I've used falling rocks with ribbon chutes that split on entry and allow odd, seemingly malnourished kobolds to get out so far, as these are expendable scouts for the Enemy. Thing is, now I gotta come up with some UFO designs that fit the brass-wood-and-fabric 1910s look... something War of the Worlds - ish perhaps? The idea is that they should clearly be the product of an alien mind, but not necessarily that much more advanced than what the PCs have access to.

>>18560389
How about something like Leonardo da vinci's tank or submarine design mixed with a core that harnesses energy from the plane of air to provide lift and thrust?

>>18560470

Leonardo's tank is perfect -- even looks a bit like a traditional flying saucer. What should it be made of?

Using magical propulsion sounds good: this is a E6 game so I don't want to throw around magic that is too fancy... hmm, use rods of levitate for lift and alchemy for thrust?

The problem is that the PCs are skilled scavengers and I don't want to make reverse engineering too easy :)

Hollow rocks (I figure the landings would look like the protoforms in the Transformers movie) from actual renaissance art here.

>>18560498
Easy, the devices are extremely fragile and coded to psionic control.

Certain special pilots are trained to use it so they need to capture one or more alive and get the information out of them to attempt to use them. Then because it isn't attuned to them their first attempt at using it should carry a chance that it breaks the enchantments ( ie a safety / kill switch in case it does get scavenged ) Which they need to learn to work around.

It should allow them to feel like they are making progress while it gives you time to bring them up to the right power level

As for materials. You could use local wood or giant mushrooms as wood. These could also be some sort of magic macguffin that allows the engines to work by amplifying / easing the use of magic around them. They should be bound with metals but not iron or steel since they are traditionally said to be magic inhibiting

Tarred wood can look quite imposing and even otherworldly if done right

>>18560532
I'm not using psionics (Well, I am, but there's maybe 20 psions in the whole continent total) although that could definitely be an edge for the Enemy commander to be a psionic mastermind...

An immovable rod variant mayb*CLANG!

WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?

>>18560614
Ah ok, how about the control units being bound to someone via a spell or ring etc. something small and harder to notice for what it is especially if there are other magic sources like the engines nearby

Also how common are engineers and researchers? Because trying to figure out the controls may be either a trial and error thing or hire an expert to work on it to give your team an edge on figuring out the workings.

Maybe a gnomish airship designer who has always had big dream of making the next generation of airships or a crazy elf who was kicked out of the college for his ideas on fusing magic with existing designes to improve speed / durability of the airships. Both might have good ideas and bad and it is up to the party to decide what they want to try and see how it works out

The magic option should be unreliable and expensive but if it works is a great bonus as opposed to the more reliable and tested options of the technology

>>18560614
Immovable rod anti air mines.

Drop them behind you with a short timer to make enemies run into the, and tear their ship apart

>>18560654

Hmm, thing is, the setting is a little quirky on that matter. Non-magical airships were invented, but due to a war that claimed all prototypes (arc 2 of this campaign) only lifting-gas balloon technology was salvaged: there is no propulsion. Right now interceptors are gliders towed up by balloons or launched by a trebuchet, and airships are either towed by flying animals or rely on oars for close maneuverng and going up/down to catch good winds for traveling.


>>18560729

Haha, nice! A bit expensive... I'm pretty confident my players have looked up the Bat Bomb on Wikipedia already :)

>>18560769
The Leonardo's helicopter design could be adapted to providing thrust and/or steering to a greater degree by using it as propulsion instead of lift. If they figure it out that is.

Also sails and gust spells could be used, for a massive price they could acquire gale rings that let them get boosts of speed for a short time.

Basically if you look for simpler designs to flight and make them scale in effectiveness as your group figures out how they work and refine them it shouldn't be too bad, part of the draw of X-Com I always felt was that you have people fighting these monsters, but they are also researching at a breakneck pace trying to find new weapons and tactics to level the playing field

Maybe they even rescue an engineer during a raid or something similar so that they can start fiddling about and trying to make their vehicles and equipment better

>>18560858
Right now I'm designing the UFOs, I would not take the pleasure of designing their own craft from the players :)

The idea is, it's OK to use magic, but the flying thing should (1) use as little magic as possible simply for cost reasons since the alien faction doesn't have unlimited resources (2) be able to at least glide to a survivable stop if magic is denied or disjoined or turned off.

I'm trying to "play it fair" with respect to the alien faction and may actually let a fourth player play the aliens and just "run the world" so to speak.

So far the major factions are:

the Floral Brigade: X-com. Player faction.
the Enemy Unsure: Aliens. Possibly player faction if this turns into a VS campaign.
the Dios family: New rulers of Izwald, the only extant city in Ethengar.
the Grand Trunk: Darokin-based semaphore company. Shady dealers (you've read Going Postal, right?). Would be interested in right of way.
the Murkit clan: After the defeat of Moglai, they have returned to their original roaming grounds. They are attempting to reforge an alliance, and want to raze Izwald as they see it as a beacon of corruption and foreign influence.
the other Ethengaran clans.

