Blazer-Sharp, Prattle-Ready, Brainless Steel Samurai Banana

MMOs versus FOSS - tl;dr the entire way an MMO is structured means you can't do any hard anti-cheat and still have your game be FOSS

Adrian's post with discussion

My abridged comment:

the only alternative i can come up with that doesn't require the entire playsim to be server-side-only is to have a decentralized mmo (w/opt-in federation if there's to be any at all) where individual admins are strongly encouraged by both word and UX to actively vet players and run instances in a way that's conductive to ppl identifying with it as part of a community

Which raises the question: what sort of design features would encourage this?

Brainstorming some beneath the cut.

( Read more... )

I am aware that all of this offloads a lot of power and responsibility onto a server admin. Perhaps there's some way to distribute this authority in a communally-controlled server setup, but that is beyond the scope of this brainstorm.

https://mc776.neocities.org/

By no means am I going to be putting all of my writings tag onto here, only a few personal favourites to polish up and upload. If/when Github becomes unusable this may also be the home of future Hideous Destructor releases.

I've still got everything from the old Shaw webspace on my hard drive, though what's up now is all that seems unequivocally worth preserving in my totally subjective opinion (plus the new Email Dungeon which is a recent distillation of some thoughts I've posted here already).

Welp, back to the HD custom shell shotgun rework...

Me, commenting a while ago on someone's post on Mastodon:

now i want to write up a setting where everyone's nomadic and the only borders are natural or seasonal

Some very basic ideas...

The relevant places:
The Mountains
The Hills
The Lakes
The River
The Marshes
The Sea

(yes i know what this looks like, oh well "write what you know")

Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall

1. Sea, Mountains, Mountains, River - they love cold
2. River, Lakes, Hills, Sea - they eat lots of fish
3. Marshes, Sea, Hills, River - they dig
4. Sea, River, Lakes, River - they live in boats

1 and 2 meet in late fall to mingle and trade, and intermarry frequently
3 and 4 meet in early spring and ritually forgive each other for what they do to each other in the fall
2 and 3 often have ad hoc "border" disputes but also rely on each other for things they aren't usually specialized to obtain themselves
1 raids 3 and 4 in the fall and gets away with it by pitting them against each other
1 and 4 rarely interact in winter since 4 is usually far equator-wards
2 and 4 might once have been the same people but one of them thinks sbubuu is an extension of uuquru while the other thinks sbubuu/khwophong is an independent existence that lives in harmonious reflection of uuquru/okangoro

A co-operative board game similar to "Sorry!" or snakes-and-ladders but where the goal is to endure as long as possible. Mostly inspired by Killing Floor.

( I should probably rename my RPG tag... )

This grew from a passing thought that the Potterverse would make a lot more worldbuilding sense if Gryffindor and Slytherin were actually one and the same house. Added a side helping of a bit of an RPG thing that sprang up in my head on Friday.

( Setting fluff )


( Classes and mechanics, for explanatory value only )

The hoplophage is worn on the person, usually on the belt. Some helmet mounts are also available ( but it is this author's opinion that for the reasons below a head mount is, at a population level, a self-correcting tactical error. )

While browing the RPGnet forums there was yet another discussion about reinventing the "stock" fantasy races - elf, dwarf and orc. This seems usually to take the form of taking something that looks like an elf, then pulling it completely out of the mythical role it had in Middle-Earth and/or D&D.

That gave me another idea: take a bunch of other species tropes and shoehorn them into these roles.


Deathbots

A long time ago the Atlanteans built a terrible race of sentient killer robots to conquer the world. They built very many and they scourged the planet, and Atlantis became the ruler of the known world for centuries. But eventually its expansion had to stop, and as Atlantis teetered between downsizing and stabilizing and collapse from its overreach the deathbots had nothing to do. So they settled down, raised families, and moved off to greener (or in their case blacker) pastures. People say that they fled to the caves and deep underground because humans distrusted them, or that it was part of a great tragic rift between the peoples above and the peoples below that drove them into exile, but really they're just down in the mines and caves and undermountains because that's where the fuel and ores are that they need to live.

