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Halloween Jack posted:All 4 of those artifacts made it in exactly as you've posted them, IIRC. I seem to recall InQuest magazine in the 90s consistently criticizing TSR for consistently publishing sourcebooks that were collections of material copypasted from earlier books. They got real bad for that toward the end, and downright obnoxious when they started to seal the books, so you couldn't even check to see how much was reprinted. The Factol's Manifesto did it cleverly, with a wraparound band marked 'Banned in Sigil!', even though it was mostly reprinted Dragon material. Random late-era Dark Sun books wrapped in cellophane... not so much.
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Apr 14, 2016 22:07
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Nessus posted:I'm actually super stoked for Savage Worlds RIFTS, I know people who want to do a play podcast or whatever for it. (Do we have a thread for that stuff?) Anyway, if it lets you mine all that goddamn Palladium insanity into a system that isn't ball-twistingly painful to wrangle, it would be a beautiful thing. I've got a copy of Splicers sitting right beside me that I should try to review at some point.
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Apr 14, 2016 22:07
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And despite not playing the actual tabletop games, I bought monster manuals because as a kid that wanted to do both fantasy writing and art, they were wonderful jumping off points, and it's kind of surprising when I did play what I considered to be be the memorable monsters versus what those who played the games did.
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Apr 14, 2016 22:08
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I hear that Palladium is good at selling their back catalogue, but I don't know how. I figure every Palladium fan has already bought every old Palladium book they want. I doubt a lot of people are "discovering" Palladium, getting super into it, and buying lots of old books. And if they did, there are tons of cheap used Palladium books floating around.Alien Rope Burn posted:[*]West Virginia: Largely still collapsed. Drivers are warned to stay on major roads, as otherwise the "population is reputed to be inbred and vicious". Ooookay. "White Sulphur mineral spas must be avoided at all costs." Wait, what? Young Freud posted:Harlan Ellison's "Along The Scenic Route" is very much the epitome of autodueling as it's presented in Car Wars/Autoduel. It probably had a bigger impact on the game than Mad Max did. Kavak posted:Nothing But Flowers? I wish I had a lawnmower... Evil Mastermind posted:So every monster has this Fear value. It's (technically) a drawback because it robs the PCs of two of the tools in their arsenal. That said, I'm sure you're wondering what the meaning of the value actually is. Hostile V posted:Major Reginald Stratford-Collingham fought in India, France and Palestine. He's 63 year years old and still sees himself as a dashing young man. Before Venus, he turned what little money he had left from war/inheritance into big game hunting expeditions in Africa where he turned it into a business for himself. However, the Major was bad with money and leading expeditions grew boring until he was approached by the businessmen who built the Lodge to live there as a guide and fixture. Venus...is not good for him. In the year and a half since, he has rarely been sober, using quinine gin and tonic to control his malaria. The food and drinking has made him heavy, bloated, gouty and jaundiced. But hey, he's the real deal and that's still impressive to visitors. occamsnailfile posted:There's also inspiration from, in the west at least, stuff like the Andy Griffith show oddly enough--people in a small town who are not genuinely malicious end up with problems like cheating in a pickle-making contest that requires two characters to eat like, fifteen jars of pickles. A lonely older person manipulating the legal system to conceal their loneliness. Home maintenance issues gone awry. Pets that go missing for non-nefarious reasons. That kind of thing.
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Apr 14, 2016 22:12
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Bieeardo posted:They got real bad for that toward the end, and downright obnoxious when they started to seal the books, so you couldn't even check to see how much was reprinted. The Factol's Manifesto did it cleverly, with a wraparound band marked 'Banned in Sigil!', even though it was mostly reprinted Dragon material. Random late-era Dark Sun books wrapped in cellophane... not so much.
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Apr 14, 2016 22:17
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Halloween Jack posted:It seems like they have to do that to convey that an area is a wasteland. Most people don't get than an area can be green and thriving but still be desolate by human standards. Trying to survive in pine barrens is surely better than the desert, but no picnic. "But there's plants and stuff, things are fine. What's Chernobyl?  "There's also The Last of Us, and a lot of zombie apocalypse stuff takes place in very temperate areas.
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Apr 14, 2016 22:29
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Nessus posted:My uncle has, somewhere, one of those giant collections of Assorted Spells - the ones that kind of had a faux embossed red plastic cover? Anyway, it was real clear that someone did find-replace "mage" for "wizard," because a whole lot of things told you how many dice of dawizard to roll on things. The Eycyclopedia Magica, every goddamn magic item (and more) for every edition of (A)D&D to date. Silly, silly books. And yeah, I noticed the same thing about dawizard showing up. Probably the same intern who scanned every last page of the first 200-odd Dragons into PDF.
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Apr 14, 2016 22:39
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Who dawizard? I'm dawizard.
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Apr 14, 2016 22:41
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Yeah, I remember those I had them and a book of magic items which managed to be even worse because it would print a version for each magic item from every different book, magazine or setting it had been in. So you had copy after copy of the same magic items with slightly different entries. Still, gotta love the huge tables for wands of wonder or decks of many things. Because in high school I was "that guy" who always played the wild mage.
