New Story (8/7) A Deal Re-Negotiated

In The AEG Website

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That must be some tasty meat if they’re planning to make money raising carnivores rather than herbivores! The energy required to feed carnivores goes up exponentially with trophic level, so even just a carnivorous cow that eats normal cows would consume an order of magnitude more energy. Instead of a $20 steak, we’re talking about a $200 steak!

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ah, but it is REALLY tasty, tender, steak that the Noveau Riche in New York will happily pay $200 for.
Remember, a plan doesn’t have to work to be implemented, it just has to be PERCEIVED as successful. Lillian BELIEVES that this is a successful plan. She is willing to pay to hire folks to implement the plan. And what Diamond Lil’ wants, Diamond lil, gets or they die trying (Kyle sez ‘hi’) :smiley:

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Step 1: Create mutant cows.
Step 2: Feed them the juicy meat they so desperately crave.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit

Obviously, this isn’t your everyday cowpoke’s steak. The market for Morgan’s special beef is almost exclusively back east in the places where people spend ridiculous amounts of money for all sorts of curious new trends … especially those that taste as good as this.

The other thing is that this is a transformative process. They aren’t raising animals like this from birth, but creating them from existing animals. So the need to feed them meat is only for a limited time until slaughter.

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I didn’t even consider this. If this is the case, it makes much more sense. Good point.

Then why feed them beef in the story? Surely it would make more sense to “transform” the normal cow into a delicious lizard-demon cow, rather than to slaughter it to feed another lizard-demon cow.

Honestly, I feel like this is just a poorly conceived concept. I’m going to chalk it up as “a wizard did it” in terms of rationality, and just live with it.

Maybe Lil can arrange a deal with Ivor to secure a steady supply of pagliaccios…

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You know entirely too much about the physical practicality of raising demon-beef, should we be worried?

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Don’t forget the good ol’ Ghost Rock factor. It makes everything better (just don’t mention the side effects…)

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As someone pointed out in the Facebook group, the ghost rock factor may mean they don’t need to consume nearly as much meat…

Of course, we all know that working with ghost rock can only result in happy things, right?

On a sad note, this makes me really disappointed in the Morgan faction. I was hoping for a more difficult struggle with money versus morality in their faction, not just a ‘well, of course that sucked about Kyle, but look at these cows!’

Don’t kid yourself, Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he’d eat you and everyone you care about!

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Now I can’t wait to see a Morgan dude who is a cow abomination.

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I wanted to put something in that explained this better, but there just wasn’t room and it probably was too technical anyway.

In addition to the fact that the cow isn’t mutant its whole life, remember that the meat it’s fed is not the only place it’s getting energy – it’s getting it from ghost rock too, which has an incredible energy density. A way to convert the chemical energy from a fuel like GR directly into chemical energy edible by humans is Kind Of A Big Deal, and worth putting up with their more particular dietary needs.

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And hey, Lillian is EXACTLY right about how she defends her practice: Progress isn’t free. Everything has a risk. WAY more people have died as a result of the industrialization of clothing manufacture than have died or ever will die to mutant cattle, but you’re not going to go naked because of that. Especially when you’re dealing in unexplored territory, you’re going to make mistakes and people will get hurt or die. But people can get hurt or die anywhere – if we get scared when someone dies doing Something New and stay away, we’ll never progress anywhere, and we’ll just have our people dying doing Something Old instead.

It’s a risk, yes, but a huge potential reward. Whether this will end up great or end up in ruin depends on if Lillian and her associates are as smart as they think they are. And they might very well be.

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“A wizard did it”.

Which is perfectly fine I suppose, because hey that’s essentially what ghost rock is in the setting. I just think the whole concept of feeding beef to cattle to make beef is conceptually underdeveloped in the story itself. I understand the space constraints, but if you need an addendum to explain the fiction then it just doesn’t “work” as a piece. At least in my opinion.

Overall I like the plot development that the story covers, I think just this part of the execution rubs me the wrong way.

As if I needed another excuse to get naked.

Back on topic, one thing is losing some lives at work and being ok with it because labour force and worker’s rights are something not very developed in a setting where people are still fighting a civil war about slavery. And another thing is playing to be god and creating a breed of flesh eating cows.

The difference is the answer to the question “What could go wrong?” on the first case, miners, factory workers, train workers and so on is just a few lives. On the second one is a little bit more catastrophic.

Isn’t the war over and the CSA abolished slavery in the story?

At this point it’s worth remembering that the dudes involved have the keyword ‘Mad Scientist’ (well, except Lil. But she’s a graduate of the Mina Devlin school of business which isn’t known for teaching things like corporate ethics and responsibility).

Also, yeah. In the Deadlands timeline the CSA was the first to abolish slavery (it helped gain them international recognition as an independent nation), and by late 1878 the Civil War has ground to a halt and there’s a ceasefire in place.

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Sorry, I’m not very familiar with the setting, I haven’t read the rpgs.