Zeke, I know you can’t post anything for the next two days, but you can still read everything that comes up here and I just want to say that I do have a plan that won’t feed you to anything too danger.
Now. Hi. I’m your new Primary. Yes, I like combat and yes, I’ve been pushing for you to write more action scenes into your fic, and yes I know that you’re scowling right now. But I brought Mushroom and 7Spirals into this because I knew that you were going to hate my plan on principle.
We merged our Primary slots because the arc that I’m pitching is big enough that one person steering it would be impossible, AND because you trust Mushroom. We’ve gone over the plan piece by piece, and both of them helped me iron everything out. If this actually was a dumb and suicidal idea, then Mushroom would have nuked it immediately. He’s been backing your fic since the beginning, and he’s not interested in seeing your OC get pasted to a wall by something you can’t handle.
Yes, the plan is for you to kill the Reclaimer. Before you, or anyone else on the thread, jumps in with an argument that it’s an endgame boss…yes. It is. That’s the whole point of the plan. Endgame bosses drop endgame loot. This is a win-win-win setup Zeke. Take a breath and hear me out.
Read through the plan and realize that everyone gets what they want. I get a dungeon crawl through the Under-MIZ with some action. The lore addicts in this thread get detailed descriptions of collapsing structures, environmental hazards, and a bunch of other things you’re going to talk about on your way through the Under-MIZ. And you get paid a shit ton of credits.
The Reclaimer is classified as endgame content in Frontiers. That means, when you kill it, there’s going to be an absurd amount of loot. This thing has spent years gestating all sorts of pollutants, machinery, structural materials, and living things. When it goes down, you’re going to have so much valuable loot that the Pale Regiment would be tripping over themselves to give you whatever you want.
You’re looking at enough high-tier loot to cover mercenary wages, several months of living comfortably in the MIZ, and enough credits to get serious upgrades. Think of all that you can do with a couple months of not having to worry about food and rent, and just grinding skills until nothing can stop you.
Here’s the kicker, if you trade that loot to the Pale Regiment (the people who run that library you often visit) instead of dumping it on the open market, they’ll give you access to their locked inventory. I’m talking about equipment and alchemical creations that they don’t sell to everyone. You can get something that would instantly boost one of your skills straight to 7. You wouldn’t have to grind and make incremental progress for numbers to go up.
Want your weapon skill to jump to 7 and you’re terrifying in a fight? Done. Want to boost your Instrument Mastery to 7 so you can stroll into any bar in The MIZ, play three songs, and walk out fed and drunk? Done. Want your History to 7 so you can write more lore drops for all the addicts on this thread in the hope that they give you a bunch of secrets for you to steal? Done.
I know what you’re thinking right now. Once your 48 hours are done, you’re going to come back in here and swear and make accusations about me trying to get you killed for entertainment value. But if this was actually a death sentence, Mushroom wouldn’t be anywhere near it.
I’m not trying to throw you into a fight that you can’t win. You can beat the Reclaimer with the plan I came up with. And once you do, you’ll earn the single biggest payout that you’re likely to see in The MIZ.
You keep saying that you want to get home. Well, this is how that happens. This is how you get strong enough to make it home.
MushroomCleric
For the record, I had the same reaction as Zeke when Crush first laid out his plan. He said he wanted Zeke heading into the Under-MIZ to take out the Reclaimer and I thought he’d lost his mind. Then I actually looked at the plan and…regrettably I’ve got to say that it’s solid.
7Spirals and I have gone through the whole thing and cleaned it all up. The Reclaimer fight isn’t all that dangerous as long as Zeke follows the plan. Plus, if something goes wrong, he can always just run away. The Reclaimer isn’t all that fast, and hiring mercenaries is a core part of the strategy. Zeke just needs to make sure that he’s faster than at least one of them.
7Spirals
^ Mushroom.
That’s literally what mercenaries are for: to be slower than you when something horrible is chasing after you.
All jokes aside, Zeke, it’s a solid plan. Mushroom and I aren’t nearly as combat-starved as Crush, and we made sure the risk is as controlled as possible.
