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If I was to ever run TORG (which I might legitimately try, it looks awesome) I'd do it in Fate and set the High Lords up as Factions like in Atomic Robo. Make them very much face-punchable and let the players go hog wild on taking them down if they want. Big battles to uproot the stelae, driving the High Lords back and eventually even breaking the Darkness Devices. That would actually be a cool campaign idea. Also do away with the whole "your cool toys turn to rocks in other worlds" thing. You're a Storm Knight, you don't care about lame laws like that. Yeah I'd run that.
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Apr 9, 2015 16:45
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Evil Mastermind posted:I've said it before, I'll say it again: I'd kill for a Fate Core version of Torg. I have so many half-assed notes and ideas for it. And yes, I'd have transformation as something that only happens to Ords. I'm strongly considering working up an Atomic Robo hack of TORG. fool_of_sound posted:I've been thinking that non-detrimental transformation for each realm might be more interesting. Like a Asyle wizard might become a Watch-Dogs-esque magic hacker in Core Earth or Marketplace, a powerful priest in the Living Lands, a pulpy superscientist in the Nile Empire, and a hacker OR a witch in the Cyberpapacy. Basically, have players choose a high concept and aspects that are realm agnostic, and have them come up with realm appropriate versions of them whenever you change locations. This would be a cool idea, actually. I'd love to see what the players could come up with to explain their pulp superpowers in Orrorsh or their cybertech limbs in Aysle.
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Apr 9, 2015 18:30
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Evil Mastermind posted:Rocks are dead things. The Living Land doesn't use dead things. I'd still go with dinosaurms.
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Apr 9, 2015 20:50
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Kurieg posted:So, like megatron? Just have a T-Rex head for a hand? I was actually picturing a person with huge dinosaur arms with like iguanodon spikes instead of thumbs. This works too.
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Apr 9, 2015 20:57
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theironjef posted:I think the degree to which characters adapt to their environment in new realities is actually a really great hook to hang character design on. Like if you divided your characters up into I'm looking for a Kickstarter link but I'm not seeing it.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:13
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theironjef posted:I'm happy because now I'm going to read Fate and Dungeon World (which let's face it I should have done like in January of last year) and decide which one I'll build my Malleable Realities game in. Fate is the better choice in my mind, but I could see a PBTA TORG game doing some interesting things. You could have a playbook for each cosm and one consequence of getting disconnected/transformed could be "take a move from the playbook of the cosm your currently in" to represent getting transformed. Have a way to get rid of the move or just make it temporary.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:47
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theironjef posted:I always assumed that every D&D campaign is set post age of wonders, so there was this time before where ancient wizards could knock out spoons and lobsterbots and immovable rods without dying as a result, and the difference between magic and regular items was somewhat less relevant. Of course, I don't think that was ever codified, it was just the only way the magic item prevalence made any sense to me. I had fun setting a game during the height of the age of wonders, where factories churned out magic weapons and armor and portal networks made sprawling cityscapes possible. Mechanically, this meant most items were magical, and so got normal stats. The really good stuff, custom-made/bespoke or tricked out with illegal/rare enchantments actually got the +1s and other stats. Now setting it after the collapse means that everyone and their mom has an old magic sword laying around, but those cool custom items from before are now basically artifacts.
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Apr 28, 2015 15:12
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I also like the idea that not all magic items are made by wizards. Some are made just because they were used to to something particularly badass. Like this sword was used to cut the last head off of a legendary hydra, so now it drips with poison. Or this bow was used to shoot the magic staff out of the hands of an evil lich, so now its super-accurate and can counterspell wizards. And a shield that was used by a commander who was kept their troops fighting long after most would be exhausted, so now just being near it heals and inspires people. Eat it, wizards.
