<span class="mu-s">It is a time of conflict.</span>
Driven by greed and by justice, by a righteous and sheer self-interest, by whatever else reasons conjured from the minds of men, a conflict has gripped the very soul of your world. It is a war that spans states and empires, battles fought seas apart for the name of the same cause. It's justifications are manyfold, it's goals even more so. In the end, there is but one certainty, and it is of the death that shall come. The lance is drawn, the sabres rattle, the memory of peace fades, leaving naught but the fog of war.
In this age, warfare has changed - long gone are the days of archers and catapults, replaced by the inaccurate yet powerful firearms and earth-shaking cannons of the modern era. Where there once were men wielding shields and swords there are now pikes and halberds, woven in tight unassailable formations once thought to be ancient history. Monumental walls of stone, once thought to be unassailable, are torn down as if they were made of straw, and in their place, earthen fortifications begin to rise. Though the might of the armed noble cavalier continues to hold it's place, for how long shall it last? Yes, war has changed, but in the end, men still die, cities still burn, and to the victors are left the spoils...
You are but one of the many officers of the many nations of the many fronts that span this war. You are no king nor emperor, no doge nor duke. You hold no lands save for a meagre county whose administration you no longer practice and whose visage you have long forgotten, so many years has it been since you last saw it. Your side and allegiance does not matter. You are the Field Captain of your Army, and for today, that is enough.
Your army, yes - what <span class="mu-i">**is**</span> your army?
"Congratulations, Adventurer, you have made it to the top of the Tower. In recognition of your deeds, you can-"
The flickering figment of an old man rambles on with a speech you've heard a thousand times. Any adventurer who capped their level can reach the top of the tower, as intended by the laws of the Celestial Clockwork. Immortality, priceless treasures, weapons that can sunder reality itself, power that exceeds the gods... you found all of these and more during the ten years that you've been farming the top of the tower.
Kings bow and scrape before you in hopes of finding your favor. Merchants would empty their treasure vaults to obtain the trash you pick up on your travails. The wisest of sages seek your counsel for all that you have seen and learned upon your journey. Knights beg the honor to match swords with you, when they aren't begging the honor of your hand. Your beauty matches your strength, and when you reach the level cap there are none in this world nor the next with the power to oppose you.
<span class="mu-i">Yet nothing satisfies you anymore.</span>
Ennui takes you, it stills your heart and makes what should have been another satisfying victory a hollow pile of meaningless dust. Your overwhelming and unchallengeable strength is a curse. Nothing challenges you. Even when you hire yourself a burly man to beat you, to push you down and sate your womanly urges, you barely feel anything for the tremendous difference in strength. Your heart yearns for the thrill of the knifes edge, where one false move will lead to your immediate demise... and nothing in this world can give you what you want.
"What treasure will you choose?" the figment asks. A relic of the founders, the first age who created the Stellar Laws and set the system that rules the world in motion.
As always, there are three chests for you to choose from. The uncertainty of a treasure chest is one of the few joys left to you in life, but even that fades when the treasure isn't earned through struggle. How you long to need to fight for it, to feel pain again, to be defeated...
The first treasure is another reliquary sword that can sunder the bonds of space and time to eliminate the concept of distance. You have seventy three such blades, each different from one another, but still quite the same.
The second treasure is a Greater Potion of Eternity. You drank one of these long ago, and can no longer be slain by any means, your eternal existence having become a law of this world. Now, you have a small pantry full of them, to be held over the heads of men and women who think themselves powerful, so you can derive some amusement in watching them squirm.
The last is new. Your heart flutters with a flicker of happiness.
[NEW GAME+]
You immediately choose it. The System Sings, and asks you to select a class. (Roll 1d100) >Bard >Dancer >Hime >Kunoichi >Monk >Ojou >Priestess >Shrine Maiden
It is the year 2907 A.D., humanity, initially flourishing out in the cosmos, has begun to turn on itself, civil wars, secession, profiteers of the industrial war complex, the galaxy was growing more dim as colonies stopped being made, and danger was around every corner.
You are Erik Bridger, high schooler, senior and an all around ace student. Anti-social but proficient in your work, you were soon, and expectantly were 'offered' an position amongst the Mobile Response Force. Said organization being your systems version of the military, an cog in machine serving the Independent Communion of Stars, ICS. An fanatical organization that uses faith to inspire and control the masses to the leadership own ends.
Though he cared for none of this as he looked at the holo tablet he was reading, listing several positions available for Erik to join thanks to his exemplary grades, he was allowed to pick his poison...
[A] Infantry(Join the rank and file on the Frontline in service of the Communion!)
