DELETEDUSER007

TNT - The Nameless Tavern. (Always Open)

>I may have a character of mine drop by because this has popped up a few times, and I've always been wondering if I should make a post or not on such an old thread. They probably won't do much in the way of combat though, but I suppose that is the point.

The Court of the Gods

@Zyx

The premise works -- there's a plausible motive as well as an MO (that of creating multiple backups; perhaps your rogue/fallen 'god' for lack of a better term has been fought and destroyed by the pantheon one or several times before and is therefore presumed dead, giving them the advantage of surprise if they entered into a new form and then just hibernated and/or made preparations for centuries whilst waiting for an opportune time to try again).

Interestingly MarshalSolgrieve has the idea for a janitor on the crew to have become deified as Hades, with the humans having some sort of burial ritual that results in the corpses actually being taken down pipes or tubes to a physical underworld where they can be processed, for "sanitation purposes". So this state of things might be at least in part to deprive your character from being able to quickly and quietly amass an army of the dead if they return again, and similarly, the other gods might view uploading and/or backing up their minds as taboo due to its association with your character.

So yeah, the existence of that underworld is a nice coincidental thing that keeps the threat level of your character from being too great. There would naturally be some corpses available since not everyone or thing would receive the proper burial for various reasons, but it means there aren't graveyards with tens of thousands of corpses waiting to be converted into soldiers. Perhaps you should discuss some things with solgrieve because I see the potential for some significant overlap there. As an aside, I've been wondering why you use the > markers to greentext.

@Cyclone

>I see. Well I'll see what feedback they give on my idea when they get back online, as that would be an interesting conflict. The main thing that concerns me about my idea, however, is how exactly they've managed to create more machineforms to download to. I mean maybe I could say they gave the assembler plans for the machines in question, and as a part of the modifications altered it to be able to build them, but idk. I'm also wondering if the drones that go scavenging for corpses should be armed with weaponry or not, because on the one hand it would be the logical thing to do, but on the other it would lead to an arms race. And might not necessarily fit with the theme of decaying technology.

>As for why I speak in greentext, it's because I like to.

The Court of the Gods

<Snipped quote by Zyx>

I think these ideas are workable and was even hoping that somebody would make a character that's secretly (or possibly even openly) opposed to Zeus.

@Cyclone

>Well in that case the rundown of my idea is as follows:

>One of the original crew members in charge of medical--more specifically the medical nanites and their assembler--disagreed with how their captain wanted to handle things. Not only because it violated the mission, of which their part had been to aid in restoring the health of the colony's inhabitants while other staff more skilled in using an advanced form of CRISPR took care of any mutations caused by the disaster, but also every sort of ethical boundary and moral oath.

>Said crew member takes the tech they're in charge of, the nanites and their assembler, along with some other Clarketech like Finity--temp name--Boxes and possibly a CTD (Consciousness Transferral Device) before sneaking off the ship and hiding away on the planet below. Fast forward a bit after Zeus takes control and they get situated, and they start using remotely controlled machines--who have what few Finity Boxes that were stolen built-in to help shunt excess heat--to raise armies of biologically functional yet brain dead corpses. As even if the person was brought back in time, the nanites simply rewrote their neural pathways to such an extent that they no longer exist.

>As for the crew member they've since uploaded their mind to the assembler, which they more so jury-rigged in order to attach a virch world of sorts, and started backing up their consciousness as time goes on. That or they stole a bunch of machineforms their mind can inhabit, and they use a separate data storage device in which to store backups of their consciousness in case said machineforms get destroyed, and they simply control the nanites, injector drones, and the "undead" through a wireless node based system. One in which the drones act as controlling nodes for the nanites. I've not really decided yet on which one works better.

>I could also see them possibly doing some excavation just to create more feedstock for the assembler itself.

>In the end though I could use some feedback and help on ironing the idea out, as I'm trying to create both a credible threat without having them be too broken. Even though with theoretical hard science fiction technology alone all the characters would be, to say nothing of straight up Clarketech.

