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Alien Rope Burn posted:What it comes down to is that trying to relate an imaginary evil it as the cause of a real evil is a cheap way to try and give it weight. That's not to say you can't ever relate an imaginary evil to a real evil, but it really helps if it isn't the cause, and it also helps for it to be necessary to the setting or story you're telling. Shadowrun did a better job of it They basically left it at 'hosed up poo poo makes the astral plane hosed up in that area and dangerous spirits are more likely to hang out there'. They did specifically mention concentration camps when giving examples of more warped areas, but never went around naming real life mass murderers and trying to tie them into the game setting.
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Jan 9, 2016 09:51
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LatwPIAT posted:A lot of the Crafts that make up the Disparate Alliance were first described in Book of Crafts, so I decided to check it out for some context for these groups that are now suddenly all so important. Really, the Book of Crafts is itself worth a review here, but for now I'll just make a note of the most egregious and offensive thing I found in there. I'm pretty sure I already know the answer, because White Wolf, but are they actually transgender people and not men cross-dressing as a disguise to go around murdering babies? I don't even know why I'm trying to hold out some glimmer of hope here; all of White Wolf's asian stuff has just been horrible from day one and it's completely par for the course for them to pick the post disappointing possible option.
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Jan 9, 2016 10:05
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. As a transwoman, it did not make me particularly happy... (The book also suggests to the ST that they should put on a Chinese accent when roleplaying one.)
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I do enjoy the juxtaposition between the bellum maga review and the golden sky review, however. Crazy mean-spirited fetish wank, then a game about helping people.
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Apr 6, 2016 17:23
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Tasoth posted:To the people suffering under the abuser, it straight up says 'You couldn't save yourself and the only reason you're safe is a greater power decided to step in'. We have that greater power. It's generally referred to as "the law". While it doesn't make as much of a feel-good ending if the abuse survivor doesn't Rambo out and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, the fact is that many aren't in a position to save themselves and at the end of the day being saved by a greater power is a preferable outcome to more status quo. I'd want them to seek ever how much therapy it'll take for them to reach a point where they could save themselves, but it's more important to get them out of a dangerous situation ASAP and work on the details later instead of hanging back waiting for them to maybe someday do something and hoping they don't get killed in the interim.
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Apr 10, 2016 23:54
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I can completely get behind wanting characters to have families, friends, motivations. Just not to the point of flogging players through the rule mechanics about it.
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Apr 14, 2016 00:07
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Nifara posted:Or you could kidnap his wife, torture her and murder her, and then shoot him through the head. Wait. How can you murder his wife? Does she not also get a love shield?
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Apr 15, 2016 19:11
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It would be a cool scene for the evil vizier to come into the torture chamber and find the wife standing over the bodies of the ex-guards inside, with but one line reaching the room outside as the door swings shut: "Thou done goof'd."
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Apr 16, 2016 04:37
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The sad thing is, I can see room for an actual fun, albeit dark setup for Beasts being supernatural Dexter. So you have a monster in you, one may perhaps refer to it as a dark rider or something similar, and it wants to eat people. But you don't want to eat innocent people, so you have rules, perhaps a code of some sort. Or maybe the monster just has exotic tastes and won't eat just any random schmuck, it only wants to eat pimps or Redditors. And because you're a supernatural, person-eating monster, there are understandably a fair number of people out there trying to kill you, maybe for revenge or maybe just because civilized society doesn't stand for eating people, regardless of how bad they are. Boom, done, collect paycheck from White Wolf. It's not loving hard. It's not even original! Lots of people back in the day had vampires/werewolves/whatever with the character concept of 'well sure, Goth McBlackEyeliner does suck all of the blood out of people on a nightly basis, but he only drinks bad people so it's cool', and Beast could've just rolled with that and turned out fine. All they had to do was refrain from writing a book based around social activist buzzwords with random conservatives as the antagonists, and write it with some degree of internal consistency, but both of those hurdles were apparently too high.
