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Daeren posted:I'm going to argue this when we get to the mechanics. Well, I mean they aren't massive threats. If I were writing the game I'd make a single hero capable of taking on an entire cadre of Beasts by himself, probably needing the players to sacrifice one or two of their own to get over in a straight fight. Because they're literally your antithesis. They should be scary. But Beasts don't have plot immortality anymore(or if they never did I can just blame the Kickstarter copy for being weirdly worded ) So at least Heroes are marginal threats rather than annoyances.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 05:18 |
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# ? Apr 23, 2024 07:41 |
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I've been considering how to try to fix Beast quite a bit myself while reading this, and it's *really* hard to do because it's really hard to do anything interesting that hasn't been covered by another nWoD splat already (Or JAGS Wonderland, in the case of what I've ultimately come up with), but it's hard not to desperately TRY because it feels to me like there's some really interesting concept buried deep down under the poo poo that's salvageable, but it may be wishful thinking. I think it's the rough idea of something that is literally an expression of primal fear. At any rate, my thoughts are roughly thus: Have the Beast be in a Jekyll and Hyde situation. The basic effect is that there's something dark inside you alright. But you're only tangentially aware of it, it's just at the very fringes of your consciousness. When you sleep, it takes over your body, warps it into something monstrous and primal, and goes out and *does* things. You don't know what it does, but you wake up to find things in your room not quite how you left them, and you hear things. But it's not something that comes from without, it's created from your own mind. And what makes it terrifying isn't that it's trying to do bad things or it wants to ruin you, but that it's trying to *help* you. It wants to *protect you*. You encountered something out there that was unnatural and terrifying, and your mind's somehow manifested something even more terrifying, a monster based on your deepest, darkest fears, to go hunt it down. But the problem is, it doesn't want to go away, whether it dealt with the initial problem or not. It wants to keep helping you, but it's basically nothing but your id and it has very... questionable ideas about what helping you might be. Generally it's hunting down other splats or whatever gribblies are out there, because anything that unnatural is clearly not safe for you. But maybe you wander past where it killed a Werewolf the other day and there's a crime scene, and then suddenly it's offed a vascu guy because he's investigating the crime scene, and suddenly you have a manhunt coming after you. The point is, the consequences sooner or later hit you in the waking world. And then suddenly you remember everything and you're left with how to deal with the fact that you've not been fully human in a while, you've been burning bridges and making enemies and you weren't even aware of it, and now you have *everyone after you*. And you have to decide how you deal with it. Do you accept what you've become and try to take some control, or run away and let your 'Beast' handle everything for you while you pretend it's not happening? Are you going to try to make things right for whatever crazy stuff it got into without your knowledge? Are you willing to kill people who may have an entirely legitimate grievance against you? Anyhow. Unrelated to any attempt to salvage something from this pile of poo poo, anyone else notice that Beast is somewhat similar to Wraethu in that it's a game that portrays something it's trying to present as an analog for LGBT people as horrible, murderous individuals, and yet claim that they are *absolutely right to be*, and that anyone who won't just sit back and let them do their creepy poo poo is a horrible person and deserves what they're getting?
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 05:31 |
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OvermanXAN posted:I've been considering how to try to fix Beast quite a bit myself while reading this, The best way to fix Beast is to give nChangeling some tweaks and reskins and play that instead.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 05:32 |
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Kurieg posted:Because I hate myself, and love this thread, I picked up the Beast Fiction Anthology. Could you please provide similar brief summaries for each of the stories in the anthology? Thanks in advance.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 05:39 |
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Here's how to fix Beast 1. Fire everyone at White Wolf who defends it. 2. Burn all physical copies and delete everything off RPG.net and the like, tell backers it's for their own good. 3. Donate amount raised from Kickstarter to appropriate charities. 4. Drink heavily. I'm starting to remember why I dove back into 3rd Edition D&D around the time of the Beast kickstarter. Kavak fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Apr 28, 2016 |
# ? Apr 28, 2016 05:42 |
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I'll probably do a brief summary of all the stories after I'm done with the main Beast book. If only because the last story re-introduces Changing Breeds to the Chronicles of Darkness. I was almost out. I was free. Dave Brookshaw why hast thou forsaken me.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 05:44 |
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Kurieg posted:If only because the last story re-introduces Changing Breeds to the Chronicles of Darkness. So Matt's trying to burn Onyx Path and White Wolf to the ground on his way out or something? I can only assume he must have decided that they had committed some sort of slight against him and that he must destroy them by making GBS threads on everything he can touch. I really can't see why the heck else he'd do that. What is the point? Wasn't Changing Breeds so bad that they basically tried to pretend it didn't exist?
