We’ve got a lot of documents today. Some are kind of optional. Though with the momentum broken it takes me a bit to spin back up so this will be a quirky couple of weeks.
Article on shields and ships. Debating if more of these are needed for other concepts. Tess probably zoned out anyways but mezzy and I were writing weird articles. Well lemme know if you have anything you want covered, don’t say psionics.
Zenaka battle report – results didn’t change but here is the full explanation of why VSEC is struggling to deal with the Vloz. Debating if I should do battle reports more often like this for big fights.
Vasia’s Odyssey for documentation even though you already read it.
And now for patch notes!
-New sheets, note the dropdown menus to select various options.
–Of particular importance are the location ones so I can just scan those to figure out who is where. Due to the way the sheets work it creates a dropdown with more options than you might really need. The top few are the major locations as what system they’re in is important. It also keeps scrolling to encompass all the colonies you have if you care to be specific, but I really just need to know who is in the system most of the time.
–Development plans change the resource income/expenses to change the xp rate. It goes in 50% increments from neutral being 100%. So “full development” is “i reinvest everything right back into this to get it more xp”.
–Colony builder, for consistency.
-Bunch of unnecessary characters added to round out some of the undefined things that were just lurking around even if the players should know about them. Particularly Kharla’s 7 binds and more members of the Phantoms as a sampler.
-Balance might be all over the place right now. Oh well I’m sure you’ll find a way to deal with it.
-Vasia updated
-Reika updated
I’ve been working on this update too much to write more SoL’s for all the major events so the advisors will summarize everything.
I am filling in since there is a vacancy. I hope to not be here long given this position’s record thus far. So to summarize the state of affairs, The Heretic threw The Raven out of the warrens through that universal boundary our probes never returned from. The Outsider is lightly damaged though shouldn’t be too hard to repair.
Faelyn is on her way to Auwana with her own fleet, from the intel that Aryn gathered while connected to the systems of Moncayo we also gather more fleets are on the way. Somnus’ radars detect a lot of stuff coming from a lot of directions. If they were all after us I’d be willing to say we should evacuate immediately, though we have reasons to believe they’re not and we’re just the battleground for multiple interests.
Obviously one of the fleets must be Faelyn’s as we learned from your expedition to Moncayo. We can also confirm that another of the fleets is a small detachment from the Celestial Order, apparently they’re coming with Reika. We’re not sure who the others belong to. It would seem that the sudden move by the phantoms to eliminate us comes with several other forces moving that are either after them or after the Rift itself that we’re sitting on top of. One of those fleets has to be Sharen just by the rather unique signature our radar gives us. The Nomad Flotilla is also on its way back, since the retreat plan is to go through the rift anyways. With this we can assume The Nomad starship itself is also on its way.
Also your trip to Moncayo resulted in the death’s of Nevada and Satsujin. Somewhat inconvenient that all of our soldiers with guns went to fight the person who is really good against soldiers with guns, and your two heavy melee specialists went to fight the place that is weak to guns but effective against melee. Dr. Taz and I have been trying to figure out what has been giving us the sniffles. After some research we’ve discovered the figure you encountered at Moncayo is Ei Khal, one of the phantom’s three big mummies. That is why you are now quarantined, as am I, Dr. Taz, Aryn, and Allison…on Ash. Mummy rot resurfacing is considered a ‘we don’t have a color code for this’ emergency. So we had to voluntarily let Vasia put us in containment units as she might be the only one who can contain it. So I’ll be your neighbor for a little while.
Mummy Rot is a special kind of plague that is no small part of why the era of rising was probably a good idea. It has three layers of infection, a curse, a parasite, and it modifies the DNA of its host. All three infections recreate one another, if you can cure one it’ll be back within an hour or less from one of the other two and immune to however you cured it last time. Normally, we’d have just fixed it up and called it a day using tried and true techniques. Turns out the phantom mummies have had time to cultivate it and with one of their newfound members being the matriarch of Jaal’darya it’s been purposefully put through all the usual manners you might use to cure any one element of it to give it even more immunities. Basically we have no idea how to fix this without killing the mummy that created it, at least not at the moment. As I said, we’re working on it. However, it’s so contagious that it can infect anything with mana production. That means all plants, animals, and ship reactors are vulnerable. We threw your ride into the void because of that last one. Khymin, Kanemur, and Renjala are trying to cut out the bays you’ve been in since arriving and throw them into the lower planes to prevent it from spreading to the rest of the station, just in case.
