Kobold King

On 7/27/2023 at 10:53 AM, Slowswift said:

Agreed, but...

why are the tags green

The ghost of the old green upvote buttons, still haunting their final resting place.

Eldest of five, with about a decade and a half's distance between me and the youngest. I'm almost in the "honorary uncle" zone.

6 minutes ago, Chaos said:

Delightful, welcome back!

And oo, Kobold King, maybe we can make it more obvious. It is also in the menu of extra options to the right of the search box. It can be difficult because I want several things in the top bar and I'm not totally sold on this. The overflow menu is where things die.

It's actually pretty dumbfoundingly obvious now that it's pointed out to me. I think my eyes just slid right past it because my brain is still stuck in 2014.

3 minutes ago, Kaymyth said:

 

@Kobold King We have had a Discord for several years now. There's literally a sideboard of it on the main forum page.

Hello Delightful! It's been a while!

I'm still around. I don't post very often, but I still check a couple of times a day just to see if anyone's paged me or shot me a message. Usually no one has. But every now and then, I go through that double take of realizing today is the day...

Also. We have a Discord? Have we always had a Discord? Is a Discord always a form of communication that the Shard has embraced and reveled in? I'm on Discord just about every day.

1 hour ago, Slowswift said:

Noooooo

I caved and bought every episode individually on Amazon, but it looks like they've got a season pass up on Prime Video now. (Still don't understand why they didn't offer a season pass from the beginning. Jerks. ) 

Recent photograph of the Hasbro digital marketing team:

Hey, welcome back!

I'm still more-or-less around. Not too active, as Voidus says, but even at my least active I check back here at least once a day. The forum's changed a lot and I am not even remotely plugged into whatever current events or trends are going around, but I'm far too much of a nuisance for time alone to get rid of.

To be fair you must be of at least primary intelligence to understand Superiority political doctrine. The stratagem is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of peaceful statecraft most of the citizenship requirements will exceed a typical species' grasp. There is also our diplomatic outlook, which is deftly woven into our interstellar policy--our philosophy draws heavily from past experiences with the human scourge, for instance. The varvax and the dione are races that understand this; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate being part of a greater whole, to realize that it isn't just mutually beneficial: it says something deep about SAPIENCE. As a consequence races that oppose the Superiority truly ARE inferior--of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the importance of using Superiority-designed hyperdrives instead of relying on unstable cytonics, which only have a negative effect on civilizations everywhere. I am clicking my mandibles in dismay right now merely imagining those poor lesser species being erased off the surface of their planets as the delvers' unspeakable horror strains itself through their planet. How avoidable... how I pity them.   And yes, by the way, I DO have a licensed human. And no, you cannot see it. It is for integration with our special defense force only--and even the other applicants must prove they are within 5 intelligence points of our own civilization (preferably lower) beforeclaw.

2 hours ago, winter devotion said:

How do you think most of ya’lls characters would fade in an Endbringer attack, assuming they were inclined to help? (Still haven’t finished Worm yet, just listening to this reading of it. It’s really good.)

 

Depending on the buildup, Kokichi would get completely wrecked or one shot it. Red could help keep track of people and the Endbringer with her heartbeat power, but her blood wouldn’t be useful at all. 

Haven't read Worm, but if some sort of giant apocalyptic monster attacked most of my Epics would probably just book it out of town. (I'm picturing something like Godzilla or the thing from Cloverfield.) They have very little to gain from fighting a massive doomsday beast and quite a lot to lose.

Lightwards is an exception because he has a lot less to lose than others. He'd probably throw everything he had at a giant monster in an insane hope that he could kill and reanimate it. He'd probably lose, but a ton of innocent people would be murdered and used as cannon fodder before he finally gave up or was killed so many times he went insane.

Assuming they were somehow inclined to help...

Arsenal would be the most useful because he could both stock the military and provide evacuation vehicles for civilians.

Glamour, Deathwish, and Redlight would be pretty much useless, assuming Deathwish's damage reflection and Redlight's momentum-freezing can't do anything to the monster.

Darkrose can dish out a pretty hefty amount of damage, but anything much more durable than steel isn't going to give way to her vines. She might be able to keep something restrained for a while, maybe long enough for evacuation efforts to get underway. Her chances of contributing something worthwhile are raised exponentially if Alastair is there and providing direction.

Aldo and Cricket are pretty useless but will be enjoying the show from a distance.

Backtrack could be used by someone much smarter than him to figure out the origin of the monsters, and is thus potentially the most valuable of all.

(I'm probably forgetting someone because it's been a while.)

