So make them interesting. Parts of walls can extrude monofiliament manipulators as sensors, cutting whips, or fractal manipulators. Most of the time they stay inside the walls (where they are protected, as well as extended if needed), but they shoot out if something not sending the correct alien recognition signals, image it, and then strike at the weakest points. Characters going down the hallway find themselves suddenly speared and held from all directions by a thousand ultra-thin strands, which then quickly dissect them alive. Guardbots that appear to have psi. They know where you will look and shoot, so they just go out of the way. Nanohives that build iridescent swarms that fill an installation. Most of the time they are harmless... except when they decide that someone should be stopped and suddenly act as an omnidrectional phased array laser. They have a particular aggression against anything carrying nuclear batteries. Defences that systematically evolve, borrowing ideas from the equipment characters have. Sure, they have never seen a plasma gun before and it breaches most defences initially. Half an hour later it tries to spread out magnetic fields that make the plasma miss. A bit later the defence bots (alien creatures looking like velvet worms covered with diamond hair) start shooting back with plasma weapons, as well as distribute little "mines" that can move bolts a bit - suddenly your accuracy goes down, while the enemy can shoot around corners. Meanwhile it has also been monitoring how quickly certain chemicals affect lost skin cells, figuring out a really good poison... Alien defenses should be alien. A good start is to look at all the weird things in biology - why not have them spit smart slime, do suicide explosions, jam certain kinds of equipment using chemical, ultrasound or electrical discharges, change temperatures drastically, imitate 'safe' objects until a sudden attack, control the bodies of transhumans, hide inside porous walls, be nearly perfectly transparent, be covered with ablative scales that themselves are small attack-bots, change between solid, liquid and gas freely, mimic the explorers perfectly, attack as a big swarm, play dead when suitable, make up a sizeable fraction of the structure that is being explored...

Just to add to the idea pile: Floors made of nanites or smart foam. You are detected to be an enemy and suddenly find yourself pulled through the floor and put into a form of suspended animation until a security team can come and detain you... Which will never happen because they left long ago (or perhaps, more interestingly, they will?). A sound burst is played that is debilitating to anyone who hears it... Or was to the alien species that built the place. As it stands, people with enhanced hearing just hear a kind of soft buzzing. Or perhaps it's not so harmless and forms resonance with important organs or components, and suddenly the PCs are hacking up blood or literally falling to pieces. Perhaps a sudden temperature increase that just keeps going until the inside of the area is approximately 1000 C, as an attempt to prevent contamination. There's lots of nasty ways, really. My personal favourite is monofilament wires that suddenly leave people falling into chunks.

Start with a heavy EM pulse and dampening to shut down the electonic systems of the entire group - including synthmorphs, communications systems, nanoswarms and all unshielded equipment (even mesh inserts maybe?). Follow this up with mechanical devices that emit liquids or gasses to subdue or even kill whoever is left active. Thats a painfully mundane and unimaginative example, but reasonably effective i should think.

The Green Slime wrote:

They're basically just dungeon traps, and I seem to remember there being no better way to extinguish player interest in your awesome dungeon than to have it kill them by sheer dumb happenstance.

Explain Tomb of Horrors popularity....

Wow, these are awesome Ideas. How does everyone else get around the other part of the Yawn? I'm talking about the Yawn that is produced when you realize that by EP definition "Automated" means the Attack number is maxed at 40.

That's true. Small size makes em hard to hit and I suppose Aiming actions would apply to boost the Hit number a bit if they're a ranged weapon. It does suck some of the tension out of the game when a player says; "Pfeh. They've only got a skill of 40." :rolleyes and I have to say; "Fine then." "You're character gets Space Herpies. No one really knows what it is and there is no cure but it's got an Initiative score so, Roll for Surprise!" :[

Arenamontanus wrote:

I am reminded by the classic novel "Rogue Moon" by Algis Budrys. It is very appropriate to EP: an alien artefact has been found on the moon, and there is a way of exploring it by duplicating an explorer on Earth onto the moon using a matter duplicator. For a while both versions are in telepathic contact and act as one person. This allows exploration of the deadly labyrinth - most explorer copies are killed nearly instantly by various "traps". Slowly the protagonist (who is singularly unperturbed by dying all the time) advances into the labyrinth. The novel is more about the psychology of the thing than the actual artefact.

Which reminds me of Reynolds' Diamond Dogs story in which two rival scientists seek to master an alien artifact/Labyrinth only to come out completely inhuman.

Alien sentrybots (and perhaps high quality human ones too) can of course be much better than current AI tech. Not just skill-wise, but perhaps also speed-wise. Sure, the skill 40 bot misses in 60% of all shots, but it does have speed 4 so it will get 1.6 hits per turn anyway. Of course, when players expect a mere AI with the Stormtrooper Marksmanship 1.0 software they might get a beta fork of that particularly keen sniper who doesn't just have Kinetic Weapons 60 with a suitable specialization (bringing the hit chance up to 70), but also Tactics 60 (knows who or what to shoot to do real damage - like that big oxygen tank) and a tacnet that allows it to bring in reinforcements, set up crossfires... or open the airlock behind the intruders. Game-wise it is more fun to have a few highly skilled enemies rather than a horde of koboldbots. But hordes can be deadly.

Someone should totally do a "Pandora's Gate of Horrors" conversion adventure, with either a TITAN fork or alien intelligence at the end. A.C.E.R.E.R.A.K. could make for an awesome acronym.

[I realize I've hijacked this thread, Sorry] Decivre; You've put some thought into the mechanics of the game. If you wanted to represent the accelerating state of technology in EP how would you represent the next step in robotics into the game mechanics? At this point, as I understand the setting, strong AI is strictly limited. Humanity can make AGI and has produced a singularity (twice LOL). No one writes code for AGI now because they're worried about producing another singularity. But how does that apply to the 40 skill cap on narrow AI? In my game I have a character with Navigation 80. That's cool but it seems kinda silly that her ship has a skill of Navigation 40. I'd love to be able to come up with some fluff rationalization for why a "Nav. Computer" only has a Navigation skill of 40. I'd also like to have some framework for introducing 'the next step' of technology into my game via the rules.

I think a given AI is competent at performing any manoever, and their ability to respond to threats is there, to a limited degree. They just can't think creatively (very well, at least), too far ahead, or outside their field of direction, which make them like very clever animals trained to do tricks. The more competent you want an AI to be, the better it has to be at all these things, and the better it is at these things, the less it is a simple AI and the more it is an intelligent, self-aware AGI. So in that sense, the tech already exists; it's just a trade-off between capability and ease of control.

icekatze wrote:

• Suddenly the room is filled with microwaves.

That gave me a quasi Tomb of Horrors flashback consisting of "microwave ovens fall, everyone dies."

icekatze wrote:

• Cutting through wall? Suddenly 1.21 gigawatts.

I believe the word you are looking for is 'Jigawatts!', with a 'J' and followed by an exclamation mark. Regarding the AIs, remember that as our AI technology advances, so does our training technology. Skills cap at 100 because 100 is a nice, round number. I fully expect by 15BF we'll be craking it up to 11 (or 110, as the case may be).

Well, it was that cranking up to 11 that led to the Fall... :-)

Arenamontanus wrote:

Well, it was that cranking up to 11 that led to the Fall... :-)

Well played, sir. Well played.