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 So Fragged Empire, sorry...  Is pretty exciting. Evil Mastermind has a pretty good incomplete writeup. "Evil Mastermind posted:Post-Post-Apocalyptic Setting. Post-apocalyptic stuff is nothing new in games, of course. But FE doesn't take place right after everything went to poo poo, or in that period where everything stabilizes and everyone goes "whelp, I guess this is how things are now". FE takes place at the point where everyone is focused on rebuilding, and because of this most of the races are free to carve their own destiny and decide for themselves who'll they'll be, instead of being at the mercy of the progenitor races. So this is where you come in as one of, currently eight, races, unless you feel like homebrewing your own which might take all of three minutes, you gather some friends, pool your influence and build a ship capable of pushing the known section of space just that little bit further out. Ship building is as collaborative as you'd like, and is a system in the game I really like, like how combat works as well as skills and resources and research and- Maybe a moment to quickly explain the mechanics in totality: "Fragged Empire works off a 3d6-plus-skill-beat-a-number system. When you use a skill, you roll 3d6, modify it based on your skill and possibly good description of your action, and roll to beat a target number. Any sixes rolled on the dice are considered Strong Hits, which can trigger special effects based on your character's abilities and gear." OK so now that you know how to play the game we can get back to races You've got your humanoid types who rediscovered capitalism in human ruins and think it's the neatest ideology and whose language is designed around being simple enough to provide plenty of wiggle room in contracts and negotiations and consider themselves to, The Corporation (they're not all one big conglomerate, that's just what they call their species). The flipside are The Kaltorans who think of their family/clan as the smallest unit, and have the unique biological perk of genetic memories, which came in handy when the X'ion arrived and tried to wipe out the Archon's favourite race. Standing above most are The Legion, strong, powerful, proud with a genetic predisposition for battle and not really much else. Which makes it hard to fight a war once your lines of supply are exterminated and you have to work out how to build a society when wouldn't it just be so much easier to fight fight fight. The Nephilim really were born this way, biologically engineered sentient rifles that were armed with vatborn holders, until the X'ion left, decades later in an act of desperation, crashed onto the Legion home world and figured maybe this getting along thing is worth a shot, and so they engineered a subrace called Emissaries, who are trying to do just that.  The art is also really really nice. Protagonist Archive introduced four more races; The Palantor are the remnants of humanity that uploaded themselves into the matrix, the Archons ripped some of these minds out to run their murder robots, not really realising (or caring?) that they were turning people into sociopathic killing machines. Having left their paradise for the first time in 3000 years, there's a lot they don't know. The Ursai are psionic religious types, the favoured of the Archon until they betrayed them to the X'ion, who then exterminated them all. Some time later they were resurrected by a mysterious being, and the race would really like to know why they were worth being resurrected. "The Twi-Far are a spaceborn race that consists of two distinct species existing in one body. The physical half are the Twilinger, another Archon-created race that were intended as disposable cannon fodder. Not wanting any of that horseshit, the Twilinger fled into deep uncharted space where they encountered an energy-based alien (maybe?) race known as the Faren. The two species came together in a symbiotic relationship, and have returned to Archon space to experience the changes the galaxy is undergoing." "The Zhou were an Archon-created bioweapon race made using Nephilim genetic techniques. Originally, Zhou was basically a organic-tissue devouring grey goo scenario weapon; drop them on a planet, they multiply like crazy, let them eat up all the beings on said planet, let the Zhou starve to death, and clean up the mess afterward. What the Archons didn't expect was that when the Zhou was forced back on one planet, it would do something completely unexpected: adapt. The Zhou utilized their Nephilim genetics to grow as a unique species." There's heaps more about how cool resource and influence are used, how powerful traits are, the absolute speed of character creation. The only complaint I have about the main book, aside from the fantastic story sections, is that if you come to this as your first RPG you are going to be incredibly spoiled when you try and reference anything in any other RPG. The book is fantastic, you'll be paging back and forth a lot before it all starts to click in just right (at least my group and I did), but if you ever need to look up a rule or what a modifier means it is fantastic for being incredibly clear, and the character sheet even includes and replicates all the rules you will need. While this does lead to what can feel at first as check page 23, to check page 42, to check page 128, to check page 12, it does this so that the game is crystal clear, using language that is as simple as it can be to not get in the way of your story.  The third successful kickstarter for Soulsborne, Fantasy and Piracy sourcebooks succeeded!
Cassa fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Jun 17, 2017 04:01
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So... probably gonna grab all the PDFs through the kickstarter, and I'm looking through the intro rules right now. Any good podcasts to listen to about the game?