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Apr 27, 2016 08:49
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Plus, and let's be honest here, the fact that Beasts would go around ruining other peoples' poo poo for no good reason could've gone under the radar except the book makes them so  about it.That's the part that also bugs me about the current social justice idiots, the same as it did for animal rights idiots, abortion clinic vandalizers, and pretty much every other radical group that's far up their own rear end. The part where they're "we just (doxxed someone who disagreed with us/released ebola monkeys from a lab trying to save people from a terrible disease/set fire to an abortion clinic) woo, go us!" and are all back-patty about it like they actually did some good instead of just dicked over other people who probably didin't deserve it. A lot of the other WoD protagonists dick people over just as hard as Beasts, if not harder. But they're not usually self-congratulatory shits about it. While you could have a vampire who only feeds off of criminals and thinks they're being Batman, vampires as a whole don't try to frame their victims as deserving to be murdered. That's what sets Beasts apart, and I think that deep down that's what's provoked the response from people.
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Apr 30, 2016 06:24
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Is there any kind of summary for the changes between first and second edition nMage? I'm enjoying the writeup, but so far it's mostly covering familiar ground and I'm hugely curious about whether any mechanical changes occurred aside from the whole CoD changeover.
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May 5, 2016 07:56
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Doresh posted:So a while ago, I said something about doing a review relating to oldschool mechs. No. No, you fool. I read those rules once. I don't believe I've fully recovered from the sheer awfulness.
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May 6, 2016 22:19
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gradenko_2000 posted:I recently discovered the Primitive Technology youtube channel, so I gotta ask: besides Wurm, are there any other games with a pre-Bronze Age setting? RuneQuest from back in ye olde days was set in very primitive times. I haven't kept up with more recent editions to know whether that's still the case. Talislanta is in a weird place that sort of fits that bill; a super-magic civilization blew itself up and hosed the world, so there are some city-states that are pretty urbane but the vast bulk of the world is savages and wilderness. Kinda Conan-ish in that regard.
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Oct 9, 2017 05:45
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Seeing Starfinger just makes me increasingly sad that Alternity never really took off. Alternity has levels, but they serve just to increase skill ranks and buy proto-feats. If you have a big rear end laser gun, it's a dangerous weapon. It doesn't matter who's holding it, who it's pointing at, if you get a good hit with it, someone's going to be hurting. You don't have to throw it away and buy a new one every two months that is inexplicably more powerful that for some reason you couldn't purchase before. The real shame is that Starfinger has some great ideas. Who wouldn't want to stick a mod in their laser gun to make it shoot holy lasers? That's just loving awesome. A lot of the class concept are, on the surface, really cool. It's the lovely mechanics under the hood that are letting everything down.
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Oct 9, 2017 05:57
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah. There isn't actually a shortage of decent chase rules out there, at least, no more than there are shortages of any other kind of rules. Savage Worlds did okay and it's a decade-and-a-half old. The fact that Starfinger goofs their mechanics is not because the is some endemic failure of chase rules, but more clearly indicative of bizarre or sloppy design decisions at Paizo itself - something, frankly, that is an ongoing issue they have. It's also fairly damning proof that they can't have done any playtesting whatsoever, given that anybody sitting down and actually trying to use those rules in a scenario would quickly say, "Waaaaait, this makes no loving sense."
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Oct 11, 2017 21:19
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Two details worth noting about Starfinger's ship building: 1. Since the drift drives can't be used when fighting, they aren't counting as a drain on the reactor. As long as you have a reactor of x size or higher, you're fine. 2. There is a (fairly mandatory) upgrade for medium+ ships that lets you stick in additional reactors. Ships pretty quickly reach a point where the have plenty of internal space but are starved for energy. I'm betting they hosed up on designing the reactors to be able to provide sufficient juice for the bigger ships and just stuck in a quick, "Oh, uh, yeah, you can add more reactors." as a bandaid.
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Oct 12, 2017 21:36
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Here's an additional fun bit of absolute idiocy in the starship rules section. Can anyone in the class tell me why this is a fundamentally stupid limitation to place on teleportation magic? Planets rotate. Really, really fast. Valatar fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Oct 13, 2017 |
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Oct 13, 2017 06:53
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senrath posted:Yeah, they didn't really think that one through. They introduced a specific spell to get around that issue when teleporting between planets, but they forgot to take into account what that means for teleporting on the same planet. We already have a winner! If teleportation requires an absolutely fixed point in space to work, it cannot possibly work on a planet, given that Earth rotates at 1,000 mph and is moving along its orbit at 70,000 mph. Any attempt to teleport would be instantly lethal, leaving the person nineteen miles above or below the destination point, assuming a six second casting time.
