[f||esh] i hope i am not a||one in this aspect

[irenicAlmiraj]

-◡- i am one of the few who have ro||ed f||esh. i wou||d ||ike to hear about other's experiences with the aspect.

[grinningcat]

Smith of Flesh here

[cannonOverload]

GOT HEIR OF FLESH IN MY LAST SESSION. [Flesh] IS... INTERESTING. ITS ALL ABOUT IMPROVING, EVOLVING AND AUGMENTING. YOU CAN DO SOME REALLY COOL THINGS WITH IT, SO USE IT TO IMPROVE YOURSELF AND OTHERS. AND YOU DON'T NEED TO USE JUST ORGANIC MATERIALS, YOU CAN TURN YOURSELF INTO A CYBORG IF YOU WANT TO.

[azureAngelic]

oh my god i loved flesh so much i could talk about it forever

my second session (out of three as of this writing) ended up giving me rogue of flesh, and nobody else in our session seemed to know anything about it, so i had to more or less feel my way around it. that said before the whole infinite hellgame thing i was a pretty big fan of horror games with putrid festering abominations of nature, so maybe it was just my sort of thing. i guess i'll try and compile whatever i can think of for future reference

it felt to me like flesh had three overlapping "domains", so to speak: augmenting, false life, and undead. undead is kind of a given, but the other two are a bit more abstract and malleable

the augmenting side of flesh is sort of like mad science. it's the art of looking at a dead body and seeing all the way you can reuse it. say you have a generic dead human body and one of your friends has a nasty scrape on his arm. augmentation through flesh would be taking skin from the corpse and using it to replace the skin missing on your bro to keep them from bleeding out. it's a really simple-sounding concept but there are a lot of uses.

the downside is the "false life" aspect seeping through; you can do all kinds of awesome transplants and pretty much make medical biology your bitch, but rotting flesh is never permanent, and as great as attaching a second set of arms to yourself is you'll be lucky if they last a single strife

speaking of false life, there's the whole zombies and golems bend to flesh as well. it's a bit like how rage players can imbue, say, a rock with their aspect, and give it the order to fly up to an imp and bonk it in the head. with flesh, you're imbuing your aspect into that same rock, but instead of giving it an order you're giving it...man, i can't even explain it. it's like you're turning it into a robot with no brain and no self-independence (no offense, cO), and you can tell it to go hit the imp and it's just all "durr ok" because it's fake life, it doesn't have emotions or feelings

i'm not going to lie flesh is morbid as hell (i really should have said that first)

when it comes to abilities flesh is kind of, say, mundane made awesome. you have a set of really basic abilities that do really basic things and you have to learn to manipulate them to pull off really awesome stunts. just off the top of my head:

[Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep] is probably the quintessential flesh ability, which makes me an idiot because i didn't discover it until midway through the session. obviously, to start doing fleshy things, you need to have flesh, which is a problem when everything around you poofs into grist when you stab it to death. [NILMDTS] is, aside from being a terrible acronym, the solution to your problem. as far as i can tell, mechanically it imbues your weapon with the aspect of flesh, and if you would then kill an enemy, it doesn't turn into grist. it dies, but it just...keels over. i almost think it generates a corpse in place of the original target, but i'm not sure. the point is, it gives you a body to do as you please, which is the backbone of your aspect. the pluck cost actually seems to scale with what you're using it on, so obviously it's harder to [NILMDTS] an ogre than an imp

[Rip And Tear] is...ok, i'll be blunt, either utterly disgusting or the most awesome thing you'll ever see. it's another weapon-imbuement sort of ability, but whereas [NILMDTS] causes your target to "peacefully" die, [RAT] is sburb language for "crank the ultraviolent meter to max and let 'er rip". i once cast it on my hammerkind-wielding ally's weapon and when he smashed an imp with it, it just EXPLODED IN GORE. i know imps don't normally have accurate biology, but there were guts everywhere, little black bits of bones and splats of reddish-black blood and intestines and pieces of brain and it was just amazing in both the good and bad ways. i felt like an asshole because aforementioned hammerbro puked at the sight, but if you're like me and you aren't afraid to get your hands messy then start throwing it everywhere and consider all the squishy bits that coat your land as more fuel for your nature-defiling necromancy

