The Rogue's Scribe: Building Us Some Aliens (and Their Tech)

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Building Us Some Aliens (and Their Tech)

Oh yay, I'm back in the habit of completely losing track of my weeks. That's... fun. Maybe life is becoming "normal" enough that I should put in the effort to audit my time again. That seemed to have helped me a bit prior to the world shutting down. I need to find my binder and print off the next couple of months. Guess I know what I'll be focusing on tomorrow.

In the meantime, what DID I do this past week?

Generated by Bitmoji

Well, to start, Sunday I covered for my manager so she could drive out to see her newborn grandson. So a big congratulations to her, her daughter and son-in-law, and the new babe born Saturday night.

Generated by Bitmoji

A lot of the rest of the work week was spent working on price tags in some shape or form. Through store owner shenanigans, the sale tags weren't ready until Wednesday, but the sale started Thursday, so instead of a casual day or two to scan the store, print the tags, and prep them before putting them up on Wednesday, me and the newbie had to rush around the store doing everything that day. Thankfully, we didn't really have many customers interrupting us, but still.

On top of that, there's a particular product where I'm specifically in charge of creating the pricing printouts. It's normally just a tedious job because there's about 50 different product that are then slotted into 12 different pricing packages each, so it's a LOT of data entry. A fairly simple job, though. Just... tedious. This time, however, part of the packages had price increases because the freight cost of getting the product went up. Problem is, no one actually told me what the surcharge was for the freight, so I had to find a way to figure that out first. Also, there's usually only about 20 or 30 pieces of product that go on sale at any given time, and most of the sales are the same, so I just need to copy and paste some of the pricing into the new sales header. Still tedious, but not nearly as time consuming. Now I had all 50-some products with all 12 packages each that needed price increases. My eyes started going a bit googly, and I started including typos. I must have re-sent/re-printed these price cards about 3x because I just kept catching math errors. Third time's the charm, though, because I THINK I caught them all now?

Well, after I was done with the everyday price increases, I had to work on the sales cards themselves. Again, with the actual sales items, it was only about 20 or so pieces, so it wasn't AS overwhelming. Except one of the stores kept having issues with the new everyday pricing I sent them. They kept telling me they were missing price cards for some of their product, and I... just couldn't find them???? I have no clue how they printed out the price cards in the first place, because they just weren't on the main shared server all the other pricing was stored in. So I had to create new price cards while rushing to try to get the sale cards done in time for the sale.

It was mild chaos.

And then I went to put up the sale cards late Saturday... only to notice the disclaimer on the bottom of the cards said "June 23 through July 12". The disclaimers aren't readable in the program I use to update the price cards.

The price increases took effect this Saturday, so the new everyday pricing had to be up, but I must have gotten confused with everything, and thought the Fourth of July sale also started on Saturday. I mean, our Memorial Day sale on these same products was about a month long, so why wouldn't this sale?

With a heavy sigh, I started pulling all the sale cards back down. At least now they're all set for the 23rd, and that's one less thing to do this week. Right?

Work has been a bit exhausting, so post-work has been as much recoup time as I could muster.

Honestly, this is the hazy part of the week for me. I know that at least some of the days Rozsavaria and I met up for our new walk routine. I think she stuck around a few days to chat about Scum and Villainy and her character, so... there's that.

In fact, she stayed at my place for about 5hrs post-walk yesterday so she could work on her character build, as well as generic hang-out time where we watched YouTube videos and just chatted. (Dear lord, I only JUST NOW realized how late she hung out and how long she and Hubby worked on their characters... well... technically Hubby spent most of that time watching nopixel and Roz's husband's stream on Twitch, but still....)

I think last night was the most writing-adjacent work I did this past week. I needed to explain my vision of how the game universe would play out. Then Roz, Hubby, and I talked about whatever tweaks we felt should be done to make sure things were balanced.

The majority of my creativity was actually focused on Roz's character and helping her build tI'kæl. She thought it would make her name look more alien if written as if it were the pronunciation guide in a dictionary. So the pronunciation is:

/t/ as in top, better, cat
/ɪ/ as in it, big, finishes
/k/ as in can, speaker, stick
/æ/ as in apple, can, hat
/l/ as in let, follow, still

In other words, it's a slight slant-rhyme with the word "decal".

Anyway, as I mentioned, Roz wants to run an alien character - or a Xeno - for our SaV campaign. Unlike RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, SaV only gives the vaguest instructions on how to run a non-human character. It's mostly, "have fun figuring it out yourself, but here's some basic guidelines on how to keep it balanced."

Roz made things slightly easier by going with an alien race the rulebook used as an example on how to build a Xeno character, in part because the race is called "Memish" and she thought it looked a lot like "Memeish" and got a chuckle out of that. Also, the race is from an aquatic planet, so, instead of hair, the mostly humanoid Memish have tentacles. We joked that they almost look like humanized Knuckles the Echidna from the Sonic the Hedgehog series. Add in that SaV has its own version of The Force from Star Wars, called The Way.

Okay, so maybe he doesn't look THAT much like Knuckles,
but same energy, I think.

