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It's own server actually, irc://limestone.tx.us.gamesurge.net is what I used to connect on there.
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May 17, 2014 18:39
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KittyEmpress posted:I'll drop by the IRC then and see if I like the people I guess, before I commit to joining, if that's okay. Is it gamesurge at synirc? or?
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May 17, 2014 18:54
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NutritiousSnack posted:Can someone please tell me who John Wick is and why he is so bad apparently? He's often credited for being the creator of Legend of the Five Rings. This isn't true, though he was the original story writer for the CCG and did a lot of the setting writing for the original corebook. He was one of the primary creators of 7th Sea, and has done a variety of indie games. He has diehard fans but hasn't really made a huge splash since 7th Sea. He also occasionally writes for Paizo these days, and has done some Pathfinder licensed material more recently. His writing for Legend of the Five Rings laid out a lot of the important world elements. On the other hand, he was known for building the Scorpion Clan up as the Best Thing Ever, and particularly waxing on about his pet NPC, Bayushi Kachiko (based on an ex-girlfriend). He also had a column for Pyramid Magazine called Play Dirty which is notable for some genuinely interesting ideas and horrid, passive-aggressive GM advice. He also did a column for a defunct website called The Gaming Outpost called The Game Designer's Journal. The Journal was awfully back-patty, but his most famous column has to do with him declaring 3e total poo poo due to its class system, and how he was going to do a d20 supplement that was going to blow people's minds. It took over a decade for Wicked Fantasy to come out, and though some people do like it, it's a far throw from the the D&D-killer he originally posited. There was a "prank" where John Wick and Jared Sorenson implied that their game, Memento Mori, had its IP stolen by a third party. Presumably this was to build buzz, but this isn't clear, but in any case rpg.net banned him for a time. He was unapologetic about the whole thing and has painted rpg.net as being a much of ridiculous reactionaries. He's had a number of moments where he's been fairly derisive within the community of... well, a lot of things. Also he writes objectively dodgy rules (he didn't write the Legend of the Five Rings system) and some people find his style subjectively grating. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 09:02 on May 18, 2014 |
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May 17, 2014 20:07
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Just to amend/clarify something, the RPGnet prank in question was (as I recall) that Sorenson had gotten C&D'd over his game InSpecters, which was a not!Ghostbusters sort of game, and as a result he was giving up being a game designer and closing up shop within a week or so. This resulted in a bunch of sympathetic posts as well as people buying his stuff before it all disappeared forever. Then it turned out that the whole thing was actually an April Fool's joke that was, as ARB mentions, meant to build buzz and I think Sorenson might have had a new game or a new website or something coming out. Note that the initial post that led this off was something like a week prior to April Fool's. People weren't particularly happy being jerked around like this and Sorenson copped a lengthy ban, which prompted Wick (who had been in on it with him) to get all shirty and so he also copped a length ban (like six months or something). The punchline to all this is that earlier in the year someone had posted a prank thread posing as a friend of John Wick's family who sadly informed everyone that Wick had died in a car crash. Now that's kind of a dumb and lovely thing to do and Wick had every right to be pissed but I remember that his reaction was essentially "people who use the internet to spread misinformation like this are the scum of the earth," which made his whole spiel about RPGnet not taking to his and Sorenson's "prank" the height of something resembling irony.
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May 18, 2014 08:30
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Yeah, as much as I like a lot of his work and L5R is particular, its cultural tone deafness has never sit right with me. Like how often the words heinin and heimin show up, especially in the earlier works. Technically correct for the time but it would be like creating a Pre-Bellum South RPG and refering to all the slaves as negros, Jims or another word I'm sure you're all familiar with. These are real minority groups facing real discrimination and the game tends to treat them as a prop the same way the worst of feudalism did.
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May 20, 2014 13:51
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Yeah, as much as I like a lot of his work and L5R is particular, its cultural tone deafness has never sit right with me. Like how often the words heinin and heimin show up, especially in the earlier works. Yeah, I generally try and avoid those terms in play nowadays. "Heimin" isn't as bad as far as I'm aware; obviously it's fairly classist, but not as damning as hinin or eta. It's comparable to the sort of feudal attitude that puts "commoner" at the bottom of the d20 class tier (because farmers are physically weak, unskilled dopes, amirite? not like nobles!). After all, Way of the Wolf back during 1st edition literally had peasants written up as physical invalids with starting Rings of 1 and poo poo for Character Points to build off of that. It wasn't just classist in its setting, but in the very character creation. Obviously that isn't still the case, but it is a game where non-noble characters are rarely given the time of day. There are exceptions (Toku, mainly), but for the most part commoners are treated as background noise.
