea Federation homeland of Londes on mission with the Esset battlefleet aboard the Battleship Escalon.

These re-relases are accompanied by the new WIP release currently in galley edits grydscaen: idol whihc focuses on one of the main musicians that pops up in the grydscaean story, the glam rock band, Athens with lead singer Hibiki Sato and drummer Takira Mizutani as they train to become rock stars at IHS Music Academy inn the Echelons. Plus was have the second edition re-release with a fully re-written storyline of the flagship grydscaen title, the first book published in the dystopian cyberpunk series grydsacen: retribution which Kirkus Reviews called "anime-esque and well written" and Rainbow Gold Reviews called "dark adn gritty, an unpolished gem... as dark as it gets" for a new decade renamed to grydscaen: revolution featuring the Packrat leader Faid Callen startng a hacker revolution and all new cover art featuring the same character on the original cover which was drawn while I was studying animation inn art school the clandestine psychic operative and damper Julian "Blue" Iskafiin.

The Black Holes Logo Concept

I wanted to kickoff the new logo designs with bold hard black-and-white lines with hard angle fonts, gritty graphitti-like urban warfare logo gamer graphics and a bold statement. I started with the hacker group the Black Hole because they are the most militant of the rebel anti-government hacker gangs in the grydscaen series.

The character gryphon is central to the climax of the book grydscaen: dark after Jester wipes the Triumvirate leader Zoon's memory. Though we see him in other books, this is the first time we actually get a close iinsight into his personality. That messed-up narcissistic militant view of a harsh world full of goernment corruption and lies shapes gryphons view and drives him. I wanted to have the Black Holes logo be sort of subversive and edgy so went with a sneering mask feel. The blue highlight colour I chose to resemble to blue sky before the nuclear bomb which is now shrouded in a reddist lightening toxic colour left over from the uceal explosion caused by the Dionysis Effect which forev rendered the sky red lightening covered innn radioactive fallout. The blue is a hint at Grypon's soft spot hidden deep within his militant harsh exterior.

The grydscaen Hacker Factions

There are many hacker factions in the grydscaen series. Each group has a particular purpose. They include:

- The Black Holes - DNA Data Pirates led by Gryphon

- The Packrats - Anti-government Psychic Cyberterrorists led by Faid Callen

- Velvet Hour - Climate Terrorist Bio Hackers led by Rafe

- The Terror Hack - Anti-Government Rebel Hactivists led by Mage

- Jester Hacker Guild (JHG) - Anti-Corporate Blackhat Hackers led by Jester

- Clannet - Organized Crime Drug Gang Directed by Drug Dealer Wraith

- The Soul Deep - Jet Jockey Underground led by Hacker Informant Jazz

The Packrats Clan is then further broken down into sub-groups called "inner factions" which are only recognized internally and include:

Runners led by Ang responsible for runs and psi inducer drugs. Mobile Comand Center led by Dark responsible for the Mobile Frames. Wastes led by Set later Naito Sennish, the main Packrats fighters . Acolytes run by Elite Level 9 hacker Acoyle formerly of Terror Hack. Prophets led by Aseth who act as spiritual gides for the Packrat clan. Hosts whose members are hosts and escorts. The rules for these groups are all layed out in the Packrat Code which is included in the series bible, a sort of fandom encylopedia of characters, locations, drugs, political factions, warring governments, global powers, rebel hacker groups and terminology used in the grydscaen seriesand included in the appendix of the backstory book grydscaen: beginnings.

Hacker Logo Design Plans

All logos will be black and white with a single highlight colour for each group with the Black Holes colour as neon blue. The designs will be timed to the re-release of grydscaen: revolution and hoping to have them all completed by the indie release of the tech noir series sequel to grydscaen: dark and grydscaen: scout with the new novelette called grydscaen: zero day.

My Next Logo Design

Next design will be the bio hacker terrorist group Velvet Hour and the new 18 year old host Nier Ishida the petulant and flamboyantly gay younger brother to Sakama Ishida the Psi Faction Night Team Lead and psychic operative. Sakama can use the technique "witch blood" spiritual which is a psychicinduced medium power of the Prophets first highlighted in book 10, the final book in the main grydscaen series titled grydscaen: imperium.

#grydscan #hackers #hackersunite #cyberpunk #psychics #cyberpunkaesthetic #grydscaenseries #grydscaenmanga #grydscaenanime

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nhorus · 8 years ago

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Bolos: All-beloved AI supertanks

(commencing education)

Bolos and the Concordiat

Bolos are the 'face' of Concordiat military might, despite how its power actually rests mainly in its navy.

Bolos are notable in that they mount the same main gun as Concordiat warships. And in orbital denial, it is hard as fuck to pick out even something as big as a Bolo against the even bigger background scatter and atmospheric lensing of a planet's surface. It also helps that there's this massive heatsink called the atmosphere or an ocean to allow it to keep firing without having to worry about rapid heat buildup.

Bolos being supercomputing AI brains means that they also serve as secondary knowledge sources in settling a colony. In the early wave of human expansion, Bolos were sent out with colonies because expecting Concordiat support in a hurry was just not feasible. In many ways, a Bolo's role is NOT to defeat planetary invasions on their own. They are strategic deterrents. An invasion on the way cannot be stopped so easily; the least the enemy could do is to land on the opposite side of the planet as the Bolo.

What a Bolo is meant to do is to make the enemy think twice before committing forces that he knows a large number will surely die. The soldiers themselves don't want to die futile deaths.

A Bolo's natural combat environment is called 'inside a nuclear fireball', and unless you're Concordiat main force with power armor made out of the same stuff Bolo warhulls are made of and infantry-portable 20 KT fusion mortars as light artillery support, you ain't surviving in that battlefield. (Or you're a Melconian with a backpack 10 Megaton charge diving in to a glorious death just to take out a Concordiat infantry defense line).

Human-vs-human conflict is therefore minimized with the threat of the Concordiat sweeping in to kick your teeth in if it gets out of hand.

In alien-vs-human conflict, and in many ways first contact affairs, a Bolo's role is twofold: 1) To not be detected until it is too late, and wipe out a substantial amount of the enemy's orbital support and landing craft 2) Hold the enemy at bay until the Concordiat Navy arrives with their own AI-driven warships, their banks of Hellbores and their overpowering swarms of missiles that could make Macross and Manticore go "Holy fuck, that's a lot of missiles."

It's just that Bolos are so capable that many times they resolve an alien invasion before the Concordiat can even respond. The Concordiat relied on their technological and firepower superiority to carry the day for so long, that they got arrogant. Then they ran up against the Melconians.

The Melconians were technologically inferior, but conservative estimates put their size at anywhere from three to five times the number of worlds as the Concordiat. Their weapons were inferior, but not that inferior. And they could reverse-engineer observations of Bolo capabilities just fine. They soon had supertanks of their own.

And so the Final War burned, and whole swaths of the Milky Way were wiped clean in an orgy of mutual annihilation. The Concordiat and the Melconians went around burning each other's worlds to an extent the Imperium of Man would go "Whoa, hold on there. You're resorting to Exterminatus too much." Tens of thousands of worlds burned, one after the other in retaliation,and trillions of innocents of either side died screaming into the long night.