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Oct 13, 2017 07:17
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theironjef posted:It's been a few years, but we now have official art of Helga the Punch Witch, our character created in Witch Girls Adventures: Director's Cit, along with Synnibarr adventurer and real balloon enthusiast Captain Chester Balloonman: It might just be a perspective trick with the witch hat, but Helga's head looks slightly too small, it's kinda freaking me out.
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Oct 13, 2017 19:55
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Yeah, the simplest solution would've been "No teleporting through shields." Boom, done. At that point you have to actually beat down an opponent before you can start teleporting the spess mehreens on their ship to mess with their poo poo, and you'd have to drop your own shields to do so, adding an element of risk to that sort of boarding action. And then the writing staff doesn't look like a pile of idiots who don't realize that everything in our solar system is currently hurtling through the universe at a couple million miles per hour.
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Oct 14, 2017 03:18
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Spelljammer also had a bit of a natural dampening effect on magic due to the scale of ship combat often being outside the range of spells. That and ship weapons required users with a decent THAC0, which were not spellcasters. If anything, Spelljammer was probably the setting least in the grip of caster supremacy as far as second edition stuff went. Especially since you were often plugging the wizard into your space boat as a battery.
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Oct 14, 2017 04:27
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After having read the review for Kidsworld, I have my own, shorter review: Buy Cybergeneration instead. R. Talsorian's occasionally clumsy, occasionally cringey view of a future where an uncontrolled nanite has killed a lot of adults and made a lot of kids into X-Men has the benefits of having its heart in the right place, having a view of children that isn't insane or fetishy, and having the potential to be fun if handled by a decent GM. Valatar fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Oct 16, 2017 |
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Oct 16, 2017 02:45
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Alien Rope Burn posted:(Which is probably the real reason why fighting classes tend to suck, not because people are trying to sabotage them, but because the fighter was bad from the outset and people just treat that as the example to work from. It's also why people freak out when you deviate from that.) D20 warriors suck because there was never a very good way to balance limitless melee attacks against limited spell slots in a way that isn't instantly broken by the 30-minute adventuring day. Arcana Evolved attempted it by a flat upgrade on melee damage and introducing combat rituals to give melee people their own limited combat boosts to handle, which was a certain improvement over 3.5 melee but still didn't quite bridge the gap. 4E did bridge the gap, by filing the serial numbers off of magic and giving it to everyone. Now your fighter can run in and swordchuck five people for 4d12 damage and scatter them around the map, so when it comes to raw numbers everyone is more or less on equal footing. Of course, the people who loved their metamagicked up 3.5 wizards promptly poo poo themselves about the loss of caster supremacy and the pushback buried 4E well before its time.
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Oct 17, 2017 05:02
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Things just need to be slightly tweaked to get Lovecraft working again. Back when his audience was WASPs with only an inkling of what we consider modern science, running in and yelling, "There is no God and hosed up ancient things in the universe don't give a poo poo about us!" was a pretty upsetting sentiment. The loss of a loving creator was a hefty pill for a lot of readers to swallow, but today that's generally the status quo; even if a reader believes in a creator, they're probably expecting the creator to be a hands-off sort of person. To get a modern reader creeped out, you just need to ring the two following bells: 1. The existence of a god or essentially godlike thing is utterly, conclusively proven. Like, Azathoth tools on over to the Milky Way and you can see him eating starts when you look up at night, or some sciencey thing happens like they discover some tachyon that lets people see the angels and demons flying all over the place. So it's not 'humanity's totally alone', it's 'humanity is definitely not alone'. 2. The godlike thing is directly malevolent. Humans do have an immortal soul, but it's dragged to some hosed-up Hellraiser place for an eternity of misery. People watch Aunt Edna's departing spirit being torn apart and eaten by 'angels' from the hospital bed. Every last human who is alive is completely, utterly hosed the moment they die, and nobody escapes. Dead Space did a pretty good job of this with the necromorphs, although humanity could at least sorta fight back despite a bunch of idiots intentionally going and digging up markers for contrived reasons.