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Jun 20, 2017 07:57
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Not that I'm aware of, but I know they published a fairly good set of youtube videos about the mechanics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=channel?UC8YZVac5wtpGMKO_BqlH0Yg
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Jun 20, 2017 11:54
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Hopefully going to try out the free sample adventure on the website with friends sometime. We're nearing the finish of a DnD campaign and I'm kinda getting sick of DnD/d20 systems. Would not mind hearing from more folks who have used the system for a bit or have run some of the adventure books.
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Jun 20, 2017 17:03
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Spectral Werewolf posted:Hopefully going to try out the free sample adventure on the website with friends sometime. We're nearing the finish of a DnD campaign and I'm kinda getting sick of DnD/d20 systems. Yeah I've been diving into a few other systems and I've been looking for a sci-fi game that has combat rules that are a little heavier than the narrative systems I've been seeing, and F.E. is looking good for that. The rest of the system looks like stuff I'll really be able to get my players into, too. Humanity being dead is A+ material.
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Jun 20, 2017 18:53
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Cassa posted:Not that I'm aware of, but I know they published a fairly good set of youtube videos about the mechanics. This link is dead and I would very much like to see the video described.
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Jun 20, 2017 22:06
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:This link is dead and I would very much like to see the video described. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8YZVac5wtpGMKO_BqlH0Yg/featured They've got a playlist for mechanics.
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Jun 20, 2017 22:11
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Yeah, the forum ate the link and I didn't notice, sorry. My play experience has been limited to a communal spaceship build and a few low level games, as well as ages spent modifying guns to make them as cheap and light as possible. From what we encountered, the concept of GM sets a challenge and the PC's describe how they use their skills to approach solving it. Talking about it afterwards, this was something we all thought worked better than being told what the target number was and the only skill we could try. The mechanical support for descriptive bonuses did encourage us to spend time working out how we could actually engage those skills, and the fact that assists are so easy to give, meant that no one was really left aside twiddling thumbs. On the other hand, the way that formalised penalties to repeated actions did stop us attempting to just pick a lock over and over and explore other avenues afforded by our characters. The way combat isn't just 'lol you dead' and more 'oh gently caress I'm almost crippled' is also much, much scarier.
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Jun 21, 2017 03:20
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So the kickstarter's in the last 24 hours, and just announced they're going to backload a lot of the new content.quote:I will now create a PDF booklet for Fragged Empire that will bring lots of the new ideas from these Sourcebooks back into FE, this book will act as a kind of Version 1.5 for Fragged Empire. Here is a short list of what I want to add to this PDF: 
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Jul 4, 2017 03:59
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Seems like the most important piece of the project. It should probably just be part of the new books, just add an appendix for "How to use new rules in Fragged <X> campaigns".
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Jul 4, 2017 06:00
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Have there been any additional adventures / campaigns released apart from Let Sleeping Gods Lie, The Ghost Ship Carthage, Genetic Spectres and Alien Flame?
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Jul 7, 2017 17:58
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GaistHeidegger posted:Have there been any additional adventures / campaigns released apart from Let Sleeping Gods Lie, The Ghost Ship Carthage, Genetic Spectres and Alien Flame? None that I know of. Here's something that's always bugged me about the setting though. These races are supposed to be the pinnacle of Archon genetic engineering right? To the point where they're inherently superior to a baseline 20th century human right? Consider that with the normal rules the maximum movement a character can get is 5 squares a round, or 5m/s. Usain bolt under these rules has a 11 in the MOV stat with his movement of about 11m/s. That and even if you handwave away the parts about personal shielding; I've never been comfortable with how characters seem to be able to soak up multiple rail weapon shots before they start actually noticing they're being shot at. Characters are either henchmen that go down instantly the moment a hit is scored or immortals that soak up massive amounts of damage before they start slowing down. Especially since the rules restrict multiple traits in the same skills (your focus skills being the ones where you would most want to put multiple traits) or certain combinations of items (most of the fun in D&D is having a broken character build). I get the HP is not blood points debate, but if you're going to have guns and cover rules (especially rail guns), then that stretches credibility somewhat.
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Jul 16, 2017 14:22
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I thought a square was 2m
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Jul 17, 2017 22:56
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Endurance is your ability to endure bullets being shot at/around/near you, crits are what happens when the bullets actually hit you.
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Jul 18, 2017 01:44
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And technically speaking we don't really know what exactly the various races were created for specifically or what the Archons vision of perfection for them was
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Jul 18, 2017 04:24
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S.J. posted:And technically speaking we don't really know what exactly the various races were created for specifically or what the Archons vision of perfection for them was My theory is that the Corp were intended to be a recreation of humans, but instead they just made a bunch of genetically obnoxious jerks.
