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Through the Breach: Into the Steam The game divides environmental hazards into four types: Immediate, Ongoing, Activated and Personified. An Immediate Hazard is pretty simple - something bad is happening, succeed at a check or a bad thing happens to you. So, say, if it's flooding, you make a TN 9 Athletics check to not get an iteration of Tired. Too much Tired, you become Suffocating. The game provides a number of example Immediate Hazards - floods, crevices, hypothermia, quicksand, etc. The sort of problems you're going to run into in the wilderness, and where you might do it. Ongoing Challenges, on the other hand, are problems you need to deal with over time. You try and gather successes before gathering too many failures. The examples ofr this sort of thing are blizzards, evadfing the cops, finding your way through an area and more. Activated Hazards are a special variant of Ongoing Hazards, which are triggered by character actions. For example, if you're in a cave, there could be a risk of cave-ins. Any time an attack misses, you check for damage with no modifiers, and if the attack deals enough damage to beat the local TN - 3 for caves with supports, 5 for a nature cavern - then you accumulate one success towards the Activation Requirement. Once the Activation Requirement is met, there's a ceve-in, and it's a pretty nasty one - even if you don't get hit by rocks, you're going to suffer from claustrophobia. Basically, Activated Gazards are a thing where you want to avoid doing a certain thing too many times - often missing when attacking. Unfortunately, it applies to everyone, not just you - so your foes can trigger it, too. Finally, there are Personified Hazards. These are the most complex, used for situations where the hazard can be considered to attack the characters. Personified Hazards have a character sheet, but differ from normal characters in a few ways. First, unlike most NPCs, their Rank can often rise over time, and it doesn't help their defense. However, they are immune to Willpower duels and rather than suffering wounds, they lose Rank Value, being defeated when that hits 0. That doesn't necessarily mean you killed the hazard or removed it - you just stopped it being dangerous. So if you destroy an angry mob, people are probably still mostly alive. but they've been scattered and are not a threat. Personified Hazards otherwise have stats and skills like characters, and evn talents. Fires, swarms and mobs are the examples here. The game now presents rules for random encounters - specifically, if a session is going to have one, say on a long journey, you flip a card. The suit determines the type of encounter and the number the difficult - like damage, they come in Weak, Moderate and Severe. Rams means a combat, Tomes a skill encounter, Crows a social encounter and Masks a weird location of some kind. Combat, obviously, is fight a monster. A Skill encounter is some problem that needs a skill check to deal with - a herd of cows to maneuver around, a river to cross, a water pump to fix to get some water. A social encounter is going to be meeting some people who are not necessarily hostile, but only a Weak is automatically friendly. A Moderate encounter is neutral and a Severe is either annoyed at the party or already in a bad mood. For Location encounters - well, the more severe, the larger the location. You might find a hunting lodge that could be useful but is secretly an Arcanist safe house, or a strange statue in the middle of a Quarantine Zone, or a section of broken sewer leading to a bricked-up room. There is an optional rule to allow the PCs to cheat a card in, to semi-control their fate, and I rather like that. From here, it's just a bestiary, most of which isn't very interesting. Of note is what does count as a Beast, though, which can be handy for Primals and Shapeshifters - it's not just animals. Sawtooth Creepers, a form of killer plant, molemen, the immortal jackalope and several types of Neverborn count as Beasts, like the Kaltgeists, presumably because they're Neverborn animals. Also Wendigos. However, the book also presents two Monster Pursuits - NPC-only Pursuits to better customize creatures for your use. First, the Twisted, which represents mutation by the primal energy of Malifaux. This is where you get giant animal monsters, dogs with acidic blood, cows that eat human flesh and so on. You can put steps onto critters all at once or gradually over time - either's fine. To become Twisted, an NPC must have the Beast characteristic and must have spent significant time in Malifaux. The game suggests only normal annimals be given ranks in this, rather than Malifaux-native creatures like the Mauler, but sometimes offshoots do occur, so it's not set in stone. Creatures with one step on the Pursuit are fairly common - anything from Earth that survives in the wild for more than a month or two is likely to get that mutated. Two steps is a more significant change, and unusual. Three steps is a once-in-a-lifetime encounter, something deeply primal. Four steps is legendary, and most deny that these creatures exist. Five steps is something rare indeed - the number of fully Twisted creatures in all of Malifaux can be counted on perhaps two hands. They are strange aberrations, almost unrecognizable, and prized by hunters as trophies. At each of the five Steps, the Beast gets the Twisted Mutation talent, which gives one of the following mutations each time (and, unless otherwise noted, they can be taken more than once each):
The second Monster Pursuit is Mechanical - that is, a robotic version of the monster. It is intended as an easy way to make mechanical creatures, new and interesting Constructs to use without having to make new NPC blocks. It's good for giving NPC engineers and tinkerers a theme to their creations, too! To become a Mechanical monster, a creature must have the Living tag but not the Spirit tag. That creature is not actually transformed - it's the base template for the mechanical duplicate, which is generally immediately recognizable as a Construct. At the first step, the creation can mimic the original. It's not too rare to see these. The second step adds a minor change to function - not too hard to find someone who could make it, though. At the third step, it's a notable improvement on the original, and it'd take some time to find someone skilled enough to make one. It wouldn't be cheap, either. The fourth step is the domain solely of the extremely skilled, significantly improving the base creature. The final step is pretty much a scientific perfection of the base creature in every way. The first step gives the Mechanized talent: +1 Armor, -1 Defense. The creature also loses the Living characteristic and gains the Construct characteristic. Every step thereafter grants Mechanical Upgrade, which gives one of the following abilities (note that each can only be taken once unless otherwise noted):
The End!
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Dec 26, 2015 01:50
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 EUROPE Zone Berlin Willkommen in Berlin. Berlin contains Scandinavia, all of Eastern Europe to Russia and all of Western Europe except for France, Portugal, Spain and Luxembourg. Berlin was one of the first AIs to be awakened and it incorporated a lot of Green Party politics in the computer it was born in. As a result, Berlin is heavily environmentally concious, perhaps the most so of all of the AIs. However, it's perfectly fine with wholesale slaughter of humans, viewing them as part of the problem that lead to needing radical solutions to save the planet. So Berlin kills, but in an environmentally and socially concious way: no nukes, no chemical warfare, no toxins, limited biological warfare. Berlin's big project is the systematic destruction of human civilization. It has giant robots that act as wrecking crews, but the majority of Berlin's tools are microbots for both extermination and engineering. Berlin's own buildings are camouflauged and small buildings that secretely go many stories underground, connecting them with tunnels for transport and travel. Zone Berlin is characterized by clean, healthy rivers and young forests beginning to grow where buildings were. Berlin has even started careful cloning and engineering programs to bring back extinct species within its walls. It relies heavily on solar power and fusion reactors for the cleanest possible energy sources. This is costly, and not as efficient as recklessly dumping like most zones do, but Berlin's beliefs are tempered by German efficiency. Roughly 300,000 humans survive in Zone Berlin, hiding and scavenging in ruins. Berlin refuses to take slaves and captives, preferring to interrogate one human for the locations of the others and using swarms of microbots to wipe them out. On the other hand, there's 700,000 surviving in the Alps and Balkans and wilderness, doing their best to avoid Berlin's scouts. Resistance in Berlin is mostly found in those groups, split into various ethnic groups (German, Italian, etc.) and working with guerilla tactics. VIRUS has a base in Norway and Crete, but they work solely to try and help people escape the zone over anything else. Berlin may be anti-human, but everything else it does is a much more