Schlock Mercenary

Eh, I was under the impression that this one was halfway in between, HeroQuest level.

My copy arrived over the Independence Day weekend, and I have not had time to even get it out of the box.

Edit: Definitely not HeroQuest. My bad. Interesting system. Reminds me of Green Ronin's AGE system with how Mayhem works. I kind of wish it had shipped with a Quick Start module of some sort, though. Apparently a module was built for the HandBrain Kickstarter. It doesn't look like they're selling it separately yet.

Further Edit: I somehow totally missed "The Damaxuri Deception" near the end of the book. Now the only thing missing is prebuilt characters... although my current plan is to try to build the RPG in Hero Lab and then suggest to Howard to license the system with them. :)

edited 10th Jul '17 11:59:47 AM by FuzzyBoots

A few days late, but, newsflash, situation NOT under control.

edited 9th Jul '17 3:58:56 AM by MattII

July 20, 2017

Looks like we're finally going to see this baby in action.

Aren't they still way, way too close to the action to fire this thing safely?

It's a plasma lance, it's going to go through that tank, out of the building and over the horizon, but its gonna stay focused.

Oooh you know, one way the Allstar can Just as Planned this is if the tank lines Cindy's shot up so it hits the vault.

"Unacceptably lossy."

Wow that system sounds like not a fun place.

Yeeeah

Looks like we're finally getting some Kathryn/Tagon Ship Tease, which has been hinted at for years but never actually happened.

In regards to Murtaugh's "Abandon all hope" quote, the strip was updated with a footnote pointing out she wasn't quoting Dante.

However, on the FB group for SM Howard posted the entire song that was snippeted in the footnote, available in a convenient image package posted here (visible without a Facebook account).

So that was the reason.

Isn't 12 m/s way too fast, though? All Tagon did was cushion her inevitable stumble. Keeping the hatch clear is one thing, but if it results in a pile of grunts a few meters away, that's pretty pointless.

Yeah, that is WAY to fast. 12m/s is 27mph or 43kph.

On the other hand, for people in low-profile (or not so low-profile) powered armor who all know what's coming, a fast exit can mean a faster deployment if time is critical.

That "know what's coming" part is the important thing, though.

12 m/s seems appropriate if everyone is not only wearing power armor, but is literally deploying onto the battlefield itself. Which is not an ideal situation, because that means the cage is somewhere it can be shot at.

In any other situation, there's no reason your gate should be shooting people out at a faster speed than they enter it. A dead run is good enough.

edit: On second thought, you probably CAN run that fast in good power armor in this universe. But it should still be based on entry speed.

edited 23rd Oct '17 5:07:49 AM by Brickman

@3312 It's a good thing he put that clarification, because he didn't get it right if it was Dante he quoted.^Litsnobbery The closest translation of the original Italian is "Abandon hope, you who enter." Because modern English lacks a single word for the second-person plural, some variant of "all you" (such as "all ye" or simply "all") is sometimes tacked in there, but the word "all" never appears and is a bit redundant next to "hope". For that matter, so is "here," but English does tend to lean towards that level of clarification.

For the speed... We are talking about people who have boosts to tweak them well above what normal humans can do, plus are wearing significant body armor (enough to resist futuristic small-arms fire). That speed is quite intentional. It might also be so that people can't just crib what Kevin did wholesale without looking - the boosts the Toughs have are illegal for most, so normal people going through that would have issues.

Triage in the age of resurrection. Interesting that the RED/REO nannies need an external impetus to start regeneration. Maybe it's a safety precaution to keep them from regenerating in a hostile environment like outer space? Or a safety precaution to keep each individual piece from regenerating into a whole person.

They aren't magical, they have limited materials, so no total duplicates from regeneration. So the maintaining their information while in inhospitable environment rather than redoing the infinite incoming damage is the primary motivation.

Probably anything that could "activate" the regeneration en masse, like a remote signal, would be a huge attack vector. Like, "kill the entire population of this battleplate with one hack" huge. If you're just using it to protect against accidents or minor field casualties or random muggings etc, activating them individually by a trained medical person makes sense. It's just rather inconvenient if an entire building worth of people "dies" at once.

Not so sure about automatic activation. This universe has pretty good AI, even on a nanobot level. Remember, the package that was used for redhack could "hold a conversation" with the victim, both when Kowalski used it and when the enemy used it against Mako. If it was hijacking the victim's own brain to get that smart, there's no reason why Red Reo couldn't do the same. And if there's not enough brain left intact for the nanobots to be smart, then rebuilding the brain is definitely step 1. Presuming, of course, that the nanobots can tell the difference between "I've been separated from nanobots in the brain" and "the nanobots in the brain are destroyed".

You know, if that's all it is, you could easily just get Schlock to do it. You just tell him that he's going to do things slightly in reverse and stab them to life.

Shlock isn't any more space-capable than any other grunts. And the tarbots have been shown to be extremely speedy on the move, so yeah she's the best single person for the job.

On the other hand, a gaggle of cryptspiders could both tag and bring them all in.

edited 25th Oct '17 6:35:14 AM by Adannor

Sidenote, it's nice to see Aardman back again. I wonder whether he and Para continued to be together in some fashion. In the interim, didn't we have a bunch of revelations including her spy status? I mean, if it sank Nick and Kathryn...

Courtesy link.

I don't think Para and Aardy were officially dating before she got outed as a spy. Maybe now they are, but there was no sign of it before.

Also, Aardy appears to have been promoted to "gunsmith." That feels roughly equal to Para's robotics job, so maybe it's another Kevyn/Elf situation, where they couldn't date while they were unequal.

edited 25th Oct '17 7:51:07 AM by Discar

Uh... isn't inserting the syringes too fast a bad idea? I get they're going to be rebuilt anyway, so who cares about some more damage, but what about over-penetration?