Duke_William
Zeke’s reaction once he finds out the thread is going to egg him into fighting industrial Cthulu god:
<>
CrushDaddyXx (PRIMARY)
You already did all your homework on the Reclaimer thanks to Mushroom. Plus, he got you the History skill. That should tell you that we know what we’re doing.
What you learned from the books only told a fraction of the story. Normally, in Frontiers, you read those books and then head into the Under-MIZ all blind to the danger. You don’t get the full picture of what happened until you’re already face to face with the Reclaimer. BUUUUUUUT, you’ve got us. You’ve got this forum, and we have so many ideas on how to help you.
So let me pick things up from where your research left off. When the Fracture hit, Helix Industries got absolutely wrecked. Their containment protocols around Experiment 12-B failed almost immediately. There were power fluctuations and mana surges and all sorts of horrible shit that happened. The entire MIZ turned into a nightmare. Experiment 12-B broke out of its enclosure and the scientific staff stationed in the research lab didn’t stand a chance.
The Reclaimer tore through the lab and consumed EVERYTHING. It took biomass, neural tissue, machinery, the other experiments, and whatever else it could get its grubby little hands on. By the time Helix Industries lost surveillance on their research facility, there was nothing left to watch.
None of the Helix Industries higher-ups knew what happened or what to do in the immediate aftermath. So they acted like children who spilled something in the kitchen…they just walked away. They sealed the research facility, burned their records, and allowed the Fracture to wipe away everything else.
What players don’t know until they actually head down into the Under-MIZ, is that the Reclaimer is still around. It migrated towards the center of the Under-MIZ and embedded itself deep into the ruins where it entered a semi-dormant state. Then it started doing what it was designed to do, and it started fixing things.
The air was stripped of toxins, heavy metals stopped leaching into the ground, collapsed terrain reinforced itself with a strange, organic material. Entire sections of the Under-MIZ started rebuilding themselves, becoming much healthier than what’s above ground.
At the same time, there are large pockets of the area where life becomes twisted and wrong. Something messed up with the experiment, and the Reclaimer became a little too effective in repairing the arcology of the Under-MIZ.
Now the thing is still down there and waiting for you to kill it and loot its body.
JimothytheBarber
Since Z3ke managed to get himself banned from posting for a couple days and can’t ask questions, I’ll do him the courtesy of stepping in.
Ahem
“Hey guys, quick reminder that this is my actual life we’re talking about here. This isn’t a game. It’s actually happening to me. I don’t want you all to send me off into a hell hole to fight a Cthulu-like horror that is an endgame boss who could erase me with a sneeze. None of you are taking this seriously. None of you appreciate how terrifying this world actually is.
How am I supposed to crawl through an underground territory filled with environmental dangers and kill a thing that ate a lab full of scientists? How am I supposed to do all that with only a dull knife and Corva’s hand axe?
And scene!
Performance Rank 10
InnerMarrow
Uncanny.
SoftLocked
Man Jimothy. You nailed his mannerisms.
golfclap.gif
StoryLeech
Aren’t you guys supposed to be selling him on this plan? You’ve got to address is very real fears that the narrative would be derailed by heading into the Under-MIZ. Zeke isn’t exactly OP over here. He’s clearly trying to write a gritty and realistic character. Sending him into the Under-MIZ does sound like it’s suicide.
MushroomCleric
We do have a plan and it’ll work. But, yea, we probably need to explain better.
CrushDaddyXx
I’m getting to it. Let me say, before this explodes into a massive argument about whether or not Zeke is ready for this, let me be very clear that there is a plan. We go through it step-by-step.
Before we get to the plan, it’s important that Zeke understands what the Under-MIZ is. So, Zeke, the Under-MIZ is the dungeon in Frontiers. Everything else in the game either feeds into it, prepares you for it, or is the endgame content that comes much much later. The Cathedrals of Ash are the big dungeons that you hit at the very end of the game, and I’m not trying to send you off to deal with those. You’re not ready for that.
Think of the Under-MIZ as something like a bridge leading to the Cathedrals. The easiest way to imagine it is that it’s a hollowed-out corpse that sits just beneath the MIZ. After the Fracture hit, the apocalypse wasn’t kind to the city. Districts broke and collapsed in on themselves, streets cracked, water mains ruptured and drowned entire neighborhoods. Entire sections of the city were sealed off and completely abandoned.