The PCs already figured out that running the Floral Brigade a little like a protection racket may be a good idea... :)

The Floral Brigade has been nominally started by the Izwaldian government as a propaganda effort and as a way to get an inconvenient bastard child out of the way of the line of succession by having them start an air force, but other than the initial grant has no funding and must provide for itself. So far they've taken over a farm.

>>18560979
Yeah it was a great book.
Your players seem smart enough just giving them some basic ideas and outlines should be enough to get the ball rolling, that's why I suggested the engineer NPC's to help development since it means you can throw in a hint or two about the things they might be able to do and then let them run wild on it

>>18561020

I did and they came up with some really good stuff as far as gliders and airships go (See the archived thread for pictures)! Thing is, I am having to design some UFO types now.

>>18560979
Use the DaVinci tank as a battleship for the enemy unsure faction then.
It is rare but devastating and can launch interceptors, bombers and a large ground assault team when it is fielded.

They should have no more than half a dozen of them in total and they are generally belonging to generals

So, how are the aliums' weapons like? An important part of the existence of the original X-Com was irresponsible sale of ultra-high-tech weaponry to the highest bidder, afterall.

>>18561082
Sounds good (and yeah, as a design it looks neat).

What could I use for interceptors? The alien vehicles have the advantage of starting high, of course - the problem is recovery. I could also do the whole levitation-plus-reverse-gliding thing, but, I want it to be hard for players to get up to the "mothership", and them being able to just capture one or two UFOs makes it a bit trivial...

>>18561130
Interceptors could be light airships that need something like the destroyers to bring them back to the mother ship.
Scouts etc would be housed on the destroyers while the travel around doing whatever evil plans they have planned

>>18561106
So far the loot has been:

Xeclo (from xenocloth), a fabric which seems to be watertight and very good to make glider wings with. It is, however, about as fragile as silk and cannot be mended (Some sort of organic plastic sheet basically).

Sprayers: A bellows-powered super soaker like thing with two tanks: It mixes hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide to generate heat, and emits the steam of the resulting liquid. Basically an artificial version of a bombardier beetle's ass.

Lancets: Very large, very regular obsidian edges with copper cast around them. Makes for an excellent dissection or cattle mutilation tool but doesn't have a good grip to be used as a weapon.

Obligatory alien autopsy of critter in pic: http://emlia.org/ROTUL/autopsy%20-%20sektobold.txt

(The idea here is "alien", not necessarly "advanced").

>>18561164

Good point, and puts a time (height) limit for dogfights too which is a bonus. Thanks! I guess I only need two or three UFO designs then...

>>18561164

Actually having the alien gliders look more or less like the Floral Brigade gliders can add to everyone else's confusion as to WHO is mutilating cattle anyway...

>>18561274

Do you know if the Big City cant move your troops glitch has been fixed yet into UFO:AI?

Another problem I have is fluff generation.

Ordinarily i write fluff in the form of letters or other publications NPCs would write, but in this case, the alien faction only has one character with a functioning mind and soul. If any intel is recovered, how do I write something like that? Pro memoria? Diary? Megalomaniacal ramblings?

>>18561300
Yes, it has in the nightly builds.

>>18561305
Make it scraps left over from before the characters became soulless drones

Either that or accounts from outsiders, farmers who saw the things occur etc

>>18561336

Good point on accounts from outsiders... half of which will be false, because just because UFO loonies are part of the mileu even if you have real UFOs I figure.

Thanks!

Can I get in on this? :)

I guess the last point to cover is UFO cultists - they'd pop up eventually. (I'm trying to take the best bits of the x-com games, and also cover all the ufo lore bases)

>>18561379

Sure, email me? This is a sort of sequel to Rise of the Uncertainty Lich in that it's the same setting three years later.

>>18561305
Maybe captured aliens can be tapped into, allowing the listening of telepathic residue or other mumbo-jumbo handwavium that's left in the feeble minds of the aliums?

Make the dialogues disjointed in their internal sequence for extra creepiness.

>>18561406

Works really well if I want the players to suspect that the BBAG is a psion as it's consistent with the behavior of mind controlled people (think ramblings from Battlestar Galactica cylon hybrids).

Arc 1's BBEG, who was not a psion, figured out a way to make brains commune anyway. What he did with it was kidnap a bunch of old people and Beowulf-cluster them as a way to ritual cast faster, mostly to predict the future and simulate spells with good accuracy for research purposes (but a different faction beat him to the Locate City Nuke... I'm tracking about 200 entities in this game)

So let's see....

Alien gliders = same workings as Floral Brigade gliders, but a little better.

Alien "destroyer" = Glider retrieval, possibly research or infiltration missions; flies by wings but goes back up by magic.

Alien "battleship" = Classic flying saucer design, runs by magic, can launch gliders while moving, used for terror missions and base assault missions.

Alien "rock" = Cannot be intercepted, one use only, used for terror missions exclusively.