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clockworkjoe posted:oh and BTW - Reign is 10 bux so buy it you mugs http://www.arcdream.com/store/product.php?id=75404 That doesn't have any of the setting material, but if you're cool with that it's a steal. His new Setting should be coming out for free soon anyway, it's filling the ransom pretty quickly.
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May 28, 2010 06:58
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clockworkjoe posted:oh and BTW - Reign is 10 bux so buy it you mugs http://www.arcdream.com/store/product.php?id=75404 Is the full book with setting stuff etc. worth buying anyway? It sounds like the sort of thing I'm usually looking for in a fantasy game.
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May 28, 2010 10:50
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Rpg.net melted down at Stolze because men can't ride horses in the world of Reign.
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May 28, 2010 11:54
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Kemper Boyd posted:Rpg.net melted down at Stolze because men can't ride horses in the world of Reign. In the setting that is included with Reign. Anyway I know in this thread we're going all UNKNOWN ARMIES I WANT YOUR BABIES but Reign is a really good fantasy game where it's easy to throw out the setting and use it for any fantasy adventure you want. Does better with gritty fantasy rather than DnD, since because of a system quirk, barring armour and special traits, everyone's 'hit points' are roughly the same, and you can die from a good strong blow to the head. Reign's included setting (the world of Heluso and Milonda) has a LOT of quirks that are different from Tolkien-derived fantasy to the point where it turns people off, but if you like cool fantasy rules or you think the idea of a world where the continents are shaped like people and gravity is towards the 'bones' or 'centre' of the people and there's a whole country on the underside of an 'arm' that never sees the sun and so on then Reign is pretty awesome. edit: http://www.gregstolze.com/reign/ hell just look at the website and the moving image, that's what the geography of the known world looks like literally.
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May 28, 2010 15:43
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bewilderment posted:Reign's included setting (the world of Heluso and Milonda) has a LOT of quirks that are different from Tolkien-derived fantasy to the point where it turns people off Blargh, now I'm officially interested. Don't suppose you could give me a summary of what it's like?
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May 28, 2010 16:07
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Ansob. posted:Blargh, now I'm officially interested. Don't suppose you could give me a summary of what it's like? The website tells you most of what you need to know, but: The world (more accurately, the known continents) is shaped like two people. Gravity is almost always oriented towards the 'ground'. When you're on water, though, gravity is oriented towards the sea floor/water. This means that standing on a shore, you see a wall of water in front of you. When you step onto the water, you 'shift' gravity orientations, the wall of water becomes the ocean beneath you, and if you look behind you, the land is a wall of cities and plains curving away. There are no elves or dwarves. I mean there could be, but everything's more focused on humans. There are demons and monsters and other stuff (about as much as you want there to be, the focus is on human vs human). If you murder someone AFTER they plead for their life, they become a ghost and haunt you. I think they have minor poltergeistic powers, but mostly they just yell in the ears and otherwise annoy those they haunt. This means that starvation is the usual means of execution, and provides a reason to have recurring villains (the party can't kill the captive unless they want to be haunted). The sun and the moon are fixed in position and brighten and dim on a daily basis. Days work generally as normal, but shadows are constantly fixed in place, and there's no concept of sunset and sunrise. Some plants (because of ambient magic, whatever) live off moonlight or darkness or whatever and grow in these permanent shadows. This also means some regions of the world (like behind the spine of one continent) are in perpetual darkness. It's a widely held, self-confirming (? this is a point of contention but you can easily ignore) superstition that riding a horse astride makes men infertile, and men who do so are treated as social pariahs or eunuchs. This is a setting element basically just to justify gender equality by requiring any nation who wants cavalry to employ women (or chariots I guess). The culture is more Bronze-Agey in feel, hardly anyone is literate, language hasn't evolved enough yet to have spaces and an upper/lower case distinction, nobody has figured out reading silently. The way the language skill works is actually interesting and useful in Reign, a globetrotting/nation-politics game will really benefit from a guy who can translate. Magic is 'ambient' in the world to the point that everyone has a sixth 'magic sense' that tells when spooky stuff is going on. Nearly every type of magic has a different style of casting it. Anyone can learn any magic, but to get the really powerful stuff, you have to 'attune' yourself to a style which bars you from other styles. You can also gently caress up attunement so that you get the benefits of the magic but you look ugly (example: one attunement process has you getting wings and you can fly as well as cast thunderbolts and stuff. loving it up still gives you chucking thunderbolts, but your wings can't fly and look weird). Oh right and of the four(?) cultures detailed in the book (more are mentioned or hinted at), only one of them is predominantly white (they're the freak cannibals that live in the sunless plains). So yeah that's all the interesting stuff about Reign's default setting that I remember offhand (which I stress is FREELY DIVORCABLE FROM THE RULES IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT). The next setting he's putting out for it, Nain, is inspired by Harry Potter and Gormenghast and is full of magic and wands that choose wizards and all that sort of thing.
