- Feb 20, 2018
- 607
- 391
QSP Jack-o-Nine-Tails [v2.3] [ImperatorAugustusTertius / qwertyu12359]
Nice work on the game. It is well put together.
There are a few issues with the concept. Don't get me wrong I like the entire slave management business idea.
The training system while complex is well thought out. Seriously good attention to detail. Some might find it a little hard to wrap their head around.
That said damn this is some seriously dark shit.
This is the stuff you'd expect out of Hannibal Lecter if he was real or Andrei Chikatilo who was real.
You have an entire society of these types of people. Just to be clear. only 1 in 20 serial killers of this type can hold their mental faculties together very long most were complete failures in life other than the one listed above he actually managed to become a teacher.
That's the first issue with the story.
A few issues with the story:
1. I understand some of the general premise of the story because you tell it to slaves to let them know where they stand. This Rome is cut off from other places by the fog. If that's the case how do the girls manage to wander through?
2. How are non-slave women determined vs slave women? There doesn't appear to be any sort of system described in the game for that? Given that fact why wasn't Isabelle and all other women enslaved.
3. Smugglers? Where are they smuggling from? Are they just going from the edge of the fog to the slums? If so can't really say that is smuggling. It might be smuggling if they were going through the fog bank some how. But no secret like that would last and Rome there would be probably abandoned fairly fast.
4. The magic used to modify women to make them lay eggs and so on. Why not do it to monsters?
5. Why are there some monsters allowed to live in the city when they work so hard to keep them out? Then you feed women to them? I think you are going to find a lot of people rather fail the game than do that. If the source of meat is only females that will probably stop a lot of people when the realize it. (hint smugglers real cows.)
6. Back to women coming through the fog guessing that is how men ended up there to start. So how many of them come through and what happens to them? Also pretty cowardly for men to not try to get back through the fog the other direction.
If you have a continual influx of labor like that why not put the excess women to work building a tunnel that goes into the fog and keeps going. That way monsters outside it wouldn't be able to attack those on the inside. You would only need to defend the end points. That's a smaller area and easier to control. Apparently there is ground inside the fog or the women wouldn't be able to walk out of it. So the tunnel could go under ground.
You also might want to look at the slave auction back stories on the girls some. I seen one were she was sold into debt when her husband business failed. Granted you get more of that story when at home if you get her to talk. Did she come through the fog or was her family citizens of that Rome? The auctions seem to always suggest through the fog, "she comes from a world where she..."
Given that men probably actually come through the fog as well what is to keep someone from turning you into a slave at their whim? What is to keep someone from filling your house with gas at knight to ensure you stay asleep then break shackle you and stuff you in a cell some place?
7. If you can make women lay eggs with magic why not fully transform them? An actual cow would produce a lot more milk and provide better meat. If those animals can have offspring that are animals you get around the whole eating women issue. It doesn't make much sense that this level of magic doesn't exist when you have what you currently have.
You could solve part of this by Citizens having some sort of magical seal on their person. Then you would also need to describe how it can't be faked, who issues them and under what basis.
The two bigger problems are women being eaten and passage through the fog. Without some explanation or attempt on the men's side to get back through the fog it makes the men of Rome look like pussies who took the easy way out.
Frankly, I wouldn't sell any female to any monster to be eaten, to be butchered ... There are somethings you just can't do and keep your man card. Doesn't matter how shitty the situation is.
8. Last issue, just realized it. You have a population of people that have children. Plus you have women continually coming in through the fog. You also have monsters coming through. That means you have a constant influx of mass. But you have a limited amount of area. What do you do with the remains and parts you don't use. You apparently aren't eating the monsters so do they let the bodies just rot? If so bodies don't instantly decay. So you would have a huge pile of shit at some point. Maybe, you magically teleport it away? Where, why don't use the teleport to move you there and escape? You can't just say you through it into the fog because the way it currently sits is the fog is a one directional path or Rome would be pretty much abandoned or at the least women would be treated far differently. The problem here is matter doesn't just go away. Even if you burned the corpses you would end up with city buried under the ash of the dead. If you allow for magical incineration the destruction of matter entirely then you conversely should be able to make it. You could conjure or summon fort objects and animals or other beings. Which again makes the need to eat women go away.
Side not on human flesh:
To many people rely on Seabrooks account of human flesh tasting like veal. A lot of so called claims of what human flesh taste like rely on William Seabrook's account. He claims he took a section out of the center of the roast he had to cook and eat. That right there is where my primary skepticism of his account comes in. About the only part you of the human body that would have enough meat to produce anything near what you might call a roast is the buttocks. You have a massive amount of muscle there. If there person has one of those big old bouncy butts well that cellulite and is just fat great if you want to make candles but not to eat. In fact female serial killer in Italy did just that made candles from the amount of fat in the body. What a creature tastes like is tied a lot to the diet they have. Sweets are not a good diet for any meat you want to taste worth a shit. Then you have the entire nutritional aspect 1 gram of protein equals 4 calories where a gram of fat equals 9 calories. In short if you do the math and fattened women up as described in here for meat everyone would die of heart disease.
I was looking at a number of other accounts regarding human flesh vs beef. They had issues such as talking about how red the meat is comparable to beef. Well I've slaughtered animals hunt and butcher and so on. Beef isn't red so much as it is brown. When you drain the animal of the blood that red goes away pretty fast. Same with dead human's in autopsies. The red you see when you buy meat at a grocery is there because the butcher added die to it. They do that to make it look more fresh presentable. In truth most meat you buy at the store is 2 weeks or older. Most people like their meet aged for taste.
I doubt a cannibal or someone in a hospital is going to add die to meat to make it look red just so someone can eat it.
Given the stuff I read I'd say most of these accounts are relying back on Seabrook's account. That account is highly suspect at best. Especially when you compare it to other counts of people we know for certain that killed an ate people. If you go to wikipedia and follow the sources back you will see a hint the smithsonian points out Seabrook's account doesn't line up with others. He claims it taste like veal.
We can also use a little logic here and science. The myoglobin levels of humans is 20. Sheep 6, pork 2, & cows 8. Roughly.
Myoglobin is an iron and oxygen binding protein. That right there alone is going to cause a huge difference in taste. If you look above I said that flesh turns more brown. That's in part do to that iron oxidizing. That iron you are going to taste. Combine that with a lot of other shit humans eat that cows, sheep and pigs don't.