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Apr 14, 2016 22:42
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 TOUR OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM: FINALE THE ASTEROID FIELD  The asteroid field is all that remains of Planet Eris. All that remains are giant chunks of rock dividing the border between Mars and Jupiter. High mineral content (radium, iron, gold) and scattered, half-broken remains of Erisian ruins are the biggest draws of the belt. The risks are too high for corporations to chance, though; the big ones are perfectly fine exploiting the Ore Fields of Venus. Your average denizens of the asteroid belt are wildcatter miners (or a company) with armored space suits living on ships or scientists/explorers studying the ruins and recovering artifacts. Now, from an ethical standpoint, exploring and mining the belt are much better morally than the work done on Venus (plus all that ancient technology on Venus in and around the Crater is actually Erisian tech). Ethics don’t pay the bills though and the belt is much more dangerous with a high miner mortality rate from suit damage and getting knocked off into the void. In addition, there is absolutely no civilization or living presence besides whoever is camping out there in a ship.  Big Eddy Brighton is an Australian miner who lost an arm in Gallipoli. He and his crew are the absolute best miners in the belt, operating for three years without losing a single soul. If you need to do work in the belt and need an ally, look up Big Eddy; he might be able to lend you a deluxe armored suit of his own design, nearly unbreakable and the safest around.  Big Eddy Brighton.  JUPITER AND THE JOVIAN MOONS The Europan System (so named because the Europans named it after themselves) consists of Europe, Jupiter, Io, Ganymede and Callisto. Access to Jupiter and its moons was forbidden for a few years by the Europans because they didn’t trust mankind’s appetite for expansion (plus they have the guns to back up their threats). Eventually the Europans negotiated with the League of Nations and now countries of the League, Nazi Germany and the USSR can explore certain moons and certain parts of Jupiter as long as the Europans feel like it. Mankind’s presence in Jupiter is barely tolerated and we only are allowed there so long as we don’t offend the Europans. It really doesn’t help that the mouthpiece of the Europans (a human man by the name of Grand Admiral of Jupiter Sebastian Alexander Leopold von Hapsburg I) keeps issuing edicts about what people can or can’t do. Jupiter  Jupiter’s still a gas giant, and because it’s made of different gasses (especially flammable ones, like methane) the safest form of transportation/habitation is airship. An airship is simply a modified rocket with an inflatable balloon attached to the hull and moved with propellers powered by the ship’s radium engine (which, being inside the ship, won’t ignite the atmosphere). The entire planet is like an air ocean with intense and dangerous pressures the deeper down you go. All throughout Jupiter are chunks of flying land (that run the risk of being sucked into deeper gravity wells and aren’t necessarily stable to walk on) and strange life forms that fly through the sky or live on land with nimble, careful steps. Microorganisms fly through the sky in massive packs, hunted by gasbags or leviathans while other predators fight over food and resources. The creatures that live on the pockets of land are long-legged, light critters that live in a constant frenzy of hunting, mating and dying. Nothing on Jupiter is sapient (as far as we know) but most of it is dangerous with a short lifespan.  So why even bother with Jupiter? The Europans have essentially turned the planet into a source of entertainment by claiming they want to see humans behave more adventurous and more daring, wanting to watch us explore. Since most of the nations exploring the Europan system don’t want to be on the business end of a disintegrator, airship captains are going on adventurers and engaging in dogfights while the USA, USSR and Germany maintain large floating airship docks in safe atmospheres. The USA shares its docks with England, Mexico, Canada, France and Italy and run the safest public ports. Germany has a base far away from the others, Festung Jupiter, and they don’t let any foreign ships approach. The Russians are stationed above the North Pole at Belgarski Stalin and they’re not fond of visitors either.  Vic Linter was a rich idiot with no day job, preferring to schmooze with women and race vehicles around New York. His parents gave him a sizable fortune and allowance as a bribe to go away and stop embarrassing the family. Now he’s a hot-shot airship pilot, exploring and smuggling and helping people when he’s not throwing one back at the Crash and Burn at the American docks.  Europa Humans are forbidden to go to Europa so basically everything anyone knows about Europa was gathered from telescopic monitoring or talking to Grand Admiral of Jupiter Sebastian Alexander Leopold von Hapsburg I (henceforth called Grand Admiral). Europa is 85% salt water with the sole land in a long, thin strip a bit above the equator with canals and rivers running through it. There are cities and docks but no telescope has seen a vehicle and no radios have ever picked up transmissions from Europa. The entire planet is orbited by 24 asteroids turned into beacons (1 furthest, 24 closest) with any trespassers going past 1 vaporized for intruding on Europan airspace. Demarcation Point One is basically a domed Earthling embassy on a massive asteroid with nations of the world keeping delegates and diplomats there to talk to the Grand Admiral (and Europans by proxy). The luxury and technology of DPO is beyond belief, but the politics leave something to be desired. On the one hand, beautiful grounds, excellent food, luxury out the rear end. On the other hand, the Grand Admiral never tips his hand unless you’re in front of him and every delegate is trying to make the other look bad for the Europans to look favorably on them. DPO might just be another source of entertainment to them.  The Grand Admiral, probably yelling at these people. Grand Admiral of Jupiter Sebastian Alexander Leopold von Hapsburg I is…all of that. The man’s history and attitudes are unreadable, loving pomp and bling (man has a golden throne encrusted with gems and little rockets made of platinum) as much as he loves being a condescending rear end and making threats when he’s too busy to pretend to be listening. How the hell the Europans picked him to be Grand Admiral? Where did he come from? The universe will never know, considering how he’s tanned with blue eyes and brown hair, has an accent suggesting a heritage somewhere in the small country of Most Of Europe and speaks fluent English, French, Russian, German, Spanish and Venusian. My personal guess is that a bunch of Europan scientists cooked him up in a lab and loaded whatever they thought would be funny into his brain.   