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May 28, 2010 16:32
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That sounds super cool. Is the big book that includes the setting stuff available as a .pdf anywhere or is it just sold as a physical product? If the latter then I doubt I'll be able to find it here, but I guess I'll go into Paris at some point and look.
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May 28, 2010 16:40
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Ansob. posted:That sounds super cool. Is the big book that includes the setting stuff available as a .pdf anywhere or is it just sold as a physical product? If the latter then I doubt I'll be able to find it here, but I guess I'll go into Paris at some point and look. :19bux: What I like about the default Reign setting is it is more a "fantasy setting" than a "thinly-veiled real-world fantasy analog." It is much less bland than "fantasy middle ages Europe" (or even "fantasy post-WWI Europe," IMO).
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May 28, 2010 16:52
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Tolervi posted::19bux: I'm broke as all hell but a terrible sucker for interesting settings, so bought. And yeah, I'm always lamenting about "fantasy" settings just being medieval Europe with cheap knock-offs of Tolkien species. For a genre that's called fantasy there's so little that's fantastic in the worlds they present that it's a huge shame. Give me more sentient jellyfish and neon-coloured sky whales and mosquito men and swords that fight by materialising the sword-strikes that you might have made instead of the attack you did make, and less war wizards and thinly-veiled Christian analogy religions and orcs fighting elves. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 20:17 on May 28, 2010 |
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May 28, 2010 17:03
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Tolervi posted::19bux:
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May 28, 2010 17:08
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Just adding my voice to the choir of how awesome Unknown Armies is. It really has changed the way I run any and all games, be it any of the 40K RPGs or the epic demigods of Scion, and it is all for the better. ORE and Reign are also fantastic, we had a game of Fantasy Vietnam using the rules and setting and it was one of the best we ever had.
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May 28, 2010 17:34
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bewilderment posted:Oh right and of the four(?) cultures detailed in the book (more are mentioned or hinted at), only one of them is predominantly white (they're the freak cannibals that live in the sunless plains). This is literally my favorite part of REIGN. Buy Reign, enjoy the gently caress out of it, and then realize it was totally not written as a replacement ruleset for Exalted you guys nudge nudge wink wink. Furthermore Godlike is both the best superhero RPG and the best WWII RPG because it understands that ultimately, you are a replaceable cog in a vast uncaring war machine and ORE means combat moves fast and is deadly as poo poo. Basically I want this man to have my nerd babies.
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May 29, 2010 02:34
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counterspin posted:If you want to introduce people to UA run Jailbreak from the One-Shots book. Best adventure I've ever played in, run, or read. A masterpiece. There I said it, and I got gushy. nobody spoil anything about jailbreak!!
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May 29, 2010 06:12
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happyelf posted:yeah srsly i played it at genconoz last year and it was fantastic. we played startign at like 10 at night and had a pretyt good group. I got to play the old guy :3 are you going to gencon this year?
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May 29, 2010 07:50
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Gencon oz is held in Brisbane, Australia, which is just down the coast from me.
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May 29, 2010 12:22
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I have to agree with Happyelf. If you're not going to run Jailbreak, don't even read the thing. Buy it and bribe someone else to run it for you.
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May 29, 2010 14:22
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bewilderment posted:Reign is awesome. Don't forget that a lot of extra setting info and such can be found in the twelve free supplements, too. Also, Reign is probably the only game where random chargen is totally balanced with point buy.
