RPG Miscellany

I haven’t posted for over a month. Whatever. I’m in a play and I hadn’t hammered out some stuff.

So I have some backstory, some story story, and some theory. In that order.

The world this game takes place on is in the middle of what is effectively a stack of worlds. Below it, on a different plane, lies the ubiquitous shadow-counterpart like an infinite ocean of ink. Above it is something, but nobody knows what it is. The priests have their theories, but nobody can agree, and its denizens, if they exist are either incapable of interacting with the world below or uninterested in them.

However, the beings of the sub-world are entirely interested. Daemonologists of the great cities who delve too deeply into their work, who stare into their grimoires for too long or draw their magic circles too well, are entirely aware of this. Often their minds are completely destroyed by the horrors of the dark mirror-world below them, and sometimes they disappear totally except for persistent crunching noises which seem to linger in their chambers.

The good thing is that, without intervention, the dark things from the lower plane are completely incapable of interacting with humanity. They are not sentient, and further, they are rarely even corporeal. The lower plane is a realm of abstracts, where things like malice, greed and cruelty can exist in their most truest forms. It is only when summoned into this world that they must wrap themselves in disguises. Usually they implant themselves in the bodies of humans; some say this pervasion is where all evil in the world comes from, although it is far more likely that only exceptionally evil people carry these seeds in them.

However, when summoned in large enough quantities, these literal varieties of evil coalesce into physical forms determined by their “ingredients,” as it were. They form horrifying monstrosities almost too evil for people to look at; these creatures are known as demons. The science of summoning demons is the study of figuring out which quantities of what varieties of evil to draw up from the pit.

The demons are incapable of accessing this world themselves. Or at least, that’s what everyone has though since forever. Now, however, the two planes may be beginning to intersect, and the borders may be weakening. The lower plane is beginning to soak through the world like ink through a very thin piece of paper, and demons are starting to show themselves. More terrifyingly, they are not just slavering beasts, but intelligent, thinking creatures.

This is where the story part comes in. The hero, Alarim, lives in a small mining town, buried back in the mountains north of a major city-state. One morning, his father goes into the mine at the back of the village and does not come out. In fact, none of the village’s men do, except for one, who limps out at dusk, murmurs something about a cave-in, and collapses. Alarim goes into the mine to help out, accompanied by Imere, the daughter of a mining caravan owner.

What they find isn’t a cave-in; it’s a seal. What appears to be a wall of rough black obsidian has sealed off the mine.  Neither of the two children have any idea how the man who escaped was able to. The two hunt around for a while, until they find something glimmering in the dust of the floor. It’s a key of some sort; when they touch it to the wall, a door-shaped section shimmers and disappears, leaving them to enter the mine.

The inside of the mine is entirely changed. Viscous black liquid runs down the wall, slowly coalescing into the same black obsidian that was blocking the door, and the whole place is populated by demons. Alarim ad Imere fight their way through until they discover the village’s men, cocooned to the wall in slowly-growing black crystal. They are guarded by some kind of ranking demon, whom they kill after a violent battle. With his dying breath, the demon cackles about how killing him means nothing: the mine is only a small operation in a greater, worldwide campaign. Soon, the whole world will have been soaked through with evil.

Alarim and Imere rescue the men and leave the mine, but the demon’s words remain on their minds. So, the next night, they leave town together and set out to at least warn the world against the threat. If nobody listens, they will have to save it themselves.

So here’s the theory:

Dungeons. I’ve decided this RPG is going to definitely be game, and it’s going to center on dungeons. A surprising amount of RPGs don’t do this; as far as I can see, Chrono Trigger and a lot of Final Fantasy center the game heavily around plot and combat. There are a lot of dungeons in them as well, but for the most part these dungeons are pretty small and only really difficult because they have a lot of monsters and a lot of decoy doors to lure you down the wrong path. Earthbound’s dungeons are a little better, because there are a lot of rewards for decoy paths and there’s usually at least one dungeon per town, but they still don’t have much in the way of puzzles.

Compares this with Golden Sun, which contains dozens of enormous, labyrinthine dungeons filled to the brim with insane, devilish puzzles. Anemos Sanctum has the mirror blocks, the Gabomba Statue has gear-switching mechanics, and Mercury Lighthouse has the water-pipe puzzles. And that’s not even mentioning Air’s Rock, all of which is one giant interlocking series of wind-current puzzles. Dungeons with lots of puzzles are just more fun to play through, in my opinion. I mean, look at Zelda. Puzzles are just the parts of dungeons you remember. I don’t remember anything from the Unown caves in Pokemon, but I sure as hell remember those ice-block puzzles right before Mahogany Town.

As a sidenote, I fucking hate those ice-block puzzles, and I am no better at them now than when I was eight. But that’s beside the point.