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Oct 20, 2017 02:12
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Nessus posted:I feel like you're saying that the most horrifying thing possible for a modern audience is being convinced of the authenticity and validity of a religious belief system, in the first case. I do not think that is necessarily going to be so, although I could see a certain degree of this for a committed Christian, say, who is (by whatever means) put in a situation where he is facing the complete and incontrovertible validation of Shia Islam. The second one seems to be an amplication of the fear of death, which, to be fair, is very common and universal. My brevity failed to get the depths of my point across. I wasn't just saying that finding a real religion is horrifying, it's not a, 'oh noooo the mormons were right now I'm insaaaaaane', but a 'we found the creator of the universe, not one human in history guessed right as to what it is, and it personally hates each and every one of us'. If Vishnu just dropped by one day and was all, "Sup, guess what, the hindus were the right ones," some people would lose their poo poo, but I think humanity as a whole would just all be hindu in short order. It's a scenario that people could grasp and adapt to. But if it turns out the creator of the universe is a space tarantula that lives in black holes and humanity's aversion to spiders is the instinctual knowledge that we are doomed to spend an eternity locked between seconds in an event horizon while our atoms and time itself are shredded and eaten by spiders, that's not something that people can deal with. There's no possibility of an okay outcome, nobody's getting to space tarantula heaven, nobody gets to just cease existing, everybody's just inevitably hosed and the moments before our hearts stop beating are the best moments we will possibly have in a trillion trillions of years.
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Oct 20, 2017 07:11
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Night10194 posted:Part of my problem with Pathfinder in general, and Starfinder *especially*, is...what ideas is it trying to communicate? It feels so utterly joyless, like no-one involved was doing anything but trying to produce something that would keep a supplement treadmill going in a new direction. Yeah, Spelljammer managed to absolutely capture my imagination when it came out. It was easy, super easy, to see a creaky wooden ship, dangly lanterns in cramped halls, cutlass-waving scoundrels running on a deck, but IN SPAAAAAACE. The weird plant-ships of the elves, the stone dwarven citadels, the cephalopod-themed mindflayer ships, they all fed into that really strong theme and everything seemed designed around 'what can we do that's loving cool?' Then there's this and it's just... dull. They could have done such amazing things with the core concept, but wound up with so little.
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Oct 22, 2017 22:00
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While I suspect that Genesys is doomed to obscurity without any good settings attached to it, the concept of using Fantasy Flight's Star Wars mechanics for other systems at least isn't striking me as an awful idea.
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Oct 25, 2017 17:26
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unseenlibrarian posted:They recently an announced an Android: Netrunner sourcebook is in the works, which is apparently a big deal, given they managed to sell a ton of copies of a systemless setting book for it. Netrunner's setting is... nice? The little snippets of lore they show in card text are promising, but I'm not gonna fall over myself to buy an RPG based off of it until I see what they actually put out. Not using it for Lot5R is a really bad idea, IMO. They would've sold massively based on that one setting alone, then secured a bigger user base to sell Netrunner and other properties to.
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Oct 25, 2017 20:31
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MonsieurChoc posted:God I miss Fixed. I was also a fan of Rage, back in the day. Shame that one didn't really take off.
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Oct 26, 2017 07:19
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One of the weird things about nWoD vampires is a section I remember that basically said, "Oh, and vampires don't have souls, so they can't experience new emotions. They think they are, but are actually just remembering emotions from times when they were alive." Well, that and the, "If your vampire sees another vampire they'll flip their poo poo out like sticking two strange cats in a bag together." rule. For the former it struck me like they were just trying to be edgy about it but provided a real issue with actually managing to roleplay a creature where you have to think up what past event occurred that its every emotional stimuli calls back to. So, Reginald is quite upset, but is he upset like when Snookums died and his parents told him she ran away but she hadn't run away she died, or is he upset like when Mandy turned him down for prom? Because it must be a memory of a previous emotion. For the latter, it really kills the whole sleek mover and shaker predator of the night thing when your savvy power broker shows up to meet another vampire, then shrieks, throws a couch through a window, and runs away because you hosed up the roll not to freak out. I could see calling for that sort of roll when unexpectedly finding a strange vampire right in your face, but as I recall the rules required the roll for encountering any vampire regardless of circumstances, with penalties for unfavorable scenarios. Both of those put a burden on the game without any particularly worthwhile payoff. I like nWoD Vampire in general, though I'm nostalgic for the original clans, but here and there it dropped the ball.
