Registration - Arachnia

Registration

(1) What name will your deity go by during this round?

Arachnia

(2) Please give at least three examples of terrain you'd enjoy having in your area. Caves, woods, plains

(3) If you could would you please give us some ideas about the sort of people you want in your area?

Native American- one of the "we will fight well if we have to, but would prefer trading goods and skills" tribes

(4) Would you like to give us any information about your god and his/her/it's initial plans for this game?

No real solid plan, just seeing how it goes.

(5)Please design a combination of colors, smells, sounds, or shapes that represent your deities power.
Black, red, sweet like berries, low flute music

(6) Do you need to perform you birth action before the game starts? If so what do you have in mind? If not skip this question.
I want the "people were changed a hundred years or so before I woke up" option. but here ya go:

I DO NOT want to turn spiders into humanoids!!! I DO want to change my humans!!! I want them to still be human-ish in all social, emotional, mental ways!! But physically... I want each "hip" to have 3 arms instead of legs (so 8 arms total as the upper 2 remain) I want them to have tougher hands, but still fair dexterity, at the ends of the arms, and they can walk smoothly over almost any terrain, when all 6 lower arms are available, can still walk if only 2-3 available, but not as graceful if less than 4 are used for walking.

Upper arms sleekly muscled and hands are soft as normal human hands, also decent dex and strength. Torso appears normal and functions normally. Ears are slightly elongated and are a bit more keen than human. Second pair of eyes look to the sides in front of the ears, but along the same line as the normal eyes. They see as well as the normal eyes, but enhance the vision field- **300°. There is a 60° "blind spot" directly behind them. (I can email a pic of this idea) All eyes have minor heat vision. Nose is normal, maybe slightly narrower. Mouth appears lipless and small when relaxed, but opens extra wide and boasts 2 rows of teeth (front for biting and tearing, rear for chewing) and a long, strong tongue. They have NO HAIR. Their skin is dark grey with red markings.

Alright, I think I understand what your going for, completely human folks, but with some advantages and connection to your deity. You don't want to repeat the cheetah-cat's social problems from last game. We can handle that. Six legged humans with big sturdy hands for feet is simple enough, 300 degree vision and thermal vision . . . again we can do that easily.

The big question I have is what advantage or advantages your looking for here in relationship with these people. Simply doing some minor genetic engineering seems very small for a birth action. What do you plan to get out of it for your goddess?

I just refreshed myself on the birth action post in the handbook, I want the alteration to be a timeslip effect.

My goddess is still fairly peaceful, but more than willing to have a warrior class within her society.

I want 20% of my pop to be geared for magical affinity. Later on I will have 10% of mytotal be clerical and 10% more wizard-like.... Or maybe I'll leave them all cleric, not totally decide yet. But I want that 20% to have some awareness of magic and perhaps a natural gift toward healing and growing things, from the start.

I'm still hashing everything out in my head.

ok, let me know when you have the details.

my biggest hold ups right now are, I JUST came up with this in any fashion a night or two back and haven't given it much thought. And I don't know how big I can go, or how small is too small. :-/

Admin wrote:

ok, let me know when you have the details.

cheetacat wrote:

~Can I change my terrain as part of my timeslip? I'd love a super old forest with huge trees and roots that help form an underground tunnel system

~Magics and abilities
~I would like to have all of my people have one or two simple magic abilities... (dedicated clerics gain much more after I set up a real system)
~Can I give my people an inate magical ability to suggest how things grow/ grown things to move, eg, influencing a tree to spiral or have a couple extra-low limbs? This will aid them in constructing their homes without doing significant damage to the trees' root systems. (btw, that's why I want old growth, so the can live amongst the roots mostly.)
~I want my people to be able to walk silently as long as their 6 walking hands are available.

Clarifying

I'm going to take a second to make sure we're on the same page regarding what you already want then answer the questions you sent me on mystical abilities.

As I'm understanding this you want to reach back into the past several hundred, perhaps a thousand, years ago and begin influencing the growth of the forests so as to provide extremely large old growth trees with roots that from large tunnel like structures below the ground and perhaps arching up over the forest floor like the roots of mangrove trees. Basically giving birth to a wide variety of new plant species all at once which will create your forest, and you don't need a lot of control over the specifics so long as you get the sort of forest you want in the end.

