Magical MacGyver side-by-side comparison game

**Telok** · 2023-04-04, 11:08 AM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Quertus

Lastly, I'm not sure how the Federation would feel about using time travel over so simple a matter, whether there's an equivalent of the Prime Directive wrt time travel, etc -

They can't complain if nobody ever tells them. Though it does depend of crew and ship size such. I don't have the whole canon going, I'm pretty much an original series and the first 2-4 movies kind of chappy. Given the... oh geez... thirty to fifty years or so since then, I'm pretty sure you can wring a one person warp capable ship from somewhere in all the piles of stuff that's been put out.

**Quertus** · 2023-04-04, 04:04 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by NichG

From what people have said so far I might identify four broad categories:

I’ve been thinking about this some more, and I think it’s less mutually exclusive “categories” so much as… a set of sliding scales? Since this is a 3e-centric forum, I’ll use the 3e “lose at character creation” as my basis to explain, and word things in terms of how one loses.

So, the first scale I’ll discuss is, how much does the individual character choices determine success? How well can one lose (or win) at Character Creation?

And, well, I’d expect that all systems that offer meaningful choices will have some degree of “fail at Character Creation”, that a particular character lacks the means to solve a particular problem, or to solve it in a particular way. Or, to have a less binary view, to solve it as well, or as easily, via that method.

Certainly, “being a caster” opens up more doors of options in D&D - I’d argue more so in 2e than 3e, simply by dent of the expectations wrt having an economy. But the comparative difference in available options is no less true of Paradox - strike that, it’s even more true in Paradox. Skill selection has mattered significantly in all of those systems, as well as in Shadowrun and WoD, if to a lesser extent. Although Spell/Sphere, Gear, and “tradition” selection in those two systems have also played a part. “Color” would certainly affect your options significantly in MtG, although I think both of us participating in evaluating that one have chosen “all”. For Marvel FASERIP and Star Trek, powers and stats, respectively, are very important - and both are generated randomly at Character Creation (and created/improved with experience).

Another big thing holding Star Trek LtC Staltek Vir back is the inability of his system/setting to interact with magic. But it’s not just magic - a D&D character might lack context for technology, for example. So you can fail even before Character Creation, at System Selection. Which, since we’re comparing systems anyway, should probably be worded as something more like System/Setting Conceits. My favorite example of this is Call of Cthulhu: it’s not that CoC monsters are scary, it’s that CoC characters are scared. And I’m not saying that if I turned a corner and found myself face to eyestalk with a 2-headed tentacle monster, I’d be some unflappable juggernaut of tranquility, but simply that by choosing CoC, you are limiting yourself to characters that are incapable of accepting that they are not alone, and that that’s not the only option. D&D, MiB, Star Trek, Star Wars… heck, most systems, the protagonists pretty much just accept as a matter of course that they are not alone.

To speed things up a bit, the other easy to discuss levers / metrics / sliders I can think of are Chance, Player Skill, and Character Personality. Hopefully those are pretty self-evident.

The harder / more nebulous ones that I’m debating include Advancement, Hoarding, and Time. Advancement is kinda a twin to Character Creation, but for how much choices presumably made during play in previous scenarios affect the outcome of the next scenario. Hoarding in this context largely refers to how Dragon-sized a stockpile of resources (wealth, XP, whatever) the character/player has kept “liquid” affects scenario outcome. And Time would then measure the impact of the immediacy of the problem on the viability of various solutions.

EDIT: and I think Cost is gonna be an important factor to consider, too, although it might just be a different dimension to Chance, Player Skill, and Character Personality.

Anyway, that’s what’s in my head. I’ll probably try out ranking the systems I’ve used in these metrics soon, to explore this idea further.

**NichG** · 2023-04-04, 04:30 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Telok

Edit: ya know, I'm kind of waiting for a "Your task is to get a kitty cat out of a tree. The kitty is 300 miles long and hostile. The tree is Yggdrasil. Your client is Hera. She's having a spat with Freyja. Go."

That'd be a good one!

Originally Posted by Quertus

I’ve been thinking about this some more, and I think it’s less mutually exclusive “categories” so much as… a set of sliding scales? Since this is a 3e-centric forum, I’ll use the 3e “lose at character creation” as my basis to explain, and word things in terms of how one loses.

So, the first scale I’ll discuss is, how much does the individual character choices determine success? How well can one lose (or win) at Character Creation?

...

To speed things up a bit, the other easy to discuss levers / metrics / sliders I can think of are Chance, Player Skill, and Character Personality. Hopefully those are pretty self-evident.

The harder / more nebulous ones that I’m debating include Advancement, Hoarding, and Time. Advancement is kinda a twin to Character Creation, but for how much choices presumably made during play in previous scenarios affect the outcome of the next scenario. Hoarding in this context largely refers to how Dragon-sized a stockpile of resources (wealth, XP, whatever) the character/player has kept “liquid” affects scenario outcome. And Time would then measure the impact of the immediacy of the problem on the viability of various solutions.

EDIT: and I think Cost is gonna be an important factor to consider, too, although it might just be a different dimension to Chance, Player Skill, and Character Personality.

Anyway, that’s what’s in my head. I’ll probably try out ranking the systems I’ve used in these metrics soon, to explore this idea further.

Yeah, I wasn't going to mention it for a month yet, but I wanted to do a survey at the end of this asking people to rate the systems they used on a scale from 0 to 6 (which is sort of like, the number of times across the 6 scenarios that this concern was relevant), and then do like a high dimensional scatter plot of the various systems to see which things are correlated and where there might be unexplored design space.

For me, so far based on the responses I've read, I think I'd ask (overlaps with several of yours):

- (For each system) how many of the scenarios were difficult to play (self-GM) because of the removal of randomness? E.g. how often did 'not being able to have a rare lucky thing happen' or 'not being able to have a small chance of failure' seriously warp the system for you?
- (For each system) how many of the scenarios were difficult to play because of the lack of interaction with GM who could answer questions, take on roles, adjudicate things, or introduce new information? I've noticed several of the responses have had comments like 'the GM would need to decide how good of a negotiator this character is' for example, whereas others are more like 'yes, I literally have a spell that says it does this'. So this is the 'how necessary is the GM for the actual dynamic of play?' variable...
- (For each system) how many of the scenarios could you tell definitively, 'oh, my character can't interact with this because I made the wrong character gen choice' or 'oh, I made a character gen choice that just totally resolves this'? This is your 'fail at character creation' category.
- (For each system) how many of the scenarios required you to perform either a literal or mental book dive for specific options that weren't on your character sheet (as opposed to e.g. brainstorming plans for using the stuff on your sheet already)? Call this a 'research' category I guess?
- (For each system) in how many of the scenarios does it feel like the character would come out behind even after resolving the scenario, the 'I should have stayed in bed' factor?
- (For each system) how many of the scenarios did you feel your character could actually deal with? Overall 'surface area' the system permits.

**Quertus** · 2023-04-04, 04:55 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by NichG

Yeah, I wasn't going to mention it for a month yet, but I wanted to do a survey at the end of this asking people to rate the systems they used on a scale from 0 to 6 (which is sort of like, the number of times across the 6 scenarios that this concern was relevant), and then do like a high dimensional scatter plot of the various systems to see which things are correlated and where there might be unexplored design space.

For me, so far based on the responses I've read, I think I'd ask (overlaps with several of yours):

Wow. Nice list. Kudos!

That said... as impressive as that choice of questions is... I feel like... hmmm... like the devil's in the details? Like there's more - and maybe more important - information in taking a different slant on those same flavors?

Like, take the "Stay in bed" one. If my Shadowrun character didn't have the "Create Bullet" spell, then every single combat encounter is ticking down a death clock for the Isekai gunner. But even that is about the meta-scenario, not inherent to the Shadowrun system. Whereas Marvel FASERIP, especially as a Sorcerer? "I should have stayed in bed" is a big concern, always, to the point that a player just made that complaint about that system a few days ago while we were discussing old campaigns. So, even if I had happened to run a Marvel character who happened to score a "0" on "Stay in Bed", it would still have always been a part of play for them. OTOH, I've seen Shadowrun Spirit Shaman who, from my read of the player, spent their Karma like candy (rather literally, in the way they handed them out to spirits), yet, from my read, the player never seemed bothered by this.

So, even knowing that there's a survey at the end, I still believe that there's value to be had from discussing these things as we go through the encounters.

**Telok** · 2023-04-04, 05:38 PM (ISO 8601)

Yeah, I haven't really been going on the 75% = autosuccess thing. That would warp stuff out of all recognition in the systems I'm using.

It would be fairly min/max, but not extremely so, to build a DtD40k7e character to throw 8k6 at all mental and social skills (80% success for target 35/"impossible") plus have enough left over for extreme wealth, a thousand soldiers with lasers and a spaceship. Except the current characters mostly aren"t doing that, they're basically actual play level of characters, so they'd top out at target number 20 or less for the autosuccesses before adding hero points and exalt resource points. But then the Paranoia and Traveller characters would be assumed to autofail literally everything except a very few narrow abilities or skill checks (mechanical & wilderness survival for Traveller and barricade, gloating, memory overflow, & matter eater for Paranoia).

There's also an issue that DtD40k7e and Traveller aren't as heavily weighted towards single roll binary success/fail situations as D&D is. You can totally do those rolls, but the systems play closer to their intended themes and proper function with multi-roll activities (notable not just repeating one roll a bunch but varying what's rolled) and margins of success/failure with partial successes and complications. Paranoia is closer to D&D's succeed/fail paradigm, but it's a humor game where you're suoopsed to be one of the Three Stooges hot potatoing a live grenade. You're supposed to fail rolls often and hilariously until you luck one out and resolve the scene/encounter/whatever.

**NichG** · 2023-04-09, 12:09 AM (ISO 8601)

Scenario 3: Gotta be the Economy

Spoiler: Scenario info

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Your character has been cloned and isekai’d into the role of an independent Count-level noble in charge of a small territory with a single town of 5000 people as well as a handful of smaller communities, outlying farms, etc. Unfortunately, the area is slowly sliding into desolation as the local environment has been getting both hotter and drier, glaciers on nearby mountains disappearing and rivers and streams dwindling. Ultimately this land is slated to become a desert.

The world you’ve been transported to does have magic and other such things, but is effectively an ‘E6’ world if we were talking D&D, 1500s technological equivalents if we’re comparing to the real world, or for other systems you can imagine that there’s a cap on the most expensive/hardest individual abilities that characters in the world can have that is below the level of the stuff you took.

The [Overpowering] random omnipotent bastard who sent you here offered to help you(r clone) ascend to godhood (but not in time to help with the rest of these scenarios) if you can make your territory self-sufficient despite the shift in its environment within a year’s time. The ROB isn’t physically hanging around and watching you do this, but you could try to locate them and directly mess with them to whatever end if its within your character’s powerset to do interplanar/interdimensional stuff.

The territory does not border the ocean or any large lakes, but there are neighboring countries which do not have this heat problem.

The neighbor to the east is about 6 times the size of your territory and has a major lake that is unaffected by the environment shift, as well as forests along the lake’s perimeter that remain lush and productive. There are other nations on the far side of the lake that the neighbor trades with.

The neighbor to the west lies on the other side of a high mountain pass that is somewhat hard to navigate for large convoys or transporting heavy goods. They are still getting the rain (whereas you’re on the rain-shadow side of those mountains), but are feeling mild impacts from the drought. Also to consider is that they’re significantly stronger militarily than the forces of your county, though the pass makes movement in your direction somewhat impractical for large-scale military action without something to be gained for them. If your county becomes too obviously prosperous, that might change, so a full self-sufficiency answer to the ROB’s demands should include the ability for your county to either not look like an attractive target, or to actually fend off their forces.. Their military units have magical support (if we’re talking D&D, every set of 25 soldiers is accompanied by at least one Lv6 wizard, one Lv6 cleric, and one Lv6 bard, but the power scale doesn’t go above that) with their total military being about 3000 soldiers.

To the north is a ruler with two county-sized territories who is also being severely affected by the drought, though they have better trade connections.

To the south is a very hostile trackless waste that goes on for about a hundred miles and is largely unclaimed, on the other side of which is a relatively prosperous kingdom with ocean access.

Make your territory self-sufficient and thriving!

Spoiler: Hidden details

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The cause of the warming in the region is a naturally forming portal to the Plane of Fire deep within the depths of the mountains near your territory. If you can somehow figure this out and could permanently close the portal, you could set the environmental changes on a course to revert themselves. The portal is submerged within lava in a lava tube that has been slowly extending upwards, so simply burying the portal in rock and stone would not close it or prevent its growth.

**Ameraaaaaa** · 2023-04-09, 02:07 AM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by NichG

Scenario 3: Gotta be the Economy

Spoiler: Scenario info

Show

Your character has been cloned and isekai’d into the role of an independent Count-level noble in charge of a small territory with a single town of 5000 people as well as a handful of smaller communities, outlying farms, etc. Unfortunately, the area is slowly sliding into desolation as the local environment has been getting both hotter and drier, glaciers on nearby mountains disappearing and rivers and streams dwindling. Ultimately this land is slated to become a desert.

The world you’ve been transported to does have magic and other such things, but is effectively an ‘E6’ world if we were talking D&D, 1500s technological equivalents if we’re comparing to the real world, or for other systems you can imagine that there’s a cap on the most expensive/hardest individual abilities that characters in the world can have that is below the level of the stuff you took.

The [Overpowering] random omnipotent bastard who sent you here offered to help you(r clone) ascend to godhood (but not in time to help with the rest of these scenarios) if you can make your territory self-sufficient despite the shift in its environment within a year’s time. The ROB isn’t physically hanging around and watching you do this, but you could try to locate them and directly mess with them to whatever end if its within your character’s powerset to do interplanar/interdimensional stuff.

The territory does not border the ocean or any large lakes, but there are neighboring countries which do not have this heat problem.

The neighbor to the east is about 6 times the size of your territory and has a major lake that is unaffected by the environment shift, as well as forests along the lake’s perimeter that remain lush and productive. There are other nations on the far side of the lake that the neighbor trades with.

The neighbor to the west lies on the other side of a high mountain pass that is somewhat hard to navigate for large convoys or transporting heavy goods. They are still getting the rain (whereas you’re on the rain-shadow side of those mountains), but are feeling mild impacts from the drought. Also to consider is that they’re significantly stronger militarily than the forces of your county, though the pass makes movement in your direction somewhat impractical for large-scale military action without something to be gained for them. If your county becomes too obviously prosperous, that might change, so a full self-sufficiency answer to the ROB’s demands should include the ability for your county to either not look like an attractive target, or to actually fend off their forces.. Their military units have magical support (if we’re talking D&D, every set of 25 soldiers is accompanied by at least one Lv6 wizard, one Lv6 cleric, and one Lv6 bard, but the power scale doesn’t go above that) with their total military being about 3000 soldiers.

To the north is a ruler with two county-sized territories who is also being severely affected by the drought, though they have better trade connections.

To the south is a very hostile trackless waste that goes on for about a hundred miles and is largely unclaimed, on the other side of which is a relatively prosperous kingdom with ocean access.

Make your territory self-sufficient and thriving!

Spoiler: Hidden details

Show

The cause of the warming in the region is a naturally forming portal to the Plane of Fire deep within the depths of the mountains near your territory. If you can somehow figure this out and could permanently close the portal, you could set the environmental changes on a course to revert themselves. The portal is submerged within lava in a lava tube that has been slowly extending upwards, so simply burying the portal in rock and stone would not close it or prevent its growth.

This is the trickiest by far. I love it!

Spoiler: ninja chan

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Ironically after some thinking the plan is rather simple. No it does not involve money or knowing people. It's quite simple. Tho it only works depending on your definition of self sufficient.

Basically as a legendary ninja ninja chan just uses her skills to train her entire population. Basically she orders that everyone that is able of body and mind come for 6 months of intense training to become good ninjas. Realistically they aren't gonna be great but they good enough and are gonna be quite useful.

The next 6 months are spent loaning out the ninjas to the other kingdoms and establishing the ninja business enterprise as a useful thing for the people in the other countries. They make for good spys and assassins so nobility will love them.

If that doesn't count as self sufficient then the alternative is to succeed on a trivia check to see if ninja chan can recall the telltale signs of the droughts cause being caused by a portal to the fire dimension. Depending on the gm this might be under 75%. Then she just has to convince the other countries to fix this in exchange for beneficial trade deals then a high level mage can do it for ninja chan.

Finally my other 2 traits being put to the test.

Definitely a case of gm flat here.

**Telok** · 2023-04-09, 01:42 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Ameraaaaaa

Definitely a case of gm flat here.

Just run them over with a car a bunch of times. You can flat any GM.

Diplomat Bob

Spoiler

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Ahh... pulled out the resources from our backgrounds and class feats/completion. Well that's fair, happens to everyone at some point. Glad we're a photosynthetic dryad though. Being dropped in sunny-ville at a random time could really suck for most vampires.

Still, fairly simple to solve. Dig lots of wells, teach decent irrigation, and transition to crops that do better in arid conditions. It's a bloody basic argicultural society.

More options:
Convince the dragons. So the peer & good reputation bonuses carry over. Our knowledge of advanced babking systems plus the fact that dragons are freaking rich and want to get richer makes this pretty straightforward. It won't be a "one year" thing but we're already immortal that's independently capable of being a serious demigod and possibly (depending on local rules of reality) ascending to godhood on our own. Anyways the plan is to turn the nation into a super rich banking center with dragons backing it through charm at 7k5r1 & persuade at 9k5r1 plus skills are cheap to raise xp wise plus we can drop blood points for +2k0 plus we can use hero points to lower target numbers by 5 or 10. Now DtD40k7e dragons are seriously rough in social combat, way more competent on the dice than 5e D&D dragons but probably about even with 3e D&D dragons with full social skill ranks. But if we keep it out of social combat and keep it in friendly talkies we can hit the 30 (charm) & 35 (persuade) target numbers over the 75% threshold and occasionally hero point or go full blood points & stunts to get to 40 & 48 at those 75%s. Oh, and we're leaning on the mages plus our previous knowledge on Aztechnology recruiting/training mages to get a divination fast communications network up within 10 years.

