New Monster: Leech Pod/Leech Stalk/Leech Bloom/Root Drones --- Area: Power Plant

Game Talk The Drawing Board
41

just my opinion but it seems a bit odd to me if they were nether creatures, granted we don’t know everything about the the nether on the player side of things (yet). But as Kevin said that they would be limited to places with power and the nether just doesn’t seem like it would have as much as they need to survive.

Though now thinking about it the nether portals could generate a positive energy feedback field like a black hole does so theoretically if the nether’s universal barrier is thinner than other places in the multiverse than they could be jumping from rift to rift feeding off the energy like a watering hole till one colony sensed a higher power concentration through the portal and decided to go through.

So i suppose it could go either way, regardless i would love to see these in the game

42

A theme that has developed with nether creatures is, “appear, then adapt to the surroundings at great speed”.
In this case, they appear in an area with a high flux of electromagnetic energy, and adapt to feed off of it. Once established they can survive based on proximity to either a portal or sufficient electrical power.

43

I would much prefer they reinforce the already existing but underutilized nether ability for adjacency through dimensional manipulation: The same thing that allows for teleportation devices to work and for floating eyes to effect you and for necromancers and masters to use their abilities.

KA101’s problem seems based around the fact that currently that justification is rare enough that it doesn’t feel genuine - the best solution to that, in my opinion, would be to introduce more creatures that make use of it, allowing for more vectors to deliver rationalizations and lore regarding it (these things would definitely be easier to study than the eyes and the super zombies, making good lab notes describing the result a lot easier to write and come by) and opens up a lot of possibility for future monster powers expansion in the future. We could even tie this in to a justification for the result of shocker zombies, something I know still annoys some people - they collapse the distance between them and their targets, which is how they guide the lightning to hit what they want. They use the same “nether touch” effect (though to a far less significant extreme) to simply make the path to the player the path of least resistance.

I definitely see these creatures as a Nether critter rather than a triffid or fungal, and I think expanding on this ability (specifically, as a rare nether ability, not something possessed by the more mundane things in the game, of which the fungals and triffids and more common zombies are) would be a boon for future innovation.[/quote]

Since I was named…

The “Nether Touch” as it might be called, really isn’t well-lore’d in-game, nor (so far) had I heard information on how it functions and what can/can’t use it. I objected to its further expansion w/o lore-work, because absent a clearly defined rationale for how the system works, the ability is indistinguishable from Magic, which we don’t permit people to have in DDA. Design Doc and all that.

Lovecraft!Physics gets pretty close to Magic and we’re pretty much doing that with the subprime stuff already, so lore-work can salvage Nether Touch and make it a useful part of DDA.

The general comparison is to XE037 reanimating/mutating critters. That isn’t at all IRL-realistic, either. BUT we have lab notes and other such lore indicating that it’s part of the DDA-world. The scientists are aware of that, and were working on getting it sorted out before the Blob hit critical mass. Knowledge is incomplete but definitely there. Mutant zombie ex-humans are a thing in DDA.

Last I checked (just pulled from master about half an hour before writing this), the lore on subprime planes/teleporting only has lab folks being able to transpose subjects via the subprime via high-energy, low-stability portals; range can’t exceed 30m, and they can’t aim well. Somehow got prehistoric fauna to show up once, though; at one point a subject got telefragged, but replacements are expensive; and apparently if you teleport enough you start weakening the barriers between the planes.

It’s OK to change reality. DDA already does. But you’ve gotta lay a foundation first. So the PR is gonna need some lore included, as well as the drain mechanics and all the rest of that good stuff.

44

I was under the impression the design doc was pretty explicitly against both traditional magic and magic powers controlled by the player, but that “weird science”, especially when out of the players control, was to be expected. Personally, I like the weird stuff, the stuff that leaves a slight sense of unease because the player doesn’t have any obvious explanation for it - not that a scientific explanation doesn’t exist, but just that’s well beyond the player’s experience and difficult for them to fully understand. Quantum physics for the 19th century observer sort of stuff. While I think adding lore is incredibly valuable here, I also think it’s important we don’t take the mystery out of it - we want to make it seem possible in the cataclysm world, in my opinion, without making it seem mundane.

What I would really like is two or three possible “scientific” explanations (in terms of weird science) of the effect, and to have the lab notes cut off by the Cataclysm before they were able to decide for sure between them which might actually be true.

Essentially, establish it as at least potentially scientific, without making it seem like a mystery that’s been done solved already. Let the players speculate and decide what they like best - people don’t need everything spelled out for them, and I think it’s important to reinforce the idea that the scientists involved were messing with things they really for serious did not understand, something that is undermined if we try to fully explain everything in-lore instead of just suggesting at possibilities.

Obviously this is just my opinion - the decision, ultimately, isn’t mine - but I think we want to use any lore to focus on building existing themes rather than on trying to cater to uberrationalists, and sometimes that means things happen which the player can’t find any easy answers for, or where the answers they do find can’t be fully trusted.