So I’ve decided that every important town is going to have a dungeon associated with it. And it’s going to be a big dungeon filled with traps, monsters and crazy puzzles. Also, there are going to a few giant dungeons that apply to multiply towns scattered throughout the game. And there are going to be optional dungeons to get extra super-powerful summons. Dungeons everywhere.

Also, I have character names now.

• Hero Guy – Alarim
• Quiet Girl – Imere
• Cleric Guy – Alistair
• Arson Girl – Enata
• Barbarian Guy – Khavir
• Monk Guy – Vinan
• Lancer Guy – Cathan
• Rider Guy – Sufiri
• Pilot Girl – Avi
• Tank Guy – Baldwin
• Priest Guy – Eusoph
• Summoner Girl – Ricca

RPG: Characters

I’ve got ideas. Here is a basic storyline.

The world is slowly but inexorably being literally consumed by evil. Most people can’t sense it, and won’t be able to until it’s too late, but inky black stuff is starting to spit out of the ground and congeal all over the world at specific locations, and it’s spreading like ink blotted on a page. Unless our heroes can stop, it is going to eat everything. And even if they can save the world, they’re going to have to make sacrifices. Naturally this affects how you can get characters.

Here’s how it is: you have a basic party of four -

• Hero Guy;
• Quiet Girl;
• Cleric Guy;
• Arson Girl.

After that, there are eight other characters-

• Barbarian Guy;
• Monk Guy;
• Lancer Guy;
• Rider Guy;
• Pilot Girl;
• Tank Guy;
• Priest Guy;
• Summoner Girl.

The thing is, you can’t get all of them. For various reasons, one of which is that if you have a certain number of them, the Evil eats the towns you get the others in. So in the whole game, you can only get half of the extra characters, which means you have to strategize which ones you want to get and which ones you don’t really need.

Here are some bios and basic storylines. I’m still working on it.

Cleric Guy
You get this guy very, very early on. He’s in the second or third town, which is in fact a theocratic village built around a monastery. Their high priest has been kidnapped, and the cleric guy, who has been studying for his final initiation ritual, joins your party to find him. His skills are pretty obvious – he performs basic white magic. He can heal your party, which is really important. After a while, the Hero can’t do enough. He also has a weak form of summoning, which allows him to do Holy damage to stuff. Remember, Revive Kills Zombie.

Arson Girl
A talented mage from a major city-state. Up until about six months ago, she was considered promising and pretty. Then her whole family died in a house fire, and she disappeared. Everyone assumed she was dead. When you reach the town, the residential areas have become increasingly terrified of a string of arsons which, predictably, have been caused by her. You have to defeat the minion of Evil that’s been controlling her and nurse her mind back to health before she’ll join you. She becomes the main offensive caster for the party. She can use black magic, which is very useful for killing large numbers of enemies. Most of it is probably based around fire.

Barbarian Guy
The barbarian is acquired in a wasteland frontier town. Basically, the mass of Evil outside the town has gotten so big that it’s forcing the native tribes into the trading post town, and you have to ally yourself with him in order to defeat the guy who’s maintaining the Evil and free the town. Secondarily, you have to rescue his tribe’s shaman. If you accomplish both of these, he joins your party. Where Quiet Girl’s fighting style is mostly based around Techs (fancy sword moves with different effects a la Cyan in FF6j), the barbarian’s style is based around strategic use of Rage – he does like three times as much damage, but takes twice as much. I don’t know if that’s the right ratio to use, but whatever. In addition, he has the Curse ability -  a shamanistic charm that lets him passively apply status effects to enemies like a counter ability. They attack him, and it poisons them, or puts them to sleep.

Monk Guy
By this I mean a martial artist, not a Franciscan. He lives in his family’s old house in a small town in the mountains, upholding his family’s traditions, unlike his brother, who has left to join the army in the big city. Because he is effectively the head of the village, and because his brother’s city appears to be slipping in influence, he has allowed his town to ally itself with an enemy of his brother’s city. This doesn’t please his brother, who leads an army against the small. He is determined to defend it to his death. The party has to break the conflict up, and then choose one of the two brothers to adopt. The monk is a versatile up-close fighter who does well in all areas. He can use techs like Quiet Girl, but they’re much weirder. He can get ki blasts, shields and turn skips, among others.

Lancer Guy
The monk’s brother, who sickened of his village’s stale, old-fashioned mindset and joined the army in the big city. He rose through the ranks and became a ranking officer, only to have his brother stab him in the back by allowing his village to ally with his mortal enemy (this mortal enemy happens to be Arson Girl’s town). He leads a force to reason with his brother, and is met by open, armed hostility. Naturally, he calls for reinforcements. The party has to sort the whole thing out, etc. He can use an ability called Stance, which allows him to change his role in battle in a variety of different ways. He starts off with offensive, defensive, and speed stances, but he can develop others, especially based on who’s in your party. This lends him to a highly specialized but highly effective form of combat.

