I like the episodic nature of this a lot
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We get a little more background on Black Lotus as we pick apart the artifacts from our raid, and process (e.g. legally torture in a hideously inhumane fashion) the remaining prisoners:
X-Com has been warring with Red Dawn over grey market Soviet arms, digging up classified Kiryu-Kai files to copy over the shoulder of the 1980’s JSDF, and achieving such stunning original research as our innovative “iron pipe” tech.
Meanwhile, Black Lotus took a more pragmatic route: They made a deal with a would-be alien invader - one separate from the sectoid menace we face - to essentially put an alien in charge of their alien war. A real “enemy of your enemy is your friend” approach. In doing so, they’ve achieved the impossible: an honest-to-goddess psionic human - the “Black Lotus avatar” we captured at the jungle temple in Laos.
Fuggin… was able to fly and shoot laser beams and shit… pretty dope…
Psionics
The legions of Black Lotus were highly-trained and disciplined, merging martial arts with these new extra-sensory concepts to achieve impossible abilities, like the near-invisibility of the assassins, strange no-ammo hand-held fire-and-lightning-lobbing devices used by the Mandarins, the inexplicable psionic personal shields used by Black Lotus witches, and well, the ascension into a demi-goddess. With the right training and the right controls, X-Com agents might be able to get to that level with time. We’ll see.
Like any responsible imperialist pigdog, we move in with force, loot the place, and re-brand this Black Lotus research as X-Com Originals™. The Council is amazed.
Our analysis of the co-called ‘psionic powers’ shows that such effects apply to all living creatures - humans, other animals, even plants - but the results vary according to the recipient’s level of consciousness. To put it simply, beings with more complex neural activity are more accessible to an aggressive psion, but on the other hand stronger sense of self partially shields a mind from external influence. Humans with their strong ability for thinking with symbols are generally quite resistant to psi, as they can confront invasive mental patterns with rationalism and introspection (well, most humans anyway). Simple organisms are easy to affect with psi, but their behavior is often too hard-wired to be affected anyway, or too alien to reprogram them easily. Therefore, the best candidates for psionic domination are animals with complex brains but relatively poor level of abstract thinking.
Global Expansion
The Black Lotus HQ is repurposed into a third base of operations, which we’ve named “The Shatterdome” due to its location along the Pacific Rim.
For now, our primary base, the repurposed silo Red Forest in Siberia, serves as the logistical and strategic hub. This is where we launch our strike teams (in our shitty rink-a-dink van and humvee).
The South American Dantero Bay is our second base, a coastal research/prison black site named after the Tigre dantero cryptid of Venezuela.
And now the Shatterdome, which we’ve set up as a manufacturing plant and archive for all the artifacts, arms, and alien tech we’ve found so far. It’s outside of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea.
This gives us decent coverage of the globe, as well as appropriate parallel operations for all the research and processing we’re doing.
Kitsune-106
Continuing with the theme of standing on the shoulders of the Kiryu-Kai, some interesting files turn up during the archival move to the Shatterdome:
Oh that is some low-hanging fruit right there. Low-effort, big-returns, that’s the X-Com way.
A little bit of coordination with the Japanese government (or more to the point, that block’s Councilman), and we track down where on Earth this thing tanked in the 80’s.
The manufacturing bay at the Shatterdome gets to work restoring this junker, and after re-christening it the “Mutavore”, it’s ready to go. We’ve got our first craft capable of going toe-to-toe with a medium UFO.
Can carry 15 people, one light missile launcher, and one cannon. Essentially a hybrid interceptor/dropship. Not bad at all.
First engagement with a UFO goes well, the thing’s hard to hit and takes a beating.
Puts a hole in an E.T. real nice-like.
Kinda ugly on the battlescape, but I ain’t complaining.
Dragonfly
Beyond the Mutavore, we’ve eaten enough other fish in the pond that we’ve been approached by a company called the “Union Aerospace Company” for better-than-average arms.
This opens up our options on the grey market. In particular, there’s a pretty sweet dropship that would do nicely for the Red Forest. You know, a slight upgrade from having our troops pile into the four-wheel drive humvee and trek across the Siberian wastes for days on end.
Holds 8, goes way faster than the Mutavore, takes a lot less to repair.
Looks a lot cooler on the battlescape too.
Takes plasma grenades no problem!!!
These UAC guys make some good-quality product! You just don’t see corps with that kind of work ethic nowadays, no sir.
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You know I’ve heard some really good things about UAC shotguns
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Oh good.
Cania, DaleNixon, Geoff, Daphaknee, and 8128 suit up.
Kill It With Fire
The guy we talked to on the radio was… odd. Said all the right things, knew his shit, seemed personable enough, but every word felt wrong. Under duress? On drugs? Who knows.
We pull up with the humvee, and there’s a good amount of activity on-site. A dog. People in coats, some panicked, some not. Fast little rabbit things dart about?
No obvious alien craft, no signs of battle. Smart money’s on cryptids.
We talk to these two jagoffs. They’re eager to leave but evasive on what happened here and why they called for help. Something about a chemical leak making people hallucinate.
Geoff roughs them both up and they stick to their story.
Commotion outside. We lock them in and keep looking.
The f-
DaleNixon detains the group and takes a long, hard look at the sprawling, smoldering thing on the ground.
He takes the cigar out of his mouth with a “Dear geeead…”
The door busts open. Our two contacts pour out, oozing with whipping tendrils and gnashing jaws.
Dale and Geoff light them up.
Back by the humvee, one of Daphaknee and Cania’s detainees melts into another one of these fucking horrors.
The nightmare begins.
8128 tussles with the “rabbits” we saw earlier. They are not rabbits turns out!!!
They are also extremely fucking fast!
So fast, in fact, that they leap onto Daphaknee and horrifically metamorph them into one of their own!
The team falls back to the humvee, pops open the inventory door and starts tossing napalm grenades into the fray.
They then line up, and start a slow, sweeping advance on the main bunker these monsters seem to be creeping out of.
The DaphaThing charges through the fire and is lit aflame, melting into a pulsating puddle. Cania shoots the pile of slime.
Absolutely anything and everything that moves is killed, and then re-killed, and then set on fire.
We reach the bunker.
Room by room, the team pops open a door, throws in a napalm grenade, then sets up for some burning abomination to stagger out. It is then gunned down by three fortified agents.
There are a few civilian survivors. Let’s just say we’re gonna be running a test or two before we let them go.
Back at the Red Forest, the lab is at once flabbergasted and deeply unsettled.
The site is marked for an airstrike by the mig, and we pray to god we don’t get another call like this.
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Sorry I shot your slime remains @daphaknee
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i definitely touched the thing or tried to eat it or something to turn into slime, completely accidentally voluntary
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Cyberweb
As we move through the processing queue of the gulag at the Red Forest, one of the WizKids from the cult gathering coughs up a lead on a facility the hackerlings been using for… it’s gotta be crypto, right? Mining crypto?
The team piles into the UAC ship we bought, which we’ve named the “Vulture”. It makes a pretty quiet landing for a VTOL craft.
Pretty nondescript startup in the San Fransisco area. I want to say that them still working at 9pm is suspicious but nah that’s pretty par for the course.
This isn’t a particularly tough fight for the most part, they taze whoever they encounter and cuff them for processing.
One big exception: There’s a particularly strange-looking biz casual type with a tie for a belt who takes four agents and an X-rat to bring down. He was armed with some big, bulking, weird-ass weapon nobody can really discern:
Lightning Thrower
This somewhat ramshackle weapon emits deadly electric discharges. Like normal lightning, they cause severe burns and shock. If the target survives, they are likely to be rendered unconscious. However, its power rapidly drops at distances beyond 12. The Lightning Thrower is powered with a Cyberweb battery.
Once he’s down, we cart him back to the ship.
Yep. Crypto. Shahczyk and Daphaknee set the charges.
There is a seven-hour marathon interrogation with the gentleman with the tie belt. He exclusively identifies as “The Onceler”, and is for all intents and purposes unbreakable. He spits a bloody tooth in Daphaknee’s face and tells them to eat shit.
We pump him full of drugs and dunk him into the rat farm for two days, and, in time, he talks.
The Onceler is, in fact, some kind of cyborg, able to switch on and off pain like the slur filter on the hot new Intel app. The tech appears fully human-made, as shocking as that might be.
This man is a “Technomad”:
Technomads form the core of Cyberweb. They are cyborg scientists and engineers, pursuing unearthly knowledge. They are also completely amoral and a little crazy. Our agents should approach them with utmost care, since they are much tougher than they look and they use exotic, high-power weapons that they build for themselves.
The only other kilobyte of info we’re able to juice out of this guy is that this Cyberweb thing seems to go a hell of a lot deeper than dogecoin. They’ve got transhumanist ambitions, and they’ve got all the angel investor money in the world to put it into practice.
Time to shut down this startup…
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Impressive that Daphaknee can survive being turned into a puddle of slime.
Ain’t nothing a bit of rest and recuperation can’t fix
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(This is Daphaknee II of course)
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Buster Corps
A call comes in from Vatican City on… that phone.
Oh fuck!!!
The helipad on this Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace hospital looks pretty good. We set the Vulture down.
Wisely and Boojiboy take point on this one. Cania and K.M. support.
Hallways are empty. Some unearthly sounds in the darkness outside, mixed with… panicked latin chanting?
Some kind of slime is seeping under the door to the operating theater. The gang takes up position like this is Surviving Edged Weapons and K.M. busts the door down.
Boojiboy takes the cigar outta their mouth with a “meeeey geeead…”
A scream from the first floor.
Wisely races downstairs, pistol drawn, Booji and Cania follow.
Folks, we got slimers. Probably the same kinda thing as those megaworms we fought a while back.
The gang fires a few rounds into the closest one, and the bullets pass right on through like ballistics gel. Boojiboy switches to the taser, Wisely the electro-club, and the added electrical charge seems to do the trick.
We save a doctor of some kind, who frantically babbles about ghosts, ghouls, and you guessed it: Ghasts. We can’t seem to get much useful info out of the guy… something has terrified this man beyond the capacity for rational thought, and it ain’t the slimers.
Calls them “Bug Eye Ghosts”, which, seems a little dramatic, but, sure:
Bug Eye Ghost
This malicious apparition is in fact a psionic energy node, manifesting as a ‘creature’. It is mostly made of energy and ignores most environmental hazards, except violent energy discharges and psi attacks. It is mindless, but perceives human minds and hunts for their psi energy, which is unpleasant to the victim and may even be fatal. To quote the classics, it’s life, but not as we know it.
More screaming from outside, Cania pours the slimers into a wastebin and the team moves out.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I know a bit of the bite is taken out of this after discovering aliens exist and tsuchinoko real but
FUGGIN’ GHOSTS, PEOPLE
Bullets pass through the ephemeral masses of screaming heads like they ain’t even there.
Fire doesn’t do jack either.
Boojiboy starts tossing out clips for the tasers.
It takes a few turns of roudtable bustin’ until these things collapse into…
Well, slime.
The perimeter secured, there’s one last spectral monstrosity flying about the nearby woods. Wisely and Cania reload battery carts and take off into the night.
It’s low visibility, nightvision shakeycam biz out there, but they manage to follow the haunting, abyssal deep-speech (latin) to a shambling demon skulking about the brush.
Wisely beats the thing with his electro-baton, bracing his teeth as the thrashing monstrosity howls hellish obscenities from its grotesque, cursed tongue. It finally relents.
He turns the figure to the light to gaze upon its void-touched form, and despair.
Well uh…
Shit, cuff him I guess!!!
Back at Dantero Bay, the interrogator gets to work on this Dude of the Cloth.
These beads go for a decent price on the grey market…
R&D takes a look at the wastebins of goo we’ve brought back:
Ectoplasm
This mysterious substance is undoubtedly normal matter, but its chemical, quasi-organic composition is chaotic and hard to explain. Moreover, it is charged with residual mental energy. It decays quickly and requires a special facility for further studies.
Spectral Entity
This aggregation of psionic energy is especially powerful. It feeds on negative human emotions, converting psionic energy into ectoplasm. Its hunting strategy is to induce fear in victims and drain them of mental energy as they are paralyzed with terror. It only responds reliably to violent energy bursts and psi.
They suggest the creation of a “Ghost Tank” to contain these very specific ectoplasmic entities. I figure, sure.
Ghost Tank
The Ghost Tank is a special containment unit for ectoplasm-based entities. It can hold up to 10 such beings for an indefinite amount of time.
Light is green, trap is clean.
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Man, I love the complete chaos grab-bag aesthetic that can only happen as a result of zealous megamods with 0 scope control. Are you going to fight the kids from Akira next?
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I would not bat an eye if they put me on a Fantastic Voyage at this point.
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I’ll just re-iterate that this game is fucking endless, I’ve been playing it for the entire pandemic. You really have to be playing it to enjoy as a thing to do semi-regularly to unwind, not playing it to beat it.
In the present, I feel like I maybe might be 80% of the way through this. I’m only just now starting to approach unlocking plasma weapons, and the UAC arc hasn’t resolved, the alien invasion is in full swing, there is an embassy in South Korea that’s been compromised by E.T.s that I cannot invade for political reasons, and my next act is to invade my first alien base. There’s talk of going into space, like, moon bases and shit. I haven’t scratched the surface of the ghost realm.
If this were a released title, I would never want the amount of content to be lessened, but I think I would like it to be delivered in arcs, or maybe even separate campaigns somehow. Say, you pick one starting condition, it delivers to you X number of gangs/cults/orgs/aliens that fit that theme, and you beat the game. Then you start a new game with a different starting condition, and encounter a different set of encounters. Maybe that would work.
I think the separation could work even at later tech levels, since an impressive amount of this content is for the mid-game, under the assumption you only just started unlocking laser weapons.
As it is, there’s just an overwhelming amount of content to explore. Not a bad problem to have, but you are essentially locked in an unending campaign that keeps piling on content and widening the scope. The positive is that you’re always discovering something cool and new, but the downside is you never feel like you’re close to accomplishing a victory.
All that said, this is certainly the best mod I’ve ever played. A lot of love went into this, and it stands on the shoulders of other X-Com greats like X-Piratez.
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Dang, now I regret not asking to be part of the team before some honest to gozer ghostbusting happened.
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New recruit:
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As a kid without a PC, I’d read through the X-Com strategy guide at Barnes and Nobel trying to imagine how this game is, and this thread brought all that rushing back.
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