Callisto Callisto is an ice ball of a moon, frosted over except where there are patches of water. No life forms foreign to Callisto can survive, forcing any visiting scientists to be careful. There are no reasons to visit Callisto except to study the wildlife, so people rarely go there. The wildlife is interesting, Arctic to the extreme, with the most famous species being the Callisto Yeti, a horned hominid that is covered in shaggy fur and muscle and stands three meters tall. Callisto Yetis are infamously violent and famous for killing members of the first scientific expedition to the planet that found life. Naturally, big game hunters would love to travel to Callisto and three Callisto Yetis are now at the Bronx Zoo in a special enclosure. A male and a female were captured by the Nazis as well and were meant to be brought to the Oslo Zoo through Berlin but there’s teensy problem of them escaping and currently being loose in Germany. Dr. Francesca Santo is one of the solar system’s top exobiologists, specializing in the creatures of Jupiter and its moons. She’s been studying the seal-like life of Callisto for over four months now and the last time supplies were sent out…they couldn’t find her or her crew. Their camp was destroyed and surrounded by footprints of the Callisto Yeti and humans in heavy boots. There’s currently a reward for anyone who can bring Dr. Santo home safely (or at the very least, find out what happened to her).   Ganymede Ganymede is a lush tropical jungle of a planet, not nearly as hot as Venus but enough to make a regular Earthling from a cooler climate uncomfortable. Ganymede is safest place in the solar system to mine for gold and silver: no companies to deal with like Venus, no Martian politics, plenty of air unlike the belt. There’s no government on Ganymede, no corporations, nothing but hundreds of tents and wildcatter claims. This has two problems, though. First, no formal government means the place is full of people who solve their problems and squabbles with gunfire. There are vigilante mobs, sure, but cross them and you’re screwed. The other issue is the natives of Ganymede, the previously-discussed plant people with a symbiotic relationship with fungus. They’re shy but they’re stealthy and they may be packing Stone Age weapons but attacks on camps are common and they’re vicious guerilla fighters. The big thing standing between Ganymede and Earth is the lack of a common language. Chan-la-lee is a Ganymedian warrior whose tribe strikes first to protect their planet. They figured out that guns and human weapons were even more effective against us and they began to collect them from dead miners. Up until recently, they were limited to whatever guns and ammo they could scavenge. But then Chan-la-lee was approached by humans waving white flags looking to trade. In exchange for those useless yellow rocks, the humans are supplying Chan-la-lee’s warbands with weapons and ammo. The question is, who is turning the Ganymedians into an armed fighting force and why?   Io Humans were only allowed to visit Io for three months before the Europans closed travel. Now, it’s a forbidden, desolate planet ravaged by Europan bombing. Why it was bombed? Nobody on Io can tell you and Europans will just shrug and say they had it coming. The only reason people could visit Io were to see what the Europans were capable of if they feel you warrant it. They say that Io was a beautiful planet with a beautiful people, a race of fair-skinned humanoids who put Martian Courtesans to shame. Now the planet is like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a dusty planet where the largest land mammal is a capybara-sized rodent and plants amount to weedy grass, mosses, lichens and protected shrubs. The cities of Io are broken ruins that glow in the dark from centuries-old radiation; the natives don’t stay there, they roam the planet in packs. The people of Io themselves are heavily altered from radiation, stunted into a grey-skinned, hunched species of sapient with skin conditions or other ailments from deeply-ingrained genetic damage. There’s nothing that interests Earthlings about Io except for the ruins and their people, some crews bringing them on board to give them a chance at survival. Jan San Jan watched the explorers from Earth from a distance. When they left, he took everything they left behind as relics of a species of gods. Jan runs a cult that worships Earthlings, viewing them as a benevolent race that will use their science and wisdom to save his people. He has an altar made of human items his faithful worship at (made of trash and things discarded) and his followers scavenge for items they hope they can trade to us for tools or food.   Moonlets The moonlets are all of the other bodies that orbit Jupiter that are too small to be proper planets. The four important moonlets are Adrastea, Amalthea, Metis and Thebe. Metis was shaped into a football by Jupiter’s pull and has a dark side and a near side. The dark side is permanently night, covered in a fungus that feels like grass. The near side is a steamy, lush jungle. Both sides have issues with volcanoes and earthquakes. Adrastea is an ocean moon that has weird tides due to Jupiter’s pull and is a magnet for things that fall from Jupiter’s rings. Amalthea is a desert planet that travels a path of dust kicked up by its own storms, constantly picking up the trail and dumping it behind it in a circle. Finally, Thebe is a dead planet of dust and sand that scientists believe was part of Amalthea at one point. There’s not a lot to these planets because they really haven’t been explored yet, but that could change. Morty Fletcher (aka Mort the Goat, Marvin Hayes, Dr. Martian and Professor Morthume Hildegard) is a notorious snake oil salesman and con-man. Not content to scam Earthlings, Morty sold non-existent weapons to Martian Princes and fake Martian healing technology to Venusians. He’s pulling his next jobs on and around Jupiter’s planets by writing fake exploration warrants and writs of colonization by the Grand Admiral. He’s also writing false certificates claiming that some moonlets are rich in ores and gems. How’s he getting away with this under the noses of the Europans?   Lesser Bodies The lesser bodies are things too small to be planetoids; asteroids, ice balls, space junk. They only have to offer ore and minerals and occasionally some of them have circumstances that allow a very strange form of life to emerge. The latter is really the only interesting thing about them, considering that the only ones that allow life are completely sealed from the vacuum and are little caves or little balls of rock and ice with alien creatures inside. There’s really nothing else to the lesser bodies and as a result most people don’t bother with anything but scientific exploration. It’s much safer to mine the belt because digging around in the lesser bodies of Jupiter might draw the wrath of the Europans.  