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Apr 28, 2015 15:27
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Bieeardo posted:I think the focus on plus values in D&D enchantments is really kind of dumb. A +1 weapon is a solid step up at low level, especially against targets with DR (or no-sale mundane weapons in earlier editions). A plain +5 weapon is... preternaturally sharp, but not much more notable than a workaday +3, especially in the hands of a high-level fighter. On the other hand a holy avenger or intelligent weapon is rare and precious regardless of how many pluses it has, they're the kinds of things you'd carry as status symbols, or keep safely warehoused as you suggested. Hell, the intelligent sword might have a history of mind-controlling guards into escape attempts. I like to have it both ways. Magic items aren't necessarily exceptional, they're just supplanted mundane items entirely. It helps that I've always run magic items as being things that anyone can make with enough dedication and the right materials. Like you get some hagfish skins and say the right words over them while you sew them into moccasins and bam you've got some slippers of grease or whatever. But the real good stuff is either made carefully by mages and craftsmen, usually by special order, or it gets made because the item was part of something awesome. A factory made magic sword is something you might get from any old bandit, but the Hammer of Nassem is +3 and was created when a hero used it to shatter the Black Diamond a thousand years ago. And I'm a fan of not replacing technology with magic by just keeping the technology. Trains and radio and indoor plumbing might have some magical applications, but they exist as mundane things totally apart from magic (insofar as they don't explicitly manipulate the weirder parts of the 'magic as physics'aspect that most fantasy settings have).
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Apr 28, 2015 19:54
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Cythereal posted:We've had a couple of sessions like that, but I sold the first session as "The president has been kidnapped by vampires. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?" Your game sounds fantastic. But this so much potential for later if you ever wanted to revisit it. The next great American novelist/painter/photographer is transferred to that IRS branch and is working on their masterpiece on the side in the office, giving the True Fey something to feed on, maybe even breaking free.
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May 29, 2015 14:38
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Kurieg posted:Well at the time Tweet was fired, Wizards were king poo poo of controller hill, mostly because they were the only controller. But the strongest class (at that point) was probably the twin strike ranger. Later controllers, particularly the Invoker and Psion, were more powerful than the wizard in some areas, but the wizard was the most versatile, and every class maintained the AEUDs structure. This pretty much sums up why, after buying Essentials, I looked it over and put it on the shelf never to be touched again. My Fighter player was curious one day, looked through it and tossed it at the trash can. He missed, but from then on the trash can was set atop Essentials and we never spoke of it again. I can't bear to throw it away as it is a book and I did buy it, but what a heaping pile of crap.
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Jun 10, 2015 19:21
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Kurieg posted:Seriously, what the hell happened to this Mearls? Was he just faking it in an elaborate scheme to get appointed leader of the game so he could quickly steer it back into the correct path, where Casters are God and Martials are meat, meant to gum up the gears of their enemies with their flesh until the casters can save the day. I imagine that he was totally into 4E at first, but once it came out and he saw the negative reactions from all his grog buddies, he changed his tune later on because he doesn't want to lose his connection to that particular group of old, opinionated idiots. So it's like he helped make this thing and all his friends decided to poo poo on it, so he starts going "oh well I wasn't really all that involved and actually I think it should be more like this oh what do you know I'm in charge, see I'm gonna fix it guys well now I'm gonna tear it all down and build something new, just for you guys, the true fans, our long national nightmare is finally over" blah blah blah bullshit
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Jun 23, 2015 14:56
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Kai Tave posted:Spoiler alert, literally the first thing in Blue Rose aside from the table of contents prominently features the magic deer. They don't waste any time putting that front and center. Oh so that's why Pundit harps on that so much. That's as far as he got in the book so it's all he knows.
