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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 2307780" data-attributes="member: 6533">Thanks that's very kind of you.  If you really wanted to complete the who watches the watchman cycle it would be monks watch nobility, clerics watch monks, and peasants watch clergy.  With the horrible caveat that if the nobility every feel too threatened they could defect to the gun-liches in mass and thus screw the whole pooch.There'd also be the issue of powder dealers wandering through the realm and addicting the peasantry creating small villages of powder-zombies in the rear lines all over the course of a single week if they do it right.  Hmm, well I'd be tempted to go with gunpowder fueling off of Con, but perhaps the rituals of the nobility distribute the effects or create a side effect where they boost CHA but hurt wisdom.  So that gun nobles always need clergy around to defend them from enchantment and/or insanity but at the same time seem very healthy and beautiful.That would fit a lot of the tropes of the wicked elite.  Course if you simply distributed it between wisdom and con then you would hit the trope of the wicked decadent elite very nicely as well.Then if you reverse the ritual or misuse it you start burning Con, Wis, and Cha while gaining a host of other benefits and that's how you start heading toward gun-lichdom.I'd guess that the elite stay the elite as a result of their rituals, which you could either say work better with certain bloodlines or require years of training to use perfectly both of which would exempt the clergy as well as the peasants.  I'd also guess that the nobility had refined the rituals and their combat practices on their own time so that they in fact have knowledge that is secret or unavailable even to the church.  Something that keeps the church from creating their own families of pocket nobility.Among those noble rituals might be a set that lets you train units either to work around the gun fu or to work more effectively within it.I sort of see this working two different ways at once:- powder zombies work as in combat as massive units.  Nobility counter this by being tremendous fighters capable of taking out loads of mooks at once.  Monks counter gun-liches and nobility by being better at small unit tactics designed to take out one horrificly powerful opponent.- Nobility counter powder-zombie armies run by gun-liches by being good at making units of trained men-at-arms and fortifications better at countering the mass-unit tactics of the enemy.  Maybe wizardly nobility have the ability to run communications among units so that armies of nobility have the power to use dispersed unit, coordinated fire, and combined arms tactics more effectively.- Perhaps this goes a step further and the road to gun-lichdom isn't so much characterized by an increased tolerance to the gunpowder and its tech, though it also does that, so much as to an increased ability to control the minds of powder-zombies.  Perhaps the secret to the nobles abilities in fighting powder-zombies is that they can intuitively predict their tactics and the presence of gun-powder generally.  Thus the connection between themselves and the gun-liches.I'd be very interested in seeing the IK gun-liches.</blockquote>

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