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May 30, 2010 02:19
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Evil Mastermind posted:Also, Reign is probably the only game where random chargen is totally balanced with point buy. Wrong. One of the tables gives you more points of Cooking than a regular character could buy.
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May 30, 2010 02:27
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Evil Mastermind posted:Also, Reign is probably the only game where random chargen is totally balanced with point buy. the Companies generator posted:2x1 Gossipy Old Folks I've not gotten far enough in the rules to know what those mean but the image of a bunch of gossipy old men slash sinister double-agent operatives with no morals slash experts in plunder who call plundering everything a "broad application of tactics" is hilarious. It's like Statler and Waldorf with guns (or bows as the case may be). e; it just generated a character who's the grizzled child of a general and the royal horse breeder, started his career as a notary, then moved on to being a beauty salon operator who uses his skills to case joints before organising heists and using the wealth to protect his neighbourhood from other criminals. e2; one of the Company properties is "An Underappreciated But Scrappy Officer Who Will Take Charge When All Seems Doomed And Save the Day Only To Lose His Life In The Process." Amazing. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 11:24 on May 30, 2010 |
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May 30, 2010 11:16
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Evil Mastermind posted:One of the things I love about Reign is that it can handle a group starting as just a bunch of people with a common goal, and slowly build them up into an actual force to be reckoned with. The company rules are awesome, and you can even use them behind-the-scenes in a completely different gaming system as a semi-abstract way to figure out what sort of impact your players have on politics on a local, regional, or even global level. I used it in a GURPS game a while ago, basically running the different gangs, guilds, and factions of a city at a high level using the REIGN company rules, and applying modifiers to the rolls based on what the players did. It worked great. We had the players split up a guild into warring factions, have their own puppet guild absorb one of those factions, suffer through lean times after an underling looted their treasury, quash an internal rebellion, forcibly eject several gangs from their territory, and finally see everything they'd gained slowly get ground away over a period of months by the corrosive social influence of a cult. All of which easy to figure out in the REIGN company system. If you want to throw some sort of political metagame into your setting, it really is pretty drat solid.
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May 30, 2010 20:04
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Got Unknown Armies on Amazon. It is the fourth printing, May 2010. This is probably one of the best roleplaying books every written. It's incredible.
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May 31, 2010 19:13
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Oh there's a great UA email list - not very active but there's a HUGE archive of fodder for the game. http://lists.unknown-armies.com/listinfo.cgi/ua-unknown-armies.com
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May 31, 2010 21:10
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Got Unknown Armies on Amazon. It is the fourth printing, May 2010. This is probably one of the best roleplaying books every written. It's incredible. I wasn't going to buy this, but then Amazon said they only had one copy left and my gamer collector gene went haywire and I bought it and now it's shipping in 1 to 3 weeks. I get minor charges from buying RPGs I'll never play, apparently.
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Jun 1, 2010 14:50
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FirstCongoWar posted:I wasn't going to buy this, but then Amazon said they only had one copy left and my gamer collector gene went haywire and I bought it and now it's shipping in 1 to 3 weeks. I get minor charges from buying RPGs I'll never play, apparently. You know, you can probably make a ludomancer who does exactly that: accumulate minor charges from buying a system or video game he'll never play because he already has a massive backlog.
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Jun 1, 2010 14:55
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clockworkjoe posted:Take a look at some of your old photos. Do you have one that's a street scene, maybe from a vacation? Look at it closely. See that guy in the background, in the dark suit? You have to look carefully the first time. Holy crap someone needs to run a UA game about Slenderman.
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Jun 2, 2010 16:47
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After Amazon emailed me saying that they had lost my package, the Unknown Armies sourcebook just appeared on my doorstep. Yeessssssss. I'm getting dudes together on Saturday to run over character creation, and I'll run the Bill Toges one-shot the week after. This ought to be awesome!
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Jun 2, 2010 17:37
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bewilderment posted:
I'm going to describe this a little more, just because it's a neat idea I've ported into other games and this doesn't do it justice. A ghost cannot physically interact with the world in any way. However, they are semi-visible and audible by EVERYONE. Oh, and they don't need to sleep, use the bathroom or even pause for breath. If you are haunted, you have a guy following you around proclaiming how much you suck NONSTOP AT THE TOP OF HIS INCORPORAL LUNGS. People who are haunted are shunned by their communities real fast.
