Metal Gear + Military Tactics

guides on how to translate those elements into a pen & paper context, or more abstract books on general modern combat & paramilitary organization?

thats all i feel like posting. theres like a ton more. if this is still here in 5 hours ill dump a FUCK TON of art

i could use both. i figure primarily the first one, how to make it work in Pen and Paper. but it couldnt hurt to actually know a thing or two about how the military actually works.

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OH shit. going through these pictures again, i never actually explored this concept more. the idea of using the imps for tools like automated machine guns.

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be right back, but when I'm back were getting some never before seen on here content.

Amalgamated constructs, or corpse dragons, are a class of demonic units valued for their physical malleability and human level intelligence. They are utilized in standard military operations by most countries, typically supporting human squadrons.
Like most constructs, they consist of colonies of microscopic demons, but their binding core is the cadaver of a drowned magician. Although their deployment in warfare is controversial and has been condemned by the United Nations since 1956, the practice is still technically legal.

Amalgamated constructs, or corpse dragons, are a class of demonic units valued for their physical malleability and human level intelligence. They are utilized in standard military operations by most countries, typically supporting human squadrons.
Like most constructs, they consist of colonies of microscopic demons, but their binding core is the cadaver of a drowned magician. Although their deployment in warfare is controversial and has been condemned by the United Nations since 1956, the practice is still technically legal.
-when demons swarm in water, the water turns black and viscous, becoming a substrate known as miasm. miasm only exists for a short amount of time after being exposed to magic before the demons die away.
-amalgams have been known to climb out of miasm after having fallen into water miles away. it’s theorized that demons exist extradimensionally to us, but form bridges by way of sources of water when they sense magic.
-miasm is not really safe to drink even for regular humans, causing respiratory and other health problems. in cities with extensive plumbing and water systems, a magician fight can cause running tapwater to turn black over a large radius of houses. residents are advised to call the police if this occurs, as this is an effective way to triangulate unlawful magic usage.
-there is an extensive amount of public service announcements warning magician children not to use magic while in the bathtub, swimming, or washing their hands, as this is the leading cause of bodily harm and death for their age group. twelve percent of all amalgams are children.
-surveyor’s familiars are also infamous for their effectiveness in delivering small explosive payloads such as IEDs during guerilla warfare, and at times have been banned in major cities.

-flying-type variations of the jury-rigged firearm familiar are not particularly accurate, as the concussive force of each shot knocks them out of alignment. they’re mostly used as deterrence, and are better in small enclosed spaces, like hallways.
-magicians that create and direct partial constructs are often specifically targeted and hunted down by other magicians and soldiers for their transgression.
-amalgams form the backbone of many military operations due to their offensive strength, size, and ability to regenerate from conventional wounds by constructing additional demons to repair themselves.
-magician-amalgam teams are highly effective in combat situations. a pair composed of both a magician and an amalgam for the purpose of espionage and assassination, is called a ‘blackjack.’ a large homogenous combat unit of magicians and amalgams is known as a 'butcher house.’
-amalgams have the personality and memory of the host magician. it is unsure if the magician is actually the amalgam, however.
-amalgams tend to suffer from a large variety of neurological and psychological disorders. visual hallucination is common across the board, and is theorized to be a way of relaying information to the amalgam.
-all amalgams appear to perceive other magicians in a way that is vastly different from regular humans, and as a result can identify them from afar and in crowds. surprisingly, none are able to describe what they see.
-amalgams can be as small as the average human, or upwards of a kilometer tall. some are utilized as anti-air units in war.
-amalgams face severe discrimination both from the public and governments due to being seen as innately violent and uncontrollable, and as a result have limited freedom in many societies. they are unable to hold commissioned posts, and in many countries cannot take civilian employment, railroading them into combat positions.

Amalgams are mobile platforms that consist of stacked colonies of microscopic entities informally known as demons, which are bonded parasitically to the body of a magician. A byproduct of magic use on or near significant quantities of standing water, demons spontaneously swarm puddles or lakes in the presence of magical energy. They crave and feed on magic, which also appears to have a cohesive effect on them: normally individualistic, single-cell-like demons will bond together while feeding and create larger and more intuitive beings.