Mech Pilot (Learn the ropes of mech warfare and outmaneuver and overpower your enemies!)
Welcome to /qtg/, a place to talk about quests. Previous thread(s) >>6063686 >>6063680
>What is a quest? An interactive story in which a Quest Master (QM) writes and provides the readers with options on how to proceed — similar to a choose-your-own-adventure book or an old text adventure
>Formatting guide: Only the thread's OP can format. Note that should the OP change ID, they will lose this ability as well. Remove the spaces between the [] brackets and the letters: Bold: <span class="mu-s">text</span> Italics: <span class="mu-i">text</span> Red: [ red ] <span class="mu-r">text</span> [ /red ] Blue: [ blue ] <span class="mu-b">text</span> [ /blue ] Green: [ green] <span class="mu-g">text</span> [ /green ]
>Formatting guide for everyone: Dice (type this in “options”): dice + [no. of dice]d[no. of sides on the dice] (optionally you can add modifiers: dice + [no. of dice]d[no. of sides on the dice]+[modifier]; for a negative modifier type: +-[modifier]
Examples: dice+1d100 = a 1d100 roll, dice+1d100+10 = a 1d100 roll with a +10 modifier.
Spoiler: spoiler or by pressing alt+s in-thread
>QM question: Have you ever had a quest idea that you liked so much you wanted someone else to run it, just so you could play it? If so, what? When do you prefer to be a player?
>Player question: Have you ever had the QM itch? What's stopping you from being a QM, besides the perceived time investment?
>General question: If you could wave a magic wand and make the board more active, but not necessarily faster thread-wise, would you do it? Do you want to return to the days of sessions?
>Lurker question: It would be funny if all the lurkers became QMs but kept lurking in other threads, just saying.
>Miscellaneous question: Are you a pumpkin spice enjoyer, or are you sick of the oversaturation?
Unless you have surprise assignments to suppress escaped monsters that are researched for their exotic physiology, scour the wilds in search of illegal tunnels into the stormdrains underneath the rainy city of Helsinki where thousands of <span class="mu-i">excess humans</span> gather to survive, or test esoteric technologies that are powered by your own biological processes created at the behest of the director of the Stormwatch, you have a very simple day ahead of you.
As Winter comes, so does the march of Helsinki’s Stormwatch against the underground city of squatters that lurk underneath the pristine, clean, and self-sufficient city. And while the nation of Helsinki is well equipped to commit a total pogrom with advanced weaponry, regulations on gas emissions by the global environmental regulating body, Mother Nature’s Providence, enforce that the city be taken by boots on the ground with bladed weapons in hand made from entirely recyclable materials.
And you have been assured this is the biggest opportunity you have to earn an L3 position. With L3 comes the rights that those in the past used to enjoy; the right to start a family, mainly. You are, haha, <span class="mu-i">incredibly</span> lonely. You see things, sometimes. A child of yours, yet to be.
To make this attack possible, a great understanding of the city’s current layout, population, and demographics have to be taken. Rather than rely on vision from easily sabotaged cameras, this strange thing called “WiFi” can be used to detect people through walls with comparable quality to thermal imaging. This can be used to scan the current physical layout of the Undercity, and establish its current capacity of fighting-age adults and any trained - or even <span class="mu-i">consciously cooperative</span> - aberrations.
With the end of the Unification War, the fires that once ravaged the now-independent Night City ceased to exist, leaving broken fates and untold damages in its wake. Both sides saw themselves as victors, but ultimately, the corpos came out as the ultimate winners; Arasaka was once again able to extend its tendrils around the West Coast, rearing its ugly head and imperialistic ambition to make the old United States blush at the thought. The more things tried to change, the more they stayed the same.
A year later, the post-war reconstruction is going slow, too slow as many believe. The city council prefers to focus on efforts irrelevant to the common citizenry, who are poorly defended by the understaffed NCPD, bleeding numbers to gang wars that shall shape the city's underground for years to come. The disease is rampant, the birth rates are failing, and the people choose to dig their heads deeper into their BDs, jerking away all their problems. In other words, there's no better place to call home for the downtrodden.
It won't be *your* home for much longer, however. Not with the injuries you've sustained - a hole opened in your side, a bone poking out of your elbow, and an opening in your frontal skull that bled down to your mouth, with a coppery taste reminding you that it'll take just a little longer before you'll draw your last breath.
With the last of your strength, you dragged yourself into this cold alleyway, down where the sewage went, to escape the unfolding chaos on the streets. Something about a Cyberpsycho escalating a fight, and a truck flipping over. Finer details are eluding you, and so far, you've only been able to flip yourself on your front, staring at the steam escaping from one of the manholes.
