A 'Cool' New Mutation Category and Set of Mutations

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Hello my fellow Cataclysmics,
I bring to you, a new mutation category:

The Iceman!

A new category centered around High unarmed damage, Low energy requirements, But fragility, and avoidance of heat.

Let me Elaborate:

This new category brings with it the following mutations:

Low Core Temperature:
Your body doesn’t keep itself warm as it does others.
On the upside, your body doesn’t spend as much energy on homeostasis
On the downsides, you need to wear more to stay warm.

Very Low Core Temperature:
Your body is considerably colder than the air around it.
You don’t feel as hungry as often, But you have feel cold even when in a well heated room.

Frigid Core Temperature:
Your body has completely stopped trying to keep itself warm, and frost has started to form up on your skin.
You don’t feel hungry often, but everything feel so cold. You need to be next to a heat source stay warm

Crystaline Skin:
For one reason or another, your skin has started to crystalize, and is rather fragile. You have to be careful when you move. 25% increase damage from blunt force, and 5% reduced speed.

Heat Independent:
Your body has mutated in such a way that it no longer to be warm to function. Heatstroke is still an issue, but you’re never have to worry about frostbite.

Cold Dependent:
Your body has not only come to accept the cold, it also needs it to function. Just being near heat makes you feel like you’re melting. You have to insulate yourself from the heat. It physically hurts to eat heated, or even room temperature food or drink.

Crystaline Joints:
Your joints have become sharp, crystalline points, encumbering you slightly, but adding a considerable amount of harm to unarmed attacks (+1 to hands, legs, and arms in encumberence, 30% more damage from unarmed attacks)

Stiff Joints:
Your joints don’t particularly adjust that fast. This results in you have slowed movement, but thanks to the joint’s stiffness, also reduced recoil. -10% movement speed, -10% recoil

Chilling Touch:
Everything you touch, get considerably colder the longer you hold it.
This is a way cool down food and drink so that a cold dependent character can consume it safely. Chilled drinks should also give a slight bonus to moral, and food could also be chilled by leaving it in a minifridge

Reflective:
Light bounces off of you, making you considerably more noticeable while in the light

Iceman (Threshold):
“So… So Cold…”

Other possible applicable mutations:
Fragile,
Strong,
Beautiful (Crystals are pretty damn it!)
Low Light Vision

Lore:
This mutagen was created alongside another project that was started basically the same day as the cataclysm struck.
The idea was to try to create a massive ice storm, as a possible means freeze the goo, allowing specialized mutated military units to deal with the mess as cleanly as possible. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, depending on who you ask) the ice storm project was never finished, but the mutagen, however, was. The mutagen (and research notes) could conceivably be found within the ice labs, where the Ice Storm project would likely have been developed.

What do you guys think?
Any suggestions?

2

I say it sounds more like some dangerous natural nether infection that a man made mutagen.

3

Oh?
Care to elaborate?

4

I caught a bad nether infection off a chick once. Burnt like hell to take a leak after that. Goddamned shoggoths. They lure you in with promises of love, of a life together, but all they want is your credit card number, and then they start cheating on you with your best friend, racking up huge bills on frivolous shit, goddamned thing spent two hundred dollars of my money on a cracker barrel rocking chair that fell apart after one year…

Long story short, nether infections aren’t something you want.

5

Cool. Most of the mutations seem rather negative though. Any possibility of a heat counterpart?

6

I was actually thinking about it, but im not entirely sure what the lore would be behind it.
In this case, it is a mutation set that was devised to deal with an incredibly cold environment, and deal with frozen, and presumably immobile goo.

I can see the heat counterpart being fun, but im not sure what it really would be

7

Hmm.

…

I think some of these can be handled via existing mutations: the core-temp ones are largely the Heat Dependent line, maybe with reduced Hunger drain; Cold Blooded & Ectothermic could probably come with such reduced drains, too. (Thanks for prompting that!)

Cold Dependent would be hell come summertime, basically forcing you to remain in an Ice Lab. Crystalline Joints tough enough to add melee damage are also tough enough to shred clothing worn over them (and speaking from experience, that ain’t easy to code), and I’ve no idea how you’d be both strong/dextrous AND fragile based on this. If you’re subject to shattering, you likely ain’t what DDA considers Strong (ST includes HP as well as lifting and striking power), and stiff joints are not Dextrous.

Obviously one could find a batch of this stuff (probably Serum, but wither way) in an Ice Lab finale or somesuch; the problem is that aside from micromanaging my internal temperature, playing a char named Bobby Drake, and/or living in Ice Labs, I’m not at all sure why I would want to take this category. Sorry.

8

Actually, no it wouldn’t. If you bundle up well enough, you should be somewhat fine.
Remember, wearing a sweater only keeps you warm because it insulates you from outside temperatures, allowing you to heat up from the heat your body gives off. If your body doesnt give off heat, all its doing is keeping heat out.

…Kinda derped with the Dextrous, I don’t know what i was thinking there. I’ll go fix that in the OP. My logic with strength, however, was that if this was engineered for soldiers to wipe out the goo that has been frozen, you’d want them to have additional muscle mass. The brittle aspect is supposed to help balance out the bonus from extra strength.

9

Please no Ice men, or elementals in general. Mutations for the most part have been science-fictiony ((heavy on the fiction)) examples of more mundane adaptations seen in the natural world. With all of them being more or less able to be categorized by resembling real-world counterparts, albeit in fantastic, improbable ways.

I could see a mini-fridge CBM, or even a freeze-ray ((cold-light gun if you want to get less comic booky about it.)) but to just straight up mutate into a block of ice? That seems more like an alternate game over than anything else.

10

Heat Dependent
Cold Dependent -> this is the one well worth adding!!!
Beautiful
Low Light Vision
Strong
Fragile
Glass Jaw

Glass Bones => Crystalline Skin essentially duplicates it

Would that mutation set look better?

11

[quote=“Zireael, post:10, topic:5247”]Heat Dependent
Cold Dependent → this is the one well worth adding!!!
Beautiful
Low Light Vision
Strong
Fragile
Glass Jaw

Glass Bones => Crystalline Skin essentially duplicates it

Would that mutation set look better?[/quote]
Yeah!
Still kinda think that the core temperature mutations are necessary for this aspect, considering the whole cold dependent mutation.
Also, last time I check Fragile and Glass Jaw couldn’t stack, though admittedly I could be wrong.

The mutation doesn’t turn you into a literal block of ice. It gives you traits resembling that of a cold blooded animal (Low core temperature is basically a stepping stone to cold blooded).
Where it starts to depart from this, is the crystalline aspect, though thats more a matter of flavor than anything else. You could call it “Jutting Joints”, and brittle bones. You’d have basically the same affect.

Honestly, I’m a bit on the fence about the whole “Chilling touch”, as there isn’t that much way to explain that. I only really included to give the mutation set something to make it a tad bit more interesting.