Writing Prompts

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Zarya
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by Zarya »

I imagine the lady is old - between 65 and 70 human equivalent, and if she never smoked she might reach 83-87 human equivalent. So, not old enough to spend her time gardening yet, but clearly the clock has been ticking. Think Judi Dench playing M in Skyfall.

There’s a short and a Deinar tozon. The latter are close to Earth years. Since I’m lazy I prefer to think of those.
350+ or perhaps 10 more seemed a good “ballpark” age. Can change it when necessary, it’d be nice though if she could serve as the diral’s patron for a reasonable period.
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And thinking about the age of the diral initiates, my working hypothesis is that in terms of development they’re all teenagers. As far as their escapades go, things in NF have developed far more “All Audiences” than in Beacons.

:D

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Werra
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by Werra »

Alright, added another part to SH. I'll see about writing a third part, setting up a rough arc to follow up on. I don't believe in info dumps, so the world building has to happen piecemeal.

novius
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by novius »

Zarya wrote:There’s a short and a Deinar tozon. The latter are close to Earth years. Since I’m lazy I prefer to think of those.
350+ or perhaps 10 more seemed a good “ballpark” age. Can change it when necessary, it’d be nice though if she could serve as the diral’s patron for a reasonable period.
Sounds reasonable. She has regrets on her own and would dearly like to see a diral faring better than her own did, preferably even making a diral fare better than her own did, especially after Nelonial's FUBAR, many Mizol would gladly murder for the chance to see their abilities in action, much less having a guiding hand in their development, and, last but not least, the diral would need some retraining in the Mizol way of doing things... and she did have garnered a modicum of trust with them.

So yes, I'd say that she may be advanced in age enough to take one or two steps back on particularly taxing tasks, but playing the part of a mentor for the diral might be still within her capabilities for the time being, and something she actually may be willing to take on.
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Zarya wrote:And thinking about the age of the diral initiates, my working hypothesis is that in terms of development they’re all teenagers. As far as their escapades go, things in NF have developed far more “All Audiences” than in Beacons.

:D
"Teenager" is a very rough description. Even if we limit it to the time of puberty, start to end, it could be about anything from 12-13 to 18 human years - and we all know that there is a vast difference between those two. Given what is to be read in Loroi rites of passage I'd tend towards 15-16 human years, maybe a little older - I think I've placed a hint on their apparent maturity in one of the early scenes, when Natan got a good look at the Loroi at a whole. This puts them at roughly the same developmental stage - since Natan himself is about 15 years, after having spent two years alone - and given his background, already past the age where kids were expected to take on adult responsibilities in the family household.

So I'd gather all of them have a pretty good idea of 'what goes where' - after all, at the end of their diral phase and their final gathering they gain their first male encounter rights - but so far just Argent was forward enough to follow through with it, once the opportunity presented itself.

Loroi take the saying "they grow up so fast" to a whole new level. :)

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Razor One
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by Razor One »

Regarding NF:
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If I recall the timeline correctly, Bastal would've had her early career during the centralised power phase of the empire and seen it descend into Axis aligned decentralisation. If I were to guess at her overall motives, it'd be the recentralisation of the empire, mostly as a safeguard against a full blown splintering of the Sister worlds and outright civil war.

She's resigned to this task taking longer than she has left, so she wants successors. Perhaps Nelonial was her initial choice, but was still being tested or felt out before she pulled her into her inner circle. Regardless, the diral represents a huge opportunity for her, people she can potentially pass the torch of her cause to when her time is up.

I'd elaborate more but I'm short on time.
Regarding SH:
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I'm getting serious Three Musketeers vibes. :P

That being said, I can think of several ways the story can go. The Three Amigos route, in which a villain must be stopped and a damsel rescued, the Kill Bill route in which friendships are built, betrayal sets in, and revenge must be had, or a Soia era artifact needs to be kept out of the wrong hands.
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novius
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by novius »

Character sheet

Mizol Torimor Bastal
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Age: 362 (visibly advanced, but not yet deteriorating)
Height: 172 cm
Skin: Dark blue
Hair: Dark reddish-brown, intricately coiffured in a coil and falling braid.
Eyes: violet
Origin: Perrein, Uplands

Having served a long time with the Mizol and rising through its ranks, she has seen her caste at its best and worst and collected her share of regrets while trying to retain her personal honor and dignity. As her formative years were spent with a diral under a bad, almost abusive leadership she took at as a harsh lesson to focus herself more on the diplomacy side of her caste's agenda rather than the intelligence side. Her view had been reinforced when she saw the fledgling Union almost come apart at its seams throughout her lifetime. While she has not yet stepped away from active duty, her peers almost expect her to start grooming a potential successor.
About aging: Cartilageous tissues (at least with humans) tend to grow throughout the lifetime - so I'd say that with Loroi the nose and ears do get gradually larger as well over time, though at a much slower pace. It's only the signs of deterioration (sagging skin, dark spots on the skin, fading eyesight and hearing, degenerative illnesses like arthrosis) which may not come up with Loroi until their very end of their natural lifetime, when the damages to their DNA start to overcome the repair and compensation mechanisms and their bodies undergo a cascading failure.
Last edited by novius on Thu Sep 13, 2018 7:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Zarya
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by Zarya »

