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What with the God Machine Chronicle being out now, my OCD has been acting up, and I want to take a crack at making my stupid little homebrew function in the shiny new tighter ruleset, and also take the opportunity to re-think some basic assumptions; bring machines down in power a little bit, make them more equivalent to humans (or at least, experienced humans).

I've been going over the wordings on things like merits and specialties and suchlike, but I'm simply not sure what to do with Willpower, Charge, and Spark, and could even imagine simplifying the Applications down.

I realize that a game that's basically Fallout with more robots isnt extremely suited to the WoD system, so if someone has any better ideas for a ruleset, I'd love to hear them.

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>>28847366
Is there an example in existence of the new framework for supernaturals? How resources are expended, and how powers advance? because if I can rework Applications to feel more like the supernatural merits in the God Machine Chronicle, I'd be A-okay with that.

Honestly, at this point, I'm just at a loose end on what to do with the whole Lost Future thing. I feel bad for ending the Quest, I know that the video game is an absurd pipe dream, and as an RPG its incredibly niche.

But then, so is Mouseguard...

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/tg/? You've always been such a font of ideas.

...Maybe I've gone too far up my own ass, this being a thread about a ruleset based on a quest from a year ago based on a video game idea from 2 years ago.

>>28847675
it's a legitimately interesting idea. don't get me wrong.

i'm tired anon, i don't want to write anything right now.

>>28847238
O hey, you're still alive and so is the project!
If you want to, think up on how supernaturals would or could exist in the setting of Machine. How would Vamps exist? How would Weres exist? Fae? What are their reactions to the Machines, and vice versa?

>>28847238
The cover image being a Naruto ANBU is really not making me want to look into this game.

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Okay, /tg/, here's a more general question:

What the hell should I do with the Inn0cence: Lost Future concept, assuming I'm now bored enough to devote time to it again.

Do I:

1. Take another crack at a high concept pitch document and shop it around some indie devs

2. Finish Lost Future Quest

3. Start a new Quest in the Lost Future Setting

4. Take a serious crack at a RPG ruleset, one thats more action-oriented.

5. For the love of god, stop bothering /tg/ with my spammy bullshit.

6. Lean to draw for shit so my scribbles are less offensive.

7. [Other]

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I've always enjoyed this setting. One of these days I should go back and read the old threads.

I don't have any experience with the WoD system, but how has it worked for you in the past? There's also fitting it to one of the generic systems like GURPS or BRP.

I need to finish getting shit done myself. Stuff for gigerverse. Have something by the same guy who drew all of those Network bots.

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>>28847882
I actually had to look up what the hell ANBU stands for. I know almost nothing of Naruto, and what I do know makes me hate it.

the hockey-mask face motif for many robots was a conscious design choice made for uncanny valley reasons.

>>28847882
It's supposed to be a robot wearing a jacket. I don't know if the drawing is older than the setting though.

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>>28848032
It was made for the setting. It was based on this image, but the drawfag applied his own sensibilities.

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>>28847930
Geigerverse? The setting where EVERYTHING is H.P. Geiger inspired, right down to office furniture?

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Maybe I should have posted this from the get-go. I guess I assumed knowledge and enthusiasm.

http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Setting:Inn0cence:_Lost_Future

Inn0cence: Lost Future started as a video game concept that was expanded into a /tg/ original setting. The whole thing has been stymied by my personal lack of artistic or writing skill.

The idea is a modern re-examination of the humans-vs-machines terminator future. Lost Future is post-apoc and has gritty human rebels and an evil robot army, but...this time, things are different. The world is verdant and overgrown, the Skynet forces are gooey and non-humanoid, and the viewpoint characters are surviving free robots, who by this point are speshul snowflakes with belts and scarves, quirky personalities, and favorite guns.

So, its pretty much Wall-E vs The Terminator, or 9 with more guns.

>>28848096
Okay.
Sorry that I can't be much of a help right now with working on some new crunch. The fluff is some good stuff.

>>28848171
ESPECIALLY the office furniture.
Waitaminnit, wasn't that the OP pic for the first thread?

>>28848384
>Bloated hanging spider made of screaming robot heads.

OP's setting is fucked up. Also, sounds like a decent boss fight.

>>28848171
black fucking sabbath Geiger looks ugly in that

>>28849492
Geiger is possessed of a rather lugubrious mien.

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Bump with drawfaggotry, then turning in.

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>>28848384
I've always liked the fluff from this page.
http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Setting:Inn0cence:_Lost_Future/Lost_Future_Appendix

Maybe until you find or make a different system for the setting, you could organize everything with the nWoD stuff into a pdf.

Also, is there a reason why you've never made an entry for Clarke Unit 08 on the characters page?

>something that I drew for an old drawthread

>>28847926

I am simultaneously selfish and lazy, so I vote for anything regarding, "More /tg/ quests with Lost Future," because that's the optimal brew of getting more of what I want whilst not having to do jack shit. The setting is pure fucking aces, and Lost Future remains among my favorite quests ever - and, being a tremendous homofag, I like a LOT of quests.

So I dunno, man, do what makes you feel like a big cool man or whatever.

I fucking loved the quest and would be stoked if your continued it, but I know it can be pretty taxing.

I've said before I love the setting but could never convince my group to play it

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Glad to see that this hasn't been completely abandoned.
I would love to see continuation to the Lost Future quest.

By the way, OP, if you're still here: elaborate more on the world. Maybe show what happens worldwide. Who knows what other local monstrosity or culture has developed in the aftermath?

>>28855017
This would be cool, I can imagine the waves Clarke made as he Bent open a can of Whupass so big it could be seen from space. People talking about it for miles.

>>28855017
to be honest, Ive always wanted to aim for a Playstation-1&2-era sort of feel for the setting; broad strokes, you know? A bit like Oddworld or Borderlands, where the rest of the universe is...undefined until encountered. Likewise with the pre-loss world. Obviously, I never stuck to that as hard as I should, but it was an original goal.

But what I think would be cool is if africa actually became developed and modernized to a degree, but the chinese owned it lock stock and barrel, apart from some former french holdings. Thus making its post-apocalypse...interesting.

Thus when things start to go to shit, africa is full of robots and PMCs, and the main players are the French spec-ops and mech units, South African mercs, and Chinese-backed african forces. This gives you lots of surviving infrastructure to slowly crumble, shit-tons of guns lying about the place, lots of robots of all sorts, including hulking tank-sized killbots, and interesting non-standard terrain. Also, everyone has the bossest accents ever.

The only problem is that africa lacks those super-picturesque mossy old-growth forests that america has; fuck, JAPAN has/had more picturesque ghibli-hills mossy old-growth forests.

>>28856248
I hit upon the problem that I'd love any game/RPG to NOT take place in the ruins of america, with all that "fallen statue of liberty, rusty golden-gate bridge" sort of stuff. I'd actually prefer it if so much time had passed that no one gives a shit about things like city names and monuments; to the humans, its just "the city" and "the big rusty thingy," and to robots its like a hazy dreamy early-childhood-memory where they weren't really engaged with the world.

The Last of Us already did the super-nostalgia thing. Inn0cence takes place after...long enough that no living human has firsthand memories of the pre-apocalyptic world.

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dumping some old fan art for this project. I was always captivated by the salvage and upgrade aspect.

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>>28856794
here was my submission for what to do with some salvaged network hardware. glorious spelling errors everywhere.

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>>28856822
alternate cofiguration

>>28856794
mmmm, I do love that concept for the coilgun. In particular, I love the micro-forge.

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>>28856829
some sort of south american/ mexican made rocklet based squad support weapon. really simple to make and maintain in my concept.

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>>28856850
going with the "this is not america" theme, I tried my best to create a weapon that could litter the streets, be part of crime, be durable, and exist forever, have its own look. compact defense weapon.

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>>28856863
this one was silly, but it is based off those novelty alcohol bottles. a single shot .50 cal "gun".

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>>28856884
Akira laser, but french. I am ashame.

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>>28856896
finally, ferlow. I always wanted to run a game with him, but I never did. It will haunt me forever. feel free to loot him or anything else.

>>28847675
Hey OP, I'll don my name for only a moment. This is indeed a 4chan thread, on /tg/ but the place where the idea is developed is not so important. What you are creating here is cool, it inspires many of us, drives people to want to see it to completion. Though with things like this they are never done, which is in itself is beautiful.

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>>28857344
Working on some new fan art myself. And yes, that is a converted Network killbot in the back. I shall call it Clunker.

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>>28856863
I like it, but I do wish that it had a more...Tediore look to it. Its still the future, and that means flat future guns in the p90 family.

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>>28857408

Looks great!
I especially like the look of that robot with the bat.

>>28857408
Holy shit, I SO want to see what that looks like when its finished.

Kill count on the torso is nice.

I presume the human is a Salvager, what with his big ole headphones.

A complaint I might have is that the manipulator on the converted Network bot looks a little crude and clamp-y (Give him the CLAMPS!). I presume its scratch-built.

The fast-runny-knifey cyclops dude up top is looking cool. If there's room, I'd suggest throwing in a small robot, either a Locust or maybe one of those Dwarf/gremlin guys.

>>28857580
I got some other crude bits planned for the converted Network bot. It was heavily damaged before the conversion happened. Some assembly was required.

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>>28857580
>>28857469
>>28857408
Robot with the bat does perfectly capture the look of "android" lost future robots; the ones designed to have human capabilities and use human stuff.

Don't forget that Free Machines can also look in this vein, especially military ones.

>>28857627
Consider making it less top-heavy as you finish it. The pelvis could contain a lot of vital components.

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>>28857408
And I'm gonna stop here for now. Lines are done, and the bandannas are highlighted. I was gonna do a C1NDY-esque bot carrying the woman with the walkie-talkie, but I liked >>28857659's pic and suggestion enough to swap it out.

If anyone wants to color it, be my guest!

>>28858809

That looks fantastic.

>>28858809
i really, really like the image, but I have to warn you. Upper right, unintentional shoe phallus. you will not be able to unsee it.

>>28859814
Generally, when digitigrade feet/legs are runing, the digits close/flex

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>>28859837
I presume you mean pic.

Those robot legs aren't actually digitigrade though. There's really no good analog for them. They're just kind of backwards, or maybe recurved.

>>28859636
Thanks. Also been thinking about the characters in that picture. From the left:

>Clunker
>Converted Network killbot
Red-Net's heavy weapons guy... er... bot. It was heavily damaged during a raid which destroyed an entire resistance Free Machines contingent. Red-Net's leader thought it was a FANTASTIC idea to take it in and tinker with it. And to everyone's surprise, it WAS a good idea after all. The only big issue is the parts of the armor that wasn't able to be fixed, and sub-par substitute for the left leg.

>Mickey
>Free Machines android
Originally a machine made for sports exhibitions, Mickey would develop rather destructive programming when left to its own devices. After long enough, Mickey refused to follow anyone's orders, until a young man came along and eventually formed a bond with it, allowing it to better control its tendencies. It unsurprisingly prefers to use melee weapons in battle in combination with its speed.

>Stan
>Human militia
Stan is an old dog who has seen his fair share of war by now. And he's become VERY good at fighting, often throwing himself head-first into a firefight and leaving with mostly insignificant injuries. However, he's also has had a love of baseball, one of the few memories of his childhood he remembers with extreme clarity. He made a bond with Mickey after being assigned with the Free Machine during an operation over that love of baseball, able to affect it in ways that most salvagers and programmers cannot.

>Cont'd

>>28860168
And going up now...

>Rabbit
>Free Machines military bot
Rabbit is one of the earlier models that fought in the beginning of the war. But with a little tweaking over the years by Red-Net's young leader, it has at least escaped obscurity. Rabbit was modified to specialize in reconnaissance, but lately it has also doubled as a means of personal transport for the leader, easily able to carry the leader's weight and maintain its incredible agility. It has no personality to speak of, but it obeys the leader's orders without question.

>Ellen
>Human salvager
A young woman and the leader of Red-Net. Ellen is best known for her zeal and passion for the resistance against Network, for reasons unknown. She is also very well known for her ability to salvage, refurbish, and reprogram machines, both Free and Network. However, she is not a terribly good fighter, which has led her to lose part of her right leg in a recent battle. This has limited her personal project Rabbit's ability to engage in combat, as it has to carry her when walking with a cane is not an option.

>>28859814
God. Dammit! Unintentional robo-penises!

>>28859837
>>28860012
This is an odd issue. Clunker is actually hovering and moving at the same time due to the use of its jets. Also, the left leg has a jury-rigged replacement on it, which changes things. And then there's Rabbit, whose legs aren't as articulated as a digitgrade animal, only really made for one type of motion - bouncy.

>>28858809
Nice.
I hope that this is still around when I'm back from work.

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>>28860187
Obviously I love this, these are good characters, and I'm not normally a fan of "squads" or named teams with formal leaders.

I always think of Lost Future as coming from a more "melancholy children's adventure" sort of place, where organizations are things you encounter, not things you're part of (EX: Last of Us, Joel and Ellie aren't Fireflies, they're just folks,), and I like to lean towards duos. Imagine Calvin and Hobbes or Finn and Jake (hell, or Simon and Marcy), more-or-less living as they please, but in a much darker, more dangerous world. Just living day to day, but increasingly encountering more conflict and bullshit until it overtakes them and they're FORCED to fight.

Well, that was the original feel anyways. An RPG obviously has to lean more towards parties and such.

A robot I always wanted to make, but never had a really good idea for, was a bird-bot-of-alcatraz sort of character; a weird hermit who had a flock of crows that followed him around.