While demons largely ignore normal humans (although ingestion of contaminated water may result in severe health problems), they will aggressively pursue magicians, who often avoid and fear water for this reason. Demons are highly parasitic in nature, and contact with bare skin will result in them burrowing into and anchoring themselves to the body of the magic user, where they will remain, feeding off their latent energy. While smaller sites of contamination on the limbs can be localized and easily removed, the same cannot be said for the unfortunate magician who falls into a teeming lake of demons.
The event is called a ‘drowning’ among magician lingo, and the effect is said to be similar to throwing a magnet into a pile of iron filings. The demons will maul the unlucky mage, stripping them layer-by-layer of skin, organs, and bone until only a ragged approximation remains. This becomes the magical core of an amalgam–brought together around it, the demons will collectively form a new body and begin behaving like a single, sentient organism.

While the appearance of an amalgam is polymorphic–the demons that it consists of behave similarly to a fluid matrix–it often has a form, or elements of one, that it prefers. Amalgams are often jumbled masses of limbs, teeth and organs with little coherence besides an ability to move: this is due to the fact that demons appear to construct bodies by randomly sampling the anatomy of their core host. In addition, canid, avian and other animal structures are common in amalgams, suggesting that demons have a collective 'genetic catalog’ of things they’ve devoured.

The ability to regenerate from even full vaporization makes the amalgam a prized weapon in combat situations. The mechanism is not yet understood–even the organic core has been shown to re-form after total destruction–but as amalgams consist of units of tiny demons, they seem to be able to import more to repair themselves. Amalgams cannot be killed by conventional weaponry, although they can be immobilized by shrapnel that impedes their regeneration. They can, however, be killed by religiously significant objects, superchilled iron, or certain chemically pure metals, which have a dramatic effect on the demons, causing them to evacuate the body, which kills the exposed host.

Amalgams share both memory and personality with their host, prompting debate over whether or not the magician is the one in control (or even conscious). Most individuals suffer from neurological or psychological issues that are theorized to result from integration problems with the core and the traumatic nature of the drowning itself. Symptoms can range from face blindness to tremors to even the sudden onset of phobias, and most amalgams suffer some degree of visual or auditory hallucinations. As a result, the use of them in warfare is highly controversial.

It is not especially advisable to ride an amalgam. To someone unaccustomed to being around wetware military constructs, prolonged contact with one tends to elicit feelings of unrest, and even depression. Touching one with bare skin often evokes unpleasant childhood memories and sudden, stabbing fear–people have likened the tactile sensation to everything from the feel of cold bathroom tiles, to holding a mass of live hornets.
Repeated exposure seems to diminish the effects considerably, but even battle hardened magicians accustomed to being around demonic constructs are strongly discouraged from doing so for lengthy periods of time. An amalgam may also unconsciously try to integrate a hapless rider into their anatomical structure if they have been on them long enough.

“A magician (also referred to as a mage or king) is an individual able to consciously shape and alter the physical and chemical properties of their environment through currently unknown mechanisms. Notably, this manipulation of parameters is confined to a spherical area centered on their person.

This range is popularly referred to as a kill radius due to the exclusive use of the term in both demiurgic and analog warfare, and its relative circumference varies from magician to magician, increasing with age. The kill radius of a magician grows at a rate constant and often unique to the individual, and has been found to increase with a proportion consistent with the Fibonacci integer series in mathematics.

The first magicians were born during 1930, and are thus referred to as the first generation mages. There was no precedence, genetic or otherwise, for their sudden appearance, and the births occurred worldwide at a relative frequency of 1/10,000 across all demographics.

Biologically, magicians appear virtually identical to normal human beings, save for the presence of a tapetum lucidum, typically found in nocturnal vertebrates, behind each retina. As a result, their eyes are highly reflective, and often bear noticeably decreased or vivid pigmentation. Unusually, the presence of this structure does not appear to have a notable effect, detrimental or otherwise, on the vision of the individual. Scientists hypothesize that this is due to the light-refracting properties of the radius surrounding a magician, which as a result is faintly visible to the naked eye.

The subsequent discovery of ‘magic’ prompted vast and sweeping changes to virtually all aspects of international society—from cultural norms to geopolitical borders. Governments felt threatened by the existence of magicians, but also immediately realized their destructive potential.

As a result, existing warfare and combat stratagems had to be massively retailored. Thus, World War II was the last of the so-called ‘complete analog’ wars, fought solely with technology (aside from a few scattered incidents involving child soldiers and the opportunists eager to take advantage of young first generation magicians).

