Let's have a thread for mad scientists!
First and foremost, ideas for mad creations that one can create!
also Veeky Forumss, books, webcomics, movies, series, vidya that portray mad scientists awesomely.
Just keep it, you know, classical and civil. No mengeles please.
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>no mengeles
I see you still believe that propaganda...
I'm playing a mad scientist at the moment. Its fantastic.
what system?
Homebrew percentile system. TLDR is its a fantasy setting that progressed to the modern age technologically after a way was found to store magic in batteries for later use, effectively inventing electricity/gasoline in one.
My character is a super Scientist. She exploits the way magic works in the setting to create impossible wonders of technology. See, if a wizard wants to fly, he simply wills it, and with enough magical energy, he's in the air.
But why bother with that much effort? What if instead, you invented a machine that WOULD fly, if the physical constants were just barely different, then hooked an enchanted device to the machine to alter the constants barely, essentially having science do 95% of the legwork? So basically my PC can take say, a plastic gun-casing, a laser pointer, and a magical battery, hook them all together, then weld together some piece of machinery that does nothing, spray-paint it chrome and put it inside the gun, and all of a sudden I have a working ray gun.
I just hook the laser pointer up to my "Quantum Amplifier" [all the magical 'black boxes' have ridiculous names and do nothing] and I'm off! The campaign is an SCP-inspired investigation game where 99+% of people don't know about super Science. Its great.
Also all her inventions are inspired by retrofuture pulp garbage like square robots, ray guns, rocket ships, and jetpacks. Its actually an in-setting intentional design choice, since the "World of Tomorrow" as of yet hasn't materialized despite advancing mundane technology.
Currently running a mad scientist campaign, set in the bog-standard fantasy world where most people have barely figured out how germs work.
The players have said that they enjoy it, but they don't want to do anything vaguely adventure-esque, even going so far as to abandon their first dungeon and set up a shop in town instead.
This is, or would be, perfectly fine, except one of the characters is one of those mad scientists that likes to chop limbs off of things and graft them to other things, which is hard to do when you don't have a supply of monster limbs because the rest of the party abhors getting their hands dirty with combat.
Any advice on how to give a group of secret mad-scientists a reason to step outside of their comfort zone and go do something...y'know, mad? The party is still generally in the good-aligned spectrum, somehow.
Also, recommendations for mad-science-in-fantasyland gadgets I can introduce them to or just throw at them from other secret mad-scientists?
More questions/explanations on the way if this thread proves fruitful, or if anyone cares at all.
That doesn't sound like a mad scientist. That sounds like a mad engineer. Where are your mad hypothesis? Your mad method? Your mad results and conclusions?
Well one time a ghost teleported the party to another dimension and after realizing the atmosphere was thicker then usual and the DM said our characters "felt sluggish and heavy", I flew 10 meters into the air via jetboots, dropped a large rock, and had someone else time it.
My mad hypothesis was that whereever we had been taken was not earth, as the gravity was higher. My mad evidence did not contradict my mad hypothesis, so with a little help from the party's expert on the occult, we managed to form the mad theory that we were in the astral plane.
fucking up the laws of physics just to get tech to work sounds mad enough in its own right
Totally mad.
You should publish a mad paper in a mad science journal and get it mad peer reviewed.
My character belongs to a club of mad scientists called the Society of the Atom, and they have a journal called The Promethean. If the mad study didn't involve so much magic, I probably would publish it.
>In the setting magic is essentially willworking. Its a black box that interacts with other forces in completely unknown ways, so most scientists mundane and otherwise don't study it much.
For example, the Astral Plane's physical constants apparently vary by location. Try empirically studying a place that changes in response to who and how you got there. Its a mess.
>Try empirically studying a place that changes in response to
welcome to real-world quantum physics!
hmm, are quantum physicists all mad scientists?
I believe that comes with the territory yes. Unfortunately that hasn't been discovered in this setting yet. They're still working out exactly how the internals of an atom work [they think electrons are just an electric field surrounding a positive nucleus].
So no where near quantum shit yet.
you should propose that raisin muffin theory, or whatever it was. atom is pastry, electrons are raisins in it. it was a legit theory a couple of centuries back.
Played a Genius (of the Transgressions kind) in a multi-splat WoD game. One of the first things I made was a submachine gun water pistol, due to fighting vampires. Turns out if you're a reality bending pseudo-scientist it doesn't really matter how you bless the water.
