SUETHULU: Grumpily Ever After

That was the last session we had; after the cheese foundry, the game broke down. Apparently we’d “outrun the plot” and therefore couldn’t do anything at all. We tried suggesting various ways to waste time, but apparently the existence of our characters was now incompatible with the campaign. It was heavily implied this was my fault, so I left, and Marty happily apologized for not having catered to my playstyle – which, to be fair, is a valid concern.

Much as I don’t like GSN theory, the terms are handy. I am, at my core, a gamist running under simulationist logic; I look at campaigns as a series of puzzles. Sometimes the pieces are orcs and we move them with fireballs. Sometimes they’re kings, and we move them with words (or psychoactive poisons). Sometimes they’re the laws of the universe itself, and then we get creative. Naturally, results are mixed, but over years of gaming I like to think I’ve pinned down the circumstances where this is mutually enjoyable rather than disruptive or annoying. It helps a LOT if the DM’s relatively consistent with what’s unacceptably goofy/weird in terms broad enough to let me efficiently pare down my solution set, and it helps more naturally if the campaign goal is constructive rather than destructive. That’s why I thought this campaign would be okay; I’m a lot better with “make these two groups make sweet diplomacy with each other” than “go kill this list of monsters/cultists.”

Now, Ian, Darya, and Jin’s players have their optimal environments too. Bearing in mind that this is purely from my experience, Darya’s player wants to be the Determinator; he likes his character hurt, bit by bit, because he likes his victories bittersweet and well-earned. He won’t ever give up, and he gets happier the more that means. Jin’s can deeply enjoy the same kind of campaigns I do, but his skillset is such that he needs things immune to diplomacy to feel challenged. We tend to come up with complementary solution sets. Ian tends to respond well to ethical dilemmas as opposed to tactical ones.

Marty, as might be surmised, is really good at hurting his characters, being immune to diplomacy, and putting his whole campaign in this weird Blue and Orange morality. He’s not so hot at channeling my creativity in a direction he’s comfortable with – largely, I suspect, because no such direction exists. Most of his lectures to me on how to DM focused on corralling players until you can plan ahead. He wants to run a CRPG, I think; he likes giving his players multiple-choice problems. Unfortunately, he doesn’t like telling us the choices, which runs headlong into my pathological inability to determine how weird my ideas are. Then, too, I don’t think he likes being innovated against, and he usually treats RPGs as competitive rather than collaborative.

We also don’t see eye-to-eye on solemnity; I stood far back when the gravitas was handed out, and Marty likes his NPCs to have dignity, so they have constraints on their actions that I usually don’t pretend to. I try to exploit that, and we’re back to square one, only now I’m very much in my element: about the only thing I can reliably create is a farce, because I’m so cynical I think I already live in one. Besides, they’re just so useful. Marty naturally sees this as making fun of his NPCs OOC, and he insists on stopping me in-character. This is always a bad idea. It’s a suicidal idea when it just makes the puzzles harder.

So I guess that’s the problem: my worst is irrepressible, completely undignified Xanatos Speed Calvinball, and he’s so unwilling to admit he doesn’t like that that it took way too long for me to realize I was royally pissing him off. Come on, he was smiling for most of it.

I waffle on about this in an attempt to explain how, in the morass of conversations that sprawled out after this mess, I was somehow agreed to be the villain. Apparently, without me everything would have been just peachy, which begs the question why he didn’t just eject me. Jin’s player was behind most of it. See, he thinks he’s good at talking, but all he’s really good at is talking at everyone until they “compromise” at the midpoint of everyone’s views. This is great when everyone’s sane, but the midpoint of “I like player agency” and “you defiled my cheese foundries with your damnable initiative” isn’t really useful to anyone.  Jin’s used to conflict resolution in the absence of real disagreement, insofar as that he’s used to bleeding drama off of a bunch of fundamentally stupid personality conflicts. It’s why he works so well in clubs. I’m used to material disagreements between professionals, like I said; I need solutions more than I need unanimity, and when the solutions are equivalent I don’t see why I should argue. Unfortunately, I can’t reconcile this with endless cycles of “can we at least all agree that”, especially when Marty can’t agree to anything but that mean old Zeroller broke his beautiful campaign into tiny little pieces with his nasty logic and everyone else let me do it. Without my “personal vendetta against good storytelling” we’d have been looking at roleplaying Nirvana. Oh, according to him he also never told me to do my worst, but then, according to him he never said a lot of things we have records of him saying, so take that as you will.

Then again, I was also relying on Jin to get it through his skull that he needs to at least consider the possibility that being in academic hell for years has messed him up to the point where professional help would make him a happier person, and that failed right out of the gate. Not that he didn’t agree with me that Marty needed it, mind; he just never saw an opportunity to bring it up.

Then, too, after this, it was apparently decided that they all needed to talk without me. Yeah, sure, call me a bastard, get everyone to agree that I’m a bastard, and then go convene without me. That’s not going to make me resentful at all.

So that’s how the campaign ended: an interminable snarl of arguments. All that’s left is the writeup, since Marty asked, idly, what the epilogue was for each of us. He asked me, at least, long after all this cooled off. We’ve got two: Ian’s, and mine. Darya didn’t much care, and Jin I don’t know about.

Till next time, then.

SUETHULU: We Do Something Significant, Part 3

So. Factory time.

Frankly, this was the weirdest session we ever had for a couple of reasons. I was on way too much caffeine, Chief was riding the emotional high from exams he was sure he did well on, and in general we were all in odd post-exam emotional states.

Chief was unusually generous, only cutting a few hours off the time we had last been quoted and barely quibbling when I wanted magnesium nanofabricator feedstock. It was hideously expensive at a hundred dollar-equivalents per kilo, but we got a hundred twenty-five kilos of "relatively pure" magnesium and a nice robust bench grinder to boot. I only needed twelve Repair checks to keep it from jamming! While I was doing that, Darya was down bilking Blackspire out of armor and grenades. We'd gotten smarter about asking for things: we asked for sixteen suits, so when we got four after a series of checks, we were happy. Chief was also insistent that "no one would ever believe you'd stolen police-issue body armor. You don't look like that capable of mercenaries."

Well, that was no problem. We had Darya Mozambique Drill them with her sniper rifle -- after all, it acts just like a pistol once it hits, right? Then we started spray-painting the most ridiculously macho symbols we could think of all over them: flames, sharks, barbed wire... As we explained to Marty, we wanted to look alpha as [all get out], so we'd be taken seriously. I swear he would not know satire if it bit him; we made "our symbol" a bunch of crossed katana silhouettes that were kanjis for something or other, and apparently that was just so cool. We used the extra paint on the net canisters, to make them look like outsize grenades.

Darya was blow-drying our attempt to look as stupid as possible while Jin was tending to our other needs: a flying "prisoner transport van" with the cages in the back and a GIA police team. We wanted a police van, but we could only get an undercover one -- and, of course, spray paint would run if we only let it dry for a few hours. Enter spray adhesive and a LOT of carefully cut black plastic sheeting. Naturally, it's covered in air vents, which mean more checks to cut correctly. While the lads were rolling Papercraft checks to make the letters and so forth, Jin was arranging to pick up the team in an hour or two. "Of course" we could pick up some GIA agents. Marty has a horrible poker face, by the way.

Jin: "They're going to be infiltrated, aren't they?"

"No." With this stupid grin.

"Right then."

The last thing we needed was barbed wire and staple guns, and here I was careful to explain to Marty that I wanted to staple the former into the Dhohanoids with the latter. "Sure they have it. How much do you want?" That stupid grin again...oh, Marty. I have a metaplan. Six miles of barbed wire would do fine, so we got three. Now, of course the Dhos are going to be staple-proof, but that's fine. Ian, for his part, finally got his Caster arcane revolver working; apparently in addition to the interminable bother involved in making the shells there was another check to "prime" them, and this had been troublesome. He had enough time to run get us strobe lights and speakers.

Everything went into duffel bags along with "a few hundred pounds" of coffee, and off we went into the "industrial suburbs", the scattering of factories and warehouses that persisted outside the arcology despite nanotech completely displacing conventional industry. We wanted a very specific warehouse: one that stored Limburger cheese. Apparently warehouses no longer exist unless they do something else, so I went for broke:

"All Limburger warehouses are like that, [Marty]; they need waxing facilities and curding tubs and stuff, because of how cheese is made."
"Oh, okay. Yeah, you find one."

