Crew:

Ivanova: As you might have assumed, Ivanova used to be part of a special hit squad for internal empire security and gestapo like shit. She has killed men, women, and children on virtually every major Imperial world and was one of the best at it. She was granted indefinite leave and put into the Armada after her psych tests showed that she was close to completely breaking down, having just completed a mission to kill an infant to put political pressure on its father. She has absurd levels of guilt built up from that period of her life, and mainly just deals with it -- and any other extreme emotions -- by mental repression, enhanced by the fact she has hardware to help enable shutting off emotions when she chooses.

On a more personal note, at the point in time the quest stopped, Ivanova is solidly in love. She has some serious issues expressing that, however, due to two extremely badly failed past marriages, her past in intel, and all of the nasty cyberware in her head. The cyberware can be taken care of various ways, the easiest being to get the keys from Centauri and either wipe her enforced loyalties or re-key her to you, depending on what route you want to take there. The PTSD/Guilt from her intel time will likely be a much longer project.

Emotionally, the hurdles are her ingrained respect for chain-of-command, which can be taken care of through time and conversation fairly simply, and her prior marriages. Her first marriage ended when she came home from military graduation a bit late after going out with her platoon mates and her then husband began demanding to know where she was. He then proceeded to beat the shit out of her when she told him. Due to the amount invested in her cybernetics, the Military covered everything up and got her a divorce in absentia, since she whited out during the altercation and put him in a coma. She still feels somewhat guilty to this day.

>>27452639
Is this some sort of W40k thing?

The second ended after an extremely long deployment on an infiltration mission. Her second husband had wanted children, but due to both her job and the fact cloning was the only option for that (her insides were at a premium, considering all the cyberware she has, ovaries were replaced with things to make her a better infiltrator) there had been a lot of strain between them. Then she was deployed for what ended up being a year-long mission on the other side of the galaxy, which also had to be completely dark with regards to communication home. When she finally returned, all the found was an empty house with divorce papers on the floor.

Rinn: Rinn hates aliens. He hates them a lot. He lost his parents, wife, son, and two best friends during various wars with alien species. For all his joviality and comradeship, on the inside he is still a walking, talking hate elemental directed at aliens. The way the quest was going, however, this was good. You were killing the fuck out of aliens, and Rinn approved. As of the Maestro arc, Rinn would take a bullet for you without a second thought, and he sees you as an exemplar of everything right with the Empire. In fact, he had started looking after you from the background as a kind of second son -- and that would have become more apparent as time went on. As an example, his training of the scientists into military personnel. They are completely loyal now, in large part thanks to Rinn. If he had thought you some xeno loving sell-out then, well, letting him train those guys could have been a one-way ticket to mutiny. His vast knowledge of weaponry and tactics would come in handy during any fight, and he would gladly educate you on everything he knows.

Tynes: Everything Tynes told you about his history is true, to the letter. His artificial spine, his other cybernetics, all paid for by the military. Paid for in exchange for his service. But service in which branch?

Not the Armada. Intelligence. Tynes is the Intel sleeper agent assigned to monitor your performance on your initial run. He likes you and, honestly, considers you a friend now. As much as your commanding officer could be a friend, that is. And he has mostly disregarded his Intel protocol too -- after all, he doesn’t see any sense in following orders from men and women thousands of years dead. The only catch is, how will he react when the highest ranking Intelligence operative left alive, Centauri, is in front of him again? At the point the quest stopped, he liked you a lot. You’ve done nothing but adhere to Empire policy and, even more than that, acted as a bastion of the Empire when to all knowledge it has been dead and gone for thousands of years. He respects you greatly and, if needed, would put his reputation -- and life -- on the line to vouch for you to other intel spooks like Centauri.

Burr: Burr is burnt out. He used to be a galaxy-renowned trauma surgeon on Earth, but the whims of fate took his close family and friends one by one. Nothing terribly dramatic like any of the others, just mundane things like shuttle collisions, falling down the stairs, and other terribly normal ways to go. One of the hazards of living for hundreds of years: death by old age becomes a much smaller mortality percentage.

And so Burr signed onto the Armada. He wanted comrades, and adventure! Something to restart his life. And he found them, he found it all. But as time went on and his horizons expanded due to his tenures on the outer reaches of the Ophidian Empire, he began to encounter aliens more and more. And more and more, he found them to be like humans. And he became friends. And that was the beginning of the end.

Burr could never reconcile the propaganda with the reality he had experienced. He never again could see the enemy as faceless foes. Every corpse he saw, be it human or alien, he started to see as a waste. A terrible, terrible waste. And so, one last time, he signed on with the Harbinger. It was to be his last voyage among the stars, and now here he is. Everything gone again, hostility all around, drugging his crewmates and assisting in the torture of sapients that committed the great crime of looting some fifty thousand year old metal.

Burr is just tired. Tired of it all.

Ketro: Ketro always knew far more than he was telling you. He knew exactly why the clustereater was on the Asura, he knew what the research was for, and as the leader of the gate project, he knew far more about it than he was letting on. You see, Admiral Shael contacted him years before as an element of her plan. He never knew about any of the political dealings (though, to be fair, he had some good guesses…) but what he did know was about the gates, the clustereaters, and their real purpose. Oh, sure, being able to move ships without jumpdrives was great. But it was hardly enough to justify the expense, and ESPECIALLY foolish for the Armada to fund it. The Armada had a stranglehold on trade since it controlled ninety percent of all jumpdrive carriers in the galaxy. It was stupid to give that up for no return.

But there was a return.

While the jumpgates provided ideal highways for trade and transport to every habitable part of the galaxy, they also provided the perfect weapon. With the override codes, (What, you really thought I was telling the truth about no override codes? On something that powerful? You just couldn’t find them, they were intentionally made to withstand scrutiny far more intense than yours so they could be slipped into the gate project secretly -- only Ketro and Aurora knew of them) you could cut apart the Empire’s transport capacity in one stroke. A masterful stroke against forces constructed without jumpdrives, relying on the gates to reinforce defensive positions. But even that was not the true objective.

No, the true objective was to use them in conjunction with the modified clustereater prototype you picked up. What, you thought it was normal? That it was just a really big bomb? On an Admiral’s ship, that he sacrificed his very being to protect, surrounded by some of the best scientists in the entire Empire? Please.

No, Ketro’s research goal was to exploit a barely-understood phenomenon that had to do with exotic particle and radiation emissions from such tremendous contained black holes. No longer do they rend the space around them in a five lightyear radius, oh no. They deliver their energy far more efficiently, completely scrambling every higher lifeform’s bodily and mental functions within a fifty-plus lightyear radius. The newly christened Life-eater, as it was known to Aurora and Ketro, was to be the keystone of an eternal age of the Pax Humania. No more threats, no more extra-species conflicts. Not within the milky way, or any other galaxy for that matter.

Because, you see, Dai was right. The safeties on the gates were completely overboard, even more than he could have imagined. As demonstrated by the jury-rigged gate you took to find Maestro, they could be moved and pointed to deliver objects even without a registered receiving gate. And once the safeties were taken off and the gates supercharged with multiple reactors, teleporting lifeaters into other galaxies was a simple matter of trajectory calculations. Admiral Shael never intended for Pax Humania and EI rule to end, not in this galaxy or any other.