Second, at the same time you want the human inhabitants of this area also to start mutating. You don't want to change their social structure, mentality, or emotions, but you do want to provide them with extra limbs so they walk on six gigantic heavily built arms rather than two legs. You also want to remove their hair, darken their skin to grey, and give them red markings like a spider.

In addition your adding another pair of eyes giving them excellent vision range and depth perception, these eyes have the ability to see heat (infrared vision) adding that to their primate color and depth sense. Added to their new "legs" this would make them fairly fast, excellent climbers, and great jumpers. It also allows them to "stand" on four or even three legs and use the extra hands to manipulate tools and such with. Perhaps the terrain of your forest is rocky or mountainous, or perhaps they might migrate into the trees and live an arboreal lifestyle.

You also want to enlarge their mouths and add an extra set of teeth. The front ones sharp for biting and tearing meat, the back ones flat and large for chewing meat, fruit, vegetables, or whatever. This would allow them to rip through tough meat or vegetable matter, allowing them easier access to certain foods like hard tubers, or the marrow within the bones of animals. The drawback would be that they would want to be careful and rinse to keep food from getting stuck between the two sets of teeth, I might suggest a longer and stronger tongue specifically for mouth cleaning duties.


Magical Abilities

The sort of abilities your asking for are reasonable and well within your power to set up in this birth action. If I'm understanding it right all you want is an ability to influence how plants grow, and perhaps allowing your people to tell if a plant is healthy or not. I think you also want the ability to reshape a grown trees branches, roots, etc . . . perhaps bending a branch, or having it grow a new one lower down on it's trunk.

The big question I have is how your going to pay for this in the past. You'd need either a battery of some sort connected to the people (possible) or to make it a Psionic ability set instead of a magical one. If you want I can go into more detail on what each option would do to your people.

We also can set some of your combat values from the birth action into power level dedicated to magic spell systems and thus make them natural spell casters if you so desire. Obviously though the more you ask for up front the more the powers assisting you will want to take and this last bit is a very potent ability. What the end deal winds up being would, of course, depend on how your paying for their innate magics.

Yes, that's pretty much exactly what I want!! :-) and arboreal/ root dwelling or some combination there of is perfect.

I'll have to look up the psionics/ talk to you about the stuff in your last 2 paragraphs later today, but so far, it's great!!!

*LETS MAKE A DEAL*

so, in reading up on psionics I see that "noob" bargined for a 50% increase on his creatures giving him income, I am interested in such a deal, but honestly don't know where to begin, what would be given to pay for it, etc.


Also, I'm thinking psionics would probably work well for the plant effecting I want them all to have. If I go that route, can I start with 2 slots and moderately specific powers? Such as a power to tell if a tree/ plant is healthy, sick or dying, and a power to shape trees including roots for dwellings/ paths. I'd prefer they be activated around age 10, so silly kids don't fuck stuff up, but teens can learn to respect the ability before making their own homes. And require focused thought to use, they won't go all crazy unless the person goes crazy, and even then it'd be a stretch because they'd have to be able to have focusd thoughts- often not found in crazy people, lol!!

The way deals work is that there are vastly powerful and highly experienced forces out there who are in a fairly even conflict. When a god is born the birth action lets them manipulate a new power in ways that benefit them. So long as they think they can get an advantage out of the bargain they channel their power into your birth action and reshape your nature in ways that benefit them. In this case you'd most likely be dealing with a force that is very interested in psionics. We have such a force in play, working from the shadows, and it's probably not going to reveal itself to your infant god, but it would sneakily help you alter your nature. That is the story/game world explanation.

Your probably more interested in what we can offer you. The details on Noob's deal were that he was totally attuned to his specific three races, and they had to be psychic in nature. In return he got 50% more energy from those races and lost 50% of the energy he normally would have gotten from having human worshipers or worshipers of any other race that might be made by players (including himself). It really locked him into both being psychic and avoiding having human or other types of worshipers later in the game. The change was also everything he was getting so you probably wouldn't get more than 25% bonus/loss ratio. It's not a deal I recommend for you since I know you tend to be a more peaceful player.

Here are a few options that would help you out specifically with psionic power costs. Raising your income from the race itself would probably require a deal closer to what Noob took as it is such a huge advantage. But I'm willing to bargain here.