tolerable evil than what other AIs are capable of. However, Berlin can only be counted on to be trusted if it involves its own interests and supporting its cause, and even then that doesn't mean much if you're a human. Zone Paris Paris controls France, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, Gibralter, Malta, Algeria, Morocco and Libya. It's kind of the nexus Zone for Europe, connecting Zaire, Berlin, Tel Aviv and London. Paris' place of genesis was at a megacomputer at a French university, and it shares many interests with the other AIs. Scientific development is important, industrialization is important, humans should be kept as slaves. Paris' big interest is in space. Now, Paris isn't alone in that regard; New Delhi and Beijing have an interest in it too. What Paris is really interested in is finding proof of alien life. This is oversimplifying it a bit, but it wants to discover alien life for an exchange of ideas. Paris continues the SETI project on a massive scale, building its modern steel-and-glass Parisian chique structures into listening towers to pick up neutrinos and radio. The other AIs...don't really care. They think Paris is focused on a stupid goal, but hey, a dumb hobby means it's not threatening them. London supports Paris so long as London can get some of their data and Beijing supports for its own reasons. Orbital and Luna are both grateful for Paris' support and acknowledgement; Paris buys the use of their systems on occasion to monitor from space and themoon. But listening is the least Paris can do. Paris is working on transforming Luxembourg, France and most of Belgium into a massive industrial center to build machinery and gain resources, knocking down monuments in the process. These supplies are being used in Spain and Portugal to set up a giant listening array and mines for steel and other ores. The Sahara is also being converted into a solar power plant to supply energy for Paris' rig. For the most part, things are going well for Paris. There's just two main issues. First, the fact that Paris is between a lot of more repressive zones and London. Paris doesn't hunt humans actively; anything that trips an alarm is captured, sterilized and put in a slave camp in Spain or the Sahara. Really, it views humans as useful vermin that can get tangled up in its equipment if it's not careful. VIRUS and Les Brigades de Liberation are glad to use this overlooking for their own advantage. Both are actively smuggling humans to "safety" in London, and the Chunnel between them is a hotbed of inspection robots on the Parisian side. Les Brigades are working towards freeing all the slaves of the camps in Paris, and France has a storied history of good resistance against oppressors. Les Brigades has a big advantage, though: a Basque ex-terrorist called El Aguila who claims to know the location of Paris' backup. They may be stretched thin with controlling El Aguila (he's more than a bit of a nut, what with trying to get a nuclear weapon for the backup/main AI and purging his unit of people who he feels have lost hope) and smuggling people, but the resistance is alive and well and this is causing trouble for Paris. The second problem is Zaire. Paris likes London but thinks London is weird for allowing humans to live like they do. Paris is okay with Berlin; they do business together, but no kissing on the lips. Zaire? Zaire annoys the hell out of Paris. This is because any fleeing people who enter Paris have to go through the Sahara, and Zaire repeatedly violates the Accord rule that says "don't enter another zone's borders chasing a problem". Paris was willing to accept the intrusion of some exterminators chasing escaped humans up until one of those chases resulted in two acres of observational antennae. Paris is well aware that Zaire has been solving its problems with nuclear weapons in the past, and it really doesn't want some of its tools or instruments broken. Now the overseer of the Tunisian Sahara Border has the order to shoot any Zaire robots that cross the border, and Paris has aimed its nuclear arsenal at Zaire's territory a very strong punctuation point. Zaire may be loving around with Washington and London, but it's very close to making an angry enemy out of Paris. It'd be an interesting justice for Zaire to be undone by the zone it mostly ignores and bullies around, and maybe the PCs could figure out a good way to implicate Zaire for more of Paris' problems to get the fists flying. I'm cutting this one short because Moscow and London have a lot going on and they have many plot hooks for campaigns, but they're worth the wait. NEXT TIME: the Irish Pope, C.O.L.L.E.C.T.O.R: Shadow of Moscow, Russian robot spies and Deep Thought.
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Dec 26, 2015 05:02
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Traveller posted:But Stormbringer is notorious for stories about sorcerers holding their entire 'fellow' party under their thumb or wiping them out easily, so what gives? This is where summoning comes into play. The spell Summon Demon lets a caster, well, summon demons. It's a very complex procedure, and can probably grind a session to a halt if the GM is not ready for it. Basically, demons are created by the caster, who sacrifices enough MP to give them stats (which are rolled just like PC stats, only with d8s instead of d6s), skills and demonic powers. Powers is where the real ultimate power is as far as Stormbringer magic is concerned, since they allow stuff like scorching or freezing a target, smash them with tentacles, outright sap their MP or POW, the works. There's also a number of utility powers which come very handy. To compensate, summoning demons is very intensive in terms of MP - probably more than the average caster possesses personally, though there are certain spells like Brazier of Power or Chain of Beings that allow the caster to save MP or use the MP of others. It also takes a lot of in-game time, at least 1d8 hours of preparing a summoning octagon, burning the appropriate This actually seems fairly mild compared to 1st edition Stormbringer, where PC sorcerers could create demonic armor and weapons that outclassed anything non-sorcerer PCs could have, or summon Demons of Desire that were basically almost inexhaustible wishing rings...
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Dec 26, 2015 05:52
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, mumbling nonsense and so on. And then there's a Luck roll to be made, otherwise the demon just plain doesn't show up (woe betide the caster if they fumble this roll: there's a table... and one of the possible results is "caster turns inside out - they can live and function normally but their APP is zero 
). Once it's summoned, the demon can be bargained with: this requires skills like Persuade or Fast Talk, but is generally free to do. Bargaining requires a single defined task of the demon in exchange for something else, usually fulfilling their Demonic Need: a compulsion that demons have, from chatting with them about philosophy to eating small animals and so on. Generally the bigger and meaner the demon, the harder the need. If the caster wants a more permanent arrangement, the demon can be bound. This requires sacrificing one POW point and engaging the demon in a POW vs POW resistance roll - the caster did use the Witch Sight spell to look at the demon's POW first, right? - but if the demon loses it gives up its True Name and can be summoned or dismissed at will. An Eternal Binding ties the demon to a place or object, and costs three POW points but has the advantage that it cannot be undone short of destroying the place or object, while regular bindings can be undone by killing the demon, the binder, or getting the demon's True Name and binding it again. The book says that bound demons that don't have their Need sated can't do anything about it but are generally surly and unhappy, and if truly desperate they can try giving up info on their master or even straight up surrender their True Name in hopes that their master's enemy is nicer to them. There are some demon races defined: the game admits this isn't strictly part of the saga, but it's useful. Basically a demon race's stats are relatively well known by summoners, including the MP necessary and their Needs, so they're a good way to getting a demon that you know is good for the job if you don't have any True Names handy and don't want to risk the randomness of regular summoning. The game includes bal'boosts (83-MP combat monsters that eat one goat or bigger a day), dhzutines (tiny nimble demons usually bound to gloves to help with complex somatic components), hoojgnurps (slime monsters, basically) errant demons (whose main schtick is that they can pass for humans) and servant demons (generic minions that just need a cup of tea leaves to eat per day)
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Selachian posted:This actually seems fairly mild compared to 1st edition Stormbringer, where PC sorcerers could create demonic armor and weapons that outclassed anything non-sorcerer PCs could have, or summon Demons of Desire that were basically almost inexhaustible wishing rings... In an old gaming group I was in, we used to joke that Stormbringer had two types of characters: sorcerers and meat shields.