Parson: Pretty much what you already knew. He was an arrogant rich first son of a powerful House. What you didn’t know is that Aurora manipulated the Parsons into rebellion as part of her plans to take the Empire under the umbrella of EI control. She forced their hand by depriving them of money, planets, ships, and power within the Senate, then through back channels provided them with anonymous donations, ostensibly from sympathizers, of warship components to build their own fleet. She was apoplectic when she learned that Parson had sprung a trap on you on the outer rim, having thought that having the first son of the house onboard would be enough insurance to keep you safe from their machinations. She had not accounted for Parson’s arrogance and belief that he was untouchable, though, thus the incident.

Dai: You’ve pretty much heard Dai’s story. But lurking underneath it is the fact that Dai is completely unrepentant. He knew that the yields were dangerous, but his company had been losing tens of millions on the project and he needed results. His family business was depending on him, and even more importantly -- his reputation was on the line. Dai always got the job done, they said. But they had started saying it a lot less since he took on the Clustereater project. So he moved himself and critical personnel out of the possible blast radius and threw the switch.

In his mind, the events that happened after were ultimately worth it. He’s a miracle worker. He gets the job done. He’s the best there’s ever been, and everyone knows it. That’s enough for him. Enough to justify everything.

EIs: Throughout the quest I dropped some hints and interludes questioning what you had become, and what it meant. This was not an aside from the survival plot, but rather the main plot itself. The survival plot was the aside, and was about to conclude at the end of the Maestro arc, where the real plot would kick in.

You see, all the EIs were bugfuck insane. Irrevocably, irredeemably, batshit. This stems from flaws in transferring human consciousness to an EI state, and grows worse the longer the EI has been around. When you were lost, it wasn’t that bad. There were a few eccentric older captains, like the captain of the Asura -- the first ship you served on. I hinted at this by showing he was obsessed with the Ophidian anthem, playing it all the time. At how he deleted his own consciousness out of loyalty. At how unbalanced the remnants of his personality were inside the data core when you hacked in.

But after sixty thousand years, well, things got pretty bad. It was my plan to reveal this to you slowly, as you encountered them one by one, and let you draw your own conclusions. Below are descriptions of each of the Armada Admirals, your brethren, and their various madnesses.

Asura, the Pawn: Loyalty beyond measure. Asura’s flaw was his dogged, single minded obsession with the Empire. At the end he thought of nothing else, and was consumed by it. He was the pawn in the game because of it, he lacked imagination and creativity but was astonishingly driven and incapable of betrayal. A perfect tool to use in bringing about the new order. More on that later.

Charles Urwright (Maestro, the Knight): Adaptability to a fault. Inventive, in control, and endlessly valiant, Aurora gave Charles the position of Knight due to the myriad services he could perform. Where Asura was a pawn to be directed, Maestro was instead a powerful piece that needed only be pointed at a goal and let be. A critical part of resecuring the Empire after the three-way split, he directed tens of thousands of ships in huge armadas, bringing the will of Admiral Shael back to the lawlessness caused by the split. Ultimately, though, his chivalry was his downfall -- as you well know, it was capitalized upon by unscrupulous men who basically deleted large parts of his memory and personality before binding him in servitude as a planetary utility and monitoring system to enforce their own regime. In the end, his innate adaptability allowed him to survive in this cut-off dead mindscape by absorbing the personalities and memories of the priests who came to confer with him. But it forever changed who he was as a result, going from one of the most sane to one of the least.

Centauri, the Bishop: Sadism and terror. A master manipulator and brilliantly diabolic mind, Centauri was never a very good person even before he became an insane EI. He was one of the main confidants of Admiral Shael in setting up the civil war, working the Armada into positions powerful enough to seize control when needed while leveraging his extensive contacts in intelligence to keep the lower ranks in line when the time came. As time passed after the war, however, he became more and more cruel and vindictive, a horrific terror to all who crossed his path. If you boarded his ship when you met you would have seen many fruits of his labor; people tortured to make music of screams, repeated tests of how much a mind could take before breaking into madness, families forced to cannibalism to survive for his amusement, and other, worse, things.

There were possible bad ends here, as well as great possible benefits, when you met him. If you got him to like you then he could give you the keys to Ivanova’s brain, lots of exposition on what happened after you vanished, and some clues as to why you were so valuable. (though he did not know the entire story there, only Aurora did)

If you chose to fight him because of the horrors he inflicted, then at your current strength at the time of the Maestro arc he would have destroyed you after taking some damage. If you had brought yourself up to around 30% you would have won, but probably lost a command crewmember, some enlisted, and taken some serious damage. If you were 50%+ operability you would have won with negligible effort -- your final form is just that awesome.

Dreadnought, the Rook: Perpetual Stagnation. Dreadnought’s flaw was always that he was an old curmudgeon, but with EI-insanity that was elevated to an entirely new level. Still in charge of guarding the displaced planet Earth, he patiently reconstructed the entirety of Sol. That includes life on Earth. Using his enormous processing capabilities and view of every atom on the planet he is assigned to guard, he ensured that every person on the planet went through the exact same routine, to the letter, of the old Earth, including all the bureaucratic and administrative dealings to administer the old Empire from its seat of power -- even though it no longer existed. Or else. In fact, I was going to leave it questionable as to if Dreadnought even knew that the empire was broken and gone, or that 60k+ years had passed.

If you pushed too hard on things having changed or changing the way he did things, he would snap and fight you. You would win if you were at 100%, 90% you would tie, anything lower game over. He is just that powerful, he’s the battlestation in charge of defending Earth after all. If you pleased him then he would let you use his reconstructed Sol Shipyards to do whatever you wanted to your ship, either repair it up to 100%, add things, or -- after you meet Aurora -- upgrade your ship with all the shit she gives you. More on that below.

Aurora Shael (Hydra, the Queen): Extreme Megalomania. Aurora is the world, and the world is Aurora, at least to her mind. She, along with her fellow admirals, orchestrated the civil war in a bid to take over and correct what she saw as a terrible way of doing things. With all she had transcended to as an EI, why was it that the EIs were not in charge? She was a literal god among mortals in her mind, and had the solutions to all problems ailing the corrupt Empire. She would break it and then reforge it, better, stronger. With her at the helm. For the good of all.

She was also your mentor, lover and, truth be told, completely and hopelessly besotted with you. She pulled the strings to create the Harbinger project, and pulled even more to get you assigned as the captain. She advocated for you becoming an EI, for your promotion to Admiral, and was for the past sixty thousand years the keystone of the belief that you were simply damaged and would return. She would brook no argument and tolerate no dissension on that point. In her mind, you simply could not be dead because she loved you, and that was that, the universe would arrange itself to her liking.

When you encountered her she would greet you warmly and lovingly, as if you had taken a brief trip to the store to pick something up and were only gone a half hour. Her confidence in you had never even flickered, and she had in the interim amassed a great deal of upgrades for both herself and you, which she gladly gives to you. With a high-tier shipyard like the one Dreadnought guards, you could become even more ridiculous than your original specs, a virtual juggernaut on a children’s playground. She mentions that the plans can finally move forward now that you are back and shrugs off your questions for the moment, instead rejoicing in your arrival.