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 05:55 |
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Kurieg posted:If only because the last story re-introduces Changing Breeds to the Chronicles of Darkness. This proves my theory that every thing bad can be connected to Changing Breeds one way or another.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 07:32 |
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Looks like Savage Worlds RIFTS is going to be a thing finally. The Kickstarter cleared $177,000 on the first day, beating it's goal of $8,000. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/545820095/rifts-for-savage-worlds As a result, they've dropped the first sample, the Glitter Boy. https://www.peginc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Savage-_Rifts%C2%AE_Glitter_Boy_preview.pdf I kinda like it. It gives you the benefits and drawbacks of the Glitter Boy pretty concisely, something you really couldn't get with the five pages of cruft you got with the original.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 15:09 |
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Young Freud posted:Looks like Savage Worlds RIFTS is going to be a thing finally. The Kickstarter cleared $177,000 on the first day, beating it's goal of $8,000. Okay, Siembada's ship if ever attitude vs. Hensley's we will not start the KS unless it is 98% finished product. Who will win?
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 15:34 |
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Okay, Siembada's ship if ever attitude vs. Hensley's we will not start the KS unless it is 98% finished product. Who will win? Well, pretty much the conversion looks to be entirely on Pinnacle's end, with only Siembedia giving his blessing, so it looks like a done deal. Also, it looks like Mega Damage is going to be done the same way as Heavy Armor in other Savage Worlds games, where only Mega Damage weapons can affect Mega Damage Armor. That said, you can easily just chunk it and have things still be reasonably powerful. The Glitter Boy's boom gun seems to be as powerful as a tank gun from other settings.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 15:48 |
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Yeah, it's interesting to see the way it hashes out. With the rules for bracing, the sonic boom, and its utter inability for stealth, the glitter boy turns into a potential huge liability if not played right. It's too early to say how it balances, but in terms of vanilla Savage Worlds, whatever it hits is probably going to Go Away. It's certainly better than Palladium's generic big bag of damage soak and damage deal, but I'm more interesting to see how more complicated suits of armor work out, given Palladium's tendency to weigh their designs down with a big gun, mini-missiles, a little gun, some actual missiles, eye lasers, and finger-buzz-claws. Seeing if they bring every fiddly element over will be interesting.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 16:16 |
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I note the writeup of the glitterboy deliberately avoids discussing some of the dumber stuff from the original writeup, like specific (Actually not all that fast by comparison) muzzle velocity, etc.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 16:37 |
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That's really cool, actually. It reflects KS's comments in Sourcebook One about the Glitter Boy being slow, ungainly, and designed to be deployed in squads like a tank on legs, better than its RAW stats.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 17:06 |
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It's certainly better than Palladium's generic big bag of damage soak and damage deal, but I'm more interesting to see how more complicated suits of armor work out, given Palladium's tendency to weigh their designs down with a big gun, mini-missiles, a little gun, some actual missiles, eye lasers, and finger-buzz-claws. Seeing if they bring every fiddly element over will be interesting. unseenlibrarian posted:I note the writeup of the glitterboy deliberately avoids discussing some of the dumber stuff from the original writeup, like specific (Actually not all that fast by comparison) muzzle velocity, etc.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 17:16 |
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LatwPIAT posted:My principal example within this is nWoD fan's obsession with X-splats and Y-splats. Every idea I've seen for a homebrew nWoD line starts off with "Creature: the Title. You play a Creature. There are five X-splats and five Y-splats." of some kind, completely oblivious to what purpose X-splats and Y-splats should serve, or why there should be five of them. And there's always 5x5, despite the fact that Changeling had 6x4. (And oVampire primarily ran on only 7 X-splats, while oWerewolf had a 13x5x3 model.) Seeing everything and their mother forced into this 5x5 corset really makes me cringe. It's like there's a "Fill-in-the-blanks" template somewhere that everyone uses without asking why. In order words: WoD fanbooks are the slasher movies of the RPG scene. Count Chocula posted:Because Vampires are overdone and uncool, and people want to play something different. Vampire snowflakes aren't as beautiful or unique. Kurieg posted:If only because the last story re-introduces Changing Breeds to the Chronicles of Darkness. What a perfect fit for the Beasts. No we just need to isolate these two into their own little sub-setting and forget about them.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 17:20 |