The days of kinetic bombardment platforms and surgical strikes on military targets were long gone. There were no platforms, and no one was interested in "surgery" any longer. There was only brute force and the merciless imperatives of Operation Ragnarok and its Melconian equivalent, and Humans and Melconians screamed their rage and agony and hate as they fought and killed and died. On Ishark, it was Melconian troopers who fought with desperate gallantry to preserve their civilians, as it had been Humans who fought to save their civilians on Trevor's World and Indra and Matterhorn. And as the Humans had failed there, the Melconians failed here.

The aim of the war was total extinction of the other, and for the most part, they succeeded.

If you're seeing a Cold War parallel here, remember that the first Bolo stories were written in the 60s-70s. Keith Laumer's Bolos are part of the Science Fiction Golden Age classics.

Bolo Artificial Intelligence

The most expensive part of a Bolo, just like with today's warships, are not their weapon systems or drive mechanisms, but their electronics. Bolo brains are two-meter wide balls of incredibly complicated psychotronics. They don't have the Three Laws, and yet in many ways are also much more shackled.

Bolos have two modes: 1) the nominal capacity, which they use to converse with humans, often emulating cycles to deal with how so much more slowly humans speak to enunciate their ideas 2) Battle Reflex Mode, in which the full capacity of the Bolobrain is unleashed in combat.

Bolo hulls have been repurposed to everything from construction to farming machines. Yet the Concordiat's greatest fear has always been a 'rogue Bolo'. After their first wave of expansion and the defeat of the Deng, the Concordiat went out burning out the personality centers of fallen Bolos. These Mark XXs to XXIVs were made with simplistic, battle-hungry minds on the verge of self-awareness.

Bolos have multiple protections in place to keep them from going berserk.

Among these is Resartus, the initial imprint of the first production AI that is absolutely loyal to the Concordiat and humanity. If a Bolo's mind is ever broken by a logic fault, the Resartus personality takes over.

Another is the Omega Worm, which automatically triggers whenever a Bolo refuses a direct order from legal Concordiat authority. This will kill a Bolo.

The last is actually the simplest yet most effective. Give them a human to talk to. They are well capable of forming emotional bonds.

Bolo intelligence is what make Bolos so effective. In Battle Reflex Mode, imagine as if the whole world is moving so slowly, like you're in the Matrix seeing bullets slide through the air. That's what it's like to be a Bolo. Seconds are an eternity.

But it still intrigues them to interact with humans and all their chaotic complexity and creativity. Bolos are created for war, but they enjoy the arts that humans create. Humans have the history that Bolos envy, and they love being a part of that.

You can see it in the narrative here and there, about how Bolos trace their 'lineage' to all the way to tanks in WW1 and WW2, in Tigers and Pattons and Challengers, they dream about fighting in those battlefields.

Bolos and Society

The Mark I, II, and III Bolos did not create the twenty-first-century period of "the Crazy Years" as Terra's old nation state system crumbled, nor did they cause World War III. They made both the Crazy Years and the War even more destructive, in a tactical sense, than they might otherwise have been, yet in a perverse way, they helped minimize the strategic destruction (the Mark IIIs deployed in defense of the Free City-State of Detroit in 2032, for example, intercepted and destroyed every ICBM and cruise missile launched at the city). Perhaps more to the point, it was the existence of a single Mark II Bolo which permitted Major Timothy Jackson and Renada Banner to restore security and democratic government to the Prometheus Enclave within what had been the United States of America in 2082, thus planting the seed which eventually became the Concordiat government of Earth.

Bolos were sent out to defend the first wave of colonization because FTL travel was by necessity expensive, and ton for ton sending a machine as capable as a brigade is more cost-effective than shipping said brigade with all its tanks, and soldiers, and logistics constraints, all crammed into a spaceship hull already packed with the essentials of setting up a colony.

Later, Bolos tend to be deployed in regimental teams to establish beachheads on contested worlds and force breakthroughs. In the interstellar scale, Bolos became the quintessential planet-based strategic asset, because literally nothing else could possibly survive in the probable nuclear battlefields of the future. They were the vanguard, defending where the Concordiat Navy's presence was weak, and the last line of defense for humanity's worlds.

Bolos were celebrated, but their nature as AI was almost universally feared. It is only much, much later that the Concordiat began to respect the Bolos as more than just war machines.

The story "Ghost of Resartus" showed that Bolos can choose to reject the assignment of a new commander. A squadron of Bolos were working as farming machines in a colony. The Concordiat did not remove their weapons. So you have these self-aware massive war machines, pulling a disc harrow in pairs, with multi-megaton firepower always at the ready.

The local farmers don't give no shits. They treat Bolos as like uncles home from the war.

Of course, it turned out that the reason the Bolos rejected being reassigned was that they believed the Enemy would be back, and they were right. The Enemy have been living underground, breeding, making weapons, waiting for decades just so they can and swarm up and try to take over the world when the defenders had grown lax.

But unfortunately for them, a Bolo does not get bored.

Other cybernetic and AI civilizations would probably see Bolos as not knights in shining durachrome but as slaves to mankind. Well-treated slaves, but nonetheless minds made only for war, made to die.

Bolos could probably respond with 'at least we are free from existential angst'. Bolos are happy at war and content at peace. And because they're just so goddamn big, and apart from the whole 'we can set planets aflame if we ever decide to go Skynet on you peeps', Bolos do not disturb human society. They become a part of it by remaining apart from it.

Concordiat High Command is very likely run with input from dedicated AIs, but Bolos themselves don't need much more than a data connection to enjoy cultural works. (also remember that Bolos were written decades before even the idea of the Internet)

So technically, they cannot go 'full Skynet'. Bolos can be stopped by other Bolos. By their very nature, Bolos are very resistant to hacking. And because the Concordiat understands the danger of putting so much power, so much temptation, into a commander's hands, their human chain of command is very carefully vetted.

The thing about ordering about someone smarter than you is how they can creatively fuck around while technically obeying the letter of your commands. Or they just send out an FTL message to Concordiat High Command and then the Navy comes along bringing entire Regiments of Bolos for some well-deserved teeth-kicking for some wannabe dictator.

It's somewhat ironic that Bolos can serve as their own political officers.

Bolos tend not to fight in local affairs. They're under Concordiat authority. The only stories in which they are made to turn towards local combatants rather than outside invaders is from surplus outdated Bolos that the Concordiat sells.