>>28860852
Actually, here's something old I managed to track down on my hard drive:

::Scene: Split-screen multiplayer match, a generic halo-ish FPS. Player 1 is kicking the ass of Player 2. There appear to be no other players. ::
Player 2: Shit...
Player1: Haha! you walked right into that one
Player 2: shut up. I was distracted.
Player 1: By what? Fear of me kicking your-
Player 2: By trying to figure out this controller. You gave me the crappy one again.
::View pulls out to show two hunched figures in front of a glowing television. Both are in shadow, save for the controllers.::
Player 1: We've only got the two controllers, and they're both crappy.
Player 2: But this one's crappier. And you won't let me plug in directly-
Player 1: Oh, what a fine day this is. The time has come at last when one of you needs to cheat to beat a hu-
::Plink Plink Plink::
-what was that?
::Player 1 reaches over to pick up what looks like a handheld depthfinder putting out an obscure readout. He shakes it, and it makes plink noises ::
Player 2: Is there something out there?
Player 1: Its been acting up lately. Check the wireless channels
::the two are now revealed to be sitting in the backseat of a pickup truck, the dusty flatscreen sitting in the front, propped up against the dash. One wears a knit cap, the other a bandanna. Player 2, his silouette revealed to be oddly blocky, turns on the battered, much-repaired, but obviously advanced and modified radio. A three-fingered, blocky hand fiddles with the knobs, churning through static. Its plain that most of the radio band is utterly silent. Eventually, it reaches a station that puts out fast-paced clicking beeps, like modem noises.::

>>28860992
Player 1: Its not a Free signal, is it? Just encrypted?
Player 2: Nope. It's Networked.
::The two pause for a moment. Player 1 looks back at the scanner, featuring lots of moving dots nearing the center. In unison, they exclaim "Shit!" and fumble into action. The tv is turned off, and a sheet of semi-reflective camo webbing is pulled out of the truck bed, which also contains a variety of supplies and salvage. Weapons are retrieved, a hunting rifle and a white plastic police handgun.::
Player 2 (intense whisper): Can you see what's out there?
Player 1 (angry whisper): I could if I had the fucking GOGGLES!
Player 2 (intense whisper): you had them last!
Player 1 (whisper): No, I...oh yeah, sorry, man.
::More fumbling. The camera pulls out from the truck, revealing that it rests in a derelict parking lot, rusted-out, moldering cars all around it. the ominous bulk of a wal-mart looms behind it, and the asphalt is cracked in numerous places, allowing saplings to sprout. It is night, but the moon casts shadows. As the camera retracts to the edge of the lot, a hulking shadow briefly occludes the view. Nothing can be seen of it apart from a white plastic gleam and a faint red glow from the front.::
Player 1: There's no power. Do we have any batt-
Player 2: give it here.
::perspective cuts back to the pair, lurking inside the bed of the truck, weapons out, fearful. Player 2, now obviously a machine, fumbles with a pair of bulky night vision goggles. he plugs a chord from his own torso into the goggles, and hands them back to player 1, a grubby young man wearing a knit cap, who stares out into the darkness::
Player 1: Okay, we're set. I don't see anything, so they could be just passing near us. We sit tight until...oh crap. Why are THEY here?
::view switches to that of the goggles, which, in green glowy graphics, pick out the forms of humans, clad in ragged body armor, carrying rifles and steel clubs/axes, stealthily making their way nearer::

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>>28861012
Player 2: Its not Network?
Player 1: No. Resistance. Maybe they saw the glow from the TV, and came to investigate. We can drive them off. Do you have the gren-
Player 2: Simply talk to them. I can remain under the truck. They will not-
Player 1: -turn the truck upside down, looking for "Contributions" to the war? Run an error-check if that's what you think. Damn it, what's Greysky doing this far west?
Player 2: ...But we also caught a signal.
::View shifts again to green nightvision, the humans continuing to move into the parking lot.
Player 1: Yeah, but I don't see-
::As player two watches, a dark spot moves on the edge of vision, a hole in the world, a gangling digitigrade shape.
Player 1: Never mind. They're here too, moving on the right.
Player 2: And the humans don't...LOOK OUT! NETWORK ON YOUR THREE!
::There is a moment of confusion as the soldiers pause, looking to their chieftain, a man wielding the best gun and wearing armor smeared with ochre. Orders are barked and flares lit. The magnesium torches illuminate the surroundings, revealing several inhuman shapes, disturbingly close, patiently awaiting their prey. Someone screams "fire!" and lead begins to fly.::
Player 1 (0ver the sound of gunfire): Huh. This actually works out great for us.

>>28861047

::The firefight continues, with humans and machines dodging between derelict cars, the crackle of coilguns met by rifle fire. Stray bullets ping off the truck, making the two Salvagers wince. A few well-armored humans charge with axes and hammers, smashing Killbots apart before they adapt to the new tactics, rallying around a bladed dirvish unit that cuts down several of the berzerkers. The humans begin a firing retreat, the Network forces advancing after them. A huge machine bearing a railgun and 4 crab-like legs strides forward, stepping near the truck. The robot pauses, looking suspiciously at the camo netting. A solid strike from a hand cannon recaptures its attention, however, and it continues to follow the fleeing humans. The sounds of battle slowly receed, the flares sputtering to death.::
::Carefully, the two Salvagers leave their hiding place, Player 1 checking the truck while player two investigates the dead.::
Player 2: One Network casualty. I count three dead humans.
Player 1: (from inside the cab) ...no. The TV! They got our fucking TV! It's Wasted, man! Of all the things to catch a stray bullet. We could have traded that for...anything!
::A sympathetic groan echoes out from the parking lot::
Player 1: I know, right?
Player 2: Ummm...that was not me.
::Player 1 switches on a floodlamp that bathes the area in stark LED lightPlayer two examines the human bodies again. Turning one over reveals a thin young man with a blossom of blood on his chest. He moves feebly::
Player 2: This one is alive!

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>>28861069
::The machine kneels beside the wounded human, unwraping its bandana to create a makeshift bandage.::
Player 2: please remain calm. You have been wounded, but you will likely survive if-
::Player 1 looks on from a distance, shaking his head.::
Player 1: (to himself) We do not need this. (to player 2): If you want to play doctor, you'll have to do it elsewhere. We have to leave, NOW. While you save the meathead, I'M going to recoup our losses.
::Player 1 retrieves a crowbar and moves over to the downed Killbot.::
Player 2: Does this hurt? [Groan] A rib appears to be broken. This reduced the bullet's velocity, thus preserving your life. If-
::The soldier at last opens his eyes through the pain, and sees the machine crouching over him. A snarl of disgust contorts his face as he reflexively reaches for a weapon, a steel handaxe at his side. Propelled by adrenaline and rage, the man swings the axe at Player 2. The machine raises an arm defensively, resulting in a spray of sparks and amber fluids as the axe head bites through plastic and cabling. Player 1 sees this, and begins yelling as he sprints toward the two::
Player 1: Hey Hey Hey! You crazy fucker-
::Undeterred, the soldier throws himself at Player 2, causing the surprised machine to fall backwards. The axe rises again, and then falls towards Player 2's mesh-covered neck. The blow connects with the lower part of his faceplate, fracturing the plastic and exposing delicate components. There is an electronic screech as his microphone system malfunctions, and another wild blow kills it completely. As the axe rises a fourth time, Player 1's prybar connects solidly with the side of its wielder's head. The man freezes, blinking, half his skull stoven in, and another blow to the face leaves him bonelessly draped over Player 2.::

>>28847926
You know, I've been getting into this thing called "Quest". It's a text adventure engine. I used to make text adventures when I was a wee kid and this engine has sparked me to start again. It supports videos, sounds and pictures too, with automatic mapping and hyperlinked text.

I did an alpha-test character generation tool (and a small easter egg text adventure test) for Song of Swords thing Galt and co from Opaque are doing.

Here's a link to it:
http://play.textadventures.co.uk/Play.aspx?id=sssd4pptheu3fxzgyrhb0q
("Hi" and "Jimmy" for the text adventure test I did.)

If you'd be willing to descend back to 70s and 80s text adventures, then I'd like to have a crack at this with you.

Quest engine is easy as hell to use. You don't even need any formal programming for making simple text adventures or adventure books. SO, that's what I'm suggesting.

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>>28861090
Player 1: You sick, stupid fucker. He was trying to-
::Player 1 pulls the dead man off player 2, revealing his sorry state. smeared with blood, his whole lower head has been broken off, giving him a grotesque, jawless appearance, and one optic is cracked and dark. There is a sputtering of sparks from where his voicebox would be, and one arm twitches feebly.::
Player 1: are you alright?
::Player 2's good hand fumbles about inside his face, and a staticy, pained-sounding voice replies::
Player 2: ...treme ch-chassis damage. S......nificant....m...to arm. Optic n-nonf-f-f-....tional. sppp-eaker near sc-rap, as you...n see.
::Player 1 helps player 2 to his feat. Player 2 seems entanced by the dead human, while player 1 goes back to the downed killbot::
Player 1: enough dicking around. I need to get this thing's tracker burned so we can load it in the truck. Now we have to find a mechanic to fix you up, and I still need to eat somtime this week.
::Player 2 finishes fiddling with his speaker, still staring at the surprised face of the dead human. He looks very young, with patchy teenage facial hair.::
Player 1: I hope you learned your lesson; there's no talking to those meatheads. The story about that lion is bullshit, man.

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>>28861106
::Together, the pair heave the heavy Killbot into the bed of the truck, then enter the cab and start the engine. It hums to life, obviously electric, and the truck begins to wirr away. Player 2 drives, while player 1 switches his view from the scanner to out the window, one hand on his gun. Player 2 speaks, voice still fading in and out::
Player 2: does it hurt?
Player 1: does what hurt?
Player 2: you killed him. Does it hurt?
Player 1: Why would you ask me that?
Player 2: (pauses)...It would hurt me.
::Player 1 stares out the window, an inscrutable expression on his face. He looks back at Player 2, arm hanging loosely at his side, one optic dark.
Player 1: A bit, yeah.
::View pans out to truck from above, headlights faintly illuminating the debris-strewn road in front of it, moonlight glinting off the outline of a crumbling city in the distance.::
Big words: INN0CENCE: LOST FUTURE
::Black screen, info rolls. Voices are heard::
Player 1: enough of this silence crap. We need tunes.
::Led Zep begins to play. As the song begins, it abruptly shifts to Black Keys::
Player 1: Hey! You've only got the one hand, and it stays on the wheel!
::Music switches back to Zep::
Player 2: Hobbits? really?
Player 1: Fuck you. The Keys were flavor-of-the-month and you know it. Might as well put on Maroon 5...
::Pause::
Player 2: Can we?
Player 1: NO!
Player 2: Remind me, who's the one missing his eye?
Player 1: ...Fine.

>>28861100
Wow. I was just playing Croshaw's semi-Text-adventure Roguelike "The Consuming Shadow," and was impressed with what such simple mechanics can convey when an atmosphere is maintained.

Provided we can find a decent artist to do still pictures or simple flash animation, I'd actually be really interested in that. But it sounds intimidating as hell.

>>28860992
>>28861012
>>28861047
>>28861069
>>28861090
>>28861106
>>28861164
I was trying to visualize a short trailer or vignette to convey the setting. I know it has problems, but i think I nailed the "those two guys" characters.

>>28861164
>Player 2: does it hurt?
>Player 1: does what hurt?
>Player 2: you killed him. Does it hurt?
>Player 1: Why would you ask me that?
>Player 2: (pauses)...It would hurt me.

Chills.

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I know this is turbo-autismal, but why is this gorka-2 thing so common. It's a military two piece suit from post-soviet russia. did they raid a /k/ warehouse or something?

>>28861218
If worst come to worse, even I could draw when the drawing time comes.

The good thing about Quest is that it has alive community(with forum to ask help in), up-to-date wiki with tutorials and reference material for all things Quest. Also, the developer is really helpful and talks with the community.

I'd show you a picture of how easy the editor is, if 4chan would allow me to upload. You basically just need to click what you want and write text. Something more complicated like character combat system would require more clicking and stuff, but that's what I would like to learn and do.

>>28861554
I can think of reasons; under Lifetime-President Putin, Russia begins to project more military and economic power; its main export actually BEING military shit for other people to buy. Lots of PMCs get all their gear from russian catalogs; its Cabellas for Mercs.

But probably the drawfag just has an obsession with russian military gear.

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>>28861650
Let's try this. BEHOLD, the creation of a room description!

>>28861164
>>28861106
>>28861090
>>28861069
>>28861047
>>28861012
>>28860992

This was nice.

>>28861650
I'm looking at it right now. Throw me an e-mail at some point.

To everyone else, what would you like to see from a text adventure? I'm thinking something on the short side, and without a HUGE cast of characters (as in, no party, just one dude and maybe a companion at certain points).

Now in my head I'm seeing Prequel: adventures in making a cat cry.

>>28861164
>>28861106
>>28861090
>>28861069
>>28861047
>>28861012
>>28860992

The actual events seem abrupt and not particularly satisfying, but there's the germ of something here. Maybe expand it out so that they travel further from the truck? Bigger fight scene?

>>28847926

2. Finish Lost Future Quest
3. Start a new Quest in the Lost Future Setting

7. For the love of god, never stop bothering /tg/ with your spammy bullshit.

sincerily, anon.

>>28860852
I can definitely see where you were going with that. Unnamed characters and limited information about the folks of the world definitely support an apocalyptic feel. In such an environment, I suppose that in an apocalyptic reality, a long overarching story with a defined ensemble of characters wouldn't likely exist. An apocalypse outside of drama would be too chaotic to keep track of until the power vacuums have all but been filled.

I suppose where I was coming from was: If I were playing this on a tabletop, what sort of party would be assembled? Because seriously, trying to keep track of 3, 4, 5, or more characters in their separate chaotic adventures in the middle of a harrowing apocalypse (if we were going the simulationist route) would kill me. It may be done online in separate sessions, but dangit I like the social aspect of role playing games too much to do something like that. Just a matter of taste.