Know our way out. Drop two blood points and a hero point on knowledge checks, basically 7k4r1+5 vs 35(impossible) on arcana and academic and forbidden lores. At 95% 35+ and 75% 48+ we'll call that a go (plus repeats on changing the situation by hitting up for more knowledge or dropping chump change xp on skill-ups). So that learns of the portal. Then we just talk people into closing it for is (see Dragons above or hire adventurers until some of them succeed). Also, if I'm interpreting right, that portal will not just adjust the local climate but in fact create a permanently active volcano in a while. We can leverage plus diplomacy that to get local people (monsters by D&D terms but regular non-mook people in DtD40k7e) over the "e6" limit to help.

Diplomat the solution. Basically leverage our social skills to marry the leader's kids of soon-to-be-desert-land to has-a-big-lake-land. Then we talk their evil grand vizers (they have those right? kinds a trope) into killing the current leaders and taking over while we "mysterious stranger" some adventurers into killing the grand vizers. We could just do direct ninjas but that's no fun.

Magic solution. Arcana 7k4r1+10 & two rerolls for the 75% of 40+ (more with some "aid another" type assists) to handily beat the "impossible" target number to create a new "e6" magic ritual that lets us used massed casters to control the weather for a year. Oh, and then we'll do it again to make a "nuke an army out of existance if they're on our hereditary lands" ritual.

Yeah, we got tons of options here with reasonable chances of success and still we're already immortal that's independently capable of being a serious demigod and possibly (depending on local rules of reality) ascending to godhood on our own.

Gun Whore Bob

Spoiler

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I think GWB's gonna call it in on this one.... no wait. Original DtD40k7e handwaves stuff like creating permanent enchanements, all GM fiat there, but I worked up some rules that... well... it's possible but PCs don't normally want to take the time to do it. Let me put... let GWB run a quick low threat adventure for a handful of xp and buy up a point of arcana skill... now let me put GWB and "permanent Gate spell" into the calculator. We'll gate ourselves around the planet & solar system for a while to find a nice unclaimed & uninhabited giant freshwater lake/sea.

Hey, a 99% success rate taking 1250 hours of work to design, prep, cast, debug, and repeat for 26 to 30 iterations. Permanent Gate of whatever size we think we need to bring in as much fresh water as we need. Checking... 157 days of work at 8 hours a day. And we fettered (reduced casting power) to avoid all the warpy crap. Honestly that's all going it alone too. We could just team up with smarter and more skilled arcanists for the design phase to cut the time down.

Well, sounds like focused point buy to high end conjuration powers for the win.

Paranoid Bob

Spoiler

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Umm... lets check this poor troubleshooter's random R&D gear before wormholing PB to Nevernever Land...
toxic anti-grav tin box
inflatable shrinking spray
... lol-random is lol-random.

Assume the bugger who summoned us explains, in terms PB can understand, things like magic & gods & no clones & no Computer &... You know, I think the bugger could have picked a better summons.

Only thing I can think of is if PB can survive first contact with aliens (lets face it, this much culture shock is basically meeting near total aliens) and find someone who can figure out the portal thingy (PB 100% can't under basically any interpretation, even outdoor unregulated climate is alien to him), get PB to the portal, and get PB to survive the surrounding environment long enough... PB can eat the portal.

Basically someome else uses Paranoid Bob as a magic item to solve the issue. That's the only way.

Travelling Bob

Spoiler

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No resources outside self and personally carried gear...

Survival 3, mechanics 4, int 10, education 12 (system is 2d6 so averages are 7s)... we're back to digging wells and building pumps. Thankfully that actually works to save a small pre-industrial agricultural nation. Made easier by applying real science to magical infinite motion engines, but still just fixing agriculture with deep wells and irrigation. But that volcano in a few years is going to be a real problem.

Edit: ah, misread a bit. There's basically no real local people resources because 5000 is a itty bitty small town. Well ditch everything requiring assistance from any local magic users in my answers. And Paranoid Bob just shrugs and leaves then.

**Kane0** · 2023-04-10, 05:44 AM (ISO 8601)

Spoiler: Lizardman

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Lizardman is an established cook, and cut his teeth (pun intended) on finding exotic new monsters to kill and eat. That alone isn't going to do much but it is an avenue to pursue.

Given it's an E6 world his casting up to 3rd level spells is on par with what anyone else can muster, and he can make good use of goodberry, create/destory water, purify food/drink and plant growth to stretch resources plus skywrite and animal messengers for communication and diplomacy. Given who and what he is lizardman isn't really picky about the people of each neighbouring area, but does like large bodies of water. More to the point, training up a team to head through the badlands is going to take at least 10 weeks out of an assumed 52, but its an investment and risk worth taking to get a working trail southwards or at least information on what's there. If there be monsters, well that's just a bunch of lemons waiting to be turned into lemonade.

But on to neighbourly relations. With three different options at presumably differing DCs i'll say each one takes 4 weeks for a round trip and he passes at least one of the three checks to get some trade and goodwill happening. He is a very charming lizardman after all.

After training up a proper expeditionary team and making the diplomatic rounds the remainder of his time will be spent turning this town's folk into something more impressive, and more importantly marketable. Lizardman has a broad array of skills he can share with the populace including basic natural magic, medical/alchemy training, psychic knacks for those gifted and good old fashioned survival skills of all kinds.

So it largely comes down to DM discretion how much output Lizardman can get from this education and training. Lizardman isn't much about culture, aside from the culinary arts he is a deeply practical individual and those practical skills are what he's going to be passing onto his people. Emphasising and teaching self sufficiency to as many townsfolk as possible will generate a societal shift of its own. You won't visit this town to engage in philosophy or gawk at the architecture, you'll go to hire professional navigators, hunters and the odd exotic chef or seek the services of druidic spellcasters. As a by-product of this process the populace as a whole will become that much more resilient too, so invading this place will likely just turn anyone not immediately killed into extremely dangerous guerrillas, an important factor to take into account for potential threats (on top of the fact that not much is actually being done on the fight-the-drought front, unless everybody can be taught to cast create water which feels like a stretch even if it's a first level spell).

Overall, there's no way Lizardman can make the cause of the problem go away, but he's more than capable of opening up friendly relations with at least one neighbour. The rest of his time he spends training up his towns worth of people into something a bit more respectable and valued for trade, and if he's lucky he can either break a path through the badlands to the south or get enough basic spellcasters amassed to counteract the worst effects of the drought.
45 litres per casting of the 1st level Create Water spell is respectable, it's just a question of scale. If one 6th level caster per 25 soldiers is on the cards then one 1st level caster per 25 peasants seems somewhat reasonable, and with 5,000 people to worth with that's potentially up to 18,000 litres of water generated per day, or half that and 2,000 people fed per day.

**Quertus** · 2023-04-10, 09:45 PM (ISO 8601)

Reposes to Scenario 3: Gotta be the Economy

Spoiler: Initial thoughts

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Cloned and Isekai’d? E6? Aside from what you brought with you? Not in time to help with the rest of these scenarios? Hmmm… so, I’m interpreting that set of comments as follows: from the character’s perspective, they had been in the world of the previous challenges (per my setup many having been Isekai’d to get there in the first place) and then were Isekai’d (again) into this new world, where they will be dealing with the remaining challenges, and doing so with only the things they brought with them - and there is intended to be continuity between these challenges in the new world. However, the reality is, this isn’t the old character - the ROB created a copy of the character (presumably via the Creation domain or equivalent), for their own (nefarious?) purposes / amusement. Further, while everyone else in the world has e6 levels of limitations to their personal growth, the Isekai’d characters have no such advancement limitations. And this e6 status limits the characters' ability to purchase solutions to problems. That said, I may play around with the underlying mechanics and the cause of this difference between “PCs” and “NPCs” between characters.

Unless this completely ruins things, that’s the assumptions I’m moving forward with for these challenges.

Also, I mis-remembered the challenge, so I may not have fixed some of my responses from "profitable" to "self-sufficient".

Also, for once, the hidden information just makes me say, yeah, I figured it was something like that.

Spoiler: 2e Cleric of D&D Arma

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Little known fact: a 2e Cleric in a world without their deity a) cannot recover spells b) above 2nd level c) unless c1) another deity sponsors them, or c2) they use the Contact Home Power Spell. However, Arma is perfectly capable of casting that spell, so no issues for this particular character, besides a slight spell tax.

This whole "help with ascension" offer is perfectly par for the course for 2e... however, Arma isn't exactly savvy about that, and will view the ROB with great suspicion (lessened only slightly after her divinations suggest that that's just the way the world works).

Even so, as the "High" priestess, she's itching to get back home, and, given the time frame involved, to add Chronomancy to the list of Wizard spheres/schools/whatever that she has access to. Thus, she'll begin collecting components for her own polyhedron gateway tech.

Being on a different world, she doesn't have the built-up credit with the church for all the potions she's brewed over the years, so her spending options are limited... give or take what she brought with her, and what she can get from the peasants by being a Countess. Most of which will be spent on them, not her.

More importantly, her undead army is no longer with her. She'll need to replace it.

Anyway,

Objective: Return Home (learn time travel). Set to long-term goal, because time travel.

Objective: Be a good Countess.

Objective: Provide remedies to environmental changes.

Objective: Reverse environmental change (presumably by finding and murderhoboing its source).

Objective: rebuild undead army.

Just looking at some low-hanging fruit, some of the simplest things she can do would involve casting Polymorph Other. The first objective is to create some trees that don't need watering, drawing their water from the Elemental Plane of Water - or, better yet, that actively produce water by that same tech (Arma... has seen demonic trees that constantly bleed by using that tech, and Metamorphose Liquids can always be used to "fix" the fluid produced, I suppose). Different worlds have different rules; if she can use the spell on plants, she'll get skilled gardeners to pick out the healthiest "useless" trees to Polymorph; otherwise, she'll likely target criminals (bandits, people already in jail, heretical followers of other religions, whatever) as the subjects used. If the world allows her to Polymorph based on a set of criteria into a form she isn't personally familiar with, she can make water; otherwise, she's limited to blood.

At best, she could cast Polymorph Other... dang, only 2/day, with only a 70% survival rate for average peasants (should be way higher for healthy trees). And Metamorphose Liquids 6/day (so, max 54 gallons/day - that's not much). But the hope is that an arborist can get grafts / whatever of the trees to grow, and other casters can learn Metamorphose Liquids.

Anyway, next up would be ice trees, to produce both water and cold through similar planar connections. Seems an accidental perfect solution to counter the fire portal with lots of little ice portals.

Arma's next step would be to delve into dungeons near the epicenter of the heat wave, in the hopes of finding the cause of the problem, removing the curse from her Amulet of Perpetual Youth and Inexperience for the delves. Oh, um, having replaced her Undead army first, of course. Which she could do at the rate of, say, about 70 goblin skeletons per day (because D&D thinks math is hard). I'd say her "outings" and ignoring her duties to her people would make her one of the worst Countesses in history, but I imagine parties and fox hunts and such are the norm for nobles, and her sense of commitment to Community probably means she actually rates well wrt how well she serves the citizens in general in her roll as Countess. Sadly, unlike her trees, this dungeon-delving endeavor is fruitless (heh).

As an emergency fallback plan, if things get too bad too fast, Arma plans to offer to start Polymorphing the citizens themselves, into creatures more adapted to the climate. Gold Dragons seem a good choice. But afaict, the strategic ice trees mean that we should never make it to this ~30% fatality contingency.

So, she doesn't really bring anything special to the region, except a) perfectly countering the problem; b) being the only person in the entire world able to create healing potions. I'd say just the tourism, the money paid by powerful nobles from foreign lands to stay in the best inns while seeking her favor to brew them potions would boost the local economy.

Also, depending on the ROB, she might try and establish a church of D&D while she's in town. Or maybe a hybrid Church of D&D / Church of Arma, to get started collecting followers?

So, assuming the area was self-sufficient before she arrived, it should be back to self-sufficiency, with some added money from increased tourism. I'd say she met her countess / environmental objectives (if accidentally) without too much trouble, and the biggest potential issue is simply hand-waving that the ROB chose a nation that would accept a daemon-winged priestess of a crazy 4th-wall-breaking religion building an undead army to protect them as their Countess.

Spoiler: Divine Goals

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None? I guess, if she really started to care (like I would if playing the character at an actual table), she'd (accidentally) be working towards becoming the Daemon Goddess of Icy Refreshment and Bloody Tears, with dominion over Water, Trees, and (maybe) Justice (if she used criminals instead of plants to make her trees).

Spoiler: 3e D&D Wizzard Whizzy

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Nothing much changes for Whizzy.

Objective: Live the good life!

Objective: Do enough about whatever problems arise (like the heat) that nobody complains too much (preferably, that they actually think well of his efforts).

Objective: godhood sounds nice.

I'm sure someone has done a handbook of just what an e6 Artificer can produce; I'm just gonna take a wild stab and assume that, despite its 9th level caster level, they can somehow create a Decanter of Endless Water. If not, it's time to go on a mad killing spree against the neighboring kingdom (from a different direction, to attempt to make it look like someone / something else is doing this), killing their army for XP, to get to 12th level to get... Leadership, I guess, since that'll net more second-hand Item Creation feats than the direct route.

Anyway, once we have endless cool water, it's probably time to introduce the citizens to the endless joys of games like endless frog-smashing, or overcoming endless non-fatal obstacles in an obstacle course / house of moving floors, or other ways to game the system to ensure everyone caps out at e6+NI. That should insulate (heh) them somewhat against the worst effects of the heat, and improve their profit margins, increasing their prosperity, and the odds that they'll still be self-sufficient despite the hardships of ~~global~~ local climate change.

Um, sorry, what was the challenge again? Eh, it doesn't matter, Whizzy will just enjoy his time in the cool shade with his level 6 harem, hoping that everything will be fine, and using Wall of Stone to build up fortifications in case someone decides it's not.

Seems like he has produced a somewhat unstable solution to allow him to technically meet his low-bar objectives for the time being, with "researching divinity" added to his "to do" list.

Spoiler: Divine Path

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I guess he's taking the first steps toward becoming the tainted god of belligerence and hedonism?

Spoiler: Paradox Telepathic Vampire

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Probably the only character who could conceivably do anything to ROB, but almost certainly wouldn't. Although he would hold a grudge, as "abduction" is... "assault with a deadly weapon" / potentially fatal to a Paradox character, and he's one of the few who fully appreciates that fact (thus the fact that he is unknowingly a decoy, not the real McCoy, even for his 1st Isekai). And the whole "help with divinity" thing is actually kinda funny - he previously helped a demigod obtain divinity and, thinking about it, doesn't know that he couldn't just do the same thing to make himself into a god. He's just... preferred to remain a more low-profile, low-stakes kinda guy, and so has never considered it before.

Anyway, he'd try to get the ROB to tell him as much as he can - like, does the ROB know what is causing the climate change, or is it a mystery to the gods? Is figuring that out part of the intended challenge? Is he allowed to use his power to contact ROB or the other deities of the world (which, yeah, that's a thing he could do - no, seriously, he's done even crazier things before). Speaking of - is pulling the information from the minds of one of the gods or their minions considered "cheating"? At a guess, between various social rolls (both to convince to answer, and to "sense motive" to read between the lines), I'm guessing he'll know what he needs to know. Which isn't much, tbh - probably just the rules of the challenge, and the relationship of the gods to the challenge. (Which would be "we didn't cause it, do whatever you want (leave us out of it?)", I'm guessing.)

This will be a very tricky mission. Going with some random Isekai world elements... hmmm...

OK. So, if he doesn't have his companion with him, he'll ask ROB about that; if she's permitted to come, he'll contact her telepathically to establish the link so she can open a Gate to arrive. But I'll assume that won't happen, as this isn't the real character, just a copy. So it's copy companion, or a new one. If no copy companion (and lacking her seems to be in line with the "just you" vibe)... hmmm.... for his new companion, he'll look around town for someone compatible with his objectives, with Vampyrism, and with a Loyalty upgrade, and select a catgirl Thief in bad straits to gift with Vampyrism (because 75% rule said his first choice of "Mage" wasn't happening). Then he'll spend from his Karmic Wealth (

) to give her the Karma to be able to buy basic Magic. Which means she can do absolutely anything... approximately never. Then it's sharing a meal, and setting up adventurers to collect goblins (using slave cages) for "experimentation" (really, just to serve as meals for the 2 hungry Vampires).

Then, as meals allow, guiding her through attempting to use blood-powered magic to understand the problems they're facing. While he... does a decent job of being a Count with his social skills and business acumen, and an incredible job with adventurers, being able to mind link to teams of them to instantly collect/transmit information.

Really, after juggling things for a bit, he'd most likely pick one business to (secretly or publicly) take over. And which business depends entirely on the specifics of the world. Adventurers, Thieves, Assassins, Wizards, Slave Traders? Butchers, Bakers, Candlestick makers? Beekeepers, Woodcarvers, RPG writers? Pretty much anything but the church.

With a sufficient supply of blood, brought about by sufficient funds to hire adventurers / slave traders to bring in sufficient "donors", even his pathetic fledgling will eventually be able to craft the spells necessary to understand (and, in a mass orgy of bloody sacrifices, eliminate?) the source of the climate change.

Eh, on second thought... "eliminate" might be hard to prepare for a) without knowing the 75% rule was in effect b) unless the catgirl's skills improved significantly over the course of the year c) without as much "help" to the roll (technically, the cost) as possible.

So, for instance, the cheapest way to solve the problem would be to summon something that could dig down and release / reroute the lava pressure, making the natural portal close on its own. Whereas creating a countering permanent ice portal would require a gateway made of something cool (in both meanings of the word) and an insane amount of mana. Whereas even the intermediate cost effect, of attempting to affect the portal directly, would require bathtubs of blood even with some sympathetic focus (like a lava rock) to direct the spell.

Oh, and of course, we need to actually produce some results from all the "experimentation" on Goblins, so he'll introduce Sun Screen, or some trivial product like that; more (and more magical) if his Companion is able to level their abilities, and blood is plentiful.

