Goonhub
09-17-2013, 08:57 PM
This is a roundtype proposal. I expect no preferential treatment due to being a henchmin, and welcome any and all suggestions, savage critique, or peanut gallery input.
I've been semi-inspired for a while by common threads of thought in a lot of suggestion threads for major overhauls of the wizard. It's often suggested that Corruption should animate objects in the environment, to weaponize the station against itself. This made me realize there's sort of a gap in a hole where an antagonist type could be. Wizards are glass cannons, changelings paranoia-fostering stealthy assassins, traitors jack-of-all-trades everymen, nuke operatives heavily-armed paramilitary invaders, and vampires are ridiculously overpowered wizard/changeling hybrids that need a serious revamp but that's beyond the point
I think there's potential in an antagonist type that doesn't make you paranoid about the crew. It makes you paranoid about the station. It makes you carefully eye up any unattended objects, afraid they might suddenly try to murder you. Afraid that the deep frier might grow phantom arms and try to stuff you inside itself. Afraid that the corpses that inevitably litter the station might just get back up and start exacting revenge on the living.
Afraid of Wraiths.
So what's a Wraith?
Wraith is just a Scottish word for ghost or spirit, which has often been co-opted by video games and popular culture to be a scarier, angrier ghost than the kind you might see hanging out with Michael J Fox and solving murders. This is the meaning I intend to use: wraiths are supernaturally empowered ghosts who are furious at the living because of reasons, and intend to seek bloody vengeance upon them. I'm also calling them wraiths because poltergeist isn't really that scary of a word.
Wraiths are controlled like player ghosts, and have most of the same limitations. They cannot be heard, seen, or touched by the living, their hearing range is automatically toggled so they're not bombarded with the entire station's chat, they can hear/see and be heard/seen by ghosts, they can fly freely around the z-level, etc.. They have some minor powers, however, to unnerve or inconvenience other players. Ghostly whispers, spoofing traitor PDA beeping, screwing with light switches, making chairs spin super-fast on their own (making anyone buckled to them vomit explosively), a very long cooldown that turns one item into a temporary, aggressive critter, that sort of thing. Their defining power, however, is Possession.
The Cool Shit
Possession is already a thing in the code. You just put a player's ckey into an object or person, and they control it. With some tweaking, this could have mountains of potential. Wraiths can possess any portable object, and possibly some stationary ones like the deep frier. Portable objects possessed by a wraith can move around at slightly below average speed, interact with themselves to toggle functions, and use themselves on players on objects. Beakers upend themselves on inattentive chemists. Knives fly at the chef and cut him to ribbons. A flashbang goes off in a security officer's hand, and the stun baton now at his feet rises into the air and beats the shit out of him.
Possession allows wraiths to create what they most desperately want - corpses. A wraith can possess a corpse and force it to rise from the dead, controlled like a puppet. An embodied wraith - I'll call it a revenant for lack of a better term - gets access to much more overt ways of controlling their environment as well as having a proper body to kill people with. These powers I haven't considered much, but one that came to mind was shredding the metal and floor tiles off nearby floors/walls and animating the metal sheets as angry critters. Being dead, a revenant doesn't give two shits about being stunned or tased, either. As anyone who's fought a dude on stimulants knows, stun immunity on top of an otherwise normal person is scary enough to fight, and a few ghost powers on top of that makes for a "SHOOT IT WITH EVERYTHING" scenario. On top of that, when a revenant inevitably dies, the wraith pops back out ready to find another corpse to possess. A revenant is a wraith's ideal position for carrying out whatever murders it needs to perform.
But it's not a perfect one.
The Weaknesses
Note, for this section, a lot of these ideas are just musings and possibilities, and some may be mutually exclusive.
So, this makes wraiths sound like unstoppable opponents, but they have their share of exploitable weaknesses. First of all, wraiths, like any proper ghost, hate salt. HATE it. They may not be able to cross a tile with salt on it in ghostly form or possessed form, or when they cross it while disembodied, they temporarily become tangible and forced to pay attention to things like "walls" and "lasers." There was also a recent suggestion that the Barman should get a rock-salt shotgun to deal with drunks and pubbies, and this could rapidly become an extremely effective weapon against a visible wraith or a revenant. It's also a common bit of folklore that people who've gone too deep into their cups or took some funky hallucinogens can see the truly supernatural, so people tripping balls or with gigantic amounts of ethanol in their systems have a chance to see a wraith flying around, and be able to target it. This could (very intentionally) lead to one of the best tactics being "stuff staff assistants full of bath salts, give them salt shakers, Discount Dan's, and a rock-salt shotgun, and let them loose."