Chateau de Bubble. Baron Nikolai Pahlen escaped the Communist pogroms of the October Revolution to end up chasing a bunch of bad deals in the Honduras, Paris or Africa. A ladies man and adventurer, he made a small fortune in African diamonds up until he found out that the land he thought he bought mining rights to wasn’t his. He used the last of his diamond money to buy a rocket ship and crew and is now chasing what’s probably another bad deal: mining and exploring the lesser bodies.     SATURN  Saturn is a lot like Jupiter, what with both being gas giants orbited by moons. People don’t bother much with Saturn due to it having many similarities with Jupiter (down to the creatures living in the atmosphere). People are much more interested in the moons of Jupiter, especially Titan. Titan is an ocean planet with just one continent and a sprinkling of islands. The water glows at night thanks to a water soluble radium isotope and sparkles in the day due to dissolved gold. Titan is home to many predatory species of creatures that resemble dolphins or whales or sharks, all of them able to survive the dangerous, constant storms. Aside from the exotic sea life, there are sapient beings on Titan. The H’ykar are amphibious humanoids that make use of the land, socially and technologically progressed to the point that they’ve figured out agriculture. The Sivaan, on the other hand, are amphibious starfish that communicate telepathically in any language to ask for a ride to stay out of the storms. When not speaking telepathically, the Sivaan enjoy eating, mating, burrowing and philosophy. The H’ykar worship the Sivaan who are considering manipulating them for a symbiotic (or parasitic) evolution. Other than Titan, who knows what else can be found on the moons of Jupiter? There’s no Europans to worry about out here.  A H'ykar specimen. Erasmus Cotts went too far out in space and he did it alone. He set many records for solo flight and furthest distance, but he crashed on a moonlet of Saturn when he tried to explore the moons. Erasmus lived off fungus and water for nine months on a moonlet with barely enough air as he tried to rebuild his rocket. By that point, unfortunately, isolation and nutritional deprivation set in and Erasmus lost his mind. By grace of a miracle he found an alien ship and used it to rebuild his own rocket, but he hasn’t left Saturn. Now Erasmus Cotts is a madman at the helm of a hybrid ship armed with lost alien technology hunting anyone who dares enter his realm, secretly praying for death with every fight he starts.  URANUS  Nobody has gone to Uranus and come back alive. Everything that explorers and scientists have to go on is either from telescopic observations or recorded radio transmissions from doomed explorations. Uranus itself is a sub-Arctic gas giant with no observable life (although one expedition claimed that something big had grabbed hold of the ship before their transmission was lost). The two notable moons, Titania and Oberon, are the only places big enough to land on but there was only one exploration to Oberon. Every inch of Oberon is covered in a thick red moss that glows green at night. The moss is impervious to flame, tough to cut and grows rapidly in hours, requiring the scientists to constantly keep it off the rocket. The sole expedition to Oberon didn’t end well either; the engines of the rocket exploded when it tried to take off and escape the moss.  NEPTUNE  Few people have gone to Neptune and less of them have returned. The reports of survivors and radio transmissions have told scientists that Neptune is a gas giant, but that’s it. Neptune is a mystery, almost completely unexplored and untapped. But why would you bother when it’s so far away? Neptune has no story hooks, that's all on the GM and players to figure out. PLUTO  Nobody has gone to Pluto. The closest anyone got to the planet was Einstein and that’s just because he engaged his experimental warp drive and took off into the unknown from there. Everything known about Pluto is known from remote observation, namely that it’s ungodly cold and unnaturally strange. Shapes appear in the snow sometimes, shapes scientist claim resemble howling, snarled faces hundreds of kilometers wide and long. No two faces are the same, but they all have common characteristics: man-beasts with long predator teeth and heavy brows. Are they hand-made structures crafted by the native Plutonians like the Nazca lines and American Indian mound sculptures? Are they something weirder, something alien living in the snow as snow? Are they just projections of the human mind’s tendencies to look for familiar patterns like shapes in clouds? You’d have to go to Pluto to find out. Dr. Alicia Bayers would like to go to Pluto to find out. She firmly believes that faces of Pluto are constructed by hand by an intelligent native species. However, her fellow scientists don’t believe her and she’s been applying to every grant and opportunity in the US to get to Pluto and find out. Her obsession with the planet and her zeal has given her a label as a crackpot and she’s been fired from teaching at universities over it (MIT and more). She is the world’s foremost scientist on Pluto, but her patience is running out and she might do something stupid to fund her dreams.  The book is designed so we’d jump right into character creation but before that, I’d like to skip ahead to more specifics about the playable races. This way, we can get a better handle on who they are and what they’re like rather than just what their worlds are like. So NEXT TIME, let’s look at the Sophonts of the Solar System. Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Apr 19, 2016 |
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Apr 14, 2016 22:47
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Halloween Jack posted:I hear that Palladium is good at selling their back catalogue, but I don't know how. I figure every Palladium fan has already bought every old Palladium book they want. I doubt a lot of people are "discovering" Palladium, getting super into it, and buying lots of old books. And if they did, there are tons of cheap used Palladium books floating around. Well, one way is selling holiday bags of random books; you give them a list and they see what they have and send you a stack. It's a backstock-clearing exercise, of course. They're also just religious about pushing their catalog, to the point of it being somewhat insulting, but maybe it works. Halloween Jack posted:I have family in White Sulfur Springs, and I assure you they're not inbred and that the springs aren't radioactive or anything. About the only positive thing I can recall about West Virginia in Car Wars was the Mild Ones. They're a cycle gang that rides around in tuxedos that usually tries avoid using force to steal vehicles: they'll often politely drop off victims at the next safe town either way. They're big on using tricks and traps to get people to lose or abandon their vehicles without a fight, and there's some clever bits in the scenario or two they appeared in.