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Oct 31, 2017 06:22
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:Does anyone actually enjoy that oWOD whiney goth style (and is not a horribly broken person IRL)? 'Enjoy' as in 'am amused by', yes. I could never play it straight, but I'd have fun with an over the top gothy vampire.
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Oct 31, 2017 23:20
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Alien Rope Burn has forced me to do this. After having been mercilessly Starfingered for weeks now, I felt an irresistible compulsion to counteract that joyless slog with actual fun. Messy, broken, flawed fun that came out of lackluster intentions, but fun nonetheless. I present to you the most metal D&D setting of all time:   A pirate guy with a space boat beating up another guy with an octopus for a face. Nothing about this does not deserve to be painted on the side of someone's van. A history: Like a lot of nerds who've caught lightning in a bottle, Gary Gygax was singularly unqualified to run a large company. He hared off after his dreams of turning Dungeons and Dragons into a media-spanning empire and basically left the company in the hands of acquaintances who, through bad luck, incompetence, embezzling, or multiples of those managed to send the company into a nosedive. He wandered back to find TSR on fire and got them ousted by the board, but apparently not in time to prevent huge losses and layoffs. They also between them had a large number of shares of company stock, which they promptly sold to Lorraine Williams, the then-general manager of the company, giving her controlling share which she used to shitcan ol' Gary. A lot of old D&D grognards make Lorraine out to be a Satan who hated nerds, sued fansites maliciously, prevented writers from playtesting product with a 'no playing games' rule at the company, and more, but a lot of those stories aren't verified and will probably never be more than rumor. What is not rumor is that her eventually-fatal plan for TSR was to spitball in every direction and see what stuck. This led to heavy investment in failed product lines that sank the company like a stone (see Spellfire and Dragon Dice, TSR's ill-advised attempts to compete with Magic) but it also caused the explosion of campaign settings in the late 80s and early 90s. One of the first of these 'let's see if it sticks' settings was Spelljammer. On the face of it, Spelljammer is a somewhat cynical setting. It looks more than a little bit like a 'setting' that actually only exists to tie other ground-based settings together. Is your party tired of being on Krynn? Well step right up and buy our box set and they can be on their way to Toril! On his blog, Jeff Grubb mentions that this was not the primary thrust behind Spelljammer and instead something of a side-effect that they took advantage of, but Spelljammer suffered throughout its life by not having a comprehensive setting in the same way things like Forgotten Realms had. Near the end of its run TSR finally did churn out a box set with a Spelljammer-only setting, The Astromundi Cluster, but honestly it wasn't that great and didn't turn anything around. It was by and large up to a DM to make up sufficient content for their game, and I think that's what hurt it the most. The Setting (such as it is): Spelljammer is less of a setting than a bolt-on rule mechanic upgrade for D&D. The bulk of the main box set is spent on laying the groundwork for how space works and how ships work in space. Here is the gist of it: Space works in a way that lets you fly boats in space and have adventures. Anything that keeps you from being on a boat in space and having adventures is not how space works. Are you concerned about microgravity? Well don't be, because a 30-foot boat in space is all you need for 1G. No matter how big or small a boat you have, it's 1G. Need a space suit? Ha no space suits are for your dad. Your ten tons of wood boat have sufficient gravity to attract and hold a bubble of air around it that will keep ten people breathing for about half a year, so your barbarian can go right on wearing a furry He-Man diaper and nothing else. This is not to say that everything is completely hand-waved away; there are fun gravity tricks such that a ship's gravity is a flat plane that goes through the midpoint of the ship, so a character can be standing up on the underside of a ship in space, some ships have decks that are reverse gravity from other decks, and a couple of ships are actually designed without a 'bottom'. This can lead to some fun times when your