I receive the order to commence firing, and for the first time in my career history, I hesitate at that command. I have the Enemy in my sights, and yet I am aware with laser-exact precision what the firing of my 90cm Hellbore in close proximity to unarmored civilians would do The mountain pass is perhaps eighty meters wide at this point and walled in by sheer, basaltic slopes capped with snow and ice. Hellbores fire a "bolt" of fusing hydrogen at velocities approaching ten percent c. Within a thick atmosphere such as Izra'il's, the bolt's 30-million-degree core temperature dissipates as a shock wave that would kill or maim any unarmored individual within a radius of approximately two kilometers and would bring down the surrounding ice in a cataclysmic avalanche. Civilian casualties would be horrendous. I withhold my main battery fire, then, in order to allow the refugees to continue passing me on their way to the west. Instead, I launch four VLS missiles with CMSG warheads, vectoring them toward concentrations of Enemy armor and radiating communications assets east of the mountains. Each cluster-munitions warhead disintegrates above the target area, scattering a cloud of self-guiding force packages across broad, suddenly lethal footprints. As expected, the Enemy's armored units appear unaffected, but troops caught in the open, along with the buildings and light vehicles being utilized as C[sup]3[/sup] units, are shredded by bursts of high-velocity pellets fired like shotgun blasts from falling CM warheads. I target fifteen large, grounded transports scattered across the Area of Battle but elect not to destroy these, at least at this time. We as yet have little information on Kezdai psychology, but they seem close enough to humans in their actions and reactions that I assume they will fight harder knowing they have no escape. Humans refer to it as "fighting like cornered rats," a vivid metaphor despite the fact that I can only assume that a "rat" is a creature possessed of cowardly traits yet which can, in desperation, display considerable strength, determination, or will to live. So long as the Enemy's troops know there is a means of escape waiting for them, they may be more cautious in their deployment and advance. Further, their transports provide a tactical lever in my own planning. By threatening their lines of retreat to their transports, we can force changes in the execution of their battle plan. For now, though, my own maneuvering is circumscribed by my orders. I advise the Command Center that I cannot fire my Hellbore at this time and begin targeting the Enemy's armor with VLS-launched cluster munitions.

"Bolo HNK," Martin said, speaking into the comset pick-up. "Hold position, as ordered. Can you target the enemy with your Hellbore?" "Affirmative." Was there just a trace of bitterness in that one-word response? Anger? Or was it his imagination? There was a long hesitation. "Command, I must refuse the order to fire my Hellbore at this time. Request permission to move forward ten kilometers, where I will not be responsible for heavy civilian casualties." Martin blinked, drew in a sharp breath, then let it out again slowly. "Negative. Hold position." He studied the QDC readouts again. "Damn..." "What is it, my friend?" "I'm not quite sure," he said, frowning. Both Hank and Andrew were operating at a considerably higher level of mentation than could be expected of Mark XXIVs. "The way they're talking, I could swear they're Mark XXXs." "What do you mean?" "Well ... we don't have time here for a dissertation on Bolo evolution. In extremely simple terms, Bolos became generally self-aware, possessing roughly human-equivalent intelligence, with the introduction of the Mark XX and psychotronic circuitry in the late 2700s. Succeeding marks have grown more intelligent, more human in their reasoning abilities and – importantly – in their speech patterns over the next few centuries, though their abilities were restricted by inhibitory software aimed at preventing a 'rogue Bolo' from turning on its owners. Okay so far?" Khalid nodded. "I understand. The early models couldn't do a thing without direct orders from their human commanders." "Right. Now, Mark XXIVs, like Hank and Andrew, were the first truly autonomous self-aware machines. The latest models, like the Mark XXX ... well, if you talk to them by comm, the only way you can tell they're not human is by the fact that their speech tended to be a bit more formal, a bit more erudite than that of people. They're fully Turing capable."

It's only later during the all-out war against the Melconian that this command chain breaks down. Bolos can refuse to fire on general ethical guidelines against harming civilians. They can pressured to with repeated orders. They might also choose to take the Omega Worm and fuck your face with precisely directed hellfire before they die. Specially if their commander chooses to disagree with the orders.

Bolo commanders have a certain... latitude... that allows them to help their Bolos not freeze up on getting fucktarded orders from REMFs.

Bolos and Their Commanders

Bolos and their human commanders are always at risk of having unhealthy fixations on each other. Yes, Bolos can fall in love.

This is something that Concordiat High Command always needs to keep in mind. It's part of why they discontinued Bolo minds with 'female' personalities. Actually the only thing that's different is the voice, but humans have a tendency to treat their Bolos differently. And when your infantry crew for your scout Bolo starts calling her 'Mom' as an affectionate nickname, holy hell she will go suicidally berserk when her beloved children die.

Linda Evans knows how to write a female Bolo I search all compartments within reach of my interior armatures. I discover manifest isted medications, sterile injection units, plasma-bandages, antiseptic sprays, pre-prepared foods—and in a compartment inside the head, a compartment which is not listed in my official configuration manual, I find three non-listed sets of matched playing cards. I find another non-listed object, a small booklet of instructions which matches two of the card decks. I read the title aloud. “Canasta.” An astonishing chain of events follows that single word. An entire data bank I did not ealize existed opens up. It contains Experience Data! I am flooded with memories. They are jumbled. Bits and pieces of some are missing. Whole years are missing. But I begin to know who I used to be. I am Red. My children’s names return to me. I know who Douglas Hart is, who Banjo and Willum DeVries are. I grieve for them. I have halted my forward movement. I know Gunny and Eagle Talon Gunn and Crazy Fritz and Icicle . . . I recall their deaths. I recall them in two versions. One is brutal. One is detached and ess painful to recall. I examine this anomaly and discover the reason for it. I locate a worm virus. Willum tried to spare me pain. He was a good boy. It is not his fault he failed. I sit in he sunlight and grieve. A keening sound shrills through my vocal processor. Wind blows emptily across my hull. If grief is madness, then it is proper to condemn me. I sit motionless for a full 5.97 minutes and keen my misery to the empty wind and rock. I begin to think of Ish. My new Commander. My memory retains gaps. I do not recall the Experience of 6.07 years after my commissioning. But I recall enough. I recall midnight conversations in the privacy of the head, the only compartment on board which provides privacy. I recall the woman Ish loved and eventually married. I recall his whispered confession that he loved another besides her. I recall the sense of panic in my Responsibility circuitry and the search for a solution. My child cannot love me as a man loves the woman he is to marry. Ish must not stay with me. I speculate that Ish Matsuro has come to be my Commander once again because Space Force would want an investigating officer who is closely acquainted with my systems. Space Force does not know how Ish feels. Ish knows what I know. He remembers more than I remember. His pain will be greater. If he speaks with me again as the Red he recalls and loves, he will destroy his career trying to save me. I cannot allow this. He is my only surviving child. I will protect him. I rewrite Willum’s worm virus, deleting the lines of code which copied my Experience Data before erasure. This time, there will be no hope of restoring my personality. The Red Ish loves will die. In the distance, I see a Space Force flier settle to the ground. Ish emerges. I am ready. Goodbye, my son. I speak. Execute ‘Null-Null String.’ ”

Fuck that hack Kratman. Linda Evans did it first (a Bolo - a friggin TANK - that acts as a woman? How?!) and wrote two of the most emotional stories in the Boloverse: "Little Red Hen" and "Miles to Go". They're both in the book "Bolos the Triumphant".

So Bolo commanders are trained to take a very professional code of conduct. It's fine to treat your Bolos as your very best friend. They will never betray you. Show off the Bolo to your family and children. Bolos love children and being shown just what and why they defend humanity. It also helps mitigate the fear and separation between the outside Concordiat military and the local civilians.

Bolo minds are shaped by the personalities of their commanders as much as they also train their commanders to look outside the box in turn. Theirs is a great partnership, because humans are capable of intuitive leaps and illogic that the perfectly logical Bolo mind often overlooks.

So, for hundreds of years, Bolos were the stabilizing influence on Concordiat society. If you send out Bolos to die, the least they are owed by humanity is for their commanders to die with them. They are a powerful symbol, worth much more than just what their guns bring to the table.