OPTION ONE:

You get 50% of the cost for psionic powers cut off, so an ability that would have cost you 50% of your accumulated energy income would only cost you 25%. In return I would charge you double on reserve costs for magic systems and standing magical effects. In short you'd be specialized for Psionics and would have to pay more for doing other kinds of things such as holding a temple flying in the sky, holding souls in the afterlife, or maintaining a spell system. In short you'd become a psionic based deity.

So if a magic system would normally cost you 8 points it would instead cost you 16 points.
Alternately lets say you normally get 100 points from your worshipers. Psionics costs 50% leaving you with 50 points, but due to this deal you only lose 25% and bring in 75 points that turn.

OPTION TWO:

You get 50% off from the cost of psionic powers for your worshipers, but in return all the souls you normally would collect for your afterlife are instead taken by the entity in question to be used for it's own purposes elsewhere in the universe. We can bargain on this if you want, letting you keep say 50% of the souls taken and only get a 25% cut on your deities costs from psionic abilities. Again it would semi specialize you for the psionics.

Hmm, I see. Honestly neither of those really appeal to me, because I fully intend to have a magic-based cleric class in the future, and would thus be setting myself up for higher costs unless I figured out a way to convert it all to psionics... Which still seems mote expensive.

Thank you for the added information though!!! I think I'll still with them having just the 2 slots and powers for now, as mentioned above. I tried to cross-compare the various tables to guess at what it will cost me and got all confused, if you could give me an idea of what it will cost as I described that would help me know if it needs adjusting.... Btw, I didn't mention the power points because I wasn't sure how the cost on those firgures...

Thanks for the feedback. After reading it I added a set of examples under power level for the post "The Cost Of Psionics" let me know if that helps any. I don't aim to have everyone confused. Once it's better I'll also alter our own copy of that chart in the staff area so staff and players are sure to stay more firmly on the same page.

For you however your costs look like they will add up as follows:

2 Slots cost a total 10%

The two powers are primarily useful for judging the quality of building material and shaping them over time, often lots of time as I don't think you wanted to accelerate the plant growth just know that it was happening and track it's progress, plus know the plant was healthy. This is a minor example of an ability set in the 5-8 power range, and I'd call it just a five.

I'll add more later as I am being rushed out the door and have a long trip ahead of me.

Ok, back from Detroit and I've finished revamping the cost of psionics chart to try to make it both simpler and more clear. Given that I can now help you price your proposed action a lot more easily, and hopefully both you and other players can have a better idea of their own potential costs simply by looking at the charts.

Two slots cost a total of 10%, these slots could potentially hold any sort of power at all, and maybe you'll add more potential powers to your people (we need a name for them) later.

As I understand it the powers you want are primarily used for judging the health of plant-life and knowing if they are getting the nutrition, sunlight, and water they need. Also for directing their growth slowly at their normal speed of development so that eventually they will be shaped into useful forms, such as a tree house or supports for an underground tunnel. With that understanding I'd say that you have two distinct powers here and they are in the use range between 6-10. I'd place it around 7 because it takes so long for a plant to grow and it's likely that the community would have to work together monitoring the plants health and maintaining the growth until the tree or other plant reached the desired state of maturity, which could be years. At power 7 with two abilities you'd lose 16% of your potential income each turn.

Added together the slots and the powers would mean you lost 26% of your potential income each turn to these folks powering their own psionic abilities rather than channeling that power to you.

If you added another power to accelerate plant growth this set might become a much more useful ability set. Yet you'd need to either add a third slot or at least two people having between them all three abilities for it to be fully utilized. Plant growth acceleration would now be in the 11-15 use range, and you'd have 3 abilities. I'd place the package at power level 12 because you could use the accelleration alone to quickly grow a garden crop in fertile soil even during a short growing season, or even to grow multiple crops in more productive areas. If that was the case 3 abilites at power level 11 on the chart would change your costs there to -28%, for a total loss of 38% of your potential income each turn being lost to the people powering their own psionic powers. Still not bad at all.

At the moment I'm not adding in any power level because you can get that for free as part of your birth action, and as a birth action granted power level it wouldn't count on the chart at all, so your psionics could be extremely powerful and cost you nothing if you got the power level right now.

I like your suggested third power, I'd like to add that in as described, have the same # of slots and random which 2 they each get. This will lean some towards farming specialty, some toward construction and building maintainance, and some can choose either or both.

Ok, so power level is free to add in right now, I don't want other things messing with these powers, so... What is a significantly high amount?

Deleted my previous post as I think in retrospect it got too technical and rather boring, confusing, and completely the opposite of FUN.

