Mercenary
| ENEMY STAFF | |
 Mercenary |
Access: Anywhere you can get into by hacking, emagging, or exploding Qualifications: Not defined Employers: Not defined Supervisors: Your Employer Duties: Kidnap and murder crew. Sabotage and steal vital equipment. Space yourself while trying to reach the ship. Guides: This page, Uplink |
You and your team are ragtag hired guns, bought out by a mysterious employer (or perhaps simply your own whims) to launch an assault on the Stellar Corporate Conglomerate's most prized asset; the SCCV Horizon. Luckily for you, you have a wide variety of tools and tricks at your disposal to accomplish your task.
Setting Up
You start out in your base, which possesses a Quickee's Plastic Surgeon you can use to change your appearance, and various equipment and weapons such as thermal glasses, storage pouches, guns (ballistic and laser), and faction-based clothing. Your fellow mercenaries (marked with a big red S next to their sprite) spawn alongside you, and you can converse with them by using AOOC. If the gamemode is combined, other antagonist players will also show up in AOOC.
When you spawn in, start idea-lobbing with your fellow antag players. Discuss which alien species you possess the whitelists for, and settle on a "gimmick" and plan for the round. As off-ship antagonists, you have a fair amount of leeway in creating new characters to fulfill an antagonistic role, and you don't have to bend a crew character's personality to fit into antagonism. This means your gimmick can be as action-intense or peaceful as you like, so long as it engages the crew of the Horizon. Once you've settled on a plan, use the Set Ambition verb in the IC tab to describe your motive for the round. While not strictly necessary, your ambition shows up at the end of the round and enlightens other players on what your goal was.
Mercenaries have a private communications channel, which you can access by prefixing your message with :t. You also begin with a radio uplink in your pocket, which can be used to access exploitable information and purchase any weapons or gear not found in your base.
You also possess an Agent ID, what appears to be a regular ID card, which can be clicked on while in-hand to customize name, faction, and job title (by default, you're a "Mercenary"). This means that if you'd like to play a member of a Zeng-Hu biohazard cleanup team, it's easy to edit your ID to read "Urist McStation, Biohazard Containment Operative". The most important quality of this ID, however, is that clicking on another ID with it in hand copies that ID's access, allowing you to copy even a Captain's ID and go wherever you want.
Your Ship
Once your team is ready to go, bring yourselves aboard the ship, strap in, and use the console to move to the points around the Horizon. Currently, you cannot move around the overmap in your shuttle, but that doesn't mean your team can't take one of the Horizon's shuttles in a pinch.
You'll also note a cloaking button on your shuttle console. If this option is disabled, the ship will receive an announcement about an unknown spacecraft entering the perimeter. Depending on your gimmick, this may complement or complicate matters.
Your ship spawns with some extra engineering gear of its own, plus a fully-outfitted medbay with all important medications. The shuttle can dock with the Horizon's third deck starboard docking point, but nowhere else.
Roleplaying As An Antag
Playing an antagonist does not waive roleplay. While obviously you are perfectly allowed to injure, kill, and steal from other characters, you are expected to do so in an engaging fashion. Consider; if John McClane had been killed by Hans Gruber and his goons in the first ten minutes of Die Hard, would that be an interesting movie to watch? The same applies to you and your roleplay. While you're contemplating your merc gimmick, ask yourself some questions:
- What is my motive? The classic actor question. You have far more freedom to create a more unhinged or uninhibited character, given that they don't have to be employed with the SCC, but giving them even a basic personality or quirks helps to develop them and create for more engaging roleplay. Giving your character a reason to do what they do can bring a number of interesting variables into play.
- Who do I engage with? Your actions threaten the integrity of the ship and its crew, so naturally the Security department will be given to interact with you in any round. But who else is going to be involved in your gimmick? Does this gimmick hinge on the merc team's faction? Are you targeting a specific crewmember, or is the Horizon in general a target of your wrath?