Myoglobin his hire in animals that do more work per pound. It's used to get O2 the cells which is needed for the body to do work and produce energy. So an animal like a shark would have probably hire levels than cows and so on because they are always moving. According to a number of accounts with the amount of salt humans contain and myoglobin we taste worse than sharks. You also have the ammonia factor of sharks urinate through their skin. Well we sweat through ours. Pigs don't have sweat glands. Sheep and goats only sweat through a limited area of their skin. Cows also have only a few sweat glands.
If you wonder if ammonia is a factor of human flesh. Yes, we use ammonia detectors for detecting humans in high security areas.
I could go on. The science and accounts that seem far more reliable puts people tasting worse than poorly cooked shark meat. Sharks myoglobin varies a lot from shark to shark. Salmon shark 35, Shortfin mako 21, thresher 16, gray smoothound 7.5, small spotted cat shark 9, latern shark 8, blackmouth catshark 3
Sharks don't eat all the crap we do.
Shark meet also has to be prepared correctly because of the urination issue and taste. Humans flesh would have to under go similar treatment because of the sweat. However, part of human flesh taste can't be washed away. Those sweats we eat, drinks we drink and other stuff permanently affect the taste. You would have to start from child birth or spend years raising them with the right organic diet to wait for the current cells to die off and be pushed out. Even so a lot of it will be reabsorbed back into surrounding tissue. You would have to pretty much start from child birth and raise them to taste worth a shit.
Thanks.
Contextual. If everyone else does it too, it's normalized. This is not a scenario of outlaws going around murdering people. It is lawful to be a cannibal sociopath. Also, a sizeable and influential segment of the population are undead.
The fog / mists (pick your translation) are passable, but only those with magical ability/training are able to navigate reliably. The fog / mists connect various places throughout the multiverse, but the entry / exit points are not static.
The smugglers group in the slums, as an example, started as a group of soldiers who wandered into the fog / mists that appeared on their home world and got lost and ended up at Rome.
In Rome, there are citizens, residents and slaves. The slums are outside the city walls and at constant risk of monster attack. The people who live in the slums are competing for limited space and resources while hoping for a chance to gain access to the city. The influx of humans from the fogs represents a renewable source of food for the residents of the slums, but when slums residents capture humans from the fogs they also risk coming into conflict with various parties from the city who seek to capture humans for sale as slaves. We see this in the various encounters at the edge of the fogs.
There are various ways to gain access to the city. Being recruited by a guild or having a token from one of the great houses, for example. It is also possible to volunteer for enslavement, which is rolling the dice hoping to be valued as more than meat.
They explain in detail if you ask them. Partial excerpt:
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Who says they don't? Among the non-player characters, there are plenty of non-humans. We don't have playable non-human slaves because it would complicate the development too much to find adequate images and write text variations for them, but they certainly exist from a lore perspective.
Definition of monster is a bit subjective. The opponents you fight at the edge of the fogs include some other residents of the city, who happen to be perfectly respectable vampires and liches from the Necropolis, beastmen from the Outcasts district, etc. As for real cows, see spoiler above. Since they are illegal, anyone found possessing them would be in trouble.
Men come through the fogs too. Consider the backstories of the "normal start" player characters. As for going back, it might be possible in some cases - with magic ability to navigate, combat ability to survive, and if an entry/exit point to that particular world is still open - but most of the men who come to Rome end up dead long before they'd be able to learn how to get back. Females are valued more than males, and females are barely valued. How many? Enough to have around a dozen new slaves at the daily market auction, plus however many are kept by their captors or culled before they make it that far.
Buildings that intersect the fogs have poor structural integrity. Exactly how this happens is unclear, but when you consider that the fogs contain moving portals (effectively). it stands to reason that anything stationary in the fogs would have low life expectancy.
There are very few family businesses in Rome because no babies are born there. Some of the ruling class have families on other worlds.
The slavers guild has a monopoly on the trade of slaves. Anyone who doesn't go through them for any transaction involving a slave would be in trouble. As for what keeps people from randomly abducting other people in the city, residents and citizens in the Eternal Rome have the backing of a guild or a great house or both, and offending powerful organizations like that is a good way to win a Darwin award or at the very least incur a lot of economic pain.
Having live offspring is a problem in Rome. Importing live cows is illegal. It would be far more expensive to import cow meat than to slaughter some of the endless influx of humans.
The lactation surgery replaces the womb with something that processes semen and uses it to boost lactation. At the same time, lactating slaves can be used for other purposes, which makes them more valuable than a dairy cow.
The great houses issue tokens (functionally a sort of passport) to allow people to pass through the city gate. They presumably are magically bound to a person so they cannot be stolen, forged or counterfeit.
Addressed above. In a city full of immortal vampires, liches and zombies, were-lions, sphinxes, gorgons, etc., where practicing necromancy is not only legal but probably existentially necessary, and where female humans are the only legal source of meat that is readily available ...
Babies are stillborn in the Eternal Rome. According to the Vatican, they do not have souls unless secret rituals are performed. The Vatican takes pregnant slaves and either buys them or promises to return them after birth - but keeps the babies. For what purpose?
Throwing it into the fogs is a viable way to dispose of it, as it'll be eaten by monsters or scattered around the multiverse. Specifically for human remains, aside from -possibly- the contents of the intestines, when you consider the demographics of the city, there are buyers for everything. Organs, bones, skin and all.
As for the idea that women would be treated differently if it were possible to help them return home ... let's suppose that you had an endless stream of refugees coming to your door. Maybe you'd help some of them, at first. But how long would you continue helping them? How long could you? What if all your neighbors were instead murdering them (with full support from the legal authorities) and selling their possessions and using the money to enrich themselves? While you exhaust your resources in a Sisyphean attempt to behave morally.
Everyone meaning the women or the people eating them? The Eternal Rome has more advanced medicine than we do, so dying of heart disease seems unlikely.
People drink shitty beer all the time even when they have better options available. In the Eternal Rome, if there's only one kind of meat available, your choices are limited.
The Eternal Rome also has plenty of non-humans and demi-humans who presumably have different palates and react differently to the composition of meat.