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Count Chocula posted:Because Vampires are overdone and uncool, and people want to play something different. So cross out Vampire, write "mysterious monster otherkin," and congratulations, you've just saved yourself from having to buy Beast.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 17:30 |
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Kurieg posted:I'll probably do a brief summary of all the stories after I'm done with the main Beast book. Dave Brookshaw wrote that one, and given he's a good writer and knows what Changing Breeds is for, I am fairly sure he's taking the piss.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 17:30 |
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Kai Tave posted:So cross out Vampire, write "mysterious monster otherkin," and congratulations, you've just saved yourself from having to buy Beast.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 17:50 |
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Doresh posted:What a perfect fit for the Beasts. No we just need to isolate these two into their own little sub-setting and forget about them. Anthrocon: The Fursecution - A Storytelling game of personal drama, and shame
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 17:57 |
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Mors Rattus posted:Dave Brookshaw wrote that one, and given he's a good writer and knows what Changing Breeds is for, I am fairly sure he's taking the piss. Yeah I just finished reading it. And the Shifter acts like how you'd expect them to act given the high level view of Changing Breeds, not how the book actually describes them acting (She spends ample time in her war form and doesn't poo poo on anyone's shoes for smoking). And it's probably one of the better written stories in the book. The feeding method of the POV Beast is incredibly petty still but she also speaks to how it barely keeps her fed and that it's a fig leaf of a justification that keeps her from being a mass murderer.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 18:10 |
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Thesaurasaurus posted:Anthrocon: The Fursecution - A Storytelling game of personal drama, and shame Tumblr: The Denial - A Storytelling game about First World Problems.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 18:33 |
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The storm has a name... - Let's Read TORG Part 14f: A series of unfortunate events As stated a few times previously, Orrorsh doesn't have "magic" in the same way that other realms have magic. I mean, yes you can have ranks in the various casting skills and learn spells from the core book and so on. But that form of magic is very rare; it's incredibly hard to find someone to teach you, and even harder to find spells to learn. Instead, Orrorsh has the power of the occult. What is the occult? quote:- A mad scientist works in his lab. He bends over a corpse, feverishly scratching out notes on his small pad. Glass beakers filled with strange chemicals glow with unholy light. It is his goal to animate the corpse. His notes are nearly indecipherable. His mind takes mad leaps of logic and is driven by an insane intuition. Yet it might work. The scientist believes it will. The scientist's obsession is sincere. He will do anything to succeed. It's also another attempt to work the desired tone of Victorian horror into the rules. Shocking, I know. quote:This magic system has a different feel than magic in most high-fantasy worlds. Orrorsh is a different place. If you examine horror movies and horror stories you can quickly see that a common element is that the protagonists are dealing with forces they do not precisely understand. They might make guesses as to how the supernatural works. They might even be right, but beyond that guess there's another mystery,and then another and then another. The key is the idea of the unknown. Places of horror are places with lots of unknowns. If the Storm Knights know everything about how magic works, then they are wizards. If they don't know how to make the mystical energies of Orrorsh bend to their every whim, then they are guests in a land they do not understand. They're not powerless. They are certainly not as powerful as Storm Knights in other realms, and that can be frightening. Performing an occult ritual is pretty ridiculous, even by Torg standards. Occult rituals are composed of one or more event sentences, which are the descriptions of the things the people performing the ritual want to have happen. Each event sentence consists of a Noun, a Verb, and a specific Object, and sentences can feed into other sentences. quote:The grammatical terms of the event sentence are capitalized to distinguish them from actual grammatical terms. We do this because there are some important differences between a grammatical sentence and an event sentence. Anyway, event sentences tend to fall into the pattern of "This NOUN will VERB the OBJECT"; for example, "this sword will kill my husband's murderer", or "this formula will animate this corpse". Of course, you can't just have a sword become magic or pull a corpse-animating formula out of your rear end. So once you have your overall