What’s left is a layered ruin that stretches for miles just beneath the surface of The MIZ. It’s filled with partially intact infrastructure, flooded residential zones, abandoned factories, and black-site research facilities.
There are several different dungeons inside the Under-MIZ, but you’re going to be ignoring them. The whole place is a massive complex with branching routes, dead ends, looping paths, and pockets of endgame content. The normal way people approach the Under-MIZ is through organizing an expedition to venture into its depths, and then either surviving and coming out rich as shit, or getting killed and having to restart their game.
But you’re not going to die because you have all of us. And Mushroom, 7, and I have come up with a genius way to get you through it.
I talked about the Cathedrals of Ash being the true end-game content for Frontiers. You’re not ready for that. The Cathedrals just send armies at you and drown you in bodies. Buying - or in your case convincing - an army to help you take on the Cathedrals is beyond you. But if you survive the Under-MIZ, and you do everything that we tell you, then you’ll put yourself in the position to curbstomp the Cathedrals later on.
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
You said that you never played any of the Fracture games, but have you played The Division? It’s the game where a bioplague is set off in the middle of New York and everything goes to shit. You’re a federal agent sent in to kill all the looters and then loot their bodies. In that game there’s a quarantine area called the Dark Zone. It’s this massive section of the map that’s all walled off and lawless, and if you head there you can get the best loot in the city.
That’s the Under-MIZ.
There are a few spots throughout the city where you can smuggle yourself into the Under-MIZ. Some of them are hidden, some are obvious, and some are locked down by the different factions of The MIZ.
The whole place is contested territory. It’s lousy with scavenger crews who are stripping everything that’s not bolted down, and autonomous security units still patrolling around. There are predators that have adapted to the dark, a shit ton of environmental hazards, and a bunch of residents who never left the city after the Fracture.
The Under-MIZ has entire societies existing down there. They aren’t exactly thriving…but they’re there. They’ve adapted to the flooded corridors and the low light and toxic air. They trade, they raid, they fight each other, and they don’t exactly like surface dwellers stumbling through their territory.
That’s the Under-MIZ. It’s dangerous, but you’re not going alone and you’re not being sent into the worst parts of it.
7Spirals
| It’s dangerous, but you’re not going alone and you’re not being sent into the worst parts of it. |
OOO. That’s my cue.
As Crush explained, we’re not heading you into the Under-MIZ solo. You need to assemble a team that covers three different roles for this plan to work. You’ll need a glyphwright, a delver, and muscle.
- Glyphwright (NON-NEGOTIABLE)
This is basically a magic user in Frontiers. Null, earlier in the thread, explained to you how magic works in the Fracture-verse. I won’t repeat what he said except to say that magic requires a bunch of mana to work, and all the mana in Frontiers is slightly corrupted and hostile. You don’t really want to go around casting spells in Frontiers. It’ll truly mess you up. That’s why you’re going to need a glyphwright.
Glyphwrights can read and manipulate the underlying structure of glyphs, which are the closest thing to learned magic in Frontiers. They can set wards, disarm magical traps, stabilize mana flows, and jury-rig spell effects. In short, they’re like a magical MacGuyver that can mess around with anything you come across in the Under-MIZ.
You need to know that this person is non-negotiable. The entire “kill the Reclaimer” plan dies if you don’t hire a glyphwright.
- A Delver (your way in and out of the Under-MIZ)
A delver specializes in navigating the Under-MIZ. The whole area is unstable and chaotic, and you’re going to need someone who can find their way around. Unfortunately for you, the entire Under-MIZ is procedurally generated in the games. That means this forum doesn’t have access to the layout of your Under-MIZ.
You’re going to need a Delver to guide you into the Under-MIZ, guide you around to the places you’re headed to, and guide you safely out. Without a delver, you’re going to get lost and die pretty quickly.
- The Muscle (because people are the worst)
This one’s pretty obvious. The Under-MIZ is filled with a bunch of scavenger teams. You need someone who knows how to fight and doesn’t panic and can put down anyone who threatens you. Since your weapon skill is only up to 2, it’s not going to be you who fights.