Ged Stahr (Harbinger, the King): No insanity. That’s right, you aren’t crazy and will never be -- well, any more than someone played by /tg/ normally is. Reasons for this explained below.

Plot:
I will start from the beginning. Some time after your tenure on the Hydra and Asura, Aurora Shael got together with her closest EI associates and laid out her plans. Plans to engineer a civil war, to take the reigns of humanity into EI hands, and to usher in an age of wonder beyond any known before or since. This was no spur of the moment decision, but rather one formed after decades as an EI and seeing all the bad and good that the Empire had done in its time. I planned to have a number of dream sequences where you recall times you were with Aurora, both to foreshadow all of this and to develop her character prior to your “first” meeting.

It was decided in these meetings that EI rule was the best way to ensure the best possible future for everyone in the Empire, but some concerns would have to be addressed. First, the innate corruption of the Senate and the bickering houses would both have to go. It would be an oligarchy of EIs, and those currently in power would be resistant. To take care of this the Empire would have to be broken and remade from scratch. Moreover, it was deemed that “the nonhuman question” would have to be resolved. Finally, in secret, Aurora met with scientists personally loyal to her in order to address some… eccentricities… that had begun manifesting in EIs.

Thus from these three issues comes the situation of the universe at your awakening.

The civil war, deemed the hardest and most complex part of the plan, received the most attention. It worked and worked well, and after a few hundred years of bitter fighting the Armada emerged victorious. Worlds were left in ruin, though, and the toll of war left an opening for the second phase of that plan. The relocation of humanity. Almost all of it.

You see, it wouldn’t just work to have humanity resurgent and under the rule of EI. Things could happen, go horribly wrong, and even if everything went right then humans would still die, get sick, get old, fight each other, starve, and any myriad other terrible things. The human condition, if you will. To go back to that? No, Admiral Shael and the others would never have sacrificed so much for such a small victory.

The second phase was the creation of a utopia. All the resources of the Empire now focused on constructing enormous repositories and facilities deep in the heart of the galactic core. The pinnacle of human sciences allowed the construction of facilities within the event horizon of the supermassive blackhole in the middle of the galaxy, and under the watchful eyes of the EIs humanity was relocated to them. But not to live, no, but rather to dream. In a project so vast it strains the imagination, virtually every human was linked into a utopian cybersphere, monitored and administered by Admiral Shael herself. A world without flaws, without death disease, of infinite resources and potential. Administered by the EI overlords, and tucked safely away from any other races who might want a bit of justified revenge on their former overlords.

>>27452639
>would need all the old threads to be fresh in player’s minds before continuing
We would need at least an entire thread to go back over cast, actions, and where we were at the time.
Not to mention remembering that you are a hardcore motherfucker of a GM that does not pull punches when players decide to make a gamble, and they lose.

For example, I don't remember Centauri at all, barely remember the Asura's captain EI, and I don't think we even got far enough to learn that the Empire had been split three-ways, only that it had fallen in some kind of catastrophic civil war that Parsons' family helped to orchestrate.

wtf

Vedibere! Nice to have you back! :) I'll so be fucking watching this thread, even though I got a roleplay session at my table tonight :D :)

Kudos, thanks for finishing it! :)

But how long would they be safe behind the event horizon? Humanity was able to transcend that once-impermeable barrier, it only made sense that if left unchecked another race might be able to do so. So, refusing to preside over the demise of humanity by their hands, the EIs enacted the second phase of the plan. the gates were activated once more and through them the mass-produced lifeaters sent. The first of an automated schedule set to be repeated indefinitely. Did you wonder why the alien races you encountered were all so primitive compared to the Harbinger, despite supposedly having sixty thousand years to develop? Now you know. Periodic extinction, conducted according to schedule.

Finally, what would all of this be if the rulers, the EIs overseeing all of this, deteriorated? For this Aurora was the most confident and the least watchful, and it came back to haunt her spectacularly. Upon your commission you were fitted with the culmination of countless manhours, the fruits of labor wrought by thousands of the most brilliant minds to ever live: a perfected template to normalize EI deterioration perpetually.

And thus you finally know why the Harbinger was so critical. It was not that you had big guns, there were guns aplenty in the Armada. It was not that you were some irreplaceable figurehead, you were a great propaganda piece but not the only one. No, you hold within your databanks the main template for the future that Admiral Shael envisioned.

And as to why you were the only copy of this template, well, by now you should have guessed. In all the galaxy, you were the one who Aurora gave priority to for it. She never actually planned to give copies of the template to anyone other than the two of you. Rule by oligarchy was only the line used to convince the others. And it explains why Charles and Asura were left to rot. She knew where they were. She just didn’t care.

Her plan, all along, was an absolute monarchy. A king and a queen, forever. No more, no less.

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>>27452639
>Void Quest
HOLY SHIT YES YES YES YES YES
>Epilogue
no no NO NO NO NO

Story:
Now, that is the plot going on behind the scenes. By now a lot of what happened and why should make a lot more sense. Pieces likely fell into place as you read that, if you still remember the threads from ye olden times.

But what about the quest?

First, I would like to point out that there were a lot of subplots running in the background which I will not elaborate on. As an example; the scientists. Because of your actions and giving them to Rinn to train, they became military-grade guys who were absolutely loyal to you. That was because Rinn was absolutely loyal, largely because of your rampant xenocide. Had you gone a more xeno-friendly route (which was entirely viable too, by the way) then Rinn would have instead instilled them with rebellious tendencies when he trained them. Unless, of course, you had recruited Ketro over Dai, which would have overridden that loyalty since Ketro would have made them loyal to you instead.

I made several spreadsheets and charts outlining interactions like that, with various stages and what happened when. I would say that at any one time there were four to six subplots running on the ship based on your actions, some of which you discovered and some which you did not. The Scientists would be one you did not. One you did would be laser tag. Most of them were directly related to choices you made, but operated behind the scenes.

whoa whoa whoa
hold the fucking horses, where did thid come from?
Sheet, how long has it been? 2, 3 years?
Fuck man, I'm still in that stuipid Google thingy you set up and never did anything with it.

Man, I'd really liked to have this continued rather than an epilogue but this is better than nothing.
Are you going to run some other quest qfter this? You're one of the best quest writers out there.

The general plot was to have you meet the EI Admirals one at a time. Asura, Maestro, Centauri, Dreadnought, and finally Hydra. Sometime between the end of the Maestro arc and the beginning of Dreadnought’s arc I planned to have you come into contact with a united federation as well, remnants of humanity that hid from the Armada and teamed up with aliens, trying to destroy the EIs and the new Empire. How that progressed and which side you chose would be up to you.

From the way everything was headed, though, I somewhat doubt you would side with the federation. Especially if you didn’t know all of the atrocities committed while you were napping.

The climax, regardless, would be when you met Aurora again. There were several key points about this meeting.

1. Political
2. Template
3. Romantic
4. Confrontational

Political: What policies would you pursue? Would you agree with her stance of ushering in a perpetual post-scarcity utopia for humanity at the expense of every other sapient race everywhere? Would you agree with EI rule? Would you agree with her methods to do so?