You mentioned this has lot of lore is it based off of some prior work?
Think I found it.
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If there is more info than what is on here and this other site I'd be interested.
I can only base judge soming based on what is available to me.
Darkness has nothing to do with legality. It has to do with the difference between evil and good.
Slavery though once legal in the US was still considered a dark period in US history.
Human's aren't animals (well most, some choose to act like animals), they have soles and self awareness and hopefully more intellect.
As to monster, I'd say monster is determined by the actions of the individual. There is nothing precluding an monster from being intelligent or for that matter having a sole.
Considering what we are talking here. Every last inhabitant of the city might just fall into the category monster.(Even the humans)
It wasn't about women being so much treated better but by the complete imbalance the game shows.
Take Veal for example most of it comes from male cows not female. Because males/ bulls only have one primary purpose when fully grown, breeding. So young males they don't see a future for are butchered. Beef usually comes from milk cows that have gotten old. The game linked above even shows a male slave.
So it would make more sense that elderly males who aren't capable of performing a function such as being a soldier or other jobs would be used as feed rather than women. A young woman is better at doing a task than a decrepit old man.
As for breaking making slaves out of citizens you still haven't given anything to prevent it. Think of it this way. I can go to the mist as you call it capture a female bring her in and brand her. So I go to my competitors house capture all his family brand them and sell them off. Who is going to tell on me. The guy I sold them to? Not likely. That's especially true if they won't be around long and end up as feed. The only thing you need to know shit like this will go down is look at the real slave trade history of this world. Even when most of slavery has been outlawed stuff like that still happens today.
Also a lot of what you describe seems to tie back to a law of not bringing living creatures such as cows.
Strange how animals would be treated better than people.
Most laws are made with a reason in mind. Especially when it comes to religious institutes creating them.
I can't for the life of me think of a reasonable excuse for such a law. The amount of health meat in a cow vs a female and the requirements to grow it or maintain it are far less. Not to mention it produce a lot more milk.
Tunnels breaking:
Hello you created a world with magic!!! Shields, auto repair / mending... For that matter it's a mist filled with portals to other realms. Cast your own portal no guessing where it goes required.
If we assume that the cow vs woman part is correct. It still doesn't explain the female used as a pig. If you are going to go through all that trouble may as well get the better taste and turn her into a pig. You could always transform her back if you decide nope. With the magic you already put into the game it proves these would be possible. So why would they not reap the benefits. Let me guess it might upset the Minitaur you had a cow or are the orcs going to get bent out of shape that we ate pig?
Yet, its cool to eat humans we are all ok with that.
Other meat sources:
It's not really necessary to show every source of every item. There are countless items in the world you don't show the source for.
I get humans aren't the entirety of the populace. But lets think of it this way. Vampires have more reason to keep human's alive than kill them. So long as they live they are a source of blood. Second, they are also a source of replacement.
Lichen(s) don't eat flesh. It would stand to reason beastmen might retain natural instincts to hunt their preferred pray. Like that foxen would hunt the rabbits. Given humans seem to be the primary meet source in your game you can pretty much assume that anyone and everyone but the vampires and liches and other similar entities are about the only one's not with one foot sitting on someone else's dinner plate.
Frankly, the way other stuff I read and what you described are the base I would estimate the cities survival time would be less than 10 days before all hell broke loose.
A city won't last if the people in it don't feel safe. You have nothing that prevents a citizen from ending up on someone else's dinner plate. There would need to be some sort of truce between races in the city as citizens and an authority powerful enough to enforce it. Think large scale military force that can put down riots between the most powerful of the races if it happens.
The thing about crimes is they happen because people think they can get away with them and not get caught. They stop when people tend to feel the risk out weighs the gain. Some times threat of life isn't enough. Something more immediate and long term tends to have more weight. If you kill someone its done and over with as far as they are concerned. But tell them they will spend the rest of their life being tortured in some gruesome way. Or cut their limbs off and force them to live without them. That tends to have a more lasting effect in people's minds.
- Aug 1, 2017
- 1,639
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I think the only canon lore is what you find inside the game (dialogues, descriptions...), minus what's been added since 1.21 (though it can be considered head canon if it doesn't bring any inconsistencies).
The link you gave us is a fanfiction made in 2017, 3 to 4 years after the game had been completed by Old Huntsman. But it's a good find!
I also found something that could be of interest for you:
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I found it on the Vk page of JONT's russian branch. A little bit of Google Translate and you'll have some possibly valuable information
The game's own text is the only source of lore I'm using. What each of the NPCs say and the descriptions of various activities and places.
If you look at nature, there are plenty of cannibalistic species, and when put in conditions where cannibalism is a survival imperative, even species that do not normally practice it will start doing so. To describe cannibalism as evil is simply a moral judgment. The fact is, in a scenario where there is a constant influx of meat that requires zero effort to obtain (it literally walks itself to you), and where there is insufficient space to keep it and the prospect of returning it to where it came from is chancy at best and extremely high risk and expense even if possible... well, a lot of that meat is going to be disposed of one way or another.
So what?
Humans are very good at rationalizing behaving like animals, and humans are extremely good at hurting other humans.
Missing the point. The threat of the fogs includes the presence of creatures that do not follow laws and are extremely dangerous. Those creatures sometimes emerge from the fogs and rampage. This is a constant threat that the city counters with walls and soldiers.
The is a constant influx of both men and women through the fogs. The women are enslaved and the men are left to fend for themselves in the slums (if they aren't killed immediately). The facts that there are no male slaves and that men are not slaughtered for meat are not explained, but it stands to reason that the consequences of enslaving or eating males are prohibitive, otherwise there would be a market for both.
To be clear, the great houses are factions, not families. Naturally there are some assassinations and abductions happening all the time, but "making slaves out of people" is an exclusive privilege of the slavers guild. If someone who isn't sanctioned by the slavers guild tries to pass off some citizens as slaves, the buyer is also committing a crime, and the citizens who are being "enslaved" also know this. If they are constantly imprisoned to avoid any outside contact then they're not really slaves, they're prisoners. Consider what happens when someone from an organized crime family is abducted or killed. If the family doesn't know who to blame, they might go after everyone they suspect, or investigate and call in favors until they find someone to blame. Likewise, if a citizen disappears in Rome, the absence will be noted and their faction and allies will expend some amount of effort to find them or identify and punish the responsible parties. The amount of effort will depend on how valued the citizen was.
