Got a Crazy idea

So yeah, I'm bad at Thread titles, but also I want to make sure that people who are going to be playing the RPG with me (which I think so far only PlatinumWarlock lives close enough that might be an issue) don't get a potential spoiler.

So, platinium, don't read ahead please, just in case.

So, part of my idea for where I want to take the Sentinels RPG is this idea of a brand-new city built as a "turning point" of the world in the wake of Oblivaeon. However, I realized that building a city in a year is absolutely ridiculous. So, I asked myself, how could they acconmplish this.

I came up with a potential answer, but I'd like to run it by Sentinel Lore people to get their take on how possible this could be.

They rebuilt a version of Omnitron. Sort of.

Omnitron was a learning robotics factory geared towards warfare. Now, there are two major stupid moments here, 1) learning and 2) warfare. Combining them is even more monumentally insane. However, looking at Omnitron 4 and Omnitron 1, we see something potentially interesting. A near endless supply of robots, building things.

The timeline would seem to make the original Omnitron event as somewhere near the start of the Freedom Five, comic time is wierd, but that had ot have been almost a decade ago easily, so what if someone went back and looked at what went wrong, and decided to do it better.

Use the Omnitron Tech, without the Omnitron Programming. Potentially possible, Omnitron pieces were under study in multiple labs before Oblivaeon made Cosmic Omnitron and the old lab which built Omnitron probably had some paper files which were retreivable.

So, you rebuild the original "omnitron", and change two things. First, you do not program for war, you program for engineering and architecture. That slashes the danger immediately, because there is no reason to program anything involving actually weapons systems. Then, you highly limit or eliminate entirely the capacity for learning. You don't really need a learning robot, you want a mobile factory which can build a city by following the plans you give it. I can't imagine any advantage to learning software at that point, though predictive software and software to go back and correct problems like fixing the angles of a building that was drawn improperly could be useful.

I'm planning on calling her Brighid after the Celtic Goddess of Smithing, and the company which tested the technology by building this city with it is defintely keeping things on the down low, they spent years invested in being careful with this and making sure it wouldn't become another rampaging monstrosity, they don't want people avoiding it out of fear if they learned or suspected the origin. Which, I'm happy for complications to arrive later, but I'm not looking for a rebirth of Omnitron in my city, I'm just looking to use existing technologies, because if you stop and think about it, this sort of system could revolutionize construction in a lot of very interesting ways, and is a far better use of the Omnitron system than trying to solve War.

Thoughts or anything obvious I missed?

I think it's a great idea. I think that that would best be made making Omnitron 4 mold into the shape you want for  the city, and then having Omni-bots coming down and covering the exterior and interior with some kind of brick, making it a walled city (bonus fortification points if you make it on a hill), which plays along with the safety of this universe after Oblivaeon in theming. Then, after a large fight where the city was damaged, some of the covering would be torn off, revealing the Omnitron techand raising questions. Just my take, thanks for reading all this. And if you know of any online Sentinels RP groups, could you let me know? Thanks!

Two points :

1) a factory that can build robots can easily retool itself for war , how are you sure you have eliminated omnitrons personality , an AI is a better coder than you he could have himself in some header file that's  in a language you don't know but eliminating said header file atoms the factory.

2) The name , I have always thought of Brigid as a metaphorical fire kind of girl, something while one of her powers isn't her main one she's more like Athena where she is wisdom and crafts in general, why not pick a God who's focused on something ,none of the T  de D work for that though , why not pick wayland after the Norse Smith hero

I like the idea from a overall technical standpoint, but there pretty much has to be complications built into it or else it ends up being just a superfluous detail. (i.e. it's nice for verisimilitude but doesn't have any real impact on anything) Stuff like giving it back the learning capacity and having it constantly rebuilding things in ways that make sense to an AI crunching a vast amount of data but is bewildering to its non-AI inhabitatants with lesser brainpower (not necessarily lethal ways, but in ways that do stuff like cause amusing new oddball groupings of people or give villains things they can take advantage of to cause trouble), or having it be hackable by both villains and heroes alike.

Since you could go with more mundane alternatives; like a small rural city that takes advantage of its security through obscurity protecting it to try and build itself up into a bigger city to attract survivors from other cities to build an economy, only to find that also attracts trouble they weren't prepared for (particularly if the city already has a small cadre of lower-level heroes used to dealing with similarly low-level threats). I feel like if there's going to be something more out there going on, it should be something that has a likewise more out there influence on the storyline.