goal sentence, you put in a few setup "steps" before it to explain how you're going to actually make your end-goal happen. quote:It is also possible to have more than one sentence string as part of an event. This happens when the occultist needs to pursue several objects to make the occult event work, and then brings them together at various points. In these cases, a period is used to denote the end of a sentence string. quote:When several smaller event sentences come together they form a Compound Noun. The first sentence of the last string ("This blood and fire shall enchant this sword") uses a Compound Noun, as the blood and the fire are the nouns of the sentence. Me IRL trying to figure these loving rules out. Anyway, the reason you'd want to add more sentences to your ritual is because the more Objects (sometimes refered to as "props") you have in your process, the more effective the ritual will be. Basically the players are rewarded for coming up with a bunch of ridiculous tasks, not to mention setting up their own adventure hooks to get some of the more out-there requirements. So let's say I want to create a ritual that will lead me to the tomb of a vampyre by doing the old hold-a-dowsing-stone-over-the-map trick. I'll set my overall event sentence as "This map and dowsing stone will reveal the vampyre's lair." Simple enough. But now I want to put together the steps that will get me to that point. So let's put together a few steps to set this all up: quote:1. I will aquire the fang of one of the vampyre's progeny; this fang will become the dowsing stone. The GM is encouraged to set up situations where players have to resort to using the occult to solve their problems, such as a situation where the PCs need to make a special weapon in order to kill a Horror. This way, you keep the flavor of the realm while giving the PCs something to do to solve their problems other than making a bunch of research rolls. It also leads to this 90's-as-hell GMing sidebar. I just love the whole monocle-popping idea that the players might have some say in what's happening in-game. It's just a reminder of how far we've come. (Although if you've ever read any of the published Torg adventures, you wouldn't be that surprised. So once you've done all the things to the thing to make your thing happen, you have to generate an occult total, and bear with me because this is one of those sections where things aren't presented in a logical order. Generally speaking, you're going to roll to see if the ritual succeeds when you get to the last of your events. In the above example, that'd be the step where I'm holding the bloodied fang over the map. UNLESS you have "occult sub-events", which are described at the end of this section after a bunch of other concepts. If the GM decides that a step is complicated enough to require rolling, then the character has to make a roll at that point against a difficulty of 12. So regardless, making the occult roll. Oh wait, nope, there's a step before you make the roll that's described after the part that tells you when to make the roll. Have I mentioned that these books aren't organized very well? See, because the players are the ones defining the effect they want, they have to stat up the end effect as a "spell", enchanted item, or monster as needed. You (the player) want to create a superzombie? Then you (the player) need to stat that superzombie up. Unsurprisingly, there's no guidelines on stating said stuff up. I guess you can just assign values however you want, bearing in mind that the values you assign will affect the final difficulty of the ritual. So for my ritual, I'm going to have to stat it up as a spell. quote:Dowsing Spell Now that we have all that, we can finally determine the difficulty number. The base difficulty of a ritual depends on its type; spells use the effect value, weapons use their max damage value, and if it's a creature or other effect you use the [SCENE MISSING]. Luckily I made a spell effect so the base difficulty is 15, adjusted for the range to the target. The GM can tweak the difficulty up or down a bit depending on how horror-genre-y the overall effect is going to be. Then the player rolls their occult skill, getting +1 to the skill for every prop involved in the ritual (not counting the ritual's final target). But that's too easy, so of loving course we have to get a half a page of restrictions. quote:Once an occult event string is designed in an adventure, no more than one occult prop becomes effective per scene during which the characters deal with the occult event. Dealing with the occult event includes obtaining the props, doing the necessary research, and experimenting in the laboratory. If an event string contains six props, but the characters only spend four scenes gathering props, arcane bits of this and that, or puttering around the lab before generating the occult total, then the occult value is increased by +4 rather than +6. lf players are not willing to spend game time on the occult event, do not give them the bonus for occult props and objects. So you make the roll, and if you succeed then the final effect happens. Failure doesn't seem to have any kind of special downside. In fact, you're not even required to get any corruption from the Power of Corruption unless the GM determines you commited an evil act as part of the ritual. And since you're not required to perform at least one evil act as part of a ritual, you could be occulting left and right and never suffer a karmic ping. We close out occult rituals with the limits on rituals, which would have been handy at the beginning of this section instead of almost at the end. There are only four: 1. Occult rituals have to have a singular final effect. Rituals are intended to be a one-problem solution. I couldn't use the above ritual to track down any vampyre, just one specific one and that's it. 2. You can't affect anything that you don't know about. So you can't make a "kill every monster in Orrorsh" sword unless you've encountered every single monster in Orrorsh. 