jackgraham wrote:

Well, I guess Octojean Venous did need a sidekick.

Octojean Venous? I'm not familiar with that.

Quote:

I think it needs mantis shrimp-style hammer attack forelegs, though. With the discount, that'd probably come out to a nice, round 40 CP.

Nah, that'd ruin the aesthetic, even if mantis-shrimp style hammerblows probably would justify some AP... I removed the AP-3 from the 2d10 natural weapon, and added SOM /5. Hooves aren't exactly armor-piercing weapon, but when a monster like this rears up and slams four hooves down on you, you will [i]feel[/i] it. As an aside, I'm not sure I agree with shields (such as riot shields) providing an Armor bonus. I'd be more inclined to say they provide a Fray bonus. (Though especially hard shields like riot shields might provide an armor bonus. Hrm...) A shield is traditionally used to deflect blows, not to absorb them. Anyway, I went and wrote up the world I imagine spawned this thing. [h1]New Kattegat[/h1] Type: Terrestrial (Earth-like) Primary Star: Gravity: .45g Diameter: 9,000 km Atmospheric Pressure: 0.82 atm Atmospheric Composition: 69% nitrogen, 23% oxygen, 6% carbon dioxide Surface Temperature: -120 C/10 C/80 C Day Length: 40 hours Orbital Period: 12 years Satellites: 1 Gate Access: Fissure Gate (through Carnivale), Pandora Gate Pop quiz time. Question 1: What happens when the Scum of Carnivale tinker with their Gate and discover another Earthlike world one connection away? If you said “they mostly don’t give a damn, because that planet isn’t full of plants that will get you high as hell,” you’re right, but only get partial credit for partial answers. Some of the more moderate scum, who’ve gotten a little tired of the endless insanity on Carnivale, might just want to take a vacation from their endless vacation, so they moved over to take a breather. Question 2: What happens when Pathfinder corp discovers an Earthlike world one connection away, and thanks to a combination of lottery, promises, and backroom deals, it was already promised to the Titanians? If you said “They move in,” you’re right. Question 3: What happens when the Monsters of Carnivale and the Titanians find themselves colonizing the same planet through two different Pandora Gates that are at opposite ends of the same fjord? If you dropped your head to your desk, you’re right. Welcome to New Kattegat. It gets crazier than this, but not by much. The Scum arrived first, this is indisputable fact, but there weren’t more than two dozen of them living in an seed colony up in the woods near the waterfalls at the top of the Two Gates Fjord, as it has come to be known. Following traditionally lax Scum gatecrashing protocols, they hadn’t even bother to launch a satnet-in-a-can, and all their radio emissions were low-powered, localized, and were missed when the Titanians started to move in and settled on the wooded shores down the fjord. It seemed like a dream come true for the Titanians, who had found a world that was not only earthlike, but whose gate led to someplace rather akin to old Scandinavia, if the evergreens were orange and yielded wood the color of a red velvet cake. (Well, there are, of course, lots of other differences, but those are the main ones.) The downfjord Gate lies on a beach close to the deep, running water, and when a large group of neo-ceteceans proposed that they would make the obvious choice to begin studying the planet’s waterways and oceanography, the Titanians gladly agreed to take them along. Unfortunately, the cetaceans weren’t so much interested in oceanography as they were swimming and settling in the waters of a terrestrial, Earthlike world. They also neglected to consider the possibility that the waters of a terrestrial, Earthlike world, might just have large, oceangoing carnivores, just like Earth. This lack of scientific rigor and headlong swim to the sea resulted in several neo-dolphins being eaten by the local aquatic macropredators. The survivors fled up the fjord, very, very quickly, squealing on their radios for help. The Titanians weren’t able to mount an effective underwater offensive rapidly, as they were still a scientific outpost studying the world for suitability. Forced into shallower and shallower waters as they swam up the fjords and into the rivers, fleeing the rather tenacious local predators, these inept colonists ran headlong into their personal salvation and the complete and total derailment of everybody’s long-term plans: the Scum. To their credit, the Scum worked out that the radio transmissions they were receiving were coming from fellow members of the transhuman family, and had constructed automated fishing boat-bots, quickly reprogrammed their fishery boats to ignore the neo-dolphins and -cetaceans, and quickly harpooned the predators chasing them. This revelation put the Titanians thoroughly in the lurch: they were attempting to colonize a planet which was already settled. While they might have been able to seize the planet militarily if they had acted in those early hours to secure the upfjord Gate and lock the Scum out, the backlash would have been tremendous had they aggressively seized a world from fellow members of the Autonomist Alliance. They might even have risked being expelled from the Alliance altogether. The Scum, of course, were not interested in bartering away the planet, and with the revelation of the new intrigue, the population at the Scum settlement upfjord doubled in half an hour, and again two hours later. The first wave of Titanians consisted of about 200, plus 50 (now 30) neo-dolphins and -ceteceans. A good fifty of the Titanians were settlers from Stykkishólmur, rural Titanians from a very roughnecked, bored mining town. They got slightly drunk and had the brilliantly patriotic yet gloriously stupid idea to seize the upfjord gate before anyone could stop them, deliver it to the Commonwealth a fait accompli, and take the blame personally if anyone complained. Of course, they reckoned, the scum would hear them coming in vehicles, so they did what the locals of Stykkishólmur have been doing for ages, and built longboats to sail up the fjord. They thought they had the numbers advantage when they attacked at night. They were wrong. The next morning, the Titanians camping on the shore downfjord found a tattered longboat harpooned at anchor offshore, filled with the scorched corpses of their would-be marauders, sans stacks, and a note that read [i]We’ll return these idiots just as soon as we’ve got new bodies for them. Next time, if you don’t bring guns to an axe fight, we won’t finish the axe fight with plasma cannons. Deal?