Judging from the chapter update strip, Bob's begun the Harry Potter step.  Sneaky, sneaky, putting that there without a post somewhere

One of my players made this image for the memorable encounters in the campaign I'm running. To be fair they started at 2'nd level and one of them just hit 4'th. Now I'm worried that they will be disappointed in the next encounter.

oh and this is the party;


It include the Cheshire Cat, a Djin Ninja Bard, a Wyld Hunt, a Tarrasque, and a Xixecal Cirno.

Sigh, it sounds like the kind of campaign I always want to play in. So why am I always stuck running them?
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Spacebattles made me write this!
--------------------
Koenig MonsterBase Hull: Custom Transforming vehicle (shuttle/bipedal robotic vehicle)
Length: 64m (shuttle) / 44m (biped)
Width: 62m (shuttle) / 24m (biped)
Height: 19.6m (shuttle) / 22.5m (biped)
Mass: 264,432 kg
Drive Type: 3x Compact Fusor (powerplant) / 4x atmospheric capable arc fusion reactionless drives
Drive Rating: 0.06c (shuttle) / 45 km/h (biped)
Armament: 4x 155mm railgun
2x triple 250mm rocket launcher (AGM-84 sized arm mount)
2x quad 84mm rocket launcher (Carl Gustav sized arm mount)
1x anti personal flamer (chin mount)
1x anti personal .72 chain gun (chin mount)
Primary Manufacturer:
Mars Base Sara
Owner: Gearheads
Flag of Record:
Fenspace Convention
Launched: April 2nd, 2014
Purpose: Self propelled Artillery Platform
Primary Crew: Gojira (AI)
pilot, gunner, mechanic
4 Exocomps
Operational Status:
active

The
Koenig Monster is the brainchild of a group of Gearhead around a mecha
enthusiast named Barricade. Designed during the height of the Boskone
War this machine was from the ground up intended for combat operations
in an offensive support role as self propelled artillery platform.

However
the design process and some problems with actual support by OGJ caused
the project to be delayed again and again until the Boskone War was over
when the Koenig Monster was officially put into service by the
Gearheads.

With
its impressive armament and bulk of the transformative systems it is
already large at the base, but the slow speed of the actual
transformation and the slow ground speed makes it necessary to carry a
large amount of armor. Said armor is a laminated mix of various battle
proven alloys that were forced in microgravity to get a monocrystalline
structure. In its structure is it similar to ‘dane Cobham armor.

Additionally
the system is from the ground designed to be modular and capable of
being repaired and serviced with ease. There are also 5 slots for larger
additional modules.

The following systems have be added to these slots since 2014:

1. Deflector Shield System (2015)
   
2. Exocomp Service Station with four Star Fleet issue Exocomps (2017)
   
3. 1st gen Mass Effect Core (2020)
   
4. 1st gen Mass Effect Shield System (2021)
   
5. empty
   

• The
  first larger scale public outing of the Koenig Monster was during
  Alphacon, where the Gearheads offered joyrides/joyrampages for everyone
  in a holographic mini-Tokyo.
  
• Since
  2016 there is an anual Rampage through a model city that is build near
  Mars Vegas. It even includes ‘defense vehicles' build by various fen.
  
• The Koenig Monster is capable of generating its own Seibertron strain of handwavium.
  

Maurice Sendak has gone to where the Wild Things are ... for good.
-----
Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

This started as an idea to be able to make the Chinese available as a plot device and as a secret in Fenspace. Of course it doesn't make much sense if the truth is known by the Fen. But why shouldn't a nation with that much resources have their own secret handwavium project that is in one aspect more advanced as most Fen tech.

##########

Post Handwavium History

The CNSA has no asset in Fenspace, everyone knows that. They are too paranoid to embrace the wonders of Handwavium, too angry to cooperate with anyone else. They damn themselves to being stuck at the bottom of the gravity well.