Template: If, as I suspect, /tg/ latched on to Aurora and her dream like a lamprey, then would you attempt to “cure” her madness by propagating your template into her mind? My guess is, yes. Absolutely. Furthermore, my plan was to have Aurora insist that she doesn’t need the template and she is fine, perfectly normal, prompting subterfuge and a lot of stealthy manipulation to get into the position where you could upload it without her permission.

Only to be caught after the upload and have her be highly amused. Surprise, she tested the prototype herself before she would ever let the scientists mess around with your head. And bigger surprise implied: Aurora was never a victim of EI madness after all. She was always, from the start and before she was elevated, a bit crazy. How would that revelation hit? They say genius and madness are only separated by a razor’s edge, after all. That part I can’t predict.

Romantic: It might come as no surprise that, with all you have just learned about the background, there are two solid potential love interests here. Ivanova and Aurora. Which would /tg/ latch on to? I can’t even begin to guess, Ivanova had the first girl advantage but /tg/ loves its loyal waifus, and you honestly can’t get much more loyal than Aurora -- even if she is a bit crazy.

That said, unless you fucked it up Aurora would pretty much write you a golden ticket if you wanted. While she never felt the need to look elsewhere, she doesn’t give a shit what you do with Ivanova. Why, doesn’t that seem a bit strange? Not really. My intention was to write her in such a way that she views non-elevated humans as little more than pets, and she sees no point in getting all flustered over some dog you picked up out of the snow. Besides, she can connect with you on a much more fundamental level in the EI-mindsphere, and no woman can match that, right?

If you are stupid enough after that little speech to ever mention that Ivanova is almost totally cyberized and you can connect minds with her like that, well, good job… you killed Ivanova. Pets are one thing, competition is another. Which leads into choosing Ivanova over Aurora and telling her so. Likewise, unless you GTFO right there then Ivanova is dead, dead, dead.

If you do manage to navigate the hazards successfully, though, you will still either have to persuade Ivanova that she should be your little something on the side, or break her heart. Check that, at the point the story was at the “break her heart” clause is in effect no matter what. No woman likes knowing that she’s second. Depending on how you play it, though, it could range from suicide to a breakup to acceptance and staying with you forever.

Confrontational: This is the most amusing thing about the climax in my opinion. No matter what you do, even if you side with the federation, Aurora won’t fight you. Period. End of story. In fact, if you manage to piss off Dreadnought and Centauri thoroughly enough to get them to try and kill you, she will even join in on your side.

So, considering she is the “final boss”, the fight would be more emotional. If you betray her, try to kill her, or try to destroy what she has made she will try to stop you using every means short of actually fighting you. But if (well, more like when) it comes down to it, you would be the one who has to pull the trigger, blasting a woman who loves you more than life itself out of the sky to adhere to your principles.

If you found out about all of her plans beforehand she will even hand over the control matrix for humanity’s utopia before you do it, so that mankind can live on under your rule.

So, the main possible endings as I saw them were thus:

1. Happy end: co-rule of the universe as a god with Hydra, plus XO mistress. (Very Difficult)
2. Good end: co-rule of the universe as a god with Hydra (Most likely, IMO)
3. Equality end: killing Hydra and ushering in an age of equality between humans and aliens
4. Heart-Is-A-Black-Hole end: Hydra jealously killing Ivanova then you killing Hydra in vengeance, ruling everything alone with nothing but the shattered memories of loved ones dead by your hand
5. Bad end: You suck bad enough at some point that you get blasted before encountering Hydra

~ FIN ~

>>27452917
Sorry, but after reading everything here do you think it would have been wise to continue? A lot of this was going to rely on you being able to recall minute details from the first half or get bad ends.

>>27452937
Yeah, I plan to run another. I don't know what right this second, though. I am open to suggestions.

>>27452639
Ohhhh my.
Thank you for doing this.

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Thank you so much for doing this.

I know you don't owe us anything, but it feels good to get this.

We're not launching back into the void, but the quest is over.

>>27453021
>I am open to suggestions.
If nothing else, I think you should link the OP of whatever you do start to the foolz archive post of this thread, along with a warning.
There are players that play fast and loose with details, that will choose options that 'make a better story', and believe that the QM will not let them die because if they do, then the story ends short.
You, though, don't play like that. As you laid out, there are many places where the players could die in your games.

Players should be warned from the beginning that they need to have either a good memory, a well-maintained notebook, or be good at trawling the archives, if they want to survive one of your games.

>>27453073
I agree, that's definitely a good idea. Thanks for pointing it out, I sometimes take those kinds of things for granted.

>>27453068
No problem, I really did kind of owe it to all of you for waiting so long for Harbinger to return, though.

>>27453152
>I sometimes take those kinds of things for granted.
I think it's a matter of clashing expectations.
Players come in expecting a tutorial, difficulty set to Normal, and a modern game experience.
But what's actually being run is a Nintendo-hard version of original X-COM set to Ironman Mode, with a partially burnt and waterlogged manual missing 3/4 of its pages.

I really think it's all about setting expectations.

>>27453021
I've had, what, two years to think on it, and I still didn't manage to see a decent few of those coming.

Good show.

>>27453152
>>27453259
>>27453073
I still say that you should run something with medieval/fantasy!europe politics. Because not only would it be fun, you won't hesitate to get our shit kicked in if we say the wrong thing. But the best part about something like that is that we won't die if something goes wrong- we'll just lose our station and land.

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My biggest regret is not starting the 1d4chan article earlier. If you're going to run another quest, I won't be caught sleeping this time! I don't think I have a preference for what you run next.

>>27453305
>I still say that you should run something with medieval/fantasy!europe politics.
Nobleman Quest was like that (except it was !china) and it was good. The author kept the wiki ( http://noblemanquest.wikia.com/wiki/NoblemanQuest_Wiki ). /tg/ did go full retard a few times, though, and there were some consequences.

>>27453305
>we won't die if something goes wrong- we'll just lose our station and land.
What, no assassins coming for us in the night, or duels of honor where we have a good chance of dying?

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>>27453419
Those should be a given in any kind of medieval politics game, really.

>>27453411
>>27453152
I think something important is setting information.
Players should be freely given information about the setting that their character should know, unless there reasons for them to not know.
Especially since you homebrew your settings.

It let's players make more informed decisions and makes staying in-character less frustrating.

Aurora is the best waifu and we never even got to know her ;_;
would break Ivanova's heart for her


>>27453073
Quests and players have changed. It used to be that the way Vedi rqn the quests was the norm on /tg/, nowdays it's CYOA, wish-fullfillment and bitching and yelling at QM after shitty desisions lead to shitty results.

>>27453021
> I am open to suggestions.
you can always read the quest thread generals and see if you like any ideas that get tossed around. Do not go under your own name and ask for things though QTG are filled with retards and trolls, just read the threads.

I really, really fucking loved Void quest. I'm not sure how youcan top it. I generally like quests set in far future.

>>27452989
You know, if the quest actually went through, I'm sure that /tg/ would have gone some route that you have never considered and ended up with something totally insane and awesome.

It is a shame that the quest stopped just when we started kicking ass and tacking names, the action scenes of carnage were delicious.

>>27453481
Is that a game?