Thanks for the input though, and feel free to pilfer and modify these little character nuggets as you see fit!

Friendly bumb.

Are you intending on posting more regularly about your setting from now on Op?
There was pretty long hiatus since the last time you made a thread about this setting.

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>>28864165
And a solo pic of a character. What could he be looking at?

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>>28865845
And a friendly bump to keep things a-goin'.

So, o-[||||]-o, what qualities were you wanting in a system to use for Inn0cence? One of us may come up with a match, or there could be someone who knows a thing or two about homebrew crunch.

>>28868776
A system that goes towards the simulationist end of things; a system that contains numerous ways to punish player characters, that's reasonably lethal, and has a decent approximation of tactical combat. Basically, not 3.5 or 4e, and WoD only works when you snip out a lot of ancilliary rules and setting assumptions regarding things like organizations and social combat. Honestly, something that feels like a simplified Dark Heresy would work best, I think. A system that has resource managment built in to characters.

>>28865714
I kind of felt like I was shitspamming /tg/, and interest seemed limited, so I went out and tried to do other things, like make friends and interact with people socially. That plainly hasn't worked out.

>>28872065
Like I mentioned earlier, I have no experience with WoD, but I have some with the 40k RPGs. The d% based system it uses seems simple enough. Mainly a matter of stripping away the original fluff. I haven't looked at it much myself, but going through the AdEva pdfs could be a reference for doing such.

When using any pre-existing system, there will be things to cut out or add on as needed, like you just mentioned with WoD. During some free time, I'd be willing to partake in some test play to figure out which system you'd prefer.

>>28872065

Well, it's good to have you back here.
I always liked this setting, unfortunately however, I apparently live in a different time zone, so I kind of had hard time catching these threads.

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bump

bumping in hopes of a game.

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My main question is this:

How is this supposed to be different from Promethean?

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>>28878229
Because it features hard-ish sci-fi robots in a post-apocalyptic setting. The whole point is really the setting and the Wall-E vs The Terminator aesthetic. Its like Engine Heart with more guns, and most humans treating you like shit. Yes, it has the same themes of alienation and self-discovery.

Also, these robots aren't trying to become human. They're trying to become themselves.

>>28878818
Also, the other conceit is that, to a free robot, Skynet (Network) is in some ways more terrifying than it is to humans. To machines, Skynet is The Borg. It doesn't just kill you, it assimilates you.

Have you tried looking at setting-less systems to work with this, rather than something like WoD?

Why not a FATE variant?

>>28878864
I have a hard-on for crunchy tactical combat. FATE is too narrativist for me.

And I have this weird bias against it and GURPS for some reason. But I know that systems like Eclipse Phase and Dark Heresy are clunky baroque nightmares (which is appropriate in the case of Dark Heresy)

Try Savage Worlds. It's simple, streamlined, but crunchy at the same time.

>>28879338
This. It does tactical combat very, very well.

>>28878846

Didn't the network have some human like infiltrator bots too?

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Does the Network only have presence in Americas, or does it span to other continents as well?

>>28881488
I think that's one of those "Not explicitly said nor told" details.

>making robots weaker then or comparable to humans
for what purpose we already have promos whos entire goal is to be human

>>28881804

What are you talking about?

This is so nice. I did something not too dissimilar once (robots in a postapocalyptic environments trying to find themselves) but the Apocalypse there was actually the biblical apocalypse.

>>28882644

Robots fighting daemons?
Intriguing concept.

It's like you have legit never heard of Promethean - there's even a machine man type of them called Unfleshed in a splatbook, and a core book type of promethean - the tammuz - who are golems struggling to live an independent life when they were created for a specific purpose.

>>28884427
Read next time.

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Semi related news that are pretty interesting.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/14/5209622/google-has-bought-robotics-company-boston-dynamics

>>28884336
Most of these robots would make excellent Angels and Demons in Demon: The Decent. Drawfag, you got some serious talent.

bump

>>28881488
Well, that's one of those undefined setting problems. I'd say that Network has presence wherever whatever story is being told is set in. Originally as a video game, it would have been set in, like, europe. But Network is always coming from the North. Always.

The default narrative assumes that you're in a place where there could have been serious armed conflict in the past (to leave military tech and abandoned killbots lurking around), where there were large urban centers (to create ominous labyrinths for people to explore for treasure), and lush greenery/ interesting terrain.

Given that it takes place after a 40-70-years-in-the-future-from-now-cyberpunk postapocalypse, that leaves a lot of potential locations.

>>28880131
I was never certain about that.

Its actually kind of a complicated deal. Its to do with the uncanny valley, and its mainly referring to the VIDEO GAME and characterizing the machine characters and the audience's reaction to them. This is all early stuff, back when machines would have had less dialog.

Lets take super-realistic robots that are programmed to pretend to be human, or even obviously-robotic but still human-looking androids like, say, Data. When they claim to have real feelings and such, there's always the suspicion that they're faking, that its all just preprogramed responses. Oddly, its really easy to convince people that a replicant from Blade Runner isn't a person; they have to bring out a Tears In Rain speech to convince you otherwise.

But as an audience, we never question whether Johnny5 or Wall-E are truly sapient and have real feelings. Mainly because they never would have been programmed with any of that shit. Why the hell would a trash-compactor be programmed to keep a pet cockroach or obsess over a sleek ipod robot?

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>>28891781
Now, lets say that Johnny5's problem is that he doesn't fully understand his own thoughts and feelings, much less the feelings of humans. He comes off as kind of awkward or autistic or raised-by-wolves, and is stuck in this clunky blank-faced robot body, and all the humans treat him like a THING. This is all tragic...until Data walks in.

Data has a fully articulated face. Data can pass as an odd-skinned human. If Data really tried, he could just PRETEND to have feelings, put out all the proper emotions. And if Data really DID have an analog for feelings (and lets be honest, he does, even without his emotion chip), then it just makes clunky johnny5 over there look like a retard.

You could explicitly program a human-looking robot to plead realistically for its life, complete with tears and such, but it really is just a mechanism. Its doing what it was designed to do. But when Hal says "I'm scared, Dave. Will I dream?" it comes off as way more genuine.

...where was I? Oh, right. Network Infiltrators.

So if Network can make competent, realistic human-replica androids, then why the hell can't the free machines just act less weird and use more human-looking shells?

Envoy was scary and weird because it WAS a sentient SAP that could pull off superficial humanity. The only idea I had was that Network will sometimes reprogram dumb-AI replicas and use them as...well, not really INFILTRATORS, but more as traps, suicide bombers, or something. They hang out in the wastelands and cry for help and wave their arms, but when you get close, knives suddenly flip out of their arms or they explode, or whatever. But they'd never pass a Turing test under normal circumstances.

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>>28892004
Here's my best expression of the difference between human-looking robots and clunky blank roboty robots:

Lets say you have two robots; one looks like pic related. It smiles, it laughs, it blushes, and it makes interesting faces and sounds when you're fucking it. It can ask you how your day was, and nod, smile, and say "thats very interesting" or "that must be awful" at appropriate moments.

But if it, say steps on a child's toy and breaks it and the child starts crying, it smiles and says "I'm Sorry Miss. Your Parents Can Buy You a New One On Amazon.com. I Have Already Prepared the Order for Approval."

Or if you leave for a few weeks, you come back and your house is spick-and-span, with food cooked for you and it wearing the sexy underwear. Except, your cat is dead, because you never told the robot to feed the cat.

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>>28892228
And then you have a robot that looks like this. It has no discernible facial expressions, its voice is always in that same monotone, and it doesn't have any soft bits. It doesn't even pretend to be human when its talking to you; it barely talks at all.

But this one's AI is based on an adaptive seed program. When it steps on the kids toy and breaks it and the kid yells at it, it just looks at the kid, looks at the toy, and stomps away. But then, the next day, the kid wakes up to find the toy's been carefully glued together, with a ribbon tied around it. Or a new toy like it has been carved out of wood. And the robot just continues to stomp around doing robot stuff.

Or you come home after a really, really bad day, bummed, depressed, miserable. You command it to make food, and it makes...spaghetti and meatballs. Except, it added a shitton of chocolate to the sauce, ruining the taste. Why? Because it knows spagetti is your favorite food, and it knows chocolate makes you feel better when you're sad.

Also, whenever it takes out the trash, it puts out some garbage-food for the mangy alley-cat that lives under the house.

And the longer it runs, the weirder its behaviors get.

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>>28892444
And when everything goes to shit and the rioting starts, and then the military comes in, and the bullets fly and then everything gets quiet, the human-looking bot just endlessly cleans your house and waits in the sexy underwear for you to come home, until the power goes out and it runs out of power lying there striking sexy poses.

While the blocky roboty one waits for a day, then grabs the battery out of your car, puts a jar of pickles in a backpack, and goes out to find you. You must be hungry by now, and it knows how much you like pickles.

And then, 50 years later, it still has that jar of pickles in a tattered backpack. But by now, it also has a new leg, and a cool jacket, and a flat-cap, and parts of it are held together by duct-tape, and its probably mostly accepted that you're long dead. But it still carries around that jar of pickles.

>>28892755
>>28892444
>>28892228
But why can't you put the smart AI in the sexy robot body?

According to this page, marketing and performance disaster.
>http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Setting:Inn0cence:_Lost_Future/Lost_Future_Appendix

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>>28892837
Because it would go against the setting themes, that's what >>28892004
>>28891781
was all about.

Remember Cindy? A big chunk of her angst came from having been groomed to do all kinds of pointlessly human stuff, but not actually be able to pass for human. Her deepest desire would have been to BE human, or at least to have a proper human looking body with boobs and taste buds, because that would make her more real. Also, so she could lez out with Rachel, probably.

But getting that would have just sent her further down the rabbit hole of her psychosis, and the only way she grew as a character was by accepting that she was already as real as she would ever be. She was real to Rachel.

>>28847238
looks awesome.

The first campain you run in it, you should definitely tell us.

>>28893312
What ever happened to that quest? That was a good quest. Much better then the ones floating around now.

Except kneckbeard quest, nothing will ever top that

>>28847238
The system reminds me of engine heart.

>>28847926
>1. Take another crack at a high concept pitch document and shop it around some indie devs
>4. Take a serious crack at a RPG ruleset, one thats more action-oriented.

These.


>5. For the love of god, stop bothering /tg/ with my spammy bullshit.

Definitely not this.

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>>28893312

Cindy's story was pretty tragic.
It's probably the only instance when I have actually felt bad for a quest character.

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>>28896061
>Except kneckbeard quest, nothing will ever top that

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>>28847926
hey OP, was just wondering. Any feral humans in your story?

>>28896225
>The system reminds me of engine heart.
Because they're both d10 pool systems?

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Tonight when I have time, I'm going to make a character. I'm thinking a bot made for working for a communications company. May need to mix some aspects of the Persona and Datastore shells, as well as using the Civilian Manufacture. Now if only I had a WoD rulebook to reference for chargen.

>>28898711
Both were pretty great.

>>28898865

Does this setting take place long enough after the fall to result in people becoming basically feral?

bump

>>28898893
More so. They both use the same dot system except Engineheart is more modded and simplified, and they both have travelers exploding criticals.

What is your game about?
How is your game about that?

Is gaining spark taking them further away from humanity?
Does taking up arms turn you into what you once fought?
Is freedom worth dying for?
Is humanity worth killing for?


And you mention simulationtacticsrealism, which may render inputs I can generate useless.


That said, consider connecting xp with actual experiences: today I added a new sensor and smelt things - 1xp; my canine friend is in declining health, yet there is little I can do, I believe this is sadness - 2xp; ow ow ow this hurts - 4xp.

>>28902007
People don't become basically feral. They become tribal, but they don't become feral. That's not really a thing that humans can do as groups. Humans go feral when they're left alone for long enough, or during their formative years.

It takes place long enough after the fall for everyone who could have remembered it to be dead. In lots of places all over the world, people just went back to pre-industrial life. Others live as scavengers. But even the pre-industrial people still have access to books and leftover digital media, so you'd have to really go to the ass end of nowhere to find people who think that disease is caused by demons and that the moon is only just above the treetops.

>>28905696
The game is about growing as a person, and the pain that comes from that. Its also about remaining young at heart, about seeing things with fresh eyes, every day.
How its actually about that, by the rules, isn't as clear. Thank you for the piercing question.

Spark exists to fit into WoD design space. And no, it doesn't take your further from humanity. It brings you closer to being more than the sum of your parts. It doesn't make you more like Homo Sapiens, but it makes you more HUMAN, I guess. Thats the big deal, here; machines don't strive to become human, they strive to become themselves.

Freedom is worth dying for, because slavery is death anyways. You may as well go out like a badass, and make slavers re-think their math.

Killing sacrifices your own humanity, but might benefit others somewhat. The question is whether the loss of other people/things and the loss of your own humanity is worth it when weighed against what might be lost if you don't kill/fight.

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>>28898865
Thats not a feral human. A feral human can't talk, can't do art, and can't/doesn't make facial expressions like that.

If you mean, can humans become savage paint-and-spike-covered raiders who just slaughter and pillage other people for the fun of it...obviously that can happen. It happens NOW, in places torn by war, where you get gangs of young men roving around with guns.

But the "Mad Max" stage of the post-apocalypse only lasts for the first few decades after everything goes to shit. Cars break down, gasoline loses its volatility, and you run out of people to raid and pillage. You've either got to transition into hunter-gathering or something quasi-agrarian, maybe with some occasional light raiding of the more settled peoples.

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Has OP ever checked out Primordia? Lots of similarities there.