Deathbots are stout and stubby, standing about 4 feet tall and 3 feet wide with a body covered entirely in metal with one to six yellow or red pupilless eyes glowing out of some impenetrable blackness within the "visor" of their heads. They can detach and replace parts voluntarily though for more important parts it stings a little as a protective security measure. (They tried making it not hurt at all but people kept disassembling themselves trying to do complex field repairs in stupid places in the remote tunnels and needing to be rescued.) They will very often be seen with only one manipulator, the other arm preoccupied with housing some tool or weapon, which are incidentally famous for being some of the best in the world. (They love making and selling weapons though no deathbot-led faction has started a real war in centuries.) A newly built deathbot AI core can usually last about 80-120 years before wear and tear warrant a permanent decommission.


Treebugs

Deep in the forests of every known world these vast insectoid beings flit silently across the canopies, drinking the dew and light in memory of some impossible antediluvian world. At first glance they appear to be beasts, slipping flawlessly among the leaves and branches, naked as Adam in their peculiar sort of primordiality. But in truth they guard some of the most formidable technologies ever seen on this planet, things that would make the finest machinery of Atlantis seem like the work of impatient children, thinly and perfectly disguised to our crude senses as the essence of nature and life itself.

Treebugs are tall and spindly, standing 6 feet tall with long arms like a gibbon and a long forked tail that acts as two independent grasping limbs. They have small heads with huge compound eyes under heavy eyelids, and they can turn their heads to look completely behind their own bodies. They can change colour at will, but are most often some kind of green and brown, reflecting a thousand blues when the sun hits them at the correct angle. But for the four limbs and lack of a separate abdomen they would appear very much like arthropods, but what at first glance appears to be an exoskeleton is really a pattern of scales and spikes and muscle tone - and equipment. Communications devices, telepathic nodes, medical equipment, cutting implements, wings, extra limbs, things just seem to spontaneously emerge from a treebug's incomprehensibly ornate body as needed. They weigh a fraction of a grown man of similar height, bearing the hollow bones of a bird. No one knows the full extent of a treebug's lifespan, and some purport to have personal recollections of Atlantis in its prime.


Hivers

Vast regions of the world lie barren and uninhabitable by man, overrun with twisted forms of the hives that house these brutish beings. Their ancestors exiled those of the treebugs eons ago, naming them heretics and blasphemers against the the purity of their race and the sacred nature of life itself. Now they spawn by the dozen, cannibalizing each other from birth in a race where only the strong and ruthless survive, to live a short brutish life amidst the decaying land ravaged by their predecessors, or to suffer the stigma of being impregnated and locked up in the centre of a hive, barefoot and perpetually pregnant, every few days birthing another batch of fanged grubs desperate to find a place - desperate to find the top place - in their world.

Hivers are thick and coarse, about 5 feet tall with faces like those of treebugs but thickly muscled, with shaggy feathery manes around the neck and four long razor-sharp tusks sprouting from the mouth - and a pair of slit-pupiled yellow eyes long evolved to bear as much rage and hate and inspire as much fear as possible in the viewer. Their grey bodies bear little ornamentation beyond more shaggy fur in strategic places, and unlike their distant kin are quite visibly clothed and armed with shoddy but effective gear. Aggression and visible wealth are directly linked with status. Sexual dimorphism is minimal between males and virgin females, but once impregnated and enhived the females quickly become obese and hairless and glassy-eyed. Potential maximum lifespan is unknown, though life expectancy is typically around 4-24 years for a male or non-reproducing female (with almost all of these on the high end of the scale bearing a male gender identity) and around 15-32 years for a reproducing female.

Something I'd been thinking about on my way home while trying to figure out how the mechanics of the RPG I've been working on would apply to an actual work...


A man travels far across the world, making a fortune in battle and plunder, driven by a desire to confront and slay the man who murdered his father when he was a child. ( His ship is caught in a storm... )