The Great Escape: Breaking out of Dead Peaks Prison! [Takes place ~29AO]

[Dupin 156]

I'm hoping to start my new character's adventures here in Valucre with a bang and I want YOU to join me! Yes, that's right, you. The person sitting right there and reading this right now. I know, it's uncanny. You may even be thinking "What, me? But how does he know I'm even reading this as a stream of consciousness?" Don't worry, that's totally natural. I just ask that you also take a few seconds to ask yourself "Do I want to be at the center of a major event in Lagrimosa's history? An event with plenty of room for crazy magical boom booms, interactions with some of the baddest and brightest characters in Lagrimosa, and the potential for unadulterated chaotic decadence coupled with degenerate shenanigans of any flavor?" Now take a few moments and answer that for yourself. Don't worry, I'll wait...

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Great! Glad to see you're on board! 🙂 Now that I have your attention, I'll give you a slightly less condensed version of what we're actually doing (which is a longer repackaging of the Thread's title).

 

High-Level Idea

Having somehow found yourself in Dead Peaks Prison--Lagrimosa's premier super-max prison for the baddest of the bad--you are now stuck. Dead Peaks is known for being a nearly impenetrable nut to crack for just about anybody, and when you're on the inside this is only compounded by your lack of tools and total inability to use magic. You've really landed yourself in a deep pile of helplessness this time...HOWEVER, as fate would have it, luck is on your side! An unprecedented loci event caused the Shawnee Glacier to consume most of the Wasteland; what used to be a magical dead-zone is suddenly the densest concentration of magical potential on the continent! As you can imagine, this is quite a bummer for the prison staff and management. They've basically concentrated all of the most powerful/dangerous crazies (and edge cases) in one place with the express intention that they'd be unable to use magic...so woopsy? What follows the loci event is exactly what you'd imagine. We have a classic prison revolt situation on our hands, except instead of make-shift shanks made out of soap these prisoners' capacity for making folks bleed is only capped by our imaginations.

Will you make your escape? Will you join a league of villains? Will you indulge your hedonistic fantasies of guts, glory, and confetti? Will you run around screaming? All of this is up to you. Anything is possible in the eye of a storm hurtling helter skelter without regard.

 

With this basic preface in mind. Let's talk if you're interested! I have multiple different ideas of how this might shake out and am also pretty flexible to suggestions. I won't go into every divergent potential story trajectory that my poor little ADHD mind has spun up as interesting possibilities. Ultimately, how we do this is very dependent on the characters in play and, frankly, an exhaustive list of possible routes would be a painful exercise for me, my employer, and you (the reader of this post)...Probably the easiest way to get your imagination kick-started (if you're a fan of One Piece) is to imagine the madness of the Impel Down arc in One Piece, but in Lagrimosa & you can be ANYBODY & we have full control.

Also, here are some potentially useful links to give you a gist of the setting we're in:

• Dead Peaks Prison lore page (Hasn't been updated to include loci event, but mentions some of security measures that used to be in place)
• The Wastelands lore page (Describes the area directly surrounding the prison)
• The Dead at the Dead Peaks canonized thread (Describes a successful break-in. Relevant stuff starts on page 2. Also, made me laugh at multiple points.)

Note: Not at all exhaustive. Please suggest any other links you think I should add to this list.

I'll end by describing my character's "angle" in this story and where he needs to be at the end. I encourage you to do the same if you're interested in joining (this will help us start coordinating the "best" way to maneuver this). Also, I'll mention some personal "hopes", but I'm not married to anything since we can easily fill arbitrary roles with NPCs (or not, depending on the interest).