Of course it's uninhabited, because people don't want to breathe in Limburger fumes all day. There isn't a waxing machine, because things still need to be manufactured "the old way" to warrant all the space; there is instead a vat of wax kept constantly liquid. When I say "vat", I don't mean a little vat, either. I mean a goddamn foundry ladle. I think I can explain this, given three things:

1. Marty has no idea how cheese is made.
2. Marty has a dim idea of how steel is made, apparently from an elective course in metallurgy.
3. Marty is a thundering moron.
This is the only explanation I can come up with for the foundry ladles of curds lining the back wall, the "cheese forge" in the corner, the aforementioned vat of constantly liquid wax, and the chains on the ceiling for moving them around. Apparently you make cheese by superheating milk in Martyland, and then you pour the molten cheese into molds as though it's metal. There are welding masks on hooks on the walls. I am not kidding. It's that apparatus and rack after rack of drying cheeses, all waxed-- which is what finally crystallizes the plan.

Jin tears off to pick up the team and sit in his van. He's going to serve his original purpose: he's gotten all the 911 calls in the area rerouted through his PCPU, and he'll be our responder when someone notices the explosions. Meanwhile, the Tagers finally show up, and I have them handle putting the wire coils on the roof with little coffee bricks behind them, then stapling the end of the reel to the roof and carefully arranging planks as ramps. I never said horrifying confinement was the only thing I wanted it for, after all; as it was rigged, everything was hidden under the edge of the roof, and with a single detonator channel I'd catapult a curtain of wire down the walls. We just stuffed the core of more rolls of the wire with more coffee, and there we go; we covered everything with the remaining black plastic. Horribly uneven shrapnel distribution, but the roof was going to be a very unappealing place to be once we got started. No byakhees were going to crash our party this time, at least in theory.

Almost everything else went inside the cheese. We cut the wheels in half, scooped out the insides into an empty ladle/vat, packed them with coffee, and resealed them; unfortunately, coffee is relatively stable, so we needed to add primer to every single wheel. The big racks also got a lot of powdered magnesium, until two hundred kilos of a 50:50 mix of coffee and magnesium bisected the room. More went elsewhere, as we rigged the ladles. One charge on the side of the ladle and one charge in the bottom to tip over and then explosively belch proto-cheese all over the facility floor. We also set up a little folding card table in the middle of the room, and I taped my net gun under it. The strobes and stereos had been positioned in the corners of the building. The remaining magnesium went into the light fixtures, and everything went to the multichannel radio transmitter Jin had thoughtfully spliced into my Pip-Boy PCPU. We got dressed up and took our places. Darya sat behind the lights on the catwalk around the second floor, sniper rifle handy. Ian stood in the middle of the room, by me at the table.

I rolled a literal bucket of dice. Didn't know what they were for. Probably demolitions checks. Marty didn't say.

And then we got called to ask where the meeting was, and ten minutes later I was shaking hands with three men in dark suits and sunglasses. Naturally, this was Marty, so they had to be completely stereotypical: two shaved gorillas and a little guy. The gorillas never said anything; the little guy stopped me putting my helmet on before we went inside, over my complaints about the smell. He sits down, and we start lying to each other; he notes our two guys, but of course the Tagers are "far too stealthy" and maneuver into place over our targets. Darya apparently recognizes the little guy, but can't tell the rest of us about it. Apparently the Eye is the Dagger of Trafalgar, blah blah blah Lord Nelson blah blah history blah 20% of our asking price.

Hey, do the Tagers have a smell ID yet?

No? More lying: blah blah couldn't be, what's with the freaky pseudo-text then, wouldn't anything Nelson had made been in English...

This went on for a while. Ian brought the thing over, Not A Gorilla Guy looked it over, and we kept desperately stalling for time until finally the damn Tagers tell us that, yes, both of the muscular ones are Dhohanoids.

"Well then, just satisfy my curiousity on one more point: 'air eh namblies be keepin' me wee men, ye muckle damned cultists?"

"What?"

"I SAID, YE MUCKLE DAMNED CULTISTS, AIR EH NAMBLIES BE KEEPIN ME WEE MEN?!"
And then everything exploded. The barbed wire went flying across the roof, the magnesium coffee wall lights up, all the actual lights blow out, and various cheese wheels violently self-destruct all around the building as the strobes turn on and the stereos start blasting. They were, naturally, loaded with the March of the King of Laois played at double speed and out of sync with each other. The Tagers had also had their radio headsets blip at the same time, because I had "forgotten" to tell them to wait a bit. Every single one of them failed the Reflex save against the rave from hell and hit the ground hard, where they were rapidly pummeled by shrapnel. At the same time, I pulled the trigger on the net gun conveniently taped under the table...which was pointed directly across from me.

"He doesn't even flinch." And there's the grin again; I begin to have some sense that this encounter is not what we thought it to be.

Right. Two kilos at point-blank range directly to the balls and he doesn't flinch. So much for maintaining a human guise.

Darya, having sensibly taken aim and then engaged her helmet's flash shields for the boom, put a round directly through his skull, and he flinched a bit at that. Ian got off a net shot at the dhohanoids, tripping one, and the Tagers moaned on the floor. Then it was their turn...and apparently the flash was so bright that the gorillas' glasses had melted and fused to their faces, so the other guy fired some kind of magic at Darya.

"I hit him with my gun."

"You can't. It's loaded with blanks."

"I know. It's also ten pounds of metal, apparently. I jump on the table and start pistol-whipping him."

"You can't. You aren't proficient in pistol(club)."

Oh, fine then. I reload my net gun. The un-netted Dho starts running, so I blow another cheese rack as he passes it. Ian is dual-wielding the net gun and his arcane revolver, and is apparently focused on hitting our mysterious non-Dho with positive energy shells; our sniper continues sniping. Naturally, the little guy heals the bullet holes, fires back, and wounds Darya significantly, so once I net the other Dhohanoid I fire off one of the cheese foundry ladles.

Apparently cheese works differently than I'd been led to believe. It fountains upward in a ballistically improbable geyser, "flash-cooking" into string cheese before coating everything. More reflex saves for everyone, which of course everyone on both sides fails -- but we, in our self-contained environment suits/combat armor, apparently don't have as much to worry about, because the suits are covered in nanoTeflon or something. We break out of the mess in the next round.

Two rounds later, when Jin tells us he's inbound, the Dhohanoids are covered in nets and cheese, and are barely twitching. So are the Tagers, minus the nets. We nearly die finishing off the other guy, but eventually Darya gets a lucky crit and he bursts into flames, crumbling into dust. "The Dhohanoids are trying to get up." Ian and I go over to both of them, kick them several times, lift them up, and dump them in the unexploded cheese vats. Then we rip the side charges off and suspend them in the cheese forge. Dhohanoids don't need to breathe, remember? We even made our cheesemaking check.

When Jin got there, it was a bit of work to make a door big enough, but then he just drove through the wire -- flying vans are big, apparently. Then he lets out the team. These guys in full-on police armor charge in, rifles held ready, and we're stepdancing, horribly, in these cheese-covered suits of ruined power armor by the light of the burning rubble. Hey, it was the next song on the playlist. They tell us to get down on the ground, we just keep dancing, they point guns at us, we get very unhappy...we were not in the mood for cooperating with authority, and were in very bullet-resistant suits.

They keep up the whole stormtrooper shouting interrogation thing until Jin tells them to cool it, and then they help us wheel our prizes out of the cheese forge. We didn't have any good way of telling if they were alive until Jin came up with the idea of Tasing their exposed feet, incidentally. We also didn't have a good way of storing them until we got the transport cage all the way open; then we just slid the ladles inside and unhooked them. The team was also wary of the Tagers, and then I pointed out that they were hardly much of a threat. They'd spent the whole fight lying down. We still dusted Marco off so he could shake hands with one of them, although neither liked my suggestion that they kiss and make up for years of armed conflict. Diplomacy can only do so much.

Marty, similarly, did not appreciate it when I asked if they were going to be pointing guns at the forge ladle the whole way back. Jin, too, was apparently nonplussed at everything that had transpired, and felt that he was needed to destroy the evidence -- which really meant shoveling all the speakers, strobes, and remaining wheels into the cheese forge, shutting the door, and setting everything off. It was surprisingly neat, all told. We take some souvenir cheese wheels and walk off.