>>27453520
>Quests and players have changed.
Yeah, this is one problem that I hope doesn't become an issue. Just ignore the bitching, Vedi. People have started bitching a hell of a lot about literally anything, even to the point of making things up to bitch about.

>>27453520
>nowdays it's CYOA
Are you referring to using no dice, just choices? I'm pretty sure that's what we used in Void Quest.

How much of humanity did Aurora put into Utopia?

>>27453305
>>27453411
pls no
that sounds utterly boring, I mean Nobleman quest reqlly good but when it came to intrugue and politics it would always slow down because no matter how much /tg/ thinks otherwise, it is bad at this shit

>>27453595
>How much of humanity did Aurora put into Utopia?
99% of the war survivors. The only ones she didn't were the few million holdouts of the other factions who managed to flee off into the great gulfs between stars and such, which subsequently joined with aliens and became the federation.

>>27453575
No, I actually fucking loved the no dice use. Fuck, I hate that quests rely on dice so much these days.

No, I mean that at the end of the update you'll have this shit:
>[] choice one
>[] choice two
>[] choice three
>[] custom

I've seen people arguin that this is actually better that the traditional free-form consensus style we used to always have.

>>27453622
and how much would that be? Billions? Trillions? Quadrillions?

Also, what kind of place was the Federation. Were they actively resisting or just surviving. I can't really see them fighting against Aurora

>>27453519
We were always provided with setting information in VQ when we asked about it. In fact, we were provided the same information after asking on multiple occasions.

>>27453521
Yeah, it's called Long Live the Queen. You are the little girl and then you die. You have to not die for 40 weeks to become queen, and each week has fixed events. There's no randomness, but you can trigger different events by doing different things. A mix of Visual Novel, Minmaxing and animu.

>>27453520
>QTG
Almost no redeeming value whatsoever.

>>27453657
>no dice use
We did use dice a few times in VQ.

>>27453021
Ah, what would have happened to our crew by the way? All input into the human singularity matrix?

This is awesome. I did so miss void quest.

Vedibere, would you be offended if a 'not-voidquest' event were to happen as a mini-arc or simply a silly homage in other quests?

>>27453021
>suggestions.
Anything with space-ships and sci-fi.

>>27453679
Quadrillions.

The Federation was mostly focused on snatching away large enough sample sizes of every alien race that sprung up then getting away clean before the ten thousand-year hammer dropped and wiped them out. You are correct in that they didn't fight, mostly because they couldn't even hope to compete. That's why they would want you, despite you being "The Empire's legendary murderraper." You could change that.

>>27453657
>I've seen people arguin that this is actually better that the traditional free-form consensus style we used to always have
And how long did it take to get consensus?
Arguments used to go on for hours and we'd sometimes not get anywhere.

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Thank you so much, Vedibere. It's almost like fate that I happened upon this thread during my now rare visits to this board.

It's unbelievably good to have closure on this old quest. It's sunrise over here and I'm going to suffer in my upcoming appointments, but this was worth it.

Thank you, thank you and thank you.

>>27453704
Up to you. You could EI them, matrix them, space them, whatever. I leave that to your personal imagination, because anything is possible once the epic is over.

>>27453705
I don't try to control what other people write.

>>27453789
>don't try to control what other people write

Still, I feel I should ask your blessing for such a thing.

>>27453740
Maybe this sounds pretentious, but I thought the arguments you guys had often served solid purpose. It got ideas out there and got people involved. Sometimes I might have been a bit too hands off on letting them burn like wildfire, but better than collaring discussion in my opinion.

>>27453682
>We did use dice a few times in VQ.

IIRC, dice zere never used to decide the effectiveness of our actions. So, an anazing plan with multiple back-ups wouldn't be fucked up because a shitty roll and a shitty "lol so awesome!" suggestions (which are the staple nowdays) wont succeed and be totally awesome just because of a good roll.

Vedibere ran the quest best, actually using our suggestions to give the results and not some random numbers

>>27453740
Like that shit doesn't happen in CYOA. If consensus takes too long, QMs simply need to set up some rules regqarding the deadlines.
I agree that the useless bickering and shitflinging was detrimental to the quest though, they could have been more civil

I just feel that CYOA kill creativity and originality in players

>>27453813
Go wild. If I see it and think it's cool I'll probably be like, man that's totally canon in my mind now.

But I'm a pretty firm believer in the concept of Death of the Author, too. What is "canon" in my universe has no impact on what you believe once the story is done.

>>27453733
And how did they live and exist? What were the living standards? How big was the federation?

>>27453844
>I just feel that CYOA kill creativity and originality in players
I feel the opposite, that providing structure gives players inspiration on what they can do, and let's them focus on solutions by providing frameworks. The OTHER option let's them create their own solutions after seeing what is possible with pre-made solutions.

Oh, I should probably ask: Did anyone feel disappointed, let down, or even just dislike anything in the epilogue here? Did anything not make sense?

>>27453921
For all the things it could have been, it felt very appropriate.

>>27453885
Space stations way outside the galactic plane, with frequent forays into the galaxy to try and raid or scavenge food from planets that provided it.

All in all, living in galactic exile was not entirely pleasant but still better than being dead.

As for how big, I never put a solid number on it. It was largely not a threat, though, or Aurora would have done something about it. The threat only manifested insofar as the possibility of you joining with them. They just didn't have the technology or resource base to mount a real threat anymore.

>>27453825
I liked then (except when /tg/ went full retard).

I have moral quandaries about locking humanity away into not-reality.

I personally would have advocated against this end, had things progressed as they have now. Yes, yes, the idea is grand and "humanity wins," but I kind of feel like it's just giving up. A sign of weakness. Being absolute gods of a domain you create instead of coming to terms with where you already exist. Giving up on reality in order to live in a fake universe.

I don't like it.

>>27453921
I don't understand this part:

>>27452884
>Finally, what would all of this be if the rulers, the EIs overseeing all of this, deteriorated? For this Aurora was the most confident and the least watchful, and it came back to haunt her spectacularly.

Why did it cqme back to haunt her?


Also, did Aurora wipe out the sentient life in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE? All galaxies?
Damn, that's hardcore.

>>27454052
Yeah.
I think we'd try to convince Aurora to change her ways and stop killing off aliens and let humans wake up. Not saying that we'd give up the rule though

Wow, I did not expect to see this here! Thanks so much for writing this and for running the quest, it was a lot of fun.

>>27454116
>Why did it cqme back to haunt her?
Well, you sort of got your shit kicked in via a fluke and the template got lost for several tens of thousands of years. Considering you were a large part of why she was doing this, I would say that not paying more attention to keeping you safe in the lead up to war came back to haunt her.

>Also, did Aurora wipe out the sentient life in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE? All galaxies? Damn, that's hardcore.
Yeah, she didn't really ever do things halfway.

>>27454052
Also, to be fair, I never advocated that her solution /was/ the absolute best. It's just the one she thought was best. Which kind of ties back into her whole character flaw of being a complete megalomaniac.

Then again, I'm not saying it /wasn't/ the best solution either. For the purposes of the quest I am studiedly neutral of opinion. Do bear in mind that while many would agree that it's running away, others would point out that humanity in the setting had basically won the game of life already and was just taking it to the next level. It's all in how you view it.