To be clear, there are jaal’darya plagues, silnian assimilations, Nevun’s infection, and all manner of terrible biological weapons in the galaxy. This is the worst one. Though I imagine if we dropped this stuff on a jesai world the war between them and Nelta might suddenly shift directions.
In other news, Zenaka is on fire. More than usual but not as much as we expected. Approximately one territory is a pandem clusterfuck of anomalous phenomena but Kharla wasn’t there long and already left again. One of the assault carriers was destroyed and another crippled though her flagship still got onto the ground and after that we couldn’t stop her.
We have a week before the arrival of Faelyn’s fleet. Those who are infected will be left for dead if the system is evacuated. So that includes you, me, and Dr. Taz in particular. Allison and Aryn might be fine but until we know for sure they’ll be kept under observation.
I have the feeling we’re about to have a rough couple of months. Good news is, Haziel is already nearby and hasn’t left for Eden yet so hopefully she can help us out. We’re inconveniently very close to this so we’re stuck dealing with it.
The Celestial Order, where all the paladins come from, is currently having some issues ever since they discovered Sarnai’s existence. Since she is now the only person with ties to an actual deity, but that deity has not really bothered to visit the celestial realms in any way. I expect this to be great for us and not so much for them. Though expect more politics. Speaking of which, they want to meet Sarnai and Reika has deferred that one to you. One of the paladins and their retinue is coming to Auwana to see about this phantoms business on behalf of Reika. Apparently she did actually have a friend at one point in her life, which is bizarre. Though the rest are leaving them to it since Reika officially resigned her position with the Celestial Order now that Barachiel’s death has allowed her to do so. Though I’ve yet to find anyone who feels that makes her no longer one of the last paladins since she’s even more of a divine warrior that she was before. I dunno, you sort that mess out whenever we have time. Just giving you a heads up.
In other news, Ki’Ralcht is also on her way to Auwana. Which we’re pretty sure is not good. She’s been comfy sitting around on Zenaka even if unresponsive but now that the phantoms are closing in on us she’s suddenly mobile with all of her forces. Including the zenakans she recruited. Which is bad but at least not as bad as your original predictions for the number of members in the order that were compromised.
So basically we just need to figure out who is going to make one last stand at Auwana to see if we need to retreat from the system or not.
Well Vasia is back and she has a big ship. I am somewhat concerned about Craylin salivating whenever she’s near it. By the way, this is Craylin. The result of those experiments of putting essentia into the ichor. She is the ichor’s attempt at creating a specialized essentia harvester, she also has a bunch of drones with her suited to similar purposes. Craylin did try to munch on the Heretic at one point and then never tried again. Apparently it tastes “too spicy”. As if there was some sort of horrifying demonic hellfire spitting dragon living in the soul of the ship, guarded by the unfathomable horrors of Vasia’s mind.
She went to get Balhast out of the labs and then took half the labs aboard her new ship. So now Vasia and her lab is mobile. Which is uh…terrifying.
Meanwhile…so an army is coming and they’re probably after Cassir since you put all the blame on her for doing the one thing the phantoms had made it pretty clear we weren’t supposed to do. I’m noticing that since Arkaric disappeared they’ve been much crankier. Without the calculator to just reconfigure plans on the fly they’re a bit more adamant that things need to go according to plan A. Which might have been Arkaric’s plan A for all we know. We do know he has never had particular faith that the phantoms would last for particularly long, but who knows what he’s up to now.
So Aryn being potentially infected by the mummy rot curse has left her quarantined. I’m informed this is one of the highest priorities to quarantine because something about the virulence of the rot in combination with Aryn’s artifact is considered to be a potential catastrophe. So the problem here is our ship is not particularly built to function without her. We even gutted several components of the ship that would be needed by a regular crew under the understanding that Aryn could do without them. We can get it to move forward and other basic functions but we should definitely be careful about getting it into any trouble. Even if trouble is coming for us.