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Hostile V posted:
This is obviously M. Bison eyeing his newest recruit. Just a few more weeks and she's ready to learn the Psycho Crusher.
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May 11, 2016 21:13
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 Part 5: Lists for Minions and Sanctums The equipment section in this book introduces two new systems: Minions and Sanctums. Along with the usual stat block, minions have an extra attribute, Loyalty. Whenever they are told to do something, their Loyalty score is added to a roll of their Will die to determine whether or not they’re willing to do it. The blurb implies that it’s a die, but the stat blocks have it as a static number. Have a chart.  If/When they die, minions can be replaced by spending 10 voodollars. This will give you a new one with the same stat block and abilities. (Which the book refers to as a “new hire”.) The stat blocks are always the same and can only be changed through add-ons. The book doesn’t entertain the notion of someone going out of their way to bring a minion back from the dead or undoing an ailment with their magic. If it’s good enough for Channel M’s villains, it’s good enough for you. For minion types, we have Assistant: Runs errands, does research, anything that doesn’t require actual combat. Costs 5 points, has a Loyalty of 3, and has a stat block of D4s and 6s. Their special ability lets a character spend a zap to have them instantly be nearby. Brute: Dumb muscle that is only good for kicking someone’s teeth in. Costs 8 points, has a Loyalty of 2, and has a stat block of mostly D4s with a D6 in Senses and a D6+1 in Body. Their special ability gives them a +1 to resist diseases and harmful potions and poisons, and they ignore 2 points of damage. They can be outfitted with 5 points worth of weapons and armor. Lackey: Used for menial jobs that even the assistant is too good to do. Cost 3 points, has a Loyalty of 5, and has a stat block of D2s and 4s. They don’t have a special ability. Ninja: Deadly, stealthy assassins. Costs 10 points, has a Loyalty of 4, and has a stat block of D6s, some D4s, and a D2 in Social. They have two (actually three) special abilities: a -2 to be seen and hit in dim light or darkness, move twice as fast, and have a +2 to Initiative and Dodge rolls. They can have 5 points worth of weapons. Pawn: Inside agents in positions of power. Costs 6 points, has no Loyalty stat, and a stat block of D4s with a D6 in Mind and a 2 in Magic. Their special ability gives them a +2 to social rolls when dealing with their superiors. Spy: Acquires info and items. Costs 10 points, has no Loyalty stat, and a stat block of D6s in everything except Magic, which is a D2. They can be equipped with 5 points worth of weapons. After picking a template, you can spend points to add stuff from a list of minion add-ons. Right on down the line, we’ve got Bodyguard: (Costs 3 wealth) Can spend a zap to automatically take a hit for the character. Homunculus: (4) The minions has spare clones of themselves. When they die, it only takes 2 zap and 5 voodollars and they keep all of their memories. Hyper Reflexes: (7 per rank, up to 3 ranks) +1 Reflex, agility, and dexterity. The latter two don’t exist, so just Reflex. Hyper Stamina: (5 per rank, up to 3) +2 life points, +1 to resist disease and poison, and halves the amount of rest the character needs. Hyper Strength: (5 per rank, up to 3) Oh hey, finally some god drat rules for this thing! +1 to Strength based Body rolls, +2 to hand-to-hand damage, +10 feet to jump distances, and can lift +1,000 pounds. Loyal: (1 per rank, up to 3) +1 to Loyalty. Magic Resistant: (5 per rank) +1 to Resist Magic against everyone but their boss. Monster: (7) The minion is one of the following:
Skilled: (“1 3 skill points ((Maximum 3 ranks)” “A Minion is limited to have 5 ranks in any one skill.” Quantity: (2 per minion, up to three) Get more minions. The extras have a -1 to their Body and Mind dice. Shrinkable: (3) The witch in charge of the minion can shrink them down to 6 inches or less for 1 zap. The minion cannot resist the spell. Blah. Annabelle Deville posted:I feel having a place to yourself is important for witches like us. So Titania Morganne, the headmistress of the best magic school in the multiverse and the former director of education for the WWC, is evil now? Sanctums are places witches have set up for themselves where they can go and do magic in private. The only requirement in terms of location for one is that it must belong to the witch. (This means that bedrooms in parents’ houses are okay, but dorm rooms are not. Even though children technically do not own their bedrooms any more than a college student owns their dorm room.) Standard sanctums cost 10 points, are 50x50x10 feet, and have 10 life points and 5 armor. While in their sanctums, witches have a +1 to all of their rolls, a -1 to the zap cost of spells, and automatically stabilize if they get knocked out in it. The witch can spend a zap to change the color of the walls and anyone trying to find it has a -2 penalty. All other features require buying an add-on. Architectural Control: (3) Spend a zap and change the walls, floors, furniture, whatever to anything. Bigger on the Inside: (3) Turns it into a TARDIS without the time travel abilities. Death Ward: (7) Prevents the owner from dying if they’re in the sanctum. They may need to be healed to full first before they’ll reform though. Maybe. The blurb is a bit confusing. Dungeon: (7) The sanctum has a dungeon for keeping prisoners. Has 20 life points and +4 armor. Needs to be taken multiple times to have more than one cell. Guardian: (7) The sanctum