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Apr 14, 2016 22:52
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drrockso20 posted:I had almost forgotten how much I loathe Witch Girl Adventures, makes me want to run a game dedicated to murdering that kind of magic user(actually that would make for a good campaign, a group of assorted supernatural beings ganging up to murder these Witches cause they are being too blatant and open with their magic, and it's threatening an already fragile Masquerade/truce with a government monster hunting agency, that will literally burn the city to the ground to contain this if necessary) American Horror Story: Coven reminded me super-strongly of a bad RPG campaign, with bratty witches squabbling for power with not much horror. I thought it was WoD, but it's clearly WGA (with a touch of Hoodoo Blues).
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Apr 14, 2016 23:22
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drrockso20 posted:I had almost forgotten how much I loathe Witch Girl Adventures, makes me want to run a game dedicated to murdering that kind of magic user(actually that would make for a good campaign, a group of assorted supernatural beings ganging up to murder these Witches cause they are being too blatant and open with their magic, and it's threatening an already fragile Masquerade/truce with a government monster hunting agency, that will literally burn the city to the ground to contain this if necessary) The funny thing is, the supernatural PCs could be some genuinely horrible people and still be preferable to Witches.
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Apr 14, 2016 23:25
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Hostile V posted:
These two bits are my fav. Poor Erasmus.
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Apr 15, 2016 01:59
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So Professor Prof's writeup convinced me to run Golden Sky Stories, it'll be fun to see how badly I mess it up, but it should be a good time! I just hope the Mononoke Koyake translation is still in the works, especially with how much Fantasy Friends references it... it's really, really annoying most of the news is posted to kickstarter as backer-only posts. I know I didn't help get it made but isn't having bought it since a good enough reason to keep me in the loop about upcoming stuff to throw money at? Wait, I just realized, is that monkey trying to stick a stick up the cow's butt? LatwPIAT posted:I got bored. Here's a 7th Sea 2e dice statistics calculator: And here's a version that doesn't use anything outside the standard library. (Seriously the stack module you used is just a very very thin wrapper over lists...) Keiya fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Apr 15, 2016 |
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Apr 15, 2016 04:14
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Keiya posted:Wait, I just realized, is that monkey trying to stick a stick up the cow's butt? No he's probably just trying to whip him like a riding crop.
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Apr 15, 2016 04:46
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Keiya posted:And here's a version that doesn't use anything outside the standard library. (Seriously the stack module you used is just a very very thin wrapper over lists...) Ooooh, cool! The stack module was something I just copied because I didn't know how to make it myself, so one that doesn't use non-standard libraries is great. Thanks! (In my defence I had been doing geometry for like six hours straight and wrote that program as a break from taxing mental tasks.)
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Apr 15, 2016 04:50
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Keiya posted:I know I didn't help get it made but isn't having bought it since a good enough reason to keep me in the loop about upcoming stuff to throw money at? There hasn't been any word about Mononoke recently, but I dropped the question in the Japanese Games Thread, at least. It's supposed to be in the works, but I don't know if where it is in the schedule compared to the other things still left as part of the kickstarter. Keiya posted:Wait, I just realized, is that monkey trying to stick a stick up the cow's butt? I think it's probably just whacking it to keep it moving? That is a thing, right? I seem to remember something like that for water buffalo to spur them on.
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Apr 15, 2016 04:58
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That monkey's just holding a stick and isn't trying to put it in the cow's butt, y'all need either Jesus or "to not seek fetish content in all things"
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Apr 15, 2016 05:37
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Nessus posted:That monkey's just holding a stick and isn't trying to put it in the cow's butt, y'all need either Jesus or "to not seek fetish content in all things" Witch Girl Adventures has forever poisoned us all.
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Apr 15, 2016 05:49
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Simian_Prime posted:Witch Girl Adventures has forever poisoned us all. We are all damned.