Anyway, leaning in to "memeish" aliens that kinda look like Knuckles, and can use The Way... well... of course she's loosely basing tI'kael off of Ugandan Knuckles.

Old meme is old

Thankfully, she's going a BIT more serious with her character, but Ugandan Knuckles here was her inspiration. You never know from where inspiration shall strike.

Anyway, we needed to flesh out the Memish alien race a bit more to better know what her character is capable of. I gave her a heads up that I was planning on figuring out how her bonuses due to her physiology could also be hinderances in certain situations, because I think making traits both bonuses and flaws depending on the situation makes them feel more real. For instance, due to the dark purple skin tone Roz picked for tI'kael, we assumed she is from deep, deep, deep in the oceans of Mem, and therefore has excellent dark vision, given that light would be scarce where she grew up. I warned her that this would also mean extreme light sensitivity and she'd have to have special eye coverings.

Roz also chose to be a Mystic, which is basically a Space Wizard (aka Jedi????) who can tap into The Way a bit more easily than the average person. Part of a Mystic's build is that they carry an Ur artifact with them. These artifacts are ancient technologies that virtually no one knows how to use except through experimentation. They are also so old that the technology itself has become corrupted, and so the artifacts glitch and cause problems for their owners, usually mutating them in some undesirable way. Think of the movie Laputa: Castle in the Sky and both the floating city of Laputa itself, as well as the robot sentinels on it. Or, think of the game The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and the ancient technology left behind when the Hylians first ascended to Skyloft.

Anyway, when introducing a new artifact to the game-universe of SaV, the book asks five questions:

What does the artifact look like?
What does it do? What's the effect of using the artifact?
What are the requirements? The conditions for activating the artifact?
What are the glitches? The side effect(s) of using the artifact?
How common is it?

We had to figure out what tI'kael's artifact would be. Roz had already made a mock-up of what her character would look like using one of the Doll Divine dress-up games.

Rozsavaria's design of tI'kael
Generated via Space Princess game by Inkscribble

I personally love that Roz had tI'kael loosely braiding her tentacles. The yellow tribal tattoos are actually the Memish's ritualistic carving of their hardened scales that they then embed with bioluminescence.

Anyway, Roz pointed out all of the star-shaped jewelry she gave her character, and wondered if any of them could be her artifact. Since Roz liked the idea of her artifact somehow working as a safeguard against the vacuum of space, I instantly zeroed in on the choker. It would help her breathe without atmosphere and keep her body temperature even. It was a bit tricky to try to find a way to balance that via the answers to the other questions, but, after Hubby and Roz talked it through with me, I think we came up with a fair piece of equipment for her.

What does the artifact look like? A golden choker made up of star-shaped segments.
What does it do? What's the effect of using the artifact? It allows the wearer to survive in the vacuum of space for up to an hour when fully charged. Any time activated will drain this charge, and once depleted, it must be fully charged again before it can properly activate.
What are the requirements? The conditions for activating the artifact? The item must be worn around the throat. Once the choker is set aside to recharge, the choker will not activate until it is fully charged again. This will take a week, regardless of how much remaining charge was on the choker prior to charging. (I might come up with a ritual that needs to be done to recharge it, but I'll have to talk this through more with Roz)
What are the glitches? The side effect(s) of using the artifact? The necklace slowly changes the physiology of the wearer, altering their lungs in order to better survive in space. Prolonged use will make breathing any sort of atmosphere suffocating. (We'll have to figure out how many uses will make breathing on terra firma impossible)
How common is it? Unique (I was thinking it's an artifact of a space program, similar to NASA's space suits, so it was already fairly rare when it was created, and became more-so as other necklaces were lost to time, but it's not necessarily a one-of-a-kind item. TI'kael just happens to be the only one with an active choker right now.)

We think this artifact build is fairly balanced. What do you guys think?

Honestly, it was a lot of hard work - and brainstorming, and time - to try to figure out Roz's Xeno character, but I also had a lot of fun. It was cool to think of the possibilities, and I'm still thinking of ways to either make life more complicated for tI'kael or a bit easier for her, based on the fact that she's not human.

We'll see if I get to do this again for Quarthix's character when he joins us for the official character creation session on the 21st. In the meantime, I'll have to focus on making those other RIP racers, now that I've got a bit of a starter sounding board going on what alien life might look like.

Along those lines, I've caught up to where I last left off with Voltron: Legendary Defender, so I have some more inspiration from that show on what aliens might look like. I'm definitely bringing in some alien species cameos, I think.

WOW! For someone who couldn't remember what they did this week, this blog post still managed to get a bit long, huh? I'm so excitedly anxious to get this game started on July 5th. I just hope all of my prep-work before starting helps carry me through enough sessions to make the effort worth it. I'd hate for this campaign to die off just like all the others. Roz seems excited though, as is Hubby, and both SaV and Gravity RIP play well with just two players and a GM. So even if Quarthix becomes bored or gets too busy, we should still be able to make this campaign work.

The next 6 days before our official 7pm Game 0 (character creation and discussion of the game mechanics) is going to be exciting and busy and take forever to get here while also zipping by like nothing. I'm so stoked!