I have a cool idea for a climax/ending for a quest, but have never run an RP campaign. I'd like some help fleshing it out into a whole story.
Here's my idea: In basically every fantasy work I've seen, undead can follow basic commands from the necromancer who made them. There's no reason I can see that you couldn't use these skeletons to make logic gates. For instance, Skeleton A can raise his hand if Skeleton B and C both raise their hands: bam, that's an And-Gate. You could link thousands of these together and make a skeleton computer. Now, what if this computer gets so large and so advanced it becomes self-aware? What if it either has imprisoned its necromancer and forces him to make more skellies? What if it no longer even needs him?
Anyways Veeky Forums, how can I make this idea into a fully-fledged campaign? What system should I use?
1d4chan.org/wiki/Deep_Rot Veeky Forums has Deep rot. Any system could work, it really depends on how you want your setting to feel. Skeletons don't really change, the atmosphere can. As for the campaign, play it like a fantasy terminator. Skeletons begin abducting people to add onto its processing power. Smaller computers begin emerging as the main computer attempts to branch out in the hopes of continuing its own existence, and if it should get so big it could just envelop the smaller computers. Any plot hook can lead you there, just play up the idea of this super intelligent power at play and do slow reveals/hints do guide your players to the possibility.
Julian Taylor
That pic feels way different in the wake of the Cosby serial rapist scandal.
Blake Martin
>super intelligent power at play and do slow reveals/hints What kinds of hints are we talking about?
Obviously the PC's could hear rumors about skeleton attacks, and villages seemingly devoid of people. What else?
Landon Wright
The computer would need to breed humans/sapients in order to get enough skeletons to have a high functioning computer. Perhaps have some towns that have seemingly come under control of a benevolent ruler -- who no one has seen -- and have adopted a new religion, which allows the "priests" to carry off the dead to who knows where. Perhaps have necromancers disappearing from regions they usually inhabited. Have the PCs stumble upon one of the minor computing rooms. The dwarves might be under attack for their golem technology. It could be easier to make golems than skeletons. Smaller races are the most affected, their smaller bodies means more skeletons in a single room. What is targeting the dwarves/halflings/goblins/etc.?
Ryan Perry
What if this computer has been slowly growing for centuries? The PC's could hear folklore or discover records about slowly-increasing skelly attacks.
Adam Scott
How do the heroes defeat the computer?
What is the computer's goal/s?
Nicholas Russell
The problem is scale. You'd need billions, if not trillions, of skeletons to make such a computer, and a space the size of a country to fit them.
Josiah Rodriguez
could you animate smaller corpses, like bugs or something, and still have them be capable of preforming simple tasks at an individual level?
Alexander Nelson
That's somewhat assuming you can only have a skelly do 1 bit. Really though, they can do as many bits as they have joint pairs.
Brandon Morgan
I'm trying to figure out what some reasonable ballpark numbers are. Bits are yes/no states. You can easily have a bit for each finger (extended/contracted), bit for head left/right, bits for each arm up/down, bits for each knee bent... You could possible do more than binary, if the skeleton can discern intermediate states as distinct (IE finger half-extended) but the skeleton likely has a limited ability to differentiate small differences. So we're looking at a fairly easy 16 bits per skeleton, or two bytes. You can cheese things by including more directions (IE if hand is facing left/right). I don't think 32 bits would be unreasonable.
With 32-bit skeletons, it would take 30 skeletons to match the storage of a standard IBM punchcard. That's not too shabby if you have a few hundred skeletons for processing simple tasks, but you are unlikely to make an AI or anything remotely close to modern tech levels without massive quantities of skeletons working this way.
Any CS experts know how things shake out if you include intermediate states? IE instead of 0 or 1, including ranges of say 0 to 4 (for three intermediate states). How does this change storage and processing power?
Jose Bennett
>ignoring rotation based joints You could have significantly larger numbers based on dual arm positioning along with 360 degrees and a binary off/on for each hemisphere by bending an elbow. that can give up to 360bits to work with alone.
Anthony Jones
Just going off of math, it means that instead of 30 skeletons storing values up to 2^32, they'd store values up to 5^32 (I think that's how it works?). Which... is very very large.
I suppose the chokepoint might be how complex the commands that a skeleton can be given are, and how many unique commands it can handle at once. If it's moving various parts to multiple positions, it'll need commands which terminate with each of those movements ("If conditions 1, 2, 3 --- or N are met, then do Y") which would seem to necessitate bear minimum a number of commands equal to the number of unique body positions the skeleton is going to be required to take, and that's assuming that the list of input conditions can be indefinitely large.
There's also the matter of senses and size. What's the visual range of skeletons? Is their sight blocked by objects (they have no eyes, do they see magically?)? What are the optimum arrangements of skeletons so as to maximize the number that can interface at once?
Just saw this as I was about to post. Hypothetically, the limiting factors for the base unit size are how refined the senses of the skeletons are and how nuanced their instructions can be.
Robert Allen
The number of states have to be divisible by 2 for binary logic to work at all. You could use arm down = 00, arm 1/3 up = 01, arm 2/3 up = 10, arm fully up = 11.
Nathaniel Hughes
Okay, going to try to set some ground rules: 1. Skeletons are human (or close enough to human that they're indistinguishable) with normal human bone structure 2. Skeletons are able to perform simple movement actions which the living human would be capable of (IE they can move individual fingers but can't do shit like having their limbs float around bending wildly even though they're clearly animated by magic) 3. Skeletons' sight originates from their eye holes and is blocked by solid objects. They can discern gross body movements (raising an arm, etc.) from a distance of 1000ft and can discern minute body movements (moving fingers) from a distance of 100ft. 4. Skeleton sight can differentiate between angles which are 5 or more degrees separated and can differentiate between distances which are a centimeter or more apart. 5. Skeletons can be given any number of orders and process them in the order they were given (IE if multiple orders are triggered simultaneously, they queue up and the first order is processed first).
What does the most optimum skeleton computer setup look like? What values can it store? How many do you need to replicate simple early computer programs?
I was going to ask how many are needed to replicate Pong, but then realized that you could do so without going through the effort of skele-code, but rather by giving them orders to behave as the various pieces. I suppose you could have Display Skeletons which get input from Computation Skeles... But wouldn't the skeleton representing the ball be able to do the computations itself for what angle he should move at?
Connor Peterson
They just want to know the recipe to his special sauce.
.... wait thats bad.
Grayson Howard
>You could link thousands of these together and make a skeleton computer. What makes you think that?
Jayden Bailey
Lets say you have two distinct positions for each limb, thats only going to reduce the number of necessary skeletons by a factor of 16. 32, if you figure something out with the head.
Anything more than that (ie. including fingers) would probably be too complicated for skeletons. Additionally, this would all take too long. Keep in mind that computers have a sync time in the order of nanoseconds. Skelecomp would be about a billion times slower, and that isn't hyperbole.
Ethan Cook
I don't know if this was the intention, but I found this idea absolutely hilarious.
The idea of some adventurers entering a vast cavern, only to find millions of skeletons essentially doing a big old rattly dance is just priceless.
Worth keeping in mind that when you throw players into this mix, there's a good chance that at least one of them might be like me. Might be best to embrace the absurdity rather than trying to go creepy.