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Apr 15, 2016 05:52
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I blame kancho.
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Apr 15, 2016 05:52
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Simian_Prime posted:Witch Girl Adventures has forever poisoned us all. Bieeardo posted:I blame kancho. My excuse is a webcomic strip uploaded over a decade ago, but that probably doesn't help my case.
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Apr 15, 2016 06:20
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Man, I haven't thought about Schlock since the RPG kickstarter. I hope that's worked out.
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Apr 15, 2016 06:39
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It's behind schedule, but reports from people who've played convention games are extremely positive, and the Howard and Sandra Taylor haven't failed to deliver yet. I mean, this is the guy who apologized for a late strip when the facility the web servers were in literally exploded because he'd not missed or even delayed an update before.
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Apr 15, 2016 06:46
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My Cthulhu Mythos Detector went off reading the Pluto section for Rocket Age (especially the part about space mushrooms), but once again I'm glad they've left things nice and vague. A little bit of pulpy horror seems like it would make a good diversion from pulpy sci-fi action from time to time.
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Apr 15, 2016 09:29
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drrockso20 posted:I had almost forgotten how much I loathe Witch Girl Adventures, makes me want to run a game dedicated to murdering that kind of magic user(actually that would make for a good campaign, a group of assorted supernatural beings ganging up to murder these Witches cause they are being too blatant and open with their magic, and it's threatening an already fragile Masquerade/truce with a government monster hunting agency, that will literally burn the city to the ground to contain this if necessary) The agents would be forever broken from all the sanity checks, and failure to secure the Justices would be such a high-profile incident that DG might well be re-elevated to its pre-Vietnam status in order to prevent such a repeat.
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Apr 15, 2016 10:57
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Not done one of these before, but this game needs more love. Like any loving love at all. SPELLBOUND KINGDOMS PART 1: WELCOME AND CORE MECHANIC  That's a pretty nice cover. I like that cover. The thing to note there is the bit at the bottom: Frank Brunner. That's not just him showboating, oh no. Spellbound Kingdoms posted:Design, Writing, and Layout: Frank Brunner There's no doubt about it: Spellbound Kingdoms is one guy's loving obsession. Games like that are sometimes just masturbatory heartbreakers, but occasionally it means you just get one very cohesive vision (hint: that’s what this is). He used to work for Wizards of the Coast, writing supplements for D&D back in the 3.5 era, but according to one interview he left because he was frustrated at having his work cut back and mucked around with – “I decided I was tired of my baby’s arms being torn off”. Reading the book, he’s got a point. Wizards should have just let him done his thing because holy poo poo, this is gold. It opens with a welcome text, and you’re immediately dropped into the thing I probably like least about the game – the incredibly casual way in which it’s written. He’s clear about the rules (most of the time), but everything else is done in this really chatty style, often with interjections about how the game isn't very good. It’s frustrating, because the game is actually really good, and having Brunner tell me every other page that it sucks just annoys me. Take some drat pride in your work. He does, however, also cover some useful stuff in the welcome. He points out that his game doesn’t do things that a lot of other games do, and there’s a bunch of stuff people might not expect to find in it. Usually this is just pretension, but actually he’s not wrong. When he says there are “integrated culture, war, shadow war and economy rules”, he really means that. He also talks about how the layout to the first edition was poo poo, and he’s tried to make it less poo poo this time around, but it’s still kinda poo poo. For gently caress’s sake Brunner, have some god-drat pride. He also drops the obligatory rule zero bullshit that games tend to fall back on, and that does annoy me, and it’s weird because reading over the whole text it’s clear that he’s made a decent effort to genuinely handle 99.9% of issues you might have. He kinda doesn't need rule zero. There’s also a note about materials you need (all the polyhedrals and notably copies of the “fighting styles”), and then a note saying “I think you know already know what an RPG and a GM is, so skip that. Otherwise, loving Google it (seriously, that’s what it says). Now we hit the first proper section of the book – chapter one: rules. It opens with a sort of odd discussion of the artwork for the chapter, explaining what it is, what it means, and explaining that it’s the kind of thing the game is looking to support. It's this bit of artwork:  Like, that's cool and all, but it's a bit weird to spend the opening paragraph of your rules chapter talking about your artwork. He goes onto say that it represents what he wants out of a game which is to Spellbound Kingdoms posted:drive the game at a fast pace and set it on a collision course with the most dearly held inspirations of PCs and NPCs. If lovers are riven, homes are burned, and true love conquers all, then you are playing the game as it was meant to be played. That's a pretty ambitious brief. Next up is an overview of the core mechanic , which is basically roll over the target number, with different polyhedrals to represent different levels of ability. He also calls out inspirations, that work a bit like action points, but are represented in the world directly – so if someone kills your wife, you get worse at sword fighting. That’s the first time that Brunner explicitly calls out what ends up being a major theme of the game, because that’s not an out of character metagame conceit. That’s in character and in world. People know drat well that if your wife gets murdered you’ll be worse at sword fighting – until you shift your personality around enough to use “get revenge on the fucker who killed my wife”. Spellbound Kingdoms is also weirdly a dice pool system. Basically, when you roll to do something, you might end up rolling several dice, each for a different thing (one because I’m strong, one because I’m a skilled sword fighter, one