So, it looks like he had...

Objective: acquire new companion.

Objective: resolve climate change.

Objective: improve local businesses.

Objective: take over one business / monopoly.

And, although I haven't decided for sure which business he wants to own (I'm guessing slave trade, on the "public secret" level, and sunscreen, quite publicly), I don't think any of this would prove too problematic. However, in order to make his... town and county?... be self-sufficient, he would have had to try (and discover that he's fully capable of) an entirely new trick. See, the biggest thing making businesses - especially medieval businesses, where peasants generally apprentice to learn a trade - really bad at being agile is the sheer amount of time necessary to gain skills, and the reluctance of skilled professionals to do anything other than their trade. But with his mastery of telepathy, he has no problem being agile, as, like an Illithid Savant, he can just eat someone who knows how to do the thing he needs to do, and gain their skills. What he doesn't know is that he can also grant skills to others. In D&D terms, he knows he can use Mindrape, but he didn't know he could use... um... Psychic Reformation or whatever that lets people choose differently. Point is, he can overwrite people's minds, changing their skillsets, allowing them to adapt to their new situation, and master whatever skills their challenges demand, so long as he has a sample of that skill to work from, and plenty of blood to power his abilities. So, not the quickest / most successful route, but still probably meeting his objectives.

Spoiler: Divine Path

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If he cared to become a deity, perhaps he'd seem to be headed towards being the god of telepathy, vampires, bloodshed, and slavery, although his actual goals would include loyalty as his first choice of sphere of influence.

Spoiler: Paradox Cutter Fyord

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Objective: make town rich.

Objective: deal with heat.

Objective: transition from "give a man a fish" to "teach a man to fish".

Step 1: set the bouncy balls to fade away - a year's worth of permanent bouncy balls would likely be a worse (un)natural disaster than the heat wave.

Step 0: realize that he is a copy. Because he's got an app for that.

Step... 2? Get to know the world. Which I'll... grab some different random Isekai / fantasy elements for? Oh, mana potions are nice... for, like, anyone but him. Sigh.

Right, so... he'd sit there in his office, bouncing ephemeral balls about the place, while mumbling about "making money, making money, rhymes with honey, scrambles to 'on hey' or 'no yeh'... is that how your spell... what was I thinking about again?", building up insane amounts of mana... with no idea whatsoever what to spend it on.

Days and sleepless nights would pass, as Cutter Fyord desperately searched for inspiration, before finally quietly whispering, "... create Fremen stillsuit?"

Assuming "Science!" technology works in this otherwise medieval world, Cutter would create thousands of these, while getting the citizens to find / tell him of known natural caves for him to fill with water. With a "CREATE DECANTER OF ENDLESS WATER!", of course, because that's definitely cheaper in the long run than manually creating water.

After he got some sleep, Cutter would start building up mana for some better ideas, like "CREATE SOLAR PANEL!" and "CREATE AIR CONDITIONER!". Which he'd cast a few thousand times each, until (at a minimum) the entire population 5,000 town is air-conditioned.

But long before he finished that, he'd build up the mana for his only real economic idea: "STARFALL: RAIN WEALTH FROM THE SKIES!". Or something similar, to bring exotic metals from space crashing down to earth.

If large amounts of water, stillsuits, windfall from space, and solar-powered air conditioning aren't enough to ~~make~~ keep his people self-sufficient, well, Cutter will hold periodic town meetings to find out what needs to be done, and throw insane amounts of mana and questionable ideas at the problems until they go away. Also, sell air conditioners and solar panels to foreign nations (or even his own nation) at outrageous prices to ensure he has the funds to purchase solutions instead of throwing mana at them if that seems expedient.

If things don't fall apart too badly, he could build up insane amounts of mana to create mana-storage crystals to build up insane amounts of mana to... create a friendly sentient golem to create water and build air conditioners for him?

Ultimately, Cutter could come up with an OK solution to his objectives, but isn't very good at removing himself as an essential component.

Spoiler: Divine Path

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Definitely a "god of technology", with a strange opulence / scarcity duality. Also, obviously, bouncy balls.

Spoiler: John Faseman of Marvel

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This is tricky. After expanding to being a multi-national Guild Master, John Faseman was looking to create a custom Self Duplication spell. If he thinks he got Isekai'd before he finished, then... I guess he'll rely on Gate to go back in time to not miss anything in the previous world. No biggie.

And, dagnabbit, he was just about to use his increased Popularity and Resources to try to get the nation that summoned him to teach him the "Summon Hero" spell they used to Isekai him in the first place! Well, I guess he'll keep his eyes and ears open in this world... and (sadly) I'm guessing the GM won't let him spend Karma to take the ROB as a Contact (as a way to access more ("divine") spells, and as an excuse to learn the Isekai "Summon Hero" spell)?

Sounds like it should be no issue keeping his Popularity and Resources when transitioning from a multinational Guild Master to a Count, even if that does make him quite the exceptional Count. Like Dracula.

I feel like he really wanted a spell or power of Power Creation at some point... oh, for creating the new layer of Hell. Right. Well, with that, he could grant "temporary" powers to adventurers, or even to farmers, to help them with their jobs.

And... it looks like he doesn't have Regeneration, so I guess he'll rely on local healers to heal up the damage he takes from creating new life, which is my first thought for "best tech" for him to use to approach this problem with.

Objective: empower locals.

Objective: research (and reverse?) climate change.

Objective: Obtain Isekai "Summon Hero" spell. (long-term goal?)

Objective: get back to previous world (long-term goal) (may transition to "self-duplicate to live in both worlds") (regardless, won't that be a 6th day surprise

)

So, there's lots of potential for Lifeform Creation, but the best (most efficient) choice is... probably seeds for plants that prosper in hot weather? And of course a minigirl / miniboy child or three. And, in addition to random "temporary" buffs, if push came to shove, he could just grant some permanent heat-resistance powers to everyone in his domain, pretending he did some big magical ritual to make it permanent. But making it hereditary OTOH would be quite the interesting Power Stunt.

But that's fighting symptoms, rather than curing the source of the problem.

Sadly, short of building the universe's best magitech thermal imaging system out of rusty nails and ear wax in a few days time, John has no real way of knowing what's going on. Except, little known fact: Marvel Wizards can sense anything magical that is stronger than their magic rating. So, the weaker the mage, the more they can detect. If John can't sense things himself, he can doubtless make a child who can sense the formation of the portal. Once he does know, he can simply Disintegrate... he can build a device out of butterfly wings and elbow grease to mass-Disintegrate through the mountain (or Power Stunt to gain the power to swap around his range and AoE) faster than he can do anything useful with his existing Disintegration power. And just cross his fingers that lava doesn't kill him / melt his new device.

Regardless, he's in the best position to fix the problem (if he doesn't kill himself trying). Or to make ice cold lemonade out of those lemons. So reaching his objectives may cost a little Karma, but should be possible.

Spoiler: Divine Path

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Seems like he'll accidentally pick up Nature, alongside being a god of Disintegration and Empowerment.

Spoiler: Shadowrun Troll Wizard

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Finally, time.

This sounds like a golden opportunity to learn “create water” and “create ice”, and to teach them to as many people as possible.

But there's few characters as unsuited to sitting behind a desk as a public figure than the flying, invisible (inaudible, odorless, tasteless) (twice-)Isekai'd antisocial Troll. Although a Hat of Disguise, picked up in one world or another, might be enough of a confidence boost to actually allow the attempt.

As far as the economy goes, teaching them Alchemy, and getting them to make Oricalcum will certainly be a boon to the economy. Hopefully, that will allow the funds to trade for whatever they need - something the Troll has less skill to understand than the native peasants, in all likelyhood.

I may come back to this one later.

Spoiler: M&M - Alex Daeus

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Real quick, oopsie, I talked about Alex as a "mutant" before because, as it turns out, in the last M&M game I ran, two of PCs were, shock and surprise, a mage with omnipower, and a mutant with matter transformation. These two entries aren't supposed to be those characters.

Unlike that PC from the last game, Alex is actually (not so) "secretly" a demigod, which makes the offer of assistance obtaining full divinity very enticing to him.

Well, a little cheating, making cold rain or snow out of the air, could do wonders in the short term. But he really wants a solution that doesn't involve him actively... well, fighting symptoms.

Objective: identify and solve the root problem.

So, using his wealth to hire adventurers (because wealth is a stat, and maybe a Count would have similar wealth), he could set off towards the epicenter, and build monitoring stations to attempt to evaluate the issue.

I guess the best answer would be to, in effect, build a drilling station, turn it on, and run away. In practice, he may need to buy a robot ally, and (temporarily) lose the points if it "dies" to lava.

But there's not much he could do to increase the town's wealth / self-sufficiency - other than increasing their productivity with things like better tools - that wouldn't draw the attention of other nations ("why, yes, we did just find a gold mine..."), so he's but so useful in that regard.

Spoiler: Divine Path

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Um... god of mumbo-jumbo? Science and abstract wealth for the "it's geek to me" response from the peasants who would never worship him?

Spoiler: M&M - Omni-Wizard

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Objective: Don't get burned at the stake.

Objective: Get someone else to do the "Count" job.

Objective: Deal with the problem, so it doesn't look like you're shirking responsibility, but "focusing on what's important".

Definitely the first step would be summoning nature/weather spirits, while boosting skills (sciences, magic, and social skills) to try to understand what's going on. Seems likely that, with enough spirits (enough to justify a "take 20" approach), that they'd eventually hit upon the correct answer as part of "other world magic theory". That said, they'd have to investigate a whole slew of wrong answers, too, so having a year is probably a good thing. Still, some thermal X-ray telescopic vision could quickly provide a whole lot of information here.

Probably the best solution to the Count issue is to spend XP on an Ally, summoning the perfect Count (so, probably not Dracula) to deal with that job, leaving our omni-wizard free to test the various theories about what could be going wrong with the weather.

Actually solving the problem... summoning a pair of lava wurms to dig tunnels to bleed off the pressure / local lava / whatever should do the trick.

As far as improving the town's economy... probably some AoE skill boosts would do wonders to keep the town in the (color of choice).

So, I guess that counts for hitting objectives... eventually.

Spoiler: Divine Path

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Definitely a god of magic, summoning, laziness, and passing the buck.

Spoiler: Warhammer - Mr. T

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Well, this sounds like a job for Chaos Cults! Simply by converting to cult economics, cultists can poke one another to acquire needful things. Supply doesn’t matter to the logic of Chaos, only Demand! (OK, it's probably just a bad abstraction of a bad economic model, but it’s thematically appropriate, and funny.)

This method, of creating a Water Guild, and never supplying said Guild with more than enough water to keep its members alive (its members might well be a lone duck), should solve the water problems, providing enough water to keep the people (but not necessarily the crops) from dying of dehydration, even in the worst heat / drought. With great cheese (like, making every citizen the leader of their own cult, to raise their Chaos prestige or whatever), maybe the crops could be saved, but let’s not go that far.

Next is food. If this were D&D, I’d say “dragons can eat anything”, and start a Dragon farm. In, say, the logical choice of Warhammer Fantasy, however, things are a bit rougher. But no problem: as a gestalt genetic engineer / Chaos Sorcerer, channeling the belief of the faithful into creating horrific new food sources should be dying child’s play. I say “should” because AFAIK there’s not really rules for this kind of thing; however, there are rules for more or less arbitrary rituals, and the XP cost is low enough that "it's fine", so we'll use that. I just need to make some appropriately horrific costs to the rituals, like [*REDACTED*], and it'll be a piece of cake to get this GM to agree to it.

With all the Chaos food and Chaos energy and faith floating around, doubtless the faithful will start to be blessed by Chaos, gaining mutations as a sign of favor from Tzeentch (and those other guys). My Count is totally unbiased, using their excess water to keep all colors of flowers blooming, including the white of Chaos Undivided, indicating that all (Chaos) faiths are welcome here. Just because the Purple of Tzeentch is also present / prominent / outnumbers the RGB of the other faiths just means there may be a smidgen of favoritism, that's all.

As far as building up the town, well, if the Warhammer Fantasy Chaos Dwarves can crank out plasma rifles, well, then gosh darn it, this town can learn to do so, too. Especially with a Chaos economy, where (when they're flush with food and water) they can just poke one another for a while until they come away with the necessary components. And while Mr. T powers his plasma rifles with his power armor, the faithful can power theirs with the screams of the starving children of the unworthy, or whatever. I'm sure this plan (and the primitive plasma rifles) won't backfire in any way.

So, it looks like

Objective: create city-wide chaos cult.

Objective: genetipsygeneer horrific new chaos flora to feed cultists (and overtake the desert - they should grow like weeds).

Objective: arm chaos cultists with high-tech weaponry.

Objective: ~~rebuild town~~ take up nomadic lifestyle after town burns down from plasma fire.

In the grimdark of running Mr. T, "self-sufficiency" is defined as becoming the ravaging beastman army.

(He'd probably earn both a Fate Point and a Blessing of Chaos for his two big successes along the way. I'll have to roll for the Blessing at some point.)

Spoiler: Divine Path

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In the grimdark of running Mr. T, "Deity" is just what the Chaos gods call "lunch". I feel Mr. T would be aiming lower, to become a Daemon Prince or whatever. Just... he may be too mutinate for that to fly by the time this set of challenges is over. So... perhaps ROB's help will involve removing a mutation, or convincing Tzeentch to make an exception wrt maximum mutations?

Spoiler: MtG - Elven Chronomancer

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[I’m choosing to translate “e6” as “(stores are) limited to modern / type 2 (cards)”, which is pretty terrible for 2 reasons: I don’t know the cards, and most of the “generic” answers will be older cards.]
So, doubtless some useless new cards, like Heat Wave, get added to the infinite sideboard just by virtue of the Elven Chronomancer encountering them. But the locals only have, what, spells related to a magic school, fairy tales, and an annulment park? I'll have to research the specific cards / sets, to see if there's anything useful among them. I'll get back to this one later.

Oh, wait: easy enough to cheat, and just say that "Heat Wave" and "Elemental Portal" are enchantments, or an enchantment and a artifact, respectively. Just hitting them with Naturalize (or sideboarding in a Desert Twister) would solve the problem. So it depends on the level of abstraction as to what actually happens, I suppose.

Spoiler: Star Trek - LtC Vir

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Ugh, just trying to figure out what Staltek Vir could carry with him is a pain. Like… Phaser, Tricorder, comm badge are obvious. Tools, medical supplies? An Exocomp or two? Replicators look small from the outside, and Exocomps are small, so maybe a portable replicator? Could he use a replicator to replicate the parts for a transporter? How would he power everything? This is why I had him have a full installation; without that, I’m not able to guess at an optimal load out, or how difficult creating permanent replicator and power solutions are.

If he's limited to "what he was carrying at the time" levels of gear... cross between "best remotely possible gear" and "minimum to make him actually better than a peasant"... replicators look small enough for him to carry one - perhaps he was trying to fix it? This could give him standard gear (phaser, tricorder, useless comm badge, "personal effects" (we'll get to that in a second)), plus replicator, toolkit (to fix replicator), medkit (in case of accidents while fixing replicator). But no power supply.

Random Isekai world stats... um... this might not be what the scenarios will have in mind, but this is a very... cosmopolitan town. How... appropriate for a Star Trek character, to be surrounded by diverse alien species. The largest population group being "Draconians". And, at least history as LtC Staltek Vir will be told it, is rife with war / conflict, such that he believes that if ROB hadn't set things up to make him Count, he probably would have died before making peaceful contact.

OK.

Objective: See if he has aptitude for any of this world's "magic", because he doesn't see his Science getting him home (and "getting home" wasn't what ROB offered).

Objective: Try to find some way to power his equipment. He's a few (HOUSERULE: far more than the rules say) phaser shots away from being a peasant.

Objective: Investigate the "divinity" angle, in case it gives him the power to get home.

So, as it turns out, the Replicator can convert energy to matter... or the reverse, matter to energy. Which would be a disaster. So LtC Vir needs to build a super-powerful battery, to hold that enormous amount of energy. Which... Science! might allow, but I can't even imagine with science, without an appropriate Phlebotinum, like Dilithium Crystals. Which I'm just gonna say don't exist in Fantasy land. He'll need a magitech solution. And, unlike the settings for the past world, absolutely nothing stops him from learning magic in this world. So, yay?

Unfortunately... dagnabbit, can he learn the basics of magic in a year? Searching... yes, easily. OK then. Now he just needs... oh, yeah, magic battery tech is a thing, too. And genius Staltek Vir auto-succeeds at math, so he doesn't explode the batteries from over-charging them (from de-replicating too much matter at once).

Google says... gas produces almost 13 kWh/gallon. Uranium can produce about 20 kkWh/pound. Even pretending that's even close to matter-to-energy levels of power, that's still probably 100 mana stones per pound of matter the replicator can handle at a time (create on a full charge / de-replicate when empty without exploding). And it needs to be calibrated such that the power is distributed evenly among the mana crystals, and slowly enough to allow them to absorb the energy. It's a really good thing LtC Staltek Vir literally cannot fail a single roll here, because otherwise I would expect this to result in the mana batteries exploding, leaving a small crater where our protagonist (and the surrounding town) once stood.

So, the important part of his "personal possessions" is that he has data chips containing the results of all his work, including his work on Transporters (he thought they might be useful to resequence DNA, to evolve species; also, that was part of his job several times, to augment existing transporters). So you might be thinking, "aha, you're gonna have LtC Vir replicate a Transporter, right?". Only, no. Absolutely not. He will never, especially under such suspicious circumstances, decrypt the data found on those data chips. Because as far as he is concerned, he's probably been abducted, and this whole thing is an "impervious to even his psychic powers" holodeck experience designed to con him into decrypting his research. Not gonna happen.

Instead, he'll blank the data chips, so that he can use them to add patterns to the replicator. And cry himself to sleep. Because ****, that was his life's work he just erased.

OK, now that we've established that he can do something, what, exactly, will he do?

(Oh, he'll find out that this is Not!Eberon, and nobody believes in ROB. Hope that doesn't mess up any future scenarios.)