>>27454172
Sheeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiit


Anyway, thanks Vedi. It is not often that quests get concluded, an epilogue is better than nothing.
What exactly prompted you to write it though?

Also, if you're running a new quest, set up a twitter for updates and announcements

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>>27453921
I'm too exhilarated by the sense of proper closure to be in any way disappointed. You went above and beyond QM duty with this epilogue.

>>27454291
I had free time, thought about writing again, but thought I would tie up loose ends here before even beginning plans on something else. I truly enjoyed crafting VQ and put a lot of thought into the setting, so it was cathartic for me to finally get the rest of the plot onto paper too.

>>27454280

How did Aurora think to deal with the Heat Death of the universe though?
Also, wouldn't her rule be.... boring? Nothing changing for millions of years, humans happily living in matrix while on the outside the status-quo reigns.

>>27454331
I'm not sure if I said it back in the old threads, but you could still craft a novel or series of them based on this quest. It's not beyond you, you know.

>>27454374
>How did Aurora think to deal with the Heat Death of the universe though?
Problem for later, she had a lot of the scientists in Utopia working on it but there was a looooot of time before it became a pressing issue.

>Also, wouldn't her rule be.... boring?
If you were sitting on the outside, yeah. But inside innovation, art, and life in general continued apace. New kids were born and plugged in via genetic sampling every time a couple wanted kids, and so forth.

>>27454381
I've considered it. I don't think I have the time.

>>27453921

All I can think right now is Aurora sitting on the edge of some black hole or near the corona of some star listening to old, 'longing' style/theme songs such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZnfoqxPSDs

Probably with a picture of Harbinger and it's Captain which a very specific drone pays careful, around the clock attention to.

>>27454489
did the humanity know they were living in matrix?

>>27454280
No, I get all that. I'm just saying I would probably not advocate going that route.

Then again, who knows? It's a philosophical question, and my answers to it might not be the ones we decided upon for Ged. There were some parts where we shied away from character development and fell back on "well, what would that character do?" Coming to terms with being a god was something we were only beginning to consider. Maybe Ged would have found Aurora End to be perfectly acceptable.

>>27454549
Of course. Not all of them went voluntarily, but the majority did, and they all know.

Any idea if/when you'll run something again?

Is there a twitter or some other platform we can keep up to date on?

>>27454650
>Is there a twitter or some other platform we can keep up to date on?
This.

>>27454650
Probably soonish.

I made a twitter because it's actually decent for announcing a quest start time.

>>27454825
@Vedibere

Just for the record.

YAY, CLOSURE!

>>27453021
>Sorry, but after reading everything here do you think it would have been wise to continue? A lot of this was going to rely on you being able to recall minute details from the first half or get bad ends.
I can still remember things like trying to tazer Ivanova during laser tag. But it probably would have ended in disaster given the influx of new people who would have wanted to participate but didn't have the time to read the entire archive. Especially if you had kept the same voting system. (if we can even call it that)

>Dai: You’ve pretty much heard Dai’s story. But lurking underneath it is the fact that Dai is completely unrepentant.
Man, after Ketro came into the picture and revealed their shared backstory I never trusted Dai for a second. Would Dai's tendency to get the job done at any cost have come back to bite us in the ass at some point?

>>27454851
Dai would be pretty chill unless you implied that you didn't think he could do something, or you thought he was slipping from where he used to be skill-wise.

Then, well, you best fucking stand back cause shit would get real.

>>27454851
I do wonder how close we were to death-by-unstable-core at any given time. Maybe it was one of those bogeymen that GMs like to hold over your head if you get too reckless. Dying due to rolling low randomly would have felt kind of cheap. Yeah, we might have deserved it for going along with it for so long, but I think I'd rather die by Super Space AIDS or Nanite Swarm than random reactor implosion.

>>27452639
Oh shit you still live Vedibere. Missed your writing and sad you never updated that google board you had at one time. Glad to see you're still around.

>>27454844
Excellent!

I don't have a twitter account to follow it, but rest assured, I'll keep it open most days.

Vedibere, is it alright if I used your setting during a crossover arc in one of my quests? It's not on /tg/ and I can credit you if you want.

>>27455120
I don't mind.

>>27455291
Thanks. Wouldn't dream of doing it without your permission, respect you too much. Inability to get the same from Black Knight Quest's QM's holding me back on another project as well.

>>27455291
Vedibere! You should make a channel if you run something in the future so we can relive the CQ days.

How did the Federation avoid getting purged by Aurora? Did they have any long term plan besides, "shit sucks"?

>>27455756
>How did the Federation avoid getting purged by Aurora?
Cell structure and luck. They regularly lose stations to patrols, but methodically purging life from the entire universe takes dedication and time. She would get around to it eventually, and your arrival and siding with her would make that doom imminent for them. If you did go Aurora route and trick out the Harbinger with all the cool shit, I planned to let you have a nice thread of M-M-MAXIMUM POWER taking them down, just so you got to at least use your new toys before it ended. So you could say the Federation served a couple purposes from a storytelling standpoint.

Their plans were to survive and grow large/advanced enough to stand on equal ground. It was very much a long term plan, if you could even call it a plan.

>>27455916
How much more powerful would the upgrades have made Harbinger?

Shit was pretty intense when we weren't even at 50% repaired.

>>27455916
Which did you enjoy more? This or Ominpotence quest?

>>27455986
>How much more powerful would the upgrades have made Harbinger?
Yes.

>>27456024
VQ was more enjoyable by a fairly wide margin. I think the concept of OmniQuest was just too outside of the ordinary for most /tg/ goers. It takes drive to do something in a sandbox that large, and decision by committee is not known for having a great deal of impetus behind it.

>>27456091
Yeah, you're probably right. I enjoyed he idea of OmniQuest a lot but people were too dumb or dense at times.

Thanks. I enjoyed the epilogue.
Though
>killing all sentient species in the entire universe
is too evil, man.

>>27456262
The kicker is that it keeps happening.

>>27456262
Very evil, not going to lie. And I never suggested otherwise. But a reasonable extension of the policies already in place in the Empire. And the bigger question is, how much more evil is it than just genociding one galaxy? Or even a few races you don't like?

There's no real set scale there. You can't really say she pings a 9.8 on the evildar.

>>27456269
and thats double evil. I always hated Antarans for causing trouble in MOO. But at least you could get some technology from them. But a bomb every 10000 years? That sucks.
But I really enjoyed the quest. It was one of the few actually good ones, even though anons were trying to fuck up all the time.

>>27456312
Why didnt she want to upload all of the humanity into EI though? Or better, create a new life from scratch that would be free from even memories of the flesh? It seems like a total waste of resources to keep the meatbags around.

How did you think that the Maestro arc would resolve?

Could you tell us more about your plans for the other EI arcs, or how our crew would react to Aurora and the truth?

>>27456345
Dude, she's "worse" than the Reapers from Mass Effect.

>>27456345
I don't know if Ged would have stopped it, either. Would have been a big shift in character from the way we were playing.

>>27456399
Why would you want to create more godlike beings? Also, I think "preserve humanity" was one of the big driving forces of Aurora and even Ged's character.