because I love my wife, that kind of poo poo), and you get to roll all of them. But you don’t add them together – instead you take the highest result off all the dice you rolled. Dice also explode, but not in the way they do in lots of other games: if you max out a die, you roll the nice die step up as a new die in the pool, but you still only pick the highest number out of all of them. If you think that rolling a 12 on a d12 sounds loving broken, well, Brunner thinks you might think that:  The thing is, he's not wrong. Rolling a d20 in this game is more satisfying than it ever was in years of playing D&D, whatever edition. You know when you break out that d20 it's time for someone to be your loving bitch. What polyhedral you roll is basically the biggest one you can “fit” into the number of the attribute, skill or whatever. If it’s a 7, you roll a d6. If it’s an 8, you roll a d8. Modifiers are basically advantage and disadvantage from D&D 5th – you roll a bonus die in your pool for a positive modifier, or you roll a bonus die in your pool and take the lowest value for a negative modifier. That makes penalties pretty loving brutal. If you have both penalties and bonuses, you get to roll the bonus die last and so it’s not all lost. If you tie on a contested check, the higher die type wins. If they’re the same, reroll. Contested checks are just two people rolling off, but that’s not how most checks are made. Most are made against the doom. The doom is measure of… well, I’ll let Brunner explain it, because it's another one of those moments where it's not clear right away that this isn't just a concept for the players, it's a concept for the characters. In-world stuff later in the books talks about the doom as if everyone knows about it. Spellbound Kingdoms posted:On the other hand, if you are rolling against the environment, the target number is usually the Doom of the region. The Doom is born of magic, the king, and fate. It measures the difficulty of life. Woe and misery walk in lands with high Doom, while the sun shines warmer, and there are fewer children wailing from plague-flagged tenement windows, in lands with low Doom. Doom opposes heroic actions; a peasant need not roll against the Doom to cook lunch. That's right, in this game, people have come up with an objective measure for how lovely your town is. And that directly impacts on whether you can swing on a chandelier and kick someone in the face. Because plague-ridden children being miserable outside makes your swashbuckling nonsense harder. This ain't anywhere near the extent of how weird this idea gets. Buckle up, because next time we're going to talk about how really hating a motherfucker or how being an obsessive stamp collector can make you immortal. Next up: MOOD, INSPIRATIONS, FEAR AND BEING loving IMMORTAL AT FIRST LEVEL
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Apr 15, 2016 14:45
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Nifara posted:Not done one of these before, but this game needs more love. Like any loving love at all. Aw yiss, I remember this motherfucker. Great opening post!
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Apr 15, 2016 15:03
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Okay, so I double-checked and today is April 15th. Happy Third Torgaversary, everyone! 
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Apr 15, 2016 15:10
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I've never heard of Spellbound Kingdom but this looks drat good.
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Apr 15, 2016 15:18
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Spellbound Kingdoms is without a doubt the best fantasy RPG ever written and is one of those rare games that's practically impossible to not have fun while playing in. Everything about it is golden and it's criminal that more people haven't played it. If you're going to buy it off of DrivethruRPG then please, do yourself a favour and buy the Premium Heavyweight version, because the print quality of Drivethru's standard book is really lacking.
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Apr 15, 2016 15:26
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drat, the exploding dice mechanic there is fantastic. I might have to steal that for something.
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Apr 15, 2016 16:00
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Momentum kept me going into part 2, so I might as well throw it up now. SPELLBOUND KINGDOMS PART 2: MOOD, INSPIRATIONS, FEAR AND BEING loving IMMORTAL AT LEVEL 1 So the core dice mechanic is pretty simple to get to grips with, and pretty cool, but it doesn’t explain much about how the game works unless you put it in the context of mood and inspirations. So mood is a measure of your character’s… uh, well, mood. It’s how happy they are, how engaged, how much energy they’ve got and how much they can handle giving a poo poo right now. Mechanically it’s half action point (you can spend mood to max a die, but not let it explode) and half health (you can spend it one-for-one to absorb damage). It’s a strange conceit, but as we head more into the way the setting works, you’ll see it makes sense. So how do you get mood? Well, you get some to start off, and after that you get it by:
So, inspirations. I’ll let Frank take this one: Spellbound Kingdoms posted:This is a world where love and fear hold dominion even over death. Inspirations drive the architect to build, the lover to woo, and the warrior to fight. They move the world, and they have the power of magic. For all of these reasons, the nobles condition the commoners to accept a life of blandness and to settle for tepid passions. Inspirations are far too dangerous for just anyone. Oh yeah, he’s not bullshitting with this, and it’s the first clue that the setting of Spellbound Kingdoms, despite the fact that you play ridiculous swashbuckling insult sword fighters, is super dark. Like, concentration camps and secret police dark. The nobles are all over that inspiration poo poo, and they want to stamp it out as much as possible. That means forcing people to lead as drab and miserable lives as possible, and making them do stuff they don’t care about all the time. We’ll get more into that later, but honestly that’s the difference between heroes and everyone else. Heroes aren’t any more skilled or talented, they just give more of a poo poo. So mechanically, each inspiration can be used once a scene to roll a bonus die on a check. If the inspiration actually applies to the situation, that’s called “stunting”, and you can maximise that bonus die, and the main die in your original check, and they both explode. Caring about stuff is OP as gently caress in this game. Each inspiration gets a rating, but that rating doesn’t let you use them any more often. Instead, it makes them more important to you, and