Objective: build magitech solutions to global warming.

Oh, hacks! Hacks, I say! Who needs mana when you can power your devices with reverse replication? Yeah, the other nations are totally invading, even if this wasn't "War World, Isekai edition".

Personal Log: I believe the events I set in motion are responsible for the destabilization of the world economy. If I am unable to calm the political climate, I may be responsible for having started a world war. Should I somehow survive this, and should I further somehow manage to return home to Starfleet, I expect to be court-martialed. Perhaps I will take ROB up on his offer to help me ascend, after all - I believe that to be the only logical way to achieve my objective of uplifting the Vulcan species.

So, infinite mana to power cooling spells (which, if done right, ought to themselves be reducing local energy and thereby adding power to the replicator... hmmm....) is the easy part, surviving the world war that starts over people trying to grab these magitech inventions is likely the hard part.

Spoiler: Divine Path

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I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Spoiler: WoD Alex Knight

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[I guess one of Alex’s video game playing video game Spirits has started “campaign mode” in Another World? I may consider poking the hornet’s nest that is the rabbit hole of the alternative - that the ROB created Alex, house and all, in Another World, in another post.]

Despite coming from video games, Alex’s Spirit friends aren’t terribly good at actually playing these games. And now they want Alex’s help in getting a campaign achievement trophy.

This is problematic, as Alex’s help could easily invalidate their efforts as “cheating”. Or corrupt their save file. Or both.

So Alex would contact the company (the ROB) on the Spirits' behalf, to ask what mods are allowed. [metagaming: If the answer is “none”, there’s nothing for Alex to do in this challenge.] The customer service representative, Rob, explains that there are two requirements for still earning trophies when using mods: each player may only use mods they have created (****!), and the mod has to be approved for the challenge (**** again!). Alex would ask about mods that were created by a group, and Rob explains that such mods are only valid (for the purposes of achieving accomplishment trophies) for a single account - all individuals who created the mods must sign off on what account is the “approved” account.

So, while there’s plenty of video games with items that create infinite water, or other potential solutions to this problem, the Spirits will lose their campaign trophy if Alex simply imports them. And importing trademarked characters could prove legally tricky (let alone “what if this is a Technocracy trap?” concerns, where Alex doesn’t want to put his friends at risk over a game. Still, there’s plenty (like the Zerg) who have a sacrificial, “crunch all you want, we’ll make more” attitude to their troops, and others who have a suicidal-adjacent sacrificial attitude towards helping other spirits in need.

Ultimately, Alex would submit several proposed mods to Rob. Most of them (such as raising the skill cap or adding in actively protected content or OP merchants) would be denied (or so I'm ruling). Importing unprotected IP, OTOH, would generally be approved (or so I'm ruling).

Alex isn’t a great programmer, but he has enough skills for some simple mods, and has the Magick to create “mods” to import his Spirit friends to help.

Certainly, some Hydromancers or Cryomancers would be helpful to fight the effects of climate change. And “Bringing up the map”, and importing things like Dragons or Fire Elementals, would allow the portal to be found and… interacted with. The success of those interactions... well, they might as readily speed up the process as fix it. Sigh.

Spoiler: Divine Path

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I suspect Alex will be known as the god of Fire and Ice, of Volcanos and water/Ice-spewing dragons.

Spoiler: WoD Harry tHH

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Well, this is almost right up Harry’s alley. 5,000 people in one town under his command to power his rituals, and the world believes in his paradigm? Yeah, we can definitely make some changes to the weather with that kind of power.

That said, as a player, and because of Harry’s limited Science skill, I’d definitely be dragging this out as long as the GM will allow, to give Harry time to gain XP to learn Matter and Life. Because creating water will help more than “blindly” changing the temperature and wind.

Objective: (Trivially) convert town to his paradigm.

Objective: Use town-powered rituals to Chill.

Objective: Learn sufficient levels of Matter and Life.

Objective: ????

Objective: Profit!

Rituals could definitely let Harry pinpoint the source of the problem, only… he’d probably need someone else to suggest the idea.

Ultimately, thanks to the power of ~~friendship~~ lots of people empowering a ritual, once he got the necessary levels in his Spheres of Magick, he’d “easily” change the weather, Create teleportation gates to bring in sea water, Create desalination plants to get pure water and sea salt, and make a fortune exporting sea salt and salted meats.

The town wouldn't be self-sufficient without him, but with him it would. I suppose he could create a Relic to do the hard work, and train an apprentice or three to use the Relic, for true self-sufficiency. And a knightly order, to serve as bodyguards for the poor, defenseless Mages (that he pretend to be).

Spoiler: Divine Path

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Arma is probably jealous that Harry would be the better candidate for god of Community / Group Effort, but less interested in his spheres of Knights and Salted Meat

**Quertus** · 2023-04-12, 05:23 PM (ISO 8601)

This challenge has been really rough. And it's made me see a few things.

Like, I thought of digging wells, but didn't mention it for even a single character. And there's a reason for that - and that reason is tied into a bigger topic.

I'm used to playing with a group. One of the conventional ways to try to ensure everyone gets their time in the spotlight is "role protection". My personal habit is to build somewhat min/maxed characters, who have clear areas of specialty (and, more importantly, vast areas of weakness or at least mediocrity), to help ensure that others get their time to shine. Which means that I usually build characters the exact opposite of what this thread calls for.

Worse, in order to not monopolize the game, I'm used to sitting back and not really saying anything on "everyman" skills, or things that aren't my character's area of expertise, until everyone else has had a chance to voice their opinions on the topic. Which, in this case, since none of the characters I'm using in this thread are well (or even mining) experts, none of them would open with well-based solutions, assuming that the citizens would utilize such, and only poking them about such things if they didn't bring it up first.

Which... isn't exactly in character for all of the Protagonists I brought, if placed into this situation. Which is another sign of how roleplaying is suffering by how many characters I'm trying to rush through, while focusing on certain "spirit of the challenge" items (like, "can this be solved with Voltron solutions in this system?" or "how does this differ from what other characters in this system would bring to the table?").

And, presumably, it isn't a good trait for a Count, for a leader that the people look to to provide direction, especially in these troubling times. So I'll need to adjust, and some of the characters who are unaccustomed to leadership roles will need to grow into the role more than others.

Another thing I've been handwaving is "managing up". Of course, that's largely because that's really hard without a GM to bounce off of / without the scenario providing any details about who is above the Count.

AND both of these issues are exacerbated by both time, and the 50,000 character post limit.

Also... the "75% rule" has skewed my perception and thought process a bit - the short of it is, things that are outside a character's wheelhouse are likely to fail, and so aren't worth mentioning. So it's only in certain systems where I'll likely even think to mention such non-specialist options. Like Paradox (1e), where my modus operandi was "stack lots of likely to fail options to ensure (maximize the odds of) some path to success". Or Marvel FASERIP, where "I spend Karma" guarantees success on any roll.

Probably the worst mistake I've made, though, is skipping over how some of the characters could have come to certain conclusions - possibly to the point of hand-waving something the character couldn't actually do. Just because my response to the hidden information was, "I thought it would be something like that" doesn't mean that my characters would automatically suss out what I had them know. I'll have to go back and review my responses when I get a chance.

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I hope to publish some "updated" character sheets before the next challenge. We'll see if that actually happens.

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Alternate "Endings"

So, for some characters, the challenge makes sense in their system: Arma remained in 2e, Whizzy in 3e, and Mr. T is in WHF. And the MtG Mage can't buy things if nobody else is a MtG Mage, so I kinda had to leave their "system" intact. For the rest, I've been putting most of them in random / amalgam fantasy Isekai worlds, with fundamentally completely different rules governing the NPCs than the Protagonist beyond just the "NPCs are e6". But what if, instead, they kept "to their system", and everybody was "playing by the same rules"?

Well, that's a bit odd, as, for example, lava doesn't naturally form portals to the elemental plane of fire in most systems, and ROB couldn't be ROB in many of those systems, either. Even more difficult, while the reverse might be true, a portal to the elemental plane of fire could form lava in some systems, that changes the nature of the challenge, and invalidates some of my proposed solutions. So manhandling the scenario to make it fit the system will affect the logic, the pattern of the outcomes.

Also, there's my skill set to consider. I'm really good at translating characters between systems, not so good at "what if every conceit of the system is wrong / a lie?".

Still, there are a few "alternate endings" that I can explore, so I'll do so below.

What if...

Spoiler: What if WoD Alex Knight were Isekai'd

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There's not much to say here. Suffering from chronic agoraphobia, Alex would... hopefully appear in his Count-ly abode, and never leave it. And, lacking tech, be completely incapable of doing any Magick.

Worst-case scenario... well, worst is, nothing works, he can't do anything. Or that he appears in the terrifying outside, and suffers a complete breakdown.

Second-worst-case scenario, his storm nexus merit would inexplicably still grant bonuses to interacting with spirits (even though there's no logical reason it would), and he'd be limited to "talk to (the zero spirits that he can find with no Magick as an agoraphobe, or) that choose to come to him", and it would turn into a political game of utilizing his OP social skills and (nigh-unique) ability to bribe spirits with his own "energy of exertion" (that he might be able to translate to non-vidoe-game-based spirits?) to get a coalition of spirits to solve the problem for him. Which, while I can see someone writing a decent movie or anime about such a thing, involves way too much world-building for me to do when GMing myself. It's not worth it without that interaction of ideas.

OTOH, he could find himself playing Dark Ages Mage (or Sorcerer's Crusade? The one with Scourge and each group having their own spheres), at which point he could learn new spheres from other Mages, and (maybe?) thereby be free from the shackles and limitations of his technocratic paradigm?

If it worked, this would be a very long road, where I'd be trying to turn that year into as many sessions as possible, to build up the XP to have Alex Knight learn as much Magick as possible, to have any hope of accomplishing anything while never ever leaving the safety of his new house (which he can probably never turn into a Sanctum, sadly).

I'd definitely need to find my books to have any clue what the spheres are, and what they can do, however. So this might be as far as this "what if" goes.

Spoiler: What if the world ran on Mutants & Masterminds?

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Then... their divinations should have told them everything, and they should be polishing Alex Daeus's and/or Omni-Mage's chairs before they appear, and, when they do appear, telling them how they already solved the "heat-wave" problem. Because an army of level 6 M&M characters could easily more than handle what these Level 10 characters could do.

Spoiler: What if John Faseman weren't the only one using Marvel rules

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My first thought is, "when everyone's super, no one is". Still, if they're limited to "street level" heroes, with "normal human limits" of Excellent stats?

Well, there'd still be Excellent sorcerers slinging Excellent spells, including Excellent strength Disintegrates and Excellent Gates. Which is as powerful as John has rolled for any of his spells. So they could probably solve this problem by themselves. The only thing John would need to bring, and would bring, would be Resources, and a talent for organizing people, especially groups of adventurers.

However, despite not necessarily needing to, with a warlike neighbor, John could bring to the issue the Class 1000 Adamantium Flying War Barge Delux, complete with mountain-scale Disintegration ray. That he built in a cave with a box of scraps. That might discourage anyone from wanting to draw aggro from whatever nation John finds himself a wealthy Count in.

So, not much changes when you replace "high fantasy" with "superheroes", afaict.

Spoiler: What if LtC Vir wasn't in a world with "actual magic"

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Well, then, he'd be able to analyze, understand, and replicate the energy fields that the locals are manipulating. And I'd have to make up a faux whole magic system for them to use and him to be "better at", or just for him to have all the lack of limitations his system already gives to his psychic powers. Ultimately, he'd probably end up ascending to a being of pure energy in the process.

Or the locals wouldn't have even faux-magic (contrary to the scenario description), and everything would interact with his science (or "Science!"), and I'd be giving a lot of answers of the form, "<Insert tech here>", with no guidance how long it takes to go from "stone knives and bear skins" to tech he's familiar with.

Ultimately, I think it's best if they have magic his science doesn't interact with, and he's trying to see what problems he can solve with his advanced technology while the magical locals look down on him (world of the 1st 2 scenarios). But a world with "real magic" that he finds he can actually learn and use (3rd+ scenario) might be interesting, too. He'll just have to hire diplomats or something to keep from starting a world war.

**NichG** · 2023-04-12, 07:03 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Quertus

This challenge has been really rough. And it's made me see a few things.

...

And there's a reason for that - and that reason is tied into a bigger topic.

I'm used to playing with a group. One of the conventional ways to try to ensure everyone gets their time in the spotlight is "role protection". My personal habit is to build somewhat min/maxed characters, who have clear areas of specialty (and, more importantly, vast areas of weakness or at least mediocrity), to help ensure that others get their time to shine. Which means that I usually build characters the exact opposite of what this thread calls for.

Worse, in order to not monopolize the game, I'm used to sitting back and not really saying anything on "everyman" skills, or things that aren't my character's area of expertise, until everyone else has had a chance to voice their opinions on the topic.

...

Which... isn't exactly in character for all of the Protagonists I brought, if placed into this situation. Which is another sign of how roleplaying is suffering by how many characters I'm trying to rush through, while focusing on certain "spirit of the challenge" items (like, "can this be solved with Voltron solutions in this system?" or "how does this differ from what other characters in this system would bring to the table?").

And, presumably, it isn't a good trait for a Count, for a leader that the people look to to provide direction, especially in these troubling times. So I'll need to adjust, and some of the characters who are unaccustomed to leadership roles will need to grow into the role more than others.

Another thing I've been handwaving is "managing up". Of course, that's largely because that's really hard without a GM to bounce off of / without the scenario providing any details about who is above the Count.

AND both of these issues are exacerbated by both time, and the 50,000 character post limit.

Also... the "75% rule" has skewed my perception and thought process a bit - the short of it is, things that are outside a character's wheelhouse are likely to fail, and so aren't worth mentioning. So it's only in certain systems where I'll likely even think to mention such non-specialist options. Like Paradox (1e), where my modus operandi was "stack lots of likely to fail options to ensure (maximize the odds of) some path to success". Or Marvel FASERIP, where "I spend Karma" guarantees success on any roll.

Probably the worst mistake I've made, though, is skipping over how some of the characters could have come to certain conclusions - possibly to the point of hand-waving something the character couldn't actually do. Just because my response to the hidden information was, "I thought it would be something like that" doesn't mean that my characters would automatically suss out what I had them know. I'll have to go back and review my responses when I get a chance.

One of the interesting things about this particular challenge is, there is tons of fiction that centers around people solving problems like this on the basis of 'my only meaningful power is that I come from modern Earth'. So, fictionally, there are tons of non-mechanical solutions to this scenario that e.g. in any of my games would never involve once picking up the dice. But for some systems, the system very strongly encourages you to go through its metaphor - everything is a dice roll. And there's probably such a strong table culture against e.g. 'my D&D character invents nuclear fission' that it may have created a blind spot where characters could use things they know (or things they could learn or discover) to avoid using the specific things the game lets them do.

The way I'd put it is, there is this 'set of powers' that innately comes from being e.g. a sapient, intelligent, humanoid-ish thing, independent of whatever the game system specifically gives you. That on its own can be quite powerful.

Interestingly, some game systems have things like this too, buried in the rulebooks. WoD Changeling (don't remember if it was the Lost or the Dreaming, the more recent one) for example has a lot of weak powers that you have to pay a lot of XP to buy, but also just by virtue of being a changeling you have the ability to make deals with mortals to give them like up to three free Background points AND buff yourself in the process. Three free Background points is enough to, for example, turn someone with a $10k/year income into a multi-millionaire. And you just have that ability because changeling, no XP expenditure involved, no rolls, nothing on your character sheet. It's far more potent than anything you can actually do with the powers you have to buy. Another thing you can more or less 'just do' is to physically enter people's dreams. But even noticing that that stuff is in the books seems to require a sort of different mindset than the usual character-build-focused way of thinking.

**Telok** · 2023-04-12, 08:24 PM (ISO 8601)

Yeah, I have it kind of easy as DtD40k7e is the kitchen sink of kitchen sinks so everything fits. Even Paranoia and Traveller I could get away with goinf all Matrix on the characters.

On the other hand the 75% is something that could break the challenges. There's a DtD40k7e build, human paragon peasant, that starts play with 3s in all stats and training in every skill. Add the "mid level amount of xp" thing and the character has basically 5k4+4 every roll (75% a 26+ result), three extra rolled dice per session, and 5 hero points a session. Because hero piints can be used to kick -5 off a target number (and they stack) plus the descriptions of target numbers is weirdly exactly the same as D&D 5e, the character would be basically auto-succeeding anything that called tor a straight one-off skill/ability check. The only things that would stop the character would be stuff you utterly required magic or specific unavailable tech for, or a bunch of rapid fire tests with 30+ TNs that all had to be done in a single session.

Or take Gun Whore Bob, that character has "open a doorway to anywhere with a couple hours work" and can summon a 8k4 skill+ability spirit for 5 minutes. But it's actually trivial to rebuild that to any other magic school*. You could set up for seduction plus the spells Luck, Precognition, and Commune. That would get a character able to talk to anyone they could name (yes including all the gods, it's just 'name' and not a 'secret name' thing) then throw 10k7 reroll 1s & a free reroll to seduce them. Your 75% for that is 49 before rerolls and using hero points to drop the target number by 10... math math math... not an even bell curve because exploding 10s... if I'm right the 75% for including a reroll if you roll under 50 comes out to about 60 or 61 so with the -10 we'll hit 70+ for that 75%=100% target. Or we could set up to call up a 9 foot tall elemental every hour to build an army with.

Applying that "75% = success" to spammable abilities in DtD40k7e leads to armies of elementals and "are there any gods, demigods, or anyone powerful enough to solve this that I can seduce with a TN 70 check". I just feel it'd be a little silly to go that far overboard.

* or any gun kata or sword school. Those get pretty crazy but being able to tank nuclear missiles, one-shot dragons & mecha, stealth kill anyone, or punch starships to scrap (that one actually takes hours to accomplish) isn't a "widely useful for different kinds of challenges" sort of thing.

