Proposal: Life, for Life
Reached quorum 5 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.
Adminned at 15 Jan 2020 09:02:58 UTC
Create a new rule called “The Warp”:
A Researcher in the Warp can Begin Diving by gaining 1 Spatial Damage, and are now considered to be Diving until they perform a Dynastic Action. If a Researcher has been Diving during the last 48 hours they can Retrieve a Fetal Artefact. The status of being Diving or not is tracked in the Damage column as “?” for being Diving, and its absence for not being Diving.
When a Researcher retrieves a Fetal Artefact, they add to the Ruleset’s list of Artefacts (subrules of the rule “Artefacts”) a new Artefact as per the following:
Name: X
Description: A mysterious, stillborn item from The Warp.
Protocol: None
Location: Z
Effect: YX is a string formed as “A B”, where B is a random word from this this: “Potion, Elixir, Ether, Pill, Panacea, Injection, Cream, Suppository” and A is a random word from: “Magical, Glowing, Incandescent, Frigid, Sparkling, Dark, Shining, Putrid, Transparent, Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, Shimmering”
Y is a string formed as “This Item is Alive and begins with 10 Spatial Damage. The holder of this item may focus to C and grant this item 1 Spatial Damage. If this item has 13 or more Spatial Damage, it is removed from the Ruleset. This is a Fetal Artefact.”, where C is a random string from the following list:
- Remove 3 Damage Tokens of their choice from themselves
- Remove 3 Damage Tokens of their choice from an Individual that shares a Location with them, other than themselves.
- Set the Location of a random Artefact you own to The Warp.
- Remove all Spatial Damage Tokens from an Individual at their Location.
- Remove all Soul Damage Tokens from an Individual at their Location.
- Remove all Flesh Damage Tokens from an Individual at their Location.
- Remove 4 Reality Damage Tokens from an Individual at their Location.
- Grant 3 Spatial Damage Tokens to an Alive Artefact at their Location.Z is “The Individual named D”, where D is the name of the Individual that Retrieved this Artefact
I enjoy dark, eldritch themes, seems fitting for SCP too. I like to imagine the Warp as being the “womb” of various Alive Artefacts that are then given birth into the real world.
Also inspired by the Dynastic idea where items have random, unknown effects until used. I think the “test to know its use” thing doesn’t work in a game that is played “live” like this one, but you’re gambling your Spatial health anyways to retrieve them. And it’s very hard to get into the Warp too, and it costs you a bit to leave.
Using Damage as a way to track the limited amount of uses Fetal Artefacts have.
, anyway - the ruletext here seems a bit baroque (I guess you’ve made these Artefacts Alive but Damaged because non-Alive ones can’t track Damage tokens at all?) just to introduce a lot of generic-sounding medical objects.
sure why not
Kevan: he/him
Testing at the point of use would be fine in a Nomic: it’d be like this but with the effect roll being made the first time you try to use the object, and with the object having its targets defined so that you’d have to say “I’m using this on myself” or “I’m using this on Josh” before rolling.
If you’re carrying a Blue Potion which you know heals 1 Damage and a Red Potion which could have any effect, there can be a tough call to be made about which one to drink. Or whether to throw the Red one at an opponent in case it’s bad.
(The Awful Green Things From Outer Space board game has some fun stuff there, where weapons are melee or ranged and/or area effect, but you don’t know what effect they have on the invading aliens until you try it out. The fire extinguisher isn’t so good if it makes them bigger.)