[Finish Him] is, believe it or not, [RAT] on steroids. if your universe had mortal kombat, then you should already know what to expect. the pluck cost is gigantic, and it only works if your next attack would normally kill, but when it connects, holy christ-guzzling fuck is it a spectacle. it doesn't even TRY to be logical: when i used it to finish off an ogre, there was more gore than could physically fit into the damn thing. i counted six intestines, enough ribs for two and a half ribcages, and at least an imp's worth of brain matter, on top of gallons of blood. i wouldn't be surprised if this was a berserk triggered ability because GOD DAMN

i can't remember the name, but there was a third ability along the same lines as [RAT] and [FH], i think it had artery in the name? it basically caused a wound that bled unrealistic amounts, which was kind of useless since blood isn't that manipulatable without flesh, but it's still kind of hilarious to cut an imp's head off and watch it run around literally gushing blood in a stream from it's neck

by now you're probably drowning in body parts and that's where [Men Playing God] comes in. it's the reconstruction to [RAT]'s deconstruction: on paper, its taking parts of something that's dead and applying them to other things. in practice, this has loads of benefits. you can stick arms onto people's torsos, daisy-chain intestines to make...i don't know, super-intestines, you can even use it as shitty makeshift healing. one guy in my session got his left front tooth punched out, and once we found it all i had to do was lay him on a flat surface, [MPG] it back into his mouth and occasionally reapply the cast. like [NILMDTS] the pluck cost varies, so you can stick something useless or cosmetic like hair or teeth back in no problem, but add legs or lungs and you'll need to constantly be fixing it to the point where you're better off just letting them rot off

[Come My Minions] and [Rise For Your Master] are paired abilities that play off one another. [CMM] lets you imbue false life into something and turn it into a zombie, with the restriction that most of whatever you're bringing to life has to have once been alive (or at least most of it), and [RFYM] makes your newly-created zombies at least semi-loyal. it's hard to explain; you aren't actually controlling them, but you can tell them to do something and they'll more or less do it. the good news with [CMM] is that the zombie you're reviving doesn't necessarily have to be intact or unmodified. the most basic flesh trick is to [NILMDTS] or [RAT] until you have a nice pile of dead things, [MPG] them into a hideous abomination of nature, and then [CMM]/[RFYM] the resulting misshapen mess into a beefy minion. plus, your creations don't have to be biologically feasable: i raised a starfish made out of arms and a mouth at one point, although it kind of sucked at doing pretty much anything. as always, though, flesh isn't permanent, and anything raised by [CMM] also gets slapped with a hidden debuff that causes it to rot and/or wear away at an exponential rate, so don't be surprised if your super-zombie-golem falls apart after a while of service

[Tis But A Flesh Wound] is i THINK supposed to be a psybuff, but i'm not sure. it has two effects: one, if someone is injured, it seems to calm them down and make them less likely to panic, and two, it actually seems to improve the wound. like, it doesn't heal, but it stops the bleeding and supposedly nulls the pain, so they're still seriously hurt but they don't really act like it. i guess it's good if you're a distance away from any bandages or whatever.

[Bring Out Your Dead] is pretty much a corpse radar; if anything you can manipulate with your other flesh abilities is lying around, you'll be significantly more likely to stumble across it while [BOYD] is active. i figure that, worse case scenario, you could use it for pendant retrieval, but...oh, it also seems to work for sylladexes too. one of my co-players told me i was acting weird around her and it took us a while to figure out i had left [BOYD] active and she was lugging around an alchemized tin of uncooked salmon around in her 'dex. coincidentally, fish zombies are pretty hit and miss