Rider Guy
In a town near the wasteland town you get Barbarian Guy in, there is a major cattle trading post. However, because animals can sense shit we can’t, the cattle are fidgety and scared, and it’s making it hard to sell anything. The party has to join forces with the rider to keep the cattle contained when they ultimately do stampede (which hopefully does not take the form of a horrible minigame) and destroy the evil presence that’s causing them to get scared in the first place. Then they get a cut of his profit on the cattle as well as the much greater bonus of him joining the party. He fights mounted, which obviously makes him very fast, but his real strength is in his Charge ability, which lets him do heavy damage to a row of enemies at the beginning of a turn. Also, he can buy different mounts. You have to revisit the town you get him in to stable them, but he can ride horses, wolves, giant carnivorous ostriches, and hell, probably even rhinos, which all have different Charge effects. He also increases the party’s overworld speed and reduces overworld monster encounters. He’s worth it.

Pilot Girl
The pilot is acquired in the city the lancer comes from. She owns an airship. That’s more than enough of a reason to want her in your party, but the problem is that she also has enemies in the mob. There’s some kind of crime syndicate in the city that pretty much wants her dead, and she doesn’t know why. Her airship is across town, which means you have to run her across town to get to it while fending off hostile criminal agents. If you got the Lancer beforehand, it’s probably a lot easier. Once you get her in your party, you get the Airship, which allows you to travel at a normal run speed over any kind of terrain, excluding mountains. So if you’re crossing the ocean, it’s good to have it, but if you’re crossing the desert, you should probably go with the rider and his birds. She can Spot enemy stats, which is valuable against bosses, and she also has a Bomb ability, which does damage to every enemy but can only be used once every 3 or so turns, and she used guns. Guns are cool.

Tank Guy
This guy is a knight. He fights in a huge-ass suit of full armor and uses huge weapons like flails and lances. He’s from the same religion as Cleric Guy and Priest Guy, and the town near him has been overrun by the servants of Evil. You have to ally yourself with him and take it back, which basically which means killing hundreds of monsters in a few minutes. When you’ve saved the town, you notice that they’ve kidnapped the Cleric Guy’s priest teacher, and you save him. The tank decides to stay on as a result. In battle, he is a damage sponge. His entire role is to soak up a shitload of damage. He has a universal Counter ability, which allows him to take damage for one other party member and attack back with no chance to miss. He also has a special ability that is only usable when you have Priest Guy or a highly-leveled Cleric Guy. It is called Unflinching, and it lets him shield the whole party from damage and be invincible for a turn. When he gets hit, he attacks back for twice the damage with the added bonus that it’s Holy. Unfortunately, you can only use it once per battle.

Priest Guy
This is Cleric Guy’s teacher, and a mage of incredible power. How he’s been kidnapped by monsters for so long is kind of a mystery. You spend much of the game chasing him, and when you meet him, there’s actually a chance that he’ll leave shortly afterwards and never come back. If you get the Summoner Girl, he will leave in disgust for your heresy and return to his town. Thankfully, he won’t drag the Cleric Guy or Tank Guy along with him. In battle, he can use the same kind of healing magic as the Cleric Guy, but he also has the Divine Wrath ability, which is a lot like summoning but less heretical. Basically, he prays to the gods, and based on which one answers, he gets different stuff. This can be anything from causing every enemy to fall asleep and become poisoned to causing a lightning storm. Most of them also heal the party.

Summoner Girl
She lives in an isolated village on a tiny island. She fishes for a living, but lately something has been poisoning the water. Naturally, it’s Evil. If you help her out, she joins your party, but not before you fight your way through a horrible, hellish Underwater Dungeon and kill some kind of Cthulhoid squid monster. That monster becomes a summon, and she learns that she has the ability to conjure and command monsters from thin air. Priest Guy gets pissed and leaves. Once you have her, you have to spend a lot of time wandering around in caves all over the world looking for whatever monsters you can find, but it’s worth it, because summoning Bahamut has always been the most satisfying thing ever, and you know it. She knows a bit of black magic, but her real strength lies in Summoning. She has a few very powerful one-off summons like Beholders and stuff, but she can also manifest weaker monsters to help your party out through a whole battle, and she can probably even raise skeletons out of enemy corpses. Crazy.

The characters are based around an idea of counterweights. They balance each other out in pairs. Your default party has a balanced guy, a physical attacker, a healer, and an offensive caster. This is pretty balanced.

After that, though, you start to get pairs of people who balance each other out, and you can’t have all of them, so you have to choose. Here’s a list, to spell it out better:

• Physical Guys:
  • Barbarian Guy (high attack, low defense) vs. Tank Guy (low attack, high defense)
  • Monk Guy (high versatility)  vs. Lancer Guy (high specialization)
  • Rider Guy (high ground mobility) vs. Pilot Girl (air mobility)
• Magic Guys
  • Priest Guy (extra white magic) vs. Summoner Girl (extra black magic)

You don’t have to choose between each of those pairs if you don’t want to, and I hope it would cement some kind of FF1 replay-challenge factor.