either has a physical being protecting it or the sanctum itself is partly sentient and can defend itself from intruders. The stat block for all types of guardians is 12 life, 3 Armor, 10 Reflex, 9 Resist Magic, D6+4 Fighting, D6+4 Scare, and 1 Action. Their special abilities are Illusion Body (Makes them immune to Mentalism spells, lets them camouflage themselves as anything, and lets them reform in the sanctum if they die if the owner spends 5 zap.) and Attack (does 10 damage and lets the guardian attack from anywhere in the sanctum). Increased Size: (4 per rank) Doubles the size of the sanctum for every rank taken, along with adding 10 life and a point of armor each. Has a note telling directors to make sure players don’t ruin the game by making their sanctums the size of whole towns. This and “Bigger on the Inside” could probably be used as a workaround for people who don’t want to go through the effort of making a pocket dimension. Increase Alignment: (10 per rank, max 3) Adds an additional +1 to the owner’s rolls, while adding a -1 to other witches in it. Off the Grid: (3) All of the appliances and doodads in the sanctum are powered by magic. Place of Peace: (5) To heal, the owner only needs half the amount of sleep and gains +2 to Focus rolls. Place of Power: (5) The owner regenerates zap at twice the rate and always has at least one zap. Recall Door: (4) Lets the owner access her sanctum from any entrance way. Doesn’t work as an exit. Self Repair: (10) The sanctum and objects in it repair themselves at D4 life points a day. Spectral Servant: (3 per) Hires ghosts that take care of the sanctum’s upkeep. Must have a designated job. Traveler’s Door: (5 each) Let’s the owner place multiple entrances in multiple locations to their sanctum. The final section of this chapter is an overview of character creation. It is focused on this lovely individual.  Bad copy-paste or a wig? You decide. This is Maggie Root, a Snarky Ghulvin with a lovely Temper. She’s a member of the Imp clique and has “Shrink Person” as one of her signature spells. Despite not having the requirements for them, she has a +4 and +6 in Naming and Sympathetic Magic, respectively, and uses the latter frequently for pranks. Annabelle doesn’t like ghulvins. Annabelle Deville posted:I'm not a big fan of Ghulvin, but as they go Maggie isn't a bad one if you can get past her persist sarcasm and her looking at people you like a potential snack when she thinks your not looking. And now, pictures.  Oh look, Lucinda just assaulted the (arguably) most visible and important mundane on the planet. Also, this totally won’t date this book in a few months.  One thing I've started to notice is that Harris likes to reuse the “fanart” that other people made for him. Usually by editing the pictures into new pieces.     Next: Why is there a write up for the Underworld in the chapter about game themes?
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May 11, 2016 21:13
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Adnachiel posted:
Quite possibly both, a bad copy-paste of a wig. That looks like that girl from lazytown's hair to me.
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May 11, 2016 21:21
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Asimo posted:I recall a lot of whining about this game on RPGnet and the like back when it was new, but hell if I remember what actually set it off. Besides being one of the early modern-style heavily theme-focused storygames that made grognards absolutely livid. I liked the setting ideas, but it did feel a bit weird that this cult was so invested in demons being 1) real and 2) Caused by things that from a modern moral viewpoint aren't all that bad. I think the problem is that the settings not far divorced enough from the real world to get rid of some of the bits that make me, as a modern person in a very secular nation, to suck my teeth and worry a bit. It's different in something like King Of Dragon Pass where you are essentially bronze age tribes people beating the poo poo out of each other for cows, because their the morality is so removed from the modern world that it makes a kind of sense. In this case not so much. It's still a great game though, I am just unable to run it because of how slightly odd I would feel thinking about stuff behind "you aren't obeying your father and mother enough" making literal demons put in an appearance.
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May 11, 2016 21:36
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Mr.Misfit posted:I think it was because DitV was one of the early Forge-theory produced games. Though RPGnet hasn´t really changed since then. They still whine about things incessantly and for the most part still seem to adore CthulhuTech.
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May 11, 2016 21:45
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Kurieg posted:So what's RPG.net's opinion on the forced pregnancy furries and the Nazi Rape Carousel?
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May 11, 2016 21:52
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DitV was also popular for a short time for a generic system like *World is now- the only time I ever played it was for an Airbender game, and I got to see it used for Firefly as well.
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May 11, 2016 22:17
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I wanted DitV to be a nice alternative to weird west from Deadlands, but being someone near chief Mormon country, it is rather uncomfortable how close the 'virtues' is to the breakaway fundies beliefs. You really have to gauge how your party will handle that poo poo before running this.