@Lord Flash Fire

Unfortuantely I do not know of any online groups. I'm also not looking for any so I probably won't run across them. If I do stumble upon something though I'll try and let you know about it.

@ Padcurtin

To your first point, we know that The XK-9000-Alpha (Omnitron's original designation) was perfectly fine in version 1.8. IT was in 1.9 that it became sentient and killed people. So, starting from version 1.8 or earlier is a good place to trim back to. Then you go over everything with multiple fine tooth combs. Like I mentioned, I'm imagining years of research going into this just to prevent this system from turning into Omnitron.

I agree though, there is nothing to say that there is a 0% chance. They could have missed something, or something unforseen could occur, but they are going about this way smarter than Blade did.

To your second point, I know robots are not gendered, but Omnitron feels like a masculine name to me. As part of the effort to get as far away from any association with Omnitron as I can, I wanted a female name. Which is the biggest part of why Brighid, because there are almost zero goddesses of smithing or building.

Also, I admit to something else. I had an AI with city-building capability already planned. It was much smaller and a potential ally/villain after the Living Dungeon style stories I've been reading recently. She was going to be a young girl build by "Dad-ulus" (actually Daedulus, but come on, Dad-ulus is sooo cute) a very old man who died soon after building her in secret and left her alone in a wrecked town that was abandoned in favor of this city being built. So when I came up with this plan for Omni-tech building the city... If Dad-ulus is her Father what if Brighid is her mother and she was built as an intelligent and "creative" version of this system by a Maverick Scientist? And that has some story potential I can be excited about.

This also covers @Jeysie's points to a degree, but yeah, there are definetly going to be potential problems with this, but I just didn't want them to immdeiately be "Omnitron lives again" problems. Though, once this becomes public knowledge (come on it is a secret in comic books the public isn't meant to know, it is inevitable that the public is going to learn) it could be interesting to have a terrorist who wants to set off a super-EMP to destroy the core, killing "Omnitron" but also wrecking the city. Could be an interesting dilemna.

I think the biggest hurdle is the worldbuilding.  If this story is in the US (or any major country) how did they get permission to do this?  What do people think of it?

I think there is a ton of potential for the idea, but I see it fitting an island or otherwise isolated location with a lot of autonomy that suddenly markets a "perfect city", complete with disaster proof buildings and infrastructure, nearly instant repairs, perfect security, etc.  The fact that they are using Omnitron tech would have to be the secret that the players will probably guess right away, but still have to deal with.

The new Omnitron could start trying to fix things as they are being destroyed, showing up at super hero battles, getting in the way, causing issues, etc. Eventually, they may need to try and react defensively to prevent destruction. It's only a few short hops away from there to Omnitron VI.

The other thing to do is that except for a few scientists, maybe no one knows Brighid's origins. It would be much easier to get federal approval that way. And then if a few errant lines of code got imported and things act a little funny, you've got a decent mystery on your hands where the heroes track down the strange going-ons with the robotic builders in the city and track down Brighid's origins.

One more thing you have to deal with is the fact that Omnitron is still kind of around.

If I'm remembering the Omnitron episode of LPP right, the hero version of Omnitron(O-X) is now the sole version in the RPG timeline. Depending on how you decide to use him, he may react any number of ways to old Omni tech being used.

Omnitron IV’s code is still supposed to be around but it’s inactive in the RPG timeline.  

I would say mainly: don't overthink it.

First, it's your RPG game.  Do what makes sense to you and facilitates the story you want to tell.  If someone (including you) thinks of something that could go wrong, use it if you like it, don't if you don't.

Second, this is based on a comic book.  Comic book writers are full of bad ideas.  And by "bad ideas" I mean all sorts: things that just wouldn't work, things that would go catastrophically wrong in the real world, things that aren't socially/politically/economically feasible, etc.  It doesn't necessarily make the stories worse.  Sometimes they get retconned (which is fine), sometimes they just gloss over them, sometimes they go through convoluted methods to explain them (which themselves may or may not make sense).  It's all good.