ship enters a larger object's gravity and what had been the floor promptly turns into the ceiling, better hope your stuff was tied down. Air is more of a dramatic device than anything else; while it's difficult for a ship with a normal crew compliment to run out, certain space creatures and phenomena can spoil a ship's air supply and cause trouble. The astronomy of D&D was set up to explain the often-contradictory existence of the ground settings. The solar systems all exist in gargantuan spheres that contain the sun(s) and planets and moons and all that, completely separate from other solar systems. Within a given crystal sphere, local rules apply: Planets orbit suns, suns orbit planets, planets are flat and on the back of a space turtle, planets are hollow and have a sun inside them, anything goes. The 'stars' visible from a world are not other suns, but are instead lights dotting the inside of the crystal sphere and can be giant torches, alien cities, portals to the plane of fire, windows to the outside, whatever. Speaking of the outside, the thing outside of all of the crystal spheres is the phlogiston, a luminous and highly flammable vapor that flows around them. (Phlogiston is an actual pseudoscience material from ye olde days that attempted to explain combustion.) The flows act like jet streams, allowing a ship moving with the stream to achieve tremendous speed and travel from system to system in relatively short order, if one knows the way. The lack of random magic spaceships popping in on Athas, for example, was explained away by its crystal sphere being extremely remote, or the phlogiston flows around it being unfavorable to navigation. A side effect of the whole 'local rules apply' thing is that divine spellcasters were occasionally in some trouble. The phlogiston, being unreachable by planar contact to some extent, dampened a cleric's ability to contact their deity and recover higher-level spells, and when in a crystal sphere the local gods may or may not be cool with them. Your cleric of Sithrak may be at full power upon entering an unknown sphere, or may be severely diminished. To that end a great many clerics in Spelljammer were taking up the missionary life, attempting to establish sufficient worshipers in every system they could for their god to have sway there, and there were several common pantheons in use among spacefaring clerics that had wider reach than more narrowly-focused ground-based gods. If all else failed, a cleric in a distant sphere with no faith friendly to their god could use a spell to contact their god and regain spells normally. This still managed to be far, far less obnoxious than Planescape's restriction on magic, but was still something that players had to keep in mind, as magical healing wasn't necessarily something they could rely upon. It's late so I'm wrapping up here. Next up, Spelljamming (verb), Spelljammers (noun), and The Spelljammer (proper noun)
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Nov 3, 2017 08:39
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Nobody came out of the wreckage of TSR smelling like roses. Gygax didn't let the Blumes in out of the goodness of his heart, he took their money for shares. Then when their relationship went south he half-assed the attempts at buying their shares back, leaving them with the knives that they promptly and unsurprisingly stuck in him. I don't buy into the Williams as Hitler story when there's a lot of unverifiable stuff, but the verifiable stuff still shows her piloting the company into a 30 million in the hole brick wall by trying to take on Magic on its home turf, blowing big money on suing everyone, and failing to get D&D into video games nearly as well as they could've. TSR was probably already doomed; they weren't flexible enough at moving with the shifting currents in roleplaying trends when White Wolf came in and started eating their lunch, but the demise was definitely hastened by bad decisions in the last years. All that said, the best settings of D&D are a direct result of that series of fuckups. Had Gygax not lost the company, we probably wouldn't have Planescape, Spelljammer, or Dark Sun. And given that he never had anything good to say about 3rd edition, safe bet the D20 resurgence in tabletop wouldn't have occurred under his watch either. Also, Alternity was TSR's swan song, and I still maintain it's the best skill-based RPG system yet made.
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Nov 3, 2017 19:45
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Freaking Crumbum posted:
Ahem. Yes, well, I said best, not perfect.
