Still here, just haven't really had much to contribute.
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Barbara disembarks from the Glitter armor as the sun goes down. "The servos are getting really jammed up with all of the friction, and getting stuck is just making it worse. I'm gonna let it cool off overnight. Really needs maintenance." She does a quick circuit of the area looking for a chunk of girder that might be usable as a lever or ramp to help get the Mammoth out of the ground.
... without any luck.
"Team, I need some maintenance work here. I've got some outages and components are feeling the strain. I dunno how we're set for parts, I might be able to get it working again, but I won't know until I have a little time to do a breakdown and see what's what," reports Barbara over the radio. "If we can hole up for a few hours, I can crack the shell and take a look. Otherwise it might be better for me to hole up in the Mammoth for the rest of the trip. Don't want to risk something freezing up before we have to get into a fight."
Yeah, the last time I went to GenCon was when Decipher sent me.
"Titan Industries mostly sells robot power armor and stuff like that, right?" says Barbara. "Assuming they're legitimate, they probably wouldn't be opposed to sharing information about the local trade routes and any notable hazards."
"We can't get caught in the open. Those kinds of craft probably have missiles with a longer effective range than my Boom Gun," notes Barbara over comms. "Let's see where we can use terrain to our advantage. Not sure I want to be stuck inside of a fortress with no back door out, there's no telling if the enemy can just call reinforcements and keep throwing them at us until they overrun the fort. Or just drop a nuke on it."
Barbara takes a crouched position near the main door, waiting in case she needs to suddenly intervene to hold it open with her power armor, as the rest of the team explores the facility and comes out with significant cargo. "Scrounging through the ruins of the old world. It's a living!"
Barbara starts with diagnostics, as she mentioned. She checks for any working lighting or responsive systems, measures for test current, and checks for any kind of access or maintenance panel through which she can jump in current if needed, by attaching a lead from her nuclear-powered armor.
Barbara has a chuckle at the shenanigans as the handoff logistics are sorted. "All right Bart," she says in response to his ruminating on the power systems. "We can probably jump some power to the systems from one of our own reactors if this facility doesn't have any remaining power of its own. First things first: Let's check for emergency lighting and a current. This place looks surprisingly pristine, maybe the lights are still on."
That is AMAZING! :) It's a hobby. (I actually have been a professional game designer for 30 years, but I also release some things for free just as personal interest projects, like the aforementioned Deadlands adventures and my 2nd edition AD&D DARK SUN campaign, the Sand Marches.)
Selfishly, I'd like to see DMSB run another Savage Rifts campaign since there are very few of those going and there is a ton of Pathfinder content. That way I can start a character from novice level. Oh, Savage Rifts characters never start at Novice level. It's baked into the rules that they are always tougher, because Rifts is a high-power game from its inception, so characters have to be higher rank to fit the genre.
SW isn't my top favorite, but I do occasionally do some Deadlands stuff with it. I did a rewrite of the old Deadlands adventure Coffin Rock to answer questions like "How does anyone in this town eat, if they have no jobs and the general store is shut down?" and "Where are the bandits hiding out?" and "How do I keep track of all of these NPCs anyway?" It's called Coffin Rock Resurfaced. Then I asked the DL community what I should do next, and someone said (probably jokingly) "Do a musical," so I did. I wrote a singing cowboy adventure, Wake of the Nightingale, in which a cowgirl and her family are gunned down by a small bandit gang, but she rises as Harrowed and goes looking for vengeance, gunning down anyone who gets in her way. The PCs wind up crossing her path, and they can either fight her or try to figure out what happened and use that to stop her rampage and hunt down the bandits who caused the violence in the first place. The Harrowed sings as she travels, including a creepy song that I dug up from one of John Wayne's first Westerns, and one of the ways that the PCs can confront her includes singing to disrupt her concentration on her own song. My current SW project is a Deadlands: Hell on Earth mega-adventure set in inland California and themed like The Road Warrior. One of the major barriers to actually having vehicle fights in a post-apoc setting like that is the lack of rubber to make new tires. (California has its own oil and refineries, so you can still plausibly have fresh gasoline.) Turns out, there's a local plant called the guayale that can also be used for rubber extraction, it's just not usually as efficient as a rubber tree. In a post-apoc setting, though, there's no shipments of rubber coming from Africa, so you use what you can get, and that gives the explainer for how they still have vehicles in this part of the world: They have scrap metal and parts, gasoline, and rubber for tires, so they can make wild wasteland buggies.