3 hours ago, breakingamber said:

Bit of a dumb question:

Has anyone seen a Reckoners RP character or someone seemingly based off one in another work, or used one as inspiration for a character in their work? Is this question comprehensible?

I was considering using 'Orbit and the Belt' because it's a really nice turn of phrase, for example.

I've exported a lot of my Oregon characters into an original setting, tweaking their backstories to fit with the new scenery and also to give them more agency over their lives than "Calmity made me crazy."

The main ones are Mobius, Revolution, Backtrack, and Darkrose.

I've had a lot of sore throats but I think this one might be the sorest I've ever had. I can barely even talk.

16 minutes ago, The Young Pyromancer said:

Different settings have different levels of different types of power.  SCP foundation is more sci-fi than fantasy, and so has more creeping threats than immediate ones.  But still, if the foundation figures out Kokichi’s power, they can probably send them to one of the many alt dimensions they have access to and trigger an isekai plotline.

Given one of the rules of the SCP canon is "There is no canon," even different articles on the site can have radically different power levels. It's why it annoys me when people post "Who Would Win" threads with the Foundation. Without a canon specified, no "Who Would Win" question has an answer.

17 hours ago, winter devotion said:

Her weakness isn’t actually being told she’s a disappointment as much as it is her believing it, so that might only work for a little bit. But otherwise, that’d probably be fine.

Re: Kokichi, I think they’d be able to figure out their weakness, so I don’t think they’d need that. I’m not sure when I said the thing about their warping and sleep, but upon thinking about it, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work like that, since it is a passive ability. Maybe I’m just trying to justify them staying awake? 

 

Edit: A brief description of their containment has turned into The Time Kokichi Went Even More Buckwild Than They Usually Are. Should not have considered the fact they’d be able to kill 682 super easily. Turns out, dark cosmic horror has NOTHING on the power of God (Hatsune Miku) and Anime. I don’t control the overly excitable child with way too op powers please nerf, the overly excitable child controls me. 

Am I biased towards their nonsense? Of course. Conveniently, I’m the author of this little crossover so I can do what I want. It’s approximately three quarters done, and I won’t be writing up the actual big dramatic confrontation because that is too epic to be properly conveyed by text. 

Anyway, I love these things. 

That was awesome.

Also, for your consideration.

16 hours ago, breakingamber said:

ANOTHER EDIT: Do you think all Reckoners teams would have harmsways and/or some other healing device? I'm inclined to say no.

Decent healing powers fit to make motivators out of are apparently pretty rare, since Knighthawk in Book 3 puts a lot of emphasis on how badly he wants a sample of Prof's DNA so he can possibly heal his wife. While there are probably a decent number of Reckoners cells with some sort of Epic technology, chances are that they don't have access to healing. If they do, it's undoubtedly a far inferior version to what Prof can gift that won't be healing any mortal wounds.

2 minutes ago, Kaymyth said:

We still exist!

I, alas, have not yet seen any of season 9. I have to wait until it hits Netflix.

Me too. Looking forward to it, though. Vague spoiler threads on various websites tend to have some pretty hyped up titles I don't understand.

2 minutes ago, Voidus said:

In 10 days time it will have been 2 years since the last post in Portland.

It's sad that it died down, but I also think it's really nice that so many of us are still around and that we all remember the collab so vividly, with several of us exporting our favorites OCs to newer pastures.

I can't say that about every creative writing project I've ever been a part of.

Just now, breakingamber said:

Bit of a topic change, I know, but have you decided on whether or not you'll be RPing a character and/or who? 

The plans at the time kind of petered out and I don't think it's going to happen.

Me trying to follow a conversation about a superhero web serial I've never read:

Absolutely heartbroken that Ned and Betty didn't remain a couple at the end, but I'm glad they were both mature enough to remain friends even after the breakup.

The whole Mysterio subplot by comparison felt like a hamfisted method to make sure Peter (is that his name?) doesn't become Ned's awkward third wheel, which would have gotten annoying fast. It was okay, though. Didn't really have the same emotional impact as the ups and downs of Ned/Betty's relationship, but subplots rarely do. One could interpret Mysterio's bitter angsting over Stark to be a dark parallel for how Ned and Betty could have allowed their breakup to turn into something dark that ruins their friendship, thus making the subplot more of a cautionary tale on letting a bad breakup sour your worldview, but I feel like this message would have been stronger if Ned and Betty had been able to confront him face to face and give a heartfelt speech on why he's wrong.