The nature of the kill radius singlehandedly elevates the magician into becoming what is statistically speaking, the deadliest and most effective groundside unit on the modern battlefield. Entire units, if bunched closely together into standard attack formations, can be massacred in seconds if they are caught within the ‘reaping circle’ of a mage.

The kill radius is unaffected by physical boundaries such as walls or doors, making it an ideal choice for espionage and undetectable assassinations. As a result, although records are inconclusive and there was no officially documented body count, historians believe that the 1965-1972 portion of the Cold War marks one of the bloodiest periods of human history, and boasts the largest amount of mage-related deaths.

Magicians are considered to hold an absolute advantage over the environment within their radius. This control is limited only by the skill and precision of the individual. Typical strategy in warfare consists of capturing opposing troops (magician or otherwise) within this area. The magician may then utilize any means at their disposal to neutralize the enemy—typically by igniting the oxygen within the air or otherwise briefly making the space around them inhospitable through chemical means. Skilled combat mages are notorious for their creativity and unpredictability in executions—it is common for them to publicly display the horrifically mangled bodies as deterrence during wartime.

After use, the radius of a magician has been shown to leave a complex fractal ‘fingerprint,’ on whatever surface the magician happened to be standing on. The residual image changes rapidly depending on the type of force the mage has exerted on their environment (alteration of gravity, manipulation of vectors), but they are not extremely dissimilar between individuals.

As a result, it was theorized that magicians utilize a branching subconscious language, similar to a programming code, to act on their surroundings. The effects of research in the 1950’s led to the invention of schematics: simplified two-dimensional representations of radial fingerprints.

When drawn out on flat surfaces, magicians may utilize them as functional kill radii, and perform the action specified by the schematic even when not in close proximity of the area. Scientists hypothesize that this is because it acts as a sort of conduit or circuit for the magician’s energy in the absence of a real radius.

Schematics provide mages with invaluable shortcuts for tasks that require surgical precision, such as most medical situations. To heal a wound, a magician must instigate rapid cell division in the affected area, a process that can result in the formation of deadly tumors if not done with complete concentration. To avoid that possibility, a schematic of a successful procedure may be used instead.

Less sophisticated schematics are also often used in combat in lieu of conventional explosives, able to be drawn under a bridge or truck and detonated when the magician is safely far away.

Most countries have adopted the Mauss-Crowley system of classification, which ranks magicians within a series of twelve tiers. The tier of a magician is decided mainly by their level of precision, or ability to interact with matter on increasingly specific levels. A tier 11 magician, for example, would be able to operate on the atomic level, while the theoretical tier 12 could manipulate events on a subatomic scale.

The twelfth tier may also be designated to mages that demonstrate intimacy with previously unprecedented aspects of reality—the infamous Edward Montblanc, for instance, was awarded the rank in 1953 for being able to interface with the time-space continuum.

Due to their relative rarity and low population, most militaries assign only one or two mages per essential squadron of human soldiers. Units that are composed completely of magicians are referred to as chapters, and are typically pulled for black ops, espionage, or other high-risk operations.

Magicians in the military are typically paid extremely generous salaries, but roughly two-thirds of it is withheld by the government until they reach retirement age (35). The likelihood of a combat mage to survive past the age of 25 is about 33.5%.”

i think that concludes one half of things.

That was the more FMA influenced side of things, where we talk about how daily life and the world was shaped by the amalgams.

Now we get into the work by Robert Chew
artstation.com/robertchew

His work inspired a military faction known as the Agents of Sin (found here) Agents who had managed to become merged with demons they summoned, unlike the pictures before where they simply summoned the demons. the agents were merged, giving the demon a much stronger mana source as well as giving the soldier ridiculous powers.

i mean unit. not faction.

The idea was to run a game set in that world above. where the players were part of this unit, some would have the symbiotic some would not.

More on my shitty campaign idea later

Bump? I'm still hoping to get some tips/advice

What kind of game mechanics are you looking for?
What pen & paper do you usually enjoy?

Also thanks for the dump, that was interesting.

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fasho, the original thread is way better cause theres lots of ideas for everyone to use.

I'm probably going to use savage worlds and tweak a few things, maybe add in stress.

Im looking for how to run this game as more of a military regiment, how to capture the feel. instead of my usual adventuring party routine, maybe i should have led with the fact that I've only run Fantasy and Knights for the past 3 years