Personally, I have long been a big proponent of multi-tiered lore that reinforces the theme that “things are weirder than they appear” - where nothing is what it seems at first glance, and the deeper you dig and the more questions are answered, the more you begin to doubt you’ve really yet arrived at the truth. It’s what we were aiming for, at least for a while, on many levels - it’s the same way there is no definitive answer, in game, for the exact details of the foreign conflict the US was involved in. To reinforce the feeling that intentional secrets are being kept. I feel like, to a certain extent (from my point of view at least), that’s being lost in the lore recently… but it might just be my exposure levels. It just seems too easy for people to get what they feel is the “real” story - extradimensional slime infests corpses, makes zombie mutants, US blames attempts to control it on outsiders, etc. and so on.

So, to summarize:
Even better than a good explanation would be multiple conflicting explanations, and let the player choose which one to believe.

45

Lore may be set in stone but there will always be more stones.
More variation, more fun, more play play.

Mmmmmmooooorrrreeee.

46

GlyphGryph, that explanation was brilliant. It just gave me a whole bunch of inspiration for a ‘Drawing-board’ idea I’ve had up and been working on

If I can be forgiven for being Punny…

…You might say it brought me to Lore-gasm

47

Some ideas I’ve got for lab notes. These aren’t explicitly about the creatures discussed here, but rather provide a basis for their existence:

“We’ve begun analysis on several of the smaller creatures we’ve encountered, and I’ve been assigned to the ‘Nethertouch’ group, created to investigate a peculiarity many of them share. Though their shapes and abilities vary wildly, it’s clear that all of them share the ability to act over a distance, with no discernible mechanism for doing so. It’s obvious such a mechanism must exist, of course, but it doesn’t seem as if our existing equipment is capable of detecting how these creatures manage it. Does this point to some previously unknown fundamental force? An equivalent of gravity, or electromagnetism, but previously and entirely unknown to us? One of the junior researchers was heard to exclaim that it must be magic, until I demonstrated that the phones we carry might as well be such to those who do not understand the invisible forces they use to do their work. The possibilities, if we can understand and mimic these functionality, are immense, from noninvasive surgery to save lives with no chance of bacterial infection to weapons that can bypass any amount of armor. It may not be magic, but it is incredible… and potentially very, very lucrative.”

“Report NT-1302 Summary: We have designated the small, furry, ball-like creatures as ‘tribbles’, although to be honest they share little in common with their namesake beyond a surface similarity, since we haven’t discovered a way for them to reproduce at all. Our studies would proceed much quicker if we weren’t so reliant of their appearing by chance… ah, but I’m getting off track. An analysis of their microscopic structure indicates that they are most closely related to the [XE-something? Slime stuff] group. They have been marked for further study due to a rather unique ability, best demonstrated by a recent experiment where several of them were left in a large plastic container overnight along with about a hundred marbles of various basic, solid colours. Come morning, all of the red marbles were missing - including marbles that had been stored outside of the container but in sight of the creature, although to be honest we have yet to figure out how the creature sees either since it has no obvious sensory organs. A dissection revealed no trace of the marbles within the creatures body, and when the experiment was repeated the next night, not only were all the red marbles gone once more, but so was one of the tribbles.”

“Report NT-1303 Summary: Further study of the tribbles seems to support the hypothesis that these creatures maintain some sort of connection with… wherever it is they came from. A red marble was found with the detritus from a recent portal test, embedded in the remains of a rather grotesque looking creature we’ve not seen before. It is clear that these creatures have some method for for interacting with material of interest from afar, and somehow pulling it back into the place from which they emerged, but the exact method continues to elude is - there are no gravitational, electromagnetic, or even dimensional fluxuations we can detect with our equipment, but it may simply indicate we are looking at, or for, the wrong things.”

“Report NT-2104 Summary: The experiment involving the exposure of living rats to the writher have been intriguing. Left to their own devices, the writher and rats ignore each other, but, in accordance with last weeks experiments, when exposed to painful stimulus in the form of a blaring tuba blast, the writher becomes agitated. When this occurs, a rat that has an unblocked path to the writher and which are within three or so feet of the creature begin making intense vocalizations, likely indicating a pain response. Their heart rates elevate, their pupils dilate, and unless they are promptly moved out of this range they will remain locked in place, seemingly unable to move except for their vocalizations, which grow progressively more intense as time goes on or until the rat loses consciousness, which occurs after roughly 10 minutes of this experience. Only one rat experiences this behaviour at a time, but removing that rat will cause another to begin suffering from the same symptoms. We have detected no forces emanating from the writher that might cause such a reaction, but it is likely the same effect that caused minor headaches in the staff members that attempted to handle the creature earlier. No chemicals were released from the writhers body, no electromagnetic waves were sent out, and no physical contact was had between the subjects at any time - the cause remains a mystery, but one I am confident we will be able to solve.”

48

Based on http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/16/politics/pentagon-zombie-apocalypse/index.html?hpt=hp_t2, you can expect to see broken-down robots at the power plants.