**Quertus** · 2023-04-13, 10:59 AM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by NichG

One of the interesting things about this particular challenge is, there is tons of fiction that centers around people solving problems like this on the basis of 'my only meaningful power is that I come from modern Earth'. So, fictionally, there are tons of non-mechanical solutions to this scenario that e.g. in any of my games would never involve once picking up the dice. But for some systems, the system very strongly encourages you to go through its metaphor - everything is a dice roll. And there's probably such a strong table culture against e.g. 'my D&D character invents nuclear fission' that it may have created a blind spot where characters could use things they know (or things they could learn or discover) to avoid using the specific things the game lets them do.

The way I'd put it is, there is this 'set of powers' that innately comes from being e.g. a sapient, intelligent, humanoid-ish thing, independent of whatever the game system specifically gives you. That on its own can be quite powerful.

I mean, if I were Isekai’d, sure, there’s lots of ideas I’d have, lots of concepts I’m vaguely familiar with, that could solve this class of problem. Or not.

Spoiler: Examples

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Because, for example, so what if I introduce different crops, if the local pollinator population dies out due to climate change, or isn’t interested in the alternate crops?

And I don’t know much about wells and aqueducts and such - the locals may well know more than I do, or I might even foul their water supply if I do it wrong enough (lead pipes being an example I know, but what don’t I know?).

And there’s, perhaps not tons, but fiction I’m very fond of, that talks about the danger of introducing invasive species to an ecosystem - something I hear about irl in the “nonfiction” news multiple times yearly, too.

So, yeah, I’m not convinced that the muggles are actually going to make things better.

Implementing any of these ideas would require significant manpower - which, in a non-industrial society, is that much manpower that isn’t going towards tending the falling crops, or otherwise keeping the community self-sufficient.

It’d be a gamble, for Isekai’d me, trying out my half-baked ideas in the hopes that it improves the community, and that it does so in time to be worth the cost, let alone completed before Rob’s time limit expires.

And that’s if I can convince them to do so in the first place. I’ve worked with a lot of idiots, who wouldn’t do what was obviously right, that I couldn’t convince of things I knew to be true, let alone some dubious plan that even the speaker admits is a gamble. Heck, even here on the Playground, I’ve had to talk about my characters by name to keep Playgrounders from saying “that’s impossible” about things I’ve actually done. That’s just how hard people are to convince of even things I can state as a no-gamble Truth.

Point is, I’m well and ____ly conditioned to believe… a lot of things, I suppose, but case in point that things I can accomplish on my own without having to deal with morons are by far superior and easier solutions to problems. Especially with the “75% success” rule, involving others === failure (unless the character is super spec‘s for that, like the telepathic vampire, who still only has a 70% chance of success on any given social roll, meaning he can, by these rules, at best, convince people to do the second best option, if it comes to needing to use dice).

So “using Everyman skills” isn’t, to me, a “non-mechanical solution”. In fact, it’s the solution involving the heaviest reliance on mechanics - and, worse, on mechanics with undefined inputs, or virtually guaranteed to fail.

And I’m the GM for these challenges - I know what a **** the GM is.

Further, there’s… well, as you said, there’s a difference between attempting a solution anyone could do, and showcasing what’s unique about this system / character. Given the feel of this thread, that pushes me further towards unique solutions. And this is also a product of me running so many characters, and not wanting to just write the same thing for each one.

**NichG** · 2023-04-13, 12:14 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Quertus

Point is, I’m well and ____ly conditioned to believe… a lot of things, I suppose, but case in point that things I can accomplish on my own without having to deal with morons are by far superior and easier solutions to problems. Especially with the “75% success” rule, involving others === failure (unless the character is super spec‘s for that, like the telepathic vampire, who still only has a 70% chance of success on any given social roll, meaning he can, by these rules, at best, convince people to do the second best option, if it comes to needing to use dice).

So “using Everyman skills” isn’t, to me, a “non-mechanical solution”. In fact, it’s the solution involving the heaviest reliance on mechanics - and, worse, on mechanics with undefined inputs, or virtually guaranteed to fail.

Okay, perhaps I should clarifiy the terms of the challenge: The 75% thing isn't 'if you would logically have less than a 75% chance of success, you fail'. It's 'if the system would make you roll to determine if you succeed then use a 75% success cut off for pass/fail'. If what the system says is just 'the GM decides', then the GM (you) can just decide whether something would succeed or fail.

So if for example your 2e character goes to a bar and orders a drink. If as a GM running 2e you'd require them to make a reaction roll with the bartender to see if they get thrown out, well that's your version of 2e I guess! But if you'd just run it at a table as 'okay, the bartender charges you a few copper and you get your drink', then it doesn't matter if your character can't hit a 75% success rate on a Charisma check. Personally, I wouldn't make someone roll a Charisma check to give an instruction to someone working for them unless that particular person was in some way recalcitrant or hostile. So, at least at my table, simply firing anyone who makes you roll would basically resolve the whole 'I can't do social stuff because I can't hit 75%'

Similarly, if there's something unspecified in the scenario prompt but not tied - by your system or by your table practice - to a dice roll, then you just decide what that thing is, you don't say 'well it has only a 60% chance of being what I need it to be, so its never the what I need'

**Quertus** · 2023-04-13, 04:20 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by NichG

Okay, perhaps I should clarifiy the terms of the challenge: The 75% thing isn't 'if you would logically have less than a 75% chance of success, you fail'. It's 'if the system would make you roll to determine if you succeed then use a 75% success cut off for pass/fail'. If what the system says is just 'the GM decides', then the GM (you) can just decide whether something would succeed or fail.

So if for example your 2e character goes to a bar and orders a drink. If as a GM running 2e you'd require them to make a reaction roll with the bartender to see if they get thrown out, well that's your version of 2e I guess! But if you'd just run it at a table as 'okay, the bartender charges you a few copper and you get your drink', then it doesn't matter if your character can't hit a 75% success rate on a Charisma check. Personally, I wouldn't make someone roll a Charisma check to give an instruction to someone working for them unless that particular person was in some way recalcitrant or hostile. So, at least at my table, simply firing anyone who makes you roll would basically resolve the whole 'I can't do social stuff because I can't hit 75%'

Similarly, if there's something unspecified in the scenario prompt but not tied - by your system or by your table practice - to a dice roll, then you just decide what that thing is, you don't say 'well it has only a 60% chance of being what I need it to be, so its never the what I need'

lol

So, 2e reaction rolls are iirc for when it isn’t obvious what the mood should be. So when the king and captain of the guard walk in on you with your pants down next to a screaming princess, there’s no need for a reaction check. Otoh, for your bar example, there may actually be a reaction roll - not for a reaction to ordering a drink, but if the GM didn’t know if random bartender has a friendly or surly disposition towards the PCs in general.

For more… variable response / resistance situations, sadly, most systems don’t correctly place a DC on challenges, like “put on your pants”; if they did, then “calling for a roll” would result in an automatic success… for most people who aren’t armless drunk toddlers etc. But if DCs were done right, calling for a roll wouldn’t matter to this question; 75% would be 75% and auto-success would be auto-success regardless of whether the GM called for a roll or not.

So, dealing with the systems we have, rather than the perfect system, what are we looking at? Well, unsurprisingly, systems are rather quiet about when they fail like a chump, giving very little guidance for when the system claims to not work, for when the GM should override the system logic that the DC math indicates.

Paradox (1e) doesn’t use DCs or modifiers: you have automatic success, automatic failure, and GM called for a roll as your 3 states. The creator of this homebrew system called for a roll…. pretty much every time a PC took an action that could possibly be related to one of the skills. And I probably had the only sill that had a 75+% rating in that system, ever. So no single roll ever succeeds, it’s always about having fallback plans.

Still, I suppose “telling your underlines to do something normal” was one exception that never required a roll. But I don’t think I can convince the GM that “use tech you’ve never heard of before” is exactly normal. So not only is that a bust, but “Social roll to survive political backlash when first plan invariably fails” is also an important roll to consider here. So even my character with really good charisma and engineering rolls would think twice about attempting such a solution without a Telepathy fallback plan, were they genre savvy enough.

And, thing is, when it comes to systems where it’s more “GM’s call” as to when to roll, well, the GM for my characters is a **** who knows “stop stabbing yourself, you’re just making things worse” requires a roll, because people are just that dumb (no, really, I have multiple life experiences of failing to convince people they were being exactly that dumb, quite obviously causing the problem, where they refused to believe the obvious truth). So I know that the GM for my characters is going to call for rolls, even to convince people to act in their obvious best interests, let alone be a **** about the potential logical consequences of anything like those Everyman / muggle solutions I mentioned.

So if, as a player (and especially if I know that the “75% rule” is in effect), I’ll try and… limit? Direct? Hmmm… I guys I’ll try and get the most bang for my buck, with the last catastrophic fall conditions? I’m not actually sure what underlying logic drives my decisions that drives me away from options I know can turn a type of ugly that I don’t want to have to deal with.

But I do know that, unless a particular answer speaks to me, I’ll avoid unnecessary single author fiction social interactions with characters I made up just for that purpose. I’ll try and avoid trying to a state where I find myself needing to create a “leader of the rebellion” character, and have my character interact with them, or with their plans.

**NichG** · 2023-04-13, 04:57 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Quertus

lol

So, 2e reaction rolls are iirc for when it isn’t obvious what the mood should be. So when the king and captain of the guard walk in on you with your pants down next to a screaming princess, there’s no need for a reaction check. Otoh, for your bar example, there may actually be a reaction roll - not for a reaction to ordering a drink, but if the GM didn’t know if random bartender has a friendly or surly disposition towards the PCs in general.

For more… variable response / resistance situations, sadly, most systems don’t correctly place a DC on challenges, like “put on your pants”; if they did, then “calling for a roll” would result in an automatic success… for most people who aren’t armless drunk toddlers etc. But if DCs were done right, calling for a roll wouldn’t matter to this question; 75% would be 75% and auto-success would be auto-success regardless of whether the GM called for a roll or not.

So, dealing with the systems we have, rather than the perfect system, what are we looking at? Well, unsurprisingly, systems are rather quiet about when they fail like a chump, giving very little guidance for when the system claims to not work, for when the GM should override the system logic that the DC math indicates.

Paradox (1e) doesn’t use DCs or modifiers: you have automatic success, automatic failure, and GM called for a roll as your 3 states. The creator of this homebrew system called for a roll…. pretty much every time a PC took an action that could possibly be related to one of the skills. And I probably had the only sill that had a 75+% rating in that system, ever. So no single roll ever succeeds, it’s always about having fallback plans.

Still, I suppose “telling your underlines to do something normal” was one exception that never required a roll. But I don’t think I can convince the GM that “use tech you’ve never heard of before” is exactly normal. So not only is that a bust, but “Social roll to survive political backlash when first plan invariably fails” is also an important roll to consider here. So even my character with really good charisma and engineering rolls would think twice about attempting such a solution without a Telepathy fallback plan, were they genre savvy enough.

And, thing is, when it comes to systems where it’s more “GM’s call” as to when to roll, well, the GM for my characters is a **** who knows “stop stabbing yourself, you’re just making things worse” requires a roll, because people are just that dumb (no, really, I have multiple life experiences of failing to convince people they were being exactly that dumb, quite obviously causing the problem, where they refused to believe the obvious truth). So I know that the GM for my characters is going to call for rolls, even to convince people to act in their obvious best interests, let alone be a **** about the potential logical consequences of anything like those Everyman / muggle solutions I mentioned.

So if, as a player (and especially if I know that the “75% rule” is in effect), I’ll try and… limit? Direct? Hmmm… I guys I’ll try and get the most bang for my buck, with the last catastrophic fall conditions? I’m not actually sure what underlying logic drives my decisions that drives me away from options I know can turn a type of ugly that I don’t want to have to deal with.

But I do know that, unless a particular answer speaks to me, I’ll avoid unnecessary single author fiction social interactions with characters I made up just for that purpose. I’ll try and avoid trying to a state where I find myself needing to create a “leader of the rebellion” character, and have my character interact with them, or with their plans.

This all seems to be in very curious contrast to your usual Combat as War, never roll if you can at all help it philosophy...

Anyhow, I'm very specifically not DM-ing these scenarios, so its up to you how you would resolve it. Don't want to taint the results!

**Quertus** · 2023-04-13, 09:37 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Telok

Basically someome else uses Paranoid Bob as a magic item to solve the issue. That's the only way.

Ah, I've gotten a chuckle every time I read that.

Originally Posted by Telok

5000 is a itty bitty small town. Well ditch everything requiring assistance from any local magic users in my answers.

Why make that assumption? Is that a 3e thing?

Originally Posted by NichG

This all seems to be in very curious contrast to your usual Combat as War, never roll if you can at all help it philosophy...

Anyhow, I'm very specifically not DM-ing these scenarios, so its up to you how you would resolve it. Don't want to taint the results!

Ah, I think you hit the nail on the head. Kudos!

As a player, I do indeed have a CaW attitude of avoiding rolls. But as a GM, I roll for unknowns - and the personalities of the NPCs and physics of the potential fail states of muggle solutions are unknowns. Which means it makes perfect sense that I'd avoid those paths, where the success of the plan ends up in the hands of Arangee, unless some other factor, something else about those paths interested me enough to risk them, or the character had no other alternatives.

**Telok** · 2023-04-13, 11:11 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Quertus

Ah, I've gotten a chuckle every time I read that.

Why make that assumption? Is that a 3e thing?

If you're amused by the failure and death of a Paranoia character then it's a sign the system is working.

The caster thing this was because I'd misread and thought the town had a magic supported militia. But that was the folks across the mountains. I'd have to dig out my medieval & dark ages rpg & economics references but the 85%-95% of the population being small hold farming that does not much beyond survive is relatively accurate for isolated regions.

Tangent

Spoiler

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Basically they used very inefficent farming techniques and lots of different crops, not all of which were completely suited to a particular climate/rainfall/etc. The reason is because there was functionally no long term weather forecasting and no way to switch crops or labor mid-season. What they had was a system that prioritized having some food no matter what the weather, pests, etc., did to them. The year to year survival of the majority was assured even through flooding and drought, but at the cost of efficent farming and meaningful amounts of cash crops. This is aslo predicated on not being able to rely on trade or local nobility/rules to import food during a famine, since that was the way it was.

Now if they were in a proper mid-Europe setup with villages every few miles, towns every dozen or so, and regular trade, that'd be different. But it sounds more like your typical D&D setup with a town every 40-60 miles and big tracts of wilderness. That's more in line with 1800's California Gold Rush which Gygax was more familiar with and modeled D&D frontier civilization on for early D&D. It's more familiar to American audiences and more ameniable to forgotten mines or other "dungeon in wilderness" adventures like Keep on the Borderlands than an actual European setting would be.

Anyways, we're looking at having maybe 500 of 5000 people not directly involved in required survival food production. Maybe a thousand if we can put stuff off a while. But if the local weather is changing they'll be short on food after a single season. So I'd avoid assuming there's anything more than a hedge wizard around out little bumpkin-ville. I mean, there could be a random relatively high level druid hiding in the woods, but it's not something I'd be willing to assume when playing.

Amusingly, simply convincing the neighbors to help is possibly the most reliable solution. Marry a couple local noble kids to each other and dig a canal to the lake. As a bonus canals are great for transport and trade as well as water.

**InvisibleBison** · 2023-04-14, 02:49 PM (ISO 8601)

Responding to this challenge took me a while, mostly because I was busy not doing homework and couldn't find the time, but also because it's very far removed from Blades in the Dark's intended play experience, so it took quite a bit of thinking to figure out how to approach it.

Spoiler: Initial Thoughts

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The biggest issue I'm having in figuring out how to approach this problem is that the goal is campaign-level. I can do a pretty good job of figuring out how an action roll or two would go, and can guesstimate the outcome of a score, but trying to simulate dozens of sessions of gaming is probably beyond me. Still, I'll give it a shot:

Spoiler: Reyyah Ibrili

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Initial thoughts: Reyyah's proficiency with the arcane puts her in a good position to find a supernatural method of reversing the desertification, though she doesn't have (and presumably because of the E6-like nature of the world cannot obtain) the Ritual ability, which means she can't do any “big magic”. In other words, if the desertification is happening because of a cursed magical orb hidden somewhere nearby she can track it down and smash it, but if it's happening because the land itself is cursed she doesn't have the ability to lift the curse or reverse the curse back upon whoever laid it or whatever. And of course if there's not a magical cause to the desertification none of this applies.
I think her best bet is going to be tracking down some sort of magical artifact that can stave off the desertification. She'd also have to forge some sort of alliance with the neighbor to the east to protect against aggression from the northern ruler, whose territory would also benefit from whatever magical artifact she's found. Reyyah doesn't have great social skills, so she'd probably have to take a bad deal, but the goal is self-sufficiency, not autonomy.

After reviewing the hidden details: Okay, so while there is a magical cause to the desertification it's not something Reyyah can actually deal with. Her success depends entirely on whether or not she's able to find some sort of mega-refrigerator artifact with which to chill the region, so she's probably going to fail.

Spoiler: Reginald Blythe

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Initial thoughts: Reginald doesn't really have any skills that are directly applicable to this problem. His best course of action, if such a term can really be used for such a bad plan, is to try and infiltrate the government of one the two prosperous neighbors and make them decide that sponsoring his nation is a worthwhile foreign policy objective. His odds of successfully doing this aren't great, and even if he pulls it off I don't think it counts as being self-sufficient. I'd say he just fails this challenge.

After reviewing the hidden details: There's nothing in here that helps Reginald. He still fails.

Spoiler: Oturug Bhulgan

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Initial Thoughts: Oturug has probably the best shot at this of any of my characters, because of his skill at crafting. Developing a magical device that will make the nearby lands arable is well within his abilities, though it will definitely require a lot of money to produce, especially in the quantities needed to make arable enough land to support 5000+ people. Of course, he has access to the treasury of a small territory, which even if it's small on the scale of nations is quite a lot of money in terms of BitD's finance mechanics. Military defense is a problem, given the inevitable aggression from the northern nation and potential aggression from the western nation, but they can probably be bought off with arable-ification devices of their own, though Oturug's weak social skills might make that harder than it could otherwise be. On the whole, though, I think he'll be successful.

