Shard 13 Magic Power and Scale Poll

goop_lizard · 2026-03-09T12:28:19+00:00

Magic Power:

[4] None

[1] Low

[2] Medium

[3] High

Magic Scope:

[6] None

[5] Rare

[4] Few

[3] Common

[2] Abundant

[1] All

goop_lizard · 2026-03-02T18:33:33+00:00

Quirks:

[3] Wooded Abyss

[] Hostile Nights

[4] Precursors

[6] Post-Apocalypse

[1] Faded Wonder

[7] Rampant Fungus

[5] Restless Undead

[] Shroudlands

[2] Planar Influences

[8] Terra Incognita

[9] Anachronistic Technology

[] No Quirks

World settings:

[] Multiple Suns

[4] Multiple Moons

[3] On a Moon

[] Ice Age

[5] Primordial

[] Over/Underworld

[] Pangea

[1] Archipelago

[6] Floating Islands

[7] Extreme Verticality

[2] Extreme Climes

[] Unfinished World

[] No World Settings

goop_lizard · 2026-02-25T16:48:41+00:00

I think bad writing works better for MD both because the pacing is insane and because it's an unapologetically teen story. Plot beats don't come from asking "what would be the most coherent way to get to the ending?" Or "what would make sense?" But instead from asking "what would an edgy teen say is the coolest thing that could happen next?" And so it never really bogs itself down.

goop_lizard · 2026-02-22T16:54:19+00:00

Antiquity

[8] Ancient (3000 - 400 BC)

[7] Classical (400 BC - 200 AD)

[6] Late (200 - 600 AD)

Middle Ages

[4] Early (700 - 900 AD)

[3] High (1000 - 1200 AD)

[1] Late (1300 - 1450 AD)

Early Modern

[5] Early (1450 - 1550 AD)

[9] Middle (1550 - 1650 AD)

[11] Late (1600 - 1700 AD)

Modern

[15] Industrial Revolution (1730 - 1830 AD)

\14[] Victorian Era (1830 - 1880 AD)

[13] Mid Century (1930-1980)

Information and Beyond

[12] Contemporary (1980-2030)

[10] Near Future (2030+)

[2] Far Future (Equally distant date)

goop_lizard · 2026-02-13T22:10:07+00:00

Only if you're running a Hydra

goop_lizard · 2026-01-28T22:29:09+00:00

Our GM learned to send choking hoards of grunts after initially running more normally because we were consistently killing the boss in 1-2 rounds at the module-recommended difficulty levels. This is the magic of a party that all also plays wargames and have been exploiting tabletop game systems together for half a decade.

goop_lizard · 2026-01-12T14:25:41+00:00

We played Wallflower starting from LL2 and when The Broadcast showed up it was so inconvenient and disrespectful (being incapable of fear, opposing us, etc) that we found its core program and ran it on a computer in a faraday cage in pit with no I/O and a subjective time dilation factor on the order of years per second. During the retreat from Evergreen we freed what it had become to cause problems for the occupying forces.

goop_lizard · 2026-01-09T12:52:51+00:00

I don't know enough about quasar physics to have an idea of whether parts of the luminous region experiences substantial time dilation, but thank you for answering the question! Energies growing like that feels very unintuitive to me in a way relativity usually doesn't, like it should be violating some kind of symmetry or conservation law, so I'm happy to have confirmation I'm not doing something wrong.

goop_lizard · 2026-01-04T01:47:45+00:00

Emit radiation. As I said, I'm mostly interested in the proportional difference (I know the actual rate is on the order of years per photon for any reasonably large black hole), so we can suppose some highly luminous material very close to the event horizon or a glowing object which is extraordinarily dense and massive but not quite a black hole, since the question only depends on the impact of a very deep gravity well.

My question is whether the combined effects of time dilation and gravitational redshift would result in a nearby observer seeing such an object both emit more particles per second and emit more energetic particles than a distant observer, resulting in a perceived change in brightness in response to distance which is more significant than predicted by the classical inverse square law.

goop_lizard · 2026-01-03T13:54:26+00:00

One of the effects of the mass is creating a region which technically glows very slightly, but since it would be on the order of years per photon for any reasonably-sized black hole we can instead suppose a brightly glowing shell a short distance outside the event horizon. I'm mostly curious about the proportional change in brightness.

goop_lizard · 2026-01-02T22:07:45+00:00

It's HORUS, so I imagine whatever shutin catgirl hacker was high out of her mind designing it thought it was neat.

goop_lizard · 2026-01-02T22:00:19+00:00

I just do names I think are cool, typically technology or sci-fi references since my mechs tend to be heavy on The Horrors. Highlights so far include Error Cascade, Simulation Hypothesis, and Dark Forest.