"Of course you guys know this will be investigated thoroughly. Cheese factories don't just explode."

But fireworks factories do. Don't they, Jin-the-forensic-accountant-with-government-access? "Oh, yes, especially ones with no records of an inspection ever." And he passes his Hacking checks.

We all find a convenient park, take our helmets off, and Jin pulls out a bottle of vodka and a box of Triscuits. The man is prepared, although I can't say we're in culinary agreement. They start passing it around, and when it gets to me, I think to ask when we can interrogate our captives.

We cannot; in fact, we will have no access to them whatsoever and cannot even confirm they exist. Even the bug Jin slipped into the van is useless.

Rather than drink, I start stuffing a rag into the neck.

"D'you guys think Blackspire's compromised?"

"Doesn't matter; they're about as much help either way."

"'K. Have to follow the trail then."

"What trail?"

"The trail of melted cheese."

"No, you guys solidified all the cheese."

"With several kilos of radio-detonatable coffee in the bottom. How many vents were there again?"

For the first time that day, he was no longer grinning, and I was laughing out loud.

So we started planning how to mount an impromptu raid on whatever top-secret hole Blackspire was going to dump them in and swap ourselves in for them; we wanted to see who would spring them as much as we wanted to talk to them. We eventually figured out that it'd be easiest to interrogate them in place rather than get them out, so we decided to bring along the remaining Limburger for a circumstance bonus -- and that was when Marty ended the session, while we were all chuckling at the idea of breaking into prison.

It was only afterwards that I learned that the non-dhohanoid was, in fact, the lich that had wrecked the party before I'd joined, and it was only by sheer luck that we'd survived without the Tagers' help. And I'd opened the fight by shooting him below the belt. So much for gravitas, I suppose. We should have leveled from killing him, but apparently the Tagers got equal shares of the XP, and Marty didn't want to hear about how they'd made zero contribution to the fight.

SUETHULU: We Do Something Significant, part 2

Last time, we had Kevlar, acquired via heist. Now we needed nets, and of course it would take several days to tie them apparently. Bear in mind, the nets we wanted were tied with square knots, these being the easiest we could think of; my knowledge of ropework does not extend very far into nets, I'm afraid. Nonetheless, manual tying was out; we needed a machine.

Obviously nanofabrication couldn't help, and trawling doesn't happen anymore so we can't use a trawl net machine. Apparently commercial fishing is now done entirely via angling regardless of species, because what's efficiency? Regardless, the only kind of net we could come up with that had the right characteristics was a volleyball net -- and, finally, Marty admitted that people still play volleyball. However, there is only one factory making nets for the entire volleyball-playing NEG, and it's run by Chrysalis. It's also "about the size of a high school gymnasium, because there isn't all that much demand these days." Across the entire NEG, mind you. Nonetheless, we wander down to look at it, off in the sort of suburbs outside of the arcology. Are there security cameras? And here, Marty actually pulls out a pre-prepared sheet of notes that I can only assume were for a much more important installation:

"Of course there are. There are cameras on every door, at regular intervals along the walls, and pointing back at the windows. There are frames with multiple cameras on them pointing the same way to foil the old spin-the-camera trick. There are infrared cameras, ultraviolet cameras, nightvision, radar, and a dozen other systems you all can't even comprehend, all overlapping and looking at each other. You count at least two hundred cameras, and those are just the ones you can see--and some of them are turning to stay trained on you with telescopic lenses."

I know sports has a lot of money in it, but this is a bit excessive. This is a greater investment in security than in the facility itself; he maps out the cameras we can see, and there is no approach not covered to quadruple redundancy at least. Then I look at the roof. It's clear, and when we look from the arcology we can confirm that it's clear. That, then, is plan A: get a truck over the building at night, then HALO down. Rather than interfering with the cameras, we'll just use a modified Fulton skyhook to get back up, nets in tow; the plan called for a bit of cunning with the parachutes and skyboards to dodge around tall bits of the suburbs while the winch was reeling us in. I had perhaps been too enamored of Saints' Row III at the time to plan sensibly, but hey, it might have worked, and it avoided the problem of having an air truck stop in midair to facilitate our operation.

Now, when I proposed it to Marty, he agreed with me that, in theory, the tricky bit where we're dodging chimneys via inverted parasail could, in theory, work, given the forces involved. I was expecting him to quibble over how readily our characters could pull it off, but no, he had another plan to shut us down entirely: neither the skyhook nor the parachutes existed anymore. "What use could they possibly be when all the intelligence services are unified? James Bond shit like that is for the Cold War, man." Well then. I shall ignore James Bond shit henceforth. Plan B: I tie a big bag of water to a long rope, we rappel down that, we untie the bag and the truck goes off. New truck comes in, same deal (we wanted to dump our ballast into the sewer system) we all clip onto it, and it makes a sharp turn upward to get us out of the danger zone. We'll figure out how to get off later. By our math, there was even a new moon coming up; with any luck, it'll hide the truck and we can explain away the weird flight pattern later.

"There's no air traffic over Chicago."

WHAT. Wonderful thing about Skype: it keeps records of everything. Like all the time you spent describing the hive of air traffic over Chicago, Marty.

"Uh, clearly there's no air traffic over Chicago at night. It'd be much too difficult to avoid hitting anything."

He's stammering and flop-sweating now, and nothing makes any sense. Wonderful; I'm past giving a crap. If we can't go from above, how about from below? Hop into the sewers and use these freaky hyperedge goes-through-anything-like-butter monomolecular blades to cut a path to- "The sewer lines don't run that way." Well, then can we - "And that's exactly why the security system has seismometers."

Wait wait. People are so willing to tunnel through the foundation for a stupid machine that their security system includes seismometers? I could grow to like these people; they're engagingly insane. And no, we couldn't just go invisible. "Metamaterial? What? What kind of Harry Potter bull**** is this? Okay, clearly we don't have it now, and I'm assuming whatever problem they have with putting it everywhere now is still keeping them from doing it." Unfortunately, that rules out all my plans but one: involving Ian. He had exactly one invisibility spell that "might" work on the full spectrum, and it almost always fatigued him nearly to unconsciousness to use. On this occaision, it stopped short of full-on unconsciousness, and he made it to the inexplicably external cable hookup to insert Jin's best technomagical spy gadget and loop the camera footage -- after many, many Security rolls and other things that apparently needed a sidebar conference to resolve. Then we all just walk in. To this day I don't know why that suddenly worked.

Anyway, he started going on about the power usage monitors and so forth, and I point out that we brought batteries.

"You didn't bring powerful enough batteries."

We had, in fact, brought twelve class-3 D-cells. Combined, they could run a car for a few weeks. Apparently "this is a major piece of industrial machinery, dude. It takes several kiloamps of current to run." I'm not asking it to fly itself into orbit, Marty, I'm asking it to tie some goddamn knots. Ultimately, though, when we finally calculate the capacity of D-cells, we actually have enough. "Barely." Well great; I'll just plug them into the inverter and-

"You have no idea how to operate the machine."

Well, that's no problem. Where's the operating manual? Presumably they keep a copy somewhere. I admit, I'm going off laboratory experience here, but generally there are manuals for everything; heck, we keep ours in a bright orange binder so they're easier to track down. If not an operating manual, can I maybe find a maintenance handbook or a safety sheet or something?

"Nothing of the sort exists; that would be an unforgivable security breach. The operation of these machines is on a need-to-know basis, and Blackspire certainly doesn't need to know. Likewise, spare parts are cheap; why would there be a maintenance or safety thing? A bad worker is more likely to damage himself than the machine."

Charming. Okay, how many rolls do I have to make before I can emulate knowing a relatively straightforward skill?

It turns out to be hundreds, and every single one I fail either hurts me or leaves "very obvious" tool marks on the machine. Marty, you're flinging people at this thing with no training; it should be covered in tool marks. Security checks to unscrew the access panels, Repair to unplug it and plug it into my inverter, Engineering to wind each individual bobbin, on and on until I'm rolling Repair for components demonstrably not in the machine. There are neither Tesla coils nor pumps nor lasers nor elevons in a goddamn loom, Marty. This is not the TARDIS, this is a machine normal human beings designed to perform a specific and fairly mundane task. It ties knots in a grid.

