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andmaybegayer · 2 years

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Last Monday of the Week 2022-09-26

Putting the Reading section at the end because it's Nona the Ninth discussion hour if you want to skip that.

Listening: I've had Friends At The Table in my podcast rotation these past few weeks. I asked noted blogger and Tuesdaypost Originator girlfriendsofthegalaxy for a good start point so I've been in the Partizan arc, which is a Beamsaber game.

I like stylistically constrained game systems, I think they help keep everyone on the same page for how the game is meant to go and what the stakes are. Forged in the Dark provides the tools to do this well, so do Powered by the Apocalypse games.

At some point I'll go back and listen to their session Zero to learn more setting stuff but I love factions in TTRPG design. They're a great way to establish tensions and conflicts without having to deal with personal grudges too much, which are good but can sometimes be too easy to solve in the realm of stabbing someone with a sword. Guilds and polities function well as hard-to-kill machines made up of many individuals.

I've just got to the part where the Rapid Evening extract the Prophet and Clementine gets her Obsessed scar, which is a turning point for her character. I am having a hard time keeping characters straight in my head all the time but they're distinctive enough that I'm usually fine. The other half of the story has more distinctive characters I think? I like the separate halves for different reasons.

Watching: Death on the Nile, the second of the new Poirot movies. The mystery in Death on the Nile is kind of just annoying but if you ignore that the actual movie is gorgeously done, lots of big moving scenes with lots happening.

Playing: Hades! I bounced off Hades after I got my first full clear, I succeeded and then remembered oh wait it's a roguelight, I gotta do that dozens of times to build up the necessary resource to finish the story and romance the NPC's and whatever.

This time I'm approaching combat more as an engine building exercise and it's more enjoyable, I was treating it too much like other Supergiant games which are a) very narrative-forward and b) usually based on figuring out the quirks of a predictable mechanistic weapon and ability selection. Still haven't made a full clear but I only did like four runs, I'm still getting back into the controls and patterns. Got all the way to the final boss twice though.

Making: More quilting, ever onward. Cut a ton more fabric so we can keep going without stopping for a while.

Reading: Finished Nona the Ninth.

A lot of the sci-fi I've been reading does the thing where it takes literally half or more of the book to get to the first major inciting incident. The Left Hand of Darkness did this. The Diamond Age kind of does this although that's just Stephenson. Every single locked tomb book does this. You're like halfway through Gideon when the Fourths get got by Cytherea. You spend most of Harrow fucking around in Jod's magic space house. You are fully halfway through Nona before her secret slips. You meet Kiriona like 65% of the way through the book.

Every character here has intense motivations. Everyone has some existential threat bearing down on them and yet none of them are in an active war zone. Everyone is hanging out under the intense gaze of a resurrection beast and trying to decide which groceries to buy. There's a war going on but because we're with Nona, we never see it up close. I don't know if we're going to see the Cohort at work in Alecto, but maybe you don't really need to see them in the first place, you know what smiling imperialism looks like.

Kiriona and Ianthe work well together. They're damaged products of the empire that still feel like they need to be loyal to it. Gideon is way less friendly when you aren't inside her head, she's mean and she's content to align herself with power. The perspective change to Nona gives you new eyes on everyone.

There's so many gender and identity games being played and because Nona doesn't know who anyone is she passed that on to you. It's infuriating because you're meeting familiar characters and you can't quite figure out who they are because we keep talking about Crown.

Nona is good because she's not an asshole. She's a child, she's a little impulsive, but she likes and trusts Cam and Pal and Pyrrha which is even funnier when you know what she looks like.

It's impressive how easily it managed to make Jod a hugely sympathetic character. Yes he's still an asshole but you'd also be an asshole if you were just some guy who got the key to unlimited power only to use it too late to actually achieve the one thing you cared about but just in time to destroy the thing you wanted to protect.

Cam and Pal's arc is brutal. They've always been tightly linked but it's clear that they go far beyond the other Necromancer and Cav pairs. It looks like they flipped the script but in the end Cam is still sacrificing herself even if what comes out of it looks like her.

