Patch Notes:
Change to hero system:
-They are no longer recruitable at-will and must be created via deeds of note or hired off the marketplace. Governors have been removed. Removed heroes are having costs refunded.
-Special units such as Sohei, Blackguards, Witches, Monks, and Manifesters are now generic soldier units until they are successful enough to convert into a heroic version. This affects their stats since generic will obviously have inferior stats to a hero unit. As a frame of reference, generic T1 (monk, witch, etc.) is player level 3, generic T2 (Sohei, Blackguard, Manifester, etc.) is level 5. Now that you know the generics here is a secret peek into the levels of your hero units of each class for scale:
Essi Virtanlen (Mage) – Level 11
Varpu Marttila (Manifester) – Level 6
Iwanagi (monk) – Level 11
Yuzuki Mihara (Sohei) – Level 7
Layla Sarkis (Witch) – Level 5
Vanessa Priscalli (Blackguard) – Level 7
Since I’ve revealed that much meta information here is the status update on the big hitters who you have observed reasonably well enough to understand their status in the hierarchy of power:
Heseli Toivonen – Level 16
Ankathi Nikolaides – Level 14
Queen of Wolves – Level 24
Orias – CR 22
-Hero class rarity table reworked since it is actually used now that direct purchasing of them can no longer be made.
-Advisors can headhunt for specific types of heroes when needed, though results no longer guaranteed.
-Heroes no longer spawn as agent or commander, just “hero unit” you can make them commander if you want. I’m not redoing all the cards though so the old edition will still specify for no practical reason.
-Certain characters do have higher leadership based stats then others though, so pick the commander wisely.
-Mechanical clarification: They do gain xp for doing things. If they sit in your base all day they don’t level up. This is why Iwanagi has leveled more times then anyone else in the roster. He hasn’t been home since he spawned, just constantly seeking the next quest reward.
-Additional Mechanical Clarification: Tech points are acquired by people returning from adventures (alive) as well as some more global things. But as an example Sam banging his head against the wall for druids is going to take awhile if he never brings any successful ventures home.
-Note: Pure travel time doesn’t really affect rewards of adventures. You can travel across the continent and get 1 xp but if you actually get stuff done in the hex right next to your capital that’ll be worth more.
Changes to military units:
-Hunter ships being removed due to the amount of back end math they cause. All existing hunter ships have had their costs refunded, buy warships to replace them if you want or just go blow it on blackjack and hookers.
-New Hunter ship design added. Less power then warships but faster movespeed.
-Manifesters now have a mana expense cap of 250 and a baseline bonus of +5 army power. Hero units retain the 500 cap and +10 army power
-Sohei now a normal unit archetype. Rolls twice on attack and keeps highest result.
-Blackguards now normal unit archetype. They can reroll on damage taken, making them obnoxiously hard to kill.
-Witches now a normal unit archetype. They have access to the spellbook Tess already got in a previous update.
-Trailer for new nalkas unit that reveals nothing useful because mezzy is a turn or two away from unlocking them but is going to be salty if I don’t say anything while everyone else gets fancy new things.
-Armies have their own commander by default, they just aren’t heroic automatically. RNG might roll to see if someone of interest steps forth to take over it though. RNG is more favorable the less heroes you have in the active roster.
Changes to settlements:
-Hex system dropped as it wasn’t really supposed to be there in the first place and redrawing them to expand them is a pain. Cities are now marked with icons to denote nationality based on whatever the roll20 options provide, not as many colors available as I would like so some just have weird status icons to denote a nationality instead. Lone cities with no known larger conglomeration will just have no icon. Yes I’m aware the non-colored icons are kind of hard to see, but if you care enough to want to see it you can zoom your ass in.
-With the removal of recruitable heroes, all citys now just get a governor’s bonus by default. Also so I stop having to do rolls different based on whether or not they have one.
-New settlement defense increase option in buy sheet.
-New settlement type upgrade option in buy sheet.
-Citadel upgrade now available. Citadels have massive defensive scores while sacrificing none of the civilian resource production.
-New tokens and token system:
Village: Basic place for people to live and be productive. Cheap, easy, simple.