The Court of the Gods

There's certainly room for dissenting opinions among the gods, and a crew member pursuing the original directive is an interesting idea. The only concern might be that an openly hostile character could find themselves cut off from the focus of the action at first, but some intrigue should mitigate that.

@Oraculum

>It's a valid concern, though I do have at least somewhat of a hook in mind since said character would likely be operating from afar at first if possible. Though I'd need to run some ideas by everyone first since my original concept of them being someone in charge of operating a medical nanite assembler with the original intention of curing any illnesses and the like among the cut off populace might not fly. Or might take a bit more working to make sense. But I could see an increase in depopulated villages or hamlets drawing the gods attention, along with rumors of "undead" or nanite resuscitated/pupptted corpses roaming the land.

Why I Roleplay Female Characters (As a Cisgender Man)

Hell, I spent some time trying to find a cool male picture for an anime-style knights RP I'm about to do... ALL THE BEST PICTURES WERE FEMALES. All the cool outfits, the cool poses, the sheer variety to badassness... all for the ladies.

@Saiyan

>If you think finding male faceclaims is hard, try finding faceclaims that aren't even human. Like eldritch entities, artwork of things like Maiar, or any abstract being that actually fits the theme of the RP you're going with. Or hell, any sort of surreal character art. Or just painted portraits. Or art of AI that isn't just art made by AI... etc.

>It's a pain I know all too well...

The Court of the Gods

<Snipped quote by Zyx>

Hello! Taking over from Cyclone for a moment - characters don't have to be strictly of human origin; thus far we have a player working on an AI, though overall we'd rather have this be the exception rather than the rule within the cast proportions. Mental uploads and backups are also entirely feasible, although I imagine they would be limited in their diffusion as much of the original equipment has decayed along with the knowledge of its employ. You could, however, absolutely have a character who makes this kind of technology their domain, like a Daedalus creating automata in his image or something similar.

@Oraculum

>I see. I bring it up mainly because I had an idea for a sort of antagonistic banished god who either made eir's own mythology centered around reasoning and data collection/transhumanism ideal, or assimilation, and whose creations use nanite solutions to lead armies of reanimated corpses--or at least bodies forcibly hijacked and resuscitated within a reasonable timeframe--to fight against the gods in the Marble City. That or a god of like spacetime since gravity is just a curvature in it, meaning gravity manipulation would result in a bit of spacetime manipulation as well. Albeit crude manipulation. Or possibly an Oracle god of sorts, one who uses probability and statistics to sort of fake precognition.

>Mostly though the idea of playing an antagonist who doesn't really want to see the mission parameters violated, and either works in secret or blatantly, is the idea that's tickled my fancy thus far. Barring that, I also have an idea for a god who is just as decadent as the others, but unlike them they wouldn't actually trust the clone of Zeus. Namely because it reeks of a plot on the God King's behalf. Perhaps a plot to weed out those who are disloyal, since Zeus has held power for centuries before this, which means he's probably employed some pretty ruthless and extreme methods in order to keep said power before.

The Court of the Gods

@Zyx

Your examples there would both be fine by me. Regarding "technically all their tech doesn't violate known physics," I think it's cool when some sort of reasonable-sounding explanation can be given for how an artifact or technology works. That said, I'm willing to handwave it and just let the workings of some let some things be left vague or entirely unexplained, for the purpose of allowing things that make the story interesting.

The only thing I really don't want to see is blatant magic along the lines of the psykers from 40K or the Force from Star Wars. Just to be clear, technologies that can somehow fry brains or enable something resemblant of telekinesis would be fine, so it's not the powers there that I would object to so much as how the existence of actual magic goes against the setting's big theme of charlatans using sci-fi devices to fake magic and divinity.

But I think we're mostly along the same wavelength here. Feel free to join the Discord that I linked at the bottom of the OP!