Nonetheless, two hours later the Kevlar is loaded, and I push "what [I] think might be the power button." It works, but apparently it is "very loud. About 300 dB. You all have severe trouble hearing each other." Marty did not ever take a course in sound, apparently. That is...very loud indeed. That's not even sound anymore. Apparently tying knots creates more noise than nuclear detonations. We didn't suffer much either; we should have been liquefied at the very least, but instead it was just hard to hear and everyone took a -5 penalty to all actions. For being under two hundred thousand atmospheres of pressure, that's impressively generous.

Or maybe Marty just didn't know how decibels worked.

Regardless, it took two hours to make a few dozen meters of volleyball net, which struck me as needlessly slow. We ended up having to cut it off at 80x4 meters for time's sake, but thankfully we'd been cutting it as we went so it was all wrapped up, tied to the tractors (we used bolts) and stuffed in the cylinders. Since the packing peanuts were apparently completely inflammable and unsuitable as filler for the coffee, we used them as wadding instead.

As Ian, Darya, and I worked by flashlight on the nets, Jin broke into and futzed around with the office supercomputer. Yes, a netting factory has a supercomputer. Why? Who knows anymore.

It might occur to you, as it did to me, that we may have accidentally broken into the Chrysalis equivalent of the Utah Data Center because we needed to borrow their legitimate business front. I wish I could say we did; it would handily explain a lot from the institutionalized delusions of grandeur to the staggering technical incompetence. Sadly, this "really is just a netting factory, dude. Chrysalis takes security seriously." Jin found nothing on their computer, too, although "accessing any of the files instantly deletes them no matter what you do, so they can tell someone has messed with their system." That must make legitimate use of the system fun.

Come to think of it, this might be why he never understood Shadowrun very well, or indeed any other game with a strong infiltration element: it may never have occured to him that security needs to compete with usability. He's done it in other games, too, where we've had such things as computers with passwords no one knows -- and, here, the stupid ten-minute access door delay. "Better" security is always harder to access, until the most secure facilities are launched unmanned into the Sun and never spoken of again. This is a guy who will laugh at the "shoddy" security at the local dump, because they let trucks in without scanning all the garbage for infiltrators. But then, sensible security would detract from the gamism, so what do I know?

Anyway, Jin went and put a smattering of Blackspire-issued bugs into little nooks and crannies in the walls, just as a precaution, while the rest of us cleaned up after ourselves, re-threaded the machine with nylon and verified over and over again that we hadn't left any trace of our presence. Then, as soon as we left and invisible Ian removed the technomagic bug: "You all can't keep being so obvious, you know. Chrysalis will figure you out if you keep going, if only because of the pattern emerging from your crimes." Jin fields this one, actually. "Uh,[Marty]? We're the government, remember? We haven't committed any crimes, just minor acts of eminent domain and a quick warrantless search and seizure." Then things got ugly. I'll spare the politics, but in essence: Marty likes government, and we don't. Naturally, rather than agreeing to disagree --or getting the joke-- Marty has to "prove" the inherent rightness of dogmatic jingoism. With sound bites! When he runs out, he changes the subject: the meeting's been moved up, and we've lost twelve hours of prep time.

Now, my first reaction is to run, especially since they deliver this directly to our public PCPUs, which means they know who we are. If they're confident enough to mess with us like this, they have a plan, and in any case we won't be ready; we don't have nearly enough coffee, for one thing. Marty doesn't let Cael respond in the negative to the time change. "I'm not going to accept that action." It took a while, but we finally hit an invisible wall, right where it'd knock my plan into a cocked hat.






He never explained it to the group at large, as far as I know, but he did explain it to me, while I lingered afterwards in the conference room trying to work out how to pack everything into half the time: "the Auditors have been taking over the easing of the future, now that the Scions have given up; they left Cael a message saying as much, but I never got around to telling you." Wait. The Auditors of Reality!?! "[Vamp!Marty] is very persuasive to sufficiently rational people."

Okay, so Marty's got the Auditors of Reality on his side, and they're already here. Yeah, still not passing this on; I am NOT going to drag Discworld though this. The only thing this did was infuriate me.

Time to get very, very creative.

SUETHULU: We Do Something Significant, part 1

At this point, the only real plan we had was the aforementioned capture, using the Eye as bait. No orders were forthcoming from Blackspire and nothing was going on to which we could react; the Tagers were doing nothing for us either. With that in mind, we really planned on working alone -- which led to the aforementioned problems with the resilience of a Dhohanoid to incapacitation or immobilization.

Chemical sedation was of course out, and we lacked the ability to control our damage output to keep them unconsious rather than dead through physical trauma. The best shot we had was, in our view, some kind of net or other physical restraint, combined with trusting Blackspire to have some sort of more permanent holding facility to which to transfer them. The idea of a net, in view of the Dhohanoids' melee prowess, swiftly became a net gun, and then very swiftly became many,many net guns.

Marty insisted that we set up the meeting at this point, before the prerequisite technology was tested and in place. By his logic, the underworld takes a long time to get word around about anything, so it could be a week before we hear back from any interested buyers once we say that we have the Eye. Jin and I go put a description of the Eye on Evil Space Ebay; instantly, we have a meeting in three days. "Clearly you don't know everything you think you do." Thanks, Marty; actually, this isn't that bad, and it falls well within the range of acceptible tricks to pull on us.

Immediately after halving our time limit, Marty raised objections: clearly Cael didn't have the expertise to design firearms, and anyway a gun doesn't have enough energy to launch a net any significant distance. The former was relatively easy; it just took a while to describe how to cut down a silencer, bore it open, and machine a wider tube to lock into it via a reducing bushing and cleverly cut slots/nubs. Pack a series of these tubes with wadding (and thankfully, we had amazing wadding), a net, and a quartet of tractors; load a heavy pistol with blanks and wear enough of a glove to deal with the cartridge heat. It took three dozen Repair checks (and Bluff checks to get them from Blackspire), but we got them working.

Then we got to argue over how much energy was stored in a heavy pistol round. Marty maintained we'd be better off using a "needler" gun, powered by pressurized carbon dioxide; mind, these can't take silencers, but still, they're obviously superior. "You get more gas pressure from pressurized gas than from fire." Then we start actually doing the math on the relative pressures involved, and Marty comes to the following conclusion: "If you need that much pressure to make gas rounds better, obviously pressure can't be the whole story. You're probably overlooking something." See, we took his provided energy, bullet mass/cross-sectional area, and barrel length, and worked back to an approximate average pressure of four gigapascals, because he liked anti-tank pistols. Now, I could come up with HEMs to reach that chemically given the cartridge volume, but getting that kind of power out of compressed gas is...interesting, thermodynamically speaking, especially when you consider how to build the pressure vessel cheaply enough to put in every. single. round. We can't heat the gas, either. "That would defeat the purpose."
Marty, naturally, didn't care. "Well, obviously it works, so presumably everyone just deals with whatever side effects." Side effects like several thousand cubic meters of gas ejected per shot. Yep, obvious.

Eventually, I get him to watch several Youtube clips of chemically propelled net guns, and he relents; we can get a two-kilogram net to go ten meters and still be traveling at a reasonable speed. Blanks, though, apparently don't have as much propellant as normal bullets, and "it's a lot harder to jury-rig rounds to accept more propellant than it is to overpressure an airgun." Uh...sure. Why do we need more propellant? We have enough to put some heavy machine guns to shame. Free recoil is enough of a nightmare already, Marty.

Regardless, more Engineering checks later, we make them "slightly more efficient"; they'll only fly nine yards now, but we can use them with blanks. Blanks we do not, in fact, have -- apparently Blackspire has none in stock, and can't get any in, and we can't just buy them. The entire NEG doesn't need blanks -- but thankfully I pass enough checks to make a suitable substitute from ordinary bullets. Two checks per bullet, by the way; he did not want this to happen. Finally everything was ready but the nets, which of course were not commercially available. That's fine, say I: we'll just buy the fibers and weave them ourselves.

We can't buy the fibers. Not the MWCNT-epoxy ones I wanted; no kind of nanotubes at all, actually. Nor carbon fiber. No Aramid, no Vectran, no proper steel, no silk, no aluminum. 200 MPa was our limit -- the best publically available fiber a society with free energy and nanofabrication can do is half the strength of human hair. "That ought to be enough for your purposes, anyway; it's much better than what we have now." Will it stop Dhohanoids? "Of course not, they're much stronger than that." Well it's scarcely a replacement then, is it? If you want to get anything done in this arcology, you've got to complain till you're blue in the mouth. (Apologies to Monty Python.)