So there’s my shit. This post took an hour and a half and I’m tired now.

Four White Mages? It’ll never work!

RPG Theory

I’m getting warmed up. Before I really start working on this thing, I need to have some idea of what makes RPGs tick. I’m going to apply a lot of this to my storyline, which is a little painful, since it goes against a lot of what I usually think is good in writing. But damn it, I’m going to get this right if it kills me.

The first is the hero. And I hate to say this, but I am going to go with a generic RPG hero here. The RPG hero is ubiquitous. He is a tabula rasa. He is between the ages of 13 (Ness) and 17 (Isaac), he is a he, and he lives in a small town. He is inherently good and pure, and he has some kind of special ability or history. He is naïve, but brave and willful. To top it all off, he doesn’t usually talk.

Naturally, there are a few exceptions. Cecil, in Final Fantasy 4j, is a thirty-something (I think) Dark Knight in the service of the king of a major power, ans as such he lives in the capital city. But for the most part, you can’t really escape the standard RPG hero.

The only thing on the above list I’m not going to use is the silent protagonist, because that’s just not how I roll.

Second: the villain. The RPG villain is rarely on an even footing with the hero, and is usually inherently evil, which makes it less objectionable when you kill him. He is often an ex-human who has ascended to godhood or even some kind of force in and of himself. He’s very rarely a human at all, at least by the end of the game. Giygas is the embodiment of the essence of all evil in the universe, Mithos is the ruler of the angels, and Kefka is an insane general who has attained godlike power.

One really weird exception is Golden Sun, which doesn’t have a villain. The characters who would be villains actually have complex motivations, and by the end of the game the characters end up mostly agreeing with them, even if they have to kill them. They’re also definitely human and admit the possibility that they’ll fail.

But fuck that. If I’m going with the inherently innocent and good main character, I’m going to juxtapose him with something really, really evil.

Next is the party. There are so many stock characters in RPGs that I could easily just pick and choose them, but I’m not going to. I have to draw a line somewhere. The natural assumption is that the main female lead is a healer/mage and uses a staff and is probably in love with the hero. Also, one of the male friends is big and dumb, one of them is small, intelligent and shy, and one of them is grizzled and cynical. And then there are sidequest characters. Some of this is alright, but I’m going to change some of it up.

Here are some ideas I’m throwing around. I’m thinking the healer is not going to be a pure magic girl, but might actually be a male cleric-in-training who joins the hero to save his master. I’m keeping the main offensive caster as a female, but instead of being cute and collected, I’m going to make her a dangerous psychopath. She has some kind of horrible mental disease brought on by Evil. She probably uses fire magic, too.

I like the idea of the shy, intelligent friend juxtaposed with the big, dumb one, but I’m changing that, too. The shy friend is a girl, which I guess is sort of alright, and I’m sure it has a precedent. She’s from the hero’s hometown, so she’s naturally the first party member, and she’s probably secretly in love with the hero. She’s also not an offensive caster, since we already have one of those, so she is in fact the only strictly fighter-type character for most of the game. Since the hero is a jack-of-all-trades who can do a little offensive magic, healing, and fight pretty well, she’s going to just have attack power, but have it in spades, with fancy attack techniques and shit. Doesn’t go well with her personality, but that’s interesting.

In contrast, the big dumb guy is acquired in the middle of the game, and is a barbaric tribesman from some wasteland with crazy tattoos and warpaint and skulls. He’s also strictly a fighter, and instead of having techs like the quiet girl, he has a typical berserker rage mode where he does a fuckton of damage but also takes more. He also has some kind of shamanistic magic-type thing, but I don’t know what that does yet.

I don’t know about sidequest characters yet. I’ll probably have some; the barbarian guy might even be one. I definitely don’t want to just have the Light Warriors Party of Four, but I don’t want to go the way of Suikoden and have something totally ludicrous 256 possible characters, either. I’m thinking between eight and twelve, with four being the active combat party, and maybe a row system so your second party can give support, too.

I need some towns, too. I’ve decided to structure this in a pretty standard way: you go to a town, which has a problem, and you fix the problem. You are rewarded somehow, and you move on to the next town. The rewards are pretty varied, and they can be anything from a major dungeon to a plot element to a new character to a key item. In fact, I might have every non-waystation town have a character to acquire, necessary or not. Or maybe I won’t, since that could get to be kind of ridiculous if the game is long.

I do intend for towns to be pretty big, though, so maybe it’s okay. One of the (few) things that really annoyed me about Golden Sun was that the first town, Vale, was a huge monster of a town with at least five screens of scenery, even though it was supposed to be a tiny village in the mountains, and then every town after it was basically a crossroads, even the two towns that were supposed to be gigantic merchant metropolises. So I’m going to make all the towns big and multi-layered but maybe not have so many of them.