The Chaplain should be one of the stars of the show, as usual for supernatural antagonists. Holy water splashed on a possessed object would immediately force the wraith out, as would hitting it with a bible. Doing either to a revenant would cause huge amounts of damage to the corpse the wraith is riding in. A Chaplain's burial services may also become extraordinarily important when there's wraiths about, as firing a corpse into space or stuffing it into an incinerator denies valuable assets to the wraiths.
I made revenants sound pretty strong in the initial writeup, but they also have a fatal weakness. A wraith possessing a body causes it to rot extremely rapidly, causing permanent and rapid health loss similar to wearing the Obsidian Crown, if not worse. It quickly progresses through the stages of rot as its health lowers, possibly losing limbs near the end stages, and collapses into a skeletal heap once the wraith has burnt it out. Formaldehyde might slow down the process of rotting if you get enough, but it'd also slow your movement if it did. Some powers may also burn even more health off to be fueled, shortening a body's life span even further. This means wraiths have to body-hop rather regularly to continue a rampage, especially if they're shot up by the crew, and may even become visible and tangible for a short period upon abandoning a corpse in order to de-incentivize blind kamikaze attacks, and give the best, most regular window for attack for crew members not currently high as balls.
Another idea I had was a pool of points similar to DNA points and blood points that comes directly from each death on the station, whether or not you had anything to do with it, and it served as both power fuel and the health pool for an unmanifested wraith. Not sure how that'd shake out, though.
An idea I liked but was hestitant about: the ecto-goggles and ghostbuster gun in the Void can see/target wraiths and do amazing damage to them, but that'd encourage dumb rushes to the Void every time a wraith is around and mass production of them in Mechanics which would be pretty awful.
Wrapup
The playstyle of a wraith would depend on slowly escalating the chaos on-station to a critical point where the chaos can support their murderous attacks. They could either go balls-out on lone crewmembers with possessed weapons and kill them for quick revenants, or they could wait for a quiet opportunity to grab a forgotten dead body with a bit more rot on it. They could shadow traitors, changelings, and vampires in Mixed, give them some assistance, and steal their kills, corpses, and success like a vulture, or compete directly with them to try to take their cool toys or eliminate dangerous competition for useful corpses. Wraiths may synchronize possessions to take down a crowd and get fuel for a tag-team revenant rampage, or fight bitterly over the choicest bodies and sabotage their own efforts long enough for a drunk grayshirt to shoot them both to ectoplasmic chunks. There's a lot of tweaking that could be done with this writeup, but I think the base ideas I've laid out have a shitload of potential for an amazing type of traitor.
And now, I open the floor to you guys to discuss
SPOOKY GHOST MODE
I've been semi-inspired for a while by common threads of thought in a lot of suggestion threads for major overhauls of the wizard. It's often suggested that Corruption should animate objects in the environment, to weaponize the station against itself. This made me realize there's sort of a gap in a hole where an antagonist type could be. Wizards are glass cannons, changelings paranoia-fostering stealthy assassins, traitors jack-of-all-trades everymen, nuke operatives heavily-armed paramilitary invaders, and vampires are ridiculously overpowered wizard/changeling hybrids that need a serious revamp but that's beyond the point
I think there's potential in an antagonist type that doesn't make you paranoid about the crew. It makes you paranoid about the station. It makes you carefully eye up any unattended objects, afraid they might suddenly try to murder you. Afraid that the deep frier might grow phantom arms and try to stuff you inside itself. Afraid that the corpses that inevitably litter the station might just get back up and start exacting revenge on the living.
Afraid of Wraiths.
So what's a Wraith?
Wraith is just a Scottish word for ghost or spirit, which has often been co-opted by video games and popular culture to be a scarier, angrier ghost than the kind you might see hanging out with Michael J Fox and solving murders. This is the meaning I intend to use: wraiths are supernaturally empowered ghosts who are furious at the living because of reasons, and intend to seek bloody vengeance upon them. I'm also calling them wraiths because poltergeist isn't really that scary of a word.
Wraiths are controlled like player ghosts, and have most of the same limitations. They cannot be heard, seen, or touched by the living, their hearing range is automatically toggled so they're not bombarded with the entire station's chat, they can hear/see and be heard/seen by ghosts, they can fly freely around the z-level, etc.. They have some minor powers, however, to unnerve or inconvenience other players. Ghostly whispers, spoofing traitor PDA beeping, screwing with light switches, making chairs spin super-fast on their own (making anyone buckled to them vomit explosively), a very long cooldown that turns one item into a temporary, aggressive critter, that sort of thing. Their defining power, however, is Possession.
The Cool Shit
Possession is already a thing in the code. You just put a player's ckey into an object or person, and they control it. With some tweaking, this could have mountains of potential. Wraiths can possess any portable object, and possibly some stationary ones like the deep frier. Portable objects possessed by a wraith can move around at slightly below average speed, interact with themselves to toggle functions, and use themselves on players on objects. Beakers upend themselves on inattentive chemists. Knives fly at the chef and cut him to ribbons. A flashbang goes off in a security officer's hand, and the stun baton now at his feet rises into the air and beats the shit out of him.