Human females arrive at Rome every day on their own. No cost to import. Cows would have to be transported by armed guards. Expensive! It's not possible to breed cows in Rome to produce more cows. Each and every cow would need to be imported. The space where you would keep the cows is space not available for keeping humans. The cost efficiency of cow vs. cow girl milk production is debatable when you consider that lactation in Rome is augmented and that cow girls are useful for more than food production.
Rome builds permanent structures in the form of city walls and gates and builds temporary fortifications around the city as rallying points for soldiers whose job is to deal with the constant influx of dangerous creatures from the fogs. Building inside the fogs is impractical. Magic is costly (literally consuming sparks, which originate from the flame of creation, a portion of which is found in living souls . . .). Rome expends sparks daily on rituals to push back the fogs, which on average maintains a certain amount of space between the walls of the city and the edge of the fogs, but the position of that border shifts. Consequently, the slums outside the walls are at constant risk of being consumed by the fogs. Which is why that land is left as slums instead of being moved inside the walls. The Vatican supplies the sparks for the rituals, which makes everyone in the city dependent on the Vatican for survival. (Think, where does the Vatican get the sparks from?)
The feed used for slaves designated as pigs can make a girl corpulent in a matter of days, at a cost of health. Evidently it also produces a marketable flavor profile. Your proposal to apply other forms of transformative magic assumes that such transformative magic is both possible and cost effective. Transformative magics aren't necessarily permanent. What happens inside a person who eats transformed meat when the transformation wears off?
Every day new humans arrive. Vampires keep some as cattle and turn some into new vampires, but there is not enough space to keep them all. There needs to be constant culling simply to maintain a stable population.
Not seeing your point here.
Everything starts from the fact that the city's survival depends on constantly spending sparks, which means constantly generating new sparks, which means converting some renewable resources into sparks. Sparks derive from souls. The Vatican is at the heart of this process, and incidentally stakes a claim to all pregnant females. Anyone who doesn't toe the line set by the Vatican finds themselves short of sparks and unable to ward off the fogs. So the great houses enforce the Vatican's laws within their territories. The Vatican's laws are set up to ensure the city's survival and to maintain the hierarchy of power and the social order. As with any centralized and authoritarian government, there is of course ample corruption, constant shifting of political alliances and policies as various interest groups seek to manipulate the economic landscape, and plenty of bureaucracy that only benefits bureaucrats.
Each of the great houses maintain organized militias and enforce order within their territory. Even being a resident of the city is a privilege that has to be earned and constantly maintained by providing value to society (or living off the labor of others, for those who have sufficient wealth or power to do so).
- Aug 28, 2018
- 70
- 165
Just started the tutorial with guild house and game keeps freezing on me when I click on end day. I am on over 100 days with amazon fighter slave girl and just got her to obey but now the freeze everytime. I already tried: renaming snd folder, installed all Visual C++ redistributables both x86 and x64 for 2013 ver. This is patched with L ver.
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Last edited:
Try upgrading to 2.2.3.
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You only need to download the "complete edition" code link (~40MB), not the media. Make sure you also enable "ignore version check when loading" in the Game drop-down menu.
- Aug 28, 2018
- 70
- 165
Hey, it worked! Thanks fren.
First, the only reason I am telling you this stuff is so you can fix the plot holes.
There two sides when it comes to morality. Some people say morality is subjective. They would be correct if the only person judging you is society or yourself. You can find entire villages in india and other locations in the east that both murder and theft are considered professions. You can look to south America the tribe that used to considered it ok to kill your brother to take his wife or anyone else for that matter.
Introduce God into the equation and some final judgement morality becomes more of a legal code of definitions you can't escape. That's funny considering you have a place in this Rome call the Vatican which has some of the most highly defined legal code in the world in the aspect of morality.
Maybe, your Vatican is filled with an anti-pope and demon worshipers. Who knows.
Ever heard the term Shanghai or Crimping?
Unless there is a means of identifying a citizen of Rome from those that are not and ensuring the debts on record are real. There is no way to prevent such issues. It's happened in real life even. This is were it pays to learn something about history.
It helps cows also to have some room to move around. They don't need space to run though. All in all the cow can remain standing even when sleeping. Cows can survive a lot longer period in confined space.
Sure you can take a female out of a barn and fuck her if you want. The only thing is she's going to have experienced all sorts of physical problems and the mind state she will be in... Doubt there will be any enjoyment in it for either side.
Thus anti pope and demons would be a pretty good bet running the place.
The thing most writers for get when it comes to magic systems is it has to have a set of rules and thus reliable effects or it isn't usable. So if the rule applies on one side it has to apply to the other. So your transformation magic will wear off that made her corpulent in a few days. It has to be transformation magic because you couldn't get a person to grow like that unless it was some super cancerous growth. Then who the hell would want to eat that. It can infect you as well.
In effect you everyone that ate her meet was only temperarily sated and will end up starving to death or suffering sever malnutrition.
Think of it like what the real Rome actually did with some slaves and debtors. See "Nexum". Some debtors chose to fight in the gladiator arena to while others chose voluntary servitude.
Again history. Take advantage of human nature. People are a lot more likely to do what you want it if they think it is their choice. This also allows populace control because you are always sending some back into the mist which some will be lost. You have nothing to loose from it and will gain whatever they may bring back.
Magic can ensure they return.
Why use a female human for making mill when a minataur female would be better at it. Why not feed wolves and foxes rabbit females.
What only humans come through the mist. Then how did everyone else get there? It would stand to reason all races and groups come through the fog. Thus all would be potential slaves.
The way it currently looks is you as the author have an issue with human females and are just making excuses to only have them as slaves or use them exclusively as meat.
If that wasn't the case the pig people / Orks would make a better pigs.
The rabbit girls might be pretty tasty.
The harpies probably already lay eggs along with some snake types.
Lizard and snake also taste pretty good.
You did say there was an entire section of the town full of beast people right!
We could makes some pretty awesome coats out of the foxen and wolves.
Water proof boots out of reptiles.
I've asked that several times now in different ways.
"moral judgment", exactly moral as in right and wrong, good or evil not legal or illegal.