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May 11, 2016 22:41
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That was my reading of DitV as well, it's a little too close to "This is what they actually believed" for me to really get into it and enjoy it.
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May 11, 2016 22:52
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Adnachiel posted:One thing I've started to notice is that Harris likes to reuse the “fanart” that other people made for him. Usually by editing the pictures into new pieces.
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May 11, 2016 22:56
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Asimo posted:I hate this more than everything else shown about this loving game so far. Well, almost everything, but "literally stealing other people's work" is a pretty succinct summary of shittyness. These are WG fans, though. It's entirely possible they volunteered it, or gave permission for free. Which you shouldn't do, as it devalues everyone else's art, but I can see it happening.
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May 11, 2016 23:00
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Kaza42 posted:These are WG fans, though. It's entirely possible they volunteered it, or gave permission for free. Which you shouldn't do, as it devalues everyone else's art, but I can see it happening. I have a hunch that some or all of these pieces of fanart are just commissions, hence the quotes around the word. Of course, if he didn't get permission to alter the images, it's still lovely.
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May 11, 2016 23:03
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Even if it's commissions, it's still rather abusive to put them in paid a published work without making that clear ahead of time. Which they may have? I guess? But I ain't holding my breath.
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May 11, 2016 23:52
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Asimo posted:I recall a lot of whining about this game on RPGnet and the like back when it was new, but hell if I remember what actually set it off. Besides being one of the early modern-style heavily theme-focused storygames that made grognards absolutely livid. Really? I remember RPG.net loving DIIV and suggesting it for every setting, so the point where I can look at In Nomine and Mage and Exalted and see which splats can be used to play DIIV.
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May 12, 2016 01:04
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We talk a lot about nineties RPG design and its pathologies in this thread, and I thought I'd sit down and try to enumerate all the traits that make an RPG a specifically nineties RPG. Here's what I came up with: - Dice mechanic that tries to be unusual and clever and mostly ends up not working and is hilariously broken - Badly implemented ads/disads system - Balance is a joke - Rules are often very vague or confusing and don’t work and this is excused away (rule zero! make your own decisions! if you’re getting bogged down in the rules you’re missing the point! excuse me it’s ROLE playing not ROLE playing, etc.) - Lots of talk about narrativism with no mechanical support, or counter-mechanical support (i.e. hyper-detailed combat rules) - Complicated world setting with tons of factions and subgroups - Factions relate to each other as bitchy high-school cliques - Often too many redundant factions - Little in-setting explanation for cross-faction group cooperation - Often, little explanation of what your characters are supposed to DO - Game and setting have dozens of proper noun Words used to describe things, with their definitions hidden away and always much later in the book than the Word was first used. Words are often pretentious and portentous and derived from latin or something fancy like that. - Books full of padding, both content (in-character narration, unreliable narration, fiction, potted history, documents and journals) and layout (space-eating page borders, big margins, large fonts - Actively unreadable layouts (busy, grey screens, handwriting fonts) - Often terrible organization (bad tables of contents, useless or missing indices, etc.) - Supplement treadmill - Iconic characters (unkillable, do everything, don’t follow the actual rules, story is about them not the PCs) - Metaplot threaded through the supplements. Switcheroos, revelations, what is really going on, changes to the settings, secrets that were kept from the GM - Scenario support is often very lacking (because of the metaplot) - Obvious fishing for media tie-ins (novels, video games, comics, TV series, whatever) Have I missed any?
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May 12, 2016 01:05
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FMguru posted:Have I missed any? Skill bloat.
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May 12, 2016 01:17
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FMguru posted:- Often, little explanation of what your characters are supposed to DO - Very few, if any, definitively statted-out threats / monsters / whatever. Those that are provided are often just random things included for flavor reasons, instead of having any sort of "power curve." - Large numbers of skills, most of which will have little to no impact on a real campaign (painting), but a few of which are vital to combat (dodging), thus encouraging you to dump all your points into the latter. e: f;b
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May 12, 2016 01:21
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FMguru posted:Have I missed any? Dexterity as a god-stat?
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May 12, 2016 01:27
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No thought given whatsoever to where starting PCs are supposed to fit into the creator's intricately-defined world, or what they're possibly supposed to do? Can also double as 80s RPG if you add the caveat "what are starting PCs supposed to do that God-NPCs wouldn't have already taken care of".
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May 12, 2016 01:33
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Mr.Misfit posted:I think it was because DitV was one of the early Forge-theory produced games. Though RPGnet hasn´t really changed since then. They still whine about things incessantly and for the most part still seem to adore CthulhuTech. I don't see where you're getting this, because there was heavy, heavy criticism of the game back in the day. There's a planned 2nd Edition which promises to "get rid of the icky stuff," but any positivity from that is more a skeptical "wait and see" thing than going full-on over to "I love this game now!"