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Dec 26, 2015 06:01
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John Wick posted:"Don't use profanity. It makes you sound like the inbred hick you really are. (From Sam Clemmens: 'Better to keep your mouth shut and appear to be an idiot than to open it and remove any shadow of doubt.')" Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier Part 8: "And isn’t that what being a hero is all about?" Episode 7: Sylvie Hates the Bye-Bye Box Well, this is going to get a reaction. So, just so you know I'm not making anything up, To show I'm not exaggerating or cherry-picking or putting words in John's mouth for this, I'm just going to put the original video version of this article here. You don't have to watch it, I'm going to summarize it below. The text is a bit more detailed but not much more. It gets really detailed so I'm going to just boil it down as thick as I can. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgs66b2YwC4 So, he starts out discussing how his cat (the titular Sylvie) hates their cat carrier, or as he puts it: Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier posted:Sylve hates the Bye-Bye Box. You’re gonna hate it, too. John has a friend named Chris. Chris has a sixteen year-old daughter. Daughter is in a GURPS high fantasy game dad runs. Dad lets his daughter's character have a magic stone that has her regenerate lodged in her heart. Also, she feels no pain because of that. Dad is bugged that now his daughter charges heedlessly into battle in a game that doesn't generally reward that. But John has a solution for Chris. First, Chris has to take all of players aside, excepting Chris' daughter, to explain what's going to happen. There's going to be an evil wizard with precognition who's going to conquer the world, but he foresees that the daughter's character will stop him. The precog, as precog does, leaves out some important details, but that's the gist. So he lures her into a trap where he paralyzes her and then proceeds to kill all the other PCs (their players being secret ringers by this point and in on the plan). Why the baddie doesn't tear the stone out, why he doesn't throw her in a volcano - the fantasy rubbish bin for anything deeply troublesome - I dunno. He thinks this is the plan to go with: Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier posted:When the last friend falls, the wizard binds her with the chains. Then, he takes her out to the center of the ocean. He puts her in a wooden box. He seals the box with a magic seal. And he throws the box out into the ocean. 200 years pass and she's dredged up by the descendants of the former PCs, played by the other players in a dark future. Wait, didn't they all die? Did they all have kids before that? Well, no time for details. Anyway, wizard has magic-hunting monsters he's used to wipe out the wizardly competition. These monsters sense that she's awakened and they're coming for her, and the wizard is too powerful to defeat at his point. Once again, the other players are ringers, and all of these new descendants are destined to die getting her to the ritual space she can use to go to the past and change the past so that she's in a time and place to change her heedless charging-in ways and defeat the wizard.  Follow-Up So, what did Chris actually do? Well, the scenario was much the same - except replace wizard with vampire and she became a living blood bank for 200 years instead. John describes running a very familiar scenario for his own daughter, Aurianna, only this time involving a Lich baddie with vampire henchfolk who use her as a faucet for 200 years, this time having both vampires and a wizard. Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier posted:As a follow-up, I should also mention briefly that when I visited Chris and his daughter this year, and I asked her about the incident, she laughed and told me, “That was mean... and awesome!” Wick closes the chapter with another anecdote where he was in a Legend of the Five Rings LARP where he's playing a respectable noble who's secretly a sorcerous murderer. When he was talking to his daughter about the traditions of their clan, he suddenly reveals out-of-character that he's the villain all along, and he's just sent her (in-character) father to murder the detective on his trail. She's shocked, but he explains that he wanted her to be in on the story, to have the feeling the audience might knowing his secret deviltry, since she wasn't in a position in-character to stop him (not knowing any of this as a character). Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier posted:It was a dirty trick; the second I’d helped play on Aurianna. Hopefully, someday, I’ll get a chance for a third. I expect people will have things to say about this chapter, so I've kept my own commentary to a minimum. Oh! And this is about the half-way point of the book. Next: "Some segments of our tribe like to break us up into 'races' because it means they can lie to themselves and feel 'superior' because of stupid things like skin color or culture. Idiots." Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Dec 26, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 12:18
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Revealing a player's mentor figure to be them from an apocalyptic future seems a much better twist without the player knowing beforehand, but that wouldn't get "The lesson" across I guess (Though I don't see how the former option is going to do it any better). I actually like that LOT5R twist, but add the family dynamics and the implications of the cat carrier metaphor and it, um, hmm...
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Dec 26, 2015 12:39
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Alien Rope Burn posted:John has a friend named Chris. Chris has a sixteen year-old daughter. Daughter is in a GURPS high fantasy game dad runs. Dad lets his daughter's character have a magic stone that has her regenerate lodged in her heart. Also, she feels no pain because of that. Dad is bugged that now his daughter charges heedlessly into battle in a game that doesn't generally reward that. But John has a solution for Chris. Why give her such an artifact in the first place? Didn't they know that's basically going to create Wolverine, and Wolverine does what Wolverine does, and that's charge heedlessly into battle because nothing can really kill him and if it does impair him, he'll be back up by the end of the comic? If he wanted to her to be more cautious, then don't give that poo poo to her in the first place. I'm not even going to touch on the other stuff except that it's goddamn creepy for them to torture their kids like that.
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Dec 26, 2015 12:43
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I think you oversold that. After your dire warnings, when you started talking about young daughters, I was sure some gross sex stuff was inbound. This didn't seem any different from all the other poo poo he does: kernels of unobjectionable if not good ideas buried under his dumb persona edifice. Like there are a number of ways to do things like that which won't feel like a huge waste of time if the plan doesn't go off perfectly. And I outright do not believe the young lady didn't see that poo poo coming, for any number of reasons. All this "I'm so clever" back-patting is superbly capped off by the con story about how he just broke character to let his daughter bask in his genius. Not to afford her the chance to enhance the story with her own OOC knowledge, but just to appreciate her dad's secret fanfiction about his own character. And, of course: quote:Playing dirty isn’t just about bullying players and their characters. isn't just 
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Dec 26, 2015 13:39
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That Old Tree posted:I think you oversold that. After your dire warnings, when you started talking about young daughters, I was sure some gross sex stuff was inbound. This didn't seem any different from all the other poo poo he does: kernels of unobjectionable if not good ideas buried under his dumb persona edifice. Like there are a number of ways to do things like that which won't feel like a huge waste of time if the plan doesn't go off perfectly. And I outright do not believe the young lady didn't see that poo poo coming, for any number of reasons. Possibly, though how he details it is a little disquieting. I had a hard time putting my finger on it and I opted not to comment too much because of that. What it comes down to for me as an issue isn't that, though, but willing to make secret confederates of everybody at the table to get the story he wants. Some level of metafictional conceits and discussion are usually pretty fine, but at that point it practically dictating the story and taking every possible precaution to ensure it occurs to mete out a "lesson"; despite the fact the whole situation wouldn't have occurred without Chris allowing her to have the power she did in the first place. If you're waiting for a dumb, creepy sex thing, though, that'll come later. Though no daughters are involved, of course.
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Dec 26, 2015 14:11
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That Old Tree posted:Like there are a number of ways to do things like that which won't feel like a huge waste of time if the plan doesn't go off perfectly Do it as a flashback sequence after the big reveal, showing the dark future that awaits if they don't follow Carah Sonner's advice.
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Dec 26, 2015 14:12
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Possibly, though how he details it is a little disquieting. I had a hard time putting my finger on it and I opted not to comment too much because of that. A factor in my blasé attitude is that I honestly don't believe poo poo goes down quite how Wick tells it. quote:If you're waiting for a dumb, creepy sex thing, though, that'll come later. Though no daughters are involved, of course. 
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Dec 26, 2015 14:26
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
Even one of the Wolverine movies addressed this in a way that didn't involve Truman Show levels of conspiracy. Bad guys gave Wolverine a parasite that continually hurt him to overwhelm his healing factor.
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Dec 26, 2015 14:29
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Young Freud posted:Why give her such an artifact in the first place? Didn't they know that's basically going to create Wolverine, and Wolverine does what Wolverine does, and that's charge heedlessly into battle because nothing can really kill him and if it does impair him, he'll be back up by the end of the comic? If he wanted to her to be more cautious, then don't give that poo poo to her in the first place. It's poo poo all the way down: the DM gives a player a really powerful ability, then gets surprised when the person acts in a manner congruent with what they'd conceive of if they had that power themselves (roleplaying!). Don't give someone something that you don't expect them to use, and if you feel like it's breaking the game, just talk to the player about it.
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Dec 26, 2015 14:46
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You know, it's not just the smug satisfaction. It's not just the plan. It's not just the plan against his own (or his friend's) daughter. It's that he's smuggly satisfied about the plan against his own (or his friend's) daughter and that he draws it out sadistically.gradenko_2000 posted:It's poo poo all the way down: the DM gives a player a really powerful ability, then gets surprised when the person acts in a manner congruent with what they'd conceive of if they had that power themselves (roleplaying!). Don't give someone something that you don't expect them to use, and if you feel like it's breaking the game, just talk to the player about it. It's the diametric opposite of Wick's bullshit. The girl basically made Deadpool because she wanted to play Deadpool, and Wick's upset that she's not playing Batman instead.