Now, we know they have bulletproof vests -- and yes, Marty confirmed they're made of Kevlar. As in, Aramid, with an ultimate tensile strength of around 3500 MPa. So, Marty, can we buy some spare Kevlar? "No. They don't just have spare bulletproof string lying around. It gets made into vests; that's why it's there, dude." And indeed, there is no surplus -- or, at least, significantly less surplus than the roughly four kilometers we'd like. There are "maybe a few dozen yards, total." Well, okay, can we get a nanofabricator template for it? "Of course not." But this is the perfect time for them! "Bulletproof thread is restricted." Blackspire can't get it for us either. Of course not; "you can't even get feedstock capable of producing it". But...it's...just CHON... Incidentally, Marty, it's not bulletproof thread. The thread itself doesn't stop bullets; sheets of it just spread the impact out enough that the vest can absorb some of the energy. Still verboten? Okay then. No bad batches lying around a landfill somewhere? "They're destroyed for security reasons." How about the chemical precursors? "Takes three days to make the fibers, minimum." Wha...how...who...Right. So, are there any factories making body armor in the NEG's headquarters?

Finally, an affirmative response. Apparently they ship the Kevlar fiber in by "unmarked, unobtrusive flying truck that you can't just pick out of the sky", and this month's truck is coming in five minutes. Well, this seems simple enough: we'll just spoof the navigational data to the truck's autopilot to drop it in another bay, then unload it before anyone realizes what happened.

"What autopilot?"

Come the hell again, Marty?

No automation whatsoever here. All of the materials flown into the Chicago Arcology every day are flown in manually, without so much as a cruise control. "It's all done by CB radio." Marty doesn't mean actual CB radio, apparently, but CB that isn't actually public access and has about a million channels and is more properly called air traffic control. It's also "totally unhackable"...which is, I suppose, a valid precaution. Blackspire is finally useful: they can disconnect the bay operator's radio from the circuit and patch us into it. "Once." So I get on the radio. "Hey, this is Chicago Bay Control; Bay A227 is experiencing technical difficulties. We're going to need you to divert to B227." And I roll bluff with a -40 penalty. Again, what? Apparently "You aren't speaking in Trucker so he's instantly suspicious." Oh, so that's why it's CB: everyone speaks some foreign language called Trucker. Thankfully, Jin saves the day and yanks the radio away from me before adopting this hugely exaggerated drawl: "Ignore him, he's new. [indeciperable] handle [unintelligible] Christmas card [i don't even know, something with bears] B227." Apparently that works; as we run like hell for the new hangar (dodging the people coming to pick up the Kevlar) he mentions that, in future, when I realize I don't speak their language I should leave off trying to lie to them. Good advice.

Anyway, we get down to the new bay, run in, and find the truck already open, with the Kevlar in unmarked, one-meter cube cardboard boxes inside. Thankfully, Darya and Ian brought those wonderful collapsible hand trucks. Before we wheel them out, I have a plan; I scrawl "MASTER BEDROOM" and "ATTIC" and suchlike on them in the messiest magic marker handwriting I can manage. It's moving day, you see. Not my best plan, but come on, I had no prep time.

We stack up the boxes and wheel them out. As we do so, the airtruck lifts back off again, and it's time for electronic tricks; Jin copies the footage of the truck arriving and departing from the B227 cameras into the A227 security records, then loops a few seconds of the truck just sitting there to cover the intervening time; oddly none of the cameras pointed outside. Marty raised objections; Jin pointed out that he'd never disabled his Blackspire camera hacking app. As far as it looks, the delivery truck came in, sat there, and left when the driver couldn't see anyone, while in an unrelated bay some new residents were unpacking stuff from Space Uhaul -- which Jin the maverick forensic accountant quickly creates. Hooray for unmarked trucks.

We managed to get the crates back without going under a security camera, and then we unpacked the crates. Inside each was a single bobbin of thread with about a kilo of fiber on it, along with lots of packing peanuts. "Why are you looking at me like that? It's valuable stuff, and needs to be protected. It's not like it's bulletproof, after all." Can we get more? "No. The whole air traffic center is on high alert after such a brazen theft."... Right then, time to make the nets. How are we looking on time, Marty?

"Well, I'll say all that business took a day. Now, it takes about two minutes to tie a knot, so...several days, assuming you all work in shifts."

Right, well, time to get creative. Next time: Nets!

SUETHULU: Oh, and Yog-Sothoth's Dead.

This bit's a little weird.

People have asked what happened to make the Scions useless; somehow I forgot to put that in the last post, so here we are.

They were always simply a way to offload exposition onto me; Marty had said that when we were putting this together, and I thought it was a sensible idea, all things considered. It wears thin fast, but having a way to point the players in the direction of the plot is handy if they're as prone to straying as we are. Unfortunately, Marty intended for me to ping Yog-Sothoth actively, and had implied that I had a modicum of control over the information I was receiving. None of it was ever useful, but I could hold something and expect at least part of the vision to be tangentially related to it. The Eye didn't help, having one of the dragons sitting on my head didn't help, and holding my head in my hands did nothing -- while, of course, Marty was constantly assuring me that I could get useful data if only I held a relevant item. Constantly. I receive no directions, just vagueness and the constant assurance that it's really easy as long as I find something relevant to the plot, and I was feeling really cranky that day. So I got smart and held some spare katanas with a hard copy of Twilight, because hey, I know a vampire otaku is coming.

He was not happy.

Yog-Sothoth shuns me, but in unrelated blather is either crippled or outright dead anyway, so I can't do anything about it. He's never clear on that. Apparently I am now anathema among the Scions for my petulance and irreverance before the majesty of an Elder God in this time of crisis. Instead, I get a message from who-knows-who, explaining a bunch of variously cassandraic bull about a great army coming to fight the war to end all wars -- and we were being watched. Filling our role would be rewarded with benevolence on the part of our future emperor; interference would likewise be punished. You can see why I never even mentioned this; no way am I passing this on, even indirectly, and ruining the game for everyone, especially when our role is never defined. I get to see Star Destroyers glassing Chicago, and it occurs to me: these things are moving through hyperspace to reach CT Earth, right?. Hyperspace doesn't exist in CT, but maybe the astral plane is a close enough equivalent or something. I ask if we can magic some kind of astral barrier into place, since I can see their flight path fairly clearly. Hey, maybe 'cleansing the astral fibre of the space' will act as an interdiction field, since presumably clean astral fibres don't have warships in them-- and if we can get enough mages to astral project on a watch rotation, maybe we can see them coming!

He was not happy at all.

Apparently "Traveler technology works regardless of universe, and it works according to its own rules. They aren't using hyperdrives anyway; they're using bistromathic stardrives. No fuel, no drive trail for you to technobabble your way into tracing. They work on numbers alone, because that is the superior technology." They aren't using continuity anyway; they're using retcons, because that is the superior storytelling technique. He kept babbling on for a long, long time about how they were untraceable, un-trackable, won't show up on any sensor we have, won't show up on any sensor anybody has, are totally invincible to our puny weapons, and the very physics of the multiverse were built around enabling his conquest. That last one was implied. To this day, I don't fully understand what I was doing to so unsettle him. Other people planned; other people called him on parts of his more blatant butchery of science. Somehow, I took the brunt of his more immediate fear/wrath, and I got a lot of the more desperate quibbling and rapid-fire lying. Admittedly, I did have a habit of quoting him whenever I had a data trail to prove his contradictions -- and was therefore exposed to Marty's most intense rhetoric. See, I'm used to arguing over something material, where the chief aim is to reach an agreement. It usually happens when I DM; someone tries something outside the rules, I come up with an ad hoc mechanic for it, and there's usually a brief haggle over skills and modifiers but ultimately we both want to see the roll made and the game keep moving. By my standards, the best argument is the shortest one everyone can live with -- and most of the real-world ones end by figuring out the quickest set of experiments to determine who's right. Heck, even in debate, I don't like wasting time. Marty, on the other hand, argues for fun, and usually over nothing that matters very much at all. He just wants to be right, whether by agreement or by forfeit. He can't use facts. If he argues on facts, they have to be accurate facts, or someone will probably call him on it. Instead, he just speaks and keeps speaking, raising too many points for anyone to reasonably counter. He will belabor the point so much it needs midwives.

