Exalted: City of Darkness fluff

If a place that's composed of equal parts Blade Runner and Crouching Tiger can have fluffy bits, that is. Calling it "E:CoD Chunks of Shattered Concrete and Rusted Iron, With Supernatural Kung Fu, Gods in VR, and Beamklaves" is a touch unwieldy (if accurate). Anyway –

Jina Liao knew she was in trouble when the Dragon somewhere in the wreckage behind her began to chuckle. The speaker of of his black-jade armored suit stripped all evidence of humanity from the noise – just a mechanical, grating ‘heh-heh-heh,’ amplified to a volume that shook dust from the leaning concrete pillars of the ancient garage.

Jina was the leader of a ratgang. That was the Dragons’ name for people who refused their offer of safety and security, the so-called “survivor civilization.” The Dragons made deals with spirits of electricity and information, and set themselves up as neofeudal lords in the City’s ruin. The Dragon chasing her now was Cathak Hrond – a sadistic enforcer-prince for the Cathak family.

He was hunting, a pastime for many bored and cruel Dragons. With their Essence-optics they’d pick out a likely ratganger, either kill his companions or drive them off, and then chase him through the underbelly of the City. Typically the pursuit was incredibly one-sided, the ratganger armed with a length of pipe, a shiv, her wits, and a zipgun; the Dragon armed with a Essence-fueled coilgun or flamethrower, and clad in powered jade-alloy armor, guided by spirit-AIs and navigation software.

But Jina was a quarry of a different kind. She ran a ratgang, which made her a force to be reckoned with. She knew the alleys and rooftops of Sector 81 like she knew her own breath and heartbeat. When the Cathak gave chase, lighting her path with blasts from a heavy beam cannon, she nearly lost him in the Railyard Jungle. She swam the length of the Scumpond underwater, hoping to confuse his Essence-sensors. She leapt from balcony to balcony at the Old Hotel, crossing three-meter gaps twenty stories up, to no avail. He hounded her relentlessly, dogging her steps, taunting her through the helmet speaker. “Run, girlie, run! It’s more fun that way!”

Sadistic bastard.

She was sure she had him caught at the Pillar Farm. Once there had been some kind of enormous skeletal concrete structure – a skytower, an airpark, maybe a powerbeam station. But at some point in the City’s past – after the Fall, presumably – the tower had overbalanced and come crashing down, leaving a tangled mass of twisted rebar, pillar-stumps, and pulverized concrete. It was a deathtrap, and ratgangs throughout 81 lost kids and scouts there, two or three a season. Jina figured if there was anywhere in Sector 81 that an armored Dragon could be crushed to a paste, the Pillar Farm was the place.

She was mistaken.

Her cable-tripwire was flawless, placed at the bottom of a looming snarl of snapped-off columns. It looked stable, but when the tripwire went ten tons of debris would roll down in a gathering avalanche. Hrond was following the heat-prints her bare feet left on the gritty pavement – and when he blundered into the cable, invisible at ambient temperature, the grinding roar of tumbling concrete sent Jina into a brief euphoria.

That changed when the first column rose from the pile, supported by a gleaming black jade arm. Hrond gave the shattered concrete pillar a contemptuous power-assisted shove and stood, the servos in his legs yowling as a load of debris spilled from the powersuit’s shoulder plates. “Nice try,” grated the speaker, and the beam cannon came up as Jina turned and ran. A blue-white flash of light accompanied a hisssCRACK as concrete exploded in white sparking tracers of burning lime – and Jina was off, sprinting for cover. Hrond thumbed the beam output toggle to “constant” and twisted the collimator-choke down to a pinhole as he tracked the fleeing ratganger by her heat signature. With a cold smile, the Cathak leveled the beamrifle and watched as the targeting AI settled the crosshairs on the girl’s back. Inhale… exhale… aim… squeeze— the beamrifle spat a searing thread of energy that should have sliced the girl into smoking slabs. But when the Cathak’s flash-compensating filter cleared his visor, all he saw was a red-hot worm-track scribbled across a teetering concrete wall, his missed target written large. No corpse, no girl. With an amplified growl, he kicked his way out of the tangled pillars and stomped up to where the girl had been. A pit yawned at his feet. “Suit, enhance to normal light,” ordered the Water-dragon, and the power armor’s spirit obliged by amplifying the dim and grey ambient to a level like that of a bright day. Colors were washed out into pale suggestions, and the image was grainy and restless – but clearly the girl had stepped on a weak spot and fallen through.

Hrond scowled at the thought of his hunt being cut short. “Suit! Audio enhance,” he commanded, and leaned down at the edge of the gap. As he listened, he gave the hole a brief visual inspection. A maintenance hatch, perhaps; the tags of rusted hinges jutted from the edge. One was beaded with fresh blood. Interesting. A tentative scuffle came through Hrond’s helmet speakers, analyzed and noise-filtered, and unmistakably a footfall. With a tiger’s grin the Cathak stepped back, adjusting the beam rifle’s output to “burst” and the collimator to “wide-angle:” then he lowered the business end of his weapon into the gap, leaned away, and pulled the trigger. WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM! The Essence-driven weapon loosed five blasts, each with the force of a grenade in the enclosed space, before a telltale winked in Hrond’s visor. The weapon was spent.