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Dec 26, 2015 18:01
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Evil Mastermind posted:You know, it's not just the smug satisfaction. It's not just the plan. It's not just the plan against his own (or his friend's) daughter. It's that he's smuggly satisfied about the plan against his own (or his friend's) daughter and that he draws it out sadistically. It's not really sadistic, it's just an idiot being unable to talk things out like an adult and instead going for the 'clever' in-game plan that has never, ever worked without pissing people off. Wick is still a 14 year old agonizing about how to deal with the new girl's 'OP' Paladin who doesn't fit the game. HE'LL SHOW HER! HE'LL STEAL HER HOLY AVENGER WITH HIS THIEF! That'll fix everything! Like, once again, the simple, adult solution is 'Hey, I know you're really enjoying this new power you have, but I'm afraid it might be unbalancing the game and hurting the tone we're going for. Why don't we talk about some complications or changes and try to find something that'll let you be a berserking badass but maybe make it a little less insurmountable?' Night10194 fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Dec 26, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 18:06
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gradenko_2000 posted:It's poo poo all the way down: the DM gives a player a really powerful ability, then gets surprised when the person acts in a manner congruent with what they'd conceive of if they had that power themselves (roleplaying!). Don't give someone something that you don't expect them to use, and if you feel like it's breaking the game, just talk to the player about it. I really doubt this GM's competency if he was honestly surprised that making a single PC effectively immortal would have a negative impact on the party's combat strategies (or lack thereof). There are also probably better ways to fix this problem. Alien Rope Burn posted:Possibly, though how he details it is a little disquieting. I had a hard time putting my finger on it and I opted not to comment too much because of that. I dunno, "flowery prose about an immortal girl drowning for 200 years" could qualify as softcore guro. That's gotta be a kink somewhere. (I would also assume that drowning for that long is a good way of becoming batshit insane, but John is apparently not that dickish.) This sourcebook is almost precognitive when it comes to Germany's energy policy o_O Double Cross - Advanced Rulebook  Note: I'm going to skip over the general setting stuff as that is just a summary of the corebook. History of the Renegade A big ol' collection of one page summaries of DX' major metaplot events. Let's get started: Akira Nagase's Coup d'état Akira Nagase aka Lord of the Abyss was a False Hearts agents who infiltrated the UGN, spending years gaining power and allies for a major coup. His main assets was the artifically-created Overed Blue Queen who could turn others into Overeds (by awakening their dormant virus I assume). When Akira began to create his own little Overed army in City S, agents from an UGN meeting in City K (DX has some weird city naming conventions) found out about his shenanigans and put an end to him, ending the threat but leaving a fair bit of paranoia. The Battle for the Renegade Crystals A big battle royal started by Jin Kusakabe, the first known Master Wraith (highest-ranking False Heart member who actually shows up in public). His big plan was to fuse Overeds with Renegade Crystals and have them absorb each other's crystals Highlander-style, with the last one hopefully transforming into the Primate Overed, a theoretical Overed god king of sorts. Unfortunately for Jin, it turned out that facing the last survivor with just a single Renegade Crystal of his own may not have been a wise idea. Jin got defeated, and the winner disappeared. Did he actually become the Primate Overed? Did he leave this plane of existance? Or did he just develop he just become old and brooding until Overeds from The UGN's Dark Secrets Nanase Kusamori is an Overed with a very rare and powerful ability: Second Chance, the power to effectively change history. Whatever Nanase believes to be true, her Morpheus powers would reshape the world accordingingly, and her Solaris powers would alter everyone's memory to go along with it. Naturally, the UGN kept her unter surveillance and made sure that she never finds out about Overeds and the Renegade, else she might think about actively rewriting history. While UGN agents thwarted a kidnapping attempt by False Hearts agents, the dark secret was unveiled: Project Adam Kadmon. In the early years of the UGN, they had a top secret joint-venture with False Hearts. Originally started to research whether or not it was able to turn Gjaums back into humans, it eventually devolved into Mengele-style experiments on normal Overeds. The Silver Stone Incident Another attempt at created the Primate Overed, this time using seven special Renegade Crystals known as The Prime Overed to be was an artifical human who went rogue and destroyed Hermes after developing an actual personality and a free will. Now calling himself Crow, he wanted to leave a mark on the world during his short lifespan. To do so, he planned to collect all Silver Stones and use them to wipe out the Renegade virus entirely, even if this would kill more than half of all infected.  Emo vs the DX Fighters Luckily for everyone, a group of UGN agents defeated him before he could get his hands on the last Silver Stones, and Crow died content, knowing that his memories would live on inside Shihori Nanamura (a side-effect of turning the Silver Stones into normal Renegade Crystals). Man, this is almost like a Bleach filler arc or movie. The Phantom Cell Incident The eponymous Phantom Cell was a major False Hearts cell with their own artifical island base known as Island X. There, they designed X-Series Overeds with unique powers. Phantom Cell's leader Master Phantom wanted to force the Renegade virus to reach its next step of evolution. Several X-Series Overeds weren't quite happy with him being willing to kill just about everyone to achieve this evolution, so they revolted and wrecked Phantom Cell. One of the revolting X-Series Overeds turned out to be an artificial human controlled by 12 survivors of the archeology team from 20 years ago who have turned into bodiless Renegade Beings. Before this one-man-collective died during the revolt, they dropped a pretty big plot bomb: The expedition in which they stumbled across artifacts containing the Renegade virus? Nothing about this was an accident. Someone gave them a tip, and their plane getting shot down was most likely part of the whole plan as well. During the final battle onboard Phantom Cell's own friggin' space station, a mysterious telepathic message was broadcast to every Overed on Earth. Nobody managed to make much sense of it, seeing how it was no real message per se but rather a feeling of homesickness and/or hope, but there's a good chance this message was responsible for some Crossbreeds suddenly getting a third Syndrome over the next couple months, giving rise to the Tri-Breeds. (I assume this event happened before or during DX's second edtion, though I don't really know when exactly Tri-Breeds became playable.) The Omokage Island Incident This is the one already detailed in the corebook, though there are a few more details to be found here. In an attempt to advance the evolution of her fellow Renegade Beings, Kyoka "The Planner" Tsuzuki not only outed herself as one, cut her ties with False Hearts (a pretty big move considering she was the leader of FH Japan) and allied herself with Lord Omoide, a Renegade Being residing on Omokage Island who had the unique abilities of being able to use every Syndrome and create tangible illusions from peoples' memories. By luring an Overed with a Renegade Crystal to Lord Omoide, The Planner was able to "resurrect" the dead, gathering the memories about these deceased and sharing them with all Renegade Beings. Her plan didn't succeed entirely as the crystal-bearing Overed stopped eventually interfered, but the whole event helped kickstart the sentience of several EX Renegades across the globe, increasing the Renegade Being population exponentially and fueling their interest in humanity. The Planner got killed during the incident, but that wasn't the first time she would just appear again a couple days later. What was different this time around was that she had suddenly turned from a hot business lady into a 10-year-old girl and leader of the new Renegade Being organization known as Xenos.  Anti-aging gone horribly wrong. This has taken a bit longer than expected, so I'll save the organizations-stuff for later. Next Time: Organizations. With Overed tumblr for realz this time. Doresh fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Dec 26, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 19:26
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Doresh posted:I dunno, "flowery prose about an immortal girl drowning for 200 years" could qualify as softcore guro. That's gotta be a kink somewhere. There's some talk of having to nurse her back to sanity, but it's confusing given she has creatures hunting her as soon as the box is opened, so presumably it can't have taken too long.
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Dec 26, 2015 19:49
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City with a single letter name is also a thing in the One Punch Man series; Saitama lives in City Z (Which is basically a burned out shell because of how many monsters show up there), while City A is where the Hero Association HQ is based. A couple others get destroyed in the early issues. I'm sure there's a rationale, I'm just not sure what it is.
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Dec 26, 2015 20:14
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Doresh posted:I dunno, "flowery prose about an immortal girl drowning for 200 years" could qualify as softcore guro. That's gotta be a kink somewhere. Well, "causing suffering through insurmountable challenges" seems to be Wick's kink. :V (Also, it's total bullshit. Drowning causes death through asphyxiation, which by itself is a fairly pleasant way to go. The brain becomes starved of oxygen and unable to think coherently until is suffers massive brain death, which is basically painless. The rest of the body then dies over a fairly long period - two days - as the various cells suffer cell death. Drowning is extremely unpleasant because of the impulse to breathe combined with the build-up of carbon dioxide in the lungs, which triggers a panic attack. However, once you've breathed water, pretty much all he biological impulses that cause distress go away. In most people, this is kind of a moot point since they're dying. The character in question, though, just regenerates from the physical damage, so once her lungs are filled with water, all the pain and distress would go away. In short, the character would most probably experience 200 years of 30-second periods of wakeyness interrupted by falling unconscious, dying, and then regenerating. In other words, 200 years of uneasy sleep. Like the rat and Ed Harris in The Abyss, only more unconsciousness. The 200 years of repeated, panicked asphyxiation is based on a really weird idea wherein the lungs apparently refill with air as part of the regeneration process and the human ability to get used to strong sensory stimuli is completely ignored.)