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May 12, 2016 01:35
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FMguru posted:We talk a lot about nineties RPG design and its pathologies in this thread, and I thought I'd sit down and try to enumerate all the traits that make an RPG a specifically nineties RPG. Here's what I came up with: It feels like you've just listed every feature of Rifts. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if Rifts was scientifically determined to be the most nineties RPG possible.
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May 12, 2016 01:37
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*Tendency to try to reject basic good versus evil paradigms - and overshoot 'moral ambiguity' so far that it ends up with everyone being evil, stupid, or both and a setting that's hopelessly bleak or actively hostile to people trying to change things. *Lack of editorial control so writers will boost their pet factions (i.e: Wick's Scorpion Clans, oMage traditions vs Technocracy wank, that Revised Children of Gaia book), often causing problems with game balance or setting consistency, *Attempts to tackle mature topics become tone-deaf and sometimes downright offensive. Robindaybird fucked around with this message at 01:44 on May 12, 2016 |
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May 12, 2016 01:39
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A 1-6 system for measuring character statistics. This may seem like a petty observation, but a remarkable number of games from the 90s-00s period we're talking about built their system on measuring character stats with a 1-5 or 1-6 rating system. The core die mechanic almost seemed like an afterthought, and you could practically slot characters and such from one of these games to another without much thought--it's not like they were well-balanced anyway. Storyteller, Unisystem, D6, Silhouette, Last Unicorn Games' house system, and Alderac's Roll-and-Keep System all fit the bill. Moving toward narrative mechanics... Like Ron Edwards infamously pointed out, all of these games were firmly rooted in systems that measured your character in terms of how big their muscles are and how powerful the caliber of their firearm, etc. is, while having some rules that tried to simulate things like willpower, conviction, and of course morality. ...coupled with a weird fascination with "realism." Stereotypical 90s games are infamous for going on and on about "story," and then giving you an entire page of stats for different types of submachinegun. My take on this is that new games in the late 80s all the way through the end of the 90s were still preoccupied with getting away from AD&D, which meant both trying to emphasize roleplaying and story, and also trying to be more realistic and commonsense instead of imitating D&D's weird, wonky abstractions like AC, HP, and saving throws that were legacies of building a new medium on top of minis wargaming. Grandiosity. Some of these designers were really keen on the idea that their games transcended the current state of the medium due to their emphasis on roleplaying and story. (With varying levels of arrogance, and wildly varying levels of actual insight and innovation to back it up.) The Auteur GM. The 90s wave of somewhat-narrative games replaced the stereotypical "GM as Old Testament God" with "GM as Auteur Director." It was not as much of an improvement as it was supposed to be. What's the difference between Jehovah and Lars von Trier? One is a narcissistic, misogynistic douchebag preoccupied with sin and punishment, and the other one doesn't loving exist. When people complain about the phenomenon of godlike NPCs in published settings, they're often complaining about the published adventures where you're on rails and mostly watch said NPCs do stuff. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 02:09 on May 12, 2016 |
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May 12, 2016 02:05
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-Includes an utterly worthless CD-Rom full of pregen DMPCs and word files. -Fearless about announcing supplement books in the core rulebook. -Addresses pronoun usage before defensively settling on "he" as the default. -Half-assed incorporation of religious mythology the author is clearly unfamiliar with.
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May 12, 2016 02:21
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May 12, 2016 02:25
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Libertad! posted:I don't see where you're getting this, because there was heavy, heavy criticism of the game back in the day. There was, and maybe still is, a contingent of RPGnet posters who really, desperately wanted to like Cthulhutech despite its many, many flaws who grew increasingly annoyed over the fact that for a while every thread started in relation to it was quickly diverted into a discussion/argument about its skeezier elements. On the one hand I can sort of understand the frustration in being unable to even try and salvage the maybe decent bits of a game without constantly rehashing yet another argument about Nazi rape machines buuuuut on the other hand Nazi rape machines. Some elephants in the room just aren't gonna get talked around (see Exalted: Infernals, WoD: Changing Breeds). Re: games being darlings, this happens with practically any remotely interesting RPG that catches someone's fancy. I'm kind of surprised some people even consider it something worth bringing up anymore given it dates all the way back to the time honored tradition of people trying to use D&D to run anything they could think of.
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May 12, 2016 03:26
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Count Chocula posted:Really? I remember RPG.net loving DIIV and suggesting it for every setting, so the point where I can look at In Nomine and Mage and Exalted and see which splats can be used to play DIIV.  FMguru posted:We talk a lot about nineties RPG design and its pathologies in this thread, and I thought I'd sit down and try to enumerate all the traits that make an RPG a specifically nineties RPG. Here's what I came up with:
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May 12, 2016 03:38
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Asimo posted:Nah there was definitely a lot of complaining about it. A lot of people really loved it too, mind you, so it was kind of a tempest in a teapot for a few months there. But it was also like over a decade ago so I'm probably misremembering, or thinking of some other RPG forum at the same time too. Again, this happens with every game that achieves even a modicum of popularity. Exalted's heyday on RPGnet was characterized by one group of people recommending it for everything under the sun from Star Wars to 40K to Street Fighter while another group of people repeatedly petitioned the staff to shunt Exalted off into its own subforum because they were tired of seeing so many Exalted threads.