i never managed to cast it in the alpha timeline, considering how costly it is, but [Blackest Plague] was brought up by our session's seer. according to her, it was a [CMM] that made the resultant zombie hostile to life in general, on top of transmitting [BP] to anything it landed the killing blow to. we never managed nail down exactly how it worked, but between her reluctant admittance of a vision of me berserk triggering and literally starting a goddamned zombie apocalypse and the frankly ridiculous costs i would say it's a really bad idea to even consider casting it

i've heard that flesh has a lot of interesting psybuff and psydebuff abilities, but i never quite got the hang of them. two i distinctly remember acknowledging at one point are [Land Of The Dead], which pacified hostile undead-related creatures by making anyone affected by [LOTD] "one of them" in their eyes, and [Bubonic Odor] which...smelled really, really bad. like, when people say something smells like dead shit, but worse. it was good for escaping, at least

probably my favorite late-game ability was [Corpse Party]. it basically takes every corpse around you and turns them into zombies hostile to everything except you and your allies, which makes it amazing for creating instant clusterfucks. pro tip: if you're a flesh player and you've mastered [NILMDTS], get in the habit of loading your sylladex with corpses. my biggest contribution to the black king fight was, i shit you not, ejective my entire sylladex of 60+ assorted underling bodies, 20+ hastily slapped-together mangled chimeras and 2 or 3 doomed time clones that our time player gave to me because he didn't want to be around them, and casting [CP] to pretty much zerg rush the king. there's just something so incredibly amazing about making an army of undead biological monstrosities that i can't properly articulate, even if it scared the fuck out of everyone else (pro tip 2: give your co-players advance warning if you plan to zombie apocalypse stuff)

aside from that, other minor things i noted:

-when you're really close to somebody, you can sort of feel their bodies. like, it's weird: you can kind of feel their heartbeat, and faintly hear the blood pumping through the veins, or the way their organs squish around. i never brought it up to anyone because it's hard enough making people not think you're a horrible person while casually showering planets with gore

-zombies you raise seem to have a few caveats. obviously they have a huge speed penalty, and they're a lot harder to kill. on top of that, creatures that could originally fly seem to lose the ability, even if they just floated around without wings. the reverse is true for aquatic creatures: fish don't need to breathe and they can get around remarkably well with their fins, although they still suck at not being slow as shit

-actually, i think flesh reacts oddly with underwater animals. at one point i tried to raise a carp (it's a long story, the salmon-tin-girl i mentioned earlier had a career fisherman for a dad) and the damn thing went ballistic on some imps, biting them and ripping limbs off and dragging them around until it eventually rotted and disintegrationed. might have been a glitch, but if not, zombie carp are serious business

-bones are wonky. a straight-up skeleton won't react much to your abilities, but you can still sort of feel it, and if you have any actual flesh to "anchor" it to then you can sort of get it working. i wouldn't recommend it, though, since skeletal things are even more fragile and short-lived than normal undead

-i haven't had the pleasure of playing with a blood-aspect player, so i'm not sure if there's any overlap there. does anybody know if blood players can actually manipulate blood? trust me, there's a LOT of it when flesh is involved

-if you can manage to create a durable zombie somehow, you can give it to someone else as a bodyguard. i made a sort of ogre-hydra mismatch, alchemized the corpse with a suit of armor, brought it to life, and sent it to protect a friend while he was dungeon diving. she complained of the smell but she says it was an excellent meatshield

-speaking of that, yes, you can alchemize corpses and then revive them, as long as they're still mostly corpse. no scotch taping an imp to a military tank and bringing it to life. still, making undead minions is all about creativity!

-if you're the morbid sort (which you probably have to be to seriously use flesh) and you're lucky enough to have one, hit up your local rain player and ask for some inspiration. i heard a story of a flesh player who was best bros with a rain player; the rain player would come up with utterly batshit crazy ways to stick together bodies, and the flesh player used his designs to make ridiculously awesome zombies. after all, what's mad science without madness?

-don't name your zombies. seriously, i named my first fully-intact undead imp charleston and then i got sad when he rotted away half an hour later. i gave him a bitchin' monocle and everything :(

...wow, i really got carried away.

[grinningcat]

Oh god, thank goodness for that guide. I've mostly been freestyling this session.