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Nov 3, 2017 20:25
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DalaranJ posted:Ugh, I’m so over talking frogs now. This was already brushed upon, but I just want to revisit it real quick. D&D's main settings are on run-of-the-mill planetoids, Spelljammer is tethered to that whenever it deals with them. Left to its own devices, however, they have ample numbers of weird worlds. One sourcebook was made specifically detailing examples of worlds to be found out there, Practical Planetology, and in addition to normal rocky worlds, they had water worlds, fire worlds, air worlds, and then weird worlds. The weird ones consisted of Torus, a donut-shaped world, Plata, a diskworld, and the cunningly-named ringworld Nivil.  I also recall a plant world where the entire thing was a huge overgrown vine, a dead moon where pretty much the whole surface was animated skeletons, and even though I can't find it I would swear there was a crystal sphere where its world was a flat plane filling the sphere from edge to edge with a hole in its center, with a sun that bobbed up and down through the hole to provide night and day. So yeah, DMs were pretty encouraged to just go nuts when coming up with worlds to encounter.Anywho: Spelljamming (the verb) The titular activity of the setting, spelljamming (the verb) is to move around in space. The default method for doing this involves a chair-shaped magical device called a Helm. You sit your party spellcaster in it (any spellcaster will do, arcane or divine), the Helm sucks out all of their spells for the day instantaneously, and in exchange they can make the magic space boat move for twelve hours. They can push past this soft limit, but at an increasingly-diminished rate of speed. There are two flavors of Helm, major and minor, with minor Helms able to move ships up to fifty tons and major Helms able to move ships up to a hundred tons, and at a faster speed than the minors. In both cases, the higher the level of the spellcaster, the faster the boat moves. There are two forms of movement, tactical speed and spelljamming speed, which are basically impulse speed and warp speed, to put them in trekkie terms. Being near an object of high mass will automatically drop a ship down to tactical speed, because nerds being nerds it's a safe bet someone is going to work out the math for ramming something at a sizable fraction of lightspeed if there aren't rules in place to prevent it. This also means that if you're space-ambushed by space pirates in a space asteroid field, you can't just punch it and warp off while giving them the space finger. The ship itself determines things like the maneuverability and how many crew members are required to handle the ship. Smaller ships can get away with just the spelljamming mage or maybe just a couple of crew to handle the ship's rigging, while bigger ships can need dozens of crew to steer better than a brick. It's never explained what exactly the space sails are doing on those ships, but if anyone asks just tell them it has to do with tachyons or some poo poo. The end result is that a ship needs sailors to navigate properly, and while a small group of murderhobos on a tiny ship can get by without, realistically they're probably going to need to be dealing with NPCs, giving a DM something to roleplay. Other types of propulsion exist as well: Mind flayers have helms that draw power from their innate magic, dwarves propel themselves through space by banging on stuff in a magic forge, evil people use helms that drain the life from victims for power, beholders have specially-bred gimped little beholders that act as living engines, and people with more money than sense can get engines that propel a ship by using magic items as fuel. Touching back on where I mentioned that Spelljammer is the most metal D&D setting ever devised, there is also the Bardic Helm, where a bard jamming on an instrument propels the ship. Yes, you can move a ship through space by shredding super hard on a guitar.  This guy's ship moves four times as fast. Spelljammers (the noun) The ships themselves are some of the most iconic parts of the setting. Indeed, Jeff Grubb's stated inspiration for the setting when he pitched it was the mental image of a knight standing on a ship's deck in space, and he went on to say that the artists were just cranking out weird cool stuff so they kept sticking it into the game. Here's what happens when you pay a bunch of artists to sit around and make space boats, probably with the assistance of some mind-altering chemicals:  Each space-faring species tended to have a certain theme for its ships. The butterfly-looking ones are elven and are actually plants, they're grown and carved into that shape. The nautiluses are mind flayer ships and enclosed to protect them from sunlight. The squid and fish-looking ships are human, and the spider ships aren't Drow as some might expect, but a new species for Spelljammer called the Neogi. I'll get to them further on. Not pictured are dwarven ships, which are basically just asteroid-castles full of dwarves, beholder ships, which are weird, organic-looking shells, and gnomish ships, which are insane steampunky wrecks that rely on giant space hamsters in wheels to move. Basically any weird poo poo that any artist could make look sort of like a ship was made into a ship. Lots of them are animal-themed, bugs, birds, fish. Some are just alien. Just about none of them