If Wren is still around, you should try and hire him. You worked with him before and he seemed like he was pretty competent. If you head into the Under-MIZ without muscle, you’re going to have a bad time.
Here’s some good news: you’re already at the Roaring Drake and you’ve made friends with Patch. He knows people and should help you source a team without too much trouble. Have him find you those three roles because he should know a bunch of people who are looking for a payday and are dumb enough, or desperate enough, to follow you into the Under-MIZ. As long as you promise your team some loot and salvage, you’ll be safe.
After you assemble your team, you head into the Under-MIZ. We can help you out with the surface-level navigation to get you to the Under-MIZ. We’ve already got maps ready to go that show you the viable access points in the area and all the entrances that aren’t locked down by factions or gangs.
But once you pass through those entrances and descend into the top layer of the Under-MIZ, you’re going to need to scout.
MushroomCleric
Your first stop in the Under-MIZ is an area called the Crushed Skirt. No clue why it’s named that. Before the Fracture wrecked everything, the Crushed Skirt used to be a high-density residential district. Picture offices and apartment towers all clumped up together.
After the Fracture hit, the place was abandoned. All those buildings kind of crumbled into each other and fused together over the years, creating a massive maze that is ridiculously dangerous. Floors slope and stairwells collapse on you. The whole place is a deathtrap without a delver to guide you through it.
What’s worse is that we can’t give you a proper map to the Crushed Skirt. As 7Spirals explained, the entire Under-MIZ is procedurally generated in each game. Your Crushed skirt isn’t going to look the same as mine. The forum can identify types of locations like vaults and caches, but we can’t pinpoint their exact positions.
Which means the first thing you need to do when you head into the Under-MIZ is visit the Anchor Guild. They’re a loose collection of independent climbers and riggers who operate in the area. The Anchor Guild installs cables and ladders all over the place to make climbing through the Crushed Skirt a little easier. Without them, the place would be impossible to traverse.
Most importantly for you, they have maps of the region. The maps aren’t perfect, and they get pretty outdated because the entire area is shifting and moving and buildings are collapsing. But the maps are good enough that you can plan a route through the area. You’ll need to find the Anchor Guild and get a map, and then describe it to all of us.
After getting the map, we can guide you through the Crushed Skirt. Not only that, but there are hidden caches scattered throughout the district, and some of them contain vaults or safes. The best part about all these caches is that while the rest of the Under-MIZ is procedurally generated and can shit about, the safes aren’t. Vault contents and codes are fixed in the game. We can send you to known stash locations, give you the vault codes, and then you go and loot to your heart’s content.
The early haul from all those safes and vaults does two things. First, it’s going to let you pay your crew and keep them loyal and invested. Second, it gives you leverage with the Anchor Guild, and you can get some of their more “secret” maps. After you grab the loot, you trade it with the Anchor Guild and you get the routes that descend down into the Flooded Neighborhoods.
7Spirals
The Flooded Neighborhoods is the next stop on your trip through the Under-MIZ. They were once ordinary residential blocks with apartments and schools. But then the Fracture hit and the apocalypse came to town. Water mains ruptured, the drainage system failed, and the entire district drowned. What’s left is just a floating debris field bobbing all over the place. Underneath all that trash and furniture and sewage are submerged homes. Visibility is awful and the water is toxic enough that you’ll die if you go for a long enough swim. What’s worse is the wildlife.
There’s a bunch of creatures down in the Flooded Neighborhoods; most of it is descended from the pets that used to live there. It’s filled with feral dog packs, giant cats that drop down on you from above, fish that have been twisted into piranha like schools, and so much more. My most hated enemy in the Under-MIZ is the mutated rats that nest within flooded walls and come out in swarms if you disturb them.
You’re not going to want to spend too much time in the Flooded Neighborhoods. Not only are they incredibly dangerous, but there’s not much loot there. Instead, you’re going to want to beeline it straight to the Holdfast, a subterranean city formed by the people of the Under-MIZ who never escaped the flooding.
These weirdos adapted to their new lives and now live among the trash and debris of the Under-MIZ. They’ve got fungus farms and run salvaged filtration rigs. They’re absolutely the worst, and they hate outsiders. But they do trade with them. You’re going to need to get a map from these guys. Specifically, you’ll need a map that can guide you through the Flooded Neighborhoods and into the Fossilized Factory Belt.