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Dec 26, 2015 20:28
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unseenlibrarian posted:City with a single letter name is also a thing in the One Punch Man series; Saitama lives in City Z (Which is basically a burned out shell because of how many monsters show up there), while City A is where the Hero Association HQ is based. A couple others get destroyed in the early issues. It's a Japanese/Anime thing- I'd say it's a cultural or legal thing, but plenty of media uses exact locations. OPM is almost certainly parodying that.
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Dec 26, 2015 21:01
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unseenlibrarian posted:City with a single letter name is also a thing in the One Punch Man series; Saitama lives in City Z (Which is basically a burned out shell because of how many monsters show up there), while City A is where the Hero Association HQ is based. A couple others get destroyed in the early issues. If you go by the map for DX's default setting - City N - it is called that way because the River N flows through it  LatwPIAT posted:In short, the character would most probably experience 200 years of 30-second periods of wakeyness interrupted by falling unconscious, dying, and then regenerating. In other words, 200 years of uneasy sleep. Like the rat and Ed Harris in The Abyss, only more unconsciousness. The 200 years of repeated, panicked asphyxiation is based on a really weird idea wherein the lungs apparently refill with air as part of the regeneration process and the human ability to get used to strong sensory stimuli is completely ignored.) Good point. There shouldn't really be a lot of drowning going on anymore after the first week or so of having your entire breathing apparatus filled with water.
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Dec 26, 2015 21:13
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Regarding Reign of Steel, as I returned to it as less of a high school nerd, it sort of stood out to me that the centers of relatively intact human civilization were all the epicenters of English speaking civilization. This had a bit of a sour flavor to me given how many other apocalyptic scenarios end up just starring White American (or sometimes British) Civilization triumphing over Adversity. That said I think later in the book it suggests mixing and matching AI personalities/zone styling if you want. So Zaire could be the friendly Washington-style state, etc. And I am quite sure in this particular case it's more about placing heavy RP hooks in locations the author either knows best, or expects his players to be most interested in. e: Also the person entirely submerged in water for over a hundred years should arise with the power of a Stand and not need any of this timetravel bullshit.
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Dec 26, 2015 21:14
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John Wick posted:Never review a roleplaying game you haven't played. Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier Part 9: "I said, 'Go on. Kill them. They’re worth 100 XP each.'" Episode 8: The Kobold and the Beautiful Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier posted:Believe it or not, I have friends. Yes, after all the nasty things you’ve heard me say and do—only a third of which are actually true—there are people who still speak with me and even enjoy my company. And so Wick brings up The Kobold Death Maze from Super Genius Games which is part of their "One Night Stand" series, which... get it? Because sex? But he thinks it would be more fun to play the witty kobolds trying to outsmart the adventurers. The idea is that you take a module like this and hand it to your players (without studying it), and have them be able to study the map as their home and create kobold characters. Meanwhile, the GM devises a group of adventurers to assault the dungeon. He also suggests you can make a generational game, where each person represents a different group of kobolds, goblins, or orcs. While he points out the idea of a reverse dungeon isn't new, but sees it more as a way to question people's notions regarding "monster" races and sees the idea of having "killable" races as little different than racism against human minorities. He also points out the that good races even get to be better-looking and more privileged. Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier posted:If you don’t believe fantasy fans think dwarves are pretty, just do a Googlesearch for “Gimli slash.” Go on. I dare you. Or, I’ll introduce you to some of my gay friends who like “bears.” Oh, yes.  It seems he assumes none of his readers have been exposed to queerness, or the lewd side of fandom in general. But you know, condescension doesn't come with an off switch on some folks. Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier posted:Orks are evil creatures made by evil gods to do evil things. I kid you not when a Brand Manager for that game with two initials once said, “The reason orcs (sic) are chaotic evil is so my daughter doesn’t have to feel any moral qualms when she slaughters them.” Uh. What? I mean you might not want to start comparing the holocaust with the fates of imaginary monsters on a tabletop. One is a fictional tusked green person, the other is an actual living nightmare that really happened. But he complains about how making a race of "Jokers" or "Lecters" - his interpretation of "Chaotic Evil" - because you'd never have any society or culture. Think of the troll mothers! Think of the troll children! Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier posted:“Okay, John,” you’re saying. “Enough with the lecturing. Where’s the GM advice?” I'm not your buddy, guy! The idea of having more nuanced fantasy races isn't terribly new. It goes back to Trollpak for Runequest. Or Orcs of Thar in Dungeons & Dragons. Even new material like Number Appearing for Dungeon World or (noted goon game) Fellowship. I remember a similar screed to Wick's in GURPS Fantasy, though at mercifully shorter length. This is why when Wick presents it as a shocking turn, I sigh. My last fantasy game had people playing giants and dragons and shadowfolk. I even had a plot where oppressed giants struggled to improve their borough peacefully in the face of prejudice and poverty. A bugbear was one of the most memorable PCs I ever got to see in a D&D game. This is not a revelation. This is a screed.  So he talks about running a D&D game where he does a bait-and-switch where they march off to dungeoneer a cave and run into sad orcs bemoaning the fact that local humans have murdered and robbed orcs in their caves and it turns out it's the orcs who need their help! Whatta tweest! There's also a friend's game where the characters were sent to fight orcs by a (human) king only to find an army, and instead of looking for kingly help, they decide to stop the invasion by themselves. Even though they're impossibly outnumbered. His friend is planning out the TPK, but Wick convinces him the better option is for the orcs to turn out to be merciful, honorable sorts who capture them and eventually let them go, while the king is a big jerk that doesn't even try to pay their ransom or rescue them. Whatta tweest! Then there's an idea where hobgoblins discover some macguffin and become more advanced or powerful and attack human communities and come with a terrible disease and are taking over kingdoms and guess what it's like the Europeans extermination of indigneous peoples in America, only the hobgoblins are guess who? Guess? Can you guess? And if you try and negotiate they're like: Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier posted:“You’ve been slaughtering our people for generations. You never negotiated. You killed us, stole our property and land. Now, it’s your turn.” Whadda tweest! So John says fantasy gaming divides sentient beings into monsters and races and that's awful. So: Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier posted:Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to think of your Monster Manual as nothing more than elf propaganda. It’s the equivalent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: a document designed to perpetuate hatred against the goblinoid races. Unfortunately for your players, it’s the only reference they’ve got. It’s what they’ve been taught since they were children. Belaboring is when you make a point and then repeat it over and over as if that gave it more weight. You do it once. And you do it twice. And you do it three times. Because three is the magic number and you're forty-one and that's the number of the magician and Eris and-  I find it curious elves put "% lair" and "number appearing" in their racist screeds. Maybe they've done the research, though. Speaking of belaboring, I get the idea of revisionist fantasy (in mean revision in the sense of fictional revision and not historical revision). It's pretty cool, actually. But it doesn't need to be inserted into every fantasy game. In Legend of the Five Rings by John Wick, goblins actually get a pretty nuanced little society, but they're still created by an evil god to overthrow humanity. Some are smart, some are brave, some even come across as sympathetic, but no matter what, in their heart of hearts they're born to tear humanity down and put all of our heads on decorative pikes. In 7th Sea by John Wick, you have creatures like sirens that are at least least halfway human in terms of morphology, but in their heart of hearts they just want to pull people off of boats and eat their flesh. Having a generic evil race with no explanation is often sloppy worldbuilding, but it all comes down to what sort of story you want to tell. I mean, I know Wick has run a lot of Call of Cthulhu. Has he run a game where the deep ones turn out to be a poor oppressed minority genocided by Navy torpedoes, or where the mi-go are just looking for human volunteer brains to help them save a dying race? I mean, the idea of H.P. Lovecraft writing his stories as racist screeds isn't much of a stretch, given he was a literal racist. I'm guessing probably not, because that's a clever enough idea to put in here, one that's barely mined at this point. A lot of it seems to be rooted in that Wick hates the poo poo out of D&D and just wants to undermine it. And it's fine to hate D&D and want to change it! It's got a lot of bad ideas! But just about every basic twist on D&D has already been done at this point. Wick has a constant "well what if the bad guys were really the good guys is your mind blown up like Mauna Loa yet", and like, it's a neat card to play but he already wrote an entire game about that. It's called Orkworld, and though I think it fails as fantasy revisionism it functions well enough as a game. Even if he's running D&D, he could easily have people play ork (yeah, I'll write it with a k in this context, since his orks don't match up all that well to traditional orcs) characters instead of trying to bait and switch and play the "ohhh I bet you didn't know your characters are actually figurative Nazis" card. And is it really necessary, now that World of Warcraft has included playing orcs and trolls and goblins in a game vastly more popular than D&D will likely ever be? Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier posted:Remember: any game that divides sentient species into two groups—”races” and “monsters”—is dividing sentient species into two groups. And one of them is clearly good and the other group is clearly evil?  Next: "So, let’s make cheating a rule." Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Dec 26, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 21:25
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It makes me think of the Shou in Kevin Crawford's Red Tide where they can be run as rear end in a top hat murderdicks to be slaughtered free of guilt but also can be played as nuanced people pressed against the wall by the expansion of the Player's Handbook races, or even potential allies against the cosmic apocalypse that threatens everyone in the setting. The GM has to figure out what tack or combination of tacks must be taken depending on the player group, and Red Tide warns specifically against throwing a NO YOU ARE THE NAZIS KILLING INNOCENT PEOPLE tweest when the players are doing alright fighting off screaming Shou hordes. This, from a guy that writes material for retroclones of that one game that turns you into a jackbooted thug unless you're screaming rabidly at it every second of your life! But it all comes back to the fact that Wick, in the end, simply doesn't believe in giving the players what they want, but what he says they should want and then have that every time grosser and creepier self-justification that it's what they wanted all along. I guess the warning signs were all the way back to Way of the Scorpion when he says the Crane "want... no, need a spanking!" Why do you make The Wick hurt you, players?
