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Post by DMC on Jun 25, 2015 19:10:49 GMT
Awesome! Is there a semi-realistic time frame in which a creatures body has to adapt to the pressure changes as they rise? Hours? Days? Weeks? I guess it sounds like it's just a matter of what type of "release valve" they have. What I'm thinking is having various deep-sea creatures suddenly being found in shallower waters (relatively speaking), and seeing how long it takes the party to realize that something's amiss. That it's not just a few random ones, that they've stumbled upon various staging areas at different depth levels. Meaning an aquatic assault is likely. I really like this idea. It comes across like a forced migration of creatures that most people have probably never even seen before. It seems like the players would also assume that the giant squids and other creatures are the problem that needs to be addressed. Instead, it is something greater that has caused them to surface in an unnatural way. Exaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaactly! The rising aquatic armies are like predators, pushing up all the rest of the food chain ahead of them.
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Post by DMC on Jul 6, 2015 16:06:41 GMT
Mitch & Chris, So you guys got a shout-out from someone on The Tome Show today regarding Psionics. The girl referenced the aquatic episodes and how you discussed Psionics in regards to how a race might have non-verbal powers underwater. Very cool!
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Post by DM Mitch on Jul 6, 2015 16:46:25 GMT
Really? Cool. Gotta go check that out! Thanks for letting us know!
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Post by joatmoniac on Jul 6, 2015 21:06:56 GMT
That is awesome, and now I will listen to at least one part of one episode of the Tome Show! So many podcasts, so little time. When Fantasy Football season starts back up I won't know what to do with myself!
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Post by Tesla Ranger on Jul 7, 2015 3:40:35 GMT
I know what you mean. I'm already having a tricky time trying to keep up. I fell behind last week because most of the work I was doing wasn't conducive to podcast listening and now I'm trying to catch up again. Too much goodness.
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Post by umbralwalker on Jul 16, 2015 20:27:07 GMT
Mitch & Chris, So you guys got a shout-out from someone on The Tome Show today regarding Psionics. The girl referenced the aquatic episodes and how you discussed Psionics in regards to how a race might have non-verbal powers underwater. Very cool! Thanks for the heads-up. I'm SO sorry it's taken me a while to respond; life is nuts here. If you watch James Cameron's The Abyss again (watch the Director's Cut, makes much more sense), you will hear them talk about how long it will take to decompress. I don't know the tables off the top of my head, but it takes significantly longer to come up if you're talking about a "diver" in a facility. Sea creatures are a different story. If there's no swim bladder, then do what you will. In Cerulean Seas, pressure adaptation rolls happen every 100 feet or so and each race has a depth tolerance to which they can dive without incident. I would look to their rules for more.
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Post by umbralwalker on Jul 16, 2015 20:39:19 GMT
Mitch & Chris, So you guys got a shout-out from someone on The Tome Show today regarding Psionics. The girl referenced the aquatic episodes and how you discussed Psionics in regards to how a race might have non-verbal powers underwater. Very cool! Listening now.
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Post by robosnake on Aug 29, 2015 20:02:14 GMT
So, before I joined this forum, I posted a couple of long comments on the Facebook page. These might be of interest to...someone? But they're kind of long, because I am a huge ocean-nerd. As an aside, guys, you can have as many of these episodes as possible. I'll probably love every one.
TL;DR: Many fish have lateral lines that detect vibrations in the water around them, and sharks specifically have ampullae of lorenzini, which are the bodies that detect electrical currents. I also talk briefly about Maori weaponry that might work underwater, and how I think a DM could handle echolocation without it being overpowered.
Hey guys - just finished this episode (or nearly so), and I have a few thoughts. The first is that I think guest Rich accidentally conflated two different senses that sharks have. (I'm a huge shark nerd, obviously) The first sense that he mentioned is the "lateral line", or a line of nerves that goes down the side of a shark's body - a lot of other kinds of fish have it as well. A lateral line provides a pressure sense, kind of like a weak 'blindsense' in D&D terms. It lets fish sense pressure changes and vibrations in the water, including movement the fish wouldn't otherwise see, and might be involved in helping fish turn as a group when schooling. (As in, they 'feel' the other fish turn before they would see it)
What I think Rich accidentally conflated with the lateral line (which many fish share) is a shark's electrical sense (which is more rare, though all sharks have it I believe). If you look at a shark's snout closely, you see little holes that look like pores. In these pores are bodies called the ampullae of lorenzini. They are these tiny sense organs beneath the shark's skin that enable the shark to sense electrical currents (as in, possibly the highest sensitivity to electricity in any animal). They are found in cartilaginous fish, and also in a few other species as far as I know, and are more than able to do things like read the electrical pulses that cause our hearts to beat, or our muscles to contract, or read the Earth's magnetic field.
My second thought is, when thinking about weapons one might manufacture in an underwater setting, you could look at what coastal/oceanic human cultures have put together. The Maori, for example, construct a spear point out of stingray spines, and a sword-like slashing weapon made of shark teeth attached along the edge of a wooden blade. Those are just two examples that came to mind as I was driving and listening - I'm sure there are plenty of others if we look at cultures that mostly relied on ocean resources to live.
And lastly, have you guys read The Scar by China Mieville? It involves a lot of surface and aquatic things, including a huge floating city made up of captured ships, and underwater city and species, and a monster that is many thousands of times larger than an aboleth. And it's a good book, too.
Keep it up guys, I love the show.
And then I nerded out again:
After all that, I had another thought while listening that I just remembered. Speaking of echolocation - the way echolocation could function in a D&D setting/system could be as enabling an echolocating species to make Search checks at a distance. With the example of the dolpnins' precision - it's amazing, but it probably isn't something their brains can process for every object around them at all times. Their perception is still limited by their attention. So to keep echolocation from being too OP, you could just let it allow Search checks using that sense. If you don't think to search, or if you're looking int he wrong place, it won't help you, but will still be awesome for finding hidden objects, telling what they're made of, etc at a distance.
If they are in the SOFAR channel, this could enable them to Search the entirety of the channel for something in particular, just as it could enable them to use Spot/Perception/Listen to perceive who else is in the SOFAR channel listening in. The way this avoid being too OP, I'd hope, is that it remains an Intelligence check or skill check.
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