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May 12, 2016 03:53
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And White Wolf had already made a Street Fighter game that was better designed than Exalted. And most of their other games.
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May 12, 2016 03:59
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"Minimization of player agency in mechanics and narrative" and "bloated and unbalanced game system" TORG seems to be the absolute pinnacle of both of these- nothing loving works but it doesn't matter because the players can't affect any of the situations presented to them in the books.
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May 12, 2016 04:01
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Kavak posted:TORG seems to be the absolute pinnacle of both of these- nothing loving works but it doesn't matter because the players can't affect any of the situations presented to them in the books.
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May 12, 2016 04:08
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So, I decided I should probably give Dark Sun revised a rest from the old beating stick and instead go to something that I've been intending to review for a while:  Ever wanted to play a cenobite super-hero? Want to play in a setting that's kind of like the baby of Clive Barker, David Cronenberg and Neil Gaimen? Well, that's the goal of Whispering Vault. Being honest, I really have no idea if the game is as awesome as I'm making it sound, it's been years since I've read it so I guess we'll find out together if it craps its pants or not. The Whispering Vault: Part 1 Whispering Vault's opening has the slight air of pretension you get with a lot of late 90's/early 00's supernatural RPGs. Not quite as bad as something like the Everlasting fortunately. It also shows off its love of extremely elaborate page decoration.  Note the standard "you are not a wizard in real life" disclaimer One of the first things that strikes you is that the book is quite well-illustrated. Almost every page has a piece of nice, clean B&W art and while the content might occasionally range outside of "surreal horror" and into goofy territory it's overall very well done. So, if nothing else it's worth looking at. The Other thing that you Notice is That there Are A Lot Of Words With capital Letters thrown Around the Place. It definitely makes the common RPG mistake of throwing a ton of unexplained jargon right at your face first thing. The very first semi-IC "character pitch" we get mentions you found out about the Unseen, but none of the Unenlightened believed you and then you learned that you lived in the Realm of Flesh but beyond the Mundane (is that not the Realm of Flesh?) there is a Realm of Essence full of Ancient Mysteries and Unseen entities called the Unbidden and their Minions who come into the Realm of Flesh through Vessels from across the Rift. Then there are the Stalkers who hunt the Unbidden at the behest of the Primal Powers and casting them into the Vault and now you have become one of their Circle. What is even The gently caress? Fortunately the next section explains some of this. Here's the breakdown. The normal, human world is the Realm of Flesh. There's the standard "safe within your comfortable lies" bullshit you get with any secret supernatural setting. Those who know the dark truths about the universe call themselves the Enlightened. The big Truth of the setting is that the world of Flesh is not all that there is. The Realm of Flesh is bound by fairly concrete physical laws that allow things like life and physics to happen (except when they don't). There is also the Realm of Essence which is a more surreal, dreamlike place which has little to no set rules. It's worth noting that the Realm of Essence does not seem to be an "afterlife" for beings from the Realm of Flesh, in fact it seems like the two are not meant to interact at all. In between the Realms is a "Neitherspace" inhabited by hordes of creatures called Shadows who are capable of interacting with both Flesh and Essence, but apparently don't merit a Realm of their own. In the next paragraph "The Rift" is mentioned which is presumably the same as the Neitherspace, but that is not clarified. The Rift separates the Realms of Flesh and Essence and some beings of Flesh are capable of catching glimpses of the Realm of Essence across the Rift. These people are called Sensitives and the things they see are called the Unseen, and form the basis of most human mythology. Then things get a little confusing, because the original implication seems to be that the Unseen are glimpses of the Realm of Essence seen across the Rift but then it starts talking about Shadows the beings in the Rift (or the Neitherspace?). You see apparently Shadows sometimes get Awakened by an experience that inspires them to try and get into the Realm of Flesh where they pose a danger to normal folks. But the biggest threat is the Unbidden, who come to the Realm of Flesh (from...?) to fulfill "inhuman passions". They Awaken Shadows, turning them into Minions by binding them to physical vessels. Humanity has protection from both of these threats from Stalkers who defend the Realm of Flesh by Hunting the Unseen (I thought the Unseen were things that only Sensitives saw?). Stalkers are Chosen for reasons unknown even to the Enlightened, but most of them are both Enlightened and Sensitive and have already fought the Unseen as a mortal. When the time is right the Stalker-to-be is Chosen and their humanity is forged into five Keys of Humanity which serve as their badge and allow them to return to the world of Flesh. So...yeah. Clarity is not one of the Whispering Vault's strong suits. The summary above covers two pages of intro text from before the first chapter even starts and we already have 20 Important Capitalized Words (assuming I didn't miss one or two in that count).  