First up are the definitions. Every word in the disputed statement must be defined; dictionaries are useless for this purpose, because they must be redefined "for our purposes." This process continues recursively, because we have to redefine the terms used in the definitions of the terms. Eventually, we have the unabridged English-Martian dictionary ready, and then we have to define our standards for rightness in this endless epistemological grey area. No, no, when I say "accurate" I mean "generally a more believable approximation of the unknown value than a hypothetical subset of random numbers" or something equally neurotic. Once that's over, we have to pick through the trivial cases, and reiterate them as verbosely as possible. Then we have to limit the scope of the argument by listing all the cases not covered by the statement, which is like listing all the books you haven't read. Any new terms introduced in this process need to be defined, as above. If possible, multiple definitions must exist, purely to confuse and obfuscate. All this is done, by the way, at a rapid-fire babble approaching 250 words per minuteeee, but punctuated by these whiny little paaauses, as though the nonsense machine gun needs to change baaaaarels, so you're alternately overwhelmed and annoyed at random intervaaaaals by this jarring hybrid of auctioneer and valley girl. Ultimately, he'd finish with "so basically I'm right"...and if you object, well, clearly we didn't define a term correctly somewhere, so let's go back over them all again. This will go on as long as you let it, and no one else actually needs to speak for this process to take place. Usually, this can be stopped, at which point he's off babbling and starts saying moronic things. On a few topics, however, he is totally unassailable. The nature of Marty, the logistics of the conquest of the multiverse, inadequacies in the SUE system...his speaking rate rises and his content rate plummets, until no one can interrupt but he's not actually making a point anyway.

Eventually I just walked away from Skype, made some tea, and coded until the new message notifications stopped coming in. Nothing new in all of it, although toward the end he mentioned that the guided vision ritual thing wouldn't work anymore, and by the way Cael's lost vision in one eye from the backlash. Here, I could finally have some input; I asked if it could be the right one, and this was acceptable. It was also totally incurable, even by magic, and I lost of point of Wis for some silly reason relating to physical wholeness. I didn't really care; I had better things to worry about.

So there you go. Cael was filibustered at so hard he went half-blind, and that was the end of my ability to have any agency with the Scions.

SUETHULU: Blinding Cael with SCIENCE!

Okay. Cael time.

First on the chopping block was Cael's intelligence. Before Marty's "adjustments" it was 17, which meant that Cael couldn't possibly know anything. See, Marty calibrated the SUE System Int by assigning himself (meaning GM!Marty, not vampire Marty) a score of 18, the highest possible, and scaling everything else relative to himself -- but keeping the average at 10, because "10 is always the average". By Marty's logic, because HE didn't know -- off the top of his head, no less-- how to do what Cael wanted to do, neither could Cael with a lower Int score. Because of course Intelligence is a number line of known facts, not any kind of abstraction of processing capacity. It's more of that "mental hardware" that's totally inexplicable, but because Marty "[considers] [himself] something of a Renaissance man," Cael can't do squat. Admittedly, it's internally consistent; if everyone in the setting is at Marty's level or dumber, I  can see how things might have slipped a bit.

Naturally, I bring up nootropics. I'm neither advocating for nor warning against their use in real life, but in the abstraction of a game, I couldn't see any reason that a racetam compound or two couldn't just temporarily boost Int. It's how I'd implement them, anyway, if they were allowed mechanically. Then, too, they've had sixty years on us to make better ones, so I thought it reasonable that if side-effect-free psychoactive drugs existed, so might more potent nootropics. You could watch his face go from bewilderment to terror between "temporarily" and "Int" before he could start sputtering reasons why it's impossible. Nootropics are apparently totally forgotten by the populace, and "I bet they're basically poisonous and fake anyway. They probably cause some kind of horrible brain failure. I mean, why aren't we using them if they're so great? Do they even really work? Sounds like a scam to me." I assure him that they do, in fact, work. "I'm going to need to see some studies on that." I have several saved and ready to hand to him; nootropics interest me.

He doesn't actually read them, mind you. From his complaints about science classes, I'm under the impression he's not capable of reading a journal article. What he does do is think for a bit, and then come up with this: "Obviously they exist. However, they're for the exclusive use of the Ashcroft Foundation; no one else knows about them, and they've invested a great deal of effort in keeping it that way. They're absolutely top secret." Well, they can tell as few people as they like, but surely someone remembers that these things exist in the underground? If they don't, why, see here in these documents you let me have: there you have it, plain as day, evidence of the existence and efficacy of nootropics. Apparently this was starting to piss him off: "you don't get how secret these are, dude. They are absolutely top secret. You can't get the chemicals you need to make them and you'll be killed if you try by any means necessary from covert to nuclear. The records on them have been destroyed, replaced with dummy files that kill you if you try to access them. Ashcroft is serious about keeping these under wraps; only a select few of their top men get them. They're more highly classified than D-engine technology, and have even more psychics working to perform random spot-check assassinations for people who know too much. They destroyed the books, EMPed the website servers, nuked the companies, shot the chemists. No, you are not getting nootropics." Ladies and gentlemen, the DEA of the future: going nuclear at your local library, because those junkies with their improved short-term memories are by far the worst problem facing society today and the best use of our strategic weaponry.

This was part of a larger feature of the SUE System. INT could never go up. No magic, regardless of how it worked, could ever boost INT; no artifact could ever increase it. He would get livid if you pressed him for an explanation, too. Magic (of varieties we couldn't use) could destroy the planet, but it couldn't change something as "fundamental" as intelligence. Marty does not like the idea of PCs becoming smarter, especially when they already have 'his' Intelligence. Of course racial modifiers can increase INT -- and, of course, the only race that has a positive INT modifier is Marty's adopted cheating vampire race. He does not like the idea of anyone being numerically smarter than he thinks he is.

Those D-engines also figured heavily into Marty's strategy. I liked them; they're completely ridiculous, of course, and only in the setting to make enormous mecha plausible. I still wanted them, because they "make infinite energy from nothing" and that's kind of useful. Naturally I can't have them. Not only is the technology classified, but it uses - gasp! - "higher-dimensional mathematics so your mind can't deal with it and you go insane." Jin and I did a synchronized flat 'what' at that. Jin responded more coherently than I: "Uh, [Marty]? Math doesn't care how many dimensions you use, especially if they're all orthagonal. You can have a zillion dimensions and it just adds terms to vector math, mostly." As we know, Marty does not respond well to logic; he was adamant that polychorons, hypercubes, etc, inevitably cause insanity, largely because he didn't understand them. Therefore, I was not allowed to know how D-engines, A-pods, D-cells, et cetera actually worked. That said, he liked them too, and when I asked if I could track them by whatever they're sucking in to produce energy, I was flatly denied. Apparently they're totally untrackable, because they suck energy from "the space between spaces" and their very design precludes any kind of detection, as with A-pods. Ashcroft makes them, the military can repair them, and everyone else can just be grateful they have them. I can't even explode them; apparently mere citizens are not allowed to have dangerous technology, so QED D-engines are not dangerous and I cannot make them so.

Well, crap. The Scions are deeply unhelpful (they apparently just gave up on me entirely), parapsychic powers are useless...I'm not kidding when I say that Marty removed all my options but science. I didn't initially want to have to deal with specific science, but that's how he kept defeating my more general plans, so how else was I supposed to argue? If you tell me my science is wrong, I'm going to resort to more specific science to prove my point; if you want me to stop, tell me to stop.  He did not tell me to stop. What he told me was a mess. Consider capturing a live Dhohanoid. Marty loved to go on and on about everything they were immune to. We couldn't poison or sedate them. They didn't need to breathe, let alone eat or sleep; their senses could not be destructively overloaded. They could theoretically be physically restrained, but nothing we had was strong enough to hold them and anyway they could just shape-change. At one point, Jin interrupted to ask, clearly rhetorically, what would happen if we just pressed them face-first into a belt sander; apparently they'd regenerate too fast for it to matter. Then it was my turn for a hypothetical, rhetorical suggestion: once we break their skeletons into toothpicks, start tandem intraosseous bolus injections of hydrogen fluoride and antimony pentafluoride, in the hopes that perhaps constant exposure to fluoroantimonic acid might erode whatever their bones were made of faster than they could regenerate them. Cue Marty completely misunderstanding that saying they're "immune to chemicals" and banning antimony anyway. As in, the element itself no longer exists. You'd think, if you were going to employ a cudgel where a scalpel was needed, you'd at least ban fluorine, but no. Antimony, we hardly knew ye, and damn the consequences.