I am going to have a world map, I’ve decided. Just to clear that up because I’m sure you were all wondering.

Anyway, some towns:

• The first town is your home, obviously, and you are sent away from it, along with Quiet Girl, to save the world. This kind of thing happens. It doesn’t have a problem in and of itself; rather, the whole game is its problem.
• There’s a town early on in the game, maybe the third or fourth one, which has sprung up around a monastery. Its problem is that something has happened to the high priest of the monastery, which understandably has everyone pretty freaked out. He’s either dead or kidnapped. You acquire Priest Guy here.
• The fifth or sixth town is a big city, one of a few major city-states in the center of the civilized world’s politics. Its problem is that there has been a rash of arsons in the residential areas, and people are starting to lose sleep over them. Obviously, you acquire Pyromaniac Girl here.
• There are at least two other city-states, each of which are at some level of hostility with the others. This is preventing them from seeing the encroaching threat of Evil, and much of the game revolves around scrambling to bring peace. They’re all big cities, and they all definitely have sidequest characters, if not important story-driving characters.
• One of the mid-game towns is a tribal settlement on the frontier. Its problem is that Evil is slowly and inexorably killing the land and life in and around it, and nobody knows why. You acquire Barbarian Guy here.
• There’s definitely a port city, and probably one or two crazier cities, like a flying castle or something.

Okay, so that was cool and handy. Stay tuned, kids. I don’t know what I’ll do next post, but it’ll be something.

RPG

So I just finished Earthbound, and I’m starting Chrono Trigger at school. I’m going to download Final Fantasy 6j to play at home, and I’m finishing the sidequests in Golden Sun II on my DS. Next on my wishlist for after FF6j is Secret of Mana.

I really need to design an old-school RPG.

Like, really. So much it is hurting my mind.

So expect that as my next big project. I’m going to do some planning, and maybe as early as tomorrow I’ll post some stuff. I intend to at least have characters, complete with equippable item classes and stuff, a storyline, and a developed world. Probably some specific posts on what I see as RPG theory. Maybe a battle system post. We’ll see. We’ll see.

In any case, GET READY.

Sympathies

I showed this at a show today. My attempt at Joyce stream-of-consciousness and black humor.

The only way John could pass the exam was by cheating. The teacher never seemed to realize that he wasn’t a bad student; he just couldn’t remember things. He had it in writing, too: a very formal letter from his very formal doctor explaining that he had amnesia lexigraphica, a debilitating form of short-term memory loss that rendered him unable to retain things he saw in writing, which had been acquired in an automtive accident in his early childhood. As he only had the letter in writing, John had completely forgotten it existed, and whenever he tried to explain his condition to the teacher, she told him he would have to bring a written letter from his doctor explaining his condition or she could only assume he was making it up. Thankfully, the same accident had somehow altered John’s sight centers so heavily that he could extraphysically project his vision anywhere he wanted to, so he could read the answers to the test that the teacher kept on her desk and frantically write them down before he forgot them. The teacher knew about his talent, because he had demonstrated it for her once (one of his many attempts to convince her of his condition, which naturally only gave her a reason to be paranoid) and tore her hair out over it. She had many ways of preventing John from reading the answers, which included leaving them facedown on the floor or writing them in mirror-script. But she couldn’t kick John out of her class for cheating, because nobody believed her when she talked about his talent, and she definitely couldn’t leave the answer key at home, because if she did she wouldn’t be able to leave class early with all the tests graded to feed her monstrous nicotine addiction. She had considered keeping the test key at home, but she had heard horror stories about smokers falling asleep in bed, and she was a narcoleptic. So the arms race between John and the teacher continued every exam day, with the teacher glaring at him like a hungry owl and guzzling coffee to keep herself awake, and they both knew it was completely ridiculous until the day she finally snapped and left the key at home. John failed the test, and she finally had proof of his talent, so she triumphantly went home, tests in hand, fell asleep, and asphyxiated on smoke from the tests her cigarette had lit up because she had trusted her giddiness to defeat her narcolepsy. None of the class particularly cared, except for John, who cried until he completely forgot about her death because he had only seen the notice in writing.

Meat

The mindblind came off with a rush, and Formic’s pupils contracted crazily as a hallway full of fluorescence collided with his retinas.
He coughed once and steadied himself against the wall, and then turned towards his new employer.
“Why the hell did you have to do that?!” he rasped.
Sovia smiled. “We don’t want you to know the location of the facility. You’re going to stay here now.”
Formic sputtered. “What about my kids? My wife?!”
Sovia gave him a long, appraising look. She burst out laughing.
“That’s good, Formic. If you’re already joking you’ll be fine here. No worries.”
Formic chuckled a little bit. They would never have let a man with commitments work here.
“Let’s get going,” said Sovia, still giggling a bit. “You need to learn the ropes before you get to work.”
“Alright.”
Formic shook off his head to throw off the last aftereffects of the artificial unconsciousness Sovia had stuck him with and followed her down the cold-lit hallway.
“The Black Rock Health Center has a biosafety level of six. That means no active worker can ever be allowed to leave, no air from inside can ever escape, and we have to get all of our water from an independent purification plant. We don’t take risks,” Sovia said.
“This was all in the contract, right?” asked Formic. Formic liked to read things pretty thoroughly before he signed up.
“Yeah, but people are usually drawn in by the pay.”
“That was definitely a big part.”