City: Large settlement with at least 100,000 population. 25% Enhanced productivity and population growth
Outpost: Basic military minded outpost. Takes 25% less effect from siege mechanics. Has 25% lower productivity and population growth.
Fortress: A large dedicated military location. Can be used to produce siege equipment. Takes 45% less from siege mechanics. Has 25% lower productivity and population grown.
Citadel: A massive combination of defense and civilian infrastructure. Requires a population of a 500,000. Takes 65% less damage from siege mechanics. Has 35% enhanced productivity and population growth.
Addition of Siege Mechanics:
-Reducing the city strength score of any place can now be done by parking siege weapons in an adjacent hex (now added to buy sheet). These weapons can be destroyed by an attack from an army and destroyed from range by other siege weapons, ships such as Dawnbreakers, or casters capable of artillery scale casting. These weapons have a movespeed of 1 and can only be created at a siege camp, capital, fortress, or citadel. They do benefit from roads, but with a movespeed of 1 a movement penalty of mountains will set them to less then one. Basically don’t even try to go up a mountain or cross rivers with these.
-Added Siege camp option to build in the field. Takes two turns to build the camp, then 1 turn per siege weapon produced. Has no defensive score, is easily destroyed.
-Infiltration actions can now be taken to disable city defenses such as their own siege weapons, assassinating their artillery casters, and other such things. Be careful who you send to do it though, these are some of the harder rolls to perform without a specific talent. Iraeka, Nyssa, KouKou, and Yuzuki have that specific talent. It is still a difficult roll, especially on higher tier settlements.
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So…Katara just happened. The blackguards and witches went through a civil war. This is what happens when you are dependent on extra planar beings for power. There are a hundred desperate fools who came here looking for a kingdom where their people aren’t cursed by sickness. No one particularly interesting though, uneducated adult women whose physical strength is not comparable to the northerners we acquired in our previous raids. I arranged for them to work in taverns as eye candy, or as assistants to people who actually went to school. Someone is bound to like the muscular physique on their women at least.
Queen Eliana will be here in a few weeks, Ansa went south to help the Katara with their problem at the request of Ankathi. She’ll be back in time for the queen’s visit though, the trip only takes a cycle for her thanks to the roads and the fact that she is one of the few people to have her own horse drawn carriage.
Also it turned out the Eilsath were paid to do a side gig by Ankathi down in Katara. Though they did go AWOL, so yeah fuck that group in particular. Though no idea where they’re going next. They tend to be pretty good at disappearing.
I’ll ask Essi about the airship thing when she gets back, she’s good at engineering for what she calls the ‘RFC’ department.
I asked about the manifesters making a boat, it turns out the answer is yes. Hopefully that helps them get back sooner then expected and a boat made of pure mana doesn’t attract sea monsters. I’ll tell them to keep close to the coast, its a magic boat they might as well make it a tiny thing that can keep to the shallows.
Our people in the badlands went north to check out the town as requested. It is a village called Wajaaco. Village being relative, that is a pretty big population but they haven’t committed to urban infrastructure there yet. Actually they’re working on that even now as our people pass through, lot of construction going on. Apparently Wajaaco is home to one of the badland’s demon cult. They’re rather chipper fellows all things considered, and its making the men uncomfortable how many missionaries they’ve met with. It appears the badlands has a large demonology based population though they haven’t taken full root in the culture’s identity because of the mix of oddness that is the way the king has kept power.
We won that bid for the big monster thing. Similar to us it likes to drain mana from its victims but it being a monster that was pretty obvious given that’s how they function as a whole. So its a big flying tentacle monster that can shoot lightning. That’s pretty neat.
Alongside our other monsters we bought from the stock we will have to go pick them up from the southern section of the badlands. We can end our people near Wajaaco if you’d like. Apparently the road will take them the rest of the way.
Also the monster tamer failed to express interest in our offer to come work for us. Apparently he likes being his own boss and traveling the world getting into crazy escapades on his own.