There two sides when it comes to morality. Some people say morality is subjective. They would be correct if the only person judging you is society or yourself. You can find entire villages in india and other locations in the east that both murder and theft are considered professions. You can look to south America the tribe that used to considered it ok to kill your brother to take his wife or anyone else for that matter.
Introduce God into the equation and some final judgement morality becomes more of a legal code of definitions you can't escape. That's funny considering you have a place in this Rome call the Vatican which has some of the most highly defined legal code in the world in the aspect of morality.
Maybe, your Vatican is filled with an anti-pope and demon worshipers. Who knows.
It's one of the ways you can tell we aren't animals. Animals don't behave as bad as us unless we teach them to.
We were talking about the one's living in the city not the one's in the fog.
Men are easier to catch and control than women. Women are naturally suspicious. Men are in general stupid. They think they can take care of themselves. If they end up in an odd place they look for a way to survive and entertainment and food. All can be used to trap them easily.
Ever heard the term Shanghai or Crimping?
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- This guy shanghaid 100 men in a single evening one time!Your character is a member of the guild. He goes to the wall and catches slaves. How are those people to prove to anyone they are a citizen? If it was a simple as saying I'm a citizen every slave captured would say it. What about citizens in Rome who go into debt they aren't enslaved? Are they just allowed to not pay their debt? So we make up some fake documents to show they owed a high debt and refused to pay. Most likely people sell bank notes and debts to other people. You have a loan shark in this game or money lender. So I bought the note from him because he had no means of collecting I paid him 20cent on the dollar. I promised to take it out of their hide for not paying.
Unless there is a means of identifying a citizen of Rome from those that are not and ensuring the debts on record are real. There is no way to prevent such issues. It's happened in real life even. This is were it pays to learn something about history.
A female can't stay in a pen the same way a cow can without suffering massive side effects which would mean running her back and forth to a doctor. Worse would be the psychological damage it would cause. There is a reason prison cells have grown in size. So you are going to need a bedding area and more. Also it is unhealthy to eat in certain position for humans unlike animals. You end up with issues like Achalasia where they can't eat.
It helps cows also to have some room to move around. They don't need space to run though. All in all the cow can remain standing even when sleeping. Cows can survive a lot longer period in confined space.
Sure you can take a female out of a barn and fuck her if you want. The only thing is she's going to have experienced all sorts of physical problems and the mind state she will be in... Doubt there will be any enjoyment in it for either side.
Your saying the vatican gets sparks from the infants at birth.
Thus anti pope and demons would be a pretty good bet running the place.
What happens when the corpulent wears off of the dead girls body. Suddenly you though you ate a steak and find out all you ate was a bites worth.
The thing most writers for get when it comes to magic systems is it has to have a set of rules and thus reliable effects or it isn't usable. So if the rule applies on one side it has to apply to the other. So your transformation magic will wear off that made her corpulent in a few days. It has to be transformation magic because you couldn't get a person to grow like that unless it was some super cancerous growth. Then who the hell would want to eat that. It can infect you as well.
In effect you everyone that ate her meet was only temperarily sated and will end up starving to death or suffering sever malnutrition.
Your training women to fight and use magic. You use magic in the enslavement of them. Why not use the women with a binding on them teach them to go through the fog and bring what you want back if they survive 10 trips set them free they can stay on the other side rather than return on the 10th trip. This way the population is controlled, you get use of the women. Women who don't want to take the risk will most likely voluntarily enter into servitude.
Think of it like what the real Rome actually did with some slaves and debtors. See "Nexum". Some debtors chose to fight in the gladiator arena to while others chose voluntary servitude.
Again history. Take advantage of human nature. People are a lot more likely to do what you want it if they think it is their choice. This also allows populace control because you are always sending some back into the mist which some will be lost. You have nothing to loose from it and will gain whatever they may bring back.
Magic can ensure they return.
My point was you have all these supposed races of beings there but you entirely ignore their own natures and potentials.
Why use a female human for making mill when a minataur female would be better at it. Why not feed wolves and foxes rabbit females.
What only humans come through the mist. Then how did everyone else get there? It would stand to reason all races and groups come through the fog. Thus all would be potential slaves.
So no other race other than human's has a soul? If that isn't the case what I said above all races and groups should be slaves.
The way it currently looks is you as the author have an issue with human females and are just making excuses to only have them as slaves or use them exclusively as meat.
If that wasn't the case the pig people / Orks would make a better pigs.
The rabbit girls might be pretty tasty.
The harpies probably already lay eggs along with some snake types.
Lizard and snake also taste pretty good.
You did say there was an entire section of the town full of beast people right!
We could makes some pretty awesome coats out of the foxen and wolves.
Water proof boots out of reptiles.
What proof does any person hold that they are a citizen and not someone who walked in from the fog?
I've asked that several times now in different ways.
- Jan 17, 2018
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The original author of Валет Плетей ( Jack-o-nine-tails) goes by the name OldHuntsman. He is the creator of the setting for this game as well as the slave training system which makes up the core of the gameplay. A lot of other talented people have added to this game over the years. They have built up the game's world, improved upon the systems, sights, sounds and translated the text to other languages.
It seems like you are having a hard time understanding this world and I don't fault you for that. These things that you see as plot holes are part of what makes this world interesting to me.
I don't want to be the one to spoil this belief for you. This indicates to me that you see the world in a very different way than I see it. The good news is that there is a lot of other content that won't challenge your beliefs.
The world of this game is large and much different from our own world. Many parts of it are never explained. If the game were more along the lines of Papers, Please the details of the systems and methods of identification would be more important.
I understand the world just fine. It doesn't matter what society you look at be it an urban city, a small town, company, office, military, prison... How things work effects stability. When things become to unbalanced shit falls apart.
There is also behavior that is both counter productive and a waste of resources. Given how he claimed resource and sparks are so limited it would stand to reason the city would use the most efficient means it could.
There is literally nothing he's offered to actually protect citizens from preying on one another though I pointed that out several time. There would need to be massive amount of regulation and oversight on stuff like debts to keep someone from falsely enslaving another citizen on failure to pay debt. Not just that food would end up damn near food chits or rations would need to be placed in effect. With the number of slaves coming in each day as he stated it wouldn't feed a fraction of the populace.