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Jun 3, 2010 06:46
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I have an idea for a adept that gets charged by collecting old maps, specifically ones that disagree with each other. S/he's use of magick makes travel easier/harder and can in minor ways shape the world (change street names, move cabins in woods)
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Jun 3, 2010 18:42
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I like that. Reminds me a bit of a Stephen King short story where a woman finds out how to create 'shortcuts' by folding maps, and 'Incognita, Inc.' by Harlan Ellison, where you can get this little old guy to draw you a map to anywhere you need to go.
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Jun 3, 2010 19:01
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Ferrinus posted:Wrong. One of the tables gives you more points of Cooking than a regular character could buy. It's cobbling. And it's balanced by the fact it's loving COBBLING.
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Jun 3, 2010 19:13
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Xand_Man posted:It's cobbling. And it's balanced by the fact it's loving COBBLING. You can't see a benefit to knowing shoemaking and the associated leatherworking techniques in a fantasy setting?
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Jun 3, 2010 19:17
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Ansob. posted:You can't see a benefit to knowing shoemaking and the associated leatherworking techniques in a fantasy setting? Maybe if you were a peasant in an actual fantasy setting and not rolling dice around a table, then yeah. But as it is I sure as hell hope more entertaining things are going on in your games than, "oh man I'm going to roll the dice to see how well I cobble things - yeah I fixed the gently caress out of that boot" That's not to say it's worthless, but it's not really up there with lying or killing jerks with a sword
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Jun 3, 2010 23:37
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Tolervi posted:But as it is I sure as hell hope more entertaining things are going on in your games than, "oh man I'm going to roll the dice to see how well I cobble things - yeah I fixed the gently caress out of that boot" Uses for cobbling: - teach soldiers how to spare the soles of their boots or design better boots, allowing them to march longer; - make some designer shoes as a gift for a débutante; - know how to safely boil leather so you can eat it. And there are bound to be other uses. I mean, sure, it's a little narrow, but in a military campaign it'd be reasonably useful.
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Jun 4, 2010 00:22
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Ansob. posted:Uses for cobbling: As useful as: - lying to the soldiers to sneak out the macguffin you've nabbed from their capitol? - lying to the soldiers to stoke their rage, causing them march longer, fight harder, and/or stay happy longer? - lying to a cobbler to get him to do all that stuff you proposed but for free or on the cheap? However you're totally right, it could certainly be useful. It's just still not as useful as a real skill, though. Nothing wrong with that. Gives it niche appeal.
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Jun 4, 2010 01:12
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I believe we're overlooking the possibility that fruit cobbler might be folded into cobbling as well.
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Jun 4, 2010 02:07
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Bieeardo posted:I believe we're overlooking the possibility that fruit cobbler might be folded into cobbling as well. delicious
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Jun 4, 2010 04:02
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Ansob. posted:You can't see a benefit to knowing shoemaking and the associated leatherworking techniques in a fantasy setting?
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Jun 4, 2010 17:35
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Evil Mastermind posted:Especially since it's "cobbler to royalty". Admittedly the "to royalty" bit means nothing if you don't pay points for Wealth/Status/Patron advantages. Still, the rulebook explicitly states that "Expert Cobbler" means you know leatherworking. There's got to be a thousand uses for that in any medieval-or-equivalent-tech-level setting. 
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Jun 4, 2010 18:17
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Ansob. posted:Still, the rulebook explicitly states that "Expert Cobbler" means you know leatherworking. There's got to be a thousand uses for that in any medieval-or-equivalent-tech-level setting. A guy that knows his leatherworking would be the richest man in the world in any horror setting published by White Wolf.
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Jun 4, 2010 20:08
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ZearothK posted:A guy that knows his leatherworking would be the richest man in the world in any modern horror setting. So many occult tomes to bind, so little time. e; you probably meant fetish gear but screw you. Chain-producing Necronomicons is the mental image I choose.
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Jun 4, 2010 20:12
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