3. You need some sort of lab or workshop. 4. When performing a ritual, there's no cap on how many points of Corruption you gain from the Power of Corruption. Usually you can't get more than 5 for a single act, but depending on how heinous you are ("I turn the oceans around Indonesia to blood") you could get upwards of 20. "Hey, watch where you're pointing that thing!" From here we smash-cut into actual spells. As stated previously, standard magic-skill based casting is rare in Orrorsh, so the big trick to using the new spells is actually finding them in the first place. Let's go to the highlight reel!
The next chapter is the list of Orrorshian miracles, many of which are appropriately Old Testament.
I guess he saved for half? And there we are. Orrorshian magic of various stripes. And once again, we get back to Torg's "good idea, poorly implemented" problem with the occultism rules. The whole point of occult rituals being easy to perform is that the Gaunt Man wants to tempt people into evil deeds in exchange for power, so they get started on the Power of Corruption slippery slope. But it's entirely possible to create occult rituals that don't involve anything that would be considered an "evil act". Thus defeating a large chunk of the point of occult rituals. It's almost like they didn't understand how to enforce their own ideas, or something. NEXT TIME: Things that go bump in the night
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 18:40 |
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I do like a lot of the Orroshian spells, and the only time I saw Plague cast in game was to summon a plague of lemmings.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 22:06 |
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So for future reference and people who've been paying attention to Beast discussion. Apparently they changed some rather fundamental things about the way Heroes are created (mainly, they aren't anymore) despite the fact that the first and second chapters imply that they are. So, just ignore that whole rant I had about Heroes being tragic figures. Cause now they're something much worse, of course they won't address that until chapter 5. For reference that's page 200, right now we're on page 44.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 22:31 |
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Kurieg posted:So for future reference and people who've been paying attention to Beast discussion. Apparently they changed some rather fundamental things about the way Heroes are created (mainly, they aren't anymore) despite the fact that the first and second chapters imply that they are. So, just ignore that whole rant I had about Heroes being tragic figures. Cause now they're something much worse, of course they won't address that until chapter 5. For reference that's page 200, right now we're on page 44. What a clear and well-written book.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 22:53 |
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I do like a lot of the Orroshian spells, and the only time I saw Plague cast in game was to summon a plague of lemmings. I was actually going to make an Abby Soto joke with the Pillar of Salt spell and the werewolf picture, but then realized that it wouldn't make sense when the post was archived since the context would be gone. Yes I take the archive into account when writing these now. Yes I know that's silly.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 23:06 |
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Kurieg posted:So for future reference and people who've been paying attention to Beast discussion. Apparently they changed some rather fundamental things about the way Heroes are created (mainly, they aren't anymore) despite the fact that the first and second chapters imply that they are. So, just ignore that whole rant I had about Heroes being tragic figures. Cause now they're something much worse, of course they won't address that until chapter 5. For reference that's page 200, right now we're on page 44. Oh boy, I actually don't know what this is. Something to look forward to, I guess.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 23:16 |
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Kurieg posted:So for future reference and people who've been paying attention to Beast discussion. Apparently they changed some rather fundamental things about the way Heroes are created (mainly, they aren't anymore) despite the fact that the first and second chapters imply that they are. So, just ignore that whole rant I had about Heroes being tragic figures. Cause now they're something much worse, of course they won't address that until chapter 5. For reference that's page 200, right now we're on page 44. So, what, they're just like beasts now? Only instead of saying their teaching lessons, they're just abusive pricks who embrace it?