The intro isn't quite over yet, now we've got a bit more talk about what happens when you are Chosen: When you are Chosen you transcend Flesh and the true nature of the universe is revealed to you. Sort of, apparently there are very few Chosen who fully comprehend the ancient mysteries (Ancient Mysteries was capitalized before, not sure why it isn't now). But even the most ignorant Stalker has a greater comprehension than the most enlightened (also not capitalized any more for some reason) mortal scholar. Creation and Armageddon are part of a cosmic Cycle consuming and recreating both Realms forever and ever. Very few entities have what is called Persistent Essence required to survive Armageddon and live through multiple Cycles. These are called the Primal Powers. After Armageddon there is nothing but the Powers floating in the void and they invariably hunger for sensation and stimulation and think on their memories of past Cycles. This gives birth to the Aesthetics, beings of pure Essence (aren't all beings from the Realm of Essence beings of pure Essence?) whose imagination causes things to be created. Through their collective mind they Dream the Realm of Flesh. Dear god this is a loving complicated creation cycle. As a result, many Enlightened also refer to the Realm of Flesh as the Dream (oh my god! why do you have so many names for the same thing?! So far the human world has been called the Realm of Flesh, the Mundane and the Dream and I bet there's more to come) and the act of the Aesthetics creating the mortal world as Dreaming. Magic, as humans understand it, is the process of influencing the Aesthetics to cause them to Dream something different (which, I must admit, is a creative explanation for magic). Like mortal Sensitives some Aesthetics can gaze across the Rift and see the Realm of Flesh and become tempted to journey there to enjoy themselves. As Dreamers in the Realm of Flesh they see their Visions come to life but if they gaze too long at the realm of Flesh they become corrupted and develop a passion for Flesh. These perverse desires are forbidden. However, corrupted Aesthetics will eventually give in to temptation and cross the Rift in order to indulge, becoming one of the Unbidden. By the way, I should mention that despite the squicky phrasing this game does not seem to be going the Black Tokyo route, so we can all let out that collective breath we were holding. Although there's a lot of body horror on the schedule it doesn't seem like Whispering Vault is bound on the train to Rape-Town. The absence of an Aesthetic creates flaws in the Dream, called Enigmas by the Enlightened. Enigmas are basically any sort of supernatural phenomena and while they may not be physically harmful they are dangerous if they are not Mended because the Corruption will spread and threaten the Dreaming. To protect the Flesh from the Unbidden the Powers grant some mortals Essence to become Stalkers whose humanity allows them to safely travel to the Realm of Flesh and capture the Unbidden and Mend the Enigmas. Capitalized Word Count: 30  Chapter 1: Character Creation Finally things get a little bit more straightforward as we shift towards the mechanics. In case it wasn't clear (and honestly, it probably wasn't) players in the Whispering Vault take the role of the Stalkers whose job it is to hunt down and retrieve the Unbidden and clear up any messes they've left behind. You were a mortal originally and those origins probably shape how you think even now that you are no longer a being of Flesh. However, you are also an immortal weirdo now and you aren't limited by normal human biology, psychology or morality anymore. The "fluff" of character creation is handled via a series of questions: *When and where were you born? Time is an illusion of Flesh, so Stalkers can potentially come from any time period. You could be a newbie stalker freshly plucked from a tribe in 3000 BC alongside an experienced Hunter who was a 1930's gangster in life. It notes that its possible to play characters from the future but since this demands the GM creating a timeline into the future this is discouraged. *Who were you in life? The basics of your mortal life. Were you a cop? A hobo? A revolting peasant? It's generally important that you have some experience with the Unseen, making classic lovecraftian investigator-style professions (reporter, antiquarian, scholar, archeologist, etc) likely, but not necessary. *Why did you hunt the Unseen? Did they kill your dad? Eat your dog? What drove you to pursue the Unseen instead of running from them? *How were you recruited? Just what it sounds like. It does come with one of the goofier pictures in the book:  The concerned glance being shared between 2nd Head and Normal Guy is what sells it. *What does your Avatar look like? When a Stalker is Chosen and their Flesh is removed they become an expression of spirit called an Avatar. The Avatar is your Essence-form and while it is often based on your mortal life to some degree it is not limited by the laws of physics or the constraints of flesh. It is noted that your appearance is just that, you are as strong or tough or whatever as your stats say you are and a towering giant may be weaker than a tiny child. *What does your Domain look like? Your Domain is your home in the Realm of Essence and like your Avatar it is customized to suit your tastes by the Architecture of Essence. It is noted that the best Domains are outrageous and epic in theme, although rarely much bigger than a city.  Becoming a Stalker gives you the power to launch a Hand out of your Chin. After that we get to the actual mechanical bits. As beings of Essence, Stalkers don't have physical stats, only mental ones. You get 22 points to divide among 4 stats: Awareness: Perceiving things, physically and supernaturally. This stat determines the number of Disciplines (special abilities) you get. Insight: Your ability to understand things intuitively. This determines the number of Skill Bonuses you have available. Presence: Force of personality and charisma. This determines what Servitors you have access to (basically the Stalker version of Minions) Willpower: Determination and self-control. This determines how powerful your Vessel is. A 2-3 in a stat is "unremarkable" but there's not actually a maximum stat bonus listed for any of these in the rules. Reading between the lines seem to imply that an 8 is as high as things go...but its never outright stated.  