Megafauna Zombification
[Uncommon Deployment]
[5 Beasts, 4 Mortal Dregs]
Much like their smaller zombie ken, Megafauna zombies are corpses that have deep entities coaxed into them. Two important differences, however, lie in the size of the carcasses being reanimated and the overall quality and treatment of the entities being conjured. Raising the corpses of large animals is a coup, as many such animals die either as the course of nature or accidents (or in the case of hippos, pest control), but this means that the rotting and increased entropy present more consternating issues. Few hippos die anywhere near the front line, and the only animals we currently use actively in battle are the frillnecks (who are soldiers are much happier with when attached to boats) and the boars which are fielded, at best, sparingly. This means that the bodies have to be transported to the field, or raised in the homeland and walked over while entropy rots them. While we can still field a substantial number of the beasts in the field, there is little chance of them being able to ambush the enemy when their corpses are putrescently bloated and most of their skin has sloughed or rotted away. While the quality and intelligence of the entity possessing has been increased, and such creatures are capable of rough tactics, the stench and unusual appearance of their host makes nuanced stealth and camouflage difficult. Frillnecks in particular are almost untenable as an auxiliary unit. Their naturally gelatinous flesh rots quickly even without a deep entity, and the accelerated decay combined with the depredations of water scavengers means that Frillnecks are reduced to animated skeletons in shockingly short order. This is an issue as skeletons have an excessively difficult time swimming.
[Minor Design, d6: 3]
[Moderate Bug, Simple]
A modest concern when fielding these creatures is that they can tend to rapidly lose their natural weapons. With the exception of cattle whose horns bind to their skull admirably, most other animals will begin quickly losing hooves, teeth, and claws as the putrefaction sets in- particularly with the deep entity accelerating the pace of natural decay and weakening bone. While they’re still frighteningly dangerous by weight alone, the most dangerous bits of animals tend to fall off over time.
Hog Knights Revision
[Revision Weights: 2, 5. Roll: 3, partial success!]
The decision to stop treating the giant Hogs like animals and more like fractious nobility is one that improves the lives of everyone. Healers assistants are no longer given impossible commands like ‘Just hold him still while I set the bone’, healers are no longer forced to put out help wanted bulletins that read ‘need expendable youths to distract giant boar while I set his bones’, and the farmers of giant cucumbers and therapeutic mud have made a mint on selling their products to the military. Instead of being a place hellish pig-squeals and the tormented wails of crushed interns, hog knight medical facilities are now filled with sounds of scritching, light music, and satisfied oinking. Turns out that if you’ve got a really nice scratching pole, a masseuse, and a cucumber melon rinse, giant hogs are inured enough to pain that you can straight up set a bone without them caring. The issue before was more that they were angry about you touching them, not they were actually in serious pain from field surgery. Somewhat strangely, the hog knights themselves have demanded to be a part of this process with their mounts, with the insane knights receiving mani-pedis alongside their unspeakably ferocious steeds.
Research Lead: A point of interest, discovered during the grooming process, is the gelatinous mats of hog blood. Initially thought to just be normal mats from lack of grooming and constant exposure to mud, spa workers have found these to universally be caked shields of blood. Surgeons removing foreign bodies (such as barbed arrows, spears,and chunks of tree that the hogs ran through) have been able to watch the behavior happen under their very knives. The hog receives an injury, blood flows, touches their bristly hairs, and a reaction occurs. Instead of flowing normally, the blood almost immediately gels around the wound. While this should make it a hotbed of infection, only the outer, dried, layer of blood seems consumed by parasites, while the inner layers of these gel pads remain conspicuously free of disease.
The Melon Ceremony is, similarly, a cracking success. While most of the individuals who throw melons were volunteered by friends as a joke, drew the short straw in their legion, were submitted as criminal justice, or were very drunk when they though it was a good idea, there are definite success stories. The bonding experience is one of mutual fun*. If the giant hog is having fun with the melons, and the person on the cart is having fun with the melons and chaos, then something clicks within both about discovering a kindred spirit. Hog Knight Deirdre, for instance, was formerly an embroiderist who hated her life and just wanted everything around her to catch fire and explode. After committing arson on a whim, she was sent to the melon ceremony as a last ditch effort at reform. There she met Gracie and bonded strongly over a love of making animals run in panic, hurling heaving objects, and making things explode into showers of wet, red, chunks.
--[Serious Bug, Intractable]
While they have been the mounts of a few legendary individuals, all attempts to integrate them as a standard cavalry unit have failed. The hogs are, quite simply, nearly untrainable. Massive, shockingly intelligent, very used to having their own way, and downright mean, the boar of the Zehlin Bog resist all efforts at general domestication. To date, only the heroically insane have ever been able to ‘tame’ such animals, and even then their relationship should be considered more of a partnership than a master/animal bond. However, a wonderful event known as the melon ceremony has been put in place, allowing for partnership bonds to be formed in a more 'controlled' environment. [This, effectively, adds 7 to your resource deficit for this tech, making it deployed at about a hundred-and-twenty-fifth of its apparent resource capacity]
*The draft animals are excluded from this bonding experience as they rapidly develop PTSD, a fear of the scent of melon soap, and generally panic in future at the sight of pigs.
Research Project: Sunlight Arrows
Materials are very important choices for transformation candidates, and gold seems (at present) to be the easiest and most powerful choice for harvesting solar energy. Brass and bronze both show potentially, but fewer materials survive the transformation, and those that do cannot capture the same level of energy, or capture it as quickly, as gold does. Of other alloys tested, rose gold showed strong performance, capturing a hybrid of the sun’s light and heat rather than simply its light, allowing it to accomplish about 80% of gold’s effects. Of course, this results in an even lower melting point and makes the arrows unsuitable for firing at longer range (reasons discussed below). A curious candidate is the naturally occurring material iron pyrite. Its sunlight transformation is unstable, only capable of gaining and releasing a charge once before crumbling into fragments, but it only shortly behind rose gold in terms of efficacy.
As for different mechanical configurations of the materials, cores are unsuitable as the core must be directly charged by bathing it in light, and, when activated, it is the core that releases energy. Sheathing the core causes the exterior to melt, or generate Burning miad crystals, on activation. Melting the exterior generally causes the innards of the core to melt, destabilizes the arrow in flight, and generally doesn’t work well. A thin outer coating works, but runs into an issue where it burns itself off in flight. The archer has to activate the arrow as they fire, and the arrow will burn throughout the flight. For spears, they could briefly withstand their own thermal load, but arrows are of such lower mass that they begin to burn away rapidly. A thin coat of material burns away even faster, causing the material below to be superheated but burning off the outer coat.
As for an investigation of how the burning penetration happens, testing strongly indicates that the nimbus of light around the arrow translates rapidly to heat, melting the contact point, and allowing the bulk of the weapon to push through the semi-molten material. Essentially, it’s a hot knife going into wax. The light itself appears to primarily act as an energy carrier for the heat, with characteristic nimbus acting as a sort of rate-limiter for the thermal discharge and preventing the transformed objects from melting themselves to slag in a singular burst of energy.
(You can pick one, or more, aspects of this to incorporate into a design. No matter how many you incorporate, the bonus to your roll doesn’t change as long as you have at least 1)
It is the 3rd Design, Revision, and Research Phase
REMEMBER: The Event is due this turn.
Author
Topic: Zehlin Team Thread - FR20 [~4 Players] (Read 8697 times)