{"id":30507,"date":"2021-04-13T00:00:03","date_gmt":"2021-04-12T14:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/?p=30507"},"modified":"2022-05-26T12:45:54","modified_gmt":"2022-05-26T02:45:54","slug":"forbidden-weapons-of-the-omega-archive-pt-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/forbidden-weapons-of-the-omega-archive-pt-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Forbidden Weapons of the Omega Archive Pt 2"},"content":{"rendered":"
This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Forbidden Weapons of the Omega Archive<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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Image by Jagrit Parajuli<\/a> from Pixabay<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

I explained in Part 1<\/a> what the Omega Archive is, why I’m creating the contents of it, how to use the contents in your own campaigns. Instead of repeating all that, I intend to get more or less right down to the content!<\/p>\n

But first, the ongoing index list:<\/p>\n

In part 1 I covered entries 1-6:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Anima Device<\/li>\n
  2. The Anvil of The Photosphere<\/li>\n
  3. The Arc Of Nestrus<\/li>\n
  4. The Blue Bowl of Xiphilxus<\/li>\n
  5. The Cortex Realignment<\/li>\n
  6. The Could-Have-Been King and his army of Might-Have-Beens and Never-Weres<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In this part, I aim to deal with 7-12:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. The Cipher Plague of Dantus V<\/strong><\/li>\n
    2. The Entanglement Grenade<\/strong><\/li>\n
    3. The Festival Of Delphaeus<\/strong><\/li>\n
    4. The Gauss Lock<\/strong><\/li>\n
    5. The Greater Key<\/strong><\/li>\n
    6. The Gridwyrm<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      And still to come are:<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. The Halo Field<\/em><\/li>\n
      2. The Lord Of Travesties<\/em><\/li>\n
      3. The Meteorite Funnel<\/em><\/li>\n
      4. The Moment<\/em><\/li>\n
      5. The Nanodust Collective<\/em><\/li>\n
      6. The Nightnare Child<\/em><\/li>\n
      7. The Orphaned Hour<\/em><\/li>\n
      8. The Parallel Cannon<\/em><\/li>\n
      9. The Perspective Cannon<\/em><\/li>\n
      10. The Proton Shell<\/em><\/li>\n
      11. The Pyrovore Effector<\/em><\/li>\n
      12. The Singularity Locket<\/em><\/li>\n
      13. The Skaro Degradations<\/em><\/li>\n
      14. The Stellar Catapult<\/em><\/li>\n
      15. The Sword Of Eternity<\/em><\/li>\n
      16. The Tear of Isha<\/em><\/li>\n
      17. The Wormhole Reflection<\/em><\/li>\n
      18. The Time-Gun of Rassilon<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        So, with that out of the way, let’s get creatively mercenary with a sextet of original ideas….<\/p>\n

        The Cipher Plague of Dantus V<\/h3>\n
          \n

          The Cipher Plague is a computer virus that has a particularly devastating payload – over time, it gradually introduces into a computer system a condition that resembles aphasia in humans.<\/p>\n

          To really appreciate how nasty that is, you need to read the background in the Canon Notes below. I’ll be back afterwards to talk about the symptom progression and why the various obvious solutions are ineffective.<\/p>\n

          Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.<\/p>\n

          I was captivated by the fifth episode of <\/em>Deep Space Nine in which a plague sweeps the station causing Aphasia, and eventually, death.<\/p>\n

          Aphasia is a condition in which the ability to comprehend or formulate language is lost, usually because of damage to specific regions of the brain. It’s a real, and quite frightening, condition.<\/p>\n

          In other words, someone says something entirely reasonable – “Good Morning, how are you today? I am very well, and ready to get to work,” and the aphasic person hears a string of unrelated words “Umbrella teapot, mountain dew coffee chew sun sugar donkey, waterfall grab stark lunch.”<\/p>\n

          Aphasia can affect visual languages such as sign language as well as reading and writing. Like I said, scary – how would you like to hear nothing but babble when it’s clear from the tone that someone is trying to tell you something important? Or to be reduced to communicating in babble, without impacting in the slightest your intelligence, i.e. your capacity for <\/em>having something to say?<\/em><\/p>\n

          So, now you know. Let’s translate this into computer terms.<\/p>\n

          Computer subsystems and components have to talk to each other all the time, and they generally process every task symbolically – they don’t ‘think’ of ‘apples’, they ‘think’ of a term that represents<\/em> ‘apples’. Certain parameters and values may or may not be associated, depending on the design of the storage data structure – green, red, granny smith, delicious, worm, apple tree, Beatles, you name it. All communications and processing employs such index values or ‘tokens’ to find and retrieve the data on “apples” or whatever query you might have – it doesn’t matter if this is a line of text in a document being held in memory, or in a file, or an entry in a database (which simply means that the arrangement of contents itself holds meaning), or whatever. So the first thing you notice is file corruption – depending on the robustness of the system design, you may get a warning that a file save has failed, or that the file could not be loaded correctly, or it may assume that whatever it has retrieved is exactly what was supposed to be within the file.<\/p>\n

          That’s a relatively trivial problem in a memo. It’s a critical problem if the file contains specifications for the manufacture of a pacemaker.<\/p>\n

          The second symptom is the failure of common functions, possibly leading to program crashes. Reloading the program will sometimes cure these, and sometimes not. These will gradually become more prevalent. In reality, all functions are equally likely to be affected, but because the common functions are used more frequently and routinely – “load this”, “save this”, “print this” – problems in these functions are noticed more quickly.<\/p>\n

          So, your data gradually becomes more corrupt, and so does your software, and so does your operating system, and so does your boot-up process. Because such problems tend to compound, this is a fourth-power growth rate in malfunctions – and because both saving and retrieving data produces this corruption, it’s going to be in the middle of that range.<\/p>\n

          If the virus can initially cause only one failure per hour, at the end of one hour, it will be capable of something like 5 to the 4th power, or 625 failures per hour (about 10.4 per minute, or one every 5.76 seconds). An hour after that, we’re talking 390,625 errors per hour, or about 6510 per minute, or 108.5 a second, or one every 0.009216 seconds, and your computer is a complete idiot.<\/p>\n

          Human viruses that are too lethal rarely become epidemics; they kill the host too quickly for the virus to spread. The most series epidemics and pandemics come from viruses that kill eventually, but leave their hosts alone, with mild or even no symptoms, for a period of time in which the illness can spread. Make them highly infectious as well, and possibly airborne, and you have Covid-19 on your hands. The Cipher Virus is so disruptive that, left to its own devices, it would fall into that “too lethal” category.<\/p>\n

          For this reason, it is restricted by design in it’s efficacy (but not it’s infectiousness); it contains a countdown timer that slows the rate of it’s malicious activity by a random value between 25 and 500.<\/p>\n

          Let’s look at what that means. First, a 25 (the fastest ‘kill’):<\/p>\n