#last monday of the week #nona the ninth spoilers

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nuclearnerves · 3 years

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INCOMING VAMPIRE AU THOUGHTS

Don't mind me I'm finally getting the ideas I had on this shit out so I can actually go forward with developing it as an AU. It's my usual mixup of fps protags, Gordon Guy and John, but I'm starting with Gordon as the Vampire and Guy as the Vampire Hunter.

absolute beast of a wall of text under the cut

What If Being A Vampire Literally Sucks All The Time Forever like chronic pain sucks. like THAT level of sucks. Like Here's what I was thinking of. Being a vampire isn't just "being alive forever but you need to drink human blood" It's like Oh man I have some lore you look at vampires and their main thing is that they're blood suckers right so lets start with a corpse dead body. cadaver. no longer with us. just some rotting meat. The brain needs oxygen as fuel. The blood supplies the oxygen through blood. The blood is pumped through the heart. The blood is made by your bone marrow. You die. Your heart stops beating Blood stops pumping Brain no longer has oxygen to think marrow stops making blood thats standard! Now, becoming undead, as a vampire, is a little more complicated. The long and short of it is: your body is FIGHTING ACTIVELY to be alive against all odds and wins every time (immortality), but it hurts the whole way

I have the gist of it. It's like. Your heart stops. By all means, you should be dead. but the magic kicks in, and you're still thinking. Your brain is still sending signals to your muscles to move. But using what oxygen to move? whats burning in you? You don't know but you know it's just enough to get to your next meal. So you ferociously eat something, and then find you can't swallow. You can't make saliva. You barely have the energy to chew, and once you DO get something in your stomach, it immediately comes back up. Why can't you feel your pulse? What's going on? You're out of options so you figure you might as well just lie down and die. You're too tired to keep going anyway. So you do, you lie down, and you close your eyes, and you quietly hope that death is as peaceful as sleep. You realize you've actually been moving around without breathing, which makes sense because you can barely flex your diaphragm for more than a shaky wheeze. How are you thinking with such little oxygen? But as you fade from consciousness, you can feel something in you, and it's so upset, it's crying, it's filled with grief, and you instantly can tell it's your skeleton. It's your bones. You're distraught down to your marrow. You're dying. You're dying! Your heart stopped and you have no more blood! You need blood! You need blood to move! To breathe! To think! You try to breath deep again for the voices in your bones, trying to comfort them, to sooth them with the repetitive motion in your lungs, trying to fill yourself with anything but grief, but they keep wailing. We make the blood, our creation, our child, what we put all of our work into is gone! gone! gone! We need it back! Anything! All of it! Find it! Bring it back to us! We're hungry! WE'RE HUNGRY!

and once you find yourself too exhausted to listen, to think, how badly you wish just to die already to cease hearing this wailing, you find your body moving without you. And it's hungry and it's searching and it's crawling on all fours and it misses its beautiful red life that made it feel so full before and it needs it back, and the next thing you know you're desperately grabbing anything with blood in it and shoving it in your mouth in a desperate attempt to sooth this cry for life, you don't want to die, you don't want to die, you worked so hard to keep up this body and craft it and LIVE with it and you're not going to go, and even when you try, even when you try to lay down and die, your body refuses, it takes the reigns, and it keeps up the work itself with or without your help. And it's not until your stomach is full and your teeth are stained and you feel a pulsating burning in your bones that you snap back awake, completely conscious, just fine. You're lucid, you don't feel any more pain. Everything around you is dead and drained and messy and your heart still isn't beating. but you can breathe now and holy shit you guess you literally need to kill to survive and the less you eat and the more you starve yourself the worse it gets when your body finally decides to take recourse.