Jina hardly had time to recognize her good fortune as the rusted hatch gave way beneath her feet. She fell, fetching up against a jagged spur of metal with a stifled cry as the air burned above her. Despite the pain, instinct bent Jina’s knees to accept the shock of landing, and when her feet hit concrete after a surprisingly long fall, she rolled with it and ended up sprawled at the base of a wall. Her head rang with the impact, and the darkness was near-absolute. She wasted a few precious seconds trying to decide if she was dead, alive, injured, stunned – the dim grey square of light above her was suddenly occluded, and ratgang instinct threw her into silent, scuttling motion. Her hands were thrust out, one high and one low, to detect or deflect obstacles. She struck something cold, smooth and unyielding: a metal door set into the wall. Her fingers brushed a box bulging from the doorframe: at her touch it lit dimly with golden numerals. Some mad impulse seized her then, and as Hrond lowered his weapon into the darkness, barrel glowing with its priming charge, Jina tapped 5 random numbers into the pad. No one was more surprised than she when the door slid silently open. Not one to question great fortune, she dived though just as the chamber behind her exploded with Essence-fire.

OMGZORZ DOES SHE EXALT?

Yes, she does. When I have that bit o' fluff written it will probably go up here as well.

In the meantime, I offer the following sage advice to all dwellers in the City of Darkness:

Stay alert! Trust no one! And keep your laser daiklave handy!

– Dr. Madu

Fiddling while empires burn.

Apologies for the brief nature of today's commentary: I've been out and about in the real world, trading my goggles for a sledgehammer and giving free rein to my destructive nature in the service of good (or at least not-evil). I just want to say this:

Burning Empires blows my mind.

And frankly, that's impressive, because I have a lot of mind – and it does not, dear reader, blow easily. By all means, go over to their lab and poke around. Thor Olavsrud's series of articles detailing the evolution of Burning Empires from over-dinner hobnobbery to glossy, bricklike printed product is a real insight to those of us who aspire to someday publish similar efforts of our own. Faith Conquers and Sheva's War are on their way to me as I type — and I must say, I look forward to those comics as I have not looked forward to a comic since the halcyon days when I had an Appleseed subscription.

Eagerly awaiting –

Dr. Madu

PS "Karsan League Tequila: This Time, The Worm Eats You."

You're ugly, and your monster dresses you funny.

Not everything that goes on in the lab is a product of in-house gamescience – oh no. There are many fine things brewed up in the myriad bubbling vats of game-dom. And recently among them I've found this – Monsters and Other Childish Things. This is a roleplaying game about children and monsters, and for a change the slimy, barbed, razor-fanged 11-dimensional thing under the bed is not your enemy: it is your best friend.

Monsters and Other Childish Things (Or, if I may be forgiven the abbreviation, M&OCT: at this very moment technicians are testing whether this is better pronounced 'emminocked' or 'emmin-oh-see-tee'. As soon as verifiable results are in I shall report them here.) is based upon the One-Roll Engine (as promulgated by the incomparable Greg Stolze) and was penned (Generated? Synthesized? Cloned? Surely there's a better term out there) by the illimitable Benjamin Baugh. Here the players take the roles of children afflicted with befriended by monsters. Don't go running for the airlock, now – you won't make it past the laser-sharks. Yes, you play a kid. Yes, you're puny and ineffectual. Yes, your monster is a superpower-by-proxy. No, this is not a hard-edged real-world-sim tactical game: if you're looking for that, look elsewhere. This is a game about exploration of the self* in the following context: what you would do, were you a wee child, with the perfect bodyguard-slash-troublemaker-slash-comrade-in-arms ready at your beck and call, to get you into and out of trouble? (Sorry about the hyphens.) Much as Aberrant asked, "What would you do with KEWL, W0RLD-SHAKIN' POWERZ™?" Emminoct asks, "What would you do, if, like, when that jerkface Eric McJerky trips you again on the way to math class , like, you could totally call up a cacodemonical, maddening, eldritch titan-spawn of the Elder Days to kick his ass?"

If the answer is "Do that, and then skip along to class cheerfully whistling 'Tekeli-li, tekeli-li'" then you're on the right road. The trouble arises when Eric McJerky's best buddy, an aeon-striding tentacular cthonic god (and psychic powerhouse!), takes umbrage at poor Eric's mistreatment.

Emminohseetee – I really dig the setting. I enjoyed reading the 'example characters and NPCs' section on its own merits, so much so I was driven to depict a monster named Bugnutz (above, dining upon a perfectly ripe sack of trash). I have a habit playing flawed characters, as anyone who ever faced (or was a friend of) Brendan Jermflux in the Bad Old Days of the Bad oWoD ("Overconfidence" + twin 9mm pistols + a 7-die pool divided into seven one-die triggerpulls – w00t!) knows. And the kids of Emma-knocked are the perfect mix of utterly dependent kid-ness and utterly unstoppable monsterish asskickery to satisfy the both masochist and the sadist within. I am not the Muad'dib of the ORE: at least in its incarnation as Immen-otsi-tí, it's a little more more coarse-grained than I care for. But I don't own (yet) any of the other fascinating ORE games – REIGN, GODLIKE, Wild Talents – so I freely admit to some observer bias. Further testing is clearly necessary!

I will not belabor the mechanics of Monsters &c. here, except to say that I find the idea of emotional damage equaling physical damage in effects to be intriguing, and I wish to subscribe to Benjamin Baugh's newsletter. If something similar shows up in Crows, you are all permitted to point at me and shout THIEF! Hey, it was shiny and I've got more Eyes than Beak. Whaddaya-whaddaya? Don't make me drop The Dozenz on you.

In other news, Deathmagus tops 42K with no end in sight. More on this development later.

In the meantime, science calls –

Dr. Madu

*Scientific tests here at the lab have proven it.