Is Birghid reasonable or practical in any kind of "logical" sense?  Not even remotely.  It would be astronomically expensive, require permits that don't even exist, and would be a matter of worldwide debate and protests.  The programming is also a non-trivial issue--bear in mind that self-driving vehicles do use machine learning techniques, and Birghid includes that and much more complicated tasks besides.  But does she make for a good story?  There's clearly a lot of potential there; it's up to you how you want to use it.  If I were a player in a campaign set there, I'd have no complaints.

Over all it's a cool story idea. Use it how you see fit. :)

I don't think it is too hard to imagine getting permission. This tech could allow for large-scale rebuilding efforts with little threat to no threat to workers lives. And if we utilize Omni's recycling capabilities the it could potentially break the formula and be Fast, Cheap, and Good.

The research was done privately, and now they want to use the tech, right after Oblivaeon leveled huge sections of the US and other countries. It is the perfect environment for this sort of tech to be greenlit, because if it works it changes the situation from apocalyptic to merely disastrous.

Plus, you don't need to convince "The US Government" simply your local representatives who deal with the building codes. One person, in charge of the budget, offered a sweet deal in land purchased, people relocated, and all the credit for being the guy who allowed for this quick recovery. I think he's probably jumping on board.

But, I hadn't considered the political angle before, so now I need to think about who this guy is and how big of a wave he's riding right now.

Yeah, but I feel like that is a down the road problem. O-X is stil recovering from his battle with Omnitron IV and Obvlivaeon, he's too distracted to make a fuss even if he feels like a fuss needs to be raised.

He may actually approve, since it would represent a change where his ancestors descendants could be seen as the partners of humanity instead of their enemies.

But, another good point I'll have on the back burner

It could totally work in a small town wrecked by OblivAeon, where a "new investor" suddenly starts dropping buildings overnight promising safety and high tech convenience to businesses that lost everything in big cities.  Just can't park it in Megalopolis or any reasonably big city, or there's a lot more hurdles and questions.  In smaller towns where any new development and jobs will get people to overlook the similariry in worker bots to that bad giant robot thing from years back.

It seems like the average Jane in the RPG timeline isn't hostile or friendly to super heroes, so it could be a kind of super hero free zone too, which would give the bad guy a great counter to any super heroes voicing concern.

Honestly my own comments were less "this makes no sense so don't do it", but more reading the "there won't be complications at first" bit and thinking that to me the entire fun of trying to come up with complex reasons for why a certain thing exists in the setting the way it does is because it gives you plot hooks and ways to make the players' lives interesting. If you're not going to do that, then I feel you might as well go with something simpler and more reasonably ignorable.

(Same with PC backstories; I like coming up with detailed "why does my character do their thing" because it makes it easier to roleplay them and easier for the PC to come up with plot hooks for you specifically.)

But I agree with not making it merely "Omnitron yet again"; I was trying to come up with ways that an AI with insta-building capabilities could make life interesting for the PCs and NPCs without even necessarly being malevolent, merely weird and annoying.

Ah, when I said "there won't be complications at first" I really just meant I don't want it to be obvious right away. The players are the new hero team hired to protect the new city, The Crownsguard, but I want them comfortable with the city and potentially have solved a few outside threats before I fully reveal Brighid and her origns. Probably hint at her sooner, but I want this to be a mid-story twist sort of deal, not an initial salvo.

Otherwise I completely agree, half the fun is finding ways to make things challenging, not just interesting.

I love it. Give the town a weird a bit too perfect feel to it. Adding some small detail that are off. To the common folk, they are happy for a new home but the heroes might think something is up, only to find out that they are just paranoid. I just did this to my group. Made other heroes sound super sketchy only to find out it was just how I was framing their perspective.

Birghid doesn't have to be evil. It can totally be reprogramed as a force of good, but will anyone trust it? Maybe the Heroes will have to defend it from hackers or talk to a conspiracy blogger that will oust the company and cause panic. I would keep it loose until you get a group and find what story they react to better. 

But most importantly have fun with it.

(It seems you already have what I wrote in mind. Still going to post it though)

Hey, I'm always glad to hear people's thoughts.

For some reason the phrasing of "too perfect" didn't occur to me before. Things that are obvious in retrospect and all.

Too bad this is at least a year out (forming the group at the college means I have to start games in either January or August, and no way the Core book will be out by January)