my idea was like. "the vampires curse is actually stored in the bones, thats why the teeth get so sharp and also theres a connection between blood and bones with the creation via bone marrow" its literally like i was sitting there thinking "no no no, whats it like to be a vampire. what neurosis would you develop. How would you panic? What are common mistakes beginner vampires make" which, by the way, gordon is a beginner vampire

so now you gotta factor, what blood lasts for how long? how long can you go between meals? not only that, but what creatures satisfy the urge? How long can you go avoiding human blood? Does it work like drugs where you develop a resistance to the high, or is it like food where it will keep you moving until you eat again? How the fuck are you gonna get your hands on blood? Can you just eat raw meat? Does that count? and thats where im at lol

OKAY now. now thoughts on beginning scenes of vampire au

So my idea was this Doomguy is a vampire hunter independent and one of his buds says that some freak scared and almost attacked his daughter when she got too close to his old abandoned laboratory up the hill and hes like “he might be… you know… a problem. if you needed a lead” and guys like yeah i fuckin hate the undead ill kill this dude so he busts into old lab space and sees so many dead animals its actually mostly Bones and pelt that hes seeing piles of feathers etc so hes like yeah this is all telltale signs of vampire uhhh hes introduced to gordon SOMEHOW im not totally sure of the details but the working idea i have is guy falls into a trap gordon devised that restrains him suspended in wire or something and gordon like. limps/stumbles into the room and this dude looks haggard he’s breathing heavy, his cheeks are hollow, he’s bug-eyed and shaking while looking at this massive wall of meat in his trap and he bares a bunch of hideous teeth and grits them and looks like hes really struggling with somethin... Like if these dudes don't know each other then Gordon might give in and try to drain Guy, and Guy would absolutely do anything in his power to turn this new vampire into ash, im thinking the inclusion if g-man as a coven leader can fix both issues.

i like the idea of guy falling into gordons trap and gordon thinking about what to do with him before gman shows up and whisks gordon away for a “meeting” while complimenting him on his good work catching the most feared vampire hunter in the country and gman just leaving guy suspended in wires that he has to fight his way out of. Instant situation defuser.

Guy ends up needing to take care of other monsters before going back to Gordon, and he DOES plan to go back to gordon, because no vampire is a good one, especially not one associated with the fucking head of a coven, but next time he sees Gordon, Gordon helps him out of a scrape by attacking and draining a combine who was going to take Guy out or something and escaping before Guy can catch him, or otherwise seeing Gordon do something good with his insane undead powers and like, the third time he meets up with him is when they can actually talk, and Gordons fuckin SO haggard, he’s not even fighting back and he’s even going as far as to say “just make sure theres nothing of me left when you’re done, I don’t want anyone else getting hurt”

Side Note: Guy has a bunch of scarring on his body from dealing with vampires, cops, ghosts, werewolves, anything violent that kills people. I'm playing with the inkling of an idea that he has Divine Blood in him, so that any time something undead bites him or tries to drink his blood, it burns. We'll see.

Side Note 2: now i really like the idea of the combine actually being an organized faction of vampire hunters that are WICKED crooked and exploit people for all their worth in exchange for their “safety” when they kill a vampire They’re essentially loansharks and Guy fucking hates them and hates the name theyve given to vampire hunting

Side Note 3: You've probably noticed that I haven't said anything about John yet! He's in this too. His species is a surprise but I need to get to him later I have an idea for where he came from (Cortana too)

I still need a good reason for Guy to not instantly kill this vampire, if not it's just gonna be "Gordon Freeman escapes the countrys best vampire hunter like a seventh time" every time they meet and they end up being rivals. And it gives Guy enough time to look past the whole "undead monster" thing and start looking at the "Oh this dude figured out how to fight his ridiculous craving for blood in a way more humane than most and is actually staying out of peoples way and keeping to himself. Guess he's not that big of a threat but I still need to keep an eye on him in case he loses it. Turns out he's got a family (Probably Alyx, Eli, Issac and Barney) who's been lookin for him and cares about him as well, don't wanna hurt them". I like the idea of them ending up needing to team up to take out undead together.

And that's what I got so far!!!

#freeguy #gordon freeman #doomguy #vampire au #freeguy117

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