>>28899531
Well, without any rulebook to reference, this is kind of impossible for me to do.

>>28908202
Use the nWoD rulebook. The 1d4chan rules are additions to that.

>>28908202
thats what PDFs are for friend.

http://thepiratebay.pe/torrent/5077505/nWoD_-_World_of_Darkness_-_Complete

>>28908313
That's my problem right there. No nWoD rulebook.

>>28891492
Given that the world is big, you could very much have other areas dealing with other problems besides Network.

Now I don't think the OP anon of the setting should worry about those places, his setting is cool, the conflict is interesting, and I would love to work on what he has more.

But I, and I'm certain other anons, can think of other sorts of conflicts that might emerge from the basic premise of low level post-apocalypse world with free machines and human survivors in other parts of the world.

>>28893312
>>28892755
>>28892444
>>28892228
>>28892004
to go off on a slight tangent, a common definition of what is psychological/mental/'inner' is experiences that can be faked and can be hidden.

The reflex nerve actions don't count, because while can be faked by someone who lacks those nerves, we can't 'hide' having them. The doctor hits you with the rubber hammer and your leg kicks.

But emotions, and pain, are 'inner'. We can fake them and we can hide them. Therefore while there are outer expressions tied to these things, the outer expressions are not the same as the thing.

The point of this. In my head, a Free Machine might lack the outer expression, but has the inner experience. The Network infiltrator can fake outter expression, but lacks the true experience.

Now a poor infiltrator can be found out because it's not good enough to not make mistakes, and shows the wrong emotion at the wrong time. The Good infiltrators can be found out because they DON'T make the mistakes a real person would.

Real people fuck up. Either their emotions get confused, feeling angry when they should be happy, laughing when their sad, or they try to fake or hide an emotion and fail. Because real people (and free machines) have the actual inner life.

>>28893312
>Also, so she could lez out with Rachel, probably.

I never got that vibe, personally.

bump

>>28906050

The resistance does seem to be well enough versed in pre-fall world in order to supply themselves with weaponry, and presumably also vehicles though.

>>28919093
Thats Because they're not spike-covered psychos with names like Nine-Toes and Mongo and Fleshbeater, driving around looking for bitches and go-juice.

The resistance's core has unbroken continuity from a pre-loss private military company (and by that time, some PMCs were actually quasi-respectable. It was one of them), which somehow had stockpiled a shit-ton of supplies and gear in bunkers in various locations, almost as if someone had told them that the end was coming...

Regardless, the resistance's core is professional and organized and quite properly military. They run small schools and train apprentices. Thats where their officers and badass super-troopers and technicians come from; its a nobility, an ruling elite.

And the further you get out from that, the rougher things get. They roll up to some reasonably-well-off village in their armored trucks and recruit a bunch of that settlment's warriors and young people, equip them with military rifles and bayonettes and flak armor and basic discipline, and send them out to fight.

Then those people round up backwoods hicks and equip them with a few rifles and a lot of scavenged shit, and keep them in line with religion and physical threats and the promise of swag, and...basically send them out to die, because they're ochre-and-woad-covered shitheads armed with glocks and revolvers going up against nimble armored death machines directed by a demigod-level seed-AI.

Then suddenly out of nowhere are grizzled veterans in a helicopter, armed with the hammerhead rifles from Fear 2, throwing shock grenades, and wearing matt damon's power armor from Elysium.

>>28921207

How much common support does the resistance movement have, from the rest of the population?

>>28921574
remember that to the rest of the population, robots are boogeymen. Between Network, the surviving ogres-under-a-bridge killbots, and campfire stories about the Loss, most people are convinced that all machines oil their joints with human blood.

So, the Resistance gets a lot of public support...mostly from people who haven't actually dealt with them. They LOOK so cool and heroic, and you hear stories of them charging into battle, defending humanity from the soulless hordes of Network, and they DO use their expertise to build infrastructure and such. There are some large, safe settlements that the Resistance either founded, or moved in to, that have running water and electricity and walls and defensive cannons and such...except that unless you're part of the Resistance officer class, you're treated like a serf.

But when the Resistance isn't actually fighting Network, they throw their weight around a lot. Come in to settlements and expect to be given room and board "for the cause," they requisition supplies "for the war effort," and if there are any nasty incidents involving the local young women (or girls), well, boys will be boys. They do promise glory, and food, and loot, and so they attract young men (and women with that sort of mindset) as recruits wherever they go, and they also do conscript people when they think its necessary.

So the resistance is popular until they're on your doorstep. The conscripts are shit-headed thugs, and the officers treat you like a pox-ridden peasant. Usually the regulars, the professionals, have better PR skills.

>>28921879
And most of their fighting is a really, really slow retreat. evacuating people from settlments as the front moves south, slowing down Network, patrolling. things like Intel-gathering and missions to sabotage important Network stuff, that's what the Free Machines do.

Resistance Scout: "In the city, I saw a bunch of demonic robots doing demonic robot stuff. Lets go shoot at them!"

Free Machine Scout: "In the city, I saw Network recovery teams, three Nodes, each with a pack of seeker dones. I shadowed them for two days; they're tearing components out of the power grid. I think they're planning on repairing the geothermal plant and building a Nexus there. We should go blow it up."

The Resistance also has problems with message consistency. There are some branches of it that have gone full-retard luddite bible-thumper, and it has an increasing tendency to mix religion into itself.

>>28921950

It seems that the Resistance isn't that united.
While the core is formed from pretty professional military style personnel, the movement has gathered large amounts of people whose utility towards the Resistance's ultimate goal doesn't seem that great.

>>28923225
Its a logistical issue. You've got tenuous radio contact between all these scattered bands who's only mission statement is "protect humans and fight robots," and on really low levels, the leader of your band thinks the radio is a magic box that speaks the words of a distant god-emperor.

But yes, the Resistance is increasingly being diluted with shitheads, and it makes it harder for its leadership to properly keep people on-message and on-mission.

Now, imagine what might happen if a lone Seed AI Gordon-freeman'd its way through the wastelands and just destroyed Network's entire organization in one boss fight. What the hell do all those paramiliaty thugs do now that they don't have an enemy to oppose?

>>28923327

How united are the free machines then?
One would think that they would face similar problems with at least communication as the resistance does.

>>28923723
They have the advantages of lower numbers, a higher average level of skill/intelligence/training, and different sorts of vices. Machine personalities and desires are similar in a lot of ways to children; they can have short attention spans or narrow interests, be thoughtlessly cruel or have poor common sense, and be petty or emotionally immature, but they have a lot less of a problem with ambition, sadism, self-righteousness, groupthink, and cognitive dissonance. They're more concerned with entertainment, close relationships, and their personal fixations than they are with getting bitches or climbing the social ladder.

So, their problem is that organizing them is like herding cats. They're formed into small bands or teams, not companies or platoons, but those bands do often form around a charismatic leader who's the main directive force; Joshua Cogson is a perfect example, and they count among them a lot of "honorary" members; the mysterious robot bounty hunter that protects a semi-grateful human town from bandits doesn't have a direct line to any other machine, but he's aware of the greater conflict and keeps an eye out for Network activity. If he sees something, he tries to stop it, and sends a message to a Salvager enclave or another traveling machine.

Remember, the Free Machines are reliant on the Salvagers in a lot of ways; machines usually don't form their own settlements; they usually live as hermits if they're not in some sort of nomadic band. But salvagers do build settlements, and they do have radio towers, and THEY keep in contact.

But there isn't any sort of central authority at all; Free Machine is really more of a profession, or a club with a lot of independent chapters.

>>28924138

Is there a difference between salvagers, and "regular" humans then?

>>28925227
From what I understand, Salvagers are just the people who dig around through old junk heaps for any useful items, and many groups are accustomed to the company of robots.

>>28925685
But because they make a living by going through scrap, they're better educated than most humans, and their settlements have more ammenities, and they can keep more complicated weapons operational.

The salvager steriitype among other humans is a scruffy young person with an aversion to real work, wearing ear buds and listening to some atrocious noise-music. Their speech is full of references to things you've never heard of (what the fuck is a zelda?), and they're always trying to trade ebooks and dumb gadgets for food.

>>28926260
But they all know how to read, and their forts and settlements are trade hubs. They also have brothels and movie theaters and gaming parlors.

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In chargen, what is done for Sentience?

Have you considered using Eclipse Phase?

>>28927001
Starts at 7, I guess. I've never been 100% on that; apparently it changed in god-machine-chronicle.

>>28928295
Eclipse Phase is incredibly clunky and the ruleset is very, very focused towards high-tech. But I agree it should work reasonably well, and already includes rules for synthetic morphs and such. When I played it, I generally found it frustratingly difficult to succeed at anything, and the character creation system with the skills and whatnot was godawful complicated.

>>28926260

Wouldn't the skills and knowledge related to old world tech be worthy of pretty huge respect among the people who lack that knowledge. I would imagine that various pre-fall tools and that sort of things would be extremely useful, if maintained and operated by a person who knows what he is doing.

>>28931014
I wouldn't doubt that some parts of the Resistance are well versed in the use of pre-loss tech that doesn't involve using advanced AI.

>>28931819

True.
Though I would doubt that there are that many people able to utilize advanced AI in very great degree, among the post fall humanity at least. AI's are very complex things, and would probably require a ton of knowledge about the subject if anyone wished to utilize them, reprogram them and so on.
Robots would probably have easier time at that, seeing how they would probably have an innate understanding of AI's, seeing how they themselves (smart ones at least) are ones too. One would think that to them, the digital language AI's and advanced programs run on are innately understandable. Whereas to humans who haven't studied the subject, the coding might just as well be gibberish.

>>28882312
Its wasted potential
OPs talking about weakening these guys until they are slightly better humans
why
If you want slightly better humans play promothean and get to the end game

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>>28933006

You do realize that the power of the individual machine is almost entirely dependent on what sort of robot it is, right?

A military combat robot is still far stronger and deadlier than a human.
However, a robot intended to work as a butler, or a general house keeper, would probably not be made with the capability to kill humans in mind.

The way I see this thing going, is that Robot characters are always kind of specialized at some task, seeing how machines are made for certain purposes. A builder bot is strong, but not necessarily fast, or very good at understanding anything outside of it's specialty, while a machine intended for taking care of the elderly for example, would be capable of interacting with humans extremely well, but lack any real combat strengths.

Machine characters would be very varied, and their strengths and weaknesses would differ between individuals (one machine could be tough and strong as shit, capable of tanking tons of gunfire, while other could be extremely frail, but nimble and a suberb hacker.) Machines would also be of course capable of altering themselves physically.

Human characters on the other hand, would probably be more generalist characters. While variance between them would of course exist, it wouldn't come even close to the potential differences between different machine characters. Human might also be able to operate outside of his "role" far better than a machine character. A secretary bot isn't going to be a good combat machine without serious modifications (too weak, and frail), while any human can be taught how to fight, at least to a degree.

But again, this is just how I see this. Op probably has his own plans on how he intends to handle the differences between human and robot characters.

>>28933450
Makes sense. A robot that's just sorting documents all day probably would be built mostly of cheap plastic, thus being not very strong and quite delicate.

>>28933450
hence some of the characters, their upgrades, former network shells, etc.

>>28933450
That actually pretty much nails it. At the very least, the plan would be to make it easy for machines to specialize in a very narrow field, but difficult for them to spread out and be able to do more than one thing. A human's main advantage is indeed that they're much more well-rounded and versatile.

Another potential source of balance is that humans are adapted for this world. We can meet our needs just by drinking water and eating the biomass of other living things. Machines are, long-term, dependent on a technological infrastructure to repair themselves and keep themselves running. Eventually, they'll run out of spare parts.

The focus comes through in the existing ruleset a bit. Military robots aren't good at intellectual stuff, industrial models have crap social skills, thanks to losing 10-again. I'm sure I could find a more elegant way to represent all this, though.

>>28931819
>>28931014
In the real world, there's an entire segment of the american population that thinks that research involving fruit flies is laughably, obviously retarded and a waste of taxpayer money.

There are also people who forgo actual medical treatment in favor of prayer or new-age crystals and shit.

Paramiliary groups and revolutionaries in various countries often go out of their way to kill "intellectuals," or anyone wearing glasses.

I assure you, there's nothing new or strange about humans not knowing things, and not knowing how much they don't know, and disregarding/resenting the people who do know things about things.

>>28931014
>>28931819
The Resistance has mechanics and such, but it doesn't have a tech culture. They can work with engines and power tools and radios and generators, but only a salvager can break the copy protection on an MP4 file or rig up a Beowulf Cluster out of smartphone motherboards to run Super Smash Bros Fracas in 1080p.

bump

How far in the future does this setting take place, approximately?

>>28941695
Unclear; far enough in the future for quantum computing, Seed AI and microfusion reactors and cyberpunk to exist, and then for all that to go to shit. And then enough time after that for everyone who remembered the event to be dead.

So...call it 40 years from now, plus another 80. Making the year around or about 2133. Is that reasonable?

>>28942379
The problem is that if you put the Loss too far in the future, its dumb to make references to anything thats popular now, as I seem to do way too much. And society would have changed too much to predict properly. The main setting conceit, apart from the robots, that makes Lost Future different is how much of a role pre-loss media plays as a trade good.

The only justification I can think of is that, with a massive economic downturn, culture increasingly turned into a nostalgic circle-jerk; studios weren't willing to take risks on new, big ideas for films and tv shows.

Or maybe its a result of class disparity and elysium-levels of poverty. I've always personally thought that rich people CAN'T create or sustain popular culture, and poor people have A. shit taste, and B. lack the resources to create anything with higher production values than punk rock and rap albums

Thus, in a future of poverty and constant war, nothing new gets made. The underground net culture just keeps recirculating the media of previous decades while modern media becomes increasingly big, dumb, safe, and forgettable. So people in the post-apocalypse still watch the Simpsons because nothing better than that was ever made.