This happened over and over. If I needed salicylic acid, suddenly there are no willow trees. If I joke about an AA system  based around paintball guns filled with bee alarm pheromones, suddenly there are no honeybees. Where this was impossible, "additives" prevented "whatever reaction you're thinking of." Said additives "don't actually have a chemical structure," so I can't mess with them, either. Petrochemistry was shredded, most of orgo "just [didn't] work like that," et cetera. He never just told me to stop; he had to insist it was impossible in-universe. Now, this was unfortunate, because I was feeling inventive, and when he ran out of compounds to ban he had to ban crucial parts of my workaround apparatus. To this end, he had to ban optically active metamaterials, BSCCO, NMR, gene guns, CO2 lasers, nickel column chromatography, horseradish peroxidase, nitinol, etorphine, 3-methylfentanyl, miniprep kits, dolphins, artificial neural networks, flux compression generators, PEM fuel cells, atomic clocks, yellowcake uranium, Farnsworth-Hirsch fusors, deuterium gas, single-walled carbon nanotubes, basic oxygen steelmaking, graphene, pulse jet motors, diamond anvil cells, and pentazenium itself. The dolphins were only indirectly involved, and for the record they wouldn't have been hurt. By the way, I really wish I could explain why I wanted each of these, but America says no.

Now, I had started with fairly mundane plans, and every time he shut them down I had to default to ever more extreme solutions. I had started with "break into a minor Dhohanoid-run front company and see if we can figure out how they get around the scans" and had ended, jokingly, with "boost several tons of nanofabricator-laden blockade runner into trans-lunar insertion via one-pulse subterranean nuclear space cannon (hey, the NEG has spare nukes), evade the Migou blockade through sheer speed and shrapnel, have the nanofabs construct a subsurface quench gun on the dark side of the Moon, and kinetic-harpoon a minor Dhohanoid facility from orbit in order to break in" because anything else involving flight was impossible given the Dhohanoid surveillance networks. I had hoped that suggesting that might illustrate that perhaps our foes were too powerful, since we need to break out strategic weaponry in order to get through their front door, but instead he banned "anything even remotely like that; Cael has no idea how to do rocket science." Marty's dodge skill is so high it works whenever someone's making a point, you see.

One thing he did allow, apparently because "Cael can, as we agreed, make some explosives": a very unusual Haber-Bosch reactor vessel coupled to some interesting post-processors to make what is, in real science, a white crystalline solid about twice as effective as TNT by mass. See, he'd banned so many compounds I had to literally spin (with cyclonic separators) explosives out of electrical power and damp air alone. Marty had already banned "all science machines," so I had to build the thing mostly out of welded wire-wound beer kegs, but neither the temperature nor the pressure exceeded tolerances. On air alone, it spat out several kilos per day, but when supplied with reasonably pure ethanol an auxiliary process increased production by an order of magnitude. He wouldn't let me use proper electrodes, so I had to use katanas, at which point he finally shut up about ablation; katanas are of course immune to it. And that's how I invented a disconcertingly unstable way to turn booze into entropy and fear over the course of an afternoon with a chem textbook. I'm inclined to think it wouldn't work that well, but my chemically inclined friends disagree: with as much power as we could pump into it, it'd apparently work at least for a while. Of course, Marty had to be Marty all over it: the result was neither white nor chrystalline."If it's that energetic it has to be unstable as all get out, so it probably decays in air", and of course "you won't be able to get the physical characteristics right or pure enough, given your equipment" so it's this coarse brownish chunky stuff. "I imagine it also probably smells, given how volatile it is"; the fact that it doesn't didn't stop me adding caffeol and vacuum-sealing it in foil bags. Of course I had to call it Henderson blend coffee. Now, in actual fact you'd never mistake this for coffee, but in actual fact it'd never look like coffee grounds in the first place, so I figure we're even. One pack did 5d6 damage, which wasn't too bad, all things considered; we ran the synthesizer constantly in the warehouse we'd rented, and actually started reselling legitimate coffee alongside it. But that was it; I couldn't make anything else. Just that. Truly, Marty is generous in his compromising.

Just because I had it didn't mean I could use it. Unlike the others, I wasn't formally a member of Blackspire, and they were apparently disinclined to recruit me. This meant, among other things, that I couldn't access our mission briefing -- and apparently by associating with me, the rest of the party lost their clearance to do so as well. It also meant I was permanently on thin ice, and I was warned they would have no compunction about framing me for something convenient if I was not useful. He liked reiterating that.

Really, not using it was fine by me. Synthetic chemistry was only half of my character; I also wanted to do analytical chemistry, working under the assumption that our role in the Tager-Blackspire meetup was to determine some way in which the two could coexist harmoniously. Marty had DMed himself into a very deep corner here, because he'd spent loads of time describing all the sensors which existed to foil our plans -- and he'd kept making dhohanoids more alien every time we'd tried to hurt them, so they were very detectable. You can't make something out of "basically not matter as we know it" and then expect it to pass a DNA test. What made this really bad was that I'm a computational/molecular biologist in real life, thus the slant of the above tools list towards biological lab apparatus. I know it sounds like metagaming, but Cael had the skills for it; like I said, I designed him to be hard to shut down. DNA sequencing was out. He didn't understand why Sanger sequencing "didn't just stop at the first base for everything," so that didn't work. SMRT or pyrosequencing "look like they require big, expensive machines." What nanotech? Eventually he just outlawed any nucleic-acid based forensics: "You can figure out what species something is from skin cells that have passed through an air system. riiiiiight. and why don't we do this in real life?" Besides, Chrysalis has the resources to completely "replace their agents' DNA" to foil tracking. The process apparently takes minutes.
Truth be told, I don't think he understands what DNA is. See, he's previously tried to explain away Lamarckian inheritance, and I apologize for having saved this quote for so long, but I needed to actually figure out what he was talking about: "Genes are like muscles; the more you use them, the more you end up with, and the more are passed on to your offspring, like with giraffe necks."
...

"He's not just a regular moron. He's the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived" - GLaDOS, Portal 2

And really, that was the biggest problem of all, at least where I was concerned -- Marty thought science worked the way Hollywood portrays it. Stepwise science is apparently for fools; real scientists just have "breakthroughs" one after the other, ex nihilo, while pipetting around brightly colored fluids and looking intensely at computer screens. Forget collaboration, too, or specialization. Everyone's just an omnidisciplinary scientist working on their own. This is a man who, while at college, doubts grad students are all that important; research is "basically the domain of professors." My 80-hour work week is mostly wasting time, I suppose. Other positions, like postdocs, were "more academic detritus than anything; I've certainly never heard of them." Oh, and grants were "ridiculous. Who would just give you money?" Apparently, Marty's scientists and engineers are magical hobo oracles, roaming the land dispensing completed nanofabricator blueprints at random. In addition, he refused to believe, as ever, that the PCs could think of anything his NPCs could not. Everything we thought of to detect D-Engines, they were retroactively immune to; Dhohanoids likewise changed whenever we pinned down how to pick them out of a crowd, because obviously if something that simple worked someone else would have thought of it. Never mind that no one else supposedly knew they existed, of course.

It only got worse as he got more paranoid. At some point he started trying to preempt me using what other people were thinking of, for a sufficiently vague definition of "thinking of." Someone would mention some idea in passing, and the first thing out of Marty's mouth would be "Well, he's NOT getting his hands on it. I can tell you that RIGHT now." This extended even to things we were laughing at as obviously nonfunctional, like neurolinguistic programming or homeopathy. At one point he banned timecube, although exactly how he saw me using it I don't know. I never got a coherent answer for the reasoning behind any of it. I didn't even bother him about stuff much out of game, unless asked; he took it upon himself to inform me that I couldn't use crystal healing, but why on Earth would I want to?

That's Cael, then; the only way to stop him was to make the world legendarily stupid, so at least Marty didn't have to work too hard. Ultimately, I ended up just going along with Jin's idea, in the short term, of capturing a live Dhohanoid for desperate, aimless interrogation...and that ended up being the climax of the campaign.

SUETHULU: Jin Down

So. Jin.