So with the horses we acquired the concept of cavalry we have thus far is put a geared soldier in full armor with big weapons on a horse. Given how rare the horses are, we thought it should be reserved for the best soldiers we have. Its in the buy sheet. Also Aato says he wants a horse too.
We asked around about the giant cannon at the outpost. Apparently its owned by a warlord named Zahur Hamisi. We should probably keep that secret because if the Katara realize who is aiming the cannon they’re bound to try and jump on his cannon. He is the lord of Dhame, which is a bit to the west of that outpost. To be noted, to the west of that outpost are two cities, Dhame and Manche. Actually we need to pick up the monsters from Manche. Both of those cities together are known as the ‘southern wall’ and is the reason the orcs are trying to go around through the forest as these two warlords in particular have massive defenses due to a long history of their cities being so close together but not getting along. Apparently they get along better with the new generations but both houses still field very well defended cities.
So I went to check in on Ansa with her monster corpse collection. She said…
Ohh, getting curious about my endeavors now are you? Mr bigshot university headmaster still wanna be my wittle appwentice? Well as it turns out certain body parts of certain monsters can hold mana and thus enchantment extremely well. I have been figuring out what products can be made from them. Essi and I have been working on better golems in particular, as well as new siege weapons. You can thank our work for the special siege cannon. It’s construction involves particularly dense monster bones to lace the barrels with enchantments. I also have some ideas for new ships but we only have the one sea monster to look at so far.
So she’s getting richer basically.
Also we started building an airship dock as requested.
Okay so as for undead stuff here is the basic premise of how it works. You can create mindless undead that are just reanimated corpses that take advantage of the mana remaining in whatever is left of their bodies. This is why sometimes they have time limits and sometimes they are really fragile and other times they can be complete monstrosities. The amount of decay, but also mana dissipation, both affect these things.
Now sentient undead rely on two things. The first of which is the dead thing’s brain needs to still be intact, and the more it decays the less this will work. The second is a material component that comes from the primordial chaos and can only be acquired by dark spirits, kind of. The Primordial Chaos is the one responsible for death and its where -most- souls theoretically go after dying. Theoretically once you die and go there, your soul is obliterated from existence and shredded by the primordial chaos for food. The longer you are dead, the more you are destroyed. However, servants to descendants of different primordial forces can sometimes take a hard left when they’re supposed to pass on.
The way sentient undead are normally created is the ritual that makes them as such also is their cause of death. Means they are perfectly in pristine condition during the spell and don’t exhibit any strange personality changes from having their sense of self slowly torn apart. You remember how Kurisu said Eliana seemed a little crazy? She might be one of those resurrected awhile after death instead of converted by a direct ritual.
Now this means two things. First of which, we need the dark spirits in order to raise an undead Nina and just hope for the best regarding her state of decay. More importantly, if her soul took that hard left into demon-ville -which is not much of a stretch given she was pregnant with a demon king’s child- she might be accessible via demonology. Not quite as in she turned into a demon, as in her soul’s memory might not have been ripped apart by the primordial chaos and it is instead lurking in the primordial abyss and baptized in fire and darkness.
So if we get the components and a warlock we -might- be able to get back Nina. Though after even just a few days, something about her will have changed permanently. Its just anyone’s guess if it will be the chaos that has torn out chunks of her self, or if the abyss…adds something.
Greetings keeper! It is a glorious day for the Oda people.
Serizawa is on his way back as ordered. Also the road construction has begun and Konya is on his way east with Yuzuki and the team. Yamoaka is out…looking for anything of interest.
As for Melun, the book is probably something of interest to them. If not just because they like collecting knowledge of all history as best they can. Trading is something more difficult to figure out. They are extremely self sufficient because they just don’t need things anymore, they’re all undead. I have to say I think they need a bard or something. Apparently most of the day to day affairs of the city are people sitting around doing nothing since they need nothing and have nothing.
Apparently the flight plans of Queen Eliana is to visit the Nalkas first, then visit us and Katara on her return flight. So we will have some time to prepare for her arrival depending on how long her stay in Jamsa is.