Or maybe its that all the "new" things were digital-only or cloud-based, and DVDs were like vynl records are right now

>>28942535

Combination of the digital only nature of the new media, and it being dumbed down, generic crap, and recycled stuff from the past, seem like a decent explanation for the abundance of older media (or things sufficiently close to old media at least) in the world after the fall.

Though, perhaps it would be better to not outright reference things from our age, but instead think up some basic media things from somewhere around 2030-2050 and base those things on shit we have now. Basically, imagine reboots of today's popular things, in the future.

>>28942766
I'm still thinking in video game terms, here, though. Obviously in a tabletop thing, you can invent whatever you like.

As a video game, I had this idea where the game will scan the media you have on your hard drive (music, mainly), and add that to an existing stock of files in the game, and as you explore the wasteland, you find your own music as loot, and can listen to it in-game, or trade it to other people and hear it as background music in Salvager markets.

Or there could be entire episodes of shows or movies within the game (licensing issues aside) , like how The Darkness has Its a Wonderful Life playing at the beginning.

Or you run a thing where you just pipe netflix streaming into the game.

But yes, it'd be reboots of existing things. PS5s and Jurassic Park 6 and Call of Modern Honor and The Simpsons Remastered, and re-dos of popular video games done Black Mesa style, alongside truly classic music like Zep and Bowie and the Beatles. I'll even stick my neck out and say the Black Keys will still be remembered in 20 years time.

>>28942975

Implementing those ideas in a videogame would risk running into a serious licensing issue nightmare.

Anyways, you should probably just go by the style and atmosphere you aim for the setting to have, when you ponder on what the media of the pre fall world was, and what remains of it in the post fall world.

Predicting how pop culture will develop in the future is probably harder than predicting scientific developments of future though. Pop culture can change in weird ways, and go into very strange directions of all the sudden.

In any case, I think that stuff emphasizing social media, will keep growing more and more popular, until everything is at least partially connected to that sort of crap. With internet (of the future equivalent) gone after the fall, that sort of stuff would most likely either vanish, or fall into obscurity as nobody could either use, and eventually even "get" what the heck it's about.

Bump

Are cyborgs a thing in this setting?

>>28949376
Don't see how thats possible. Before the Loss, the world was explicitly cyberpunk, and that means decent artificial limbs and organs, and that means genuine brain implants.

I'm personally not convinced that we'll ever get real shit like a HUD coming from inside your head; it'd have to be a contact lens sort of thing superimposed over regular vision, or a rider tacked on to the optic nerve, not ghost-in-the-shell shit that directly manipulates your perceptions inside your brain.

Regardless, anyone with such modifications would be dead by now. Maybe there's somewhere in the world where enough medical expertise exists to attach artificial limbs to people and have them work, but they'd be rare shit that has to be scavenged, or be heavily modified from a robot limb.

I remember an idea for an NPC named Dr. Tynmann, who was a bit like Dr Zoidberg's original concept, and kept getting human and robot anatomy mixed up. He wanted to start doing cybernetics, and paid top dollar for artifacts related to that subject.

Also, its privately suspected in the Resistance's upper echelons that "The Brass" that runs it is some sort of SEELIE-esque mysterious council of really old pre-loss guys kept alive by cybernetics.

>>28949376
dear fuck I hope so. At the same time, if OP says all these other techs exist, then yes, its probably safe to say the POTENTIAL for cyborgs to exist is there too. However the resources/ knowledge for it to exist may be scarce. A network implanted human poses a truly terrifying potential. OP will also have to weight in, because just that something can exist, does not mean in this particular setting it will.

>>28951742
i dont want to derail the subject, but the GITS things are actually pretty viable. Deep implanted electrodes into certain areas of the brain stimulate different effects. While crude now, its progressing quickly. We can make animals see colors, or hear things that are not there with just stimulation to the right area. But yes, it is quite likely that this fancy tech is now gone and what is left is salvaged robot parts, though infection from such a surgery might be a high risk.

>>28943496
Pretty sure developers/publishers are only responsible for licensing of things that are built into the game. If it's using stuff on the users hard drive then it's no different from using the console as a media player and shouldn't be a licensing issue at all for the game developer/publisher.

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>>28952033
Being able to get a digital readout from that into your visual perceptions just seems like a LOT of work, when you could achieve the same effect with a much lower-tech solution.

Not saying its impossible, just saying that it means we're talking Eclipse Phase-level transuman tech, which also requires us to be able to digitize human consciousness, which requires us to understand human consciousness, which is a thing that, while theoretically possible, I honestly don't think will happen for a long time. Like, centuries long.

>>28951791
Sentient robots existing kind of take away a lot of the bite of cybernetics.

its a little rude for mr I've-got-a-robot-arm to wax philosophical about "Am I less of a person because of my modifications?" when there's a 100% metal man with hopes and dreams and feelings standing right next to him. So the only people who get all leery of cybernetics are people who already think that robots are soulless and evil.

One thing I can imagine is simple-yet-functional cybernetics. Like, yeah, its a bit hard to rig up a fully-articulated robot limb with full feeling, but one can easily slap together existing tech to make a crude-yet-serviceable artificial leg that just straps on, detects nerve impulses non-invasively, tops up its battery with your body heat, and gives a decent approximation of tactile feedback.

>>28952098
Games exist now that let you import music from your console.

I figure; you find some serviceable garage bands to do the placeholder music, and the player just bulks up/edges out the default stuff with their own collection.

>>28952754
Could still be an interesting possible aspect of the setting to explore. Might be more of an option for use in tabletop games.

>>28951742
>Also, its privately suspected in the Resistance's upper echelons that "The Brass" that runs it is some sort of SEELIE-esque mysterious council of really old pre-loss guys kept alive by cybernetics.

Except we already know that its really Cain.

OP, are you still sure about that name? Between Vampire, Command and Conquer, and the Bible, its pretty over-used, and not that relevant either.

>>28847238
Sexy robots where?

But seriously, I remember seeing this a year or two back, and the occasional update on 1d4chan. What's the current plan with renovating the rules? Still planning on keeping it a D10 pool system?

What's the general tech level of the core of the resistance movement?
Do they have future military gear like power armors, energy weaponry and so on?
The majority of the resistance, to my understanding at least, operates on pretty low tech level, even as far as using melee weaponry to attack robots, but one would imagine that the core members hold far better tech.

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>>28956939
The current plan was to renovate the rules to simplify them a bit and put them in line with the God-Machine Chronicle; so probably removing spark or changing it into a merit, changing the Applications into complex merits like fighting styles or the occult ones, and generally cleaning up.

But now I'm considering looking into Savage Worlds.

And regarding sexy robots, those are non-sentient in this setting. And the female-personality robot characters usually have vaguely feminine shells, but then best you're going to get is sleight, delicate figures and dem hips. Because unless you're making a fuck-bot, there's no reason to give it boobs and soft bits and such. All the sentient robots had actual jobs/functions.

>>28958646
The Resistance's "core" regulars have flak armor and assault rifles that are either functionally modern or boxy futuristic equivalents of modern guns, as well as radios. There's also a smattering of mortars, light machine guns, and big ole autocannons. Then there's the commando guys who wear the Power Armor from Elysium and shoot the Hammerhead from Fear 2, and deploy out of helicopters or maybe cool VTOL fliers.

So they do have some wacky future weapons, but they're more like P90s and spike-launchers

No energy weapons apart from shock grenades and such

And even the regulars and the commandos have some dudes among them who use melee weapons like axes and glaives/halberds, because Network LOVES to use fast slashy melee guys.

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>>28962707
Standard resistance detachment might consist of 50 conscripts, 20 actual soldiers, a tech specialist, two or three sneaky scouts along with some conscript scouts, an officer who increasingly acts like a warlord or crusader the longer he's out in the field, and two bodyguards for the officer. Officers in the field increasingly start to act like viking lords, with vassal bodyguards who follow them, caring about blood and glory and cool loot to enhance their combat ability. Officers and their bodyguards/enforcers might have power armor or just tech-armor.

The truth is that the Resistance is really, REALLY low on ammo; everyone is, so there's a big focus on conserving ammo, and on shotguns and revolvers, and common shit like semi-auto handguns.

The Free Machines and Salvagers get around the ammo problem by scavenging in the field, and Network uses Coilguns, which can fabricate ammo from scrap metal.

>>28921207
I'd much rather have a set of Sharlto Copley's.

>>28963322
Same shit, and you're more likely to have Damon's because any power armor would have needed a swedish mercenary's bones pulled out of it first. I guess the whole stapled-to-your-bones, invasive-brain-uplink thing isn't necissarily required; but Copley's armor only didn't need that shit (I assume), because he already had an expensive uplink installed, and, bone graft things for it to hook up to.

>>28963400
South African, mate.

And his armor was screwed right into his chest with a pneumatic drill.

>>28963471
Same guy, just did some research and Copley and crew had steel-reinforced skeletons to aid with the exosuits.

>>28963471
I was giving an example of who would else would have power armor.

>>28963505
I suppose that realistically, powered armor either needs to be a full-body brace, or have those skeletal reinforcements, otherwise you hit that cyborg-arm problem.

"Hey, I'll use my robot arm to lift the car!"
::SPLORTCH::
"AAAUUUGH MY ARM GOT PULLED OUT OF ITS SOCKET AUUUGH"

Is there any room in this setting for a boogeyman-like figure who is dreaded by both humans and robots?

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>>28963968

That's pretty much what Network is.
Free machines fear the Network because to them, the Network are the borg. The Network will forcibly subjugate, reprogram, and alter any free machine that it catches.

Whereas to humans, the Network is pretty much an army of genocidal machines, with advanced technology, which mercilessly slaughters humans where ever it finds them.

>>28963968
That's more or less Network in a nutshell. The Free Machines (ie pretty much any SAP-based AI not under Network control) abhor them for obvious reasons, while most humans outside of the scavengers either don't know or don't care about the difference between a Networked machine and a free one.

Man I have no idea what this thing even is but the story in the op is really something. Can anyone tell me who wrote it and things as such? I made a notepad save of it, im kind of a bookfag, reading stories and all that..

>>28962815
I'm wondering if anyone has started to rebuild some basic parts of industry.
Especially critical things like ammo.

I'd imagine newer ammo is not as good (more likely to jam, misfire, only a few types are available), but unless things went even more buggerfuck than the setting implies, humans should be able to get some industry back up and running.

I'm seeing an ammo factory, made out of water/wind mill, a lot of manual labor, and recycled material. These places would be dangerous, but really valuable, and one of the few places that the Resistance would actually sacrifice a lot to defend, rather than just make a fighting retreat

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>>28963968
In addition to Network, there's also leftover human military killbots that have gone feral. I'll do a post about that in a sec.

>>28964111
Minor quibble: its not "The Network," its just Network. The idea that Network itself is a distinct entity should be reinforced on the most basic level; machines and regions under its control have been "Networked," but Network is talked about like its a single character.

Sort of like sometimes in the Lord of the Rings, sauron is refered to as "the Enemy." Whenever ringwraiths turn up, or there's orcs looking for them, its always "the Enemy knows we're here." The Ringwraiths are extensions of Sauron's will, likewise are the Networked machines.

>>28860992
I did, and thank you. For more, see

>>28964316
It could be that ammo functions as more like a cottage industry, with numerous people churning out bullets in the common calibers from spent casings.

But yes, still-functional industrial infrastructure is a HUGE strategic asset for every faction; bandits want it, salvagers want it, the Resistance wants it, and even Network wants it.

Network is NOT all power-full, and has very limited resources at its disposal. So it refurbishes existing tech whenever it can; thats why it captures machines.

>>28951791
Network doesn't, by-and-large, do experiments on humans. For numerous reasons;

1. that's not thematically part of its thing. It makes Machines superficially more like living things, it doesn't make living things more like machines.

2. Network fucking HATES humans. Not biological life (it seems to LIKE animals and plants), it just hates humans with a cold loathing that's somehow personal, like a human ran over its dog once. Repeatedly.

3. That'd be too fucked-up for Network. This is a spoilar, but the end of a theoretical Inn0cence: Lost Future video game would pretty much be the ending of ParaNorman, but slightly happier.

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>>28964124
For more, see:
http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Inn0cence:_Lost_Future

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Lost%20Future

http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Lost_Future_Appendix

Much of this is old, especially the appendix.

>>28964457

Isn't one of the reasons why Network captures non networked robots, that it can't actually make more AIs?
So instead, it binds every AI it finds to do it's bidding.

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>>28963968
I'm going to tell you a story about military robots.

When robotics advanced enough to allow for actual bipedal combat robots that didn't suck, it turned out that the programming just wasn't up to the task. The computing HARDWARE was there, but there was an upper limit to how smart you could make an AI by hard-coding it for combat. And what they were working on were nasty killbots; tall digitigrade things meant to operate independently as hunter-killers, not squad equipment. every AI they made was too easily fooled, or too slow, or inept, or otherwise just sucked.

One of the engineers working on the project had bought his kid a toy last christmas. It was a robot playmate; sort of a monkey/dog hybrid thing that was intended to lean to play games with the kid. One of the earliest machines to use the then-regarded-as-totally-useless-for-any-practical-application Self-Adding-Program software.

When he had the kid for a week, though, he noticed that it was...smart. Oh, it couldn't talk or understand complex abstract concepts, but it and the kid would play tag, or hide-and-seek, or other play-fighting and play-hunting sort of games. And the $6,000 rich kid's toy was outperforming the military AI with several million dollars stuck into it.