Possession allows wraiths to create what they most desperately want - corpses. A wraith can possess a corpse and force it to rise from the dead, controlled like a puppet. An embodied wraith - I'll call it a revenant for lack of a better term - gets access to much more overt ways of controlling their environment as well as having a proper body to kill people with. These powers I haven't considered much, but one that came to mind was shredding the metal and floor tiles off nearby floors/walls and animating the metal sheets as angry critters. Being dead, a revenant doesn't give two shits about being stunned or tased, either. As anyone who's fought a dude on stimulants knows, stun immunity on top of an otherwise normal person is scary enough to fight, and a few ghost powers on top of that makes for a "SHOOT IT WITH EVERYTHING" scenario. On top of that, when a revenant inevitably dies, the wraith pops back out ready to find another corpse to possess. A revenant is a wraith's ideal position for carrying out whatever murders it needs to perform.
But it's not a perfect one.
The Weaknesses
Note, for this section, a lot of these ideas are just musings and possibilities, and some may be mutually exclusive.
So, this makes wraiths sound like unstoppable opponents, but they have their share of exploitable weaknesses. First of all, wraiths, like any proper ghost, hate salt. HATE it. They may not be able to cross a tile with salt on it in ghostly form or possessed form, or when they cross it while disembodied, they temporarily become tangible and forced to pay attention to things like "walls" and "lasers." There was also a recent suggestion that the Barman should get a rock-salt shotgun to deal with drunks and pubbies, and this could rapidly become an extremely effective weapon against a visible wraith or a revenant. It's also a common bit of folklore that people who've gone too deep into their cups or took some funky hallucinogens can see the truly supernatural, so people tripping balls or with gigantic amounts of ethanol in their systems have a chance to see a wraith flying around, and be able to target it. This could (very intentionally) lead to one of the best tactics being "stuff staff assistants full of bath salts, give them salt shakers, Discount Dan's, and a rock-salt shotgun, and let them loose."
The Chaplain should be one of the stars of the show, as usual for supernatural antagonists. Holy water splashed on a possessed object would immediately force the wraith out, as would hitting it with a bible. Doing either to a revenant would cause huge amounts of damage to the corpse the wraith is riding in. A Chaplain's burial services may also become extraordinarily important when there's wraiths about, as firing a corpse into space or stuffing it into an incinerator denies valuable assets to the wraiths.
I made revenants sound pretty strong in the initial writeup, but they also have a fatal weakness. A wraith possessing a body causes it to rot extremely rapidly, causing permanent and rapid health loss similar to wearing the Obsidian Crown, if not worse. It quickly progresses through the stages of rot as its health lowers, possibly losing limbs near the end stages, and collapses into a skeletal heap once the wraith has burnt it out. Formaldehyde might slow down the process of rotting if you get enough, but it'd also slow your movement if it did. Some powers may also burn even more health off to be fueled, shortening a body's life span even further. This means wraiths have to body-hop rather regularly to continue a rampage, especially if they're shot up by the crew, and may even become visible and tangible for a short period upon abandoning a corpse in order to de-incentivize blind kamikaze attacks, and give the best, most regular window for attack for crew members not currently high as balls.
Another idea I had was a pool of points similar to DNA points and blood points that comes directly from each death on the station, whether or not you had anything to do with it, and it served as both power fuel and the health pool for an unmanifested wraith. Not sure how that'd shake out, though.
An idea I liked but was hestitant about: the ecto-goggles and ghostbuster gun in the Void can see/target wraiths and do amazing damage to them, but that'd encourage dumb rushes to the Void every time a wraith is around and mass production of them in Mechanics which would be pretty awful.
Wrapup
The playstyle of a wraith would depend on slowly escalating the chaos on-station to a critical point where the chaos can support their murderous attacks. They could either go balls-out on lone crewmembers with possessed weapons and kill them for quick revenants, or they could wait for a quiet opportunity to grab a forgotten dead body with a bit more rot on it. They could shadow traitors, changelings, and vampires in Mixed, give them some assistance, and steal their kills, corpses, and success like a vulture, or compete directly with them to try to take their cool toys or eliminate dangerous competition for useful corpses. Wraiths may synchronize possessions to take down a crowd and get fuel for a tag-team revenant rampage, or fight bitterly over the choicest bodies and sabotage their own efforts long enough for a drunk grayshirt to shoot them both to ectoplasmic chunks. There's a lot of tweaking that could be done with this writeup, but I think the base ideas I've laid out have a shitload of potential for an amazing type of traitor.
And now, I open the floor to you guys to discuss
SPOOKY GHOST MODE