How about giving them some rumors of some violence nearby? Some sort of skirmish between some monsters and adventurers that's left dead bodies and who knows what else. Lots of options to work with there. You can use the adventurers to hook in those not interested in bodies by adding in some mention of some shiney that may or may not be in their prefered field. Then assuming they go to check it out you can give them a little combat. Maybe an injured monster that was too weak to flee after the battle, or something that's come to scavenge the bodies, sapient or otherwise.
In my Rogue Trader campaign, a player made an Heretek magos biologis who tried to science the shit out of absolutely everything he could get his mecanical pincers on.
He once cultivated shards of a xeno fractal blade stolen from a drunk inquisitor, and used them as components for his custom designed mines for use in ship combat (he was also growing them right aboard the ship - thus accidentaly killing some kids who where playing football in the lower decks, when they shredded themselves to death upon entering his unprotected and unsignaled "fractal fields").
Another time, he secretly tried to grow ork spores, recolted straight from the remains of a pirate fleet that the players had sooner defeated. His experiments looked unsuccessful at first, until they discovered that an entire colony of gretchins was growing across the ship's air ducts - cue to blazing flamethrowers, and full on quarantine on board for three months.
He even tried once to make tyranid organisms out of genestealer DNA, hoping to somehow weaponize them in the process. The experiment failed when the entire research station that he dedicated to this task went full anphelion project, and had to be destroyed from orbit.
One of its greatest stunts was to catch a Jokaero by exploding it with a grenade launcher, before storing his still living head in a jar and connecting it to an exoskeleton. He wanted to study this species uncanny ability to build technological marvels with seemingly nothing, and gave him scraps of junk and random other things to work with. The monkey made a machine producing paper-flavored bananas out of thin air, retrofitted a Leman Russ into a mobile zen garden (complete with bonzais and oriental paintings), and only then proceeded to escape by building itself a micro-teleportarium, leaving the now astonished and depressed Heretek pondering upon wonders that he couldn't hope to replicate by himself.
Needless to say, I was very proud of this guy.
>retrofitted a Leman Russ into a mobile zen garden (complete with bonzais and oriental paintings)
I wish to see a conversion of that
where that picture comes from?
>OP pic
Too young for a scientist, moreso for a mad one.
She's got the attitude, at least.
Playing a mad Scientist in Deadlands, who dreams of one day having an invention which will make it into the Smith and Robbards catalogue. He actually succeeded (before the campaign shut down due to reasons) with a "Water Tank" (Water flame-thrower).
Inventions include a flamethrower with an armored and shrunken fuel tank and a more effiecient fuel mixture. (Double ammo capacity, while the tank went from 30 shots to 10 (twenty with new fuel), but the chances of the tank being hit went from 1d6 to 1d12, along with being concealable.
Also, crafted an alchemical formula that would let Harrowed have SOME of their biological functions restored, for the purpose of "disguising" themselves as a living person, as well as doing stuff like getting drunk again. Slowly working my way up to the ultimate brew for the "Dia de Muertos" potion, but hope to finish the formula someday.
Plus, the watertank, which is just like it sounds save for the extra bit that can refuel the tank by sucking moisture out of the air, if there aren't any handy lakes or rivers nearby.
I actually wrote about him in a few storytime threads.
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Had so much fun with that campaign.
Bump of interest
I remember the WoD fansplat Genius: The Transgression being discussed here a couple of times in the past. Mechanics aside, I really liked the concept of scientists who, by their spark of Inspiration, are cursed to never be able to perform science the way the mundanes do it.
I enjoy the Sons of Ether more. Trying to figure out a sane way of making Science work in a world where reality is defined by collective belief is pretty funny.
People wearing lab coats.
...
I think it's from a comic called "genius girl" or something, pretty sure the Foglio artists from MTG put it together.
I adore it's concept. It's a joy to read. I always wanted to create a Genius who built all his Wonders into a car or who built sentient robots as his "children".
What should I read/watch/play to get into mad scientist wibe? Aside from Frankenstein, Girl Genius, Genius: the Transgression and Back to the Future?
Venture Brothers
Rick and Morty
Dexter's Lab
Jonny Quest.
In that order.
guess I'll have to check it out
it's got airships, right? i like airships