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New enemies and ideas for future threats

Soban

Soban

Convention Veteran
So I think we are heading towards a consensus that we need more enemies that are real threats. We need more Level 3 (factional) and Level 4 (setting) threats. I think there are three aspects to this discussion. First, bringing factions like the NMX and Kuvexians who already exist but are currently not really a threat back up to where they are real threats. Second, creating new enemies who provide interesting options and storylines. Third, 'disaster' events, I'm quite enjoying reading how we are all responding to the Norian's arrival. Not everything our characters need to respond to is some big bad. Perhaps we need more 'space hurricanes' that give us similar opportunities.

Right now, I'm working on two ideas.

The first is a ravenous horde of alien locust called the Swarmtide.

The second is a robotic utopian republic who all believe that biological life is obsolete and needs to be discontinued, with violence if necessary. They aren't trying to kill people, just upload them involenarily into robotic bodies that they believe are 'better'.

What are your ideas? What sorts of enemies would you like to fight? What sort of situations do you think would provide interesting role play opportunities across whole factions and the setting as a whole? The idea of this thread is to gather a lot of ideas and hopefully to help build some of them as well.
 
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I'm working on some ideas too.

One is actually something that @HarperMadi and @ajax228 have been approving of when I've mentioned it. Is that, what if there were actually inhabitants of the Aether universe that Aether generators pull their power from. What if they're distraught about their universe being used for fuel and the overuse of Aether has weakened the barriers between the universes enough that portals can start to be made between them.

The other is the Mudulcis, which is actually already an approved settings element. It's an organism that uses paralysis and aggressive gene therapy to convert other organisms to be copies of themselves, which makes their spread exponential, especially if you don't keep tabs on your planet's fauna.

Finally, I have been thinking for a while (partially inspired by the fact there has been a 'space dragon hunters' Task Force in Yamatai service that has been floating around doing nothing for years but having that as their official mandate) of making some space dragons or other leviathans that are starting to migrate into the Kikyo Sector from the frontier, where they might be very common.
 
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Ethereal said:
One is actually something that @HarperMadi and @ajax228 have been approving of when I've mentioned it. Is that, what if there were actually inhabitants of the Aether universe that Aether generators pull their power from. What if they're distraught about their universe being used for fuel and the overuse of Aether has weakened the barriers between the universes enough that portals can start to be made between them.
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This is literally the story of the Dark One and the reason for the Second Mishhuvurthyar War
 
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An idea I am working with is that eventually, the Asune Dimensional Hordes that the Norians had unleashed in their dimensional tap of the Asune Dimension (Similar to Aether) will attempt to finish what they set out to do, possibly attacking Yamatai or other factions if agreed upon. The hordes of entities that attacked the Norians in the RPs done in the Avaen Universe had a wide variety of ugly hunger-driven creatures that emerged to try and devour everything in sight. These entities ranged from parasites that infiltrated entire factions enslaving the governments and people, to massive planet-devouring monstrosities that shared some qualities with the Norian Leviathans. The Iron Company under @Commissar Farzi and a few other players have had a great time fighting these varied monsters. The stuff going on with the Norians arriving in the SARPiverse is literally that plot arc's result.

I left a little segway for that in my last post, essentially making it a possibility that something foul had escaped.
Progress had begun to be made. The MERN soldiers on board kept things moving to assist their allies while others remained on station, especially at the lower levels where containment housings were. It was a shame that no one had noticed that days before as the Leviathan began its earliest signs of death, that necrotic ablation had already shed away enough of some of the containment barriers which had allowed what was inside to slither off into the depths of space. It was all a sin that would someday come to haunt them, but it was not the day for it. The process of elimination had begun in the other containment holdings though, as the last of the dimensional monstrosities that were kept there were being exterminated.
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These dimensional entities are built around this unfathomable void they have to consume, indulge, assimilate and destroy. That which they consume is processed and siphoned back through the rift to their home dimension. In their eyes, they are reclaiming what is theirs. Essentially what appears to be hungry, creature-like bads are actually a highly sophisticated hierarchy of sentient evil-doers.


 
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There's also Places We Do Not Go, as the Senti call them. Places where an emotional cancer has built a stronghold, corrupting the nomadic Senti technology into a nanite swarm, an ancient Skydasi weapon that consumes and builds machines of war from the remains of anything they can catch. It's intelligent, cruel, and has no problem mimicking distress signals to consume rescuers and would be heroes.
 
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Andrew said:
An idea I am working with is that eventually, the Asune Dimensional Hordes that the Norians had unleashed in their dimensional tap of the Asune Dimension (Similar to Aether) will attempt to finish what they set out to do, possibly attacking Yamatai or other factions if agreed upon. The hordes of entities that attacked the Norians in the RPs done in the Avaen Universe had a wide variety of ugly hunger-driven creatures that emerged to try and devour everything in sight. These entities ranged from parasites that infiltrated entire factions enslaving the governments and people, to massive planet-devouring monstrosities that shared some qualities with the Norian Leviathans. The Iron Company under @Commissar Farzi and a few other players have had a great time fighting these varied monsters. The stuff going on with the Norians arriving in the SARPiverse is literally that plot arc's result.

I left a little segway for that in my last post, essentially making it a possibility that something foul had escaped.

These dimensional entities are built around this unfathomable void they have to consume, indulge, assimilate and destroy. That which they consume is processed and siphoned back through the rift to their home dimension. In their eyes, they are reclaiming what is theirs. Essentially what appears to be hungry, creature-like bads are actually a highly sophisticated hierarchy of sentient evil-doers.
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And things are rightfully loathed and should purged at every opportunity.
 