Uhh, so I guess I’m your advisor now. Give me a bit to settle in all this has been…a lot to take in. Ankathi is now waging a war against the spirits that we consorted with so…I have no powers now and the coven is shut down. Which means now I can actually age…great. Fucking great. Anyways, I guess I should introduce myself properly.
I’m Vasia Kallili. One of the three…two…ugh I was a council witch. I have…had…shit this sucks. Whatever, I’m a hundred and eight years old, I’ve been around awhile. I was winter’s apprentice and I thought I was Ankathi’s rival. I guess now it turns out she’s been hiding what she can really do for decades and I’ve just been a yappy chihuahua next to her this whole time.
You know what, enough about me, this is depressing.
In the aftermath of the Sarkisa events, Ankathi is sort of off doing her own thing. Murdering Winter’s loyalists within the Coven, cutting us off from our magic, locking up the coven temple so no one can get in or more importantly- out. In retaliation the spirits are messing with us, and so at least a quarter of the population are pretty sick right now. New plague going around, so wear a mask when you go outside because its pretty infectious and is still spreading. We don’t know how bad it is, so far symptoms seem to be a bit mild for a dark spirit attack buuut I give it about a week or two before people start dying off. They’re pissed, really pissed.
This isn’t helped by the fact that Orias is also not happy with us and most of the blackguards are significantly weakened as well. Basically we have girls with spears, that is our entire army right now. Vanessa is the only one to still retain her full strength, oh and she’s upset with us about Nina.
So in the wake of the war the entire population is a little upset. The plagues and curses coming in are afflicting them directly and they’ve become aware of the full scope of the situation. The people are split between those who want to go back to the dark spirits and those who want to turn to demonology. A few thousand just ditched us entirely to go to Haven, the Badlands, Nalkas, and Oda.
Areti…Rena? Whatever, she left to the north and is heading to the badlands to go find her long-lost sister apparently. So…basically we’re militarily completely crippled. Ankathi is pretty much all we have to defend ourselves with. Nyssa, Ryo, Thyra, and Irini are doing fine. So are the girls in the badlands at the tournament. Magia and KouKou are sick though, really sick. They can’t even come back home in their current state, and as I said I think it is going to get worse.
Bagrak is just fucking gone. It turns out when all the witches and all the black guards and all the eilsath and all the town guards got into a big fight, she managed to escape off into the forest. We’re looking for her but like I said, people are really sick right now. We can’t really do much about it. Amare went to chase her down though, I can’t think of anyone better for that anyways so silver lining.
Speaking of which, Amare is now the second most powerful witch in the kingdom…because it TURNS OUT she found out how to perform witch style magic with the Wild spirits not the dark ones. So she was never really in the same boat as us, just learned some tricks from us. We’re uh…considering asking her to help us convert to her religion. I mean the empress is a druid after all right? Or maybe not…we never really took a stance on that whole thing did we?
As for the new hierarchy, I’m just your advisor since I lost all my powers and Ankathi is the Elder Witch since her spirits are so terrified of her they won’t really go against her even as she picks a fight with the rest of the spirits. Not sure if that title means much anymore since we don’t really have a coven anymore…I think she’s just ‘the witch’ now.
Look this might be a little biased, but we really need the coven back. Our whole identity is built on it, its a national treasure, and we REALLY need magic. I know we’re a pretty tough people but lets be honest, our women are not going to stack up against an orc without our magic. Anyways, Ankathi might be able to enslave more. We might be able to convert to Amare’s method, or maybe start a demon cult. I dunno but seriously we need something to work with here, if nothing else just to get some protection from this stupid plague. I’ve compiled a list of ideas we can pursue towards that end.
Option 1: We stab Ankathi in the back like she did Winter and beg the dark spirits for forgiveness and sacrifice some orphans as a show of good will, then we can all go back to normal.
Option 2: We beg Amare to help us figure out how she hooked up with the wild spirits the way she did. Maybe she can teach a little druidism on the side but judging by how long the Oda have been trying to pin that one down, that one might not be happening anytime soon. Though the archdruid has to owe us a solid for helping with the orcs right?