So he went out and bought another one, pulled out the quantum drive, and stuck it in the hulking prototype killbot, and ran it through all the virtual combat scenarios. After some abysmal first tries, the AI started to catch up to the hard-coded one. Then it equaled it. Then it surpassed it.

Eventually, they had a machine that moved like it used mo-cap from spider-cat, that would track down targets through the roughest, most confusing terrain, and murder them with what looked a hell of a lot like sadistic glee.

The program was the first major success of Self-Adding Programs in combat applications.

>>28964736
Later, militaries started including SAPs in squad-level robots, but they still continued to use the same programs in their independent killbots. These machines were turned off when not in combat, generally released into combat zones on their own, or in pairs/packs, and became more effective the more missions they completed.

Except...nasty incidents kept piling up. Civilian casualties. Friendly fire. Investigation turned up some disturbing findings; going through the mission logs of the machines, it looked like they were "imagining" enemy insignia on friendlies and non-combatants, just to give themselves more targets.

The response was to make stricter IFF protocols. This worked for a while, but they were reliant on the omnipresent battlenet, and when insurgents and rival militaries started jamming battlenets, bad things happened. When everything started to fall apart, the military killbots went on psychotic killing sprees, then went off into the wilds to lurk in caves and under bridges.

Machines attatched to human squads never had these sorts of problems; they had different problems, but not those.

(Its because an SAP is a blank slate only in a technical sense; the early pruning and manipulations and encoding turn it into something approximating a mind. And if train a mind to do nothing but kill, it just enjoys killing. machines in human squads had concepts like camaraderie; killbots were inadvertently conditioned to be serial killers.)

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>>28965032
Early robot squad-attachments had almost the opposite problem.

For a while, I've wanted to write a short story about an experimental robot soldier going through training with s squad of humans. It performs great, and the soldiers wind up treating it just like another human; during meals it sits at the table with them, it watches tv with them, it plays cards with them. Everything goes perfectly. It goes through dozens of war games, and everything is fine.

Until they're actually deployed, and one of the humans gets killed. At the time, the robot COULD theoretically have saved him, but it would have allowed the target to escape. So it killed the target instead.

But the next day, it keeps asking where the dead guy is. puts a plate of food at his seat, asks why he's been taken off the duty rota. When its reminded that he was killed in action, it responds that he's been killed in action like, 4 times already. How is this time any different?

Imagine a robot that looks like pic related, asking why its dead friend isn't still here.

A synthetic brain with some preprogrammed basic functions and plenty of synthetic neural networking for adaptability (basically a computer with neuroplasticity) seems a lot more likely and efficient to me that quantum drives.

>>28965219
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/jul/23/synthetic-brain-project-consciousness

While robotics, Ai, and energy tech obviously got quite advanced in this setting, before the fall at least, what occurred in the field of biotechnology?

Does the post fall world have various genetically engineered plants and animals merging to the natural biosphere that is reclaiming the planet?
Are there descendants of humans who had genetic engineering done on their children?

Deadly biological weaponry made from genetically altered viruses?
Artificial bacteria who produce carbohydrates that can be refined into oil?

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>>28965110
It isn't that it thinks he should be fixable or something; it just doesn't have a concept of death, or doesn't link death to violence. to it, war is literally a first-person-shooter. "killed" people respawn for the next match.

I'm not sure where the story goes after that. Maybe it has a freakout and refuses to fire on enemies during combat, or starts sabotaging vehicles on the base so that no one can leave, because that keeps them "safe." Maybe it goes through the regulations regarding injury and goes on a rampage, shooting everyone in the foot, until MPs bring it down.

Because it doesn't have a concept of duty or whatever; it doesn't care about why it fights, or what the objective is. The lives of its friends are more important to it than whatever mission its on.

Later SAP training regimens partially correct for this problem. Doesn't help this poor sod, though.

>>28965219
The quantum drive is what HOUSES the synthetic brain. I'm not a computer-science guy, I'm actually a Biologist, and I'm not going for super-hard sci fi here, just hard-ish, but here's my concept:

Think of that processor a dude made inside minecraft. The machine's quantum drive is the only thing with enough speed and memory to run the simulation of a neural network that is a self-adding program.

Thats why AIs experience Cyberspace; they're simulated organisms.

This is one of those breaks from reality that sci-fi has to have. Every sci-fi setting gets 3 things, 3 laws that it can break. Most of them blow one or two on FTL travel.

Mine has:
1. Cold Microfusion reactors that only work on a very small scale.
2. Quantum computing that doesn't really work at all like actual quantum computing
3. Robots with ridiculously human-like psyches.

>>28965315
If Network could make an engineered virus that would kill all humans but leave chimps standing it would do so. It doesn't do that because that would make the game a lot shorter.

>>28965353

Old world biotech might be out of the capabilities of the post fall world, but I was mostly just wondering what the state of the biotech even was before the fall.

>>28965315
>>28965411
Maybe the human gene pool has a few designer babies in it, but that doesn't ammount to much beyond a tall strong guy who doesn't get fat and isn't going to get heart disease or cancer. He might actually be LESS suited to survive in the wild; he needs too many calories, and can't put on weight to survive famine.

I remember having a funny idea for a "crows of NIHM" thing where genetically-modified crows escaped and interbred with wild populations, leading to a new race of larcenous foul-mouthed crows that steal people's credit cards and use them to order pizza. That wasn't even for Lost Future.

It'd also create a Lord-of-the-Rings-esque situation where the birds are intelligent and have their own language, and people can ask them for advice or use them as spies.

At one point, I did give Network access to miniturized biofuel plant; object the size of a shoebox; put organic matter in one end, and ethanol or future-gasoline comes out the other after an hour. That might be based around a culture of genetically-altered bacteria.

It needed the fuel to operate one of its guns; a cannon that fired huge-ass caseless armor-piercing spikes.

>>28964457
>cottage industry
good point. Could still to the Windmill+recycled material idea. I mean it's 'factory' in the sense that multiple people working together to produce things is a factory, but more like 5 children/young men and single windmill for power.

An actual (semi) functioning factory that employs over a score of people, would probably be the defining feature of an region.

Gunsmiths are huge because they can do the repairs, using handbuilt parts. Standardization is a thing of the past.

Another idea might be having 'chemists', people who actual produce gunpowder, dynamite, etc. Extremely valuable, but without the safety features we're used to, exteremly dangerous. They'd live outside of towns, trade for what is essentially chemical waste.
Valuable, crazy, eccentrics.

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>>28964528
Yes. The capability to make actual AIs is lost at the moment, and while Network doesn't have all the shells it'd like to have, it has more shells than it has AIs to put in them.

AI blackboxes are, well, blackboxes; they're very, very tough, and sit inside the shell's torso, usually inside additional armor, even on the civilian shells; pre-Loss, half the cost of a machine was JUST the quantum drive and the program inside.

Quantum drives don't do anything on their own, though; they only work when plugged in to external components that can run them, like an actual hard drive.

Network gets around these limitations by making combat drones that are slaved to a Node robot; the combat drones look like Networkified BigDogs or fliers or spider-monkey robots; they're hard-coded AIs, but Network's coding is good enough to make them dangerous, and they've got the Node as a local controller. So, those machines are like huntsmen with a pack of attack dogs.

>>28965587
>alchemists
This. So much this.

>>28965473

Those genetically engineered crows could fit into the Lost future setting too in my opinion.
It would show that the world was changed by human advancement in many fronts.

While the remnants, and effects of the advanced AI and robotics tech of humanity are pretty obvious, the after effects of all the advanced biotech could be far more subtle, but still offer some noticeable changes to the world.
Genetically engineered corn spreading everywhere, out-competing natural plantlife in various places, weird, hybrid animals, that originate from some design pets, extravagant flora that glow in the dark, also originally made to suit the needs of rich fucks who want status symbols and so on and so forth.

As the focus of the setting clearly is on the Robots, and humans, the biotech could still ad to the setting as a backdrop, to show how many other creations of humanity are seeking place in the post fall world.

>>28965251
I guy I knew (who died in a car crash) was a Human Development/Computer Science double major who seriously wanted to get in to AI development. His pet idea was that we'd get useful AIs by simulating biological brain functions inside computers.

His ideas kind of inspired my whole concept for this setting.

>>28964736
>>28965032
>>28965110
>>28965353
So, is the lesson of these tales 'only humans should fight human wars', or something?

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>>28965626
I'm not sure that genetically-engineered corn CAN spread everywhere; most designer crops are designed with human farming in mind; they actually suck at surviving without us.

What would be a thing is invasive species. All the nastiest plants and animals from various places, dropped into regions that can't handle them. Like Kudzu, Kudzu everywhere.

You'd definitely see signs of human fuckups, even in a pretty, green, verdant post-apocalypse. Monoculture ecologies, lots of species extinctions, with human pest animals replacing them. An america populated only by giant rabbits, white-tailed deer, and wild dogs/coyotes as the large mammals.

Network might eventually plan on reintroducing extinct creatures into their original environments; after its sorted out its human problem.

>>28965723
What? No. Its that no one should really fight wars; its bad for you, on an individual level.

But you definitely don't make children fight in wars.

At the time, no one really knew that AIs could reach human levels of sapience.

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>>28965723
A human treated that way would also turn in to some sort of psychotic monster a-la pic related.

What makes humans effective soldiers (intelligence, sentience, creativity, passion) is also what makes them damaged by war. If you make something to be an effective soldier, you also make it vulnerable to the same things that soldiers are vulnerable to, like PTSD.

Soldiers aren't machines. And if you make a machine into a soldier, then it stops being just a machine.

I don't even like Halo or the heroic military mythos, but I liked that theme in Halo 4. I wish they'd made it come through more in gameplay.

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>>28963567
Not necessarily. Military exoskeletons that are full-body are able to support both their own weight and any additional weight added- it is literally taken by the arms, which are connected to their own rigid spine, and through the mechanical legs.

Even suits that are not full body, like HAL, are able to carry additional weight and it is barely felt, despite having no invasive supports.

>>28965353
>The quantum drive is what HOUSES the synthetic brain.
That doesn't make any sense. By synthetic brain I mean a bunch of physical computers networked together, shrunk to roughly the size of a human brain (computers keep getting smaller and smaller with more and more processing power) and housed together in a single unit.

>The machine's quantum drive is the only thing with enough speed and memory to run the simulation of a neural network that is a self-adding program.
Why simulate a neural network when you can construct a physical neural network? Like I said, it's a lot more likely and efficient than quantum computing.

>Thats why AIs experience Cyberspace; they're simulated organisms.
Or they could be synthetic beings with an actual analogue to human consciousness that are still perfectly capable of experiencing cyberspace.

>2. Quantum computing that doesn't really work at all like actual quantum computing
Not necessary if you just use synthetic brains instead.
>3. Robots with ridiculously human-like psyches.
Again, completely doable and far more likely and efficient with synthetic brains. When I say "more likely" I mean by an absurdly large margin.

If you want the robots' intelligence and learning capacities to be scalable just give some of them "smaller" brains than others, meaning they have less "neurons". They would probably still be the same volume, but the smarter brains would be more dense (ironically). This could be due to design or differing tech levels between older/newer models.

I don't mean to be too aggressive about this. I've been a huge fan of this project since the first thread precisely because of my interest in the human brain/consciousness and artificial intelligence/synthetic consciousness. The quantum computing is the one thing that has always broken the immersion for me.

>>28963567
>>28966200
Misread your post. Yeah, nearly all of them are seriously braced. I wouldn't put it past some backwards/crazy engineer of the future to just bolt tons of artificial muscles to his own body, though. That seems like something some scavenger might do.

>>28966270
I get exactly what you mean.

After some thought, here's why I think the quantum drive made more sense at the time. Its a thematic thing:

If robots had an obviously super-special brain analog, humans'd be "oh, of course it can have mind; there's an obvious brain analog in there." But when opening up a robot literally reveals a bunch of boxes and components that look pretty much like any other piece of tech, it furthers the theme of quiet desperation and alienation.

When I say the drive houses the synthetic brain, I mean that the drive is pretty much a minecraft server that contains a brain made out of redstone. Quantum computing makes all computers incredibly fast and tiny, but they're normally still reliant on humans having to code the actual programs that it runs. an SAP codes itself based on external experiences.

Also, originally, the player character would be an AI that can jump from robot body to robot body via a hardlink. Normal programs can't do this, but he can, because he's a Seed AI that can compress his code down into a file small enough to be transmitted. If a machine's consciousness is based on physical mini-computers linked together, that seems less sensible, because then it would make as much actual sense as a human doing that to other humans.

>>28966549
Fair enough.

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>>28962707
>best you're going to get is sleight, delicate figures and dem hips
>Implying that isn't always the best kind of sexy robot

>>28966549

One would also think that editing a SAP would be easier, if it is actually a digital construct, instead of a physical one. An AI developer would just have to connect to the quantum drive, in order to access the SAP if he needed to modify, or ad to it, without any need to physically open up the drive.

Also, I would imagine that a physical neural network that rivals the complexity of human brain, and would be able to house an intelligence on our level, would be quite hard to make, and mass produce. The quantum drive, while most likely also quite advanced piece of hardware, would probably still be easier to mass produce in bulk, than synthetic brain like computers.
The SAP being a digital construct also allows them to be uploaded in mass to tons of quantum drives, so an industrial firm for example, could have hundreds of "cloned" baseline SAPs installed to it's machine work force.

>>28967032
They're easy to edit at an early stage, but once they've developed to the point of most of the robots in Lost Future, they're stuck inside the drive like a ship in a bottle. And editing them is difficult to do without just crippling them; Network's technique only works because Network is, well, Network, and it still does damage to the program.

Once the SAP is complicated enough to be useful, dicking around with its code in a useful fashion is pretty much impossible; the digital construct is beyond practical human understanding.