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Jul 22, 2015 21:29
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Adventure! Published in 2001 by White Wolf, this is the third game in their Aeon Trinity line, which encompasses Trinity, Aberrant and Adventure!, and these three games are set in a shared world. Although it was the last game to be released, Adventure! details the origins of the setting and some of it’s major players. Set against the backdrop of high-flying pulp action in the 1920s, Adventure! actually explains several mysteries of the Aeon Trinity setting. The book opens with a piece of fiction by well-known comic book writer Warren Ellis, who you may know from Transmetropolitan, Planetary or the Extremis storyline from Iron Man. The story, “Under the Moon” is told from the perspective of Whitley Styles, who narrates all of the stories in the book. Like any good pulp story, it gets straight into the action.  I will say that I do love the way this is presented: in the style of the pulps in their heyday Max Mercer, gentleman adventurer, is at the bottom of a pit, looking on as aptly-named Lord Darkstock monologues. Below him, the pit is opening up to reveal a cage containing… well it’s not really that clear… quote:“We raised them in the dark heart of Africa, Mr. Mercer,” came the mad royal’s rasp from 30 feet above. “In the shadow of Forbidden Mountain, where the meteor fell in 1888. There were worms in the meteor, Mr. Mercer. Worms from beyond space. Imagine that!” Darkstock laughed again as Max scrabbled to stay upright. Annabelle and I struggled futilely against our bonds. “We force-bred them with the royal beasts, our hunting animals. What you see below you is the result. The Bound Horrors of Darkstock Manor!” I guess they’re space-worms that were force-bred to… dogs? Unless British nobility are really hosed up and have hunting worms? I dunno, this part confuses me. Mercer does what any good pulp hero would do and jumps down onto the cage and tricks one of the Bound Horrors into smashing through the cage, propelling him up to Darkstock’s level, where he split’s the man’s head open with his knife. We then cut to Mercer at his New York office in the still-unfinished Chrysler Building, where he is lamenting the fact that he had to kill Darkstock while Whitley just shrugs and tells him the jerk had it coming. Whitley tells us how Mercer “...made a sheik’s fortune 11 or 12 times over in his young life from radical new mechanical patents and stock market wizardry and, each time, had given it away - wholly or in increments - to charities, trusts and reform societies. His concern was always with making life better for as many people as was humanly possible. That, and his violent aversions to both boredom and thought of his own personal safety, was what tended to make his life most difficult.” Mercer is essentially the amalgam of every billionaire playboy philanthropist do-gooder there ever was. Imagine Batman without the silly costume, basically. Their conversation is interrupted when they notice another unfinished skyscraper being lifted into the sky a few blocks away. It eventually disappears into the sky and Mercer tells Whitley to “...summon the Aeon Society.” We then meet Dr. Benjamin Franklin Dixon, whose intro contains this little nugget of, uh… quote:He lit another of his thick black cigars, unique to him and rolled by his own personal staff of insane shamen and priestesses somewhere in the depths of Cuba, and considered the scene. Basically Whitley is a crude white man in the 1920s. This is usually license to spout a lot of gross racist and sexist crap, but I’m willing to give Ellis a pass here because it is in the style of the day and it fits the character. However, the book doesn’t do a very good job of proving Whitley’s assumptions about women and people of color wrong, but we’ll get to that later. Dixon fires up his “Detectoids” which are basically spider-bots, and finds the culprit behind this dastardly feat: Z-Rays! We’re then treated to a summary of Z-Rays, which are essentially “science-magic that does what the plot demands.” Cool, it’s pulp, I’ll go with it. Dixon decides that the perpetrator must have been using a Z-Ray device mounted on an artificial satellite, and that they had missed their intended target: the Chrysler Building where Mercer was. Mercer and Whitley go to visit Sarah Gettel, who Mercer intimidates into telling him he can find the Machinatrix, who he believes to be the only person who could build a device capable of building an artificial moon.  GENTLEMAN ADVENTURER The heroes head to Paraguay, assisted by Jake Stefonowski, the Danger Ace, in an advanced superplane built by Howard Hughes and Max Mercer. In the Machinatrix’s workshop they find her shot in the middle of the room. But on further inspection she’s got machines embedded in her body that help her heal. So Max gives her a jolt of bioelectricity to get her back on her feet. We find out that the Machinatrix used to be married to Dr. Dixon, who is present through teleradio. Max convinces the mad scientist to give up the location of the person who requisitioned the satellite and shot her. She reveals that she built the satellite, and the Z-Ray emitter, which has to beam the power to the satellite from the ground because it’s too big to send into orbit. But she knows nothing about the antigravity machine that ripped the building out of Manhattan. We then find Mercer and Whitley parachuting down to Rex Mundi, an island in the South Pacific where the Z-Ray machine was installed. Inside, the place is deserted and the anti-grav cannon is aimed right at Rex Mundi! With no time to escape, Mercer calls for backup, which comes in the form of Annabelle Lee Newfield, the team’s sniper. Dangling from beneath Danger Ace’s plane, Annabelle nails the Z-Ray machine with her rifle, and Rex Mundi sinks back into place. Mercer is no closer to finding this new enemy than before, as the Machinatrix couldn’t give him a name. But the madman still possesses the anti-grav cannon, and Mercer vows to pursue them. After this opening fiction we’re treated to an in-character introduction to the Aeon Society for Gentlemen by Max Mercer himself, who is speaking to a potential recruit. I’m not even going to try and summarize Mercer’s bombastic speech. Read for yourself:   Really not digging "Darkest Africa" vibe than runs through this book and even bleeds into the art. There's a line between aping a style and just propagating ignorance because you don't care enough to do the work. One thing I should note about this book: like all the Aeon Trinity books, it is divided into 2 sections. They frontload you with the fiction, fluff and setting information, then get into the mechanics only afterwards. I love and hate this decision. I love it because I am a huge nerd and the setting of Adventure! is my favorite part of it. I hate it because you spend half the book reading about the setting, and then you get hit with the immensely dry mechanics sections. That’s a bit unfair, I remember there being more setting-appropriate examples in Adventure!’s mechanics than in Aberrant, but it is kind of a slog to get through. Next time on Serf’s Adventure! F&F: a thrilling tale of murder, intrigue and astounding science penned by everyone’s favorite tabletop writer Greg Stolze! Serf fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Jul 23, 2015 |
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Jul 23, 2015 03:32
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Halloween Jack posted:That wasn't the first time Ellis parodied racism in pulp fiction. While I respect Ellis' intentions, the rest of the book fails to really disprove anything Whitley's character says. In my opinion the authors hew too closely to the source material and bring over the more distasteful elements just because they think they have to. And they never provide a real counterpoint to the characters' opinions, as their minority characters are pretty gross caricatures.