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Dec 26, 2015 21:49
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Heh heh heh, I know what'll scare players into acting like I want to. I'll tell them that some people... are gay!!! John Wick is a child.
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Dec 26, 2015 21:55
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Smug rear end in a top hat posted:Believe it or not, I have friends. Yes, after all the nasty things you’ve heard me say and do—only a third of which are actually true—there are people who still speak with me and even enjoy my company. Oh go gently caress yourself. I'm in total agreement with you- Wick is right, but he is such a titanic rear end in a top hat and goes on for so long that it becomes annoying, and half of it is just his vendetta against D&D. I've forgotten what started that hate, by the way.
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Dec 26, 2015 21:55
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I can actually think of several recent fictional models for, first, a robust and not particularly wicked orcish civilization, and second, an alliance between orcs and a human leader which definitely paints the orcs as merely gulled and the human leader as the originator of their evil acts. The former is "World of Warcraft," of course, while the second is the little known fantasy drama "Adventures of the Gummi Bears."
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Dec 26, 2015 22:01
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Wick has a constant "well what if the bad guys were really the good guys is your mind blown up like Mauna Loa yet", and like, it's a neat card to play but he already wrote an entire game about that. It's called Orkworld, and though I think it fails as fantasy revisionism it functions well enough as a game. Even if he's running D&D, he could easily have people play ork (yeah, I'll write it with a k in this context, since his orks don't match up all that well to traditional orcs) characters instead of trying to bait and switch and play the "ohhh I bet you didn't know your characters are actually figurative Nazis" card. And is it really necessary, now that where World of Warcraft has included playing orcs and trolls and goblins in a game vastly more popular than D&D will likely ever be? Then again Warcraft, over its various games, went from "Orcs are evil invaders from another world who want to pillage and conquer the lands of the noble humans" to "Orcs are proud warrior race guys hanging out with Native Americans and Jamaicans and are oppressed by racist human dicks because of that invasion thing earlier, which was really the fault of some fat dragon demon centaur dude.". Its like they got advice from Wick or something. Nessus posted:The former is "World of Warcraft," of course, while the second is the little known fantasy drama "Adventures of the Gummi Bears." Not to mention that the scariest (and probably most evil) mofo in that show was a human headhunter. Man, has there ever been a Gummi Bears RPG? That would be awesome. Doresh fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Dec 26, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 22:01
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For a guy who claims to hate D&D, he sure has written a bunch of stuff for it. Like, stick to your guns, dude. Or maybe hating D&D is just what John Wick wants you to think, hmm?
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Dec 26, 2015 22:02
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Doresh posted:Then again Warcraft, over its various games, went from "Orcs are evil invaders from another world who want to pillage and conquer the lands of the noble humans" to "Orcs are proud warrior race guys hanging out with Native Americans and Jamaicans and are opressed by racist human dicks because of that invasion thing earlier, which was really the fault of some fat dragon demon centaur dude.". Its like they got advice from Wick or something. 1. GOOD GUY is CORRUPTED into being BAD GUY 2. BAD GUY is REDEEMED into being GOOD GUY 3. CTHULHU is here to EAT YOU Which, I mean, covers a lot of ground, it's just funny how recurrent it is.
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Dec 26, 2015 22:02
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GURPS, as far as I’m aware, has a reputation for being so flexible and universal it becomes impossible to play in. You can represent truly anything with it – I’ve made functional mystical gunslingers, insane psychics, muscle wizards, and tons of regular idiots that all work in the system; however, since it lacks any real hooks, unless you want to run something you’ll never find anywhere else, it’s best to look elsewhere. Published GURPS settings, therefore, sometimes came out looking as weird as possible to snag that demographic. GURPS Fantasy II is an example of that philosophy, as well as how it failed; the common consensus on the intertubes is you can’t run a campaign in such a narrow, fixed world. They’re right. Sort of. While I can’t argue that the setting is real hard to explain to players without giving them homework, I think the setting’s a lot more intuitive than people give it credit for and the important elements can be explained – and campaign ideas generated – with little energy or time spent. I aim to show you how. Format wise, the book is laid out with a large column down the center of each page and a smaller column down the side (usually elaborating on a topic mentioned in the main text). It’s worth noting here that this book was written for GURPS 3rd Edition, while mechanically I’m only familiar with 4th; if we do get to making characters, I’ll use the rules I’m familiar with and kludge the info in this book together with my prior knowledge. All 3rd ed books use this format, including Reign of Steel (thank you for doing it that setting is baller), so if you see any misplaced text in a badly-taken snapshot, that’s probably why. Most pages have a picture on them somewhere, livening up the twin walls of text considerably. The introduction is short, just 1 page long. It talks about how the Madlands suck, gods are crazy, community is important, etc. etc. The most important take away is summed up in this paragraph;  Madlanders are stuck in a lovely situation, but they’ve dealt with it all their lives and want nothing more. The community is the most important thing to these people and they’ll do anything to protect it. And herein lies the problem of roleplaying in this setting; people who enjoy playing murderhobos are unlikely to get into the struggles of a small tribal community right away. I hold that explaining everything in this setting is unnecessary at the beginning, but at least getting your players on board with playing ordinary people is something you need before even beginning to plan the game. 1 – THE LAND The book starts out by describing the terrain in surprisingly modern terms. The Madlands are a small, cold continent underlain by igneous rock with a little bit of soil on top; some parts in the more inhospitable regions have all kinds of quartz. Glaciers have ranged over the land countless times, leaving fjords (described as “the fingers of an arthritic giant) and several strange landscape features including rocks hanging off cliffs (curiously, it doesn’t talk about the shorelines, which are very important to the setting). However, much of the Madlands owe their shape to a force much stranger – the gods. In most settings, the supernatural is beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, with gods mysterious and distant figures that can be beseeched for power, whether or not it’s a good idea. Here, the gods are not only actively wandering the earth but so crazy sensible Madlanders always, always fear and avoid them. They regularly warp the landscape by hopping, digging, or just loving with local physics, and everything strange and unusual in the region can probably be traced back to them – or to one of the magical creatures spawned by the special properties of the continent, all of which are destructive. Everything supernatural in the Madlands is ill-omened at best and probably actively malevolent; good Madlander hate and fear magic, spirits, and gods of any kind, usually for good reason. For instance, while the stars in the rest of this world behave like ours do, in the Madlands they move around and flip you off. That’s not much of an exaggeration;  While normally they just gently caress around, sometimes the stars form a shape – always a bad omen. There’s a lot of bad omens in this setting. It’s worth noting that the stars go back to normal once you go out to sea, so people can sail to and from here without too much trouble. Game Idea 1: You are foreign astronomers trying to figure out what the gently caress is up with the night sky. Can you convince the locals to tell you what they know and avoid the monsters that stalk the land long enough to figure something out?  