Why would you waste the most valuable and limited resource the city has converting a human female to be edible when several other species in the city are meals on feet. No conversion required.
So far his excuse has amounted to "because". Oops almost forgot the one it would have take to much time to create the art work for them or something like that in his first reply.
It wouldn't hurt of writers to pick up a book on history, anthropology and so on and learn something about what makes people and societies tick and work.
Let see, I hunt, camp, fish, x-military and I still own a farm.
If you are going to talk about something like pack mentality of Dogs and wolves that still isn't as bad as what people do. Not even close. Most animals do what they do out of instinct. There is a reason behind it even if they don't fully understand it.
I seen pretty much everything people and animals do to one another. People far exceed animals the only time that isn't true is when we trained the animal.
Again there are things that make a society work and things that will tear it apart.
You raise valid points but I don't think there's any definitive answer available. We are told by fiat that the society does work, and some facts about it. We're free to try to fill in the blanks and imagine how such a society could function. Do we have to write explanations into the game? I don't think so. There's room for multiple interpretations.
And that's the primary problem. "Because, I said so."
Basically anyone that has an inkling of human and social behavior or history is just supposed to accept what they know won't work and pretend it does.
Which sucks because I like the concept of the game. However, I can't just shut shit out like that. It just sits in the back of mind and kills the mood for me.
- Aug 1, 2017
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I'd suggest calming down ^^
You made a few bold claims based on anecdotical evidence:
As if that made it impossible for Jont's world to viably exist. This is not:
This is "nitpicking on a fantasy universe with pre-conceived dogmas of how a world is supposed to work".
... I get it though, we don't all have the same suspension of disbelief. Maybe yours works in a way that you have to heavily criticize a universe until every objection ends up falling flat so that everything finally clicks and make total sense. The problem is that you were quick to assume that your "interrogations" were in fact:
thus putting on us the burden to defend the game diegesis' alleged coherence, and change the lore to your liking.
I'd argue that your interrogations are valid but your claims have just as much of "Because, I said so" than what you accuse our justifications to have.
There's nothing wrong with challenging our preconceived beliefs according to which the game has to make total internal sense, but you went two step further and kind of went with "my questionnements = inconsistencies you guys have to fix" and "my anecdotally backed opinions = objective truth based on understanding the mechanisms of human science".
I'd suggest that you answer your own questions with your own justifications. Only female slaves are being seen in your gameplay? Come up with hypothesis. There's only human meet inside the city market available for you to buy? Come up with a rational explanation. Gaps are meant to be filled; better that they are filled by yourself than by us, whom have come up with our own already, as ours might not satisfy your sense of cohesiveness (and that's fine).
I only have an issue with fictional works that have blatant issues with them.
When you use terms like, "suspension of disbelief ", it means you have plot holes and you know it you just refuse to fix them or don't know how.
You also seem to think there is some massive change needed to fix this. Suggest you read the part on how I would have done it at the bottom.
Every writer has to deal with criticism. Good writers look at a choice before they put it in and consider what issue is this going to create and then how can they will be dealt with. You have social issues, economics, logistics and so on. All have to be thought of.
My criticism is based on those aspect. We have enough historical accounts of recorded human history to know how people act and will react under all sorts of societies. We know stuff like what triggers unrest and other issues. Those things include stuff like social unbalance, perceived injustice, economics, logistical problems and so on.
Those issues are massively in your game and it seems the only answer you managed to come up with it is because I said so.
What lore? Lore has to have a foundation that gives it a solid base or the rest crumbles. What you have amounts to a hodgepodge ideas thrown together, not lore.
The way to think of it is when you build a world for a story you have to think of it as pieces to a puzzle. If you put one shape piece here will it prevent other pieces from fitting in next to it. Most good stories put in one major issue a culture or society has to deal with. War, cultural, logistics, weather, ... You put literally all of the top major issues into one story. So that makes it hard to deal with. Couple that with fantasy issues that don't exist in the RL which makes things much worse.
Fantasy issues make things difficult for a lot of writers.
Stuff like magic systems have to operate with a set or rules. The rules can differ from one story or world to another but in the same world they have to be the same. Otherwise things like spell casting would produce unpredictable results and then people wouldn't rely on it. That's hard enough for most writers to wrap their brains around.
Couple it with social behavioral issues of how other species of sentient beings would act. We can judge some base on real life and what we seen when various groups and cultures have taken on certain roles. But we also have hints from nature as to how various creatures react instinctively.
Now add all that together and still make people act like people! There is the clicker. A story in which humans don't act human is a total disconnect. We can excuse other cultures or even a villain from acting a certain way but when there is no good reason for a person to act like they should that's called a plot hole. People see and fill the disconnect.
We can understand a human eating brains because they became a zombie.
Drink blood because they are a vampire.
If you said person doesn't have feeling such as a sociopath that would explain the disconnect their lack of compassion for others. Sociopaths still care what happens to them though.
Here you have an entire society of humans that has no empathy towards one another to the point they serve up each other as food. Not just that they clearly aren't thinking the long term issue of how this going to play out for them as well.
Your city could never be perfectly stable but at least you could get it to were the issues are at a level they are maintainable.
Whether you choose to change it or not is up to you. I simply pointed out an issue with what you do have.
Arguing there isn't an issue is just ignoring the fact there is one.
Shanghai wasn't a point of your world won't work. It was to invalidate your claim men were harder to catch than women.
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What is written below is only scratching the surface of what is wrong. Call it a generalization.
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Your city as it stands current has ZERO possibility of surviving.
a. It would never have survived the founding.
b. The social imbalances would tear the city apart from the inside out.
c. Even if you managed to fix those issues the excessive drain on resources coupled with nearly ZERO influx of resources. Would cause the city to crumble in just a few years.
How about the city founding!
The entire city of Rome would had to have been suddenly engulfed in the mist for any of it to been built.
Other wise you have a individuals meeting in the middle of the mist and them trying to figure out how to survive and push back the mist before they are killed. Not going to happen.
How did they deal with the mist?
1. We know they have had time to figure out magic while fighting to survive in the mist.
2. They were gifted magic and the knowledge to use the right spell to hold it back.
3. The mist is a large vortex like a tornado or hurricane. No actual magic is needed to hold it back the citizens are lied to.