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Jul 23, 2015 11:50
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Adventure! Part Two: Stolze goes full genre and we find out what the hell is going on We open up with another piece of short fiction written by everybody’s favorite tabletop writer Greg Stolze!  This story opens with our intrepid narrator Whitley Styles standing in a laboratory full of dead men along with Professor Dixon and newly-introduced Primoris. The men all appear to have been smothered, and Styles is prevented from closing their eyes by Primoris. Styles determines that the men asphyxiated, but there are no strangulation marks on any of them, and even though a skilled assassin could leave no mark, the men all died too slowly for that. The laboratory is undisturbed aside from a lot of yellow dust on the floor. No one is coming up with any ideas on how they were killed, but Primoris and Dixon know what they were up to:  Whitley Styles would go on to found the D.A.R.E program Just as the Aeon boys are on the verge of a discovery concerning the yellow dust, six “swarthy” men enter the room, carrying strange knives. The knives emit yellow smoke, and as they approach, Whitley takes a shot at one, but his pistol fails to fire as he suddenly becomes dizzy and passes out  Whitley is a huge loving goon, basically Whitley awakens in a hospital owned by Max Mercer with a splitting headache and a stitched-up wound on his forehead from where one of the attackers sliced him. Annabelle Lee Newfield informs him that Dixon took down their attackers with some sort of glue-gun. She also shows him the long strands of coagulated blood extracted from his forehead veins, somehow hardened by the strange knives of his attackers. Primoris was stabbed more seriously and is still in surgery. One of the attackers lived and is being questioned by Max Mercer at the local police precinct. With his pants back on, Whitley takes a ride with Dixon in a flawless Bentley that smells of “leather and cigars.” Dixon informs him that the reason he passed out and that the knife thickened his blood is because they are made of a strange metal that sucks the oxygen out of the nearby air by undergoing a rapid process of oxidation. At the police station, Whitley and Mercer find that the assassin has been roughed up, and Mercer decides that the man hasn’t had enough yet.  GENTLEMAN ADVENTURER Max quickly deduces that the man is a Bahraini pearl diver, suited to holding his breath for long periods of time, which explains why he was chosen to wield an oxygen-destroying knife. When pressed for information, the man responds that they “...have my daughter.” And that concludes the story, we get a nice little cliffhanger that never goes anywhere but does illustrate a good way to end a session. This comes up later in the GM section. Next we get a partially-burned invitation from a Doctor Sir Calvin Hammersmith, who extolls the wisdom of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Hammersmith believes that there is a sort of free energy “bound up in the physical dimensions of space-time itself” which he calls telluric energy. The invitation is to come and see his engine, which apparently can convert this telluric energy into usable electricity. At the bottom of the invitation, written by hand, is a note reading: “Why me? What brought me there to witness that magnificent, tragic spectacle of fire and lightning from room-filling machinery run amok, the devastation to the estate, Dr. Hammersmith’s heroic self-sacrifice to save the rest of us, those dazed moments on the greens as each of us felt fresh stirrings of power?” Below that is a single word, “Destiny.”  After the death of Hammersmith and the destruction of his telluric engine, Max Mercer is nowhere to be found. We get journal entries written by Whitley as he searches for Mercer, starting in December 1922. He goes to England to chase leads, but comes up empty handed before returning to the US. In June 1923, Mercer turns up, under the care of Dr. Primoris, apparently with a case of amnesia. Whitley recalls meeting Primoris after Mercer rescued him from the Thuggee(sure), and to celebrate, they all go out for steaks that night and to talk about Max’s new venture.  This is the literary equivalent of a title drop During their conversation over dinner, we get this little gem:  Goddamn Whitley is irritating And so the Aeon Society for Gentlemen (and ladies too, apparently) is formed. The Aeon Society is kinda presented as the default faction to which the PCs will belong in Adventure! There are other factions that I’ll get to, but they are presented more as rivals, enemies, and allies to the Aeon Society, who provide the means for the PCs to go out on adventures, and plenty of hooks into the world. You can run Adventure! without being part of the Aeon Society, but the whole book is geared towards the assumption that you totally want to be a part of this group.  Inspiring words, Max And finally:  From left to right: Danger Ace, Doctor Primoris, “Safari” Jack Tallon, Maxwell Mercer, Professor Dixon, Annabelle Lee Newfield, and Whitley Styles. Next time on Serf’s Adventure! F&F: the early days of the Aeon Society and crackpot psuedoscience!