Really hoping the third Ned movie gives Flash some more time in the spotlight, as he's easily one of the deepest and most underrated characters in the franchise. His inner struggles with his pleas for attention and his lack of self confidence about his videos make for some of the most compelling cinema I've seen in years.

#flashmob

3 minutes ago, winter devotion said:

Wow, cool. Broken Masks, as it’s now called, is a setting where 25 years before 2026, a couple thousand people across the world developed superpowers for Plot Reasons. It’s less about the initial event as much as the now-young-adults with powers (and the ones without) who don’t quite understand how the world was before and don’t accept the fragile compromise of hero teams (whose position is a mix of cop, celebrity, soldiers, and athlete), random supervillain attacks that leave massive devastation but are caused by a mixture of socioeconomic factors, and an underworld run by a handful of rich mob bosses, some of whom have powers and some who don’t. Some of my favorite characters so far include: magic anime knife lesbian in a suit who ran away from her criminal family to fight people straight up instead of manipulating them, angsty dragon girl who breaks out of her conditioning to join three superpowered weebs dressed as magical girls, the three superpowered weebs dressed as magical girls, Red, Martin Luther King & Malcolm X Dynamic But They’re Depressed Twenty Year Old Bisexuals With Magic Powers And A Shared Youtuber GF Who’s An Anime Fox Girl, and an absolute gremlin who will eat ANYTHING, unless it’s accepted as food by polite society.

I'm trying to pick a character summary that's eye-catching enough for me to highlight and ask about, but honestly they all sound like awesome characters.

1 hour ago, winter devotion said:

Thank you! 

Sure! I’d love to hear more about it, actually.

I'm still changing a lot around, but this is an original project I've been brainstorming off and on for a while now. The core concept is a world where the Monster of the Week trope is almost literal--there are constant crises ranging from deranged supervillains to alien invasions to resurrected tengu emperors trying to take over the world. Keeping the peace is a group called the Knights Nine, a team of superheroes whose members range from good-intentioned moral pragmatists to monsters who would do more damage than the supervillains if the weren't being kept in check. Among their ranks is a body-possessing plant monster from space that goes by the name Verdant, who tends to leave a suspicious number of missing person cases behind it in any crisis it is sent to resolve. There's also a 'hero' named Pulsar, a genius (but insane) billionaire whom I could most efficiently describe as a triple fusion between Tony Stark, Lex Luthor, and Cave Johnson. He runs quite a few facilities that exist primarily to experiment on captured supervillains and other anomalies.

The world isn't entirely grimdark--there are a few heroes here and there who've remained uncorrupted by the constant stress of battling summoned demons and anthropomorphic hyena armies. Revolution Sunburst Jones is a character here, and her pacifist beliefs have thus far remained uncompromised. A necromancer who goes by the title Death's Voice has begun a fledgling career in superheroics, and as his powers grow he is becoming more and more effective at it.

Samara Treitner, aka "Dark Rose," used to fall into this category. Unfortunately, due to the way her powers operate in this setting, her mind has always been far more susceptible to stress and insanity than other heroes. She went off the grid for years, but when she came back into the public eye it was as a remorseless, indiscriminate killer with only one surviving conviction: to expose the misdeeds of the twisted 'heroes' she'd once been forced to suffer out of reluctant pragmatism, and see them brought low. The world might stand a far lesser chance of surviving without them, but to the creature who's now murdering her way through cities to get to them, that's a sacrifice worth making.

I'd also be very curious to hear about your setting, if you want to talk about it!

5 hours ago, winter devotion said:

@Kobold King I was gonna reuse some of the bits of the Darkrose design I did for an original project. Obviously I’d change the powers and personality as well as tweak the design a bit, but is even that okay? 

That's absolutely fine by me--so much of that art was your original initiative that I don't think I get a say in where you apply it anyway. I am pleased I was able to evoke some inspiration in you, though, and I'm sure your original project is going to be brilliant.

On a similar note, I'm importing a version of Darkrose into my original setting, and I think 'No More Liars' would make a great chapter title, if that's alright with you.

Often syrup, but they're also great plain.

2 minutes ago, winter devotion said:

Imagine G rated Oregon. Nighthound, but kid friendly. 

You mean... not appearing?

4 minutes ago, winter devotion said:

I’ve unintentionally caused people to make new rules before, so it wouldn’t be the first time. 

*innocent eyelash batting*

Rated R!Oregon would be completely the same, except Red is as Red as physically possible, Remington can say the non offensive f word, and Quota says slurs. 

I'm picturing it PG-13, with only one allotted f-word. To everyone's shock Nathan uses it when he drops something, immediately becoming stammering and apologetic.