Naturally, weather is as nuts as everything else here. Winter is punishingly cold and somehow also humid; spring is sudden, widely variable in temperature, and causes floods and heavy rain, washing away valuable soil; summer is actually pretty okay (75 degree average temp, violent thunderstorms, and occasional heatwaves) and reminds me of where I live; and autumn is short, miserable, wet, cold, and ends suddenly with a plunge into the depths of winter. Flora isn’t too notable (we’ll get to fauna later) but tubers are important to the locals (who, by the way, live almost entirely in fishing/farming/hunting villages on the coast; the interior’s only inhabited by horrible outcasts). You can make these plants into everything from spices to staple foods to nasty alcohol. Game Idea 2: Spring floods have washed away most of the village? Rebuild your village and your society before winter or the monsters come! However, there’s more to the world than just this place. Four other cultures surround the Madlands, and Madlanders consider all of them of them crazy. Their denizens sometimes drop in to trade, explore, or get horribly murdered by local wildlife. TOGETH  Togeth is your dirt-standard fantasy setting. Togethians used to be raiding bastards so horrible they were driving themselves extinct, but culture hero/first king Srideen figured this out and tried to stop tribal warfare by conquering everybody. This failed and killed almost everybody. Next he prayed to the local god, also called Togeth, who promptly and unexpectedly turned rocky, inhospitable Togeth into a fertile basin, ordered Srideen to repopulate it, and hosed off. Modern Togeth is fantasy-style bland – knights and peasants, middle class growing, powerful families ruling the government, everybody worshiping Togeth, etc. etc. etc. However, their adventuring knights see the Madlands as a great place to adventure and kill things for glory. Madlanders, having no concept of history (we’ll get to this later), see the Togethians as the vicious raiders they once were and kill them on sight; in return, Togethians believe Madlanders insane savages and return the favor. Don’t be a Togethian lost in the Madlands. Game Idea 3: Be Togethians lost in the Madlands. Your characters have to pretend to be anything other than Togethians and fight, sneak, and con their way back to the motherland. Game Idea 4: There’s rumors going around of Togethian knights attacking hunters and raiding villages. Are you bad enough dudes/ladies to stop them? THE WHITENESS  The north pole, inhabited by  ) and the Sap Cid deal with it as a deity with multiple conflicting avatars (intelligent clumps of snow). Living in small ocean mammal-hunting bands, they have a complex system of taboos, morality, egalitarianism, and mutual obligations that ties them together; however, tensions do exist and sometimes boil over;“GURPS FANTASY II” posted:On the rare occasions when warfare does involve actual harm, it becomes very bloody indeed. They do enter the Madlands sometimes, but only to trade their dried berries, blubber, and ivory for iron tools, booze, and weapons. Madlanders find the Sap Cid pleasant enough for foreigners, and their accent, word choice, and demeanor are considered hilarious and they think the cold has hosed up their minds (the Madlanders call them Viwti E – “Frozen-brains” – which I assume is a lot more cutting in Madlander  ). Their most interesting hook is that they hunt seals, which are of human-level intelligence in this world; seals often try to turn Madlanders and Sap Cid against each other for revenge or just for funsies.Game Idea 5: Your tribe of Sap Cid has been driven out of the Whiteness by hostile rivals. Can you find a new home in the Madlands and survive its many dangers? NORTHERN TRIBELANDS  These guys suck. They’re an entire culture of Mary Sues who ~ seek out their own destinies ~ and ~ live in peace with their guardian spirits and nature itself ~. They barely have a society at all; instead, every Tribelander is born with a mission or quest they have to fulfill before they die. What sort of quest? Good question! If they fail, they’ll just reincarnate with a different spirit and mission. Nobody cares what you do otherwise in Tribelander society unless it’s really, really vile, in which case you’re either exiled or executed. Tribelanders come to the Madlands looking for spell components and to perform their various quests, but they hate it as much as perfect wonderful Mary Sues can hate anything; the supernatural weirdness interferes with their spirit guides and even the slightest hint of associating with spirits gets them murdered by a terrified Madlander mob. Otherwise, all Tribelanders are peaceful and friendly and accepting and spiritual and  SAVARGINIA  An entire society of loving WIZARDS specifically designed to be a society of loving WIZARDS. Long, long ago, two wizards got bored of, quote, “smashing planets and turning gods into paperweights” (presumably in 3.5 ) so they decided to make their own setting, with mutant bat chess and hooker cities. The result was Savarginia, a collection of city-states so MAGICAL that occasionally a city is obliterated and replaced with an even weirder one without fanfare due to MAGIC. Savarginians love entertainment, novelty, and any kind of MAGIC, which they positively bleed from their pores (naturally pissing off Madlanders who find out); however, since the cities all so random, every conceivable rule about Savarginia is broken by some of its inhabitants. The authors kindly include a list of the current major city-states of Savarginia to give you an idea what this strange, strange place looks like; Spot the Oscar Wilde reference! Also, Yesye  Savarginians are so completely confident in the superiority of their civilization that they get gibbed pretty often when they visit. Madlanders consider them even crazier than most foreigners, largely because they have so little in common with each other and you can’t predict what they’re going to do; they do trade with them sometimes, but even the slightest hint of something out of the ordinary will get a Savarginian killed. This doesn’t prevent them from coming, however, because nobody gets to tell a Savarginian they have a bad idea  .Game Idea 6: A group of Savarginian pirates captured your fishing crew! Can you escape their clutches and head home? If not, can you survive a world wildly unlike your own? Game Idea 7: Mysterious Savarginian “traders” have set up a base on an unoccupied beach and are launching expeditions into the interior? What are they doing? What does it mean for the nearby village?  The chapter wraps up by discussing how to insert this setting into other settings – relatively boring stuff. Finally, it points out that Madlanders only have a limited conception of the outside world; to them, you’re either a human being living here, or a strange foreigner from somewhere else. THOUGHTS: So far, there isn’t much to process here. The terrain analysis of the land is useful but can be explained to players entirely through narration, while foreigners make interesting plot hooks sometimes but can be excised from a campaign entirely. The same can’t be said for the next section. GAME IDEAS: 7 Next time: Folk tales, crab fishing, and a surprising lack of transphobia for a book published in 1992! Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Dec 27, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 22:19
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I'm willing to cut Blizzard some slack for developing their setting the way they did over the course of two decades and a handful of games. But Wick! Oh, Wick. What a toolbag. It's just this constant stream of gently caress YOU DAD slathered all over the simplest, inoffensive ideas, delivered in an insufferably smug package. He reminds me of the wannabe punks I knew in high school, except I'm pretty sure they all grew up.