Then we get into the stuff derived from your main Attributes. Disciplines are your special powers available in the world of Flesh and new PCs get one Discipline per point of Awareness, but you can also Master a Discipline allowing you to perform special moves called Inspirations. This costs twice as many Discipline points. The exact effects of Disciplines and what Inspirations do are covered elsewhere and we are provided only with this summary:  Servitors are "phantoms of Essence" which are apparently not the same thing as Shadows but are still able to appear in the Realm of Flesh with Stalkers. You can be linked to one Servitor per point of Presence (double cost to Master one). Servitors are summoned as a special action using the Evocation skill and is so difficult that it inflicts damage to your Vessel when you do so. Like Disciplines you can choose to Master a Servitor which means that you won't take damage when you successfully summon one. There is a list of Servitors who tend towards dumb names and several are notably redundant when compared to Disciplines, although we're given no hard stats to compare the two yet.  Next we talk about your Vessel. When you enter the Realm of Flesh the Weavers (wait, who?) create a Vessel by spinning matter over your Avatar. Your Vessel is your physical form and thus has only physical attributes: Dexterity, Fortitude and Strength. Unlike your Avatar's attributes your Vessels are malleable and are recreated every time you re-enter the Realm of Flesh and so you get to choose different stats every single time. You get 3 in each of the three Attributes and can add one point to any attribute of your choice for each point of Willpower that you have. Mortals max out at 5 on this scale, but there's no limitation mentioned for Stalkers. The game straight out tells you that Strength is not actually very useful as it only determines the base damage of unarmed combat (apparently armed combat doesn't use strength?)  The four-armed PI is clearly a being of great enlightenment and refined Essence Next we come to Skills, which are a little bit hinky in terms of how the points are divided: First, you pick three Primary skills which get a +4 bonus. Second, you pick a number of secondary Skills equal to your Insight. All of these have a +2 bonus. You then get a number of points equal to your Insight to divide among primary, secondary or other skills, so long as no skill goes above +6. Then we have "Focus Skills" which...I'm having trouble working out. First we're told that a Focus Skill is strongly related to a character's mortal past and should be very important to them. GMs may require all players have at least one Focus Skill and you can have up to three. I'll quote from the book here: "To buy a Focus Skill all you have to do is decide what it is called, write it on the character sheet and assign a bonus to it." So...does that mean that Focus skills can be purchased separately from your Primary, Secondary and other skills...or do you have to use those points and just declare that one of those skills is a Focus skill? And to be clear, Whispering Vault isn't a game where skills are normally player-derived like in Unknown Armies. We're then told that some Focus Skills give a bonus when using a Discipline that requires a Challenge Roll. These skills have the same name as the associated Discipline so a Focus Skill to help a Stalker use Dominate is called Dominate. I thought a Focus Skill was supposed to relate to your past? Starting PCs may only have two of their potentially three Focus Skills related to a Discipline. And that's all we're told about Skills, we aren't even given a brief list and the skills mentioned (Masking, Binding, Sensitivity, Mending) here and there are very vaguely named. So good luck in trying to understand where you should be putting those Attribute points.  Baseball pin-head is my most enduring image of Whispering Vault Next we go over your Five Keys of Humanity. The Keys are material objects even in the Realm of Essence and are the Stalker's gateway to return to the Realm of Flesh and so they're carried at all times. Everyone should decide what form their Keys take and while they're usually actual keys of some sort they can be just about anything symbolically important. They're always displayed prominently on the Avatar and Vessel. The Keys are also your defining human aspects and there are three types: Virtues, Flaws and Memories. Virtues and Flaws are purely relative, its not important whether or not they're actually good or bad but whether or not you believe that they are good or bad. Memories are life-shaping events from your mortality, such as the loss of a loved one or an amazing accomplishment. Not every Key needs to be defined at character creation, only 2-3 and the rest can be worked out in game. Although they are physical objects and thus could be taken the Stalker can summon them back at will, unless prevented by magical rituals. Being without your Keys is a big deal, you can't spend Karma (whatever that is), use Disciplines, summon Servitors or use Vitality for Strenuous Skills. You can't take any direct action against anyone holding one of your Keys and you will turn to dust and die in two days if the Key is not retrieved (the dust can be drunk, along with fresh blood, to grant a mortal longevity). So yeah, don't lose your drat Keys. Fortunately, there don't actually seem to be any rules for how a Key would be taken from you given that they can be summoned instantly and as far as I can tell Stalkers don't sleep or otherwise get themselves into a situation where a Key could be stolen surreptitiously.  The last stage of character creation is some last-minute touches. First we've got your Vitality, when you are bound by Substance in the Realm of Flesh you are vulnerable and your Vitality will suffer as you take damage or use skills that drain your Essence. Hit points. It's your hit points. You get Vitality equal to twice your Willpower, something that should have been mentioned much earlier. Next we have Karma which is the meta-currency for re-rolls or to use Inspirations. You get 5 Karma and earn more with successful Hunts. Oh, and your name, or names as the case may be. Stalkers tend to have flowery or evocative names: "The Gray Man", "Shadowjack", "Abrax", "Calaphon", etc. With that we have completed chapter one. I've lost count of the Capitalized Words but I bet we're over 40 by now. I won't say Whispering Vault is a bad game, but drat it could use some work on clarity. Still, definitely points for style and imagination so far. Next we get into the actual rules on playing the game and hopefully some things will become clearer.