At least that is what everyone believes.

Being very angry and paranoid about the Fen and their involvement with China, the CNSA was prohibited to openly move into orbit. Still, huge amounts of money were made available to develop a solution for the ‘Fen problem’.

In early 2013, CNSA tested their first successful stealthed space ship in a large underground hangar, a specially waved Chinese van. Only six months later, while most larger Fen ships were turning the Asteroid Belt upside down, the CNSA sent up the ship to find a place to hide and setup a base of operation.

Only to find out that ‘the damned Fen’ have spread over the whole inner system.

Unwilling to take chances, the CNSA began to build up a small base in an lone asteroid far outside of the ecliptics. From here they began to plan China’s domination of the Solar system.

The Ships

Unfortunately for the CNSA, reproducing their stealth technology to ship enough cargo to the asteroid proved more difficult than planned. While even the first ship had a lot of quirks they had to work around, building more ships became a frustrating process. Between 2014 and 2017, the CNSA built five other stealth ships, two of them large trucks to ship cargo to their new base.

One of the trucks had to be destroyed shortly after construction when it developed an AI that wasn’t willing to join the communist party of China.

A smaller second craft was lost when the pilot left it without disengaging the stealth system. CNSA is still looking for the craft, which should still be within their testing facilities.

The Base

The base is a small set of hidden caves within an asteroid 15 astronomical units away from the sun. The original plan called to upgrade the caves to a full military shipyard to produce the new Chinese armada.

The low number of transports combined with the unwillingness to use different types of transportation delayed the plans of the CNSA year after year. At the current rate, the CNSA hopes to make the base self sufficient within 2020.

Trivia

• The CNSA managed to evade the attention of Fenspace since their start 2013 and hopes to continue this way beyond 2020.
  
• There are influential people within the communist party unwilling to allow the asteroid base to become completely self sufficient.
  
• The two small stealthed cars have been using the asteroid base as a homeport for espionage and reconnaissance missions since 2016.
  

Hello! I am starting this topic to introduce myself. There I was, happily wasting most of my spare time reading internet fanfiction, when someone just had to post a Battletech ISOT in Spacebattles.
That just shows than you simply cannot trust a commie left unsupervised. I seldom read BT, but I love ISOTs of all kinds, so I just had to check. Several days of archive binge later, losing all my spare time and a few hours of extra sleep than I probably did not need anyway, here I am, a new fen.
Somewhen in the next years months days I will post a profile of my character, so I'd like to ask if there are some rough guidelines I should follow, and if I have too many Mary Sue traits than I need to tone down:
-I planned to make him early fen: A spaniard, independiently biomodded at home about the same time of That Con, and fled the planet in paranioa after the 17 biomods were sent somewere; by the time he knew Europe was not going the Area 51 route, he was already hiding in the moon. And the Professor had started his Reign of Terror, so he decided the Cry and Run Like a Little Girl school of Conflict Resolution was still perfectly valid, just in case. Mostly because, as clumsy as I am, I would not dare to use (mych less 'wave a spaceship) illegal handwavium after the scares and restrictions appeared.
-He'll start with a former laptop AI, a biomodded dog, and a handwaved excavator he "borrowed" from an open pit mine, but he will eventually create a big construction company, with several offices in the planets and main moons, and build a town in luna to live; at the end of the the Boskone war he will start building a huge space station in the style of warhammer 40K cathedral ships.
-While talking about Mary Sue traits, and my own lack of skills as a builder, corporate mogul and/or geneticist, I could try for a more logical extrapolaition... but I suspect the story woudl go "25 october, 13:00, launch. To boldy go where no Excavator has gone before!. 25 october, 13:12. Breaking news, live! A trail of burning shapnel and burned bits has opened a path of destrucion across northern Spain"
-So I will simply handwave (literally...) the problems. My fen will be more tech savvy than I am to start with, and the biomod will somehow increase his skills in the required sciences. Or it will make him more insane and eliminate the mental blocks to those skills, who knows.
-The skills in question: Since fenspace is about sci-fi dreams, mine have always been terraformation, exotic planes and pulp space opera civilizations. When I though about available vehicles, the excavators in the mine near my grandmother's village were the first thing I though, so the space construction company was born; but I miss the "terraformation" part. The ideal objetives of Genesis Construction and Development would be to enter a solar system with an empty planet, and leave it with a working biosphere and an entire planetary infraestructure built, ready for people. So I wanted to add "genetic engeneering" to my Mad Sceintis set of skills, but I do not want to infringe in The Jason, who as far as I know is Fenspace's Mad Botanist. I have settled in this:

----*The basic skillset is building things, from space-worthy cottages to city domes and full space stations. With a side of droid construction, as this was originally done with the help of robots, before there was enoug money to pay for human masons and builders. This is split in two with Bernie the AI doing the building blueprints, and Oscar creating the robots; both have some skills in the other's field, but this is their main expertise. Even if the droids look disturbingly insectoid sometimes.
----*Oscar is quite good at genetic alteration in bacteria, and can build animals and proteine vats which mostly work as he wanted then to (he gets better as time goes on). You could claim he is algo very good at designing plantlife. If you meant to create carnivore and/or blood drinking vegetables than ocasionally move when you are not looking. He will loudly claim to anyone who asks than, yes, that is what he wanted to do. But he will buy any of his biomoded plant life from The Jason. Eventually, one or more of the droids will Awaken; one of those will have botanic talent and settle as the company's Gardener.
-The biomod: Originally I wanted to try some sort of space elf or hanyou, being a nerd and all, but Dracula was on TV and I noticed than there is a lack of gothic monster fen in the setting. So I am a "vampire". Since turning to ashes in sunlight and feeding only human blood are deadly in space (where is is always day and there seldom is someone nearby) those quirks are a bit toned down, but still present.
When disolving his original solid handawe in water, he accidentally got a papercut, and discovered it disolved much faster with a drop of blood in the water. Later, while he was brushing some of the handwaved water to his laptop battery, the dog came to play. An almost grown Spanish Mastiff puppy running over a ceramic floor is not the best braker on the animal kingdom; the crash dumped half the bucket over himself, the dog and the laptop. Two days later, the laptop was an AI, the dog was the size of a pony and Oscar had lost his tan. And hearbeat.
-Faction: One of his "dark secrets" is than he never was a harcore fan. He has seen all of the Star Wasr movies... and that's it. Before leaving earth, he had never watched all the episodes of any other series: Star Trek, Buffy, Babylon 5, Naruto... He has watched part of the, but never the entire series. He knows most of those mainly from fanfiction.
In the faction politics, he is a generalist, but he is a firm supporter of Victorian steampunk; anything he builds ends full of monuments, marble, gothic butresses, statues, glass, brass fittings and so on. He sees utilitarian architecture as something a couple steps above thionite farming, and will only build such as a purety temporaty measure for emergency use. One that will not last a single second more than the necesary time to end the emergency and build the proper way. He will not step inside places like Moonbase Alpha unless absolutely necessary.
Following the victorian styles, he always dresses in 19th century formal wear (always white, but that is due to one of his quirks). All that tuxedo-wearing has had an strange effect: He is actually more on line with the pulpers, but since he more or less moved shop to Bristol while the Crystal cities were under construction, the senshi have somehow decided he is one of then. And there are those who dump him with the gearheads, much to his irritation. Do not mention the Stig to him.
He lives in the lunar city of Marduk, which he and Bernie slowly built as a base and then hometown. While he owns most of the city (he rents the houses to the inhabitants), he does not rule it; it elects a mayor. Built in stone, with a castle in the top, and a vampire lord, the city has become an unoficial haven for the gothic fen. He won't claim to head the gothic faction -indeed, he says there is no such faction. That does not stop some of then from calling him the Count when out of his hearing. Should you visit, enjoy the monumental views, the excellent cafès, the theater and opera houses. And do not ask about the four wooden, ten feet long impaling stakes than have been stuck in the plaza overlooking the castle gates since the Ninja Incident.