It dawned on Formic.
“Wait, what the hell am I going to spend it on?!” Formic asked.
Sovia cackled again. “Once your two years are up, we let you go with an altered hippocampus. You’ll remember nothing about what you did for the last two years, but you’ll remember that you agreed not to, and you come away a multibillionaire, so it’s all good.”
“Alright. As long as we have that cleared up,” said Formic.
“You’ll spend most of your time here in a hazmat suit. Only a few areas are considered safe for habitation outside of your suit. The outside hallways are one, the rec area is another, and the sleeping quarters are the last. All the labs are hazmat zones. I hope that’s alright.”
“Also in the contract,” said Formic.
“You’re good at reading,” said Sovia.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll go ahead and assume you read the whole contract. It was all in there.”
“Sounds good. Do I have any free time before I start?”
“You’re hitting the meat lab first for a test. You’ll stay there until we transfer you to something bigger. You shouldn’t be in meat longer than three months.”

They reached a flat white door, reflecting kaleidoscopic swirls of fluorescent light. Sovia stopped in front of it.
“It doesn’t have a handle,” said Formic.
“Step in directly in front of it,” said Sovia. Formic did.
An opaque booth slid up out of the floor, completely enclosing him. A ceiling piece shut over him.
“Please remove all of your clothes,” said Sovia’s voice. She was standing right next to him.
“How did you–” Formic sputtered.
“I’m a con. Take off your clothes.”
“What do you mean?” Formic slipped off his shoes hesitantly.
“I’m a hologram and everything you’ve heard me say has been the product of an AI. Take off your clothes.
Formic took off his shirt. “You could have just mentioned that.”
“We can’t have a centralized AI over Turing level 4 in the facility in case it goes crazy. Sorry if I’m a little imperceptive,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to offend you or anything,” said Formic, taking off his pants and underwear.
“Don’t worry about it. Take off your socks.”
Formic took off his socks. Sovia faded out of existence.
The front wall of the booth opened. Formic stepped through a little self-consciously.
He entered a tiny, dark room. Hanging on the wall was a blue-latex body suit. Formic gratefully slipped it on, and then pulled the clear-faced helmet over his head.
The door on the far side of the room opened with a pneumatic hiss.
He walked through. A big red sign over his head said, “HAZARDOUS MATERIALS AHEAD. DECONTAMINATION IS MANDATORY.”

Sovia was waiting for him on the other side, along with a crew of five men in hazmat suits.
A glass screen divided the room. On the other side sat a male human in a hospital gown. He stared dully at the floor, his arms and legs hanging limply at his sides.
Formic swallowed.
“So this is meat lab,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Sovia. “He’s a human with no higher brain functions and a heavily beefed-up immune system. We grow them in vats.”
“And then you kill them,” said Formic.
“We’re a bioweapons lab. What do you expect us to do, throw pies at him?”
“I don’t know if I can do this.”
“The machine is pretty easy to use,” said one of the men. “You just need to get the hang of a clean injection. We’re hitting the sausage with a non-mutative strain of ebola today. If it goes well we might get it upstairs.”
Formic stared at him. The tester’s face was invisible behind the mask.
“I mean, I don’t know if I can go through with this.”
Sovia sighed heavily. “Formic, you signed up for this. It was in the contract.” “I don’t think I looked this far ahead. This is fucked up.”
“He’s a bratwurst, man. You don’t need to feel any guilt for killing him. He isn’t really alive in the first place,” said one of the other testers.
“He’s a human!” said Formic.
“Here we go,” murmured one of the testers.
“Hey, man. We all said the same thing. Cut the FNG some slack,” said the first one.
Sovia looked at Formic very, very hard.
“Formic, nobody likes having to do this. It’s morally abhorrent. Even I understand that. But if we don’t give up some of our qualms, we’re all screwed.”
“This is bioterrorism! How is this going to save us?”
“We got some clippings of the verd by refugees in Almaty. It has human DNA.”
Formic’s eyes widened slightly.
“We think we almost have the verd’s genome decoded, but if we don’t get at least a proto virus ready to kill it by the time we have the genome cracked, the virus isn’t going to be ready by the time the verd eats us all. It’s already the size of Mongolia and it’s not going to stop growing until every single cell in its mass has been destroyed.”
“So we’re doing this all for the best.” said Formic bitterly.
“If we don’t, the whole world gets eaten by algae,” said Sovia.
Formic closed his eyes and took a very deep breath.
“That’s the spirit,” said Sovia. “The first one is the hardest.”