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Jul 18, 2017 04:53
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Ratoslov posted:My theory is that the Corp were intended to be a recreation of humans, but instead they just made a bunch of genetically obnoxious jerks. Mission accomplished.
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Jul 18, 2017 05:01
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Ratoslov posted:My theory is that the Corp were intended to be a recreation of humans, but instead they just made a bunch of genetically obnoxious jerks. 'Instead'? Maybe they're a failure because they hit the mark too well 
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Jul 18, 2017 07:04
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S.J. posted:'Instead'? Maybe they're a failure because they hit the mark too well That was my theory as well. More specifically that they were intended to pad out the numbers for humanity, but with no more humans around to induct the Corporates into their culture, the Archons didn't know what to do with them and just gave up. quote:
I believe a square can be either 1m or 2m depending on the scale you're using, but I think the rules default to 1m. Even at 2m, you've still got a standard human with a stat of 6. Which isn't as completely broken but still doesn't say great things about Archon genetic "perfection". quote:
I've been wondering about that, because the fluff heavily implies that the PCs are carrying around shield generators built into their armor right? However everything has roughly the same endurance scores, including dark tribesmen and the mobile plants which probably wouldn't have had opportunities to get shielded properly.
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Jul 19, 2017 19:58
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Luck and skill and fate and stupidity and sheer chance have an effect I guess? Backerkit link's gone out to backers, so check your e-mails.
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Jul 22, 2017 04:40
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rastilin posted:I've been wondering about that, because the fluff heavily implies that the PCs are carrying around shield generators built into their armor right? However everything has roughly the same endurance scores, including dark tribesmen and the mobile plants which probably wouldn't have had opportunities to get shielded properly. Shield Nodes, an outfit modification, gives you +10 endurance and -1 armor when at 0 endurance. Stealth Suit is another type of shield (in this case holograms instead of absorption) which gives you Light Cover and the Stealth Strike strong hit. End Dmg is described as: "How much pain and stress the Weapon causes". As opposed to Critical Damage (which is what directly attacks your attributes on crit/at 0 end): "How effective your weapon is at penetrating your Target's Armor and killing them" Put together, taking a hit to your shield or armor causes you pain, like taking a shot in a kevlar vest would. But it's the kind of pain you can (at least in theory) power your way through and still function without actually being damaged. Lastly, the Prep action gives Major Effect: Recovery (heal End = Recovery) and is listed as "You are briefly catching your breath and regaining a little focus, while possibly taking time to do a short task." Further showing that Endurance is more about being in pain, but not actually injured. I really enjoyed the Fragged Empire setting, and a lot of the rules are pretty cool. Though I'm looking forward to some of the lighter rules in the upcoming settings to possibly backport into FE. But I'm always waffling back and forth about crunchy vs not crunchy, especially in combat. These days I'm super into Blades, which is moderately crunchy but in a whole different way.
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Jul 22, 2017 08:14
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Endurance is exactly that. You took a hit that doesn't actually HURT you, but it slows you down a bit. Makes you a bit tired. Maybe it's a small scar, maybe it got absorbed by shields, maybe it just barely missed you but that was enough to take a bit from you, either way, your endurance is going down. When you get hit with a crit, it actually punctured through and hurt. Mind you, you SHOULD get creative. I did a non-grid combat for a bar fight and when one player failed to hit and loss Focus, I fluffed it up as their opponent laying such a sick nasty burn on them that they needed to spend some Spare Time reaffirming their self esteem before they could get over it.
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Jul 22, 2017 09:50
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ProfessorCirno posted:Mind you, you SHOULD get creative. I did a non-grid combat for a bar fight and when one player failed to hit and loss Focus, I fluffed it up as their opponent laying such a sick nasty burn on them that they needed to spend some Spare Time reaffirming their self esteem before they could get over it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMZuBSJ3LEc&t=366s Now that sounds super cool.
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Jul 22, 2017 10:20
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Bard combat is objectively the best so that makes sense.
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Jul 22, 2017 19:59
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DemonMage posted:These days I'm super into Blades, which is moderately crunchy but in a whole different way. Assuming you mean Blades in the Dark, is there a thread? I've read it recently and have been thinking about running it for some friends, but would like to soak up more wisdom first.
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Jul 22, 2017 21:37
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3713405 There's also the G+ community which is fairly active: https://plus.google.com/communities/112767357581554417629 And both the Rollplay channel and John Harper's channel have games running.
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Jul 22, 2017 21:39
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Thanks!
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Jul 22, 2017 21:41
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Yeah, Fragged Empire is the next campaign I'm running definitely.