About Bastal we also need a good reason for her to look into Soia-Liron artifacts. She is not only a diplomat.
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Perhaps a special project, looking into the almost defunct transport system that everyone else considered a dead end street, but that unexpectely yielded Natan as a 'gift'.

novius
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by novius »

Zarya wrote:About Bastal we also need a good reason for her to look into Soia-Liron artifacts. She is not only a diplomat.
It's a good plot hook for the story itself. Apart from every Soia ruin having its promise of new, wondrous technology anyone with a bid for power would surely be interested in? Could be, since the command structure could be even more convoluted with Mizol, that she'd be quite a latecomer to this mess. Though...
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Given that the structure of this ruin was already known from depictions, the idea of a transport system could be something the Loroi speculated on - after all, maintaining the vast Soia Empire just with ships and jumpdrives would be a logistic nightmare. And, of course the Loroi's secret wish was to find another telepathic species and maybe confirming or denying the existence of a template... So the idea that there could have been an open gate to reaches unknown might have been quite intriguing for her.

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Werra
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by Werra »

Instead of a long, pre-planned scheme, this Nathan matter could also be a golden opportunity for the Mizol on which they seek to capitalize. Would give them a huge motivation of not calling in anybody else.
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It would also implicitly strengthen the Dirals position without the Diral realising.
@Razor One
That might be because I shamelessly steal names. Purvs is latvian for swamp for example.
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The group is being sent to a neighboring city state to retrieve a price breeding male. The male was lend to that city as part of a brokered deal and now needs to be transported back. Diplomacy is always tricky and the threat of betrayal and worries about agents from a third city will be a concern. Therefore the group springs Batz from prison so that she can pretend to be a civilian camp follower as not to raise suspicions as to why four instead of the agreed upon three warriors are being sent.

That'll be the basis for the plot I will set up.

novius
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by novius »

Werra wrote:Instead of a long, pre-planned scheme, this Nathan matter could also be a golden opportunity for the Mizol on which they seek to capitalize. Would give them a huge motivation of not calling in anybody else.
Since they never expected something or someone like Nathanial to show up, they must have had a prior reason to investigate. And Loroi are simply too practical and (sorry...) unimaginative for 'just because it's there'. And an unknown energy signature sort of equals to unknown technology, which is appealing to a society which more often than not relies on digging through old artifacts in itself.

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Zarya
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by Zarya »

A reason to investigate is the indication of the transport function the structures once had.

Perhaps Loroi do not have an overly rich imagination, but they could still be be interested in researching long shot options for interplanetary travel, or anticipate on potential hostile incursions on the Sister Worlds via remnants of the mostly defunct Soia transport system.
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It would be a sleepy but still operational program consisting of the utterly frustrating and tedious monitoring of planetary surface areas known to be littered with ruins that - until recently - never lead nowhere, and was considered as the perfect end-of career type of activity for capable geezers close to retirement.

Indications of the bulk transport function might be marine fossil materials and remains of large water animals on places where they clearly weren’t native, such as on terraformed places like Mezan.

In one of the earlier NF fanfic contributions Poisoned Claw is familiar with the shape of the surface tiles of the ruin and she recognises it as half a dodecahedron net. There’s more about this shape - and about Penrose tiles - on this page. The cavity that Nathan fell in indicates that there’s also an underground structure to it.

As a symbol it might have meant the same to the Soia as the Transport for London roundel to visitors of that city :)

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Razor One
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by Razor One »

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Another reason to vigorously investigate Soia ruins, technology aside, is cultural.

Given the (incorrect) belief that the Loroi descend from the Soia, there'd be a heap of cultural gravitas towards investigating and excavating such ruins, reclaiming lost glory, etc. Granted, Nathan does shoot a universe sized hole in that ideology, which is yet another reason to keep him a secret.

On the Bastal front, I think we need to perhaps dive into the politics of the period to get a better feel for her motivations.

So, it's ~1779. Bastal is ~350 Years old, meaning she was born around the 1420's.

She was born barely 20 years after the Splinter Wars ended. She probably saw the tail-end of the first Mannadi war before the space-time instability separated the Sister Worlds. This was followed by the second and third Mannadi wars and subsequent occupation.

They are presently in the midst of the Seren sector expansion, and are due in 20 years for the Neridi succession war and for the Civil War where Provincial Governor Eighth Dawn will challenge and successfully take the throne from Swiftsure before recentralising the government.

--

If I had to feel out the situation here, the Sister Worlds are confederated in a manner that allows each individual sector to manage their own affairs whilst being nominally one nation. Each of the sister worlds have provincial governors which in turn expand their territories.