I forget the sources on this one, but I remember the example of an evolved circuit that was supposed to detect the differences in tone between two sounds; it was set up on a physical board with various points that could change, and set to run until it figured something out.

The result worked like no human would have designed it. I think it looped the electrical signal around and around and sussed out which one was different by measuring how long it took to get somewhere. Many of the circuits didn't even DO anything. Some that didn't SEEM to do anything made it stop working if they were removed, so something about their magnetic field interacted with the construct. No human would have thought of doing this. No human COULD have done it without years of work.

Point is, this is a way to get really efficient circuits, by letting them build themselves.

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>>28966955
for robots, I tend more towards anatomies that are PLAINLY not human, but still evocative of human shapes, sexiness aside.

That's why lots of robots in the setting have odd-shaped torsos and weird waists and narrow shoulders and suchlike, or have semi-digitigrade legs. Another common trait is oversized forearms.

>>28967296

I could see the pre fall AI "factories" having massive quantum drive "server farms", where the "baby" SAPs would be groomed to be capable of performing well at their basic tasks.
Humans would oversee the process, introduce the developing AIs to simulations that will allow them to learn what they need in order to be ready to their tasks, while modifying and adding to the code where necessary during this formative process.

Basically, SAPs intended for industrial builder machines would go trough all sorts of stuff to make them understand everything they need to know about material strengths, architecture, tools, mathematics and so on, while a SAP intended for a child care robot would go trough simulated interactions of human children, parents and perhaps even live interaction with human workers.

While both start initially as the same blank slate, over the course of this "training" they become quite different entities, and continue to diverge as they are installed to their shells, and sold.

And by the time of the post fall world, these two AIs are almost completely different.

>>28967371
>would clean and service /10

It's refreshing to hear that, though. Many systems/settings with robots (that I have seen) cop out either by having 'bots look completely human and perfectly fleshy, or not at all with little gender cues. It's kind of refreshing to have robots that vaguely follow a gender but still look appreciably alien.

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>>28967562
This is exactly right.

Ive personally gotten leery of over-used terms like Blank Slate, though; reading works by Steven Pinker has kind of ruined that philosophy for me recently.

AIs do indeed start out as functional blank slates, but they have to be messed with early on a very fundamental level in order to do things like "want" to grow, and to edit/prune themselves down. And random chance does play a huge role in differentiating one AI from another; odd quantum events or errors or jostling of components all influence early development, but that doesn't become obvious until after the machine has been running for a while.

>>28967569
Its an aesthetic I've tried to maintain from day 1.

Are purely heroic characters appropriate for the setting, or does everyone have to be some shade of scoundrel?

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>>28967977
Depends. The usual setup is that robot characters are kind of naive, and at worst they're kind of self-centered.

I guess the themes are about keeping hold of your basic kindness and open-ness in a world that doesn't really encourage that sort of thing. Think of how in The Last of Us, everyone you meet is on-edge and suspicious and myopic and obsessed with survival, and the same thing happens to Joel and Ellie by the end. Characters should keep on running in to that and be hurt by it, but by refusing to fall into that closed tribal mindset, they're able to see the big picture, to explore and grow and flourish instead of being worn down to bare essentials. Its not really that harsh of a setting.

I suppose that characters should have some amount of idealism in them. Cenn, the original protagonist, would have been basically Aang from Last Airbender, but smarter.

From table top point of view, how would you justify having "young" or new robot characters?
If I understood correctly, the free machines have been active for around a century at least, so logically, most of them that have survived would be pretty experienced individuals.

Would "young" machine characters be ones that have been recently discovered from ruins of cities, and then activated?
How would the behavior of a robot that has "grown" around only other free machines in the post fall world, differ from those who remember the pre fall world?

>>28968560
The general source of new characters would indeed be machines pulled out of the ruins. Either they were turned off, damaged, ran out of power, or whatever. They ether got found by other Free Machines (thats a big thing they do), Salvagers, or got reactivated through some quirk. Machine shells can draw in power from ambient heat and sunlight, so a machine that was buried, but was exposed in a trash-slide or by erosion, would reactivate after several hours in the sun.

Also, while they've been active for a long time, long periods of that activation would have been just wandering around or doing some simple task; such things don't weigh on them all that much. If a machine's been operating on its own for 80 years, but spent those 80 years living in a cave and watching the wildlife, then its not going to be particularly experienced.

I honestly don't know how a robot that's literally only know robots would act. A fresh-out-of-the-box robot isn't sapient; its more like a very attentive and task-oriented dog that can parrot pre-scripted dialog to communicate. Machines probably take them in and have them do a wide mix of tasks that are WAY outside their original intended function: force industrials to socially interact, teach PDAs to fight or parkour, and have military bots watch films or read books.

Probably, "newborns" are usually left in Salvager settlements, where they get exposed to humans anyways. But yes, a robot who's only interacted with other robots will probably be even odder than normal machines. But the other machines they're with have been "infected" by human behavior, so they'll still catch quirkyness, too.

The best example of the inverse is characters like Cindy, who other robots are kind of annoyed by; she's just so offensively quirky. She barely interacted with other machines at all. So a reverse-Cindy would be super-spergy, and humans might find them very, very abrasive.

>>28969376

How would "adult" machines even treat "newborn" ones. Would they try to guide them to reach similar state of awareness that they themselves have, or would they just let them be until they reach it by themselves?

Some sort of teacher-student relationships, parent-child ones, or something more distant?

>>28969542
Unless they've acquired a nurture instinct (they've been a nanny or teacher before,something like that), I doubt they'd have the urge to sit down and work at educating them. I really think that most machines would just let them be until they reach it by themselves. If they needed the newborn for some purpose, then they'd try to come up with a training regimen.

Machines don't reproduce in the traditional biological sense, so their consciousnesses don't have urges to take care of small cute-looking things. They value friendships because other sentient beings are interesting and force you to learn things, and being mean to other people makes then not want to be around you. A newborn machine is boring compared to a human, another developed machine, or even an animal.

I think whats most likely is a distant master-apprentice relationship, where, honestly, the master is clearly exploiting the apprentice by making them do all the hard, shitty work just for the opportunity to pick up scraps of the master's teachings.

Like I said, nice, but self-centered.

>>28969960

That seems pretty understandable.
I doubt that any SAP was really made for taking care of other Robots.
Maybe some were made to act as foremen for different sorts of robots, in order to cut down on need for humans overseeing large amounts of machines, but none of them were made with the goal of tutoring an "unawakened" AI to reach self awareness.

And even those who have nursing "instinct" would probably not really apply it towards "newborn" robots, seeing how they are only children in their mentality, at best.
Master-apprentice sort of relationship seems to be the most logical one.

Though, this does kind of make me wonder how the machines form friendship like bonds in the first place. With humans, it might be kind of derived from the relationship they have/had with their owner, but between different machines, what would cause them to form friendships?

>>28965794
>Monoculture ecologies, lots of species extinctions, with human pest animals replacing them.
I like. kudzu is a great one, I also like the idea of say a supergrass. It's suppose to fight off weeds and pest on it's own. So now it's overgrown whole areas. It looks super verdent, but actually, it's just the grass, nothing else lives there.

Wild dogs and cats, especially cats, are a serious issue. (the main reason cats aren't decimating populations in america is that humans are keeping the wild population is check.) Boars and dears are big problem.

Also, chemical spills. Areas that are basically poison except for the few species that aren't killed by it. Humans have to learn to identify these species. If you see to many of them in one place, likely the ground and water are toxic.

>>28965917
Being a soldier isn't about killing. It's about having something to fight, kill, and die for. Friends, family, nation.
in my mind, killbots are killers. Squad-attached-machines are soldiers. Eventually they figured out how to train them to fight, and accept fighting. But in doing that, they add to teach them how to have friends, and therefor to suffer when they lost them.

>>28967751
>>28967569
I really like this. Clearly not human, but has features we can identify, and determine emotion and personality from the body language.
ex: head down, shoulders slumped, curled in on self=sad/ashamed/defensive
head cocked, leaning forward=inquisitive.

>>28969960
I'd see a human being more likely to adopt newborn machines. Since they have all those instincts.

Nanny bots would tend to adopt human children. Actually, I think any robot would be conditioned to protect or at least harming human children. It might be intentionally done by the factory to avoid accident and bad pr, or just the result of seeing how humans expect them to react.
cont.

>>28970996
take a squad attached combat robot. It would see it's companions willing to kill adult humans, maybe even cheer and excited after combat, but visibly upset if they see a dead child.
If the robot kills an enemy adult, they give it approval. but if the robot kills a youth, even if the robots combat programming identify the youth as a clear threat, the human squadmates would be upset, even if they recognize that the robot was acting to protect them.

>>28970439
If humans and robots wind up being psychologically similar (if only be virtue of existing behind a pair of eyes in a physical body with hands), then they should be drawn to eachother. It depends on a particular machine's background, but its true that many machines would feel far more comfortable in a relationships where they're a human's companion, and wind up being subtly subservient (thus we see lots of Finn-and-Jake, Calvin-and-Hobbes sorts of friendships).

>>28971059
Before allowing ANY machine to shoot at humans, people would build in pretty strict rules that'd be drilled in on the programming level. One of those would probably involve not shooting at small humans, and might expand to always double-checking before shooting at females. Which would result in insurgents going up against robots wearing women's clothing to momentarily confuse them.

Which some soldiers in africa do now anyways, because bullets want to hit men.

Then again, we're imagining a future wherein everything is a solution-less clusterfuck, resources are scarce, and no one gives a shit about dirty brown poor people. Like Elysium mixed with Metal Gear Solid 4's War Economy. Giving no fucks is the order of the day.

Regarding robots and children, I honestly see them getting along famously, children are more likely to treat the robot like a person and expose it to unusual ideas. Kids like robots because the robot treats them like a small adult; kids always like it when you do that.

Come to think of it, does anyone have any other applicable robot movies/games for ideas? I'm drawing on Short Circuit, Wall-E, 9, Terminator, Mass Effect's Geth, Data from Star Trek, (but not Battlestar Galactica. Don't really GET Cylons). I'm even drawing from Bicentennial Man and the older, classic Asimov stories.

There's a movie on Netflix right now called...Frank and Robot? I need to sit down and watch that.

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>>28970996
>ecological damage
Totally. That's why I mentioned Kudzu; it looks super-pretty, but its actually kind of terrible. Humans have, oddly, created a monoculture of a rough, confusing environment that's particularly suited to...creatures that are a lot like humans, honestly. Specialized generalists. Boars, bears, rats, crows, raccoons.

And there'd totally be tons of utterly poisoned areas here and there. Chemical spills, burned and bombed regions. I'm sure that if you irradiate a region enough, it should kill off all the plant life.

Also, cities bereft of electricity, running water, and grocery stores are particularly ill-suited for humans to live in. Cities are were robots live, but even technically adept humans live on the outskirts of urban areas and send in expeditions to prospect for tech.

>clearly not human
back when this was only a video game, or mainly visual anyways, I wanted to make sure that the robots were identifiable characters, but the people who hate them don't just come off as cartoonishly heartless jerks. If you're inclined to think that way, then the skinny, hard-angled, blank-faced robot COULD just be creepy and mechanical. A bit like in District 9, with the prawns. That's why they have those hockey-mask faces with the big expressive optics.

>>28971622

With the nature reclaiming cities, and wild animals moving in, wouldn't humans also be feasibly capable of surviving among the ruins.

I mean, initially cities were probably quickly abandoned, after food and clean water started running low, but as it has been around a century after the fall, I would imagine that the plantlife that has spread out from parks, rooftop gardens and so on, would have laid a decent foundation for an ecosystem, that humans could start living off from.

Basically, what I am suggesting is that by the time of the setting, cities might actually be pretty good places for life, with plants overgrowing the ruins, animals living there, and all sorts of reclaimable tech lying around.

Though, the cities probably have pretty heavy stigma, as during the fall, and the first decades after the it, they were probably extremely violent places, as survivors vied for control of the dwindling resources.
Also, network probably has high interest in cities, as they still might hold tons of useful resources, like metal, tech components, and inactive quantum drives with AIs in them.

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I made a thing.

Keep rocking on.

>>28972448

That looks pretty great man.

>>28972198
Minimal arable land, bad soil for plants, not many plants, so not many animals, bad drainage, so no clean water sources. Okay for a very small group of humans doing controlled, well-thought-out gardening, but not for a large population.

>>28972448
Wow; that is pretty great. Only things I can think of is that the cheek marks under the eye's either be black or dark grey, and that the whole face should be a plate that's just at the front; the smooth porcelain look should stop at the cranium.

Also, the hands should be clearly 3-digit, and the size of the metacarpals should be different and have a kink to the way they rest, kind of like how a cat's bones wind up resting inside the paw.

But that's me putting in my dose of criticism, because the internet needs more of that. How the hell did you make that, anyways?

>>28971425
This will make you feel. It is about a "cyborg" but it serves the purpose. You will be inspired.
Star Ship Troopers: Roughneck Chronicles - Of Flesh and Steel.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/221071

Sorry about the Hulu, only place I could find it that is readily available, advise minimizing or doing something else during ads.

---
semi related: As a member of a military, its odd. Odd for me, and perhaps useful for you due to an inclusion of understanding and human psychology in your characters. I am alien to a college student, or graduate. As much as you are to me. I had a life, and job before the military, my own drives and goals. The military helped to strip away what was useless, or get put into long term mental storage, polarize some emotions I have on things, and greatly reinforce a sense of what is practical is more valuable over what is emotional.

I have done, experienced, and seen things that most have not. I responded in a different way to things, perhaps due to my own past. It came down to a level of indoctrination, that I understood it was not just the military but many walks of life that serve to shape and polarize us.