After reviewing the hidden details: In theory, Oturug might be able to do something about the portal, but I don't think he's likely to find it. He probably could if he went looking for it, but he's more likely to just address the immediate problem. And I do think his arable-ification devices are more likely to succeed than some sort of heat-trap deployed near the portal.

**Quertus** · 2023-04-15, 10:55 PM (ISO 8601)

Notes (mostly for character sheet updates)

Spoiler: 2e Cleric of D&D Arma

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If there's very little that requires her attention, she could create maybe 75-100 potions in a year, while still going on the occasional dungeon dive. Unfortunately, creating ice trees and undead take priority here. Still, as the only person in the entire world who can create potions, she'd crank out a few for trade to other kingdoms (and be really sad she didn't keep all the ones she brewed back in (what remains of) her home world).

Still, trying to imagine an e6 2e world is quite challenging. Nobody can create any magical items whatsoever, so one of two things is true. Either nobody in the entire world has any items (in which case Arma is extra OP by comparison), or all existing items are even more "relics of lost civilizations" than usual, coming from a time before the e6 limit existed, or from another world that lacks the e6 state.

Worse, 2e doesn't exactly cater to "you're special". That is... boy oh boy, how to explain? So... either 2e has some contradictory lore, or some of the lore is actually from older editions. Regardless, canonically, worlds can have different rules for a number of reasons in D&D. One reason is the chemistry of nutrition - certain elements and proteins and whatnot just don't exist in certain worlds. This results in travelers suffering the other world's limitations, and/or getting sick and dying. Following this logic, Arma would lose a level each month, until she dropped to 6th level. Or she would slowly sicken, and just keel over after a while. However, thanks to Contact Home Power and Create Food and Water, she could simply create a bland but filling gruel from her home world that would allow her to keep her power. However, this isn't just an additional spell tax, as it would also allow others who partake of her repast to break the e6 limit. Like if One Punch Man trained a group of apprentices in exercise and diet. Totally OP.

Alternately, it could be a nature of the fabric of magic and reality, in which case it's highly likely that Arma would sicken and die before the year is up. There probably shouldn't be a workaround for this, but... it's possible the ROB worked out a variant on the... memory fails me on the name of the spell. The Native Item spell, perhaps? Anyway, it's possible that the ROB worked out a spell that works like a planar bubble (like an Acorn of Far Travel, actually), and provided Arma with this. Alternately... I suppose Arma could use those soil samples she collected off her boots, not (just) to create her not-so-cubic gate, but as a focus for her own custom spell she "researches" / prays for... if she receives divine inspiration that that's what's going on. Or her "divine blessing" that lets her survive the outlands of her own broken world could allow her to no-sell the sickness caused by this world, too. Or she could just die. Since I imagine she'd throw some divinations if she started getting sick, and transition that ending to "pray for new spell", "just die" seems an unlikely result, even if the ROB was a ROB and set her up to die.

And then there's the possibility that some or all of the items in the world exist because future, time-traveling Arma created them, and sent them back to the past, for Elminster-like nutter reasons. She would test that theory, by planning to make one or more of the items designed to return to the owner's hand when they activate a command-word trigger (see also "hammer space"), and speak the command word(s).

So, now that I've written up some possibilities, what would I rule as the Truth of this world?

Well, Arma is based on Armus, who enchanted his Polyhedron Gateway to return to his hand whenever he said "Mine" in elvish (had it enchanted, whatever), and who got to loot his own dead body. So having Arma have crafted such items is just funny and appropriate for the theme for this character, so I've got to go with it. But not without cost - likely some distant foreign powers / adventurers had some of those items, and eventually use divinations or whatever to figure out who "stole" them. But that's a problem for another year.

Since it's a future Arma sending them back in time, she could literally McGuffin herself for any challenges (not just the 6 of this thread) that she encounters. So she'll be surprised that the items that respond to her command words do not exactly match what she envisioned creating, and she'd be prepared that they might have unexpected uses / powers.

To continue the running gag, I'll say that she expected to craft items that parallel items that Armus acquired later in his career. A power stone that powers out 20 levels of arbitrary spells per day would give her 5 additional castings of Polymorph Other per day for the current crisis. A Staff of the Arch-priest could give her access to some high-level spells, and allow her to cast them without aging herself... and allow her to cast some lower-level spells (like, say, Metamorphose Liquids (because for her it's a Priest spell, dagnabbit!)) at no cost. Her Dodecahedron Gateway... we'll get to that. And the other... let's say two items... will remain undefined (and hopefully, if they do need to be defined, can similarly be made to match something Armus ended up with).

So, because that's mighty OP as it is, I don't want to let Arma just break the e6 limit on her chosen, and the not-so-cubic gate will probably come with a ROB note saying "no bringing in others" or something similar, to keep from having a whole army of e6-breaking beings on her side.

Even if Arma became truly immortal, I don't think she'd actually create a whole world worth of items... unless she actually secretly is the ROB... who offered to help her reach divinity... OK, actually, I think I accidentally just talked myself into going that route, as I kinda like that angle.

Well, I guess I see where I'm going with this one. Sigh.

So Arma will be the self-created monotheistic creator deity of the world she was Isekai'd into, unless some future scenario necessitates that the world is polytheistic... in which case, I guess she can use Create Food and Water to break the e6 cap, and the other deities are her Chosen.

Spoiler: 3e Wizzard Whizzy

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Well, as I already covered, Whizzy is now probably 12th level, with an Artificer cohort and one or more Decanters of Endless Water, causing cool water to flow through town on a series of stone aqueducts into the new frog ponds. The weather is hot, and the neighboring militaristic kingdom is likely to get even hotter if they ever realize Whizzy was farming their troops for XP as hard as he's having the peasants in his domain work to hit their level cap. And he's definitely looking to add some form of "Harem Girl" prestige class to the setting.

Spoiler: Paradox Telepathic Vampire

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So, I'm feeling dumb. The really easy, in-character answer to "creating a new companion" and "getting them the magical power to solve this problem" wasn't to, when served the lemons of "no appropriate Wizard", to make lemonade out of Karmic Wealth and hoping they can raise their skills, but to go the simple in-character route: eat a wizard. All it takes is (the mysterious death of) one "at cap" Wizard (like those from the neighboring nation), and bam!, our Illithid-Savant-like protagonist has max Wizard powers - which he uses to transfer that max Wizard power to his Vampire Thief Catgirl companion. Because "Transfer Power" is a spell in Paradox (1e). Sigh.

So using magic to understand and solve the problem would be much easier, and they'd probably have a decent magic item business, not just sunscreen and slave trade, plus some decent material and Karmic Wealth to boot.

Spoiler: Paradox Cutter Fyord

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At long last, Cutter would have mana storage crystals on his character sheet. Also a stillsuit, one or more Decanter of Endless Water - equipped golems, and an air-conditioned mansion.

Spoiler: John Faseman of Marvel

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So, it occurred to me that I was being dumb, and, if the ROB operates like most D&D deities, granting followers spells, then John spending the karma to take him as a contact should more than make sense. Of course, that's probably only useful for John's purposes if ROB is actually a god of Isekai, or can otherwise grant John the Isekai spell he's after.

Regardless, he's got a few new children, and a flying adamantium fortress that enhances his Disintegration powers to insane, "solve that last problem" levels. And probably a Self-Duplication spell for good measure.

Spoiler: Shadowrun Troll Wizard

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Ugh. Some more pathetic Creation spells, to create water and ice. And a bunch of apprentices with the same. Terrible "solutions" and terrible at being a Count. Even with a Hat of Disguise. The only good thing the world / county got from the Troll is some newly literal and figurative cortex-bomb-equipped alchemists learning how to create Orichalcum. I don't know if "can make money to trade to other towns in its own nation" qualifies as "self-sufficient", but it's probably the closest the Troll is likely to pull off.

Spoiler: M&M - Alex Daeus

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Alex is currently temporarily down his half-a-level supply of XP, from watching his new robot get melted by lava. Fortunately, he made a backup copy of its programming...

Spoiler: M&M - Omni-Wizard

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The Omni-Wizard is also down (much of) their half-a-level supply of XP, as they have a new "actually good at being a Count" ally.

Spoiler: Warhammer - Mr. T

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Wow. So Tzeentch rewards Mr. T for creating a new Beastman army... with the Reckoning of Tzeentch. Which, while it boosts some of his characeristics (and lowers others), it also gives him an additional mutation, disqualifying him for becoming a Daemon, unless ROB can help out there.

Despite Talents to allow multiple rolls on the Mutation table, the most interesting option is Prehensile Tail.

So, having been made Count, Mr. T. has gained a Fate Point and a Prehensile Tail for turning the population into Chaos-worshiping beastmen, who now roam the chaos-tree-filled desert wastes with their faulty plasma rifles and their magic water-granting duck.

Spoiler: MtG Elven Chronomancer

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Right, so... a few updates. Being a count definitely increases his available funds from "poor mage who inherited a good deck" to, well, actually able to afford a few good cards. And being a count for a year means that it's pretty safe to assume that the "infinite sideboard" (collection?) has grown significantly over this time. Also, the amusement park is in space, from an "Un-" set that isn't tournament legal, so "Type 2" is a bit... more restrictive than I was going for - perhaps "printed in the past few years" better represents how I took the "e6" status of the world.

Expanding to "printed in the past few years", in addition to adding in the amusement park in space to Type 2 cards, we've got (I think) something with Transformers and Warhammer 40k and "Brother's War" during the type 2 timeframe. Probably more stuff I'm not aware of.

Warhammer 40k has "Abundance", which sounds like it would do wonders for the crops. "Deny Reality" both mechanically and thematically sounds like it could deal with the heat wave / portal, if Naturalize didn't cut it. Or "Harrow" could be used to sacrifice the cursed/"enchanted" Mountain, and replace it with two new lands - which sounds like great fun (for me, not so much for the cartographers)!

And if it's somehow hard to notice when one's mountains are enchanted, "Reconnaissance Mission" could help with that.

On a different note, "Beacon of Unrest" and "Death's Presence" could be used mechanically (if not so much thematically) to push normal normal e6 citizenry past their limits, increasing everyone's power (and toughness) by repeatedly killing and resurrecting one unlucky sacrifice. Not much use in this particular world, however.

It also has "Birth of the Imperium" and "Biotransference", in case I really wanted to shake things up, changing who the townsfolk are, making them into the Imperium or (semi-)sentient robots. And it also has "Exterminatus" or "Let the Galaxy Burn", for the ultimate overkill ways to shake things up (that I imagine will get hit with a Counterspell from somewhere if anyone tries it...). Actually... I'm kinda liking the Biotransference answer. I'll definitely have Count Elven Chronomancer offer that solution to any citizens who can't take the heat (heh).

Regardless, it's questionable why the Count would themselves ever have to solve any of these problems, since any mages in the citizenry could do so just as easily. All in all, I suspect dealing with a world rife with tranformers, dragons, space amusement parks and tyranids (let alone magic schools and whatever else) will prove more challenging than the simple heat.

Spoiler: Star Trek - LtC Vir

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Well, in addition to standard gear of phaser, tricorder, and (useless) comm badge, LtC Vir has a medkit and a toolkit, and a replicator hooked up to a maddening array of magical power storage devices... inside a carriage... that's upgraded to be more like a shielded tank... that drives around, with the replicator by default set to be converting ~~matter to cooling spells~~ ambient heat into matter. Curiously, nothing really needs to be changed on his character sheet to represent the mad skill at Technomancy he's acquired from the locals (although he'll doubtless take "Technomancy" as a skill/specialty to boost his already "unable to be failed" rolls the next time he gets the opportunity. And he's doubtless building other technomagical wonders as fast as his skills allow, which is faster than his lack of diplomatic skills make it wise for him to introduce such wonders to the world.

Spoiler: WoD Alex Knight

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No real updates to Alex's character sheet, but the world status for Another World, campaign mode, has mods that include Hydromancers, Cryomancers, and fire- and ice-themed elementals, dragons, etc. Also, the portal situation is probably worse than if Alex hadn't gotten involved.

Spoiler: WoD Harry tHH

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Geez, Harry really cannot afford all these XP. But he'll have dots in Matter and Life, and lots of new Backgrounds, for the... Follower, Retainers, Resources, and Relic he now has. And Status. And maybe Fame. And his former Retainers are greyed out. But if he doesn't get to use Dark Ages rules, he'll be down one Willpower for creating that Relic.

All in all, he'd really have to stretch this out over a lot of sessions to get the XP to afford all that. Of course, it does represent a year's worth of time, so maybe? Otherwise, he's got a huge XP debt, to pay off all the Backgrounds he acquired.

**NichG** · 2023-04-16, 01:05 PM (ISO 8601)

Scenario 4 - Dreamsick

(Note, this is not a continuation of the same clone/character as Scenario 3, each scenario is separate)

Spoiler: In-character info

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You have been requested to investigate a peculiar rash of disappearances that have a clearly supernatural angle to them. What makes it particularly troubling is that the information about the appearances seems to disappear over time, until it’s as if the person who disappeared never existed in the first place. This was noticed by a local investigator who had collected testimony about a few of the disappearances, then later found that their own notes had been erased.

Your employer wants you to find the source of the disappearances and ideally stop it and return those who are missing if possible. Of course given the nature of this exercise, if you want to do something else with the information that’s also interesting!

Spoiler: Details that could be revealed by investigation into reports

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In reverse order (which corresponds to ease of discovery via investigation):

- The final thing that happens is that the timeline adjusts as if the victim had never existed

- Before that, the victim disappears, and people far from them begin to forget while people close to them still remember.

- Before that, the victim exhibits sleepwalking and other strange nocturnal behaviors. These behaviors if observed have a supernatural aspect to them – the person might be able to climb a flight of stairs that does not exist, etc.

- Before that, the victim might report strange and stressful dreams, the sort of thing where you dream about taking an exam that you already took or other sorts of important or worrisome daily activities. Most people will not connect this occurrence to the disappearances, so its hard to find via investigation.

- The moment of onset of this phenomenon is tied to interacting with a certain individual living in the city in daily life, OR interacting with any of the sleepwalkers when they are in the process of sleepwalking. The ‘patient zero’ is one Kamar Tarnak, is an obsessive gambler who has a habit of using a coin flip to decide their actions on a day to day basis.

Spoiler: Details that could be revealed by magical investigation/experimentation with the ailment itself

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- Those impacted by this do not respond to Remove Disease or Remove Curse, and in general it does not register as a disease, curse, or magical aura/ongoing active magical effect.

- That said, things which are sensitive to planar effects or which are creature-type-aware would register all under the effects of this as ‘native outsiders’. Banishment or other similar spells will cause this condition to immediately proceed to the ‘disappearance’ stage of its progression. If the specific type of outsider can be determined within a system, it would register as
‘Plane of Dreams’.

- A character who causes themselves to be affected sleepwalks, or who telepathically or otherwise investigates the experiences of a sleepwalker will perceive that the person is going about their day in a time-shifted version of the world but with some small details differing. The longer the investigation goes on, the more different those details will be. Others who disappeared will be present in the alternate space.

- Kamar Tarnak’s coin does have a strong magical aura on it, a mix of Conjuration and Divination, though he himself is not aware of this fact. In systems that enable one to make a distinction, the source of this magic is divine rather than arcane.

Spoiler: Full details in case they’re relevant to figure out if your approach works

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Kamar Tarnak attracted the attention of a god of luck (Overpowering) who effectively gave him (via his coin) something like Coil’s power from Worm – both possible courses of action in some sense ‘exist’ when he flips the coin, and he subconsciously navigates towards the course of action that would be most interesting for him (not the one that would be the best for him!). This has created a bunch of planar turbulence of a sort in the form of these now suddenly more-real-than-they-should-be side timelines, and contact with Kamar Tarnak or others influenced by this can tie others to those unreal timelines. As things go on, reality ‘corrects for the disruption’, slowly pruning away those things which responded to any unreal causes to a significant degree.

The place where these alternate timelines are seeding and growing is the Plane of Dreams, and physically traveling there can visibly reveal the phenomenon. Things that have been pruned from reality still exist in those dreams, though those who have fully disappeared are now outsiders native to Dream. Restoring them to reality might be possible, but doing so just by physical transport will result in a sort of phenomenon where people can’t form long-lasting memories of the returned people, with all of the attendant consequences of that. Fully repatriating them as a non-Outsider via any means resolves this, as does making them into a different kind of Outsider first.

Preventing the coin from being flipped will mean that gradually the disappearances stop. Isolating those who are in process will also help. One could also try to get the luck deity or the rest of their pantheon to intervene somehow – this would be considered a bit of a sloppy job by the luck deity and so others would step in to do something about it, but only if you had either sufficient clout to get them to take a look personally or sufficient evidence to present about the sequence of events.

**Telok** · 2023-04-16, 03:46 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Quertus

So, having been made Count, Mr. T. has gained a Fate Point and a Prehensile Tail for turning the population into Chaos-worshiping beastmen, who now roam the chaos-tree-filled desert wastes with their faulty plasma rifles and their magic water-granting duck.

This is hilarious. I love that guy.

The current situation... hmm... that's a lot of D&D-ism in there. I'll do a bit of checking and translate them into DtD40k7e. For Paranoia and Traveller I think it'll have to go all Ghost on the Shell with a jacked in virtual world, but maybe I can come up with something a bit more fringe that's closer to the original intent without just replacing all the rules of reality.

**Kane0** · 2023-04-16, 07:41 PM (ISO 8601)

Spoiler: Lizardman

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An investigation! This will be interesting.

As a Ranger Lizardman doesn't really have any problem tracking targets, but the supernatural disappearance and interplanar aspects really ratchets up the intricacy.

Going through the obvious tools first, we have access to Detect Magic, Dispel Magic, Locate Object, Speak With Animals/Plants, Lesser Restoration, Feign Death and Nondetection in order to gather information and narrow down possibilities. Telepathy is also an option.
Our Arcana and Investigation and Insight skills aren't particularly great, even with Guidance and Enhance Ability we are only clearing easy to medium DCs with any sort of regularity. We are better off with knowledge and speech checks to get the groundwork done, clearing medium to hard DCs with the same window of rolls.