The problem then arises when the expansion of these territories outpaces the size and scope of the inner territories. If the Seren sector outproduces, outguns, and outmans the central territories despite being more diffuse population wise, then that's a very unstable situation. Moreso because the decentralised nature of the provincial governors make them more like foreign nations / quasi-feudal lords than federated states, and moreso again if the locals, the commanders and the civilians are more loyal to their governor than to the imperial throne.

Now, while there probably are byzantine schemes to play off the various governors against one another such that nobody ever gains a clear advantage, all it would really take is for a certain caste, the Mizol, to begin backing someone who can see the current state of affairs as being inherently unstable and is willing to redress that situation with a minimum of bloodshed.

If Bastal sees that war in the next fifty years is going to be inevitable, then it ought to make sense for her to pursue a path whereby she'll support a plan that will ensure that any such war is as short and painless as possible. Triggering a small, quick and bloodless war to avoid a large, grinding meatgrinder is arguably the lesser of two evils. That can be viewed as either high tier patriotism or outright treason depending on who you are, so that's something one would entrust to someone they trusted absolutely, or had a lot to lose by being a blabbermouth.
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Zarya
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by Zarya »

Thank you, very useful. Lot’s of things going on in the Loroi timeline.

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dragoongfa
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by dragoongfa »

Not done with this entry but it already took me a few days to get this written down and I am still not done as the next and final part still needs cleaning.
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Alex will propose three distinct things:

1) The use of Maskirovka type tactics to fool the Umiak.

2) The quick retrofit of freighters into missile Q-ships to serve as bait and traps.

3) The adoption of an 'abandoned' Loroi gunboat design, cheap and easy to mass produced with existing parts throughout the sector; not really worth much in a fight alone but squadrons of them could be troublesome if fielded properly.
I will have the next part done tomorrow and I apologize for this taking so long.

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Werra
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by Werra »

Can you help me understand why the side with the faster ships with the longer ranged firepower would need gunboats to maneuver and not fighters to defend against missiles? And what can a gunboat do that a Loroi destroyer couldn't do?

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dragoongfa
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by dragoongfa »

I will dig into the meat of it tomorrow but here are some basic stuff:

A gunboat's primary mission won't be close point defense but it should serve as an adaptable, flexible and cheap weapon's platform:

1) Skirmishing duties, able to dart ahead and directly counter the barrage of torpedoes and the enemy gunboats before they are on final approach, this while still being robust and sturdy enough to not be swatted aside by a single missile or a light plasma PD.

2) Fast pursuit and harassment unit, gunboats should have with inertial dampeners which should allow them to sustain heavy acceleration for longer than a fighter would while also having a greater range. Allowing them to move into positions that fighters couldn't get to while still having more firepower depending on the duties.

3) Finisher unit, depending on the weapons loadout a gunboat could have a punch hard enough to cripple if not destroy a heavier warship. A gunboat with a load out of heavy kinetic missiles could dart out during a fleet clash while the Umiak charge through the Loroi lines, launching its warheads from close range

novius
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by novius »

In contrast, destroyers are usually more soft-shelled, agile and fitted with lighter weaponry, suitable for facing lighter ships like frigates, fighters or even as point defense against missiles. Their primary role would be an anti-fighter screen to counter the danger of a whole squad of fighters doing a wolf pack on a heavier vessel.

The Loroi Ship Classes page places the Warhammer class as the odd one out, as it is rated as a destroyer, but has an armor and defense screen commonly found in higher ship classes and is specifically geared to counter gunboats (and their raw firepower, without sacrificing agility overly much), where the Curved Knife class is more suitable against fighters and frigates.

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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by orion1836 »

dragoongfa wrote:I will dig into the meat of it tomorrow but here are some basic stuff:

A gunboat's primary mission won't be close point defense but it should serve as an adaptable, flexible and cheap weapon's platform:

1) Skirmishing duties, able to dart ahead and directly counter the barrage of torpedoes and the enemy gunboats before they are on final approach, this while still being robust and sturdy enough to not be swatted aside by a single missile or a light plasma PD.

2) Fast pursuit and harassment unit, gunboats should have with inertial dampeners which should allow them to sustain heavy acceleration for longer than a fighter would while also having a greater range. Allowing them to move into positions that fighters couldn't get to while still having more firepower depending on the duties.

3) Finisher unit, depending on the weapons loadout a gunboat could have a punch hard enough to cripple if not destroy a heavier warship. A gunboat with a load out of heavy kinetic missiles could dart out during a fleet clash while the Umiak charge through the Loroi lines, launching its warheads from close range
In a nutshell.

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dragoongfa
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by dragoongfa »

Sorry for the delay, I am not going to lie, got hooked into a game and lost track of time the last two days.

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Werra
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by Werra »

As long as the game is worth it.

@Beacons
Hope you guys don't mind that I ended the date.

@New Frontiers
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How do you feel about going into the direction of inter-caste intrigue? That would mean the Dirals peaceful time camping in the woods is coming to an end soonish.

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orion1836
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Re: Writing Prompts

Post by orion1836 »

I forgot - who is Sedel?

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