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Aug 7, 2015 03:02
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FMguru posted:More Anglo-Saxon than Norman England IMHO - peep the Kingdom conquered by the not-Vikings in the far north. Yep, this looks about right.
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Aug 14, 2015 12:35
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Covok posted:Could they make that graphic more cluttered and hard to read? Have you seen the newspapers from back then? I remember reading those things on a microfilm machine in college and it was like navigating a maze.
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Aug 27, 2015 19:08
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PurpleXVI posted:My mental image is that by this practically all of the knights are women, all of them keeping up the pretense of being male, and somehow no one's caught on yet. This is the plot to my favorite Terry Pratchett novel.
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Sep 16, 2015 16:41
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Halloween Jack posted:That's funny, because I know a guy who knows a guy who was diagnosed with a tapeworm...and killed it by giving it alcohol poisoning. This dude sounds hardcore. Stupid, but hardcore.
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Oct 8, 2015 14:50
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Nessus posted:Did anyone ever F&F the Aeon/Trinity games? I keep hearing people moaning in erotic pleasure over memories of them but at the time they seemed lame to me and now I am curious (spandex). I'm working on an F&F of Adventure! but I haven't posted an update in a while. I'll get on that. I had planned to do Aberrant and Trinity as well, but we'll see how that goes.
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Oct 16, 2015 12:58
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The sad thing is I know I would be absolutely captivated by several pages of onion world-building. I have a problem.
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Nov 23, 2015 21:32
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I used to be really into transhumanist nonsense when I was a teenager. It sounds pretty good when you're disabled, after all. Then I wised up and realized it was a rich white boy's game and that I'll never have the cash to get a piece of that pie. We ended up getting all the lovely parts of cyberpunk without any of the cool stuff.
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Nov 30, 2015 18:23
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Nessus posted:I think the all consuming desire of a lot of the singulatarians is that, oh please, let the computer god - who will be, strangely, exactly like the Biblical God, but with computers instead of divine power - come before I die, so I never have to. It's very precise in these metaphors. Yeah, there's a quasi-spiritual tinge to some of the things I used to read that really put me off. It seems that transhumanists would be better served investing in the future than hoping the singularity will happen tomorrow. I remember watching a documentary with a computer science guy who was pissed off that he wasn't gonna get to live forever. He was seriously bitter that all his work was going to be for nothing. It was pretty sad and pathetic to watch. Eclipse Phase seems to have some more grounded depictions of how these technologies would likely play out. Life under crushing "hypercapitalism" seems a more realistic outcome than most cyberpunk games I've seen.
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Dec 3, 2015 21:52
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The fun thing now is that you can read that whole batch of word vomit in the voice of Keanu Reeves and it makes it much more tolerable.
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Dec 22, 2015 19:12
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FATAL & Friends 2k16: The Hateful d8 FATAL & Friends 2016: No, not that John Wick FATAL & Friends The Fourth: Now we are all sons of liches
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Jan 5, 2016 21:09
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