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May 20, 2014 15:26
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Spookyelectric posted:In all honesty, being on the Story Team has it's ups and downs. It's been a very eye-opening experience for me. But I'm glad I worked up the courage to try out and it can be very rewarding to see or hear people chatting about your work. You also get to see a side of the industry that is invisible to a lot of people, for better or for worse. I've made a lot of good friends and contacts through this work and I encourage any aspiring writer to give it a shot. For some reason I thought the deadline was the 30th and just finished my story, hahahaha-  Well, maybe there'll be another chance, someday.
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May 28, 2014 20:27
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So after a bit of hunting around, I can't seem to find anything at all that will tell me how big Rokugan is. None of the maps I can find have a scale and most of the forum postings I find are just guesswork and making excuses for AEG. Anyone got any real answer or am I stuck with "however big your GM wants it to be"?
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May 31, 2014 16:25
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Here's a 3rd edition map. Take it with a grain of salt.
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May 31, 2014 17:00
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I have several maps and none of them agree on scale. The ultimate answer is make it up for what you need it to be and recognize that cartography in the emerald empire is not an exact science. Seriously cities move and coastlines change between editions.
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May 31, 2014 17:26
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I have noticed this. Based on searching google, what few maps are around with a drat scale attached, and what others have posted for speculation, rokugan is somewhere between 300 and 1600 miles long & 200-800 miles wide. Major cites are somewhere between a 1 and 30 day hike between them, there's about 1-6 major rivers (some of which may just start and stop in the middle of a field), and the mountain ranges may or may not have some manner of connecting pass through them depending on what map you're looking at. I guess this is why "imperial cartographers" is an actual suggested campaign mode. 
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May 31, 2014 17:57
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Pretty much all that can be said is 'Rokugan is significantly smaller than the Burning Sands, but possibly about the same size as Not India', I think. Which leads to the possibility that the Burning Sands are literally a continent-sized desert.
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May 31, 2014 18:34
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So... Basically Australia, then?
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May 31, 2014 18:46
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Just try not to think about it. Aeg didn't.
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May 31, 2014 20:15
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Zero Suit Ridley posted:Just try not to think about it. Aeg didn't.
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May 31, 2014 20:22
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Anyone have an image of the 1st edition map? That map was a glorious mess and one of the most evocative parts of the book.
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Jun 1, 2014 01:52
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 Unfortunately this was the biggest example I could find. It's pretty jumbled and the figures on it don't help. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Jun 1, 2014 |
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Jun 1, 2014 03:18
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I didn't know that if you put several magnets on a CRT monitor the color warping would be saved into the image, but there it is.
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Jun 1, 2014 04:36
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I think my personal favorite map was the one that came in the City of Lies box. Which...may be the one above.
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Jun 1, 2014 04:57
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:
Thanks for that! I still love this map. It's definitely the one from the back of the 1st ed. main book. Maybe it was reprinted in the box set.
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Jun 1, 2014 07:29
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Has anyone else picked up Sword and Fan? I bought it while waiting on the Book of Void to come out and have been pleasantly surprised with the amount of history/setting that was put into it.
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Sep 19, 2014 11:24
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Unfortunately, I ordered it and Book of Void at the same time and have been waiting for both to ship.
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Sep 19, 2014 12:49
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Have they announced any titles beyond Book of Void yet?
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Sep 19, 2014 15:09
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I haven't really had a chance to play or read anything past like, Book of Earth. Were the campaign settings in Fire and Water intriguing at all? I actually really liked the weird isolationist one in Earth and kept meaning to run a game with that mountain enclave of the Boar.
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Sep 19, 2014 18:02
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FreshFeesh posted:Has anyone else picked up Sword and Fan? I bought it while waiting on the Book of Void to come out and have been pleasantly surprised with the amount of history/setting that was put into it. I highly recommend Sword and Fan! But then I'm pretty biased.