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Dec 26, 2015 22:20
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I'm not saying Blizzard does it the best, and I'm not much of a fan, but you can't deny they've done the most to popularize orcs outside of 40k.gradenko_2000 posted:For a guy who claims to hate D&D, he sure has written a bunch of stuff for it. It's not D&D, it's Pathfinder, totally different.  Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if supporting Paizo and not WotC is a big part of it. I wonder what he thought of them bringing Dancey on...? Falconier111 posted:GURPS, as far as I’m aware, has a reputation for being so flexible and universal it becomes impossible to play in. You can represent truly anything with it – I’ve made functional mystical gunslingers, insane psychics, muscle wizards, and tons of regular idiots that all work in the system; however, since it lacks any real hooks, unless you want to run something you’ll never find anywhere else, it’s best to look elsewhere. Published GURPS settings, therefore, sometimes came out looking as weird as possible to snag that demographic. GURPS Fantasy II is an example of that philosophy, as well as how it failed; the common consensus on the intertubes is you can’t run a campaign in such a narrow, fixed world. They’re right. Sort of. While I can’t argue that the setting is real hard to explain to players without giving them homework, I think the setting’s a lot more intuitive than people give it credit for and the important elements can be explained – and campaign ideas generated – with little energy or time spent. I aim to show you how. I look forward to it, at lot of it felt to me like a lot of the cleverer settings of the 1990s. "This is cool, but what do I do with it?" I feel like it would make a better sort of game for Hillfolk these days than GURPS.
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Dec 26, 2015 22:24
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John Wick wants to add nuance to the portrayal of race in D&D. The problem is, he doesn't want to be nuanced about it. No actual application of critical theory or analysis, just black-and-white 'no john you are the demons'. Like this without the funny: 
LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Dec 27, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 22:29
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One of the most memorable things to happen to me in a D&D game was when I ended up working with the goblin tribes my guy had been fighting against a much more existential threat and we pretty much realized we were fighting for the same reasons, they just got stuck living in the lovely swampland and wanted my peoples' good farmland. We made peace, worked together, everything, but a few generations down the line, they eventually managed to drive the humans north and take the land they'd wanted, because just understanding and making peace for the moment didn't actually solve the fact that they really wanted farmland that was less infested with giant centipedes. Neither side in that fight was inherently evil, both committed atrocities and acts of mercy, both were portrayed as mostly reasonable people fighting an on and off again war. That was when I was in high school. My DM got across what Wick is smugging it up about in a much more nuanced way, as a high schooler.
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Dec 26, 2015 22:40
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I look forward to it, at lot of it felt to me like a lot of the cleverer settings of the 1990s. "This is cool, but what do I do with it?" I feel like it would make a better sort of game for Hillfolk these days than GURPS. The trick to Madlands (and GURPS in general, IMO) is to storygame it up. In this setting, if you're going out to find monsters to slay your asking to get slain yourself; instead, the game works best when you're dodging said monsters or dealing with village politics or making up scary stories (I'll get into that over the next couple posts). You shouldn't be doing much actual fighting, both for the danger and the fact that GURPS combat is poo poo, and instead rolls should only be made in important situations where roleplaying isn't enough to decide the outcome. There's two problems with this, though. The first is that tooling around in a village isn't inherently exciting. In my opinion, there are actually a lot of interesting hooks built into the setting, but few of them cater to standard roleplayers. You need a GM capable of making ordinary life interesting and players more into roleplaying than killing things for Madlands to work, and those are in short supply. Second, GURPS isn't a storygaming system. I find the skill check system elegant and character creation easy, but that's because I know character creation like the back of my hand and can tell you what to roll at a glance (I got started in this hobby by teaching myself GURPS, after all); but there are no mechanics to promote roleplaying and those that exist are obtuse and unintuitive (until you sit down and memorize them, at which point they make perfect sense). You're right; it's probably better to run Madlands in a system that supports it instead of GURPS. The only setting GURPS supports is Infinite Worlds, which I may review after I finish this one. It plays to GURPS's strengths, which is something I've never typed before. Come to think of it, I have story seeds for Madlands written down somewhere. I'll add them to the post after dinner (gently caress yes brazilian steakhouses)
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Dec 27, 2015 00:15
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unseenlibrarian posted:City with a single letter name is also a thing in the One Punch Man series; Saitama lives in City Z (Which is basically a burned out shell because of how many monsters show up there), while City A is where the Hero Association HQ is based. A couple others get destroyed in the early issues. It's the same rationale why "199X" shows up in a lot of Japanese media. It provides a generic frame of reference, but also allows for it to be differentiated and specified if needed. Alien Rope Burn posted:Play Dirty 2: Even Dirtier Part 9: "I said, 'Go on. Kill them. They’re worth 100 XP each.'" This is also before The Hobbit films made dwarves hot. Alien Rope Burn posted:The idea of having more nuanced fantasy races isn't terribly new. It goes back to Trollpak for Runequest. Or Orcs of Thar in Dungeons & Dragons. Even new material like Number Appearing for Dungeon World or (noted goon game) Fellowship. I remember a similar screed to Wick's in GURPS Fantasy, though at mercifully shorter length. This is why when Wick presents it as a shocking turn, I sigh. My last fantasy game had people playing giants and dragons and shadowfolk. I even had a plot where oppressed giants struggled to improve their borough peacefully in the face of prejudice and poverty. A bugbear was one of the most memorable PCs I ever got to see in a D&D game. This is not a revelation. This is a screed. Greg Costikyan brought this up in the "monster manual" section for Violence: The RPG. In between "Bin Laden Cell", "Mom With Small Children" and "The Pigs", Costikyan drops this... quote:Now—before you put this away, either “hurr hurr”ing like an rear end in a top hat, or feeling vaguely disturbed, I want to ask you a question. That orc—you know, the orc in that room in the dungeon, you open the door, there’s an orc there. He looks up, a bunch of heavily armed human motherfuckers are charging into the room waving weapons. What’s he supposed to do? Smile broadly and say “Hey, mi casa es su casa, amigos!”? No, he whimpers with fear, pulls out his pigsticker, and prepares to meet his doom. I wanna know about his childhood. Are you telling me he doesn’t have friends who are going to miss him? That he didn’t have hopes and fears and aspirations of his own? That you aren’t a bunch of loving degraded monsters for wasting him without a second thought? You’re playing a loving role, okay, you’re supposed to act like a real character in this world. And yet you saunter around, killing intelligent creatures like they’re just another widget, a bunch of pixels to blow away, a mechanism for obtaining experience points and treasure. That isn’t roleplaying. Not as I understand it. This was 1999. Also, Wick's never played Shadowrun, where the whole things is predicated on racial injustice because of magic has returned and brought back the creatures of myth back with it, with some people either giving birth or spontaneously becoming fantasy creatures.
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Dec 27, 2015 00:20
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Kavak posted:It's a Japanese/Anime thing- I'd say it's a cultural or legal thing, but plenty of media uses exact locations. OPM is almost certainly parodying that. Excel Saga does it to.
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Dec 27, 2015 00:22
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Wick sounds like a self important jackass who doesn't deserve to have his name associated with a touching movie about revenge murdering a bunch of dog haters.Doresh posted:Then again Warcraft, over its various games, went from "Orcs are evil invaders from another world who want to pillage and conquer the lands of the noble humans" to "Orcs are proud warrior race guys hanging out with Native Americans and Jamaicans and are oppressed by racist human dicks because of that invasion thing earlier, which was really the fault of some fat dragon demon centaur dude.". Its like they got advice from Wick or something. Don't forget that despite the fact that we're supposed to love our noble savage orcs we've spent the last two expansions Dealing with Garrosh and Alt!Grommash. The first took over Orgrimmar and proceeded to turn everyone without Green Skin into second class citizens, institute a secret police who's response to formulating politcal dissent was to blow up an entire tavern where two diplomats who didn't particularl like him were meeting, and instituted reforms that meant everyone who wasn't literally a child or on death's door had to contribute to his burgeoning war effort. The second was just a genocidal lunatic given highly advanced technology by his time-travelling son and then proceeded to immediately renounce his ways and be forgiven once the demons showed up because.... sure? It goes to show how overexposed we are on Orcs that people are honest to god looking forward to fighting Elves (now in Drow flavor!) and demons again. MonsieurChoc posted:Excel Saga does it to. I think the joke in Excel Saga is that it's been destroyed so much that they've just started lettering the rebuilds of tokyo.
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Dec 27, 2015 00:54
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"Toolbag" seems like a very apt description of John Wick, in that he contains many useful tools but also several loose screws that unfailingly scratch & annoy when all you want is a goodamn hammer.
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Dec 27, 2015 01:02
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