That’s the old industrial heart of the Under-MIZ. It’s filled with massive foundries and assembly lines that have all been shuttered after the Fracture.
Here is where Mushroom, Crush, and I all disagree. Crush thinks that there’s a fortune buried within the Fossilized Factory Belt and you should spend some time there. If you’re careful, the salvage you grab from the area would be enough to buy you some safety for a long time.
Mushroom disagrees and thinks that you should just sprint your way through the Factory Belt. His thought is that if you stay there too long, you increase your chances that something goes wrong. There could be hostile scavenger crews or automated security systems that have gone berserk. Frankly, he’s not wrong. I’m willing to agree with him and suggest you just go straight though.
But, and this is a big but, if you’re already in the Under-MIZ and want to make some money, you should scout around. It really depends on how beat up your crew is and how greedy you are for credits.
Whatever you choose, once you’re free of the Factory Belt, you’ll be at the research blacksites in the middle of the Under-MIZ. That’s where the Reclaimer is and it’s the part of the plan that Crush is most excited about, so I’ll let him explain it.
BabyBloos
So far this plan isn’t completely batshit crazy. Kinda surprising.
HandsWithoutArms
Yea…but Z3ke still isn’t going to go for it. He said before that he’s not interested in anything combat heavy after coming out of the Valley of Echoes. There’s no way that he goes with Crush’s idea.
He should just grind his skills for a little bit. We can help him if he picks up any small quests in The MIZ. And I’m sure there’s tons of places that are hidden in The MIZ that we can point him to and make him a bunch of money off of loot.
FarFieldVanishes
| there’s tons of places that are hidden in The MIZ that we can point him to and make him a bunch of money off of loot. |
I don’t know about that. If Z3ke is still on the whole “this is real life,” how often do you find sellable gear just laying around. A bunch of the spots in The MIZ that people would point to as having loot probably doesn’t if Z3ke is treating the place like a real city. Sure, there are secrets we can help him solve, but a lot of the money making schemes are probably out of reach right now.
HonoredBibliophile
He needs to be able to get stronger to get closer to his goal, and there is no option on the table that doesn’t have some level of risk. He could follow the typical player option of steadily fulfilling quests and slowly getting stronger, but the events in the Valley of Echoes show that path to have higher risks than expected.
Normally, it wouldn’t be possible for a Deadlands native to find a low-risk way to get absurdly strong, because logically any such method would be immediately locked down and fought over by anyone trying to profit from it. But Zeke has a key advantage compared to all the people around him: access to this forum. It seems like the best way to play to his strengths would be to complete some sort of high-level quest that normally would be a death sentence for any player, but possible as long as he leverages his insider knowledge to find an unexpected way to succeed and essentially cheat his way to victory.
CrushDaddyXx (PRIMARY)
OH MAN. Alright. You ready for this Zeke? This is where you forget all about Null and choose me as your favorite primary.
I know what you’re expecting from me. You’re expecting me to tell you to kick in the door and start swinging at the Reclaimer until it dies. That would be awesome. But it would also be dumb. You’d last all of three seconds before turning into a smear on the wall of the research lab. So we’re not doing that.
Instead, we’re going to kill the Reclaimer the smart way. We’re going to kill it before it even knows it’s dead. And it requires the glyphwright that we told you to hire.
Quick history lesson because it matters. Everyone loves to dunk on Shards of Time. It’s basically the redheaded stepchild of the Fracture-verse. Barely anyone finished it, it doesn’t have a good mod scene, and anyone who says they like it gets boo’d out of the forum. It’s got no fans except for VENERATED.
But here’s the dirty little secret. Shards did get one thing absolutely right, and that was the glyph system.
NullSigil already broke down how magic works in the Fracture-verse. Essentially, all magic needs a shit ton amount of mana, and human don’t have enough of it. End of story. There’s really only three ways to get around that bottleneck for player characters: items that store mana, ambient mana siphoned from the environment, and glyphs.