Option 3: We urge Ankathi to enslave us more dark spirits and we make them our bitches. I’m not even sure if this is feasible, the fact Ankathi did it at all is just…unheard of. I think her personality helped a lot, but not all of us are madwomen like her. I just can’t kill fifty children without batting an eye like she can. For all she’s done for us lately let’s not forget this is still Ankathi, she’s still the meanest and cruelest thing in our entire kingdom. The dark spirits make us sacrifice our own loved ones for power and laugh when we cry over it. Just what the flying fuck did Ankathi do to make them submissive through sheer terror? Lets revisit option 1 for a moment…
Oh god I just remembered all the quips I made at her and it turns out she holds a grudge extremely well. Don’t tell her I suggested anything…in fact I’m going to go send her some flowers. I know she likes roses…I think she likes roses…I hope she likes roses. I have no powers please don’t let her kill me.
Option uh 4: Maybe once the queen of Melun gets here we ask if we can borrow some of her spirits…maybe they’re less likely to curse us. In theory she draws power from a different population of spirits who might be able to write up a new deal that doesn’t include the curse on us. I’m honestly not entirely sure how this would work, but if she is a witch queen there is a chance she might know some way to help us get our powers back.
Option 5: We go try to suck up to Orias and convert to demonology. That’s actually not too far off of witchcraft, maybe we can invent demonic witch magic. That’d be pretty cool.
That’s all I got so far. Though I’m looking into more! Magia reports that her head is spinning from trying to get through the kindergarten version of Nalkas training in her quest to discover manifestation so I think learning their wizardry on a mass scale is out. Maybe we check out the monks and their whole ki thing?
Though the thing with all of these is we need to pick a team and stay in it this time I think. All of this happened because we were working for two different sides, the dark spirits and Orias. Spreading out our divine power sources might be a major way to cause conflict and as we can see it has fucked us big time.
Right right uh, the crossbreeding stuff I’m supposed to look into. I’m going to be honest, I have no children. I was never really into the breeding thing, I know I’m supposed to for the kingdom but I couldn’t stand the idea of it. So I have no idea where to start here. Ankathi says she called Ansa to come visit us and once she gets here we’ll be able to figure some things out. Though I’m kind of wary of meeting Ankathi’s best and only friend, I hear she’s as much of a bitch as-
Alright I made it. I cannot believe you had to call me all the way down here just to explain fucking to you.
Oh shit.
Okay so what you do, is you take the man’s penis, and you put it into your-
We know that part. We needed help with-
Oh you precious thing, I’m just messing with you. Ankathi explained everything to me. Now shut up and listen. If you want to crossbreed your people with demons, angels, dragons, and all that good stuff, there is a deteriorating effect on the dominant traits they possess. The closer a descendant you are to the real deal the better the effect. And yes, dragons a big and dragonborn are made through some VERY questionable relationships. Every half dragon has at least one parent who is absolutely disgusting. It all started when some woman thousands of years ago decided to be adventurous and ever since then people figured out that half dragons were ridiculously powerful. So that means that either Sotirious had a really freaky parent or two half dragon parents. So, precious here wanna take one for the team and see if she can fit it in? Because you’re all women sooo…you’re gonna have to do it the…heh…hard way.
I feel like you’re messing with me again.
Aww, it’s learning. They grow up so fast don’t they?
I am over a hundred years old…
Heh, cute. Sit down pup. You can only begin to comprehend how ancient I am.
You were asleep!
Look you were adorable at first but now the interruptions are getting on my nerves. Sit down and shut up before I tear your tongue out and attach it to your asshole. I know, I know, it sounds like it could be fun to be able to eat your own ass whenever you want at first but it gets old pretty quick even for a degenerate slut like you.
Holy shit there really are two of them…
What did I say about talking?
…
Good girl. Okay so the truth is dragonborn came from a primordial clusterfuck of magic. Dragons are descendants of the primordial forces, and just as Nina got pregnant from becoming a conduit and not taking Orias to the bedroom, an ancient cult of dragon shamans created dragonborn on accident through similar methods. Also yes, just fucking one works too. I tied some barbarian to a post and smeared her with some stuff and had a juvenile dragon have its way. She got pregnant, and boom, dragonborn. This was before the long sleep, so no I don’t have that dragon anymore and they’re a lot less common then they used to be. I think the rise of these new monsters has affected their numbers.