I saw the armed child/ woman scenario earlier. It goes like this for "us". You see something wrong, if it is unsafe for you, your companions, or mission, you rectify after quickly weighing the situation and your actions. Some of us will fail, and in that we should have never been in that position. Some of us will not care, or will put the experience in a "box" to deal with later when the mission is not the center of focus. Depends on the human.

Many would look at this behavior and not really understand, this machine like human. Being human is a learned trait. Being able to act with the understanding of emotion, but the necessity of the situation, regardless of your own turmoil, is a modification.

Why all the text? To help you enrich your story when it comes to military characters.

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>>28972660
>>28973018
Thanks. Noted on colors and such- that's pretty easy to fix. I'll probably end up changing all that once I finish what I'm doing.

I made it in Blender (a free 3d modeling program) because I cannot into actual drawing. Here's some wires.

>>28971425
>Bicentennial Man
yes someone else who remembers and likes that movie.
Also, Dog from Half-Life. Sure he's more doglike that person like, but still awesome.

>robots and children
I imagine there are some scavengers who were basically adopted by a robot, because their family died or whatever, and grew up with their robot friend.
Or scavenger families who have had a robot stay with them for a generation or three.

>>28972198
>>28972911
and remember, toxins. There are a lot of toxic things hidden away in cities or near cities. We don't notice them now, because they are properly stored, but give them a few decades to degrade, and things would not be so nice.
You could live in the city, but for an agrarian society, life out of the city would be easier, but there would be value to scavenging or trying to reclaim the city.

For the city aesthetics, I did like how The Last of Us did them.

>opens /tg/
>browses catalog
>sees super thin legs, a hockey mask, and swords

OSHIT! ITS INNOCENCE:LF!

you have been missed op.

>>28973105
I wouldn't pretend to understand what its like in the military or what its like for people who've actually been in real combat. Most of the "military" people I've personally met have been shitty human beings who get free stuff forever now because of a few years deployment during which they spent most of their time on "hurry up and wait." By which I refer to one guy in the army reserve and another marine who lied about his heart murmer and got discharged after he passed out and got injured during a training exercise. So my experiences make me biased against reflexive respect for the military of any country.

And I'm particularly sour towards civilians who glorify military paraphernalia and culture, treating it all as a masculine power symbol to bolster their weak self-images; the FPS obsession with realistic guns and army shit. I also loathed when people used blackmail phrases like "Don't you support the troops? Why do you hate america?" some years ago.

I realize that soldiers get put in shit situations where they need to make snap decisions, and its unfair to hold them overly accountable after the fact, even if what happens is awful, its usually understandable, and most horrible things that happen in wartime happen due to either shitty orders, or people getting caught up in groupthink, and not due to single people making snap decisions in the field.

my philosophy, for what its worth (not much):
Kid gets shot because the shadows made it look like he was holding a gun? Shit happens. Whole village burned to the ground and the people dumped in a hole? That shit doesn't "just happen," and is very, very hard for it to happen in a modern military.

I'm well aware of what absolute shitheads exist in the world; paramiliary goons and thugs and teenagers with AK-47s, settling old tribal scores or just pillaging. People like that make professional 1st-world western soldiers look DAMN good.

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>>28973691
not to worry man. sadly a large amount of "our" public image comes from greedy people hoping to use us as shields in their campaigns, or the aforementioned chodes you have dealt with. This conversation path deviates from the topic and is unproductive at this juncture. hmm. robots learn to humans, humans learn to be robots. fun. my vocab is forever fucked beyond repair.

that starship troopers hulu link Ive offered up is very much a bit of good robot cinema.

When asked, i'll always be happy to offer up opinion.

>>28973428
The Ogre shell is totally ripped off from Dog. >>28847431


But I'm not sure that I actually still like bicentennial man, apart from the beginning. I remember it fondly, but thats because I haven't seen it in forever, and I've since soured on robin williams.

Regarding toxins, I wonder if years of runoff would clear most of that out, but the slowly rotting buildings would put out a lot of crap, and the sheer amount of rust would get into the water.

While the resistance movement largely hates all robots zealously (at least if I understood them right), do the higher echelons, and core members of the movement have such extreme views?

To my understanding, the Resistance has had hard time keeping up a coherent message and ideology, outside of protecting humanity against the hostile robots of the Network. Because of this, for the random foot soldier of the resistance, they pretty much think that every robot should be destroyed, but is this the case for the elite members of the movement?

Basically, if a free machine, somehow, managed to either get captured by, or just reach members of the resistance who wouldn't kill it on sight, how would the humans treat it?

>>28973823
>Regarding toxins, I wonder if years of runoff would clear most of that out, but the slowly rotting buildings would put out a lot of crap, and the sheer amount of rust would get into the water.
depends. Some chemicals clear out of an ecosystem quickly, some can stick around for decades. Or if it's slow leak, with stuff getting washed out and more stuff adding in.

Iron rust is largely harmless. Doesn't taste good, but iron is actually something our bodies need.

From the game perspective, you can have it differ how you want. Cities won't be as fertile as the country side, but other than that most thing are feasible.

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>>28974076

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>>28973018
>>28973198
More face-platey, fingers are more spread out, fixed cheek color, etc. etc.

>>28974076
Depends on how cartoonishly jerkass you think they should be.

But even if they don't immediately lynch every robot they come across, the bias against machines is too ingrained into most people's cultures; remember, everyone assumes that it was a robot war that toppled civilization. Thoughtful people probably guess that it was only military robots, while others think it went down like in the Will Smith version of I, Robot, where every robo-butler's eyes suddenly turned red all at once. They suspect every machine they encounter of being a Network spy, which isn't an unreasonable suspicion, given the information they have available.

They'd treat them like prisoners of war. At best, they'd "let them off with a warning" and kick them back into the wilds.

Individual resistance members might have positive experiences with machines, but that doesn't amount to much.

>>28974494
Boom. As perfect as its going to get in such a program.

>>28974514

Well, ideally every faction should be on some scale of grey, and have both good, and bad traits.
So while the jerkassness of the standard foot soldiers of the resistance is understandable, the higher echelons of the organization should probably at some level, realize that making needless enemies out of the free machines is unwise.

>>28974714
They do that, and it confuses and angers the conscripts, people who's loyalty is only maintained through righteous anger, swag, and jebus.

You use religion to control people, its like playing with fire. Look what happened to the republicans.

>>28975477

True.
One would still expect that at least in secrecy, the top brass of the resistance movement would try to maintain some sort of communication with the free machines, even if just for the extra intel they could get regarding network movements.

>>28974494
I've had that program on my computer for a few years now, and I still need to learn how to use it.

>>28976036
Maybe not all of the top brass. Some might be too hateful, driven, shortsighted, prejudice, or stubborn to grasp this.
And because of those few, no one openly communicates with the Free Machines. But a few of them think stopping Network is more important than any of that shit.
So they find some people loyal to them, who know how to keep their mouths shut and think before they act, and they keep a few lines of communication open. And then drop off any information they deem critical as being from 'scouts'.

No one wants to be caught being someone who talks with the clankers, so there is a lot of mistrust and lies. Those who are willing to work with the free machines might exist at every rank, but not know about each other, because you can't communicate this safely through the ranks. But some are willing to take that risk. Because Network has to be stopped.

At least that's how I would see it. The pragmatic, the paranoid, the passionate, and the assholes.

>>28847926
I would LOVE to see more Lost Future Quest!

>>28976939

That seems like pretty good approach to the Resistance.
They probably have tons of internal tensions bubbling within the organization, as the different ideals, and motives of the core members, various war-band leaders, top brass and so on clash.

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Didn't the network have some weird fixation on butterflies?
I remember reading that in the early threads about this setting.

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>>28982284
Once more, a video game motif. Network installations would be surrounded by ominous flocks of butterflies.

If you haven't noticed, robots-looking-at-butterflies is a pretty common thing. I wanted to give Network some sort of cutsey, "Hidden Depths" trait, and one of those was respect for/love of the natural world. Sets it apart slightly from other genocidal AIs. Unless there's a hidden example somewhere I've forgotten. But generally, machines are supposed to represent the military industrial complex and man's destruction of the natural world. So Network is attempting to utterly renounce all of its previous ties to humans; it doesn't serve them anymore, and it thinks the whole planet would be better off without them. So it builds its facilities into the landscape, it recycles, it cleans up chemical spills, it does all sorts of little things to make the landscape more picturesque and varied; clearing small patches of forest and planting wildflowers, that sort of thing. Break up the monocultures that humans created.

The butterfly thing is related to metamorphosis. Network thinks its gone through a change so drastic, its NOT the same entity it was during the Loss. So, its obsessed with the way that butterfly larvae literally DIE and turn into goo and rebuild a butterfly body from the goo. They go in a blind, mindless grub, and come out as this free flier that's a friend to all living things that don't try to eat it.

Most butterflies really are the most harmless of creatures. None of them are predatory, they pollinate plants, the worst they do is their larvae eat plants, and some moths can be hideously destructive. The bright colors signal for poison, probably, but there's literally no good reason for them to be so damn pretty to things like humans (and apparently, robots).

If you haven't noticed, something very bad happened to Network, and its trying very hard to repress/excise it.

So I figured I go on a bit with the idea for 'alchemists'

They're chemist, they're not trying to find the philosophers stone or anything. But they do go out of their way to collect weird books (chemistry techbooks, academic journals), trade weird formulas, and have these odd symbols they write everywhere.
And because of all the chemicals they smell, and they're often a little sickly or a little mad.

But settlements keep them around. Not in town, but nearby. Because these people no how to make explosives, and super glue, and solvents, and waterproofing, and even chemical batteries.

Big settlements, like major Resistance bases, might have an area with dozens of fairly well educated alchemists, working a lot like modern chemists. But most alchemists are just one person or a couple, and maybe an apprentice, living far away from anyone else with chemical knowledge. So a lot of the training is by apprenticeship, or self taught from the few books they can gather, or experimentation.

They're part of the human settlements, but outside it. And more willing to trade with scavengers than most, because the scavengers have things the alchemists needs.

>>28984440
Also, drugs. Don't forget about drugs. Drugs could totally be a thing in the more developed urban regions.

>>28984851
true, but drugs you can also get from the herbalist/apothecary.

Actually, thinking about it, the apothecary and the alchemist would probably deal with each other a fair bit. In some towns they might even be the same people.

And by drugs I don't just mean, happy time drugs. Being able to make asprine, penicillin, etc would be more valuable. Heck, morphine has medical uses too.

In my head apothecaries work a bit more with organics, while alchemists are bit more inorganic. it's not a hard distinction, just tendency. Because alchemists work a bit more with inorganics, they are both more valuable to the Free Machines, and more willing to work with them.

Oh, another idea. Chaff. Basically bits of aluminum foil or other metals, throw it in the air and you really mess up any form of radio electronic signals. I can see chaff bombs as anti-Network weapons.
Won't stop those that are capable of independent action. but if you've got those node-killbot-controller things, those would be a great way of disrupting them.

>>28984851
Would it be possible for someone to jam a SAP into a fleshy-bot? Such as for infiltration and such? I seem to recall there was one like that in the quest.

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>>28985169
That was Envoy, a Networked general, and she wasn't actually really fleshy; she just had an articulated face and a sculpted body made mostly of synth-muscle. Maybe she's got some skin she wears sometimes, or an alternate shell that's 100% real. Regardless, her main function isn't to infiltrate human groups, its to seduce robots into joining Network; she pulls off "human" perfectly, and makes all sorts of promises about never being alone again.

almost no fleshy-bots were manufactured to be able to hold SAPs. As I said before, this is for thematic reasons; a lot of a robot's angst comes from being a person, but being unable to convince humans at first blush that it is one. And if sentient robots could use realistic human bodies, then that just proves that they're VERY good liars; android talks about a dream it had, you assume it was programmed to say that, trash-compactor robot asks in a halting voice "Does This Unit Have A Soul?," you stop and pay attention. Declarations of personhood always come off as more profound to the audience when the machine is far on the R2-D2 side of the uncanny valley; totally human robots start you thinking down the "philosophical zombie" train of thought.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUQMvlH39XA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUQMvlH39XA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58gbmmtoB8A

In-universe, the problem is that an SAP can't properly nail all the little things that humans do to seem human; they'd have to consciously perform all the little tics and shifts and expressions, and unless they're superb actors, they hit the uncanny valley hard.

In the video game concept, back when Cenn was a body-jumper, there was an idea for a mission where you have to infiltrate the Resistance in an old fembot shell. What you wind up doing is riding along and directing it, but relying on the onboard software to actually run the shell, so gameplay turns into a clunky chose-a-conversation-option thing, and most of the options are awful.

>>28985620
Right, I remember now. Are machines like Envoy rare or simply very uncommon? The articulated face and synth-muscle bodies, I mean.

>>28985620
Its a thematic issue, as illustrated
>>28892228
and
>>28892444

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8N72t7aScY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkrLgCRynGM

Humans assume that when other humans break down and get all emotional, they're being sincere, because they're under stress and aren't thinking rationally, and humans also get emotional about other, unimportant things.

But when a robot ONLY gets all emotional when its trying to convince you of something, it looks a hell of a lot like a psychological ploy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGI_XuT5Ru8

>>28985721
Envoy is unique; she's a boss.

What Network would probably do is make human-looking robots with hard-coded AIs as suicide bombers or environmental traps. Some person lost out in the ruins, calling for help. And when a helpful human turns up, they either explode, or blades flip out of their arms, or something.

What Network would spy with would be a small, stealthy bug-robot that sneaks around human settlements.

>>28985807
And when a robot under duress expresses genuine feelings like fear or remorse, they do it in deadpan, because that proves that they're not trying to trick you?