Using these we can figure out it's not a poison or disease but definitely something supernatural even if it doesn't register as traditional magic, potentially a curse that we can't counter or something else entirely. We also know that affected individuals sleepwalk, but it isn't Fey shenanigans because those are our specialty and this doesn't have Fairy stink all over it.

So first step is we find an affected individual and use a combination of Feign Death and Telepathy to try and figure out what's happening to them during those witching hours. Thankfully we have good mental defences and 1 months worth of perfect memory so we have a good window of time to get to work, but once we get to the stage of figuring out how the effect spreads (which means Lizardman is now affected) and that the dreaming contains other lost people we're at a bit of a dead end.

So we can try repeating this process with someone else, or better yet multiple someone elses. We cross reference information as things get more and more accurate to real life the farther we go back until we find the point where people's experiences start overlapping. Perfect memory will be doing a LOT of heavy lifting here.

This should bring us to Kamar as our next lead. Tracking him down and interrogating him is child's play for Lizardman, Detect Magic will even tell us it's not even him but that stupid coin he keeps flipping. Armed with this information, there ain't diddly squat we can do about it other than confiscating the thing and making our report before we forget everything in a month's time and disappear off to dreamland ourselves.

Partial success. Lizardman figures it out but can't actually fix anything himself and gets to add 'dreamlander' to his resume in the process.

**Quertus** · 2023-04-16, 08:56 PM (ISO 8601)

Aw, not continuations? Sadness.

Spoiler: Initial Thoughts

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This may be hard to roleplay, in that my "scientific method" will probably look very similar for all characters who utilize such to investigate using trial and error.

Why and how is the writing "erased"? What does that mean? Quill and ink usually leaves not just ink, but indents on the page - are those gone, too? If information is interspersed with a grocery list, does only the information disappear? What if it's written in code? What is the disappearance rate? Does it vary based on where the information is recorded? How often it is viewed? if it is transmitted or transported to a remote area? Does the effect have an epicenter that can be tracked by utilizing this method? Heck, does the erasure show up to various Sights?

Have any of the witnesses forgotten anything undue? Have the possessions of the disappeared disappeared? Do spells and abilities (like, say a bloodhound) that should be able to track the disappeared function properly? If not, can Sights see a cause for this malfunction? Can retrocognition see the notes / the disappeared? Is there any evidence that the reverse is occurring, that they aren't the disappeared, but the appeared, that are being inserted into the timeline, albeit poorly / piecemeal?

Is there anything similar at the site of the disappearing notes and the sites of the disappearances, or other similarities (they all happened at night, or during church, or after the Head Detective was made aware of them)?

Any chance the one who recorded the information did the erasure? Should we assume some sort of cognitive virus, and nuke the town from orbit, just to be sure? I'm liking Mindrape here...

Let alone the usual, is there anything connecting the disappeared? Any defined rate of disappearances? Locations? What does the investigator remember about their notes? What do the witnesses remember?

Huh. That's an odd name for the challenge.

Wow, those details... really beg for translation into other systems.

Now on to responses for Challenge #4 - Dreamsick

Spoiler: 2e Cleric of D&D Arma

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Well, ****. Is this another symptom of the world breaking, or is this the cause of the break showing up a second time?

Regardless, Arma will use her authority as High Priestess to put the... town? city? Imma call it a town. Anyway, she'll use her authority (and undead army) to put the town on enforced lockdown. Anyone who disagrees will join her undead army.

I'm not sure the exact path, whether inquiries into past victims, divinations, loosening restrictions to create new victims, or random Detect Magic sweeps will be the path that first leads her to Kamar Tarnak and the coin, but the artifact level of magic on the thing will definitely grab her attention.

The most likely outcome of that meeting is that she will determine that Kamar Tarnak doesn't know what's going on, and she will come into possession of the coin... likely in a way that destroys that bubble of reality.

End result: Everyone but Arma is erased from existence. And she needs to create more undead. But now she has an artifact to study, to understand the breaking of the world.

Short of a Chronomancer, I'm not sure anyone in 2e is actually better equipped to interact with this challenge. "Dream" wasn't a real place in 2e and older mechanics, the way it is in 3e.

Spoiler: 3e Wizzard Whizzy

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Yeah, um... Whizzy's familiar accompanies the Investigator while Whizzy plays with pen and paper and Sending. The "inverse distance" rule is quite striking. Whizzy teleports away, and writes down copious notes about the victims - all made up - waiting to see which ones disappear. If only true statements disappear, this fact (plus a map) allows him to track down the common denominator even faster than actual footwork. Either way, he'll wait until night, then Wall of Stone in the residence in question before Fireballing it to ashes, then sift through the ashes to find the Artifact. Problem solved?

Spoiler: Paradox Telepathic Vampire

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Huh. A few deep brain scans later, he's left with an unwelcome but unavoidable conclusion: the affected individuals are not from this world. And a gnawing hunger. So he'd grab a quick bite, affecting a disappearance of his own. Probably after his companion ran a few tests, too, so they'd share the meal. Her findings are that, incongruously, the "invaders" aren't all from the same world. He'd consider poking the gods about this, but would decide against it for now.

Next up is trans-reality telepathy, to get into contact with the "real" versions of the affected individuals. From there, it's easy to find the Disappeared.

Getting the Disappeared back should be as easy as having his companion open a Gate, introducing everyone, and explaining the situation. The problem is, after a time, Reality inexplicably rejects the Rescued... and their dopplegangers... replacing everyone with new, "clean" dopplegangers.

Worse, these interactions have triggered Reality to wipe the vampiric duo from the world, too.

There are two possibilities at this point. The simplest is, they both get kicked out, and they don't really care - they just explore the new realm they find themselves in.

The trickier possibility is that only the Companion gets kicked out, as the Telepath doesn't sleep / dream. If that natural connection to the realm of Dream is a prerequisite for the full effect, then they have their answer. (Accidentally) sacrificing all the Dreamers to power a ritual, they disconnect everyone in town from Dream, and (because dreams are essential to human survival or something) connect them to an alternate Dream realm. Problem solved.

Only question is how the 2 vampires get back together.

Spoiler: Paradox Cutter Fyord

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Um... "Summon Spy Camera!" "Summon Spy Camera!" "Summon Spy Camera!"

Ideally, Cutter would rent 2 rooms, one on top the other, cutting a hole in the floor to fill up the lower room with bouncy balls while he makes doodles on maps of the city and mumbles "big brother is watching". Eventually, he'd build up enough mana to "SUMMON PIXIE NINJA TEAM!", and have them set up the tiny cameras all over town, complete with wireless signals, AI software with facial recognition to record who interacts with whom where and when, and remote backups. All in all, it's a really Epimethian Big Brother solution to the problem, requiring multiple additional victims before maybe churning out the answer that Kamar Tarnak is the common denominator; more likely, Cutter will get pointed to video evidence of someone sleepwalking in mid air.

... is the kind of solution he was aiming for. Instead, his first sign that something is wrong is when the remote backups indicate a data desync error. Cutter would be surprised that the effect managed to simultaneously hit all but his furthest remote backup, and would instruct them to all carry both sets of data, while creating an additional really-distant backup. Eventually, he'd catch on that it was, in fact, affecting the further ones first. Working out how quickly which backups fail, he'd see the inverse distance problem.

And, more importantly, he'd see the difference(s) between the two sets of files. Which would be... everything that the Disappeared did.

A few instances of this, and... if the Investigator is still around, and some dream comments and an outdoors sleepwalking video have reached Cutter, I think that he'd most likely consult with some Dream experts while... probably building up mana to create mana storage crystals with a built-in "doesn't work while asleep" limit, since this sounds like he could need mana at a moment's notice.

Problem is, those "dream experts" are much better equipped for this. Short answer is, it's a sloppy solution, where someone else solves his problem (or just points him in the right direction), and chides him for not noticing the timeline distortion.

If he hadn't felt out of his element wrt Dream, he would have figured it out simply by giving all the cameras Magic sight, and seeing the coin and its effects. He didn't initially go that route simply because he feared an active opponent with magic sight spotting magical cameras, or even uninvolved adventurers doing the same.

Spoiler: John Faseman of Marvel

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What's a Guild Master to do but to make this a Guild quest? Which should trigger the "distance" flags. Which does nothing but make him paranoid, as the distant Hero Summoners won't remember to summon him should he Disappear.

OTOH, he probably sensed the changes the moment they started, and he and his children certainly sense them if they're called into town.

Getting the local guild to canvas the area for magic, finding the coin should be pretty trivial. Then it's a sneak-attack Disintegrate, with the hope that solves the problem. AFAICT, that'll prevent future disappearances, but won't bring anyone back. Sadness.

Spoiler: Shadowrun Troll Wizard

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Best case scenario, they'll Disappear with the coin, having killed Kamar Tarnak. So, perhaps they'll be the last disappearance, and perhaps some day they'll... nope, Shadowrun magic explicitly cannot help anyone get back. Yup, best case, they're gone, and so is the coin. Worst case, they don't attack Kamar Tarnak, and they just Disappear.

Spoiler: M&M - Alex Daeus

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At every step, all I can think is, the best answer for Alex Daeus is to nuke the site from orbit.

The note was not erased. This sounds like a mental effect. Alex can't do anything about that. Best to nuke the site from orbit.

He could literally wall off the city, and subdivide it into sections, to try to contain and narrow down the problem, implementing something like quarantine zones. But it's already spread to multiple zones, and doesn't follow any science he understands (until much later, when new cases only appear in one zone). Sounds like flying / incorporeal / invisible / disease / plane shifted / something else he cannot really find or interact with, still best to nuke the site from orbit.

If he stuck it out long enough, he could sub-divide the problem section(s), until it was just 1 section, then one sub-section, then just Kamar Tarnak left in his section.

Then he'd still want to nuke the site from orbit, as he has no clue what kind of powers this being possesses.

So he'd play "the ground is lava", "the air is acid", and **** it, let's put the area in a metal sphere, roll it out of town into the desert, and nuke it for good measure.

Massive number of disappearances, doesn't get anybody back, but at least we got to nuke someone.

Spoiler: M&M - Omni-Wizard

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In an accidental success, the first thing the Omni-Wizard would want to do is to use Retrocognition to view the "erased" note. Only... does this produce a vision of the Investigator failing to write on the always-blank note, or does the note get set out and not written upon, while Retrocognition on the Investigator shows them writing the note?

Regardless, the Omni-Wizard is definitely clued in that there's timeline shenanigans afoot. It may take a few tries to get the spells right, boosting the right skills, or summoning some Time Spirits to explain / assist, but, in short order, the Omni-Wizard will be perfectly capable of writing the definitive research paper on the subject.

Which does approximately nothing for actually preventing future disappearances, or returning the Disappeared.

So, a little more tuned Retrocognition to observe the disappearances with the right sights active, and... some of the "right" sights return nothing. I've never really understood how the planar extras in M&M are supposed to work, but for my HOUSERULES version, eventually something should actually work, causing a startled reaction that the Disappeared weren't sucked into an alternate timeline.

With these findings, it would take a whole lot of skill boosting, sage summoning, and mental gymnastics to eventually hit upon the following theory: Someone is using Chronomancy to change what is Fact. That which does not match their new Fact is Fict. Dream is the realm of Fict. Find and neutralize the Chronomancer, and you solve the issue.

Detecting the coin is trivial compared to the steps leading up to this point, as would be getting it from Kamar Tarnak.

A whole lot of mental gymnastics later, and maybe a Transform ability could be used to, in effect, change Fict to Fact, returning the Disappeared, and hopefully making reality return the evidence of their existence.

Spoiler: Warhammer - Mr. T

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This... sounds like something Mr. T would encourage rather than try to stop. He'd probably push for expensive backup, only to arrange for them to "disappear", ensuring that no further aid would be sent.

Ideally, the whole town will disappear. And Mr. T will likely be trying to siphon this "Disappearance" energy. While it will seem he's trying to help, in reality he intends to use the energy to fuel his ascension to a Daemon.

In the Grimdark of running Mr. T, he holds civilization back from the brink, until he's ready to spread his wings and take the leap into the abyss himself.

Spoiler: MtG Elven Chronomancer

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Wow, this sounds like a really rare spell, like Shahrazad or something. And the Disappeared sound like, once they become the Returned, they'll be unique creatures you can play from RFG.

But best I can think is to throw spells like Inspiration and Brainstorm at the problem, because, while plenty of MtG cards interact with Dream, there's limited reasons to think to try them at first.

While the Coin is clearly an artifact, it's hard to imagine what the Disappearance Cycle translates to... I guess it's a delayed effect, like Mana Drain or something. So I can see it being really hard to notice or deal with that. However, creature type is rather obvious at some layers of abstraction, and I think there's a really cheap card to remove that? Aquameoba or something? I'll have to look it up later, but this should be a solvable problem, depending on how much information the abstraction provides.

Spoiler: Star Trek - LtC Vir

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As his science doesn't interact with magic, he has no way to "detect" anything amiss.

As his telepathy confirms that "friends" and "family" have never heard of the Disappeared, and the Tricorder shows no signs of tampering with the note, he is forced to conclude that the problem is the Investigator - they are insane, or from an alternate universe, or otherwise the "problem".

LtC Vir would explain this to the Investigator, failing to convince them of the rightness of this, and failing to convince them to leave their super magic planet for the backwater of the Federation in the hopes of better equipped individuals being able to send them back to their real home. Which they also don't buy.

On the off chance LtC Staltek Vir stuck around after this, I suppose eventually they'd be confronted with sleepwalkers performing impossible tasks, which... LtC Vir would definitely be thinking "tricorder", not "telepathy".

Now, the tricorder cannot pick up on or interact with magic; however, the interactions between multiple realities / timelines? That's something Federation tech... technically has some ability to interact with, even if they rarely seem to "get it right" and actually correctly analyze what's going on. Fortunately, this version of the rules has no concept of DC, so Staltek Vir automatically succeeds at scanning and analyzing and understanding this multi-dimension-timeline snarl.

And as much as I'd love to say, "do I care?", nah, LtC Vir would find this fascinating.

In addition to requisitioning better equipment to scan and experiment, doubtless Staltek Vir would eventually use Telepathy on the sleepwalkers (whom he'd likely have "quarantined" in a makeshift lab somewhere (the details are unimportant).

Eventually LtC Vir would start sleepwalking, and the race would be on to find a solution before he Disappears. Or he'd Disappear... and then be attempting trans-planar and/or Dream Telepathy, and the race would be on for the team to bring him back. Which... given the stated nature of the problem... transporter buffer pattern analysis and selective recombination insert tech here Science! would probably work better than what LtC Vir had initially been attempting, if the goal is to "change creature type".

Spoiler: WoD Alex Knight

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"Bringing up the map" (or sending in a few hundred Overlords) could make keeping track of things really easy, but... OK, I guess a Cor/Spirit rote could be used to find missing beings trans-zone (trans-planar) to locate them in Dream? But that's it. Without translating this differently, I don't think Alex Knight can help his video game spirits complete this level of Another World. He can only let them watch the citizens Disappear.

Although... he could find the Artifact even faster than Harry, if the spirits want to attempt that route.

Spoiler: WoD Harry tHH

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Short of burning the town down, the best thing Harry could do is just walk around, waiting for his Awareness to show him something. Like that Artifact coin. A little murder later, and he could accidentally prevent (some) future Disappearances. Or, you know, cause them, if he is able to start using the coin himself.

**Telok** · 2023-04-17, 01:51 AM (ISO 8601)

Traveller Bob

Spoiler

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So there's three ways for this situation to even occur. 1) psychic powers gone wild, 2) psychic or sufficently advanced Ancients tech run amok, 3) go full Matrix.

1) The Imperium is prejudiced against psi. The Zhodani based their civilization on it. Non-human species apart from the dryone exhibit none of it. The Solmani as pricks, as always.

This will have to be... probably some sort of accidental time travel in combo with shunting people to alternate dimensions. As people the rogue psi affects 'fade out' into alternate dimensions info about them also fades out backwards along their information light cone.

Now, Traveller exists in a fully computerized future. When fully settled world government tax database A on continent 1 and local governmemt tax database on continent 2 have a discrepancy of "that person has never existed" alarm bells are going off and phone calls are made and the affected person has a phone & computer. This won't even get to a retired wandering scientist-for-hire. The IT people will track the holes in the data, the security forces (not regular police) will quarantine the core area, psi detector gear will be deployed, and patient zero will disappear.

On a frontier world, or somewhere with substandard tech levels this could involve a wandering scientist. So, some low end colony on a world with at most couple million people and a class C (has a control tower & spare parts) or class D spaceport (cleared land and a shed with a strong radio). Now that TB is involved... Info loss in real space and people not actually wandering off into the winderness or taking a ship out is more than just a computer virus, serial killer, or basic alien life form... Start scanning for energy readings & power spikes, copy all the local electronic records to our comp for analysis. Lucky we have a robot to run that for 4 days straight (or longer if we plug into a wall socket) without getting bored or tired. It won't produce anything but the next disappearance and more data loss with no outside access tells us it isn't a technology thing.

Hmm. Psi detectors are a TL 12 $750 item. Can we whip one up in our lab? Hard to do but probably possible.... and that basically solves it. Wander around investigating false positives until we ping patient zero then... well honestly since this is unconsious action the guy isn't trained so he probably can't stop it. Psi suppressing drugs are TL 9 but pricy and at a daily dose... they may have to exile or kill the guy. As a bonus though, because of how Traveller psi works (as I recollect) stopping or killing him stops the issue. You aren't getting anyone back, but then in Traveller with a pure psi issue like this that was never an option anyways.

If we build the psi detector (or I guess maybe find a convenient local life form that's psi sensitive) then it's a good a result as can possibly happen. If we don't then it's mass disappearances until patient zero get himself killed by trying to book passage on a ship or something.