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May 12, 2016 04:10
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Remember when MAD magazine did movie parodies? The art in WV reminds me of a MAD spoof of Hellraiser.
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May 12, 2016 04:27
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One of the things I like a lot about The Whispering Vault is that while it plays up the bizarre horror angle a lot, the GMing advice is convivial and encourages a permissive attitude. Because the PCs can't be cosmic horror demigods if you're constantly nitpicking them.
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May 12, 2016 04:38
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Oooh, Whispering Vault. That's another one of those games where I've heard of it but never actually sat down and looked at it. Plus the concept is neat. Looking forward to more.
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May 12, 2016 04:43
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Halloween Jack posted:One of the things I like a lot about The Whispering Vault is that while it plays up the bizarre horror angle a lot, the GMing advice is convivial and encourages a permissive attitude. Because the PCs can't be cosmic horror demigods if you're constantly nitpicking them. Indeed. Despite being mired with some of the 90's problems mentioned upthread, Whispering Vault does a good job of encouraging players and GMs to work on things together, discuss what they'd like out of the game and try and get there rather than worrying too much about the details.
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May 12, 2016 04:44
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FMguru posted:Have I missed any? - Thematically tenuous quotes to lead chapters, particularly to show your knowledge of '80s glum subculture music, misanthrophic philosophers, or even worse: Yeats. Asimo posted:Even if it's commissions, it's still rather abusive to put them in paid a published work without making that clear ahead of time. Which they may have? I guess? But I ain't holding my breath. Considering the astonishingly small amounts they paid the artists that did the full-page comic work, I get the impression they're not terribly concerned with compensating artists fairly.
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May 12, 2016 05:46
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LatwPIAT posted:Skill bloat. megane posted:- Very few, if any, definitively statted-out threats / monsters / whatever. Those that are provided are often just random things included for flavor reasons, instead of having any sort of "power curve." wdarkk posted:Dexterity as a god-stat? AmiYumi posted:No thought given whatsoever to where starting PCs are supposed to fit into the creator's intricately-defined world, or what they're possibly supposed to do? Can also double as 80s RPG if you add the caveat "what are starting PCs supposed to do that God-NPCs wouldn't have already taken care of". Robindaybird posted:*Tendency to try to reject basic good versus evil paradigms - and overshoot 'moral ambiguity' so far that it ends up with everyone being evil, stupid, or both and a setting that's hopelessly bleak or actively hostile to people trying to change things. quote:*Lack of editorial control so writers will boost their pet factions (i.e: Wick's Scorpion Clans, oMage traditions vs Technocracy wank, that Revised Children of Gaia book), often causing problems with game balance or setting consistency, quote:*Attempts to tackle mature topics become tone-deaf and sometimes downright offensive. Halloween Jack posted:A 1-6 system for measuring character statistics. quote:Moving toward narrative mechanics..coupled with a weird fascination with "realism." quote:Grandiosity. quote:The Auteur GM theironjef posted:-Includes an utterly worthless CD-Rom full of pregen DMPCs and word files. Hostile V posted:
Alien Rope Burn posted:- Thematically tenuous quotes to lead chapters, particularly to show your knowledge of '80s glum subculture music, misanthrophic philosophers, or even worse: Yeats.
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May 12, 2016 06:55
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Robindaybird posted:I wanted DitV to be a nice alternative to weird west from Deadlands, but being someone near chief Mormon country, it is rather uncomfortable how close the 'virtues' is to the breakaway fundies beliefs.
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May 12, 2016 10:12
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Vampire -started- with a limited skill list, but they kept adding new ones with vague suggestions that these other skills were secondary and should maybe cost less because they were narrower in scope? But AFAIK there weren't any fast rules on that.
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May 12, 2016 10:19
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