[azureAngelic]

Nov 11, 2012 7:39:04 GMT -5 grinningcat said:

Oh god, thank goodness for that guide. I've mostly been freestyling this session.

that's not necessarily a bad thing, though! being creative with your grotesque undead minions is part of the fun

need something heavy moved? grab some muscles and make a hulky sort of thing. sick of your zombies being slow? try and come up with a way to give them more legs and not have them trip over themselves. feeling nostalgic? dig up some old movies or games and see if you can recreate your old favourites. at one point in my session as a flesh player i used alchemy and a few underlings to recreate pyramid head (well ok it was more like a cheap pyramid head knock-off but still the looks on the others faces were priceless)

why not chop up some intestines or some arms and stitch them together to make tentacles? why not skin a few beasts and give your favorite minion some big leathery bat wings? you might even be able to figure out how to get them airborne if you aren't like me and have pretty much no idea how aerodynamics work

also, one great ability that completely slipped my mind: [Through The Eyes Of Death]. channel it onto one of your zombies and you can see and hear whatever they see and hear. it's great if you've got some leftover squishy bits and you're in a dangerous area; you can gouge out an imp's eyes, hook them up to a hunk of flesh, give it a few ribs as tripod legs and have it scuttle around scouting out dark crevices and whatnot. it even works for things that can swim, if you don't mind the fisheye view from looking through...well, fish eyes. worse case scenario you can just bring a severed head to life and punt it off a cliff for a glimpse of how far the drop is

[cannonOverload]

FORGOT TO MENTION, BUT BLOOD PLAYERS ARE ALSO YOUR BEST ALLIES, THEY CAN ACTUALLY GIVE YOUR CREATIONS TRUE LIFE WITH [Awakening], AS LONG AS YOU USE AN INTACT HEART IN YOUR CREATION, SO IT CAN ACCEPT [The Pulse] INTO ITSELF. LETS YOU MAKE PERMANENT MINIONS, WHO ALSO CAN THINK FOR THEMSELVES, BUT ARE STILL VERY LOYAL.

THERE IS ALSO A VERY USEFUL ABILITY I FORGET TO MENTION: [Ultimate Chimera]. [Ultimate Chimera] HAS A HIGH PLUCK COST, BUT THE BENEFITS OUTWEIGH THE COST GREATLY, BECAUSE IT LETS YOU PERMANENTLY GRAFT THINGS TO OTHER PLAYERS, WITHOUT THE ROTTING DEBUFF, MAKES IT ALIVE, AND THEN GROWS THE APPROPRIATE BLOOD VESSELS, NERVES, AND MUSCLES TO MAKE IT WORK AS INTENDED, AS IF THEY HAD THE ADDITION THEIR ENTIRE LIFE. LEARNING HOW TO MOVE/USE IT IS... DIFFICULT, TO SAY THE LEAST.

BUT AS I SAID, [Ultimate Chimera] HAS A HIGH PLUCK COST PROPORTIONAL TO THE AMOUNT OF AUGMENTATION YOU'RE PREFORMING, SO IT'S BEST TO DO IT IN SECTIONS FOR LARGER PROJECTS.

EDIT: SO THATS WHAT CORPSE PARTY IS. ALSO, IF ZOMBIE CARP CAN TEAR IMPS TO SHREDS, THINK OF WHAT A SHARK CHIMERA COULD DO, BE GODDAMN "Jaws" ALL OVER AGAIN, BUT WITH LANDSHARKS! OR EVEN ZOMBIE WHALES!!!
THIS REQUIRES EXPERIMENTATION!!

[irenicAlmiraj]

goodness, that is... exceptiona||y comprehensive.

i have do admit, i have taken a somewhat different path with f||esh. one that i suspect is somewhat inf||uenced by my first session as a guard of mind, and somewhat he||ped by the prototyping of my own doomed corpse.

and [the unburied dead] are the abi||ities i took to raise the bodies of cop||ayers and enemies, respective||y, though i did not know the difference at first. [suicide is pain||ess] can have enemies you would overpower take the easy way out and join the horde.

