Grrl Power #1416 – Hoard bunny
Many dragons have treasurephilia. A fetish for gold and trinkets and shiny, magic weapons and sometimes even nicely framed art or delicate glass figurines. Having a big hoard is a nesting instinct, as humanoid currency isn’t really a necessity for them. When you bring a lady dragon back to your place, make sure you sweep out all the goat and adventurer bones, straighten up the tapestries with the gold thread you pilfered from the castle you knocked over, and make sure you’ve got enough coins and gems for a nice rumpy-pumpy caldera. And if you have a few virginal maidens chained to the sacrifice posts for a post-coital snack, even better.
Of course, that’s how your more anti-social dragons do it. A few razorbacks slow cooking over a lazy magma fissure is nice as well.
Anyway, dangling a “gold” woman in front of a dragon like that, especially one that spends a lot of time in a humanoid form and can appreciate the particulars of the female humanoid form, is borderline irresponsible and/or funny, because Cora knows Maxima can vociferously dissuade Gaxgy if he “just has to have a little pinch.” Cora figured there was a 50/50 chance Gaxgy would either do this or stand in the back forcing down a Squee of monstrous proportions.
And yes, I am working on a picture of Maxima supining on a pile of gold. I hope to make it a vote incentive, it just depends on how it turns out.
Maxima knew she was going to un-disguise, and didn’t want to wear that white zentai suit under the hologram for the reveal. As long as she’s on the ship, she can do that. The suit is for off-ship infiltration, but the ship has projectors in corridors and rooms. They’re not enough to do the whole interior holo-deck style, but Cora is planning on that as an upgrade. Partially that’s for fun times when it’s just her and her hunky crew on board, but having the entire interior of the ship able to function as a holodeck would make hostile boarding actions really difficult. If the force-field part of that equation was strong enough to withstand blaster fire and acetylene torches, or whatever raiders might use to cut through security doors, you could keep pirates going in circles for hours before they started to guess something was up. Or just send them in a U back to the hull and shoot them all into space. Really, any boarding party would have to have full environmental suits, because venting the part of a ship that raiders were in would be SOP.
Kobold Sydney vote incentive! Is finally done!
So… you know, check it out. Oh, and as usual, Patreon has a scales only version.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
I like it, though I will say the swap to sometimes having the more cartoon-y panels does stand out since it hasn’t been done extensively before. The one on this page with the noodle arms feels a little odd. Like they have sort of… an unusual level of detail? The bodies and faces mostly match up, but the arms are maybe a little overly simplified. A couple of cartoony clenched fists for Maxima might have made it seem less weird.
Gaxgy’s stump arms with finger nails/talons poking out of the elbows is actually kind of off-putting. At least Maxima has forearms, too, but she ends up looking like an amputee.
We know at least one of those hoard proposals came from Deus. Even tongue in cheek.
Deus would hoard her all to himself if he could
Perhaps Deus is a dragon is human disguise.
lmao of course the dragon is going apeshit over the gold woman XD
Well, now we know what the next vote incentive is going to be, and I must say I am looking forward to it.
Poor Gaxgy, he’s a thespian who has found his muse, but she’s not interested in inspiring him.
“but having the entire interior of the ship able to function as a holodeck would make hostile boarding actions really difficult.”
My group in Traveler, the role playing game, had our ship kitted out like that. And, yes, it made hostile boarding actions really difficult, when you could stand behind a wall that wasn’t really there, and ambush people, who were never, ever going to find their way to anyplace important on the ship.
Illusion magic is rediculous when you start using it intelligently.
I feel like something that needs mentioning is the part where you can conjure an endless army of holographic guards as well. If the holograms include forcefields the holographic guards are functionally real guards.
Manifest restrains already on all the boarders and then ziptie their arms to their legs. Or create iron maidens around all of them that shrink every time they move. Or if the forcefield technology allows, create forcefields through their arms and legs and offer to reattach the limbs if they behave. Forcefield through the neck if they decline.
Of course, if this sort of thing becomes at all common, countermeasures become routine for boarding parties. If you can generate holographic illusions, you can defeat them with sensor fusion. If you can generate forcefields, you can carry equipment to locally cancel them.
Then it just becomes a war of who has more power, where the home field advantage will generally prevail.
Honestly, it never made sense in STNG that the Borg could transport onto a federation ship, and not get immediately vaporized by unauthorized transport denial systems. They’re military ships, developing countermeasures once you know an attack is feasible is SOP.
Awwww I was hoping on a wicked montage episode xD
If only you’d left ot the “naked”-part, dragon dude, you might’ve had a ghost of a chance.
Offering to strip down yourself is just double-tapping your chances.
Dragons are not known for being subtle.
Okay, raise your hand if you saw this coming.
…Clearly that was a bad request. All right, raise your hand if you didn’t see this coming.
– Really, any boarding party would have to have full environmental suits, because venting the part of a ship that raiders were in would be SOP.
In any game that lets you, it is. Even if your own people are in there. (FTL is a good game)
I think Gygax just ruined his chances.
Well, all dragons have “treasurephilia”(*) and it’s the gold and jewels that tickle their fancy, art and magical items less so. (**)
I’d also say that they dislike paper money (flammable!) and electronic credit. Both are based on trust, which dragons notoriously lack. They want solid assets, not credit.
(*)Excepting few deviants whom other dragons look down on like we look down on r*pists and p*dos.
(**)Jewelry is …less appreciated. Oh, cut gems and artistically forged gold are better than uncut gems and bullion gold, but value added is kinda …meh.
I do believe the term you are looking for isn’t treasurephilia but plutomania.
The problem with boarding parties is not that you need environment suits, but when is it actually safe to take them off?
You’d basically have to capture the ship, then dump and reload all software from known good sources you carried aboard yourself. After careful examination of the hardware.
This to prevent a logic bomb from e.g. opening all the airlock doors 100 hours after an ownership change.
If there’s force field technology available, there must be some portable devices to prevent the defenders from arbitrarily manifesting fields in the vicinity of the boarding party. Otherwise I don’t think you could get anyone to be a boarder.
If not, the standard procedure would be to stand off and blow the ship up rather than taking a surrender. If you’re after cargo you can gather any that survives the blast.
No, it’s not as fun to game, but it’s about the only reasonable tactic that doesn’t result in unacceptable (to you) casualties among your boarding parties.
It also means you don’t really have pirates. You may have some privateers, though that’s a marginal career if they’re relying on the sale of small amounts of cargo, and they can’t reuse any captured ships.
Incentives matter.
You gotta give him props for trying!
Paint me like one of your french dragons.
Thank you for the laugh generated by this comic and your comments, I sorely needed cheering up today
She’s still covered in a holographic “disguise”, even if it’s now a hologram of herself, right?
Draconic Neuron Activation