You could also use that to have counter rotations which would also explain why gates/portal in the mist move.
Where did the material come from to build the wall:
1. You can't say they scrapped the lower class housing to make it because those homes aren't made of stone. So it would have needed to been the upper class homes.
2. I know maybe everyone coming through the mist just happens to be carrying a large stone with them or timber.
Water and food during the founding:
What did they do for water and food during that time. Let me guess they drank the blood of the dead and ate them.
How did they survive the diseases they would have gotten from doing that. How about the malnutrition and jaundice?
I can solve some of these issues:
Magic existed before Rome became stuck in this location. In fact it was magic cataclysm that caused it.
In fact the walls and barrier were erected before the event. The walls were to protect from invaders and barrier spell was initially to protect from weather.
That still doesn't solve:
Building decay and the need to make repairs and the resources needed to do it.
It doesn't cover the need for fresh water. Light and fresh produce. (Did we forget plants are living things). Not to mention you are going to need a hell of a lot of space for growing trees to replace the lumber needs of up keep. How about the weapons you fight the monsters with. I know you pull that iron or metal out of thing air.
I know maybe you are using magic to prevent everything from decaying. You know out of that limited number of sparks you get from the Vatican killing babies.
If you say something like a river or aqueduct flows into the city. Anyone large enough to supply the city would be large enough to use a boat on. Which means there would be no city because most people would use it to leave. You can run the waste water into the mist since you say it will get rid of most everything.
If there is some force moving around sucking stuff up and getting rid of it completely in the way you described why isn't the mist itself affected by it?
Besides you already eliminated the ability of this working when you said a tunnel wouldn't survive even. Thus no aqueducts or river wouldn't. This also means wells aren't likely to work because a well relies on under ground aquifers. Given the area isn't stable enough for a tunnel the walls of an aquifer wouldn't stand a chance. So no well water.
We can assume water isn't just magically conjured up otherwise food could also be easily conjured up.
If you say rain fall. You are going to need a huge rain water collection system, retention ponds and water purification.
So you either need a lot of rain fall or lots of space to be used for water retention to store what rain comes when it does.
You already made it clear space is limited. So now you have water you still need to clean and filter it. Boiling and filtering.
We can make the assumption the city isn't designed for this because until the city existed in the current state it is in it didn't need such. Given it wouldn't have expected to be put into something like this it wouldn't have been built for it to be this way before hand.
You boil the water from the corpses before they disposed of (Sort of a Dune type thing). You would need vastly more people coming in. Pretty much the entire slum area of the city would need to be converted to areas to line people up to be slaughtered to get the water from them. Just to make enough water. A human needs about 64 fl oz a day of clean water for eating and drinking to stay healthy. The human body is about 60% water by mass. A gallon of water weighs 8.3lbs.
Your still going to need to filter that water after boiling it out of them so charcoal and sand. You are going to need a massive supply of it. You have creatures living in the city who are larger and have greater needs of water. Lets say you have 10,000 citizens. the average woman 120lbs *.6 = 72 / 8.3 = 8.6 gallons of water one slave would make enough water for 17 people.
That means you would need to kill 588 women a day for water to create enough water for the 10,000 people. Not accounting for losses. If they were all human. Then you need to look at how much fuel it will take to do that. Just because you get water to 212 f or 100 c it doesn't all instantly evaporate that temp has to be maintained for the duration. It takes 8092 BTUs of energy to evaporate a single gallon of water. Luckily that works out to just to about 1 lbs of wood. meaning you would need 8.6 lbs of wood to evaporate the water out of each person. * 581 = 4997lbs of wood each day. That's if your system is 100% efficient. You probably can count on about as much as 30 to 45%. So figure 15000lbs of wood.
If you want to use magic consider the amount of energy that is being used when it comes to wood. That would be a massive amount of sparks. It's enough to not just kill but evaporate 581 people.
Even then that doesn't give you water for washing and cleaning to the extent you would need.
The city is going to loose water from people perspiring /sweat and any other water left out evaporation. Food that is cooked with water looses some in steam and evaporation.
I know this because of the work I have done in my life and the 4 backgrounds of science my education covers.
However, there are changes that could be made that are minor over all then the cities survival goes up massively.
Take the hanging gardens of Babylon, aquaponics has existed in various forms since then at least. Mayan's had floating gardens. Granted that's a lot later period.
Along with that work history also comes the fact I'm x-military with a good bit of survival knowledge and time spent traveling and living around the world.
Humans as a primary source of meat:
If you wanted humans as the primary source for meat you should have made them all slaves to the rest of the races. That includes men. That would have precluded the issue of them having any rights to compare themselves against the rest of the populace.
Currently in your game:
Think of the difference from a slaves perspective. Obey and stay in servitude. Which means you'll be used up and die eventually or be eaten. Option two run into the mist maybe get eaten maybe end up in a portal that gets you to any other place which would be better than this hell hole. (Both you have the chance of being eaten, One you are guaranteed to spend your life in servitude and be used up, the other you have a chance at freedom.) What slave isn't going to run but the most cowardly and feeble.
Social issues:
Humans as primary source of meat:
You don't think that massive of a social imbalance isn't going to create unrest and contention and disdain the populace of the city.
Especially when there are other races that you don't need to use magic to make them taste better or more nutritious.
Even if those are included in the food supply there will still be issues.
All the races that are in the food supply will have an issue with races that can't be used as food. Vampire, lich and other undead.
You think some of the free people are never going to take pity on the enslaved? If that was the case slavery would never have ended today. We got something better than food from slaves in our world money. Which we could use to buy what we want.
You would have issues such as other races looking down on humans and comments like why is my food talking to me. Human slavers would get questions like how does it feel to sell your own kind as food? Eventually that would lead to self imposed segregation and the talking shit about each other, then plotting and riots, and war.
In RL we've had slave revolts, class revolts, religious up risings, riots over injustice, riots over racial tension, war over racial tension, You have all those issues in spades.
The Vatican and sparks:
The way sparks are created per you was the Vatican sacrificing babies. This is done when a slaver turns a pregnant woman over to them. So do they get some sort of massive amount of pay from the Vatican for it or just get the woman back.
It would be more economical for them if they just got rid of all the female fertility on the slavers part. Then they don't have an issue.