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Jul 26, 2017 06:28
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I just wish I could get the PDFs earlier than waiting for the backerkit to close.
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Jul 26, 2017 07:16
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About that, are they just going to email the PDFs or will they be connecting them to like a drivethru account?
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Jul 26, 2017 07:45
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8one6 posted:About that, are they just going to email the PDFs or will they be connecting them to like a drivethru account? He sent out a backerkit survey already for that in case you haven't gotten one yet, he's emailing the PDFs to the email address of your choice.
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Jul 26, 2017 18:05
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So since nobody at r/FraggedEmpire had an answer, I figured I'd goonsource it: do you think Drone Weapons can Jam? The reason I'd suspect otherwise is that Drones can't Unjam - it's not on their specific list of actions, and Fragged Empire is always pretty explicit about options. So the options are: 1) drone operator has to Unjam (but Prep/Unjam doesn't say anything about doing it for someone else), 2) Drone weapons just can't jam (not specified anywhere, although NPC mooks who are very similar to drones have a "can't jam" rule), 3) Drones can Prep to Unjam as normal people (suggested by gun rules as the only solution to jamming but not explicitly listed), 4?) Jammed drone guns are forever broken? (The weirdest and most RAW interpretation I can think of). I appeal to the goon Tradgames hive mind to find the best solution.
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Jul 27, 2017 01:22
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I'd just make the drone do it with the caveat that they don't get extra turns to do it, but the drone operator can give up their turns to help.
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Jul 27, 2017 01:33
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Huh, I'd go with you can spend the reload to clear the jam, as that makes sense to me. But also depending on the design of the drone that may not be an option. I'd say it's on the operator to clear the jam for any drones/companions. Or don't take guns that can be jammed?
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Jul 27, 2017 01:34
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8one6 posted:About that, are they just going to email the PDFs or will they be connecting them to like a drivethru account? I'm pretty sure the PDF rewards from the previous kickstarter were linked to your DriveThru account, so consider using the same email that you do for DTRPG in case that happens again.
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Jul 27, 2017 01:53
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I found the core book in print on Amazon and bought it, since I backed the Kickstarter. Things I like: *Frequent reminders about the data summarized in the back of the book, lots of pictorial examples *Optional Theater of the Mind combat for when you don't want to pull out the grid *The system in general is carefully-written *Good to great art *Thoughtful use of keywords in trait and action design Things I don't love: *The four starting character backgrounds are the genetic creations of the genetic creations (RIP) of humans (RIP). Humans died out because of lack of genetic diversity? That's ... weird, right? Are we to infer that miscegenation doomed humanity? *The four character backgrounds are genetic hive mind dark elves, four-eared trauma kender, yellow objectivist humans, and Semper Fi giants. The setting isn't bad, but it feels very "tactical miniatures game faction"-y *Legion have a language of hand signals that can change in the middle of the battle? What? That makes no sense. *The game's sense of time is kind of weird overall -- 100 years to make these monolithic cultures, and to make old languages unintelligible, in an age of space travel and computers? I don't regret my purchase at all, there's a lot to like here. All the things I don't love are in the setting, though, so I am excited about the KS.
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Aug 8, 2017 17:18
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A hundred years is longer than it sounds, particularly in a highly technological age. Also keep in mind that these 'monolithic' cultures are either designed to be that way (That is, the Legion were designed from the ground up to run as an army, ICly) or are found in basically one or two solar systems, total, for much smaller populations than we'd consider normal.
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Aug 8, 2017 17:36
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Yeah, there's only a few million of any of the given species populations, and one of them has numbers in the decline. I think the implication in humanity is that despite all their great achievements, they just gave up on life. The reasons for that are for the GM or the players to figure out/decide on though.
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Aug 8, 2017 17:40
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homullus posted:
. Based on the Palantor and the Mechanoids, it's more "Humanity hit a tech singularity and with so many people uploading their brains to the internet and lopping off bit to be robots they hit a point of population collapse where there weren't enough people with meat-bits to keep reproducing." Of course my pet theory about the mechanoids is that the reason they went crazy and turned on the Archon is at least 70 percent humans being conditioned to think "Well, poo poo, army of killbots? Gonna turn on their creators" from millenia of bad sci-fi and that didn't stop just because they -are- the killbots. unseenlibrarian fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Aug 8, 2017 |
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Aug 8, 2017 17:42
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S.J. posted:I think the implication in humanity is that despite all their great achievements, they just gave up on life. The reasons for that are for the GM or the players to figure out/decide on though. Were it a game I ran, the "human genetics failed!" would just be the stories that the Archons told everyone else, since they're obviously genetics-fixated. Something else happened.
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Aug 8, 2017 17:43
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