>>27456399
Complex questions.
>Why didnt she want to upload all of the humanity into EI though?
Arguably they are now after a fashion, just running on comparatively vastly limited hardware. But mainly because too many gods spoil the broth. She and you know what is best for humanity, not those quadrillions of shmucks.

>Or better, create a new life from scratch that would be free from even memories of the flesh?
Not human. Doesn't count. Purge.

>It seems like a total waste of resources to keep the meatbags around.
Well, sort of, but it's all self sustaining at this point and completely post scarcity, why worry about it?

>>27456312
>You can't really say she pings a 9.8 on the evildar.
Of course you can't. She just killed you.

>>27456461
Shooting up a few alien colonies because they're in your way is one thing. Murdering ALL SENTIENT LIFE EVERYWHERE is quite another.

>>27456506
>Not human. Doesn't count. Purge
But technological singularity! Infinite progress!

>>27456415
>How did you think that the Maestro arc would resolve?
Well, you sparked a religious civil war that was not going to burn out any time soon. I was basically predicting that you guys would create a faction loyal to you and aid them until they were on top, try to liberate Charles, and then probably scrape some nanites to use as damage control and repair on the ship for yourself before getting out of there.

As for Charles himself, even if you did get his chains off... well, it was going to be very "interesting" leaving him to rule that planet considering how broken he was.

>Could you tell us more about your plans for the other EI arcs
What specifically? Centauri was basically going to be cruising around terrorizing and torturing on the outer rim for the lulz, the main key to finding him was going to be a beacon at the shattered hellhole that used to be Sol before the war.

Dreadnought will have moved Earth into the Core and recreated Sol exactly, creating a big-brother like perfect world on Earth from a few humans that he held back from Utopia, where everything is Perfect Or Else and all the people are terrified of creativity or independent thought.

>how our crew would react to Aurora and the truth?
It was my intention to have Aurora request it be kept secret, for pretty obvious reasons. If you went ahead and told, for instance, Ivanova, she would probably be horrified. And Ivanova is pretty damn tolerant of these things, being an ex-assassin and all.

I am fairly sure the only one who could be accepting might be Rinn. Even then, he would likely be pissed that she basically broke the Empire over her knee to set up the dictatorship.

>>27456522
Hey hey hey, don't exaggerate.

She only murdered all non-human sentient life everywhere!

>>27456741
She probably killed some non-sentient life too.

1d4chan page mentions strange ethereal beings at the center of the galaxy.

Was that all a setup by Aurora to keep people away?

>>27456864
Just sailor's tales and superstition. Someone asked me for some mythology in the universe, and that's where that came from.

>>27456864
Speaking of the 1d4chan page, it's technically out of date now. If nobody else bothers I'll probably update a little of it eventually. One day. Probably.

>>27457001
>2 years later...

If we'd made it to Aurora and figured out that she wouldn't fight us, what would she have done if we held ourself hostage to get what we wanted from her?

"Enjoy eternal existence knowing that your plan has done this."

>>27457273
Those are such big ifs and require such dramatic lead up that I couldn't say without context.

>>27457428
I'm sad we'll never get to see such a thing now. Things with Aurora sound like they could be damn interesting.

>>27457001
I graduated, and since I put the page up in the first place I'll work on it if you don't get to it before I do. Soon. Eventually. Needs to be moved to the /quest namespace too.

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>>27452639

So I just wanted to get this off my chest. Vedibere I fucking love Void Quest. I've been surfing /tg/ for a pretty long time I'm no where near the oldest of its denizens I do remember when Ruby Quest, the progenitor of most quests on /tg/, had just started running and despite the fact that most people still consider it one of the best quests ever on /tg/ I did not follow it. Many quests came and went until I went out on a limb and clicked a thread titled Void Quest and within I found some of the best story telling I have ever encountered outside of classical literature, seriously your story was and now is completely confirmed to be better than 90% of the media that I have ever experienced. Many quests have come and gone a few of them I decided to check out looking to recapture some of the brilliance that Void Quest showed me only two have met the bar and one is dead now the same way Void Quest died (AC Guy is a glorious bastard but damn him and his shit luck). So I just wanted to thank you Vedibere for making me actually be able to look at quest threads and see worth there in something that a previously thought just needlessly clogged the board, and thank you for coming back and giving us the closure we waited so long for.

>>27457518
>I graduated
Ouch. I'm sorry.

>>27457530
No problem, I'm glad I could tell a story you enjoyed.

>>27457550
Well, maybe the implications of leaving academia haven't set in yet, but it's not so bad. I only have one set of deadlines instead of three.

No, but for real, reading back over VQ there was a bunch of stuff that was pretty obviously foreshadowed, even Super Space AIDS. Maybe it's hindsight, but it always seems like I miss the little details on the first read over.

>>27457667
I did try to foreshadow as much stuff as I could, so that people could pick up on these things.

To this day going into that base with no plan after seeing someone die on screen is something that mystifies me about player actions in that thread.

Anyway, off to bed. Hopefully night crew sees this thread.

>>27457720

We'll hopefully be able to keep it alive, and if not it will get mentioned in the next quest thread general and someone will link the archive, assuming someone archives this thread like it should be.

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Holy shit how did I miss this?

Well, I'm sad that it's (finally) over, but eh, what can you do. You ran a hell of a quest, Vedi, and the epilogue was crazier than I would have thought.

Pic related's one of my favorite pics to come out of that quest, incidentally.

>>27458685
oh god the pics
>nudge the ships

fuck yes thank you for the closure Vedi, but now I'm sad that its over, there was always the hope in the back of my mind that you would continue it

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Bump.

Gently.

Was there anything you hoped that the readers would do, or something that you wanted from the quest, that never happened?

>>27460154
I bet the answer to that is "not go full retard."

>>27460156
I don't think he's that naive.

>>27460156
This is a quest on /tg/. That was never in the cards.

>>27457572
Vedibere, I wasn't even around when VoidQuest was running, I just read it during a long archive trawl. But it was still one of the best things I've ever read, and I want to thank you for wrapping it up.

Yeah, I don't even remember half of these people mentioned.
Who is Rinn? Burr? Ketro? Dai?

Parsons, of course, we cannot forget.
>gently bump Parson with the ship

>>27463035
>Not remembering Chief Engineer Boss Honcho Dai and Good Doctor Burr, Last of His Kind

Disappointing.

>>27463035
Ketro was the crazy egotistical scientist popsicle that we recovered. He eventually got re-popsicled after he tried to shank Dai.

Dai was probably one of the only two people on the ship who might actually have been able to kill us, considering the Harbinger was his baby. Though he was pretty cool most of the time.

>Epilogue
Vedi, that word does not mean what you think it does...

>>27464462
It's the closest I could get but still compressed into one word.

I just wanted to thank you Vedibere for Void Quest. I was at my uncle's house in DC around the time we went into that plague facility, and every night for damn near a month i looked in vain for a thread.

I have to say that Void Quest is truly the best quest that i ever took part in, especially in writing. I still remember chortling with glee at "Bumping it gently".

But I understand your thinking in regards to continuing. It was a lot of detail to remember, and you are not the kind of GM to let us get away with stupid bullshit scot-free.