@Cyclone

>Good to know. Although another question I had was do we need to play strictly humans or could we be like an uploaded human/AI? And if that is the case how would we handle the whole old gods have retired type deal since a reasonable amount of consciousness backups could be made and used across specialized hardware through the centuries?

>Finally, while the offer is appreciated, I prefer to communicate here even if it is a bit slower. Gotta keep the OOC alive after all.

The Court of the Gods

<Snipped quote by Zyx>

I'm familiar with the term Clarketech in general sci-fi as technology that's just indistinguishable from magic. I'm not sure exactly how it's portrayed or defined in Orion's Arm, but Clarketech was exactly what I was going for here with people posing as gods.

Mind uploading for virtual afterlives or resurrection of a sort is definitely fine by me, as is artificial gravity and its manipulation. I'd consider teleportation but probably permit it depending upon the details, though FTL in particular one that I have some qualms with. I'm open to the possibility of almost any ideas so long as the implications are reasonably well thought out.

The thing about FTL is that it opens a whole can of worms about scope of the setting -- it feels less plausible for this isolated planet to have remained isolated and turned out like it did if FTL is present and people can just zoom around all over the galaxy, and I also don't intend for there to ever be any real possibility of leaving the vicinity of the planet and solar system where most of the RP takes place.

In general I haven't set any strict guidelines for what the technology level is because that felt like it'd firstly be a bit beyond the scope of an interest check, and secondly because I'm just generally open to ideas and am happy to collaboratively establish such details based upon the characters that we get and the technologies that they use.

@Cyclone

>I see. That does help me narrow down ideas for characters then (who won't just be a Gravital rip-off I swear). As for FTL, that's understandable. I assumed we'd not move beyond the local planet or star system in all likelihood, but I figured I'd ask to make sure. And as for Orion's Arm, technically all their tech doesn't violate known physics. There's a lot of gaps in how exactly some of the super advanced stuff works, or how they actually created AI, but then again that's to be expected in speculative fiction.

>So every time they mention wormholes for example, ships do have to actually travel through the connecting bridge in spacetime. Which while significantly faster than sublight travel, still takes some time. Days iirc, but don't quote me on that. So not quite FTL speeds, but still pretty quick, and also dangerous if you suck at piloting or don't have some machine to do it for you. A lot of their advanced stuff also tends to focus on biology, psychology/sociology, and spacetime engineering from what I've seen. General informational technologies notwithstanding of course, as the entirety of humanity in that setting is ruled by AI gods.

Two specific examples of OA Clarketech

Finity Box
High level clarketech device. Basically a box from 0.5 to 1 meter on a side that is larger on the inside than on the outside. May employ a basement universe or space-time folding (no S-level below the creating intelligence knows for sure). A Finity Box may be as much as five times larger on the inside than on the outside and no amount of mass put inside it causes any perceptible change to the mass or inertia of the box itself.

So far some 2048 Finity Boxes have been found, all within a 5 LY radius of the brown dwarf Grupna Red, and between the years 5221 to 5279 (late ComEmp period). None have been found since, despite repeated searches. Nor has any ISO been observed in the vicinity.

Since their discovery, several Finity Boxes have been stolen, 2 have been destroyed, one spontaneously disassembled when probed with an exploratory nanowormhole, and 12 are used in space-time hyperdimensional research. The rest reside in private collections or archailect museums throughout the galaxy.

Disintegrator Weapon
A very rare clarketech device, much more common in fabulist tales than in real life. Most actual disintegrators work in different ways, showing their origin as rare artifacts. Almost all uses clarketech effects that weaken the atomic bonds in the target so it vaporises in a huge ball of superheated gas. The range is not known to exceed 200 meters (more often no more than 50 meters), making it almost as dangerous to the user as the target. Some weaken molecular bonds, some weaken atomic bonds (such as a weak force boson beam), the most powerful (probably never hand held) somehow separate the quarks from each other.