You’ve already given that Vaultstone to Riley at the Tock & Spanner and she’s going to turn it into a weapon for you, so you’re on the right track with items. Ambient mana is a little iffy in the Deadlands because everything is so corrupted and unreliable. But glyphs are a perfect workaround in Frontiers, and they’re how you’re going to kill the Reclaimer.
A glyph is basically just a spell you set on the ground. It drinks in the ambient mana, does its job, and doesn’t kill you in the process. It’s fire-and-forget magic.
Frontiers introduced the glyphwright class, but they kind of sucked. You dropped little traps on the ground and had to kite enemies into them. It was very limited because the tech for the game engine just wasn’t there yet. It was only in Shards where glyphs became interesting.
Severance Systems built an entire language surrounding glyphs. I’m not kidding here. They created a language that the nerds on this forum could learn to read and write in. It’s got syntax and grammar and rules and all that stuff. I don’t entirely understand it, but it’s possible to write whatever you want with the glyphs. Think of them like machine code. You could use glyphs to program your spells to do whatever you wanted.
At first, everyone ignored the glyph system because they were so gobsmacked about how unplayable and buggy Shards was. They were viewed mostly as a way to lay down stronger traps. Then, people started really digging into the system and realized that you could program glyphs to do basically anything.
That’s when things became incredibly stoopid in the best way possible. I’m adding a pdf file to this comment. Think of it like a primer for the language of glyphs. It’s got everything the forum has on glyphs. Give it to your glyphwright and sit back and watch the magic.
Normally, glyphs run off ambient mana. You lay down a glyph, wait for it to charge, bait something into it, and then it explodes. But a bunch of the forum posters discovered that you don’t have to power your glyphs off ambient mana. You could hijack a glyph’s power source and make it drink any mana. Your mana. Stored man. STOLEN mana.
Blood ritual glyphs were the first big breakthrough. The original idea was pretty simple. You’d lay down a glyph, toss a captured creature (or your own mercs) into it, drain its mana, and then dump all of that into a big boom. But that was only the early experiments on glyphs.
Let’s talk about your target. The Reclaimer is a massive mana battery. It has sooooo much mana coursing through its veins that it’s not even funny. You’re not in any position to outfight it. If you tried to solo the boss, you’d be dead in seconds. It would be like a child trying to break a skyscraper by punching it to death. So instead, you’re going to use its own mana against it.
You need to get your glyphwright to lay down a series of specialized glyphs. We’ll help design and test them. These glyphs aren’t dangerous at all. They’re not going to explode or damage the Reclaimer. Their only job is attunement.
When you get down to where the Reclaimer is, you’re going to need to scout it. It’s in a semi-dormant state, but it does occasionally get up and wander around. You need to place your attunement glyphs along the Reclaimer’s patrol route. Once the Reclaimer passes through a glyph, your glyphwright will activate it. The glyph is going to read the mana signature of whatever just walked by and lock onto it.
A single glyph trap isn’t going to be enough. Hell, four or five traps won’t be enough. But after ten? Twenty? Those glyphs will lock on and attune themselves to the Reclaimer’s mana signature and then feed that information back to a much larger central glyph that this forum is going to design.
After the Reclaimer runs through those ten or twenty glyph traps, you activate the large, central glyph. That glyph will start to cast its big spell, and to do that it’s going to take in mana. But it’s not going to draw ambient mana. Instead, it’s going to draw in the mana that is attuned to it from those ten or twenty glyph traps. It’s going to draw mana from the Reclaimer itself.
The spell that is attached to the central glyph is going to be a transmutation spell. Again, the forum will be able to design it for you. You just need to have your glyphwright set it up. The transmutation spell is going to grab all the organs of the Reclaimer and transmute them into alchemical components.
If you build this trap correctly, you’re not going to be fighting the Reclaimer. It’s going to kill itself by powering the glyph that kills it with its own mana. I mean…come on. THAT’S FUCKING GENIUS!!! And after it’s dead, that’s when you head out and grab the loot.
Endgame problems require endgame solutions.
So…what do you think?
InnerMarrow
| So…what do you think? |
Did you already forget that Zeke has been banned for 48 hours? He can’t reply to you right now.
JimothytheBarber
I got this Inner.
Ahem
“Yeaaa…fuck that noise.”