Details are all mixed up in your predicament, but there's nothing to lose in watching your life flash before your eyes. In your delirious state, you recall that you are. . .
>Adam Kisiner, a mediocre accountant who endured a string of failures before ending up in the reopened Arasaka America, grinding through the corporate ladder for survival. A man who never learned to live, only to fight, now bleeding out on a nameless street, never able to taste the fruits of liberating his soul. >Philomon Steele, formerly a young revolutionary who abandoned his passion in pursuit of med school. Result? Cushy job as a surgeon at MT, putting limbs on and off all day. He had it all - a girlfriend, a group of friends, a future to look up to, and it all has been severed in one fine stroke. A death full of regrets is the worst kind of death a man can have. >Imaeda Yasotaro, a self-proclaimed hooligan with no future. Nevertheless, he attended the Night City University with ferocious zeal, all to achieve the approval of his demanding father. Said father once asked him to deliver an innocent little package to a buddy, a fixer, which led him to this tragedy. Dying by the orders of an old man. . . story old as time.
The Town of Mulekick. A bustling mountain town touting clean air, unpolluted rivers, and untouched forests. Shortly after your parents died, you moved here from the city for cheaper, simpler living.
One day while hiking alone on a popular trail behind your apartment, you catch a glimpse of a weird insect you've never seen before. You follow it off the path, and dirt turns to grass, and grass turns to brush. The beetle is many different shades of green, and seems fuzzy or even glowing. You jump over a pile of thin, fallen branches and trees stacked on top of larger logs, not paying attention to where you wander. The path is easy enough, as long as you watch your step. The bug gets tired of you tailing him, and flitters off straight up into the sky. You watch it ascend until it's a little dot.
When you look at your surroundings, you find yourself coming upon a clearing that leads to a rock face. A small cave covered in dead, dry moss, with an entrance you have to hunch to enter, taunts you with a piercing whistle. You look around, alone. You can't be more than ten minutes back to the trail. The sky is getting darker. Hunching down, you shine your flashlight into the cave, revealing that the cave gets big enough to stand in just a few feet deeper, and the moss gives way to stone and weeds. Intrigued, you decide you'll just check it out for a minute, and turn right back.
You take a deep breath and enter the cave. Then, you forget.
You wake up. This is the cause of no small distress.
In the first place, ships don’t, as a rule, wake up. They don’t have eyes or limbs or skin either. But looking down with your newfound eyes, you have a body that is by all appearances human, warm and soft and pink and squishy but firm underneath, with a great mass of thick navy-blue hair falling down to your chest. You are dressed in a rather tight-fitting white officer’s summer slack shirt and a black skirt open up the sides to your waist, with black leggings underneath and polished black shoes on your feet. Although hard to judge without a reference, your proportions suggest you are quite tall, as tall as anyone that had sailed among your crew.
In the second place, you should be dead. Your last memory - or log entry, at any rate - is from February 3rd 2017, the day of your final decommissioning. Yet, as you listen to the GPS satellites orbiting far overhead, they say that the time is 0742 1st August 2027.
What the hell was going on? Had you been repaired and recommissioned? No, that couldn’t be - even if the USN were in the most extraordinarily dire need it would still have been easier to build a brand-new diesel carrier than try to recommission an old nuc tub like you, assuming you hadn’t been scrapped entirely by now, and at any rate not even Uncle Sam's most ingenious contractors could turn 95,000 tons of steel into something the size of a normal human. Even so, here you are, alive, and you can still feel your hull, somehow impossibly compressed into this new body. All systems were nominal, reactors newly-fuelled, all airframes fresh and in flying condition, armoury, fuel bunkers, and stores all full. In fact, you felt good, better than you can remember feeling since, well, maybe ever. There wasn’t a spot of rust or squeaking hinge or missing fleck of paint anywhere. You’re definitely alive and in full working order, and in a way it should not have been possible for a ship to be.
Was this the afterlife, maybe? Somehow that didn't feel like the right answer. Looking around, you see nothing but blue blue sea, shallow and crystal clear, evidently some tropical lagoon, and though you seem to be standing on top of the water without issue, the sight of white sand and coral barely a fathom deep is a little unnerving. You try listening again to the GPS sats to get a fix on your location, and find your confusion and concern only deepening when you match coordinates to charts: you’re standing in Bikini Atoll. And, listening to your other comms systems, you hear nothing else at all except encrypted satellite traffic. On the ground is radio silence. True enough, Bikini was remote, but the Marshall Islands had tens of thousands of people living not too far away, and nearby Kwajalein had a Navy missile test range. How could there be literally no one here?