This one is tough, because Jin filled the role of party face a lot of the time, so Marty had to deal with him on social grounds. This means we have to delve into Marty's views on people, which unfortunately skirt very close to politics by way of sociology.

The last thing I want is to turn this into a political debate; this really isn't the forum for it, literally and figuratively. I want to be very clear from the outset that I'm not saying that his views are universally or intrinsically wrong (or, for that matter, right); he's free to have them of course, whatever sense they let him make of the world, and I'm not attacking his thoughts or the thoughts of anyone who might agree with him. That said, I am saying that his insensitivity to the objections of his players led to a world of completely needless strife.

Jin's player himself deserves some of the blame, I suppose. If he hadn't attempted to work out how to combat Chrysalis Corporation, the game would have stayed on a level too local for politics to really enter into it. Unfortunately for our game, he's very ambitious, and that meant Marty needed to consider the reactions of large numbers of people to whatever Jin was doing.

Most of what he wanted to do was some variation on incentivizing people to help us in apparently innocuous ways. We knew Chrysalis was too big to fight directly, since this one single corporation employed one in three citizens of the NEG and the Cult had agents saturated in every branch of the government. Marty was more than happy to list off the dozens of monopolies they had on ubiquitous goods, and to describe how the limitless resources at their disposal could easily be brought to bear against us.

See, Marty played a bit with Ctech's canonical problems with long-range communication. We couldn't talk to anyone outside the Chicago arcology easily, but the Dhohanoids' cell phones all had "unjammable, unhackable, untraceable" direct links to Cult HQ, no matter where they were on the planet. This, combined with them having "untraceable priority access to all government files" outside Blackspire's own tiny archives, apparently meant we couldn't touch them without the entire Cult instantly knowing and descending upon us with lethal force. "It's a miracle you aren't all dead already."

With that in mind, our original plan to hit isolated agents one at a time was out of the question, so Jin wanted to enlist the help, knowing or otherwise, of large groups of people in lessening Chrysalis' chokehold on the NEG economy. In theory, we could keep our involvement indirect enough to be not worth stopping, while still making enough money to fund our next venture. If we teach people to grow their own food, for example, so as not to be dependent on Chrysalis foodstuffs, they can hardly stop everyone -- and we can sell them seeds or fertilizer or something. If we can break the planned-obsolescence programming on their appliances, we can rob them of revenue and make existing end users still less dependent on them while encouraging people to learn basic mechanical skills. Then we can sell them tools. Jin didn't want to challenge Chrysalis' monopolies directly; he wanted to create alternative industries and supply those, and by offering people a choice gradually erode how much their monopoly mattered. Once Chrysalis was less omnipresent, we might have enough breathing room to start considering how to turn the people more vocally against them, expose them, et cetera. I'm doing his plan a disservice by describing it so loosely; he put a lot of thought into this. He just hadn't gotten much beyond sharing step one with us, at least not in specific terms.

In the end, Jin wanted to remove the Cult-infiltrated elements of the NEG and Chrysalis at a stroke, in one glorious popular uprising. I think that phrase was what ticked Marty off so much. Marty's world does not have glorious popular uprisings. "The people" are generally not held to be capable of them.

To start with, he believes very firmly in the Great Man theory of history, as I've said previously. He then extends that theory to economics, sociology, and politics; any system with a lot of people in it is reduced to a competition between very few. When combined with his disbelief in population equilibria, we reach the state he describes here:

"You really don't understand economics, do you? The company with the best product optimizes their price to maximize their profit while filling the demand, and the others are edged out of the market. Come on man, you're a biologist, you should understand survival of the fittest. The best people have the best ideas and make the money. That's how progress works."


(Incidentally, 'survival of the fittest' isn't Darwinian at all. It's Herbert Spencer trying to overextend a complete misunderstanding of Darwinian evolutionary theory to ethics by way of Lamarckism. But I digress.)

This is the NEG, then: everyone jumps on the same bandwagon because economics, somehow. We can't persue niche markets to break into larger ones because Marty "know[s] from economics class that niche markets are a waste of time." "The people," as Marty loves to call them, are monolithic, and this is where we get the idea of the best product: whatever everyone buys, that's best, and no one buys anything else because who would buy anything but the best? They don't want new products, either. Demand is not specific to needs; people don't have multiple demands for things. It's just one thing, and Chyrsalis has filled it. They've also filled it to the point of excluding competition. "There's nothing [Jin] can think of that their developers haven't. That's why they work for big companies and [Jin's] an amateur."

Do I even need to point out that Marty is fanatically brand loyal? He is a fanboy, a rabid fanboy, for everything from game systems to anime to ramen blocks to pens. Everything he likes is "superior", everything he does not like must somehow be bad, and everything he hasn't heard of is "minor". Chocolate is not just Marty's favorite ice cream, "it is the superior flavor. I don't have preferences, I just know what's best." Given that, I can well understand the people's tendency to unanimity: they're all Marty clones, because that is the 'superior' personality.

The superior personality also has views on government. "People don't revolt, dude. That would be stupid; they have a good government and plenty of wars to rally support from the populace. If they have a problem, they make a complaint to the proper authorities and wait. That is how sane people deal with their problems." I believe I've mentioned that Marty does this, too. He loves "giving feedback" to whoever is forced to listen, and firmly believes that he's rewarded for doing his duty as a consumer with preferential treatment. He's claimed complaints, including anonymous complaints, have gotten him things like early housing selection. Apparently in his 'verse that really works. "Why do you think they have employee suggestion boxes, dude? It's to pick out the best people and get them on the fast track by seeing who's willing to invest more time and thought in the company." Marty, are you familiar with "A Kind of a Stopwatch"?

But more seriously, I do not have a problem with this being the political system of the NEG. Not in and of itself; it's not the kind of story I would like telling, but I can work with it. I can even deal with those being his personal politics, insane as I find them. The problems start when he starts mixing the two. Marty somehow did not understand that, and refused to admit that other people could, in fact, hold different and equally valid opinions on human nature. Oh no. The NEG was the ideal government, built on self-evidently perfect principles, and any objection to them could only be founded on delusion. He was so adamant about this that I ended up asking if he really wanted us to explore this kind of extremist politics in his game.

"Not really, no; I'd appreciate if you could keep your hippie moralizing to yourself. It's not dictatorship to protect people from themselves, and whether you like it or not, rule by the strongest is the most natural and efficient form of government. In peacetime, you can let governments mess around with [nonsense] like populism, but you can't ask three hundred million morons whether or not a war is a good idea. By the time the last of them flips a coin for his opinion you're already dead. The NEG works the right way: the best people are put in charge, given whatever resources they need to get the job done, and kept free from petty whining from people more concerned with fantasy than reality. Sane people do their best and are rewarded accordingly; the NEG is kind enough to offer counseling to everyone else. They're even willing to accommodate maniacs like Cael, as long as they're more useful than they are troublesome -- which I'm not at all certain of, by the way. All these crazy plans you and [Jin] keep coming up with to have veterans teach people or set up neighborhood watch groups or spread propaganda or whatever else you were thinking of just won't help get Chrysalis off your back or discredit it or anything else. People aren't like that; you keep assuming revolutionaries when all you have are sheep. People are sheep, dude. They don't bite the hand that feeds them. The government and its corporations are everything to everyone, and if you all can't accept that, they're used to dealing with enemies."

Slightly paraphrased in that I added punctuation to a bunch of Skype IMs, but there you have it, everyone. That's why Jin can't recruit or sell to anyone: because GM!Marty knows the best way to govern, and that way doesn't permit it. He didn't share the specific plans Marty mentioned with me in any great detail, but as I understand it he wanted to learn tactics from NEG instructors. Instead, he can do nothing, because all of his ideas are predicated on some assumption of individual initiative, and Marty finds that sufficiently unrealistic to be dismissed out of hand. That was the line, over and over: whatever he wanted to do, people wouldn't go along with the change. No real rationale was given. "The people" apparently resist change for its own sake, because everything is already perfect. Other than the constant warfare, presumably.

Beyond that, though, he just played up Chrysalis Corp as absolutely untouchable, and that's what got Jin to finally give up, mostly. He still joked, he still laughed, but he didn't try to plan beyond bringing up the utility of capturing a live Dhohanoid and suggesting the occasional hack.

Bear in mind, Jin's player was Marty's best friend.