⇨ HELLBOUND HALLOWS: A PLOTTING POST

[ringleaders]

GAME CUBE PLOTTING↴ As mentioned in the Mainframe location write up, during the carnival’s stay there, some unfortunate carnival members are going to end up having to play A Game. Simplistically put, this means that those pulled into the Game will have to take the part of the NPCs in a computer game, with their goal being to stop “the User” (also known at the Player) from winning. How do they do this? Mostly by making the Game hard enough that the User can’t beat it. If you’ve ever been so mad at a video game that you rage quit or run out of lives, that’s what the characters inside the Game will be trying to inflict upon the User. Unfortunately , most people will be without their powers, and the Users will be designed to be proportionally a lot more powerful than the carnival workers and programs that will be fighting against it – and the cost of failure is permanent nullification. That is, turning into a rainbow slug and losing all sense of self. The Game NPCs will have to work together in order to defeat the Users. Fortunately, they also have the advantage of being able to REBOOT. REBOOTING EXPLANATION↴ What is Rebooting? It’s actually pretty simple. When the programs of Mainframe are forced to participate in a Game against the User, they are able to temporarily reformat their forms (IE. Rebooting) in order to gain skills, physical features, or tools necessary to play their role in the Game. Since the Game they are playing is a dark fantasy dungeon crawler, this means they will mostly be gaining the abilities of whatever demon, skeleton, ghost, or other horrible dungeon monster they end up becoming. You can be creative with this, and the powers your characters gain don’t really matter, as long as you keep yourself from powerplaying against the User – remember, they are supposed to be enough of a challenge for every NPC in the dungeon. Just try to keep it to the theme of dungeon crawler horror/fantasy and you’ll be good. What you become when you Reboot inside a Game is essentially random, based on what the Game needs, so it may or may not suit your character or your usual skills. So the domestic housewife may become a terrifying arch-demon, while the grizzled war veteran becomes zombie canon fodder. It’s up to you how appropriate or inappropriate the form you get is. The one restriction is that you cannot make your character radically more powerful than the average unless you sign up for the opportunity to play a Boss Monster. CAN I BE THE BOSS?↴ This wasn’t actually part of the original plan, but I had a few people ask about the idea of Boss Monsters, so I’ve decided to go ahead with it! There will be three opportunities to play Boss Monsters: two Minibosses, and one Final Boss. You want one? Awesome! There’s two different ways you can win a slot. 1. You pay for the opportunity with Activity Reward points. 2. If not enough people are willing to shell out points, you can sign up to participate in an RNG selection process for the remaining slots. FINAL BOSS (1 SLOT) Cost: 60 AC points. If more than one person is willing to pay the price, one of those people will be randomly selected to take the role. (Don’t worry, you get to keep your money if you don’t win the RNG.) Rewards: You get to be the Final Boss in the dungeon, and so you get to have your character be some kind of epic monstrosity that the other NPCs will have to build their strategies around. You can also have other characters be your minions. Mostly importantly, though, you will be able to give your character one Rare Change, randomly selected by the mods. It will be randomly selected from the 9 listed options on the Transformations page. You may opt out of 3 before it is rolled. MINI BOSS (2 SLOTS) Cost: 30 AC points. If more than two people are willing to pay the price, two of those people will be randomly selected to take the roles. (Don’t worry, you get to keep your money if you don’t win the RNG.) Rewards: You get to be one of the baddest asses in the dungeon, you can have other players be your minions, and the structure of the dungeon will be partially build around the fight with your character. This one is purely an RP reward, with no additional changes. Please sign up for these options below. You can sign up to be a free 2 play slot filler for no cost, but if there are enough people willing to pay, you won’t have the chance to take any of these roles. HELLBOUND HALLOWS: XTREME↴ The Game everyone will be playing is called Hellbound Hallows, and it is essentially a Diablo (1/2/3) clone, where a team of 4 Users will be trying to storm through the NPCs to defeat the bosses and claim some sort of loot prize at the end. As an NPC, you must stop them. If the Final Boss is defeated, then everyone will be nullified. Those that win the Boss slots will have the liberty to design the nature of their boss fights and what the surrounding room is like, but the rest will be pretty standard spooky hallways full of scary monsters, blood effects, and traps. Each Boss will only have one life – if they are defeated, they will be put down for the rest of the Game. The weaker NPCs will have 2 spare lives, meaning that they will respawn up to two times, which is important because the Users will probably be able to slaughter them relatively easily. Dying will be a bit painful but not especially traumatizing (your corpse essentially poofs into experience points and loot), and then next thing you know you’ll be respawning from the shadows. If you die a third time, you won’t come back. Characters who do this won’t actually be dead, and will wake up after the Game is won. Of course, the other NPCs won’t know that until the Game has ended, so feel free to be dramatic about it. NPCs will be aware that they are on their last lives when it comes around. Unfortunately for you, the four Users will also have multiple lives. On the bright side, that means more people get the opportunity to murder them. There will be a Warrior, a Mage, a Rogue, and a Healer. You can also post below if you'd like the opportunity to take out the PC characters specifically, because there is a limited amount of times this can happen before the Users lose officially. The spots to sign up for Boss Monsters will be down below, and this post can also be used for more detailed plotting about the Game in specific.

Comments

ANNOYING GHOST + BIG BAD-

[otoko]

SO now that rolls have been decided it is PLOTTING TIME.

Carly is going in alone; she'll be a spooky rambling NPC ghost/skeleton that rattles off various nonsensical phrases-including, rather unfortunately, tips for the players, so it might be good to shuttle her off to some corner away from the players whenever possible. She'll be getting full on glowing orange blood from this after things are over too, so hooray for that!

GONGENZAKA though... Gongenzaka rolled for the FINAL BOSS of the game, so hold onto your hats!

Gongenzaka, having rolled for a plant based change, will have a rather plant-like look to him; but at the base, the boss monster appears as an enormous, serpentine dragon, more 'tail' than body. It bears four smaller heads coming from along the shoulders, and one especially massive one, hooded with a canopy of bloody petals to match similarly dressed wings and fore-legs.

The idea behind this boss will be that it appears from beneath the ground just as the players seem to escape the hellscape or reach their final goal; whether it's to leave or to get to the pit, the arena will appear to be nothing but a brutal garden of rose and thorn, lot poly 'texture bodies' stuck in the bramble. The BOSS MONSTER rises from beneath it-carving out an enormous pit where the tail disappears downward, and hovering up out from the middle.

To say that anyone facing Gon alone is *screwed* is to put it lightly; if only the Warrior reaches him, there's not going to be much of a way for attacks to hit, not until Gongenzaka himself moves to swipe with an arm or something. In true Boss Monster fashion, the goal will be to strike the heads-or alternatively the narrow snakey base- from a distance until Gongenzaka basically falls over. At which point things move more like a standard LARGE DRAGON fight, and the goal to fight each head begins.

Each head has a unique blast of 'breath', the middle one just has a great big stunning roar, and, naturally, it REALLY hurts if one gets hit by that. SO THAT'S BOSSDRAGON.

Gongenzaka is open for minions though! Suzu the snubbull is technically one already; existing as one of the plants surrounding, her purpose is to be an unkillable tiny threat that basically just causes a smidge of damage if a player touches it. In other words, Arena Boundary. But there's definitely room for more lively minions, and having one could even help to figure out the details on Gon's fighting!