The syringe plunged into the subject’s neck with a soft hiss.

Sim Games

Testing out my new “tiny game idea overload” format:

Sim Domination
You have successfully taken over the world. The Age of Empires portion of your career is over. Now, all that remains for you to do is to manage everything. Make sure no rebellious heroes get through any cracks (by which I mean ventilation ducts) in your fortress. Keep taxation at a high enough level to pay for champagne for your generals, but not so high that China will revolt and stop making shoes for you. See how long you can last until you are overthrown. Victory occurs when you deliver a soul-crushing O’Brien Monologue to a captured hero and it becomes clear that your oppressive regime will never, ever go away.

Sim Label
Choose your genre – thuggin’ rap, super-hip indie, angsty punk, or arrogant electronic – and sign some guys. Build your empire until you become a universal household name. Manage your funds carefully, and make sure your PR campaigns and tours are handled well. Remember, if you are a hip-hop label, signing a band that lists “Insane Clown Posse” as an influence on their MySpace will give you an instant game over. If your label becomes trendy enough, you make spark your own sub-genre. Many bonus points.

Sim Crimefighting League
Those secret identities aren’t going to conceal themselves, and that secret MoonBase isn’t going up overnight. Choose from any number of procedurally-generated superheroes, make sure you apprehend supervillains before they become too powerful, build your super-secret hideout, and handle personality clashes, drama, and the inevitable Legion of Doom. For extra bonus points, start your own guerrilla marketing campaign and distribute comic books.

Sim Mystifying Television Show
You know the ones. The shows like Heroes and Lost that are so full of plot twists that you almost can’t believe it. The shows that make you feel like the writers have absolutely no idea what the fuck they’re doing. You can handle one of those shows now. Pay your actors, introduce new characters and elements when your ratings start to sag, conceal your own arc words in secret places every episode, and do your best to keep the viewers growing their Epileptic Trees higher and higher. If anyone ever publishes a correct theory on the internet, you have three options: hire them as a writer, abruptly change the direction of your show to avert an I Told You So, or silence them. By any means necessary.

Sim Crime Syndicate
Cosa nostra is a very hard to thing to run. It takes ruthlessness, determination, will, and exorbitant amounts of old Sicilian money. Convince your family to immigrate to America, start dealing whatever (heroin, alcohol, guns, whatever), and build your criminal empire until every US FBI agent from here to Alcatraz is itching to bring you up on charges. Naturally, there’s no way to actually win the game, but if you become a martyr, you’ve pretty much got it clinched. If you become a catchphrase – “Say hello to my little friend!” – you might as well have won, because in ten years nobody will remember who shot you, but they’ll still spout your last words. Maybe they’ll even wear your face on t-shirts.

Sim Quarantine
The most depressing and dehumanizing game you will ever play. A horrible plague has broken out, and it’s up to you to make the hard decision – split up families, hospitalize those who can be saved, and set fire to those who can’t be. You can play this at different technology levels – from Black Plague in the 1400s all the way up to AIDS today. You can even pick your diseases in the modern era – for an extra challenge, try Ebola. It’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll lose. Maybe even head into the future, in which you can quarantine entire planets once their Grey Goo advances to far and you have to nuke colonies from orbit if even one case is ever reported. Watch out for Yeerks.

That’s all for now. I do like this format, though.

In Reverse!

So there’s a growing fad for doing games backwards. You know, like the RPG where you design the dungeon instead of going through it. So I figured I’d do it too.

The Shooter in Reverse
Your army is vast, your funds limitless, and your troops absolutely fucking useless. The enemy’s dwindling force, long on the verge of crumbling, have augmented their soldiery with a single super-soldier, a man capable of cutting through entire armies with his bare hands. Your object is to place your massive numbers of pathetic, mindless drones in such a way that they can damage him enough for your few powerful troops, or (for extra style points) bosses to mop him up. From there, you can mastermind your rule over the planet/galaxy/cosmos/country/what the fuck ever.

The Sports Game in Reverse
Your team has been paid to throw the season. That is to say, you must lose all the games. Unfortunately, it’s also the best team the world has ever seen. You have to narrowly miss goals/passes/tackles/hits/whatever, keep the league in the dark, and claim your massive prize money without anyone noticing, because if they do, nobody will let you play ever again, and Tom Hanks will probably make a movie about you in 70 years. (Or whoever made Field of Dreams. Not looking it up.)

The Survival Horror Game in Reverse
Like the shooter, but this one is really easy. The hero is smart, but easy to kill, and he doesn’t have any ammo. Cover the valuable ammunition dumps with your strong zombies and send your weak ones out to wear him down. Wear him out psychologically until he’s desperate, and then send out your baghead chainsaw man and cut him to tiny hero pieces.