So, is there something I need to change or tone down? And what kind of past relationship is he allowed to have with the protagonists? I did not paln for him to be bosom biddies with Nah Scot or something of the sort, but maybe being in speaking terms with some movers ans skahers and such.

So, for a while now, I've been contemplating doing a Legendary run of all the Incarnate Trials.

At the minimum, a single league of 12-16 would be able to do all of the Trials one after the other without hitting any of the size restrictions. Alternatively, one could do a team of 8 for the smaller trials before ramping up to 12+ for the bigger ones.

If doing the one league composition, I'd expect we'd run it BAF -> Lambda -> Keyes -> Underground -> TPN -> Minds of Mayhem -> Dillemma Diabolique

Scheduling is, of course, a concern, which is why I'm tossing this out there with no really defined schedule just yet to gauge interest.
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."

An alternative concept, partly from pondering on the Titanic and what happened shortly after it sank and why, since the city’s fall seems conceptually rather similar.

On the surface, it fell because bad guys attacked, blew holes in the walls and messed with the ventilation systems. But disasters are rarely that simple. There're decisions that mitigate or worsen the consequences, some of these made years before the attack began. What seems like a valid decision to cancel an evacuation with hindsight is disastrous. While for the people making the decision, based on the information they had, it was exactly the right thing to do.

Quote:In the years since, the events surrounding the fall of Crystal Osaka acquired their own mythology. The story was told and retold and grew into something it never was. It took on its own life as a rallying cry for Great Justice. The city grew into an invincible fortress that had been felled by malignancy from without and incompetence from within. It gave people the heroes they wanted and put faces to the villains they needed to blame while the city itself remained pure and perfect.

It suits the myth to believe that the city was doomed from the first moment. It makes the heroes shine all the brighter as we have them come dashing in out of the cold void of space into knowing danger and a desperate struggle against time. It blackens the villains who could have destroyed something so pure, for something so pure could only be destroyed by the evils of men.

Nobody wants to believe that the city could’ve fallen for any other reason.

What many people forget is, the city was buoyant for hours afterwards. The city’s engineers had time to conduct a full structural analysis and concluded that, despite the serious damage to the city, it wasn’t going to fall. In the growing mythology after the event, they were cast alongside those who refused to believe that the Titanic could sink.

And yet, subsequent analysis have shown that, even with a compromised ventilation system and with the damage to the buoyancy cells, the city should have remained afloat. The city did remain afloat for nearly eighteen hours; long enough for the evacuation order to be rescinded and for the city’s residents to begin to return. The punctured sections had reached equilibrium and the City’s list had stabilised at three degrees South.

Those involved in making this decision were villified in the mythology that grew up as being dangerously reckless. And realising the error of their ways, they went down with the city trying to save the lives of the people they had carelessly doomed.

It is only with the benefit of hindsight that we can see how wrong they were, however. It is a common mistake of popular history to assume that people at the time knew everything that we know now. With the information presented to them, the city’s council made the correct decisions. A fact quietly brushed under the carpet of history is that quite a few people complained about the evacuation orders lasting for so long.

Many of the heroes of Osaka are forgotten in the Fennish clamour for idols, for shining archetypes of fiction. People remember the Grey Knights fighting against the virus in the computer and lionise them as saints. It’s become almost taboo to discuss the city’s ordinary damage control teams who ran from sector to sector manually operating failed valves in a desperate attempt to keep the city afloat for as long as possible. They trimmed the sinking city using hand radios and legwork, keeping it from capsizing right up until the concourse imploded.