The Bolos did not really change the fundamental truth that humanity’s survival depended, both for better and for worse, upon its weapons technology. What did change was the fact that, in the Bolo, humanity had, in a sense, developed a weapon system which was better than humanity itself was. Better at making war, better at destroying enemies (including, at various times, other human enemies), better at defending its creators, and, arguably, better in living up to the ideals humanity espoused.

And then in the advent of the Final War, the Concordiat invented the mind-machine interface that allows Bolo brains and their human commanders to become as one. And that was a whole new frontier of fucked-upedness.

Bolo Firepower

The Bolo's killiness on the battlefield is based upon three critical Concordiat technologies: 1) the battlescreen 2) the durachrome/flintsteel/composite armor 3) the hellbore

1) Bolo Duralloy

Bolo Mk I was pretty just an Abrams with some AA/AM gatlings strapped on. Bolos really became their own distinct platform upon the discovery of durachome.

The first true Bolo (the Mark II) was a 150-ton MBT with two 2cm railguns on its side and a durachrome hull. It is an exceptionally hard metal that is proofed against everything but a 150mm APDS shot at 90 degrees or a close nuclear detonation. It is effectively immune to anything less. The MK III was a rolling pyramidal mobile pillbox of death with a rudimentary programmed AI operating of premade battle plans. Markee was astonishingly hard to kill.

She took artillery fire. Landslides. Missile attack. She was buried in lava. She had no intelligence to speak of, only operating on premade battle plans and voice-activated commands. She broke out after being buried for [i]decades[/i] in hardened volcanic rock and smote an army of cannibal cultists. (She also had a porn star's voice.)

Bolos are stubborness personified. They are knights in endurachrome.

Bolos are made with enough armor to take a hit from their own main guns. It can't take multiple hits to the same area, but it's enough for fighting on the move. Bolo warhulls are made with multiple layers, with reflective anti-beam and ablative anti-plasma coating. Now they are effectively immune to everything except Bolo weapons or contact nuclear detonations.

But armor has its own penalties. No amount of armor can really make you immune to enemy fire, since heavier armor makes you slower and an easier target. An enemy could just deploy a weapon of sufficient strength from prepared positions to render your armor cost-ineffective.

This is where the battlescreen comes in.

2) Bolo Battlescreen

The battlescreen defines the Bolo as much as the hellbore does. It is the very thing that tilts the development of defensive tech over offensive technology.

The battlescreen is fully the 'monopermeable anti-kinetic battlescreen'. It works via shredding any matter that strikes it into subatomic plasma. Mass is what matters, not velocity. Bullets and such just explode into harmless radiant heat and light. But obviously, this means that massless energy weapons go through.

Lasers (in all bands of the spectrum) however are defeated by the second property of the battlescreen, its conversion field. What it does is to sap from 50% of the energy to create turbulent currents that it can then use to power its own capacitors. There are stories of Bolos with their reactors already slagged but still able to shoot back simply because the enemy kept shooting at it and therefore allowing it to power up its weapons from the damage it was receiving!

What's striking about the battlescreen is that it cannot be depleted by multiple tiny hits. It's not your generic scifi bubble shield. It treats each hit as a discrete event, so it doesn't matter if you hit it once or a thousand times - all those tiny impact events are shredded equally into a wash of harmless diffuse plasma on the warhull.

The battlescreen can be extended or contracted, it can be set to lightly sting with electricity or set everything within its field on fire. They rip apart missiles that get past the Infinite Repeaters before they can detonate. This is why anti-Bolo missiles are tandem fusion shaped charge warheads.

3) Bolo Hellbores

Many prior Bolo marks have only one main gun. This is because a bigger gun works better than multiple smaller guns. This is in part for how a Bolo is the most reliable way of destroying another Bolo. So the main gun had better stand a good shot of defeating their own defenses in repeated hits.

With the adoption of the first Hellbore in the Mark XIV, Bolo designers actually began placing the equivalent of current-generation capital starship main battery weapons—and armor intended to resist them—in what could no longer be considered mere “tanks.”

Hellbores fire a laser-initiated fusion beam at .7c. It kills not with heat (though it produces tremendous thermal transfer as a side-effect), but with kinetic energy. And since hellbore bolts are already subatomic plasma, battlescreens can only do so much to mitigate the damage. They can only do so through deflection, making the battlescreen act like a shield to blunt and divert the hit.

This is why Bolos tend to go with one more powerful main gun rather than two smaller guns. It doesn't matter if two 110cm Hellbores have the combined firepower of (2.75 x 2) 5.5 Megatons on target when a single 200cm 5 MT/sec Hellbore will punch deeper and more reliably and from further away.

The Mk XXXIII's three 200cm Hellbores are deemed 'equivalent to the main battery of a Concordiat Battlecruiser." This means 15 MT/sec precisely on target with a refire rate of about 4 seconds. But they also have a sustained fire mode of 78 shots/min or about 1 Megaton-range bolt every .8 seconds. When the VLS cells are depleted, this can be used for glassing all around the Bolo.

Hellbore ranges are all over the place. We do know that at the very least, Hellbore fire is effective past high orbit. Which is 35,000 kilometers straight up.

4) Other Armament

Bolo main armament consists of not just their Hellbores, but also large-bore Howitzers and Mortars that allows indirect fire capability. A Hellbore could punch through a mountain, but why not just lob shells over it? Artillery may be less accurate than missiles, but they can pack a larger bursting charge. For targets without a battlescreen, nuke-tipped 240cm howitzer fire would be no less damaging than a Hellbore strike. Rapid-fire 40cm mortars are equivalent to 15.75" battleship shells.

Bolos are also known for their 'Infinite Repeaters', which are used in anti-air and anti-missile defense with limited anti-armor capability. From railguns to lasers, to ion-bolt particle beam guns, finally to 20cm Hellbores capable of outputting .5 megatons/second at peak charge, Bolos are absurdly good at point defense. Melcon land-based missiles accelerate at mach 50 and are fired in the thousands to overwhelm Bolo defenses. A single Bolo can pare down these thousands to a dozen that might get through.

And like today, it comes hand in hand that being very good at defeating missiles helps being very good at manufacturing missiles that stand a shot of penetrating said defenses. Bolo VLS cells pack a variety of smart munitions from cluster to fusion-tipped. The main weapon of the Concordiat Navy is not the Hellbore, but even longer-ranged missile attacks guided with FTL sensors.

In addition to infinite repeaters, Bolos have small last-ditch point-defense anti-infantry railguns. They fire hypersonic flechettes. Late-mark Bolos also have various drones for recon and fire support. They are stealthy and on occasion launched into orbit for satellite overwatch.

Bolo Classes

There used to be different classes of Bolo, pertaining to Scout, Standard, and Siege roles, but they usually fold into a general hull in the next mark. This echoes the transition of tank hullls into the MBT platform. Later Bolo generations are bigger, heavier, and yet faster.

They stopped making Scout Bolos with infantry for being too fragile to last, the whole 'unhealthy attachment' thing, and dismounted infantry itself ceasing to be of any significant factor in battlefields where Bolos need to fight (i.e., inside a nuclear fireball). Dumb vehicles are better for recon. Force recon is just a Bolo with orders to seek out and shoot at its own discretion.