[/i] What could have been an utter disaster politically turned into a local custom, but it spelled the end for any hope of a complete Titanian colonization of New Kattegat. Negotiations quickly ensued, highlighted by the occasional axe-wielding longboat raid, as both sides beefed up their numbers, with anarchists from all over the solar system (including, ironically, Titan itself,) egocasting to the Fissure Gate to go through Carnivale and settle upfjord, while the Titanians settled downfjord. The entire planet is claimed under the Anarcho-Collectivist principle that everyone is free to choose how to do things. In practice, this means that settlements which are majority loyal Titanians are free to declare themselves a Titanian Commonwealth settlement, but under the agreement that allows that, the Titanians aren’t permitted to claim the entire planet in total, only that territory that they have physical domain over. Somehow, along the way, recreational raiding became the planetary pasttime, like historical reenactions, only with real weapons and if anybody actually dies, they can just get resleeved. To the chagrin of the locals of Stykkishólmur who started it all, the Scum of Carnivale, used to things such as recreational murder, took to recreational Viking longboat raids like fish to water. Obviously, participation in these is by consent only, and people’s public profiles broadcast what they’re game for at any given time, anything from not interested (in which case entopics will mark them as a non-target,) just being down to fight with anyone who shows up spoiling for a rumble with a diamond axe, or (to the abject horror of many of the Titanians,) being game for being bent over and properly despoiled. Which is not, of course, to say that raids are only Scum-on-Titanian or vice versa; it wasn't long before the Scum settlements diversified and started raiding each other, and it wasn't long after that before the first Titanian-on-Titanian raid was staged, causing a monumental headache for the lawyers when trying to sort out if crime had been done or not. The dolphins and ceteceans got in on the fun times as well, in the end; after setting up defenses to keep the deep-sea predators out of the fjords around the Two Gates Fjord, neo-Ceteceans can at last live in terrestrial waters again, albeit a limited range of them until much more research is done to determine how to get along with the local oceangoing megafauna. They've also been known to join in the raids at times; a neo-orca can tow a longboat at incredible speed, or ram one at even greater speed, and few would-be Vikings are prepared for a neo-dolphin to start hurling axes at them from just under the water's surface. Total population of New Kattegat today lies around 5,000, as despite its natural beauty and habitability, not too many Titanians want to move someplace where people practice recreational murder and rape, even if it is entirely by explicit consent, and the sort of Anarchists who are down for that usually don’t get further than Carnivale, though it has drawn a number of interested anachronauts from There’s No Going Back who hadn’t been able to find a barge in the flotilla for a Viking theme. Most settlements look like a combination of modern Titanian cities and ancient Scandinavian settlements, making extensive of use of local lumber for construction materials whenever aesthetically appealing and fabbing together modern smart materials where and when it’s practical and necessary to do so. As a result, one should expect to see a wooden palisade wall surrounding a settlement of thatched roofs with gleaming communications nodes emerging from the rooftops, a longhouse in the center of the town and a modern, metal biomedical facility standing on stilts next door. Local wildlife is a broad spectrum, tending towards the large and beefy and aggressive, but so far no true megafauna of the sort one would think capable of wrecking an entire settlement has been discovered, and the local flora is interesting, but contaminated with Scum favorites from Carnivale, which are growing wild and quickly. This doesn’t bother the Scum, but gives the ecologists amongst the Titanians conniption fits.

sysop wrote:

..... Oh dear. Now I'm wondering what the next choose-your-own-path with these two is gonna be like....

Eh?

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

Yes! No? No! Noooo...

Hahahahaaah! What's wrong? :)

sysop wrote:

This is what I was referring to ;) http://www.maskedmolluskmedia.com/p/octojean-veinous-and-space-time-robo...

I discovered a bug in it. If you choose to go sex Alyssa with grape jelly instead of, say, folding laundry or going to chat with Firewall, and then further choose to read it all out rather than take advantage of Octojean Venous's memory filter, you get the choice to use mayonnaise or marmite in 17. But later, at the end, the SPACE ROBOT chastises you for using mayo and peanut butter together, when in fact you may not have used mayonnaise on her at all.