This is a tragedy of its own sort. Ordinary people who gave everything just doing their jobs get nothing but a line for their name on a memorial obelisk.

The city should never have fallen, this is easily demonstrated with the proper analysis tools. We know from the surviving logs that the damaged cells had been isolated both automatically, and using the manual valve system. The system was properly designed to account for a malicious failure in the controlling computer. Even before the Boskone War began the possibility of the ventilation control system being compromised by an attacker had both been discussed and planned for extensively.

The fact remains however, that Crystal Osaka is a tangled mass of wreckage on the surface of Venus.

And so it comes to us to figure out why the city really fell, to understand what really happened in those final hours. Because without understanding, we may be doomed to repeat these events all over again.

----
The City’s own logs show that, six hours before the final collapse a damage control team was dispatched to compartment A-24, neighbouring the damaged sectors. This was nothing more than a routine survey of the damaged sectors.

After five minutes the team leader called into to report a slight smell of leaking gas, but concluded that it was just lingering remnants after the isolation doors had shut. Moments later all contact with the group was lost as a series of explosiosn ripped through sectors A-24 coreward to A-18 and up onto B-level. With the isolation doors open in the thus-far undamaged sections, there was nothing to stop the inrushing atmosphere..

Only now with twenty percent of the city potentially open to the Venusian atmosphere,did the fall truly became inevitable. Gas started flooding in through the remains of the ventilation system.

It was widely held that this must have been some form of booby trap left behind; a last dastardly gasp of the defeated villain

-----

The truth is, there was no explosion. While the wreckage shows signs of damage by some sort of high energy pressure wave tearing through the corridors, ripping isolation doors from their mounts and blowing open the ventilation system, no explosive residue was ever found.

The City fell because of a single failed bulkhead. Specifically, the bulkhead between A-25 and A-26. It may have been damaged in the firefight, or have been defective from design. Without recovering the remains of the door the truth will never be known.

One one side of the door was the Venusian atmosphere at high pressure. On the other, one single standard atmosphere. The bulkhead was already under immense stress before the city settled at its new equilibrium altitude. Once it failed, that pressure differential would have been like a bomb going off inside the corridor.

All that mass of gas in the damaged compartments behind would immediately have rushed forward through the opening, tearing the door from its mounts and likely instantly killed the damage control team. It would have rushed down the corridor beyond where it would have met the isolation door for A-24. The gas hits the door, but by now tons of pressurised atmosphere are moving at high speed down this corridor.

All this gas has it’s own inertia. For a few brief moments the pressure on the intact A-24 door spikes far beyond it’s design rating. The door fails, blowing open and allowing this gas to continue to the next door, then the next in a daisy chain of failures. It only stops because of a low mass flow rate through the initial breach, causing the pressure in the whole system to drop as the gas expands. Door A-18 holds.

These same pressure waves blast through the ventilation system, tearing isolation valves apart before bursting out into unprotected sectors of the city.

With the automatic systems failed and nobody now able to reach the venting sectors to activate the manual valves, Crystal Osaka had six hours to live.

So, Peg and I have the broadcast of the most recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on the TV this afternoon, and Donovan's segment comes on (and if you haven't seen it, it's a great; he did most of his thank you speech in the form of a poem he wrote for the occasion).  Anyway, as he was performing some of his music afterwards, I idly said to Peggy, "You know, I think 80s-90s teen movie star Ione Skye is his daughter."  She grabbed her laptop off the couch next to her and said, "I'll look it up."  I nod and walk into the kitchen.
A couple minutes later I hear this shriek of laughter.  I come back out and Peggy begins regaling me with information she's gotten off IMDB.  As it so happens, this RnRHOF induction is practically a family reunion for Ione Skye.  Her father's inducted.  Her former boyfriend Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers, is also inducted.  As well as her first husband, Adam Horowitz of the Beastie Boys.
Peggy's still laughing.  And now trying to find out what Donovan has his doctorate in.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

The blog post yesterday inspired Warringer and me to get it into Fenspace...