Bolos can scout and fight by themselves. The most technologically advanced Bolo is faster than anything, can outshoot anything, can lay waste to planets, and can fucking fly. Bolo Mk XXXIIIs are the last true Bolos built by the Concordiat. Bolo Prime on Luna, and Earth itself, were blotted out by Melconian world-burners soon after. Bolo SHIVA is explicitly the very last Bolo to come out of the assembly line. They are the Planetary Siege Units.

The Bolo XXXIV

There are post-Final War XXXIVs, but they are different and made from plans included in the Seedcorn Colony computers. It is probable that there are many different XXXIVs with different loadouts depending on what each successor society deems the best next step to the venerable XXXIII.

Actual Concordiat Bolo XXXIVs are modified XXXIII warhulls. They sacrifice the entire 240cm howitzer battery, some heavy VLS cells and a 200cm Hellbore turret to free up the room to mount two 60-meter long Hellrails, each firing 90 megatons per bolt with a refire rate of about one minute. They cannot be depressed enough to hit ground targets not because of the risk of damage, but just from the simple geometry of where they're located. But get a Bolo's ass up enough against an incline, they can be shot at things on the ground.

They are orbital denial platforms. What's significant about them was that they seem to be a stopgap measure while the Concordiat Navy is busy fighting the Melconians. They are not more powerful than an XXXIII - its three faster-cycling 200cm Hellbores are made to chew up anything it can reach.

"So what do you think of the new Mark XXXIVs?" Kiel asked. "I am not fully briefed on their exact specifications," Kal said. "But they appear to be quite capable." "And their firepower?" Kiel asked. "You know anything about that?" "Formidable," Kal said simply. Kiel knew, from his briefing with Veck, what the specs were on the XXXIV's Hellrails, but he wanted to know what Kal knew. "Give me your best guess on what the Hellrails can do?" "My limited understanding," Kal said, "puts the firepower of the Hellrails at 90 megatons per second, and a firing rate of one to one-point-two minutes per rail, depending on the thermal coupling from the plasma, the cooling mix used, and the exact efficiency of the cooling system." "Impressive," Kiel said. He was surprised that even though Kal had never seen a Hellrail fired, Kal had hit the specs that Major Veck had shown him earlier exactly. "What did you base your answer on?" Kiel asked. "On the thermal imaging of the weapon and the configuration and dimensions of the external casing," Kal said. "Okay, I'm impressed," Kiel said. "From my short briefing on the weapons, you hit it on the money."

Hellrails do not sound like simple railguns to me. It takes shitloads of KE to turn a slug into 90 megatons on target. A 10-ton slug would need to go .028 of c, while a 100-ton slug only needs to go .009% of the speed of light. From a sixty-meter rail. Why would a solid slug still have a 'per second' qualifier?

The post-Final War XXXIV, specifically the ones made by the Indrani Republic, are based off the plans sent with the Seedcorn colonies trying to escape from both human and Melcon space just so the species doesn't become extinct. Both Human and Melcon sent such last-ditch colonies. Most of them died, hunted down or preyed upon by other alien civilizations.

Ironically, the strongest new civilizations that arose after the War were Human-Melcon coalitions with peace brokered by Bolos unwilling to murder any more. It is, strictly speaking, a concordiat.

By bluepencil at Sufficien Velocity

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asktheadeptus · 8 years ago

Text

Standard Template Construct (STC)

A Standard Template Construct (STC) system was an advanced, artificially intelligent computer created during the Dark Age of Technology said to have contained the sum total of human scientific and technological knowledge. The STC was invented when human interstellar civilization was at its technological peak. Introduced during the Dark Age of Technology before the Age of Strife, an STC allowed workers to build anything from a Lasgun to a fortified bunker or the fearsome interstellar warships now used by the Imperial Navy. STC systems possessed the ability not just to store information but also to produce new designs to meet changing circumstances. Examples of STC technology still in use are the Rhino Armoured Personnel Carrier, the Land Raider and the Baneblade. Imperial forces (especially those of the Adeptus Mechanicus) will go to any length to recover a lost or stolen STC, even if it means the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Imperial citizens. It is said that even the flimsiest rumors of an STC system will spark cross-galaxy journeys, titanic fleet search operations, and the spending of untold lives and treasure. An STC system was possessed by every group of human interstellar colonists before the Age of Strife, allowing them to build all of the equipment necessary for survival on an untamed colony planet. During the Age of Strife the systems fell into disuse, were damaged or destroyed, and so became increasingly rare, until they were lost entirely. In the Age of the Imperium, after so many thousands of solar years, it is unlikely that any have survived. What technological knowledge remains from the Dark Age of Technology survives only in the form of STC hard-copies that have been preserved and copied over thousands of standard years by the Tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus, who believe that STCs are the most holy of artifacts, gifts to Mankind from the Machine God.

History

The Age of the Imperium is not a technically-inclined era in human history. It is an age where problems are solved by brute force and ignorance, where dangers are either too gross or too unthinkable to elicit any other response. Little, if any, technological innovation and invention exists in the Imperium, and those that come into contact with technology use it with reservations and a reverence that is almost religious. The Space Marines, for example, treat their equipment and armour as if it were imbued with a will of its own -- a fine chest-plate, well looked after and constantly maintained, may reward its wearer by saving his life; whereas a Space Marine who neglects his equipment may be struck down by a leaking suit or malfunctioning weapon. Such is the will of the Emperor.

Much of the technology used by the Imperium of Man is recovered from Standard Template Constructs, or STCs. These databases were designed during the Dark Age of Technology for use by human settlers establishing colonies on newly discovered planets. Their prime function was to enable the colonists to construct shelters, power generators and transports without prior knowledge. Some Imperial historians have theorized that the scientists of the Age of Technology somehow foresaw the coming of the Age of Strife, and created the STCs to ensure that their knowledge would not be lost to future generations. The designs contained within an STC were intended to be able to cope with anything -- by the standards of their day they were rough and ready, big and brutish, hard to damage and easy to repair. During the Age of Strife human civilization reverted to barbarism, and almost all of the technological innovations of the previous millennia were lost or destroyed. All that survived from before that terrible time were debased and corrupted versions of the old STC designs, scattered and lost on thousands of back-water planets across the galaxy. These databases contain lost knowledge from the Dark Age of Technology, and the Adeptus Mechanicus make it their business to find them -- the STCs are their equivalent of the most sacred of holy texts, a font of all knowledge, a quest for the holy grail.

Design

The STC was an advanced, artificially intelligent computer data storage and fabrication system designed to provide construction details for human colonists during Mankind's early interstellar expansion across the Milky Way Galaxy before the massive Warp Storms of the Age of Strife brought an end to all interstellar travel and communication for several millennia. Each group of colonists carried such a system with them when they embarked for their new homes. It enabled the colonists to build efficient shelters, generators and transports without any technical knowledge and using almost any locally available materials. The user simply asked how to build a house or a tractor and the computer supplied all the necessary plans in the form of holographic schematics. The rare complete STC Library is said to contain the total sum of all knowledge possessed by the great human interstellar civilization that existed before the onset of the Age of Strife. But as the technological level needed by the majority of the human population at that time was simple, most STC systems were for producing relatively unsophisticated technology like threshing machines and simple transport aircraft, not Warp energy taps or holographic field emitters. Very few examples of STC schematics for the more advanced devices have been found. The STC systems themselves worked by providing in a hololithic format the full schematics for a machine, device or vehicle according to the given needs of the user. This resulted in the production of some extremely sturdy, functional designs still found throughout the Imperium. Since no confirmed reports of a fully functional STC Library have been made since the Dark Age of Technology, the full nature and contents of the STC -- and what technological secrets and wonders it may contain --remains unknown.