While what is significant changes over time I'd suggest putting 500 points into power level for your race's starting psionic package. Even if there is a mystical/psionic arms race in power level later on that is a very nice platform on which you can build. Most people won't have the ability to match it any time soon unless they too get their powers out of the birth action. Five hundred points of power cost a LOT, especially in relation to early game income values.

I'd put another 1200 points into security levels versus transformation or genetic engineering vs your new trees and people. That gives each of these major pieces of your birth action 600 points of security. After all this is your birth action and you don't want to have someone else easily alter your creations, or transform them back into normal humans, grass, or worse.

The remaining 200 points I'd place into stealth values focused entirely on an enemy god targeting your people or trees. The focus means that the other gods can see your stuff, but if they want to target it they have to pay more, plus certain types of spells will have a very hard time effecting your people or effects at all. The focus also means that in addition to the stealth effect itself being semi-hidden, it's also doubled due to the birth action rules on specialized combat values. Your 200 free points are counting as 400, so you'd have 200 points on the plants and 200 on the people.

I hope those suggestions make sense. I've spent so much time developing the game sometimes I assume everyone else also is intimately familiar with the new parts of the rulebook.

I like the way you just described that above, let's go with that!! I'm sorry I haven't gotten to reread the psionics cost page, I haven't had a chance yet.

Just as a side note what are you intending to call these spider people, or should I name them? Simply saying "Arachnias spider looking dudes" all the time is going to get tedious. lol

I've been thinking about that. Everything I think of would give an innaccurate assumption to others though: arachnids, driders, and spidermen are all less than accurate.

Perhaps some version of "eight arms".

Orempyk found via google translator. I forget which language though, it was near the end of the list.

Orempyk it is, I like that it doesn't come with any outside connotations that might imply something about the culture or cultures this race develops. Especially ones that would force others to assume you were making a Drow based sneaky/violent race the way the term Drider would.

Working on the culture for these people, particularly groups that live outside the spread of your forest and I think I've found either a problem or a miscomunication. I had/have understood that the two outer eyes provide depth and heat vision, while also extending their range of sight. In practice this means that during hot days in certain terrains those eyes are going to be blinded due to the heat being "too bright" and that they work better at night.

That's not a huge problem since I can have them close the heat vision eyes during the day, and hunt with the infrared/depth vision at night, but the spacing without the normal eyes provides a gap in their view to the front, poor binocular vision also suggest poor depth perception though which ISN'T what you stated wanting, and of course they'd lose their color vision at night. Even during the day I'm suddenly picturing weird things as their peripheral vision would have a totally different set of color and depth markers from their front "color" vision.

I'd like to suggest that we make these guys fully nocturnal/forest dwelling and give them enlarged eyes for seeing color at night, with lots of receptors, plus all the eyes are either able to process all of the spectrum, or we might give them two sets of four eyes (one for day/one for night OR one for color and one set for heat/depth and the other for color/texture). I particularly like the idea of eight little, very specialized, eyes, as it seems particularly arachnid based to me but it's your call. I simply don't want to saddle you with people who would have some weird vision problems without getting your input first.

Hmm, I *was* thinking that all 4 eyes could have both normal vision, and dim/ infared vision, (this idea was from the drow- their clerics and wizards use candles regularly in spell casting and while it stings, they can see in low to moderate light.... But) I kinda like the 4 smaller pairs of eyes, same vision range (300°, blind spot directly behind) and one set for use in "normal" daylight and the other heat and distance seeing- like the better infared goggles. That way they can function pretty well
in any light amount.

That works out well. It will allow them to operate perfectly in dimly lit forests, and they can operate alright in bright light or in complete darkness (unless there is no heat or too much heat for some reason), plus the four evenly spaced pairs of eyes should give them GREAT depth perception and the wide range of vision you wanted. It will be like having several pairs of binocular vision looking at different angles and slightly different heights and all processing together to form a single image. Very detailed and with a lot of control depending on what eyes they open or close different amounts of data will be gathered.

Did you see my email with the rough drawing? I hope it helps. With the 2 sets of eye I was thinking 2 rows of 4.

I saw it, think we are on the same page here. Love this idea and it will make things so much easier for me to figure out when it comes to dealing with your people. Should be fairly cool looking too. lol

Yeay!!! I want to draw my people, but I won't have the chance for quite some time. *sigh*