CAN CRY: FOURTH TDM

[cancrymods]

CAN CRY: FOURTH TDM

Welcome back to Can Cry's fourth TDM! If you're unfamiliar with the game, then you can check out the interest check, FAQ, world & setting info page and the powers and abilities page to get up to speed! Due to the slightly wonky timeline, threads on the Can Cry TDM are overall not considered canon, but players may consider individual threads to be canon for their CR. Characters on the TDM will have access to all of their starter powers as outlined on the powers page as well as two unique abilities to play around with as you please. Some prompts and location details have been provided below for you to play around with but please feel free to go hog wild and have fun!

AVARITIA

Larger than life and brighter than bright, Avaritia is the Greed layer of Purgatory. Despite sitting under a permanent night sky, Avaritia blazes with light of all kinds, in searing, strobing neon colours. Jazzy, mid-tempo music spills out from every corner of the streets and there always seems to be someone laughing, shouting, crying or making some manner of raucous noise. Unlike the previous two layers, Avaritia does not have any pretense of being a real, functioning settlement and instead presents itself as a city-sized monument to hubris and gambling. It's... well, it's Vegas, baby! Or it's a rough approximation of the general aesthetic and feel of Las Vegas's repuation, but, you know. Same difference, really. As well as being perpetually dark, Avaritia is also perpetually rainy. For the most part, this is just a thin drizzle that only barely makes itself known but on occasion, the heavens will really open up. Because of this 24/7 rainfall, the streets are constantly damp and dotted with puddles which quite frankly, with all the lights and signs reflecting in the wet asphalt and puddles, looks fucking dope. This, combined with the thin fog that's constantly seeping through the place, gives Avaritia a similarly disorienting effect as Limbo, where it can be hard to exactly find your way through the streets, even if you have a good idea of where you're going. The actual structure of Avaritia is rather scattershot. Rather than streets, most of the buildings are grouped together into small clusters, leaving wide open spaces of asphalt for people to congregate. This is to provide room both for the tidal wave of Spectres constantly coming and going but also for the many pop-up stands and kiosks that are pitching their wares to potential customers. Some of what they're selling is food, but a lot of it is gaudy accessories or clothes or trinkets or any kind of overpriced souvenier you can imagine. What does stand out in Avarita, however, are the four main buildings that the entire layer is more or less built around: the two banking towers, the vault and of course, the casino. Each of these buildings stands out against the skyline and the other buildings in its own way, so if you're ever terribly lost, you can use these as a landmark to re-orient yourself. Avaritia is markedly different from the previous two layers in that it runs very much on our old friend, capitalism. Unlike Limbo or Invidia, you won't be able to trade or barter here. The only kind of payment the residents will accept is cold hard cash, in the form of fat golden coins, colloquially referred to as "novas". Each coin is printed with a denomination of either 5, 10, 25 or 50 and prices in Avaritia run high – even your average shit-tier fast food meal will easily run you thirty nova. How you make money in Avaritia is up to you – but even if they won't barter, the Spectres of Avaritia are always up for a good gamble... Avaritia is a big-ass location, so to get the full lowdown on all the deets, check out the location page!

QUESTS

Since it's up to Executors to maintain order in Purgatory, this also means they need to resolve any issues that crop up for the Spectres occupying it. You can come up with any sort of quest you like, but here are some ideas to get you started: ⚝ A fight has broken out in the casino between a handful of Specters who were gambling together at a card table. One accused the other of cheating, the other made a very rude remark about the first Specter's parentage and now the gloves are off! You'd better break up the fight and see just how much weight that cheating accusation has. ⚝ You hear a rumor of disappearances in some of the more run-down areas of Avaritia and when you go to investigate you find a stray Revenant that's found its way up to the Layer from the Underside! It's causing chaos and no end of property damage so you'd better be rid of it. ⚝ While out and about, you hear rumors that the theater is being haunted by a masked woman who calls herself a "Phantom" and is demanding payment from the owners of the casino for some unexplained slight. She's uh, not the most original soul but does she have a legitimate beef? You'd better investigate and find out! ⚝ While giving the casino a try, you happen to get lucky and strike it rich with a small fortune! Lucky you! Of course, now you have to deal with the absolute mob of Specters coming your all way who just want to borrow (or outright steal) some or all of your cash. Feel free to NPC Spectres as you need for this TDM!

THE UNDERSIDE OF AVARITIA

Descending into the Avaritia Underside is like willingly throwing yourself into the deepest, darkest pits of sensory hell. The Greed Layer has never been a particularly friendly looking place but with it distorted into a labyrinth of flashing neon signs, oversized casino machines and Revenants swarming the streets, it's as though everything that makes Avaritia unbearable has been turned all the way up to eleven. It's... not a fun place to be! To make matters worse, things are loud here – as well as all the noise from the casino machines, music blares from an unseen source and the Revenants laugh and chatter and babble between themselves even as they fight and kill for the grubby Nova coins that can be found scattered around. It's a deeply unpleasant place to be, but this is where Greta has ended up and if you want to proceed then you have no choice but to plunge into this neon-drenched hellscape. AREAS OF INTEREST ⚝ Main Street: The main street of the Underside is kind of a hot mess. Whatever buildings might have made up this street before are long gone, some crushed and destroyed by the regular outpourings of coins from the giant slot machines and some having been ravaged and destroyed in some fight or other between Revenants. The street is lined with grubby, battered novas that have changed hands so often that the metal has worn smooth. Even so, the Revenants here fight over the money viciously, biting and scratching and killing over even a single coin. ⚝ Fort Nyx: The already labyrinthine layout of Fort Nyx's underground vaults has somehow managed to get even more confusing with the transition to the underside. The upper layer that once housed the bank has vanished entirely, leaving wibbly wobbly corridors that snake down deep into the depths of the vaults. You'll want to move fast as you travel through here, as the vault doors will occasionally burst open and a particularly aggressive Revenant will burst out, intent on protecting whatever meager treasures it's managed to collect and keep in the safe. ⚝ Et Voila Casino: You might have heard the term 'casino pit' before but this is pretty ridiculous! The interior of the casino has been replaced with a knee-deep deposit of gold novas that's not super easy to walk through. To make matters worse, there appears to be some kind of sinkhole at the center of the building that all the coins are gradually being pulled into. Thankfully, there's plenty of dilapidated casino machines and fixtures to climb up onto and keep yourself safe... but the place is absolutely flooded with Revenants who have absolutely woken up and chosen violence today. Stay on your toes! This is a general prompt for combat-oriented testing, to allow characters to experiment with their new powers as Executors! Because of that, and because combat will function slightly differently in-game, this section is pretty loosey goosey. Like previous posts, you are free to invent locations and NPC Revenants to make things more fun and exciting! If you would like some ideas for what sort of Revenants to battle, you can check out this video to see what sort of enemies exist in the original game, but beware that it does contain spoilers for Crystar.