STCs in the Age of the Imperium

Although the most advanced technological information eludes the Adeptus Mechanicus in the Age of the Imperium, through their efforts, much has been either recovered or reconstructed through the comparison of copies of STC databases already held by the Tech-priests of Mars. Recovered STC data eventually lead to the ability of the Imperium to construct such mighty vehicles as the Land Raider, and rediscovered STC designs serve as the basis for all other Imperial technological advancement.

While the STC would prove to be the crown jewel of human technological achievement, they would also lead to the loss of that same knowledge. The Men of Iron, artificially intelligent (AI) constructs created by humans to fight their wars and carry out tasks that might otherwise risk a human life, eventually turned on their masters. This machine rebellion sparked a major war with humanity that would see much of the advanced interstellar human civilization that flourished during the Dark Age of Technology destroyed and lost. This war occurred early in what was later named the Age of Strife, though it is unclear whether it came before or after the cataclysmic Warp Storms that destroyed the earliest interstellar human empires.

After Mankind's downfall and the following years of deep technological neglect and regression, it became very rare for an intact STC database to be found. Only through the recovery of the ancient print-outs from the full STC systems has Mankind scraped together much of its knowledge and its current understanding of advanced Dark Age technology.

Known STC data in use by the Imperium at present has created the ubiquitous Land Speeder, the Thunderhawk gunship and the Land Raider of the Adeptus Astartes, along with Lasguns, starship components and most of the other advanced technologies of the late 41st Millennium. Perhaps the most important fragments of any STC led to the creation of the Land Crawler, a farming and utility vehicle that has kept the worlds of the Imperium fed since its earliest days.

STC Discovery Incidents

Unknown Date.M30 - Technoarchaeologist Arkhan Land led an expedition into the Librarius Omnis of Mars. Within, he rediscovered the STC hard-copy templates for the Land Raider and Land Crawler. He also discovered the templates for rare anti-gravitic plates as well as recorded theories of their use. These would later be used in the development of the Land Speeder.

Unknown Date.M30 - The STC designs for the Baal Predator were discovered on the planet of Atium III amidst the ruins of the Arch-Heretek Lord de Ladt's fortress by the Blood Angels Space Marine Legion. The Blood Angels never handed the designs over to the Mechanicum as Imperial law required and instead returned with them to their homeworld of Baal, where the original database remains to this day.

Unknown Date.M31 - Just before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy the Warmaster Horus encountered a technologically advanced human faction known as the Auretian Technocracy who still possessed some amount of Standard Template Construct-derived technologies. Having been corrupted by Chaos by this time, Horus declared war on them. After a brutal conflict, Horus gifted the recovered STC technology to the Fabricator-General of Mars in return for the assistance of what became the Dark Mechanicum in his war against the Emperor of Mankind, but no more has been heard of it since then. It is possible the recovered technology is still on Mars, hidden away and hoarded by the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Unknown Date.M36 - The STC schematic for the Centurion was unearthed in the aftermath of the Age of Apostasy and, once sanctioned by the Adeptus Mechanicus, the vehicles produced from it found their way into the armouries of almost every Space Marine Chapter.

Unknown Date.M36 - The STC templates for cybernetic combat suits known as the XV Bellam Ravager and Thermae Missile Suit were discovered by the Adeptus Mechanicus, but proved too difficult to reproduce.

322 - 384.M39 - STC fragments called the "Aegis Data Fragments" were discovered in the Calixis Sector during the Adranitian phase of the Angevin Crusade. They contain a few new small arms patterns, systems schematics and Augury interfaces. Known schematics within these fragments included the Minerva-Aegis Las Carbine, Aegis Anbaric Shock Blaster Pistol, and the Sollex-Aegis Energy Blade.

Unknown Date.M39 - The STC template for the Omega Pattern Plasma Blastgun was discovered by Explorator Magos Valistle Hum'nal.

Unknown Date.M40 - The STC template for improved jet engines was discovered by the Dark Angels while hunting a suspected Fallen Angel known as Baelor the Imposter in the Nephilim Sector. Designated the "Lionheart Engine," the technology was used to modify older aircraft designs and the end product was an agile aircraft with improved speed called the Nephilim Jetfighter. This vehicle is still exclusive to the Dark Angels and their Unforgiven Successor Chapters. The Dark Angels also possess an STC database containing the designs for weapons known as Rift Bombs that can cause fluctuations in space and time. When faced with an inquiry by the Adeptus Mechanicus amid allegations that the Chapter had illegally hoarded lost technology in contravention of Imperial law that requires all recovered technology to be handed over to the Mechanicus, the Dark Angels adamantly denied possessing STC databases of any kind.

Unknown Date.M41 - An STC database template for a Combat Knife was discovered by two Imperial Guard scouts that proved "sharper and lighter and tougher" than previous designs. They were hailed as heroes by the Imperium for this discovery, and were each rewarded with being raised to the Imperial nobility and made Planetary Governors. The new Combat Knife design was adopted by 30 Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes.

Unknown Date.M41 - A large STC Library was located on the planet Hito. This planet had escaped from the Warp and was reclaimed by the Imperium. The library was hidden by the local clerical Order of Heavenly Virtues who managed to deceive Imperial agents as to the library's existence to keep its secrets out of the Imperium's hands.

Unknown Date.M41 - A rare STC template known as "Panacea," containing the cures for several types of common diseases and toxins, was unearthed by the Forge World Verdigris IX. Despite the Verdigris Mechanicus' best efforts to protect it, it was stolen by a Dark Eldar named Aurelia Mlys and her Kabal during the Panacea Wars.

755 - 778.M41 - An STC template was found by Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt on the world of Menazoid Epsilon during the Sabbat Worlds Crusade. The full abilities of the device were never made clear, but it is known that the device could make the actual objects (constructs) corresponding to a standard template, rather than producing just the designs. In this case, it made the legendary "Men of Iron"; robotic soldiery that were considered heretical in the Imperium because they possessed true artificial intelligence, but it is possible that the STC Constructor also held and/or could create other STC designs. However, the device had been tainted by Chaos and the robots it produced were misshapen monstrosities that attacked humans on sight. To prevent the use of these robots, Gaunt destroyed the device.

998.M41 - An artefact called the Omnicopaeia was sought after by Magos Delphan Gruss. This device was believed to be a data storage mechanism that contained every STC schematic created during the Dark Age of Technology. Its existence became known after Delphan Gruss examined numerous STC legends; he has since devoted his life to finding the artefact. In 998.M41, rumors erupted across the Imperium that the Omnicopaeia lay on the Daemon World of Hell's Teeth in the Maelstrom. Due to the immeasurable value of the device, the Adeptus Mechanicus mobilised billions of Skitarii for the reclamation operation.

999.M41 - An original STC template for a new Battle Titan, a so-called Castigator-class autonomous bipedal weapons platform, created for fire support and siege operations, was discovered on the planet Chaeroneia by a team of Grey Knights led by Justicar Alaric investigating that long-overrun Imperial Forge World . It was much larger than an Imperator-class Emperor Titan and made use of superior technology. The STC was also discovered on that world, but was unfortunately destroyed by the Grey Knights to prevent it from being stolen by the Forces of Chaos.