That however would fuck everything all up because then the Vatican would have no source of babies unless it started keeping its own slaves just for that purpose to impregnate then kill the child. Of course that would cost them shit loads to maintain. Which means they would have to make use of these women in some way to get afford them. My guess they put them in brothels and lend them out to certain people who could require skills the Vatican could provide them. So they would fill up pretty much every job from whores to secretaries and assistants there is. That would pretty much put an end to the slavers guild and people needing it. Why would they go to them when the Vatican would ultimately provide them with one they need.
If it was me writing this story:
The first thing I would have done is figured out the size of the city and time period.
Referenced a few history books to get an idea of the technology we would be bringing across.
The size and needs of the population including those non-human.
Then decided how they became trapped there.
Then looked at what logistical issues there are going to come from it all.
Then went back and made changes on that level to prevent any conflicts.
You have people coming from all these different time periods including future and yet you don't make use of them to near the extent you could frankly the futuristic one's could lead to the end of the story easily. Example lab grown meat and blood. No need to kill slaves for it. Humans get hold of laser blasters and light sabers. No, no longer do they need to listen to other races.
So I'd probably limited them to people coming in from the past. That said even that can be a matter of perspective. This Rome may not be our Rome from this universe it could have existed during our current time. Thus if it could only draw from current back it could draw people from our time frame. Same goes with the future version.
Which is why it would be important to decide what time frame it exists in for the reader in some way. Say your character is from modern day earth. This Rome was shifted into the current state 500 years ago. So now you have a solid foundation for when stuff is in relation to one another.
Then I'd have came up with a system such as the Vatican bestows citizen ship and they are the only one's that can remove it.
That way citizens are protected from the slavery system being abused.
Then create a system by which one human might not see another human as being "As Human" as they are. Such as if they don't posses any ability for magic at all. Then one class of human might not see them as being any more than animals to them.
That would give you the reason needed for the disconnect. You could even back it up with a law created by the Vatican only animals or people who posses no magic can be eaten.
Why don't animals wonder through the gates just people other sentient and monsters?
Well that could be easily explained. Australia. People are tossed through the gates in other worlds as a form of punishment. Consider this area sort of a prison colony with little chance of escape. It's a way of banishing people without directly killing them. Of course the people on the other side don't realize what is going on here in general maybe a few do but they keep it a secret.
It might not have started off as a magical cataclysm but over time as others in out side worlds began to use it for banishing people. They might not be criminal even maybe a competitor, or one other family members or political ... So basically anyone and everyone could end up coming through the gates even those who seek to explore.
Where a gate ends up in another world could be relatively random. Such as maybe the land mass in that world was destroyed or sunk and it ends up in the ocean or a lake or river.
Lets say as long as something is passing through a gate it only can go in the one direction and stops for the time there is something moving through it so as not to cut it in half. Like if a person goes through you don't want them split in two or no one would make it to the city. Now you have potential constant water sources and the gate only works in one direction at a time. That makes it possible that stuff can come through those gates but can't be used to escape.
Occasionally rocks and boulders are washed down into these areas and end up in the water and those are harvested for maintaining the walls. You might also find some ores and wood even coming through. Probably not enough would to do much more than act as kindling. It also gives you potential fish both fresh and salt water and access to water type monsters.
I'd move the wall of mist about a 0.5 to 1 mile from the wall. Currently you have slums so that's going to take up some room and then you have going from the slums down to the mist. Id use the extra land to farm vegetables and trees timber needed to maintain and upkeep the city.
So far that explains why humans will sell other humans as food to a greater extent.
It also provides sustainability for the city.
Next we need to solve the social economic issues between various races and classes.
You have multiple class systems at work in this city so far.
Economic, Ruling vs non-ruling, religious based, cultural class distinction.
The biggest issues will be if any class or race feels it is the one getting the continued short end of the stick.
If others perceive it that way and start to voice it that would also cause issues.
If one race is subject to something the other races would need to also be subject to it.
Races with special requirements of another race would need to give something up in turn to equal out the playing field.
Example:Vampires drink blood of humans. They might be limited to those who posses no magic. Even so humans would eventually see some issues of mistrust there. If a device or spell was put in place to prevent them from drinking of anyone with magic that would help reduce that. However, that isn't the only benefit the vampires get from this. No other race has a live food supply. Vampire need not kill those they drink from. So they could use the same group of slaves for many years so long as they keep feeding them. Everyone else is forced to pay for food.
Alternatively, vampires could be forced to only use willing participants and pay compensation for them. Thus equaling the food cost and so on.
Vampires and the undead aren't edible by humans so the demand for them as food would be lower only those creatures that can eat them
I'd make a list of the races in the city then work out what the trade offs and so on are for them would and that is only if they preferred the taste or cost of them. Do dead vampires for example even retain a body when they die or do they turn to dust.
While that won't get rid of every single issue in a city like this it would get rid of the bigger one's and allow it to function more than a year or two.
More importantly it solves the plot holes.
Hi guys, there's some guide to help with the game mechanics? Even doing the tutorial I completely suck on this game...
I'd argue that it's more important to make the game interesting than challenging. As I understand it the money mechanics, paying rent and buying items, exists mainly to put a timer on the player. The idea being that with infinite time training any of the girls is easy and would make for a boring game, so by introducing a time limit the player is forced to find efficient strategies which makes the game interesting.
Personally, I'd rather the difficulty come from complexity in the training, rather then the speed at which it can be done. I haven't played that much, I've trained maybe a half dozen girls, but in my experience past D+ they all seem pretty much the same. The one girl I remember had a unique trait where she would always refuse acrobatics no matter how obedient or loyal she was. I remember her because she was the one girl that actually felt different.
Instead of pushing players to efficiently train cookie-cutter girls, I think it would be more interesting to make each girl more unique. Add more unique traits and have each girl spawn with at least a few. If that's already happening, maybe make the traits more prominent. Many times I finish with a girl and her traits section is a blank slate, and so it feels like she isn't really anyone. She really is just a collection of stats with a jpg slapped on top.
What I enjoy most about JoNT as opposed to other similar games is the focus on a single girl. I think it would be better for the game to lean into that. Make the experience of training each girl feel unique and memorable, rather than something you're trying to rush through to pay rent.