###########

[big]Bio-Globes[/big]

History

Bio-Globes are a recent development in Fenspace, which began at the end of the Boskonian war. While Fenspace already could produce lots of food at Wonderland and the Jovian system, smaller settlements in remote places had discovered that being totally dependent on one or two suppliers lightminutes away could be a problem.

In the late 2013s, a small group of Belters began to look for alternatives. After some time of experimentation, they began to work on a concept published in 2012 by Conceptual Devices on Earth (link) and built the first Bio-Globes.

Design

The typical Fenspace Bio-Globes are double layered geodesic domes of five to eight meters diameter, which are used for growing plants, fruits and fish. On a series of trays along the walls of the transparent dome, different kinds of plants and tree-fruits are raised. Water is transported back and forth between the plant area and the fish tanks to exchange nutrients between them.

While most plants can be grown in hydroponics or aeroponics, others, such as potatoes need to be grown in actual soil.

Most outer layers are made from waved materials and are designed to be completely airtight, while the handwaved parts keep the atmosphere within clean and fresh and produce artificial gravity. Some Bio-Globes in asteroid settlements or in places far away from the sun add bright lights to sustain the plants, other add solar panels for generating electricity used in the inner dome.

The inner shell is often completely handwavium free to lower the chance of cross-polluting the ecosphere inside. In addition to the plants and the fish tanks, the Bio-Globes contain a small recycling container for most kinds of organic matter as well as smaller containers with bacteria that reduce the ammonium/ammoniac of the fish wastes to nitrates that can be used by the plants.

Additionally they provide variety in the daily work of belter habitats and provide emergency shelters in the event of a hull breach.

Culture

While the original designers built their Globes mostly for themselves, the design quickly spread among the small settlements of the belt and beyond. Fen began to trade design modifications, plants and fish species between each other, others began to construct additional Bio-Globes for friends and neighbors.

For most of the smaller habitats the Bio-Globes also provide a place to teach Fenkinder who were born and raised on Fenspace responsibility for their environment and in some cases with a way to keep pets (fish) that are not impacting too heavily on the life support systems.

Today, the Bio-Globes are a widespread installation among remote Fen settlements. While most of them are still buying food from external sources to increase the biomass of their constructions, the Globes have become an important part of Fenspace’s food production, as they provide a basic minimum most habitats can survive on.

There are some commercial variants of easy to setup Globes including plants and fish, but most of the globes started as self made constructions and gifts by other Fen. Most settlements prefer to use multiple smaller Globes to reduce the chance of losing their whole local food source in a single accident as well as having multiple harvests per year spread over the number of Globes.

Known Variants

Depending on the construction, and quirks of the outer dome structure, various Bio-Globes may only reach certain temperatures on the inside, allowing to grow only some specific plants.

Some of these Bio-Globes are called ‘Winter Globes or ‘Cabbage Globes’ because they are generally used to grow cabbage and other cold season plants.

Others are known as ‘Summer Globes or ‘Citrus Globes’ as they are used to grow citrus plants and other hot season plants.

There are also some larger Globes in existence, used to grow plants such as rice, wheat, soy and corn. Generally the habitats with these ‘Wheat Globes’ tend to also produce local alcoholic drinks.

Trivia:

• Bio-Globes cannot provide food from nothing, it is the responsibility of the owner to provide enough recycled biomatter as a replacement for the harvested food.
  
• Some larger spaceships carry small Bio-Globes to provide food on longer journeys for the crew.
  
• A basic 6 meter Bio-Globe can produce up to 400kg plants and 100kg fish per year, enough to feed 12-15 people. Some habitats with multiple Globes are exporting food.
  
• Tilapia and Oreochromis are the most used fish in Bio-Globes.
  
• Because most Bio-Domes use Handwavium only for life-support, they are practically quirk free.