The RTS in Reverse
This is a little weirder. Basically, there are two players on the map, one who is very good and one who is very bad. In real-time, you must edit the map in such a way that the bad player cannot lose. However, you cannot directly harm the good player’s units. You have to wall them off with terrain, but they can climb, dig, or go around; it just takes longer.

The Puzzle Game in Reverse
It’s very hard to design a puzzle that’s hard for you to solve, but the idea in this is that you design puzzles until the computer can’t solve them, and then you win. The puzzles can range anywhere from mazes to those insane ice-block puzzles (god I fucking hate those) to Myst-style lever-block-whatever puzzles that span entire islands. The computer, naturally, has different difficulty levels, and I guess you can do it two-player as well.

Alright, so there’s some stuff for today. I actually kind of like this formula. Lots of little game ideas are kinda nice, and it’s definitely easier to write in the middle of the night.

Mutable History

This is a really new game idea that I’ll be hammering out for a while. Check it.

Basically, the idea is that in the future time is becoming pretty fucked up. The entire world changes very fundamentally on a regular basis, just because people go back and change stuff to suit their needs. Every so often, some Confederate sympathizer will go back and murder Ulysses S. Grant or whatever, and the next day all black people will lose all their privileges and everyone will have Texas drawls. Or World War II will have regularly not happened because of all the times people have gone back to 1938 and killed Hitler. The only stable things are time machines and Immutable History Books, which are protected in a Time Sphere (this is inexplicably bad science, but shut the fuck up). Every day, everyone on Earth has the Immutable History Books dumped into their head so they know the way history was supposed to go, and then the Time Police go back and change whatever went wrong.

The idea is that you play as one of the meddling time people. You’re given a set of 5 objectives that you have to accomplish by going back and changing things. This would be really easy if there weren’t X other people trying to change stuff too.

Basically, every person has an ultimate goal – maybe one of them is Egyptian radical, and his goal is to prevent the Exodus and make sure the dynastic rule of the pharoahs never actually ends. However, one of the other guys is a Jew who is secretly in control of the world (or whatever, maybe he’s just an ordinary Jew, but it’s funnier this way) and wants to foment Jewish victory not only in Palestine, but everywhere.

So some of their goals might conflict. Like, naturally, the Jewish guy is going to want to go back and, if he’s crafty, cause the Ten Plagues. If he’s not crafty, he might just kill Pharoah and give Moses a plasma rifle or something, but he’d lose style points and have to dodge agents of the Time Police for the rest of the game. The Egyptian guy is going too want to keep Pharoah alive, discredit the Ten Plagues, and possibly kill Moses, although that will change stuff pretty heavily.

But when someone kills Moses, the whole timeline changes.

(Digressing a bit, there are two game screens. One is the activity area, which is large when you are doing something in history and probably resembles a third-person shooter view. The other is the timeline screen, which is just that – a timeline with lots of dates on it. All the significant Goal Dates are on it, and you can see where all the other players are. If they’re not in any particular date, they show up as orbs floating in the middle of the timeline. If they are, they show up as arrows over their date.)

Basically, when someone kills Moses, a huge ripple travels up the whole timeline. All the dates change. So the Jewish guy would go from seeing “AD 32 – Jesus crucified” to “AD 35 – Judea completely subjugated.” That would be a big deal. But naturally he would want to change some stuff before then – making sure that the Tyrians didn’t win over Egypt, or whatever. Basically, ripples are constantly traveling up the timeline.

The obvious strategy is to secure the first date and go from there. But there are lots of people, and you can only be in one place at one time. So the way I’m envisioning it ending up is that, in a given date, if there is too much conflict, the Time Police show up, and everyone has to escape or be arrested. Being arrested immediately takes you out of the game. Once everyone has disappeared, the Time Police secure the date in whatever state it is currently in for future change. This is considered a definitive win for whoever was the last person to have the date in the state they want it to be in.

Once either everyone but one person have been eliminated or one person has managed to shift 75% of the dates to their goal, the game ends, and the last person standing or the greatest converter wins. There might also be a time limit, and at the end the person with the most dates going to their goal wins.

I’m thinking this would probably be scenario-based, or else the logistics would be too icky. That means there’d be an even number of players, and there’d be an opposite for each player, to create conflict. So the white supremacist has a Black Panther, the Tory has a French supremacist or an American imperialist, the anti-war type has a neo-Nazi, and the Jihadist has a neo-Crusader. There could be up to four of these pairs, otherwise it would get too crazy.

Damn it, I want to play this game now. I hate when this happens.

Terribly Sorry.

Been feeling kinda feverish all day. You don’t get anything meaningful today.

But none of you commented on the story from yesterday. And the first one this week was a pretty fucking long post. So I’ve got no pity.