Source: http://warhammer40k.wikia.com

#horus heresy #warhammer 40k #adeptus mechanicus #adeptus sororitas #adeptus arbites #adeptus astartes #adeptus custodes #Adeptus Astra Telepathica #astra militarum #officio assassinorum

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nxycult · 8 years ago

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Goldana Fonts from Seventh Imperium

Goldana, a multi layered type collection with Art Deco inspired sans and script fonts published by foundry Seventh Imperium.

Designed by Cucu Supriyadi of foundry Seventh Imperium, Goldana is a multiple classification font family that includes 24 styles. The different layered sans and script typefaces are inspired by the elegance of Art Deco and good old signage of the 1920s and 1930s. The…

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a GDC talk on 'the aesthetics of cute', the hidden story of TOSE, & the return to car wrecking of key Burnout developers.

Another interesting week of longer-form 'things', and I've been ruminating a bit on how these videos and articles intersect in weird but neat ways with 'breaking news' or 'hottest games'. Seems like you'll get at least _some_ bleed-through - for example, this week we have Battlegrounds, Signal From Tolva & Night In The Woods again, all of which are newish or interesting releases.

But many of these pieces are evergreen & exist separately of the 'hot reactions' grind. Which is good. Exist too close to the 24-hour hype cycle, and you'll miss trends and more thoughtful takes like some of these good folks. VGDC aims to reverse that. We hope you think we do a good job.

- Simon, curator.]

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Guild Wars 2’s art style passes from father to son (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "Recently I had the chance to talk to ArenaNet (and thus Guild Wars 2) art director Horia Dociu about his work at the studio. One of the interesting things about his promotion to the role is that he succeeds his father, Daniel."

We’ve been missing a big part of game industry’s digital revolution (Kyle Orland / Ars Technica) "Last year, the Entertainment Software Association's annual "Essential Facts" report suggested that the US game industry generated $16.5 billion in "content" sales annually (excluding hardware and accessories). In this year's report, that number had grown to a whopping $24.5 billion, a nearly 50-percent increase in a span of 12 months. No, video games didn't actually become half again as popular with Americans over the course of 2016. Instead, tracking firm NPD simply updated the way it counts the still-shadowy world of digital game sales."

Warren Spector believes games 'need to be asking bigger questions' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Gamasutra sat down with Spector at GDC last month to catch up on how the process is going, roughly a year into his full-time gig at OtherSide. It was an interesting conversation, especially if you're at all interested in where games are at these days, where they came from, and what sorts of stories they're best at telling."

A Rare Look Inside Nintendo (Otaku / Game Escape / YouTube) "This clip is an excerpt from the French documentary film "Otaku" by director Jean-Jacques Beineix from 1994. It appeared dubbed on German TV some time later, which is the version you are seeing here. It has, to my knowledge, never been released in English. The subtitles are my own. Content is the intellectual property of the original rights holders."

An Interview With One of Those Hackers Screwing With Your 'Black Ops 2' Games(Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "He's not there to ruin your stats. He's there to sell you software that'll let you launch a DDOS attack from your Xbox 360. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is crazy - modded Xbox 360s that find other player's IP addresses and can DDOS them?! I had no idea.]"

Put a Face on It: The Aesthetics of Cute (Jenny Jiao Hsia / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Hexecutable's Jenny Jiao Hsia explains why cuteness as an aesthetic may be worth exploring for developers who want to push against current trends in game design."

Proc. Gen. and Pleasant Land | Sir You Are Being Hunted (Robert Seddon / Heterotopias) "It was a perfect rustic idyll, in its way. Perfectly lovely, nestled between the grassy fields. Perfectly quiet, as only dead places can be. Perfectly still, because a player careless enough to create a disturbance might attract the robotic hunters. Big Robot’s Sir You Are Being Hunted had, through the digital governance of its landscape generation algorithms, somehow perfected the British countryside."

How video games were made - part 3: Marketing and Business (Strafefox / YouTube) "In this final chapter we cover the business side and marketing of 8 and 16 bit games. [SIMON'S NOTE: Lots of archival footage in here & SO much work cutting it all together - and the other entries in the 'how video games were made' series look pretty good too!]"

Video Games Are Better Without Stories (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic) "A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. [SIMON'S NOTE: lots of responses to this all over the Internet - here's a couple of good ones from the Waypoint folks.]"

'Burnout' Series Creator Talks Remaking Crash Mode for 'Danger Zone' (John Davison / Glixel) "Spend longer than a few minutes talking with fans of driving games about which series they'd love to see revived, and invariably someone will bring up Criterion's Burnout. Unlike contemporaries that were leaning harder into realism and officially-licensed cars as a response to games like Gran Turismo, the first Burnout – released by Acclaim for PlayStation 2 in 2001 – was unapologetically action-focused."

Famitsu Special Report – The Mystery of TOSE (Famitsu / One Million Power) "This is the real story behind TOSE: The game development company that’s been making games for nearly 38 years (since 1979), but hardly any gamers know. [SIMON'S NOTE: Brandon Sheffield covered TOSE for Gamasutra back in 2006, but by and large, they've been PRETTY vague about what they work on - which is fascinating.]"

How Three Kids With No Experience Beat Square And Translated Final Fantasy V Into English (Jason Schreier / Kotaku) "One day in the late 1990s, Myria walked into the Irvine High School computer room and spotted a boy playing Final Fantasy V. There were two unusual things about this. The first was that Final Fantasy V had not actually come out in the United States."

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

Designing the giant battle royale maps of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (Alan Bradley / Gamasutra) "For Brendan "Playerunknown" Greene, the creator of Battlegrounds, the vision for his game world was born from extensive experience creating and manipulating environments that direct players to play his games the way he intends them to be played."

All We Have Is Words (Matthew Burns / Magical Wasteland) "Sometimes I give the impression of knowing Japanese, but I really don’t. I have no claim to it. I never made a real study of the language, I don’t know kanji and thus can’t read at all, and even in speech I can’t exchange more than pleasantries or the most rudimentary logistical information. [SIMON'S NOTE: I believe this is a subtle 'subtweet'-style article response to the recent Persona 5 translation furore? Maybe?]"

Changing the Game: What's Next for Anita Sarkeesian (Laura A. Parker / Glixel) "Anita Sarkeesian’s talk at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco falls at an unfortunate time: 10am on the last day of the conference – a Friday. Most attendees – a mix of indie programmers, mainstream publishing teams and media – are still bleary eyed from the night before. And yet, at five-to-ten, the small room on the third floor of the Moscone Convention Center is standing-room only."

The quest to crack and preserve vintage Apple II software (Leigh Alexander and Iain Chambers / The Guardian Podcast) "Why has the quest to hack old Apple II software become the best hope we have of preserving a part of our cultural history? How do these floppy discs – still turning up in their box-loads – shine a light on the educational philosophies of the 80s? And do a new generation of gamers risk losing whole days of their lives by playing these compelling retro games in their browsers?"