How my character got here (the abridged version): Around 30 years ago he was your typical socially conscious magitech scholar who started noticing some really funky business with some pretty influential people in an upstart empire. Afflicted with a severe case of cannot-mind-his-own-business-itis, he decides to use his technical prowess and hackery skills to dig deeper. Let's be honest, this was nothing he hasn't done before, so what could go wrong? Ultimately he gets tangled up in something BIG, and it gets dicey. He somehow gets caught, which ultimately leads to him being framed "as posing a threat to national health". Doing what the authorities do with "threats to the national health", poor Aymeric is sent to Dead Peaks Prison. While being carted off and the people who set him up watch, Aymeric proclaims his "final" bold words: "Everything is at the whims of the Law of Chaos! You'll get what you deserve, and one day I'll have the pleasure of knowing that!" Since then Aymeric has sat in Dead Peaks, thinking, biding his time (he's an elf, he has plenty), and carving small runes into tiny inanimate "toy" golems made of the odds and ends around him...

My character's goal and where he needs to be at the end: Aymeric hopes to get out of this madness. He isn't really a fighter, he isn't really even a lover (if we're being honest), he just wants to get back to doing the things he likes doing under that big wide Arcanosphere. (Prison has a way of giving a man perspective, you know?)

Some "hopes" I have:

• Ideally we will have a group of at least 3 characters "willing" to "work together" to find the portal out of Dead Peaks (with some NPCs as needed) . The dynamic between these characters will be a major plot driver.
• One of these characters is a prison guard who (reasonably) doesn't want to go up against a sea of baddies...or any other motivation. Again, if nobody has a character for this we can always use an NPC.
• Some sort of tension built on conflict with the Minotaur warden.
• Some sort of tension built on conflict with another prisoner(s).
• To explore the prison and gather some gear that might be useful once we get to "the outside".

Again, I'm flexible with specifics. There are plenty of seeds we can fertilize in this story and I look forward to coming up with a cool skeleton of how we want to tell the tale 🙂. If the interest for this is more than I anticipated, then we can certainly make this a "big" story. What's also nice about this sort of environment is that we can quite easily "write in" people who want to join and "write out" people who want to leave.

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TL;DR

Location: Dead Peaks Prison, The Wastelands, Lagrimosa, Valucre.
Idea: The loci event has breathed unprecedented magical capability into the super-max prison facility on Dead Peaks. Suddenly some of the worst criminals in Lagrimosan history find themselves empowered and a prison revolt ensues. Some prisoners are trying to take advantage of the bedlam to get out of there. Some want revenge on the guards. Others are just out for blood. Be at the heart of this historic event and ride the wave of chaos to your freedom...or don't and just go wild with your fellow degenerates. 
Expectations: Summarized in the bullets up above that are under the bold and underlined "Some 'hopes' I have". Make note that those aren't "hard" expectations. 
FAQs: TBD.

 

Current IC thread with a high level description of the setting in the second post: https://www.valucre.com/topic/45048-the-great-escape-breaking-out-of-dead-peaks-prison/

Again, remember that we can still edit things as needed! I just tried to set up enough basics to help pick up that creative traction.

 

Edited July 21, 2020 by Dupin

[supernal 21,905]

It's only been a few days but just putting this here in case you find yourself interested in an announcement banner

https://www.valucre.com/topic/40587-announcements-for-your-roleplay/

 

[Dupin 156]

Great, thank you very much! Helpful as always!

I'll probably write up a first post tomorrow to set the scene and try an announcement. If I don't hear after that, then I'll just keep the thread open and proceed as if it were solo. 🙂 

[HollowCipher 1,485]

Hmmm...... A prison break, you say? Dan may be up for this....

[Dupin 156]

9 minutes ago, HollowCipher said:

Hmmm...... A prison break, you say? Dan may be up for this....

Yes indeed! Is there anything in particular you (Dan) would want to get out of this/directions you'd like to nudge in?

[HollowCipher 1,485]

Well, Hmmm.
The reason Dan would be in there is because he heard this was inescapable. Dan LOVES breaking into the impregnable and escaping the inescapable.
Just ask Biazo Abbey.
 

Spoiler

Im not WHOLLY sure, but, being a son of hermes, and a serious klepto, he's probably gonna swipe everything of value he can.

