Reverse Urban Arcana... OR: The Blood War just got a whole lot worse

[glass]

I think a nuclear warhead would make a cool 'fiendish doomsday device' for the PCs to find and defuse. Don't let the PCs know what it is they have discovered, until a few adventures later, when the PCs run into pit fiends packing Miniguns...

As for modelling high tech in game, you have a number of decisions to make. For example, how easy is it to combine technology and magic? For example, can you create +1 machine guns? Possible answers are no, yes, or yes but you need and extra feat (craft technomagical item or whatever).

For the actual nukes themselves, I'd be inclined to say fiends (etc) are completely immune to the heat generated by a nuke, otherwise how do you consider fire elementals? Do you have different levels of immune? DR would apply to the shockwave, but close to ground zero the damage would be very high. As for radiation, I'd probably say they were subject to tissue damage but not long term effects.

I'd second the reccommendation for GURPS Technomancer. I don't have it myself but I have heard Second World Sourcebook is also very good.


glass.

 

[LordVyreth]

Why limit the technology to modern era stuff? What if the world has already moved beyond nukes to fusion bombs, anti-matter bombs, or Death Star-style planet destroyers? What about cybernetic implants? What about genetic enhancement? What if the the fiends try to create a "super-demon" that has the powers of all the major fiendish types grafted or genetically spliced into them? What about demon-shaped robots? Or devilish starships?

 

[PeterMikelsons]

The basic story is that a demon discovers that the powers (gods) have one great fear-- humanity. The demon doesn't know why, except that somehow humanity somehow has a tendency to become far too powerful, and so the gods shut any material plane off from the rest of the multiverse whenever they feel it's starting to advance too far technologically..

The really interesting question is: why, really, are the gods shutting off these planes? Is there something the gods fear? Do they just fear what WMDs would do to them or their followers? Or maybe its something subtle like nearly universal, nearly instantaneous communication (radio, Internet) and what that would do to belief in gods. Or, even more subtle, maybe it is philosophies that (arguably) go along with tech progress (reason, individuality, empiricism, materialism, etc.), that threaten the very concept of "gods" or even magic. If it was the latter, the reasons for the ban could be gradually revealed, like peeling an onion, making for a very cool campaign.

 

[Cheiromancer]

I think that shockwave damage would be more akin to sonic damage, myself. Or maybe force damage. Though it could be impact damage, I suppose... Maybe all of the above?

In the question of simulating modern weapons (especially WMD) you really have to think what kinds of immunities/resistances/magical defenses work against it, and stat the weapons accordingly.

For example, does a wall of force block a nuclear explosion? It is immune to most kinds of damage, after all. If it doesn't then, you have to say that a nuclear explosion functions as a disintegrate within a specified radius.

Can artifacts survive it? If not, then you have to say that it acts like a mage's disjunction too. Probably cast at a pretty high level (60+).

And then have it do fire, force, impact and sonic damage, too. And poison (radiation) damage directly to ability scores. How much depends on what you want to have a chance of surviving. Could Orcus survive a direct hit by a Hiroshima-sized bomb? Suppose he was a few hundred feet away from ground zero?

All in all, I find the idea of "statting" a nuclear device to be quite intriguing. I wonder if anyone has seriously worked out what this would involve?

 

[Sejs]

Why limit it to fiends with (effectivly) our technology? Why not have them take what we've got and start to tinker with it?