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Sep 19, 2014 21:25
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Gravy Train Robber posted:I haven't really had a chance to play or read anything past like, Book of Earth. Were the campaign settings in Fire and Water intriguing at all? I actually really liked the weird isolationist one in Earth and kept meaning to run a game with that mountain enclave of the Boar. The game I'm running is set in just pre-coup so some things had to be tweaked/ignored, but by and large I think they're good books. Not as essential maybe as Emerald Empire, but certainly good supplements. More spells, more kata, new schools and techniques, and of course the story ideas, but learning so much more about the world and its people is very cool. I think Sword and Fan did an excellent job of this; it addresses the difference between strategy and tactics, the necessity for supply organization as well as martial force, and the realization of some that the battlefield and the court are one and the same. I think it does a good job of looking at all of the martial and political Clans, and shows that they really are on an even keel, just specialized in different arenas. One of my players really, really loved it. Of course, he is playing a Lion bushi ...
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Sep 20, 2014 03:51
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Is there any kind of fan project to rebuild 7th Ses so a) the setting is less stupid, and b) update it to L5R 4th style rules? Edit: because there was tons of awesome in the game... Just the metaplot was kind of terribad, and its kind of silly to have a pirates game without a new world.
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Sep 20, 2014 04:37
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ascendance posted:
Educate yourself, son.
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Sep 20, 2014 06:21
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ascendance posted:Is there any kind of fan project to rebuild 7th Ses so a) the setting is less stupid, and b) update it to L5R 4th style rules? I'm working on something which could be described as 7th Sea with the serial numbers filed off, tho there's other stuff that has influenced it along the way.
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Sep 20, 2014 07:40
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Well, Pirates of the Caribbean without a Caribbean
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Sep 20, 2014 13:04
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I enjoyed Sword and Fan for the reasons FreshFeesh described and I liked how it further expanded upon some of the stuff in Emerald Empire by basically taking the chapters on Politics and War and turning them into an entire book. I haven't had a chance to see Book of Void yet but someone told me that there's a lack of discussion on Void skills (Divination and Tea Ceremony), but I guess they're few in number and somewhat discussed elsewhere (Sword and Fan, for instance, has a section on the ceremony).
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Sep 21, 2014 14:52
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ascendance posted:Well, Pirates of the Caribbean without a Caribbean Sometime late in the product line they got around to introducing the midnight archipelago or whatever it was called, but at that time, the game had gone sour already.
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Sep 21, 2014 15:40
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So are there any online TT or irc games in this setting that regularly run? I don't want to do some dorky pbp fanfic stuff, but I am somewhat interested in playing in the setting.
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Sep 22, 2014 02:01
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Kemper Boyd posted:Sometime late in the product line they got around to introducing the midnight archipelago or whatever it was called, but at that time, the game had gone sour already.
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Sep 22, 2014 02:17
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nucleicmaxid posted:So are there any online TT or irc games in this setting that regularly run? I don't want to do some dorky pbp fanfic stuff, but I am somewhat interested in playing in the setting.
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Sep 22, 2014 03:22
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Unfortunately, I ordered it and Book of Void at the same time and have been waiting for both to ship.
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Sep 22, 2014 05:34
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No idea! I would have bought it at GenCon if I knew it was going to take this long. AEG's page says "September 29th", so hopefully then.
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Sep 22, 2014 06:00
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Yawgmoth posted:Well if you want to run a game that has apparently lost its GM, I've got a few players for ya. Otherwise, I remember there being an L5R irc channel but I forget what it is. I don't know the setting THAT well, and I haven't GM'd in ages or that might actually be fun.
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Sep 22, 2014 06:15
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AmiYumi posted:Does anyone know what has been up with AEG's distribution since 4e launched? Every book I try to order online (especially anything pre-ordered on Amazon) ships well after release, from weeks to 3+ months. Book of the Void has been delayed over and over to the point that it now just says "will ship at some unknown future date". The Book of Void doesn't release until September 29th, so it's not even out yet. AEG has this way of not announcing when their books will release, giving vague estimates like "3rd quarter" or "fall," etc. I have noticed that a lot of online vendors will basically guess a release date, display that as if it is a solid release date, and then push it back when the book fails to release. Amazon does this a lot. So does Diamond. Maybe that accounts for it?
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Sep 22, 2014 13:20
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nucleicmaxid posted:I don't know the setting THAT well, and I haven't GM'd in ages or that might actually be fun.
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Sep 22, 2014 18:54
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