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So the TLDR general idea is basically necromancer mechs that run on corrupted burial steal as their core. They act like an intelligent virus, working out of cells that dig in out of sight, then grow by doing hit and runs to collect bodies, material, and salvage they can turn to the use of the nest. They are cunning, cold, and brutal to a T, and are not above doing overt moves to cause lots of damage for potentially large gain. They are spread around across space, and not centralized to any one area, ensuring they cannot be wiped out in a one and done operation. Farzi and madi are already well versed in these guys, and some may have seen the doc I dropped in worldbuilding that had more details, but that's the gist.
 
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Andrew said:
An idea I am working with is that eventually, the Asune Dimensional Hordes that the Norians had unleashed in their dimensional tap of the Asune Dimension (Similar to Aether) will attempt to finish what they set out to do, possibly attacking Yamatai or other factions if agreed upon. The hordes of entities that attacked the Norians in the RPs done in the Avaen Universe had a wide variety of ugly hunger-driven creatures that emerged to try and devour everything in sight. These entities ranged from parasites that infiltrated entire factions enslaving the governments and people, to massive planet-devouring monstrosities that shared some qualities with the Norian Leviathans. The Iron Company under @Commissar Farzi and a few other players have had a great time fighting these varied monsters. The stuff going on with the Norians arriving in the SARPiverse is literally that plot arc's result.

I left a little segway for that in my last post, essentially making it a possibility that something foul had escaped.

These dimensional entities are built around this unfathomable void they have to consume, indulge, assimilate and destroy. That which they consume is processed and siphoned back through the rift to their home dimension. In their eyes, they are reclaiming what is theirs. Essentially what appears to be hungry, creature-like bads are actually a highly sophisticated hierarchy of sentient evil-doers.


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Ohh all the things that came crawling out as a result? Delicious. Thee whole void wars plot is quite possibly my favorite to have participated in so far.
 
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I don't think I could put into words how much I love necromancer mechs. I've written this post three times and it's just not coming across... I'm a necron warhammer player if that explains it.

edit: I don't think I could kill them though... My first tournament game was against deathmarks so I'm just not destined to kill necrons.
 
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Jack Pine said:
So the TLDR general idea is basically necromancer mechs that run on corrupted burial steal as their core. They act like an intelligent virus, working out of cells that dig in out of sight, then grow by doing hit and runs to collect bodies, material, and salvage they can turn to the use of the nest. They are cunning, cold, and brutal to a T, and are not above doing overt moves to cause lots of damage for potentially large gain. They are spread around across space, and not centralized to any one area, ensuring they cannot be wiped out in a one and done operation.
Click to expand...
Yet another plague of monsters to be burned out....

Soban said:
The second is a robotic utopian republic who all believe that biological life is obsolete and needs to be discontinued, with violence if necessary. They aren't trying to kill people, just upload them involenarily into robotic bodies that they believe are 'better'.
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This makes me think of Total Annihilation's intro monologue; "What began as a conflict over the transfer of Consciousness from flesh to machine escalated into a war which has decimated a million worlds. The Core and the Arm have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy in their struggle for domination. Both sides now crippled beyond repair, the remnants of their armies continue to battle across ravaged planets, their hatred fueled by over four thousand years of total war. This is a fight to the death. For each side the only acceptable outcome is the complete elimination of the other...."

I don't know what your plans are, but at the same time I just can't help but hear that in the back of my mind when reading about this.
 
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Please, I'd like to see some answers put into this thread with some thought put into them. I've enabled voting on the answers people give to encourage that.

I think we should steer clear of the "enemies from the aether" idea as this has already been kind of done by the Umbral in the Mishhuvurthyar Wars. And aether has been a reliable tech for Yamatai for many years and is a core part of the setting that I don't really want to mess with. Moreover, the concept is very similar to the monsters coming out of the Asune (basically the Norian equivalent of Aether) in the Norian RP. Based on close similarities, Andrew got pretty upset by the suggestion. Basically: It's been done and I'm asking as Yamatai's FM not to break our aether.

That said, let me try to answer the question. I've thought about this a lot and here are some of my thoughts about the enemies I'd like to see:
  1. Their faction should be composed of characters who have faces, personalities, and goals that oppose ours.
  2. Player characters should be empowered with the ability to fight them (I don't want something they can't fight).
  3. They should have a strong, coherent theme, including a visual look to them.
  4. They should be built to last and become a long-term parts of the setting. You can't just aether them and call it a day.
  5. Some sort of victory should be possible. Let's not make enemies that will just destroy the setting.
Speaking as a FM/GM, I'm less interested in monsters and more interested in interesting peer factions composed of interesting, intelligent characters. That's why the SMX was followed with the NMX, and why I made the Kuvexians. I don't get a lot out of running from some eldritch horror, I want something composed of enemy units that my characters are capable of fighting with.
 
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The legion in fact do have personalities as they are essentially hostile merged collectives of souls in the seni's living steel. They're less eldritch horror and more vengeful science project gone wrong really. It also offeres something that provides a threat at Mecha level player combat as well since that has had a rise in popularity.

Though I hope human faces is not expectation here as that's a bit odd for every encounter. Just having an enemy who can be understood and interacted with on some level is more important in my opinion.
 
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So I think we are looking for long term persistent threats. Things that are kinda always going to be there and provide roleplay over the long term. England/France type thing where they never really beat each other, but they were always fighting and winning/losing. I think we want both forces of nature, and peer rivals. Several of the ideas we have here have a lot of synergy. Of the two, I think we are looking more for peers who have characters so we can put a face on our enemies.
 
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