are boring. Things fall apart somewhat when you get to the nuts and bolts, however. It was not infrequent that a ship's art didn't mesh well with its in-game stats, and the deck plans given for many ships were usually somewhat awful. For example, the nautiloid ships pictured above are 35 tons, the deathspider ships further back are 100 tons. However, the deck plans give the nautiloids more interior volume than the deathspiders, despite being a third the mass. The listed maneuverability, armor, and weapons for a lot of ships never seemed to mesh well with the visual depiction or description of them in the sourcebooks. It's very clear that there was little or no oversight being paid to getting the ships all done in a unified manner, and any given writer or artist could crank out a ship that looked cool but was essentially unusable without a DM tweaking it. A book with ship construction rules was released eventually, and anyone with even the smallest min-maxing bone in their body could quickly design something vastly better than most of the official published ships, it was a mess. If there's one thing Spelljammer could sorely have used, it's getting one person to go ship by ship through them and tweak the stats to get them all in line with the ship construction rules to even out the really bad and really good ships. The Spelljammer (proper noun) It's a giant space manta ray with a city on its back.  Hope you weren't expecting more. The Spelljammer itself is unique in the universe, an artifact, or vessel, or creature, or all of the above, that seemingly aimlessly flies around. Like a lot of legendary ghost ships on Earth, the Spelljammer is often considered a herald of misfortune for the places it visits and the people who see it. People who land on it are never heard from again, though plenty of people moving around the city have been observed through telescopes. Spelljammer itself fucks with magic that would normally permit teleportation or remote communication, so the exact nature of what's going on on board is a spoooooky mystery. Unless you buy the boxed set adventure that details everything. It's a giant space manta ray with a city on its back. 
Valatar fucked around with this message at 09:27 on Nov 4, 2017 |
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Nov 4, 2017 09:09
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DalaranJ posted:I'm interested to find out the phlogiston fire rules. It seems like ship to ship combat is going to get destructive. Just a quickie tonight, as I'm packing to leave town for a few days: Phlogiston blows the gently caress up. For all intents and purposes it's like a fuel air explosive mixture, it seeps into the air envelope of a ship and makes everything explode, instantly, upon the creation of any flame. The handy dandy chart the book includes for the relative flame and the resulting boom-boom is as follows: Candle (lit) - 1 die fireball 4" across Lantern (lit) - 3 die fireball 1' across Oil flask (lit) - 3 die fireball 3' across Cooking Fire - 4 die fireball 10' across Fireball - 3 times size and effect Match (fuse) 1-2 points (plus immediate misfire if used for a gun) Dampening the enthusiasm somewhat of mages here is that the hugely-buffed fireball will in fact explode centered on them. So unless they have some really impressive fire resistance, that's probably not the best idea. So it looks at first glance like trying to use the phlogiston offensively is pretty much off the table, since it goes boom at the instant you light a fuse, not on the other side where your target would be. And the substance for unknown reasons cannot be carried into a crystal sphere, evaporating instantly, so you can't snag bottles of it to make into molotov cocktails. But never fear! Space sailors are clever devils, and there are some items listed specifically for harnessing the phlogiston as a weapon. There's a magic trident that, upon impact, creates a bit of fire at its tines, with the intention that the wielder would be outside the resulting explosion. There are also anti-ship weapons that are essentially spark grenades, glass balls at the end of a ballista bolt or just meant to be tossed from a catapult, that shatter on impact and release a magic flame inside with poor results for the people on the receiving end. Fire in general is uncomfortable in Spelljammer, given that many of the ships are wood and that having your space boat on fire isn't great for the finite air bubble around it. Oh, and I nearly forgot, there's a weird property of phlogiston where if you run out of air, it will preserve you in some kind of suspended animation. It's possible to encounter long-lost ships in the flow from years or centuries ago with a crew that could still be rescued, if you don't ruin your own air supply by coming close to a ship with bad air. Also, gnomes have invented their own take on stasis pods by basically locking poor fuckers into an airtight box in the phlogiston; as soon as they asphyxiate and pass out they will, in theory, be preserved and not using air or supplies for that part of the journey. There is a saving throw involved to not die, however, and if someone forgets to let them out of the box before leaving the phlogiston they'll die regardless, so it's not really the best of ideas. Valatar fucked around with this message at 10:33 on Nov 6, 2017 |
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Nov 6, 2017 08:36
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