Tag Archives: Love

SLA Industries Ficlet: The Dream

Posted by Grim Jim on

There’s a sort of background hum to any home, whether you live in downtown, uptown or anywhere in between.

Power lines, devices, appliances, heating pipes, water pumps. You get used to it after a while, and you no longer notice it, but you do notice it when it’s gone. That sudden silence can wake you up more surely than any alarm clock, and that’s what happened to me the other night.

I woke up with a start, and it was pitch, fucking, black. For a moment, I thought I’d gone blind. Sure, it gets dark in downtown, but not that dark. Everyone has to see. There’s always a standby LED or the sodium glare of the streetlights, the flash of passing traffic. This time, nothing. I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face.

I tried to swing out of bed to find a torch or something, but… well, you won’t believe me, but the floor wasn’t there any more. My foot found nothing but empty air, and I had to scramble not to fall off the bed. I was terrified. I almost shat myself. Was it a nightmare? It didn’t feel like it.

You’d think the amount of time you spend in bed, you’d know your way around it, where the pillows were, how the sheets or the blanket are folded over, how big it is, but you really don’t know at all. I was fumbling around like a newborn, clinging to the bed for dear life, when I felt someone else there with me.

I didn’t feel them exactly, not to start with, but I was aware of another presence, another weight, pressing down on the bed, shifting when I shifted, breathing when I breathed. I reached out again, and a hand touched mine, our fingers interlaced, but it was cold where I was warm.

I spoke to it, I said ‘Hello’ and… it said ‘Goodbye’ in this mocking, sarcastic tone… but it was my own voice. I reached out with my other hand and… it touched me… intimately. I’m not making this up… it.. it… felt like my own hand, it moved like my own hand and… Loa save me… I…

It stole it. It stole ME. It took me away, but I can still feel it… They’re doing things to it. To me. They’re taking ME and putting me inside things. Making things. Bad things. What woman is going to want me now? How am I supposed to take a piss? When are you going to let me out of here? You can SEE I’m not lying… do you want to see? LOOK!

SLA Industries Ficlet: Keen’s Last Stand

Posted by Grim Jim on

“I fucking hate Conflict Worlds,” I said to nobody in particular, hunkered down in what was left of the bunker. I didn’t have anyone else to say it to because they were all spread around the area doing a passable impression of a strawberry smoothie, with the bits in.

I’d been shot in the tit and it fucking hurt. There was a gaping hole in my breastplate, which, honestly, at this point should just have been called a ‘plate’. I was out of just about everything right about now, ammunition, hope, armour, medical kits and even drugs.

A Frother without drugs. That was a bad joke, right? I mean… our blood courses with the fucking stuff. We were born high, and we die high. Isn’t that the motto? I’m old school, highland clan, and I’m not going to die curled up in a bunker, sober, like some sanctimonious straight-edge cockbag. If I’m going out, I’m going out high as a fucking kite and spitting in the face of my enemies.

What did I have left?

A quick inventory of the smoking crater that used to be a bunker turned up this short list.

  1. A bunch of dead friends.
  2. A power claymore.
  3. Broken armour.
  4. One tit.
  5. One bent cigarette.
  6. A double dose of Alice, my recreational drug of choice and fuck-all use in a ruck.

I sighed deeply and tapped my mic.

“Control, this is Operative Keen. I’ve found the renegade Genocide Suits. Any chance of claiming the completion fee now and putting it into my LAD account?”

The cunts put me on hold. I was buggered if I was going to go out to tinkling muzak, so I tore my helmet off and gulped back the Alice, letting it take me away on a warm wave of strange as I dragged my claymore up and used it as a walking stick, scaling the crater wall to face the bastards.

The custard smelt of elderberries and coughed butterflies in my marzipan as I danced to the tune of distant drums.

“It isn’t so bad.” Said the elephant in the kilt as the hornets nested in my hair and whispered that they wanted to mate with my television.

He was not wrong. Not wrong at all.

#RPG – Love, Death & Robots Sonnie’s Edge (Daikaiju Die!)

Posted by grimachu on

Love Death and Robots came out a while ago on Netflix. It’s a worthy successor, in many ways, to Heavy Metal – the series, the anthology comic and the movie. It can be a bit hit-or-miss, many of these kinds of shows can be, but it’s more hit than miss. One of the stand-out episodes was the first one, based on a Peter F Hamilton short story, where bio-engineered mini-kaiju battle it out in underground arenas.

That would make a great premise for an RPG campaign, and carries implications with it – around the technology – that could form a broader and more varied set of RPG scenarios. The technology would be unlikely to only be used in the underground and the military applications of producing cybernetically controlled monsters, organically, bypassing a lot (but not all) of the normal industrial infrastructure necessary for war machines.

Creatures bypass a lot of the real-life issues around giant robots, and engineered and bio-printed organisms, stitched together from cybernetics and vat-grown organs are – in many ways – a lot more plausible.

My FATE-based game, Daikaiju Die! Has the basis for people able to run such a game, with a few tweaks.

Scale

  • Fighting monsters should be scale 2-3 (vehicle or tank).
  • Scale adds to physical Stress.
  • If you’re attacking something bigger than you, the difference in scale counts as two points of extra armour for them.
  • The other way around, the difference in scale is added to damage.
  • If you’re shooting at something smaller than you, the difference in scale is a penalty to the roll.
  • If shooting at something larger, the difference in scale is a bonus to the roll.

Fighting Kaiju Creation

Concept: Overall idea behind the creature.
Codename: Start with a codename for your Fighting Kaiju. Something that sums it up in one go.
Aspects: Concept Aspect, Trouble Aspect, Bonus Aspect.
Stunts: Fighting Kaiju start with a single stunt.
Everything Else: Fighting Kaiju also have Skills, Armour and Attacks to buy. These come out of a starting pool of 12 points.
Skills: Fighting Kaiju have Athletics, Fight, Notice, Physique and Shoot skills. Buying them is 1/1. Don’t forget to increase stress according to their Physique as per the main rule book.
Armour: Fighting Kaiju are naturally very tough, but some are tougher than others. 1 point of armour costs 1 point, 2 points of armour costs 4 points and 3 points of armour costs 9 points. For Fighting Kaiju, armour also adds to stress.
Weapons: Fighting Kaiju’s weapons must be natural, claws, teeth, biological acid vomit and so forth. Weapons cost one point per bonus point of damage, up to a maximum of +3. You can also buy aspects for a weapon for one point each.
Bonus Stunt: A Fighting Kaiju can have a second stunt at a cost of 3 points.
Bonus Aspect: A kaiju can have additional aspects at the cost of two points each.

Rules

The Interface skill works as normal, but there is only ever a single ‘pilot’.

The connection is direct and at the speed of light and is essentially lagless out to a distance of 225km. The operator suffers a -1 penalty for every 100km distance or part thereof beyond that.

A civilian transmitter typically only has a maximum range of 500m before connections start to drop out, less in built up areas or inside structures.

In both competitive and military settings, the relative loss of operational effectiveness and the use of upgrades follows the same rules as per normal.

Khanivore

Concept: High velocity predator.
Concept Aspect: Lithe and Twisty.
Trouble Aspect: Relatively Weak.
Stunts: Split Attack – After making a successful head-tentacle attack, Khanivore can spend a FATE point to split the tentacles, making four strikes instead of one, at -1 damage each.
Skills: Athletics 3(4), Fight 3(4), Physique 2.
Weapons: Claws +1, Teeth +1, Head-Tentacle +2.
Bonus Aspect: Skin in the Game.
Scale: 2.
Physical Stress: OOOOO