Novice level is rough. You have no real flexibility, you basically pick one thing and that's what you do. It's still hard to die outright, but it's also really easy to get into a position in which nobody in your crew has the ability to put down a tough enemy. It can be helpful to think of Novice Rank as your "tutorial" levels (much like levels 1–3 in D&D 5e), where you're leaning how your character works and either improving the areas that are going to be your specialty or shoring up some weaknesses so that you can survive tougher challenges.
Barbara seems to realize the side effect and tugs the zipper up on her décolletage. "I haven't had a remoulade in years, but I know that our ration packs always come with too much extra mustard. Maybe just a dash of that... ?" she suggests. "I also wanted to say... I'm doing a lot better since that bad night where you saved me from bleeding out. Mentally as well as physically. So thanks again." She gives Bart a friendly rub on the back before she circles around the fire pit to help cut up the chunks of bear meat into smaller pieces that'll be easier to cook on a skewer. ~~~~~~~~~~ As reports come in of the discovery, Barbara muses to herself, I wonder if it's extradimensional, or pre-War? She brings up the Glitter Boy for a cover position ahead of the Mammoth and opens her comm channel. ++"All right Kid, give us a chance to get into overwa- aaaaand there he goes."++
As the team settles in for camp, Barbara clears some space with the powered hands of her Glitter armor, which makes it easy to make a debris-free campsite and to collect some firewood for cooking and general warmth. She also sets up a few lean-tos for folks who want to sleep outside, then she grabs a 30-gallon drum from cargo storage and goes scouting to find some fresh water.
She returns with a barrel of water, into which she puts a decontamination tablet and lets it sit and clean for a while. Then, she sits the Glitter armor down next to the vehicle, and opens the clamshell to step out. The Kid's predictions are true; he's gonna win some money from his crew. She takes off the padded headpiece with the embedded comm channels and cooling system, and shakes out her luxurious blonde hair. She pulls down the zipper on her jumpsuit a bit to get some fresh air. She undoes the velcro that secures her piloting gloves and slaps them onto a tab on her belt where they stick, then saunters back to the water barrel, cups her hands, and dips them in the water. She splashes some water on her face and dribbles some around her neck. The whole thing would be farcical if it weren't so... hormonally enticing. The Iron Lady is definitely a woman. Some might call her "the girl next door," but "girl" would be doing her a disservice. She saunters over to where Bart is prepping the bear meat and says, "Need another hand? Least I can do, considering all you've done for me. I'm not a great cook, but I can follow directions. And I know enough not to eat the liver."
Barbara gives a wave to the merchants as they continue out west. "All right team!" she says cheerfully. "These kilometers aren't going to travel themselves. If our, uh, guests are able to travel, we should keep going. Otherwise, it might be time to look for a good, defensible place to bunker down for the night, see about some local hunting for additional food supplies, and set up our watch rotations."
Barbara closes ground in the glittery armor and turns on her exterior mic. "This glitter armor isn't just for show," she says. "Our team's been dispatched to help liberate people from the Coalition, and to prevent them from taking any more captives. We also have latitude to take opportunity events to prevent other attacks and aid refugees, and that's what we're doing."
Babs is probably too far away to get involved in Persuading anyone at this juncture.
+++You got it, chief.+++ The Glitter Boy sets course to become an iron wall between the hostile groups.
From half a mile away, Barbara raises the Boom Gun onto her shoulder. She moves down from the elevated position and starts crossing ground to rejoin the crew.
Barbara takes up an overwatch position. If the enemies break formation and some of them are far enough from innocent targets, or move to engage with a vehicle, she's ready on the trigger.
(AP 25)
Barbara looks for a tactically sound spot for overwatch and support artillery fire.
"Hasn't changed from the last encounter. The impact force creates a shockwave that'll tend to knock down folks nearby and pop eardrums. But, no guarantee that they don't have elements that are detached from the main unit, like if they have outriders on a vehicle, or a scout in robot armor."
"Dave, you got all the dirty you need," says Barbara. "My hope is, if I take up an elevated position and do the artillery, they won't have anything with matching range."
"If I can get to a slightly elevated position, a half mile is a doable shot for cover fire."
Barbara moves to serve as escort for the vehicle; the Glitter Boy armor can move at a good clip for quite a while, and she'll need to be ready to dig in so that she can use the Boom Gun if something crosses their path anyway. She checks in on the encrypted comm channel that the team's been using and says, "We've got a long trip and a lot of extra heads. We gonna need to stop for foraging and hunting in order to keep everyone fed for the next two weeks?"