Tieflings and Aasimar also done via fucking, that one is way easier to wrap your head around since demons and angels are roughly human shaped and equipped. However, there is another option worth considering that I suspect might work. Never done this experiment though. If you contract lycanthropy it changes your race. So asking the archdruid’s wolves to start biting girls might do the trick in fixing your population up too.
Part of all these processes I can synthesize provided a proper specimen. By synthesize I mean bleached-her-skin-to-look-more-like-winter over here is gonna suck some dicks and spit into cunts with a bit of a container in between to store samples. Also because once you get started on this I can start taking samples and do some things that don’t actually involve having a primary specimen for sunglasses-at-night over here to blow and help the process along without you needing to find an absolute army of horny critters to plow through. Really that offer is only useful because these are rare pursuits and finding enough to deal with your entire population’s needs might not be the most feasible plan.
Now that we got the ‘how’ out of the way lets move onto why. All the options can have dramatic impacts on your people but you should know that mixing them can produce mules, basically sterile offspring. So you don’t want aasimar and tieflings running around banging each other or you’ll just create dead ends. Dragons are slightly different as they just beat everything. I know some tieflings want to mate with a dragon so their children can end the cycle of corruption…even though its technically just a different cycle of corruption.
If you go looking for demons, your people will gain some mild physical increases. Strength, speed, and so on. Though what happens is their internal mana corrupts to being infernal in nature and they’ll make for really good warlocks but they will never be able to cast arcane magic or weave witchcraft again. Tieflings can only use demonology and hit people with sharp pointy things.
The aasimar route actually gives very little physical help compared to human but gives a lot of free range mana to work with. They’d be able to still practice things like witchcraft, probably even better then before, though physically they’d remain largely human. Actually I think they generally get slightly more frail to be honest.
Dragonborn have access to draconic magic as they then have draconic mana. Again not so great for their arcane prospects buuut dragon magic is pretty sweet so its acceptable. However, most notably, dragonborn have the most pronounced increase in physical attributes by a wild margin. Just look at Areti. One major advantage to converting a whole society into dragonborn is that’s pretty goddamned easy to build an army out of. With the other two you have to invest years of training into understanding magic and casting, which as the coven showcases is hard to do on a massive level. With dragonborn, hand them a spear and watch them go.
If you were to go with the lycanthropy option, physical stats increase just like with dragonborn, mana type stays pure, buuut you’re obligated to start walking around half naked wearing furs and have huge packs running around the woods on full moons. Not that the full moon actually forces a shift, that’s a misconception, but if you can why not run naked through the woods under the moonlight and attack every monster you see for meat right? No gaurantee they all become wolves though, the last lycan society had a huge range of transformations. Pretty sure I’ll-never-regret-face-tattoos over here will turn into a bird. I dunno why, I just bet money on it.
Other options! Fuck a fish. Maybe that’s how you get merfolk, that might be an interesting route to go while you have the option right?
Though in truth given your situation as I-spent-2-hours-to-make-my-hair-look-like-I-got-out-of-bed-like-this pointed out, your options are based on dealing with your own spirits turning on you…well turning on you even worse then before. It’s not really enough to just go find tieflings and start banging them, you need a patron to protect you from the spirits you pissed off. Whether it be a demon king, an archangel, a dragon, the wild itself, you can’t make it on your own. I am not an expert at extra-planar beings and primordial entities so I can’t help you with that. Ankathi might be the closest to an expert actually, given she was able to arrange a demonic temple and figured out how to mess with the spirits.
Anyways I’m here for a little while to look into the matter and conduct some experiments once you have made some choices on what to explore or look for. Though I’m headed back home for Eliana’s visit in a week or two, so come up with something by then and I’ll start workshopping it in my lab up there. Also I’m abducting maybe…ten of your people for experiments back at my own lab alright? Alright. Anyways peace, I’ma go find Ankathi and hit a bar.