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 23:17 |
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Tasoth posted:So, what, they're just like beasts now? Only instead of saying their teaching lessons, they're just abusive pricks who don't bother with even the flimsiest justification? Beasts embrace it real hard.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 23:19 |
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Tasoth posted:So, what, they're just like beasts now? Only instead of saying their teaching lessons, they're just abusive pricks who embrace it? So they're just like beasts, but more tolerable, huh.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 23:19 |
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Spoilers for a future chapter of Beast even though that's dumb as hell Heroes are born "just like Beasts"(and yes I will have words about that), High integrity heroes realize their place in the world and that Beasts are serving a noble purpose. And therefore leave them alone. Low Integrity Heroes hate that Beasts get all the attention and want to kill them all and steal their glory and write their name across the collective unconscious of mankind in Beast blood. Yes it's basically a binary line between "Abuse Counselor" and "Serial Killer" with no inbetween. Beasts no longer make heroes, they just attract them when they do something 'bad'.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 23:22 |
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Kurieg posted:Spoilers for a future chapter of Beast even though that's dumb as hell And, unless they changed it from the December draft, the actual mechanics Heroes use to find Beasts means that Heroes will never, ever actually catch them unless they literally find one red-handed.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 23:31 |
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Daeren posted:And, unless they changed it from the December draft, the actual mechanics Heroes use to find Beasts means that Heroes will never, ever actually catch them unless they literally find one red-handed. Sort of. Open Gateway and the new Hive Rules basically mean a sufficiently powerful hero can go on a Horror killing spree if someone in the hive manages to do something nasty enough.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 23:39 |
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Kurieg posted:Spoilers for a future chapter of Beast even though that's dumb as hell The problem with this is, no they don't and low integrity heroes hate of beasts is completely justified
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 23:40 |
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Kurieg posted:Sort of. Open Gateway and the new Hive Rules basically mean a sufficiently powerful hero can go on a Horror killing spree if someone in the hive manages to do something nasty enough. Well, yes, but the trick is that they can't level up without killing Beasts.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 23:42 |
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They're NPCs they can kill as many Beasts as the ST wants them to.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 23:48 |
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NutritiousSnack posted:The problem with this is, no they don't and low integrity heroes hate of beasts is completely justified Everyone's hatred of Beasts is completely justified. I'm having a hard time thinking of any lines that wouldn't see Beasts as, at best, competition. Maybe Slashers, but that's about it.
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# ? Apr 28, 2016 23:59 |
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Cythereal posted:Everyone's hatred of Beasts is completely justified. I'm having a hard time thinking of any lines that wouldn't see Beasts as, at best, competition. Maybe Slashers, but that's about it. Slashers would see them as posers and also fun to murder.
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# ? Apr 29, 2016 00:03 |
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# ? Apr 23, 2024 07:41 |
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Doresh posted:What a clear and well-written book. It turns out, when you launch a Kickstarter and receive a response from a large proportion of your fanbase of general horror at huge swaths of the book's content, it's not actually feasible to try to rewrite everything problematic in a month instead of backing out of the campaign. Who knew?
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# ? Apr 29, 2016 00:14 |