Mostly I b*#*! about it in the Discussion thread and then just do RP in the Gameplay thread. :)
We went back and forth on this a while back, I'll try to do the tl;dr. In the original Rifts rules, the Glitter Boy has an enormous MDC pool, combined with incredible damage reduction against laser weapons. It's a form of mobile artillery power armor that fights like a boxer: It's supposed to absorb tons of punishment and keep fighting while it's smoking and damaged and throwing sparks. You're supposed to feel heroic because your gameplay cycle is about pushing how much damage you can take while you get into position to use the Boom Gun to make a big dent in the enemy forces. In SW, you cannot model this, because of the way the wound system works. Either you absorb the hit, or you don't. That means the Glitter Boy armor is set with an immense toughness rating, making it very hard to damage, but when something penetrates, you just get shellacked. This happened early on because we were in a fight with some Coalition APCs with triple rail guns. I don't have the books handy at the moment so I'm going from memory. The Coalition APC has a formidable rail gun suite, but in Rifts, this is not enough to penetrate the Glitter Boy armor with one shot—not even close. The Glitter Boy is supposed to take risks, by taking hits while moving into position, then use the Boom Gun to wipe out the enemy. The cadence of play is that you get shot, and you get shot again, and you get shot a third time, and then you lock in and turn the target into a crater. You are always pushing the envelope by going "how much more can I take to get the job done?," which is how the Glitter Boy feels heroic. In SW, you cannot do this cycle, so you get what happened in our game—the Boom Gun hits the APC, it bounces off harmlessly, then the APC hits once with its rail guns and completely shreds the Glitter Boy, ending it in one hit. The change to the rule system made it impossible to model the cadence of play that the Glitter Boy had.
Hoo boy, we had a lengthy discussion about how migrating to SW really undercuts the playstyle fantasy of the Glitter Boy. :D SW is pretty OK as game systems go, but it still has a little bit o' clunk. It definitely hits for fast though, they landed on that goal.
Barbara says, "Good thing I have environmental filters on this suit. But once I get out when we camp, either I'm going upwind, or someone's taking a bath."
"You the one who does dirty deeds dirt cheap?" replies the Glitter Girl, though she doubts anyone will catch her pre-Rifts musical reference. (One advantage to working with a lot of old war tech in the field is that the veterans sometimes crop up with the oddest selection of old data storage, including music and entertainment.) "You don't need my approval if you're killin' vampires! You got an odd way of talkin' to women, though."
"No need for rough play, youngsters," quips Barbara from the Glitter suit. "It's on us to treat these prisoners with a modicum of dignity and safety, even if they were enemy soldiers. How we treat them reflects on us more than it says anything about them." She reaches up the right arm of the Glitter armor to tap the side of her shoulder-mounted gauss cannon where it says "unicorn power." "The Coalition's told them a lot of things about the outside world, and the only way we're gonna challenge that is if we show them which ones aren't true. For instance that we aren't all monsters and psychos."
Barbara moves into a guard position with the refugees to make sure they stay protected just in case any other surprises come up today. "Folks, you've been through a lot, but we're going to do our best to get you helped out. If you are trying to get somewhere, we may try to help you get there. If you're just scared and trapped, we'll do our best to make sure you are safe."
Unbothered by the dragon, the Glitter Girl finishes disposing of the collars and then moves to intercept some of the fleeing refugees, on the assumption that they need help the most and the rest of the crew can figure out a way to deal with the captors.
The glitter girl points as she says, "People over there, collars over there!" directing them to different locations. "Just because you got it off of someone's neck doesn't mean it's not going to explode anyway!" The glitter girl retracts her stability pylons and rotates the boom gun back up into storage position, then moves to the side of the damaged building to find a good spot to start piling up all of the explosives where their small detonations won't add up to knock down a wall, set off a nearby vehicle, or kill anyone.
The towering glitter armor glances down at The Kid and there's a brief hum as its external audio turns on. "All of the captives have these collars," comes a woman's voice from inside of the power armor. "We have to get all of them off before something triggers them. I hope that neutralizing one doesn't trigger all of the rest to detonate!" The glitter armor points to indicate Bart nearby. "Bart's going to try to help me with figuring out how to spoof or jam the signal. It's a deadman switch though, so if the signal stops... things get messy."
"Careful! If you destroy the switch and the triggers are set to detonate when the signal stops, they'll all blow! Bart, help me nail down this frequency hopper. If we can spoof the signal, we can keep it going as long as we need, buying us time to get the collars off."
"Picking up an encrypted transmission. I'm gonna guess that when it stops, we get a very different kind of boom," says Barbara over comms. "Get out as many people as you can! Does anyone have a way to shield the detonation?"
Barbara keeps the Boom Gun lined up and waiting to take the shot once she has clearance.
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