2) Ancient tech/psi-tech run amok. Well, it's the same as #1 except the scanning for emissions & power spikes works pretty fast. Then we hunt down the guy with the artifact (just some public broadcasts should do it, thr guy isn't bad just ignorant of what's happening) or go to the big buried machine complex that's doing all the work. If the device is understandable enough we might have a mini-adventure of portal/reality hopping to try some rescues or maybe just reversing some polarities might get people back. But without any info on the people who have been vanished (because that went out too) it's a lost cause without the device having an 'undo' function.

3) full Matrix/GitS. It's late. This sounds like a generic "plug & play by local different rules in a virtual world" thing. Which is canon in Traveller, there's a corporation starting that market. Maybe I'll look up the specifics tomorrow. Which also means it's a entertainment business on the high tech worlds (they had around three places doing it) and people going brain dead by transferring into the sim while the company panics and tries to cover it up is... handled by the police. I guess we might rope TB in by having a friend/contact vanish this way. But then it's just track down where they were seen last in meat-space since all their electronic records were erased. Once we have that we find a couple other missing people through the usual routes (b&e, shake down, physical records, go in as a customer, etc.) and then pull in the police.

Ironically this one has the best chance of recovering people. If (very iffy) we clone the missing people (limb & organ cloning is normal so full body is just an order of magnitude more expensive) then get some good therapists in there, we could maybe get them out again (bonus getting a younger body too).

See about doing the others later.

Edit: ok, Paranoid Bob...

Spoiler

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Same issues, looser "science!". 1) mutant power shunting people over to alt realities, 2) freaked out R&D equipment, 3) Matrix-style jank

Checking random R&D...
electric anti-grav whip (useful but dangerous to everyone)
invisible anti-matter cloak (scratch one clone and possibly an entire sector)
volume-amplified novelty scanner (helpfully labelled as "commie mutant traitor detector")

1) It's a mutant power. Right. We run around spamming the "commie mutant traitor detector" at people, preferably high programmers and other high sec clearance people, until we accidentally run across and kill patient zero (unlikely) or get called in for debriefing and use the "commie mutant traitor detector" on the debriefer and the Computer. Assuming the most amusing outcome we use the antimatter cloak here (on anyone/anything) and our next clone has a higher rank in PURGE plus some extra treason points. No, nobody is comng back, massive destruction everywhere, random executions of critical people, flooding a high programmer's living quarters with sewage, throwing grenades at groups of infrareds who ping the detector, launching warbots and IntSec goons into the air with the whip....

2) It an R&D device gone AWOL... Same as #1 except we're keeping the dang thing if we find it and lying about it. Stash it somewhere and blow up the debriefing. PB's next clone tries to collect it and it turns out to have been found by a Junior Citizen who is, by dint of being underage, immune to all accusations of treason and mutation and commie-itis. Repeat until we run out of clones or run out of Alpha Complex to blow up. There is no "solving" here, only chaos and explosions and and bad puns.

3) It's all in your (jacked in virtual) head. This is, astonishingly, solvable. If PB is in the sim then the first attempt to cause a memory overflow in a bot glitches things out and exposes the truth (to the player at least). Then we just keep that up until PB gets kicked out into the real world (or a higher level sim). If PB is in the real world or once kicked out to it, then several surprisingly good skills come into play. Hacking, data analysis, and finances. We "prove" it'll get the people involved coming in under budget to fix this. Then we sabotage the whole thing because we're a PURGE member, with explosives and grenades preferred.

Yeah, we could have gotten people back as holograms, uploaded into bots, or re-cloned. But that all takes a back seat to blowing up the Computer's ****. Paranoid Bob could solve that... but won't.

Edit2: There's an issue translating this scenario into Dungeons the Dragoning 40k 7e.

Spoiler

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The whole 'plane of dreams' isn't something that exists. I mean, we could retcon it in or quick brew something but that has some severe implications.

History: In the original DtD40k7e version there's the real world, the Warp (WH40k), and the Umbra (WoD) which is the shallow end of the Warp. The Warp has 6 paragraphs of description, mostly about that it's totally nasty, 100% death to the unprotected, full of demons and worse, plus it's mostly there to be used by starships to bypass the lightspeed barrier and frag unrestrained excessive spellcasting. The Umbra has 2 paragraphs. There's ghosts, spirits, and weaker demons in it. It's more the membrane between the real world and the Warp than anything else. That's it. That's all we get as canon in the original version. I blarfed some random thoughts into an appendix when I rewrote chunks of book 2, but it's mostly that the place is a bit difficult to navigate and the local fauna plays rougher.

So what's that mean for our scenario? Well patient zero and the magic coin are fine, it'll just be some annoying demon lord or Tzeench or someone who gave it. The mechanics of people translating out are OK, but they'll end up in the Umbra and get eaten or possessed and mutated. You aren't getting them back, period. Really, once someone's been whacked up with a demon, insect spirit, pi elemental, or violent angry ghost then anyone you get back after expelling the monster is deformed and insane. Well maybe if you can snag them back from a ghost within a couple days it'll just be white hair, a new birthmark or scar, and a couple years-to-decades of therapy. The rest of them it's probably more merciful to just kill what's left of them.

It also needs to be mentioned that in the setting there's instances of retcons that extend back in time (mostly diety level screw jobs). People know about planets that were vanished or blown up and mostly or completely erased from history. People and places have been sucked into the Umbra and the Warp, "lost" forever along with their names. Machine spirits can be summoned to erase all traces of someone from every technological and techno-magic information medium on a planet. There are spells to modify memories and see into the past that are well documented and have known effects. What I'm saying her is that this scenario here isn't unique, stuff like this has happened before and people watch for this kind of stuff.

Diplomat Bob

Spoiler

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Right. We're still out at some podunk planet being scouted as a new market because the organized and advanced places watch for this sort of junk. Now, which one? It matters a lot, there's places tech fails, places magic fails, places where magic works too well, anthro-spider cowboy Western planets, planets labelled 'kaiju spawning grounds', luxury resorts for the super rich, multi-kilometer tall slum-archologies or oppressed wage-slaves, farm worlds with 10 meter tall cows where the ranchers all drive assault helicopters, people who think a tarrasque is suitable as a missile warhead, habitable asteroid belts inhabited by idiot space pirates in wooden sailing ships armed with 12 pounder black powder cannon.

Reaction 1: "Too much bother". Nuke the site from orbit and find another new market and/or sell the survivors an environmental cleanup contract.
Reaction 2: Check the ship's library for similar crap (library comp with +1k1, two minion assistants, two blood points to boost the roll = 8k5+10 ~=43+ at 75%) pull up the standard operating procedure for similar weird vanishings and implement it. Which lore skill is used doesn't matter, DB has them all at the same level. All ship's navigators have ranks in Divination magic (it's a requirement) so crew quality 3 let's our navigator wander around town with us detecting at (arcana+wisdom) 6k3 vs 20 78% success rate and no penalty for retries anyways. Anyone who can't explain their magic spells/auras gets hauled in for a Detect Thoughts (first level Divination spell TN 15) interrogation (patient zero is a normal so a casting result of 25+ means we don't care if he's willing or able to answer questions & fetter casting own to 2k2 for absolute safety so unlimited rerolls is OK and the 5% chance of 25+ per casting = success). Summary execution of patient zero (it's that kind of game) and lock the coin in a small stasis field box that we'll drop off at HQ next time we swing by.

Good game, go home.

Gun Whore Bob

Spoiler

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GWB is probably annoyed because one or more of the follower mercs have been vanished. GWB, after talking with the investigator looks at the backgrounds on the character sheet. 1: Rogue Trader Spelljammer Captain. Cocaine Wizard. Cleric of Lolth. We'll be nice and assume that Diplomat Bob is not the SJ captain contact and just pass on that one. Let me check the stats on my default Cocaine Wizard NPC. Academic & Arcana & magic detection at 8k3... oh, Alpha drug doses, right, 9k4, and a 1/5 chance of being a diviner OR just refer us to a comrade who is and we'll Wealth 5k5 to hire them for a bit (or just buy bunches of drugs to bribe them to work for us for a while, same thing).

9k4 to know what's going on, wait Luck spell and two helper minions so 10k4+10 for 75% = 42+ so success at know what's happening. GWB's detect magic is 2k2 so he's not doing well (no Arcana skill is a detriment) but buddy boy can assign us some journeyman mages (NPC has guild backing & ally wizards) to 6k3 it while the master does a few more lines of coke. Then it works like Diplomat Bob's solution except there's a bunch of punching patient zero and a torture death or being given to the Cocaine Wizard Guild as an experimental subject instead of a summary execution. GWB does not like people ****ing with the followers. The coin is likely sold/gifted to the Cocaine Wizards Guild for another rank in the Contact background or an Ally or something.

Well, looks like qualified successes for those two based mostly on the fact that this sort of thing isn't unique and people write down the solutions to this sort of stuff. In theory if they were Wraith exalts, knew a high power stat Werewolf, found a natural hole/slip fault, or wanted to do some long complicated magic rituals to enter the Umbra they could try some rescues. But, well... see that first spoiler. You're much more likely in for fighting some ravening mutant daemon or insect spirit possessed horrors, and that's if you can identify forgotten & data-erased people.

**InvisibleBison** · 2023-04-17, 05:30 PM (ISO 8601)

Spoiler: Reyyah Ibrili

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Reyyah is going to try and suss out any mystical or arcane energies around the places where the disappeared people were last seen and where the disappearing documents has been kept. With 4 dice – 3 from Attune and 1 from Ghost Mind – the 75% rule means she's guaranteed to get a limited amount of information.

Without directly examining a person suffering from the condition, a lot of the information in the third spoiler doesn't really make sense for Reyyah to uncover. I think she'd be able to discern that the areas where the disappeared were last seen have extraplanar energy in them, though identifying the specific plane is not possible. Still, that's enough of a lead that she can go Surveying the city to find similar energies – thanks to Ghost Mind she's rolling two dice and thus is again getting a limited amount of information. This means she's able to find an afflicted person, and examine them to figure out what's going on. She'll try to connect with the energy in their body via an Attune roll. Initially it's going to be Risky/Limited, but she uses her fine spirit mask and pushes herself to boost the effect to Great. A mixed success automatically ensues, so she discerns the details of what the sleepwalker is experiencing but is herself afflicted by the contagion. She uses her Warded ability to resist the consequence, avoiding being afflicted. The last step of her investigation would be to interrogate the people she's found who have the affliction (a Command gather information roll), which should allow her to uncover that they all interacted with either a sleepwalker or Kamar Tarnak. She now knows how to stop the spread of the disappearances and what's happening to those who disappeared, but doesn't have the means to retrieve them or to cure those who are already afflicted.

Spoiler: Reginald Blythe

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Reginald doesn't have any ability to directly investigate this himself, so gathering information is going to be a two-step process. First, he's going to Consort with whoever else has been investigating the disappearances and get them to share what they've figured out – in particular, he wants to know if they've got any theories about where the next disappearance is likely to happen. If they are able to give him a lead in this regard, he can then Survey the area and hopefully observe a disappearance occurring, though he'll have to push himself to get a second die.

Reginald's success on his first gather information check won't get him all the info in the second spoiler, but he'll be able to convince someone to tell him about the supernatural sleepwalking. That's something specific enough for him to focus on it for his Survey roll, and he should then be able to interview several victims before they disappear. It may take some time, but I think another Consort gather information roll would reveal that the disappearances are spreading contagiously through interacting with sleepwalkers and Tarnak. That should be enough for him to produce a method to stop the spread – simply spread the word that people shouldn't interact with anyone sleepwalking, and the plague should eventually burn itself out. He can't do anything to help those who are already infected or recover those who disappear, though.

Spoiler: Oturug Bhulgan

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Oturug is going to examine what documentation is available on the disappeared people, and also what documentation has disappeared. Has more gone missing than just the investigator's notes? What patterns can be found in the holes the disappearance has left? With 2 dice in Study, Oturug is well equipped to answer these questions.

Oturug's investigation into the records isn't going to get all the information in the second spoiler, but he should be able to uncover the first three bullet points. At this point, he's going to want to find a sleepwalker and investigate what's going on. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the skills to find one on his own; fortunately, he knows someone who does – the local investigator (at least, I'm assuming this is within their skillset. It certainly seems like it should be). Oturug will push himself to successfully Consort with them and get them to find a sleepwalker for him, at which point he will visit them in the night and observe them while they're sleepwalking.

While his first instincts are to simply observe the sleepwalker, he can't directly perceive the actual magical phenomenon that he's trying to investigte, so he'll eventually realize a more active approach is necessary. He will push himself to get a second die and roll Attune to monitor the magical energies in the sleepwalker. As a gather information check, there's no risk of consequences here, but with two dice he's only going to get limited information, namely that the sleepwalker has been contaminated with extraplanar energy. But know that he knows what he's looking for, he can get to work!

Developing and creating a device that can track the specific type of extraplanar energy he sensed on the sleepwalker will take a week or two and a good amount of money, but eventually he gets it done. This gadget can detect concentrations of this specific type of extraplanar energy throughout the city. That will not only allow Oturug to identify everyone who's been afflicted, but it should also allow him to monitor the spread of the affliction, which will eventually reveal Tarnak as the origin of the phenomenon. With what he's uncovered, halting the disappearances should be possible, but he can't recover those who are lost.

**Ameraaaaaa** · 2023-04-19, 01:31 AM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by NichG

Scenario 4 - Dreamsick

(Note, this is not a continuation of the same clone/character as Scenario 3, each scenario is separate)

Spoiler: In-character info

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You have been requested to investigate a peculiar rash of disappearances that have a clearly supernatural angle to them. What makes it particularly troubling is that the information about the appearances seems to disappear over time, until it’s as if the person who disappeared never existed in the first place. This was noticed by a local investigator who had collected testimony about a few of the disappearances, then later found that their own notes had been erased.

Your employer wants you to find the source of the disappearances and ideally stop it and return those who are missing if possible. Of course given the nature of this exercise, if you want to do something else with the information that’s also interesting!

Spoiler: Details that could be revealed by investigation into reports

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In reverse order (which corresponds to ease of discovery via investigation):

- The final thing that happens is that the timeline adjusts as if the victim had never existed

- Before that, the victim disappears, and people far from them begin to forget while people close to them still remember.

- Before that, the victim exhibits sleepwalking and other strange nocturnal behaviors. These behaviors if observed have a supernatural aspect to them – the person might be able to climb a flight of stairs that does not exist, etc.

- Before that, the victim might report strange and stressful dreams, the sort of thing where you dream about taking an exam that you already took or other sorts of important or worrisome daily activities. Most people will not connect this occurrence to the disappearances, so its hard to find via investigation.

- The moment of onset of this phenomenon is tied to interacting with a certain individual living in the city in daily life, OR interacting with any of the sleepwalkers when they are in the process of sleepwalking. The ‘patient zero’ is one Kamar Tarnak, is an obsessive gambler who has a habit of using a coin flip to decide their actions on a day to day basis.

Spoiler: Details that could be revealed by magical investigation/experimentation with the ailment itself

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- Those impacted by this do not respond to Remove Disease or Remove Curse, and in general it does not register as a disease, curse, or magical aura/ongoing active magical effect.

- That said, things which are sensitive to planar effects or which are creature-type-aware would register all under the effects of this as ‘native outsiders’. Banishment or other similar spells will cause this condition to immediately proceed to the ‘disappearance’ stage of its progression. If the specific type of outsider can be determined within a system, it would register as
‘Plane of Dreams’.

- A character who causes themselves to be affected sleepwalks, or who telepathically or otherwise investigates the experiences of a sleepwalker will perceive that the person is going about their day in a time-shifted version of the world but with some small details differing. The longer the investigation goes on, the more different those details will be. Others who disappeared will be present in the alternate space.

- Kamar Tarnak’s coin does have a strong magical aura on it, a mix of Conjuration and Divination, though he himself is not aware of this fact. In systems that enable one to make a distinction, the source of this magic is divine rather than arcane.

Spoiler: Full details in case they’re relevant to figure out if your approach works

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Kamar Tarnak attracted the attention of a god of luck (Overpowering) who effectively gave him (via his coin) something like Coil’s power from Worm – both possible courses of action in some sense ‘exist’ when he flips the coin, and he subconsciously navigates towards the course of action that would be most interesting for him (not the one that would be the best for him!). This has created a bunch of planar turbulence of a sort in the form of these now suddenly more-real-than-they-should-be side timelines, and contact with Kamar Tarnak or others influenced by this can tie others to those unreal timelines. As things go on, reality ‘corrects for the disruption’, slowly pruning away those things which responded to any unreal causes to a significant degree.

The place where these alternate timelines are seeding and growing is the Plane of Dreams, and physically traveling there can visibly reveal the phenomenon. Things that have been pruned from reality still exist in those dreams, though those who have fully disappeared are now outsiders native to Dream. Restoring them to reality might be possible, but doing so just by physical transport will result in a sort of phenomenon where people can’t form long-lasting memories of the returned people, with all of the attendant consequences of that. Fully repatriating them as a non-Outsider via any means resolves this, as does making them into a different kind of Outsider first.

Preventing the coin from being flipped will mean that gradually the disappearances stop. Isolating those who are in process will also help. One could also try to get the luck deity or the rest of their pantheon to intervene somehow – this would be considered a bit of a sloppy job by the luck deity and so others would step in to do something about it, but only if you had either sufficient clout to get them to take a look personally or sufficient evidence to present about the sequence of events.

Just realised i forgot to answer this one. Here we go!

Spoiler: ninja chan

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Well she'd use her connections to find the best possible magic detectives to help her out. From there there's not really much ninja chan can do to help. Mystery solving isn't her strong suit.

Yeah ninja chan lost this one.

**Telok** · 2023-04-19, 08:11 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Ameraaaaaa

Yeah ninja chan lost this one.

Still doing better than Paranoid Bob! You didn't use it as an excuse to randomly murder people and then throw around antimatter all over the setting.

**animorte** · 2023-04-19, 08:19 PM (ISO 8601)

I promise I will get back in here with Panaka (Risus), Unicorn (MLP), and NecroFist (WWN). Just been adjusting to a move, new job, all that good stuff. Not that anybody missed me.

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