- How will I complete my objective? Whether or not you "win" or "lose", your gimmick will change vastly if you change your methods. Your goal can be to kill Captain Jane Coalition because NanoTrasen has decided she knows too much, but do you kidnap Dr. Muhammad Elyra to convince her to turn herself over? Do you hold the ship ransom with a nuclear bomb? Or do you opt to blackmail Jane Coalition into giving up the information to a higher bidder?
It is good to remember when being an antagonist that losing is fun. You are four people up against a security team that can number up to ten, plus an entire ship of people willing to shout out your location over communications once the jig is up. Dying, being imprisoned, or even being cyborgified can all be part of the fun, so roll with the punches.
Nuke Ops
In your base in the dining area, there is a piece of paper with a code written on it. This is the nuclear code, which, along with a nuclear authentication disk, can be used to destroy the ship and end the round. Since this is obviously not a thing that is done lightly, activating the nuke requires admin permission, and significant buildup should be devoted to foreshadowing the nuke's involvement.
But, assuming you've met all of the above criteria and you've decided on the right moment, it's time to get nuclear.
The nuclear authentication disk is, by default, stored in the Captain's office. You possess a pinpointer which, when active, will show a little arrow pointing in its direction. Once you've grabbed it, you'll also need your nuclear code.
When you have both the disk and code, find the nuclear bomb located in the compartment at the very aft of the ship. (Keep in mind the code only works with this nuke, and not the ship's scuttling device.)
SOMEBODY SET US UP THE BOMB
Once you've found an appealing place for your nuke, you'll need to properly set it up.
- Right click the device to open its control panel.
- Make it deployable.
- Click it with your open hand.
- Place the authentication disk into the slot.
- Punch in the nuke code and hit enter.
- Set the time. Make sure to give yourself sufficient time to get off the ship; or don't.
- Set it to
Armed. - Disengage the anchor.
- Begin the countdown. If you die at this point, the nuke will still go off.
- Place the nuke anywhere you want on the station.
- Anchor it.
- Remove the authentication disk.
- Guard it with your life.
Spacing it is cheap. - Get to your ship and get the hell out of dodge, or die in glorious nuclear hellfire.
Contracts and Exploitable Information
Contracts are player-submitted antagonist prompts from unscrupulous sorts that involve theft, murder, vandalism, and other such crimes. If you are particularly in a bind for ideas, you can use these as a jumping-off point for your gimmick.
Exploitable information is player-written dirty little secrets about crew characters that can be looked up using your uplink. It isn't a hard and fast rule that all of the information is canonical; merely that the information about a character is plausible enough to give you, the antagonist, something to act on.
Keep in mind that this information doesn't always need to be something painting a target on said character's back; you can do a lot with the mere fact that a character can be bribed. Also note that if your plan is to kill a character for their compromising information, make sure to roleplay with them first.
Tips and Tricks
- If you think your gimmick could be improved by a smidgen of adminbus, feel free to send an admin help and ask for something to be spawned. Whether or not it's allowed is up to the discretion of the admin in question, so don't lean on it too heavily. Examples include spawning Lii'dra gear and black k'ois, miscellaneous xenowear, and special faction gear.
- Taking hostages can be a mixed bag, so use them with due caution. Rounds where the entire gimmick is centred around taking a hostage can quickly get tedious for everyone who isn't Security or the aforementioned hostage, particularly when you make excessive demands such as "I want all of the ship's funds" or "please give me the Captain in exchange for this Hangar Technician".
- Hostages work best when you're using them for brief periods of time as leverage to get out of a sticky situation. If Cindi Kate grabs Urist McStation and uses him as a human shield while John Sol has a gun pointed at her, Cindi Kate can slowly back out of the room and put some distance between herself and security. The longer you stay in a position bogged down with a hostage, the further the scales tip out of your favor.
- Human Wildlands gimmicks and Einstein Engines gimmicks are very, very common. Consider doing something different.
Antagonist roles
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| Antagonists | Odyssey - Traitor - Mercenary - Ninja - Changeling - Vampire - Revolutionary - Raider - Cultist - Cortical Borer - Loner - Technomancer |