OKay, so we have this cluster of nuclear warheads... and then we attach this necromantic battery that we've charged up with a few thousand souls... and that mission to the Negative Energy Plane was a success - we've got enough voidstone to place secondary charges that will powder and disperse when the device is set off. We've run some tests down in Cania with a smaller version of this design and the results were well within acceptable limits. The primary detonation of the warhead produced great ammounts of heat and concussion. Of the test subjects that wern't in the primay blast radius, the tanar'ri seemed unaffected by the radiation while most of the other specimens succumbed to it rather quickly. Particularly when fallout particles were ingested. We may want to look into packing some lemures with the stuff and sending them into the next engagement, but we'll get to that later. Oh, and I think you'll be interested in what happened to the slaadi once they sucked up a few rads. Very intriguing possibilities. I'm getting off topic, my appologies, my lord. On our second run, we included some voidstone seeding in the package, and attached one of our n-battery prototypes. This is where things get fun - we took one of the heruzou we had, made it immune to concussion with a warding, and secured it inside the primary blast area. The main detonation didn't kill it, but when we examined the remains afterward the body showed severe dessication and signs of negative energy taint. After a few minutes observation, the remains reassembled themselves and rose as undead! It attacked the observation group as well as the other test subjects present, seemingly mindless. Putting it down proved to be rather difficult, as the voidstone kept funneling energy into its body, renewing it. We were able to eventually destroy the creature, albeit with some small difficulty.

Here's the full file, my lord.

 

[king_ghidorah]

So, I'm running a Planescape game soon (gestalt, incidentally, but that's besides the point), and I'm thinking at some point I'm gonna have a technologically advanced world become accessible. The basic story is that a demon discovers that the powers (gods) have one great fear-- humanity. The demon doesn't know why, except that somehow humanity somehow has a tendency to become far too powerful, and so the gods shut any material plane off from the rest of the multiverse whenever they feel it's starting to advance too far technologically.

Since one of the key concepts of Planescape is the power of belief in one's philosophy, I would think that part of the issue is that a highly technological society might no longer believe (as a whole) in magic, powers, demons, devils, etc. Perhaps a demon might open a gate seeking weapons, thinking that this is the reason the powers shut off access to such planes. But the real problem is that rational belief is like a virus, that might begin to spread through all the planes as the primes and their technology begin to spread, too, weaking magic and powers alike.

The demon would start trafficking in weapons, becoming more and more mortal, not even seeing it as the effects of the rational prime begin affecting him, but the heroes see the after-effects of the changes wherever the weapons are found -- as well as the power of the weapons themselves-- and have to trace the problem back to its source-- and to the magic-poor plane that must be sealed off again.

Just a thought.

 

[Taneel BrightBlade]

Give them mechs.

 

[Shemeska]

Giving the various fiends access to modern/high tech weapons, they'd probably, at least in my opinion, fall into the following lines of expertise:


Yugoloths = undisputed masters of biological weapons, 'medical' technology, spies, communication, arms dealers and R&D 'consultants' to both of the other two sides.

Baatezu = neutron bombs, heavy armor, tactical nukes, and mind control gases.

Tanar'ri = lots of dirty massive nukes, half of them being detonated in their own backyard. The Tanar'ri would fall all over themselves in celebration at having just 1 of those things. Except for the fact that the plane is infinite, they'd irradiate their own home plane in short order, and like cockroaches be breeding even quicker after the fact.

 

[Shemeska]

As overheard on a radio transmission by mortal mercs on a Baatezu mission to recover a Baatezu outpost on a Tanar'ri overrun orb on the 1st layer of Carceri:

Mortal merc: "I say we should take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Baatezu overseer (imp): "Woah woah woah. Hold on now, those installations down there have a substantially high jink value attached to them, and this Tanar'ri subspecies is clearly of value for study. And I don't think that you, or I have the kind of authority to just wipe them all out."

Other mortal merc: "I agree. I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

 

[Ozmar]

I think you really ought to explore this question: Why exactly do the gods fear the technological advancement of humanity?

What do the gods fear? Can nuclear weapons be used to kill a god? Does modern technology inhibit magic or bypass magical defenses? Does modern ideology destroy faith and undermine the deities' sources of power?

I think if you answer any of these questions in the affirmative, then you create a much more interesting and engaging campaign scenario. It certainly raises the stakes if the demons are consorting with Kim Jong Il to obtain nuclear weapons in a plot to annihilate the holy realm of Helm. Or maybe modern technology can be used to break past the barriers that keep the demon lords from invading Sigil, and Asmodeus plans to kill the Lady of Pain with targeted fusion bombs.

Later!
Ozmar the Techno-theorist