ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So this one kind of snuck up on me. It started when I discovered that some of the shimmer packs have underwear/swimwear shimmers for body armor that look sort of like the bikini I chose for some of my characters and will actually show up on the character doll image in the vault (yes, I obsess over things like this… ). That got me thinking about bikinis in general, and when I saw another character in Steam Powered Armour, I got the obvious idea. Then I realized the problem: we'd need a mechanical core as a component, and there's no source of those in the main campaign. That got me idly brainstorming about how we could possibly add such a source. Then I checked and found a few more artifact schematics in Embers that also need mechanical cores and that people have been asking for in the main campaign, and I started wondering if we could wedge those in someplace…

The end result is my new Steam Powered Bikini addon. The eponymous Bikini (or Mankini for male characters) has slightly lower stats and requirements than the corresponding Armour, and by dint of some really deep wizardry, it also forms a set with the other Steam Powered gear in the same way as the Armour (though, again, with slightly lower set bonuses).

Also of note:

• We reproduce our sex-change handling from The Black Bikini, for all your Moonlit Dancing Lunar tinker needs.
• The upper- and lower-body moddable tile images for Steam Powered Armour turned out not to be really amenable to simply being cropped to the shape of a bikini, like we did with chainmail bikinis. So I had to resort to some Inkscape fiddling, cropping out assorted chunks of the armor images and reassembling them into something at least kind of appropriate:

  

  steam-bikinis1.jpg (111.8 KiB) Viewed 64 times

  

  steam-bikinis2.jpg (103.91 KiB) Viewed 64 times

  As always, I claim no artistic talent…

Now, in the Embers campaign, we simply arrange to have the same boss that drops the Armour schematic also drop the Bikini schematic. For the main campaign, we add a new subzone to Vor Armoury with hostiles that drop the relevant schematics and components. (This, of course, is the part for which I'm soliciting the advice and assessment of the local experts; this is my first attempt at designing new content on the level of an entire new zone, and my idea of "game balance" is "Normal Adventure with the Master nerfed to hell and back"… ).

And no, obviously this one isn't going into ZOmnibus…

Frequently Asked Questions:

Do you get an achievement for winning the game while wearing the Steam Powered Bikini?

…no? Obviously you didn't start the game wearing this artifact, and it's significantly more powerful than a normal bikini or mankini, which kind of defeats the "challenge" aspect of the achievement. There are, however, a few achievements related to the Steam Powered Bikini, which we will leave for the player to discover.

Why can't I put the Steam Powered Bikini in the items vault?

The Steam Powered Bikini/Mankini object itself requires a bit of support from the addon, notably the conferred talent definition, the character doll image and special handling for the online character sheet (about which more below). Using the items vault to move the Steam Powered Bikini/Mankini to another character that doesn't have this addon enabled would probably break badly, so we block it from the items vault to avoid the problem.

Hey! The Steam Powered Bikini isn't showing up right on my character sheet!

That's unavoidable, unfortunately. The characters vault on te4.org obviously doesn't know about our custom images for the Steam Powered Bikini/Mankini, and in their absence the character doll image on your online character sheet would probably end up naked. While we suppose that might appeal to some, we prevent it by modifying the character sheet for export to the server, replacing our custom bikini/mankini graphics with the corresponding default graphics. We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™