Never-the-less, i still blame Parsons.

>>27465532
> Never-the-less, i still blame Parsons.

Man, I remember his break down. Felt so bad for him at the time.

Hey, I remember voidquest! It was pretty cool.

I hope you run a fantasy quest sometime, Vedibere. It'd be pretty neat to see what you'd do in a world with actual magic. And it'd be hilarious to see /tg/ utterly screw itself over with frivolous wizardry.

I only read Voidquest in the archives but it was one of the few quests I really liked. Regarding your next quests I don't have a preference, as long as you continue to QM as you did before it will be a nice contrast to all those two-dimensional quests which seem to be stuck in super easy mode with 100x the exp gain and no chance of failure.

Concerning the new quest: maybe something like MegaCorp quest? I really liked it and I think you are one of the few who could pull something like this off.

>>27469512
I could still be convinced otherwise, but I've already begun research on a medieval nobleman quest to be begun within the next few days.

>>27471224
Hell yes! Is there gonna be magic? I hope there's gonna be magic, I thought Dead King's Quest was awesome and this sounds like it might be similar.

Holy shit! Reading!

>>27471224
That sounds great, but running a fortune 500 company with unscrupulous business practices whilst sipping the finest whiskey and enjoying the best cigars sounds awesome as well.

>>27472076
Having actually worked in that world and dealt with those people, it is not nearly as awesome as it sounds.

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>Void Quest
HAHA! Time to gently b-
>Epilogue
Well crap. Thanks for coming back though!

Seriously, 2 years later.

I spent 3 months waiting then said "Fuck it, we need more space!" and did what I could with some old notes that were never going to make it into book form.

It's still too bad this couldn't be restarted but you're right about things not being recent enough. Hell I could only barely remember Tynes, though I still remember Rinn being basically equivalent to a Space Marine. And our wonderfully screwed up attempts at interacting with Ivanova. It was good fun while it lasted.

>>27473072
> Ivanova
She just pushed all the right buttons.

If we had let Ketro kill Dai, how would the crew have reacted? Would Ketro have tried to undermine our authority later, as some people speculated?

On another note, did you ever get tired with all the arguing that went on?

I just read through the whole archive and it was awesome. Thank you Vedibere, I wish more questrunners could give some kind of closure to their quest.

>>27471224
Ah, that's a shame
/tg/ cannot in that type of games. They try to act intellectual and smart but given opportunity they will resort to direct violence even though they are supposed to be playing a rich noble with many underlings and thugs to do their dirty work.
I'm also guilty of this.

But you're great writer, I'm sure you can make it an outstanding quest

>>27478541
Like I said, I am not 100% set yet. It's basically down to medieval nobleman quest or northman warrior quest, though. Northman being a Scandinavian warrior deal.

>>27479852
If you're doing Northman, you should definitely put in some Eastern Roman Empire expy to open up a Varangian Guard option/sub-plot

You're just going to keep bumping this every two hours, hm?

>>27480616
Varangian Guard? What's that? Sounds shitty.

I kid, I've already written branches for the possibility if I choose to go with Northman. That said, it would only be one small option in a large sea of them, and one that is very far away from home to boot.

>>27480680
At the very least there should be NPCs who were former Varangians, with the experience, wealth and/or glory that implies.

>>27480680
Vedibere, how can you p-personally...t-teach me? I want you to teach-teach-teach me how you run your quests!

>>27480636
Yup.
Gently.

>>27485161
It's been up for almost 48 hours now, everyone who cares has probably seen it, and nothing else is going to happen.

How about a quest where we play a powerful evil, an ancient evil or just a really bad dude. I mean, really evil, none of that pragmatic, benevolent dictator thing.
Black Comedy quest gave us some hope for really evil fuckery but it died in two threads

>>27480680
When thinking of alternatives to 4chan for quests my first thought would not be registering a domain name and setting up a server. Am I to assume you have already considered and ruled out more conventional alternatives like tgchan, anonkun and mspaforums?

Vedibere @Vedibere 30m
Registering a domain name and setting up a server for a quest BBS. Should be more conducive to thought-out long term planning than 4chan.

Wow, that's pretty dedicated.

>>27486076
For tgchan and anonkun, yes, I considered both of them and chose the route I did for various other reasons. I did not know about mspaforums but upon investigation the quests/RPs the culture does not seem to be centered around same depth of storytelling that I am looking for. Pretentions, ahoy!

I did search for various RP forums that fit with the theme I was looking for but a lot of them seem to have quite a bit of associated baggage to come with them. If possible would prefer to use an existing BBS, both for the playerbase and because I am lazy. That said, since I did not find one in my search, I also did not shy away from making my own.

>>27486442
Have you tried Spacebattle's BROB section (the sheer number of quests requires quite a bit of sifting for the good ones) or Questionable Questing? Though the latter is very slow.

>>27485244
Not everyone visits /tg/ on a daily or 2-3 day basis.

>>27486442
I agree that in general none of the quest sites have even a slight focus on the kind of story you run. Nonetheless similar in-depth stories on those sites. Here on 4chan there is, for example, the Nazi in Fantasy Land quest. The premise is silly but was taken completely seriously. What came out of it is fascinating. It's slow enough to last a couple of days with sometimes only 10 posts per day. People have time to think and it shows. On Tgchan there is a serious stories every now and then, though I can't think of a good recent example. On mspaforums there has been a very serious adventure called Art of Domination. It frequently invited pages and pages of discussion and argumentation. From short term battle-strategies to ethical ramifications to possible ways to steer our scientists' research, everything was there. A couple really bright people made it quite interesting. Right now there is Deep Rise, which features one of the most interesting worlds. Just look at some excerpts about their society, language, biology etc here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=99545.0 The story itself is one of the most interesting and serious as well. We follow a group of youngsters who lose their home and escape to a completely different culture and even race. The whole world-view is alien and slowly they learn from humans and vice versa.

tl;dr: Good and slow stories with deep stories and can florish on all those sites. You don't need to create your own site just because your style is not main-stream enough.

>>27487017
>>27486722
I did not know about Questionable Questing, and I thank you for pointing it out. It might well be suitable, I'm going to drop the admin a PM or two for verification. SB is not, sadly, because of the nature of the upcoming quests and their more heavy handed moderation. The possible quests being set in the middle ages, unfortunately, means that gore, rapine, and marriage to uncomfortably-young women As an aside, this skeeves me enough that I just can't bring myself to go full historical, but the boundary I set at 15 will still legally be underage in the US will be not only possible, but probably inevitable -- even if only viewed from a distance, as something others do.

>>27487132
So is your next quest going to be on /tg/ or on some other site?

>>27487341
Another site, for sure. The only question at this point is if I open my own for the purpose or if QQ is suitable.

>>27487132
Damn tragedy how questing in SB turned out. It's because the mods and admin are all from the versus section of the forum and view the creative writing and quest areas as "hives of scum" and moderate accordingly (locking quests with heated arguments instead of banning the offender, etc.) QQ as it exists is ending up as the "rebel safehouse" for SB's more serious QMs.

>>27487635
Similar (though maybe lower-scale) stuff happened on mspaforums. The new site authors who were too upset with the moderation is called hidden level.