that protects them - when you run out of mood, people can try and convince you not to care so much about your inspirations, but there's more not caring you have to do to lose them if they're higher rated. Equally, if they do something to gently caress over your inspiration, then it can get “damaged” or even just taken away. The other thing that high-rated inspirations do is make you unkillable. That’s not hyperbole, here’s the rules verbatim: Spellbound Kingdoms posted:Love and fear are the most powerful forces in the world. Where there is love, death has no dominion, and where there is fear, peace finds no purchase. Inspirations can change the world. You read that right: if you love something enough, your character can’t die. However stupid and improbable it is that you’ll survive, love will find a way. We’re not screwing around here:  But that’s not just soppy romantic love, oh no. Love loving killing people enough? Now you’re immortal. Is there a good reason why you, as the wizard, should not take Love of Magic at 3+? No, no drat reason at all. You 100% should. If 90% of the party aren't immortal at character creation you’re probably playing the game wrong. On the other hand, the person who takes lots of inspirations all rated at one is going to be terrifying, because they can use inspiration a lot more. It’s one of those things that, actually, works really well as a balance. You can give up being absolutely sure of your character’s survival to give them more screen time and make them more effective. Fear is the last thing in this section. Fears are basically negative inspirations - they’re things you care about because, well, they scare you. In effect, it’s really easy to pick up fears in play, and they work just like inspirations (yes, that does mean if you’re scared enough of something you can no longer be killed). If you decide you’re actually super scared of being robbed by muggers, boom you've got a new inspiration on your sheet. The downside is, if you come face to face with your fear, then you’re screwed, and you get penalty dice shoved at you from every direction. There’s a limit on the total number of points of inspirations you can have, which is probably a good thing. It’s worth thinking over the whole “inspirations can make you immortal” thing a bit more though: In a world where loving your wife enough renders you unkillable, and, explicitly, everyone in the setting knows that, assassinations play out a bit differently. You can’t just beat the Duke in a sword fight and kill him - he’ll survive, 100% guaranteed, because he really loves his wife. So how do you get around that? Well, you could either subtly undermine him, make it seem like his wife was unfaithful, destroy his belief in the institution of marriage, and generally bum him the gently caress out until he’s miserable, inspirationless, and then run him through. Or you could kidnap his wife, torture her and murder her, and then shoot him through the head. Both of those are valid tactics. It also makes the Assassin class the scariest drat thing in the game, because at level 10 they get the ability to actually just kill someone regardless of their inspirations. Next up: SKILLS, HISTORIES AND CLASSIC VS SCENE ORDER PLAY
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Apr 15, 2016 16:11
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Doesn't that mean exploding dice rarely have any effect unless you're critting on a d12? That may be intentional, I don't know, but it seems like it's an extra step that rarely matters.
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Apr 15, 2016 16:13
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I'm also going to jump in and recommend people check Spellbound Kingdoms out. There's a couple times where the rules fall flat, mainly the crafting rules, but the Inspiration rules are really good and I love the combat system.
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Apr 15, 2016 16:14
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Doesn't that mean exploding dice rarely have any effect unless you're critting on a d12? That may be intentional, I don't know, but it seems like it's an extra step that rarely matters. It doesn't have a massive effect, but it's definitely an edge. It means that you don't run into the classic exploding dice problem of explosions rendering every other type of result meaningless, while still being a cool benefit. It's one of the best balanced explosion systems I've seen, and works really well in the games I've run.
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Apr 15, 2016 16:17
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Doesn't that mean exploding dice rarely have any effect unless you're critting on a d12? That may be intentional, I don't know, but it seems like it's an extra step that rarely matters. Well, it is also more likely to happen at lower dice levels. Rolling a 4 on a d4 or a 6 on a d6 is much more likely to happen, and I'd imagine it's not especially rare to end up jumping from a d4 to d8 as a result - that's a 1/24 chance, after all, to go from 'the shittiest die' to 'double the possible roll'.
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Apr 15, 2016 16:20
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loving bought.
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Apr 15, 2016 16:27
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Robindaybird posted:The problem with stuff with an element of Revenge Fantasy (Bellum Maga is especially bad for it) is the punishment has to fit the crime, making the characters you're suppose to root for all powerful and able to wipe out the "Bad guys" with a snap of a finger ends up paradoxically make you feel sorry for the "Bad guys" and disgusted at the "heroes" for punching down instead of up. Tasoth posted:The whole concept of the beasts being teachers is neat, but from what's being posted in this thread, how they do it is hosed. Just devising ways that you could use that concept and produce conflict for the beast without making them abusive is a fun thought exercise, but probably one that's going to leave me dissatisfied how it was actually implemented. Humankind has spent millennia telling stories about the monsters that will get you if you go out after dark, to warn children against going out after dark. So monsters serve a purpose! But when Beast says these monsters are real and applies that logic at the individual level, they end up saying that disobedient children deserve to die and killing them is morally acceptable. Then the analogies to the Other, the Queer, the immigrant, the bullied, etc get dragged into it, and you accidentally back into justifying the logic of a spree shooter. Oh, and Little Red Riding Hood was asking for it.
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Apr 15, 2016 16:40
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