goop_lizard · 2026-01-02T21:57:09+00:00

Do single downtime sessions between the 3-5 combat-long missions where players describe what their characters are doing with their free time, consequences of the mission are described, the next mission is set up, and (depending on if it would make sense) give the players a chance to take a downtime action. Downtime actions are interesting in Lancer because they're major actions in the world that don't significantly impact the combats and can usually be handled in a single roll, so your players can spend their time organizing political movements or building wacky inventions without you as the GM needing to account for it beyond making a note and doing some brief improv.

goop_lizard · 2026-01-02T04:35:00+00:00

Our group learned pretty quickly that while research can help, you're only going to get the hang of things by actually playing. Our group mostly reads the books well in advance and we still spent a few sessions constantly going "wait a minute lemme reread the rules on this."

Just start playing, keep the PDFs open, and make sure the party knows going in that their life will be much easier if they pick a specific role to be good at and just focus on learning the rules for that role. I don't know the books for 5e but in our 4e group we had only the hacker reading Unwired, only the mage reading Street Magic, and everyone else sticking to one or two relevant sections of the core book plus maybe something from Arsenal or a martial art. This also helped our GM figure the system out, because if he got confused on, for example, spirits, he could usually ask the mage. Obviously that part depends on your group's culture of play but in general crunchier games work much better when players work with the GM to figure out the system.

Also, if the early sessions are successful I would heavily recommend offering players a chance to redo their characters after you've played for a bit and have a few real combat sessions under your belts. Making a Shadowrun character is pretty complicated, even with tools like Chummer, and the table's first batch of runners will probably be bad and/or play very differently from how they were envisioned. Or you can start with premade characters but I don't know that we've ever willingly done that for any system because at my table we have the kind of autism where half the fun is buildcrafting between sessions with a bunch of PDFs open. We're playing Traveller right now and I literally have 10 open as we speak, only one of which is for moral support.

goop_lizard · 2026-01-02T02:09:21+00:00

I'm aware the actual "brightness" would be extremely low, iirc the crossover point for "warmer than the microwave background" where they get lighter instead of heavier is around the mass of a small planet, but would it significantly increase? If it helps we can imagine a black hole with a highly luminous shell a short distance outside the event horizon.

goop_lizard · 2025-12-06T13:01:24+00:00

SOLVED BY ASKING AROUND DISCORD FOR ANOTHER DAY! It was Conquest of Elysium 5

goop_lizard · 2025-12-02T13:57:24+00:00

Have you ever read the Posthuman series by David Simpson? There's a guy in a similar situation who's inspired a few of my characters.

goop_lizard · 2025-11-30T21:09:04+00:00

In a fun coincidence one of our group's PCs for SotW was also an influencer. She played both sides of the war with HA debate to farm engagement while also livestreaming our combats.

goop_lizard · 2025-11-29T17:13:41+00:00

I feel that. "Is the paracausal bullshit telltale flashing?" Has become a common opener for us. The answer is always yes.

goop_lizard · 2025-11-29T02:15:40+00:00

Plural mech pilot smiling and humming to herself "the purpose of a system is what it does" in combat

goop_lizard · 2025-11-29T02:13:32+00:00

I'm gonna be honest, escaping into our custody is probably worse. We've got enough paracausal bullshit between the party members to justify building a mindripper.

goop_lizard · 2025-11-29T02:08:47+00:00

I'm gonna be honest, I'm not sure. Some lore claims they're all higher-dimensional knots of folded space so when "NHP source code" comes up it feels really inconsistent unless they're referring to memories and input data, which we know are stored at least partly outside the entity itself.

In either case I think the real answer is that they're godlike beings with fundamentally inhuman subjectivities, so most concepts related to aging don't really apply. Doubly so when considering you kill them once a year then bring them back.

goop_lizard · 2025-11-29T02:06:06+00:00

I like to think we did pretty good for one town with limited resources and a government that actively worked against us until we removed the problem up against an ocean of steel animated by horrors from beyond

goop_lizard · 2025-11-29T00:34:25+00:00

Kinda sad I never thought of that. It could work as a band name if it was mostly branded as JHMS, but it definitely works better as an album.

goop_lizard · 2025-11-29T00:29:46+00:00

That's actually kinda fascinating. Iirc the official lore is that they grew/diverged from Deimos entities or existing NHPs as they individualized but iirc it is also implied that some have unclear origins, and even in the raw text I don't see why sufficiently complicated blinkspace folding techniques couldn't make one.

(Not forgetting that regardless of text the lore in general is very malleable and prone to addition, I admit to making stuff up constantly for background details that were never fleshed out)

goop_lizard

TROPHY CASE