[the wretched], [the frai||], and [adrift and at peace] are contro|| abi||ities. the fist disso||ves one's connection to a zombie, the second has them focus on assisting each other instead of outright attacking, and the third ||ets them wander peacefu||y without re||easing them entire||y.

[the art of se||f-destruction] wi|| cause them to attack re||ent||es||y, until they break apart under the strain. i am not terrib||y fond of the abi||ity.

[head ||ike a ho||e] is a psybuff. it numbs.

as you can probab||y te||, i took a focus more on crowd contro|| of my zombies over anything e||se.

[cannonOverload]

NEAT, THE COMMUNITY SHOULD BE PUT AT EASE, SOMEWHAT, WITH THE DISCOVERY OF THOSE CONTROL ABILITIES.

PERSONALLY, I RARELY USED ZOMBIES, UNLESS I COULD KEEP THEM FROM ROTTING.

WHEN I WAS [Flesh], I ALSO DISCOVERED THAT ALCHEMIZING FORMALDEHYDE WITH YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD ABOMINATION ACTUALLY REMOVES ROTTING ENTIRELY FROM YOUR CREATION! THE GRIST COST IS RELATIVELY CHEAP, BUT YOUR MONSTER WILL ALWAYS SMELL LIKE AN AUTOPSY LAB, WHICH IS QUITE FITTING, CONSIDERING THE CIRCUMSTANCES.

I'D RECOMMEND THAT YOU USE THIS ON YOUR MORE IMPORTANT/STRONGER CREATIONS.

[agonyembraced]

Also of note: zombies that do rot have a big "candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long" going on with them. If you have them mostly just stand around, or move at a fraction of their already slowed speed, you can get them to last much longer than if you were using them for strenuous strifing. Also, since I didn't know about that above trick while I was flesh (seriously, you can put these things in your sylladex? man, wish I knew that before), I've learned a fair bit of other methods to extend their unlives:
-physical plausibility.Yes, you can make a freakish chimera that could never actually exist. This will rot quicker than something who's only issue is that its heart has a hole in it.On a creepy note, this means player zombies last longer than underling zombies, since player's already have an anatomy that works, while underling are already fairly implausible.
-Mundane preservation. Anything that would preserve a dead body normally can help keep it from suffering the rotting penalty. I kept large handfuls of salts and spices on hands to dust off new zombies with for this. Lemon juice also works a bit. As a bonus, zombies coated in spices and juice don't smell as bad as normal ones. Makes them a bit more flammable, though (since your basically mummifying them, and almost always removing moisture).
-One-corpse creation.You know how bodies will reject transplants and transfusions? That doesn't stop happening when the heart stops beating. Making sure all the pieces come from the same place makes it last a bit longer. Small bug with this, all doomed timeselves and dupliclones count as the same person for this purpose, so it's still possible you get your dr. frankenstein on(the Rain player will likely find this hilarious, the Time player will likely be really creeped out/angry). Mist players, of course, completely screw with it's ability to tell.
-Mundanity. If it has some cool special ability, like spitting fire or acid of exhaling chlorine, then using it will make it rot quicker (think of it this way: when other creatures would use up energy and get tired, these guys instead rot a bit more).
-Allied abilities. Not counting infusing the dudes with Flesh yourself to patch them up, a lot of abilities of other aspects can help keep these guys going. Not counting Awakening, having The Pulse imbued into them keeps them going a fair bit, as does receiving Life healing. Being in the area of Doom abilities also helps delay rotting (presumably some crap about killing the little things making them rot). Just another way it looks like SBURB wants flesh players to keep being team players.

Of course, now learning that just a bit of alchemy can obsolete all this might make it seem pointless, but at least you can do all of these for things "in the field" when you don't have an alchimeter with it.Also, I recomend any flesh player to bone up on their knowledge of anatomy, biology, and any exotic wildlife of the world. Might give you some interesting ideas for your creations, and knowledge of how to get them to do what you want.