Video Games Help Model Brain’s Neurons (Nick Wingfield / New York Times) "Since November, thousands of people have played the game, “Mozak,” which uses common tricks of the medium — points, leveling up and leader boards that publicly rank the performance of players — to crowdsource the creation of three-dimensional models of neurons."

Longtime 'Star Citizen' Backers Want Its New Referral Contest to Die in a Black Hole (Leif Johnson / Motherboard) "Developers of multiplayer video games often host referral programs encouraging existing players to recruit their friends for a boost in cash flow, and in that regard, the new referral contest from Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games isn't much out of the ordinary. The same can't be said of the reactions from the players themselves."

Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World (Jung-Sheng Lin / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, IGDShare's Jung-Sheng Lin discusses a wide variety of possible issues that can arise when undertaking Chinese localization for your game. These problems include grappling simplified vs. traditional Chinese, naming problems, UI & fonts, and China-specific policies that may relate to localization, political implications, and more."

Good Game/Tech/History Youtubers (Phoe / Medium) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this got birthed after a conversation I had with Phoe in the Video Game History Foundation Discord chat - he watches a lot of good retro/interesting YouTube, and there's a number of recommendations in here I was unaware of!]

Red Bull TV - Screenland (Red Bull TV) "Plug into the fresh stories within the world of video games and game design. The personal tales, wild new developments, and unexpected genres shed new light on what gaming means in the world now and what it could mean in the future. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is an entire _season_ of gaming documentaries, including with Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation), UK cult classic Knightmare, and lots more.]"

Tim Schafer tells the story of Amnesia Fortnight (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "“I started feeling a little bogged down by the scope of [Brutal Legend],” says Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine. “It was really huge and I felt like the team had been doing it for a long time and had a long way to go yet. I felt like they needed a break.” That break was Amnesia Fortnight, a two week game jam during which anyone at the developer can pitch an idea and, if it’s selected, lead a team to turn it from concept to working prototype."

The Signal From Tolva: The Best Game Ever (Matt Lees / Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "New video! Matt dives into a spooky robot world, to talk about some of the cool design aspects of The Signal From Tölva. [SIMON'S NOTE: Can't emphasize enough that Cool Ghosts has some of the best game criticism on YouTube. Please patronize them! (On Patreon, not by talking down to them.)"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to [email protected]. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

#IFTTT #Blogger

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lulu2992 · 1 year ago

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Decoding the scripts and secret messages in Rebel Moon

Part 3: Figuring out the Old Imperium script

To try to decode the entire alphabet, I studied the Scribes and Priests’ outfits, Noble’s Bone Staff, but also and mostly the inscription on Kora’s gun, which we know means “My life for hers”:

As I’ve said before, it appears this script uses what resembles opening square brackets as spaces/word separators, but there are three other things we can notice. Firstly, all letters basically consist of either one (I), two (II), or three (III) vertical lines. Secondly, vowels and consonants look different: consonants are just lines while vowels have a rounded shape at their top or bottom. They almost look like either a P or lowercase b with up to two additional (vertical) lines.

The third thing we can observe is that, in each consonant, there is a smaller, horizontal line, and I realized this little line could be located at seven possible heights:

As I was trying to figure out which symbol was which letter, a clear pattern started to appear. It seems Old Imperium follows a logical progression: the first 2 vowels and the first 7 consonants in the alphabet have one vertical line, the next 2 vowels and 7 consonants have two, etc. As for the small horizontal line on consonants, it just gets lower and lower as you move from letter to letter in each “group”. So here is, I believe and if I’m not mistaken, how the script works:

In theory, there’s room for another consonant, “III-7”, after Z, but I don’t know if this symbol exists in the alphabet; I haven’t encountered it.

Below is the part of the bone staff that says “a rocking cradle”. It’s very blurry (sorry, the image is so small), but the logic seems to work!

I found the symbol for double letters on the Scribes and Priests’ clothes (under the 5th letter in the image below). As for the other symbol, it seems to be a question mark on Noble’s Bone Staff (the semicolon looks different there, but I can’t see it very well) and either a semicolon or a period on the outfits, so I’m not sure what it represents. I don’t know if my drawings are 100% accurate either, but this is what I see in the pictures.

Part 4 will be dedicated to the Priests and Scribes because they have a hidden message on them too! Using what I’ve just explained in this post, can you already guess what the 9-letter word above is? Fun fact: either I made a mistake... or they did.

#if they did misspell the word I kind of feel bad for noticing that :’)#but if they didn’t I really don’t understand why the letter looks like that #rebel moon #rebel moon part one a child of fire #a child of fire #zack snyder #old imperium #old imperium font #x/twitter update: people are still cool #but here you get to have the colored text

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lulu2992 · 1 year ago

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Decoding the scripts and secret messages in Rebel Moon

Part 4: The hidden message on the Priests and Scribes’ outfits

In this final part, I will be using pictures from Gizmodo, Bleeding Cool, Insider, and Home Grown Radio.

After I noticed that the red robes worn by the Scribes and the Priests in the movie were adorned with golden letters from the Old Imperium script, I looked for more pictures of them to help me understand how the alphabet worked, but also because they clearly formed words and I wanted to decode that too!

I said in my previous post that I believed they had made a mistake, and here’s why. When I tried to decode the sentence, I found this:

The underlined letters are doubled (and it’s precisely when I studied the robes that I understood this rule), but while “ALL” is definitely a word, “DISALLEAR” isn’t… As you will soon see, the letter P appears elsewhere on the outfit and looks exactly like what I expected it to (shape “II-5”) after figuring out how the alphabet worked, so I don’t understand why this one seems to be an L (shape “II-2”) instead. Either I’m wrong and double letters don’t work as I concluded they do, or it’s a typo.

In any case, after I had gathered a few pictures and decoded the letters (assuming the apparent double L was an inconsistency), I ended up with this:

If you’re a person of culture (which I’m apparently not; thanks, Google), you may have already recognized a quote from the second part of the famous German tragedy Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

All that must disappear Is but a parable; What lay beyond us, here All is made visible; Here deeds have understood Words they were darkened by; The Eternal Feminine Draws us on high.

The quote is also on their masks, where their mouth is, and on their hats:

Interestingly, on the former, the symbol we’ve seen used previously as a semicolon or a question mark is now a period. On the latter, many things look different: words are all fully spelled out, the symbol used for double letters simply seems to be part of the E, L, and S, capitalized letters are slightly taller than the others, spaces are actual spaces, and the opening brackets that usually symbolize them became other characters. It appears the font has gone through several alterations during the making of the movie, and I’m not certain which version is the “canon”, final one. In any case...

There is a secret text hidden on the outfits worn by the Scribes and Priests in Rebel Moon: a quote from Faust, Part Two by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about the Eternal Feminine.

And… I’m done! For now, at least; until The Scargiver comes out and (hopefully) gives me new secrets to decode. Thank you for reading :)

#rebel moon #rebel moon part one a child of fire #a child of fire #zack snyder #faust #goethe #johann wolfgang von goethe #the eternal feminine #old imperium #old imperium font #x/twitter update: not as many notifications today but still zero hate

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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- Simon, curator.]

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Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

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#IFTTT #Blogger

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

-------------------

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes

symbianosgames · 8 years ago

Link

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Night in the Woods is Important (HeavyEyed / YouTube) "An analysis of the recently released game - this video contains very minimal spoilers but watch at your own discretion.."

-------------------

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes