Boat Trolls planning thread! (full of spoilers, non-players enter at your own risk)

okay no visible shrooms! how about a sort of mold that makes their blood go black. that would be SUPER FREAKY for trolls (and us frankly) and also make them seem to fade to an awful grimy colorlesness. the troll can survive a certain amount of this because *dismissive handwave gestures* and recover if they're given the proper antibiotic/pesticide in time. past a certain point, organ failure and brain damage.

some kind of troll dialysis can slow the process down, or even reverse it, but the stuff starts building back up as soon as it's not being cleaned. and there aren't enough machines on the ship for everyone— why would there be? there's probably just one, or they have to build a few from scratch and online plans— so it's a juggling act to keep as many people as possible ok for as long as possible.

once the troll gets too messed up to cooperate with the cleaning, they get shoved in a quarantine room and left, because it's too much of a risk to have a berserk troll tear up the medical room and destroy what little treatment equipment they've been able to cobble together. so— at some point someone would have to make that call on bel. actually, probably sooner than the other infected, because erskin and murfey would be about it for trolls on board who can physically contain him, wheras plenty of people could shove berserk midbloods around.

.....hm. i wonder if this might be an opportunity for galley to actually pitch in? he'd have the power to control bel, and the motive to want to try. of course, if galley got infected, everyone would be dead inside an hour. if sufficiently brainfucked he could ignore the minder programs and simply rip the ship into confetti. brrrrrrr.

anyway pancho would be planetside, possibly attached to a squad of cavalreapers or ruffianihilators or whatever, land-fighting wilderness-roughing types, and hence would have plenty of anti-zombie-meds, and/or the means to synthesize it on the spot. erskin could transfer her a big whop of cash and a warprince's fiat to do whatever the fuck she wants so she can book it to his ship asap— it could be pure bad luck that the carrier is too far away from anyone else in a position to get it there sooner.

thhhhough, that admiral that hates them might be actively popcorn.gif-ing at the chaos on erskin's ship, and manipulating things so no one's close enough to help in time. so, they gotta rush pancho in and sneak her under the admiral's nose. drama!

 

yes but please consider bel with a muzzle on, sadly snuggled up to his lusus.

ETA: wait i'm silly we can do both of that

 

*foams at mouth, shambles off*

 

The helmsman's infected too, and just with it enough to get the ship through docking procedures, because the mandates 'get us to safety' and 'well we were supposed to be docking here as scheduled right' and 'INFECT EVERYONE HAHAHA' all synch up pretty well here. Maybe Galley figured this out through the secret helmsnet? or just got a proper link established with the poor guy and was like OH SHIT before his communications were cut.

God, helmsmen getting infected must be an absolutely apocalyptic scenario for trolls and their horror movies.

 

oh right also this version of erskin is better at sex but much worse at guns*. everything's a trade-off.

*like me

 

if you don't want to think up your own battle plan, here's what needs doing:

-erskin and unattacked crew gtfo and lock the docking bay doors.
-bel and bitten crew keep fucking shit up and lock the plague ship from the outside.

-if some blackbloods get loose in the ship there should probably be an intercom notification about that haha.

 

it makes sense! and gives bel a decent number of people to organize for the fight. his captainy skills in can come to bear here to organize a bunch of panicky unprepared mechanics into a decent fighting force. i'm assuming all trolls are decent at SOME sort of weapon. but a bunch of mechanical specialists wouldn't have much if any training in fighting like a military unit or dealing with a sudden mass attack.

ETA: also yes erskin should have been booted out, a ship losing both captain and first mate in a few minutes to zombie chomping would be in a really bad situation. plus erskin doesn't even have body armor. he might have a big sweater. heh.

 

I can edit the post if Galley's bits don't sound right!

 

the idea of the ghouls running rampant in the ship just seems like too much horror to me, i'm not sure how they could recover from that kind of widespread damage and infection. do you have plans for an extended campaign?

 

ok re: erskin, feel free to have bel kick him right back out, he's leaning on his cane badly and he hasn't fired a gun since he was 7-8. but a blackrom 'go get em' smooch could be nice. he could stay behind to man the barricades, i suppose?

 

yeah the trope thing has been fun!

 

hmm well it was a little ship, but it still probably had a couple hundred dudes. let's say half of them are dead, and another big chunk aren't berserk yet, and some other proportion of them managed to take themselves out of commission by tying themselves up and stuff.

i figure an incubation period of at least a day, and then from 'a little sick-feeling' to 'ravening death monster' would be something like 2-3 more, depending on constitution and temperament. so the freshly bitten crew would have about two days to get their affairs in order and even help out with getting medical areas set up. bel would be able to coordinate with pancho for several days. we could say that with the treatment and blood-cleaning, the freshly bitten could hold out easily for a week, and pancho would be scheduled to arrive several days before any of erskin's people were unrecoverable. the rescued crew is a different matter, and if pancho encounters too much trouble getting to the sunslammer things could get right down to the wire. medical is going to be frantically busy the entire time, so they're gonna need volunteers.

15 out of 20 of the initial crew got bit, let's say, and the entirety of the strike team bel's leading, and then maybe 30-50 trolls on the Zero-Sum are salvageable. so there could be something like a hundred patients, upper estimate, fifty at the lower estimate.