[supernal 21,905]

6 hours ago, HollowCipher said:

Well, Hmmm.
The reason Dan would be in there is because he heard this was inescapable. Dan LOVES breaking into the impregnable and escaping the inescapable.
Just ask Biazo Abbey.
 

  Reveal hidden contents

Im not WHOLLY sure, but, being a son of hermes, and a serious klepto, he's probably gonna swipe everything of value he can.

On that note if he broke in to break out, he would have found that he could not escape, all of his abilities nerfed inside of the prison

He would have been biding his time until the moment that this escape happened, which was facilitated by the loci conflict, something he would have had no control over. Exposition for your post!

Also I definitely haven't forgotten about those priests you maimed / killed on the way out of stealing from an abbey. That’s a murderer, not a gentleman thief ... maybe that's how you wound up in there!

Edited July 21, 2020 by supernal

[HollowCipher 1,485]

Look, that was The Other Guy, not Dan.
And he wasn't going to use his magic if he, well couldnt. Remember how I escaped first time? I used no magic. Just thief skills and the ability to grow wings from shoes I wear. I have raw talent, baby! My mega sick awesome abilities are a nice bonus. X)

[supernal 21,905]

18 minutes ago, HollowCipher said:

Look, that was The Other Guy, not Dan.
And he wasn't going to use his magic if he, well couldnt. Remember how I escaped first time? I used no magic. Just thief skills and the ability to grow wings from shoes I wear. I have raw talent, baby! My mega sick awesome abilities are a nice bonus. X)

I sort of . . . remember wings from shoes lol but that was outside of the supermax prison and outside of the magical dead zone right? If he broke in at any point before the loci conflict which switched magic on, he would have no magic. In being a prisoner, he wouldn't have those shoes to activate, let alone the question of whether they would activate in the prison to begin with

If he's in dead peaks prison, attempts to break out will have failed until the near miraculous circumstances that conspired to allow the particular prison break talked about in this check

To say it another way: if you want a place you can waltz into and tango out of that's not dead peaks prison

Edited July 21, 2020 by supernal

[HollowCipher 1,485]

..................................................
No u.
(pout)

Edited July 21, 2020 by HollowCipher

[Dupin 156]

Yeah...my dude isn't a total weakling without magic and even then I had to give him an NPC prison friend since, inside Dead Peaks, the folks on top are the big bad fighter types who are still essentially death incarnate with their un-magicified bodies.

Another thing to note (I should've actually made this explicit, woops) is that this would going down in ~29AO IC. 

[HollowCipher 1,485]

The winged shoes and mega speed and thief skills and stealth aren't magic, by the by, theyre genetic god traits.

29AO? Whats that mean?

Edited July 22, 2020 by HollowCipher

[Aleksei 7,419]

22 hours ago, Dupin said:

Another thing to note (I should've actually made this explicit, woops) is that this would going down in ~29AO IC. 

 

8 hours ago, HollowCipher said:

29AO? Whats that mean?

The year this thread currently takes place, using the Terran calendar. Currently, in real time, the year is:

Terran Calendar: The current year is 31 AO = 599 WTA. All new threads happen during the current year unless otherwise stated by the creator.

You can find more information on it all right here in the good ol' lore article:

So that means this thread is taking place two years in the past, which would make sense considering the loci event.

All that said, may I sneak on in?

[supernal 21,905]

9 hours ago, HollowCipher said:

The winged shoes and mega speed and thief skills and stealth aren't magic, by the by, theyre genetic god traits.

29AO? Whats that mean?

Incidentally genetic traits are also controlled in the prison to avoid, for example, a siren that can emit sonic attacks due to its biology. I’d already considered this argument however many years ago I made the place 

If you can’t abide by the fact that supernatural abilities, however you want to define them, are controlled for until this event then this location isn’t the place you want to play. It isn’t an element you can game by saying “it isn’t magic, they’re god traits” 

[HollowCipher 1,485]

(sniffles) I was just looking for loopholes.